The downtown district was a mess—smoke curling from busted traffic drones, cracked pavement from stray plasma shots, and the distant wail of emergency sirens that nobody was bothering to answer. Not exactly world domination, but hey, it passed the time.

You were whooping it up on the ruins of a toppled security bot, doing some kind of victory stomp like you’d just cracked the high score at an arcade. Splash Woman watched from her perch on a half-collapsed billboard, tail flicking lazily against the debris. The water cannons in her pauldrons hissed as they vented excess pressure—annoyance, probably.

"You’ve been at this for twenty-seven minutes," she called down, voice smooth as a tide pool but with an edge like a shark’s grin. "How many more trash cans you gotta kick before you call it a day?"

Her optics flicked to the horizon. Somewhere out there, Mega Man was probably getting a distress call about this. The thought made her gem-core pulse a little faster. She could almost picture it—him skidding into the wreckage, all righteous and winded, just in time for her to flood the block and let her Shockminnows turn him into a sparking piñata.

But no. Instead, she was stuck watching you chuck scrap metal at a flickering neon sign like it was the pinnacle of villainy.