The Vanguard, supervillains who maintain a front as heroes, are planning on establishing a branch in Chicago. And they plan to do this by spreading chaos, mayhem, death and destruction to the Windy City, all while profiting from it at every step of the way.
And along the way, we see some of the origins of the Vanguard and it's rise to power in the Core Timeline.
"Tales of the Vanguard" (currently composed of "The Great Senzu Bean Heist" Parts 1,
2, 3, and 4) and ("Extra-TERROR-Estrial Thrills and Chills" Parts 1,2,and 3) is written by Orion Pax 09 and is currently located on DeviantArt. It is part of the Coreline Shared Universe.
Please add tropes to this page as you see them!
All stories in "Tales of the Vanguard" provide the following:
- Kick the Dog: Given that the Vanguard are all experts in this, it's no surprise that there's a lot of this trope.
- Origins Episode: We get to see how each of the Vanguard members came to be. Part 1 is Gigantic Asuka's and Black Mari's, Part 2 is Hyperion Shinji's.
Tropes in "The Great Senzu Bean Heist" include:
- And Show It to You: Black Mari utilizes a collapsing building to distract Super Rei and sneak up on her, killing her by ripping her heart out and tossing it (and Rei's dying body) to Marvel Asuka as an insult.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: An important part of the Vanguard's titular heist is Giganta Asuka performing a Kaiju-style rampage throughout Chicago to draw people's attention.
- Brought Down to Badass: Part of the Marvel Asuka/Black Mari fight has Asuka depowered while Mari just dopes up on Venom after getting her powers shut down, forcing Asuka to improvise.
- Continuity Nod:
- Once Marvel Asuka starts fighting with Black Mari, the facts that make her determine is not another joke by Georgia Silvana include the fact she can damage her glasses and punching her face doesn't feels like hitting a force field (which is something mentioned on Clash Of Marvels A Coreline Short Story).
- "Honest Liggie's" (the establishment of Ferengi "salesmen" that has appeared on various stories) makes an appearance again. The Vanguard uses it to teleport themselves and their stolen goods away, even doing some minor damage to the Ferengi to make sure they can convincingly lie about being coerced to do so, if they need to.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: A very literal one in the case of Giganta Asuka vs Matariel. After breaking through the Angel's AT-Field, Asuka finishes it off by crushing it underfoot with a single stomp.
- Death of a Child: Giganta Asuka kills an entire children's hospital and a school at the beginning of her rampage and pulls off a very personal Kick the Dog moment by killing Kiki and mocking the Young Avengers about it.
- Deus ex Machina: Invoked: the "Return To The Past" program, boosted with magic thanks to Dr. Shikigami, restores the city of Chicago and resurrects all casualties, including Super Rei and Kiki. The invocation was the work of another of Dungeon Master's ideas (although some folks would label them "manipulations").
- Expendable Clone: Black Mari insults Super Rei by means of calling her stuff like "mass-produced whore" and how the people who love her could just get a new one if she dies... which she says again after seeing Submariner R and Marvel Asuka grieving after capturing her.
- Godzilla Threshold: Utilizing a highly modified, techno-magical version of the Return To The Past program to repair the devastation the Vanguard's rampaging left behind. The Core Timeline's rules regarding time travel are... dodgy, to put it nicely, but Dungeon Master's Cryptic Conversation throughout a good chunk of the story pretty much translates as: "we're gonna need a miracle, we're gonna need it as soon as freaking possible... and the RTTP is it".
- Later on Misato discusses that the use of the RTTP is such an obvious use of the crossing of the Threshold that, regardless of how much the Dungeon Master tries to illustrate it as a necessary source of miracles to come, she drearily wonders what is the "Godzilla" that will be unleashed as a result of this... cut to Paris, and inside an abandoned Factory on the Seine River, XANA Emerges...
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Captain Mari's plan to place Giganta Asuka on the Mirror Dimension to stop her from doing any more damage to Chicago backfires big time because the energies the comprise the Dimension interact with (read: empower) the magics that grant Giganta her powers. By the time Mari finally catches on how bad she's goofed, Asuka has grown to the size where she can stomp on entire city blocks with ease.
- Heroic BSoD: Marvel Asuka suffers this when Black Mari rips out Super Rei's heart and then tosses her into Asuka's arms. When Super Rei dies moments later, Asuka can do nothing but watch as Black Mari takes a "victory lap" that consists of her destroying every skyscraper in the immediate vicinity and killing everyone in them. However...when Asuka soon snaps out of it...
- Megaton Punch: The Black Mari vs. Marvel Asuka fight comprises a big exchange of these, in the vein of the Dragon Ball franchise.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Marvel Asuka completely loses it after Super Rei (childhood friend and lover) dies at Black Mari's hands, who then threatens to rape and then murder Submariner Ranma (Asuka's other childhood friend and lover). Asuka ends up giving Mari a Megaton Punch that tosses her past lunar orbit and keeps on pummeling her while swearing bloody revenge.
- Shout-Out: In the aftermath of the battle, Dr. Shikigami helps a team of Avengers and Champions shut down several Secret Socity plants by using his make to turn them all into giants. When asked how he knew how to do this, he says that its, "Just a trick I picked up while fighting a bad-tempered space witch on the moon."
- We Need a Distraction: Played for horror. The Vanguard is the kind of bundle of brutal Jerkasses that would instantly jump on the option to perform a massacre that will escalate (they hope) to encompass the entire city of Chicago, performed in the most sadistic manner possible they can pull off, for the sake of a "diversion".
- Would Hurt a Child: Giganta Asuka begins her diversionary rampage by stepping on a school (and then a children's hospital) and killing everybody inside it. She then escalates by killing the Young Avengers member Kiki in the goriest way she can pull off within a few seconds (crushing her like a tomato and then tossing her away) for the sake of pissing off the Young Avengers.
Tropes in "Extra-TERROR-Estrial Thrills and Chills" include:
- Aliens in Cardiff: Obvious pun aside, this whole mess happens because of a Xenomorph hive suddenly appearing in the middle of Illinois.
- And This Is for...: Vasquez' first contact with the Xenomorphs ends with her ripping them all to pieces with her bare hands while yelling out the names of her dead fellow Marines.
- Comically Missing the Point: More darkly comedic than actually laughable, but when Vasquez tells Bradley that she expects him to backstab her because he feels like Burke to her, Bradley asks her how she expects him to literally backstab her, considering she's Nigh-Invulnerable.
- Continuity Nod: Way back in Legends of the Fourth of July it was mentioned that Xenomorphs were a thing in the Core Timeline. Now they take place as the Big Bad.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: When the Xenomorphs attack and take Vasquez by surprise, the trauma she suffered because of them in the past leaves her unable to fight back. This lasts just as long as it takes for Vasquez to realize that her gamma-mutated body can No-Sell everything a canon Xenomorph can throw at her. Once that happens, cue the dismemberment.
- Drill Sergeant Nasty: The story starts with Sergeant Slaughter showing the Renegades that he is this Trope.
- Flashback Cut: Vasquez' initial wandering of the hive is intercut with her having flashbacks to her squad's initial clusterfuck of a contact at Acheron.
- Expy: Vasquez meets a surviving SSS soldier named Dominic Bradley, who stumbles out of the woodwork and feels to her like a copy of corporate scumbag Carter Burke... Of course, once he explains the facts that make her feel iffy she knows that the situation has gone From Bad to Worse. She even mentions in the second chapter that he looks a bit like him (well, to her) and one of the reasons to leave him behind that she expresses is that she expects him to backstab her.
- Fully Absorbed Finale: In a very weird fashion, to Alien: Covenant.
- Guest-Star Party Member: Vasquez and Bradley run into Janet Daniels in the second chapter. She provides them an Info Dump on how bad... or rather worse... things are.
- The Load: Vasquez feels that, even if Bradley is an honest soldier and genuinely wants to help, the fact that he's only human means that he'll be this Trope.
- Not Afraid of You Anymore: Vasquez after discovering that canon-style Xenomorphs are unable to punch through her Hulk Nigh-Invulnerability.
- Oh, Crap!: Vasquez has a nice one when she finally reaches the hive and gets a bomb dropped on her: it's the Emerged Universe Shrapnel remains of the USCSS Covenant. Mari gets the same sentiment when she finds this out as well, courtesy of the Dungeon Master. It gets worse in the second chapter: Daniels informs the heroes that David encountered the homeworld of Sil's race and has engineered super-Xenos with the Species DNA.
- Pull the Thread: Bradley explains to Vasquez that the reason he's wandering around is because Scout cut him out of a cocoon but he was running out of DISKs and when Bradley refused to be placed in one, Scout used them (his last two) on other people. Vasquez then instantly points out that Scout carried a hundred DISKs just in case (thinking Bradley is lying to her like Burke did). And then Bradley points out that the hive is the remains of the USCSS Covenant — a Colony Ship. Meaning the hive may have several thousand aliens. Oh, Crap!.
- Pun-Based Title: A Shout-Out to Disney's attraction, the ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter.
- Shout-Out:
- Vasquez decides to toy with the Xenomorphs she's tearing apart by subjecting them to various Mortal Kombat Fatalities, such as the "HEEEEERRRREEE'S JOHHHNNYY!!!" Torso with a View kill Johnny Cage does in Mortal Kombat X.
- As expected, the Alien series gets a lot of mentioning throughout the story — the characters have all seen the related media.
- Take That!: Mari mentions that she's seen the whole Alien series, or at least most of it, because she considers Alien³ and Alien: Resurrection crap. It's more plot-important than that: as a result, she didn't see Alien: Covenant. Once Dungeon Master tells her the really important part (that the film ends with a colony ship under the control of a crazy android with access to Xenomorph-making material on board), Mari is understandably distressed.
- This Is Gonna Suck: Mari's reaction to Dungeon Master's arrival. Mainly because she knows that he only shows up when things are about to get very bad.
- Trauma Button: The moment she enters the hive and everything seems to be going the very same way, Vasquez gets flashbacks to the events of Aliens (especially the Curb-Stomp Battle the Marines get during their first contact).
- Xenomorph Xerox: The original Xenomorphs come out to play in this occasion.
