Too much

Tendrils of what looks like pink lightning dance over the doctor as he clenches his teeth and talks into the radio, “Ate too much. How far are you?”

“Half a mile and pushing ninety along with the rest of the troops. I also hit the town evacuation alarm. Over,” the chief returns on the radio.

“Not nearly far enough…” Doctor Benjamin Maddox Beaux shakes his head, breathing hard and bending over as the lightning dancing around him intensifies, “sorry… but hey, the hostage will live.”

“As will everyone else if you are about to do what I think… over,” crackles back.

“Yeah… overate… can't…” the doctor's next words are lost as he virtually explodes, a wave of pink energy going out in a sphere from him, quickly engulfing the building, the surrounding neighborhood, the town, and out into the surrounding countryside until it finds enough suitable vessels within which to deposit the power.

When the pink glow fades, the doctor is no longer alone: The sharks in the tank are now blonde bimbos, looking like nude mermaids swimming around, smiling and showing three rows of jagged triangular teeth. There's three dozen naked women with golden wool on their backs in the pens.

The radio crackles to life as the doctor walks over to the corpse, “Oh, wow, like, I feel so totally ALIVE. Oh Em Ge this is great. Like, over.”

Benjamin kneels down to examine the body as he replies on the radio, “So… Chief?”

Words cackle back as the doctor looks for a latch on the armor, “Duh. I've slowed down, but I'm not sure like, why I was like, scared of this? Now that it's totally happened it's like, awesome. Over.”

The doctor frowns as all he finds are welds: This armor doesn't come off. He sighs and gets down to business with a grinding wheel on his rotary tool as he responds, “How far are you, as the crow flies?”

“Just, like, a mile or so. You totally didn't give me, like time to get away, duh. Over,” cackles back as the doctor gets a plate off, showing a mess of wound wires.

“Okay. Please do me a favor and figure out how far the pink wave went,” Doctor Beaux cuts through the wires, having a pretty good idea what he's going to find from having done this in the steampunk era as well.

“Like how am I going to tell? Over,” the radio crackles as the doctor shakes his head and discards the electronic trash, moving to the generator to examine it as well.

“Just look at the birds, squirrels, and other wildlife… potentially including larger plants,” Benjamin rolls his eyes as he unscrews a panel on the ruined machine, “there's some thresholds for the major changes, but anything alive will have soaked some of it. When you aren't completely surrounded by brainless bimbos anymore, you'll have reached the edge. I'd like to know how far away that is.”

“Oh, like, duh… so those aren't angels like everywhere then? Over,” crackles from the handheld device as Benjamin shakes his head at the tangle of seemingly random burned wires in the generator.

“Nope, they were birds, now they're literal bird-brained blonde bimbos,” the doctor shrugs and drops the metal junk, walking towards the door.

Dr. Beaux gets the final message for now from the chief as he opens the door to leave, “Will, like, do; I'll totally call on like, a phone or junk once I know. Over and out.”

Stepping outside, Cowgirl and Nancy greet the doctor, “Yay! We like, totally won!”

Benjamin shrugs, “Technically, I suppose. That wasn't the villain, though. A robot.”

Cowgirl pouts, “Well, at least you can feed that insatiable hunger of yours with…”

The doctor shakes his head, “It doesn't work like that.”

As the Texan frowns, Nancy explains, “It's not like, real tech. Benny here calls it ‘pseudotech’ or some junk.”

“Right,” Benjamin sighs, “Take a famous one… have you ever wondered why when Arachnogal defeats Jetman, she doesn't take that flight pack that carried them both for a couple hours while they fought back to a lab to sell it to big business for use in delivery drones or whatever?”

Cowgirl frowns, “hadn't thought about it, really, but now that you mention it, why don't we just cut Jetman a check? He regularly invents things that'd be worth billions and uses them to steal stuff worth millions at best.”

The doctor chuckles, “It's because it's not real. The tech is a manifestation of Jetman's super power. Mind you, Jetman would disagree: He talked my ear off for an hour once explaining how one of his inventions worked… but they're all nonsense. They can't be replicated except by someone with a sufficiently similar power. Jetman's jetpack will work for someone else… if Jetman is nearby. Another pseudotech user could maybe fiddle with it for a bit and get it running… but then it would be because that pseudotech user invested in it. Occasionally one invests too much in a robot and it kind of becomes a self-sufficent child…”

“This also like, totally leads to the inverse law of robots,” Nancy jumps in.

At Cowgirl's raised eyebrow, Benjamin continues the lore dump, “A pseudotech user only has so much ‘power’ to throw around. How much varies by the user, and they can get stronger with exercise just like anyone else, but there's always some limit - so the thousands of robots that Jetman makes to rule a city can individually be brought down by a high schooler's fastball, because there's almost nothing in them… but Jetman's ‘masterpiece’ that he spent months building, when he's standing right there, or even piloting it? It can rip through tanks like they're just paper mache… because he's invested more of himself into it and is there to… well, feed it his power. If he runs, it'll weaken with time and distance because he's not ‘feeding’ it anymore.”

“So that's why you didn't take out the generator…” Betsy Monroe nods… and adds, “I may have thought a steel building would contain whatever it was, and peeked,” at Benjamin's expression.

“Right, it ultimately didn't matter,” the doctor agrees, “If whoever that was…”

“You didn't even bother to get the poor boy's name?” the blonde cheerleader raises an eyebrow.

“What's like, the point?” The nurse steps in, “these villains are totally a dime a dozen.”

“Eh, he's going to be fine once he rests up… that wasn't him, it was a pseudotech remote,” the doctor shrugs, and considers, “although he was probably close enough to get caught in the pink wave; he had a lot of himself invested in the shield, and there are limits…” the doctor shrugs, “but that's a problem for another day.”

“Yeah, I reckon I need to get back to mah classes…” Cowgirl admits, “Next time you find yerself down in the lone star state…”

“I'll be sure to look you up,” the doctor agrees, “The expense card should work at the airport just fine…”

The college student interrupts, “Can I get another o’ them ‘charter flights’ of yours? That was classy.”

The doctor chuckles, “Sure…” and they walk to their respective cars.