[POS Industries]

As the light from this latest wave of electromagnetic doom faded into nothingness, those with eyes that needed to adjust to the change in light did so, and those among them that had been looking in Rei's general direction would have surely noticed the android girl merrily squeezing TB in her arms as tightly as she could.

"SSSSSSOOOOOOOOOOO KYUUUUUUUUUUUUUUTE!!!!!!!!" she squealed, rubbing her gleefully smiling face against the top of the prinny bomber's little asphyxiated head, before quickly tossing him into the nearest cave wall as she suddenly remembered something.

"Oh! One moment!"

Leaping into the center of the space that, until very recently, had been occupied by the flowstone boulder, Rei proudly raised her hands into the air and emitted a strange humming from her internals. Through the magic of science, the gravity of the area immediately surrounding her reversed momentarily, lifting the various substances that had been covering the floor into the air, where they suddenly hovered as the gravity field was altered once more.

Most notably among these levitated substances was several puddles of the goo that goes by the name Flare Cobra. After initiating a series of purely asthetic gestures, Rei manipulated the gravity field further, forcing the floating orbs of slime together into one big blob before setting it gently upon the ground and returning the gravity to normal.

"There you go!"

As the slime reformed into a more Flare-like shape, Rei's eyes suddenly flashed red for a moment as her internal processors began going over a number of conflicting orders.

It seems that Rei had orders to kill Flare on sight...

BEGIN FLASHBACK!!!!!!
(You know you love 'em!)

NPF AVATAR ARENA, QUARTERFINAL ROUND:

It was hot. Really hot. You can't imagine how unbelievably hot it was. Then again, given that these events were taking place on the north side of an erupting volcano, one could suppose that the level of heat was more than understandable. One of the two people that currently inhabited this particular side of the volcano was, in fact, quite comfortable here.

The Negative Kamen (aka Pedro O'Sullivan), however, was not.

His opponent, Flare Cobra, had very decidedly won field advantage in this round and was using it well. There wasn't enough light here for the Kamen to create any decent shadow portals, and the shadow puppets he was making were weak to the point of near-transperancy. Flare, meanwhile, was able to just dive in and out of the rivers of liquid-hot magma with the greatest of ease, and there was no following her there.

In one final desperation maneuver, Negative Kamen had summoned four of his puppets and sent them on a multi-vectored collision course with their dragoon prey. Flare stood several feet away from the safety of her lava, and this would be the only chance the Kamen would have to catch her.

Or not.

"MEGA FLARE!!!" And with two words, the shadow puppets and their target all disappeared into a massive explosion of fire and other such hotness. As the Kamen began to move away from the blast, he looked up to see the dragoon descending upon him from the ashen sky above, just as she transmogrified into her slime girl form.

"BLURGLE!!! BLUBRBNGLRBLE BLRBH GKHUBNDLR!!!!" the Kamen cried out as he found himself enveloped in Flareslime. For those not fluent in the language of the drowning, his words would be translated thusly:

"AW HELL!!! NEGATIVE HEART CRUSHER!!!!"

Suddenly, the ring on his right index finger exploded in a pitch black wave of doom, crushing everything in its path to mere subatomic particles. As the Kamen suddenly gasped for air as the slime vanished from him, it could be seen that his expertly-tailored tuxedo had changed from its original black to a pure white, just before dissipating to reveal the normal clothes of Pedro O'Sullivan.

Pedro, now temporarily purified as a side-effect of the attack, looked in horror at the destruction he had wrought. "Is.... is that it?" he stammered, "Did I win? Flare? Flare, are you okay?"

"Yes, POS, I'm just fine," stated a voice behind him, just before a large snake tail smacked him hard in the back of the head, knocking Pedro to the ground in a sudden case of unconsciousness.

"And here is your winner," called out Raiden as he appeared next to the lamia and raised her hand into the air, "FLARE COBRA!!!"

END FLASHBACK!!!!!!!!!

Back in the cave, Rei considered her various orders and determined that ensuring the survival of all of the NPFers was paramount to her termination order of Flare. Instead, the android simply patted the extremely angry slimegirl on the head before leaping off to deliver a potentially deadly tacklehug to Skyshot.