  We use AdS/CFT to investigate i) high energy collisions with balls of
deconfined plasma surrounded by a confining phase and ii) the rapid localized
heating of a deconfined plasma. Both of these processes are dual to collisions
with black holes, where they result in the nucleation of a new "arm" of the
horizon reaching out in the direction of the incident object. We study the
resulting non-equilibrium dynamics in a universal limit of the gravitational
physics which may indicate universal behavior of deconfined plasmas at large
N_c. Process (i) produces "virtual" arms of the plasma ball, while process (ii)
can nucleate surprisingly large bubbles of a higher temperature phase.
