Avenger Assembled

Tou vs 21: 23 Tou vs 23: 28 Nice! Didn't expect that

Ben demonstrating of his powers had sometimes gotten a negative reaction from onlookers - after all, there was a lot of losers and haters out there. But the reaction of the Atlantean warriors was something else, a sudden inhalation of breath and a tension like the cocked string of a bow. Not an adolescent's fear of something new, but the sudden response of trained warriors to an enemy in their midst as all eyes turned to him. No actual blades were drawn, but it gave some context to his interrogator's question about magic. "Good." Said interrogator didn't seem to mind his display of power at all - she smiled as the other Atlanteans went back to their preparations - they must have arrived in the last minutes before departure. "You like our surprise for Deep Ones then!" She laughed, and introduced herself as Doctor Galena. She looked older than anyone else there, even Dalekos, perhaps why she was wearing battered white body armor rather than the somewhat-scantier clothing on the others - and was unarmed, save for the long white staff she carried, which looked a bit like mother-of-pearl on closer inspection. "Don't mind Guard. They never see Surfacers before." She winked at him. "I been 'around the street.''" Once all surface preparations were ready, the group climbed aboard the submarine, which on closer inspection looked like a military vehicle from Heroditus's grandfather's day. There wasn't much room inside, but nobody seemed to mind. It helped that the ship filled with water as they descended, letting corridors turn into three-dimensional working spaces as soldiers swam above and around each other rather than around. The flooding also meant the ship could have windows, and from its forward compartments the assembled group could watch the sun fade as the waters closed around them and they descended into the depths.

Judy looked to Leroy to see if all this was having any effect on her fiance, wondering exactly what was going on inside that head of his while the women talked. Adrian certainly made all this sound very attractive, but she'd seen the way Leroy went quiet like a whipped dog when people talked in loud voices around him, the way he deferred to the authority of strong women like...well, like the mirror image of many of the women she'd known growing up, if she was completely honest with herself for a moment. But she'd never seen somebody raised in the church who reacted the way Leroy did, which told her everything she needed to know about his homeworld. "Yet here you are, a guest." said Ashley. "What's stopping you from rolling into Prime and liberating us?"

Lacking any better ideas, and cursing the fates that had brought them here, Watchdog sped towards the school that had attracted Forever Boy's attention, figuring that sticking with the other superheroes was the best way to handle this. She spared a quick thought for her paternal grandfather running guns from his father's shop in Huế, and her mother's grandfather crammed aboard merchant machine ships dashing their way to Europe - then focused on the mission. She still was not convinced all this was real, but the smartest play was to act like it was until she was damn sure she knew better. As they drove, she felt Daystar 'ignite' behind her and heard Judy's grunt of exertion as she fired a blast of searing white radiation past her head and towards an approaching tank - clean miss. Dammit! She reached down at her belt and found one of her grenades, throwing it in the direction of the tank's escorting infantry as she floored the accelerator of her bike. "Hang on!" she called to Daystar as they went, heading in the same direction as Pan. The subsequent bang was very satisfying, even if it didn't do anything to solve their larger problem...

Down Below Both Miss Grue and Wraith were objects of attention by the Deep One crowd, all big eyes and teeth, but not the sort of attention their look would have gotten on the Surface. Wraith might not have spoken Lemurian, but she knew enough Deep One body language from sharing space with Aquaria that she could see the mix of awe, pleasure, and fear as the Deep Ones watched and sang at what she'd made of herself. It seemed they liked what they saw! Daphne could understand the words but it took her a moment to realize exactly what she was hearing - this great assortment of Deep Ones was not merely talking to itself but singing. She could hear elders teaching the young, warriors singing songs of the hunt, the young at play; all the sorts of things she might have expected to hear from a gathering of hunter-gatherers. None of them seemed to know exactly what to make of her; it sounded as if several of the watching adults in the little 'square' before the temple thought she was some sort of mammal! It seemed no one was going to challenge Aquaria's threat display - so she took out her trident and held it with her side with casual ease. The sight of Hydra's trident brought the exciting singing from the crowd she'd hoped for, even as it occurred to her that she was not exactly being subtle. "I am Hydra's champion!" But of course, subtlety was never really required among her people. "Where are those of the Steel Mountain tribe?" "Behold!" bellowed a voice. "One comes!" The female that strode forward out of the crowd looked more than a little like Aquaria - more frog than fish, like a noticeable majority among the Deep Ones. She was dressed in a loose assortment of sealskins that covered very little, a long spear clutched in one hand, and looked a bit more of the undersea hunter than some of those around - the fishy Deep Ones seemed to be the wealthier ones, dressed in dark leather studded with metal. She was surrounded by a small crowd of young, some half-dozen or so, who darted about her like a school of fish. Aquaria and Naia looked at each other, mother and daughter held apart by time and culture, struck their polearms on the ground together - and said nothing else. Deep Ones really weren't much like Surfacers. While mother and spawn greeted each other (and Aquaria made introductions), the young took a great interest in Daphne and Indira. "Got any meat?" one begged Daphne in a voice like a human toddler, staring at her with big black eyes as it swam around her quickly, a few siblings joining in the song, baring mouths full of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. "Meat! Meat!" Another one, braver than the others, floated over and began circling Indira, swimming out of immediate reach of her limbs. Naia looked at the others and took one of her necklaces in her three-fingered hand, speaking slowly and distinctly. As she did, her voice a low rumble, the necklace flashed and - and spoke itself. "This. Work? Took it from - Atlantis-Man. Can understand you."

If I stand up for Leroy now, he'll suffer the next time he's back with them - unless he's never back with them again. She sat there uncomfortably for a few moments, wishing one of the adults in the room would speak up - until she remembered that this was her idea, and her responsibility. "Say everything goes well today, and all the other days - and Leroy and Ah lived on your homeworld after we graduate," she said, even though she had no intention of ever doing such a thing, "what would our lives be like?"

All right - I'm going to say that Watchdog spends the round making a move action on the bike, going 2500 ft and passing through the middle of the German troops. She'll take a standard action to throw one of her bombs into the middle of the German troops as they go - that's a DC 20 Reflex save to avoid a DC 25 Toughness save. This has the descriptor (ballistic) as it happens, since it's a standard plastic explosive. Daystar spends _her_ turn making a full-round action, firing on the biggest, most formidable-looking German installation - whether that's a tank or a fortified site, I leave that up to you, RL. That's a 12, though, so unless she's shooting at a fixed target it doesn't work too well! Oh well. https://orokos.com/roll/778455 I'll let you post the saves of the Germans she hits before I post IC, RL

Aquaria sat in the front of the ship, careful not to touch anything as she didn't actually know how the starship worked. As they flew, she sang an old song in a low nearly subsonic rumble, one that the ship translated for Wraith a little bit like this: "Hear mighty Dagon and Hydra too The blood of sacrifice washes clean, the Deep One brave and true..." She fell silent when the vessel descended below the waves out in the North Atlantic, putting her hands on the front window as they went. "I can hear them," she breathed in English, her voice full of awe. "There must be very many..." As they went lower and the light above faded, the others could hear too; a deep rumble like an underwater earthquake that went on and on. They let the ship fill with water as they descended, the better to protect it from the pressure outside, and so they could all get used to what lay out there. They went lower and lower, until Mother Unit began to worry about just how low the ocean's bottom actually was - until finally about a mile down, they found what they were after. The first thing they saw as their ship descended was movement - the wriggling, writhing mass of Deep Ones below that turned out to be much larger than they'd first thought. Baby's lights showed them what had to be a mass of thousands of Deep Ones, a horde as vast as the one that had attacked Freedom City years ago. They were arranged in a shape a bit like a three-petaled flower, one that Mother Unit recognized as being used by the Grue Arcane as well. From above, an awestruck Aquaria guessed there must be a dozen tribes there, maybe more. At the center of the 'flower' was their destination - a vast, cyclopean temple as big as a small skyscraper and as broad as a city block, its stonework vast and infamous in the gloom, all black marble like wrought iron, vaguely resembling the trident slung across Aquaria's back. None of the Deep Ones below rose to meet them as they landed amid the surging crowd beneath the steps of the temple, but the songs outside seemed to die as legions of gold-black eyes turned to stare at them. Aquaria rose, trident in hand, a fierce look in her eye. "Ia!" she called, before hitting the button that opened the front of the ship. She strode out boldly amid the crowd of Deep Ones and tried to keep down her awe. So many! Dark Brothers, coastal dwellers like herself, armored warriors and swarming spawn, all of them watching her. Was she like them? She was - and in some ways she was not. Holding her trident high, she swam forward with powerful strokes and drove it into the ground. "Behold! The Water-Bearer comes! Of the tribe of Dagon and Hydra!" They were bold words to declare herself an unashamed outcast, and something like a gasp went through the crowd. "I have traveled among the Sea of Stars and across the Surface! I have slain my foes and heard Hydra's song! I have taken what I will and done Dagon's deeds! Will any dare challenge me - or my companions?" To an outsider, it looked a bit like she'd bared her teeth and bellowed loudly at her fellow Deep Ones, some of whom were now bellowing back. - "I'm sure your assistance will not be necessary," said Dalekos smoothly. "I do appreciate your presence here as a sign of cooperation between Surfacer and Atlantean against our common foe." In Atlantean, he said to Heroditus, "<If you think him necessary, then let him be your remige. But his life below is in your hands.>" It was not quite a chastisement - but it was certainly the most serious Heroditus had gotten from the elder general. "<Your sister's magic - I will need to know what she can do.>" At the embassy, they joined up with a party of armored warriors who Heroditus at first mistook for barbarians before recognizing several of the soldiers who had come with Heroditus on their first trip together, some of whom gave him respectful nods, and even sympathetic comments as he passed. "We play the part of a barbarian warlord and his vassals, come to parlay with Deep One chiefs." The tone of disgust in his voice told Heroditus what he thought about that. "Come, let us make sure you are dressed appropriately," he said, divesting himself of his Surfacer garb and donning silver armor that did more to accentuate his muscular physique than actually conceal it. They were standing at the Embassy's floating dock, alongside a submersible craft that looked like a barbarian design to Heroditus but to Ben looked a bit as if someone had hired Leonardo da Vinci to build a submarine with its brass-and-iron-looking frame, visible wheels, and vague suggestion of a technology he barely understood. Octo-Man didn't speak Atlantean - but he could read the skeptical looks in the faces around him and the vaguely contemptful body language of these muscular, armored warriors as they looked him over despite Dalekos's short introduction.. One exception turned out to be one of the women in the dozen-strong group, who with her relatively slight frame and white-colored armor stood out amid the iron-and-silver crowd. "You," she said in accented English, shouting a little as she caught his attention by all-but-turning his head to face her. "You magic?" she asked seriously, staring at Octo-Man with green-tinted eyes.

Anybody with a Notice check higher than 20 hears the thing that made Woodsman go quiet.

Those are all sound ideas!

Woodsman slid down the opposite wall, still holding his crossbow. "Saw them taking the girls," he said. "So followed. Knew vampires; was going to warn them." His hands twitched on his crossbow. "Started seeing things on the lawn. Killings, maybe. Not sure. Then one of them was eating that girl." His voice was quiet and slow, his heartbeat and breathing alarmingly regular. "So I killed him. Head was still alive so I used knife. Then I thought 'wait, if they can talk, they probably won't like this', so I took the head and went inside the house. Put a bomb in it; surprised them-" He shifted, and suddenly went dead silent at a distinct creaking noise from down below. The silence dragged on, and on; and he sat there like a composed statue, breathing in a slow, regular rhythm that was almost inaudible.

With a great unwholesome sucking sound, Cheval managed to tear his arm free from the clinging beast, leaving behind a tremendous sucking wound in its unwholesome hide that suddenly burst into flames. His costume covered in blood and gore, his nightvision goggles across his face, Woodsman stepped further into the room from the doorway where he'd appeared and fired another flaming shot into the writhing beast - which wailed like a frightened child and lurched backwards against the wall before suddenly falling apart into a wriggling mass of bloody, fanged tentacles. "Okay. Okay. Okay." Woodsman stared at the burning mass of abominations for a moment, unaware that he'd spoken until he realized the others were looking at him. He racked the slide on his repeating crossbow, which was perhaps the only thing on his person not covered in blood. "Real?" he asked them. After a moment, he realized that might make him sound like a crazy man when he actually did already have some significant doubts about his sanity, so he clarified, "You saw them too? With the teeth?" It was a hell of a question from a nameless man wearing a hatchet caked with gore.

All right, what was supposed to be an interesting opening fight has gotten way too bogged down - so let's go ahead and move on. We're out of initiative; for now!

Who's up now, @RocketLord?

Family Wishes The drive out of Freedom City (to the airport in Philadelphia that led to a flight to DC) was a liminal space - a space where Ashley wasn't quite Agent George and Judy wasn't quite Jaycee Cahill. It was the last time they'd be able to be alone together until after the holidays, anyway. Sitting in the back of the Dawg and peering out its tinted windows at city streets decorated for the holidays, Judy finally offered, "Ah wouldn't have told anybody." She looked up at Ashley, meeting her eyes in the car's rearview mirror. It was a measure of how much time they'd spent together that Ashley knew immediately what her 'sister' was talking about - and that she'd have to respond. "I know," she finally said. "You're a good sister." "Do you want to talk about it?" Ashley sorted through scenarios in her mind. Was Judy going to ask why she'd made that choice? No, probably not - she'd learned better than that at Claremont. Was she going to ask if Ashley was sure? Well the answer to that was no but there was no way she was having _that_ conversation with Judy. Was she going to come out of the closet herself? As terrifying a prospect that was, Ashley was reasonably sure that a girl who looked at Leroy that way had to be pretty goddamn straight. "There's not really anything to tell," she said, which was true enough, in a sense. "It doesn't change who I am." Doesn't it, though? This was not really the time to be having this conversation with herself. "Well, okay," said Judy, a little awkwardly. There was silence for a while, then Judy said, "Can Ah just say, Ah'm sorry it took so long?" Ashley shot a look in the mirror back at the look of big-eyed sympathy from her Pentecostal teenage ward and repressed a deep, deep sigh. "Don't be," she finally said. She glanced up at the sky, where light pollution on the Interstate only left the Moon visible, and thought of stars so distant you couldn't even see them from Earth. "Things happened for me at exactly the right time." "Well good for you," said Judy, smiling. "Ah guess we both had some big changes this year..." She sighed softly, then made a confession. "Ah hope Daddy doesn't win next year. It'll be a lot easier if he doesn't. For all of us." Especially you and Leroy. Ashley knew it would be deeply unwise for Judy to keep her relationship with her would-be fiancee from her parents for too much longer - just as it would be deeply unwise to tell them that she was engaged to be married to a prince from another dimension. But things _would_ be easier if Judy didn't have a Secret Service escort anymore. "That would...change a lot," she finally said, not wanting to comment on how she was probably going to vote Democrat for the first time in her life in 2020. "Well...change isn't so bad," said Judy, smiling brightly. "You know," she said, "maybe Ah'll start my knitting now. There'll probably be lots to do this Christmas..." - To the woman who puts stars in my eyes, Ashley typed alone in her apartment a few weeks later. She looked at the words, then at the books she'd spent her Christmas money on. She typed in a few lines from the Who Moved My Cheese guy, then deleted them; she typed a few lines from Shakespeare, then deleted them too. She looked at the neatly bound copy of the King James Gospels that Judy had bought for her for Christmas, considered it for a half-moment, then decided that nothing from there was likely to be immediately appropriate either. Thank you for Well there was a lot of stuff she could thank Fa'Rua for, none of which was going in a text message that might be read by somebody other than its intended target - which was to say, in a text message. for showing me what it's like up there. In the attached picture, she was sitting next to her bedroom window with her brand-new telescope, narrow band filters and astronomy book. Her pink lipstick was the same bubblegum color as her hair - and if everything was covered by her Christmas outfit, it covered everything well. You'll have to come down here for your real present, though... - Across town, Jaycee Cahill opened her sister's bedroom door. Jerusha Deborah Cahill, fifteen and red-faced blotchy from her tears, shot one look at the door and said, "Are you gonna pray for me too, freak?" There was a time when Judy would have bolted from the room at that - or maybe burst into tears where she stood. As it was, she took a moment to compose herself before she stepped inside and closed the door behind her. "Ah'm sorry about what happened today." Of course she was going to pray for her little sister, but not over her like she was trying to cast out demons. "Your pity is even worse," hissed Jerusha, sitting up in bed and glaring daggers at her sister. If she'd cursed, if she'd actually told Judy to leave, she would have - but this moment of connection was something else. "You gonna tell me you feel sorry for me? You gonna tell me Ah made a mistake?" Normally she was the sister least inclined to speak with their native accent, but it had been one Hell of an evening. "No," Judy hissed, "Ah'm gonna tell you that Momma did." She took a few steps into the room, then said, "Ah don't care what you did, she shouldn't have made you apologize to all of us like that! You didn't do anything to me, or Joanna neither!" She was sitting on the bed now. "And Daddy just shrugged like he always does and let it happen! Ah was so mad at them Ah wanted to throw something." "...well don't do that, you'll set the place on fire," said Jerusha, a weak smile on her face. When Judy did flinch, Jaydee said, "Oh come on, if Ah can't joke about it, who can, huh?" The smile turned into a scowl as she reviewed the events of the last couple of days. "It's not like anything happened, anyway. Carl and Jennifer and the others were the ones actually messing around, Ah just went to sleep, and Carl's daddy is sure as hell gonna make sure all those pictures get deleted. My first drunk and this is all it got me." "Yeah, well..." Getting drunk with her youth group had been a pretty goddamned big mistake, in Judy's personal opinion, but that didn't justify the handwritten apology letter her sister had given to her, to Joanna, and to her father over dinner, nor the obviously-rehearsed speech that had gone with it. "It wasn't right. Things need to change in our family."

Judy stared at the Demon, and suddenly regretted dousing her light. The glow hiding her facial features would have come in handy now. "Y-you're asking me to prove that Ah am worthy of Leroy?" Her jaw worked for a moment, then she said..."As y'all are the guests in this dimension, Ah believe...the burden of proof goes in the other direction." She lay her hands flat on the table and forced herself to make eye contact with the terrifying extra-dimensional conqueror. " Ashley thought Can you see this? and realized to her annoyance that Callie Summers was looking at her and probably knew perfectly well the gesture she was making under the table. She folded her arms and stared implacably at Adrian, torn between admiration for Judy's spunk and a conviction that things were going to get bloody. "It's simple," she growled, backing Judy's play because God help her she _was_ the adult guardian here. "This girl is a queen. She's not auditioning here. You are." She practically radiated not-impressed.

Dalekos "I have little to tell you," said Dalekos frankly. "Your father was engaged in the business of your family when he was attacked. He and a few others were the only survivors aboard the vessel that was attacked, near one of your family's aqueduct projects." He fell silent for a moment, then said, "That in his condition, he could tell us about your sister, and ask me to find you, tells me that he is a remarkable man." Evidently knowing what questions that would prompt, he said, "This is hard to hear, Mr. Stylanios, but they...they took his left arm below the elbow." He squeezed his own left hand into a fist for a moment, then put it on the younger man's shoulder. "We will gain justice for him, and for those who died." Sea Devil "If you show what you are, and that you are not Surface-Men or Atlanteans, that will show them your power." Aquaria occasionally said "Surface-Men" when stressed, away from human ears, or both - it was the literal translation of the thing that Deep Ones called the soft-bodied beings that lived above Terra's oceans. (The Deep Ones, of course, simply called themselves "Men" or "People" in their own language.)

Aboard Miss Grue's ship Once they were on board, Aquaria squatted down in the position in which she was usually the most comfortable. Resting on all fours, her legs folded beneath her and hands out in front, she mounted her trident on her armor's back. As the ship made its way to their destination out in the mid-Atlantic, she croaked, "Beings like you have...they will say you have the blessings of Hydra." She swallowed nervously, inflating and deflating her throat. It was of course trivially true that the Kinigosi and Grue were clearly species blessed by the power of the Dark Mother, proof that surely the stars were right that so many of them lived among them, but she knew neither Indira or Daphne believed that about their people. "If I land in this ship, with you at my side, it will show that I am strong, and not...alone," she added, the last word an unhappy squeak. She did not like being alone. Aboard Dalekos's ship Dalekos was actually glad to see Octo-Man, smiling and shaking his hand in the Surfacer fashion. He felt drier and harder than Heroditus did, and smelled distinctly of what were probably the Atlantean equivalent's of men's cologne. Perhaps surprisingly, given the circumstances, their ride back to the Atlantean embassy turned out to be what on the outside looked to be a Surface limousine parked out in front of the school's main gate. The inside of the limo turned out to be more like an Atlantean craft than a Surface one - all shining white and silver, with sealskin seats and a warm, humid atmosphere inside. Dalekos studied the boys as they went for just a moment, then said, "Enjoy the ride, young men. We will be at the embassy soon enough - and from there, we'll take a speeder to my troops in the field. One of your sister's teachers will be joining us; he'll be able to find her with his spells. With an enemy that favors human sacrifice, there's no time to waste."

Judy decided that it must be the blessings of Jesus that were protecting her soul from the Demon's (indeed!), and that it couldn't be that her physical transformations were turning her into something without an immortal soul because that was impossible. In the moment or two it took her to think that, Watchdog spoke up. "She's not doing #($# for you," Ashley growled flatly, knowing how stupidly far Judy was probably willing to go to defend her relationship with Leroy. If that's a problem, you can suck it, she thought. Judy shot a look her way that was a little hard for the others to read, then said, "Ah'm sure what mah sister means is that any such discussion will need to be two-way, and of course filtered through this dimension's superhero community. After all," she said with a nod to Callie Summers, who was notably watching them both very closely, "we're just two girls without anything to our names."

Okay, @RocketLord, you are now up

Judy took this as an opportunity to do something she'd practiced on her own but never actually demonstrated in front of people who didn't already know her - she raised her hand, snapped her fingers, and dimmed down to her usual levels of illumination. From the look in her eye, it didn't look like the inner fires had gone out at all. "You're talking to me." She folded her hands and looked the older woman in the eye. "If the fact that Ah am part alien is a problem for you, then your homeworld is not the civilized place that Leroy has described."

Okay, new round! @Thunder King Speed Demon is up. Cheval is currently bound and helpless. What are you gonna do?

"I have never been to a gathering of clans so big," Aquaria admitted. "But we will do what we must." She dropped to all fours as she cast her gaze up at the spaceship - then with a single smooth leap, bounded upwards and grabbed on, the sticky pads on her fingers and palm making a _slap_ as they connected. "We will show them we are strong, and that they should do what we say." She considered Wraith's words, then decided it was best to tell the truth. "Naia said the tribe sang a song of victory and vengeance - and had mighty champions. We will fight them to show we are strong. It is Dagon's Law - eat, or be eaten, and follow those strong enough to eat."

Okay, are we in new round country?

"Now let's see, Adrian, isn't it?" asked Daystar, her voice cool. She lay her hand on Leroy's and said smoothly, "First of all, I know y'all are new to Earth-Prime and our ways, but y'all really should call people by what they want to be called. Ah know a lady of high birth such as yourself has to appreciate the need to maintain order - after all, if people start making up their own names for other people, who knows what they'll call you?" She smiled, the expression clearly visible despite the overall glow that still obscured much of her face. This sort of talk would have surprised people who only saw Judy around her friends and family, the Judy who was devoted to making people happy and being a good Christian girl. But she'd heard Leroy talk about his family before and she understood the kind of people they were - poisonous as rattlesnakes and just as inclined to bite. If she was going to talk to them long enough to make sure Leroy got free of them, she had to be able to bite back. Plus, she was confident that Ashley could shoot Leroy's cousin through the head if she caused any trouble here. "Now to actually answer your question, Ah think you'll find Leroy's not the boy his mama sent off to Claremont." She heard the accent thick in her voice, and not for the first time realized she sounded very much like her mother when she was feeling this way. But the truth was that Rachel Cahill was a survivor, a woman who'd walked in a world that judged her for her family, skin, her gender, and what church she attended since she was small. Maybe she wasn't such a bad model after all. "But I'm sure Ah don't need to tell you that he's brave, kind, and has a good heart. He's going to be a fine husband to me." For her part, Ashley knew better than to be baited into talk by the other side's bodyguard - but what the hell was going on with her head? Was this an actual talking zombie or what? What the hell was wrong with these people?