Avenger Assembled

I'll let either @EternalPhoenix or @trollthumper in here.

We'll be happy to see you!

"Oh, I'm sure we looked very alarming," said Monsoon with a smile. She unbuckled her son from his front harness and held him in her arms, turning him around so Tempest could see big blue eyes and a frizzy one-year-old's black hair. Amir gave him a very small child's deep stare and smile. "Amir and I both have aquatic abilities, and I enjoy testing him with them - especially now," she added with a reflective look at the river that had only recently been cleared from the post-invasion wreckage. "Tempest, hmm - are you new to Freedom City?" she inquired. His lack of costume certainly suggested that, but commenting on a stranger's wardrobe when they might make a powerful friend was an indelicate idea.

Wadjet: Resisting the Trip: She can't make a 24, so not going to bother to roll. Reflex save: 19 I'll take the falling into molten metal thing. Tou vs DC 27 on the gun: 17 Alas! Lady Horus goes to save her sidekick, as that is the heroic thing to do! She'll spend her turn grabbing Wadjet and pulling her out of harm's way. As for the gun going off, I do like the idea of that complication. I will post to that effect ASAP and hopefully earn some Complication HP, or at least burn the place down. =D

I'll go ahead and let you post, @Tiffany Korta

"In the dark wet gloom, Sea Devil hadn't so much changed as evolved. She'd trusted Singularity to take the lead and had taken second place herself, her helmet pulled back to let her hear the sounds of the world above and the world all around them. The stars The stars The stars will tell The past the present and the future as well The ancient song roiled through her mind as she cocked her head in the direction of the three tunnels; finding nothing to distinguish between them, she gave a short soft croak as signal to show that she had no clear idea; then slid her trident against the hard tile ceiling of the left-hand path, keeping her sounds quick and quiet enough that they could pass for the natural sounds of the tunnel complex to beings further away. Take you always the lefthand path, for we wait for you between the curves.

"...oh," said Nina after a moment's pause, giving the good Samaritan one more once-over before putting her sword down - albeit not a way. Diplomatic measures were the way to go, especially now that so many new people were coming to Freedom City to aid in its reconstruction. She was soaking wet but not dripping; on closer inspection, most of what she was wearing (down to her headscarf) seemed to be made of the same stuff as bathing suits and superhero costumes. Her son seemed in an equal state, covered in water but drier than he should have been. "Your pardon," she said. "My son and I have many enemies; I had reason to be suspicious." She studied the man and added, "I don't know you - but in Freedom City I am Nina al-Darsah, Monsoon." As Tempest watched, the water on the baby's carrier began to flow outwards and upwards, as if the water had become quicksilver. "This is my son, Amir Richard."

Anna answered by lightly murmuring and throwing her arm around her girlfriend, still almost entirely asleep. This close, Nicola could see the grey at the roots of Anna's light blonde hair - but on the other hand, she'd seen a hell of a lot of Anna just a little earlier. Stirring a little at her girlfriend's words, Anna blinked sleepily. "Mmm? Sorry, baby, that was a lot..." Once she was actually awake, Anna took in the situation quickly once she had an explanation. She sat up, brushing the hair out of her eyes, and spoke, "I ain't been with anyone seriously in a long time." That wasn't to say her bed had been empty, but that was definitely not a conversation she was ready to have with Nicola right now. "But, you know. If we're gonna have a thing, I don't want it to be all sneaking glances and screwing around when nobody's watching. This ain't 1960. I want to take you out places, show you off, maybe go sit in the park and feed the ducks...And maybe people will think I'm yer mom, but screw 'em if they do."

Have an HP for being a good hero, end!

Nina was briefly confused when she felt the tug pulling her out of the water - then her body tensed as she understood what must be happening. Assassins! Rather than resist a pull that was greater than her own ability to combat it, she used her own kinetic powers to enhance Tempest's pull, leaping out of the water with Amir as if the two of them had been shot from a cannon. Landing on a nearby dock, she took a moment to size up the situation - a man she didn't recognize, not in superheroic garb, with strange powers; she took the opportunity to snap open her sword with a flourish, the long, curved scimitar shimmering slightly in the early morning light. "Who sent you!" she demanded of the man flying over the river, her English accented with the Received Pronunciation she'd learned from her tutors. Neither mother nor baby seemed terribly traumatized by their dip in the river, even though Tempest had distinctly seen them go under for a good thirty seconds. Even the baby didn't look bothered; instead burbling like an angry kettle as he tried to get his mother's attention.

Sorry, Cape, I keep signing on when I'm too exhausted to think straight - what you suggest sounds fine! I'll wait for a GM post. If Wadjet can't get it open during the fight, she'll go for her gun when she's up again.

Esperanza stared at the man from behind her mask, doing some rapid calculations about what she was witnessing. "...these are the Mara. It's a bad gang; worse than the cartels." Which was certainly true, she thought, as she listened for the sound of approaching sirens that would mean the police were timely for once - or the screeching of tires that meant the Mara had sent another hit squad. How was she going to take them down, keep Los Furies from getting killed, and maybe make sure Silver Guy here was a friend and not an enemy? "I know where one of their houses is, but I can't bust their asses on my own. You want to help me out with this?"

Here you go, @endwaar

August 2018 The invasion was over - and Freedom City was rebuilding. With her husband occupied with the rebuilding process, Nina al-Darsah Lucas was taking a rare opportunity to get out of the house with her son and walk the streets of Freedom City. Close to a year old now, Amir Richard Lucas was dressed in a striped blue and white onesie that matched his mother's headscarf - which he seemed to recognize from his eagerness to rid her of that garment. "Amir!" she taunted him in playful Arabic as they walked fearlessly along the short pleasure boat dock extending out into the river. They were close by the Pramas Bridge, but for the moment Nina's eyes were all on her baby. "That is Mother's! Do not take from your mother!" She caught the baby's hand and he laughed, and she laughed too. He'd risen early that morning, but so had she, heading out together through the city with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the money in her pocket. "Come on, it's swimming time," she told him as she picked her big boy up in her arms and stepped off the dock; the two of them falling together into the river and not coming up. From his position on the pedestrian pathway on the bridge, Tempest had seen the mother and baby fall into the water without a sound - but it didn't look like anyone else had. This early in the morning, with most of Freedom's heroes and first responders still doing cleanup, if he didn't take action, no one else would.

"Got sent here by a witch," commented Wadjet as her mentor resumed a rapid-fire search of the building and its contents, the tech-sniper's voice muffled by her fully-concealing helmet. Listening to the other women talk, Esperanza realized she was perhaps the only native of the city on their team. Well, sort of a native. "Gonna need to take a look around." Esperanza had lived in Bedlam most of her life but knew very little about this part of the city. "You better sit down in your office and play Minesweeper or something until we're done here."

I think Cape has it right - Long-Range just means it takes a full round and you're flat-footed.

They'd all been through dimensional gateways of various sorts at one time or another; and they'd all been warned about the gateway to Nihilor - warnings that came in handy over the next several minutes. The energies of the passageway seemed to cling to them as they went like a thick, oily film that was somehow noisome without any visible sight or smell; the stuff of dying universes in which Nihilor swam had a spiritual decay to it even if no eye could detect it. Visions flashed before their senses, almost too quick to process - ghosts of dead worlds? A touch of the corruption of the Terminus? Nina smiled as she threw the baby in a dumpster "Weakness cannot be tolerated!" - "No, Erin, please!" Megan screamed as her sister's cold grey fingers grabbed her arm - Phalanx knelt in homage before Omega - and the whole world saw it happen - In his trophy room, Travis ran his fingers over a bit of tanned human leather, smiling - The party opened their eyes and found themselves stumbling out of the portal on a rooftop that looked vaguely familiar. Looking around, they were in a neighborhood of low, vaguely rectangular buildings, something that wouldn't have been out of place on Freedom City's south side. A few miles away, cruelly huge structures rose up on each side of the "neighborhood" where they'd landed, the nearest a mirrored tower with a twist at the top that made it look vaguely like an eagle. The fortress of Shadivan Steelgrave; their destination. Overhead the skies were red and starless, but marred with rapid movements of a thousand different sorts of vehicles, and the distant sounds of energy discharges. The invasion of Freedom City wasn't the end of it. The Terminus really was at war with itself. The streets were full of people; the proles they'd been warned to expect, but none of that harried, greyish-looking bunch seemed to be looking up. Their eyes were all cast down as they moved from one building to another, or simply sheltered where they stood in alleyways. The firm voice of propaganda extolling the virtues of entropy and the glories of its "Steelgrave knight" echoed from the sides of buildings, cutting the sounds nearby into inaudibility. There were things below that looked like shops, and even four-wheeled vehicles, all of it unsettlingly like a cruel, twisted version of the Freedom City they had left behind. If that was the fortress of Steelgrave in front of them, about where they'd been told to expect; this was the place of beings denied a home in that dark paradise.

As that's less likely to set off an alarm than my idea, I'll get Cape's answer first =D

Comrade Frost kept close behind his former colleague, disappearing into an apparition of smoke and mist as soon as they were out of eyeshot of the cafe. He left icy trails behind as they went but the great thing about this age of heat-spotting cameras was that they looked for patches of heat - not the scientific impossibility of a moving patch of cold! A cloud of mist with two glowing red eyes in the center of it had its own problems, of course, but he knew how to keep to the shadows as he went - and to let Klara's much bigger and more imposing form be the center of attention. Not that they were looking for attention on this mission!

The fiery Latina women of Esperanza's mother's soaps would have cursed, or even screamed, as the silver man picked up a fully-loaded dumpster and threw it into the middle of the street! Wadjet was largely silent, though, hissing under her breath as the action happened almost too fast for her to react. The dumpster hit the car a glancing blow, sending it skidding into a wild spin and smashing abruptly against a brick wall. The boys inside had not been wearing their seat belts, and were in no shape to fight as Wadjet ran for the car with her gun leveled. She threw open the left passenger door, an Uzi clattering to the ground at her feet, and pulled out the passenger there - a boy about her age, tattoos on his face and bleeding from a blow to the mouth he'd taken when the car had made his abrupt stop. "You son of a bitch!" she hissed at him in Honduran Spanish, "What were you trying to do? Hit the stores? Hit _me_?" Her suspicions were confirmed when the Mara spat at her feet and said "No - nobody cares about you, witch - want the other girls..." She looked back at Chromium and took a gamble. "Hey. You speak Spanish, man?"

Looks good! One quick note is that Wadjet is taller than most citizens of Hardwick Park and her voice is muffled by her costume; telling her age by looking and listening to her is quite difficult.

Got my actions up! Wadjet is going to keep clinging to the thing while she works, Anna is going to hold her move actions while hovering between the robots and Wadjet; she doesn't want them to get between them.

Wadjet cursed in Spanish - then in Miskito, as she went to work on the robot. Damn primitive garbage! she thought to herself as she began applying her safe-cracking tools to the task of removing its head. Why can't we have nice $(E(ing things in this $))%*(ing hellhole!? Her gear, mostly modified dental picks and screwdrivers for this task, was designed for slow, precision work when she had all the time in the world to take apart a nice piece of technology that she or Anna had picked up and brought back to their lab. Not while under fire, on fire (practically) in full costume! She tried to entertain herself with visions of what she was going to do with this thing once she got it open. For her part, Lady Horus went to work, knocking the head off one of the monkey-robots with a slash of her glowing gold ankh. Anna was an old pro at super-burglary and she knew that these robots weren't the real problem; these little bastards were probably sending an alarm to their boss even as they fought, and soon she'd be crashing through the wall on some kind of giant goddamned fire-breathing penny-farthing bicycle. Why is it so freakin' hot in here? Turning to her sidekick, she called, "Be moved to quickness! I have a plan..."

And I'd be happy to help - just let me know!

Oh, I just meant Wadjet is taking 20 on busting into the thing - the idea is that Lady Horus has her back while she does the breaking and entering.