Avenger Assembled

HGM, if Lady Horus just flies after them really fast, how long would it take her to catch them? Would I need to roll Search, or...?

Init: http://orokos.com/roll/587652 = 19

Hmm. This establishment did not look much like what Anna was hoping for. Based on her experience, sleazy gyms tended to be run by guys who liked to get handsy with girls - or by mobsters. Or by both. She was mollified, a little, when it was a girl who came to see her. The slim blonde woman who was standing on the other side of the desk, waiting for Alyia, had light blonde hair the color of a bottle and wore a heavy Maniacs jacket against the chill of a Bedlam January. It was cold outside. "Not quite, honey," she said in a thick American accent that Aliya didn't immediately recognize. "I'm here to ask about yer private lessons. Usa the facilities, that kinda thing. You got a legit establishment here, sweetheart?" she added, meeting Aliya's eyes with bright baby blues. She was in her fifties, if Alyia guessed, but with the look and agility of a woman who'd kept herself in training.

Merlin frantically signaled Matt to run as fast as he could! Gesticulating wildly, he informed the teen that there was big trouble overhead - multiple bad guys of various powers, and strange magic to boot. At Merlin's signal, Matt got two distinct impressions - one was that Death was waiting for him up there, a greater Death than he'd ever personally seen or known, greater even than the death of a world that was still chewing on his heels. The other was that the dogs were that way, and coming closer... Leading the way, the thing ahead of him found the way up through the complex almost contemptuously easy. The bloody knobs running the place didn't seem to know what to do without their fancy gewgaws, which it seemed like that little chunky o'Raina's had screwed over somethin' fierce. She knocked them aside as they frantically hammered at security cameras or pounded on the communicators at their wrists; screaming in terror about how "It was loose!" and "I don't want to die like this!" and if Merlin looked sadly at discarded laptop parts as they went, neither of the heroes he was with were in any shape to notice.

"If I require specific favor, I will do you specific service," Frost assured him. "For now, I have but one request. You have rented hall, secured loyalty of great musicians, and you have all the world as your audience. Now is your time to show world you can dance. You understand?" he inquired, his tone frank but not actually unfriendly. "I will see your clubs! I look forward to what worlds you are able to provide."

"I know many secrets," croaked Aquaria, hopping closer to the fire, the light looking impossibly yellow on her face. Reaching back to where her stored suit lay, she came up with a tube of translucent hydrating cream, which without comment she began spreading on her skin. She thought of the tortures that sometimes made Jessie weep when she thought no one was listening, or the whispers Tarva made to strange gods, or the many other things people talked of guilelessly around the Deep One - as if one who could sing across the depths of the sea could not listen. "Secrets of the sea, and secrets of the Surface, and secrets of the Sea of Stars," she said, gesturing upwards towards the scattered jewels in the sky over their heads. "I will keep yours." She knew what price Surfacers made of their names, and so she did not ask. Instead she said, "I am sorry you have to change, but I am sure you are happier that way. You have been a good friend to me. Do you like to sing with that mouth?"

Slipping in an APPROVED so @TheAbsurdist can make it official once he has a chance for his!

Voodoo is a 'real' religion in-setting (or at least as real as it gets) - so it's worth thinking about what the voodoo deities think of this fellow. APPROVED

APPROVED

The laws dealing with superbeings and federal employment are complex - something Ashley George knew even before she filled out her application to join the Secret Service. She had the grades, she had the physical training, and she certainly had the experience. She had to be careful about how she wrote about that last thing (given that Copycat had much more training in criminal justice than Ashley George could ever admit to having) - but her two years at the NOPD, her fluent command of French and Vietnamese, along with glowing recommendation letters from her former supervisor, turned out to be just enough to make the grade. She was young (at 22, just past the minimum age) and not powerfully built - but she had what the federal government was looking for. Of course, she _also_ had the meta-gene. There was no hiding the former, not when there were so many witnesses to her accidentally stealing Lady Liberty's powers as a teenager, and not really any hiding the latter given the extensive battery of first physical, then psychological tests she had to undergo once she admitted to having superpowers on a federal employment form. But she'd thought this through, and she made her case time and time again. Despite her powers she was all-too-human; and those powers could be tremendously useful as a government agent - she could shut down the powers of an attacking metahuman with a touch, and detect the hostile intentions of many different types of beings even before they attacked. Easy to overlook (albeit often mistaken for a teenager thanks to her youth, slight build, and rounded features), she could blend right into a group of agents until she had to go into action. The hard part was avoiding AEGIS. After the mandatory ten week AEGIS training course for metahumans working for the federal government, almost all of them wind up working for AEGIS in some capacity or another - but Ashley wasn't interested. Working with AEGIS would put her too close to the worst parts of the life she left behind, with its codenames and its secrets, and she wanted the best parts instead - the bravery, and the courage, and the principles, to risk your life for another because it was the right thing to do. Plus, she'd always loved In The Line Of Fire, one of the few adult movies she'd been allowed to watch as a kid largely because it had been part of her VHS collection. As the first superhuman agent of the Secret Service, her promotions were fast-tracked - within certain limits. She was in her mid-twenties (and had only been an agent for two and a half years) when she was assigned to the White House, but only to manage the file room in the basement. She liked it there, only called 'upstairs' when the President was meeting with superhumans of some character or another (usually the members of the Dream Team), where she usually stood discreetly off to one side in her sunglasses and dark, conservative clothing, making sure that President Cahill (a man popular with his detail) stayed safe. She wasn't actually part of the Protective Detail - but it was still pretty damn good. Then came D-Day.

On the one hand, it was incredibly satisfying. Raven and Copycat found the killer of her father in the spring of 2010, the culmination of two years of investigative work by the duo (both remotely and on-scene) that finally cracked after a lucky break. He made the mistake of fighting back when Raven crashed through his apartment door and Copycat through his window, and Copycat had the great pleasure of kicking him in the knee until he collapsed, then beating him into unconsciousness with the butt of his own shotgun. Ashley still lets herself go back to that moment when she needs something to get her blood pumping. On the other hand, it wasn't. Paul Dubois was a drug dealer and a criminal, a man who had turned to marketing zombie powder and Zoom to impressionable young people in Ashley's old neighborhood. He was a bad man and taking him down was a great thing. But he'd turned to crime as a way of paying for his own addiction to zombie powder, a downward spiral that earned him a death sentence in the spring of 2012 when he was convicted of murdering an NOPD officer who had come across him cleaning out one of his drug stashes while the storm hit. It was hard to ignore how superhumans had made him worse rather than better, how a man who might have been able to turn his life around had only sunk further into the muck because of the gods and monsters of the world. She and Raven started arguing more after that, arguing about superheroes and supervillains, about how much good the former actually did when they weren't stopping world-ending threats. Then came the real disaster - fresh after an early summer patrol in 2010, while waiting for enhanced sensory powers she'd stolen to wear off, Copycat overheard a noise outside the Rookery - the Raven talking with Magpie, in the spot that they both pretended was just part of a neutral skyscraper. It sounded like Magpie was planning to _kidnap_ the President! "Some people have an interest in making sure the President doesn't abandon certain clandestine operations - are you in, darling? You could play the heroine who saves him at the last moment-" Then she was fairly sure she heard them kissing? Horrified at the unexpected betrayal, and determined to keep this in the family, Copycat took to stalking Raven herself to find out more, catching her meeting Magpie again and again, talking in code about some secret plan of theirs - and she realized her mentor's attraction to Magpie (who she had always thought of as a creepy lech who wasn't nearly good enough for her boss) had overcome her good sense. Raven had made it clear to Copycat that she was not a big fan of the then-President's policies towards super-criminals, considering the administration's willingness to pardon super-criminals who hadn't paid their debt to society a sign of weakness. Nobody had even heard that the President was going to be in town! It was all hush-hush, except to the powers that be. Determined to keep the shame of this as quiet as possible, she left a message to be transmitted to Claremont in case something happened to her - then she snuck into the President's hotel room in City Center, where she found - The Raven waiting for her in an empty room.Quickly, as they sparred, Raven told Ashley the truth she was only just now realizing. There was no secret Presidential visit to Freedom City and there was no Magpie, or at least no Magpie her mentor was really interested in that way. This had all been one last test, a test to make sure that Ashley valued truth and justice more than she valued her mentor, and that she'd do the right thing when called on even if it was hard. "Though really, you should have brought more people to fight me than just-" Copycat interrupted her mentor with a sharp, profane word - and demanded to be taken back to Claremont. It was her last time in costume - and the last time she and Callie spoke face to face until the events of D-Day. Things were different for the Raven after that; she kept to herself for a while - and played things differently with the other students she mentored from then on it. Avoiding emotional identification - and emotional manipulation. Copycat learned from her mistakes too. When Ashley graduated from Claremont Academy in 2010, she had her diploma and her associate's degree both - having taken advantage of the school's early college program during her time as the "workaholic wallflower." After two more years, she had her bachelor's degree in criminal justice (and a minor in political science) from Our Lady of Holy Cross College. After a lifetime of repression, college had been a breath of fresh air - she'd gotten drunk for the first time and smoked weed while she was at it and had her first real boyfriend - at least until he found out she was serious about wanting to stay in New Orleans and that she wasn't interested in getting married right now. She had plans - plans that she fulfilled first with two years at the New Orleans Police Department - and then, at the age of 22, joining the United States Secret Service.

Phillip Tran fled what had once been South Vietnam with his parents in the late 1970s, his family traveling through the Phillippines and Guam before their arrival in the mainland United States. They settled in New Orleans, with its heat, its French language, and its Catholic population. (His father had served in the South Vietnamese army and his mother was Hoa, an ethnic Chinese minority disliked by the new regime - they had ample reason to leave the country.) The Trans were determined that their son, only a small boy when they fled the country, would remember the nation of his birth and so taught him language, culture, and customs. When Philip was a young man, he did what his father had and joined the military - at eighteen, he enlisted in the US Army in 1989. Phillip served his adopted homeland well, fighting in Operation Desert Storm before returning to New Orleans East to marry his high school sweetheart Mary Arbour in 1991. They were a mixed couple, but Mary was a good Catholic and fluent in French - the Trans had no complaints. They settled in New Orleans East, a town about a hundred miles west of Knoxville, deep in the heart of Appalachia, where Phillip's military service got him a job a job with the NOPD, patrolling the neighborhood where he'd grown up. Phillip and Mary became the parents of five girls [(Ashley (1992), Mary (1994), Cecilia (1997), Agnes (2001) and Phillipa (2003)] and did their best to balance both worlds - Ashley grew up hearing English, Vietnamese, and French spoken in the household and in both school and afterschool programs, worshiping at the local Vietnamese Catholic Church, and was honestly very happy. Her father doted on her and passed on his deep love of his adopted homeland, its people, and his chosen career - law enforcement. Ashley loved her father and the neighborhood where she grew up - but unlike her father, she hoped to use service to others as a way up and out. Her way out, influenced by her dad's love for Clint Eastwood movies, was from an early age the United States Secret Service. Protecting the President, the symbol of American freedom, seemed like the coolest job in the world - she read about the long hours and thankless conditions, but she appreciated the need for sacrifice to get what you want. And what she wanted was the Secret Service and the Presidential Protective Detail. It would take years of training and study, especially since fate and genetics had given her a small frame that would make a lifetime of physical activity difficult. But she had the drive and the commitment to make it happen. But life had some curves to throw her way first. Ashley was thirteen when Katrina hit - thirteen when her father died. It was all very sad - a beloved local cop killed by a looter in the frantic days just after the hurricane, four little girls and one very pregnant widow left behind. She didn't believe it - despite what the outside media said, there weren't that many looters around, especially not in their relatively isolated neighborhood, and even those looters wouldn't shoot a police officer in the back for no reason anyone had ever been able to find. It didn't add up. But nobody wanted to hear it - especially not her grieving mother. A few months after her father's death, a month after her baby sister was born, her mother married one of her father's former partners - an Anglo man who was himself eager to get out of the damaged city. They moved to Lafayette, where her stepfather found a job as a campus police officer for the University of Louisiana - and Ashley made plans to get the hell out of town. When Ashley's powers first appeared on the Fourth of July, 2006, when Lady Liberty's appearance at the Lafayette, LA Fourth of July festivities ended with a certain teenager firing beams of golden light from her eyes and singing the National Anthem (an utterly mortifying experience that she is forever grateful took place just before the widespread adoption of the smartphone), Mary George almost didn't let her daughter go to Claremont even after the League helped keep the news of the "Copycat" out of the national news, and after the arrival of kindly headmaster Duncan Summers - not until it was made clear to her that the school was safe and that her daughter would be protected. When Ashley found out what the school was _really_ for, it wasn't hard for her to figure out what she wanted to do - she wanted to find the man who had killed her father! First came two years of hard training and discipline, learning everything she'd need to learn to be a superhero. What was a social life when there was work to be done? Maybe she studied too hard, and pushed her body to its breaking point - but what else was there to do? She had to find justice, even if no one else wanted to - or could.

Character Backstory: Ashley George's first time on patrol with the Raven changed her life. It was 2008 and she was sixteen, in her second year at Claremont Academy and honestly not sure if she wanted to be a superhero. She didn't have the flashy powers of many of her classmates, the first Next-Gen students like Bolt or Megastar, she wasn't a particularly outstanding student (though she did work hard, spending hours in the library every night), nor was she particularly happy in Freedom City, so far from her home in New Orleans. But the Raven saw something in Ashley she didn't see in herself - and so it was that 'Copycat' joined the Raven on patrol as an occasional sidekick. Ashley enjoyed adventuring alongside the famous hero, especially once she gained enough control over her energy-draining abilities to use them in the field - but truthfully she appreciated the private lessons more. She learned the Raven's "style-less" style of goju hand-to-hand fighting, learning how to take down men half again her size in hand-to-hand combat. She learned how to work a room and how to control a crowd with her voice and her eyes, letting darkness, mystery, and the occasional violent beating distract from the fact that she was just a petite girl whose superpowers generally didn't do much to make her bulletproof (except when she was fighting psychopaths who could punch through steel doors!) She learned other things too - Raven was Amerasian too and had also lost a parent to crime, and had been raised by a loving, albeit overprotective parent with a strong interest in law and order. Maybe it was their similarities that had drawn Raven to her - Raven wasn't much for talking. The problem was, after her senior year, Ashley wasn't one for listening- at least, not with all her attention. Ashley George's break with superheroing began the spring of 2010; the day she caught the man who, ten years earlier, had murdered her father.

February 2018 St. Gregory's The area around St. Gregory's Church was the home of one of the larger Russian emigre communities in Freedom City, a legacy of the city's long history of accommodating immigrants from all over the planet - and beyond. The owner and manager of A Taste of Irkutsk, the closest thing you could get to authentic Siberian cuisine in this part of New Jersey, was a fairly recent arrival in Freedom City, with ample friends and family back in the old country. So when the most famous Russian super-agent in the United States called him and reserved a table, he'd been happy to provide whatever he needed - including a restaurant that was mostly empty despite this being the dinner hour. Sitting patiently at a table for two, Comrade Frost waited for the arrival of his guest. The message had come to the Davydov residence - not Claremont Academy. Comrade Frost, the longest-active member of the People's Heroes, had invited Vanya out for an evening of "delicious Siberian fare for the appetite of a young bear!" (the exclamation point had been in the original) - a pointed invitation that was difficult to refuse. Vanya had grown up on stories of the People's Heroes and how they'd defended the motherland from the Germans during the Great Patriotic War; Vanya's father had grown up on stories of the People's Heroes and how they kept the Soviet Union safe from the forces of capitalism. Who could turn one down? "Don't let him frighten you," Ivan had assured Vanya. "This is not 1975 and this is America, not Russia. Everything will be fine." Still, Ivan had opted to come to the restaurant with his son, promising to stay "out of the way and let you do the talking, since you are a big man now." The restaurant certainly smelled familiar as they got off the bus together, the scents of home easily detectable even on the street. Was that pelmini in there?

As Leviathan's volume went up, Aquaria leaped backwards without turning, away from the fire, only the bright reflection of the membranes behind her eyes giving a clue to where she crouched in the dimness of the beach. When Leviathan's actual intent didn't seem hostile, she hopped back towards him and croaked as if it was simplicity itself. "You talk like a Surface-Man." She hopped closer again, looking up at Leviathan, and added, "I am sorry if the answer was a secret. I have friends who do not tell people what they turn into at night," she assured him. And I can tell by how you look at me, she thought, but there was no use dwelling on what could never be.

At the sight of her counterpart, the Feral Winifred wrinkled her nose. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! She seemed disappointed by what she saw, if a creature like what she was was capable of an emotion like disappointment. Baring her talons, she made a leap for the Solution anyway, though - and was promptly brought down by an electrical discharge that radiated through her control implant with a visible crackle of blue-white light. The blast knocked it to the floor but she was clearly not out of the fight, crawling forward with a pitiful fury. The baby was life, cutting through the death that permeated this place (and seemed to be clinging to Matt in particular) like a light shining in a dark room, and as he took it in his arms Matt distinctly heard the distant sound of a far-off canine, then another - dogs looking for their pack. He could taste the deaths still on the back of his tongue and by now he could sense something more about them - he was tasting the death of things as well as people, things like the version of Fred that was still trying to get up and fight its vastly superior foe. Things. And the death of a world - the death of dreams, of hopes, of heroes, a civilization's dreams and nightmares alike bursting in bubbles in a sea of red, tooth and claw - the baby seemed to like Matt, burbling up at him as the distant howling of lost friends echoed in his ears. Did he hear another voice? An equally mammalian but somewhat smaller one? Behind Matt, Merlin demanded to know what the two of them were doing here - but waving his arms, added urgently that that was no time to worry about that, not when the world was ending upstairs. And why were there two Freds, anyway?

"It is a mighty treasure of the kings of old," Aquaria croaked softly, listening in her mind to songs of other places and other times, and the ancient days of lost Lemuria. "Another treasure could challenge its power." She bit off the last sentence with the precision of someone speaking an alien language - and saying things she had little desire to say. She hopped from the chair where she'd been awkwardly perching, her facial armor sliding up to mask her amphibious expression. "The other treasures, the small and large things he stole. What will happen to them?" "No one's yet had a chance to apply technology to the Serpent Crown," Siren admitted to SFX, "it's generally been combated with magic, either Atlantean or human." Siren studied Sea Devil's posture and said gently, "Most of them will be returned to their owners, if we can find them. It looks like Devil Ray and his gang plundered museums and occultists on several continents." "But not their owners," Aquaria croaked again, insistently. It had been a long day, full of fears and triumphs, and half-heard songs she might never have known. "..may I see them?" she asked. "I could tell you what they are."

What's his Device?

"If he was a Deep One who had killed thirty of your young, he would not be alive now," croaked Aquaria in reply, a statement that was not a question because everyone knew the most likely answer. She took a breath, neck bulging visibly inside her armor, and spoke, no, sang - "Dagon and Hydra, Gave we our shape and our teeth, to be their glory," "I have seen..." Aquaria paused, rarely struggling for a world in English. "...shapes of the Creation of Deep Ones, from the hands of Dagon and Hydra, in the cities Below. There is one you call the Serpent Crown, but it is on the Surface. They had great power in them - power over shapes. A Surfacer who saw one might have been...transformed." She struggled for the last word because she knew that while 'enlightened' was the correct one that it was not one her listeners would want to hear. "If he continues to become, and goes Below, he will live a long time if he is not killed."

Quill and ink were not unfamiliar to Frost; though his own use of ancient writings tended to be of the sort carved by ancients into tree bark and stone. It took him only a moment to ensure he would not embarrass himself with the took at hand. Frost signed with a flourish loud enough to be audible - then turned to Murk, placing his hand on his arm. "You have my words," he told the ancient seriously. "I give them to you with great expectations. Now pay me for them in deeds."

"Hello," said Siren as she entered as well, giving SFX a friendly greeting. "You certainly performed well today, young lady. I'll make sure your teachers get a note excusing your absence," she added with a small smile. "And perhaps some extra credit, hmm?" "They want to know if I was the one who transformed Devil Ray," croaked Aquaria, shooting a suspicious look at Siren. It wasn't that she was hostile to the Freedom League member, not as such - but Siren was a well-known ally of the Atlanteans and claimed the powers of strange Surface gods. it was hard not to be unsettled in her presence, for all that she liked Phantom the sorceress well enough. "I did not. I am not a shaman or a priest." She wore her armor sensibly retracted in Freedom Hall, but hadn't bothered to take it off. "We don't think you transformed Devil Ray," said Siren reassuringly, shooting a glance at Phantom before looking back at Aquaria, her arms spread wide. "But even if you don't know that sort of magic yourself, you are the person on the Surface who knows the most about Deep One curses - and how they might be removed. Anything you could tell us, even legends or rumors, could help." Aquaria blinked, staring at the woman with big, goggly eyes, and shifted inside her armor. "Why do you want to help him?"

Aquaria was silent for a while, staring into the fire as she breathed air, the sacs at her throat bulging audibly as she considered her words. "Thank you," she croaked wetly. She blinked her great eyes at Leviathan, the flame reflected brightly in them. "It is a hard thing to make such a change - and if I had come without you, my blood would have spilled - and theirs, too. But now they will live and their young will grow, and their songs will go on. I am grateful to you; and so will that tribe be, as long as their song continues." She looked at Leviathan to see if she was shocking him before continuing, "Things would not be different if we had the power and you had not," she finally said. "When I was young, I saw the cities Below," and when she said it, Leviathan could hear the capital on the word. "Far from Atlantis and the Surface, where the temples are great and the songs echo in the deep, and the knives of the priests flash. If they had the power, they would drink Atlantis, and flood the Surface, and the oceans would taste of a world's blood." She shivered at the memory before saying, with obvious reluctance to confess such a thing to a powerful ally, "Be-be careful of my people. That we have suffered does not make us sweet." She took a breath and exhaled, an audible broak of sound before she added, perhaps a bit more cheerfully than she felt, "Do you wear this skin always? Or do you shed it?"

Watchdog Physical Description: Ashley is short and round-faced, with big eyes and a smile that makes it easy for her to pass as sixteen - not that she's doing a lot of smiling these days. She's grown her jet-black hair out for this mission and dyed the tips pink, another way to help herself pass as someone a decade younger than her actual age. She has the muscular build of a born athlete, albeit one with a boxer's training rather than a gymnast's. When not wearing her helmet, she sticks close to Claudia and doesn't say much except when directly addressed or speaking to her 'sister', keeping most of her face hidden behind dark sunglasses and a near-perpetual scowl. She speaks English with no particular accent, though her French and Vietnamese have Louisiana and American accents, respectively. She usually dresses like a teenage girl trying to look like a punk, or at least push the dress code - leather jackets, dark T-shirts, and denim skirts or pants. In costume as Watchdog, she wears a grey armored outfit with a bright red snarling dog's face over the chest. Over that she wears a black and grey leather jacket with metal studs on the shoulders - and covering her head a modified motorcycle helmet painted the same red as her chest symbol. She wears fingerless black gloves on both hands while in combat. Her jacket comes with a hood that she usually keeps pulled up, the better to strike a more intimidating profile. At either side are two silvered pistols, hanging on each hip. Watchdog is, if anything, a sourer presence than Ashley - her helmet-muffled voice sounding tinny and artificial. Quote: <Watchdog stares up at her interrogator until they go away> Character History: Phillip Tran fled what had once been South Vietnam with his parents in the late 1970s, his family traveling through the Phillippines and Guam before their arrival in the mainland United States. They settled in New Orleans, with its heat, its French language, and its Catholic population. (His father had served in the South Vietnamese army and his mother was Hoa, an ethnic Chinese minority disliked by the new regime - they had ample reason to leave the country.) The Trans were determined that their son, only a small boy when they fled the country, would remember the nation of his birth and so taught him language, culture, and customs. When Philip was a young man, he did what his father had and joined the military - at eighteen, he enlisted in the US Army in 1989. Phillip served his adopted homeland well, fighting in Operation Desert Storm before returning to New Orleans East to marry his high school sweetheart Mary Arbour in 1991. They were a mixed couple, but Mary was a good Catholic and fluent in French - the Trans had no complaints. They settled in New Orleans East, where Phillip's military service got him a job with the NOPD, patrolling the neighborhood where he'd grown up. Phillip and Mary became the parents of five girls [(Ashley (1992), Mary (1994), Cecilia (1997), Agnes (2001) and Phillipa (2003)] and did their best to balance both worlds - Ashley grew up hearing English, Vietnamese, and French spoken in the household and in both school and afterschool programs, worshiping at the local Vietnamese Catholic Church, and was honestly very happy. Her father doted on her and passed on his deep love of his adopted homeland, its people, and his chosen career - law enforcement. Ashley loved her father and the neighborhood where she grew up - but unlike her father, she hoped to use service to others as a way up and out. Her way out, influenced by her dad's love for Clint Eastwood movies, was from an early age the United States Secret Service. Protecting the President, the symbol of American freedom, seemed like the coolest job in the world - she read about the long hours and thankless conditions, but she appreciated the need for sacrifice to get what you want. And what she wanted was the Secret Service and the Presidential Protective Detail. It would take years of training and study, especially since fate and genetics had given her a small frame that would make a lifetime of physical activity difficult. But she had the drive and the commitment to make it happen. But life had some curves to throw her way first. Ashley was thirteen when Katrina hit - thirteen when her father died. It was all very sad - a beloved local cop killed by a looter in the frantic days just after the hurricane, four little girls and one very pregnant widow left behind. She didn't believe it - despite what the outside media said, there weren't that many looters around, especially not in their relatively isolated neighborhood, and even those looters wouldn't shoot a police officer in the back for no reason anyone had ever been able to find. It didn't add up. But nobody wanted to hear it - especially not her grieving mother. A few months after her father's death, a month after her baby sister was born, her mother married one of her father's former partners - an Anglo man who was himself eager to get out of the damaged city. They moved to Lafayette, where her stepfather found a job as a campus police officer for the University of Louisiana - and Ashley made plans to get the hell out of town. When Ashley's powers first appeared on the Fourth of July, 2006, when Lady Liberty's appearance at the Lafayette, LA Fourth of July festivities ended with a certain teenager firing beams of golden light from her eyes and singing the National Anthem (an utterly mortifying experience that she is forever grateful took place just before the widespread adoption of the smartphone), Mary George almost didn't let her daughter go to Claremont even after the League helped keep the news of the "Copycat" out of the national news, and after the arrival of kindly headmaster Duncan Summers - not until it was made clear to her that the school was safe and that her daughter would be protected. When Ashley found out what the school was _really_ for, it wasn't hard for her to figure out what she wanted to do - she wanted to find the man who had killed her father! First came two years of hard training and discipline, learning everything she'd need to learn to be a superhero. What was a social life when there was work to be done? Maybe she studied too hard, and pushed her body to its breaking point - but what else was there to do? She had to find justice, even if no one else wanted to - or could. Ashley George's first time on patrol with the Raven changed her life. It was 2008 and she was sixteen, in her second year at Claremont Academy and honestly not sure if she wanted to be a superhero. She didn't have the flashy powers of many of her classmates, the first Next-Gen students like Bolt or Megastar, she wasn't a particularly outstanding student (though she did work hard, spending hours in the library every night), nor was she particularly happy in Freedom City, so far from her home in New Orleans. But the Raven saw something in Ashley she didn't see in herself - and so it was that 'Copycat' joined the Raven on patrol as an occasional sidekick. People who kept a close eye on Raven around the start of the current decade will remember Copycat in her full-face mask and cat-ears, the black and navy blue costume that she burned years ago. But never mind that. Ashley enjoyed adventuring alongside the famous hero, especially once she gained enough control over her energy-draining abilities to use them in the field - but truthfully she appreciated the private lessons more. She learned the Raven's "style-less" style of goju hand-to-hand fighting, learning how to take down men half again her size in hand-to-hand combat. She learned how to work a room and how to control a crowd with her voice and her eyes, letting darkness, mystery, and the occasional violent beating distract from the fact that she was just a petite girl whose superpowers generally didn't do much to make her bulletproof (except when she was fighting psychopaths who could punch through steel doors!) She learned other things too - Raven was Amerasian too and had also lost a parent to crime. Maybe it was their similarities that had drawn Raven to her - Raven wasn't much for talking. The problem was, after her senior year, Ashley wasn't one for listening - at least, not to Raven. Ashley George's break with superheroing began the spring of 2010; the day she caught the man who, ten years earlier, had murdered her father. On the one hand, it was incredibly satisfying. Raven and Copycat found the killer of her father in the spring of 2010, the culmination of two years of investigative work by the duo (both remotely and on-scene) that finally cracked after a lucky break. He made the mistake of fighting back when Raven crashed through his apartment door and Copycat through his window, and Copycat had the great pleasure of kicking him in the knee until he collapsed, then beating him into unconsciousness with the butt of his own shotgun. Ashley still lets herself go back to that moment when she needs something to get her blood pumping. On the other hand, it wasn't so satisfying at all. Paul Dubois was a drug dealer and a criminal, a man who had turned to marketing zombie powder and Zoom to impressionable young people in Ashley's old neighborhood. He was a bad man and taking him down was a great thing. But he'd turned to crime as a way of paying for his own addiction to zombie powder, a downward spiral that earned him a death sentence in the spring of 2012 when he was convicted of murdering Phillip Tran, an NOPD officer who had come across him cleaning out one of his drug stashes while the storm hit. It was hard to ignore how superhumans had made him worse rather than better, how a man who might have been able to turn his life around had only sunk further into the muck because of the gods and monsters of the world. She and Raven started arguing more after that, arguing about superheroes and supervillains, about how much good the former actually did when they weren't stopping world-ending threats. In the end, it was no one great thing that drove apart hero and sidekick, no great crisis that either of the two born 'fixers' could have solved. When Raven kept Copycat at arms length, endless tests and trials and secret drills only taught Ashley that her mentor valued her costumed identity more than her real self - when Raven kept Copycat close, the hidden reality of the superhero world showed her the underbelly of the gods and heroes - the dimensional vibrations where supers had gone to war with humans rather than protecting them, the criminals turned heroes who laughed at justice for their crimes, the Grue and other monsters hiding among innocent people, the codenames and secret identities and the endless secrets kept from a general public that supposedly couldn't "handle the truth". When Copycat left the Raven's side after graduation, it was not on good terms - and she didn't look back. She had better things to do. When Ashley graduated from Claremont Academy in 2010, she had her diploma and her associate's degree both - having taken advantage of the school's early college program during her time as the "workaholic wallflower." After two more years, she had her bachelor's degree in criminal justice (and a minor in political science) from Our Lady of Holy Cross College. After a lifetime of repression, college had been a breath of fresh air - she'd gotten drunk for the first time and smoked weed while she was at it and had her first real boyfriend - at least until he found out she was serious about not wanting to stay in New Orleans and that she wasn't interested in getting married right now. She had plans. First came three years (2012-2015) as a New Orleans police officer, wearing the star and crescent badge her father had died wearing, defending the New Orleans East neighborhood where she'd grown up. (Beyond her family ties, it's the largest American police force that doesn't ask questions about superpowers or vigilantism when you join - a legacy of the post-Katrina recruitment drives.) Eurasian and female, she was part of a tiny minority on the force - but she'd already been through much worse than anything the boys in blue could throw at her. She enjoyed the work, enjoyed patrolling the streets and keeping people safe, but nothing about being back in her old neighborhood changed her mind about her desire to move out of it. Her mother, sisters, and step-brothers were settling in fine in Lafayette; there was nothing for her here but ghosts. The laws dealing with superbeings and federal employment are complex - something Ashley knew even before she filled out her application to join the Secret Service. She had the grades, she had the physical training, and she certainly had the experience. She had to be careful about how she wrote about that last thing (given that Copycat had much more training in criminal justice than Ashley George could ever admit to having) - but her three years at the NOPD, her fluent command of French and Vietnamese, along with glowing recommendation letters from her former supervisor, turned out to be just enough to make the grade. She was young (at 23, just past the minimum age) and not powerfully built - but she had what the federal government was looking for. Of course, she _also_ had the meta-gene. With so many witnesses to her accidentally stealing Lady Liberty's powers as a teenager, and the extensive battery of first physical, then psychological tests she had to undergo once she admitted to having superpowers on a federal employment form, there was no hiding who she was. But she'd thought this through, and she made her case time and time again. Despite her powers she was all-too-human; and those powers could be tremendously useful as a government agent - she could shut down the powers of an attacking metahuman with a touch, and detect the hostile intentions of many different types of beings even before they attacked. Easy to overlook (albeit often mistaken for a teenager thanks to her youth, slight build, and rounded features), she could blend right into a group of agents until she had to go into action. The hard part was avoiding AEGIS. After the mandatory ten week AEGIS training course for metahumans working for the federal government, almost all of them wind up working for AEGIS in some capacity or another - but Ashley wasn't interested. Working with AEGIS would put her too close to the worst parts of the life she left behind, with its codenames and its secrets, and she wanted the best parts instead - the bravery, and the courage, and the principles, to risk your life for another because it was the right thing to do. As the first superhuman agent of the Secret Service, her promotions were fast-tracked - within certain limits. She was in her mid-twenties (and had only been an agent for a year and a half) when she was assigned to the White House, but only to manage the file room in the basement. She liked it there, only called 'upstairs' when the President was meeting with superhumans of some character or another (usually the members of the Dream Team), where she usually stood discreetly off to one side in her sunglasses and dark, conservative clothing, making sure that President Cahill (a man popular with his detail) stayed safe. She wasn't actually part of the Protective Detail - but it was still pretty damn good. Then came D-Day. On March 15, 2018, there was an incident at the White House. The general public is aware that all the radios and other electronic gadgets near the White House went dead, some of them permanently, for a good hour and a half. The Secret Service, Capitol Police, and other law enforcement agencies in Washington went on high alert that afternoon and the whole city went into lockdown for 24 hours. The general public believes that the incident was the result of a terrorist attack by robotic members of the Foundry - an attack foiled by the Secret Service. This is a lie. What really happened was that Jaycee Cahill nearly set the White House on fire. 'Sick in bed' with agonizing migraines, she was the source of the sudden 'radio black hole' that made it appear that every radio and other wireless signal in the White House had gone dead. In the process of being evacuated from the terrorist attack along with her mother and younger sister, it was she who generated an EMP powerful enough to keep Marine One from flying - and then in a sudden burst of microwave energy, emit a pulse powerful enough to nearly kill her family and Secret Service detail as their internal temperatures raised to dangerously high levels. It was Agent Ashley George, running at full speed across the White House lawn even as the grass began to smolder around the frightened teen (who had run, hands to the side of her head, from the landing pad on the South Lawn), who saved the day, grabbing Jaycee by her pressure points and holding her as she drained the energy that powered the teen's radiation. She saved the First Family, she saved her fellow agents, and she probably stopped the irradiation of a significant number of White House staff and tourists. And it was Agent George who was on point for the news of what had followed - about Jaycee's powers couldn't be turned off or suppressed, about how she needed to learn how to use them or she would die - and so would a hell of a lot of other people if she stayed in the White House. So what could they do? Could they really tell the world that the President's daughter had power enough, theoretically, to fry an entire city - power that had come from Farsider DNA that blood tests found in the President and his three daughters? There had to be another way. NPC Backstory: Jaycee Cahill was born in 2002 in Guymon, Oklahoma. She's the middle of three girls, all of them named after their father J.T. (who she still calls 'Daddy', especially when she wants something from him). Her family has deep roots in rural Texas County; her late grandfather's savvy business sense made him a millionaire (and the richest man in Texas County, at least for a while) when he sold his failing cattle lands to invest in the natural gas boom of the 1930s. Her daddy met her momma Rachel twenty years ago, when he was fresh out of Harvard and a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma and she was just finishing up her BA in nursing. Rachel left her family in Muskogee behind to settle in her husband's hometown and work as a school nurse; Jaycee looks a lot like her mom, with her mother's skin tone, petite build and dark hair. Jaycee knows there was a time when her daddy wasn't a politician, but she can't really remember it. She wasn't yet in elementary school when her daddy ran for the Oklahoma State Legislature, a position he held for only a few years before deciding legislative service wasn't for him. The former political science professor at OPSU wasn't a man for legislative negotiations and dickering - he wanted to be the man in charge. Friendly to the oil industry, married to a Comanche woman, projecting a folksy-but-informed manner that let him speak cordially to both Tulsa suburbanites and farmers in the Panhandle, JT Cahill ran first as an outsider in the Republican primary, then was elected Governor of Oklahoma in 2010. Jaycee found that she liked being a governor's daughter. She was one of the most popular kids in her tony private schools in Oklahoma City, getting her attention she'd hardly ever won as a middle child back home, and living in Oklahoma City was a lot better than living in Guymon. It meant changes at home - she saw a lot less of her daddy and her momma, but she was reaching an age where that wasn't so bad. She got to travel too; out to DC and down to Austin, getting to know the children of other politicians and rich friends of her daddy's, and even got to visit. She wasn't old enough to be interested in boys the way her older sister Jaybee was, but she was sure that when she did, she'd have her pick of the best ones. She had a lot of plans. Jaycee was old enough to have some idea of what they were getting into when her daddy and momma sat her and her two sisters down in December of 2014 to tell them something very serious. Her daddy had thought hard, he'd prayed hard, and he'd talked to their mom and his friends - and Governor Cahill was going to run for President in the next election. Freshly 13, Jaycee rolled her eyes but didn't actually backsass her daddy - her daddy had just been re-elected Governor earlier that year and she figured the campaign for President couldn't be _that_ different from the campaign for Governor. And besides, it probably wasn't going to amount to anything. She had to admit she loved her dad (privately, anyway), but the country wasn't going to elect her dad, with his corny jokes and his Sooner ties and cheerful belly, President, right? The headaches started around the time of Jaycee's fourteenth birthday, just a short time after her father had been elected President of the United States. They were small at first and she got aspirin for them, then stronger stuff - stuff the White House doctors had to prescribe, then hospital visits to get her on a new type of painkillers. Her daddy's people kept it out of the media, which made her feel a little better - running for President was _not_ like running for Governor at all, and the campaign had turned her life completely upside-down. She knew how important this job was to her family, to her sisters, to America; she decided not to tell anyone when the headaches came back after a few months of treatment - or when she started hearing whispers in empty rooms in the White House, and then seeing things she knew weren't there - strange colors and patterns that she blocked out by sheer force of will. She wasn't going to ruin everything for her family by being a freak! And then came D-Day. Judith Claudia Cahill Metahuman Abilities: Subject's metahuman abilities reflect a biological connection to the lower end of the electromagnetic spectrum - particularly the VHF frequencies just above one meter. Her neurological and skeletal systems have a unique chemical composition that makes her a natural transmitter and receiver of these frequencies. In a 'resting' state, she has the ability to send and receive signals along these frequencies, visual data being transmitted to her optic nerve and auditory to her ear canal. However, subject's abilities are 'overpowered' (as is common among younger metahumans). When in an environment with sufficient VHF energy (such as that found in any major metropolitan area), her body begins to act as a natural 'sponge' - absorbing and storing these energies throughout her cellular structure. Sufficient accumulation of these energies results in so-far uncontrolled discharges of energies cascading 'above' the VHF range into microwaves and infrared radiation. These discharges are extremely hazardous to her environment and others within it. Unless her abilities can be reliably controlled, there will be further D-Day events. Subject is not recommended for inhibitor technology for multiple reasons - in addition to the hazard her abilities pose to the sensitive environment where she lives, her neurological functions have become dependent on the VHF radiation she absorbs unconsciously. Without regular exposure to VHF radiation, her brain will begin to shut down and she will enter a persistent comatose state. Joanna Bilhah "Jaybee" Cahill - 18 Jaybee Cahill is starting at Bacone College in the fall, where she plans to major in Native American studies. She's the only one of the kids who speaks fluent Comanche, having paid close attention to her mother growing up - especially when she was trying to slip profanity past the ears of the girls. She's the most liberal of the Cahill kids, sometimes that's been a source of contention around the family dinner table, but the President has always affirmed that he "values mah daughters and wants to let them grow up to be the best women they can be" - it helps that she doesn't criticize her father or his administration in public. Cahill is somewhat displeased with her veganism, something which he makes a point to call "an alternative lifestyle." She wishes her sister hadn't developed her powers - but hopes she's able to do some good with them. Someday. Judith Claudia "Jaycee" Cahill - 16 Known to be in poor health, Judith Claudia Cahill is being educated by private tutors in the White House. She occasionally makes public appearances with the First Family, but has never shown the appetite for the limelight that her older and younger sister do, and her parents have never sought to push her into it. (She was going through a rather awkward phase of her adolescence during the 2016 campaign.) She really wishes she hadn't turned into a 'freak'. Jerusha Deborah "Jaydee" Cahill - 14 Jaydee Cahill is the daughter closest to her father, having come of age during his political career. She has ambitions herself one day, but contents with ruling the roost at her expensive private school in Washington. She wishes her sister hadn't developed her powers - so dangerous, and what a scandal it'll cause once it leaks! With the certainty of a 14-year-old queen bee, she knows that secrets have a way of coming out... Power Descriptions: Watchdog generally fights like someone who has no superpowers - hanging back and picking foes off with her pistols, or wading into melee to take them out with well-placed joint strikes and body blows. She's tough in her armor, capable of taking hits from metahumans or bursts of automatic weapons fire, and isn't afraid to take some hits in order to get the job done. Without her armor she's much more cautious (especially since that deprives of her of her firearms), preferring to strike from the shadows rather than enter openly into combat. When she does use her powers she doesn't comment on the fact that she's doing so; instead closing into melee range and striking her target with her hands. There's no apparent visual effect when she does so, but psionically adept characters can observe a spectacular 'splash' of psionic energy like ripples in a pond as she copies her target's psionic aura, then absorbs that copy into herself. Once she does have powers copied, she tends to fight in a style that mimics her opponent - taking to the air for a blaster, slugging it out for a powerhouse, etc. Complications: Agent: Ashley is technically a sworn law enforcement officer, but doesn't act as such while wearing her costume except for her duties to protect Jaycee Cahill. This is a complicated situation. Break: Ashley's complicated relationship with the Raven remains both a sore point and a point of pride. Copycat: Ashley isn't hiding her superpowers but she is keeping them to herself; she'll use them as a second resort rather than a first unless she needs to save a life. Duty: Ashley George is responsible for the life and well-being of the First Daughter, Jaycee Cahill. This is her highest priority - whatever she or Jaycee thinks about this. Enemy: Baron Samedi's drug empire indirectly killed Ashley's father. Given the chance, she'll go for him - minus her duty to Jaycee. Guns: Though Ashley's pistols are not actually firearms, they strongly resemble them (this is a way of distracting attention from the level of high technology she carries) - this may be something other heroes have trouble with. Lies: Ashley lied about how she'd developed her powers when she joined the Secret Service. Nobody Knows The Troubles I've Seen: Watchdog's personality is of necessity not very nice - she has to play the part of the gritty, unlikable vigilante as a way of making sure no one pays too much attention to her. Out of Town: At her core, Ashley is in many ways still a product of her conservative upbringing - even though she did learn to relax during her time at Claremont. Patriot: Ashley George loves the United States of America and all it stands for. Secret: Ashley George is a 26 year old Secret Service agent, not a teenager from an alternate universe! Split Personality: Ashley's powers occasionally result in her copying certain mental traits of those whose powers she steals - this annoyance is one of the reasons she doesn't do it very often. We Get The Job Done: Ashley is the biracial daughter of a first-generation immigrant. Who's That Girl: Ashley wears her helmet because while there aren't that many people who would recognize the workaholic wallflower that was Ashley George from her time at Claremont - or for that matter connect her with the heroine Copycat, there are a few. Watchdog Abilities: 4 + 4 + 6 + 0 + 6 + 4 = 24PP Strength: 14 (+2) Dexterity: 14 (+2) Constitution: 16 (+3) Intelligence: 10 (+0) Wisdom: 16 (+3) Charisma: 14 (+2) Combat: 10 + 10 = 20PP Initiative: +2 Attack: +5 Base, +9 Gun, +9 Damage, +15 Mimic Defense: +9 (+5 Base, +4 Dodge Focus), +2 Flat-Footed Grapple: +7 Knockback: -5/-2/-1 Saves: 5 + 6 + 5 = 16PP Toughness: +11/+5/+3 (+3 Con, +2 Defensive Roll, +6 Armor) Fortitude: +8 (+3 Con, +5) Reflex: +8 (+2 Dex, +6) Will: +8 (+3 Wis, +5) Skills: 72R = 18PP Bluff 8 (+10, SM) Climb 3 (+5) Drive 3 (+5) Gather Info 3 (+5) Intimidate 8 (+10, SM) Investigate 5 (+5) Medicine 3 (+5) Knowledge (Civics) 5 (+5) Languages 2 (French, Vietnamese, Base: English) Notice 7 (+10, SM) Search 5 (+5) Sense Motive 7 (+10, SM) Stealth 8 (+10) Swim 3 (+5) Feats: 14PP All-Out Attack Defensive Roll 1 Dodge Focus 4 Evasion Interpose Power Attack Precise Shot 1 Quick Draw [Draw] Skill Mastery (Bluff, Intimidate, Notice, Sense Motive) Takedown Attack Well-Informed Powers: 7 + 17 + 32 + 2 = 58PP Damage 3 (Raven's Training, PFs: Accurate 2, Innate, Mighty) (training) [7PP] Device 4 (Watchdog Armor and Guns, 20PP, Flaw: Hard to Lose, PF: Restricted 1 [voiceprint]) (technology) [17PP] Blast 5 (pulsed energy projectiles; PFs: Accurate 2) [12DP] Protection 6 [6DP] Super-Senses 2 (Infravision, Ultravision) [2DP] 12+6+2=20 Power Thief Container 5 (25PP Container, PFs: Accurate 5, Precise, Subtle 1 [psionic senses]) [32PP] (mutation) Fatigue 5 (Extra: Linked [Mimic, +0]) {10} + Mimic 5 (All Powers, 25PP; Extra: Linked [Fatigue, +0], Flaw: Tainted) {15} + = [10+15=25/25PP] Super-Senses 2 (Danger Sense [Mental], Uncanny Dodge [Mental]) (mutation) [2PP] Drawbacks: (-0) + (-0) = -0PP Totals: Abilities (24) + Combat (20) + Saving Throws (16) + Skills (18) + Feats (14) + Powers (58) - Drawbacks (0) = 150/150 Power Points

Rewards Announcement: (TITANIUM) As our site enters its second decade (words that startle me, reader, perhaps more than they even startle you!) we've decided to go ahead and implement some rules changes (effective as of January 2018) that will benefit both those of you that have been part of this community for so many years and those of you who are lucky enough to have just joined our community. Maxed Characters: When a player maxes out a character (250 pp) that character no longer takes up the character slot/veteran award that it once occupied. The character can still be played for full posting credit, regardless of how many threads the character might be in for a given month. Those posts can be rolled over to other PCs as the character chooses (similar to GM posts). This character level (as opposed to player) is called TITANIUM, and is tracked in the Reward Tracker. This does not replace the existing extra slot received when you max out your first character, nor does it refund any additional slots used on those characters (e.g., if you spend a veteran reward on 15 points of equipment, that reward is still considered spent even when the character reaches Titanium status). New Player Boost: New players to the site will be provided a boost to their posts for characters for the first three months they post on the site. New players will receive double the posts for their characters during this time (similar to the boost given to GM posts). We will annotate this on the Reward Tracker.

"The words are just," said Frost after a momentary silence. "But aren't they always?" he inquired seriously. "You will have my support in your efforts," he said, reaching out to take Murk's hand with fingers that were chilly even through his gloves. "But let me tell you something seriously, my friend." He squeezed the hand, then released it. "But let us see those efforts. Seventy years have gone by and here we are tonight. Let it not be another seventy."