Avenger Assembled

Hm. Wonder if she's on Young Freedom, thought Citizen, recognizing the underground location. "Hello!" he called to the Claremont student, not immediately recognizing her. Claremont's student database wasn't in his face-recognition database - for obvious reasons. "I don't think we've met," he said with a smile, the android paragon recognizable enough to the West Coast-native Corinne as the most famous hero active in the Emerald Cities. His picture hung in a few places on campus too. "I'm Citizen, and this is Salvo." With supername etiquette, he usually defaulted to the codename first, not knowing who knew what on campus these days. I'll let you introduce yourself, he added by radio link to the armored heroine. He knew her armor made for quite a change from her previous existence, and how she chose to present herself was up to her - and to the psychologists on staff at Claremont.

The subsequent investigation took longer than either man had anticipated at first - but of course it all made sense. Professor Psion hadn't lived so long, and done so much, without a willingness to cut his losses and play the waiting game. It was clear Psion had been active in Texas for at least the last year or so, building his cult in Austin and elsewhere. Dismantling that was going to take a while, but at least the other heroes active in the state were on it. It was a long couple of days. It was, of all things, the chastened Presidio County Sheriff's Department that gave them their first major clue - the 'Director' had simply moved into one of the old Victorian mansions in town, ordering the occupants of the place to go visit their cousins in Amarillo for the duration, and once inside the building he'd been careless. He'd used the old landline phones to make a series of telephone calls, most of them to a blocked number in the 213 area code in Los Angeles. That gave them a lead, at least, and they were working on that (Hyperactive's speed powers having made commuting back to Marfa easy enough for both men) when one day Hyperactive's telephone rang. "Hey. It's Fast-Forward."

Okay, initiative time: Lady Horus: 35 Stabbo the Clown: 34 Nightingale: 28 Thugs: 7 Lady Horus: Move Action 1: Enter the bedroom and return (interrupted w/Move-By Action) Move Action 2: Don her Lady Horus helm and transform Free Action: Activate Concealment 10 She'll surge (and hold her action), readying an attack vs. anything that attacks Esperanza Stabbo the Clown: Move Action: Enter the kitchen! Free Action: Activates Concealment Standard Action: he'll prepare a standard action to attack Lady Horus when she appears! Nightingale is up as soon as I post IC!

For Anna Cline, Clock Queen, Lady Horus, time slowed to a crawl. Esperanza was a brave girl who'd been in her share of fights - but she was also a kid who'd been through a whole hell of a lot in the last few months. She was crouching for cover in the kitchen, taking shelter from the bomb blast, her hands pressed over her ears. "Down!" Anna mouthed so she could see it, moving far faster than a normal woman could have, almost faster than Nicola's eyes could follow. Faster than she _could_ have followed, if not for the blood in her veins. For her part, Anna turned, caught sight of Nicola, and sized her up in an instant, faster than anyone could have processed. Another super - she'd had some hints to that the previous night. And a friendly one, or she'd have stuck a knife in at any time since the last evening. "Stay here!" she said to Nicola, stepping around her to run down the hall. It was all terribly familiar - and terribly strange at the last time. "I'll be right back..." "Hah! Hah!" At the door, a man was entering the room, backed by five of the muscled, ill-fitting-suit-wearing thugs Nicola had come to associate with Bedlam organized crime. The man in the lead, though, was no regular criminal. He was stripped to the waist, slim, muscular upper body covered in a variety of tattoos, bright red hair slicked down on his head and his face painted like a clown's. His eyes were wide, and he was smiling as he twirled two knives in his hands, fast, faster than any normal man could have. "Stabbo the Clown and his backup band are here for two special girls' birthday party!" He twirled the knives again, striding forward with slow, deliberate intent. "Where are the BIRTHDAY GIRLS?" he demanded. Tick tick tick. Anna Cline entered the master bedroom in a blur, finding the Helm of Horus hidden among their dirty laundry, and clapped the Helm to her head. Nepthys flashed into her mind - but the goddess of night and silence had better things to do than castigate her for 'Hathoring around when there was work to be done'. Nepthys was sometimes a trouble but she was no fool; she knew a fight to the death when she saw it. Anna hit the corridor again at a speed faster than a speeding car, blurring into invisibility as she ran into the kitchen. She knew intellectually that she was (as per what she'd heard from some very smart people) phasing her way out of the space-time continuum - she preferred to think of it as being too fast to be seen, or heard, or smelt until it was all over. "Well well well!" Stabbo took another step forward, flipping his knives and was _in_ the kitchen with phenomenal speed, twirling his knives with a look of delight on his face. Despite her terror, Esperanza had rallied enough to grab a sharpened knife from the drawer that hadn't come with the room's silverware. "Here's the little one - but who the Hell are you?" he demanded of Nicola. "Oh well - Stabbo will be happy to put on a show even for uninvited guests!" He leered at Nicola, took a single step into the room - and vanished.

It wasn't easy for Steve - not to boil down months of planning and conversation, of fear and anger, into a few words that would convince his friend and ally that what they were doing here was worth doing. The terror of the fortress's entrance when he had stood there himself and known that despite the great weight of earth pressing it down and the great age upon it that this was the architecture of a twice-dead world, the fortress of Mandragora built in the ancient styles of the warlord's dead people out of the living rock of this continent. The icy cold of an Antarctic night, knowing that worse was waiting for them all. The weeks of waiting here, amid the growing defenses, until it became clear that there were no drones here, nothing beneath the rock but the remains of the ancient struggle that had put men and dragons there long ago - and then the months of planning that came after that. The thought of Yolanda's face, if she knew what lay at the bottom of this world, had been as terrifying as what remained of the monsters below. When Ellie spoke to him, he took a moment to reorient himself in the moment before he said, "We have not opened the tomb. It seemed imprudent. We have discovered its central processing unit."

No, I'm made of flesh and bone, not magic superman hullaballoo! Woodsman swallowed the words, remembering what lay in the center of the flame and how dangerous it was, and considered tactics with rapidity. Really should have brought Sanderson. "Already used the bomb." Without comment, he reached up and undid one of the straps on his crossbow, throwing it aside as far as he could, and away from the fire. "Don't go that way," he said quietly. "Not fireproof. Blow up." He studied the pillar of fire again, still considering. "If we can get it over here, we can get it onto the bomb," he added, nodding backwards towards where he'd thrown the heat-sensitive chemicals and explosives. "Nice shrapnel. Gotta know where we are first."

Sharl liked the cut of Nicole's jib. She'd been through a great deal, left permanently disabled by primitive Terran medicine, which probably explained the way she still clung to superstitious mumbo-jumbo - but she was brilliant, a hard worker, and even had pleased Miss Americana with the quality of her work that summer, which was about all he really asked for in a trainee. Really, she'd be better off just going ahead with a full upload, he thought, not for the first time, or at least full-on cybernetic augmentation. But he'd learned not to judge people for their personal choices in the last few years, and he had to admit the teenager had certainly constructed an impressive piece of power armor for herself. And all that on her own, too. Citizen himself had been something of a ghost during that summer, popping onto screens to chat with Miss Americana about Archetech West over in the Emerald Cities, occasionally appearing in holographic form to offer technical advice during Salvo's work. Coming today in his android body was something altogether special - but then it was a special day. Over a secure radio link, he said, It's okay to be nervous. There's a lot to be worried about today. Citizen and Salvo touched together on the Claremont grounds not far from the two Atlanteans, Sharl frowning briefly before he recognized his former classmate Glamazon and what must be her protege as well. "Thaelia, hello!" he said out loud with a wave, not breaking his radio link with Salvo as he did so. "I think we must be the first ones here."

Okay, @TheRedGuy, you're up with El Huracan

Me too!

We'll take a look!

All right, he has juuuust enough movement to reach the Gorilla. And that does hit! Tou vs 25: http://orokos.com/roll/538661 He takes another bruise!

I'm ready to go ahead and have us get together, if that's okay!

Anna sighed softly and settled back to the other side of the couch. "I got no veggie stuff," she admitted. "Always thought that was food for rabbits." "Never mind, Hope!" she said, raising her voice. Hope's exaggerated "Ugh!" from the kitchen spoke volumes, as did her exaggeratedly loud efforts to start making herself some lunch. For her part, Anna didn't seem too bothered by the girl's tone. "Teenagers," she whispered with a quick grin. "What are ya gonna do?" There was a lot she wanted to say to Nicola - but most of it would have made her feel more vulnerable than anything they'd done the night before. So instead she said, "Hey, listen, I ain't gonna probe about why yer in town. But if yer ever lookin' for a good spot, Hardwick Park's real nice this time a'year. Coupla good sports bars too," she added. Knock-knock-knock! "Hope, you wanna-" "I'm eating breakfast and reading my calc book!" called Hope, trying too hard to sound virtuous. With an elaborate sigh, Anna rose to her feet and headed for the door. "We got another week left on our lease, damn super said he'd be checking to make sure we were packed. Jussec." She took a few steps down the hall towards the door - and from Nicola's perspective, something happened. She saw Anna turn and run, stutter-step backwards, towards the kitchen where Hope was, an instant before an explosion blew the door off its hinges!

Citizen took off and whipped around over the battlefield, pushing cybernetic computation and magnetic propulsion to its limits as he accelerated to his maximum speed. Plowing into the side of the writhing hydra-thing, he braced his shoulder and pushed, the great beast's limbs whipping around as he pushed it backwards, deeper into the water from which it had come, literally pulling the floor out from under the Atlantean that Asad was grappling with. Take out these two, leave the soldiers back on the bridge for the others to deal with. He got another faceful of gassy venom from the beast, a blow that had exactly as much effect as it had before. "I can't believe you brought your pet along!" he called up at the Atlantean warlord. "I thought you people cared about oceanic life!"

Hey Blarghy, I am sorry - I actually blanked on your message about this. That is very weird - are you getting this across multiple platforms/browsers? Have you cleared your cookies? (The best way to communicate with folks is generally going into chat)

Anna almost said what she was thinking - that Nicky hadn't eaten anything the night before, not even the peanuts and hot wings down at the bar. But luckily her brain moved quickly, even on limited amounts of sleep, and so with nothing more than a faint color in her cheeks, she said, "Hope, honey, can you get me Tuesday's bag? Yeah, I see that look on yer face, I'll run out and restock later." With a sigh, Hope headed down a few steps towards the furnished apartment's small kitchen/dining room, giving the two older women a moment's privacy. "It ain't no fancy breakfast, but it's chicken sandwiches, apples, and bottled water," she said with a shrug. She'd made meals like that all the time back in her younger days, when it had been her and Richard living on the move. "Take it with ya." Her voice got quieter, and a little huskier, with Hope still carefully out of the room. "Listen, Nicky, we may not being staying in Bedlam long, but I gotta tell you somethin'." She leaned in and on a quick impulse, pecked Nicola on the lips. "Last night was...real special. So I ain't gonna ask a lot of questions about yer prison ink. But if I ain't askin' questions, you ain't givin' anybody answers, right?"

Steve relaxed fractionally as Miss Americana entered the room - the two briefly touching hands. Two months apart from Gina had been difficult, but the work was necessary. And there were ways of bridging the gap - the presence of Miss Americana being one of them. But the work was why they were there, and it was the work they needed to focus on now. "You saw its entrance when you arrived." He carefully pressed a few buttons on a nearby keyboard, summoning up on one of the monitors what was clearly a ground-penetrating radar image - a white circle showed their own location, and off to one side was what looked like a vast underground complex. "An Archetech geological team found a deep layer of entropically-decayed soil and debris earlier this year. When they dug deep, they found this." Aarush took over, after a quick glance at her boss. "Most of what you see here we found with drone-crawlers, down into the depths of the dig site. We only began sending people below when we had the likes of Caradoc and Miss Americana with us." "Caradoc identifies the ruin as a temple of Mandragora, the Dragon of the Terminus," added Zielonki, circling around back to his artifacts. "There are remains there, both human and non-human, and...well, I'm sure you'll have a chance to see the rest. At first we thought it had been built into that hillside out there - but now we think someone _dropped the hill on it_, two hundred thousand years ago." "The date explains one of the most fascinating anomalies in Antarctic climactic history, to quote our former climatologist," added Aarush, "but I'm told that's not what's truly important here." "The most recent probe below," said Steve, "found something deep in the lowest reaches of the complex, buried beneath bones of men and dragons as if a whole army was snuffed out about it, a cyber-crypt labeled as "The Tomb of Mandragora" in the speech of the Terminus. But that makes no sense. Two hundred thousand years ago this dimension was not within reach of the Terminus - it would have been completely inaccessible to Mandragora's armies. And Mandragora did not die here two hundred thousand years ago. We know that." He fell silent, then added, "This is why we have kept this place a secret from the world - and from our friends. This mystery would attract attention - and then with it, disaster."

"Ah, jeez!" Anna and Esperanza stopped their argument long enough for the former to get Nicola to sit down on the almost-spotless couch in the living room and the latter (with an eye-roll) to head into the kitchen to fill a plastic bag with ice. "Here, siddown, you don't wanna go anywhere after gettin' a hit that hard." Not wanting to trust her knees with kneeling down, Anna sat on the couch next to Nicola and handed her the icepack. "You musta taken off runnin' there." Anna's accent, like it had last night, was clear as a bell in Nicola's ears - out of place among the Wisconsinites of Bedlam, she was the sort of person who said "Joisey" without a trace of irony. "You two get high last night?" inquired Esperanza, folding her arms and watching the two adults with a faint air of superiority. "That why you-" Anna rolled her eyes right back at Esperanza. "Honey," she said with a sharp tone to the word, "I don't need you judgin' me or my friend here. I didn't do anything heavier than Shirley Temples last night anyway." She sighed, then went on, "This is Hope, she and I are a team. Hope, this is Nicky. We, uh, both like the Heroes." The last pre-season game had been on the television back in the hotel bar down the street. "Well looks like you're not gonna bruise, anyway," she said, giving Nicola a look.

"Yeah," said Anna, her tone making the word a question. Ya wanna make something of it? She opened the door, partway, and was confronted by Esperanza Azul - at seventeen fanatical exercise meant that the girl was coming into the well-built, muscular build of a born athlete, her 5'8" height making her big indeed for a young woman of Honduran descent, her black hair in a short ponytail. She was wearing a Bedlam Maniacs T-shirt and jeans - and looked annoyed in that way only teenagers can be "I heard you coming in last night, Anna," she said. She ticked off points of a past conversation on her fingers while peering over the shorter woman's shoulder. "So me having boys from the neighborhood over is 'crazy irresponsible', but you can-yikes!" she jumped as she caught sight of Nicola. Anna stepped out into the short hallway outside, pulling it closed behind her. It was mostly artifice, though - this building was built for temporary accommodations for the various off-shore companies that had offices or plants in Bedlam thanks to its lax law enforcement. The walls, and doors, weren't thick. Not really in the mood to have a teenager judging her personal life, Anna said, "The boys you usedta run with are gang kids, and they can't leave it on the street when they come in here! If they don't bring in you-know-who, they'll bring in Mara, or Yardies, and then what the hell are we supposed to do with ourselves?"

August 2017 Downtown Bedlam Anna Cline's (Temporary) Apartment Anna woke up in bed, taking a moment to take in the situation. Even with the slow fading of her powers over the last few decades, the situation was easy enough to take in a moment or two. She was in bed, in the apartment where she and Esperanza had been staying the last few weeks. The girl had dropped out of high school after the incident with the Hammer of Justice, and Anna herself had left behind the apartment she'd actually rented under her own name. She could have taken Espy out of the city, dropped her in Freedom or even back in Florida, but Esperanza had said she didn't want to leave her ma or just run away from the man who'd abused her, so they'd stuck around and technically lived as fugitives. They'd moved every couple of weeks, paying cash with the money Anna got from the drug pushers and lousy pigs she took down as Lady Horus, and for the second time in her life, Anna Cline was taking care of a kid. She'd made a lot of plans, bringing home books from the Bedlam library, making sure Espy kept up with her studies so she could get herself a GED and get somewhere other than this one-horse town Anna had tied herself to because it was better than doing nothing with her life. The kid was smart, the kid was strong, but you didn't get anywhere in the hero world unless you had an education. Of course, it would have been easy enough for her to teach Espy to steal. Or encourage it, anyway, her sidekick certainly hadn't shown any hesitation about picking locks or swiping things for her mentor, and with her skills and smooth tongue she'd have made a fine little apprentice thief. Espy reminded Anna a lot of herself as a kid, and for that matter a lot like her boy, a which was why she tolerated the backtalking, the light fingers, the lying, and the outright complaining a lot more than a lot of mothers of her generation Of course, that didn't mean there wasn't stress now and again - stress that came from searching for a murderous vigilante who wanted her dead, lying to her son and her family about why she was in Wisconsin, from wearing the helmet of a god and hearing the whispers of the shadow of a goddess who could only tell her that the great trial was coming soon and that she needed to be ready. And Anna was ready, she had been ready from the moment she'd put on the helm, a queen taking on the likeness of the goddess she'd always known herself to be. She'd never been really good at waiting. It sometimes made her - She blinked a few times, thinking about the night before, and the bar, and thinking about being old and outliving all her friends, and all the things she'd never done in almost eighty-three years of living, and sat up, automatically pulling the sheet up to below her shoulders. Espy was knocking on her door with the double rap-rap she'd taught her, the Helm of Horus was safe in the bedroom closet, and there was another woman in bed with her. Well you knew this was going to happen, Anna, you were stone-cold sober last night, her inner voice chided her. "Just a minute, honey!" she called, rising to her feet and digging around for her clothes faster than a woman of her apparent age should have been able to. "That's, uh, sorta my foster kid," she admitted to Nicola as she pulled her dress down over her head. They'd gotten each other's names but not much beyond that. "So you may wanna..."

chrome is up now!

Okay, Chrome is up as soon as I post IC.

Under assault though he was, Primal kept it together - driving his massive fists through the side of the plane and ripping away a hunk of metal about the size and shape of his head. It was instantly clear that Air Force One was no ordinary plane - from his position clinging to the plane's flank above the wing he was exposing circuits and wires underneath, but not yet the interior of the plane proper. Still, he was doing significant damage - especially when he leaned back to let the firebreather spit a gout of flame directly into the hole he'd just torn, her pin-point accuracy (she was some seventy-five feet away as she made the shot, knocked backwards by Chrome) matched by her ability to burn things! "You'll never save the old order, boy!" she spat at him. "We're burning down the old and ringing in the new!" Electroman, in the air, threw a bolt of lightning at Argonaut, one that (from the way it made her systems ring as it passed) would have fried every circuit if it had hit. "I know you!" he declared, "you're the bloody cyborg! Think you can come here and work for Uncle Sam and nobody'll bring ya down?" Meanwhile, Mind Knight's efforts to bring down Miracle Girl weren't going well - Casey could feel the insidious psychic fingers tugging at her mind, but so far her brain was tougher stuff than Mind Knight's smoldering costume. For now!

Sure, but what's the logic there with the Invisibility being arrayed with Flight and Super-Strength? In the meantime, APPROVED

Disability (Paraplegic) -5PP (Frequency: +2; Intensity: +3) - this not an appropriate drawback at this magnitude, given that she has a battlesuit that compensates for it. I could see taking it down to a 1 or 2 PP drawback. Magic 15 (Flaws: Side-Effect, Uncontrolled, Unreliable; Drawback: Distracting) [4DP] Magic 1 (2PP; Flaws: Unreliable) [1PP] Dazzle 1 (Visual + Auditory) [2PP] - what's going on here? Combat: 0 + 0 = 0PPInitiative: +0Attack: +3/0 Base, +3/0 Melee, +3/0 Ranged, +5 Weapons Suite Array [+11 Blast; +9 Missile Batteries, Not Killy, Hellfire)Grapple: +17/5/0Defense: +5/0 (+4/0 Base, +1 Dodge Focus), +2 Flat-FootedKnockback: -7/0 - not sure what was intended here, but it needs to be fixed. Remember that at least 1/3rd of her Base Attack and Defense must be paid for directly, rounding up So if she's going to have +5 ATK and +5 DEF most of the time, you need to buy at least 2 of each. Servo-Dynamos 6 (11DP Array, Feats: Alternate Power 2, Dynamic 3) [16DP] DBE: Flight 0-5 (500 mph / 5,000 per Move Action; Feats: Subtle) {0-11} DAP: Super-Strength 0-5 (Effective Strength 20-45, Heavy Load 400 lbs-6 tons) {0-10} DAP: Invisibility Matrix 0-1 (Invisibility; All Visual Senses; Feats: Close Range) {0-9} - why are these powers arrayed together?