Avenger Assembled

"I have no senses other than visual and auditory," explained van Raalte, happy to show off his work for Mannequin. "And I cannot go beyond this ballroom and the corridors around it, or I move out of range of the on-site generator. But luckily no one thinks it is strange for an old man to move slowly and travel with helpers. As for Vision, we had some mutual talent scouting that went amiss. I suppose they think we stole _their_ man, but such is life." He hmmed. "Of course, that man from Vision, Mr. Swearingen, he left us on bad terms too. It was my fault," he admitted, "If you hear a man is leaving one company because he is a thief but nothing can be proven - you should assume he will steal from you too. An unpleasant lesson. As for Waco, we have a man at Baylor who gives us the names of promising young graduates, ah, Mr. Johnson, I believe." "Drone Master?" growled Woodsman curiously. He never did like admitting ignorance.

Sea Devil was getting more and more distressed - how could Surfacers like Ruby abandon their pod like this? She understood Bliss better than the Surfacer community here did, lacking a mammal's strange, overprotective bond with her offspring as did the octopoid, but her angry promises certainly weren't getting anywhere towards solving the problem that had trapped them all here. When the radio signal came through, she cocked an eye towards Cavalier to see if he'd heard it too, then decided that discretion was the better part of valor with him in the middle of an argument with Bliss. "Singularity and I will commune with the Dark Mother," Aquaria finally croaked, shooting a look back at Jessie to make sure she wasn't speaking for her friend. She knew Jessie would start getting tense if she was around raised voices and angry words much longer, and she didn't want to add her friend's confusion and anger to her own. "You may come with us," she offered to Javeen and the others, "and tell us more of time and its currents." Her companions from the Sea of Stars could find their own path.

"Oh, my boy, that is my secret!" said van Raaltle brightly. "Telepresence droids are the wave of the future for public appearances in settings full of dangerous people. Now none of you shock easily, do you? I don't want to give you a fright!" Woodsman tensed just a little at that, but said nothing as van Raatle rolled up his sleeve, exposing the forearms that his suitjacket had covered. Forearms that, on closer inspection, were clearly not human - hairless and a strange shade of pink, moving with too many joints underneath. With a wink, the grandfatherly scientist rolled up his 'other' sleeve - showing steel bones and actuators within. "I am actually back in Grand Rapids in my living room even as we speak! My wife's puddingbroodjes are delicious." "Well, that's one hell of a thing," said Woodsman with vaguely horrified fascination. Despite his own acute senses, he hadn't noticed anything different about the scientist. "And to answer your question, fellow, yes, I do know Vision," replied van Raalte, rolling both his sleeves back down. "We have done some business with them. It, ah, went poorly, but that's capitalism for you."

Edge: Intro: Super-Move: Victory: Monsoon: Intro: Super-Move: Moonson gestures and picks up her opponent with swirling hydrokinetic energy - smashing them against the sides of the arena with bone-crunching force, then lifting them up high and smashing them brutally to the ground, face-first. Victory: Hydrokinetic energy wraps itself around Monsoon's opponent's neck as she briefly chokes them, then drives them to their knees in front of her. Extending an armored hand, she intones, "Kneel before me." Comrade Frost: Intro: Super-Move: "To HEL with you!" Comrade Frost grabs his opponent and pulls them into the swirling vortex of his chest, dropping them into the middle of an undead battlefield in Nifleheim! They take several blows and cuts from the horde of Viking skeletons before a blow from a giant ax sends them hurtling back through the portal and outside. Victory: Comrade Frost snaps his finger, casting a pall of ice over the scene - he then squats down and begins doing a cheerful hopak while a campy version of the Korobeiniki plays. Citizen: Intro: Super-Move: Citizen punches his target straight up in a stratospheric punch that lifts them up out of the scenery entirely - then flies up above them and eye-beams them back into the arena with a tremendous BOOM. Victory: Citizen takes off into the air at supersonic speed - then can be seen hovering over the city. Sea Devil: Intro: Sea Devil turns around, her armor's mask retracted and can be seen in the middle of chewing on an extremely large fish. She swallows, her armor's mask closing shut, and hops into the arena. Super-Move: "Ia!" Sea Devil drives her trident into the ground and points at her target, bellowing in some eldritch tongue. At her words, giant purple tentacles erupt out of puddles on the ground and grab the target, pummeling them against walls and into the ground, before throwing them back across the arena. Victory: Croaking with triumph, Sea Devil retracts her mask - then cuts a yellow sign into the ground with her trident and squats in the middle, looking right at the player with big yellow-black eyes. Woodsman: Intro: Super-Move: Woodsman shoots his opponent in the face with an explosive arrow, blinding and deafening them as he charges. He hits them about the face and upper body with his hatchet, then slaps a sticky grenade on their chest, jumping away as the blast knocks his opponent across the arena. Victory: Woodsman quickly binds and gags his opponent, then strings them up by the ankles from a stage hazard. Pulling his hood up over his head, he disappears into the shadows, reappearing atop a darkened rooftop somewhere in the city. "Gotcha." Harrier: Intro: Super-Move: Victory: Lady Horus: Intro: With her back to us, Lady Horus puts her helm on - then spins around, hawk eyes glowing, ready for action. "Hah!" Super-Move: "Hah!" Lady Horus flies towards her target at full-speed and strikes him in the belly - then with impossible speed is there to catch him when he lands with a blow to the back, driving him upwards into the air. She finishes with a flying ankh blow that smashes her target directly into the ground from above. Victory: "Hah!" Smirking, Lady Horus takes off, her white cape fluttering in the breeze, ankh gleaming brightly. We cut to her sitting on a golden Egyptian throne, legs crossed and still smirking, flipping a shiny gold coin. Fast-Forward: Intro: Signing autographs for the crowd of onlookers, Fast-Forward looks over at his opponent and sighs - taking off his sunglasses and handing them to a spectator. "All right, kid, it's time to fast-forward!" Super-Move: Victory:

"...bring me along?" asked Woodsman, more hesitant than he normally would have been about tagging along with a classmate. Raina was pretty social - but, he had to admit, not usually with him. "I started the thing, wanna finish it." He would not have known how to find Seven if he didn't go looking - or go through channels that weren't always reliable for Claremont students. "Won't make you look bad in front of the queen of magic," he promised, teeth set in a hard smile.

"I would be honored," said Dimitri as he gave Leilani a courtly bow, stepping up onto the stone platform she provided for him, close enough to bask in her warmth. The usually loquacious thermovore said little as they flew towards their destination, a rooftop he'd reserved for their benefit overlooking that evening's festivities - an outdoor movie in the park. It was a chance to be social without being in his apartment or hers - and without too many prying eyes from the people below. And if it keeps Leilani in her lovely volcanic form - well, such is a blessing! "You need not worry about roof or furniture," he promised her, both the roof and the couch he'd provided covered in a black protective film that Leilani was becoming accustomed to by now, a European-made plastic that could generally stand against Leilani when she wasn't feeling wrathful. "All we need do is enjoy each other's company."

Dimitri was there to greet her at ground-level, smiling up like a man watching a angel descend to Earth. "Ah, my lovely fire-flower..." He took her hands for a moment and pecked her on the lips, heedless of the cameras that their mutual presence was rapidly attracting. People knew how many superheroes lived in DuTemps, after all! "Will you come away with me?" he inquired of her, though of course they already had a date. "I have arranged everything so we need not be bothered - the rooftop, the scenery, all is as it should be." He wasn't going to bother driving them on this one - especially not when it meant that Volcanic would be a burning monument to femininity wherever they went.

Outside the hospital room, having steered Rhonda away from an online supplier that provided low-quality goods at high-quality prices, Raina found Riley standing inside the door of the empty room opposite - the closest thing to a dark corner he was likely to find in the brightly lit hospital corridor. When she stepped out. he moved to join her. "Kept expectin' somebody to show up and cause trouble while we were here," he admitted, "but nobody's done a thing. The cop down there even got backup before he went to take a leak. You get what you needed?" he asked Raina expectantly, without probing for the gory details. He'd seen plenty of those already.

The trio of heroes wound up meeting with van Raalte in the control room of the convention, where a privacy screen gave them a little protection from the gaping eyes of the IT techs who kept all the electronics running for the electronics people. "Ach, I don't really know why anyone would to kill an old fellow like me," said van Raalte, raising his hands in bafflement. Miss Americana might have sent her lawyers after us, but we got that prototype finished for her on time. Made all the papers in Michigan, yah, and back in Amsterdam too." "What exactly you make for Miss Americana?" asked Woodsman suspiciously. Miss Americana wasn't one of the heroes on his 'list' - but she was certainly nobody to trifle with. "A telepresence prototype for the European market, it's the latest thing in high security presence. You, uh, boys want to see?" he asked, glancing at Mannequin in hesitation.

"I'd seen them summon things before. Nothing like that." She gave Raina as detailed descriptions as she could of a group of about half-a-dozen - two men who were a couple, with Crowley-ite beards and pentagram necklaces, a dark-skinned woman who she thought was Native from the style of magic she used, a couple of suburban pagan types, and an older, distinguished-sounding man who she said "sounded like one of those old actors, you know, like playing a Senator or something." They met at the full moon every month, and come to think of it, the attack had happened on the full moon too. When she was done, cursing herself all the while for not paying better attention, Rhonda asked Raina, "What are the heroes gonna want out of me, when all this is done?"

_Are_ the civilians Citizen was with disappearing?

That sounds awesome, Heritage!

"No, they said they were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts - that I could pay them back once I had what I wanted and came into my true power. They never really asked me for anything." She shook her head. "They were supposed to be summoning an earth spirit, like we've done before. I didn't know there was any danger until I saw what it was - and it stepped out of the circle-" She swallowed hard. "I didn't see them leave. I was...busy," she added in a shaky attempt at humor that she didn't seem to entirely believe. "Seven and Bowman said they didn't see anybody there but me. I guess they're looking into it. I can...I can give you all the craft names I know."

"I found them on the Internet. They said they were the Misfit Circle of Magik - for everybody who didn't fit in with a regular white-girl coven. No offense," Rhonda added Raina's way. "My folks don't approve of anything I do and they stopped caring a long time ago, so it was easy to slip out and make it to some full-moon covens. They seemed nice, everybody was legit, and they could...they could do real magic! I've seen people do it on TV, I've felt it inside," she added, putting a hand over her heart, "but I saw them do it! Summoning spirits, binding them, playing with fire and water...they said I was just the kind of person they wanted. After a couple of months, we were doing an soul-unbinding, and I told them what I wanted - and they promised they could help me with it. They...they told me things, their craft names, where they lived, but they were lying about everything else - why not lie about that, too?"

The girl looked at Raina for a moment, seeming to take her measure, before replying, "What do you want me to say, huh? That I got stupid? That I let them-" Tears stood out at the corners of her bloodshot eyes as her voice roughened with barely suppressed emotion. "They told me the cords on my wrists were to show my submission to the Circle." She raised one arm, thin bruising visible at her wrists. "Good thing I had the marks on me, I guess, or heroes'd have locked me up in Blackstone for what they did to me." She stared harder at Sparkler. "I don't know you. You're not one of the famous ones, but I don't think you're one of them, either. Who are you - really?"

Riley had fit in well in the tech expo - albeit being darker and younger than most of the attendees. Woodsman, with his crossbow and poncho, was a more awkward fit - he wound up sticking close to the other heroes and not saying much as they tracked down Dr. Van Raalte. It was very bright on the hall floor, with few of the visible shadows he liked. The Dutch-American scientist had stayed on the scene during the super-battle, staying close to the small coterie of uniformed security guards on the convention floor, albeit having the sense to move off the stage to stand on the floor at its base rather than actually occupy the wooden platform. "My friends, it is the heroes from outside!" declared van Raalte at the sight of the trio, leading the remaining convention guests in a round of applause for the heroes. Woodsman didn't so much shrink as he hunched down a little, ducking inside his hood.

The doctor's report was unpleasant - there had been a partial disemboweling with several large, curved things heated to what must have been red-hot temperatures. On the plus side, the heat from the claws (which was probably what they were) had cauterized the wounds and kept Rhonda from bleeding to death. Raina had never actually seen a demonic attack, but this sounded like some of the descriptions she'd heard. If nothing else, it sounded like Rhonda was safe enough in the hands of terrestrial, non-magical medicine. When it came time to see the patient, Woodsman kept a position just outside the door, looking over medical reports that were alien enough but all-too-familiar. He knew what the victims of attack looked like. Surviving could be a challenge in its own right. Escorted inside by Dr. Barnes, Sparkler actually had a chance to meet the patient. In a hospital gown that didn't seem to quite fit right, with a blanket pulled up above her injuries and onto her stomach, Rhonda McIntyre was not a happy woman. She barely looked Sparkler's way as she waited for the doctor to leave, not bothering to turn off the quietly playing meditation music channel. Her thin, elfin features were bruised now from the picture Raina had seen before, with angry purple discoloration all along one side of her face. "You gonna ask me something else?"

"No no, I am good guest, leetle Eden," said Dimitri cheerfully. The interior of the bag, on close inspection, revealed a considerable quantity of chocolate candies of various sorts, heavy on Russian specialties like Alenka. "Today, I have chocolate for you!" He supposed chocolate wasn't the best gift for a house with so many small children but on the other hand it would make the children happy and he suspected it would soon find its way into adult hands as well. "And only wine I need is the pleasure of distinguished company," he added with a nod towards the other new arrivals. He didn't pressure Talya, confident that they would soon find out why they were all there. Still, he could certainly speculate. Hmm. With so many of Talya's wartime allies together, he wondered if they were about to go to war with someone. Or something.

"Stupid guy says he hates tech but comes here with super-tech," Woodsman was muttering as he went over the squirming cultist for other weapons, devices, or lock-picking mechanisms - he didn't find much, but he felt better for doing it. "You know technology is how we're all still alive, right?" He normally wasn't this talkative after a fight - but he normally wasn't this annoyed. The arrival of the authorities broke up the tete-a-tete of heroes, Woodsman taking this opportunity to loosen the handcuffs (so he wouldn't get lectured when he got back to school) and to for once be the guy who got to talk to the cops first. For a couple minutes, anyway - by the time the spotter was being loaded into the back of the STAR Squad van that had arrived at the scene of metahuman combat, Woodsman had slunk back into the shadows to let Hyperactive and Mannequin talk to the cops about what had happened. He took this opportunity to shoot a quick text back to the school as part of his hourly check-in.

The two credible-looking superheroes (or at least Sparkler and her associate Woodsman) made it inside the hospital with a small police escort, Woodsman tagging behind and letting Sparkler do the talking with a slightly intimidated, youngishpolice officer who was a few inches shorter than Raina. "Yeah, the League's had us on this one since they brought McIntyre in. Poor kid," he said, shaking his head sympathetically. "Nobody deserves to get torn up like that." The lights in the hospital corridors were brightly lit and the hospital itself was fairly crowded, ratcheting up Woodsman's tension several notches. There was a reason why he'd come in through the window during his last visit. At the door to the secured ward, they met Doctor Barnes, a stocky, middle-aged African-American woman who went over the medical report with the two heroes, Riley once again keeping his distance. He'd heard this one before, after all. "The patient was brought in with deep lacerations of the lower abdomen and upper groin area - injuries like an attack by a large wild animal or metahuman. We've stabilized her condition and she's on the mend - but it's going to take time." Her voice falling quiet, Barnes looked around before confiding to Sparkler, "the lack of family visits doesn't help anything."

Citizen grinned at the thugs. "Someone is already disarming your bomb - you really shouldn't assume your technology is invulnerable in a city like the Emeralds." It was a bluff - but hopefully a bluff they wouldn't check. Speaking of checking, he didn't recognize the voice that replaced the police bandwith on his internal receiver. Hello? Who is this? asked Citizen, a touch crabbier by radio than he usually was when he addressed the general public. Are you sure you know how to disarm a bomb? He could always spin this if the person on the other end didn't turn out to be credible - but it didn't hurt to come on strong when dealing with thugs who already seemed intimidated by the most powerful hero in Emerald City. As he spoke, the robotic paragon began cracking his knuckles, a gesture he'd adopted from Miss Americana even though he didn't have the laser emitters in his fingers that she had. It was a gesture with a powerful meaning in Terran culture even so. "There are a lot of people here, and a lot of sensitive high technology. If you try and start a fight, innocent people are going to be hurt. That means that if you try and start a fight, I'm going to stop you - but that means _you_ might get hurt. We can do this in a way that doesn't end in violence for anybody. So what's it going to be?"

Riley didn't say much on the ride to the hospital, gripping the bike's handlebars tight as they flew through the city skyline, his back tense underneath his poncho and uniform. But when they touched down on the rooftop, Raina caught a real smile on the boy's face as he rolled them to a stop. "Nice," he muttered as he shouldered his bow and pulled down his costume's hood, adjusting the outer poncho a bit to make it clear he was wearing the blue and gold uniform that Claremont students were supposed to wear on the town - one that Freedom City cops had at least learned to tolerate. "See why you fly everywhere," he commented as they headed for the steps down into the building. "Cops prolly saw us comin," he opined, shooting a glance at Raina, who was still not in her Claremont colors.

The fire-thing was ablaze - and so was Aquaria. Ablaze with fury at her god's name in the mouth of this Surfacer. "HYDRA HAS NO TEATS YOU STUPID MAMMAL!" she bellowed, tridents burning the green of alien stars in her tri-fingered hands. She vaulted into the air and kicked off the ceiling of the office, landing on the other side with tridents drawn and teeth flashing behind her translucent helmet - the first time Temperance had seen the Deep One flash her massive, triangular teeth in combat. Other Deep Ones might have gone mad with fury now, but Aquaria's fire burned with a cold, terrible rage as she jabbed her tridents at the beast, forcing it backwards towards Temperance. "BIND HIM!" she bellowed, "BIND HIM!"

Move Action: Scuttle across the ceiling and land on the other side of the Ember Standard Action: Aid Temperance's next attack vs the Ember http://orokos.com/roll/499031 = 24 She'll be adding +2 to that attack roll!

"We're going to be moving to Socotra," said Mark, adding quickly at the looks on his friends' faces, "but we'll come visit, honest, guys. That's the advantage of mass teleportation, the whole world is our oyster." "Well, moving is a little light, darling," said Nina with a hard smile. "We'll be changing things in Socotra - changing them for the better. I've been in consultation with my siblings and the 'Free Socotra' government, and they all agree that my father has gone mad. So, one of these days, preferably when I'm not pregnant, we'll be removing him." "Not, you know, ha-ha, like lethally," Mark added, gesturing with his fork. "But Socotra needs to be free, and so we're going to do that." He looked a little uncomfortable at the words - but not actually afraid of them. "And if I'm living on Socotra after that, well, it's less weird. Not like some American mercenary is showing up to overthrow the government." "And to answer your question, Mike, it'll be Amir Richard for a boy, or Farida Martha for a girl. At least that's what we'll use with Americans, the formal name will be much longer."