Avenger Assembled

Hyperactive didn't find any signs of a bomb, despite his super-speed search. As far as he could tell, everything inside the convention hall itself was normal. CRC Tech's booth didn't have anything unusual he could see; they seemed to be discussing enhanced models of the Archetech telepresence droids more than anything else, praising their new wireless hookup system for having far more connectivity and reliability than the hard-wired Archetech models. CRC seemed to generally be in the enhancement business rather than the innovation business, building better versions of what was already on the market rather than new things. - Dr. Albert van Raalte had the thick facial hair that bespoke steampunk cosplay, a hipster's fashion sense, or simply poor personal grooming - it was hard to tell with people in the tech industry. In a faint accent that bespoke his Dutch heritage, he stood behind the on-stage podium to address the small crowd of congregants. Eschewing the fancy displays that were typically part and parcel of tech expos, he chose to instead speak about his company's latest project "one that promises to revolutionize the field of robotics!" - Up on the rooftop across the street. Woodsman retrieved his bow and his hatchet and prepared to return back to the conference center - when he caught sight of something all-too-familiar. Casually dressed in a workman's outfit, a woman was laying on the rooftop, presenting a low profile to the building across the street as she took aim with a high-powered assault rifle! Riley guessed she'd have a spotter and wasn't disappointed, vanishing into cover behind an air conditioning vent just as another rooftop figure hurled a bladed weapon at his head! Remembering the heroes across the street, Woodsman fired a flare arrow in the direction of the convention center, the bolt erupting in a clearly visible flash of red light and loud noise right over the street between the low-rise office building where they were squaring off and the convention center across the way.

"Godless voidings of the underworld!" bellowed Aquaria gutturally, her fury at the cowardice of her enemies boiling like the sea before a volcano. Her shout, even mediated by her armor's vocoder, was loud enough to nearly rattle Temperance's teeth. The sacrifice, with no sacred markings, no chanting drummers, and Surfacers dying of no will of their own, had been bad enough - but that they hid from her was truly infuriating. "Can your spirits catch their foul scent?" she demanded. Crouched low, her armor smeared with soot and ash, she didn't look like an aquatic Deep One - but she didn't seem human either in her righteous fury.

Citizen played it smart. He didn't try and split the wave down the middle (essentially impossible when you considered his mass against the wave) or to try and use his internal energies to change the phase state of the wave (again - essentially scientifically impossible given the level of energies he had to work with and the time allotted). Instead he acted like a pin being driven into a balloon, zipping in and out of the wave over and over again at nearly full speed. He plowed underneath to break up the roiling waters beneath the wave where the water was beginning to pile against the continental shelf. He slid along the front wave, skimming the surface, sending that great bowfront collapsing in on itself like a surgeon cutting a knife across a swollen vein. He hit the wave, again and again, until at last he emerged from the wave soaking wet and smiling confidently, watching the wave fall apart with a feeling of great satisfaction. He had other reasons for satisfaction too, one of which was clenched in his fist, hands around its wrists. "What do you think I am, stupid?" he demanded. "That wave was obviously artificial. Who are you?"

Good luck, olopi! You can share us the gory details after your inevitable triumph.

At the sight of the obviously inhuman guy, Woodsman's head whipped around automatically. The environment didn't allow for much cover, but it was easy enough to slip behind a half-translucent partition and listen to what was going on. This is what I get for leaving my gear behind! Deciding that if there was going to be some super-action soon, it was better to be armed for it, Riley slipped out of the room quietly - figuring that the planned guest speaker couldn't be that important. Meanwhile, everyone was interested in Mannequin - a superbeing who wasn't hostile got a lot of attention in Freedom City, usually positive! People were discreetly snapping pictures and some were boldly introducing themselves - he was rapidly becoming the life of the party. Fred Fawcett, the elderly host of the tech expo, stepped out onto the stage by the booths and spoke into the microphone. A high-end tech conference would probably be texting or emailing its guests right now, but Fred had gotten a little on in years and tended to do things the old way. "Good evening, everyone, I have an announcement - our Socotran guests have been delayed at the airport and will be unable to give their talk tonight. Dr. Van Raalte of CRC Tech has generously volunteered to give his talk in their slot. He will begin in ten minutes."

I'll go ahead and roll his Energy Systems array rank for this? http://orokos.com/roll/488214 = nat 20, for a 36 Let me know if that's what you want me to roll. Autopasses the Notice check

"Detective Jack O'Ryan," said the officer, who didn't lose his smile for a moment. "Oh, are we taking pictures? Cheese!" Practically throwing himself into the selfie, he threw his arms around Set and Sekhmet with great good cheer, a man enjoying the moment quite thoroughly. He'd looked tall and muscular from afar, but up close he was a force of nature, with the solid build of a man who must spend a fanatical amount of time taking care of himself. He smelled faintly of cigarettes and strongly of men's cologne. When the picture was done, he studied Set's card and shrugged. "Ah, computer nerds, eh? All right, I'll check these out. You two ladies keep your eyes open," he said with a wink. "You need anything, just give me a call." He traded cards with Set, handing over one emblazoned with the logo of the Bedlam Police Department. "I know I'd be happy to keep an eye on you."

March 2017 Wading Way The Blanchard Center (Freedom's Fourth Best Conference Venue!) 6PM Down below on the conference room floor, the tech representatives, executives, and families were circulating, spending the last couple of hours on the conference floor before supper started at 6:30. Through their ranks, a predator stalked - though you wouldn't have known it to look at him. His suit and tie didn't fit exactly right - he needed specially cut suits to accommodate his binder anyway, and his arms were considerably bulkier than his counterpart's in this dimension, but plenty of teenage guys didn't quite fit into the suits designed for an adult's frame anyway. He'd left most of his gear on the rooftop across the street, the same place he'd used as a base to spy on this place (by means of binoculars by night), so here he just looked like any other smart teenager with an eye for miniaturized portable computers. Just the sort of thing he could use to make a really awesome bolt.... One eye closed, he sighted down the length of one particular chip, getting a strange look from the man behind the table. "Just looking," he commented, setting the chip back down. "What kind of heat tolerance do you have here?" The crowd of strangers moving from table to table behind him was hardly on his mind at all - well, relatively speaking, anyway.

Catching the reluctance in Jessie's words even as her suit closed around her and misted with water, Aquaria was briefly torn. She couldn't stay here while Atlantis was attacking - and she couldn't tell Jessie to stay when she knew full well that Singularity wouldn't let her go out there alone even if she had to run and leap after her the whole way. "Brek-kek-kek..." she croaked unhappily before coming to a decision. "I promise I'll stay back unless there's no other way. Most Atlanteans don't know that Sea Devil is a Deep One. Even if I do have to fight, it'll be okay." She looked at Jessie, her face still visible inside the armor, then at the two-dimensional battle on the news. "Not again, Jessie. I can't let it happen again." True to her word, Sea Devil stayed low to the ground on the flight towards the would-be Atlantean embassy, largely as a way of staying close to Singularity. She wasn't a lone survivor of a massacre anymore, or a podless loner cast away on the Surface. She had her companion, she had her pod, she had her friends. The Atlanteans couldn't hurt her anymore.

Let me know what kind of check you want for Citizen attempting to counter the wave by flying through it.

Individual wrap-up! Who was that masked man, etc. The snake guy will appear again in other threads.

Lady Horus will activate her Concealment 10 and begin searching the building. She'll take 20 with Quickness 5 (x50) and Speed 5.

"Hooker froze to death overnight. Nothing two fine ladies like yourself need to be concerned about," said the detective with a wink. "You got ID?"

Looks good, let's get this up there.

This looks good! The magnetar probably makes navigation and such in the area interesting - a potent source of stories!

Citizen hovered in front of the bridge, putting himself between the people and the ocean for a long moment. He wished for the tidal dissipators that were standard waterfront constructions in the Lor Republic. He wished for a metahuman weather controller, or a mass teleporter, or Temperance, or any number of things. While he was at it, why didn't he wish for Terra's moon? Over his internal radio, he continued his conversation with Archetech West. _Okay - I'm on the scene and it looks bad. Estimate just another few minutes until impact - make sure everyone's off the coast, and clear the river banks, because this is going to turn into a tidal bore._ He was faced with choices - try and disperse the tidal wave? Try and evacuate the bridge? There were so many choices, and there was only one Citizen. Other people can evacuate the bridge - but I'm the only one here who had a chance of stopping that wave. Drawing his fists up before him, Citizen rocketed forward, his electromagnetic drive powering him towards the oncoming tidal wave at supersonic speeds. Try and undermine it underwater first, he thought, cut its legs off and keep it from running any faster...

Lady Horus had had personal reasons to pay close attention to the news from Freedom City - only the assurance that everything was in good hands there had kept her in Bedlam. Especially with the dreams! The helm had warned her of much doings in the world of the supernatural around the museum but had been little help besides that, so she'd taken to spending her days at the museum in the guise of a particularly nosy tourist, wandering around and taking pictures with her brand-new phone, occasionally pleading baffled confusion when the bored security guards caught her behind a rope. You could get away with a lot in Bedlam if you looked right and sounded right - or could convince some young guys you did, anyway. To distract herself when away from the museum, she'd put on the live podcast from the museum while she made herself supper and watched the snow fall outside. Bedlam was cold - and godly rainments meant for the desert were not much help. She hesitated just a fraction of a second when she heard the sounds of melee at the museum. She didn't actually know the guy who was getting manhandled but she did owe the Bedlam museum something for all the use she'd gotten out of it, she supposed - and if this was the start of another serpentine eruption, she needed to be ready. Finding the helmet in her closet took just a second - and then she was in the air! Out of habit, Lady Horus kept herself invisible and soundless as she zipped towards the museum, easily passing both car and vigilante without leaving behind a trace of her passing. She appeared briefly on the roof by the skylight - then, with a smirk, disappeared again, reappearing inside the museum's main hall by the front entrance.

"You don't have to please me," said Mark with a faint shrug. "I'm just here for another twenty minutes anyway. And there's nothing you could show me that would shock me," he added reassuringly. "I've been around the block a few times." He kept drawing anyway, though, not trying to push the younger man into revealing something he didn't want to show. "My mom's an artist too. I don't know if you read Andi comics, with the girl and the two boys who crush on her in River Falls, New Jersey? That's her." He smiled. "She's been drawing and illustrating all the Andi digests since I was a kid. When I was in high school, she kept sneaking my friends into stories under other names."

"It was a surprise," said Nina with a glance at Mark - but she held onto him anyway. "But it was always something we'd planned. It just happened sooner than we expected." "Yes, well," said Mark, "we've talked a lot about the future and what we plan to do about this. C'mon, everybody, let's eat." As was usual at a Lucas - al-Darsah meal, the small round dining room table was soon loaded with food, both what Mark had prepared and what their friends had brought. There was a vague Middle Eastern theme to the meal, one reinforced when Mark took out his phone and put some soft Egyptian guitar on in the background as everyone ate and talked. "We plan to have a quiet wedding," Nina was promising Alex. "The real wedding is going to be back in Socotra, in the Great Mosque." Mark shifted a little, knowing the implications of that, even as he finished cutting his frittata. "We already told my mother and she's very happy for us. We had to promise her we wouldn't make the baby grow up to be a superhero, but I'm pretty sure something like that will happen anyway."

"Voiding-eating cowards!" boomed Sea Devil with great force as she leaped and bounded towards the sounds of the distant screams, immediately putting the trapped Surfacers above her desire to punish the mad cultists. For now, anyway. Her revenge could wait - and if she was honest, could probably wait in particular until no other Surfacers were around to see it. Flames were nothing before her armor, which had taken the ultimate heat and ultimate cold of the Sea of Stars without so much as a scar. As for the threatened explosion, well, she was confident about whose hands guided her leaps and bounds down the corridor to the trapped hostages.

"I help you girls with something?" The man speaking to them was a big, cheerful-looking officer in plainclothes, a detective's badge on his herringbone vest and a massive revolver hanging on his hip. He was leaning against a squad car and making notes on a yellow legal pad, and had looked bored before the two pretty girls arrived. He looked happy to see them - in that somewhat predatory way a predatory man can be when he sees things he likes. He reminded Sekhmet a bit of a male lion - not a particularly flattering comparison. On the other side of the police cars, a bodybag was just being zipped up by two bored-looking med-techs. Some uniformed officers were joking with each other about "cherry Popsicles" in a way that bespoke a grim meaning given the snowbank where they'd found the body and the deep chill of a Wisconsin winter in the air.

Lady Horus was watching the police still, but turned quickly to the others. "I am...Lady Horus. Yes - a god, at last. Yes." She smiled, clenching her fist and marveling at it. "We should meet again - and before the city needs us. This is a mighty metropolis and Lady Horus is new to the world of men, I-" When the first police cars skidded to a halt down the block, she muttered something under her breath that didn't sound much like a god's intonations - it sounded a little more like what Betty Boop might say if the police caught her at a speakeasy. When she spoke again, though, it was with the same divine intonations she'd used before. "These churlish spur-galled pignuts. If you would stand with me again, or merely lift a bowl of beer at my side, leave a card at the Egyptian wing of the city museum. I would have words with these jarring hedge-born flirt-gills." Brandishing her glowing ankh, she advanced on the police cars. "Lo! Thou bastard sons of Erin!" Twirling the ankh above her head, she shouted, "Lady Horus has returned to the land of her birthright - and need not bow to the likes of thee!" The police had their guns out now, but the Sunhawk merely laughed. "Fah! Your puny weapons are no match for the power of the Sunhawk! Strike at me and be struck down yourself." Please do not begin your use of the Sunhawk's legacy by attacking local law enforcement! ...fine! But I won't say I won't do it if they cross me! And with that, and a flash of light - Lady Horus rocketed into the air, vanishing in a flash of golden light just above the city skyline.

Aquaria hopped out of her room and turned on the television, crouching down before it as she studied the scene of violence at the Atlantean embassy. She had learned, from long experience sharing space with Jessie, not to panic when she was frightened - but it wasn't easy. Her hands wrapped around her mouth, she watched with gigantic eyes, remembering some talk of Jessie's sister and her friends being away in some other dimension. Who would save them now? They had only a moment's warning before the explosions began - and the elders died beneath Atlantean bombardment. The island had burned by the time the pitiless sun rose. "HAIL HYDRA!" she shouted along with the other females, iron tridents in hand. In a few days she would undergo the rite to fully open her gills - making her a woman of the People and a warrior in their armies. "SACRIFICE! SAC-RI-FICE!" Aquaria Innsmouth opened her eyes and bounded to the closet where she kept her armor, heart pounding in her chest, as news reports of the melee beginning at what had been the embassy site. "I'm sorry, Jessie," she croaked as the armor opened, "I can't let them do this! I can't let them do this! Not again."

"Oh come on, you're not gonna let Mr. Big tell you what to do, are you?" Fast-Forward knelt down in front of the talkative thug, deliberately showing his back to the triggerman. There were advantages to working in a team. He smiled at the man, his face all teeth. "Big tough guy like you probably has a lot of things to say. Come on, tell me more about my kid." Getting more conversation didn't really have any downsides at the moment, even with Will not too far away. "Things aren't gonna be easy either way. You can make 'em less hard, though."

The ride west and north had...not suited the dignity of gods. Hours spent in the cramped confines of Greyhound bus stations, with strange smells and people, often in commercial areas of passing interest in the daytime and little of interest at night, the conveyances themselves, crowded and slow, sometimes with strange smells and people too - the music players who didn't bother with headphones, the children who certainly had ample justification for their unhappiness but were no less loud and active for that. Still - it was better than a slave-crewed boat up the Nile in high summer, with the stink of human dung rising from the fields on either side. Along the way, the temperature dropped, especially once they passed the Great Lakes, snow and ice appearing alongside the road at an alarming rate. Things being what they were, both Set and Sekhmet became the subject of paternal and maternal attention from fellow travelers who urged them to put on a coat before they caught their deaths! They'd also been mistaken for a couple more than once, which was not uncommon for the two of them from mortals not paying attention but seemed to happen with special frequency when they began their journey on the night of Valentine's Day. - Some of the buses had WiFi (as did most of the stations), most passed through areas with cell service - Set was able to do some research. 'Lady Horus' had appeared in Bedlam around the beginning of the year, making her debut by battling a...Scion of Set? (one of Apep's get, from the look of him) right there in the middle of the deplorable of burgs - Bedlam. She seemed to favor flashy stunts - a difficult task in such a grey, unpleasant city. Her fight with the dealers in Hardwick Park was actually somewhat unusual - she tended to pick fights with corporate executive and city officials with a reputation for corruption.This was interesting because this was, so far at least, effectively meaningless. In Wisconsin, a costumed superheroine with no public identity was essentially a vigilante with no real legal power. The men she'd 'taken down' were all on the street, albeit with a few bumps and bruises. Even so, the reward for information on her capture was not small - Bedlam's leaders did not enjoy public humiliation. From the bootleg films Set could find, Lady Horus was fast and strong, more kinetic than the Horus Set remembered, more like Shu made flesh than Horus as she ducked and weaved through gunfire. She spoke differently too, with the intonation of a Heliopolitan but with a vocabulary more suited to Sobek in his cups than the Sunhawk. - The Bedlam Terminal was under a freeway overpass - in a trailer rather than the buildings Set and Sekhmet had seen over the last couple of days of their journey. It was cold and dingy, with piles of exceptionally dirty snow at the edges of the parking lot that easily towered higher than either Set or Sekhmet's heads. In the last fifty or sixty miles, a change in character had seemed to come over the region. This area was diverser than other parts of Wisconsin, more like the industrial cities to the south, but seemed surlier, meaner, more unhappy. The dark grey sky overhead, laden with clouds, seemed to be frowning. Nobody looked their way as they stepped out of the bus terminal - this city was perhaps a quarter the size of Freedom, but the locals didn't seem to want to know anybody, relying instead on the sort of anonymity you got when it was too depressing to take a close look at anything else. There was a small police presence at one end of the parking lot, and an ambulance, gathered around what looked like a half-visible crime scene. Nobody paid them much mind.