Avenger Assembled

"It's real nice," agreed Riley, who hardly ever felt cold, stabbing terror whenever he saw a figure flying in the sky anymore, or a colorful costumed person on the street. As much as he missed his home, and his family, and his people, he'd be crazy not to appreciate the virtues of this place - like unexpected friends, and hot cocoa. "Least nobody glares at me when killin' comes up anymore. New semester wasn't so bad." He smiled thinly - a bit of gallows humor given how difficult things had been at the beginning of summer. He paused for a moment, remembering, and took out a little camo-patterned pocket notebook to write down Erin's words. His handwriting was neat and small, more precise than most people his age who had grown up with computers everywhere. "I worry still about things getting worse," he admitted. "People might shake out good - but a lot of bad stuff can happen before that."

"It's not good," Riley agreed. He looked down at his own reflection in the mug for a moment, closed his eyes, then kept talking. "I know here isn't like home. Things have to be different, because the world is different." There were no crimes grave enough to warrant the gallows or the ax - not when a super was usually just a stone's throw away. People did terrible things to each other - but there were limits. "Sometimes you can't stop 'em any other way, though. You know they're gonna get away, you know they're gonna hurt people, or kill people - and even if somebody stops 'em later, they're not gonna stop. Sometimes it just doesn't get better."

Riley held the steaming hot mug in his hands, feeling the heat radiate through his fingerless gloves. Hot cocoa was one of the many things he had grown up without - and he took a moment to savor the smell and the taste it put in the back of his throat before he took a sip. "We're, uh, takin' ethics class and we're doin' a round table about 'lethal force'." The euphemism still sounded odd in his mouth - just as it had in yet another classroom discussion where he'd had to keep his mouth clamped shut. He was talking about killing. He sipped his cocoa again. "I got the 'personal interview' group. Everybody'n our group's supposed to find a veteran super and ask why supers don't kill people. Good ones, anyway."

"Goin' fine," he said. He debated the relative merits of offering to help carry a bag - but dismissed it quickly. Erin didn't need his help carrying anything (not when she could have lifted the truck) and she was fast enough that she didn't need an extra hand. "Hey, could use your help with somethin' when yer done. Not this," he added hastily with a look down at his machinery. He knew enough to ask for help if he was actually in danger but he'd be damned if he'd ever be a burden to the people who had taken him into their home (at least sometimes) and given him a job when everyone else thought he was a maniac with strange cares. "School stuff. Supposed to talk to a veteran super."

"Y'eard about it too?" The wiry teenager who appeared alongside the other young men was in a green and brown poncho, his dark face partially concealed by the shadow of his hood. He gave no signs of appearing and disappearing by magic the way Crow had, he simply walked out of the shadows and into a clear part of the woods. Riley could have called Robin, he could have called Erin or Trevor - but this was something he had to handle himself. Woodsman's voice was flat, calm, and almost a whisper, his crossbow slung low over his back. "Probably just the Green Man." He said that because the alternative was unthinkable, because the alternative was enough to make him want to scream and scream and scream, to be the violent monster everyone at Claremont said he was. But Woodsmen were in control of themselves. "I'm Woodsman. Let's go."

December 2016 Hunter-White Mansion It was snowing outside, thick and heavy, unusually so for this part of New Jersey at this time of year. But that hadn't put Riley off - the wiry teen was working in the garage of the Hunter-White Mansion, putting in the hours for his part-time job here with classic cars. A lot of things had changed in his life and at the school in the last year - but not his job and his relationship with Erin and Trevor Hunter-White. He'd closed the garage door as he worked but left the outside door open, the direction of the wind meaning that only a small amount of snowflakes were actually blowing into the increasingly cold room. He'd turned off the room's heaters as he worked, and even his sensitive hearing could detect nothing other than the wind and the sound of his tools as he carefully tested the troublesome headlights of this 1931 Model A Ford. On and off, on and off, but he couldn't get a steady illumination despite what he knew were perfectly good bulbs. Must be the wiring, he thought as he stepped out over the running board, a fuzzy knitted hat atop his shaved head.

There was a barely perceptible pause before Steve rumbled "Mmm. Christopher has the experience in combat. I will wager on his behalf." The words were cordial enough, but tinged with the faint aura of distraction that meant Harrier's mind had been elsewhere - in other times, and other places. They were here - they were here and they were hostile. What could be done? If the doors could be closed, they would have been, on worlds more powerful than this. The fact that one shared Min's powers was no particular surprise. All of those he saw here on Earth-Prime had their entropic duplicates - and of course his own talents could be easily matched by the armies of Nihilor.

Nina's face flashed in Mark's mind, clear as a bell, before Mark's thoughts came back. Better not. I promised her I wouldn't tell anyone. Mark's thoughts were usually clear as a bell and unambiguous - but now they were stumbling over each other in a way his words almost never did. "I like parties," Mark was saying out loud, "you just have to get out there and be yourself, and then everyone will appreciate you." He smiled a dazzling smile, suggesting that people usually did appreciate him, and he couldn't understand anyone who didn't. "Plus the food at League stuff is always good - and locally grown whenever they can, too!"

Aquaria retreated to a nearby wall, scuttling up and clinging to the tiles with the sticky pads on her hands and feet, as she listened to the others converse. "The gods lie between the worlds," she croaked seriously. "You must be mindful you do not catch their terrible eyes when you travel there." She scuttled along the wall and cocked her head - then lashed out with a two-foot tongue as green and white as what could be seen of her skin beneath tattoos and armor. Snatching up a bit of her and Miracle Girl's lunch, she swallowed it whole and began chewing the meat with soft wet bites, watching everyone else with her huge black and gold eyes.

Caradoc was only a step or two behind Fleur de Joie, greatsword in his hand and gleaming with power as he strode out into the scene of the too-recent battlefield. Fragments of rock crunched beneath his heavy boots like ice, the cries of newborns and human voices reached his audio sensors, but the cybernetic warrior said nothing, and made no move at first towards his allies. His head cocked and his face invisible behind his armor, Caradoc could sense the nature of the energy burning in the air like a man scenting a forest of fruit gone to rot on the vine. Everything he had feared was coming true. Well no, that wasn't the case. He looked around at the broken bodies and saw the faces and forms of no friends there. Not yet.

Some math issues here. You need to incorporate the bonuses to Attack and Defense he gets from his Shrinking. You shouldn't use odd-numbered Ability scores - just take those points and put them somewhere else. You've forgotten to add in the math for his combat and saving throws. http://www.freedomplaybypost.com/topic/5127-from-the-laboratory-of-dr-archeville/?page=2#comment-149453 Take a look at that sample build and see what you come up with.

Beth Walton-Wright excused herself to put the kids down for a nap - Nina took the opportunity to follow her along, asking something about what kind of support the League offered families like hers, leaving Mark alone with the rest of the party. Carefully cupping the empty glass in his hand, Mark made the rounds with the faces old and new, either shaking hands or introducing himself. Pressing the flesh at parties was second nature by now, right down to producing the odd Christmas toy for the few kids still running around what was after all a family gathering. And wasn't that a thought. "Joe, Asli, glad you could make it," he said warmly as he made his introductions. "and everyone else! Looks like this is going to be a real party."

APPROVED

"I waited. Until the stars were right." The titanic Deep One set Jessie down near and ducked towards the base of the cliff - peering downward, Aquaria could make out a vast cave entrance underneath the stones where they stood. "Go and see the city on the Surface," the other Aquaria croaked in a booming rumble like undersea volcanoes erupting. "Then we will sing a song of ages past. And of the walls in the caverns of the sky." She vanished then, in a great bulk underneath the hill, and some of her followers began the journey down the cliffside to tend to her. But Aquaria and Jessie stayed above. "The unutterable that can dwell in silence and immensity," quoted Aquaria in a soft bass Lemurian sing-song, in awe remembering the ancient chants of the Dark Mothers she'd learned in her youth. But this other Aquaria, this reflection of her past self? Future self? Dwelt in no silence - but from the look of things with spawn, hybrid or not, around her as great as any on Earth. She was acutely aware, with a sudden sense of sick grief as she looked at her friend, that this Aquaria had outlived Jessie by two centuries? More? "Come," she croaked softly to Jessie. "Let us see our friends, and see what these others have built." She added to Kee'lee on the way, "Sing to me of how we were stranded on these rocks three hundred years before I hatched." "

Looks like your HTML got lost at some point, whoops! Can you go through and bold and underline in the style of the sample sheets?

"Fate is cruel, yes," said Dimitri flatly as he knelt by the fallen man's side, his red-rimmed eyes cool as a Siberian winter. "Is very unlikely you will survive - but you have time yet." He put his hand on the stones next to the man's head and looked into his eyes. "Who sent you? Tell me the truth and we shall give them your regards. Otherwise..." He made a little gesture with his hand, perhaps a shrug. There was no need to say what he was thinking - the hard reality that the man would die slowly, in pain, and for no purpose if he didn't tell them who had sent them to that place. "Time is wasting."

Aquaria made obeisance before the matriarch, bowing low and sprawled to show the clan markings on her back, before she realized exactly who this was. "Dark Mother," she bellowed, "how have you come to be here? How have you-" birthed so many hybrids!? She didn't ask the last out loud, not when she was surrounded by so many of the latter, who were still looking on her as she might look upon a Serpent Person communing with an avatar of Dagon and Hydra. They seemed like nice people. Well, 'people.' The other Aquaria had no words for her counterpart, though, not when there was something more interesting to focus on. "Jessie?" Without another word, without so much as a glance at Bliss, the titanic Deep One reached down and scooped up Singularity with one massive limb. The three-fingered hand was familiar, albeit bigger than Jessie herself. Up close, from the noise and smell, Jessie had the feeling that the segmented armor that covered the thick, barnacled hide of the Deep One matriarch was covering other things too - things that perhaps weren't yet visible on the Aquaria she knew. But as it was, that giant hand drew her level with a massive face, curved snout, and gigantic eyes. The titan looked at Jessie and suddenly raised her head to the sky, giving a great and terrible bellow that was matched a moment later by some of the hybrids on shore, a mournful wail that sounded something like whalesong in the air - if the whale was the size of a small mountain.

That earned Leviathan a hard glare from Quirk - and at first he thought that was all that had happened. Until everyone's eyes opened wide with alarm, staring at him, and he realized his mouth wasn't opening. His mouth was gone. "Hey." Edge looked at Leviathan, and then back at Quirk. "Hey, c'mon, I'll make you a deal. If you send him back to Freedom City, and you fix up his face, I'll teach you everything I know about girls. I had to figure everything out for myself when I was as old as you look, and it wasn't fun." The last part wasn't actually true, but there was no need to dwell on it right now. "Okay, fine, but I'm not sending him anywhere till I hear something useful." Leviathan's face was whole again. Quirk took a seat and retrieved his sister from Mark, dandling the latter on his knee as he sat on one of the benches behind the toy shop's counter. Grumpy teenager or not, he seemed to like the baby. "Just for the record, by the way, it was my sister who did the doll thing, so don't go blaming me for your problems, Wishes-He-Was-Gigantosaur."

Used to the media customs of Terrans, Sharl posed for the picture, reflexively bringing in Spellsmith and Sun Wukong, before reacting to the sudden arrival of one and the strange words of the other. Spellsmith and Sun Wukong. His Internet connection gave him information on both at lightning speed. Delightful! He kept a smile on his face even so, though, too familiar with Eliza's friends to actually get into a fight with people over what they believed. "Welcome to the party, everyone, and to Archetech. Help yourself to the snacks." He wound up zeroing in on Spellsmith, who had certainly made the most impressive arrival of anyone at the party. "How did you generate that portal?" he asked the man, looking around him curiously for the necessary technology that would have accompanied the feat. "I don't know who Sun Wukong is," admitted Dr. Collins, studying Sun Walker with a fascinated look on her face. "Are you part of one of the archetypical dimensions, then, infused with the imageria of another plane? That's fascinating! Are there others like you here?"

"I would be honored," Dimitri told her affectionately. "If you would have me there." He put his arm around her and watched the snow fall, glad to be inside and out of freezing temperatures. He'd been keeping himself warm in the winter for nearly eighty years now, but never quite so pleasantly as this one. "Perhaps we can climb one of those great volcanoes of yours and watch the stars come out - or the fire from below." Any sort of company was welcome, really, especially Leilani's. "Aquaria, Indira, hello! Thank you for letting me be the rooster among the hens tonight." "I would like chicken," agreed Aquaria in response to Indira's metaphor, not really following Dimitri's metaphor. "It is cooked in many juices and will be sssucculent." She hopped over to the carved roast chicken on the buffet table. "I have heard that there is a meal one can make that is a turkey with a duck inside of it - and then inside the duck, a chicken!"

"We're doing well, thank you," said Nina, smiling at the sight of Alex and her husband-to-be. "Especially now that Mark and I have dug our way out after that terrible storm. Here I thought living by the coast was supposed to save us from all these American winters Mark keeps telling me about." "Hey, we can't go to the tropics for Christmas _every_ year," said Mark with a ready grin. "Come to think of it, I already know you can ice-skate and you don't get cold, and there are still some frozen ponds up in the forest.." "No thank you," said Nina cheerfully, her own smile perhaps just a touch too bright. "You know, I think I heard Joe and Asli were on their way tonight. Maybe we can make a triple date of it."

Months went by. - "There haven't been any further echoes from that universe," Daedalus told Miss Americana during one of their regular communications. "We even lost the background T-neutronio hum shortly after the detonation of the electromagnetic device." It had been a powerful device, one capable of scrambling organic as well as inorganic matter. "Whatever was happening there - it's not happening anymore. - "I need help." Sitting at the kitchen table, they were among the most difficult worlds Steve had ever said - especially when they meant admitting weakness to his lover. "If I had gone on my instincts, I would have been worse than dead - and so would those I sought to protect. And...and I think some part of me knew that. I will seek counseling," he promised her. "And I will do what I can to be the man you deserve." - "You're better off not thinking about those times," said Tarva, pulling her robe back on, black silk sliding over her scarred torso. It had been a full month since the brief, removed encounter with the women from her homeworld. "We live in the world that we live in, and we take the joys that we can. Don't let the darkness of the past touch your soul. Mine has been dirtied enough." - "We cannot discuss what happened with Erik." The sound of deception seemed to curdle Steve's deep voice. They were away from the dojo and its plants, Caradoc's armored form gleaming in the starlight overhead. "Now, or ever. If the heroes of this version of Freedom City become convinced that the Terminus is a dimension that they can invade, then it will result in their deaths." - "I disagree with Daedalus's choice in the matter," Rick told Daphne, a faint static in his voice the only sign of his station at the edge of the Solar System. "But I understand it. And I am glad you did not face the forces of the Terminus, alone or with companions. There are enemies that lie beyond this dimension whose very touch is death, not to the body but to the soul."

Between Mark's powers and Corbin's, they were able to get some illumination in the dark, alien tunnel network inside the mountain. What they found was a grim scene - twisted corridors that seemed to run over and under each other with no particular rhyme or reason, oddly-shaped chambers still adorned with strange pieces of alien machinery marred with the signs of various sorts of gore. The larger pieces had been removed by the initial UN team (Mark was able to produce high-def photographs of the original scene for the detectives on the team) but the scenes of what had once been a slaughterhouse was intimately clear. "We scanned for Terminus activity, of course, but there's no sign of entropic radiation anywhere around here," said Mark as he shown his flashlight into a darkly-stained crater in the cave floor that had (from the pictures) recently held a collection of matched viscera. A few rooms away, Monsoon (who had no need for a light) was studying an irregular-looking series of grooves and markings against a cave wall, some of them marked in blood, others in strange, bioluminscent alien fluids. "They think this was its resting room. The other, ah, Triakosia. Hair was found here, and other things, that matched DNA files. Sorry," she apologetically added.

"How can you be so selfish?" demanded Quirk, glaring at Leviathan. "My life is ruined! This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me!" Focusing on Punchline, he went on, "I don't wanna date some stupid 4-dimensional, that's like you dating a goldfish. I just want somebody to like me!" Teenagers really could whine when they wanted to. "You're right to be angry," said Monsoon suddenly, her mask down over her face. "A broken heart hurts. But if this girl broke your heart, you're better off without her," she agreed with Punchline. "But for now, forget her. What could she give you that you couldn't do yourself?" "Lots of stuff," muttered Quirk. He was still fuming, but it sounded like all the diplomacy was breaking through. "Maybe I don't need a stupid girl to be happy..."

Look Around, Look Around Mid-December 2016 "Mark, I'm pregnant." Sitting across the dining room table from Nina in their too-big house that suddenly seemed far too small, and indeed closing in on him, Mark nearly fell out of his chair. Absurdly a thought entered his mind - Well, that's one way to settle what we're going to do with our day off! He recovered a moment later, and did the only thing he could do. He moved around to the other side of the table and putting his arms around Nina wordlessly. She hugged him back, her grip firm around his waist, and silently they held each other for a long moment. They'd had conversations, sometimes arguments, about this moment more than once in the last several years, but for now silence seemed like the best option. "I love you," he said when he pulled back. They were both in bulky Christmas sweaters, his in green and hers in red, a tacky American affectation that she'd adopted with her usual ability to blend in. "What do you want to do?" He knew what he wanted, he knew that he'd wanted children ever since he'd really understood what a father was - but that wasn't really an issue right now. Is Marcie Lucas doing cartwheels while her fiance wonders what he's going to do right now? "I don't know," she admitted, a slight tremor in her voice as she sipped her peppermint cocoa the only sign of a significant inner tension. She looked up at him - always taller than her, especially now when she was sitting and he was standing. "Don't-don't loom, Mark," she teased him distractedly, "sit down." He pulled his chair around and moved it next to her, and listened to her words. Outside the snow fell, thick and white, a silent blizzard that by all accounts was sweeping the area. "I don't want to tell anyone just yet," she said. "Not your friends, not mine. I looked it up on the Internet and I must have conceived just a few weeks ago." Mark did some quick math in his head and realized what must have happened. "Many things can happen." She took a breath, and then another. "Especially to people like us." "I won't breathe a word," promised Mark, "not even at the Christmas party." His heart was pounding in his chest, but he was doing his best to stay calm. He gripped the handle of his mug tight, until he felt the warmth of the drink inside almost burn his knuckles. "You know the things that I want - but I want you to be happy most of all. Whatever you want to do," he promised her, "I'll be with you, every step of the way." He'd accepted for years that his vision of them one day settling down in the Freedom City suburbs, raising a blended family and continuing their work for the United Nations, wasn't what Nina wanted, especially with things the way they were in both countries - but now...now there was no knowing the future. He thought of visits from his future child, and the visits Trevor and Erin's had made. Was there something significant about these years? "'Uhabik. Wanahn sawf nnafeal dhlk maea," he added. "I love you too" She took his hand and squeezed it tight. "Whatever happens, let's get married. We can do it here civilly - and in Socotra in the Great Mosque." There was a job to do in her home nation too - one that had just gotten a lot more urgent. "I want you to be my husband, and the father of my children." "Hey, that's supposed to be my line," Mark teased, his fingers brushing against the sharp edge of her diamond engagement ring. "You know that's what I've wanted for almost five years now. We'll talk about...the mosque later." The issue of conversion had come up before, the necessary requirements of a consort of a royal of Socotra (even one who might never set foot in that land again) but it had suddenly become substantially less urgent than it had been even a few weeks earlier. "Let's just stay inside today." He looked with her at the snow outside, listening to the wind howl. "It's a good day for that."