Avenger Assembled

http://orokos.com/roll/436804 = 21! Not great, not great. He's got both your Evasions.

"We sometimes have pregnant patients come in," said the nurse, looking as baffled as everyone else. "I'm sorry, I should have gotten it before." She disappeared, security doors swinging behind her, and came back after a few minutes with diapers and a bottle of formula. The fussing form of what could well have been Bryant Halliday fussed and kicked at the first - but latched greedily onto the second. "Can you read his mind?" asked Richard, looking from the baby to his wife with the sort of baffled horror that seemed to be unique to the superhero condition. "Is that him in there?" Probing revealed that there was a mind in there - a mind that reminded Paige very much of the consciousness of Bryant Halliday from the few times she'd touched his brain. But it was attenuated and thin, with only ghostly echoes of the mind she'd once known. This was the unformed mind of an infant - and there was no sign of the man this was supposed to be. Anna Cline seemed to be growing tenser and tenser, and finally moved to put her hand on her grandson's arm. "Willie, honey, can you help your nana get some air?" she asked, her eyes flicking from Bolt to the baby to her son and daughter-in-law so fast that only a speedster like Thoughtspeed could have made it out. "I need-" From the contact, Thoughtspeed seemed to hear the echo of two voices in his mind, or rather, in Anna's. "It hurts so much, Anna. Can you help me?" "Oh God, Bryant, anything. Just ask."

Kaige, you have been a real pleasure to have on the site and an incredible asset. You don't need to feel bad at all about what you've done or the burden you've carried - you have delivered a tremendous amount already. I for one am delighted with what you've done. I'm glad you're doing what you need to do for work-life balance and sanity - and glad you'll be sticking around, even in a reduced capacity for the moment. I look forward to seeing more of you!

Yes - though the middle one might be tough. In general I'm inclined to say, let's do all these things.

Daedalus studied Miss Grue, giving her a level, albeit not unfriendly stare, before speaking again. "Miss Grue, you should be aware that the signal we detected across the dimensional barrier was a standard Grue miitary distress signal. We don't know what that means at this point - but your familiarity with Grue culture and technology is one of the major reasons why the League assented to Tarva's request to include you as an observer. I should have told you this beforehand," he admitted, "but we needed to know your character." "Fate brought you here," Tarva told Daphne reassuringly, "and fate will guide you to success." Even across the city and in her cradle, Gina could feel the tension in Steve as he pushed himself to his feet with a sudden burst of energy that sent his chair sliding backwards with a notable squeak against the shiny marbled floor beneath them. "If - if the probes find survivors, I recommend a small party," he said. "With expertise in both science and mysticism - and training in stealth." The tactical report seemed to bring him peace - or at least give him something to focus on. He looked up from the table where he'd been staring. "I concur with Miss Americana. This must be investigated without destroying what lies beyond - but the risk of what lies beyond that portal is greater than your deaths." Daedalus spoke again. "The general consensus, based on what we've learned from accounts of Terminus invasions in other worlds, is that we were fortunate to escape as lightly as we did in 1993." They all knew what it meant to call the Invasion of '93 light - its memorials were everywhere in the city, including a memorial to the greatest loss of all. "If the people on the other side of that portal found a way, even in their last extremity, to stop an invasion cold, we owe it to them to find out what happened - and make sure what they found is not lost to the forces of entropy."

When Miracle Girl turned around, Sea Devil was on the ceiling! Clinging with bare hands and feet (she appeared to be triple-digited on both, with pads on the ends of her digits), she looked for a moment like a startled frog in power armor - in the instant before she landed smoothly back on bipedal legs in the ground below. Aquaria ran her three-fingered hands over the top of her head, nervously patting her crest back down from where it had leaped up in surprise at the sight of the strange figure inside the film. "Why is that?" she croaked, pointing to the clown and its words. "What did it say?" Surfacer languages in their written form were sometimes a difficulty. While she got a translation, she hopped backwards, as if nervous the clown might simply step out of the screen at her. She folded her arms over her chest. "That is strange. This does not happen in the movies I have seen. Are the dreams...leaking?"

In an eyeblink, the doors slammed shut - first, a square cage around Epiphany and Raptor whose orange-tinted vitrium walls made it look oddly like a hamster cage, right down to the airholes punched in it at the top. Garuda got magnetized - the iron in his costume pinning him to the bare floor with a whumpf, while the opposite happened to Prestige as anti-gravity conditions suddenly pinned the lithe fae to the celing like a stuck butterfly. As she tossed Nighthawk aside, Alkahest was the last to fall - the cage around her dark, silent, and as it turned out, unbreakable... Fred heard her heartbeat first, and then her breathing, and knew that Alkahest was gone. "Hey, Fred." Riley and Robin were kneeling down around her, Riley's poncho draped over her, offering extra protection besides her unstable molecule labcoat. As frightening as her powers were, Fred just after her transformation back always struck a great chord of pity with Woodsman. Riley knew what it was like to be exposed. "Welcome back to the land of the livin'." Across the room, a conversation was taking place. The headmistress had not been interested in hearing from either group of teenagers upon her arrival in the company of two of the new faculty members, the English teacher Joan Collier and the new science teacher Ms. Ambrose. Immediately upon her arrival. Mrs. Collier had scooped up both Mr. Archer and the fallen Raptor and left for medical attention, leaving the students down in the Doom Room with each other, their headmaster, and what they were all learning was a much, much bigger problem than a schoolyard brawl. "There will be a full investigation in the morning," Callie Summers was promising, her eyes looking from face to face among both Next-Gen and their rivals. "after all of you are treated for your injuries by Nurse Joy. I will be contacting your parents and guardians tonight to discuss what's happened - after that, further steps will depend on what we learn over the next few days."

"Well, that...can't be good," said Edge, peering outside past Bonfire and Leviathan. He'd passed the baby over to Monsoon as he went, a faintly muffled sigh coming from the armored heroine as she handled the baby. It was hard to tell what she thought of the matter, her head and face being fully covered beneath white and gold armor. He took out what looked like a very fancy phone and tried tapping out a few numbers, then slid it back into his pocket with a sigh. "Might have known that wouldn't do anything. I wonder if we're even still on Earth-Prime...." "Well damn - can you teleport us out of here?" called Monsoon, the baby in her arms giggling and waving the crocodile around as she watched Punchline's antics. Here, at least, was a completely appreciative audience. Mark tried, and shook his head, evidently unable to do so. "I might have known. Gods." Just then, from the direction of a particularly thick clot of mangroves outside, there came the sound and sight of movement. Something was running towards them, fast and awkward, as if it wasn't entirely at home out here - something that on closer inspection revealed itself to be an alien! Looking vaguely like a humanoid alligator, it ran on two legs, a once-silvery skin-tight spacesuit wrapped around its body now covered in mud, blood, and other stairs. The gator-thing hadn't noticed them yet, it was too busy running along, occasionally stopping to look frantically at the sky overhead.

Impulsively, Aquaria lashed out, impaling the star vampire through one flank with her glowing tridents. She didn't think she'd done any damage, but the creature was now stuck, impaled on her blades like a jellyfish on a fishing spear. Immediately she realized the error she'd made, however, when she felt the heat from the star vampire burning its way up her tridents. She didn't whimper - pain was no new thing to her, but she felt her throat bulge against the insides of her armor as she took stock of her situation. "Better strike soon - can't hold," she cautioned Temperance, even as a part of her kept wondering how this fantastic creature had come to be here so far from the star that was its natural home.

A lot of bad things could have happened that evening - so many of them that Riley felt himself going hyper-vigilant from time to time. Was a supervillain going to attack? Would there be a robbery? Would someone decide they didn't like his face, or his arm around Robin? Would the set suck? But as it happened none of those things did - the hardcore rappers from DC who took center-stage for the main event were a pair of sisters named the Go-Go-Girls, who alternated hard, aggressive beats about how they ruled the streets with fast jamming on electric guitars that reminded him of the blended musical styles he'd grown up with. He wasn't one to dislike violent music - in fact, he could feel his adrenaline pumping faster once he'd convinced himself that the many real dangers out there weren't going to happen. The act kept the crowd on their feet, singing along when they weren't rocking out, and by the time they gave their final performance, it was truly dark outside, the park lit only by its ample street lights. As the crowd's screaming applause died down, Riley decided he was in no hurry to go anywhere. "Yeah! Kick some ASS!" He cheered at the stage. He'd gotten carried away, sweating and energized, but it was more than worth it. He grinned at Robin, having obviously had the time of his life. "Wasn't that sweet?"

Okay, shall we cut to the actual rescue squad arriving?

"Oh, geez!" said Richard, his eyes wide as he looked at the corpse for a long minute. Well, for him anyway - from the perspective of those around him, his eyes would have been on the man with the gun the whole time. "I'm so sorry. You should know that this is happening in the towns down on the coast, too," he said, cocking his head back towards 'Freedom City'. "Somebody's killing down there and they're trying to blame it on Indians. That's why we're helping your friends run away." He took a breath, thinking more about the time, the place, and what these people had seen. "I know things have been bad here lately, with the war. Just tryin' to put things right."

APPROVED

Okay, Renegade is up.

Her pink Cyndi Lauper hair ruffling in the breeze, Paige's studded denim jacket kept her warm as she stepped inside the room that lay at the innermost sanctuary of August Roman's mind. It was a grim scene. The room was like a hospital room, but one pulled from a time even before her birth, with a steel-frame bed, bedpan beside it, radiator against the wall, and other furnishings that belonged to a bygone age. The walls were covered with images, some of which she knew, some of which she didn't - superheroes whose names she didn't recall, villains and criminals and civilians too, Saturnalia Roman and a figure she distinctly recognized as a younger Anna Cline, the pictures themselves (like clippings from a magazine) smeared with filth and dirt. At the very center of the far wall, directly opposite the bed, was a clear, perfect image of the Centurion as the Man of Adamant had looked just before his death in the early 1990s. That image was perfectly clean. August Roman lay on the bed, withered and pained, but with his eyes burning as he stared up at Paige. His mental voice had far more power than his physical one. "There is nothing left for me. Why should I help you?" Outside the windows of the room, Paige could see the swirling ashy clouds of the Angel of Death. - Fast-Forward was hurt - he tasted blood in his mouth and the aches and scrapes of torn skin and bruises across his body where he'd been thrown headfirst into the concrete - but thanks to the protection of his little charm, he was still alive. And still in the fight. "You shouldn't have let go, asshole!" he yelled at the Angel of Death, running around the now shattered parking lot with blinding speed, his feet tracing complicated geometric patterns on the ground that glowed with an arcane light that should have taken hours to summon. He passed Renegade on the way and felt the healing magic wash over him and smiled, feeling a renewed sense of confidence along with the renewed sensation in his body. Maybe they had this guy licked yet! When he'd finished his spell, he didn't stop to look behind him - instead he ran all the way, taking shelter behind the ground floor of the hospice as a bolt of lightning came streaking down from the sky and blasted the Angel of Death square in the center of the back! But the blast had little effect - except to outrage the monster! "Your fear is irrelevant," it informed Phalanx, "only your deaths matter!" And with that, fiery chains erupted from, no, _through_ the parking lot as like the fingers of Hell itself, lashing upwards to grab and rip at even super-tough flesh. The creature, now flying impossibly fast, erupted past the forest of burning chains and grabbed Phalanx by the sides of the head, bony claws digging deep right through his super-tough flesh, and squeezed with impossible force!

I'll spend Fast-Forward's last HP to shake the dazed. He'll use Damage 16 (stormy light of Arcturus; Extra: Area [Targeted, Shapeable], PFs: Indirect 2, Stunning Attack, Variable Descriptor 1 [any weather]) {36/48} Rolling vs DC 24... http://orokos.com/roll/435339 = that's a miss, I'll just say it tanks the hit. The Angel of Death: Switches to its Damage 0-17 Extras: Sustained Duration (+2), General Area Burst (85ft radius) {0-68pp} – Death AP So that's a DC 27 Reflex save, halved as usual, vs DC 32 lethal damage. It then punches Phalanx with an All-Out Power Attack using Strike of Valor - and hits! http://orokos.com/roll/435340 That's a DC Tou save of 35 for Phalanx vs. lethal. It heals a Bruised.

"Ah, I still can't believe it..." Dimitri looked at Talya's abdomen for a moment, then put his hands in his pockets and looked away, composing himself. "There has never, and there shall never be, a time that I judge you. I am happy for you, Natalya." By the time he looked back, he was composed. "To see life come from one of us, after all we have seen, is a beautiful thing." It was considerably more sentimental than he usually got in front of strangers, but he supposed Erik didn't count as a stranger at the moment. "...the incineration!" He snapped his fingers, a triumphant look on his face. "That's what it was! Ace's old curse must have been reset by incineration by shadows! Ah, fascinating! You know, this could be worth some study," he opined, an excited look on his face. "Many of the lady magic practitioners want to have children but are worried about the terrible curses and children with wings and what have you, so there is much professional market for talk of ferteelity of various sorts." He grinned at Erik. "And you too, fellow, such interest there may be!"

"Your concerns are noted, Nevermore. If you are interested in earning higher evaluations, you should put forth a greater effort during training - and you should be more prepared for the unexpected. Thank you for your efforts tonight. You will have a full written evaluation by the end of the week." And with that, Archer was gone, the lights upstairs going dark. For his part, Riley looked no more than mildly nettled by Archer's training - being exposed to imminent harm that was not harm was not a major concern for the wiry teen. "Sounds great," he said seriously. Robin really was great - and Nevermore was an all right guy too, he conceded to himself, having been nettled by the other teen before. "Hey, you're OK'n my book, Nevermore," said Riley, patting the larger boy on his armored back. "We did great. You just gotta taste of one of Archer's specials."

Wild card - why can't the answer be yes to all these questions?

Okay, did you want to post for your NPC?

Electromagnetic repulsors and anti-grav units strained - and the airplane began veering up and away, slowly shifting out of its downward descent. Steer it towards Jacobs. The airport had been the initial destination of the plane, and would be the easiest place to put it down. As they navigated, the two machine intelligences communicated in binary radio transmissions about more mundane matters. I'm sorry, I'm not normally one for personal questions, but who built your body? I'm not familiar with your design. She did have a striking build, but despite his own cybernetic nature Citizen had grown up among people who believed themselves to be biological organisms. His admiration was professional...mostly.

http://orokos.com/roll/435212 = 46 That's more like it! Okay, just 4 more points of success are needed now, right?

Okay, the fight is technically over. Go ahead and describe whatever - we'll be moving on when I make a GM post.

That should wrap things up nicely!

"Wasn't that bad," said Woodsman, doing his best to be reassuring to the other young man. "We coulda taken those guys," he opined, "I had coverage behinda boxes, and half of 'em couldn't shoot at us without hittin' their stuff." He hmmed, thinking about that - what had been the point of a poorly-planned ambush like that, anyway? He didn't think about it for long, though, high-fiving Nighthawk with a cocky grin. "Awesome fightin', babe. Need ta get a camera and take your picture doin' that." When the lights came back on all the way, they could make out Archer in the glass in the observation booth, the computer's glow reflected in his glasses. "Adequate performance," he said calmly. "Woodsman, your marksmanship was well within expectations, as was your ability to lead, Nighthawk, and yours to fight and plan, Nevermore. I have no serious complaints about your performance tonight."