Avenger Assembled

When Triakosia arrived at her appointed rendezvous, she found a roadside rest-stop near the top of a seaside cliff. As this was after Labor Day weekend and early afternoon on a workday, there were only a few cars parked in the lot. Sitting at one of the outdoor picnic tables, she found her two subjects - Mark Lucas, who as Edge was one of the most famous unmasked heroes in the world, and his associate Monsoon, resplendent in blue, gold, and white armor and cape. "Hello, Triakosia," said Edge warmly, standing to greet her and shake her hand. "I'm glad you're here." His grip was firm, his gaze on hers measuring. Monsoon was watching Triakosia, and favored her with a nod - but didn't rise. "Will you sit down? We need to talk."

Riley put his arm around her shoulders, giving Robin a big smile that spoke of nothing more complicated than a young man out with his girl. "Only 'cause I have good company," he said, kissing her back. Riley's body was mostly hard and wirey against her, the hours of physical training paying off in an upper body strength that outmatched almost every normal person in their class. "You're the best, babe." The first show was a neighborhood act, DJ Noobian, who combined a techno and ancient-Egyptian look that reminded Riley a little bit of Peyton's Sun Ra VHS collection. The crowd, some of whom were in what had to be souvenir Egyptian headdresses, was game, and soon Riley was letting himself get pulled into the crowd's enthusiastic call and response of "KINGS AND QUEENS! KINGS AND QUEENS!" as a homemade laser show lit the stage behind the impressively muscular Noobian, wearing only an Egyptian-style skirt covered in a circuit-breaker design. By the time Noobian left the stage, he had the crowd more than warmed up for the main event, an out-of-towner from Pittsburgh who was evidently tremendously popular.

Okay, do your thing.

Citizen pushed back against the mass above him - and immediately felt the fragile aluminium of the plane began to crumple. Alien curses about the inferiority of Terran technology were interrupted by the radio signal from the entity inside the plane. Profound relief filled his mental 'voice' as he declared "Yes, absolutely. I'm seven meters down the main axis from the nose section, moving towards the eight meter mark." He readjusted the electromagnetic supercharge being emitted by his body, trying to successfully 'grab' enough of the plane behind him that he wouldn't go tearing through it if he exerted himself again.

Okay. Citizen is rolling 15 + 7 + 7 = +27 http://orokos.com/roll/433632 = 28 Not yet!

As Levithan headed out among the toy shelves, the scene around him was one of a faint sense of dissolution. The toys on the shelves and bins were all well-made, most of them by hand or with other simple tools, the wooden toys showing a carpenter's touch and the metal the mark of a smith. But everything looked old, not just in style but as if it had been sitting on the shelves for a while, long enough for items near the window to grow faintly discolored and a faint layer of dust to settle on most of the items too. The prices were a little off too, more appropriate for a store of his parents' generation than one active in 2016. Reaching the frosted glass at the front of the store, he peered outside to see not the street scene he had left, but a swamp! He didn't have a clear view outside, but he could make out mangroves strewn with Spanish moss and a distinctly grey sky outside, and condensation on the window that suggested it had abruptly grown much warmer and wetter outside. The baby took the crocodile from Cassandra and began chewing on it avidly, making pleased baby noises and burbling noisily. "Yes, you're a good baby," Mark encouraged Baby, bouncing her up and down. Despite a truly impressive quantity of drool, none seemed to be getting on his neatly tailored suit. "Hey, can you do faces for a baby?" he asked Punchline, trying to keep the clown on their side. If Nina was right about them all being brought together for a reason, it was probably important they all work together. He held the bright-eyed sprog up so she had a better view of the other hero.

September 2016 Lincoln Dancia had spent a week away from the office, covering a story about the new generation of West African nuns who were taking over an isolated Franciscan nunnery down on the Maurice River in southwestern New Jersey. it had been a fascinating story and a chance to meet people she might never have met, but the nunnery's remote location had left her isolated from world events. No sooner had she arrived back at the Ledger that she had a stack of urgent messages - including one from a familiar UNISON agent asking her to arrange a meeting with Triakosia at a remote cliffside lookout spot near Lonely Point. "This is an urgent meeting. Please let me know as soon as you've arranged it - and when we can see her there."

Content Note: Disturbing Content, Gore September 2016 Freedom Hall The world survived the Terminus Invasion. But only a few people on it survived a Terminus invasion - from the other side. Neither Steve Murdock nor Tarva the Black had so much as looked at each other upon their arrival in Freedom Hall. Rather, they had taken seats on the opposite sides of the conference room's big table, each joined by their closest allies, responding to the one summon in the multiverse that could bring the two of them together under one roof. Freedom Hall and its staff seemed on edge tonight- and no wonder, with all the crises great and small that had come that summer, and with this new crisis no doubt whistling through the super community like an incoming shell. "As you know, the Freedom League occasionally dispatches remote multiversal probes to probe areas of Terminus activity, using Zero Zone technology originally gathered from the Centurion." Daedalus, who Steve knew was no mere man but an ageless immortal (at least in the realities he knew), looked fatigued today, and perhaps some shadow of his age. "That's the source of the data we send to Archetech and the DuTemps Building," he added, with a nod to Ghost Girl and Miss Americana. "Typically the data we recover is largely fluctuating levels of entropic radiation. A multiversal weather report," he added for the benefit of the non-cosmic scholars in the room. "Recently, one of our probes was activated by a significant surge of entropic radiation greater than what was observed during the invasion of 1993. This triggered its internal video function and autonomous exploration unit." - It was Liberty Park. Or had been, once. The city was transformed into abomination. A red, pitiless sky lit by a too-bright, too-blue sun lit a park whose trees had burned and stones been shattered by spiked half-spheres that gleamed with an almost organic oily wetness. The doomforges lay empty now - but there were Omegadrones perched on them, the light, quickly-made ones that could nonethless slice a normal man in half or throttle him alive, like flocks of demonic birds waiting for the kill. The forges themselves were decorated with a scattering of corpses like so many mounted butterflies, the impaled, half-decayed corpses of beings who by the bright colors of their tattered costumes had once been superheroes. Tarva had turned paler and paler as the film played, her eyes staring and hands pressed flat against the table in front of her as if she was about to bolt, while Steve was bolt-upright in his chair and watching the film with an intensity that suggested a gathering storm. "...those drones are dead," he said, his voice a low rumble. And sure enough, one of the drones, one perched at the very edge of the doomforge that must have created it, actually tilted and toppled off as the group watched, hitting the ashy ground below with a tremendous crash. "Is this actually from the Terminus," asked Tarva, her voice tight and close to tears. "Can your probe peer so far?" "No," said Daedalus, shaking his head. "The radiation levels suggest there's been cosmic compaction on a tremendous scale - but this universe has not yet, for the moment, been pulled past the entropic threshold."

"Can you read me!?" Sharl was shouting out loud, but the message was being broadcast by radio too, his internal systems reaching out to whatever electronics still lay in what had become a falling brick before him. Citizen pulled up alongside the airplane - then moved directly in front of it, frantically calculating the structural integrity of a falling 747. It wasn't like in the movies - his electromagnetically reinforced frame could rip the falling plane and its fragile aluminum body apart like a micro-meteor striking a starship in the depths of space. He'd broken the sound barrier on his flight from across the river. But had he been fast enough? Getting no immediate response, he matched the plane's velocity with his own, then took a position just ahead of the plane's center of gravity, spreading his arms and legs so the electromagnetic drive that powered his flight could begin the slow, careful process of pushing the plane out of its descent and guiding it towards a safe landing. He could feel the great fragile mass resisting his pull, and he knew with perfect clarity that he was alone out here, there was no one else in the Emerald Cities who could stop this plane before it struck the heart of the downtown...

Okay, I assume my current HP is in regards to Aquaria's religion being triggered here as a Complication? Aquaria: Toughness DC vs 20 http://orokos.com/roll/433005 = 15, with the fatigue penalty Well, the dice are not with me at all here. Let's spend that last HP to reroll that so Aquaria avoids injury. Is the Fire Vampire vulnerable to being coup de'graced?

"Is that supposed to be there?" croaked Aquaria, pointing with one long outstretched finger at the flicker of movement. She wasn't at all sure. While she could follow the action on the screen, the film had been made for the small, limited eyes of Surfacers, casting a strange, cramped pall over the action more so even than similar films she'd seen. This certainly was a strange movie - did Surfacers know so little of the peoples and places in the great sea of stars in which their world floated? She peered at the screen, folding her limbs up under her massive jaw. She found herself wanting to see more of the Xenos. Did a female in the forgotten nest weep that her egg had opened and closed and its occupant taken from the tribe? Did they exult that their seed would be carried among the stars?

Sharl shot Emerald Spider a quick, reassuring smile, then was all business with the villains. "My name is Citizen." He was speaking as much for the cameras as the bad guys, knowing that his reputation on the western coast of this continent wasn't what it had been back east. "I'm the most powerful cybernetic entity in this part of the world." There'd been no reason to disguise his nature, not when the obviously robotic Citizen-1 had been flying around earlier in the year. Given the lack of superactivity in the Emerald Cities, advertising what he was seemed like a safe bet. People who had no experience with robots would be fascinated by one that could talk. "And I'm sure these two need no introduction." He nodded back to Emerald Spider and Salmon, walking himself into the center of the bank's atrium. "You have two choices here. You can surrender now and nobody will be hurt - or you can fight and you'll be hurt worse than anyone else. It's the simple logic of it, gentlebeings, and I would prefer not to hurt anyone today. You don't need to suffer because you needed money. Nobody should."

Prestige pushed herself away from the wall, staring for a moment at Woodsman, then at the hole Garuda's sword had left behind, then at the man himself. Garuda'd been hit bad by Raina's fireball; his scream of pain at flames licked at the feathers on his chest and back all-too-human. He was on his knees, still pulling himself back up despite the scorch mark over his heart - which left it to Celeste to fight the Alkahest. Focusing her attention on Alkahest, she said in a honeyed tone that seemed to come from the very back of her throat. "Good, good, my paragon of destruction, let that voice speak - be the one that destroys it all. Alkahest, strike Nighthawk!" As he saw his worst enemy at the school stagger and fall, it occurred to Riley, with a sudden, terrible knowledge, that he could hurt Garuda very badly right now if he wanted to. Jay was hurt and not thinking about anything other than his own pain - and Riley was still as armed as when the long, terrible night had begun. But that was wrong...right? Woodsman turned and ran for his bow, kicking it up and into his hands without a passing thought, and rolled for cover. There was none on the flat floor of the Doom Room normally, but the shelter of the overturned fragment ripped up and thrown by Robin earlier let him not so much vanish as simply move so no one else was focused on him. Who could pay attention to one teenager with a crossbow in the middle of a vicious super-battle?

Prestige spends her move action issuing her command. Woodsman: Riley is in bad trouble, surrounded by multiple high-level characters with superpowers. As a standard action, he runs over and retrieves his bow. The smart tactical thing to do would be to retreat - but he can't leave Nighthawk! As a move action, he attempts to hide, inflicting a DC 30 check. Hide in Plain Sight is awesome! Nighthawk is up.

Prestige: Prestige tries to Mind Control Alkahest - http://orokos.com/roll/432873 = 23 I finessed that one a bit, Giz, so have an HP

"Sofia! No!" Epiphany disappeared from where she stood, then reappeared next to Raptor's fallen body. She snarled, eldritch energy crackling around her eyes and hands, a sudden font of magical energy that Raina could feel all the way up in the air. Epiphany really was the most powerful magus of her generation, and a potent threat indeed - but one thing she'd never learned to do was cast the sort of magic that could see through invisibility. "Monsters, that's all you are! Ferro , ligabis inimicus!" she waved her hands and the floor of the Doom Room itself began rising up as if to swallow Robin, a binding that Nighthawk herself just managed to wriggle free from. "Prestige, stop Alkahest!

Epiphany: Move: teleports around to another part of the Doom Room Standard: attempts to snare Nighthawk DC 20 Reflex save, Nighthawk!

Edited By Da Durf Woodsman: Drop his current Dazzle effect. Replace it with: AP: Dazzle 6 (stinkbomb, visual and olfactory, Flaw: Unreliable 1 [5 uses a day], PFs: Improved Crit 2, Variable Descriptor 2 [Chemical/Ballistic/Bludgeoning/Concussive/Piercing/Slashing]) {16/16}

"We never went out at night," said Riley, "not outside, and not for fun. You kin see lights and movement from outside the fences." He knew Robin didn't need an explanation of what that meant - and that she wasn't curious the way some of their friends were either. He slowly worked on his chili dog, not one to talk when there was food in hand. By now the crowd was pretty thick - it was just a few minutes till the first act was supposed to hit the stage. "But inside, we'd turn on the lights down inna bunker. People'd play instruments they made, or put on plays, when we weren't watchin' videos." Growing up in a still-functioning nuclear power plant meant that a little electricity to siphon had usually been pretty easy to come by. He was quiet for a moment, listening to and watching the growing crowd, before he said, "Like'd the little band, like 'n old-time one, with jazz stuff. Chief Hunter had a dance class for the kids, and anybody who wanted got music lessons. Said we needed to know how, 'cause it mattered that we still knew how to live. It was good. Made you feel like you were savin' the day even if you were just a kid in, uh, formal stuff."

That actually just hits Raptor! Raptor Demoralize: She passes this with Skill Mastery on Sense Motive Tou vs 30: 15

Woodsman took a calculated risk and shot the red-black man not in the body but in the magazine of his rifle - a risk that paid off, big, when the hissing, smoldering bolt struck home! He wouldn't have done that to a normal man - not when a normal man would have died from the explosion. But the sudden eruption of the magazine in a gout of flame at the man's side sent him staggering to one knee, the flaming pop-pop-pop of the exploding ammunition having cracked the armor open without seriously injuring the man inside. It was the sort of strike that would get Riley a talk from Mr. Archer but no actual detention. An acceptable loss, especially to save Nighthawk from some all too real bruises. Smiling, he rolled back into the shadows, away from the skylight.

"Nah, our date's on Peyton." Riley half-smiled, embarrassed about the source of his cash but not too proud to turn it down. Riley was, as Robin knew, something of a specialist when it came to junk food - it was only his constant physical training and retraining that kept him from growing fat in this new world with its abundant food and abundant flavors. He stuck close to Robin as they hit the concession stand, leaving with a soda for both of them and a dripping chili dog in his hand that was only possible to eat without a fork thanks to some careful wrapping in wax paper. Most people were sitting on the ground but Riley was more interested in having a position with a good view - he and Robin wound up perched on the base of an abstract stone sculpture vaguely like a giant ball between two spires that had the marks of a recent degraffiting on it. They probably weren't technically supposed to sit there but no one was chasing them off yet. "Look at 'em all," commented Riley, squeezing Robin's hand as the crowd gradually grew, families with children, young people like themselves, and even tour buses arriving. "Never seen this many of 'em at a concert!"

Paige cannot tell if Roman is there or not. She can: Take the Paragon option to keep pushing harder into Roman's brain. or Take the Renegade option and go fight the monster, even if it means abandoning what may be the most compassionate way to end the crisis.

Merlin will gain control of the Doom Room when you are next up. http://orokos.com/roll/431436 Oh man, well, he's staggered and dazed. Alkahest is up.

Tickticktick Richard took his wife's hand as the room slowed to a crawl around the three Clines, slow enough that the wings of a fly buzzing by seemed to freeze in amber. "Don't worry about them," he told Will, nodding his head towards the door. He caught a glimpse of the goons through his psychic connection to Hologram - enough to share her read on the situation. "They're used to dealing with sneaky kids who have to run and hide. They don't know how to handle people like us." Richard and Paige crossed the room and Richard smashed open the window, wrapping his hand around his jacket so he wouldn't cut the skin. He'd done this plenty of times before - he cleaned all the glass out of the frame, then shook his jacket so the fragments of glass came tumbling out. To anyone outside their bubble of time, of course, the process would have seemed instantaneous. He let time speed up inside their bubble too, the better to let the run itself go more quickly. "Let's go." When he had his jacket back on, he took Paige's hand and they ran - following his wife's lead as they bolted after the enemy psychic, crossing the distance almost faster than thought itself, running up and down the building walls themselves. It had always been hard to catch Hologram and Fast-Forward when they were together.