Avenger Assembled

OK, just double-checking that was what you were doing - the daze has cleared, so go ahead and post. I'm open to mechanical ideas for digging yourselves out, BTW - 100 tons is a heavy load for STR 65. This was a rank 15 attack, so I'll say digging yourselves out is against an object with Toughness 15, with some difficulties from size and weight and the like.

Since taking up his sniping position, Riley had been debating calling Robin. He'd gone out on his own to prove that he didn't need his super-strong girlfriend's help, especially not when it came to hunting. But the more time he spent on the rooftop, prone on his belly, watching the street scenes and the rooftops with his binoculars, the more he began to kick himself about not bringing along his local expert in the terrain - even if they probably weren't going to get up to the usual business they got up to on rooftops by night. Not really in the mood for that. The murders in the Fens, some of the last recorded 'real' crime before the death of the Millennium Bug, had been bad enough to stick in the consciousness of a people living through the end of their world. This wasn't going to be the kind of day that ended with kisses. His tactical recriminations were soon banished from his mind by the sight of the watcher across the street. Stock-still at first, Riley began making slow passes with his binoculars to scan over the other man, getting a good look without making it look like he'd actually spotted the other man. No use flushing potential prey this early.

Okay - were you gonna spend that HP and shake the double-daze, Nick?

There was no visible damage to the exterior of the Voidrunner that Roulette could see. The autopilot on that fool's ship across the way had landed neatly enough now that the alarms were silent, albeit close enough that a spray of dust and debris had left brownish stains along the craft's left flank. Nothing that wouldn't be washed off by the interstellar medium - unsightly though it was. As he watched, the cargo hatch in the rear of the nearby shuttlecraft opened up and a humanoid he wasn't familiar with walked out. It was of average height for a Galactic sentient, but its bulging eyes, glistening green and white skin, and webbed wide feet and hands bespoke a creature from a far more aquatic place than most worlds. The being padded slowly down the gangplank, sniffing the air and studying the scene with those two bulging eyes. Its garments were a tight jumpsuit like many technological interface suits Roulette had seen, albeit adorned with armor that looked vaguely like Star Knight armor. The creature looked around, locked eyes with him, and suddenly vaulted back aboard ship, taking the gangplank in one leap of those massive legs!

Aquaria disengaged from the unconscious Serpent Person as soon as the battle was over, snapping her tongue back into her mouth as she tasted the essence of Coral Snake against her teeth. It was not a pleasant flavor. At the sight of the alien trinket all the fighting had been over, she gave a soft, basso sigh. "Is that all it was? What all this was for? It's not Lemurian." She twisted her torso back and forth in an approximation of a human shaking its head. "We find things, sometimes," she croaked quietly, looking up at the ceiling of the chamber. "From Atlantis, or from the Surface, sent to us by the tides. That must be how it came to be here in the first place." Her shoulders slumped more at the sight of the arriving Surfacers, and she looked away from the Atlanteans. "We shouldn't...we shouldn't stay long. The shrine has been..." She looked back at the fallen Serpent Person and went on, "...defiled enough. There's nothing you people need here."

27 with Skill Mastery

Okay, new round. Based on my current understanding of the initiative order (and yours too, oowweeoo) , It looks like this - Miss A Jill O Cure Willow Fire Dragonfly The Beast The Withering Mastermind

INTIMIDATED BY HGM Woodsman: Feats: 4PP Acrobatic Bluff Challenge (Fast Startle) Improved Ranged Disarm Startle Skills: 3PP Intimidate 12 (+14)

Dragonfly shot Mastermind in the face! For the second time in the space of a few minutes, the immortal manipulator of men, nations, and cultures cursed in surprise as a blast of energy hit him right in the head; this one blowing his face mask off entirely. The classical beauty beneath might have been worth studying under other circumstances, but as it was he flashed his piercing blue eyes and clenched his rugged jaw. The Withering, losing his fight to Jill, suddenly stepped backwards, briefly making her stumble and pulling them both out of the grapple. "My apologies, zhànshì," he hissed, "but I have a greater fish on the hook than you." He shrugged and fired a shot over her shoulder, a glowing white beam that missed Jill entirely but instead struck the still-insensate, bloody form of the Beast! The big man vaulted to his feet almost immediately, wounded but back in the fight, taking in the scene with a practiced eye before he moved like lightning, bounding away from Jill and her dangerous hands without a word. For his part, the Withering ran too - summoning his small white dragon and leaping aboard to kip up some hundred feet in the air. "Perhaps next time - if you survive the new world!" Instead he landed next to Willow and the Fire, where he sketched a bow in the instant it took him to scoop up Fire and leap away up onto the strip mall rooftop nearby. "Désolé , mesdames , mais parlées pour!" While all this had been happening, Mastermind had been concentrating across the street. "Enough! I have not waited a century and a half to be defeated by the likes of you!" Across the street, the Tugboat Crab Shack, an al fresco seafood cafe built into an actual converted tugboat that had been taken apart and rebuilt on the site after the 1993 Terminus Invasion, raised itself up into the air as he gestured. "Atavisms!" Mastermind called. "Destroy the Interceptors - and then their machine. History will be ours!" And with that, he hurled the entire building at one side of the street, piling Miss Americana and Willow into the parking lot asphalt with bone-crushing force as a hundred tons of weight came crashing down on them!

Aquaria listened to Jessie's words, then carefully removed the suit. Neatly rolling it up, she placed it on the floor at her feet and looked over at Jessie and shivered slightly. "It's cold," she croaked softly before turning to look at the incoming planet. They were going faster now, or so it seemed, the impossibly vast planet now filling the screen, filling their world, the invisible top of the sky swallowing them up. As the rumble of atmospheric descent began, she closed her eyes and waited for the warm embrace of the Final Seas of Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. She didn't reach out for Jessie, knowing her friend didn't like to be touched, but she knew Jessie would be with her all the way. "Surface contact in two minutes." -- One of the most swampy worlds in this part of space, Pantanal was too hot and too wet for the comfort of most hominid species, though amphibians and aquatic species liked the high humidity, the high temperatures, and the omnipresent (albeit toothed) insect and piscine life once you got out of the artificially ionified air of the planet's few settlements, mostly constructed by Lor resource-extraction companies centuries earlier. The logging and mining had never really struck computronium, though, and the towns themselves hadn't much expanded in nearly a humanoid lifetime. At the fringes of civilized galactic society, its companies the sort of low-rent enterprises that asked few questions, the workers the sort of rough-hewn characters who answered even fewer of them, Pantanal was a good place to go to disappear - or to go find someone who had tried to do the same thing. The Voidrunner crew had only touched down at the small Pantanal City spacestrip a few minutes earlier when the next vessel arrived - a civilian shuttlecraft, its emergency lights blinking frantically in the numeric code that was the universal signal of autopiloted distress, touched down next to them. It was local night, the stars overhead bright and the noise from the swamp nearby almost as noisy as the local cantina would be. At a manned spaceport, emergency crews would be piling out right now to see what was wrong with the unlabeled civilian craft. But here, it would be dawn before local law enforcement showed up to investigate and probably demand a bribe from whatever suckers had just gotten stranded in this backwater.

Blasting Mastermind! That does hit. And it beats his Defense by enough to give her the +5 Tou vs 32 20... Not gonna go with that! I'm going to fiat that to a bruise and dazed for you, Fox. The Withering: Breaks off from his confrontation with Jill. He uses his Ranged Healing on the Beast - and hits, since the Beast is essentially an inanimate object. He flies up into the air w/his Flight The Beast is no longer Unconscious!. The Beast Stands as a move action Leaps over and grabs Fire (her Aura is only at Rank 1 now and can't penetrate his Impervious) and leaps to a nearby rooftop, out of the range of...well! Mastermind: Acts! Have that other HP. He drops a 100 ton building at Miss Americana and Willow! Is it the novelty tugboat-themed restaurant across the street, sure it is. OK, DC 25 Reflex save for half damage vs. DC 30 Toughness. Note that even if you pass the Reflex save and aren't hurt, there's still a 100 ton building on you. You dislike the mechanics for that? Well, have an HP, the both of you! =D

Screaming in fury and disbelief, the flaming Atavism tore herself free of the binding plants. The flames didn't just free her - they wooshed across the battlefield, burning away Willow's hard work into so many ashes and freeing all the villains from the bonds she'd put on them. The Beast was already down and the Darkness fell towards the ground, landing with a solid thump on the nearby concrete, but the others were now back in the fight.

Fire: Makes the Concentration check to keep her Damage Aura up even with the pummeling. The Snare drops to +8 Tou She takes a free action to switch to her Rank 12 Blast and attacks with it. That inflicts a DC 27 Tou save. Taking 10, the Snare breaks.

Aquaria was sitting up in the front seat when Jessie came to the front too, watching that ball grow larger and larger, until the impossibly vast planetary landscape filled the entire screen. The greenish-brown planet was mottled with dark blue sea - and unless Aquaria missed her guess, they were going to hit somewhere where the sea touched the land. That seemed fair to her, after so long, Dagon and Hydra calling her home - even if it wasn't fair to Jessie. "I'm sorry, Jessie," she said, swiveling her whole body to look up at her friend, her eyes wide and glistening in the glowing lights from the control panels. "Everything that happened to you since I picked up the trident was my fault. I'm so sorry." Jessie had seen Aquaria cry, a noisy, melodramatic affair full of bellowing sobs, but Aquaria was holding that back now at the end.

"No one in this house likes chocolate! Such a scandal." Frost put the chocolate bar in his pocket before extemporizing, "Was, ah, my fault. I dared her to meet old friend from war with me." His smile pulled tight across his pale face. "Was friend no longer. So, I owe her liquor, and whose better than you mine generous host, eh?" He winked at Jack, his jovial mood revving up again like an engine that had briefly become stuck in the ice. He still had questions for Erik - but these were questions best not asked in front of a child. The way a man acted could be a better guide than his words in any event. "Will you join us in liquor?" he asked as he began negotiating his way around Erik and out the door. "Or have you a lady for evening already?"

A few days after the events of Shore of a Cosmic Ocean Aquaria crouched between the front seats of the shuttlecraft, her forelimbs folded in front of her, arms tucked under her body, and back legs folded forward so far her elbows and knees brushed together. It would have been an uncomfortable position for a Surfacer - but then she wasn't a Surfacer. She wasn't sure what she was, not after three sleeps journey through the cold, endless ocean of space, not with the faces of the creature she'd seen die, no, that she'd helped kill, burning in the back of her mind, not with the sight of the burning Spectrum Knight fortress overrun with those Praetorian thugs curling away like the ever-present shadow of a nightmare. She was still in her armor, largely because their hasty flight had meant she'd left her moisturizer back on the planet where they'd started and the glowing energy field it emitted was all that kept her from burning in the cold dry fake air of the shuttlecraft. There was water, but of course they'd needed that to stay alive. She and Jessie had been able to find food from a panel in the wall, silvery meat packets that tasted dry and squishy to her but that Jessie ate without complaint. In a few days they were going to run out if they weren't careful. Aquaria had seen the inside of the ship, once, when Bie Yie had given her a tour. She knew that the front of the ship was where you steered it and she knew where the food was, and the head, and the places to sleep in. But neither she nor Jessie White had the slightest idea how to fly a spaceship; or what the words and lights that the ship had been saying to them meant. Through the windows, she could see something approaching that Jessie had said earlier was a planet, a brown-green ball that was getting bigger and bigger, like they were going to crash right into it. She closed her eyes and began to croak softly. "Oh Father Dagon, Mother Hydra too, listen to me sing your song-" she opened up her eyes and stared out at the pitiless cold black ocean that surrounded them, then closed them again. "oh-oh so far from you. I know you have a plan for me and a crooked pattern for my life, a pattern you made when I was hatched from my egg. I know that you are trying-" the last word was more of a pained bellow, "trying me. Because I was vain and swam too high, the sun of your wrath burned me. I understand that." She thought of Jessie, still in the back compartment, quiet and still as a barnacle. "But Jessie didn't do anything to deserve punishment. She's tried so hard to be a good person. I should have listened to her from the start..." She swallowed hard, an impressive sight as her massive throat bobbed. "Dagon and Hydra, I know she doesn't believe in you - but please, please, take her into your maw if we die, and remember her when you return in your glory." She began to sing then, the names of her tribe and her friends from Project Freedom, the names of Jessie's 'sister' and her mate, of her friends from the DuTemps Building like Kimber and Indira. The names of people she would never see again. Meanwhile, the autopilot spoke again in a dignified male tenor Galstandard (Lor-Van Standard accent) that neither Aquaria nor Jessie could understand, continuing the conversation it had begun with them two and a half standard days earlier. "Autopilot protocol engaged. Fuel supplies critically low Emergency landing course plotted. Touchdown on planetary surface in five minutes."

By the time Jack finished cutting through the door, the Darkness had vanished in a swirling cloud of shadows - leaving Steve alone in a room where red and black bloodstains on the wall and floor told a grim story. As he pulled his legs free of the last chains that had bound him in place, Steve looked as though a wire brush had been applied to his scarred brown skin, reddish black blood visible in multiple places across his torso from what looked to be countless small, shallow cuts. "What an unpleasant woman," he hissed, before dropping to one knee with a loud BOOM. He gestured for Jack to lean close, not to lean on him but to whisper in his ear. "She will be warning her Master. Her Master is one capable of cosmic understanding - and with the technology to know that an Omegadrone is not like other men." The truth was he had seen little of the latter once the interrogation had begun.

That does hit! +1 Damage. DC 24 Tou save http://orokos.com/roll/343589 = 17 He is also down, whee!

"Yeah," said Riley with a little shrug. "People eat all kindsafood here." Not much of it was like what he'd eaten growing up - which was all to the good. "You wanna try Chinese food 2015 style?" he teased Fred with a little grin. "Might be better than whatever unwashed stuff you ate back in the dark ages." Fred had corrected him before about the dark ages referring to the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of medieval scholasticism, but he as usual did not seem bothered by his error. He pushed open the door for the ladies as they headed inside the restaurant, as usual scoping out the place for potential hostiles, visible rear exits, and means of taking cover in case the patrons rushed them.

Dragonfly is up!

http://orokos.com/roll/343534 = 22 He's down!

http://orokos.com/roll/343355 = 17 Coral Snake is loose, alas!

Aquaria opened her eyes and stood up, the hymns of a thousand Deep One generations echoing in her ears. "<Dagon and Hydra have protected her from your foul venom, usurper!>" she declared, pointing a long green finger at the rocky snake. "<When you invited Surfacers into our sacred places, it was _you_ who they abandoned as an INTERLOPER!>" She hissed the last word, a foul curse among the clannish children of Lemuria, before she sprung into action with the perfect confidence that her gods were on her side. She leaped from her kneeling position and pounced on the Lemurian, wrapping her long arms and legs around the creature and even lashing out her tongue to grab the side of the snake-woman's face, pulling her away from Jessie by sheer muscular force.

To hit that jerk: 8 Spending an HP... http://orokos.com/roll/343325 = 21 with the HP, so that hits. http://orokos.com/roll/343326 = 35 on the Grapple check!

http://orokos.com/roll/343313 = 17 Ouch, she is dazed and staggered!