Avenger Assembled
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http://orokos.com/roll/337844 = Aquaria goes on 6 http://orokos.com/roll/337845 = Bie Yie goes on 7
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Using this for Bie Yie (since he's a tough customer) http://www.atomicthinktank.com/viewtopic.php?p=495545#p495545 He is Fearless. Since it's the surprise round, she does manage to hit him. http://orokos.com/roll/337843 = 32 But he makes his save!
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The OOC
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Bie Yie reached for Jessie, a snarl on his face, but Aquaria interposed herself between her friend and her erstwhile mentor, trident crackling to life in her hand. "Hey, no!" Jessie could hear the sudden desperation crackling in Aquaria's voice, the grief that edged her "No!" Inside, Aquaria was screaming Not again! Not again! "You leave her alone!" And then suddenly the sky opened up. The gateway in the stars that the Spectrum Knights used to gather new recruits, and to send out large groups for reconnaissance, suddenly gaped wide - a golden circle of light in the sky overhead looking as big as Earth's Moon. The gateway disgorged a small, rapidly-fleeing group of Spectrum Knights, recognizable as the "liberation mission" that had left that morning. Everyone had seen these before; liberation raids that freed captive Spectrum Knights, battled against the forces of galactic oppression, and each time the result had been much the same. Until today. This time, the returning Spectrum Knights weren't alone!
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When the crowd was in a frenzy, Bie Yie called for a volunteer onto the stage. All the Spectrum Knights could fly - but none could leap as high as Aquaria, or wave an extended limb with as much vigor. Aquaria tried to take Jessie with her, not wanting to leave her friend in the middle of this crowd of excited aliens who (if she was honest with herself) were starting to make her feel a little uncomfortable, but wound up leaving an unhappy Jessie at the foot of the broad, curving stage while she joined Bie Yie out front. His sword in hand, Yie took her hand, then 'cut' the air, producing a glowing blue circle in the air as if he was cutting a paper shape out of the fabric of the universe. Her trident still in her hand, Aquaria gave Jessie a reassuring human thumbs up as Bie Yie addressed the crowd. "Behold! By the power of our patrons, I can show you all a sign - a glimpse into the future of the LIBERATION of your world! Take my hand, Ackwareeaa." Aquaria did so and the scene changed; the glowing blue circle now showing images that Aquaria knew well - images drawn from her secret dreams; and beyond. - Atlantis bled. Clouds of foul fluids stretched up above towards the hated Surface; the mixed blood of Atlanteans and their shattered city. The empire of Poseidon had fallen - and everywhere, Deep Ones moved among the ruins. Amphibious in their breathing masks, aquatics standing proudly naked in Hydra's ocean, the victorious armies of Dagon and Hydra rounded up Atlanteans everywhere, driving them forward with whip and chain, driving them out of their city and onto the naked sea floor. Where they could starve. Where they could know suffering. In what had been the throne room of Theseus, king of Atlantis, Ackwareeaa In-His-Mouth, the queen of the Deep Ones and High Priestess of Mother Hydra, sat sprawled across the orichalcum throne, glowing, bloody trident in her hands. Theseus and the rest of the royal family were there too, surrounded by Deep One guards armed with fearsome, twisted weapons that looked like gigantic fishhooks, bound by burning black chains that kept them bound despite their attempts to assume a watery form. "Mercy!" begged the broken monarch, his hand severed by his earlier battle with the unstoppable cthonic warlord. "Mercy!" "Yes, mercy! The same mercy you have shown us for two thousand years!" Ackwareeaa taunted before impaling the Atlantean through the midsection on her triple blade. As the princesses screamed in grief and rage, the Deep One monarch pulled her trident free. "My brothers and sisters!" She called to the other Deep Ones. "Lemuria is AVENGED! We will eat our fill of this blasphemous city - and then we will free ourselves at last from TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF SLAVERY by the final war against the SURFACE WORLD!" - The crowd of Spectrum Knights cheered lustily - but Jessie could see Aquaria's crest fallen completely flat and her big eyes bulging wide, and in fact the gregarious amphibian actually took a step back away from the image as her other 'self' fell upon the Atlanteans with her blade. Having temporarily forgotten her English, Aquaria croaked nervously, her eyes casting around the crowd for her friend's face.
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"Hey Fred," said Riley with a smile his friend's way. He gave Raina a more cautious look, one that practically required him to crane his neck up at the tall girl. "Nice outfit, Sanderson." Full of nervous energy, he wanted to keep moving - but sticking close to Robin seemed pretty good. "Place does look nice," he said to Huang, not really understanding what most of the decor meant except that it was supposed to be spooky. The place was dark and sealed off - that was all he really needed to get the hair on the back of his neck standing up. "Point me to your fridge when you need me to go start the party," he added to Huang, shooting a significant glance at Fred. Both their work was tied up here, after all. "Hey, give the dog a break, Toto! You gotta feed them some more meat, maybe they'll stop beggin' ya so much."
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"That's not so bad. Maybe there's a driving game I can learn how to do flips from." It was hard to tell if he was kidding, but the high-strung teen looked much more relaxed after his conversation with Erin, anyway. "Hey, thanks for coming out and, uh, talkin' ta me. It's nice to finally meetcha," he admitted. "I always wondered who Erin was, and how she got strong as you had to be." He fell silent, then was serious to add. "Got friends here, like I said, but...nice to know I'm not 'lone. You know. 'Bout everything." He popped up to his feet and asked "So did you come here inna bike?"
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The last day came about a week after their arrival by Jessie's count, though it was hard to know exactly how much time lay between the rising and the falling of the double suns here. It was a busy day on Stronghold; the skies were buzzing with more Spectrum Knights than Jessie had seen all week, and gossip around the barracks was that some of the Knights had gone on a "mission of holy liberation" to rescue some of their fellows held in captivity by the Lor. (Many of the people she shared the barracks with were members of religions she didn't understand, and there'd been at least one brawl she'd witnessed that had been broken up by the Knights 'associated' with the combatants, a Zultasian woman like Bie Yie and a big lizard-faced humanoid over two meters tall.) There was some kind of ceremony going on for new Knights like Aquaria, who was excited to report to Jessie that her training period was complete. "We're done! We can go back to Earth soon!" That was good news, enough to get Jessie and Aquaria together in a big glass-steel dome the color of the reddish seas below. There were lots of Knights here; and their families too, but Aquaria's grip on Jessie's arm meant she joined the Knights down inside the bowl. There were a good fifty humanoids of various shapes and sizes here, all of them in different colors of armor, with enough space that Jessie and Aquaria could stand together without too much crowding. When Bie Yie took the stage, the crowd roared with enthusiastic applause - he had evidently been the trainer of this particular class of Spectrum Knights. "My friends!" he was calling. "My friends, your training is complete! You are ready to FIGHT! For your freedom! For your people! For the LIBERATION of this galaxy from the monsters who have bound it in chains! From the lowest soldier to the mightiest Praetorian, from the most vile king to the most fearsome Star Knight, none shall keep us in chains again!" The crowd went wild, Aquaria along with it, waving her arms and bellowing noisily in triumph, her trident glowing brightly in her opposite hand.
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"Nah, this house has to be new," Riley opined to Matt as they waited at the door, "they're probably new rich types. Prolly got it all fancy just for us." Which described Peyton Quinn pretty well, come to think of it, a thought that made Riley suddenly wonder if the duplicate of his mother knew the Farettis. "Been on this hill at home and there's nothin' like this, I tell you what." He made sure to introduce Jimmy to the others, wanting to make sure the smaller boy fit in with the crowd. Riley's eyes followed Huang's and narrowed, catching sight of Raina and Fred on the broom. Raina had been...pretty cool to him since the incident during training some weeks earlier. But hopefully things would be all right at the party, especially once he and Fred rolled out their masterwork. He shot a quick wave to the fliers, but was more concerned with Robin; and the arrival of their friends. He'd been a little distracted by Phaedra's arrival too, but as smokin' hot as the girl was, he had a smokin' hot girl on his arm already. "Hey man, nice place," he commented to Huang. "You gotta a pretty good spread." He was moderately interested in the decor, and the admittedly spooky ambiance, but the lack of ruin in the old house made it feel almost comforting.
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Projected, Cyberknife found that the landscape around NSA headquarters had changed significantly since her last 'trip' here some years earlier. She could follow Freebooter's familiar trail towards the building itself, but the defenses there were too great for her to enter without making a significant effort, and once inside there would be no telling exactly where he was. There were plenty of places in that building not covered by computers or security cameras connected to anything outside of that place; but she was fairly confident he was somewhere in that building. - Miss Americana, to all appearances, was breathing normally and otherwise healthy - simply unconscious to Miracle Girl and Argonaut's examination. Steve had spoken little to Yves about his lover; only that her power and intelligence were both exceedingly great, and that she had an untold mastery of machines. - One thing about Freebooter was that he never could resist the urge to taunt. 0h c0m3 0n cyb3rkn1f3 - 7h47 w45 4 l177l3 funny! n3x7 71m3 4ny0n3 7h1nk5 0f 4rch373ch 601n6 cr4zy - 7h3y'll 7h1nk 0f h1l4r10u5 f1r3w0rk5! The glowing green message floated right in front of her 'eyes', hovering in the middle of cyberspace. 1'm d01n6 4 c1v1c 53rv1c3! 1f 7h3 60v3rnm3n7 d035n'7 pr073c7 7h31r 53cr375, 7h3y d353rv3 70 637 r1pp3d 0ff. m4yb3 n3x7 71m3 7h3y'll b3 m0r3 c4r3ful. - "Excuse me!" The man who ran up into the wrecked-open museum gave Miss Americana a frightened look before looking over the other two heroes. In his rumpled suit and misplaced combover, the red-faced man looked like more like an overexerted middle manager than a spy. "Oh no...we have a man who needs evacuation too," he said, "one of the civilians on our headquarters tour. Can one of you assist us?"
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It's not like I've helped, Heritage! No worries. Give me a Computers check, Cyberknife! Why yes, you do need to roll.
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Okay, everybody, sorry for the delay. Make whatever checks you think are appropriate given your chosen approach.
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"Pain?" Steve leaned forward and whispered in Magritte's ear, the taste of his own blackened blood in his mouth. "You think you can make me speak with pain?" His voice was throaty - not from screaming, but from the effects of the shadowy tentacles that had gone down his throat just a few moments earlier, blocking an airflow he still needed. "In the black ghetto of my youth; we longed for something sweet as pain." - The giant head-ship was easy enough to approach, or so it seemed to Jack. A shipment of rocks, the fossils preserved in them visible to his keen eyes, were being loaded into the front of the vessel by mine car, the overburdened people carrying them straining as they pulled their chains to lug the wobbling vehicle towards the irised-open silvery gateway at the head of it. Two more T-Rexes were there, one on each side; and a figure Jack didn't recognize. It looked like a man in traditional white zhiduo, but with an oddly grinning porcelain mask over his face. There didn't seem to be any other security here; perhaps the Master and his Four were simply not worried about this? - The rest of the cyberized dinosaurs turned out to be in a deep, wide paddock, as large on the inside as a football stadium, a few rises away, the grandeur of the various dinosaurs cut down to size by the dank odor of rotting flesh that rose from the filthy, gore-covered ground. It looked like the T-Rexes, and various smaller creatures of similar bipedal, predatory build had been fed so far on the livestock of the people of Moab, but the sickly-looking cattle and sheep took up hardly any of their smaller sub-paddocks. It looked like the dinosaur army was close to running out of food. The guards were encamped in tents near one entrance to the paddock (all of it with the smooth marks of artificial construction), with no visible barrier between themselves and the dinosaurs. There were two visible ways out of the massive artificial rift; one that would lead out of the area and through the mountains (no doubt their planned exit) and one, curving, twisted path through sharply rising red rock columns, that led back towards the mines.
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Over the next few days, Aquaria and Jessie had very different times. For Aquaria, Spectrum Knight training was just as exciting as she'd hoped it would be! She didn't really follow the explanation for how her trident worked - the shamans' talk of 'charged plasma fields' and 'subconsciously-adjusted internal environmental controls' was certainly exciting, though. Her new trident made her strong enough to lift heavy objects, let her fire blasts of energy from the weapon's tip, and super-charge it enough to cut through the strongest metals. And that wasn't the best part - carrying the weapon, she could fly through the air, even into space from what Bie Yi told her. But even that wasn't the best part. As she told Jessie, her voice thick with emotion one night, "I can fly underwater! I can fly underwater!" The oceanic depths here were very different than the oceanic depths back on Earth; but they were hers, the energy of the trident pumping oxygen into her system, letting her survive even at crushing depths. It was like she'd been transformed into a true Deep One without all the emotional sacrifice such a transformation would have made. Jessie had never seen her friend so happy. Of course, even for Aquaria it wasn't all perfect. The other Spectrum Knights were all learning how to use their weapons for war - each of them armed with swords, knives, whips, and other energy weapons of various colors that each had roughly the same powers as her own. Aquaria had no real objection to a righteous war, especially not when the scarred bodies and hard eyes of her fellow Knights told of the grim conditions on their homeworlds. But time and time again, conversations with her peers centered around revenge, about the oppressors they would bloodily slay upon their return to their homeworlds, about the righteous war that would end with them ruling on high as kings and queens of a transformed planet. That made sense to Aquaria too, raised in the blood and autocracy of Deep Ones, but something about it still seemed...wrong. They all talked the same, as if they'd all been chosen for a purpose. For Jessie's part, she found herself in the strange position of being the human friend of one of the chosen ones. The people who talked with her were mostly the families and friends of other Knights, people who'd been close by when their relatives were taken away by the Knights. She was able to find out more about their lives; it sounded like space had been through a long, bloody war in the recent past, and these people had suffered from it more than most. But for all they shared the desire for revenge against a long list of oppressors, it was easy to see how alone many of them were. Aquaria, with her frequent visits to the barracks where the humans and humanoids were sleeping, at least four or five times a day, was very unusual.
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Dragonfly and Miss Americana's joint efforts paid off as far as they could tell. Draining the energy blocking the small vortex did let them pump a tremendous amount of what turned out to be raw cosmic energy into first Dragonfly's transformer, and then the larger power grid, giving them access to what turned out to be a gateway into the past about the size of two basketballs held together. Dragonfly's spatial warp sensors were able to detect that the gateway had a range of about two thousand miles - and narrow the location of the other end down to somewhere in western North America. The temporal detectors that Miss Americana had begun carrying since her own brush with time travel let her detect the chronal energy of roughly one hundred and fifty years, give or take a decade on either side. To actually get more information, they'd have to send a probe through - or perhaps find a way to expand the temporal fissure. Rechanneling the cosmic energy made quite a light show; it was hard to see clearly through the foilage that Willow had erected outside their little group, but the lights outside did indeed flare brightly before suddenly going dark, and Dragonfly's transformer was glowing with a silvery light as it absorbed a fantastic amount of energy that Dragonfly had seen before, energy that she had encountered while inside the brain of a planet-sized 'preserver of worlds' - And then suddenly one of the Archetech employees did something unexpected. He came up behind Liz fast and wrapped an arm around her neck, pressing the blade of a screwdriver from his toolbelt against her side; "You!" he called to Dragonfly, his voice resonating far deeper than Terry Fontaine's usually did. "Restore the temporal barrier! Or she dies!" He certainly had a lot of moxie for a weedy-looking middle-aged disaster technician - which in fact was what he was.
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I'll throw in some free action speaking and free action sniping - the DC to spot him is now 10 instead of 30.
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When the smoke cloud cleared, there was absolutely no sign of the Woodsman - at least until a crossbow bolt came zipping out of the dense brush at the edge of the treeline and came right for the leader of the bounty hunters. The arrow struck home with almost contemptuous ease, missing icy bonds and insulated armor, instead coming to rest at a join between two armor plates directly over the center of the mercenary's body mass. The bolt struck home with a thunk, a too-quiet sound in the middle of a super-battle full of wooshing energy and cursing voices. And then the internal charge in the bolt detonated; the binary explosives inside directed outward by the handcrafted structure of the carbon-wood composite bolt. There was a loud boom and spread of a small cloud of white smoke - and suddenly the mercenary leader was slumped unconscious in his bonds, the front part of his body armor blown away over his lower midsection, exposing a charred undersuit within that had taken most of the blast. From the treeline came Riley's voice, commanding the other two mercenaries, "Drop those guns!"
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Once in the tree-line, Riley will drop prone as a Free Action! Move Action: He will Hide in Plain Sight, getting 30 on Stealth with Skill Mastery. Free Action: Switch array slots. Standard Action: an action to +5 Power Attack the Mercenary Leader.as soon as the smoke cloud clears. He is using this power from his Array slot Blast 6 (augmented bolts, PFs: Improved Crit 2, Variable Descriptor 2 [Chemical/Ballistic/Bludgeoning/Concussive/Piercing/Slashing]) {16/16} http://orokos.com/roll/337070 = 27! Oh wow, that critted. Okay, so that is a DC 31 Toughness save for the hunter leader.
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Riley looked Robin up and down, putting his hands on her arms, his eyes wide. He'd always thought Robin was sexy - now she was like a gorgeous goddess. "Hot, uh, hot damn, you look good," he said, his voice a little weak. "Damn." He looked behind her - the pants were just as tight around the butt, too! He felt like he'd just been given a brand-new Holiday present in some very, very nice wrapping. "G-glad you like the hat." He took a moment to swallow, and try and force his voice out of the contralto. When he did, he sounded a little more sophisticated - at least to his own ears. "Boss gave it to me. Says she knows hats. You look like a piece of sugar candy. Hey, uh, Jimmy," he said with a little wave at his friend, the only boy his age shorter than he was. "Robin, this is Jimmy - he's the kid I told you about." His arm had settled around Robin's waist - and he liked it there. "We gonna do this thing?"
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Riley had tried to approach the run-up to the party like any other tactical scenario. He'd been making fermented fruit juice in small batches with Fred's help, supplying them to Huang so he could stash it at his house in advance of the party. That way, Riley himself never had more than a small amount around at any one moment, and the party would have enough good stuff for everybody to enjoy themselves. As far as he knew, that had all gone smoothly - certainly no one had burst into his and Matt's dorm room to demand to know what those bottles under his bed were, and Huang's famously overprotective parents hadn't shown up on campus either. If it all goes well, we switch to the hard stuff. He and Robin had discussed costumes before deciding they lacked the resources to customize their outfits, a problem made worse by Riley's unique build. He'd been promised a special outfit from Robin, though, so he'd done his best to match her - ultimately winding up in a storebought fedora, black striped vest and black pants, and red tie that made him look like a 1920s gangster. It seemed appropriate - even though no such gangster would have gone outside with a hatchet on his hip. Riley had not brought his bow tonight. Not when he was trying to be a normal boy for his normal girl, even when he didn't feel anything like that. The night, with its costumed monsters and its light-cut darkness, had been unsettling for him - he'd wound up making his own way here, with promises of meeting Robin at the gate and going inside together. As he waited, lurking in the darkness by the front door, he kept looking back doubtfully at the house. He knew this part of North Bay as well as he knew his own hand - there was no house and there were no ruins here! He decided that perhaps Huang's parents had built the estate sometime after 1999 and simply gone for an old-fashioned aesthetic.
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"Hmm." Riley didn't comment on that for a moment, instead taking a moment just to watch Huracan at work. "Not a trick," he said after some consideration. "Just a way 'a havin' fun." He started climbing the obstacle course's balance bridge - not from above but from below, leaping up one-handed to grab on, then slowly making his way down the line. This time he had his hatchet in his hand rather than the bow, but that didn't seem too slow him down as he made his way along the bridge, deliberately not pulling himself up. Raising his voice, he called, "Never had a date like you do here! Can't just take the girls huntin' or shootin', not till we can get out inna forest..." He dropped to the ground again, taking a moment to catch his breath. "Never thought the woods were that roman'ic anyway."
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When Riley was done, he came out again, a green sucker sticking out of his mouth. He didn't comment on why he'd gone in; but he was certainly looking much more relaxed than before he'd gone in. "I was good," he commented laconically, taking the candy out of his mouth to talk. "I'll see you 'round, Jimmy." Is my voice deeper? he wondered. He knew that was stupid, hormones didn't work that way - but it was still nice to imagine. Gonna grow that beard yet!
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Caradoc did not speak or move at their victory, instead planting his sword point-first in the ground, its faint hiss the only sound that came from him as the possessed man told his grim story. He should have spoken to inform his colleagues about what they were dealing with - but instead he pulled his blade free and began seeming to walk away, his footsteps treading on the ground with a solid finality that bespoke his great weight. "This way," he spoke, his voice a sharp growl that was utterly unlike what his temporary allies had heard from him before. "It is still here. I can...feel it. Oracle, can you feel its mind?"
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Hermes actually blushed at Starlight's question before admitting, "Mercury thought the conquest of the globe would be fitting sport for a god and their brothers and sisters." The speedster twirled the staff zie bore, the familiar snake-wrapped staff of Hermetic legend, and replaced it on the other shoulder. "He was wrong." Hermes wasn't interested in expanding that point, but instead in asking a million questions of the heroes about their homeworld - who were its champions? What were the gods there? Edge took charge of this, giving answers to the divine speedster that managed to straddle the line between detailed and vague perfectly; to show all this world must have lost, and to show Hermes that even the gods were happy in a world where they were still on Mount Olympus. After some hours of work, Arcturus succeeded in crafting enough symbols on the ship that he could reasonably hope to shift the entire vessel back home - given a source of raw magical power. Luckily, Edge was standing right there! He joined Arcturus down in the engine room, the center of the dimensional disturbance, while Nina took up a position on the bridge, where a quick radio link revealed that things were getting bad. "Objects incoming on radar! This is going to be close!"
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"Yeah, well..." Riley's voice trailed off for a minute as he considered his words. "People grow up fast where I'm from. Not always good." He shrugged a little, no more willing to get into the details of his personal life than Huang was. "People here raise their kids soft. Some of then can handle it when everything goes bad," he said, thinking of Erin White, "some of 'em can't." He scratched the back of his head, then said, "Just gotta cheap costume, but it'll be all right. Store in North Bay sells 'em in bulk." Peyton had steered him that way, not something he really wanted to discuss with the other boy either. "Never actually had onna these before."