Avenger Assembled

Here's what the heroes find out. Investigate: Putting everything together, Terrifica concludes that the scene was staged. Not only was all this created for the heroes to see but everything, even the grimly scattered gore that looks like it was once teenage superheroes upstairs, is fake. The blood itself is real, certainly, but the parts and signs of actual murder are fake (they don't even appear to be real flesh, just cunningly molded high-grade plastics). It's the sort of thing that would fool someone on close inspection - but even a middling police crime lab would pick up that this is almost entirely phony. It's not just a fake - it's actually a pretty shoddy fake. Except for that poor innocent receptionist, who appears to have been stabbed through the heart and left to bleed out on the floor. Someone did die here last night. Notice: It's certainly a grim scene, with carnage and gore everywhere and the unmistakeable parts of bodies scattered through the house like a scene from a horror movie. Come to think of it, it does look just like a horror movie! This was obviously staged to strike fear and panic in someone. The highest-ranking Notice score reveals something in a room with half an Asian teenager's torso in it (or IS it?), what appears to be a still picture of a warehouse somewhere in Greenbank. Search: Searching reveals that the kids' rooms are empty of any personal items. There's some random debris scattered around (and covered in the gore, as if to simulate a bloody fight to the death) but there's nothing here that actually belonged to anyone who lived in these rooms.

Couple of minor things - You should try and put in his full Leaping distances so you don't have to calculate it on the fly. You can find that info with this helpful spreadsheet. mutantsandmasterminds.com/2007/11/17/leaping_spreads/ Speed 2 is 25 MPH/250 fpm You should actually put in the stats for his Boomerang and Club (i.e., Blast X, Strike X)

A little bird tells me you may want to do some proofreading on the backstory, LH

When the dawn came, after all this, it was a beautiful sight. The sky rioted with pink and orange and purple, the Sun itself seeming to rise with particular force as its ray reached the little trio in the park, Tarva's spell vanishing with the dawn. When the sunlight hit her, Kimber felt the familiar vanishing of her body beneath the warming rays - except, looking down, where Tarva's shadow got between her and the sun, her flesh was was real as it ever was. For once Tarva was silent when the sun's rays hit her face, her grip warm and very real in Kimber's, just watching the sun and the morning sky like a child. For his part, Harrier rose to his feet, shaking the mud and dirt off his armored form. With the rising sun, and his holoemitter still disabled, he knew he'd need to get out of there fast. "It was easier to hate you, Tarva the Black, for your cowardice and the evil you did in Steelguard's name." And for that painted face, that laughed, there at the last. "But this life is your fate." It was, despite everything, a statement of real approval. "We are no longer enemies, Tarva. But we will never be friends." He struck his pike against the ground and took off, flying into the sky on a roar of burning jet fuel, heading up fast and out to sea so that no one could recognize the Omegadrone in the sky.

In a scene out of nightmare, the giant snake lashed out and swallowed the ship. In a sudden rush, they and the cloud of semi-liquid gas that surrounded them were tumbling down a vast tunnel, the sensors picking up wildly exotic technology on either side, the work of a dozen lifetimes of Preserver tech coming and going far too fast for them to make out any details. "Not _you_," Zober said, pointing to the Traveler. "Us. The Gorgon wanted our vessel to stop so that she could...swallow us. Oh, bother!" he said at the thought, licking gold nutrient-gel off his hairy paws. They were going fast, at least by orbital speeds, a continent-long tube wide enough to swallow cities whipping by in the space of a few seconds, until they found themselves suddenly floating in an entirely new medium. The shifting fluid around them was almost entirely transparent, not clear like water but nearly invisible altogether, save for strands of cosmically-charged fiborous carbon that drifted and clung around their vessel like silvery seaweed, guiding them towards their destination - a single grey sphere, floating in the vast ocean inside the Gorgon, no bigger than Dragonfly's HAX back home. Another moment had passed, and their vessel clanked against the sphere outside, the hatch glowing green with an established docking seal. The Gorgon's head? Body? appeared again, hovering in the middle of the room for a moment. GET. OUT.

Vaulting from house to house, Aquaria landed on the Whites' front lawn right next to where Edge and Monsoon were building something gigantic out of snow. "Coldcoldcoldcold..." Aquaria was starting to feel sleepy from the cold, and knew if she didn't warm up she'd curl up in the snow and sleep until spring if she wasn't careful. She pulled a red Santa hat she'd found down around her small ears, trying to keep her whole head warm. "Hey you guys! Is Jessie okay?" She'd followed the tracks in the snow, keeping a close eye on motorcycle and foot marks made at super-speed as she went. "She's probably okay," said Edge, sticking his head out from behind a snowman's head nearly as big as his torso. "She's in there with Midnight and Wander, they've got this. You wanna build a snowman?" "No, I'd better see if she's okay!" Aquaria hopped her way to the front door and rang the bell. With all the discussion inside the house, it wound up being a young cousin of Erin's (upstairs because she'd been using the potty) who answered the door - who answered the door to the sight of a froggy humanoid in a bulky orange outfit and Santa hat, said humanoid looking down at the small child with gigantic eyes set high in her head before asking, "Hey, have you seen-" "THE CHRISTMAS FROG!" The little girl dropped the book she was holding, which on its cover showed a frog in Christmas gear bringing a pile of toys to little tadpole children, and suddenly hugged Aquaria tight. "I LOVE YOU CHRISTMAS FROG!"

"Do you not see?!?" declared Frost, wildly gesticulating with his lit cigarette. "This is the face of Henry Griffin reborn! This is the Human Tank! Cloned by some foul sorcery, some unspeakable evil!" Angrily, he doused the cigarette's flame with his thumb. "It would explain everything! The memories full of amnesia, to hide some growing tank or homunculus vault!" Frost was shaking with barely suppressed fury. "The secret missions, so that the pitiful few of us left who remember Henry Griffin's face could not be wise to it!" He knelt down and touched one of the flowers grown by Fleur, only for his eyes to close in grief as the flower died at his icy-cold touch. Smoothly, he rose to his feet. He stared up at the giant and declared suddenly, "This is where she died, Henry!" He was jabbing at Titan's chest, heedless of the size difference between them. "You told me she died for you! For you and Thomas! And you asked me why I wasn't there! Do you remember!?!"

Tarva cried and cried until her tears were exhausted, pathetic black streaks that ran down her face and onto Kimber's arm, impossibly liquid against the ghost's flesh. When she was done, she raised her head and looked at Kimber. "How can you do this?" she begged. "How can you comfort me, knowing the evil I have done, the evil I have...I have danced in like gossamer veils?" "It is their nature to forgive, Tarva," came Steve's voice, quiet and mechanical from nearby. "Why do you remember this?" he asked in a confessor's voice. "It would have taken effort to shield your mind from the Doom Coil, again and again and again, and to never be seen. If you so hated the thing you had become, why did you not let that Tarva fall beneath the Doom Coil and rise again as an Annihilist?" "Because then...then I would have died." She spoke as if a dawning revelation was coming to her. "And all that was would have died with me."

Fast-Forward threw his sandwich aside. "Geez, kid, you all right?" He zipped over to Miras' side and checked her over, using his limited knowledge of first aid to determine she seemed as all right as she could be. "Those bastards aren't so smart." He zipped up to the front door and extended his hand just in front of it, and to the others it looked like his hand was vibrating at super-speed - a vibration that seemed to swell from his hand to encompass the door. When the door was 'vibrating' all the way, its form lost in a slight visual blur, Fast-Forward kicked it open, dodging out of the way of any snipers waiting for him on the other side. (This wasn't his first forced entry!) "Electricity's fast," he said confidently. "But I'm faster!"

Fast-Forward stunts Nullify All Electrical Effects 10 (Extra: Continuous) [30/30] off his time control array. http://orokos.com/roll/267261 28 on the Nullify roll

She wandered the coast of North America, a solitary hunter, for a long time after that, sticking close to the Surfacers to avoid both Pale One attack and the attack by Dark Brothers she was sure would one day come to take her back to their city. The Surfacers were an endless puzzle - their cities vast and terrifying, their skins a near-infinite variety of colors, their ships big and menacing as they cut their way through the water. She met a few of the People along the way, and a few Dark Brothers not from the Cuban city, but they were all vagabonds too - there was no home here. Finally, a few years ago, she heard of something big happening -a major Dark Brother raid against a Surfacer city. Tired of being alone and hungry, she decided to take her chances and explore there, figuring she could easily blend in with the People and the Dark Brothers on the surface. She arrived in Freedom City just a few weeks after the Deep One raid that accompanied the Archevil Event (as she later learned the news called it). She explored at night for a while, hanging low along the Waterfront, a little surprised to find none of her kind here. Finally, foolishly, she decided to reveal herself to the surfacers. The subsequent Waterfront battle pitted her against the Freedom City police, Next-Gen, and her hated enemy Nereid - a foul, loathesome Pale One who laughed and called her cruel names as she casually blasted her with the very water that had been her home! That night, caged for the first time in her life, she screamed and clawed at the glass, spitting venom and threats, until finally she passed out from exhaustion. She awoke in Blackstone, where the lonely silence of the air nearly killed her.

Once the People roamed all the Islands and the seas beyond, singing their songs and dancing beneath the moonlight, leaping high in the air to mock the Sun and swimming as deep as they dared to greet their Dark Brothers in the depths of the seas. Then the Surfacers came, and at first things were good. There were battles, sometimes grim ones, but in the end the Surfacers had the land and the Dark Brothers had the sea, and the People had all that lay between. It was a good life. Then New Surfacers came - hearts as cold as the iron they wielded, and gradually the land of the First Surfacers shrank, and the People’s land and sea shrank with it. Then the Pale Ones came from below - enemies of the Dark Brothers who hated all who bore the mark of Father Dagon and Mother Hydra on their bodies. The People fought them, oh yes, but they had spears and bone and muscle against machines of death and pain, and their lands gradually shrank. Gradually the lands of the People shrank over the years, with some fleeing below to join the Dark Brothers in their cities of obsidian glass, but most simply dying of plagues, of swords (and then bullets) from above, and the terrible pressure of the Pale Ones who let nothing live in their sea that did not love their gods or wear their skin. Their culture shrank, their world shrank, and gradually Ocean became a small patch of blue and a few scraps of land, surrounded by enemies all around. When Aquaria Innsmouth was born about twenty-five years ago, her world was dying - the last remnants of the once-mighty People of the Islands having shrunk to a pitiful handful of a few dozen males, females, and spawn living on Flanagan Island, an uninhabited patch of a few acres in the US Virgin Islands. She learned to hunt and fish like her brothers and sisters, and walked on land as soon as her legs were grown. Unlike many of her siblings, she took no mates - the sole survivor of her egg creche, she was widely considered to be cursed, or blessed, by Mother Hydra and Father Dagon. But that was all right with her; when she wasn’t hunting to feed her many siblings, it gave her time to explore the ocean, to watch the New Surfacers with great care as they did unknowable, fascinating things on islands full of animals, to feel the sun on her face and dive deep beneath the warm blue waters of the Caribbean. It was a good life, but hard, and when she slept, she murmured prayers to the ancient gods of her people. She was fifteen when the Atlanteans came. Battle-hardened soldiers returning from a raid against a Deep One city off the coast of Cuba, they saw a Deep One surfacer colony and attacked without looking too closely at what they saw, ending civilization on the island of the people in a few short minutes. Hating herself for her cowardice, Aquaria (as the oldest unattached female) hid with the spawn in hidden caves to guard them against Atlantean attack. When she came out, the island was burning - and her people’s community was gone, with perhaps a dozen adults left alive after the battle. And so the People began a journey, a long, bitter one, through the waters of the Caribbean and towards the only salvation they knew - a Dark Brother colony near Cuba, lands they knew that were free both of the New Surfacers and the terrible ways of the Pale Ones. The flight wasn’t easy - they had to stop and raid Pale One settlements to survive and the Pale Ones rarely gave quarter to their enemies, and the New Surfacers treated them no better when they clashed with their vessels. Aquaria had just turned sixteen when they finally reached their destination - the Dark Brother city off the coast of the island the New Surfacers called Cuba. It was beautiful. The temples to Dagon and Hydra rose high in their cyclopean splendor, all dark volcanic glass that reached up to the skies, and there was food to eat and nests to sleep in without fear of attack. It was cold for the People, and dark, and the oceans thick above their heads, but the Dark Brothers promised that they would soon be reborn as Dark Brothers themselves - and could gain revenge on the Pale Ones! It wasn’t until the prisoners arrived that Aquaria understood the mechanism of her transformation - and the cold heartless nature of the forever war between the Dark Brothers and the Pale Ones. It was a human sacrifice that drove the transformation of People into Dark Brothers, and she watched in mounting horror as the elders of her community gladly submitted to the transformation, even as the screams of the murdered Pale Ones echoed in her ears. Monsters though they were, didn’t they deserve to live? How could her joy come from the suffering of others? That night she tried to slip away, taking the roe with her, but she was caught by a Dark Brother patrol and, feeling guilty as sin, fled without the young ones. She was one young hunter-fisher, how could she take care of so many little ones? How could she even take care of herself?

sharl chooses to hold till the next round begins

Another place. Sharl wasn't sure what he'd expected in the mind of the Communion. Legions of animate cyber-dead like those he'd fought in the Lor-Van traffic computers? Armies of miniature drones like those he'd seen in the Curator's mind? Instead he found himself floating in the void, all around him was the cold blackness of space, filled with infinite stars and moons and galaxies, stretching off to infinity as far as he could see. There was no sign of the Hunger vessel, but he thought he recognized this as a representation of the space they had been occupying, particularly with the nearby wormhole, the glow of the magnetar, and the ever-present light of the nebula. Floating where the mothership had been was something unexpected; a single, staring eye that was horribly organic and inorganic at the same time, metallic veins like pipelines pulsing with decaying blood, pupil as wide as a starship dilating as it stared at him. Even an optic nerve was visible, ominously disappearing into the Kestevanian wormhole. The whole thing was as big as a small asteroid; infinitely vast next to the teenager from Tronik. SHARL TULINK OF TRONIK. The eye stared.

"I had been banished from the temple when it happened." said Tarva suddenly, her eyes deep pools of almost impossible black. "It was...it doesn't really matter why," she admitted, her voice tight with remembered tears. "I was on the outskirts of the city, making a show for the peasants, when the sky opened up and the Black Ships came forth." She folded up into a ball, arms pulled tight around her legs, and rested her chin on her knees. "The war against Chaos had gone on for so long, I remember the way people cheered when the Six stepped out of the vessel. And the way Nightmare Doom said their long quest was over - that they had found new allies that promised peace for all our kind." "And then the Omegadrones came," said Harrier, an edge of sympathy in his synthesized voice. "Yes." said Tarva quietly. "And there were so many of them, and the Six were helping them, and..." She waved her hands spasmodically and suddenly the shadows at her feet moved. Steve's hand briefly tensed around his pike, but the shadows that moved moved in human shapes that writhed and screamed beneath oncoming hordes of shadowy mechanical raptors, a play no bigger than the frogs in the pond. "The boys tried to protect me, and I tried to protect them, but it was all too much, too fast, and in the end there was nothing any of us could do. We were on our way to the forges when we were taken to the Madrigal to see who was worthy to join her cause." She looked at Steve, black, inky tears in her eyes. "And I know what you're thinking, freedrone, but I had already seen the forges! I had already seen them cast the young ones into the doomfires and I...when the Madrigal asked me to prove my worth, I offered to show her my spells. And so she unshackled me, and I did, and she looked at me..." "You're pretty. Steelgrave will like that." Steve spoke in a haunted voice, like the undead remembering the grave. "Yes. And I thanked her, I thanked her on my knees, I told her I would love her forever if she spared me, and so she asked me to prove my love, and then..." She started crying, really crying. "They didn't even fight! They didn't even try and run away!" She leaned over and all but collapsed on Kimber - her shadowy aura giving her real substance as she supported herself against Kimber's ectoplasm. "And after that, why bother? What did it even matter?!"

Okey-dokey

Frost lit another cigarette and paced almost frantically, the other one having actually gone out in his hand from excessive heat drain. "Yes, yes, significant psychic trauma at the sight of this holy place, and a life story that begins, what was it, fourteen years ago? Adopted by the military?" Frost was silent for a moment, and when he spoke his voice was thick with unaccustomed emotion - a great grief and dawning anger that was altogether new for Fleur, who had mostly heard him cold and snarky in his interactions with others. "His face, Fleur de Joie, do you recognize his face?" Frost looked almost wild in the dark, the glowing flame of his cigarette matching the glowing red lights in his eyes.

"Thank you," Steve replied, after his usual long hesitation when a compliment came his way. "And you are a fine niece." They fell silent again in the corridor, the two survivors, faintly listening to the sound of the happy family inside. Yolanda belonged to this family, of course, as much as she belonged anywhere in this new world. "If I could have children, I would want them to be like you." It was the simple truth, but she was brave, resourceful, and one who had lived through much already - what more could a father ask for in a child? To his surprise, she hugged him, fierce and strong, burying her square head against his stomach for a long moment. He hugged her back, a little awkwardly, one big, scarred hand against her muscular shoulder. When she looked up at him, there were no tears. "Do you wanna see my katas?" she asked. With his silent nod, she began demonstrating them, showing the mixed martial arts taught to Nicholson students as a means of promoting self-discipline and exercise. For some, like Yolanda, they had an entirely different purpose, one that would be hers as she grew into womanhood. In the corridor there was silence, except for an occasional explosion of breath and kia as Yolanda threw a punch, or kick, or body blow.

"She is no telepath," Frost assured Titan, "but a healer. She can help you with headache and after that we can figure out what has happened." We can figure out who it was who raised the Human Tank from the dead. He walked off a few paces and lit another cigarette, the scent as old-fashioned as the man himself. "What has happened...indeed. I have seen many things in recent years. Set the Destroyer returned as Millennial child. Robotic invaders from beyond Moon. Portal to Hell and world saved from insect plague..." He looked up at Titan again, his voice cold. "But you, my friend, are something new." - January 1945 France "I am dead man, Comrade Tank," said Frost as the two men kept watch beneath the shocking-bright moon overhead. "Killed by the Reich, resurrected by Lady Hela, with hole where heart should be." He laid his hand on his uniform chest, ready to spring out of sight if any of the passing German patrols in the neighborhood took an interest in their farmhouse. "I do not think there are any girls for me out there. Not all men are as fortunate as you and brother of yours, with that little lady of his."

Stesha heard Russian profanity on the line before she recognized Comrade Frost's voice. "Fleur de Joie. There is bad trouble. I need to see you in Wittmund, Germany - can you teleport to GPS signal in cellphone?" For all of his problems with modern technology, he had learned the necessary tools of his trade easily enough. "There is super-powered man who may need medical attention. And other problems." She heard him say on the other end, "That is very interesting story, Titan, yes...very interesting indeed. I am speaking to Fleur de Joie of the Freedom League, you know her, pretty girl with green hair and magic flowers. She can help you with your headache and we can solve the...the problem here. Yes, we can find solution."

Fast-Forward was barely visible as the women set off on their journey, an impossibly fast blur of motion that went by them...well, much the same way they went by people who were standing still! it didn't take him long to find the destination to which Miras had dispatched them, a place he could easily have burst into all on his own. But Richard had learned his lessons from his impetuous youth and so he waited for the other heroes, zipping around Greenbank at great speed. He left a fiver on a McDonalds counter and grabbed a Whopper. He read a discarded newspaper left behind at a bus station. He visited the FORCE Ops memorial, small though it was - and when the others arrived, he was there to greet them. Rapidly wadding up his burger wrapper, he asked Miras, "What's the plan, kid?"

"Aaaah..." Frost stepped back, running his hands through his hair, his blue hood falling back and revealing the white face and red eyes beneath. I can go to Russian government. Tell them that AEGIS has suspicious copy of Henry Griffin. And then...and then what?! They protest? Why would Putin care what American agency does with American heroes? He faced Henry, mastering himself as he had mastered a thousand situations before this. "I am experienced Russian superhero, Titan, and I can see you are sick man. Perhaps there is something in your past that has to do with this place, eh? I will call healer with Freedom League and she can help. And tell me your story," he offered as he took out his cellphone and began dialing a number back in Freedom City. Would she even bother to answer? It had to be nine o'clock Freedom City time, even if she was back in her home dimension. "What is your life?"

He'd better, or Miss A will take the cost of the robot body out of his beard

"A life taken before the forges is a life spared. We learn this as children. In the Black Ghetto. Of dread Nihilor." Were they words of comfort? Even Steve was not entirely sure. "They were not the first." Tarva, perhaps to her surprise, actually managed a response to Steve as well. "How-how do you live like this? How do you live with what we have seen? With what we have done?" "There was a time when I could not," Harrier conceded. "But then I realized that was another defeat. All that you have lost yet lives while you do, Tarva the Black." For Kimber's benefit, he added, "There are no afterlife planes in the Terminus. There is nothing left of the worlds that it devours - but what we remember. If you forget; if you die, then all you have known becomes...dust in the wind." He made a little gesture in the air. "It is our fate to remember the long-dead past. And keep it alive in our hearts."

There was dead silence in the park, long enough for Kimber to think her advice had been ignored. The rain did indeed begin to slow, then stop, the sky gradually beginning to lighten as the sunrise approached. "Will you seek to escape again?" Harrier finally asked Tarva. "No," she said, shaking her head slowly as she watched the eastern sky. "No, I'm done," she added, looking at Kimber as much as Steve. "This is all I wanted." She actually laughed. "I'm no fool, freedrone. I know what waits for me outside the walls of my sanctuary." "I'm not alone, you know," replied Harrier, just a touch of a barb in his mechanical tones. "There are two others on Earth-Prime alone." That made Tarva fall silent again, pressing her hand to her mouth for a long moment, then "That must be...terrible." "Yes." Tarva couldn't look at either of them, instead staring at the eastern sky as it gradually began to pinken. "I'm glad I killed them." That made Harrier's head turn to study her impassively. "You remember, Kimber, I...told you their n-names." Her hands were balled into fists. "On the old world, at the end. I killed them to...to show what I could do. They would have gone to the pit with the others if...if they had lived."