Avenger Assembled

The Quesitor led Sharl through many projects, effusively elaborating on the great work these cutting edge scientists were performing. A couple of subservient scientists tagged along, occasionally chiming in, with the soldiers trying to unobtrusively remain in the background. In a great atrium, scientists worked on a method of advanced faster-than-light travel, based on some confusingly elaborate hypothesis involving quantum entanglement and light acting neither as a particle nor a wave. The floor of the room was, unlike the clean surfaces of the Lor city, dirty and strewn with wreckage around generators and engines and holoterminals over which scientists pored through astronomical data and star charts. "He swears he got data back, with what he could salvage indicating unusual activity in that region of space." "Nonsense, the probe was only meant to measure how quickly it reached the test destination, not scan for objects. Besides, the data was a corrupted mess!" Another room oddly resembled an art gallery, comprised of plain white walls with different rectangular sheets hung at regular intervals, with small holoterminals beside each one. But the true nature of the room, that of testing advanced composites, was revealed when some of the staff occasionally produced lasers and shot them at the surfaces, pausing to check readings on the terminals. As the delegation passed one canvas of a strange shimmering gold-blue, undulating between two colours while seeming to be both simultaneously, two more Lor in lab suits could be heard muttering gossip to each other. "One of the actinide 99 miners came back from the outer rims, heard that some of the deep space races are moving. Something about refugees?" "Hah," scoffed his friend. "Unlikely. Those planets rejected the federation umpteen times, why would they come running now? We all know those miners' personal habits, he probably dreamed it when he was blotto." The delegate scientists gave the composite workers harsh looks and they fell silent until Sharl had been led from the room, and to another workshop, and to another. The Quesitor seemed set on ensuring Sharl was impressed at the level of cutting edge science the Ministry was performing, yet curiously did not go near any labs testing energy conversion. Soon, they reached a small and understated room, where on an unspoken agreement, the delegation dispersed, leaving the soldiers outside the door as the Quesitor led Sharl inside. Evidently, this was his office. In contrast to his effusive, booming mannerisms, it seemed humble, consisting of only a plain desk with a holoterminal, and a number of chairs. A dispensary stood in the wall, no doubt linked to food systems and those mechanisms for delivering any physical messaging. Even in Lor space, the paperless office was not quite realised. The Quesitor gestured to the chairs as he sat behind his desk. "Now, I hope our facilities have satisfied you as to the quality of our work. Do you have any questions, or would you like to dive right into discussing the project which, no doubt, interests you a lot more than the FTL labs?" The Quesitor leaned back and smiled, arms folded.

The hovercar lowered itself down and into an access port in the dome of the arcology, descending down and down through the forest canopy. As they approached the ground, the dome closed once more behind them. Several Lor and associated species walked through the trees, some in labcoats, some using delicate-looking instrumentation on the trees. The grass below their path of ascent folded away, revealing an access tunnel. It came out in a hangar 'parking lot', with several other hovercars and a couple of larger transport vehicles. Obviously, they didn't want people parking in their forest! A group of Lor waited patiently in this lot, mostly more scientists, but one at the fore seemed more important. He was a tall Lor male of deep purple skin, head shaven and etched with ritualised tattoos. He took a step towards the contingent as they exited the vehicle. "Greetings, Citizen Tulink of Tronik," he boomed in a deep, solemn voice. "Welcome to the Lor Ministry of Science." He clasped his hands in front of him and bowed. "I am Quesitor Arkhid. I hope your journey has been safe, and I assure you some of our best scientists are working on this endeavour." He spread his arms wide. "A tour, perhaps, of our facilities, and then onto business?" Deep down, the part of Sharl that still saw the world through the eyes of a Tronikian teenager was growing a little uneasy at all the friendliness. It wasn't that he was unfamiliar with it - he'd learned to smile, to laugh, to shake hands, just as Terrans did. After all, it was just a part of their culture. But to see that openness in these people, to see the diversity of a real Lor city, so much like Freedom City but so much more...but then the Lor Republic they had left a thousand years earlier had been _very_ different than the Lor of today. "Certainly," he said with a big smile, bowing his head in acknowledgement of the Quesitor's offer. "We may be a little behind the Republic in some things, but we have a very personal mastery of computer science, hah-hah-hah!" That got him a polite chuckle, anyway, and he decided to listen rather than talk for a while. What he was really interested in was energy conversion technology, of course, a descendant of the technology that Tronikians used to produce food and other necessities directly from solar radiation - but he had a feeling that would come at the end. So he followed along through tours of FTL projects and wormhole construction, all the while wishing he could have brought Miss A or another Terran scientist along. They were masters of understanding advanced technology despite technological barbarism, and confronted with all the wonders of Lor civilization at the height of its technological mastery...well. Maybe this is how Young Freedom felt when I talked about how primitive Terran culture is!

"Ah, and you took those refugees into your Tronik?" asked Milo. He had read of such possible incursions and relations with extradimensional cultures, but never had he imagined being involved himself, let alone in a situation with a digitized city. Vorka shot her friend a dirty look, silencing him. She inclined her head, indicating how upset the citizen of Tronik was. While it was not entirely customary for clone-children to be so heavily involved with their parents, she nonetheless felt empathy towards this young man the same age as her daughter, who'd clearly been through so much sorrow and hardship in his life on Tronik and on that backwards Terra. Scientist Rex merely nodded sympathetically. "Such a group sounds terrible indeed," said Rex, inclining his head. "But please, continue. I apologise for my colleague's outburst. A second Tronik?" Sharl told them the story of how he and his friends had traveled to another dimension, rescued a reflection of his own Tronik, and restored it to Terra, just before the Curator's invasion had nearly destroyed both cities. "And the world besides. He nearly had a whole new planet to put in his collection." Of course, these were all stories Sharl himself only knew second-hand - a thought that was only a little unsettling when he dwelled on it. "In another few years, when the research has been done here, we'll be ready to let both Troniks know exactly what's happened, and that we can save them both. And then we'll come back from our dimension to yours, and that will be...." He shook his head, and admitted, "More than I'd have ever thought possible. When I found out Terra's technology, before I learned about the Republic's survival and all the advancements of the last thousand years, I thought a hardware failure would kill us all before I was old enough to fly a hovercar." He grinned lopsidedly, "Of course, now I can fly on my own inside the system, so that's not so bad." He answered a few more questions about Terra, mostly from the fascinated Milo, but didn't have many answers to give; even after years there he didn't really understand Terran culture. He did confirm that the champions of Terra really were as mighty as the latter had heard - something Vorka and Rex seemed to take with a faint air of skepticism. But he didn't care - because as the hovercar swooped around a rounded 'domed' arcology in which a green and gold forest was visible, their destination came into sight: the Lor Ministry of Science. The home of the people who were going to save Tronik...

"So you fought the Curator, forced him to make a hard reboot, and then you...died?" Vorka-13 had heard some crazy stories before, but this had to take the cake - for all that both Milo and Scientist Rex were nodding along with the tale! What the hell was going on in Deep Space these days? "I did," replied Sharl, a little unused at having to tell this story to people again. "Or rather, that version of me did. Miss Americana, my teacher, rebooted my program from backup files. So it's more that a copy of me died than..." He glanced out the window of the hovercar and suddenly gasped, eyes lighting up with joy. They'd broken through the cloud cover and reached the skies above Olhtav City. Below them, massive arcologies towered up from the surface below, bustling with people living safe, orderly lives. "This is...this is right," to his embarrassment, Sharl realized he was crying - right in front of the Lor! He laid his hand against the glassteel of the car and said aloud, "And when Lor-Van grew too small to hold us, we took to the stars, our destination..." He shifted nervously, conscious of all the adults looking at him. "For all of our history, my people believed that we had cast ourselves out of the galaxy, maybe even the universe; that we had lost the Republic, the stars, and condemned ourselves to isolation. But if this works," this being the reason why he had come across thousands of light-years to the heart of Lor space, "if what you said on the Vox is true - all that can end in just a few more years. All the sons and daughters of both Troniks will have our lives again." "...both Troniks?" asked Vorka, leading Sharl to explain, "Well, on Terra, there once was a vicious, violent political group called the National Socialists - corporatist nationalists who practiced genocide against their enemies. And in a dimension a few vibrational turns from this one..."

Lor-Van Lor Timemark 1312.8 In the southern hemisphere of Lor-Van, it's springtime. On the island continent of Olhtav, the largest technological feature in a world full of advanced technology is the Vox - a massive communications relay system, big enough to hold an entire Terran city, that uses mechapsionics to tap into the depths of nth space, allowing for nearly instant communications across the Lor Republic and even beyond. The work of centuries by farsighted Lor monarchs, and then senators, of years past, it's a wonder of the galaxy. Towering several miles in height, it's a massive dome of super-compressed psi-crystal mounted on a tower of near-neutronium that looms above the already-massive spires of Olhtav City at its feet like a skyscraper above a trailer park. From the Vox, you can see for thousands of miles all around - even if many people need multi-ox treatments or even breathing masks to work in the upper-most levels. Of course, the fact of the matter is, most people get used to where they work pretty fast. "I'm telling you, you can't listen to anything that comes out of the Unity, man." Leaning back against forcefields that held her back from a drop of four and a half terrestrial miles, Vorka-13 gave her shiftmate a sympathetic look. "What is it with you and those cranks on the 'Net, anyway? First it's the Terran Origin stuff, then it's 'Oooh, there's an invincible army eating up the Grue'...c'mon, you don't want to be 'that guy' around the office, right?" Milo, her hirsute shiftmate, gave her an impassive look. "If my enlightened understanding of the world deprives me of promotions, then such is my fate. Besides, you should pay more attention to Terra," he added diplomatically. "Don't you know that's where our visitor's from?" "I...hey, wait a minute!" Vorka-13 unpolarized the visor of her helmet to look Milo in his slitted red eyes. "How does that work? Terra's a disunited backwater that's barely mastered fission, much less hardware - what are they doing with a sentient AI?" The reminder of today's big news got them both moving back on-shift now that their break was ending. As they made their way back to their stations around Central Receiving, Milo told Vorka-13 the story of how, millennia earlier, a city from an outlying colony world had been digitized by the Curator, its inhabitants transformed into living computer programs subject to his will, only to be rescued by one of the many genetic mutants that made Terra home. They had to stop talking once they were back in Central Receiving, both of them with their helmets on like good Lor soldiers, but they carried on by suit-message. +That is puckey,+ replied Vorka, even though come to think of it she'd read the file too. +So he's not really Terran at all?+ +No more than I'm Lor-Vanian,+ agreed Milo. +I saw Scientist Rex speaking to the AI's employer, though, and she looked Terran enough. Pretty too. I wonder if she'd like to visit this place...+ +Just make sure you don't get into an Honor Duel the way you did over your last sweetheart,+ replied Vorka with the glyph for witty banter behind her words - a moment before the countdown began! A long-distance transmission was on its way, one complex enough that it was being absorbed into the system as a contigous unit. From the outside, Vorka mused, it would have looked a bit like an ultra- long distance teleportation. "3...2...1...INCOMING FILE!" Despite the urgency of the countdown, there were no exploding lights or even a flicker when the file from Earth arrived - instead the holographic projectors in the room lit up as if receiving a telepresence message, albeit with an unusually bright glow, and suddenly there was a thirteenth humanoid in the big steel-bright room - a slim, dark-haired Lor (who looked barely as old as Vorka-13's clone-daughter) who rose from a crouching position to take in the room before taking off his black eye protection to pronounce a single syllable in English. "...woah." When he'd had a moment to collect himself, his heart pounding in his chest, Sharl Tulink approached Scientist Rex, the slender, almost serpentine humanoid who'd been on the other side of most of the transmissions Miss A had carried out through Daedalus' computer network. "Greetings. I am Sharl Tulink of Tronik." "Greetings, Citizen Tulink," agreed Rex, bowing his long, narrow head in a gesture of welcome. "You have arrived safely on Lor-Van."

They flew on; Stronghold escorting the plane by air (from a discreet distance) and Foreshadow aboard it, thousands of feet above what was now New York state below. The clouds were heavy; the world beneath disappeared beneath a fuzzy-white blanket. Stronghold was beginning to tire - the plane was going quite fast now that it was outside of the cloud cover and she'd had to push herself to keep up this far. In another few minutes, even with the best of intentions, she was going to have to break it off. Fire flashed before Foreshadow's eyes - a gigantic explosion of white-hot, burning rage that erupted through the plane and scattered the fragments to pieces, sending all aboard tumbling in helpless agony towards the ground far, far below. And over in New Jersey, some hundred or so miles away, Paige Psion-Cline saw the same thing.

Fox: Tiamat does indeed recognize this. It's an Anopheles - a monstrous race of insects from a dread dimension overrun by fiendish insects bloated to tremendous size and possessing unnatural hungers for the flesh and souls of living beings. They're magical creatures and diabolically cunning, and more than once some fool sorcerer has probed into their dimension only to have his skin devoured by swarms of intelligent ants and his blood fed to the terrible Brood Queens of the Anopheles. It's not good one is here! But how could one come here without a ritual circle to summon it?

AvengerAssembled: All rollover/RefPP/extra stuff to Comrade Frost. Just count any missed GM posts towards the PC in that thread, or do whatever seems the most logical Edge >Until You've Crossed >Great Apes Fast-Forward >Death, Crime, Rage >Embrace the Silence >Back in the Day Harrier >The Spirit of Revolution Comrade Frost >Firestorm GMing >Can't Change Time >Necklace of Ropes Electra: All rollover to Hologram Hologram >Embrace the Silence >Great Apes >Back in the Day >Death, Crime, Rage of the Beast Miss Americana >The Spirit of Revolution Fleur de Joie >Firestorm >Mission of Mercy Wander >Midnight Dynasty >Until You've Crossed

"Do you see that plane on your right?" When Stronghold looked that way, Chase went on. "That plane is a prisoner transport from Blackstone to Ravenclaw, a federal facility in upstate New York. Aboard that flight is Ember Psion, a murderous metahuman terrorist who the Atom Family and our allies apprehended several months ago." He sounded in her head exactly like he did in all those science documentaries he'd narrated as a kid! "Ember is part of a brutal family of metahuman terrorists called the Psions - a group of criminal bigots and would-be members of the master race who have plagued my family, and the world, for decades." He sighed. "We suspect Ember's family may be planning to break her out of prison during this transfer, so myself and my sister Tessa are keeping an eye on the situation via invisible hoverjet. We're on the opposite side of the plane from you - you may be able to see our displacement in the clouds. Can you assist us? We'd be pleased for any extra eyes in the air."

Perceptive Paragon PL: 10 (150) Abilities: 4 + 0 + 6 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 20 pp STR 30 [14] (+10/+2) DEX 10 (+0) CON 16 (+3) INT 10 (+0) WIS 20 (+5) CHA 10 (+0) Combat: 12 + 8 = 20 pp ATK: +6 (+10 Unarmed) DEF: +8 (+4 Dodge Focus, +4 Base, +2 Flat-Footed) Init: +0 Grapple: +16-+19 Knockback: -12/-1 Saves: 5 + 5 + 3 = 16 pp TOU +12/+3 (+3 Con, +9 Protection [+6 Imp]) FORT +8 (+3 Con, +5) REF +8 (+0 Dex, +8) WILL +8 (+5 Wis, +3) Skills: 28 r=7 pp Diplomacy 7 (+7, SM) Notice 7 (+12, SM) Search 7 (+7, SM) Sense Motive 7 (+12, SM) Feats: 9 pp Attack Specialization [unarmed] 2, Dodge Focus 4, Skill Mastery (Diplomacy, Notice, Search, Sense Motive) Takedown Attack, Uncanny Dodge (auditory) Powers: 35 + 30 + 7 = 73 pp All-Seeing Eye Array 16.1 (33 PP, PFs: Alternate Power 1, Ultimate Skill [Notice]) [35PP] BE: ESP 4 (Clairvoyance; Auditory + Visual Senses, 1 mile, DC 24 Notice; Extras: Action [Free], Duration [sustained], No Conduit, Simultaneous; PFs: Fast Task 4 [Full Action to search 1-mile-diameter area], Subtle) {33/33} AP: Super-Senses 25 (extended on hearing group [2], extended on sight group [2], microscopic 3 on sight group [3], radius on sight group [2]; direction sense [1], distance sense [1], infravision [enhancement: tracking] [2], low-light vision [1], radar [radio; enhancement: accurate] [3], radio [1], time sense [1], ultra-hearing [1], ultravision [1], x-ray vision [not vs. lead]] [3]) {24/33} Container 6 (Paragon Powers) [30PP] Enhanced STR 16 (to STR 30/+10) {16} Impervious TOU 6 {6} Paragon Array 6 (6PP, PFs: Dynamic, Dynamic Alternate Power) {9} DBE: Flight 0-3 (0-50 MPH/500 fpm) {6/6} DAP: Super-Strength 0-3 (Effective STR 30-45, Heavy Load: 1.5-6 tons) {6/6} Protection 9 [9 pp] costs abilities 20 + combat 20 + saves 16 + skills 7/28 + feats 9 + powers 75 = 150 pts ------------------------------------- Design Notes: Continuing my on-and-off again Paragon Project, here's a paragon with the Super-Senses part of the Superman powerset (one often left out of PC builds) given the full treatment. He's bulletproof (at least against small arms), able to fly and lift heavy objects, as well as punch through a steel door - but his _real_ power are his incredibly enhanced sensory abilities. He can concentrate on something close by and pick out every detail - or he can expand his insight outward and study a whole square mile of space at once! There are few secrets from him, and not many villains can hide from his eyes (though he lacks Counters Concealment and other Illusion-busting powers just to keep things interesting). His high Sense Motive means he's pretty good at spotting liars, just as his Notice makes it hard to hide things from him. Perhaps he became a hero because, much like some depictions of Superman, he was intimately aware of the suffering of innocents all around him - suffering his powers did not allow him to ignore! The picture is of Thundermind, DC's Chinese Buddhist Superman/Captain Marvel mashup. A hero rooted in theology like Thundermind should probably have some more Knowledge (Theology and Philosophy), while one from space (maybe a Lor mentant with touch-range telekinesis, Superboy-style) should have some Knowledge (Cosmology).. This guy's skills and feats are pretty generic - perhaps because he had a generic childhood out in the Midwest after being adopted by a kindly farm couple in Kansas.

Frances Psion, the only one of the half-dozen prisoners on the small plane to be traveling unbagged (thanks to her psychiatric conditions, evidently a long list) turned her head and glared at Foreshadow - but surprisingly, given her sharp tongue at their last encounter, said nothing. Instead she stared out the window with a look of longing on her face, at least until the guard closest to the window pulled the shade shut. After that Frances stared straight ahead for a moment before closing her eyes and sitting stock still, as if she was about to elevate her soul out of this place by sheer force of will. Not likely, though - everyone knew Ember was the dumb, crazy Psion! ---- As Stronghold flew, suddenly there was a voice in her head! "Stronghold, this is Chase Atom. Stronghold, this is Chase Atom. Can you hear me?" the brain voice asked.

DC 20 Arcane Lore skill check to know what this is! DC 25 Theo and Philo DC 20 Life Sciences to recognize the creature as more than a giant mosquito Frost knows. Do YOU

Whether by flower, flight, or rocky platform, the heroes arrived to a scene of chaos and disaster! For Comrade Frost, unfamiliar with the bees, it was like stepping into some mad version of the warzones of his warm days - a half-dozen bees circled overhead like panicked fighter jets, their loud, angry droning nearly deafening even to the ears of the undead. There were fires burning, many of them, and the trees were already smoldering as if a bomb had detonated in the middle of the big round clearing. In the middle of the clearing, which must have been the size of several American football fields (and had been a favorite picnic spot for some of the locals) lay a hideous corpse - what appeared to be a gigantic mosquito cut from the same scale as the bees, its head and belly torn open and with the edges burnt smoldering black. In the air behind it, beneath the circling bees (and backed by burning trees, as if FLAMES had erupted from its rear) shimmered a hazy, ominous portal that did not bear looking at closely; a gateway to some terrible place! Resisting the urge to simply stand beneath one of the burning trees and calm himself, Frost approached the portal with fascination even as the bee closest to the giant corpse descended to speak to the new heroes. With a domino mask big enough to cover the front end of a truck and a cape that could have covered an SUV with room to spare, there was no disguising Super-Bee! "HEROEZ!" she exclaimed in a buzzing voice like thunder. "YOU ARE HERE! THANK GOODNEZZ, IT WAZ HORRIBLE!" She gestured with a limb like a small tree at the corpse. "THE CRAZY DOOR OPENED AND THIZ HORRIBLE MOZQUITO CAME OUT AND AZKED IF WE WORZHIPPED THE TRUE GODZ! AND WHEN WE SAID NO-" "IT ZAID WE ZOON WOULD!" came a voice from above, a drone who must have been particularly terrified, "AND THEN HORRIBLE THINGS CAME CRAWLING OUT OF ITZ MOUTH!" "ZO WE KILLED IT WITH FIRE! ALL THE LITTLE ONEZ AND THE BIG ONE! IT WAZN'T EXPECTING UZZ TO BREATHE FIRE!"

November 1, 2014 Frances Psion swore up and down she had nothing to do with the mysterious fire in Blackstone's psychiatric wing a couple of weeks ago - but given her powers and her penchant for scrapping with prison security personnel, the Blackstone authorities haven't been inclined to take any chances. She's gotten into trouble with inmates too, trouble enough that there have been some very nasty threats against her life (and other things) made inside the prison compound. The Psions have been scrapping with villains for years and Ember had always been the Professor's fist; a sadistic brute whose fiery punishments were great at striking fear across the villain community. In jail, in power restraints, she's just a short woman with a strange accent, reddish-blonde hair and skin tanned a faint, perpetual orange. She's being transported to lockup in upstate New York, where she'll be held for the next few weeks until the repairs to Blackstone are finished and her safety can be guaranteed. After that, she'll start what may be the first of many trials sometime in the beginning of 2015. Surrounded by two heavily armored female prison guards, she's in power-nullification shackles and a Blackstone orange uniform that she wears like a badge of honor. She's not talkative today; instead staring out the open window she can make out past the guard on her left, her eyes hooded as she looks out at the clouds overhead. Among the passengers on this particular flight is someone very special - the second Foreshadow, a special consultant who has experience dealing with Ember Psion and her ways - as well as an ability to foresee the future. For this prisoner, with the escape attempts that have already happened, that's a very good thing. - Stronghold is in the air, soaring high above the clouds! It's cool and crisp this high, with only her ring's power saving her from an icy coating and hypoxia, but that's okay - it's a beautiful day and the clouds are the sort of light, fluffy things that in cartoons would be like big balls of cotton candy. Nearby she can see what looks like a Lear Jet zipping through the sky, but she's an experienced enough flyer by now to know how to handle herself around civilian traffic. It really is a beautiful day. - Back in Freedom City, it's Richard and Paige's day off - as well it might be, given that it's Saturday! Holly has begged her way into another viewing of Maleficent, and Will has blessedly volunteered to save his parents from yet another showing of a movie they've seen no less than four times now between the two of them. Christie had pulled some strings and gotten a prison-band radio for them to monitor Frances' flight, and occasionally in between house-cleaning they listened to the check-ins and all-clears from the pilots - who were now safely in the air.

The OOC

November 1, 2014 Sanctuary It was midnight and the bees were SCREAMING. Comrade Frost, as awake as ever, was sitting outside in a small clearing, looking up at the so-bright stars overhead and thinking of the past. It had been a strange week, particularly since it had begun with Fleur de Joie approaching him and asking for help. Thousands of domestic animals had been brought to her adopted homeworld by the recent refugees from Entropy; thousands of unvaccinated animals in primitive conditions without access to 21st century medicine. There were veterenarians in Freedom City, it was true, but none with his experience, none with his training, and none with the willingness to drop everything to travel to another world to conduct perhaps the fastest rinderpest vaccination campaign in history. In the last few days, he'd been calling on the skills of Dimitri Peshkov far more than Comrade Frost, among these people who had no idea there had ever been a Russia. So he sat beneath the half-Moon and sipped a hot drink, and thought about the past. When he turned around and saw the earth-walled barn behind him and heard the snoring of the cattle, when he looked further to see the ramshackle dwellings in which the farmers hereabouts lived, it was like he'd stepped back in time. To another place, another life. Then the bees started screaming. Frost jumped to his feet, his drink set aside, and watched for a moment in shock as gigantic cries erupted through the half-grown forest - and a moment later the sound of fiery eruptions and the glow of red and orange stood out on the smoky clouds that dotted the sky above. "Pizdets!" he swore as a gigantic insect body, lit from the fires below, swooped up again and then straight down as if dive-bombing something. Without hesitating, he left aside the past and erupted forward into the forest, a cloud of icy mist racing towards the apian creatures and their distress.

"With pleasure, my lady." Caradoc reached over and touched Miss Americana's arm; all the physical contact that he knew Gina would tolerate before all these people. Later there would come more; once he had flown back to Freedom City (probably atop the robot itself) - but not yet. "Set, Sekhmet, Temperance, Terrifica, thank you for your help today. We will meet again." And that, with all those words, was more than he might ever have said beneath his own face; and certainly more than he would have with the armor of an Omegadrone visible. Perhaps there were advantages to these false faces after all - an unsettling thought that he put away to continue this conversation with the others.They had done far more for Steve, and for Gina, than they could ever let them know.

Nina balled her hand into a fist, psionic hydrokinesis making the air ripple around her fingers, and punched her father in the face - driving his armored head back but doing no serious damage to the tyrant. "In the name of God, Father, your dynasty is crumbling around you! This day is not the work of the Lion of Socotra or the Lord of the Sea, this is petty rage and bickering across an ocean full of people! I will help you take the others home, but you must put aside this madness!" She was pleading; the rain in the air bending around the two hydrokinetics as they shouted at each other over the sounds of thunder and lightning and explosions; the French military having resumed its offensive now that the bulk of the al-Darsahs were in no shape for a true super-battle. "These people fought ancient gods in your name! And now you turn on them because they seek to stop _you_ from a war that could doom us all? What cause is so great to make you do this?" Running across the deck of the ship, Mark dived low like a baseball player sliding into home, his costume carrying him across the rain-slicked deck until he nearly went over the edge! "Oof!" Catching himself against a a stanchion at the last minute, Edge pointed and cast a gigantic life raft out across the ocean below, a huge rubber contraption that kept Nina's siblings from falling unconscious into the ocean (they wouldn't drown, but they might be struck by a ship otherwise)...and kept them from having the direct connection to the ocean that would deny them access to much of their powers, at least for a few moments. And maybe a few moments would be all they needed...

Nina taunts her father as a Move Action: DC 24 As a Standard Action, she slaps him across the face Mark has already spent an HP on someone else's behalf this round, so - Typhoon has some saves to make Save vs 24: 21 Fort save vs 15: 16 Tou vs 20: Impervious! Unfortunately she's not actually doing enough damage to hurt him right now; she is just trying to get his attention.

The Spiral On September 26, 1960, during the preparations for the first televised Presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the Centurion arrived at the Chicago studios where the debates were to be filmed. Wearing a circlet of golden leaves on his head, the Man of Adamant announced that the debates were unnecessary and that he, the Centurion, was now the Imperator of the American Empire! Luckily for the Centurion's reputation, he had a friend there he had never met - Alexander Rhodes, just a few months before his debut as the Scarab, was at the studio after a psychic premonition warned him that a dire threat to the world was in the offing. From his position in the VIP box, Rhodes engaged the being that had displaced Mark Leeds' conscious mind in psychic combat, eventually driving it free and letting the Man of Adamant make his horrified apologies to the bemused executives and VIPs. This had repercussions most people know. The Kennedy administration was always a little cool towards the Centurion (one reason why the new Freedom League never had a government representative) while the Centurion himself realized that perhaps he'd been wrong at the beginning of the decade and that he did need other heroes after all! This was also, unknown to most people, the first encounter that the heroes of Freedom had with the Spiral, enemies who have dogged the 20th and 21st century ever since. We don't know much about them, even now, only accounts gleaned from memories absorbed by psychics who have encountered them like the Scarab, Brainstorm, Chase Atom, and even the reclusive villain Professor Psion - and eyewitness testimony from people like Daedalus, Raven I, and others who have survived having their personalities exchanged with inhabitants of the year 100000 ACE! At least, that's the year they claim it is - there are no written records on the other side. The possible future that is 100000 ACE (so far every encounter has had them in the same year, even decades apart) is a grim one. The Moon is a fiery red in the sky as if recently made molten and the surface of the Earth (around the portholes in the uppermost part of the Spiral's headquarters) is covered in a white, sere desert that on closer inspection is made of tiny shards of broken glass worn down to fragments by prolonged wind and water exposure. The only life visible are various silicate creatures that live in the glassy deserts outside. And the Spiral themselves, of course. if you call that living. They are old beings, very old - they have vague memories of the world above, a desperate flight below, and a last-ditch procedure that granted them survival. But that was all very long ago, and the memories of their fleshy bodies have long since been supplanted by unending centuries of preservation. For you see the Spiral are brains, human brains (albeit greatly enlarged), each floating in a preservation tank that (with robot aid) will keep them alive for uncounted more centuries to come. They have libraries, musical collections, all manner of entertainment, but by now they have seen them all, read them all, felt them all. For all their great psychic power, they cannot directly affect their world - especially not the great desert that is the surface. They are dreadfully, dreadfully bored. This is a bad thing. Even worse, one of them (Spiral Three, the one who possessed the Centurion and bedeviled him as a prankster until 1993) has recently (by their calendar) learned the art of mental time travel, one that it shared gladly with its fellows as a means of offering them an escape from the unending ennui. The Spiral like to play, and even at the best of times their play is sinister in its amusements. Their favorite game is to find someone of power in the distant past and switch minds with them for a while - casting said person's consciousness into the distant future while they revel in the sensation and powers of their new form. Sometimes this is simply a great jest (by Spiral standards) and the person (if not discovered) will reawaken in their bodies amid a bacchanalia of amusements that they must now pay for, physically, socially, and financially. Other times the situation is darker still. One may decide that a given hero's life is inadequate and they must be improved, made superior, and so will simply move in for days or weeks at a time, fooling even the most intimate partners into believing that they have done nothing stranger than simply read too much Ayn Rand. Other times...Spiral Seven, known among those familiar with the Spiral as "The Sadist" has not been seen since the early 1990s, when it was driven out of the body of its most recent host (and cast back into the future, its powers burned out) by the combined efforts of the hero Evening and the villain Hologram (the two most powerful psychics in Freedom City in the early 1990s) - but its body count ranged into the high dozens. The Spiral has been quiet since the turn of the millenium - perhaps sizing up this new generation of heroes to see exactly what it is they're facing. After all, they don't age and there are plenty of other eras to play with. But none so exciting as our own. And the Spiral do get bored. Oh yes. Spiral-possessed hosts have whatever mental powers the GM thinks will make the adventure interesting, at whatever rank is necessary to make things difficult for the heroes. They are rarely deliberately wicked - but they have no respect for the individual rights of the people of the past and will play with them in whatever way they find the most satisfying. Taunting and boastful when exposed, the only one way to truly terrify one is to injure it psychically and send it back into the future - or far, far worse, find some way to isolate and restrain the mind inside the body.

I love this idea! took the liberty of polishing up your power formatting. APPROVED

well, I gots no beef, as the butcher says! - though you should probably add just how far her Notice range increment is with that extended vision APPROVED

Why is her brain so vulnerable to being poked?

That's enough to hit all six al-Darsahs - http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4667400/ And they're all down, because they're all minions! Well well well, let's go with this. go ahead and post, Giz