Avenger Assembled

APPROVED

"DRAGON: YOU WILL HAVE WHAT YOU SEEK." The great eye began to close. "BRIEF ONES: YOU HAVE SEEN THE GAZE OF GHORUMMAZ. YOU WILL SEE IT AGAIN. WHEN THE SKY FALLS." And then the eye closed, and they were back in the darkness of the vast cavern, with a dragon that might have been part of the living rock itself for all it was inclined to speak. In a low, slightly awed whisper from behind his camera, Fast-Forward commented, "He...he meant the asteroid, right?" He coughed. "I mean, I don't know a lot of magic stuff...but that had to have been it, right?" Unspoken was the unsettling idea, at least for Richard, that the dragon god had recognized them and knew it would encounter them again in the unimaginably distant future to which they would soon be returning!

As Set and Temperance returned, Caradoc finished sharing his news with the others, gleaned from the cellphone game of 'tag' that had finally ended with him getting through to one of the League's emergency contact operators. "...she is delivered of two healthy girls. What a marvel." Unaccountably, the happy news seemed to be making the shining knight tense, his gleaming armored form frozen with suppressed energies as he carefully stood in place, thick metal-shod arms folded behind his back where one hand gripped the other tightly. "Perhaps childbirth was what forced the spirit free. I have little experience with yon world of the supernatural," he confessed, tilting his head towards the now-recovered Miss Americana. "Are you well, my lady?"

As Wander's hurled missile struck home, Typhoon staggered back, battered by the speeding impact of the thrown weapon! Now that combat was truly joined from below, two of the al-Darsahs focused directly on the one who had attacked their father. There were two of them at first, one a man riding a wave detached from the sea as Nina al-Darsah sometimes did, another a woman who seemed to be staying in the air through sheer cussedness, her costumed body wrapped with a sheen of water that clung to her like armor - and with two simultaneous gestures they began pulling columns of water right out of the ocean dozens of feet below, rapidly intertwining the self-sustaining pillars of the sea together into one large, rapidly growing column of seawater that was beginning to spin with impossible speed!

Al-Darsahs 1 and 2 hold their actions. Midnight is up

Historian's Note: ABDUL SULTANI is still hale and hearty at the age of 101, though now a younger man has taken over as imam at the Lion's Head Mosque. He attributes his good health to his daily walks around the city, noting with a smile that "You meet all sorts of interesting people there." CLOCK QUEEN, aka Anna Cline, left the Crime League after the Battle of Capetown. She took her son Richard back to Freedom City to stage one last big score - but in the fall of 1981, just a few months after the battle, she and Richard were caught by POF-SWAT, an ultraviolent police "supercrime" unit whose commander would go on to head Freedom City's police department during the Moore years. It was Clock Queen who gave Roy Allquist his trademark facial scars - after he had put the restraints on her. KYOGEN, aka Jade Harper, returned to her native New Freedom after the Battle of Capetown. Shortly thereafter, following on the death of Othello, the President of New Freedom, she seized power in a bloodless coup d'etat. Her absolute rule, marked by cruelty and dogmatic politics, would last until her death in 2007, whereupon she was succeeded in power by her daughter Leah. Her remains lie beneath a marble statue built along New Freedom's shoreline, where a ten-meter likeness of Jade Harper looked out over a frozen Antarctic sea with blades in hand, always on guard to defend the nation that bears her indelible stamp to this day. Pictures of the Harpers appear in all New Freedom classrooms and private homes, and the long, tedious series of political ramblings she wrote during her time as President are required readings for New Freedom students. PAULETTE PSION was murdered along with all but one of her siblings and their spouses, by her father, Professor Parker Psion, on November 1, 1989, leaving her three-year-old daughter Frances behind as an orphan to be raised by Psion himself. She was just twenty-nine. Frances, embittered by what she believed to be her mother's murder by the Atoms and by her grandfather's twisted upbringing, is better-known by her super-name - EMBER PSION. RAIN SPIDER, aka Paula Van Der Berg, retired from the Jet Patrol in 1981 thanks to extensive injuries suffered during the Battle of Capetown. Like South Africa's nuclear program, the team disbanded itself (and destroyed its assets) to avoid becoming property of the new post-apartheid government in the early 1990s. In 1993, Van Der Berg was the only member of the former South African super-team to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 1995, she was killed rescuing President Nelson Mandela from a super-assassin hired by some of her former allies. At her request, she was cremated and buried at sea with no ceremony. Her suit was stolen a few years ago by the American super-thief who now calls himself Downtime.

~Hah, nice! Baby, you're the greatest~, he thought before getting down to the touchy business of what to do with the blinded, self-battering Slamdance. He zipped over near a blinded duplicate and called "Hey, Slamdance, stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself! Bwahaha!", enjoying the look on the thug's face before he went to work himself. ~Can't just punch him or he'll make ten more jerks; can't just hit him with Instant Sunshine or I'll crater the plaza floor...~ Luckily, he'd spent enough time fiddling around with his big book o' spells that he had a pretty good idea of what he could and could not do with it! Instead he traced green fire on the floor around the various Slamdances, his footsteps leaving behind a complex geometric pattern as he chanted at a rapid-fire pace, his voice on, well, fast-forward as he summoned forth the mighty harvests that grew beneath the light of green Spica! When it was done, he reappeared next to Hologram and declared, "Time for you to get in touch with nature, thugboy!" he called.

Move: Fast-Forward taunts Slamdance like woah - and gets a 20 with Skill Mastery Standard: he uses his Area Snare - DC 22 Reflex save for our boy Slamdance!

Comrade Frost Summer Vacation The old woman opened her eyes and found a monster sitting at her bed. "So," she croaked, her Franconian accent slurred by age and the effects of medication. "You have come to see me at last, Peshkov." She fixed rheumy eyes at the blue-white fiend who had killed so many of her countrymen in ages past - in ages past when she had been Die Mörderin, the finest woman warrior in the Wehrmacht, one who needed no special powers to kill the enemies of the Reich. "I know you came to Eagle, and Blitz, and Kantor, and all the others before their end - and now there is me! Does it please you to see an old woman withered and dying with age?" "Yes," agreed Comrade Frost, deciding not to mention that at least one person on that list was not dead at all. "It does." He sipped his tea, studying his old enemy with uncertainty that never showed in his cold predator's eyes. Thin and frail, she was so shriveled he could have picked her up like a child. With a face like an rotten apple and white hair like a puff of cotton on her head, Die Mörderin was a long, long way indeed from the woman she had been in 1941. But weren't they all? "It would have pleased me more to see you dead all those years ago, scattered on the ground like so much wheat, but this death is pleasing enough." He'd seen enough murders at her hands - the sort of savage, stealthy attacks with knife and hammer that suggested Die Morderin might have had a fine career as a serial killer under a saner German government. But then the Germans were ever defined by their madness. "Well then, come see me," she sneered, showing a few yellowed teeth still in her gums. "Ninety-seven years old and I have been a free woman all my life, while you have toiled ever for Stalin and his paltry successors. What a shame it was for you and the rest of you Bolshevik scum that the Western Allies gave me shelter for my secrets, leaving your pitiful Soviet Union to scrounge for scraps amid the cities and bodies of a violated Germany. And look at you. Still a slave to Moscow, though hammer and sickle are long since dead." "Your Fuhrer called me slave, before I froze his meat to his vegetables and smashed them with a hammer," said Frost with a predator's smile. "And look at you. All your legacy of frightfulness, all your years of slavish devotion to whatever power promised you protection, and what do you have?" He looked around the cottage. "A little room, a bed that reeks of your decay, and a few HIAG bullyboys outside taking a little nap against the chill." "My great-grandsons," said the old woman with venom in her voice. "I have known love, and marriage, and a dynasty that will stretch on long after my death. But what do you have, ice man? Flesh so cold no woman will share your bed, a heart so foul no one will touch it. And even your government sends you away so they can rub their filthy Slavic hands against the West without even a protest from you. Not that you would anyway. You were there at the fall of Berlin, you know what was fed to the beasts of Stalin and his henchmen-" Frost's teacup froze in his hands like ice, and with great care he set down the solid block before he studied the dying old woman. "You are taunting me into your murder, old woman, but time will do what the Cold War denied me soon. Soon a day will come when the last soldier of the Wehrmacht is dead and his great-grandsons snort cocaine in a discotheque by his grave; and a day beyond that your Fuhrer will simply be a ghoul lurking in the pages of history. A monster to frighten children with tales of the past." "And what will _you_ be then, Peshkov?" she whispered back, her face beginning to pale. "When there are no more parades in Moscow, no more old men clutching each other as they march through the streets, when there is only Dimitri Peshkov - the last of the Great Patriotic War. What will you be?" In a voice as cold as the Russian steppe, Peshkov replied, "I will be, ever, Frost. And you will be gone." She was dying as he watched, something with which Frost was intimately familiar. "Do you fancy yourself a hero of the war still, Frost? With your medals and your valor, and the bodies that lay at your feet? You could have stopped at Poland and won our surrender. How many dead Germans lay between the Soviet Union and your icy body in the Chancellery?" "Do you think to shame me with my service, woman?" replied Frost, his voice clipped. "I did what had to be done, for the survival of our people and the survival of our nation. Innocents died. It was a war. I have fought wizards and necromancers since 1945 and I have heard all the tales of woe and sin thrown at me again. I have seen the dead rise and judge me with outstretched fingers, and rejected their counsel all the same." "The Fuhrer....died, Frost, at the hands of...Slavic dogs..." Her breath was coming in short gasps now. "After he sent your people...to their graves..." With a great effort, as her face reddened further, she choked out, "but not so many as Stalin! Stalin died in his bed while you served his madness. You claim to have served your people, but you defended their killer!" Frost curled an icy lip and was silent for a long moment. "Perhaps. But he's dead now. And soon you will be with him - and I will see it happen. Goodbye, Mörderin." Frost stayed all through the night, and into the morning (going outside to chase away the goons she'd left outside as they roused to wakefulness) - and when she was gone with a last shuddering breath and a rolling o the eyes, he walked outside and sat beneath the morning sun, watching as it slowly rose in the east. Five to go.

That misses Typhoon - but here's an HP from Mark! So that's a 12+5=17+15 DC 33 Tou save for Typhoon. http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4660374/ = bruised and dazed!

"Back in a flash," agreed Fast-Forward with a trace of a smile. "You guys want anything?" he called to 1-800-Justice, and when they didn't disagree - he was off! Fast-Forward at full-tilt was something to see - they'd seen him in combat all that day, zipping around the battlefield faster than the eye could follow, but he was simply gone now, leaving behind a faint woosh that belied the hypersonic rapidity of his exit. The minutes ticked by, ten by Jive's watch, the only sounds where they were the occasional sound of settling buildings and the woof of a distant dog. Something might have been happening at City Center, from the flashes of light in the sky against the reddened clouds overhead and occasional low concussion, but there was no way to tell from this distance. And then Fast-Forward was back with the same gentle woosh, sure enough reappearing with an armload of thick, boxed pizzas that practically burst with the scent of cheese and tomato sauce. He'd even improvised an entire backpack full of soda - which in this case turned out to be nothing but Cherry Cola Slice. "Foodshere!" he called to the heroes as he sat down next to Paige and, in a snap, laid out the spread. "And I even paid for it legally, with money I..." He shook his head, then added, "It's already over in Chicago! There's something...on the Sears Tower, but the local heroes have it handled. I saw something on the news about them sending people over here."

"She has not been at her classes at the, uh, ye FLSCH," croaked Caradoc. He had figured out what spirit this must have been from all the conversation - and only now realized the danger that America's other star-spangled champion might have been in. "She is very great with child." He stepped away to try and call the League on the cellphone Gina had implanted in a functioning patch of flesh near his right ear - one of the few organic places on his body that remained intact while his armor was deployed. It had the advantage of allowing him to speak normally, even while disguised as Caradoc, or for that matter when wearing his armor at all.

"Oh my god..." Leaning against her husband, babies in her arms, Elizabeth Walton-Wright felt a feeling of perfect joy that was every bit as wonderful as the surprise double-birth had been painful. "Look at you, my little surprises!" She smiled down at her daughters, their faces wrinkly and heads pointed like the newborn natural-born children, big baby blue eyes staring up at nothing in particular. "Who would have thought that with the best super-science doctors in the world, there was a second one of you hiding in there the whole time?" At least those same doctors had gotten the preliminaries out of the way fast, cutting both cords and washing the babies off of bathwater and other fluids alike - letting the new family get close together as they should. She beamed at Trevor, tears in her eyes reflected in her husband's. Surprise child or not, their age or not, this was everything they'd wanted for so very long. Everyone had cleared out for a moment, giving them time for skin-to-skin contact as a family. "We don't even have two names!" "I think we should still call this one Madison," he finally said towards their first-born, who had a head of soft black baby hair that looked like it might one day resemble her mother's. "It's a good name. And this one?" He pointed to the other, a red-faced little girl with a bald head who began wailing in that high-pitched, inhuman shriek only little babies have. "Oh, little one, are you hungry? Poor baby..." As she soothed her youngest daughter, whose little legs were kicking up a storm inside her blanket, Elizabeth said, "Let's call her...let's call her Mary."

When Ghorummaz spoke it was with a choking roar that seemed to fill the whole cavern, an avalanche of a voice that seemed to be a mountain's words, a volcano's comment - and yet for all that, the dragon-god seemed to be whispering. "I AM MORE." Silence fell, save for the distant sound of falling rocks, somewhere in that great darkened cavern. "SINCE THE SKY TURNED WHITE AND THE STARS BURNED, I HAVE WAITED HERE BELOW. SOON MY BINDING WILL END AND ALL ABOVE WILL DIE. FOR AN AGE, THE WORLD WILL AGAIN BE MINE." It would have been incredibly ominous - if the falling asteroid wasn't about to create the world of humanity and all the histories the heroes knew. "CHILD." That great eye was focused on Tiamat directly now. "YOU COME TO ME BEFORE YOUR BIRTH AT THE TIME OF MY LIBERATION. WHAT DO YOU SEEK?"

"Hang on. A few new tricks." Richard reached into his jacket and snapped open the spell book he'd been casting from earlier and began zipping around the battlefield, leaving behind a blue-white givemeyourlightohasteroth trail of fire as he traced an arcane design the size of the Pyramid Plaza's central courtyard. "Man, this is tedious," he complained to one of the Slamdances as the starofwonderstarofnight latter was in the middle of ripping apart a Jonathan Grant campaign poster. "Not your terrible fashion sense and punk-ass punkery," he added to another who had thelightthatburnsawaythesin overturned a beverage cart, "I'm over that. It's this thing!" He hefted the book as he zipped a glowing circle around another. "Do you have any idea how tedious it is givethemyourjustice reading this little handwriting and following these little starcharts? I didn't even go to high school and this is all Victorian magic mumbo-jumbo! If I couldn't speed up lettherebelight! my perceptions of time, this would be like four, five hours! Totally not radical!" He finished by Paige's side and went on, "But it does have one big thing going for it. Everybody down. Whammy-shazammy!" He snapped his fingers and a celestial flash of blue-white light erupted from his fingers, detonating in the center of the mass of Slamdances with a tremendous eruption of soul-searing light with a glow that burned and burned and burned the eyes.

APPROVED

Fixed a math error I found. You need to fix the math in her abilities.

APPROVED

With a speed that belied his bulk, the shining knight Caradoc interposed himself between Sekhmet and Terrifica - not incidentally also providing another layer between Sekhmet's magic and Miss Americana. "You are not the god behind that woman's fate. And your vengeance is not hers." It occurred to Steve that he had met few gods in his time on Earth-Prime, and had few ideas of what powers they had - would this one, with her familiar face, smell the stink of burning linen on his soul? Hear the screams of the dead as they did yet die again beneath the soul-searing fires of an Omegadrone's powerpike? Why not? He did often enough. He went on, his croaking, metallic voice inside the armor firm without the heat of anger behind it. "Save your godly wrath for the soul that sought to bind another to her will. And the dead world that made her. It was her fate to be what she was."

Mark does a full Inspire. Wander is up!

But when Typhoon didn't fall, and the villains closed on the heroes, that was a rather different kettle of fish. "Nina, get out of there!" he called as her family united in a sphere around their father. "They're not on your side right now!" Crapcrapcrap Mark knew Nina was powerful, enough to easily be a superhero in her own right - but so was the rest of her family, and they were much bigger jerks than she was even on her worst day. After all, it wasn't that long ago they'd all been fighting them together. "Get back with us and we've got your back!" Hope she's not mad I blasted her dad! Oh well, I owed him one - jerk blindsided me today. Man, I bet normal people never have these problems with their relationship...In the privacy of his own head, Mark had to smile at that - now if they just could avoid a fight to the death here, he could actually smile on his face! Over the commlink, he called "Wander, don't try and jump on them, they'll just dive with you hanging on! They're cheating jerks! Throw something big and heavy! Midnight, make a Midnight Jet and blast them! You've got the Furion tech, you know how to handle these things!"

Edge What I Did On My Summer Vacation June 21, 2014 Mark sat by himself on a low hill near the edge of Freedom City, resting by the side of a red oak tree that stood just a few feet high. Freshly planted, within a few decades it would tower as much as sixty feet tall if they were lucky. "So anyway," he said aloud, "I really think things are working with Nina. I'll admit, when we first hooked up, I thought it was just one of those things. You know how it is," he went on, studying the setting sun in the west, "cute princess, daughter of an evil king, handsome young hero..." He stretched out on the long grass and looked up at the darkening sky. "But she's changing, because she's with me, she's really...being a better person," he finally said out loud. "Somebody I want to be with when we're not fighting, or screwing, or the stuff we did early on. And I don't know, but maybe I'm changing too." He studied the few visible stars, thinking about the Lor and Grue planets circling them so many hundreds of trillions of miles away. "I'm twenty-one years old. At the end of this year, I'll have my college degree and I can finish moving my stuff out of Mom's house. I've been to every continent and even into space; I've gone to other dimensions and I helped dethrone the Knight of Entropy. And now I can drink legally!" he added, fishing out a beer and cracking it open, leaving its companion sitting alone in the grass. "So that's something, anyway." He tossed back a shot of the cold Guinness and added, "You know, there's another reality out there where right now, Erin and I are married and we have a kid. A big kid too, like four years old! Weird!" He'd expected Trevor to be jealous about that one, if briefly, but the dark detective that was his best friend in the world had turned out to have a lot more self-control than Phalanx had had. "I think about asking Nina to marry me sometimes. We've been together a lot of years and we're both gonna be out of college soon, and now that she's broken with her dad..." He turned his head and looked to his right. "It's hard when that happens..." He was quiet for a while, drinking his beer, before he went on, "But that's dumb. I don't feel like I'm old enough to get married. Jeez, in my head I'm still sixteen and meeting all my friends at Claremont for the first time. Getting married's a big step, you've got to be sure you're with the right person and that _you're_ the right person before you hook up for life." He hmmed. "I guess it's OK for Corbin and Quo-Dis to get married – he's all old in his head now and Quo-Dis is like a hundred and fifty, so between the two of them that's gotta be mature enough. Trevor and Erin should get married, too, they're awesome! I bet they'd have great kids together. Or Eve and that girl in Canada, she sounds cool." He chuckled to himself, "Hah-hah, girlfriend in Canada, I wonder if she's just using her to...” Putting his hand under his chin, Mark's eyes widened. “In that case, maybe-” “No, no, she really is gay, I'm just kidding! But if she _wasn't_, I bet she and Joe would work really well together – they both kick a lot of ass and they know people from World War II. I wish Eve was around more, but I guess she's busy with her new team and her new house.” He looked over at the distant shape of the Dutemps building, the new structure clearly visible in the skyline even at this distance. “Now, back to who should be dating who...” He pulled his little pocket Moleskin out of his jeans and started making notes, adjusting the careful tabs he kept on his friends' social relationships, both the real ones and the ones that he thought would be just awesome if they pursued – it never hurt to know who liked what and who was dating who! By the time he was done, it was getting dark, and he slipped the book back into his pocket. “Shoot, it's getting late, and Mom's gonna worry if I don't call! And Nina's gonna go patrol alone if I'm not there with her, and she might get a little crazy with the bad guys.” Standing up, he dusted the grass off his butt and sighed, feeling a weight settle back onto his chest. “Man, I get really weepy when I come out here. Sorry about that,” he went on, reaching up to wipe his eyes. “Anyway.” He looked down at the stone at the foot of the red oak tree – Richard Milhous Lucas, 1946-2011. A Friend To The End. “Happy Father's Day, Dad.”

The spirit gasped, eyes wide - and then, as the magical heroes watched, went to the place where ghosts go when they die. For his part, Caradoc had missed most of the exchange between the heroes and the spectre, occupied as he was with looking over Miss Americana to make sure her pilot was all right. Secrets had to be kept here - a look, a glance, a nod behind his armor; and for all that they hardly exchanged a word he knew she was well enough. He approached just as the startled policewoman, a uniformed officer with short black hair and bright blue eyes, sat up as if she'd been poked by a cattleprod. "Jesus Mary and Joseph!" she exclaimed, "it was like...good God, what happened?" she asked, looking up at all the heroes. "Did I hurt anybody?" Caradoc looked around at the scene, where some considerable property damage had been done to the park, and said, "No. Only things - and that is small."

Cho felt a hand grab her wrist and suddenly she was accelerating, erupting out of the park and the carnage inside to take her place alongside Errant and Thoughtspeed. Outside the park things didn't look much better - Errant's tremendous effort had saved lives all around them, but the smell of death and fire was everywhere. Clock Queen, Cho's savior, looked around and called, "I'm gonna find Kyogen and get her out of here! You kids get the hell out of this place!" She looked at the fire and death, shook her head, and distinctly said, "No hero..." before she turned and bolted out of sight. As she ran, lightning crackled in the air, pulled from Thoughtspeed to Rain Spider's suit and back again, and before the South African super-agent - or anyone else, could react; there was a tremendous flash of light that enveloped the three time travelers! And then they were, all of a sudden, back on the waterfront of Freedom City - the sky overhead was dark and spattered with the few stars that shone through a city's glow and they were surrounded by groaning Yakuza thugs - and for a moment, it was as if they had never left at all.

"Oh, please." Frost snapped his fingers and cold snapped along with him, his body briefly a vortex of ultimate cold that sucked the heat from the surrounding air in the space of a few seconds. Before the chill could penetrate the shielded bodies of his fellow heroes, the icy chill faded as a brief snowfall fell on the landscape. The fog was gone; the brief flurry over before it began, but evidently it had been time enough for their opponents to escape. Frost looked around peevishly and stared up at the sky, his red eyes following the trails of heat their departed foes had left as they departed upwards. "They have taken to sky, and quickly as well. Feh, Gabriel could likely catch them, but not safely fight them alone. And others left by some other means that left no trail. Plenty of coward's paths for that." He snorted. "Mangy dogs, to run and flee when they fear thrashing at our hands." He picked up a still-flaming arrow in his hand and clenched it between his fingers, burning end first, as he hit his League communicator. "Fleur de Joie," he inquired over his communicator, "has yours flown the coop as well?" It was a logical deduction for a man who knew warfare as well as Frost - Fleur de Joie, ever a loyal ally, had not been at their side as they fought the Zodiac, so she must have faced an enemy of her own!