Avenger Assembled

It is now Terrifica who is up

The maddened ghost-in-the-flesh struggled against Sekhmet's grasp, but proved unable to escape from the lioness's flaming grip. "Narrr..." She snapped her teeth, eyes wild and face as feral as the cat-god who wrestled with her. "Ah'll kill you! Ah'll kill all of you! Miserable uppity scum!" The words were wrathful but the voice behind them was high-pitched and close to hysterics, terror flashing in those bright blue eyes. "Ah'm not going back in there! Ah'll skin you and use you for moccasins, you foul excuse for a feline!" Having seen villains at bay before, Caradoc was briefly brought up short by the look in Southern Belle's eyes - was that the unwilling host of the escaped creature, or the creature itself? "Feh!" sneered the possessed robot who was her archrival. "It's better than where you'd go if you were getting your eternal reward, monster! You should be thanking Liberty!"

Military Flyer PL: 10 (150) Abilities: 10 + 8 + 10 + 0 + 4 + 0 = 32PP STR 20 (+5) DEX 18 (+4) CON 20 (+5) INT 10 (+0) WIS 14 (+2) CHA 10 (+0) Combat: 16 + 16 = 32PP ATK: +8 [+10 Unarmed/+12 Ranged/+14 'walking the fire'] DEF: +12 (+4 Dodge, +4 Base, +4 flat-footed) Init: +8 Grapple: +13 Knockback: -4/-2 Saves: 3 + 4 + 6 = 13) TOU +8/+5 (+5 Con, +3) FORT +8 (+5 Con, +3) REF +8 (+4 Dex, +4) WILL +8 (+2 Wis, +6) Skills: 76 r = 19 PP Acrobatics 11 (+15, SM) Craft (Mechanical) 5 (+5) Diplomacy 12 (+12) Languages 2 (Arabic, English [base], Farsi) Medicine 3 (+5) Notice 13 (+15, SM) Pilot 11 (+15, SM) Sense Motive 8 (+10) Stealth 11 (+15, SM) Feats: 22PP Accurate Attack Acrobatic Bluff All-Out Attack Attack Focus (Ranged) 4 Attack Specialization (Unarmed) Dodge Focus 4 Environmental Adaptation (altitude) Evasion Improved Initiative Power Attack Precise Shot Quick Draw [Draw] Second Chance (Medicine checks) Skill Mastery (Acrobatics, Notice, Pilot, Stealth) Ultimate Skill (Diplomacy) Uncanny Dodge (auditory) Powers: 16 + 17 = 33PP Device 5 (25PP, Arsenal, Flaw: Easy to Lose, PF: Restricted [fingerprints]) [16PP] Bullets Array 12 (24 PP, PF: Alternate Power 1) [25DP] BE: Blast 8 (machine guns, Extra: Autofire) {24/24} AP: Damage 6 ('walking the fire', Extras: Selective, Targeted Area [Cone], PFs: Accurate 3, Improved Crit 2, Precise) {24/24} Device 4 (20PP, Falcon Harness, Flaw: Hard to Lose, PF: Restricted [Pilot +10]) [17PP] Immunity 3 (environmental cold, low pressure, suffocation [altitude]) [3PP] Flight 5 (250 MPH/2500 fpm) [10PP] Protection 3 [3PP] Super-Senses 4 (Extended Vision 1 [all visual, 100 ft increments], Low-Light Vision, Radio) [4PP] costs abilities 32 + combat 32 + saves 10 + skills 19/76 + feats 22 + powers 33 = 150 pts ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Design Notes: Here's my build for the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Falcon, aka Sam Wilson, not long after the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. (The idea is that Steve has introduced him to Tony and he's gotten some upgrades to his equipment - though not many!) I found Anthony Mackie to be among the highlights of the film - he played his character as a completely normal man who happened to be a badass soldier and expert flier (as well as an all-too-realistic hero in his work as a veterans' counselor) getting mixed up in a world of costumed heroes and super-spies. The Cinematic Universe dispensed with the many questionable elements of comic book Falcon's backstory and made Sam Wilson an Iraq War veteran who like Steve Rogers had found himself out of place in the America of 2014, leaving behind the 'streetwise' backstory and the ability to talk with birds and just making him awesome - a choice that worked very well indeed. This guy can do most of the things we saw Sam Wilson do on-screen - his high Diplomacy and good Sense Motive make him an excellent counselor for returning veterans (whether of Iraq or WWII), while his Craft skills let him take care of his gear and repair malfunctions that may occur in the field. He's fast and stealthy, just about right for someone who worked as pararescue during his service in the Middle East. His Medicine isn't that high, but he's good enough to keep an injured soldier or civilian stabilized while he evacuates them to a real doctor. With a STR of 20, he can carry Steve Rogers pretty well - though he's not Superman, so it's going to take some work! He's not as fast in the air as a jet, but he's certainly pretty fast - and much more maneuverable, to boot! When he's armed, he can't quite bring down a helicarrier on his own, but he can certainly cause it a whole lot of problems. If disarmed, he's PL 7.5 offensively and 8.5 defensively, giving him an excellent shot at going toe-to-toe with super-agent types like Brock Rumlow. His suit provides him some protection, but no more than a bulletproof vest; he's no Iron Man! He's not ready yet to inherit a team leadership role like Sam in the comics, but some more experience (and maybe the chance to buy some Charisma and Inspire) will help him out if you want him to go in that direction. I honestly think this guy would be pretty fun to play! He needs some Security Clearance or other Benefits if he's still working for the government, or maybe some more INT and Craft skills if he's the guy who built his gear in the first place. It wouldn't be that tough to change him into an alien space cop if you want, Hawkman-style.

There you go.

Suddenly, there came from above, and all around, a terrible booming laugh - one that made Tarva scream in utter despair! She turned and was ready to leap directly from the platform where they stood towards the nearly bottomless drop beneath their feet before the shaft they'd entered through suddenly slammed shut with a sizzling whine - as did the doors of the complex where they stood, all around. Tarva bounced off a force field before she could fall and landed back amongst the heroes as the voice went on. They were not even graced with a face. "Oh, Tarva. Did you really think you'd fooled me?" It was a warm, loving voice now, all cool, mocking control. "I've seen you naked and covered in blood, honey, your little shadow tricks and your little games don't fool me." He snorted and went on. "I don't even understand you - after all the things you've done, my little project gets your goat? But no matter. What bothers you won't be a problem for long." Overhead, the nearest pipes were beginning to bubble and their sides to slowly iris open. "You know, this is going to be a little messy, but I think Madrigal will pay me enough to afford a new lab." Overhead, a single drop of grey nanite solution fell and landed, sizzling, on the observation platform beneath. "This is the part where you run!" he added with a whoop.

Fast-Forward hesitated for a moment, a subjective eternity, as he studied the time-worn face of Slamdance. Hey, I don't think that's makeup. He zipped around Slamdance in the time it took Hologram and Cannonade to perform their own analysis of the man, then stopped just out of arm's reach. "Hey, Rick." He produced sunglasses, then peered over his sunglasses at the other man. Geez, what the hell happened to him? That was a real guy back there, you were in his head...is this some kind of shapeshifter mindgame or something? "We gonna do this dance again, or are you going to talk first? Because we've got all the time in the world - but it looks like your time is running out."

Frost will be making Notice checks as needed to look for familiar patterns. He has 20 with Skill Mastery in Arcane Lore, History, and Theo + Philo. http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4613914/= 27 on the Notice check!

Trusting that the healers could tend to the wounded, Frost strolled up to the smashed Humvees and began examining them closely, studying the heat patterns left behind by the recent fire. Ah, of course it must be out by the time I arrive! Such is fate. Hmming, he peered in the windows and at the damage to the vehicles themselves, looking for familiar patterns. "Have seen lightning-struck vehicles before, and clouds used against them as well." That made him peer up at the sky again, shooting a suspicious look indeed at those clouds. "Say fellows!" he called to the soldiers near the damaged jeeps (which, if he was honest, was what he still called US Army vehicle in the privacy of his own mind), "Did you see any angry Germanic gods come out of sky with murder in mind?"

This seems like an awful lot of punishment for a PL 7 with no tradeoffs to have taken. How on Earth did he beat two rampaging supervillains with the power to level a house and wreck a city block? What's his girlfriend's motivation for staying with him at this point, given all the bodies hanging around his neck?

Cobalt Templar found an exit easily enough - or DID he? The alley outside was trash-strewn, but part of their history, as far as they could determine from the discarded newspaper in the corner. The sky overhead was dark with the colors of early evening, as if they hadn't been gone long - and come to think of it, they hadn't spent that long in the simulation. Or had they? Looking around, Riff was able to identify the (now-smashed) parts of a high-end holographic system scattered all around them, the kind that might have been easily available to wealthy supervillains like the Psions...but even this didn't look to be sophisticated enough to produce everything they'd encountered inside the illusion. Meanwhile, Titan found his cellphone ringing - his contact back at the base. "Titan, check in! Where have you been?"

"Wait, who now?" Richard exclaimed, both in his head and out loud enough to get his son's attention as they paused in their filming of the Tyrannosaurus pack. He set down his camera and reached into his jacket pocket. He read out loud, again for Will's ears and Paige's mind, "'Ghorummaz the...'a serpentine dragon of stone and fire whose fiery breath is magma itself, Ghorummaz is mother and father to the dragon lines of Earthly magic and the Four Greek Elements. Ghorummaz is mother and father of storms and earthquakes, and the binder of darkness...' Well, he sounds like a gnarly dude!" He closed the 19th century book, thinking briefly about all the extra years the hand-written pages were seeing in his care, and added, "Nothing in there about him being 65 million years old, either! Jeez." Slipping the book back in his pocket, he turned to Will and said, "Okay, evidently there's a dragon god under the islands and we need to get back and find out what's going on. Let's go."

BR, feel free to make an Arcane Lore roll to know more about the G-man! http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4613821/ = 29 Fast-Forward does...pretty good!

Southern Belle tries to break the grapple! http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4613803/ = 25 And rolls terribly. OK, gimme a response to that one, Giz

The end of August and the beginning of September mark a very special time of year for citizens of Freedom City. Summer is ending and fall is beginning, vacation is wrapping up and the school year is beginning! Our theme for the August/September vignette is - WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION/BACK TO SCHOOL Did your family go on a cross-country car trip and let you actually get away from crime-fighting for once? Or were your good times in Seattle interrupted by the need to fight Grunge, the Flannel Bandit and his coffee-swilling crew of criminals? Did your feet stay on the ground with the normal people, or did you finally make it up to Farside City with your fellow heroes? Or maybe vacation is over, and you're back in school. Are you a Claremont student going back for your senior year? A new graduate looking at colleges, wondering if you need to bother given your caped career? A proud parent of a super-tyke sending your kids off to Nicholson again with the other super-elementary kids? Or maybe you're stuck balancing your classes with your heroing at a perfectly normal school - or one you THINK is perfectly normal before you learn the terrible truth? Either way - only one vignette per character, as usual! Go ahead and post your vignettes to this thread by September 30 so they can be included in September's post counts.

Hendawhit took deep, sucking breaths at the oxygen, nearly hyperventilating, but after a few anxious moments stabilized with Trevor's help. Still wearing only the tarp and pressing the mask to his face, he looked around at all the people above him, obviously sensing the simmering hostility still bubbling-hot among his victims and their families. Tentatively, he ventured a question. "Hier. I am hier in realis, wit Hendawhits. Baeddel. It must have been baeddel, It was...bad?" he said, as if carefully picking out half-forgotten words. "Spell faillered. Mistaka."

She cannot resist a demoralization of that magnitude! That does hit her - http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4612965/ = 26, though she is unhurt. http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4612975/ = 28 But she is grappled!

Meanwhile, up in the sky, Tiamat closed her eyes for an instant and had a flash of insight. When the Great Darkness had come and the others had died, she had fled deep into her lair with her most precious treasures and slept for an age, protected by mighty spells of unimaginable power that bound the rocks to her. But when she opened her eyes, the rocks had been bound too tightly and she was trapped! She could dream her way into the minds of those who lived on the surface and live through their savage hunts, but few had minds worth thinking about until the last few eons. The hunts of her thinking children had not been as good as her own - but they had been hunts all the same, and their sacrifices were welcome. She had sensed the great skyrock and mourned the death of her children above - but now they were being taken to a better place, and that was good. Now that they would be leaving, she could break free from her self-made prison and walk the world again...

Edge will power-stunt (and spend an HP) to create an Environmental Control effect to end the snow and banish any sort of fog, while luckily not letting it warm enough to melt the prints in the snow.

"Good point," agreed Edge, neatly wedging himself onto the machine behind Midnight and Wander. He rubbed his gloved hands together, then belatedly grabbed onto the snowmobile. Oh, right, the need to not die! "If I were a sneaky arctic guy, I would hide behind the weather...hey, there's an idea! Midnight, it might get super-bumpy if the permafrost melts or something! Come on, you guys!" he said with a wave of his wrapped-up sleeve in the direction of the other heroes. As they started up, he concentrated and the sky overhead began to brighten, transforming from grey to a shade of piercing cerulean blue that was almost blinding in its clarity. "Hey, I made it stop snowing! Neat!" he said cheerfully.

He cannot beat either of those! He learned about those things by praying to "Ghorummaz, the Dragon Within the Earth, Lord of Storms, the Earth-Binder" - a being that the dinosaurs worship as a god! Somewhat ominously, Ghorummaz appears to be a real entity - the shaman speaks to him by swimming to a nearby volcanic isle and speaking to a voice at the volcano's mouth. Ghorummaz is glad of their liberation - he has told the shaman that "your salvation will be my deliverance!"

Will vs 22 = 20 Notice = 17, he does not notice! First question - he knows that the sky gods will come soon and take the People somewhere wonderful. As far as Paige can tell, he is pleased about this - he had not been looking forward to the prophesied doom from the sky.

"Done!" It's a beautiful day along the Krakeelwater River in Wynberg Park, one of the loveliest spots in Capetown. There are families picnicking (well, white families, anyway), policemen chatting by a hot dog cart, and someone's transistor radio is blasting "Jessie's Girl" at top volume. This is the place that the Crime League has chosen to make their stand - this is the place where, with a flash of light and roar of super-speed brought to a sudden and memorable spot, the heroes make their arrival in the company of villains. Kyogen moved first, Clock Queen momentarily delayed by the need to check on her three passengers, at least one of whom didn't take kindly to subjectively superluminal travel brought about by powerful time manipulation. Being who she was, she approached the nearest authority figure, a policeman by his startled partner, and simply knocked him down, blades in her hand. An instant later, Clock Queen was at her side, hand on her arm. "Don't." And there was steel in that motherly voice, and her hand was on her own sword. "Why the hell not?" asked Kyogen curiously, casually kicking the other policeman across the parking lot to land in a boneless heap amid a suddenly screaming crowd of picnicers. The island of asphalt where they stood was the the only source of calm in the whole park thanks to the sudden violence of their arrival. "Eh. Seems unseemly," admitted Anna with a shrug as she kicked the downed policeman in the ribs. "Here, you can do the speech." "Fine." Kyogen took what looked like a small camcorder from Clock Queen, much smaller than anything that should have been on the market in 1981, and set it up. "Attention, Jet Patrol!" And suddenly Errant remembered this speech because in his training in New Freedom he had _seen_ it, seen it as something the future dictator was very, very proud of. "I am Jade LeFleur Harper, and I am Kyogen!" She was ranting into the camera now, practically stabbing it with a gloved finger. "I am the deadliest woman who has ever lived and I am that way thanks to the powers given me by Charles Darwin, powers that make me better than each and every one of you fat, bigoted Dutch bastards and your city full of the wretched genetic scum of the planet! And the same goes for my friends here!" "Put this on, honey," opined Clock Queen, slipping a domino mask on Cho before the camera in Kyogen's hand panned her way. "IIf you think you can cause trouble for me, and the rest of the future of humanity here, then you come here and you face it! I don't start trouble! I END IT!"

Riff's mighty note struck what at first seemed to be thin air - but then the air, the walls, the floors, and even Litwack himself suddenly cracked and flew to pieces like so much shattered stained glass! An instant later, the heroes were standing inside a black-walled room painted with high-tech gadgetry along the walls, now shattered like a dropped rock candy with silvery pieces scattered like broken glass. And they weren't alone! Dressed in a black trenchcoat over a bronze and purple costume, the same woman Riff had seen in the parking lot looked startled for a moment before she gave them a confident glare. "Well well well, so the heroes have seen through my techno-trap! What a shame. Perhaps a new experiment is needed. After all, once I've fooled you once, how do you know you're not being fooled all over again?" She winked - and as she did so, the nameless teleporter who'd been transporting so many people during this adventure appeared behind her, snatched her up, and disappeared!

What he says about history makes a kind of terrifying sense! Riff senses shenanigans, though, D42. Make a Will save vs DC 16