Avenger Assembled

Daisy landed on her back, hard, when the thick-necked costumed freak who'd dragged her away from the other hostages threw her down inside the broadcast trailer's small enclosed office. He was big and strong, with a body-builder's physique and a colorful outfit like a circus strongman "Mouthy #)@," he opined. "You should have just stayed quiet!" Daisy smiled at him and hissed. "You have no idea. Close the door." And he did. - Outside in the rest of the broadcast trailer, the other hostages had been suitably cowed by Daisy's seeming fate. "Now if anyone else wants to be a hero, get in line and wait your turn," said the hard-faced man with the automatic rifle who was the leader of the small group of regular mercenaries holding the broadcast hostage. "The rest of you, shut up and keep the feed going!" And sure enough, the feed came back on just as Ashley was saying "Wasn't exactly my idea. But somebody's got to look the Patriot in the-" - The Patriot and her interviewer had time to put their guard up when suddenly a figure landed between them, a black armored paragon with a lightning symbol on his chest and cape waving in the air behind him. "People of America!" he declared, pointing right at the cameras. "Your real protector - OVERMAN - is here!"

seems wise

The teens headed into the busy mall, where amid all their strangeness they were largely lost in the busy crowd. Though Neko had legitimately come to try and get Owain to actually buy some clothes and care for his personal appearance, she was thoroughly distracted by the Christmas decorations that had recently been placed around the mall. It was mid-November in Freedom City and though the Christmas shopping season hadn't technically started yet, there were candy canes and holiday symbols everywhere, busy sales going on, and and the line of children waiting to sit on Santa's lap! (It was a good press this year, complete with costumed elven attendants and everything.) It soon became apparent that Neko had no idea who the bearded fellow in red was, and Owain's comments about "that is hardly how elves comport themselves, now is it?" were not really helping anything. (Though Owain hadn't raised any issues with anyone else's Christmas celebration, he had opined on campus that Christmas was a holiday to be spent giving to the poor and needy, not throwing festivities for one's own self) She got as close as she could, peering at Santa Claus as she leaned over the 'candy-cane fence' that kept the children moving in a neat and orderly line, her nose wrinkled as her ears caught everything the children were whispering to the 'right jolly old elf.' And so it was that she was the first in position when the skylight overhead blew off as if from a mighty storm and three terrible figures plunged down into "Santa's Workshop"! There was a great crash as screaming children and parents began to panic and flee, even as voices emerged from the wrecked fiberboard buildings that had once looked like the North Pole. "HO-HO-HO!" boomed the giant in the middle of them, a muscular fellow wrapped in a red and white furred outfit, a fiery crown of candles atop his head. "There is-hey! Hey stop screaming you little brats! Listen to me!" But the panicking crowd was in no mood for a supervillain's speech, and the big guy's face flushed red. Next to him stood a skull-faced figure in red, carrying two menacing looking gas guns, and on the other side a sinister glowing figure in green. The students didn't know the one in the middle but they knew the other two well enough; skullface was the Red Death, a murderous anti-capitalist supervillain, and the glowing humanoid form was Hiroshima Shadow, among Japan's most fierce supervillains. The latter certainly seemed to be in fine form, rising into the air and declaring "Yankee scum! I told you we should just have burned them!" Red Death immediately shouted back that they were here to send a message to the children that their parents had lied to them about Santa Claus to make them wage slaves of late capitalism, seemingly blind to the threatening stampede in front of them. For her part, Neko stared - and stared - and stared at the glowing green figure of Hiroshima Shadow, her small mouth open, green fire reflected in her huge yellow eyes.

Okay, nobody is flat-footed for what follows!

Neko cocked her head like a curious cat as she looked up at the building, her face hard to read. Bent on all fours with her tail lashing behind her, she looked more like a cat than Luke and Leon had ever seen. But something in her eyes wasn't cute at all. She took a moment to compose her thoughts into English, then said "Men. Guns. A...kojin, like this." She snapped her teeth in frustration. "They come!" "With respect, fellows, Neko's magic does not hide. But mine does." Owain stepped back and put his hands on Luke's scaly body, repressing the urge to shudder at the touch of draconic flesh. "You will have to touch the dragon if you wish to remain hidden," he told Alice before turning back to his dragon friend. Why did a boy with such a striking figure have to turn into something so fiendish? "Anweledig," he said, and abruptly Luke, Leon, and Owain vanished from the sight of any onlookers. Neko, still crouched like a big cat, suddenly hissed; and it wasn't pleasant. Behind them, the ground warped, bubbled, and out rose a gigantic flaming skeleton! It towered some ninety feet tall when it was done, clearly visible to all inside the building and for that matter anyone nearby, and then it shouted in a voice that roared like thunder: Dare ga watashi no niku o nusunda no?! Over the sound of the giant skeleton's roar, Neko scrabbled up onto Luke's flank and hung on for dear life as the skeleton extended a gigantic bony hand towards the building as if it sought to climb up and devour all who stood within.

Neko blinked and stepped away from Owain and Chimera, incidentally leaving the spell that hid her from view. She faced the jackal-headed man and cocked her head, her eyes reflecting golden fire from the light in front of her - exactly like a giant cat's. "You see me?" she hissed. There was now a steady drip-drip-drip from the walls and Chimera could see a red fluid dripping from them that pooled and flowed like blood. Neko herself seemed to be undergoing a metamorphosis as she stalked towards Mr. Tak, her limbs distending and hands turning into claws, eyes bulging with madness. What Neko was thinking was that her teachers had been right and that dark magic had dark consequences, but lacking the ability to say that in English, she said "You see me?" She floated suddenly in the air, dark hair obscuring one eye, fingers extended into talons as she reached for them. "YOU SEE ME YANKEE!?" she demanded as suddenly a terrible wailing sound came from her mouth as if the screaming of a giant horribly starved infant, and all around them and out into the corridors, a vast illusion that penetrated even onto the stands, came the sound of men screaming for mercy in English and Japanese, a cacophony of slaughter. Meanwhile, the real Neko dropped to all fours and ran like Hell for the door. For his part, Owain appeared again, his form collapsing again to that of a wolf, and interposed himself between Chimera and the thugs, giving a menacing growl to back up Neko's terrifying illusion.

Intimidate check: 27

okay, let's start with Notice checks. Patriot has 25 w/SM.

Okay, let's see some Notice checks! @Spacefurry @Nerdzul

And you - still the pretty blonde? Come on, Eira. I am not a pretty blonde. I am a gorgeous blonde. Eira and Kay cocked their heads and looked at each other, eyes unfocusing, before they turned to address the organic in the room - on the runway? Kay extended her left "foreleg" to shake Davyd's hand, smiling at him with her teeth as his hands went around cool, vaguely chitinous metal. Her accent was distinctly British but her voice tinny and obviously artificial, for what had to be a top of the line robot. "Hello, Davyd! Welcome to Rurland. I'm Kay. You can think of me as Rurland's Minister of Culture." "Kay has...risen far since she came here," said Eira diplomatically, her hands folded behind her back. "She is about our age." "An advantage of a machine society is that we are not held back by the same sad prejudices of so many organic nations," said Kay warmly. "The security escort was necessary," she added with a look up at the birds. "We have many enemies here, especially with Russia's mobilization against our Ukrainian neighbors. Would you care for a ride?" she asked, gesturing to the limo.

Neither Owain nor Neko seemed keen to stay in the room with the seer, making a quick exit up to the bathroom door, then disappearing out through another illusion as Neko did her best to make it appear the door had never actually been opened. "I suggest we make our departure quickly," murmured Owain as they headed out quietly into the corridor, keeping his voice low. Lacking any better ideas, the two of them headed out into the corridor. "The Tyger has hidden himself beyond even your eyes," he told Neko. "And if there are enchanters here, they may yet see through mine own or Neko's works. I would say flee now but I would not simply leave these people to the dark magic of this place." Neko kept her own council at that, then said, "Your man? Have you see him?" to Chimera.

Neko's using her ESP to scan the place - let me know what she spots!

Neko had been following Leon's joke as best she could, wondering if this was the sort of thing she could tell Danica later. When the glass crashed open, though, she cocked her head and listened to the long fall from above. She was by the side of the body almost as soon as it fell, her wide yellow eyes staring down at the twitching wreck of a man. He is dead. There was nothing here she hadn't seen before. With a blank expression on her face, her magical 'disguise' fell away, revealing her eats flat against her head, her tail curled around her legs as she stared up at the building. She concentrated; and suddenly in every dark corner of the building above a cat watched and waited, its eyes and ears telling its maker down below everything that went on. By her side, Owain knelt down by the corpse, his face fallen and his voice a low murmur as he whispered, "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Animae eorum et omnium fidelium defunctorum per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace. Amen," he stood up, his fists raised, missing his sword back at the dojo. This had been supposed to be a safe evening. "A beast has been upon him. Not - not a wolf, or a lion, or a dragon..." He hesitated, then pressed on, "there is something up there."

so At that moment, a police car pulled up nearby, its lights and sirens flashing. It was definitely an older car than the ones Leon was familiar with, certainly belonging to the apparent time period. The officers who stepped out were a timeless pair of cops who seemed right out of Central Casting; an older white man with a greying mustache and a younger black officer with a smaller mustache. "Hey!" Greystache took the lead, marching right up to the kids with his hand near his weapon. "Whaddya you punks think you're doing?" he growled, seeming to target Effigy in particular. The officer was hanging back, watching the Claremont arrivals and speaking with some urgency into his radio. Meanwhile, Danica's efforts at a physical retreat weren't accomplishing much. But she realized that, standing where she was at almost exactly the spot they'd appeared in, she could distinctly smell the desert scene they'd so recently left behind...

Sounds plausible.

There were no thoughts in the bird's mind at all - not even the usual hostility towards a stranger that a goose would feel when near an osprey. Or a human. Or another goose. Or a Grue. But nonetheless it fixed its gaze on Davyd and honked, a sound eerily like a goose would make but one distinctly mechanical. Precisely 47 seconds later, every goose around them made an identical noise. With their avian escort, Angelic and Horrorshow made their landing at Rurland's airport, a wide X near the middle of the country's borders with a series of low pyramidal buildings nearby. At Eira's direction, they landed near what looked like a stretch limo, albeit one with no visible driver, as their avian escort flew away. There was a momentary pause. There were workers nearby, helmeted humans (probably?) in the company of multi-limbed machines that seemed to be clearing metal debris off the runaway, but Eira's eyes were on the figure emerging from the limo. She was feminine, vaguely, with a gold and purple body and an extra set of curving limbs that lay above and below her torso as she approached them; multi-eyed and multi-limbed, she looked as much arachnid as humanoid. "Hello, Eira; and friend." "K-kay?" said Eira, sounding briefly taken aback. "That is a - profound change." She approached the other young woman, walking around her and studying her with fascination, briefly having forgotten her escort entirely. "I like it," she whispered throatily.

Delighted that Jessie and her protege were bonding so well, Aquaria hopped over next to Utsawa and stuck to him like glue. She wasn't terribly interested in the Surfacer art and architecture, all of which looked and smelled much the same, but she wanted to make sure she was giving the boy what he needed. "Ah, look at this!" she croaked cheerfully as they found a wall-sized tapestry of the Namazu. "Such a fish! And it lies beneath the islands?" "Not...as such," said Gary carefully, "it, ah, is in another dimension, as I understand it, only accessible by magical beings. I'm sorry," he said apologetically, "magic!" He laughed a little nervously, dismissing the idea just a little. "And when the Surface gods fail to watch it, it seeks to escape. Hmm." Aquaria croaked, bobbing her torso thoughtfully. "A tale worth telling! They are wise to fear such things!" She rumbled philosophically, then quieted as they moved onto the next room - the one depicting Japan's modern history. There was much to see here; Japan's industrial and technological development had certainly been impressive, but as Gary mentioned - most visitors came to see the material on the Second World War. This section of the room had obviously been quite carefully assembled. There was little here to glorify the Hinomaru, who were themselves only remembered positively by Japan's nationalist far right. Rather the exhibit showed the way many of Japan's future superheroes survived the campaign of strategic bombing waged against their homeland, or those few Japanese agents who had worked alongside American superheroes to try and liberate their nation from the militaristic cabal that had dragged it into war. There was a simple image of the Hinomaru against the wall; a sepia-toned painting that looked vaguely like a group mugshot for the Crimson Katana and his gang, right down to a cat-eared girl in a sailor suit, tail curling behind her, her head crowned by a circle of flame.

"We're both in, ah, law enforcement," said Ashley a little guardedly, squeezing Fa'Rua's hand. "Though my work is a little more down to earth than hers. I can't really drink hot tea through a straw, but if you have sweet iced tea that would be lovely." The level of unsweetened tea that people from this far north drank never ceased to faintly appall the New Orleans-raised Copycat. "I do make it up to space from, uh, time to time." She thought about telling them that her last extensive space trip had come out of the theft of a large elephant along with some kidnapped Claremont students, but decided that story had probably gotten back to the Espadases and would be too easy to trace to her. Once they were all settled in, Ashley said "So, let's see. I knew Ellie a little bit when we were in high school, but I didn't socialize much back then, so we mostly got to know each other through our mutual friend Wander, you know, the starship puncher, and the, ah, the gay community here in Freedom City. She's the first person in the community I came out to," she lied smoothly, not particularly eager to discuss the politics and emotional weight of outing herself to a bunch of high school kids when she had barely outed herself. "I just want to make sure Fa'Rua knows who she can work with in the community when I'm not around. There are a lot of aliens on Earth right now, but a lot of them are here as refugees, so they're not always friendly to space-cops."

"Oh, well..." said Owain, his voice trailing off. "I suppose I've always hoped for a return to Logres. My home is far out of alignment with this dimensional plane but your great wizards hope it might yet be found." He glanced over at Neko, who was staring at the ground, and coughed before he said "I - well, you see, there are many realms of Logres, many of them very different from each other. Worlds where the old faith of the druids be the true faith of Camelot, others where we live as our ancestors did after the Romans left our land, others with science beyond even this time, and many more enow. Mine own Logres was close in the time of the Second World War, but it is far now. My mother and father are there still." He fell silent, looking rather pensive. This time it was Neko who broke the silence. "I did not know," she said in her slightly sing-song voice, "but my friend Merlin, the monkey, he told me I should make 'reaction videos.' But I don't know anything about that." She shrugged. By now they were at the front entrance to the local mall; a older place that had been standing there for longer than - well, longer than two of them had been alive. "Hot Topic is nice," she opined, "but not clothes for boys like Owain."

If she rolls well enough on her Computers check, Angelic is familiar with a great many things.

"We are safe," whispered Owain reverently, "as were the knights who stood with the enchanter Menw when they battled the giant Ysbadden. We should depart. This is not a safe place," he told the other two, especially seeming to speak to Neko. "We must find Tyger," whispered Neko in return. Her tail dangling low and between her legs, she led the way past the last goon to the closed door. With a moment of concentration, the door itself seemed to stay firmly shut as the three of them made their silent, invisible departure out into the hallway. "Came to find him," she told Jennifer. "Why you here?"

Rurland was not so big from the air. Oh, a thousand square miles was certainly big enough - but it was closer in size to a large American county than a nation as such. Still, Davyd could easily see the differences in the air as they approached. The landmass below visibly glittered with a faint dusting of sparkling silver, as if he was looking at rock permeated with mica, and arrays of geometric shapes of all sorts lay over the land in the familiar grid patterns of a developing city. The locals seemed to favor geometric designs everywhere - cubes for the residential neighborhoods that were mostly the human refugees who had settled in the nation, spheres and other rounded buildings for the mechanical in nature, and perfectly straight roads for travel. And what travel there was! Davyd could see what looked like repurposed Ukranian cars down below along with rapidly moving mechanical craft of all sorts, some of them shaped like vehicles, others not. There were quite a few geese and other birds in the air and a V-shaped wedge of them joined the flying duo; Angelic flying with her hands out in front of her, Davyd at her side. One of the birds turned and looked right at Davyd as they flew towards the central airport, and he could spot its glowing red eyes...

Sea Devil hopped out to the middle of the giants and leaned on her trident, deciding to try another round of diplomacy with the great Surface-Men. "Behold! We have shown our strength!" She snapped open her helmet, showing her great fearsome teeth, large enough to tear off the limbs of these unfortunate fools if she was so inclined. Fortunately for them, she was not. Instead, Aquaria struck her trident against her armored chest with a loud gong noise and extended a three-fingered hand to the most likely-looking of the fallen giants. "But we are stronger together! Tell us of your ancient wounding!"

Ashley made a small noise that was almost a laugh. "Yeah," she said, "I have." She wondered if Olivia was expecting to hear about school hallways, police department locker rooms, or the rarified world of the Freedom League itself - knowing all the while she'd never say a damn word about those places. "But I'm here, right?" she added philosophically. "I'm a damn superhero for pity's sake. So I can't complain. Whatever stories I have, I know other people out there have it worse." She considered a moment, then said, "That's why I want people to know. I'm Vietnamese-American, I'm a police officer, I'm bisexual, I'm a woman; and I'm here, wearing these colors. There is no country in the world where somebody like me could exist except this one, and I'm proud to be fighting for us."

"Everything I wear is the property of the US government, with a little help from some of our friends in the super community," she said, which was all certainly true enough. "I know there are people who ask questions about this," she added. "I'm about to draw my weapon." She drew her sidearm and laid it down on the table between them, then said, "There are people who think it sends the wrong message for a superhero to carry a gun." She hesitated for a moment, sorting out her thoughts, then said, "I respect guns. I grew up around them; I've been carrying one on and off for ten years now. This weapon is here to protect other people and myself from the kinds of metahuman threats that don't respond to a few kind words and aren't interested in negotiation." It was mostly hippie nonsense to say otherwise if you asked Ashley, but that was definitely not a conversation she wanted to have on national television. "You can't always assume somebody in a cape is going to fly down and save the day." "Not everyone has superpowers or access to a superhero. I can't make energy swords and I can't stop bullets with my bare skin. What you see is what I am," which was technically true if you could look closely enough to see metahuman DNA, anyway. "That's why I carry a gun." She picked up her weapon, went through demonstrating for Olivia how she checked to make sure no energy cells were currently active, then stored it again at her waist.