Avenger Assembled

Fast as he was, Richard wasn't on all the time the way a lot of guys with his powers were - so he made way for his wife to join him in the kitchen while he chopped peppers to go in the eggs. "I wouldn't miss this morning for the world. Big day for my big guy, starting at superhero high school!" With an expert eye honed by years of cooking on hot plates and RV grills before he and Paige had made it big, he added just a tetch more hot sauce before scooping in the cheese. High school was mostly something Richard had absorbed through stories about the kids of his friends and the occasional boring parent-teacher conference, but he knew this was a big moment for Will. For his part, he was actually rather looking forward to having one kid out of the house on a regular basis, particularly now that Holly's burgeoning powers sometimes made privacy tough to come by at home, but it was hard not to look at Will, his nearly-grown son who could crack the sound barrier when he wanted, and see the little boy in short pants who liked to climb onto his father's shoulders and hang on at super-speed, giggling all the while. Pushing aside the memories, he added, "You'll do great. Your locker combination might be different, but high schools are all the same when you get right down to it. And if anyone asks, remember, tell them "Yes, I am that Will Cline, of the awesome Clines.'" Turning to his wife, he added, "By the way, honey, there's a wicked storm over most of the Rockies. I must have lost thirty seconds plus going cross-country. Better wear your windbreaker to work today."

Wail - 20 Wander - 14 Cannonade - 12 We'll say there are 150 clerics of fighting spirit in the temple - 3 units of 50 each (the rest are being dealt with by the two raptors; well, be the one and a half raptor...) . +5 to their Force Modifier for being of that size. These are veteran troops, the elite of the Orthodox clerical forces, so their statistics are as follows. ATK: +9 DAMAGE: +11 DEF: +9 TOU: +7 INIT: +9 Group 1: 25 Group 2: 23 Group 3: 28 All right, so they all go first! Group 3 targets Wail, Group 1 targets Wander, Group 2 targets Cannonade 3 = http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4318349/ A miss! 1 = http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4318350/ ...A miss! 2 = http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/4318352/ ...a miss! Welp. Good thing this was just the distraction. Gimmie a minute here.

2AM (Los Angeles time) December 5, 2013 Richard Cline sipped his coffee and checked his 1989 Chrono-Quartz digital watch, a 20th anniversary present that he would get tired of about the time his son stopped asking him when he was going to learn how to text. Six am in Freedom City. Better get moving. "Juanita," he said, slapping a twenty down to pay for the several cups he'd drunk that morning, "your coffee is great every night, but this stuff?" he picked up the cup and winked, glad as ever he'd found this greasy spoon diner instead of the trendy coffee shops everyone else seemed to hit in LA. "Totally radical." He stepped out of the shop, let his feet hit the pavement - and ran. Back in the late 90s when he and Paige had been trying to have a kid, Richard had sat down for the first time with a science-type and figured out how his powers worked. Behind all the nerd stuff, the German guy they'd hired had been pretty straightforward: first he emitted a chroniton field that stopped time all around himself, freezing everyone and everything in a nanosecond bubble of no-time as his powers washed over everything like paint on a tie-dyed shirt. And then he turned his power on himself, accelerating his own subjective time so that he was running faster than a man, faster than a plane, faster than Johnny Rocket, as he laughed at the sound barrier and reached his typical cruising speed of 20,000 miles an hour. At the end of a run, he reversed the process, slowing himself back down again, then restarting local time so that he synched back up with the rest of the world. From Richard's perspective, though, it was like this - Olvera Street slowed to first a crawl, then a stand-still as Richard sprinted down the zigzag brick street. Pause. A moment later, as acceleration kicked in, the city erupted to life again as Fast-Forward rocketed down blurred LA streets faster than a jet could fly, Richard's phenomenal reflexes turning speeding cars and zipping bikes into so many standing-still slowpokes. Play. As he left the LA basin behind, Richard reached down his watch and hit the timer button, a smile curling his lips. "Time to fast-forward!" he exulted as he hit hypersonic speed, the wind in his face like a summer breeze as the world became a series of slow-moving images and garbled sounds, the thousands of miles between LA and Freedom City falling away like a sprint around the block. 8 and a half minutes from LA to Freedom City. Four slow, slow minutes buying a box of assorted doughnuts at World's Fair in St. Louis. His watch beeped at 6:13 as he hit the streets of Freedom City and Richard slowed down, coming to a halt just outside the Cline family's brand-new front door at six-fifteen on the dot. He glanced down at his watch and turned off the little timer, keeping a grimace off his face. Fifteen minutes to go cross-country. I'm turning into Don freaking Ameche here! He pushed that thought down, reminding himself that today wasn't about the old man, today was about his boy and the family taking him to school. Holly was asleep, or at least her lights were off, but even still there was no burdening his little girl with her dad's unhappy thoughts. He glanced back at the white picket fences around the house and opened the door; his leather jacket was hanging up and costume in his belt buckle faster than a normal man could blink, and he set the box of donuts down where they'd stay warm in the kitchen. All right, time for breakfast...Freedom City was cold, so reluctantly he turned on the electric stove, flipping his way through five or six cookbooks until he remembered where he'd left Will's favorite Mexican bacon and egg recipe. This was a big day for the kid - better get it started off right!

The titular warehouse wasn't very prepossessing on the outside - the metal roof was rusted in places and the masonry exterior was old and dirty, with only a giant inflatable Santa Claus on the roof looking down at the heroes like an omen. But inside conditions were much better - someone had gone through and fixed this place up pretty heavily. Most of the warehouse space itself had been converted to a big practice room large enough for multiple superheroes to compete against - there was everything from a giant monkey bars set to a series of rattan sword targets, with enough space for all of them to practice together simultaneously. There were bedrooms with cots enough for all of them and even a well-stocked kitchen, which had alongside its Thai food, Welsh potatoes and bacon, and black coffee, a selection of what turned out to be rare earth and mineral samples for the alien member of the group. A short, cryptic note was waiting for them, stuck to the fridge by a Freedom League Heroes Super Bowl XXXI magnet. See you on the big day. -R.

"Ohcrapohcrapohcrap, okay so there's a little cafe that serves Afro-Panamanian food that's really great, and next to that there are some apartments, and a little park, and next to that is the Ditko Street crosswalk where the lights look like two red eyes staring at you all the time, and then there's..." For his part, Mark was doing his best to _be_ a fundament of reality, calling on everything he could remember about the real Riverside to make sure it snapped back to normal the way it was supposed to. "And next to that is the house where I think Eldritch lives and..." His eyes closed tightly in concentration, Mark waved to his friends frantically. "C'mon, help me out here! We've got to do it right!"

When Miss Americana had returned to 'herself', Caradoc thought for a moment before pointing to their map of the complex and the nearest clear area she'd indicated. "The front door. The systems that control it can be taken from there - and if not, the door itself can be sealed shut behind us once we pass through. I am familiar with the properties of such steel." For his own part, Steve was acutely aware of the dangers of exposing an entire planet to infection, and possibly invasion. "We go together. No separation once we are inside." With no disagreement from his party, Steve led the way in the air towards the big front door, a structure built into the side of the mountain itself about a quarter mile away. He kept watch as the technopaths worked, shooting an unconscious glance back towards the distant plane that held Gina's semi-conscious body. He had a bad feeling about this place.

Al-Qaum flinched and drew himself up, glaring down at Midnight with all the dark intensity a god of war and night could muster - against anyone else, that eyeless black face with the cold fury behind it might have been truly intimidating. Trevor knew a cornered criminal when he saw one. "What? What nonsense is this? You see how these mortals prattle with their lies?" he demanded of the other gods. "They would defend the mortal even though he is a criminal in their realm, so that _that_ one and his daughter may continue to-" Evidently Mark seemed like less of a threat than the ones who'd already stumbled across his scheme; but Al-Qaum soon had much worse to worry about. Mark wasn't the one making his shadows disobey him! Even as the shadow tyrant spoke, his darker shadows, those at the fringes of his power, seemed to break from the cloud orbiting him and settle again over the heroes like fish breaking from a school to join another. "Wait a minute, that's what all this is about! You couldn't do it, could you!" exclaimed Edge suddenly, shooting a look at the others as inspiration struck him like a lucky bolt out of the clear blue sky. "When people stopped worshiping you, you had to do something to keep the lights on in here! So you-" "Enough! You mortals will be SILENT!" Al-Qaum was beginning to lose his shape, humanoid form flowing like ink towards something less human entirely. "SISTERS! I BEG FOR THE RIGHT TO DESTROY THEM AS IS MY RIGHT AS A GREAT GOD OF THE BLACK STONE!" "...you may call for their deaths, brother-nephew," said Manat in her impossibly-aged crone's voice, having turned to study her putative ally with some care. "But as _you_ well know we do not slay visitors." "Then...then I make the challenge!" he boomed. Facing the others (he seemed to have difficulty meeting Midnight's gaze), al-Qaum hissed, adopting more of the style of his ancient name and station, "By ancient law, I challenge you to War with me in the name of the criminal al-Darsah! If you win, his life is yours - when I win, I will destroy you all."

A couple of hours later, in the interrogation room proper, things weren't going well for the villain interrogators. A mulish Dr. Stratos, still in his bedraggled Zeus costume, was telling a disjointed story about his time on the Curator's ringworld that didn't seem to have much to do with the question at hand. "...and so then I tried flying to the edge and what do you know, I did! There was this weird planet full of blue Grue in the way, craziest bastards you ever saw, so I blasted some of them and flew the rest of the way with them chasing me. Damndest thing I ever saw! Funny thing is, the Grue don't like getting hit by lightning any more than anybody else, haw-haw-haw!" He laughed a horsey, nasal laugh at that and sipped his glass of water and added, "So then I got to the wall and there it was! Thousand miles high, I swear to God! Biggest work of engineering in the galaxy, did you know that? Just sitting there, making a mockery of everything I did to escape. Just sitting there...mocking me..." Stratos fidgeted in his power-restraining cuffs and glared through the one-way window at the place where he evidently thought the heroes were. "Just like you're mocking me right now!"

APPROVED

Initiative time! Field battle rules vs. dinosaur clerics, yeah!

The Orthodox temple turned out to be shaped like a gigantic Tyrannosaurus Rex like something out of a children's story, complete with amethyst-glittery purple skin, gigantic staring eyes big as a cathedral's stained glass window, and teeth that glowed like silver or polished aluminum at least twenty stories above the heroes' heads. "We build our temples in the image of our deity," said Runs-With with perfect seriousness, albeit a ghost of embarrassment. "That's why we were so lost when we came upon your temple." Thinks-and-Eats pulled the hovercar around behind the great statue-building, parking it in what looked like a small service lot, the grassy square overshadowed by a nearby statuary group of realistically painted velociraptors tearing apart what were clearly identifiable as Grue drones. "There's a back door here," he said, "but I dunno what's inside." He cocked his head towards what was, semi-circular or not, clearly identifiable as the janitor's backdoor and break area, complete with a waste receptacle stuffed full of discarded cans and paper wrappers that between the rotting meat and other things smelled very strange indeed to human nostrils. "I think..." He shot a look at Runs-With and suddenly growled, "I think we should go for them!" And with that, the little raptor charged straight for the door, the other raptor charging after him with a hiss of real delight!

Raven raised her arm and fired a whirling Ravenrang into the concrete between the heroes, a black cylinder poking up from the side of the projectile not buried in stone. "Inside you'll find the directions to an abandoned warehouse in Greenbank, one owned by a...friend of the family. Go there and train together, learn each others' moves, and adopt a new secret identity. Your team is called "the Birds of Prey", so find nom de guerres and personal styles that match; half the supervillains on Earth are undiagnosed obsessive-compulsives who won't believe in a team that doesn't match. They'll come for you on the night of the 27th to move you to the arena. All we know about that is that's somewhere near Freedom City, but outside the city limits. Stay together, and watch for our signal once you're inside the arena. We'll take this scum down." She looked right at Blod, or seemed to anyway, a measure of her working with the heroine in the past. It was a serious, tense moment as the heroes contemplated their situation - Suddenly, as if signaled, a large black bird emerged from the mouth of a nearby statue and gave an avian SCREAM of anger at having its sleep interrupted. As the bird flew away, the heroes looked around and realized that Raven was gone...

Frost pulled back his hood and smiled down at the river of lava with real pleasure, his eyes a faint but visible red in the underground shadows. "<Delightful>," he said with a sharp smile before turning back to the others, looking visibly relaxed as he took in the comforting heat. "I should retire and enjoy lovely underground scenery of fine Igneous city some night. Truly it is delightful place; like Muspell but with more pleasant company." He winked up at Canadian Shield and went on. "Much better to arrive in strange place with invitation. Makes relationships with local inhabitants so much more...delightful." It was warm enough, at least by his lights, for Frost to actually remove his gloves as he went, and the sensation of distant lava and compressed earth around him had him positively animated.

Don't forget to put in her Leaping distance as well as the multiplier, Roo!

I could not be happier to APPROVE yon sheet.

"On the contrary, Wraith, you're right on time." The Raven didn't so much emerge from the shadows as she seemed to appear in them, perched above the shadowy figure of an eagle bearing children on its back as if she'd been born there. The Raven's costume had changed from what few pictures of her the heroes had seen; thickened like armor over the chest and back, with faintly visible blue piping to match her glowing blue eyes along the flanks of the costume itself - but she was nonetheless the dark champion of justice who had been watching Freedom City since before the heroes on the rooftop with her had been born. "I called you here because I need your services - an acrobat, a shapeshifter, a master of muay thai, and an artist with the blade." - she had seen the Welsh ninja, then, for all that not so much as a glance had gone Blod's way. Or had she? "For the last six months," she went on, cocking her head like some predatory bird as she watched them all, "a team of my operatives has been infiltrating the Circut Maximus, trying to put an end to meta-fighting in Freedom City before any more kids get killed jacked up on zoom and crystal meth trying to be the next Sir Razor." She shook her head. "But my team has had...complications, and at the worst possible time. I need someone to go in as their replacements for the main event on Thanksgiving weekend. Word has it this is a "Venation" - a Beast Hunt. That means they've captured _something_, tied it down, and they're going to send people in to beat it to death on international black broadcast. If we can catch them in the act, the League can swoop in and arrest them all right there. That's dozens of thugs and low-level metas, hundreds of scumbag guests, and maybe the Roman himself. But to do that...I need people on the ground. I need people in the ring."

I don't have any real issues with the powers on the sheet - nice straightforward backstory, albeit maybe missing a few sentences! You should go ahead and put in her Leaping multiplier and distances.

Sooo, what does her Drain power drain?

Have I mentioned how much I love this concept? Because I love this concept. Go ahead and put in his lifting strength under super-strength, Exaccus - do it as (Effective STR X, Heavy Load X) - that's the only serious tabulation issue I have here.

Once you get the notation/HTML fixed, Exaccus, I think this sheet will be ready for submission.

"Yes, I have spoken with him at length these last few years. He admits that the Terminus is a mystery to his people, save as an embodiment of what was cast out of their realm in ancient times." Steve knew of Carson's deep faith in his god, and chose not to delve any deeper down that particularly murky path. He was in something of a sticky situation where he sat, not trusting himself to move without showing pain, but knowing his friend lacked the strength to carry his augmented body. "I do not need your comfort, my friend," he told Carson gently, pat-patting his hand with his own. "I have been wounded today, but all my hurts will heal with time. Those who went below, and sought to die rather than be taken again..." He let his hand fall away, and looked up at Carson. "I would have done the same had I been them," he said frankly. "Anyone would."

"I can provide a distraction above," added Caradoc in counterpoint to Miss Americana's words. "I am not capable of interfacing with machinery, but I can certainly convince machinery that the hour of its destruction is close at hand." He tapped the point of his massive blade against the ground. "It surely know we are here, or that something of this place will try and stop it - I cannot make it more alert. But a system focused on an external threat will not be attentive to clandestine infiltration from below." He knew full well the extent of Gina's power, especially with her physically present, and was sure the most helpful he could be was keeping whatever physical defenses were occupied. "Even if we are dealing with a swarm and not a singular mind, keeping them physically present elsewhere will make your works easier."

Steve spoke in a voice like the animate dead, his eyes looking at something beyond Carson. "There is no escape. Not for them, and not for me. I allowed myself to believe otherwise for a time, but in my heart I have always known this to be true. The past cannot be changed. The dead cannot be brought back to life." He pulled himself to his feet, keeping himself there by sheer force of will. "Thank you for saving them. It would be easier if I could...hate them for what they've done." He took a step forward, seemed to consider going forward again, then slowly but firmly slumped back into the bench he's been sitting on. "Do you think what they said is true? About the Terminus infiltrating other realms, divine ones, adjacent to this one?"

Hey SC, thanks for providing this interesting set of ideas - would you be interested in my moving this over to Character Building so people developing their sheets can take a look at it?

Here is the OOC