Avenger Assembled
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"Miss Americana is here?" Steve flushed along his scars at that, putting his hand in his sport jacket pockets. "That is, uh, a surprise." He leaned close to Gabriel as they boarded the elevator to the psych ward, his voice quiet. "Listen, Gabriel, while we are down there, if you could...keep an eye on things with her for me, that would be very helpful. Things have been very...complicated between us lately and I don't want it to interfere with the operation." He coughed a little and straightened up, still looking a little pink along the lines in his otherwise dark face. "This is a very important day for me. You know what it means for me to confront even a shadow of the dark lord Shadivan Steelgrave." He looked away as the doors slid open, letting them on the psych ward level. "It would be...appreciated, my friend." - "All right, I'll make a note of that," said Officer McInnis, frowning as her narrow-tipped marker squeaked along on her clipboard. "Outside of the whistler there, things have been mostly quiet today. 45034 is off getting her art therapy today, so it's just us and you-know-who down here. What can you recommend for anti-sonic material in the meantime? We can get almost any part in under 24 hours." She cocked a finger towards Shadivan Steelgrave, the goateed despot still snoring in his bunk. As she spoke, the desk officer, Officer Johnson, a middle-aged African-American man just beginning to grow a paunch, was just rising to his feet greeting two familiar faces. "Special guests today," she murmured. "Talking to Steelgrave about that Terminus stuff."
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Dragonfly + Interceptors: Arms and the Man Blod, Warp, Kit, Blue Jay, and Heraldo: Pale Moonlight Velocity, Jubatus, Silver Spider, and Bee-Keeper III: Time and Chance Gabriel, Harrier, and Miss Americana: These Chains On Me The Liberty League, Cobalt Templar, and Renard Blue: Counterfeit Medications Forthcoming Young Freedom: Everybody Wants To Be Freedom League Auxiliary: Thank You Very Much
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Feel free to post. I'll let Ari know when stuff starts happening.
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The Interceptors + Dragonfly deal with some problems.
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January 15, 2013 Morning West End There's a man in a giant robot suit marching down the street, calling down vengeance on all who have oppose him. Just another day in Freedom City. "Fools!" boomed the voice of the giant automaton, the pilot just visible inside. "Everyone always said old Jerry Craven wasn't ever going to amount to anything, but look at me! I've got a giant warsuit! Now I'm big, and YOU PEOPLE ARE SORRY! AHAHAHA!" He laughed manically and stomped forwards, people fleeing in terror as he made his way from the warehouse that he'd simply walked his way out of, heading in a leisurely fashion towards the sea. His suit was big, towering as tall as the small tenements on either side, and wide enough that he nearly brushed them on both sides as he went. This was a big problem for the neighborhood; one false move in that big suit and the whole thing would come crashing down on the neighborhood!
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Velocity, Jubatus, Silver Spider, and the Bee-Keeper III deal with some problems.
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There are fewer gun battles in the Fens than you might think. It is true that the neighborhood isn't a safe place to live and that crime is pretty common. But it's also true that there's not enough money floating around to really support a gang, much less a real syndicate operation. For the most part the Fens is where the heavy criminals go to score some cheap pornography or some relatively low-cost drugs. The most violent crime you're likely to see is the occasional giant coin golem robbing the place. Most of the time, anyway. The gun battle inside and outside the decrepit old warehouse had been going on for minutes by the time the first heroes arrived, the conflict between a rough-looking biker gang on the outside and what were (from the gang soldiers visible through the windows and from their shouts) a pinned-down group of Russian mafiya. The two groups traded shots and shouted obscenities at each other, the bikers using their mobility to try and cancel out the cover of the Russians. Normally even so, a half-dozen bikers against several dozen mobsters would have been a fool's errand. If not for the laser cannons they were carrying. "Pew pew!" yelled the leader, a stalwart fellow in black and red as he fired a shot from his massive handcannon that disintegrated a chunk of brick as big as a man's torso. "Yeah, these are the best damn things since sliced bread! The Red Devils are going to take this city back from the Russkies one street at a time, yee-haw!" he ducked as a bullet whizzed over his head, but didn't so much as wobble on his bike as he returned fire into the warehouse proper. The locals, no fools, had long since cleared the streets.
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Blue Jay, Warp, Heraldo, Kit, and Blod under Arichamus' watchful eye deal with T-baby problems.
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January 15, 2013 Bayview "...and there are even rumors, my friends, of Terminus mutants so powerful that they can enter our minds and control our thoughts, taking away our God-given free will. Now I think the American people deserve the right to decide if they want their children to be in school with Terminus mutants. To be taught by Terminus mutants! Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that Terminus mutants are very real, and that they are among us. We must know who they are, and above all, what they can do!" Aaron Walsh's rallies are always raucous affairs, the blue-collar Freedom City Congressman being something of a political showman. But something has happened recently, perhaps in the wake of his recent election, that's given the Congressman's simmering anger at the world outside South Freedom a particular focus. "Am I saying we should _abandon_ these people? That we should turn our backs on the _victims_ of Omega? No!" That silenced the crowd in front of him, a mixed bunch of Bayview locals who for a moment looked like they were ready to go beat up a T-baby or two. "Many of you, my friends, have lost family, or friends, to the forces of the Terminus. The wounds left on our bodies, and in our hearts, can't be healed as easily as those fixed up by Dr. Metropolis. The national T-Census will not only help keep us safe by letting us know the strength and power of the T-mutant problem, but it will also be the first step to finding a cure. So that our sons, our daughters, our friends and our family, can live free from the Terminus. Now and forever, I make you that my pledge! No! More! Terminus!" He pounded on the dais and the crowd roared. Maybe this wasn't how they had planned to spend Croatian Independence Day, but Walsh's charisma had swept the audience along anyway. Across the street, a less-friendly crowd, mostly college kids and hero groupies, had taken the other angle. "No more Walsh! No more Walsh! Take your hate back home!" The campus radicals are a plucky bunch to be out here in a Freedom City January for the sake of a protest against one of the most controversial men in Freedom City, bundled up beneath parkas and breath turning to steam. They waved banners high and chanted, "All heroes welcome! All heroes welcome!" The mood between the two crowds was getting ugly, especially with rumors that at least one T-baby group had put a hit out on the life of the Congressman. Walsh didn't seem to fear the danger, though, standing alone on the stage as he whipped up the crowd of his supporters, his wife, son, and traveling party guarded by uniformed Freedom City cops among the honored guests at the celebration.
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Gabriel, Miss A, and Harrier get to the bottom of a serious problem. Miss A can tell that it was sonic damage, slowly applied over many months, that fractured these circuits.
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January 15, 2013 Blackstone Prison With rumors of clandestine Terminus activity circulating through the city, it was only natural that the Freedom League wanted to interrogate their most high-level Terminus prisoner...and only natural that the most experienced expert on the Terminus would be part of the interrogation. Steve was waiting for Gabriel when the latter arrived on Blackstone Island, standing near the outer perimeter fence in a suit and tie and looking as menacing as any of the prisoners inside. "Good morning, Gabriel," said the former drone, his expression hard to read as he faced an imminent reunion with the monster who had destroyed his life. "Thank you for calling me on this case." With a faint smile, he cocked his hand towards the outer gate where the 'blackguards' were watching attentively at the arrival of the famous Gabriel. "They thought I should wait for you to actually go below. It seems I set off the security system." - Down below, in the ultra-high-security wing where the clone of Shadivan Steelgrave was currently sleeping in his cell, the man in the cell opposite was whistling. Miss Americana had been called in to repair a very high security, albeit damaged computer system; the tough, albeit rigid, circuits inside the cell's door control, among the most high-security in the entire facility and a restricted design trusted to only a few super-geniuses, had fractured into pieces like broken glass the night before. Only a backup system had kept the big impervium door blocking his cell from sliding right up and out of the way. "Yeah, 37042 thinks he's funny that way," Officer McInnis was telling Miss Americana, the stocky blonde rolling her eyes with a guard's amused distaste for a persistent prisoner. "Courts say we can't actually stifle him if he's not attacking people with his sonic powers, and he's been in here long enough to know the score. Nothing says we can't put you in solitary, though, does it 37042? " she called, rapping on the impervium with her billy club and making the whistling stop. "No pretty girls like me and Miss A to look at in there!" The only response was a single, defiant wolf whistle and a wordless grumbling that finally lapsed into silence.
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ooc Counterfeit Medications (OOC)
Avenger Assembled replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in Archives
Trawler's tables: Gather Info: Knowledge: Art: -
Cobalt Templar, the Liberty League, and Eve Martel deal with some bad medicine.
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The night of January 15, 2013 2 AM The call went out to le Renard Rouge's, Cobalt Templar's, and the Liberty League's line, one after the other, at a time that just happened to catch them all when they were otherwise indisposed. The woman's voice on the other end is rough and raspy, with the tension clear as she speaks. "
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Wharton Hill Harrier watched, as amazed as anyone else, as the Curator's ships gathered up the severed Freedom City and began to carry it away into the perpetually grey sky overhead. Over the distant rumble, he called, "We should not remain this area long! The subsidence from the city's removal may cause a collapse...and if the Curator's ships do come hunting for the missing ones who probed the sky, they will pass through this area early in whatever search they make. We should avoid being taken by the Curator...again," he added, chewing on that thought unpleasantly. "His attentions will not be in our favor." He was carefully not looking at Blue Jay or Bee-Keeper, eager not to resume the arguments that had nearly gotten the armored warrior and young (so young, was I ever that age?) archer captured by the collecting vessels.
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As Bee-Keeper's words fell on what seemed for a moment like silent air, there was no noise in the dead Freedom City but a deep rumbling from beneath the Earth and the loud radioactive hiss of the rising dome of energy outside. A moment later, a wide-eyed, pale-faced young teenager appeared from mid-air just feet from his face and said, "Hang on! We're going to-" And then they disappeared. "make a quick trip!" Quickstep and the Bee-Keeper popped into view again in the middle of the group of heroes outside the hill, Dorothy depositing Baxter (still in his armor, of course) in between Jill and Wander. "I'll be right back!" she said gamely, vanishing again and leaving the Bee-Keeper alone with the two young women and the strange-looking, heavily-scarred man who had to be their last remaining companion... - "Hey, Blue Jay!" yelled Dorothy as she popped into being in front of Tona, "Let's go!" On closer inspection, Tona recognized Dorothy, a second-year student who had been expelled after a criminal attack on another student just a few days before...well, it was hard to remember exactly what had happened! Dorothy reached for her, and teleporter and archer popped back into being right in the middle of the little group on the distant hill. Tona recognized Wander and Jill O'Cure from their pictures, Quickstep from the school, and she knew what an Omegadrone without its armor deployed looked like well enough and there it was right there! Behind them came a low rumble that turned into a deep bass vibration, hard enough to make the nearby trees sway and buildings crack: and no wonder! The now-completely encased Freedom City was rising out of the ground, green-wrapped rock rising higher and higher in the sky, the very ocean rushing in with a roar to take the place of the stolen dead city that was high enough now to cast a deep shadow against the small group of heroes on the hill in the distant forest, dwarfed by the sheer power of the transition taking place before their eyes. Among them, a very tired Quickstep took this opportunity to sit down.
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ic And Countless Screaming Argonauts [IC]
Avenger Assembled replied to trollthumper's topic in Midtown
"They teach us that you're a joke," said Edge fiercely in response to the immortal warrior's taunts, dodging the falling ceiling like so much falling raindrops. "You're just another old man trying to reshape the world in his own twisted image. And it's even worse than that, because you're a soldier!" he added, leaping over a blow from one of the Spartoi as if it had barely swiped at him. "Look at you! How many millennia have you fought this war and you can't even finish the job! I should be really mad at you, and I was earlier, because you were a faker and a liar who couldn't be trusted to keep his word, but now I'm just disappointed! I mean come on now, can't you do _anything_ right? Well, maybe," he looked around at the others. "You picked the best enemies to have in Freedom City; the Liberty League! C'mon, team, let's show this guy what a legacy of heroism is all about! And Medea, come on, show him you have a life outside your old relationship! Give him the old Greek fire!" -
ooc And Countless Screaming Argonauts [OOC]
Avenger Assembled replied to trollthumper's topic in Archives
Mark is going to take a full-round action to Inspire the others. -
While loading incredibly toxic biological weapons hadn't been on anyone's agenda for the trip, it wasn't long before the big storage refrigerator in the Wonderbus (which Bigfoot never really had explained) was carrying enough crates of Ragnorak to kill -"Oh, I wouldn't let it break," was Rogue's breezy explanation when asked how many people the virus samples could potentially kill on Earth-Prime in the event of an accident. With her silvery thumb on her chin as she stood outside the Wonderbus, she said, "Otherwise I'd be tempted to keep a few vials here just as a precaution in case the local humans do prove troublesome. But if they are as trustworthy as you kids, and if they are as willing to work with us for what we are...I'm sure we won't need it. We have other emergency measures." "Well...let's just hope it doesn't come to that," said Sharl a little awkwardly, stepping out of the Bus once Erde-Tronik was secure. "In the meantime, we'll get our people safely to our world, and get the two Troniks together." He took her hand and shook it firmly, then bowed in that awkward Tronik way from the shoulders. "Whatever happens," he promised her, "we survive. We are the city pulled from the burning planet. We will overcome, and we will survive. And some day, our Tronik and yours will live together under the same skies...far away from any of this." She nodded at that, and bowed back. "Take your words seriously, Sharl," she went on, speaking in English as a gesture of trust for the non-robots all around her. "And all of you," she added with a look at the rest of the team. "Tens of millions of our people go with you. Don't let us down." Raising her voice, she added, "My people are going to move out to try and make contact with those anti-National Socialist warriors you spoke of. If you have any business in this area, now's the time!"
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Harrier crashed back to the pavement fast and hard enough to crack the asphalt across the street, his armored body rising from the crater immediately as he ran over to join the others. Startled, both by the moment and by Harrier's arrival, Quickstep stuttered, "I-I-I...not all of you at once! But I can do it!" She grabbed Wander and they vanished together, reappearing in a deserted campground an instant before Dorothy vanished again. This time she took Jill's hand, saying "This was where-" "-we used to come for summer camp!" she exclaimed before disappearing again. When she appeared the last time, it was with Steve, whose armor was just retracting as he looked back at the Freedom City now completely surrounded by a circle of alien ships, the trench they had dug around Freedom City complete. From their hilltop view at the edge of Wharton State Forest, the heroes outside watched as the ships began to glow an eerie shade of green. The glow was answered by a verdegris wash of light that seemed to begin rising up from the landscape below. "The Curator is a thief," replied Harrier, "a gatherer of places, peoples, and things from across the cosmos. Miss Americana's sidekick, Citizen, his homeworld was stolen by the Curator centuries ago," he went on, trying his damnedest to remember the history of a young man who generally fell into an embarrassed silence around him. "His ringworld incorporates the material from an entire star system, and things stolen from across all realities together. He has been a...rival of the Terminus, but only for his own gain, not for the benefit of all. He...he still has the others!" Inside the carved-out city, Bee-Keeper and Blue Jay could see the glow too: a slowly-rising wall of brilliant, shimmering green that was bright enough to cast even shadows in the city into daylight and was clearly going to encompass a massive circle that included them and all of the city in its effects. Rising all around the city in the beginnings of a dome shape, it was clear that within a few minutes they were going to be completely cut off from the outside world.
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Definitely, the circle the ships are digging will incorporate Claremont as well as their current location.
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A moment later, Harrier's view whirled frantically in the air. "Incoming starships," he said simply as his engines roared and the grey clouds swooped up to greet him, swallowing the mad vision of the ringworld above. He turned back to provide perspective for his words, still roaring downwards, and displayed a flickering image of a rapidly approaching, impossibly fast swarm of black ships that had to be coming in faster than any Earthly rocket given the sheer impossible distance between what had been a high solar orbit and the Earth-distant planet beneath. Grey skies filled his vision as he disappeared into the cloudbank again, keeping up a regular report schedule as he flew. "Believe they are using protonic reversion drive. High acceleration. No living crew. Intentions unknown." Behind him his jetpack screamed like a damned soul, the sound of the spaceships following him into the atmosphere like twin distant explosions that never quite settled down. "Coming in fast." - Minutes later, before Blue Jay and Bee-Keeper could decide where to go, and well before Steve had actually broken cloud cover, the alien ships broke through the perpetual cloud cover over 'Freedom City', circling the city's edge like a flock of gigantic metallic birds. A few moments later, the energy discharges began: silent red beams that blasted into what had to be the rock and dirt at the edge of the city, the distant grey seas, followed closely by black, spongy balls that were just visible as they plunged into the rents dug by the lasers. They weren't approaching the city, rather, they were circling it.
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Steve walked to her closed door and said simply, "I will see you again," before he turned and headed for the door. Perhaps his handling had been rough, but the ending had gone as well as he could expected. Gina and Steve's relationship had always been a very complicated one, but taking it to the next level, even in words alone, would more than suit his purposes for the moment. And if she chooses to break it off, or never see me again? The thought wasn't a pleasant one, it certainly wasn't one that would please the heart of the former Omegadrone. If she does, well, then I will have learned all I need to know about this relationship. It was a cold thought, but as Steve braced himself against the chill outside, he decided that it was a very cold night.
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Steve flinched; his shoulders seeming to slump at Gina's words. "I...perhaps it was a mistake to bring it up at all." He looked away, composing himself as he seemed to give up on something he'd been holding onto. "I had thought that things might be different after all this time, with all we have done for each other, but if it cannot be done, it cannot be done, and mere words will not change the facts. I will not ask you to say or do things that are beyond your power to do, even if they are things that I desire myself. I have stayed away because I knew I would...hurt you if I came too close. I...I love you, Gina." Silence fell, something he was evidently content to let lie in Gina's quiet house forever.
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On the small monitor they'd rigged up, the heroes watched Harrier's painfully slow descent through layer upon layer of featureless grey cloud. He was not a fast flyer, which might have been the best argument against taking to the sky, but the speedier Bee-Keeper had evidently opted not to join him. "These clouds are unbroken. They are unnatural," he opined over the radio as he ascended higher and higher. Not much of a talker, for the longest time there was nothing but the grey sky and the roar of Harrier's jets over the video signal. It was long enough, alone in the deep alien sky overhead, that Harrier was almost ready to believe that he'd been wrong about what lay above the atmosphere and that he needed to fly back down and rejoin the others. Until suddenly came the moment when he finally broke through that oceans-high cloud cover and, for a moment, the flare from the sun overhead blocked both his transmission and his vision. "I..." His view returned after a moment, and down below on what had been VINCE's flickering display, an alien sight swarmed into view for Wander, Jill, and Quickstep: the horizon curved _upwards_ as Steve rose, curling up towards infinity on either side as he swiveled around in the air to take in the sheer size of the planet, no, the _structure_ on which they were all embedded. The scale slowly became visible as Harrier's flight ascended; those were not islands but continents distant, that was no ocean but a world distant, laid out flat like a map and stretching on as far as the eye could see. There were 'maps' visible that hazily resembled Earth, others that were completely alien, the sheer suggestion of impossible bulk almost stupefying for someone born on a planet. Steve turned his head again to the sides where, far, far distant, multiple Earth-lengths away, massive walls that must have been big enough to swallow a planet towered above the landscape, holding in the atmosphere, and then looked up again at the 'sun': this close, the silvery line of the space-ring was visible behind the off-yellow star, its bulk partially blocked by a series of great black squares between them and the star itself. "Cosmic Entity 045," said Harrier over the radio, his normally impassive voice tight at the awesome, terrifying sight of the cosmic superstructure all around them. "The Curator's Ringworld." An instant later, "I am being pinged by active radar."