Avenger Assembled

"As a matter of fact, no, I don't!" Sharl yelled back at Koshiro, getting a little flustered as the big van bounced and flounced over the muddy, pothole-strewn roads. Cosmic craft though it was, every shock made the entire enhanced interior of the craft shake. "Stupid, wretched useless khestin groundcar..." Eventually he jabbed a few buttons on the console before him and the car seemed to stabilize on the road. "OK, we'll be hitting the base perimeter soon," he called back to the others, his voice coming in on the bus's interior speakers like some bizarre tour guide. "We should be totally invisible to everything at the perimeter, it's all just mundane hardware till you actually get inside the base. I've got a circuit here that'll open the front gate, and we can go in stealth mode while they're trying to...Oh my god!" The bus screeched to a halt, sending a spray of mud in front of it. It didn't take long for the teen heroes to see what had so startled Sharl. They'd found the perimeter of the base all right, a high razorwire fence with a guardpost alongside the small road leading into the base proper. With armed guards and lights, big No Trespassing signs in German and English, the masonry blockhouse was probably a solid little fortress most of the time. Not today, though, as it appeared something had torn the little house apart, scattering cinderblocks like child's toys and breaking open, but not removing, the sliding gate. There were two humans visible outside; German-allied guards from the look of them: one was face-down and unmoving in the mud, while the other was crawling towards the gate, only moving his arms as he dragged himself forward inch by inch beneath the freezing rain. Behind them, the road turned sharply into the forest, leaving no sign of what lay beyond. "Oh geez, oh geez..." Sharl stared for a moment at the badly-wounded man before he said, "We can't just leave him here. Everybody, cover me!" With determination, he grabbed one of the medkits and stepped out, appearing as if from a pane of light in the open air as he stepped out for the first time into the cold, misty air of Erde in January. He was there first, and so it was he arrived just in time for the broken-backed soldier to look up at him and speak two words in a whisper that carried across Sharl's commlink into the bus, and to any of his friends who followed him out. "Sie stieg...sie stieg..." And then, without another sound, the German guard died.

Tou vs 24 31 Nice

She peered back into the darkened trailer for a moment before she realized that two giant red eyes were staring back at her. From within, a sonorous voice sounded: "...Voice module online. Audio functionality test initialized. Designation: America-Tron. Mission: the liberation of Freedom City." A massive automaton suddenly seemed to sit up inside the cab, ripping through the broken steel of the truck with its huge body. Even sitting, it towered above the heroes. Its massive silver body had once been polished and smooth, but now looked battered and scuffed by age, the red LED visor that was its "eyes" clearly had lights missing as it flashed on and off. "America-Tron signalling base. America-Tron signalling base. Respond." it spoke in that deep, booming base . "Oh, Lord, it's active!" exclaimed the scientist as Cobalt Templar helped him out of the smashed-up cab. "It's a defense robot from the 1950s, one of the ones the government built when the supers were all in retirement! It got banged up pretty bad when Hades showed up, and its been in storage. All its systems think it's 1961 and there's a war on!"

Inside the truck, Cobalt Templar found a semi-conscious driver behind the wheel of the big truck. There was something familiar about the man's blue and white uniform, but it didn't click until Corbin made out the ASTRO Labs tag on the man's shirtfront. "Oh God," he said blearily, raising his head and peering at Cobalt Templar. "Are you on fire?" he asked blurrily. "No, wait, those must be superpowers...is everybody okay?" he asked, waking up as fear seemed to motivate him. "I didn't hit anybody, did I? Oh God, this damn weather...is the package still in the back?" It was easy enough to get the power shut down to the area, emergency staff at the power plant having noticed the power break as soon as it happened. "We've shut down the power," said a voice on Erin's radio. "But our emergency crews are over in the Fens dealing with a roof collapse at the substation there. You're on your own for the next little while."

From down the street, Cobalt Templar and his masked companion heard a squeal of tires on the icy road below that quickly became a tremendous crash! Looking down, they saw that a big unmarked semi had skidded off the icy, rain-soaked street and smashed sidelong against a big power pole. The pole had fallen across the otherwise vacant street, the far end coming down in a vacant lot across the way as it nearly cut the truck's back in half. The near side of the street had gone dark from the broken lines, but the power outage was the least of their worries. The sparking lines had fallen across the body of the truck and were clearly still live, spitting fat sparks onto the caved-in trailer. There was no sign of a driver behind the tinted windows of the cab, opaque in this weather to people up on roof level even with enhanced senses.

"Feh!" said the ex-Soviet agent with an old man's stubbornness, but he was too much the practiced veteran to actually resist. "I took this suit into space long before you were born, boychik," he said with authority, his accent thickening as they walked. "Fighting the Venusians, you know, both times!" he added with a waggle of his finger. "You won't see _that_ in your Western history books, let me tell you that! Capitalist heroes left _us_ to deal with the flying swarms of red-hot Venusians while they were busy smoking their American cigarettes and listening to their jazz records!" On the way out, he turned and winked at Vicky to show he wasn't serious before they disappeared out the door so the scientist could work on him.

This was an unexpected development, but not one Mark was unprepared to deal with. He'd paid attention in school to the tales of the heroes of legend almost as much as he had the heroes of Freedom City, and something about this case was rubbing him the wrong way. Not that he didn't believe in it, but it was just...disappointing. "Listen, Jason. You've been dead, what, 2000 years? 3000? More?" he said, trying to reason with the Grecian madman as he kept Jason's attention on him rather than on the team. "And you're still doing the service of the Greek gods? One god in particular, in fact?" He shrugged, trying to stay sympatico with the bad guy. "I mean, here you are the legendary hero of song and story, and you're just...doing what Hades says? To get back at your ex-wife? I mean, don't get me wrong," he added hastily, "I can understand why you'd want revenge. Medea did something awful. But I mean, come on," he said with a grimace, waving his arms for emphasis. "You couldn't sneak out and get revenge on your own? Or stir up a rebellion, seize the throne of Hades, and rise up with your own army of the dead? You have to just show up, taking someone else's orders and doing their dirty work? I mean come on now!" He shrugged, then added, "Well, I guess we're gonna have to kick your butt for it."

When the science-weapon's radiation washed over Jubatus, transforming the already-altered man into an entirely new simian appearance, Comrade Frost decided the joke was wearing thin. "Enough! I grow tired of games, comrade apes. Your chilling crimes stop now." He reached up and slowly, methodically peeled off his right glove, revealing pale icy flesh underneath that seemed to suck the heat out of the room. "You are outsiders. I go easy on you. No longer. Jubatus, DOWN!" He pointed his open palm at the cluster of apes and a chilling, burning cold erupted in the room as heat, life, and energy was drained from the bodies of the apes, their clothes, the floor on which they stood and their weapons. An icy chill washed over them all, sinking deep into their bones, as the thermovoric power of the icy hero washed over them all. As an icy fog arose from the frozen air between him and the apes, the ice-covered Comrade Frost said simply, "Freeze."

Edge spends an HP to Seize Initiative. He inspires as a full-round action. Lemme get a post up

OK. Comrade Frost is going to take a five-foot step back and spend a full action refocusing. He will shout at Jubatus to keep his head down. At the start of the next round, he will hit the apes with his Targeted area effect: +2 All-Out Attacking 13 How undramatic! OK, I'll surge again (this time sucking the fatigue...) 12 Wow, OK. Spending my last HP, as I pled for from my good buddy the Ref... 19, which becomes a 29, yay! OK, that's a DC 27 Toughness save for all the apes (and the wall behind them, for that matter...), while Comrade Frost is fatigued and has a to-hit of 16 all next round.

Posting for Electra, combining October and November for ease of calculation: Wander: Midnight City Briefing With Friends Argonauts Brighter Than The Moon Fleur: Panacea Cheesetopia Radiance at Dusk Miss A: Party Time Ghost in the Machine Pepper's Ghost Moloch's Champions Paying Paul Papercut: Last World War Mile in My Shoes October Nights Other Place

HARRIER EDGE CITIZEN COMRADE FROST GMing Put my December ref point towards Edge.

Once the guys made their move, the evening settled into a particularly raucous version of movie night in the dorms back at Claremont. After all, up on the roof, there was no one to look at them funny if they cheered loudly for the hero, or booed the bad guys. Or, for that matter, jumped in surprise at a particularly startling monster's appearance. "That is a very large tree," said Sharl with just a trace of a teenage boy's defensiveness as the plant golem on screen loomed over the plucky protagonists. "It would surprise anybody..." Despite temptation, he didn't touch any of the snacks they'd brought: they looked really good, and he didn't want to disappoint Temperance, but the last thing he wanted to do was lose his solidity when he was around a pretty girl after he'd eaten lots of food. At least she doesn't just think I'm a jerk for not eating it, he thought. She really was very distracting, and in a very pleasant way. Reminding himself that humans didn't appreciate comments about their various phenotypes, he waited for the end of the first movie to offer. "You're looking really pretty, by the way. The darkness here really brings out your eyes." And it was dark, at least if you were from a society where it never really was night. "I can watch the food if anyone needs a bio break," he offered to the others as the credits began to roll. "That mini-mart up the street probably has shorter lines than the bathroom at the theater."

Just to clarify, Cubist, what I think SW is suggesting is surging for another attack and spending an HP to cancel the fatigue from the extra effort.

January 2013 Outside Heesterstadt (formerly Branson), Missouri It was raining when the Wonderbus arrived, a thick, icy-cold storm of freezing rain that would have surely been a blizzard had the weather been any warmer. Warm and insulated through the dimensional craft was, it wasn't hard to feel the chill outside. The bus had folded its way through space and time to come rumbling out onto a deserted stretch of concrete road by a grim, grey lake that might possibly have been more attractive in the spring. As it was, the whole world was grey and brown: the city across the lake, what was Branson on another world, was almost lost beneath the heavy fog which swaddled the area. Shifting his clothing over to the bland, servile pattern his counterpart had worn, Sharl peered through the front windows, just able to make out tall concrete towers and a massive, hovering flag projected against the clouds from the city below like a massive old-style holographic billboard. It was grim. "Everybody get changed," he said, calling back to the passenger compartment as he reached down to turn on the conventional gasoline engine. "The Tronik base is about five miles up this road! We're turning around..." He muttered a bad word in Lor, trying to remember how to work these stupid controls. With all the worries about fighting Nazis and transdimensional technology, maybe he hadn't paid enough attention to how to drive a stupid four-wheeled, rubber-tired bus! Why can't they just use antigravs like civilized people?

Continued in A War-Torn World in the Lands Beyond

The next morning, Citizen buzzed around the Wonderbus in the first-floor gateway room Miss Americana and he had spent most of the night building. He'd already said his goodbyes, both to Miss A and Gina, and with her words still ringing in his ears he was carefully focused on making sure their vehicle was safe and sound. Painted a dark blue and white, the Wonderbus looked as ready for action as a refurbished interdimensional craft could be. The dimensional resonators were in place on the outer skin and synched with their counterparts on the black and white gateway circle he and Miss A had built, the backup universal quantum drive that would be keeping Erde's Tronik safe was humming away inside the bus's extradimensional passenger compartment. Everything's ready... he thought, feeling his heart pounding at the realization that all the work, all the frustration, all the fear, was coming to a head that very day, no, that very hour. What would Mom and Dad think now? he thought, realizing with a guilty thought that he hadn't actually mentioned this during his weekly communications with his parents. Bad enough I'm in what they think of as _this_ dimension, he thought, what would they say about going to another one entirely? Before he could dwell on that, or the hour or two he'd spent getting his program deep-scanned by Gina before he left, his team started arriving. "Come on, guys, get in!" he called. "We're all ready to go, and there's a major thunderstorm on the other side of the link! The sooner we get there, the sooner we can take cover and get to work!" Inside the souped-up Wondermobile, the team found the decor wasn't too much different: a late 60s and 70s look better-suited to a hippie crash pad, albeit now much cleaner and less musty (and free of Cholaxian hair), though now the 'rec room' had their suitably civiliany Erde uniforms hanging on neat little hooks, as well as local maps and other displays showing more about where they were going. "I'll get the startup going," said Sharl, disappearing into the front cabin. "We're starting as soon as everyone's on board. Kimber, you guys just load the crate into the back." Hanging on the wall was one last gift from Bigfoot, a mounted guitar that bore the slogan: This Machine Kills Fascists!" Once inside the cabin, Sharl began activating circuits, speaking to Miss A via the cabin's radio as he began firing up the dimensional circuits. The gateway was beginning to fire up now, the dark and light material ahead of them rotating faster and faster as the dual-edged quarks they were firing began tunneling their way through dimensional matrixes. "Better strap in back there, things are going to get a little bumpy..." When everyone was on board, the teenager grabbed the throttle and threw it forward!

Vrix Dopple, the bronze-skinned and red-haired buzzcut RA for this floor, the one who some of the girls swore was either an alien or a lesbian, burst through the crowd of students, her face white and her mouth tight-lipped. "Silvestri, you are on report! Get back to your dorm, right now!" Her voice sounded in Errant's head as she spoke, a harsh, military bark of a thought, "" Errant remembered that this no-nonsense older girl was the telepathic ethics instructor this term while Ms. Albright was on vacation, and it wasn't hard to guess that he was going to be made an object example of if he didn't watch his step. Turning back to the girls, she stared at the vandalized door and wrecked room with bafflement and anger on her face. "What the frak is this?" she demanded of the students milling around the hallway. "How did this happen? Did anyone see who did this?" A dark-skinned girl with white hair and eyes looked around at the others for a moment before pointing across the little knot around Kat, Kit, Errant, and Dopple to a short sophomore with red hair, freckles, and heavy glasses. "...Dorothy hasn't said anything, but she's been hating Kat ever since she moved in, she-" "Shut up!" shrieked Dorothy, her face flushing even redder in her anger. "Stay out of my head, loser!" Glaring at her TA and the other kids, Dorothy hesitated just an instant before bursting out with, "What are you gonna do, T-baby, call your Omegadrones to blast me? You all heard about that, didn't you?" she asked of the other girls, who were staring at this ugly upwelling with surprise on their faces. "How last year, there was an Omegadrone on campus to talk to the T-babies! To teach them about the Terminus! Can't you see?" she demanded of the others. "Now she's got her creepy pervo friends reading our minds! They're everywhere! If we don't get them out now, every year there'll be more and more until the whole school is nothing but dirty T-babies! They're going to take over the whole WORLD!" "That is quite enough of that, Dorothy Langford," spat the TA with intensity, and with a gesture purple tentacles of energy erupted from her hand and wrapped themselves around the angry girl. "You are coming to detention with me, right now!" She turned and floated right out the window over Dorothy's struggles and angry curses, adding with a shout through the window, "Just hold your positions! I'll be sending a teacher in to talk to you and fix the damage immediately!"

Another Paralyze attack 17 I don't like that one, even slowed. 23 Much better. CF is down an HP, and that's another DC 22 Fortitude save for Chimpsky

The cloud of frost chilling Dr. Chimpsky solidified into the shape of a man, the parka-clad, red-eyed form of Comrade Frost himself. Frost couldn't let stray shots from that gun go wild in this building, not when there were people around who might be hit, particularly if it did have the effects he thought it had. Give the superweapon to the superscientist was a pretty common practice. As icy armor slid over his body as the air itself froze around him, the now-ice clad cold controller reached out for the simian scientist with a sinister expression. "Such fear on your face," he taunted. "Why don't you...chill!" He reached out and laid an icy hand on the scientist's cheek, his touch draining the very warmth from the scientist's bones.

"I have a problem," admitted the Sun. "For some time I have been employed by my kinsman to watch over his cattle, but I fear one escaped our fence and jumped into the world of Men. And dragons," it added diplomatically. "You have successfully defeated the beast and prevented the conquest of your planet by divinely-empowered bovines, for which I am grateful. But would you do me the favor, sweet daughter of fang and flame, of keeping this...quiet?" Those big, painted eyes flicked back and forth nervously. "I, ah, I have very few worshipers these days, you see, only a small handful of young people who worship my avatar in a cycle of war and rebirth, and well...I have no place to go if Helios removes me from his shining halls," admitted the painted disk of the sun itself. "I know those of your blood and mine have often been enemies, but let us leave that to the stories told by others."

On Sanctuary, Fleur and Vector found a badly-rattled, albeit somewhat recovered, population of tourists, out-of-town merchants, and the odd Pleasantvillian who for whatever reason hadn't had any cheese in the few days before the big Cheese Festival had driven everyone crazy. They were dehydrated and poorly fed, even those who had succumbed to the temptation to eat of the tainted dairy weren't in the best shape nutritionally. It was hard to tell from looking if any of them had any further contamination from the divinely-poisoned milk, but at least no one was shouting in ancient Greek or attacking anyone else as they milled about Fleur's big sanctuary for refugees. The first person to talk to them was Charlotte, who hadn't gone far from her roommates' side. "I've been asking around, and I think it had something to do with that so-called meteor that crashed into town a couple of weeks ago. One of the people here is a secretary at the local parish; she said the priest came back really excited, talking about a new archaeological discovery, and how maybe it was good the League was already coming to town, but he was drinking the milk even then. By the time she could ask him, it was too late." - Gaian Knight knew most of the people who did disaster recovery for the League pretty well, given that his terrakinetic powers made him a natural ally for the team members who concentrated on recovering from disasters rather than supervillains. Some people with powers didn't want to fight, or weren't any good at it, and some specialists with flying power-loader suits preferred to use their equipment for its original purpose rather than refurbishing it for combat. This wasn't the kind of forest fire or tidal wave that really got the team moving, but after one look at the images beamed up from the town, the League was on its way to help. Team Red, named for Adair, was forming up at the Lighthouse and would be there within the hour. From the look of the dazed people still wandering the streets, taking stock of their brief, unsettling transformation, they would need all the help they could get! Meanwhile, Tiamat was hearing voices. The golden, smiling sun painted on a nearby brick wall as part of some sort of seasonal commemoration, presiding smilingly over a field of painted cows amid oversized flowers, was speaking directly to her, its lips and teeth moving and eyes winking, the people around her and Gaian Knight (as well as the man himself) not reacting to the display. "Greetings, child of Ladon," the sun said in a pleasant, jovial, dare she say sunny?, voice. "How are you today?"

"I used our morphic molecules fabrication machine and made versions of all your costumes that can pass for clothes on Erde. Except you, Kimber, obviously, but I'm sure you can adapt as needed!" He took a breath, a conscious reflex while he was projecting. "OK, great, sounds like we're all ready." At those words, Sharl felt that brief twinge of fear that he'd become more and more accustomed to over the last several months. He'd risked so much for this mission; his relationship with Gina, his studies at Claremont, and even though both had survived despite a rather rocky turn lately he was still taking himself and his friends into terrible danger. "Most of the packing's done," said Sharl, who today appreciated the ebullient Canadian phantasm's enthusiasm more than ever. "And I don't think you'd get much out of Miss A and I talking science." Miss A had made it very clear that he was to know every detail of the transdimensional gateway they'd built in the bus, and that failure to know what was going on would end their plans right there. "If you really want to help pack something," he suggested, "there is something you could do. We're leaving behind a surprise for the Resistance when they get around to liberating Branson. A box with a signal attached that broadcasts on the frequency they use. Lots of, you know, MREs and medical supplies; nothing the Reich is likely to bother looting if they find it first, but it'll be really helpful once they get around there. We can't help them win their war, but we can at least make fighting it not suck so hard for them. It's in the doctor's office at school, and they'll let you in there to get it packed and ready. Add other stuff if you want. They know we're going to do something 'more dangerous than our years deserve,'" he said, his voice falling slightly into a Mr. Summers speech pattern. "Let's do this, people."

APPROVED

Solid backstory. I think I may have to conscript you into a thread or two down the pike. You're right at the edge of what we allow for Accurate and Attack Specialization. Nothing over the line, just remember that it's an issue next time you buy up her combat. I would go ahead and either: move her ability scores out of their container, buy the innate feat for it, or make it a number of PP divisible by five. Makes bookkeeping easier. Put in her Dimensional Pocket load so that you have it handy for reference.