Avenger Assembled

The game ended with a last-minute field goal for the home team breaking a long-standing tie, giving the kicker a moment of glory as the Freedom City crowd went wild. Quo-Dis had grown quiet as the game ended, clinging to Corbin's arm as the show ran down, but cheered lustily when the game ended. "Well-met, and well-matched," she said when she was done, putting her arms affectionately around Corbin's shoulders. "You know, I originally thought this was a pointless waste," she confessed about the game with a nod, "but I think it is a fine thing this society has learned to channel its aggression into pursuits more productive than simple warfare. A healthy competition that ends in celebration, not slaughter, really is the best thing for this culture. Does anyone need a snack?" she offered.

"Be thankful I did no worse. Now, kick your weapons over here." When the chilly apes had complied, Comrade Frost slowly redonned his glove, the ice on his skin gradually fading away as he restrained his body's innate thermovoric powers. "Now. Tell me how it is the transformation brought about by your gun can be undone." he said, slowly circling the chilly group as Jubatus conducted his search. "Are you victims of its power yourself? Or has Comrade Dr. Simian turned to gangsters and wreckers as his allies?" he asked, his voice as cold as winter winds. He'd encountered a lot of apes in his time, and knew you had to be cruel to be kind, especially if you didn't know their motivations. "A chilling thought, eh?"

Doo doo doo.

"That's a lot of things," said Sharl cautiously, as he looked back at Koshiro. "I don't know how much their culture has changed with all the years the National Socialists have been bossing them around, either. I can probably recognize the other me, maybe whoever we've been talking to, but that's about it. I can ask them something about Tronik or the old homeworld that no one else here would be likely to know...but that's assuming they haven't been interrogated by the locals, and I don't think that's a safe-" Two things happened then: first, the base finally swung into view down the road; the squat bunkers buzzing with activity and moving figures, lights flickering on and off erratically in the dark, and the sound of industrial activity. And that was also when the Kubelwagen slammed head-on into the Wonderbus, the German military truck having come around a curve fast, splashing mud everywhere, and slammed full-on into the invisible vehicle. Only the relatively slow speeds imposed by the heavy weather kept the terrestrial vehicle from cracking up, as it was they both went tumbling off the road and hit the nearby mud. Only able to keep his seat because he was projecting directly from the bus''s internal systems, Sharl bounced in his seat, peering out through the mist at the base now half-visible down the road, then at the truck. The figures inside were moving, coming out with guns ready, and they didn't look like robots to him. "Oh, jeez! Everybody okay? I think we've got company outside..."

That hits, sure enough. 15 Harrier failed by five, so he's bound and helpless (though his finger was described as being on the trigger of his weapon earlier; we'll see how that plays out if things go further!) 17 He fails the Dazzle save too, so for the moment he is bound, helpless, and blind. I'll wait to see if we go further before I start initiativing and stuff. :D

Harrier batted away the attack from the black and yellow armored warrior, wincing as he felt the shock of the blow rebound up his pike and into his armored flesh. Power there; great power. This was no Omegadrone, but he was clearly a mighty opponent. His pike discharged with a scream of energy, blasting a crater into a Well, if he wants a battle, I will give him one!He swung the pike around, its sizzling black tip carving a gash in the ground between his position and his apian opponent. And then he did something Baxter had never heard of an Omegadrone doing. He spoke. "If you want me, come and claim me, mad one!" he hissed in a sepulchral voice of steel and stone, beckoning to him with his free hand as he brought up the pike, its energized tip sizzling like the fires of Hell itself. Blue Jay turned a corner amid the shattered buildings of downtown Freedom City and came across the crash site, where she was confronted with the all-too-familiar sight of an Omegadrone in combat with a superhero. She knew that model of Omegadrone well enough: not one of the great hordes made when cities and bases were swept dry by their brethern, but the heavy combat units that the Terminus deployed against the most powerful soldiers of the Resistance. This was the kind of drone that could kill a base, a town, all on its own; this was the kind of drone that killed Furions. As she watched, it sliced the ground in front of her friend the Bee-Keeper and made a beckoning gesture, the crackling flames of the burning transport too loud for her to hear anything else. Jill and Wander both heard the power pike blast a few blocks away; Jill had seen Harrier demonstrate his weapon at HAX and Wander knew that sound only too well. This was singular, though, not the mass hymn of destruction with which she was personally familiar. Kicking open the door of the shattered clinic, Jill found herself confronted with the grim pile of bones and bits of flesh that suggested where the patients had gone, and the familiar sight of Wander heading in the other direction. Turning at the sound of the door, Wander saw one familiar sight not twisted into horror by this place: Jill O'Cure, the snarky surgeon herself!

Swing and a miss!

OOC thread

Unable to see Kimber's visions, but savvy enough to have some idea what they were doing, Sharl was already back inside the Wonderbus when it was finished. "Come on, guys, get in out of that!" he called. "We can talk in here!" As soon as everyone was inside, he flipped the vehicle's stealth mode back on and began the slow, ponderous drive towards the base. "I don't know what you guys saw, but I don't think we should wait much longer," said the slightly translucent holographic teen.

Elsewhere Test Site I Freedom Hall Blue Jay woke up in a ditch, the smell of ashes in her mouth. She was in her costume and fully armed, the quiver at her back weighted with arrows. Raising her head, she found herself surrounded by a vision from Hell: a bombed out Freedom City laden with debris, ashes, and the broken remains of what once might have been bodies. She'd seen the effects of power pikes well enough to recognize their work. And there, screaming down from the sky like the armies of the damned, came the all-too-familiar sight of an Omegadrone troop carrier, big as a small jet liner but covered in the spikes and weapons she knew all too well. It roared overhead, antiproton engines screaming loud enough to nearly deafen her, and headed for what looked like Freedom Hall. Baxter awoke from a dream, and found himself in Hell. Bee-Keeper III felt the vibrations in his suit before he saw the ship come roaring down out of the sky; a monstrous vision of technological hell as it swooped overhead and plowed into a nearby street hard enough to rattle his teeth, careening along a street to plow into a nearby building. He noticed the apocalyptic surroundings next; the ruined Freedom Hall behind him, the smashed windows and fallen bodies of what looked like the aftermath of a grim and terrible battle here at the heart of Freedom City's heroing, and then finally what looked for all the world like a shattered city all around them. Jill O'Cure's eyes snapped open and she found herself in an empty hospital. She could tell that right away; the red, flickering emergency lights exposed a scene of wild chaos, torn and fallen beds and equipment in a mad jumble, but no sign of life, or death, for that matter. She knew this place, the waiting room of the clinic in City Center just down the street from Freedom Hall. She was in costume, not her scrubs, but before she could take further stock of the situation there was the brief scream of mighty engines and then a nearby BOOM, as if a plane had hit the ground just a few blocks away. Bones. Bones bones bones. Wander had seen plenty of those in her life, but the pile she was standing over was impressive. Smashed and broken, they were scattered over the front steps of the City Center Clinic like a child's much-abused toys. She could make out the familiar sight of skulls and other big bones, but these bones hadn't rested easy: something had disturbed the remains, if they'd come here first inside bodies. The ossurary at her feet was new; the burning city all around her wasn't. Suddenly, the familiar sight of an Omegadrone troop carrier roared overhead and disappeared over the nearest high-rise with a BOOM that shook the ground beneath her feet. When Harrier awoke, strapped into the recharging station of a heavy combat Omegadrone, Steve found himself frozen to the spot in the mortal terror of an awakened nightmare. He wasn't conscious of anything about his surroundings, only the sudden, horrible surety that his life was a dream and he was about to be taken away and dissected by the Physician. WAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUPWAKEUP-the crash interrupted his frenzied mental shouts and tore him loose from the station, sending him bowled end over end against a hard steel wall before he realized the ship had crashed and that he was all alone inside it. Taking a moment to steel himself, and think of Gina, the Omegadrone chose to meet his fate head-on: armored up, he blasted out the nearest hatch and burst forth onto a murdered Freedom City street. It wasn't so strange, really, he'd seen many of those in his time. He distantly saw an armored figure in yellow and black nearby, and moved towards him with pike raised defensively.

"Security protocol detected. America-Tron thanks you for your citizenship, young man and young lady," the giant robot spoke to Cobalt Templar and his companion before settling down onto the street. "Awaiting further instructions." All but one of the red lights faded, one right in the middle of the visor seeming to stare off into space. "Okay, good, that's good," said the scientist, rubbing the now-dried wound on the side of his head, shivering a little against the renewed rain, which had begun pouring down, pounding on the street, robot, and all those who stood beneath it. "He'll be in his inactive state until we can retrieve him, as long as nobody does anything...well, you know, irrational while we're here. It'll be fine. Thank you so much, you've saved a priceless artifact of our nation's giant robot history!"

"Supernatural invasion no longer detected. America-Tron moving to active mode." One of the glowing lights on the robot's visor seemed to fixate directly on Cobalt Templar. "Secondary protocols: Communist invasion. Security protocols active. Interrogative: Who won the 1957 World Series, citizen?" It was not a threatening question, really, nor a friendly one: simply a machine making a mechanical inquiry of a person. "The America-Tron units got a little...jumpy at times," murmured the scientist, who was keeping a discreet distance from the giant robot. "This is the only intact model left! Every vacuum tube and wire is from the original model, preserved in our archives since 1961! It's absolutely priceless, assuming it doesn't try to melt us..."

"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."