Avenger Assembled

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.

Reasoning that his arrival could only distract the criminals before they injured their captive further, and that he was made of sterner stuff even than most superheroes, Comrade Frost went into action without hesitation. Swooping down from the sky, he made his way directly for the sciency-looking monkey with the ray gun: in his experience the weak-looking fellows with the large weapons were the most dangerous in a fight. "Forgive me, comrade, but you are new to Freedom City, yes?" he hissed as he roiled out of the sky, a cloud of freezing fog and chilling mist that rolled over and enveloped the monkey so that only his outline could be seen by those outside. "If you had come as a friend, I would have welcomed you as a man and a brother, but now?" At his words, icy cold seeped into the simian, soaking through his fur and into his muscles. "I am afraid you will find my reception far more chilly."

9 Comrade Frost flies down and attempts to paralyze the nerdy-looking monkey. In his experience, he knows the science guys are nothing but trouble. 19 DC 22 Fortitude save vs. the freezing cold for the nerd-monkey.

Initiative time, SW?

Edge had stopped quipping about the time the deception had been revealed, his eyes hardening at Medea's words. "I don't appreciate being lied to by bad guys, I don't appreciate being used by a fake hero, and I especially don't appreciate being used to bring sacrifices to the dark lord of Tartarus. Let's go," he said, his mouth set. "Medea, frankly, I don't trust you as far as I can throw you, and I'm sure as hell not going to leave you here where no one's watching you." He considered his words, and with an effort made sure to soften what he said next, trying to be persuasive. "Even if you are on our side, who's to say there aren't more bad guys out there hunting you today? You come with us so we can keep an eye on you. Meanwhile, we're going to stop Hades and Jason from hurting anyone else. Even really bad people." And with that, in a flash of his own overwhelming magical energy, the team disappeared and reappeared in the cavern indicated by Medea.

"She's his assistant, Callie Summers?" said Sharl, shrugging a little. "She seemed nice enough, and certainly very competent. You've probably seen her around campus. Miss A thinks she's going to take over if Mr. Summers ever retires." That didn't seem like a likely prospect, given how vital and active the man was even at his advanced age (for a human anyway), but the thought was still there. "Anyway, everyone who looked the Bus over swears it checks out. We'll have a direct connection to the dimensional portal Miss A's building in the lab, so we can trigger it as soon as we're back in the bus with the Tronik database. Not too close to their base," he went on, pulling up a somewhat sketchy holographic map of a town no one on the team recognized. "The base was built in the forest near a town called Branson. Something about it being a big tourist destination, so they could hide the traffic for it there. We'll be going in through the woods, so we shouldn't have to pass through the town itself." Gina had thought that was funny, in a grim sort of way, but Sharl hadn't really gotten the joke.

"Well, we're bringing a full load of up-to-date computer interface technology," said Sharl as he thought over what was set aside for the team. "We have the specs for their system, as much as the Tronikians could give us, so it'll just be a matter of physically interfacing with their system. People inside willl definitely notice something's up, but there's no 'secret' to keep there. It's just a matter of-" He hesitated, caught on to how the others were looking at him, and added, "Anyway! We'll be going in with a stealth vehicle, a heavily-armored one that's designed to stand up to punishment from a mundane army, and that should be able to pass right by most of the sensors we know the National Socialists have around their base. It's decently armed, enough that we can at least fight our way out if something bad happened." Despite all his promising words, Sharl still looked nervous, and when a gesture over the table revealed their vehicle, his nervousness made sense. "Yeah, yeah, it's the Wonderbus, but we got the systems up and running again!" he said defensively as the still-70s themed vehicle turned in holographic display before everyone. "It's freaking powerful! Chameleon cloak from a Lor starship, quantum cascade lasers Miss A installed, gravity engines, a connection to our portal here..." He touched the holo-bus as he spoke, cloaking device in the rear, lasers in the front, and engines in the back all lighting up as he touched. All the upgrades were on the inside, it seemed; it still looked just like a VW Bus to the naked eye. "Summers came out to personally inspect it to make sure it was up-to-date and ready to go. Even brought his daughter, the..." He noticed the girls looking at him and said, "You know, his daughter. They did a full inspection, and she's ready to fly." He pointed a few more times, 'unpeeling' the hologram to show what lay inside. "There's food, there's medicine, there's enough for us to spend a couple of nights there. But with any luck, we won't have to. In and out, save the day, and rescue millions of people who no one else gives a darn about. That's Young Freedom," he said with a little smile. "Anything else you guys think we need?"

With the cow gone, a great stillness seemed to fall over the corrupted town. For a moment the heroes thought the worst, at least until doors began opening and people began staggering out into the sunlight, rubbing their eyes as if they had just awakened from the most remarkable dream. From the growing crowd pouring out of homes and onto streets, as well as the deputies and sheriff sitting up and rubbing their heads on the street, it was as if the town was awakening from some bizarre dream. The heroes, though, who had seen the cost of this bovine nightmare firsthand, knew of course that it had been too terribly real. Whatever the cow had been, fallen divine messenger of the gods, warped alien, or some creature from beyond, it left behind no clues.

Combat is over!

as it is currently bound and helpless, the cow is restrained in Fleur's dimensional pocket...for now!

"I AM NO MAN, FOOL!" bellowed the giant cow in Vector's direction as great gobs of its spit flew in her direction, howling in rage as Tiamat's fangs bit deep. It took a step, staggering, as the rock around it crumbled, but whether through its own growing weakness or the strength of the earth, Gaian Knight's stony grasp held it tight. "Geld you all," it muttered weakly, though still with a voice like a roaring helicopter's motor, "Bring back the rule of the old gods..." It was weakening, and getting a sound thrashing, but it didn't sound like its intentions were lessening any. "When I turn enough, they will welcome us into their world as their divine handlers! It will all be...so very easy..."

That hits, since the thing is bound and helpless and blind. 34 Aw boo a nat-20! It rolls to escape the snare... 28 And completely botches! OK, GK's snare is straining, but still holding. Fleur is up.

Vector is up

bound helpless and blind