Avenger Assembled

Obekaybe, Vector is up

Citizen let Miss A handle that one at first, instead going over and working on the Lab's computers while they dealt with the awkwardly sentient program. He was still a little uncomfortable around D-Gray, but it wasn't hard to feel sympathy for the luckless musician. Sharl's transformation had come with family and friends and been a world turned upside down. D-Gray's world was dead. "There are plenty of options for sentient programs," he offered D-Gray, not wanting to raise the possibility that maybe he wasn't so sentient after all. "Sentient machines are legally people, so there's no chance of you winding up as somebody's property." And if this was just an unthinking machine he was talking to, such promises certainly didn't hurt anything. "I'm just some lines of code in the grand scheme of things," he said with an awkward little laugh, "and I do pretty well for myself."

"No!" A pathetic figure, Billy Shepard clawed for the disintegrating gateway to another world, coming up short as Harrier knocked him down again. "No, I was so close..." He buried his head in his hands and wept like a son deprived of his mother, or a cultist deprived of his god. From personal experience, Harrier knew that the two were not so far apart when it came to the Black Madonna. "No..." He collapsed to the floor and wept as Harrier almost, but didn't quite, look away. For all his loathing of the would-be Annihilist, he had seen the kinds of horrors that warped people into this all too intimately. But he has known no such horrors. What could make a man of this world so eager to embrace THAT one? "We're...we're all right," said Billy's mother, or the closest thing to it in this world, anyway, embracing her wide-eyed husband. "You have to find Tommy; he's not...he's not as smart as Billy, he might have hurt him, or gotten him into trouble, before he came to find us. He said..." She knelt down and tried to look her son in the eye. "Why, Billy? Why?" He gave no answer. Harrier backed away from the group, acutely conscious of his armor before these live people. "Tommy has been rescued by Miss America and Nick Cimiterie. He is safely in the hands of the authorities. "

Quo-Dis laughed, rubbing her knuckles good-naturedly. "A good bout. Thank you for the service, Trevor." She caught Corbin's blush and laughed ."Ah-hah, yes, it is all right, darling, you do not need to cover for me." Turning to the other two, with the air of one sharing a funny, albeit embarrassing story, Quo-Dis went on. "When Corbin and I started dating, I was very socially awkward. On one of our first dates, I asked our friends Jessica and Blake if they were having intercourse!" She laughed, covering her mouth, and blushed prettily. "And then my mother asked him if we were having intercourse. It was a very awkward conversation. So now Corbin is always very careful whenever the subject comes up. But it's all right, I will not ask your friends about that!"

31 Curse that nigh-fearless cow! New round; GK is up.

A hand closed around Corbin's wrist; not the flaming-blue grip of Citizen with the ring, but the familiar holographic grasp of Citizen himself. "Gotcha!" Sharl grinned at Corbin behind his shades, enjoying the role reversal for a moment. "Let's get that ring!" he encouraged, before he and Corbin began zooming their way back down to Earth to collect. "Grab my shoulders!" he called, "I can carry a person easily with my projector running. I'm not going to lose another vital artifact to that stupid ocean full of fish again!" he added as they swooped low. Over everyone's commlink, he used his wonderful, delightful, so-glad-to-be-back powers to shout, "Hey, somebody try and grab the ring before it hits the water! I'm inbound from way up with Cobalt Templar, but the ring is going down fast!"

"We need to find him, and fast, before something very bad happens," said Edge without hesitation. "I...I guess we need your help," he said to Medea, trying to look past the sorceress' pain to all the bad stuff she'd done over the years. Being a sucker for a pretty face, it wasn't an easy task for Mark. "Listen, this is a pretty serious crisis for all of us. Can you take us to Jason?" he asked her. "Or at least figure out where he'd take the Crime League if he does have them prisoner? There can't be that many places the Greek gods love around here, they've gotten their butts kicked too many times for them to get really attached...and the ones that are here, though, I'm willing to bet you know something about."

"Taste the wrath of Helios, foolish mortal!" boomed the giant cow a moment before red-orange light erupted from its eyes in a burning bolt that blasted against Vector's shields with awesome fury! Vector could feel the heat burning her skin and licking at her clothes even through her protection, an awesome show of celestial bovine fury that would surely have killed a lesser woman. "Your flesh will be roasted and you will be consumed in the cleansing inferno! The world will belong to the cows of the gods!" the great dire cow bellowed, its voice loud enough to vibrate the glass in the windows all around the area. Its thralls didn't seem to be helping it in the fight, but as ice cream trucks slowly collided with walls and people fell down just at the edge of the heroes' vision as the army of thralls fell apart, that didn't mean they were out of danger!

OK, with that roll she is bruised and dazed. Teagan is up as soon as I post IC.

"I am prepared," said the icy ex-Soviet agent as he joined the others, his insulated space suit looking like the cross between an old science fiction spacesuit and a parka. Gloved hands in his pockets, he said with a nod. "And you are not scary spacemen. I have seen much worse." He took up a place next to Vicky as they wanted for their teleport up to the stars. "" he reminisced. "" He said with another nod. ""

APPROVED

Fleur spends her turn rescuing civilians. Have an HP for doing the heroic thing. The Great Cow is up. It uses its solar vision to blast Vector! That's a DC 23 Reflex save for half (DC 28 if you fail the save, 21 if you make it), depending on your evasion.

Needs Burrowing and Flight speed.

For ease of play, I'll say it's within thirty feet move if you run right out the door and punch the nearest leg, sure. Tou vs 27: 32 Unhurt, yowsa. Fleur is up.

TOU of 18, DEF of 7 That exceeds the DC of 17 to hit by 12, and so he gets that full bonus. 24 Bruised and stunned. Go ahead and have an HP, Fox, and I'll just have him take that bruise. Vector is up.

Initiative: Gaian 'eating his wheaties' Knight: 18 Vector: 11 Fleur: 11 Divine Cow of Apollo: 8 Teagan: 3 GK is up

Edge Lord of the Manor Crashing In Harrier Moloch's Champions Brighter Than The Moon Citizen October Nights Mile Pepper's Ghost Paying Paul Viral Celebrity Comrade Frost You Can't Go Home Again GMing Cheesetopia Put my Ref point to Edge, as well as any boost I get from GMing. Bleah.

Fleur knows to stay away from the eyes, and maybe focus on the udders. She also knows that, if this _is_ a cattle of the gods, its weakness is liable to be social rather than physical: it somehow got here through the Pact, and if so perhaps there is a normal cow deep down inside this one.

The couples wound up sitting on the edge of the building, one pair on either side of the cooler, as the movie started. With the radio cranked up well enough that everyone could hear it, Sharl copied what he'd seen in Earth movies about how to sit at a drive-in, pulling over the cheap blanket he'd bought the other day (and had Eliza bring along in her cooler) and setting it on both their laps. He focused on the movie as it came on, and naturally as well on the cute girl next to him. "So you go to a lot of drive-ins?" he asked Eliza curiously, letting Koshiro and Mali get their business on (whatever that might turn out to be tonight) without any interference from him. "I mean, I know these are dying in a lot of places as people stick to watching things in their homes." That actually made more sense to Sharl, but there was no denying the sheer exotic novelty of the experience. Or Eliza, for that matter.

Fleur de Joie recognizes the aurouch as an ancestral species of cattle, long extinct, though this one is of course much, much bigger than any of those. meanwhile, Tiamat recognizes the divine cattle of Apollo, the great sun-beasts of the sky herd! This one is being wicked! Initiative time! The giant cow, which has the stats of my dragon at PL 13, goes on 8

DC 20 Life Sciences or History to recognize an Aurochs

Rumblerumble For a moment, it looked as if Gaian Knight's ground probes had done nothing more than suggest that no one with them was cheese-possessed. The rescued tourists did no more than look around in surprise and a little fear at the mini-earthquake beneath their feet, while the still-enslaved townspeople twitched. A second later, though, Gaian Knight could feel something pushing back against his probes, something big, fast, and coming up! It erupted out of the street outside the jail within seconds, roaring defiance as it scrabbled to the surface with massive fleshy limbs larger than a car, towering over the jail and the small town like a giant mastiff above a Lego city. It might have blended in fine among the creatures that occasionally attacked Freedom City, but as it was the great beast was the most impressive thing this town had ever seen. With glowing yellow eyes fixed on the jail, the great beast bellowed with a terrible roar. "FOOLS! WHO DARES TAMPER WITH THE POWER OF THE CATTLE OF...THE GODS!" The massive bovine was five or six stories tall if it was anything, and big to match, clearly female as massive udders swayed just above the shadowed streets below. Those eyes, flaring like twin suns, seemed to gaze directly on the heroes and the people they'd come to save inside the jail. "COME AND FACE THE LIGHT OF HELIOS, MORTALS!"

"," said the dragon with a look of almost a plea at the humans. "" It snuffled at the broken, aged nest for a while, then said, "" "Makes sense to me," commented Nina with a shrug. "If I found out I was some sort of clone, I'd drown the place and anyone fool enough to linger there." "I can understand that," said Edge carefully with a glance at Doctor Archeville. "But we'd like to study the place more beforehand. If there's more than one dragon-cloning lab, we may be able to find it, and keep any further horrors like this from happening to any other members of your species..."

"Fools! None of you can stop me! I am the light and the way to darkness!" shouted the ranting wizard, and as he raised his borrowed blade in the air a black, oily energy poured from the air itself. Wrapping itself around the shortened pike, the black, oily Terminus magic, the curling strands of anti-light, sizzled and froze the air as he hefted it triumphantly. "Yes! With this blade, I will cut aside the doorways of the world and step into my mother's arms!" A pool of black light bubbled in the air above him, casting eerie shadows onto everyone in the room. "But first, I will cut out the heart of the enemy of Omega!" He stepped forward, ignoring his parents for a moment, and swung the blade directly at Harrier. "Die, son of Steelgrave's whore!" he spat, the words actually enough to make Harrier flinch as the blade nearly tore out his heart. But the cybernetic veteran of 1000 wars had heard worse, and batted aside the blade with his outstretched pike. Pinning the blade with his own, Harrier growled in a voice from a mechanical Hell. "No more. Your parents are protected. Your magic will be stopped. Your words mean nothing. You are nothing." He flipped the blade around and smashed it against Billy Shepard's face, driving the blunt end in hard enough that an audible crack rang through the room, and the young mystic was hurled backwards against the wall in a daze. As his head hit the wall behind him, the black cloud that had empowered his blade began to fade away, but not before an echo of a voice, like the ghost of another world, sounded distinctly in the air. "No, Billy..."

OK, Billy is up. He'll try and cut Harrier down to size. DC 20 Feint for Harrier He passes with Skill Mastery 16 He misses Harrier Harrier's turn. Startle again: 16 He is startled Harrier is through playing nice. All-Out/Power Attack with his staff 14 Of course! Harrier rerolls 29 with the HP DC 12+15+5+3=35 15 I'm trying to run down the number of threads I'm running, so if no one objects, i'll take that one. For now...