Avenger Assembled

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...

32 Boo.

"I, uh, I guess I should admit that I can't eat," Sharl suddenly confessed to Temperance as he sat down next to the radio, idly fiddling with it to make sure it was tuned to the jazz station that came on before the movies. "I mean I can, just not out here." He demonstrated by reaching into the cooler without opening it, his hand passing right through the surface of the lid before he pulled it back again. "I'm not really here, you see," he said with a little shrug. "I'm in here." He tapped the little black plastic bud on his shoulder. "I can make myself solid, but I'm not made of the same stuff as you guys. What you see is a hologram." He coughed, and added nervously, riding one awkward moment with another, "I'm Sharl, by the way. I just...I guess we should get all that out!"

29 vs. 19 OK, he's not flat-footed, so that blast misses. Miss A is up.

There were no monsters waiting inside the jail, but there certainly was monstrosity: the half-dozen cells of the small Pleasantville jail were filled to capacity and beyond with what had to be at least a hundred tourists. They'd been caged there for days in cramped conditions, hosed down with sour milk and fed nothing but cheese and yogurt, and the smell of the various byproducts thereof was as grim as the looks on their pale, frightened faces. "Oh thank god, it's the Freedom League!" someone exclaimed, a round-faced elderly woman from the nearest cell as she waved, "Come help us! You've got to watch out for the people in town, they're crazy!" They'd had to come in through the sheriff's office to reach the jail cells. In the office, at the front of the jailhouse where the keys and the records were kept, was an enormous pile of the captives’ confiscated belongings. Among them are several dozen cell phones that occasionally rang. "Vector! Vector! Over here!" yelled a familiar face, one who was being careful not to divulge her roommate's secret ID but still looked tired of being locked in an overcrowded cell. As the bars gave way to viney yanks or sword blows, the victims crowded out of their cells to surround the heroes excitedly. "Are you going to stop the bad guys? Do you have any idea what happened? The place is a madhouse!" And it was, a din of voices and faces in the gloomy cells that was hard to sort out. "Why did they feed us so much cheese!?!"

Harrier: 22 Nick C.: 18 Miss Americana: 15 Billy Shepard: 7 Harrier's going to go ahead and intimidate this fool. DC 30 is beyond his ability to match, so he is flat-footed vs. Harrier's attack: 15 Just barely hits with a flat-footed DEF +13 and Dodge 4 Tou vs DC 27 16 That's a little much, so I'll take an HP for Harrier and give him a bruise.

The heroes blasted through the roof and burst in on a grim scene like something from one of those 1980s warnings about occult sorcery mixed with what few images of the Terminus had made it into mass circulation. The attic of the big house was all wood paneling and high ceilings, looking like something from the upper levels almost of a cathedral. A pool table and other accourtrements of an upper-class man's den had been hurled to the side with great force, leaving open a bare wooden floor to which an elderly couple in the tattered remnants of afternoon clothes had been bound by glowing mystic sigils around their wrists and ankles. Gagged and unable to do more than cry out, the senior Shepards were in the middle of a glowing Ω presided over by their son, a sneering figure in red and black robes adorned with Egyptian calligraphy, wielding a massive blade that Harrier recognized as the tip of an Omegadrone's power pike. "And there will be a sacrifice, a sacrifice that will open the gateway to-" Harrier hit the ground hard, his steely bulk shaking the attic floor as his feet hit wood. "No more sacrifices today." he spat before firing a blast of screaming black energy at the dark entropic mystic, sending him staggering back but without actually knocking him off his feet. "We will stop you now, and for all time." "You're too late, traitor!" spat the dark mage as he waved his dagger, "No one will stop me from seeing my real mother! After all these years trapped with this filth, I'm finally going home!" he exulted. "You'll have to come in here if you want to stop me!"

Rather than yet another fight with low-level bad guys, just go ahead and write your heroes mopping up the thralls and heading into the jail. Don't worry, combat is coming!

Having passed the red brick jail building in the center of town, it wasn't that hard for the heroes to find it again on their way back aboard Gaian Knight's flying rock. Thralls aplenty there were visible down in the fields, human and otherwise, but there wasn't much they could do to heroes in the air. Down below, the only moving vehicles were two ice cream trucks and three milk floats from the dairy, each making slow, menacing circles around the jail. (Peering in the window of one of the ice cream trucks from above, the heroes could clearly see that one of them was in fact driven not by a person, but by a cow!) As for the jail proper, it was well-guarded: six townspeople, three police officers, two teenagers in black, baggy clothes with punk band labels, and one elderly woman in a flower-print dress stood guard outside, three in the front and three in back: each carrying rifles. The jail itself stunk of sour milk from the air, obviously having been sprayed at least once, and people inside could be seen peering out from cells that looked very crowded even through barred windows: a small city jail like this had to be overflowing with people if all the tourists who had come to town were in there! "Help! Help!" came the distant cry from down below, even as the thralls leveled their rifles at the oncoming heroes.

"I, uh, don't actually drink milk," confessed Reed sheepishly. "I'm lactose intolerant in a real bad way, and so are the boys. I actually came into the cattle business through working with beef cattle, but I met my wife back in ag school and decided to move out here to her family business when we got hitched." He shrugged and actually, despite everything, blushed. "We tried to keep it from spreading around in town, thought it would make the business look funny, so I don't think anybody rightly knows but my wife and our doctor over in Ten Commandments. The boys and I just drink soy." "Are we going to Sanctuary?" asked Benjy, looking up at first Fleur, then his dad. "I read about that when I was writing the essay! Sanctuary's cool! It'll be..." He coughed and seemed to remember the gravity of the situation. "We'll be okay there. I knew the Freedom League would save us. And you too!" he added with a boy's awkward smile to Vector and Teagan. "Thank you!"

Normally Citizen found that kind of talk superstitious twaddle, but something about the way Temperance said it made him want to believe it. He shivered a a little, thinking about things much warmer than Earth's Antarctica and how it compared to the Nightside back home. "...yeah, yeah, let's see what they're doing," he said, blushing a little and smiling as he took to the air again. Careful, Sharl, you don't want her thinking you're overeager... He stuck very close to Temperance on the way back to the rooftop where they'd started, and sure enough he found both Papercut and Crimson Tiger there waiting for them. "Hey guys," he said, trying to play it cool, "We took care of patrolling. Looks like the only thing interesting that's going to happen tonight is going to be the four of us up on the roof. Papercut, Crimson Tiger, this is my friend Temperance. Temperance, this is Papercut and Crimson Tiger. We're teammates."

"There was a meteor came down about a week before all this started," said the dairy owner thoughtfully. "Came down north of town up by Breakwater Spring. They had a couple of guys come over from the state university, but they swore the thing broke up when it hit and there weren't pieces enough of it to take away. Made the brightest yellow flash you ever saw up in the sky," he added, rubbing his chin as his sons gathered around him. Soberly, he added, "Yeah, I saw 'em. Locked in those cells, getting sprayed down with raw milk, with nothing but cheese and yogurt to eat. Tryin' to make them like they were, I guess? Didn't look like they were hurtin' em besides that, but a couple of days with nothing but milk is going to be its own problem." he added, a remark that might have been funny under other circumstances.

Initiative time! Harrier goes on 22 Billy Shepard is this guy, upped to +13 ATK/DMG and +13 TOU/DEF He goes on 7. Ouch. He does have a surprise in place for the heroes, as Nick can see: there's a magical booby trap built into the floor!

"" hissed the sheriff in a voice that didn't sound like his own. "" the thing speaking for the sheriff said with a malevolent leer. "" Looking through the window opened in the dairy office, Fleur could see the occupants: Cedric Reed, a middle-aged man with a florid face and balding head, and two boys of about twelve: Benjy and Hightower. The contest winner and his brother looked relieved to see their heroes, albeit very tired. Both of them with a child's weight, they were sitting next to a mini-fridge and a pile of empty bottles. Their father was obviously on edge, shotgun still in hand as he talked. "Thank Heaven you folks got here in time. All we got to eat in here is Twinkies and Coke, we were gonna have to make a break for it soon. I don’t know what’s gotten into everybody. Must be some kinda drug. I heard about this sorta thing happening in France one time when some ergot fungus got inta the wheat, but not with dairy before. Not here or anywhere. This here used to be my dairy before it turned into cuckoo-land central.” "Pa, the crazy people?" offered Benjy. Cedric spoke at that. "I don't spend a lot of time in town," the dairy owner confessed. "With my wife out of town, I spent most of my time around the boys. Everyone's been so busy getting ready for the festival, I saw people...people startin' to go crazy, grabbing strangers in town, the postman, some tourists, and force-feeding 'em cheese and milk. I went to the sheriff about it. Big mistake, because he and his deputies were keeping the tourists in the jailhouse, and the minute I walked in he knew I wasn't with them. Good thing I left the boys in the truck...I just managed to get back here with three squad cars behind me," he added, gesturing to the cop cars all around and his own red pickup. "I never actually shot a man before, but the deputy, he had some kind of lockpick and I..." He paled and looked down at the shotgun in his hands. "I had to save my boys."