Avenger Assembled

Sure enough, she got the code answer that told her everything was okay. They'd been working together long enough that Sharl knew that one right off the top of his head. "All systems are nominal," said Sharl, the pained look on his face and slight tremor in his voice certainly sounding authentic for how he sounded when he was scared and upset. "I, uh, guess I didn't know as much about security here as I thought, huh?" he said with an awkward laugh that was quickly stilled as he imagined the look on Gina's face. "Sorry...listen, we...we need to talk. I was trying to keep this a secret, but now that you know, there's no reason not to tell you everything." They'd talked through sensors and codes often enough that he was no stranger to it, but this was a moment that called for a little more than that.

For all that he'd arrived there by clandestine means, Sharl was neither cowardly enough nor foolish enough to attempt to evade Miss Americana's eye. When the doors slammed shut and the magnetic barriers zitzed into place, fortifications he knew well enough were there even if he evidently hadn't known everything about their structure, he sat down on the floor in front of the open security locker and put his head briefly in his hands as the tension he'd felt since he'd gotten the idea for this independent break-in erupted in a wash of brief, memorable terror. Oh, no. This isn't going to be good at all... He was looking up in the direction of one of the security cameras when Gina reactivated them; there was no mistaking her erstwhile sidekick, or the carefully-suppressed (in that not-so-subtle teenage boy way) look of dread. "I'm here, Miss Americana," he said out loud for the benefit of the audio sensors he was sure she'd kicked back on too, "it's just me."

"And even if you don't take that stance," said Edge with a nod as he agreed with Jubatus, "Sharktopus has caused a lot of problems for heroes in the past. It's a little much for one man to handle, even someone as able beneath the waves as Wave-Eye here." He hmmed. "Look, I'm here for First Contact purposes through the UN, but you're from a recognized species and you're here on Freedom League business. That takes you out of my jurisdiction. Why don't I get you guys over to the League, and then I can come back here with a UNISON team and we can try and do something about chasing off Sharktopus? It sounds like you already know where you're going, Philo, and these guys can probably help you get there as well as I could," he went on without hesitation.

Inside the computer of the 13th Floor, Sharl and Sharla sat around the table in Sharla's house and talked. It made things easier to deal with when they were in a system rather than outside dealing with the others, it also made it much easier for them to talk where no one could hear. "I guess it would be different in human culture if I was a girl and Gina was a woman," said Sharl with a little frown as he heard Sharla's story. "I still go back and visit her all the time, and stay over if we've been working late together. There's never been any issues with that." "George made sure I moved out to Clairemont as soon as I was enrolled here," said Sharla, her eyes narrowing in judgement of the human culture that had made her friend's life so difficult. "He said people would talk if a teenage girl program that he could edit whenever he wanted to lived in his place, even though he's never been anything but good to me. I feel really sorry for him," she confessed suddenly. "He's got so many problems that could be fixed in a second if he were from Tronik, but he doesn't want to hear about getting changed. He's happy the way he is, or at least that's what he wants me to think. If it wasn't for Lady Freebooter, I don't know if he'd talk to anyone when he wasn't inhabiting the robot." "That's really a shame," said Sharl sympathetically. "Gina has it a little better, she's got a boyfriend and everything, but she's still working on...everything," He winced, then asked, "So, how about you? You getting anywhere with your Crimson Tiger or Glow?" "No way, Kotone's got a thing for Malian this big, and Glow...you know, I hadn't thought about it," she admitted, Loran her dog barking out in the field behind the computer house as he chased butterlifes. "He is pretty cute, and he does have that crazy red hair!" "I know, right? It's crazy how different humans look from each other."

Citizen didn't need to take a shower, of course, so by the time Koshiro and Mali had changed back into street clothes, Sharl was already standing in the corridor talking to a very animated little girl. "" said Eira, waving her arms for emphasis. "" she added with the ingenous loyalty of a little sister with her big brother wrapped around her finger. She switched back to English, and so did Sharl, when the others came out to the hallway. "Can I meet the rest of your team, pleaaaase? I know you said they were probably on campus, and it will not take too long. I would like to meet the girl from India, and the ghost!" "She's not really a ghost," said Sharl patiently, "but I bet we can probably find them...Mali really should meet them anyway if she's going to be on the team. I'll message your dad on the way," he added as they headed to the elevator and back upstairs. "I was going to be a ghost too," Eira informed Mali and Koshiro sociably, "but Miss Americana and Sharl and Dragonfly made me a robot instead."

"I think that's our cue," said Edge with a glance at Cannonade and a look up at Wander, who he knew had gotten the message as clearly as he had. "Everybody get close!" One everyone was together, Edge concentrated on Midnight's last message and what little they knew of his friend's last location. If stealth wasn't working anymore, it was time for the application for force: and that was one thing the Liberty League did with great skill. He closed his eyes, and opened them in the depths of Medea's lair alongside his friends, the Liberty League lined up just a few feet behind Midnight in the battle-ready pose they had honed so well through months of training and battle. "This is the part where normally I'd say something really badass," he said with a confident smirk in Medea's direction, "but when the Liberty League's around, it's the bad guys who do all the talking."

"Difficult years," said Dimitri grimly. "Stalin had arrested tens of thousands, and killed as many. He saw enemies everywhere, even among those who had once been closest allies. Even I was briefly relieved of post and held under, what do you say, house arrest?, in Moscow." Comrade Frost smiled thinly, and for just a moment his teeth looked very sharp. "When finally he had stroke, his guards feared to awaken him and he died alone in bed. A fitting fate." It was a cold-blooded way to describe a man who had been his master for many years, but no less true for that. "As for space mission, there were many in those years. It was covered by another agency. Beyond my purview. Strange it was forgotten by Korolev and successors. But," he went on, "if mission was assembled and launched, and planners killed in purges of '53-'54, it could have fallen from records. Much good was lost in those years." He nodded. "I will go on mission. But what exactly would you have us do? Space is big. Do you need planet so badly?"

Comrade Frost started briefly at the sight of the Lor, but his face went cold and impenetrable as Siberian ice as they showed the Soviet colony on the forgotten homeworld. Dimitri steepled his fingers and closed his eyes, thinking back to briefings he'd barely paid attention to decades ago. After all, Lady Winter was a child of Russia and Wisp a legacy of the old Soviet Union; he was the only one in the room who had actually held a post in the forces of that gone-away nation. "Mir meant world peace," he said out loud in the English he assumed the Lor had been trained in. So easily they'd learned the language of the Americans, as if it was the world tongue instead of all the others. "Something Americans forgot. And Soviets." He hmmed and studied the planet over his steepled fingers. "What is date of colony?" he inquired of the Lor. "Even with eff-tee-el drive, you should know how long has sat on alien planet," he said with a gesture, trusting in the technical competence of the aliens. "At what star system are we looking?"

"I don't know, he read whatever he could get his hands on," said Tommy with a shake of his head. "I didn't even pay attention to most of that stuff. My powers make more sense, I can drain energy and use it to speed myself up, so I can run really fast and leave a trail behind. Billy started reading the magic stuff when he was young. That's how we got picked up by Claremont in the first place, when we were breaking into an old magic shop to get what he wanted out of it. He, uh, wow..." He concentrated, running his hands through his pale white hair. "He can set things on fire, and fix them up again, and he can fire blasts of, like, nails out of his hand to pin things down. And turn things into blood. Yeah, that part was really creepy," he added with a shudder. "The thing in the basement? It...it goes to our old family place in North Bay, I think. Gramma S lived there till she died there last year, and it's been sealed up ever since." Miss Americana found that, as far as she could tell, Tommy's story checked out. He was a normal human, albeit one with obvious entropic mutations under the skin that accounted for the superpowers that Nick's spell was currently suppressing. He was also very drunk, and probably shouldn't be so much as running unaided for a while. As for whether he was from Earth, it was tough to tell. Like most Terminus babies, enough entropic radiation flooded his cells to make a definitive match nearly impossible to make. He had certainly spent the last twenty years on Earth, at least, and if he'd come from the Terminus it must have been as a very small baby. There were none of the long-hidden legacies of malnutrition that she'd found deep in Steve's cells during close examinations, no hint he'd once lived beneath red skies and entropic fires. If he was from the Terminus, it was hidden very well indeed.

"" Comrade Frost pulled up his parka and peered at the new arrival. "" He extended a gloved hand and shook hers, his touch cold even through the glove against Dasha's icy skin. "" He grinned, showing the crooked teeth that were a legacy of the dentistry of decades earlier, and went on, "

October 1, 2012 Gina's silent alarm went off late one night when most of the rest of North Freedom was sleeping. Someone was tampering with some of the equipment stored in her lab; not her facility at Archetech or at the Lab proper, but at the personal workspace that only she, Harrier, and Citizen among a very small, select group had ever actually visited. Whoever was doing it was good; they'd disabled most of the obvious security systems in place around the restricted equipment: the laser eyes, the cameras, the touch-sensors, the air-current trackers, and even the hidden electromagnetic readers that she'd concealed inside the walls around the sealed equipment room. But they'd missed the backup IR readers in the light fixtures, an easy mistake to make if you weren't as smart as Gina. Most people wouldn't bother to look for sensors that were only active when everything else had been turned off. This was potentially a high-risk theft; the material stored in that particular locker were high-tech items she had confiscated from supervillains over the years she'd been active: Grue reactor cores, Terminus tech of gruesome provenance, dimensional reactors, hard radiation, and various other items that she would have preferred not to have out on the street.

"Great! Take that, you Foundry jerks!" said Citizen with some heat as he went around disabling the fallen drones before they could get up to do any more harm. "I hate these guys, especially when they go after people like Dr. Atom," he muttered as he went around the street cleaning up the damage the robots had made. He paid special attention to Keres, making sure to break up the specialized robot body before any internal booby traps could be triggered to do more harm. If there was a program wiper built in to the elite Foundry-bot, that was an additional hazard he had to fix, since a security measure designed to clear away spare Foundry programming was a potential hazard to his own life and limb. "I don't see why, like, half the robots I meet on this planet have to be evil. We need more people making good artificial life," he grumbled.

Outside, Edge stood up. "I've got a bad feeling about this, you guys," he said, shooting a glance at Cannonade behind his mask. "Midnight normally checks in by now, even when he's doing his super-sneaky thing. He can take Medea, but who knows what kind of crazy magic mojo she's got going on in there? Even if she hasn't seen him, he might be pinned down or dealing with something so big he hasn't had time to radio in. If he doesn't call in in two minutes, let's pop in and see if we can help," he suggested. Having trained alongside these people for years, Trevor in particular, Mark knew better than to simply have them disappear out of the alley where they were concealed and pop into the theater without checking first.

"Listen...listen, I'm not a good guy," admitted Tommy Shepard. "I've hurt people, I've hurt women, I've...I'm not a good man," he confessed, the carrot and stick of Miss Americana and Harrier enough to make him spill his guts. "Billy started the Terminus stuff after we got kicked out of Claremont. I mean that was fair, I punched Old Man Archer and he was selling dope, and it was just a matter of time, but then Billy started coming up with...all this. Talking about the black Gospel and the Church of the Dark Mother. It all made sense at the time, you know?" he said, his voice a frightened noise that was somewhere between whine and whimper. "The world's run by fools and parasites, so why wouldn't things be better if someone came along to burn away the chaff? And there are a lot of people who believe that, you know?" Harrier loomed at Miss Americana's backside, and Tommy twitched. "It wasn't like we were worshipping _Omega_...I, uh, I...anyway, things were going great. We were making enough money that it didn't matter that Mom and Dad cut us off, and I was getting some primo tail, and...then Billy started having these dreams. These crazy, f-ed up dreams about her. About the Black Madonna. And about him. And me." He licked his lips and went on. "We're adopted, you know? T-Babies born during the invasion, at least that's what the man said when he turned us in to the Freedom League. But Billy...he started talking about how maybe we were born _in_ the Terminus. That maybe that's how we got our powers. And that the Black Madonna was our _real_ mother." "The Black Madonna has no children. Only those she takes from others and changes into her own image. Her mutation renders her...incapable of any natural procreation." His earlier anger had dimmed, somewhat, and he was beginning to feel a swell of pity for this poor stupid child. "Attempts were made." he went on, and that was a memory he was uncomfortable visiting even inside the confines of his own head. "...he said we weren't born. Not like that," admitted Tommy, looking deeply uncomfortable at the memory. "I told you, it was crazy. He said we were the pieces of something else; pieces of something called Taarvon the Undying, pieces that the Madonna had taken after a great battle, and that she'd molded us from the shadow beyond shadow into children in her own likeness so that we could..." "You are certain of this. Pieces of Taarvon the Undying?" Harrier's manner had suddenly become very to the point. "Could your brother have used his abilities to learn about the Terminus? About the shadow sorcerers there?" "I don't know! I didn't pay any attention to that crap!" said Tommy, flattening himself against the wood of the pew. "When I told him that, he said he'd handle it with me...or without me. Handle getting back to our mother, I mean."

Sharl listened patiently as Mr. Archer talked to them about mercy and necessity, about the tension between a hero's duty to protect his people and her duty to guard life. "This was a tough decision to make, and there are no easy answers for it. What matters at this stage of your careers is that you were willing to take action fast and that you could all defend your choices when it was done. Not every student is able to act, and defend what they've done. All three of you get full marks for this mission; but by the end of the week, I want you to write up a summary of the arguments of the other side. So Sharl and Koshiro, try and argue from Mali's perspective, Mali, try and argue from theirs. I'd like to see how well you put yourselves in each other's shoes." When it was done, and they were all leaving the Doom Room, Sharl took his chance. Mali had shown a lot of promise by his lights; she'd been willing to risk her own life to guard a group of enemies that most people didn't think were human (like, say, alien Nazi computer programs), and she was right there. "Hey, Mali," he said as they headed for the locker rooms. "You did pretty good back there. You want to get a chance to get on a team that sees some real action?"

There was a great flash of light outside the ship and a deep, basso rumble from the deck beneath their feet. Citizen pulled himself out of the computer to watch, eyes wide, as a celestial beam of reddish-blue fire tore from their vessel's hull and slammed into the planet's surface beneath like the fist of an angry god. No, not a fist: as they watched, the planet's surface seemed to catch fire like wood dropped into a campfire. Red seared to black and black seared to ash, and by the time the beam stopped mere seconds later the planet's surface below was all scorched earth and absolute devastation. The Grue ships chasing them seemed to go mad as they careened towards the now-tumbling Lor vessel, out of control and firing wildly, and for a second, all at once, one filled the viewscreen- And then, the lights were coming on and the scenario falling away, and the three young students found themselves standing among the naked walls of the Doom Room, mere seconds away from simulated devastation. Sharl took a moment to steady himself, shooting a glance at Koshiro and Mali, before the voice from above spoke. It was Mr. Archer. "Hmm. Well, that was an interesting result, everyone. Why don't you tell me why you did what you did?" "Well...we had a chance to stop the Grue, and we took it," said Citizen after a moment's thought. "Even if we didn't make it back there at the end, risking our lives to save so many others is worth it. A hero should be willing to make sacrifices for the greater good. It's not like we had a lot of good options, popping out of space right there over Gruen. I think we took the best one."

Firebug fires a blast to keep the cops' heads down, and succeeds! He continues to advance on the building, and is about 100 feet away from it. Caradoc lands and tries to intimidate him. vs 30...32 Doh! Must be holding back. Wander is up as soon as I post IC.

The white-haired young man tried to run, his eyes widening in terror behind his orange shades as he nearly fell off the altar. "What the hell? I'm not that drunk-" Harrier grabbed the man by the collar and lifted him into the air like a puppy. "Your name!" said the former drone in a voice like steel on stone, the cold fury in his metallic voice enough to make the other man spill his guts immediately. "I'm Tommy! Tommy Shepard! Oh God, you're the one who killed Billy!" he gabbled in terror. "Do you think we are FOOL enough to fall for your cult's deceptions?" Harrier dropped Tommy Shepard to the ground at his feet, looming over him like a vision of Hell itself. "We know what you did. A false corpse, an all-too-real bomb, human lives that you might have sacrificed in an instant in your god's name." He gestured around the church. "Tell us where your brother is hiding." "It...I don't know!" said Tommy, who in his fear looked much younger than his twenty years, his confusion palpable enough to make the obviously still-furious Harrier take a step back. "I...I mean, the police said he was really dead! They said he'd picked a fight with a superhero and gotten himself killed! And he's been so, so nuts lately, I thought that made sense!" He looked desperately from Harrier to Miss Americana. "He started...he started believing all this!" he said with a gesture around the unconsecrated sanctuary. - Down below, Nick found what was by all appearances a fairly typical hoodoo teleport circle in place, the raised staff driven into the floor and watermarks around the edge showing where the "Red Sea" had been parted and the gateway opened to the other place. The other end was blocked by the same wards that had kept him from finding the missing evangelist, but he could tell that the other end of the gateway wasn't far. Rather than serving as a gateway to the Terminus, this was a gateway to some place close by in Freedom City. Pushing at the wards without incinerating them, he was able to catch a glimpse of a dark room with half-visible paintings and sculptures everywhere, matching the Black Madonna imagery he'd seen in the church but somehow all the crueler and barbaric. What lay beyond was no playing at wickedness.

Wander and Caradoc found Firebug engaging the police and AEGIS agents on the street outside, his fiery blasts driving them back under the cover of their armored vehicles. The armored pyromaniac usually wasn't that tough, but it looked like he'd brought a special suit of fire-engine red steel for this battle, one that let him project searing-hot blue and white flames as he marched towards the apartment. STAR Squad and AEGIS probably still had the resources to take him down eventually, but not before he set the building on fire! "I'm coming for you baby!" he was yelling blurrily at the tenement as he staggered closer and closer. ""No lousy Canuck's gonna take my baby away from me!" Firebug added in a shout. "Even if you hide behind every cop in Freedom City! It's time for some Canadian bacon!" Bullets bouncing off his armor, Firebug fired a blast of flame at the building, a searing blast of blue and white fire that flew directly towards the upper stories of the massive structure! Dodging the blast in the air, 'Caradoc' appeared riding a shining curtain of his own flame; a shining knight of valor and honor and cunning holographic sophistication. "What ho, villain!" called Caradoc as Steve landed himself between Firebug and the structure. "You bring your romantic squabbles here, in the middle of this beautiful day!?! You shall surely know the taste of my STEEL!" Steve was trying his best, but as Firebug eyed him suspiciously and advanced on him, he didn't seem to be impressing the armored pyromaniac.

"It's..." Citizen's fingers slipped through the console as he interfaced with the 'system' onboard the ship, the modifications that Miss Americana and he had made to the Doom Room systems letting him establish a cybernetic connection to the illusory unit. His jaw tightened as he concentrated on the work ahead, face pulled into an expression of concentration behind the mirrorshades he wore in costume. "It...can't tell for sure," he reluctantly admitted. "This matches the coordinates in the ship's databanks for two centuries of stellar drift, the star system is right, the Grue fleet pulling into the system is right, all the Grue on the planet below are right, but all the images it has are so old and so attenuated by distance it can't be 100% accurate. The Meta-Mind _is_ on the surface, though; it's detecting way too much telepathic energy for it to be anything but that." He nodded. "I think this is the place."

21 Firebug: 22 Of course he does. I'll use the stats for Coppertop above with ATK and DEF adjusted to +12 to make him a PL 12 NPC.

He's out! Good! With the occupant of the pod out and safe, Edge nodded in satisfaction. "Everybody hang on!" he yelled to the other heroes, hoping he wouldn't need to translate for the benefit of the man Jubatus had helped pull out. Is that a Farsider? Neat! "We're all getting out of here right now!" he shouted, then concentrated, reaching out into the air and water all around them to gather up himself, Jubatus, Wave-Eye, the Farsider's spaceship, and the alien himself from the ocean's surface before everything faded for a long, crucial instant... And then, after that brief moment of discontinuity; all was right with the world again. They were back on the Freedom City beach as Sharktopus tore apart the rapidly disintegrating bridge Edge had used to walk out to the crash site in the first place, the space pod resting on the beach on its side and all the heroes and their new friend safely rescued from wherever they'd been. Edge walked right up to the misplaced Farsider and extended his hand. "Welcome to Earth! Sorry about the mess back there; normally we try and greet people with a little more respect. Sea monsters, what can you do?"

Crack. And then another, gunshots echoing down into the basement level through the thin walls of the tenement as Erin and Steve lifted their heads to the sound of the action. Steve had kept his armor on here away from the view of the others, and as he did so he heard the voice of the police outside on the radio. "We're taking fire!" one of them yelled, then another, "It's Firebug! It's that crazy maniac Firebug! He's got some kind of crazy power armor!" If he'd had a face behind his armor at the moment, Steve would have made such an expression. Why is everyone in Freedom City insane today? That is not supposed to happen in the fall! We are supposed to be eating pumpkins now!As it was, he muttered a curse and headed for the stairs, his weight shaking the wood beneath his feet as he ran up them. (He didn't dare risk flight, not so close to the bomb Dragonfly was working on!) "I will engage him in my other identity from the air," he suggested. "No one need connect Caradoc to this place!"

Citizen backs off a step and tries his heat vision as a full-round action. DC 27 Tou save for the bad lady.

Roo: Edge does potentially have the power to teleport them all away at this juncture, but that would end the fight with Sharktopus. Do you want him to try and do that, or keep things going?