Avenger Assembled

"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?

"" suggested Dimitri jovially, half-serious as he probed the young Russian teleporter. "" he said, pronouncing the second-to-last word in his accented English. "" He sighed, and added with a wry chuckle, "" he said with a wave of his hand at the beauty of Freedom Hall all around them. "" He set his drink down with a sigh, and Wisp could see the little flakes of ice floating in it. ""

That'll work! Whatever Mara is doing is solving the problem; she's making definite progress, and should have this situation handled in an hour or two. As long as nothing baaaad happens...

Quo-Dis put her elbow on the table and took Trevor's hand. "I wouldn't know," she confessed in response to his comment, looking wistful for a moment at the words. "My body heals all injuries as soon as they are made. We live on vril as much as on life itself. Now let us count down from three," she went on, "so that we may pit ourselves against each other. "Three...two...one!" She was all strength and solid muscle as she resisted Trevor; her eyes on him rather than their match as they pitted themselves against each other. "You are very fast, Erin!" she called to Wander as she and Corbin competed. "There are few who can stand against Corbin in foosball-battle and come so close to victory!" She gritted her teeth and narrowed her eyes at Trevor for emphasis. "Your power is great, Trevor! Few humans could stand my strength so."

Go ahead and give me a Disable Device check, Fox.

A beam of something black and flaming seared from Edge's hands and cut into the flesh of the tentacle monster, cutting deep into its massive flesh without doing any lasting damage. Edge hadn't pushing himself as hard as possible, but that certainly had been no slacking attack. "Unh...it's tough!" exclaimed Edge, having concentrated hard on the attack but only barely done any damage. "Stupid Sharktopus. If we get into an interstellar war over this, I'm going to bake you into fritters and serve you at the next Freedom Day barbecue!" he shouted in frustration at the monster. "Can anyone see if there's an opening in the ship?" he called to the others. "Even if we can't get the creature off the pod, maybe we can get whoever is in there out before everything gets even worse!"

Reflex vs. 22: 21 Booooo. Tou vs 27: 30 Yay! Well, Citizen can't go Insubstantial inside the computer. He's Flying Brick Sharl at this point, using the stats from low down on his sheet. Citizen goes ahead and tries to Bluff her as a move action. I'll spend an HP to acquire the Challenge feat to do it without the penalty. That's DC 25 with Skill Mastery. He'll follow that up with an attempt to punch her. 11 Of course! Another HP...26 DC 29 Tou save.

"" said Dimitri with a wave, glad that Vicky didn't seem particularly concerned with the physical changes that had come with her maturity. He'd known plenty of young people with powers who had let a warped body lead to a warped mind, and it was good to see that the daughter of his old colleague hadn't gone that way. "" As he spoke, he poured himself a steaming cup of hot coffee and held it between his hands, visibly relaxing as the heat from it soaked into his fingers. "" he added, using the old term for Russia's super-soldiers that had been out of fashion for a great many years now. Figuring there was no harm in asking, he added speculatively, ""

Any objection to the use of Harrier's long-updated sheet, SC? If not: Harrier gets a 38 and is not intimidated by Skull-Face. He passes the zombiedrone's startle automatically via Skill-Mastery.

Dimitri had put his cigarette out as he stepped inside the building, having learned that it wasn't worth the arguments with his colleagues during his two months as Russian liason to the Freedom League, however much the small flame comforted him. Americans, so obsessed over the little things, he thought, pulling his parka up around his face as he headed into the building. It was going to get much colder, he knew, but he was old enough that he no longer worried about looking odd in front of young people: when the cooling Freedom City air chilled his bones, he would warm himself and what was it to anyone else? He was looking forward to the meeting today, which promised to be a reunion with an old friend and a chance to meet a new curiosity, and was smiling when he opened the door to see a familiar (albeit much-grown) face inside. "" he boomed ebuillently at the sight of WIsp, and walked right up to embrace the young woman with an avuncular smile. "" he said with a nod. " " he added with a wink.

Rodimus Prime! http://transformers.wikia.com/wiki/Hot_Rod

There were no more holdouts left in the apartment after the departure of the Mad Maple and the Weather Mistress, a small blessing on what was already promising to be a very strange day. Steve followed them to the edge of the perimeter, the police and AEGIS agents on scene wise enough not to provoke the still-tweaking criminals into a fight near the indifferently-secreted explosives, and watched as they flew away in separate directions with the aid of their respective talismans. With the police calling in an APB, Steve trusted that the job was done and headed back to the building to join Mara and Erin at their work. The basement was empty now but for them when he arrived; Mara and Erin's escorts all having sensibly evacuated the building. There was no cowardice involved, it was simply a safe place to be! Of course, it wasn't any of their jobs to be safe. "Maple and Mistress are gone," Steve murmured to Erin from their position near the door, having kept their distance so as not to disturb Mara at her work. "Police helicopters were in the air, but if they are caught, it will be well outside of our concern. There are heroes enough to handle that. The media present may be a larger concern," he went on. "But so far the authorities have them under control." He'd only seen the trucks pulling in as he'd left, but it was certainly something to keep in mind. Meanwhile, Mara found that the missing pieces of the bombs were all there, secreted away years before her own birth. That meant the bomb had begun to fail, but that did not mean her work was done. Bigeye's chemical components had begun to decay and rats had been at the wiring, but of course that made things no less dangerous, as the several long-dead scavengers (now skeletonized by hardier cockroaches) down below in the cement hole could tell her. Even rotting, Bigeye was a dangerous thing, and the explosive components still had the power to destroy the building itself and scatter toxins across the neighborhood. The loss of hundreds of people would still be terrible.

With his attention divided between drone and skull, Harrier aimed blade at the first and barrel at the other. "I have experience with skull-faced creatures from beyond the depths," said Harrier flatly. "I have better things to do than listen to your whispers, and I find it unlikely that even the designers of this vessel would have been so foolish as to tie their ship's lifecycle to this monster. Surrender yourself or evacuate the area, so that I may concentrate on the more important of unholy abominations." This was a very confusing day for Steve, but even amid a sinking ship and maddening foes he was determined to be true to what seemed right.

At Nick's words, Harrier didn't speak. He turned and walked with almost military precision down the church's well-maintained sidewalk right up to the front door. The reinforced wood didn't stop his armored body for more than an instant as with a mighty heave he grabbed with his armored fingers and squeezed hard, seizing the door in his hands and ripping through the lock that held the double doors together like so much cardboard. A moment later, he flung the double-red doors aside and stormed into the church. He saw at once that Nick was right; this was the temple of abomination he'd heard. And he'd seen places like this. before. He stormed into the sanctuary and caught the gaze of the half-drunk young man before the altar, who bolted to his feet with a terrified expression on his face that the usually gentle Steve found terribly satisfying today. As one, though with the one considerably more fearful than the other, man and drone shouted, "YOU!"