Avenger Assembled

Whatever concern Mara had about the competence of their commanders, the cops she approached had no lack of courage. An AEGIS grunt and Freedom City cop, Agent Reeves and Officer Stone, respectively, accompanied her back into the building, evidently glad not to have to deal with the super-battle overhead. "The super found it when he was trying to fix a leaky pipe," commented Stone as he led the way downstairs, the flashlight of the two officers and the jittery bulb overhead the only illumination in the cement-finished basement. The 'crawlspace' turned out to be under the cement as Reeves' handlight showed once they were down at ground-level, as shown by a half-open steel door that protruded from the cement floor awkwardly. "Yeah, no kiddin'. Good thing the guy got curious enough to open the door, or who knows how long that thing would have been down there before it started leaking enough to actually poison people?" the agent said aloud. "There's two, maybe three feet of headroom in there, just enough to hold the bomb standing straight up, and more space to crawl around in. Super thinks it got sealed up ten years ago, when his boss bought the building from the old holding company."

"Foolish girl, you dare tamper with the awesome power of the WEATHER MISTRESS?" Said worthy burst her way through the apartment's rear door in fine form, now fully-dressed in her familiar costume. With a triumphant shout, she hurled a bolt of lightning from the weather wand in her hand, a searing electric jolt that Wander deflected back at her with as much ease as she had the earlier cold blast. The lightning struck the hovering woman and faded in a moment, but before the startled weather controlling gadgeteer could continue, the Mad Maple hastily intervened. "No, baby, no! It's not like that! They're not even here for us, so they're gonna let us go when we get outside! There's some kind of big bomb down in the basement and they just want us to get out so they can fix it! Don't be a Mulroney here, honey-" "Oh, for..." Weather Mistress rolled her eyes and said in a more normal voice, "What the hell is this? You said this was going to be our night, that we could finally do something as a couple without Firebug getting all creepy and possessive about how I'm his 'match', ha-ha, we get it," Cheeks flushing pink, she turned and stormed towards the door in more ways than one, wobbling slightly in the air. "That's it! I'm going home!" In the room opposite, Steve appeared out of the darkness, back in human guise and visible as he came through the window near where Wander and Mad Maple were standing. "The police are deployed down below. They will be prepared for whatever these...people do." He obviously had no idea what was going on, but was willing to follow his chief's lead as they dealt with the two misplaced supercrooks, Mad Maple chasing after his erstwhile sweetheart to pour out his love for her in an accent as thick as Red Green's.

Weather Mistress flies back into the room and sees what's going on. She fires a lightning bolt at Wander! 24 It hits! But is bounced by Wander's Reflective Impervious. She's immune to her own powers, though. Mad Maple takes a full-round action and succeeds in talking his girlfriend down.

Sharl was, rarely, left speechless by the bizarre figure the Marchess cut. No wonder he hated magic so much! "...listen, lady, I don't want anything from you," said Citizen, facing down this magical (pfft) monstrosity with as much courage as he could muster. "You need to stop letting your people come into Earth and play with people's lives. People deserve to be able to go about their lives in peace, fail or succeed, and not just become the playthings of forces they don't understand and beings from another plane of existence," he said with great determination, his courage mounting as he remembered the place he was from in all-too-intimate detail. "You don't want this to turn into a whole thing. may spend a lot of time in computers and technology, but I _am_ computers and technology. Go back where you came from and leave Earth alone."

Koshiro felt a distinct sensation of warmth as his hand settled onto the glowing hand outline, then suddenly a voice spoke from the speakers in plain, albeit weirdly-accented English. "CAPTAIN'S NEUROLOGICAL SCAN COMPLETE. LANGUAGE ADJUSTMENTS MADE TO MATCH UNKNOWN LOR-DERIVED LANGUAGE." There was a click as everyone in the room stared at the consoles that were now speaking a language the two humans could recognized. "234.403 STELLAR YEARS SINCE ACTIVATION. MISSION REACTIVATED. TARGET ACQUIRED. PRIMARY WEAPON PRIMED. ORDERS?" Down below, they could hear the ship coming to life as the touch of an organic being shook it back into mechanical awareness. "What's your mission?" asked Sharl, shooting a worried look at those incoming ships. "SHIP DISPATCHED 234.404 STELLAR YEARS AGO TO STERILIZE GRUEN WITH RELATIVISTIC ION BOMBARDMENT TRIGGERING QUANTUM INCINERATION OF PLANET. OPERATION: ANNIHILATION." Citizen put his hand over his mouth, eyes wide. "Oh my God, that's...that's the Grue homeworld!?! What?" "GRUEN MATCH CONFIRMED FROM STELLAR RADIATIVE FREQUENCY AND PRESENCE OF META-MIND ACTIVITY DETECTED IN STAR SYSTEM. ESTIMATE 18 INTERVALS UNTIL INTERCEPTION BY GRUE STARSHIPS."

Miss Americana finds that:

"...a bomb? Aww, no, I knew this place was too good to be true." The Mad Maple looked disconsolate in his underwear as he looked around at the lovenest that had become a prison. "This is the worst day ever." He faced Wander distrustfully, his staff lowered but still in his hand. "All right, I'll come quietly, eh? But no funny stuff. You're gonna need me to talk down Clarice anyway. She gets kind of crazy when she takes the pills, and normally in a good crazy, but, guess that's not really important now..." He coughed and started pulling on his clothes, awkwardly trying to keep hold of the staff albeit not aiming it at anything in particular. The terror of the 45th parallel was not having a good day.

Edge spends an HP and Seizes Initiative.

19 He fails and is intimidated enough to do what Wander says. Dragonfly is up.

Miss A: The church was purchased last year by William Shepard, heir to the Shepard family fortune (they own several artificial sweetener factories, as it happens) along with his twin brother Thomas. They're also joint heads of the Black Onyx LLC, a limited liability corporation that's recently become active on the Freedom City real estate market. They're very young, just barely twenty-one, which fits the age of the dead evangelist pretty well, and the pictures she finds seem to match. Being the mentor of a Claremont student, Miss A remembers the scandal of some years ago when William and Thomas were expelled as freshmen under a cloud of something to do with running a cult on campus...

"The Black Madonna takes children and gives them to the cause of Omega," replied Harrier to Miss Americana, answering Nick's words as well. "She was a mighty magus before she fell, dragging her world into black flame with her as she went. She goes among those altered by entropy and makes them her own, then makes them Omega's. She walks the worlds by night, taking those the world fears and hates and making them repay hate with the all-consuming fires of the Giga-Genocide. Her children become the willing, living soldiers in Omega's armies. Monsters who would burn a world and smile to see the same smile upon her face. And sometimes, the streets of Nihilor. I knew her as a child. And as her guard." he confessed, agony twisted hot in his voice. "If her cult is here among entropic mutants, it is...a crisis." He raised his head, and eyed the door. "Let us...let us go in."

At Erin's message, Steve moved quickly to support his colleague. With the AEGIS agents focused on the blockade, he took a few steps back and ducked behind a parked car as he reached for his pike. Protected by its chameleon circuits, steel erupted from his flesh and warped his bones, transforming him invisibly into an Omegadrone as he roared up towards the third floor of the building. The invisible flight got the attention of the police down below, but they were more focused on the super-melee they could hear over their radios than some strange noise in the background. He floated around the closed windows, trying to get a better lead on where Erin and her antagonists were as he listened for the sound of battle. What sort of fool fights in a place such as this? he wondered, not at all happy with where this situation was going. "What...?" cautiously, the Mad Maple backed up again, all the way till he hit the wall, staff still in his hand. "What are you talking about, lady? What's going on with this here building?"

"Good call, Wave-Eye," said Edge with a nod, staying calm despite the potential crisis. Whatever was going on down there, sending in the water specialist was the logical way to handle it. He'd planned to ask what language the pilot was using, but the fish-man was gone before he could raise the subject. Oh well, he must not be used to working in teams. "If you can hear me," he called to the pod, "we're humans, and we're the native inhabitants of this planet. My name is Edge, that's Jubatus over there, and Wave-Eye coming up beneath you." He figured hearing the names again couldn't hurt, especially if a translation program was at work. He hmmed for a moment and took out a piece of paper and began carefully reciting a string of numbers. "The first few prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, and 37! As you can see," he called, "we have mastered science and mathematics on this planet, and are as sentient as you!"

Harrier takes a full-round action to hide, use his Concealment and pop his costume, and fly up to the third floor. Wander will be up as soon as I post IC.

20 And the Mad Maple is bruised again.

TT: There is the legend of Die Kindersdieb, The Witch Who Walks Between Worlds, who takes children back to her realm and transforms them into fiends or simply devours them alive. Some people have connected her to the ur-myths of the child-stealing witch, but it's hard to say if that was her or if she's just representing that particular cultural archetype as a conscious choice. It would explain some things if she's from the Terminus, given how mighty she is against even other mystics, and that would explain how she's managed to be active for so very long. She's very bad news.

Give me an Arcane Lore check, TT.

Harrier: 24 Wander: 17 Dragonfly: 14 Weather Mistress: 10 Mad Maple: 9 Police: 5 You can go ahead and write the use of your Reflective, Electra.

Once they reached the 13th Floor, the team broke up to tour the alternate headquarters and talk. It didn't look too dissimilar from the 13th Floor back home; the Miss Americana poster by Sharl's work area had been replaced by the tall, strapping, clean-cut Mister Olympic on the far wall, and it looked like Roy and Indi preferred playing HALO on the big video game station to Kimber and Indira's usual fare, but all in all things weren't too different on the gross level. Sharl and Sharla quickly closeted themselves away inside the computer, leaving the others to explore the building and see how different the 'home away from home' of their counterparts was. The news was playing on the kitchenette TV someone had left running; Mr. America and Captain Thunder were at the opening of a new exhibit at the Hero Museum in Midtown, while President Robinson was in town for a campaign speech. A typical day in Freedom City...almost.

"Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap...other wormhole signatures just opened up," said Citizen, getting into the moment easily, perhaps because it was something he'd spent most of his early life imagining. "The other side of the star system, though. We've got maybe twenty minutes till they're inbound. The coordinates, though...I don't know, this is _weird_. This area's never been charted because it's so deep in Grue space. It's only ever been seen on super-intense scans. I don't know why a ship like this would be pointed here in the first place!" As Citizen spoke, distracted by the displays in front of him, a panel rose out of the crash couch near where Koshiro and Mali had taken shelter, a square shape with a glowing humanoid hand outline visible on it. "It just doesn't make any sense," Sharl muttered as the hand outline started to glow.

Harrier brooded silently on the trip, lost in the grim memories of the dark streets of Nihilor, landing on the church's front walkway with a solid thump as massive steel body made contact with asphalt at speed. As his jetpack's flames died down behind him, he hesitated, briefly considering simply blasting down the front doors before remembering where he was and who he was with. As Miss A and Nick joined him, he took the moment to read the sign for the 'non-denominational' church. "The Church of the All-Loving Onyx Mother." When he turned from the sign, simple gold letters beneath a wood carving of a female form cast in black with red drapings, there was loathing in his voice. "Yes. Yes, this is in her name. The Black Madonna. A taker of children."

"I'm going in," said Citizen decisively. "I'm a machine intelligence; I can fight it on its own turf and drive it out here so you can deal with it. I'm a whole lot tougher inside a system than out, anyway. You saw how she nearly fried my projector. If it kicks me out, we can still fight it out here." With a nod and a Centurion wink, Citizen turned and dived straight into the sea of faces above, merging with the program inside and casting about his gaze for the technological phantom that had caused so many problems. Outside, Temperance could see him for a moment on the various screens, flitting around like a technological ghost himself. "You want a fight!" he called to the sea of electronic movement all around him, audible inside the system and out. "Let's fight!"

That's a good point, SC! While the current construction is legal, it does seem odd he can't detect Hiroshima Shadow. If you don't want to sink more points into it, Thaum, I'd switch it to visual or auditory. (Sure, most 'real' radiation is invisible to the unaided eye, but this IS comics...)

For his part, Edge was getting worried. "Hmm, I don't _see_ any leaks...Wave-Eye, can you tell if that pod's taking on water? If it is and starts flooding, we'll have to get in there fast." He sat on the edge of his bridge and studied the fallen spacecraft, toes almost touching the ocean water beneath his feet. "The current's calm here in this part of the day, but once the wind kicks up it might get pulled out to sea. if that happens, I'll crack open the hull if I have to, we're not going to lose whoever this is. The only reason I'm not trying to get in now," he said out loud to the other two men, and they were men even if they had funny shapes, "is that I don't know what kind of security protocols they have. They might be scanning _us_, they might be waiting the ritual five minutes before they open the door...aliens can be strange that way."

The cops stayed back for the moment, letting the obvious super handle this crisis, while Harrier gave the click of acknowledge that let Wander know he'd gotten the message. On her end of things, the half-naked woman disappeared into the apartment's back room, the door slamming and locking shut behind her. The Mad Maple, meanwhile, was proving to be a tough nut to crack. "Pfft! You must think I'm pretty stupid, eh? Sure, you track me and Courtney down the one day we're fooling around away from the Thieves' Guild!" He fired another blast Wander's way, backing up frantically from her bat, and this time proved to be a less than competent marksman. "That jerk Firebug doesn't know how to treat a lady!" Say what you will for Maple Leaf, despite the purpling bruise on his body and his distance from his discarded clothes, he wasn't running despite what a really good idea that might have been.