Avenger Assembled

Underwater, Citizen slid along as he and Cobalt Templar continued their search for the lost Bauble. he thought, and it wasn't about their search. Citizen really hated magic.

"That's Gloria Greenwich, the debutante," said Sharl, taking a seat opposite Eliza. Up close the tall, skinny boy was pale and dark-haired now that he was under lights that didn't distort the color of his skin. Absently, he toyed with what looked like a black box attached to his jacket at the shoulder for a moment. "I don't understand why someone who is styling herself a new kind of celebrity would want to make her name by playing such old-fashioned music," he added frankly. "I mean those vinyl records have been obsolete for twenty, thirty years? When I was at Horizon," he confided, "they had all new systems, practically super-tech. It was pretty cool."

Supercape, All the blasts missing Harrier into the pump room, any chance those are damaging the equipment enough to shut it down? Or is that something that might require spending an HP maybe?

"Freedom," said 'Steelgrave' with a shrug, at least as much of one as he could manage inside his bonds. "I've, heh-heh, made some enemies among my fellow Annihilists over the years. They don't like being outsmarted, what can I tell you? And I'm the smartest man in Nihilor," he said with conviction, returning after a moment to that relaxed persona that seemed to come so naturally to him. "Which isn't hard, I'll grant you. If they can't have the real Steelgrave to destroy, they'll happily take their frustrations out on a clone. I figured you guys, being heroes and all," he added, "might be a little more willing to see reason. Or don't you think you can use a version of Shadivan Steelgrave who knows everything he knows?" "For the love of..." For a moment, Bowman didn't lower his notched arrow, his muscular arms not even wavering as he steadily held a shot. "This is outside my pay grade," he finally said. "Keep him covered, I'm going to try and get in touch with the League again. This is bigger than some corn colossus. We could maybe use a barricade up so nobody stumbles across this, and some way of moving all this back into the city? I know a very deep hole where we can throw this for the duration."

Done!

Round 2: The mini-blasters blast Glow! 24 22 9 11 For what it's worth, Citizen, ever the paragon, will interpose for the first one (which misses him)...but that's still a DC 23 Tou save for Glow. Or should I say Toast?!?

Am I good to go, SC? If so, Harrier will attempt a grapple. All-Out Attack: 20 Well, that's a miss and it leaves him with a to-hit of 17. I'd like him to at least get his arms around the drone, so! HP reroll: 30 More convincing! 40 on the Grapple check

The sizzling black fire poured across Harrier's armored body, but he shrugged it off with a momentary hiss of pain. The lash of the Terminus, even this sort of finely-tuned beam that sucked at the very essence of his soul, was something he had felt before. He turned his impenetrable gaze upon the other drone, the urgency of the moment letting him fight past the demons of what had once been. There are far more important things than your old ghosts. And far greater terrors than your doom. "Come. Down here, where you can hurt no one else!" And with that, armored arms outstretched, Harrier went for the zombiedrone! His fists skidded off the armored body, but the bulky drone moved fast: he kicked off the wall as his jetpack roared, flames searing the air as he swooped back through the open door. Like this, eh? He raised his hand and made an unmistakeable beckoning gesture towards the zombiedrone. "Come at me!" he called challengingly. It wouldn't have worked on a drone, not with no one else's morale around to break, but perhaps the programming in this bizarrely resurrected unit was different. Modified by an army of humans, designed for a human battlefield...it could work!

16 Exploded! Sure, I'll go with that. There are enough robot parts around (and still active baddies) to keep things interesting.

Fort save vs DC 27: 28 Woo-hoo!

Tou vs 23: They take an injured!

The interior of the Wonderbus, which Citizen reluctantly followed Ghost Girl into after a moment's hesitation, turned out to be a palace: the interior space loomed as large as their dorm back on the Claremont campus, half-open doors showing corridors stretching everywhere. The main room that Bigfoot had set aside to greet visitors was decorated like a huge rec room with huge leather couches, a television in one corner, and sure enough a table full of homemade nachos, various flavors of Fanta, and a gigantic bowl of Cheetos big enough for an eight-foot fur monster to eat from. Visible through one open wooden door was what looked like a high-tech control room; the sensors and readouts there looking like something from the cockpit of a Tronikian flyer or one of the smaller craft interstellar teenagers Indira's age were learning to drive on more advanced worlds. This bus was the product of high technology indeed! The entire place smelled of patchouli oil, and not just to the nose. The shag carpet was thick and a shocking shade of orange, the paisley paneling on the walls a riot of color, the couches all cracked, broken, and then patched together with duct tape. From the patches of brown fur in occasional places, Bigfoot had evidently not always been good at cleaning up after himself. And the big Cholaxian himself was... "So yeah then after Ryder went back to his band in Salt Lake City it was just me hangin' around the old Wonderbus that must have been back in 93 or 94, after the last big Terminus invasion anyway, anyway after that it was just me in here." He scratched his ear and went on, "I still tour and have gigs with some of the other non-human groups on Earth but there's not much demand for an old Cholaxian on drums these days." He suddenly grinned, showing a mouthful of yellowed teeth. "But that's okay, I mean I've still got my tunes and my ride, and that's all a guy needs, right?" He reached over and carefully, lovingly removed a 78 from its sleeve, depositing it on a vintage record player that soon began booming Sympathy for the Devil. "So why are you selling the Wonderbus?!" called Sharl over the sound of the music, vaguely remembering stories of Cholax, the savage forest planet with the subhuman inhabitants. Whoops. Well, it's been 2000 Earth years, surely the exploitation stopped by now. He turned, distracted for a moment by the eerie wibbling and wobbling of molten wax in neon-lit fluid in a row of multicolored lamps nearby, as the big alien spoke. "Well I mean I figure you kids need a base too, right?" said Bigfoot as he raised his massive, trunk-like arms and began swaying to the music,. "I want to help out the younger generation! Youth power! Fight the squares! I remember when we did that all the time, traveling the country in the Wonderbus and solving mysteries, eating big...sandwiches and then maybe making time with the ladies afterwards!" He winked a blood-shot eye. "And anyway the reactor core is running low and I'd have to go all the way out into Lor space to fix it and, heh-heh-heh, Papa B's still got some outstanding warrants out there if you know what I mean!" he said with a wheezy laugh as he tried and failed to clap Sharl on the back. "Anyway, I'm getting old, Citizen. I'm sixty years old and that's near an eternity for a Cholaxian. I want to get back to my home forest and dance under the trees before I die. Steel coffins just ain't very groovy, you know what I'm sayin'?"

Behind his own overloaded plate, covered in a variety of cheese and meat that would have made a state fair in Wisconsin jealous, Mark thought. This was an occasion for friends, but it was more than that too. "Here's to the start of a New Liberty League tradition," Edge suggested as he raised his glass of sparkling bubbly Dr. Pepper, cold and frosted against his fingers, "To everyone who's here with us today...and everyone who isn't." He didn't want to get more maudlin than that, so he instead klinked his glass against the others and began building his burger back up. "I was going to say I don't know where we'll all be next year...but I hope we'll all be here."

Harrier dug his armored fingers into the crack where the bulkhead door had slammed shut and pulled, his cybernetically-enhanced muscles letting him bend the door to the pump room further and further open. He wasn't surprised to find it empty, or as empty as far as he could see anyway, as he pulled with all his might; whoever or whatever was controlling the ship was surely taking steps to make sure that the humans aboard were unable to save the wounded vessel. And if the drone follows me in here...well, we will between us be able to do enough damage to stop the machines that drive the flooding. One way or another! And with that, as the doors slid open, Harrier hurled himself inside!

Any chance I can use Online Research + Well-Informed, TT? If so, that's a skill-mastered 25. If not, 23! So not bad either way.

As the big blasters are dazed, Glow is up.

The cybernetic intelligence snapped its way free of its bonds, the connections between it and the machines inside the system breaking down. it thought to Cyberknife, seeming to grow in strength now that it was free of the bonds that had drained it of so much energy. said the machine, and for all its sincere regret that was still a deeply mechanistic neutrality to its 'voice.' ----- "Come on, you ghouls!" called Citizen as he swooped right through the smaller robots who'd been blasting at him, going for the half-assembled robot skeletons that were looking more and more like the oddly dressed gynoid they'd fought earlier that day as loose metal parts flowed together to make up their bodies. "You'll have to do better than that if you want to take me on!" He was improvising here, desperately trying to keep the robots from blasting the others or turning on the Miss Americana construct, but it seemed to be working...so far! He shoved his hands into the machinery, disrupting vital connections as he tried to fry particular circuits. "Let's go!"

Citizen: Move Action: Taunts the Big Blasters: DC 20 14 They fail surge to fly in among their numbers and fight in melee (spending an HP for the fatigue!) Standard Action: +5 Power Attack w/Corrosion! 18 Their defense is 18, so that just barely hits. Reflex vs. DC 25: 24 Ouch! That's 22 with the successful Taunt. They have Impervious TOU, so that's 2 for 1 and then 1: their TOU drops to +11 [imp 9] Tou vs DC 30: 14 Hah-hah, ouch! That's more than I want, so I'll give myself that HP back and have the Big Blasters be injured, staggered, and dazed.

Eventually the boys reunited, the Koshiros and Tulink arriving silently and discreetly with the parts needed to repair the dimensional transporter. "We can complete repairs working together," the machine intelligences reassured their allies, "it will be only a few moments." The truth was, Tulink was nervous about letting his own team's gadgeteer near the device, and Sharl was willing to help him keep the repairs in the hands of the Tronikian duo. said Tulink without hesitation. promised Sharl as they screwed vacumn tubes into place together without saying a word out loud where the others could hear, a technological team with similar instincts. "We're nearly finished, sirs," Tulink said out loud. "All this lacks is a power source."

OK: Mini-Blasters: 31 Cyberknife: 30 (as a sidekick, Cyberknife has no HP to spend, but Miss A will be down one as soon as Gina reinhabits her) Citizen: 27 (4 HP, +1 from his Sidekick complication) Big Blasters: 24 Glow: 18 Wail: 7 (3 HP, +1 from Being Old complication) The Mini-Blasters go, firing blasts of fire at Citizen. (She knows what a cybernetic intelligence is, and she knows he's between her and the door!) 17, 18, 12, 7 The door is heating up, but everyone else is OK. Cyberknife is up. You can free the genie on your turn. Note that since a sidekick has no HP, you'll get that HP to spend to cancel fatigue once you're back in the cyber-body.

Edge: Meat and Explosions Argonauts Briefing Faded Giant Citizen: House Is Not A Home (and GMing) Unfair Science Fair (and GMing) Viral Celebrity Mile In My Shoes In Another Life (and GMing) Pepper's Ghost Harrier: (vignette) Threat to Society GMing: The Devil Shovels Coal All excess points to Harrier, please

"Annihilists protect themselves from their enemies via distributed cloning banks," replied 'Steelgrave', his hands still raised and a faint, embarrassed smile on his face. "If Madrigal snaps my neck one day or Mandragora sets her on fire, we pop out a couple of weeks later with the loss of some memories and feeling pretty stupid. Anyway, a few days ago, somebody set off a collapstar bomb in one of Shadivan Steelgrave's cloning labs. That's when I woke up in the rubble, just in time to find out who I was and what was going on." He shrugged. "Turns out that Shadivan Steelgrave guy is kind of a jerk. He doesn't want there to be more than one of him around. In any universe."

Initiative time! Mini-Blasters: 31! Citizen: 27 Big Blasters: 24 The mini-blasters have the stats of Dok's PL 7 Photon with Fort Immunity (and no Insub) and fire control The big blasters have the stats of Dok's PL 10 Photon with same same. Computers check: 45 OK, Gina will need to break DC 45 on Computers to break Tomorrow out of its confinement. The DC for this will go down -1 round to round if she doesn't crack it first thing.

Gina found, in STAR Squad's computers, a scene like something from Gulliver's Travels. There was an entity down here, buried deep in the code, something mighty and powerful bound by chains of ones and zeros, its energy being pulled off to power dozens, if not hundreds, of cybernetic entities much like the robot Miss A and the others had fought in Keith LaMarr's school. Buried deep inside the code, the entity looked at her, and Gina realized she'd met this thing before, albeit many years earlier, in her computer at home. Please help me. I am bound in my own chains. the cybernetic intelligence inside the computer said. My power will- Suddenly the mind gave a terrible computerized cry as its power was drained (from the look of things against its battered code, not for the first time), convulsing against its chains in agony. Hurry! ---- "No, no, not going to be like this..." Danson was pounding at the side of her head, as if trying to still voices there. "You put these things in my head! This is YOUR fault! YOUR fault!" And with that, her head jerked backwards and she slumped in her chair, a faint line of drool coming from her mouth. She looked like someone in need of medical attention at first glance, but Citizen's eyes widened in sudden and terrible recognition. "We need to get out of here right now!" he exclaimed to the others, shoving his hand through the door's control circuits even as suddenly the robots all around them, all the hundreds and hundreds of robots throughout the garage-sized vault, suddenly began sliding and crawling together, mechanical joints slithering and snapping into place as dissassembled parts grew back together into a building army of mechanical hominid with flaming red eyes. A few smaller robots, like animate mechanical torsos with no heads or lower limbs, took to the air and began hurling gouts of red-burning flame at Citizen, the cyberintelligence who stood between them and the closed Vault door out into the building. Citizen nimbly dodged and turned in the air, avoiding the blasts that would have overwhelmed his program matrix with skill, distracting the fliers from focusing either on him or on the door. But that wouldn't last for long, not with more of them coming. "Glow," he called, "try to take out the little ones! The rest of us will deal with..." He glanced over at the unconscious-looking Miss A, knowing what Gina had to be dealing with. "...the big problems."

As the soldiers ran for their lives, Harrier thought fast. He'd seen vessels of all kinds die in his too-long life, and knew that this ship was in trouble. This is no normal leak. Something aboard this ship is making it bleed to death. He faced down the zombie drone squarely for a moment, then turned and flew after the others, his implanted jetpack roaring and belching smoke and flame as he rocketed quickly through the increasingly chaotic corridors of the ship, passing by too fast for the sailors to react. Down one level, I think...or is it two? Time was of the essence. Luckily, Wave-Eye should have no trouble following the Omegadrone's path. He reached a sealed door marked EMERGENCY PUMPS and landed on the deck, armored feet booming against the steel deck before he raised his fist and punched the door as hard as he could. It gave, but not quite all the way, and he prepared to do it again. I must proceed quickly!