Avenger Assembled
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"Erin!" said Mark, concerned for his friend's welfare as anyone would be under the circumstances. "Are you guys all right?" He glanced out the window despite himself, wondering for a moment if he'd missed some tremendous crisis. He still felt guilty about spending that night away from heroing when the Gorgon was closing in, but it had been a rough week that week..."I was calling to invite you and Trevor out to a state dinner at the Socotran consulate, but if you need help I can get over there in a second," he promised in a flash, his costume already snapping into place around him. "Where are you?"
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May 4 2012 After all the exhaustion of the last few months, it had been a welcome relief for Mark to get invited to the get-together at the Socotran Consulate for Nina's brother Morakot. Or be informed by Nina over breakfast that they'd be attending, anyway. "Personally, I never thought Morrie was going to get married," she told Mark breezily as she sat back in her chair and drank her dark, strong-smelling Arabian coffee with a thoughtful expression. "But he's nearly forty now and he's not getting any younger. Father does value family, and he does control the purse strings. You can't be a gentleman bachelor forever, not and enjoy the lifestyle of a prince of Socotra." Morakot al-Darsah, Mark knew, had been something of a playboy in years past, his dark skin, good looks, and well-groomed mustache making the wealthy prince a star of the tabloids of a previous generation: he'd even once squired Princess Diana around. He'd made it a point to be up to date on Nina's family after they'd started dating. "So he's announcing his engagement here in Freedom City? He must be marrying somebody local." He put his mind to the thought of all the eligible women in town interested in marrying a handsome prince, but there were too many possibilities. "And you don't know who, or you'd have told me already." That got him one of Nina's more predatory smiles. Mark had the idea Nina didn't always appreciate it when he was clever, but she seemed to find it interesting all the same. "You seem to have my number, Mr. Lucas. Anyway, yes, it is a mystery! He's been out of the public eye lately, you see, going to all those clubs of his and spending Father's money like it's made of water. So Father has used his influence with the consulate to make sure you and I both have tickets to the soiree next week. The better to keep an eye on my errant brother, and to make sure he's not about to disgrace the family." "A courtly evening with you? I'd be honored," said Mark with a wink. "You should wear that black dress of yours, the one that shows..." He demonstrated with his hands, and Nina laughed. "I can get my good suit." Sobering a little, he added, "We should bring Trevor and Erin too. They're smart and they're observant, and they're good in a crisis." Very good, as it happened, but there was no need to dwell on the fine details in front of someone who wasn't in their circle of trust, even if she was in his. Kind of. It was complicated. "Your schoolmates. Yes, hmm, I remember them." Nina and Mark had never actually discussed where those superheroes had come from when the Nazi transdimensional assassin had come to kill her for her father's defiance. "All right, I'll make sure there are two tickets..." That evening, with Nina off at her late-night class, Mark called Trevor's 'workphone', figuring that if he got lucky, he'd catch Erin and Trevor together. And as it happened, he did!
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Nick can tell the bones are beginning to animaaaate
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Nick gazed backwards into a scene of horror. " And that was when Nick realized magic was beginning to seep out of the bones...
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I need a DC 15 Reflex save, then a DC 20 Tou save for all the PCs for this Rank 5 Area Burst effect. Oh, and have an HP, everybody!
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ic The Hard Hand of Fate (IC)
Avenger Assembled replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The North End
As the machine finished its last cycle, Samson called over from his position by the detonator. "That's the last of our people out! Now it's just myself, Kashi," he added with a gesture towards the former storage locker that held perhaps the last living being native to this planet, "and you, my friends." He gave the mostly-naked techs a suspicious look, their tattoos and other markings clearly showing they weren't from his own planet, but Samson Powers was evidently willing to trust his new-found friends. "And... now!" He smashed the button on the panel before him and the Vault shook with distant detonations, a look of hard satisfaction on his face as corridors far above their heads collapsed into rocky ruin, crushing the still-moving LED lights that showed where the dragons breaking in through from the surface had been. "That ought to hold the little bastards." With a look of great satisfaction on his face, he rose to his feet and headed for Green Screen's box. "I'll take charge of moving Kashi. The rest of you had better-" The box exploded in his face. Still wearing his armor, Samson was smashed backwards into Harrier, the big drone just having the presence of mind to catch him as a shock of heat scorched at them both. The man inside the improvised holding cell hadn't even had time to scream, thought Harrier, half-deafened from the concussion inside the small space as the lights overhead went out! With his armor up, he could see by the glowing red emergency strips; the heroes had taken the worst of the small explosion, Samson had taken a hit enough to be unconscious in his arms, bleeding from a head wound...and there was a large piece of shrapnel, big as his hand, buried in the side of the now-black and lightless dimensional transporter. Oh- "He lives! And so do I..." -
"Do people ever stare at you?" asked Pluto of Victory as he walked alongside the big cyborg, his cybernetic arm kept close to his side as he walked. It didn't seem to bother him physically, but he was obviously sensitive to it. "There are few people in this civilization with technological augmentation." The Lonely Point staff had been briefed ahead of time, and they were all professionals. No one stared at the Omegadrone kids, not for too long, anyway. "Of course they do," grated Demeter, her child's voice eerily flat and mechanical from her artifical voicebox. "You saw how fast he flies up there. Sometimes it's not bad to have people pay attention...right?" she asked, looking up at the pilot with those glowing red cybernetic eyes.
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The team hurled themselves into the void in pursuit of the intergalactic space bikers who had kidnapped their friend and ally, Young Freedom past and present leaping, flying, or riding through the gateway to find themselves in a place all the Claremont students instantly recognized: from the red starless skies to the eerie movements of distant sunless planets just visible beneath the great bowl of forever twilight overhead, they were in the depths of the Terminus! Not on accursed Nihilor, they could tell that right enough (and anyway, the Overriders wouldn't be there, not with the penalty Omega had put on all their lives!) Instead they were over a cool, wet planet, one of the Hundred Worlds of legend. Forests of pine trees rose high along the shore of the red-tinted ocean just nearby, the sand along the shore white and shining like something Hawaiian. Max Muscles was just behind them as the portal slammed shut with a whispering sound, the big Furion's bike accomodating anyone who couldn't cram onto Redbird. He didn't look like a too-young man debating with his baby mama now, he looked angry, and not a little frightened. "That...something's wrong!" he yelled, the distant shapes of the three bikers and their cargo just visible on the horizon as they roared along above the beach line. "You guys, Hardina's wild, but she's not stupid, and she'd never take someone who wasn't into it! And another thing, this is her week with the baby. Something's the matter with her and the others...and she's got my son!" And with that, Max Muscles roared after the disappearing shapes on the horizon, his jaw set. "I'm coming for you baby!!!"
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Carolina Crusader PL: 10 (150) Abilities: 34 p STR 40 [24] (+15/+7) DEX 12 (+1) CON 40 [24] (+15/+7) INT 10 (+0) WIS 12 (+1) CHA 12 (+1) Combat: 12 pp ATK: +3 (+5 melee) DEF: +5 (+1 flat-footed) Init: +1 Grapple: +21/+27/+28 Saves: 10 pp TOU +15/+7 (+15 Con/+7 Con) FORT +15/+7 (+15 Con/+7 Con) REF +5 (+1 Dex, +4) WILL +7 (+1 Wis, +6) Skills: 40 r=10 pp Bluff 5 (+6/+10) Diplomacy 5 (+6/+10) Intimidate 14 (+15) Knowledge (Pop Culture) 5 (+5) Languages 2 (German, Russian; Base [English]) Notice 4 (+5) Sense Motive 4 (+5) Feats: 12 pp All-Out Attack Attack Focus: Melee 2 Attractive Challenge (Fast Startle) Dodge Focus 2 Interpose Power Attack Startle Takedown Attack Ultimate Save (TOU) Powers: 71 pp Enhanced CON 16 (to CON 40/+15) [16 pp] Enhanced STR 16 (to STR 40/+15) [16 pp] Immunity 9 (life support) [9 pp] Impervious TOU 10 [10 pp] Super-Strength 7 (Heavy Load: 720 tons) [14+1=15pp] AP: Leaping 7 (x250) and Speed 7 (1000 MPH) Super-Strength 1 (Heavy Load: 6/1440 tons) (PFs: Groundstrike, Shockwave, Thunderclap) [5 pp] costs abilities 34 + combat 12 + saves 10 + skills 10/40 + feats 12 + powers 71 = 150 pts ---------------------------------------------------------- Design Notes: Carolina Crusader is the youngest member of Freedom's Alliance; she turned 18 just before she was formally signed on. She's native of North Carolina and speaks with a heavy Southern accent. She's a testbed for a great many things, including a prospective program to recruit a native hero for every state in the US. She's something of a loose cannon, much to the frustration of her superiors: she doesn't really want to be a superhero, she got drafted into working for the government after she tore apart a shopping mall in Charlotte when her powers manifested during a shoving match with one of her friends, and she's chafing under the pressure of being this close to the authority figures she's resented most of her life. She likes being able to help people, and she likes the positive attention she gets for helping people, but she doesn't like having to take orders and live under the semi-military discipline of the Alliance in the process. She's hot-headed enough, and naive enough, that if she doesn't get a safety valve of some kind soon, she might just jump the fence and take her chances on the Soviet team. CC is basically Rogue with the Hulk's powers, so I've tried to build her as such: she's incredibly strong and tough, her sheer physical power helping keep her on Freedom's Alliance even as her personality runs into conflict with the others. She can take massive hits and keep coming, carry tremendous weights (and fight almost anyone on the other team to nearly a standstill), and is pretty solidly a badass. (And also an ass, if played as an NPC). She's tough enough to potentially survive a nuclear detonation nearby, an important skill for a patriotic heroine in a Cold War setting, whatever team she winds up playing for. She has one rank of Super-Strength (with the PFs) out of her big array so she can run or leap into a fight and still use her Super-Strength power feats without having to surge. She's mighty enough that she's still a tough PL 6 even with her powers completly nullified. A loose cannon and potential traitor is no fun as a PC, of course, but she works just fine as a hotheaded teen heroine learning the ins and outs of heroing. She's also tough enough to be a terrifying threat to a group of low-PL heroes, or an antagonist to a particularly strong one! She's an interesting challenge for a costumed adventurer type as well; one who has to be outsmarted rather than beaten in a standup fight.
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Aoiroo: Thanks to her magical super-senses, Etain detects something, maybe a group of somethings, hovering around the heads of the three Wyldriders (and not around Max) It's not a kind of magic, she's immediately familiar with (which is odd, given how very very good she is at magical blood-hounding) but it seems to be having some kind of effect on their minds. It looks a little like this.
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ic The Hard Hand of Fate (IC)
Avenger Assembled replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The North End
"I can do more than that," said Samson, flipping open a glass panel on his console and putting his hand over a big red button beneath. "I can collapse the tunnels down on their scaly heads. Even if those murdering monsters can survive a mountain falling on them, it'll slow them down long enough to complete the evacuation. I'd have done it sooner, but I didn't want them to think blowing the mountain down was the only way to take us out." As damaged as the complex was, the only way to track the dragons was by the security display overhead, the red LED lights showing the systems in the upper tier of the complex slowly going dark as the dragons burned deeper. "There goes the crew quarters...and the mess hall." Level 2 had fallen, and they were well on their way to Level 3. "Wait for it..." ----- Dragonfly blinked across the blasted hellscape as fast as she could, a dragon in pursuit. The massive grey specimen overhead loomed impossibly large and fast in the air, beating the red and dying sky with great leathery wings as it chased her. He was fast, fast enough to have scorched the complex they'd left behind with a single gigantic breath of burning entropic fire and to chase the fleeing Dragonfly in the same moment. She was faster than he was, and that great bulk in the sky got further and further away at every blink, but he had clearly got her scent and was in a slow, ominous pursuit like a force of terrible nature. At the very last blink before the Vault, Mara appeared almost nose-to-nose with another dragon: a red-crested lizard as large as a schoolbus, curled up lazily amid a massive pile of scorched bones in the middle of the burnt-out park; the dragon had just enough time to look at her in surprise before Dragonfly abruptly appeared down in the depths of the Vault! -
posting for Electra, who is not feeling well. Excess points to Papercut.
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ic It's Gonna Be The Future Soon (IC)
Avenger Assembled replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in Elsewhere
Citizen hit the deck near Sage, hard; the electronic paragon having taken the beating of a lifetime in the sky with Rogue. Not as badly as Eve, though. He limped over and dropped next to her broken body, reaching down to check her vitals and make sure she was at least still living. I didn't want this! He had no way of knowing how badly she'd been hurt in her flesh-and-blood body, not without taking precious time out to leave Tronik behind when his city needed him. Just because Rogue was down didn't mean the crisis was over. "Good work, Citizen Martel," he finally murmured. "You stood up for the people, and that's what counts." Even if he wasn't sure Eve thought of them as people, which somehow made this a little more meaningful. He carefully moved to where Rogue lay and began the work of restraining her, bending metal and ramming it through the deck to pin her there. She could still leave the simulation if she put her mind to it, but this would hopefully slow her down. "Not going...to let you...get away with this..." he hissed around broken ribs, the taste of his own blood coppery in his mouth. -
Edge: Old Bones Lord of the Manor Faded Giant Gathering Like Clouds Spoiler Alert Harrier: Hard Hand of Fate The Remade Demon in a Bottle Last Record Citizen: Future Soon Incompatible Hardware GMing: Shadows on the Horizon Hot and Cold Put my Ref point towards Citizen.
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Bam! Everyone there gets an HP because of Mark. BAM! Everyone from YF 1.5 gets an HP because of the Terminus. Enjoy!
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The group headed down towards the docks, Eve's boat and a fun party waiting for them. As it turned out, though, the party was about to get wilder than they could possibly have imagined. Suddenly, with now a triple-boom, three more figures on motorbikes came plunging out of the sky towards the party. This time, the two natives of the Terminus looked decidedly uneasy at the new arrivals; Redbird moving to protect Midnight automatically, while Max (for all his bulk and evident strength) looked almost embarrassed as three massive humanoids in black leather outfits adorned with jingling metallic ornaments from ten thousand worlds came roaring down to within shouting distance. For the leader of the group, a big woman with dark skin and flashing green eyes, shouting distance was actually pretty far as she loomed a good fifty feet over all of them. Pointing with one finger at Max, she boomed, "Max Muscles! I might have known I'd find you here with your one-dimensional friends! You were supposed to be taking our son to the Wall of Ten Thousand Sorrows to learn the names of his fallen progenitors!" The Overrider on her left cracked a chain that glowed with supernatural fire for emphasis. "Instead, you're here partying with all these girls who aren't your one and only Hard Mama!" "Hey hey hey now just hold on a minute Hardrina Helltiger! It's your cosmic spin with Junior, not me!" said Max, looking offended at the insult to his honor, the two Furions shouting over the backwash of cosmic engines like they had all the time in the world. "You can't fool me, it's in the schedule! You tell me you want to be my girl even though you're still with your people, but now you're trying to hand off my boy to me like he's a football?" His eyes narrowed. "Is this because of-" "SAVE IT!" yelled Hard Mama. "You think you can tell me how to live because you gave me a baby? I'll..." Her eyes lit up as she studied the heroes below. "By the law of the road, I choose a new father for my son, Max Muscles! If you want him back, you'd better come take your place at my side back, by force if necessary!" And with that, her two peers opened up their gateway again an instant before the leader of the Overriders herself swooped down and snatched Mark Lucas up in her arms as easily as if the (fairly lightly-built) Mark was only a child, roaring up through the portal with Mark an instant later. "Not like thiiii-" Mark was in the middle of exclaiming as he began to vanish up into the sky.
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APPROVED
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APPROVED
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Nick's words seemed to mollify the locals, for all that the bones themselves were still a mystery. "Can you look into their eyes? See the last thing they saw, maybe?" Mark had sobered noticeably when surrounded by all the skeletons, memories of the past in his mind as he respectfully, delicately picked it up and gazed into its open eye sockets. It reminds me of Erin's homeworld, he thought. Those poor people. "If you need to do a magical ritual or something, I can clear out everyone else," he commented quietly, gently replacing the skull as if having thought better of it. "I know that may not be something you want everyone watching."
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Ice crystals erupted over the dragon's body, cascading over its massive form and sealing it beneath a solid block of ice as massive as a tractor-trailer: only its position still standing on the ground kept it from crashing right onto the heroes, especially Edge who it had been straddling a few moments later. As Nina was going in for the kill, the dragon blinking at them all in frustrated fury, Edge slid out from under the dragon and interposed himself neatly between the beast and the heroes. "" And so he began to talk, his voice soothing and warm, his arm going around first a bemused but not displeased Nina, then Archeville, until they stood together in a trio of good fellowship beneath the dragon's iced-over maw. "" he added with a gesture to Archeville, "" And done ill too, but that was neither here nor there. "" He reached up and put his hand on the ice, and from inside his bonds, the dragon began to weep. "" boomed the dragon. "" Mark made a gesture to Viktor and turned, sotto voice, to Nina. "See," he murmured, "sometimes diplomacy is the best option." She hmmed up at him and said, "All right, I'll concede you were right about diplomacy, just as I was right to come along on your expedition. But you owe me a pair of boots," she added with a smile. "I'll make it up to you," Mark promised, and bent down to kiss her before they both turned back to the scene at hand.
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Edge uses his formidable Diplomacy skills, backed up by a hero point, to talk the dragon down. Nat-20. Hey, nice! 40
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ic The Hard Hand of Fate (IC)
Avenger Assembled replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The North End
"They will die in agony if you leave them here," said Harrier coldly as he joined the two women. "Swiftly, if Mandragora is merciful. Slowly, if not." Through soulless, faceless armor of spikes and pain he stared at the terrified prisoners, memories of a thousand horrors in the back of his mind. He thought of his parents, finally, and the grief and horror of a thousand years in bondage. "...too many people have been slain by the Terminus in this place already." Despite temptation, very powerful temptation at that, they were all better than this. "Real enemy is..." His head jerked up as, far enough away in the sky that the unaided eye could see only a cascade of black against the red sky, reality tore open and something grey, massive, and six-limbed, one of which was a set of massive wings, broke through. "Incoming!" Louder, he shouted over the technicians screaming in utter despair, "GET CLOSE! NOW!" -
ic The Hard Hand of Fate (IC)
Avenger Assembled replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The North End
The evacuation of the Vault was proceeding apace, people crowding through the whirling dimensional teleporter at every stroke, the room thinning out all the while. Tress and Kurt (at Samson's insistence) had already gone through, leaving Samson and a pressed-into-service Lieutenant Hudson to watch the machine's gauges as they whirled. With two dozen people left, suddenly there came a great BOOM and the entire Vault shook harder than it ever had before, the dimensional teleporter yawing dangerously back and forth as everyone left staggered and tried to keep their feet against the shockwave. A new alarm was sounding, urgent and high-pitched, while green sirens flashed. Samson pulled himself to his feet and said simply, "That's the breach alarm. Something's at the surface door and is trying to dig its way in! I'll see if I can get something on the interior cam..." He walked over to one of the few still-functioning computers along the wall and typed quickly at the keyboard, the screen changing to a grainy, black-and-white security camera that showed a scene like something out of Hell itself: three massive reptiles, each panel-truck sized or more, were inside what must have once been the entrance hall thousands of feet overhead, the bank vault door that once must have been the front entrance next to them neatly melted to pieces. They seemed to be arguing with each other; one small and yellow, another grossly fat and blue-green, a third lean-faced and red-skinned, with the hatchet eyes of a born predator, but there was no sound on the feed: instead they seemed to settle their argument, deferring to the red one, who led the way down, breathing black curling Terminus fire as they went. "Looks like Mandragora didn't have a lot of faith in Green Screen!" called Samson. "They'll be knocking on our door in twenty-five, thirty minutes once they get through the blown tunnels! I suggest we finish up and let you people get home!" -
Just barely! 14 Bound and helpless, at least till it gets a chance to break the thing. I'll get a post up for Edge and the dragon shortly.
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ic The Hard Hand of Fate (IC)
Avenger Assembled replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The North End
Dragonfly and Wander efficiently shut down the redhead, who stood there palefaced, her white skin cast ruddy by the red and burning skies overhead, while the others went about their work. From the look of fear on her face, it wasn't hard to guess what she was fearing: the consequences of failing those she'd been working for were worse than death, and from what Harrier had described, even those in the Terminus who opposed Omega had a tendency to treat his slaves as disposable enemies rather than disposable pawns. But that wasn't how the heroes of Freedom operated, a fact Harrier only occasionally had to remind himself of as he herded the last of the techs into line. They'd done their grisly work as best they could, turning the after-effects of the dragons' slaughter into something that would look much like theirs. The techs, made up of the usual assortment of races and appearances that marked humans from the Terminus, didn't bother begging or pleading as he gestured with his pike. They knew they could expect no mercy from an Omegadrone. Harrier might have expected to enjoy their fear; it only made Steve Murdock angry. Damn these people for what they'd done...and damn the Terminus for revealing the darkness in them. The darkness in them all. Finally, so he didn't have to feel like an Omegadrone anymore, Harrier spoke. "Stop there. Form into a circle so that Dragonfly's spatial warp can reach you." He stalked back and forth like a prison warden inspecting new recruits, nodding as the redhead joined the larger group. "You will be transported back to our Earth, where you will be dealt with fairly and justly. As you have dealt with NO ONE!" The shout came from the heart, and it was enough to make the crowd flinch. "Are you...are you from this world?" asked the redhead, looking even more fearful of the Omegadrone than the others. Harrier kept his armor on as he stared the woman down, perhaps because hiding his face made it easier for him to control the emotions he felt today. "I was born on the streets of Nihilor. Son of a murdered world, father to a murdered life. Were I yet the boy from those streets, your fate would be-" Suddenly, just as Dragonfly was putting the finishing touches on her spatial device, the communications console flared to life. Beep beep. Beep beep. "It's...it's Dragonshelm!" called the tech, backing away from Harrier so far she bumped into her peers, who still were giving her hostile looks. She flinched forward and hurried over to rejoin Wander and Dragonfly. "It's Mandragora's ship. He's calling us."