Avenger Assembled

Edge had no idea what the Color out of Space would find attractive. Brief visions of a floating, inhumanly-colored mass with lipstick and long blonde hair crossed his mind, and Mark was tired enough to find that pretty amusing before he buckled down and concentrated on what he was trying to accomplish. "Okay, let me think..." He considered for a moment, concentrating hard, and holding his hands in front of him. As he concentrated, something made of shaped metal formed in his hands, an electric motor emblazoned with arcane symbols and a felt-lined bag behind it, an old-fashioned piece of housewares and so much more. He handed it to Cannonade and said, "It's just like the one Adrian Eldritch made for my grandpa when they were fighting the Ghost-Kaiser's Spook Army back in '43. It looks like a vacuum, but it actually blows ghosts and things around. Pretty handy."

For his part, the Sanctum was both familiar and unfamiliar to Sharl. This had been his home, and the home of all his people, his whole life, but he hadn't known that until very recently. When he'd stepped out of the world, he'd come out in Freedom City, not into the Sanctum, and his visits here hadn't been that common with the direct shunt Miss Americana and Dragonfly had set up between the Lab and the Sanctum. He'd certainly never met the Centurion, a man who'd lived and died years before his birth, and many of these monuments didn't mean anything to him. But there was no denying the emotion of the moment for him as he pressed a few buttons on his emitter, nodding in satisfaction as he found the Sanctum's systems waiting for him. His resolution visibly dropped when he picked up the Sanctum's projectors, forcing him to squint behind his glasses as Sharl seemed to get a little off-color. Better fix the new projectors..."The Centuritrons are in a maintenance cycle this week," he said out loud for the benefit of his fellow students, floating up to study the Centurion's big statue in the main hall. He couldn't actually reach up very high, not when there were only a limited number of projectors in the old Sanctum, but he didn't want to dwell on that. Soon enough, he'd be home!

Navigation: The DC is 15, so Wraith can navigate them through the jungle just fine. It's not that hard to keep the mountain in view, particularly for someone who can go up trees and back Hazards: Oh, there are hazards. Everyone give me a Survival check (or Wisdom, if you lack the skill). I'll pick on the one with the lowest result: 14

As soon as they were obliged with a translation, the Omegadrone said simply "We are being hunted." That was something Harrier understood instinctively, for all that most of his experience with being the hunted had been in the grim ghettos of Nihilor, not these lush jungles. "I suggest we head for the site of the transmission," he said immediately. "If they are affiliated with our captors, they will have the resources to get off this world." He turned suddenly, his pike screaming to terrible life in his hands, and fired a bolt of black smokeless flame that blasted a mighty tree in half: good, his weapons did still work. "And we will take them. Good." And with that, trusting that the others would see the wisdom of his actions, Harrier stomped off into the woods.

"I don't know for sure," admitted the former Eye. "The Raven locked her up before my time, and my wife's dealings with her were all through third parties." He sighed, looking at the place where Madame Zero had been before getting sucked into another dimension. "My wife and I have fostered a half-dozen kids for the League, usually kids whose parents are nothing but bad news, but we've never had an attack like this. Emergency foster kids either are behind seven different informational firewalls, or their parents are glad to see the back of them so they can get back to hurting innocents." The look on his face showed what he thought of that. "Her kid's got enough trouble as it is. One of the kids who's got mom and dads powers, and weaknesses, right from the get-go. My wife's in there with him now."

Sharl paged through quite a few breeds, enjoying the attention the puppies brought as well as the chance to see all the adorable, exotic-looking animals: he still didn't quite believe that these were all interfertile members of the same species! He associated that kind of flexibility with Lor humanoids, not with domestic animals. He looked torn between the German shepard and a Scottish terrier, switching back and forth between the two dogs, before finally their imminent landing at the small hidden airstrip associated with the Sanctum made him put his computer away. Ms. Harcourt patrolled the aisles to make sure all the students who needed to be restrained were restrained before taking her own seat. When the plane dived through the storm, they finally got their first look at the exterior of the Centurion's Sanctum. It turned out to be deeply unimpressive from the outside, of course; the artificial structure of ice and rock which encased the Centurion's home looked like any other frozen-over mountain here deep in the Arctic Ocean, thanks to the cunning design of the Man of Adamant decades earlier. When the students gathered their things to depart, Ms. Harcourt fussed over all of them, making sure they were all wearing their thermal gear and carrying their spare equipment, even Kimber pressed into service to carry a box of survival rations, before they headed out together into the Arctic winter. It was bitter, bitter cold, enough that without their Claremont-issued blue and gold survival gear, all-too-human students like Sage and Papercut would have been in very serious jeopardy in short order on the windswept icy plain. But luckily that was just the space of a few minutes before they were at the front entrance of the Sanctum, a massive steel door embedded in the icy rock before them. Ms. Harcourt, ensconced in as heavy Arctic gear as any of her human students, called out a muffled Latin syllable that opened the massive gate for them. As the massive steel door rolled open for them, the students stepped into the massive (and delightfully climate-controlled) entrance hall of the Centurion's Sanctum! Around them all was the stuff of legends; the regal man and woman in togas holding up an image of the Earth that had birthed the Centurion, artifacts collected from all over the vast space and time that had been the Centurion's career, everything from Grue battlechargers to ancient Egyptian statues, with even a sign clearly leading the way to "The Alien Zoo". Ms. Harcourt excused herself to signal to the pilot that he was safe to take off, giving the kids a few moments to stow their gear and take in where they were.

Edge looked unusually subdued today, particularly for the generally ebullient reality warper. Peering out the windows of their helicopter for any sign of the damaged trees they were concerned about, he tried to stay awake in the vibrating helicopter as he drank coffee borrowed from Midnight. Mark was many things, but not actually superhuman physically, and his UNISON work had been keeping him busy. It didn't help how cold it was; weeks of work in the tropics made a Freedom City winter uncomfortably cold even for a lifelong Freedom City native like Mark. But Mark wasn't one to complain, particularly not in uniform while on a mission, and so blinked back fatigue as he kept his eyes open. "I wonder if we should try and recruit an alien," he said thoughtfully, not taking his eyes off the scenery as he talked. "Or someone with more experience with outer space. We all fought the last time the Grue showed up, but none of us have a lot of experience with weird magic from space." He had some personal experience with weird magic, but somehow he doubted a genie was to blame here.

"She's headed for the woods," called Citizen, knowing Sage would send that information to the others, disengaging from the system with a deep ache in his bones. Interfacing with the primitive system and pushing it to its utmost had drained him; his pain and fatigue adding to the overall creepiness of the day. As if he'd stepped completely outside the boundaries of the world again, and was desperately trying to keep his friends from doing the same..."Let's go!" Emitter in hand, he headed not through the walls but through the doors, lingering behind to make sure no security systems trapped his friends below when they were all in danger. "We've got to move fast! The last thing we need is the students rallying to her defense before we get there!"

Sharl searches the school grounds using his electronic ESP. With his Rapid, he can do it 100k times faster than normal. That's a 30 if he can take 20 on the Search. He's looking for any sign of Collins, or of any further arcane seals.

Sharl was glad to be the center of so much attention, even if it did mean having to get up close and personal with his teammates. At least Indira and Kimber were both pretty girls; most of the time, anyway. There was personal space, and then there was personal space. "See, Miss A got me new rooms for my house," he said, awe in his voice at the idea as he tabbed over to show the girls his pad: it turned out that inside his computer, Sharl lived in a wooden house with a white picket fence, where inside he scrolled through to show them a bedroom, a fully packed kitchen stocked with the chips and snacks any teenager would love, and now an entertainment room with video games and pool, a huge bathroom with marble fixtures and a jacuzzi, a library full of books ("Miss A says I need to learn to appreciate those," he admitted), and even a yard in back with a tree, tire swing, and a half-built doghouse. Sharl was the most excited about the yard, really. "Look at all that grass! All that space!" he said about a yard that looked as big to scale as any suburban backyard. His dog program turned out to be something of an animated dog encyclopedia; clicking on each breed on the screen brought up a gamboling puppy that looked ready to jump out of the screen and lick the trio by the computer in the face, along with behind it a little screen of information on each breed. "I like the little dogs like the bichon frise and the Scottish Terrier," said Sharl thoughtfully, "I don't know where I'd put a St. Bernard or husky if I take him home! But they're really cute too, and I'll already have to tell people about my alien pet..." He hmmed.

Edge: Hotsy-Totsy Nazi (GMing) Cup of Adventure (GMing) Harrier: (and vignette) The Hunted (GMing) School Counselor River Monster Citizen: (and vignette) Future Soon Change is Necessary Freedom Angel: (none; blegh, got to get some threads for Heyzel this month!) GM: Ethical Dilemmas Shining Promise Hot and Cold

Having taken a seat near his roomate, but not too near, Sharl repressed a wince in sympathy for Koshiro. Personal space was something the electronic teenager valued quite highly; one reason that he and Koshiro had been put together in the first place. He knew Kimber didn't mean anything by it, though, and so he opted to distract the peppy blue girl rather than risk turning the trip into a personality conflict. They weren't that far, he remembered, from their landing site. "Hey, Kimber," he said, impulsively making a decision. "before we get there, I just now downloaded the puppy packet Miss Americana gave me for Christmas," he said, tilting his laptop to show Kimber a huge melange of a wide variety of small dogs woofing and sniffing at each other adorably on-screen. Miss A had also hardened his laptop enough that it could stand being around Kimber without too many problems. "But since I don't know anything about canine breeds," he extemporized, "I was wondering if you could help me pick one out?" He demonstrated by clicking on a bichon frise, bringing up an image of an adorable floofy white puppy that seemed to look right out of the screen with intelligent eyes, its 'breath' steaming the screen slightly.

I'll call it a DC 25 Physical Sciences check to recognize the Mintaka system. (Normally it would be higher, but both Scholar and Wraith are from an extra-terrestrial civilization. Scholar's impressive Life Sciences score tells her that this is a hothouse jungle, a high-energy ecosystem likely to have large, active predators: indeed, it's surprising nothing has investigated them yet. The fact that the clearing they're in was almost certainly produced deliberately is perhaps suggestive! Victory's radio detects a covert signal (from an area in the mountains about twenty miles distant that he'll need to get closer/actually roll Notice to pin point more directly) that sounds like alien chatter; perhaps a language one of the aliens around here speaks! When he does (it's Galstandard), he gets an upper-class Lor accent reading: "...little did these four aliens know that they were being stalked by Gammazon himself and a wing of the finest Alphan hunters in the sector! Truly, this was a great day for all those who worship the Fang-Mother, as well as anyone who appreciates the glory and majesty of the Ultimate Hunt!" And then theme music plays, which Wraith recognizes as a crappy attempt at rendering Kinigosi (and several other hunter-species)' music as something vaguely tribal and exotic: it's actually pretty insulting.

"I am unfamiliar with your organization, or your civilization," said Harrier apologetically to Scholar. "I have been freed from the Voice of Omega for some years now, and have lived outside the Terminus for most of that time." He hesitated a moment, confronted with a question that was impossible to answer. "My kin are dead," he finally answered. "A long time dead. If you are familiar with the Terminus, then you are aware that no Omegadrone is capable of planning or organization, much less of the magnitude required to bring the four of us here across interstellar space. And no Annihilist would ever allow a freed drone to live." After a moment's consideration, Harrier took another risk and turned away, instead assessing the jungle around them. He appreciated Victory's gesture, but part of him wanted to tell the other cyborg to back off. The other cyborg..."Are any of you familiar with this star system? Or with each other?"

"I am not responsible for our location," replied Harrier, his voice the flat echo of a man speaking through circuits never designed for human speech. An Omegadrone speaking any language was novelty enough that the others let him finish. "This is clearly not the Terminus," he added, tilting his faceless head towards the sun-filled sky, "nor am I familiar with any dimensional axes where those stars have replaced Earth's sun." There was still no trace of expression in his mechanical posture, and no sign of the face inside his armor. He didn't argue with the attitude the two shapeshifters were displaying, it was an entirely reasonable response to the sight of an Omegadrone. His hands tightened automatically around his pike, the double-headed haft that had snapped into place at the sight of Wraith and Scholar shifted back to a singular point. He could feel the phenomenal light from the two suns on the horizon, casting vivid shadows and warming him through his armor. "It is good to see you again, Victory. I am Harrier," he added to the other two.

I'd be fine with CT just taking the thing out.

As the hideous alien monstrosity weathered their strongest attacks, Citizen fumed in disgust. This sort of thing seemed natural enough to the other students of Young Freedom, to whom magical abominations were apparently a freeday's walk in the hydrobay, but for the Tronik-raised teen the monster was unsettlingly alien and familiar all at once. He remembered the raw, naked madness of computer networks without his emulator program, the terrible things with no names and impossible bodies that had seemed to slither through and in and out of reality, and felt a pang of recognition at the sight of the Dark Young. It's just a coincidence, he told himself with desperate determination as the thing shrugged off the paper birds from Koshiro and barely looked phased by Kimber's touch. It's just imitating forms that drive the humanoid mind crazy. I won't let it drive me crazy! Stepping back, he didn't bother with summoning a phantom keyboard; instead he shoved his hand directly into the control panel for the dairy machinery that was all around them, reaching out with his mind and mastering the simple program inside by sheer force of will. That was reassuring; that was a reminder of the way the world was supposed to work. Behind him, the machinery whirred to life as he faced down the monster. "Hey, meathead!" he yelled. "You like animal protein so much, why don't you eat this?!" At his words, suddenly an overhanging tube, used for some arcane engineering Sharl didn't want to know about, detached from a tank nearby and slammed into the monster, pinning it to the floor as milk spilled out over its body in a disgustingly slow, viscous process: luckily the tube itself was sealed where it was connected to the tank behind, or they'd have a flood on their hands. "Hit it now, while it's stuck!" he called, his hand still inside the sparking panel.

Roll in chat for now.

Citizen currently has 24 pp in his Tronik array. He stunts Snare 12 (Flaw: Action [Full], PFs: Accurate 3, Covers Sense 2 [vision/hearing], Indirect 2) [19 pp] with the technology descriptor. (He will be animating some machinery and dropping it on the Dark Young. He will go ahead and Power Attack that, as the children say. (21:53:12) System: AvengerAssembled rolls 1d20 and gets (3)+7=10. That's a pretty terrible roll, so he'll spend an HP for a reroll. (21:57:28) AvengerAssembled: HP reroll (21:57:32) AvengerAssembled: roll 1d20+7 (21:57:37) System: AvengerAssembled rolls 1d20 and gets (20)+7=27. All right, well! That's 22+5+5=DC 32 Reflex save. Sharl will be fatigued at the start of the next turn if he does not spend another HP in the meantime.

Citizen House of L Revisited Behold the Citizen! The Lands Beyond "What is this thing you humans call love?" asked Citizen, the robotic sentinel, of his friend Seven as they sat together on the Claremont campus. There was a party going on, one of the many that seemed to be going on all the time at the happeningist place for heroes, but as usual they only had eyes for each other. Everyone thought their relationship was only platonic...if only! "It is not logical," he informed her gravely. He understood emotions well enough; after all, his people had once been humanoids before their transformation into androids by the Curator, and he'd spent enough time around humans like Miss Americana to understand many of them. But romantic love between two teenagers, neither of whom were old enough to create biological offspring together by the customs of their culture, was most illogical. So what was this feeling that stirred in the blue and gold-clad robot's heart around Seven? "Well," said Seven, patting her friend's hand with patient understanding that a more sensitive man might have seen as a deeper longing, "love is...love is like oxygen for organic beings," she told him gently, flowers stirring beneath her fingers as she stroked the garden box on the other side of the gazebo where they sat. "We need it to survive, to really be happy. Don't you ever want to have...love?" They were watching Corbin and Quo-Dis make googly eyes at each other, Quo-Dis proudly wearing Corbin's cowboy hat with that look in her eye that said she might be wearing something else for him later, and something in what the handsome senior and his girl had together made the witchy teaching assistant wrinkle her nose in a way that had nothing to do with casting spells. She supposed it was unethical in some ways for her to have this crush on the teenage student, but the heart wanted what it wanted, and anyway they weren't that different in age, just a couple of years. "I have...many kinds of love," said Citizen thoughtfully, putting a steel hand to his chin as he tried to consider how to proceed. Human emotions were so fraught with danger and peril, driven by a thousand wants and cares of the flesh: how he longed to "I love the Centurion, who protected our people and liberated us from the Curator. I love my parents, who assembled me together and raised me, and I love Miss Americana who has been my teacher about the world, and I love...I love..." He put his hand on Seven's and gazed raptly into her eyes. "I love...you!" They kissed, then, urgently and frantically on the lips and cheeks, before they pulled away, gasping. "Oh, Sharl!" cried Seven, hugging him to her chest as he embraced her in the same moment, overwhelmed with the sort of passion that only young people overcome by the sheer power of heroic love and emotion could feel. "Can we make it work? Can a human and a robot really find love together?" She looked up at him. "I believe in free love as much as any girl, but is the world really ready for us?" She knew how tough people in mixed relationships had it, whether interracial, interspecies, or both, and an organic/inorganic couple was about the weirdest, wildest thing she'd ever heard of. "We can make it work," Sharl reassured her, taking her hand in his. "Mixed relationships may be controversial with _some_ people, but only with those squares who are too blinded by hate and fear to understand the logic of pure love." They kissed again, the scent of rising patchouli oil in the air, and snuck away from their little love nest to rejoin the party. Maybe the Radio Freedom kids of the last class had graduated already, having helped save the world from Omega, but the new generation of Radio Freedom kids were ready to help save the world from everyone over thirty. Well, not _everyone_; of course groovy Guses like Duncan Summers were always welcome among the kids whose exploits they had long admired. As he and his new girlfriend joined the party, the mechanical Citizen sighed. Sometimes he wished very much to have a fleshy organic body, something denied him by the Curator's actions so long ago. He had the brain patterns of the teenager he would have been, downloaded into the body his parents had built, but he lacked the flesh to go with it. He'd talked with Miss Americana about his feelings, but the beautiful giant had always reassured him that he was just fine the way he was: a marvel of alien engineering with a hero's heart inside his steel chest. She was also a great source for romantic advice, and one of the people who'd helped persuade him that it was worth acting on his relationship with Seven before it was too late and he went back to take up his duties as part of the Centurion Assistance Squadron up in Tronik, the robotic city in the Arctic that was his home. In his blue and gold uniform, Sharl was the first of the Tronik androids trained to act as the Centurion's aides to leave the Sanctum and fight alongside the heroes of Freedom, but of course that duty wasn't going to last forever. It wasn't until much later, when he and Seven were cuddled up together in the aftermath of the latest Rocking Rift concert, psychedelic colors still whirling in the air from the groovy genius' wicked grooves, that Seven broached a question. "We'll find a way to have children," she told him in a voice that spoke of calm surety. "With your science and my magic, we can make anything happen. It doesn't have to make sense, as long as we have each other." There was something vaguely troubling in her words, but Sharl certainly wasn't about to complain. After all, everyone knew love conquered all. And without his love for Seven, where would he be?

Off to Raleigh for two and a half days, with mighty consequences!

Second Week of January, 2012 Young Freedom 2.0 goes to the Sanctum, and by extension to the Claremont Academy. (This is set after Wraith's return from the Hunter planet, chronologically)

Second Week of January 2012 Christmas and New Years were not a particularly meaningful holiday for Sharl, lacking a cultural understanding of the holiday and a chronological mindset that made the change between one year and the next relevant to his day-to-day life. It wasn't even like he'd gone onto a new grade at Claremont yet, something that made all this talk of school years seem terribly archaic. But things had gone pretty well for him; he'd gotten a house upgrade from Miss Americana that he was still customizing; the incredible, sinful luxury of another five rooms to himself, not to mention a simulated animal to tend to, was still something he was trying to wrap his mind around. Home and how different it was from Claremont had been on his mind lately: he'd managed a trip back home during the school holiday to visit his family in Tronik and to do some more superheroing in his home city, where the "mysterious Citizen" had gotten a chance to pull off some pretty impressive feats of derring-do, culminating in a spectacular rescue of a sinking exploratory ship on its way to visit the new set of islands Leroj had helped raise at the end of the previous month. No one on the outside had seen that, and maybe none of them would care, but he'd still felt good about it coming out. And that, he thought, had been that until Mr. Summers had summoned him and all of Young Freedom into his office the first day they were all back on campus after the Christmas break. Even with Mrs. Harcourt, by no means Sharl's favorite teacher, as their chaperone, Sharl was inordinately happy: they were going back to the Sanctum, the place that held his home, and with any luck his friends would be able to see it for themselves! With his usual laptop as his companion, Sharl put aside his house and went to work studying the school's files on the Sanctum again, heedless of the Arctic winter outside their jetplane window. After all, the Sanctum was one of the great repositories of super-tech on Earth, as well as the home of his home city: he'd better know something about it!

Harrier, Scholar, Victory, and Wraith You have all been abducted by Alphan long-range teleporters on the night of January 3, 2012 from your bed to a planet in the Mintaka system. (It's real, look it up!) Conscious characters (i.e., those who were not sleeping) felt a moment of dissolution (DC 20 Technology check to recognize a teleporter, DC 35 to recognize Alphan specifically) before awakening in the air. You fell about 5000 feet before landing in a jungle near the north pole of Mintaka. Attempts to fly away reveal an impermeable force field; you're obviously all being directed to the riverside jungle clearing where oh hey there's an Omegadrone standing there waiting for you!

January 3, 2012 Mintaka II Murdock's eyes snapped open as he felt the rush of atmosphere against his bare skin, taking in the scenery below him in a moment of raw confusion as he sussed out where he was and what had happened. He'd taken a double-shift at HAX, overtime in the local word, and collapsed into bed as soon as he'd returned home. He'd gone to sleep and woken up here, thousands of feet above an unfamiliar sub-tropical jungle, the blue and white stars in the sky instantly telling him he was nowhere near Earth-Prime, and probably nowhere near Earth at all. (That there were stars in the sky and not the red glow of the Terminus was a relief so welcome he forgot for a few moments about the incipient fall). He'd been brought here for a purpose by beings possessing a powerful technology; the feral surroundings below him suggesting he'd been brought to be used rather than interrogated for his knowledge of the Terminus. He hated being used. A few moments later, Terminus armor exploded from his skin, shielding his body from the cold and rushing winds that had otherwise threatened to take his breath away, his armor's sensors reaching out to the jungle below and trying to get a better grasp of what he saw: a mountain range in the distance, a heavy jungle of massive trees like Earth's palm trees but twice as large, a purple-dyed river...he used his jets to slow his fall, but not to change his landing site, guessing that he was still under observation and the less intelligent, less resourceful his unknown enemies thought him to be, the better it would be when the time came to prove them wrong. Looking up, Harrier saw three rifts in the purple sky; spatial vortexes or other anomalies, perhaps like the one that must have transported him from Earth to this planet. Standing all alone in the jungle of an alien world, the sounds of unknown animals in his ears, he tensed, his pike crackling to life in his hands as he looked up at the sky and waited. If that _was_ the enemy up there, they would find him not such an easy mark awake as he had been asleep.