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Avenger Assembled

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  1. Avenger Assembled
    But it was all too late, as a curtain of black fire came erupting from the horizon, spreading impossibly fast. They could hear screams from the city as the obsidian flame washed over everything, all it touched vanishing in an instant as if it had never been there at all. Edge just had time to erect a shield around Young Freedom before the wall hit, its impossible black light blotting out the world, its deafening roar like the howling of an unstoppable wind as it whipped around Mark's blue and gold bubble like a hurricane. Mark felt the comforting wall he'd thrown up begin to fry beneath that awful flame that was neither cold-nor-heat, like a wooden ball beginning to burn in an inferno. But this was no fire: this was the all-destroying conflagration of entropy itself. All around them, there was nothing but that terrible burning nothingness, the world having vanished with neither a bang or nor a whimper, even the ground beneath their feet beginning to cave way. "It's slipping, it's slipping, it's-" Beneath the all-destroying wash of pure searing entropy, Earth-Prime collapsed into the primordial nothingness that waited for all life and all existence at the last, terrible end of all things. With the destruction of the universal keystone, the entire universe that had once held this particular third planet from Sol began to pour into the firey chasm that had once been the Earth like a bathtub flowing into an open drain, pulling with it first all of the nearby chain of universes, then the others, as all of reality began its inexorable collapse into the Terminus. END OF PART ONE Continued in >Worn-Out Places
  2. Avenger Assembled
    Suddenly, someone else was there, stepping out of the air as if she was stepping out of a door, interjecting herself into the camaraderie of the group. Those who'd been there for the depressing saga of Mark's family instantly recognized Martha Lucas. She grabbed her son by the shoulder and all but spun him around, her face pale. She wasn't in the camping gear she'd been wearing when Mark saw her last, instead she was in a bizarrely incongruous polo shirt and jeans that made her look like she'd just stepped off a golf course. "Mark," she said urgently, "Listen to me! You have to be ready right now! Right now or it'll be too late!" She was attracting a lot of attention; even in this crowd people didn't just step out of nowhere and shout about it in the process. "Mom, Mom, what's going on?" asked Mark with equal urgency, his heart suddenly racing at the sight of his missing parent. He asked the first question that came to mind, unable to keep the suspicion out of his voice. "...where's Dad?" Before she could answer, there came a low tremor in the ground, as if of a distant earthquake, a wind from the southwest blowing up hard, and the sky began to darken as if in eclipse. But from the surprised exclamations from the crowd, there was no eclipse scheduled for today...
  3. Avenger Assembled
    "" said Sharl, giving the little girl a shaky smile of his own and a little wave. He forced himself to master his own fear, though, since so many people were counting on him, and reached over to pat her lightly on her other hand, his electronic hand tingling. He was glowing slightly and was translucent, enough that even a little girl like Eira could see right through him. "" he said with complete confidence, ""
  4. Avenger Assembled
    "Go over and talk to them," Quo-Dis urged Corbin, giving him a solid punch on the arm when she caught him looking at his Young Freedom buddies over on one side of the quad. "Star and I can finish up here just fine, and those are your friends and comrades in battle. Who knows when you'll have a chance to talk to them soon, as busy as they're going to be today and this weekend." She grinned. "They'll need me to do the sound check and height check for Alex Albright anyway, so I won't be going anywhere. I'll be here when you get back, I promise." Mark stared at Eve, tilting his head in incomprehension for a moment. "Hey...hey you can talk! You can talk!" He unthinkingly swept his little friend up in a big bearhug, a look of joy on his face. "Oh man, that's wonderful! How did that happen?" he asked, full of a million questions. "Was it Dr. Marquez? Because I've been seeing him a lot lately, and he does great therapy. Wow! That's great! I can't believe you can talk!" He set her down, looking really happy. "Man...do your folks know? Does Faith?"
  5. Avenger Assembled
    "Uh, more of a gut thing, definitely. I was never very good in school," Edge admitted. "I mean, I got lucky when it came test-time, every time, and they asked about things I was expecting, or I just guessed all the way through and got good grades like I did on the SATs. All this science stuff...I never thought I'd need it, so I never bothered to learn it." He scratched the back of his head, a little awkwardly, before moving on. "Hey, are you really from Britain? That's neat. Did you ever work with Troy Griffin over at the Ministry of Powers? He's an old friend of my grandpa's and I met him a couple of times. He's a nice guy." Under the examination in the atom-smasher, Supercape found that the rubber ball was good old-fashioned latex rubber all the way down; it had even been vulcanized. Somehow the mass of that space had increased tremendously!
  6. Avenger Assembled
    "Thank you, sir," said Mark with the sort of respectful politeness you used with your friend's grandpa. His awesome superhero grandpa, that is. "It's been a long road, but we're all glad to be at the end of it." He grinned, and clapped Trevor on the shoulder. "I know I wouldn't have made it this far if not for your grandson here." Truthfully, he felt a little better just seeing the elder Midnight there, knowing that the older generation hadn't abandoned them after all. "Hey Eve," he said with a little nod her way. "How's it going?"
  7. Avenger Assembled
    Citizen was polite, and didn't comment on how primitive the hospital was. What kind of thing would that be to say, anyway? he asked himself, a little angry he'd even had thoughts like that about these nice people who didn't have anti-grav or tissue regeneration devices. They were doing the best with what they had. "And I'll want to spend some time looking at the computers," he said. "Miss A and I brought over the custom unit we'll be using for Eira, of course, but you can't be too careful. I've had to be stored in emergency places before, so I'll make sure we have spare storage media for her too."
  8. Avenger Assembled
    "I have lived my life in the shadow of the black flame that gives no heat, gives no light, and can never be put out. When I see it burning in another, I know it." He listened to her plans and replied, " I tell you only what I learned on the streets, and what I heard at Omega's side. If you journey into the Terminus to destroy the Doom Coil, I encourage you to end your relationship with Viktor Archeville and to have a telepath scourge your memory of any recollection of vital access codes or security defenses of Earth-Prime." He certainly knew none of those, being what he was. "Or if you prefer, take him with you, so that you may meet your fate together." He fell silent at that for a moment, sussing out her reaction, before he said, "I do not say this to dishearten you or frighten you. If you undertake the quest of which you have spoken, you will be fortunate to die. I have heard it said there is sanctity in noble death, Mona, but I have seen nobility die in its millions alongside a billion others. Make your choices carefully."
  9. Avenger Assembled
    Mark obediently followed the adult downstairs, keeping up the chatter that was how he filled spaces in conversation. "I've been experimenting with making different kinds of toys," he added, "but rubber balls are always a classic. I figure I want to give te kids something they can keep and enjoy that isn't likely to get stolen and will be pretty durable even in the middle of nowhere. The biggest so far is a real working tricycle. It's a real Huffy! Well, not a real Huffy." He hmmed. "I guess I shouldn't put fake labels on. Even if I'm somewhere remote, and if my trike is better than the ones from the store, it's wrong to violate copyright, and I don't want to get sued."
  10. Avenger Assembled
    "<We are grateful,>" said Runs-With-Claws a little peevishly. "<Did we not show you the backs of our necks, as one does to a trusted equal? Your great powers prevented the escape of one of our most terrible criminals, a threat to the civilization of the Empire and certainly to the lives of millions, both our own and yours. If we were not grateful to you, we would not be speaking so civilly now. I merely wished for you to know who we are and where we come from. I am sure you are all very happy with the civilization that you have. Now let us work together as the equals that we are, so that we can go from this place and trouble you no more.>" It sounded difficult for her to say, but it had the air of a concession. As she worked alongside Wail, Bloodfang confessed "<You have to understand: when we call you not-people, it is not meant as disrespect. Across a dozen worlds, we have never met anything like us...like you. My mother and I have served the empire for thirty years between us, traveling from world to world in the Zone. There are no other worlds where primates build and think. When we arrived here, we thought we were in some rich nest's playground, like a show for younglings where primates are dressed in clothes and taught to sing and dance, and that your speakers were only some sort of mutant, or disguise.>"
  11. Avenger Assembled
    Check Required is not really a valid flaw, since he'll either fail it too often, or pass it too often, to really only be usable half the time. Please write him an actual backstory. Maybe save what you wrote here for a News post? Be advised that "good-natured troublemakers" really, really, really require a deft hand to write. Claremont has a lot of Jerks with a Heart of Gold already. Claremont really is more formal an institution than this. (And you know, given the temp. differences between Darwin and New Jersey, he is going to be suffering a lot) All in all, I'm not really sure why this is a high school student? He codes like an adult for me reading him. Maybe you can work that into his revised backstory?
  12. Avenger Assembled
    Sovem, If you want those to be your powers, go ahead and put them in. (Call it "Simian's genius?") Make sure to match the format of other sheets that you see.
  13. Avenger Assembled
    Mark headed downstairs, graduation bundle still under his arm as he and Erin walked out into the busy quad where the juniors were just about finished setting up. Waving a friendly hello over at Corbin by the stage, who stuck up a lot higher than the typical high school kid, he sighed a little. "I'll go say hi to Trevor and his grandpa," he said, keeping himself cheery, "then go see if my cousin is up from Florida yet. I like Mr. Hunter," he commented as they walked through the growing crowd of students and families. "He seems like a nice guy to have in the family."
  14. Avenger Assembled
    Since you're catching him off-guard (and have been sorely used at his hands), I'll say that hits. 14. Okay, he's stunned and staggered.
  15. Avenger Assembled
    This time the change was a little easier to follow, if the insane rewriting of reality itself could ever be easy to follow. All the little oxygen atoms suddenly had more and more protons and electrons in a cascading tide of change at the atomic level, cascading higher and higher in density as more and more atoms spun together in a dance far too small to see, shifting into a nearly organic compound. The ball rippled in the air as it approached Edge, then settled neatly into his hand in a perfectly black sphere. With a little grin, he bounced it off the floor and up into his hand again. "That's oxygen to rubber," said Mark, "I've been practicing it. I thought making toys and stuff would be a good trick to use if I have to work around little kids."
  16. Avenger Assembled
    Runs-With-Claws gave Willow a look to make a prey animal's blood freeze in its veins: luckily, Willow was neither of those things. "<You are a plant-not-people, yes? Then perhaps you will understand this. The Forever Empire was born in the ashes of a million races, like a seed of food's food after an inferno. Our scientists have found ten thousand empires that came before us on the Hearthworld, each which rose and fell in nuclear, biological, or chemical fires as their rage and hunger overcame their civilization. We have learned to build without the tools, the resources, everything else that they had and used up. We are not like our ancestors. In the earliest days of my nestmother's nestmother, the Empie's greatest scientists found the truth of what we are: a species planted on our world by ancient powers beyond our reckoning. We knew then our destiny: to spread the civilization that we plucked from the ashes of the Hearthworld across the planets of the Ghost Zone, until at last we find the world that hatched our first eggs. Your biospheres are our tools to preserve and use as we wish. Nothing more, and nothing less.>"
  17. Avenger Assembled
    "Okay..." Mark studied the ball for just a second, then decided to go all out. He pointed at the ball, and a wash of black energy like spilled ink came from his fingers, spilling over the ball with a liquid wash. Supercape's instruments could read the wash itself well enough, it read like any other 'magic' blast he'd looked into. But what happened to the ball was exciting even in its mundanity. With a puff of air rushing in to fill the space as Mark's energy wash faded, the hovering ball simply vanished: not teleported, not shrunk, not catapulted into another dimension. The test item had been there, and now it was _gone_.
  18. Avenger Assembled
    Quo-Dis winked at him, and replied with an intense series of images describing what she planned to do with those hands later. She was socially adept enough these days to know that kind of talk (in public, anyway) bothered her boyfriend, but that certainly didn't silence her mind. "Don't make plans for the future yet," she did say out loud, laying one long finger across his lips. "Let the people who'll live forever do that." She smiled at him. "Live in the moment, Corbin. You never know what the future will bring." And with that, she pitched in with him to continue working, from her smile enjoying the way her thoughts of throwing him down on the stage were keeping him occupied!
  19. Avenger Assembled
    Outside, Quo-Dis was pitching in alongside Corbin, the tall, muscular girl easily keeping pace with all but the super-strong students as she manhandled seats into position and jumping up to do soundchecks with the mic. When no one was looking too closely, she leaned over and gave Corbin a kiss on the cheek while he worked. "Just think, in only one more year, we will be the ones leaving Claremont forever." She didn't look too displeased at the process. "And I am sure they will like it," she added in a murmur. "You may be a new member of the team, but you are still their friend. The things you do with pencils and ink are good things," she added. Upstairs, Mark nodded, relaxing at Erin's words. "She should be, with all the work she put in to get here. And she's not the only one!" Mark had certainly worked harder his senior year than he ever had before, balancing his difficult personal life with his academic requirements, not to mention his busy work as a superhero. Erin, though, had put in a lot more than he ever had to get where she was."I guess we should go out and see who all is out,"" he suggested, peering out into the busy corridor. "Is anybody coming out from Seattle?" he asked her, not wanting to raise the difficult subject of her family.
  20. Avenger Assembled
    "No," said Mark, shaking his head. He looked away for just a half-second, then back at Erin with that same half-smile. "If they can't make it, they can't make it. I'm...I'm just telling myself that that's their problem, and not mine." Of course, it might mean something bad had happened to them, wherever it was they'd gone. What did it say that some terrible accident was the best choice for him to think about? "This is my day, and my friends' day, and I'm not going to let...to let bad stuff ruin it. Friends to the end, right?"
  21. Avenger Assembled
    "As ready as I'll ever be," said Mark with a little smile. He looked tired, and more careworn that Erin had ever expected to see Mark, but he was obviously over the extreme stress he'd been feeling over the last few months. Or at least he was doing a good job of hiding it; you could never quite tell with Mark. Truthfully, he couldn't tell you himself. "I'm graduating from high school alongside my best friends; it's gotta be a good day, right? Wow, you've really done a lot of work," he complimented, very impressed as he walked in. "I haven't even done half this much...I was going to get it done over the rest of the week," he admitted. "I spent the whole weekend with Peter, my UNISON rep, making plans for my trip out to Mozango. Did you and Trevor do anything over the holiday?" he asked.
  22. Avenger Assembled
    Edge, Wander, Midnight, Sage, and Cobalt Templar are there for the end. June 1, 2011
  23. Avenger Assembled
    June 1, 2011 8 AM Mark stood in his dorm room, peering out the window at the junior students working to set up the stage, folding seats, banners, and other paraphernalia of a Claremont graduation. Mike had already moved his stuff out, leaving a hollow space on one side of the room. The Class of 2011 was just a couple of hours from graduation; he was just about to finish high school. He didn't feel quite as triumphant as he'd once thought he would. Maybe it was because he was alone; he'd have a few cousins in the crowd, but neither Rick nor Martha Lucas had made any sign of coming to their son's graduation. They'd made no sign at all of where they'd gone, just a month earlier, and made no sign of coming back. His parents were gone. And worse, it looked like he'd be going too: he was happy about the thought of working with UNISON, and loved the idea of going to Africa to work for people who needed the kind of help most superheroes couldn't give them. But it still meant going away from the city that had been his home his whole life, from the friends and extended family he'd known for so long. He checked his watch, then gathered up his bundle of graduation stuff (just so he wouldn't lose it), and decided to head upstairs to where at least one friend would probably be. He figured this was one night she probably hadn't spent at Trevor's. Amid the hustle and bustle of his fellow students getting ready for graduation, Mark knocked on Erin's door. How many more times am I going to do this?, he asked himself. Not many. No one I know will be living here soon! That thought was soothing enough to relax him, at least for the moment. He wasn't really good at dwelling on things for long, not even on a big day like this. They were all moving on, after all, and surely the always-prepared Erin had more in mind for the future than he did.
  24. Avenger Assembled
    Between Dragonfly and especially Miss Americana, Sharl wasn't sure what to say at first. Instead he looked out the window as they talked, thinking about his family back in Tronik and the little kids he'd seen at play there. "Things are going to be hard," he finally said, a little awkwardly. "But, uh, you've got the best scientists from America here," he said with perfect faith, "and I'm sure you're the best scientist in Sweden. In a few days, Eira and I will be talking to you from inside your computer, and then she'll have a robot body, and that'll be pretty awesome!" He wasn't actually sure if that helped, but as the hospital came into view out the window, he felt better for having said it.
  25. Avenger Assembled
    "The Doom Coil is the driving engine of the Terminus," said Harrier, looking away with his face flat. "It is the fire into which Omega hurls the burning worlds, a terrible work of his own creation that shatters planets, stars, whole galaxies, into the absolute destruction that is the Terminus itself. The Terminus was not always what it is now. In the days of the Alphans, the greatest among them tried to end destruction and death. Instead, they birthed it in a new and terrible way. It-" In the middle of a sentence, the drone cocked his head, looking almost mechanical for a moment, before he turned and suddenly looked at Fulcrum. "I understand you," he said suddenly, knowledge burning in his eyes. "I understand your words, and why you spoke them. I hold you no ill will." His eyes burning into hers, he said, "Does Doctor Archeville know about your...contamination?"
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