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."

"<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.>"

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?

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.>"

"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_.

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!

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.

"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?"

"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.

Edge, Wander, Midnight, Sage, and Cobalt Templar are there for the end. June 1, 2011

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.

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.

"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?"

Edge headed straight into the simulator. "I've had a lot of simulator time at my school," he said, "so I'm familiar with holograms and stuff. If that's how you do it," he said with a little shrug. "I don't know very much about really high-tech science these days." He hmmed, looking around. "Okay, I'm ready for whatever you want to do. I can take whatever you throw at me. Just don't make the illusion too good," he said with a little laugh. "Once I blew the hard matter coils right out of our holo-simulator at school, and I had to spend two weeks helping our science teacher put all the pieces back together. That wasn't fun." He winced a little at the memory.

Mark had been a little cagey about that in the email, largely because he had a feeling science types like Supercape might be put off by the nature of his abilities. "My powers are magical," he said with great seriousness as he fastened the lab pass to his lapel. "They're genetically inherited from my grandfather." He could say those words without hesitation, after months of dealing with it, and looking Supercape dead in the eye. "When I was younger, and up until just about a year ago, my abilities were about luck and probability control: I could change how likely it was something could happen, and make accidents happen to bad people. But now...now it seems to be almost anything. I can blow things up, turn them into other things, I can teleport myself places...I haven't really found any limitations to what I can do, and sometimes that's a little scary. I try not to think about it, but I'm going to be using my powers a lot in my job and, well..." He shrugged helplessly. "I don't want to hurt the people I'm trying to save," he said as he followed Supercape into the elevator.

"Hello there," said Edge affably. He'd come in costume, and was glad to see that Supercape seemed to have a fashion sense similar to his own. I like the cut of this fellow's jib! "I'm Edge, I made the appointment. Wow, you guys have a really nice space," he commented admiringly, looking up and around the lab. "I heard about all your equipment, but this is amazing!" He put his hands in his costume pockets and said, "So like it said in my letter, I need to get powers-tested for my job. I'm graduating from high school in a couple of days, and I'm going to spend a couple of years working for UNISON in Africa before I come back and go to college. Since they're hiring me for my powers," he admitted with a rueful grin, "I've got to have professional certification about how they work. Can the Lab do that for me?

Evil Sorcerer In 1697, Abigail Williams lay dying. She was just seventeen. Having fled Salem after the collapse of the witch trials, she’d been forced into the grim life of an unattached girl in Puritan Massachusetts and disease had rapidly taken its toll. Maybe she had deserved punishment for her role in the Witch Trials, where over a dozen men and women had gone to the gallows on the word of her and her friends, but she’d been a child then. After years of life on the streets, doing all she could to survive, she wasn’t a child anymore. As she lay dying of pneumonia, she remembered the words of her childhood and sketched out on the floor of her tavern home a terrible pattern in her own blood. And as happens sometimes, particularly in darkling lands founded on the blood of innocents, Something answered her. Abigail pledged her life, her soul, and all else to her new patron, and that Dark Lady gave her power and immortality in return. Hellish flames burned that house to the ground, and Williams never looked back. Instead she headed to Europe, where there were more infernalists to learn from, and then elsewhere to learn the black and terrible magics of Hell. As a girl Abigal had preferred to draw attention to herself, but as an adult she learned discretion. Fires and plagues followed her wherever she went, and she played the innocent young woman through them all, sometimes sadistically blaming a man or woman who had offended her for the deed. Across Europe and Asia, wherever she could go and not be questioned, many died where her feet walked, many more died at her word. By the late 1700s, some eighty years after her death, she was ready to go back to Massachusetts and burn it to the ground. But she hadn’t counted on the spread of science, or rather, a scientific understanding of magic: Paul Revere’s alchemically-treated silver proved sufficient to hold her, while Benjamin Franklin’s Masonic rituals were powerful enough to bind her for generations into a vessel made of the same stern stuff. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that an unwise thief robbed the Franklin house and tried to melt the silver down for its raw value. As a laughing young woman emerged from the melting silver, he learned his mistake far too late. In the years since, cunning Abby has proved among the most successful infernalists, careful to play her demonic patrons off each other, careful to keep herself out of the terrible crimes she inflicts, and careful to keep the glee off her face as she watches the innocent die at her hands. Their souls may go to Heaven, but their AGONY goes to the Things below that are her true mother and father. It’s all they deserve, anyway. Abigal Williams still looks like a stereotypical Puritan in body-covering black and white pointed cap, at least when she’s outraged enough to stop using her body-warping magics. She avoids the world-wrecking threats of her fellow infernalists, instead typically moving into a hotel or homeless shelter, spreading disease and starting fires through magic, and then encouraging the survivors to abandon the God that had done so little for them and pledge their souls to Satan afterwards. Once they do, she gives them a chance to meet their new lord immediately, and then she moves on. Until she shows her full powers when sorely pressed, she looks like a low-level cult leader, and is one Hell of a surprise for low-level heroes expecting her to not be particularly powerful: she doesn’t look like an immortal, centuries-old infernalist. But when she laughs, when she really laughs, she sounds like one. Suggested Powers Drain All Ability Scores X (Extras: Contagious, Disease) (PFs: Insidious, Subtle) Hellfire Control X (Extras: Range [Perception], Vampiric) Regeneration X Teleport X

"<Our empire is...>" Runs-With-Claws hissed at Bloodfang, silencing her lieutenant before she could speak. The commander chose to share those facts herself. "<Let us not be pulled into questions of politics,>" she said with the gentle firmness of a mother predator, once again talking to the woman there who had taken a leadership role. "<The Forever Empire endures where others have fallen. Where worlds are empty, we fill them with the blood and glory of civilization. When we pass through the Ghost Zone, we will have taken our monster from this world, and you need not worry about our ways any further.>" Bloodfang kept a close eye on the work, hissing instructions at her slow-moving male subordinates. But even as her leader talked, she murmured a question to Wail. "<This is...this is all your web is, isn't it? Worlds upon worlds of...your kind, roaming free, and not one of us to be found.>" She sounded fascinated and scandalized all at once.

The angels stirred uneasily for a moment before Jeanne rose to her feet, getting her husband to his as well. "Thank you so much for your time, Fleur de Joie. I appreciate both your hospitality and your healing. Would you mind if we took some as well?" she asked. "Your hospitality among the angels will be well-remembered." For her part, her husband looked oddly unsettled, peering out the window for a moment before returning to join his wife. "I WILL NOT SEE YOU AND YOURS FOR...A GREAT AGE," said the angel of death, bowing to her cordially as his wife got some lasagna. "IT WAS A PLEASURE TO MAKE YOUR ACQUAINTANCE IN THIS WAY RATHER THAN OTHERS. NICK, HEARKEN TO MY WORDS ABOUT A PARTNER. OUR NEXT MEETING WILL NEEDS BE LESS SOCIABLE THAN THIS." Heyzel rose to say his goodbyes to his folks, and watched with a strange expression as they vanished into the air with the faint but unmistakable sound of trumpets. "I had better head back to the church," he said, "and see if they will still have me." He folded his wings behind him and said, "Thank you as well for the help, Fleur. It's nice to know that there are still friends here, even after all this time." And you as well, Nick. Sometimes I let myself forget that virtue and friendship aren't just heavenly things, but things here on Earth as well. You shame my arrogance with your goodness, just as men and women should do for angels." He added to Fleur "Should there ever be a need in the next few weeks, call me at the church. I have been in at births before."

"Good. We will talk again, Donar's daughter." The angel looked away for a moment, and was ready to fly away before he turned to Thrude again. "You have found the good fight today, and suffered grievously for it. You have faced a great loss, and pledged to work beyond it. This is good; this is virtue, and I am pleased. But make no mistake, daughter of Donar. The world of men has moved beyond the ancient gods. Spread the word of your people by your deeds if you do. But such as you and I make no temples these days. That is for men to make, not us. If you fall from that trust, and revive the worship of the old gods, then...well, it will not be me you have to worry about." And with that, and a thrust of wings, the angel of Freedom took to the sky again as the summer sun came out above.

Down below in the church basement, it was easy to see the scene where the giant T-Rex had thrashed around and tunneled out with his radioactive fire-breath: luckily the church stored most of its records in the attic, though the loss of the spare choir outfits was certainly upsetting, the fact that no one had been using the big meeting hall down below had saved a lot of lives. Finding the raptor ship through the seared cinders (the stone foundation had luckily held up just fine) was a little harder until they pointed out the huge round hole in the floor: they had come in and intersected the concrete underground! A few more feet, and they might have been trapped, or their ship might have materialized inside the crowded congregation. Bloodfang went about clearing the mess around the open nacelle, hissing over her duo of men to help her clear away the space for Wail to work. "<Just a minute...>"