Avenger Assembled

Far down below, the coughing sputter of an old-fashioned Model T engine reached all the way up to the 40th floor, while down below they could just make out the moving black shape of the old car on the mostly empty streets, helping out by the glorious silvery moon overhead. The Model T turned and headed for the parking garage opposite, the one attached to the USNet Building across the width of Mondale Street. USNet was the biggest ISP in Freedom City and one of America's biggest computer companies; they were the people who technically had built Claremont's computer network, as well as the ones who'd programmed most of the kids favorite PC computer games. They were all about to dismiss the odd old car, which looked strangely disproportionate from this far up, until suddenly it crashed right through the parking gate and into the garage!

"Yes sir!" said Cline brightly, giving half a knowing wink in the Blank's direction as he tipped his hat in Trevor's direction. His mind was full of suppositions to Eve's eyes, the best of them saying terrible things about this place and the worst...well, even Cline didn't think _those_ were possible! Not without the man in the family lying dead in the lawn, and the older women being parceled out to the labor pool. "The Syndicate can always count on my total discretion, especially when it comes to, ah, personnel matters. Ah-heh-heh. I'll make sure my superiors have no questions to ask." And with that, he turned and made his way back down the sidewalk, looking downright jaunty. When the door was closed, Mark offered, "We really need to get out of here," to the others. When the police officer outside had moved out of view, the neighborhood still looked quiet, and the family was as ready as they'd ever be, though the brush with law enforcement had them looking tense indeed. There was nothing standing between them and the door to the sewers, which was good; the price of failure here was just too high to consider.

Sharl used to watch this in Sunday School

"Sir!" The officer straightened up immediately, his erect spine, direct forward stare, and the staccato bark of his speech more like a North Korean cop than anything Trevor had seen on the streets of Freedom City. "Experienced equipment failure in unmarked patrol car while passing in front of Gravois residence, sir! Planning to use private comm screen to call headquarters for technical assistance, sir!" Eve found his mind easily enough: Officer Cline was a low-level beat cop with no particular ambitions beyond serving the Syndicate, collecting enough bribes to retire on, and maybe bust a few heads if he could get away with it. He'd be odiously corrupt in the Freedom City PD; in Empire City, she'd seen into much worse minds...

Maybe it was because families generally loved each other, even on Anti-Earth. Or maybe it was because Caryatid was moving from room to room as her parents and sister packed, pleading with them in a too-old girl's voice to move fast, they had to pack quickly if they were going to save themselves. Or maybe it was just Mark Lucas providing his reassuring presence, and wishing all the while as he watched the little girl Donna pack that families, any families, would stick together even in the face of awful adversity. But as it was, within the space of eight minutes, each member of the Gravois family was packed and ready to go: their white faces showing that they were all afraid even as they took a courageous step towards their own freedom. Marlena kept a grip on Donna, the little girl for her part keeping a very close eye on her big sister. And just as they were prepared to leave, out the window the watchful teens saw a passing policeman turn and walk up the sidewalk towards the front door!

"No," said Mark, shaking his head. "I guess I could trap another disembodied magical spirit in it," he added with a little shrug, "if I knew Solomon's old magic." He didn't, of course. "The genie of the lamp was freed decades ago, and without him, this is just a nicely carved vessel. It might belong in a museum, I guess. It can't hurt anyone...not like the Mask." He picked up the diabolical artifact and held it lightly in his hands, thinking back to his childhood. "Dad used to use this to roast weenies out back...anyway, yeah, I guess I should show it to Mr. Summers. The League may have let my dad keep this, but they're not going to want it just lying around the school."

Edge: Down Together Family Portrait Rainmaker Job The River's Just a River Somewhere that's Green Fusion: Place your Bets Harrier: Citizen: Lonely Eyes Conquering Mind And GMing GMing: Picnic Basket Confessions Certain Flaws Please put my GM points towards Harrier

I need a DC 25 History check from Miss Americana. Victory: Agent Irons...looks a lot like the Patriot! Really a lot! But the Patriot's dead. :o

The agents pulled the stretcher forward and pulled aside the sheet, revealing the patient underneath. He was in an AEGIS uniform, or rather the remains of one, a huge crater occupying much of the man's chest. Sharl gasped involuntarily, not used to scenes of such carnage, but Victory and Miss A both recognized the marks of the sort of energy weapons available on the black market to terrorists and supervillains with a large enough budget: this man had taken a blast to the chest at close range. How had he survived? Perhaps he hadn't, or rather, he hadn't been alive at all. From the silvery lines visible beneath the burns on his face and jaw to the cracked steel torso and scorched processors within his chest, down to the half-exposed chassis below, there was nothing but a thin layer of organic tissue over the mechanical man beneath. He made a short gasping noise, but seemingly couldn't speak, fixing two pale blue eyes on his trio of rescuers. "This is Agent Irons," said Bonham firmly, looking from one to the other of the three heroes as if to make an explanation. "He was struck at close range by an OVERTHROW anti-tank weapon while serving in an undisclosed location." With Victory right there, either Bonham was exceeding his authority or 'Agent Irons' had been in the middle of doing something very classified indeed!

"We'll...we'll do it!" said Gardner, prompting a wide-eyed look from his wife. "Lord, Marlena, we only took the job in Empire City to get out of that Park Avenue hellhole in Manhattan! And we only worked for them because of what it meant for the kids!" He embraced her and said, "If we can get away, really get away, even if it's to one of those other dimensions, it's got to be better than this!" "But the things they say," said Marlena Gravois, her Quebecois accent coming out under stress, "You know what those other dimensions are like, with the Nazis and the-" "That's just what the Syndicate wants us to think!" yelled Caryatid. "There's a better world out there! A world where people and kids are free to live their own lives and their own choices! This is our only chance to get away from this terrible place!" "You!" Marlena gave her daughter an angry look, restrained by her husband's hand on her arm. "I...all right! We know what'll happen to us if the Syndicate loses Francois, anyway. At least this way we'll be on our feet...and not in some stupid resistance!" And with that, they were all off to pack, moving fast as they ran to their rooms. The little girl, Donna, looking young for seven, followed her mother, eyes wide and teary. "Whew!" said Edge to no one in particular, peering nervously out the windows at the silent suburban houses. "Says something about how used these people are to surveillance, if they spill their guts that fast as soon as they're sure the cameras are off." He shuddered. "Man, this place is so quiet...This town gives me the heebie-jeebies. Midnight, how long do you think before the security goons realize something's up?" He caught Erin looking at him and realized what else was up. "Whoops!" Within a second, he was scuttling after the family, Caryatid just ahead of him.

"This body is made up of magnetic fields underneath a holographic shell," agreed Sharl, floating down to join the puzzled duo. "I don't really understand all the principles myself," he admitted, "but Miss A designed this body for me. She's a genius! I can interact with the world or just float right through it. It's pretty cool, huh?" He grinned, then sobered as he looked around the empty hangar. "It is pretty weird. Do you want me to go check it out?" he asked Miss A. Before she could answer, though, there was a slight fissuring sound from outside, followed shortly by a commotion as a dozen AEGIS agents in full uniform, all of them battered and bruised, came bursting through the door, a half-dozen in the rear carrying an injured humanoid shape half-hidden by a blanket. "Never seen anything like it-came out of nowhere-..." The man in charge, an agent Victory didn't know, flashed an ID badge at the two and said, "Oh, thank God! My name is Agent David Bonham. I was afraid we were too late with the technical staff pulled back. Miss Americana, Victory, we have a patient that requires your assistance. We need your expertise on cybernetics, Miss A, and Victory, the use of your non-essential implants will be required. I cannot fail to emphasize that this is a matter of the utmost secrecy. Can you promise, for the sake of your country and free world not to breathe a word of what you see here to anyone else?"

"I dunno. A lot of these kids weren't even alive when the Centurion died. Some of their parents were just kids back when the old League dissolved, I guess..." He hmmed and knelt down, ripping open a taped-up box to look inside. "But I guess some of this stuff is pretty cool. Hey look, the Serpent Mask!" He pulled out a verdigris face mask with a serpentine cast, looking a bit like a Greek theatrical snake costume. "Hmm, I guess this should be locked up. Wanna hold it?" The mask was warm to the touch, and a little scaly, despite its smooth-looking surface. "Just don't put it on. Oh hey, here's..." He settled back on the floor and pulled out a tarnished black bottle, its glass surface pitted and marred with age. "This is it," he murmured quietly. "This is the lamp Jimmy Lucas bought back in 1940. This is...this is how it came to my family."

"She wouldn't mind having company, I bet, and..." Mark flinched away from that topic, thinking about an ever-shrinking, neatly ordered stack of proofs that kept going off to Castle Comics downtown. Just how long had she been planning to leave, anyway? "It's a nice place to live. Even if it's just you. And it might not be, like you said, depending on Trevor and stuff. How's his grandpa, anyway?" asked Mark curiously. "I assume you've got the Original Midnight seal of approval and all?" He'd only had one chance to meet the elder Hunter, and rather wished he hadn't been so distracted at the time!

Caryatid knocked firmly at the door, her clenched fists the only sign of her nervousness. Within a few minutes, the door swung open and a tired-looking man in a rumpled blue shirt and slacks opened the door. Caryatid's father gave the kids a look, straightening up instantly at the sight of familiar faces. He didn't react much to the sight of Erin, perhaps he'd never had an encounter with Singularity. "Caryatid," he said formally, using his daughter's Syndicate name in front of the others, "what can I do for you?" He shot the Blank a look and added nervously, "If she's done something, I can-" "Dad, we need to come in," said Francois, "this isn't on Syndicate business." He stepped aside for that, opening up the vistas of the Gravois house to the small group. The house looked like any standard suburban home back on Earth-Prime, if you omitted the armor in the walls, the propaganda posters on the wall, and the wallscreens that a little girl in a black and red uniform was working on along with a tired-looking woman in a suit. "I don't know what happened to the monitors, honey, they just..." Francois' mother shot them all a look and discreetly interposed herself between her youngest daughter and the Syndicate members. And then, without further ado, Caryatid spilled the beans. "Mom, Dad, Donna, we...we need to get out of here. All of us, tonight." She bit her lip at their shocked exclamations and said, "Please, if you love me, if you love Donna," she pled to her parents, "you'll pack our bags and go, right now. These are my friends from another world, another dimension like the ones I was telling you about. They've come to help us get away and get somewhere safe. Somewhere where you won't have to drink all the time, Dad! Somewhere that you won't have to work designing machines to brainwash people, Mom! And somewhere where Donna can go to school and not have to beat up other kids all the time! Somewhere where I won't have to kill anyone again!"

"Well...maybe if you're on the League by then, you'll be on his testing committee," said Mark with a little smile. "You did a pretty good job getting him onto one team." He caught sight of Erin looking at the boxes, and made a decision. "Hey, you know...if you need a place to stay, you're welcome to housesit in my house when I'm in Africa. I mean, if no one's back then. I don't think Trevor would think it was weird if I wasn't living there," he added, not wanting to get a Midnight visit after dark, "and it's a nice house. There's enough money to pay all the bills there for a long time."

For those of you who haven't heard it, I'm taking my exams in the middle of the month. I will be around, but at a very reduced level, through April.

"I dunno but that thing had most of the Freedom League behind it and I didn't want it to get you guys and so I sort of jumped into Star Knight's armor as a distraction!" Inside the armor, Sharl felt decidedly odd occupying the same space as the unconscious woman he was in there with, but not being able to feel her helped things a bit. Beneath him, the ground roared by at impossible speed, the spectacular reality of flying at supersonic speed marred by the mind-controlled Freedom League chasing him. "The good news is, a lot of them are chasing me now, so the Mind is almost unguarded! We're headed for the...oops, missed the Lab!" Overhead, the science heroes could all hear multiple sonic booms. "Oh man, Captain Thunder is throwing a lot of lightning bolts!"

Midnight found a house, and a neighborhood, strangely like the suburbs back in Freedom City. Sure, the gates on this community were patrolled by armed guards and armored cars patrolled the streets, but it was on first inspection no different than a particularly paranoid (if very middle-class) neighborhood back home. Until he looked closer, and saw the thin lenses of pinhole cameras on the fenceposts and the security emplacements near the edge of buildings, perhaps aimed at keeping out thieves and desperados from the hungry masses of much of this place, or maybe just resistance fighters targeting the lackeys who lived in the neighborhood. The American flag flew overhead from a pole, and alongside it the raised fist of the Syndicate and the Latin motto: "Sumus Victum". They were watching from space, or maybe Metropolis was from underground...but if they were, they gave no hint of it, and within seconds, the only people who could see him were the ones looking right at him. And for the moment, on a quiet suburban afternoon, that was nobody.

"Tell me about you and Trevor," said Mark suddenly, realizing this subject was making Erin nervous. "Is he going to apply to the new League, and be on a team the way his grandpa was? It'd be pretty great if the two of you could get hired to the same team. I know most of the Next-Gen who the League picked up still work together these days, so you guys could wind up fighting alongside each other even after you graduate." He smiled. "I think you guys are lucky. You..." His smile faltered a little, but didn't go away, "You have ties that'll keep you together and close by here even after you graduate. Not everyone has relationships like that in high school. That's pretty special."

"Oh, all kinds of stuff," said Mark artlessly. "Ms. Harcourt was saying something about modifying the science lab to accommodate insectile hands, so maybe we're getting some kind of crazy bug as a student, and from all the new cybertech, maybe a robot or a cyborg. Well, besides Blue Rogue, but she's hardly around so I don't think she counts." He hmmed. "And there was something in the gym about equipment for someone who was permanently very small, but I don't know what that's about. Maybe it's the bug person, and they're like a swarm. Or maybe it's just a really tiny student!" He shrugged. "Either way, it's gonna be a great class."

Star Knight, the fastest Leaguer except for Johnny Rocket, is hit and fails her Possession check

Sharl reappeared in a darkened hangar, memories of the much more positive meeting with Victory in his mind as he gazed at what lay within the Lonely Point complex. Great good fortune, or maybe very bad fortune, had put him near what looked very much like the brain of the creature: a great glistening mound of red and black that...No! It was neither red nor black, it was some alien color like nothing the electronic teenager had ever seen: this was nothing new for him in the bright and shining world outside Tronik, but the great writhing mass of brain matter before him was neither bright nor shining. It writhed and twisted spasmodically in on itself, an ever-churning, ever-thrumming mass of pure telepathic brain tissue. But it doesn't affect me, because I'm not real...no, that's not it. He tightened his jaw. It's not real. It's just a freakish abomination of tissue and viruses. I'm the real thing. He ducked into the shadows as more people flew through the holes someone, or something, had blasted in the roof, and tensed as he recognized the growing crowd of heroes, all of them standing slack-jawed and mindless before the Conquering Mind. Captain Thunder, Star Knight...what do they all have in common? It came to him suddenly. They can fly! They can fly in space! If it can't get a rocket, it's going to get enough people here to carry it out there... He felt a sudden surge of jealousy in his magnetic breast: what did it mean for the fairness of the universe that this thing might see the stars before he ever did? But of course, with any luck, that wouldn't actually happen. All the heroes and the Mind stared at each other, communing with a psychic frequency he was literally not on the right wavelength to ever understand. Crap. It can't hear me. I can't hear it. What do I do now? He studied the assembled heroes before him and made a decision. I can't hear it talking, and it can't hear me thinking...but I know it can see me. He studied the Mind closely until he was satisfied that it couldn't talk, that all its thinking was being done for it by the minds all around it. That's got to be it. No one's heard this thing talk at all, not even with the telepathy detector. It's all instinct, all Grue and Legion, and the minds do all the work! That's why it needs to conquer, that's why it needs the Grue! But as more heroes arrived, he soon became concerned with something else. How could the Lab crew beat all these powerful people, even mind-controlled? He'd have to...he'd have to...he caught sight of Star Knight again, remembered her League bio, and made his decision. -- The radio in the Lab crackled to life. "Hey, uh, guys? Can anyone hear me?" It was Sharl's voice, clear as a bell, on an unfamiliar frequency. "If you can hear me, the Mind is in the same hangar where we met with Victory, Miss A: it's a big, pulsating sort of red mound, you can't miss it as you fly in: it's right under some holes!" There was the distinct sound of explosions over the line. "I don't think there's a real Mind behind it. The captured brains do all the thinking. From what I saw, it's just giving instinctual commands! Yeow!"

"Trevor's smart and perceptive," agreed Mark. Even if he'd thought otherwise, he certainly wouldn't say anything different in front of Erin. "Maybe if it's you, me, and Trevor evaluating people, we can make the assessments for the next year. Give Corbin and Eve a vote too, since they'll have to work with these people. Yeah, it'll be great." He was already up on his feet, distracted, if not swayed, by what Erin had suggested. "We can leave a legacy that matters, one that really belongs to the new kids without being taken over by a bunch of freshman chumps. Hey, did you see they have a divine Norse student starting next year? I got briefed on it with the other Golden Age legacies as a precaution. Wild, huh?"

"Well," said Mark automatically, "I've been testing my powers and I can go a really, really long way when I do the colored dot thing, and I can do it really fast. So even after we graduate, you can just call me and I can come get you wherever you need to go. I wouldn't do that for just anybody, but we're friends, right? And I know you wouldn't ask if it wasn't important." He hmmed. "You're right, we can't just hand it off to anybody. I think between all of us, we can put something together. Will Trevor be joining us, or is he still not technically a Young Freedom member? I know he's not handing his house off anytime soon."

"Secret tryouts," said Mark grandly, "and secret adventures. Good call on the publicity thing. That was our problem early on with people like Breakdown and the rest," he said frankly. "People who are in it for pats on the head and attention, not to save the world. The people who want to do the showy stuff, they can be on Next-Gen with the other, uh, dramatic types. That's why I've kept a secret ID, so I can be known for what I do in public, not who am I in private. You have the best ideas," he told Erin. "Just think of it, we could have like a clubhouse ritual at the end, where we secretly induct the best!"