Avenger Assembled

"Ah yes, Mr. Hughes," said the plump, middle-aged secretary. "You have an appointment with Mr. Summers, the headmaster. You...must not have met him yet, if you've forgotten his name," she said after a moment, nodding in satisfaction. She handed a pile of papers to him and said, "Please make sure to fill all these out before the meeting. Your parents signed most of the paperwork for you already, of course, but there are some disclaimers you need to sign yourself." The top form read CONSENT TO PERFORM TELEPATHY. She turned to Etain and said, "Ah, Mademoiselle Maher, I believe you're next on the list. Do you need forms printed in French, or would you prefer them translated into English?"

"I was a heavy combat drone. I was designed to bring down targets with abilities beyond the norm." Murdock closed his eyes for a moment, and remembered the feel of his pike coming down, hard, cutting through armored skin as the shock of impact reverberated up his arms, the cry of defiance turned to a scream of pain, and it was a dozen screams on a hundred worlds... "Several of your years ago, I was struck by a magnetic charge fired by an unknown alien starship. It destroyed the molecular circuitry that connected me to the Voice of Omega. I am _permanently_ severed from that link." he added with a trace of fire in his voice. "Forever."

Archer PL: 10 (150) Abilities: 30 pp STR 14 (+2) DEX 20 (+5) CON 18 (+4) INT 10 (+0) WIS 14 (+2) CHA 14 (+2) Combat: 28 pp ATK: +6 (+10 Ranged) DEF: +14 (+4 flat-footed) Init: +9 Grapple: +8 Saves: 9 pp TOU +6 (+4 Con, +2 Armor) FORT +6 (+4 Con, +2) REF +8 (+5 Dex, +3) WILL +6 (+2 Wis, +4) Skills: 16 pp=64 r Acrobatics 10 (+15) Bluff 8 (+10) Knowledge: Pop Culture 8 (+8) Knowledge: Streetwise 8 (+8) Medicine 4 (+4) Languages 2 (English, Russian) (Base: German) Notice 8 (+10) Sense Motive 8 (+10) Stealth 8 (+13) Feats: 24 pp Accurate Attack Acrobatic Bluff Attack Focus: Ranged (4) Challenge (Fast Acrobatic Bluff) Dodge Focus (6) Equipment (3) Evasion Improved Initiative Luck Move-By Action Precise Shot Power Attack Quick Draw [Draw] Ranged Pin Uncanny Dodge (auditory) Powers: 41 pp Archery Array [37+1=39 pp] Damage 10 (Extras: Autofire, Ranged) (PFs: Improved Crit 2, Indirect 3, Precise, Subtle) AP: Damage 10 (Extras: Selective, Targeted Area [Cone]) (PFs:Indirect 3, Precise, Progression 2 on Area, Subtle) Super-Senses 2 (Extended Vision (2) [x100] ) [2 pp] Equipment: 15 ep Bow (Blast 4) (PF: Improved Crit) [9 pp] Concealed Body Armor (Protection 2) (PF: Subtle) [3 ep] Grapple Gun (Speed 1 10 MPH and Super-Movement 1 (Swinging) )[3 ep] costs abilities 30 + combat 28 + saves 10 + skills 16/64 + feats 24 + powers 41 = 150 pts ------ Design Notes: She's one of the world's greatest archers, capable of nigh-impossible shots that strike with fantastic force. Her custom bow and years of strong training make her one of the world' most formidable marksmen: she can put an arrow through a tank's engine and kill it dead, make a long pull and bring down an airplane, and shoot her way through a steel door, then fire multiple shots that clear a room in seconds, or just string a rapid volley that strikes with impossible force. She can pin a man to the wall from a hundred yards away, fire impossibly curving shots that ricochet off walls before they hit targets she couldn't even see, and is generally regarded as one of the best there is. It's not true. Well, don't get me wrong: she's a good archer, and a formidable PL 7 with bow in hand. But her _real_ power is to kinetically charge weapons, turning her conventional arrows into unconventionally spectacular weapons. She could use anything as cover for her special talents, but superheroes doing crazy things with bows is a genre staple: what's so weird about doing it with superpowers instead of with budget and training? Why keep her abilities secret? Well, maybe she's not aware of them either, they are Subtle. Or maybe she used to think she was just a Badass Normal, and is too embarassed to tell people the truth, or maybe it's for self-defense: people who think she's helpless when she's caught without her weapons are in for one hell of a surprise. I tried to make her archery as cool and awesome as possible, but you can probably dig up more feats or more APs if you want to: she's certainly got plenty of space for it if you tweak her the right way. You could free up points by giving her a sword and making her a melee specialist, or by somewhat cutting down on the crazy things she can do with weapons. You could also make her a gunbunny martial artist with two pistols akimbo, doing impossible things with bullets because she actually isn't using bullets at all.

Murdock was only human, and for half-a-second something like a smile edged at the corner of his mouth. But the moment was gone quickly as he extended a hand to Ms. Americana. His skin was a little cool, and his bones very hard when she began to lift him up into the air. He was indeed heavy, at least three times what she'd have expected a normal man of his dimensions to weigh. "I would be happy to help." he said nearly tonelessly. "It is good to help heroes learn about their enemies."

Murdock blinked, processing the words of the swordsman and his sidekick. "I am too heavy for any but the woman to carry. I cannot fly without my armor. If you allow me, I can fly behind you without being seen." Slowly and carefully, he added in a tentative voice. "Th-thank you. I will not trouble you, and will return to my own apartment in the morning." His head swiveled, looking up at the sky overhead. "Perhaps it is a good day."

"My name is Steven Murdock. But he died many years ago." Harrier looked around the alley, back and forth, the joints in his neck moving with a slow, methodical machine's precision. Even with the suit inside, his body language was...off. "I once was what I appear to be. But there was an accident." The word seemed to have some deep meaning for him. "And then I was free. Those who found me sent me to this place, so I could live." He studied the battered-looking building before them. "I studied your history. Took the name of one of your champions. I want to help." Out front, a very nervous man stepped forward. "He, uh, he looked like my friend Murdock. We work together at, uh, Champions. I don't know what was going wrong with him, miss, he got into it with those, uh, boys..." Farouk pointed at six _unconscious_ men in cheap suits, the mobsters all alive but with enough broken bones to show they'd taken a quick, merciless beating. "And then everything went crazy. You said he was some kind of Grue?"

Rift, This is a sophisticated piece of surveillance equipment, designed to shadow and monitor people without them noticing. It's got a very modern design, but is built from clearly inferior parts. It looks like it's part of a series, one of many of a similar model constructed by whoever did build it. The sharp little spikes at the end of the legs look tough, as if they'd leave marks even on the concrete walls of the sewer roof.

Harrier's grip was bizarrely solid, his flesh soft over diamond-hard bones underneath. "Good afternoon," he said, as if it was something he'd learned to say when someone shook his hand. Silently, the former Omegadrone turned and walked out the rear door, his heavy feet thumping loudly against the wooden floor, but quieter on the asphalt outside. He didn't seem inclined to argue with either of the three heroes. He cocked his head, listening to the noise of the crowd out front. "A coworker witnessed the altercation. I am no longer employed. I am...glad the woman is well." He looked up at the half-visible sky overhead, the stars almost completely swallowed by the light pollution of the city and a faint haze overhead. It was, as usual, beautiful enough to Harrier's eyes to move him almost to tears. "The night is beautiful. Even now. I can return to my apartment until it is no longer mine."

Even with the mask off, Harrier's face moved in odd ways, as if he was unused to having expressions at all. It wasn't that his eyes were dead, so much that there was so much between him and the world around him. In a slow monotone that at least sounded like a human being talking, he said, "A woman was being struck. I caught the hand of the man who did it. You can identify him. No others will have the broken elbow." There was, just for a second, a glimpse of pride in his voice. "The others shot me. I activated my armor," he added sorrowfully. "As I left, a man fired a rocket. It struck the ceiling instead." He looked from one to the other of the heroes before him and said, "You should not fight each other. I am to blame."

"I know fewer people than you'd expect, Viktor," said Jack with a little shrug. "But as always, I'd be happy to help your research. Truthfully, it's nice to have something to do with the super-community. These days it feels like I spend all my time just trying to keep the vampire powder keg from exploding. We're actually making some real inroads into building a stable community." He smiled a little. "When did you start believing in the supernatural, so-called or otherwise?" he asked teasingly. "Anyway, I can send a few your way, though some may prefer that you meet them on their own ground."

"Ah, the Shepard! You know him!" Nelson Fletcher lit up, and for a second it seemed as though Red Bolt was still inside him. "Soon, soon the Shepard will return and cleanse the world for his flock. It had been a hard road in this cell these many long years, my friends, but I know he has not abandoned me. When the time is right, he shall return from the sky and repopulate the world with clean men and clean animals, bringing about a golden age!" He coughed nervously, then added, "Ladies, of course there will be clean women too. The Book was written in a different time, when those things were taken for granted...here, let me show you something far better than my clumsy tongue!" He pointed them to his mural on the wall, which turned out to be a depiction of a lovely green Earth, shining and new, covered with fertile plants. In the distant background was the decaying remains of a city; neither there, nor anywhere in the picture, were there any people, or animals. Save up in the sky, in the 'space' of his picture, was a round, clear bubble, full of smiling, clean-limbed people, and strong-looking animals. "Here is his work!"

"I am not very friendly," replied Harrier, completely missing the cultural reference. Instead he stared up at the ceiling and said, "I tried to help. I failed." Suddenly, the armor he was wearing...retreated. Jack and Jill had images of shocking mutilation as the metal slid back inside his body: not through his pores like high-tech armor they'd seen, but rather through slits and cracks that opened in his skin, showing muscle and bone as his body warped back in on itself, leaving behind a brown-skinned man that looked more like a 24 villain than anything else. "You should let the ceiling fall when you are gone." Outside, as Ms. Americana deposited the last injured party on the sidewalk, a woman rushed up to her. "You, lady! Please!" The woman was dressed like a club-goer, but looked like she'd taken some hard hits over the evening, her face bruised and her blouse torn. "That...that man in there, the Omegadrone! He wasn't the bad guy! He tried to save me from my...my ex," she added, looking around worriedly. "He was beating on me, and that man, he...he saved me."

"I'm not familiar with that immediate area of the local shelf," said Fusion, professional and courteous. "But I can reach that level easily enough. I've done underwater searching often enough. The Jersey shore is murkier than the South China Sea, but I'll get by." She studied the map, tentacles waving slightly in the breeze, and cocked her head to look at Robin. "Is there anything I should know about the cause of the wreck?"

Right on time, long, suckered arms erupted from the water, entangling themselves around the edges of the pier, before a shiny black figure launched herself out of the water and landed neatly in front of Robin's open window. Nearly a foot taller than Robin, particularly with Robin seated, the black-clad figure retracted her sinously writhing, muscular arms down to wrap around her waist, looking down at the other woman as water ran down her body, the sheen outlining the white biohazard symbol across her chest. "You must be Robin. Hi, I'm Fusion," said the octopus totem, her manner disarmingly friendly for something so bizarre. "Anything to do with the water, I'm happy to help with."

"I am Harrier. I am no longer what I appear to be. I have no allies." The Omegadrone's voice was an almost perfect computer monotone, sounding like what Stephen Hawking might if he was playing Hannibal Lecter. "There are two more." it added, pointing to the door behind it. " Injured." The fire died out, leaving the place oddly quiet, save for the groaning of timbers overhead. They did the same beneath Harrier, its metal body putting an evident strain on the damaged floorboards beneath its feet. It, no, he, looked up at the ceiling. "The building will collapse soon."

Harrier uses the Total Defense manuever, raising his Defense to +12. Miss A is up.

The patriotic lasers struck Harrier in the mid-section, their blast superheating his armor right through to the flesh it protruded from underneath. The faceless drone staggered under the blast, shielding its invisible face with an armored limb. And then it did something neither of them had ever heard an Omegadrone doing: it spoke. Omegadrones made noise sometimes; hideous growls, shrieks of unimaginable emotion as they died, but never this. "The building!" it plead, its robotic voice just audible over the sound of the fire overhead. "Stop!"

Harrier: 24 Miss A: 15 Jack: 12 Jill: 5

24

He is bruised!

The bar itself was not on fire; the first was actually in the apartment overhead that luckily appeared to be vacant. Something had smashed its way through the ceiling and set the place upstairs alight as if by a gigantic explosion. But heat was growing from the burning timbers overhead, the air thick enough to make Jill and Jack cough before Jill's bubble asserted itself, and it wouldn't be long at all before things overhead started to cave in, dumping flaming timbers down on the trapped people below. Unless someone did something about the fire! Just as the heroes took in the four people still trapped inside the bar, all of them still unconscious, an Omegadrone walked in through the open back alley door. Clearly recognizable as one of Omega's faceless minions amidst the flames, glistening black power pike at its side, the blank-faced creature in armor stood there with flames licking at it, the armor visibly heating up from the ambient heat in the room. Harrier wasn't sure what to do. I don't know them. They won't trust me. None of the three heroes could see his face, so instead he turned his body and headed for the nearest victim. From outside, Miss Americana, Jack, and Jill put words to the yelling fire victims for the first time. "It's an Omegadrone! There's an Omegadrone in there!"

Screams ripped from innocent and guilty throats alike the monster that had haunted so many of their nightmares since 1993 stood before them. There was more gunfire now from terrified, fleeing patrons, the bullets and hurled dishware all easily bouncing off the armor that encapsulated and enfolded Harrier. Oh no. He thought. He disposed of the gangsters expertly, smashing his armored fist into Tommy's face, then beating his way through the others like they weren't there. He didn't even need to draw his pike, instead simply smashing them aside with spiked, armored fists that broke their human bones like cardboard. Lady Liberty will be angry. I need to leave. Ignoring the gunfire, he turned and walked towards the rear door of the bar, planning to simply batter his way through if no alley exit presented itself, and to fly away once that deed was done. But then, just as he reached the door, the white face of the man who'd been behind the bar burst out, carrying a green and brown rocket tube. "Take this, you Terminus-OH CRAP!" He hadn't been expecting Harrier to be standing right there, and panicking, he fired! Harrier acted on instinct, bringing up his pike and deflecting the blast, sending the projectile to the ceiling where it erupted in a tremendous, blinding explosion. Seconds later, Harrier pulled himself to his feet. The building was on fire, smoke obscuring his sensors, and he was surrounded by the bodies of those who'd fled the blast too slowly, their slowly-moving chests the only signs of life in their battered bodies. Oh. This was a mistake. He looked around for a moment, feeling the bar floor creak under his hundreds of pounds of weight, and finally made a decision: he took the bartender's unconscious body in his arms, and began making the first trip out the rear door. There'd been one there the whole time!

Murdock caught the fist as it came up again, Tommy V's punch landing hard enough to produce a clang against the metal under his skin. "Is your power so great," he hissed at the suddenly wide-eyed gangster, "that you must prove it on the bodies of the weak?" The bar went dead silent, the proles meaning nothing to Murdock as he stared implacably at the abuser of the innocent. Catalina took the opportunity to split, slipping out under the table and heading straight for the door. After a long moment of shocked silence as the gangster unsuccessfully tried to pull his wrist free, Tommy V exclaimed, "Jesus! Claude, waste this son of a bitch!" The gangster just behind Tommy immediately went into action, silently drawing a pistol and firing a shot into Murdock's midsection. The bullet clanged off the metal inside the man, and all the gangsters suddenly cursed. "Christ, he's a meta!" Taken aback by the sudden ferocity from the powerless humans, Murdock just stood there, still holding onto Tommy's wrists, as a volley of gunfire hit him, heavier and more powerful than he'd expected. One shot hit him in the eye, richocheting right off the armored plating beneath. And that was startlement enough to trigger his instincts. The armor erupted from Murdock's back with a CLANGCLANGCLANG and RIP of forgiving flesh giving way before Terminus steel, bursting around and enfolding his body, his face vanishing beneath an erupting mass of faceless, spiked black metal that burst from his very skin, a few drops of blood falling as his body vanished beneath an eruption of armor and gear usually kept folded away in the fourth-dimensional space inside his bones. Within the space of just a few seconds, a bristling, ferocious Omegadrone took shape in the middle of the bar. And then the screaming started.

"So, what do you think, man?" Farouk al-Fayid was an immigrant from Pakistan, a cordial, friendly man with an East Indian accent and full beard. He'd thought the strange, silent new man on the busboy crew at Champions was Indian too, but Murdock had turned out to be...well, he wasn't really sure. But he was a loner and from far away, and that was something the refugee from civil war and death could certainly understand. "I am unsure of its purpose," said Murdock after a long, slow silence, speaking in his usual deliberately chosen monotone. "The flavoring is unpleasant, and chemical poisoning will happen very quickly if drunk." He was about to try the smile he'd been practicing in the mirror over his bathroom sink when he heard a cry from across the bar. Looking up, he saw six human males sitting with one female, the bruise on her cheek telling him she was the source of the first cry. A moment later, the male that was her companion struck her across the face again. "You think Jack of all Blades is so cute, huh, sugar-lips? Maybe you see how much your hero likes you when your face looks like something my cat dragged in!" His circle seemed to find that hilarious. "Aw, c'mon, Tommy," the female was pleading, fear in her too-wide eyes, "I was just making a joke, it's-" Murdock's jaw tightened, his hand on the bar turning white as the taunting and blows continued across the room. "Who is that?" he asked Farouk. "Ah, man, I don't think you should mess with those guys," said Farouk, looking around uncomfortably. "It's a guido bar, man, and they let in a lot of wise guys. Best if you don't...ah, Murdock, damn it!" But he was too slow, as Murdock had already gotten to his feet. The gangsters sat like kings among men, and were so busy enjoying watching one of their number torment a weaker person that they never looked up until Murdock was among them.

Round 1 [surprise round]: Standard Action: Harrier initiates a grapple attempt against Tommy, who he can't miss as a flat-footed minion. 10 vs 25 Having failed by 15, Tommy is Bound and Helpless under our grapple rules Move Action: Harrier attempts to Startle Tommy as a Move Action, taking a -5 penalty on the roll. Tommy fails badly, and is Startled Round 2 [initiative] Harrier: 19 Gangsters: 11 Tommy: 3 Not sure of what to do, Harrier holds his action till the gangsters go. He'll go after them from now on. One of the gangsters pulls out a pistol and blasts Harrier in the chest. He hits, as Harrier is flat-footed in the grapple. TOU DC of 18 Harrier passes easily Realizing that they're dealing with a superhuman opponent, the other five gangsters all pull out their weapons and open fire: Two hit Harrier passes both Harrier: Realizing that he's under lethal attack, Harrier automatically pops his armor as a free action. Standard Action: Harrier attacks Tommy with a +5 Power Attack. He's a minon and can't make the DC 30 Tou save, and so is automatically unconscious Harrier surges to attack all the gangsters, knocking them all unconscious by taking 10 and Power Attacking. Round 3: There's an Omegadrone in the bar fighting with the patrons. The crowd starts screaming and running and more gangsters open fire on the monster as they run for the door, but none of them can get past his Impervious. Harrier realizes he's in a very bad situation and starts walking out the rear door. Bad move, as the bartender kicks open the rear door to reveal that that's where he's been keeping the heavy weapons over the years! He catches Harrier flat-footed and shoots him with a rocket launcher. But Harrier dodges! With his Impervious, Harrier passes the halved damage without needing to roll. But the rest of the bar doesn't; the half-dozen people who didn't get out this round are all knocked unconscious by the explosion. And that's when we'll start, with Harrier in a burning mob bar full of unconscious people.