Avenger Assembled

Let's rock the exotic saves. Have an HP for some fiat, and gimmie a DC 28 Fort save vs. Stun.

Once high in the sky, Tyranny Eagle turned around, his mighty ape wings flapping as he studied Phantom. "I propose we settle this dispute in the ancient, time-honored ape fashion of sambo. In this style, I-SUCKER PUNCH!" Despite the sheer unlikelihood of it all, Tyranny Ape landed a massive blow athwart Taylor's face!

"I was breaking up a robbery outside that warehouse when I got a weird vibe from inside. Found that big lab, the one you found me. I tried approaching one of the scientists inside and...they must have jumped me." He rubbed his eyes. "That thing he had me in was running me through...I don't know, a dream, or something. A dream of my life. A place much more tempting than the world outside, except..." He took her hand. "It all died. That pretty, shiny, happy world just died off around me. I killed it. With my bare hands."

"Twenty-seven. No, twenty-eight. I don't keep track of birthdays much these days." He caught her look and added, "I...died about four years ago. Precocious little scamp, ain't I?" His mouth quirked in a half-smile. "Powerful bloodline. Or so I've been told, anyway. I've never met anyone higher up the food chain than my dam, Claudia. And she told me a lot of lies."

Jack looked around the room, judging faces and names, legacies and attitudes. He'd lost the Scarab, maybe for good, and it might be a long time before Dark Star trusted him again. Arrowhawk had taken things much better than he'd expected, Jack's own deeds evidently a distraction from the man's own war on crime. As for Ace, well...come to think of it, things weren't actually any different between the two of them. And as for Taylor? She was with him, even after all that. That was something, at least. Finally, he leaned close to Taylor and whispered four fatal words. "Let's get out of here."

"Not everything I do is some misguided attempt to cling to the fading embers of humanity," said Jack, looking down at her seriously. "I like you, Taylor. I asked you out because I like you. You're basically a normal person doing a huge job and that's...something I can identify with." He thought for a minute, then added, "Our relationship means knowing there's someone out there I can depend on, and who I know can depend on me. And, as long as we're being honest, I really like the way your costume shows off your legs."

You stole my kill! Jack thought, as usual deeply annoyed at Ace. Not that he'd planned to kill the brute now that he had him nearly disabled, but seeing the other man sweep in and take his victory was still annoying. He stepped back deeper into the shadows, far enough that none of the onlookers could see him. But he supposed it wasn't very heroic to think that about someone who had come to his rescue. Eventually. He decided to at least try to be civil. "Good to know Ace Danger deserves his reputation. Thank you." He turned back to Taylor. "Will meet you inside by the rear entrance."

"I don't know," Jack answered after a while, his face hard to read as he looked down at her. "I can't...I can't answer that," he admitted. "I'm used to it being death to say that to anyone. Death." He stroked her hair softly, gently. "The vampires of Freedom City live in a place where gods can fly down and tear us apart at will to the cheers of the masses. We live because we don't talk."

"No one else. I told Scarab because I thought she'd be able to figure it out on her own, and Wesley _did_ figure it out on his own...and Dark Star found me, and helped me once, when there was no hiding my true nature." He smiled thinly. "Is there anything else you want to know?" he asked her, looking at her honestly. "You know what I am, and what I'm capable of. And what I don't do."

Jack was on the phone long enough that he was just hanging up when Taylor came back out. "...and I'll meet you all tonight. Not so easy to get rid of." Hanging up, he forced himself to concentrate on her words, his fingers tight on the end table beneath them. "I...I don't know," he finally said. "I imagine I was followed, then you were. This property belonged to the former leader of the city, before her demise. There are a couple of ways my people could have followed you. Did the person say who it was?"

"Just be grateful for them. For every hug, every kind word, every moment of love. And anger, too, when that happens, because it always happens with family." He squeezed her hand. "And for everything else, too. I didn't understand the value of that until I had real friends in my life. People I really cared about." He sighed a little, his hand cool in hers. "Oh, um, I guess I should tell you something. Scarab knows. And Dark Star knows. Wesley knows I'm not a man, but not the specifics."

"Oh, okay," said Jack after a moment's pause. "That sounds very difficult." He put his hand on hers, his arm still around her. "I guess I never thought of you having to go through something like that, even with losing all that time with your family. There's nothing worse than being separated from the ones you love like that. At least you've got them back now, though, right?"

Recovery check, Scarab. Phantom, you're up.

Arachnos kept his feet as Dark Star's gravitic energy washed over his body, the dictator bearing up despite the sheer power of the hero's assault. "TAKE ME SINGLY OR ALL AT ONCE!" boomed Arachnos. "None of you shall survive before the assault of that which is eternal!"

"Do you ever meet yourself?" he asked her curiously. "The chosen of Heshem of the dimension over, trying to keep her dimensional boundaries in line? If there are enough dimensions," he said, hazarding a big guess, "surely there's another one of you out there with the same job. Or just someone else in the same position." He shrugged, and admitted, "Not that I actually know anything about it."

Edge blows another HP for Wander to reroll her second attack.

DC 27 Toughness save, Shaen. Dark Star is up.

"First Heru-Ra, then the world!" shouted Odysseus, bringing his weapons to bear on the evident leader of the Knights. With an enormous roar, bolts of mystic electricity came crackling from his armor, lashing out over the Scarab and threatening to shatter her very consciousness as they bored into her soul. He flew down over the others as he did so, lording it over them with the sheer might of his mystically empowered armor. Nearby, Columbia was heavily engaged in hand-to-hand combat with more of her former friends, holding her own against the former Freedom League. For her part, Valkyrie swooped down fast and brought her blade down right on Avenger's face! Avenger staggered and nearly fell, but bore up under the assault, spitting fire back at her. "You'll have to do better than that!"

Jack let Taylor get him out of Avenger's jacket, slumping into a chair when he was in just his white T-shirt and black leather pants. "I need to make some calls," he said suddenly. "If I've been missed and not found, there'd be a leadership struggle. Things will be on the edge as it is." He picked up her phone and began dialing it, dropping quickly into the easy mode of the cunning vampire leader. "It'll be just a couple of minutes."

Pleas, lies, deceit, outright insults poured through Jack's mind. In the end, for the first time in what felt like forever, he settled on the truth. He shot a single, grateful look at Taylor before he looked back at the group, unable to stop that instinct of pure self-preservation. "I am what I am," replied Jack to the room at large. "I make no apologies for that. How I choose to live my life isn't anyone else's business." He flexed his big hands, Avenger's leather gloves creaking slightly as he made the movement. "My nature does not determine who I am or how I act." He bent down, carefully, and picked up Avenger's fallen mask. He didn't put it on, instead gazing down at the white face like Hamlet and the skull of Yorick. "Everyone in this room is here because we want to be part of something larger than ourselves. Because we believe that, together, we can be more than the sum of our parts."

Jack picked himself up off the floor, slowly, popping his neck back and forth. Well, there it is. Every instinct in his body was screaming at him to run like Hell, to flee this room and the mortal threats each and every super-being in the room represented. He'd seen this moment coming in his mind a hundred different times, sometimes with different faces, sometimes with different names, but each time ending the same way. And now even Taylor's on the other team. Running isn't very heroic, though, is it? The funny thing was, he reflected, it had been Scarab who'd taught him that. He shook his head. "I expected better from you, Elena. About a lot of things."

25 Init Just to be safe.

Resisted Grapple 22 My beautiful face!

Those near Avenger saw his body go absolutely, perfectly still as Elena finished speaking. He looked at Taylor for a moment as Arrowhawk and Dark Star finished speaking. When there was a pause in the room, he rose to his feet, the sudden movement catching everyone's attention...and was gone. When he reappeared, a bare second later, the bare-faced Jack Faretti was on his feet and standing in the middle of the room. For those who hadn't seen the transition between Avenger and Jack, it was almost shocking to see the shift from the grunting, monosyllabic vigilante to the tall, imperious Jack Faretti. He threw his mask on the ground at Elena's feet. "For the first time since I've known you," he said, his eyes first on Elena, and then sweeping across the room to encompass everyone, "I'm disappointed in you. All of you." He began to pace, his movements all quick, barely controlled energy. "When I was four years old, my family packed me up into our little station wagon and we drove two hours on the interstate to see the Centurion visiting Freedom City. I don't even know why he was there; it was in the middle of the Moore Act so he must have been a criminal just for being there." He walked back and forth, meeting the gaze of everyone unflinchingly. "I didn't understand why we were there at the time, we never got close enough to even see the man except through those little tourist binoculars. It was right here, actually, right up in the observation deck of the Pyramid Plaza." He made a gesture at the distant sky. "You know what my father told me, when I asked him? He told me it was important to see superheroes in their element. That they weren't just characters in comic books or in cartoons, but that they were real people. That if I wanted to see one, all I had to do...was LOOK UP!" His fist stabbed again at the ceiling. "When I became a superhero, I wanted that for myself. I wanted to be more than the man I was, more than what I'd become." He looked from Elena, to Taylor, to Dark Star; all the people in the room who knew his secret. "So you can imagine how I feel when I find us, my so-called friends, my so-called fellow heroes, hiding in an underground room posturing about how moral we are, putting on blatant display that the only thing more boundless than our respective powers is our turgid egos." He looked Elena right in the face. "Those of you who know me will understand why I find this so familiar! And so contemptible." "Let's deflate the arrogance now." He pointed at Elena. "You are a child who wears a dead man's clothes and lives in a dead man's house, so damned frightened of the world above that you'd rather violate your friends than trust them with your secrets. That's supposed to be me doing that, Elena. You're not the one we're supposed to be afraid of! And as for the rest of you?" He smashed one fist into another, then pointed at Ace Danger. "You are a presumptuous bastard still living on the name your father gave you, trading on old glories and old friends rather than doing anything with your life. This is how you spend your immortality?" Not finished, Jack moved on, first from the woman who'd been his closest ally and the man he disliked the most to all the rest. He pointed at Taylor. "You are a dimensional guardian who fights gods for a living with such little confidence in your mission you can't even tell your FAMILY what you do!" He pointed at Dr. Archeville, his eyes narrowing. "You're one of the ten smartest men on Earth, Viktor Archeville. You could speak without sounding like some biergarden attendant if you wanted to." He looked at Arrowhawk. "You blew up a mad arms dealer's house in a crowded neighborhood and were surprised when people DIED? What did you think was going to happen?!" He looked Dark Star in the face and said, "You're not really a man anymore, are you, Derrick? Sure you've got your girlfriend and your life in the flesh these days, but can you really tell me you feel anything in common with Grimalkin? With me?" He looked down at his own hands, finally, as the subject of himself finally came up. It was the worst of all. My hands are covered in blood! "And me. Look at me. God, just look at me!"

Avenger listened for a few seconds as Ace talked, but when the old man began pontificating on how the Knights ought to do things, he hmmed and looked around amongst the others as Danger continued speaking. Under the cover of the other hero's monologue, Avenger picked up the little Scarab-engraved notepad on the table before him, wrote a note, and passed it to Phantom. Written too small for anyone else to read, it said, "Taylor: if no one says something useful soon, shall we go? Can show you sights of the Lair."