Avenger Assembled

I'd have thought the sporting thing to do would be go rescue your colleague in villainy, Warmonger. Quote, I'll let you have an HP for the indignity of it all. Hopefully your putative allies will eventually come through for you and tear themselves away from the gun-measuring contest. If not, I'll see what I can do in later rounds. :D

I believe it's time for Malice to show that horrible space ghosts are no match for All-American Science. ;)

I endorse evil mimes. Your character has no Dodge bonus while he's using his powers? That's going to make him atrocious in combat. Note that Create Object will not actually boost his Toughness. This character will basically fall over as soon as an NPC of much lower level so much as looks at him funny. :|

Let's see that Tou save, Warmonger.

Countering the Obscure with my Blast power. Surging afterwards with my Blast power (not spending the no-fatigue HP yet) to hit all the thugs and such I can see with the smoke off. That's a DC 25 Toughness save. :)

"I'm getting really tired of being ignored over here!" Edge fired his grappling gun and swung up onto the car, landing there and focusing in on himself for a moment. "Hey, you thugs! You know what? Maybe I can't see you, but that doesn't mean I can't hit you!" He concentrated at that, deciding it was time to push himself a little. With great good luck, a strong wind blew up at that point, dispersing the smoke all around them and clearing the air enough for him to see. He grinned at that, and concentrated hard, accidents erupting all around him as guns went haywire, thugs punched themselves in the face by accident, and everyone outside of the car and the heroes around him took a beating.

That hits easily. 31 Unfortunately, the Eisenfuhrer holds out this time. Fortunately, you have a Luck Controller. Unfortunately, it rolled a 34. Edge is now down to 3 HP. Go ahead and post, durf, and then Wander is up.

James is up. :)

Edge is down to 4 HP with astonishing rapidity. Phalanx has +5 on his attack vs. the Eisenfuhrer, since he needs it the most. We're using the mass combat rules from Golden Age for the robots, Erin, so if you hit the little ones, just make one attack and they'll make one save. Phalanx is up.

The team landed on the other side of the wall together in the midst of something out of a fever dream of Albert Speer and James Cameron. Everywhere was the glare of robotic eyes from skull-faced Nazi robots, their fleshless bodies bearing the terrible brand of the swastika and a coldly polished steel purpose. The heat and stench of the forges inside the great nearby factory buildings was sharply painful on human skin and to human sensibilities, at least for those without superhuman constitutions, and the glare of the crucibles just inside was intolerably bright. Between the hundred-odd robot guards in the main quad and their master, though, the teens all had other things to worry about. The evident master of the robots was a great hulking machine that towered above the others a good twenty feet in height, the swastika on its chest huge, its terrible mechanical eyes and arms like something from the worst kind of Nazi propaganda film. As it swiveled on them, Edge did the natural thing; he raised the blasters on his wrists and fired, plinking at the massive mechanical man as it seemed to spy them for the first time. "Take down the big one! Bring it down on the smaller ones!" he called to his friends, concentrating as he pulled his grapple gun and fired it to swing closer to the assembled robots. "We're too far away, I'd just be picking at them from here!" "FOOLS!" shouted the great Nazi robot as its minions lined up behind it. "YOU HAFF TRESPASSED UPON THE EISENFUHRER AND ITS MINIONS! NONE SHALL ESCAPE TO SEE THE END OF THIS DAY!" It raised its massive arm and fired a massive beam from its wrist at Edge in a grim mockery of the teen hero's own strategy, the white-hot beam of energy coming perilously close to incinerating the teen! Only Edge's good luck saved him, the huge shot instead blasting away a hole in the wall behind them. He'd have been dead for sure if that had hit!

Initiative Edge: 22 Eisenfuhrer: 20 (goes first) Phalanx: 20 Wander: 18 100 Nazi robots: 15 Geckoman: 13

Go ahead and close this one down, Sand.

Go ahead and close this one down, Sand.

"Not all of us are bullet-proof," said Mark gently to Mike. He hugged Alex lightly. "In fact, I think I'll go change right now. Be right back." Mark ducked into a private corner between two booths to change, taking advantage of a space that was usually in use by carnies to smoke or tourists to litter to exchange his clothes for his armored costume and gear. Luckily, as usual, he'd thought to bring almost everything along with him!

Jack did opt to go first, sighting carefully as he lined up his shot. "You sure you won't think less of me if I bobble?" he asked with a grin. Sure enough, despite Jack's proficiency in hand-to-hand combat, miniature golf was evidently not his thing. A good firm hit from his putter sent the ball through the hole right enough, but it kept ricocheting around the sides of the concrete pentagon that was the green, finally coming to a halt just beneath the foot of the heart-shaped bonsai that was just at the edge of the green. He'd barely kept it on the hole at all. "Ah, well. Your turn."

Got tired of waiting on Invisible Castle. We're out of initiative presently, though not necessarily out of combat. ;)

Melinda's fist smashed into Jack's face, knocking the hissing vampire backwards against the heavy wooden beam behind him. They were in the rafters far above the battle in the ballroom below, struggling just above the broken remains of the ceiling that Dark Star's blasts had knocked a hole in. The taunting, the jabs had long since passed; they were two feral monsters struggling with each other and the heat of their madness. Jack could feel the broken arm she'd given him when she'd nearly pulled it off, and see the deep slashes along her midsection he'd given her. She went for him while he was pinned against the beam, grabbing him by the midsection as she glared at him. "Jack, listen to me," she spat suddenly, "they'll never accept you, no matter what you do. I know you, Jack." She looked him dead in the eye. "I've seen the darkness in you. Touched it. Tasted it. They may embrace this game you're playing as long as you play it, but what happens when you get bored? Can you really tell me that you're never going to kill again? Never ever? Are the lives of your friends, of your people so valueless to you?" She wasn't trying to backstab him, was the worst part of it; he could feel the meaning, the knowledge of decades, centuries of inhumanity in Melinda's eyes. "Look at me." Jack looked at her. "My hands are covered in blood for what I do here tonight," he told her, raising his taloned fingers. He remembered the ground rushing up at him at the Pyramid Plaza, the trust he'd gained from Dark Star, Elena, and all his friends that had brought him there tonight. "But when I shed that blood, I do it to save the souls of us all. Goodbye, Melinda." He suddenly threw himself at her, the shock of his rush startling her out of the fight and before she could form into a mist or fly off, knocking them both down through the broken ceiling as they came crashing down in the middle of the wild melee of vampires and superheros beneath. The two vampires slammed to the ground together, Jack's knee buckling beneath him...and a single, solitary shard of broken ornamental wood passing through Melinda's chest. Her eyes widened, and with no dramatic speeches and no terrible last words, Melinda Ainsley exploded into ash. The vampires in the room fell still and silent almost at once, an eerie, deadly pall falling over the darkened space, glowing red eyes falling on Jack Faretti above all others. For the living, there was a moment's pause.

"I can take out their weapons without hurting any of us," agreed Edge, "it's kind of my thing. And I can make sure that whatever we're doing, we do it right." He looked at the others, sussing the adults out to see if they were ready. Grapple gun in hand, he started heading straight for the bad guys himself. "Let's do this thing."

Doctor Archeville, give me _two_ DC 30 Computer checks. ;)

Magpie disappeared suddenly, her body silently collapsing in on itself like a candle snuffing itself out. As the two remaining guards prepared to strike, one drawing his gun and the other going for an alarm, suddenly there were two tiny, nearly insignificant flashes of light behind their heads. One fell, then another, and Magpie herself formed back up again behind them. Avenger acted in concert with his ally from the other dimension, hitting the last two fallen guards hard enough that they wouldn't be getting up again anytime soon. The dark Avenger and the tiny Magpie shared a look, a brief moment of comradeship, as the team studied the hallway they'd just cleared. By now the children had begun to leave their rooms, peering out with wide eyes at the heroes who'd come to rescue them. While Magpie made an immediate beeline for her own children, sweeping them up with tears in her eyes, Avenger took the opportunity to move from the control room to rejoin his colleagues. "All down. Suggest we get them out, fast."

Mark took this as an opportunity to put his arm around Alex protectively. "I thought I saw someone in costume near the waterpark," he murmured to the others. "Near the closed waterpark. I think we should check it out." He hugged Alex lightly. "Any of the rest of you bring your gear?"

Mark stared at Eddie and gently took the map back from him. "Eddie, you can read the map as well as I can," he told his colleague politely. "That's over a hundred feet down, and you don't have the range on your teleport to go that far without pushing yourself. We need you to keep that effort in reserve if there is danger down there, whether to James or to us. I would also appreciate it if you didn't rip things out of my or Alex's hand in the future, given that this is a thirty year old map written on acid paper that's likely to tear in half if we treat it badly." He handed the map back to Alex. "Alex, can you track him well enough to tell us where he is from here in relation to us?" he asked her.

"It's been a couple of years," admitted Jack, "but I'll probably do all right." Indeed, with Phantom touching Jack's wiry, solid arm, it was hard not to think he'd be good at something vaguely athletic. "I have some friends who are regulars here, but they're more Saturday night people than anything else. They mostly come for the ambiance." He paid their bill in cash, putting his putter jauntily over his shoulder. "You'd be surprised the kind of people mini-golf is popular with."

Taylor's height meant she wasn't easy to pick out of a crowd, but Jack had the advantage of arriving earlier and being able to knife through the crowd of teenagers like a hot invisible knife through butter. He found Taylor by the expedient of simply looking for her until he stumbled across her. "Hi, Taylor," he said from behind her, grinning when she turned around. He was wearing a charcoal-grey sweater and black slacks, an absurd cloth cap on his head. "I went retro tonight," he said with a little laugh. "Classic golf stylings. Nice to see you."

Works for me, alder.