Avenger Assembled

Four Acrobatics checks. Your DCs are 10, 15, 20, and 25.

Archer took a few steps back and called out "Run training program Lola!" At his words, the walls seemed to ripple around Erin, transforming themselves into solid, flat steel dotted with big bolts like armor plating. When the steel cage came down above her, she moved fast, diving away and tucking a neat forward roll as she leapt away from the falling cage. Her quick save was good, but unfortunately as she jumped forward the ground beneath her feet vanished! Just as a wide pit opened up beneath her and her heart skipped a beat, the "room" faded around her, and she was back in the Doom Room with Mr. Archer. "Hmm, well, we'll work on that," said Archer. "Don't worry, it's your first time down here. Take a breath, and we'll run an acrobatics trial."

"Asgard!" boomed Magni at the door, making it slide obediently open for them. Inside the two young men walked onto the grid-patterned room, the seemingly-innocuous room practically humming with power. Once inside, Magni clapped Mike on the shoulder and said, "Michael, our first test shall be one of valor. You must face a fiend most foul in personal combat and not turn away, whatever sights you see. Are you prepared?"

Okay, Psyche, give me four Concentration checks. Your DCs are 20, 25, 30, and 35.

All right, Erin, give me four Reflex saves. Your DCs are 15, 20, 25, and 30.

You are correct, Dark Star. (Even this Medea isn't very nice, and is inclined to think that obvious non-humans like Dark Star are inferior in one way or another.)

"Good." There was a smile with the thought, and Alex recognized the 'mind' of her TA Serena Vervain. "Because of how your powers work, our usual testing protocol is going to be a little adjusted. There are some things you can't fake with solid light technology. If you can sit down in lotus position on the floor and make sure you're not disturbed, we can begin. You're a mentalist, so your tests will be of the mind."

"Alan Archer, running training exercises for Erin "Wander" White." The words were enough to get the big doors to slide open for Erin and Archer, exposing a big, square room marked with squares on the walls. Pop culture on Erin's world had been similar enough to this one that she was familiar with the concept of a holodeck, though here the walls and squares were grey and darker grey rather than yellow and black. "Erin, the first thing we're going to do is a physical test. What I want you to do here is avoid the physical situations you'll see without fighting back directly. Imagine you're breaking into a highly protected supervillan's vault, and you need to keep moving past the booby traps without setting off any alarms. Do you understand?"

"Aye, we have a special test in mind for you," said Magni, throwing his arm over Phalanx's shoulder like a Viking warrior with his blood brother. Magni really was very strong, and probably a bit better at using his Strength than Mike was. "Never before have I been invited to take part in the exercises of my handfastmen...er, students. The honor for both of us is truly magnificent. We shall have a magnificent battle together." They headed down four levels in the elevator, coming down somewhere entirely different. The subbasement, or at least level four, turned out to be very different from the organic, old-fashioned school upstairs. The walls were polished steel and the floors bright white linoleum, with frosted glass panels put over every door that they walked by. "Welcome to the greatest training ground for warriors in the universe," boomed Magni as they started their walk down the corridor, "I know well that you shall keep the secrets of the school, as you have sworn." They passed by a huge gymnasium as they went, the half-open swinging doors big enough to show a space as big as the entire gym upstairs all squirreled away down below. The hallway brightened as they approached and dimmed as they left, leaving student and teacher walking in a bubble of light in an otherwise dimmed corridor. Eventually they reached their destination, a big set of sliding doors marked with "D-R" on each one. "Welcome to the DOOM ROOM!" exclaimed Magni, giving Mike a look. "Need you water? The refresher? Enjoy them now; you will find neither within those doors!"

"Don't worry," said Archer with a reassuring look, "this isn't like one of those bizarre psychological tests where everything you do and see and say is part of the experiment. You get enough of that manipulative stuff in high school as it is." They headed down four levels in the elevator, coming down somewhere entirely different. The subbasement, or at least level four, turned out to be very different from the organic, old-fashioned school upstairs. The walls were polished steel and the floors bright white linoleum, with frosted glass panels put over every door that they walked by. "Welcome to Sub-Basement Four," said Archer as they started their walk down the corridor, "I know you had the confidentiality talk with Ms. Dugan when you joined the school." They passed by a huge gymnasium as they went, the half-open swinging doors big enough to show a space as big as the entire gym upstairs all squirreled away down below. The hallway brightened as they approached and dimmed as they left, leaving student and teacher walking in a bubble of light in an otherwise dimmed corridor. Eventually they reached their destination, a big set of sliding doors marked with "D-R" on each one. "Welcome to the, uh, training room," said Archer, giving Erin a reassuring smile. "If you need a glass of water or to use the bathroom, now's a good time to do it."

But are any of those really that likely to come up? Like you, I'm not necessarily comfortable with an outright ban, but I do think double-dipping is a bad idea. It might work best to put "double-dipping" in category of stuff you run by a Ref before you try it, but otherwise don't do.

"It's going to be fairly rigorous," Archer told her honestly as he led her further into the building. "You'll be tested mentally, physically, and emotionally. There is one thing I want you to keep in mind before we start," he added as they walked down the hall to the administrative offices. "Nothing of what you're going to see is real," he told her, "so that when you're being tested, you can be honest with your reactions." To Erin's surprise, Mr. Archer led her into the staff library, where no one looked particularly surprised to see her. He bent down before a panel on the wall, holding his finger there and keeping his eye still. As Erin watched, the wood paneling parted slightly to reveal a laser scanner. "Hot Rod," said Archer clearly, his words causing a whole panel in the wall to slide open and away, revealing an elevator inside. "Let's go."

This here? I like it. Approved

This is the OOC thread for Psyche's placement test.

Alex was in her room one day, thinking about the relative merits of studying telepathic ethics vs. getting a Coke, when she felt a knock at the doors of her mind. There was a psychic presence reaching out to hers, a nearby one that seemed interested in a mental conversation. She was left with a couple of options, ranging all the way from hurling the intruder out to inviting it down for tea at the edges of her mind. Before she could make up her mind, the voice resolved itself into words, still a message rather than a probe. "Greetings, Alex. Are you ready for your tests?"

This is the OOC thread for Phalanx's Placement Test.

Mike got the message about his Placement Test from his RA, the vociferously hard-charging (if oddly-spoken) Magni Thorson. "Greetings, Michael!" boomed Magni as soon as Mike opened the door at his knock one Saturday morning, the big, beefy teenager with the lineman's build and heavy-metal-guitarist's hair length looking uncommonly cheerful today. "Come with me and we shall grapple together for the benefit of Mr. Archer! Aye, he aims to take your measure this very morning, and has sent me to fetch you for a test of strength most...profound!"

Aight, there's not really a point to running this thread for just one PC, so we'll lock this up now. If you guys would like to do a thread where Quark and Erin interact in the aftermath, by all means, hint hint. ;)

Dr. Marquez didn't do anything to stop Erin from leaving, indeed, he discouraged any of the students there from intervening as she went out the door. No sooner had she disappeared then Hope Rogers rose to her feet and announced, "It's not fair for us to be one short, anyway. If I go, we'll balance out again." With that, the angry teenager from Erde stormed out the door too, to considerably more eye-rolls than had been seen when Erin left. Maybe it was just because they'd all been around Hope enough to get a little tired of all her troubles. To the others, as the door closed behind the two girls, Dr. Marquez was seen to sigh just a little before he assigned the new team structure. Angsty superpowered teenagers who didn't want to play by the rules were just part of life for the Claremont psychologist.

This is the OOC thread for discussing Erin's placement test. This takes place roughly a day after the Sweet Science.

It was a fine day in early June, not long after her shenanigans with Coach Jones and the punching test, when Erin got the message from Mr. Archer about her placement test: the equipment was ready and it was time for her to take her turn! She'd been invited to meet with Mr. Archer in the Jasmine Summers Administration Building, the intimidatingly official structure where she'd first had to sign all the forms that had helped her become a student at the Claremont Academy. Fortunately, Mr. Archer was there to greet her at the door, a relaxed smile on his face. "Good morning, Erin," he told her sociably. "How do you feel?" he asked as he pushed open the door for her.

Listen to me, man, and listen well, for his ears are everywhere even in the gulf between minds. Medea's "voice" was calmer now, but the repressed tension there was obvious even as she smiled and cocked her head at the conversation, the very image of the loyal, attentive spouse. They will take your world as they took this one in the name of their master. They will buy the loyalty of some of your champions and slay the others. And then the world, and everyone on it, will be theirs. I tell you this because even now I am Medea of Colchis, and I know the hearts of men. "It is true," Odysseus replied carefully, "that Ranaga and Samedi have both done terrible things in their time. But I think you will find, too, that there are few great kings who have not committed some sin or another on their rise to power. We have moved beyond superhero and supervillian here, and come to deal with everyone willing to work for world peace on an equal, honest footing. The sins of the past here are as dead as Poseidon." To Dark Star, he added, "As for other worlds, our primary conflicts have been with the Grue and the Farsiders. The Grue first invaded, oh, back in the 1940s, not long after I began acting as a superhero alongside the Patriot and the Sea-King. Their story on our world has been...too similar to your own, I think. As for the Farsiders, 'King' Mentac has been a thorn in the side of our civilization since the first Lunar colonies were built in the 1970s. I understand he was something of a hero on your world...but, then, many things were different there." In the air, Dark Star could hear things. Most of the traffic seemed to be in English, though there was also significant coded traffic, probably military. There was an announcement from Egypt that the annual celebration of the death of Heru-Ra attracted crowds large enough to fill the streets of Thebes three times over, and that the celebration about the purging of Tan-Aktor at the end of the year will surely double that number. There were patriotic broadcasts in the air proclaiming the recent third anniversary of the unification of the Earth; another reminding everyone about the penalty for harming a spider. Civilian traffic was amazingly low, with virtually none of the free transmissions he'd come to associate with Earth-Prime. "So, gentlemen, shall we go? The whole world is waiting for us out there."

Dark Star is From the Depths of Space, so he knows a little about the Farsiders automatically. They've had occasional moments of villainy when the wicked Lady Lunar seized power and ruled them as an absolute monarch, but for the most part they're basically a nice if isolationist people. They're the sort of people who would say hello if Dark Star passed by, but wouldn't invite him in for dinner.

"Grimalkin is trustworthy. Have dealt with her before," replied Avenger evenly. "But not you," he added, giving Phantom a level look. He was supremely glad he was dealing with superheroes, where such conflicts could be resolved equitably and reasonably, not with violence. When new vampires met, as a given rule, often they had a fight to determine dominance. Thank goodness superheroes didn't fall victim to such a silly trope. "How detailed is your knowledge?" he asked Phantom. "Can you name the dimension that homes the enemy? Describe it? Send us there?"

"Hello, ladies." When Jack appeared next to Grimalkin and Thunderstanding at the bar, it was with a cheerful grin on his face and an old-fashioned black domino mask on his face. He was playing the cheerful Lothario at this moment, one of the many party personalities he'd adopted over the years. He'd timed things well, appearing just as Ace went over to talk to the evident interloper, meaning that the room's security staff was paying attention to their boss and not to any handsome young men in black suits who simply came into being at the bar. "Bartender, lemme have a mint julep. Drop it in that frosted glass, would you?" Because that way, no one would notice the level of what he was drinking. And he already had mint on what passed for his breath thanks to the mints he'd chewed that night. No smell of blood on him!