Avenger Assembled

Eira looked up to watch Pan catch Micah, her face shadowed in the dark, and then commenced the quick, efficient process of getting herself dressed again. It was a simple enough matter when there hadn't been much to your outfit anyway, and by the time Pan and Micah touched down Eira was back in her tight jeans and long, bulky jacket. "Is he well?" she asked, looking over the fallen teen. "There is a hospital to the north but they might ask us questions. It might be wiser to return to Freedom."

"In Ra's name, you show wisdom today, defenders of Bedlam!" declared Lady Horus, her glowing ankh at her side but not actually deployed. "Thou art a man," she added Lou's way, thinking Well at least he ain't bad-lookin' "I do not know if thy eyes are turned to the Heavens, but this - enwolfening has spread across the globe this very night, and this fellow be not the only one so afflicted, so put thy garrison here on high alert! There must have been nigh half a dozen on the streets I spied, and for a beast against a man those be dangerous odds." Not for the first time, she regretted that vampire business kept Niccy busy in Freedom City so much. "Somebody's out there." Wadjet had made her appearance by the side of the hole, carefully positioning herself so the bulletproof Lady Horus was between herself and the armed cops. "In cars, I think, chasing the wolf." "By Thoth's avian pizzle," Lady Horus declared. "Do our great foes the Mara plan so far ahead? Or is it the other - the - nay, let us not speak of him here." Looking around, she sized the group up then said, "Lubrano, hast thou a smartphone? I know one wise in the ways of magic here - perhaps the greatest such in Bedlam. But be you respectful of their pronouns, lest we have an even greater struggle afoot." The number she gave was Dr. Thorne's. "Cadaverine," commented Wadjet, a smirk in her accented voice even if her face and body were still fully concealed by her mask and costume. "Hit his ass with enough he'll be smelling up the place for days. Can probably track that."

Eira watched the ride with fascination on her pretty face as they waited in line, narrating like a scientist discovering new territory. "You see how the gondola passes so just over the canopy?" she commented as the spinning giant frisbee swung wide over their heads, "close enough that anyone can feel the breeze on their face. It travels over seventy-five miles an hour and takes the passengers over one hundred and thirty feet off the ground." Her hair was short enough that she didn't need to worry about it in the ride, but she pulled her hood up around her head as they all got on board. She made sure to get strapped in next to Pan inside the machine, looking around with a big smirk on her face as the ride filled up. "Hope you boys can handle a little delirium, yes!" she called cheerfully.

Sea Devil stared at Ouroboros for a moment before bounding to her feet. Like most Surfacers he looked very much like...well, like most Surfacers, but the magic about and of him sang of so much more - of the song that lay between the worlds that all Deep Ones could hear. "Ouroboros!" she croaked, her voice low enough that it was no louder than a human speaking loudly. Luckily there was much noise hereabouts as the bottomless Sea of the Devourer struck the rocky shores of the causeway, pushed by the eternal turbulence of the Wind That Gives No Breath. "No, it is only me. There were transformations in the Castle and _this one_," she said, poking her still-unconscious prisoner with her trident, "would give only half an answer for how to walk this road." She struck the rocks with her trident and said reluctantly, "We have little time, and we must enter their gates and defeat them?"

Eira frowned at Pan and said more seriously, "I will not tell anyone if you prefer privacy." She patted Pan's arm, shifting where she sat for a moment to look at him, then added tentatively, "You are a very sweet boy with a very large heart - and you are very pretty." She considered for a moment, then added, "And while my knowledge of what we just did was primarily theoretical, you were very-hm." She smirked, licked her lips, then added, "You are very real to me, and you are also a very good story."

Somewhere else There are many roads to the Temple of Vhoka, built on a platform deep above a bottomless sea, far out into the inky void of the Dreamlands that stretch on forever in an endless sky of ever-changing colors that the unwary do not study too long lest they find themselves studying the place for eternity. The Temple is this - a low place like an iceberg in a blood-red sea, a small fragment of curled stone like an animal's tongue extending a story or two into the air, surrounded by jagged rocks like an unholy maw. A perpetual waterfall falls below through the mouth, down into guts that must be miles deep, but the temple itself never floods. Vhoka is after all very hungry. A line of stairs seemed to lead down into the water, if one is brave enough to do it. The roads are this, the curls and twists of the Cosmic Coil that leads one to this place through worlds enough and time. The Sea Devil arrived in this wise - erupting out of the bottomless sea with a maddened cultist in her grasp, the man's mad chanting interrupted by his gasp of astonishment. "What!? But no unprotected human could have survived such a spell - and lived!" "None did!" agreed the Sea Devil before picking him up by the ankles and striking him against the rocky causeway until he was no longer a threat. after that she hunkered down on the island where she and her prisoner had landed, studying the distant fortress of her foes and the slippery stone pathway that led there. Perhaps she had come hastily but she knew that time in Freedom City would not last forever, and if they were not careful, there would be no saving those transformed by the cultists' spell. Her liver turned over at the thought of what had taken place - Lemurian sorcery, Lemurian magic, corrupted by Surface-Men again, this time to change the world in the image of one of their long-dead vassals! It truly was disgusting. She sat down next to her unconscious prisoner and sniffed the air, then after a moment's consideration opened her helmet and pulled a still-wriggling fish from her armor, tossing it in the air before catching it with her tongue and swallowing it in one mighty gulp. Normally she chewed but this was a stressful day, and a thorny problem. Surely she and Tarva couldn't have been the only ones to find the Road to this place? She would take the place alone in Dagon and Hydra and Singularity's name if she had to but the Lair of the Devourer was perhaps a bit larger than she had imagined...

"Yeah yeah," said Jubat dismissively, "Terra's full of crazy monsters who can punch a hole in a starship and wear Spectrum Knight armor. Kid, we've heard everything about that planet. Listen, we don't want a fight with whatever BS you have on your planet, we're just here to make our bones with the Kraken and get out." "Wait a minute," Ashley interjected, "as in Captain Kraken? The squid space pirate?" "Better not call him that where you can hear it, Shouty!" said Jubat. "Grand Admiral Kraken put together this whole syndicate." For his part, Lon met Benny's gaze, sniffing him suspiciously, and stuck close to him as they headed through the corridors before whispering, "They don't know, do they? But I can tell just from the smell of you. Here I thought there was just one alien on your crew." The doors behind them slid open and revealed a small but homey room, adorned with crude-looking pictures of various sorts on the walls, some of them of reptilian-looking entities, some of them humanoid. There were about half a dozen small beings here of various sorts, watched over by what looked for all the world like a large anthropomorphic platypus, albeit one with green fur rather than the typical brown. The kids looked up and stared at the new arrivals, some looking worried, some interested. The still-glowing Judy blinked a few times, shaken out of her worries, and mouthed "...the platypus?" to a baffled-looking Ashley. "So this is where we keep the kids on the ship," Lefty the lizardman told Danica cheerfully, though he was obviously trying to disengage like a parent dropping a balky child off at school. "It's nice, we've got snacks, and games, and Porcus here knows a lot of crafts and stuff. If Jubat and I had kids, this is where we'd keep them." Jubat snorted at that, adding, "You wish, pal." "I think you'll have fun. And what a story this is gonna make for the other kids, huh?" Lefty spread his limbs wide. "Soon as we get the gold, we're on our way. There's tons of it on your planet anyway." "We are not children!" declared Ashley, sounding highly annoyed. "Who wants snacks!" called Porcus in a surprisingly deep voice, pulling a tray of big pyramidal fruit with lush red skin dotted with small seeds out of a slot on the wall. The kids looked very interested.

Wadjet From her rooftop perch, Esperanza Azul watched the werewolf tear its way out of the police station and go loping away down the street. She stared, eyes wide behind her goggles, and spat está bien pijeado! under her breath. She managed a shot, wild, the ball bursting near the beast as it went loping away into the darkness. There's no way I'm fast enough to catch that thing. Luckily she knew someone who was. She took out her comm, dialed a Freedom City number - and Lady Horus "Ah jeez, ah jeez..." It had only taken a minute for Anna to get out of the bathtub, dry herself off, wrap her hair in a towel, and grab her phone. It might as well have been an eternity. "It was a -what? Did it look like it ate him? Well there'd be blood and guts and stuff, I've seen werewolves honey they ain't what you'd call dainty eaters-okay, okay, jeez! On my way! But you gotta get out there too." She zipped over to the Helm of Horus where it lay by her bed, raised it high, and called BY THE MIGHT OF HORUS! And so it was a few minutes later, the Avenger of Evil, Lady Horus herself, came zipping down in front of the hole in the side of the police station, a glowing star in the darkness of the Bedlam night. The first thing she called, hands spread, was "Lo! Parley! Let us not fight each other tonight, noble guardians of justice - there are wolves in Bedlam!"

"Well we will find out soon - I was livestreaming the whole thing," Eira lied glibly, her smirk threatening to split her face in twain. "Hah!" She sat up from where she'd been resting her head on his lap and zipped up her jacket again, leaning against the Forever Boy with a look on her face like a cat who'd gotten the fish. "My first sex talk was from a bisexual ghost, the second from a repressed robot, the third from Miss Americana. They will be understanding. I will not go telling them for a while anyway." She looked up at the still-raging storm above them and said, "It will make for such a story when I do."

Eira looked up at Micah, eyes unfocusing for a brief moment, then looked back at Pan. "The nearest cave is miles away, but I can open the buildings here if you need something to keep you warm." She smirked up at him before adding, "What I want to do is...this." And then she reached down and unzipped her jacket, lightning above flashing in her light eyes as water pooled on her pale skin.

Eira looked up at the storm as she and Pan moved to a discreet distance, seemingly entranced by the flashing light reflected in her pale blue eyes as she wrapped her arm around her boyfriend's as the winds howled and the lightning crashed. "My body's neural framework is particularly vulnerable to massive EMP discharges like those," she murmured breathily. "Contact with them could cause complete structural breakdown." She didn't seem bothered by the prospect or for that matter the chaotic weather that surrounded them - fascinated was a better word. She turned to Pan and said softly, "I think this will help him. Not what you expected would happen when I called, yes?" She smiled, blue lips pulling back from her teeth, and admitted shyly, timing her words between claps of thunder, "When I called before, I was...going to do a little tease for you. Show you what I had on under my jacket, but you could not touch, you know?" Her hand was in the pocket of her big, bulky jacket, the sort she usually wore around campus that hid most of the lines of her body.

APPROVED

I'll go ahead and do Lady Horus/Wadjet for the Bedlam thread.

Eira's eyes widened, her blonde eyebrows shooting up under her hairline. With her dataspikes thoroughly irradiated, she let her arms begin to reassemble, turning her head around further than a human could have to watch the proceedings. "That is - something we can fix," she said, swallowing the words that she might have meant to say from the rapid change in her tone. "Miss Americana is the greatest robotocist in the world." She did her next chore without being asked, standing up and letting her flesh shift to transparent to expose the metallic super-structures within. She stepped forward into a unfolding articulation frame near where she'd been already working, and began extending her implanted wings with a slow, tick-tick-tick of metal, hooking the wings onto the frame as they went.

Nice! Okay, you get the feeling that these are small-time operators - not just the crew, but everything you're hearing about the story so far. That doesn't necessarily make them good guys (small-time operators can do some bad things) but these are people on the fringes of power and influence rather than at the center of it. They don't seem immediately hostile in the sense that they're not going to attack you, but that doesn't make them allies either. And you're not sure about that werewolf-looking guy in the back either.

@TheAbsurdist Give me a Streetwise check.

Angelic Caught outside of Claremont when the fiery wall went up around it, Angelic soon found herself pressed into service on street patrol while the more experienced heroes dealt with the real crisis. (It was by no means the fifth time she had heard those words.) It went well enough and proved no serious challenge - her infrascopic vision made it easy to tell a running werewolf from a running human even without catching a good look at their outline, and even a werewolf's rapid soft tissue regeneration wouldn't save them from having a steel stop sign wrapped around their torso and pinned beneath a heavy object. Werewolves were strong, but she was a product of the finest science the world could produce. She was stronger. A few hours into the night, when the number of wolves seemed to be increasing but her own assigned sector in Midtown was unmolested, she took a moment to stop and recuperate, listening to status reports from other heroes with similar jobs all over Freedom. She even dropped the 'image' of Angelic, looking for all the world like the teenage girl she was. It was a darkened rooftop and she was focused on the signals about the mystery at Claremont; which was perhaps why the ravening wolfman was able to sneak up behind her and go for the throat. Eira screamed in surprise, throwing her left hand up to protect her face, as the monster's teeth sunk deeply into her flesh, and screamed again as signals of pain and damage flashed into her brain. And then her right hand lashed out, grabbing the beast by the throat, and she squeezed. She saw the beast's eyes widen in alarm, felt its teeth hit metallic skeletal supports, and felt a hard, feral smile curling her own blue-painted lips as it began to thrash. "You taste that, yes?" she hissed, hardly recognizing her own voice in her ears. "It's not human blood at all, is it, beast?" Her grip tightened as she heard it choke, then cough - and then she hurled it away, so it smashed against an air conditioning duct above with a crunch that might have killed a normal man. And this had once been a normal man - a building repair worker from what was left of his clothes? A tourist who favored a workingman's costume? It was easy to make the calculations but they did not matter. She advanced on the werewolf, heedless of the shining blue trail she was leaving behind her, and kept smiling as the werewolf rose up on all fours to snarl at her. "I know your mind," she hissed. "You know there is no meat here." She pulled off her jacket, clinically studying the bite marks on her lower left arm for a microsecond before she fixed her pale blue gaze on the wolfman again. "But you know there is something wrong, don't you?" She stamped her foot, a hard, sudden movement, and watched the werewolf flinch, just a hair, and laughed bitterly. "A thing that should not be! Something that looks like a human but is not! Your kind always know." In the last ten years of her life she had never met a single canine not directly powered by magic that could stand to be in the same room as her without showing its distress. Werewolves were it seemed not as magical as they believed. She snarled, showing her own teeth, and spread her hands. The werewolf saw her threat display and charged, leaping straight for her throat and bowling he rover with the sheer force of its attack. She took the weight and welcomed it, blocking its teeth with her jacket-wrapped, already-damaged left arm, reaching up lightning-fast to sink her hand into its throat again. She felt the pain again, sensors screaming simulated agony - and moved past it. "Do you feel pain?" she asked it, her hand around its throat squeezing, heedless of the claws that were tearing at her jacket and slacks. "Is there anything behind those eyes?" She squeezed and felt the thing bite down again, hard, her own blue circulatory fluid dripping on her face. "Look at me when I speak," she hissed, and began levitating to her feet, the magnetic dynamos in her outer frame reaching out to the steel structures on the rooftop, pulling her up in a way the wolf couldn't have expected, couldn't have fought - until she was standing, hand on the beast's throat, fingers digging deep. "Yes. I see it now." She threw the wolf down and replaced her hand with her foot, stepping down with the same magnetic force that had lifted her to her feet, pinning the werewolf to the ground. "Something that was once a man, but is no longer. But I am stronger than you!" She pinned the werewolf down with her foot, dripping blue from her arm, legs, and torso, until it had passed out. "Puny thing of claws and teeth," she hissed, then wobbled briefly. Perhaps she had taken more damage in that display than she had first believed. Robotically, she bound up the werewolf in some chain-link fence. Then she looked around the rooftop for a utility outlet, nodding in satisfaction when she found it. She removed her jacket where it was wrapped around her arm and studied her injuries - there was indeed some missing flesh, but mostly it was torn, exposing fluids and metal within, even the inner housing of her sinistral dataspike. With a soft sigh, she extended its dextral sibling from underneath her right arm and drove it into the outlet, the electricity inside coursing through her body hard enough to make her gasp, throwing her head back as her eyes glowed white, speeding the smart metal regeneration that would seal up her injuries until she had a chance to fully repair them. She looked up at the full moon overhead, her internal processors noting both the time and the many more distress signals coming in from the region. It was still many hours until sunrise; and much work left to to do. She couldn't afford any more encounters like the one she'd just had. There were a great many things out that night that were no longer human. And it was her job to keep them under control.

While most of the world's heroes concentrate on the werewolf epidemic, a few plucky types are called to deal with solving the great and terrible crisis that has caused the Night of the Wolves. These threads are first-come, first-serve for non-Refs/Mods/Admins. If you are one of those, restrict yourself to just one of these threads for the moment. These will start when there are at least three people in each. 1. (Freedom City) - Great, Captain Thunder's a werewolf - and he's supposed to be retired! Help catch the poor guy before he does something he'll regret like knocking down a building for the sport of it. Yikes! Howling Thunder 2. (Freedom City) - Claremont Academy has gone into security lockdown during the werewolf crisis - but that just leaves it open for a spooky surprise! Fire and Bring on 3. (Emerald City) - In a cosmic alignment across time and space, mystic heroes and their allies are pulled into the Cosmic Coil to battle against the Thule Society wizards who have cast the Schrecklichwolfswelle across the world! - the big finale thread. Tail of Gold 4. (Bedlam City) - Roberto Meza was finally about to testify against the Mara in court - but oh no, he's furry; and so are the super-hitmen the Mara hired to take him out! The Fast and the Furriest More threads will appear if there is enough interest. Potential Players so far: 1. Miracle Girl (Heritage), Chimera (Spacefurry), Shock and Awe (Brown Dynamite), Terrifica (EP), Facsimile (Exaccus) 2. Shift (Heriage), Specimen (Thunder King), Paper (Spacefurry), Nightscale (Nerdzul), Chronia (EP) 3. Ouroboros (Angrydurf), Salvo (Zeitgeist Blue), Justice (Rocketlord), 4. Dr Thorne (Tiff), Gremlin (Fox), JETTE (EP), Tattered Man (Thunder King), Lady Horus/Wadjet (AvengerAssembled), Judex (KD)

Eira shot a glare Natalia's way and hissed, "I am not weak. I did not need Veronica Danger to - intercede on my behalf." She picked out each word with a frosty precision as her left arm moved with a robotic efficiency that mirrored the last stroke of the whisk every time. "That is how it is here, you know? Some know how to bite, some of them know only how to hide. Even Chelone knows how to bite and she is a tortoise." For a moment it looked like she wanted to say more - before she smirked and said, "So you and Ryder are friends, eh? He once tried to set me up with his sister for smoothies." She snorted loudly, almost a guffaw, and shot Ryder a friendly elbow at the comment.

Watchdog stepped back into the shadows with the glowing rainbow that was Daystar, knowing full well she couldn't actually conceal herself nearby but trusting that Judy's presence would give her enough cover to take out the cannibal pirates. She raised her guns, and then - "Ah by the stars, it's a bunch of kids!" said Jubat, sounding more annoyed than amused. "Why would you idiots just stand there under a teleporter?" she demanded of Pan. "We have plenty of food," she added, "we're not some vagrant 'fugee ship." "Oh be nice," hissed Lefty the reptile, who did sound amused. "The teleporter works so fast, they probably had no idea what it was." He smiled toothily at Pan and Danica, then his eyes lit up as he focused on the latter. "Hey, look at this one Jubat, she's some sort of reptoid fusion. Hello there, little one! Did we take you away from your clutchmates? I'm sorry; we'll have you back soon." For his part, Lon seemed to focus where Watchdog and Daystar were concealing themselves back in the shadows, narrowing his eyes and snuffing the air with his black-nosed snout, but relaxed visibly when the two of them stepped out from concealment. He seemed to watch Judy especially carefully as Watchdog carefully put away her guns. "Better call Cap'n Rex," he said, turning around and padding towards a panel on the wall.

Eira made a thoroughly disgusted noise, then another when she seemed to come to a realization. The teens went about their work, after a short discussion about milk substitutes that settled on the use of nut. It wasn't actually very difficult to make pancakes, so while some of her classmates concentrated on gathering what they'd be adding to theirs and whatever of several possibilities was going to make this both savory and rich, Eira concentrated on whipping the flour into the milk. Finding herself near Nocturne she shot a look at the other girl and said, "Hsst," unsubtly, nodding her head to get her attention. "I did not ask her to do that, you know," she whispered when she had a moment with Nocturne. "On move-in day." She looked too annoyed for a moment, scowling at her work, to name names. "I am not like that."

Eira had met the boys on the roof wrapped in the same bulky jacket she'd appeared in down below, her ears pierced with lightning bolts and her blue hair wild and free inside her hoodie. She grinned at Pan, insinuating her arms around him and pressing her body against his as they took off, her own magnetic repulsion giving them an extra push until they were away from buildings. "The skies are clear in every direction, and there are clear flight paths." She seemed much more focused on Pan than anybody else, but was talking to Micah anyway. "There is nothing to stop us."

On the night of October 31, 2020, a wave of fell magic sweeps across the world at sunset (wherever you happen to be) - transforming eighty million people (1% of the world's population) worldwide into bloodthirsty werewolves, wounded by silver and fire, not infectious by bite except that they sure have a lot of gunk in their teeth. The great and the good, the big and the small, gone wolfy! "Did I eat flesh?" "Only a little!" Good people act out on their secret desires, bad people on terrible urges, all of it driven by Lemurian magic! While some heroes are busy putting out this magical fire, others are occupied dealing with the Night of the Wolves. For your October/November vignette, describe what your character does on Halloween Night, 2020 as the world around them gets just a little wolfier. Or is it woofier? Maybe your character turns and can hold back the hunger, maybe your character is now being chased by his supporting cast, or maybe she wakes up the next morning stark naked in a field and has to figure out just what happened...

Eira looked down at the ghost, who seemed to be paying very little regard to her at all, and her pale blue eyes went wide and staring as her hands clenched into fists so tight the metal inside her grip audibly clacked. "...var aldrig..." She muttered softly before she slammed her eyes shut tight, frozen in tension for a long moment. When she opened them, she said in a voice like crystal glass. "W-what. Is. Your. Daughter's. Illness?" "The...the same as you had," said Hvarlick, protecting his daughter and staring with horrified fascination at the ghostly little girl before him. "Madga's heart is failing, and she is too frail for a transplant, so I thought she could be transformed as you were. But I needed a reliable DNA sample to verify the upload that-" "My DNA is what carried the fatal gene," said Eira, clutching at the back of her hand, her voice breaking into a sob. "You would have found nothing there of consequence." "...are you a ghost?" asked Madga suddenly, the little girl's voice so soft and frail it almost didn't penetrate the conversation. "...yes," said the ghost, hovering higher into the air. "but only for today. Only because someone came and tampered with my grave." "What is it like to be dead?" "You need not fear, Magda Hvarlick," said the ghost, not unkindly. "It is not your time. But if what is mine is not returned to me, it will be mine."

Some stories happen in common across a great many universes. Kenji Ledger was fourteen and looking for adventure when they crept their way into the cave. A voice seemed to be calling to them from inside, but they weren't afraid - only intrigued. The hovering multicolored jewel inside glowed with an eerie light as they approached, introducing itself as the Cosmic Prism, a fragment of the Cosmic Coil cast down to this dimension, telling them that after almost three hundred years, it had finally found its next destined wielder. And so they reached for it but suddenly the Prism gave a small, shrill cry and shattered - And Ken Ledger opened his eyes, wincing in pain at the burning sensation in his chest - what had happened? How was he going to tell his parents? And Ken Ledger woke up in the hospital, wincing at the burning sensation in his chest, feeling a strange sensation in his head that he only later would realize was the withdrawal pains he got from unfiltered water. And Ken Ledger woke up in the hospital under the watchful eye of his Boy Scout master; getting himself hurt was no way to learn the skills he needed to fight Hitler! And Ken Ledger woke up just as the representatives from the League were arriving - Captain Thunder smiled and told him was never going to be a prole again! And Keni Ledger woke up, alarmed to find a hole burned in the front of her shirt - tarnation that was her only good shirt! And Keni Ledger woke up and tore off her shirt, staring at the glowing crystal fragment embedded in there - it wasn't nanotech, was it? The whole thing hadn't been some big trick!? And Keni Ledger woke up in a hospital in Freedom City to find Fleur de Joie herself standing over her, and smiled with relief as she sat up in her quick-grown hospital bed. Everything was going to be all right. Wasn't it?