Avenger Assembled

"My flesh is permeated by a charged dynamic magnetofluid," said Eira with a smirk. "It allows for both liquidity of motion and rigidity of reaction." She studied Ryder, frowning unaccountably for a moment, then said, "Perhaps I will bring my boyfriend and we can have smoothies with your sister." She hmmed and added, "I eat for pleasure. But I am a vegan," she went on. "It was unethical to be otherwise." She looked over at Yellow and said, "I have been designing my body since I was a child. The key is to visualize yourself; and then be that. It is an advantage over the typical organic - but it is not without its challenges. My parents had many opinions of their own," she said, a sharp smile on her face. She looked at Ryder's work, seemed about to say something, then put her hands in her pockets to turn away. "How long has Dragonfly been training you? I first met her when I was eight."

Eira gave Ryder a hard smile, painted lips pulling back from perfect white teeth. "Yes," she said shortly, seemingly able to talk and carry on the work of programming without any trouble with the latter. She paused for a moment, letting it hang, then added, "I am fully synthetic. I do not know Talos, I am not related to Protectron, and Miss Americana and myself are responsible for the design of my current super-structure." She pulled her hand away from the computer, her datacable snapping back into place. "There, the program is now self-generating. By the time you are finished, it will be able to produce subjective weeks worth of content for the Infernects."

APPROVED

"This is what I meant by exile," scowled Eira, lowering her hands and beginning to loudly crack her knuckles. "We are no different than those two to them." She shot a look at the kindergarteners, not looking nearly so irritable at the little kids, before looking back at Ryder. "If I had not spoken out, I might be in there with them still." Frowning, she looked at Ryder and threw up her hands. "We might as well start building the Infernect Jail! It is better than busywork." Eira's touch with machines proved to be fast and hard, her brain seeming to run faster than anyone's had any right to. Without preamble, she attached herself directly to one of the room's computers by means of that same silver datacable, the system moving faster than Ryder could quite make out. "I will generate the synthetic reality - if you and Yellow can - build the hardware." she said.

Eira only got a 20 on her Intimidate, but it seems to be getting him to talk. Maybe more questions, and more rolls, will get more information...

With an air of injured dignity, the man said, "I took it because I was paid - not enough to cover this, I might add." He rubbed his throat and looked up at Eira, who had water gleaming on her quicksilver hide now that the shower was turned off. "I would have thought a young transhumanist like yourself wouldn't be so attached to the flesh..." Eira drove one fist into her hand and hissed, "They are the nice ones. Talk to them!" Pan heard the thought as clearly - she is exactly like her grandfather - before the man said, "I delivered the ashes and their container to my contact just a few hours ago. He may still be there now, assuming he's not on the plane to Bornholm..."

A DC 20 Notice check will give you the hovering drones above the treeline, watching.

The barriers came down with a faint shrug from the announcer, who was giving a hard smile as the various heroes chased down the fleeing shadowbeast. This new land wasn't so big that the chase was long, nor did they go unobserved. When a small stream blocked the wildly fleeing Miurne's flight, Mette and Klara briefly had time to catch her. And so did others. "What are you doing?" demanded a voice from above, Angelic landing with metallic wings spread on the opposite side of the stream. "What happened to her?" She was all robot now, metallic skin gleaming in the bright sunlight, and for a moment was easy to mistake for a local.

Judy was sitting up in bed, wearing an oversized University of Oklahoma shirt, and grinned naughtily at the sight of Lulu. "Well Ah'm not supposed to tell anybody that unless it's an emergency," she confessed as she turned the phone around to show an ornate bedroom with some furnishings and wall posters that looked familiar. "But let's just say the British aren't invited back here anytime soon. It's been a crazy summer but Ah've had fun - I spent a whole week out west looking at reptiles with Danica and that was great. Check out the new me." She turned her head a little bit, letting Lulu see what she'd done with her hair. The long feminine locks, raven-black and glossy, that she'd worn as long as Lulu had known her were cut so short that they just barely reached her collar. The style was familiar; though it wasn't dyed, it looked closer to the way Ashley wore her hair than anything else. "Do you like it? Ah heard a lot about it, I'll tell you what."

Lulu had found Eira's parents to be in some ways the opposite of their daughter in temperment; though sharing a certain amount of reserve. But what Eira kept quiet through scowling and curt remarks, her mother and father had the sort of Old World charm that would have fit right into an American television show about old money. Their nerves were a little frayed, though, and she distinctly heard Eira's father mention calling Magnus if they didn't hear back from the teens soon. - The various teens found themselves confronting a naked man in the shower (well, clothed if you counted his mustache anyway) who seemed distinctly startled by this turn of events. "I don't-this is illegal!" he declared loudly as the shower began to freeze around him, cowering backwards from Pan's blade. "You American tourists! This is not the United States where you can abuse innocent businessmen in the shower!" "IS THAT SO!?" A metal fist went through the drywall, followed shortly by Eira as she entered the shower stall not by the door but by the wall, plaster falling around her and breaking around her body. She shot Pan a grateful smile before picking up her target by the neck and lifting him in the air. "Perhaps you should dial 112, yes!?" She dropped him on his rear, leaving him seemingly helpless before the various super-teens. "Fine, fine," he coughed disgustedly, raising his hands. "I'll tell you what you must want to know, just let me...turn off the verdamnt shower, yes?" he said. "And let me put on some clothes..." Eira did not look inclined to let the man do that, but she didn't interfere as he gestured to a terrycloth robe on the wall. "I planned for the hammer, not for the circus..."

It had been a long but good Fourth of July - a chance for the President and the First Family to put overt politics aside and have the celebration with military families that was de riguer these days. Judy had played her part to perfection, applauding the talent shows of little kids, cheering as the fireworks echoed above Washington, and even serving meals alongside her mother and sisters at the service table. It was all good footage for a Presidential election year, or so the news media was presenting it. She lay on her bed and listened to the news outside without having to turn on her television, then after a moment's consideration she took out her phone and texted Crystal-Gazer. Hey Lulu. Can you FaceTime?

Doktor'd! Angelic Change "Psionic Effects" in her Immunities to "Mental Effects" - I have a better idea now than I did at character creation of what the latter are, and how they differ from mental powers.

I do rather like the idea, especially after that great cartoon about Batgirl and Supergirl knitting together! Maybe there's a variant of the Hot Zone virus out again, and the metahumans have to stay inside and wait for it to end?

"I think it is very unlikely that we will be crazied," said Eira with a teenager's invincible assurance. "Whatever these entities may be, I doubt they are a match for contemporary software systems - otherwise they would have sought to leave this hardware before our arrival. With that in mind, a new home for them seems like the most prudent course of action. Perhaps Chitin could construct a new system for them to operate on once they have been displaced from this one. " The addition of Chitin's name was a trifle belated but seemed no less sincere for that. It was a serious potential crisis, although certainly one within the wheelhouse of Dragonfly and Wander. Were there genuine magical sentients or were they artificial creations produced by some logorhythmic coincidence in the ancient text itself? Were they hostile or friendly - and if the one, could they be persuaded to be the other? These were all important questions. But not ones that the two teens could necessarily answer from inside their laboratory across the hall, where once again they found themselves reunited with their small charges along with their equipment. (Charlie was very busy playing a game on one of the security balls, but Mia had many questions about where they'd been, what were they doing, and why did that room they'd been in smell like farts?) In the privacy of the lab, while Mia talked with Ryder, Eira took a moment to bury her face in her hands.

Eira spent the next several hours in her bedroom, occasionally pulling in Soliton to "facilitate the use of her powers for our mutual goal." It was not exactly a comfortable setting in the household that day but they made do, with the servants even providing everyone an awkward, mostly silent lunch. By the time it was late afternoon, Eira was finished with her work - a metal circle built into her bedroom wall that hummed with barely suppressed power. Eira was no longer bothering with her human disguise, her quicksilver metal body polished bright as it reflected the scenery and the humming crackle in the room. "Mia's powers will drive the tracer," she said, "which will direct her teleportation towards our target." For all that they'd spent the first half of the year squabbling, they'd evidently found enough in common to get this done. Eira was all business as she waited for Mia to power the machine, but stuck close to Pan all the same. - The trip took them to the inside of an upscale apartment that would have cost several thousand dollars a month to rent in Freedom City; though that did not much resemble Freedom's skyline outside. The teens had been deposited in the living room, and from somewhere in the apartment they could hear running water and a male voice singing lustily "I stay high, all the time, to keep you off my mind, oo-oo..."

The generalities of what had happened seemed obvious enough. A mysterious stranger had come to the house, opened a hole in the wall, and taken Eira's ashes. The specifics were a little harder to come by. Despite his black robes, it seemed he had used science rather than magic to transmute a section of the wall into air before entering to take what he wanted, then teleporting away outside with a sizzle of displaced dimensional-shunting energy, the sort of teleportation technology that was typically banned because of its potentially hazardous effects on its users. The man had come with intent in mind, passing up expensive furniture and antique art hanging on the walls before taking the urn and vanishing with it, and had for the moment gotten away with it. There was no great air of lingering wickedness in the room or particularly strong emotion - just a man who had come to do a crime, done it, and then fled. For her part, Eira did recognize the thief. "I know who that is," she said, her voice churning with barely suppressed emotion. "That is Urmakare; he is a...Scandanavian science criminal. He was once a rival of my uncle's." She stared, eyes unfocusing, and said, "We can track his signal - and follow him. I am eighteen years old and I have fought frost giants in the depths of Jotunheim - I have been to space ," she added to her parents, who both looked deeply skeptical of this proposition. "I can handle the likes of him." Her hand tightened in Pan's. "I will not be going alone. "

500 ft per move - 10 rounds, less if she's running.

Are we still here, folks? @Tiffany Korta, you could investigate *Otaku while @RocketLord chases @Kaede Kimura...

Okay, everyone, it's detective time! Go ahead and make some rolls, let me know about any applicable Super-Senses/Powers

The action on the screen stopped abruptly - so immediately that if not for the ticking of the system's clock and the sudden sound of an exhaust fan coming on from inside the drive, it might have appeared to have frozen altogether. But then a variety of things happened - the first being a snap from the system's internal camera. A new bar of text appeared in the top of the screen, picked out in cartoonish red, flaming letters: ARE YOU GODS? Meanwhile, the slide shifted forward to an image of two of the demon-locusts, both of whom seemed to buzz out of the frame down to the text on the bottom part of the bar. Fixing their human eyes upward, they fastened their teeth onto the R in Ryder's message and began to tear it to pieces, waving their limbs in a way that would surely have been terrifying if they'd been full-sized abominations and not little animations the size of a quarters. When the deed was done, they perched proudly on their work for a moment before a new slide appeared; clearly a photograph of Ryder from the computer's built-in webcam. The locusts started eating that too; looking like nothing more than hungry, misshapen grasshoppers gobbling up a still picture dropped in the middle of a cornfield as they tore up Ryder's image with great relish.

Back On My, You Know

The images gradually flickered to life - blocky, low-quality images that resembled a file shared on the Internet around the time Eira had been born. The first time, anyway. They portrayed scenes of carnage as the scorpion-tailed, human-headed locusts fell upon the human race with unholy cunning, terrible powers, and diabolical wickedness. It was probably a good thing that Charlie and Mia were entertaining themselves in the hallway with their security ball and not able to see this; even if the low quality of the actual images decidedly cut back on the horror. "That is a star wipe," said Eira accusingly as the image shifted to a six-pointed star falling to Earth and then opening a gateway to infernal realms. "It used a star wipe to show a star falling to Earth." Her disgust was palpable - more so than usual, anyway. Gradually the images on the screen shifted to show familiar scenes amid the apocalypse - a Freedom City overrun by demons, familiar-looking (albeit crudely drawn) figures beset by the creatures, and the like. With the low quality of the still, vaguely pen and ink images, it was a bit like watching a talented but emotionally disturbed child tell a creepy tale. "Is there something stinky in there?" Mia called from the hallway. "It smells very bad!" "Perhaps we can move them to a different system," Eira hazarded, her voice doubtful. "One without sensitive data?" On closer inspection, some of these demon-bugs looked familiar to Erin - it was hard to tell given the low quality of the images, but she was reasonably sure she'd encountered at least a few of these during the demonic invasion - and for that matter when she'd been the Horseman of War some years later.

The little place in East New Orleans had had the same owner since Ashley Tran's family had lived up the street when she was a little girl. They'd gone there with their dad, she'd gone there after Vietnamese cram sessions, and it had wound up the perfect place to talk to her younger sister about something important. It helped that the food was good too. "Okay. Here goes." Ashley folded her hands on the table in front of her, met her sister's eyes, and told her the story. "Last summer, I met a very nice, and very interesting, woman-" she caught Agnes's eyes widening, but kept talking anyway, "and...I did a lot of thinking about some things." She traced the rim of her glass with one finger, the better to stop her hands from shaking, as she said, "about how maybe there are some things about myself that I haven't been - honest about. And so I realized that I am a bisexual woman." Confessing this to a teenager to keep Judy's secret safe had been easy by comparison. "I just kept it to myself for a while, but...things have changed, and I want you to know. You're the first person in the family I've told about this." Aggie looked at her sister and grinned, reaching across the table to punch her lightly on the arm. "Well, it's about time, idiote," she said affectionately. "Good for you, though." Ashley stared at her sister and said, her voice going up slightly. "What do you mean, it's about time?" Aggie grinned and began ticking off points on her fingers. "Come on, Ash, I'm not stupid. All that time you used to spend at the gym - rating yourself next to the other girls? The pride parade you took me to because you said it was important to honor everyone in our community who was on the outside? And remember that picture of the Raven you put over your bed when you came back from boarding school?" Ashley blanched and said firmly, "That is _not_ why I had that picture of the Raven!" She hadn't realized she'd actually hit the top of the table until she saw people looking - instantly, she quieted and was about to get up before her sister raised her hands in surrender. "Okay, okay, jeez," said Agnes. "Sorry. I didn't mean to step on the moment." It was a real apology from her younger sister, and Ashley took it as such. How the hell did she get so smart at nineteen, anyway? "I'm proud of you." She smiled over her iced latte, a contrast to Ashley's cà phê sữa đá, and asked, "So when are we going to meet her?" "Meet who?" asked Ashley, starting to wonder who the hell was the detective in the family anyway. "Lucky guess," said an annoyingly smug Airman Aggie George-Tran. "But I figured if you actually were coming out to me, you had a reason. You don't normally give a crap about keeping your business to yourself." "Yeah, well..." Ashley ran her fingers through her pink-dyed hair and said quietly, "It's a long-distance thing, and it's complicated..." The girl she'd used to babysit as a teenager, the one whose diaper she'd changed and who had once interrupted a date by banging on pots and singing loudly in Franglish, patted her on the hand. "It's okay. Your secret is safe with me. You're my grande soeur, remember?" Ashley would have firmly denied that she was crying if asked but she wiped her eyes anyway - the arrival of their po'boys luckily interrupting anything more emotional. The two of them ate for a while, talking about nothing, before she went on, "And...I think this is my last year with the agency. It depends on how things go in November." That made Aggie's eyes widen for real. "You what?! Jeez, Ash, you're the biggest cop I know. What are you going to do with yourself?" Now it was Ashley's turn to grin, even if there was an edge to it. "There's more than two ways to be a cop. You know how I felt about New Orleans cops when I left, and this one...well, there are more important things than protecting VIPs." She caught Aggie's raised eyebrow and grinned. "Definitely not getting into that where anyone can hear us. But there are other things worth protecting too." She hesitated while they ate some more, then said, "I know Mom and the rest of you are worried about me on this assignment. I know it's weird, but things really aren't that bad. I mean, I made a...friend," she said, blushing a little and making a distracted gesture in the air, "but...it's been important too. I've found family there." "Well...okay," said Aggie, a little doubtfully, "but your girlfriend better not take my room. Bad enough Dad wants to turn it into his fishing gallery." Ashley threw a pickle at her. "That is not what I meant!" _Or who._

"When Eira was uploaded to her first synthetic body," said Bernhard as if he was reciting a carefully memorized script, "an...organic one was left behind. The hospital wasn't sure what to do, so they - followed protocol, and mailed us the ashes." "We couldn't just - throw her away," said Magna, looking as thoroughly miserable as if the teenagers had spotted her naked - which in a way they had. "So we kept the ashes in here. And since we wanted Eira to grow up without any reminders of being sick, we moved the pictures in here too." "I only found out about all...this just before they sent me to Claremont," spat Eira, gesturing in disgust at the broader room. "This is...this should not be in my house." She made brief eye contact with one of her pictures on the wall, then looked away, her voice cracking as she looked at her friends and asked, "Well?"

Pan gets a very clear series of images: <a glowing shape cuts a circle into the wall and flies through> <fire curling around his fingers, the dark-robed man looks around the room before spotting the urn> <he nods and scoops it up in his arms - looking more like a postman picking up a package than a cunning sneak thief> <with that he disappears through the hole in the wall, where there is a faintly audible pop like a soap bubble some time after that>