Electra

All righty! Raina is going to do what she was hired to do! I believe that Heinrich is already flat-footed until his initiative in Round One, so she'll just go ahead and unleash the Fire Blast, then go invisible and get to cover for her move action. She rolls a 21

Raina goes on 22

"There's some kind of white powder in here," Jessie murmured from where she was crouched in the corner of the closet. "I don't know what it is or what it means, but it doesn't belong here. It might be salt, if this is Megalodon." She frowned at it, as though hoping it would reveal its secrets, then turned to Ghost. "Megalodon is a shark-man-thing," she explained to the strange hero. "He was a human doctor, but he did mad science on himself and turned himself into a bloodthirsty villain who kills for fun. When he takes his medication he is human, and he is also sleeping with the director of Providence Asylum, so he gets treated lightly. But he is very dangerous. When we fought him at the amusement park five years ago, two civilian people died and many were injured. If he took a baby, he might be trying to do mad science on it, too."

"Hang on," Raina insisted. "If you're gonna bash the place to bits, that means people are going to come around and look at it and try and fix it. You can't just leave a magic booby trap on the door for them to run into." Hopping down from her broom, she approached the door very cautiously. "It's definitely a magical trap," she murmured, her voice a little abstracted as her eyes followed the swirls and eddies of magical current. "But I can get around it, I think..." She reached into the pocket of her cape and pulled out a willow wand, nearly fresh and peeled under the light of a full moon, and touched it ever so gently to the top bar of the locking mechanism. "Open the door, Richard," she sang softly, "I've heard it said before, open the door..." The lock gave way with a soft click and no disaster, swinging open just far enough to reveal what the trap would've been. "Magical poison," she muttered, "something that would look like a deadly allergic reaction. You'd be dead before the EMTs could arrive, not that an Epipen would fix this. Rude." It was disabled now, though, leaving the door ready to open.

Well I was going to say Arcane Lore is for squares, but Raina managed to get a 24, so it is obviously for cool, cool, hip and groovy people.

Raina's going to use her Magic Awareness super-senses with extra analyticalness to have a look at that lock. She is then going to attempt to use Disable Device to open the lock without setting off the magical trap. She gets a 30! Good job, Raina.

The monster stuttered, there was no other word for it, Dougal sputtering out into the shadowy, shifting mass. With no easy path to its original target, the monster's rage grew... and so did it. "Perhaps you can answer that yourself!" it snapped, shadow suddenly becoming huge and amorphous, then solidifying into great blue wings, a long sinuous body and a head full of malicious teeth. The blue dragon made Tiamat look almost small by comparison, which was a hell of a feat in itself. It opened its mouth as though planning to take a bite out of her, but instead roared out a huge red pulse of energy that hit the real dragon with the speed and strength of a freight train. The air filled with the smell of burning flesh as Tiamat was thrown into the air, narrowly missing Shadowborne as she was thrown back into the trees. The monster curved its huge long neck to smile down at the remaining teenagers.

"Oh no," the creature hissed back at Shadowborne. Even if she hadn't hurt it much, her shadow attacks had obviously shaken it from its posture of amused condescension. Its voice now dripped not with laughter, but with rage. "You first, insolent child. May you die frozen, alone, and as forgotten as you have been for all these years already, with no one to even care." Its face was Dougal's again, and he was preparing a spell, he was preparing the spell, and there was nothing Muirne could do but watch it happening, too fast and too strong to stop...

All righty, Nightscale is holding! That means the monster is up! It is going to attack the hero who keeps bothering it so much! It doesn't do so great on that first roll so Muirne, take a hero point! It gets a hit! Normally this would be the part where Shadowborne has to roll a reflex save, but Tiamat has already announced her intention to interpose and take the hit. IC posts coming up!

"Whoa!" Raina jerked backwards, almost falling off her broom in her surprise as chunks of ice and marble sprayed everywhere. "What the hell? Are we actually excavating the guy instead of just waiting for him to come out?" She looked from the historic wall that Frost was savaging to the actual real-life door of the tomb, which appeared to be secured with a fairly simple lock. "And if we are, can't we just, like... unlock it? If you don't want to ruin the cemetery and stuff?"

Raina narrowed her eyes at Matt, looking like she wasn't at all interested in giving up the subject, but she did know something about subjects you didn't want to discuss in front of all your friends. There'd be time later to return to the topic, so she let the conversation shift. "Don't think I've heard of her," she told Riley. "By 'City Girl,' I'm assuming you mean stuff like 'demands indoor plumbing' and 'only moderately friendly with alligators,' so that's got to be tough." She picked up Fred's empty glass and waved it to request a refill. Merlin had already given the bar staff a generous tip while opening their tab, so service was excellent aside from the whole insisting on carding thing. "So is she nice?" she demanded of Riley. "She treating you good?"

"Badges?" Danica demanded. "We don't need no stinking badges!" Giggling, she was off down the hall as fast as her legs would carry her, which was not actually particularly fast. She was apparently correct, though, since nobody tried to stop them and make them sign anything on their way to the lab. "This place is so cool!" she told Ryder. "I bet you're right, I bet there's a ton of old tech stored someplace from people who don't work here anymore. Maybe they're like, ghost labs, everything all covered with sheets and waiting for somebody to come and use them, but they're never going to come! I mean, it's so big, right? And there aren't that many super-scientists working here. It just makes sense."

"Oh, so we're setting an undead Nazi necromancer on fire?" Raina's eyebrows went up as she studied the grave. "You should've said that in the first place, I'd have rustled up some friends. They're gonna be mad that I had all the fun." She cracked her knuckles, making the fireball spark and pop. She sent it floating over towards the mausoleum so she could read what was written on it. "What's his name? Anybody they taught us about in school?"

A slow, spiraling loop brought Raina down to about five feet off the ground, close enough to normal speaking level without giving up the speed and maneuverability of her broom. Creepo Coldhands looked even worse in the dark of a cemetery than he had in the light of the dojo last time she'd seen him, like something out of a creepypasta vid. The fact that everything around him was cold and dead and shivery-wrong with magic that smelled like musty dead things just encouraged her to keep her distance. She flicked her lighter and poured a fireball into her cupped palm, which helped steady her nerves a bit. She could feel Merlin snuggled up warm against her neck, no more eager than she to engage with the vamp. "So what am I blasting here?"

Raina sort of wanted to know more about the Lantern Jack thing, but at the same time she really didn't want to know if Comrade Frost could somehow cack centuries-old ghosts. "Fine, I'll be there in ten minutes." She actually went to the trouble of putting on her real costume for the occasion, just to avoid the minor distraction of having to maintain a double illusion with the invisibility. Merlin put on his tiny domino mask, grinning at her because he was a jerk, and then they were out the window and away on Raina's broom, shooting invisibly into the chill of the evening. She was definitely glad that her costume included leggings under the skirt. Getting to Lantern Hill didn't take long, and soon she was circling, trying to spot the vampire in the cemetery.

Raina sighed. Destroying monsters was actual hero work, which meant that she couldn't really say no if she were going to keep her personal resolution to get back in practice at heroic stuff. It also meant that the whole thing about pay was just as likely to be the thanks of a grateful whatever as actual money. "Yeah okay, I'll come set your monster on fire." Merlin looked about as happy as she felt, but he didn't actually object as he turned to shut down his game. He was on board with the being heroic thing, maybe even more so than Raina was herself. "Where are you at?"

Raina could tell Merlin had paired her phone to his headset just by the way he gradually turned more and more her way over the course of the conversation, wearing the most wtf look it was possible for a monkey to express. She had a feeling her own face looked pretty much the same. "You want... to hire me?" she asked carefully. "To do fire mage stuff." All at once she remembered what Talya had said about his powers, and exactly why she'd called him Creepo Coldhands. "This isn't something weird and personal, is it? There's no way I'm gonna toast your... whatever. That's nasty."

Raina's phone read "Creepo Coldhands," which meant she'd actually saved the number at some point, but for the life of her she couldn't remember who or why. She muted her phone without bothering to reply, then looked across the bedroom to her partner in crime. "Hey Merlin, who the hell is Dmitri Peshkov? Did I get really drunk and give some rando my actual phone number?" Merlin, whose small head was dwarfed even by the child-size Dora the Explorer headphones he was wearing, didn't even bother looking away from his raid. He reminded Raina that it was almost certainly Comrade Frost, someone it was wise to at least be somewhat civil to if she didn't want further problems with the Freedom League. "Ugh." Raina unmuted the phone. "This is Sparkler," she answered dutifully. "What do you need?"

This was interesting stuff, Paige hadn't heard much of this from Quickstep or anywhere else. That young woman had been so overwhelmed by her experience on the ringworld that her recollections were mostly of how hungry and alone she'd been, and how glad she'd been to be rescued. She'd followed the older heroes unquestioningly, without much of an idea of what they were actually doing. "So even on the ringworld, you were able to tell that something was happening with the Curator?" she asked. "What did you do with the drone ship you captured?"

Erin studied the baby, brow furrowed as she tried to work through the problem. "If the problem is rate of flow, then maybe what we need is something or somebody whose power is to siphon energy, somebody who can step in if things get too intense and pull away the extra power before it can hurt the baby." She looked up at Ellie. "What about your brother?" she asked. "I've seen him pulling power from people and things to make his swords, could he pull extra power out of Lightbringer if he needed to? Or there was this girl, back at Claremont... I don't think you would've known her, she graduated when I was a junior, but her power was literally that she could take peoples' power and use it. Her name was Copycat, I think. Or maybe make some sort of device?" She tried to think of some way to describe it without saying "turkey baster for power" but came up pretty empty. "Could something like that help?"

Oof, that was a nat 20 from our monster friend on the toughness save, so no joy for Shadowborne! Go ahead and post IC, and then Nightscale, you are up!

Okay Fox, noted! Tiamat's distress call will go out to all Freedom League and Freedom League Auxiliary members. League distress calls are rare and high priority, so you can expect to get answers starting after Round 3. You may choose how Gaian Knight responds. Other than that, it's time for Round 3! Shadowborne: 16, Bruised x1, Injured, -1 base HP Nightscale: 10 Bruised x1, Injured, +1 base HP Memento Mori: 9 Uninjured Tiamat: 3 Uninjured Remember that you can choose to combine attacks by holding your action until the initiative of the lowest participant! This can cause greater damage than single attacks.

Jessie has no CSI skills, but she does have a skill mastered Notice of 20.

Jessie did not seem bothered by the sudden increase in humidity or amphibian aromas when Aquaria opened her suit, instead skirting deftly around the Deep One and into the closet itself. She kept her fingers laced together to avoid accidentally touching anything, but did her best to look for anything strange or out of place or broken, anything that might show where the bad guys had gone. She wasn't very good at this, she knew, but there didn't seem to be a lot else she could do at this point. Her phone chimed with a new text message. have you figured out if you are arrested yet? probably not, Jessie wrote back. police lady says it would look bad. we are looking at crime scene y r u looking at the crime scene? Jessie could practically hear Erin's incredulity in the text. It was hard to argue. so they dont arrest us, she answered with a mental shrug.

This was tricky ground; Paige knew as well as anyone that Jonathan Grant was dirty to the core, but SuperCrime had already gotten an entire episode killed in development five years ago due to network pressure. Nobody wanted a lawsuit, and Paige didn't want to derail the entire finale episode on one or two details. One day, she figured, just not today. "I understand that the attack from the Wander replica severely injured the CEO of Grant Pharmaceuticals, then went on a rampage through a subway station. What did you and your teammates do?"