Electra
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The creature hissed at Shadowborne's attack, the shadows of the spear seeming to writhe for a moment as they did battle with the stuff of the thing's own essence. It still managed to shrug off the damage, but not without some sort of cost. "You will pay for your insolence, shadow-child," it promised. It swung around to face Luke, watching his transformation with amused interest on that ever-shifting face. "The angry cub, always tearing at his tethers, even though he scores his own flesh! Hurts himself more than his enemies, hurts the ones he claims to love more than himself. So many lessons to beat into that hard, hard head." Suddenly the creature was changing again, a hard-faced, potbellied man of middle age, wearing the uniform of a prison guard. He sneered at Luke, even more imposing now that he was nearly twelve feet tall. "Sometimes a bad seed just won't learn," he claimed, slapping his baton against his open palm with a noise like a shot. "Sometimes a kid's just a waste of time." He swung the baton in a wide, hard arc, and even though Luke was no longer small, even though he was no longer even human, somehow the blow hurt every ounce as much as it had the first time he'd felt it, a pain that sent liquid fire through his shoulder and bells ringing in his head. "Come now, Mistress Monster!" the thing called to Tiamat, voice carrying across the park. "Are your claws really so dulled from this soft world? Will you let the whelps die for you?"
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Nightscale is now a dragon! The monster is up! It will attack Nightscale this time, using the same mojo it pulled on Shadowborne. It gets a 27 on its attack. Let's see a reflex save from Nightscale! DC 22.
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She hits, and while once again he does not like the shadowy thing, it is not enough to cause damage.
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Okay, that's the end of round one! @Kaede Kimura is up first in Round Two! Shadowborne: 16, Bruised x1, Injured -1 base HP Nightscale: 10 Uninjured +1 base HP Memento Mori: 9 Uninjured Tiamat: 3 Uninjured
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The monster's grin at Tiamat's words was wide enough to literally split its face, breaking the illusion of Dougal to return to its original shadowy, sharp-toothed form. It was still much larger than it had been, nearly ten feet tall now and looming over the teens. "You will always be abandoned by those you trust," he confided in the two remaining. "But I will always be there." The concrete slab that marked the park's entrance was rubble from the hit it had taken, with Fleur half-buried in the debris. Tiamat managed to move enough to free her, turning her over to face the light of the street light. Broken bones shifted under skin that hadn't even had time to bruise, more broken bones than whole under skin that was already starting to cool. Stesha's still-open eyes looked oddly surprised, even filmed over and fixed. It was exactly as bad as it had looked.
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"Sounds great," Paige told her encouragingly. "You're doing really well so far." She looked offstage and nodded to the crew, who came back to their equipment to resume filming. After a few moments, the director gave her the thumbs up and she looked back to Jill. "Having to rough it in a dead world sounds like it was tough enough, even with some experienced friends along on the trip," she began, electing to slide past her earlier question. "But I imagine the Curator didn't leave you alone forever. What happened to get you off the Ringworld?"
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Despite their earlier bad luck with buses, Danica and Ryder were fortunate in that there was a bus stop very close to The Lab. Just a block or two of slow walking was enough to get them to the base of the glass-clad egg-shaped building. "I've always been curious about this place," Danica admitted. "Some of the older kids got to go on a field trip here once, but then they mothballed it for awhile or something and we didn't get to go. It's cool that it's working again, and that Eira gets to help out!" She avoided the large revolving door in the center, choosing to go in the less-fraught normal door on one side to enter the lobby. The lobby was big and very space-age, full of exhibits about the various scientists who worked in the building and some of the more interesting projects that were going on. Danica thought it would probably be very easy to spend an entire afternoon just looking through all the displays, some of which had very inviting touch screens and even VR helmets, but they were on a mission! Making her deliberate way across the lobby, she stopped at the information desk. "We're here to see Angelic and Voltage," she said politely. "Can you tell us where we need to go?"
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The monster stepped aside from Nightscale's attack with an absent deftness that had the young dragon missing it entirely. Its attention was focused beyond him, on the defiant young woman with the arms of living darkness. "You dare, shadow-child?" it hissed, sounding more angry than amused for the very first time. "Sharper than the serpent's tooth, indeed! Perhaps you need reminding of your lessons." The creature seemed to grow all at once, suddenly much larger and broader, over seven feet tall and half again as broad as it had been. Rich clothing covered its body, and its face was suddenly male, a face that would've been handsome if not for the ruinous scar running along his chin, and the terrible red white eye with a white slit for a pupil. He made a sharp gesture with one hand, and suddenly pain exploded through Muirne, a pain she'd felt before.... To the watchers' eyes, Shadowborne staggered at the motion with blood blossoming on her skin, but the effect was far less pronounced and much less deadly than whatever it had done to Fleur.
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Just as a note, Nightscale gets 1hp from having the monster poke at him where it hurts. Tiamat would too, but I can't give her one, sorry! Okay, the monster is going to go for Shadowborne, doesn't like those shadows at all! It attacks and gets a 26, which does hit. Need a reflex save please, DC 22.
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Unfortunately our scary friend has a fair amount of Intimidate itself, a 19 is not enough to startle it. The shadows, on the other hand, seem oddly effective. Muirne does manage to hit! It does not hurt the monster, but she has definitely gotten its full attention.
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Well, this monster is many things, but it's not particularly fast. I will also be referring to it OOC as Memento Mori, even though that hasn't come up yet in the scene, because I like to make things easy for myself. Initiative is as follows: Shadowborne: 16 Nightscale: 10 Memento Mori: 9 Tiamat: 3 Fleur is... well, she's not in the initiative order this evening. Shadowborne, you're up!
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Between the angle and her background, Muirne is unlikely to recognize who the monster became for the moment that it attacked Fleur. Tiamat should recognize Dark Star and Luke may or may not, depending on how much he liked superheroes when he was younger. Dark Star was a world-class gravity controller, a Freedom League member and one of Earth's most powerful heroes a decade or so ago, who eventually went off to do hero work in space. Taking a full power hit from Dark Star would kill nearly anybody, if he wanted it to. Let's have some initiative rolls! If you would like to have a post just to react, feel free to do that, but since the monster got the surprise round, no attacks until we go into initiative order.
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"How would I know?" The monster turned towards Luke, and for a moment the face was his uncle's, then his childhood bully's, then a strange face that was familiar and not all at once. "All I have is what you give me, little cub." Its voice was half-soothing, almost songlike, but with that unearthly hiss underneath that sent a shiver down the spine of everyone who heard it. "You are the sum of your experiences. All I am is all you are." It turned to Tiamat, and its eyes were reptilian, its face suddenly longer, more fanged. "The past has a bite sharper than the serpent's tooth, hmm, Mistress Monster? The whelp has no idea yet of the true pain of memory." It turned its attention to Fleur, and suddenly it was a thing like a black hole, a being made of nothing, but with glowing white holes where eyes should be. When it spoke, its voice resonated like it came from nowhere and everywhere at once. "And memory is never a thing that goes peacefully." The monster raised a hand, and suddenly Fleur was flying, swept off her feet and whipped backwards so hard that instead of flying into the trees she flew through them, so hard that she couldn't call out or scream or draw a breath before blackness closed in. She was all the way across the park before she even slowed down, her body colliding with the concrete sign at the front entrance with an impact that crushed both.
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Paige nodded along as her guest spoke. It was hard to be sure of anyone's age behind a mask, but Cobalt Templar looked the nearly thirty that her personal knowledge put him at. Not old, certainly, but not exactly a stripling. She wondered what he meant by the comment, but decided to focus on the narrative. "So that part probably wasn't too unusual, at least at first. When did you first start noticing that something strange was going on?"
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"We should go," Jessie finally said, rousing herself finally and looking around. "It's not safe." With no more monsters around she felt a lot more like herself again, if an enervated and ashamed version of herself. At least she'd managed not to hurt anybody. She gave Aquaria a nudge to get her moving back towards the hatch, then paused to make sure the boy was moving as well and not too absorbed in his prize. She could hold her breath for a long time if she had to, but that did not make her at all eager to risk a trip to the bottom of the ocean in this dark and miserable capsule that reeked of rust and old death. She did too, she realized, and tried to remember when she'd rolled around in a puddle of... whatever it was that was on her clothes. Anything she was wearing that hadn't already been ruined by the ceremony was definitely ready for the trash can now, or possibly an incinerator.
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Danica was super-duper extra-ignoring Pan by now, growing her shell an entire extra foot in diameter just so her turned back would be sure to get the message across. It didn't matter if he was trying to be funny or just being ridiculous, she wasn't going to let him make her feel any worse. Maybe he'd seen Toy Story and thought it was real or something; he was a weird kid. "Yes please," she told Judy softly. "Let's go home."
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"Dangerous to you?" Erin asked immediately. She'd passed over the baby but stayed close by to watch the proceedings, brow furrowed with concern. The speed at which the blue light of Ellie's magic had been sucked into the baby was a little alarming. Erin was the last person to claim to know anything about magic, but she was pretty sure every kind of energy was finite. If the baby needed a rain barrel-sized amount of energy and Ellie was a glass of energy, or even a jug of energy, it didn't sound like something that could possibly be good for her. At the same time, she wasn't sure that suggesting maybe they should find somebody with a lot more power wouldn't put Ellie's back up. Ellie was stubborn in the best doctor way, but Erin wasn't about to let her hurt herself in this effort. As far as the baby went, the little drop of extra energy didn't seem to have changed much so far. Erin looked to Serpa and her family. "The good news is, he's not getting any worse," she told them. "He's going to be able to grow up. If he's human normal, with the medical technology you have, he could get a century, maybe more. We have learned to do a lot with the years that we have. But I know it's not quite the same for you."
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"If you hadn't, maybe." Sparkler snorted. "Anyway, good luck with being crucified by the papers. Remember if it gets too bad, you can always try out a new name and a sexier costume, see if they like you better that way. Whatever sells, right?" She hopped back onto her broom, sitting sidesaddle to preserve the illusion of the skirt she was wearing. Even if her "legs" were fake, she didn't want to be showing off any more of them than she chose to.
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"You really ought to," Fleur encouraged with a smile. She stood up herself, sighing at how the cold had stiffened her muscles. She might not be getting any older physically, but cold weather still didn't do her any favors. A hot bath was definitely in order for the evening, along with a little soak under her favorite sunlamp. "It was very nice to meet you, Ghost. I'm glad we ran into each other tonight. I hope things turn out well for you and your daughter."
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Danica's eyes got very big at that idea. "You mean I could throw a shell over the car and just, like, crash it into something to break it?" she asked, her voice a little awed. "That would be epic..." She walked back over to where Mr. Hunter was working, hoping to get a look at what he was drawing. "Maybe the car could have radar or sonar or something, or like a periscope so I could see out of it if I put the shell on it. That way I could see what I wanted to run into!" The idea of sudden destructive potential in her vehicle seemed to please the young heroine greatly. "I guess cars that shoot out grappling hooks and oil slicks are probably not a thing in the real world, right?" she asked, sounding a bit hopeful.
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"Scoots Magoots?" Danica asked, testing the name. "I guess it's better than Scooty McScootface. It's a go!" she agreed. "And being on time is overrated anyway. People were never meant to be timed right down to the minute, it's unfair to judge us by completely arbitrary definitions like how many tiny sub-units of the rotation of the planet it takes to get us places!" She nodded emphatically, her backpack jouncing a little with the motion. "Just tell him you're like a wizard. You're never late or early, you always arrive precisely when you mean to. Or just say you were helping me!" she suggested cheerfully. "I have a permanent hall pass. Because I'm a wizard."
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Would a Notice or a Sense Motive check get anything from the detective, especially when Aquaria says she's resonating? Singularity has a skill-mastered result of 20 in both.
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"It might be better if somebody, um a victim advocate, maybe? If somebody like that spoke to the family," Jessie offered. "We don't want to bother them, and we aren't, um, trained to deal with upset people." The news that the cop was echoing whatever disruption Aquaria was sensing had Jessie giving the detective a close second look. "Sea Devil is good at sensing magic and I'm good at noticing other things, so if we could see the closet and the room where the baby was, that might be more effective and make less, ah, undue stress. If she says there's magic involved, then it's definitely magic."
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"The body's shot," Miss A said with a shrug. "No pun intended. It was already a disaster, and this last insult was enough to do it in. It's not worth fixing and it's not worth scrapping. I'd say put it in the Super Museum if it weren't so classified." She studied the memories still replaying on the split screen, absently flexing her fingers to zoom the images as much as possible. "I'm not sure that AEGIS is involved with this at all, except maybe by virtue of neglect. Take a look at these guys, 'Fly, they're chassis duplicates, but the insides are wrong. Which makes sense, because the inside of the Ironsbot is a disaster of low-bid parts stitched together with luck and some kind of crazy intellect operating on the edge of the rulebook. I never got the full story on who built the Ironsbot, but I'm willing to bet they had one supergenius working for them in the nineties who put it together and didn't stick around for upgrades for whatever reason. Vintage artisanal robotics." She smiled wryly. "The insides of those things look more like Otakubots," she continued. "Simple, cheap, durable, and dumb. The only weird thing about them is the faces. Why put that face on them if they thought the Patriot has been dead for decades? It doesn't make sense unless somebody spilled the beans on Agent Irons, in which case an army of him could cause a lot of trouble." She unmuted the room again. "Agent Irons, we're going to be talking to Keres in just a moment, but we wanted to speak with you first. How many people outside of AEGIS were aware of your true identity?"
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"Possibly," Paige allowed, still studying the papers. "Maybe even more than one person. We'll have to start tapping our contacts. I'll give Stesha a call and see if she knows anybody. She was only on the periphery in the whole Curator thing, but she knows everybody in town. I'd honestly be surprised if some of the local roboticists didn't know more than they've said already about the whole business with the drones. It might be worth trying for some follow up with Miss Americana, or give Dragonfly a push. A gentle and polite push," she emphasized. "We don't know exactly what's going on, let's not make ourselves persona non grata at school events just yet."