Electra
-
Posts
11,284 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Freedom City Guidebook
Freedom City PBP: A How-To Guide
Gallery
Events
Everything posted by Electra
-
Wander kept an eye on her teammates as they all entered the base, letting CT take the rear guard position for once as she hurried into someplace less cold. Her natural grace at least kept her from walking like a duck as she navigated the icy terrain into the warmth and light of the base. Her scan of the surroundings was both instinct and training, looking for exits and defensible positions, but also for the other residents or signs of what might have happened here. "Can you tell us more about what's going on, Chief Alvarez?" she asked their guide. "The message you sent out became garbled in transmission and wasn't very clear."
-
"Stay back and don't touch him!" Wander snapped to the others, still keeping herself a healthy staff's length away from the slightly amorphous villain. Her grown-up daughters nodded, looked to each other, and got to work. Knightfall drew her bo staff and dropped into a somersault, coming up in time to hit the bad guy in the back of the legs with her staff. It didn't knock him down, but it threw him off balance for a moment while Sojourner took aim. Two bullets aimed precisely for his right shoulder, bouncing off his armor but jarring with their impact anyway. Wander used the opportunity of their attacks to come up from behind, striking him across the back of the neck with her bat with a thwack sound. The tight quarters and many combatants worked against her and made it a glancing blow at best, but it did seem to hurt a bit at least.
-
Wander will again hold her action until after Sojourner goes. Knightfall will make an Aid Attack for Wander, using her Bo Staff. She succeeds Sojourner will make an Aid Attack for Wander, using her Monster Shooting Guns. She succeeds Wander will use Acrobatic Bluff against WH She rolls a 25, so that's probably a fail. Wander attacks the White Hunter using her bat, a full Power Attack with All Out Attack for 2. First roll is terrible, HP reroll. She rolls a 25.
-
Paige still had her camera in her hand, holding it in her palms with the viewfinder pointed up so as to make it look as nonthreatening and unweaponlike as possible. "You're welcome to scan us as long as it's nothing invasive," she said graciously. "We're sensitive to many types of radiation, though, so please have a care. Do you mind if we continue photographing you?" She held up her camera. "Recording visual images and sounds for later playback, so we can share them with others of our kind. It's our mission here, to learn and record so we can educate others." As she spoke, she reached out tentatively with her mind, trying to determine whether the nonthreatening and excited attitude was real or a facade. As she tried, guilt had her sending out a quick message to her men. ~You should probably come back now. We've encountered sentient aliens of some sort. No hostilities so far, so be nice and don't come in hot.~
-
"All we need is a little bigger can opener." Tensile drew his weapon, which still looked disturbingly like a power pike even knowing he was not an Omegadrone, and fired it at the barrier that was already flickering with Daybreak's attack. The field sputtered a moment and then went down, leaving the way clear. "Come on!" he shouted, beginning to run toward the door. "Just keep making noise guys, we'll find you."
-
Tensile will blast the barrier with his power pike! Since it is not dodging, I assume he hits the broad side of this fancy barn. With that done, he uses his move action to run as far towards the battle as he can.
-
"That goes for you too," Sojourner called back to Wander. "Maybe double, you know who he's trying to get at. Let us help you!" "Yeah!" Knightfall chimed in from the basement. "We came all this way! Be right there!" Moments later, the young heroine appeared in the hallway with the others, a slightly impromptu-looking device held in her hands. "Check it out, it's too early for the no-teleporting-in-the-house wards to be in place yet." "Man, I hated those," Tensile chimed in on the radio. "We're on our way." "Hurry," Sojourner said flatly. She looked to the young adult version of her mother, who was already poised to spring, and slammed a new magazine into her gun. Two quick pops, and the strange villain suddenly had two points of blazing light illuminating the center of his forehead and the place where his heart should be. The futuristic tracer rounds did no damage to the bizarre creature, but they served as enough of a distraction for Wander to charge in. With her bat fully extended, Wander didn't need to get close to a villain to smack him around, and in this case she definitely wanted to keep at arm's length. She used her bat as a pivot to vault herself over the others, appearing as though out of nowhere and shoving the end of the bat into the thing's center mass like she was making a really aggressive break at a pool table. It was hard to tell what might hurt an amorphous mass of darkness, but that seemed to have some effect.
-
Wander, being who she is, will not back off from a fight, but she may listen to her daughter's words of wisdom up to a point. If nothing else, she will hold her action and let Sojourner go first. Knightfall is going to join the fight with the use of her gadgets, spending a move action to arrange them into the following configuration: (tempero-spatial displacer, Teleport 4 (400 ft/1 mile, Extra: Accurate, Flaw: Short-Range, PF: Easy) [13/15PP] She will then teleport up to where the battle is taking place. Sojourner will perform an Aid Attack action, shooting at WH with her monster-blasting guns. For her move action she will step behind cover. The aid roll succeeds, adding +2 to Wander's attack. Wander will enter into melee with the bad guy, though she is taking care to avoid physical contact, just in case. She'll start off with her acrobatic bluff as a move action, DC 29, and follow it up with a full-on charging power attack with her bat. The result is a 27.
-
Wander stood off to one side of the group, looking a little bit like a lost duckling in her bright yellow snowsuit and orange scarf and mittens. They weren't the most stylish choice of clothing, but they stood out very well against the gray sky and white ground. Besides, they had been on sale when she'd gone looking for cold weather gear, and she wasn't about to shell out more than necessary for winter gear she was unlikely to wear more than a few times a year. "Do you have a key?" she called to Edge, stamping her feet to keep them warm. "This is like going to the Sanctum but with a chance of penguins." Her lips thinned behind her scarf as she remembered that ill-starred trip. Hopefully this was just a case of radio failure or something else totally innocuous.
-
"Is that God?" Tensile asked over the radio as he raced for the house. "With the whole alpha and omega thing? Cause if you're fighting God in there, you'd better wait till I get in there too. Just wait till I get home and tell everyone I kicked God's ass." "It's definitely not God," Sojourner replied, her voice flat as she checked her weapons once more. "But I think it might be Voldemort," Knightfall chimed in helpfully. "Definitely got the look going." "Damn. But kicking Voldemort's ass would be all right too," Tensile replied, not sounding at all winded despite his pace. "It's definitely not Voldemort," Sojourner snapped. "Uh, Voldemort is fictional in your universes too, right?" Knightfall asked. "Focus, please!" Erin demanded, waving her bat to full extension. "Whatever the hell it is, wherever it's from, its ass will be kicked and then you can all talk about religion and Harry Potter all night. Just don't let it tag you, we know it's poisonous."
-
Wander: 29 Tensile: 15 Sojourner: 24 Knightfall: (wasting a nat 20) 27
-
Paige blinked at the torrent of words from the young superheroine, but she hadn't spent most of her life around speedsters for nothing. "We're gathering more information right now," she told Sam honestly, her hands still busy with the camera rig she was assembling in her lap. "Richard and Thoughtspeed have gone to the mainland with cameras to learn more about the village and its inhabitants. We want to learn more about their level of sentience and technology, and more about how they live. We're still discussing whether there's any feasible way to help them, but the outlook isn't great right now," she admitted. "At the very least, we can ensure they aren't lost to history anymore. Come over to the tent with me, you can watch the live feed." They arrived at the tent in time to see some of the footage from the village, all of which was replayed and immediately put into the editing computer for better analysis. Paige was too caught up in work to notice what everyone else was doing for most of the morning, right up until the point where the giant shape began to block out the sky. All of a sudden, she was very interested in knowing where the nearby heroes were. ~Hey everyone,~ she sent telepathically to the local group, ~we've got company. Or possibly trouble. Or both!~ She projected the image of the icosahedron, even as instinct had her raising her camera and recording it.
-
For a split second, Wander stared in open-mouthed astonishment at the place where War had been standing. She looked to Gabriel and blinked, then seemed to recover her wits all at once. "Well, I softened him up for you," she quipped with a quick grin and a nod of thanks. "Lemme just clean up the rest of this mess." Leaving the rusted sword where it lay, she lifted her own shining blade into the air. "Nobody stops till they're all back in hell!" she shouted to her cadre of angelic warriors, then led the charge into the horde of fleeing demons. Once the battle was joined, some of the demons turned back and continued fighting, but it hardly made a difference. Wander seemed to be a dozen places at once, sword flashing in the air as she took a head or stabbed a heart with every swing and thrust. The clean economy of motion made her look almost as though she were dancing, the wounds she'd sustained in combat with War now visible only in shredded fabric and drying blood all along her right arm. For that moment, she was War in its purest form, righteous fury poured out to end whatever would threaten the things she loved. The demons really didn't stand a chance.
-
With War gone, Wander is going to wade into the fight and start depriving Hell of its foot soldiers. Taking 10 and using Takedown Attack 2, she has 10,000 feet of move action to use up in five-foot steps. This will hopefully cut a fairly broad swath, yes?
-
There was a brief moment of scuffle as Wander and Sojourner each tried to step between the other and the new danger, with Wander eventually winning mostly on grounds of seniority. "You couldn't take us last- wait." She broke off, cocking her head to one side. "It's a fake!" she called to the others. "I don't know what the hell it is, but it's not a Hound." Picking up a heavy leaded-glass vase from a side table, she hurled it at Nightmare Moon, gauging the trajectory to avoid hitting anybody if the projectile happened to pass straight through. Sojourner immediately followed Wander's lead, pulling one of her guns from its holster and bringing to to bear on the intruder. She held her fire, though, waiting to see whether the thing could be affected by weapons. A broken vase was one thing, a hallway riddled with useless bullet holes was quite another. "Any hostiles still visible outside?" she asked tersely into the radio. "Nothing out here anymore," Tensile replied, "we cracked the van open and it's full of sleeping guards. What the hell is going on in the house?" Already he was primed to move back to join the real battle. "Bogey on the first floor," Knightfall chimed in from the basement. "All internal security's been activated. It looks like Nightmare Moon, the leader of that freako Terminus gang, but Mom says it's a fake. Whatever it is managed to teleport in, so we may be in trouble." "On my way," Tensile replied, all levity suddenly absent from his tone. "Hey little sis," he called to Mystery, "can you stay here with these guys and see if there's anything more in their heads, or if they need hospital or something? We prolly shouldn't leave them out here in the snow." He turned and headed back for the house, his long stride eating up the ground beneath his feet.
-
Paige woke at dawn to the buzz of her alarm, giving Richard a nudge to get him out of his sleeping back before joining the crew assembling for coffee and breakfast over the campfire. It was going to be a great day for filming; the gray predawn sky was clear enough that the meteor approaching Earth shone in the sky like a small moon. The sight was more viscerally unsettling than it would've been this time yesterday, Paige decided, but she still didn't have any answers. Instead, she started talking with the camera guys about planting a few stationary surveillance cameras around the village to collect some footage. By the time the other Clines and the expert guests began to emerge for the day, she'd put together a crude camoflage net made of leaves and vines for the cameras. "Didn't expect to need any hidden cameras for this gig," she admitted wryly.
-
A heavy blow from War's battleaxe sent Wander reeling backwards, stains of blood blossoming along her right shoulder where her uniform and skin split open. Her arm went numb to the fingers for a moment as adrenaline and endorphins worked to stave off shock until her natural healing abilities kicked in. Between that and the blood running down her arm, she had to switch her sword to her left hand or risk dropping it. The battle continued to rage around her, deafening and disorienting, till she barely had time to raise the sword before he was upon her again. The clash of sword on sword was nearly enough to drive her to her knees, just the sound of it made her ears ring. With a grimace, Wander threw off his blade, sending it bouncing harmlessly off her chest and away. As she rose, Gabriel's voice echoed through the sky like a cry of victory already won. She wiped her free hand across her brow and grinned at War through a face streaked with blood. "I know something you don't know," she told War, circling to close with him once again. She wanted to check out the rest of the battlefield, see if her troops were holding their own, but inattention right now would mean nothing but a grisly death. Instead she waited, circled, looked for her moment. It arrived in the least auspicious of ways; one of the skirmishes nearby exploded into a bloody ruin of bodies as a pack of hellhounds scattered a small company of angels. One of the bodies landed at War's feet, and he glanced aside just for a second to smirk at it. That was enough for Wander. Tossing her sword from hand to hand, she leapt a dozen yards into the air like a bird taking wing. At the apex of her leap, she seemed to hang suspended for just a moment, brilliant in the sun, then twisted her body to descend blade-first upon a half-blinded War. Her crimson sword sliced deep into the shoulder joint of his armor, repaying wound for wound as they hit the ground together. "I'm not left-handed." In an instant she was up again. "We could use a little help over here, Gabe!" she called to the sky.
-
All right, let's use this Inspire for all it's worth. Move Action for Acrobatic Bluff, skill mastery because my dice luck has been so horrifying lately. DC 32 with the inspire. Standard Action will be a charging power attack with her sword, which will drop her defense by 2 for War's next attack. We're going all in on this one! 1d20+12+2+5-5=26 It could be worse! DC 32 plus any Autofire.
-
"We're going to lose the light soon anyway," Paige pointed out, looking around at the other members of the group. "There's not much we're going to be able to do at night, certainly not safely. Let's get back to camp and talk to the crew about all of this, have some dinner and rest on it." She turned and began to walk back towards camp, her own hand-held camcorder jouncing lightly from its shoulder strap. The world around her was still quiet, but now that she knew they were there, the dinosaur village was a distant smear of sound and light on the edges of her mental map. Two thousand living, thinking beings, with no idea that their lives would not only be ended but wiped out of history in a matter of days. Two thousand beings who had been dead for millions of years, whose death had paved the way for the rise of mammals and eventually humans, then metahumans. It would be the height of hubris to attempt to change anything that was going to happen. There were so many ways something could go wrong on either end of history. Strange how hard it was to remind herself of that right now, though. This was why she never visited the sad parts of history in the first place! Paige massaged her forehead with her fingertips and resolved to do an extra half-hour of meditiation before bed. She was going to need it.
-
Wander makes her toughness save with a 30! Also, she is not bruised anymore, she healed that on her turn even though she couldn't shake the daze.
-
"Isn't every day that an armored bank van tries to break into you," Knightfall quipped over the radio. "I've got a license plate on the van, going to input it and see if I can pull up the depot it's based out of. Even odds the plates are stolen too, though. I'll let you know." She began typing with the slightly awkward air of someone trying to recall a skill learned in school and forgotten, then was distracted by Travis' departure. "Freaky-deaky," she said approvingly. "On it, boss," she added to Trevor, "just don't call me late when the fight breaks out." Upstairs, Erin was busy being thrown into a wall when the radio sounded the first warnings. She put out her legs and rebounded neatly to the floor, holding up a hand as she cocked her head to listen. A few feet away, Sojourner did the same thing, her breath heaving loudly as she rested her hands on her bent knees. A night of tension and forced inactivity hadn't been doing either of them any good, till eventually it had seemed the most sensible thing to just push all the furniture in one of the larger parlors out of the way and try a little sparring. Erin was oddly gratified to know that whatever her deficiencies as a parent might have turned out to be in the future, she'd apparently taught her daughter everything she knew. They both held back significantly to avoid any injuries, but it was great exercise and the footprints would probably come off the walls and ceiling eventually. "It probably is a distraction," Erin agreed, brushing herself off quickly as she went for her radio and bat. "Someone sneaky enough to be using time travel isn't going to make a head-on assault his only vector. Doesn't mean it won't cause a lot of trouble if it breaks through." "I'm all over it," Tensile assured her from outside, "approaching the gates now. We got any spike strips to throw down here, maybe a handy moat?" Even over the radio, the sound of his gun charging up was clearly audible. "I'll go for the tires first, see how long I can keep them outside." "We should get to the back," suggested Sojourner. "Find out what we are being distracted from. But you have to stay back!" she reminded Erin urgently. "We win the battle and lose the war if either of you are infected during the fight." Erin grimaced at that, but bowed to necessity for once. "I guess there's always throwing things," she acceded with a sigh. "But I swear, somebody had better kick every inch of this guy's ass." The pair headed back for the first floor, where they found Trevor and Hematite. "You guys gonna back Tensile?"
-
Paige jumped when Will appeared next to her, a rare occurrence for a psychic mother, but she'd been very distracted. "What, you mean those of us who are not grounded?" she replied, but without any real heat. "I'm afraid it's more complicated than that," she went on, turning her attention back to the busy saurian. "There is nothing we can do to save his world. There is nowhere in this world that we can move him and his people to that isn't going to be extremely on fire in just a few days. The history is already written." As the dinosaur began packing up the spoils of his hunt, Paige caught his happiness and eagerness for home and had to turn away. She looked at the men around her instead. "Even if we found a way to pick them all up and take them to the future, would that be doing them any favors? It's not their world. Where would they go, what would they do? How would we ever explain any of it to them? What if they couldn't survive the pollution? We could be trading a quick and painless death for drawn-out agony and fear."
-
"He may be the only one on the island," Paige allowed quietly, automatically stepping back to give Richard the best camera angle on the saurian sentient. "The field team's been all over the place and they didn't see any settlement, and that canoe's built for one. But I can tell he's not a loner, and I don't think he's particularly far from home. I would guess there's a settlement on the mainland and they come here to fish." She lifted one shoulder in a tiny shrug. "Either way, they have ten days left to live. The impact is going to vaporize everything within a thousand miles of here. We have the opportunity to gather some interesting data to take back home with us, but that risks disrupting their last days. And it's really damn depressing." Paige frowned. "This is why we never go back to visit doomed civilizations. Way too easy to get attached."
-
Paige stared for a minute, by turns fascinated and aghast. If she didn't know better, she'd think that hollow log was a primitive canoe... of course maybe she didn't know better, seeing as how the dinosaur was spear fishing. Dinosaurs didn't spear fish! Paige didn't have a lot of formal education, but she certainly knew that much. But then, if the dinosaurs who went spear fishing were this close to what was about to become a hundred-mile-wide crater, that would explain why they didn't make it into the fossil yearbook. Leaning forward unconsciously, she gave the creature a soft nudge with her mind, wondering at its capacity for thought. Could it be a more evolved raven-type, using simple tools to secure better food for itself? Not a sentient being, but a clever animal? But its thoughts, when she felt them, were alien and near-incomprehensible, but complex. She couldn't tell exactly what he (and he was a he, some self-concepts were outside of language and didn't need translating) was thinking, but his mind was abuzz with activity. Some was directed at the crabs he hunted, some in other directions, perhaps towards his home. She caught quick mental flashes of other dinosaurs, but the effort of picking out detail was dizzying. And honestly, in some part of her mind, she didn't want to know. ~Everyone,~ she broadcast, speaking on a wide band to encompass all the humans. ~Get back to camp right away. We have a problem. Richard, Gaian Knight, I need you here.~ She sent a mental image of her coordinates, trying to keep a lid on her anxiety.
-
The campsite was a little quieter without the kids or the dragon or Richard around, but a television set is never truly quiet. Paige spent the first couple of hours reviewing B-roll with the director and scouting around to a few potential filming sites nearby. It was kind of nice that Richard was taking a nap, she decided; he never had much patience for this side of the work. On the other hand, he could run them sixty-five million years into the past without any equipment, so there were tradeoffs. There were also some perks to a world almost entirely without people. It made everyone a lot easier to keep track of. Paige didn't want to violate anybody's mental privacy, but it was nice to be able to keep a light mental touch on Will and his (not his little friend, and please not his girlfriend, not ready for that), his friend, just to make sure they weren't getting into any trouble. Not being able to feel Holly was a disquieting itch on the edge of her mind, but Paige tried to ignore it. Holly would be fine while they were gone, more than fine, really, back in LA for a visit with friends. It helped that Paige's old friend Leslie, or Somina when she was doing the psychic hero gig, had a daughter almost Holly's age. It would suit Holly a lot more than a week of camping with dinosaurs at Mom and Dad's work. By the time dinner rolled around, Paige was starting to get just a bit antsy. Maybe it was all the quiet in her head, maybe it was just not having enough to do. She decided to go and find Richard, see if she could get her own tour of the area at high speed before they all sat down to eat.