Gizmo

Jack gave the creature who had caught him a nonplussed look. "Miss, I don't mean to alarm you, but I appear to be 'on the drugs', as the kids say," he deadpanned. As he regained his bearings, it dawned on the swashbuckler from where he recognized the winged cat's voice. "Wait... 'Angel? What the heck happened to you, girl?!" Nearby, Jackalope sprung from an awning to a flagpost, ending his series of leaps on the rooftop of the building his human counterpart had been swinging towards. Collecting the dropped grapple, the swordsrabbit waved his compatriot over.

As Jack landed in the yard lightly, it took him a moment to remember where he recognized Fleur from. "Hey! Dead green-haired girl! You're looking, y'know, not dead." Leaping over her head, he flipped through the air, coming down atop the nearest plant-creature flaming blade first. "So," he asked casually, "friends of yours?" The swordsman was surprised to see Phantom's friend up and about, but next to the night's other oddities, it seemed prudent to leave that particular question unanswered for the time being.

Hmm, not sure if these things are even smart enough for this, but Jack will dish out a DC 26 Feint against the closest plant beasty, then give it a Power Attack 5 (1d20+12=30). That's a crit thanks to his extended threat range. If the plants are vulnerable to that sort of thing, it's DC 32 - 36, depending on Autofire. Let me know if that take it out in one shot; if so, it's Takedown Attack time!

After a moment, the alien woman accepted Physicus' hand as he helped her to her feet. Her expression conveyed wrestling with a great dilemma, with responsibility winning out over her personal vendetta. "...no. Broanfoes will pay," she promised, clenching a fist as electricity crackled between her antennae briefly, "but I must oathhonor our mission first." She gestured to the ship behind her. "The Flareriders are... were... it is difficult to truthtell. Some called us pirates, but we did much good on many planetworlds. The Lor Republic hirepaid us as... privateers." Pushing up the left sleeve of her navy blue jumpsuit, she tapped a button on the bracer on her wrist. A small hologram appeared from the device, depicting a dark skinned girl in flowing robes, not quite into her teens. "This is Iana Th'emme; she is royalborn, high-castedaughter to the monarchy." "A princess," Jack of all Blades supplied, listening intently. The Flarerider nodded. "Yes. A tencycle ago, she was abducted. The Republic is led by the Senate, but many are longloyal to the old families.". She shook her head sadly. "Her ransom could sparkfire a civil war, or worse. " Another tap of her bracer changed the image to that of a tentacle-faced visage well known on Earth. "The Lor believe Krak-En Vas is responsible, and who better to catchtrack a pirate than other pirates?" The corner of her mouth almost twitched up into a smile. "The Broanfoes wish the... princess for themselves, and set a cowardambush." She looked to each of the heroes. "I must rescue Iana. I cannot ask new allyfriends to join me -" Stooping to gingerly pick up the body of the fallen Flarerider captain, Jack interrupted her. "You don't have to. As a buddy of mine would say, saddle up. I'm Jack of all Blades, but my, uh, 'allyfriends' call me Jack." Seeing that the rest of the locals were no less willing to lend their aid, a faint smile touched the Tempestian's lips. "I am Myshel Czak, pilot of the Flarerider. I am in your oathdebt, all of you."

I thought that was clear. For most practical purposes, they're the same person as their Earth-Prime self, just slightly exaggerated for the sake of comedy. The Ani-Earth crew are as heroic as your regular characters - maybe a little more so, in this case, seeing as you three comprise the 'vaguely morally ambiguous' team, comparatively speaking, and Ani-Earth errs on the Super Friends side of things in terms of good vs. evil. Remember that episode of Justice League Unlimited where they get turned into kids? They act like kids, but they're still the same people. It's like that, only instead of kids they're Looney Toons characters. If that makes sense.

"What, you have extra guns just on you?" Jack asked Colt as he moved to the center of the room. "Just in case you need a housewarming gift or party favours suddenly?" There wasn't much the swordsman could do to battle the horde outside until they broke into the building, so he resolved to take the opportunity to concentrate solely on his metahuman energy awareness, extending it to it's outer limits and searching for an explanation to their unbelievable situation. Are these things the same as Dead Head, or are we dealing with something totally different? And what's their connection to this drug lab?

There's not much Jack can do until the zombies get inside, so he's going to take the full round to examine the room and the undead horde outside with his energy awareness, see what he can turn up. He gets an automatic 20 on Notice, if that's relevant.

Awesome, condescension from the jukebox hero, Jack grimaced internally as his head pounded. Ironically, he could already feel himself getting impatient of the chatter, which was largely what had driven him to rash action in the first place. "Sword innuendo, great. 'Cause that's new. And if you need polite warning to use your defensive shield, you've got a problem," he grumbled under his breath, largely to himself. As the pounding in his head subsided, he made a conscious effort to think the situation through. "It was a set up," he announced suddenly. "They were never going to take anything in the first place. They were leaving something behind." The fencer turned to the rest of the motley band. "You don't leave something like that turned on for storage, and if it's not plugged in you don't need an energy dampening container. I just set the damn thing off early." He'd initially assumed it was just the aftereffects of the blinding flash, but as he recovered Jack realized that the colour of everything around him appeared oddly muted. It couldn't just be his eyesight, however, as the others looked perfectly normal. When he noticed the bugs, frozen in midair like it was amber, he felt a different kind of headache coming on. "Aw, nertz."

I can change it if you want. Jack's always happy to refer to someone my a vaguely condescending nickname instead. I just assumed that since Breakdown was already referring to people by name that the implication was they'd introduced themselves while searching the warehouse.

Definitely initiative count. Also: I'm not fighting the monsters, Jack is! (I'm only PL 2...)

For the attack, just use her ranged attack bonus (+6, I believe). For Toughness DC:

Jack of all Blades normally kept his patrols restrained to the West End and after dark, but he'd been getting the oddest sense of echoing deja vu from his energy awareness coming from the Parkside area and decided to investigate. The acrobat was still reveling in his new grappling hook, swinging from rooftop to rooftop across distances he never would have been able to cross unaided. As he did, he kept an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. As he swung low, something bounded into his peripheral vision. Snapping he head around, Jack's jaw dropped. Keeping pace with him via prodigious leaps was a five foot tall anthromorphic rabbit in a costume practically identical to his own. Jackalope of all Blades considered his human counterpart analytically. Suddenly his mouth spread in a bucktoothed grin. "Shucks, I can even make being a bald ape look good!" he announced. The Earth-Prime native responded with a startled, "Gah!" accidentally letting go of his grapple line in surprise. Momentum threw him up into the air until he began to arc back down, plummeting between buildings to the street below. "Whoops," Jackalope winced as he hopped forward. "Slightly less handsome me is still too good looking to be carrot topped street pizza! Calico, a little help?" he called to the winged cat flying nearby.

Sighing at Jester's antics, Jack ran a hand across his face, partly to hide the corner of his mouth, which was threatening to twitch up in a grin. Heh, Captain Glow Stick and No Pants Kid... S'pretty funny. Outwardly, however, he gave the sanity-challenged clown a flat look and turned to the others. "Well, I think we can assume whatever brought us here was random selection. I can't imagine anyone choosing to recruit Jester on purpose." He shrugged in surrender. "Except maybe the giggle gang. We're flying blind here; we could use the intel."

Deciding that there wasn't much more he could do on the rooftop, Jack nimbly hopped back down into the alley, his acrobatics making the drop seem but a trifle. "'Not from around here,' he says. Don't miss a trick, huh, padre?" he drawled. Reflecting on the archaic cut of his coat and mask, the swashbuckler rubbed his chin with his free hand. "Alright, so maybe I blend a bit." A wolfish grin spread across Jack's face as his considered Colt's newly acquired outfit and Grim's glamoured costume. "So the only ones who really know about this guild are the members, huh? Think they're hiring?"

Groaning, Jack staggered back to his feet, holding the sides of his head and squeezing his eyes closed. "Yeah, alright, that one's on me," he admitted, blinking groggily. "In my defense, what happened to all the stuff in here being broken or failed or whatever? Besides, better we opened with Thad's force field up than the..." The swordsman's voice trailed off as his senses cleared enough for him to think straight. "The police," he said, making his way unsteadily to the hole that had been smashed in the warehouse wall. He'd definitely heard approaching sirens while they were poking around the stacked boxes. "Should have been here by now..." They couldn't have come and gone; they wouldn't have left the metahumans lying unconscious on the floor. An queasy pit formed in Jack's stomach.

Man, Jack opened the box to avoid another round of Notice checks... He's still got 20 from Skill Mastery, and whatever his energy sense tells him.

Jack doesn't solve mysteries! Jack stabs things! Jack is going to open the crate! With stabbing!

Jack shrugged as he ambled up to the crate. "Or it could be an absurdly large number of styrofoam peanuts," he pointed out as he gave the large box a once over with his metahuman senses. There wasn't anything that screamed 'dangerous energy' to him; no obvious radiation or pulsing charge. Of course, that might just mean whatever was inside hadn't been triggered yet. "Let's face it, all this science stuff? There could be a megaton bomb the size of a breadbox stowed away in here, for all we know." Considering for a moment, the swordsman evidently made up his mind. A thin line of electricity leapt from the lights overhead to his hand, an arcing rapier formed of lightning appearing in his hand. "Screw it. Hey, brain guy, hows about setting us up with a telekinetic shield or something just in case?" So saying, Jack jammed his sword into the edge of the crate's lid, using it as a rather exotic crowbar to reveal what was inside.

I went with Initiative. (1d20+9=19) a while back, so I ought to stick to it.

We were just kidding about the telepathy thing, Darius. Mind reading tends to solve problems really quickly, so it's common in both comics and the game for the writer/GM to handwave the telepath, or at least their powers, out of the fight. Martian Manhunter gets that a lot.

Jack's nose wrinkled as Breakdown's black haired friend arrived. It took a moment to realize that the familiar smell assaulting his nose was courtesy of his energy awareness. The youth positively reeked of hellfire. Having finally purged himself of that particular taint, the swashbuckler wasn't wild about working with a demonically powered teen. Although, he thought with a sigh as Breakdown ran towards the motionless group, that distaste might have more to do with the 'teen' part than anything else. He turned to Hellion with a long-suffering expression. "Alright, Brimstone Boy, let's go. Keep an eye of 'your man' while we're at it; I'm marginally less confident in his ability not to get his head bashed in by a brain puppet." Sprinting forward, the swordsman fired his grapple at the roof of the house, retracting the cable immediately and letting it carry him up and over the roof, swinging into the backyard.

And now the phrase every GM is bloody sick of hearing by now: "What does Jack's energy awareness say?" About the big crate, specifically. Anything radioactive or whatever inside he can pick up on?

Actually, Moira and I were talking about that in chat. I'm going to say that, with the obvious exception of Jestnut, the Infurceptors or whoever they are have to play by Earth-Prime's rules. They're still surprisingly durable, but no producing stuff out of thin air. Think about how Elmer Fudd could survive getting a piano dropped on him, but he couldn't do instant wardrobe changes like Bugs Bunny.

Those Broan still in possession of their wits paused in mid-battle, the tusk-filled expressions unreadable to the human heroes. After a long moment, one of them choked out an unfamiliar curse and slapped a panel on his bracer. "The pirates are all but dead, the mission is accomplished! Regroup!" One by one, the alien soldiers disappeared in a red and gold spiral of lights. Their ship hovered for a moment longer above the clearing, then disappeared into the overcast sky. The blue skinned woman howled after them. "Fearcowards!" As the Broan ship rose above the clouds, the electricity surrounding her dwindled then disappeared, and she collapsed to her knees next to the body of her fallen shipmate. Her fingers hesitantly brushed his azure cheek, as tears quietly etched lines down her own face. The locals composed themselves, then gathered around her, offering a moment of respectful silence. The thunderclouds finally decided to open up, and rain fell softly all about them. It was Jack of all Blades who broke the hush first. "I... we're very sorry for your loss," he said simply. The words felt saccharine in his mouth, but his tone conveyed a simple sincerity. The alien woman looked up, tears mixing with rain water. "Crewfriends... crewfamily... The Broanfoes, they use an electromagnetic weapon. Cripples shipsystems for a few cycles... surgekills most organics, too," she explained quietly. "My people, Tempestborn, are immune, but..." Her face contorted with grief. "We have failed!"

Gonna roll all of them together to save time: Intimidate save vs. DC 37 (1d20+14=15) Haha, what? I'm pretty sure, mechanically, that means they just soiled their armor, man. I could Fiat, but that's actually kinda awesome, so... Fight ends, everybody gets an HP for showing up. Let's go meet the neighbours!