Raveled

GM The Australian hero turned towards the smell of water, Lord Steam and Myrmidon trailing in his wake. The trio of heroes moved through the complex, approaching the huge mixing tanks where the water was actually processed. Just before a final turning, Animus stopped them all; the particular stench of the hobo gunman had gotten noticeably stronger during the last few steps. He peered around the corner and, yes, there they were; a group of twenty or so were group around one of the large basins, and several more were manhandling a barrel up the staircase on the side. A barrel with a very clear BIOHAZARD warning on the side.

Some Stealth rolls, if you're being particularly Stealthy, please.

Glowstar started when Equinox sat up so abruptly and made ready to charge into the warehouse. He jumped to his feet, pumping himself up for the action. His force field, which had fallen quiescent while he'd waited (and dozed, if he was being honest) sprang to crackling life again, and a ruddy glow emanated from the teen hero. "Right on," he muttered, striding towards the door. "Let's get this started." The hero put one hand on the doorknob, then paused. He threw a glanced back at Push and asked, "You mean, like, a gun that shoots sheep, right? Not one that turns people into sheep? Because wool makes me itch, man."

For a moment it seemed like nothing had happened. The computer hummed to itself, Puppy rolled across the floor, the A/C rattled on and started blowing cool air around the place. Mara started to relax and was almost ready to call the whole thing a stupid hoax when her couch jumped several inches to the left, throwing her on her side. When she sat up, she realized she wasn't in her warehouse anymore. In fact she wasn't exactly sure where she was; a black, featureless space with some kind of illumination that seemed to come from everywhere at once. There was a sharp crack like a wooden board breaking in two and Mara glanced around to see Jessica's chair coming in from nowhere at speed. The other young genius wasn't as fortunate as Mara; when some invisible force stopping the chair dead, it neglected to do so for Jessica and she ended up sprawled on the floor in a tangle of limbs. She pushed herself upright and brushed herself off, pushing her golden hair (cut quite short at the moment) back from her face. "Mara! Um, I didn't hear from you for a couple minutes so I, ah, kinda clicked the icon myself." She waved a hand in front of her face, dismissing the action, and glanced around. "Any idea where we are?"

"I had to do it down here," the scientist insisted. "I had to do it on my own, in the worst conditions imaginable, so that everyone would know that I did it!" He was almost in tears by now, even as he kept hurling vitriol at the heroes. "I had to show them all that I could do it without any of those over-developed super-geniuses trying to take credit for my work. Do you know how it feels to ta-- ACK!" Ironclad moved quickly, even carrying the DNA typer in her hands. Her boot slammed down on his breastbone again, driving the air from the babbling scientist's lungs and cutting off his tirade. As a rule the heroine didn't get mad, but behind her mask she was snarling. "Shut up already! You're supposed to be a scientist? Hiding in the dark and being afraid of someone else 'taking credit' for your work isn't science! Science is about working together with everyone in the world, helping our whole species take steps forward, together! A scientist can't work all alone, concerned with just their own glory. We all have to work together!" She stepped off the man, floating over the water and around Warlock. "You make me sick. If it was up to me, I might just wall you up with fish-face here for a few days. But you're going to face the music for what you did, and then you're going to be locked into an even-smaller cave."

There's nothing incriminating on the hobos, except for the weapons. They are all dirty and smelly -- meaning that they are probably genuine street people, not thugs or mercenaries simply dressing the part. Know/Streetwise from anyone who wants to roll it.

Jessica frowned and tapped at her computer's screen directly, regardless of the chance of breaking the screen. "Some icon is showing up all over my desktop," she complained. "There's no text describing it, and the associated filepath looks like more a set of GPS coordinates than anything I have on my computer." The young woman bit her lip and hovered her cursor over one of the icons. "Are you sure there's nothing like that on your screen? Looks like, I dunno, a couple of arches? Kind of like the McDonald's sign." She was tempted to click the shortcut and see what happened; that 'push the big, red button' instinct every human seemed to have. My back ups are up-to-date, aren't they? Oh, if I lose something, I'm gonna find whoever made this and feed him his own kidneys.

Jessica smiled at the idea of her friend anthropomorphizing the Christmas gift. On the other hand, considering who her friend was, Jessica wouldn't be surprised if Puppy had some rudimentary (or not so rudimentary) AI by this time. The young woman trusted her friend to be kind enough to the robo-pet that it wouldn't go all Skynet anytime soon. "I found a really fun-looking sports game," Jessica said/sent. "All these weird non-human players doing excessively violent things to one another. I think there was a ball involved, too." Her cursor moved over to the shortcut she'd placed on her desktop, a bare skull and a green humanoid face pressed against each other antagonistically. She clicked once -- and stopped. The icon had changed to a pair of arches, on intersecting the other. Jessica frowned and hunted around for the skull-to-head icon again, but it had disappeared. Perturbed but determined, she hovered over the icon for Counter-Strike. "Actually, come to think of it, I found this excellent CS server the other night. They run rotating all-weapon rounds, so all shotguns, all sniper rifles, all pistols, like that." She clicked the icon -- and was staring at the arches again. This was unusual, to say the least. She clicked several other icons experimentally -- a word processor, an internet browser, an anti-virus application. They all changed to the interlocked arches, and before long her desktop was littered with them. She folded her arms and addressed Mara through the link. "Mara, did you give my machine a bug? Something weird's happening here."

The OOC for this thread.

June 14, 2011 8:32 PM Jessica Parker settled back in her mesh-covered office chair, feeling it give against the metal frame ever-so-slightly. She hunted around her desktop for the proper icons, getting used to using a keyboard and mouse for the affair -- an anachronism for her, really, but something she was used to doing. Besides, this was game night! It was a floating date, given the schedules involved, but she and Mara always tried to play some kind of video game together every week. Or so. In any case it was always fun and challenging, whether she played co-op with Mara or against her; with their shared technopathic abilities, latency and the power of their own computer systems were really the only things keeping their in-game reactions back. Jessica activated the voice-chat program, finding Mara's handle easily. "Evening, Mara." She sent the words over the connection even as she spoke them aloud. "Ready to get your game on?"

GM A unmarked door opened in the wall and a head poked out. It looked around quickly and retracted; the alarm shut off and a number of people stumbled out of the concealed room. The last one out was the one who had looked out when Glowstar called. It was hard to tell at first, but eventually the hero decided that he was human, just one that had shaved all the hair off his head, even his eyebrows. It was a striking look, especially when he locked eyes with Glowstar. "Were you to one that drove Angel away?"

GM The scientist Blake had fought and laid out began to stir. He also began to shrink before their eyes, losing muscle mass at an appreciable rate and even an inch of height. Before long a much scrawnier figure was lying there. He propped himself up on one elbow and glared at each superhero in turn. "Of course I injected myself," he said, his voice full of spite. "This was the culmination of my life's work. I'd been in contact with those damn antediluvian mutants since college. I managed to isolate the parts of their genome that made them stronger and tougher than humanity, synthesize it, boost it past their potential -- and yes, I injected it in myself. Why should someone else have it!" A sudden coughing fit wracked his body, and when it was done he spit a globule of phlegm into the water. "I've worked my entire life for this. For one damn moment, I was going to be as good as all you freaks. But you had to ruin it, didn't you?" He eased himself back into a prone position, covering his eyes with one arm. "So go ahead. Arrest me or kill me or seal me up in here, I don't care."

Jessica stepped back from the table and chairs, framing everything once again as her mind checked things off. The chips were a loss, but the condiments and meat seemed to have made it through okay, so that was the main thing. She moved over to the stacked hamburgers and grabbed one for herself, piling onions and hot mustard on the meat patty. While the guests descended on the food, she bumped her hip against Blake's and smiled at him. "I'm the sugar mommy," she whispered to him, walking down to one end of the circle, "remember?"

Glowstar folded into a dive an caught Angel by the arm a scant few yards above the street. He let her weight dangle for a moment and thought about shaking her silly by that arm, but was already out so he just lowered her to the street. The building Angel had backed out of was a glass-fronted storefront. Gold letters above the windows spelled out HUGO. The interior was all off-white, with impossibly graceful mannequins draped in what the hero was sure were fashionable dresses and suits. Or at least they had been draped in clothes; now they were mostly laying on the ground, most of them roughly dismembered. Glowstar guessed that was the villainess' work. The hero couldn't see where anyone could be hiding, but nonetheless he stepped inside and cleared his throat. Raising his voice above the noise of the siren, he called out, "Is there anyone in here? Are you alright?"

Glowstar barreled through the portal with his friends. Going through a horizontal surface and exiting a vertical one messed with his perspective and he ended up crashing against the floor, but even with that couldn't dampen his spirits. The young man rolled to his feet and danced around the small room, punching the air like a prizefighter. "Oh, man! Yeah! Go after the lady, punch the bad guy in the nose, and get home just ahead of the storm! We are so fricking huge heroes! Ha ha!" He sat suddenly, the surge of adrenaline draining out of him and leaving the teen's legs feeling like they were jello. "Oh, man. I am gonna go back to Claremont and sleep for, like, a week. How about you -- huh. Hey, Morgan, should that be happening?" He pointed at the circle of runes surrounding the portal (or rather, where the portal should have been); they were smoking badly, several of them eliciting small flames from the hardwood floor.

GM Crow's rune-enhanced fist cut through the Lady's defenses, striking her in the belly and sending waves of disruptive energy through her body. Before she could recover Wisp appeared behind her and struck, shattering her force shield again. The sorceress stumbled away from the heroes, glaring at them angrily. "You have made a grave error," she said. "You stalk into MY realm and attempt to defeat ME!?" The fae sank into the ground suddenly, and for a moment it looked like they had driven her off. Then the sky above them began to churn angrily. A hard rain came out of nowhere, pounding on the flagstones hard enough to make the heroes flinch -- and that was before the hail started. Glowstar looked up, the weather bouncing off his force field, and noticed the lightning crawling from storm cloud to storm cloud. He glanced back at his friends and gestured at the portal. "I think it's time to leave," he shouted, raising his voice over the sound of the growing storm.

Toughness save, vs DC 27 (1d20+9=13) Hahaha. Oh, wow. So fail by 14 means Stunned + Staggered. Okay, I can work with this.

Fortitude save, vs DC 25 (1d20+6=12) Reduced by 5 ranks, so Toughness +9 and Impervious 9.

GM Animus' nose was instantly filled with a thousand scents, most of them with a harsh, chemical edge. Chlorine and fluoride were both there, as well as human waste. More immediate were the unwashed bodies of the gun-toting thugs laying just in front of Lord Steam's vehicle. The Aussie hero traced the scent deeper into the complex. Before long though it crossed another path and he had to make a decision -- follow the path towards what looked like a block of offices, or head after the smell of water.

Glowstar sighed and shook his head. "I told you before, no one can predict when supervillains will attack. If we could predict is, we could stop them before they did something." He stopped and thought for a moment. "Well, someone like Foreshadow or the Scarab could probably predict when a villain would attack, but then they'd probably stop it before it could happen, so it would be a self-defeating prophecy." The young hero glanced over at the aliens and gave a helpless shrug. "Don't know how to provoke an attack. Don't think I would do it if I could."

Ironclad wiggled out of Warlock's arm, patting him on the cheek. "Shouldn't have been," she said, her tone teasing. "Don't you know I'm the mighty and wonderful Ironclad? Paladin of super-science and all around butt-kicker extraordinaire?" She walked over to the far side of the cavern, where the stone bridge widened out to a shelf of sorts. She bent down there and picked up a black rectangle about half her size. "Here's the DNA typer," she said, "along with a whole bunch of test tubes and a couple of needles." She picked a hypodermic up and examined it. "Something on the end -- human blood? Maybe this guy injected himself with something?"

Jessica smiled at Blake's description of a 'routine day.' "I've no idea what a spectral flow is," she admitted, "or what its source may look like, but I'm glad you did so well, sweetie." She took his hand, pulling it away from his forehead and interlacing her fingers with his, squeezing tightly. "I'm so proud of you. Most of my enemies I can explain with a graph or a dip in a textbook, but the things you deal with are real dawn-of-time evil stuff." She giggled suddenly, ducking her head and looking at Blake shyly. "I'm sorry. I just keep thinking about this vacation. European road-trip, just you and me! It'll be the greatest thing ever, I just know it."

Warlock's throw was exquisitely well-timed, coming out just as the scientist was trying to clear the last bunch of dust from his sinuses. He snorted the dust out and sucked in a big load of the next batch. The amount of sleep powder managed to overwhelm his body and he fell backwards, snoring before he even hit the ground. Under the water, Ironclad grabbed the Deep One mutant before it could fall into the depths. With a burst from her magnetic-etheric drive she broke the surface, hauling the limp fish-person after her. She put the creature down next to the recumbent scientist. She regarded him with a cocked head, trying to place his face, when it came to her in a sudden rush. "Hey, I think this guy works in the Lab's biochem division. Well, worked, anyway. What the heck is he doing down here, working with fish people?"

+7 makes that 8. He's down.

Jessica grinned slyly. "I think we can put that down as community service," she said. "Making sure someone with a lightning gun gets enough sleep and isn't so cranky that he sets a barrista on fire." Her smile faded swiftly into a frown. "That being said, if you do get the urge to, say, redirect a poltergeist to a coffee shop, I've got a couple of contenders. Can you believe they won't refund a latte that they made with decaf instead of good coffee? I mean seriously, I don't care if --" Jessica snapped her mouth shut, shaking her head firmly. "No. Only good thoughts tonight." She leaned away from Blake so they could turn and face each other without bumping noses. "So what's been keeping you so busy? I haven't heard f any mass zombie risings since Halloween, so I'm guessing that you succeeded in whatever it was."