Fox

"No, Cricket. No calling it a day." Nocturne was striding forward, bubble already gathered around her and more particles beside bleeding off it like smoke. The denser they got the more they gathered together, macro-particles overlapping in blacks and golds. "I think she needs to come down here and get some data first-hand!" A small wave of black and gold surged up toward the observation deck, cresting like a great taloned claw before crashing down to crack at the glass, steel starting to bend and twist as shards of window fell with much harsher speed than should have been warranted. It held, though, for all that it was taking on damage, and the figure inside started to step back. Nocturne grit her teeth. "I think your monkey's going to need some help."

Monkey was punched! Monkey punch BACK! Melee Attack Roll vs. Chitin: 1d20+6 11 Swing and a miss.

Chitin's got that monkey fight, right? Sure, looks fine. Nocturne's going to try to tear Mystery Science Person's observation deck out of the wall. Power Attack +2/-2, All-Out Attack +2/-2 Ranged Attack Roll vs. Observation Deck: 1d20+8-2+2 24 That's a DC25 toughness save for the deck, which is an object and will just take 10; its important bits are steel, so we'll say it takes 10 for a toughness save of 20. Deck fails by 5; she's done some good damage to it, but it'll take her a bit longer to really tear it down.

Toughness Save vs. Chitin, DC25: 1d20+11 28 Monkey can take a punch! Apparently. Dang monkey.

Roborilla: Initiative Roll: 1d20+2 11 Nocturne: Initiative Roll: 1d20+5 15 The robo-gorilla is not a minion; it is large and very durable-looking. It is very obviously hostile, and can be assumed to already be charging at the heroes (from a suitably dramatic distance, but within movement range). Round 1 22: Chitin, 2HP 15: Nocturne, 1HP 11: Robot Chitin's up.

Time for initiative again!

GM "Yes," said the voice over the speakers, without so much as a trace of guilt or embarrassment. "I thought the traps would take you longer, anyway. That's actually where the last one stopped? They made a great jump, but that's what the flamethrower's for. I really should have gone for more tripwires." The door jerked into motion, grinding off into the wall to reveal a massive concrete room. Scattered lights illuminated nothing but cement and detritus, machinery old and new strewn across the floor like so many uncontrolled weeds. It had only four real features of note, aside from the door through which they'd entered: 1) Set high on the opposite wall, extending out from the otherwise-sheer cement, was a glass-shielded observation deck of some kind. There was a figure there, in a lab coat, working at some kind of console. 2) At ground level, below the deck, was a door. A simple thing, metal with an eye-level glass pane, like you'd see in half the secure buildings in the city. 3) To the left of the door was a security window, glass reinforced with lines of wire. A bedraggled group of people were looking through it. A couple were pounding against the glass, but they couldn't be heard. 4) In the direct enter of the room was what could only be described as an eight-foot robotic gorilla.

Nocturne stared at Chitin for a moment, impassively, trying to figure out if he was pulling her leg. She was pretty sure he wasn't, and that was concerning. ".....no," she said, slowly, "I'm pretty sure he was a bookie." She shook her head, brushing long black hair back under her hood as she turned back toward the door. "I've known you for less than a day, Cricket, and already I'm concerned about your survival instincts. You had better make much better armor, or your enthusiasm's going to get you killed one of these days. But for now, and speaking of hurting other people...." The young woman drew up straight and snapped her fingers, sparking off a cascade of little particles. The heavy steel door visibly shuddered, making a very satisfying metal noise as it rocked on its tracks. "If I didn't know better, I'd think our host was stalling. She's being so very quiet."

"Yes, it is cool, and that's extremely specific, Cricket," said Nocturne with pursed lips. "Been making a few enemies of Michaels, have we? A well-armed Anti-Cricket Michael Empire? What have you been up to." She dropped an eyebrow, peering upward toward the door to their next challenge. "I suppose it would make some kind of sense," she admitted; "I don't think I've ever known a Michael who wasn't some kind of terrible. Considering how you handled those robots, I hope you made them rue the day they choose their name and target. It's the only way a Michael will ever learn."

"The particles are what they are." Nocturne liked this topic; she was trying to not let it show. "I have some control over how many of them are around, but not their basic color. Since my hair's black and my eyes are gold, the outfit colors mostly worked themselves out." Once they were past the vent, she dropped the light; this earned the hallway a quick blast of fire and a burst of spikes from what had looked like a solid concrete floor, but that was no longer their problem - in short order they'd reached the doorway. "Dropping now," she said, gesturing at the floor; the ceiling no longer held them, but their fall back to a right-side-up world was much too slow for normal gravity. She even managed to very gracefully flip back upright before landing - she'd practiced that. Was she sweating? She'd better not be. "If you wear the deathtrap, Cricket, I'm pretty sure the answer to 'Do you spend a lot of time with deathtraps?' is 'Yes, I spend a lot of time with deathtraps, and also I'll stand a few feet further away from you, Nocturne.'"

"I don't usually do subtlety," said the young woman in well-fitting black and gold, "but I don't think I want to be on fire today. Slowly, was it? How slow?" Nocturne pulled another work light off the floor and off its cable, letting it drift up against the wall and slide, unsteadily, toward the vent. It wasn't a perfect process - the light earned a half-hearted guttering flame when it skipped across the surface of the vent at one point - but with Chitin for guidance and Black to nudge things into place the vent was well-covered and silent...for as long as she could hold a light in front of it. Precision was always more tiring, but she'd had practice. "So far so good. Come along, Cricket." She had one hand gesturing toward the light, and with the other she spread her fingertips toward the ground; a dim ten-foot field of swirling motes bloomed under her feet, and she started to casually walk up the wall. "Stay in the circle unless you want to fall, and do try not to fall because I need you next to me to block the fire if we set it off by accident. That....was cleverly-spotted," she admitted, with noticeable hesitation. "Have you spent a lot of time with deathtraps?"

Even in awful lighting and through a drone's eyes, Chitin can figure this device out no problem. It looks custom-built, but it was installed into a pre-existing vent system and that limited its ability to be properly hidden or disguised. The vent cover itself is bolted pretty securely into the wall; Chitin's strength or Nocturne's gravity could probably rip it away, but Black's a little too small to get that job done, and a little too big to squeeze in with the cover in place. The trap is in two parts: there's a motion-sensing camera that watches out the front of the vent, and a brilliantly compact flamethrower that punishes anything that sets off the camera - tubing out the back of the flamethrower implies it has a fuel source somewhere else in the vent system. With a 30 (goodness!), Ryder can probably take quick stock of both the camera and flamethrower being used: the camera's only designed to pick up relatively rapid movement (walking pace or faster), and the flamethrower's a little intense but it's definitely throwing flame and not, y'know, some kind of super-science liquid thermite.

Nocturne was quiet for a long moment, hands folded across her chest as she followed Chitin's description across the floor and around the walls. "That makes sense," she said. "So this is, what, stage two? We did the robots and now it's tripwires and traps? This isn't even a proper lair, it's a...." She trailed off and started tapping her foot, running her eyes back across the corridor and then staring at the camera for a solid ten seconds. "....I know what this is. She makes lairs. You make lairs for villains." She was pointing, accusingly, at the nearest camera...but there wasn't much response. "This isn't her hideout, it's a showcase. A lab. She doesn't use these things because she sells them to other people - all those big doors and tech and traps have to come from somewhere. She's a contractor. She's running lab tests on prototypes, and she's using us as rats." Nocturne bit her lip, lifting one of the work lights with a gesture and a distressing sparking noise as it tore free from its own power cable. "But she sells this stuff to people who expect trouble, and real trouble wears a cape...and flies." She sent the work light sailing along the ceiling, and it made it almost to the halfway mark before what should have been a air vent blew fire across the room, sending a half-melted piece of wreckage down to the ground. Chitin could see it trip a laser before immediately getting struck by arcs of electricity from the exposed 'rebar'. "I can absolutely walk us across the ceiling, Cricket. But we're going to need a plan to deal with that."

GM They'd moved past the television and around a sharp corner, and that apparently rendered them exempt from whatever replies their villain of today might have summoned up; no televisions in this corridor, and very little in the way of speakers, just scattered cameras and lights and what looked an awful lot like a door at the end, at long long last. It was all wrong, though. It didn't immediately look all wrong, but to Chitin's keen eye it had to be. There were too many strange breaks between the otherwise regularly pattern of work lights that shone their way, a few too many cameras spaced in oddly awkward places pointed in curious directions. Large bare patches of wall and floor and too-neatly-arranged extension cable screamed negative space in a way that didn't gel with the rest of the hallways they'd seen to date. And were those little holes in the wall a ways down, disguised as exposed rebar?

Give me a Notice check, Chitin!

Nocturne narrowed her eyes, short-heeled ankle boots tapping against the floor as she followed. "I've....some, yes. But not the way you're thinking." Floor lamps were spaced more or less evenly down the long hallway, and she idly reached out with one finger, wispy black particles turning a lamp on its base to follow them for a bit. "Robots aside, I'm not some victim of science - but I've met the type. I think you're right, I think she could have built something better. I think she's installed robots and cameras in a long corridor in her underground base just to put people through it, and it bothers me that we don't know why." "It's not mine, technically speaking," squawked the voice from a television partway down the hall, lighting up in static before the sound and image settled. The camera transmitting from her...office? lab? it was poorly-lit, either way, which made it hard to tell...had been moved to the side, apparently, or perhaps it was a new camera entirely; she was standing in front of a large dry-erase board, looking over notes. "I'm using it, but if I'd built it I'd have put the rooms closer together, maybe resized them for more optimal combat conditions. I'd definitely have laid down proper power cabling and spared us all the extension cables and terrible camera placement. It's really awful, and I'm disappointed in whatever group dug this all out years ago before abandoning it." "....you're squatting." "Repurposing. Salvaging space?" She shrugged, light gleaming off those metal-clad hands. "I did mean to track down the original title on the property, but I had so much else to do and I needed the room on short notice."

Nocturne almost dropped her shield, bubble fading before she caught her own bad reflex and brought it back to full strength. Weakness. "Well done, Cricket," she said, striding across broken machinery to look the two battle-worn blaster-bots straight in the...well, not the eyes, exactly. The sensors? "I still want to put her through a cement wall, I think. Perhaps more than ever. You said you had experience - would you rate it better or worse than being kicked repeatedly in the face?" She looked back over at the armor-clad hero, golden irises flashing as the two robots slammed backwards into a wall. "If science is so important," she said in a voice like a sharpened dagger, "I think it's important we do studies of our own when we catch up to her." She gestured, a tiny thing, toward the open door. "After you, Cricket."

GM "I think I have what I need." The only two robots standing dropped their arms, blasters going dim as they audibly powered down, joints locking in a slumped but upright position. The room was very quiet, now, past the hiss of the speakers and some sputtering wreckage. "Thank you! That was very useful, you put up a much better fight than previous test runs. I think I'm not very satisfied with this model's performance, but with some work I can probably salvage most of what you've left behind. Ah, but I can't do that until you actually leave, so let's get on that." The far wall of the chamber had a door to match the basement entrance, and this too ground open on unseen gears to admit the heroes to one more featureless, intermittently-lit cement corridor. "I understand if you want to rest, but don't wait too long. And do take this as seriously as if it weren't just a test, I really am trying to get some usable data."

The robots....shut off! That's the three rounds of combat, and we are out of initiative now that science-lady has some combat data.

Toughness Save vs. Chitin, DC20: 1d20+10-3 26 1d20+10-2 11 ......no, but really, how did Chitin make the dice this angry?

Nocturne could feel her bubble constricting a bit under the fire, but she had it under control. Right? Visibly, certainly, she had it under control, and the tight fist she was making was probably just how her powers worked. "I think she's like every mad scientist I've ever met," she said, with a tone to imply that she'd met a few. "You and I see the obvious problem but she doesn't because she has a head that's more gears than sense. Why bother even having these tests if she's--" One of the robots shot her bubble dead-center and it pushed her back a fraction of an inch, cutting her off; she took a deep and measured breath. "I'm talking," she rebuked; with a wave of her hand one of the shattered robots lifted off the ground and accelerated toward its energy-firing fellow. She'd missed, and she could already tell that she'd missed, but another quick save of her hand dragged the target sideways just in time to bring its head in line with her projectile, and she could at least pretend that had been on purpose. The now-headless robot sputtered and sank back down to the floor. "Don't interrupt, it's rude."

GM "Thank you for noticing the work! I do appreciate it, honestly. These really aren't my best, but they're functional, and as a professional it's nice to be recognized." If their mystery villain had heard the less-complimentary things Chitin had to say, she wasn't showing it. She didn't sound insulted, at least. "Were those kicks random, or did you find their central engines that quickly? It's impressive, either way; I've already noted the need for better gyroscopes, and harder shielding on the gearboxes may go a long way. This is all really very useful." Ryder's assault left only the blaster-bots standing - or, well, sitting, but with a momentary lull in the combat they clanked back up onto their feet and leveled their guns again. Chitin, in his moving and flipping, was a target too erratic to track properly; Nocturne made for a nice, stationary target, but the shots that came her way lensed around her body in a perfect sphere, sheering off her nearly-invisible bubble in tangents to strike the surrounding walls. "....and more firepower, I think, if it's in-budget," mused the voice on the speakers. "That really is disappointing, I was sure at least one of them would get through."

Nocturne's going to go ahead and try to smash a fool. She could grapple+crush, but that'd take two rounds and +Damaging Move Object lets you make ranged 'strike' attacks! No power attack feat, so we're limited to the +/-2 version: Ranged Attack Roll vs. Robot 4: 1d20+8-2 8 Embarrassing. I think the Nocturne Way is to reroll that, even if it's to her disadvantage to burn a hero point on something so trivial. Making poor decisions is in-character! Ranged Attack ReRoll vs. Robot 4: 1d20+8-2 15 Sure. Toughness Save vs. Nocturne, DC25: 1d20+10 23 ....well, it's a good thing she power attacked. As a minion, Robot 4 crumples. That leaves 6 and 7, the damaged ones, still on their feet.

No more robots are getting up. A couple look like they're trying, but they're not a threat. Round 3 25: Nocturne, 2HP 20: Chitin, 3HP 16: Robot 6 (ranged, minion, Injured x2), engaging Nocturne 4: Robot 4 (ranged, minion), engaging Nocturne 0: Robot 7 (ranged, minion, Injured x3), engaging Chitin

Just the ranged bots left, per discussion! They'll stand up and split up their fire, two at Nocturne (since one was already shooting at her!) and one at Chitin. Ranged Attack Roll vs. Nocturne x2, Chitin x1: 3#1d20+5 19 18 12 Well, that misses Chitin but Nocturne's not so lucky. Toughness Save vs. Robots, DC20: 2#1d20+10 23 25 Huzzah, toughness-shifting!