Fox

"That may have been their plan," Wraith noted, pondering the screens with interest. "Cutting the power not only aids in confusion, security, and escape, but in the darkness their...energy field?...is quite striking. It may scare others, and it is far easier to be brave when you are the monster. How unfortunate for them." She grinned, which was a pretty neat trick for someone who didn't even have a mouth a few seconds ago; it grew more like a crack than a smile, etching its way across the sides of her head to uncover long, awful teeth in a jaw so wide that the whole top half of her head seemed to hinge backward at the neck. She was still for a moment, upright but inhumanly slumped, until an arm pulled its way out of her throat, emaciated and shining, fishing for purchase until it could dig its claws into her mouth and drag the rest of a new body up behind it. It was thin, wet-looking: old metal skin wrapped too-tight over an inhuman skeleton and an angular face with sunken black eyes from which no light could escape. "Perhaps they should have worried about other monsters," the thing brightly mused with thin lips over shark-tooth fangs, resting its head conversationally in its hands, elbows propped against the lifeless lower jaw of a somewhat deflated body that still trapped its lower half, like some awful insect only half-free of its pupal host. "We should say hello."

Grim's dogs were...laughing? The noises they made were unmistakably dog-like, but also entirely too close to laughter for comfort, wheeling about a bit until their master let them off their metaphorical leash. They'd either gotten their signal by the time of Woodsman's explosion, or they simply felt they didn't need one anymore; two held back to protectively circle their teenaged overseer, but the other three nearly stumbled over themselves as they rushed to enter the fray, biting and snapping at one of their fey counterparts - not with enormous success, but at least one of them found purchase in the fray, digging its teeth into one of the Cu Sidhe's legs in an attempt to drag it to the ground.

Two dogs are going to hang back and interpose. The other three will pick a Cu Sidhe and attack! I freely admit that I mostly want to play with Trip, here, so. Let's do that, even at a somewhat bad disadvantage. Dog one: Trip! Melee Attack Roll vs. Cu Sidhe (Trip): 1d20+10 18 That won't hit. (Note that I had to edit the bbcode, here; the version in Orokos has a bad +4 modifier, because I'm a dunce and got ahead of myself.) Try that again! Dog two: Trip! Melee Attack Roll vs. Cu Sidhe (Trip): 1d20+10 24 There we go. Trip check! Strength Check vs. Cu Sidhe (Trip; Improved Trip): 1d20+4+4 21 Aaaand regardless, the third dog will just attack. Melee Attack Roll vs. Cu Sidhe: 1d20+10 11 DOGS.

GM "I b-believe I may help with that," announced Browning; he'd managed to find a battery-operated lantern of some kind, and under its faint glow he was armpit-deep in a series of wires and cables that he'd gotten running between their 'amplifier' device and a set of old computer monitors. "We d-don't have p-power, but the old security cameras have emergency b-batteries. The s-security room is downstairs, but if we can get enough p-p-p-p- enough juice into the screens and one of the machines, maybe we can t-take a look." Even as he spoke, with his injured fellow limping his way over on his companion's shoulders, the screens flickered to life. Doctor Browning made a noise, and his fingers played a staccato across the keyboard - several more old monitors blurred to life, each showing packs of glowing figures making their way through the disparate floors of the building. "O-oh. Oh. Oh dear." He glanced back at the shattered door, then to the screens, then to the heroes. "Oh no. ....h-how do you two believe you'll fare against...?"

"....waited with the others?" Wraith asked. She was still sitting on the impromptu ice sculpture, perched on what would have been the man's chest like some kind of awful bird of prey - not overtly menacing, but a distinct reminder and threat, none the less, especially with one arm still so disproportionately large and club-like that the blunt end was resting against the floor next to her. "You said 'we' did not come here...and I have not known many people who could create such a power that would call it 'science junk.'" "We must know how many of you there are. There is no shame in losing when you are out-numbered, and perhaps helping us here will do you some good."

GM "Man, #### you," came the...surprisingly human response, the thing managing just enough leverage with its arm to badly crack Kimber's ice. "We didn't come all the way here to get stopped by floating ice women and....and...." It slumped back in the ice, all the fight going out of its form...and all the glow, too, retracting across its body like some kind of energy field until it left only a human behind. He was hard-faced, shaved bald (by choice, apparently - he didn't look like he'd had access to a razor in the last couple days), dressed in a dirty tank-top and what looked like khaki pants. He could have been any generic street thug if it weren't for the odd device strapped to his chest, a slowly-dimming disk the size of a dinner plate hanging from heavy cables and wires that ran around his shoulders and up to a three-pronged headpiece molded close to his skull. "#### it, I'm not winnin' this one, am I? Ain't all the fancy science junk in the world gonna beat you two without backup. I shoulda waited."

With Attractive, that's a 35 - just enough to knock him from Hostile to Friendly! I'm gonna say that takes us out of combat. For now!

Initiative Ghost Girl: 21, 4HP Wraith: 10, 3HP ?????: 5, Bruised 1, Bound & Helpless (snare) Non-combatants: 0 Ghost Girl's up.

GM Whatever the thing was, it could apparently take a full-force Wraith-blow to the head and live to tell about it; it didn't seem particularly happy, between its sub-zero prison and metal shot to the skull, but it didn't seem out for the count, either, dazed and making an awful, distorted growl of frustration as it struggled against its prison - with no small strength, given the dent its ill-positioned free arm left in the floor, but to only superficial damage and little progress toward freedom. Across the room, Doctor Browning had apparently decided he was brave enough to venture out of the shadows and give Doctor Whale a helping hand, the latter struggling to keep his feet as he tried to get wind back in his lungs. He'd live, at least - if he could keep the heroes between him and their assailant.

Their luminescent foe flickered briefly at Ghost Girl's display, but it didn't have much time to react, otherwise - as soon as it seemed to realize what was going on, it went from glowing menace to glowcicle, head and one limb trapped helplessly in a jagged block of ice. Wraith spared one glance toward the scientists before deciding that priorities were in order, given how easily that thing had blown through a door; she hunched, limbs reforming into heavy-limbed brawler that covered the distance in two bounds to claw into the ice and bring one fingerless, over-sized maul of a limb down into the creature's exposed head.

The thing struggles! Because that's literally the only option available to it. Take an HP Wraith, I guess, for it no-selling the Daze! The snare saves: Toughness Save vs. Damage, DC28: 1d20+12 32 When Ghost Girl snares, she SNARES.

Wraith can't coup de grace without extra effort, but she can make him hurt! Move action: shapeshift! Strike 5 (Feats: Improved Critical [19-20], Mighty, Power Attack) [8pp], Speed 2 (25mph) [2pp] Standard action: charge! Melee Attack Roll vs. ?????: 1d20+12+4+2-5 29 (+4 adjacent vs. helpless target, +2 charge, -5 power attack) As a bound, medium-sized creature, ?????'s defense is 5, so...that'll do. Toughness Save vs. Damage, DC32: 1d20+13 27 Oh dear. It seems durable. Fail by 5, at least!

APPROVED!

????: Reflex Save vs. Ice Breath: 1d20+4 9 He is not fast. Bound & helpless!

Fluff Minor typo - "Yoon-sung didn't glow up religious" Combat With enhanced dexterity 10, Kuksón would have an Initiative of +0/+5. With the Improved Init. from Sinbyeong, that goes up to +0/+9. By house rule, a minimum of 1/3rd of your Attack and Defense must be Base Attack/Defense. With 13 of each, Kuksón would need 5 base attack and 5 base defense. Skills You have purchased 82 ranks of skills, not 76. You may also want to re-calculate final skill bonuses - I suspect some of them may date back to an earlier revision of the sheet (such as Disable Device, an int-linked skill, getting a mystery +2 from somewhere). Powers The tally line for the Powers section is incomplete. The first power of the Blade array is well under budget - which is fine, but its tally should probably be updated to reduce confusion. Damage 4 with a +1 extra, a +0 extra, and 4 feats is 12pp, not 20pp. Your Move Object is missing its rank - I'm guessing that'd be rank 1, given the cost. Be aware that's an effective strength of 5, which some napkin math says is ~6 gallons of water at a heavy load. Notationally (and of little importance), your Sainchamsageom goes from noting powers as DP to noting powers as PP, toward the end. I'm assuming Sainchamsageom is intended to be Hard-to-Lose, but that should be noted explicitly on the Device. You may also want to note somewhere in the fluff or such why it's Hard-to-Lose, being a hand-held object - what force prevents it from being removed or disarmed without Kuksón being KO'd first? A container is not a physical object unless the fluff says it is (usually by making it a Device) - putting Indestructible on Sinbyeong does nothing for you, here. Same thing with Restricted, as this is not a physical object and you don't need to worry about someone else picking it up and using it against you. (You are also already not actually paying for these feats in the final pp tally, so.)

APPROVED

Initiative Ghost Girl: 21 Wraith: 10 ?????: 5 Non-combatants: 0 Ghost Girl's up!

Initiative time! For thread purposes, the statistics of this thing are being deliberately withheld. In the interests of fairness (and plot relevance), though, it does circumvent a couple of Ghost Girl's abilities - so take a hero point, Ghost Girl. Wraith: Initiative Roll: 1d20+7 10 ?????: Having effecitvely used its action to break in the door, the glowing thing will go last in the combat round.

GM Wraith smiled and gave a short bow, even as one of the scientists could be seen slowly feeling his way through the darkness. "It is the least we can do. I fear the advice may be good, however; if your building cannot handle the experiments you are doing, you may not have a chance to unlock the secrets your device holds." "Oh, no, no problems there, I assure you," Doctor Whale insisted, feeling around for the doorknob to the lab's main exit. "We don't even have it hooked up to the building's grid, for just such a reason. It's just asking for trouble, of course! It is odd, though, we just had the grid checked last week for an earlier...." His hand found the doorknob, and with a small noise of accomplishment he opened the door to the hallway. "....experiments. Ah. ....hello." Standing behind the open door was a six-foot man shaped from soft red light, who - from the features barely-visible under its luminescence - seemed just as surprised as the good doctor. "....goodbye," Whale said, and closed the door, spinning around to rest his back against it. "Well! I, for one, am truly glad that you two--" The doorway smashed inward, flinging Doctor Whale across the room to skid to a heap against some boxes. The thing stepped into the room, smashing its fists together in clear and unambiguous aggression.

GM "Oh! Oh, yes, no, it's fine, I promise!" Doctor Whale insisted, holding up his hands. "We know what it does -" "Mostly," interjected Doctor Browning. "- yes, well mostly, yes, and we're quite sure it's safe to be around. It's some manner of amplifier, you see, you give it power and it gives you more power back, but...well. It isn't very efficient." "N-not at things we've tried," countered Hitch. "You can't feed it back into itself, see, a-and it works b-b-better for some things than others. It was - it was clearly designed for something in particular, and if we can find that it w-w-will be a m-m-m...a great thing." "As long as nothing else goes wrong," said Bole, pinching the bridge of his nose. One got the distinct impression that he was accustomed to the chattering of the Doctors Three, but had never quite gotten used to it. "I assure you, we'll be fine here. This building does have some automated security left, and this company will be fine for a long time as long as nothing else goes wrong today." And on cue, the lights cut out, plunging the room into quiet darkness cut only by the thin shafts of light that managed to filter in through the heavily-shuttered windows; Bole, barely visible in the darkness, could be heard muttering something extremely unkind about the world's sense of humor. "W-well," said Browning, his hand-wringing nearly audible with all the machines off, "that's...well. At least the fuse box for this lab is right outside. If...if it is just this lab. Do you...you do suppose it's just this lab, don't you?"

Wraith returned a simple shrug from the other side of the science team - but with all eyes on Kimber at her inquiry, the alien's torso rippled to briefly form an engraved word: 'Lor?'. "It does look very alien in nature," she supplied, torso smoothing back out, "but I am not a scientist - its purpose is not obvious to me." She'd been inspecting the device since they arrived, more out of curiosity than any great recognition, and out of the novelty of seeing better technology again. She'd been on Earth for so long that it was easy to forget just how far behind Earth was in some regards...even if she didn't necessarily know what this particular bit of metal and wire did. "You are sure it is safe? You do not seem to have much security, and your lab is not well-shielded."

OOC thread for this thread, as we'll need it sooner or later.

GM "I do mean to apologize, again," Doctor Browning was insisting - for about the fourth time, by Indira's reckoning - as he stood there wringing his hands. "I really simply do not know how the alarm went off like that, much less falsely. It's the budget cuts, you see; we don't really have many maintenance staff left...." The building had certainly seen better days. At some point in the past, the Hanover site had been some manner of large research and development facility, with the footprint of a warehouse and the multi-story brick design of an office building. As recently as a few years ago it might have been a bustling center of the sort of science that came accompanied by mad laughter and lightning bolts, but from what the ghost and the alien had seen on their way up it now housed sheet-covered machines and abandoned labs, the outside keeping up appearances while the inside was slowly claimed by dust and entropy. Not that foreknowledge of the metaphorical rot in a financially collapsing research institute would have kept them out, of course. Kimber Storm and Indira Singh had been in the area on other business, but they weren't likely to ignore a piercing shriek of an alarm, nor an old man rushing down the sidewalk shouting about assailants and his "precious findings". Which, unfortunately, led them to their current predicament. "Problems of the past, surely!" chimed in Doctor Whale, before anyone else could - a recurring problem. He was thinner than his portly companion, and clean-shaven to his partner's mustache, with only slightly more optimistic hand-wringing as he circled their prized possession. Clear on the top floor of the building, they'd found the object of their concern sitting exactly where it had been left yesterday: a curious sphere, pulled apart into two halves, wires and devices trailing out of it and into the monitors and unnameable science paraphernalia. "Why, we'll be back on the map with this, in no time. You'll see. No false alarms will stop us, no sir, no how, and then we can get this place right humming again, with all-new alarms and better security and new labs...." The only person not wringing his hands sighed - a larger, better-dressed businessman with close-shaved hair, briefly referenced to by the others as a 'Mr. Bole'. "Please pardon them," he said in a light accent, offering Ghost Girl and Wraith a sympathetic look at the severe lack of polite disengagement they'd been offered so far. "I don't want to waste any more of your time. They're brilliant, but...excitable. It's the sphere, you see - some military and government groups are starting to offer 'safe' alien or extra-dimensional technology out to some of us for research, if they can't make anything of it, and...well. I guarantee that what happens here will finally pull this company back out of the red, but you don't need to be here for that. If you don't mind, I'll show you out myself, before Doctor Hitch bursts in and completes the trio, and you never esca--" The door to the lab burst open, a severely winded man in a lab coat gasping for air after apparently sprinting his way up the building - a scene the heroines had seen three times, now, in ever-diminishing levels of impressiveness. "I got the - t-the alert!" he shouted, too much volume echoing around too much space. "Is...is it okay? Did anyone break in and t-take it?"

This topic is now locked. We will honor all existing edit requests, but for new requests please use the 2017 thread.

With the newcomers given warm(ish) welcome by their host Indira relaxed again, all genuine smiles and eyes that were not in the least awful black voids bereft of even the faintest of human features or reflection. "And I am Indira. Welcome, all," she greeted, smoothing out her dress and gesturing at the tables. "If you would like to leave your bags and coats, we have a place by the door for it - please enjoy the food before it grows cold." She almost wished she could take part in the latter, but she was in perfect health and about the right size for her liking, which left her entirely without her own approximation of appetite. Instead, she busied herself making people feel welcome and ensuring everyone was as welcome as she could manage.