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July 4th, Monday, 2022, 4.33PM Sunset Hill, Emerald City, Oregon, USA One hour after a giant bowling ball almost crushed the Liberty Dome... Fort Cutler was well-named, a broad, square, red-brick mansion shouldering its way between other, milder mansions clustered at the top of Sunset Hill, overlooking the grey Pacific Ocean and the glittering twin Emeralds below. It was an open secret in the contacts that the Clines maintained that some of the most successful supercriminals in the world, retired by reason of age or injury, lived behind these handsome doors. Richard Cline was looking for two in particular, Preston Cutler and Josephine Sherman. A few decades back, they'd done crimes as the masked duo of the Sportsman and Princess Poison. Tony played the Robin Hood gimmick by robbing sports events and showing up world champions at their specialties (barring a spectacular defeat at the hands of Bruce Lee), while Josie prowled the society circuit for daring (and deadly) jewel thefts. Both had been pals and accomplices of Richard's in his youth, and they'd eagerly kept in touch well into their current age, even asking him and Paige to be godparents for their now-grown son, Michael. And, very recently, a giant bowling ball exactly like one of Preston's had nearly crushed the Liberty Dome where Richard, Paige, and their children had been. The Cutlers hadn't picked up the phone when called, and somehow couldn't be contacted by less mundane means. And so, here he was. In answer to his knock, the door emblazoned with a stylized 'C-S' swung in, and a trim old man with a neat black suit, a bristling mustache and great wings of white hair peered out. It took a second before his resemblance to Diomedes, one of the deadliest assassins of the 20th century and vicious rival to the second Bowman, sunk in. "Oh!" he blinked, smiling warmly, "Young Mr. Cline! What a pleasant surprise! Mr. and Mrs. Cutler are in the garden, hosting an Independence Day party. Dr. Devastator just got out of prison, they thought it fortuitous. Shall I show you to them, sir?" He stepped partly aside, silently acknowledging that Richard knew the way and could get there *very* quickly.

OOC thread for this thread with @Avenger Assembled's Fast-Forward visiting a family of supervillains. For starters, Notice (min DC 15, max DC 30), for clues in the house At a glance, Richard notices that the son he's met, Michael, quickly changed from a gentle, normal, if unusually athletic child into a glowering pinnacle of physicality that rivals Jack Simmons' propaganda art. Mementos of his life events, especially sports trophies, are displayed prominently throughout the house. There was also a daughter the Cutlers never mentioned, introduced or even hinted at, named 'Melissa', with much sparser and less-obvious tokens of her life. per 5 DC increments: 15 - Both appear to have attended the same Claremont-esque (but much larger, more modern and more thickly-populated) private school. Michael is surrounded in his photos by various flunkies and hangers-on and toadying faculty members, while Melissa is largely alone in hers. The one that isn't, showing her and a small group of other teens, has been vandalized and repaired. 20 - The clutter is so profuse that a slower eye wouldn't have noticed it, but several of the largest photos have been removed from the walls very recently, and smaller ones spread out to take up the space. Of particular interest is the one at the centre of a series showing Michael's rapid physical changes and increasing feats of strength and agility. 25 - Also removed are one of Preston's prized gimmick baseball bats, crossed with its twin over a mantlepiece, and replaced with an obviously normal one. The difference in dust makes clear that this didn't just happen recently, but today. 30 - There's a lavish, full-scale cross-section of the Liberty Dome in one of the sitting rooms, with a tiny 'X' drawn on the model's wall exactly where the real Dome was attacked.