R. Bluefish
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Sensing what was coming an instant before it came, Starlight tried to hurl herself backward through the air, towards the hole she had created in the wall. She was too late - Card lunged with hideous speed, crossing the room in an eyeblink. In the space of an instant, she felt like arms close around her, holding her with a grip like iron. One of Card's arms fastened itself around her throat, crushing her windpipe - not that her windpipe mattered much to her these days - while the other ensnared her own right arm, twisting it painfully behind her back. "Get...the &$#%...OFF!" snarled Starlight, forcing the words past the constriction in her throat, struggling in his grasp. He ignored her utterly, his inhumanly strong muscles not so much as twitching despite her efforts. "You try to bring the sun to my home?" roared Card, staring at Shrike over Starlight's shoulder. "I will rip out your friend's glowing heart and devour it while you watch!"
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"Uh..." Starlight thought about saying something, then subsided. This seemed like one of those situations where talking would just throw off whatever magical crap was happening and get somebody possessed by a demon. Or something like that. God, she was going to need to read up on magic, just so she had some idea of what the hell was going on around her. She instead only waited in silence, not sure what they were expecting to happen. Ill at ease, she leaned on shoulder against the wall and jammed her hands in her pockets in an attempt to hide her discomfiture. The seconds ticked by, and she made an effort to produce as little noise as possible - which was made easier by the fact that breathing was a strictly optional thing for her. I oughta suggest something helpful. Could do with a raise.
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All right, let's get this fight underway! Surprise round's over - we're going to straight-up combat now. Alec Card's Initiative roll: 1d20+9 19 Vampire Drummer's Initiative roll: 1d20+3 9 Round 1 Initiative Character HP Damage condition 19 Alec Card GM Bruised 10 The Shrike 0 Unharmed 9 Vampire drummer GM Unharmed 8 Starlight 1 Unharmed Card will attempt to grapple Starlight! Alec Card's melee attack: 1d20+10 20 Alec Card's grapple check: 1d20+24 30. Not even that great of a roll, but good luck beating that one, Sam. Starlight's Reflex save: 1d20+8 28. Well, huh. How 'bout that, a nat 20. Unfortunately for Sam, natural 20s aren't automatic successes on opposed checks, so she still loses! (Waste of a perfectly good 20, if you ask me.) Starlight is pinned! Okay, Gretchen is up.
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Echo's Diplomacy check: 1d20+10 15
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"Me? No. Definitely not. I don't even know what a psychomactic is," Echo said truthfully, hands held out open in a placating gesture. "And I, uh, turned off my radiobeamatrons before coming down here. Just seemed polite." She stepped aside slightly to afford Tin Hat a better view of the unconscious bodies. "Those people, on the other hand," she said, pointing, "did indeed come here to take you away. They were carrying restraints, and I'm pretty sure I saw some injectors as well. I just gave them a bit of a thumping - it's kinda my thing. They'll be fine in a little while, although I don't envy them the headaches they'll have when they wake up. "Thing is," she continued, "there'll probably be more of them soon enough. They work for a company called Neutron - don't know if you know who they are - and they want you for some nefarious purposes of their own. I - we - came here to save you, because we need your help with something...potentially pretty big. Like, 'countless-innocent-lives-in-the-balance big." She reached out a hand, being careful not to make any sudden movements or draw too close to him. "Whaddaya say? If you come with us, we - well, I - can protect you from Neutron, and you can help us help a lot of people."
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A dazzlingly bright flash of light momentarily lit up the alley behind the building. A few seconds later, Samantha strode out, looping around the building towards the front entrance. She had, for once in her life, forgone her usual leather jacket-and-T-shirt combo, wearing instead a simple white blouse (which she has purchased roughly an hour ago) with jeans. A slightly roughly-wrapped package was tucked under her arm. The toothpick dangling from her lips, however, stubbornly remained - at this point, there was very little that could be done to break her of that particular habit. Reaching Lynn's front door, she paused briefly upon seeing Samuel already there, then moved to stand beside him. "Hey," she said, nodding, as taciturn as ever. She then reached over to rap sharply on the door, adding her knocking to his own, before moving back a step to shift restlessly from foot to foot. She was trying to remember the last time she had been to somebody's birthday party, and was coming up blank. All she had were vague memories of sneaking into someone else's party when she was in third grade, for the sake of swiping a slice of cake. What a little angel I was.
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Guessing that's him, then. Echo approached him slowly, stopping well before coming within arm's reach. She didn't want to come across as threatening. "Hi," she said, keeping her hands plainly visible. "Are you..." wish I knew his real name, "...Tin-Hat? My name's Echo, and this is Jack. We're...in a bit of a pickle, and we could really use your help with something." Even as she spoke, she was watching his movements carefully from behind the opaque lenses of her mask. She didn't have any interest in hurting a mentally ill homeless man today, but at the same time, by all accounts this guy was not one to be trifled with, nor was he well in the head. If he came at her or Jack, she might not have much of a choice.
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That hits, all right. And he's flat-footed, so he's also denied his Defensive Roll bonus. Alec Card's Toughness save: 1d20+6 24. Lucky sod - no damage. Starlight will use her Targeted Area Blast to strafe the whole band - except Gretchen, of course! Starlight's Attack roll: 1d20+10 25. A hit on all of them! Band members' Toughness saves: 1d20+5 14 22 23 16 That's three failures and one success - the band members are minions, so all but one of them is out of the game! Alec Card's Toughness save: 1d20+6 22. He's got himself a Bruise.
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As fast as vampires supposedly were, they weren't fast enough to react to the one-two punch of Gretchen's trick and Starlight's entrance. All Card managed was a "Wha-" before the crimson blast of magic struck him square in the chest. He staggered, smoke rising from his shirt, but gritted his too-sharp teeth and didn't fall. If anything, he looked more pissed off than injured. In no mood to give up the offensive, Starlight shouted "Shrike, move!" Clapping her fists together, she unleashed a beam of brilliant white light, which swept across the room with savage speed, striking the entire band and carving a jagged gash in the drywall. Three of the bandmembers struck by the beam were instantly blasted apart into dust - the one who had gone to get Gretchen's drink only hissed as it singed her skin. Card himself didn't fare as well - the beam sent him reeling back into to slam hard into the wall. "What is this?!" he roared, his teeth now fully extended into bone-white fangs. "Did you trick me, little bird?!"
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"Hey, stick around, stuff like this happens to me all the time." Perking up her ears, Echo stood to shine her flashlight in the direction she thought the noises were coming from. "Remind me when this is over, I'll tell you about the time I got sent back in time to fight a bunch of robot dinosaurs who were stealing trash from the present day." She shook her head. "Or something like that. I was never too clear on the details. I just hit the things people told me to hit." Looking down at the unconscious soldier-types, she gestured for Jack to follow her. "Come on. We'll leave them here. With any luck, they'll be having Nap Time for a good long while, and they're going to need one hell of a hot shower when they wake up. In the mean time, we've got a guy to find and a zombie to deal with." She pointed off down the network of tunnels. "Hear that? I think it's coming from that way. Listen to the - heh - echoes." Do I have echo-sense as a secondary power? Need to experiment with that, that would be nice and fitting. "Let's go."
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Echo's Notice check: 1d20+12 26. Success!
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The last man to have spoken barely got the words out before Echo's boot connected with the side of his head, so hard that cracks spread across the surface of his helmet. "Good advice!" Pivoting on the spot, she launched herself into the air, somersaulting over the second man, pushing off against him as she did so so that he was hurled into the side of the tunnel with wince-inducing force. "Can't say I was expecting to run into the Empire down here. I thought we were more doing the trash compactor scene, from the smell of it." Her gut punch doubled the third man over, just in time for her uppercut to the chin to knock him flat on his back. A quick glance around confirmed it. Hey, I won. Change of pace. She nudged one with the toe of her boot. What a bunch of wusses. "All clear!" she called to Jack. "They weren't so tough. Although," she crouched down to examine one of the unconscious men, "weird gear loadout for a sewer search-and-locate op. Is this medical equipment?"
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Let's see - are they all minions? If so, Echo will just take 10 on her attack (assuming that's kosher), for a total of 24. If not, then here's the attack roll just in case. Echo's attack roll: 1d20+14 27 Something tells me that the difference might not matter hugely! Eh. Anyway, that's a DC 23 Toughness save, plus Autofire of course. She's also got Takedown Attack 2 - if that's applicable here, she'll take 10 on subsequent attacks as well (again, assuming that's possible).
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Echo's Initiative roll: 1d20+14 25
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Echo had one hand warningly placed on Jack's chest, keeping him back. Great, stormtroopers. The good news was that they didn't seem to have thought to bring night-vision goggles any more than she did. The bad news was that now she was going go need to decide what to do, and decision-making wasn't her strong suit. As if that wasn't already apparent by this point. Picking a fight here would, assuming she won, mean they hopefully wouldn't have to worry about Neutron finding Tin-Hat before they did. And they could search at their leisure without the risk of tripping over the goons. On the other hand, she wasn't exactly having the best of luck today when it came to fisticuffs, was she? One Capone-looking thug had already thrashed with nothing but a cut-the-cheese grenade. Oh, better tuck in your shirt, Stein - your yellow belly is showing. They needed to find Tin-Hat, and right now, doing that looked to mean going through these guys. She wasn't about to let one bad turn of luck take away her confidence. "Get ready to move," she hissed into Jack's ear. "Things are about to get interesting." With that, she was sprinting, hurling herself towards the group. "Howdy!" No sooner were the words out of her mouth than she was hammering the leader's torso with a flurry of blows, intent on being the one on the offensive this time. "Any of you folks seen my pet alligator? I flushed it down the toilet ages ago, and now I want it back."
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Things seem to have stalled out a bit (which I apologize for)! If we feel like continuing with this - and no worries if we don't, of course - feel free to let me know about anything I can do to try to breathe a bit of life back into things. For example, we could just cut straight to Stranger and Blue investigating the necromancer.
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Whoops, double post. Site went a bit screwy on me for a second there.
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Okay, Echo's going to just go ahead and attack the leader. Here's hoping that it works out better this time than it did with the Gas Man. She'll use 2 points of Power Attack. Superfast Fists vs. Leader: 1d20+14-2 22 That's a bit better than my previous array of nat 1s. So damage is +10, with Autofire 8.
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Echo will take 10 on this Stealth check as well (for a total of 25), if needed.
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Well, dying ain't exactly Plan A. Echo squinted into the impenetrable darkness, lowering her voice. "Night vision is not in my bag of tricks, more's the pity." She looked down at their flashlights. Should try to sweet-talk somebody into installing night-vision goggles in my mask. Setting her teeth, she clicked her light off. "Go dark. It's no good them seeing us before we see them." Gripping Jack by the arm as she spoke, she drew him back into one of the adjoining tunnels. Darkness alone wouldn't be enough to hide them if whoever-it-was had thought to bring goggles of their own. "If things start happening," she hissed into his ear, "just run away or hit the dirt. Let me handle it. Because there's a decent chance that I'm going to be beating some people up in a second."
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Echo frowned, absentmindedly shielding her eyes from the light with one hand. "Oh, nothing special. The usual, really. I wouldn't want to bore you with the details." She hesitated, then sighed. "There was a version of me from a parallel universe who developed powers and visited a different parallel universe, then went psycho and killed the version of me that was living there, whereupon she absorbed her latent powers. Then she started just repeatedly hopping universes to murder...well, me-slash-herself, so she would keep getting stronger, until she ran into a version of me who was able to escape to our universe and warn me before dying." She brushed a strand of white hair behind her ear. "So then I absorbed her powers - hence my modest bag of tricks - and took up her name, because I...I don't know, wanted to honor that sacrifice somehow. But someday evil-me is probably going to come here and try to kill me, and I'll almost definitely die." Trying to cover her discomfort, she tossed her flashlight up into the air and caught it nimbly behind her back. "Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse, right?" The stink in the air was already permeating her improvised nose plugs further. She saw Jack looking at her and managed a smile - although it was hidden by her mask. "Yeah, I know, right? I usually just tell people I was bitten by a radioactive physicist."
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Echo looked from the gaping sewer below, to the cotton in Jack's hand, then back to the sewer, then grabbed the wool from his hand. "Yeah, I think you may be on to something there." She ripped off two small pieces and lifted up her mask to stick them up her nostrils. "Honestly, this should probably be a standard component of super-suits. Mask, tights, cape, nose plugs. Might prevent a lot of problems. Maybe I wouldn't have been gassed as badly!" Gingerly, she lowered herself into the manhole, then dropped down into the sewer tunnel. "Ugh." Even with the nose plugs, the stench made her gag. She fixed her mask back in place for a little extra protection. Gotta get some of that mint gel cops use for crime scenes on TV. Looking up at Jack, she waved. "Come on, it's great down here. Clears your sinuses like nobody's business." Shining her flashlight around warily, she continued. "So you grew up on a farm, huh? Where? Never really figured you for the overalls-pitchfork-and-big-straw-hat type."
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Echo's usually-reliable information-gathering skills had let her down in this case. Even when working together with Jack, the most they had been able to divine was that Tin Hat supposedly haunted Greenbank. Or, more specifically, the sewers beneath Greenbank - if the rumors were to be believed. She had been hoping to glean something a bit more precise than that - something that would spare her the necessity of searching an entire neighborhood's worth of sewers in one night - but such was the life of a C-list superhero. With a slight grunt, she stooped to grip the edges of the manhole cover before her. Hanging around Greenbank late at night was usually ill-advised, but for one person with kickass powers and one person with less-kickass-but-still-useful-in-a-limited-capacity powers, it wasn't much of a concern. Without so much as a grunt, she pried the manhole cover off and set it aside, then produced a small flashlight from her utility belt and shined it inside cautiously. "So," she asked, feigning casualness, "just how good is your super-hearing dealie? Are you going to be able to ping this guy if we so much as get within five blocks of him, or am I going to need to break out the time-dilation and just search the whole neighborhood? Because I have a feeling that whatever stains I pick up down there are never going to wash out of my super-suit, and I'd like to limit my exposure if at all possible."
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Echo's Gather Information check: 1d20+12 23 No dice (pun intended). Oh well. I also have no problems with the scene cut (sometimes such things are necessary, especially in formats like this). So are we jumping straight to them entering the sewers?
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Buffy frowned, weighing her options. "Hmm." She looked down at her hands for a moment, then back up. "We can't risk following Neutron's heels, because we can't risk them getting to him before we do. They've already got a head start on us - we need to find him first. And from the sound of it, that means," she stood with a grunt, "that I need to go have a talk with some homeless people. It's...not my area of expertise, but we're kinda strapped for options at this point." She paused to consider Jack. "You know...you can stop now, if you want. It's only going to get more dangerous from here on out, and you've already taken this thing a lot farther than anyone would ask you to. You should just find somewhere safe to hide until this whole thing blows over. I can take you wherever you need to go."
