Mad Scientist

The rest of the squad closed the remaining distance as Hūhunu finished the threat assessment of the immediate area. "Clear," the marine reported. "Moving forward; I'll pause at any divergent corridors, and will report contact." Reactivating the perception filters, the small armoured form became difficult to notice and slipped away, heading deeper into the tunnel. Hūhunu's weapon was out, the selector setting on stun. Not that there was an issue with killing pirates if it came down to it, but killing was generally quite noisy, and the stunner, while limited to close range, was a much more subtle tool. Besides -- once an enemy becomes incapacitated, killing becomes a matter of choosing methodology....

Okay, so imagine him naked instead. Go on, I'll give you a minute....

Incidentally, and and all Praetorians and otherwise are free to call Hūhunu by whatever single gender pronoun they see fit, if that's what's comfortable for them. He, she, it, all will be accepted without protest or prejudice.

Tamahine glanced up as the call to assemble came in, but given that it wasn't a priority alert didn't drop everything in a panic. His/her sandwich had only a few bites, left and he/she took one of them as he/she stood and cleared away the rest of the preparations. He/she knew that the rest generally had a problem with consuming food that they claimed 'smelled bad', but in his/her opinion, any food that had additional food growing on it was simply a bonus, and the colour variations tended to enhance the aesthetic effect. Mould was no less edible than processed things like bread, or cheese, or gaļa, and he/she had a difficult time understanding how other species had developed to the point of space travel with such...delicate sensibilities. And bellies. Sweeping the last scraps into the trash disposal -- he/she had found out some time ago that the others were most certainly not interested in any last bits being saved for their consumption -- Tamahine swallowed the last of the sandwich, nasal ridges flaring as he/she savoured the slimy texture of the meat, before departing for the command centre. Triggering the comms built into the Phase Tech bracer, he/she reported in. "Hūhunu reporting; on my way."

Large, ebony-skinned, naked man:

Cerulean abruptly found herself in the middle of a pair of questions -- fortunately, talking quickly had never been a lack of hers. "Sorry! I'm Cerulean, and this is Hestina," she introduced herself and her roommate to Rampart. "This is sort of a regular thing, actually," she explained with a grin to Hestina -- this city seemed to be a magnet for weird stuff, which is one reason it appealed to her. Why should she be the only one? "Hestina, this is Rampart, she's got something in common with us," she went on, belatedly realizing that maybe she should try to be a little more discreet about what she said in public. Lord only knew she didn't want certain things about her becoming public, and being indiscriminate could lead to dire results. "Hestina here has a vocal block, but she can understand you just fine," she explained to Rampart. "She can also--" A strident alarm cut her off, and she sat bolt upright in bed, thoughts driven right out of her head. She was next to impossible to get out of bed without hitting snooze at least three times, but this alarm seemed custom designed to drill right into her brain and guarantee she was far too awake to go back to sleep once it went off. Red, white, and blue was flashing on the wall, and she stumbled out of bed to smack it into silence -- surprisingly, that worked, the alarm going silent when she touched it. Silence, blessed silence, what a relief. It let her think again, and the first thought that came flooding back in was what the heck had just happened? How had she gotten from the mall to here, and...where was here, for that matter? A draft eased across her skin, and she added one more to the list. Why was she naked? "Duty calls, babe?" an unfamiliar, deep, and decidedly masculine voice spoke behind her, and with a shriek and a jump that brought her down facing the bed, she saw that said voice had come from the quite large, ebony-skinned man lying in the bed, looking like he too had just woken up. Correct that -- a large, ebony-skinned, and apparently also naked man. Eileen yelped again, and grabbed at a robe lying over a nearby chair, holding it against her front while looking around a bit frantically "Who are you? Where is this? What's going on?" she demanded, eyes wide and tone climbing as she spoke.

Wildcat didn't feel any compunctions about snagging not only a replacement shirt out of the van's small supply locker, but also a tactical harness with equipment pouches and attachment points. Hopping down out of the back of the van, he dropped his loot and stripped off his ruined shirt as he filled Jill on on what he found. "GPS unit has a number of addresses in it like this one, but that's not what we need to worry about," he growled, tossing the remains of his shirt aside and stooping to pick up the new one. "They've been to the west end water filtration plant, or it's on their to-do list," he told her grimly, pulling the shirt over his head and tucking it into his pants before grabbing up the tactical belt. Something like that could probably come in pretty handy, he imagined. "If they get that crap into the water supply...game over." Getting the tac harness backwards at first, he switched it around and figured out how to shrug into it and fastened it about his waist. Yeah, he'd have to keep this. "You got anyone on speed dial who can do stuff with water?" he asked, recalling Wander's advice about calling in backup when things got too big, and wondered if this was one of those times....

So, this is a ST:TNG "Future Imperfect" scenario? We jump right from teens outside the mall to adults with new looks and possible relationships, etc? But no power or skill evolution, I'd imagine?

None here!

Heh -- well, we go to all the trouble of making up these rep charts, might as well use them! :P

Cerulean was startled by the unexpected appearance, but managed to refrain from blasting the newcomer on general principles. "I'm not one for turning down help anyhow," she replied, even as Hestina manged to paralyze the beast with a touch of her hand. "Say, you're...Rampart, right? We go to school together, you're part of Next-Gen?" Holy geeze, the other girl was tall. She herself was prone to complaining about the lack of suitably tall guys, especially since she liked to wear heels, but Rampart -- Cho, she believed -- was huge. Like, taller-than-some-NBA-players tall. She felt a great deal of sympathy for the other girl, while at the same time was disgruntled that she clearly had first claim on any seriously tall guys that came by. "Do you have any idea what's -- look out!" she cried, eyes flaring a brilliant blue and sending a pair of tightly focused beams close over Rampart's shoulder to squarely strike yet another of the monstrosities as it swooped down behind the unsuspecting heroine. It roared in discomfort and broke off, crashing painfully to the ground nearby before laboriously hauling itself to its feet.

Gather Information (Well Informed): 1d20+10 25

Notice: 1d20+9 26

Despite the fact that Miracle Girl was loaded down not only with rescue gear but also with a passenger, Cerulean wasn't any sort of sure thing to beat her out to the site of the emergency. For one, her reluctance to gain any sort of real altitude kept her limited to following the streets through the city proper, streaking by low overhead of traffic and pedestrians while she kept her speed down to a point where she wouldn't start causing problems with sonic booms. For another, when she reached the waterfront she pulled up short, equally reluctant to venture out over the deep water -- certainly not into the dark storm clouds she could see massed low on the horizon. She dithered back and forth for long moments, shifting from foot to foot in thin air, before guilt and obligation both forced her out over the water. She streaked at top speed, pushing herself as fast as she could go in an attempt to get this over with as soon as possible, and a rolling boom of displaced air followed in her wake as she came close to hitting Mach 3. She was probably a little higher over the water than she managed over land, both out of a desire to stay further away from the plunging ocean depths and the fact that the ocean surface was a lot more difficult to judge the distance from than the familiar proportions of a city environs. Entering the storm was far from a picnic, and she shivered uncomfortably as the chill rain pelted against her. She wasn't comfortable telling anyone this, but from the way things felt when they touched her powered-up outfit, she may as well have been naked. But she wasn't naked, she knew that. It was just a blue and gold outfit that she couldn't remove that provided no sensory protection from the elements whatsoever. That was much better. Really. While visibility wasn't great because of the storm winds and rain, within the range of her own light Cerulean had no difficulty seeing clearly. It seemed that even natural weather events weren't able to restrict her vision, something that she hadn't been aware of. It wasn't extremely difficult to locate the foundering ship and the ongoing rescue effort, but as she approached the ship the sense of perspective it gave made her aware of not only just how large the ocean swells were, but what her altitude was. She was, unsurprisingly, immediately torn between a desire to descend to a safer height, and a desire to climb further away from the frankly terrifying surface of the heaving ocean. Caught between two of the more disturbing prospects she could think of, she ended up doing something that wasn't particularly helpful -- freezing in place, her mind running frantically back and forth between two equally undesirable options.

Eileen...wasn't quite sure what to say to that. Which was, while not a first, was certainly less than usual. "Wow," she came out with finally. "That sounds like it sucks. If that were me, I'd probably be three hundred pounds from all the chocolate I ate to try and compensate," she told him soberly. "So, if a black-bag retrieval team tries to get the drop on you, do we jump in and smack 'em down?" she inquired curiously. "I'm pretty sure we're all in this together, right? The Claremonteers, one for all and all for one?" The blonde smiled, hoping that at least one of the others about the table might find it funny. Or at least, sort of funny. She was starting to get the idea that there was a whole lot of weird out there, and she very much liked the idea that people would jump to back her up if she needed it....

Despite her determination to keep her mouth shut, it up and ran away with her. "Who am I trying to what?" she demanded nervously, unsure of what he meant. "I'm not trying to--" And then she got it. He was looking at her, not listening to her, and he had that cybernetic eye. It could be that he could see through her decoys as well as she herself could. Well. She got to feel all sorts of out of her depth today, didn't she? Collapsing her decoys back into herself, she tried to give the impression that they'd never been out in the first place. Fine! It looked like they weren't going to be fighting anyhow. She descended again, rejoining Fleur and hovering at her side. "Do you know any super-scientists?" she murmured, still keeping her eyes on the pair of dimensional travellers. "I've, well, got this classmate who's good with tech, but I'm pretty sure we want experts on this, right?"

Wildcat staggered a bit when he was abruptly released -- he hadn't realized how much support this crazy schoolgirl had been giving him. And he wasn't at all pleased when the next stop on that train of thought was that she had been holding him up after knocking him down. His ego had already taken quite the beating, it didn't really need ongoing bruising. "Normally, I'd just follow the stink of ape," he muttered, crunching across broken glass as he limped out of the store, stepping over the glass-studded windowsill even as the shop owner poked his head up over the counter to survey the wreckage of his place of business. "But they were getting into black SUVs, and that sort of thing is a lot harder to single out." He had no idea where his boomerang had ended up, and quite frankly at the moment he didn't much care. "I guess the question is, if you were a smarter-than-normal giant monkey who had just robbed a convenience store, where would you be holed up?" he demanded of Glamazon, a touch sardonically. He would be very, very surprised if she could put herself in the place of a jumped-up animal.

Eyes a little wild, Eileen was already pushing back the sleeves of her light sweater to expose her wrists. "Based on how my life has been going lately, I'm gonna have to say probably not," she replied, her voice a little high and excited as she pressed her 'tattoos' together. Brilliant blue light began to flare, and within half a dozen heartbeats she had assumed the form of Cerulean. "C'mon, we have to stop it before it hurts someone!" she urged, blue light condensing about her as she brought up her defenses. Leaving a glowing contrail behind her she zipped off toward the escalators, unwilling to simply head off over the edge of the second story gallery railing and out into the open air. Yelling at the beast to draw its attention didn't accomplish much, but the barrage of cerulean bolts that spattered against its hide seemed to do the trick. She split into multiple copies of herself just in time for one of the duplicates to get slashed into oblivion by a heavy clawed blow. A second barrage of light bolts seemed to cause the creature some pain, and it roared its outrage before smashing out through the large, three-story glassed front of the mall, spilling out into the parking lot. "C'mon, Hestina -- we need to stop that thing!" Cerulean urged and flashed after it in hot pursuit, a cluster of decoy images swirling about her.

Cerulean winced at the admonishment from Fleur -- apparently, she wasn't really helping any. While it wasn't in her nature, she tried to tell herself to just shut her mouth and let the experienced experts handle things. However, even without her stirring the pot, nothing was becoming any clearer. Was Artoo a freedom fighter against a corrupt regime, or was Vigil a law enforcement officer in pursuit of a terrorist? Or, quite possibly, were both things equally true, depending on which side one was looking at it from. The entire swarm of her was looking nervous, switching attention from one to the other and back again. She didn't know what to do -- and so it was a good thing that Fleur was here to take charge and sort everything out. She was still very new to this, and the hand of experience was a great comfort....

Well. Cerulean had wanted Fleur to bail her out of her story, but she hadn't quite anticipated the whole, y'know, tell the truth methodology. That wouldn't have occurred to her, mostly because of the associated embarrassment. Hearing that their visitor was, most likely, from another dimension instead of the future actually made things better. Messing around with time never, ever ended well, from anything she'd ever heard, seen, or read on the subject, and so she had felt obliged to put their visitor on the defensive and make it feel like it was already 'busted'. Dimensional travellers? Sure, a lot of them could get up to no good, but usually not in a way that could destroy her whole existence. Then Visitor B arrived, and everything got more complicated. "Aw, no, it's Cable," she protested, and took to the air again, splitting into her multitudinous self once she was about fifteen feet off the ground. "We have an existing claim on the destructive actions of Citizen 0047 -- stand down, identify yourself, and prepare to submit your own claim. Once the prisoner has been processed and restitution has been collected, we can see about releasing him to you for termination." She spoke rapidly, hoping to brow-beat the newcomer into avoiding hostilities for the immediate future. She didn't know who was in the right here, but she didn't feel fantastic about the idea of turning someone over for summary execution, nor did she want to turn him over at all before they found out what he may or may not know about impending danger. Plus, what was up with the air...?

The shock of hitting such an unexpectedly unyielding target jolted Wildcat from his rage -- he had dented steel with a punch like that before, and he hadn't even rocked her on her heels? He was so taken aback, and still in pain from his battering, that he let his guard down and-- ...was wrapped up in a hug? A hug? Her words belatedly penetrated his fuzzed brain, and he got the gist of what she was saying. All of this, that incredible blow, her unyielding resistance, it was...pretty much an accident, a moment of immediately-regretted ill-temper? He was that much of a nothing, compared to her? "...if you do not let me go, I am going to bite you," he growled in her ear, trembling with a combination of pain and outrage. Apparently even high school girls were more than a match for him -- what was he even doing? He just couldn't handle this right now....

Wildcat shrugged. "This is your party," he agreed. If they were operating in his own neighbourhood he'd likely feel different, but down here at the waterfront he was willing to defer to someone else. The entire city wasn't his territory, he wasn't going to get pissy about it. "Don't get your ass shot off," he recommended, then with a series of bounds and clambering ascents made his way to the warehouse rooftop. He prowled the surface for a bit, getting the lay of the footing and obstacles, then picked a spot in which he could lie in wait while watching the approach. While he preferred to be moving, by inclination, he was willing to lie in ambush -- that was as much of the hunt as anything else, and sometimes you just had to wait for your prey to come to you.

Cerulean faltered as the robot's responses weren't...quite what she had hoped. Knowing what was coming? "So...from off-planet as well as out of time?" she replied, much less forcefully. "That, of course, alters circumstances to some degree. Artoo Threepio, the timelines from this point are varied, with some branches less probable than others. Would you...please tell us what date you departed from, and the specifics of the impending events of which you speak?" Reason reason reason-- Ah. "Once we can cross-reference with your particular branch, we may be able to assist you in your return. You arrived here by accident, you wouldn't want to get back to a timeline that wasn't your own." She made a quick sweeping gesture, then made motions as if she was tapping buttons in the air. Yes, this was a holographic interface the robot couldn't see, totally believable. What had she let her mouth talk her into? And what had it meant, by 'with the air like that'? She darted a glance at Fleur, hoping the more experienced hero might be able to help rescue her from her own folly. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time....

Cerulean stared. "Oh...my god," she exclaimed, as everything fell into place. Her quintliplicate images absorbed back into her, and she descended to float a few inches off the ground beside Fleur. "This is not the droid we are looking for," she assured Fleur sagely, before turning to address Artoo. "We were concerned this was a T-1000 scenario, so you can understand our caution," she told him in a clear, firm voice. "This is the year twenty fifteen, Gregorian calendar. I am Agent Connor, this is Agent Isley, we're with Temporal Affairs." She fixed the time-displaced robot with her best stern expression. "I take it you have authorization for this chronal displacement?" she inquired, sounding doubtful that he had any such thing. "I assure you, there are quite severe penalties levied against joy-jumpers." If he gave her half a moment, she would come up with some doozies, if necessary. Oh. And, um, hopefully Fleur would follow her lead on this.... Bluff: 1d20+10 22

Move action to the doorway, standard action to begin the search (Search being a full-round action). Taking 10, Search result of 20.