Dr Archeville

Indeed so! And if Valencia had not stepped in, Archeville'd be having words with Legionnaire about stabbing the unconscious Tech Priest in the stomach & decapitating the other. Though I'm not sure if they'd be words of praise of admonishment; depends on which part of him's in charge at the time So, would Doc have had any time to enact any of the things I'd posted earlier (stripping gear, calling police, etc.) before Valencia came bursting in?

*re-reads first post* *realizes he made an error* *edits to fix*

Here's what I was thinking: In the prison Infirmary Dryad sees what she thinks is one of Archeville's serums working to revert one of the samples back to normal, and she leaps in and drinks/injects it all. Convulses, falls comatose, then wakes back up, with her powers back. At the same time, there's a riot/escape attempt somewhere. Other guards go to handle it, but Dryad -- who wants to show she is trying to redeem herself -- helps stop it. Maybe she even says she'll help, but from what I've seen I'd more suspect that she'd just leap in after spouting some off phrases, not bothering to see if the guards want her help or not. Riot is stopped, but though Dryad can do so, she chooses not to escape and remains in prison. After a few hours her powers fade back to being nullified. Her help in stopping the riot/escape attempt, plus her choice to remain in prison and not escape herself even though she had her powers -- and perhaps some smooth talk from Archeville -- allow the parole board to be more lenient, and they remand her into Archeville's custody/house arrest to serve the remainder of her sentence. During that time he finds a way to permanently restore her to her human form, and after her time is up Valencia's handmaiden approaches her. (Dryad may be approached before her time is up, but it's a test: if Dryad chooses to go with her, and not finish serving out her time, it's an indication that she's not worthy enough and so Valencia wouldn't take her. By choosing to finish out her sentence, she shows the penitence required.) Drawback to this is that, once all is said and done, it'll be December 2008, so she'll be limited in what adventures she can take part in (depending on when the new adventures are set).

Loot the corpses! I mean... strip the two Tech Priests of any gear (I believe you'd mentioned a gauntlet and a visor, so definitely those; he would strip these guys to their underwear looking for concealed stuff, but he has no idea how Legionnaire or Keira would react to that). Check to see if the one he fired on is alive, or dead. If alive, make sure he's stable, then bind him (hopefully there's something around here he can use for that, a length of rope or some strips of metal he can fashion into some crude handcuffs or something). As for the dead one, assure Keira they'll deal with it later, but right now they need to hide the body (too many questions otherwise); see if she can teleport it away through the shadows. Call the police, Doc tells them who he is and where he's from (on the off-chance someone on the force recognizes him from his work in Germany), and that he and an associate (Legionnaire; Doc's intentionally not mentioning Keira) had been following a lead on a kidnapping case. He tells them that there had been two kidnappers/assailants, but one escaped. Ask if they have any record of Valencia, if so why anyone'd be after her. When the police get there, turn over the bound Tech Priest and his gear to the cops, and ask if he can assist in the investigation. Doc tells Legionnaire he'll keep him informed of any developments, and let him know as soon as they get anything from the Tech Priest; Doc suggests Keira leaves quickly & quietly, no need to ruin her life over one mistake. Archeville will pocket the tech from the dead Tech Priest -- staff, visor, gauntlet, and whatever else -- for future examination (and trophies). If need be he'll cannibalize tech from his own gravimetric belt to make an extradimensional pocket (i.e., using extra effort on his own Device -- that's okay, and not part of our current discussion in the Ref forum, yes? -- to get Dimensional Pocket 1 [using gravity manipulation to warp space so his labcoat pockets are far larger on the inside than they should appear to be], 'fatiguing' the belt to do so). If Keira cannot teleport the corpse away, he'll make a bigger dimensional pocket to carry it, too, telling her he'll find some way to make it 'disappear'.

So could I. My problem is not being able to install it on my new Vista computer.

You jinxed it! I've barely been able to make any posts here because I keep getting "taking too long to respond, connection timed out" messages.

Happy Birfday!

[plug] The final draft of the ArcheTech Special Report on Powered Armor has been sent to the publisher (Cracked Mirror), and should be available for purchase soon (within a couple of weeks). [/plug] And Folkert's quite right, there are no Battlesuit Hero PCs (and only one real Heroic Battlesuit char, Daedalus), at least none active (there may be some that are retired/inactive); there's just the two active Supervillain Battlesuit chars, Icarus/Heavy and Malice (plus folks like Devil Ray and Doc Otaku and Downtime and Overshadow and the Power Corps and Star-Khan).

Well, the FC-verse does have the Shattenwelt ("shadow-world"), a dimension of endless inky dark predatory life-draining hunger. The super-assassin/super-Nazi Nacht-Krieger draws his power from it. Seems the perfect match for her.

Big money, big money, no whammy.... Diplomacy check (1d20+2 = 10) I'm pretty sure that doesn't do it, but I would like this to go through, so I'd like to spend an HP to re-roll. Diplomacy re-roll (1d20+2 = 16) I think that does it!

How would a mental sense detect objects work? How do you track the mental signature of a briefcase?

"Ah, ja, I understand," he replied to the female guard, rising and walking slowly towards her. He looked back to Dryad, gave her a wink, then back to the female guard. "If I may, I vould like to speak to zhe varden before ve go," he said with a nod to the walkie talkie. (OOC: If they let him talk to the warden via the walkie-talkie, he says the following. If not, he'll say pretty much the same to her once they reach the warden's office [or wherever s/he is].) "Varden, zhis is Doktor Archeville. Dryad seems much calmer now, und I believe it vould be most beneficial to both of us if she accompanies me to zhe infimrary vhile I conduct mein experiments. Seeing zhat I am working on a cure for her condition vill, I suspect, put her into a better mood, and make her less agitated. From vhat I heard in mein briefing, she's been giving everyone here qvite a bit of trouble. I take full responsibility for her actions; I know you do not know me, but officer Miller, zhe officer who arranged for mein visits, can vouch for me."

That would require retconning that thread (which has just started getting back into action), something I personally would not want to do. You can always just have Legionnaire run from this area after the fight, looking for Valencia, while Archeville looks the other way (busy examining their tech, tracking down Keira, planning to extract a favor from Legionnaire at some later time in exchange for letting him go this time, or so on ). And anyway, the other Tech-Priest may be meeting his comrade soon....

Archeville gives a "ya shouldn't have done that" look with a cock of his head, and activates the staff. A bolt of energy shoots forth, seemingly straight for the Tech-Priests soft, unprotected face.

Jury's still out on Adaptation (and all other VPs), and will be for a few weeks more, so you may wanna go ahead and change that now.

It'll depend, some of those feats are very specific to their genre.

"Feel nutzing, hrm? Fascinating..." Archeville mutters to himself in German for a bit, then re-focuses his attention on Dryad. "Are you sure you feel no different? Any change, no matter how slight, is important to know." The doktor cast a sideways glance at the two guards, wondering when they were going to let them to the infirmary.

"Throw me ZPM, I'll throw you the whip. " "Too bad the Jaffa don't know you the way I do, Belloq." "Yes, too bad. You could warn them... if only you spoke Goa'uld!" "Replicators. Why'd it have to be Replicators?"

Notice check (1d20+10 = 16) to see if Archeville happened to see what's going on with Keira & her (dead) foe? Archeville switched his force field from stealth mode to full defensive mode, popping back into view, then aims the staff right at the Tech-Priest. "Zhrow down your veapon und surrender! It's zhree against von now, you cannot vin. Get on zhe ground, now, hands vhere ve can see zhem!" OOC: Readying an action to shoot the Tech Priest if he does anything other than throw down/drop his weapon and gets on the ground.

Don't worry, I'm sure she'll be able to talk her way out of any trouble over his mysteriously unseen death while associating with someone who will become a raging psychopath and a man infamous in certain parts of Germany as being completely mad. :harley: And I'm sure the ever-present trails of shadows around her only seem to be forming a copy of the dead man's face, frozen in a rictus of agony.

By now, the sun has fully set, though the nearby 'street' light offers decent illumination. Owls hoot here and there, and the cool spring wind blows through and rustles the branches, but other than that, all is silent. The weird blob-thing continues lying on the ground, split, leaking, its weird fluids seeping into the earth. It faintly stinks, of partially-digested meat (i.e., Imposter's face) and of excrement.

Well, there's this big stone ring that's been uncovered in Giza. The heiroglyphs on it have been translated as "Door to Heaven"...

Archeville checked Mongrel Ange's bandage one last time, "zhat should heal mit no trouble, in time." He smiled at her, though it looked more manic than what most folks would call normal.

With lasers on their foreheads! (The lasers, of course, would be red.)

Ah, gotcha, I was misunderstanding what you were saying would take/last 20 rounds. My mistake, I'm sorry. Wha? How do you figure that? How is "Can anything be stunted off anything?" the same question as "Can I use invent/jury-rig to make a 1pp Alternate Power"? Both are very broad questions, yes, but each addresses very different topics. The answer to the first is tied to the basic rules of how powers work, how effects and descriptors govern powers and interact. The answer should be "No, the APs must make sense in the context of the base power's effects and descriptors and the internal logic of the game world." The answer to the second is more a game balance issue. The answer would be determined in part by how much freedom and "loose-ness" the Refs want in the rules, and how much leeway they're willing to give the players. Yes, and it's accepted because A) that's how it works in the source material (i.e., countless comic books and novels and movies and tv shows), and that's how the examples given in the rules of the book are. It would seem to me -- and if I'm wrong on this, please let me know, and I'll readily apologize -- that you have problems with the "rubber science" aspect so common to comic books & sci-fi stories, especially Silver Age comics. That the "nonsensical" nature of it goes against your preferred style and tone. If this is true, then perhaps you should not GM characters who are centered on that conceit/element of the genre, like Battlesuit wearers and Gadgeteers (or Energy Manipulators). Set the capacitors (which store the electricity) to discharge all the electrical energy in one rapid burst though a single-loop antenna (made from the wires & electrodes which would've been used to pass the current through the condemned) or a magetron (a microwave generator, such as is found in a microwave oven or some radar systems), and you've got an EMP. Assuming thjere's enough electricity in the capacitors. (After having done some research, it would seem my remark in another thread about EMPs being much more difficult to generate than tv and movies have shown was a tad erroneous; the biggest problem is getting enough energy dumped in a one burst.) There is a very large difference between a flamethrower and an electric blaster/taser, in non-game system terms (both are Blast, yes, but how each does it is different). Electricity can be turned into electromagnetic energy, an electric field in motion generates a magnetic field (and an EMP is just a short broadband burst of high-intensity electromagnetic energy). Fire cannot be turned into a fire nullifier, the closest you could get is like when firefighters do "controlled burns" to remove the fuel from an area to stop the spread a raging forest fire in a given direction... but that doesn't Nullify the existing fire, it just makes it change course. I see no way a simple flamethrower can be altered to do a Nullify Fire Effects power, short of making a big enough blast to completely consume all the fuel (including people) and/or oxygen (which'd also need a Linked Suffocate effect) from the area... but as you can see that has some very big problems. And, again, Cos had clearly said the staffs were shooting off electrical blasts, and you gave no indication in any post that that had changed to fire/heat. You changed the descriptors/effects mid-game with no apparent explanation or indication. If I'd known you had changed them, I would never have tried to do what I did, since there's no way a flamethrower can do a Nullify Tech Effects power (short of making a blast big & intense enough to melt/fuse all the tech in an area, but that's just a big Area Blast).