N/A

(I have no problem with anyone noticing that Kingsnake is paying real close attention to every piece of evidence in the room except for the big bloody footprint in the middle.)

If Triakosia is Aiding, she can't take 10 on the skill check.

So that's +2 from Grim and +3 from Net-Fly on the Search check.

He's got +5 INT and Search is untrained. That gives him an 80% chance of giving Kingsnake at least +2.

It's Search, not Notice.

You need to specify which sense type(s) the Dazzle suppresses. House rules demand at least 1/3 of your total Attack and Defense bonuses be from base ATK/DEF. I seriously doubt you'll find all those exotic attacks in the array useful to have. There's a lot of overlap. I'd recommend paring down and maybe buying a rank or two of Luck for help with power stunting temporary APs as needed. You need to specify whether her challenge feat is offsetting the penalty for feinting as a move action with Bluff or with Acrobatics. Those are technically two different maneuvers, just like how Feint and Startle are two different maneuvers. I'd build the Communication as rank 1, with a 1PP drawback for being touch range, which would offset the cost of the 1PP feat and leave the total cost of the power at 1PP. Reactive teleporting seems like a better descriptor for Defense bonus than for Toughness bonus. Especially since you're already paying for Protection and Fort save separately, I would just buy 20 Con and get the +5 to Fort, Toughness, and damage recovery checks for the same price, unless it's vital to the concept that she be a fragile flower and yet also have +10 Fortitude somehow. This build cries out for Uncanny Dodge.

Sorry, just to be clear, if his hypersensitive touch does find any fingerprints, he will go ahead and use the classic powder & tape method to lift them.

It's also pretty obvious to Triakosia at this point that Kingsnake is the source of the other ultrasonic squealing she's been hearing, especially when he turned it off and then on again in the basement.

Kingsnake stopped just inside the storage room when he realized the other heroes were piling in close behind. "Stop." He spoke English now. He kept his back to them, but turned his head slightly to the side. Not enough to see over his shoulder if he had eyes anymore, but barely enough to show physical acknowledgement of their presence. "We don't have much time, and that's when it's most important not to rush. Watch your step and don't touch anything. If you find something, call me over. Everything is relevant until it isn't. Don't just stomp around scooping up whatever shiny objects catch your eye. The police will be here to do that soon enough. The super-strong flyer should keep one eye on the ceiling that's about to collapse on us." Before taking a step, he stood at the entrance and took in the whole room with each of his senses, one at a time, and then all at once, trying to put a picture together from all the various pieces. He held his nose and "closed" the part of his brain that broadcast his sonar like it was an eye, straining to hear any sounds that might be hiding under the footsteps and breathing of the assembled heroes and the cacophony above ground. Then he held his fingers against his ears and let the air fill his nostrils. Finally, he opened his mind and let his brain start sending out pulses of ultrasound again, taking a deep breath as the shapes of the people and objects around him started flooding in again. He pulled out a pair of rubber bands and slipped them onto his boots, rendering any footprints he left instantly distinguishable from the others. He resisted the urge to head straight for the body, instead walking back and forth across the room methodically in a grid pattern, occasionally stopping to gently smell or feel anything of interest. When he finally did kneel down beside the corpse, he gently lifted the head and then each hand and foot, sniffing each one and the ground beneath them. He pulled out a series of small plastic bags and scraped traces from the soles of the mans shoes, under his fingernails, and from the floor under him. He felt the man's skin, hoping he could tell how long it had been since his blood had stopped circulating from what tiny amount of heat hadn't yet left the flesh. His fingers traced the contours of the head wound. He followed the blood spatter with his nose and scraped some of it onto a slide which he then sealed into a bag. He fished through the man's pockets and felt along his shirt, looking for a billfold, keys, and maybe an ID badge. No time to examine the contents here, but don't want to let them get buried. When he finally turned his attention to the machine, he gently ran his fingers along the surface as he circled around it, hoping to find fingerprint residue or seams that might indicate an opening to a control panel. He sniffed at it, hoping to recognize something about its makeup. After he finished examining it, he turned to the woman who had been flying around earlier. "The police will probably need your help getting this thing out of here. The other two can lift the body out before it gets buried under rubble."

Ok, let's see if Kingsnake can finally make himself useful. Search to find clues, Investigate to collect and analyze them. To my knowledge, Notice doesn't apply here. Kingsnake has the highest relevant skill bonuses by far, so I suggest everyone else Aid him. That's a DC10 Search check and you can't take 10. If you make it, he gets +2 to his Search result, +1 for every 10 points you get over (so you give him +3 by hitting DC20, +4 by hitting DC30, etc.). A Search check will take us either a full round, a minute, or 5 minutes, depending on whether the diameter of this area is closest to 5ft, 10ft, or 100ft (respectively). If it's 100ft / 5 minutes, then Kingsnake will take a -5 penalty to drop it one step down, to 1 minute. He has +20 Search, so he'll take 10 and get either 30 or 25, depending on the size of the search area, not counting any Aid bonuses from other characters, and/or any additional circumstance penalties the GM hands out. Of course, he'll automatically fail to find any clues which rely on normal vision exclusively, such as perceiving color or text at a distance. If he finds any clues, the base DC to collect them is 15, and if he exceeds that result by 10+, then he gets a +2 circumstance bonus to analyze the clue he collected. He has +15 Investigate, so he'll take 10 and hit DC25, getting that +2 analysis bonus. Analyzing the clue(s) is where the penalties come in. I'm guessing that ground zero of an earthquake counts as an "extremely disturbed" scene (+6DC), rather than just "slightly" (+2) or "moderately" (+4). The scene isn't outdoors and less than one day has elapsed, so I think that's the only Investigate penalties to clue analysis, aside from any other circumstance penalties the GM hands out. That's DC21, unless the GM is handing out any additional circumstance penalties. If there are any clues Kingsnake can analyze on the spot with his Super-Senses taking the place of normal lab equipment (using his nose as a mass spectrometer to figure out the chemical composition of the trace evidence he's smelling, feeling microscopic features of objects, etc.), he'll do so. The rest he'll save for later. He can smell blood spatter and feel fingerprints and compare them with others he feels or smells later, for example, but he doesn't have a database in his head to compare them to right now (beyond, presumably, knowing what each blood type smells like). He can take 10 on the analysis and hit 25, +2 for the good collection gives him DC27, which should hopefully beat DC21 with room to spare. Let me know how that all shakes out.

Kingsnake's altered (deformed?) brain never stopped broadcasting high-frequency sound waves, but it took a minute for his ability to receive and interpret them to register. Blurry and inconsistent at first, gradually his "view" of his surroundings returned. The floor of the arena (or what was left of it) wasn't thick enough to block those sound waves, a scientific fact for which he was very, very grateful at the moment. A transparent line-drawing of the stadium's guts took shape in his mind's eye, and he took off running again, this time toward the nearest service entrance he could find into the bowels of the wrecked dome. Can't lift truck-sized chunks of debris up off of people like the other capes here. Up here, I'm just one more candystriper among thousands. Down there, maybe I can find some scrap of a clue about who did this, how, or even why.

Kingsnake: 9 Namazu The Savior (6) Man That You Fear (3) The Newt: 2 March Badness (2) The Scarab: 7 The Killers (4) Network Error (3) GM: 6 March Badness (3) Man That You Fear (3)

When the tremor hit, Kingsnake's whole world went dark. The glowing line drawings scrawled onto windows looking out at a cloudy night sky that passed as "sight" for him vanished. The tapping of forty-thousand heartbeats, the dull roar of conversations, the machine-gun clatter of applause, everything was eclipsed by a high-pitched squeal that wouldn't stop echoing back and forth through his brain. As he lay on the ground clutching his head, half-delirious, he mused grimly at all the forgotten tidbits from his childhood suddenly flooding into his mind. This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System...this is only a test...if this had been a real emergency, you wouldn't have gotten caught with your pants down...56k modems, remember those? Only '90s kids will understand... The sound, the sonar, all of it was gone. So...that's what it's like to be blind. His whole world was noise...and smell. The blood. So much blood. So many tiny cuts and scrapes. He almost gagged. As he staggered to his feet, he pointed up into the sky, then back down where home plate used to be, screaming himself hoarse in thickly-accented Japanese, hoping the slight vibrations he felt in his throat meant he could be heard. "<MAN-MADE! SIGNAL...CAME FROM OUT THERE! UP THERE! RECEIVER...DOWN THERE! THEY CAN DO IT AGAIN!>"

Sorry. Didn't mean to mansplain at you. Hopefully the next redname will get something out of my wall of text.

Complication HPs will almost always be more useful than Drawback PPs in the long run. But sometimes you just need dem points. Having to turn the ring to activate everything sounds like a Power Loss or Normal Identity drawback, depending on whether or not she has any powers outside the devices. And yes, the Device flaw on the power container CAN stack with that. The most commonly known example is the core book power armor build which has the armor as a device, and a Normal Identity drawback which prevents the character from using the device if she's unable to take the required action to "activate" it (i.e., put it on).

Thanks. Bouncing is weird. I still have some trouble with it. It's another construct where Kenson took his "art as much as science" approach. Barring the usual disclaimers about him contradicting himself, he did make a couple of helpful forum clarifications. Near as I can tell, it's a 1PP/rank Leaping effect Linked to a 1PP-per-2-ranks Protection effect. The Leaping is Reaction (+2), despite the entry for Leaping in the same book saying the Action couldn't be modified, Limited (Opposite direction or perpendicular stretched-out arc from fall/knockback), and Limited (Distance can't exceed fall/knockback distance). Common sense would dictate that you also can't exceed the normal jump distance for whatever rank of Leaping you have (or else why bother incorporating a Leaping effect in the first place?). The Protection effect is Impervious (+1) and Limited 2 (Fall/knockback damage). It also does the same weird 1E holdover thing as Absorption, lowering the rank of the incoming damage instead of adding to your Toughness save directly. Like Limited Absorption, it technically counts against PL caps for Toughness, but Kenson recommends ignoring it since the focus is so narrow (see Captain Thunder's sheet for the most prominent example of this design philosophy in action). I ditched the Protection effect entirely in favor of Immunity and Limited Impervious Toughness, hopefully sidestepping that whole mess. The Bouncing entry in UP specifically says that you choose whether or not to bounce with each impact. Kenson also clarified that (assuming you choose to bounce) Bouncing triggers off the "potential" damage, as if you had failed the Toughness save by 5+, "suffering" Knockback regardless of whether or not you actually took any damage (which you most likely didn't) here. So if he takes a +6 damage solid shotgun slug to the chest, his Impervious Toughness 7 against physical damage will render him immune, and he doesn't have to budge, but he can still choose to "suffer" knockback as if his Impervious wasn't there, flying (Damage 6 - KB resist 3 = KB 3 = 10 feet) 10 feet backward, and then, if he hit something, rebounding up to 10 feet back toward the shooter as a reaction, or 20ft upward in an arc 5ft toward the shooter. Similarly, he could take a move action to jump off a 100ft tall building, ignore the Damage 10 because of his Immunity, then, as a reaction, bounce 100ft back up into the air, or 200ft forward in a 50ft tall arc. MATH. He also clarified here that the total bounce distance could represent multiple smaller ricochets, which is the only way the Ricochet feat on Bouncing makes sense. I just took Move-By Action as a standalone feat, so there wouldn't be a question of when during the full round of bouncing he could take the full complement of actions to which he's entitled. The consensus last time people discussed it seemed to be that his Elongation and Wall-Crawling were enough to use a move action to stop or change direction mid-bounce, assuming there is sonething within reach to grab onto, and there aren't any objects in his original path to Ricochet off of. Does any of this help?

[...]

If you find yourself with a surplus of EP to spend, you could invest an extra +1EP on a lot of Features to make them +Masterwork, giving a +2 circumstance bonus (ignores PL limits) to relevant skill checks. Computer, Infirmary, Laboratory, Library, and Workshop can all benefit. Also, don't forget to state whether your Holding Cells are the +50% Toughness kind or the Nullify kind (or just spend 2EP to get both).

What exactly is the effect on Kingsnake? Is he unconscious/incapacitated?

I think her combat traits are cripplingly overspecialized, and her skills are all over the place. Look at the DCs for each skill in the book, then put your total skill bonus to within 10 of the DCs you want to hit. Most of them come in increments of 5. Right now, she'll suck equally at more or less everything, but she won't accomplish much of anything. It looks like you're invested in Bluff, but not Diplomacy, so I don't think you get anything out of taking Attractive instead of just raw Charisma and Bluff ranks. With so many Hero Points to burn, you might want to drop some of those situational combat feats. You can burn a HP to gain a normal feat for a round as a Reaction. She has enough invested in Dex skills and Reflex, and Wis skills and Will, that higher base Dex and/or Wis might be good investments. Starting off in Stealth, Feinting with a high Bluff, having high Acrobatics and Acrobatic Bluff as a backup for robots and zombies, and Sneak Attack is a fairly cheap way for ATK-tradeoff Badass Normals and Badass Abnormals to hit offensive PL caps.

19.

Kingsnake will drop a smoke pellet to obscure a 20ft-diameter sphere, and use his Quick Change feat to change into his costume. If he's got time, he'll whip out The Fangs of The Serpent and take off running down toward the field.

The mysterious ultrasound pulse completely ruined Brian's concentration on the game. His head whipped around over his shoulder. One of the fans sitting next to him raised a quizzical eyebrow at the gaijin with the dark sunglases and white cane who seemed to be trying to look at something. What could that have been? I doubt there's a submarine burrowing under the streets... His face snapped back down toward the field in response to the second pulse. ...And there definitely shouldn't be one under home plate. Brian fished a smoke pellet out of his pocket, let it fall down beside his foot, and pressed down on it with the sole of his shoe. Thick black smoke shot out of it in several directions. In seconds, the cloud covered several seats in every direction. During those seconds, Brian pulled at the hidden snaps and zippers of his street clothes, tearing them free to reveal his black and white jumpsuit. He pulled the mask of the Kingsnake down over his head and somersaulted over the seats in front of him, hitting the ground running toward the field below.

Kingsnake will take 10 on the Notice check with Skill Mastery and get 30. His sonar is active, so if any of the ultrasound waves come within 120ft of Triakosia (-1 per 10ft, 12 Notice), she'll hear them. And the sonar is +Extended, so it's likely that they will. Her Ultra-Hearing isn't +Accurate, so she shouldn't be able to pinpoint the source. But auditory senses are +Acute by default, so she should be able to distinguish Kingsnake's sonar from whatever else is going on. Kingsnake also has Danger Senses, BTW (auditory, olfactory, and Tactile for his sonar).

The Scarab (0) None Kingsnake (2) >Namazu The Savior (2) I also wouldn't turn down a bonus point for the work I did on the reputation index and TV Tropes page this month.