Avenger Assembled

"Mr. Summers, it went like this." Under the watchful gaze of Mr. Summers, Mark began to talk, telling him the story of Young Freedom and their battle in the stadium. "We arrived late thanks to heavy traffic. Just our luck, as it meant we missed whatever knockout field those hoodlums were using on the spectators." He did his best to tell the story as he remembered it, being both honest and positive at the same time. "After a brief conference to assess the situation, and when I was confident we had the support of our faculty advisor, I deployed the team in the manner that seemed the most advantageous. We destroyed the robots, banished the demons, and stopped the bad guys from hurting any innocent people. We made some mistakes, but those were just because of our inexperience. I'm proud of what everyone accomplished on the field."

Edge rose to his feet, straightened his slightly singed costume, and marched down the ramp. Duncan Summers had been a fairly frequent guest at his family home growing up, but that didn't make the older man any less intimidating. His father's old friends had often been like that in one way or another, especially Mr. Summers. But Edge was a confident young man, unafraid to face the consequences of his actions that day. After all, they'd been heroes. Following closely behind Eddie, he addressed the older man seriously and said, "Mr. Summers, today I was lucky enough to go to the baseball game with superheroes. We saved the day together."

"It's so nice to meet you, Ms. Albright!" said Mark, still smiling as he gave Alex's mom a firm handshake. Man, Alex has good genes. It was a good thing he trusted his friend not to go psychically wandering. "I'm Mark Lucas, I go to school with your daughter. It's a real pleasure to meet you and see your lovely home. I'm just lucky to have the chance to be here with Alex on her big day. She's very special to me and everyone else at Claremont."

Oh hey, I guess I was higher in the Initiative order than I remembered. Avenger's going to spend his turns rescuing the remaining cats. What do I need to do for that, boss? :)

OK, Avalon's run into some trouble, so we'll say Vestige is holding his action. Ronin, you're up.

"Hey, Erin?" Edge had taken the seat next to her as they headed back, sitting itchy as the first-degree burns he'd gotten from the exploding robot slowly healed up. "Thanks for what you did back there," he said to her, quiet but loud enough for anyone listening to overhear. "I saw you take that hit for me. And for everybody else, when you were fighting that big robot. Even if you get some static from people who weren't there for how hard you hit that guy, you did the right thing today." He shot a cautious smile her way.

Edge was very impressed at the keen figure Alex cut in her colorful skirt and blouse, and wasn't shy about showing it. "Wow! Look at you, Alex! You look great." He stepped up and gave her a quick hug, smiling down at her as he stepped back. "And so does this place. You guys must have been working for hours." He looked around the place, quite happy to be there. "So is it just the three of us so far? Are your folks sticking around?"

Avenger kept an eye out, moving with effective invisibility to watch Scarab as she worked and to make sure no one else was coming. We need to find that bloody painting. I was here to verify its existence for some of my, uh, backers. He had a feeling Scarab would know what he had in mind about that. Not to steal it. Just to make sure it was in good hands. You said you knew this person? Anyone I'd have heard of?

"I'm sure it'll all work out," said Mark easily, clapping his buddy Mike on the back. He set his box on the table, his own blending in perfectly with the other wrapped presents. "So, looks like some party, huh?" he said with a grin, looking around the highly decorated room and house. "Man, I didn't get half this for my sixteenth. But I guess it's different for girls. Where's the star of the show?"

Mark timed things just right, luckily pulling up just as the preparations for the party came to an end. Parking his parents' red Ford station wagon neatly on the sidewalk outside Alex's house, he bounded out with a cheerful smile on his face and a big wrapped present in his arms. He'd dressed up a bit for the party, donning an handsome buttoned-up shirt and slacks that happened to be specially engineered to be machine-washable. Nothing but class for his friend's big day. He knocked on the door, politely waiting to be admitted.

Dee-Dee resists your untoward advances! But Edge comes in for the save and luckily makes it easier! Psyche, her brain is yours.

Summers seemed to approve of Estelle's philosophy, but it was difficult to tell. Dr. de Haviland could already tell that Duncan Summers was not going to be a particularly demonstrative boss, even if he might be a supportive one. Once inside the administration building, Gossamer met with Summers' second-in-command Martha Dugan, and soon was put to work signing the usual disclosure forms and employment filings that were a necessary part of working in the teaching sector in the state of New Jersey. The school had many powers, but avoiding state licensure was evidently not one of them. This particular school had some unique forms, though, like asking Estelle about her own metahuman makeup and offering an extremely extensive list of non-disclosure forms and liability waivers. You didn't see a lot of "Consent To Mental Scan" forms outside certain black ops military organizations, and of course the Post Office.

Yes, Ace can easily see that Edge is totally BSing about them having been doing anything productive when he showed up. ;)

As far as your second question, Electra, one good way to represent damage to Fleur's hair as the Weak Point drawback. That's an uncommon, minor drawback that's about bypassing your Protection; critical hits are assumed to have hit her hair, and do the usual additional +5 crit damage in addition to bypassing your Protection so you're only making your Toughness save with your straight Con bonus. That may be a little too ouchy, though, so you might be better off sticking to a Weakness drawback to represent an Instant damage effect.

"...so that's why I called you," Jack finished explaining to Elena's cell phone some several minutes later from the pay phone across the street from the museum. "I'm not going to mess with anything that looks like a bomb in a museum, but the police seem pretty concerned about it. The red and gold colors were a pretty obvious message to you; I took a close look and it looks like whoever did it was trying to copy the Scarab's markings directly. Honestly, I don't know why anyone would want to steal this painting in the first place."

"Breakdown and I have been pursuing a variety of leads," said Edge, luckily coming up with a semi-convincing story on the fly. Looking up as Dust-Stalker approached, he said a cautious "Hello," to the hero he didn't recognize before focusing back on the others. He gladly pocketed Ace's card, looking thrilled at having got the older hero's autograph. "This is totally going on my wall...uh, anyway, yeah, that's what led us to Greenbank. We'll happily follow your lead."

Might make a good complication. In the meantime APPROVED

Stupid though he knew it was go in without his costume, Jack vanished and headed down the corridor, nearly invisible to any forms of detection. If he was caught like this, he could always say (truthfully) that he was going in to make sure that none of the artifacts his patron cared about were being molested. What were the odds, really? He paused, thought about that, then ran faster. If he'd learned anything about this business, it was that they always took out what was important. He passed among security guards, invisibly, and thought unhappily of Stesha.

"We're..." Oh crap! Edge belatedly realized that they should have decided their team name sooner rather than later. Generation Freedom? Lord no, Bolt will think I've stolen his idea. All-Stars? No, can't rip off the baseball team, it'll be too corny. And if I think it's too corny, it's pretty frickin' corny! A legion of names, large and small, tumbled through Edge's head before he came up with a compromise. It sounds kind of lame, but we'll go with it for now. We can always change it later, right? Right. "You can call us Young Freedom." He grinned into the camera and held stock-still for several minutes, letting everyone get a picture. It's what you were supposed to do at this point.

This is just material for building a setting so far.

Right now, I'm just looking for writeups of your alternate self. Alternate character backgrounds, if you will.

In the universe next door, On Anti-Earth, Claremont Academy is known simply as "The Academy." (When you say that name in Empire City, everyone knows what you're talking about.) The students there are petty godlings drunk on power, young superhumans taught to believe that they are the natural masters of humanity and that the unfortunate regular people of Empire City and the world are there as their pawns and slaves. (However, the Academy doesn't actually discriminate against well-trained young killers, as seen in their most famous recent graduate Tyranny Syndicate member Black Bowman.) Cruel students are encouraged in their cruelty by their harsh taskmasters, decency and humanity discouraged by positive example and negative punishment. Compassion for the weak is a terrible embarrassment liable to fetch you a beating, or worse, from older 'cadets' or your teachers, most of them minor Syndicate members bitterly jealous of their usually more powerful students. The bold student can retaliate against a particularly brutal teacher, but falling beneath the watchful gaze of the drunken, lecherous Fletcher Beaumont II would be a mistake for even the most powerful student. Disobeying the orders of those higher in the Syndicate is a crime punishable in variously unpleasant ways. The most famous cadet team at the Academy is the Next-Syn, formerly headed by the Black Bowman himself and now commanded by Bolt, the spoiled, vicious son of Captain Thunderbolt himself. Bolt is the son of the head of the Tyranny Syndicate and plans to succeed his father there someday, hopefully after the older Ray Gardner retires. But there are other cadet teams at the Academy, organized by ambitious young students determined that they will be the next generation of masters of the world. The newest of these teams is the Young Imperials, headed by Hex, aka Mark Mason Lucas. A group of murderers, thieves, and outright bastards, the Young Imperials are a team with spectacular ambition and a whole lot to prove. And they don't care who gets in their way. Hex: Mark Lucas is the son of a slave and the grandson of a slave. Oh, that wasn't how they billed themselves. To hear him tell it, Jimmy Lucas had been an early member of the Praetor's gang, a loyal toady and supplicant who'd risen on the coattails of the Golden Age Syndicate into a position of wealth, power, and esteem. A generation later, Rick Lucas had been the Praetor's right-hand man, acting as his eyes and ears all over the world as the Syndicate broke the back of their world's few heroes and assumed near-total behind the scenes control. Rick was no fool, though, and when Captain Thunderbolt assassinated the Praetor and his people took over, Rick unhesitatingly took an oath of allegiance to the new regime. After all, he had a son to take care of: and this one he planned to acknowledge as his own. Mark hated his father. And he hated his grandfather, too, for the spineless, powerless, weak little men they'd been. The more the boy learned about history, growing up and watching his father bow and scrape to Captain Thunderbolt and his goons, the more he grew to hate his family and the weak nothings that they were. His family's power was the power of favored pets and slaves, nothing but a legacy of shame and disgrace. When he started as a student at the Academy, it wasn't as a cadet: he was in training to be a favored servant, a minion and goon like any other non-powered student who hadn't been training in combat his whole life. Fuming in his disgust, Mark worked, a brooding, spiteful boy whose anger finally exploded out onto the scene the day William Polsky's chest caved in. The other cadets had been gathered around and watching as Polsky abused and heckled the janitor-trainee on the steps of the Doom Room, the training yard where prisoners of the Syndicate were put to use as test subjects and targets for various student activities. Polsky wasn't a bad boy, really, but he was determined to win respect from his peers by picking on a much-despised "zip." And so it happened that Mark gathered up all his rage at the ill fortune of the world, focused in on William Polsky, and stopped the boy's heart dead in its tracks. That was something; when Fletcher Beaumont II personally appeared to welcome Mark into the Academy track...well, that was something else. Mark was a "luck vampire" for lack of a better word, a young man able to suck the good fortune from others and use it for his own nefarious purposes. He used his powers to pass a test; a car crashed nearby. He dropped a tank on agents of LIGHT? A school burned down nearby. Still deeply jealous of the spoiled children of power like Bolt who mocked him when he was nothing but a slave, Mark used his charisma and stolen good luck to build a team of his own; a team that would one day let him sit and rule where his father stood and waited, that will one day let him be served where once his grandfather was a servant. He hasn't spoken to his parents since the day his powers manifested. (Hex's costume is identical to Edge's, with the exception that he is red where Edge is yellow and black where Mark is blue.)

Dee-Dee wobbled a little bit, the alarm on her face settling down into controlled calm. Candy did the same, but being calm didn't stop either of the two women from trying to get away from the teenagers chasing them. Just because they weren't upset didn't mean they wanted to get caught and have to explain a lot of awkward details about who'd been planning to sell who as cheap household labor. It did mean they didn't attack as they broke apart and tried to move past Erin and Chris, one on each side.

"ACE DANGER!" Edge lit up as if a switch had been thrown, his eyes huge behind his goggles. Only good luck had kept his exclamation a stage whisper instead of the shout he'd wanted to make. He shook Ace's hand with a huge smile on his face. "Oh, man! It...it's an honor, sir!" He fumbled around on his belt for a moment, coming up with a fabric pen. "May I just say, sir, that I have been a fan ever since I first saw Danger in Africa when I was a kid? You really taught me a lot about why it's important not to exploit people." He offered the pen to Ace. "Will you sign my costume?"

It's good to know that attractive people with viable social lives can work out of their parents' basement. I appreciate the message that this character sends. How would her father feel about her career? (Tech-wise or criminal-wise?)