Raveled

"Kind of," Ironclad replied. "The whole suit can be visualized as sandwiched layers. The outermost layer is the armor shell, but just underneath that is a series of rails and switches that are fully articulated. If I want one ability, I use one configuration. For a different ability, it's a different configuration. See what I'm talking about?" The light changed the traffic began to flow again. "Have you thought about about some kind of storage device," she asked. "If the problem is trying to control the rate that the system dissipates energy, then a sink could be a good idea. Store enough for a typical combat so that it can be radiated out at a slower rate later."

Robin paused in her tracks when Phantom's surge of power raised the hair on the back of her neck. She turned back to the group, bowing from the neck. "My name is Robin Cross," she said, a bit more formally than was probably required. "I'm... Well, I suppose tonight I'm Wesley's transportation. And the taxi driver doesn't want to get in the middle of things." She turned away again and wandered off into the park, but stayed close enough to provide support if Wesley got into trouble.

Robin stared at the man storming off and ran to catch up with him, her staff in hand. "Hey, wait up a second." She grabbed his arm and pulled him to a halt. "There's all this chaos in the city -- we're being attacked by freaking aliens -- and your idea of your civic duty is to start a few fires? What'd that store ever do to you, anyway?"

"Underground..." Ironclad considered the idea. "City has miles of tunnels underneath it. If they took it far enough underground, we could use your scanner to follow it deeper." The armored heroine touched a finger to vehicle's steering column; looking closer, Dragonfly could see that there wasn't a place to put a key. Instead, it looked like an I/O jack, or maybe an infrared port. In any case, the car started up right away and they pulled off into the city. Being a superhero apparently didn't qualify Ironclad's truck for emergency sirens, so they ended up sitting in traffic. The armored heroine drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, staring out the window. As the silence between them stretched, she cleared her throat nosily. "So, uh. That was a really cool force field you put up. Para-dimensional properties?"

Freud calls that a slip. :D

"Problem," Ironclad interrupted. "Checked the half-life on the radiation. These hot spots are all at least two months old. I'd almost say that it's not in town anymore, except." The hero pointed at a liune of radiation along the South River, almost evaporated. "This is new. I'm guessing it's where the speedster took it. And then it just disappears." She sat back in her chair. "I can't figure it out."

Robin stood there for a moment as the energies of the portal dissipated. The teleports were outside her normal range of abilities, and they were proving to be rather more draining than she expected; too, it was getting late in the night even for her. Any other time she might feel up to trading barbs with the woman in tight black leather, but right now she just turned to Wesley and said, in a quiet voice, "I'm going to keep a perimeter. Do what you have to."

The map shows many smaller trails of radiation (where the device was presumable being moved from place to place) and three hotspots (which it was presumably stored for some time).

Ironclad nodded to the other heroine and lead her back to the parking lot. There was a big SUV there, black with chrome trim; she unlocked it with a wave of her hand and slipped into the driver's seat. The center console had an LED display for the GPS. She punched up a map of the town, and overlaid something, a number of hotspots of some kind. "I figured out what sort of radiation you were looking for and repurposed a satellite to look for it. These hot spots go back six months or so, see?" Ironclad moved her armored finger across the screen, pointing at three particular hot spots on the map. "Follow?"

Frank's Attack. 1d20+8=20 That hits. So, 8 Blast becomes 12 Blast Ironclad. Toughness 27. Clad's Toughness. 1d20+9=23 Well, she's still in the air.

Forcing through the crowd was out of the question, so Ironclad was reduced to hovering above their heads and waiting for the pressure to die down, before she could go in and investigate. As it turned out, she didn't have to; on the tail end of the crowd walked a giant. He must've been at least eight feet tall, and broad across the shoulders. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that hid his face from the air and a tattered longcoat that fell to the ground. His hands, protruding from the sleeves of his coat, were a pasty blue-gray color. Ironclad cleared her throat and called out to the giant. "Sir, I need to see your face. Please look up." The giant paused, then tilted his head back; his face has the same blue-gray color as his hands, his eyes were pale yellow, and his teeth were stained brown and cracked. The heroine recoiled from the walking dead man. She armed her weapon systems with a blink, pointing her gauntlets at the giant. "I need to see some ID," she said. Her target raised on long, powerful arm in response and Ironclad could see the electricity jumping from finger to finger. Before she could get a shot off a blast of lightning reached up into the sky towards her.

Ironclad paused in her private calculations, staring at the spot where the Hellhound had disappeared. It interested her mildly, but teleportation was a well-known and closely-studied phenomenon. Even this teleportation was trans-dimensional and of magical origin, and possibly lead back to a plane of reality that could be considered some off-shoot of Perdition... Ironclad shook her head sharply, and reminded herself that she didn't have any way of taking any sort of readings. It would be much more productive to examine the hammer. She turned to Valkyrie and spoke. "Excuse me, but I don't suppose you'd let me cut a piece of your hammer off, by any chance? If I had an opportunity to run some chemical tests it could be very enlightening."

And I'm waiting on a cue from Sand, who's waiting on a reply from AA, who's...

The OOC for this thread.

The priest hesitated, and just a more a moment Dead HEad saw fear and concern pass over the man's face; and the next second, it was gone. He smiled that same broad smile again and gave the revenant's should a squeeze. "If you ever need a place to sleep," he said, "for whatever reason, the church is always open.

Ironclad glanced down between her feet, noticing the visored woman for the first time, but luckily her helmet hid any expression of surprise. She floated down until she was standing on the short grass, right in front of her erstwhile ally. "Well, if you're ready we can get going -- Dragonfly." Her eyes twinkled with mischief behind her impassive mask. "That is what you go bay, right? Dragonfly?"

The OOC for this thread.

Things were pretty normal as things went, in the bustling economic heart of Freedom City. The streets were packed with people and cars, the tall buildings hummed with commerce, and in the sky men and women in gaudy costumes flew in every direction. One red and gold figure was moving slowly, though; Ironclad hadn't got the suit's rapid recognition system working properly yet, so she was searching the crowd by eye. A disturbance further up the street drew the heroine's attention. People were flooding out of a subway station. They weren't panicking, not quite yet, but they were moving awfully fast if they were just getting back to work. There was a flash of harsh, bright light from inside the station, and people started moving faster. Ironclad shifted her weight and sped towards the light.

The Sentry Statue was a popular destination, and not just for tourists. The entire city was still standing because of the Centurion's sacrifice; there was still people who visited the statue to leave flowers and thank-you cards. To the hero community, it was a stronger connection, of course, a symbol of what they could be -- and what they could be called to do. Ironclad floated level with the nose, about fifty metres out. She studied the face of the statue; in her bleaker moments, she wondered if she would go out that way, being called to sacrifice herself to save someone else. Would she be able to do it, when the time came? And if she didn't, would she be able to live with herself after?

Dead Head blended in well enough with the ranks of the homeless, as they shuffled into the kitchen and queued up in the soup line. Even once he was seated, something kept the other transients from approaching him. It was a bit surprising, therefore, when he felt a strong hand clasp his shoulder. The revenant turned his head to see a portly Hispanic man in a Catholic priest's robes, smiling gently. "Greetings, my son," he said. "I'm Father David. I don't think I've seen you, before."

Board rules state that you have to have base Att equal to at least one-third your PL. So, even though all your attacks are Perception range, you need at least Att +4.

And with this, we go to a new thread. See ya!

Ironclad snatched at the detector, making a face at the shoddy wiring job. If she had designed it, it would be in sealed plastic with an LED display. Of course, she had the entire Dawes Tech industrial empire to draw upon, whereas this woman apparently was working on a tighter budget. Regardless, she nodded along with the visored woman's demand. "If we get this thing back, you're free to go all EOD on it. Just remember, Sentry Statue in an hour."

Ironclad's face went blank behind her helmet as her mind kicked into high gear. "Give it to me. And meet me in an hour at... Damn. Uh, meet me by the Sentry Statue. I think we're still in the running."

Ironclad's face went blank, under her mask. "Tracked it. Tracked it? The thing inside the case? You were tracking that?" Ironclad took a step forward, her mind whirling with possibilities. "How? Does it put off radiation of some kind!?"