Cubist

I'll burn the Hero Point. The fluff is "After spending 45 seconds studying a bee-bot for an hour, Jube wires up every spare battery in his vest for a mini-EMP that neutralizes every bee-bot in the swarm"; the crunch is "Nullify with Area (Cloud)". This EMP may or may not affect Bee-Keeper 3.1 and/or the Bee-Keeper armor, depending on just how much of a robot he is, how good his shielding is, etc.

Okay: We've got a massive cloud of bee-bots, plus bikers with excessively high-powered energy weapons. And neither of these facts is conducive to a peaceful end to this situation. Jube's going to grab one of the bee-bots out of the air and open it up, in hopes of finding out some way to exploit the thing to bring this mess to a relatively peaceful conclusion. I'm thinking Knowledge (Technology) would be an appropriate skill roll here?

Jube's Reflex save (1d20+7=16)… is a miss. I think I'll burn a Hero Point to re-roll that, because honestly, whoever heard of a speedster who can't dodge between bullets and stuff? So the re-roll on the Reflex save (1d10+10+7=21) just barely squeaks by, but making a roll by 1 is still making a roll, and still allows Jube's Evasion feat to get in the way of his taking damage from the area-effect bee-blast.

The Bloodhound Detective Agency. As in, thread ideas involving. It's pretty much inevitable that Jubatus and Bloody Mess and/or the Hound will find themselves in the same place at the same time. Jube covers all of Freedom City in his patrols, and he can & does show up at any hour of the day or night; it's really only a matter of time until he and they cross paths. The question is, why would Jube interact with Hound or Mess to any extent greater than, say, a perfunctory minimal "Hello, I'm Jubatus. See you around"? • Somebody hired BDA to investigate a crime which, independently, Jubatus is looking into. They meet, discover they're working on the same case, decide to pool their knowledge & efforts • Whilst on patrol, Jubatus passes by Hound—and notices Hound's distinctly doggy scent. Curiosity impels Jube to stop and chat with Hound, and further consequences ensue, maybe some evil souls decide this is just the right moment to try killing Hound and/or Jubatus. [this assumes Hound actually does have a doggy scent while in human form, which may or may not be true, I dunno] • A client hires BDA to investigate one Jay Nelson Xavier, who is presented to BDA as a suspect in [insert crime here]. The client is actually a criminal kingpin of some description, who's trying to get Jubatus to stop interfering with the kingpin's business • The Hound has a brainstorm: Why not get a superhero on payroll? Jube is just one of the heroes that Hound approaches with this proposition…

Hmm. Looks like I guessed wrong about who was leading this gang, Jubatus thought. My bad, and may as well disable this bad boy A-S-A-P. Not bothering to wait for a reply from the person whose bike he'd just gotten on, the feline upshifted, then dismounted and moved to the vehicle's back end. However great the bike's realtime velocity, it might as well have been parked, as far as Jube's accelerated eyes were concerned. He grasped the vehicle's rear fork in one forepaw; took hold of the rear wheel in his other forepaw; and wrenched the wheel backwards, his Timeshift concentrating his musclepower into a sharp pulse of densely concentrated force! And… yes! The rear sprocket was clearly damaged, with more than a few of its teeth broken off and floating in the stillness of fast-time. The cheetah downshifted to confirm his 'kill'—and, yes, the chopper's engine roared like an enraged Valkyrie, the abrupt rise in its RPMs leading to an equally abrupt rise in torque, and the whole thing went down, machine and rider and all, sliding to rest in an inert tangle. Jubatus took a moment to confirm that the pilot was merely unconscious, not seriously damaged, and turned his attention to the rest of the gang…

Jube's going to nuke the leader's motorcycle. The 'fluff' is, he grabs the cycle's read fork in one hand; grabs the rear tire in his other hand; and wrenches the rear wheel to turn backwards. the intended result is, he fries the chain and/or at least one sprocket. The 'crunch' is, Jube unleashes his Mighty Strike(1d20+12=26) upon the unsuspecting vehicle… and we shall see how much good it does.

Jube's Initiative roll (1d20+37=45) is thoroughly outclassed by Velocity's, while at the same time thoroughly outclassing everybody else's Initiative rolls.

Trouble in the Fens: Not an unusual state of affairs. When laser weapons were involved, now, that was out of the ordinary. Which is why a certain data-absorbing software entity, that had been written by a certain feline speedster, had picked up on the event rather quickly… "Incident in Fens. High probability of gang labeled 'Red Devils' using exotic weaponry, most likely energy weapons, in warehouse firefight with not-yet-identified opposition. No data on involvement of other exotic abilities." "Jeeves: Thank you. Jeeves: Get some rest." And within a small number of clock-seconds, a sand-colored blur arrived at the impromptu battleground: Jubatus, the Fastest Cat Alive! With the world still frozen in the stillness of fast-time, the cheetah took in everything, looking at it from various angles to give himself a clear picture of the entire scene. Hmm. Looks like someone didn't realize it was a bad idea to bring guns to a laser fight—and vice versa, for that matter. And… yeah, that guy's at the top of my short list of Who's In Charge for the bikers. With that thought, Jubatus blurred onto the back of the putative leader's motorcycle and downshifted. "Hi there!" the feline said, shouting loud enough to be clearly heard over the noise of the engine (not to mention all the noise of gunfire). "My name's Jubatus, and I'm way the hell faster than you. Care to stop shooting the crap out of innocent masonry?"

Erde: Blitzsterben Jürgen Xavier was one of the Third Reich's most skilled technicians—and one of the most difficult to work with, as well. He could, and did, find fault with anyone's work, a trait which was even more irritating because his scathing criticisms were always correct. However, it wasn't until he criticized the Final Solution as a "preposterous and exorbitantly costly waste of human ingenuity which otherwise could have benefited the Master Race" that the Nazi High Command decided that enough was quite enough. So it was that Jürgen was ordered to join the staff of Projekt: Blitzsterben ("swift death") in North America, never suspecting that he was meant to serve the Reich in the capacity of a guinea pig… Jürgen was one of the earliest Projekt: Blitzsterben test subjects. He did, in fact, gain the superhuman speed which was the Projekt's intended goal, but this speed was accompanied by a number of unwanted ancillary changes which made him an inhuman monster. It took him a week of calendar time to master the peculiarities of his new body; once he did, his newly bestowed speed made it easy for him to escape from the biological laboratory in which he'd been held, leaving a trail of maimed and dead scientists and guards behind him. In the weeks and months that followed his escape, Jürgen became something of an angel of death to the Nazis that had betrayed him and stolen his humanity away. His exploits attracted the attention of the American Resistance movement; they thought he was an innocent victim of Nazi cruelty, and he did not choose to disabuse them of this notion. Working side-by-side with people he'd been taught to regard as inferior, Jürgen came to realize that Naziism was built on lies. He now seeks to atone for the horrors he had contributed to as a willing tool of the Führer, and hopes that the Resistance will allow him the opportunity to redeem himself.

Jubatus All post-counts approximate… some more than others… Canon threadss: Chimply Awful: 1 post Time and Chance: 4 posts GM threads: Like a Greased Porcerine: 1 post Non-canon posts: Blitzsterben, the Jubatus of Erde

Transforming stuff into diamonds… hmm. The base Transform power has a duration of "Sustained", meaning it lasts as long as you continue to divert some part of your attention keeping it that way, and it goes away when you stop making that conscious mental effort to keep it going. Add the Duration Extra to it, and the transformation lasts until you explicitly decide to end it—which is pretty much the same as Permanent, in brute practical terms. Hmm. The problem with an effectively-permanent transformation to diamond, is pretty much the same problem that Teleport with the Attack Extra has: If it works at all, the target is utterly nuked. Just as Teleport-with-Attack is explicitly forbidden by this campaign's House Rules, I rather suspect any nuke-'em-in-one-shot power is likely to be forbidden, on much the same grounds. One interesting alternative: There's a strict weight limit on inanimate Transforms. A 1-Rank Transform can zap 1 (one) pound of inanimate matter; your 10-Rank Transform is good for half a ton. So, what if your Transform-to-diamond has a real stringent weight limit, such that only part of the target's body gets all Diamondy when you zap them? That way, you can whittle the target down one piece at a time, as opposed to the current nuke-or-nothing deal. Another alternative: What if the Transform-to-Diamonds power has bad effects on the character themself? Like, say, whenever they transform someone into diamond, the character themself turns into solid, inert diamond. Yeah, the character can do this thing… but do they really want to? If you'd rather not go that far, you might want to consider putting the Flaw, Tiring, on the power; that way, any time you use the power, people will know that Things Just Got Serious. Third alternative: Leave the Transform-to-diamond power completely off the character sheet, and if you decide you need it at some point, pull a Power Stunt (pp 120 in the Core MnM rulebook) to make it an Alternate Power that will stick around until that particular encounter is done. Even if you do go this route, it's likely that you'll want to tweak the power so it's no longer nuke-or-nothing. Fourth alternative: Don't have an actual, explicit Transform-to-diamonds power in the first place. MnM worries about the actual, practical effect of a power, and not so much the mechanism by which that effect was achieved. So okay, what are you going to do with your shiny new Transform-to-Diamonds power? A lot of the things you might want to use it for are basically covered by the power Create Object—which you already have on your sheet. If you just want to immobilize your targets, that's what the power Snare is good for… and again, you've already got Snare on your sheet. So, what sort of things would you use Transform-to-diamonds for, which aren't already handled by one of your existing powers? On the plus side, the Range Flaw means you gotta touch the target in order to transform them. This is a good thing, and you probably want to keep that Flaw on the power, methinks.

Jubatus patrols all of Freedom City on a fairly regular basis, hence he'd be well-suited to notice odd patterns that might not attract the attention of any hero who focuses on just one neighborhood.

Interesting, Jubatus thought as the extradimensional apes talked. Two of them seem to be okay with the notion of undoing the injuries they've inflicted, but the chimp thinks he's in a position to bargain. If he's the leader, there's already dissent in the ranks; let's see how much more strain I can put on his 'authority'. Jubatus glared at Sammy. "Plea bargaining? That's between you and your lawyer—all I can do is testify in court. I can tell the jury that you guys used an experimental weapon you knew wasn't properly tested, that you didn't give a damn how lethal it might be, and that when I asked, you deliberately, knowingly refused to help your victims… or I can tell the jury that you made a good-faith effort to cure the injuries your weapon inflicted, that you were cooperative, and that your actions suggest you weren't fully aware of what kind of dangerous toy you were playing with." The Quickest Capuchin Monkey Alive shrugged, paused a moment. "Odds are, you're going to be tried for assault and attempted burglary, end of discussion. It's up to you whether you want to add however-many counts of attempted murder, and/or premeditated homicide, to the charges against you." Now Jubatus looked at Doctor Chimpsky, and the rest of Sammy's fellow criminals. Gesturing at Sammy, the ex-cheetah said, "The chimp here seems to think he's in charge. You want to keep following the bozo who led you into this mess, that's your business—but if I was in your position, I'd sure be considering mutiny right now." Then, turning his attention to the simian scientist, Jube said: "How much time would you need? And how many test subjects?"

Minor note which may or may not affect your character's reactions: Jubatus has a very strange voice that sounds like a batch of sound effects strung together in a reasonable facsimile of human speech. Note on the incipient 'safety lesson': This is an opportunity for you to demonstrate Lulu's level of technical competence. It also might be an opportunity for Lulu to 'read between the lines' of Jube's questions, and deduce that the cheetah has some sort of spacewarp ability himself, and that he's careful about that power.

Oh, thank Athena and Dionysus—this woman's an idiot, yes, but not so idiotic that she can't see and acknowledge when she's wrong. "Not to worry. As a local saying goes, 'No harm, no foul'." Jubatus wasn't sure why Lulu felt the need to work through her reasoning out loud, but since she was doing that, he listened intently to her monologue. "You don't know the half of it…" the cheetah replied. "Rrrright. Wherever your vehicle poofed away to, I'm going to assume you can bring it back at any moment. But before you do that, I'd like a crash course in Spacehog Safety: what's normal operating conditions for the machine, how can a pilot or passenger tell when the spacewarp is getting dangerously unbalanced, everything about safe usage. After that's done, then we can start teaching me how not to get sucked up in spacewarps. Okay?"

Having made his pitch, Jubatus could only ponder his next moves while waiting for the response—which wasn't long in coming: "Alright," the ex-cheetah said, projecting a good deal more confidence than he actually felt. "We're going to move your daughter, and we're going to do it in a way that minimizes any risk of further damage. Just a second 'til I—" Upshift. The Fastest Capuchin Alive blurred through all the stores in the neighborhood, seeking the various component parts of the contraption he intended to create, grabbing the items that he judged would do the job, leaving itemized lists of the commandeered materiel plus checks to pay for them, and ferrying it all back to where the suffering girl waited. Downshift. "—get the parts. And now—" Upshift. And in less time than it takes to tell, it was complete: A hollow rectangular frame, rigid thanks to its corner braces, large enough to completely encompass the girl, with mildly elastic cargo net loosely hung across it, and a large number of helium balloons securely fastened to the frame. The child was lying on the cargo net; the balloons had been filled with precision, so that their collective lift was just enough to counter the weight of the whole affair, passenger included. Downshift. "—it's time to go. She'll be okay," Jube said with more confidence than he actually felt, "so just follow me and push her along." The child's mother was absolutely willing to coöperate, so the three transformed apes soon arrived at the site of the foiled robbery, where Comrade Frost had the primate perps on ice. Jubatus was the first to speak: "Like I said before, you sure did zap me—and a bunch of others, some of whom are hurting bad. Here's one of them," and he gestured at the partially-transformed girl. "You should be proud—you zapped her fair and square. And hey, what do you care if she dies?"

Problem: Move a damaged, mostly-transformed girl a nontrivial distance, without making the poor child's injuries any worse. Solution: Airlift the child -- put her on some sort of platform, with enough helium balloons to make the whole thing float, and push the whole thing along thru the air, thus avoiding all the bumps and potholes of the road along the way. Jubatus is rich; he can zip around to various local stores, grab what he needs, and leave itemized lists of the now-missing items, plus checks to pay for it all, in place of the stuff he took. And the crunch for all that fluff is, Jube uses his Gadgets power to provide the child with 1 point worth of Flight—just enough to negate gravity so's she can be pushed along easily. As for how the extradimensional apes respond… in particular, whether or not Jube judged their reaction accurately… we'll just have to see how it plays out.

When its pilot disembarked, the pigbot vanished. Even took it's neuron-scratching spacewarp with it, thank Tesla! Jubatus noted with satisfaction. "Okay—" Let me talk, woman! "Yeah, but—" Sigh. Okay, she's on a roll. Wait until she runs out of steam, then try to talk sense into her friggin' skull. An instinct-triggered upshift—Damn! That's one serious punch she wants to unload on me. Not gonna happen, lady.—allowed Jubatus to fully sidestep this attack. Okay, try the talk-talk thing one more time. He downshifted, just in time to say "Now—" and see the pigbot's pilot fall awkwardly to the asphalt! And—no joy. Change of priorities: Forget the bar brawl, try to keep the Nutcase From Beyond the Solar System out of trouble until her synapse closes. So he waited for the flood of words to recede, only listening to its content with half an ear… …wait. "on your planet"? There's a whole planet of things like me!? This body is an actual species, not just a bioengineered one-off!? As the bluish woman revealed more of her interactions with the culture she supposed Jubatus to be a part of, the feline decided talking might actually be worth trying. Or maybe not… where do I begin..? Eh, it's better than trying to pound her into submission. "Woman, you've got some serious misconceptions here. So let me talk, okay? First: I'm strictly local, and was born human. The fur and fangs and all the rest of it, they're aftermarket modifications, not factory-equipped. So I have no idea whatsoever what's the deal with those 'big globe things' and the 'Marks of Shame' you mentioned. Second: You say your 'hog doesn't have any built-in abduction features, I'll take your word for it—but this is the second time I've been dragged along in the wake of a continuum-warping vehicle, and that's twice too many for my taste. Any chance you'd be willing to help me learn how to avoid getting dragged along like that? Third: I'm Jubatus. Or you can call me Jay, if you like. What's your name?" And he gave a palms-up gesture which the woman would hopefully interpret as 'go ahead, you can talk now'.

Question about your post whose first sentence is, Lulu dismounted from her spacehog and made no attempt to keep from looking pissed off., Gingerbread. Looking on Lulu's character sheet, it says in the Power Descriptions section that Should she be knocked off her spacehog or if she dismounts from it, it will automatically "poof" itself to a pocket dimension, so the spacehog should have poofed itself into storage at that point, right? But the 2nd paragraph of this post begins She paced next to her hog, which says that the spacehog is still there. So… which is it? Is the spacehog on Earth where Lulu can walk beside it, or is the 'hog off in its pocket dimension, awaiting the next call to action? I think the simplest solution to this puzzle would be to change the wording of the She paced next to her hog sentence. Maybe something in the neighborhood of She stomped back and forth, never letting that arrogant feline out of her sight ?

It felt like something was gently massaging Jubatus' brain with fine-grained sandpaper. Definitely an irritating sensation, but it was ignorable, with effort. Now that he had a chance to think about it, that weird pull was a sensation he'd experienced somewhere before… Got it. Little Miss Steampunk's ride. Not precisely the same, but a real close family resemblance. And in both cases, then and now, it happened while I was upshifted. Raw coincidence? Unlikely. Preliminary hypothesis: Some sort of space-warp, interacting with my Timeshift? If so, that could be what's trying to weakly sandblast my medulla oblongata. See if downshifting makes it ease up. And the feline did just that. Ahhhh… The weaker the upshift, the weaker the irritation. But when he downshifted to the common tempo of 1, he was met with— Was the hogbot's pilot human? Her skin and hair (both in the bluish range of the color spectrum) suggested otherwise, but Jubatus knew very well that human beings could have non-human features. Either way—Oh, great. Either she doesn't know that her ride can suck things up in its wake, or she's an obnoxious jerkwad. At least she's talking English, so let's see if she's willing to listen. "I didn't choose to hitch a ride," the feline declared. "What's this thing run on—a spacewarp?" At these words, the hogbot squealed; Jubatus winced as its sound lanced through his ears in a most uncomfortable way—Argh! Tune it out, just like you tune out screeching tires and 60-cycle hum and all the rest of it!—and then the unorthodox vehicle scraped itself to a halt—Tune! It! Out!!—against the surface of a parking lot. The cheetah's usual method for coping with irritation involved upshifting to make himself some extra recovery time; thanks to the hogbot's presumed spacewarp, that wasn't an option here and now… Calm down, Jube. Keep a lid on it, no matter how bad she pisses you off. He carefully dismounted from the porcine vehicle, then tried (with only partial success) to keep his ire from showing in his face and ears and tail as he asked the pilot, "One more time, slowly: Does. This. Thing. Run. On. A. Spacewarp."

9:48PM, 26 December 2012 WIthin a few blocks of One-Tooth Reefer's Jubatus didn't like the Fens; he thought the place stank. Literally. With his predator-keen nose, there was no neighborhood in Freedom City whose ambient aromas he actively enjoyed, just some places that didn't smell quite as bad as others. And the scent of the Fens was the worst of the lot. Still, stench-filled or not, the Fens were part of Freedom City, so he patrolled it as often as he would any other region of the City with a comparable crime rate. Tonight, this meant cruising by a highly disreputable hole-in-the-wall bar named One-Tooth Reefer's, whose owner was a recovering pot-head with horrifically bad dentistry. One-Tooth's patrons pounded the crap out of each other more nights than otherwise; this was 'merely' one of the evenings on which drugs like Max were involved. As he blurred along on his way to One-Tooth's, Jubatus noted something unusual in the air ahead of him: A large, flying metal pig. That carried a passenger. Who in Ford's name would bother to trick out a flying vehicle so it looks like a friggin' pig? Jube thought. Sure would be nice if the pilot was a peaceable sort, not that there's much chance of that. Okay, one more variable to worry about, damnit. And the feline zoomed forward, only to be caught in some sort of irresistable pull— "Rrroww—" he snarled as the invisible force wrenched him off the ground, and deposited him on the flying pigbot! "—wrrl!!"

This be the thread for die-rolls, Hero Point awards, and other such out-of-character activity related to guess which IC thread. Characters involved in this crazy thing: Jubatus and Hogrider.

Jay Xavier nodded wordlessly; what al Misri had just described struck him as a textbook example of 'doing well by doing good', and he didn't have any problems whatsoever with that. Here, Xavier interrupted the heroic financier, but only just long enough to say, "Take a rain check, al Misri. Snark is how I cope with idiots, and you're not stupid." And then Silhouette spoke of enemies, and keeping certain information concealed from hostile eyes; Xavier approved of her caution. "Good thinking," the feline said. "'It's not paranoid if they really are out to get you', as the saying goes. Hrrrmmm… How easy is it to trace your scent?" It was obvious that Silhouette had taken steps to conceal her identity, but did her security protocols extend that far?

Jubatus was not happy. Granted, 'not happy' was his default emotional condition, but the suffering child didn't help, nor did the fact that he was utterly powerless to do anything to relieve the child's torment. Bastards. They just ran through the area, zapping targets-of-opportunity, not giving a damn who got hurt… wait. Do they even know anyone got hurt? It was a logical question; given that most of the transformed people were 100% healthy members of their newly-assigned species, the sort of misfire that Jubatus was seeing now had to be a comparatively rare event. And since it had presumably been a drive-by zapping, the anti-social apes might well have been around the corner before they could have gotten a clue that a transformation had gone wrong. So let's say the apes don't know about any painful side-effects. Odds are, they wouldn't have zapped a kid if they did know… hmm. "Protect the offspring" is a bit of an innate instinctive reaction for primates; betcha it's an exploitable reaction! The ex-human, ex-cheetah hero realized he'd slipped into fast-time while he pondered; he maintained his upshift while working out details of his plan of action, then downshifted to speak to the mother. "Hello. I don't look it at the moment, but I'm Jubatus. I can't undo this transformation myself, but the apes who zapped your daughter are in custody, and I'll bet they can undo it. And I'm thinking they'll want to undo it if they see how your daughter is suffering." Hopefully they'll end her agony by reverting her back to normal, not by a second zap that completes the transformation. But either way, the kid'll be better off than she is now. "Can I bring your daughter to the apes who transformed us. let them see the results of their handiwork?"

Jay Xavier nodded his approval as he pored over the electronic 'blueprints' al Misri had provided. The feline had, himself, drawn up zeroeth drafts of designs for a superhero team HQ; while the plans he was looking at now shared very few specific details with his own plans, it was clear that whoever al Misri had tapped to create these documents, that person (or persons) had been thinking along much the same lines as Xavier. Meanwhile, it didn't smell like Silhouette was entirely on board with al Misri's proposal—there was a little too much Fear and Doubt in the air. Makes sense; the main reason I'm buying in, is because the man's scent told me he's utterly sincere. Without my educated nose, I'd probably feel the same as her. But Fear and Doubt or no, she was still here, which suggested that whatever suspicions she might have, she was merely being cautious. If there was more to it than just simple prudence, it wasn't likely that she'd accept contracts from the man! No point in telling her why I'm in; if i was in her shoes, I wouldn't trust the cat-freak to tell me the unvarnished truth. And hell, if it turns out that al Misri knows how to lie with his scent, I'll be the one who's screwed. And then Silhouette gave Xavier custody of the tablet she'd held, asking his opinion of the device. "Maybe we should compare notes on whether claws or gloves are the worst obstacle to tablet use. Personally, I've found a stylus to work just fine, like God and Bill Gates intended. The battery won't be a problem if this beast can be charged via contact-free induction. As for size, let the man know how big your pockets are; we'll see what he can come up with to fit them. And since I already carry a vest-full of toys that aren't bulletproof, I don't see where the durability, or lack thereof, will be an issue."