Curious Key

Kat ducked and dived across the platform, dancing out of the way of flashes of red and yellow, till she ran into a shot that had been aimed ahead of her, rather than at her. A blast of yellow energy took her in side, and only a quick twist kept it from nailing her straight on. Still, she felt it burn at her side, a startling heat that threatened to scorch her. But she continued on, the damage either marginal or ignored in the heat of the moment as she dashed open the catwalks and made a sharp turn toward the robots Serge had engaged himself with. Diving forward, Kat plunged her hand straight into an Artifizoid's torso and pulled out a cable, sparking with electricity as she drove it straight into the face of the second.

That hit home, really. Warp had helped to ward off kidnappers with submarines, bank robbers with cold powers, theater-hating ghosts and more. "Maybe." She said, propping both her hands on her hips. "But people in danger is always people in danger, no matter how much it happens." Alternate dimensions and weird otherworldly stuff? Just what she needed. Warp wore her best wry smile to keep the anxiety from her face. There was nowhere in the world she couldn't go, but if it wasn't in the world . . . Warp watched Pitch work, tapping her fingers against her side, fighting to keep from chewing on her lip where the others could see her. Once Pitch reported back, Warp felt relief. A call to action was something she could contribute to. "I'm guessing that means walking through won't kill us then." And just like that, Warp was gone from there, and standing in front of the O'Neil's door. It took a step to take her inside, and Warp was overwhelmed with a curious sensation. She shook her head, looked around into the endless hall. "Huh," she said, glancing around, fighting back a pit of uncertainty in her stomach for umpteenth time since she started this heroing business. She stepped to the side to examine the extradimensional invasion a bit more closely. "Neat."

Sorry I didn't post sooner. Got a little sick. 19.

Warp glanced from her perch at the schoolteacher and raised an eyebrow. "Yeah," she said, casting her eyes around the blockade, keeping her voice deliberately bland. "That's what's wrong with this picture." When Captain Maddicks started his presentation Warp crossed the distance with a thought and peered at the pictures as though she understood what it meant. It wasn't until Maddick was finished speaking that it clicked. "Sounds like a one-way portal," she said, like it was the most common thing in the world. "We've gotta stop it, yeah, but . . ." Warp bit down on her bottom lip. "If all that's in there is this weird hallway, where did O'Neil go?" And where are the people inside?

Warp waved the question off. "Nothing out of the ordinary," she lied with a smile on her face, tucking her arms behind her head. Generally, Warp liked to keep school trouble out of the eyes of anyone who might say she'd be better off staying in to work on it, and more than anything right now all she really wanted was to hurt someone who deserved it. Deflection, then. "And it's fine," Warp said, "I needed some time to touch up my history project anyway." It had only taken a few days but technically true. "Don't worry about it."

Warp rushes over the catwalks on foot and jumps alongside Serge into the cluster. She gets close and tries to hit one with a martial arts strike. 30. I'll assume that hits. 22DC toughness. If that destroys it, she'll use takedown attack to hit the other robot. And if not, she'll be close enough to it to give the other robots nasty penalties for trying to shoot her this round.

Okay. Warp doesn't have her costume on, so she only has five toughness. First roll . . . 8 Not really willing to take that kind of blow in the first round of combat, so she'll be spending a hero point for a reroll. 24. Well damn, I would have accepted a bruise! Warp tanks the blow like she isn't a five-two waif.

For her part Warp was late by about a minute, taking the moment to make a joke and roll her eyes before closing the door to her dorm, locking it tight and making the full change into Warp. The air parted just above the Barbary Theater and Warp tumbled out of it, landing just as she pulled her hairtie out and vanished it back into the corner of folded space she hid the rest of her civvie clothes. "Sorry I'm late," she said, standing up straight and giving Velocity a sunny smile. All said and done, it had been a quiet couple of weeks for Warp. A few thugs here frightened away by a show of entropy that would've made a sith lord proud there, a mugging here . . . Most of Warp's problems had been of the scholarly sort. A project neglected one day too long, a long, ongoing arrangement for extra credit in a class she had refused to take seriously until it was too late. Punching things was just stress relief, at this point. Warp smiled and raised her hand, clenched into a fist. "Ready to find some bad guys to hit?"

Warp tried to rub the smell of the place out of her nose, holding her blaster loosely at her side, feeling less like a hero with a super science gun, and more like a girl with a toy weapon. She snorted at it, forced the corner of her lip up and drove the dread back for a moment longer. Her first instinct when she saw the robots was to hide, but where? There was nowhere on the walkway to hide behind, and before anything could be done they'd spotted them, turned and opened fire. What if the robots hit the supports and they tumbled into the vats of who-knows-what? Warp gritted her teeth and looked past it, aiming toward the robots and drawing deep on her power. A thought made her turn the blast up. A lance of darkness sang from her hand and chewed through the wall of the tank like nothing, spitting out of the other side and slamming harmlessly into the ceiling. Caustic green acid poored from the hole, coating three artifizoids which twitched and smoked as the chemcial wrought havok on their electronics until they collapsed.

Warp will take aim for . . . a section of the tank above the cluster of four, in the hope to drench and destroy them all! 22. Basic disintegrate, so 22DC toughness and 17 Fortitude drain.

Warp's Initiative: 19

I should probably tag this too.

Reflex roll is . . .24. So she fails by exactly four. Lucky! She is only entangled.

Warp switches to teleport and uses turnabout to jump next to the illusionist, try to hit with an Attack, DC 22 Toughness and port a safe distance back.

They are sharp! It's where Sera gets her sword from, after all, but I think I'll refrain from adding an attack to it till there's enough points in her flight array to make it worth it.

First, rolled to resist Rapids: 17. That's just a bruise. Warp can eat that no problem. Reflex roll on the mental attack comes up a 16, so that's a hit. Warp has evasion 2, so she takes half damage whether she succeeds at the first save or not, so keep that in mind when checking to see if this does anything: 23

I was basing her lack of additional limbs on several builds floating around, like AA's or TT's the thought I had was that if they're useless for anything but flight it might not need apply. Giving her glide does have some merit, but if I do that then I'd also want to give Sera some means of getting into the sky . . . so probably a bunch of leap. But those points have got to come from somewhere, and the one point I'll get by changing flight to glide isn't gonna cut it.

Pending queries, pm sent... This edit I'll be funneling a lot of points into one place. Warp's Terminal array is getting beefier by seven power points, and another seven is going into a new power. None of the attack powers are going to be bumped up ranks, mind you, so she's still technically PL 10. First, her disintegrate no longer has the action flaw attached. Second, her drain toughness aura has been upgraded to a corrosion aura, with complementary incurable power feat to bring it into line with the disintegrate. Third, her teleport with the portal add-on no longer exists. Fourth, her regular teleport now has accurate. This brings her rank down from fourteen to twelve, though her effective rank is still 14, for reasons. Fifth, her Terminal Array no longer has the Power Loss drawback. It is now a complication applying to all mutant powers. Sixth, I cut out some superfluous complications that both seemed dumb in retrospect and had never been used in play. Seventh, seven points are going into a teleport outside of her main array. Two ranks, accurate, with turnabout. This stacks with her terminal array teleport, bringing the effective rank to 14. Eighth, to help pay for the loss of the Power Loss drawback, her Vulnerability has been boosted from Moderate to Major.

Base toughness of +six, brought down to five by the bruise. 20. Well all things considered that's about as good as I expect this roll is going to get. So it's NOT Warp's turn, because she's been dazed.

The tiny's gods tentacle smote Warp, sent her sprawling across the pavement. There was a taste of iron in her mouth, and a wetness trickling down the side of her scalp. She spat blood onto the ground, thought about pushing herself back up . . . thought better of it, staying down and pretending senselessness as she felt the lackeys tear their way out of her hole. She peered up, saw Glow slapped down again and breathed in, sharp, but stayed down. She waited until Marduk stepped through the portal, waited until he had turned away from her and raised his hands to conjure the barrier before she kicked off the ground, power shining through her eyes as she molded it to her will. "Bring that shield down," Warp hissed, with no intention of giving him a choice. She ripped through Marduk's barrier like rotten wood and drove a hand clad in black-red power that spread over his body like cracks in stressed glass, burrowing deep into his core.

When Lucy Meeks didn't show up at the theater before the performance, the director was livid, and Kat was too. They fumbled through the play without her, and Kat did her best to play both parts, darting in and fudging the lines and praying the audience couldn't tell. She followed the director into his office after when he phoned in Lucy's number, eager to hear her getting told off . . . But nothing came through. Cell phone, personal line; they called the main apartment complex and still no one answered. Kat felt her anger switching rails to worry fast; an innocuous question was enough to ferret Lucy's apartment complex out of the concerned director, and then it was only an issue of getting affairs in order and stepping out of sight. Twenty minutes later Warp fell out of a hole in the sky, landing the peak of a roof overlooking the O'Neil projects. Her heart turned over twice in her chest as she saw the flashing lights and cars gathered around the building, like a flock of crows waiting around a body. Another flash and Warp was standing crouched on a lightpost overlooking the scene, leaning dangerously forward, peering at the tenement. There were a lot of cops outside, but no residents that Warp could see. "Hey," she called down from her vantage point. "What the hell happened here?"

First, Warp is going to do a bluff check as a free action to try to make Marduk think she is still indisposed! She'll skill mastery it, which means he needs to break 26 if he doesn't want to get caught flat-flooted. Next, she's going to stunt corrossion off her disintegrate, reach out and try to touch the magus with ANOTHER full power attack. 16 I don't like it. Let's make use of that generous pool of Hero Points. 17. Well, that's less than eleven, so I get to add ten to it; 27. I imagine that's a hit, so 22DC Fortitude Drain and 27DC toughness for damage.

Fun fact for later: invisible castle is back up!

As she landed on the workshop floor Kat reached for her costume, only to press feebly against reinforced space again. Something like panic crept up Kat's throat and forced her to stop, breathe in the moment of privacy she had before the the others followed her. She grinned over her shoulder and put a hand on her waist when she heard them land. "I prefer professional asskicker," she said, brushing her bangs out of her eyes. "Let's just figure a way out of this, okay?" When she was in uniform at least, Kat felt like she wasn't talking out of her ass. Warp was a superhero, and she could pull that off. But Kat was just a teenager with powers, in her gym clothes, kidnapped by a madman in a metal cage with no way . . . Kat cleared her throat, shook her head and distracted herself with a closer examination of the room. White walls, white floor, metal pieces, yada yada yada . . . ". . . Wait." Kat stopped in front of a pile of machinary, a little higher piled than the rest, and behind it . . . She shoved it once, twice without it budging, but the third sent it falling with a terrible clamor as steel clattered against the floor, and Kat stepped back and raised her hands, wary of getting caught in some part of it as everything fell. Hidden behind the pile, now fully exposed, was a door. Moments later she had picked blasters out of a rack for each of the three. "Dunno about you, but my powers were feeling a bit slippery last I checked. And I want us armed," she turned back to the door. "Just in case it goes from slippery to straight-up dead."

Warp can help with the notice checks, but she is awful at science. In celebration of IC's return, I will roll it instead of skill mastering it. Fingers crossed! 23. Still technically higher than her skill mastery would have been.