Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'cannonade'.
-
August 15, 2013 The messages arrived in different ways for different heroes - Cannonade and Wander had theirs delivered to one of the anonymous tip drop boxes the Liberty League used to collect correspondance, Wail had his delivered by standard mail to Keith LaMarr's home address, while Willow's came via a scanned copy emailed directly to Vince. They were instantly recognizable as odd - the envelopes weren't paper but vellum, some sort of processed animal skin, and the stamps affixed to them were wildly overpaid, as if someone had bought a chunk of postage and slapped it on an envelope without knowing how the value of postage actually worked. Inside the envelopes lay a simple message written in thick, heavy block printing - again on vellum, albeit by something that looked more like a pencil. HELLO YOU ARE INVITED TO THE ADULTED HOOD CELEBRATION OF RUNS-WITH-FANGS-BARED. PLEASE COME TO BATSTO VISITOR CENTER AT SUNSET TOMORROW IF YOU WANT TO COME. WITNESS MIGHTS OF WITH-FANGS-BARED CLAN AND RAPTOR EMPIRE. A quick trip to Google found the Batsto Vistor Center easily enough; a historic "living history" village deep in the heart of the Wharton State Forest. Heroes who remember the encounter with emissaries of the Raptor Empire will recall Runs-With-Fangs-Bared, the teenage daughter of the raptor commander who learned a lesson about not calling humans apes all the time.
-
ooc
-
Saturday, April 6th 11:32 AM Cannonade usually wouldn't have been in costume and about town this early on a Saturday. But he, like the rest of the Liberty League, had been on high alert the last few days. There'd been a number of suspicious thefts in the Freedom area over the last few days, and if the pattern held up, odds were the thieves weren't going to take a day off. Midnight had been the first to notice the pattern. On Thursday night, at around 3 AM, several items went missing from the Harcourt family vault at Eastern Seaboard Bank. They could tell the time because the disappearance of the items had set off the motion detectors and pressure sensitive plates in the vault - even though the thieves had not. There was no sign of breach, no sign of forced entry, and no sign of electronic subversion of the vault's countermeasures. Then, around midnight on Friday, someone had done a smash-and-grab on the Valert mansion in the North End and had stolen several antiques from the family's private collection. Two thefts that might, by themselves, be either coincidences or the sign of a particularly brave gang of robbers. But the Valerts had a reputation for considering private acquisitions the family hobby. Their collection was rumored to consist of pieces that might better belong in a national museum - bits of Greek architecture, Renaissance painting... and paraphernalia from the homes of Hitler's inner circle. Likewise, the Harcourts had a black sheep in their family tree - Roland Harcourt, who it was rumored had made a bank securing Nazi funds in American institutions. Some of which he might have actually kept. So it appeared that somebody was going about stealing Nazi assets - or, worst case scenario, relics. Which was why Cannonade was on patrol in Midtown, keeping his eyes locked on the Super Museum. Midnight had been able to narrow down a few "avenues of interest" for the robbers to strike at, potential assets that the thieves might strike at - private collections, arcane libraries, and so forth. The Museum was hosting another retrospective on the heroes of WWII, this time focusing on some of the artifacts belonging to the Reich's own superpowered operatives. There was little chance anything was going to go down in the light of day, but he'd volunteered to keep an eye on Downtown. And hey, nothing wrong with spending more time at the Super Museum. "Nothing big so far," he said into his communicator. "Anything on your ends?"
-
The Liberty League and Sage try to figure out who's stealing Nazi relics. The answer? Fascist leprechauns. Yes, really. As the thread starts, odds are each hero is checking out their own possible Freedom-based cache of former Nazi belongings - dusty storehouses, old banks, mansions of the morally dubious, and so forth. Feel free to describe the scene.
-
Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013 11:23 PM Cannonade tread across the roofs of Southside, looking down on the streets below. He was looking for some sign that might lead him to the answer to the latest mystery in a city that never seemed to run out of them. Specifically, he was looking for an anachronism. He'd first learned about the issue at work, the week before. Harry, one of the long-time guys, had been talking about his brother. The guy had been working at a construction company that had gone bankrupt, and had spent months looking for a new job without finding much luck. Joe knew that well - his dad was busting his butt just trying to keep all the guys on the crew. But Harry's brother had called him about finding a new job, one that wasn't inside his usual skill set but which would pay well. He'd been gone two weeks, with his wife not hearing one word from him. But she had received something through her mail slot - a sack full of coins. Gold coins. He'd done some digging, checking over news articles on missing persons cases. Over the past three months, there'd been a few cases where the person who'd disappeared had been jobless, and had been so for a while. Not many articles mentioned if they'd taken employment before their disappearance, but the families had received items in the mail - a jade statue, for instance, or a box of rubies. Valuable things from people who had no idea how modern currency worked. Cannonade knew he wasn't the detecting type; he was more willing to throw himself into the fray and beat a problem until it went away. He'd checked the case files on the missing persons, finally finding a detective who was willing to bring in a hero. They'd let it slip that there was a detail in one of the disappearances that wasn't mentioned in the press - the man's daughter had heard the clopping of hooves on asphalt, and woken to see a carriage outside her house. She'd gone back to bed, thinking it was a dream. And now, Cannonade locked his eyes on the streets below, hoping for one hell of an unlikely sight, and hoping it might help him find where these people had vanished to.
-
Cannonade, Wail, Harrier, and Gabriel investigate missing people, end up dealing with an industrial revolution in Avalon. Odds are your character is investigating some aspect of the disappearances. All the missing people were jobless, but in different aspects - some were homeless, others were students just out of college who couldn't find work, others were unemployed and had been for a while. Somewhere in the disappearances lies the story of a carriage.
-
Monday, April 15th, 2013 7:32 PM The O'Neil Housing Projects were not exactly the finest place to stay in Freedom City. It wasn't like anyone expected anything better out of the Fens, but the place had one hell of a reputation - gang violence, break-ins, and a thriving drug trade. But it was also home to several people who really didn't have anywhere else to go, and who were trying their hardest to reach for something better. Cannonade knew of at least one of them. Darnell Franklin was a guy he knew down at the foundry. They weren't exactly the best of friends, but they'd shared a few lunches and talked about how the Comets were doing. When he didn't show up for work on Monday, he didn't really chalk it up to anything weird - probably just illness. But then Alex - who was friends with Darnell - had mentioned that his phone was going directly to voice mail. After he'd gotten off his shift, he'd decided it wouldn't hurt to stop by the O'Neil projects as part of his nightly patrol. When he got there, he found the place on complete lockdown. Cop cars were around the block, with a SWAT truck or two for variety. And it looked like some of the cops were making adjustments to the types of robots the bomb squad tended to use. Yeah. There's no way this can be good.
-
Cannonade, Wail, Pitch, and Warp respond to a series of disappearances and find that a housing project has been colonized by the Dimension of Doors. Cannonade, Wail, and Warp all arrive on the scene either because they know someone at the Projects who didn't show up for work/school/etc., or because the news has started to break out over police channels about how there's "a wide-scale event" going down at the Projects. Pitch, meanwhile, likely heard from her pet demon that something is "growing" at the Projects.
-
The night of January 15, 2013 2 AM The call went out to le Renard Rouge's, Cobalt Templar's, and the Liberty League's line, one after the other, at a time that just happened to catch them all when they were otherwise indisposed. The woman's voice on the other end is rough and raspy, with the tension clear as she speaks. "
-
Cobalt Templar, the Liberty League, and Eve Martel deal with some bad medicine.
-
Friday, June 29th, 2012 8:47 PM It had been a perfectly ordinary evening for the Liberty League. Then someone had to tempt fate. There had been the usual security briefing at the Midnight Manor, with a discussion of movements amongst noted villains, possible security risks, and other matters of importance. Someone had brought up the fact that the Super Museum was doing another wartime theater retrospective, including some of the safer treatises of Lady Celtic. And not fifteen minutes later, the silent alarm had gone off, instructing Midnight and everyone gathered around the table that four people who weren't supposed to were stomping about inside. One teleport by Edge brought the League into the lobby of the Super Museum, the statues of Freedom's fallen looming dark in the night. They could hear traces of movement down the hall. "All right," whispered Cannonade. "What's the plan?"
-
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012 8:52 PM The night brought a nice chill to Freedom City, a relief from the heat of the day. A mini-heatwave had fallen on Freedom, the heart of Summer right in the depths of Spring. While the weather forecasts said it would break tomorrow, no one was holding their breath. Cannonade was already sweating under his flight jacket; he thought about the possibility of making a costume that'd allow him to run about in just his shirtsleeves, but tonight was not the night for that. So instead, he hung close to the water, taking in the cool breeze that was whipping up off the water. He ran across the rooftops of dockside warehouses, looking down on the scenes below. There was always some game going on by the Waterfront, if you knew where to look. The smaller outfits competed over abandoned warehouses, using them to store or, in some cases, produce drugs. The larger outfits based their fronts out of the docks, using the apparent import of china dolls or stuffed animals to bring cocaine and heroin into the country. Cannonade slowed as he approached the lip of the warehouse roof, pausing to listen to the voices below. "This isn't what we asked for." "It's been a slow month." He crouched down, taking some cover as he gazed down at the confrontation. Five men in pinstripe suits were engaged in negotiations - the kind that involved wagging fingers and visible firearms - stood toe-to-toe with four men in denim jackets, all looking like some matter of metalhead. Cannonade recognized the patch of the Death Road Ministry on their jackets. "We're not letting you hold this place out of charity," said the lead goon in the suit. "If you think you can stiff us..." "Don't think we care," said the lead Minister. He reached into his jacket. "This is our place now. You can go tell your boss where he can stick that cigar of his." The men in the pinstripes went for their guns, just as the Ministers reached into their own jackets. Cannonade dropped down softly into the nearby alley, moving forward. Pretty good as gang negotiations go. Took thirty seconds for someone to do something stupid.
-
The Liberty League deal with the Crime League, a new hero, and other weirdness.
-
Cannonade, Glowstar, Wail and Gabriel all deal with shark drugs. And we don't mean "drugs for sharks."
-
July 4th, 2012 5:32 PM Joe Macayle stepped off the bus, feeling a bit out of his element amongst the swirling labyrinth of classical mansions. He'd been here quite a few times before, but usually at night and usually with an eye towards the back entrance. But standing before the gates of the Hunter Estate, in broad daylight, he really wondered if this was his place. Usually he didn't give a crap about things like this, but somehow, the invite had stirred up some lingering traces of self-consciousness. He'd come fairly dressed down - a fairly simple tee, jeans, and Docs, even leaving the braces at home in favor of a belt - carrying a cooler full of burgers in one hand and another full of ribs in the other. And yet, somehow, he found himself standing at the gate, wondering if he should turn back, get some better clothes or something. He shook his head. What the hell, he said. They've taken me as I am so far. With that, he rang the buzzer. "I'm here," he said into the intercom. "Don't know if I'm early or not..."
-
The Pine Barrens Thursday, January 4th, 2012 2:32 PM In all honesty, Cannonade could think of better places to be on a Thursday afternoon off from work. Walking down the Boardwalk, or getting a coffee and snack at the Black Petal. But here he was, flying in a helicopter over the Pine Barrens, looking for strange trees. Then again, he had to thank AEGIS for getting him out of work in the first place. They'd called him up with the assignment, and one call to the steel mill later - apparently cellulitis was the hot thing this year for sick day excuses - he had the next few days off, fully compensated. Which meant he was waiting for the other shoe to drop when Commander Grayston, who'd put him on the Nina al-Darsah job earlier in the year, swung by his apartment. "Aerial surveillance over the Barrens caught these a few days ago," Grayston had said, tossing a folder Joe's way. He'd picked it up and flipped through it. First was a photo from the sky, of a seemingly endless row of the famous pine trees of the Barrens -- only the needles were ash gray, and falling out in clumps on some trees. Next came photos from the ground, depicting the trees in more detail. The branches seemed to have grown in upon themselves, swelling until they burst or wrapping around themselves, and the trunks had turned the same pale color as the needles. A before-after picture, complete with time stamp, showed an AEGIS agent, clad in an NBC suit, taking an axe to one tree -- and felling it with one chop, as a large chunk of the base seemed to turn to dust with the impact. "...so, what, really local forest fire?" Cannonade had asked. "Budding firestarter?" "There was no chemical evidence of a forest fire -- no smoke traces, nothing. And unless this theoretical pyrokinetic could shut off his own fires, the damage would have spread farther than this. No, we've seen something like this before. Farmland around Salem, Massachusetts, 1927. Something fell onto a local settlement, spreading effects similar to the fallout of a nuclear explosion... only much more concentrated and with more mutagenic properties." "Great. Nukes. Mind telling me what this thing was?" "If we knew, we'd tell you. The phenomenon... vanished, just as quickly as it appeared. All any eyewitness could describe it as was a 'color,' similar to the Northern Lights. In any case, this seems to be the highest burst of damage from whatever it is - odds are that was the impact site - but we did find subtle evidence of a trail leading east. It's only a matter of time before this thing finds civilization." "And you want me to go in before it gets there," Cannonade had said. "All right. Mind if I make some calls?" The rest of the Liberty League had come out at the call - well, except for Ace Danger and Bombshell, who were still tied up in some sensitive business in Saudi Arabia - and, attended by more than a few AEGIS technicians, they scanned the Barrens from the air, looking for some sign of whatever was prowling through the woods, spreading blight as it went.
-
The Liberty League deals with something weird in the Pine Barrens and gets dragged into some of the stranger mysteries of the Soviet Union. For those among the League who are curious about the first incident, there are some folders in the helicopter with a much more detailed account of the first incident.
-
February 2012 Shoreline Battered and bruised, the members of the Liberty League watched as the Yamato Kaiju collapsed to the beach in a shower of burning debris, the robotic titan originally constructed by the finest engineers of the Imperial Japanese Army, circa 1943, finally defeated by the combined efforts of Freedom City's legacy super-team. Once forty feet high, capable of breathing radioactive fire and shrugging off heavy weapons fire, now it was nothing more than one more shattered legacy of World War II that had crashed against the rocks of the next generation of Freedom's heroes. It was cold on the February beach, but the brilliant red and white flames rising from the burning skin of the fallen robot dinosaur kept the more fragile heroes like Edge warm as he studied the fallen wreck. Mark wasn't one for a lot of abstract thought, but even he was moved by the sight of the fallen behemoth. (Well, mostly because while his allies had all taken their lumps against it, no one had been seriously hurt.) The Yamato Kaiju had walked across the seafloor from Truk to Freedom City, most likely going around the Straits of Magellan to avoid the Panama Canal, had survived nearly seventy years only to emerge onto the land and be beaten by the Liberty League over three long and difficult hours. "Okay, team," called Edge, stepping back from the burning dinosaur and feeling the slight ache from a near-miss that had turned into a sunburn thanks to his brush with radioactivity. "Let's-" Suddenly, up in the sky some thirty feet overhead, reality collided with reality as two shining chrome spheres the size of a Greyhound bus erupted from the same space and moment and collided with and fused with each other simultaneously. The twisted double-mass of metal came hurtling downward and smashed into the surf, just too far away for the heroes to reach before impact, kicking up a sheet of spray and sand as they landed.
-
February 2012 The team helps some stranded travelers get home. But who?
-
November 3, 2011 Somewhere in the Wharton State Forest Mark Lucas hated Nazis, which made it all the more awkward to be here in the middle of a growing crowd of them. His long-sleeved "Don't Tread On Me" T-shirt hid his lack of white supremacist tattoos, but his blonde hair cut very short let him look very much like an Aryan poster boy. This was not really reassuring to Mark, but this was the sort of thing you did when you took up the legacy of the greatest Nazi fighters in the world. He tried to remember his conversation with Cannonade that had brought them all there: Greta Ratner, aka the Aryan Angel, or as his UNISON file had described her "Britney Spears meets Eva Braun" was one of the most famous neo-Nazis in the country: there weren't many beautiful blonde eighteen-year-olds willing to shake their booty in the name of racial purity. But Greta had, through her own channels, approached Cannonade (the very face of skinhead superheroes) and asked for help: she was worried that her latest concert was going to be attacked by her many enemies, and that meant she needed a superhero to help. Of course it was a trap. You couldn't trust Nazis, even if they were hot blondes from the Midwest. Which meant instead of just one hero, the Liberty League was out in force! Even if Cannonade would be the only one the Nazis would be able to see in uniform. Hmming, sipping his Coke, Mark walked around the gathering crowd, looking for familiar faces.
-
November 3, 2011 The Liberty League deals with neo-Nazis.
-
September 12, 2011 Not long after their meeting in Paris, Edge made his own way to the Chateau Relais, following the plans laid down by Midnight and the more experienced heroes on the team. I guess I can't really call it Young Freedom; that belongs to the Claremont kids and anyway some of them aren't really that young! He'd hidden in plain sight as a UNISON employee on break, renting a car at the Bern airport and chatting volubly with the clerk there about how great it was to be in Switzerland and how much nicer it was than his usual African posting. From there, a car ride up to the mountains had taken him to the Chateau, where the last few weeks before the first real snow of the year had left the roads empty and quiet as he drove up and up towards the Chateau at an impressive 10,000 feet. Once there, he was all the cheerful, loud American tourist, buying a jaunty Tyrolean hat and parading around in it while he butchered German for the amusement of the locals, eating a huge breakfast in the chateau's impressive dining hall adorned with hunting trophies from all over the region. There were quite a few people there already, Japanese businessmen and quiet Swiss and Germans alike, and he let them see him without a trace of apparent artifice. The more of that that was in place, the better; who could be suspicious of that loud tourist in the silly hat? He kept a close eye out for his team, however, knowing that they'd find ways to contact him once they were all in place. Of course, with some of them, they'd be obvious even to him...
-
North Bay September 22, 2011 While interstellar monsters weren't the specialty of anyone on the Liberty League these days, the new superteam was on high alert as the Gorgon's approach brought a dawning chaos the world. They'd only been back from Switzerland a few days, but those had been busy days for many of them between the Gorgon's coming, Edge's visit home, and of course various changes in Wander's general lifestyle. The wealthiest neighborhoods in town had so far avoided the panic beginning to gnaw at the poorer areas of the city, or at least that panic had been confined to the interiors of beautiful mansions rather than on the wide streets. North Bay, the home neighborhood of Ace Danger and the Midnights, had locally been the scene of one particular set of bizarre local disasters: localized thunderstorms had rocked the area for nearly 48 hours, flooding the streets, blowing tiles off roofs, and worst of all setting several homes ablaze as lightning strikes rocketed down from the sky in the middle of the 'North Bay storms' as the news was calling them. No one had died, yet, but several people had been hospitalized from electrical shock and at least one home, the Munoz manor near the waterfront, had burned to the ground with total loss of property. It couldn't be a coincidence, and so the new team had gathered together beneath Midnight Manor to discuss evidence and options.
-
September 22, 2011 Wander, Midnight, Edge, Ace Danger, Bombshell, and Cannonade get a visit from that old-time Norse religion.
-
September 1, 2011 Jordan International Airport Freedom City International Terminal This is not why I joined UNISON thought Mark Lucas, keeping his annoyance off his face and a smile on it as he listened to his charge's complaints. "You have a UNISON escort because you're the daughter of a head of state of a UN-recognized nation," said Mark, feeling a little silly in his blue UNISON uniform. At least they hadn't made him wear the helmet on the plane. "and because Dr. Typhoon made the request personally." Princess Nina al-Darsah, the youngest daughter of Typhoon, the arch-nemesis of the Freedom League-turned-Middle-Eastern head of state, was about Mark's age. About to begin her first year as an FCU student, Nina was on her way back to Socotra for an urgent meeting with her father, who had requested not just a UNISON escort for his daughter but the most powerful agent in UNISON's employ. In fact, the man's exact words (as Mark had seen) had been "only the mightiest among your pitiful ranks is suitable to give security to the daughter of TYPHOON!" Pulled out of his camp on the Ivory Coast for this, Mark had spent the last day in the company of a gorgeous young woman with her father's tan skin, black hair, flashing eyes, and with the personality you'd expect from the daughter of one of the most absolute rulers on Earth. It hadn't been his favorite trip. "That's the third time I've made you tell me that, Agent Lucas," said al-Darsah with an amused smile as she folded her hands before her. They were sitting next to each other in the first-class cabin, Mark's uniform and her Socotran dress with its merger of Arab and Indian styles having gotten a lot of attention along the way. "You're very obedient. I was hoping an agent of the United Nations would have a little more gumption. But I suppose you'd have to be good at following orders to wear that uniform of yours." Oh, what the hell. If he was going to spend an entire transAtlantic flight next to this woman, the least Mark could do was try and make it interesting. What was the worst that could happen? "I'm good at all kinds of things, Princess," replied Mark with a warm smile as he turned on the charm. "And my job is to make sure you make it back to your father in one piece. And when we're done, if you'd like to see me out of uniform, I'd be happy to oblige you." He smiled, and actually got a blush from Nina, who'd evidently not expected that comeback. Out of high school and on his own, he'd only recently become aware of how good he was at flirting when he really put his mind to it. "In the meantime, though, the other passengers are arriving. Let's not give them any hint we're anything other than seatmates." They'd boarded the plane through a separate door for security, but since it was a regular commercial flight (Freedom City to Paris with a layover, and then to Socotra's big airport on the main island), the regular first class passengers were about to embark.
