Archive Mutants & Masterminds: The Unlikely Prophets - Swords And Sorcery: Larissa/Kenshin

[Charlotte]

"Did they? Damn. I mean, I can't see but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to say 'fuck the Order.'" The blind man seemed cheery as he continued walking down the street. He looked in his mid-fifties, his haircut fresh and his face unevenly shaved and tanned. When he spoke he had an Australian accent.

Tokyo's city street was busy. A child was playing with a radio controlled car on the sidewalk. A maintenance man was working on the local fire hydrant. A few people were walking along, snacking on bagels and drinking coffee. Many of them stared at him. No one spoke directly, but there were whispers. They were looking at a dead man walking.

Larissa and Kenshin saw the Watchmen cruiser down the street. Obviously, the blind man didn't. He kept chatting. "See, most of the time when someone shouts or writes 'fuck the Order' no one says a thing, they just let him or her get his or he head bashed in. So I'm impressed someone didn't look away. Who are you, then? And why are you - "

The cruiser's siren chirped. Three Knights stepped out.

" - here?"

[SalmonMax]

Larissa froze for a second on seeing the Knights. The back of her head, always studious, found it odd that they always looked the same; in Japan, in California, in Boston...everywhere she'd ever seen them. The rest of her was locked in fear.

Except that, in spite of the fear, she found herself stepping forward as if to interpose herself between them and the man with the sign.

"Officers, hi. Look, this is really a harmless situation," she heard herself saying. "He doesn't mean any harm. He's just...just blowing off some steam. I'm sure you've all felt sort of bottled up sometimes and you just want to do something really sort of...cathartic? I mean, kind of stupid, but cathartic. Right?"

[The Scarlet Samurai]

"Sir, sir! Are you trying to get yourself beaten up? Why ...oh damn ..." Kenshin saw the Watchmen and things went from bad to worse. "Sir, we should get you out of that, we can explain that it was a misunderstanding, that somebody changed your board ... please, let me get this off you."

[Charlotte]

Click to reveal..

Larissa's Diplomacy Roll: 7

Kenshin's Diplomacy Roll: 16

Good enough to shift their attitudes towards Kenshin from Unfriendly to Indifferent; not enough to shift their attitudes towards the blind man out of 'Hostile' or Larissa out of 'Unfriendly.'

"You might want to leave, buddy." The leader of the pack - and it did feel like a pack - rested his hand on his baton. "You might want to run like hell and not look back."

One of them unbuckled the holster on his taser. A third didn't seem to be doing anything. "Oh yeah. Yeah, miss. I love catharsis. My job's very cathartic. I do cathartic things all the time. I'm about to do it now."

"She's right, you know." The blind man smiled, staring at nothing. "We all feel bottled up inside. Every day we know there's a boot on our necks. We take it out on each other, we take it out on ourselves, but never on the people who deserve it, because they say we can't. The hell with that!" The blind man stuck his middle finger up at the sky. "I know you're up there! One of you probably had super-vision or something so super-see this - "

Amazingly, the man's gesture was aimed right at the Order's symbol, projected by satellite and hovering in the sky.

"Oh boy. Oh, I am gonna enjoy this." The Knight's leader drew his baton.

Click to reveal..

Knight's Initiative: 3

[The Scarlet Samurai]

Kenshin slumped in defeat as the blind man made the situation worse. No point now in even trying to try and claim the guy was setup. Instead Kenshin folded the small knife and put it into his pocket as he backed away from the blind man, slowly moving around so as to be on the edge of the group of Watchmen. He readied himself for the inevitable struggle that would begin shortly, still unsure what he would do, how he would act.

Click to reveal..

Init +1

http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/2136014/

Result = 8

[SalmonMax]

Larissa took a deep breath. She felt...suspended somehow, like she was in a roller coaster that was just cresting the top of a tall hill and was about to plunge heedless and out of control.

She knew what she had to do. There were just so many people around.

In the eye of her mind, Larissa saw a page from the Book. The spell was a fairly simple one. A binding invocation.

She lifted her hands in a warding gesture. When she spoke, there was a...thickness to her voice that wasn't quite natural. It sounded a little as if two people with identical voices were speaking at precisely the same moment.

"The circle is open and you stand within. I bind you from doing harm to others. I bind you from passing the threshold. By my will, let it be. The circle is closed, so mote it be."

Nothing seemed to happen. Larissa took a step back as in her eyes she could see the outline of a circle burning around the Knights, though no one else seemed to see it.

She said to Kenshin, "Take him and get him into the museum. Hurry! I'll be right behind you."

(Init: 13 http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/2136942/ )

(Using 'Circle Ward' spell to create an invisible barrier with Toughness +10 that will impede the Knights and any attacks they make, but nothing else. They get a Reflex save at DC 20 to avoid the dome as it forms.)

[The Scarlet Samurai]

"What?! I'm not gonna let them beat you up, you've done nothing wrong." Kenshin wasn't entirely certain what to do, they were three on two and he had never even taken martial arts as a youth for exercise, he'd always preferred swimming. To the Watchmen he said, "Listen, clearly this is some big misunderstanding, the guy must be nuts or something."

[Charlotte]

The one standing behind the leader fired his taser, which impacted and discharged... a full foot before the blind man's chest.

The leader didn't fare much better. He slammed down on the circle ward with his club. It made a sound like a bell. The club bounced off, hitting him in the head. He stumbled backwards, over a remote controlled car that had stalled because its pint-sized owner was busy staring at the scene. He tripped and fell, colliding with the maintenance man working on the local fire hydrant. The maintenance man twisted the wrench at the exact wrong moment, and a high-pressure spray of water hit the Knight, flinging him into...

Nothing. He stopped dead in midair and slid to the ground. The water ran past him. He slumped, out cold.

The blind man smiled. "My lucky day."

Click to reveal..

The Knight's Reflex Saves: 4, 6, 13

Circle Ward's Toughness save vs. a club attack of DC 16: 17

Mook rules in effect; attack by its nature auto-hits, their leader auto-fails.

[SalmonMax]

Larissa stared in abject horror. She'd only intended to keep them back while the three of them ran away. Now one of them had been -knocked unconscious-! She pointed at the fallen Knight with a shaking hand.

"I didn't do that," she said, apparently nonsensically since anyone watching would have seen she didn't have any apparent role in it. "That wasn't what I did."

Larissa looks at Kenshin again.

"We really have to go. It's okay, they can't follow us."

She takes the blind man's arm. "You, on the other hand...follow us."

[The Scarlet Samurai]

"Buh .. what ... " Kenshin was already fleeing before he realized it. "What did you do!?" He looked over his shoulder at the two Watchmen pounding on air as though they were mimes. "Oh, this can't be good. Why did you do ..." Kenshin realized that the blind man was still wearing the sandwich boards and quickly tore them off of him. "No point in making it easier for us to get tracked down and arrested."

[Charlotte]

The blind man lets himself be led along. By the time the remaining Knights figure out the dome and set to trying to break out of it, Larissa, Kenshin and the blind man have entered the museum.

Click to reveal..

Combat rounds are off, so post as you will.

[SalmonMax]

"Door," Larissa mutters, looking around. "Door...we need a door."

She looks at Kenshin and the blind man apologetically. "I'm sorry, we havent' got time for me to learn a new one. I'll take us back to my house, and we can work out what to do next from there. Hopefully those Knights didn't bother to record our faces..."

She starts back towards the gift shop, but stops when she sees the bathroom symbol nearby. Faster and easier. Better!

"This way!"

[The Scarlet Samurai]

"What? No, I'm not ... what?" The woman, this woman he didn't know at all was dragging them to the men's room. "Miss, what are you doing? How do you think we are going to get out of here to go anywhere without passing by those Watchmen?" What have I gotten myself into?

[SalmonMax]

Kenshin saw the woman pull the large book out of her handbag and open it to a page marked with a colored strip of paper. She then started drawing weird little signs on the bathroom door with a black marker, occasionally checking the book again.

"I know...this won't make any sense to you at all," Larissa said to him as she drew, without looking back at him. "I'm really sorry. This was not how I saw this working out."

"On the other hand, I guess this is as good a demonstration as I can give to show you what I mean by this book being special."

She finished the last symbol, and before Kenshin's eyes the door...changed. One moment a sort of faded lime color that matched the museum walls, with the universal sign for 'men's bathroom' on it...and the next a plain wooden door with an eyehole, painted beige.

Weirder yet, when Larissa opened it he could see a house through it. A living room, a hallway, and what might have been a sliver of visible kitchen off to one side down the hall. Not a men's room at all.

Larissa motioned. "Take him and go through. I'll go last. When I close the door, the connection will break so they won't be able to follow us."

[Charlotte]

"Now that's interesting." The blind man sniffed. "Suddenly I smell microwave popcorn. This bathroom must kick holy ass if it's got that."

[The Scarlet Samurai]

Kenshin's eyes grew wide, "Wha? How did you?" He stared at the door and the room beyond, the room that couldn't possibly be there. Into the realm of the Oni I go. Kenshin tugged the blind man as he stepped through the door in the world and waited to see what madness lay beyond.

[Charlotte]

The effect was a bit like stepping from a comfortable shopping mall into the outdoors on a day when the weather was off. A slight change in the environment... not an uncomfortable one, but a noticeable one.

"That's popcorn all right. Save any for me?"

[SalmonMax]

The madness turned out to be a small but serviceable one-bedroom, one-bath house. There were a bunch of boxes of knickknacks and various old, dusty things arranged in the living room...many of those boxes were also full of books. Some had folded clothes or kitchenware or other things. It looked like someone was moving in. Or out.

A little strange, since the house already had plenty of stuff in it though.

And it did smell a little of popcorn.

Larissa came through the door then as well, and past her Kenshin could see the museum in Japan. Then she closed it and waited a few seconds, and opened it.

It was a closet door. There were jackets and coats in it. And an upright vacuum cleaner.

She closed it again and turned to face her new houseguests.

"Um. So. This is my house. Make yourselves at home. I have milk and juice and tea, and water. Don't get TOO comfortable though, because I'm not sure we should stay here for long. If one of those Knights got footage of my face, they may look for us here..."

[Charlotte]

"Son of a bitch, he was right. I found them. The last of the good guys." The blind man chuckled. "Ma'am, if it was a normal cruiser then you'll be okay. If it was a riot van with a dome thing on the top then you might be in trouble, but something tells me you lucked out."

He removed his visor-like sunglasses, revealing eyes lined with scar tissue and milky white irises. "So hello there, you two... two of you, right? I'm Jack McNeil. Call me Blackjack. So anyone ask you who you are and why you're here recently? And is there any popcorn left?"

[The Scarlet Samurai]

"Who are you lady?" Kenshin was having trouble taking it all in, it wasn't the powers this woman had, it was the entirety of the situation, the sheer amount of chaos that had suddenly taken his life over. He turned to the blind man, "And who the hell are you? We're wanted people now because of you!"

[SalmonMax]

"I'm Larissa," she answered, and quickly added, "And he's saying we're not wanted. Those Knights were just in a regular car, not a van with a dome on it. That means they might get descriptions, but they won't know our names or our faces. Not to mention they have no way of knowing we're not still in Japan...so we should be safe."

She took a deep breath to steady herself.

"Even so, that was a really crazy thing to do, Jack. What if we hadn't been there? Even if you do dislike the Order, what good does carrying around a sign do? You said it yourself...most people just look away. They don't even see it."

[Charlotte]

"Most people look away, yes. I was looking for the ones that wouldn't." Jack put his sunglasses back on. "Let me tell you how my week's been. I'm blind - surprise - and I've been blind for thirty years. I have a small house in the Australian outback, and I had, until about a week ago, live-in help. Lady named Lori Pine. She up and left a week ago. She left me this."

Jack reached into his pocket and withdrew a tape recorder. He pressed play. There was a thumping noise, as if someone was tapping the microphone to test it. Then a woman's voice came on.

"Jack, it's Lori. I know this won't make any sense. I know that after what we shared, me just up and leaving like this will break your heart. But I have to. I don't think I'm going to be coming back. What I'm about to do is... there's no real way to describe it. We haven't invented a language for it. Well, I have, but it won't make sense to anyone who hasn't been working on it for the past three decades.

"Yeah, I cracked it. That song I've been writing for thirty years? It's done. I wish I could play it for you but I have a feeling this is a song that'll only play once.

"You ever listen to a song and it takes you somewhere else, in your head? Well, this is a bit like that. Except it'll take all of us - the world - somewhere else. I can't explain it better, but if I'm right... if what we heard about the Mathemagician is right, then once this gets plugged into it, the world will shift under our feet. Things that were impossible before will be possible." She sounded a bit shaky and excited, suddenly. "The superheroes will be coming back. The world's going to let them back in, for just a second. You need to find them, Jack. You need to listen to a radio constantly for the next week. The Order controls all telecommunication through the Mathemagician and it's the key. It's how the song will get out. It's going to ask you and anyone else who fits the criteria 'who are you, and why are you here.' You'll be able to find them because I caught a glimpse of what you can do if the world lets you, and it's made me more confident than ever that this is the right thing. You need to find the superheroes, Jack. Because we're ruled by supervillains and no one's ever been able to stop them or stand up to them, and I know how that eats you up inside."

Jack rubbed the bridge of his nose, his face crinkling with loss. The tape played out. "I love you, Jack. It kills me to leave you. But if I don't do this then by the time we're gone they won't even have the word 'love' any more. I have to go now, Jack. I have to go hack the machinery of gods."

The recording ended. Jack pressed the stop button. He tucked it away.

"I get angry listening to the radio, listening to what they - " He pointed skywards. "Put us through. But I did it. Every waking hour I did it, for half a week, and then I heard the song. And afterwards I found that I had the most... uncanny luck. So I thought, 'how would I find you?' Well, I reasoned, any person decent enough to be called a hero would leap to a man's defense where all others would avert their eyes and look away. And I pulled up a world map, and I put together coordinates with these."

He pulled out a deck of playing cards. "I've played blackjack with Lori for thirty years with these. I know every fold by touch. I love blackjack, because it's random... but only to a point. If you keep track of cards, and if you're patient, you'll eventually find... what you're looking for." He gestures, indicating the room. "Before I ran out of cards I had eight 'hits.' One in Tokyo, two in Seattle, one in Chicago, one in the Grand Canyon, one in Boston and two in London. I figured I'd start in Tokyo. That I'd find who I was looking for there - someone who knows we all have a super-strong boot on our necks and who was capable of such amazing things that they could do something about it. I need to know if I'm wrong." Jack sounded suddenly uncertain. "So tell me if I'm wrong."

[The Scarlet Samurai]

"So that wasn't the Mathemagcian's voice? I need to get home. I need to go home right now!" Kenshin ran back to the door and flung it open, he was greeted with coats and shoes and a vacuum cleaner. He slammed the door shut and spun looking to Larissa, "I need to go home now, before they find them!"

[SalmonMax]

"The song." Larissa nearly fell over from shock. Kenshin's panic was all that saved her from that fate.

"Wait, stop panicking!" she urged. "They don't know who you are. They have no reason to go to your house! Just...relax for a second, Blackjack said something really important just now."

She looks at him. "I heard music. From my TV. And then the Mathemagician appeared and asked me who I was, and why I was here. I've been so focused on the Mathemagician I didn't even think about the music. Please tell me...what is this 'song?' What does it mean about these...weird events that are happeniing to us?"

[Charlotte]

"Lori worked on that song for thirty years. She knew how to play every single instrument I've ever heard of. I only heard bits and pieces all my life, but when that song came on the broadcast, I heard it all, all at the same time. I thought it was just her magnum opus. Clearly I was off. Asides from that? All I know about the song is what she told me, and you two, just now..."

"Well, that's one other thing. We used to talk about it. It's hard, getting information on any of the Order. Most people don't want to, for reasons I have some very dark suspicions about. But we had a theory that the Mathemagician isn't really alive. That whatever he, she, or it is, is a front for something else."

"And... what was your name, son? and what's this 'them' you're so worried about finding? You sound like Archon himself is on your ass."

[The Scarlet Samurai]

Kenshin was more than a little irritated at the way this woman avoided his questions and had now kidnapped him to who knows where via some sort of magic closet. The fact that she now simply pushed him aside to talk to this man had him all but fuming. As the blind man answered Larissa's questions Kenshin couldn't help but be drawn in. The man's story was interesting, and from a purely historical standpoint his account certainly raised questions. Any other time and Kenshin might have simply grilled the man over the minutia hoping to squeeze some hidden fact, some nugget of truth that the man had forgotten or dismissed over the years. Instead he was anxious and agitated, he realized why, he had left his father's relics on some shelf in a closet. He could feel their absence and the feeling had grown steadily more unpleasant as Kenshin had come closer to a realization that he had not bee ready to admit to, one that had been voiced by the recording the man had played. ...we're ruled by supervillains and no one's ever been able to stop them or stand up to them...

[SalmonMax]

As Larissa digested Blackjack's story, she looked over at Kenshin again and felt a stab. The poor guy was freaking out and she'd been too wrapped up in her own personal crisis to notice. Talk about bad first impressions.

"I'm really sorry," she said to Kenshin. "Everything's been moving so fast...well, that's no excuse. I've been very inconsiderate. Please understand, I just found this book last night. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, and what it says...what it lets me do. I brought us back here because...it's the only other place I could go that's safe."

She hesitated, then went on with the bad news.

"The problem is that there's only one door in Japan I know well enough to open to, and that's the door in the museum gift shop. Which we probably shouldn't go to. I can learn another one, but I'll need a good picture of it."

[Charlotte]

"Wait, hold on. We're not in Japan any more? And you're not from Japan originally, lady? Interesting..."

"Then the one I was looking for in Japan was you." He waved in Kenshin's general direction. "You said that something's at your apartment. What is it? Is it something... well... a little strange?"

[SalmonMax]

"No, we're in Boston, in the United States," Lari answers. "I went to Japan to meet the son of the man who gave my father the Book...who's right here."

She looks at Kenshin, letting him react.

[The Scarlet Samurai]

"And now you're going to take me home. Without delay." Kenshin's tone may have been polite but the look he gave Larissa spoke volumes. "As for why, let's just say that events have moved faster than my ability to comprehend. Something important was left behind and I wish to retrieve it at the earliest possible chance."

[SalmonMax]

"Okay...I will take you home," Larissa agreed, not wanting to make things worse. "I promise. But I can't do it right away. I need to see a picture of one of your doors to bring you back. If I take you the same way we left, we'd wind up back at the museum."

[Charlotte]

"They tell me they can do amazing things with search engines now. Just look up a picture of a street close by, or even his apartment complex. And while you're there - " Jack fumbled in his pocket, and produced a deck of playing cards. "I want to see if I can figure out where the other six are... if you have a chair and a table for me."

[The Scarlet Samurai]

"If you have a computer I can get you pictures. Quickly please, I should never have left them at home." Kenshin paced anxiously, once Larissa showed him the computer he was about to pull up his online photo album and a few pictures from the last time his parents had been at his home.

[SalmonMax]

After all the discussion, the reality is a bit anticlimactic. Larissa studies the photos, finally selecting one in particular that has a good view of the door that led from the hall to Kenshin's bathroom. She jotted a few notes down, got a ruler and measured the apparent size of the door, then the size of his father's head...jotted those down.

Then she got out the big old book, a marker and started drawing on her own bathroom door. It didn't take long. She made the weird symbols now with some confidence, only changing a few variables in the arcane equation that would guide the spell to the right door.

Then Larissa's door seemed to warp and shift, and it became HIS door. When Larissa opened it, it didn't show the hallway of her house behind it, but rather that of Kenshin's apartment.

"I'll hold the door open so you can get back," she offered apologetically. "If you want to. ...do you want to?"

[The Scarlet Samurai]

Kenshin puts lips requesting quiet and stuck his head through the door listening for any signs of Watchmen in his apartment. Satisfied it was clear he went to the closet and grabbed the mask and sword wishing that they were not so obvious. He'd not be able to keep them hidden in public without a large bag or a long coat. As his fingers closed around the items their very material construction seems to writhe under his grasp and change. The mask became a baseball cap with the image of an Oni on the front. The Sword shrunk and took on the benign appearance of his pocket knife. Smiling he dropped the sword into the pocket opposite his real knife and quickly tugged the baseball cap onto his head. He ditched his cell phone on the couch and made his way back through the door to Boston. "OK, I got what I needed."

[Charlotte]

"Nice one." Jack had already laid out an elaborate and random array of cards on Larissa's kitchen. He runs his fingers delicately over each card, whispering numbers to himself.

"Okay," he says, gathering the cards and reshuffling them. "Are you two interested in meeting someone else who's had a weird couple of days? Because I have an address and you have Google and if you can find a picture of a door, we have a way anywhere in the world. Like I said, I had eight hits. I found you two via them. There's a lot the three of us could accomplish. There's a lot more that nine could. Larissa, Mister Sanada, I have to ask you. Will you help me find them? Because you could turn a two week plan into a two hour one. And then... well."

He tapped the deck and put it in his pocket. "Lori was right. We are ruled by monsters and it's been killing me by inches for thirty years. No one's been able to stand up to them, and I think, with us? That's about to change."

[SalmonMax]

Larissa felt a sudden stab of fear at what was being proposed. Up until now, this had been a largely personal quest to solve a personal mystery. The book, her father, the strange appearance of the Mathemagician... That was as far as she'd worked out.

"I admit, there's things I haven't been happy about," she said carefully, as if navigating a minefield, "but I don't think I've seen a spell in this book yet that would do much against one of the Order. And even if we DID manage to win, what would we do then? Become the next Order? Everything hinges on them. If they were gone, society would fall into chaos."

Even as she said it though, she wasn't so sure. They couldn't have been around forever. Surely humankind had done without them once upon a time.

[The Scarlet Samurai]

"Yes." Kenshin was half surprised by the strength of his conviction as he answered the blind man. His father had been, something, a hero perhaps; maybe someday he would find out, but today he had the ability and the will to make the world better. It was a frightening proposition and he knew that he might regret it but something told him that this was required, that it was right.

"It feels right. I cannot explain but things are starting to come into focus. My father, he tried to get a message to me, I'm still not sure I understand it, but I know that he wanted me to do what was right. This feels right. The order, it's not right, people getting beaten for having an opinion; that's never right."

[Charlotte]

"We haven't had super-powered rulers forever. Before the Gap there were elites and dictators, yeah, but there were elected representatives as well, and at least if worse came to worse we were ruled by mortal men. Suppose Archon's immortal? Do you really want the next million years of human activity shaped by one man, whom no one elected and whom bullets bounce off of? No, they have to go. You've seen what they do. I think you've always wanted to do something about it but you never could. But you, miss? You stopped three of them cold with a wave of your hand. I think all three of us are out of excuses."

[SalmonMax]

"I stopped three ordinary people," Larissa retorts, "bullies with clubs. That's a far cry from..."

She looked at Kenshin, then back at Blackjack. Because the simple truth of the matter was there had never been any other people who had more of a chance than them. There was no fence to sit on. To act or not to act, either way was a decision. Taking action might not result in anything useful...

But not acting definitely wouldn't.

She took a deep breath, and spoke treason.

"All right. I'm in. Where are these others you're trying to find?"