Mutants & Masterminds: The Unlikely Prophets - Issue #3: "History is a Bomb"

[IndyPendant]

Sharatur opened the door and trotted inside. She was dusty and smelling of earth, sweat, fresh air, and exercise. She was also flushed and almost glowing, looking genuinely happy for perhaps the first time since the other met her.

"Hey everyone" she calls out brightly. "I miss anything?"

[SalmonMax]

Larissa nodded at Necronaut and asked, "Is Boston good? I live there, I know a whole bunch of doors you can use."

She scribbled more weird sort-of-hieroglyphic-but-not-really marks on one of the doors in Jack's house, and opened it from a hot Australian day to a cool New England night. Once Necronaut had passed through, she closed it and looked at Gloom.

"I'm not asking you to do it alone," Larissa assured Gloom. "I think with some help from the rest of us, and your own powers, you should be able to do what you need to do with no one knowing you were ever there."

Then Sharatur burst in, looking unusually pleased, and Larissa gave her a slightly confused smile. "Hi there...you're looking...uh...happy. What's happened?"

[Charlotte]

Necronaut walked through the door, looking around - having the presence of mind to remove his gas mask before he started off for the nearest cemetery.

As he made his way through the city, he didn't notice much difference between here and Chicago. He took the bus, and everyone seemed almost the same. Almost.

A few seats down, Necronaut saw someone viewing a video on his phone, shakily capturing the sight of a dark cloud surrounding a biplane in the middle of Seattle rain. The man with the phone nudged his friend and they crowded around the screen.

"New Order?" one asked.

"That's what they say."

"What do you say?"

"I say those helicopters look kind of... it looks like a chase. I dunno, man."

"Huh."

Norman saw the look on one's face, as he struggled to fit it into the world he knew, where the only people who could fly lived on thrones.

* * *

Back in Australia, Jack's fingers brushed his bookshelves. Mostly nonfiction, from the look of it, organized by date.

"Well, Shar, we lost Kenshin and Cyan. Cyan went off to do... something, I don't know, something about spreading the word of God. Kenshin just didn't have his heart in it. Said he couldn't control his sword. Norman's gone off to DAMMIT - "

Jack drew his fingers back, sucking on one. He bumped the table his bookshelf was perched on, spilling a few cards.

"Damn paper cut. Ow."

He looked thoughtful for a long moment. Then he knelt, feeling the cards.

"Hmmm."

[IndyPendant]

Sharatur blinked for a few moments, obviously trying to switch gears and process Jack's words. "They...quit? Just like that? Can they even do that?" She considered briefly before delivering a casual "Well, good. Kenshin was batshit crazy, and Speed Demon was totally unreliable anyway."

She looked over at Larissa, grinning again. "I just finished roaming all over Ayer's Rock. In one day. Not to mention skyjumping without a parachute--or a plane, for that matter! I'm starting to feel a bit better about this whole impossible situation."

She turned back to Jack as he bent down. "Uh oh. I know that tone already. What have you done now?"

[Necronaut]

Norman pulled his eyes away from their conversation, trying for his own part to imagine what more obvious dissent might do to the populace. The Samauri's vision of a world of violent chaos danced around his head briefly. He felt a twinge of guilt as he realized, now that he had the wherewithal, he'd fight the Order regardless of the consequences of their fall. That twinge was quickly dismissed.

He wondered if the team's work in Chicago might have been spun as well, or simply covered up altogether, and resolved to look up the news from his old home-town later on.

When the bus finally arrived he paused for a moment before stepping off. "It was definitely a chase." He noted casually to the pair of news-readers. With that, he vanished into the grave-yard.

[z-Gloom]

Gloom nodded at Larissa's words, but didn't look entirely convinced. She was, she realized, afraid of taking on the Order head-on.

That was probably because she'd seen so many people lose that fight - and what became of them after.

"Let me know when and how," she rasped before settling her water buckets in her wheelbarrow. "I'll be there." No matter how much she didn't want to be there.

[Charlotte]

Norman left the bus and made his way over to a Boston cemetery. This was noteworthy because it was Boston's version of New York's Potter's Field - a place where the nameless went to die.

He entered the cemetery, feeling that familiar tingle he felt when entering a place meant for the living and the dead. He closed his eyes, and called them up.

It took some talking. It turned out that many of the anonymous dead just wanted a name on their tombstone. Many others were too far gone to be coherent. And then, Norman encountered who he was looking for. A prison inmate.

* * *

Jack brushed his fingers over the cards as they'd fallen. At Sharatur's voice, he spoke.

"I can't be sure. It's... unclear. But I think someone else just heard the song."

[SalmonMax]

"Hold that thought, Gloom," Larissa said. She looked at Jack.

"I thought the song was already gone. How could he hear it now? Can you tell where he is?"

[Radiance]

"We need to go get him and find him, before the Order does."

Hikari smiled. They'd lost two teammates, but another might have been found. She knew they'd need all the help they could get to handle this task,so maybe this new person would be able to help.

[Necronaut]

"I'm sorry guys, I don't have a lot of time to help... but I'll do what I can. This is just a temporary thing, ok?" He reached into the interior pocket of his lab coat and pulled out the instrument of his new charges' salvation. It was a magic marker. "Hm... well, it says it's permanent, but I think that's relative."

He was half-way down his third row of graves when he finally found what he was looking for. Though he had started with enthusiasm, the repetition of his task had gradually lulled him into a dreamlike stupor. Most of his mind was occupied with random imaginings; the various mental preoccupations that kept him safely disconnected from his previous occupation's less pleasant moments.

"Hello, please spell your first and last name and state your date of birth and death if you like." After monotonously reciting this functional litany he waited for a cogent response and, upon receiving one, quickly but elegantly scrawled the relevant information onto the simple blank tombstone. "If you've ever heard of the 'Iron Gate Prison' please let me know. Thank you. Rest in peace." He was moving on to the next headstone and attendant ghost before he realized, at last, he was getting more than the usual expressions of gratitude (or mournful, wordless vocalization as was sometimes the case).

[Charlotte]

"Maybe the song has echoes. Maybe it's still playing. I don't understand how it works much more than you do." Blackjack ran his fingers over the cards. "North America... the west coast, or close to it. Get a pen, write this down."

Blackjack rattled off a string of numbers. After a quick search, they determined that the address they were looking for was somewhere in Silicon Valley.

* * *

"'Iron Gates?' Never heard of it. I know prisons, though. Name's Ty Coates." The luminous form that hovered before him gestured towards his tombstone, which had only a serial number chiseled into it.

"What kind of prison is this 'Iron Gates?' Order has a lot of 'em."

[Necronaut]

"Wait What? Oh!" Norman paused to blow on the recently scrawled name, wanting to make sure the indelible ink dried before the rain he suspected was on its way arrived. "Well, I don't know a great deal. I guess Iron Gates is sort of a secret. It's where they might keep prisoners they just wanted vanished... people dangerous to the Order who maybe hadn't done anything wrong at all, if you know what I mean. Or, perhaps, people they suspected would be useful eventually and didn't want to, pardon the expression, inter irrevocably."

[SalmonMax]

"Silicon Valley's a big area," Larissa said. "But at least there should be lots of pictures of doors online. Jack, I need to use your computer really quick."

She hurried over to the adjacent room and using an Earth mapping site, picked three places to memorize doors from, that would between them cover the lion's share of the valley.

"Are we calling everyone on this?" she called as she looked up the pictures of gas stations and restaurants online. "Or do we want a smaller, subtler team?"

[Radiance]

Hikari nodded. "More people does raise more questions."

"Whatever's easier for you to manage since you're handling transport."

[Charlotte]

"Huh." The ghost thought for a long moment, then chuckled.

"There was this one guy who kept stirring up trouble. He wound up in the clink for stealing from a Magistrate's car, you see. Very punishable offense. Inside he was always talking about how it wasn't right - the Order, I mean. How if we showed solidarity we could stand up to them. And the riot broke out and they put a stop to it real fast. Had one of their armored knights in the big robot suit show up. Used subsonics on everyone. Not pretty.

"They transferred him out, along with a few other ringleaders. They didn't say where, but it sounds like the kind of place you're talking about. They said... heh. I remember this. They said he'd have a great view of the Olympics. That mean anything to you?"

* * *

"I don't think we need everyone. Whoever wants to come, should come. Larissa, think I've narrowed it down enough... I have it at... write this down."

A quick check at the computer showed that the coordinates were a deli. A fairly nondescript one, except for the fact that its website advertised 10% off for employees of De-PX, which looked like a local technology company, one of the ones that were kept around because their infrastructure was useful.

"A deli. Hmmm. Wonder if they have super-cooking as a power. Whoever just showed up, I mean."

[Necronaut]

"The Olympics? Either the Order has a secret 'rehabilitation through sports' program or... Hmm..." Norman stared off into the distance as the wheels in his head turned. They idled often enough, and slipped gears from time to time, but at the moment they were oscillating his mind's eye between Italy and north Washington-State. "Thanks Ty, that's a lot more to go on than we had before. I should head back to..."

He looked down the row of graves, at the line of ghosts waiting to have their names remembered. He sighed.

"If you remember anything else, please let me know. I'll probably be here for a while." He popped the cap off of his magic marker and, with a grateful nod to the helpful spirit, stepped up to the next grave in need of marking.

[z-Gloom]

Gloom slunk back into the shadows, fading from their view. Back in 'her' house, she grabbed her belt again and snugged it around her hips. Then she disappeared again, coming back to the shadow she'd just stepped through. Walking into the light, she rasped, "Ready."

[Charlotte]

Necronaut went to other graves, performed other favors. Many of the ghosts promised to keep an ear out for him, spectrally speaking - but none of them had a lead like Ty did.

Back in Australia, Jack nodded in Gloom's general direction. "I don't know how the timing is on this, or how tight the security is, so we'll have to act fast. Anyone without a disguise, grab one out of the L.O.O.M. or make one up fast. Larissa, ready when you are."

[IndyPendant]

"Wait, what? Disguise?" She looks down at herself in something akin to horror. "I just got back! I haven't cleaned up yet!" Her hair is matted in wild disarray, dust mixed in with the strands. Her clothing is rather dirty and sweat-stained, and there's a large brown smudge along one cheek.

She approaches the device the team just freed from the Order, eyeing it as if it were a very dangerous, savage beast. "How do I use this thing, anyway?" She looks at herself again. "No one would recognize me dressed like this, would they...?" she asks somewhat plaintively.

[Charlotte]

The L.O.O.M. looked fairly easy to operate. It had a touchscreen which displayed what the options were for the user, and what the results of picking certain options would be. It had a camera for scanning the user, and options like "advanced identity protection" that seemed to be designed to fool retina scans, biometric scans, and the like - all with a simple face mask.

[Radiance]

Hikari left, and came back in some different clothes, and her Blonde bombshell form. She would take the percaution of a suit from the LOOM as well.

"Better to be safe than sorry."

[SalmonMax]

Even Larissa made a simple domino-style mask with the LOOM, reasoning that her glamour spell couldn't mask her biometrics.

"Handy gadget," she remarked. "Made by and for people like us it seems like. Anyway, lets get cracking on this."

She started the complex drawings, though it went pretty fast now that she had the hang of it. The symbols shimmered and faded into the wood of Jack's door...and the door itself became another one; one far, far away. When Larissa, wearing her mask and cloaking her appearance in magic, opened it, it opened out onto another landscape entirely than the Australian outback. She held the door open for the others, knowing the link would sever once it shut.

[IndyPendant]

Sharatur is far more hesitant using the LOOM; by the time Larissa steps up and whips up a mask, she's somehow managed to tell the thing she wants a green and white striped, rabbit-sized bodysuit, complete with ears. She wipes that and is ready to start over, muttering "I think I've got it now" when Larissa walks off with a simple mask. Sharatur tracks Hex with her eyes, then looks back at the device. "I'll have what she had. Only, make it green. No, so it matches my eyes. Right. And more" she gestures vaguely "...pointed. No--" she looks over at everyone starting to head through the portal. "Okay yeah, sure, good enough. Send it to the, uh, printer? Thing?"

She snatches the mask and makes to dash for Larissa's portal. Then she hesitates, looking thoughtful. She puts the mask on and attempts to teleport to the other side instead.

[Charlotte]

Sharatur's attempt to blip through the portal succeeded - in placing her in the room that was on the other side of the door, still in Australia. Apparently, the way Hex's spell worked, one actually had to travel through the door itself.

As they emerged from the door next to the diner, there was the blaring chirp of an alarm that drew their attention. Those with eyes, looked across the road to the squat building - and specifically, towards the armed men running out of it, chasing another man kitted out with strange glasses and wielding a small gun, a shimmering field around him.

The guards fired on him. He flinched at the impact, but was unhurt. He looked at the assembled group, pausing in mid-step.

With his usual superb timing, Blackjack spoke. "Has anyone asked you who you are and why you're - " He ducked as a ricochet exploded the brickwork over his shoulder. "Close one."

[Thomas Froit]

Thomas stared for a moment at the group, and the closing portal? Either this was the new Order people were talking about, or.... he connected the words of the song and the Mathemagician with this older man's words. Hmm. Time to figure out who they were.

"That depends..." Thomas replied, surprisingly casual despite the force shield repulsing a fusillade of pistol shots.

"There's a song making the rounds with those lyrics. Do you know it?"

[IndyPendant]

Sharatur placed her fists on her hips. "Damn. Well, at least I know for sure, now." She turned and trotted through the door--and into the building on the other side. She paused, and turned to face the magical portal still displaying the Australian home, blocking the way outside to the rest of the group. "Oops."

At the last moment, Sharatur reconsidered just teleporting through the building's wall. She decided to head over to a nearby window instead, padding silently out of view just as Larissa canceled the spell. Sharatur settled by the window, satisfied with her position. She was well hidden from view here, yet she could observe the whole scene, and most of the outside conversation floated to her through the door.

"Just in case" she muttered to herself. "You never know." She was startled by a strange thrill of pleasure she got, though. She was enjoying herself, seeing without being seen! There were men with guns out there, potentially lethal violence was likely to erupt--had already erupted!--at any second, and she was unable to suppress her delighted grin simply from spying. "I am totally fucked up."

[Radiance]

Radiance's field flared into being, energy swords in her hands. "Holy crap, talk about a hornet's nest.."

She looked to the strange new guy and nodded. "Yeah, we know it."

[Thomas Froit]

Glitch's eyes widened, before composing himself. More.... not-average-human powers? The burst of inspiration and techo-development of his he currently refused to define as superhuman. Well, time to hedge his bets a little.

"I'm going to take a wild guess and assume the Order has it out for you? Because if so, how... you got here, might be useful for getting out, what say?"

[z-Gloom]

"Chat later, kick ass now," Gloom chided in her raspy voice as she stepped out of the shadows and hefted a pistol in two of her hands. The third hand held a set of handcuffs; the fourth one remained free.

"Or we run," Gloom added. She took a shooter's stance. "I vote kick ass." She presented an odd appearance, in the remnants of a Knight's uniform, with four arms. "Either way, decide fast."

[Charlotte]

"I say run. We don't need to risk a fight. People might get hurt, who don't deserve it." The man with the strange shades that made his face hard to read stared at nothing, but Glitch knew he was talking to him. "But tell me this, whoever you are... how do we know we can trust you?"

A bullet exploded another brick over his shoulder.

"I mean, besides the fact they're shooting real bullets."

[Thomas Froit]

"Thomas, and good question of your's.... You think we can wait until the Order puts out a WANTED bulletin? Since you seem anti-Order, I think that would confirm I can't sell you out."

Thomas' dry voice continued to seem calm even with the bullets flying and pattering off his field. He put away his gun and stared at them. "Well?"

[SalmonMax]

Hex shook her head. "You're who we came for," she said shortly. "It'd be stupid to come here and risk all this for someone we then turn around and refuse to trust. But this isn't a good place to have this discussion. Hold them off while I get us out of here."

She started drawing peculiar symbols on the door they'd come through...runes that Thomas could almost swear looked subtly different each time he looked at them, and writhed like snakes in the corners of his eyes.

(OOC - Making a portal to some relatively safe/remote spot that isn't Australia, so we can talk without bullets, but not give away our hideout right away.)

[Charlotte]

The portal opened, on wherever Hex had decided was a safe "neutral ground," while the others stymied the guards who were determined to gun down Thomas.

Click to reveal..

OOC: Hex, the portal can go to any location you're familiar enough with, so your choice where this leads.

[Radiance]

Radiance moved forward, her protective energy barrier flickiering blue-white like the swords she carried. She would try to protect the others and buy Hex some time.

[Charlotte]

Click to reveal..

Hex, last time I talked to her player, mentioned a park in Boston, so we're gonna go with that. If this is incorrect, let me know.

The door led out into the middle of a Boston park, with relatively few people around. Hex shut the door behind them just as a stray bullet thumped into it - leaving a dent she could see from the other side. They had just emerged from a portable bathroom door.

[z-Gloom]

Gloom turned to the newcomer as her three occupied hands worked on becoming unoccupied. "Welcome to being on the Order's bad side," she said gruffly in her harsh rasp. "Now that we're safe, mind giving us some information about who and what you are?"

She didn't quite trust this new guy yet. He was a latecomer, and she didn't put it past the Order to try to get a mole into their ranks. The only reason she wasn't treating him with more open suspicion was that Jack had sensed him. That gave him some credence, but Andi had been a cop too long to just take that at face value.

[Thomas Froit]

As soon as he got through to the other side, Thomas relievedly shut off the force shield and pocketed the blaster. No use in having anything eye-catching in sight. He glanced around and looked a little unsure.

"You sure this is a safe spot?" he asked concerned. This was a bit of a possible sitting duck in the open. Then the shadowy woman started asking him and he sighed.

"Fine. Have it your way. My name's Thomas Froit, and until just a little bit ago, I was an engineer at De-PX. And then this morning at work, I hear this mysterious song you guys seem to know about, and..."

How to describe what had happened to him? Kind of hard to truly encapsulate the words, but...

"You know how there's mentally a lead blanket in your brain that prevents someone from coming up with an innovation? By the time the song was over, mine had disappeared. I felt it go. Then, I started getting dozens of ideas, one that could solve my current project, and ideas for stuff like you've just seen."

"Now how did I get to this? Well, I found myself tinkering in the company engineering facilities, and the CEO found me. They had cameras, of course. They were actually impressed, and if I didn't remember my lingering suspicions about the Order, I would have definitely would have given them this tech and milked it for all it was worth. Suspicions ended up being put into words, and predictably they tried to arrest me. Fat chance of that happening. And so I fled, and now we're here."

The blind man paused curiously as he was listening, then asked, "Why did you have suspicions about the Order?"

Thomas sighed and it was clear he was dredging up painful memories. "Mom and Dad used to work at De-PX. Then Dad got an Order flunky with a little too much clout pissed off at him for reasons of the personal kind. My parents were blacklisted from the tech companies thereafter. It played shit with supporting the family until I got a steady job at De-PX. Irony for you."

[SalmonMax]

"Still," Hex said, "That's not really the Order's fault. That's just one flunky with clout, being a corrupt jackass. Just a second, there were more bushes here when I came here last. They must have relandscaped. Let me just turn back the clock a bit..."

She opened the large book she'd been reading from when she drew the marks on the door, and began speaking some crazy language that sounded a little Greek, a little Latin, a little Chinese...it was all over the place. But whatever it was, it must have worked because suddenly there were bushes sprouting out of the ground all around them, making a hedge that concealed them from sight.

"Okay, that should help. Don't lean against them though, they're not real."

She cleared her throat. "We're asking these questions because we all have information that implicates the Order in crimes against humanity...crimes that eve we're just starting to learn the full extent of. We want to remove it from power. Now, if you're just mad at one man within the Order for making your life hard, that's one thing...but if you understand what the Order is, and what it's doing...well, that's another. What do you know about the Order?"

[Thomas Froit]

Thomas scowled fully and deeply. "I know that the man who did this is not the only case. What happened to my family was but one case of a greater disease. The Order is an international police state, with at least some corruption, while possessing a level of control over its citizenry that I'm sure no one in an earlier time would have tolerated at all. Hell, it's already guilty of crimes against humanity. What do you call going into people's minds, and shutting off the part that creates innovation, that raised us from the animals? It's a crime and insult rolled in together in one. Before today, I'd never have considered fighting the Order. But now... I think I've got the know-how, you've got numbers and powers. I've got nothing to lose now anyway. I'm in, if you all agree."

[Charlotte]

"It's risky, kid." Blackjack adjusted his darkened glasses. "You hide, and trouble might not find you. With us, trouble will. You really up for all of that?"