Westport City IC (Villains and Heroes)

[sinisnalp]

Atomic and Astronomical had been working on trying to fix a few things while talking. They have been successful for some of the more immediately important things, but there was still a good bit of work to do, but they could only do so much.
"Suntech?" Atomic said, thinking for a second after hearing the comment. "I think that is over on 25th street. We were going in that direction soon if you want us to show you."

(yes, I did just make up a random street name)

[Jabez]

Lucien nodded to Friction. "Thanks for the save. Any clue who these guys are or what they were after?" The Warlock began to trace lines on the ground with his index finger, leaving a thin glowing line of light. After he had built a rather complicated arcane design he dragged a semi-conscious thug over and placed his head in the center of the circle. As the man came to his first view would be the ominous cloaked form of Lucien. His second would be the faintly glowing arcane circle he was in.

"Listen, Jerry. Can I call you Jerry? You are in a lot of trouble, but if you help me I can help you. Tell me what I want to know and I won't have to dig around your mind for it. Capesh?"

The crook began stammering but Lucien cut him off and asked a few very specific questions which the terrified thug answered readily. When Lucien was done he made a gesture and the arcane runes faded. "Run." Was all he said to the thug who scrambled away.

[General Scales]

"Couldn't tell you, nothing really recognizeable about them." Friction said. It did annoy him that he didn't already know who the criminals were, but he could find out later if need be. He had an odd feeling about the situation though and it wasn't helped when Lucien interrogated the thug.

"Get anything good out of the idiot?" Friction asked somewhat curiously.

[Invisible Man]

Burton Haringoth walked toward city hall with a smile on his face, his cane in hand and his bowler hat on his head. Sure, he was a bit eccentric at times, but he felt that the style suited him. He imagined himself as a sort of modern Oliver Hardy, though he could never pull off the mustache.

But the thought that ran most rampant in his mind was that this was it--his first day as mayor of Westport. He relished the thought of being able to actually do something about crime, of not simply leaving it to the heroes to deal with. His whole life had been leading up to this point. He walked into the city hall and was greeted by a receptionist. "Hello, Mr. Haringoth," she said. "My name is Laura. Could I get you some coffee?"

Burton smiled at her and said, "Pleased to meet you, Laura. That would be spectacular. Thank you." He walked into his office and saw that it was twice as large as his old one, as a councilman. He knew he was going to enjoy this job. He sat in his chair, reclined, and put his feet up on his desk as Laura brought in his coffee. "Thank you, Laura." Burton smiled and began sipping it, happy that his first day was working out so well. He called his communications advisor and close friend, Patrick, to his office. "Hey, Pat," he said to him. "So, the heroes need to know that I actually want to work with them. Could you arrange a way to tell them all this?" Pat smiled and said, "Sure thing, Burton, but I'll need some time." Burton laughed and said. "Sure, sure. See you in an hour."

He was going to enjoy this.

[Greycat]

Last item on his shipping list, the box of ZP cores. Like the stop before, he hacked the lock to gain access and secured the package to his board. He could here the sirens of the police as they set up their little so-called secure perimeters. Laughable. Such tactics wouldn't work on a villain of his caliber. Still, he supposed he owned them some attention for all the hard work they but into it. He sighed. But he had so much to do. Construction of the exo-augmenters, finalization of the satellite's support systems, and he had yet to locate the electron core he needed to finish the orbital platform. Two minutes would have to do.

He rose to pass over the stacks and blasted a hole in the wall of the warehouse. The moment he cleared the opening, the standard order was yelled over the bull horn. "This is the WPD! We have you surrounded Dr G. Land and step away from the board with your hands in the air!"

"I can comply with 33.333% of that demand," he respond. He lifted his hand halfway and blasted one of the police cars, encasing it in a block of ice. His powers were so much more effective in the open. The police opened fire on him, the bullets ricocheting off his extended hyper-agitated field. "So predictable." He rewarded their unsurprising tactics by hitting a few more squad cars, freezing a few more over, melting a couple and just plain blasting others. It was therapeutic in its own way. He was approaching the two minute mark when the helicopters showed up. Three of WPD's finest.

It would have been a much more impressive blockage if they had brought those in earlier, still ineffective, mind you, but much more impressive. Being in a somewhat altruistic mood, and not wanting to embarrass them too much, he didn't wreck them too badly. He simply trapped the closest one's rotors in a stasis beam, causing the poor craft to fall from the sky, only releasing with just enough altitude to salvage what could have been a fire crash into a bone jarring one. The other he simply blasted a hole in fuel tanks. The last one he hit as he climbed higher, sheering the tail off as it clear the rooftops after him, forcing them to make an emergency landing. He supposed that was all the time for 'therapy' he had for the moment. On to work.

[Clay]

Magma walked along with the heroes, encasing his body in a thin layer of stone, preventing further damage to the ground and keeping him for emitting extreme heat, and allowing him to get a bit closer to the heroes. He left his face molten so he could speak easily.

"You know it's ok right?" Magma looked at the Molly, "There are disasters everyday, usually caused by villains. We can destroy a few blocks every now and then!"

Magma attempted a smile, but feared it wouldn't be recognized on his molten face.
Silence passed as they walked... Magma felt extremely uncomfortable among these 'normal' heroes. He wanted to be accepted, he wanted people to be able to look at him and smile, not jump in fear...

"I promise I won't hurt you."

Magma uttered to the beautiful Martian before encasing his face in stone...

[Dr K]

Bloodthirsty Bob was gazing at the spacecraft that lay a short ways from him, deciding on what would perhaps be the best course of action; would it be more villain-y to sneak around undetected before boarding the spacecraft, or to simply stride forward, showing off his villainous laugh to the few onlookers nearby, attracting as much attention as possible?

The street, despite being the site of an alien spacecraft crash, was pretty close to being deserted; the amount of supervillains and dangers each of them had to face every day had made the citizens somewhat cautious and fearful (although generally not enough to not be targeted at least 4 times in their lives by a supervillain), and only a small minority tended to be genuinely curious before certain situations, thus explaining the lack of people in the street at the moment; everyone that could run on their two legs had done so in the last 15 minutes, leaving little behind them, except for a lonely couple of bored-looking young officers and the crossword they were working on at the moment. Bob looked at a nearby clock; taking in consideration all the information the Fat Man had given him, he had little more than 15 minutes before the Government Agents came to put their grubby little hands on the alien machinery.

After a good while of thinking, Bob thought he'd do a bit of both. He lowered the balaclava over his face...
One of the two police officers looked up from the crossword he was completing with his colleague as soon as he heard a curious jingling sound in the distance; it sounded as if Santa Claus had decided to come early that year. He squinted a bit at the figure he had noticed in the distance, just to make sure he wasn't dreaming; by the looks of it, a gargantuan man wearing a balaclava over his head was dashing from behind cars. Also, he was laughing histerically.
I wonder if I should report this... thought the officer. He rubbed his eyes a bit, to make sure he wasn´t dreaming and, by the time he opened them again, the laughter had stopped and the man was nowhere to be seen. The officer let out a sigh of relief.

Bob, with a sudden burst of speed, had managed to reach an opening on the outside of the spacecraft and had dexterously bounded in without the officers noticing him (or, rather, not wanting to notice him...)
Once he had managed to get his breathing back to a normal rhythm again, he reached inside his pockets and took out a single penny. He flipped it in the air; the small metal disk flew up, but never came down. Instead, it started simply spinning madly in midair around its axis. Slowly, the machinery wthin the spacecraft started to react as well; at first, small chunks of a metal Bob didn't recognize started to slowly move towards where the coin was hovering. It was a matter of time before the smaller pieces started to fly through the air towards the coin, forming a curious metallic ball. Another couple of minutes and the larger chunks of machinery had now started to creak disapprovingly as well...

[Metronome]

Molly, while walking with the humans to find the Suntech labs, suddenly stopped. "I'm sorry, but I must go back. My ship has informed me that and alien -erm- human has boarded it. I'll keep my mind open for communication, so I may find you again once I sort this out." Molly didn't want her craft being stolen or damaged any further. She may never be able to go home if such things happened.

Molly took off into the air to return to her craft. Luckily, it wasn't too far away; she landed outside of it within a few seconds.
"What are you doing?" She mentally intruded into the human's mind. Molly could tell he was up to no good, so being polite wasn't an issue here. She shifted back to her natural state and boarded the ship. Her glowing green eyes landed on the human, then on the floating coin. She reached out her arm and stopped it where it spun, but found it unusually hard to hold onto it with her telepathy. This human must have some sort of mental abilities as well, She thought.

"Get off my ship," She said in an authoritative voice. "Don't make me harm you, human."

[bangarang]

Rose grinned as Black Cat finally confirmed her suspicions that some sort of crime was taking place in the Westport Museum. She made a mental note to follow her instincts more often from that point on, as not only had it tossed her the opportunity to protect something potentially important to her Father, but it had also stuck her in the company of another Super Hero. A tall one at that, with a sense of style, and a mysterious coolness about him...

Rose blinked back into reality as Black Cat vocalized his thoughts on the situation. It seemed like he was a little worried, which put the young girl a bit on edge. He had much more experience than her, so if he thought something could be very bad, she did not doubt him.

The fiery haired teen grabbed at the bandanna tied around her neck, and promptly pulled it up and over the bottom of her face, so that along with her goggles, it concealed anyone from seeing her true identity, while slightly muffling her voice. She skittered down from the wall, and padded up to Black Cat's side. She followed after him, doing her best to keep up with his pace, for his strides were long and full of confidence.

The question about African History caught her off guard. She wasn't exactly sure what it could have to do with the task at hand, but she answered him anyways.

"Um... no not really. I mean, 'Buffalo Soldier' is probably the gist of my knowledge..." Rose told him, trying to turn her lack of knowledge into a joke. She was glad her face was covered, because she could feel herself start to blush, and when she blushed, damn did she ever turn red. Ginger problems.

"Really? Last month's history unit was on African history, but oh wait, I forgot you slept through all those lessons..." Alexander suddenly piped in over Rose's comm unit.

Rose quietly shushed him, since after Black Cat's earlier comment, she was fairly certain he could hear Alex when he spoke.

He was right though. Last month had been when Rose had first acquired her powers, which had led to a lot of late nights exploring them on her part. She had used her history class to catch up on some much needed sleep many times throughout the previous month. Now she suddenly wished she had paid more attention.

[Greycat]

"Basically," Black Cat grinned as he eavesdropped on the two's conversation, "African history, mythology, to be more specific, has many gods and even more spirits. And there are many spells and curses that can exploit anyone of them. Add to that magic's rather nasty tendency to overlap, warp and or just plain change it's nature from place to place or religion to religion. For example; Chinese elements are wood, fire, metal, earth, and water, Babylonians used Earth, Sea, Sky, Fire and Wind, while the Greeks were all for Fire, Air, Water, Earth and Aether. One cultures symbol of luck and fortune is another's symbol of disaster and death." That one was a bit more personal. Cats represented everything from monetary gain, the afterlife, to the sun and moon, disease and death, to fortune.

He didn't let his conversation slow his activity either, as he dismissed actually taking the stairs for flipped from one landing down to the one below it. Without even skipping much of a beat. "It get's really confusing sorting the real from the false. But the problem is that a lot of it is real. And can be dangerous if you know what to do with it. Not that there aren't good magics. But I don't think the person who is willing to break in just wants to call down rain to water their Gardenias."

"Buffalo Soldier is a good song though," he commented, dropping his voice as he neared the exhibit. Yep, definitely some hocus pocus going on in the museum that day. He really need to expand his actually (practical) magical knowledge. What he knew were a random collection of rumors and tales. Understandable, since schools didn't over History of Magic courses.

----------

Following his successful shopping excursion, Dr G stored his goodies in his transport and sent the little craft on it's merry way back to his lab. The bots would start the prep work for him. In the mean time, he had a few more deals and arrangements to make. Under cloak, he dropped to one of the underground's entrances and made his way down to the tunnels. He wasn't really a fan of them. Far too stereotypical for the villains to be underground of the city and the heroes above it. Which, coincidentally, was one of the things he was seeking to remedy by coming here. But there was only so much he could do, he was one man. So until he had a henchman, he would have to contract out labour.

He made his way down the lair Dr Malevolence frequented. What he needed was above the level of the small times who looked his way as he passed them. He needed big. He needed everyone's attention one it. Which was why he went to Dr Malevolence. Whereas he preferred precision, skill and cumulative effects, Dr Malevolence has a certain skill when it came to cause destruction on a much grander scale. "Dr Malevolence," he called out, hoping the villain was in. "I have need of your skills."