Kissy and Rory become superheroes in the Promethean Metaverse!

Armand shook off the spell I had cast first. For a moment, his dark face had gotten darker, but he quickly got to the business of running the game.

“I’ve made up characters for everyone to choose from, two or three for each of you,” he said. “I’ve even got extras that you can choose from, Beeson, if you want to play for at least tonight. This isn’t going to be a game where you have to be here every time to play your character. If you show up, I’ll work you in.”

He started dealing out character sheets that he’d obviously created on a computer and printed on card stock. He’d even found photos or illustrations for each of the characters. “The character you play tonight is not necessarily the one you have to play each time. We can be pretty flexible with a supers game.”

The three he gave me were labeled Damselfly, Phantom Angel, and Aura. Aura was a tank with forcefields and power lances, not my style at all. Damselfly was a scrapper who could fly, sting and do minor heals. Interesting. Also interesting that all of my choices were female, even though these had been made before I showed up in a dress. I grinned; Armand knew me better than I knew myself, apparently.

But Phantom Angel was my kind of character; I’d actually played her in previous games. Flight, invisibility, control of winds and a party heal: a classic defender type, the supers equivalent of a cleric or paladin. The illustration was cute, too. A blonde teenager with wings dressed in a tank top, cutoff jeans and high heel sneakers. High heel sneakers? Where would I find a pair of those in real life? Me want!

I looked up to discover that all of the guys, except Rory, were watching me and not looking at their character sheets at all. Even Hoot, who had to lean forward to look around the bulk of Rory sitting on my right side.

I glanced at Armand and saw his nostrils flare. Uh-oh. He sometimes did that when he was about to go off on a rant about something, like people not paying attention in a game. But he leaned toward me, too, and said. “You smell nice.” He tried to smile as he said it, and it was one of his friendly smiles, not one of those he made when he thought he should smile but didn’t know why.

Rory looked up and saw what was happening. Grinning, he nudged me. “Hey, babe? Little help? What do all these numbers mean?”

I turned to look at his cards. “The numbers are like baseball stats, except you start from the numbers to figure out what you can do, instead of figure out the numbers from what you did.”

“Huh?” He stared. “These abbreviations are as bad as the ones on the scorekeeper’s pads. What’s AGI?”

“Agility,” I explained. “Useful for moving fast, getting out of the way, and hitting what you want to hit. Look, the easiest character type for a newbie to play is a tank. Tanks are mostly defense so you can wait for the enemy to attack you and counterpunch.”

“A tank, huh?” He pulled one character out of the three. “Like Dreadnaught here? He’s covered in rocks and metal, and it says he has variable armor from 10 to 90.”

“A 90 armor? You’d almost need a critical hit to hurt him unless you have a really strong attack. Yeah, he’s a classic tank.” I agreed, looking the card over. “And see here under Affiliations? He’s a member of both the Cometeers and The Good Guys, just like the character I picked, Phantom Angel.”

“Cool. We can be each other’s main squeeze.” He grinned but had more questions. “AGI 8, I guess he’s not very fast. What’s DoA? Dead on arrival?”

“Damage over area. It’s one of his attacks—he can spray rocks at a target or in a circle all around him. Anyone nearby gets hit unless their own armor stops it. Or if he has a feat that lets him miss friends.”

He kept grinning. “Sounds like a hard guy to get close to.”

I glanced at the other cards offered Rory. Seven-Star was a blaster with a gimmick—a seven-shooter that fired trick bullets. Not an easy character for a newb to play. And Zed-FX was worse, a techno-wizard with a cloak full of gadgets. “I think you better go with Dreadnaught.”

Armand had got the other players to make their picks, too. Melvin would play Daedalos, a gadgeteer who specialized in party buffs and enemy debuffs. Norris chose Shadojak, a sneak with teleport. Bob would be Justifier, a scrapper/tank with a hammer and a self-heal. And Hoot took Man-Tiger, a classic scrapper, all attack and avoid, with HtK and high vitality.

Like me, they had all played their characters before in Armand’s super campaign, except for Bob whose last character had been Doc Spectral, currently a captive in an undersea harem. Long story.

“HtK?” Rory asked.

“Hard to Kill. It’s a feat, a special ability. He gets to keep fighting after he should be dead until he misses a save based on his vitality.”

“Which is high,” Hoot pointed out.

“I would hope so,” commented Rory. “I think I could get into this. It’s like a team sport, huh? We all help each other against the bad guys?”

“Exactly,” said Armand. “If you let your teammates down, everyone will suffer.”

“Can I change Justifier’s name to Justiciar?” Bob asked. “Justifier is hard to say.”

Armand shrugged.

“And Justiciar isn’t?” asked Norris, shaking his head.

“Hard for me to say,” amended Bob.

“Do you talk to yourself a lot?” asked Melvin. “Or about yourself, in the third person?”

“Justiciar does not have to answer that,” said Bob smugly.

Rory laughed. “I like you guys!” he said. “But why not just call yourself Justice?”

Armand commented. “There’s an old Marvel character that used the name. We try to avoid that.”

“What? They might sue?”

“With Disney owning Marvel, you never know,” said Hoot, smiling.

“Aesthetic integrity,” Melvin added.

“Yeah, it’s just better to have our own names,” said Bob and they all nodded.

Melvin pointed something out. “There was an old Centaur Comics character called Dreadnought back in the ’40s. He could turn himself into a pocket battleship.”

“Obscure characters from defunct companies in the Golden Age are fair game. Besides, I spelled it different,” said Armand.

“Especially stoopid characters,” said Bob. “What the heck is a pocket battleship?”

“Marvel and DC do it all the time. Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Amazing Man, Catman, Bullseye,” Norris added.

“Those last two are villains,” Hoot pointed out.

“Phllbbtt,” Norris counter-argued.

I couldn’t stop grinning. These were my people. I’m still a gamer nerd, I just smell better now, I thought.

We made short work of the nermal (non-super) bank robbers and Armand soon had us in the middle of another mission. We were all members of the Good Guys, an umbrella national organization of regional super teams, and C.O.S.H.R. wanted us to investigate a suspected super-villain secret base in the Malibu hills.

“Kosher?” asked Rory.

“Combined Office of Super Human Resources,” Armand explained to him. “It’s a DOJ/DHS project to keep track of supers.”

Rory grinned at me. “I love it! The bureaucrats found super-villains in Malibu!” he said, causing me to giggle. The rest of us had played in Armand’s Prometheus campaign before and already knew some of the inside jokes.

Hoot was our natural tactical leader, but he had to roleplay the savage Man-Tiger coming up with a plan that made sense. “Rrr!” he said around his imaginary fangs. “Sthince Dreadnaught can’t eashily be hurt, he shyould draw any fire while Shyadojak reconnoitersh.”

Bob and Norris wiped imaginary spittle off their faces.

“What do I do?” asked Rory.

I pointed to a line on his character card. “You’ve got a tunneling speed. You can travel through solid earth almost as fast as ordinary people can walk. And you can choose to leave an open tunnel behind you for us to follow. Tunneling into their base is sure to raise alarms.”

“Holy shit,” said Rory. “I’m awesome.”

I giggled and kissed him. “Your character is pretty hot, too,” I said.

Okay, that delayed the game for a minute until the guys stopped staring again, but Armand got us going by asking Norris, “Shadojak, what do you do?”

“I go invisible and search the Shadow Realm for some shadows inside their base I can teleport into. Since their lair is underground there should be plenty of convenient darkness.”

Armand shook his head. “You might think so, but efficient artificial light leaves fewer shadows than natural sources.” Nevertheless, a darkened storeroom provided Shadojak entry into the secret base and his thief skills and invisibility allowed him to do a quick and fairly safe scouting of the place.

He and Armand communicated by notes during this since the rest of us couldn’t know what was going on while we were following Dreadnaught through his tunnel. Armand had ruled it would take Dreadnaught twenty minutes to tunnel from out of sight of the base up to the underground walls.

***

“It’s bad,” Shadojak tells us when he catches up.
 
I’m busy using my winds to make sure we have breathable air in the tunnel. Dreadnaught makes all speed with his rock-moving power, about five feet a second after a buff from Daedalos. But that causes a lot of incidental dust that I channel into the forest outside so we don’t have a visible dust plume above the ridge. Freddy (DN’s real name) pauses while we take SJ’s report.
 
“How bad?” Daedalos asks. “Who are those guys and how many are they?”
 
“I spotted red glass pylons holding up the ceilings and bracing the walls.”
 
We all gasp. Well, I do.
 
Red glass meant the solid permanent forcefields of Dr. Bellerophon, a top-ranked super-villain gadgeteer and mastermind. Doc Bell was a nasty enemy to face, even in a group. He had powered armor made of his forcefields, and a force blade, named Bad Axe, that would cut through almost anything. Plus he was a psychiatrist in real life and adept at choosing loyal minions.
 
“He’s supposed to be dead!” Justiciar protests. “No one’s seen him in at least two years.”
 
“I didn’t see him, either,” says ‘Jak. “Just about forty minions wearing his double-bladed axe insignia. And all that red glass.”
 
“One good thing,” Justiciar notes. “Doc Bell seldom works with other supers—he doesn’t trust them.”
 
“Have we got five minutes for me to build a beam that will cut his force fields?” Daedalos starts pulling pieces of golden gear from his pockets and backpack.
 
Everyone looks at Dreadnaught. He nods. “At least, if I get back to tunneling. I can feel the emptiness in the stone ahead about 1800 feet. Call it six minutes, though they might hear me if I’m still going full speed just before I get there.” I beam at him, Freddy is good at this stuff.
 
“Where’s Khan?” ‘Jak asks, meaning Man-Tiger.
 
“Topside as lookout,” says Daedalos. “In the forest up there, he’s almost as invisible as you. And probably quieter.”
 
“I can whistle loud enough he’ll hear when we need him to lead the assault,” I say. “A long and two shorts, we set up a code.”
 
“Good,” says Daedalos, still choosing modules to build his gadget. “But ‘Jak, go topside and let him find you so you can fill him in that this is a Doc Bell minion base.” He grins. “Khan goes through minions like bad potato salad through an American Legion post on the Fifth of July.”
 
Freddy starts tunneling again and I go back into air conditioning mode. We all have something to do except Justiciar who stands there caressing the handle of his hammer. Daedalos had built it for him and it was designed to channel Justiciar’s mystic forces. “Bad Axe versus the Hammer of Justice,” he mutters. “We’ll have to see how that comes out.”
 
I hoped Dr. Bellerophon wasn’t home. We could clean out forty or a hundred minions before they knew what hit them. But if any of our team have to face Doc Bell alone…. I swallow hard. Heroes can die, Freddy and I knew; we had already lost one partner in the Fimbulwetter War.