The X-men run missions and work together with the NYPD, striving to maintain a peaceful balance between humans and mutants. When it comes to a fight, they won't back down from protecting those who need their help.
Haven presents itself as a humanitarian organization for activists, leaders, and high society, yet mutants are the secret leaders working to protect and serve their kind. Behind the scenes they bring their goals into reality.
From the time when mutants became known to the world, SUPER was founded as a black-ops division of the CIA in an attempt to classify, observe, and learn more about this new and rising threat.
The Syndicate works to help bring mutantkind to the forefront of the world. They work from the shadows, a beacon of hope for mutants, but a bane to mankind. With their guiding hand, humanity will finally find extinction.
Since the existence of mutants was first revealed in the nineties, the world has become a changed place. Whether they're genetic misfits or the next stage in humanity's evolution, there's no denying their growing numbers, especially in hubs like New York City. The NYPD has a division devoted to mutant related crimes. Super-powered vigilantes help to maintain the peace. Those who style themselves as Homo Superior work to tear society apart for rebuilding in their own image.
MRO is an intermediate to advanced writing level original character, original plot X-Men RPG. We've been open and active since October of 2005. You can play as a mutant, human, or Adapted— one of the rare humans who nullify mutant powers by their very existence. Goodies, baddies, and neutrals are all welcome.
Short Term Plots:Are They Coming for You?
There have been whispers on the streets lately of a boogeyman... mutant and humans, young and old, all have been targets of trafficking.
The Fountain of Youth
A chemical serum has been released that's shaving a few years off of the population. In some cases, found to be temporary, and in others...?
MRO MOVES WITH CURRENT TIME: What month and year it is now in real life, it's the same for MRO, too.
Fuegogrande: "Fuegogrande" player of The Ranger, Ion, Rhia, and Null
Neopolitan: "Aly" player of Rebecca Grey, Stephanie Graves, Marisol Cervantes, Vanessa Bookman, Chrysanthemum Van Hart, Sabine Sang, Eupraxia
Ongoing Plots
Magic and Mystics
After the events of the 2020 Harvest Moon and the following Winter Solstice, magic has started manifesting in the MROvere! With the efforts of the Welldrinker Cult, people are being converted into Mystics, a species of people genetically disposed to be great conduits for magical energy.
The Pharoah Dynasty
An ancient sorceress is on a quest to bring her long-lost warrior-king to the modern era in a bid for global domination. Can the heroes of the modern world stop her before all is lost?
Are They Coming for You?
There have been whispers on the streets lately of a boogeyman... mutant and humans, young and old, all have been targets of trafficking.
Adapteds
What if the human race began to adapt to the mutant threat? What if the human race changed ever so subtly... without the x-gene.
Atlanteans
The lost city of Atlantis has been found! Refugees from this undersea mutant dystopia have started to filter in to New York as citizens and businessfolk. You may make one as a player character of run into one on the street.
Got a plot in mind?
MRO plots are player-created the Mods facilitate and organize the big ones, but we get the ideas from you. Do you have a plot in mind, and want to know whether it needs Mod approval? Check out our plot guidelines.
Posted by Cheshire on May 24, 2009 22:44:50 GMT -6
Mutant God
3,233
18
Sept 24, 2018 19:41:05 GMT -6
Calley
((ooc: Lory, Calley's sister, is brought up in his back story thread, Why Cats are Awesome.))
New Jersey, and death. Raina. Abyss. Bear. Katrina. The Order, and the X-Men. But most of all, New Jersey.
During the Fall and Winter of 2007/2008, every state in the Union was slapped with the Mutant Registration Law. It wasn’t just New York that had collars and camps. Round-ups, deaths. Escape attempts.
Caleb was on the campus of Rutgers University, logged on to their computers as a guest. Outside the library doors, the sounds were loud and laughing. It was a sunny day. Classes were out; finals were being graded, and professors were posting up the scores slowly or slower, depending on how hard their course was. Caleb Yeldham had arrived early for his tour of the campus. Caleb Yeldham was a normal student, a graduate of a no-name Trenton high school, with decent enough grades for him to look anywhere but not good enough to guarantee admittance. His extracurricular activities included the school newspaper, and running.
They didn’t do in-depth background checks much, for these tours.
On the computer monitor, images and articles passed through tabs. Interesting, how little of this he knew of. He—Caleb Swartz, Calley—was a New Jersey native. Born and raised in Newark, a city name most people outside of the East Coast couldn’t pronounce correctly to save their lives. That was okay—Bennies could just go home, anyway. His accent had been changing the past few years. Not talking with human vocal chords had left his natural speech rather malleable; when he took on human form again, it didn’t take him long to start picking up the crasser New York accent, with foreign variations from all of the people he met. Today, he was putting a conscious effort into using his own voice. Not something he’d picked up, while blending in. His own voice.
The death toll at the New Jersey Detention Center for Dangerous Mutants was seventy-nine ticks higher than that of New York’s. New York escape attempts: two successful, including that gloriously infamous final break out; many failed. Jersey escape attempts: zero successful, but they damn well tried. There were more Stalker bots guarding the Jersey Camps by the end of the Registration Act than at almost any other Camp in the nation. He couldn’t help but feel proud of that. There were pictures from the day the Registration Act was overturned—the inmates walking through the gates to freedom. Some of them were leaning on each other. One of them was grinning a fiercely toothy grin, two of his four fingers raised up for the camera. V for victory. What victory, maybe he knew.
Caleb couldn’t help but feel a little ashamed of what he was planning. But at the end of the day, he wasn’t hurting them. Only stomping on the sanctity of what they’d lived through. It would be the same with any Camp he picked, anywhere in the nation. Jersey’s, though? Jersey’s was home.
“Sorry to keep you waiting. You’re Caleb, right?”
That voice was home. Caleb turned around on his chair, and smiled back at the smiling Grad student holding the bright green folder that contained everything a Prospective Student didn’t really need. She was twenty-three years old. Her eyes were the same blue as his; at the edges of her smile lurked the same Cheshire mischief that purred on his own. That smile froze for a second when she saw him. Really saw him.
“Yeah,” Caleb answered. “You’re Lory, right?” Lory Swartz. He wondered when she stopped wearing her Goth black. Now she was dressed in a light summer dress; white with blue flowers. “Just let me log out.”
“Sure,” his older sister said, as the ghost in front of her turned back to his computer, and shut down his tabs. V for victory switched with the generic field of a pre-loaded Windows background. Windows XP, not Vista. Rutgers was a good college.
The campus tour proceeded in the manner of all tours. There were empty buildings, history quips, pointing and nodding and smiling. Lory Swartz settled into the familiar pace. Caleb Yeldham asked generic questions, and didn’t seem to notice any of the glances she sent his way.
They ended up in the cafeteria. He picked a hamburger, because he didn’t care for them particularly. They were good, but had never been his favorite. He did, however, mix every soda flavor into his drink, with deliberate attention to the ratio. The trick was to have in more of the clear stuff and the yellow stuff than the brown stuff and the red stuff, and to go easy on the punch, as nummy as it was. It cut down on the carbonation if you went overboard. Lory watched him, with a question on her lips that she couldn’t ask. Her brother had done the same exact thing, with the same exact look of culinary concentration on his face. Her brother had been missing for four years.
She looked good. Like she’d moved on successfully. He should be happy about that, probably, but it was hard to be happy about anything when you’re eating a school hamburger. Even at colleges, they apparently tasted terrible.
“Are you okay?” She asked.
“Yeah,” Caleb answered minimally. “Just not as hungry as I thought.”
Home. Home wasn’t a place; it was people. So why was it still so fragile? Abyss. Katrina. Neena. Lory.
Charles Triggs met him at the front parking lot, wearing a Hawaiian T-shirt and cargo shorts. Apparently that was his idea of ‘try to dress like you’re my dad’. There was a grin on the Triforce member’s face as he hung over the open door of the black jeep. “Ready to go, son?” He asked, like a can of Kraft cheese talks to a cracker.
“Yeah,” Caleb said, wishing the word didn’t hurt so much. Lory was still watching him, like something out of a memory. As he moved towards the jeep, she finally asked it:
“Calley?”
One word. His feet stopped moving at one word. Somehow, he thought he’d be stronger than that. Home was a powerful thing, even when it was broken past repair. Lory was human. She was human, and she was living her life just fine without her little brother. And he was living just fine without her. And before he’d borrowed a few Lab techies to track her down, and before he’d turned around at the computer lab, either of them could have been dead without the other knowing and it wouldn’t have mattered. Home shouldn’t be this hollow, should it?
He didn’t know how to respond to her hug. So he did what came naturally: his own arms looped around her back. His chin settled over her shoulder. He was taller than her, now. That seemed strange. “Hi, Lor.”
“Hey,” she said. “Where the hell have you been?”
He shook his head, his tousled brown hair messing up hers. “I’ll try to keep in touch,” he said, drawing back.
“That’s all I get?” She asked. Calley gave a shrug, as he got into the jeep. He thought she understood. At the least, she didn’t say anything else. Just watched him leave.
It was all he could give. She was human, and he was dangerous. His whole world was dangerous. What he was going to do next wasn’t going to help that.
It was about time Calley joined all three Factions.
He got it at the zoo. It was a good place for new forms. And for this, he wanted something completely new. Untried, unused, unseen. A fresh start.
“This young man is Mellow,” the zookeeper had said, as the black puma had calmly sat at his side, only a thin leather leash and a stage separating it from the audience. The sleek young cat had blinked green eyes out at them. One woman had snagged the back of her toddler’s shirt as he tried to wander closer to the big kitty. The kid had started to cry. Mellow had flicked his ears, then calmly returned to scanning the rest of the crowd as the conservation presentation had continued. Perfect.
Back at Mondragon Labs, the tailoring began.
There were certain advantages to owning—or having your brother, or yourself, or however you wanted to define that—an entire research complex, complete with spacious training grounds. The first few days were a matter of basics. Calley’s abilities had grown quite a bit from when he was a scared thirteen year old, but he still had to start every new form from scratch. First, there was the initial shift. Learning to breath, to move. The fine-tuning: learning not to run, but to run like liquid silk. He did laps, obstacle courses, tree climbing for kicks. The kept cat’s muscle mass starting building back into respectable levels at the same time that Calley learned it, inside and out. He slept on top of the library shelves at night, paws stacked comfortably one on top of the other as Lab guards snorted at the thick black tail hanging down over the Culinary Arts section. The twitching tail tip begged to be pulled. Sadly, there were no thirteen year olds around with enough gumption to do the deed.
Katrina. Huh. A few days later, he shifted back to human form, and left a note in her room. Not dead, just purring around town. Back later!
He grabbed a sandwich from the Labs’ Canteen, and settled back in the library with his anatomy books. It took him awhile to find the right pages; dog-earring was a lot like saying he cared.
He didn’t decorate his apartment, or his Mansion room, or his Sanctuary room. He didn’t dog-ear. Therefore, he didn’t care.
This tale ends, of course, in square-rimmed glasses. Pastel purple ones.
He started with the puma. From there, he shifted. The first shift lengthened the puma’s arms and legs; shortened its torso. The cat’s breath snagged uncomfortably against its own ribcage. Organ sizing: hard to guesstimate. At least he hadn’t punctured anything.
Things continued slowly after that. Little shifts at a time; rests in-between, to check how the fits were progressing. Slowly, the switches occurred; human vocal chords for cat’s; distinctly more human hipbones, to allow for bipedal movement in addition to the quadruped; lengthening and thickening of the tail, to aid in that precarious balance. The ribcage flattened to a more human level, though distinctly stocky; the face flattened and the forehead broadened; the—
Oww.
Oh, nasal cavities. How little you like to be compressed. The puma man cringed against the library carpeting, and tried to shift that space a bit broader. The entire room went fuzzy. Ack. Eyeballs: surprisingly jealous of other senses getting higher priority. Okay then, how about—
The cat shook his head, ears swiveling around the crystal-clear room. It sounded like his head was under a pillow. Calley wasn’t a fan of pillows. Okay, so how about—
Aaaaaand they were back to the fuzzy room. Okay. He would deal with that later. For now, there was one final touch. New Jersey, death, and the Camps. Calley hadn’t been in the Camps personally, but he had visited them in winged form, and he had met the survivors. It was the little touches that made a finger painting into fine art. Calley shifted the fur away from his neck, in a subtle ring that was almost hidden by the rest of his fur. Onto that bare patch, he jerked and tweaked the skin, patterning it after a small line the puma had cut into its knee years ago, doing who-knows-what. And that, friends, is the less painful way to acquire your very own Camp’s collar scar.
New Jersey was home. New Jersey was where his accent was from, even if it was a bit rusty. New Jersey was his attitude, and his schooling, and the smog lines on his lungs. With just a bit of homework, New Jersey was where this little kitty had spent his entire life. Camps time included. That, friends, was as good a reason as any to dislike humans.
He rested in his blurry world, then picked his new puma man form up and took it for a walk to the training rooms. A wobbly walk. Was that the door?
Several days later found the puma man stepping lightly out of an eyeglasses store a few blocks from his goal. The pads of his feet were broad; his tail was a counter-weight behind him, allowing his steps to flow. Err, not too gracefully, though. He tripped in a cross walk when a taxi honked at him. Four paws hit the pavement; he flashed a toothy grin to the driver as he leapt with fluid grace to the curb. His clothes were loose; they chaffed against his fur, but let him switch between two and four legged movement with the ease he’d worked to iron in. He bounded easily between the legs of New Yorkers on phones and tourists gawking up at buildings. At a familiar entryway, he wobbled his way back to biped, heavy tail swinging down behind him.
New Jersey, and death. That was his new history. Raina; the counselor who’d helped him see just how screwed up he truly was. Abyss, who’d dropped a comment during their last meeting, just a little thing about joining the Order. Bear, who’d made him think that maybe every member of that group wasn’t homicidal. Katrina. The Order, and the X-Men.
Calley needed to find out why he—why Slate, why Caleb Swartz—was bothered by killing people. And why he wasn’t. And why he could stay in a place, but never a home. He hadn’t found his answers with the X-Men. He wanted to know what was wrong with him, and how deep it went. The Order seemed to cater to that.
The puma man set his thick-fingered paw on a golden door, and pushed. Inside, a receptionist was waiting for him.
“I’ve heard,” he said, pushing purple glasses lightly against his broad nose, “that this place is ‘Sanctuary’. I could use a little something of that. You got room for one more?” A large black tail swung behind him, curled tip dancing just above the floor. A flashing of perfectly white, perfectly inhuman teeth. “My name is Miles.”
