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 Welldrinker Cult
A shadowy group is gaining power, drawing in people who are curious, vulnerable, or malicious, and turning them into Mystics. They are recruiting people into their ranks to spread the influence of magic in the world, but for what end goal?
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.
Amber looked up at the ever so familiar image of the Mansion, blinking her pitch black eyes. It was very much the same as she remembered it being only a few weeks ago. The building was still the same colour, the grass around the building was still green and, she assumed, the mutant students still lurked inside its safe walls. It should have been a comfort to be back at The Mansion, one of the few places she had felt almost welcome, but it wasn't. It wasn't, not because anything had changed in the old bricks, but because of the experiences she herself had ever so recently been through.
At that very moment, the very idea of safety seemed a foreign concept to Amber. How was one supposed to cope with being cooped up and experimented on like a rat in a cage? She had been treated like an animal, the men who had imprisoned her not considering either mutant or dinosaur to be anything worthy of dignity or respect. They certainly hadn't considered her to be human, perhaps believing her mind to be as animalistic as any one of her dinosaur forms. Of course, in the end their lack of respect for her and her abilities had allowed her to escape her captures, but that didn't eliminate the mental scars they had left. Or the physical scars for, for that matter.
Amber shuddered visibly as she tried to banish the images from her mind. Images of being trapped with wild animals just so the so-called scientists could see how the ancient Deinonychus would fair against a full grown black bear. As it turned out, she fared better than the bear did, but that didn't eliminate the terror she had felt knowing that her life was at stake, that there was no one to help, no one who cared, and that her enemy could not be reasoned with. No wonder so many mutants despised humans, when they treated mutants like that. She hadn't been treated like an animal at all, she had been treated as less than an animal, fed and watered only so that she could be healthy enough for their little experiments.
The first thing Amber had done upon coming back to the city was to call Abyss and let her know she was all right. The second thing she had done was to come to where she was now, to The Mansion. She would tell Abyss and Aura all about her time in captivity, of course, tell them how her field trip had gone so horribly wrong. But not yet. She couldn't bear to talk to them, knowing how angry they would be, not at her but at the humans who had done those things to her. No, right now she needed someone of a more understanding disposition, someone whose first instinct would not be blind rage and murder. She wasn't sure who she might find now that she had come to the Mansion, but she knew that this was the place to go. Because Sanctuary didn't house pacifist mutants who would offer a shoulder to cry on, Sanctuary housed those mutants who couldn't find a place to stay anywhere else, the most violent and angry mutants in the city. Sanctuary didn't have what she most needed at that time.
Taking a deep breath Amber opened walked up and opened the Mansion doors. It was well after midnight and she wasn't sure that anyone would even be awake at that hour, nor was she positive that she wanted anyone to be awake. As much as she wanted to talk to someone, there was a warring part of her that didn't want to mention her captivity with anyone at all. Somehow speaking of that time would make it more real and it was all ready more real than she could deal with.
Silently Amber walked through the dim hallways of the Mansion, her expression more than a little shell shocked. She felt at the breaking point, as if one tiny little shove would send her tumbling down a deep pit. She almost wasn't even aware when she came to the Mansion living room until her eyes registered a familiar figure, all alone. "Ghost?" The name came out quietly with a slight quiver to her voice. Almost, she didn't even realize she had spoken the name out loud.
Someone had to be awake. That was the rule. Someone had to be there in case a fire started or someone was trying to sneak in and do something nefarious. It wasn't so much guarding the Mansion so much as making sure it wasn't wholly unguarded. There were so many precious lives here with so much left to learn.
Ghost was entering that slump time. TV had gone from bad to worse to infomercial so she had the blasted thing on mute. Without the noise, she could expand her hearing and make sure no one was sneaking out of bed, a favorite Mansion past time apparently. Fortunately all was quiet on the front lines. The Mansion had slowed just like the good programming and now everyone seemed to be laying still in their beds.
>"Ghost?"
A little voice pulled Ghost out of her reverie. She had gotten distracted following a breeze outside and let her guard down. If Amber was a bad guy, Ghost could have been in big trouble right about now. It was probably the sleepiness, but somehow Ghost couldn't be bothered with paranoia at the moment.
"Yep. Just me, haunting the graveyard shift." That made her giggle every time. Graveyard. Ghost. Haunting. Get it? But as Ghost's pupils adjusted to the darker hallway and she started to take in the details of how Amber was standing, the look in her eyes, Ghost sobered up quickly. "Are you okay, sweetheart?"
Amber promised herself that she was going to be strong, for her family and for all the other mutants who had it worse than she did. After all, what was a few weeks spent in captivity and treated like a rat compared to the sorts of things that her dear sister had gone through? Or those poor unfortunate mutants who had found themselves trapped in the camps? Her suffering was nothing compared to theirs.
"Are you okay, sweetheart?"
All of a sudden, with those few simple words, Amber's compsure cracked. She didn't mean to cry, didn't mean to place all of her worries and problems on the shoulders of another, especially one so kind and wonderful as Ghost, but she simply couldn't help the tears that began leaking out of her midnight black eyes. It was one thing to try to convince oneself that her suffering didn't matter at all, it was quite another to actually believe her own words to herself. Despite everything she had been through, she was still a teenager. Teenagers weren't supposed to have to go through the sorts of things she had all ready experienced in her short life.
"I'm s-sorry." Amber tried to wipe away her tears with teh sleeve or her dark red robe, not that it did much good given that the tears simply kept coming. "M-maybe I shouldn't have come back here. I sh-should leave. I d-don't want to bother you." She half turned, preparing to flee both the room and the Mansion.
She saw it coming. For a moment Ghost thought Amber might choke it back, but no... there it was glistening in her eyes and then stammering out her mouth. The white haired woman may not be a biological mother, but at heart she was a mom. Amber had just tugged on those heart strings. She was on her feet and across the room before Amber had even finished turning.
"Hush now, you're not burdening anyone here." Ghost wasn't a toucher by nature. Her hands hesitated above the girl's sheet covered shoulders. It seemed that touch might be warranted in this kind of situation. Maybe even needed.
But she didn't feel right about it. She had to start small.
Ghost knelt and wiped a tear from Amber's cheek. This way they were at eye level. Even if it was embarrassing to cry in front of someone else, Ghost wanted to see her face and be sure of her reactions. "You're safe here. Please don't go, Amber. I haven't seen you around in a while. " Sometimes, that's all anyone wanted to hear. That they were safe. That someone noticed when they were gone. That they were missed.
Amber had her doubts about that, not to mention the embarrassment of crying in front of someone else. When she was a child she had cried often, but always alone. No one else cared about her or her problems anyway and she was certainly not going to allow herself to become vulnerable in front of them. They probably would have just laughed at her and said something mean anyway.
It had been many months since Amber had truly broken down and cried, but there was just something so comforting about Ghost's presence. Maybe it was embarrassing and maybe she was imposing on the older mutant, but she was just so nice and sweet and Amber had been holding in the tears since she had first been captured and she simply couldn't hold them in any longer. It simply wasn't fair, what she had been forced to endure.
"You're safe here. Please don't go, Amber. I haven't seen you around in a while. "
Normally Amber didn't much like to be touched, but there was something almost motherly in the way Ghost wiped away her tears; not that she was one to comment on mother's since she had never had one, but she liked to imagine that if she did have a mother, that mother might be something like Ghost.
"They made me fight a bear," Amber sobbed. Yes, it sounded utterly ridiculous when stated like that, but they were the first words that came to mind as an image of a giant clawed pay heading towards her at breakneck speeds flashed through her head.
Made her fight a... "Well there are no bears around here." Who in the world would make a child fight a bear? Ghost was going to have to talk to Sam about the curriculum. Poor Amber was traumatized, but at least she didn't shy away from Ghost smoothing the wetness off her cheek.
"Why don't you keep me company? I have a hard time staying awake sometimes and the infomercials on at this hour just aren't doin' it." The light from the TV flickered serenely when there was no sound on.
Ghost cleared a pillow off to make room for Amber and pulled a throw blanket off the back of the couch too. "Why don't you start at the beginning? How did you meet this bear?" She wasn't about to ask who made her do it... just in case she wouldn't like the answer. Though, Ghost did still have that baseball bat upstairs. If Sam was sleeping he would never see it coming...
Amber tried to stem the flow of tears coming from her eyes. It wasn't like her to simply break down like that. Sure, she was no stranger to tears, but they weren't something she commonly shared with others. Tears meant vulnerability and vulnerability was something that she knew wasn't entirely safe to show to others. Even if there was only one other and that other was one of the most kind hearted people she had met.
"Why don't you keep me company? I have a hard time staying awake sometimes and the infomercials on at this hour just aren't doin' it."
Amber nodded her head, wiping away the last of the tears. She wasn't quite up to talking yet and instead sat down on the couch, taking an exaggerated amount of time to arrange her robes.
"Why don't you start at the beginning? How did you meet this bear?"
With a final sniffle and the determination not to start crying again, Amber composed herself enough to speak. "I w-went on vacation to an archeological d-dig site. I g-guess I wasn't careful enough and some very b-bad s-scientists captured me and p-put me in a cage. They f-forced me to fight b-bears and wolves." It wasn't the most detailed description of what had occurred to her but it pretty much summed up the experience and she wasn't certain that she really wanted to relive all the details anyway. "Th-then I turned into a very t-tiny lizard and escaped." She didn't even know the name of the little prehistoric reptile that she had imprinted and hadn't exactly had the time to find out.
She wasn't talking about any Danger Room bear. Amber was talking actual danger. Actual capture. Actual combat.
Ghost slid her pale white arm around the sheeted shoulders and pulled Amber in close. Who wouldn't need a hug after all that? "You're not hurt are you?" Ghost pulled Amber away from her so that she could give her a good looking over. The girl didn't seem to be oozing anywhere, but it was dark and hard to see when Ghost handled her.
"You were clever to keep your head and get away. Did you have anyone else with you? A guardian or chaperone?" Hopefully someone else wasn't still stuck there. Though if someone was, Ghost supposed that Amber's tone would be urgent rather than soulfully downcast.
Amber shook her head. She wasn't physically hurt, not really. A few healing scratches and bit marks, but nothing she needed to worry Ghost about. No, her wounds were internal rather than external and those were much more difficult to fix.
"You were clever to keep your head and get away. Did you have anyone else with you? A guardian or chaperone?"
This time Amber nodded. "Yes, b-but she left. She abandoned me there." She had even liked Karen, it was part of the reason she had agreed to go with her. Karen had a natural charisma about her, a carefree attitude about the world that was downright infectious. During their journey together, before all the truly bad things had happened, Karen had been a wonderful companion. When times got rough, unfortunately, she wasn't nearly so wonderful. She had managed to get herself out almost a week before Amber's own escape and she hadn't even bothered to try to help her younger ward, she had just up and left. Leaving her there, alone and abandoned.
"I thought she was n-nice before that." What else was one supposed to say in a situation like that? What did one say about the person who had left you to your fate, a fate that included very probably risk of death? There was nothing really too say.
"Unfortunately people aren't always who we think they are." Ghost hugged Amber close again, satisfied that the girl wasn't physically wounded. "I'm so sorry that you had to go through that. But I'm more glad that you made it back. You'll have to show me that lizard form sometime. It sounds crafty."
And Karen needed a good baseball bat to the face... wherever she was.
It helped to have someone who would listen to Amber, who seemed to understand, at least a little, about what she had gone through. It helped to have someone who would listen who wasn't interested in simply arming up and going to seek vengeance against those who had wronged her. Amber loved her sister Aura very much, but sometimes what she most needed was a comforting person to talk to, someone to simply listen and offer a little sympathy, not someone who would get angry and violent against her wrongdoers.
"D-does it ever get any better?" Amber asked sadly. Oh, how she wanted a world where she wouldn't have to constantly fear. "Will I ever be able to go out into the world and not fear the things humans might do to me simply because I'm a little bit different than they are?"
Amber looked up at Ghost, her black eyes sad and desperate. It wasn't even as if she were truly dangerous, not in the way some mutants were. Yes, she could defend herself with claws and teeth if need be, the it wasn't as if she needed to worry about losing control of her powers and hurting people in the process. What was the worst that could really happen, after all? She shift accidentally and not be able to fully control her new form, thus being clumsy and falling down? That didn't sound very dangerous to her.
Amber was asking her a delicate question. Ghost was a good one to ask, though. "Did you know that I've been in a similar situation before? Not fighting bears, but..." She licked her lips and somehow holding Amber was as much comfort of her as it was for Amber. "I've been there."
Her lip took a little chewing while she thought it through. What could she possibly say? Ghost couldn't get past one thought.
"My mom went through a lot of rough times in her life. She's not around anymore, but she lived through the times when nobody even knew mutants existed. Talk about getting in trouble for using your power." Ghost smiled at Amber. This was something personal she was going to share. Something perfect for TV-lit late nights.
"My mom always said that you can't live your life in complete safety, not if you're really living. If I ever asked her if she was okay and I could tell that she really wasn't she would say something like 'I have to be okay. I'm alive, aren't I?'"
"That's a little sad now considering mom is gone now, but I know she lived her life. She had the courage to go places and see things and meet people. For me, it helps to have a buddy." Ghost jostled Amber a bit next to her. "It's always good to have someone you trust, somebody you can call when you need a hug or if you need someone to go somewhere with you." Somethings were just better with a friend.
"Also, it never hurts to be unbearably polite." She nodded, all her sage wisdom spent for now.
"Did you know that I've been in a similar situation before? Not fighting bears, but... I've been there."
It was both a comfort and a sorrow to know that someone else, especially someone as kind and wonderful as Ghost, had been through something similar to what she had been through. A comfort because there was someone who could relate to her and a sorrow because no one should ever have to go through such things as that.
"My mom always said that you can't live your life in complete safety, not if you're really living. If I ever asked her if she was okay and I could tell that she really wasn't she would say something like 'I have to be okay. I'm alive, aren't I?'"
Amber smiled back at Ghost. "I thought that m-maybe I could learn to defend myself. That way, maybe I wouldn't have to worry as m-much." She didn't mention that it was probably going to be her sister Aura teaching her. She was aware of the fact that her sister didn't have the best reputation in some circles. "Even if I c-can't be safe, at least I won't have to be a victim any longer."
"Also, it never hurts to be unbearably polite."
Amber smiled weakly, though the smile did manage to reach her eyes. "I t-try to be polite. I don't think I have many friends though." At least not many friends that she thought would actually help her with a situation like that. Not other than her sister. It didn't help matters that she was, every day, looking more and more like a disease victim. No one wanted to be around someone that looked like they might just give them the plague.
"Learning some defense probably isn't a bad idea, to be honest." Ghost smoothed Amber's sheet, what would have been her hair, and then let the girl go.
"I think it's important also to always be vigilant. I don't want you to get paranoid, but be careful. Don't let a little training get to your head or else you might end up in over your head." Ghost nodded sagely. She had done that too.
When Amber confessed that she didn't want to be a victim and that she didn't feel like she had many friends Ghost frowned at the dark and empty living room. "You know, I think it's all how you're willing to look at it. I always feel like it was my fault that I let myself get into bad situations. The people who are bad, they're going to do that no matter who they entrap. If you keep yourself out of trouble, you won't be a victim. Your defense would have worked before it ever got bad.
It's the same with friends. If you don't go where you can meet people, or be met then you won't ever get trapped in a friendship." Ghost winked and then covered a yawn. She had some hours yet before her watch was over. "Do you have a room here? Maybe you ought to get to bed."
It felt good to Amber to have someone encouraging her even if she was advising caution at the same time. Caution, in fact, actually seemed like a very good thing to advise. She knew her sister would make a wonderful teacher when it came to the mechanics of combat, but she wasn't exactly the right choice when it came to teaching caution and common sense. Perhaps she'd have to look elsewhere for that particular lesson.
"You know, I think it's all how you're willing to look at it. I always feel like it was my fault that I let myself get into bad situations. The people who are bad, they're going to do that no matter who they entrap. If you keep yourself out of trouble, you won't be a victim. Your defense would have worked before it ever got bad.
"Its n-not always my fault, you know," Amber replied, just a little bit defensive. "H-how could I expect or stop an angry mob from attacking me? You know I c-can't help the way I look or the fact that some humans fear and hate me simply because of something I can't control." Maybe part of it was mindset, she was willing to concede that, but part of it was also the fact that she was a mutant and nothing she could do would ever change that, whether she wanted to change it or not. And, at the core of her being, it wasn't something that she wanted to change.
"It's the same with friends. If you don't go where you can meet people, or be met then you won't ever get trapped in a friendship. Do you have a room here? Maybe you ought to get to bed."
Amber nodded, her slight and momentary anger forgotten. "Th-thank you so much for sitting and talking with me. I think I will go up to my room now." She reached over in hopes of getting a hug before going off to bed. Maybe she'd been through a lot during her short life, but she was still just a teenager and sometimes she needed a hug.
