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.
A thief. Noel chewed on that thought for a moment, but decided that... well, he was honest about it. He wasn't in denial and he legitimately believed he was moving away from that kind of life.
"Wait. You got shot?" She hadn't really noticed... she should have noticed. "How long? I mean, you're not like oozing?" Did she need to take care of him?
He pulled over and walked around to help her. "Ty... hey." She stopped him from hobbling and made him look at her. "Beggars can't be choosers. So what if we ride off into the sunset in a stolen car? You're not selling it for parts or anything and the owners were stupid enough to leave their keys inside. This is LA, for Pete's sake. It was just begging to be stolen."
Noel for her part just kept her head down and tried to look happy as well as completely exhausted. The last part wasn't hard to pull off. Being really ecstatically happy about an IV was a little harder to pull off especially since she realized that she wasn't quite sure where "home" was.
Ty brushed everybody off like a champ, but was a tad panicked as he all but dumped Noel into his car.
They zoomed away and Noel relaxed, but Ty only seemed to get more tense.
"Sanctuary is fine." Was that like a church? Didn't matter. He was being incredibly sweet and totally like a brother when he offered her his bed.
And then, he dropped the bomb.
"DITCH THE CAR!?" She hadn't meant to say it that loud and it sent her into a coughing fit which hurt so much it made her tear up. She barely remembered to keep the pink blanket in place to keep herself modest. "You... stole..." She huffed and puffed and tried again at a lower volume which worked better. "You stole this car?" Okay. They could like pull over now, right? No wonder he was tense.
"I can walk. My legs are fine. How far is Sanctuary?"
She did some more fuzzy math while Ty ducked out of the room for a bit. He was legitimately 21 and Noel just felt 21. Oh dang. She probably looked old now. She would have to ask Ty if her tattoos were all stretched out now. No wonder she had decided to play brother and sister.
> "...how would you like to be the mother of my daughter?"
Blink. "Oh that is some sick kind of genius. Help me out?" She directed him to take down her IV and then she wrapped it in a pink blanket. "I think she has your eyes, dear" Her power just didn't know what to do with that one so it registered somewhere in the neighborhood of lie. She frowned. This would take deception to get out. "I don't think I can lie believably right now. Or ever again since my power manifested as a kid." Hopefully that wouldn't be an issue.
With a little help she got situated in the chair and traded her hospital gown for a draped a pink blanket over her chest. She put the "baby" under the blanket like she had seen ladies do at the beach. Nobody was about to tell a new mother not to feed her baby.
"Let's roll." As humiliating as the chair was, Noel knew she wasn't making it out of here without one.
Twenty thirteen. It sounded so... future-ish. She did the math in her head, lost the numbers a few times and had to start over, but eventually came to a conclusion. "7 years. That... could have been worse. God. Just think if I'd gone back to being like 4 and eating glue." Yeah, actually she would rather not.
All the same it was a lot to process. What changed in 7 years? President, for sure. Businesses come and gone. The internet. That crap always moved crazy fast. Were they using holograms or something now? She wanted to see it for herself, but instead she was stuck in here. Like, drugs were good and everything, but she could be uncomfortable at home while playing with her hologram... thing.
"Screw it. Just fill me in on what I missed? While we get ready to go? General stuff. I'll figure out the details later." Noel pushed herself up to a sitting position and darkness edged in on her vision. If she could not puke, that would be great.
Noel swung her legs over the edge of the bed and held up her modesty gown. She focused on her breathing and the sound of Ty's voice while she got it together. Her lips were pale and she just wasn't sure she was up to escaping the hospital, but she really, really wanted out.
A nurse popped her head into the door to ask what they were doing, no doubt in response to something Noel's finger monitor told her. "I'd like my discharge papers, please."
It took some back and forth, most of which seemed to take something out of Noel, but she was stubborn and insistent even if she was weak. The nurse left to go got instructions and the discharge papers and Noel took that as a wonderful time to lean her side back against the bed.
In case Ty was wondering... "I don't have insurance. I mean, I didn't 7 years ago and I sure as heck don't have any on me now. The less time we're here, the better." Besides, it wasn't like she was a criminal or anything. They couldn't hold her against her will.
Ty's answer provided Noel with profound relief followed by crazy panic. FBI agent? That thought jangled around in her head dislodging all others. FBI agents had to go through years of training, at least the ones that carried guns around did. "Maybe it's the drugs, but I feel like I just time travelled. Let me take a wild guess and say it's not 2006 anymore, I'm not in school anymore and, for once good news, all the finals I was worrying about last week are ancient history?"
This whole situation was making her feel tired right down to her soul. A fate worse than death? No, though thinking like that did erase any and all thoughts of potential revenge. Noel had done all this herself, from recruiting Ty to putting herself here. Freaking depressing. She'd crippled herself mentally, not as bad as it could have been, but still... She both wanted to hug Ty and push him down the stairs for all the scary truths he had. But again, it wasn't even his fault.
Noel reached up to touch the tender spots on her neck and strands of hair fell in her face. She couldn't reach higher than her neck without her torso screaming at her. She really wanted to feel out that throbbing spot at the back of her head, but had to settle for what she could get.
Okay. New, less depressing train of thought time. "so, beyond getting better and getting out of here, what's next?"
So it was a sh and she was a mutant. Noel filed that little nugget away for later.
If Noel essentially did this to herself... If she had meant to wipe everything... "Yeah. Must've gone wrong when I took away control of her mutation. That explains my own break down in that area. Plus the fact that I still know my own name, how to read, that kind of stuff." Noel looked at the monitor just in case. Yeah. Still knew how to read.
"We'll I guess if revenge is what got me here, I shouldn't run off and avenge myself again, huh?" Funny that her first inclination had been to get revenge. Did she have some leftovers from who she used to be or was that part of her core? Something she would always do no matter who she was? She sent the psychometric a handgun to read to learn about her before.
"Am I... was I some kind of crazy?" Like right wing gun happy shoot 'em up crazy? Or mass murderer crazy? Who lived their life in full view of a handgun?
A philosophical conundrum for another day, perhaps.
"She deserved it, right? You know enough about "her" that you can tell me that, right?"
Aaaand then he had to go and get all cocky about how much she had trusted him. Right after he had said she didn't have any other choice, too. "Our next move? Don't you have like... A day job? Or something?" Noel wondered if she was still going to college. Nah, with her luck she'd probably only managed to erase a couple weeks off that chick's life and she would be just in time for finals only without any of the knowledge of this semester. She certainly didn't feel like any time had gone by.
"Take your time." Seemed like that was in ample supply around here too. The only thing that wasn't plentiful was positions where Noel could lay and not touch something that ached. Maybe her side? She struggled to roll herself and declined any offers of help. It wasn't pretty, but it did feel a bit better.
Years of shirt, eh? She supposed she could lick it and find out, according to Ty anyway.
"I don't know what I wanted to remember before, but right now what interests me is the person who put me in here." She tightened her fists as much as the IV and finger monitor allowed and took a deep breath to keep herself from setting off her mutation again. Revenge sounded pretty good right about now.
Okay, well. Not now, now. But like... pretty soon?
"Hey now. C'mon. It can't be that bad..." How messed up could she be that she was comforting the person who knew what she had just done? Maybe it was that bad. He was talking about blame. And leaving her here. He was the first person to stop and talk to her, not that she minded the doctors doing their jobs rather than stopping to chat. "You're sorta freakin' me out." He sounded like he might just pass out. No better place for it, but still...
Noel rolled her lips together at Ty's explanation about powers. Her thing. That thing she did on accident. That was a mutation. A controllable ability. Her brain felt like it was trying to shrink in on itself or rearrange something. "Right. Memories and lies." She must have forgotten, but him brining it up like this was helping her remember.
In fact, the more her head felt like it was squeezing, the more she was certain of how it worked. The memorymancer held her head in her hands and took a long blink to shut off the forgetting part. Now the room was on solid ground again, she could make eye contact and finish getting treatment as needed.
But first, "What else? There's a short window where I can get some of it back." She had been smart to pick out Ty. Since what he was telling her was true, there was no one else that could get her the full picture unless they were there and... Judging by her injuries being wherever she was before this had been hazardous.
Actually, if she just closed her eyes it wasn't nearly as bad. Not watching the room shake violently did a world of good for Noel's nausea. So she closed her eyes and she listened.
Noel knew what she had done. She'd done the thing where she got mad and people started forgetting. Only this time, she had to be really, really mad because she was still trying to piece together basic things.
"If I had a place to go better than this, believe me, I would." She had an apartment, but it was a drive from... wait... where was this? "And I need you to feed my cat." Didn't matter. Nobody ever knew which hospital they were in because all hospitals were the same.
How would he figure out what she'd been through? She had her eyes open before she'd realized it. And then he was walking up to her. She pulled her gown up higher and higher in direct relation to how close he was getting.
He touched the hem of her clothes and... and just stood there for a second all glassy eyed and slack jawed.
"What? What's rough?" She squirmed. She was asking because he'd made it sound bad. She didn't know any better.
Noel swiveled her head slowly to inspect this newcomer. Ty, eh?
"You're not my brother." Just by looking she could tell that much even if his words hadn't registered as... well, garbage. She made a face at the taste. "And I am calm." It was the room that was freaking out.
What she did not make a face at was the idea that they would skeedaddle. "Can we do that? Let's get out of here." She looked down at her shirt and hesitated. She had virtually no shirt left. And what little material was touching her body felt like a cheese grater against her skin.
And then there was the prospect of standing up. And after that the thought of walking.
She hadn't even sat all the way upright and was exhausted. "Wait. Maybe we start at the beginning."She pulled the covering up a little more. No need to get risky with a possibly related stranger in the room. "Your name is Ty. My name is Noel. Nice to meet you."
"Mr. Ty Fisher?" The nurse hardly even waited for confirmation. "We have a patient here, a uh- Noel Fisher. You're listed as her brother and emergency contact..." She filled him in on the details. First and second degree burns on her chest, abrasions and contusions all along her back, neck and the back of the head. Something electrical blew up and shot her across the street into a car. Noel had a concussion, two fractured ribs and will likely carry a small degree of scarring on her chest for the rest of her life.
---
"I hear music." And her head felt like a blender attached to a balloon. Did that make sense? Balloon-y blenders? She would have laughed, but even just breathing burned. The ceiling zoomed by and Noel blinked until someone clapped loudly in front of her face.
"Hey! Don't go to sleep."
Sleep? "Freaking impossible," while strapped to a "freaking board." She did, however, blink again.
And jerked awake again in a different room. In a bed. Someone came to check her pupillary response with a small pin light and when they made eye contact...
Noel was still laying down, but the bed was cracking its way up with a mechanical buzz. A nurse was escorting someone out of the room who was just as confused as she was. If the room would just quit shaking, if her head would just quit spinning around for a minute...
"Can you remember your name?" The doctor began, pin light in hand, pulled her chin up to make eye contact...
This time everyone was clearing out of the room. She had an IV in place and a bit of gauze on her chest with a bit of cloth draped loosely over it so that the cloth wouldn't touch anything and so she would be decent. Her shirt was a wreck, a combination of burnt and cut open, but at least she retained her pants and what little dignity they afforded to her. She was propped up slightly by the angle of the bed which made her chest throb in a distant, unimportant way.
What really bothered her was the gauze. It burned and grated like it was too heavy a covering.
"Hello?" She didn't recognize her own voice. It eeked out and made her grit her teeth to keep from drawing too deep a breath and disturb the gauze of doom.
"Discontinue the use of your mutation so that we can continue giving you medical care." The voice buzzed over the speaker from the phone next to the bed. Noel took her time turning her head to locate it in order to keep herself from throwing up.
Her last note, she taped to the door. You won't have to worry about Lori anymore. Or me. Have a wonderful life, Sebastian.
It took time, setting one's affairs in order to end this life.
Not that Noel was dying. She was just ending who she was now. Tomorrow, Noel would wake up a different person. She might wake up thinking she was three years old, or she might wake up on a ventilator because she'd forgotten how to breathe. That was how far she was willing to go. She would end her life to make sure that Lori's life ended as well.
Oddly enough, despite her over dramatic fatalistic feelings, Noel wasn't nervous. She wouldn't remember this anyway. She was more... numb. This needed to be done. She deserved it. Sebastian deserved better. Maybe numb wasn't the right word. Was pre-guilt a thing?
Maybe pre-meditation was better.
Noel waited for the CEO outside of the building. As a member of the security team, the memorymancer had ample time to observe Lori's comings and goings. She had access to video feeds and had tracked the woman all day as much as the cameras allowed.
5 o'clock. Lori did not use the service elevator to go up as she sometimes did to disappear for a few hours. This time she picked up a package and went straight down to the lobby and out the front doors. Noel had to jog to catch up. The blonde might be short, but she was a freaking champion power walker for how fast she was scooting down the road.
"Hey!" It took Noel's hand on Lori's shoulder to get the woman to stop and turn around.
She seemed flustered and shifted the parcel in her arms. "Oh. Noel. Do you need something?"
"Do you know what you did?" It just blurted out. No lead up, no nothing.
"I try, but in this instance why don't you enlighten me?" She shifted the parcel again and Noel saw... a floppy ear? A stuffed animal? Not important.
"You ruined Sebastian's life." Not to mention her own. It wasn't worth mentioning, really.
"Ah. I made a reasonable argument in order to persuade you to help me in a gambit that ultimately failed."
Noel folded her arms in response.
"Don't worry. It wasn't your fault. It was Sebastian's."
Noel huffed. This wasn't going as planned. "But... why? Why did you do it?"
She smiled in a way that made Noel feel less numb and more like punching things. "Would you believe that I just wanted everybody to get along?"
The lie didn't taste like straight up garbage, but there was enough dissonance to that statement that made the memorymancer shove Lori hard enough for her to stumble. She caught her balance, but only by bracing herself on a nearby skyscraper. She wasn't even wearing heels. "No."
A small noise came from the parcel and the blonde clutched it tighter. "You get once chance to walk away. I'd take it if I were you." The way she was holding that... no. No way. It was a ploy. Another 'unsuccessful gambit.' Had to be. Noel had been working in teh same building as Lori and that lady had never ever been pregnant.
Noel wanted to press her face against Lori's. She wanted to know why, but... ultimately it didn't matter did it? Neither of them would know once tomorrow dawned.
It only took a split second to make her decision. Lori was either too bold to deny her eye contact or didn't believe that Noel would actually do it.
Forget. Noel's eyes started vibrating back and forth in their sockets. Forget EVERYTHING.
She started with the most recent events and worked backward, a full and complete sweep of the mind.
Noel didn't see it, but she did taste it. Lori had to be the least truthful person Noel had ever met. It was awful. Purposeful.
She absolved Lori of those lies, making her mind clean again.
It was better. For everyone.
Somewhere along the way she took the memories that kept Lori's power in check. The effect was immediate.
sssrKRACK!
It hit her in the chest like an ax, both knocking the wind out of her and feeling like a deep stab. The blonde woman went backward toward the building which immediately squealed and crumpled. Noel went flying back into the street. She made impact with a vehicle that, thanks to Lori's power, was moving the same direction she was.
A small package arrived for Ty by a courier service that wore yellow. It held a disassembled matte black handgun wrapped in a tee shirt. No ammunition included. It was the one thing she had managed to keep with her through before everything that she could remember.
The day Noel got her gun was the day of her field exam when she had finished training with the FBI. She carried it with her through missions and continued to carry it after she was transferred to New York. The gun was there when she captured, threatened, tagged and wiped the memories of her fellow mutants. It witnessed her humiliation when her face got gutted by a knife, when a co-worker stole her clothes in the park, and when she went to the meeting that changed Sebastian's life.
It had less and less to witness as Noel started to prefer the sword, but the last and most recent memory was deliberate. She used it like yet another answering machine.
---
Noel pulled her gun out of a drawer and sat on the couch in the apartment she and Sebastian had shared.
"Ty, you said that you can see the whole history of something. If that's true you now know more about me than I do. At least I hope you do. I met Sebastian's wife last night. It was... Awful. I don't know how I got to this point, but I do know somebody who is responsible for a large part of Sebastian's suffering." She didn't say it, but she was thinking about her current suffering as well. She had never wanted to betray someone's trust like she had obviously betrayed Sebastian. With almost angry movements Noel started to take the weapon apart.
"I'm going to make her suffer the same way Sebastian suffered. I'm going to make her forget everything." An eye for an eye, so to speak. "I'm listing you as my emergency contact so when it's done, when I am a vegetable or have the brains of a three year old or whatever, they're going to call you. Sorry. You said you didn't really have anybody. That's double true for me. I hope you get that."
She was done taking the weapon apart so she buried her face in her hands. "Tell me. Or don't tell me. Use me. Kill me. Or make me into whatever you want after this, but gods damn you if you lie to me, Ty, I will know it." She took some time before she spoke again.
"Sorry to dump this on you."
Noel didn't cry, but she did have to wipe her face before she wrapped the weapon up and put it in the same packaging Ty had now.
"Ty." Just that one word held enough emotion to set the tone for this message: serious. "I'm about to do something... well, really stupid." She breathed into the receiver, part laugh and part disbelieving hurrumph. "I'm sending you something that's important to me. Remember how you said you'd do this thing for me? For free? I hope you don't regret that offer once it gets there."
There was an awkward pause where Noel tried to figure out what she would say next. This wasn't scripted by any means. "Uhm, once you know everything from what I've given you... If it's bad... Ty, I don't know, maybe... Maybe help me not be like that? I'm putting a lot of faith in you about this." Because she didn't trust herself anymore and she couldn't remember anyone else trustworthy at the time. He had her back once before. He made her an offer. She just had to hope he would follow through with it.
"Thanks. Sorry." As far as goodbyes went, that could have gone worse. She hung up.
Posted by Noel on May 7, 2013 23:39:25 GMT -6
Sebastian likes this
S.U.P.E.R.
S.U.P.E.R. Agent
yellowgreen
Ranger
1,751
532
Dec 21, 2021 8:26:40 GMT -6
Ghost
>“Mmm, smells good enough to eat,”
"That's the idea, right?" She tried to tease in a casual way. Yeah. Dinner casual.
Noel trailed along behind Sebastian like a wooden pull toy. This was surreal. She tried to take notice of the exits, the walkways, the kitchen and the restrooms because the necessity of a quick exit seemed like a very real possibility.
They sat, Noel pulled her hair over her shoulder to keep from sitting on it and to avoid anyone stepping on it and also to keep the surprise from making her do something suspicious when he kissed her. Because he did. Don't think she didn't notice.
She tried to rationalize. Yeah, they'd slept on the same mattress when they'd been down on their respective lucks, but it was innocent. There hadn't been anywhere else to go. Sebastian was trustworthy. He was real. This wasn't some skeezy stranger. This was her swordmaster and she was his shadow. Her place was by him. This was natural. A perfect extension of what they already had. She was the only one feeling weird about it so she tried not to feel weird about it. Because it wasn't weird.
She hadn't thought about how many people there might be around. Of the tables around them, not many were telling full truths. So far it wasn't anything dinner ruining. She could handle this. Maybe. Probably.
He had the swords, right? Noel craned her neck to check and... Right. She could see the hilts reflecting light from the dim overhead halogens. With Sebastian across the table, her lifesaver and her usual comfort objects were all just out of reach. She tried to relax anyway. If she was going to do this, she was going to do this right.
"If you hadn't asked, I don't think I would have thought that way about us. You're an attractive man, a god even. It's not my natural..." She floundered to find the right words. She just didn't think that way. "I don't take a lot of chances with this kind of thing. And People who know me, who know what I can do... I don't want to be a burden." Like an Alzheimer's patient. But Sebastian had never treated her that way. That earned him some good, solid eye contact. She wasn't ashamed of what she was saying. It was the truth.
"It's nice to be appreciated." Any girl who owned heels wanted on some level to be appreciated.
The waiter? steward? porter? garçon? maitre d'? came by for their drink orders. Noel didn't want anything alcoholic so she ordered something called a long island iced tea off the short fancy drink menu.
