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.
Jocelyn really wanted to wash her hands, or maybe even take a shower or two.
She glanced at the still, but still breathing rat in Kaitlyn's hands. Honestly at this point she wasn't really too worried about him unless he turned out to be the kid they were looking for.
“I suppose we tell them that if they are Stephen, they should shift back to human. If that doesn't work we can drop them off somewhere far away from here so they don't find their way back in again.” Normally she would have just killed them, but considering their current status as possible humans, she didn't really want to add to the rat bodies in the refrigerator.
The super sniffer leaned down to poke at the one in Kaitlyn's hands, really wishing that she could use a stick instead of her finger.
“Hey, you a mutant? You should shift back if you are.”
While she was at it, she took sniff of him, trying not to make a face while she did it. He smelled like a rat, or course, but he also smelled like all the places he'd been and all the things he had touched. Drywall and insulation of the Sanctuary walls, moist concrete and washed up garbage of the sewers, and more strangely, the distinct smells of two different people who had touched him within the last few days. One was a mutant boy, probably the rat shifter Stephen. The other was a girl, another mutant with a psychic scent. That a rat should be touched by humans at all, but for this one to be touched by two, or rather four now, humans in a short period of time seemed very odd.
What she didn't smell was the scent of newness, of an animal body that had simply begun existing suddenly with a fresh slate of smells. This rat had been a rat for quite some time and didn't seem ready to change back any time soon.
“I don't think this one is Stephen,” she said, reverting her gaze to Kaitlyn. “Let's check the others.”
It was the same for all of them. They all smelled like rats, sewers, and the same two mutant children.
She shook her head at Kaitlyn when she had finished checking the last one, then added, “Stephen doesn't have any friends, does he? I mean... other friends who like to pet his rats, too?”
Kaitlyn was the first to successfully catch one of the things. Jocelyn was finding it much more difficult to catch one when it was with her bare hands rather than the point of her knife. When the little red head held up her wriggling prize, the undercover cop couldn't help but wrinkle her nose. This really was gross. She looked around the room and grabbed a t-shirt and held it out like a sack.
Carefully, so as not to touch the rat if she didn't have to, Jocelyn pulled the shirt up around the rat and tied it at the top. Hopefully it would be a little while before the rat was able to wriggle or chew out. For good measure, Jocelyn tossed the makeshift sack into a dresser drawer.
“Now it's my turn I suppose.”
Jocelyn dove at a grey shadow that was sneaking its way into the closet.
Stephan's hygiene problems: further proof that children and the Sanctuary just shouldn't mix. Why did no one but another child try to teach him about how to take care of himself? Jocelyn thought that it was something she could easily handle along with whatever Order duties she would be assigned.
That was provided Stephan was still alive. If he wasn't... words would not describe how awful she would feel. She would make it up to him; she would make sure that every child at the Sanctuary was properly cared for and taught appropriate safety procedures.
That included Kaitlyn, who swore that she had been adopted by someone named Lori who also lived here. Children were not especially skilled liars; they certainly told enough of them, but there was always that fear of being caught that gave them away. Telling a convincing lie was not something that came naturally to them.
Kaitlyn, who up until this point had been cheerfully telling the truth, smelled of just a little bit of nervousness when she recited her residential status. Lupe raised an eyebrow at her, but didn't say anything. She could do more poking around later. She didn't want to scare the girl away from being her friend by poking into a past that the little girl obviously wanted to keep hidden. There would be plenty of time for that later.
They arrived outside Stephan's room, though she could smell it long before they ever got there. It smelled very much like rats and sewers and mildew and who knew what else. Once the door was opened, Jocelyn almost gagged. The sheer amount of smell was overwhelming. It took a few breaths before her nose was able to adjust to the onslaught before she could enter.
The room looked as terrible as it smelled. The piles of clothing wriggled as she stepped near them.
As her nose got used to the onslaught, she started to be able to pick out the individual smells: rats, at least three of them; stale pizza crusts; rotting banana; ants in pop cans; a pancake with syrup; raw putrid chicken; a liquified potato; and sweat, blood, and tears.
Lupe picked up the cleanest looking article of clothing she could see: a t-shirt draped of the bed post, labeled “Rock Paper Nuke” and thoughtfully inhaled. The scents were all mixed up. A mutant boy had worn it, but a whole host of rats had also gotten their scent all over the thing. She had no way of telling if the boy's scent morphed into one of the rats' scents.
One rat skittered from under the bed to a hole in the wall.
She turned to the little exploding girl, indicating the direction the rat had gone with her chin, “Kaitlyn, we've got to catch them all.”
Jocelyn tried to be patient with the slow pace of this short legged little child. She tried not to rush ahead, since she didn't actually know where they were going. She tried not to think too hard about the possibility that Stephan might... not be home.
And then something made her stop short, if only for a moment. This girl was a walking bomb?
A child with an exceedingly dangerous mutation was being raised in the Sanctuary, surrounded by murderers and thieves, listening to them brag about their kills as if it was just another day at the office... or whatever these people talked about at their family dinners.
They are raising a weapon. This girl could be the next Isabel Duskmoor or Rena Whilver.
The thought sickened her.
But she had to keep going. She had to keep walking as if nothing was out of the oridinary. She had to keep living as if she accepted everything the Order was doing. She had to answer the girl's question before the silence got awkward.
“I have the nose of a wolf. I can smell things really well and track them. It's how I picked my name: Lupe. I'm hoping to use my nose to help you track down your friend.” Hoping really hard, because she didn't want to be someone that killed innocents, even if it was by accident.
“How did you come to be living at the Sanctuary?” If little Kaitlyn had been kidnapped and brought here against her will, someone was going to have hell to pay. Possibly even if she hadn't been.
Not too long into the evening's news, the opening jingle of the short segment Equal in Stupidity played. Jocelyn adjusted her position, sitting up a little straighter on the plush couch. She would never admit it out loud, but she did usually enjoy the snark of the redheaded Maxine Ralls. The irony, the hyperbole, the satire, the sarcasm, all served to highlight the absolute truth; human or mutant, there were a lot of idiots out there. And yes, sometimes she, too, was offended, but like vilification tennis, that was part of the beauty; everyone was offended sometimes.
Tonight's episode hit a little closer to home than most. It featured one Isabel Duskmoor and her girlfriend on their most recent... she could only assume it was meant to be a date. They had made their way through an ice cream shop, a bar, a police station, and a museum, killing at every step. Jocelyn had been out of town when she had heard about it, and because she wasn't supposed to look like a cop, hadn't been allowed to go to the funerals.
Of course, Ms. Ralls turned the whole thing into a farce; Jocelyn just couldn't feel the humor tonight. She was more saddened by the reminder, and below the sadness little embers of anger flared into being. Not at the reporter, but at the ones who caused the situation in the first place.
There wasn't much time for these embers to smolder before the broadcast was cut short by a white projectile through the center of the television. Almost as if in slow motion, Jocelyn turned to face the door, where the woman who had thrown it still stood.
Isabel Duskmoor, the cop killer herself.
Looking and smelling madder than a hornet. Wisely, the children that had been sitting around scattered.
Jocelyn inhaled, not going anywhere. She counted silently to five before she reacted. She had to keep her cool, she knew that.
“Isabel, I presume? I've heard a lot about you,” she used calm tones, soothing ones. The last thing she needed was for the bow adorned girl to stab her in the face simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Most of it is pretty preposterous, of course,” she waved absently at the shattered television, “It's nice to meet the real you.” She gave a hopeful smile, hopeful that her own calm reaction would be contagious and the bone thrower wouldn't start maiming people at any minute.
Jocelyn was suddenly not hungry any longer. Family dinner? Maybe some other day.
“A... rat,” she parroted. On the outside she plastered a helpful and friendly smile on her face. On the inside she was running through every moment of the previous two hours.
The rat from her wall had not acted like anything except an ordinary rat. If it had been a boy, it would have had plenty of chances during their encounter to shift back to a person. Also, it hadn't smelled like a mutant, a boy, or anything other than a dirty rat that had been crawling around in dirty places and eating garbage.
She was pretty sure the rat in the refrigerator was not a shifter mutant. Almost definitely sure.
Almost.
“So... Kaitlyn. Does Stephen have a room at the Sanctuary? We could go check to see if he's at home.”
She could also check to see if his belongings smelled like the particular rat that had ended up in her wall. Not that she suspected he would. In fact, that might not even be necessary, since Stephen probably was in his room right now.
What were children doing running around the Sanctuary, anyway? This was clearly no place for children.
She started toward the door, completely bypassing the dining room table where people were starting to gather for dinner. She was definitely not hungry.
Jocelyn swung by the cafeteria on the way back from her morning run. She was all sweaty and probably smelled terrible even to those with inferior noses, but she didn't care. At this time of morning barely anyone would be up anyway.
“Do you have plain yoghourt,” she inquired of the hair netted lady behind the sneezeguard. The lady didn't look like she'd had her daily dose of morning coffee, but her eyes did widen a bit when she recognized the description she had been given of Lupe.
“Got somethin' else for ya, too,” she handed over a note along with the plastic container containing breakfast.
A note?
From the tiger boy, it looked like.
Curious, Jocelyn returned to her room. Sure enough, there, in a pile on top of her tall boots, was a bag from McGrease King with her name on it. Spelled wrong.
How thoughtful.
Jocelyn ate her burger for breakfast and washed it down with the yoghurt, all the while staring at the hole in her sheetrock and thinking of what she would do to thank Calley for his kindness.
-Later-
It was almost time for the news. Jocelyn settled back on the couch. All around the room, all throughout the Sanctuary in fact, a multicolored string was threaded, hung, and wrapped. One end was tied to Calley's doorknob. The other end was on the roof, tied to a raw steak that may or may not have been pilfered off her own brother's grill before it had a chance to start cooking.
Bonus present: basketball sized ball of yarn.
Jocelyn relaxed into the plush couch just as the opening jingle for Wolf News began.
It didn't take long for Jocelyn to get settled into her room at the Sanctuary. She didn't have many belongings to settle. There was a duffel bag full of clothes, which got unpacked into the dresser. That filled one drawer. Her gun (not the police issued one with the smiley sticker on the bottom, but the illegally obtained one) and knife went into the drawer in the nightstand, easily reachable from either the door or the bed.
Unpacking took about five minutes.
Next up, changing out of the hunting clothes that made her look like a tramp and feel like her feet were going to go on strike until she gave them a pay raise and better working conditions. The tall boots went in a pile by the door. The short dress in a pile in the closet. She replaced them with well worn tennis shoes, cut off jeans, and a loose fitting red tank top.
That took another five minutes.
Sigh.
Jocelyn collapsed back onto the bed. A broken spring greeted her spine in a poking manner. Something rustled in the wall. Jocelyn listened, then sniffed. Amidst the smells of chlorine from the pool, which she was still getting used to, mildew in the shower, and various scents of the inhabitants of the Sanctuary and their rather exotic pets, she smelled something that belonged only in sewers.
It was a rat.
She could live with murderers with skunk pets and mildewy showers, but she was not going to live with a rat in her wall.
-An hour later-
What did one do with a dead rat anyway? The hole in the wall she could fix with a little spackle. Disposing of the rat would actually be more difficult. She didn't even know where the garbage canisters were in this place.
Maybe a tigger pet would want it.
On a corner of a piece of newspaper, she scribbled a note. “I left a present for you in the fridge.” She used the rest of the paper to wrap the present and put Calley's name on it. “Kaylee”. The note she left on the floor by his door, since she didn't have any tape. She made her way towards the kitchen with the present itself.
The kitchen staff were somewhat busy, and someone pointed out that she should be sitting out in the dining room if she was going to join the family dinner for the evening. Ah, okay. Right after putting this in the fridge... and Jocelyn scampered out to the dining room to avoid any more harsh glaring. Note to self, don't get in the way of the kitchen staff.
Lupe chuckled. It was a combination of the memory of the cat from one of her son's favorite movies from when he was five and the comment about how expensive the lobster had been.
“Yeah, lobsters can be pricey. Usually people don't take them home in a fishbowl, though.” More like in their stomachs.
After the question on whether she'd be moving in, Lupe shrugged her tattooed shoulder.
“I do need a cheap place to stay. I suppose it's a difference between cockroaches in the mattress and skunks in the hallway. And skunks don't get through a locked door...” at least not without help.
“If I'm going to be staying here, I'd rather not be pumping anyone's gas or have boogie men jump out at me from every corner, so I guess I'm stuck in the middle,” with the chlorine and the umbrella-required hall and the tiger boy, but hopefully away from the skunk, the bone furniture, and any other unforetold dangers that the lower levels seemed to offer.
“Nice to meet you,” Lupe replied to Lobenstein the toad-who-wasn't-really-a-toad. Lobentein croa-Ked his response.
The lower level was kind of like a community center, with places to work out and hang out. Felix would have loved living down the hall from a swimming pool and every type of gaming system imaginable, in their respective rooms. Not that he would ever be coming here. Personally, she could have done without the strong smell of chlorine permeating everything on the floor.
Acheew!
“Does each room have it's own bathroom,” she wondered out loud. Or did everyone on the floor go down to the locker room?
That question was quickly answered when Calley steered her into an example bedroom, apparently his own. It wasn't locked. In fact, it didn't really look like it could be locked anymore. The furniture was somewhat sparse, kind of like a college dorm room. There was a personal bathroom though.
Aside from the kiddie pool, Calley's looked kind of impersonal. Jocelyn's would too. Her guess was many of the people who lived here didn't come in with a lot of personal effects. It would only be the people who stayed for long periods of time that would start to accumulate enough possessions to actually give a room some personality.
While she inspected the layout of the room, she heard a splish! followed quickly by an “Umm.” She turned to see Calley looking slightly worried about having just dumped his toad into the kiddie pool.
“I don't think...”
One second there was a toad, floundering in too deep salt water.
“...so.”
The next second, the toad was a lobster waving his claws angrily in Calley's direction as he tried without much success to climb the wall of the kiddie pool.
The name Lobenstein made complete sense now. He was huge!
“How did...” Jocelyn looked down at the lobster and then at the tiger, still glued to her hand, trying to connect the dots. “What is he really, then?”
If she had already suspected that Calley's tiger was not a normal tiger, it was now confirmed. First, he was tame. Not in and of itself all that unusual.
Second, it seemed to understand English. He snorted when she told Calley that she could smell better than the tiger. Tame and intelligent.
Third, when she scratched his just there she got not only a tiger rubbing up against her leg, but an young Order member with half closed eyes practically purring for her as well. Tame, intelligent, and linked somehow to his original creator.
Good to know.
Lupe followed down the stairs, noting automatically which ones creaked when she stepped on them. She kept one hand on the railing and the other on the head of her big striped kitten friend. She had a feeling that for the price of her bacon each morning for breakfast and a few scratches she might have at least one person at the sanctuary who probably wouldn't kill her if they found out...
Mentally she changed topics, “What do you mean, 'before he changes back'?” She kept her thoughts curious about her surroundings and Calley, one never knew who might be listening in.
Lupe chuckled at the tiger's antics. Like any cat, he wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. Snack time was over. Now it was petting time. She let her fingers scritch and scratch until they found a spot that the tiger seemed to like.
“There's really only one definition of hyperosmia. It means I have a keener sense of smell than your handsome friend here.” She gave him pat on the head in between scratches to the ears. “But I don't have claws or teeth nearly as fine as his.”
“Lets try downstairs first,” she decided, “but we can skip the reptile room.” Lupe tilted her head at the toad in the bowl. “Can he... breathe okay in there?”
She was almost afraid to find out, what with skunks and bone furniture on the list of interesting things she'd found out about so far.
She was going to have to tread very carefully, if she wanted to get out of this alive. Or better yet, she could just walk out now and never come back, Captain Cynthia Myers be damned.
Except.
Except the captain was right. Jocelyn probably was the only one that could do this. And she had already gotten the damn tattoo.
“Are there any other hazards I should be aware of before we continue on? Pit traps with spikes at the bottom? Telephones that blow up when you answer them? Elevators leading straight to hell if you press the wrong button?”
