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.
Allison raised an eyebrow as the puppy bounded back and forth, clearly wanting her to follow. Well, that’s a bit of a change from the scared whimpering fur blob ten seconds ago. “I talk about where you belong and you start leading me somewhere. You’re either a very intelligent puppy, or coincidence is trying to mess with me again today.” I’ll go with the second. It really likes messing with me. Normally Allison would be quite amused by either option, but....
Nope. Still pissed off. Distracted from it, but pissed off. Hopefully I won’t meet anything, ditzy-Alli would be hard to do today. She stood up carefully, working around the bruises that were beginning to set in, and followed the puppy.
Okay enough to lick, anyway, which Allison normally disliked in dogs but could happily put up with if it meant the dog she’d nearly crushed was okay. Whimpering, so presumably in pain, but okay. Still, though, she didn’t really want her hand covered in slime, so she started petting the puppy’s head and scratching around its ears instead. “What are you doing here, anyway, puppy? Not too many houses that close, and I haven’t seen anyone around recently, so no one to be your owners. And you must’ve been here longer than I have been, which... how long was I here?” The petting paused for a moment as she dug out her phone, checking the time. “Most of an hour. You don’t look like a stray, so where’d you run off from, puppy? Who's looking for you?”
Allison could take human obnoxiousness. She’d spent all her life dealing with it, and anyway, at least then she had something to blame. And possibly remember and later take revenge on, should the opportunity present itself. It might make her want to strangle something, but at least she had something to strangle.
When the trees started trying to make her life worse, however, it was probably time to just go home and hide for a few days.
...That thought might have been more cheering had it not led her back to why she was mad in the first place.
Allison snarled, at the tree branch that had broken--despite being quite large enough to take her weight, and having leaves growing on the end, so clearly alive as well--and the bush that she’d fallen through to acquire further scrapes and bruises and land on a fairly large stick that was digging into her back.
...A very loud, protesting stick. And possibly moving a bit. Allison blinked, turned her head, sprang onto her feet, tripped from the excess momentum and entangling bush branches that she hadn’t yet managed to crush, rolled to her feet again and leaned over toward the puppy whose tail she’d landed on, holding a hand out for it to sniff. “Sorry puppy, didn’t know you were there. You okay?”
Allison had not, much to her regret, learned any form of martial arts. Which was quite a shame, as it would have drastically helped with a number of things; stress relief and fighting with a certain army-trained cousin among them. At this moment, however, stress relief was the issue.
Allison’s landlord did not approve of mutants. Not enough to hunt them, but more then enough to make life difficult for them. And he was businessman enough to convince other landlords to agree with him, and force mutants into a resulting choice: pay extra fees, wait months for one of the rare mutant-friendly apartments to be open (and, coincidentally, probably be living only with mutants; prejudice or not there were some issues that came with that), fake humanity or don’t rent at all.
He was also smart enough to include a line stating that fees could be added or increased at any time for any reason in the rental contract, and make sure to inform all his landlord friends of the total fees for any given mutant who might be looking to move elsewhere.
Allison had a job, and at times had had two, but even with two she wouldn’t have been able to pay for her (really quite miniature) apartment after the first few increases. Her parents had money, and were willing to spend some of it on her, but the last increase had apparently been too much.
That the ‘too much’ line coincided almost perfectly with one of her mother’s favorite nephews starting college neither surprised nor amused Allison in the least.
There was not, however, much she could do. She couldn’t stay in the apartment she had, anyway; it was too expensive and getting worse. She could move, but the fees would carry over to any new apartment, and she couldn’t come close to what she’d need to buy anything outright. Her options were basically limited to dropping out, going home for a semester, and going back to school somewhere else, cutting off contact with her parents and living with a friend, both of which would probably require her to fake being human, or dropping out, getting more jobs, and maybe being able to stay where she was. Even that might take faking being human to get the jobs. And the second option would be easier if she actually had friends in New York, rather than the array of acquaintances she’d so far managed to acquire.
So, drop out temporarily and go crawling back home, or drop out apparently permanently. If she’d been less angry, Allison might have been amused at what it said that she considered the permanent dropping out option better than going home. Not that she was anywhere in sight of happy with that, either.
So. If Allison had been trained to fight, she probably would have gone and found a fight, or at least a spar of some kind. The fights she’d gotten into recently, while still fairly unskilled on her part, had at least been satisfying. But she wasn’t trained; probably even a punching bag would only manage to break her fingers before she calmed down at all.
So, instead, Allison ran. Without bothering to change, still wearing jeans and a tee shirt and even a hat. She had running shoes, but no socks, and by the time she reached an empty park she certainly had blisters already, and wouldn’t be surprised in the least if some of them were bleeding. She’d be more surprised if they weren’t.
Allison stopped, gasping for breath, shoved some loose hair out of her eyes, dropped the hat she’d had to pull off and carry on the ground, kicked her shoes off and began climbing. If she couldn’t get into a fight with people or punching bags, she could at least go to war against gravity. The branches weren’t low enough, and the trunks were too smooth, so it was difficult, and Allison fell as often as she reached a branch. When she did reach a branch, she either aimed for a higher one or, if she wasn’t too high to have a chance at not breaking her neck when she fell, attempted to lump or climb onto a branch from a nearby tree. Once or twice she even managed it.
Fifteen minutes after reaching the park Allison was covered in sweat, scratches, bruises, and blisters, her hair was tangled, she was still panting, and her clothes were themselves thoroughly dirty and probably unsalvageable from dirt and grass stains and small tears.
She was, however, at least calm enough that the anger was no longer making her want to cry. Just strangle a few people. She kept climbing.
“How rude of them.” Allison managed to suppress the outright laughter that wanted to appear into just a grin. “If they were going to be obnoxious the least they could do is continue to do so.”
She waved the iPod off. “I’ve got another” two “and it’s not like I had any music on that one that isn’t on the other. I’ll just have to pay more attention to whether it’s charged now.” She grinned as she opened the door. “It was nice meeting you too, much more fun than most nights I go wandering from boredom.” She waved, and ducked inside quickly before her grin became too obvious; she’d decided on a text.
A few minutes later, Allison was up in her apartment, and sent two texts, one immediately after the other. “Tag, you’re it!” and “No tagbacks! (That’d be too easy.)”
“I was thinking about iPods and sugar, not your phone.” Allison dug her own phone out of her pocket and typed his number in. ...Huh. I never did get his last name.... She listed her own phone number as she slid her phone back into her pocket. “Thanks. Should I call you Nate Shadow? Nate Painter? ...Painter of Nates?”
“No, see, you’d think that, I did too, but actually the surface tension--I think it’s the surface tension anyway, been a while since I read it--is stronger than the friction, so the water stays in a roughly spherical shape. Maybe slightly elongated, particularly as it gets larger, but definitely not pointed.” She’d paused about half a run on sentence back as they reached her apartment door, and lingered with one hand unlocking and resting on the knob, the other gesturing nonsensically as she talked. “And, they weren’t allowed to know what real hearts looked like, desecrating the dead or something. Though they might have dissected animals and guessed, and certainly not everyone listened to the laws....”
Allison burst out laughing again, if not for nearly that long. “I figured that out the first time. Terms like that have never made sense to me, though. Like candy hearts. Who would want to eat a heart, especially the heart of someone they loved... well, cared about? Or eat anything out of a heart? And it doesn’t even look like a heart anyway, it looks like a couple teardrops stuck together and flipped upside down. But teardrops aren’t even shaped like teardrops anyway, liquid drops are generally more orblike, or at least a hemisphere, so where the hell did hearts come from?”
Once she caught herself rambling and returned to the conversation, Allison nodded. “No problem. You have a phone?”
Allison burst out laughing, and continued to laugh for a few minutes before she could answer. “Art therapy’s not about analyzing. It’s more like....” She gestured with her hands a bit, sketching shapes in the air as she tried to think of a description. “Like using self expression to figure out and work though your own thoughts and issues. It’s way easier for a kid to draw pictures that relate to death than to consciously sit down and think about how their father died in an accident, and they’re upset, and they blame their father for abandoning them, and still want him back, and the whole huge mess that goes with all that. As soon as a kid can hold a crayon or stick their finger in a jar of paint they can draw that, but they can’t talk about it, or even really think about it. Even most adults never really get to a point where they can just think through a mess like that, certainly not on their own.”
Allison shook her head. “No, I live by myself, no other humans or mutants. Couldn’t fit more than one person in my apartment anyway, even if one of them had some sort of shrinking mutation.” She grinned. “Probably not if they both did, even. I like privacy, though, so tiny apartment it is.”
“If I let go now, you’d just run and then your tattoo would be a black hand. Apart from being every evil cliche combined, that would just look stupid. You are at least staying until you’re tired enough to sit while I make something new without running.” Allison nodded firmly, though probably just to herself for all that Andrew would care.
Another glance back at Andrew led Allison to follow his gaze to a banner reading “Mutant Outreach Resource Alliance,” and a table with a quite unmutated looking person sitting at it. Of course, neither Allison nor Andrew looked mutated, either... unless you counted Drew’s temporarily black hand... so that was hardly a standard. She veered slightly off her course--she’d been interested in a table a bit down, with paintings that really reminded her of nothing so much as a classmate who was known for coming into art (and every other) class high, but they’d still be there, and she didn’t want Andrew to hate her that much.
No matter what his opinion on that fact might be at the moment....
“Good a reason as any. Sometimes our moods know more than we do.” Even without some kind of mutation, the subconscious was amazingly skilled at planning and figuring things out. And making Allison dread things for no reason that was apparently until much later.
Allison nodded. “Wish I could do art, but I’m not good enough, and don’t have the patience for any kind of history. I’m in psychology, haven’t picked a specialization in it yet.” She grinned and gave Nate a sideways look out of the corner of her eye. “I have been looking at art therapy a bit.”
Allison grinned as she accepted the hand up. “I refuse to lose any more fun in my life because it happens to be accompanied by failure.” She stretched to get rid of the dull ache falling had gifted her with, then headed toward the door, weaving between chairs and tables with much more skill than anyone who’d seen her earlier singing and recent fall would be likely to expect. Unless they knew her, anyway.
She waited until they were outside before casting around for another topic. “Any reason you picked New York to visit? It’s hardly the only city with a lot of art around.”
Allison raised an eyebrow at the demand, and then the other at the girl’s so-very-obvious-it-wasn’t-even-a-hint-anymore that the feathered boy leave, followed by his immediate, if awkward, movement away from the fight. Did it... really take that for him to realize he should leave? She shrugged. “A variety of names. You can use Lily, I think, at this point.”
She hesitated another moment, then shrugged and grabbed for a few chips of broken brick as the girl yelled at her, flinging them at one of the attackers’ heads as another got attacked by coffee. Allison gave a brief second’s paused to mourn her respect for the (apparently not) most amazing coffee in existence, then grabbed the arm of an attacker and yanked him partway around while she moved to the side, aiming a punch for his gut.
Fighting was not in any vague way Allison’s forte, or really even a more than (possibly) mediocre skill. But she also wasn’t crippled, and if coffee girl thought she could take on the four attackers protecting an already beat up, and apparently helpless, feathered boy, Allison would at least not require to be protected, and could distract one or maybe two of the attackers. She tilted her head so the (admittedly dim) moonlight would reflect off the silver and hopefully the red lines, and grinned. “And I happen to also be a mutant.”
Allison laughed. “With as many colleges as are around here, I doubt you’d have any trouble finding models if you wanted to.” She grinned. “Thanks, I might take you up on that sometime. Not sure it’d be any use, with my abilities, but it’d at least be fun for a while.”
Allison blinked, suppressed a grin, and shook her head. She slipped off the stool, into a handstand, and began walking toward the door on her hands. “I shall lead the way this way.” She managed three “steps” before falling on the fourth, and blinked up at Nate from her suddenly, newly acquired position. “...It might work better if I hadn’t been kicked out of gymnastics for being unable to do a handstand.”
“Oh, oils were always the hardest. Half my teachers didn’t even bother mentioning them, and the ones that did didn’t teach it.” Allison stretched, then finished the rest of her drink. “I might’ve made one or two attempts at oil, but certainly not many. Acrylics I could at least get to work sometimes. Do you do landscapes, portraits...?”
Allison laughed again. “Well, not too remiss, so long as I can stay on my feet I can outrun nearly anyone without a mutation. Thanks for the offer, though, I’d like that.”
