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.
“If you bothered to have fun on your own, I wouldn’t have to make you,” Allison answered, sounding a bit sulkier than she really felt. Which was, indeed, only a bit sulky, and really very much amused. She tilted her head a bit as she continued, thinking, and glanced back at the boy (well, he’d probably insist on ‘man,’ but whatever) she was dragging behind her with conveniently special ink. “Plus, I think I’d be more worried about your fingers, really. Much easier to remove fingers than arms, I’d guess.”
Some minutes of dragging-by ink (and bewildered, amused, disgusted or other various looks which Allison ignored) later, they reached the art festival. It was a little more festival and a little less performance than Allison had planned, but then, whoever set it up would probably just say that the entire thing was their art, so it worked. I am become Art, decorator of worlds. ...That sounds a little less intimidating than Death. There were several areas, some of which could and some of which could not be called stages, where obvious art was going on, some tables that Allison was fairly certain weren’t performance art but you never could tell, and some people and areas that she really had no clue about. Allison paused, shrugged, and headed toward a nearby cluster of tables, still focusing a large part of the back of her mind on dragging Andrew’s promise ink, and so Andrew as well, after her. Him escaping would be disappointing, but letting him escape with all the ink drained down to his hand like that would border on criminal; she would at least have to fix it before letting him go.
Allison shook her head at the offer. “Nah, thanks though. Still have to walk a decent way back home, and I’d rather not be tripping over everything more than I normally am. Doesn’t invite the best attention, doing that.”
And shook her head again. “I’ve been here the last two years, basically, but I grew up in Chicago. Some ways completely different and some ways exactly the same, it’s a bit weird to think about sometimes.” She paused just long enough for the change of topic to not seem like it was in the same sentence, then continued. “What do you paint? I’ve always enjoyed art, but never really been good enough to do much with it.”
Allison grinned, raising her hand to cover her mouth and barely managed not to giggle. “Well, I’m not sure it’s the gentleman part that scared them off so much as the environment attacking them bit. But yeah, whatever works. Pretty effective philosophy.”
She twisted the glass, watching the liquid in it swirl a little before drinking more. “So, Southern Gentleman, what’re you doing here? Can’t be business or you’d be at a dinner meeting right now.”
The first commotion that moved toward the door and then away was very dimly noted in the back of Allison’s mind, on a similar level to such thoughts as ‘maybe they’d want me to buy something after eight hours sitting here’ and ‘when did I eat last anyway?’ where she could probably recall them later that day if she was reminded, but wasn’t disturbed at all at the time they occurred.
The music, when it started, was relegated to the same level of inattention, but as it continued it began to filter more and more into her conscious mind, so that when someone bumped her chair as they hurried past she looked up, hissed quietly at them, and blinked as some of what was around her was suddenly part of her awareness again.
She shook her head, giving the window that looked out on what was obviously night time a bewildered look, and tried to go back to reading. Then tried again, and again, and after five attempts to read the same paragraph failed, gave up.
Allison shredded the napkin that must have come with her no-longer-hot chocolate, dropping pieces into various pages to mark spots in her books and magazines, then closed and stacked them and spent twenty minutes rearranging before managing to fit them all back into her backpack. That done she dropped the backpack in one of the two chairs at her table, and leaned forward to rest her chin on a hand, idly tapping the half a cup of not-hot chocolate, wondering if it would still be worth drinking. Probably. It is chocolate. She leaned back in her chair, letting her eyes drift around the room and eventually up to the girl playing on stage.
Allison turned on her seat to mostly face the approaching group of boys and gave them a drawn out, evaluating look that was clearly both amused and disappointed, and let her gaze drift to and stay on their feet as she took a fairly large drink. She coughed slightly, partly at the--slightly more than she’d intended--drink and partly in incredulity at the boy’s question. “Uh, really? No.” Private show? Really? A private lesson, now, might be in order; if he can’t learn any etiquette he might at least learn some creativity in being crude....
Allison had, fortunately, not bothered to actually look at the boy as she answered him--she actually wasn’t even entirely sure which one it was--which was fortunate, as she got to see what turned out to be Nate’s shadow run down in front of the boys and trip the entire group of boys at once. She laughed, a bit more than she necessarily felt, as they backed off without a fight, though she did catch some resentful glares and body language among the confusion. Not a surprise really; she’d’ve been pretty irritated in their position too.
Allison grinned at Nate once she stopped laughing, and rested her chin on her hand. “Cool. And pretty useful, too, not a lot I could do like that. Well, anything.” She gave him a larger, amused grin before continuing. “So, spoken for? I wasn’t aware of that.”
Allison nodded. “I control ink, any ink, and it’s not part of me.” She paused for an instant, then continued. “I can move it through things, but not without affecting them. It disturbs nerves especially, though I’ve never tried with similarly delicate nonliving structures, but I assume I’d mess them up too.”
Allison blinked, glanced at “bro-bag,” who was now back on his seat and had apparently completely forgotten his fall, and considered for a moment before guessing. “Some kind of telekinesis? Or illusions, or messing with balance?” She casted about for other obvious guesses for a moment before shrugging. “Well, thanks, whatever you did. Going to chase them off that way?”
Wandering around large cities at night by herself was not, Allison knew, a smart thing to do. It was, however, apparently becoming a habit.
Allison has spent most of the day bored, and as a result, what had originally been just a pattern of black swirls and waves had eventually turned into solid black ink with red and silver lines, waves and swirls through it. When she’d finally started considering the practicality of absorbing ink into her hair to dye it, she decided she clearly didn’t have enough to do and left to walk. By that point, of course, the sun was setting.
A few hours of wandering left Allison... somewhere, that she was relatively sure she knew her way back from. Probably. She knew the general direction, anyway, and could fine-tune where she was going when she got back to stuff she recognized. A few blocks and a turn later, and she was heading back toward at least the general vicinity of her apartment.
“Can you douchebags just stop‽”
Allison stopped and blinked at the yell, turning to glance down an alley. Arguments, that sounded like they were about to be fights, were really not what she should be getting involved in. She was not a physical fighter, either by mutation or by training, and she was only even a verbal fighter when her sense of humor (or irony, or any of a number of other forms of ‘whim’) wasn’t getting the better of her.
A bit more, indistinguishable, speech sent her running in the direction it had come from, not nearly sprinting but faster than a jog, while the more rational part of her mind set about kicking all other parts, yelling about self preservation and the ignorance thereof.
Allison really needed to work on that. If she was going to be charging into dangerous situations all the time, she ought to at least shut up the voices in her head about it. The distraction was hardly helpful.
It didn’t take a full minute for Allison to reach a... fairly confusing group of people. A boy with scattered feathers, looking scared and surprised, surrounded by four other boys, who were being attacked by a girl who was for some reason holding onto a cup of coffee as she did so. Allison paused a moment to admire the apparent quality of coffee that was worth hanging onto like that, and inform the still-grumbling logical part of her mind that at least she didn’t occupy one of her hands with a drink that could be thrown at enemies when she fought. It was not appeased in the least.
Allison took a few steps closer to the group and pitched her voice so it was, if not a yell, loud enough to hear. “So who’s picking on who now, and for what imbecilic reason this time?”
Allison grinned at the boy’s answer. He was either joking, with a remarkably straight face, or being evasive. Either way it amused her. “I know how to sing, I can sing. I want to know how one kid and one guitar in a park sounded that loud.”
Allison nodded, if a bit absently; she was still more interested in what the kid had done. “I did, yeah. Apparently a lot of people did.”
“Prettymuch everyone’s more open in New York than in the South, I think. Except maybe Confederates, Christians, and NRA members.” Allison glanced at Nate before looking back down at her hands, reabsorbing the ink into her nails. “But yeah, there are a lot of us here. The schools help. And some of us are more obvious than others. Like me, I tell everyone when I get the chance, because otherwise they’ll figure out a few days later when they start wondering why my tattoos keep changing, and the ones who get mad about it get even angrier if they don’t know immediately.”
Allison grinned and nodded slightly at Nate. “Great, thanks then.” She could probably avoid drunk boys on her own, particularly since they’d be assuming she was drunker than they were, but why bother when she already had a convenient defender?
Allison grinned again. “Yep.” She held her hand out, displaying the metallic nails. “Didn’t think these were natural, did you?” She pulled the ink up a bit, so it was shining on the surface of the nails instead of just under them.
Allison laughed, a bit breathlessly, grinned and tipped her glass toward him as she unfolded her legs, slightly enough that she didn’t spill the drink. She twisted so she was facing toward the bar again, leaning on it before trying a sip of the drink. It looked vaguely familiar, but a lot of drinks looked the same to her anyway. Kind of like cars. She blinked at the flavor, then hummed and grinned. “It’s good.” She flicked her eyes in the direction of the rest of the bar, taking another sip. “So now we just wait until I do something that makes one of them helpfully decide I had too much to drink before I got here and tries to take me home.” She glanced back at Nate out of the corner of her eye, somewhere between grinning and smiling. “Think you can scare off the nuisances before I insult them too badly?”
Allison leaned in conspiratorially--or, the same way she has when she was six and trying to advertise to everyone that she and her friends were conspiring, whether they really were or not--when Nate’s voice lowered, and giggled at what he admitted. “Nah, there’s no way you only met one, unless you got here half an hour ago. There’s way too many of us in New York. Just not everyone’s obvious about it.” Take Allison for an example. Well, Allison that night, who’d decided to practice doing some subtler effects, and so instead or her normal intricate tattoos had only a small amount of ink, in her nails--metallic black again, with a bit of blue--and imitating eye makeup and reddish-orange lipstick. That last had almost been painful enough to make her decide that wearing actual makeup would be worth it. Almost.
Allison only vaguely noticed the pointing from farther down the bar; pointing and superior glares had been lurking in her peripheral version most of her life, and certainly all the time since she’d started being deliberately cheerful. She did notice when one of them fell over, but only flicked her eyes in their direction to give them a raised eyebrow--and the grin that was perpetually there--as she continued singing to the entire room.
“Razor blades are rusty, and not a lot of fun so when they try to amputate your legs you’d better-- Run and fetch the chemist, a patient’s feeling sad she’s been in chains for ages and she isn’t even-- Madness is a nuisance, and no one is immune your sister, mom or daughter may become a raving-- Lunatics are dangerous, and doctors are obeyed they also go together just like toast and marma-- Ladies are like children, with brains the size of squirrels’ let’s give clidoridectomies to all the little-- Girls are helpless treasures, that daddies must protect so lie upon the table for the doctors to in-- Speculums are super, and stirrups all the rage so spread a lady’s legs and put her back into her-- Cage of naked crazies, the surgeon’s here to bleed the doctors are all learned men and some can even-- Reading can be risky, for women on the verge It only did us worlds of good to poison, leech and-- Purging is a penance, phlebotomy’s a chore no need to sterilize the tools, we never did-- Before the night is over, before you go to bed they’ll take a hammer and a nail and jam it in your Headstones in the courtyard, and statues in the park are not for the insane just leave them rotting in the D-A-R-K Dark Dark Dark Dark Dark!”
Allison finished the song, paused for a second to catch a breath, then folded at her waist in what was as close to a bow as she could get while sitting on a stool with her legs crosses, at the same time letting her arms spread out to the side like they would in a curtsey.
Allison had taken a while to get used to people in New York not knowing her. Sure, in Chicago there were always people who hadn’t met her yet, but there were also always people who’d known her all their lives to fill them in. People there knew who her family was, and knew what she’d been like before she started being cheerful (and kind of ditzy, too, but that was fun, and it made being cheerful easier, and it made people around her happy too, so what was wrong with that?), and so knew that that wasn’t all there was to her. It was kind of annoying, having people always curious-wary-concerned watching her to see what was beneath the cheerfulness, and apparently completely incapable of understanding that what was beneath wasn’t worth bothering with. Unless you made her mad, anyway, but without killing anyone that was pretty hard to do.
It was often even more annoying, though, for people not to know. Allison was becoming a bit irritated with the constant underestimation and (admittedly, amused, but still) patronization her neighbors and classmates generally showed. So, when a classmate (the girl swore she was Allison’s friend; Allison was less sure. The constant patronization and weeks of silence when Allison wasn’t useful for homework or entertainment purposes were less than convincing) sent an IM out of nowhere complaining about the basic psychology class she was taking over the summer, Allison kindly offered to help.
Two days later, Allison met Mariah outside a coffee-shop-with-a-stage called The Closet--Really? How old is this place that no one found any innuendo in that? And who is either lazy or determined enough to make a point not to change it?--with an entire backpack full of psychology books and magazines. Mariah wouldn’t need more than one or two of the books, and definitely none of the magazines, but Allison had a point to prove.
Correcting Mariah’s misunderstandings and proving Allison’s point took most of an hour and a half. Really, Mariah hadn’t seemed to even read her textbook; all her ideas on psychology seemed to have come from movies and TV shows. Maybe the occasional dramatic news report. Hypnosis, anyway, was definitely not a common psychiatric treatment, and certainly not the main method that Mariah thought it was. Allison didn't even want to guess where she'd gotten some of her other ideas.
Of course, in proving her point, Allison had been reading some of her magazines while Mariah worked. Which meant she’d found something interesting. Which meant she had to check other magazines and books on the same subject. And crosscheck the dates and authors.
Which meant that, six hours after Mariah had left and well after it became dark, Allison was still sitting at a small, three-person table in a coffee-shop-with-a-stage called The Closet, nose and all attention buried in a book, with seven magazines and four more books spread out over the table’s surface. And, for all her time there, half a cup of hot chocolate was still all she drank.
Allison mostly managed not to grin at Nate’s expression, and kept singing. It wasn’t like anything she was actually, technically saying was that bad... and it was, in fact, an actual song. And she was in a bar. She could always point to that.
She heard a slight change in the pace and tone of conversation as people began to notice, and so turned, singing as she backed up a step the stool she’d just gotten off of, climbed up, and sat on it with her legs crossed, in what could had been a meditative position had she not been singing what she was and grinning like a lunatic.
“Come it’s nearly tea time, the lunatics arrive the keepers bleed them all until there’s not one left a-- Lively little rodents, are eaten up by cats we’re subject to experiments like laboratory-- Rats I’ve dropped a teacup, how easily they break I’m on my hands and knees until I pay for my mis-- Take off all your clothing, we’ve only just begun we have no anesthesia, it’s eighteen forty-- One thing we should tell you, before you try again the tests are all invented by a lot of filthy Mentally hysteric, she’s failed the exam don’t bother telling Lucy....”
Allison grinned brightly at Nate’s question, then slid off the stool, gave something in between a nod and a bow, and began singing. It wasn’t quite the right song for her voice, but she could do well enough.
“Miiiss Lucy had some leeches, her leeches liked to suck, and when they drank up all her blood she didn’t give a-- Funny when the doctors had locked her in her cell Miss Lucy screamed all night that they should go to bloody-- Hello to the surgeon, with scalpel old and blunt....”
