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.
Soon, various glass containers lay smashed on the concrete floor of the dimly-lit lab, their contents, mostly clear fluids, lay in puddles at the mime's feet. Those small, gray bricks lay all throughout the lab. Most of them were attatched to a concrete column in the center of the room.
Dorian's heart was bursting in his chest. He didn't know whether to thank the adrenaline, or the fact that he'd just finished completely wrecking this laboratory and filling it with explosives as fast as he could. It was probably a mixture of the two. Either way, now would be a very good time to leave.
Before he could get to the door, the room was engulfed in a blinding, white light.
When it subsided, Dorian was not alone in the room. Another man – perhaps some kind of teleporting mutant or M-user, had appeared in the middle of it. His back was turned to the Orderling.
Thinking quickly, he held his hand up over his head menacingly and charged towards the man, as if he were going to stab him with an invisible knife. "Motherf-" Before the teleporter could react, Dorian had tackled him to the ground and was stabbing him in the throat.
The blinding white light came back.
"-ound the corner!"
Now, Dorian and the dying teleporter were in a hallway. There was a man running towards them, and another three goons pointing their guns at a stairwell. The mime jumped to his feet, keeping his blade between himself and the man running towards him as he started to back away. It had enough blood on it that one could tell it was a knife, and Dorian had enough blood on him that wasn't his that one could guess he'd been killing people today.
The bullet crumpled and stopped several feet away from Dorian's face.
Normally, when you shoot a gun at somebody's face, the bullets don't do that. They hit people. In the face. The thug stared at the bullet for a confused moment, his mind racing to determine why it would misbehave in such a way.
Dorian sidestepped and lunged forward. Soon, there was a hole in the thug's neck, and the mime's rapier had become partially visible; one could get a vague idea of the blade's outline from the flecks of blood that now lined its surface. It had gone all the way through. He used the momentum from the thrust to get in close and knock the pistol to the ground. The gun's owner and the invisible blade soon followed.
Problem solved.
He took a look around. There were several long tables lined with glassware and labels he recognized. Stuff you would expect to see in an M lab. One thing bothered him, though: there was an incubator full of trays of agar dotted with colonies of bacteria in the corner of the room. Furthermore, he couldn't find any of the fancy equipment that, as Dorian's friend in Faust Pharms had explained to him, was necessary to make the specially engineered retroviruses that carry the X-Gene into the human body. Or something like that.
He opened the incubator and carefully placed a single, carefully-covered tray of the bacteria in his backpack. He'd been asked to bring back some of the Vermici's materials, just to see if there was anything useful to learn from the mob's monumental screw-up. Super-cancer or no, they had to be doing something special if they could charge even less for it than the Order did.
Then, he pulled from his backpack a small, gray brick with a smaller black module attached to it. He placed it in the incubator. There were a lot of those in his backpack.
This 'Frosty' caught Aura robbing a gas station, and offered to give her not only amnesty for her crimes, but also free room and board, an education, and a future. Of course this made her want to run away, kill some cops and resent the mansion for the rest of her life. Then she broke into the mutant organized crime scene, and this, she seemed to think, was a pretty good way for all of this to end.
The mime raised an eyebrow. Aura could be called many things, but 'smart' or 'right-minded' were unlikely to be among them.
The part about the forest piqued his interest. A life spent like that might explain why she hated nonmutants so much, especially if they were trying to kill her just because she was a mutant.
They had reached the bottom of the staircase. Now they stood next to the door to the rest of the basement level, which contained lots of stuff that was important for maintenance people, but, as far as he knew, very few people lived down here. He sat at the bottom of the stairs and wrote another question: Why were they trying to kill you? Where?
Just as Sledge was about to knock down the wall, Dorian pantomimed holding up a baseball bat in preparation for an imaginary pitch. As soon as it started feeling solid, he took on a more neutral stance and held the invisible bat at his side, just in time to make his entrance. Only someone familiar with his power might suspect that he was holding anything at all.
If Dorian could speak, he would have shouted something less-than-family-friendly when he saw what Aurion had just finished doing. He'd made it in faster than Sledge, true, but he'd also just knocked a lot of desperately sick people out of their beds. Some of these sick people were now being flattened by other beds, and a number of them were bleeding profusely. Also, the screaming had gotten louder. This was exactly why Dorian wanted them to make an entrance somewhere else. Just because the three of them were criminals didn't mean they had to act like toolbags.
Poor bastards had enough to worry about without Aurion the Ugly knocking 'em around like ragdolls.
Arson man didn't really seem to care about any of that. He also seemed to have some very twisted ideas about religion, and a very unwholesome interest in trapping himself and others in burning buildings. The mime once again took note of the unconscious people strewn all over the floor before their arrival; firebug must have some kind of trick up his sleeve, if he could knock all these people out at once.
It would be best if he didn't get the chance to try it.
Dorian locked his eyes on the arsonist's in a grim stare. Without looking away, he reached into his left pocket and retrieved one of the envelopes he'd prepared, then approached. When the mime stopped, he held it out, with the implicit suggestion that he should take it and get to reading.
His right arm, which seemed to be hanging innocently at his side, was in fact ready to interrupt any and all letter-reading with an invisible baseball bat to the side of the head.
The back door lead into an empty stairwell, which was entirely lined with concrete, and did an excellent job of making Dorian's footsteps echo through the entire thing no matter how hard he tried to be quiet. Thanks to his accomplice, this wasn't a problem. Everyone else in the building wasn't busy trying to stop the building from burning to the ground. The double doors across from the one he'd just entered would lead into a large, warehouse-style area. He didn't want to go there. According to his informant, the lab was somewhere on the second sub-level. Dorian raced down two flights of stairs, then burst through the door at the bottom.
This was a very stupid thing for him to have done. At the other side of this door was a very nervous, wiry man who very quickly decided to point his handgun at him.
"Who the hell are you?" he demanded.
Dorian stopped dead in his tracks. He took a step back and held his hands out in front of him. Most people would think his body language was saying 'look, I don't want any trouble.' Most people would be sorely mistaken.
"I said: who the hell are you? I won't ask you again." The pistol was now aimed at Dorian's face.
The Orderling took another step back, and he did something that the other man would find very strange. He fell into the sort of stance a fencer would take, seemingly pretending to flourish an imaginary foil at him. The gunman raised an eyebrow, shrugged, then pulled the trigger.
So the 'humans,' as Aura called them, were mere animals. She could kill those and not even care, and she'd happily done so, many times. But the mutants, the super-humans, the ubermensch were a different story entirely; she wasn't so hot on killing those. Dorian found this frame of mind just as reassuring as he found it disturbing. Aura would happily kill over 95% of the human population, but at least Dorian was in the 5% that she wouldn't! Working with her wouldn't be too dangerous.
This 'Mansion,' if Dorian recalled correctly, wasn't such a bad place; they were a private boarding school up in the Bronx, and they claimed they were trying to teach their students about tolerance and equality. The one thing that bothered Dorian about them was their insistence on only accepting mutant students; it struck him as almost mutant supremacist. Even so, he could only imagine what fresh insanity might lead Aura to single them out for special mention.
The word "Order" made the mime throw some very nervous glances down each end of the hallway. He was less than impressed with Aura's decision to speak so openly about the Order. Somebody could have overheard them. Was she crazy?
Oh. Right.
He erased what was written on his board and changed course, leading her to a stairwell that, conveniently enough, was insulated from the outside world by a set of doors on each level. His answer came only after he had finished holding the door open for her, and that door was securely shut behind them. From here, he would lead her to the basement level, where he wouldn't have to worry about that.
I had one of those future dreams. In it, I helped that Order take over Australia, to help create a world where mutants didn't have to live in fear of nonmutants' hatred. Lori caught me telling people about that and now here I
He tripped. While he caught himself on a handrail, he lost his grip on the writing board, which clattered as it tumbled down the stairs. Writing and walking down stairs at the same time might not have been a great plan. With a sigh, he pantomimed picking up another nonexistant writing board off the ground. Once it started feeling solid, he started writing again.
She recruited me. Now I'm helping her change the world, one drug deal at a time. Yourself?
He didn't worry about the board he'd dropped. All that stuff about his future dream would be a lot less legible when the board faded out of existence in around a minute.
That was the sound money made after being very well spent. It was followed by a flurry of profanity from within the building, some of which was surprisingly creative.
Dorian opened the lid of a dumpster, which contained a large number of things, only two of which were of any interest to the Orderling. One was an unconscious human being; a Vermici thug whose head earlier had the misfortune of finding itself in the way of an invisible golf club. The other was a backpack, which Dorian now took the opportunity to sling over his back before moving on to
Wait.
Some loud, creative profanity was coming from that direction, and it was getting closer. The mime froze. Thinking quickly, he lay down by the wall and used his backpack as a makeshift pillow, hoping any passing thug would assume he was just a homeless person who'd been sleeping there earlier. Said thugs ran by him moments later without a second glance.
They had bigger problems to worry about than idiots taking a nap in their alleyway.
Once they'd rounded the corner, Dorian stood up and continued his progress to the rear entrance of the building, backpack in tow.
Dorian couldn't blame them too much; that stuff was complicated. He'd glanced over a paper about it written by a Harvard professor who'd experimented with the drug, for what everyone was assured were purely scientific purposes. It was an enlightening read; he'd had no idea how rad it would be to be able to melt stuff with his mind. Sadly, even with the plethora of graduate degrees Dr. Ballou had accrued, he didn't figure out very much that wasn't obvious to everyone already. Most scientific research papers about the X-Gene seemed to boil down to "here's some stuff I did, and I have no idea what in the hell was happening when I did it, but it was pretty sick."
You know what else is "pretty sick?"
People who come down with what the news media has taken to calling "super cancer." Sufferers of this disease very quickly acquire almost every known variety of cancer at the same time, and then each cancer manifests the X-Gene in a different way, usually resulting in swift and horrific death. For example, Dorian heard of a guy whose blood had turned into liquid nitrogen, while his bones turned into something rubberlike, several of his internal organs turned into some kind of crystal, his brain grew a number of thorny tentacles that burst from his skull, and his skin grew a number of tumors that each glowed brightly before exploding into massive fireballs, mercifully ending his life. To top it all off, Dorian heard the story from a tumor that sprouted somewhere on the man's naughty bits, gained self-awareness, and managed to split off into an entirely seperate creature with its own thoughts and emotions before his 'father' died.
The name this tumor chose for himself, unfortunately enough, was Richard. Richard lived in the Sanctuary now; the rest of society simply wasn't ready to accept a self-aware genital tumor into its ranks.
The leading (and thankfully, only) known cause of "super cancer" was the M drug. Or, at least, a particular strain of it that Dorian had managed to trace to an underground lab run by the Vermici family; and even then, it only had around a one-in-five chance of happening to one of their first-time customers, and an even smaller chance of happening to a seasoned user. Not that the media was making this distinction.
As you could imagine, this was terrible for anyone involved in the M business, and it would be even worse if it became a widespread and persistent problem. Which seemed horrifyingly likely at this rate; the one advantage to the Vermici's methods was that they could sell it for an even lower price than the Order's dealers. This wasn't the first time the Vermicis had tried to undercut the Order's business, but this time, they had really messed up. That underground lab needed to stop existing, and quickly.
This lab existed below a building the Vermicis had acquired near Gravesend Bay. Anyone not in the know would think that the building just belonged to a company that made and sold several kinds of airline snacks. This was technically still true, and a good cover for the Vermicis' M operation.
...
It was one o'clock in the morning, and not a single star could be seen in the sky over New York City.
A tall, slim man leaned against a wall in an alleyway, his face concealed by a dark gray hoodie. He heard a garage door open, and watched as a large truck made its way onto largely empty streets. That was the third such vehicle to leave the building tonight, likely taking a few armed thugs with it.
It was a good time to strike.
The hooded man ventured deeper into the alleyways. He pulled out a small prepaid phone and typed a text message. Start now. Keep them away from the back door.
There was a surprising amount of truth contained within that statement. Syrian news media, for example, was largely run by government supporters in the summer of 2012; what outsiders would consider serious human rights violations, Syrian reporters would call "eliminating terrorists."
Syrian reporters were far less likely to talk about the number of government-issue bullets put through the heads of Syrian children by government forces. Likewise, to the best of Dorian's knowledge, American reporters were far less likely to talk about the concentration camps built for mutants back in 2007, when they were operating at their highest capacity.
What had the news media been lying about on the subject of Aura? Or had they even been lying at all? From what Dorian just heard out of Aura's mouth, he suspected she had performed an astounding mental feat by actually dehumanizing humanity.
He'd have to answer her question before he'd have the chance to ask his, though.
Mutants deserve respect equal to or greater than what non-mutants enjoy in most societies. I think the M drug could help non-mutants overcome their collective inferiority complex.
Dorian refused to refer to those without an X-Gene merely as "humans." Such terminology served only to promote dehumanization on both sides. The mime had gotten into bitter arguments with several other Sanctuary residents over that word. He didn't feel like getting into such an argument with a murderous madwoman, though.
Without stopping, he moved on to his own question: Name-calling aside, has the news lied about any of your actions?
While the Orderlings made their way down to the bar, they began to hear an unusual amount of screaming. As far as Dorian could tell, it came from that clinic a few blocks ahead of them; a conclusion supported by the fact that there was an equally unusual amount of smoke billowing out of some of its windows.
That was probably worth checking out.
He whistled sharply to get his comrades' attention, gestured towards the clinic, and dashed towards its front doors.
These doors were primarily made of glass, allowing him to see the massive amount of bed-ridden people that had been used to barricade the way in. This was Dorian's first hint that they'd stumbled upon a very intentional act of arsonry and murder. The other hint was that guy kneeling down and praying next to a ring of beds and fire in the middle of the clinic, and all the unconscious people lying on the ground next to him.
A few of the people in the beds by the entrance had noticed him. All of them lacked the strength to do anything about their situation besides screaming, and some of them couldn't even do that. The man nearest the door had casts on both his legs, and the visage of a terrified animal. "He says he's gonna burn all of us!" he wailed, gesturing wildly at the one kneeling in the center of the room. Though unique in that it was directed at a potential savior that he could see, this particular instance of wailing didn't stand out much in the sea of screaming soon-to-be burn victims that flooded the clinic.
So they'd found their guy, but it would probably be better if they found a new entrance. Thinking quickly and still catching his breath from the dead sprint he made mere moments ago, it took Dorian all of five seconds to come up with a plan.
He dropped his fire extinguisher and pointed at Sledge to get his attention. Then, he ran along the clinic's brick wall, stopped half a dozen steps away from the entrance, and threw an exaggerated punch in the wall's direction. He knew Sledge's power from reading his file; if he punched through the wall right here, they could walk straight up to the idiot and take care of him.
The mute took a few steps back and gestured wildly at the wall, Sledge, and back again.
A cat? Dorian looked over her shoulder again. Yup, that was quite clearly a skunk. But this was quite clearly a madwoman. He shrugged, then gestured for Aura to follow him down the hallway. Calling it a cat didn't make it smell any less terrible. She could probably walk and talk, and he could write and talk just as well.
Ask me anything. He wrote this on a small, invisible dry erase board, making it seem as though the ink from his marker was floating above his arm. That said, you know what they say about you on the news?
Now imagine that rich guy suspended half a mile over a desert island, hanging upside-down from an invisible rope attached to an invisible balloon, thrashing about, screaming for help, and striking fear in the hearts of his comrades.
Dorian peeked over Little Miss Omnicidal's shoulder, and found one piece of very good news. All those rumors about her making furniture out of the remains of her victims seemed to be just that. Rumors. Even so, the pet skunk, and its food, were a bit off-putting. Who the hell kept a pet skunk, anyway? And why did she have an aura-axe stuck in her wall...?
Anyway.
To answer Aura's question, Dorian quickly wiped off his invisible board with an equally invisible eraser, then wrote some more with his red marker. The mute's practiced script came out almost as quickly as the average person would be able to speak.
Your reputation, mostly. Also can we talk somewhere w/ fewer skunks?
Living in the Sanctuary meant having to deal with some unusual smells on occasion, and the mime had come to accept that. But... really? A pet skunk? He mimed a clothespin into existence and used it to hold his nose closed.
Dorian had been putting this conversation off for too long. But you couldn't blame him.
The woman he was meaning to talk to had walked into fights with nothing more than the clothes on her back, and walked out not only having killed large numbers of heavily armed individuals, but having done so gruesomely and imaginatively. The guys who had to clean up after her often needed psychiatric help afterwards, and these were people who cleaned up after murderers for a living. Shooting her, he'd heard, only made her angry. In short, this woman was among the most criminally insane, violent, terrifying, and dangerous people in the history of mutantkind.
Her name was Aura, and she was also one of Dorian's new coworkers.
He could see the value in having somebody like this in the Order. It's far better to have someone like this on your side than against you. That didn't stop his jaw from dropping a little when he saw her in their roster, though.
Since he might, someday, have to work with this terrifying madwoman, he'd resolved to sit down and have a conversation with her. To him, Aura was unpredictable, and a possible threat to his life at any given time. He would feel a lot more comfortable working alongside her if he could stop feeling that way, and the best way he could see to make that work was to have a chat with her.
After Dorian made the resolution to talk with her, he realized that there were all kinds of things he could be doing at the time that wasn't that, and he would much rather be doing any of those things. So, he put it off. When he remembered that this was a thing that he was meaning to do, he put it off again. He continued this cycle for a number of weeks, because he liked having a throat, and didn't feel like getting it torn out by a madwoman would be a very pleasurable experience.
Now, Dorian was standing outside of Aura's room, having just knocked on the door, and feeling like this was a patently bad idea. However, since he lacked the mutant ability to un-knock on her door, he realized that he had already crossed the point of no return. He managed to look like he wasn't afraid for his life, telling himself that she would have gotten kicked out by now if she made a habit of killing other Sanctuary residents.
At least, he hoped so.
A few words, written in bright red marker, hung in the air on an invisible dry-erase board in front of him. Since we'll be working together, I think we should have a chat.
