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.
The hybrid was thinking through his answer. Curious. That could be good or bad, for Adder; it brought in a lot more variation and unreliability. Still, information was information, and the information Adder was picking up on was that there had been some less than pleasant experiences. The trick was, though, was this place a haven from those experiences or the source of them?
Best place to be implied that it was indeed a haven, although Adder wasn't looking for protection from anti-mutant opinions. He was actually looking for a shield from a mutant. Not the same sort of protection at all... but not necessarily exclusive.
The hybrid finally got around to asking a question. Adder bit back a huff, not really looking to explain himself or even really talk about himself any more than he already had. "I'm looking for something," he said, eyes sliding away and indifference rising up to hide his defensiveness. "Does this place only care about being a mutant, or is there more to it?"
Adder just had to snort. The city was just chock full of people who couldn't tell a person from an animal. He even had unusual colouring, though not impossible as far as he knew, and yet people still assumed he was a literal wolf.
He stayed where he was, but cracked his jaw in a definite smirk. Go get help? Oh please.
He could help, if he wanted.
Or he could not help. Hm.
He let his tail squish from one side to the other, curling around his toes. Mostly he watched the girl, and occasionally the cat.
Oh, fine. After a few minutes of apparent consideration, Adder walked over and hopped onto the bench. Should he keep playing the part he'd been given, or shift back? At such close range, the soul- and flesh-scent were more than a little overpowering, and would only get stronger...
But if he shifted, then she would have a face to associate with him and this situation, and she definitely was one of the excessive number of people who had been in the mansion recently.
All right then. He opened his mouth, at least polite enough not to breathe or drool all over her, and delicately tried to catch just the binding stuff over her mouth with just his teeth. His hearing wasn't good enough to interpret complete mumbling, and her hands seemed to be more bound.
Sometimes, Adder really hated city people. He'd just been walking along the sidewalk, and some idiot went and reported a wolf wandering around town like he were nothing but a stray animal escaped from the zoo. Did people still not realise that mutants were real?
Never mind that he'd only been in his wolf form because the ground was cold, or that he was acting more like a pedestrian than a predator. Nooooo, stupid city human had to be completely irrational.
End result, Adder was in a bad mood and was sullenly watching the idiocy pan out from the general crowd. Like he'd put himself at risk and try to tell these people that the wolf wasn't a threat, since that would lead to admitting that he personally was the wolf, and confessing to whatever led to uniformed people being sent out was absolutely not on his list of things to do casually.
Didn't stop him from grumbling to the -
Wait. Why did a robot smell like a person?
Oh right, mutants. Eh. Adder shrugged.
"You'd think they would have to learned to ask if the random animal sightings might just be mutants by now."
It wasn't a good time to be a canine mutant, much less a wolf shifter. Adder had made it through such situations before - a scattering of apparent dog attacks - and with far less protection than he had now, but it was still somewhat risky for him.
A little bit of risk wasn't going to stop him from ensuring that he wasn't confined to the x-men mansion, though. Imprisonment, captivity of any sort, was a much greater and far more distasteful risk, and he had to know. He couldn't trust that knowledge to what people said. People lied. People lied a lot.
There was also a sort of logic to why he was moving around in wolf form, not just to why he was out in the city again. It was actually protection against those dog attacks, odd as it might sound to someone who hadn't seen a wolf in the flesh. He was clearly not a dog, and dogs tended to shots him like the very dangerous predator he could be.
He'd eaten dog before. It didn't bother him to do it again.
It was also quiet enough to avoid sensory overload, and in all honesty he was kind of reveling in that. There were so many people in the mansion. So much chaos, even if it was a safe, rich person kind of chaos. Out here he could sustain four feet if he damn well chose.
As a result of that only slightly petulant decision, Adder heard the muffled shout from some distance away, and approached out of curiosity. A girl, wrapped in cop-robot string, with a cat that was very much not a real cat hanging around. She smelled familiar, in a recent passing sort of way. A mansion resident?
He ambled into view, body language idle curiosity rather than any form of aggression, and then neatly seated himself in front of the bound girl and tilted his head. Did she want help, and why should he help?
Reassuring. The cop wasn't being especially hard to read, didn't seem to be faking his reaction, and didn't appear to like Aura one bit. Adder had been right about how well known she was to law enforcement, and it had paid off.
"I never said she was at the mansion," he replied drily. Regardless of his individual reliability, this cop at least matched everything else he'd learned.
His face hardened at the blunt mention of interest, though, and he turned his shoulder a little bit towards the cop. Like he was just going to quietly follow at his heels back there like a lost and lonely puppy.
"Thanks for the food," he said shortly, and made to slide out from the table.
Adder watched, and in this instance didn't try to hide that he was watching. He might as well let this cop know that he was evaluating him - judging him, and everything he represented - and see how that affected his responses as much as Adder's words.
And the colourful guy who smelled a bit of metal took that comment seriously. Was he so literal? Hm.
He probably shouldn't mess with the guy, all things considered, but he still wanted to. Messing with cops of any sort wasn't on his list of useful, safe pastimes. It was on a different list, along with pretending to sell fundraiser cookies and throwing shoes into the river.
That train of thought kept him from thinking too much about the idea of people caring, which wasn't a foreign concept do much as a nostalgic one. It wasn't something he'd been able to rely on in many years.
"Oh, just some women," Adder answered casually, poking through the empty wrapper from his burger for stray bits of toppings but quietly keeping an eye on the cop-slash-x-man. He wanted toooooo but he shouldn't. But wait! The response would be valuable.
...
He continued as if he hadn't been debating the wisdom of this tract. "The glowing pink one made an interesting case for your place."
Technically true. Avoiding her was a very strong motivation.
Adder circled the hybrid a few more times, assessing him out of interest and learned wariness both, although he wasn't particularly concerned right now, and then stopped abruptly.
Not that the pause was more than a pause; Adder stopped walking, but he didn't really stop moving. Tiny shifts in his weight, different muscles flexing slightly, a casual need for unending fluidity that kept his limbs from stiffening or being caught unawares. And more than a little instinctive impatience.
"You said why you came here. What keeps you here?" The sudden question was blunt, and accompanied by a very careful examination of the hybrid's reaction and expression. It was a question that could be interpreted in a number of ways, and the way something was said - or not said - could give Adder the information he needed as much as the words that followed.
If shrugs were a language, Adder was trilingual. Still, burgers were food and Adder wasn't paying - and he was relieved to recognize the place. It added a certain reliability and assurance that his food wasn't going to come out of the kitchen contaminated.
Of course, he'd eaten some pretty nasty stuff before and survived, so he could at least recognize the initial symptoms of recognizable poison. He didn't want to have to.
Adder still worked through his first bite slowly, letting his tongue work as much as his nose to hunt for any out-of-place ingredients. It worked for a bit, but there was, er, something to be said for properly made food and its interactions with salivation. Once he ran into the intersection of satisfied-with-safety and can't-taste-through-the-drool-in-his-mouth, he ripped through the remains of the burger in very, very short order. His teeth were better for tearing and shearing than human teeth, after all, and he didn't have a problem eating like a dog.
He sat back, examining the cop for a long few moments after he finished eating and the cop finished talking. "There a new reward for recruiting or something?" He was... actually almost amused. True amusement was pretty rare, but this at least made it into passingly worthy of a snort. He did snort, and rolled his shoulders a bit to stretch.
"Just how many people with badges run around for this place?"
Those might not be the exact words he'd heard before, but there was an eerie similarity to what the mirror-teleporting not-cop had said. Coincidence?
Adder made a point of not relying on coincidence. Coincidence was, by nature, unreliable. How could it not be coincidence? Was this guy working with the not-cop? The badges supported that. They might not be working together with respect to him, although that possibility was extremely concerning, but they might just work together. People in groups tended to do things similarly. And his poking around the place the not-cop had talked about had been reassuring.
..........lunch in exchange for talking, or at least listening?
He wasn't especially hungry, by his standards, and he still had some money left... but food was still food. Food was always food. And cops who weren't dirty had a level of reliability. And cops who were dirty had a level of predictability, and the option to flip the situation by involving clean cops and exposing the dirty one. Not that Adder had actually done it, but he'd seen the setup for it before.
"Keep it public and short," he said, and made sure he gave every indication of being unwilling to take any idiocy - and able to handle it in his own way if it was tried.
Father, huh? Adder could vaguely remember a quiet scent, but he couldn't describe it anymore. Something earthy, maybe, but not simply soil. Anyway, his father was long dead and not involved in the current situation. "Some parents aren't good," he said instead of voicing his brief nostalgia.
Adder glanced down at his hands, flexing his fingers and considering the different between them and his paws. The concentration brought a hint of wavering fur, but he shifted his attention before actually changing forms. "Paws are less useful than hands for some things," he agreed. "But there are things they are better at. And with practice, there are things you can do with paws just fine. It's just... being used to the joints. Understanding how each part of you moves, and how to make it move the way you want."
He could almost remember learning to move his tail properly when he first started shifted. Shifting was, after all, more recent than the rest of his mutation. Now, of course, he could 'move' his tail without conscious thought even in this form, when he didn't have a tail. It was just... well, it was just practice.
Adder didn't run, but moved with the flow of pedestrians once he was free of the tangle. His ears might have been focused on the guy trailing him - and his nose, now that he had enough space to identify individual scents again - but his eyes seemed casually focused on his hands. All young people walked with their phones out, wasn't that obvious? Even if Adder didn't have one, and never had. He could still fake it, and draw less focused attention.
But not shake the attention that had clung to him. His ears shifted subtly, a quiet cocktail of stress and wariness, and he mimed pocketing his 'phone' with all the casualness of a standard city teenager.
He turned towards the cop but kept walking, trusting his ears and nose to lead him around all the people he couldn't see - and drifting around them without incidence.
"Rolling on the ground isn't going to break me," he said. His tone was a bit clipped but it wasn't openly aggressive. "And I didn't do anything, so there's nothing to talk about."
So confused. And it wasn't Adder who was confused for once. It inspired such curiosity.
"Is it new to you? Your instincts, your shape." Adder circled around the hybrid, leaving a reasonably comfortable amount of space but trying to see if there was some sort of clue. If it was new to him, that would certainly explain why he seemed so off balance and out of sorts. And out of touch with himself. He definitely didn't seem inclined to pay attention to what his senses were telling him.
... Explaining a bit more might ease up the confusion. Explaining wasn't something Adder did all that much. Did he want too now? Less confusion might get him more information, or it might be less interesting.
Information beat out interest. "I've been as I am now since I was a kid." He rolled his shoulders and held out a hand at the vague height of a very young child, certainly under five years old. If his mutation had activated after birth, it was before he could remember, and it was all on what he remembered his parents telling him. He didn't remember much of them anymore. It had been a long time.
Adder could smell the guy, in more ways than one, and it told him enough that he only glanced up to watch for the first strike - but it was interrupted by someone else. Someone who could put statues of athletes to shame.
The fight left the guy he'd rolled into, and Adder made to leave the fight. Quickly. So very, very quickly, except the crowd was too tight to dodge through easily and there was too much attention on him. He tensed up instead, ears back and attention flicking too quickly from one spot to the next, and then settled on the badge the new guy was flashing.
Adder took advantage of the crowd's shifting attention and made for the distance, aiming to at least get out of the cop's reach before anyone else had a chance to react.
