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 girl would have been stunning if she didn't look so smug standing on the other side of the fence. Juliette had been entirely caught up in the fact that she seemed to know what this girl was doing that she had barely registered the fact that this girl had clearly used some sort of mutation to slip through the fence that was keeping them apart. The bars were too thin for anyone to slip through, even if they had been living off of the last few boxes of mac and cheese like Juliette had for the last few days.
”Probably best if you head back to the group unless you can get yourself through the fence; I can’t really help you there, sugar.”
Smug and unapologetic. She had a better handle on this than anyone that Juliette had met up until that point, though, and she did say that she was going to wreck havoc on the man who was about to kick her out of her apartment, which meant that she had something that Juliette wanted: a plan. More than anyone else standing out there, anyway.
The girl was obviously a mutant from the way that she moved, but that definitely didn't mean that the situation was safe for Juliette to give herself away. Her power wasn't exactly subtle, and each time she did something flashy, she had to spend more time looking for energy sources afterward. She had no idea where they were going or if it would be safe once they got there.
But her options were to follow, turn back to the crowd, or go home. Only the first sounded like it would do anything at all.
Juliette stood with her arms crossed for a minute, contemplating whether or not to follow. Before long, she had made the only clear decision, and without moving, she let her powers do the work of turning her into her light form before breaking apart into specks of light that easily let her slip through the bars, only to reform on the other side of the fence, next to where the girl was standing.
The last few weeks had been a waking nightmare for Juliette.
She had woken up in a bed that wasn’t hers in a single bedroom apartment in a city that was thousands of miles from the last place she remembered living. Things were foggy in her head, but she clearly remembered her last house and going to bed one evening, and none of that lined up with the life that she found.
There were other people experiencing the strange phenomenon, many of which were living in the same building as her. Several of them had emerged from their apartments, bleary-eyed and confused, and there they compared notes. Over the course of a few days, she pieced together that the apartment was actually hers, and that when she had gone to bed the night before, she had been a twenty-seven-year-old nurse whose life looked very different from the one that current-day Juliette remembered.
It wasn’t exactly the life that she had pictured for herself ten years in the future.
What was worse than waking up to find that you were living a stranger’s life and learning that the family you remembered was long passed was learning that you were living under threat of being evicted from that very apartment. She had gotten a phone call a few days in from her boss, wondering why she had skipped so many shifts, and Juliette was certain that it wouldn’t be long before she was fired, especially since she couldn’t exactly just show up and do a job she had no qualifications for.
It was only a matter of time before she couldn’t pay the bills that came in (especially since she had no idea how to actually do that), and the landlord of the building knew that better than anyone.
It was some rich, old, white man asshole, of course. Of course that would be the case - it was hardly anything new to anyone. A group of them had gathered outside his home, cold, tired, and scared of living in a giant city with nowhere real to call home. Juliette had bundled tightly, unused to the New York cold after her last memories had been of living in Georgia. She had been standing in the same spot for at least an hour, her black coat, striped scarf and hat only doing so much to help her unengaged protesting.
The whole thing seemed to be going nowhere, and she was about to turn and leave when someone brushed past her. A girl with dark hair and tight clothing breezed past the crowd, seeming to know where to go. It was the most deliberate movement that Juliette had seen in ages, and it stood out from the pack like a sore thumb.
With her hands buried deep within her jacket pockets, Juliette trudged after the woman, her eyes locked on her prize.
“Hey!” she half-whispered-half-hissed toward her so as not to distract the entire crowd. “Where are you going? Do you know something the rest of us don’t?”
hi, sorry- don't want to step on any toes, but I feel like I might be able to offer a little bit of insight? I'm currently running a rather large jcink resource site, so I see a lot of what makes sites succeed or die. I still have a lot of love for MRO in my heart, and I'd like to see it continue to succeed more than anything.
MRO has always had a good base - it's always been somewhere that people feel comfortable coming back to, and it's been running for FOREVER. That's absolutely something that people look for when joining a site, and you've got a lot to offer people in that sense.
BUT, MRO is getting to the point where it probably needs a good shakeup of sorts. Proboards isn't popular with rpers anymore, primarily because it's chunky and the customer service isn't as good. Something that would be a lot of work, but also would increase the amount of people that would be willing to look at the site would be considering looking at switching to jcink. It would be a big switch, but it would get you more in tune with the current base of rpers that you're looking to draw from.
As well, currently, the RPC is focused strongly on aesthetics. MRO has a great skin right now, but a lot of things on it are broken (the header has about 50px of padding from the top, the affiliates are floating and half of the images are broken, etc). Even apart from the skin, many images on players' accounts are broken because they're tinypic or photobucket links, which have been dead for a LONG time. There's a post in the header that's months old, and half of the accepted character profiles don't have all the information fields in their profiles filled out. It's just that general cleanup of making it look like there are people that care and will take the time to make sure that it's a presentable place to be.
Another thing to look into would be general site info, like face claim templates and a member directory. These things are considered to be very standard these days, and I know it might be confusing to log on to a site and be unable to find those.
I highly suggest looking into archives. It's great that MRO has this huge history, but it's confusing for players to log in and find posts floating around from 2006 and to have to wonder whether the site is really still active. You can absolutely still keep all these threads, profiles, and accounts, but consider making a forum to put threads and character profiles that are inactive so people know what they're walking into when they join.
Finally, advertise!! I cannot stress this enough!! It's a little bit harder in the proboards community, but I know there are still tons of resource sites, linkback sites, and maybe even tumblrs that allow advertisements from proboards sites. You're not going to bring in new players unless you're visible to the ones who are looking.
Basically, you need to go where the people are if you want them to join.
Here're a few places where MRO can advertise as a proboards site:
It wasn’t easy to maneuver the needle around when the guy was moving so much. She couldn’t exactly blame him, though - it probably hurt quite a bit, and the local anesthetic could only do so much. If she had any laughing gas, then she would have added that to the mix, but the room was not completely stocked. Not only that, but it was getting difficult to see what she was doing. She was definitely better off with staples.
“This is probably going to hurt more, but it’s going to be faster and easier, so… better in the long run,” she said, trying to make the best of the not-great situation. It wasn’t as if he had all that much choice in the matter. It would also probably leave a more visible scar, but he clearly wasn’t a stranger to scars, given the shrapnel scars that dotted his chest already. He had dog tags, too, so he was likely in some sort of service. Those were all going to help in this case.
“Fast. Yes. Go with that one.”
Svetlana did, in fact, work with Devon, which made Juliette feel a lot better about helping them. She wouldn’t have sent them away if they hadn’t, but it eased her mind. It would be easier to tell Devon that she had just saved the lives of two Haven members than to say that she potentially helped criminals avoiding a mass murder scene. They were both covered in blood and running from something, so the idea wasn’t completely absurd.
Only, that definitely wasn’t the case. Juliette had made herself busy with the staple gun, much to Matt’s dismay, but she looked up when Svetlana mentioned SUPER. She had definitely heard of them before. “If it was SUPER then it’s lucky that you guys got away,” Juliette said, looking between them with a new gaze. She hadn’t personally an agent, but she knew through the X-Men how much trouble they could cause. She definitely felt better about helping them out now.
Svetlana asked how she could help, and Juliette looked up and around. There wasn’t much else to do other than what she was covering. “Just keep him distracted. Hold his hand or something.” They looked like a couple, but she wasn’t about to make assumptions about what they were comfortable with. Still, a bone-crushing hand hold would likely do him some good. “Oh, and grab some of that gauze and the medical bandages from that drawer over there.”
Juliette was not an anesthesiologist. Not by a long shot. There was nothing inside of her that wanted to put this man under and risk hurting him more, so she chose the safer bet. A local anesthetic that would numb the general area. It wasn’t great, but it was better than nothing. It wasn’t usually her that was doing everything at once in an operation like that though, so she felt rather flustered as she walked around the room, trying to figure everything out.
The I.V. was in his arm now, and he was being transferred blood as well as fluids. That was good, but only if she could keep the blood inside of him. She needed to work faster.
It felt good to engage the people in the room as she did so, though. Usually, she would be talking to patients as she did just one aspect of the things she was doing in the moment, but she was still able to keep up with it. “Matt, then? And you are?” she asked, turning to the blonde woman. She was absolutely covered in blood, which was a little nerve wracking. She had claimed that there were anti-mutant people involved, but how much could she really trust that? The hospital was out of the question, so maybe they were avoiding the cops.
“You said you work at Haven, correct? You’d know Devon, then?” Juliette trusted Devon. If he trusted her, then she felt like maybe the two of them would be safe. Maybe, just maybe they weren’t as dangerous as they looked. She was getting strange vibes from the woman, anyway. She looked concerned about Matt, but she also looked guilty. Maybe she was just reading into things too much. Matt seemed calm, considering his current situation.
She moved around the table, moving a tray of various instruments and a stood over so she could sit on the correct side of the man. “The shirt’s going to have to go, sorry,” she said, picking up her scissors and cutting right up the front of it. It was ruined, anyway, so there was really no use in trying to salvage it, especially with the I.V. in the way.
There were quite a few coincidences that day. It had seemed like a good way to get reintegrated with regular life was to do some outreach, just like she used to. The sanctuary was always taking volunteers, especially when they had medical training, so they welcomed Juliette back with open arms. Within a few hours of calling the place up, they had her working a late evening shift. It had been pretty simple, for the most part - just a couple of bumps and bruises from street fights that needed to be looked at. No infirmary was needed.
As it turned out, though, they had been lacking in volunteers for a while. Devon wasn’t even there, and he had been a staple from when she’d used to volunteer there. Apparently he had gone off and started his own organization in the meantime. She really needed to keep up with her friends.
It wasn’t until late that there was any commotion. A couple walked in and headed right for the infirmary as if they had been there before. Or, at least, that was what Lisa said when she found Juliette. It took a few moments to get things figured out, but Juliette walked down there soon enough. Something about a gunshot was yelled through the door, which made her walk just a little faster toward them.
“Sorry, did you say a gunshot wound?” she asked as she entered the room. There was a man already on the table, who was holding a bloody rag to his side. Next to him was a blonde woman who looked to be a little upset. Juliette walked up to the man and began to inspect his side. He made no argument, and instead moved a little to allow her better access. He was in bad shape.
The brunette tutted her tongue as she took a look at it, frowning. She had moved the rag out of the way, but the wound was bloody. It was in a spot that would be one of the least likely to have internal damage, but there was always a danger of it. “Why did you come here? Is the hospital out of the question? It’d be better to get an x-ray of this.”
“Hospital’s out of the question. Just do what you can and I promise I won’t sue.”
Juliette chewed her lip as she looked at the wound. It was nasty and she didn’t want to touch it if she didn’t have to, but she couldn’t send him anywhere that wasn’t in an ambulance. Her options were to either do something within her abilities or leave him to bleed out. Obviously, she chose the former. “What’s your blood type?”
“B positive.”
With a nod, Juliette formulated a plan and moved over to the fridge in the corner, where they kept blood stocked. As she hooked up an I.V. line, she spoke. “Alright, I can stitch you up, but I can’t make any promises. Are you willing to take that risk?”
“I’ve taken bigger ones. Go for it.”
“Alright, then. My name is Juliette and I’m going to do my best to make sure you walk out of here.”
Okay, so Juliette knew very little about Shin, but what she did know was that he was that he was very… peculiar. Juliette had her hands on her knees as she watched him throw the piece of bread that he had been holding in the opposite direction. He had clearly just been using it to feed the ducks from, so there was no obvious reason why he would need to throw it away. His movements, too, seemed almost frantic. Was he… alright? Had he hit his head or something? Juliette narrowed her gaze and tried to pinpoint any signs of a concussion.
It was difficult to tell, really. He just continued along as if he’d done nothing at all; as if he hadn’t just done something very strange. Could he feel the awkwardness too? Was he trying to diffuse the tension? If so, that was an even more uncomfortable way of doing so.
He turned back with a smile, which Juliette just couldn’t seem to match. Normally, he’d be teaching. Normally, so would she. Except, his math class had been blown up. Unfortunately, that was just one of the many hazards associated with teaching at the Xavier institute. The school was no stranger to having rooms blown completely to smithereens, and it seemed to have a very large budget for repairs. Juliette simply nodded at the comment, not bothering to laugh at the math joke. She really wasn’t feeling up to it and he was being a little dodgy. It was off-putting.
The question was turned over to her, and she simply shrugged. He wasn’t really making her feel comfortable enough to be truthful, so it seemed like her best option lay in being vague or lying outright. “The weather is nice,” she agreed, glancing up at the sun. It was nice not to have to come back to snow. “I guess I just thought I would spend some time outside before I head back to… everything.”
Half truth. She had wanted to be outside, in a way.
She’d only seen Shin in passing, so, honestly, it wasn’t that surprising that he wouldn’t recognize her. She’d only just lost the “Trainee” status in front of her X-Man logo, too, so that was another thing. It took him a moment to place her, but he did get it eventually. Her eyes travelled down to look at the finger he was pointing at her, but she nodded gently.
Yes, she worked at the mansion; yes, he would have seen her at staff meetings; and yes, Sam likely would have mentioned her.
Karma was a f***ing b****.
“Yeah, it’s no problem,” she said awkwardly, putting her hands on her knees as she took in an uncomfortable breath. She knew nothing about this guy other than the fact that he worked at the mansion and was an X-Man. Not a whole lot to go on. Even his powers were a mystery to her at that point. He could have been using it that very moment and she would have been none the wiser. The mansion wasn’t a big place, but there were still ways to completely avoid a person if you wanted to.
The dimensional rip was still a thing, too. Juliette had put it out of her mind as she travelled around, but coming back to New York where it was still very much the forefront of everyone’s minds was a little strange. That was the big thing on everyone else’s plate. On hers there was just a whole lot of shame and damage that she was in charge of.
But she was talking to Shin, the X-Man that the universe had sent her to give her a big old slap in the face. “I was gone for awhile, anyway, and we haven’t interacted a whole lot. I really only know the few things that I heard from… Sam…” Digging deep into old wounds. “Anyway, what brings you to the park?”
It was funny how the world could just stop for a while if you closed your eyes for long enough. It was almost like not existing for brief moments. When she closed her eyes, there were no more problems, no issues calling for her attention. It was just Juliette at peace with the sun, and there was nothing getting in the way of that. Nothing, of course, until someone else sat down beside her.
For a second, Juliette just kept her eyes shut tight, hoping that whatever was happening would pass and she would be alright to sit there for the next foreseeable future. Maybe it would finally happen; maybe she would officially just dissolve into nothingness. It would almost feel like a relief at that point, considering all that she was avoiding in her life. To be able to take a step back and have the weight lifted off of her shoulders, even just for a short time, sounded like an incredible blessing. It was no way to deal with things, but it would undoubtedly make everything a little easier. She could do with a bit of easier.
It was only when the person next to her actually said anything that she even opened her eyes. As casually as she could, so as not to have it look like she was staring, she glanced at whoever it was sitting next to her. Her eyes opened a little wider once she realized that she actually knew the person she was sharing the bench with. Shin, as Sam always called him, had been an X-Man for many years longer than she had. He was even a fellow teacher at the institute. While she had seen him in passing and at a few meetings, she'd never actually interacted or worked with him before. It was quite the coincidence that she would run into him in the park in a city that large. She had specifically sat there to be able to avoid her life, too.
Even when she was running from it, the mansion followed her.
Maybe it was a sign. Someone up above was laughing at her and showing her that she'd made a commitment, and that commitment was for life. There was no real way to run from it, as much as she might try. She'd gone two months, and now it was time to go back to life as she had known it and try to pick up the pieces. There were a lot of pieces, though.
"Shin, right?" she asked, turning her head toward the man and brushing the strands of hair off of her face. She hadn't been listening to whatever he had said before, and in all honesty, she didn't really care. She was engaging because she'd received her sign, loud and clear.
Two years after she’d first moved back to New York, Juliette had stepped off of her plane looking a little more sun-kissed than usual. Two years since she’d made some of the biggest steps of her life and fallen farther than she’d ever thought she could. Job changes, a tangled mess of failed relationships, and now this.
Booker breaking up with her hadn’t come as all that much of a surprise, if she was being honest with herself. As much as she liked him, and she was pretty sure that he liked her, there was no future in it. Not when it made her sick to spend more than a few hours around him, and her powers only seemed to be reacting more harshly to it with each passing day. That wasn’t, however, to say that it didn’t hit her like a punch in the stomach. She and Sam had been doomed from the start, but she’d still cheated on him when she thought that she and Booker were meant to be. She’d clawed and carved her way right to rock bottom and was somehow surprised to see herself sitting alone again.
When she’d moved to New York, she’d been a nurse, fresh out of school and looking forward to a long career. Then, a flashy mutant with pink hair had made a public speech and she’d been swept away in the idea of being a superhero. Saving people before they were brought into the ER. For a while, it seemed like that was the place for her to be, but she also knew that she was very much out of her element.
So, with little warning, she’d packed her bags and headed south. South, originally with no direction in mind, but she’d ended up right back where she started. Quite literally. In the Dominican Republic, she’d explored her roots and tracked down her father and discovered a little more about him. Some she’d half expected. The rest… had come as a shock. A nearly two months travelling had both answered questions and given her questions that she’d never expected to need to ask.
Her current, burning question? What did one do when they’d gone to find themselves and come back more lost?
She couldn’t go back to the Mansion just yet. She wasn’t quite ready. She’d been back to her apartment, but even that was different. Every piece of grounding she’d clung to in the past few years had shifted under her feet like sinking sand and left her without direction. The mansion would likely take her back if she asked, but did she want to be back? That was the real question. To face everyone after leaving suddenly; to go back to avoiding Sam in the hallway… it all seemed a little overwhelming.
The one thing that wasn’t overwhelming was the little bit of sunshine that New York had been blessed with in the middle of February. Despite having spent the last while in a tropical climate, she was still eager to be able to spend time outside in the nice weather. She was sitting on a bench in central park, her eyes closed and her mind clear, blissfully unaware of the person who happened to take a seat next to her on the bench.
Hey all, I figure I should probably make something public.
I've been feeling like this for a little while now, but at this point, I don't think that MRO is the place for me anymore. I've enjoyed the past few years that I've spent on here, but I feel like it might be time for me to move on. I hope you guys continue with awesome plots and characters and continue to have good times on here. I'm not closing the door on coming back, but right now I will be discontinuing my current plots and arcs.
If you have plots with my characters, you can assume that they are closed, and you're welcome to either continue on without them or reroute the arcs entirely. If you have any questions, feel free to PM or message me (if you already have my discord only, please).
Thanks for the good times, guys. Keep on keeping on. <3
The question of whether Nessa had opened any of her gifts yet had been one that had come to Juliette as soon as she claimed that she liked to open them early. It was interesting to hear that she had had enough self-control to wait to open any to that point, especially since they were nearing the evening of Christmas Eve. If she really was as impatient as she and Booker both claimed, then she was doing fairly well for herself. Much better than her track record suggested, anyway.
Juliette grinned broadly as the conversation turned to whether or not Nessa had been able to read Booker’s mind yet. The information that her boyfriend’s sister was psychic was definitely… strange, but it explained some things. Namely why she had been acting so strange the night that she had walked in on her and Booker. It also made Juliette slightly more wary about looking her directly in the eyes, especially when Booker was wearing something tight…
She met Booker’s eyes when he looked at her with a mocking expression. Always one to participate in a joke, Juliette played along, making exaggerated facial expressions as she followed his line of thought. Patient. Nessa. She could certainly try it out.
>>”I do know what he got you,”
”Eek! No! Don’t tell me!” Juliette squeaked, covering her eyes with her hands. For a moment, she forgot that Nessa’s mutation only worked one way, and that Booker, the adapted was sitting right next to her. There was no way that Nessa would be able to spoil it for her, and it didn’t even matter, since they were meant to be doing their gift exchange shortly. Even if she did somehow ruin the surprise, it would only matter for a few hours.
She wouldn’t, however, put it past Booker to have come up with some multi-layered story to lead Nessa down the wrong path. She wasn’t entirely sure that it was worth it just for her Christmas gift, but it sounded like something that he would do. Anything to mess with his sister.
Juliette had settled back down since her sudden aversion to looking at Nessa, so her hands were back in her lap and she was resting back in the crook of Booker’s arm. ”Honestly, I’m just amazed that any of us made it this far without revealing gifts if Nessa is as bad as everyone says.” She grinned and looked directly back at Nessa, knowing now that she wouldn’t be able to read her mind. ”Though maybe we should just exchange gifts now and put her out of her misery.”
