LOG 1 – Getting to Erde - 05/02/2022

Day 1 in Erde, and I’m definitely not a fan
 
I guess the first thing to cover is how we got here … which to be honest is a bit of a question as I’m not entirely sure.
 
Today started out pretty standard, with us just hanging out at the hideout (The Doll was off somewhere else but the rest of us were there, messing about and looking at this old arcade machine Velocity picked up).
 
Saph sent me a message with a video of AJ attacking a Casino (even though he was standing right next to me at the time) Of course, us idiots decided to head over there to wade in, even though it was really obviously a ploy to get us there, but we were so confident we could just deal with whatever came our way… easy to manipulate.
 
AJ called the hero association and let them know that there was an evil doppelganger of him, cue extended questioning but ultimately the news that there were a few big incidents happening across the world and there wasn’t anyone else to help. Red flag number 2.
 
None of us could get hold of the Doll, although a weird kid called “La Poupee” with a similar style and powers sauntered along to “help”. Red flag number 3… though I don’t know if she was actually involved in the end, she might just have been actually trying to help.
 
We just charged in with our disguises (apart from AJ) and saw pretty much a swarm of villains robbing the place blind. Initially I focused on creating distractions (first the sight of our team swarming into the building from the other entrance, and then a load of the others parents coming in from the other side. The Doll arrived during this chaos but quickly noticed the weird other Doll and had a few choice things to say!
 
Anyways as the others scattered to deal with the ice guy (since he was freezing the whole place, one dude in a domino mask wandered over to me with a grin, asking me to drop the illusions and ask my friends to stand down. Felt something trying to control me but I’m pretty hard to control, so I just gave him a grin and a sarcastic response. At that his expression fell, and he instead had some normal dude who was hiding nearby walk up to him and hold a knife to his throat. I tried to teleport him away but I just couldn’t get them to take hold, probably something to do with the other guys influence. Out of ideas, I did drop the illusions, but also let he others know that there was a villain here who could control people so wasn’t super long before he had fabric shoved in his mouth, punched in the throat and thrown out the doors we’d entered by.
 
Meanwhile AJ had put his evil German version in a bubble and kept waring him down, and the dude who was throwing Bola’s fired at velocity but he managed to dodge, while the Doll made a huge Frankenstein plushie out of the poker table fabric. A few other villains joined the party at this point, one apparently called the firebug, and the other was a lady in a white dress. Velocity ran in and nicked their loot as well as the hostages and ran out. Impulse ran out and completely pounded the firebug into the dust leaving him broken and bleeding
 
I decided to turn my attention to the guy in the Bola, dressed as a desperado I figured he could probably be manipulated by a pretty woman – so of course I made myself one! Beautiful body, sparkly dress, one of those voluptuous models with super unrealistic bodies… easy enough to head over, put a sword to his throat and start flirting, and boy did he flirt back.
 
Didn’t take too long before he started talking about what was going on – they would get the loot and their employers would get what they wanted… a distraction. Apparently, someone’s eyes had turned to the death ray and energy cells that had been confiscated from Professor Echo, and given that most of the superheroes were dealing with the stuff going on in Tokyo it was figured that this would pull in any other superheroes who might have been left, leaving them free to do their business.
 
Looking around, the weather witch was being swallowed by the Frankenstein plushie, and although the other woman was still free I figured wouldn’t be too long before they had cleaned up, so I suggested to “The Bola” that we have a bit of a jaunt over towards the inner city where this would be going down. Putty in my hands, so he agreed and I teleported us both away, meaning to let the others know at some point when I’d seen what was going on.
 
Pretty much the last thing I saw at that point was a huge hole knocked in the building, the sound of energy weapons discharging and a huge flash of blinding light – then darkness.
 
As I said, not sure exactly what caused us to end up here and why we did. I mean, there was definitely something going on in the Hero Association building I headed to, but the others seemed to think it was to do with the German AJ. It sounds like maybe La Poupee ended up here so guess that leads credence to it being to do with the casino and German AJ… but then I wasn’t really close by at the time. The other consideration is that the Bola was nowhere to see, and I ended up in the same place as the others even though I was nowhere nearby…. It definitely feels like someone is manipulating us, especially given who was nearby and who they lead us to….and if someone was targeting us particularly, gotta ask why us?