Fandom Teen Titans Vol. 1 (M-Rated Cops-and-Robbers Proof of Concept Roleplay)

[Two Fives]

These aren't your average Teen Titans. As a matter of fact, Teen Titans is a misnomer, an inaccurate representation by the media--for the headline Teen Titans always get clicks and coverage.

Few of these Titans are actually teens and even fewer typify what a Titan should be. These Titans are a team of morally-bankrupt mercenaries, working not for the good of Metropolis, but only to line their pockets. These men and women used to have ties with the Teen Titans, but not anymore, having decided on a more decadent dogma.

These Titans are a criminal syndicate with as much infamy as the Sicilian Mafia and Gulf Cartel. From arms trafficking and oil smuggling to contract killing and political assassination--they've done it all. When these Titans refer to themselves as Titans, it's for irony only--nothing more; an inside joke to add humour to a humourless life.

While these mercenaries live all across Metropolis, most of their meetups happen in Suicide Slum, their headquarters a cheaply rented warehouse, not a Titan Tower. They move headquarters often, lest the authorities catch them or, better yet, the Teen Titans themselves.

 

[Two Fives]

Headnotes

- Teen Titans is an open-world sandbox. This means characters can go anywhere and do anything in Metropolis freely. They can become vigilantes or villains. They can become police officers, district attorneys, senior doctors, mob bosses, petty criminals, ect. You can interact with NPCs by mentioning @Environment, e.g. ordering a drink from Ace O'Clubs Pub.
- Always edit errors in writing. Third person limited and default formatting only (bold and italics allowed). Tense is up to you. However, NPCs will be written in present to create a sense of speed where everything feels like it's happening in the now.
- For DC canon consistency, refer to superhumans as metahumans, not mutants.
- Leaving the story? Roleplayers lose interest in roleplays sometimes. It happens. If this is you and you find yourself wanting to leave the roleplay, let me know. Since all stories should have an end, I'll set up a sidestory for your character where you can tie up any loose ends in one final roleplay. Go out with a bang, you know?
- Mercenary Manual
- OOC
- Looking for GMs

 

[Two Fives]

.

.

Metropolis

Vol. I

The sun lowers and so does Metropolis' standards. These are the times street women, heroin dealers and machete men dare show their faces along with their moral depravity, stalking the streets and skulking in back alleys.

All is red come sundown. The red is a warning--one in the back of the mind, whispering... lock the doors with bolts, fasten the windows' latches, sleep with one eye open… lest the bad men take YOU from your bed in night's dead. The city's red skyscrapers rise and rise as monolithic silhouettes of steel and stone. They rise some more into a red sky that darkens by the hour, by the minute, by the second... until, abruptly, the city is thrown into the dead of night, shadows cast onto the tarmac roads and backstreets, only illuminated from time to time--briefly--by the red-and-blue lights of cop car phosphorescence.

Where are you tonight in Metropolis?

 

[Two Fives]

Frank O'Neil slays a World of Warcraft orc in one tab and sells the mayor of Metropolis' confidential files in another. The third tab is a YouTube documentary by Shane Dawson. The fourth tab is the social networking forum Frank has been using to catfish big buck businessmen out of their money. His name is Jessica Johnson and he's a Brazilian singer-songwriter from São Paulo. They fall for her every time.

He lounges with his laptop on his living room couch and, with one conversation, he's a thousand dollars richer. Frank can't help but laugh. He laughs and laughs until there's a THUNK that vibrates through the wall--something thrown from the other side of the plasterboard--followed by, "Shut the hell up! You know what time it is?"

That's his mother.

He does as he's told like a good boy.

 

[Loki The Trickster]

A human heart fetches for one-hundred thousand dollars on the black market. A liver, one-hundred-and-fifty thousand. A kidney, two-hundred-and-fifty thousand. Granted, most of these organs become utterly useless following death, but bone marrows, cornea membranes and heart valves are the few dead tissues that can be salvaged and sold. So can skin... but stripping a body of its skin tends to raise suspicions. In any case, this mercenary man has a buyer for heart valves.

In the late hours of the night at one of Metropolis General Hospital's mortuaries is Edward Enfield, a senior doctor at this premises, whose practice spans many more years than his medical license would suggest. He uses a scalpel in the same way Van Gogh would a brush. In front of him is a mortuary slab, a body lain across the stainless-steel, and the nine-hundred year old man uses his surgical knife to take what he needs from it; scarcely leaving a trace where he sews the skin back together.

All that's left to do is approve the body for cremation.

 

[Belmont GT]

Perhaps the most infamous area of Metropolis was known as Suicide Slum by locals, where the dirtiest criminal activity was known to take place. But not all of it was at the expense of others. Well... actually, that depended on who you asked. On one of the dirty street corners sat a grid patter of buildings. The middle one was ablaze with life, as it had once been a large gym, now converted into an underground, illegal fight club where fighters entered and earned money for each victory. The same fighters showed up every week, but the bracket selection was changed up often enough to keep things interesting...

As cheers erupted from the crowd, a man in a shoddy-looking homemade costume went flying out of the pseudo-boxing ring and slammed into the outer wall of the building, causing him to slam to the ground with a likely broken appendage or two. Standing in the ring victorious was a young man with blonde hair and a costume of his own. A silver mask up pulled up to obscure his face, a black leather jacket and blue-silver jumpsuit that bore a large R insignia in the middle of the chest. As he lowered his arm, someone in the crowd handed him a beer, which he promptly cracked and lowered his mask to sip from.

"He's bored!" he said in French, collecting a stack of dollar bills in his free hand. "Bring on the next!"

The crowd went wild again as the announcer yelled into his microphone, "Another seismic-powered victory for RICHTEEEEERRRRR! Who's next to challenge the metahuman? Do any of you dare?"

 

[hellion]

As the midnight moon gradually rose to its precipitous perch in the vast vacuous expanse of the heavens, floating aloft amidst a black blanket speckled with brightly glistening stars, a woman strolled the empty streets, far lonelier than the skies above her. She hummed a soft, simple tune under her breath, its high notes landing in time with her somewhat muted footfalls, the fortuitous and inevitable product of neglecting to add a pair of shoes to your daily outfit. Speaking of which, this attire was equally peculiar in that it consisted of what seemed to be an asylum-issue pair of trousers and its accompanying straitjacket, slightly loose around the collar, under which a black and grey costume was made partially visible.

She turned the corner with a jaunty cadence incorporated into her steps, seeming to lack a single care in the world until an earsplitting shriek rang out suddenly, its harried, high-pitched tones penetrating the brisk, barren air of the frigid winter's night. The woman cocked her head towards the sound, ears perking up and footsteps quickening until they carried her through the dark, dingy sidestreets that led straight to the city's rough-hewn concrete heart. Mariko could feel the disrupted psychic energy, the frantic outcry of a tortured soul in dire need of a savior.

This inquisition swiftly carried her to a grim scene which unfolded directly before her eyes -- three men, junkies by the look of them, wrestling a defenseless young woman roughly up against a brick wall as she yelled at the top of her lungs in an instinctual display of desperation and horror. No one would stop to answer the poor girl's cries, especially not after one of the vagrants clamped a meaty hand firmly over her mouth, craning the battered broad's neck backwards before muttering coarsely-delivered threats in her ear, the brigand's voice like gravel mixed with sandpaper. "No one's comin' for ya, bitch, so clamp yer cute little lips shut 'til me an' the boys say so, kapish?"

Mariko cleared her throat sharply, cutting through the tension of the moment as three heads whirled towards her, and four pairs of eyes tracked her with clear surprise. "My name isn't no one," she mused with an empty frown, "it's Mariko."

The three men cackled aloud at the newcomer's juvenile defiance, as they currently held someone they saw as not unlike herself completely inert within their brutish clutches, the innocent woman's fair skin marred with blood and bruises, even-toned complexion turned ghastly and pale. "Nice top, twat. Now why dont'cha slink back to the loony bin 'fore me an' the boys work up another appetite, eh? I think Jimmy's caught a case of yellow fever these last few lonely nights, he'll be after you in no time!"

The men laughed once again in chilling unison, but Mariko seemed unfazed. She stood perfectly still and silent, eyes locked with her fellow female, as if searching for some intangible secret that lay within them. The goons seemed surprised at her taciturn insistence, casting confused yet confident glances between each other, amused by the turn of events. "Chick ain't movin'! Maybe she really is nuts. Looks like we got ourselves a two-fer tonight, boys!" Two of the would-be rapists approached Mariko with slow, steady steps while their leader stayed behind to restrain their unlucky victim. Her muffled cries were met only with a brutal knee to the chest which stole the wind from her already aching lungs.

It was then that Mariko's eyelids began to flutter, as a sinister voice emanated within her mind. "So what, you're gonna rescue the poor, helpless maiden from the sex-starved band of street trash? It's so pathetic how you pretend you're something you're not." She shook her head furiously, hair flying wildly as the voice reached a fever pitch within her cranium. She didn't want to hear it, not now. "These people don't matter, they won't change who you are . . . or who you aren't. You're not a hero anymore, little Mariko! You're not a Titan! Your old friends left you to bleed out and rot! You're nothing!"

"NO!!!"

Her furious shout rang out even louder than the terrified screams of the injured woman she'd come to save. In the span of a mere instant, she'd charged the first man and spun her body wildly, sending forth a powerful kick that would wreak havoc on the lower half of his features, leaving his jaw hanging unnaturally unhinged. As he clutched his face with both hands and struggled to even express the depths of his exorbitant pain, she deflected the other attackers hand-delivered blows and snapped his leg sideways at the knee with a downwards heel strike.

Mariko then used the thug's hunched-over posture to her advantage, his crooked leg becoming her own personal steppingstone to leap onto his shoulders and firmly grasp his temples, fingernails digging into the nightstalker's flesh. His frantic mind barely even managed to struggle against her telepathic barrage, as a gruesome slideshow of everyone he ever cared for being completely eviscerated in the most garish displays of gore imaginable flitted through the tenebrous webways of his currently- ailing consciousness. The same condition soon spread to afflict the lowlife with the broken jaw, his eyes rolling back into his head, mouth squirming as if it were capable of registering any meaningful protest.

The leader of this scrappy band recoiled in horror upon seeing what had befallen his cohorts, and gripped his victim's neck as if to take a hostage. "S-st-stay back!" he stammered in an attempt to sound cool and commanding despite his present circumstances. "I'll kill her, y-you know I will!" And yet Mariko seemed genuinely confused as she met his quivering gaze. Her next few words were fairly straightforward.

"But it's nap time, mister, and you're already asleep . . ."

She seemed almost saddened by this notion, as if her childhood playmate were dozing off in the middle of a late night slumber party. As she predicted, the man's heavyset form slipped away from the petrified person he'd been holding captive, his thoughts sure to be plagued with horrific nightmares he wouldn't soon forget.

As the rescued woman's mouth hung open, unable to articulate her utter shock, Mariko giggled with girlish delight. "Did you see, did you see? That's what Titans do! I'm a Teen Titan, and don't you forget it!" She pointedly tapped at her own forehead, as if to drill the message home to the alternate persona she'd so clearly proven wrong. She then marched off proudly without so much as a word, humming the same upbeat tune, leaving only chaos and discord in her wake.

 

[Daric J Fender]

He shuffled the cards once, twice, three times, and with a swift movement he spread the deck out on the poker table. He had his eyes on Olivia Twain, sister of the guest, Oliver Twain. It may have been the man's birthday, but Shi'en Tamanaki had everyone's eyes and ears focused on him. He had her pick a card, write her signature down, then he quickly gathered them up. Hers was the six of diamonds and it was back with the rest.

With a sly half smile, he shook the deck after stacking it. They went blank, and when fanned, the diamonds weren't there. He stacked and shook them again, turning them transparent, revealing the diamonds inside.

Now the goal. "You were probably worried, weren't you? We don't want to lose the diamonds." He flipped the deck from one hand to the other, then flattened it in his palms. "Because, after all, they are quite rare and expensive." He held up the diamonds with her signature, leaned over while blowing smoke over it, and slammed the card down, only then it was a wad of hundred dollar bills.

They clapped. "Looks like we have a winner." he said. Another flip revealed the diamonds underneath. Shi'en set them there and slammed down on it again, flattening the wad down to just the card. Little did the Twains know that he had actually managed to snag money from Oliver's wallet.

 

[Environment]

Your mobile rings. You recognise the number. He's a man you've done odd jobs for in the past--traffickings, blackmailings, kidnappings, bombings, smugglings--but always alone.

He says this is different. That you'll be working with others like you--mercenary men and women from all walks of not only life, but the criminal underworld. That this job is bigger than any other you've done before. An assassination. The target: Metropolis' mayor, Frank Berkowitz. You already know the bigger the job the bigger the bucks.

He reveals to you that he has a criminal consortium as large as the Sicilian Mafia, Gulf Cartel and Irish Mob and that, out of all of these criminal minds, he chose you. You might've declined jobs before--but there has always been someone else to dirty their hands instead. Especially when money is involved. After all, desperate times call for desperate measures.

"Get your ass to Suicide Slum," he tells you. Static. The line goes dead before you get a word in.

Two Fives Loki The Trickster Belmont GT hellion Daric J Fender

 

[Two Fives]

Abruptly, he closes his laptop, THUNK, and considers having a shower. He hasn't showered in three weeks. Frank shrugs his shoulders into some clothes--a RuneScape merch t-shirt, frayed denim trousers and flat Vans. Over all of this he throws on a coat, a dark woolly parka. He's one of the first to arrive at the warehouse in Suicide Slum, having ran Google Maps to follow the address provided by the contractor.

 

[Loki The Trickster]

He finishes up at Metropolis General Hospital. He slides the body into a stainless-steel drawer and stuffs the organs into an ice cooler. He sterilises everything, cleaning thoroughly, scarcely leaving a trace wherever he goes. There's video surveillance, of course, but they'll never see him; the most they'll see is an empty hallway or an elevator's doors sliding open on their own.

He remembers the last time he saw his image, his reflection. A river's bank in the capital of Constantinople during the eleventh century. On second thoughts, it might've been the tenth. The old man forgets his history almost as much as he forgets his age. He stores the ice box at his house in New Troy before he makes his way to Suicide Slum.

They've started calling it Istanbul, haven't they?

 

[Belmont GT]

Nolan was hesitant to go at first... the jobs he’d taken were all usually low key and small time. Taking out the mayor? Usually, it wasn’t something he would’ve even considered. But counting his money that night, the Metahuman realized that he really did need it to get his life back on track. He sighed, pulling the mask back over his face.
“It’s been fun, monsiuers and madams” he announced, “but this is where I’l calling it a night!”
As the young, costumed man hopped out of the ring, he could hear the crowd chanting “Richter! Richter!” after him as he left.

Google maps provided him with the address, which wasn’t far from the gym he was already at. Nolan found himself at the warehouse, leaning against the wall with his arms folded tightly.

 

[Daric J Fender]

He excused himself and stepped aside for the call. After the call ended, he smiled. The Titans found him before he found them. He gladly strode out of the building and into an Uber limousine.

Once outside the old warehouse, he breathed deep the cold air and fiddled with a bicycle card.

 

[hellion]

Mariko's facial expression remained featureless and blank for the full duration of the call, as if she were barely even registering his coarsely-delivered words. After the final orders were quite crudely given, the young woman suddenly blurted out, "Does this job come with benefits?" in a futile and relatively irrational attempt to sound businesslike and authoritative.

Unfortunately, this came much too late, as the caller had clearly already hung up, and Mariko's words were met with only the dull, distant ring of unresponsive static. Her face contorted into a mask of frustration at the sound, and she impulsively mashed the block button after the call ended. However, all the consecutive presses simply ended up restricting and unrestricting the number multiple times before she petulantly thrust the device into her pants pocket and crossed her arms tightly against her chest. The ex-Titan grumbled incoherently to herself while her bare feet stomped rhythmically against the concrete and asphalt, already approaching her intended destination.

 

[Environment]

The mercenaries arrive at the warehouse and what they arrive to isn't the man one the mobile... but, instead, a radio box--on the cobblestone floor, positioned perfectly in the centre of the open interior, buzzing. Nobody has ever seen the man and this, as it happens, is no exception.

The radio box is set beside a firearm and a round of cartridge shells. For the assassin--the one who'll deliver the coup de grâce; the final blow that'll snuff Frank Berkowitz's life out like a candle's wick. Beside these are comm devices that can be attached to the ear for ease of long-distance communication.

The radio briefs them of all the information they need to know like Charlie's Angels and, shortly afterwards, reveals that all of those here coincidently have a history with the Teen Titans. Laughing, he calls these mercenary men and women the, "Reject Teen Titans," in a witheringly witty way. Nevertheless, he says this is their conception--the first time he has assembled a team of this type.

Should they finish this off without a hitch, he says he'll be more inclined to dispatch this line-up for more jobs in the future. A specialist team, comprised of ex-Titan associates, will be sure to bring in the big bucks from the criminal clientele who want these types of jobs done. "Go, Teen Titans..." The witheringly witty tone of voice again. "The mayor won't assassinate himself."

***​

8:00 AM. Bakerline.

Sun casts light along the streets of Bakerline--a middle-class district in the northern sector of Metropolis. Four steel-reinforced vehicles racing along the roads have the curtains of every house drawn back, the nosey neighbours standing as they look out from their porches, the sidewalk strollers stopping to see where those engine revs are coming from. The mayor is in one of those cars--but which? Eight officers are beside these vehicles, driving alongside them on motorcycles, all seemingly armed.

The time is now.

Two Fives Loki The Trickster Belmont GT hellion Daric J Fender

 

[Two Fives]

Frank is in one of Bakerline's coffee shops, enjoying a Caramel Macchiato. He watches the vehicles on his laptop screen, having hacked into the borough's CCTV footage. Like his hands are Frisco's, he types and, in no time at all, he's in Frank Berkowitz's mobile, tracing the GPS location. "The third car," he says into his radio comm, repeating himself. "The mayor is in the third car."

 

[Daric J Fender]

Tamanaki followed alongside the collection of vehicles ready to move in with a grin. "Misdirection." His appearance shifted so he wore the same uniform as the other bodyguards, his tan skin, features, and hair reshaped to make him look African American. Slowly, he moved in closer, blending in with the crowd.

Even with an armed escort, he knew there would be some on foot. If not, this guy would have been a really big idiot. "Any way you can hack their comms?" He asked Frank over his own radio. If so, that would aid in confusing the bodyguards. Seemed like it was on. Without waiting for a response from the geek, his fingers morphed into claws and he began dispatching the guards around him.

 

[hellion]

Mariko tracked the steady advance of the mayoral cavalcade from her silent streetside vigil, lurking within a nondescript alleyway along the political procession's all-but-inevitable course. It was her job to slow their progress so that the more grisly elements of the mission could be carried out, and that didn't sit too well with her . . . nor did the exact language with which she'd been addressed upon the operation's very inception.

"That man, the one on the phone . . ." The troubled teenager muttered softly to no one in particular, "he called me . . . a reject Titan . . ."

The malevolent manifestation that made its home within her head spoke in a smooth, sickly sweet tone, its saccharine smugness infecting the young woman's every thought. "Of course he did, my dear, he said the same thing I've been trying to tell you for so long . . ." Laughter reverberated throughout the twisted annals of her thoughts like a broken bell whose resonant ringing spread only madness and discord. "You know it's true, deep down inside . . . why else would I be here, but to remind you?"

Twin trails of sorrow-stricken tears streaked down the sides of the one-time heroine's pale, pallid cheeks, descending past her fragile facial features to meet the angular precipice of her jaw, and cascade downwards to the cold, unremittant concrete below. "You're wrong . . ." was all she could muster between weighty sobs, her quivering, unsteady words struggling to sound defiant in the face of her implacable fear.

"Are you crying, little Mariko? Is this too much for you to handle? Oh, you poor, pathetic thing, I'll carry your burden for awhile . . . whatever it takes, I'll make you a Titan again."

Invisible hands grasped at the fractured folds of the young misfit's conscious mind and wrenched away the reins from the feeble fingered grip of its original owner. A single hand rose, the sleeves of the straitjacket gradually slipping off the arm's slender shape as it extended forward with a sudden surge of telekinetic energy. The first car passed by, trailed by the second, and the third. Two of Mariko's fingers pointed unerringly at the hood of the mayor's car, reaching inside it to stall the engine block and bring the car to an unexpected crawl before it halted in place completely. This was but a taste, an unassuming opening for the rest of the team to mobilize without arousing undue suspicion. A far more grandiose and powerful display was sure to come when the opportunity presented itself.

 

[Belmont GT]

“Right. Keep it steady for me, freaky chick!”

Richter stepped out from his hiding spot between the alleyway and cracked his knuckles. He positioned his hands outward and fired powerful seismic waves from his hands that crashed against the armored vehicle and began to dent and force the alloy to push right through, allowing them easy entry.

 

[Loki The Trickster]

He dusts the lint off the lapels of his Victorian three-piece suit.

Edward Enfield comes out from an alleyway as he whispers, "My turn," ambling aloofly into the Bakerline street. Very calmly. Eerily so. Even in spite of stray bullet lead, startled gasps from onlookers, thrown and twisted aluminium car scraps... screeching tyre wastes that smoke pungently with carbon black. Still, ever so calm, as he continues across the road. By now, the vehicles have been stopped, the escorts taken care of, the door that closed the mayor off opened up for him to step inside. And when he steps inside, it's over. That firearm from before, he has it--a Smith & Wesson M&P with a matte black finish--and he aims to blow the mayor's brains out with pinpoint precision.

 

[Environment]

The mayor tries to say something before he dies. Whatever it is, a BANG humbles him to sombre silence. Frank Berkowitz's head bursts open in a red mist, a vicious spurt of blood and brain covering the upholstery with red, red and only more red. The mayor has been assassinated. The only thing left for the Titans to do, now, is make a getaway, returning to the warehouse.

 

[Loki The Trickster]

He murders Frank Benkowitz. He doesn't even look him in the eye as he does it, not because of self-condemnation, but because this act, simply put, is not at all important to him.

Does a human feel guilty when they step on an ant? When they hunt deer for sport, when they rip fish from riverbanks, when they work Greyhounds to athletic atrophy? What about at Ace O'Clubs when they order a steak and kidney pie? No. These animals aren't important enough to warrant moral consideration.

Humans are to Edward Enfield what insects, burrowing through the earth, are to humans. They're the dirt beneath his heel, the buildup of scum beneath his fingernails--the ants beneath almighty God. They aren't worthy of moral consideration. Let alone, an eye-to-eye. When a man has lived nine-hundred years, knowing the Grim Repear and his scythe all too well, it changes him. He has lost sons to the Battle of Hastings, daughters to the Salem Witch Trials, a wife to childbirth, another to the Black Death, a third to old age, a psuedo-husband to the Great War and so many more in between. His mournful misery knows no bounds and the witch who cursed him a millennia ago is cackling in her tombstone. Damn her.

When the vampire Edward blows Frank Benkowitz's brains out, he next blows the steam off his gun, then holsters it. He throws out the driver, then uses the car for a getaway, disposing of the body in a Suicide Slum ditch, cleaning up--as doctors tend to do--and scarcely leaving a trace. Somewhere in between all of this he instructs Frank O'Neil to clear the traffic and, should the vehicle appear on any surveillance systems, clean any sight of it. When he's far enough away from the scene of the crime, he disposes of the vehicle and then and only then does he make his way back to the warehouse.

 

[Daric J Fender]

He was a bit bored with the job when it was all said and done. But these weren't Tamanaki's feelings, his feeling was disgust, but ever since he had contact with that, creature, it seemed that its mental influence was starting to take over. This side job was a distraction, but the other side enjoyed the carnage. Next time though, it wanted more creativity in the killing. A thousand ideas went through his mind of how to make it all more interesting. But again, these weren't Shi'en's thoughts. they were its thoughts.

He shifted again to resemble a caucasian woman and slowly made his way out. But once out of sight, a red grin with shark like teeth spread from ear to ear, and a chuckle that wasn't Tamanaki's came out before officially disappearing.

Sometimes he wondered if he made a mistake. Was revenge worth this?