Avenger Assembled

"What exactly do we do?" asked Eira, looking from one face to another. "Claremont students have traveled the world, and to other worlds. They have saved the world - more than once!" Her cheeks colored again. "And all we do is sit here talking to each other like...like babies, trying to get in touch with our feelings?" She shot a look at the new arrival, not necessarily a hostile one, but not a friendly one either. She looked down and briefly made eye contact with the toyetic version of herself that Mia had made earlier. "Last year at this time, I was in space! A year before that, I was having breakfast with a living ghost! Now I am here - because the world out there is afraid of what happens when I step out of its shadow. Have the rest of you not seen the same?" She folded her hands before her, slim body practically vanishing inside her oversized hoodie, and stared flatly at the rest of the room.

Easiest first - I need a Reflex save for Artificer! You can roll for his sister as well if you like, Dok.

The rear of the temple: The Deep One exhaled with a throb around his gills, a movement that was oddly similar to how Aquaria herself responded to the release of a great tension. "Hydra's champion makes a play for the prisoners, eh? I will not raise my hand against her minions. Do as you like." With that, the two of them were free to enter the temple, the iron grate clanking into place behind them with a thump. It was dark inside, naturally; a people who could see in natural darkness and who preferred to listen needing no particular lightsources. As they moved through the tunnels, it was clear that the plan of the place was distinctly off, at least by Terrestrial standards. Aquaria had sometimes talked about how the architecture of the castle had unsettled her and if this was typical, no wonder! The stones that held the castle together were all square but there were no corners anywhere in a building full of ropey, curving dark-walled corridors that curved back against each other like a seashell, the walls adorned with abstract images that seemed to be guiding the eye to concepts that were best not thought about for too long. They might have wandered for a long time through floorless corridors but a distant sound, echoing through the water that surrounded them, led them to a central chamber that was roughly spherical in nature. The most arresting feature in the room was a statue of a Deep One, looming perhaps half as large as the Centurion statue back in Freedom City, a tentacled, winged mass on its back obscuring its face and much of its upper body. This was the god that meant Wrath to Aquaria; Dagon, a king sitting on its throne - and in its hand was the globe of the earth, the continents misshapen, as if recently overrun by water. There was something ominous about the statue and its great black three-eyed gaze, surveying a room whose walls were adorned with mosaic images of the laughter of thirsting Things. The other feature was a roughly spherical cage tethered by iron chains to the statue, guarding by two fishy-looking Deep Ones who didn't look like they'd be quite so amenable to persuasion as the last one. Coming in from the front side, Octoman confronted a similar scene. It was clear this temple was used for something horrific; the art on the walls, with its scenes of Deep Ones and other undersea monsters laying waste to first Atlantis, and then the rest of the world, certainly suggested that. He could occasionally feel vibrations as he moved, but this was a place where his deafness was a particular trial. So many things almost there, at just the edges of his perception, that he couldn't quite perceive...Finally, well after Miss Grue and Wraith arrived, he found himself entering a spherical room with a vast statue of a god and Atlantean prisoners in a cage, guarded by two hideous-looking Deep Ones... - "Why, _this_-" "You stupid dolphin-couplers!" Aquaria suddenly bellowed, her voice loud enough that even the interplay between the Stylanios siblings was interrupted. "I have had enough of these dolphin-coupling Atlanteans and this dolphin-coupling cult!" Interposing herself between Dalekos and the Harbringer, she declared, "Your madness has made you weak and foolish, Surface-Man! I make the challenge!" There were great hoots and bellows from the Deep One crowd on the temple mount and above in the temple proper, and over it all, Dalekos raised his wrist to his hand and said the word - "Now!"

"I am powered by a compressed amalgam of magnesium and lithium...a battery developed by Miss Americana, Dragonfly, and the Fenriswulf. I-" Eira peered at Elizabeth over her glasses for a moment, pushing them down her nose. "...magic. What is your tradition?" It was not an unfriendly question from the tone, but it was a frank one, and one that she could evidently ask without so much as looking down at the machine she was assembling.

Doktor'd Angelic Math error - set Eira's birthday to April 1, and her age to 17.

"One knows another." Eira reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a pair of odd glasses, black mirrorshades without frames that looked more steampunk than science. "Cardiomyopathy. Heart failure. Slow, degenerative, and genetic." She polished the glasses with a cloth, then placed them on her nose, hiding her big blue eyes. "They actually named the disease after my doctor. My parents thought it would be inappropriate to tie our name to such a thing." She hesitated a barely perceptible moment, then opened up their case of modular parts and began to work assembling the ice cream maker, not quite looking at Elizabeth.

With that, Eira went back to her work. Or so it seemed, anyway. Crystal-Gazer had seen images of cyberkinetics like Miss Americana or actual androids like Citizen at work with machines and they typically used them much as humans did, typing at keyboards, looking at monitors, and the like. Eira didn't seem to bother, instead laying her hand against the silvered surface of her desk and closing her eyes. Just when it seemed she had fallen asleep, or perhaps shut herself down, she opened her eyes and said, "I...grew beyond them, and they were afraid."

Without standing up, Eira shook Davyd's hand, her grip bony and a little cool to the touch. "It was a good trick," she said softly. "I will remember that about you." She studied Davyd, blue eyes seeming to unfocus slightly, before she said, "The accident at the university, yes. So are you our minder?" she asked him frankly. "The one we are supposed to be like?"

Eira blinked a few times. "The Beaumont trials. Yes, I have heard of this." She looked up at Lulu and said simply "I am sorry." She folded her hands in her lap and kept her gaze on the other girl. "People must have been afraid of you after that. Not knowing what you might do, or what your powers might give you." As she sat there, she began cracking the knuckles on her left hand with a slow, distinct, crack-crack-crack. "I understand. What will you do after school?"

Eira twitched at the mention of where her parents were and what they were doing, her cheeks flushing. "N-no." She paused a moment, then looked at Elizabeth. "What was it?" she asked, her voice a soft whisper as she peered over at the gregarious girl. As she spoke, she rested a hand on her chest, where a electro-chemical battery hummed with power.

Eira paused in her work, left hand's fingers pressed down into what looked like pinkish rods buried in a larger, damp-looking red mass inside her hand. She turned to give Lulu a flat, steady look. "Did you read my mind to find that out?" She turned back to her work and laid the skin back down on the back of her hand, smoothing it flat as if it had never been displaced. "You never answered my question. Why are you here?"

Eira balled her hands into fists for a moment, looking away from Lulu. After a moment's hesitation, she turned back to her as the spreading nano-matrix filled roughly a third of the room behind her, all of it on her side. "...I am aware that this is not easy for you." She raised the hand she'd punched the wall with, scraping the dust and fragments off her fingers absently. "I will not trouble you with talk. Perhaps I will be gone at the end of the year, if I can convince them what a...stupid idea this is." She looked down at her hand, muttered a curse, and without another word pulled the skin off the back of it. Sitting at her desk, she spread her fingers wide and began futzing around somewhere between her fingers and wrist with the fingers of her other hand.

Eira looked up, her face confused for just a moment before it settled into an expression of disinterest. She folded her arms inside her hoodie's front pockets and leaned back, her eyes fixed and unblinking as she studied 'Lulu' and 'Davyd'. Come to think of it, no one in the room had seen her blink at all. Time went by and time went by, and she smirked. "Impressive. Most metamorphs get the infrared wrong."

Eira fixed those wide blue eyes on Elizabeth, then seemed to unfocus as if she was looking at something internally. "Ice cream. I can make the chemicals here and on my desk, and talk you through the concepts of molecular weights and moles. It is a matter of solutes like salt affecting the behavior of a solvent - all very simple." She nodded to herself. "There is a dairy allergy in the class, but no nut allergies, so we can use nut milk." She actually smiled for a moment, even if it was tight around the edges. "Everyone likes ice cream." She proceeded to give Elizabeth a rundown of exactly what she'd be doing, which mostly sounded like reading the results of Eira's experiments with different solutes and then talking everyone through making their own ice cream in a bag. She was speaking now with considerably more animation than the flat-eyed stare she'd been giving the wall before they'd started, albeit still quietly. "Did your parents come here for this? The school?" she asked suddenly.

Eira blinked a few times. Her eyes moved past Leroy and Dio to (very briefly) look at Mia. "Eira Katastroff Natt och Dag." She looked down at her fingernails (flat and neat and a bright shade of green), then back at Leroy. "I have met too many gods to worship only one." She gazed at him for a moment, then said, "Wait a moment. Your uncle is in prison. You nearly were arrested. And my uncle was...away for a time." Her voice tightened as she spoke. "Was this someone's idea of a joke?"

Eira picked up the doll and gave it a frank, assessing look. The sight of herself as a toy seemed to unsettle her, and she put it down suddenly, a bit too hard. With her hands free again, she began cracking the knuckles on her other hand, crack crack crack. "Hmph. Flight. Strength. Cybernetic interface." Silence, and then she fixed her gaze on Mia again. "Is that why you are here?"

Eira leaned back in her chair and began cracking her knuckles, one-by-one, as she looked Mia over, a look of great disinterest on her face that turned into a smirk. "So," she asked in a soft, accented voice, "was it tagging? At the mall."

I'll take the 20 they both get with Skill Mastery!

January 2020 Eira sat in the library meeting room, staring at the closed door. The lights were off and it was quiet, and she had arrived several minutes early for the Orange Squad meeting. She was wearing an oversized blue hoodie and jeans, a concession to the relative cold that her robotic nature didn't actually require. This would be the first time she'd met most of the Orange Squad, the team to which she'd been assigned upon her admission to Claremont - an admission made possible by her parents connection to the hero community and substantial wealth. It was team-building day.

"It doesn't mean you." Woodsman landed among the group downstairs. He was going to say more, but when he turned his head to look at the trees in the wall, the trees in the wall driven through by superpowers he briefly lost the ability to speak entirely, instead ramming a bolt home in his crossbow as if that was the only language he understood. The demon could talk though. "You!" Its voice was all laughter now, coming from the very walls. "You know what they'd do if they knew, don't you? Freak-boy-monster, last son of a dead world!" Woodsman laughed suddenly, a high, dangerous sound. "You - you called me boy."

"I should not even be in-" Eira's scowl deepened, and for a moment it looked like she was about to go off on a tangent that had nothing to do with the subject of Chemistry 102, before she placed her hand flat on the desk in front of her. She was dressed down for class, in a black sweater emblazoned with ARCH ENEMY and plaid skirt. After another moment, she said, "I am not interested in presenting here. But if I design, and build, and test, can you...?" She didn't bother explaining further, fixing Elizabeth with wide blue eyes as she assessed her would-be-partner.

"Right!" said Judy, who looked like she was ready to light up in ways besides the usual one that typically required sunglasses. "Ah just felt so bad, lying to everybody for so long, even if Ah knew it was for a good reason." She took a breath, let it out, then said, "Ah think this'll be the year Ah tell people. Ah don't know when, but if this worked so well, we can make it happen." She beamed up at Monica and admitted, "Ah won't be able to make it to the rally. Jaycee Cahill is notoriously a sick girl," she said with a rather watery smile, "so Ah don't get to visit the rallies where there are visiting superheroes. It would be a shame if Corinne happened to tune in to see you and saw me there. But Ah'm sure you'll do a great job. Ah'm just...Ah'm just so happy that everything is working out okay now, Ah just prayed for it so much and now it's actually happening!"

"Here and there," said Riley, reaching back to scratch the back of his head, a gesture Fred knew only too well. "Gotta look good for the man in the mirror, anyway. But...yeah, yeah. It's good." Riley actually smiled, a rare look on his face at the best of times. "So, uh, how's the company? You still making girls pretty?" He'd have ordered something for a girlfriend; but of course it had been a long time since he'd had anything like that. He folded his hands on the table in front of them and didn't lead off by asking about Robin, which he felt was a sign of some kind of emotional health, anyway.

Everything went well, at least at first. Judy cuddled up to Leroy on the couch as much as propriety allowed; her leg against his leg and her hand in his, her head on his shoulder as the movie started. There wasn't quite enough room on their couch for both couples, but Judy figured Micah and Mia would be more comfortable without a lot of company. They're such a cute couple, especially in those robes! I hope they do get together. Mia was a good friend and Micah was a good boy; they deserved each other. Judy knew that her friends would probably want to talk as the movie went (and she was eager to share her own knowledge of the material), so she'd turned on the subtitles to go with the film so nobody would miss anything if they talked quietly. But for the moment she was content to enjoy the moment. In the dark, she smiled up at Leroy before turning back to the film. "It's a shame what happened to Mr. Heston, he was such a good actor!" For her part, hanging around in the back, Ashley kept half an eye on the kids and half an eye on the movie, which really was very long and she had already seen. Twice.

Eira gave Elizabeth a considering look. "Eira is acceptable," she sniffed, her expression shifting slightly without actually cracking into a smile. Her handshake was decidedly cold in Elizabeth's grip, closer to room temperature than the human norm, and given with the enthusiasm of a wet noodle. "Paper is ridiculous, she muttered, handing her copy of the handout to Elizabeth. "We could all have tablets as they do at Archetech, but instead they operate like dinosaurs." Scowling, she began cracking her knuckles with a faint "click-clack" as she did so. "And these sample experiments are better-suited for children. I could make a better one in a day."