Avenger Assembled

Later that night: "That's not a bad idea," said Ashley thoughtfully. The Patriot was deployed to Indiana today "trust me, this isn't something you want a piece of" but she always had time for a late-night conference call with her mentee. "You're going to have to get used to operating in the public eye if you're going to be a government meta, and an interview with one of your classmates is a good test case. Just don't say anything stupid for God's sakes." She ran her fingers across her short-cut, blue-dyed hair, and frowned at her phone's camera. "What's your read on Musume?"

Neko considered her options and said suddenly, "Would you...like to be on the Internet? I have show." She took out her phone and showed Sharaf a Youtube channel, Tiktok account, and Twitch hookup, all of them adorned with her image and the cheerful words "CATGIRL REACTS!" The top video link appeared to be "CATGIRL REACTS...TO FLAMING RANCH DORITOS" with Neko making a disgusted face and giving two thumbs down. "I have never had, um, a guest...but the teen Patriot could be very good for my hits and subscribers." She smiled at that, looking downright avaricious at the thought. "You could be, ah, incognito, and I could give you question." She gave Sharaf a hopeful look.

Richard put his hand to his mouth and considered his response. This would require due thought. Luckily that was something he was very good at - or at least good at doing very quickly, which in his experience was all you needed. There were a lot of ways to do this. Subtle prop comedy where he pulled out first a television playing news broadcasts of the attack on the Liberty Dome, then pictures of his family, then the marked dome cross-section that Preston or whoever hadn't been smart enough to hide. Talking the other man aside and telling him he had a heavy goddamn secret for him and they needed to talk in private. Punching him in the goddamn face at super-speed for threatening the safety of his wife and family. He considered his options in the space of a barely-perceptible blink then said in a voice not designed to carry. "Meathead," it had been a term of affection when they were younger - mostly. "The Liberty Dome. The bowling ball." He looked at the other man for his reaction.

Let's see - Richard is just going to leave his Quickness at maximum, so he hits 30.

"Persephone!" Copycat headed straight for the goddess, all smiles as she first curtseyed, then took her hand. "Or should I say, 'your majesty'?" she asked, beaming. This was an embarrassing character to play but still not as bad as playing a high school student; hopefully the few people present who knew who Copycat was wouldn't be checking in on her afterwards to make sure she hadn't drunk too much wine. "Hello, I'm Copycat, and I am sooo honored to meet you!" This was not the first superpowered crime lord she'd gotten up close and personal with. "I grew up reading about Greek mythology and I always thought your story was the best one, so romantic!" She smiled and handed the goddess a cat-pin she removed from her outfit's small purse. "I hope you'll take this," she added, eyes wide. "This is just a little token of my, oh gosh, my esteem..." She blushed on cue, summoning up memories of her recent thoughts about Set and Fa'Rua to lend some real color to her cheeks. I'm just a harmless idiot peon here, nothing to worry about. "Does Hades need any, you know, help?" she asked. "We'd be happy to pitch in, as thanks for all this, if nothing else."

An advantage of being husband and father to telepaths was that Richard knew exactly what was happening back at the Liberty Dome, where Paige, Will, and Holly were all helping clean up or treat the injured, along with watching Bryant. He looked at Diomedes and considered the man's face, looking him over with a skeptical look. Seems a lot shorter than the last time I saw him. A lot of old supervillains had found ways to cheat aging one way or another, certainly he and Paige didn't look like they were in their early sixties. Diomedes was fit for a man who'd been able to fight the second Bowman and be seen on the arm of the glamorous Clock Queen but it was hard to tell if he'd actually found a backdoor or if he was just a physical culture freak. No use wasting a lot of time thinking about it. "Yeah, yeah, they're real Patriots, I'm sure. Lead the way, buddy." He considered what to say as they made their way through the living room, studying the place with new eyes, as intense in a few seconds as a good detective in minutes. "What's going on in Casa del Cutler these days?"

Neko stared at Sharaf unblinkingly, her golden eyes wide, ears twitching atop her head. "Oh," she said after a time, her hands folded neatly before her. "An honorable name, I am sure." She considered what to do next, tail swishing behind her and then closed her eyes for a moment and remembered another life that wasn't quite so far away, and the terror and rage she would have felt under other circumstances. She did not retreat, instead simply ducking her head slightly to look up at the transformed boy. "What does it mean?"

Owain looked at Luke, looked at Neko on Leon's lap, looked at Luke again, looked at Legatus and Carmen over by the edge of the pool, and then suddenly splashed Luke in the face. "Ah-hah!" he declared. "I have you!" Neko landed artfully in Leon's lap, curling her back just so that he didn't take the full impact of her weight. "Oh hello," she said, blushing slightly as she smiled up at Leon, her lips curling up and eyes almost closing. She was warm, with a cat's body temperature rather than a girl's, and didn't seem to be in any hurry to get up at first. "Thank you for saving my phone. It was a gift from Merlin and I use it to twitchstream."

"When I was coming up, there was this guy, Solo Takashi, who went by the name Otaku if you can believe that #($#, who built himself a legion of schoolgirl sexbots and used them to be a supervillain." The Patriot spat, loudly enough to cut off whatever it was Quirk was trying to say. "And you can imagine what that was like, being sixteen and Asian, and having a guy like that running around. I hear the robots got him finally, and good for them I say." She considered her response, then said, "I...used to have a cat-themed super-identity, back when I was in high school. It was just a pun, Copycat." Quirk had appeared behind her ear. "Because that's all your powers are, aren't they? Just copying, no, stealing from better people-" A furry bundle toddled over and plopped into Puma's lap, looking up at her cheerfully. "Kitty!" waved the little girl happily, wrapping chubby arms around her midsection. "Anyway, there are a lot of real pervs out there. But you don't have to take their crap just because of how you look or who you are. You never do." "Pay attention to me!" Quirk yelled, the air around them crackling white, August Roman and company vanishing. The little girl, eyes getting wide, clung nervously to Puma, Quirk not seeming to notice as he focused his attention on the Patriot. "DO YOU KNOW WHAT I COULD DO TO YOU!?"

Neko strummed her shamisen a few more times, then waved into non-existence when she saw no one was really paying attention. After some consideration, she stood up and neatly shucked off her kimono, then padded up to the edge of the pool on her bare feet, pointed nails clicking slightly on the concrete. The chlorinated water smelled as bad as she'd feared, but it certainly was pleasant to see all the boys down there in the water. Her tail twitched behind her as she said, "Owain! Are you going to water-fight? Come on!" She looked down at Leon and favored him with a smile. "He can fight more than he looks." Having taken out her phone from her kimono, she turned around and snapped a selfie of herself by the water - and then seemed to slip, tumbling right for Leon's lap...

It took Neko a little while to remember recent history classes and to understand the event Sharaf was talking about. Such a small thing, to make them so angry for so long. She looked down at her own pointed nails and thought about what she'd learned about Japanese history after she'd slept. About cities that had burned, and people that had died. Perhaps it's for the best I missed seeing those things with my own eyes. Would I be able to stand here now if I had? "Ah. And what is your costume?" she asked curiously, folding her hands before her. Sometimes that was a question the students here didn't want to answer, but sometimes it was, and that was something she could add to her storehouse of information about this place. "I have none," she said, putting a hand to her chest. "No - longer?"

"If you teach your daughter to pick on things smaller and weaker than she is," said the Patriot, her back going up when she saw Puma's obvious fear, "eventually she'll try that out on dear old Dad." The 'cat show' seemed to be working on Quirk Jr, who was watching with great interest, smiling and laughing. Quirk yawned. "You were much more interesting when you were a catgirl," he said, patting his hand against his mouth. "In fact-" The Patriot sat down on the ground and took off her helmet. The costumed adventurer and new American icon revealed herself as an Asian woman, her hair dyed blue at the tips, dark paint smudged around her eyes by the helmet. "Ugh. I hate this stupid helmet sometimes, but I actually do want to have a secret identity even though speculations about my sex life are evidently number five on reddit behind 'who's really the father of Fleur de Joie's baby'. They give you that talk yet, about all the pervs out there?" The Patriot was not looking at Quirk at all.

Royal vintage deep blue historical gown. Square neckline, bowknot decorated rococo style bodice, romantic trumpet sleeves, A line ball gown, embroidery skirt. Argus smiled at the boy-god, paying little attention to anyone else for a moment. "We 'children of the gods' have placed bets. I am hoping for a bacchanalia to end all bacchanalias - perhaps something for your social media." He smiled and spread his hands, eyes open wide everywhere. "Even I can see new things now and again." Eira stuck out her tongue at him, slipping her arm through Pan's. "We can find someone much more interesting than him to play with, yes?" Though it was always fun to watch Pan take down some thick-headed lummox, Eira was getting annoyed that the adults were just standing there flirting with each other and not complimenting her very clever dress. No, wait - I am an adult! Dammit!

Neko's ears twitched, and she gave him a cool, sharp smile like silk wrapped around steel. She stood there with her bare feet against the carefully-trimmed Claremont grass and was silent, her tail twitching behind her. Ah. So that is why he's not afraid of me - and probably why no one else is, either. The Hinomaru are the dead past to him, a sad thing that happened to a distant people in a distant land, perhaps before his grandparents were born. Hardly anyone was still alive who had seen those days, of course. A boy his age in 1944 would be a great-grandfather by now. If he had survived the war. "You were right," she said simply, folding her hands before her. "The headmistress is very nice," she conceded. She considered what to do next, then smoothly stepped forward into a forward flip, so fast her kimono didn't quite have time to fall down, landing on her feet with inhuman grace. "Socotra was an enemy nation. Does anyone fear you?"

Neko shifted where she stood at the way Sharaf described himself, wondering if she'd made another mistake. She kicked out of her shoes, high old-fashioned wooden ones, and slipped them into her sleeve. No wonder he likes America so well, she thought, if it has given him so much. "Okay," she said agreeably. "I don't know anything about Socotra, the island?" she hazarded, vaguely remembering something from geography class. "But America is very big." She looked up at the buildings around them, then at the city that surrounded them. "My village, it only has...few hundred people. All in the mountains. Not like this." She looked at Sharaf and said seriously, "Headmistress is nice. I never had teachers like her before." She thought of Katana, shook aside the memory, then said, "I thought - more people would know. Would care."

Listening with growing alarm to Betsy's tale, Neko stared wide-yellow-eyed at the Englishwoman until she was finished and said "Okay. I don't know anything about that." She shook her head as she finished speaking, all the cats in the room resolving into one white and brown bobtail she held in her arms, petting it behind the ears. The girl's very presence purred with supernatural energies, the cat a seeming nexus of them, as she looked up at Betsy. "What do you want to see?"

"I was born in 1929 in the Iya Valley," said Neko, not quite meeting Sharaf's eyes as she recited what was obviously familiar. The cats at her feet were nuzzling her leg and she bent down to pick one up, stroking it behind its ears. "I was frozen by American weapon during the war." She thought about Owain, but that was his secret to tell, not hers - besides, if Sharaf had found the one, he could find the other easily enough. She gave Sharaf a yellow-eyed look. "I am - safe here. Thank you for asking." She thought about telling him how alien even Japan was now, but kept that to herself as she did much else. "And you are the Arab boy. Will you go home when you are done here?"

Neko couldn't see Leon or Luke's faces from where she was sitting, just their physiques. For a moment she blushed, mouth wavering and cheeks turning pink, before she strummed her guitar and began to first play, then sing, the song of the beach. The pool wasn't quite the same as the beach, but it was as close as she could get. Maybe they are cute if you don't look too closely at their ears, she admitted to herself, even as she focused on the song. "Oh, ah...here I go!" Owain studied the pool, obviously drawing up his courage, - then circled around to enter into the shallow end. "I, ah, learned to swim in standing water. There was a pool near..." He hesitated, then pressed on. "Well there was a lady who lived in that one, but she was cordial enough." The water was cold but he would never admit such a thing in front of the other fellows.

Neko blinked down at Sharaf, and when she opened her eyes some half-dozen white bobtail cats were looking down at him from the tree alongside her, some resting in her hair, some her back, some on the branch itself. He knows. She was many things and as she'd had occasion to teach a few people in her life, one of them was clever. She considered her response, then leaped down from the tree, landing neatly by Sharaf's side and folding her hands behind her back. The cats up in the tree disappeared at that, but then reappeared around her, all of them watching Sharaf even as she looked away, her cheeks coloring slightly as her tail twitched behind her. "Yes?"

"What the hell!?" The Patriot, appalled, looked past the teen's hand to confirm what she'd seen. "Well either this is just some bs replicant, or-" "No, that's the real deal, I'm afraid," said Quirk, reappearing behind them with a sharp smile and a happily cooing baby. "That really is the one, the only, the original August Roman." "Kitty!" declared his daughter, waving her chubby fists in La Puma Negra's direction. "The game ends when you decide what you're going to do with him," said Quirk with a smirk. "Killer, criminal, torturer? You can spare the timeline from him now if you're willing to take some action..."

Cats can be hard to find if you go looking for them. A little discreet inquiry got Sharaf directed to the big old tree in the middle of the quad, one that Claremont students had been carving their initials into and climbing on for a great many years now. Neko was high in the tree, some ten feet off the ground, and was walking along a fairly thin branch that extended out over the green. She didn't usually wear geta and kimono on campus anymore, but it made the climbing and balancing harder, and so made it all worthwhile as she walked along the wood, her wooden shoes clicking as she went. She sang softly to herself as she walked back and forth, pacing out the limits of how far the wood would bear her weight. It was a good tree; one of her favorite spots, and she didn't even mind the green leaves stuck in her hair as she moved. Gradually she lowered herself down to all fours, still balanced on the limb, and looked down to spot Sharaf. Her eyes were big and distinctly yellow, her ears pointed and atop her head, her tail twitching behind her, and for a moment she locked her gaze with Sharaf before she blushed slightly and looked away.

Outside, Kay promised to meet them at the government center "in my own fashion", leaving Eira and Davyd to make their own way there. Up and outside of the studio, Eira sat on a nearby rock that must have been placed there deliberately, a pensive look on her face. Ping scuttled over her fingers as she sat there, and she reached down to pet him like a girl scritching the head of a favorite pet. It was snowing in the sky, thick white Ukrainian flakes, but nothing seemed to be touching down. "The car is bugged, but we are in a machine land. There are no places here where we would cannot be spied on, yes?" She looked over towards their Rurland-provided ride and then back at Davyd. "There was a time when I would have trusted her with anything." she asked suddenly. "There are not so many Uploads, even in all of Europe. We were the best of friends." She picked up a small rock, more of an ornamental pebble, and threw it fast and hard enough that it fell out of sight.

Neko looked around for a moment, seemingly unsure of herself. She hadn't heard any of the sirens Wilona had mentioned, so maybe the police everyone was worried about weren't coming. She sat down by the edge of the pool, peering at her wide-eyed reflection in the water, then settled down into one of the nearby pool chairs after brushing off a layer of dust. It was obvious that they weren't the first teenagers to come this way, she decided, and so she wasn't going to worry about it. She waved her hand and produced a chuzao shamisen, a curved Japanese guitar, and without taking the time to tune it began picking out notes that nonetheless sounded perfectly formed. "Mm." Owain peered at the pool himself, looking uncertain. "How does it stay so clean?" he inquired thoughtfully. "These pools are standing water, they have those cleaning machines...but surely no one tends it here?" He shot an uncertain look at the house, his eyes widening. "Unless..."

Sharaf found the picture near the end of the school year, a steady black and white photograph in a book about the Hinomaru. The Hinomaru had been Imperial Japan's version of the Ubersoldaten of World War II; cruel agents of empire who had mostly come to a sticky end at the hands of American, British, and Chinese super-agents during and after the Second World War. This particular book had been put together by the US National Archives just after the war, a murderer's row of assassins, terrorists, and killers of various stripes. (Socotra of course hadn't been involved in World War II; the first Typhoon had been just a boy living under British rule off the Arabian coast in those days.) He found the girl near the end of the book. Akuma no Neko, aka "Devil Cat" had fought several Allied incursions on the mainland of Japan at the side of Crimson Katana, and had vanished in engagement against British heroes during the campaign in Burma just as the war was entering its final stages. There was an image like an identification picture; a pale-eyed girl with shockingly white hair, standing modestly in a schoolgirl uniform like a sailor suit, one of her standing at a podium, standing on a stack of books so she could address a small unit of IJA troops, and an artist's rendition of the girl surrounded by illusory devils. She was by all accounts a black magician, an infernal sorceress of the Green Dragon Society, and - well he had seen that girl before, walking around the halls at Claremont, sitting silently in most of her classes, her accent thick and English often uncertain. There really could not be that many young Japanese women with white, fuzzy hair and big visible cat-ears atop her head, or a tail visible in the rear shot at the podium. This was Neko Musume.

The Patriot exhaled - and then exclaimed, briefly. "Mary and Joseph! Thank God, I can talk..." She shook her head and looked down at the thugs, then at La Puma Negra. "Quirk is - very powerful. He's an extradimensional entity who has been playing with the heroes of Freedom since I was - well, for a while now. Recently he got married and had a kid, no idea how that works, and it seems Daddy's girl likes to play too. The only way out of the game is to figure out the rules and how to win." She bent down and began searching the unconscious thugs, automatically zip-tying them in advance of their waking up. "Looks like...time travel? Recreations? Could be anything."