Avenger Assembled

When she was done in the bathroom, Gina found Steve, still fully-dressed in his pajamas, making breakfast in the kitchen. He had a small handful of meals that he rotated through, all hard-won skills he'd picked up during his life skills education in Freedom City. "My genes are badly corrupted. It is unlikely that I am now capable of fathering children." He flipped over the eggs he was frying. "Perhaps the point is moot to begin with. I am no more capable physically of fatherhood than I would be emotionally." Sizzle sizzle, sizzle sizzle. "Had you thought of having children when you were older?"

"I'm from outside," said Citizen agreeably, not wanting to alarm the gibbering dimensional thing any further. At least it wasn't hostile, just an alien creature confronted with another alien - who could hold that against it? He went on, trying to get something productive out of this strange conversation to take back to Eliza on the outside. "I'm not the same kind of thing you are, but don't worry, I'm a friend. I'm working with superheroes and we're trying to fix whatever's going wrong. So something's in the city," hazarded Sharl. "Do you know what it is? Is it a creature like you or something different?"

"No," Steve assured her with a quick shake of his head, coloring along his scars in embarrassment at her reaction. "I have been spending much time with children lately. More than I certainly ever believed that I would. The Omegaorphans, Yolanda, and now Dorothy, and I have been thinking about how I should never be a father. I have too many problems to give of myself enough for a helpless innocent like that, and I have...I have seen too much happen to children. And to mothers. I would not want that to happen again. I am content to care for them. I just..." He put his hand on the back of his neck. "Wanted to know if you felt the same. About children, and life. You are a fine caregiver for Sharl."

"You feel guilty that you felt relief that you survived," Murdock went on. "That is called, I believe, survivor's guilt. The notion that you should feel shame for being glad to be alive. You should not feel that way." He looked over at her, his lined eyes looking almost overrun by spider webs in the light. "I am no counselor of grief," he confessed, "but it is something which I understand. You are new to death, and it is no shame that you took it in a way you did not expect." He fell silent again before adding, "My friend Dorothy speaks very well of you. She said that even after the robot doppleganger attacked your possessions, you defended the real Dorothy when some of her classmates were...skeptical."

"I was unable to sleep. I preferred not to wake you." Given Steve's great weight, slipping out of bed without jostling Gina had been something of a challenge. "I should have kept a closer watch on the time." He caught sight of himself in Gina's bathroom mirror, standing tall and straight, and met his own gaze impassively before looking down at Gina again. "Do you ever want to have children?" he asked her seriously. "Because I do not, and I have read that is something that should be established in relationships like ours."

The weeks after the Day of Wrath Heavily bandaged over the heart, Congressman Aaron Walsh stands at a podium in City Center, his son David at his side. "And so I've learned something this week, as I'm sure we all have. People of Freedom City...I was wrong." The crowd goes silent as Walsh goes on. "I allowed myself, and we allowed ourselves, to be distracted by threats from the Terminus. We became so obsessed with Omega and invasions past that we lost sight of the danger of invasions to come. Heroes like Warp and the other entropically-powered heroes who rallied last week showed us that it doesn't matter who you are - it matters what you do. Terminus mutants aren't our enemies. They're our family." He put his hand on David's shoulder, smiled at him, then went on. "And that's why, given that we have faced both a serious, perhaps ongoing Grue infiltration in the last five years, as well as the recent robot crisis, I plan to begin hearings right here in Freedom City that will examine the extraterrestrial presence here on Earth to-" - Nobody came for Jerry Craven's body. His family was too poor to afford a proper burial, and anyway the pretty-clearly undiagnosed Jerry had been something of the black sheep of his small clan (he'd lived with his brother and his wife, who supported the family from her salary as a lunch lady in the West End) even before he'd left home a week earlier for what he'd probably thought was going to be the happiest day of his life. Potter's Field in the West End lies along the river in a little scrap of land that's been a cemetery for nearly a hundred years. Jerry's grave is on a small hill near the water's edge, and if you stand on it and look straight out the water, shielding your eyes from the buildings and bridges across the way, you really are the biggest thing around. - Dorothy wrung her hands for just a moment before she made introductions - her middle-aged, scholarly-looking parents were red-eyed still, and her mom couldn't quite seem to stop hugging her for more than a few minutes. "Anyway, so, we talked a lot, and I wanted to make sure they met you as soon as they could. Mom, Dad, this is my friend Erin..." Outside the house, amid several buildings knocked over as if by gale force winds, the burn scars left on the asphalt by a teleporter ripping open a gateway to a forest fire had only just begun to heal over, and that from the direct efforts of Dr. Metropolis. "She and the others all saved my life." - "Dear Nephew," the letter to Baxter began, written in Uncle Barry's familiar erratic, wandering handwriting. He'd had his priest carry the message out to his family, the only way his letters could be read outside Providence without anyone reading them. "I recently received a very angry letter from a certain relative of yours, convinced that it was my doleful example that led you to don my armor and carry on the mighty Bee-Keeper legacy for justice instead of for petty crime. I could not be prouder of you, my boy, and I think you are a worthy successor to the legacy. I know you may feel poorly about the massacre done in your name. But let me assure you it is a high honor to be replaced by an evil clone, robot, fiend, or infiltrator from another dimension, one that goes to no common hero. Onto more productive matters - have you considered a queen?" - "And so that was how they did it, Father." Nina raised her head just a fraction to look up at Typhoon, unable to stop herself from the guilty thought of just how much easier it was to talk to people back in Freedom City. She'd spoken to her father in other ways, of course, but in court she knelt like anyone else. "Once Mark exposed the Grue, there were only the mechanical infiltrators left, and the Freedom League disposed of them all. The Curator's threat has ended on Earth." "Your relationship with the Lucas boy has pleased Typhoon, daughter," replied Typhoon. The blue-masked armored despot steepled his fingers across his lap. "But the threats from space have come too often for my liking. Too long have blue skies blinded the heroes of Freedom City to enemies all around them. Perhaps they will learn more if they survive a TYPHOON..." - One night after one of his patrols with Miss A, Citizen found Koshiro up late and approached his roomate. "Hey, uh, Koshiro..." said Sharl a little awkwardly, not quite sure how to phrase what he was about to say. "Miss A gave me something to give to you. It's a message from space?" He shrugged. "From VINCE, the cyberintelligence she left running the Curator's stuff. It's a message for you! He said he found it lying around the inside of the system with your name on it...I dunno, man." It was a line of all-capital letters and numbers - 24.4833333|S|46.6833333|W|. -TM. - Steve went home with Gina and didn't go back to his own place for over a week. His first night there, he was sitting up late watching the news and flipping through jewelry catalogues when a figure he'd seen widely reported on made a surprise appearance. In a neck brace and badly contused still, Jonathan Grant looked pretty good for a man who'd had his neck broken. "So I think it's ridiculous, Lana," said Grant, sitting alongside the Freedom City editor on the late-night panel show. "Superheroes go crazy, murder dozens of people, nearly kill _me_, and what do we do? We cheer them on, and the man who is supposed to be _OUR_ mayor says he thinks we should trust the same suckers who let this happen! Freedom City loves its heroes, but we're not stupid - we're not going to reward people with our loyalty because of some ridiculous story of how they were kidnapped by aliens, or whatever the latest line is. Hey, maybe Viktor Archeville was just an alien the whole time!" Grant threw up his hands and winced. "I need to stop doing that," he said with a rueful laugh. "My wounds aren't healed yet. And neither are Freedom City's. That's why I'm taking this opportunity, right here on FreedomTalk, to announce my candidacy for the office of Mayor of Freedom City in 2014. Twenty-two years is enough. It's time we learned to embrace change."

March 1, 2013 Gina found Steve in her bathtub one morning, the tub dry and Steve still in the new pajamas she'd bought for him for Christmas. He'd changed into them at dark like clockwork every evening they were together, even when he was just going to get changed again later. "I am in the bathtub." He looked up at her as she pulled aside the shower curtain. "I did not want to frighten you if I caught you unawares. Is it morning?" he asked her. From the look in his eyes and the set to his metal-reinforced spine, there was no sign he'd slept the night before. "I had lost track of the time." He started to get up, careful so that his great weight did not unseat the tub from its foundations. The truth of the matter was, he hadn't slept a wink that night, despite what had otherwise been a very pleasant evening, or the two nights before, but Steve would no more complain about that than he would have a broken arm.

"Okay, that's good..." said Sharl with a grateful nod Koshiro's way. Koshiro's calm helped Sharl straighten himself out - maybe he'd died and been brought back to life, but that didn't mean he wanted to look like a wimp. "I'll make sure to call Corbin so he doesn't think anything weird is going on. Eve too, just to be on the safe side. You never know what she hears. Yeah, I don't really remember anything since Miss A did my last backup scan, and that was even before we left for Erde. She took what she'd scanned, plugged me into a default Tronik program, and went from there..." He thought for a moment, then asked,"Oh hey, did you guys save the body? Did you do any of those gnarly human death customs, like burn it?"

Edge: Disco Inferno Harrier: Within Post Comrade Frost: in the Wind Team Citizen: Pass GMing: Was a Triumph [Outside] Medications of the World Site III Angels Fall and the Man Pleas give all GM-related points to harrier.

And then they decide to stick her upper body on a horse! Cue wacky shenanigans.

"Greetings, friend," said Sharl, automatically adopting Citizen's persona. "What seems to be the trouble here?" Aaaaaaah Floating in mid-'air', he divided his attention between the tense man and the situation all around them. Please don't talk in irrational magic flim-flammery! he thought worriedly. Passing that back and forth to Temperance was going to be weird; it was tough enough with Kimber, and Ghost Girl wasn't somebody he was hoping to make out with once the day was over with. "I saw you were having some trouble with your car? Do you need a tow?"

Dammit, Tona, always falling into other dimensions and into the depths of space - get a strap for yourself or something!

"Me too," said Sharl, "It's so strange, I mean, I still feel like we're ready to go off to Erde and save the day, but instead we're back here and everything's better again! It's really weird!" He dropped down on the couch, his magnetic body making it vibrate a little just like a real person's would. "I'm sorry I died, I guess..." he said, scrubbing his hands briefly on his arms. "I mean, I don't even know how it happened, I just know from reading the report you guys gave the Freedom League. I know people died in Tronik, were...were my mom and dad and sister okay?" he asked, looking first at Kimber, then at Koshiro - the former having actually been in Tronik, the latter knowing the most about his family.

http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/3956765/ A 3, oh boy!

Steve fell silent at those words, staring off into space for a moment. "You can only live so long with grief," he said reflectively. "Until despair and loss permeate your soul like meat and drink, and you vomit it out with every word and every breath. If what you lived through is too much for you to mourn the dead, then that is for you to decide. Your emotions do not make you evil. They make you young." He fell silent for a moment, then said out loud, "Had you ever seen the taking of a life before? In a small or great quantity such as that."

"I didn't really know!" said Sharl, raising his hands defensively. "Miss A and I don't really talk about that stuff! The last thing I remember is, she was scanning me just before we went off to Erde, and the next thing I know she was putting me back together. I don't even know what happened on the mission or anything, just that we saved Tronik and stopped the Curator, and that...a lot of people got hurt along the way. But you guys are all okay, right?" he asked concernedly. "I mean, you didn't get hurt? I heard Koshiro took out the whole bioneural complex by himself..."

Make a connection to Red Death II, the "Lois Lane snaps and grabs a supervillain's gear" legacy NPC. (She's using the gear of Red Death I, a Soviet supervillain of a previous generation) - perhaps Comrade Zero was a friend of the original and wants to bring his legacy to an end. Sure, RD1 was a no-fooling bad guy, but that's just further reason why these kids today shouldn't be running around wearing his colors...)

January 24, 2013 It was just after beginning of lunch period on Thursday, January 24th, 2013 when a holographic dog appeared in the common room of the Claremont dorm that had recently been the home of Sharl Tulink, the young hero who had given his life to save his home world, and much of Earth, from the ravages of the Curator earlier in the month. Claremont's students had been hard at work rebuilding their damaged campus and making new connections with friends who had been falsely accused of being Terminus replicants, or had in fact turned out to be evil robots from beyond the depths of space. Lora, Sharl's familiar electronic German Shepard, woofed at everybody a moment before Sharl Tulink himself simply appeared in thin air with a faint electrical hum. Standing right in front of the TV, and in fact seeming to be partially projected from it, he was hard to miss. "Uh, hey everybody," he said with a little wave. "I'm back!"

Doctor Zero, so much more handsome and muscular than Comrade Frost!

Frost stood at ground-level and peered up at the observation tower so far overhead, his parka falling away from his head for a moment to reveal his white hair and blue-white skin for a moment before he pulled it back down as he looked at the others. The Russian hero was an observer here, but in the end they were all heroes faced with a crisis. "She is waiting for superheroes. She would not be so public if she did not want the attention of Freedom League." He put his hands in his pockets and said, "I am troubled. Her powers must be under her own control, or else she would have stunned the crowd on her way up there...I suggest we send someone in to speak with her, and have fliers ready beneath."

Sharl waited impatiently through his diagnostics, getting up and pacing whenever he needed to respond to one of Gina's questions, but obviously trying to do his duty anyway. He was a little surprised, when he was done and talking to Gina, to realize that Gina's boyfriend Steve was there too, or, rather, that he was somewhere in the basement where Gina was working from the conversation they were having! He trusted that Gina wouldn't have let anyone see his private information, which only left the rather unsettling thought of just how long Steve had been over at Gina's place! Maybe they'd had a lot of catching up to do, if Steve really had been a robot replicant for so long... "I'll message you if I have any problems," Sharl assured Gina as he headed for the 'doorway' that would take him to Claremont's familiar holo-systems. He smiled, though she could tell he didn't entirely mean it. "Everything will be okay." He paused at the door, and turned back to her avatar and said, "It sounds like it's been really rough, Gina. I'm sorry I wasn't around to help, but I'm glad you could help me. I've always liked you best. Thanks." And with that, as the automatic sliding doors on the wall hissed their way open, Sharl stepped forward into the Claremont system!

"From a material perspective," said Steve thoughtfully, "it is not such a bad life. They are taken away from a young age and given food, medicine, education, the stolen luxuries of a billion murdered worlds...most die young in palace wars between Annihilists, or as shock troops in wars against the Furion or Omega's enemies, but the same can be said for those they left behind." He fell silent for a moment, then said, "I was taken, once, for Gathering among them. That was long enough now that even the youngest of those children must have fallen in the wars of the Terminus.." He fell silent again, then shook his head. "You need not fear such a fate for yourself. Wombs on Nihilor breed entropic mutants more often than not. There is no shortage there. As for becoming Omega's pawn..." He shrugged. "It is a dire thing to say, but there is cold darkness in even the best people. The Terminus feeds as much on corruption as conquest so...do not do evil, and you will not become evil. It is a rule that works on this world. Death may come for you, for me, for all this," he said with a wave at Claremont, "tomorrow. But today we are alive. So be alive, and enjoy what you have. It is very precious."

"Okay...well, I guess that makes sense," said Sharl a little unhappily. "I mean, you used the tools that you had, and putting me in...in a new body is all right." He looked down at his hands and flexed them, watching the muscles move under his pale skin. "I mean, it could be a lot worse, right?" He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths, measuring his lungs. "All a person really is what's inside their mind, so having a new body isn't that weird. It's just like you transplanted my everything." He shrugged a little, then added, "Well, if I'm stuck in this system, I guess I should call people and let them know I'm okay." He smiled thinly. "And maybe watch the news and catch up on what happened for ten days."

"Okay, well...if something bad happened, I should go to Tronik first," said Sharl hesitantly. "I mean, people there will be looking for Citizen to help them, even if he doesn't have any answers. I can't just go talk to my friends and worry about my family. If I go there right now, I can help and come back in the morning to see everybody. I..." He fell silent for a moment, thinking things over. "Gina, I'm still not sure I understand what happened. You said you were able to fix me, right? Using what you knew about how my body works to put it back together. Like doctoring? So when you talk about backups, what do you mean?"

"Oh..." Sharl fell silent at that, gradually accepting the bizarre circumstances his mentor was describing. He tangled his hands together on his lap, pulling away from Gina when he sensed her reaction. "I guess I have a lot of catching up to do. But you're okay, and my friends are okay, and Steve is okay?" When Gina nodded at that, Sharl said, "I don't...I don't remember any of it. I've never know what I would do if the Curator showed up, or attacked Tronik, I always thought I'd call you, or the Freedom League, or Dragonfly...but I guess I came up with something." He smiled thinly at Gina, then his face fell. The fate of his body didn't cross his mind, but who might have seen it did. "Was the fight in Tronik? Did my family see it happen? "