Avenger Assembled

This was not an easy conversation for Steve, who preferred to stay far away from things that might blow up in his face most of the time. But having done one brave thing already, Steve pushed the point. "Not Miss Americana. You." He gave her a searching look. "When I heard your voice in the depths of space, I was amazed that you had built a machine that let you speak to me. When I saw it was you, I was...overwhelmed. " He put his hand on the table next to hers. "I know what it was for you to do that, more than anyone else. Take one more step with me," he urged her. "Together. The children will delight in meeting the woman I love, and Yolanda will treasure you. She already wants a suit of her own one day."

"I doubt they will have any complaints," said Steve with a little shrug. "They have never been anything but welcoming to me, and I have told them of my work with the Orphans and their reintegration into society." He set down his fork and gathered both his words and his thoughts. "You know," he hazarded on the unsubtle way he had that meant this was obviously a suggestion, "I have an idea. You should come with us. You said it yourself, there will be few people, a pleasant spring day, and only those who we care for around. The children will be interested in playing together and in seeing the place, not in anything else. And their parents are grateful just to have them in their lives."

"All right, well, I'll see what I can do.. You hang tight here, and I'll go find my friend and we'll see if we can deal with the monster." Outside the computer, figuring that this was a crisis bigger than a jammed-up vehicle, Citizen 'popped' into view again and relayed the conversation to Temperance. Sharl had a good memory and was trying his best, but it was pretty obvious he didn't really understand what was going on. "So I guess there's some kind of void...thing, floating around this dimension? Something like Doctor Metropolis? I don't know!" He threw up his hands. "I don't know what we'd see if we went back to Earth-Prime. It's really weird. The guy seemed nice enough if you want to talk to him, he was a little weirder than most things I've met in a computer but not that strange."

Spending an HP to have a Detect Magic [visual] ritual up, TT, if that's okay with you.

"This is not my first action," snapped Frost, a little peevish himself in the crisis. "She has dysautonomia, which means her autonomic functions have become disconnected with each other. She needs hospitalization. Fleur, can you transport her to the League clinic? Treatment fast, or this becomes worse." He stood up and reached into his parka's front pocket, coming out with what looked for all the world like a pair of old-fashioned bifocals. "Hmm. Many causes for this condition. I could not see what happened from below - did she overpower herself in attacking you?"

A cloud of icy mist came pouring in over the balcony railing seconds later, instantly forming into the hooded shape of Comrade Frost. He'd headed straight up here at the sign of trouble, leaving a thin line of ice on the windows trailing all the way back down to ground level. Frost relaxed at the sight of the fallen woman and standing heroes, albeit just a little. "Gaian Knight and Tiamat have the helicopter crew. What happened here?" he asked, making a beeline for the unconscious would-be jumper they'd all come to save. "I'm a doctor," he said without preamble as he bent down and began examining her with his red eyes narrowed, though he was careful not to remove his gloves. "You are safe now," he said to the victim, though for all he knew it was a lie. "Are you two all right?"

"What was once my organic body has been altered nearly beyond my recognition. I doubt there is much to see," said Steve, but he didn't say no. Instead he carefully took his usual seat across the table from Gina, careful not to overburden the chair he sat on. "Speaking of children," he said thoughtfully, "I have been thinking of taking those who have been under my care out together. Yolanda has shown no fear of Omegadrones from her rescue, and the Omegaorphans would benefit from time out together. They have done well at their school and with their adoptive families, but they have rare chances to socialize together. The school...is concerned about them damaging each other. In here," he added, tapping his temple. "There has been some difficulty in reversing the policies that my replicant agreed to."

I guess that's a neigh vote.

Steve noticed the name first, and then the food. Both discussion of her past, and eating, were rare things from his girlfriend. "I never knew my father in his prime, only the man he was in the Black Ghetto. He loved me as much as he was able, as did my mother. For all that they were...not like mothers and fathers here, I could do worse for examples." He began to eat from his own plate, relaxed enough not to hoard, stirring everything together on his plate before eating. "A parent should be able to put their child above all else, without hesitation. When I can slip the bonds that are in here..." he tapped the side of his head. "I will be ready then. Faster, with you."

"I know." Steve reached out and hugged her, pulling her tightly to his broad chest for just a moment. "But I am a son of that place, and it will be with me till the end of my days. Even knowing there is no rational way that you could share her fate, I remember what was lost and...I fear enough for you, and for me, when we are together," he confessed. "They have come together for us in a way I thought was lost. I could not risk going any further with that. With anyone else." He released Gina and turned back to their food. "I have seen fathers at work. Before, and here, with men like Jack and so many others. I am not brave enough to be a father." He dished up, adding, "We have the lives that we have. I am content with mine today."

"Because the last woman I loved died of having a child," said Steve suddenly, nearly dropping his glass as he set it down on the counter before him. He looked down at his lined hands and said, "There, I...I have said it, and I did not break. The words cannot hurt me." He looked at Gina and said, "It was before. After my parents were dead, before I was taken. We were young, and we were all the other had, and when she became pregnant she killed herself so that she would not birth a child into the misery of the Black Ghetto." He flattened his free hand on the counter next to him. "She had saved some of the poison for me but I could not make myself take it. So instead I took her body to where it could be burned, and I did it so that predators could not take her. Aaand when I lay awake and looked at you tonight, I remembered what I had lost and how I could lose that again. And so I could not sleep."

"Well, then, you have no problem," said Murdock with a shrug. "You have defended the weak against the strong and done so for what is right, you helped save the city from an attack by a cruel adversary who made a point to hunt the weak for his sport. There are many walking around the city who have done far less and know nothing but pride." He rose to his feet, briefly looming over the girl. "You will find, I think, that an origin of the Terminus will matter less these days as the public turns its eyes to other fears. As for the legacy of destruction you fear, let me say..." He gathered his thought for a moment before saying, with great firmness. "You will talk to those who will try and tell you that the Terminus is not evil. This is false. But _you_" he said, pointing to her, "are not evil. Your powers, and their use for good, are not evil. Remember that."

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.