Avenger Assembled

The young Mr. Lucas certainly did seem to be enjoying himself, having swept Chloe out onto the dance floor as soon as dancing opportunities presented itself. He felt a little bad for Trevor having no date, but he supposed Trevor wouldn't have come alone if he minded that. Besides, he remembered prom; Trevor didn't need a girl on his arm all the time to look cool! For his part, Mark liked having a girl on his arm, especially a pretty one. "My name is Mark, I'm a friend of Stesha's from, ah, school." he told Chloe. "I'm graduating this year, so I wanted to make sure I saw this before I went away. I'm going to go work in Africa for UNISON."

As the more sociable kids settled into a conversation, Hope gave Trevor an apologetic look and said, "I'm real sorry if I weirded you out, earlier, honest. It's just, well, Midnight's a pretty big deal where I come from." Sobering up a little, and letting the jokey manner that was an affect from other teens slip, she added, "I guess that's why I haven't said anything to you before. When you spend your whole life hearing stories about someone, trying to live up to their legacy, well...it's a little intimidating meeting him, or at least his heir, in the flesh."

"You really should avoid dating criminals," said Fusion, politely but a little disapprovingly. Well, this new bit of news certainly put Grimalkin's story about being in love with a Japanese cyborg in perspective. "I know bad boys have a certain cachet, but I think that's just a natural response to people who project a certain amount of confidence. There's a difference between being attracted to a man because he seems confident and capable, and being attracted to him because he's a bad guy. If you do have to do those things, at least keep them on the down-low. We need to set a good example for the kids." She hmmed, bet, and winced when her two pair turned out to be a little too low. "Ah, damn. In any event, when it comes to scientific mysteries, I think of my grandfather, who didn't see a...ah, motorized vehicle until he was Wisp's age. There's always new things to discover, and the mysteries of today will be the commonplaces of tomorrow." When Sage spoke, she nodded approvingly and added, "You Young Freedom kids are all right. Do you know Wander?"

Joan knew she had to be careful here. There was no use getting into another shouting match with people about their religion; that was not a problem she'd ever solve over poker and chips. "Magic is just a word our ancestors made up to explain things they didn't understand. Someone like Captain Thunder, or most of us, for that matter, would have been branded some sort of god or wizard a few centuries ago. Because they can analyze the electrical energy stored in Ray Gardener's cells, or the, ah, non-human DNA in mine, we know better. A few more years, maybe we'll know more about how Siren's metahuman powers work. Or Grimalkin, for that matter," she added with a nod the pixie's way. "I don't know about you kids, but I'm looking forward to that day. The more we know about the world, the better it is for all of us."

"Spending time together is good." She batted her eyes at him, a gesture she'd picked up from Zarana. "Between one thing and another, we don't...we don't have as much time to spend together as I'd like. I mean, you'll be graduating next year, and I might be as well if everything goes according to plan. And Corbin," she said frankly,. "odds are pretty good we're not going to see much of each other after that." She reached up and put her hand on his. "So that's why we should make the most of the time we have, don't you think? Like on beautiful days like today, when it's just the two of us."

"Oh, uh, yeah, there's stuff like that up in my parents' room..." Mark led them to the safe in his parents' room, which turned out to be a conventional wall safe in what looked like a conventional 'older people's' bedroom. There were a few of Rick's novels on the shelves, Martha's paintings on the walls, but with the older furniture and wallpaper, this could have been anyone's room. Well, till you opened the safe and found the Lor blaster pistol across the top. Mark took that and cracked it open with remarkable efficacy, checking the safety and putting it, divided, on the floor with the power cell removed. "Here's, uh, all those papers."

Despite all the talk of an evil telepathic hivemind taking over the city, no mind-controlled friends or ground-to-air missiles loomed up at them as they flew over a still and silent Freedom City. Even the animals were quiet, and there were people visible down below who looked (one could hope, anyway) as if they'd just fallen asleep on the streets. It was a warm day, they'd had time to settle down. If they were quite lucky, maybe nobody had even died. The Lab, though, was an exception. The people on the streets were up on their feet and moving: but not _towards_ the fortress of science that it represented. As the heroes made their landing, the crowd of shuffling, mumbling people beneath was heading directly away from them.

Sharl shook his head, listening for an imaginary voice, then listening to the garbled-sounding message Protectron was reciting. "I don't hear anything. I'm not getting any kind of message." He looked at Miss A and said, "Is it going out just, uh, telepathically, or is there a radio message too for Protectron to hear?" Sharl knew very little about telepathy, but as someone who lacked an organic brain, he wasn't surprised that it wasn't a problem for him. So why was it an issue for the synthezoid? "It would explain how everyone was acting together in groups down below when they were, er, swarming me, and what they were chanting, but what are those little Grue mind-things for, then?"

"Okay, thank you," said Mark, giving his friend a grateful look. "That'll be good, I've been meaning to get to the lawn, but the rake and mowers and stuff are in the garage..." He ran his hand through his short sandy hair, looking for a way to keep himself calm. To Erin, he said the same, adding, "No, no, my mom's been working out of her studio at Castle, so all her artwork is there, and my dad's papers, we...we sent those to the League after he left the first time. Everything here can stay. I guess it's good we didn't get that dog after all." Mark looked around the house, taking several deep breaths. "It'll...it'll be okay. Things will work out."

"I've run into a few lycanthropes myself. So-called kitsune, people with an inherited condition that gave them visual illusions, an animalistic appearance, pyrokinesis..." Fusion shook her head. "Their ancestors had set up shop in dimensional pockets over half of Japan, telling themselves and everyone else they were magical to explain things that they didn't understand. Until we showed up, half of them didn't even know there was an outside world. The other half were still trapped in the same old-fashioned feudal paradigm that their ancestors had established. We set most of them right." As she dealt, she went on, "I've helped out with Atlantis recently. It was a difficult visit, but a lovely city. Have you ladies ever been?"

Upstairs in his room, Mark went through the motions of emergency planning that he'd been taught since he was a small child. He had his emergency suitcase under his bed, the one with a few changes of clothes in it and ID, as well as genetic ID markers and spiritual fetish objects in the event of a Grue invasion or a magical artifact. He lived his life at school without worrying about these things, but this was a real emergency, not one he could just pretend was another school issue like universes collapsing together or evil interdimensional duplicates or...no, this was his family going away. He cracked open the bag, saw the clothes from years earlier that might not even fit, the canned food that was probably a little old, and sighed, quietly. Of course it was. He hadn't bothered repacking this in years. Why would he? He was a superhero. What could happen? With his rather dusty bag under one arm, realizing that this emergency measure wasn't actually going to help anything, Mark turned and started back downstairs. Erin found that there were no perishables in the refrigerator, what had happened had taken place slowly enough for all the perishable food to be taken with or dumped out: there was even a fresh bottle of milk on top of the trash. As for Trevor, he found that several things were actually missing from his previous visit to the room. He couldn't sort out all of it; some things he remembered as Young Freedom trophies that Mark's dad had insisted on displaying alongside his own, and some older stuff that had belonged to Rick's father. Including (and the familiar face was why he recognized it) a personal picture of the late-stage Liberty League of the 1950s, just before the less-determined heroes had left his grandfather to fight his war alone.

The heroes could see something was wrong almost as soon as they were in the air: the highways leading into Freedom City were all clogged with traffic, some of it just with honking horns and police barricades, but further in the blockage was silent and still. The skies over Freedom City were quiet, with no heroes or airplanes in the sky, an ominous site given the nature of the city before them. Even birds were absent, and as they watched a flock of geese flew by beneath only to suddenly make a rapid, though not uncontrolled, descent into the leaves just beyond a line around the city. As soon as they were over that line, Dragonfly and Protectron both heard something. Not from their radios, not from their communicators, but rather a voice inside their heads. "-must-the-. You-obey-Mind. -Mind-all. -are-Mind. -with-Voice-the-." It was not the inviolable command it was evidently intended to be, rather, it was more like an annoying radio station they couldn't quite turn off. As they flew further towards the city, it sounded again, no louder, but all the more insistent.

Mark muttered gratefully, wiping his eyes and face with the tissue Erin had grabbed for him. At her words, he bit his lip. "But what if they..." His eyes widened, and he reached out to squeeze Trevor's hand on his shoulder. "No. No, that's stupid. If they come back, they can find me. If my dad is as powerful as he acts, he can just come find me wherever I am. I'd, uh, I'd better go back. I need to get my emergency suitcase..." He turned and all but bolted up the stairs, and for a second in the eerie house, the teens were reminded of another visit to the Lucas house, when Rick Lucas' unfolding power had combined with the looming threat of the Terminus to make another terrible moment for the family.

"It was all right. I'm looking forward to spring break. Even if I don't go home like the other kids do, at least it's a change. Things change so slowly back where I'm from, I expect everything to be on the move here." She was grateful for the food, and showed it, but studied Corbin carefully before saying, "Corbin, I appreciate all the work you did to bring all this here. And I'm definitely looking forward to the food. But you never have to worry about trying to impress me with material things." She smiled at him. "You're what I care about, and you're what I'm happy to see."

"...they both tried to get me to go," said Mark, sounding stricken. "They said this wasn't a place for our family anymore." He looked away, guilt thick in his voice. "I said this was crazy, that I wasn't going to just leave without knowing more. My dad said he didn't expect anything less of me, that I was acting how he'd raised me. My mom said she'd see me again soon, and they both, they both just left." He scrubbed his eyes, fighting back even more tears. "Going to some world I've never even heard of, so I couldn't even tell you how to find them. And I don't know how long they'll be gone, my mom talked like she was coming back, I think, but my dad...I don't know." He sobbed quietly. "I mean, we had a Grue scare a few years ago so the house is all paid for and everything, and the cars, but...but I don't know what I'm supposed to do now."

"Well, um, it was like this. My dad came back, and...and he took my mom." Mark shifted under Trevor's regard, feeling a stab of irrational guilt at incriminating his father, and an equally irrational guilt at worrying his friends. "Normally, um, I'd just have not said anything, since she wanted to go for a while and everything, but the thing was, he said why they had to go for a while." He fought the urge to wring his hands, and instead settled for pacing, "He said that the Terminus is going to come. And soon. And that our family wouldn't survive if we stayed here."

All was quiet and still for while, and it looked for a moment like no one was home in the Lucas house. After a noticeably long pause, Mark opened the door. Their usually ebuillent friend looked blotchy and tired, and it didn't look like he'd been taking very good care of himself the last couple of days. There was no sign of movement elsewhere in the house, indeed, many of the lights weren't even on. "Hey, you guys," said Mark, a little shakily. "Come on in." He took a few steps back from the door, gesturing for them to enter. "How are you? Are things good?" He crossed over and sat down on the couch in the living room, looking up at them.

"No, you don't really need to come in-costume or anything." Mark hadn't slept much the last couple of days; he wasn't quite sleep-deprived as such, but he was certainly a little punchy. He wobbled a little as he sat, and hugged the pillow on his lap a little tighter. "It's just a problem I have, kind of a personal problem...hey, is Trevor there with you? You should bring him too. We can all have a little party here. Or something."

Erin and Trevor were having lunch together the Monday after moving their relationship to the next level when Erin's cell phone (which she was luckily carrying) rang. It was Mark on the other end, Mark who neither Trevor nor Erin had seen that morning. "Oh hi Erin," said Mark, his voice sounding oddly warbly, and a little thick. "Um, how are things going? Is everything okay over there?" On his end of things, Mark was sitting in his room, staring at the wall and one of the many, many, many pictures of Young Freedom there. "Things aren't very good here. Could you guys come over?"

"Okay, where is it?" As soon as Fleur de Joie told Edge to which hotel she'd tracked Rook, he nodded. "Okay, I'm going to send us all there. You might want to take cover if you want to be sneaky." And with that, in a flash of black light, they all vanished, only to reappear right in Rook's hotel room. "All right, buddy!" said Edge, pointing dramatically at the erstwhile hero. Say what you will for Mark, he wasn't one to take the complicated route when an easier one presented itself. "I know this is a little unorthodox, but the life of a superhero is full of surprises. We want to be your friend. We want to help you, and we want to help your city. What's going on?"

The flight was easy enough, the semi-conscious woman, baby, and medtech giving no trouble to Miss Americana and Sharl besides weight as they made their way back to the lakeside. Still cradling the baby, rocking him back and forth in what turned out to be an instinctive gesture across humanoid species, Sharl bent down over the baby's battered mother. "Hey there," he said, "we've got your baby, and he's-" "My baby!" her eyes snapped open and fixed on the electronic teenager, and Sharl almost jumped out of his skin. "Is he okay?" The woman, whose name Miss A had noted was Celia while going through her suitcase, looked around wildly. "Where's my baby?" "Uh, right here," said Sharl, bending down while the medtech tended quickly to Celia before she could hurt herself. "He's okay. Superheros have come to rescue you!" "Oh, thank God...I knew someone would come..." She was settling back down, having evidently satisfied herself, though still obviously hurt and semi-delirious. "I couldn't leave him. I just couldn't leave him..."

Quo-Dis actually laughed at that, taking a seat by the blanket that not incidentally let her be close to Corbin: not just close, but actually touching. She hadn't brought up sex since the first awkward conversation, but she hadn't done anything to conceal that it was still on her mind. "Turkey," she said. "I find the ethical conditions of turkey raising much more palatable than how hogs are farmed. If your society has to be agriculturally based, and I suppose it does, turkey raising is generally much more friendly to the planet. Plus, it's delicious!" She put her arm around him affectionately. "Do you have the drink I asked for?"

She came to him from the sky, like any angel should, a faint sheen of sweat on her skin as she came in for a landing before him. She was still in her costume, the one that showed...well, that she was more confident with her body than many of her fellow classmates. "Hello, Corbin Hughes," she said with a smile, crossing to him and pecking his cheek. "Sorry I'm late. Mister Archer decided to run our whole team through drills again after Rex Hound dropped the ball. It was a long afternoon."

The Fearsome Five A loose coterie of supervillains who have teamed up together for mutual protection despite their disparate goals >Heka: Heka (no real name known) was a sorcerer in ancient Egypt, a student of certain arcane arts now lost to time. When he sacrificed a child for his own immortality, the high priest Tan-Aktor imprisoned him in his own tomb, neither alive nor dead, for an eternal punishment. (He and Tan-Aktor had quarreled over who would benefit from said sacrifice, you see...) When Egyptologists freed Heka a few years ago, he blasted them to pieces in gratitude and tried to take over the country. When the Spirit of Egypt defied him, Heka fled, and now the undead wizard practices his arcane arts in somewhat more humble surroundings. He looks the classic evil Egyptian wizard, mummy robes (worn for effect) underneath his arcane trappings. He communes every few weeks with his 'teacher', Malador the Undying, and together they spin their terrible plots. He is the interim leader of the Fearsome Five these days. Blackfire: Blackfire (formerly John Smith) is the result of an experiment by Talos: can a human being be transformed reliably into a robot? So far Talos is cautiously optimistic: Smith, a vicious thug and murderer who'd worked for one of Keres' alternate identities, has turned out to be a model android, obeying Talos' commands and acting as the perfect infiltrator into the supervillian community. But Smith has begun to rebel secretly, memories of the agonizing nanite infusion that transformed him creeping back when he least expects it. Unfortunately, John Smith is the last man you want to be in a bulletproof, immortal robot body, even if he's not working for Talos. He'll stage robberies and your standard super-crimes frequently, just so Talos can test the responses of his body and the authorities, or he'll do it on his own time just because he enjoys their screaming. >Khania: Spoiled princess Khania arrived in Freedom City some months ago and turned out to fit into the Fearsome Five like hand-in-glove. A jaded thrillseeker, she'll gladly start a fight with anyone just to see what would happen, or assume that all men (and most women) are interested in her sexually whether they admit it or not. She acts like she has noblesse oblige when she's in the mood, but frankly she wouldn't have been kicked out of her father's court if she had anything like even his limited sense of honor. While a lot of people think she's her father's agent on Earth, he actually can't stand her at all. Actually, unknown to anyone, she's one of the rare aliens who are lucky enough to be a paid informant for the Grue Unity! >Diehard: Diehard used to be Wong Ahn-Li, a particularly enthusiastic Red Guardsman who volunteered for a government experiment during the Cultural Revolution that gave him superpowers. They'd hoped to make him invincible, and indeed, Diehard (to use the English translation) can indeed recover from any injury...except he feels the full effects of that hurt first. Decades of pain took their toll on Diehard's sanity, particularly after a few serious brain injuries left him with an unstable personality. When the political climate shifted back in China, Diehard fled the country, and is now muscle for various supervillains when he's not amusing himself as a "dojo-buster" in martial arts circles. He enjoys picking fights with young bloods who can't hurt him and then beating the crap out of them while lecturing them about the People's Revolution. Thanks to certain devices installed in his brain back in the late 70s, everything he sees and hears is broadcast directly back to Dr. Sin's laboratory. >Guy Fawkes II: Guy Fawkes II, born Sean McIntyre in Belfast, used to be one of the most vicious terrorists in Ireland. A professional with no particular political motivations, he worked for Protestant and Catholic alike, going from 'counter-insurgency specialist' one week to 'freedom fighter' the next. The truth is, Sean just enjoyed hurting people, and he was lucky enough to live in a part of the world that let him do that. When peace came to Ireland, he tried to provoke a further confrontation and was caught at it: busting out of prison before he could be whacked by his many enemies, he made his way to America to break into supervillany. Still in great shape for a man pushing 50, he fancies himself an anarchist, but that's mostly just a cover for blowing people up or stabbing them with his knives. He's equally likely to work for pay (insurance jobs, muscle and the like) as he is to just be out blowing crap up. He's on OVERTHROW's payroll, naturally.

The argument cast a pall over the table for Joan, even after Fusion sat back down. Ugh. So much for being the adult voice of reason. When she thought about it, though, she decided she'd done the right thing. Look at these kids. Those two girls have Bea Arthur's hair, the one's got real black eyes, Grimalkin's some sort of pixie, those two are lesbians and the one's got a speech impediment...they need to know that there are people out there who don't judge them for how they look and what they are. And that's not okay for them to judge each other. Joan was emotional enough to mourn the sight of women fighting with each other, for all that she was practical enough to know that it happened all the time. When it was time to deal again, that's what she did.