Avenger Assembled

Here's what you can tell: An extended application of your powers (over a period of some hours, perhaps days) will probably cure what's wrong with this child. There is also danger; just as there is with any complicated surgery. If nothing is done, the metaphor that comes to mind is that this is a shot glass in the body of a gallon jug. This child could live a long, healthy life, but he will live it as a mortal human, not a Furion

And E has volunteered Singularity for the same thread.

I volunteer Sea Devil for Baby Shark!

Eira looked down at the puppy, who proceeded to lock eyes with her and growl. The other puppies were all obviously agitated by her presence as well, even the one Judy had been cuddling, yipping and whining unhappily. This had been so since her upload. Eira had learned the scientific reality behind it when she was younger and it made perfect evolutionary sense. Humans and dogs had evolved together into their modern forms, so it made perfect sense they would be able to detect an imposter, something far enough from human that it was clearly not what they had evolved alongside, but close enough they could tell this was no alien but something trying and failing to pass for human. Just as it made sense that a perfectly preserved human mind would remember that bond between human and dog herself, and regret the inability to fulfill it. Everything about it made sense, the cold, scientific logic of what was and what could be, and what would never again be possible. It was, all things considered, a very small price to pay for one's life. Eira Katastroff stared at the pups, then at Pan, and then stepped back. The agitated dogs calmed almost immediately as she retreated, as quickly as if a switch had been thrown.

"Oh is this midlife crisis?" asked Frost blandly. "Is fine, I had that in 1962 and almost caused World War! Funny story!" He laughed, not sounding amused at all, then added "We should meet face-to-face to discuss professional matters and for audition. Are you free at present moment?" Suspiciously, he eyed a small cluster of pigeons that had landed nearby. "Is short notice I know but that does not bother me."

"Okay, yeah, this is right number." said Frost. He put out the cigarette in his palm, pressing hard to put out the ember, and continued the conversation, high winds around him as he spoke. He sat down on an outside vent, looked at the cigarette he'd stifled, and with a sigh slipped it into his coat pocket. "Fleur de Joie is pretty good judge of character but we need more introduction than that. Why do you want to join Freedom League? I have to tell you is not luxury posting. All this super-technology and they make me smoke on the roof!"

The phone rang a few times and then someone on the other end picked up. "Yeah, is Frost." asked a distinctly Russian-accented voice over the sound of blowing wind. "Who is this?" On the roof of Freedom Hall, Comrade Frost was holding his "guest" telephone after in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. The only people who called this phone were people who his colleagues had given his number to, but nobody had told him to expect a call. He was thus not hostile but not necessarily friendly either. He paced as he spoke, the lit Camel he held the only spot of light near him.

"Ohmahgosh it's puppies!" declared Judy excitedly. She took Micah's hand and pulled him right over to the enclosure, because who could possibly think there was anything wrong with puppies. She neatly stepped out of her shoes, giving him a quick glimpse of hose-clad leg, before she stepped inside with the dogs. "Oh Ah love you!" she declared, bending down and scooping up a black-furred pup who immediately began vigorously licking her face. "Ah always wanted more dogs," she told Micah, figuring that he didn't need a detailed walkthrough of the history of Presidential pets. The elderly bloodhound that her father had bought when she was a baby had his own wikipedia page for Heaven's sake. "Oh he's giving me kisses!" At the sight of the dogs, Pan saw Eira give a single look of longing before she smirked and smiled at him. "You should go pet the dogs," she said, "I will take pictures for my Instagram."

I need a Computers check from everyone inside the room with Irons: which I think is @Tiffany Korta, @Fox, and @Thunder King

Okay, @Gizmo,give me a Medicine and/or Life Sciences check.

There was a moment's tension, but then it eased almost immediately as Aarden and even Serpa smiled. It had evidently been exactly the right thing to say. "Well-met, Doctor!" The elder struck the table hard enough to make it shake. "By all means, take Lightbringer to your bosom, as the Dethroner has. One who has stood with her and for herself is all we need to know." "Are all the warriors of this plane women?" asked Teledar in a child's voice as he looked around the room. He did not sound displeased by the idea, just intrigued, as one might when hearing about a fascinating new species. "Many of the mightiest are," said Steve in a soft rumble, a faint smile on his face. The soft-headed baby looked up at Ellie, eyes dark, and immediately tried to stick her finger in his mouth. He was overall healthy as far as she could judge, big and responsive, but peering closer something seemed amiss...

"And that's just the ones that disappeared that we know about," said Richard. He didn't feel triumphant having convinced Paige this was something to look into; hell, he felt a little more worried that he had been. If the most sensible person he knew thought something was afoot here..."I got this just from them, and then literally Googling stuff in the public record." He did actually know how to do that in real emergencies, even if Holly had helped him a little bit with optimization. "If we dive deep and we find something; well hell, we'll have to blow the whistle. Even if it's just calling somebody on the League."

"These super-geniuses, we'd have no way of knowing till it was too late if we didn't catch them in the act. But here's the real deal," Richard added. "A little while after the Day of Wrath, a whole bunch of seized Curator tech gets shipped overseas. Nanites, drone parts, the whole nine yards, and it winds up in the hands of Katastroff and Sorensen Industries out in Sweden. They lost the whole thing to some kind of industrial accident, but nobody's talking about that, not here, not in Sweden. I did some digging and picked up some hard copies of what made it to the press out there and over here, but nobody's said a word about it since the initial accident. And you know what else? Remember that gloomy teen intern who was hanging around with Miss Americana for my interview? She's a Katastroff too."

Jill O'Cure arrived to find a conference room holding two big, strapping members of a warrior race of space gods, a scarred cybernetic warrior, a scion of the ancient race, and a child of the space gods infused with the unholy power of entropy. Or maybe a grandmotherly figure, a wounded mother, a small boy watching her over top of a tablet, a baby, and Steve. Once introductions were made, Serpa handed the baby over to Erin, shooting a suspicious but not necessarily hostile look Jill's way. Ellie had spent years working at a hospital in a busy, diverse world-city like Freedom; these vaguely-Magrebian-looking women were not the first people she had met who were uneasy around doctors from a different culture. "May I take your hand, child?" asked Aarden, extending hers to Jill. The older woman's grip was hard, her nails worn, an old woman who had worked with her hands her whole life but was healthy despite all this. "My sister-daughter is uneasy trusting her only living child to an Outlier's hands. Friend of a Dethroner she may be."

"If I had serious evidence, I'd be bringing it somewhere bigger than our dinner table, hon," said Richard seriously. "We know a lot of people got taken right out from under everyone's nose, and we know it happened fast - hell, some of them must have been taken just hours before the robot duplicates showed up. There's no evidence anyone looked hard at any of the returnees, and nobody ever found a master list of who was taken, even when Miss Americana was picking through what was left of the Curator's brain." He shuddered just a little as he remembered the look on her face when she'd described her sidekick's sacrifice. "And coverups don't need to be organized to work. People just need to be happy they got their loved ones back, and decide that's that, I'm done, and we don't need to talk about the time I couldn't tell my wife was a robot for three weeks anymore."

"If they could find something big, something city-shaking like this, it's evidence that they're somebody we should take seriously," said Richard stubbornly. "Some things are big enough that you take it seriously and you check it out, even if you don't think the source is 100%." He spread his hands. "You and I have both seen things a lot crazier than the idea that the hero community circled the wagons and covered up something serious, or just didn't dig into it enough because it meant they'd show their asses. Come on, honey, there's no harm in looking into it as long as we're not throwing around accusations. If it turns out they're full of crap, I'll eat dirt, and there's no harm done to anything except my front teeth." He grinned.

"I think that is wise," said Steve after a moment's thought. He shifted uncomfortably where he stood, then said, "I will watch the Furions." He leaned back against the wall, his eyes on both the half-open door and the Furion child who had fairly quickly figured out the tablet Erin had handed him. "Why does it not speak?" he asked Steve. "Sentient machines are rare on this plane," he said softly. "But the information network to which it links is voluminous...."

Steve stared at Erin, shifting from foot to foot with a degree of nervousness that didn't quite fit the big man's typical demeanor, before he whispered, "You and the other members of Young Freedom pulled Omega from atop the Omnicidal Throne. The multiverse quakes at your passage and you are commemorated amid the shining cities of worlds far greater than this one. For all ages after this one and many before, you will be remembered as champions mightier than the greatest of the gods." His voice trailed off before he folded his hands behind his back. "...This is not something you wish discussed at work so I do not mention it. Were you - unaware of this?"

That logic seemed to persuade the Furions, Aarden exchanging a look with Serpa and nodding before saying "Perhaps many hands do make a miracle after all. We will wait here for you to call." Serpa took the baby back from Erin, sighing softly as he latched on again, the first sound Erin had yet heard the scarred woman make. Aarden added to her youngest companion, "Teledar, go with the Dethroner and attend to her needs." They would brook no argument on this point, and soon the dark-faced boy was following Erin out of the conference room. Steve followed her as well, his back tense, looking around as if expecting some imminent disaster. "The Nomads are outsiders among the Furions. They wander beneath the branches of the Silver Tree to find direct connection with Creation itself. I have never seen a group leave the Silver Tree before. Their fears for that child must be very great." Teledar tugged at Erin's arm, his grip very strong for a child who looked no more than ten, and asked in a tone of soft awe, "Are there other gods here?"

The baby stirred in Erin's grip, reaching up to grab onto her finger with a strong, pudgy fist. Lacking any particularly attunement to the cosmic she had no way of telling if anything was actually wrong with it. Dark eyes met hers steadily for a long, silent moment before it became clear the baby was trying to jam her finger into its mouth. "The children of the Silver Tree are stronger and faster than those of this Earth," said Steve softly. "A child of - half a turn?" he guessed, earning a nod from the mother in reply, "should be..." He was silent for a moment, thinking of his own scars, before he said in words seemed inadequate when he spoke them, "more than this." Aarden let out a soft breath and said, "Not all miracles can be seen; but faith is belief in what cannot be seen. Do you feel anything, Dethroner?" The mother, Serpa, was watching Erin yet with hooded eyes, her nephew having risen to his feet to look at the walls, the floor, the Omegadrone. Novelty for a child only went so far.

"He carries the same entropic taint that slew his father," explained Aarden hesitantly. "But are you a Dethoner, are you not?" She looked at Serpa, then back at Erin, as if she could not quite believe what she was hearing. "We came to you because of all those who Dethroned the Destroyer, you alone will one day birth a child of your own, you alone understand what a mother can be. Are yours not the hands that tore his armor apart? Your eyes that saw his energies dispersed across the cosmos?" "Wander is not of the faith of the Nomads," said Steve suddenly, his hand raised halfway, tentatively entering the conversation. "You cannot expect her to understand what you ask." The two adults in the trio gave Steve a hard look at that, but he didn't seem to mind, returning it levelly, his arms crossed across his chest. "...perhaps not," admitted Aarden. She reached over to Serpa for the baby, the mother reluctantly handing him over as Lightbringer disengaged from her nipple, and asked Erin, "will you at least hold him, if you will not bless him?"

"Yes, we know him." The look Steve got from the Furions wasn't hostile, exactly - it was a look that could best be called pity. "All are welcome, if..." Aarden consulted silently with her party, none of whom seemed to object to Steve's presence, and so continued speaking. "We have come across the dimensions to seek the services of a Dethroner. We are Nomads; of the Furions you have known, but unlike them." Steve nodded at that in Erin's direction, looking a little surprised. "Rarely do we leave the sheltering branches of the Tree, but we have come to you in our time of need..." The bundle Serpa held began squirming and with a small sigh she unwrapped the blankets around what was clearly a baby, small and dark like her and her nephew. She adjusted her robe to bare her breast, and held the infant up to suckle as Aarden went on. "This is Lightbringer, Serpa's child by blood. His father was slain in battle against Omegadrone, and Serpa herself was gravely wounded." The adjusted robes showed that well enough, a deep, jagged scar across her neck that must have been terrible when it was inflicted. "As you can see, Lightbrighter has suffered much in the time since." This was actually hard to see. Erin was no expert in babies but this certainly looked like a strong, healthy child of about six months as he squirmed in his mother's arms, fuzzy hair looking like soft wool on his round head. "Our own arts of healing have failed. We have come to ask that you will lay hands upon the child, so he might live with the freedom of his body and mind."

Steve nodded and went about his work, relieved that she hadn't asked him to actually greet the gods that had welcomed him upon his return to humanity - offering him a paradise his darkness hadn't quite been ready for. He followed her anyway, monitoring the scanners by the door as they went. "They are armed, but no more than one would expect from Furions. Energy-staves and hand-blades. The life signature is - profound, as one would expect." The group of Furions turned out to be what looked like a trio, an older woman with a shock of silver-white hair escorting a dark-skinned woman with a shaved head, the latter followed closely by a male child who strongly resembled her. They looked like Furions certainly, tall enough that elder was about as big and muscular as Steve, the younger woman taller than either he or Erin. They submitted willingly enough to their escort to the conference room, though surely a group like this could have matched Steve and Erin together in hand-to-hand combat. The child was watching everything with the wide-eyed awe of a boy on his first trip away from home, the younger woman gently carrying a wrapped bundle in her arms, the eldest wielding nothing at all. In matching brown and grey robes with hoods, they looked like a group of Bedouin misplaced from the desert to the streets of Freedom City. "Greetings, Dethroner!" said the old woman, giving a sharp salute and bow that Erin had seen Redbird display only in moments of great formality, one matched shortly thereafter by the two she escorted. "I am Aarden, this is Serpa, and her sister-son Teledar. I pray that you will forgive the informality of this meeting. We have come to ask a favor of you."

March 20, 2021 HAX It was a quiet weekend at HAX. The boss and most of the staff were away with their families or working on projects at home, and for once the security director and her assistant had given most of the security staff the day off too. Drilling could come the next day, when they'd be simulating an attack by space pirates from the 22nd century on the building. When the door buzzer sounded in the main security office, Steve answered the message, holding the headset up to one ear and speaking into the microphone. "The building is closed." A pause. "Who may I say is here?" And then an even longer pause, with his eyes noticeably widening before he said with a tone that mixed reverence and a sudden, sharp skepticism. "...whose name shone brightly among all other in the branches of the Silver Tree?" The answer he got seemed to satisfy him, and he turned to Erin and said "There are Furions at the door. They say they have come to speak to the Dethroner."

To their credit, the agents were professional. Sadler and Gonzalez exchanged looks with their director and then immediately rose to their feet to leave, either catching an invisible signal or figuring that arguing with Miss Americana was an impossibility. Gonzalez was harder to read than Sadler despite her relative youth, her demeanor icy composure while Sadler seemed to be holding back something close to mortification. Whatever had happened he was dreadfully embarrassed by the whole thing. For his part, Bonham said, "Agents, you heard our host," as he rose to his feet. "We will discuss professional behavior back at our headquarters, and leave the Foundry in your capable hands, Miss Americana." He hesitated just a moment, then added, "...be careful with Agent Irons. He's given real service to this country." before turning to join his agents on the way out. Behind Miss Americana, Eira looked pleased with herself for a moment, shooting her mentor a grateful look that spoke of a later conversation to come, before heading back to join the rest of the scientists. There was, after all, an investigation to undertake. "...I remember we were chasing Keres," said Simmons after a moment. "Chasing a shapeshifter is hard work because you can't let him out of your sight for a second, and it's better done with a partner. I got separated from my team, lost sight of Keres for a moment, and I thought..." He shook his head. "I'm sorry, but this isn't the first gap of continuity in my consciousness. May I speak to Director Bonham?"