Electra

Wander shrugged. "Sometimes," she told him frankly. "It's probably the only reason I'm alive now, but it's also damn near killed me more times than I can count. It's painful, and scary, and boring, and frustrating. The day never stays saved. There's always some new threat bearing down on the horizon, just waiting to take over the world or kill everyone or just destroy the city or hurt all your friends. You can make a lot of friends, really good friends, but they're going into all this danger with you, so sometimes it's even harder that way. You'll save peoples' lives, but you'll be haunted by all the people you couldn't save, and the more powerful you get, the more that kind of guilt bears down." She shoved her bat into its holster and just looked at him, and her face was haunted, someone who'd seen much more than anybody of her age should've seen. "But if we don't save the world, it doesn't get done. And that is so, so much worse than you could possibly imagine."

Wander was still for a moment, her face unreadable, but then she nodded again. "That's a pretty good reason," she told him. "Somebody's gotta do it, might as well be us, right? There's a lot of bad stuff in the world." She picked up her bat and spun it, closing it and then opening it again in an oddly directionless gesture. "Do your folks know about the heroing gig? When I was in school, most of my friends' parents knew what they were doing, but it's different for people who start older, I know. Easier to keep the whole secret identity thing going when you don't have a curfew."

"Good," she nodded. "Make sure you're keeping your weight centered as you deliver the kick, there's a surprising amount of recoil when you're connecting with a body and it could unbalance you. Keep your standing knee bent and you'll be ready to do another flip if you've got to get out of the way of something." She planted the end of her bat in the grass and leaned on it, regarding him steadily. "So what made you decide to take up the whole heroing gig in the first place?" she asked.

"That's exactly right," she told him with a quick smile. "If you can fake somebody out, even for half a second, that's enough of an opening. That's one of the things I learned here at the school, that and the acrobatics to manage it pretty consistently. Like if I had a bad guy right here." She described a circle in the grass with her bat, then faced off with it as though an opponent were standing there. If she were with one of her friends, she'd have demonstrated on them, but she suspected that Wildcat would not like it much. Come to think of it, he reminded her a little of herself when she was just getting started, naturally talented, but with too much power to control reliably and hair-trigger reflexes that tended to go off at all the wrong times. "A lot of melee is done face to face on level ground, so that's what they expect. It can give you an edge." She feinted with her bat, once, twice, then made a ten foot standing leap with a twisting somersault in the middle, landing on her feet on the opposite side of the circle, with her bat extended to where the opponent's head would be. "You're a good jumper, you could probably use that to your advantage in a fight."

Micah looked confused, even a bit sympathetic, but Caelyn scoffed. "Nobody goes to sleep and sleeps for eighty years! That's just something that happens in stories. You would die of not eating and drinking. Plus you're not even old!" She glared at Lucy. "But she's sad," Micah murmured, his voice all but inaudible. "Maybe it was bad magic." "She's trying to trick us," Caelyn muttered, squeezing Micah's hand until her knuckles went white. The little boy flinched, but didn't pull away. "She isn't from here. She's going to try and take us away somewhere, and we'll never see each other again, or anybody we know. But we won't go!"

"Yeah, go ahead," she told him. "There's a whole different way you have to approach people who you can't hit without hurting yourself, and my preferred style is definitely "make friends with somebody who has blasting or laser or fire powers." It'll save you a lot of wear and tear in the long run. But most of the folks you'll meet, you'll probably be able to at least touch them without hurting yourself." Wander shifted her stance a little, not quite combative but not relaxed either. She didn't really think Wildcat was a threat, but her instincts were nagging her about his increasing near-subliminal aggressiveness. "Say someone like me is your enemy, a brawler and a speeder. Say also that we're pretty evenly matched, so you don't have reason to think I'll wipe the floor with you... or you with me," she added for politeness' sake. "What do you do?"

Both children turned to look at her, their fingers clasping tighter together as they watched her with eyes that were too weary and wary for any child. Caelyn straightened her back and took the lead, obviously ready to protect her younger comrade in arms. "You're not from Homewood," she said, a definite note of accusation in her voice. "if you were, we would recognize you. What do you want?" While Caelyn was speaking, Micah was busy looking around, seeking possible escape routes, adult allies, or perhaps something else entirely. But they weren't running away, at least not yet.

"The time to have made us that offer would've been when we were still villains," Hologram pointed out, sounding faintly amused. "And before we had school-aged children who I would like to be able to watch television occasionally without permanent emotional scarring." She leaned in slightly, dropping her voice to a more confidential level. "Come on, now. You've had your fun for hours, and if it all goes away now, the city has an enduring mystery that will eventually become urban legend but never quite be forgotten, the night when all the televisions went sinister and strange. Leaving it go until the cold light of day does dampen the mystique a little bit, these things are always better in the dead of night when most people don't see, but it's still weird enough to be plenty memorable. Haven't you already gotten what you wanted?"

"Feel free," Stesha encouraged, gesturing towards the kids. "They haven't been very responsive to anybody outside their group, but I like to think they're starting to feel a little bit more comfortable here.Maybe you'll be able to get through to them now. At any rate, they ought to learn who you are if you're going to be representing them, right?" She looked around, scoping out possible places for a conference. "If you don't want to talk to them out here in the open, you could probably go into the tool storage shed, it's cramped but nobody should disturb you. Or we can ask the teacher to hold recess long and you can go in the classroom. We only have the one here," she admitted with a rueful smile.

"If you can get a tactical advantage from hiding, that's awesome, definitely use it," Wander agreed, abruptly relaxing from her alert pose and planting one end of her staff on the ground like a walking stick. "But at least sometimes you're probably going to find yourself actually facing off against a bad guy. Bad guys like to get recognition for their evil plans," she explained, reciting back what she'd learned in her own Tactics classes. "If you need to get information from a bad guy, a lot of times all you have to do is stand there and look like you're frustrated but not quite ready to attack yet. Then they'll start gloating, and they'll tell you where the hostages are, or how their evil machine works, or where the secret plans are hidden. It doesn't always work, but often enough to be worth a try in some situations." She took a few steps back, putting a couple of yards between them and keeping her bat held nonaggressively. "All right, say I'm a bad guy and I've seen you coming, but we haven't engaged yet. How do you come at me?"

"That's pretty good," Wander nodded, "once the fight actually starts. Maybe a little lower than I'd go myself, but I'll bet you like to lunge to attack, right? Push from the legs so you can get in close with your body right away? The stick is good, but it's not your first instinct," she guessed, stepping around him to check his form. "The problem with a stance like this is that once you're in it, you've given yourself away. Anybody can see that you're in fighting mode now. Before the fight starts, you still need to be ready to fight, just not so obvious about it. Here." Wander's posture barely changed from the way she'd been standing before, but something about her suddenly twigged all of Wildcat's predatory senses. She balanced evenly on the balls of both feet, arms held at her sides with just the faintest of tension, her knees bent ever so slightly as she watched him. "Fighters will know," she told him. "Watching people react to you can let you know who in a group is a threat. And from here," she drew her bat in the blink of an eye, deepening the bend in her knees and drawing the baton into a defensive position, "you can go into a real stance basically instantly."

"Your powers of observation don't need any honing," she replied with a quick grin. "It is indeed a soccer field, and football, kickball, we once played a particularly intense game of capture the flag here as well. Most of the real powers training takes place underground in the simulator, but I don't have access to that anymore, at least not without coming during normal hours and asking nicely. As for whether the headmaster is watching... better safe than sorry, right? And it's polite, even if it's just a teacher or security guard watching the cameras tonight." She bounced up and down on the balls of her feet, testing the springiness of the ground. "Anyway, simple is better for early training, anything else will just distract you. Show me how you stand to fight."

"Don't worry, there won't be a problem," Wander assured him, stifling a laugh at the idea of Trevor jealous over a phone call from another superhero. "And you can send me a text message or something, then I'll have you in my phone. We're almost there." Sure enough, another couple of blocks brought them to the tall and stately red brick wall that marked the boundaries of the Claremont Academy. Wander jogged halfway down the wall to one of the security cameras and waved up at it. "Hello, Headmaster, it's Wander. Just dropping by to help a new guy with some training. We'll be on the field." With that, she leapt neatly to the top of the wall and over to the other side, then waited for Wildcat to join her. Even in the dark, Claremont was an attractive campus, tree-lined paths wending from building to building, a wide green quad marking the center of campus. It was very quiet now, though Erin was sure there were a few young supers out and about, probably on their own patrols. She led the way behind the buildings to a grassy field with both soccer goals and football uprights on each end. "Here we are."

"Redbird, I need you to get in the sky and be aerial reconnaissance for us, okay?" Erin told the NightRyde as she hopped off and walked to the front of her group of soldiers. "Stay in camoflage mode. Let me know if anything is coming at us from any direction, but otherwise radio silence. "Now remember," she told her team, "if I say duck, you duck. If I say run like hell, you run. Otherwise, you keep moving towards that installation. If we don't shut this thing down, none of us may have much of a future, so we have to get it done." Some deeply internalized Mark-shaped voice inside her wanted to end the speech with something inspiring, probably "friends to the end!" but she firmly squashed that impulse and set out for the mouth of the gorge, silver staff extended and in her hand.

Wander rattled off the number for him, all the while reminding herself to stick a few more cards in her pocket. Mark was all about networking with other heroes and hero teams, and she could definitely see the point, but sometimes she missed the days when they'd just been Young Freedom. No business cards or anything, just the world's most dangerous after-school job. "And I'll give you my number too, just in case you ever need it," she decided on the spot. "I usually keep it with me, but if a guy answers, it's my boyfriend Midnight and he's on the team too, so that works." She gave him the second number as well. "Never hurts to have other heroes on the speed dial. You'll probably run into more as you keep patrolling, especially in the West End. That's Interceptors territory."

She snorted, the corners of her lips quirking up. "Yeah, I'll give you the Liberty League's contact number, that way you can catch us no matter who is working or available at any given time." She slowed to a ground-eating walk as they left the bridge, heading down the sidewalks of Bayview close to the school. "We all have jobs or school and stuff, so we sort of pass around the responsibility of answering the phone. You got a cell phone on you? I haven't got pen and paper on me, and I always forget my cards." She shrugged. "These uniforms don't leave a lot of room to put stuff in your pockets when you head out."

"Oh, Harkers, like from the books!" Stesha's voice was surprised. "I didn't realize that was your original name, I thought it was an- an homage or something, I suppose. That really is an interesting story. Erica may be right about licensing it and making it into a movie. You could be world-famous, for better or worse." She chuckled, then turned to look at the game. "There, over there by the wheelbarrows, not playing, that's Caelyn and Micah, the ones I told you about. They both lost their parents in the insect invasion. We looked for their families after time got rewritten, but Micah's parents weren't together and one lives in Australia now, and we couldn't find Caelyn's mother at all. We think she may have ended up written out of history when the world rebooted. They feel safer with the other refugees and with each other, so we're keeping them all together right now. On the other side of the boisterous game of tag happening in the square, Lucy and Erica could see the two non-participating children, sitting on a bale of foam insulation and watching the play with grave expressions on their faces. Micah was big for his reported five years, tall and stocky with freckles and the sort of white-blonde hair that would darken to brown at puberty, while dark-haired, brown-skinned Caelyn looked pinched and strained all over, as though stress and grief had stolen the vitality from her flesh. They held hands, but didn't say a word. "We have one counselor on-planet, and she's been working with them, but there's only so much time in the day when there's so much trauma to go around." Stesha sighed. "Another reason to get them to Prime if we can."

"Don't think about it like that. If I saw demons pouring out of a hole right now, you think I'd be leaping right out to fight them?" Wander pointed out. "I'd be on my communicator in half a second, calling every other hero I know. Nobody's on their own out here, that's how we stay alive. That's why we win." She waved an arm towards the city. "There's all kinds of heroes here, and some have powers and some have no powers and some have crazy powers that are a little scary even to me. The point is, everybody does something. If you're out patrolling one night and you see something big and bad and you call me and I call the Liberty League and we fight it, you saved the day too." "Besides," she added archly, "you'll get better with practice. Sometimes you find you can do things you never realized until you're pressed to the wall. And hitting stuff with a stick can be surprisingly effective. Come on." She headed for the cables again, but this time chose the center cable, which had two sets of support cables at shoulder height for safer descent. Down was harder than up, after all.

"One of my friends at school was the son of a fairly major demon in one of the hell dimensions," Wander explained matter-of-factly. "He didn't get along with his dad, wanted to be a hero and not a demon, but his dad needed him, as an Earth Prime native, to summon him so he could bring about Armageddon. So his dad managed to kidnap him, drag him to hell, and torture him until he was brainwashed enough to forget his friends and want to open the portal to hell. So he did, and demons started just flooding into the city, basically everywhere. Destroying things, killing people, it was pretty horrific." She looked out over the city, remembering how it had looked in those horrible hours "Anyway, we on Young Freedom went to face off against him and we managed to remind him of who he was and what he wanted to be, and we managed to defeat his dad and close the portal. And as soon as it was gone, time started... rewinding, sort of. Like everything that had happened, hadn't actually happened, and only the heroes who were fighting and a few others managed to remember anything. That was back in, oh, 2010 I guess, so it's been awhile. It definitely wasn't our worst disaster, but it was the first one I was around for, so that makes it especially memorable."

"Our world is pretty amazing," Stesha said with an easy laugh. "Sometimes I forget just how much, and it's nice to be reminded. You might see Tiamat, the local dragon, flying around if you keep an eye out, but you'll almost certainly see... yep, there's some now." She pointed at two flying shapes in the distance, big round zeppelin bodies flying through the air in loopy, slightly erratic patterns. They looked small with the distance, but in person would probably be the size of semi trucks. "Looks like a food run," Stesha guessed, shading her eyes to watch for a moment. "They won't come too near the village. We have almost five hundred adult bees now, and I have no idea how many juveniles. Luckily, they have no legal problems," she assured Lucy with a grin. Turning towards the village, she escorted her two visitors past the massive garden and into the town square, where more than a dozen local children were taking advantage of the good weather to have recess. The clothes they were wearing were a bit odd, often mismatched and mostly slightly too big, but clean and in good condition. The exception was a green-haired preschooler wearing overalls with pink ruffles and a matching pink t-shirt beneath; aside from the hair she'd have fit into any playgroup on Prime. "Oops, I don't want to interrupt," Fleur said, hanging back a bit from the square. "We'll let them play a minute. I was wondering, Lucy, how did you come to be undead? I mean, if that's not too personal a question! You're obviously no vampire, and you don't look at all like the zombies I've seen."

Wander chuckled wryly and followed him up with the confidence of someone who had done the same trick many times before. It was easy enough to walk it at first, if one considered tightrope-walking on a slanting cable the width of a coffee can to be easy, but as they got closer to the top, the cables tilted at a sharper angle and they both hand-over-hand climbed to the broad flat top of the bridge support. "See, you can take in practically the entire city from here," she pointed out, taking a second to enjoy the view. "The Grue damn near took this thing out a couple years ago, but we managed to save it, and then Doctor Metropolis put it back together. Now you'd never know it was practically wrecked. That's the nice thing about this city, it bounces back. Buildings and people, both. Were you around for the whole thing with the Grue? Man, that would be back before the Communion Incursion, before the Gorgon threat, before the Day of Wrath, but after the demonic invasion, which you wouldn't remember anyway, so never mind." She shook her head. "Hard to keep it all straight."

"You're very welcome," Fleur told him, her face warming into a smile now that the conflict was past. "I'm glad to be able to help. But unfortunately I don't think I've healed the root cause of your headaches, just the current symptoms. Unless you deal with whatever is causing your symptoms, they're very likely to keep recurring. If you like, I can put you in touch with a League doctor who can examine you for any underlying physiological causes. Or a psychologist, if it's a more psychosomatic illness. Sometimes stress and mental trauma can have very real physical symptoms."

Wander set an easy pace across the city, pausing every few buildings to make sure he was still with her or to point out another set of useful landmarks. This was a route she could do in her sleep, for three years it had been the way back to the only home she knew. She didn't get back to Claremont too often anymore, but she still patrolled Bayview every so often to make sure the new kids were keeping things clean. "We'll take the pedestrian walkway across the Pramas Bridge," she told him, "unless you're in the mood to climb the cables. The view is amazing, but it's easier to do it the first time in the day if you haven't before."

"Perfect," she told him, "you can follow me and we'll stick to the rooftops till we hit the bridge. No more than city driving speeds," she promised with a quick grin, "and then you'll know the way. When you run on rooftops, it's easier to keep an eye on your landmarks." She pointed to the lights of downtown in the distance. "Pyramid Plaza, downtown." She turned south, pointed. "Mona-Glen bridge, takes you into Southside and Lincoln. From out there, you can see the international airport. Turn north, there's Hanover and the ArcheTech building, that one's pretty easy to pick out. Lots of weird buildings in this city," she told him, "lots of signposts to keep you oriented. And if it's dark enough you can follow the stars," she added, pointing up at where the Big Dipper was attempting to make itself seen through the haze of light pollution. "But I wouldn't count on it around here. Come on, this way." She leapt to the nearest roof, waited to make sure he could follow, and then set off eastward in an easy lope.

"Nah, roofs are terrible places to spar. Footing's bad, and you might wake somebody up," Wander told him, straightening to stand as she collapsed the baton with another quick twist and tucked it away. She checked the street again, still quiet and nearly empty, a good time to wrap up patrol. "Also, somebody could fall off. Claremont has some outdoor practice fields that hardly anybody uses at night, they won't care if we spar there and nobody will see. It's right over in Bayview," she added, nodding towards the southeast. "Do you have a way you get around?"