Electra

Wander grinned without meaning to, but she did restrain herself from out and out laughing, so she gave herself a little credit. Reaching for her holster, she pulled out the silver stick and gave it a twirl, spinning it out to a baton five full feet in length, then held it horizontal, nonthreatening for him to inspect. With the bat out, it was obvious to Wildcat that this was the source of the strange, indefinable smell. "You see this? I got my first one back at Claremont when I started training. It's got shock absorbers in it so I literally can't hit anybody too incredibly hard with it. My trainer was worried I was going to kill somebody before I learned how to control my strength. Means when I go up against big bads I have to fight barehanded, but that's okay. It's way convenient for everyday." She leaned back on her heels, bat resting across her knees. "You're not going to hurt me," she promised. "And if on the offchance you do, I heal really fast. Sparring with people who can take your strength is how you start to learn to manage it. It's how I did it."

She shrugged one shoulder. "Couple fighting techniques that help when you have a lot of extra strength, some fighting stances and how to read them in other people, ways to duck and avoid what comes at you from weird angles, like right over your head." Erin wasn't exactly sure why she was offering, it wasn't exactly her style. She wasn't the teacher type, but maybe it was the mentoring stuff she'd been doing lately, rubbing off on her hero work. The idea of leaving a newbie to fend for himself in this town seemed wrong. "A lot of it's just practice, lots of practice, and learning how to read the city."

"No, no, I'm sure you've got the basics down just fine," Wander told him, waving a hand. New superheroes could be very touchy, especially the guys, if they thought someone was disparaging their powers. "And for most of the basic patrol work, that's really all you need. But if you do run into a supervillain, or a group of supervillains, or get caught up in some kind of world-threatening event, the whole ballgame changes. Guts and instincts are great, but they'll only keep you alive for so long. I could show you a couple things, if you want."

"Well then, by all means. And please, call me Fleur or Stesha," the green-clad heroine told Erica with a smile. "Hold hands with each other now." Resting a light hand on Lucy's shoulder, Stesha touched the flowers braided in her hair, and suddenly they were no longer in the office. There was a moment of green light, diffuse and warm as sunlight through leaves, and a nigh-overwhelming scent of fresh-mown grass, and then they were back on solid ground again. Springy, grassy solid ground. The trio now stood in a large clearing, surrounded by thick-trunked old maple trees on one side and one edge of what looked to be an enormous garden on the other. Several people working in the garden looked up at their appearance, waving and calling "Hi Fleur!" Stesha waved back cheerfully, then turned to her companions. "Welcome to Sanctuary, my own little corner of alternate-universe New Jersey. We're right on the edge of Homewood, the oldest and smallest of the three villages. There's also Mayberry and Springfield a couple of miles away, past the Bee Meadow. On a clear day you can see Gaian Knight's floating castle from town square here, you should look out for it, and Gabriel's monastery is about five miles west of here towards what in our world is Wharton Forest. We've kept things pretty close so far, there's lots of land going pretty unused at the moment, and far more that's currently unusable. Come on, let me show you around."

"Or seriously hurt whoever you're sparring with," she agreed with a rueful grin that suggested she understood what he was talking about. "I went to Claremont, the hero academy, so I never had to worry about giving myself away, but it definitely takes awhile to learn to gauge your strength. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea for you to pick up some training, at least some basic martial arts, acrobatics, dodging-flying-people-trying-to-kill-you, stuff like that. It's dangerous out here," she told him soberly. "Nights like tonight, you may sit on a roof all night and never see anything, but when it hits the fan in Freedom City, it gets really bad, really fast. It's good to be prepared."

Wander nodded. "So a little bit like a cat, then? Makes sense." She was still keeping an eye on the street, but her companion's nervous demeanor was commanding most of her attention. She wasn't sure if it was meeting a superhero at all, something about her in particular, or just people in general, but he looked about ready to jump out of his skin and she was starting to feel like she was in high school again. She took a knee to better look over the edge of the roof, a tactically vulnerable position that made her well-trained instincts yelp at her, but it was just about the least threatening posture she could manage without it being weird. "Have you had any training?"

"Wildcat," she nodded, storing it away. His mask did look kind of catlike, she supposed, and lurking on rooftops at night was also pretty thematic. "Nice to meet you. Are you new around here?" As she spoke, she walked to the edge of the roof, still staying out of arm's reach so as not to spook him. The wind carried her scent, clean smells of soap and detergent, a faint smell of chocolate, just a whiff of dog and axle grease, and a strange, hard-to-identify scent that prickled the nose and seemed mostly centered on the silver stick in a holster at her side. She looked over the edge of the roof, keeping one eye on the quiet street below. "Not much going on at this hour, but you never know. Sometimes things pick up after midnight. What kind of skills do you have?"

"You're going to be fine," Stesha insisted, after a quick grin for Mara. "Even if it doesn't seem like you're doing anything, you're still very important to the process. You can't even understand how vital it is that you just be there for her..." She swallowed once, quickly, then went on. "And I think you'll find it's very easy to focus once things get going upstairs. Until then," She reached into a flower that opened out of nowhere and rose to her hand, withdrawing a pink egg of Silly Putty. She put it in his hand. "I brought this for the girls, but you may need the fidget a lot more than they do right now."

The awkward silence after Trevor's admissions was broken by the squeal of the little girl at the front door. Erin spun and reached for her bat, but managed to avoid drawing it when she realized there was no actual threat. Behind her, Roger and Clarissa were just confused, and from the sound of things, some of the people downstairs had heard the yelling as well. "Ah, hi Aquaria," Erin said, suppressing a sigh. "I guess you probably got cold waiting?" She turned to Roger and Clarissa for half-hearted introductions. "This is Aquaria, she's Jessie's roommate at Project Freedom, she helped us fight the monsters tonight. Aquaria, this is Roger and Clarissa White, they're the parents of the Erin, um, the version of me and Jessie who lives here." She looked past the frog woman, trying to see out the door. "Did you see everybody else? Are they with you?" She couldn't keep just a hint of dread out of her voice. Upstairs, things were quiet in Erin Prime's closet, aside from the occasional jangle of a wire hanger. Jessie had scrunched herself small in the back corner of the closet, down amongst the summer sandals of years past and the boxes of old pictures and mementos that Erin Prime had taken off the walls when she'd decorated her room in a mature collegiate style, but hadn't been able to get rid of. She picked halfheartedly through the box, looking at old pictures of Erin Prime in high school, all the old forgotten friends, nobody looking quite how she remembered them. Everyone so tall, so grown-up, even Erin. "How old are we?" she asked suddenly, the first words she'd spoken since coming up here. "What?" Erin Prime asked, surprised. "Um, twenty-two. We turned twenty-two in November." She turned her eyes to Eric, begging him silently to wait for answers a little longer. "That's right," Jessie replied, nodding though no one could see her. "I forget sometimes. They took away my bad memories and gave me Erin's instead, but it's still hard to keep track of time. It's been such a long time." She sighed and rested her head against the back wall of the closet. "You have a lot of stuff."

"Good to hear," Wander told him, relaxing another fraction and leaning one shoulder against the big metal shell of the HVAC unit. He was pretty young, she guessed, but not a student, somewhere close to her own age. "I'm Wander," she told him by way of introduction, "I'm with the Liberty League. Sounds like you and I are in the same business, or at least on the same side. But I don't think I've seen you around before. What's your name?" Meeting a new hero was at least considerably more interesting than bouncing around the city looking for stranded motorists and drunk drivers heading home from the bars.

Stesha looked surprised, then amused to see the little farce playing out in front of her. She smiled at Erica. "It's nice to meet you, Erica. Sure, that would be totally fine. I have to warn you that normal cell phones don't work on Sanctuary, we use walkie-talkies and radios, and our League phones when we need to talk across to Prime. But you can still take pictures and make notes, it's just a lot easier in airplane mode. Smartphones kinda freak out when they can't find anything to connect to anywhere." She closed the folder and returned it to her bag, then rose. "We could go now, if you'd like? It's just about lunchtime, so people will be congregating in the cafeterias at the various villages. I've got the temporal refugees at Homewood right now, so maybe we should start there?"

Erin wasn't one to automatically assume that anyone dressed all in black was a villain (just look at her boyfriend, for pity's sake), but it couldn't be denied that a disproportionate number of villains decided on the as-dark-as-humanly-possible look. But his stance said he was more pluck than skill when it came to fighting, so unless he had some kind of combat power, she probably wasn't in danger either way. She left her hands loose and planted her feet to move quickly if the need arose. "West End's not a good neighborhood for supervillains," she said neutrally. "Lots of heroes around to keep things in order."

Wander cocked her head, taking a few silent steps across her own rooftop to get a better look at the lurking presence. Being as how this was the West End, the rooftop lurker could easily be another hero... or a villain, or a burglar, or just someone hoping to get a cigarette before bed in the cool night air. Better take a closer look, ideally in a way that would not surprise a civilian into falling off the roof. Not even bothering with a running step, she leapt the distance between the two buildings, carefully avoiding the HVAC unit (experience had taught her that while they offered the high ground, they made an enormous BONG noise when landed on), and touched down with no more sound than a soft swish of gravel. Bat holstered and hands loose, she walked around the air conditioner to get a look at whoever was lurking this evening.

It was getting late, nearly midnight as Wander leapt into the West End, landing atop a bank building to take in the lay of the land. Warmer weather was keeping people out later, which in turn invited more bad-deed-doers, but the night had been fairly quiet. She'd busted a teenage pickpocket at half past eight, saved a dog from traffic on the Pramas Bridge around nine-fifteen and served as a human jack for a motorist with a flat tire just after eleven. Street superheroing, a very glamorous life, she thought to herself with a small laugh. She'd take it over fighting off apocalypses any day. She was familiar with the West End but didn't come out here that often, just because there were so many superheroes who called this place home. Next to Bayview, it was the most super-dense population she knew of in the city. But the Interceptors were justifiably distracted these days, and she'd heard rumors that someone might be trying to cause them trouble, so she'd cruised through the area on her last few patrols. She wasn't technically responsible for Mara, Ellie and their family when she wasn't working, but they were still her friends. Never hurt to be a little cautious.

"Oh no you don't," Paige muttered, the steely resolve in her mental voice somewhat at odds with her teenage punk body. She pointed her hands towards the wave and concentrated, her eyes bleeding black as though oil were dripping into the liquid sclerae. Black energy slid down her arms and over her fingers, coalescing into a sickly-looking ball of seething entropy. With but a thought, she launched the ball at the spreading wave, sending it hurtling like a bowler going for a strike. It hit with a massive crackle of energy that sent the whole wave alight for a moment before being swallowed by blackness and disappearing.

"Yes, I'd be happy to facilitate that," Stesha agreed, "I go back and forth myself almost every day anyway. I think most of them would be happy to get back into a city even temporarily, they really miss the lives they used to have. Everyone else on Sanctuary, either they never lived in a high-tech society, or it's been gone so long they don't miss it anymore, or they volunteered to live there. It has caused some friction, honestly," she admitted. "They're happy that we managed to save their world, but the fact that they sort of didn't get saved along with it is a source of some justifiable anger, especially to me. If I'd left them where they were, they might have all been fine. Or they might have all been unwritten from history, but who can know, right?" She shrugged. "If you'd like, I can take you there now and you can get a look at the place, meet some of the people?"

"They're not on Prime right now," Stesha explained. "They're not actively in danger, so League policy would be to return them to their world of origin, but even though their world wasn't destroyed by insects, it was still obliterated and replaced. They had nowhere to go there. I tried to pull some strings anyway, but there's no room in the Cline Building for another twenty-five people, and with everything that happened earlier this year on the Lighthouse, trying to get anything organized in terms of paperwork is a nightmare. They're safe and fed and housed for the moment on Sanctuary, but I hate that they're so unhappy. But they are from Freedom City on their world, so maybe that will help. Um, and two of them are technically unattached minors, even though they're sort of de facto adopted by the others." She leaned over to lift up the pages for the children, sorting them till she found pictures of a boy about five years old and a girl about seven. "Their parents were in the original group of survivors, but they didn't make it. I could keep them on Sanctuary with no problem, but I think they're all going to want to stay together, so we might have to work out adoptions, but they don't have any identities yet..." She sat back in her seat and massaged her forehead. "I'm a florist," she admitted. "This is not my area of expertise."

Fleur let out a rather unheroic yelp of surprise as the two drones rushed her, knocking her flashlight to spin crazily for a moment before she caught hold of it again. "When the hell did this become survival horror?" she griped to no one as she shook off the effects of their attacks. It hurt, but nothing that would slow her down. She just needed to get back on Earth with some actual sunlight and native plants, preferably sooner rather than later! With a tremendous effort, she blanketed the entire corridor in thick vines, wrapping the two drones tightly and leaving them hanging. "This is Fleur deJoie," Stesha spoke into her communicator. "Can anybody hear me? Does anyone know how many more of these things there are?"

Don't mind me, I'm just going to be over here hating everything. Using extra effort for another action, spending a hero point to clear fatigue, throwing the snare again. DC 25.

Fleur's just going to use her area snare again to try and bag these guys. DC 25 reflex saves for them

"Whatever you can do would be great," Stesha agreed readily. "Eventually I want people to know about Sanctuary and the work we're doing there. We have children and teenagers there who I'd like to send to college on Earth Prime, and I don't want it to be a secret they have to keep. But right now, the timing... it's just complicated." She grimaced. "So as quiet as possible is perfect." She shuffled the papers in her folder, then pulled out a small sheaf secured with a binder clip. "This other issue, I'm not entirely sure whether you can help me or not, but I thought I might ask while I'm here." She passed over the pages, and Lucy could see that they were pictures and brief dossiers of about two dozen people, men, women and children, none of them looking very happy. "These are a different group of refugees now, from a world with no name, one that doesn't even exist anymore. A few months ago, there was an invasion of giant hostile insects on Sanctuary, and I and most of my colleagues on the FLA went to try and stop it. We found a world where the cities were overrun with giant carnivorous insects and most of the humans were dead. I found a group of survivors and sent them to Sanctuary in order to keep them safe while the fighting was still going on. But one thing led to another, and we wound up accidentally teleporting through time and rewriting the original temporal incursion that caused the invasion in the first place. History was rewritten and the world was saved, but unfortunately the people who were on Sanctuary were not rewritten into it. They had no lives in that world, no past or future, and it was my fault." Stesha ducked her head. "They didn't have any place to go anymore, so I offered them a home on Sanctuary, but most of them aren't settling in well. They're not agrarian types, they want cities and modern jobs and things I just can't offer them. I'd like to find a way to establish some kind of identity for them so they can live here if the want, instead of having to stay in the village."

Stesha started shaking her head before Lucy even finished talking. "No publicity at all if it can be avoided, and definitely none with me. If we need a public face I can ask Gabriel to give me a hand, that's really his area of expertise anyway. He lives on Sanctuary too," she explained, "he's been very helpful in getting everything set up. Maybe later we can try to get a little publicity going, when we start up a scholarship fund and such, but right now one-on-one networking has been working to get what we need, we just need the tax implications sorted. Can you do it on the quiet, do you think?" she asked, folding the edges of her paper between her fingers.

"All right now, let's just calm down for a moment here," Fleur said firmly, stepping between the two angry men. Vines rose from the ground and nudged against Frost's chest, pushing him painlessly backwards a few steps till he was no longer in poking range. "Both of you. This is sacred ground, especially tonight," she reminded them, then turned to Frost. "Dmitri, he does look familiar, but even if you're right, he remembers nothing. Grandchild or clone or just man who bears a strong resemblance, he's not the man who was your friend. They're gone, Mitya, they've been gone a lifetime now." "And you," she turned to Titan, "I don't know what you know or suspect about yourself. I know you probably didn't come looking for a fight and it's confusing to get one. But can't you see he's grieving?" she demanded, feeling only a little bit hypocritical to be considering her colleague's feelings now and not before. But he had never looked quite so raw or wounded before. "Have some respect, please."

"Territorial rights?" Stesha looked baffled. "Wow, it's never really come up. I asked the people in Homewood, that's the first village I started, how they felt about having a new village of refugees come in, back when we were first talking about the idea, and they were all fine with it. They were refugees too, after all, and I like to think things have gotten a lot better for them in the past few years. Sanctuary is a ruined Earth," she explained, "Earth-D-Self-7(extinct), in the standard notation. I didn't think it could support human life at all when I started working there, but life finds a way, no matter how tough it is. The area I've reclaimed and rehabilitated covers a space half the size of New Jersey now, so there's plenty of room for everyone. Of course, we all expected to get a thousand new residents and ended up with ten thousand, but everyone's really stepped up to the plate and helped out. Nobody was going to leave them in the Terminus! I don't think territorial rights are much of an issue."

"Oh no, I don't mind at all," Fleur assured Lucy easily, "I'm used to it. You should see my-" She broke off suddenly, looking as though she wished she hadn't spoken at all, then regrouped. "There are all kinds of interesting sights where I come from, my neighbors are dragons and giant bees. And you can call me Stesha." She settled herself into the visitor chair and opened the messenger bag she'd brought with her to pull out a folder. In the small room, it was easy to catch the scent of flowers even from across the desk. "The first issue I need to deal with is registering a charity," she began, opening the folder to look at the list she'd made. "I found some instructions on how to do something like that online, but it's complicated by the fact that although I have a home in Freedom City, my primary home, and the place where all the work is taking place, is on an alternate dimension Earth that I call Sanctuary. You see, we have ten thousand refugees from the Terminus that we took in this past summer, on top of the few hundred refugees of the ecological disaster the planet was before I started rehabilitating it, and the resources we have are stretched very thin. I've made arrangements with several businesses and organizations for money and in-kind donations, but only if we can sort out our tax status, and I don't even know where to begin," she admitted with a wry smile.