Electra

"Look, I'm very sorry for the misunderstanding!" Miss A called to the faux-Star Knights, "but you approached us under false pretenses when we were literally minutes away from a war! I'll be happy to take a look at your suits and see if that one can be fixed as soon as we're not all about to be completely destroyed. Going to Talos isn't going to help anything, he's a first-class villain and he probably fled the dimension weeks ago anyway." She punctuated her speech by flying straight upwards, a little wobbly in the low gravity, and shooting a barrage of red, white and blue laser beams from her fingertips. They scattered against the hull of the ship, burning patches where they touched.

Miss A will blast the ship with her lasers! An 18 should hit and then it's a DC 27 toughness save

Hologram will use her mental blast against Antibody 1, which will require a DC 25 will save and is Subtle

Paige made a small noise of protest when the strange monster took a swing at Richard, her breath catching in her throat until he moved and rolled over again, obviously alive. Her face darkened then, her eyes bleeding to pitch black as she regarded this new foe. She didn't use her entropy-fueled powers often, but in a world that seemed to be coming apart at the seams, it probably couldn't hurt. And that thing had hit Richard, so it had to pay. She moved quietly, taking a few steps away from the creature, ducking her head and trying to look harmless and unobtrusive, nothing a villain would need to worry about. There were much more tempting targets within his reach than one woman apparently trying to escape. The instant she had a little cover, Paige straightened up and stared at the monster with her black, black eyes. She broadcast images into its head, joy and laughter, love and pleasure, all of them enhanced by the fact that the monster was not there, could never be there, would be long since destroyed and forgotten. There was no future for monsters, no reruns, no syndication, only the darkness of a static-filled screen.

Paige is going to use her move action to back away and try to get the protection of distance or partial cover, then she's going to hit him with her Enhanced Damage effect. That's perception ranged, and with the extra boost from her Entropic array is a DC 27 will save.

When Edone got back to Olympus, everything seemed perfect, at first. She retained her memories of her time as Moira, though Aphrodite assured her that those would go away with time and goddesshood. The part of her that was Moira missed her friends and her mortal life, but Edone enjoyed all the benefits Olympus had to offer. Life was easy up on the mountain. She began making friends and enemies among the gods, as Olympians are wont to do. There were her parents of course, busy with their responsibilities, but happy to have their wayward daughter back home and ready to take up her mantle. There was Dionysus, with whom she clicked immediately due to their relative closeness in responsibilities. They even joked that maybe she was his child. Ares was not fond of that joke. She had a fling with Apollo, but the stories of the fickleness of gods have persisted for a reason, and that didn't last long. Edone was just happy to escape without being turned into a flowering plant. Zeus was fond of her as well, as he was of any pretty little goddess who liked to party. Not everyone was happy to see her back, though. Edone had her fair share of enemies amongst the gods and their children. Turned out that in her absence, there were plenty of claimants to the position of god or goddess of hedonism, and none of them wanted a new competitor. They were mostly spoiled children though, for all their godly natures, and Moira had been shrugging off their sort all her life. Illythia was more of a problem, punished by both sides for her role in Edone's birth, she was more than a little resentful to see the young demigoddess alive and well and back on Olympus. Hephaestus, though, was by far her biggest problem. It had been bad enough when the child he'd wanted killed hadn't died as ordered, and now he was certainly not content to have his 'mistake' hanging around as a goddess forever. He never met her personally, but there were a few minor gods that did his dirty work for him. They made life on Olympus a little less pleasant, but there were rules of engagement, and Edone wasn't about to let a few jealous haters ruin her immortal life. The rituals to turn Edone's soul into that of a full goddess were complex, carried out by nymphs bathing her in godstuff and soulmatter to cleanse her of the taint of mortality. It happened infrequently, but enough for Edone to expect it once she got in the groove. It was quite relaxing, really, having all her cares melt away as though she were immersed in a really good bubble bath. Unfortunately, it gradually became clear that the rituals were not working. Each ritual was powerful enough to keep Edone alive on Olympus and in possesion of her minute (in Olympian terms) godhood, they were barely able to keep her above the threshold to stay there. Her body was beautiful and immortal as ever, but her soul remained stubbornly mortal. Moira continued to surge to the surface inside Edone, reminding her uncomfortably of her friends on Earth, the hero work they'd begun to enjoy, all the good they could be doing there instead of lounging in bubble baths and pursuing social intrigue with gods. She could be ignored, suppressed, laughed off, but she would not allow herself to die away. It was a situation that could've continued indefinitely. Humans didn't need much help to be hedonists, it wouldn't matter if the goddess of hedonism was very low in power as long as she was beautiful and indulgent of her followers. The nymphs certainly had nothing better to do than continue to bathe her as necessary! Edone had a place on Olympus, and she could've stayed and fought for it, using her wiles rather than her strength, relying on her powerful allies as necessary. She could've made it work, were it not for the part of her soul that was still Moira, the part that longed for home and for something more. The soul burned inside her like an itch she couldn't reach, and nothing on Olympus could assuage it. Finally one day she'd had enough. Edone turned away the ritual, put on her finest clothes, and visited her parents to tell them that she had decided to leave Olympus forever. Once Edone had made her decision, the gods had no choice but to strip her of the power she'd had. Edone in her glory, minuscule as it was, could not pass back to Earth though the barrier of the Pact, but human Moira Morley could. Edone's godhood was ceremoniously taken away from her by her weeping mother, who embraced Moira and gave her an enchanted flower for her hair before Moira could die of the overwhelming atmosphere on Olympus. Old Hephaestus could be heard celebrating in his workshop, finally rid of a thorn in his side forever. Gods did not concern themselves with human by-blows, and this mortal woman was no concern of his anymore. Before Moira left she was approached by friends and family alike. Each came with a gift for her new life, some with blessings for her protection, some with magic or items to make her human life easier. It was the least they could do. She was no longer Edone, would never be a goddess, but she was still an Olympian being. With a last round of goodbyes, Moira packed her things and allowed herself to be returned to the mortal plain. She had work to do and people to see, and even for an immortal, time waits for nobody.

Erin sighed and opened her eyes, staring into the darkness. Outside the wind was whistling between the buildings, but the thick insulation in the windows kept the room pleasantly warm. The walls around her were powder blue, like the uniform they'd given her at Blackstone, soothing and unlikely to cause any empty flashbacks. The blue was nearly obscured by all the art she'd pinned up, both what she'd made herself and what she'd copied from books and clipped from magazines. A large wall clock and calender hung where she could see them from her bed, all her daily appointments and activities carefully noted down and marked off as they happened. Erin didn't know why it reassured her so much to do that, but she still went through the ritual every day. She didn't have to make any decisions tonight. Tomorrow was art therapy day, and that was generally uncomplicated fun. She'd help with the laundry and run twenty-five miles in the gym, and maybe look at the online course offerings from Freedom City College. In two weeks, she would go and spend the entire Christmas weekend with Wander and her dark-haired boy at their home in North Bay. She was glad Aquaria was coming, too, to prevent things from being unbearably tense and awkward. Maybe after all of that was done, she'd be able to start making some decisions. There was a light knock on the door. Erin stiffened with surprise, then made herself relax as the door opened and the light from the hall flooded the room. "Jessie?" the night attendant asked. "It doesn't look like you're getting much sleep tonight. Would you like to come put a puzzle together in the activity room?" "Yeah, okay," Jessie replied, pushing herself to sit up and running a hand over her face. "Could we have a snack, too?" Sometimes when you were lost, it was just easier to keep walking the way you were going.

But aside from the few hiccups, the mental revision had done what it was supposed to. Erin could function, could answer to her new name and attend therapy and life-skills classes and Project Freedom group activities without being dangerous to herself or anyone else. With the help of her therapist, she took ownership of her crimes even though she didn't really remember them, and vowed in front of all of Project Freedom to never be a villain again. It was not nearly as difficult a vow for her as it seemed to be for some of her fellow inmates. She completed her GED and struck up a cautious friendship with her neighbor Aquaria, who was oddly friendly for a Deep One and didn't mind if there were days when Erin was thinking too hard to be able to leave her room. Aquaria slept in a big inflatable bathtub, so she didn't even notice when sometimes Erin woke screaming from nightmares she didn't remember. It was a pretty good arrangement, and when Erin didn't think too hard, she felt almost happy. Felt almost Jessie sometimes. The psychologists had started talking about supervised release and jobs programs, and Erin had deliberately backslid a little in her therapy sessions till they'd stopped. There was something out there waiting for her, looking for her, and she was in no way ready to face that yet. Sometimes she missed Blackstone and the room she'd had there, which was monotonous and small, but so very safe. Eventually they'd kick her out of here, she knew, and she'd have to face the dangerous world on her own. She'd have to choose for herself who she was going to be. She couldn't be Erin, no matter what she felt like inside, that spot was already taken. She didn't want to be Wander, who'd been molded by memories nobody had taken away, and who for all her moments of joy still lived a life of constant conflict. She definitely didn't want to be Singularity, a person she didn't even really remember, but whose image in Wander's mind was wrapped in concepts like monster and trapped animal and murderer. She could be Jessie, the name she herself had chosen in what seemed like another lifetime, but to do that would mean surrendering to all the things that had been done to her, good and bad, and becoming the person she'd been molded into. Wash away the past, forget the losses, and never dig too deeply into the back corners of her own mind.

Erin's repaired past didn't come without problems of its own. Memories, she'd found, didn't exist independently, they formed webs and complex lattices, where old experiences connected to new ones so that thinking of one could bring up a half-dozen others. Now when Erin thought back to things like the Homecoming dance her freshman year, she could remember it clearly, thanks to the transplant. The nervous fun, how her best friend Kathy hadn't come because of the flu, how she'd kissed Ben on the cheek and not on the lips afterwards because he'd spent the whole evening with his friends instead of with her. She remembered other dances, dancing on her dad's shoes at a wedding reception, her brief and disastrous flirtation with ballet in third grade. But she could also remember another dance very faintly, dancing with a tall boy with dark hair and a damaged suit, in the middle of a hallway with one earbud in each of their ears. Her body was bruised, her hair was ruined, and somewhere nearby people were yelling at each other, but it didn't matter. She remembered feeling a way about the dark-haired boy she'd never felt about Ben, or about anybody. Erin knew that memory didn't belong to her, and that it was probably something private and special to Wander. She knew she ought to try and forget it, along with the handful of other memories she'd uncovered that belonged to a person who hadn't lived her teenage years in blunted edges and smooth white blank spaces. She kept them instead, filed them away like secrets along with the scraps of memory Psyche hadn't managed to catch in her cleaning effort.

Eventually, Psyche had come up with a solution, even if it was an uncomfortable one. She'd brought in the other Erin, Wander-Erin, who did not belong here on Prime either, but belonged more than Erin herself did. Wander was older (not true, her brain reminded her, three lost years still counted even if she didn't remember them), colder and more combat-experienced than Erin ever wanted to be. She walked like a soldier and held herself like a weapon, and the part of Erin that could reliably evaluate threats even though she couldn't explain why knew that Wander was very dangerous and could hurt her if she wanted. She didn't seem to want to, though. When they met up, Wander mainly sat in a corner with her arms crossed and watched Erin without ever looking her in the eye, depressed and miserable as Erin on group therapy day. Psyche had explained that since Erin and Wander had once been the same person, an idea that neither of them liked but neither could contradict, their childhood memories ought to be the same. With that in mind, Psyche was sure she could use Wander-Erin's memories as a template to reconstruct Erin's shattered past, cutting away the bad stuff, patching together what was left, and replacing whatever was gone with copied memories from Wander. That whole operation had taken a half-dozen sessions, most of which ended with Erin half-conscious on the bed and Wander weeping silently in her corner, but they'd done the trick. Aside from the smooth white gap, Erin had herself a full set of memories that she was pretty sure were accurate. Mostly, anyway. Enough to get by on. The first fourteen years were accurate. After that, Psyche had admitted to blunting the edges of a lot of it, so that the bad things that happened seemed barely real, like a television show she'd watched a long time ago. The facts were there when Erin needed them, but they were clearly not her own memories. Psyche said it was better this way, that she didn't want Erin to have to cope with another set of traumas so soon. Erin wondered privately if all the tampering with her memory might have left her a monster, that she could remember the deaths of her whole family and not even remember caring. More than that, that she could feel relieved about not having to experience the pain. But were they even her family, or were they Wander's? Could someone from a six-hour-long universe be said to have had a family at all? Easier not to think about any of that, easier to let the memories blur to nothing.

Psyche had explained what she was doing before, during and after doing it, which was just as well since it was a procedure that allowed for a lot of forgetting. All those bad memories from the years since she'd left EZO2 (that was the name of her world, according to Psyche, a world that had only existed for a few hours in any meaningful form and Erin didn't like to think about that) and gone to EVM1 , all those bad memories were just too traumatic to even work with, and so they had to go. Three years gone, just like that, a smooth white emptiness in her memory that she sometimes puzzled over at night the way you'd stick your tongue in the space where a tooth used to be. Occasionally a memory fragment would crop up from that time, usually nothing she wanted to see, but she knew they were her own memories so she kept them and filed them away. She'd written them down at first, or drawn them in art therapy, but that got her more attention than she wanted and she'd started keeping them to herself. Fixing the rest of her memories had been a more difficult puzzle. Someone in the bad time had damaged Erin's memories of her entire life, adding fake memories, deleting real ones, scrambling what was left into a weird and frightening pastiche of what it had once been. She'd asked Psyche why anyone would do that, and Psyche had winced visibly. After crying her way through their first meeting, Psyche hardly ever showed any sort of negative emotion around Erin, so that was notable. She told Erin it was all about control. The past created the people they were in the present, and so by destroying Erin's past, that person in the bad time had made Singularity far easier to manipulate in the present. For just a quick little moment, Erin wondered whether Psyche's removal of all those bad memories would do the same thing, but she'd hastily dismissed that thought. The bad memories had been much too bad, they were better off gone.

Not lost in the traditional sense, of course. She knew the day of the week, the month and year, she could point out her location on a map of the world. But the years that had passed were a blank white blip in her memories, leaving her a time traveler stranded in the future with no way back. The map she would point to, and the world it represented, was nothing but a facsimile of something that was dead and gone. What do you call it when you know where you are but it means nothing because you can't get home? Lost seemed to be close enough. But at least she wasn't as lost as she'd been. When she'd been brought to this new world, she'd had nothing of herself but scraps, and even those had been blurred and ruined by careless handling. Her mind had been full, but of what she was no longer sure. Bad things, she knew, bad enough that even now a particular noise or a smell, or even sitting in a white room could make her shudder. Then Psyche had come, making Erin very uncomfortable with her tears and her guilty face and the scraps of memory that told Erin both to flee and that fleeing was useless, but she'd changed things. Emptied Erin out, like her brain was an infected wound that needed draining.

The clock on the wall chimed gently, ten soft repetitive notes. In the rooms along the taupe hallway, the lights dimmed and went out, leaving just a narrow beam of illumination from the observation window set in each door. Footsteps and voices in the hall were muffled by thick walls and soft shoes, but still perfectly audible to anyone who couldn't help but listen closely. In the third room on the right, Erin lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling where a muted afterglow lingered on the extinguished fluorescent tubes. Eight hours till morning, eight hours in the privacy of darkness, unmoving, unsleeping. She closed her eyes to slits. If they looked in on her and saw her awake, she'd be taken out and assigned some mindless time-occupying task, and she needed to think. She needed this time in the quiet dark to remember who she was. They'd tried to remake her here, gave her a new name and a made-up past, but it didn't change who she was. She was Erin Keeley White, and she was lost in time and space.

Paige rose to her feet with some help from her husband, one hand pressed to her forehead. "I'm definitely getting too old for this," she told Richard ruefully. "Who'd have thought you and I would end up not only heroes, but middle-aged heroes?" She looked around the cabin, then extended a hand to Aura. "Come on," she encouraged, "it'll be all right. You helped save the day, remember? I'll talk to anybody who might want to make trouble, and we can find you a place to stay if you'd like. Gwen will be happy to see you again, she's missed you."

Miss A goes on 8 and does not need to roll in order to make the notice check

For a moment, Fleur looked very much as though she'd like to agree with Frost's plan, but then she firmed her jaw and shook her head. "You're not going in there alone," she told him flatly. "If the gateway needs to be closed from the inside, I'll go with you and we'll do it together. I'm pretty hard to kill myself, and I haven't found a universe yet that I can't get in or out of. But we don't send anybody out alone, that's not the Freedom League way." She looked at the others. "Do you think you guys can handle the rest of the nests here?"

Wander narrowed her eyes at the sight of Midnight ramping the robots, even as her heart gave a little thrill at the ease with which he performed the stunt. "Should've known he'd head right into trouble," she muttered with no heat in the words. "Come on, let's clear the way for him." When Singularity didn't respond instantly to the instruction, Wander grabbed her arm and pulled her along, the two of them vaulting over the mass of robots to land near the obelisk. "Start with what's close and work your way out!" Wander instructed, already beginning her assault on the robots. A single robot, grabbed by the legs and swung hard, was an excellent weapon for taking out a half-dozen of its fellows at a time. "They're not tough, it's just a lot of them." "I... I can't..." Singularity took a step back from the robots, her eyes wide enough to show white all around the edges. "I don't know how to do this, there's so many, I can't!" "Of course you can!" Wander snapped, arcing back around so she was between Singularity and the robots, protecting even as she scolded. "This is easy, this is how we learned to fight! They're not human, they're not even very smart. Just think about fighting zombies, and take away all the gross stuff. These things can't even hurt you!" She smashed the one she was holding into the ground by way of demonstration, shattering it into dozens of pieces. Singularity shook her head wildly. "I don't remember how to do this," she insisted. "I don't remember the fighting, Psyche let me forget, she said I didn't have to anymore. It's not who I am now, I'm not the one who fights!" "Then why are you here?" Wander demanded. "You said you wanted to help! This is how we do it! We're not the smart one, we're not the powerful one, we don't make the plans or solve the puzzles. The only thing you and I know how to do is fight, so if you want to help, stop wringing your goddamn hands and do it!" Wander grabbed another robot that was getting a little too close, snapped off a leg and handed it to Singularity. "It's like riding a bike, just don't think about it and it'll all come back to you." Singularity took the proffered weapon, her face contorting for a moment with indecision and fear. Wander left her to it, turning away to resume her devastating assault on the robot army before they could get too close to Midnight's investigation. "All we know how to do is fight," Singularity murmured, staring at the leg for a moment, before turning to meet the advancing throng. Her face cleared, went nearly blank, and then she was in motion too, clearing away robots with nearly the efficiency and speed of her counterpart.

Hologram goes on 9

Sorry sorry sorry, forgot to follow the OOC thread! Paige goes on 12

"Can you tell us more about what happened to the Star Knights?" Miss Americana asked, curious in spite of herself. "We know many of them were destroyed along with the home planet of the Lor. How did this virus get started, and what kind of damage did it do? How did all of you escape from being destroyed?" She tried her sensors once more, but they were still frustratingly blank. With time and effort she was sure she could overcome the jamming, but that didn't seem to be on the agenda at the moment. Instead, she offered up her best diplomatic smile, which was very good indeed. "I'd also like to know what science you're interested in trading. On Earth I am the head of a large scientific corporation, and the exchange of knowledge is our business. If you could tell us more about what you need to know, maybe we can come to some sort of arrangement."

I like it! It does not surprise me that her hair wasn't easy to do, it's not exactly a common style (or color) for superheroines! The color and texturing on the coat is especially pleasing. And I think the ice mask on Temperance is awesome!

These are cool! Nick is so creepy and yet still heroic. I'd love if you did any of mine that happen to trigger your imagination.

"This area is familiar, sort of," Erin frowned, her brow furrowed as she set aside the invasion for a moment to consider the terrain. "Where exactly are we?" She pulled out her phone and called up a satellite map of the city. Her eyes widened. "That's right. This place is right on top of the Seattle Fault line. I did a project on it forever ago. It's like an ancient fault line that hasn't done a big eruption for a thousand years, so nobody even knew it was around till twenty years ago. That can't be a coincidence." From beside her, Jessie furrowed her brow in an identical way, then muttered, "The a'yahos." Erin turned. "What?" "I did the project too," Jessie reminded her, "and fewer memories between. That old earthquake, the local legends said it was because of the a'yahos. Um, it was like a shapeshifter monster, caused landslides and made the earth shake. What if it really was something like that?" "I guess that could be it," Erin agreed after a moment's surprised hesitation. "I kind of remember that. Did anything we researched mention how to kill one?" Jessie shook her head. "Guess we'll have to improvise. Don't bother with the bat for these things, it barely works on robots. Pick up whatever you can find and hit them with it." She looked over to Cannonade. "Singularity and I will wade into the assembly area, you and Aquaria come behind and start picking them off as they get near?" she suggested, ready to move on his agreement.

Miss Americana took her scanner out from one of the extremely subtle pockets in her uniform and trained it casually in the direction of the newcomers. "It's most likely them who are our problem, Dragonfly," she reported, her voice mild but her eyes extremely alert. "They've got some kind of scanner block up and I can't get any readings on them at all. That's not the usual pattern for Star Knights as far as I'm aware. They like to show up clearly, the better for potential allies to trust them." She tucked the scanner away and cracked her knuckles. "So we pretty much have a problem, and we can't really get a good look at it remotely. The Farsiders are all under cover, should we go out and say hello?"

Knowledge: Tactics: 19 Notice: Skill Mastery: 25