Electra
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Wander nodded, rounding up the orange-clad duo and fixing them with her sternest i-am-the-boss-here glare. "You will both stay near me no matter what unless I tell you otherwise," she instructed. "You will do whatever I tell you as soon as I tell you. If I tell you to run like hell, Singularity, you pick up Aquaria and you get to a safe distance. I don't want either of you to get hurt, or for anybody else to get hurt because we're saving one of you instead of doing our jobs, got it?" Singularity's face was familiar enough that everyone on the team could see her biting back a reply that might well have been undiplomatic. "We understand," she answered instead. "So long as you let us help." "I'm sure there'll be enough to do." Erin replied dryly. She took a step to close the distance between her and her double, dropping her voice to a murmur. "Are you sure this is how you want to go back the first time?" she asked. "There'll be work to do here. It was hard for me the first time and there wasn't even a crisis. It isn't weakness." Jessie hesitated for a fraction of a second, then shook her head. "You know I have to," she told Erin. "I can't let them down again." "Fine." Erin stepped back and pulled one of her training batons from its spot on the wall, tossing it to Singularity. "Don't tell anybody I armed a paroled felon, all right? We're ready to go when you are, Edge."
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"Dark Star?" Fleur closed her comm link without a second thought as Daedelus relayed his message from the front. Wrapping her arms around herself, she walked to the window and stared out as though sheer willpower would sharpen her eyes enough to see for millions of miles. "He shows up now?" She shook herself out of her momentary stupor, then opened the internal comm to her teammates. "Okay guys, what can we do to stop these things? I know my powers are worthless out there, but this station must be able to do something, right?"
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Paige concentrated on smoothing her hair as she listened to the Scarab's summation; getting her costume on in Richard-time always made her hair look like she'd been through a windstorm. "Of course we'll do whatever we can," she agreed, speaking aloud just as Scarab had. "If you can give us some idea of what to look for and how to take it down, that would be very helpful. I'm also wondering if this psychic signal might be immediately dangerous. I mean, obviously it's dangerous in the long term, whenever this worshiped thing arrives, but do you think there's any immediate threat to a psychic who is caught in its influence and can't get free?" Despite her careful shielding, she was in a roomful of trained psychics and her anxiety was obvious.
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Paige surreptitiously pressed two fingers behind her left ear to try and quell the headache from the mental squeeing. She'd met excited fans before, plenty of times, but they were rarely broadcasting psychics. "It's nice to meet you too," she told Miss Grue, with a smile that was only a little bit pained. "Maybe you can come to the studio some time, take the grand tour. Ah," she added, trying to be tactful, "there may be other psychics around on this plane, and they might not be friendly. If you can shield your broadcasts, it might be safer for all of us. Have either of you seen any other inhabitants of this place?"
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"While I'm sure you're the best judge of your own capabilities for handling hostile energies, Jack," Miss Americana began diplomatically, if hastily, "it might be safer for you to absorb the charge from my laser beams instead of taking any chances with Caradoc's energy. I'd be glad to offer you some." Her hands began crackling with red, white and blue sparks of energy even as she kept talking. "It might also be prudent to move the trainees and ourselves to a more secure location until we get some idea of what's going on. If the Communion is interrupting our long-range communications, they may already be in-system."
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Erin stood and watched the screen in silence until it went dark, not even noticing her glass crumbling to shards in her hand until cold eggnog began running down her fingers. Behind her, she heard Jessie make a small, pained noise. "Twelve minutes is too long. Mark can take us, he's been to Seattle before." Her voice was toneless, all business, but her unsticky hand groped for Trevor's. "Freedom City has plenty of heroes covering it tonight. We can't leave them defenseless out there." Her eyes flicked to Jessie, who'd also gotten to her feet. "We can send you back to Project Freedom before we-" Jessie shook her head, her face pale but her lips pressed together in determination. It was her home too, after all, maybe even more so for her than for Erin, who'd at least managed to make a new home in Freedom City. "Fine. There's a uniform for you in your guest room. Go put it on." In an instant Jessie was gone, running almost too fast to see. "And the paperwork on that will be fun later," Erin muttered.
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Paige bit back a curse as Jump's possessed body disappeared again, teleporting god-only-knew where. At least the planes were starting to descend, and in a reasonably controlled manner given the circumstances. After a quick brush of Tesla's mind, just to be sure she was in a fit state to be flying, Paige gathered up her niece's energy once more and launched herself back across the void and into the plane that held their real bodies. Paige's real body was suffering more than a little at the moment; the emergency oxygen provided by the mask was nearly exhausted by now, her hands and face felt more than a little frostnipped, and her ears were ready to explode from the rapid descent. Checking to make sure her seatbelt was secure, she began broadcasting to everyone on both planes and in the adjacent airspace. ~The Atomcraft is secure. Professor Psion has escaped for now, but we'll track him down. Everyone who can, assume the brace position for landing.~ She pushed the image over the link of a little man belted into an airplane seat, hands braced on the headrest of the seat in front of him, forehead resting just below his crossed wrists. Tightening the band of her mental transmission as she leaned forward and took her own advice, she sent just to Richard, ~I love you.~
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"That's the spirit of optimism we'll need to defeat the threat from beyond the stars!" Miss Americana quipped cheerfully, coming in for a neat landing after a short flight from the administration building. She wore a clear bubble helmet that fit to a snug silver cowl around her shoulders, but other than that and a certain extra thickness to her red, white and blue costume, she could've been standing on the surface of the Earth. Raising her camera, she caught a candid shot of Caradoc and Jack of All Blades, then a few pictures of the Farsiders in training. With Dragonfly supervising the construction of the not-a-weapon, Miss A had found herself relegated to the position of back-up brain and project liaison. There was only so much that could be done to calm the public about the nebulous, rumored threat bearing down from the stars. ArcheTech was at the forefront of the public relations effort, of course, with Miss A herself hosting webcasts while the social media team put out FAQs and AMAs in bulk, tweeted updates, tumbled, instagrammed and snapchatted photos, and in general put out a phenomenal amount of useless but comforting information that managed to avoid conveying exactly how dire the situation really was. Being on the moon was almost like a vacation; at least she was taking pictures of other people for once! "Have we heard anything from the League yet?"
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Fleur de Joie rarely needed to sleep, but that didn't mean she couldn't get very, very tired. She'd carved out the time to spend Christmas morning on Sanctuary with Amaryllis, her parents, all her brothers and sisters, and their families. It had taken weeks to convince them to move the annual celebration to what they affectionately referred to as "Stesha's treehouse," most of them not quite ready to accept that the cottage was just the smallest part of the entirely separate world she took care of. But as Christmas neared and the rumors grew, one by one they'd acquiesced to her plan for family togetherness somewhere safe and out of the way. That had required adding an entire extra wing to the house, six extra bedrooms with furniture she'd be paying down for the next six years, and still she'd have nieces and nephews on the floors and in the living room. The close quarters and undercurrent of potential danger had made for some family tensions, but Christmas Eve had still been very nice, part of it spent in the villages with the settlers old and new, and the rest of it at home, just for the family. She hadn't really bargained on how hard it would be to leave that family togetherness and head for the Lighthouse when the call to action had come in. They'd all be safe, she reminded herself. Sanctuary was secure, well-defended and entirely out of the way of the Communion, so no threat there. All the settlers, the monks and the bees knew to look out for her family as they spread out to explore the picturesque confines of the little world, as though there was much dangerous for anyone to get into at all. And not only was her mother there to look after Ammy and keep her company, Gina Espadas and Eden, Ammy's very best Prime friend, were on hand as well. Nobody would probably even miss her till she got back. And if for some reason she couldn't come back... well, there were contingency plans in place for anything up to and including the destruction of Prime and the loss of all Sanctuary's adult metahumans. But that wasn't going to happen, and Christmas would come again next year. Stesha rubbed her forehead with the tips of her fingers and stifled a yawn as she finished yet another very long-distance phone call to Earth. "No, you should absolutely send JJ to Sanctuary, don't even worry about it. I know you both are going to be tied up with everything going on, you shouldn't have to worry about him. And he's gotten over that biting thing, right? Okay, great. I'll tell them to expect you in Rio by dinnertime, then. Give my best to Jack, and Merry Christmas." She hung up the phone and looked out the station window, the wilted poinsettias in her hair the only external sign of any internal disquiet. The stars hung like chips of diamond, undisturbed by the as-yet-invisible conflict at the edge of the solar system. Friends of hers were out there now, trying to keep the sky so quiet, but deep down she knew it wasn't going to happen. The Communion would be here soon, and what could she do but make phone calls? Well, at least she could make phone calls. Thumbing through her contact list again, she reactivated her phone. "Hi, Pharos? This is Fleur de Joie. Oh, thanks, merry Christmas to you, too! Busy Christmas, though. You remember that situation we talked about a couple weeks ago? Well we could use someone with your talents tonight in Auckland, if you can pitch in. We'll give you a ride and everything..."
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"Mama, I can't hear you! I can't hear the inside of my head! Where's my head?" "It's all right, baby," Paige crooned, taking hold of her daughter's flailing hands and gently folding them across her stomach. "Everything's going to be fine, I promise. The doctor turned on your suppressors and gave you a little bit of medicine to help you sleep." "I can't hear anything!" Holly wailed again. "It's like you're not even here... is this even real? Can we dance? Praise be to the... what?" Paige shot Richard one worried look over Holly's infirmary bed, then reapplied her best reassuring smile. "Just get some rest, okay cuddlebug? Daddy and I have to go do some hero work and stop the bad guys, but we'll be back very soon. Dr. Johannson is here to look after you, and Will is going to be nearby, all right? When we get back, we'll finish up all the Christmas stuff we didn't get to do today." Holly's voice was slurring from the light sedative, her eyes growing heavy. "Don't trust it," she whispered to her mother, patting the air with one hand. "It's so pretty, but it's baaaad." "I know, baby, I won't," Paige promised. She tucked the blanket around Holly's shoulders, then kissed her forehead and stepped back to let Richard do the same thing. She saved her long sigh for when they were safely away from the baffle-shrouded cubicle in the corner of the Claremont infirmary. "This is just getting worse. We've got to get that telepathy under control before something worse than an impromptu Cthonic church service breaks out in the living room." She forced another smile. "Wanna give me a ride to Puerto Rico?"
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Erin, who was not about to take a turn with the karaoke machine, relaxed on the sofa next to Trevor and sipped her eggnog while keeping an eye on the festivities. It was still a little strange, a little tenuous, this idea of a Christmas party for family and friends. The holidays still weren't an easy time, and last year she'd been proud to manage a quiet evening with Trevor and Travis, listening to Christmas carols and opening gifts. But it had been almost five years since she'd come to live on Prime, and she was a different person now than she'd been. She'd laid a lot of her old ghosts to rest, even gained the absolution she hadn't really understood she'd been craving. It was time to make some new holiday memories with the people she cared about. Or in some cases, she amended, looking over to Jessie, the people she had to care for. Jessie's bracelets were deactivated this evening, the indicators glowing the soft amber of standby mode that meant they could be turned back on in an instant if necessary. She looked no more likely to attempt karaoke than Erin was, having drawn herself up in a recliner with her knees to her chest and a cup of orange soda in her hand. It was still strange for Erin to see a version of herself with short blonde hair, but it was Jessie's body to do with as she pleased, and the cut and color did make telling them apart at a glace much easier. Jessie'd hardly said anything all evening, but Erin hoped this had to be better than being alone all night. At least Aquaria seemed to be having a good time. She leaned over towards Trevor, speaking into his ear just loudly enough to be heard over the music. "Maybe we should push the furniture out of the way later and dance," she suggested. "See if we still know the way."
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Fleur is readying an action to pocket the queen the second any of the bugs makes an aggressive move.
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Fleur dropped a handful of seeds as she walked into the room, letting her power flow around her and grow them into a leafy carpet over the foul mess that covered the floor. "You came into my world," she told the queen evenly, stepping around Gabriel, Gaian Knight and Tiamat. "My world, and you tried to invade it with your creatures." Vines climbed the walls, knocking aside the desiccated hanging bodies, then burying them. "For that alone, I should let the dragon kill you. She'd enjoy it, and I like it when the citizens of my world are happy." A thin, humorless smile curved her lips, then was gone in an instant. By now the walls were entirely blanketed with vines on Fleur's side of the room, the runes totally obscured, the smell nearly overpowered by the scent of greenery and flowers. Only the space the Queen and her minions occupied remained clear. "But then we came here, and I saw what kind of parasites you really are, and what you do to unprotected worlds, and it occurs to me that's not nearly good enough. You are vermin, preying on and destroying what you cannot build yourselves. Give me one reason not to crush you where you lay."
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~Thank you, Aura. Just follow my lead.~ Paige adjusted her own oxygen mask, then reached out and lifted Aura's limp and paralyzed hand. She squeezed it once, reassuringly, then gathered up her own mental energy along with her niece's and flung them both into the void. Black tendrils of energy began to seep from her body, flowing out of her closed eyes like tears, dripping in rivulets off her fingers and through the floor of the plane. In seconds they were outside, pierced by the subzero winds, in another instant back inside another plane, this one much warmer and less perforated than the one they'd just left. The black energy slid over Tesla Atom's boots, ran up her body like water flowing backwards, and disappeared into her ears. ~You've done your best to destroy two families, Father,~ Paige sent in a firm, even tone. ~You'll have none of us anymore. Get out!~ With all of her strength, and all of Aura's strength, she gave a massive shove, pushing Parker Psion back into the stolen body of his grandson. In a softer voice, she added, ~It's all right, Tessa, you're free. You have to put the plane back on the ground and get help for your brother.~
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Mind Control check, spending an HP to reroll a very bad first roll. 1d20+14=30
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Paige winced as Richard took her hand, accustomed if not resigned to her spouse's bursts of impulsivity. She could only hope that the rules of this dimension were enough like the rules of Prime that he could run safely without crashing them into an invisible barrier or the end of the world or anything truly unpleasant like that. She couldn't have pulled away if she tried, and even if she had, she'd have been placing herself in great danger of falling out of the acclimatization bubble that allowed Richard to run without catching fire, so she figured she might as well make the best of it. Closing her eyes once more, she extended her senses past the barrier, slowly stretching farther and farther away from her body until she reached the limits of her range.
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Stesha's delighted squeal sounded a lot like her daughter's as she clapped her hands and raced forward to hug both her friends at once. "Congratulations!" she bubbled. "I'm so happy for you both! That's such great news! You have to tell me all about it, in the village where there's a warm place to sit and talk." She released the hug only to beckon them along in the same direction the girls had gone. "So when are you due? Do you know what you're having yet? Oh, have you told Eden? She'll be a great big sister. It must be such a pain for you to be pregnant in the wintertime, ugh! But you'll have the baby in the warm months, and that'll be so much nicer!"
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I'd like to sign up all my characters for Phase II, but I have no problem letting some drop out and vignette as needed. In priority order: Wander Miss Americana Fleur de Joie Hologram
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"No, I'm Ammy!" Amaryllis insisted to Erik, delighted to have fooled him. "I'm big now! I can eat even more applesauce!" She grinned at Erik, then noticed Min setting Eden on the ground. Releasing a squeal of joy that hit a frequency audible only to dogs and bees, she abandoned the grown-ups in favor of a new playmate. "Edenedeneden! Mama told me you were coming to play! You hafta see my Christmas tree!" Grabbing the toddler by the hand, she headed off around the edge of the garden and towards the village. "They'll be fine," Stesha assured the others with an indulgent grin. "I can feel them anywhere on Sanctuary, and there's not much trouble to get into between here and the tree. But I'm so glad you could come. You know you're always welcome here." She threw her arms around Erik in a hug, then moved in and hugged Min as well, after a moment's pause to be sure that the sometimes-diffident woman was all right with it. "I've even put another guest room on my cottage. It's kind of not a cottage at all anymore." Pulling away, she glanced down at Min's abdomen and raised an amused, inquiring eyebrow.
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Paige looked around the destroyed landscape, her eyes wide, then finally let out a giggle that held only a slight hysterical edge. "Hello out there from TV Land, a beautiful place to be..." she sang softly as she pulled a long pair of scissors from the knapsack on her shoulder. "I can sense the three of us just fine," she reported, "and I think there are some... native, I suppose? Some soldiers from this reality, anyway, about a quarter-mile to the west of us. We don't want to run into them unawares, they are not in a good frame of mind." She shuddered a little bit. "But beyond the edge of the base... a little ground, a little sky, then nothing. It's like all the features of the world just stop. I don't really want to have a closer look out there just yet, not with everything we've seen with just our eyes today." She turned to her companions. "What do you think, Eliza? We're here, now how do we go about fixing things?"
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December 5, 2014 2:00 pm Village of Mayberry, Sanctuary There was a light dusting of snow on the ground of Sanctuary as the visitors popped out of the hickory tree-shaped dimensional portal their host had conjured up for them, but the weather this afternoon was clear and cold. The place where they'd arrived looked like the edge of a large garden, with rows of berry bushes still fruiting nearby, and nut trees clearly ready for harvest all around them. Stesha was waiting for them as they stepped out, her cheeks pink despite the puffy brown fleece jacket with matching knit hat and mittens she was wearing. It looked a little like a cold weather version of her costume, if one squinted just right. "Hi guys!" she greeted them cheerfully. "It's so good to see you, feels like it's been forever! Ammy, come say hello!" There was a rustling behind a nearby tree, whose branches parted to allow Amaryllis to come rushing through them without so much as slowing down. She was bundled up like her mother, except all in pinks and purples, and her hat was askew on her green curls. "Hi!" she chirped, finally slowing down just before she plowed into Erik. "Merry Christmas!"
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"Okay," Paige said, and from the tone of her voice she didn't think what Eliza was saying sounded crazy at all. That might or might not be a reassuring thing. "We've got a hundred-twenty inch projection screen down the basement in the 'man cave,' I think that's the biggest we're likely to find at short notice that's already hooked to cable. "You get your ritual supplies together, I'll grab everything brand name I can find in the pantry, and Fast-Forward will come collect you as soon as you tell me where he should pick you up. I suspect you're right about time being of the essence, but he moves quickly." Paige paused and thought for a moment. "And we might have a few things around the house that could come in handy. Good?"
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"Don't take it too much to heart," Erin advised sympathetically. "Freedom City almost gets destroyed a lot more often than most people think. The entire Earth, really. And when the entire universe gets threatened, most of the time hardly anyone knows about it at all, or they know about it and forget afterwards." She took a hot pretzel from the tray on the table and broke off a piece. "The thing to concentrate on is not that it almost got destroyed, but that you managed to stop it. And how to stop it better next time. I'm guessing you're making sure that key people are more informed on Terminus issues and what to look for from here on out?"
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Paige was a bit at loose ends until the phone rang, to tell the truth. She and Richard had evacuated their office with its dozen screens hours ago, and after phone consultation with LA had decided to stay home from work as well. At this point there was no telling what exactly was happening, except that it seemed to be all over Freedom City which ruled out Richard's haunted house theory. If it were somehow contagious, spreading a television-borne anything to Los Angeles would be disastrous. So instead she'd thrown sheets over the televisions in the living room, kitchen, and master bedroom, and forbidden the kids from touching any of their electronic devices until further notice. Holly had pouted about that and about being kept home from school, until Paige had gotten out both the Playdough Candy Cyclone and the Fun Factory, a significant bribe indeed. Paige cleaned the kitchen and folded the laundry and made it until nearly 10:30 before just sitting around (not to mention Richard's complete inability to just sit around) drove her up the wall. A quick phone call and Holly was off across the street to play with her best friend Gwen, whose extremely protective father would ensure that nothing scary got near them from the television or anywhere else. After some debate, she decided on the living room television for this, if only because if something broke, she didn't want it to be their expensive work equipment upstairs. Flipping it on, she clicked through channels, carefully avoiding going anywhere near the Discovery neighborhood. Despite a momentary suggestion from Richard earlier in the morning, neither of them wanted to risk seeing what had become of SuperCrime! today. Apparently the horror in the television had dispensed with its idea of foreplay, since every channel was displaying something profoundly disturbing or downright horrifying. Paige quickly steered away from the news anchors locked in a battle to the death, past the master gardener being strangled by a giant forsythia, paused for a moment's horrified giggling at the Teletubbies ritually sacrificing Po to their smiling baby-god. "This must be what television in Hell is like," she decided. "If they have TV in hell. They probably do, I mean, it's the only explanation for where half the regular programming comes from." She finally stopped on one of the local Univision channels, who seemed to have pulled the plug on their own broadcasting for the moment. Instead of the normal flat blue screen or old-school static, though, the screen was black and looked almost greasy to the touch. Still better than actually watching the programming, Paige decided. "I don't think I feel so good about being a television personality today," she decided. Before Richard could respond to that, Paige's other work phone, the local one, rang on the coffee table. She picked it up quickly. "This is Hologram, go ahead." She cocked her head and listened to Temperance's announcement. "Well thank god somebody has. What do you need us to do?"
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"It's a pleasure to meet you." Erin extended a hand in her best professional manner, even as her eyes flickered in quick assessment of the reclaimed Omegadrone. When Steve had told her he was meeting someone with information related to the Terminus, she'd been more than willing to tag along. It had been a couple years now since the incident with Madrigal's Hounds, and since then they'd seemed to be avoiding the former members of Young Freedom, but she suspected that couldn't possibly last. Any Terminus activity on Earth was a high priority threat anyway, even with the Evil Whatever From Space potentially bearing down on them. "Is Catherine inside, then?"