Electra
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Miss Americana paled, a nifty feat of autonomically-controlled hydraulics that she didn't even have time to admire under the circumstances. "So what you're saying, in a nutshell, is that this Communion swept in from space and in a matter of what, a day, hours even, they wiped out the Star Knights and destroyed Lor-Van?" On a separate screen from the one running through Sharl's program, she began searching for The Communion, wondering if there was some big player in space she'd simply missed in her research. "Did they say, could you tell where they might be going next?"
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"Take your time," Miss A murmured, her eyes locked on the screens as she watched the disaster unfolding in real time from Sharl's perspective. Far away she could feel her stomach twisting from the horror of what he'd seen, but she locked it away and hoped she wouldn't vomit while she was gone. "Do you know anything about who the attackers were? You said something earlier about the Star Khan, but those don't look like Stellar Khanate ships." They didn't look like anything she'd seen before, and even though Gina's specialty wasn't space, the fact that they were completely foreign was not good news. She thought she'd gotten a good handle on all the major spacegoing races after having to go rescue Steve from the Curator's ringworld. If this were some new threat, they could all be in deep trouble.
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"Okay," Miss A murmured, hugging Sharl back as she checked him over for injuries. He'd obviously been in a fight, there was damage all over his body, but nothing that seemed immediately dangerous. His mental state was far more fragile. "Okay, Sharl, it's going to be all right. You're safe here," she reminded him. She maneuvered him over to one of the plush visitor chairs and sat him down, then went over to the wall computer screen. As she spoke, she opened his program in the ArcheTech mainframe and began repairing the bits of damaged code. "Take a couple of deep breaths, and then tell me everything. Start at the beginning," she encouraged.
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"What?" Gina scrubbed her face with her free hand, tried to focus. Her eidetic memory let her rewind Sharl's babble and play it over again in her head, but it didn't make much more sense the second time. "All right, try to calm down," she told him, flipping on the bedside lamp and groping for her slippers. "Go up to my office on Eleven, I'll meet you there in two minutes." She closed the phone and turned to look at Steve. "I have no idea what's going on," she told him, "but it could be big. You may want to stay awake for awhile. I'll be in the basement." Tossing on her favorite shapeless brown bathrobe, Gina headed for the kitchen, a can of Mountain Dew, and hopefully a little mental clarity. Two minutes later, in the spacious walk-in closet of the eleventh floor penthouse office at ArcheTech, Miss Americana's perfect blue eyes opened wide. She looked around, opened the door, and stepped out into her office, dressed for a new day and ready to lead. "Sharl?" she called.
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Not too far away. in an unassuming little house with way too much basement for its floorplan, Gina Evans was sleeping the sleep of the fairly righteous. She and Steve slept back-to-back in their ultra-king size bed, as much cuddling as either of them would allow while unconscious. She'd had a long day at work, public relations in the morning, overseeing human tests on the newest line of cybernetic replacement limbs in the afternoon and evening, followed by a late-night conference call to a robotics manufacturer in Tokyo. It had only been an hour ago that she'd fallen into bed, dreaming happy dreams of flexing her authority and giving herself a day off tomorrow. The shrilling of Gina's phone startled them both awake, though thankfully time and therapy had tempered Steve's instincts to come up swinging. Gina would've thrown the phone and gone back to sleep, except that she recognized the especially jarring ringtone as one of her emergency codes. Sharl's emergency code, in fact. "What the hell?" she muttered, groping her way to the edge of the bed. "He's like a billion light years away. What kind of cell phone coverage could he get?" She picked up the phone, noted the glowing "404" flashing on the screen, Sharl's general purpose distress code. It had seemed funny at the time. "What is it?" she demanded as she answered. "Did you do something to piss off the Lor?"
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"Ouch! Hey!" Fleur threw up her hands as the bullets began hitting her, looking more than a little put out. The bullets bounced off her skin, leaving little red welts like mosquito bites wherever they hit. "Stop that!" She threw up a screen of vines between herself and her aggressors, not quite opaque enough to block sight, but enough to block some of the bullets. "Somebody's going to get hurt! I'm here to help you!" She heaved a sigh at that, looking at the ragged group. Booked to capacity or not, she couldn't exactly just leave these people here like this.
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Despite the cramped confines of the plane, despite Ember's flashy display of power and noise, Paige barely paid attention to what was happening around her. Her eyes were locked on her father's, her hands clenched into fists tight enough for her nails to leave deep imprints in her palms. As she stared, blackness crept over the surface of her eyes, swirling in like stormclouds to obscure the warm brown with the shiny patina of an oil slick. "You're a monster," she told Parker, her voice gravelly and just a bit more resonant than usual, "but you haven't finished killing this one yet. He's still in there. We're going to get him out, even if we have to rip you to shreds doing it."
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Okay, it's unlikely to work given his high Will save, but Paige will dip into her entropic array for her Enhanced Mind Reading with a side of Drain Wisdom. If she can get in, she's going to look to see if there's anything left of Josh in there that might be salvageable. She rolls a 30
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Fleur took a long look around the ruined city, taking in the death, the senseless ruin and decay that seemed to be everywhere. Abruptly, she swung her leg over Superbee's side and slid to the ground with the ease of long practice, just in time to vomit into the already-choked gutter. When she finished, her face was white against the green of her hair, but her eyes were full of determination. "We need to know how far this has spread. I'm going to look around at the edges of the city. I'll be right back." She touched the flowers in her hair and disappeared, heading for some of the places she knew best at Freedom City's outskirts. . Lonely Point, Wharton Forest, the seafront boardwalks, the fields outside the airport, something had to be outside the reach of the bug swarm.
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"I don't know," Erin admitted, shaking her head a little. "It's a lot of trauma to all happen in one day. First her mom, then her dad... it's probably gonna be rough." Her own lips quirked ruefully. "I can't exactly claim to know what goes on Nina's head on normal days. But at least she's got Mark, and they seem... okay, still. I guess? A lot to take in there, too. I don't know if she really understood what he can do before now." She sighed, pleased when that didn't bother her ribs or lungs, and ran her thumb back and forth over his fingers. "I should probably send her a gift basket or a card or something, the 'thanks for hauling my ass out of the ocean' gift. Do you think we're gonna bring her onto the team?"
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Erin made a dismissive noise and reached out a hand, inviting him to unfold his arms and take it. It was looking much better already, the fingers straightened and the bruises faded to a fascinating swirl of green and yellow. "Not with my teammates there. I knew you wouldn't let me stay down there too long. Hell, by the time I figured out where I was and which way was up, Nina was practically on top of me already." She glanced over to the other bed. "I think she's more freaked out about the trip than I was. The whole Mark power boost thing can be kind of overwhelming." She shifted and turned onto her side to face him, wincing a bit as her ribs protested the movement. "You know why I had to do it," she insisted quietly. "I couldn't stand there and let him hurt you."
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The first fifteen minutes of Erin's convalescence were mainly occupied by thoughts of how much her body hurt. She was certainly no stranger to pain, but if nothing else, her advanced healing meant that most of her injuries were over and done with very quickly. Apparently getting shot to the bottom of the sea by an angry water controller was a little worse than the average tussle with a Freedom City bad guy. So for awhile she was content to lay quietly and let the spots recede from in front of her eyes. The doctors dithered a bit about what to do with her, but after they ruled out an IV or any of the painkillers they had on hand, she let them wrap her ribs and leave her alone. After fifteen minutes, though, she started to get bored. Laying prone in an exposed and unfamiliar area bothered her combat instincts, and there wasn't even a TV to take her mind off things, after Nina's little temper tantrum. Erin debated getting up, but suspected she would fall, and besides her boots were now fish food. She looked over at Trevor, still inscrutable behind his mask and totally silent. "Hey, you okay?"
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"Careful," Erin murmured without opening her eyes, a very small smile curving her lips. She didn't need to open her eyes to know who held her hand. "Think I broke a couple fingers down there. 'N mosta my ribs. 'N some other stuff. Gonna lay here a minute." She coughed, wincing at the motion, and spit out more blood. For once she'd finished a tough fight with her uniform largely undamaged, if wet, but nearly all her visible skin was rapidly purpling with bruises to match her outfit. "Joo finish the fight without me?"
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While the bees were assembling, Fleur had disappeared for a few moments back to the village, looking in on the labor she was still ostensibly supervising and having a few words with the village coordinators. She didn't like leaving right in the middle of things, but another call to the hive had an obliging bee dispatched with one of the balloon-style baskets they used when transporting people hither and yon. The bee would have a nap in the big, warm barn, and if there were any problems, the monastery with its portal to Earth Prime was less than ten minutes flight away. It was the best she could do on a moment's notice, and it made her glad that the existing residents of Sanctuary were melding well with the new arrivals. Survival here would be impossible without cooperation. She arrived back at the portal just in time to hear Comrade Frost's words. "You should see when they all get together," she murmured, then hopped up onto Superbee's back. "Until we see what we're dealing with, I think "bust in and burn them all is the best we're gonna do. Though stunning them with sound and blasting them with rocks is also totally okay." Nudging the massive bee with her heels, she dodged the remaining spires and flew through the portal.
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Paige goes on 8
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Wander kept her eyes tightly shut for the entire ascent, lest the pressure and speed do even more terrible things to them, so the flying impact onto the deck was doubly shocking and enough to finally drive the air from her lungs. She sucked in a wheezing breath, coughed up a mouthful of blood, and automatically rolled herself onto her side in the recovery position. All those first aid classes hadn't gone to waste after all! Everything was still sparkling with weird lights when she opened her eyes, so she kept them closed. "Thanks," she whispered to Nina.
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"That just makes him braver than I was," Paige countered coldly, marshaling her scattered thoughts and throwing up every mental defense she could muster. "What did you do to him?" she demanded. "Is he still alive in there somewhere? I know you killed my brothers and sister, are you going after your own grandchildren now?" On a tight mental link to Richard, she sent ~Take him down whenever you get the opportunity. His focus isn't on you now, but he might try and take hold of you because it will hurt me.~
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Paige listened to Frances with half her attention as she tried to mentally prod the guards back to awareness. Not a single one budged, which set off a big red flag. Josh wasn't even a psychic, even with a boost from his cousin he shouldn't have been able to encourage anything more than a catnap. And his eyes... She couldn't help but shiver, staring into those angry eyes, somehow familiar and wrong all at once in that furious young face. She raised a hand to Frances in a "just a moment" gesture that was more suited to polite dinner conversation than a life-or-death standoff, and concentrated. "Verdammt flatscan mercenary, I should leave him behind when the plane goes! Now, for my traitorous daughter and her cocaine-addled thug of a husband!" Paige's eyes flew open wide, her face draining of color as she stared at Jump. "...Father?" she blurted, her voice half-gasp.
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Paige is going to use her Mind Reading 10 to attempt to get a look in Josh's head. She is suspicious! First roll is v. bad, spending HP to reroll Second roll is a 28
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Stesha closed her flower portal and rubbed her forehead with her fingertips as she turned back to the others. When had everything gotten so complex and difficult, and so very, very crowded? "Any ideas on how we're supposed to free up a world overrun by these things?" she asked. "We don't exactly have numbers on our side." She looked to the masked giant bee still lingering near the portal. "Superbee, do you think you could gather up a detachment of GDBs willing to help out? At the very least, we know fire destroys them very effectively."
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Wander was already slowing rapidly by the time Nina approached her, the pressure and cold of the water taking a toll even on the supertough young heroine. She still plowed doggedly through the water, but her movements were becoming jerkier and less coordinated, dropping her speed and increasing the churn in the water around her. She still looked up, albeit with closed eyes, when Nina called to her. Erin was indecisive for a second; how much could she really trust the daughter of the man who'd thrown her down here in the first place? Holding still would make her a sitting target for any attack the water-controller wanted to unleash. Just as important, stopping would kill whatever momentum she'd managed to build up, jeopardizing her ability to get to the surface at all, even if Nina provided no hindrance. But her arms were already numb and aching, her head pounding, her leg muscles cramping. To get herself to the surface would take a miracle, and she suspected her situation wasn't going to get any better. Ignoring her more paranoid instincts, Erin went limp in the water, concentrating on holding her breath and listening.
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Another round in the ocean, another fort save. Erin gets a 20, That leaves her Injured x2 and Staggered.
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Erin hummed softly at the kiss, reaching up to thread her fingers through Trevor's dark hair. "In that case, we might have missed a few hours of our weekend, but there's still plenty of time left. And I think there's something in my contract about extra time off in case of temporal incursions that spawn new timelines, I'll have to check. Wonder who I'd have to get a note from to prove that." She turned to face him and kiss him more thoroughly, undoing a couple more buckles on his jacket while she was at it. "So," she finally said, breaking off with some reluctance, "check in with your grandpa, grab some coffee, eat some pizza, then start the weekend over again? I'm pretty sure we've got more couches."
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"Maybe we could send Redbird out to get some, even if nobody's delivering. Send her out in one of the vehicles with treads... or maybe the flying saucer. That'd speed things up." Despite the late hour, Erin wasn't tired at all and probably wouldn't need sleep for another day or so, barring vigorous activity. "We should see if your grandpa wants anything, or if we can help with the stuff on the road." Erin looked mildly chagrined. "I can't believe we forgot about those drivers. At least the trucks were heated. And we did have a lot on our minds." Erin walked up to the grandfather clock, currently reading well past midnight, and sighed. "So do you think we set ourselves up for it, trying to take a weekend off? Like thumbing our noses at fate?"
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"Augh!" She drew back and smacked him playfully on the shoulder, though even a playful smack from Erin was nothing to sneeze at. "Why did you have to remind me? I was saving that mental scarring for later." Even so, she didn't seem too upset as she slid her arm through his and continued down the hall. "That's almost as weird as the idea of you growing a beard. I bet it's a big, bushy one," she teased. "So you have to make yourself a new mask for your costume, just to fit it in." Erin brightened with a sudden idea. "Maybe I'll get you a Woolly Willy for your birthday, so you can experiment with different styles." She chuckled, glad to shake off some of the heaviness of the moment. "And you know, now that I think about it, pizza does sound pretty good. I wonder if anyone's going to be delivering this late in this weather."