Electra
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Hologram goes on 20
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Inside Caradoc's armor, an urgent chime signaled an incoming communication. The caller didn't bother with the nicety of waiting for him to answer, instead overriding the system to make herself immediately heard. "Goddamn it, Steve, what the hell is going on with my robot?" Gina demanded, sounding angry, frightened, and a little congested from her recent nosebleed. "Something kicked me out, and it shouldn't have been able to do that, and the automatic safety protocols didn't engage. I can't get back in, and the satellite feed from Boston shows that something is driving it. You've got to stop it, whatever it is, you can't leave a weapon like that with... whatever the hell it is."
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Paige tensed at this new looming threat, looking first to her crew. "You heard her, guys, time to get back to the house. Something nasty could be headed this way." Dave the cameraman cocked an eyebrow at her. "If we're back at the house, how are we supposed to film it?" he pointed out with a grin. "We can run with these things if we've got to, we've proved that a few times." "I appreciate the enthusiasm, but the insurance guys are gonna have kittens if they see you standing there while some kind of army comes bearing down on us. House!" It took a little goading from Frank, but the crew began jogging towards the house, Dave ostentatiously walking backwards to keep his focus on the action as long as possible. Paige ignored him, turning to Gargantua. ~There is something coming this way using a matter transporter,~ she projected, tossing in a brief image of what a matter transporter was and did. ~You must head towards the main house, where the humans are gathering. Stay with my camera crew and follow them if they move to another safe place. We'll protect you.~ Or Edge and Velocity would do the protecting, but it was close enough. Paige closed her eyes and extended her senses, trying to track whatever was bearing down on them.
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While Trevor and Mark worked on the unexpected guest, Erin slipped downstairs and began activating the Manor's defensive systems. The alarms were all well and good, but if anyone figured out where Mark and Nina were, they could have an international incident barreling down on them anytime now. She killed the floodlights that had triggered with the alarms, but couldn't do much about the thousands of gallons of water puddling over the backyard. (Except double-check the sump pump system in the Manor, which she did.) While she worked, she flipped on a couple of the television monitors to BBC and Al Jazeera, wondering how newsworthy all of this had been.
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"All of you, look at this," Sojourner ordered, her voice uncharacteristically harsh. "I think this is it, this is our key." She laid out the specifics of the spell in broad strokes, pointing to the various aspects and variables of the spell. "We'll need blood from all of us, maybe Grandfather too, and a very large casting circle. We need to go back." Knightfall studied the spell, obviously torn between hope and worry. "But... this spell will change the past, won't it? Unwrite our timelines? What if we cause a paradox and completely bork ourselves out of existence?" "If we haven't borked ourselves by now, anything we do from here on out is unlikely to change that," Tensile pointed out, his cheer slightly edged with nerves. "That's the only reason we're around at all, we inherited Mom's resistance to changes in the timestream." "There's also paradox protection built into the spell," Sojourner added. "We'll actually be lifting ourselves clear of the timestream for a little while, to give us the metaphysical leverage necessary to move the coil." "Now that sounds dangerous," Tensile commented. "It is," Sojourner admitted. "And I'm not entirely sure about the long-term effects on any of us. The consequences could be unpredictable, and we'd just have to hope for the best." She looked around at the others, seeking consensus.
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"Huh," Paige murmured, "marsupial reptiles. I guess that particular evolutionary path died out right about here. I've never heard of a bird or lizard with a pouch." "They're all scared," Kelsey murmured, her boom mike loose and almost forgotten in her hands. There wasn't much to record anyway, except whatever Paige and Tiamat translated. "The whole village is near panic," Paige confirmed, her face tightening a little. "We'll have to hope they don't do anything crazy while our friends upstairs are still getting things ready for them." "Can we get closer?" Frank asked, peering over the edge of Gaian Knight's rock platform. "You can shield us, right? They won't see us even on the ground." "I don't know," Paige replied, looking uncertainly towards Gaian Knight. "I could keep the shield up, I don't know if it's a good idea?"
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Tensile: Knowledge, Technolgy: 12 Sojourner: Arcane Lore: Nat 20, for a 30
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Paige blew gently across the surface of her steaming-hot mochacino as she scanned the part of the bookstore set up for the reading. She didn't go to many book readings, but this one seemed reasonably well-attended for a Saturday night. She was interested to know what a journalist with twenty years in which to gain perspective would make of the bad old days in Freedom City. She and Richard hadn't been more than footnotes back then, but she'd read several books on the heroes and villains of Freedom City during the Moore years. This was a bit further from her oeuvre, but she'd known some punk rockers back then, too. She grinned a little as she remembered the mohawk on the stylist who'd done her hair and showed her makeup after she'd run away from the Psion compound. The lawless and unlawful kept close company back in those days. "Let's sit towards the back," she suggested to Richard, moving past rows of chairs. A few people noticed them, but dressed in casual clothes and a continent away from Hollywood, no one was quite certain enough to point them out. "I told Holly to text if the whole sleepover thing wasn't working out and we'd go pick her up."
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Hardly a minute later, Erin raced onto the sodden lawn as well, her feet barely splashing on the surface of the puddles. She was wearing a shirt that probably belonged to Trevor and a pair of faded Ocean Point Amusement Park shorts, her hair flattened to her head and a sleep crease still embedded in one cheek. Despite that, she was utterly alert as she opened the box and spread tools out for Trevor. "Ambulance?" she asked him, raising her communicator, then looked to Mark and Nina. "What happened?"
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Miss Americana's focus on Sam and her family faltered, replaced by a rather glassy-eyed expression as she bounced lightly back to her feet. "Yes, I am Miss Americana," she told Stan cheerfully, then lurched forward a step before catching herself and straightening. "Thank you for your concern, but I am uninjured," she added, turning to address Sam. "I must... I must return home now. Stay in school," she told Lucas, and then took off again, wobbling a bit as she climbed. Many miles away, Gina picked herself up off the floor with assistance from a worried Emerson and climbed back into her seat. She wiped a thin trail of blood from under her nose and reached for her computer. "What the hell was that?" she demanded of the empty air.
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"The assprancer who started this whole thing, the freaky poison guy," Knightfall whispered back. "He was trying to open a portal to some dark mystic power and it ate him, like always happens, and spit out the creature we saw. Way not to think ahead, right?" She dug an elbow into Daybreak's ribs. "Probably one of your descendants." She looked around, taking in the rows of caskets. "Are we sure this guy actually killed all these folks? It kind of looks like a creepy family mausoleum or something. Like look at these nameplates, some of these people lived to be real old. And some of these caskets look like they actually got dug up out of the ground. It's like maybe he went around stealing dead bodies before he realized he could make his own."
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Miss Americana seemed to take notice of the two new heroes in the crowd, looking in their direction and beginning to move towards them. When she was still a few yards away, though, her knees seemed to buckle for a moment, an alarming lapse for an inhumanly graceful woman. For a moment, her smile disappeared, replaced by a startled and horrified look, and then it was gone again, replaced by a toothy and determined smile. "So sorry, must go, duty calls!" In a second she was in the sky, flying away from the city at top speed. Inside and far away, Gina was in a full-out panic. Something was pressing on her, something huge and inexorable and at the same time ineffable and filled with light and a strange kind of... goodness? Whatever it was, it wanted control of the robot real bad, and it was about to get it. Gina automatically activated the kill switch that would disable the robot, only to find it already possessed and nonfunctional. More of her systems disappeared by the second, she had little time before she was booted entirely. She had to get away from the civilians that pressed in around her, get over the ocean maybe, or north towards less populated areas. With a cheerful cry that sounded grotesquely fake to her own ears, she rocketed into the sky and headed east, broadcasting a distress call on the semi-encrypted Freedom League Alert channels. "This is Miss Americana in Boston airspace, I'm being overtaken by a hostile mental presence with unknown intent. I can't hold on, don't let me hurt anyone--"
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Gina is feeling very willful! A nat 20, for a total of 30
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"Thank you so much, everyone, for coming on the tour," Miss Americana addressed the crowd. "In the next few days we'll be emailing out a survey about your experience, I'd love to get everyone's thoughts on the historical immersion experience. And if anyone has any questions now, I'm happy to answer them." She let the tour group break up as her assistants collected the special glasses, moving into the crowd to address the individual questions various people had. "That's an excellent question, Mr. Williams. We're working on several types of assistive devices for consumers with various disabilities. The current glasses work seamlessly over any type of corrective lenses, and we are currently fine-tuning the earpiece to interact with more types of hearing aid. The beauty of the holotour is that it takes advantage of existing local infrastructure, so takes advantage of accessibility accommodations already in place..." She worked the crowd effortlessly, with only about half her attention devoted to the questions and handshakes and photos and autographs. It was all routine by now, even if it was a routine that would've had Gina herself running for the hills in thirty seconds. She mentally allotted another hour to wrap up the session, then back to the hotel to change and teleconference with her teams at ArcheTech before attending the Pops concert with Steve and the various city boosters who wanted to be seen with her on this very patriotic holiday. With any luck, they could be back in Freedom City before midnight. Overnights in hotels just weren't that fun when she didn't actually have her body along. As the tour broke up, other people began to approach as well, drawn by her familiar face and voice. She didn't mind, it was certainly more entertaining to talk to the kids than to the town fathers.
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Paige quietly repeated the words she was hearing for the benefit of the other heroes, then continued speaking aloud even as she projected mentally towards the freed simian. "The men who kept you in a cage have all been captured," she told him, projecting quick images of what little she'd seen of the arrests and detentions. "They're being taken to an underground prison to await trial. They should be locked up for a very long time." Turning, she gestured to her colleagues. "This is Edge and Velocity. They're superheroes, and they're responsible for putting villains like the Crime League into cages. My name is Paige Cline, and this is my camera crew. We're here to document what happened, so people will know. What's your name?"
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Paige stared blankly after the men of her family as they fled the scene at high speed, then looked around at the rest of the group. "Well!" she said with all the forced optimism of a camp counselor on a rainy day, "I guess we should decide what to do next. Gaian Knight, Tiamat, Crimson Tiger, would you all be up for a little covert observation of the dinosaur society? If Gaian Knight can give us a ride, I can conceal us from them, and we can get a better look and some footage as well. We should pay attention to what they're eating and using for clothes, that'll probably be important to setting them up in a new location." She took the memory chip out of her camera and handed it to Frank, replacing it with an empty one. "Might not be quite so depressing now?"
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There was a brief commotion from the crowd as a figure appeared in the sky overhead. Boston did not have the same superhero density as Freedom City, so flying people were generally more noteworthy around here. A moment later Miss Americana touched down in front of the group, feet hitting the ground with the grace of a ballet dancer despite three-inch heels. As a representative for her company rather than a working hero today, she'd eschewed her uniform in favor of a deceptively simple designer sundress in swirls of red and white, paired with navy blue leggings studded with tiny white stars. It should've been tacky, but somehow she managed to make it look striking instead. She beamed at the asssembled VIPs, catching Steve's eye as she did. "Hello all of you, and welcome to the first official Holo-History Boston Tour, sponsored by ArcheTech! I'm so pleased to see you all today, I know that many of you have been instrumental in paving the way toward making this project a reality over the past twelve months. When the Holo-History program was first being developed in our labs, we tossed out the names of a number of cities for the pilot program, but in the end there was only one real choice. Boston's wealth of history and forward-thinking civic boosters made it the ideal place to launch our most ambitious educational initiative yet." She went on for a few minutes, thanking VIPs by name for their assistance, reeling them off without notes or prompter or ever seeming even a little bit bored, then concluded: "But I don't want to waste any more of this perfect holiday weather talking about the nuts and bolts of the project. You can feel free to talk to me afterwards with any questions about that. If you'll all put your glasses on now, we'll get started with the tour!"
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Paige turned and motioned to her camera crew to leave the building entirely; they didn't look pleased about it, but headed for the door. "If this goes south, a little timely assistance would be appreciated," she murmured to Velocity, sotto voce, before retrieving the key from its metal hook on the wall. She walked slowly to the cage, keeping her eyes on the giant ape. ~I want to help you,~ she assured him again, ~but you have to help me help you. Show them that it's safe for us to free you.~ She put the key in the lock, the well-oiled tumblers turning easily and silently. Leaving the key in the lock, Paige pulled the door open, stepping aside to let the massive simian walk out on his own. "It's okay," she said aloud to everyone. "Everything's okay."
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Erin waited to hear Roland's reply, but when the refugee was silent, she spoke up instead. "Jessie's not my sister, you know. She's my double from another dimension. Both of us are doubles to the woman who really belongs here on Earth Prime. Our worlds were destroyed and we had nowhere else to go. I lost my whole family, and when I came to this world all I could feel was anger and grief. I've been here six years now and it still hurts. But the heroes here, they gave me the same chance they're giving you, to put all that pain towards doing something good, saving other lives. It doesn't change the past, but it helps."
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"Who are you?" Knightfall demanded of the strange new apparition, automatically raising her bo to a defensive position. She edged around the room towards her brother, keeping both eyes on the wispy intruder. "What are you doing here? What mystery have you solved?" On the other side of the portals, the remaining Hunter-Whites looked at each other as minutes passed and there was no response from the away team. "Come on, get the hell out of there," Erin muttered impatiently. "Don't make me come in there after you..." "You can't," Sojourner interrupted firmly. "It's too dangerous, you could destroy all our timelines simultaneously if something happened to one of you while the universes are in flux. Besides, it may be that the two of you are providing a magical anchor to this dimension. If you go through, the portals could pop loose on their own and strand everyone." "You know magical theory?" Erin asked with some surprise. "Enough to get by," Sojourner replied with a faint smile. "You never know what's going to come in handy." "Well if that's a magic portal, I don't think anybody who's gone through so far knows bip about magic," Tensile pointed out. "Maybe that's why they can't get out, they're waiting for a magician. Come on sis, we can help them out. Beats waiting!" Without so much as waiting for assent, he scooped up Sojourner and hopped through the nearest portal.
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Erin shrugged one shoulder at Mark's question, finally warm enough to pull off her gloves and tuck them away in a pocket. She could tune an engine now, even rebuild one with some help, but that didn't make her an engineer or a scientist. To her, the entire thing looked like a melted lump of plastic. "Maybe it belonged to a time traveler," she suggested half-heartedly. "One who went back to a time when it wasn't cold down here, then left some of his stuff behind. Weirder things have happened."
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Knightfall looked a little pale by the time the playback finished, swallowing convulsively a few times as they watched the living corpse sit in place and twitch. "Dubyateeff," she murmured as the screen shut down. "Guess the universe got a head start on punishing him for his crimes. What a nutbar." Shaking herself, she addressed her comm channel. "Daybreak, Hematite and I can hear you. I'm going to try and home in on your location with my comm signal. Do you need help?" She lifted her radio and took a few steps, watching the signal and hoping to find a clue..
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Knightfall completely ignored Hematite's sputtering, looking as though she were plenty used to getting the "stop jumping into danger" speech from male relatives. "If the virus was something airborne and contagious, we'd have spread it already just by coming back from worlds and times where our parents have just died," she pointed out coolly, then set down the hallway without waiting for Hematite. She did, however, let him shoulder past her and retake the lead with a minimum of fuss. "You know," she observed aloud, looking at the signs flashing on the walls, "this kind of reminds me of a setup Dad was planning to setup, kind of a status display for the house. It monitors us all anyway, so he figured why not have icons to show if there's an emergency anywhere. I don't know what the symbol there means, but the idea seems familiar." She startled a bit as they came across the dead guy. "Well, that might be the emergency, for all the good it did him."
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Knightfall gets a 13. Wah-wahhhh
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Come and See: Epilogue Wander I guess at the beginning I felt more shocked than anything else, seeing Erin after so long. They say time moves different where we are and I guess it's true because there's no way of keeping track of minutes and hours, much less years. And you don't really want to anyway, when you're just totally happy doing whatever you're doing for as long as you're doing it. There's always enough time and never too much, and nobody ever gets put to bed, which is cool too. But it's not that way down on Earth, and time had totally left a mark on her. My first impression was pretty much “hey, when did she get to be a grown-up?†because that was the most obvious thing. She's only a little taller now than I remember, but her face has changed a lot. The baby fat is all gone, and her hair is longer and straighter. No curling irons in the new world where she lives now, I guess. She was smiling when she saw us, but it was a weird smile; it looked kind of like it hurt. Like she wasn't used to really smiling very much, maybe. And her clothes were weird too, purple and black and clingy, like she'd dressed up as a superhero or a scuba diver for Halloween. Then I saw she had a sword strapped to her back, one with blood on the hilt, and it made me think that maybe she wasn't just dressed up. But it's too weird to think that your big sister might be a superhero, especially when you're still trying to deal with the idea that she's gotten so much older. I don't even know how old I am anymore, but she's way older. I looked at Mom and Dad to see if they were feeling the weird too, but they were just staring at Erin like they'd never had anything to look at before, and Mom was already crying, so I didn't know if that was good or bad. Then came the hugging part, which is pretty normal. Lots of hugging in my family, always. Erin hugged me first, actually picked me up like I weighed nothing and hugged me till I oofed. Her body was shaking like she was crying, even though I didn't see any tears. She set me down then, but didn't let go. “Megan, oh god, Megan,†she whispered into my ear, then she pushed me back to arm's length and just looked at me for a long time till it was weird. “I'm so, so sorry,†she told me, with her voice cracking at the end. “I shouldn't have let you go. I should've found a way to save you.†“It's okay,†I told her, because it totally was. “Things kind of sucked there at the end anyway, and then I got to come here, where it's... you know, it's really great, all the time. Anyway, I know you did the best you could.†I gave her a big smile because it looked like she really needed it, and it seemed to work because she hugged me really tight again for a long time. Then she hugged Mom and Dad too, and talked to them both for awhile, but I couldn't hear what they were saying because it's basically impossible to eavesdrop here when other people don't want you to, so I guess it's not entirely perfect for little sisters. But they all started crying some, and Erin was crying and laughing at the same time, and I think they were telling her it was okay too, that they knew she'd done the best she could. Like I hadn't totally said it first and in a lot fewer words. Then we all talked together for awhile, and that was cool because Erin told us all about what she'd been doing since she'd ditched Earth for her new world and we'd lost track of her for awhile, and it turned out she really is a superhero now. She uses all that strength and jumping and stuff to protect people and save her new world, and she's got a real job and a boyfriend she says is totally hot and has superpowers too. I'm gonna try and talk one of the angels into letting me get a look, now that we know where she is, because I'm super curious now. But she's doing good now, even though she's not with us, and she was really happy to see us and know we're good too. I guess she worried that in the shakeup in our universe that we might have somehow gotten lost or fallen out or something. But nobody gets lost up here, not for too long anyway, and nobody ever gets forgotten. Eventually Erin had to go, because alive people aren't really supposed to be here at all and she was just around because she'd been doing a special favor for some of the big angels. Which is weird to think about too, her being powerful enough to do things like that, but I guess she's pretty hot stuff with that sword. It was sad to see her go because she cried again, but it's not her time to be with us yet. Just a little while longer, though. I can't wait to show her all my favorite places up here!