Electra
-
Posts
11,284 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Freedom City Guidebook
Freedom City PBP: A How-To Guide
Gallery
Events
Everything posted by Electra
-
Paige wrapped her fingers tightly around the monorail's grab bar, keeping her eyes fixed on her companions rather than on the narrow tunnel and the encroaching darkness. If she pretended it didn't bother her, she reasoned with herself, maybe she'd stop perspiring sooner. She supposed she ought to feel flattered that she rated two security guards as an entourage along with the Captain, but apparently some of the nice folks at Blackstone weren't as big of believers in rehabilitation as they claimed. Apparently twenty years on the straight and narrow wasn't quite enough to inspire trust, now they knew where she came from. Paige wasn't sure she'd have gotten in at all if she hadn't been toting Christie along. Christie Levin was both an old family friend and an excellent attorney, which made her the perfect companion for a jaunt like this. She'd been Paige's court-appointed the one time she'd gotten picked up way back in the day, and they'd managed to strike up an improbable sort of friendship. Christie understood about Psions, and family, and even a little bit about Paige's fear of mountains, and even though she was nearing sixty now and making bank in private practice, she had time to help out with this very sensitive bit of trouble. She'd managed to legal-eagle the staff at Blackstone into submission with less than ten minutes of wielding paperwork at them. Paige just hoped they'd bee as successful at convincing Frances to cooperate. Christie's first visit, just after Ember's incarceration, had not been terribly productive. "Has she had access to the outside at all?" Paige asked Captain Schmitt, and was pleased when her voice sounded normal. "Newspapers, television, visitors? I know you haven't allowed her cousin in to see her since she was arrested."
-
"Troy," Erin repeated contemplatively, turning to look at him. He looked a lot more like her than most of the others, though she could see Trevor in the lanky body shape, in the turn of his nose. Oddly enough, his personality reminded her mostly of James, the brash cockiness that concealed both power and underlying insecurity. "That's a nice name. And you won't have to change the monograms when you inherit, that's a plus." She smiled faintly and drank the rest of her water. "And you're right, we've always got somebody or other gunning for us, or plotting how they're going to get us someday. I know one day Omega's going to come back for another round, and I don't know how we can possibly defeat him again." She shrugged. "But this isn't him. Not his style, too indirect and uncertain. Not enough terror. I have no idea who we're ever going to piss off enough that they want to eradicate us from history. Which means we're pretty short on clues right now." Setting the glass in the sink, she walked into the small breakfast nook and looked out the three-sided windows there. No new intruders on the lawn, and the snow was still falling, shining like bits of glitter under the floodlights that bathed the grounds while the house was on alert. The silence stretched for a few minutes, till she finally said, "I'm sorry I didn't raise you to be more touchy-feely. It's hard for me, even though that's how I was raised. Too many memories, I guess. I hope it didn't make you feel unloved." Downstairs, the gaggle of time-travelers was being mostly quiet in deference to Mystery's concentration, barring the occasional grunt from the spirited elbow-fight that had broken out between Knightfall and Daybreak. Taking advantage of the distractions, Tensile made his way over to the chair where Travis was sitting. "I just wanted to say, sir," he began softly, "that it's an honor to meet you. I don't think it's spoiling the timeline to say I never got a chance before, but I've heard stories all my life. You were one of the first really great heroes."
-
Somehow Erin was unsurprised to see that her small cadre of angels had caught up to her again by the time she reached the stables. In the heat of the moment, she could ignore the fact that her horse was a horse again, leaping to settle on its huge back. "Any warriors that are mine to control, have them join me at the front gates. And bring lots of weapons," she added with a grim half-smile. Drawing her own crimson sword, she nudged her horse into motion, following Gabriel into the sky and off to War.
-
Miss A took a few minutes to consult with the doctors after depositing Magnus on a diagnostic bed, sketching out a treatment plan for the worst of his injuries. She suspected the baron would have his own technopath on hand to handle his rehabilitation, but made sure the doctors had her contact information through ArcheTech if additional help was needed.By the time she was done, Magnus had been given very good painkillers, so there wasn't much she could've said to him, had she known what to say. It was with a sense of relief and a great fatigue that she headed back to the plane with Harrier, keeping an eye on the sky to see if Dragonfly would be rejoining the group or finding her own way home. As she climbed the jetway and entered the plane, her shoulders slumped, losing her habitual perfect posture. "It really isn't bad," Miss A told him reassuringly, but obligingly sat down in a seat and closed her eyes. A moment later, a hidden latch opened in the bulkhead, swinging out a door to Gina's hidden compartment. Gina blinked into the light, wiping dried blood off her face with the side of her hand. "Every time I go out of town on a mission, it sucks," she told him peevishly. "What have we got to eat around here?"
-
Miss A gave Harrier a reassuring glance. "I'm okay," she murmured as they walked, "bloody nose, a headache I won't really feel till later. I got off pretty easy. What about you?" she asked in return. "You took a couple of hard hits there yourself." A herculean effort kept her from glaring at the disreputable ragamuffin creature in her arms. "But yeah, a big ol' BOOM sounds just about right for finishing this place off." She quickened her pace slightly, not running, but certainly eager to reach the shelter of the prefab domes and the infirmary.
-
Erin had reached the nearest kitchen by the time Hematite caught up with her. The tension in her shoulders made it obvious she knew he was there and had heard his greeting, but she remained silent while she poured herself a glass of ice water. She drank it slowly and watched the snow fall outside for a minute. "I was always pretty sure I'd die before I got old enough to have kids," she finally said. "But hearing that someone deliberately went back in time to wipe me out of history is still weirdly troubling.And now you're all here, and I have no idea what the future's supposed to end up like." She half turned, looking at him from the corner of her eye. "What's your name?" Down in the basement, Sojourner smiled a little at the byplay between her "siblings" and "father," obviously privy to all the stories as well. She sobered a little as she leaned toward Mystery. "It's okay if you can't get much," she assured the younger girl, "but it couldn't hurt to try, right? Use every tool available and gather all the information you can before you make your plan," she added, obviously quoting as she looked towards Trevor.
-
"Yes, as soon as possible." Only a little of the tension had left Wander's face as the world melted back to normal. "I need to get back to North Bay and check on Midnight. We left him fighting most of the League, all by himself." Erin wanted to think that even in a severely altered reality, the Freedom League would not use lethal force, but she knew better than to count on that. And even using non-lethal force, they could've hurt him badly in the few minutes it had taken to cross the ocean and fight the evil wizard. She hefted Medea in one hand. "And we can haul her to Blackstone as we go. I'm sure she's got some warrant outstanding."
-
With a sigh, Miss Americana crossed the room to go fetch the fallen hero. "Oh my god, you're naked," she blurted out when she got close enough to see him well through the near-darkness. The incongruity of it all had her laughing aloud. "This just gets worse and worse." She stepped over to the wall and used her elbow to break the glass of the fire suppression station. An alarm chirped weakly and died as the heroine reached in and grabbed the fire blanket stashed there. A little rolling and some wincing from both parties got it wrapped around Magnus before she scooped him up like she was planning to carry him over a threshold. "All right, let's get the hell out of here. I think I've had quite enough fun for one day." Miss A set a very brisk pace as she headed for the door.
-
Paige paused with the bottle raised to her lips, staring at the sky. "Is anybody else feeling weirdly religious right now?" she asked rhetorically as the Omegadrones spilled once more from the rips in the sky. "I feel like I should be praying." Instead she carefully capped her soda and set it on the ground, then grabbed Richard and kissed him for all she was worth. "I love you so much," she told him with great conviction. "If by some crazy miracle we live through this, we're getting married." With that settled, she stepped away, her hands and eyes flickering with black energy as she turned once more to the fight.
-
Erin rocked back on her heels a moment, surprised to hear it stated so plainly. Most of the celestial beings she'd met were a lot more cryptic, and generally much less helpful. She immediately suspected some kind of trap, but even her ingrained cynicism couldn't quash the hope and relief welling inside her. "You can? Can I-" The scream inside her head cut off her words; instinctively Erin knew it was her "horse" crying out with fear and rage. Something had gone very wrong back at the stables. Well that just figured. "I have to go," she told the angel in front of her. "Something bad is happening, and I have to help." Spinning around, she raced through the hallway and out the nearest window, which obligingly fizzled away instead of shattering at her passage, then began sprinting towards the stable. Thoughts of home and family would have to wait, now, she suspected, was the time to earn her badge.
-
Wander took Fast-Forward's word for it, especially when immobilizing the wizard did not seem to be changing the world. They were rapidly running out of time. Clutching her sword in one hand, she used the other to do a handspring off a thatched roof that was modern shingles in alternate moments, taking her out of the line of sight of the stoned magician. With an expression of fierce concentration on her face, she leapt off the roof and down as hard as she could, bringing the flat of her sword up against the side of Merlin's head with a resounding THWOCK. "He's not thinking now," she reported with grim satisfaction, watching Merlin's eyes roll back in his head.
-
Erin suddenly placed her hands flat against the table and pushed herself to her feet. "I'm going to go... check the defenses again. You all talk amongst yourselves." Turning on her heel, she strode quickly from the room and off towards the stairwell, closing the door just a little too firmly behind her. The eyes of most of the kids were on her as she went. "I'm kinda suspecting that she's not as not-upset as she says she is," Knightfall commented dryly, turning back to the table. "It's not an un-upsetting sort of situation, really," Tensile pointed out, his scarred face settling into a frown. "And right now we're just shooting the breeze about how she and Dad end up dead in most universes. You know how she is about other universes already. We need some kind of a plan. Preferably something better than "wait around and try to kick the ass of whatever shows up." If it were that simple, I don't think we'd all have to be here today." "What we need is some intel," Sojourner put in, throwing back her coffee like medicine. She looked to Mystery. "Eve and Alex are taking care of you, are you a psychic of any sort? Maybe you can pick up some hostile intent floating around?"
-
Move Action: Acrobatic Bluff, DC 27 to resist Standard Action, Charging Power Attack v. Merlin, 1d20+9=21
-
Wander goes on 16
-
Jive's comment actually drew a small laugh from Hologram, mostly for the absurdity of it all. "Hell no," she told them fervently. "Your job sucks. Hopefully today is an outlier in the bad day category, but I've been bumping up against your kind for decades and it looks like long hours and big danger and no compensation. Nobody even says thank you anymore, right?" She walked over to an overturned newsstand and began rummaging in the cooler, finding a few undamaged bottles of soda and carrying them over to the others. It wasn't a hot meal and a good night's sleep, but it was better than nothing. "I never understood why you guys didn't just flip 'em off and leave town." She opened her Coke and looked to the sky, still full of smoke. "Now I guess I can kind of see why," she admitted in a small voice, "but it's scary. We're staying and fighting, but that probably means we'll never leave."
-
Miss Americana moved at the last instant, diving out of the way of the plasma missile intended for her, but stepping right in front of the missile intended for Dragonfly. She reeled slightly at the impact, but shook it off with a disgusted look at her charred clothing. "I am definitely billing for that," she muttered under her breath. If nothing else, the impact jarred a bit of sense back into her, tempering rage with a bit of strategic thinking. Fighting the man wasn't working, but there was plenty of machine around here for the destroying. She began cracking her knuckles. In the space of seconds, she'd calculated the power frequencies that her allies and their equipment operated on, filtering it out along with her own signature frequencies, and targeted the remainder of the EM spectrum with a wide-ranging blast that ought to fry pretty doggone close to anything electronic. It gave her a brief flashback to the reactor room at Blackstone where she'd lost her first robot, but this blast wasn't near as strong. Hopefully it would do the trick, though! Spreading her hands, she aimed one blast at each side of the room and fired twice, plunging the room into sudden dimness.
-
Erin stepped into the office and stopped in front of the desk, not sitting down but relaxing her stance with her hands clasped behind her back. She really had spent too much time in this office over the years. "Not too much, I don't think," she told the obscured figure in Duncan Summers' chair. She took a deep breath. "Really just one thing. I want to know where my family is. Are they here? Are they in some other heaven dimension, or..." She swallowed, clenching her hands white behind her back. Her father had committed suicide, but he was dying already. She would've said no god would be so cruel as to deny him heaven for that, but she knew better. "Are they anywhere that I can see them?"
-
I didn't mention the Curator because I am honestly not sure that he would be affected by a Limited: Objects blast. If he is object enough to hurt, then yeah, she's basically blanketing the room, so he's gonna be in range of one of the blasts. And it's a 50 foot burst radius, so yeah, she'll tag the ceilings as well.
-
"I'm not upset, I'm... absorbing information," Erin muttered as her many, many, many offspring all began to clamor for coffee. She had a sudden fevered image of all of them as infants, simultaneously crying for attention, and could swear she felt her ovaries beginning to shrivel. She took a few moments to catch her breath and think while refreshments were passed out, and thought she had something close to a handle on rationality by the time she spoke again. "All right. So the upshot of all of this is that Trevor and I are going to be infected by a deadly virus sometime in the next day or two, unless we manage to stop it. Do we know the vector?" "Not really," Knightfall admitted after a glance at her twin. "I mean, we're pretty sure it wouldn't be airborne, because it would be hard to control and Dad wears a gas mask like, everywhere. Plus, if it got into the general population..." She went quiet, and suddenly all the kids were looking at Erin. Erin swallowed past a suddenly dry throat and nodded understanding. "We don't really know much about the perp," Knightfall continued, "but we're reasonably sure he's not looking to cause a mass slaughter." "Scant consolation though that may be," Sojourner commented. "But I agree, it's almost sure to be a contact vector of some sort, delivered at a time when you're vulnerable. Even a routine patrol battle would make it simple to administer a skin-contact virus." "That's kind of the weird part," Erin mused, ignoring the voice telling her this whole thing was the weird part. "We're not even on duty for the next four days. I don't know that we even planned to leave the house." She had no interest whatsoever in discussing their weekend plans any further in this company, but silently bid them farewell.
-
Okay, gonna spend an HP to clear the Dazed Gonna spend an HP to stunt off the Blast Array: Drain Toughness 10 (Extras: Affects Objects, Area [General, Burst, 50ft radius], Linked [Damage], Selective, Flaws: Limited [Objects], Limited [Electronics]) [20PP] Damage 10 (Extras: Area [General, Burst], Linked [Drain], Selective, Flaws: Limited [Objects], Limited [Electronics]) [10PP] Gonna use a Standard Action to fire that EMP blast into the room, blanketing as much of the room's computer equipment as possible. Gonna spend another HP and fire the blast again, trying to take out as much of the nanite flood as is visible, or if they are not within range, more of the computer equipment. She's trying to make the lights go off. And of course Selective to avoid her buddies.
-
"The thing about criminals," Wander muttered, "is that they love to do stupid things in big groups. Medea almost never operates alone, and she managed to wrangle herself some power in this universe despite being a semi-washed-up Crime League relic in our timeline." Wander gave Medea a vindictive little shake, though most of her attention was on Blue Jay and the wizards. "She's almost certainly involved, but I don't recognize either of these guys. God, I wish we'd brought Midnight along." For a lot of reasons, her expression said. "Hey you! Both of you!" she called out, taking a few steps forward. "Which one of you is responsible for altering the timeline and getting us stuck in the Ren Faire here? Now is a really good time to put things back to normal and spare yourself from a truly horrifying ass-kicking that we're going to have to give both of you if we don't get some answers! We're really on a tight schedule here!"
-
A stern look from the original Midnight worked at least as well on the fourth generation as it ever had on the third, and soon all the "kids" were silent, looking from one to another with some throat-clearing. Finally Tensile, the obvious eldest of the group, took a half-step forward and adopted some semblance of gravity. "Well sir, I can only speak for myself as far as what I know of the situation, but there's got to be some similarities. Ah, in my family, all of the kids have limited temporal immunity because our mom isn't a native to the dimension. It's not perfect, but when something comes along and tries to overwrite the past, it usually always missed her and at least some of us." "That's similar," Sojourner confirmed, looking over at Erin with an unreadable expression. "Even when Dad would get hit by a ripple, Mom would avoid them and get them fixed. We theorized-" She pursed her lips and swallowed hard before continuing. "We theorized that for this temporal attack to have hit them, it would need to be specifically targeted and precisely aimed. It was also tailored to avoid both of their immunities." "Yeah, exactly," Tensile agreed. "Once we realized that, we figured the temporal insertion had to be made decades ago, because of... reasons," he elided, suddenly looking a little uncomfortable. "Look, I don't want to get into all the gory details, you understand? Someday you might be my parents, and I don't want to make things weird. Weirder." He grinned quickly, then sobered again. "Anyway, I figure we all came to some similar conclusion, zeroed in on the date and time, and jumped back. Or sent back their little brother."
-
"Don't touch me!" Paige shrieked, lurching to hide behind Richard and away from the encroaching yellow light, actually dragging him backwards a few feet for good measure. "I mean... I'm okay, no problems here, well, of course there are problems, we have nothing but problems. We are in fact so far beyond screwed that the light from screwed will never reach us, but it's nothing that another dozen superheroes won't cure, right?" She laughed, high and near-hysterical. "I promise you one thing, my little extra mojo issue is the very least of your worries. And where the hell is our inspirational speech?" she demanded. "We're not the superheroes! We don't even live here!" Paige could remember having this exact argument with Richard from the other side hours ago, but it seemed like she'd been a very different person then.
-
Paige sighed. "I knew I owed you one for bringing Jimmy to stay with us and arranging for the lawyers, I just didn't expect you to call in the marker right away," she admitted ruefully. "But you know what they say about picking your friends and picking your nose." A particularly loud exclamation drew her to the window, but the angle was wrong for them to see much. She was confident that the aggressive woman who'd jumped out the window could more than handle the two-bit villain, now that her own family was out of the line of fire. "We'll call it even. Now let's get back, I have to pay the babysitter double if we're out past ten-thirty." Putting her hand in his to keep him from jumping out the window, she headed for the front door, walking maybe just a tiny bit slower than absolutely necessary. Part of being even meant suffering equally, after all.
-
Erin hesitated for a bare second, then turned around and walked away from the mirage of Seattle, back over the crystal water and into Bayview. She could've gotten there faster with any of her powers, or with the bike she somehow knew would appear at her summons, but there didn't seem to be any rush. The sun did not move in the sky here, and the people she could see in the distance had little of brisk purpose she associated with the people of Freedom City. The angel at her side certainly didn't seem impatient at the leisurely pace. Even so, it didn't seem to take long before the orderly residential streets of Bayview gave way to the brick walls and manicured lawns of the Claremont Academy. There were people here too, or maybe angels, walking the grounds or reading, sleeping under trees like she herself had done once upon a time. She thought she recognized some of the people and their costumes, but decided not to look too closely. There was such a thing as getting too much knowledge of what came after. Without asking her guide, Erin walked straight into the main building, up the shallow marble stairs and into the administrative hallway. At the end of the hallway was a narrow bench she'd sat on many times, and beyond that, Duncan Summers' office. Deciding on manners at the last moment, Erin knocked on the door.