Electra
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"I think we should be asking you that question," Sojourner replied, her face stony, "since you are the intruders here." "You are all intruders!" Erin barked, "and if anybody is going to be asking questions, or alternatively beating all of you unconscious, it is going to be me! Which I will do unless I start getting some answers that are actually related to what kind of deadly danger we're supposedly about to face but not notice for thirty years!" She took a deep breath, then turned to the new arrivals. "So who are you? I mean besides being my children from an alternate dimension who may or may not be related to each other." At least this new pair looked like they were actually younger than she and Trevor were. The fact that this was at all comforting just told her how low the bar was set right now "I'm Knightfall," the new girl said as she pushed back her cowl, looking a bit intimidated. Without the hood, she favored Erin very heavily, with the same bone structure, pale skin and auburn hair, though her eyes were red and black like Trevor's. At least until she blinked, whereupon they bled back to a more traditional brown on white. "With a K. And this is my twin brother Daybreak. We're here to save you from a terrible danger... that I gather you've already heard about," she added, losing a little steam from what had apparently been a prepared speech. "Twins?" Erin said incredulously, losing the color she'd gained from her previous outburst. "Huh, must run in the family," Tensile observed.
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Tensile broke into a wide grin, his cheerfulness oddly disarming even under the circumstances. "Wow Dad, what happened to you? In my day, you're the master of deduction, and here you are asking the obvious questions." Sojourner smacked Tensile on the fleshy arm, a sisterly kind of gesture that seemed to surprise even her. "Didn't anyone ever warn you about risking disruption to the timestream? Foreknowledge of the future-" "Timeline's already disrupted, 'sis,'" Tensile pointed out affably. "Or at the very least we're in a disrupted period prior to a major divergence point, cause I sure as hell don't remember being related to either of you." He looked from Sojourner to Hematite. "Course, I've got five big brothers and sisters, so it's easy to lose track some days..." Erin's mouth had fallen open around the time that Trevor had demanded to know their guests' parentage, but if it hadn't, it would've fallen open now. "Five brothers and- six children?" she sputtered incoherently. She had the growing sense that the conversation was definitely outpacing her, but it was a lot to take in! "Some of them are adopted," Tensile told her comfortingly. "Not me, though! I was a late surprise!" he added with apparent pride. Erin blanched. "It's true that the three of us obviously come from divergent timelines," Sojourner put in, quelling the burgeoning madness. "The fact that we're all here for the same reason suggests that this point in history is sometime before Trevor and Erin Hunter-" "We're not even married yet!" Erin objected, sounding like a drowning woman. "-conceived their first child, or began the chain of events that would lead to them having a family. So it does seem that knowing there are several possibilities in play should be harmless enough," Sojourner conceded. "Not too far before," Tensile noted, giving Midnight and Wander an assessing look. "How old are you right now?" Erin gave him a look that promised great pain and he immediately took a step back. "But, you know, nothing's set in stone. We're here to help!" Erin rubbed her temples. "Right now the most helpful thing is going to be everybody sitting down and somebody finally explaining exactly what the threat is that you're all here to help us with. Because right now nothing makes any sense at all!" No sooner had she said that than the temporal alarm began whooping again, announcing another chroniton burst.
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Paige had slumped to sit on the curb when Richard let her go, exhausted and dazed from the expenditure of mental energy and the sheer horror of what they'd seen. When he returned with Archer she just blinked stupidly for a moment, unable to process what she was seeing and hearing. It was only when the others began to speak as well that she started to make sense of the bloody mess. She twisted around to look at Jav. "There's nowhere to go," she told him, her voice small, "and no way to get there if we had a place. We could run away," and her eyes flicked to Richard for a moment, "but not for very long. The other heroes are gone. Force OPS is dead. Nobody's coming to save us," she concluded, her voice very small.
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Paige took the baby from her niece, cuddling him against her body with the ease of long practice. Jimmy was tense and afraid, but a whispered brush across his mind was enough to remind him of family and relax him a little. "They won't kill her," she promised Carolyn, letting her own certainty show in both voice and mind. "She's being transferred to Blackstone while she's waiting for arraignment. They won't hurt her in any way she doesn't do to herself while attempting to get free. She'll probably be sedated for awhile, she'll probably be put in nullifier cuffs after that." Paige shrugged, a little fatalistic, a little sad. "You know she won't cooperate of her own accord anytime soon, but she needs to at least take a step. I've arranged a lawyer for her as well, but if Frances won't participate in her own defense, she could be held indefinitely." Raising her free hand, she rubbed her face. "If either of you do go to trial, I will testify on your behalf. You're both young women with a lot of life and opportunity still in front of you. I know being a Psion is important to you, but you could be so much more than that, and maybe this is your chance." She leaned in. "When I ran away from home, I was eighteen and scared out of my mind. I didn't know how to be anything but my father's daughter, but I knew I couldn't let him run my adulthood, and I couldn't turn my future over to him. Finding a place in the world was hard and it took a long time, but it was worth it. And I will help you if you want." Looking at Carolyn's face, she judged it was probably not the time for any more of this discussion. "For now, I promise I'll take care of Jimmy until you can be bonded out. And he'll only be a thought away."
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"Wow, everyone is suddenly so interested in saving my life all of a sudden," Erin noted, unable to keep a thread of sarcasm from her voice. "Weird how you all show up on the first day of my first vacation in six months, instead of like, say, when we were fighting off Omega three years ago." "Well yeah, you didn't need any help to fight Omega!" Tensile protested, his face and voice full of hero worship that made Erin feel vaguely uncomfortable. "You kicked his ass! Every time Uncle M-" "That was an entirely different situation," Sojourner interrupted, neatly cutting off whatever Tensile had been about to say even as she looked at him with an air of dawning understanding (and still suspicion). "Your ability to win a physical fight is certainly not in doubt. The threat you face today is invisible, intangible, and won't manifest itself for decades. No one will even notice till it's too late." Tensile looked surprised, but nodded in agreement with that assessment. Erin gave them both a narrow-eyed look. "This is starting to sound like some kind of really over-elaborate and super-complicated cover story, and given the way things around here work, that may well mean it's totally true. Now we're going to go downstairs and sort this all out, and nobody is going to be shooting anybody with anything or I will kick both your asses, understand?" She brandished the poker again. "Yes ma'am," Sojourner glared at Tensile, but tucked away her weapons in her belt. "Yes'm." Tensile grinned at both women and concentrated on his arm, which folded up like a weird origami sculpture, the gun turning into a metal hand with fingers that flexed and stretched. "Well... good." Erin was surprised and a little suspicious of the easy acquiescence, but she was also in a hurry. She herded the intruder-visitors into the living room and keyed open the clock, then nudged them down the stairs, Tensile first, then Sojourner, then brought up the rear herself. "Coming down!" she called down the stairs. "Got two... well, probably non-hostiles with me." Hopefully nobody would be shooting anyone today.
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With nearly-identical instincts, Wander and Sojourner swung clear of the misplaced wall section, coming around it to see the cyborg from the lawn barreling out of what had to be a secret passageway. I didn't know there was a passageway there, Erin thought, feeling oddly miffed that this stranger knew more about her home than she did. From behind her, she heard the unmistakable click of a weapon being cocked, and looked back to see Sojourner with a silver blade in her left hand and a raised pistol in her right, pointed unwaveringly at the newer new arrival I also didn't notice the gun. Brain must still be in vacation mode. "Hands up!" Sojourner snapped at the cyborg. "If that arm so much as flashes, there won't be enough of your brain to collect in a specimen jar." Wander brandished her poker helpfully, but felt almost superfluous at the moment. Up close she could get a better look at the cyborg, a male in maybe his thirties, maybe older given the pure white hair. It was hard to get much of a read on his face, thanks to the giant scar that bisected his cheek and ran down the side of his face. He looked oddly familiar anyway, enough to weird Erin out all over again. He put his hand and arm-gun-thing up nonthreateningly at Sojourner's prompting, but his eyes were locked on Wander. "You have to listen to me," he told her urgently. "You and your husband are in terrible danger. I'm here to help you!" He finally gave Sojourner a suspicious look. "Who are you?" "My husband?" Erin repeated. "Sojourner," the well-armed woman snapped, giving the cyborg the stink-eye. "And why should she trust you? Who are you anyway?" The cyborg grinned suddenly. "I'm Tensile," he said with surprising affability. "And you look real familiar. I think we just might be related."
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"I've asked to be allowed to take him while you're in custody," Paige replied carefully, not yet reaching for the child. "It'll be better for him and for everyone than going into metahuman foster care. I've raised two of my own, I won't let anything happen to him. You're going to be held for questioning for awhile, and you might be charged for this or other Psion family incidents in the past. You don't have to answer anything without a lawyer being present to help you. I've called a friend of mine, someone who understands the family situation and who will be vigorous on your behalf. If bail is set, we'll find a way to pay it so you don't have to stay in jail." She sighed, looking at the young woman who was stranger and family, enemy but not. With a glance towards the police who were standing nearby, she opened a focused psychic link, reaching into her nieces head to talk. ~What was Father thinking?~ she asked, faint despair in her mental tone. ~Going into what could only become a fight and bringing the babies along? Did he have a plan at all? You could all have been killed.~ Despite herself, Paige was momentarily overcome by a memory of her time in the mountain, running for her life while her father's words of condemnation rang in her ears. She shut the memory down as fast as possible, not ready for that conversation with her niece.
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Miss A will save twice, since she is also interposing for Dragonfly against a targeted area attack First roll is terrible. Spending HP Second roll is a successful save, no damage Third roll misses by one, one bruise The bruise results in a feedback check for Gina, using the toughness save of the manifestation of her powers Gina is bruised and dazed
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Erin squirted peanut butter onto a cracker and finished up her meal, the packaging obligingly dissolving in her hands as soon as it was no longer needed. "All right, a little while to walk would be good." She assigned two of her army angels to stay in the stable-cum-garage and monitor events on Earth, then set out with the angel who'd provided her lunch. They walked in silence for awhile, as the conglomerate architecture of shared Heaven became more and more a perfected vision of Bayview and the south banks of the South River. In the distance she could see the Pramas Bridge shining as though made of platinum, and she smiled, thinking of Trevor. Further away, the skyline changed again, showing other places in other cities. Off in the distance, past City Center and what should've been the Bay, she caught a glimpse of a familiar bulbous sculpture in the sky, one that had nearly fallen on her the last time she saw it. "Is it nice, working in heaven?" she asked her angel, not sure how to ask what she really wanted to know. "Better to serve in heaven than to rule in hell," he replied with a faint smile. "This is just the outskirts of paradise, but it's still a kind of paradise." "Even with what you have to do?" "Would it be paradise for you to have to watch the Earth but never be able to intervene? Or to move to the higher reaches, but know in some part of you that things were left behind undone and undefended?" Something in his gaze sharpened as he looked at her. "No, I guess not," she admitted, looking back towards the stable. From here it looked like one of the buildings at Claremont, brownstone and slate roof, chased with ivy even in winter. "The work we did today is horrible, but at least we did something. Does everyone feel that way?" "If they did, this place would be a lot more crowded, and there might be a lot less pain on earth. But still, there's enough of us to hold the line." At his nod of direction they stepped out onto the water, frozen crystal and nearly dazzling to the eyes. "Most of the dead are content to move on, to rest or to whatever comes next for them." Erin looked at him, wondering who he'd been in life, if he'd ever been alive. She sensed a certain kinship, that maybe she and he hadn't been in the same line of work, but the sort of things they'd had to do and see and give up had been similar. "The dead who move on, is there a way to find them from here?" "You're thinking of your family," he replied. It wasn't a question, but she nodded anyway. He was silent for a moment, then admitted, "I don't know. I've wondered myself, but finding the answers... Here I have found some peace despite the questions that weren't answered. I fear finding the answers and losing the peace." She nodded, but her face firmed with resolve as they walked over the frozen waves forward the Space Needle. "Who should I ask?"
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Erin could feel Sojourner at her heels as she raced down the stairs to the first floor, though the stranger's feet were as silent as her own on the steps. The alarm noise cut off abruptly, though the subtle strobing of the lights in the wall sconces indicated the house was still on full alert. She cut towards the back of the house, darting through the kitchen and into the mudroom long enough to step into her boots. If she had to hunt down the intruder or intruders outside, no telling how long she'd be out there, and just because she could walk barefoot through the snow for hours without sacrificing toes, that didn't mean she wanted to. "So what are you saving our lives from?" she asked Sojourner during the momentary pause. "If not the drone?" Sojourner looked almost embarrassed. "I, um, I'm hoping I'll know it when I see it," she admitted. "See, where I come from, my best friend is a telepath and a pretercognitive. Uber-useful, but she tends to be vague on a lot of the details. She told me that..." She stopped again, almost visibly editing her story in her head. "She told me that some important people who died in my world shouldn't have died when they did. Somebody went back and messed up the timeline, and it had to be fixed. She told me a day and a place, and I found a guy to open a portal, and here I am." "Time travel, huh?" Erin cocked her head at that. "Well, that's not something we've had to deal with much, I admit." There'd been a time in her life when she'd been very interested in time travel, but Alex had explained to her that trying to go back and change the past would only result in spinning off new alternate universes, rather than doing what she hoped it would. "Don't you worry that changing the change could erase your timeline?" Sojourner shrugged. "A- my friend told me that our timeline is the wrong one, and it's unbalancing the temporal sheaf we live in. If I fix what went wrong, my timeline will absorb back into the original line and everything will be the way it's supposed to be. I'm hoping that means I hook into whatever version of me is there and we just glom together, but I can deal with it if it just means that the original, good timeline is safe." Erin nodded at that sentiment and decided not to press further for the moment. Temporal mechanics gave her a headache at the best of times, and they sitll had intruders. She headed towards the stairs at a fast jog, only to check herself with a screech of boot rubber as a section of the hallway wall swung into her path. "What the hell?" she demanded again.
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"All right, if this is the center of the anomaly, how do we fix it?" Wander demanded, hopping up onto a hay-wagon that sat on eight steel-belted radial tires. Just to be on the safe side she took Medea with her, hauling the witch one-handed by her belt an the gathers in the back of her costume. Wander took in the lay of the land, looking for anything that seemed obviously mystical or at least like it required punching. She wished for a moment that she'd stayed behind instead and sent Midnight along, he was always better at the tactics and the solving of puzzles than she was. "We haven't got a lot of time."
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"Steve!" Miss A cried out, her entire body jerking for a moment as the knight fell to the floor, his armor folding away to invisibility under the holoprojector that was incongruously still functional. The heroine swayed back and forth for a moment, seeming to struggle for control in a way that only Dragonfly would know was more than metaphorical, then turned burning eyes upon the Curator. "Oh Magnus," she murmured, her voice the arresting snarl of a jungle cat, "you really shouldn't have done that." From unseen pockets in her clothing, she produced a few circuits and scraps of plastic and began adding them to her scanning device, working by touch as she continued to watch her enemy. When she focused like this, it was very hard for the object of her attention to look anywhere else, even at what she was doing. "Bad enough that you were determined to exploit the Curator's technology," she told him, her voice still deadly and soft. "That was just hubris and we're all guilty of that. But you went so much further. You did what you knew you shouldn't, what everyone said you mustn't. If you'd only made a vegetable of yourself, well, we'd all have been sad and said what a great man you were and kept the "I told you so's behind our teeth." She removed a small device from one compartment of the scanner, clipping it to her belt loop with an absent motion. "But that's not what happened," she continued in a near-whisper, her eyes on his. "Your foolishness put us all in danger. You put the world in danger. You put out a damned welcome mat for a power that's trying to kill us all. A power that someone I care for gave his life to stop. And now that power is here, and it's trying to take someone else from me, and it's your fault. I'm afraid I can't forgive that." With a single, incredibly rapid motion, she raised her arm and fired the weapon she'd built. An intense burst of sickly-red energy shot across the room and impacted Curator-Katastroff in the sternum, spreading across his chest in a red wave. "I know you'd want us to stop you."
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The name tugged faintly at Erin's memory, but didn't really mean anything till the woman behind her cursed softly. "Doctor Tomorrow," the woman muttered, "it must be a temporal incursion alarm. Someone's trying to stop me." "Trying to stop you what?" Erin demanded, whirling again to face the stranger. She motioned to Trevor and Travis to keep going. "Arm the defenses and get downstairs, I'll catch up." Turning back to the strangely familiar woman, she asked again, "And who are you? What are you doing here, and what's the deal with the half-Omegadrone outside?" She lifted the poker threateningly, and was mildly surprised when her opponent seemed... amused? "I'm a friend," the stranger attempted to reassure Wander. "I don't want to hurt you, or Trevor, or Gr- Travis. I'm here to save your lives, I just didn't exactly intend to meet you like this. You can call me Sojourner." She gave Wander a half-smile, and for a second her face was so purely Trevor's that Erin's mouth dropped open. "I came here alone, I don't know anything about an Omegadrone outside, but I know something bad is going to happen today. It's better if we don't split up." It wasn't exactly a story to inspire great confidence, and Erin knew enough to know she ought to be skeptical, but the moment of recognition had thrown her. Abruptly she remembered the great interdimensional adventure Young Freedom had gone on in high school, and meeting Lucky Strike, her alternate dimension daughter from the future, a daughter who'd been older than Erin herself at the time. Sojourner... could it be a coincidence? She shook it off and went with her instincts for the moment. "Fine, but I'm going to need some better answers very soon. Let's get downstairs."
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Paige felt a moment's relief as the villain chose the better part of valor, then sighed as she took in the chaos that remained behind. "Richard, I think we'd better excavate your mother. Will, help your grandmother, please. We need to leave now before he finds a friend or two and comes back. We can call this in as a possible base to the Freedom League and see if they have any information on a new villain with a Samedi theme, but there's no point looking for trouble tonight." Automatically she began straightening the rest of the kitchen, using paper towels to wipe down anything anyone touched.
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Free Action to freak the hell out Standard Action to rearrange gadgets like so: Enhanced Blast 6 (to Blast 18) (PFs: Incurable, Indirect) {14} 'entropic blasts' Force Field 6 (to TOU 18 (12 Protection, 6 Force Field) {6} 'force field belt' Move Action to Bluff Curator. A terrible roll results in a 33, and since it's a move action that's a DC 28 to resist being flat-footed. Surging for another Standard Action to Blast, still at -1 due to static : An excellent roll results in critical success, 31. That'll be a DC 38 toughness save.
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"Sounds like a plan," Erin agreed. "Travis was saying something about spending the afternoon in the library, he can take the secret staircase to the basement from there and we can meet him." She raked her fingers through her messy hair, reached automatically for the bat she wasn't wearing, then picked up a fireplace poker instead and headed for the door. Two steps into the corridor, dim since nobody had turned on the lights yet this evening, she collided with another body She could tell from the feel that it definitely wasn't Travis, so Wander went with her instincts and attacked, bringing up her makeshift bat with one hand on each end and shoving it lengthwise into the intruder's chest. She was surprised when her opponent was able to jerk backwards at the last minute like someone going under a limbo pole, not avoiding the blow entirely, but deflecting most of the impact. A leg shot out to trip Wander, hooking her behind the knee with one ankle in a move she herself had used many times. Countering, Wander threw herself forward onto the intruder,overbalancing them both before flipping overtop the other fighter's head, and coming down in a fighting crouch on the other side. Before she could capitalize on the maneuver, though, the intruder was already turned around and reaching for the lightswitch that was hidden in shadows behind a silk fichus. They both blinked as the lights came on. The intruder was a woman, Wander noted quickly, not much older than she herself, wearing a black outfit ideal for home infiltration. Her hair was black too, cut dramatically to frame a high-cheekboned face that was weirdly familiar. Really weirdly familiar. She had no obvious weapon, but the belt full of parts she was wearing was probably more than enough to produce something lethal. For a crazy moment, Erin wondered if Tricia Hunter had traveled across dimensions again, but this woman was too old. The resemblance though... "Who the hell are you?" she demanded. It wasn't clear if the stranger had even heard the question. Now that the lights were on, the dark-haired woman looked stunned, as though she'd hit her head when they'd both tumbled to the floor. She stared at Wander, then through the door to the room where Trevor was. "Oh my god."
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Erin yelped in surprise and backed away from the window, diving for her discarded jeans. "We've got trouble," she told Trevor, jerking her head towards the window. "Someone just appeared out there in a bunch of green sparklies, somebody with what looks a lot like some Omegadrone parts stapled on. I couldn't see much, but some kind of metal arm and probably a power pike." She dragged on her pants,, but her shoes weren't even in the room, a poor tactical decision in retrospect. Her feet would survive the cold. "I guess his timing could've been worse," she allowed, sounding resigned. "There was no way we'd have four crisis-free days."
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It was some time later that Erin looked out the window again, this time looking up from the floor and out into the darkening skies over Freedom City. "Huh, it's stopped snowing," she observed as she shoved her hair out of her face and moved to sit up. Wincing, she pulled a large splinter of couch from under one thigh and tossed it into the fireplace to send up a shower of sparks. "I really don't know why they call them loveseats," she decided with a faint smile as she rummaged for her clothes. "They're totally unsuitable." She found her shirt and put it on, handed Trevor his jeans. "You hungry?"
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"I'd like to take the baby myself, if there's any way to do that," Paige said, keeping her voice firm by force of will. She was coming dangerously near the point where there was no plausible deniability of her own place in all of this, where she'd have to come right out and claim her heritage for the record. She really, really didn't want to do that, but she couldn't let her nephew go into the foster system if she could help it. Of course, the upside was that keeping busy let her avoid thinking about her father and the rest of the family. "My husband and I both have background checks on file with the Freedom League, and we'll submit to a home inspection. He... he could have latent psychic powers," she added, groping for some kind of justification. "It would be better for him to be placed with an experienced psychic, and my home is already shielded. And I'd like to talk to Carolyn when I can, please."
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Erin dismounted from her motorcycle but remained leaning against it for a minute, her eyes closed. There was blood splattered across her purple and black uniform, and the hilt of the crimson sword on her back was even redder than it had been before. It was nice to know she'd done some good, but stopping the atrocities of war meant looking unflinchingly at the worst things humans could do to each other, and the elastic perception of time gifted to Heaven's chosen warriors mostly just meant that the morning had seemed to last for days. One of her angels wordlessly brought her a thermos of coffee and an MRE in a brown plastic bag. She gave him a brief, humorless smile and opened it up. "How long?" she asked Leliel again. "I know it won't be more than a few days on Earth, but what does that mean for us? When do we get to stop?"
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"See, that's another thing I like about you," she laughed, as much from her own joke as from his fingers tickling along her sides. With an obliging wriggle, she tugged her shirt up and over her head, tossing it in the vague direction of the door. The light from the fire lent color to her always winter-pale skin as she leaned in once more, this time turning his shoulders so they both wound up half-laying on the couch. It wasn't entirely comfortable, but it was better than the garage floor, heated or not, or the cockpit of an antique flying saucer, or really any number of other places. In fact, it was really quite nice, and getting better by the moment. "We should also talk about how we haven't broken nearly enough furniture around here," she informed him, eyes locked on his face, her lips a breath away from his. "This couch is hideous."
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To judge by the pleased humming noise she was making under his lips, it didn't seem that Erin was too upset by the ruination of her scheme. "Guess I'll just have to work ahead," she decided, "keep you from getting anything done next week." Scooting just another inch closer to him, she began to play with the buttons on his shirt, sliding them open one by one. "But so long as I have your undivided attention, I should take advantage of it. To talk about important things." She caught the tip of her tongue between her teeth for a moment as she worked out a particularly tricky button. "Like the laundry. That's pretty important. You wear way too many clothes."
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Erin laughed, nuzzling him lightly under the ear. "The couple that tinkers together, stays together," she informed him with great pretend gravity. "And the 4/4's a great car for a two-person rebuild, very streamlined, pretty sexy. Doesn't have a backseat, but I imagine we could make do. I mean, the garage does have heated floors." Scooting around on his lap, she settled herself comfortably with her knees on either side of his hips and her hands on his shoulders. "I should probably warn you that I'm making it my personal mission this weekend to make sure you don't get your homework done. Your grades are way too high, and it's got to stop." She leaned in and kissed him then, her lips still tasting of the very sweet cocoa. "Have to just find other stuff to do."
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Paige had spent most of the battle hidden behind cars or bus shelters or 1-800-JUSTICE, anywhere to try and stay out of the line of fire, and still the fight was exhausting. Wielding the energy of the Terminus against its own denizens was effective, and even somewhat satisfying, but it really didn't feel good. The moment Richard put his arms around her, she folded bonelessly into his embrace, the black web of energy melting away to reveal a completely white face. "What are we going to do?" she asked, her head on Richard's shoulder but her eyes on the veteran heroes. The fact that hours ago they'd been enemies seemed completely immaterial now; Paige just wanted somebody to know what was going to happen next. "We can't keep fighting like that."
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"Mmm, thank you." Erin sat up as she accepted the mug, settling herself comfortably across Trevor's lap. She licked most of the whipped cream off her cocoa first thing, then took a sip. "'S good. Way better than the powder stuff. And I appreciate it more because I know how much it hurts you to make a hot drink that doesn't involve coffee." Chuckling, she leaned her head on his shoulder and looked towards the broad windows. "Lots of snow, but it's not sticking much," she observed. "They say we could get a foot tomorrow night or Sunday. Perfect weather for staying in." That was as close as she dare come to saying how nice it was to have some peace and quiet for once. Saying that, of course, would be tantamount to begging for a crisis. "Maybe later on we can go down to the garage," she suggested idly. "I was looking at the plugs on that Morgan 4/4 coupe the other day, but I wasn't quite sure how to take them out. Spring's coming eventually, be nice to try out a convertible."