Electra
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Freedom City Guidebook
Freedom City PBP: A How-To Guide
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"In the office!" Paige called, her voice only slightly muffled by the walls. Holly's room was securely baffled against auditory and psychic noise, but the thin walls in the rest of the house weren't exactly soundproof. The home office on the first floor was a strange sort of room, half office and half production studio, with a cluttered desk shoved into a corner and the rest of the space taken up with monitors and editing equipment and bookshelves full of history books and reference guides to metahumans. Paige was watching dailies in front of the center monitor, a routine job she brought home most nights when there'd been filming done. There were tired lines around her eyes and she looked a little sad, like she had for most of the past month or so, but it was getting better. She paused the screen and turned to him, opening her arms for a hug. "Welcome back, my baby! How's school treating you?" Just by looking at him, Paige could tell that something was bothering her son, not to mention the emotional echo around his communication earlier, but she wouldn't talk about it until he was ready to bring it up.
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Paige will go on 7, whenever Richard finishes absconding with her
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"Sounds like we've got a deadline," Miss A said grimly, avoiding the carapaces of the dead robots as she headed for the door. "Given the sheer number of nanites at work in here, I'm betting we really don't want to let them open this facility back up after the Time of Rebirth. If we don't find him within the hour, I suggest we make a tactical retreat and do what we have to in order to neutralize the site. I know he'd understand." She put both hands on the door and tested it, seeing if it would slide open like the others, ready to force it if it wouldn't behave. They didn't have much time left.
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Down in the parking lot where most of the spectators had been gathered, there was a brief disturbance as the crowd was parted by something moving too quickly to see. The blurred disturbance halted at the hastily-erected police cordon, stilling to reveal two people holding hands. Fast-Forward and Hologram were superheroes, but today Richard and Paige Cline weren't dressed in heroic costume. Both of them wore blue coveralls with the Supercrime! logo on breast and back, both wore the subtle makeup that reads to television cameras as natural skin. Paige wore what looked like rappelling gear, while Richard was equipped with a mobile camera harness from which the camera had been removed and the boom arm snapped clean off. They spoke briefly to the police officers, then sped inside, yellow crime scene tape flapping behind them. Paige let go of Richard's hand as they entered the gymnasium at ground level, stumbling for a few steps as she left his speed bubble. She stared at the quietly gruesome scene laid out in front of her, one hand going up to cover her mouth. She'd known on some level, even out in California, even as she'd released herself from the rigging and fallen onto the emergency air cushion while calling Richard's name. She'd known from the instant the pain had ripped through her mind, a second's agony and then the severing of a mental connection she'd almost forgotten she still had. How could she not know what it meant, when she'd felt it three times before? Richard hadn't asked questions, bless him, when she'd told him they had to get to Freedom City right away, he'd pulled off his equipment and they'd gone. Knowing, though, was a very different thing from seeing the body on the polished wooden floor, the wheelchair covered in blood and worse things, the puddle on the floor with footprints through it that said the battle had gone on even after this, that it had gone elsewhere. Right now Paige found she couldn't care much about the fight. She walked to the body of her father, the heels of her boots loud and echoing in the empty arena. On the edge of her mind, she felt Holly, inquisitive and nervous, wondering what was happening. Paige gently shut her out, cut off Richard and Will as well, instinctively protecting them from the strange upwelling of grief inside her. He'd never been much of a father, and she'd been afraid of him as long as she could remember, but here in death he seemed so old, so frail, so alone. Kneeling down next to the body, she shut her eyes to the gore and took his hand. "Sh'ma Yis'ra'eil," she murmured. "Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad."
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Wander nodded, dropping the unconscious villainess into the cage with a minimum of care. After the beating Medea had already taken, a few more bruises wouldn't even register, but it helped to make up for not being able to take her out in combat. Damned flying bad guys. She stepped out of the cage and pulled it shut behind her, then turned to look at the others. "All right, we probably don't have a huge amount of time before someone tracks us down, but we should probably take care of the introductions and talky bits. Except for Midnight, all of us here seem to be immune to whatever it is that's flipped our dimension or changed the timeline or whatever, so maybe if we can figure out why that is, we can start figuring out what's going on." She looked around, realized everyone was looking at her, and shrugged. "I'll start. I'm Wander, I'm mostly a hand-to-hand fighter, and I'm not from Earth-Prime, I'm from a dead dimension a few hops away down the universal block. Last time this happened to me was in high school, and it was a similar deal, everyone else got new lives but I was rejected or immune or something. This time I can feel this other life that's supposed to be mine, but I still remember Freedom City and how things are supposed to be. How about you guys?"
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Erin swallowed hard as she walked into the stable, looking up and up at the massive reddish animal that was supposedly hers to ride. "Pretty big for a metaphor," she mused aloud, her voice a little bit strained. Large animals were not her forte, even ones who were supposed to like people. And she suspected that a horse for War might not be the friendliest creature in the world. Still, no matter what size it was, it was still an herbivore, so she had at least the theoretical advantage here. Leaping to a narrow ledge formed where the stablebox met the wall of the building, Erin crouched and studied the giant horse eye-to-eye. Slowly, she stretched out a hand, fingers loosely curled, as though the horse were a strange dog and she was letting it smell her. "I'm Wander. I've seen some fighting, and I bet you have too," she told the creature in a low voice. "I guess we'll get by. I don't suppose you can metaphor into a motorcycle or anything like that, can you?"
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Paige was thrown off her feet by the concussive forces surrounding them, with Richard's arm around her waist the only thing holding her upright. She looked around in disbelieving horror as the sky burned with lightning and the air became chokingly heavy with ozone and smoke. Her first thought, because it was always her first thought whenever something inexplicable and bad happened, was that it was her family, but they weren't anywhere near capable of this madness. This was a thousand times worse, but she had no idea who or what it was. But she knew how to find out... It took all the courage she could muster to gather her mental energy and send it speeding out into the whirling cloud of dust that lay before her. Every instinct was screaming that she didn't want to see what was happening out there. Even worse, when she looked down ,she saw the black energy tendrils she'd spent half a lifetime suppressing, playing over her body like a cloak of spiderwebs. That occupied her attention for the split second before her Inner Eye focused and her mind was pummeled with a scene straight out of hell. Instinct kicked in then, the instincts gained from years as a Psion kid, and she was reaching out with her mind, not only to Richard, but to the heroes they'd been fighting only seconds before. ~STOP!~ She screamed inside her mind, her inner voice panicky and high as her fingers clawed into the spandex of Richard's costume. ~Don't go in the cloud, it's death and killing and ohgodthey'rekillingthem and it's so many so manymany~ She couldn't find the words and so she pushed in a picture instead, columns of Omegadrones, walking in step, pouring from the portal the lightning had torn open, mowing down anyone in their path. ~They're coming!~
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Wander leapt from the rooftop, landing with a quick bounce next to the unconscious villainess. "We can't go too far, all the answers we need have to be around here somewhere, if whoever's behind this is bothering to try and keep us away. Midnight Mano- um,Castle is isolated and defensible, we can go there and come up with some other plan. And we'll take her with us," she added, gesturing to Medea. "If a villain is playing at being a hero in a world where the heroes are still good guys, something's weird there. Maybe she can tell us something." As she watched the crowd, Wander deliberately put her sword away and curled her fists. She didn't have a lot of practice in nonlethal sword fighting, and it wouldn't be good to make a mistake. "Nice shooting, by the way," she told Blue Jay, then looked to Midnight. "And it's good to know you've still got your talent for flashbang grenades. Those'll come in handy."
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Those answers were both fairly reassuring to Erin, for all she couldn't help but feel a little inadequate to the task of directing War in the world. She wished for a moment that Trevor had been home, then she could've told Leliel that he was much better suited to the job, that even in a small, very unwarlike super-battle she typically deferred to his tactical planning. But she was here now, and hopefully she couldn't screw things up too badly over the course of a few days. And if it did come down to a hand-to-hand fight with the fallen angels over the seat of power, at least she was definitely better at swordfighting than Trevor. "I guess we better get started, if we want to start figuring things out before something tries to attack," she told the others, taking a good look around the neighborhood. "How do we get around up here? Is it like walking, or wishing, or-" She twisted her neck around on the offchance she might have grown a pair of wings in the few minutes she'd been among the heavenly host, but no such luck. "Or whatever?"
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Wander stared around for a few minutes as the group made introductions, trying to wrap her mind around the idea of being in heaven while still alive, or being in heaven at all. She knew people who'd been to hell and back, literally, but it was still very weird. Not knowing what one wore to become an avatar of apocalypse, she'd changed into her purple and black uniform and left her face bare. The crimson sword was sheathed at her back, out of her way and far more comfortable than carrying a sword as long as her leg at her hip. She much preferred the comfortable weight of her silver bat, which gleamed like a light bulb in the glow of Heaven. She gave the heroes she knew a friendly upnod, glad to see some familiar faces in this strange place. "Hey Nick, Gabriel." She studied Comrade Frost as he shook her hand, the corners of her lips twitching when he called her "little lady." It might have been patronizing, had she not had the edge on him in height and muscle. "Wander," she supplied. "And yeah, it'd be nice to know exactly what we're supposed to do, now that we're here."
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Given the feeling of approaching doom she'd had all day, Paige wasn't even particularly surprised to see the heroes come in. If something was going to go wrong, it could go a lot wronger than some illegal do-gooders dropping in to spoil the heist. 1-800-JUSTICE were pretty hip for old guys, and they didn't pull out the lethal weapons the way some vigilantes did. The job was probably ruined, but at least there'd be a good fight. Paige stayed back for a few moments, letting Richard glory in his favorite part of a battle, the run and pun right at the beginning before fists started flying. She grinned to see the fun he was having, but it didn't last. If the heroes were already here and the battle was joined, why was the premonition of doom stronger than ever? It didn't make any sense, and it was starting to scare her. It was time to finish this before somebody got hurt. "Looking for me?" she asked, dropping her invisibility at the same instant that a half-dozen illusory copies of herself appeared around the lobby. They began moving in a roughly clockwise pattern, one that brought some illusions closer to the battle, while the real Hologram edged towards the door. --Richard, we've got to get out of here,-- she sent with as much urgency as she could muster. --The job's a wash, you can come back and play later--
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Erin pursed her lips, not liking the sound of another burden much, but if there was an apocalypse to be averted, it was probably best that they not have to go to a Plan B candidate. Why did everyone in the multiverse believe that she and her friends had killed Omega, except for the humans on Earth Prime? It was kind of irritating, really. And apparently it ended you up on the cosmic "in case of emergency" call list. Leliel was still holding out the sword expectantly, so with a long exhale, Erin reached out and picked it up by the hilt. "All right, you've got your War," she told the angel. "Just let me leave a note for Trevor when he gets home." She twirled the sword once, unsurprised at the perfect balance, then looked down at herself. "And I should probably put some clothes on, too."
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Erin was quiet as Corbin spoke, studying her plate with great attention as though it were going to reveal some great truth. Thirty years, more than a lifetime for any of the rest of them in this room. Thirty years of endless war, yes, but surely there'd been more to his life than that. She wondered what it would be like to lose three decades, wondered how much he remembered about any of the people at the table right now. He must have made other friends, other teammates. Had he fallen in love, married, had children in what must have seemed like a permanent new home? It seemed like there were a million questions, but Mark asked the first one right off, so when she raised her head, all she asked was, "How did you come back?"
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Wander's attention was jerked skyward by the arrival of the other sort-of heroes, and held immediately by the floating sorceress. "Medea," she growled, her face going stormy. "Should've known she'd turn up." She looked to Trevor, jerking her head towards the villainess. The circumstances hadn't quite been the same in this universe, but she was quite sure that this Trevor would know how important it was to put Medea out of action before she could start in with the mind mojo. "I hate flying villains," Wander muttered, even as she held her sword aloft, keeping the glowy stick in her offhand. She leapt into the air easily enough, but Medea had been in the superfight business a long time. Taking advantage of the imbalance created by the staff, Medea ducked out of the way of Wander's blow, leaving the heroine to land on the rooftop across the street, even more angry than usual.
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Wander is going to attack Morgan, wielding her sword like a bat in such a way as to produce non-lethal damage because despite what she might wish, Medea is not an Acceptable Target quite yet. Alas. Move action is going to be to Leap straight up into the air the thirty feet or so to Medea. Attack is a regular bat attack. Fail, it's a horrible fail, again! Since I already squandered most of my HP, that's just gonna have to be that way.
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From her concealed position in the corner of the lobby, Paige watched her boyfriend bop and jitter his way through the crowd of humanity doing their afternoon banking. It was nice to see him excited about something again after the months of irritability and depression they'd both had to live through when he'd quit using cocaine, but something about this job still seemed off. Normally Paige loved bank jobs more than almost any other kind of heist. They were classic and easy, theatrical but in a controlled space, and the FDIC insurance took the edge off any little pangs of conscience. Nobody really got hurt except the government! This one, though... Paige blew out a breath and raked her fingers through the multicolored spikes of her hair, knowing that her powers kept anyone from seeing her tension, or seeing her at all. She'd been having bad feelings all day, and that just wasn't like her. In the years since she'd run away from home, she'd learned more about her powers, including the odd little touch of clairvoyance, but that had never been like this. A quick premonition of danger, maybe a prophetic dream that was much clearer in hindsight, but never this pervasive feeling of dread, like the sky was about to fall. She'd considered calling off the job, but the last thing she wanted to do was rain on Richard's parade because she was having a case of the vapors. Nothing was going to go wrong. The commotion from the front counter brought her attention abruptly back to the matter at hand. The guard was gone, as predicted, and he'd have a hard time finding his way back through the fog she'd projected around the entire perimeter of the lobby. In the clear air of the lobby, pyrotechnics began to erupt, lights exploding in the ceiling, sparks flying from the floor, almost all illusion except for the handful of firecrackers Richard had planted to lend verisimilitude to the picture show. The frightened patrons began retreating from the explosions, herding themselves into a corner and getting on the floor, the better to avoid the rockets whizzing by overhead. "Just sit back and enjoy the show everyone," she added, her voice coming from everywhere at once while she herself remained concealed. "Our friends the bankers are going to open up the vault nice and easy, and everyone gets to go home today with a really exciting story."
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Erin bounced once on the balls of her bare feet when the angel drew her weapon, subsiding again when it became apparent that no fight was in the offing. The half-apology wasn't much consolation, but it did at least suggest that someone was paying attention up there, even if they hadn't intervened. Maybe heaven had really needed six and a half billion new residents for some reason. Or it was like Heyzel had told her, and that God wasn't even there to check His holy answering machine. Somewhere along the line she'd realized that there was no answer she could live with, so it was better not to ask the question. She stared at the proffered sword, seeing her own distorted reflection in the crimson blade. Without touching it, without looking up, she spoke in a quiet voice. "War, huh? I remember hearing something about that back home . Comes right after Pestilence, I think. Which I guess would be fitting." She jerked her gaze upwards, locked eyes with Leliel. "This had better not be some kind of apocalypse you're inviting me to help kick off," she told the angel. "Because I'm in the business of stopping those, by whatever means necessary."
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As a patrolling hero, Erin didn't have many free evenings to settle in with a book. When the opportunity did present itself, at least she could do it in the deep and cozy window seat in the library, blanket over her legs and mug of cocoa close to hand. The cozy atmosphere, however, could not change who she was. The instant the beacon began to take shape, paperback and blanket were tossed aside as she leapt to her feet and took a ready stance. Unarmed, barefoot and in her lilac flannel pajamas, Erin was still anything but helpless. When the intruder made no immediately hostile move, Wander relaxed fractionally and listened to her spiel. It was a mark of how far she'd come in the past five years that an assertion that she was "blessed by heaven" was met with a sardonic raised eyebrow instead of an angry rant or an actual beatdown. "I'd hate to see what you guys do to the folks you don't like," she said mildly. "I thought you had angels on the payroll in Freedom City already. What are you looking to me for?"
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Paige stared at the painting in silence, ignoring her husband's frantic energy with the ease of long practice. Twenty years gone, and it was hard to remember herself that young, even if her face hadn't changed that much. Archer was a surprisingly talented artist, making up for what the scene lacked in realism with the raw emotion in the strokes. Looking at herself, she could almost taste the smoke and blood and the sour-acrid-slimy fear of death that rose in her throat when she'd looked down at a city full of Omegadrones and realized that she wouldn't run away. All at once she wished she hadn't come in here, wished herself back in the warm lobby with its crackling fires and all the youngsters who didn't remember. "He's very good," she finally said, taking a sip of wine to rinse the past from her mouth. "I can see why this would be a private collection piece. Has he done any others?" Paige was pleased that her voice came out mildly interested, a gallery voice suitable for cocktail parties and art criticism. At the same time, she reached out a hand and put it in Richard's, knowing without looking that it would be there.
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Wander will hold as well, and she will interpose for Midnight, Blue Jay, Fast-Forward and Hronos, in descending order of importance.
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Gina submitted to the hugs as best she could, pulling back as quickly as possible to not-quite-hide behind Steve's bulk as she gave the guests a smile that didn't really reach her overly wide eyes. "We're so glad you could come," she said again, and relaxed just a touch when Steve squeezed her hand. "You're our first visitors." She was actually grateful when Peter Jr. began his potty dance, since at least that was a problem to focus on. "Okay, yeah, we can fix that. Emerson, show him the guest bathroom." Emerson, who'd been unobtrusively charging in the corner under the breakfast bar, rolled forward with an obliging beep-boop, the light of its optical diode a relaxed green color. It rolled up to Peter Jr., sized up one of the few humans in its lexicon who was its own height, then extended an arm full of slim waldoes to beckon the boy down the hallway toward the restroom. "Um, help him if he needs a boost to the seat," she called after them.
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Erin goes on 22
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"Just wait till you remember the future, you've got way better toys," Erin assured him, eyes on the fight shaping up. It was weird, she thought, that someone like Daedelus who had lived through the medieval period once as an inventor should be a wizard now, but that was a question she had no way of answering. It was pretty clear, though, that this Hronos knew something was up, so he was someone they'd better keep around to talk to. With the fluid grace of a circus performer, she rose to her feet on the back of the horse, calculating trajectory and thrust as she focused her attention on the glowing staff. He obviously had a very solid grip on the thing, but if they could get it away, she might not have to punch someone who was supposed to be a good guy. With one powerful leap, she flipped herself over Midnight, over the horse, over Hronos, and come up behind the Brass Knight. Resisting the urge to simply punch him like an everyday villain, Wander reached around his arm and grabbed hold of the staff, wrenching it away with a surprising amount of effort, then racing off.
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I faiiiiiled the roooooolll Spending another HP (argh) for Improved Disarm so that actually worked. Because of the principle of the thing! Anyway, move-by action to get out of easy takebacks reach of Daedelus.
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Well, I guess he's still technically a good guy, so better not give him a savage beatdown until he gives us more of an excuse. Alas. Move Action: Acrobatic Bluff, dc 27 to resist Standard Action: Charge Attack, full power attack, aiming to disarm. First roll is terrible! Spending an HP! Second roll is also terrible! But it's a total of 20