Electra

At the shout from the foyer, Erin turned off the music in the kitchen and turned off the pot of water on the stove. No matter what Mark's "something big" was, it was extremely likely that her plans for spaghetti and meatballs tonight had just gone out the window. At least she hadn't put the noodles in the water yet, so nothing would be wasted. She paused for a second at the weird laugh. "Please don't say you're getting married," she muttered under her breath as she headed for the foyer. With Mark, there was just no way to guess. She walked into the foyer, but a cursory glance didn't bring any clues. Mark was wet all over, as though he'd been standing in rain that wasn't falling here, but that wasn't unusual given the company he kept. "What's up?"

Erin puzzled over the invitation for a day or two after receiving it, wondering what the protocol was for attending a raptor coming-of-age party. She wondered if it was maybe like a bat mitzvah or a quincenera celebration, or if it was more like the cultures she'd read about in National Geographic where the adult-to-be had to eat bugs and get tattoos and be initiated into adulthood. Either way, she was probably supposed to bring a present, but what did raptors like? Meat, maybe, or something to sharpen their teeth and claws? Maybe something to decorate with, she supposed, remembering the general attitude surrounding Cannonade's headgear last time they'd encountered the Raptor Empire. That had been pretty funny. In the end, she did her best and picked up a vinyl case of a half-dozen acrylic paint pots, a couple of brushes, and a pad of white paper. Runs-With-Fangs-Bared might find a use for the paints even if raptors didn't do much art painting, and it was a hell of a lot easier than trying to wrap a live chicken. She wore her uniform without the mask and showed up at the appointed hour, wondering what on earth, or off it, she was getting herself into.

As soon as she'd flown out of sight of the others, Miss Americana touched down in the tiny scrap of public park that was all Blackwater boasted for dedicated green space. Taking out her tablet computer, she quickly began running searches, the pad almost more a prop than a necessity as she linked in with all the old familiar databases and a bunch of new ones besides. This couldn't be a coincidence. Something was targeting her family, and she had to figure out why. Maybe they'd gotten onto somebody's radar somehow and this was an attack focused on them. The probability of that was low, but she couldn't ignore it. The other, even worse possibility was that someone had run down her secret identity and was using her family in an attempt to hurt her or draw her out. It didn't matter that she hadn't spoken a word to anyone in her family in the nearly six years since she'd been kicked out of the house, or that her life with them had helped make her the ridiculous mess she was today. She'd made herself a hero, and a hero wouldn't let even strangers suffer on their account if they could stop it. So she ran a search on herself as well, with the same parameters. Gina routinely kept a flag program running for any correlation of her name with anything associated with her secret identity, words like Miss Americana, ArcheTech, Cyberknife or even Freedom City. That was common sense, but her name was simply too common to keep a close eye on all the time. In retrospect, that may have been an error. The cyberkinetic cursed softly as results began racking up on her search. Nothing unusual on anyone in her family, what looked to be standard pre-employment runs on Peter before he'd gotten the trucking gig, her father's yearly disability approval process, Charlie's son winning a Little League award. All normal things, and she even smiled at little at seeing little Chuck's picture with the bat and glove she'd sent him for Christmas last year. Her own name, though, brought the frown right back. Somebody, or somebodies, all over Cooper County had suddenly gotten _very_ interested in Gina Evans over the last two days. It was a pattern that started at the hospital in Boonville nearly as soon as Peter had been admitted, and that had spread within hours to nearly all of the households in Blackwater, with the notable exception of any of the Evans family homes. Someone was looking for her hard, but without any technical skill at all. Google and Spokeo, White Pages and Peoplefinder, but none of the more powerful tools that might have (unlikely but possibly) have tracked her down. As far as she could tell, no one had even come close to Freedom City, concentrating their searches much more locally. That was scant consolation. This had to be something to do with flushing her out of hiding, but why, if they didn't know who she was? And what did it have to do with the Grue artifacts? Putting the tablet away for the moment, she retook the sky and headed the few blocks to her family home, now solely her mother's. Before she went in, she called Cobalt Templar. "If you have some police contacts in Kansas City, ask them to put a watch on Charlie Evans," she requested. "There's reason to believe he and his family might be in danger."

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Okay, she's going to delve further into these searches and try to isolate patterns in the search that might indicate where and why they are looking for Gina Evans, and she is also going to attempt to run down the IP addresses and locate specific homes and names. She is also going to check and see if anyone got lucky and nailed down her actual address in Freedom City, which is under her real name. It's not in any easily accessible public directory, but is in plat books and tax records if someone had a very good idea where she was and access to nonpublic government information.

Okay, Miss A is going to take a quick detour from seeing the Evanses to sit her butt down and do some computer searches. She's going to use her Online Research and her Quickness x6 to search every database she knows for any mentions of any member of her family, including herself, for the past two years. She's especially interested in knowing if any of them have come onto the radar of any supervillain or done anything that might have brought attention to themselves at all. If that requires some extra hackery, she'll do that too. If I can, I'd also like her to get onto the radio frequency for Cooper County's emergency services and monitor those communications.

Miss A looked startled to see yet another hero touching down in this tiny patch of nowhere, and with each new shock it seemed to take her just a bit longer to bounce back. Still, after just a couple of seconds her smile was in place and her voice was almost entirely normal. "Cobalt Templar, fancy meeting you here. We haven't seen you around Freedom City in a bit of a while. It's nice to see you back." She cracked her knuckles and thereby avoided cracking her comm radio in a too-firm grasp. "I think you've met Caradoc already, and this is Cavalier, also from Freedom City. It's practically old home week around here." There was definitely something brittle in her voice when she said that, but then it was gone as though it hadn't been there at all. "If the man you met up in Kansas City was named Charlie Evans, then I'm sure the situations are connected," Miss A told the ring-bearing newcomer. "I just got word that other members of the same family are apparently suffering from an unknown physical ailment, including the young man who was driving the truck." She took a breath. "We've got some strength of numbers here for the moment, so we should put that to work. Cavalier, you seem to have the recovery operation well in hand, if you could continue supervising that and see if any salvageable computer pieces are brought up. We need to know why that distress call was sent. Cobalt Templar, if you would be willing to assist him, he can bring you up to speed on what's been going on here. Caradoc," and here her voice was cool, but she'd apparently set aside the anger of earlier for the moment, "see if you can find the ambulance that's headed to Marshall and accompany it by air, then stay with the plane. There is very sensitive equipment on board, and it would be disastrous if anything happened there. I'm going to go check in on the situation with the Evans family and arrange for their care. Keep a sharp eye out for people acting strangely, especially anyone in positions of authority."

Meanwhile, back in Blackwater, the situation was really no clearer. When she got the call from Dr. Irons, Miss A seemed literally staggered for a moment, rocking back and forth as her eyes went blank for a few seconds. Most people would notice nothing more than an emotional shock, but Steve had been around the block with Miss Americana a few times and knew the signs of Gina momentarily dropping the robot. Whatever she'd heard on the phone must have affected her intensely. "My team is on the way already," she spoke into the phone, struggling for an even tone, "but I'll see to it that arrangements are made to transport any other victims as well. Has anyone else been in prolonged contact with Peter Evans since the accident?" she asked. "Are any other members of his family affected?"

The tacit agreement from Janet was enough to mollify Erin somewhat, along with the fact that somehow the older woman had managed to coax some speed out of the pokey waiters. She fiddled for a minute with her napkin to try and get it to stay on her lap where it was supposed to, then took another stab at polite conversation. "It looks like it's going to be nice again today," she observed. "Are you going to watch the race?" she asked Janet. Sure it was an obvious bit of small talk, but it was the same thing everybody else was talking about today. And given what Trevor had told her, she figured trying to be witty was wasted effort.

"Excellent, thank you," Miss Americana told Cavalier, motioning her technicians over to load the equipment into new containers for transport. Everything was wet and undoubtedly in even worse shape than it had been, but there was no help for that. "Have you found which part of the wreckage might be broadcasting that signal?" she asked him. "My equipment isn't calibrated to detect it at the distance of the bridge." She smiled wryly. "And if I don't have to go into that creek, I'd rather not. Snakes like to make their nests under this bridge, keeps them out of the runoff from the Edmunds farm downstream." She closed her mouth suddenly, a quick look of mild consternation crossing her features. "So, ah, be careful," she added quickly, "but I'm sure none of them are the slightest danger to you." Only then did Miss A spare a glance for Caradoc. "Yesterday was Independence Day," she reminded him. "You think a wrecker crew was gonna come in on their holiday to rescue a bunch of boxes of what they were told were machine tools? Once the driver was rescued and the truck was out of the water, I'm sure the rest of it seemed like a somewhat lower priority. This waterway is trashed anyway."

One of the spear-tipped roots crashed straight into Fleur's chest, and instantly disintegrated into powder. She took another implacable step towards the Green God, not so much as bothering to brush the dust from her cowl. Somewhere nearby, her friends were fighting as well, she could tell from the noises and shouts echoing through the tunnels. The thought gave her confidence, and increased her determination at the same time. "You are the destroyer here, Green Man. You could've built your paradise anywhere, but you ripped up homes and cities to do it instead. And now you seek other worlds to crush as well? You act like a savior, but you're really a tyrant, and we will not let you grow any further." She concentrated on the green creature in front of her, human but also plant, plant enough to call to her powers, plant enough to understand. Stretching out a hand, she curled her fingers into a fist as though wrapping them around something intangible, then pulled. Green energy rippled through the air, as scattered parts of the god's body became powdery and gray.

"Let's get to the crash site," Miss A said tersely. "I want to see where that signal is coming from, and be there if anything decides to answer it. Let's stick together," she added. "I've ordered my people to not go anywhere alone, and I think it's good advice for us as well. If there are Grue around, or something worse, we need to back each other up." She gave Caradoc a little added glare to ensure he knew this didn't mean he was off the hook. "Cavalier, can you home in any further on that beacon? If we can get any part of the ship's computer, we might be able to see what we're dealing with."

Fleur gets hit, but makes the toughness save. Spending an HP to tune up her array a bit, stunting this slight adaptation to her disintegrate and using it against the Green God: Damage 13 (Extras: Linked +0, [Drain], Range 2 [Perception], Flaw: Limited 2 [plants]) {13/13} + Drain Wisdom 13 (Extras: Affects Objects +1 Linked +0, [Damage], Range 2 [Perception], Flaw: Limited 2 [plants]) {26/26} (PFs: Incurable, Precise, Reversible, Split Attack, Subtle) {13+26+5=44/48}

It took some time to iron out the details with Valut, time in which Ammy seemed to want mostly to show Tona every toy she owned by dumping them in the young heroine's lap, but eventually Fleur agreed to help get the alien botanist settled in at the village and working on their gardens. More technological developments, Fleur warned, would have to wait for the people to be more settled and the money and material to become available. "It sounds like we'll be having a large influx of new settlers coming in soon," she told Valut while glancing over at Blue Jay, "so there's going to be plenty to keep everybody busy. I hope you don't mind working with bees." A couple of the women from the village came to collect Valut and take her to an empty cottage for the night. They seemed a little wary, as well they might, but Fleur's word that this was a friend to be treated hospitably was enough for them. Ammy started to fuss once all her toys were spread all over the living room, obviously up well past her bedtime. Stesha scooped her up and bounced her soothingly a few times. "Well, this ended up being a much longer project than I thought it would be," she admitted to Tona with a smile. "Ready to go home?"

"We'll talk about this later," Miss A promised Caradoc, a look in her eye that suggested she was not nearly done with him yet. It was possible that he'd been sent to oversee the recovery of HAX's portion of the ruins, but that seemed a thin story at best. Right now, though, she had other matters to deal with. Accepting the paper from Deputy Erlanger, she looked it over quickly just for form. "Thank you, Deputy, that's efficient work. Now we-" She trailed off for a moment as she studied the written portions of the form. There weren't many of them, hardly more than a few names filled into blanks and signatures, but the whole thing had obviously been done by the same hand, even the signatures. That would've been a little odd, except that the monstrous storage organism that was her brain managed to unfile and bring up a handwriting match from a long time ago. This was Peter's handwriting, right down to the glitchy little way he drew his Ts and Fs with tilted crossbars. It was just about then that Cavalier's message came in as well, putting another layer of warning on what was already a comprehensively iced cake. "Now we really ought to regroup," she finished, almost smoothly, folding the paper and tucking it away. We definitely have a local problem, she sent back over the same radio frequency Cavalier had used. But damned if I know the shape of it yet, or where it's coming from. We need a look at that wreckage, but I have one pressing matter to take care of first. "Let's step back inside for a moment and arrange for the transport, then go from there." She turned and headed back into the hospital, reentering through the window she'd just left.

Miss A gets a 37.

If anything, Miss A's beautiful face grew even more irritable with the code words. She pulled him away from the others, stopping a dozen yards away only because going further would look even more strange. "I'm not being held hostage, you idiot!" she hissed. trying to keep her voice down. "I'm so pissed off at you I could scream! Why the hell would you follow me down here when this is none of your goddamned business? Do I go poking into your family history because it seems like it would be fun? You should never have come here, and now you're standing here and ruining my operation and destroying my focus, oh, and letting everybody in town know about suspected Grue activity, as well! Maybe you should just make things absolutely perfect and turn off the holoemitter and then start yelling my secret identity all over town!" She turned away from him, pulling on her golden tresses with enough force to actually dislodge a few strands. "Goddammit, Steve," she muttered, her voice still pitched low. "Just go home."

"What is the justice you're planning on enforcing, Draniel?" Wander asked, leaning her bat lightly on the unconscious shapeshifter she'd dropped on the floor with the others. Her pose was nearly casual, except for the way she balanced on the balls of her feet, ready to spring. "Because I'm pretty sure that here in the human world, justice would say that anybody who gave assistance to the Nazis while they were murdering millions of people and trying to take over Europe absolutely deserved to lose whatever it was they gave to the cause and never get it back. And if they gave anything really useful to the Nazis, they probably deserve punishment beyond that, too. It doesn't matter what their contract with the Third Reich was, the Third Reich doesn't own anything anymore. It doesn't even exist. Your guy just stole an artifact from the people of Freedom City."

"Peter is none of your business!" Miss A snapped at Caradoc, not sounding much like her usual diplomatic self. She paused for a second and actually pressed her hands to her face, taking a deep breath to steady herself. When she looked up again, her calm facade was nearly back into place. "Ask Dr. Irons to get Mr. Evans' wife to sign a release for transport and treatment," she told the deputy carefully. "He'll know what's needed and it will save time. I don't want to disturb the family any more than necessary during what must be a very difficult time for them." She turned to Cavalier, once again entirely pleasant and businesslike. "It's good to see you again too," she told the Star Knight. "I'm sorry I didn't contact you personally about this, I've had a lot on my plate lately. If you could do me a favor and oversee the engineering team as they retrieve the wreckage, that would be a tremendous help. You'd also get first chance to see if any of it is what you're looking for." For the moment, she ignored the terrestrial knight entirely.

"Not that I know of," Miss A told Deputy Erlanger, her face grim. "It's possible that someone was sent down to assist me, but I haven't heard anything about it. This man is deranged, but he's no Grue," she told him, gesturing to the raving Dr. Suri. "You'd better get him into custody before he hurts himself or somebody else." She stood and brushed herself off, looking to her medical team. "Get Peter prepared for transport. We'll fly him into Kansas City and then get a teleport to ArcheTech if we need to. I'll go see what's going on." Trusting that her instructions would be competently followed, the statuesque superheroine pushed open the nearest window and leapt out, taking to the sky for a better view on the situation. She saw the deputies first, hustling out of the hospital and looking extremely excited to be seeing any action. They were, she supposed, too inexperienced to be wary of supervillains. She flew in closer, and only then did she see the two new arrivals. Cavalier was in front and she saw him first, and immediately felt a little bad. He'd be interested in the Grue artifacts, of course, and if she hadn't been so distracted, she'd have asked if he wanted to join her engineering team. The other... "Caradoc!" she exclaimed aloud, loudly enough to catch the attention of the folks on the ground. "What the hell are you doing here?"

Miss A's brow furrowed as something about the speech struck a chord in her memory. Inside the vast recesses of her cognitive function, memories were accessed in their archives, slid smoothly into place within her consciousness. "If you're a Grue, you've been passing too long," she told Suri, pinning him with her knees while she ran her scanner over him. "Dr. Nicholai, get the Grue tester from my field kit and check this guy out. Winston, Jong, stay with Peter, do a full evaluation. I want to know what the instruments here aren't telling us. Dr. McNeil, contact the engineering team, see if they're having any trouble there and put them on alert, then have the base team seal up the plane."

Pop Culture Roll is a 33

Despite the surprise of a hospital director suddenly turning into an animalistic escapee from a locked ward, Miss Americana and her colleagues were not left flat-footed for long. In seconds, the doctors had cleared the doorway, leaving the path wide open for the actual superheroine to go to work. Miss A took to the air, flew over the bed and out the door after the demented man, tackling him before he got more than halfway down the corridor. Rolling him to his stomach, she pinned Suri's arms behind his back before he had a chance to shapeshift. "The second you start to change," she warned him, "I'm going to render you unconscious. Calming down and cooperating will save us both a lot of time."

There was plenty more Erin could've said, but Trevor's signal was enough to make her let most of it go and just squeeze his hand instead. It was hard to understand why his mom's treatment didn't bother him, but he'd been living with it his whole life. "Maybe," Erin said carefully, "but I think it's better to say those nice things to people you care about whenever you can, so you never wind up regretting all the things you didn't say." She subsided then, studying her menu intently for all that most of it was incomprehensible. Omelette au fromage fit both her reading comprehension and her appetite, so she settled on that rather than risk another sugar-coated grapefruit like on the flight over.

In an eyeblink, Miss Americana was across the room to study the EEG machine. "This machine has been tampered with," she snapped at Suri, even as she punched buttons fruitlessly on the machine. "The data on it is looping, not giving a true reading of the patient's status. What the hell is going on here?" Deciding to prioritize for the moment,she delayed disassembling the EEG and began running her portable scanner over the unconscious patient, taking readings of her own. "Doctors, I believe transporting the patient has just become an urgent priority. I don't like the way any of this smells." She gave Suri a hard look, quite at odds with her earlier bland amiability. "Machines falsifying readings, a specialist who damn well should've been called in being called off, a man in a coma who shouldn't be unconscious. I'd like to hear some better answers than I've been getting, and quickly." -- The lead engineer from ArcheTech, a wiry woman in her mid-fifties, gave the deputy a cool look. This was hardly her first go-round with local authorities on a work site, and she was calm but firm. "I'm sorry, but protocol dictates that once we put on our suits, we do not remove them until we've gone through decontamination procedures. This site is classified as potentially hazardous, and nobody ought to be here without protection." She gave the pair of obviously unprotected deputies a look. "In any case, ArcheTech has filed reports with the state and with the local and county authorities to get clearance for this emergency cleanup work. If you have any question about our permissions, you should speak with Miss Americana. She'll be coming down from Boonville shortly. In the meanwhile, you can have a look at these," she offered, proffering a set of badges on a lanyard, "but we really cannot delay our setup process."