Electra

"We don't need a hole," Fleur called back. "Valut says there's a garden, that's enough!" She watched as the ground heaved beneath the ship, lashing it again and again with strong woody thorns the size of combat knives. "Beeatrizz, Blue Jay and I are going into the ship. Fall back, but take shots at the ship whenever you can. Distract them! Valut, you stay here and hold on tight!" With that, Fleur grabbed Tona's arm and touched the flowers in her hair, immediately teleporting them both into the living plant matter aboard the alien ship.

Fleur is going to teleport herself and Tona into the ship via the hydroponic garden. In the meantime, the planetary defense will be continuing to focus upon the ship, firing a Blast 15 lashing of woody thorns against it every round. The bees can be left to their own devices to distract and take potshots at the ship while not putting themselves in undue danger.

Fleur hopped up in front of Tona, seeming perfectly at ease on the massive back. The one good thing about sitting on the bee's back was that, once one was situated and hanging firmly onto the long fuzz, it was very difficult to look down. Fleur crawled forward to sit on the head, giving her a better view. "All right," she told her bee friend, "Keep going northwest another mile or so. Look for a big grassy clearing, or for any more groups of humanoids wandering around. And be on your guard in case anyone starts shooting!"

"Willow and I can go up and talk to her," Fleur suggested. She was standing as far as possible from Comrade Frost without causing actual offense, but even then she seemed a little chilled. "She might respond better to women, and I can get us up there through the ornamental trees on the observation deck. I'll keep an open channel, so you'll know if you have to intervene. Until then, though, try to keep a low profile." Fleur pushed her cowl back to reveal her green braided hair, then took her mask off and tucked it into her pocket. "All right, here we go." Putting a hand on Willow's arm, she touched the flowers in her hair and teleported them both to the tippy top of the tallest building in town.

"This diagnostic's only got about ten minutes left to run," Gina offered, knuckling her eyes like an exhausted child. "If you can hold your horses that long, and everything checks out, I can send you over to their holo system. It's about eleven in the morning now, so people ought to be around. Though you will have a lot of catching up to do. I'd ask Kimber," she advised dryly. "She seems to really want to talk about it."

"You're not going anywhere just yet," Gina told him firmly, "not even out to the projectors in my lab. I didn't pull three all-nighters in a row to have you spaz out on me and have your legs fall off or something wretched like that. Once I've got these diagnostics finished, then you can project into the room, and if that works all right, maybe onto the network at Claremont to see your friends. But you're not going to be visiting Tronik for a few days yet, not till I'm totally sure you're physically ready to reintegrate." She stifled a yawn, wishing the simulated soft drinks in Sharl's fridge would have any effect on her. On the other hand, if she had any more caffeine she was likely to throw up anyway. "Backup, you know, like data backup. You got important computer programs, you back them up. I took one of you every time you came in for checkups, just to be on the safe side. I wasn't copying everything every time, obviously,but your brain patterns, your memories, the things that made you unique. When your program was destroyed, I took the backup and recombined it with a stock Tronik template and fused them together, and restored you to exactly the state you were in on January 14."

"I don't know," Gina admitted. "I wasn't part of it and didn't hear much about it for a few days afterwards. Miss Americana got slagged in a fight during the initial confusion in the city, and then I had to help rescue Steve and the other abductees off the ringworld. Your friend Kimber told me a little about what happened, but not much. I haven't had time or the ability to go investigate for myself. But I know that both Troniks are safe and functional, and that because of Young Freedom's timely intervention, the casualties were light enough not to require an attempt at backup restoration." She spread her hands helplessly. "Maybe your friends will be able to tell you."

Gina recoiled visibly from Sharl's display of emotion, but the computer gave her enough of a buffer to keep her from retreating entirely. "No, I mean no, Tronik is safe, both Troniks are safe. I had someone check on them personally after the dust settled. Your team is okay too. When I said you were killed fighting him, I guess I should've said you were killed defeating him. You... jesus, I don't know exactly what you did, but you dismantled yourself and threw yourself into its mainframe like a virus. Stopped up the whole works and ended the battle right there." She twisted her fingers together, but kept talking. "And it was a good thing too, because the Curator had agents all over Freedom City, and heroes it had kidnapped. One of your classmates, Quickstep, was abducted more than two months ago. And..." she swallowed. "And Steve was one of the abductees as well, since early December. They were very clever Curator-drone duplicates. By now everyone who was taken is back, and they're cleaning up the remains of the Curator's ship at the North Pole, so things are getting back to normal."

"Not exactly," Gina said carefully. "Here, give me a minute." In just a few moments, there was a knock on the door of his simulated bedroom, and Gina was standing there. She'd given up the generic matronly avatar she'd used with him in his first days out of Tronik and now looked substantially as she did on the outside, just somewhat more attractive. "I can finish the scanning in here just as easily." First, though, she took a long look at him, then smiled in what seemed to be great relief. "You look good," she told him. Motioning him to sit down on the bed, she sat next to him and began running a scanner up and down near his body. "Your memory wasn't wiped, per se, and there's nothing wrong with you. I had to restore you from a backup," she finally admitted. "There was a serious incursion by the Curator just after your trip to Erde, and you were killed fighting him. Luckily, I had taken that fresh backup just the day before, so you didn't lose much beyond the one day. It just took some time to restore you properly afterwards."

"Okay, that's good," she told him distractedly. "Your program is looking good, all the integration points read clean and the memory matrix is stable. I'm going to synchronize your internal clock now, hold on one second." She tapped in another series of commands, and suddenly Sharl realized how much time had passed, nearly ten days since he'd laid on the table in Miss A's lab. But where all the memories of that time should've been, there was... nothing. Blank void. "All right," Gina told him, her voice brisk but in the way she got when she was avoiding talking about something. "Give me your personal information, then tell me everything you can about the last day you remember."

"He won't answer us," Stesha told Tona, and with a dismissive wave of her hand, the orange-mummy-man disappeared, the plants that had been constricting him suddenly falling to the ground empty. "I have a pretty good idea of where the ship might be, and we can ask Valut." She crouched down next to the biologist. "You don't seem to fit in as a pirate," she commented to the cowering woman over the near-deafening buzz. "You don't have to stay with them! We can help you, but I need you to help us find the ship you came in on!" Standing to give Valut a moment to think, Stesha waved an arm to the foremost bee, who came circling down for a landing. "Thank you, Beeatrizz!" she told the massive insect. "I knew I could count on your prompt defense! This is Blue Jay, my friend! We need to find the ship these pirates came in on and convince them to leave. Can you give us a ride?" "WE ARE PLEAZZZED TO DEFEND ZZZANCTUARY FROM ZZZHOZZE WHO WOULD ZZZTEAL AND DEZZZTROY!" the big bee said, blowing a puff of smoke as she spoke. "AND IT IZZ GOOD PRACTIZZ FOR THE YOUNGLINGZZZ WHO HAVE NEVER ZZZEEN DANGER. LET UZZ FLY!" Beeatrizz fanned her massive translucent wings to allow a clear path up her furry back. It would be like climbing up a semi-truck, but at least there were plenty of handholds. Stesha gestured to Tona to climb on up, even as she waited for Valut.

Okay, Stesha's going to shove the trapped guy into her dimensional pocket before flagging down Beeatrizz. She will also ready an action to snare Valut if she tries to run, lest she get herself into trouble.

UPDATE: March 2, 2013 Welcome to the new and improved site! The first stage of the donation drive was an awesome success, we raised $350 after Paypal fees within 24 hours of starting the drive, which was enough to pay all the fees and licenses and get us installed over here. Woo-hoo! You are all amazing, Sorus is amazing, this is an amazing site. Even so, when the drive was started, we said it would be a six-week drive, and so it will continue on until April 3, as planned. At this point, all the money that we raise will go towards general site improvements and defraying the costs that Doc and Sorus pay every month just to keep us online. Possible improvements for the future could include customized add-ons to make the site more responsive to our needs, or a commissioned logo for the front page with corresponding icons for different platforms to make us look cool wherever we go. The site costs $41 a month for hosting and database services, and there is a $30 charge every six months for the chat. We only need 200 more dollars in then next month to make our $550 goal, but I'm sure we can do even better. Thank you so much to everyone who has donated already, and thank you so much to Sorus for working your butt off during the changeover, and to Doc for keeping this place running every day! This place wouldn't be what it is without what everyone brings to the table.

As Freedom City: Play by Post enters its sixth consecutive year of play, it's nice to look back on the years of stories, characters and adventures that have been created on this unique site. It has also come time to take a good look at the infrastructure of the site, with an eye both to maximizing current uptime and enabling future growth. Many of you have probably already noticed that the site has been going through periods of reduced stability lately, especially in areas like the chat and the wiki. A software platform that was adequate for our needs in 2008 with a handful of players is just not doing the job anymore. Sorus has done a great deal of research and come up with a new software platform that will let us port all the existing site information (characters, threads, archives) away from the current PHPBB system to a platform that is much better able to integrate all the parts of the site. The move should ultimately result in less lag, less downtime, and many fewer instances of that thing where somebody leaves chat, then comes back and leaves fifty times until a ref kicks them. The new platform is the IPS Board software from Invision Power Services. We did a small beta test on the software last year as proof of concept, and were impressed with many of the features it offers. For those of you who like to keep your threads organized, this is going to be a big improvement. Anyone who is curious can take a look at their website:http://www.invisionpower.com There are a lot of benefits to moving the game to this new platform, and Sorus is ready to get started right away. Right now the sticking point is money. There is an initial startup cost to pay for the software, the licensing for features like an expanded chat room, and the porting of all our information. There are also yearly license renewal fees, as well as the regular hosting costs just to keep this place online. Doc and Sorus have been footing the bills for hosting lo these many years now, and it would be nice for some of the rest of us to step up as well. Here's the breakdown of initial costs: Core + IP.Board $175.00 IP.Content $ 50.00 IP.Gallery $ 65.00 IP.Chat: 50 Users $ 15.00 10% Discount -$ 30.50 Total $274.50 To keep IPS chat upgraded, we will also need to pay a $30 license renewal fee each year, which will also let us access support for those times when we inevitably manage to crash something. In addition to that, we have the monthly hosting charge, which is $30, plus another $11 for database, bandwidth, and miscellaneous charges. So, toting all that up, the cost to do the entire platform move, pay for an additional year of chat licensing, and free Doc and Sorus from having to pay for this site in addition to everything else they do here for the next six months is: $550.50! Now this is definitely a solid chunk of change, but absolutely nothing that we can't pull together. Think of all the books, movies, computer and video games you've bough this past year. In all likelihood, you've spent much less time enjoying any of them than you've spent playing here! And of course not everybody is going to be able to donate, and that's understandable. Nobody's going to name-and-shame, there aren't going to be any special prizes for kicking in. But this is a great game, and it's worth any contribution you can make to it. In order to keep things moving and try to get us onto the new platform ASAP, there's going to be a six-week time limit on this donation drive. That gives you from now until April 3, 2013 to make a donation, via the PayPal link below or by whatever method you want to set up with Sorus. All the money will go through him, and he'll be making periodic updates here to report how we're doing. If we exceed our initial goal, any money beyond that will go towards further customizations for the new site, or perhaps even hiring someone to write some specialized code just for us. The donate button is right here, what are you waiting for? Freedom City needs YOU!

Gina startled at the voice, raising her head off her own desk to stare blearily into the computer screen. "Oh hey," she said in a scratchy voice. "The recompiler is finished. Awesome." She ran a hand over her face, wiping a trace of drool from the corner of her mouth. Too many late nighters on this project, what with one thing and another. Typing in a series of quick commands, she overlaid a set of diagnostics on half of Sharl's interface window. "Looking good," she muttered, "no major error flags, no glitches so far... how do you feel, Sharl?" she asked him.

"No, you did exactly right," Miss A assured Kimber hastily. "I'll have someone stop by campus to pick them up sometime this afternoon, if you could just leave them in the office. Thank you for calling and telling me what happened, I really do appreciate it. I'll make sure that you hear as soon as anything happens with his rebuilding. You can go ahead and tell your friends that, too. He's very proud to be working with all of you, and he'll be back with you as soon as possible." She ended the call quickly after that, then sent a quick text to Steve to ask him to pick up the emitter on the way home from work. Not having the robot body was going to be damned inconvenient, she could already tell. It took another hour for her to return all her messages, even with shunting the less important ones off to her assistants at ArcheTech, but after that she ordered her calls held and no disturbances. It took hours just to set up a clean workspace within her mainframe to her satisfaction, but there would be no errant variables, no lost snips of code coming in to mess things up. Theoretically, she could keep trying again and again till she got a proper copy of Sharl that worked just right, but the philosophical implications of a string of mistakes were more disturbing than any question Ghost Girl had raised. She intended to get it right on the first try.

"Pirates, huh?" Fleur asked, a smile tugging at her lips. "Well, that does explain the Johnny Depp look, I guess. I thought maybe you were going to a party. But this is much simpler. Get down, Valut." As soon as Fleur spoke, the ground around the orange-skinned man seemed to explode with the morass of vines that had been quietly pooling there, unnoticed. They wrapped around the pirate until nothing of him was visible and he was merely a green mummy, blind, deaf and helpless. As if that weren't enough, at that very moment, every single one of those vines sprouted razor sharp leaves and thorns, digging into every exposed inch of orange skin they could find as the planet itself fought on its own behalf. "This is my world!" she repeated with cold fury, for all her first target could no longer hear her. "And pirates are not welcome!"

Well then, let's do this thing. Snare first on the Rocky guy, hoping to catch him flat-footed from the surprise. And that was an excellent roll, a 26. If it catches, that is a DC 28 reflex save to avoid being entangled/bound. At the same time, the planetary defenses, a straight unmodified blast capped at Fleur's PL, will target Rocky Guy. That roll, on the other hand, was freaking horrible. A 17. On the off-chance that it hits, DC 30 toughness.

Fleur's eyes narrowed as she watched the interchange, helpfully translated thanks to Valut's neck device. She picked up her radio and placed a call to the hive. It had been a serious technological puzzle figuring out a radio that the bees could hear and use, but it did come in handy. "This is Fleur," she murmured into the radio, knowing it would be highly amplified on the other end. "There are strangers near the hive, and I could use some help showing them they need to be polite. About five miles northwest of the human village." Clipping the radio back on her belt, she raised her hands like a conductor addressing an orchestra. All around them, the trees gave a single rustle, seeming almost as though they were coming to attention. Even the grass and bushes seemed to shiver. Dropping her arms, she murmured to Tona, "If there's a fight, take the snake," With that, she stepped forward into the clearing, imperious as a queen on her own castle grounds. "Excuse me!" she called. "This is my world you are standing on, and I would appreciate you showing some politeness while you are here! In addition, I do not appreciate you stealing animals from me, and threatening to eat other sentient life forms! Please tell me who you are and exactly what it is you're doing here."

All right, Fleur uses her ESP to determine where people are on the world. She can't make out a ship, but she's got a pretty good idea of where one might be hiding under a cloak. She's going to put in a quick call to the bees, and since they can fly at 250 miles an hour, they shouldn't take long to arrive for backup. She's also going to call up the planetary defenses and hold them ready. She will also ready a surprise round attack using her Indirect Snare. If either of the bad-looking dudes makes a hostile move, she will snare the rocky-looking one and leave the snake for Tona to shoot. Because her attack is indirect 3, I think she can still preserve surprise even when she breaks cover and talks to the dudes.

Stesha winced a little at that revelation. "If any of the animals are still alive, we really do need them back. They're an important resource for the village here, and for more than just meat. If your crew would like some more diverse foods, I'm sure we can arrange something else. What exactly are you doing here?" she asked. "This world is all but dead except for the patch we're rebuilding here, it can't be terribly ecologically interesting. As your crew probably noticed if they went hunting, we haven't even got any undomesticated animals larger than tiny rodents." Following Tona's lead, she didn't clarify exactly where they'd come from, even if some of the aliens had obviously found the village.

"That's the one," Stesha confirmed easily, "you should be able to talk to anyone on the planet using that setting, at least all the people I know of. My name is Fleur de Joie, I'm the caretaker of this region. We've noticed some strange disturbances out this way, some of our animals disappearing from the barns at night. I thought it was best to come and see what was going on. I didn't realize we had a visitor. What's your name?" she asked politely. The entire time she didn't so much as glance at Tona or make any indication that she hadn't come alone, letting the archer remain concealed and at the advantage.

Stesha scooped up Ammy as well,following Min to the door of the small kitchen. "Mama's got to go help save people," she told the toddler, who was already familiar with that reason for being left with a sitter. Even as Ammy's little face turned mutinous, Stesha turned her to face the kitchen. "Look, here is Mister Erik, Eden's daddy! He'll look after you until I get back. You be good and listen to what he says, all right? And don't go in the kitchen," she reminded the little girl sternly. "Hungysup!" Ammy immediately whined, her reddening face beneath spring-green curls making her look oddly festive. "You can have the applesauce in the diaper bag," Stesha told her, then turned to Erik. "I'm sorry, this should really only take a few minutes, hopefully. Usually they can either be talked down or caught in the air."

With a shower and change of clothes, Erin was looking almost entirely back to normal and none the worse for her offworld adventure. With Charlie tucked in the crook of her arm, she made sure to say a quick goodbye to Dorothy and make sure the girl had her phone number in case she needed any help getting settled back in at home or school. She was confident of Blue Jay's ability to settle herself, so was satisfied to give the archer a nod of farewell to a comrade. It didn't seem like Blue Jay wanted to talk much anyway. Scratching Charlie between his fuzzy ears, she gave Mara a half-smile. "So boss, you want us back on the clock in the morning? I suspect I've used up all my vacation time for the year by now. Sorry about the lack of notice." She glanced over to Baxter, a little perplexed. "Hey Beekeeper, you got anyone you'd like us to call for you, or would you rather get yourself home? Or one of us could go with you." The idea of delaying more time with Trevor didn't thrill her, but she could see how it might be daunting for the poor kid to go home all by himself and try to explain things.

Stesha stepped wide of Tona, putting perhaps a dozen yards between them before stepping into the clearing. "Hello!" she called, raising both her hands in nonoffensive greeting. "Welcome to Sanctuary. My name is Fleur de Joie. I noticed that there was someone new in the area and wanted to come by and say hello." In the middle of the forest, Stesha was far from unarmed, but she looked entirely harmless and inoffensive to the untrained eye. "I didn't know that anyone was out this way. What are you doing?" she asked with honest curiosity.