Electra
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Freedom City Guidebook
Freedom City PBP: A How-To Guide
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As the ship began to slow to a halt, Erin started rolling up and stowing the equipment, packing the most essential supplies into backpacks for herself and Steve to carry. On a ship the size of a moon, with possibly no living things on board, it would be unwise to go out without food and water. "Hey Jill," she called, "better grab VINCE as we head out, we don't know if we're going to make it back here." Passing Steve his bag, she slipped hers on and nudged her way past the suited up Beekeeper. "You're our air support," she reminded him. "We can't risk letting you step out there first." She drew her bat and held it ready, then looked to make sure everyone else was ready as the door in front of them slowly opened. "Nothing here is alive," she reminded the motley team of heroes. "Do what you have to do." As soon as the door was open wide enough she stepped out, immediately taking a defensive position as she scanned for any hostile activity.
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While it was true that Gina had believed Dragonfly when she'd told her about the robot doppelgangers, it was still a great relief to hear the confirmation from Gabriel. "Yes, apparently there are more than a handful of these robot replacements in the city. We need to figure out where they came from, and where the originals are, and quickly. I'd be obliged if you would drop my robot off at my private lab in Hanover." She reeled off the address, one that was part of an industrial office complex in a forest of identical complexes. "The robot will let you in at the door. And if you could bring or have delivered the Harrier robot to HAX as soon as possible, we need any intact specimens. They seem to have a habit of catching on fire and melting." She pursed her lips, weighed her words. Even just talking on the phone was harder when she was out of "body" as it were, but it needed to be said. "And thanks for, ah, for understanding, and covering for me. I'm sorry I had to leave you to handle the prison on your own."
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Gina pressed her forehead against the wall of the elevator and closed her eyes. "Calm down, Gabe," she told him, only then remembering that her portable comm didn't have a voice modulator on it. Well, they'd both have to live with that. "I'm not dead. The EMP destroyed my robot, but I'm all right." That was... well, that was a total lie in a lot of ways, but it served the purpose for the moment. "I appreciate you taking care of that for me, it would raise a lot of uncomfortable questions if that were left for the guards to find. Do you know anything about what happened to Harrier?" she asked, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice to avoid winding him up any further.
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Koshiro stepped cautiously to the door of the bus, looking around and feeling very insignificant indeed. This had not been anything he pictured when they sprung him from juvie to go to Claremont, that was for sure. But he'd learned a lot more in the past year than just how to control his powers. Leaning down, he petted Avro on the head, careful to avoid the spiny tail. "Okay boy, you look after the bus, okay? Don't let any strangers in." He took a handful of paper mice from his knapsack and breathed life onto them, then dropped them to the floor to skitter around tantalizingly. "We'll be back soon. And no acid baths!" With that he stepped out of the bus and followed the others, cranes already beginning to flutter around him in a defensive cloud. "If you get hungry, Wraith, you should probably just go ahead and feel free," he commented.
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"All right, good." Gina clenched her hands into fists with her nails pressing her palms and looked anywhere in the elevator but at Dragonfly. "Miss A got the press tour of this place when it opened, but I've never gotten a look at the labs. That'll be interesting." She focused on studying the design of the elevator and on taking slow breaths, an exercise that worked long enough to get them to the proper floor. "I'm sorry," she finally said, her voice very quiet. "I'm not good with people, or with... you know... being outside. This is hard. But I won't slow things down."
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"Well, this is weird," Gina said with false bravado once they were in the silence of the pocket. "Guess it beats traffic, though." Her palms were slick with sweat at the idea of going out, and the headache no longer pounded quite hard enough to beat down the feeling of panic creeping up her neck. "Right, let's put waiting to work." With patient Emerson holding up a mirror and a trouble light, Gina got into her bag and began carefully applying makeup. It didn't do a lot to cover up the black eyes, that would've taken pancake makeup and a much higher pain tolerance, but the jaw bruise she'd taken falling out of the chair was softened, as was her general ghostly pallor. "It's not much to work with," she told Emerson, "but it's the best I can do. It's for Steve, right? He'd do worse for me."
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"The pocket will work," Gina decided, resuming her journey up the stairs. She didn't seem to notice Emerson right behind her with his neck fully extended and his arms half raised, looking about as concerned as a robot could be that she'd lose her grip on the railing and fall backwards. That didn't happen, though, and within just a few minutes Gina had cautiously washed her face and changed into a blouse and slacks that had been sitting in the closet long enough to smell faintly of cedar. She held a small bag, even as Emerson made his way once more up the stairs with a large case of tools and equipment. Gina's face was white under the bruising, but she managed to make her voice almost confident as she told Mara, "Okay, we're ready to go." She'd seen the dimensional pocket in action before, so that was really the part of the trip she was least afraid of.
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"No." Gina raised her head from the desk and shook it, a motion she stopped quite quickly. "I need to see it in person, in a lab. You're a superlative engineer, but robots are my specialty." She stood up, swayed, then found her balance. "I'm going too. Just give me a minute to..." she waved her hands helplessly, "to clean up a little bit." The thought of going outdoors, especially knowing how she had to look, was enough to make her feel even more shaky inside. It would be so much easier to stay and work by camera, or to try and project into the systems at HAX. But what if she missed the vital clue because she wasn't right there? What if it meant they were too late to save Steve? Living with herself was hard enough as it was, she wasn't going to let it become completely impossible. Without waiting for a reply she headed for the stairs and started up to her bedroom. At the very least she could wash off the blood and put on some clean clothes. Halfway up, though, she paused. "I can't fly," she realized suddenly. "I'll have to take the car."
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Gina blinked stupidly at the communications array for a minute before letting it disconnect. "Gee, I'm glad you're not dead, Miss Americana," she muttered in a fakey baritone voice, then gave in and rested the unbruised side of her head on the desk. "Play messages," she told the machine. It was a relief to hear from Sharl that he had made it back to Prime, though the idea that he was traveling with a huge load of bioweapons was a bit nervous-making. She frowned as she heard his last message, a shaky recitation of his plans to take the weapons to the Sanctum where they would be safe. "If he's at the Sanctum, that explains why he didn't respond to my distress call," she said aloud, partially for Mara's benefit, partially because it made thinking easier. "We're going to have to address that situation as soon as possible, though. The Wonderbus is sturdy, but it's not designed to carry hazardous material."
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Gina managed to stagger to her feet long enough to fall into the righted chair that Emerson anxiously pushed behind her legs. It was better than the floor, anyway. "That EMP blast we used on Harrier," and now she deliberately avoided saying Steve, "it might have disabled the self-destruct as well. There'll still be a lot of damage, but I don't think it would have burned. Don't know where they would've take it, though. Or my robot." She grimaced. "That'll be a hell of a mess if it gets out." The idea of her secret being blown wide open would've sent Gina under the bed on a regular day, but this day was anything but normal. She just couldn't think about it right now. "Gabriel will know," she decided, turning to the state-of-tomorrow's-art communications setup on one side of her circle. "I have to get in touch with him anyway, tell him I'm not dead. I didn't have a chance to tell him what was going to happen when the EMP hit. I hope he was able to handle the prison by himself." She put a call through to Gabriel's commlink and waited for him to pick up.
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"Robots?" Gina picked out the word, turned it over in her head. "Robot impersonators... but I would've noticed!" The vehemence made her voice loud enough to have her wincing again. "God, Emerson, have pity. Four aspirin, glass of water." The robot chirruped and rolled away hastily towards a recessed door that led to a bathroom. "Steve was distant this month," she said aloud, considering. "Thought he was going to dump me. Then he comes back a few days ago and is all telling me he loves me and wants to be with me forever. I freaked out and he left and didn't come back. I thought it was my fault!" she admitted, her voice choked. "Somehow I made him lose his grip. But if he was a robot, and trying to throw me off, then- then he's not gone. He's somewhere." She grabbed the pills the little droid brought her, swallowing them all at once. "I need to see the robots," she told Dragonfly, and made a shaky effort to push herself to her feet. "Take one apart and we can figure out who made it."
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Gina gasped in shock as recognized the voice and saw Dragonfly, a terribly unwise move that only redoubled the pain in her head. The first strong impulse was to hide, even if that meant crawling away behind the chair or something. Even that fear, though, was crushed by the memories of what she'd seen and done at the prison. Steve, god, what happened to you? She forced herself to bear down and think despite the pounding headache. If Dragonfly was here, that meant that the automated distress call had gone out, but neither Steve nor Sharl had responded to it. Steve, she could understand, but where was Sharl? He shouldn't have been gone in Erde so long, not unless things had taken a serious turn for the worse. She had to know what had happened to both of them. "M'okay," she told Dragonfly, her words somewhat slurred as she looked at the battlesuited heroine through eyes that were nearly all pupil. "Robot's slagged, kaput. Had to do it! I'as with Steve, Gabe at the prison. Steve went crazy, dunno. Real bad, he killed the Steelgrave clone, tried to get at the reactor." She knuckled her eyes, which was a really bad idea with the bruising there, but the pain brought a little more mental clarity. "God! He was talking like... he sounded like Terminus, said terrible things." The memory of his jeering, cutting words was enough to bend her double over her own knees as once again the pressure rose to get the hell out of sight. Her voice was very muffled, but she managed to continue. "He got his pike into the reactor. We couldn't stop him. I had the guards use the EMP defenses on all of us. Saw him... saw him going up like a fireworks show before I got thrown back here." Slow tears plopped down onto the plastic mat. "There was nothing else I could have done," she told Dragonfly, her voice almost pleading. "I don't know what happened to him. It wasn't... he's not that man, he couldn't be. Something terrible must have happened to change him, but I couldn't stop him!"
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It didn't take long for a response to come over Velocity's commlink. "Velocity, this is Fleur de Joie. I read you, I'm coming to help." The veteran plant controller's voice was tired, but still calm and reassuring despite the circumstances. She didn't even seem surprised to hear that Beekeeper had turned evil and started attacking other heroes. "Can you lead him into Mona-Glenn Park, down on Kendall Street by the bridge? My ETA there is sixty seconds." Fleur popped into the park by the bridge seconds after leaving the rooftop in the West End and immediately looked around to make sure she was alone. The park wasn't a popular spot in the winter, and even less so on a day when violence was rocking the area. A look to the sky and the streets didn't reveal Velocity or the Beekeeper yet, but they'd hopefully be coming along. She concealed herself in the trees and waited, seeds at the ready in her hand.
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Tagging in! Fleur will enter initiative on 19. (If that's okay with you, Tiff!)
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At almost the same time, Fleur cocked her head to listen to a transmission on her own earpiece. She hastily packed up her remaining plants, shoving them into her pouch as she replied. "Velocity, this is Fleur de Joie. I read you, I'm coming to help. Can you lead him into Mona-Glenn Park, down on Kendall Street by the bridge? My ETA there is sixty seconds." Rising, she turned to the Interceptors. "I have to go. My comm line is still open to you, let me know if you need anything else. Good luck!" With that, she touched the petals in her hair and was gone, leaving only the scent of flowers in her wake.
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Emerson chirruped assent, and in a moment the screens began to clear. "MEDICAL ALERT ENDED. ALL SYSTEMS RESUME NOMINAL FUNCTION." The lights rose to a level designed to stimulate alertness and minimize eyestrain, while the various computers and video screens tuned back in to their various news feeds, surveillance sites, and what appeared to be a World of Warcraft guild chat. Even Emerson stopped blinking his red and white lights, switching not to green yet, but at least to a guarded sort of amber as he rolled across the floor after Dragonfly. In the center of the circle, the porous server-room floor had been covered with a plastic mat to allow free movement of the Aeron chair that now lay tipped over on its side with two wheels in the air. The chair's former occupant was huddled on the floor, blinking unfocusedly in the suddenly brighter light. She was a young woman, maybe a couple years older than Mara herself, and looked a trace like what Miss Americana might have looked like if Miss A had been short and pudgy with basement-white skin and frizzy hair that was not quite blond. She was also looking quite a bit worse for wear, with a bloody nose and an impressive pair of black eyes, plus a large bruise blooming along one side of her jaw. She squinted up into the lights with bloodshot eyes, obviously unable to make out more than a vague outline. "Sharl," she rasped. "you've got to find Steve, something bad happened to him. I think... I think he might be dead." She made another keening moan at that, the noise of which had her grabbing at her own head.
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The panel thought about that for a second, then released the door with an audible click and a hiss of escaping air. The atmosphere inside was instantly recognizable to Mara, the cool, humidity-free and highly filtered air of a high-end computer lab or server farm. The room she stepped into seemed like a bit of both. On the far side of the room were banks upon banks of servers and processors, whirring away busily in half darkness. Nearer the door was the computer lab, a large near-perfect circle of cutting-edge equipment and home-built computer processors that looked like they could quite easily have run a medium sized country or sent a spacecraft out of the solar system. Beyond the circle, the walls were covered in massive high-definition screens of all shapes and sizes, as well as more holoprojectors and a lot more computer hardware. Many of the screens were flashing the same alarm pattern as Emerson and the door, this time with the words "MEDICAL ALARM: AUTOMATED DISTRESS PROTOCOL INITIATED. PRIMARY PROTOCOL: FAILED. SECONDARY PROTOCOL: FAILED. TERTIARY PROTOCOL: ..." emblazoned over the pattern. The flashing lights made the room resemble a crime scene and made it harder to see what the trouble actually was. Under the ozone smell of filtered air was the faint smell of sugar soda and the odor of sickness, both coming from the center of the ring of computers. Something was definitely moving on the floor, and moaning loudly enough to be heard over all the mechanical noise.
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As it turned out, removing the door from its hinges was not necessary, nearly as soon as the cameras turned in her direction, the front door swung open. Waiting for her was a small robot, Emerson or one of his several duplicates, with its chassis lighting array blinking the red and white of urgent alarm. In The Lab, Dragonfly had only seen that particular pattern when something was about to or had just blown up. Even the greeting chirp it gave her sounded worried, and it lost no time in shutting the door behind her and leading her through the house. The interior of the house was also not what one might have expected of the lair of a gadgeteer and roboticist. There were innovations here and there for convenience and security, and most of the house functions seemed to be automated to run from a single remote. Dragonfly could also see a few of the holoprojectors Miss A had installed in her lab for her sidekick's convenience, but otherwise the house was... boring. Comfortable but sparsely decorated and very light on the furniture, it seemed as though perhaps she hadn't finished moving in, or just didn't have a lot of guests. The little robot led her straight through the living room and kitchen, down a long flight of stairs as fast as his treads and arms would swing him along. At the bottom of the stairs was a metal door, far more reinforced than anything she'd seen in the house thus far, with a security panel next to it. The panel was flashing the same alarmed red and white, but paused long enough to show <>
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January 15 It was not a good day for getting commlink messages in Freedom City. It seemed like every message that came in heralded some new disaster in the city, another hero replaced by a robot double, another fire that needed put out somewhere. In the middle of the parade of messages assailing the communications array of Dragonfly's suit on a day when she was already considerably distracted, one message managed to stand out, for its oddity at least. The message was in text, bald blinking letters that scrolled across the screen of her suit. <> That was one voice who had been silent through the tumult of the day, Miss Americana had been nowhere to be found during all the rescue work, though there had been word of her at Blackstone Prison early in the morning. What followed the message header, though, was no description of danger or location, but rather a long string of scrambled letters and complex equations.
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"Thanks, Vince." With no bad guys to fight and nothing to do, Erin settled in to pass the time as best she could. She watched Blue Jay for awhile as the latter made arrows from the scrap on the ship, asking questions occasionally about notching and fletching but mostly just studying technique. Erin was much better with her hands or her bat than with any ranged weapon, but it never hurt to take an opportunity to pick up a new skill. She spent some time reading a mystery novel she'd picked up from a gas station on one of their supply runs. She had looked at it but not bought it back on Prime because it was too expensive, but that was a bit of a moot point now. After awhile, though, she began to drag out the sleeping bags and food supplies and set them up as best she could in the crowded space. "Now's the time to get a meal and a little rest," she told the others. "We probably won't be able to do either once we get to the ship. Chemical toilet's set up in the back behind the boxes." With that, she settled in crosslegged on her sleeping bag and opened a pack of granola bars. While she ate, though, she kept an eye on Baxter and Dorothy, both young and inexperienced, both looking the worse for wear from the adventure. "Hey Bax," she asked, "what's the first thing you'll do when we're back on Earth?"
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"Yes, I think Geckoman is right," Fleur murmured, briskly but gently checking the fallen hero's pulse, his ribs, the inside of his eyelids. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips and tongue an unhealthy bluish shade, not a good sign at all. She undid the belt bandolier that Jack wore across his chest, but needed to use her scissors to open the shirt. "His ribs are all intact, and no visible wounds. It looks like he had some kind of pulmonary embolism, maybe more than one. This doesn't even look like battle damage. But if he was fighting Jill, she can create bubbles..." The thought of that made her visibly shudder before she turned back to her work. With her supplies exhausted, she took a bit longer to work, growing plants in the loose gravel of the roof and then harvesting them for her remedies. Within a few minutes, though, Jack's chest was covered in sap-smeared leaves that smelled strongly of menthol, and Fleur had put several types of ground-up plant under his tongue. Patting his cheek, she put as much cheer as she could into her voice. "Can you hear me, Jack? Time to wake up now, you've got lots to do."
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Before Baxter was even finished speaking, Erin was shaking her head. "No, that's just a waste of time we don't have. Don't you understand? We don't even know how long we've been gone ,or how much time passed between when we were taken and when we woke up here. If we were replaced like Dorothy, there are people or things with our faces in Freedom City right now, getting close to the people we love, doing God knows what damage! We wanted to get to the Defenders ship because even though it was a long shot, it was the only chance we had. You saw how much time it took us to fuel up and jump a simple bus, now imagine trying to do that to a spaceship that hasn't run in months or years, that none of us can even drive, much less repair." Looking into the ship, she set her hand on her hips. "Traveling like this isn't my first choice either," she admitted. "But if we can get to the Curator's ship, at least we have something to fight. Right now we're like ants running around on the surface of a tire, making no progress and not even knowing when we're about to get squashed. We need to get moving, get off this world, and do whatever it takes to get home. I say we grab the food supplies we have and get on the ship. It's not even that much riskier than staying here, and at least we have a chance to win."
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The roof the Interceptors found themselves on was fairly bare of furnishings, with the exception of a small group of potted evergreen trees by the access door that had obviously just been brought up for storage after the Christmas season. That was fortunate, since mere moments after Fulcrum made her call, one of them sprouted an extra-large pinecone which stretched like a cocoon, then spun around to reveal Fleur de Joie. She looked like she'd already been working hard that day; her coat and hood were gone, her green tunic and pants splattered with dried blood, tendrils of her long green hair escaping confinement left and right. Even so, she was running as she crossed the roof to where Jack was laying. "What happened?" she asked the group at large as she knelt by the fallen swordsman and opened her pouch of seeds. "Fulcrum said you fought a robot impostor?"
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Stesha opened her eyes, blinking away the afterimages of her communion with the plants. "The suit was empty!" she blurted out. "It was Star Knight's battlesuit, but it was empty and still moving and talking! How can that be?" She shook off the slight headache that always came from trying to make sense of what plants were thinking, loosening a few more pins from her green hair in the process. "All I know for sure is that whatever was in there, it wasn't Star Knight the hero." That was a relief, anyway! "And nothing inside the portal caused it to catch fire, it just suddenly did, and burned to nothing in less than thirty seconds." She paused suddenly, holding a hand to her ear as a message came over her private comm link. "Yes, go ahead.... wait, they fought a superhero robot?" Her eyes widened, then flicked to the remains of Not-Star Knight on the ground. "Well, that would clear things up... yes, patch her through immediately." In the moments the commlink was connecting, she told GK and Myrmidon, "The Interceptors just fought a robotic imposter down in the West Side. Could all of these things be just robots of heroes?" She quickly turned her attention back to the comm, taking a few steps away from the others. " "Fulcrum, this is Fleur de Joie. Comm says you're reporting a medical emergency? Are you guys all right? I'm in the city, just tell me where you're at and I'll jump over there. The city is a madhouse right now, but I guess you probably know that." She listened. "All right, I'm on my way." "I have to go," she told the others. "Medical call. I'll be back as soon as I can!" With that, she touched the wilted flowers in her hair and blinked away.
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Koshiro watched the Curator ship through the windshield for another long moment before he swung around to face Sharl. "You and Kimber have the best chance of interfacing with the Curator directly, since neither of you need to use the VR gear or anything he could destroy. If you can get in there, distract him, mess his internal system up, we'll stand a better chance of deactivating the ship and what's in it directly. If we let you out here, can the two of you get into the Sanctum while we fly up and circle around to find a back door to that monster? If we pull up to the Sanctum and drop you off, we risk the bus getting the ship's attention." He smiled to disguise the fact that the spit had all dried up in his mouth. "But hey, if there's anything we know how to do really well, it's mess stuff up and break things in places where we aren't supposed to be."