Electra
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Freedom City Guidebook
Freedom City PBP: A How-To Guide
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Everything posted by Electra
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Erin dropped to a crouch when Dorothy sat down, giving the younger girl a quick once-over. She looked shocky, tired, recently malnourished, but at least there were no visible injuries on her. It occurred to Erin that this might well be a trap, but then again, maybe it wasn't. There was no real reason that she and people she knew should be the only ones affected by... whatever this was, or even that they should be the first. If this was some kind of abduction to a Primelike universe, it would even make sense to take a vulnerable youngster out of the school first, just as proof of concept. If they could get someone out of Claremont, they could get someone out anywhere. But if that was the case, why hadn't there been reports of a kidnapping? Either way, better to take things at face value, at least for now. Whoever was orchestrating this had already had ample time to ambush them while they were separated and disoriented. If Quickstep was some kind of plant, it was unlikely she was there to stab them in the backs. And if she was what she seemed, she needed help and protection. "It's going to be okay," she told the girl. "We'll find some food, find a defensible position, and then we'll figure out what's going on and how to fix it." Rising, she extended a hand to Dorothy, then looked to the others. "I don't know how close this world is to Prime, but now's a good time to find out. I have survival supplies in my apartment, who knows, they may still be there. I'm nervous about going into Freedom Hall like this, at least until we get Harrier spruced up. And while we're on the north side, we can check on HAX as well." She pursed her lips, not wanting to wonder aloud about what they might find there.
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Not a bad roll, a 20
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Wander instinctively took a half-step forward the new figure appeared, putting herself between it and her friends. The kid didn't look like much of a threat, but looks could be deceiving. If Steve was right, a lot might be deceiving in this place. "We just got here," she told the girl, "we're reconnoitering. Who are you, and who are you here with?" For the moment at least, she wasn't going to answer any questions about their tactical situation, even whether they had food. The idea of being without food was a deeply discomfiting one to her; briefly she thought of the bug-out bag she kept under her bed at home. Would that still be there in this world, wherever it was? What about Charlie? Something to check on, soon. "He's with us," she added when she saw the girl look at Harrier. "He won't hurt you."
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"Thanks, Erin said, getting up and stretching, "but I think it's about time for us to get going. I go on shift at eleven tonight, and I'm sure you two have some stuff you'd like to talk about in private." She tossed her empty pop can in the trash. "Thanks for having us over, it was fun. We'll have to do it again sometime." Sometime when you've had lots and lots of time to dissect your relationship without an audience, she added silently. She looked to Trevor to make sure he was ready to go as well. "Nice seeing you again, Quo-dis. Good luck with the job offer and everything."
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"I think you're getting used to it," Erin decided, acquiring a bit more green paint as she nibbled lightly along his jaw. "And making positive associations. That's important too." A careful flick of her foot levered them sideways till they were nearly horizontal in the air, her grinning down at him with a satisfied expression. Released from wig pins and gravity, her hair made a wavy auburn nimbus around her head, tickling his cheek as she leaned down to whisper in his ear. "It's way too late to get to that party by now, and your grandpa's been in bed for hours. Guess it's just the two of us celebrating for the rest of the night."
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Go ahead and combine my Oct and Nov post counts, all points to Wander, then all rollover to Papercut
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"The Expendables?" Erin asked Jill, rifling through her shallow pop-culture memory file. "I liked that one. Pretty much everything that could blow up did. Poor Liam Hemsworth went down like a chump, though." She shook her head, then returned her attention fully to the situation at hand. "Guess there's only one way to figure out what's going on, get together and investigate." She thought about tightening the focus on her communicator to exclude the potentially hostile audience, then decided not to. It might mean missing other living heroes, and they didn't have to say anything tactically sensitive on the unsecure channel. "Underclothes?" she repeated into her communicator. "You're in your underwear? We're definitely going to have to find you something to wear. It's freezing." There was a trace of amusement in her voice, gone when she resumed questioning. "Are you alone? Does it look like there's any activity in Freedom Hall?" The questions were largely unnecessary, since they were already running onto the plaza outside Freedom Hall as she spoke.
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Wander stared at Jill for a moment, torn equally between annoyance, amusement, and incomprehension. It had been obvious that Blue Jay was lying, but by calling her out on it, Jill had not only tipped their tactical hand, she'd spilled it all over the table. Any element of surprise they might have had was pretty much gone. Still, there was something to be said for cutting through the murk and trying to get as clear a picture as possible, as soon as possible. She supposed the success of the ploy would be revealed by whether or not either of them ended up shot in the next few minutes. And sometimes it was just nice to be able to call a liar a liar. She flipped her communicator shut, breaking for a moment from her run. "What do you mean, it's a team-up fight?" she asked Jill. "Do you think this might be some kind of setup, like we used to have in the Doom Room to get us working together? What would be the point of that? And who'd be doing it?"
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"You're the one who got me interested in dancing," she pointed out with a grin, sliding a hand up into his hair. "But I was thinking something that needs less of an audience." Leaning in, she brought her mouth to his in a gesture smooth enough to not add any new momentum to their lazy movement through the air. It was chilly down in the subbasement, but they were both plenty warm enough at the moment. "You taste like face paint," Erin murmured with a laugh, not seeming much put off as she hooked a foot around the control chair and stopped their spinning. "But I think the weightlessness adds to the whole experience."
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"I'm staying inside for this one," Koshiro said firmly, sliding into the front seat of the bus. "I'd only get shot if I went out there, and then somebody would have to drag my stupid ass back inside. Our stealth is shot to hell anyway, may as well make use of what this bus can do. Sharl said that Miss Americana put some fancy guns on this thing, I just need to figure out how to use them. Gotta be user friendly, this whole control board was originally designed for that pothead wookie to use." He cracked his knuckles and got to work, accessing the onboard computer even as he read the labels on various switches.
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"I read you, Harrier," Wander replied, feeling some relief at hearing a familiar voice, at knowing communication was still possible. "I can't hear you yet, but if you're near where that transport went down, we're closing in on your position. Jill o'Cure is with me, we're moving west on Liberty Way towards League HQ. We'll be alert for hostiles." Shifting gears even as she kept one eye on the sky for enemies descending, she addressed the stranger on the line. "Blue Jay, this is Wander of the Liberty League. I'm trying to get in touch with any heroes still left in the city. Are you near the downtown? Do you have anyone else with you?"
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Unmodified CHA roll 18
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With the blows and shots still flying, it was tempting for Fleur to remain engaged in the fight until she was sure it was safe. But Gabriel and Gaian Knight were holding their own, and she had other priorities right now. Moving awkwardly with the weight of the boy, and nudging the girl as well, she scooted them all to the corner of the room, well behind the wall and out of eyeline of the door. "Stay close to me, Penny," she instructed, giving the girl a handful of leaf-wrapped sap balls from her pouch. "I need you to help me take care of Scraps. Whenever I tell you to, give me another one of those. Scraps, honey, I need you to open your mouth for me," she cooed to the injured boy. "This will help you feel better." She tucked the first herbal concoction into his mouth, then began unwrapping the rest of them to paste over the hurt places. The improvement was rapid, burnt skin quickly scabbing over and flaking away from healthy new skin beneath.
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Wander sighed but followed, quickly overtaking the medic as they raced through the streets. She hadn't really thought she'd be able to keep Ellie from racing into danger, but if they somehow got out of this situation into something resembling normalcy, she wanted to at least be able to tell Mara she'd tried! Thinking of Mara made her remember her communicator, snug on her belt next to the holster for her bat. Pulling it out, she set it to wide frequency, where it might tag any of her contacts, whether from HAX, the Liberty League, or even Young Freedom. She didn't know whether she hoped to get answers or not. Surely this wasn't really Earth Prime, but surely they weren't the only people alive here, either? "This is Wander calling any heroes," she barked into the communicator as she ran. "Emergency alert. Please respond with your status if you're able."
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"It was an Omegadrone troop transport," Wander told Jill tersely, "it passed right overhead and looked like it was going down somewhere close. Drones are really tough, though. Even if it crashed, they're probably still intact and ready to fight." She looked at Jill, considering the tactical situation. Ellie was tough, but a horde of Omegadrones wasn't a situation where you took anybody you were hoping to protect. Still, they had to figure out what the hell was going on here, and they wouldnt' do that without somebody getting a closer look. "What's the situation inside the clinic?" she asked. "Are there civilian casualties in there? I haven't even seen anyone else alive so far, but if there are survivors, they'll need medical attention."
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"Whoa..." Erin chuckled as she floated into the air along with her tools, automatically righting herself before she thumped her head against the side of the cabinet. She quickly secured her work space, then pushed off with one foot to join Trevor in the cockpit. "That's a good sign for the internal circuitry being mostly intact... and it's fun, too." Putting her hands on his shoulders, she wrapped her legs around his and spun them both in a slow midair circle. "I wanted to try this last time we were in zero g, but it was too weird with the guys around," she admitted with a teasing grin.
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Cobalt Templar had worked with Wander long enough to know she wasn't the sort to waste time during a mission. Indeed, as soon as he'd gotten the wires clear of the truck she was in motion, shoving a shoulder against the rear axle and pushing the entire mass of the thing off the road and into a parking lot. It wasn't a move with a lot of finesse, and the shrieking and scraping of metal was enough to bring some of the neighbors out even in this weather, but it was both effective and fast in getting the truck out of the street. With the truck moved, some of the backed up traffic was finally able to flow again, which at least reduced the chances of a second accident on this street. A few of the cars honked appreciatively as they passed, but she ignored them in favor of checking in on the vintage robot in the truck.
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Erin skidded to a stop when she caught sight of Ellie coming out the door of a ruined clinic. Her belief that this was a dream was already waning inexorably under the hard reality of ground crunching under her feet and the smell in the air, and seeing someone who had never featured before only added to that. Where the hell were they, and why? She reversed course, bringing her even with the healer in seconds. "Do you know what's going on here?" she asked. "It feels like I went to sleep in my bed and woke up on the steps of the clinic and all this..." For the first time, Erin let herself take in the entire scene of devastation around them, and it was almost too much. For a split second she was back on EZO1and the noise of battle became the neverending cries of the zombies, searching for living meat. She shook herself hard, dragging herself back into whatever this reality was. "What the hell happened?"
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"They looked like Nazi robots," Koshiro pointed out, even as he rubbed at his temples. The blasting of memory hadn't exactly been painful, but it certainly hadn't been pleasant. "Like what Sharl was saying they were planning on shoving the Tronikians into. It could be that we're walking into the middle of a rebellion that's already started, if somehow they managed to get into the robots and get them turned against the Nazis. Or hell, maybe the robots became sentient themselves. Can't get through a chapter in the hero history textbook without that happening somewhere, right?" he pointed out. "They look real dangerous, but they might be on our side. Trouble is letting them know we're on their side. Hey Sharl," he called to his roommate, "is there some secret handshake deal in Tronik, something people do to say hi or bye or whatever that they don't do on Prime?"
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Erin snatched the lamp from his hand and gave him a teasing hip bump. "You're a laugh riot," she told him, not quite suppressing a chuckle as she walked up the ramp into the ship. "Man, it's like a history museum from the future in here..." Exploring the strange interior and unfamiliar machinery of the flying saucer was enough project to occupy most of the night, with both of them eager to take apart various systems to see how they'd worked. Erin shed her wig early on when it got snagged in the latch on an access portal, with the flowy gown following later on when it got in her way on a ladder once too often. The basement was a little chilly for undershirt and shorts, but it didn't bother her, and made for much easier working conditions. And hell, it was more fun too, given the company. "We could probably spend weeks just taking this thing apart," she decided eventually, her voice muffled as she worked with half her body wedged into a circuit cabinet. "But it seems like it could fly again, if we could scavenge the right parts. Wouldn't that be something?"
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"It's just a dream," Erin said aloud, even as her heart began to gallop and her muscles to twitch with readiness. "Just a dream. I went to bed and this is a dream." She remembered going to bed, remembered a late-night leftover pizza snack before laying down with Charlie curled warm at the small of her back to catch a few hours of sleep. Her day off was coming up, she reminded herself, and she wanted to spend it with Trevor and be able to stay up for a nighttime patrol. Now she was having a bad dream that conflated two of her most persistent nightmares. She just had to ride it out. "Oliver?" she called, looking around as she tried to summon the image of the cat into her dreams. It was a technique she'd been working on with her new psychologist, defusing lucid nightmares with comforting thoughts and images. "Here, kitty..." The technique worked sometimes, but not tonight, it seemed. Instead, there was the smell of burning metal and death in the air, sharper and more insistent than she could remember in dreams. She was just going to have to power through this one to the other side. Drawing her bat and opening it to full extension, she began running toward the crashed transport ship, dreading whatever she might see there.
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Koshiro headed for the door nearly as fast as Sharl, but checked for a moment when he realized how vulnerable the drizzling rain would make him to anything that was out there. He still hadn't managed to get a really waterproof origami figure; something about the magic that empowered them didn't seem to recognize even thin, foldable plastics as sufficiently papery. Waxed paper was semi-waterproof, but the coating flaked and made the figures move stiffly. Until he got something figured out, something as simple as a rainy day could disarm him. Even so, he couldn't just stand in the bus while his teammates ran out into danger. He followed on Mali's heels, arriving just after the German's odd last words. "Ziesting?" he asked quizzically, even as his hand went to Mali's shoulder in a supportive gesture that seemed almost automatic. "I don't know any German, what does that mean? Is the rebellion here already?"
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"I can move the truck myself," she assured him with careless confidence. "Just get the wires out of my way and keep out of the way of my push." That last seemed to be mostly directed at the driver, who she'd barely had a chance to glance at while she'd been involved with the robot in the cargo compartment. Now she looked the truck up and down, even as the rain continued to pelt steadily on all of them. "We'll get this done fast and be out before that robot starts rusting or something. Whenever you're ready," she said with a nod to Corbin.
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"The Milwaukee Braves won the 1957 World Series four games to three against the Yankees," came the answer with surprising alacrity. Erin wasn't much a student of history, but she did like sports, especially baseball. And back in 1957, her timeline and Prime had still been running in perfect harmony. "It was the first time in about ten years that a New York team didn't win." She climbed through the hole into the trailer itself, taking a nonthreatening posture that nonetheless kept her close enough to take out the robot if necessary. "You're damaged and in need of repair, America-Tron," she told it. "We need to take you to base to restore you to full functionality."
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"First things first," Koshiro pointed out. "If we have time on the way out, we can trash their stuff, but we've got a mission first." He swore and grabbed at the nearest seat as the Wonderbus took another curve too fast and too tight. "Jesus, Sharl, do you know how to drive a car? Try to leave some rubber on the tires to get home with!" He made his way up to the front, looking out the windshield and holding tight to the doorframe. "Doesn't seem to be a lot of other people around on the road. That should make things easier, at least until we have to go through a security gate or something."