Electra

"The essay contest," Fleur reminded Gaian Knight. "'What the Freedom League Means to Me.' We were going to meet Benjy for a photo op along with the judging this afternoon." Her eyes were grim, her uniform already stained with blood from kneeling next to the deputy she'd been too late to save. "I just hope Benjy is at the festival and not here right now." She turned to the sheriff. "Can't you shut this down?" she asked, pointing to the dairy. "From the smell of those casks, the milk's already no good. We're going to need quiet and space to work if we want to sort this out."

Fleur blinked at the question, most of her attention still concentrated on the place where the shots had come from. "Probably not too many," she decided, "but this is a tourist area with Gettysburg so close. People rent cars they'd never drive otherwise. Why?" Seeming perfectly comfortable on the platform of rock careening through the air, she looked over at Catherine. "So what can you do?" she asked point-blank. It wasn't the time for chit-chat, much as Fleur thrived on that.

Fleur winced as Amaryllis, already overfull and overstimulated, began to wail right along with the siren. She took the baby out of the sling and gave her a cuddle, which stopped the crying for a moment. "Hush, hush, hush, the bad noise will stop in just a-" Her head jerked up as she heard the gunshot from over the rise. She held up a hand to beckon the others to silence and heard another, then another. "Gunshots," she told them tersely. "A shotgun, I think. There's trouble over there." She jerked a hand towards the plant on the dais, which obediently opened an outsize, yawning flower. Without hesitating, Fleur stuck her head through and called "Darcy, I'm sending Ammy your way. Keep an eye on her, would you?" Apparently satisfied with whatever response she received, Fleur put the baby into the flower, which immediately closed and disappeared. That taken care of, she looked to Gaian Knight. "If you fly us, we'll get a better view," she suggested.

31 for the observant Fleur!

"If the crowd keeps on this way, we'll certainly see her when she shows up," Fleur pointed out with a wave of her hand towards the crowd. "I just hope she isn't lactose-intolerant!" She took her spoon back and caught a bite of ice cream of her own, then gave another to Amaryllis. "I'd like to go look at the childrens' entertainment, but I think we'll just have to wait on that till the crowd thins down a little bit." She took a seat at the table that would be used for judging later, sitting sideways and looking perfectly comfortable. "So you're going for a masters' in architecture? Do you want to teach?"

Wander And Countless Screaming Argonauts Brighter Than the Moon A Briefing With Friends Fleur de Joie Radiance at Dusk Sanctuary:Panacea Bee Good and You Will Bee Lonesome Miss Americana Moloch's Champions Paying Paul Pepper's Ghost Party Time Papercut Going To The Other Place Little Girls and Cute Dogs NPC Amor Fati

"I can think of worse fates," Fleur said easily, even as she accepted a little cup of chocolate ice cream. She wasn't quite fast enough, though! Ammy caught sight of the treat and immediately disregarded her cheese in favor of the new treat, complaining loudly when none was forthcoming. Fleur passed her back a spoonful and resigned herself to getting ice cream in her hair. "Just remember," she told GK, "it's still nearly three hours till the judging, and you and I have to be able to taste-test a few dozen kinds of cheese without bursting." "So Catherine," Fleur went on, turning her attention to the new girl, "you don't look to be from around these parts yourself. Where are you from?"

"It doesn't seem like they get a lot of out of towners," Fleur murmured to Gaian Knight, her voice pitched low so that the mayor couldn't hear. "Which seems a little strange for what should be a big tourism thing. We used to go to cheese festivals in Wisconsin, and they had people from all over the region " She took a piece of string cheese off a tray and handed it back to Ammy, who squealed with delight and began chewing on it with gusto, then stepped off the dais. "May as well play the hero and rescue her," Fleur quipped. Making her way through the crowd took some effort, a lot of "excuse me's" and a little out-and-out pushing, but eventually Fleur made her way to the young woman. "Friendly crowd, huh?" she said cheerfully. "Why don't you come on up to the dais where there's some room to breathe?"

"Tiamat, of course," Fleur corrected herself. "You should definitely come over soon, the both of you. I feel like I hardly get a chance to socialize anymore, we've all been so busy." She gave the dragon-woman a gracious smile. "And I hope you feel nothing but welcome on Sanctuary, but there is always room for a pair of willing hands." She was distracted then by the approach of the mayor, giving him a polite and friendly smile. "We're very happy to be here!" she told him, even as she deftly intercepted the veiny yellow cheese he'd been passing to Ammy. "Bleu cheese is a little too strong for her," she said with pleasant firmness. "But I've heard wonderful things about Pennsylvania mozzarella. She's a big string cheese fan." To take the sting out of the rejection, Fleur ate the bit of cheese herself, though she wasn't much a fan of moldy cheese either. "What time does the judging start?"

"She's here strictly as an observer," Fleur assured GK with a grin. "Just between you and me," she added, dropping her voice conspiratorially, "her favorite cheese is processed American slices. Don't tell!" Chuckling, she turned her attention to Gaian Knight's companion. "And you must be Teagan," she guessed, extending a friendly hand. "I've heard about you, but I've been so busy I haven't had the time to come by when you two were at the castle. It's so nice to meet you."

It was a beautiful October day, just the sort of weather the Cheesetopia organizers had probably been praying for. There was a crisp fall bite in the air, but not so much that Stesha wasn't perfectly comfortable with her regular-weight uniform and cowl. Winter was coming, and with it the fleece-lined and insulated set, but not today! "Hey pumpkin, are you ready for the festival?" she asked Amaryllis as she buttoned the little girl into a hand-knit sweater the color of fall leaves. "What are we going to eat today?" "Chee!" Ammy replied happily, dancing in place as her mother struggled with the buttons. She was dressed for the weather too, in sweater and matching hat knitted by Grandma Madison. Stesha had debated bringing her along or leaving her in the village to play, but a cheese festival sounded like a fun and harmless outing. Ammy needed to spend more time on Earth Prime, anyway! "That's right, cheese! Lots of it!" With the ease of long practice and some cooperation from Ammy, Stesha wrapped them both up in the cloth sling that held the toddler secure on her mother's back. "And remember, say hi to everyone! We're on a goodwill mission." With Ammy's enthusiastic "hihihihi" in her ears, Stesha teleported to Earth Prime, popping out of the plant the festival organizers had set on the dais for her. "Hey look, there's Gaian Knight!" she told the little girl. "Let's go say hello."

"I don't think so," Miss A disagreed, bringing up the contents of the diary on her pad. "It's quite likely that he has been there tonight, but we lost time securing the scene at the speaker's corner and searching here. I think we'd better get to his parents' home as soon as possible. It looks as though he plans to move quickly on his intention to sacrifice his mother and father to the Madonna. If we keep dogging his steps, we may end up being there too late. Shall we fly?"

After enduring the strangeness of riding his own airplane but not being in control of it, Koshiro was glad to be on the ground again, even if it did mean landing in the middle of a fight! In the distance, he saw Corbin hanging onto the Bauble despite being wrapped up like a ghost dolphin in a tuna net by Get-Away. If he could just get there, surely this metallic body would have something useful to do. Koshiro looked to the singed and flattened airplane and got an idea. He couldn't fold paper anymore, but he could fold himself. Abandoning the human shape he'd been wearing, he allowed himself to flatten on the ground till he was a giant square, then he began folding. Edge to edge, corner to corner, valleys and creases with rapidly increasing confidence as the others fought around him. In moments, he was a flat and angular figure with a wedge-shaped head and accordion folded back, poised on two triangular front legs. He opened the eyes that had migrated, one to each side of the head, and the origami frog Papercut was complete. Bunching his powerful accordion-legs, he sprang across the landscape as though launched by a massive unseen finger, with the wicked silver point of his head aimed straight at Get-Away. His aim was true, and she hadn't been expecting a shapeshifting origami monster out of nowhere, so the collision was intense, sending them both flying!

Origami Thing Speed 3 (50mph / 500 feet per Move Action) [3pp] Strike 5 (Feats: Extended Reach 1 [+5 ft], Mighty) [7pp] [3 + 7 = 10/10pp] Koshiro is going to fold his body up into a giant paper frog, one of those rare simple origami pieces that have distance movement powers. He will leap across the distance between him and Get Away, and attempt to pummel her with his metal-paper-froggy-body! First roll, awful. Spending HP! Better, better. A 32.

"It'll be enough to let you keep your keys to the thirteenth floor, anyway," Miss A said rather ominously. "We'll see about the trust part. I'll be changing the security systems here, you can consider yourself trusted enough if I ever give you another cracking lesson." She went to a console on the wall and input a very long string of commands, too quickly for Sharl to follow even if he'd been standing right there. The lights began to dim in the laboratory, the ventilation fans slowing and stopping to leave only the soft hum of computer equipment in the air. "I'm shutting down the projectors in here now, so you're going to have to clear out," she told him coolly. "Dr. Atom will expect you tomorrow afternoon, he can show you what you need to do." With that, she began to walk towards her private office, the place where she kept the Miss A robot when it was stored on premises.

"It's obvious that you don't really have a strong grasp on the way the Freedom League works, or the depth and breadth of information they have about various technologies that qualifies them as experts. If you did, you would have far more respect for technology that they have classified as extremely dangerous. If the League thinks it's extremely dangerous, most other regulating bodies would be screaming and running in the other direction," the beautiful heroine told her sidekick dryly. "Luckily, there's a perfect opportunity for you to learn a lot more about the way the League operates and how it keeps data." She finally stopped pacing, which was both a relief and instilled a touch of foreboding. "In the basement of the Goodman building, the League is storing about thirty years worth of old files and microfiche that has never been digitized. There's rooms of the stuff, going back to the early days of the Liberty League. The classified information is stored elsewhere, of course, but all of this data is still quite valuable. You're going to go down there with the appropriate equipment and digitize the lot of it. Consider it your hundred hours of community service. At least." Now she even smiled a little, but there was no humor in it.

"That's the spirit!" Fleur told him with a friendly chuckle. "If you do stop in at The Lab, tell them that you're my friend. They're all lovely people there, and I'm sure they'll be glad to help with whatever you need. Good luck with the crime fighting! And remember, dust your silk flowers and turn them every couple of weeks so they wear evenly in the light. Wherever the light is coming from!" Reaching up, she touched the flowers in her hair and disappeared, leaving only a faint scent of flowers behind her. Well, that and a park that looked like April in the middle of September.

"If you have cats, it might not be the radiation killing your plants," Fleur pointed out with a chuckle. "Nothing a kitty likes more than a few bites of leaf or a romp through the "jungle." To say nothing of having a go at the dirt." That drew a bit of a grimace from her. "In any case, it sounds like you're safe, but if you do ever want to get a more scientific analysis, I can help you get set up. Here." She dug into her pouch again and this time produced, incongruously enough, a business card. It smelled faintly of flowers and gave phone and email contact information for Fleur de Joie, Freedom League Auxiliary. "If you ever need anything, or need to get in touch with another hero, just give me a call at this number. If I don't know someone personally, I'm sure I can find someone who does. None of us should have to go it alone, not in Freedom City!"

"I'll keep it between us for now," Miss A agreed, "and let you present the plan, as long as you're totally upfront and honest about what you're going to do and how you want to do it." The stress on those words were obviously to remind him of his current position in the doghouse. I'll take a look at those plans when you get them to me, and the information on your team. And all that planning will give you plenty of time to take on a few extra assignments, just to reassure me that you understand exactly why what you did was wrong, and that you aren't ever going to do anything like it again." The look in her eye suggested that these extra assignments were not going to be of the fun and adventuresome variety.

"This is a hell of a time to ask me for a favor," Miss A snapped, but he could see by her face that she wasn't ruling it out entirely. Even in her anger, even with her near-irrational mania for privacy, she was still a hero, and what he was asking would save lives. It wasn't something that could be dismissed out of hand. "I want to see your tactical plans, such as they might be, and your dossiers and mission briefs. And you're not going anywhere without backing from the school," she added sharply. "You've done enough sneaking and slinking around already. If the school won't sign off on it, that's the end of it, no arguments. Once you graduate and are out on your own, we can't control what you do, but until then, by god, you are going to have to listen to reason."

"Is the radiation you emit dangerous?" Fleur asked, sounding a little bit cautious. She was understandably concerned by the idea of plants dying in his presence, though some people without radiation powers could kill plants almost by looking at them funny. "If you haven't had that tested, it might not be a bad idea. I know some people who could help with that, without having to deal with questions about secret identities and things like that," she offered, then grinned. "And I could probably set you up with some very nice silk plants for your apartment. Sometimes it's just easier that way."

Skill Mastery 30

"That might work," she said tightly, obviously having no trouble following his explanation. "Or, given the shoddy workmanship of materials from Erde, your borrowed board could've blown out the transducer, shorted out the power source, and blown up floors 11-16 of a building with more than two thousand people working in it. Or you could've miscalculated the time coefficient between dimensions and stranded yourself in Erde forever, or you could've used a disc with a bad sector on it and completely depopulated the Tronik you were trying to save. "The point is" she continued inexorably, her voice rising a bit, "you are eighteen years old and everything you know about Earth technology, you've learned from me teaching you on the job. You're certainly clever enough to pick up a lot, but taking shortcuts and bypassing failsafes isn't going to make you any better. It's going to get you killed, and maybe a bunch of other people as well. I don't know why all the men I know seem to insist that they can throw their lives away for impossible odds just because 'it was for a good cause,' but that's stupid thinking and it stops now, understand?" she demanded. Miss Americana's breath control was truly impressive. "If you're going to travel dimensionally, you're going to do it supervised, and you're going to do it with proven technology, and with a plan that's better than "go find Tronik and rescue it."

"Seems okay right now," Erin replied, at least as relieved by the genius' relatively chatty tone as by her words. If things were bad, they wouldn't be talking. "Caradoc is going to stay up here and monitor the situation till the AEGIS agents finish with Firebug. I'm returning to your position. And if you do find whoever made the bomb, make sure to leave a piece for me, okay? Not only did they leave us a mess to clean up, but I've seen three members of the Thieves' Guild in their underpants today. Someone ought to pay for that." With one last look around, she swung back into the building, heading down to the crawlspace where the bomb waited.

"That's supposed to be 'Thou hast the radio,'" Wander muttered under her breath. "Fair maid." Even with the silly language, Steve was quite correct, so she put her earbud back in and activated her communicator. "Firebug's taken care of," she reported. "There is no perimeter breach, and we're back to condition green up here. How's it going?" She thought about mentioning that she wanted to have Steve stay uptop to keep an eye on things while the AEGIS agents were distracted, but thought better of it. She'd had enough practice dealing with Trevor when he was working on delicate projects to know when extra verbiage would probably not be appreciated.