Electra

"The hideout at Grandma's is as good a place to start as any," Miss A decided. "If nothing else, we might get more clues there as to what he's up to. Meantime, we need to stash this one away somewhere safe. I can have a copter out here in ten minutes to take him in, unless you've got something faster, Nick." She shut the scanner and tucked it away again. "Let's spread out and search the building, turn the place over just to make sure we're not missing anything. I'd rather not have to come back here unaccompanied by a wrecking crew and maybe a team of clergy."

"I'm going to hang back," Wander told Edge, "try and come in from above. There's a roof access up here, and I don't want to be near any of you if she tries something. Remember to keep an eye on each other." With that, she made her way carefully across the roof towards the old rusted door, hoping it would open and not need to be taken off its hinges or taken apart entirely. She kept her communicator very quiet, but listened to it intently as she waited to hear how the situation would play out. The cowardice of staying behind left a bitter taste in her mouth, but part of being a hero was knowing when you couldn't or shouldn't be fighting.

"And what were you going to do with the dimensional transducer if you got your hands on it?" Miss A demanded, hardly seeming mollified. The fact that her gait had smoothed out was probably a good sign, but Sharl certainly wasn't out of the woods yet. "That thing's not just a toy I put on a high shelf, it's League-restricted technology, and for good reason. It's very experimental, highly unstable. You make one mistake and open that thing onto a bad universe or a void universe, you could send that void spilling into Prime and destroying everything it touches, starting with your dumb ass. The fact that it worked even once was a minor miracle. Trying to save the Tronik on Erde could've easily murdered everyone on Freedom City Prime. You think the rules are there for fun, or to make life more difficult for you? If I've locked something up, it's because you're goddamned well not supposed to touch it!"

Wander didn't spend any time trying to impress or intimidate Firebug; she'd had just about enough of the Thieves Guild for one day already. Racing out of the building at full-tilt. she leapt into the air just in time to use her body as a shield against the fireball the blaster had aimed at the building. It wasn't hot enough to burn through her impervious skin or even ruin her uniform, but the smoke still had her coughing a bit as she landed, plus there was an ominous whiff of burnt hair. At this rate, she'd never finish growing out the misbegotten short haircut, and it was all the fault of guys like this. As soon as her feet were solidly back on the ground, she was moving forward, taking advantage of the path cleared by the fireball to launch into a dizzying series of handsprings. Each one ate up the distance between her and Firebug, till on the last one she came up bat-first and smashed him solidly across the forehead with the center of the bat.

"A lot of my flowers aren't quite as nature intended them anymore," Fleur admitted cheerfully. "But they do their jobs very well. And the police here are used to dealing with criminals arriving in all sorts of ways. I'll give you the number of the precinct I work with, you can call them and use my name and let them know exactly what those thugs should be charged with." She walked around the place where her vines had been, looking at the trees and shrubs and grass. Everywhere she passed, the plants became a little greener, a little bigger. "And you say you've only been doing this a week? You've got a talent for it, obviously! Back when I was a week in, I was still falling off porches and scaring myself with bee stings." Fleur laughed. "I like the glow you've got going on. Are you a light controller?"

Erin is using Interpose to block the fire from the building so it doesn't get all on fire. She wastes a nat 20 on soaking it! She's going to use her move action to do an acrobatic bluff, then charge him and attempt a Stunning attack with the bat. I'm assuming that there's both a clear path for the charge and for the knockback, given that Freedom Citizens have enough experience and street savvy to get the hell out of the way when fireballs start flying. Acrobluff is the usual DC 27 Charging stunning attack is a 29.

Miss America loosed an uncharacteristically family-unfriendly word to show what she thought of that explanation, then stalked away for a moment. "That's garbage," she snapped, whipping suddenly to face him again. "You find a problem that's out of your weight class, you come to me with it, or you go to a teacher at school. That's what this whole sidekick bit is about, isn't it? That's why you're in a school for superheroes, not so you can pull this supervillain crap. I have spent the past two years on you, rescuing you, taking care of you, trying to teach you how to live and act so you turn out better than I do. I put you in the best school in the world, tried to find people who would make you who you said you wanted to be, a hero for your whole world." She turned away again, paced, but this time her movements were ever so slightly jerky. Gina's usual unbreakable control was obviously fraying at the edges. "But the first time your teenage angst rears it's ugly head and you think your problem is the worst thing in the world, you don't tell me or your school or your mentors? Instead you start lying and sneaking around and stealing? You break my trust and sit there trying to tell me it's for my own good? You sit there and lecture me about being a hero? Where the hell do you get off, Sharl?"

Miss A went very still, robot still, as though Gina had vacated for a moment. The narrow focus of her eyes was the only clue she was still in residence, very different from the amiable vacuity of her AI. "You broke in to steal?" she repeated slowly. "You broke into my private laboratory, my sanctum, using the knowledge I imparted to you to help me protect it, with the intent to breach my highest-security vault and steal something you knew was dangerous, illegal, and not remotely yours." Her voice was cold, nearly mechanical, with each word bitten off. She stared down at him with icy eyes. "You have one minute to tell me why I shouldn't be kicking your ass out of my sanctum and back to Tronik on a one-way ticket for this."

He heard the soft hum of the roof hatches opening, a moment before the magnetic fields died down in the walls. Miss Americana descended from on high, perfect despite the hour, and wearing lounging clothes in pastel blue and white that suggested she'd been interrupted while at ease for the evening. She walked over to her errant sidekick, a frown marring her amazing face. She looked about equal parts concerned and angry, a balance Sharl was fairly sure would shortly tip. "What the hell is going on?" she demanded. "Did you bypass the security here? What exactly is it that you think we should talk about?" Brushing past him for a moment, Miss A lost no time in examining the high security locker itself, coding it open and checking its contents. There were things in here that were dangerous, and things in here that were irreplaceable. Though she'd never mentioned it to him, Sharl himself was in here as well, or at least his secure offsite backups, along with the offsite backup of Tronik itself. Everything looked all right, so she shut the door and secured it, reminding herself that it was obviously time for more upgrades.

"Citizen?" One by one the systems Sharl had turned off began to reroute themselves and come back online, lights, cameras, alarms, even the little droid robots. One of them whirred towards him, swinging its camera around to get a good picture of him. There didn't appear to be anyone else in the lab, but looks could be deceiving. There were things that had no trouble evading the lens of the most sensitive camera. "What are you doing here?" The voice was Gina's, a faint hint of difference from Miss A's tone that only someone who spent a lot of time around both would notice. "Are you all right? Give me your status." They had code words set up for this sort of situation, at her insistence. If he gave the wrong innocuous answer, she'd know he was in bad trouble, blackmailed, hostage or worse.

Gina was a heavy sleeper normally, but when the alarm went off in her bedroom, she woke up fast. As soon as consciousness returned, she was sending it out again, flinging herself into the integrated network that ran her home and linked to the powerful computers beneath it. A fraction of a second's work told her what she needed to know, that the high-security locker at her private lab was under assault, and that whoever was behind it knew what they were doing. A hacker that good had to be after data, she reasoned. The files in the high security vault were kept on stand-alone systems, the one true deterrent to computer crime, and the information about her inventions she kept there was easily worth millions of dollars. Not even bothering to get her body out of bed, Gina activated the Miss A robot in its private "bedroom" at ArcheTech and instructed it to make best possible speed to her lab. At the same time, she was activating an entirely different level of security than that which had been disabled, bringing down the steel-barred security doors, bringing up the brilliant interior spotlights, and most aggressively, running magnetic current through every door and window. "Attention," she said calmly through the speakers in the lab, "You have been noticed and detained. Any attempt to leave or resist will be met with force. Any attempt to remove data or equipment from this building will result in its destruction by magnetic force." Finally, when the work was done, she flipped on the cameras to get an idea what she was dealing with.

"Atomic Bob, I like that," Fleur said approvingly. "And no, getting shot at is a hard thing to get used to. But I just try and tell myself it's better that the bad guys are shooting at us than at helpless civilians. Sometimes it makes me feel better." She laughed and pushed back her hood to get a better look at the situation around her. With the hood down, her long, intricate braids of bright green hair became visible, interspersed with a crown of yellow flowers. "Let me clean this up and get these bad boys off to the police station." Fleur rummaged in her belt pouch, then withdrew her hand and seemed to mime throwing something at the muggers. As if out of nowhere, a flower began to form in the air, a giant trumpet of a lily that sent shoots down into the ground even as it descended over the bound men like a candle snuffer on a flame. When it bobbed up again, the men were gone. "How long have you been doing hero work?" she asked Bob curiously.

Even at a full run, the muggers actually weren't in that great of shape, and it was the work of only a moment for Bob to take them down and restrain them. He was just securing the last one when he suddenly became aware of the park coming to life around him. All around him, the ground was seething with vines, circling the scene and growing little white flowers that seemed oddly menacing in the half-light of dusk. One flower right in front of him budded and then grew, and grew, and grew, until it was the size of a garbage can, then the size of a phone booth. It opened in a flutter of petals and a pleasant-scented breeze to reveal a woman dressed in a brown hooded cowl over dark green tunic and trousers. The domino mask she wore made it plain, as though it were necessary, that she was also here in a super capacity. She stepped out of the flower and looked around, then raised her hands. All at once, the vines stopped moving and began to recede. "I was coming to help," she admitted with a grin for Bob, "but you were too quick for me. I don't think I've seen you around here before. My name is Fleur de Joie."

"That's not a problem," Koshiro assured her. "Listen, why don't you come on by the HQ tomorrow and meet everybody, see how it all clicks? I can pick you up and give you a ride over there, maybe afterward we can grab something to eat. You shouldn't try and decide what you want to do till you have a chance to see what you're getting into." He gave her a smile that was considerably more charming than his intense demeanor during the simulation, then slunk his backpack up over one shoulder. "And maybe I can talk you into joining if you're still not sure. We need more traditionally alive human beings on the team, I'm totally outnumbered right now."

"If he's trying to reach the Terminus, or if something there is trying to reach him, you're both in grave danger," Miss Americana told the frightened young drunken fool. She took out her scanner and, ignoring his flinch, began running a medical scan on him. Her scanner wasn't as sensitive as the equipment she had in her lab, but it should be able to detect any gross abnormalities. "I'm going to place you in protective custody for your own safety," she said in a tone that brooked no disagreement. "Whatever else you've done, we'll deal with that later, but we want to make sure you're alive for that. Now I need you to tell me everything you know about where your brother might have his private sanctuary, and what he does there, and who else might be there. You're his brother, I know you have some idea of where he goes. If we're going to save him too, time is of the essence."

"Pay's not much," Koshiro put in with a half-smile, "but you get a lot of extra training. And so far, we've saved one planet and haven't blown any up. So our record's pretty good that way. Sharl got us a headquarters out in one of his mentor's big science skyscrapers, and when you're on a team, you get some extra freedom to patrol and use the Doom Room. Studying's good and all, but the best way to learn to be a hero is to just go out there and start doing it." He took his birds out of the pockets of the bulky spacesuit-simulation and put them all back where they belonged, even the cranes that had been fluttering around. "Plus it's some extra credit."

"We did make the choice that saved lives," Koshiro maintained, a bit of heat creeping into his voice. "If we want to be superheroes, we have to be ready to make decisions in the heat of the moment, not look for ways to pass the buck. That's why we're here, right, to learn how to make tough choices. We didn't have a lot of time, but we did have enough information to know that we had a good chance of being able to use the Lor's weapon to wipe out the Grue. And that's not murder." He turned on Archer, as though expecting the teacher to argue. "You've fought them yourself, right? You see what they do, how they do it. Just because Pseudo could be reprogrammed doesn't make them sentient beings. We wiped out a virus before anyone else was contaminated."

From the safety of the ground, Miss A watched in satisfaction as Keres was shut down quite neatly. "Good work, Voltage," she called, then prepared to engage in a bit of technical work of her own. Folding her hands and closing her eyes, she allowed her consciousness to flow from its current vessel, outwards into the damaged and directionless robots Keres had left behind. Without a leader or a clear battle plan, it was a simple matter to override their programmed directives and nudge them into their shutdown modes. When she opened her eyes again, both robots were nonfunctional, laying docilely on the sidewalk. "Better late than never," she teased Doctor Atom cheerfully. "If your security is up and running, perhaps you'll want to take control of these chasses, get a better idea of what we're dealing with. I don't want to stay away from The Lab too long when I've got an AI in quarantine for debugging."

Miss A will use Machine Animation to take over the remaining droids and force them into shutdown mode.

"You're obviously in way over your head, Tommy." Miss Americana's voice was pure honey compared to Harrier's grating rage, yet it was effective enough to grab and hold the young man's attention. "I'm sure you didn't understand what you were getting involved with, or how much trouble you could get yourself into." She glanced at Harrier, then stepped forward just enough to partially stand between the terrified youth and the Omegadrone. "Why don't you sit down right here in the first pew, Tommy, and tell us everything you know about this church and what you and Billy have been up to. The more you help me, the more I can help you." She sent another quick glance over her shoulder, the implication obvious that if Tommy didn't pony up, she might not be able to hold back the angry nightmare behind her.

"It's where it's supposed to be, it's where the ship navigated to, it's full of Grue, including the Meta-Mind... good enough." Even so, Koshiro's hand hesitated one more moment. He knew they weren't real sentient beings, knew they were murderous monsters from space, but something inside him still shuddered at the idea of raining death down onto the unsuspecting planet in order to prevent future atrocities. "You don't get to kill any more of us," he murmured aloud, then slapped his hand down onto the firing button.

"That's a nice, easy thing to say," Koshiro pointed out evenly, his voice flat, "an easy opinion to have that doesn't make you consider the difference between sentient beings and vicious animals, or lethal viruses that destroy whatever they touch. Just because an animal or insect crops up occasionally with the ability to talk and think doesn't mean we don't wipe out killer bee nests or destroy vicious dogs. The Grue are a million times worse than the worst animals we have on Earth, and I'd much rather wipe out a billion mindless monsters than be responsible for every sentient creature they murder for the rest of my life." He put his hand to the button, let it hover there. "Citizen," he said to the thin air, "you can use the sensors, right? Can you confirm that this is the world, and that all that's down there is Grue?"

Wander goes on 10

"Good idea," Erin agreed, not breaking stride as she raced up the stairs and spun open her bat. "There's an abandoned lot a block south of here, past the perimeter and away from this building. We'll flank him and drive him in that direction. Do whatever it takes, non-lethally, to bring him to ground there. IWhatever you do, don't let him get any closer to the bomb site." With scant thought to seams or buttons, she gave a hard tug to her uniform top, revealing her costume beneath it the staid blue fabric. A super-battle in the sky risked the attention they were trying to avoid, but she could hardly fight a supervillain in public with a HAX uniform on. They'd have to take their chances that one more skirmish between good and evil would fall under the radar in Freedom City.

"Thank you, your majesty," Fleur said with another bow, nudging Beekeeper to copy the action. "If you are ever in need of anything, please send your emissary to my house. For now, let me fix the lighting conditions in here. Too much moss will give the babies a stomachache, they aren't equipped to eat it, she warned. Even as she spoke, moss was beginning to creep up the walls, forming narrow stripes of light that looked vaguely bee-patterned on the dark walls. With the increased light, it was possible to see to the further reaches of the chamber, where one end held a recessed pool of water that gleamed in the near darkness, and another held a large pile of a dozen or so of those yoga-ball sized eggs, being tended to by little zamboni-sized juvenile bees. "And now we must depart," Fleur said as she completed her work. "Superbee, would you give us a ride?" One bee was more than large enough to seat them both, and it allowed them to converse as well. "It's not really safe to walk in the lower reaches of the hive," she explained to Baxter as they flew up the long and twisting slope. "The bees fly very fast down here, especially the little ones, and they can get sensitive about outsiders in the nursery."