Electra

Fleur hopped up on a second bee with the easy confidence of someone who'd done this many times before, and suddenly they were airborne and streaking across the bee meadows at great speed! Luckily, the ample fuzz covering the bees provided a secure seat and a place to hold on, so it was marginally less dangerous than it might have been otherwise. Giant gossamer wings beat the air like helicopter blades, preventing much in the way of speaking while they traveled, but there was plenty to look at! From this height, he could see the meadow spreading beneath them for miles, dotted here and there by strange formations that looked like ancient artifacts but were too small to make out in detail. Off to the southwest, the meadow gave way to deciduous forests, while to the northwest, patches of cultivated farmland, orchards and fenced pastures dotted the land. As they rose over a hill, he suddenly could see the hive itself, growing bigger by the second as they flew towards it. What had seemed like a natural hill formation turned out to actually be a beehive the length of a city block and at least ten stories high, made of stone and daubed liberally with mud for insulation. The bees slowed as they approached, swooping downwards to fly into a cavernous entrance at the bottom of the hive. Inside, the hive looked a bit more like a traditional beehive, if one done at a thousand times normal scale. Wax honeycombs covered the walls, some of them merely providing insulation, others filled with what had to be gallons of honey each and sealed up for storage. Everywhere bees were working, repairing, filling cells, or busy with chores Baxter couldn't begin to fathom. Many of them noticed Fleur de Joie flying past and acknowledged her with a wave of their antennae or one of their strange buzzing calls, but apparently speed and time had granted the Beekeeper some measure of anonymity.

Gina studied him soberly for a minute, then touched her hands lightly to his face, framing it with her fingers. She didn't know if she herself was ready for the kind of commitment he seemed to be expressing, or exactly how she should respond. From someone raised here on Earth Prime, she'd have considered it a proposal, and probably freaked out accordingly. But things were different where he was from, and somehow it didn't sound too bad. And if it meant he wouldn't let a lifetime of painful memories drive him to do something crazy... "I can live with that," she told him softly, leaning down to kiss him on the forehead.

"You're damn right you're going to live," Gina told him, not seeming that much mollified by his acquiescence. "I've put a lot of work into you, and I don't build anything to break." She paced a few more laps of the breakfast nook, face stormy even in the dim light. "Don't you get it?" she demanded. "Nobody here puts up with you out of pity. Nobody you work with is saying, 'Oh, there's Harrier, he's had a crap life, let's let him call himself a hero till he self-destructs or something.' They call you a hero because you've made yourself a hero and that comes with responsibility. You don't get to throw yourself away. People are depending on you to be around when there's trouble. They depend on you to call when you need help because if something defeats you it makes us all weaker. And I depend on you too, dammit, because when you're around I feel a little less crippled and wrong inside." She stopped with her back to him and stood very still for a moment, then spun to face him. Her eyes glistened in the muted light, but her glare was fearsome. "If you really want this world to be part of you, then you can't be existing only for yourself. It's not about you, and it's not about the horrors of your past. It's about us, and it's about Earth, and it's about picking battles that you're going to win." She took two steps towards him, closing the gap and looking down at him. "I want you to promise me on whatever matters that you won't go there on your own."

"To live at all is to accept that one day you'll die," Gina snapped impatiently, tugging her hand away from his, fisting both hands in her lap. "You say you don't want to die, then in the next breath you talk about throwing your life away in some kind of crazy one-man war against the Terminus. If you want to fight, that's fine. I know we can fight the Terminus. Hell, I've seen what those Young Freedom kids brought back to Prime that made Viktor lose his everloving mind." She got to her feet and paced, a hint of Missouri drawl creeping into her voice as she grew more agitated. "But doing it on your own because you feel like you owe the universe something is suicide and I want nothing to do with it. You can't ask for me to give you part of myself, knowing you're going to throw all of it away like some goddamned self-styled martyr. I didn't come this far with you for that."

Koshiro slouched in after the others, the backpack slung over one shoulder looking like it was full enough to burst. He'd obviously taken the instruction about self-sufficiency to heart, and tended to need a bit more for that than his teammates. He seemed to cheer up a bit when he saw Avro hanging around with Kimber, and reached into his pocket while dropping his bag into an empty seat. With a small flourish, he pulled out a little rice paper bat and sent it flying past the manticore kitten's head, its translucent wings flapping madly. Despite his initial misgivings about the not-a-cat creature, Koshiro did enjoy making toys for such an appreciative audience. As he slid into a seat, he looked at the giant machine in the middle of the room and raised an eyebrow. "If that's an airplane, I think we've got some work to do," he noted.

"Baybee," Fleur scolded with a laugh, deliberately using the pet name she'd given the giant apian when she was no bigger than a large dog. "Girls, that's not at all polite. Friends help each other because they are friends. You don't become friends with someone because you think he can do something for you! Gaian Knight and Gabriel both helped you out before you'd ever done anything to help them, isn't that right?" She waited expectantly until three sets of giant antennae waggled in reluctant agreement. "I'm sure Beekeeper would love to have a tour of the hive," she suggested in a meaningful tone of voice. "Perhaps you could give us a ride there and show him around?"

"I'm sorry I missed you, I had errands to run this morning," Fleur told the trio of bees, sounding as though she were explaining to the neighbor kids why she hadn't answered the door for them. "And then there was a bank robbery, and you know how that goes. But that's very good noticing and remembering, Superbee," she complimented the lead bee . "You were really paying attention in hero history!" Stepping back a bit, she gestured to her companion. "This is The Beekeeper, but he's not the same one who created your parents. This is Beekeeper III. He's new in Freedom City, and he's a hero instead of a villain. If it hadn't been for him, I might have spent half the day chasing the bank robber around! He was very interested in meeting all of you. He's a little nervous right now," she added in a voice that would've been sotto voce if she didn't have to speak so loudly over the buzzing. "But I'm sure you'll all get along really well."

She gave him the sort of level, lowered-brow look that said she was not amused. "So all you're doing now is hanging around here, getting me to feel attached to you, letting me and my designers and the other technician heroes put hundreds of man-hours and tens of thousands of dollars of equipment into upgrading you, making yourself a part of the community here, all so you can extinguish yourself in some kind of imaginary blaze of glory because you don't think you deserve to be happy?" Gina sat back in her chair."This is why I spend time with you," she told him. "You make me feel a lot less crazy by comparison."

"I call this world Sanctuary," Fleur told him, with a not-unkind smile at his stupefied reaction. "It's Earth, but an Earth that was ruined by war many decades ago. Some friends and I have been rehabilitating it, making it beautiful and liveable again. When the bees needed a place to live, I brought them here and created the meadow so they'd have enough to eat and something close to a natural environment. My friend Gaian Knight, that's his castle up there, he helped them build their hive. That's a mile or so over the hills there," she told him, pointing off to the east where what he'd taken to be a rocky ridge could be seen, upon close inspection, to have a lot more bees flying around it. "Let me see if I can get their attention. They're pretty single-minded out here in the meadows." Putting two fingers in her mouth, she let out a piercing whistle that cut through the warm air. Several of the bees turned in their direction and began flying over.

Gina laughed at his comment about being the worst thing, leaning back and relaxing a bit as he carried the remains of the meal into the kitchen. Steve never wasted food, so she'd just go later when she was alone and warm up her supper from the fridge. "Only you," she told him, "would take that as such a great compliment. I like a guy who's easy to please." Her grin lasted until he came back and knelt in front of her to say his piece. She looked startled for a moment, then confused and a bit concerned. "Normally I'd freak out over a statement like that and assume you were dying," she told him wryly, "but I'm also what passes for your doctor. I know for a fact you're in excellent health. Why would you assume you've only got a few years left?" Given his enhanced constitution and cyborg parts, it was entirely likely that, barring disaster, Steve would outlive her and most of the citizens of Freedom City. "You're not borrowing trouble, are you?"

"You'll be fine," Fleur assured him, forbearing to mention that he would surely not receive a zillion stings because the first couple of giant-bee stings would surely be fatal. Luckily, the bees were not like that. "They love meeting new heroes. And even though their relationship with the old Beekeeper was... complicated, they won't hold that against you once they understand. They like the idea of bee-themed heroism in Freedom City. One of the youngsters even did a tour as a junior superheroine in Freedom City last year. You probably heard a little about Superbee, if you follow hero news." As she spoke, Fleur finished collapsing the walls and coiling the vines and leaves neatly away to nothingness. With the street once again normal-looking, she extended a hand and rested it on the Beekeeper's shoulder, touching the other one to the pink rosebuds braided into her green hair. In an instant, the world was sucked away from around them, leaving them in a void that was the light green of sunlight through leaves, where the air smelled strongly of newly-mown grass. A second later they were out again and back in the world... or back in some world, anyway. It looked as though they'd been dropped into a fairy tale world. The sky was a perfect blue with puffy cumulus clouds dotted here and there, and the sun shone down on a meadow unlike anything Baxter had ever seen. It seemed to stretch for miles, calf-high grass that moved like ocean waves as the breezes blew over it, interupted only by hundreds of massive flowers. The smallest ones were the size of helipads, the largest, the size of baseball diamonds. They came in all colors and shapes, creating a fragrance that filled the air with sweetness. In the distance, he could see what looked like... could it be a castle floating in the sky, drifting along like one of the clouds itself, but clearly made of earth and stone? And then there were the bees! Dozens of them were at work in this giant meadow, moving from flower to flower to collect nectar just like their tiny counterparts. Only these bees were the size of semi-trucks, yet they hung in the air with seemingly no effort. Fleur surveyed the valley serenely, pushing her hood back and tucking her gloves in her pocket. "Welcome," she told him, "to Beedom City."

Koshiro nodded behind his mask. "If the crew were awake and friendly, they wouldn't just be leaving us to wander around on our own. Either something's happened to them, or it's an ambush. Everybody stick together." He looked at the sign Citizen had explained, then took out another handful of cranes. "If anyone is alive and needs help, they're likely to be on the command deck," he decided. "I'll have the birds scope out the downstairs just in case, but I think we should probably check out the bridge in person." Koshiro released the birds from his hand and they took off, zipping down the nearest ventilation shaft like they were late for an appointment.

Fleur cocked her head in acknowledgement at that. "That's most of the high points," she agreed. "Barry has his moments, times where you can see the good man he might have been, but it was buried under a whole lot of totally nuts." She seemed pensive for a moment about that, then brightened again. "But you do know about the giant bees, that's good. Would you like to come and meet them? I'm sure they'd be interested in seeing someone who is making a hero of that suit." It was hard to tell, but it seemed a little as though Fleur were trying to make up for her earlier suspicion, and the whole tying him up with vines business.

Fleur laughed. "There'll be other opportunities, I'm sure," she told the young hero. "The master mage tends to crop up when he's needed, and if you fight crime in the city you'll run into him now and then. But I suspect that in time you'll start seeing him and other heroes as colleagues instead of celebrities. We're all just people who do what need to be done." She watched the police in action for a few minutes, satisfying herself that everything was under control and she could let down the walls of plants. "How much do you know about Beekeeper II?" she asked her companion as she undid the walls and sent the trees back to their patches of ground. "What he got up to in Freedom City and all that."

"None that I care about," Gina replied bluntly. She smiled a little, though without much humor. "I've spent the past year heading up a company whose last CEO literally turned into a sanity-warping monster and caused the death of hundreds of civilians around the world. He did this one year ago, in plain sight of the entire world. If the full story behind that incident got out, no one would ever trust ArcheTech products, patents, or personnel again. Despite all that, we've regained forty percent of our market share and almost that much of our favorable rating in consumer polls, largely due to the relentless public relations spin. After all that, do you think being seen with a man who was once a victim of Omega's forges would bother me at all?"

"Tell her no," Erin suggested blandly, scooping up a bite of jello salad. "You don't want to end up being muscle for Typhoon, right? Saving his son's life is one thing, but he himself is still kind of crazy and extreme. And there's no point in dodging the question. If she's just dating you to try and feel you out-" She coughed and rephrased. "Trying to see if she can persuade you to work for her father, then it's better you know that now. If she really cares about you, then it shouldn't matter that you don't want to be a goon for her dad, right?"

Wander A Briefing With Friends(9) Celebrating Liberty Through Meat and Explosions (2) And Countless Screaming Argonauts (3) Fleur de Joie Bee Good and You Will Bee Lonesome (9) The Devil Shovels Coal (4) Sanctuary: Panacea (5) Miss Americana Unfair Science Fair (5) Pepper's Ghost (4) Papercut Mile in My Shoes (1) Little Girls and Cute Dogs (8) A House is Not a Home (3) In Another Life (2) Cyberknife (NPC posts) Amor Fati (9, worth 4) All posts to Wander for tallying, then to Papercut.

After a moment to gauge the few windows and doors in the room, Erin settled in next to Trevor on one corner of the giant L-shaped couch, putting up her footrest and finally starting to relax. It was much easier for her to socialize with the football game on the wall-sized TV screen soaking up most of everyone's attention. In a way, it reminded her of the evenings she and James had spent together playing video games when she'd first come to Claremont and had found it hard to talk to anybody. Something about the shared activity and the ability to keep looking at the screen when you talked seemed to help. Maybe this was what their next group get-together ought to be? Most of the outings her friends planned turned into disasters, or at least into fights with bad guys. Surely Trevor could rig up some kind of crazy-big projector in the Manor for a movie night, and they could invite over all the people they hardly saw anymore. Glancing sideways at her stoic boyfriend, Erin rather suspected she might need to sell him on the idea for awhile. In any case, it was a really nice rec room, and with the awkwardness past for the moment, it was fun to watch TV with friends. On the first commercial break, she glanced backwards towards the games. "You any good at those?" she asked Corbin.

"Why would you even want that?" Gina asked, her tone clipped. "Plenty of heroes aren't public with the secret identities of their lovers, even to the people they work with." She nudged her untouched plate of food in his direction, though the garlic bread was much too far gone to save. "This way you get the social boost of dating Miss Americana with none of the hassle of dealing with my panic attacks in public. In any case, it would be entirely impractical. You'll be making your personal life something for public consumption by dating Miss Americana. Anyone you date publicly after that would be subject to comparison and scrutiny that's bound to be quite unflattering. You really ought to consider the possibility that you have, in a sense, the best of both worlds."

Miss Americana shook herself out of her reverie enough to glance over at Sharl. she told her protege. Though Danson was unconscious, at least she seemed to be in less distress this way. What her mental state would be like on awakening was anyone's guess. "Your motives may be good," she told the energy entity carefully, "and I have to appreciate your willingness to share your power and knowledge with people who can put it to use. But the power you gave her is obviously destroying her mind and her sanity. How will she make those discoveries you expect from her if she's sedated in a hospital for the rest of her life? You're hurting her, and she's going to hurt other people, and there's simply no point to any of it. If there are discoveries to be made, someone will make them. Maybe not as quickly as you like, but we humans are a resourceful bunch of people. And surely the ones you've already empowered are sufficient to the need."

Gina waved a hand dismissively. "They shouldn't question it that much," she decided. "Neither of us has a romantic history that any of them would know about, and it's not like Harrier and Miss Americana haven't spent plenty of time together. Similar interests, and I'm sure your friends aren't going to be thinking of your history first and foremost when they look at you," she reasoned. "The strange factor, the one the public is going to pick up on, is going to be Miss Americana's superhuman pulchritude, but anybody who works with heroes long enough gets used to that. It's just that common in the business. Your friends will probably give you high fives and buy you a drink."

"I think it can't hurt to get some ties with heroes in other cities," Erin decided, digging into her meal with enthusiasm. "Even if it's just to get the word out more quickly when something big is starting to happen. We could maybe use one or two more people on the team, even, especially since we're all starting to do grown-up stuff now and have responsibilities. But I wouldn't want to go crazy with recruiting, a team that's too big isn't very efficient." She took a big bite of her burger, chewed it thoughtfully. "Good job," she told Trevor when her mouth was clear again. "It's great."

"All right, looks like we're good here," Koshiro told Sharl as he and Mali finished checking one another out. "Even if the air's supposed to be breathable, we may as well put the masks on for now. You never know." He matched words to action, his voice becoming a bit more hollow as he closed his faceplate and switched to radio communication. With his gloved fingers, he removed a handful of cranes from his bag and activated them, letting them fly in close formation behind his head and out of his line of sight. "Let's open the airlock and see what we've got."

"Don't worry," Fleur reassured the Beekeeper as Eldritch whisked the prisoner away. "The Master Mage is always a bit of a pessimist, I think it's a natural condition of the people with the high-stress global and dimensional guardian jobs. There's no reason for Malador to take any interest in you or I, and with luck, he might never hear of this at all. Hardly anyone got a look at Mystic Force's little trick before we put him down, so the story may not even reach his ears. If it does, it's Mystic Force he'll be annoyed with. People like Malador are very concerned about their image." She looked over and saw the bank guards and officers finally beginning to arrive, and the police along with them. "Oh good, here comes the authorities. We won't be stuck cleaning up all that money ourselves," she said with a grin.

"See," Koshiro said to Mali, nodding towards the suits. "Typically I'm the only one on my team who ever needs one of those stupid things. I'll check your seals if you check mine." Koshiro'd worn an environmental suit enough times in the simulator that he was able to get into it with a minimum of fuss, even with having to transfer over all his paper. He did pull off his hoodie and hang it on the rack, it was simply too bulky to wear. Clicking his helmet into place, he left the mask open as he went to check Mali's suit. "Citizen, can you tell anything about that ship from here just through the computer?"