Electra
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Koshiro took a minute to look around, a minute really all that was necessary in the small space. In an overcrowded place like Tronik, it was obvious that no one got a whole lot of room to themselves. He was just circling the living room when Kimber smacked into the wall next to him, and automatically put up a hand to catch her. She caught herself before that was necessary, though, so he dropped his hand. "Ah, you okay?" he asked uncertainly, watching her smack herself in the head. "Maybe you should stand closer to the middle of the room."
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Erin blinked at that assertion, feeling oddly disappointed. It didn't really matter that much that people didn't believe or even know about most of the things they'd done, including their fight against Omega, but she'd sort of believed in her heart that history would one day vindicate them. "So none of us are keystones that way?" she asked the Clockwatcher, trying not to let defensiveness creep into her voice. "Ma- I mean, um, Edge, at least, has some characteristics that might make him similar..." She snuck another look at Rick Lucas, hoping he was no more intuitive as a boy than he'd been as a middle-aged man.
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"Yeah, I got it," Papercut told Citizen, even as he banked to make another pass high over the battlefield. With most of his attention devoted to keeping an eye on the paper box holding the villain, Papercut had just enough concentration left to keep himself airborne. Those tree monsters knew who was keeping their boss tied down, and while they couldn't do much to Kimber, they could sure as hell pulverize him if he came into range. He wiped away the blood that continued to trickle down his forehead and kept an eye out to make sure that no new monsters were coming to join the party.
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Papercut is going to keep his array tuned to maintaining the box, just in case Collins is shamming about being frozen solid. He's also going to stay in the air and out of reach. So basically not doing anything new this round.
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"Why the hell would we want to do that?" Lady Laser drawled dismissively. "Nothing over there but a bunch of dusty castles and rude baselines without the sense to respect their betters. At least in America they appreciate metahuman powers, even if it ain't enough. Why, you want to show us slides from your vacation?" She snorted dismissively. "What kind of tests are they going to want us to take? I got better things to do with my time, and I thought this place was supposed to be real friendly to people like us."
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"I can get back here with no problem, if that's what you're asking," Fleur replied, turning the little seeds over and over in her hand. Some of them were beginning to swell and sprout, for all she didn't seem to be concentrating any attention on them. Nervous habit, perhaps. "As for getting the creature out... I would need to have a look first," she admitted. "If the prison is actually made of earth, buried in earth, I might need to tap someone like Gaian Knight to dig it out first. But if it's at all freestanding, I think I can make it work. We'll have to be careful, though. I don't know if any of us can breathe vacuum on the trip." She looked to the possessed workers. "Can you show us what we're dealing with, or describe the prison?"
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"It kills people and turns them into zombies," Erin murmured, her lips barely moving. She'd stayed nearby while the autopsy was being performed, but hadn't participated in the somewhat gruesome ritual. Even staying in the room had cost her face some color, this revelation leached out a bit more. "Can you tell how long it was in that body?" she asked Trevor. "If it has a hard time changing hosts, that could give us an advantage." Her fingers danced restlessly over the bat at her belt, her eyes focused on the now quiescent (and much dissected) corpse.
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Koshiro found it quite easy to adapt to the style in Tronik; he didn't like loud outbursts or crazy behavior in public anyway, and it was second nature to shove his hands in his pockets and walk at the back of the crowd. He kept his eyes open as he did so, though, both to see the many unusual sights and to watch for danger. If Rogue was here, she would almost certainly be waiting for them in ambush somewhere. Trouble was, he didn't know what was normal here, so how was he supposed to look for trouble? He squeezed into the elevator alongside the others, frowning at the tight fit. Hopefully this would just be a short trip. "Your folks don't know we're coming, do they?" he muttered to Sharl.
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"Well then, Su Li," Lady Laser drawled laconically, a deeply Southern twang creeping into her voice, "why don't you tell us more about what we're going to find when we get to New Freedom? I get the feelin' it's not the sort of place where they roll the welcome mat out right away, even for superhumans. We gonna have to make our bones here right off?" She smiled, revealing too many teeth for it to be entirely friendly. "It's been awhile since I've had a good throwdown, so I'm ready if you are. Got anything to drink on this flight?" She relaxed in her seat, her pose lazy but her eyes still quite watchful.
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Wander Faded Giant Fleur de Joie Semiotic Drift Miss Americana Frozen Shadows Papercut It's Gonna Be The Future Soon
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Wander was silent as she shook hands with the Centurion and Rick Lucas, both of them so startlingly alive and vibrant, so unaware of what was to become of them. Rick was hardly older than she was in this moment out of time, and right now he was a hero like any of them. Who was to say what could happen to any of them in another thirty years, if one could go so badly astray? She shook the thought away and tried to keep her face blank of anything but the polite smile she used when taking visitors around the facilities at HAX. They had a job to do here, and no time to think about anything else. Except... how could she not? Even after the initial shock of seeing historical figures come alive, she remembered what Chen had said about time travel. Things that hadn't been possible in 2009 were possible, even simple right now. They could go back, they could fix things that went wrong. Especially when to correct a wrong would be as simple as giving the right person the right chemical formula at the right time. Even as she thought it, though, Erin knew it was impossible. Rick Lucas had given up his life to stop Omega's return to Prime, and she had given up her world. Even if the time travelers here would go along, there was nothing left to save. She raked her fingers through her hair and followed Midnight off the platform.
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Koshiro hadn't been totally sure what the transition to Tronik would be like or feel like, but it wasn't actually that bad. Maybe it helped that he was totally human and fit within the design specifications, but when he closed his eyes, it felt as though a bright light passed over his body, like being in a really big copy machine. A moment of darkness, and when he opened his eyes, he was standing in a very weird place. He recognized it from Sharl's stories, but it was one thing to hear about it and another thing to see buildings so tall they literally blocked out the sky. Looking down, he noticed that the computer had put him in the Tronikian uniform of a black trenchcoat over black clothes. With a reluctant smile tugging his lips, he shot his cuffs and looked over at Sharl. "Whoa." A quick check of the pockets revealed that the most important part of his ensemble, the square book of papers, had been replicated for the trip as well. Quickly pulling out a piece, he folded an orange crane and released it, letting it fly from one hand to the other before tucking it away again. Whatever else had changed, that still worked. "What's our next move?"
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Lady Laser looked nothing like the Miss Americana Sharl was used to seeing. Instead of beautiful wavy blonde tresses, Lady Laser had no-nonsense straight brown hair scraped back in a no-nonsense ponytail, with dark brown eyes and thickly muscled limbs. She was fuller in the face, with a pugnacious nose and a ridged eyebrow, someone who looked like she was much better at trading punches than stealing data. If Sharl hadn't seen the many hours of work Gina had put into the sculpting, he might have doubted Miss A was under there at all! Lady Laser looked up at him as he came in. "We should be landing soon," she observed. "What are conditions like out there? They going to be able to meet us?" Even her voice was different, slightly lower and rougher. It was, in fact, fairly close to Gina's actual voice, though it was hard to say whether that was intentional.
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"I could move it," Fleur suggested to the others, sounding a little diffident about the possibility. "I mean, it's big and powerful, but it's really just a monster in a big rock prison, isn't it? If we can excise the part holding it, I can send it to a dimension where there's nothing living anymore. I'm sure I can find one, Phantom told me about plenty of dimensions where everything went wrong and it's just blank space. Maybe this thing would even be happier there, if it's a creature of entropy," she added hopefully.
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Papercut is using his out-of-array flight power to get in the air while still maintaining the box with his array.
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Papercut listened to Collins' words, then laughed out loud, extra-derisively for her benefit. "Maybe I am, but what does it say about you that a naked and weak mystic can keep you stuck in a paper box? Take away your tree-monsters and I bet you wouldn't be so brave." Unseen by Collins, he wiped away the blood that was running down his face from the shallow cut one of the Dark Young had left across his forehead. Bold words were one thing, but he couldn't take many more hits like that. His ears were already ringing! Keeping most of his attention on the box of villain, he drew another paper airplane from his pocket and tugged on the ends till it was big enough to stand on. Riding it like a skateboard, he soared into the sky, out of the reach of the Dark Young.
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Fleur quickly stepped forward, grabbing hold of the webcam and pulling it free of its moorings. She had to pull harder than she'd expected; it felt almost as if the camera was stuck to the computer itself with magnets. "There's no cord," she realized, looking at the strange little device. Rapping it against the table dislodged the battery pack, which didn't look like anything she'd ever seen. "I don't know who's watching us," she said grimly, "but they know we're onto them. See if you can get any data backups for this computer," she told Blackwell, then looked to the others. "We need to get to Rayford and see what he knows."
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Wander frowned as she listened to the traveler's story. "But if someone goes back to the past and changes things, doesn't that only create new divergent timelines?" she asked, trying to remember what Alex had told her, years ago now, when she'd considered trying to go back in time to save her own home. "If we go and stop them, is that going to mend the timeline, or just create even more new branches and mess it all up more?" She held her bat by her side now, not threatening but still not ready to collapse it and put it away. "Anyway, how do we know any of this is even true?"
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Papercut is unimpressed by Collins' taunting! 29.
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"Anyway, she's already gone," Koshiro pointed out, adjusting his helmet to make it marginally more comfortable on his head. "If you wanted to go in from the computer angle, that's like one set of codes mixed in fifty million codes. Maybe some super-tech superhero could weed one code out and isolate it, but that's nobody here. If she's a rogue AI program, then she has the advantage in computer geekery. What we're doing here isn't going to her turf, it's bringing her onto ours. If we have physical bodies and she's got a physical body, that's a fight we know how to have."
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Miss A might have preferred complete anonymity for Sharl, who likely would've been able to infiltrate the computer network unnoticed if most of the population was still at the floppy disc level of technology, but she supposed she had to appreciate his initiative. Being on that hero team at school was definitely giving him a very bold attitude about superheroics. That was all well and good, but on summer break they'd have some remedial lesson in subtlety. "Thank you, Citizen," she told him. "Have Maurita arrange for private transport, nothing we own and nothing chartered through ArcheTech, to get us as far as McMurdo Station. At least it's the right time of year for it." She looked over to Dragonfly. "It'll probably work best if you and I present ourselves as unaffiliated mercenaries, working together at the moment because we both want a look at New Freedom. If we need a deeper cover story than that we'll roll with it, but this isn't going to be a long mission. I do suggest that some sensory calibration is in order to ensure private communications." She didn't want to reveal too much to Roosevelt, but a major benefit of working with another cyberkinetic was the near-telepathic communication it made possible.
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Erin dropped her bat and tugged the hiker's jacket open, running the instructions for CPR through her head. He'd lost consciousness only moments ago, if Edge could teleport them to a hospital... Her hands stilled as soon as she pressed them against the man's chest. "He's really dead," she realized, pulling back as though burned. "I mean, he's been dead for a while. Jeez, what is it with us running into old stored corpses?" She brushed off her hands, then made herself examine the body again. "He's got the mottled skin, um, lividity, you don't get that till you've been dead awhile, but there's no real sign of decompositon, no rigor. Body's real cold." With the coat already open, she pushed up the tattered shirt to get a better look at the skin. It was distasteful, but her face was set and her hands steady. "He's got a whole lot of tattoos," she observed. "That might make it easier to identify him. We should check his clothes too."
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Wander kept her bat at the ready, taken aback for just a moment at the sight of gory death associated with that particular S-word, but reality quickly reasserted itself. "Who are you?" she demanded, gesturing at the stranger with the bat to stay where he was. "Where do you come from?" It sure didn't look like he came from anywhere nearby, but despite working at HAX, she didn't exactly keep up on the latest super-technology. She glanced over at Cannonade, then at the others. None of them were in any shape for a fight, for all that had never stopped them before. In fact, they looked downright disreputable, even compared to the ragged-edged newcomer. "We're the new Liberty League, from Freedom City," she thought to clarify. "We're good guys."
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Koshiro hesitated for a moment, looking from the chairs to his much sturdier or at least less squishily human teammates, but it wasn't a very long moment. Sucking in a breath, he went to sit in a chair. "I don't know how much help I'm going to be," he admitted candidly, "but I'll go in there. I'm used to cities, anyway, maybe that'll help some." He wrapped his fingers around the arms of the chair, but otherwise tried to be cool about the whole thing. "Nobody better mess with my body while I'm gone, though. If I come back and anybody's written on my face..." He let the threat hang in the air.