Electra
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Raina's first roll is very terrible, as usual. Spending an HP. Her second roll is a 22.
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Well, I posted before I looked at the OOC, whoops, so Raina's trying to get a surprise round in. Move Object with the damaging extra, trying to lift up that bike. In regular initiative, she goes on 12.
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Raina watched from a safe distance as the biker gang tore up the boardwalk, the wind from the bikes plastering her skirt against her legs. "Well, at least I'm already in a crappy mood," she remarked. "Might as well get some use out of it." As she spoke, the large, firm-sided purse she was carrying unzipped itself to disgorge her familiar. Merlin had enjoyed the date only slightly more than she had; he hadn't needed to endure Eddie but he hadn't been able to get a good wifi signal anywhere in the casino. His little monkey teeth gleamed as he grimaced in the direction of the bikers, opining that these were some people with too much time and disposable income on their hands. "And hanging out on all the wrong message boards," Raina agreed. "Why don't you find them online and eff 'em up, and I'll do the same out here." A few bars of hummed music brought the illusion of her costume to life, red, white and gold, with a face-concealing mask. "...aannd pop goes the weasel," she sang softly, flicking her lighter. A massive hand of flame roared out, dodging the civilians as it attempted to scoop up the first bike and rider!
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Danica's yelp of surprise was swallowed up by the tractor beam, and before she knew it, she was back on Earth and sitting in the surprisingly plush howdah of an inexplicably alive fake elephant. She quickly slid out of her shell and yelled inside. "Ashley, Judy! We're back on Earth! I don't know what to do with these kids, and the aliens still have my scooter! And the elephant is alive now!"
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"I suppose that's true," Stesha agreed. Some of the seeds she'd tossed on the ground were still growing despite the cold, turning into pansies, marigolds, black-eyed susans where they'd fallen. "It's harder when you see something bad and can't do anything about it. But when you've got the power to do things, it feels like you always need to be doing them. I'd take a vacation, but trouble seems to pop up twice as fast whenever I try to do that." She laughed softly and went to adjust her cowl, before realizing she wasn't wearing it tonight. Just as well, too, or it would've been a sheet of ice. "Twenty years in Freedom City, I bet you've got stories."
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"I knew it was him," Miss Americana insisted, her voice steady and sure. "There was a warmth and an aliveness that his doppelganger lacked. The infiltrator had made it a point to stay away from me as much as possible after replacing Harrier, but even in the brief times we were together, I noticed something was wrong and just wasn't sure what it could be. When he came back, the real him, it was a difference like night and day. The Curator was very skilled, very technically proficient in its creations, but what it didn't really understand was human emotion. That was the real difference, that's what cannot be faked."
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"I will definitely do that," Paige promised. "Take care!" As soon as the insubstantial hero disappeared, Paige turned to her crew. "Okay everybody, great work. Now let's get this all packed up and get the hell inside before anybody starts losing toes. Vivi, there's a Starbase Coffee right across the street, I'm buying, get people's orders. Venti half-caf almond milk latte for me, please. The good news is, the rest of these interviews are indoors!" Very happy to hear that, the crew packed up and got gone within minutes. There was still so much to do!
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With the practiced hand of someone who'd done it many times, Paige wrote "To Carrie: Remember, the weird stuff is the fun stuff! Love, Hologram." The show's first and more recognizable tagline, coined by Richard only four episodes in, was generally a crowd-pleaser. She passed the call sheet over to Ghost. "Look, your name is on the sheet, too." Indeed, in the first box on the call sheet was "Interview with superhero GHOST" and brief instructions for the camera setups. "This episode is going to be airing in June, with plenty of lead-in advertising, so you guys will definitely know when to watch."
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"Absolutely!" Paige told him with a smile. In moments, Vivi appeared with a blue canvas bag branded with the SuperCrime! logo in white. Inside were a similarly branded pen, stress ball, plastic cup, penlight, and stopwatch. "There's a sheet of instructions in there," Paige explained, "on how to reenact a couple of our experiments with the stuff in the bag at your own house. And here..." She pulled a copy of the call sheet off the side table and scanned it to make sure there was no sensitive information, then picked up a pen. "Would you like me to make it out to someone in particular?"
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She laughed ruefully. "It only feels like it," she told him. "I was working with UNISON on a disaster relief project in Haiti. Sixteen hours straight of trying to clean saltwater out of farmland and coax the crops back into it. I was glad to be able to help, but it's tiring work. And tomorrow I need to sit down with a couple of tax accountants who speak a complicated sort of Algebraic English that I can barely follow, so no day off there." Stesha shrugged broadly. "No rest for the wicked, I guess." Leaning back on the bench, she began to toss seeds again, though she was looking at Ghost. "I've always wondered," she said frankly, "how people like you can do it for such a long time. Don't you just get exhausted?"
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"I've seen video of the news feeds from the rally," Paige said, keeping a careful eye on her guest. She didn't actively use her psychic powers when she was doing interviews for the show, but when someone was leaking distress all over the place, she didn't really have to try. Still, this was the heart of the story she was hoping Blodeuwedd would tell. "It looks terrifying, chaotic. What did you do?"
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"Hey, Cathy!" Raina rose and gave Cathy a hug that involved as little actual skin touching as possible. "You're not too late, the night's barely getting started. Sorry that three weeks' notice wasn't enough, I'll make sure to send out save-the-date cards next time." Smirking, she pulled away and gave Cathy the same once-over she'd given everybody else. "You know, you look just the same, but the clothes you always wear have come into fashion now. So congrats on being avant-garde, I guess!" She shrugged, then gave her old roommate a nudge towards the booth. "Scoot in and have a seat, we're strategizing drinks for Fred."
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"It wasn't for the heck of it!" Danica exclaimed indignantly. "I told you I tried to call the Freedom League but the phones were down!" And yes, maybe-possibly her classmates had rushed headlong into battle without even knowing what they were fighting or how dangerous they were, but that didn't change the fact that they had technically done the right thing! Her attention was snagged by the newcomer's obvious needs. "Oh yeah, totally!" She reached into her shell and pulled out the bag of Takis she'd just bought at the convenience store. "Here, those are really good, you can get started on those, and we'll take you over to the school cafeteria," she told Elena, passing over the chips. "It's kind of late for lunch, but I know all the kitchen workers and they're super nice. They will definitely give you something to eat." She wheeled the Segway around and started herding the group back towards the school.
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ic (OMTB) The Young These Days Are Glued to TV Screens
Electra replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in City Center
They both scoffed at him politely. "We actually uploaded our first video to YouTube in 2006," Kinsley informed him. "It was an expose of the terrible photoshop job the Freedom League did that year on their "Be a Hero: Stay in School!" booklet." "Our theory was that with the majority of the League off fighting the shadow war against the forces of Omega, they weren't able to get the pictures they wanted and had to repurpose old photos," Devin explained. "But they did a really bad job of it. I mean, Siren had three arms, and you could clearly see that Captain Thunder was cut in from a different photograph entirely." "We stayed on YouTube for a long time, and we still have a presence there," Kinsley continued, picking up seamlessly, "but we found that to really bring in viewers, we had to be short and to the point. We started our "Unbelievable Superhero Facts" series on Vine, and then moved over to TikTok when they shut Vine down." -
Her smile became a little warmer, a little more real. "Ghost, I've heard of you. You've been in Freedom City for a long time now." In truth she had wondered about the guy a few times, especially when she'd never managed to run into him on any of her park beautification missions back in the day. It had seemed possible that he might be a for-real ghost, only appearing when the city was in need or something like that. But here he was, in person and drinking coffee. "It's very nice to meet you. Are you on patrol tonight?"
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Miss Americana's eyes were dry, though whether that was composure or a feature not built into her robot body was open for debate. The question made her chuckle, though. "Oh, it wasn't any run through a meadow with our arms spread, I'm afraid. The abductees were trying to stop the curator without an engineer on their team, which is a pretty tall order. Dragonfly was piloting the ship against the Grue, so I used my technopathic abilities to get into the computers aboard the control module. Once I was there, I could use the cameras and speakers. I saw him, and he heard my voice when I told them to get to the ship. "Afterwards, once we had managed to stabilize the Ringworld and neutralize the Curator's threat, the Lor helped him and the other missing people get to our ship." Her face was an odd mix of fond amusement and embarrassment. "He found me where I was sitting at the engineering console, and I all but dragged him into an auxiliary control closet. Not like that!" she added, holding up a hand before even Fast Forward could get a word in. "I was absolutely at the end of my rope in terms of being around other people. Couldn't handle another minute of it. We rode all the way back to Earth crammed into a space the size of a broom closet, and he never complained once. After that, I think we both slept for a couple of days straight."
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ic (OMTB) The Young These Days Are Glued to TV Screens
Electra replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in City Center
"Um, okay," Kinsley began, some of the certainty giving way to nerves. "Well, I grew up in Freedom City, so it's pretty much been growing up with superheroes my whole life. Devin and I met each other when we were basically kids, in a Yahoo group for superhero fans and superhero sightings. We got along right away because we loved to read about hero stuff, but we could both tell a lot of it was just bull- um, baloney. We started talking about all the weird stories, how the whole Liberty League was in jail for three months in 1954 for being Communists, or the Patriot faking his own death, the secret confederation of aliens and superheroes that keeps alien tourists off the planet. Nobody ever talks about any of that stuff, but people ought to know about it, you know?" "So we started doing our own research," Devin put in. "We found out we both lived in the City, so we got together and formed an investigative society. We did research into all kinds of weird superhuman stories, just like you guys do! We watched your shows, like, all the time. There's a ton of bizarre stuff going on just under the surface here." -
"It was really, really good to see him," Miss A agreed with a soft laugh. "For a long time, Harrier was one of the only people who knew all of who I really was, and he's always been my biggest supporter. He understood exactly how hard it was for me to leave my house and get on that ship, but he didn't understand that I'd have gone twice as far if I had to. Seeing that robot replacing him was so awful, especially knowing everything he's had to overcome in his life already, how he had his personhood ripped away from hin for so long...Having him back felt like being able to breathe again."
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Raina dug into the bag and pulled out the bottle, giving it a speculative look. "What, I'm not good enough for haunted booze?" she demanded, giving Matt a raised-eyebrow look. Merlin, having peeled open the steak and passed it to Fang as promised, came over to have a look as well. He opined that it looked like something Talya would drink, so it was probably very good. "Good point," Raina agreed, sliding the bottle discreetly back into the bag. "Thanks Matt, I'll think of you next time I need to drink like a real grownup." She gave him a smirk that was nonetheless gratitude and turned to order another rebujito and another glass full of fruit.
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Singularity goes on 23
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"We first made contact with a small Lor exploratory vessel," Miss A recalled. "They'd been sent out to investigate the disabling of the Ringworld's security systems, and had already gotten in touch with our people. Most of them were still inside the control center, trying to neutralize the Curator completely, but we were able to speak to Jill o' Cure and Quickstep, who told us that everyone had survived the abduction." She took a soft breath, her smile growing distant, reminiscent. "You have to understand, we'd gone all that way on nothing but hope. We hoped we were right about where they'd gone, we hoped they'd been taken alive, we hoped that they were still alive. They'd been gone for over a month by that point, and Quickstep had been gone for twice that long. Learning that we'd been right and that they were all alive... it was an intense relief. It made all the fear and discomfort of the trip worth it." Her smile curved wider and became wry. "Of course we still had to fight a couple of opportunistic Grue raiders and put down the remains of the Curator that were left after its encounter with Young Freedom on Earth before we were properly reunited, but considering what we'd already done, that was just mop-up work."
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ic (OMTB) The Young These Days Are Glued to TV Screens
Electra replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in City Center
The two looked at each other, notecards already in hand. "Mr. Cline," Kinsley said quite seriously, "I know we've sent you a lot of emails trying to get on your show. We've made audition tapes and wrote spec scrips and sent emails-" "And did that podcast," Devin chimed in. "And the podcast," Kinsley agreed. "We would love more than anything to be part of your show just because it's been a huge part of our lives for so long. But for this?" She gestured around to all their paraphernalia. "It doesn't matter if we get a second of airtime, just so long as you please, please listen to us. Something weird happened after the Curator's infiltration, and nobody is paying attention." -
"Damn, I leave you guys alone for like five minutes and you're all glowing up without any kind of supervision." Raina slid out of the booth to give Matt a good up and down look, then a quick hug. "Glad you could make it, it's been way too long. Have a seat!" She waved vaguely towards Riley's side of the booth. "We've got a tab going at the bar already, but they card hard so you're out of luck if you're underage. The bartender's like a psychic or something." She rolled her eyes. "I got told in no uncertain terms that if I didn't go to a "safe" place for my party, my boss was gonna stake the place out from the rooftops all night." Annoyance was replaced by a quick grin as she added, "so I figure we'll start out here, then hit the clubs and see how long it takes him to notice." On the table, Merlin had given the dog one wary look before digging into a nearby bag and pulling out a porterhouse steak, wrapped in plastic and styrofoam from the store. He informed the dog in no uncertain terms that this was Raina's special night and there could be no disruptions, but he was willing to call for truce and provide an attractive incentive.
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"He only got here a couple minutes before you, so I think it's only come up seven or eight times," Raina assured Fred. "Check out this knife, three kinds of magically sensitive metal and a bone handle. Guess where the bone came from. Go on, one guess," Raina urged, then ran right over any possibility of Fred getting a word in. "That's right, gator!" She picked up the knife and did a fairly credible job of deploying the silver blade. "Pretty cool, huh?"
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Miss A relaxed back into her seat and recrossed her legs as the recording started again. "That was right about when we got the first piece of luck we'd had all day. You must understand, the ringworld is massive, the size of a star system, and filled with thousands of planets worth of land and populations. It would be possible to spend a lifetime searching for one person in all the noise. We had a device we were hoping would let us find at least one of the abductees, but if they were scattered or shielded, we'd have been in trouble. Instead, by the time we got there, they'd not only organized themselves, they'd gotten to the control center for the Ringworld and were in the process of arranging their own escape."