Electra

"OUR HIVEZZ IZZ THE BEZZT," Beeatrizz agreed with complacent pride. "IT IZZ ZHE ONBEE ONE HERE, BUT IT WOULD ZZTILL BEE BEZZT IF ZZHERE WERE OZHERZ. ZHE GREAT ZQUIZHY BIPED FRIEND GAIANIGHT BUILT IT FOR UZZ, AND IT IZZ VERY FINE." The little bees chimed in with agreements of "Bezzt hivezz!" and "Mama'zzz hivezz!" "The little ones are especially enthusiastic," Stesha told Murdock, "they learn and grow at just a phenomenal rate. They spend the first few weeks in the hive after pupating, and they've just started to be allowed to fly around and explore. But all the worker bees have plenty of curiosity and desire to learn. Which is good, because I was afraid they wouldn't be flexible enough to adapt to a totally new way of life in a new place, but they've done wonderfully." Rubbing her hands absently over her tummy, Stesha watched the little bees play, the fascination with Caradoc's armor quickly turning into a pushy-shovey game, and then a flying tag-race around the clearing. "The fact that they have a diet of almost pure sugar with a little high quality protein for muscle probably helps with all that energy," she added with a laugh.

Miss A smiled with satisfaction as she watched the happy reunion and the generally positive response from security. "Looks like they're taking it all right. Good piece of work," she decided, looking around at the restored area and people. "For a quick and dirty code job, anyway. There are a couple more sites like this on the map, I wonder if they all have mutant refugees in them. It might be worth it to try and hit at least those hot spots before we unproject, if you're feeling up to it. I'm still doing well so far."

"They both are," Erin agreed. "They could use some seasoning, but I mean, we all were like that when we started. Even me, and I'd been fighting for years. It takes time to get used to working on a team." Despite her youth, Erin spoke like someone perfectly confident in her own training now. And heck, she'd probably earned that confidence. "Young Freedom and Next Gen are both going to be having building years next year, I guess. Gotta make sure kids are being trained up for the League and the Interceptors and all that." She laughed, but it was a little hollow, since she was still feeling the sting of not making the League herself. "Your roster still all the same?"

"That's true," she agreed thoughtfully, "or it might be worth it to call him in and say you were hoping for better from him. I'm sure some kids come from high schools where they were able to excel with very minimal effort. Having someone expect more might be a surprise, even a wakeup call. It'd be a shame to waste his talent, but we both know that outside of school, no one he works for is going to care what his personal dramas are when there's work to be done and he's expected to be there. Would you like some applesauce?" she added, switching beats suddenly. "I just realized I forgot it at my apartment, but I can pop right back."

"Much different," Erin agreed. "Nothing but cows for miles and miles. Air's a lot fresher, though." She decided not to continue on any further with that train of thought, even as the Night Cycle began to wend its way into the posh neighborhoods of North Bay. "I guess if you wanted to," she offered, "and your grandpa's still up, we could go, um, say hi to him or something. If you don't think that would be very weird." She was all but squirming with embarrassment already, but Mona's words did probably have some truth to them. She needed to fix things with Trevor's grandpa, and Trevor was the conduit there.

The first major change the guards probably noticed, after the walls repairing themselves, was the moment all their guns disappeared. This was well-timed, too, since a moment later, the mutants in front of them began to shift as well. Suddenly where there had a man with eight malformed legs, there was a man with two strong ones, where a woman's face was malformed and sloughing away, she was suddenly pretty again. One at a time, but with commendable speed, Gina searched for the coding errors that had made these people's lives a sudden misery and repaired them, even as the personifications of those codes shouted or screamed in surprise. The dozens of hours she'd spent working with Sharl's program came in very handy now, she knew where to look for the worst of the problems and could slap good code in on top of them. She did accidentally drop Sharl's entire skin code onto the transparent woman, then had to go back and edit out the hair commands, but in general it was not an overly complex batch of edits merely to restore a bunch of physical traits to the factory default settings. The results, however, were quite striking.

Bay-bee was startled for a moment by the light and noise, fanning her disproportionately little wings and fluttering backwards, but at this age she had little fear. She flew closer, bobbing up and down as she stared at his shiny breastplate. "Bay-bee!" she crowed delightedly, catching sight of the somewhat distorted beeling face reflected in his armor. "Me me me! Pretty!" Within a few moments, Bay-bee's siblings had left their snack for a better look at the new distraction, jostling and jockeying for position in order to admire both themselves and the strange flaming dragonshead.

"Wow," Erin murmured. "I sort of remembered the ambulance part, but not the rest of it. That must have been something." She was suddenly very glad that Trevor had made that trip on his own. "But the Lumins are expecting a baby pretty soon now, aren't they? Maybe you can offer to help out if something unexpected happens," she teased. "Sounds like the sort of thing you'd get badges for if the Freedom League was more like Boy Scouts. Be some pretty weird badge tests, though." She relaxed again and enjoyed the ride, ready to let uncomfortable topics blow away with the wind that whipped around them. That wasn't going to be possible forever, but it worked for tonight.

The complement of Young Freedom had changed a few times over the years of its existence, but there were few bad choices as far as its male members went. They were certainly a handsome group of heroes. Breakdown had been out of school and off the team for some time, so obviously wasn't a contender, and it was semi-public knowledge that Alex Albright was involved with the strapping Phalanx. Erin had mentioned visiting Champions with Edge before, and he was both handsome and friendly, so that might be a possibility. Geckoman didn't seem quite the type, and it was hard to tell much of anything about the mysterious Midnight II. Wander was standing next to Hellion in several pictures, and that young man carried himself with an air of almost unconscious aristocracy. He could be the Trevor with a lot of money and a big house. It was hard to say, but entertaining to wonder. "We're auditioning some new members," Erin told Mona, "but keeping it low key. Sage and Cobalt Templar are already sort of junior members of the team, and they're not graduating. If we find a few more decent candidates, and maybe they check out who comes in during the fall, they could refill the team pretty easily. I would hate to see it just go away, even if it was a team we formed more on accident than by design. It's a good team," she said pensively, looking at the pictures.

Stesha chuckled at that. "Maybe you should shadow him one of these days," she suggested, mostly in jest. "He might be one of us. I'm sure you've probably felt the pain of having to duck out or cancel a class to go handle a heroic emergency, imagine if you couldn't reschedule things and just had to miss! But you're probably right and it's some sort of trouble with a girl. That's one thing I don't miss about college. I never dated because my dad was a professor and I had three obnoxiously protective older brothers, but it seemed like everybody around me was neck deep in drama all the time. It was exhausting just to watch!"

Miss Americana pursed her lips and thought about what to say long enough for Dragonfly to blurt out what she was actually thinking. Trying to finesse the situation, she said carefully, "It is definitely a troubling case history, but it's obviously been under control for some time. You're certainly right to be concerned about a change in your behavior patterns after this long, beneficial as they may seem on the surface. If we could get real-time scans of you for several weeks, ideally in combination with a log you keep of your own activities, thoughts and feelings to correlate with mental shifts, I think we could get some definitive answers."

Even after the apparition dissipated, Wander stayed in the basement, scrutinizing the place where it had been for any trace of its passage. With the light bulbs blown and dark, she pulled a pair of red sunglasses from a holder at her belt and slid them over her eyes, investigating the whole area until she had satisfied herself that the danger was actually past and not merely hiding. It wasn't that she didn't trust the super-senses of those who had them, but she still trusted her own senses a lot more. The Terminus was not anything to take chances with. Besides, staying in the basement gave the crowd plenty of time to dissipate upstairs before she had to go up there.

"Ah, those were the days, huh?" Stesha asked with a laugh. "I remember having to round out my general education credits with history and math classes, since I was majoring in plant biology. I didn't mind the English requirements, but the math was tough. It's funny how I graduated just four years ago, and it seems like a lifetime now." She was attacking her own lunch with relish, having worked up an excellent appetite helping out with the castle's landscaping. "Do you have any particularly promising students this year?"

"Better than getting it from church," Erin countered dryly. "Way before I knew any of the specifics, I knew God didn't like it one bit. Some novels my friend Kathi found filled in... um, answered a lot of questions, and there were a couple discussions with my mom on how it was definitely better to wait, preferably a long time. But I was pretty young, though." She shrugged, a movement he could feel rather than see, and was quiet for a moment. "So," she finally asked, "have you ever actually had to deliver a baby?"

Miss A murmured an obscenity, checking her footing as she walked further into the warped building. "We may need to change our plans," she told Dragonfly in a murmur, despite the fact no one could hear them. "Being in such a badly damaged sector is at least as dangerous for programs who are already corrupted as it is for normal programs. We can't let them stay here in this condition." She cracked her knuckles and looked towards her confederate. "It may be time to get our god on. Can you program while projected? If you can patch the building, I think I'm familiar enough with the basic human program layout to stabilize the mutants."

Stesha laughed, catching the glance. "If there's one thing we have plenty of here, it's space. The human refugees are a little bit leery of the bees yet, and a little bit suspicious of their own good fortune. So far they've been sticking pretty close to the sod huts that Gaian Knight and I made for them. I've told the bees not to bother them, but I'm hoping that a little time and familiarity will make good neighbors of them. If not, well, I keep increasing the size of the rehabilitated area, eventually one or the other may move on to other green pastures." Tired of being ignored in favor of boring human conversation, Bay-bee insinuated her fuzzy round body in between Stesha and Murdock, getting right up into the latter's face with her giant, multifaceted eyes and tiny mouth. "You hazz cazzle?"she inquired, antennae wriggling. "Flowerzz?"

He could feel Erin shift uncomfortably behind him as she took that in. "Yeah, I guess," she allowed, "but knowing he knows is still different from actually running right into him, you know? I mean, that probably wouldn't be that comfortable for anybody." She thought for a moment, cocked her head to one side. "You and your grandpa don't even, like, talk about that sort of thing, do you?" The image of the two Hunter men talking in more than monosyllables about anything was one that she couldn't quite make gel in her mind, much less on a topic like the one at hand.

Erin chuckled, leaning forward to rest her chin on his shoulder. "Nah, I already decided to blow off my responsibilities tonight anyway. If I go back now I'll just start worrying about things again." She raised one arm up from his waist, splayed her fingers across his chest. "How likely is it that we'll get caught if we go back to your house instead?" she suggested. "KInd of a departure from last year at this time, but I can live with that." Thus far Erin had managed to avoid running into Travis on her visits to the mansion, and though she knew it couldn't go on indefinitely, it seemed like a streak to try and continue for tonight.

You may call it whatever you please, the cat told Eve with avuncular amusement. The name does not matter, only that it exists, and that we move with it and through it and in it. Why are you here now, where your special gifts are so badly needed, instead of pursuing the art that you loved? Why am I here where I am most needed, though it means a life of kitty chow and nylon collars? Oliver gave his neck a scratch under his blue collar, narrowing his eyes to slits. Good or bad, pain or pleasure, if you are committed to the side of good, you will find yourself where you are needed. It may be scant comfort now, but wait a few clawfuls of years. He closed his eyes, relaxing utterly across Eve's lap.

Eventually the fog began rolling in off the bay, obscuring some of the lights and making the air a little damp even through Trevor's clever devices. They packed up the picnic hamper and secured it to the back of the Night Cycle, and Erin tucked her new buddy safely into her jacket for the trip down. Before they left the bridge, Erin stood next to Trevor for a moment and looked out over the misty sweep of the city that they both defended. And as much as it did occasionally bother her, right now she could understand why he loved it so much. Tilting his hat back just enough for comfort, she put her arms around him as they shared a long kiss above the city, then climbed onto the bike for a fast and thrilling trip back to earth.

Wander kept an eye on the interaction between the police and the diminutive villains, making sure that the arrest wasn't going to turn into a farce, or worse, an escape. "The next step in that investigation is to take the clues and use them to find where exactly an abandoned oil derrick might be, which isn't exactly a piece of cake," she remarked. "Even then, if we manage that, we're flying blind without more clues as to who's behind the operation. What do you think?" she asked the two underclassmen, implicitly indicating that this was a test.

Miss A considered the scans once more. "If you're amenable," she told the Doktor, "I'd like to see some real-time brainwave monitoring done, preferably over a period of time. Watching your brain in the process of making the shifts that it does would likely prove more elucidating than these static pictures we have available now, and we all know that the lab is not always the best place to get a good look at normal life activity." She smiled slightly. "A few microelectrodes under your hair and a miniaturized transmitter should do nicely, and you'll hardly even know you're wearing it."

Erin had worried that she'd spend most of her time feeling self-conscious about being in uniform, but as it turned out, it wasn't really that bad. Fulcrum attracted a lot of attention, of course, but she herself was able to blend into the background a little more, especially with her jacket on. They saw some exhibits that she hadn't seen before, and some that she had seen and had liked before. It was strange and a little bit surreal to see a couple of pictures of herself in a mini-exhibit on Young Freedom, but even there she blended into the background next to her flashier teammates. There was certainly nothing wrong with that, she decided as she studied the pictures.

Miss A finished with the robots and walked over to Jack, shamelessly tugging aside the edges of his torn shirt herself to get a look at the wound. "It won't kill you," she diagnosed with a half-smile, "but for the sake of your pretty skin you may want to have a couple stitches put in, scars or no scars. I could fix you up back at the Lab, but I'm betting you probably have a regular doctor for this sort of thing. Secret Boy Scout type and all that." She gave him a quick wink, then turned to the room at large. "I don't know about any of you, but I could use a change of clothes and a drink. It's true what they say about there being no days off in this business." She sauntered for the door, once again the very picture of poise and confidence despite her ruined designer suit.

"But think of the nightmare it would be to get permits here," Stesha joked, walking over to the kitchenette. "Everything is already made," she told him, "I just have to get it out of the fridge. Be right back." With that she touched the flowers in her hair and disappeared, leaving Tarrant alone in the cozy flower-scented cottage. It wasn't more than a couple of minutes, though, before she was back, this time carrying a tray of meats and cheeses, a reusable grocery bag full of condiments, and two loaves of crusty fresh-baked bread. "Nothing too fancy," she told him, "but I just baked the bread this morning. My poor bread machine is going to seize up and die from all the dough I've been making lately." She set all the sandwich fixings on the table, then went to the minifridge for bottles of water. That was a bit of a challenge, as bending over for anything was these days, but she managed by holding onto the counter. "How has school been going for you?" she asked as she returned to the table and sat down.