Electra

"That's sort of the impression I got too," Erin admitted glumly. "I went to an interview and they were sort of hinting that they might be setting something up on the West Coast I could apply to with better chances, but I can't leave Freedom City right now." A faint trace of a blush crossed her pale cheeks. "I'll figure out something, though," she assured Fulcrum, not wanting the older heroine to feel sorry for her or anything like that. "If the League doesn't work out, I can just, you know, get an apartment somewhere, find a job. All my paperwork is finally in order, and I've been saving up money." She shrugged. "Doing hero work as a job would be nice, but I know most people don't get to do it that way."

"Well, I've applied the League, but they don't have openings right now..." Erin broke off as the waitress approached, pausing to order the Siren Seafood Salad platter and a glass of raspberry lemonade. She folded her menu and waited for her companion to order, trying to decide the best way to phrase things without making herself sound like a charity case waiting to happen. Considering that everybody seemed to be asking her the question these days, she really needed to come up with a better set of answers.

"She's crazy. She's in Blackstone now because she can't be trusted anywhere near the public," Wander said matter-of-factly. "She's not evil, because she's like me, she wasn't actually native the universe where she was living. But they made her crazy and used her as a weapon, so I'm just hoping she can eventually be fixed." That was sort of depressing lunchtime talk though, so Erin made an effort to move on quickly. "Some of the underclassmen are pretty good, and I think they're interested in being on the team," she told Fulcrum. "But I don't know. It feels like what we had with Young Freedom was, you know, special. I don't know if it's ever going to be quite like that again." She looked down at her menu and frowned, then up again. "How is stuff with the Interceptors going? Any new members there?"

"It's not too surprising that a massive, disembodied, half-Grue, half-disease construct doesn't really understand much about love," Miss Americana pointed out dryly. "I trust you not to go squirrelly on me, because I don't think we can either of us finish this mission solo." She paused a second. "I'm sorry it got her," she offered, almost hesitantly. "She'll be okay as soon as we get this nullfier working, I'm sure. We're almost there." She spiraled high in an evasive maneuver designed to confound the soldiers firing into the dark night sky, then angled downward for a fast approach to the malignant Mind.

Erin shrugged, leaving her jacket on as the waitress seated them at a table in the corner where there was room to push the table out for Fulcrum. "I don't wear it when I'm not working, and neither do my friends, so I guess I'm not really used to it. When people look at me funny, it makes me nervous," she admitted. "Things have been good though, I guess. We've been doing a lot of alternate-universe work lately, so we haven't been in the Freedom City papers as much. I sort of rescued another version of myself from Anti-Earth the other week, so now there's even more of me hanging around on Prime, and that's kind of weird." She shrugged. "But mostly everyone's just getting ready for graduation, you know? Trying to see if any of the underclassmen are going to take up the team name after we're gone."

They emerged in an open space underground, and for a moment everything was completely dark, eerie especially with the distant thunder of the destruction going on overhead. Her breath loud in her own ears, Erin turned on her flashlight and played the beam around, turning quickly to make sure they hadn't tunneled straight into an ambush. The room was strange, perhaps fifty feet in diameter and very unfinished, and looking more like an animal burrow than an actual room. Roots hung down from the dirt ceiling, and the concave floor curved up to become the walls, as though someone had dug a hole and then put a lid on it. A single large retractable door, something like a garage door, was set just under the ceiling, providing the only non-burrowing access to the cavity. It was obviously made of impervium and seemed to have no latch or handle on this side. There were several infrared security cameras set around the walls, set to catch every angle. In the center of the room, at the lowest point of the concavity, sat a box that all of them but Sage had seen before. It wasn't very big, perhaps twelve feet on each side, but it was reinforced impervium underneath the wires, cords, and pipes that ran across and around it. Though the dirt in most places was supernaturally smooth, molded by the power of Caryatid and other geokinetics, there seemed to be places on the walls where the dirt had been disturbed, by mechanical tread tracks that led in a path between box and door, and in a few places by digging that seemed to have been done by human hands. Erin blew out a breath. "This isn't going to be easy. Midnight, can you open that box without us destroying it this time?"

"I've been all right," Wander said, glancing around a little nervously at the people who were watching them. She figured Fulcrum had to be used to that by now, there wasn't much chance of hiding behind a secret identity when you were ducking to avoid the ceilings. "Keeping pretty busy lately. I've got a friend who loves this place, so I've been here a couple of times. They always put up new stuff, though. If we eat first, I guess we'll probably miss the lunch rush, right?" Eating at Champions was a little weird too, but at least they hadn't named an entree after any of her friends yet. "How have you been?"

Wander felt a little bit strange coming to the Super Museum in costume when she wasn't actually on a mission. It felt like showing off, or like she was trying to compare herself to the heroes on display. But Fulcrum had mentioned that she should come in costume, so maybe she was planning on getting some training or patrolling in later. She landed on the roof of the building and jumped down onto the loading dock in the back, then made her way as unobtrusively as possible to the front of the building. The jacket she'd tossed on did help soften the spandex-clad look, making it seem to the casual eye as though she were just wearing brightly colored leggings. She stopped at the entrance to pay her admission, then walked in to join Fulcrum. "Ah, hi," she said. "I hope I'm not late."

"It's okay," Erin murmured, not quite able to get the words to stay in her head without saying them, but dropping her voice to match the tone of Eve's mental communication. "We all feel it, this place is just... it's just rotten, and evil, and only a few good patches like this make it even bearable. But we're leaving soon." She raised her voice, turned to the others. "I say we wait through the night and strike at dawn. Anyone who's been patrolling will be tired, anyone who's been sleeping will be sluggish. It might give us a couple more minutes."

Erin gave Eve a slightly harassed look. "I appreciate the sentiment," she told her teammate, "but we've got to be practical too. I mean, I know a lot of what we're basing our strategy on is guesswork from what we've seen and pieced together. I still think it's pretty safe to guess that Singularity is really not going to react well to somebody who comes in and starts talking to her in her head. If Pathos, evil Psyche, is her personal bogeyman, any psychic may be enough to set her off. It doesn't mean you aren't going to be part of the mission."

"If Caryatid can tunnel us straight in there, that'll be an asset," Erin added, studying the map. "Less chance of us being spotted on the way in or out, and less chance of Singularity escaping. I'm hoping that if Sage provides us with psychic cover, I can talk her into coming with us quietly, otherwise I'm fairly sure I can take her down in a fast fight. In any case, I need to be the one who goes in to deal with her, because the possibility of her killing anybody else is just too high. I'm not going to sacrifice anyone to try and save her."

Miss A gave Dragonfly a crooked smile. "Believe me, dignity is the least of our worries right now. Who's gonna see?" She began affixing heavy nylon straps to the device, rigging it for easier transport. "Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna take off from the roof and fly straight and as fast as I can out to Lonely Point. We're going to swing wide, out over the water, and come in hard and fast from behind." She paused at that, snickered, and went on. "Anyway, I'll drop the nullifier and activate it, and it should do the rest. If I can't activate it for whatever reason, you're gonna have to. Meanwhile, you shoot at things and make sure nothing kills us. Sound good?"

Miss A began blinking more rapidly as work drew to a close on the nullifier, and when she wasn't giving instructions, she began humming instead, as though trying to keep her brain fully engaged. "All right!" she announced with a sigh, "that's as good as we're going to get it. We just have to get it over to Lonely Point and activate it with half the heroes in the city trying to kill us on the way. No sweat, right?" She giggled, looking over at Dragonfly. "The boys will keep some of them busy, at least. I can carry it, and you besides, so maybe if you ride pickaback, you can shoot anything that comes after us while my hands are full."

Erin stared at Caryatid a moment, then stopped and crouched to let Donna off her back, her expression unreadable. "If we're going to risk using powers," she said to the group, looking at her teammates, "then we're better off having Edge just teleport us. I thought we were going this way for maximum stealth, not because it was necessarily the fastest. We don't know exactly what kind of sensors they have."

Feh, good thing Wander is only in this fight as a last resort, since I rolled a 1. Initiative 14

Hey Doc, I don't think Erin's posts got dispersed to my other guys. If I dump them all on Stesha, that will give her 4pp for the month. Doktor'd

"Hopefully that shouldn't be necessary, but I appreciate the offer," Miss A told Victory with a distracted air, already at work on the robot's open chest. "I'm going to start by shutting down the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerve-analogues, and interrupting the sensory pathways, to stop the pain. You shouldn't feel anything after I do that," she assured Irons. Slipping on a pair of magnifying goggles, she went to work with her microtools, working on the robot with the air of someone who knew very well what she was doing. Occasionally she called out an order for a tool or material, but she never so much as broke a sweat over the tetchy work, her perfectly manicured hands remaining absolutely steady.

"Love you too," Erin murmured, "and you're right about that." Giving him a last quick smile, she resumed her rear guard position, dashing back down the tunnel a little way to make sure nothing was following them before circling back to the group. "We're clear in the back," she reported to the others, "if anything saw us and tried to follow, they're way behind us. Let's keep it that way." When the going got rough, she scooped up the little girl and carried her piggyback, the better to keep her own arms clear.

"You're not him," Erin reminded Trevor quietly, brushing a hand over the side of his face lightly enough that he could just barely feel it through the mask. "You're so much more, so much better. The fact that you can pretend to be him for a few minutes, well enough to fool people, that's a tactical advantage. I bet he wouldn't do nearly so well trying to pass for you if he even thought to try. And we can use every single advantage we can get. We've lost most of the day, but we still have some time to look at the maps, go over the plans." That was one of Trevor's best things, so she hoped it would seem at least somewhat appealing. She herself might have preferred just charging in, but that was why she hadn't come here alone.

Erin automatically fell back to the rear of the group for the return trip, protecting their backs and making sure no one fell behind. She kept her glasses ready, just in case they got into a fight and Trevor misted things up, but for the moment, she could see well enough with the flashlights they carried. In one quiet moment as they paused to rest at a junction, she put a hand on Trevor's shoulder. "Good work back there," she murmured. "Quick thinking."

Wander leapt off the sled as it drew to a halt, dropping the couple of stories and landing neatly next to Mercury on the ground. She was very alert, holding her bat in her hand, but she didn't seem tense or too immensely concerned just yet. And she obviously wasn't going to tell the guys what they ought to be doing, waiting instead for one of them to take the initiative and head into the parking garage.

"For some government heroes, the government comes first and the heroism second," Miss A muttered, then turned her attention entirely to the task at hand. "These aren't exactly ideal working conditions you're giving me, but I'll do everything I can. I need a full microcircuitry toolbox and whatever module you use to access the programming. Bring out some sheeting and let's start getting the air filtered and dehumidified, stat. If you've got a deionizer, even better. Sharl, I need you to hurry back to the lab and get the gray case off the workbench in my electronics lab and bring it here as fast as you can. Are you in pain?" she asked the head that was regarding them still. "Blink once for yes, twice for no."

Miss Americana brushed away some of the scorched cloth and sytheskin obscuring the extent of the chest wall damage, but her eyes were on the "injured" man's face. She looked up at Victory, then at Agent Bonham. "This is the Patriot," she said, confusion and just a hint of accusation in her tone. "Or at least an extremely close body model to him. But the Patriot was killed in action in 2002. What's going on here? Did you build a Patriot-model android?"

Miss A rolls a 31.

Paying half-an-ear's worth of attention to Dragonfly as they raced up the stairs, Miss A hustled into her electronics lab and began grabbing for equipment, issuing orders to the boxy robot on treads that served as her automated lab assistant. For someone who was apparently extremely adept at building robots, Mavis was almost comically mechanical and inhuman, but it did move with surprising grace and speed, and obviously possessed a very capable AI. Miss A called out instructions to Mavis and to Dragonfly, assembling a large collection of parts in short order. "Power's still on," she muttered, to Dragonfly or to herself. "Don't know how long that's going to last though, if no one's maintaining it. The central brain may not have the complex understanding to know that it ought to keep people working on that. We've got a generator here, but getting it running, keeping it maintained would take time. We haven't got that time. Sharl hasn't got that time. Let's go." They started work.