Electra

As luck would have it, right at that moment, there was a knock on Mark's door! Erin stood outside, knapsack slung over her arm still full of books from the day's classes. Since she rarely had time to return to her room during the school day, and she never bothered with what was technically her locker in the academic building, her bag was packed full, but the way she handled it, it might as well have been full of packing peanuts. "Hey Mark, you around?" she asked through the door.

"We do need to find out whether it's sentient or not," Miss A told Sharl, speaking into the comm for all that most of her attention was on Dragonfly and her interesting set of responses. "I don't like the idea of putting you in harm's way, but they haven't got much computer security at Lonely Point right now, and while they do have Daedelus, he doesn't seem to be operating on all cylinders, and he's going to be busy with the gantry I f- damaged. I'll send you out there, but you have to be careful. Report back to the lab with your projector so we can start working on that. "Dragonfly has a point though," she continued, "we have a responsibility to weigh the magnitude of our actions. We have an overriding obligation to the people who are dying because this thing has taken over their minds. If its behavior while controlling Blue Wall and Electrolux are any indication, it has little concern for the survival of any component piece of itself, which doesn't bode well for anyone in hospital or needing any sort of help or care right now. But even if it is evil, we also have an obligation to attempt to preserve sentient life where possible. If there's a way to take it out without hurting it or putting the city in any more danger, I definitely want to find that way."

That got him a sympathetic face from Miss A. "Ouch, giving till it hurts, and we're only what, three, four days into the season? I can do a bottle of water for you, no problem" She pulled two bottles of spring water from a minifridge under a lab bench and gave him one before cracking the other for herself and taking a sip. "All right, I'm going to lay out the test results for you, and you can stop me whenever you have a question or want me to explain anything in more depth. Don't feel bad, I tend to let my lectures run away with me sometimes." She spent a few minutes laying out the results of the physical scans and tests, pointing to various clips from the high-speed cameras, and showing footage from the resonance imaging scanners. "To boil it down as simply as possible, the noise you make with your voice is only the most obvious manifestation of the noise you can make," she told him after the show and tell session. "There are sonic-resonance producing nodules scattered all over your body, producing ultra-high and low frequency sound to produce the effects you are capable of. As we saw in the manacles test, the nodules are optimized for certain tasks and frequencies, each with a vocal range, you might call it, that is specific and tailored."

"Quicklime?" Miss A asked, fingers flying over the keys of the console she was working at, doing rapid research. "I suppose in a general sense, all organic life is pretty damn vulnerable to that stuff. It's corrosive as all hell. But I suppose that with a sufficiently overwhelming quantity of it, delivered directly to the source, we could destroy the entity, then slake the lime reaction with seawater and avoid lingering danger to the civilians in the area. The problem is going to be the civilians. Quicklime is a fine powder that takes easily to the air, and Lonely Point gets some incredible breezes. We need a delivery vector that will shield not only civilians, but possessed civilians who are more than willing to die for the main entity. Ideas?"

"I'm sure we can get you flying right again," Miss A said reassuringly, after giving Sharl a quick nod of approval. "The techs here are top-notch, and the foundation you've got between your equipment and the programming could hardly be better. Whatever's gone wrong, we'll iron it out." It was always a little chancy to step into somebody else's sandbox, but Miss Americana was so charismatic, her words of praise so convincing, it would be hard for even the most territorial of engineers to get too huffy about the troubleshooter from the private sector coming in to help. "Do you have a work log of what's been done in the most recent upgrades?"

"All right then, I think we've done enough tests for one day, in that case." A few moments later, Miss Americana walked out of the observation booth and escorted him back to the lab where they'd started. "Even better news," she said with a smile,"I'll even let you get dressed before we start the discussion." By the time Gabriel was finished dressing, Miss A had cleared off part of a lab table with two stools next to it, and brought up some test results on screen. "Have a seat," she invited. "Would you like something to drink?"

"Well, we destroyed the last holding cell pretty thoroughly, then blew a hole in the roof," Erin recalled with some satisfaction. "Even with the regenerative powers of impervium, it must've taken awhile to fix. If we could tunnel into the cavern, we could potentially buy extra time before they realize she's gone, in the confusion topside." She frowned. "Then again, we don't have a lot of time to be subtle. We might have to just smash and grab when we can. Do you know exactly where under the Academy this cavern is?" she asked Carytid.

Miss A listened to the communication from the cell Dragonfly had filled, then activated the internal commlink that would let her respond. "Affirmative, we are aware of the situation and will be handling it. Please remain calm. You are safe where you are, and will be released from confinement as soon as the danger of infection is passed." She disengaged the commlink and engaged the one that would let her speak to her teammates. "Sharl, abort that action and move to rendezvous with the rest of the team. Nobody goes there alone." She massaged her temples,trying to think. "We need to stop the rocket, but only when we have something we can use against the entity inside. Dragonfly, any insight from the bioscans?"

Miss A seemed perfectly at ease as she walked into the open-air laboratory that had been set up inside the hangar. She gave Victory a smile that could've launched a thousand ships, and a slightly lower-wattage version to the scientists and engineers around him. "Good morning, everyone! Thanks for calling me in for the consult, the work you've been doing here is immensely interesting. It sounds like you might have a discontinuity in your VTOL accelerator?" she guessed, "judging from the boom we heard coming in."

Erin nodded, a smile tilting the corners of her mouth despite the circumstances. "I should have known you'd have planned ahead,"she murmured. Looking over at Carydid, she said, "We're going to do everything we can for your family. But once we start an actual operation, things could wind up moving quickly. Before we go anywhere, you need to tell us all you know about what's going on at the school this weekend. Where are the senior students and the faculty likely to be? Are there any field trips or training runs or important visitors planned? And where are they keeping Singularity these days?"

"It's nice to meet you," Stesha said cheerfully, for all that it wasn't entirely easy to talk and jog at the same time. "But no hero's truly a solo act in Freedom City, we've all got to help each other out. What do you know about our guy here?" She gestured to the mess ahead of them, trying not to think too hard about the exhibits that might be ruined already. He was obviously not far ahead, she could hear the crashing noises still.

"Yes, I think we've established what I was hoping to from those tests." Mavis pressed a button and the device on Gabriel's hands was released, freeing him from his ignominious confinement. "Now are there any specific questions you have about your powers?" Miss A asked, "or things you would like to test out in a controlled and monitored environment? This is a very secure area, you can attempt things here that would be unsafe in most other places, even other laboratories."

"Of course," Miss A agreed over the speaker, concern and amusement at equal levels in her voice. "Would you like a medic to look you over, or are you too much of a manly man for that?" The dummy retreated back behind the wall, even as Mavis rolled over on its sturdy treads, offering a robotic pincer arm to help Gabriel to his feet. "Now is that recoil something you feel whenever you use your blast power but usually absorb with your body, or is that something new you haven't experienced in previous uses?"

"Soon," Miss A assured him over the loudspeakers. "I think we're onto something here." The blasted dummy wheeled back behind the wall, and was replaced by yet another fresh one. The Mavis robot wheeled away as well, back into her alcove in the opposite wall. "Now I want you to blast the dummy, but don't use your voice, either. No hands, no voice. Be creative," she encouraged, a faint thread of amusement in the faceless voice issuing from the speaker. "You never know what situations you might run into in the field."

"It's very precisely calibrated," Miss A explained patiently as they flew, "and keeping it that way is part of the reason that we're going out there today. Now remember, we're just observers today, and you are my very quiet, very unobtrusive assistant. I've helped out with Victory's suit a couple of times, which is why they offered me the opportunity to sit in on the session today, but let's not abuse the privilege. And no asking him if he's worried about blowing up, all right?" She gave her young protegee a dry smile as they soared down towards the testing facility.

While Gabriel amused himself, Gina worked feverishly to get the data into some kind of coherent order and begin drawing conclusions from it. Luckily, it was all very obvious to her, so the sort of correlation that might have taken days for a lesser researcher took only a few minutes, and by the time he was done with the song she was trying very hard not to be distracted by, she had a decent set of datapoints plotted and a strong working hypothesis. She rolled out another dummy from the far wall, but this time also opened a compartment in the long glass wall. Mavis trundled out, holding something that looked a bit like a fur muff from a Victorian outdoor costume, if it were made out of smooth white metal. The robot rolled up behind him and held up the device."All right, this time I'd like to try something a little different," Miss A told him. "I'd like you to put your hands behind you and insert them in the inhibitor. Then I want you to try and shoot the dummy anyway."

Miss A had to scramble to keep up with the sudden change of plans, and for a moment the lights in the room flickered as Gabriel began showing off all his powers in quick succession. It only lasted a moment, though, before things returned to normal and the testing could proceed apace. It was a lot of data to try and take in at once though, and even interfaced with the computer and with her superlative intellect, it was all Miss A could do to capture the various sounds that he was making and the underlying physiological data. She was busy enough with that work that she barely caught what she'd wanted to hear in the first place, the singing! "All right," she said when he was done, sounding just a bit frazzled. "That was very impressive, now you're going to have to give me a few minutes to sort through all the data. Go ahead and relax."

Miss A "woke" with a jerk as Gina's consciousness was tossed out of Daedelus' metal suit and back down the makeshift link she'd formed. Sheer habit and the comfort of the familiar nearly launched her back into her own fleshy body, but at the last moment she managed to grab hold of the cybernetic network that was the basis of Miss A's computerized brain. She gasped for a few moments, uselessly, and tried to organize her thoughts again. It was hard, much harder than it should have been for someone who was used to her mind as a high-performance machine. Twelve hours now, she thought, glancing over at the clock and wishing, once again, that she'd been better prepared for this. Even purely mental exercise took energy, especially the sort of mental exercise that involved stretching her powers this way. Maybe she needed to start giving the fleshy body some more exercise, build up a little more stamina in case of situations like this. Even the idea was unpleasant, so she set it aside for now. Activating the commlink again, she reached out to the others. "I've just seen what they're doing out at Lonely Point. They're building a rocket to send the new hybrid lifeform out to the Grue Unity to infect them as well. I've disabled some of their equipment and bought us some time, but we need to get out there and stop them before they start infecting the rest of the galaxy as well."

Erin studied the crude sketch, her brow furrowed. "We need to figure out a time when they're all going to be in the house together, then disable the security system on the house, as well as any cameras that can see into the house. We have to be quiet about it, we can't afford to let on that the Resistance is up to anything out of the ordinary." She pursed her lips and thought. "MIdnight, if you could get a look at the security beforehand, that would make it much easier to disable it, right? Maybe Edge could change up your costume and you could go out as your counterpart and have a look. I mean, it's not likely you'll get caught anyway, but it doesn't seem like they'd stop a super... I don't know, superwhatever while he's doing his rounds." She didn't like the idea of putting Trevor in danger, but his skills were what was needed for this. "We can back you up from the sewers in case things go wrong."

Fleur goes on 24

"That's right," Stesha told him, scurrying after him, picking her way around debris and fallen exhibits. She kept an eye out for injured civilians, but if nothing else, the altercation outside seemed to have given the patrons and employees enough time to get clear. "My name is Fleur de Joie. And you look familiar somehow, but I can't place your name right now. You say you used to be active in Freedom City?" If he was around thirty years ago, he was heroing before Stesha was born, but he looked well-preserved.

Daedelus has a pretty crap computers score, has anyone else noticed that? In any case, Gina wants his suit. Same stunt, same skill mastery check.

Oh no you don't, Gina murmured, Miss Americana's lips forming the words back at the Lab. Daedelus was an amazing technician and inventor, but he wasn't much of a computer guy and he wasn't exactly at his best right now. Suppressing a feeling of schadenfreude that at least the author of this madness had been hoist on his own petard, Gina gave up her cozy home in the gantry and homed in on the probe itself. It saw her coming, all right, an instant before her consciousness plowed through it like a freight train and straight on into the power armor itself, seizing the controls despite the dizzying triple-body feeling. She couldn't do this for long, but It was scientifically fascinating to test her own limits in such a way.

"Don't worry, we have plenty," Miss Americana told him, her voice sounding amused over the speakers. "Your body is producing ultrafrequency soundwaves in a focused distribution not dissimilar from a parabolic amplifier. The focused waves are spread over the frequency spectrum, which allows for the broad range of your power. This time I'm not going to introduce a target for you, I'm going to ask you instead to use your less-destructive abilities. Sing something, the way you would to incite emotion in a person or a group of people."

Erin nodded in return, looking troubled. "Stick with us and we'll take you with us," she promised the girl, "and we'll do what we can for your family. They have to at least be willing to let us help them." She looked over at Trevor, shrugged a little. "It'll cost us time," she murmured, "but I don't think not trying is really an option." She tried to look at the situation objectively, but it wasn't easy. Though maybe it would have helped a little if the girl stopped looking at her like some kind of nightmare horror.