Electra

"Actually, I've got another project just coming off the drawing board that'll do something like that," she told him. "I've got the house rigged with stationary projectors now, but what I've been working on is a mobile self-contained projector, one that will project your body, but can also be contained by your body. That is to say, you'll be able to carry it in your pocket, even while it's creating the stuff your body is made of," she explained. "A mobile projector would allow you to move around freely, even to places where there are no stationary projectors. That's a much safer project than attempting to streamline your programming to keep you cohesive while traversing the internet," she told him sternly. Having Sharl able to walk around her house, as happy as it made him, made Gina increasingly uncomfortable the more realistic the hologram became. And yet her own pride kept her tweaking the program towards greater perfection, just because she knew that she could. Talking to him about his programming and the holoprojectors helped a little bit, at least helped to reinforce the knowledge that he wasn't real.

"Oh, thanks." By the time Erin had wiped her cheek with her hand as well, the smudge had spread to cover most of her cheek. "I kind of don't think that helped," she admitted ruefully, looking at her dirty hands. Using one of the rags instead helped clean a little off, at least. "So..." she finally asked, as casually as she could, "how were your holidays? Did you have a good time? Have you used the stuff I got you yet?" She knew it wasn't polite to ask, but she and Trevor didn't stand much on politeness anyway.

"And here I just thought you liked crawling under cars with me," Erin joked. She dug a penlight out of the toolbox and passed it to him, then slid back under the car herself. "I can see well enough, but maybe after the oil change, we can put it up on the lift." She already had a smudge of oil across one pale cheek, and more on her hands. "I should've brought those glasses along. I keep them on me when I'm patrolling these days, they're really handy."

Properly attired, Erin joined him on the floor of the garage, grabbing her own creeper and sliding under alongside him, so that all that was visible from the outside was their shins and shoes. She listened carefully as Trevor pointed out the various details of the engine, how they were similar to and different from the engines she was used to. It was interesting, almost absorbing enough that she didn't notice their close proximity in a confined space, but not quite. Luckily, tight spaces did not bother her. She slid out to grab the tools they needed, and they got to work.

"You're welcome," she told him, sounding a little rueful. "It's still rough now, but at least there's proof of concept. I should be able to create something a little more sophisticated, given a few more days. I'm still not going to be able to let you eat food and drink liquids though," she warned him. "Holograms just don't work that way. You'll have to go back to your partition habitat to do that, at least for now, and you'll always have to eat specially programmed foods. There's no way around it." Emerson rolled up with an armful of towels, spreading them out several layers thick on the floor. "Okay, you stand there," Gina told Sharl.

"Yeah," Erin agreed, at either or both suggestions. "And also really cool." Trevor opened the hood, and they got down to business, standing in front of the car with studious looks as mechanically-minded people have been doing since the invention of front-engine cars. "It's easier to understand these old cars," Erin decided. "Not everything is hidden under the manifold like it is in modern cars. Oil change first?" she asked, going to the well-stocked wall of supplies for the oil pan and tools. While she was there, she put on a pair of mechanic's coveralls that happened to be handy, since she couldn't very well afford to be getting oil all over her clothes.

"Oh, it will," Erin assured him with a chuckle, letting loose of any dregs of holiday melancholy. "And all the rest of them will give us something to do this summer besides job hunting." She opened the car and climbed into the driver's seat, enjoying just sitting in it for a moment under the pretext of looking for the hood release. She suspected that a car this age probably wouldn't have one inside the cabin, but no harm in checking. Sticking her head out the window, she asked Trevor, "Hey, you remember that PADLOC dance? That was fun."

Erin let out a long breath, her cheeks coloring slightly. "Yeah, I'm okay," she told him. "I did pretty well this year, actually. Better than in other years. I went out and worked at a homeless shelter instead of sitting in my room on Christmas, and that helped. Having Oliver around helped. Just... just having another year behind me helped. It still kind of sucked overall, yeah, but it was better." Stepping up to the car, she ran a light hand over the smooth black hood, and a ghost of the smile returned. "So, just a tune-up?"

Erin was a bit startled at the effusive greeting, but did no more than widen her eyes in surprise before kissing him back. "Missed you too," she told him with a grin, taking a moment to lean into him and enjoy the unique feel and smell and sight that was Trevor. It had been too long. "I'm so glad the holidays are done and everything is back to normal now. Even if Freedom City is way colder than Seattle ever was." Her eyes brightened as she caught sight of the limo. "Are we working on that today?" she asked, sounding very pleased.

Erin kept one eye on the road as she sped up to North Bay in her shiny blue just-washed truck, and her other eye on the houses she passed. She rarely ever actually drove in this area, and it was easy to forget just how wealthy Trevor's family was. This was definitely mansion country, each one bigger than the last. She even recognized a few of them, places that Doctor Atom had sent her, on another world, to collect various security components or necessary parts for his machines. She'd never been to the Midnight Manor in that world, thanks to Doctor Atom's totally legitimate concern that Midnight would've installed booby traps that needed no electricity or maintenance to function, but she was familiar with the neighborhood. As she drove through the chilly white and gray world, she reflected briefly on how glad she was that it was finally January. The holidays were over for another year, and she'd come through quite well, all things considered. Maybe one of these years she wouldn't feel compelled to hole up by herself all through Christmas break, but she wasn't setting her hopes unreasonably high just yet. She'd missed Trevor most of all during her self-imposed solitude. The idea of spending time with him and with his cars both seemed just about perfect. Pulling into the long driveway, she parked in front of the house and went around the side to the door that led into the garage, then rang the bell.

Stesha goes on 22. Heck of an initiative pattern we've got going here!

"You drank a Mountain Dew?" Gina demanded, then forcibly modulated the sharpness in her tone when she saw his face. "Sharl, you're not designed to be able to digest actual food. You're a hologram, remember? That Mountain Dew is sitting inside a magnetic field within your torso, just waiting to spill out all over the floor the second you zip back into the mainframe. If you want food or drink, just wait till you're back there, okay? I've specifically programmed all that food to be compatible with your programming. "Emerson!" she called suddenly, "we're going to need some towels."

He wandered for awhile and Gina let him, refraining from calling him back down while she made more finicky adjustments to the projector settings. When he finally came back down on his own, she did take the time to look up and over at him. It made her very antsy to have another human form in her home, human-looking eyes watching her, staring at her, even. She shifted in her seat and reminded herself that Sharl was a computer program, no matter how sophisticated his design. "Satisfy your curiosity?" she asked him.

Wander leapt to the edge of the volcanic crater, next to Midnight. She set Edge down and kept a very careful eye on the Beast, lest it get a second wind somehow and come after them again. It didn't seem about to go anywhere, though, so after a minute or two, she relaxed fractionally. "Good work, guys," she murmured. "We'd better get in touch with the King again. They'll probably want to put another permanent enclosure in place over this thing before any other villains get ideas."

Gina's kitchen was about twice as big as she needed it to be, considering she didn't cook so much as shove things in the microwave or warm them on the stove if she was really feeling ambitious. Broad expanses of granite countertops covered beautiful glass-fronted cabinets that revealed enough dishes for one person to get by on comfortably in one cabinet, cans and boxes with food pictures on them in another, and books, magazines, and bits of machinery filling most of the rest. There was a breakfast nook not far from the stairs with a small two-person table tucked into it, one of the two chairs was stacked high with yet more books and a cardboard box that said "Peapod" on it. The real attraction, though, was the windows. The breakfast nook was all but glassed-in, surrounded on three sides by broad windows that overlooked an expanse of green growing plants! Sharl recognized grass by now, and he'd known of trees already. The yard, for that's what it was called, was surrounded by a tall wooden fence that was lined with trees, so that it was hard to see anything around or over it. The grass was cut neat and short, but otherwise there was no sign anyone spent time out there. It was just there, like a monument to nature.

"Only as far as the kitchen," she told him. "I put a projector in the stairwell, and enough in the kitchen to let you get to the windows and see the backyard, but the rest of the house isn't wired up yet. Mind the stairs, god only knows how you'd clip if you fell down them at this point." She didn't move to go with him, seeming intent on staying in her chair and calibrating the hologram further. Already the glow around Sharl was beginning to fade a little, becoming more of a faint nimbus than an electronic glow.

"I have another one like it at my lab," Gina told him, "but those are the only two units in production right now. I've licensed a couple of design patents for parts of them, but they're not ready for release just yet. They help around the place, do household chores, carry heavy things, good for some spot welding jobs. It does have some trouble with stairs, but antigravs are economically inefficient compared to just letting it take its time getting up. Okay, try putting you hand on something now. Don't push too hard," she instructed.

Taking Edge's cue, Wander blew a raspberry at the huge beast, then leapt away, slowly enough to make sure that it could follow. She hated running from a fight, but she trusted the intel that said this was the surest way to deal with this particular baddie. Trevor would have the cage waiting, she was sure, and hopefully the others were doing all right with Adamant up in space. That was a fight she was very concerned about, but no time to think about it now, not when she herself was up to her neck! "Come on," she taunted the thing, a little halfheartedly. "Can't you do better than that?"

"We can certainly help you look into that, if you'd like," Miss A reassured him. "I have some experience working with humanoid robots, and several of my colleagues are excellent engineers. If your systems have been damaged, I'm sure we can develop some solutions to get you operating at full capacity. After all," she told him, "we need all the help we can get in protecting life. I'm sure you'll make an invaluable ally." Personally, she wasn't sure about the idea of giving the robot a berth at the Lab, but that would at least let them monitor it for aberrant behaviors. Right now she was a little more worried about the fact that Dragonfly seemed to be slipping mental gears from lack of sleep, an unacceptable trait in a superpowered hero.

"Well, this is Earth," Stesha said with a shrug, "the star is as far away as you'd expect it to be at this time of year, though I can't say I have any idea what that means as far as degrading the metals. But I don't have access to anything like that," she admitted. "If you leave this improved area and go poking around, you might find some in the ruins, perhaps of a hospital or lab that had a lead-lined room. I wouldn't know where to start, though, and it's not very pleasant to stay too long outside of this part of the world."

"Of course." While the bees put up a ruckus bidding him goodbye and thanking him, Stesha put a hand on Gaian Knight's arm and teleported both of them back to Earth Prime, right where they'd started from. The mundanity of it was almost startling after the work they'd been doing and all the massive insects. "Thank you again," Stesha told him with a smile. "You can't know how much this means to them. They haven't been treated well by humans for most of their existence. They will remember that you made a fine home for them and kept them save from the cold. Come and visit any time, really," she encouraged.

"All of us here in this group are superheroes," Miss Americana explained to Protectron with a kindly smile. "We make it our special mission to protect life and guard our city from any threats that come upon it. We wear costumes and use codenames so that the ordinary citizens can recognize us at a glance when there's trouble. And that's why we're all here, when we noticed you coming online, we wanted to make sure that you weren't something dangerous. Do you have a place to go?" she asked him with kind concern. "If you've just come online and have no information about your home base, we can help you find a place to stay and a way to recharge your power source if necessary."

"Guests?" she asked absently. "Not typically, there are people I bring into the lab to work with, but that's not exactly a matter of having guests. I don't like to make this place more public than I have to. The Lab is my public location, or ArcheTech if it comes to that. This is a place for me to work on personal projects, and things that I'm not ready to release to the public just yet. Nobody's going to be walking in on us while we're adjusting your holograms, if that's what you're worried about."

"Do you have access to any of your old medical records?" she asked him curiously, making notes on her pad. Perhaps if the records had been digitized she could find them herself, but from the sound of his medical center, their decades-old records were more likely lining a rat's nest in some basement than safely stored online for posterity. "I would be interested to see the progression of your case and compare it to those of known metahuman adolescents. I would posit that you may have had some latent metahuman potential that attracted the attention of a transdimensional life form, thus causing your current state, but of course I can't draw any conclusions without more evidence." Her fingers flew across the screen as she wrote, her lovely brow furrowed in concentration. "I need to get you into the lab at ArcheTech," she said again. "If you're willing, of course."

"Just say the word," Stesha assured him, "and I'll be happy to give you a lift. It's always nice to have other craftsmen taking an interest in this place. It could use as much help as anyone is willing to give it," she admitted wryly. "And it's a great place to practice new techniques! With a whole uninhabited planet, think of what you could do! You could make your own cities, all straight out of the Earth! We could clean up the ground, and I could cover them in plants. They'd be homes for animals, or even for people if anyone ever decided they wanted to move here. It'll be beautiful someday," she told him with a resolute nod.