Electra

"You're interested in proceeding on that camouflage project we discussed back in October?" Miss A asked, moving over to her exam table and clearing off the detritus. "I do have some ideas about how we could cover your origin and make you look more like an Earthly superhero. It will require additional study on you, though, so we can double up the research with that project. It won't," she had to admit, "change what you are inside. I don't have the technology to undo what was done to you, or even to significantly alter it without risking your life. But I can alter its appearance, so you don't have to carry that stigma anymore."

The trip was a very short one, only about a minute to the other side of Hanover and the business park where Miss A kept her lab. Harrier had been here before, but she'd done some expansion since, knocking out one interior wall to enlarge the lab and set in even more equipment. "Help yourself to a drink or a snack," Miss A told him, gesturing to the kitchenette with an expression that almost seemed rueful. "Now what's going on?"

"All right," Miss A told him, struggling for focus herself as a million explanations and possibilities ran through her head. "I'm going to call Doctor Archeville," she told him. "He has a great deal of experience with all types of metahumans. If anyone knows what might have triggered this or how to reverse it, it will be him. Just remain calm, and concentrate on your humanoid form," she said again. For all her intelligence, it was the only suggestion she had. Moving back to the wall, she called up to the top office. "Doctor, this is Miss Americana. We have something of a problem."

"Of course," Miss A said with a nod, understanding perfectly. It seemed that her lunch was going to have to be put off a little longer. At least she didn't feel the hunger pangs when she was fully inhabiting the robot. As long as she didn't get dizzy from low blood sugar and fall out, she'd be fine. "Would you like me to give you a lift to my lab? It'll be faster than walking, and we can talk once we're inside. I don't mind flying out of uniform."

"I can imagine it would be," Miss A replied, not unsympathetically. "For anyone, really, but most specifically for you. What sort of villain was it? Another Omegadrone, or something bigger?" She didn't seem affected by the cold either, though the wind tousled her blond hair artfully as they walked. "It looks like you came through relatively unscathed, though?" she hazarded. "Or is that what you needed to speak with me about?"

"I understand perfectly. You should've called me ahead of time, Miss A told him, walking with him towards the front doors. "I would've told you to come to my private lab and avoid any of those problems. But we can go there now and have a chat," she suggested. "How have you been lately?" she asked conversationally as they walked through the doors and back into the chilly winter weather. "Have things at the restaurant been working out?"

Abandoning her snack, and the lunch she'd planned to have soon, Gina inhabited fully and answered the intercom. "Thank you, Greg," she said politely. "Could you tell him to wait in the lobby and I'll be down in a few moments?" Signing herself out of the lab, she shrugged out of her lab coat and headed down to the lobby, dressed in smartly tailored navy blue slacks and a red blouse with a white crystal snowflake pendant. Passing the security desk, she greeted her ally-cum-experiment with a smile. "Murdock, how good to see you again. How are you?"

Miss A shoved the inert machines out of the way and tipped the exam table up, sending the last of the oily goo to puddle onto the floor with the main mass. "Can you concentrate on your humanoid form?" she asked. "It might help you to come back. There's a team of medics on the way to help you, and all the scanners are turned off. Has this ever happened to you before?" It certainly didn't seem that way, unless he'd lied in his interview, but nothing she'd done should've provoked any kind of response like this!

A wordless cry of surprise came over the microphone, and suddenly every scan, every machine shut down, even the music on the loudspeaker. There was deafening silence for a moment, then Miss A came running from behind the screen, activating an emergency beacon on the wall. "Medical Emergency in Lab 4A! I need metamedics stat!" It occurred to her even as she called that this could be another prank, but if it was, she could always kill him later. "Slick! Can you hear me?" she asked the blob, not even daring to use her hand scanner on the blob.

Miss A laughed. "Quite all right," she told him, "I know plenty of those words myself. "I'll just call this in, and then I won't have to actually pick him up and fly him to the precinct myself. She took out a cell phone, though it was not immediately clear from where, and dialed the police, holding a brief conversation while the Fearmaster himself gibbered and gnawed on his gag and glared balefully at Jackie B. "They're sending a truck now," Miss A told her colleague as she got off the phone. "We have the thanks of the city and all that."

Erin was quiet for awhile, resting her chin on the pillow and thinking about that. Alex gave mostly good advice, but she tended to give it in big enough chunks that it had to be chewed on before it could be swallowed. "Part of me thinks you're right," she admitted finally, "that I should just go with it and be happy about it for as long as it lasts, and figure that he's perfectly capable of saying what he thinks, usually in the fewest possible words. We're both adults now, or close enough. The other part is still worried because I don't know if I'll ever do more than make out with him, or be healthy enough to have a good adult relationship, or any of that stuff, and I keep thinking I should at least, I dunno, disclose all that explicitly or something." She sighed and punched the pillow so that a few more feathers escaped. "The other part, the stupid part, can't stop worrying that because I care about him, something awful is going to happen to him."

"No, god no," Erin said immediately, scrunching the pillow hard enough that a few feathers flew out of it. "If that's what it takes for him to really understand, I don't want him to understand. I wouldn't wish seeing that on my worst enemy. I'm really sorry that you've had to see it sometimes in my dreams, and I'd change that if I could. I don't want to do that to him." She relaxed her hold on the pillow, hugging it to her chest instead. "I think he got that part, anyway. I think he understood at least as much as anybody can how bad it was there. I told him about all of it," she added softly. "About my parents, and about Megan. It was the first time I told pretty much anybody the whole story when I wasn't in a debriefing session. I think he knows that. But even seeing it play out in the Doom Room or in his own head wouldn't put him into my brain, and I wouldn't want to do that, either." Erin shrugged helplessly. "Half the time I don't even know why I think or feel or act the way I do. I just know that it messed me up, and that I'm never going to be the way I would have been. He's really a good guy, and I don't... I just don't think it's fair," she said again.

"He's never pushed or anything like that," Erin told her friend, tossing another pillow at Alex just to see if she could catch it without dropping the handful she was already suspending. "He really takes it slow and easy, you know, lets me make most of the moves when I'm ready. I think it's the only reason things have gone as far as they have. He makes me feel... safe, you know?" Alex, probably more than anyone else except maybe Dr. Marquez, would know how important that feeling was to Erin. "And happy. But I sort of feel like maybe it's not fair to him." She picked up a pillow and toyed with it, mashing it up in her hands and smoothing it out again. "I told him everything," she told Alex, "or close enough, about where I come from and what happened. He was good about it, he didn't freak out or anything like that. I don't want to lie to him, even by omission. But I don't really think he understands how messed up it made me, or what kind of problems I have. I can't help thinking he's getting a really bad deal, getting into any of this."

Erin looked up the instant Edge called out, seeing the fiery death plummeting out of the sky just moments before it impacted. Instinct took hold, and she pushed Trevor to the ground, shielding him with her body while the forcefields covered both of them. The roar of impact all around them was deafening, to the point that she had to open her eyes to realize that the impact was over, but the danger was not yet past. She jumped to her feet and pulled out her bat, as though she intended to fight off the landslide by smashing away every single rock that came near. "Are you okay?" she called to Trevor, then was disturbed anew when she couldn't hear her own voice.

1d20+10=19 Erin would like earmuffs for her birthday, kthx.

Miss Americana's voice came over the microphone again. "Nobody's going to be starting or breaking anything," she told him sternly. "But if you don't stop using your powers, I'm not going to be able to get a clear set of readings from you. You're all over the energy spectrum now, and it's going to ruin all my data in about thirty seconds if you don't knock it off, for real this time. I thought you wanted these tests done."

"I'll make sure to keep the defibrillator handy, in case that quiver gets any worse," Miss A told him, her mechanically-augmented voice dry. "And as charming as it sounds to cuddle up with a septuagenarian who believes compelled groping and tired lines are the best way to win a girl's affections, I'd much prefer to keep things on an entirely professional level. If I want companionship, I can find as much as I want outside of working hours."

Miss A thought for a moment, as though accessing some vast mental database, then grimaced. "Oh, Dead Head. Please don't tell me you pulled your head and upper digestive tract out and threw them. That's really no way to fly. Did you have to regenerate your entire body, or were you able to find yourself again?" The idea was repugnant, but scientifically interesting, and bizarrely humorous, if looked at in the right way. The mental picture, though, was nothing short of horrifying.

The music changed to some kind of chiming and chanting thing that was odd, but not unpleasant, and rather relaxing. The scientist was nowhere to be seen, but her work was obvious as various sensors moved in and out of his line of sight, scanning him with different attendant lights and noises. He never felt anything more than a little hum in his bones and occasional warmth. "Try and relax," Miss A's voice came over one of the speakers, as though she were speaking into a microphone. "Your heartrate and breathing are still elevated. Are you uncomfortable?"

"That wasn't a real human," Stesha told the bees, "it was just a robot. It can be deactivated and disassembled. It won't bother anyone ever again." Though the robot was already secured inside a flower, she disappeared the tangle of vines as well, to remove all confusion. "For now, it's stored in a safe place. If you all have any things to gather, get them now, otherwise, we'll leave right now. The others are already waiting in your new home. And the travel is perfectly safe!" To prove it, she stepped through the portal first herself. To her surprise, Phantom's portal provoked a sudden wave of nausea, but Stesha forced it back, only swaying slightly as she stood on the other side and looked back.

Erin chuckled at that, despite the pinkness of her face. "Well, I don't think you really need to be a psychic to see that part," she told Alex dryly. "And it's kind of fun. The kissing and, you know, cuddling and stuff like that. Okay, really fun." She grinned, then sighed. "I'm just not sure where to go from here, or if there's anywhere to go from here. Dating is one thing, but I don't know how far he wants to go, or how far I can go, you know, on any level. I didn't really expect to be doing any dating at all."

"Your timing is obviously impeccable," Miss A told him with a slight curve to her lips, arching one perfect brow. "And your tongue is certainly facile. Still, I can understand not wanting to sit through classes, when there's far more interesting work to be done." She walked back over to Fearmaster, checked his bonds. "Have the police been contacted yet, or are we responsible for dropping off their lost lamb? Last I heard, he'd escaped from the county jail during a transfer."

Though Fleur de Joie hadn't arrived with them and was nowhere to be seen, her presence manifested itself quite visibly in the form of two large and extremely fast runners extending themselves from the rosebush. In two blinks of an eye, they'd shot across the room and wrapped around the robot, binding its tentacles, arms and legs in one messy and rather thorny package. To add insult to injury, little red flowers began blooming all over the runners, looking quite festive.

Stesha's going to spend another HP to stunt off her big array so she can actually attack from safety. Move Object 14 (Extra: Perception) (PFs: Split Attack 2 (5 targets) She's going to attempt to grapple the robot. Wow, IC, way to suck. DC 30 on the grapple check.

Stesha uses the Affects Others on her teleport to send the group through without her. She will be remaining behind. I'm going to power stunt ESP off her Summon Plants 3, keeping her main array open to fight with. The growth of the bush is just for effect, it has no mechanic at the moment.