Electra

"Oh, it's all right, I have lots," Stesha said, a little vaguely. "Of spoons, that is. I only have one head." She yawned, stretching as she rose with her teacup in hand, carrying it back to the kitchenette. "If you two would like to practice throwing things, I could get some balls or pillows for you and you could practice outside," she suggested, trying not to make the suggestion about not throwing things at each other in her house sound too pointed.

Miss A watched him go for just a moment, her face full of concern, then with a shake of her lovely head, she flew away to take care of her part of the mission. She'd just have to hope that there was no damage she hadn't been able to see, and that he'd be able to overcome whatever trauma or lingering fuzziness remained, with the fate of the city at stake. If nothing else, she admitted to herself, he'd be a convenient target that would keep the mad monkey from using the big device until he was dealt with. Maybe that was only borderline ethical, but she was quite certain that the goggles would protect him from the idiot ray. Any other attacks, well, she was afraid he was on his own for that.

"Not as much rest as I'd like," she admitted ruefully, "there just hasn't been time. I don't typically need much in the way of rest or food, but this past couple days, I've been burning a lot of energy, and looking at some things I'd rather not have seen. I'll be glad when things calm down a little more, and I've already promised myself a whole afternoon laying under a sunlamp. Though now I'm thinking of upgrading it to a day on the beach, somewhere warm and sparsely populated," she added with a grin. "Just the thing to perk up a plant controller. How's the soup?"

"Mr Faretti picked up some of that gel stuff for teething," Erin volunteered, wincing a little as JJ bit his mom. "It seems to help some when he's real fussy. And he likes the frozen teething ring pretty well, but he broke two of them already. There's a whole box of them in the freezer now." She bounced her knees up and down with her hands a few times, thinking. "Um, I was wondering if it might be okay if sometime when I'm babysitting in the evening, I could have my boyfriend come over. We don't get a lot of time to hang out between homework and training and babysitting and all that. He's very responsible," she hastened to add, "he's a legacy hero and everything."

Miss A's interest sharpened as the mood of the room changed, but she remained outwardly casual about it.. Withdrawing a small silver device from her purse and flipped a switch on the handle, then began running it over her hair to take out the static and strengthen the curl she'd put in her platinum locks, all the while keeping an eye on the other two women in the room. It wasn't hard to figure out why there might be tension, after the rather scandalous editorial the reporter had put out. Sure, it had been under the anonymous byline of the editorial staff, but no one else on the paper's staff had quite the same strange brew of moral majority values and feminist stylings. A little peek, just for curiosity's sake, at the paper's computer system had confirmed the hunch. It was a good reminder, Miss A thought, of why it was best to keep Ms. Collier at arm's length.

Miss A swooped around to face him, stopping him in the air by the simple expedient of grabbing his shoulders and giving him a little shake. "Dammit, Quentin! Pull yourself together!" she snapped. "I need you with me on this! If you can't handle it, you get out of the sky right now and find a safe hiding place, because I can't be saving the city and babysitting you at the same time. Yes he shot you, yes it was scary, but it's over now, and he's not going to do it again, because we're going to stop him." She looked him straight in the eyes, her face grim and her voice level. "Because if we don't stop him, he's going to do what he did to you to a lot of other people, and they aren't going to be as lucky as you. Some of them are going to get hurt. Some of them are going to die, unless we stop it. Are you with me on this?"

Erin studied Trevor as he spoke, revealing nothing but intense concentration until he got to the part about the Grue in the Doom Room, when she broke into a goofy smile. "That was it, huh?" she asked softly. "I need to train with you in the simulator more often." She glanced over as Alex spoke, rolled her eyes. "Shut up, Alex, I'mma kiss him anyway." She matched word to deed, for once not giving a damn who might be watching or what they were thinking.

"She's not a people person," Miss A said dryly. "Your best apology would be a note, really, or I'll just pass it along. I'm perfectly sure I'll be safe, don't worry. Just don't unleash that EMP blast again. It's damned inconvenient." She climbed higher as they approached the tallest buildings in Freedom City. "Let's do the same thing we did last time, but better," she suggested. "You come in from the front and distract him. I'll swing in from behind and grab the gun. Once the gun is neutralized, you can take him down and we'll call in the Star Squad to take him back to the zoo. Good?"

"I was fine," she assured him. "You remember the waldo-control gloves I used to defuse that bomb? I needed to use something very like that in order to repair the equipment damaged by your EM pulse. You thought I was sleeping, but I was merely concentrating very hard. My assistant had to corral you with food to get you to leave me alone long enough to finish working. I eventually sent her out to get more food just in case my focused-light beam didn't work. You were very insistent," she added with a half-smile. "Though I wasn't about to give you any alcohol."

Miss A did a wide loop to let Supercape catch up, admitting to herself that she was more distracted than she liked to let on. She wasn't at home, she wasn't safe, how was she supposed to concentrate all her attention at the task at hand? At least now she had a competent body to work with, but that didn't change the fact that her brain was locked into an empty room in an office complex, and who knew what could happen to her? While they flew, she called to Supercape, "Do you remember anything?"

"A lot less stupid than when you came in here, I'll tell you that much," Miss A pointed out with a rueful smile. "If we ever do this again, I'll try to find something more stylish for you, honest. But for now, we've got work to do." She led the way down the hallway to the back door, casting a single look towards a room with an electronic lock on the left side of the corridor. There was a brand new green Chevy Volt outside the door, but Miss A paid no attention to it as she vaulted into the sky, off to save the day again!

"I don't see any lasting damage," Miss A told him, "though you may want to consult a neurologist who has more specific experience with injuries to the brain. For now, though," she told him, "we still have work to do. Dr. Simian is trying to set his ray up on top of Freedom Plaza, and if he sets it off, the whole city could suffer what you did, or even worse. Give me just a second here..." She went to a big cabinet and pulled out a pair of what looked to be high tech safety goggles, and did something to them that involved exposing about half the wires and covering them with electrical tape. The lenses turned dark, like very powerful sunglasses. She handed them over to Supercape. "These should protect you from the frequencies of light he was using in that beam," she told him. "Make sure to keep them on at all times, just in case. I have a natural immunity due to my hypercomplex brainwave functions providing neural path redundancy, so we should be able to take him down. You ready?"

"No!" Miss A said with uncharacteristic sharpness. "You should know better! This is a working laboratory! If you want to experiment with your radio waves, the responsible thing to do is to find a shielded area and work in a controlled environment. Do you know how many delicate experiments you could disrupt with an incautious demonstration of a power like that?" She held up the scanner again and ran it over his head, as though searching for previously undiagnosed damage.

"You were hit with a beam that temporarily disrupted some of your neurocortical pathways, leaving you unable to access most of the higher functions of your brain for a little While," Miss A reported. "I was able to reverse the effects by recalibrating a scanner to basically reboot those sectors of your brain, and it worked quite well. Also, I had no idea you were capable of disrupting radio transmissions. You disrupted my communications quite thoroughly for a little while," she told him with a wry grin. "And probably that of a few hundred thousand Freedom Citizens."

Miss A laughed, extending a hand to help him sit up. "I'm not sure that's a good look on you," she told him good-humoredly. "I much prefer you with your magnificent cape. How are you feeling?" She ran the scanner over him again, but things were looking much closer to normal now, brain function nearing 100%. "All the parts of your brain back into working order again?"

MIss A snickered, for all she was only paying a little attention. Even a little of her attention was a formidable thing. "You're lucky I'm too nice to take a picture," she murmured, finishing her calibrations. "Okay," she told him, holding the scanner in the air above his head. "I want you to look at this very closely. It's going to make a bright flashing light, and then you're going to feel better." Closing her own eyes to protect the sensitive optical sensors, she thumbed on the device and let it shine its focused light patterns right into Supercape's face!

"Yes I can," she promised. "I just need a few minutes of you being very quiet and good. Can you show me how quiet and good you can be?" Miss A asked coaxingly. "If you're so very good, I will give you a piece of candy when I'm done looking at your thinky." Even as she engaged with him verbally on his minimal level, most of her attention was caught up in the results of the MRI scan. It looked as though he'd been hit with some sort of focused light wave that had shorted out portions of his cerebellum related to higher functioning, essentially knocking them offline. It looked to be a temporary problem, one that would fix itself in days or weeks, but she wasn't about to wait that long. What had been done could be undone. She quickly began recalibrating a scanner to emit light waves in a certain frequency pattern, her fingers flying with speed and grace.

"Oh no, please don't," Miss A cautioned him. "You must never do that around me or my equipment, it's very dangerous. It hurts me!" She gave him a frown so full of sorrow and pathos that even a man with a heart of stone couldn't help but be moved. "When we are done looking at your thinky, you can show me how you make the ball again. That's very interesting." She patted his shoulder soothingly and slid the scanner down to position it above his head. "Right now, just relax and think about bunnies hopping in a beautiful green field. Can you do that for me?"

"Stop it!" Gina shrieked, grabbing the spectrotherm from his hands and making it shoot giant sparks at him. "I should never have brought you here! Just sit down and shut up and stop touching my things!" She fended him away from the robot, then turned and ran out of the room entirely, slamming the door behind her. A few moments later, Miss A turned her head and blinked, stretching as though waking from sleep. "Oh, Supercape, there you are," she said, perfectly pleasantly. "We'd better get you fixed up. Why don't you lay on this nice table for just an itsy-bitsy second while I look for your thinky?"

"No!" Gina said firmly, hastily turning to make sure he wasn't going to start using some other power right then and there. "Come on, just give me a break, I'll do a brain scan on you in a minute." Leaving the robot for a moment, she retrieved the less-hot cup of instant noodles, her own stomach reminding her crossly that she hadn't eaten yet either. That would wait. Grabbing a plastic fork and sticking it in the cup, she shoved the whole thing at the addled hero. "Here, eat this and be quiet, okay?" she half-begged, then went back to the robot.

"It's possible," Gina allowed absently, pouring some water into a souped-up hot pot that boiled in the time it took her to unwrap and open a cup of instant noodles. While the noodles soaked, she collected a can of Coke from the fridge and a handful of fun-size Snickers bars from a plastic pumpkin. "Here," she told Supercape, giving him the promised candy and soda. "Eat this, and then I'll give you something else. Just stay where you are and don't go anywhere. With the idiot scientist's attention briefly occupied, she gathered up her tools and set about repairing the mostly cosmetic damage to Miss A and resetting the radio receiver components.

That took Erin aback for a moment, and she nibbled on the end of her thumb as she studied him. She'd expected that Trevor would pick Dare, and she'd had a good one all thought up and everything. This was something of a stumper. She hemmed and hawed for a moment, trying to come up with a good question. A really good question, she decided, was one she wanted to know the answer to, and that she'd never have the guts to ask while she was sober. "Tell me why you like me," she finally asked, watching his face intently.

"Yeah, yeah," Erin said, waving a hand. Her blush hadn't subsided one bit, but she seemed to be taking it in good spirits. Or the good spirits were responsible for her good mood, at least. "Okay, let's see here..." She looked over the entire group calculatingly. "Hmm.... okay, yeah." She turned sideways. "Trevor, truth or dare," she said with a challenging smile.

"That's impossible," Wander said, holding her bat defensively as she watched the hallway behind them for ambushes. "Time travel doesn't work that way. Even if you travel in time and change things, you just create a new alternate reality. The reality as it happens is still there. I asked Psyche about it, and she would understand time travel theory if anybody does. Just changing the past shouldn't have made Baby JJ disappear." She sounded like she wished she could be totally certain of that.

"You have a good eye," Miss A told her, recovering her usual poise with admirable rapidity. She picked up a bottle of perfume and spritzed a little bit on, coloring the air with the scent of flowers and citrus. "It's from the new line, only just became available in the states. And you look very nice," she added in return, "but you're wrong about what styles you could pull off. With your figure, I'm sure you could pull off a pencil skirt with a bias hem. Something in a bold color, and lipstick to match. It would be very striking." The reporter was really hiding her light under a bushel with those frumpy peasant skirts, but some women tried to look professional by dressing like grandmas.