Electra
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Up in a tree, there wasn't a lot of company, so it was a little surprising when something leapt down beside him, lightly bumping his thigh. Examination revealed a gangly orange cat that looked about half-grown, in that awkward stage between kittenhood and cathood. He, and it was definitely a he, had a glossy coat that spoke of good care and feeding, and a blue collar with a round copper tag. Perching on the branch next to Corbin, the cat regarded him from calm yellow eyes, then purred and licked one front paw with an excess of nonchalance.
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Erin didn't hug him back this time, keeping her arms folded across her chest as she turned her face to look at the monitors where Mark was picking off zombies as though it were a video game. She felt like she was going to be sick, which was quite a rare sensation for her, but there was work to do now. She could fall apart later, or do whatever it was she needed to do. "Then I need a weapon," she said again, her voice flat and strained. "I know you must have a few laying around here, and I'd rather not go out there barehanded. But you're not going alone."
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Singularity melted back into the shadows when Hex appeared, trying to wish herself invisible. If she hurt him, she would be punished, her well-trained subconscious reminded her again and again. Pain and fear, pain and punishment and the box... but that was what he was promising her anyway, she realized suddenly. She could do whatever she wanted, because every outcome was equally bad. And at least this way maybe she could fight her way out, at least for a little while... Silent as a shadow and fast as a cheetah leaping out of ambush, she launched herself from her hiding place and towards the bad luck man. She would take his head, take his head just like a zombie, because zombies and bad luck men didn't get up again if you did that. Unfortunately, her antagonist was ready for her, if not quite totally prepared. Even as she leapt at him, a surge of inky black dots poured from his hands, covering her the way she'd seen them cover over zombies in other fights. When that happened, the zombies melted away, like they weren't even there. Now, though, they ran like black mercury over her skin and slid away, leaving her untouched. The bad luck man barely had time to look surprised. "No!" Singularity screamed in his face. "I WON'T GO BACK!" She punched him as hard as she could, and even with his bad luck deflecting her fist like a physical force, she still managed to sock him square in the jaw.
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Given Hex's crap notice score, I'm assuming that Singularity's attack and his readied action are going to go off about simultaneously. She's going to do an all-out power attack while still raging (girl's got a lot of rage!) and try to take Hex's head off. First result: A 27. AA informs me that I have to reroll it. :evil: A 23. Spending Singularity's last VP (though I really think she's got some complications active at the moment) for a reroll. It's a 34! She's toast with her defense dropped to 7, but at least she got a hit in. Edit: And versus the DC 33 toughness save from the blast: A nat 20, for 34. She lives to be crazy long enough for the rest of you to pulverize her!
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Erin hesitated, obviously torn as she watched Trevor suiting up for a fight. She looked at the monitor, then back at him, arms still hugged tightly to her chest as though she feared she might fly apart if she didn't keep a physical hold on herself. The zombies were out there, and she could fight them, wanted to fight them very badly. But she'd fought so many zombies, and it hadn't done a damn bit of good. It had never kept the people she loved safe. She couldn't go out there with him and hope to fight effectively. "If I stay here," she asked him softly, "will you stay too?"
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Miss Americana thanked the receptionist graciously and pinned the badge to her lapel as she headed for the elevator. The twelfth floor was the top floor, she'd counted from outside, so she was probably going to meet him in his office, or somewhere nearby. Anyone who would build an entire building to showcase his monogram was going to have a top-floor office. She scanned the badge where the blue light indicated, and rode the fast elevator alone, which was fine with her. She took one more deep breath and smiled in preparation as the doors opened and deposited her at the designated spot.
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Date: October 22nd, 2010 (Friday) On a sunny day in Hanover, Miss A touched down outside the large pyramidal building that housed ArcheTech's Freedom City headquarters. She looked around for a moment, a confident smile on her face, and then seemed to lose focus for a moment. Halfway across the city, in the basement of a normal house in a nice neighborhood, Gina took a deep breath and tried to calm her own jitters. It was a risk going into the job interview this way, but a calculated one. She wanted to know if she could do it, for one thing. Her research told her that the security systems wouldn't block her radio transmissions, and it wouldn't be too hard to fool the X-ray machines and metal detectors at the door. She should at least make it to the interview with no problems. It wasn't as though she thought she could go undetected forever, anyway. She didn't even want to, really. The robot was her finest achievement, and it and her double handful of patents were her only resume. If Doctor Archeville never noticed the robot body, he'd be missing her best work, and she'd be rather disappointed. Maybe that made it an audition for him too, in a way. She would know by the end of the interview whether he was someone she wanted to work for. In any case, it was game time, and she had to get back on the ball. With barely a flicker, Miss A straightened her shoulders and walked into the building, her red, white and blue costume replaced for today with a maroon and navy business suit and skirt, with white pearls at her throat and ears. She gave the guards a dazzling smile as she walked in, then continued on to the reception desk with the air of someone who is sure there's no reason to detain her.
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"I didn't take too close a scan of your head," Miss A told him, looking up from her analysis and taking a moment to refocus. "I was concentrating more on your cybernetic limbs. Does it feel like something's wrong?" With concern on her lovely face, she picked up a handheld scanner and took it over to him, running it lightly along his scalp. "I do have a lot of equipment in here, I hope it's not causing any interference."
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With so many scanners pointed his way, it didn't take Miss A long to notice the ex-drone's climbing stress level. She wheeled over a monitor screen and turned on a relaxation program, random patterns of colors and soothing chimes designed to ease tension and relax the mind. "Try and watch this while I'm working, it will help me get clearer results," she told him, tactfully not mentioning that she knew he was afraid. He was obviously trying not to show it, so she wouldn't give it away. After that, Miss A didn't say anything for long time, caught up in the terrible beauty of the complex fractal build. It was an awful thing that had been done to him, certainly, and it must have been very painful, but the work itself was gorgeous. Her superintelligent mind took in the patterns instantaneously, turning them over and finding new nuances with every angle. Yes he was designed to be a killing machine, yes it had been a terrible invasion of his body, but it made the cyborg implants Lance was wearing look like peg-legs in comparison. For a few minutes, she sort of forgot there were other people in the room.
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Erin swore under her breath as she watched the scene. "She's got my powers, and she's totally crazy," Erin muttered. "If they've been hitting her with the sort of images they tried to get me with, I don't know if she can tell people apart from zombies anymore. That's what they were afraid of with me when I first got to Prime, but she's a million times worse." Wrapping her arms around herself, she struggled for a modicum of objectivity. "She's obviously not on campus anymore. She could be anywhere. Is that machine still going to switch us back if our doubles have spread out or gotten far away?"
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Erin stared at the images, her face set, expression blank. "We have to get out there," she said to the room at large, clenching her hands at her sides. "This is a safe enough place, and people are going to die out there if we don't do something." She turned to Trevor, then Travis. "I don't have my bat, and it's not the tool for this job anyway. I need something long and bladed." She had every confidence that the engineer and the scientist would have something that suit her purposes.
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A Doktor Who Makes House Calls?! [IC] [Closed]
Electra replied to Dr Archeville's topic in North Bay
"Not too bad," Erin told him. "One hit apiece took care of the ones I was fighting, but I hit pretty hard," she acknowledged. "I can get myself out to the asylum, but I'm not going to be much use fighting over water. If you two go out there, I'll take care of the other one. We can regroup after that, or call in if one of them is tougher than we expected. Do you have a radio or a phone on you?" she asked K.C, even as she dug her own beacon out of her pocket and checked the frequency. She wasn't in uniform, but she had the equipment she needed. -
"It's nice to meet you, Mr. Hunter," Erin said, distractedly remembering the barest of manners. "Trevor has told me all good things about you. Do you have a lookout post on your roof anywhere? I'd like to go up and keep an eye on things. There's a lot of activity in the city, but I couldn't get a good look at any of it while I was moving. We'll make sure that nothing gets too close to your house," she promised him. "If you have a safe room, though, it wouldn't hurt to go there."
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"That's good," Miss A said absently, studying her data ferociously. "Well, it'll take some doing, but I think I should be able to get a decent analysis done of your cyborg parts that will at least let me field dress you if you're ever injured in a fight. You're quite an impressive feat of technology, Lance." She tucked away the pad for a moment and smiled at him. "I'm done with you for now, though. You can go ahead and get down. Murdock, you want to get up on the table?"
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Down below, on the fifteenth floor, Singularity had been busy. Crashing through the window had caused a lot of consternation among the office workers there, apparently even in Freedom City they didn't see a lot of teenage girls in pajamas flying into buildings. The office worker people had all run away after what she'd done to the security guards and a couple of guys who had tried to tackle her, so this floor was pretty empty for now. Singularity didn't know what to do now. If she stayed, they might catch her. If she ran, they might catch her. She'd lost her food when the bad luck man built the cage around her, so she didn't have any supplies, either. And she didn't have any place to go. Even though she had been happy for a few minutes, this was still hell, and no place was going to be safe. But she wasn't going back in the box. Using some modicum of tactical thought, she picked up the mess on the floor and propped the bodies up at desks to look like they were working, then hid herself back in a maze of old filing cabinets. It was a big building and a big city, maybe they wouldn't find her and she would be okay.
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"So you do a medical diagnosis, for the most part." Stesha nodded thoughtfully. "That could make it harder to heal things besides people, because you may not recognize the symptoms as well. If you do end up wanting to expand your repertoire, you'll need to do some studying, but for today we can look at proof of concept. Here we go." She touched Jill on the shoulder and after one more transit, they were somewhere new entirely. This was neither the metropolis of Freedom City, nor the green abundance of Stesha's home base. This was a blighted land, a wasteland, with the ruins of collapsed buildings sinking into sandy soil. Once this had been a city, perhaps sometime in the 1950s, from the rusted shells of a few cars laying around, but it was long empty, long gone. "This is a place I haven't worked much on lately," Stesha told Jill. "It's much too depressing to stay here for long. But it's a good place to get some practice." She led the teen over to a stand of terrible-looking trees, leaves wilted and brown-spotted, branches falling off. "These trees have anthracnose, or brown leaf spot disease. It's common to urban areas. You can see the wide brown spots on the leaves. They'll eventually wither up and die, the tree can't fight the disease on its own. See if you can feel it."
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"All right... here." Moving over to a nearby picnic table, the sort with attached benches, Erin upended it and gestured the others to get on. It was a flat surface with places to hold on, a lot easier than trying to carry three people on her back. "Get on here and hang on, we'll do this the fast way." Erin's color still wasn't looking too good, but from the set expression on her face, she was going to ignore whatever turmoil she was feeling until the job was done. As soon as her comrades had seated and secured themselves, she lifted the table over her head with no apparent effort and leapt off campus , landing in three quick bounds on the lawn in front of Mark's house.
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"Whatever you want to be called is fine," Stesha said easily. "And Jill is a lot easier to say than Fleur de Joie, at least. I think if I had it to do over again, I might pick something shorter and easier to spell." She laughed and led her student down the path that led between the buildings. "The first thing, I suppose, is to know when something needs to be healed, even if you can't see it. How do you know when someone or something is injured? Is it from your training, or do you have a sense of how things are supposed to be, and when it's not right?"
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"Absolutely!" Stesha agreed, setting aside her cup and rising to her feet. "We'll start just by going outside and taking a look around, so you can get a feel for the place, then I'll move us about a hundred miles away, to an area I haven't done a lot of work on yet. You'll be able to cut loose with your healing and see how it works on things that aren't human. Oh, and you can call me Stesha while we're working here. Half the time I forget to use my code name anyway," she laughed. Opening the front door, she gestured to Jill to precede her. They stepped out of the house an into a forest that looked a little like it had come from a Disney cartoon. Tall stately trees clustered around them, their autumn foliage providing a roof under the sky, but allowing sunlight to trickle through in golden beams that illuminated carpets of flowers. In front of the house was a path paved with seashells, though it was obviously only half-finished, turning to dirt after about ten feet. Nearby were a few other plant-based buildings made with various degrees of sophistication, a few of which were being allowed to collapse like fairy mounds, others that seemed to be intact. "This is it," Stesha said with a laugh. "Fleur de Joie central. It's where I've been practicing."
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That idea seemed to pull at Erin a lot more than Trevor's suggestion to defend the school. "Well, your grandfather's house has security, doesn't it?" she asked Trevor, sounding more unsure. "We could send Mark's mom over there, and they could lock down. Zombies aren't smart... at least most of them aren't..." She thought of Dead Head and hesitated again. What if there were more like him, only with the hostility and aggressiveness of the zombies she knew? How long had it been since security there had really had a severe test? "We should definitely get your mom somewhere safer," Erin told Mark. "A normal house isn't enough protection." She would decide the rest later.
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"I should be out there," Erin told Trevor, color returning to her face in a near-feverish flush across her cheekbones. "Zombies are zombies, and nobody knows how to fight them like I do. This school is the safest place in the city once it's locked down, and I know you can keep track of every conversation any superteam has on your equipment. This isn't the time to be thinking about school regulations, peoples' lives are at stake." Already she was looking towards the walls as though thinking of leaping out there now, out of uniform and unarmed, just to be doing something.
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For a moment, Erin looked as though she'd been slapped in the face, not even remembering to put Mark down for a few seconds. White-faced, she eventually set him down and looked over at Trevor. "I'm on restriction," she murmured. "I can't go out on missions that involve zombies. But if there are enough that I could smell them in the air this morning..." She swallowed and looked at Mark. "How bad are we talking?" she asked. "What kind of undead, and how many, and what are they doing out there?"
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"It's okay," Erin told Trevor with a little sigh, looking up at the sky, then back at him. "I'm okay for now. But we need to get Mark a parachute for his birthday." With that, she leapt into the air, judging speed and velocity by dead reckoning, and snatched Mark out of the air as neatly as she'd once fielded fly balls from first base, a lifetime ago. "You okay?" she asked the hapless luck controller as they returned to earth in a much more controlled manner.
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"We happened to meet each other during a rescue operation," Miss A said easily, jotting a few more notes. "Harrier would've had the situation quite under control, except that an Omegadrone sighting itself is enough to cause a panic, which exacerbated the situation. Jack of all Blades and his sidekick were in the neighborhood as well, and between all of us, we contained things and got the civilians calmed down. I can understand the reaction, I did shoot him myself when I first made the scene," she admitted with rueful good humor. "Luckily, he's a sturdy guy. Once we get you a public face," she told Murdock, "you'll be an asset to the city." Turning back to Lance, she began running a handheld scanner over his scalp, just above his hair. "Do you have much pain these days?" she asked him. "From the wounds, or from the implants themselves? Headaches, dizziness, muscle soreness? That's a lot of weight for your body to be hauling around."
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"So they cut down till they were able to find healthy tissue and grafted the cyborg parts on from there?" Miss A asked. "Was that immediately after your accident, or did they wait until you'd healed what you were going to on your own? How long did the post-surgical recovery take?" Belatedly it seemed to occur to her that this might be a painful subject for him to remember. "I hope it doesn't bother you to talk about this," she added. "It's just a matter of scientific curiosity, I'm not trying to pry into your history."