Electra
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Erin took a couple of steps back towards the door when Mark's grandma woke up, not wanting to intrude, but he was right about the old lady being sharp. "Um, hi Mrs. Lucas," Erin said with an awkward little wave. "It's nice to meet you, I'm glad you're feeling better. Mark has been telling me about all the cool stuff you did with the League back in the fifties and stuff. It's really neat." She wanted to finish backing out of the room and escape, but that would hardly have been heroic, especially with Mark feeling so bad already. Friendship was tough sometimes.
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Erin went over to Mark, standing behind him and putting her hand on his shoulder. She had no words to comfort him the way someone smarter or more socially clever might, but she could be there, even if it was all she could do. Glancing over, she saw that Mark's grandmother was still resting peacefully, having slept through the whole interlude. That was probably for the best, it would just be too painful to have to try and explain.
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That drew a laugh from Erin, the corners of her eyes crinkling up with amusement as she drove. "If you think I'm going to object to you saying things like that, you're really wrong," she told him. "I like it that you just say what you mean and I don't have to guess or wonder or think maybe you mean the opposite. That gets annoying really fast. So where's a good place to get some coffee at this hour?" she asked instead, hitting an off ramp to turn them back in the direction of Freedom City.
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"No, I mean, I like to talk about him," Stesha began, sounding uncertain. "I love him, and I'm proud of the work he does. He's stopping interstellar wars, for God's sake. But I miss him, and sometimes talking about him just makes it worse. He set up this wonderful weekend for us out on this uninhabited paradise world, where there was hardly any salt in the ocean and the biggest creatures were these little bouncing fuzzy balls the size of soccer balls who tried to eat our granola bars. It was amazing." The memory made her smile, and chased off a little of the melancholy. "I guess beaches are a good place to build good memories. Maybe I should lay in some beach towels and sand toys for visitors. Have you ever been off the planet?" she asked Quentin.
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Erin listened to Rick's diatribe in growing disbelief, but checked herself before saying something that might be too inflammatory for the volatile reality warper. She couldn't be silent at the end of it, though. "You won't come back," she asked very carefully, "because you're too embarrassed of what your friends will think about you losing control? Mr. Lucas, if everyone at Claremont felt that way, we wouldn't have any students left." Honestly, she couldn't believe he'd put his ego above his wife and kid. Well, she could believe it, but she really preferred not to. Saying that right out, though, would probably be unwise.
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"Maybe you should explain it to him," Erin suggested. Her heart twisted for Mark, who wore all his emotions so clearly on his face, but she kept her own impassive. "What exactly are the rules for you now? We know you aren't dead, and we know you can bend reality in really weird ways, but not much else. Maybe it would help if you tell him exactly what's going on." She folded her arms and stayed back by the door, watchful.
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Erin followed him, without waiting for an invitation. She could totally understand why Mark wanted the chance to see and speak with his dad again, but she wasn't going to let him do it alone. Mark didn't have any kind of judgement when it came to his dad, and if things started to go south, someone had to be there to intervene long before Mark realized anything was wrong. And she wasn't afraid of Rick Lucas. He'd already proven that he had nothing to give or take away from her.
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Erin put the truck back into gear and pulled back onto the road, glancing at Trevor out of the corner of her eye. "It's great," she told him. "This truck is pretty much the only thing I own that's worth anything, so it's, you know, it's pretty important to me. "I'm really glad you're teaching me to work on it myself, and doing all this cool stuff to it. And it's fun, too." She was quiet for a minute. "So, where do you want to go?"
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Erin stiffened, looking towards the room where Mark's grandma was sleeping. Rick Lucas was a very dangerous man, she knew. but if he was just paying a visit to his sick mother, it might not be wise to antagonize him. Still, it went very much against the grain to let him go unsupervised, when god knew what he might decide to get up to. She wasn't at all sure he was entirely sane anymore, or what his state of mind was. "What do you want to do?" she asked Mark in a murmur.
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"Guess not," Erin agreed, walking around the room to stretch her legs. "But writing, even if it's because she has to, is probably going to be good for her. Doing creative work can really help people recover from bad things that happen. And people really like her work, too. I picked up a couple issues of Andy, they were funny." She wound up back at the coffee carafe. "You want more of this stuff?"
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"Yeah, I guess he will," Erin said thoughtfully. It wasn't something she'd really considered before now, though she probably should have. "He's really smart, and he's got that secret identity to take care of. It would probably look weird if he didn't go to some fancy college in New England." She scratched her head uncomfortably and got up to pour another cup of coffee. Depending on where she managed to find work, that could put quite a bit of distance between them. It wasn't a happy thought. "He's already done some work on my truck," she told Mark, "made it faster and all that. But I don't think I want to make it a panel truck, that would kind of spoil the look. Has your mom gone back to writing again?" she asked, picking the best lever she knew to switch conversational tracks.
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Erin will take Skill Mastery on that for 27.
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Stesha made an exaggerated face at that. "Jellied what?" she asked. "Do people really eat that sort of thing? I mean, I won't even eat eel in sushi, much less in jelly form." She stepped out of her shoes and walked out onto the beach sand, enjoying the warmth of it between her toes. "Swimming doesn't do it for me, especially ocean swimming, but it's nice to come to the beach. I've already started collecting some shells for the walkway in front of my little house in the valley. Derrick and I..." She hesitated, frowned, then continued. "Derrick and I went to a freshwater sea on one of our first dates, somewhere out in the Pleaides, I think. Swimming without salt or chlorine is nice." She gave Quentin a wave, inviting him down onto the beach. "Come on, I promise there's no malfunctioning sub or wayward bathtub around here," she joked.
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"All right, you have a good night, Bee-atrice," Stesha told her. "You know how to get in touch if you need anything." She watched the giant bee fly off into the sunset, then turned to Quentin. "You're right, without a queen, there is no hive, no next generation, no nothing. I need to go talk to the Beekeeper in prison and see what he can tell me, but I've been putting it off." She made a face. "He's such a slimy and unpleasant person, and I'm afraid that if he learns I have his bees, it'll just increase his fixation on me. So it's a hard question." Putting a hand on his shoulder, she moved them again, this time to a seashore on the edge of her valley. It was quite pretty, full of smooth sand-washed seashells and tumbled stones, but again, not particularly lively. "As far as your question about the ocean, I just don't know. I know there are plants down there, but I can't breathe underwater any more than any normal person, and I don't really know how to tell. I do know that a lot of these seashells seem to have been vacant for awhile, but that's about it."
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"No," Erin told Fulcrum, shaking her head, "we haven't got one in our actual base. The school has a really good one and we have access to it whenever we need it, so I guess it just hasn't been necessary. Maybe Alex will put one in once we graduate and aren't training all the time for school, anyway. Right now it's the teleporter we use more than any other part of the base," she admitted. "It's really handy to be able to get to a crisis without having to walk to fly or jump there."
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"Yes, apparently it was a genetic variation that popped up in the mix somehow. It's very impressive to watch," Stesha told him enthusiastically. "When I get some prairie areas up and running, I might ask them to help me with the yearly burns, just to keep things growing. The problem for them is that they don't have a queen," she explained. "Or at least not one that's here. I think there is one, but unless I can find her and bring her here, they don't have a sustainable hive. But at least the flowers are nice." It was a conundrum that worried her, but one more thing she hadn't been able to think up a solution for.
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Wander watched the two adults as they spoke, cocking her head and taking it in. "Yeah, but you let that robber get arrested," she pointed out. "Because he was breaking the law, not because you found out that he was doing it to support his drug habit and not to feed his family, right?" She shrugged. "As long as we put the bad guys where they can't hurt anyone and then let the courts sort out who they feel sorry for, I think we're all on the same page anyway. All I'm saying is that people use their bad hand to explain their bad choices, and don't take into account how lucky they actually are, most of the time. Now why is this place we're going to the biggest hotspot around here?" she asked Gabriel.
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Erin followed along willingly enough, taking in the sights of the Interceptors' headquarters. It really did seem a lot like a group home or something, aside from the high-tech headquarters in the basement. "Whatever you want to show me is cool," she told Eli. "Did you ever get a cannon-ball setup going here, like you were thinking about?" The equipment here was a lot newer than the stuff in Young Freedom's headquarters, but tucked into a smaller space, for a very different vibe. Still, she imagined, they served a lot of the same purposes.
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"They can, but they won't. They're bee-, um, benign here, like most bees who aren't threatened," Stesha murmured back reassuringly. More loudly, she said, "Quentin, I'd like you to meet Bee-atrice, one of the fire-breathing bees here in Beedom Valley. Bee-atrice, this is Quentin, a good friend of mine. How have you all been getting along lately?" she asked the giant bee. "The new flowers working out like we'd hoped they would?"
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"Oh, I'm pretty sure I could do it, if I decided to steal animals out of zoos, I just think it would be wrong," Stesha told him with a laugh. "Maybe if it was a really bad zoo, or a circus, but I don't want to get too close to the line of being the personal decider of right and wrong. It's that healthy doubt thing we were talking about earlier." She took his hand again, and suddenly they were back where they'd teleported from, in the valley of the giant bees. "These guys are actually sentient," she told Quentin, "they're about as intelligent as ten year old children, from what I've been able to figure out. They were part of the Beekeeper's apiary, and when he went to jail, they had nowhere to go. They really shouldn't be this big, of course, what are they supposed to eat, where can they live? They were causing a lot of trouble in Freedom City before we rounded them up and I brought them here. I can at least give them a nice place to live, flowers that are sized for them, and somewhere they're not going to bother anyone or be bothered. Sometimes I come and talk to them. Let me see if any of them are in the mood. Stepping forward, Stesha raised one arm and waved wildly. "Hello, bees!" she called to the massive insects droning lazily in the field. "How's it going?"
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It's 28. Gina's charisma is at the core of it, after all it's her mind in there, choosing her words and actions. But this beautiful robot makes her look amazing, which also gives her an intense burst of confidence that overcomes a lot of her social tics and phobias. But none of that extra is really her, as soon as the robot goes, she's back to 8.
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"My powers are useful, but my backgrounds' kind of a problem," Erin told him, treating that like the monumental understatement it was. "Any group that went to hire me on would get to see my sealed records, and I doubt they'd want to take that on when they could easily get someone else to fetch and carry or hit things really hard." She crumpled her empty coffee cup and tossed it into the trash can. "I'm hoping I can really manage to impress the League this year, so maybe they'll take me on anyway. Otherwise, I dunno. Maybe I'll start my own moving company out of my truck. Wouldn't need a partner to carry stuff or anything, y'know?"
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"I drove for almost a year before I was willing to go above forty-five on the freeway," Erin admitted, leaning back in the seat with a grin. "I could run faster than I would drive. There's just something about the huge chunk of gas-powered metal that makes it all seem a lot more out of control. "Maybe we could rig up a driving simulator in the Doom Room and practice in there. But even if I couldn't hack it, the truck worked great. Nice job," she told him.
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"I'm sure she'll be happy for you," Erin encouraged. "Even if you're far away working, it's not like you can't pop home once a week, or if there's an emergency. It's sort of the best of both worlds. I know she'll be proud of you for wanting to help people. Anyway, you've got some time still, senior year is just starting. Maybe you can drop hints or something." She wasn't at all confident of Mark's ability to be subtle, but it was maybe worth a shot.
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Erin nodded. "I think you'd do really well there," she told him sincerely. "You have a good heart, and you want to help people. Those people really need help badly." She grinned a little. "They could use a little luck, I imagine. And I know what you mean, if Claremont is preparing us and teaching us everything we need to know to be heroes, why do we need college if heroes is what we're going to be? It just seems like wasting time and effort. Have you applied yet?"