Electra

"There are a lot of superhero comics," Erin agreed, nudging the red onions to the side of her plate and eating around them. "How do you get ideas for the strip? It must be hard to think of a new story every week or every month, especially after you've done it awhile. Do you, like, use real life things that happen, or is it mostly your imagination?" That was a good question, she congratulated herself. She'd made it up to use on Mark's mom at Thanksgiving, but it was still a good one in this situation.

"Thanks, you too." Wander nodded back, then cracked a quick smile before launching into another prodigious leap that carried her back towards the city. Maybe the swordsman wasn't as bad as she thought, she allowed as she headed back towards the school. He was pretty good in a fight, and didn't balk at getting thrown around by a girl the way some guys did. She still didn't think she'd want to hang around with him outside of doing hero stuff, but he was okay. He was also going to have a long walk back, she thought belatedly, but hopefully whoever was coming to deal with the bees would give him a ride.

"That's good," Erin said with a nod. She rolled up her uniform sleeve to look at her watch, the latest five-dollar plastic thing she'd picked up from Walmart. She'd spent more on an unbreakable one initially, but after it had broken almost immediately, she'd decided it was easier to just get the cheap ones and replace them. "Crap, I was supposed to meet up with Psyche half an hour ago for calculus." She looked to the bees, then over to Jack. "Do you mind handling this till someone gets here to move them?"

"I'm fine," Erin told him, crossing her arms over her chest, then uncrossing them when she realized how defensive she looked. "I just feel kind of bad for them. They didn't ask for the situation they're in. I just hope we're not lying about them ending up someplace nice." She suspected the too-witty swordsman would just laugh at her if she admitted she felt empathy for the giant fire-breathing bees, but she knew how it sucked having nowhere to go. "Cleaning up after fights isn't my strong point."

"It's okay," Erin told the giant bee. "You just want someplace that you can live and be safe and have enough to eat. Everybody wants that, you just, you know, went about it the wrong way. But things will be better now, and you won't have to worry about fighting anymore." She tugged on the ends of her own hair, looking around as though expecting the promised backup to suddenly appear. "Anyway, that one, um, Henry-bee, he'll be okay in a few minutes. I just knocked him out, no permanent harm done or anything."

"Listen," Erin told the bees, hopelessly out of her depth. "You're not the only ones, there's a bunch of other giant bees that got gathered up in a fight a couple weeks ago, I guess." She looked to Jack for confirmation. "They found someplace for those bees to go, and I guess you're going to go there too. Maybe it's nice, and you'll like it. Better than trying to beat people up for giant flowers and getting chased out of the city, right?"

"Bees get married?" Erin murmured, raising an eyebrow. "I thought like only one bee in the hive even got to have sex or something like that." Still, she wasn't going to talk to the sixty-foot bee about her sex life, so she let that one go. With the situation apparently well in hand, she collapsed her bat and put it away, then checked over the singe marks on her uniform. Not too bad structurally, but definitely burned black in places. "This was a new uniform, too," she muttered. Belatedly, she thought to look to the swordsman for injuries. "How about you, you okay?"

The names were more or less familiar to Erin, but she didn't know any of them personally, so she just shrugged acquiescence. Now that the fight was over, it was time for talking, and she usually left that to her more gifted teammates. Especially talking to someone like Jack of all Blades, where it sometimes seemed like talking was most of what he did. "You want me to keep an eye on the bees while you get things arranged?" she asked.

"Yeah, that sounds like it would probably work." Erin decided. She could call Hellion and try to get him to find some place for the bees, but she was still trying to decide if things were weird with him, so for now she was perfectly glad to pass the responsibility off to an adult. "But you saw how they were acting," she added. "That one basically said he was going to clobber people till he got a giant flower. That's not exactly a peaceful attitude."

Startled by the sudden motion, Erin nearly hit the last bee reflexively before checking herself. Now that the fighting was over, she was suddenly out of her depth. She looked over at Jack and shrugged. "I don't know," she murmured, sotto voce. "What are we supposed to do with these guys? I don't know any places with giant flowers and no people." For a moment she thought of her own world, which was full of plants and no people whatsoever, but she wouldn't send her worst enemy there, much less some hapless giant bees.

"Here's hoping," she said with a half-smile, cuddling the now-content and perfectly normal-looking cat in her arms. With his ordeal over and the crate not threatening, Oliver seemed happy to close his eyes and purr for his person. "I'll pass your number on to Avenger next time they ask me to babysit," she promised. "Thanks for taking care of Oliver." She nudged open the door with her hip and headed out, back towards the shiny blue truck.

Erin didn't know much more small talk, so she waited until their food arrived and they'd carried it to a secluded table back in the corner. A booth wouldn't have worked at all, given Fulcrum's size. She dug into her salad immediately, both because she was actually kind of hungry and to have something more to talk about. "You're right, it's good," she said, forking up another generous bite. "'S spicy." Burgers were good and all, but there was just something about a lot of really fresh vegetables, probably something that had to do with living out of cans and boxes and mixes for a couple years. Now would be a great time to think of something to get Mona talking for awhile so she could concentrate on her salad, but Erin couldn't really think of anything. "Um, so tell me more about your comic," she finally asked.

Erin regenerates the bruise at the top of her turn, then does a Skill Mastered acrobatic bluff, and follows it up with a power attack. That should drop the bee's Defense to 13, after its all-out attack. She does poorly on the first roll, so I'm going to spend the HP from her complication. The second is a crit. I'll use it for an extra +5 to damage. Add to that +3 autofire, and +5 Power Attack, and it's a toughness DC 42.

Wander dove between Jack and the attacking trio of bees, shoving the swordsman behind her and raising an arm to protect her face from the... whatever it was it was trying to bite her with. "Henr-bee" gave her a solid chomp that engulfed most of her arm, but he wasn't strong enough to actually break the skin. Hurt like hell, though. Pulling her arm away, Erin shook it to bring the feeling back to it. When it felt better, she turned a quick series of flips to confused that giant multifaceted eye, then twirled her stick around several times and smacked the bee right in its massive, fuzzy face.

Erin gets a 25. Bruised, no stun.

"Yeah," Erin said matter of factly. "I'm on Young Freedom, but I usually stand in the back for the pictures. My code name is Wander." Young Freedom had some degree of fame in Freedom City, mostly due to Edge's charismatic way with the media, but Erin never really expected anyone to recognize her. A lot of the biggest stuff they'd done was stuff that no one ever knew about or remembered. That was sort of the way it was, doing hero work, she guessed. "I graduate next year, then I guess I'll try and join the Freedom League."

"Um, I can't really give that out," Erin admitted. "Secret identity and all that. But if you want," she suggested, "you can give me a number to reach you at, and I'll give it to him? Probably easier to do that than to try and find him, he's very sneaky. He has a bad habit of hiding in the corners of rooms and just popping out randomly whenever he feels like saying something. It's kind of annoying, but it's his house, so what are you gonna do, you know?" she shrugged. "Anyway, he'll probably call you back."

"Yeah, I know him," Erin nodded. "I babysit for his kid, that's how I paid for this vet visit," she added with a half smile. "It's sort of a small town as far as heroes go. If you don't know one particular hero, you probably know at least one person who knows them. There are more heroes here than in any other city, but that's still not a very big crowd, you know? We wouldn't even fill a conference room at the Holiday Inn. Are you going to join his team?"

It had been a quiet night around the Faretti residence, and Erin preferred it that way. She and Jack Jr. had needed to work through a few snags in their early relationship, but once he'd found out that his teeny fangs had no hope of breaking her impervious skin, they'd settled down into a good babysitter-baby rapport. He was a good kid, mostly, even if he sometimes had a hard time settling in to sleep at night. She didn't mind carrying him around the house to put him to sleep, he was sort of warm and cozy and cute in her arms, and it wasn't like she got tired. And so far, there hadn't really been anything to defend him against, so the pile of money they were paying her was just a bonus. She was passing through the kitchen, which was always disappointingly free of any snack food, when she heard the voice from the yard. She startled, which roused the baby a little, and patted him on the back while she went to peek out the window. It took her a second to recognize the guy as the crazy doctor from the city fights, Mona's boss. Well, he was a good guy, she knew, so probably he wasn't a major threat. Still, she was cautious and kept her body turned to shield the baby as she opened the door. "They had to go out," she told him. "What are you doing here?"

"I don't know anything about you," Erin said with a shrug. "I just was pretty sure you had to be a superhero somehow, or the headmaster wouldn't have told me to come out here. And you're not a very good liar, um, no offense," she added. "Claremont's the hero school, all of us that go there are training to learn to use our powers. It's a nice place, even if it's hard work. And they allow pets, as long as they're not too disruptive. Oliver likes it there."

"Are you a superhero?" Erin asked again, a little impatiently. "I know you're dancing around something, and if you don't want to tell me, that's okay, but if you want me to spill details about stuff that's normally confidential, it's gotta go both ways, you know? Normal people aren't that interested in what goes on at Claremont." Oliver bobbed his head, and it almost seemed like a nod of agreement.

"Something like that," Erin agreed, tucking her wallet back into the pocket of her shorts. If he was going to be coy for whatever reason, she wasn't totally comfortable sharing much about herself. "I don't have to bring him in for another year unless he gets sick, right? This is just a once a year thing?" She suspected strongly that it would take another year to talk Oliver into another vet visit, so she hoped so.

"Not very many who can handle melting cats," Erin agreed. "I live all the way down in Bayview, at the Claremont Academy, but last time I tried to take Oliver to the vet, we didn't get anywhere. We had to have some very difficult negotiations about neutering." Oliver's tail bristled. "I asked around for where I could take a pet with powers and they said this was the place, so we drove all the way out here."

"Oh. I was told that you were the best person to take a superpowered pet to, from someone who would know." Erin looked a little confused. "I just assumed you had some superpowers. Maybe he meant something else. And Oliver pretty much takes care of his own grooming. His coat's gotten nicer since I started him on Felidae cat food. It's expensive, but it's the only kind he wants to eat." Maybe the guy was really paranoid about his secret identity, Erin figured. Some people were like that.

"Um, dine in," Erin said, looking over at Mona. "I'll have the southwest chicken salad and a Coke," she decided, then stepped aside to let her companion order. Maybe she just needed to get out more, she thought, and then it wouldn't seem so weird to do simple things like going to restaurants and talking to people. "So you live around here?" she asked Mona while they were waiting for their food at the far end of the counter.