Electra

If there was one thing the past year had done for Stesha, it had quickened her reflexes. "Hey!" In an instant, she was down next to Liebinz. She gave him a sharp, attention-grabbing slap across the face. "Pull it together!" she ordered. "You're a man of science, not some kind of dimwitted fool who is nothing but a liability to himself and everyone around him, right? So start acting like it! All of you!" She looked to Green. "If the ballast tanks aren't working, then we need to get the power turned back on, right? How do we do that? And you," she said to Quentin, "can you feel how it's already starting to get warm in here? We need the heat under control so we don't freeze or bake. "And you," she said to Liebinz once again, taking his face between her hands so he had to concentrate on her, "what can you tell me about the plants out there?"

"So how do we get back to the surface?" Stesha asked, looking over at the eerie orange and brown light of the vent, like an undersea campfire. "There's got to be a system in place for emergencies, right?" "Sure, right, right..." Green said distractedly, going over to a set of panels. "I'll just blow the ballast tanks one at a time, we'll gradually rise up to the surface, hopefully we won't have any decompression problems..." "Of course there will be problems, you fool!" Liebinz burst out, his brownnosing forgotten in the face of possible death. "We're three thousand meters down and have no circulating air! We are at risk of being squashed like a soap bubble at any moment! If we start to gain any pressure, the bends are going to be the least of our problems because we'll have been squashed like grapes!" "Easy, easy!" Stesha said, focusing on one thing she could do in the cramped confines of the ship. She put a reassuring hand on Liebinz's shoulder. "It's going to be okay, just try to be calm. We've got three amazing scientific minds here, I'm sure that together you'll all think of something to get us out of here. Take slow breaths, and think calm thoughts," she encouraged.

The lights suddenly went, plunging the sub into an eerie red-tinged dimness, surrounded by an ink-black sea. It suddenly became very, very easy to remember that they were in a tiny, fragile metal capsule surrounded by thousands of tons of water. Even the hiss of air from the ventilators was silent, which was surely a bad sign. She reached for Quentin's arm in the darkness, just to reassure herself that the others were still there. "Is there any way to tell what's wrong?" she asked, not liking the high sharp edge to her own voice. Stesha took a couple of deep breaths and tried to calm down. "I mean, you built the ship, right, Mr. Green? You can tell what's the matter with it and how to fix it?"

Stesha eventually felt better enough to eat the soup, then as the journey continued, to move forward to the reinforced glass windows at the front of the sub. "Oh, it's beautiful!" she said, gasping a little at the unexpected world of color and life captured in the running lights. Brightly colored and strangely shaped fish were everywhere, rocky coral covered the sea floor, and strange species of algae waved in the breeze. "We're gettng close to the plume now," Green told her. "All this life is here because of that warm water flow. It's twenty or thirty degrees warmer down here than anywhere else at this depth. There's nothing like it, really." Stesha readily agreed, pressing her fingers to the glass and watching in fascination as the sub traveled silently through the ocean. Even the unpleasant Liebinz's chatter faded to unimportance, even as he started asking Green about why the air seemed to smell a bit like ozone all of a sudden.

Erin shrugged. "Dunno, guess it doesn't matter." She left the clothes in her bag and hopped off the fire escape, figuring that if they were in costume they didn't need to be quite as subtle. "I never really thought about people doing normal stuff in costume, going shopping and eating and stuff, but I guess it's not illegal or anything." She wondered if maybe it was more comfortable for someone as huge as Fulcrum to go out in costume instead of just being a really huge random woman, but decided it might be rude to say anything about that. "How often do the Interceptors go on missions?" she asked instead.

"Wander," Erin corrected absently, her attention centered on their massive foes. "Yeah, looks that way. Maybe the Beekeeper, but you'd think he'd have made some pronouncement by now. Maybe these got away or something? We need a better way to deal with them." She thought for a moment. "You seem to have a talent for, hmm, getting a rise out of people. Think you could get them to focus on you? If they're concentrating on you, I can pick you up and run with you, and we can lead them out of downtown."

Erin watched with satisfaction as the monster she'd been fighting went down for the count, and the other nearby collapsed as well. There was another, she knew, but it was further away, surely more than a jump... but she was going to try it anyway. "Come on," she told James, grabbing him snugly around the waist. "We've got more to do." She leapt into the air... and was quite startled when she leapt higher and further than she ever had before! Desperate times, desperate measures, she thought to herself, landing in front of the final monster and putting James behind her. With her bat fully extended, she plowed into the monster, smashing it hard and fast with both ends.

Wander will use her move action to grab Hellion and move to Behemoth 3. Once there, she will make a full power attack against the thing. She gets a 24. DC is 34 plus any Autofire damage to a max of +5.

Okay, here's the preliminary rough-sketch build for my Diamond character. The idea is that the Sidekick here is really the PC character. She's a clumsy, out-of-shape, antisocial basement dweller type who is also a cyberkinetic and genius inventor. She still sort-of lives in the basement, but it's of her own nice house. Tired of the anonymity and boredom of white-hat hacking as heroism, she decides to build herself a robot to go out heroing in. The main build here is the robot she built to inhabit for heroism purposes. It has its own physical stats and saves, but uses her mind to operate. I'm thinking about trying to put an int penalty on it to represent the distraction operating the robot creates, but I'm not sure how it would work. In the robot, she is beautiful and strong, and thus far more confident, hence the enhanced charisma. Basically what I'm looking for as an end product is a very intelligent brain with a body that is pretty much a total liability except that it is not actually physically handicapped. I want her to be able to hack into just about anything and have the knowledge skills and feats to back that up. She should be able to take maybe one hit at her PL on a good day in her own body, but also be able to handle the fact that damage done to the robot can reflect back and hurt her (to avoid the Bathroom Mentalist problem.) She doesn't have a good formal education, so while she is very clever, she is not well-rounded and will not get a lot of references. For the robot, I'm looking for a basic paragon build, though I'm thinking about adding a weapon or some kind of special attack, mostly to avoid another character whose only attack is "hit it!" Basically the robot is a large piece of machinery operated by mental remote control, that the sidekick can pretty much inhabit to the point where she can ignore the input from her own body in favor of the sensory input from the robot. I would like for the robot to be able to fool most people into thinking that it is both human and self-motivating, though I'm not totally sure how to do that. Not all of the stuff I want is currently reflected in the build. I need to find a way to move some points around to get the things I want and lose some things I don't need. The Robot: The Sidekick

Erin was still recovering her footing after her own attack, and didn't dodge quite quickly enough to avoid the massive bee slamming into it with a force far greater than any semi-truck. She tumbled across the roof, catching her arm against an old, rusty bit of metal sheeting as she went. It tore her sleeve and her skin, but by the time she picked herself up and shook herself off, the skin, at least, was already mending. She was about to face off with the bee again when she saw her erstwhile partner tumbling through the air. Maybe he would catch himself with his grapple gun and maybe he wouldn't, but she hadn't been trained to take chances with peoples' lives. Running across the roof, she launched herself into the air once more, bulleting across the open space to wrap her arms around Jack of all Blades' waist as he fell. Her momentum carried them both across the street to yet another rooftop, Erin reflexively absorbing the landing with her legs and knees as they hit. "You okay?" she asked him.

Erin is bruised and stunned by the attack. Spend an HP to clear the stun (the one she got from the grappling stuff), and let Regeneration clear the bruise. She's going to use her action to go and save JoaB from the cruel grip of gravity.

Stesha didn't pay much attention to the presentation, instead tucking herself up into her seat and closing her eyes as the sub began to descend, trying to regain her equilibrium. Leaving the plants was bad enough, she'd sort of forgotten she'd be leaving the sun behind as well. At least the air was all right, she'd been a little worried that there'd be more oxygen than she was used to, but it was quite easy to breathe. But the stress of decontamination and the descent into the plantless dark had her less enthusiastic about this trip than she had been when she was on land. To distract herself, she looked over to Professor Quill. "What sorts of experiments will we be running?" she asked him.

"That sounds good. I'll probably stick with Coke, though." Erin looked down at her costume, then hefted her knapsack. "Should I um, put on my civvies before we go down? I don't get recognized much, but I think in costume people might notice something weird. I have my school clothes in my bag though, I could just toss them on."

Warily, Stesha stepped into the chamber and let the laser beams play over her. It didn't feel very good, an unpleasant tickle inside her skin, and it seemed to take a lot longer than for the others, but she stood still and endured it with nothing more than a few shudders. Finally, the laser switched off. "Decontaminationcomple-plantlifedetected!" the computer said, the two phrases running over each other. Green frowned at the odd bobble. "There must be a malfunction there, I'll have a look at it later. But you were certainly in there long enough," he said with a smile for Stesha. "If any plant life was in there, it would have been eradicated by now! Let's get a move on!" Stesha could certainly believe that, she herself felt a bit nauseous and woozy as they headed into the submarine, now totally plant-free.

"I don't know exactly how smart he is," Erin admitted as they landed on a roof with a convenient fire escape, "but sometimes I'm pretty sure he's been using Alex's computer when I'm not around. He's got some kind of weird power, he can get through closed doors, even locked ones. But he's mostly just a cat." She climbed down to stand on her own feet and looked around. "I don't come out here very much, I don't know where a good place to eat is," she told Fulcrum. "Bet that art school feels dumb now, anyway."

Stesha blinked dumbly at Green for a moment, then over to the Professor. "Well, I'm a botanist by trade," she ad-libbed smoothly, "and I have a few samples in my pack, an apple for my lunch..." "No, no, entirely unfeasable!" Green exclaimed, flapping his hands a bit. "We need a sterile environment down there to make sure the readings are entirely, one hundred percent accurate! No lunches, and definitely no samples!" He seemed a bit apologetic about it, but entirely firm. "We'll all be going through the decontamination chamber before we enter the submersible, for the same reason. If you'll just leave your pack up here and fix your hair, we'll be all ready to go." The unexpected prohibition made Stesha hesitate, suddenly nervous. Without any plants on the sub, she'd be totally powerless, and if something were to go wrong... That was a silly way to think, she reminded herself. People with no superpowers worked on submarines every day, doing far more dangerous things than exploring ocean vents! It would be just fine. "All right," she said, "just give me a moment..." Stepping aside, she shucked off her knapsack, then began unbraiding the little yellow roses from her green hair.

It took Stesha nearly every moment of her appointed twenty minutes to gather her things, after she finished watering all the plants, of course. She packed a sack lunch of turkey sandwich, hard boiled egg, apple, and bottle of water and stuck it into her knapsack along with her swimsuit and her usual collection of seeds. She didn't need to eat, of course, but it would look odd if everyone else had a lunch and she didn't. Besides, someone might be hungry! She wasn't sure what tools she might need for analysis, so she didn't take much of anything, hoping natural talent and whatever tools were available would be enough. She walked up to the docks exactly at the appointed hour, looking a bit winded as though she'd been walking briskly on the way. "It's a gorgeous day, isn't it?" she asked Professor Quill affably. "I can't wait to get started!"

"Just let me know where to be," Stesha assured him, even as she started gathering her things, "and I can make sure I arrive there without raising any questions. I'm not the best in town at the secret identity thing, but I do all right. It'll probably take me about twenty minutes to get everything together that I need, will it be all right if I meet you there?"

"It sounds fascinating, I'd love to come!" Stesha bit her lip in amusement at the thought of wearing the rather scanty bathing suit she'd bought for extraplanetary use on a scholarly research trip. Hopefully she still had a one-piece around somewhere. "Ah, who's Liebniz?" she asked curiously.

Stesha was having a quiet day gardening at home, so she didn't hesitate to pick up the phone as soon as it rang. She smiled as she saw Professor Quill's name come up on the caller ID. Dark Star had been on call with a civil war halfway across the galaxy, which had impeded her plans to have the professor over, but it was nice to see him calling. "It's me," she confirmed cheerfully, "and I'm always up for exciting excursions!" Living with Derrick had vastly changed her perspective on excursioning, but it was always fun to to go new places and see new things. "Where are we going, and what should I bring? Oh, and when do we leave?"

Well, so much for that idea, Erin thought ruefully as she tumbled through the air. She needed to stop trying to get creative and leave the fancy stuff to her teammates. All it got her was embarrassed. Straightening out her body, she landed on the railing of a fire escape and perched just long enough to eyeball a trajectory. The bee was a fast flier, but it was still well within range for now. Bending her legs and lifting her arms like a high-diver, Erin instead rocketed into the sky, bat held at the ready. As soon as she was close enough to the bee, she smacked it once-twice across the fuzzy head, then dropped neatly back down to the nearest rooftop to reassess the fight.

Okay, for her move action, Erin is going to Slow Fall her way over to something she can land on. She has a free action available, so she is unharmed by the fall. Standard action, she will initiate a charge attack on Bee 1, using her flying leap supermovement to allow her to reach it and attack it. This will be a full power attack and all-out for 3, which leaves her attack roll and defense DC unchanged. The roll absolutely blew chunks. Spending an HP to reroll. Also crap, but at least it's a 25. That hits, and with 1 Autofire to spare. DC 35 toughness save for the bee. Erin will use move-by attack to land on a rooftop after hitting the bee.

Wander We Can Be Like They Are (10) Giant Dragon Bees (24) At the Mountains (13) Lights at His Back, Stars in His Eyes (3) Midnight Oil (10) Rose-Tinted Glasses (8) Calamari on the Menu (20) Strength to Strength (11) Case of the Mondays (16) A Doctor Who Makes House Calls? (1) Just Another Class Trip (5) The Other Guys (8) Crypt Tonight (3) A Better World (8) Fleur de Joie Rooftop Meeting (7) The Big Bathtub (22) Sea of Green (21) Plastic Flowers (1) Training Wheels (1)

Erin didn’t spring awake like she often did from her nightmares, ready to fight whatever menaced her. Instead she woke slowly, the darkness of the dead city melting into the dimness of her dorm room in the gray pall of predawn. She was curled up like a dead pillbug in the back corner of her bunk, with her back pressed painfully against the beam that supported Alex’s mattress. Alex was stirring restlessly above, and Erin knew that was her fault. She sat up and raked her hands through her hair, dislodging dried mud, and looked at the clock. Two hours of sleep would do for another couple of days, surely. Grabbing a change of clothes and her shower kit, she slipped out of the room before anyone else’s sleep was ruined.

The voices picked up the chorus as the zombies began to reassemble themselves. “Try, try, try, try,†they murmured, watching her with reproachful eyes, those who still had them. Zombie Trevor rose and shambled through the group as they fell back, making his way to Zombie Megan, whose legs didn’t seem to be mending. He reached down and scooped her up; she put her arms around his bloody neck and laid her broken skull trustingly against his chest. They both looked at Erin. “Every zombie, corpse,†he reminded her gruffly. “Each of them a person. Forgetting made it easier for you. Heroes don’t do easy. Heroes save the day.†He turned and walked away with Megan in his arms, fading back into the shadows. The rest of Young Freedom fell in behind him, barely sparing her scornful glances as they passed. When they were gone, she was truly alone, except for the city, for the world, in which every corpse had been a person, someone’s everything. And she couldn’t forget.