Electra

"Just a moment, let me see if I can get a servo operating where you are." A moment later, a servo with a toolkit rolled up to the juncture box, moving much more slowly than the speedy little robots usually managed. It opened its kit and began working. Persephone's voice was even fainter in the headset now, but she sounded pleased. "It'll take another hour or so to get the repair finished and tested, but I'm rerouting power now from all nonessential areas. Things should look normal in just a few more minutes. Erin is still in the menagerie, if you would like to rejoin her, I can take it from here. Thank you so much for all your help!."

"The treetops," Wander said immediately. "They'll be coming from the sky if any get through. Everybody knows that Dark Star's uberpowerful, but something could still get by him. If we get up high enough that we're still screened by the trees but can see up, it's a tactical advantage. And if you've got anything with range, that'll help." She began climbing till she was out of range of the others, then turned and looked back to Trevor. "And hey, your power might be only to make smoke, but you can fight with the best of them. Most of them down there couldn't find their ass with both hands and a map. Power's not really what counts, it's being good at what you do."

"He loves teaching, even though it's just a sideline right now," Stesha told Trevor. "He's told me about the class, and I think it sounds really exciting. Lots of field trips all over the universe, visiting new planets, learning about other cultures. It's hard for me to imagine doing that sort of thing in high school instead of visiting museums and historic sites, but It does seem like a lot more fun. If you get the chance, I think he's teaching a seminar this summer, so that's not as much of a commitment as a regular school-year class."

"I don't know," Erin admitted. "I didn't bring a list of questions. Why do you keep doing things that are so gross, or using that creepy voice? Why don't you get some regular clothes, or a costume or something? You could look a lot more like a regular superhero without having to work very hard at it, so what's the attraction in being... like that?" She waved a hand vaguely in his direction, still not looking exactly at him.

Erin goes on 27

"Not a lot," Erin replied, unfazed by Trevor's sudden inclination to take command. She wasn't much of a leader type herself. "We didn't exactly bring a lot of power on this trip, so everyone's abilities are going to be fairly minor. Let's see, I think we've got a geokinetic, a weather controller, a matter transformer, a size changer and flyer... um, an illusionist, I think, and a catgirl. We may be best off finding someplace to hide them all and facing down anything that comes through the line ourselves."

"No, Dark Star," Stesha told him. "I don't know if you'd have met him, he only teaches part time. Intergalactic Civics, I think the class is called. I keep meaning to visit there myself, but I never seem to get the time. It sounds like a really interesting place to go to school though. Your grandfather must be very proud of you. Do you like it there?" she asked him curiously, then grinned. "If you don't, I promise not to tell on you."

"Hmmm," Persephone murmured in his ear. "Oh, you'll be glad to know Wander just subdued the tigers, no problem. A mild sedative is all it took, and I'll put them in separate enclosures for a little while now. Let me take a look." There was a moment of quiet as the servos clicked and whirred in the background, then she crowed happily. "I found it! Look, right there, oh, well, you can't, but if you could see further along the electromagnetic spectrum you would see! The fourth juncture has become depolarized, and that's what caused the malfunction. If a hyperpolarized iron rich asteroid brushed us, that could easily have caused the disruption. It won't take me very long to fix it, but I'm glad I turned off the engine. If I hadn't, the other junctures could've failed as well, and we might have been looking at a major containment breach! Whew!"

"It would be great if you could, and at least they're out of Doc Otaku's hands, right?" Fleur agreed. "And surely some super-scientists would be willing to help you if you need it. I could give them to you now, but you'd have to haul them home with you. Is there somewhere I could take you that would be better for storing them? I travel through plants," she explained easily, "so there aren't too many places in the city I can't at least get near."

Stesha looked at Trevor with sharper interest. "You go to Claremont?" she asked. He didn't look much like a superhero, but she of all people knew how deceiving that was. And she supposed that there were all sorts of ways a famous chemist's grandson might wind up with some extra powers. "My fiance teaches at Claremont."

"I'm sorry James, " Penelope said contritely. "You look and act so much like the James I remember, I sometimes forget you don't have his intuitive understanding of the ship's functions. When the malfunction light went on, I immediately disabled the engine as a precaution. Continuing to try and tap energy from a malfunctioning engine only makes things worse, and I couldn't take the risk, especially with you and your friend on board! Having only three engines to power the entire ship and complete the orbital readjustment stretched power resources extremely thin! Now that I've finished the orbital burn, I have a little more power to play with." Indeed, the servos around them were coming to life, very slowly, and some of the maintenance screens. "Oh, look over to your left!" Persephone exclaimed. "The malfunction light is around the second altiplanar junction. I've been meaning to overhaul that! Can you take the faceplate off the box so I can get a look at it?"

Erin shuddered at the noise but didn't otherwise move, a fact she considered progress. Everything about the zombie was so wrong and creepy except his voice, which was oddly close to human. If she just didn't look at him, she could almost forget the rest. Except, of course, that he persisted in reminding her. "It's a teen team," she said, talking mostly for a distraction. "There's me and Psyche, a telepath and telekinetic, and there's Phalanx, he's super strong and can fly. Edge is a luck controller, and Hellion has all kinds of fire controlling abilities, and Geckoman has a big green airship. I'm mostly muscle for the team, but we do pretty well for ourselves. Geckoman was at the fight," she added, for all she didn't want to talk much about that night.

"He certainly seems to be doing well," Stesha replied reassuringly. "It's nice that you can still come by and help him out. I'm sure he appreciates it. So are you a student at Freedom City University?" He looked young, but not so young that he couldn't be a freshman or sophomore. She wasn't sure why anyone who lived in Freedom City would go to boarding school there, but she could certainly understand the impulse to get out of the house when you hit college, even if you were going to school locally.

"That's a good way to think about it," she decided with a chuckle. Sitting in a quiet room with a cup of tea for a few minutes was heavenly after the day Stesha'd had. Really, anything that didn't involve being screamed at or picking around giant patches of dead and rotting plants was pretty doggone good. It was a few moments before she roused herself for more polite conversation. "Do you live here with him?" she asked Trevor.

Erin's been around the school long enough that I assume she knows at least a little about most of the students that came with them. What have we got?

"It's Ace!" Stesha told him urgently. "He put together a costume, I have no idea from what, and turned himself into me. He told me to hide, and I think he had a plan, but I don't know if the plan's any good now that he's been taken inside." She raised her hands reflexively, even though Dark Star obviously wouldn't be picking her up with his hands. "We have to go after him and help him, or god knows what the Beekeeper will do when he finds out it's not me."

"Good guess," Stesha replied with a chuckle, settling in and picking up her tea. "Just to be on the safe side, though, I think I'll stay out of your greenhouse till we know more about what that chemical is and does. I don't mind waiting." She pushed back her cowl to sip her tea, revealing a glimpse of very green hair. "Are you studying chemistry like your grandfather?" she asked him.

"No thank you," Stesha told the polite young man. He seemed to have a lot of his grandfather in him, and she wondered if he was going to follow in the old man's footsteps. Those would be awfully big shoes to fill, from what she'd gathered of Travis Hunter's reputation. Taking a seed from her belt, she cupped it in her hand and closed her fist around it. In a moment, a step was growing up from between her fingers, and in just a few more seconds, a pretty yellow tulip had bloomed right there. She reached into the cup of the tulip with one gloved hand and brought out a plastic baggie filled with dead plants. These were not plants that were dead from drought or temperature, they were rotting as though they'd been dipped in something caustic that was eating them away even now. "I don't know if these plants are hazardous," she warned the elder Hunter, "but we've been treating them like they are."

"I'm not allowed to respond to distress calls that might involve the undead," Erin replied, her tone of voice that of a sulky teenager, even if the words were strange. "Not unless I'm already on scene. But if you call Young Freedom, the rest of the team will respond. They're very good, better than Next Gen, maybe better than just about anyone in the city. We've fought plenty of demons before, so an unholy army isn't going to be anything new." She fell silent for a minute, her head turned so she could study the row of graves that stretched into the darkness on either side of them.

"I don't know who that is," Erin admitted. She looked to be simultaneously trying to keep an eye on Dead Head from the corner of her eye and not look at him with most of her eyes. It wasn't an easy posture to maintain. "We've fought all kinds of supervillains and bad guys since I joined Young Freedom, but that doesn't really ring a bell. Is he one of those vampire guys with a cape and hat and stuff who think they're reincarnated royalty?"

"I don't have many," Stesha admitted. "A park ranger out in the state forest noticed it first, three days ago. I went out to look at it, and found circular areas where the plants were entirely dead, withered and already rotting. I can normally bring plants back, even after they're pretty much dead and gone, but they were beyond my ability to recover. It happened again the next night, and again last night. There's about a dozen sites now. Last night I noticed that the newest dead plants looked shiny, almost greasy. I began to wonder if they were coated with some kind of chemical. I have samples," she told him.

"James is fixing things," Persephone said brightly, "everything will be fine in just a few more minutes. I couldn't get by without him, you know. He doesn't remember designing this ship, but he did, and he's very clever with it!" She "sat" on the edge of one of the observation benches and waved towards the servo, which slowly began powering up. "My universe is quite different from yours, I'm sure you already know. The people act in very different ways! For example, in my universe, Hell-Ion was just smitten with the Wander who lived there. Hopelessly devoted, in a very romantic and touching way." Persephone sighed dreamily, then frowned. "But she was no good for him. She only wanted to play with his heart! She would encourage him, then run off to go on dates with Midnight, then come back, and go away again. It was terrible to watch!" Persephone seemed quite worked up, for a computer program, but she quickly calmed again. "I'm sorry, it was just so difficult to watch him be hurt again and again by someone who looked so much like you. I didn't think he'd be able to bear it. But I know you're not like that. When you decide to date someone, you're the faithful sort, I can just tell." She nodded approvingly. "And of course James is different too, in this world. He's not the sort to settle on one girl, is he?" She chuckled indulgently. "Even just since I've been here, I've started to lose track. It's all right though, nobody's feelings are involved, so no one gets hurt. It's all in fun!" _ _ _ Down in the engine room, Persephone's voice, still faint, murmured in James' ear over the headset. "Anything that seems off, any hot spots or broken places, or anything caught in the drive. I hope it was just a minor asteroid impact and no real damage was done, but we just can't take the chance without a careful inspection! I'm so glad you were here, I don't know what I'd do if you were planetside today."

"Oh, um, that's okay," Erin said uncomfortably. "How did you get down from the wall?" she asked, mostly because it was the first thing that popped into her head. "I thought your power was gone." Rather than wait for an answer, she let her curiosity get the better of her. "I never really interacted with my double on your world," she admitted. "How do you mean, she wasn't a nice person?" Erin could certainly believe it, given that it was, after all, herself on some level, but it seemed strange that she would let it show in such a whitewashed world.

As the tigers fell unconscious, Persephone suddenly appeared beside Erin, startling the hell out of her for a moment. She seemed to have stepped down from the wall and into real life, for all Erin could still see through her just a little bit. "That was great work!" she said enthusiastically. "You got them both, and not a scratch on anyone! What a relief! I just didn't know what to do!" Persephone looked at Erin with soulful blue eyes. "I think I was wrong about you, you know," she said, sounding contrite. "You're nothing like the Wander I knew in my world. She was a good hero, but she wasn't a good person, if you understand what I'm saying. I shouldn't have judged you so quickly."

Several decks up, Erin hastily made her way back to the zoo area, guided by the occasional green arrow on a wall panel pointing the way. It wasn't hard to hear where the trouble was, even from a corridor away she could hear the snarling and roaring of angry animals. When she reached the cage, she could see a deactivated servo unit with a pair of syringes it had obviously planned on using before the power had begin to fail. Erin took them both and went into the enclosure. The enclosure irised open as she approached, allowing her inside, then closing behind her. Two extraordinarily bizarre looking creatures were circling each other with loud snarls and growls, hackles raised and teeth showing. Their bottom jaws looked like they were unhinged and about to fall off, but since they both looked the same, she hoped it wasn't an actual injury, just how they looked. As Erin walked in, both the creatures stopped circling and sniffed in her direction. Suddenly, both were ambling in her direction, not with a lot of speed, but with definite purpose! Erin tensed, ready for them to leap, but neither did, merely continuing to hasten towards her! As soon as the first one was in range, she jabbed the syringe into its shoulder, and did the same thing a second later with the second one! Within moments, the tigers had stopped their advance! They staggered around for a few moments, then fell unconscious to the deck.