Electra
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Freedom City Guidebook
Freedom City PBP: A How-To Guide
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Erin tensed visibly all over when Dead Head detached his hand and let it scamper around like some horrible headless rodent. Every instinct screamed at her to kill it, till she had to clench her hands around the edge of the bench and squeeze till the metal threatened to give way. It wasn't until the zombie was back together and in one nonmoving place that she could relax at all and listen to what it- he was saying. "That's about it," she told him, her voice sounding tight in her throat. "I beat things up really well. Not much to talk about, but everybody's got to have a niche." She glanced up once at Dead Head's face, then looked away again. "Why do you stay in Freedom City? There's gotta be a lot of dead people around looking for resolution."
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Stesha both men a smile as she took a seat, her face only a little shadowed by the brown cowl she wore. For this visit, she hadn't bothered with the domino mask. She simply wasn't that worried about her secret identity at this point. The uniform itself was, well, a uniform, she wore it because she was working. "I very much appreciate you agreeing to meet with me on such short notice," she told Travis. "I have a puzzle to solve, that needs to be dealt with quickly. Someone has been killing plants out in the state forest. I think they're using a chemical agent, but it's nothing I've seen before or can analyze myself. I was told you're the best in the city at this sort of thing."
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The plants seemed to move aside for Stesha before she even touched them, letting her duck easily into the overgrown dugout. For good measure, a few more sprouted up after they were inside. "Maybe this is a universe where everyone just got bored of baseball," she suggested, peering into the doorway that led to the locker rooms. It was closed and locked securely. "It is kind of boring, I have to say. Do you think we should just try and go back to Prime?"
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On the ground, Stesha watched Ace and the Beekeeper disappear into the building with mingled frustration and fear. What were they going to do in there? Ace should know better than to go into the enemy's lair! She activated her communicator again, even though it hadn't gotten a response last time. "Dark Star! Down on the ground, in the trees! I could use a lift!" Even as she spoke, she was concentrating on the flowers, trying to lure all the captivated bees towards the biggest, sweetest-smelling, most colorful blossom of all, a massive tree-blooming flower nearly the size of a basketball court.
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It was just after dusk when Stesha popped out of a stately elm tree on the grounds of the Hunter Estate. She'd hoped to arrive earlier, knowing that her host was of advanced years, but a nasty Bridezilla had complicated her afternoon on a day when it had been hard to concentrate on work in the first place. Someone was killing plants out in Wharton Forest, killing them so dead that she couldn't bring them back, and she had no idea who or how or why. Her botany degree only took her so far; for this, she needed a chemist. Adjusting her cowl, she walked up to the front door of the large home. This place wasn't too far away from Ace's house, she realized, though the security was of course far less elaborate. Even a chemist who assisted superheroes was less likely to attract mayhem than anyplace Ace Danger stayed for any length of time. Glancing around the front stoop as she walked up, Stesha rang the bell and waited.
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Wander Coincidences (8) Just Another Class Trip (12) Strength to Strength (5) Crypt Tonight (18) A Clearer View (25 for Erin) Walk Softly and Carry a Collapsible Stick (17) At the Mountains (11) MAWS (8) Save Tonight (25) No Mercy (1) High Noon (2) Now What Did You Learn (12) I See What You Did There (3) Cold Case (1) Nockin on Iron (1) Could've Danced All Night (24) Fleur de Joie Fresh Plots 13 Midnight Bloom (15) Worldbuilding (10) The Legacy of Al-Kazar: Happy Grimday! (7) Imma Bee (7) Plastic Flowers (5) Chaos in the Streets (1) 1.21 Gigawatts (18) A Case of Mistaken Identity (2) So We Meet Again (4) Sunflowers (11) Training Wheels (7) Pater Noster (5) Anklebiters (1) Groundskeeping (6) Non Canon (Wander) With You Always (4.5 worth) NPC Posts A Clearer View (8 worth as Persephone, in blue text)
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As Dead Head spoke, Wander studied the filigree in the arm of the bench, the nearby gravestones, her own worn tennis shoes, anything besides looking at the zombie. She seemed to be listening though, if the visible wince when he mentioned dying was any indication. "What can you do?" she asked him, leaning down to retie her already tied shoe. "What kinds of powers do you have, I mean? If you bite someone, do they become a zombie?"
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"It's an assignment," Erin admitted, sitting on the edge of a wrought iron bench about fifteen feet from the zombie. Close enough that she didn't have to raise her voice to talk, but far enough to give her a split second in an emergency. "My shrink is trying to condition me back to normal. I've watched every damn zombie movie ever made, most of them a couple times. He says the next step is you. I need to be able to talk with you and learn about you without freaking out." She spread her hands, showing herself to be unarmed, though Dead Head knew as well as anyone how deceptive that was. "So, tell me about yourself."
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Erin looked up as well, trying to get a bead on what was causing the thrumming. "I don't know that we're going to have much luck communicating with them unless you've got a perfume sampler in your belt somewhere," she murmured to Trevor. "I think they've got some sort of combined language going. No idea how to replicate it, though." She shaded her eyes against the sun and leapt up one level of branches to get a better look at the sky.
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"If you mean that, you'll do just fine around here," Erin told her. She drained her water, then started packing up her duffel bag. "I've got to get going, or I'm going to be late. Maybe some other time you can teach me how you did that double sideways flip on the bar. I couldn't quite see how you did that. See you around, then?" She tossed her bag over her shoulder, ready to go.
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Erin walked into the cemetery, staying a good ten yards away from the zombie and standing with her hands clasped behind her back. She wasn't wearing her typical blue and gold uniform tonight, instead wearing a pair of patched jeans and a faded band t-shirt for Madman Finale. In that outfit, she looked like a million other teenage girls, with nothing to mark her as particularly special or psychotic. She shifted from foot to foot and watched the zombie, sorely missing the weight of her bat on her belt. "I didn't come to fight," she called to the zombie, and probably to remind herself as well. "I just want to talk to you."
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Dead Head helps Wander with her ongoing zombie-acceptance therapy.
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With a little help from Alex, Erin was quickly on her way through the nighttime shadows of Freedom City, leaping from rooftop to rooftop across the downtown, then speeding along surface streets when the neighborhoods got residential. Alex had said he was around here, and there were only so many cemeteries in the neighborhood. It felt so strange to be out here at night in her street clothes, almost as though she were underdressed. She definitely missed the weight of her bat at her side. But there would be no fighting tonight. She'd promised Dr. Marquez and Alex both that she would be able to restrain herself. As soon as she found the zombie, she would talk to it. Him, whatever. Just talk, and then she could go home and be done with this especially obnoxious part of therapy. As she neared the closest cemetery, she slowed, looking around for signs of motion. It would be really bad, after all this, if the zombie took her by surprise and she did something unfortunate.
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"I know I can always count on you," Persephone told him. He had to open the door manually with the emergency latch on wall before he could get in, but eventually he made it into the aft engine room. The room was dim and smelled faintly of ozone, but nothing was actually on fire. "There's a handlight on the wall," Persephone told him, "and a headset mounted camera in the locker by the door. If you put it on while you do your observations, I can look with you. If we work together, we can surely find any problems."
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Skill Mastery 27 on notice
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"I'm operating on emergency power in your sector right now, James," Persephone said, her voice sounding faint, almost breathy through the wall panel. The main corridor lights were turned off, punctuated here and there by harsh emergency lights. Two servos at the end of the corridor were inactive, crumpled in place like odd, sad little sculptures. "I can reroute power, but only after someone does a visual inspection of the engine for damage. I need your help, or we could be looking at a catastrophic failure of the power relay system!"
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Erin took her bat from her belt and held it palmed, looking around for cameras or more robots. "We might need to beat a quick retreat," she murmured to James, "depending on how powerful these robots turn out to be. I'd say we should go now, except that if Rift is right, having someone taking over the Sanctum would be seriously bad news. Just be ready in case we have to bail." Moving casually, she worked her way to the front of the group, putting herself between them and the door the robot had come from.
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Erin listened to the recitation, a little flabbergasted. Losing an engine seemed like really bad news, especially if it was disrupting the power to the ship. "You should probably go take a look at the engine," she told James. "If an alternate you built this ship, maybe you'll remember something about how to repair it. I have no clue, but I can at least break up a fight. Tasmanian Tigers are extinct, aren't they? I mean, besides what you've got here? We better be careful with them."
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"I'm not sure," Persephone told him, apparently distracted enough that she didn't even put her image on the screen. "I was performing the orbit burn when a malfunction light on the aft portside engine came on. The engine shut down automatically, and it disrupted the burn, and our orbit! I need to recalculate our trajectory, but I have no idea what's going on with the engine. It needs to be looked at physically from the aft engine room, but I need to conserve power that I'd ordinarily use to run the servos! To make things worse, the lurch caused a fight in the Tasmanian Tiger enclosure, and they're really going at it! Someone needs to break them up, or we could lose one of our only breeding pairs!"
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"You can try," Erin replied, swinging up into a higher branch and watching the family as they continued on to one of the nearby houses. "I don't know if they have mouths like ours, or if they can talk, though. I suspect Dark Star wouldn't have brought us here to teach us a lesson if there wasn't some kind of trick to communicating with them besides just talking at them. But we need to start somewhere, I guess. I don't think it could hurt anything, it's not like they seem hostile."
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While Fusion was busy talking her her husband, Erin headed down the hall again, this time to the locker room for a few towels. A shower would've been nice, as she was pretty sure she had some sand in her uniform, but it would have to wait. She was willing to bet that the octopus lady was going to want to head out soon anyway, so there'd be time after that. Briskly toweling her hair, she carried another couple of clean towels back to the teleporter room, to give to the rescuee and dry up the puddles of water on the floor.
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Erin shrugged. She was having a pretty good time just climbing around the natives' arboreal habitat. It was like a giant collection of tree-houses, a tree-town, and she was hardly worried about the idea of falling. "I have no idea." she told Trevor, watching as a few Mai'yoa swung by on a family vine. "I don't even know how they talk to each other. Maybe if we watch them for awhile, we'll at least figure that part out."
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Whatever response James might have made was abruptly cut off as the ship took a sudden, hard lurch that nearly knocked them both off their feet. A passing servo robot caught and steadied James, and Erin caught herself thanks to her own natural grace. The lights dimmed and reddened slightly giving the whole place an ominous look. A klaxon began to chime, and Persephone's voice came over the speaker in the wall. "Captain to the bridge, please. Hellion, please report to the bridge!"
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"You know you're always welcome back at Claremont," Erin told him, looking out one of the wide viewports at Earth spinning beneath them. It was an amazing view, one she'd really only seen on television before. "Even though you graduated, and even with the stuff that happened this summer, you have a lot of friends there. You shouldn't be alone all the time, even in an amazing place like this." She looked over at him and grinned. "I mean, imagine the video game tournament we could have on one of those wall-sized projection screens, with a computer the size of the one on this ship running things. I could really show you a thing or two."
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"It's really neat. And it's good you don't have to clean up after them and feed them and all that, too." Besides the zoo, there were fairly extensive gardens for a spaceship, a swimming pool, and exercise room, and all sorts of other things to look at. Erin got thoroughly lost on the tour, but she was quite impressed. "It's like your own little city up here," she remarked as they moved from attraction to attraction. "It's just huge. Are you the only person who lives up here?"