Electra
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oh yeah, you told me about the oranges, Jessie typed back. She wasn't sure what to think about the whole business with angels and falling. Erin, the real one, was the one who'd been to heaven and hell and met angels and all that crazy theological stuff. Jessie mostly had her stories about that and a bunch of very fuzzy memories of Sunday School to fall back on. They didn't seem to apply much in this case, so she decided to let it all go. Ray seemed happy with whatever he was doing. i guess it is convenient to be able to eat your mistakes : ) why is it your favorite?
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Jessie scrolled through the reply, impressed at Ray's phone-typing skills. It made sense, she guessed, if he was one of the angels who wrote heaven's history books. It was weird to think about Ray as an angel, rather than as a guy who did magical tattoos and had painted beautiful art on his walls. is that why you went on vacation? so you could talk to people instead of just watching? i remember seeing you do aquaria's tattoo you were doing some magic stuff then weren't you? Jessie's memory wasn't very good, even for things that happened after the blank white hole. Sometimes memories didn't stick very well without something to hang them on, and sometimes it felt like her older memories were sliding slowly away to fill the years of empty space. Her time at Project Freedom was soft- edged and often impressionistic, like something that had happened when she was a little kid (when real Erin was a little kid), while her more recent memories were sharper and in better focus. Visiting Ray's shop was in between, sort of clear, but fuzzy around the edges. She'd almost gotten a tattoo, she remembered, but had backed out at the last minute. Her control hadn't been as good three years ago, and she hadn't wanted to risk a panic attack or falling into Singularity. He'd been nice about it. He was a nice guy, which was probably a prerequisite for angels. how did you learn how to tattoo?
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yeah i'd love to but you'd have to talk to project freedom they're kind of pissy about it after aquaria took us to space without asking Jessie winced at that memory, even though there was nobody around to see her. It hadn't been the worst adventure Aquaria had ever dragged her along for, but it had been one of the most unnerving. And she was never going to enjoy flying around in spaceships, with their unnervingly white walls and small rooms that reminded her inexorably of... nothing at all. Best not to think about that. space is weird i'd rather go to france when you were working as an angel, did you get to tell them what to paint in the churches and stuff? or did you get to tell them what you thought? i've never been to the met but i did go to the national gallery one time when i was a kid and the seattle art museum on field trips and stuff Jessie paused before sending the last line, then shrugged and let it go. It didn't really matter that the memories she had of a family vacation to DC and field trips to the art museum weren't actually hers, they were close enough. She did wish they weren't quite so fuzzy in a lot of the details, but she took what she could get.
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"Works for me," Stesha agreed easily, giving herself one last look in the mirror before securing the cowl at her neck. "I'm not even going to bother with the mask," she decided. "I haven't had a real secret identity in ages, and it looks silly on me anyway." She shoved the domino mask into one of the many pockets on her utility belt, then turned to look at everybody else. "We don't really need a leader anyway, it's not like we haven't all taken point on one mission or another. If you want to do the talking, Gabe, then more power to you." Laughing, she followed him in the direction of the stage.
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sometimes not doing things makes you less afraid and that's enough to be happy Jessie stared at the words on the screen, then deleted them. That was not something to be talking about with somebody who was a complete stranger. She took a long breath and kicked her leg idly off the edge of her bed, feeling the soft clink of her tracking anklet against the bedpost. i wish, can't leave the country except to fight evil two more years with good behavior but i'd probably have to stop hanging around aquaria : ) what's your favorite?
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Jessie breathed a sigh of relief and absentmindedly took the phone into her bedroom. That was some awkwardness avoided, at least. i think aquaria feels that way about me because i don't have a lot of friends but sometimes it's okay to be alone if you don't feel bad about it i've never been to europe i haven't really gone anywhere where i wasn't fighting but i watched a documentary about the louvre maybe someday have you been there? did you have to wait in line for the famous paintings?
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"Aquaria!" Jessie held out the phone in Aquaria's direction, but the Deep One was fast when she wanted to be. Jessie frowned at the phone, wondering what the hell she was supposed to do now. She hated when Aquaria got her into these things, and participating at all would probably only encourage her in the future. Jessie knew that, Jessie had been living that as a lifestyle for years now, but she couldn't bring herself to be mean enough to actually make Aquaria understand it was wrong. So now she was stuck with a fake dating profile that was probably absolutely horrifying, to judge by the eating dogs comment, in a conversation she wasn't sure what to do with. The thing was, she'd liked Ray, the one time they had met. He hadn't seemed that old, but he had cool-old-guy vibes everywhere, like her great-uncles back in the borrowed-memory days, who'd done exciting things like gone off to war or gone traveling around the world when they were young, long before they'd settled down to raise families and fix old cars with her grandpa on the weekends. He probably had really good stories. But as far as dating... Jessie wasn't sure she was ready to date anybody, much less somebody cool. If she was sure of anything about her love life, it was that she was bound to be hideously awkward at it, if she ever even got the courage to start. Nope, nope, nope. that's really flattering i like his work a lot he must have had some crazy dreams i think i think you should probably know i'm not really looking to get a date right now i have a lot of stuff going on aquaria doesn't really understand human relationships or especially dating sorry
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Jessie stared at Aquaria for a minute, then rubbed her hand over her face and made a noise in her throat that signified deep emotion, though of course it lacked much resonance in a tiny human larynx. "Ugh! You're not a bad friend, Aquaria, you know I like you, I know you just want to help..." Flattening her lips together so that they almost disappeared, Jessie furrowed her brow and began typing into the phone very rapidly. hi ray this is jessie sorry about aquaria she means well she is a good friend but she forgot about no surprises i go to the museum all the time they sometimes let students paint there
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"You did what?" Jessie snatched the phone from Aquaria's hand, the little machine making a distressing little crack noise as the screen gave way a bit under her fingers. That happened with Jessie sometimes when she was very excited. Phones were fragile things, and much too sensitive to things like water and super-strength. This one at least stayed turned on, though. Jessie scrolled through the conversation rapidly, then looked up at Aquaria with a face like the time Aquaria had brought home a live tuna and put it in the bathtub till she could figure out how best to eat it. "Wait... I know this guy, this is the tattoo guy... oh my god, why did you do this?"
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Jessie stuck her head out of her bedroom at Aquaria's call. The expression on her face looked like it might be unhappy, but Aquaria knew it wasn't because it was the same one Jessie always wore for Aquaria's surprises and special dinners and for a lot of their superhero team-ups. "A surprise?" she asked, then rubbed one hand over her face. "Aquaria, didn't we talk about surprises?"
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"It's as big as it needs to be," Danica assured Micah, then gave Lulu a quizzical look. "Um, it's my shell, I've had it since I was born." She stood up from where she'd crouched down to greet her guests and walked further into the room. As she approached the far wall it stretched almost imperceptibly, adding a few additional square feet to better accommodate the sudden rush of visitors. "I started decorating it when I was pretty little, but it wasn't till my powers started developing in, um, maybe 1996 or so that my parents and I figured out how to get furniture in here. When I was little-little it was all pillows and toys and stuff!" She opened a mini-fridge next to the desk. "Anybody want some clementines?"
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"Kinda predatory, last I checked," Stesha reported, her words somewhat muffled by the bobby pins clamped between her teeth. She'd found a small mirror on one wall and was using it to get the last flyaway strands of her long green hair into place and brush a few specks of dirt off her costume. The whole morning had been blocked off on her calendar for weeks so she would have plenty of time to get ready for this, but of course there'd been a missing child in Wharton Forest and some minor flooding in one of the settlements on Sanctuary, and Amaryllis couldn't find the shirt she wanted to wear to school, and before Stesha knew it, she'd been running late again. At least the crown of flowers that encircled her head and trailed down her waist-length braid made her look cheerfully natural rather than just disorganized. She hoped. "There's a whole roomful of reporters wanting to get the scoop on what the New League is going to be like, as though we haven't been hanging around the place for the last seven or eight years." She jammed the last pin into her hair and gave herself a quick swipe of lipstick. "I guess we should figure out some kind of strategy for this thing before we get out there. Who's going to be our spokesman?"
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"You can come in if you want," Danica offered, scooting back from the door. The room inside looked very much like a typical young teenager's bedroom, though the wide variety of posters and decorations gave it an oddly timeless quality. There were old and curling posters for movies that had come out well before Danica's classmates had been born, Now and Then, Casper, 10 Things I Hate About You, right alongside posters of Rey from the new Star Wars and a sprawling Minecraft vista. A pink landline phone with a curly cord sat next to a nearly-new laptop hooked up to a ZIP drive with several adapters. A bed with a plushy green comforter took up much of the space, and the parts of the wall that weren't covered in posters had windows curtained in the same green color. "ASHLEY!" Danica yelled out the door. "JUDY'S IN HERE! WE'RE OKAY!"
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A moment later there was a brief noise, like someone shuffling to the door and looking through the peephole, then the door swung open to reveal a shell-less Danica in t-shirt and shorts. She smiled at the visitor. "Hi Lulu!" she said cheerfully. "I didn't even know you were around today. Is my shell bothering people in the common room? I can move it." The height of the door meant that Danica was on her knees as well, but the room behind her appeared to be much larger and lit by afternoon sun, with the smell of nail polish and oranges wafting gently out.
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"I want to meet Wail!" Danica piped up, suddenly trying to get her Segway out of the van as hard as she'd been trying to load it in the first place. "He was on 1-800-JUSTICE! They had a cartoon show and fought in the second Terminus Invasion, and his teammates both died but he kept on being a hero anyway. I didn't actually know he wasn't retired," she admitted, "but I want to meet him!" Giving up on the Segway, she began making her way, very slowly, in the direction of the kerfuffle.
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The inside of the shell was very dark, unnaturally so, in fact. The lighting of the room outside should've allowed someone to see at least a little ways into any one of the openings, but instead it was merely a flat matte blackness that Lulu scuttled into. It would've been much more unnerving but for the fact that the moment her trailing foot cleared the edge of the shell, she saw a round wooden door, the sort that might be expected to grace a hobbit hole or other similar fairy-tale dwelling, except that it also had a porch light above it. The door was quite small, enough so that most people would be expected to crawl or at least bend over pretty far to get through. It was currently closed, but there was an equally petite doorbell set in the right-hand frame.
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"If you can't fight with somebody and then be okay afterwards, then how are you ever going to be able to relax around them?" Danica mused aloud. "I mean, nobody gets along all the time, right?" She brightened. "But you can come into my shell if you want, I just cleaned it and everything! Rocking forward, Danica plunked down chest-first onto the floor and wriggled until she'd disappeared fully inside the black and gold patterned shell. As soon as she was no longer visible, the shell began to grow, spreading up and out till it was the size of a pup tent. The neck opening was big enough to crawl inside, if one didn't mind tight places. "Come on in!" Danica called, her voice a little echoey from inside.
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"Well, maybe Ashley was trying to protect you, then?" Danica suggested. "I mean, she seems to be kind of..." Overprotective seemed at once too blunt and perhaps not quite strong enough. "She seems really invested in keeping you safe. I guess that probably gets to be a drag." She slid out of her shell, a sight that never got entirely less weird, and leaned back against it, now clad in a black and yellow t-shirt and blue jeans. "I mean, being safe is good, especially with you guys coming from where you do, but it gets suffocating, yeah?" She gave Judy a raised-eybrow look. "Did he say he was sorry?"
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Danica raised her eyebrows. "She's your big sister, right? I don't have a big sister myself, but if television has taught me anything, it's that butting into your life is basically her full-time job, and vice versa. I mean, think about when you were younger, you were always getting into her stuff and following her around, right? You guys are always going to be tangled up in each others' lives." She rocked from side to side a little. "I guess the main point was whether Leroy was actually being an idiot. Was he?"
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"Probably a good idea," Miss A agreed. "We do run into those all hands on deck situations from time to time. Plus, going out for god knows how long into space with only AIs you've programmed yourself is a recipe for going stir crazy." She grinned at him. "Even Mike Nelson had some evil scientists to talk to. But space is a busier place than we used to give it credit for, you could probably find some company out there without too much trouble. I know some Earth heroes have gone to space permanently already."
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"You didn't upset me," Danica assured her easily. "I see a lot worse than that in powers training. There's only so much you can do with a hero whose main power is being too sturdy to hurt, so they mostly work on my emotional abilities. Last year they took me to the courthouse and I just had to sit in the gallery for an entire afternoon of divorce court and see if I could keep anybody from screaming or throwing a punch at anybody else. It was messed up." She shook her head, not seeming terribly fazed by that memory either. "But I wouldn't do that to you," she assured Judy, "stop your fights, I mean, not unless you wanted me to. It seems kind of rude, and emotion control's a little ethically tricky." She leaned back on her elbows, only a little bit because most of her weight balanced on the shell. "What was today supposed to be like?"
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It was easy to miss Danica, curled up in a beanbag chair by the window; with the roundness of her shell and the general not-quite-humanoid outline it gave her, she looked more like a second beanbag stacked on top of the first. "Sorry! Danica told her, sounding a little embarrassed. "I would've left when you started yelling, but you know how long it takes me to get out of a room. It would've been like one of those movie scenes where the climactic battle has to stop while the creaky little old lady crosses the screen with her walker." She pursed her lips and looked at Judy. "Are you okay?"
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"There is something to be said for a return in triumph," Miss A allowed, "as long as you think that the people whose minds you're hoping to change will actually be impressed." She leaned back in her seat, nearly slumping but not quite losing that excellent posture. "If I've learned anything in this job, it's that the public is a fickle creature, and never wants to pay attention to the things you want to highlight. I have lost count of how many press conferences I've given where clean energy or prosthetic advancements or shareholder confidence has been ignored by the press in favor of talking about whether my skirt was too short or long.On the other hand," she allowed with a tip of her head, "they do love a good redemption story. Are you planning on going alone?"
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A small smile curved Miss Americana's perfectly bowed lips. "Well, it would be pretty goddamned hypocritical of me to tell anybody that running away from the past and all its problems isn't a viable solution. At least, not for the short term. I hear that there's plenty of work for a genius scientist to do out in space, you could probably do a lot of good out there. Maybe make a name for yourself with people who don't have any preconceived notions. The thing about running away, though..." She sighed a little, leaning back in her seat. "The longer you stay gone, the harder it is to ever go back."
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"When I was little, I thought the mall was the raddest place in the world," Danica admitted cheerfully, seeming happy to follow Judy's instructions as they left the theater. Her Segway hummed cheerfully up the aisle, running over bits of popcorn as she went. "All the cool kids hung out there and had Orange Julius and got Glamour Shots." She sighed wistfully. "At least Orange Julius is still around." She looked over at Aja and Pan. "I guess probably no real malls where you guys are from, either." Her eyes rounded a little. "I wonder if this one has a Spencer's," she mused. "We could probably go in there, since there aren't any adults with us."