Electra

Stesha smiled at Jack, momentarily disarmed by his obvious elation, then ignored him completely as her attention turned to mother and baby. "Oh, Taylor, he's so beautiful!" She blinked in momentary startlement at the fangs, then regrouped. "...And so advanced, too! Awww, he got your dimples. He looks so much like you!" Stesha had to coo over the baby for a few more moments before she could attend to any other matters, running her fingertip over the tiny clenched fists and examining the scrunched little face. "Everyone's okay," she told Taylor, "a little banged up, but Derrick and I have been working on them. This is nothing," she reassured her friend, gesturing to herself. "It's just taking a little longer for the bones to heal without the sun. I'll be fine by morning. We sent him off with his tail between his legs, for sure."

"Wow," Erin murmured, sounding not unlike Trevor when he'd seen her in the dress. "Cool car..." Her voice was nearly reverent. It ranked right up there with James' convertible, though it was cool in an entirely different way. It definitely fit Trevor's image, and even the subtly retro stylings that Frank had added to her dress. She couldn't help rest a hand on the hood for a moment, even though she was pretty sure it had been waxed recently. It was irresistible. "I can see why you wouldn't want a chauffeur." Glancing over at him, she decided she'd wait till after the dance to try and wheedle a turn behind the wheel.

"That's all right," Fleur told him, compassion edging her voice. "I'm here to help you, for as long as you can stay. We all have other obligations in our lives, right?" She checked her own watch. "Do you need a lift home? I can drop you off and it will only take a second. I think you've made a good start today, but the big thing you need to do, the studying, is going to take a lot longer than one practice in the park. I'm sure Dark Star and the other teachers at Claremont can help you with that."

Erin raised her eyebrows at the mention of the helicopter, which at least saved her the trouble of raising them again at the thought of a couple hundred people at a party. Trevor's... set, she guessed it was, obviously didn't do anything small. That would make it easier to blend in, though. "Least it's for a good cause, whatever it is," she joked. "I wonder if it's tacky to order a vegetarian meal at a forest preservation dinner... or a carnivore meal at the animal rights party. I can see where these things would be full of pitfalls." She had to concentrate a little on walking in the heels, but it was certainly no harder than navigating a tightrope. In either case though, a fall would be embarrassing.

Before Jack could answer, the door opened again and Stesha hurried in, limping but obviously eager to see Taylor and the baby. Her hair had come free of its pins in several places, sending green fronds spilling down her back, and she had already-healing bruises on her face, testament to the fight that had taken place down in the lobby. She skidded to a halt upon noticing the family moment. "Oh, sorry, I can come back," she told Taylor. "I just wanted to make sure you were all right."

Not far away, two other heroes were just finishing up a much less dramatic mission. Wander stepped through Hellion's dimensional portal and back into Earth Prime, brushing her arms at the strange feeling of stepping between worlds. This attempted incursion hadn't amounted to much, a thief with a bagful of stolen technology looking for a low-tech world to buy his fancy weapons, but without many weapons of his own. Really it had hardly amounted to much more than taking his toys away and dropping him back on his world, but Erin was glad to have a chance to work with James at all these days. Now that he was graduated, it seemed like they saw even less of each other, which was too bad. She was just about to suggest heading back to the school when her communicator chattered to life with news of a nearby distress call on the police band. A super-battle had gone bad, assistance was needed! With a quick look to James for confirmation, she acknowledged the beacon and let him teleport them both to the scene. It was easy to tell who the bad guy was, the drunken Paris Hiton wannabe on the flying surfboard was making quite a spectacle of herself. One powersuited figure was already on the ground, the other apparently injured but fighting on. "I'll try and get a hit on her," Wander told Hellion quickly, "then you take her out with a blast. We don't want to give her a chance for any more casualties." She raced down the street and leapt into the air, opening her bat as she went. Her leap easily took her high enough to reach the drunken villain, whereupon Wander delivered a punishing blow straight to the woman's abdomen, then turned a sommersault over her own bat to aim herself feet-first for the ground.

Erin's going to do a regular attack against Angel, using Leaping and Move-By action to get up to where she is, hit her, and then land again. First roll is miserable, but I'm not going to pass up the chance to hit Angel. Spending an HP. Second roll hits with a 25. That's a DC 29 toughness save.

Ick. Erin goes on 14.

I don't think I have any old threads with you that can't be quietly handwaved, but I need you for some new stuff whenever you're available. My characters need counsel and advice! More specifically, I'd like to do a thread where Alex and Erin talk about boys, and as soon as Stesha gets her ring, she's going to have to show it off, of course. And after that... new plots!

Erin took his arm, quiet for a moment as she considered the implication of his words. "If I said I thought you'd have problems balancing an entire car on those narrow little cables, you'd just take it as a challenge, wouldn't you," she asked with a chuckle. "Maybe some other time. I'm already kind of nervous about the party," she admitted. "I realized I never asked you what sort of party it is, or who it's for, or how many people are going to be there."

"Sounds good," Erin said aloud, inwardly struggling between amused and impressed. Most days it was pretty easy to forget that she hung around with people who used things like chauffeured cars as a matter of course, but a night like this was probably going to be very different. It already was different, really. People passing by the common room were staring at them, and for once it didn't feel as though they were staring at her like she was some kind of ticking time bomb. That felt pretty good. With the nerves of getting ready behind her, Erin found herself looking forward to this again. She tucked her bag under her arm and gave him another smile, cocking her head to catch his eyes. "We should probably get going before traffic gets too bad on the bridge."

"Stop!" Stesha told him firmly. "You can't just make it disappear because you broke it. Maybe you can do that with a television or a bookshelf or whatever inanimate object you're making, but if you want to work with live things, you have to respect them. Even if you're just going to pluck a flower or send a vine out to get cut down, you have to remember what you're doing. That's important working with plants, and far more important as you start working with more intelligent things." Vines began to crawl out of the ground, scooping up the chunk of tree and lifting it back into place where it had been growing. The vines wrapped tightly around the trunk, holding the lost piece in place like a fresh graft while Stesha rested her hand on the tree. In a few moments, it was whole again and healed, the vines relaxing and becoming quiescent. "Most of the time, what's broken can be fixed. But it's better not to break it in the first place."

"That's good," Fleur told him with a nod. "You can start slow then. Stick with the powers you know how to use, and get that studying in. You can practice when you're not in a fight and your adrenaline isn't high. Take your time, be very careful, and you'll probably do just fine. A big part of using your superpowers properly is having the desire to use them right and not hurt anybody. The fact that you care about it means you'll be okay eventually. It'll just take work."

Erin smiled at the reaction, glad her hard work was being appreciated. Trevor looked amazing, like he'd stepped out of a magazine or something, but he always looked so good that it wasn't unexpected he'd clean up very well. "I could say the same for you," she told him. "We look pretty good for a couple of street brawlers. I was just thinking though, how are we going to get there? I'm not sure I could ride a motorcycle in this without being unladylike about it."

"It sounds very handy," Fleur replied with a smile. "There've been times in a fight when I definitely would've liked to change the odds a little. I've heard about some of the things Young Freedom has done, it's really impressive. Is it that your powers still work like that and you can just do more with them now, or have they fundamentally changed lately? I know that's rare, but it can happen sometimes."

"I can hurt people with them," she allowed thoughtfully, "knock them unconscious, throw them around, things like that. Plants can be dangerous. But no, I can't do any of the things that I can do to plants to people or animals. One trick pony here," she said with a laugh. "On the other hand, what I do with plants can have a profound impact, so that's something I have to be wary of. If I uproot a tree and don't put it back, that's decades of growth just gone, shade lost, animal habitat lost, to say nothing of people who might have an investment in it. Same thing with someone's garden, or somebody's crops. So I have to be thoughtful when I go to use them. I imagine you've had to use your powers to hurt people before?" she guessed.

Once upon a time, before the end of the world, Erin White had been a much girlier girl. She'd had fun at sleepovers with her friends, giving and receiving makeovers and talking about boys. If everything hadn't gone careening off the rails, she would've gotten professional instructions from the Avon rep that Kathy's mom had booked for her birthday party, but even so, Erin could put on makeup without looking like a fool. But that had been in another lifetime, and she just didn't anymore. For a long time, there was absolutely no point in it, between one thing and another, and then, when she'd been released from quarantine and gotten used to being around girls who cared about their appearances, she had no money for that kind of thing. It was easier to pretend not to care and just make sure to keep her skin clean and avoid zits. Now, though, she had a job, sort of, and a scarily amazing dress, and she was going to a fancier party than anything she'd ever been invited to before. If there was ever a time, it was now. She wished Alex was around to help, but at the same time, doing it on her own protected her ego when she scoured clearance racks and tested what sort of products worked on super-resilient skin and hair. The curling iron and hair doo-dads she could borrow, at least. With Oliver watching encouragingly from the counter, she co-opted one of the girls' bathrooms on the day of the dance and spent literally most of the afternoon getting ready. Training and homework be damned, just this once. Maybe she had no chance of fitting in, but she wanted to at least look the part. All in all, she thought she did a fairly good job. After experimenting and deciding that she couldn't put her super-straight hair up in any sort of complicated arrangement by herself, she let it go and just curled the tendrils near her face, holding the rest back with a couple of sparkly rhinestone combs. The makeup was understated, it had to be with her pale skin, but it set off her lips and made her eyes look bigger and darker. She'd borrowed the shoes, too, strappy red heels that added inches to her height and a sway to her walk that she'd had to practice with a little. The dress, however, was doing most of the heavy lifting in the ensemble. Despite her concerns, Frank had done an amazing job on it, creating a calf-length showpiece in deep red charmeuse that clung as much as her costume did but somehow made her look a whole lot more feminine. He'd gone with a little more cleavage than she'd hoped, but not as much as she'd feared, so she figured they could call it even, since he'd also included the matching shorts and slit the skirt enough to let her work if she had to. Frank obviously knew his customers. The earrings and the necklace she'd found were rhinestones too, and people would probably notice at a shindig like this, but there was no help for that. They looked pretty. Oliver purred his approval as she looked at herself in front of the mirror one more time, getting up and stretching after his long stint playing moral support. "Wish me luck," she told him with a crooked smile. "I think I might be better off going into a war zone than doing this. But it'll be an adventure." Tucking her bat and her wallet into the little matching evening bag, she headed out to the common room to wait for Trevor.

She helped him to his feet, then automatically restored the grass they'd both been sitting on, so the new bushes were the only sign of their presence. "Plants are my life," she said with a smile. "Or my professional and heroing life, anyway. Most of my hero work is less about fighting bad guys and more about making Freedom City a more beautiful place to live." She was quiet for a moment. "Maybe that's the best lesson I can give you, more than teaching you how to grow plants. Shaping reality is best done in small doses, and that doesn't make it less effective. You don't have to change everything. Changing one thing, like making a park beautiful or putting flowers in at an old cemetery, can make a big positive difference for people. Just because you have a lot of power doesn't mean you always need to use all of it."

"Much better!" Stesha told him enthusiastically, passing a hand over the bushes to perk them up after the strain of their creation. "When you let them grow the way they're designed to, all you have to supply is the power. That's the safest way to do it, but you want to be able to do more, right?" She touched one of the branches of the bush, making a deep red rose bud and bloom. "The real answer is education. I was lucky, I suppose, that I had a degree in botany before I ever got my power. It gives me a fundamental understanding of the way plants work, so I know how to change them without hurting them." She stood and brushed herself off, offering him a hand. "In your case, well... you may have to do a whole lot of studying. If your business is changing everything, you'd better know how everything works. But starting small isn't a bad idea."

Stesha rested her fingertips against the soil and concentrated, checking on the health of the little plants. "You're doing well," she encouraged Edge. "Can you feel how it's different, doing it this way? You have to know how something is supposed to work before you can start trying to change it. If you don't know why and how something is alive, how can you change it without risk of killing it? Keep going," she told him. "These are ready to go further."

"That's not what I want you to do," Fleur told him patiently, reaching into the water lily's purple flower and withdrawing some more seeds. "If you want to work with life, you need to respect it for what it is. These seeds have all the blueprints they need to grow perfectly. They don't need your input on what to be, they just need a little nudge." She poured them into his hand once more. "Try again, but this time, try and take ego out of the process. Grow the plants the way they want to grow, not the way you want to grow them."

"Mmm..." was all Stesha could think of to say for a minute as she watched the blighted plant grow. "Okay, let me have it now." Taking control of the plant with her own powers, she did what she could to untwist the stems and correct the weird growths, but it certainly wasn't the rosebush it should have been. When the plant's growth had stabilized and it was quiescent, she looked up at Edge. "Can you describe to me in words what you were trying to do when you used your power?"

Very relieved, Stesha gave both her parents a hug. "Tomorrow sounds good," she told them. "I know everybody's wiped out from the party today anyway. Besides," she added with a grin, "if I stick around here, I'll just be down and in the refrigerator for leftovers at 3am, and I'd probably bump into Dad." All three of them laughed at the truth in that statement. "We'll be back at breakfast time, and you and Derrick can get better acquainted too. I've been waiting for this for a long time."

She laughed. "You can call me Fleur," she told him. "Most people do. I went a little overboard on the whole hero name bit." She reached into her pouch again, poured a few seeds into his hand. "Why don't you start smaller?" she suggested. "You might find it's easier to encourage what's already there than to make something new from whole cloth. You can get the feel of it that way."

"All right," Fleur said, nodding as she sat down on the edge of the pond. She took a few seeds from the pouch at her belt, dropping them into the water. Within seconds, water lilies had grown up from the muddy bottom of the pond and unfurled their flat mats of leaves on top of the water. As the purple flowers bloomed atop them, she looked to Edge. "What exactly are you afraid of?"