Electra
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"Was that part of your training?" Erin asked curiously, "learning how to blend into any situation, stuff like that? I know there are heroes who specialize in that, but aside from you and James, pretty much every hero I know would stick out like a sore thumb at any fancy party." She grinned. "I don't even own a dress."
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Erin waved a hand philosophically. "Well, Alex is in love with Mike, but neither of them had ever dated anybody else, and Mike was too shy to ask her out. So when Mark asked her out, she said yes, because it would be fun and good practice in dating. Mark's dated around quite a bit, so that was a good idea. Mike did the same thing with me, but that was a dumb idea because I had no idea what I was doing either." She hadn't exactly meant to share that information, but Trevor was deceptively easy to talk to. "And I don't know what's going on with him and Faith. I think maybe she's the type who reads Teen Hero magazine, except that she has powers and the opportunity to actually date a superhero."
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"She is now," Erin explained, "but she dated Mark first, for practice, so that when she dated Mike, she'd have some experience. Then when Zoe came along, things got really confused for awhile, and eventually Mike and Mark had a fight over a silly misunderstanding, and then Alex and Mark broke up and Alex and Mike started dating. But it's okay," Erin concluded, "because Alex and Mike were meant to be together all along, and Mark doesn't take that sort of thing very seriously anyway." She shrugged. "It was all sort of weird for a few weeks there, but I think it's settled down now. And now that Mark and Faith are dating, I think that's the end of the whole triangle or whatever it was." Erin, at least, seemed entertained by the drama provided by her classmates, for all she'd obviously edited out some juicy details.
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She leaned into his embrace, holding onto him and resting her cheek against his shoulder. "I'm not sure," she admitted. "I feel fine, really good actually, like I've just woken up from a great nap. But I can't wrap my mind around any of this. If I died, I should remember it, shouldn't I? All I remember is... all I remember is you," she admitted, "or something that looked like you, saying he was going to kill us, and then shooting at us. And it was scary, and it hurt. But it didn't feel like what I thought dying would feel like."
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Erin let most of what he was saying wash over her head, sunk in the gloom of foreseeable extended sessions with Dr. Marquez. Things had finally been going well, and once Geckoman and Rycon got back to school, she'd probably be back up to six visits a week again. That is, if Summers didn't know already. He had a talent for that sort of thing. She roused enough to hear Dynamo's important-like questions. "Having a secret identity doesn't matter much when the principal and the other students all know it already. And I guess I could handle it, but I don't think I probably should. Everyone there probably thinks I'm crazy, whether or not I was right."
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It didn't take long for Stesha to pull on a comfy pink sweatsuit and some slipper socks, but the hair was already a problem. There was a reason she rarely left it down, and never without being carefully pinned and tamed. Even after just a few minutes it was becoming a mess of tangles. She took her comb and walked back into the living room with it, already beginning the laborious work of straightening it. Derrick's look brought her up short, though. He looked like a statue, or like he'd been stunned. Despite her own tumultuous emotions, she went to him and lay her fingers against his cheek. "Are you okay?"
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Erin grinned. "I'd say that's a safe bet. The interviewer asked me what it was like to work with all the guys. I didn't really know what to say that wouldn't get me in trouble one way or another, so I think I just mumbled something. Half my answers got cut from the finished piece anyway." She didn't look very bothered by that. "Anyway, it probably doesn't help that half the time when we go out, we're going to Champions, where the superhero fans hang out. I like places like this better. I don't really want a Raven burger or Centurion-size fries. It's Mark's favorite though, so he always suggests it when we all go out somewhere. He even took Alex their on their first date. To each their own, I guess."
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Erin didn't quite understand what James was doing, but at this point, that didn't matter much anymore. The world seemed to be collapsing around them, and it wasn't the time for a lot of discussion. The fog suddenly filling the room made her job much harder, rendering her eyes useless and forcing her to concentrate on her other senses. There was Faith's soft sobbing breath, there was Chris's unusually fast heartbeat, there was Trevor's grating Midnight voice. She picked them out one by one, doing her best to pull them back across the room into whatever safety that James could provide. There were others, too, that she nudged in the right general direction, but her teammates were her priority right now.
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(Directly subsequent to One of These Is Not Like the Other) Stesha's apartment was just as she'd left it two days ago, a few wilty plants the only sign of the longest, strangest days of her... life, perhaps? As she and Derrick popped out of the plant and into her living room, she could see the baby catalogs she and Taylor had looked through before going out on their shopping trip, and smell coffee gone stale and sour in the pot. It was entirely too surreal, and being naked didn't help. She squirmed till Derrick let her down, then wavered a little bit on legs that felt strange and new. "I need to get some clothes on," she told him, a little shakily. "I'll be just a minute." She headed into the bedroom, touching the plants along the way to perk them back to health.
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Erin looked up at James when he spoke, confused at first by the words. "But I thought he didn't have any...oh. You mean like if Mark has, had one quarter powers, his dad would have twice as much..." Her eyes widened in consternation. "What do we do? Can you get a portal open before something really weird happens?" When she concentrated, Erin realized that Rick didn't seem quite as present as he ought to. She could see him, but to her hearing he was muffled, as though he were much further away than he ought to be.
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Erin shook her head as though trying to clear it. "I don't know. I felt like I had to go home, to where my family lives, anyway, really urgently. But it doesn't make any sense. If there's a zombie threat starting up, I should be here, trying to fix it, not in Seattle. And why would I run to Seattle anyway?" She massaged her forehead with one hand, leaving a few more traces of yick across her face, and muttered a bad word. "I really lost it back there. I was doing pretty well for awhile, but now I'm probably going to be in detention till I graduate. To say nothing of what my shrink is going to say. I guess that guy in the suit probably used some sort of mind control power to stop me from hurting anybody, and that's what got me running out here."
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"You're not making any sense," Erin told him firmly. "Zombies aren't anything, they aren't heroes, they aren't people, they're just bodies that don't know they're dead yet. Hungry bodies. I have to get..." A look of confusion crossed her face as she suddenly slowed and stopped, letting Dynamo instantly get far, far in front of her. She sat down on the concrete divider, looking at the cars speeding past as though she had no idea where she was or what she was doing there.
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Erin stood quietly and watched the parade of heroes in and out of the room, her face white and impassive as she tried to make sense of any of this. Mark couldn't die, how could Mark die? Nothing bad ever happened to him, surely no stroke of bad luck like what had taken place a few minutes ago. Fifteen feet away and he'd have been injured but survived. That was what his power did, made sure he was those fifteen feet away. Omega was responsible for this, somehow. He'd managed to turn off Mark's powers just long enough, or something like that, something insidious enough to kill a boy whose power was happy-ever-afters. The one thing she could and did do was keep an eye on James and make sure he didn't follow through on whatever harebrained scheme of self-sacrifice he was cooking up. She stuck close to him as they waited, taking his hand and squeezing his fingers as much to comfort herself as him. Right up until the moment Lady Liberty came out, she could tell herself that there was still a chance, that something would happen to change fate, but she was wrong. Closing her eyes, Erin rubbed her face, unable to look at the grief of Mark's parents as they heard the news.
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Erin startled when Dynamo popped up behind her, and looked for a moment like she'd take a reflexive swing at him, but apparently he didn't trip whatever trigger had gotten her going so enthusiastically after Dead Head. The question itself brought her up short for a moment. "If there are zombies, I have to make sure my family is all right. They can't protect themselves. The ones here have never seen what it's like, so they won't even know what to look for. You saw the people back there. They weren't even worried." Erin's voice conveyed a world of disgust.
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"I don't like to talk about it," Erin said shortly, jumping neatly onto the guardrail as the shoulder disappeared over a bridge and running along it as though it were a jogging track. "It wasn't the zombie in the painting, it was the other guy, the one dressed like a mortician. I don't think I've met you either, Dynamo. What are you doing here?" she asked, turning around on the guardrail to run backwards as she as asked.
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"Erin," she told him, forgetting to use her code name for the moment. "It was a zombie," she repeated. "You have to destroy them. If you don't, they'll come after you. They can smell people, and they're always hungry. I don't know who the man was, but there's a painting of him and Phantom on the wall in her library. He must be a superhero." She paused for a moment at the on-ramp to the freeway, cocking her head to read the signs, then speeding up the eastbound ramp.
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"I have to go home." Wander's voice sounded strange and strained, but not as though the hundred mile an hour run was bothering her in any way. She seemed to be heading for the freeway, or at least towards the edge of town. It didn't seem as though she had any inclination to attack him at the moment. "Back there... it was a zombie. But I killed it. It's dead." She was obviously certain about that, and it was just as obviously very important to her. "If I go home I can check up on things there. Just to make sure it's all okay."
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Erin stopped in her tracks, the look on her face going from blank adrenaline-fueled concentration to confused and slightly dazed. "Dead?" she repeated, as though it was a foreign concept. She lifted her hand and ran it through her hair, not seeming to notice or care that it was slimed with the unpleasant byproducts of decomposition. It looked like some part of her was trying to fight through the suggestion, but her mind was nowhere near strong enough. "I should go home now," she muttered. With one last look at the dilapidated pile of Dead Head, she turned and raced for the door, moving far faster than an ordinary human.
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I think the most hilarious part of this is the blase reactions from most of the heroes to one of their fellows being ripped to pieces by someone who's basically having a psychotic break. ;-) As for where we go from here, the simplest answer would likely be for Dead Head to just play, well, dead. If she's taken his head off and smashed him around a little and he's not moving, she'll perceive the danger to be over and start to come back to herself. She'll still be very upset, obviously, but she'll no longer be a threat and will hopefully go home and allow Dead Head to pick himself up and put himself back together. As long as she's hitting him but he's still moving, she's just going to get more and more worked up. Alternatively, someone else could step in and try to intervene, but Erin is PL 14 and doing lethal damage, so that may be rather unwise. AA has volunteered to have Avenger step in with some mind control, so that's another way to go. All things considered, I would rather not have to describe the blow by blow account of Erin taking Dead Head apart into tiny little pieces. cause it's kinda gross. :D
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Erin looked over at James, wondering why he wasn't starting the teleport, and found him looking like he was a million miles away. From the look on his face, there was only one place he was thinking about. After this long, she had some idea of the way his mind worked, and what he might be considering. Keeping one hand pressed over the impromptu dressing, more for Rick's sake than for Mark's, she picked up a clod of dirt and threw it at James' head. "Don't even think about it," she told him. "Get us to the hospital!"
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"That's surprising, given your background, but you are pretty elusive," Erin allowed. "Even those of us who know your habits find it hard to keep track of you these days. Keep an eye out for Mark, though," she advised. "Eventually he'll probably pin you down and throw you to the lions at Teen Hero. Getting an interview with Hellion would be a way bigger coup than one with Wander, especially given that their main audience is teenage girls. The fan mail will come pouring in," she teased.
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I know this is technically the middle of the round, but does any interested party wish to enter the initiative order before Wander commences with her very best effort to take Dead Head apart with her bare hands, literally? I will warn that she's likely to attack anyone who tries to physically intervene. ;)
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Erin thought about that for a minute. "Yeah, I bet not," she conceded. "That's a good reason not to want to be on a super team. Especially one with Mark as the leader." She cracked a rueful smile. "He basically lives for photo ops. Not like he does hero work just for fame or anything, but he basically always expects that there's going to be a reporter around waiting for a picture or a soundbyte afterwards. And he's usually right." She shrugged. "I usually just try to stay in the back of the pictures. With all the superhumanly gorgeous guys around this place, it's not too hard to fade right into the background. Makes getting out like this a whole lot easier." She gestured around. "Now that the team's getting more exposure, it's hard for some of them to go out in public like this, at least without some kind of disguise. Your mask may be scary, but it's convenient."
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Erin reached out to try and prevent Faith from pulling out the shard of metal, but she hadn't been expecting it and wasn't quite fast enough. Still holding Mark's head in her lap, Erin reached out and braceleted Faith's bloody wrists with her own hands. "Faith, stop! Stop! You can't do anything for him right now, he needs to get to the hospital." Mark's body was bathed in the glowing light of Faith's powers, but there was no answering leap of pulse or intake of breath, just more bleeding now that the shard of metal was out.
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Erin covered the ground between herself and Mark in a single leap, catching him before he'd entirely hit the ground. She pressed her fingers to his neck, even though it was all too obvious to someone who'd seen enough death that it was a futile action. "James!" she called. "Get him to the hospital, now!" They had to do something. She was far too jaded to doubt that everything could be over just that quickly for someone, but this was Mark they were talking about. There had to be a stroke of luck still waiting to happen.