Electra

Erin had no qualms about pushing her book away as soon as a distraction presented itself, sending her pencil to the floor where Oliver chased and pounced on it. Really, anything was better than advanced algebra, and she was working ahead anyway. If the trip to Erde that summer had taught her anything, it was that you couldn't always count on having time to finish your homework at the last minute. And she'd spent too long catching up to risk falling behind again. "Come in," she called, turning her chair towards the door.

Stesha made one last trip to the ship, where she'd found the danger mostly past and her compatriots headed shoreward. Since Doctor Haviland, the woman with the very long hair, did not seem to have a quick way to shore, Stesha gave her a ride, popping out of the pine tree in the midst of the refugees. She listened to the others as she made her way around to where Dark Star and the armored man were talking. "I'm Fleur de Joie," she introduced herself with a smile. "You all must be worn out after coming all this way." She looked to Dark Star. "The Freedom League should be able to find a place for them, don't you think? They deal with refugees from different worlds from time to time. In any case," she told the armored man, "we'll find somewhere. Are any of you injured?"

Yeah, I think we may have kind of gotten oopsed to shore somewhere along the line, but that's okay. ;-) Stesha will give her a lift.

Stesha began teleporting people in groups while the armored man did whatever he was doing on the downed spaceship. The transits were quick and easy, since they weren't that far from shore anyway. Just a quick rush of green and the smell of mown grass, and then they were standing in the middle of one of the waterfront parks, next to a handsome old pine tree. "Just stay here," Stesha told them, trying to mime staying put to people she suspected had no English. "I'll be right back." By the time the armored man arrived back on deck, she was just ready to move the last group off to shore. She paused to look at the man's burden, stepping close to study the body before realizing he was beyond her help. "I'm sorry," she said sympathetically, looking up into the helmeted man's face. "We should get you to shore." As he joined the others, Stesha put a hand on his arm, then touched the petal of one of the large flowers, and in a moment, all the Khaladi were reunited in the snowy park.

Wander: Down the Rabbit Hole Beach Party in Winter Gazing Into the Abyss Beyond the Door Title of Show It's A Jungle Out There From the Shore to the Water It is Well With My Soul Battle of the Sexes Fleur de Joie: The Crash One of These Things is Not Like the Others Childhood Dream White Wedding Crossroads Friday Outing Con Games

Erin nodded, darting into her room. She took a few precious seconds to scramble into her costume, just so she wouldn't chance ruining any of her precious clothes, then grabbed her bat, made sure Oliver had food and water for the evening, and was out without Alex ever waking up. "All right," she told James, clipping the bat to her belt and securing the cloth band that kept her hair out of her face when she fought. "Let's go find the marshmallow guy." Taking a deep breath, she took his hand and prepared for the transit.

Stesha approached the man in the powered suit, the one who seemed to be the captain of the strange craft. "It's very good to meet you," she told him pleasantly, giving him a warm smile, "and we'll be sure to introduce ourselves in just a few minutes, but right now we need to get these ships apart and fixed up before one or both of them sinks. Do you mind if I move you and your people to shore?" She pointed to the land in the distance, even as she scattered a few seeds across the deck. They sprang up into vines sporting large, multi-colored flowers. "It won't hurt and it's not dangerous," she assured him, "just have everyone hold hands so I can move them at once."

Erin flushed, but did her best not to respond to the dismissive tone. She was starting to think that maybe Phantom had seen too many worlds to care very much about any particular one, or get too worked up about anything. That seemed kind of sad, but it also wasn't going to help Erin any. "Everyone has weaknesses," she replied. "Nobody is completely invulnerable. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but he needs to be stopped. Please tell me if you know anything more about him, where he lives, what he's like," she asked again.

Erin hesitated a bare moment. "I'll come with you," she told him, as though it was never in doubt. "Just make sure not to forget me in some universe of melting marshmallow people, or I'll be pissed. Will it mess up the track if we pop back long enough for me to get my bat? I don't really need it," she was pretty sure, after all her practice in self control, "but it would be nice to have, if we might get into a fight."

"But there are other worlds, lots of them," Erin pressed. "Even if Prime is prepared, those other worlds aren't. And maybe things won't be as bad, if they aren't stupid enough to jump on a vaccine without realizing it's going to kill everyone, but even just the flu is bad enough." She unlaced her fingers, clamped them into fists. "Do you know any more about him? What he's like, or if he has any weaknesses?"

Unable to meet that level gaze, Erin looked down and studied her hands as she tried to process that information. The possibility had always been there, indeed, even reasonably strong that the hero flu had been manufactured deliberately. Few natural diseases targeted metahumans with such zeal, and few were so quickly lethal and resistant to treatment. Having confirmation that someone had deliberately chosen her world for a laboratory of death was still a quick punch in the gut. She took a couple of meditation breaths before speaking again, pushing past the feelings to get her questions answered. It was easier with a stranger who'd seen it all before, easier to pretend some kind of objectivity. "These experiments," she finally said, "what happens if they work? Or if they work even better than he could have predicted? Would he ever try it again on a new planet?"

It was Erin's turn to pause and think then, her knuckles going white as she tightened her grip on her own fingers. "So he's a scientist?" she asked, looking for confirmation. "And he does experiments on people. Could he have come up with a disease that looked like a normal flu, but a lot worse, and that killed metahumans first? Could he have released it on a planet?" Erin never had a lot of color in her face, thanks to her impervious skin, but right now she was looking a little ill herself.

"A few weeks ago, I was in a fight with Shadivan Steelegrave," Erin began, lacing her fingers together. "While we were fighting, he was trying to distract me by talking to me about what happened to my world. I know most of it was probably garbage, but I don't know how much." She looked even more uncomfortable at that, but soldiered on anyway. "Do you know about anything or anyone there that's called Friendly? Not like, someone there who's nice, since it's the Terminus, but like someone or something's actual name?"

"Can we follow him?" Erin asked. "I don't see or hear anything here, and I'm not sure we have time to search the whole store." She climbed down from the clothing rack and went to investigate the shoes and flashlight to see if they held any clues to the owner's identity. "There doesn't seem to be any blood, at least. We can hope that whatever it wanted him for, it wanted him alive. I'm not sure how he would've lost his shoes, but it probably doesn't matter right now."

Erin sat down near the desk, though she didn't seem to be trying to make herself comfortable. She perched on the edge of the seat with her back straight, looking a little bit like a kid called into the principal's office. She knew that Phantom was very unlikely to try to give her the boot from this dimension, but the fact that it was even a possibility was a little disturbing. "No thank you," she said politely. "I need to ask you some questions. James said you might know things about the Terminus, and Omega, things we haven't learned in school. Is that true?"

On one side of the ship's deck, inconsequential amongst the commotion of everything else that was happening, a strand of live kelp suddenly poked up over the edge of the ship. It appeared to almost look around for a second, then wrapped itself around a rail and continued climbing. At the top of the rail it stopped, and bizarrely enough, a daisy sprouted. It grew huge in a matter of seconds, then yawned wide to disgorge Fleur de Joie. Stesha had taken just enough time to put on her costume, something she was getting faster and faster at these days. Given Dark Star's warning about the attack, she kept her head down and an eye on the sky as she scuttled across the deck to where he was. "Do they need help with evacuation?" she asked, both to him and to anyone else who might know. "I can start moving people to shore."

"I'm pretty sure I can get another beacon," Erin said, still perched like an odd bird on the clothing rack. "But if you think he might have made off with a person, we can't go without checking it out, at least. I don't see or hear him anywhere in here, anyway. But why would someone steal some random civilian? What's the point in that?"

Since I don't want Stesha getting too wet while making her appearance, I'll have her burn an HP to stunt an unflawed teleport onto the deck of the cargo ship. =)

"I don't have a lot of free time," Erin demurred, "they keep us busy at school. Maybe sometime, if I can manage it. Guess I might see you around, if you 're doing the hero thing too while you're here." She zipped her coat, more from habit than from need, then jammed her hands back into the pockets. "Anyway, it's good that one angel is doing something, even if God and the rest of them are asleep at the wheel. See you later." Pushing open the front door, she headed out into the always-surprising frigidity of a Freedom City February night.

Erin hesitated, pausing at the door before leaving the kitchen. The school encouraged them to keep their secret identities whenever possible, but she honestly didn't see the point to getting too worked up about it. What could it hurt? "It's Erin," she told him. "You never told me your name, either."

Erin said a nasty word as the creature slid through her grasp, and then another one as she realized that her pocket was lighter than it had been a moment ago. "Alex is going to kill me," she muttered, then dismissed that problem when she saw the shoes and flashlight. "Look at that," she told James. "It might have attacked a security guard. Can you feel anything?" Hopping nimbly onto the nearest clothes rack, she scanned the store, listening intently for any noise, even breathing.

Stesha heard about the accident along with everyone else in Freedom City, when the breaking news bulletin cut into the Nonstop Nineties block on her radio station at work. She was up to her elbows in ivy trellis runners, but she disentangled herself long enough to get to her phone and head for the employee bathroom. As she went, she projected her senses through the ground, through roots and leaves and vines, all the way out to the trees that lined the waterfront. They couldn't see very well, but what they saw didn't look good. Stesha speed-dialed Derrick. "Did you hear about the accident in the harbor?" she asked him. "Do you know if they need more help out there?"

"So I guess... I guess you don't really know that much more than I do," Erin said finally, "when it comes down to it. About where people go when they die, or what God is thinking, or whether God even exists." She looked down at her hands, only then realizing that she'd fiddled the muffin down into a pile of crumbs during the conversation. "It does explain a lot, though. And now I don't need to bother with praying, if I ever felt like it again." She swept the mess of crumbs back into the wrapper, then pushed back from the table. "Anyway, thanks for talking to me again. It was interesting."

Erin was silent for a minute, absorbing the enormity of that idea. "You mean nobody, not even the angels, has seen or heard from God since, what, 530 AD? He's just been gone, and you all knew it, and just went on with business as usual anyway? What do angels do, anyway, if they can't do anything without God and God is dead? Do you just all sit around in heaven and play cards and make little angels and knock bad souls into hell?"

"But why?" Erin demanded. "If you were all there just watching, all of you on Prime, or all of you in my world, or wherever, why didn't God send you down to help us? If your God is merciful and loving and all that, why did he let everyone in my world die? He's supposed to be all-powerful, he could've stopped it. He could've at least, I dunno, put a hand to write on the wall that the vaccine was no good, and more people might have survived. We really needed help, and all anyone up there did was make sure people who needed to go from hell on earth to real hell got there?"