Electra
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"Well, not exactly," Danica admitted, producing a toothbrush in a cellophane wrapper and handing it to Judy. "Tortoises don't reach sexual maturity until relatively late. Some of them can be in their fourth or fifth decade before they're ready to lay eggs, you know? They don't know when I'll start, but I'm only thirty-two, so I've got lots of time." She smiled a little, shrugged. "This was more like... well, the doctor called it magical puberty. I've had my powers since I was born, but they tend to evolve some as I grow older. Last year they grew a lot and it took awhile for me to control them. I kept falling into my shell, or being green all over when I didn't want to be, and a couple times I actually turned into a tortoise and had to figure out how to change back. It was kind of crazy!"
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"Oh, that sucks," Danica said sympathetically. "Not having to eat food is cool, but not being able to eat it is a drag. But maybe when your body finishes recalibrating, you'll be able to taste the radiation and stuff? One of my teachers told me that humans can taste stuff because it helps us know what's good for us and what isn't. So maybe you'll start to like the kinds of radiation that are good for you, or learn to, like, mix different kinds together in a recipe?" She rummaged around a little more in her shell. "I think I might have a toothbrush in here if you want one."
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"Oh, yeah," Danica said, automatically glancing down at the little that must be visible under the door. "I don't usually wear it around in the buildings because I bump into things, but I keep all my stuff there! Did you develop an allergy?" she asked sympathetically, crouching to rest on the tripod of her feet and shell. "That happened to my roommate before she went into the chrysalis, all she could eat was milkweed and she said it tasted super-terrible. The doctor thinks she'll grow out of it when she finishes pupating though!" she added, obviously hoping to cheer Judy with this news. "Sometimes powers do weird things. I couldn't go to class for like half of last year because of-" She unconsciously dropped her voice a little. "Puberty."
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"Oh, yeah, sure!" Danica quickly manifested her shell, which hit the floor with a soft thud as she disappeared inside it. A moment later she was back with a full-size box of Kleenex and a little bottle of water. She passed both of them carefully under the door, moving cautiously to avoid running into anything in the narrow room. "Is that you, Judy? It's Danica," she added belatedly, as though the enormous shell hadn't given her away. "Do you need the nurse? There's one on call even at night, in case anybody gets sick."
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It wasn't more than a minute later when the outer door to the bathroom creaked open again and soft, slow footsteps pattered in. The new arrival was singing softly under her breath, obviously not aware she wasn't alone in the bathroom. "Hold it now and watch the hoodwink, as I make you stop think, you think you're looking at apple-man! Summon fish to the dish- hello?" she asked suddenly, pausing outside the closed stall door. "Sorry, didn't know somebody was in here." She hesitated a second longer, maybe smelling vomit, or sensing distress, or having a precognitive episode, so many possibilities in a school like this! "Um, are you okay in there?"
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Footsteps came from down the hall, or at least they seemed like footsteps, extremely slow and deliberate ones. Step... step... step... Finally a small figure rounded the corner and came into view: Danica, wearing a Claremont uniform that was mostly obscured by her shell, her hair pulled neatly back in a half-ponytail. She was on foot for once, and every step seemed to take twice as long as a normal person. "Hi guys!" she called cheerfully. "Sorry I'm late! I picked up a rock in my wheel after lunch and had to go to the maintenance shed! It took forever! I was going to call, but I didn't have anybody's number yet. We should fix that if we're going to be working as a team, right?" By the time she finished she had almost, but not quite, reached everybody else.
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"Yeah, okay, but only if there's no clowns," Danica agreed with a shudder. "I saw that horror show with the clown on TV when I was little and I had nightmares for pretty much ever. My parents wouldn't take me to the circus anyway because they're cruel to animals but I didn't even want to go because of the clowns. And have you ever seen Dumbo? That was messed up." She shook her head gravely. "But I've got a whole bag of quarters in my shell for the laundry room and vending machines, so maybe sometime when we've got a free period." She slowed her segway, almost stopping. "But we might need more people, now that you've said clowns. I think you've probably jinxed us."
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"That's probably good," Danica decided, pursing her lips thoughtfully. "I mean, it kind of sucks because screw those guys, but if you're going to face the Terminus, you have to have a big team of powerful heroes or you'll just die, right? I remember last year they taught us in hero history about what Young Freedom did, and everybody knows about the Centurion..." She seemed thoughtful for a moment. "Maybe once you're done with school you can look for the Furions?" she offered. Looking over her shoulder, she smiled at Elizabeth. "Yeah, it's really good!" she enthused. "They've got like ten kinds of cereal and an ice cream freezer for desserts, and there's always a salad bar and a sandwich bar if you don't like whatever they're serving hot, and on Mondays and Fridays you can get made-to-order hamburgers! Lots of metahumans have really fast metabolisms, so you can take as much as you want, but you're not supposed to take any out of the cafeteria. People still do," she added, "but you've gotta be sneaky about it."
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"Abby can do lots of things, she's cool!" Danica said with loyal pride. "Come on, you guys should see the cafeteria! They're probably not serving again til dinner, but there'll be snacks!" She turned her Segway in a tight circle on the pavement. "You come too, Abby, you can help tell them all the stuff I forget." As the little group rearranged itself, she asked Abby quietly, "How was your summer? Were things, ah, okay?"
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"I'm not very good at arcade games," Danica admitted, lifting one hand from the handlebar to flex stubby fingers. "I'm just not very fast! I'm better at strategy and worldbuilding stuff. But I can win crane games," she confided. "I spent like four whole years figuring out how to do it. Some of the games are just rigged and nobody can win, but I win a lot! Have you heard the story about how there's supposed to be an old Street Fighter machine down in the basement of the library behind the periodicals stacks?" she asked, switching gears without a pause. "I hate going down there because it's really spooky and the aisles are so narrow so I never checked it out, but I heard some seniors talking about it last year."
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"Abby!" Danica caroled happily, tilting her Segway into a running pace as she zoomed towards the newcomer. Abby was tall enough that Danica did not have to disembark to give her a hug. ""Wow, I haven't seen you all summer! Did you have fun? What did you do?" Beaming, she half-turned to show off Abby to all her new friends. "Guys, this is Abby, she is my friend all the way back from Nicholson, and this year we're in the same grade and everything! Abby, this is Elizabeth and Pan and Jack, they're new! I'm taking them to see the place."
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"Okay, good," Danica said with a grin. "In that case, I love pizza! And we should drop by the cafeteria just to see all the people we didn't see all summer! I remember last year they had the make your own banana split station too, that was great." While her roommate hung the posters, Danica had busied herself putting away her books, very slowly and deliberately, onto the shelf of her new desk. "There are a lot of differences between tortoises and turtles, but the main one is that tortoises don't go in the water much. Feet instead of flippers, you know?" She grinned, wiggling her own sneakered feet. "But you can fly and you're nice and you know that tortoises and turtles are different. I think this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship!"
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"Oh yeah," Danica agreed, grinning as she spread some of her own posters out on her desk. They looked to be mostly nature photograpy, except for one of Harry Potter's golden trio and another for an old cartoon called CatDog. "I guess if you can fly you don't have to be tall! Here, you can use some of my tickytack if you want, so you don't get yelled at for damaging the walls," she offered, and produced an egg-sized lump of grayish-white mounting putty. "And pizza sounds good, so long as you didn't suggest it just so you can make ninja turtle jokes." From the aggrieved tone in her voice, it would not be the first time, nor maybe even the tenth.
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"No, that was the heaviest I've got, but thanks!" Danica looked around the cozy little interdimensional room and obviously decided she had everything she needed for the moment. "I keep a lot of my stuff in this room instead of the dorm room because it's just easier when I go home to have most of my clothes with me. My parents moved to town when I started at Nicholson," she explained, sounding as though she hoped she wasn't poking any painful areas. "I go home a lot of weekends unless I have too much homework." She cocked her head thoughtfully. "I wonder if we could find somebody tall in our hallway to hang up posters for us. Do you know anybody tall?"
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"Yeah, it's a shell," Danica agreed, looking a little bashful at Pan's enthusiasm. The shell shimmered back into existence, much easier to see this time, and large enough to cover Danica's back from neck to knees and elbow to elbow. "It's a radiated tortoise shell, they're my favorite," she explained. "I'm pretty tough without it, but when I'm inside it there isn't much that can hurt me. But I still don't think I want to fly that way," she added with a laugh. "Sounds like a bumpy ride!" Summoning her shell had changed the look of the rest of Danica a little as well, her skin had gone a more grayish green and looked almost leathery, and her eyes were suddenly bigger and darker than they'd been. Turning her Segway abruptly, she led the way down the sidewalk to the large rectangle. "And here's the gym!" she announced with a flourish. "You can go in and look around if you want, there's gonna be a big gym orientation thing later in the week to tell you all the rules and show you how to use things and stuff."
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"Pfft," Danica said, dismissing the possibility out of hand. "Everybody should get a chance to see their family more than once a year," she insisted. "And I'm sure the PTA metahuman parents will agree. Besides, for teleporters it hardly takes any time at all to get anywhere!" she added. "Maybe if we can find a student teleporter, they'll get extra credit!" She went to one section of the wall and opened a closet that may or may not have been there a moment ago, then pulled out a box filled with knit scarves and hats. It went out the door too, though with a little more care. She headed for a box of books next, but it was obviously a little above her weight class, to judge by the way she was trying in vain to budge it.
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Danica's eyes went huge and sad at the idea of being so far away from one's family for too long. "That's terrible!" she said with great feeling, "I'm so sorry! You should find, like, a teleporter or somebody who can send you home for weekends so you can see your family! There's got to be somebody!" She picked up another stuffed animal, a teddy bear the vivid green of electrolyte sports drink, and visibly considered giving it to Selena before deciding that the gesture probably wouldn't be appreciated by a near-adult. It went out the door as well. "I'll ask my mom," she decided. "She hasn't got any powers, but she knows all the teachers here and at Nicholson, and lots of the parents too. At the very least your parents need to be here for Parents Weekend!" She nodded firmly at her own resolution, then jotted it down as a note on the very pink, very glittery notebook on the bedside table. There was an image on the cover of three unicorns with big eyes and sparkling manes running across a rainbow over a multicolored lake. It was very... bright. "How old are your siblings?"
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"That sounds fun!" Danica agreed, scooping up a box of clothes and shoving it into the shadowed part of the room that was the doorway. It disappeared, and a distant thudding sound indicated that it had probably fallen off the bed in the dorm room. "This is not a very exciting dimensional pocket," she admitted, "it only goes to the time and place where my shell is, but it's useful and cozy! And people can only come in when I let them, so it's safe, too." She picked up a stuffed rabbit and gave it an absentminded hug, then threw it out the door as well. "Puerto Rico is really far away," she observed. "Did your family move up here with you?"
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"No, Mr. Eldritch said this is a dimensional pocket world, that when I come in here I'm not actually on Earth Prime anymore, just very close to it," Danica explained. "But look, I have four kinds of solitaire and Snake on my phone, plus downloaded books on my Kindle so I won't get bored. Do you have Mario on your computer?" she asked. "Mom and Dad had a Nintendo when I was little and then I got a Nintendo 64, but when I asked for a Gamecube my mom told me I was playing too many video games and I should go outside." She sighed. "But some of my friends at Nicholson had Playstation 3 or 4 and they were so amazing! But I like Sim City and The Sims, and Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego, and Pokemon, and Little Big Planet, all kinds of games," she added earnestly.
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The feeling was very much like crawling into a small tent, except that when the darkness lifted, Selena found herself in a little round room, perhaps fifteen feet in diameter, with a rounded eight-foot ceiling. There was a twin bed with a cozy-looking green duvet, a well-filled bookcase with an overstuffed beanbag next to it, a small dresser with a television on top, and a pile of moving boxes, garment bags and rolled-up posters. The whole thing was lit a soft gold by a three-stem floor lamp next to the bed. Danica, sitting on the bed and thumbing through her phone, looked up and grinned at Selena. "See, this is my sleeping room! It's always nice and quiet and dark when I need it to be. Can you teach me how to play video games?"
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"It's magic!" Danica informed her happily, climbing back onto the bed. Everything she did was at about half what might be considered a normal pace, but that did make some sense given the whole shell thing. "I'm the living avatar of a tortoise deity so old it doesn't have a name, so I have tortoise powers! You can come in, if you want." She crawled back into the shell and disappeared once more. If Selina looked into the opening in the shell, it did indeed seem big enough for a grown person to climb through, though there seemed to only be darkness underneath the shell's overhang.
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"Oh no, don't even worry about that!" Danica assured her, finally managing to wedge the dresser where she wanted it. With the desk chair for an assist, she cliimbed ever so slowly onto the bed, laying down flat on her stomach on the bare mattress. Nothing happened for a moment, then suddenly a huge shell materialized around her. It was mostly black, but shot through with starburst patterns of brilliant yellow, with a high, nearly semi-circular dome. It started the size of a large camping backpack, but grew bigger and bigger, till it was the size of a large pup tent and Danica was completely invisible inside of it. Then, improbably, she wriggled out of the back end and down onto the floor again, a box of schoolbooks suddenly clutched in her arms. "I usually go in my shell to sleep, so i won't notice a thing." She began to pack the books into the drawers of her desk. "I've never been to Puerto Rico, but I'd love to go someday. I hear it's really ecologically interesting! Have you ever seen the Yellow-footed Tortoise there? They are gorgeous!"
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"Um, not really, I mean I hope you're okay with heat because I have to have it warm in the room all the time," Danica ventured. Indeed, it was already noticeably warmer in the room than the hallway. "Lisa was fine with it because she was really sensitive to cold too, so in the winter sometimes we'd have it at ninety in here and the windows would get all foggy, but really eighty is okay." Danica did something with the posts on her bed, fiddling until each one made a clicking noise, then pushing the bedframe up a few inches so that the entire mattress was a bit higher off the floor. "You can adjust your bed to whatever height you want, down low or lofted so you can put all your stuff under it or whatever. Oh, and I'd like to have the left hand closet if that's okay because I stuck a bunch of stickyback hooks in there last year and never took them down." With her bed raised to about four feet in the air, Danica proceeded, extremely slowly, to begin shoving her dresser underneath it. She didn't seem to have anything to put in it, or indeed any luggage at all, but she obviously had a furniture plan in mind. "So where are you from?"
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When Danica had first come to Claremont as a freshman, her parents hadn't been thrilled to see that her dorm room assignment was on the third floor. Given the length of time it took their daughter to climb a flight of stairs, it seemed likely she'd spend most of her first year of high school just trying to get in and out of her building. They were quickly reassured that Danica's room was right next to the elevator, which was more than big enough to accommodate her and her Segway in shelled or unshelled form. In the unlikely event of an emergency that shut down the elevator, she would be teleported to safely by campus security. Danica herself loved living on the third floor, it was just high enough to give her a good view of the campus and just low enough that she really could take the stairs if she needed to. This was her third year in this same dorm room and she was very used to it by now. Disembarking from the elevator, she parked her Segway next to the door of her room and walked in. As she'd kind of expected, her new roommate was already there, poring over the contents of her moving boxes. Danica's side of the room was completely empty except for the school-issued dresser, desk and bed, bare mattress and all. "Hi!" she told her roommate, walking very slowly into the room and sitting down on the edge of her mattress. "You're Selena, right? It was kind of crazy busy down there earlier."
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When Elizabeth poked her finger at Danica, she made it within about six inches of the other girl's arm before her finger sort of... bounced. Not painfully or anything, just as though Elizabeth had poked something both firm and invisible. For a moment the air around Danica wavered and a large dome was suddenly covering her, tall and round in the back, broad and flat over her front. It was definitely a tortoise shell, black with vivid gold starburst pattens running all over it. As soon as Elizabeth withdrew her hand, the image disappeared. "Whoops!" said Danica, just as cheerful as before. "I usually have control over that, but sometimes it pops up when I'm surprised. Anyway," she confided with a grin. "I definitely cannot fly." She wheeled onwards in the direction of a large square building, obviously considerably newer than the buildings at the front of the campus.