Electra

"Definitely quieter out there," she agreed as the elevator rose silently. "More like what I grew up with, too, except everything's closer together. It takes awhile to get used to all the noise in the middle of the city. What do your folks do?" she asked suddenly. As they talked, she worried at one of the green hat jewels with her fingers, till she realized what she was doing and shoved the hat into her pocket.

"Sounds good to me," Erin agreed, tugging off her baseball cap as they walked out of the room and into the silent hallway. For once neither of them had worked up much of a sweat during Doom Room training, so they bypassed the locker rooms and headed for the elevator. "I've never really been out that way except at Alex's party," she commented idly. "It seems like a nice neighborhood."

Erin raised both her eyebrows as she looked at the container. "Fission reaction? Isn't that like what they had in the bomb that nuked Hiroshima?" she asked, sliding out to drop down from the shelves. "I'm not sure things like that are just supposed to sit in a storage room for a few decades and then go back into use," she pointed out dubiously. "It sounds like you could melt down your grandpa's house."

After looking around at the paused scene, Erin smiled ruefully. "It might be fun to try and get in a whole game sometime, maybe by averting the fight, but I think the sportsmanlike attitude here is pretty shot. We'll just call it a win for the blue team, since the yellow guys started it." She touched the "No" option, then brushed aside the screen of performance assessments that cropped up. The scene faded to a plain black room once again. "Where do you want to go?"

"Uh-huh..." A few months of day-to-day living with Alex had taught Erin a couple of things about her roommate. Alex always talked like someone about ten years older than she actually was, but when she veered off into the truly didactic, it was usually because she didn't want to talk about something and didn't want to admit to not wanting to talk about it. Erin could respect that, even if she didn't always even understand what Alex was going on about when she got like that. "So what do we need the coil for, anyway?"

Erin jumped out of the stands and bounced down to the field just as the reverberations were settling. The players were scattered like bowling pins, looking like they didn't have a lot of fight left in them. "Nicely done," she complimented, looking around at the quiet. "That clapping thing really works." As the players were starting to pick themselves up, suddenly the entire scene came to a halt. A glowing screen appeared in front of them, reading "Continue Simulation, yes/no?" "That's probably the normal endpoint," Erin guessed, "if someone was doing it for training. We are still up by three."

As Mike restrained the two yellow-team players, the rest of the yellow team took offense and began piling on as well. They couldn't do a thing to actually hurt him, except maybe for the guy he already had bear-hugged, but it wasn't doing much to restore calm. The blue team, loyal teammates all, came to his defense, with the speedster and the beefy-armed catcher doing their part to help pry apart the warring factions. The umpire wasn't much good, he was still standing behind home plate and looking kind of dazed. Up in the stands, without the superpowers to deal with, Erin was having slightly better luck at calming the masses. A little shake here and there, a few intimidating looks, and a lot of the spectators were willing to return to their seats. She only had to lift one guy above her head and threaten to throw him out bodily before he and his friends were ready to calm down. She glanced down at the action on the field. "Are you okay?" she called. Erin knew Mike could handle the situation with no harm to himself, but he might be stuck there for awhile, since he was always so careful with his strength.

Some of the color came back into Erin's face as Alex passed along her emotional stability. Deliberately turning away from the oncoming crowd, she grabbed the bench and the other trash can that had stood beside it, ripping them from their moorings as she leapt into the sky. At the apex of her leap, she threw first one, then the other at the cluster of figures, each with the precision of a bullet flying from a gun. The fight had to be over before whatever Alex was doing wore off, she knew, but at least for now, the idea didn't bother her. She touched back down near Geckoman, looking up at the tower for changes.

Erin does another move action leap, straight up, for the move-by attack, and continues to hurl the scenery at the bad guys. First attack (bench): All out power attack, ranged, inspired: 1d20+11=24 Spend HP to surge for another throw at the top of the leap. Second attack (can): Another all-out power attack, ranged, inspired. Not so good, but my good friend Edge is blowing an HP on her behalf. Second roll is a 26. Erin's defense is now at +5.

"Help me put it on?" she asked, giving him the box, then turning and drawing up her long braid so he could fasten it around her neck. "I got you a little present too, but I forgot to bring it with me," she confessed. "I'll give it to you when we get home. It's just a little something I found, but I hope you'll like it. This is just gorgeous. I'm going to have to get a dress just to match it. Where did you find it?"

"He seemed pretty happy to be down here today," Erin observed, tossing a couple of odds and ends down from the high shelves to Alex. "Maybe now that you're taking up the hero thing, he'll start up on it all again. What do your parents think about all of it?" she asked, pausing again to look at a device that, against all odds, still had a glowing energy light on it after all this time. Curious, she pressed the button, and was rewarded with a substantial shock. She jolted, then set the thing aside, shaking out her hand and arm.

Stesha chuckled. "You're more than welcome," she replied, nearly as formally. "Anything to help out a fellow hero in a time of need. Why don't you stop by when you're done with your errand? We can, ah, debrief, and stuff." Despite the situation, she couldn't help but crack up at her own terrible pun. "My roommate's likely to be gone all night, after this, so we'll have the place to ourselves. I'll make dinner."

Flying through the air was a great way to reorient one's priorities, and suddenly Erin was back on task. She executed a neat mid-air tumble and landed right in the thick of the brawl. It was a sea of chaos, but no one here could begin to harm her, so it was easy to keep her cool and focus on breaking things up. Pulling people off each other as she went, she worked her way to the middle of the fight and picked up a yellow supporter and a blue supporter by the scruffs, one in each hand. "That's enough!" she yelled at the top of her lungs, doing her best to project authority and intimidation. "You're a bunch of adults! Do we have to separate all of you?"

Erin leaned away reflexively when the device opened, having learned a healthy respect for super-gadgets in her travels. "Why doesn't he still do it?" she asked. "I think there are still heroes out there using bow and arrow, even, and practically every hero has a couple of little trick devices. If he could make them, he'd probably be in big demand, right?" She set the binoculars aside and shinnied up the side of one of the shelving units, attacking it with a rag as she went.

Erin took a deep breath, angling her head to look back at him as he picked her up. Maybe if this were just training and the word "date" had never even come up, she wouldn't have the weird fluttering sensation in her stomach from having his hands on her. It was just an exercise, it didn't mean anything more than that. Even so, she had to swallow quickly before she said "Okay, ready when you are."

Erin looked from Mike to the crowd and back again. Unarmed civilian fights weren't necessarily her cup of tea, but she'd learned a few tricks over the summer. And hey, he seemed pretty relaxed, and they were doing an activity together, and it wasn't totally and irretrievably awkward. Not too bad. She took his hand. "Okay, what have you got in mind?"

The yellow crowd was up on its feet and screaming as the ball shot across the field. Erin took a few quick steps back and dove for the ball, tumbling across the grass a couple of times before coming up with it in her hand. "OUT!" the umpire called. Now the blue stands were on their feet as well, cheering while the yellow team booed. From the field, it was hard to tell who started it, but suddenly the two sides of the stands were bleeding into each other, yelling, swearing, and hitting. Erin hurried to the mound, still holding the ball. "Guess the description meant "very top of the fourth. Want to try and break it up? We could fool with the simulation and see if we can turn the fight off."

Erin and the other blue players were quick to express their disapproval of these very unsportmanlike tactics, along with the blue-supporting side of the crowd. The umpire just shrugged, though, even as the yellow players howled with laughter. The situation didn't get any better when the hapless second batter went up to bat and got hit with three quick strikes in succession, ending the inning with loaded bases. Both sides of the crowd were on their feet and yelling now, mostly at each other, but some for the umpire as well. "Rowdy crowd," Erin said with a grimace as she met up with Mike near second base. "You wanna try pitching this time?"

Erin nodded at that, digging around until she found a couple of empty cartons to start loading things into. She was a very, very fast cleaner, if not a totally precise one, moving far faster than a normal person as she began taking things down off the shelves and wiping away a few decades of dust. She stopped for a moment to play with a pair of binoculars she found, holding them to her eyes and pointing them Alex's way. "So all this stuff was your mom's and your grandpa's, and it's just been sitting here?"

"I guess some people can do both, but I don't see why anybody would," Erin replied, leaning forward as another batter managed to get on base, by the skin of his teeth. The leering batter who'd nearly clocked her was pitching this round, and throwing some pretty wild stuff. "If you can be a hero and do that for a living, what else could you be doing that would be more important? Maybe we got our powers by accident or mistake, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be using them like they're there for a reason." She hissed out a breath as yet another batter struck out. "Okay, two out and two on. You're up, good luck."

"It's okay, she said, equally uncomfortably. "I, ah, don't know what all Alex told you already. It's just not something I usually talk about. It depresses me, then it depresses everybody around me." She tugged on her baseball cap, then gratefully took the offered change of subject. "I guess I'll probably join the Freedom League, if I can get on. See some of the world outside America, do full-time hero stuff and disaster relief. I haven't really got a lot of other skills unless I want to start my own truckless moving company. What about you?"

Erin narrowed her eyes, looking over at him. Given how close Alex and Mike were, and how much Alex liked to talk about Mike, she'd sort of assumed that Alex had shared some privileged information about her with Mike in return. But maybe not, or maybe he was just sort of dense. That sort of made it awkward to talk about. It really wasn't even very pleasant to think about, but for once she tried to refrain from biting someone's head off over it. "Being normal was better," she told him. "They were useful, but after awhile, I'd have given them up if I could. I'd have died like everybody else, but whatever, you know?" She jerked her shoulders in an abrupt shrug. "I like it here because at least I can do something useful with them, as soon as I finish figuring them out."

Once upon a time, Erin had had pretty well-honed ducking reflexes, but those days were long gone now. Shooting up her ungloved right hand, she caught the ball inches from her face and winged it to third. "That was rude!" she yelled to the batter. "It was an accident!" he sneered back, "just like beaning the batter!" The exchange resulted in some catcalls between the audience members as well. The crowd seemed to be getting a little restless. Shaking her stinging hand, Erin headed back to the dugout with Mike and the others. "Guess they're trying to build up to the fight," she murmured to Mike as they took their seats again. "Maybe you should give pitching a try next inning. You've got a good arm."

"That's the plan." She took the mound again and managed two outs before another batter hit off her, this one a regular-looking but obviously very brave member of the yellow team who managed to hit the ball just past third base for a single. A little rattled, Erin tried to vary up her pitching and wound up beaning the next batter. That would've been very bad, except some sort of invisible shield deflected the ball, sending it ricocheting almost all the way back out to the mound. The next batter, a guy about eight feet tall who made the bat look like a souvenir, caught the ball with the center of his back and sent it into a high pop fly over the infield. Three blue team players rushed to catch it.

Stesha caught her breath as she opened the little box, gaping a little. "Derrick, you shouldn't have," she murmured halfheartedly, even as she tilted the box to let the stone catch the light. "It's gorgeous. I've never seen anything quite like it." She ran her fingertips over the stone, absorbed for a moment in the sparkling facets. "It matches my hair," she added with a grin. "You don't need to buy me things, especially not after a weekend trip like this, but I love it anyway. Thank you." She leaned in and kissed him again, wrapping an arm around him.