Electra

Erin's initiative is 26

In a heartbeat, Erin was on her feet and lifting her radio. "Aliens on the roof, not the good guys. Armed with guns. I'm moving to intercept." Dropping the radio, she picked up Edge bodily and leapt with him up onto the roof, putting an HVAC unit between them and the alien contingent. "Sorry," she muttered belatedly. "Guess we pissed him off." She spun her bat back out to full size. "You ready?"

"Just being right isn't always good enough," Erin agreed ruefully."And if you're dead, it doesn't really matter if you're right. Do you think the simulation is supposed to be over now? I mean, Paris is probably not going to end up burning, now that we're a few thousand miles away. I thought we were supposed to be learning to link up our powers, but this wouldn't be the first time he's psyched me out." Even though Erin knew Archer was surely listening, she didn't mind talking in front of him. She was sure he already knew how she felt about his training techniques.

Erin had moved past keyed-up to bored during the round of negotiations , and now sat on the grass outside the installation with a radio in her lap, watching the sky. She looked over as Edge stepped out to join her, then back up. "Do you really believe those things you say?" she asked, with more curiosity than antagonism. "When you're giving those inspiring speeches. Do you mean it, or is it just to make people feel better and fight better?"

She shook her head, reaching for her wineglass as she studied him. "They don't hurt," she told him honestly, "and waiting in the sun has almost gotten rid of them anyway. I could've just kicked him when he showed up, except I'd probably have just broken my foot." Stesha paused a moment and sipped her wine, watching him. "I guess you can't change back for awhile, now that you're like this?" she asked. "You never even got to finish your cupcake."

"Uh, great," Erin said, keeping her eyes on the approaching UFO. "I hope they've got something that can take out a good-sized spaceship, or our fake Freedom City is going to be blown into little computerized smithereens. Even my new little stick thing isn't going to take out this destroyer thing, and it doesn't look like it's ready to stop anytime soon. You got any ideas on where we're supposed to go from here?"

"Yeah, I guess..." Erin said dubiously, jumping up into the observation bubble. "Don't mind me," she told the alien sitting up there in English, "just looking for Satan, I guess. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing anymore." With a broad fakey grin, she bent her head to look into the telescope, trying to focus it on anything that looked very destructive. She wished something would just attack them already. She was probably supposed to feel like that, she realized, because Mr. Archer loved to do that to her, get her all wound up and then send in the bad guys. He was an old-school sadist. At least in big group training, he rarely picked on her individually anymore.

"This is not really the kind of training I was hoping for," Erin muttered, rubbing her forehead with one hand. "I mean, you and Psyche should be handling this kind of thing. I thought we were just fighting bad guys. Can you tell them I need to call my leader so she can come to meet with them over... over the Great Mother Ocean?" she improvised. "It's the best place for meetings to be held. If we can summon the League, get them locked onto us, we can get out of the ship and let the experienced types handle it, so we don't become hostages or provoke, I dunno, an interstellar incident." She jerked her shoulders in an irritable shrug. "Otherwise we just start beating on them and take the risk of flunking the exercise. What do you think?"

Stesha was sitting on the blanket and waiting for him, her arms wrapped around her calves and her chin on her knees. She'd poured herself another glass of wine, but hadn't touched it yet. The armor was nowhere in sight. Dark Star's sudden reappearance startled her for a moment, till she saw it was him and relaxed. Since nobody else was looking their way, she assumed he had some kind of invisibility thing going. "Hey," she replied with a small smile. "Nice job there. I can't believe he tracked me down again. I was sure he'd at least do jail time for breaking into the shop last month." It was strange not being able to see Derrick's face, she decided. Looking into a black, head-shaped void, even one with the same voice, was a little bit unsettling, as was knowing that if she reached out, there wouldn't be anything there to touch. "Thanks for taking him down for me. I'm glad not to have another batch of bee stings."

"I'll be all right, sir," Stesha told him, hamming it up a little. She was all but fluttering her eyelashes at Dark Star, the picture of a rescued bystander all of a sudden. "I'll make sure that no one comes and takes this horrible mess of instruments for evil purposes. And you can tell the police I'll be happy to testify against this villain whenever they'd like!" She gave the Beekeeper another glare, and the armor another little kick, for good measure.

"We don't want them over Freedom City," Wander pointed out. "Over the Atlantic somewhere would be better, less targets to worry about. But it could mean some swimming." She looked around at the sparkly ship, trying to assess how strong those decoratively painted bulkheads were. "Is it any kind of religion you recognize, or something unique they came up with? And can we get access to their radio so we can contact our leader?"

Erin dropped back to walk next to Edge as they entered the ship. "It might be a test," she murmured. "Archer loves them. We could flunk if we fight when we shouldn't. If we can get in touch with the Freedom League, they might take the problem off our hands. How are you at falling into water?"

Erin looked around at the civilians nearby, the historic monument in the background, the dense city all around them. "We can take you to our leader," she told the first alien, "but not here. We can show you where to go to get in touch with the Freedom League, if you take us on your ship." She looked to Edge for backup.

Erin ran a hand over her hair, looking about as uncomfortable as Mike felt. "Yeah, I'm sorry too, I shouldn't have said anything about your issues when I've got my own to figure out. If and when we get back, maybe we can do better. But if it's robots... well, we're both good at robots." She shrugged, not really able to think of anything else to say about that. "Anyway, the faster we get this done, the less likely anyone in the other group is to get hurt. You ready?" She nodded towards the door of the submarine thing.

"Go, go!' Wander told him, breaking into a run that was right at the limits of her partner's foot speed. She ran up to the ramp that the aliens were descending, blocking the ramp with her body. "You're not allowed here!" she told the creatures, her bat held ready. "If you're not hostile, leave immediately and contact the Freedom League from your ship. Otherwise, we'll make you leave." She didn't like having to stop and talk, but she knew Archer was watching somewhere.

"At least petty thugs sometimes get the wallet," Stesha snapped, giving the armor a little kick with her toes. "You can't even pick on someone your own size, or without your stupid Tinkertoy armor. And you've got no right to talk about your stupid bees, after what you did to that poor tree! Maybe this time you'll stay in jail where you belong, and not go out menacing people! Why can't you just get a real job?" She was still hugging herself, but now she at least looked more pissed than panicked.

She nodded and boosted him onto her back, then began leaping across the rooftops towards the park, keeping an eye on the saucer. "Neither of us can fly," she pointed out, "so something's going to have to land out of that ship, or the disc itself will have to come down. We should stay close to each other, and try and get onto the ship if it comes down. If they've got guns, try and stay behind me, and use that "everything goes crazy" trick to try and disarm them." Her last long leap took them into the park itself, and a quick jog had them over to the field where the saucer was descending. Wander set down her passenger and twirled the bat back to its full size again, holding it in both hands while she watched the ship come down.

Wander took the bat and played with it for a minute, collapsing it down to pocket-sized, then expanding it to nearly five feet in length, more like a staff than a bat. "It feels weird," she commented, taking a few practice swings with it. Setting it aside for a moment, she looked at the specs on the instruction sheet. "Huh, it's padded, or something like that. It's got shock absorbers, so I can hit harder and do less permanent damage." She snorted. "That's good, I guess. Won't kill any simulated bad guys today." She practiced with it for a few minutes, fighting invisible enemies while Edge did his exercises, then collapsed it again. "That's enough for now. You ready?"

Erin shook her head. "It doesn't sound familiar. And I don't think you can eat the food here, but I've never actually tried. It's not as fun as the ones on Star Trek." She did a couple of lunges to stretch her muscles, then launched into a more acrobatic warm-up, leaping up to flip over the bars of the fire escapes like a gymnast on uneven bars, tumbling through the space between the buildings and catching on to bits of masonry or windowsills where the ladders and platforms didn't reach. When she got to the roof, she leapt as high as she could and dove back to the roof with a bone-jarring thud, aiming her heels first as though going for someone's head. Since the simulation wasn't active yet, she didn't plunge through the ceiling or anything, but it made quite a loud noise. With the first wave of nervous tension taken care of, she sat on the edge of the roof and looked through her instructions. "Hey, I'm supposed to have equipment for this one," she called down. "Do you see it where we came in? Some kind of stick or bat, it looks like."

Erin's eyebrows went up at that. "I didn't think that was even possible. I've done some pretty serious attacks in that room and never had anything happen. Maybe you can do that again today, and we'll get out of a couple hours of training." With a wry smile, she detoured into the changing room to put on her workout uniform, clipping her hair back and stashing her books in her locker. The simulation was waiting for them in standby mode when she reached the simulator, so she simply walked in.

Erin shrugged. "I don't do weight warm-ups, but I get the drift. We've all got stuff we can and can't do. I don't have any actual powers like you do," she pointed out. "My body just works really well. If we can get some kind of link worked out, the way we've been sort of doing in fights, with your powers and my skills, it could be really useful. I guess that's what this training series is all about." She rolled her neck. "I hate fighting in the doom room, but it beats having to do it in real life." She headed down to the main lobby, towards the brushed-metal elevator. "Have you done much there yet?"

Erin was walking while reading a review of the timeline of World War II for her afternoon history class, but she looked up and closed the book when Mark approached. "Yeah, I gotta do twenty minutes of warm-up first, so you don't have to come down for that unless you want to. I don't know if you do warm-ups or not." She was a little skeptical of the idea, for all his healthy good looks, Mark wasn't exactly the most physical of heroes when he was working. Did he need to warm up luckiness somehow? She shoved the book into her knapsack and slung it over her shoulder. "Do you know if we're self-directed today, or is Archer going to be there?"

Erin nodded at Mike's words, most of her attention still on the activity in the city. A lot of people here moved like she did, with one eye and one eat open all the time, alert for trouble. It was hard to think that wasn't justified. "Tell them to be careful," she murmured to Mike. "There's no point in them killing themselves when we can get the parts we need here to bring them back. None of them can take a hit like you or I can, so if they've got robots and tanks on that base..." She trailed off, looking nervous. "What's the fastest way to the river?" she asked Lilith.

Although Stesha wasn't sure she liked all the handsiness, or at least wasn't sure whether she was entirely comfortable with it, the reminder of the difference in their ages helped. Her Grandpa Madison was a little bit like that as well, always patting backs and squeezing hands and, if they didn't watch him in restaurants and stores, occasionally pinching bottoms as well. After a man got to a certain age, that sort of thing was more easily tolerated, it was just that in this case, the great-grandfather type still looked like he was her age, and very attractive to boot. Besides the hand squeezing though, he'd been nothing but perfectly polite and kind, so she'd give him the grandpa-caliber benefit of the doubt for the moment. If he pinched her bottom, they'd have a problem, but somehow she didn't see her suave host doing anything like that. If he wanted a bottom to pinch, he didn't need to surprise an unsuspecting passer-by! "I've gotten a chance to meet a lot more heroes than I thought I would, just in my few months here," she told him. "Most of them do a lot bigger work than I do, but they still try to hang onto a normal life when they're not busy working. And I can understand that, I think. Doing hero work can get exhausting, and frightening. But it's exciting, too. Are you looking for the peace and quiet and the normal life now that you're back here in Freedom City?" she asked with genuine curiosity. "Or is it too hard to give up the excitement?"

"Let's do a roller coaster first, if you want something fast," Erin suggested, taking her pile of things to the register. "Then the tilt-a-whirl before we eat anything, definitely. One time..." She cut herself off, regrouped, and went on. "It can get really nasty if you don't have a strong enough stomach. Only thing worse than cotton candy on a hot day is cotton candy twice." She waited while her items were rung up, then handed over her card. After giving the receipt a careful study, she shoved it and the card back into the pocket of her jeans, thanked the cashier, and picked up her bag. "I just need a locker for this, I think there are some right outside."