Electra

Erin shrugged. "People say a lot of things about Edge, but even the Next-Gens say he's a nice guy. I don't really see him dropping you flat. But there's risk in everything, isn't there?" She gave Alex a look. "Unless the only reason you're really interested in Mike is because you don't believe there's any way he's ever going to hurt you or leave you. That's not much of a basis for spending your life with somebody," she offered challengingly.

"Maybe he's got hidden depths," Erin said dubiously. "Or maybe he's just a good kisser. But you don't have to get emotionally involved to let him kiss you." She smirked. "Think of it as just another lesson. I know how you like those. And maybe the reason Mike isn't getting jealous is because you haven't done anything so far. It's the oldest story in the book. He's all comfortable with you, till he sees you going out with someone else, then he realizes that he's got to come up to standards if he doesn't want you going off with some preppy guy. Maybe it'll hurry up the ten year plan, at least."

"If he's interested, why not take advantage of it?" Erin pointed out. "Maybe it'll be exciting. Don't you ever wonder what it'd be like? I mean, no offense to Mike or anything, but I don't see him getting a lot of romantic skills before you decide he's ready for you. One of you should have some experience, and is there going to be a better place and time to get it than when one of those snappy comeback, rooftop zipping types decides you're hot?" She rolled back up to a sitting position, reflexively dodging the pencil as it sped by. "It's not like just because you kiss him you have to marry him and have ten kids. But if you and Mike aren't even going to be dating for years, it's not like it's cheating."

Erin shrugged at that. "He's cute," she pointed out. "You could always just call him practice." She watched the pencil's lazy movements in the air as they talked. "Besides, you can't always be planning ten years down the road. What if something happens tomorrow and it all goes to hell? Someone could die, or the school could get blown up, or the government could collapse. At least if you live in the moment a little, you'll have some good memories. And if he's already had a girlfriend," she added, switching gears smoothly, "he probably knows how to kiss."

"Maybe, if by 'friendship' you mean 'kissing you until you fall down,'" Erin replied. "But having guys fighting over you is kind of cool. If you can get Mike more into the game, anyway. It'd be kinda like a movie." When Alex looked at her, Erin shrugged. "It's not like there's a lot going on here," she pointed out. "You have to take entertainment where you can get it." Time was ticking away in her history study period, but she'd make it up later that night. "But you know, you can't drive flowers. They don't do anything but sit there and die. Are your parents getting you a car?"

Erin laughed aloud at that idea. "Not unless you were sending it to Funniest Home Videos. Then we'd at least maybe win something. If anyone's going to do the flirting, it better be you. You've already got Mark chasing you and Mike... doing whatever it is Mike is doing. Maybe if you play Mark right, he'll win you a car in a lottery or something. It'd be better than getting flowers." She stretched out on the institutional carpet and paged through the book again. "Do they really think we don't know what stop signs look like?"

Erin blinked. "Did you say Summers is teaching the class? I didn't know he taught anything but seminars." She stared ahead and thought about that for a minute. "Jeez, can you imagine doing a driving unit with him? I don't know if we'd be going seventy miles an hour down back alleys, or spending five hours learning to parallel park. Could go either way." With a grimace, she paged through the book again. "Mark's already got his license, and I think Eddie does, too. Mike might take it, but I think we'd need a bigger car." She turned a few more pages in the book. "I wonder how much of this stuff we have to know before we can actually get out on the road. Think James would let us borrow his car to practice with?"

Erin thought about that. "The one with a driver?" she suggested. She sighed and slid out of the bunk to sit on the floor next to her roommate. "It can't be that hard. Stupid people learn to drive all the time. I've seen them on the roads outside the school." She picked up her copy of the book and looked through it. "Huh. Guess that person should've worn a safety belt." Resting the book on her knees, she looked over to Alex. "Who's teaching it?

Erin, who'd been holed up in her bunk with a history textbook, raised an eyebrow at the stack of books. "I still don't know how you sleep eight hours a night and do all that," she told Alex dryly. Crawling out from her bunk and unfolding herself, she looked at the book. "Driver's ed?" she asked. "You signed us both up?" She looked over to the chart on her wall, wondering where she was going to wedge that in. "I already know how to drive a car." She opened the book and turned it sideways on a long list of road signs that opened out like a centerfold.

"I dunno..." Stesha said, still sounding very dubious. She'd wanted to see the Starlight Room, which was both exclusive and expensive, but she still wasn't sure this was a good idea. Who knew what kind of guy Moira might try to set her up with? It was better just to say no right away, get all this nonsense out of her head. But it had been almost half a year since she'd had a date that had gone well... She sighed. "What's his name?"

Stesha gave Moira an exceedingly skeptical look, skeptical enough to have her even opening her eyes. "Not to put too fine a point on it, but the last time you set me up with a guy, the last thing I remember is being wrapped around a cedar tree on his front lawn. And I think I was singing. I'm not sure I'm brave enough to walk that road again."

Stesha snorted with laughter, nearly inhaling a faceful of sand. "Yes, I suppose I could see that in you," she replied drolly. "I keep meaning to get out to your pub, but I keep being so busy. Aside from He Who Will Not Be Named, I haven't even been on a date since I moved in here, and that's been, god, close to half a year. Between the hero work and being in a new place, there's just no time or opportunity. Is your bar the sort with a lot of guys who hit on single women?" She asked it half-hopefully.

Erin sputtered, wiping her face with her hands and spitting out the water that the cannonball had splashed up onto her. She ducked backwards into the water, wetting her hair evenly and slicking it back from her face. "You are an infant," she told James with mock-annoyance when she surfaced. "And you're lucky you didn't bruise your butt on the bottom of the shallow end." She waded over to the stairs and picked up a striped beach ball, tossing it like a volleyball and batting it towards the deep end of the pool.

"Yes," she teased, waving her fork in a little circle. "Any of those will work nicely. I went through a phase where I watched a ton of those space shows on the Discovery Channel, but I'm sure it's got to look very different when you see it all close up. What would you go back and see first, if you had to pick?"

Stesha laughed. "That doesn't answer very much, since you could be thirty or five hundred thirty as well. But I guess age is really just a number. I'd think you'd lose track after a certain point, anyway. Too many candles on the cake." She sampled her vegetables, closing her eyes to savor the delicate seasonings. "Mmmm. So," she continued, opening her eyes again, "what's the coolest thing you've ever seen, out there in the galaxy?"

"That seems like something that happens to a lot of heroes, at least from what I've read," Stesha commented. "It seems kind of nice, actually, never getting old or creaky." She grinned. "People probably start asking questions after awhile, I guess. But it's kind of nice that with everything heroes give up, some of them don't give up their youth." Stesha paused, mild consternation crossing her face. "You know, I don't think I've ever asked Moira how old she is. She could be my age, or she could be five hundred years old. That's sort of a strange thought. "

"No, no, it's okay," Stesha said, waving a hand. She took another sip of her wine. "It just surprised me, sort of. I'm not really used to people who, you know, look different than their age. It threw me off for a minute, that's all." They were both saved when the waiter came back with a different wine and their entrees, some kind of breaded chicken thing with spring vegetables in a ring around it. "Mmm, this looks great," Stesha said, perhaps just a little too enthusiastically. "The food here is really excellent."

Stesha blinked at him, taken aback. "You saw Ghostbusters in the theater?" she blurted out. "In the first run theater, in what, 1985?" Inwardly, she was doing a drastic reevaluation of Derrick's age. She'd sort of assumed he meant months or maybe a year when he said he'd been gone awhile. Could he have been gone for decades and come back looking the same?

"We have plenty of time," she pointed out, taking another sip of her soup. "It's still a long time till dessert, and you've done a lot of interesting things." Setting her spoon down, Stesha thought for a minute. Next to exploring the galaxy, her hobbies seemed a little tame. Godawful boring, in fact. "I like to garden, well, obviously. All indoor right now while I live in an apartment, but it's doing pretty well. And I like to watch movies." She smiled at that. "Especially old movies, black and white. That's one of the perks of not really needing to sleep, when you stay up late, you get to see all the neat old films." She nibbled her bottom lip thoughtfully. "I go out with my friends sometimes, to parties or to clubs. And doing this heroing stuff, well, it's almost like a hobby at the moment. I'm practicing and getting better, but it's still pretty much something I just do in my off-hours, because it makes me happy. Meeting people like you and Moira is really opening up a whole other world than the one I knew before. Sometimes I feel like I'm on the verge of everything changing, but in a good way."

Stesha smiled, a little embarrassed. "It was my fault, it was sort of a personal question. I sometimes don't think before I talk. But I won't let it put a damper on things if you won't." She turned the conversation then, heading for safer ground. "So what do you like to do in your free time? I know you mentioned that you don't spend a lot of time, you know, solid, but that must allow for interesting hobbies. Do you ever just cruise around the solar system to see what's going on out there?"

Erin swam over to the shallow end to keep out of the way of all the rowdy antics, and to avoid anyone trying to dunk her. She wasn't a particularly graceful swimmer, but she cut through the water very quickly. From the relative safety of four feet of water, she laughed at the ridiculous spectacle of Alex attempting to dunk the mountain of Mike, and Mark and James managing to dunk each other. "Are we going to need a lifeguard here?" she called over to them.

"So now what do we do?" Erin demanded. "We've got 'em, but we can't just stand here indefinitely. This girl's strong, and she's not going to stare at the pretty lights forever. Do we call the police, or call the school? Did they actually do anything wrong except having terrible ideas about what to do with Chris?" She firmed up her grip a little on Candy, turning her head to look mostly at Mark and Alex.

Erin purses her lips. What she's feeling isn't exactly grief, or at least not much more than usual. It's more along the lines of craven terror, but there doesn't seem to be any need to admit that. She's just got to figure out a way to overcome it. "Yeah," she says finally, her voice a little raw. "Let's get out of here. Maybe... maybe later we can go and actually try out those ideas." She steps through the portal, back to the peaceful, real world where her pile of books is still waiting.

"There's something there," Erin murmurs, her voice barely audible. She hugs her arms to her chest, still staring at the place where the portal was, now a blank white void. "Nothing should be there now. Something else came. After the people, after the zombies..." She trails off, goes quiet for a minute, then seems to shake herself back to reality. "I'm sorry," she tells him. "I just... I couldn't do it." Rubbing her face hard with one hand, she looks away from him as she makes that painful admission. "Not even to save them. God, I'm such a coward! But it's dangerous to go back. I lived, but I don't know if anyone else could."

Erin stares into the portal as the quicksilver slides across it like water, then clears away into a window. A small, tortured noise escapes her throat as she looks through the window to see the home she hasn't seen in two and a half years. It's not in very good shape. The weeds and grass in the yard are nearly waist high, and the front door hangs open at a drunken angle. It was kicked in, she remembers, by the neighbor who raided the house for food, and discovered her father's body. At least he's not there anymore. He died before they stopped burying the dead in Seattle. Someone else was not as lucky. In the foreground of the picture there is the edge of a skull and a bony hand; remains of some poor bastard who died on the sidewalk. Even through the airtight portal, she chokes a little on the remembered stench. "It's my house," she murmurs. "My house in Seattle." She takes a step towards the portal, then stops. Even looking through the window brings nauseating fear churning up from her stomach. It's something she hasn't felt in a very long time. All her nightmares are waiting on the other side of that portal. She escaped that world once, against all the odds, and got to a place of relative safety, relative sanity. How can she go back, even for the chance to maybe turn it all around? As she stares into the maw of the portal, suddenly the scene changes. A shadow falls across the lawn, over the bleached skull and the long grass. It's a humanoid shadow, a large humanoid shadow. "Shut it down!" Erin tells Quark, her voice a terrified whimper. "Shut it down now!"