Electra
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Erin fielded the frisbee with a grin, giving it a quick toss to get the weight of it before she tried throwing it herself. It was too squishy to do any real harm, but better to be safe than sorry. She looked over at where Eddie had been, then blinked to see him down on the ground with Mike. "Doing that's going to make playing catch harder," she pointed out mildly, then gently turned a summersault in midair, just for the heck of it. "This is so weird..." Righting herself, she lobbed the frisbee lightly over in Alex's direction as she lifted off the ground.
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Looks like the current GM ruling is that the Area part is for who you can choose to be affected by your flight, and afterwards that person can fly until the person with the power withdraws it. And since Mike and Alex have grown up in "Everybody's a Super" land, I imagine that Eddie is not the first person to ever zap in for a chat, but I could be wrong.
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"What, seriously?" Erin asked, looking startled by the idea. She gave an experimental little bounce, jumping only a few feet off the ground, then hung there. After a moment's surprise, a grin spread across her face. "Huh, that's cool. Now I can play Centurion Fights the Supervillains, for real," she joked. Concentrating, she rose a little higher into the air, wobbling a little as she figured out how to control this borrowed power. It probably wasn't going to replace leaping and jumping her repertoire anytime soon, but it was pretty neat. Raising an arm, she called, "Mike, toss it here!"
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Erin looks from the screen to Darian, her eyes wide. "I didn't know this thing worked two ways," she murmurs under her breath. Surreptitiously she tries to lean out of the view of the screen, shamelessly leaving Darian to explain what exactly it is that they're doing. For her part, she's not even sure whether they're tampering with the laws of time and space or not.
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"I don't think Dr. Marquez is very good anyway," Erin admitted, "but it can help to talk to somebody. I mean, it sucks most of the time, and it's not fun, but you generally feel better afterwards. Maybe Mike could go and train with this lady they've got me working with. She's really, really strong, but she's, hmm, matter of fact about it, you know? How it's easy to break things, but you can learn to control it. If he asked Mr. Archer, I bet he'd let him go." Erin looked uncomfortable to be talking about Mike's problems, but they were close enough to ones she had herself that it seemed wrong not to try a little.
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Erin raised an eyebrow as she watched the boys take off, her lips quirking. "Nothing like a good distraction," she murmured to Alex. "But we'll have a tough time joining in if they're a hundred feet up by the time we're done." She would much rather have joined in the game herself, airborne or not, than continued working, but the schoolwork always had to come first, when there was this much to catch up on. She hesitated for a moment, almost let the subject go entirely, then finally asked tentatively, "So, is Mike talking to, um, Dr. Marquez or anybody else like that? Sometimes it helps."
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Erin watches the screen, transfixed as the drama unfolds. She braces and nearly closes her eyes as the plane plummets, then gasps with astonishment at the rescue. "Oh, wow," she says, an incredulous smile breaking over her face. "Did you see that? That was the Centurion! He was so awesome! If I could fly, I would want to be like him someday. Was that really from a camera, or did your TV just sort of... pick it up on its own?"
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Erin watches the snippet from the past with fascination. She's not entirely sure where the historical value is in this, she never heard of anyone setting fire to the school or anything like that, but she recognizes Marquez. "Guess some things never change," she murmurs, just a thread of bitterness in her voice. "He should've offered him a good game of tug of war." With a sigh, she lets that go and turns her attention to the far more interesting matter at hand. "Can you see any year with that thing? I want to see another one."
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Erin rolls for what they see. She rolls... a ten!
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Erin looks a little confused, but she's very impressed by the little box that produced the television apparatus. She listens attentively to his explanation, lacing her fingers together to avoid reaching out and touching the device. She's not sure that would be a good idea. Instead, she picks a year off the top of her head. "Um... 1992," she says. "That was the year I was born."
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"I guess it couldn't hurt," Erin agreed, settling back down on the blanket. "Everybody's got sore spots. And really, I guess if he's upset and he's mad and he's walking away or shutting down instead of striking out, that's got to be a good sign. That's what they want us to learn to do here, and he already knows it, so it's not like... you know, it's not like he's probably going to accidentally hurt someone now." She picked up her book but wasn't quite ready to study again yet, keeping her eye on how things were going.
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Erin tensed immediately, following Alex's look. "What's wrong?" she asked quietly, trying to suss out the situation from a distance. It looked like the boys were still just talking, but she didn't have Alex's special in on the situation. She pressed her hands against the ground, ready to stand up and intervene if it seemed necessary.
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Stesha stared at the phone a moment after the abrupt hang-up. "Yeah... well... you can go piss up a rope," she told it impotently. "Next time just send a text message." Grumbling to herself, she finished her plant chores, then rummaged around in her fridge until she found a lonely bottle of hard lemonade left over from a movie-watching party last month. She popped the top, then sat down in her favorite chair with it and a bowl of potato chips for a sulk. Did he really think lying to her was going to make her feel any better? Could do better than him, indeed. Maybe not in the looks department or the money department, but she could at least find someone with some manners. She turned on a movie channel and dug into her potato chips, foregoing superheroic antics for one night to nurse her bruised feelings. Flower power indeed. Pfft.
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"It's not you, it's me?" Stesha parroted back blandly. It was easier to be dispassionate about it over the phone, she decided, and when she'd had a few days to think about it. And it was easier to be sarcastic about it than to admit to hurt feelings. "It's okay, Jack, I got the idea by the end of the date. You probably don't go out on dates with very many florists. But I will point out that if you just wanted the discount, you wound up at a net loss after the movie tickets and the tip."
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"It was fine, she said you were busy," Stesha replied, doing her best to sound bland and cosmopolitan. She checked the leaves on a few seedling she was letting grow up naturally, but it was hard to think about that and the phone at the same time. "I'm glad they turned out the way you wanted them. Thank you for the tip, by the way. I'm sure you know it was much too big."
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"Jack?" Stesha asked, a little incredulously. She kicked off her shoes and hung her purse over the doorknob, then walked into the kitchen with the phone still pressed to her ear. "Yeah, I've got a couple of minutes, no problem. Was there something wrong with the flowers?" She couldn't think of why else he might be calling at this point, when all seemed said and done. Turning on the faucet, she filled a watering can and began watering the many plants that had gone all day without her.
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Mr. Skyler is a canon NPC, he reportedly enjoys taking the mega-smart kids down a few pegs to show them that their intellect won't always make thing easy for them. Conversely, I figure he may be a little more sympathetic to the average students who are having trouble grasping the fundamentals. =)
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"I need help with the algebra again," Erin admitted with a grimace. She looked over to where the guys were standing, but they seemed to be amusing themselves, so she gathered up her bag from where she'd hung it on a tree branch and took a seat on the edge of Alex's blanket. "I just don't understand how I'm supposed to be solving for X when I don't know what Y is. It doesn't make any sense." She took a sandwich and a can of soda as well, more to be polite than because she was hungry, unwrapping it as she dug out her algebra textbook and the notebook she'd been filling with fruitless equations. "Mr. Skyler helped me with the first five, but I still don't get it."
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"I'll keep an eye out," Erin replied. Surprisingly, she was feeling better than she usually did after one of her nightmares, almost enough to try getting a little more sleep herself. "You seem pretty good at it, though. But if I ever start feeling... I dunno, something that doesn't feel like it belongs to me, I'll speak up." She waited until Alex had climbed back into her own bunk to add, "And I'm glad your my friend, too."
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"The 'zombie king,' that was different," Erin said, laying back down on her bunk instead of remaining scrunched to avoid bumping her head. "It wasn't real, my mind just made it up. When I went to the doom room, I had to fight a villain who could throw lightening and fly, and who was faster than I was. It upset me, so she showed up in my dream, but as a zombie instead. I fought zombie metas, but it wasn't like that. They were strong, but they still didn't have minds, couldn't fight properly." Her voice was soft, almost meditative. She didn't normally talk about any of this, but in the quiet dark, when Alex had already seen so much, it seemed easier. "Lots of times when something gets me worked up, it'll sneak into the dreams. But that all goes away. It's the memories that don't change, and I can't just wish that they would end differently. And they aren't always nightmares. Sometimes it's just memories. That one tonight is one of the worst. Second worst, I guess. But I can't give it up. Thanks, though." She looked over at Alex, only her eyes really visible in the darkness. "If I was going to have someone riding along, I'm glad it was you."
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Erin hesitated a minute, then shook her head. "No, no I don't want to get rid of them. I wouldn't think about any of it if I didn't have to, and it would be wrong to forget them. Everyone I ever knew died miserably, and here I am, doing just fine. The least I can do is live through a few bad dreams on their behalf." She shrugged. "It's like... it's like prayers for the dead, you know? I don't believe in God, but it still seems important to not just let them go."
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The room was quiet for a moment as Erin stared into the water glass. "If you think you can handle it," she finally said, "I won't say you're wrong. You must have a strong mind, just to get by with the powers you have. I wish I could be so sure for myself. I hate when they come down like that, and it's like being there all over again, but even worse. It's the damn tests I had to do today, they made me fight a bunch of simulated bad guys, and brought it all right back up to the top again. I couldn't beat the last one, could barely touch her, and it made me feel so helpless. Like I couldn't fight or run away, or anything." It was far easier to talk about that part than about the rest of the dream. She snorted. "Mr. Archer didn't even let me finish the test. I probably won't see any results from it except a whole new round of talking with Dr. Marquez."
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Erin sat quietly for a few minutes, sipping the water because it was there. "I'm sorry," she said finally, sounding very sincere. "If I'd known that might happen, I would have asked for a different room assignment. You shouldn't have had to see any of that. I can find someplace else to go when I need a few hours' sleep, so it doesn't happen again. You don't deserve to be stuck with all the crap that's hiding in the back of my brain."
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"Thanks," Erin says, again with the same half-smile. "I appreciate the help, but I don't think you probably want to offer. I mean, you're obviously meta-level intelligent, right? I can barely keep up in the basic stuff. You'd probably be ready to scream in twenty minutes or so after seeing me go around in circles." She leans back against the tree, absently running a finger down the spines of the stack of magazines. "If I could build things like you do, I don't think anyone would be able to pry me out of the shop."
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Erin looked up and studied Alex's face, pulling the blanket a little closer around her shoulders, almost like a shield. Though the campus lights outside cast a soft blue light into the room, the space between top and bottom bunk was still cloaked in deep shadow. "Was that real?" she asked, her voice soft and slightly hoarse. "I thought I saw you, in my dreams, where you couldn't have been. Were you really there, or did I just dream all of it?"