Electra
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Raina repeated his motions clumsily, getting each separate move mostly right but not quite stringing them together. It was hard to move and listen and concentrate on the flame at the same time, so that by the time she took the follow-through step, the "blade" looked more like a sloppy cone. She frowned at it, firming up the shape once more. "So did your mom know he was evil when she married him?" she asked, trying the sequence again in slow motion. "Or did he like trick her, and then run away when she found him out?"
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Raina drew her lighter as well, this time flicking it on and harvesting the flame into her cupped palm. "Boys, definitely boys," she assured him, though she wasn't quite sure why. Maybe because her boyfriend was in Central America and it was nice to remind herself of him once in awhile, maybe just because it would be easier if it were girls and she wouldn't have to worry quite so much about hurting Fred's feelings except for the whole Alkahest thing. Either way it couldn't possibly matter. "But Talya's been teaching me for months now, I can fight and flirt at the same time without even thinking about it." She extended her small ball of fire into a slender spear, more foil than rapier. That was an easy enough trick, though she had no real idea where to take it from there. "I talked to your mom a little bit," she offered. "She was a cop, right, got hurt on the job? Raised you guys by herself?"
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"I don't think that," Raina insisted, sounding a little petulant even to herself. She uncrossed her arms and instead stood with one hip cocked and her hands on her waist. "And if you don't think some really disturbing people with creepy powers know who I am, you maybe haven't been paying a lot of attention to my career so far. But I've seen how you guys live," she pointed out. "Even when you go out for fun you're ready for a fight, cause that's just sometimes how it happens. I don't see why it's any different for me." With that said, she allowed herself to unbend a little, flicking a few loose strands of blonde hair behind her shoulder. "But I guess even if maybe a fire sword wouldn't have done any good at the concert, there might be times when it would come in handy," she allowed.
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"You didn't let me down!" The words might have carried pardon, but Raina's tone was far more affronted than forgiving. "If you let me down, that means you're in charge of me somehow, right? And that it's your fault I screwed up because you didn't teach me what I needed to know?" She folded her arms across her chest and glared at him. "I got news for you, then. I didn't screw up that night. I chose not to use fireballs because we were in the middle of a crowded club and I didn't want a Cocoanut Grove on my conscience. And we won, and nobody died, and that was partly because of me! What didn't I do that I would've done if I had a fire sword, huh?"
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She cocked her head and studied him for a minute, taking in the air of weariness, the punishing workout, the words he'd said and hadn't said. Honestly she wasn't sure exactly what it all meant, except that it added up to something more than one of the impromptu lessons he'd give her sometimes on footwork or the proper way to fall. Rather than keep guessing at what might be being left unsaid, she came right out with her questions. "I get the weird feeling this is about more than keeping me from getting rolled for my lunch money. You let me watch your kids, you know I can protect them and me just fine. What's the sword going to do?"
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Raina laughed anyway, looking deeply amused at the very thought. "I don't want a fire sword," she reminded him, letting her feet drift lazily to the floor like a balloon losing helium. "What would I even need a fire sword for? I can pretty much cause as much fire damage as I want just with this." She pulled the lighter from her pocket and flicked it to life, but didn't bother to harvest the flame for a fireball. "And I can do it while remaining safely out of range of melee combat. It's really a perfect system."
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Raina put up with the thudding noise without complaint for a very long time. Ten minutes, at least. Erik was about as close to a regular guy as one could get around here, surely he couldn't keep smacking the heavy bag around forever. Or so she'd thought when she'd wandered in to read a library book and wait for her monkey to finish with his playdate. She didn't know what Merlin and VINCE were getting up to and she didn't care that much so long as nothing blew up or melted down, but the metronome-like thudding of the bag was going to drive her crazy Poe-style long before the pair got done playing. Finally she floated up out of her seat and across the room to where Erik was working. She could tell the moment he became aware of her by the slight tensing of his shoulders, but it didn't stop the rhythm one little bit. "So what did that bag ever do to you?" she asked conversationally.
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ic (IC) Pop Quiz: All You Have Is Your Fire
Electra replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The Fens
Raina was silent for a minute, staring at the last frozen frame. "Merlin," she finally said, her voice sounding a little raw even to her own ears, "do you remember that conversation we had about burying the lede?" Merlin seemed vaguely abashed, even as he insisted that it had been important to lay the groundwork ahead of time so she'd know what they were dealing with. "All right," she finally cut him off. "I know what we're dealing with, or at least what we know about what we're dealing with. Did you get any audio on these videos?" Merlin shook his head, it was just standard security footage. "Do we know if it's real?" A shrug, it checked out on every test he knew how to run, which was quite a few. Nobody was shooping the image and the faceprints matched, but both of them knew how easily that could be managed by magic. There was really no way to tell remotely. But the more Raina watched the replayed footage, the more little tics she could find. The way Mom tilted her head when she was trying to make a point, the way Dad bopped his shoe up and down whenever he crossed his legs. If it wasn't them, it was someone who knew them or had spent many hours watching them. She got up from the chair and turned her back on the computer, walking slowly over to her bed. Nobody had said anything about her parents escaping from Blackstone, but would anybody tell her if they had? At this point it was pretty much accepted, at least by the powers that be, that Raina had been an unwitting pawn in her parents' schemes. That was enough to keep her out of magic juvie, but it didn't make anybody trust her. Maybe they'd escaped and nobody wanted her to know for fear she'd try and go to them. But if they had escaped, what were they doing in a warehouse in the Fens? Why were they still wearing jumpsuits and why were they in negotiations with somebody holding a bunch of mind controller parts? Raina sat down on the bed and rubbed her eyes with both hands. If her parents had escaped, why hadn't they come to get her? Merlin chirruped softly, sensing her distress. They didn't have to do anything, he suggested. He could forward the information to the League anonymously, leave the security footage out of it. It would be enough to get the wheels turning, let someone else handle it... "No," Raina interrupted. "That's... the League would go in shooting again. I can't let that happen to them, not again." She took a deep breath, rested her hands on her thighs and dug her fingers in just enough to sting. "I'm gonna need an address." -
"That's Ghost Girl," Miss A replied to Jill's question, most of her attention divided between the monitors and the conversation outside. Luckily, she had a lot of attention to give. "An actual ghost as far as anybody can tell, one of Sharl's friends from Claremont. I honestly don't know much about her powers. She seems like a nice girl, heart's in the right place, but a really terrible judge of character. She is the one person on the entire planet who seems to truly believe that Tarva can somehow be rehabilitated. As for what Tarva wants... she may just be on the level this time," Miss A admitted. "I think she's probably at least as scared of her old bosses as we are, maybe more since they know her by name." Miss Americana had several choice words in response to Tarva's taunts, some of them rather at odds with the heroine's squeaky-clean public persona, but at least the mic was dead at the time. She didn't open it back up again until Caradoc finished making his report. "That's because you're a glutton for punishment" she reminded him, deadpan. "But somewhere in the middle of that massive hissy she just threw, I think she said she could find Mandragora for us. If that's true, we may be forced to deal with her. We just don't have the resources to mount a massive search in these conditions, and inventing something that will do the job takes time. Tell her and Kimber that they can come into the dome and we'll plot out some kind of strategy, but that if she does anything, anything with her powers without negotiating it first, I'm going to portal her into the ocean. I'm not risking anything down there waking up."
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ic (IC) Pop Quiz: All You Have Is Your Fire
Electra replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The Fens
"Well, that's effed up," Raina decided, studying the detailed photographs and the accompanying descriptions. "I'm guessing that if your buddy saw them and tipped you off about them, then the cat is sort of out of the bag in terms of supervillain types knowing about all this stuff being up for grabs. You think if we call this in to the Freedom League they'll give me a stamp on my Alert Citizen card?" she asked dryly. "Twelve stamps and I get the benefit of the doubt again." She pulled out her phone and began scrolling through her contacts. "Nice find, though." -
ic (IC) Pop Quiz: All You Have Is Your Fire
Electra replied to Avenger Assembled's topic in The Fens
OMW, Raina texted back, not bothering to add any emojis. She'd gotten into emoji battles with Merlin before and knew he cheated. There were certainly a lot more emojis in his vocabulary than were available on her phone, that was for damn sure. But Merlin wouldn't text her to come home for no reason, so she didn't waste time as she headed across campus and back up to her dorm, unwinding her scarf and pulling off her hat as she entered the room. "Okay," she began as soon as she walked in, "I have in my hand an ice cream cone entirely full of fresh mango chunks I stole from the caf. If I give it to you, will you finally stop complaining about the sweater?" -
Satisfied that her compatriots were on the field and ready to intervene if anybody started messing with Cathy or Phae, Raina began slipping through the crowd of dancers till she got a look at the banks of speakers. There was magic emanating from them, and though it didn't look like the speakers themselves were producing the magic, they were definitely spreading it, amplifying its reach. The aura looked oddly familiar, almost like Talya when she was using power, but the scent was different, wrong. She wasn't quite sure what to make of it, but she did have the beginnings of a plan. She danced her way across the floor, flickering like a flame as she wended her way through the moving bodies. When she reached Riley and Robin she paused, taking a moment to cut in between the pair and loop her arms around Riley's neck, leaning in towards him intimately. "I'm going to try and take out the speakers," she told him, "try and limit the spread of the magic. You guys need to get the band; I think whatever's going on is coming from them. There's not enough of us to stop whatever's gonna happen if we can't wake up the audience." She pulled away, gave Robin a playful pat on the cheek and was gone again, heading for the walkway behind the speakers. She dearly wished she had Merlin with her tonight, but surely destroying a technological project would be easier than putting one together.
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"All right, hold off on warming up the helicopter," Miss A ordered, just as the two pilots were about to head out into the cold. "Keep things packed up, but the energy readings have leveled off for the moment. If our uninvited guests can hold it together awhile longer, hopefully the energy readings will drop again. Give the age of this place, I can't imagine it has the juice to stay at an alert status for very long. I certainly hope not, anyway." Blowing out a breath, she looked over at Ellie. "Oh, you haven't met Tarva the Black yet? She's quite a character. Comes from the same world as Madrigal's Hounds, originally, but she didn't get the full Annihilist treatment, the sort that warps body and mind, removes the sense of right and wrong, all those exciting side effects of gaining ultimate Terminus power. Tarva is an interesting case because she kept her original mind and her original conscience, and still spent several human lifetimes willingly serving the interests of the Terminus." Miss A deliberately concentrated on her console, speaking without looking at Ellie. "She eventually defected when she realized that her faction was unlikely to survive the current civil war going on in Omega's absence, but you can probably imagine why someone who grew up on Nihilor like Steve did would have some lingering issues with her." Her face screwed up in a rare expression of distaste. "I personally try and deal with her as little as possible. She is... exactly as repentant as she must be in order to keep her asylum. I've heard from others that she is tortured by her past in private and just doesn't show it, but somehow even that doesn't seem like enough. Steve is tortured every day and night and he was an innocent. She chose."
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"Understood," Wander murmured, trying to keep her voice low in deference to the Important Business happening on the other side of the room. She'd have given a great deal to be able to just step back outside and forget everything she'd seen, but people with time travel pretty much always had teleportation as well, so there was no way she was going to get out of arm's reach of Mark and Nina so long as there was a threat. "I'm in the birthing room now, things are proceeding... I guess the way they should. Seems okay." She winced at an especially loud noise from Nina. "Christ, I have no idea," Erin admitted. "But if they pop in here, I'm hoping to hear them before I see them."
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Erin's first impulse was to run outside and find Redbird, try and get a bead on where the threat was so she could face it head-on. But in this case, with such a vulnerable target to protect, she had to agree with Trevor's tactical decision. Nodding fractionally, she raced back to the birthing suite, moving so quickly that she blurred a little around the edges. She didn't bother to knock before entering, though she did carefully open the door rather than bursting through. It was not a good idea to startle people with superpowers any more than necessary, especially ones who were probably already kind of busy and distracted. "Redbird detected a possible temporal incursion," she announced. "Trevor's checking it out."
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Miss Americana watched the monitors, her perfect face taut with worry, worry that tightened her voice as well. "Ready Evacuation Plan Three," she told her assistant lead engineer. "Warm up the plane and get everybody together." She switched on the comms channel. "Dragonfly, you need to get Caradoc and the newcomers out of here right now. Something about one or more of their powers is spiking energy inside the chamber. It's not critical yet, we might be able to save it if no more fuel gets tossed on the fire. Just don't let any of them do anything until they're far away from here." She personally suspected that Tarva's power was entirely to blame, but this wasn't something she was willing to be wrong about.
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Erin had been making regular patrols of the hospital, as much to pass the time as anything. The villains around here tended to understand that Freedom City's heroes were vigilant in protecting their own on special occasions, and she doubted any of them would be eager to have a go at the first child born to the new Liberty League, even if they didn't understand exactly how powerful and dangerous Mark Lucas was. She'd stopped back in at the waiting room to get a bottle of soda and an update when Redbird's report came in. In an instant she was on full alert, her collapsed bat in hand. "Did she say temporal incursion at the hospital?" That was one kind of interference she hadn't anticipated, though in hindsight...
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Miss A didn't take her eyes from the screen, completely engrossed in absorbing the probe's information and images as it slowly navigated the ruins. "A relationship of convenience," she agreed. "Against a foe so deadly and implacable that it justified transcending age-old hatred for a brief time. I don't know that we're going to learn much about the Atlanteans or Lemurians in this investigation, but we have other opportunities for that. I do think we need to take what information we can get about Mandragora, even if it's just a matter of storing it in eidetic biological memory and transcribing it later. If this is a puddle that formed from a cut-off eddy of the timestream, then Mandragora is still out there and still a very present threat."
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Matt disappeared before Raina had the chance to say anything, which was just as well. It had been on the tip of her tongue to offer to help him with his arm, which was stupid anyway because what the hell did she know from first aid? But wrapping a bandage around one's own arm had to be tricky. Maybe some of the dogs had thumbs or something and could help out. Familiars with thumbs were much more useful than any other type. Merlin took that opportunity to point out that it was late and he was getting cold, plus with their luck one of Madison's goon squad would be out patrolling for evildoers and see them outside the walls after curfew. "What, you don't think I could take 'em?" she asked aloud, pretending affront. Merlin just rolled his eyes and said it wasn't a matter of 'could," so much as 'want to.' Fighting against the girls who thought she was evil incarnate had always been pointless, but now it wasn't even fun anymore, so why bother? Raina sighed and unstoked her broom from her bag, plopping down on it sidesaddle and riding it over the fence to settle by the dorm. "You're taking away my one hobby," she pointed out to Merlin, half-irritated. "Besides, it's not about having fun. It's about being right. Come on, let's get in before the cold front hits." Merlin seemed unconvinced by her arguments, but followed her in anyway.
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"Yeah, nobody deserves to be stuck here forever," Raina agreed, sounding a little pensive even to her own ears. She wondered for a minute how many ghosts might be stuck in the basement of her old home, then decided that was not something she wanted to be thinking about at all. It was unlikely she'd ever see that house again anyway, so it wasn't like there was much she could do about it. She climbed out of the car and stretched, then extended an arm so Merlin could easily climb her shoulder. "Well, it was an interesting experience, I'll give you that. And it's always fun to get a little playing with fire time in. You all done for the night?"
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"So if you had to, you could keep them off with one of those million-candlepower spotlights or something?" Raina guessed. "Might make it hard to be low profile after that." Merlin mused aloud that it would be informative to know what part of the light spectrum could actually dissuade the things, because then it might be possible to create a less-bright alternative. "It's ghosts, it's not exactly regular science," she reminded him. "Regular rules might not apply." They weren't quite back at the school yet, but they were close enough to be back in neighborhoods Raina could recognize. She began repacking her bag, though without Merlin this time as he'd obviously decided not to be scared of the dogs anymore. "I guess I can see why you want to make sure you get the ghosts where they're going, if that's the competition you're working against."
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"Oh well, guess I won't be the next big TV medium." Raina smirked a little, then sobered. "What were those dark shadow things, anyway? I meant to ask earlier, but forgot with all the fire and her turning into a little kid and all. It looked like they were trying to get at us, or maybe at her." She rubbed her hands over her arms, chasing away an imaginary chill. "I saw a movie on TV once where these gray things with long arms appeared right after a bad guy died; they latched onto his ghost and pulled him right down and out of the world. Is that the sort of thing those creatures were trying to do with her?"
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"I wonder if I could talk to dead people," Raina mused, changing the subject without really needing to think about it. It was all automatic by now. "I have a really great translation spell I hardly ever get a chance to use, except for the permanent version on Himself over here." She waved a hand at Merlin, who ignored her. "It's supposed to let me talk to anybody or anything, even stuff that's not technically alive. I've used it on rocks and cars and things like that, but never tried it on a ghost. I guess the first problem would be seeing the ghost in the first place." She looked over at Matt. "I don't suppose there are any resident ghosts on campus I could try it out on? Maybe the less-deadly non-poltergeist versions?"
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Raina slanted a glance in Matt's direction, weighing her answer for just a moment before laughing and flicking her fingers dismissively. "I don't need to make plans, my boyfriend owns something like ten percent of Mexico's GDP. But if I were to need somethnig to do, I'd be a perfect human figurehead for the tech company Merlin could form. Surprisingly few companies are willing to trust a monkey for their IT solutions, which is really closeminded of them." Merlin chirruped disagreeably at that. "Well you can't just keep doing up fake IDs and obnoxiously reporting security flaws to companies forever," she pointed out. "That's not gonna keep you in monkey chow." She could sense Merlin teeing up some response about keeping them both in monkey chow when she broke up with Anibal, but she gave him a quelling glare before he could vocalize anything. "Do you have to feed the dogs?" she asked Matt instead. "They seem incorporeal most of the time, but they also seem kind of... doggy. Can they eat if they want to?"
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She snorted. "Then worry about it when you get there. There's nothing saying you have to make a career out of it, I'm just suggesting that for now, you've both got something the other needs. If it turns out it's not working, then quit and go deliver pizzas or something." Raina waved an impatient hand. "Or don't do it in the first place, it's not really any of my business." She reached out a hand to Merlin, flat palm up. Without looking, the monkey put the denuded and somewhat chewed cake pop stick on it. She grimaced. "Next time I'm getting you a cinnamon roll." She put the stick back in the paper bag it came in, then looked at Matt. "You about ready to go? If I don't get back before Cathy goes to bed I'm like as not going to find a sock on the door."