Electra
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"I just want to know about the spell," Raina replied with a deliberately casual shrug. "I'm sure you've had to answer all kinds of stupid and obnoxious questions about everything else already. I'm not gonna get you in trouble or anything, but that was some dangerous magic going on in there. I've heard tell that you're into magic, but that was no solo practitioner spell circle." She leaned against the wall, her eyes interested, but devoid of either condemnation or pity. "Did they leave you behind on purpose, Rhonda, or did they just run away when the circle broke?"
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"We don't exactly need your expertise for makeup consultation," Raina reminded Matt archly. "You could always take the packages out to the car while we're getting the rest of Fred's stuff." Her cellphone chirped at her from her purse, which foreclosed any further suggestions. She read the text and sent a quick one in return as she led the way through the store, somehow navigating without looking up from the screen. "Anibal got called back for some thing with his dad and his uncle, but he's gonna send the car back for us," she reported. "He says to have fun, and he's glad Fred's getting the stuff she needs. So I guess you're stuck with us for a little while after all." She turned her attention back to Fred. "They're going to want to put you in a chair and put makeup on you, show you a nice look for your coloring. You up for that, or would you rather just pick out some stuff to take with?"
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"Ew, not listening!" Raina insisted, making an exaggerated face. "Old people flirting is not cool." With a faint smirk, she lobbed a fireball in Erik's direction, fully expecting him to parry it before it reached its destination. If she was lucky, one of her erstwhile teammates would take advantage of the distraction and move in, but otherwise it was at least sort of satisfying to get to throw a fireball at somebody. As soon as she released it, she prudently took a couple steps backwards, hiding behind Phae's broad wings.
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Raina made an appropriately sad face at that; she was doing a surprisingly good job of behaving like a mature superheroine for someone who spent so much of her time being deliberately abrasive. "I'm sorry to hear that. Is she up for receiving visitors right now? We probably won't take too long, I just need to know if she remembers anything about the spell that was going on when she was attacked. And did you notice anything unusual about the wounds, any strange colors or smells, unusual infection setting in? Anything might be a clue."
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Raina blew out a breath. "Fiiiiiine," she muttered. She pulled out her compact and gave herself a quick look, and suddenly she was wearing a blue and gold uniform as well, her hair pinned up in a neat and professional bun, and her heels replaced by boots. She was also, it appeared, another couple inches taller. The backpack had disappeared, but it was surely still where it had been a moment ago, Merlin safely concealed within. "You probably better let me do the talking," she told Riley as they walked to the helipad doors. "If this girl knows your double and doesn't want to talk to you, I don't think she's going to be fooled by your secret identity disguise." Raina pushed the intercom button next to the door, looking up into the security camera. "Hi, I'm Sparkler and this is Woodsman. We're following up on a victim of a monster attack a couple days ago? Rhonda-" She looked at Riley quickly for the name. "McIntyre. We were hoping to ask her some questions if she's feeling up to it." She gave the camera a winning smile.
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"Yeah, sure. Real question's whether you can drive a flying bike." Raina reached into her backpack and pulled out a whole handful of tiny feathers, resting them on her palm a moment before blowing them all over Riley and the motorcycle. Immediately, the two teens and the bike began rising into the air like a slowly escaping parade balloon. "Your motor's not going to be much use up here," she advised him, tongue-in-cheek. "Best think of a wonderful thought." As she spoke, the motorcycle began to accelerate, rising above the rooftops as it achieved greater velocity.
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Raina frowned at him. "Why can't we just, like, go there and walk in the door?" she asked. "We're supposed to be superheroes, even if we're trainees, they ought to let us in if we're legit investigating a thing. I mean, I'm practically an expert on magic compared to most of the supposed mages and wizards in this town," she couldn't help but scoff. "Even if she doesn't want to talk to you, maybe she'll talk to me, but this doesn't sound like anything I really feel like risking my neck for, breaking into a hospital. You know what the assholes on the Freedom League would do to me if they caught a bad seed like me breaking in on the victim of a botched demonic summoning?"
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"Well the circle itself is broke all to hell, so to speak," Raina muttered, examining the circle from up close. Rather than kneel on the dirty floor and risk smearing things further, she was stretched out in the air, face-down, a foot from the floor. The fireball was now a ring of floating flame illuminating the area, and if she hadn't been so intent on what she was doing, it would've seemed like she had to be showing off. "But it's not actually a one-person job. The basic circle, yeah, that's Fisher-Price stuff, My First Spirit Summoning, but it's only the top level. C'mere." She beckoned him over impatiently and began pointing to various faint marks on the ground. "There, there, there, there... and there too, I think. Six person circle, good for summoning deep creatures, but whoever did the second walk on the circle added all the extra people. Either Rhonda was apprenticing somebody who fixed up her circle for her but didn't bother to save her from the thing they summoned, or she was a patsy for somebody who wanted us to think she was working on her own. And that's assuming she was the caster at all, and not brought along for munchies. You talked to her yet?"
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As soon as they were off the bike and the coast was clear, Merlin climbed out of Raina's backpack to sit on her shoulder and whisper a piece of his mind into her ear. She hushed him impatiently, looking around and trying to get the scent and taste of the magic in the air. It wasn't very pleasant. "Yeah, something got summoned here, and probably made it all the way, too." Extending one hand, she pulled out her lighter and flicked it to life, then seemed to pour the orange flame into her cupped palm like a liquid. It pooled and then formed into a ball, casting odd flickering shadows on the wall of the warehouse. "In here?" Not really waiting for an answer, she floated over the tape and nudged her way inside, fireball raised high.
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The squawk of alarm from Raina's bag was more pronounced this time, and fit well with the expression on Raina's face. "And telling me that you're carrying live hand grenades in your bag is supposed to make me feel safer about riding with you?" she asked acerbically. "This is such a bad idea." She put on the helmet, then pulled a feather from her pocket and ran it through her fingers while humming under her breath. It was a ritual Riley had seen before, Raina invoking her magic-powered flight. When she settled herself on the motorcycle's pillion seat, her weight and balance was so minimal that it was almost like riding alone, except for her long frame pressed up against Riley's back. "If you crash this thing, I will haunt you in the afterlife," she promised.
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Raina gave Riley and his motorcycle a look so skeptical, it made her previous consideration of him look positively fatuous. "You want me to get on that thing?" she repeated dubiously. The chirrup from inside her backpack was slightly muffled, but it seemed Merlin agreed with her unease about the situation. "It looks like you put it together yourself from a kit. They didn't have, like, highway safety standards or crash tests where you're from, right?" She took one step closer to the motorcycle, but seemed no more inclined to board. "Have you even got helmets?"
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Raina just stared at Riley during his little diatribe, as though she had no idea what he was saying beyond the first sentence and didn't really care that much. She finished the visible portion of her ice cream and began nibbling on the cone. "Body alteration is risky stuff," she commented when he finally wound down. "Even skilled practitioners are iffy about it, and it sounds like your friend's-friend was no more than a wannabe. Even a benign spirit might have given it the old college try and just done a really terrible job of it. They should've done a body-swap instead, those are easier and reversible, too. Get to take some other equipment out for a test-drive, anyway, right?" she suggested, in what appeared to be a sincere attempt to be helpful for once. "If you think it'll help to know what happened, I'll take a look."
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Raina frowned at the tablet, obviously trying to make it show her the scene in more detail than the low-rent machine wanted to cough up. Merlin hissed at her irritably, and with a moment's juggling, Raina ended up with the ice cream cones and Merlin with the tablet. He seemed to have considerably more success, with Raina watching over his shoulder and licking her drippy ice cream. "What do you mean, fix herself up?" Raina asked Riley without changing her focus. "Money, sex appeal, a looooove potion? No, lemme see the burn patterns," she told Merlin, who chittered in annoyance. "I know it's not a DSLR, but it's not a pinhole camera either, right?" The monkey huffed. "These pictures aren't gonna be enough."
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Looking interested despite herself, Raina handed Merlin her ice cream cone and took the tablet from Riley. "I can maybe get a read on what some of the symbols are for, but to get a real good taste, I have to actually be there," she told him, already studying the picture. She took her time with it, zooming in here and there, pursing her lips over some of the symbols, and one time holding the tablet up for a quick consult with her familiar. "It's a summoning circle," she informed Riley. "It looks like somebody was trying to call up one of the spirits under the earth. I can't tell from the picture whether they succeeded or not, or what they might have managed to conjure up. What's this for?"
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Raina gave Riley a skeptical look that didn't divert much of her attention from her chocolate ice cream cone. On her shoulder, Merlin gave him an identical skeptical look, though his cone appeared to be filled with salad mix. In her wedge heels Raina hit a solid six feet in height, giving her a significant tactical advantage when it came to looking down on people. "What do you need?" she asked Riley, failing to keep the suspicion entirely out of her voice.
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Jessie still looked a bit distracted from the fight, hugging herself to hold in the nervous energy generated by her unsuccessful attempt to close with the monster. She hadn't been practicing fighting enough to stay very good at it, but that was apparently something that would change in a hurry if they stayed here. Wander trained every day to stay in peak condition, she knew. If Jessie did that, she'd quickly become a better fighter. The thought was a little appealing, but mostly it just tolled alarm bells that echoed deafeningly through the empty white hollows in her memory. Wander said, and Jessie and her probation officer both tended to agree, that it was better for everybody if Jessie forgot how to fight. But neither of those people were here right now, so it wasn't really their choice to make. "I don't understand what happens if we don't stay," she admitted. "Don't you just get spun into an alternate reality of your own?"
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"It's nothing, it's stupid," Raina assured Fred with a careless laugh that was just a tiny bit forced around the edges. "Even though I'm always up for smacking Matt around a little bit. You'll know if I'm ever really mad at you by the way you'll be on fire," she assured him. Raina had apparently decided on the shoes she'd tried on, and busied herself wrapping them carefully in their tissue paper-lined box. "Matt doesn't understand these things because he's a peasant, but if you do want to ride a horse, all you need is a boot with a supportive ankle and a low heel to keep your foot in the stirrup. They don't have to be expensive. You'll lay out more for a decent helmet." She set the lid back on her box and turned back to Fred's tennis shoe options. "Get something with a lot of tread for icy weather," she advised, "and don't worry if it's kind of expensive. You'll need them for running. We can buy you some sneakers to be your grubby disposable shoes."
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"Ugh, do I have to?" Raina whined, even as Talya vanished from view. "They're doing fine! Getting extra points for style and everything!" Hunching her shoulders to avoid the light thwack from the baton, she reluctantly unfolded her legs and put her feet back on the ground. Merlin, at least, was willing to give her a commiserating look, though of course he wasn't about to help out with the fight. He assured her that he would assist by eating the remaining grapes before they had a chance to spoil. She rolled her eyes at him, then reluctantly hummed a little fireball into her hand and walked onto the edge of the mats. "Am I still in trouble if I set stuff on fire in here by accident?" she asked the thin air that presumably contained Talya somewhere. "Cause I'm not going into a superhuman swordfight with just my basic self-defense moves, no way."
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As soon as Matt and Fred figured out the all-important size issue, Raina reappeared, this time clutching an armful of single boots and also towing along another store clerk. "Find three or four things you like," Raina instructed briskly, "then Emily here will go to the back and bring out the right size to try on. And also these in a nine and a half," she told the clerk in an aside, handing over an extremely impractical-looking heeled sandal that Fred would never wear. "We has better get a move on, time's a-wasting!"
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ic From Beneath You It Devours: Atlantis Attacks
Electra replied to Brown Dynamite's topic in Lonely Point
Singularity came up behind Klara, studying the soldiers with an intensity that bordered on unnerving. She'd suited up for the fracas, looking strikingly like her doppelganger despite the different hair color in her new black combat gear. "You should let us pass," she agreed levelly, her attention still focused. "You're not equipped for combat with metahumans, and I don't think they're here to negotiate. We don't want you to die for no reason while you're trying to do our job for us." The next obvious step would be jumping over the barricade, but that might be some kind of tricky probation violation. It was better not to risk it if they didn't have to. -
Raina looked over at Matt while he gave his rundown on modern horsemanship, and for a moment the air around them seemed perceptibly warmer, like a breeze from a heating vent had wafted through. It went away when she turned to scrounge the metal foot-measuring device from under a chair, dropping it down unceremoniously in front of Fred. "Here," she said, her voice just a little clipped. "Take off your shoes and stand on this, right foot first. The number closest to where your toes line up is your shoe size. Measure both feet, then take the bigger number. Matt, get over here and help her." Obviously uninterested in getting down on the floor to suss out Fred's shoe size, Raina disappeared around the corner of the aisle, to where more boots were apparently waiting.
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"Be careful out there," she reminded him, still sounding annoyed, but a bit worried at the same time. "If something did destroy you out there, don't go hunting it down alone. You use your teammates, or you come and get me. And backups everyday, dumbass!" she added. "You're letting yourself lose bits of your life when you don't back up! You could've seen something beautiful or had great sex or had an idea for the next great Archetech invention, and you'd never know. Every night before bed, you hear?" She tapped her virtual foot, looking very motherly despite the relatively scant difference in their ages.
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"Ahkay." Raina blinked a little at the sudden spurt of fashion consciousness, but rolled with it, putting down both heeled shoes and heading over with Fred and Matt to the aisle with boots. "Again here you're gonna need a specialty store for anything really good, but there's enough to get you started. The jeans you got are bootcut, which is a stupid name because it really should be "hard to wear with boots," but you can scrunch 'em on in there with the right pair of socks," she assured Fred. "If you want to wear tall boots without looking like a dominatrix or an Arctic explorer, you're gonna want riding boots. Liiiiike... here." She perused the shelves till she found the sort she wanted. "Do you know your shoe size, or should we measure you for that, too?"
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"How the hell should I know?" Gina demanded. "You fell off telemetry and nobody had any idea what happened to you, and then suddenly I have fifty terabytes of pain-in-my-ass initializing in protected disc space! I knew this was going to happen if you moved to Washington with nobody to keep an eye on you and make sure you didn't get into trouble or that your code didn't start self-optimizing." She glared at him as though expecting something. "Well, are you planning on staying in here all day?" she demanded.
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"SHARL TULINK!" A booming voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, a very familiar voice, a deeply annoyed voice. One corner of the room suddenly shimmered and resolved into Gina's digital form, one much more reminiscent of her Cyberknife identity than anything Gina actually looked like, but familiar to Sharl nonetheless. She glared at him. "What the hell did you do now? Where's my robot?" Her eyes flicked to the side suddenly, as though she were looking at something he couldn't see, the very building-blocks of data that made up this world. "FOUR DAYS?" she demanded, her voice getting a little high and piercing at the end. "You didn't back up for four days?"