Electra
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"That's why when you see somebody cutting a rope, or notice one that's fraying, you fix it," Erin told him. "That's why people like you and I are important. We know what certain kinds of dangers look like, so maybe we notice them earlier. But to do that, we have to become part of the world. And that means we live by their code of ethics, even if it's hard, and even if it means having to relearn everything about how to fight. You want more cocoa? Or I've got some cookies in one of these bags."
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Erin waited patiently while Riley wrote down her answers, pulling her phone from her pocket so she could check her email and play Fruit Ninja. Not destroying her own phone while playing Fruit Ninja was another significant accomplishment of fine superheroic control. She looked up when he asked the question. "Things can always get worse," she agreed. "The ones of us who've seen how bad it can get have to be more watchful than anybody. But I'm hoping that by being here, I've helped keep this place good." She shrugged. "I've seen entropy at work, I've fought entropy. I don't think it's something that's inevitable. Are you worried about anything in particular?"
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"I know how it is," Erin assured him. "That's why you work as hard as you can to come up with a hundred strategies and tricks and skills to make sure you can stop somebody without killing them. You go out in teams so you've got the backup, you practice your ass off until you know in every fiber of every muscle that you can make the hit or take the shot and it's not going to be lethal." She hopped up to sit on the edge of the counter and face him. "You sit through every one of those ethics classes and you pay attention even when they're stupid, even when it seems like nobody in there has any fricking clue about how the world works. You and I don't come from here, and it's easy to forget what this world is like. We have to remind ourselves, because this is better. This is the kind of world I want to live in, you know?"
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Erin paused for a moment, can of beef stew in hand, then resumed her methodical task. "Lots of reasons," she told him. "We don't want people to be afraid of us, or see us as some kind of force outside the law. If we make a mistake and capture somebody innocent and turn them over to the police, that's fixable. If we kill somebody and it turns out we were wrong, nobody's going to fix that, and it's going to be hard to hold anybody accountable. Now most of the time we're really sure of who the bad guy is and that wouldn't even be an issue, but the people we protect don't have any way to know that for sure. They feel safer when we use restraint. Plus there's the fact that even the guilty ones deserve a trial, and they don't get that if we kill them." She dumped a bag of potatoes into the bin in the bottom of the pantry and tossed the plastic sack away. "And there's the fact that when we kill people, it hurts us too. Even if they deserved it, there's something about killing that is bad for humans. Every so often the situation will come up where you have to and there's no other choice for whatever reason, and then you do what you've got to do. But it's not good for you."
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"Wow, okay." Erin laughed a little. "You're gonna make me old before my time, but I guess I count. I've got to get the food put away, come on in and have some cocoa." She led him into the house, still not exactly warm thanks to its age and size, but much warmer than the frigid garage. The Manor had way more kitchens than any one house needed, but Erin headed for the main kitchen at the center of the first floor, where the appliances were brand new and the lighting had been upgraded to warm hominess instead of industrial foodservice. She put on the electric kettle, then started unpacking the groceries. "What do you need to talk about?"
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At the front of the expansive garage, a good dozen yards from where Riley was working, the garage door opened and allowed in a blast of frigid, snowy air. Erin's blue truck pulled in and the door shut quickly behind it as the garage fans kicked on to quickly balance the temperature and remove the humidity from the air. Erin herself climbed out of the truck, swinging around the back of the cab to jump into the bed in one of the carelessly acrobatic maneuvers that Riley was becoming used to after a lot of time spent around superheroes. She reappeared a moment later with an armload of grocery bags and jumped out of the truck just as easily. "Hey Riley," she greeted casually. "How's it going?"
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At that moment, a small plant began twisting its way out of the ruined floor not far from the new mother and her family. It seemed to be struggling at first, unfurling spiky leaves that writhed even as they grew, forming a bud that looked like a red missile in the center. It grew larger, tearing at the earth around it, dislodging tiles and creating its own little field of rubble as it forced its way through whatever was holding it back. More leaves grew from the center mass, deep shiny green and sharp as knives,creating a dangerous corona around the opening flower. Finally, when the whole thing was taller than a man, it blossomed all at once into a spiky bromeliad and tilted almost sideways to allow a traveler to emerge from it. Fleur de Joie looked somewhat different from the last time they'd seen her. She was sweaty and panting, her hair mussed and coming loose from its long thick braid. Her skin was flushed, verdigris instead of pink, but she was pretty clearly exhausted. "Are you guys all right?" she asked, looking around with eyes widening in horror. "My god, what happened here?"
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I'm a little confused, where are we in relation to where the enemy psychic is? I know we went chasing after him, is this all going down inside the building where he is now? Can Paige still feel and track him?
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Jessie yelped with shock as she was scooped up, sitting down on the massive green hand in an instinctive bid to avoid falling. The skin was uncomfortably clammy and a little slimy, and though she had excellent balance it seemed smart not to take chances. She scooted backwards a little further as the massive frog-monster-maybe-Aquaria-somehow brought her much closer to that massive mouth. The enormous sad noise was not as bad as being eaten, but it was definitely not good either, blowing Jessie's hair almost straight back even as it sent a chill down her spine. "Are you okay?" she finally asked, for lack of anything more sensible to say.
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Gina, once again working at the kitchen table, kept her eyes averted and on her work while Steve spoke. It was a difficult and awkward situation to hear exactly the words you wanted, really to decisively win the argument, and still not be ready to stop being upset. She glanced up at him while still keeping her head tilted down, ambivalent even in posture. "That's good to hear," she allowed carefully, her face neutral. "I'm glad you're getting help, and the Freedom League's got some good psychologists. Are you going to be taking time off from superhero work while you get your head on straight?"
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Jessie hesitated and stepped back when approached by people out of the crowd, but they didn't seem threatening and they didn't have weapons. If there was a fight, she could probably grab Aquaria and fight their way out before the crowd could overwhelm them. She cocked her head curiously and tried to understand what the young people were telling her. It sounded as though there'd been another Erin White here at some point, one who had been some kind of folk hero to these people. That happened sometimes, Jessie knew. Erin was already a folk hero among the Furions and probably some other people as well, and although her own memories were purged and blurred and indistinct, she understood that she herself was a bogeyman on the world she'd come from. Would there forever be iterations of Erin everywhere she went? For now, it seemed like the best course of action was to keep an eye on the crowd. Some of the Voidrunners were obviously not happy with the situation, and that could mean trouble was about to descend, but Aquaria wanted to see the Dark Mother, so Jessie would stick around as long as necessary to make sure that happened.
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"An EMP won't take long to rig up," Miss A said neutrally, after watching Harrier leave the room. "And while I have the Emerson robots already through the portal, I'll see if I can get them into the building for a sweep, just to see if there's anything we're missing. Give me half an hour." She sent a quick radio message to her team at ArcheTech to unearth EMP equipment from the storehouses in the basement and make sure it wasn't going to explode or do anything else unfortunate. While they were getting to work, she navigated the little Emerson bots further into the tunnels and set them to map mode, to see if they could find any way into the building itself. That done, she headed out of the room as well, looking for her absent lover.
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Jessie was the first one off the Voidrunner, practically tumbling through the hatch as soon as it opened. It was very important to be off the ship, for one thing. Being on the ship was not good, especially when bad and dangerous things were happening. No matter what dangers the outside might offer, being out in the open air was definitely a thousand times better than being on any spaceship. More importantly, though, these were the people who might be holding them prisoner and keeping them from getting back to Earth. They told a weird story about time that she wasn't sure she understood any of, but it was possible that they were just lying. If their purposes were nefarious or dangerous, she was going to stop them by whatever means necessary. She stopped at the bottom of the gangplank, momentarily nonplussed at the size and composition of the crowd. It didn't look like any army she'd ever seen, but she wasn't sure what it did look like, either. They all looked like they were waiting for something incredibly interesting to happen.
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Raina took a few more hasty steps backwards, glancing around automatically to see if anybody else was nearby who might be helpful or wind up as collateral damage. Not much of anything in either category, really. "I'll have Merlin look into it," she said quickly. "He'll figure it out, there's gotta be some clues left in the virus he isolated in the Doom Room. I don't know any of that computer crap, but neither does Mr. Archer, so he must've gotten it from somewhere. Maybe it's like the Foundry or something, they do a lot of stuff with electronics and bionics and whatever the hell else. They'd probably like to mess with the school." Her words came out faster and faster as she tried to calm Fred down, even as she reached into her pocket for the handful of feathers that would focus her flight spell and give her a chance to escape. She couldn't just go, though, somebody else might not try and talk Fred down. "Don't even worry about it, it's practically a done deal."
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"How the hell am I supposed to talk down to you when you're ten times as smart as I am?" Raina demanded. "If I sound dumb, maybe it's because I am dumb!" She pushed herself to her feet, standing on the ledge to give herself the advantage of higher ground. For a moment, her face was all confused hurt before she packed it away again. "I don't know much of anything about where you come from, and I've tried to show you some of the good stuff about here, but the truth is that it's terrible here and now, and things are rotten at the core, and I don't know how to say it in a way that sounds smart." She took a couple of careful steps back when she noticed Fred's emotional turmoil, but didn't flee the scene entirely. "I don't know what you expect me to do."
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Raina laughed hollowly. "Mr. Archer hurt us. Maybe, and I stress the maybe, somebody wound him up to hurt somebody, but he's the one who focused in on us. Maybe there was no enemy and he took super-mechanical steroids and got super-roid-rage instead, but he doesn't want to tell us. Maybe that's not Mr. Archer at all on the screen, and how would we even know? You can't trust the things that they tell you, Fred. If your first principles are wrong, if you believe the wrong people, then you can think you're fighting the good fight for a really long time before you realize you were just a tool all along." She flicked her lighter off and on, staring down at it with her face a frozen mask.
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Raina laughed, letting the smoke dissipate into the air. "Oh honey," she told Fred, "It'd be easier to count who doesn't have a gun pointed in our direction. I don't know if you noticed, but every faction in this town wants us either off the map or under their thumb. Good, bad, doesn't really matter." She shrugged, staring down at the scuffed toes of her shoes. "I'm here to get trained so that I can control my own power, not because I trust any of these people to tell me what to do with it. I don't want any part of whatever gang war might be going on between the school and some rival faction. If things do blow up, I'll do my best to keep the neighbors out of it, cause I'm pretty sure that's the heroey thing to do. But why should we let ourselves be drafted into their wars?" She gave Fred a pointed look, as though demanding a reply.
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Paige took Roman's hand and squeezed it, meeting his eyes steadily. "Well done, old man," she told him, augmenting her soft voice mentally so that he would hear it even if his hearing had gone. She waited with him, even as her mind sought out Richard, testing the feel of his emotions to make sure that things were all right outside. He was angry and confused, but triumphant as well and not particularly worried; things were going well enough. As Roman's last breath rattled away, Paige gently placed his hands over his chest and closed his eyes. Someone would come along and find him soon enough. She walked to the enormous hole in the wall of the room and looked out, a little surprised by the sight despite decades of metahuman experience. ~Everything okay down there?~ she queried Richard.
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Raina hadn't gone far, she was sitting just outside the administrative building on a landscaping ledge, blowing smoke rings. Not even smoking a cigarette, just lazily breathing out whitish-gray smoke in wobbly rings as she looked up at the sky. She glanced over as Fred approached, raising an eyebrow. "Is the meeting over already, or are you here to drag me back in by my hair? I really think I've had just about goddamn enough of Mr. Asshole and Headmistress Vulture for the next little while." She swung her legs on the ledge and looked supremely unconcerned, which for anybody who spent a lot of time with Raina, probably meant that she was putting the lid on a lot of less-than-unconcerned feelings.
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Jessie dashed over and retrieved the ball from Eve, checking her over for any possible injury while doing so. "Sorry, sorry, sorry!" she repeated, trying to brush sand from Eve with her hands. "That was bad, I shouldn't have set it like that. Are you okay?" She set the ball down next to the net, giving it a surreptitious baleful look for causing problems. Baxter, much relieved now, came over to give it a sniff so she sat down in the sand and began to pet him, relaxing when he whumpfed down next to her and let her scratch his ears. "Sports are hard for superhero type people."
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"If the Madrigal Martinet and her Hounds are in the vicinity, it's damn near certain that there's nothing in that building to save, or that can be saved," Miss Americana said tonelessly, even as she used her tablet to send the probes down into the subterrenean passageways of the other world. "They would likely find it amusing to fake the life signs, and even better if they take a group of actual survivors and corrupt them or render them brain dead, just to see the faces of the people who come to save them." She didn't look at Talya or Daphne or Daedelus and especially did not look at Steve, keeping her focus on the camera feeds. "It's also likely that there is no technology worth saving there; that it's all just part of the trap to draw in curious and desperate interdimensional explorers. Lives for the altruistic, weapons for the hard-pressed, there's bait for everyone, really. The wisest course of action is to slam this dimensional door shut and throw away the key."
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"Oh, no way," Raina insisted. "Anibal's got a car and driver we can use. We can't walk if we want to do any serious shopping." She plucked a tiny feather from her hair and crumpled it between her two fingers; instantly her feet settled all the way back to the ground again as the magic dissipated. "Let's get going before somebody puts on double-secret probation or something." Raina was relatively sure that going to the mall wasn't even against the rules, but she'd gotten kind of used to being in trouble by now, and that was hard to shake. "We'll make it back before curfew."
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"That you know of," Paige pointed out smoothly, giving the young man a quelling look. "Untapped metahuman potentials are difficult to pin down at the best of times, and who knows what might have been happening to him as the cancer began affecting him more? He'd hardly be the first metahuman to exhibit a huge temporary increase in power when faced with a life-or-death situation." She shrugged. "But at this point it's immaterial, I suppose. We can have him tested for metahuman potential when he's aged up another few years, but until then, there's not much anybody can do." She was still keeping a close eye on the baby, even as the doctors poked and prodded at him. Bryant Halliday or not, at this point in his life he was an innocent who needed someone looking out for him.
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Raina stared flatly at the screen, the air around her beginning to smell ever so slightly of smoke. "You're sorry?" she repeated in a disbelieving voice. "You attacked us on purpose to save yourself, you dug in to find what was really going to hurt, you gave us all a bunch of nightmares we get to live with now, and now we forgive you and everything's okay again? I thought you were supposed to be a hero." She turned her back to the screen and walked away. "Just because we're supposed to be heroes doesn't mean you can set us on fire to warm yourself up. Go screw." With measured steps, she walked out of the room, not even slamming the door behind her for once.
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Jessie calmed down a little once Aquaria was back on board the Voidrunner, at least to the point where she could sit down in one of the seats instead of pressing herself up against the bulkhead. They were still stuck, but she wasn't alone anymore, and if Aquaria was in any danger, it was at least going to be danger that Jessie could probably see and cope with and maybe even fight. "Tell them to let us go!" she called up to the flight deck. "Tell them we'll fight them if they don't!"