Electra
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"Oh, I'm happy to have you, and your kids," Stesha told Ellis expansively, joggling the baby on her hip. "The more the merrier, right? And they're having fun." She looked over to where some kind of elaborate game of tag was starting to form up, now that Holly and Yolanda had reached detente and joined the other children. Amaryllis and JJ were both attempting to balance precariously on a cooler while shoving at each other with their fingertips, but since the ground was soft and Ammy's nascent gravitational powers were letting her keep up with the bigger JJ, she let them go at it for the moment. "It's good to get to know the good side of hero work and not just the bad." She pointed him to the duffle bag that held the bocce ball set, being slightly too preoccupied with cooing baby talk to Mia to help set it up right away. "I can't believe how big you've gotten, sweet thing! I need to come visit more often, that's the only thing to do! That's right! Or maybe you come visit me more often, you can crawl around in all this nice grass! We'll get you green leggies and everything!" Raising her voice, she called out to the group. "So I've got a big grill getting hot, and a cooler of steaks and chicken and portabella mushrooms. Does anybody know how to cook it?"
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"Islands, huh?" Raina repeated, navigating her way up the stairs to the second floor. "I'm assuming from your accent you dont' mean the Carribean islands. And, you know, the whole lack of a tan thing." Her lips twitched with amusement as she took in Cathy's white, white skin. "Scotland, I'm guessing? Never been there, but I went to England once and Ireland once. She unlocked the door to their new shared dorm room. It was very simple, two bunked beds, two dressers, two desks, two chairs, two closets. Raina immediately moved towards the desk and dresser on the left, letting her suitcase fall onto the dresser with a soft thud. "Man, welcome to prison," she muttered, slouching into the desk chair. "This place is dire."
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"Well, I can wear seven-inch heels," Raina quipped back, still in Spanish, "that's a life skill right there. Let's see, my non-magic skills. I can plan a dinner party for twenty from soup to nuts, I can ride horseback, I have fantastic fashion sense, despite what you may see before you." She grinned ruefully. "I'm pretty good in school, when I feel like it, and I'm not a half-bad artist. Oh, and I have a familiar who can do things with computers that I don't even know how to describe, but I think that might fall into the mystical skills category." She sat back, wiped her mouth daintily with her napkin. "So how about you? Go on and brag a little, what are you good at, besides your marvelous singing voice?"
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"Okay, Robin, you're with me, Cathy, Hannah, you get there however you want, we'll meet at that big fountain thingy at the front of the mall," Raina decided, putting down her broom and straddling it as it began to rise slightly. "And we'll figure out jeans for you, Robin, but you're not wearing them tonight. You can't beat up the bouncer and you won't get in if you don't look sexy, so you just gotta do what you gotta do. It'll be nearly painless, I promise." As soon as Robin climbed on board, she took off, shooting up into the sky very much like a Harry Potter character. When the quartet regrouped in front of the fountain, with Raina's broom safely tucked behind some decorative foliage in the parking lot, Raina seized command once more. "All right," she told the others, pointing at the map like a general laying out a battle plan. "We've got three kinds of stores, the discounts, the anchors, and the good stuff." She pointed at examples as she went, then smacked her hand down on the lighted glass. "We are only going for the good stuff today!" she decreed. "Juniors stores with hot mannequins and weird ambient air fresheners is what we need right now."
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"Oh thanks, I'll check it out." Raina glanced over to Merlin to make sure he'd noted the name, while simultaneously making sure not to get any hopes up. A bookshop owned by someone actually in the mystical know would be fraught with problems, not least of which that the second they heard her name, they'd refuse to sell her anything. And the magical community was small, incestuous and nosy above all things. Maybe she could give it a try, but the odds of success were small. Better than nothing, though! She looked to Talya. "So, like how often do you want me coming here for training? And could you maybe give me a note so I can get out of PE for already having exercised?" she added hopefully.
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Jessie's eyes widened a little. "It would be better if you came in our door," she told Kimber with wholehearted intensity. "I get, um, a little twitchy sometimes. Like when something is in the room that I don't expect to be there, or didn't come in the normal way? I might break something by accident, or surprise you," she added with a grimace. "But I don't sleep much either. Only every couple of days, or sometimes I'll just take a nap. Aquaria sleeps a lot though, especially when it gets cold outside. Do you guys ever do puzzles at night?" she asked. "I do a lot of puzzles. And draw, and read. Oh, here." She looked around the room. "If you have a pencil and paper, I can give you my new phone number."
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Miss A looked over at the new arrivals, but remained closely focused on the empty patch of parking lot she was busy analyzing. "Field team should be arriving any minute with better gear, and some caution tape so nobody gets too close on accident. There's not even a shred of Terminus energy, so I think we can rule out a portal to there, and it's not behaving like any dimensional portal I've seen before. There's some chroniton radiation mixed in with the radio interference, more than normal background levels. I think they were right when they called it a temporal portal, but something is blocking it." She nodded at Bombshell's introduction. "I've heard of you. Didn't realize you were with the Interceptors."
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"All right, keep me appraised." Miss Americana hung up the phone to let the remaining Interceptors gather themselves and get moving, and concentrated her own efforts on securing a command post. A little searching netted an outdoor power outlet in front of the strip mall for the equipment she'd brought with her, and the security guard was quickly persuaded to help keep any passers-by at bay. It was a little shocking that such a high-energy phenomenon was invisible to the naked eye, but the fact that the parking lot looked empty and dark was probably helpful for the moment. Her assistant called to say that the field team was underway and would be at the West End in ten more minutes. She tried to raise Steve again. No answer.
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Raina clearly caught the look for all it wasn't directed at her, to judge by her sudden blushing. "Um, right. Yeah, so you throw ping pong balls at me or something until I can get out of the way of them? I guess that works. Except again with the sniping thing. Guess there's no way to avoid that unless you have super-speed? Or a forcefield, maybe..." She trailed off, thinking hard about that. "Neither of you would happen to know where I could maybe find some magic books, would you?" she asked innocently. Neither Talya nor Erik had seemed to know about her less-than-savory past, so maybe they wouldn't freak out about her asking.
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Jessie smiled at Kimber's enthusiasm. "That sounds really fun. I'm glad I have an apartment with Aquaria, I think I would be too lonely by myself. She likes to go out more than me anyway, Um, we have a kitchen full of stuff downstairs, and we both have to eat everyday. Maybe sometime you could come down to our apartment and cook with me, if you want?" she offered tentatively. "It might be fun. We just bought like a month's supply of food, so there's a lot to choose from. I bought some of those chocolate chip cookies in a roll, that you can just slice up and put on the pan."
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Raina took the phone with a grin. "I appreciate a confident man," she told him, then touched her necklace and hummed a few bars of music under her breath. Putting the earbuds in, she watched the video, first in wide-eyed silence, then in torrents of giggles till she had to wipe tears from her eyes. "You are a phenomenal dancer," she told him at the end of the video, and now she was speaking in flawless Spanish herself. "I think we may have to arrange some kind of talent show here on campus. It would be a crime to put your light under a bushel."
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Raina grinned delightedly. "Oh wow, that is suddenly right at the top of my must-watch list. I'm sure Merlin can find it for me, no matter how it tries to hide." She took another bite of her pie, then waved her fork in a litle circle as she added, "And of course I'd jump off a bridge. I can totally fly. Jumping off bridges is fun!" She raised her eyebrows and leaned towards him. "Play your cards right, and maybe sometime you can jump off one with me. If you're brave enough."
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Singularity dove forward, but she did not attempt to finish the job she'd started before. Instead, she pinned the unconscious creature to the ground by the expedient of applying her knees to its shoulders and both hands to the back of its oversized scaly head. The legs were left exposed, but since it wasn't moving or flailing, it left ample opportunity for Aquaria to apply the medication. Or, if the medication didn't work, it was also a position from which the threat could be easily disposed of. Singularity kept her eyes locked on the monster, watching for any hint of renewed struggle.
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"It's like you've jumped ahead three decades in thirty minutes," Koshiro told her with a laugh, slightly wheezy as he was still trying to catch his breath from the big group hug. Some of his old teammates weren't exactly clear on the whole needing-to-breathe thing. "It looks good on you. So this power up thing," he asked, "is it permanent? Are you going to be solid from here on out, or is it just a sometimes thing?"
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Raina flinched reflexively when the knife went flying past, even though it was immediately obvious that Erik had never been in any real danger. "How do you do that?" she asked. "I mean, how do you figure out from their eyes where the knife or the punch is going to be? I mostly look at faces to figure out whether somebody's mad enough to punch me, not where they're going to aim. And with the crossbow, what if he's like a hundred yards away and sniping at you or something like that? You can't even look at his eyes!" She picked up the padded staff Erik had been using and gave it a little experimental twirl, nearly beaning herself in the head.
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"You'll get there," Erin promised him. "You've got plenty of time, and peoples' memories are short. Somebody else is going to do something exciting, and they'll start forgetting about whatever rumors are going around about you. I'm not saying it's ever gonna be comfortable," she admitted. "I had underclassmen believing I was going to flip out and kill them till the day I graduated, but a little fear from the kiddos can be a healthy thing." She gave him a sardonic grin. "But the people who get to know you will know you're an asset. And while you're stuck, you can do other stuff to get ready. I recommend studying maps, lots of them. Get to know the city as well as you can. And take Driver's Ed."
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She grinned at him. "Some of the stories are probably exaggerated. But not by much! Mike, Phalanx, he and I were in school at the same time, on the same team together. Standing next to him, I didn't feel particularly strong or durable at all. So I went the other way, learned acrobatics, learned how to fight by surprising the bad guys instead of just walking up to them and punching them. It's served me pretty well. So are you on a team yet, or is it still too early in the year for people to be grouping up?" She didn't mention the other possibility, that Riley's actions might be preventing him from getting on a team.
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"Sometimes," Erin agreed, not seeming at all shocked by his words. She looked out over the campus, where students were walking or flying or teleporting across the broad, placid lawn. "Don't get me wrong, the heroes here work very hard to protect the world, and they do amazing work. We do amazing work, and someday you'll be a part of it, if you stay that long and want to. But most of them can't possibly understand what kind of role blind luck and good fortune have played in their success. So many times, if one thing had gone another way, one last minute save hadn't worked, everything would've been destroyed. And they pat themselves on the back because everything turned out, and they deserve the pat on the back, but they don't really understand. "And I don't want them to ever have to understand," she continued, wrapping her arms loosely around her knees. "I care for so many people here now. Friends I love, a fiance, people who are like family to me. The only way for them to know what we know is to make them live through what we've lived through. I don't want that for any of them, even if the price I'll pay is that there's always going to be that little gap between the way they see the world and how I see it. Even if it means that sometimes I end up looking weird, or callous, or cruel."
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"I've called in a support team from ArcheTech, they'll be bringing in equipment to analyze the field and seal off the area." Miss A replied, with maybe just the tiniest hint of relief in her ultra-professional voice at hearing Dragonfly had not gone AWOL with the team. "Civilian activity is low at this hour, but the field is invisible to the naked eye. We don't need any accidents. If you've got any equipment to analyze temporospatial claudications, bring it with you." It went unspoken that of the two of them, Dragonfly was far more conversant with tears in the fabric of reality.
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"Seven minutes ago, I received a communication from Caradoc," came Miss A's terse yet dulcet voice over the speaker. "He reported that they had located a "car-stealing cloud," and that it was an unstable temporal field in the parking lot of the strip mall. He was then cut off by static and the transmission ended. Two minutes ago, I arrived on the scene and ascertained that there is definitely an energy field in the parking lot, but there is no vortex present, nor is Ste- Caradoc, or any other heroes. I'm unable to approach the field due to high levels of interference. Are you in contact with your field team?"
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If Vox wants a psychic mentor, Hologram might be able to teach him a few things, and can sympathize to a certain extent with time spent living on the street. For a psychic mentor closer to his own age, you might ask Alderwitch about Psyche, who just graduated from Claremont herself a few years ago.
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Miss Americana was on the scene within minutes of Caradoc's abortive communication, still wearing an ArcheTech labcoat and with her usually impeccably-styled hair pulled back in a ponytail. Despite her speed, she was still too late, the parking lot was empty, the heroes nowhere to be found. Steve wasn't answering his communicator anymore, and the sensors she'd put in his suit weren't registering him anywhere in Freedom City. Even so, she called out into the night. "Caradoc! Interceptors! Can you hear me?" Pulling out her handheld sensor sweeper, she aimed it at the field she still couldn't get close to. Coming within less than fifty feet made her feel dizzy and nauseous on the other end of the link, not good for concentration. She placed a quick call to ArcheTech for people and field equipment, then called the number she had for Interceptors HQ. "This is Miss Americana. I'm looking for any of the Interceptors. Are you there?"
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"Well," Erin said cautiously, "I don't think it probably would've been Fleur de Joie, cause I don't think she's very old. She'd have been a kid or maybe a young teenager when you were a baby. But you're not wrong that it could've been some plant controller, or some magic user, or another metahuman who got everything started. And it makes sense to be pissed about it. I mean, I can look around on Prime and I can see some of the people who helped create the zombie vaccine on my world. They were stupid and sloppy on my world, and they got everybody killed. I hate those people on my world. But these people, they didn't do it here."
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Erin went very still for a minute, till it seemed like Riley might have gone too far. "It was a very comprehensive apocalypse," she finally said, her voice careful and flat. "I tried to keep my little sister alive, but she was only seven. After her, the only non-zombie humans I met were a little cult somewhere around Ohio and they ran me off with torches and pitchforks. They wouldn't have gone anywhere. After I left, the Terminus came to pick over what was left. Very comprehensive," she said again, then seemed to shake herself, remind herself that she was supposed to be mentoring here. "I've been to Sanctuary, it's really nice," she told him. "There's this plant controller named Fleur de Joie who runs the place, but it's like almost this old fashioned farming community, except they've got electricity and medicine and stuff. And giant firebreathing bees sometimes, but they're friendly. That definitely wouldn't be a bad place to evacuate to, and I'm sure they'll find your world eventually. It's just a matter of time."
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"Nope," Erin said ruefully. "Two besides me. When I was at Claremont, we ended up getting thrown into alternate dimensions pretty regularly, for all kinds of different reasons. I met a bunch of different versions of myself, and we almost never got along. But one time we got swapped here on Prime with our counterparts from Anti-Earth, and I found out that the version of me there wasn't evil, she was a split of me from my world, and they were... they were doing horrible things to her." Erin's voice made it clear how much she wasn't going to discuss details of that. "So my friends and I mounted a rescue mission and brought her to Prime, and she lives here now too. She picked the name Jessie, and her codename is Singularity. She's in Freedom City, you may meet her one day."