Electra
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"It's hard," Erin agreed. "Seeing your life the way it could've been, and this other person who gets to live it, and doesn't even appreciate how good they have it. Makes it feel like there's no room for you in your own family, and how is that even fair? And maybe you see things in them you don't really like in yourself, and it's just so annoying. Erin Keeley and I get along a lot better now that there's most of a continent between us," she admitted with a rueful grin. "We couldn't make it work in the same house, and only part of it was that I couldn't handle being around copies of the people I'd lost every day. You should let her help you," she added abruptly. "If she wants to help you, count it as a blessing. It's weird for them too, having you around and not knowing what to do, but maybe it helps if she feels like she can take care of you at least this much."
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An expression that was hard to quantify flitted across Erin's face, before settling back into her bland expression. "There are two, actually," she told him. "My legal name now is Keeley Erin White, I reversed my first and middle names so I could have a legal identity separate from the Erin White native to this timeline. Once they let me out of the Goodman Building, I went and lived with the Whites in Seattle for a few months before we all decided I'd be a lot better off at Claremont. I see them once a year or so, we exchange some emails and photos, but we're not close. You went and stayed with your double's family for awhile too, right? They're here in Freedom City?"
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She gave him a side-eyed look and a little smirk. "None taken," she told him evenly. "Just don't go making too many assumptions about who can handle themselves and who can't. Looking like a badass and acting like a badass tends to mean the opposite of actually being a badass. But some of the toughest people I know haven't got much in the way of superpowers. If you can use your brain and your skills and your good sense, you'll get by just fine. You planning on trying to do hero work while you're here on Prime?"
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"Kids can bounce back from a lot of crap if they've got people on their side," Gina opined, fisting her hands tightly as they walked out from behind the truck and rounded another corner. "Yolanda's people take real good care of her, I'm sure, and they aren't going to let anybody break her down or ruin her. That in itself will count for a lot. Anyway, she's still just a little kid. She's got a lot of time left to shake off the old and get involved in kid stuff and teenager stuff. She's not like you and me. She'll be all right," she assured him.
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"Yeah," Erin confirmed, her voice oddly flattened. "I was fourteen when people started getting sick. My mom smuggled my sister and I out of Seattle when my dad started coughing, so we watched most everything on television from this isolated compound my crazy uncle had. Eventually a crowd of zombies found the compound, and that was the end of that, for everybody but my sister and me. The experimental flu vaccine he used on us gave me superpowers, but that only takes you so far, especially if you're fighting alone." She shook her head, changed the subject. "Sounds like you joined up with the Woodsmen as soon as you were old enough. Did you like doing it?"
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Erin hrmphed a laugh. "That's not exactly reassuring," she admitted. "I did a lot of time in the Goodman Building before they decided I was safe to let out onto the street." She hesitated for a minute, obviously trying to decide what and how much of her story she wanted to tell. "There was a pandemic in my world. The Terminus engineered it and set it loose, and it was killing people by the millions, starting with the superheroes. Every genius who was still alive got together to work on coming up with a vaccine, and when they found one, they rushed it into production. And everyone who got the vaccine turned into a zombie within a few days and started killing everyone around them. Since the people who got the vaccines first were soldiers, health care workers, infrastructure workers, families, it got ugly really fast. Between that and the flu, the world was an empty wasteland within a year, except for hordes of starving zombies. I wound up traveling from Southern California all the way to Freedom City, where Dr. Atom helped me get offworld, to someplace safe." She didn't look at him as she told the story, her eyes were distant in a way Riley could recognize from the adults who'd lived through the worst of the Forest Wave.
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"It's a good lesson, taught in a stupid way," Erin told him. "One of the most important things you learn at Claremont, no matter what your skills and powers are like, is that you can't do it on your own. The impulse is going to be there to go it alone, especially when it feels like nobody understands where you're coming from. People who are from Prime can be incredibly stupid about responding to deadly threats." There were years of frustration in those words, but it was an old, settled kind of annoyance. "But when you do hero work, you need a wide base of skills to draw on, and people to watch your back. Going it alone is a good way to get yourself hurt, and for the day not to get saved."
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"It's hard to see somebody die for the first time, even in simulation, I imagine," Erin commented, turning the bolt he'd given her in her hands. "And Archer's a well-known asshole. I honestly don't know why they even keep him around, except that he's got no other skills. But serving detention isn't so bad. You can serve it in the Doom Room or the gym if you want; better than study hall and you get more done. This is nice work," she commented, handing him back the crossbow bolt. "Did he tell you what the solution to the simulation was supposed to be?"
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"It's a specific question for a specific problem," Raina told Erik, her eyes busy following the staff he was flipping around so cavalierly. It looked really dangerous, but also fun. "Anyway, even if I had a cast iron broom, I wouldn't be able to flippy it around like that. The sweeping end is too heavy." Talya's suggestion was met with a flash of interest and Raina cocking her head thoughtfully at Erik. "That could be very educational," she agreed. "Um... that's not the way you'd teach me how to do it, right?"
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Raina gave him a look of playful outrage. "It was a dare!" she reiterated. "What was I supposed to do, not kiss the statue? If you're gonna be asking hard questions of anybody, you should ask Robin why she wanted me to kiss the statue in the first place. That's what's really messed up." She picked up another french fry with the tips of her fingers, quite primly, and ate it. "I suppose you've never done anything at all ridiculous because someone challenged you to do it?"
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Singularity stared at Glamazon for a moment longer with those flat, empty brown eyes, till some twitch or motion from the dazed monster caught her attention once again. This time, though, she hesitated, glancing from the creature to its victims, to the enemy who told her that she couldn't kill the monster, that Erin wouldn't want her to. The cognitive dissonance in her head made her want to run away, but Aquaria was here somewhere and might be in danger. She dropped the metal bar she'd been holding and instead lashed out, almost too quick to see, and kicked the shark monster in the pointiest part of its nose.
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All right, Singularity is going to switch back to nonlethal damage and attempt to kick Megalodon in the head while he is dazed. She will again be doing the all out (2) power attack (5). She gets a 22. That's a DC 30 toughness save.
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Erin held out her hand for the bolt, her smile wry. "You think you're the first student to make Archer wet his pants during a power assessment?" she asked sardonically. "The first scenario he ever ran me through, I wound up twisting one mugger's head clean off his body, then crushing another one to death inside his own super-suit. I was less than six months out from my apocalypse, and raw as hell. I barely understood the concept of not fighting to kill. From the way I heard it, you made a principled choice that was different than the one somebody who grew up on Prime might have made. That about right?"
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Erin sat down crosslegged on the grass and watched him work, observing the weapon with a practiced eye. "You keep it in good shape," she noted. "I don't have a lot of experience with crossbows. I used one for a little while when I was younger, but the things I was fighting, putting holes in them wouldn't have done much good. Though I hear you've got some bolts with a little more punch. How long have you been practicing with it?" Her voice was mild, interested, just shop talk between two people interested in weapons.
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He heard her coming before he saw her, deliberately loud steps to announce her arrival and avoid startling him while he was armed and looking in another direction. Erin was wearing sturdy and practical clothes today, jeans and a flannel pullover covering a t-shirt, ankle-height boots and a sturdy backpack. She walked up to him and stopped a few feet away, looking him over. "Are you Riley?" she asked, mostly for form's sake. "I'm Erin. People around here usually call me Wander. Can I sit down?"
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Raina hung back as long as she could, fascinated less by what was on the other side of the portal than by the portal itself. She ran her hands along its outer edges, feeling the magic tingling over her hands, teasing the parts of her mind where her magical senses sat. She wondered if she could make a portal with enough practice, wondered where she would go if she could. If there was a universe out there for everything that could possibly happen, maybe there was a world out there where none of the past year had happened and she was happy and home and maybe okay with sharing a little of the wealth with a dimensional cousin. Or maybe that me is just fully indoctrinated in the dark mysteries and who knows what that would mean? The portal felt so interesting against her senses, strange and familiar and huge and dark but not scary, just vast... Raina realized suddenly that she was holding up the field trip, and reluctantly pulled her hand back. "Still want to learn to make an anchor," she added, then hopped through the portal, Merlin clinging to her shoulder with great determination.
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"Huh, good for her," Gina mused, flinching slightly as a squirrel rustled the bushes they were passing. "And it's the same guy who came on the space rescue? They were pretty wrapped up in each other then. You should go to whatever they do." She relaxed fractionally as they walked past a large moving truck that combined with a hedge to narrow their world down to the strip of sidewalk for a few yards. "He wants you to teach little kids? That doesn't seem exactly your style," she admitted candidly.
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Sparkler is getting into a mentorship relationship with Bombshell, which should lead to fun and felony for everyone! Wander is going to be mentoring Woodsman for his many, many "orphan from an alternate dimension" issues. Wander could probably take on another mentee, most likely somebody who is facing some of the problems she came to school with, (ie uncontrolled strength, traumatic past, dimensional dislocation.) I could see Hologram or Fleur de Joie potentially taking somebody on, if the situation were right.
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Jessie seemed to be considering the offer for a minute, then shook her head with a slight, almost wistful smile. "I don't think it's a good idea," she told Kimber. "It's better not to talk about, like Erin said. But if you want to talk more, you should. I like to listen to you. And you make really good waffles." By now a surprising portion of the large stack was gone, despite the pauses in eating. Jessie picked up her fork once more. "How did you end up living in the castle here? Is it fun?"
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Singularity turned her head to look at Glamazon, and for a moment it seemed that the Atlantean would be the girl's next target. Her face was blank, her eyes empty of everything but faint puzzlement. "It's a monster," she told Glamazon, her monotone voice very matter-of-fact. "It eats people. I have to kill it or it won't stop. If you get in the way, you're going to get hurt," She waited, but her attention was already beginning to slide back towards her dazed quarry.
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Singularity will hold her action temporarily, in order to do some free action talking.
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Raina looked surprised for a minute, then grinned. "Wicked. Let's get out of here." She led the way down the steps and to the foyer, keeping eyes and ears open for any sign of an encroaching RA. A quick spell momentarily disabled the emergency alarm on the back door, and then they were out of the building, near to the dumpster and hidden from students still going to dinner or the library. She'd mapped the route earlier, finding the sneakiest way from the dorm to the back gate, through a few a few bushes and behind a copse of trees Within moments they were on the outside of the imposing red brick walls, standing on the sidewalks of Bayview. "Ah, freedom!" Raina crowed. "Let's get a few more blocks over, then we'll fly. We're really going to have to squish to get us all on my broom."
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Raina got a very odd look on her face for a moment, then she laughed. "Weird," she said with great certainty. "It was super weird. See, we were supposed to be doing this incredibly boring school project, but while we were going around, we saw this creepy statue making this grotesque face. I got in close for a better look at it, and Robin dared me to kiss it, so I totally did. Then the statue exploded and turned into Fred, have you met her yet? She goes here too now. And then Fred turned into a monster, and we had to fight her till she turned back into Fred, and we got to skip the rest of the homework assignment. But other than that, it would've been really boring," she assured him cheerfully.
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Raina looked scandalized at the idea of hitting somebody with her broom. "I can't use my broom as a bludgeoning instrument!" she insisted. "If I break it, how will I be able to fly?" Merlin laughed at her expression, but for once he didn't contradict her. "If I need a bludgeoning weapon, I'll just use one of my textbooks or something. They weigh ten pounds apiece and it wouldn't exactly break my heart to lose one. But I guess I just figured that if there's time to be thinking about weapons and stuff, there's probably time to do magic?" She paused a moment, thinking. "So I was kind of wondering, do you have any, like, tricks that let you deflect a crossbow bolt, or get out of the way of one?"
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Jessie was quiet for several minutes, acceding to Avro's imperious demands for petting while turning over in her mind what Kimber had told her. "I think you're probably right," she finally decided. "If you had died and passed on, you would've gone to heaven, and Erin says it's nice there. But you wouldn't have been able to do anything else. And you can't be who you used to be, but people still like you anyway. Maybe you can do stuff you didn't get to do before." She picked up Avro into her arms and snuggled him, heedless of the quills that snagged her shirt. "But do you ever miss your memories?" she asked plaintively. "Like being able to remember your family and how you felt about them? Or to be able to remember how you died?"