Electra
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"Maybe they'll move," Raina offered. "Sounds like a pretty crap place to live, no offense, way up in the cold and the dark, far away from anything, in a village full of nosy assholes. They could come to Freedom City and be with you, and you'd all be happier. I don't know anything about the gay scene here, but they've got a club scene at all, so it's better than where you or I either of us came from." Merlin crawled out from under the blankets and stretched, careful to avoid singeing his fur on the fireball. Hiking up his sweater, he headed back to the computer, but took the time to suggest that Headmaster Summers could be an invaluable resource in helping the parents of a metahuman teenager immigrate to the US.
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"Just don't do anything I have to explain to the headmaster, okay?" Raina requested over her shoulder to Erik. "It's really hard to convince her that things exist that aren't my fault." Merlin expressed skepticism of the idea as well, but in an absent way, as he was busy looking over Erik's paperwork. Raina turned back to Talya. "Follow-through, right." She clenched her fists, set her body, twisted and swung, landing an almost-decent hit to Talya's midsection. "Ouch!" Raina complained, waving her hand. "That hurts a lot more than I thought it would."
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Miss Americana drew herself up to face her double, ready to fire her lasers, but stopped short by something ridiculously familiar... well, other than the obvious, in the way the other Miss Americana addressed her. "My beauty?" she repeated incredulously. "Oh my god, is that you, Freebooter? I am going to kick every single inch of your ass, I swear it. What the hell are you even playing at? What's this all about?" She waved her arms. "I thought you were into piratey things!"
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Raina rinsed her mouth and ran a soaked paper towel over her face, beginning to look a little embarrassed now that the scenario was over. She was sure the images would stay in her head for quite some time, but the calm sanity of a Claremont locker room at least offered some perspective. It also reminded her that Anibal technically wasn't supposed to be in the girl's locker room, but she still appreciated the support. "I could go for some sugar calories, yeah," she agreed, looking back at him in the mirror. "Give me a few minutes to change clothes and freshen up, and we'll hit the caf, okay?"
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"But if I can hit you with my eyes closed, I'm a prodigy, instead of just being minimally skilled," Raina quipped, even as she adjusted her stance to try again. "And that's Merlin, he's my familiar. You can just ignore his commentary, he's just a nerd monkey who couldn't fight if his life depended on it." Merlin snorted and indicated that was what he kept Raina around for, and she wasn't doing a particularly good job yet either, was she? "Maybe you don't want me to learn how to punch," Raina suggested warningly. Merlin stuck out his tongue and climbed up on the desk where Erik had been sitting, sensing a more adoring audience. "All right," Raina said, ignoring both the extremely distracting males. "Again?"
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"You don't have to tell them right away, do you?" Raina asked, lazily beginning to juggle the ball from hand to hand. "It's not like you've got a girlfriend or anything yet, right? Maybe by the time you've actually got something to report to them that they need to know, they'll have had some more time to absorb the whole having-powers thing. It's 2015, having a gay kid isn't as weird as it used to be. I mean, I come from Bumfark Indiana and even I knew gay kids at my extremely expensive private school." An injudicious move of her hand brough the tip of Raina's finger into physical contact with the ball. She hissed and popped her finger into her mouth for a moment. "Anyway," she continued, her words slightly garbled, "after they dealt with the whole superpowers thing, you'd think this would be easy."
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"Well you're probably in the right place, there's a hell of a lot of 'em around here," Raina pointed out after a moment's cocked-head consideration. "Just stay away from Madison. Robin said that Riley said the first thing Madison did when she saw him was try and get a selfie with him and tell him she approved of his alternative lifestyle. She's got problems way beyond being an insuffrable bitch," she counseled. With the air thawing a little, she shrugged the blanket off her shoulders and let it pool around her crossed legs. "Are your people back home going to freak out about it, or are they cool?"
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Raina's eyebrow quirked at that assessment, and from under the comforter she could hear Merlin's sardonic chuckle. Silently she willed him to silence, or at least to less audible mirth. If Cathy wanted to believe she had her life together, who was Raina to dissuade her? She sat up a little, bringing the fireball in towards her chest like a coddled pet. It cast weird shadows over her face, but her coloring was so fair and her face so harmless, it couldn't even be described as spooky. "Go ahead," she invited, "shoot."
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Raina did her best to pay attention despite her mortification (and her natural inclination to tuck her thumbs inside her fists.) "I'm not really worried about hurting you," she admitted, wryly, "I'm more worried about falling on my ass trying to hit you, and then you having a heart attack from laughing, and then I'll get detention again." She drew herself up, closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then, figuring surprise was the only thing she had going for her, launched a quick jab to the midsection before even opening her eyes. She was rather surprised when her knuckles met flesh, even if they seemed to bounce off immediately.
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"Um, well, I did cotillion in middle school, but that didn't end up having a whole lot of dancing..." Raina, who'd been trying valiantly not to look at all, blushed scarlet to her shoulders at Erik's mock-indignant comment. "He's not laughing at you," she muttered, barely loud enough to carry across the room. "He's laughing at me because he's apparently forgotten who buys the monkey chow around here." In the corner, Raina's backpack opened, seemingly of its own voiltion, then a small brown, black and white monkey climbed out, looking about as amused as a monkey could be. He chirruped at Raina, a sound that was obviously a reminder that she wasn't buying much of anything these days and also he hated monkey chow. Raina squeezed her eyes shut, looking very much put-upon. "Can we just start?"
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"Well I said without fireballs," Raina reiterated, then somehow lost her train of thought when Erik sat down on the desk. "Um, yeah, that sounds good. I'll do that." She could hear Merlin laughing from inside her backpack, and resisted the urge to drop-kick it into a corner. She filled out the form, leaving vast swaths of it blank and the school itself as her only emergency contact, then stood up, trying not to blush as she handed over the form to Erik. "Okay... so what do we do first? How do I learn to defend myself?"
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Jessie looked up, surprised and a little baffled by Kimber's reaction, but willing to take it at face value. She relaxed enough to pick up her fork again and keep eating while Kimber flitted about the kitchen. "We were suitemates," she confirmed, "we each had our own room but we shared a bathroom. Aquaria sleeps in a pool of water, so it didn't bother her when I would be loud at night. And I was in Blackstone Prison for almost three years before Project Freedom," she felt compelled to admit. "It took a long time for them to make me better. How did you get out, if you were stuck in the cabin for such a long time?"
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Raina cautiously stuck one hand out of the comforter and waved it around, her pretty rings glinting as they caught the lights. "Getting there," she allowed, "but it'll take a few minutes for the thermostat to catch up. Here." She hummed a nursery rhyme under her breath and flicked her ever-present lighter to life. Catching the flame in her cupped hands, she shaped it like a child might shape a snowball untill it was a pretty little globe of flame emitting a warm orange light. "If I don't let it touch anything, it shouldn't smoke enough to set off the fire alarm." The little fireball was definitely warm in the cold room, chasing away the residual chill. "There we go."
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"Uhhh..." It took Raina a second to even register the fact that she was staring, the way she sometimes concentrated on the TV when Dylan Sprayberry or Ansel Elgort were on screen. But this guy was older, so maybe more like Tom Felton? That worked. He was just so good looking. And the woman who answered the door was nothing to sneeze at either, but that just made Raina immediately feel a little bit jealous. She wondered if they were sleeping together. That was inappropriate, she reminded herself, then reminded herself that she didn't care because doing appropriate things was stupid, then she reminded herself that either of these people could beat her up really easily if the rules of polite society stopped being in play. But she could still wonder, if she did it in the privacy of her own head... Merlin pulled her hair surreptitiously from inside her backpack, jerking her brain to an abrupt halt. "Sanderson, that's me, yep!" she confirmed with all the cheer she could muster. "I'm Raina. Here to learn how to fight things without throwing fireballs at them. Or if you guys are busy, I could just clean up the place," she offered with a slightly manic grin, hefting her broom.
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"Holy goddesses below the earth, please don't make it any colder in here," Raina begged. "Think warm thoughts. Do your meditation, or whatever. Nice, calm, relaxed, peaceful." Merlin abandoned his post on the desk and scrambled awkwardly in his oversized sweater to get on Raina's bed. She opened up the comforter enough for him to crawl in as well, completely disappearing as soon as she closed it back up. "Cause if it gets any colder, I'm going to have to start setting things on fire for warmth. What's got you nervous or sad or whatever?"
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It took two passes over the West End for Raina to find the Espadas School for Self-Defense, mainly because the first time around, she'd discounted the building covered in plants without a second thought. Why would a dojo have a rooftop garden? On the second time around, Merlin and the GPS colluded to convince her to at least make a landing and check it out. With a much put-upon sigh, Raina landed and dropped her invisibility as she slung her broom over her shoulder, not willing to admit aloud that Merlin had been correct. The laughter coming from inside her backpack was galling enough. The school looked sort of like a business and sort of like a house, to the point where Raina wasn't sure if it was okay to just go in or not. Better safe than sorry when it came to just barging into somebody's house, she decided, with only a thick hint of bitterness, and knocked loudly on the front door.
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"The hell?" Koshiro, who'd been braced for another round of Kimber's bizarre humor, stumbled backwards with a nearly-comical expression of astonishment. "You touched me! It worked! You look different!" In a few quick strides he covered the ground between them to scoop Kimber up into a full body hug. "Look at you, not-so-Ghost Girl!" he laughed. He set her back on her feet to examine all the changes. "And you grew up, too," he observed. "How do you feel?"
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"I'd say wait till the weather gets warmer before you start looking, won't get many takers when it's already getting cold outside." Raina quipped, shrinking down further into the blankets. For a tall girl, she was surprisingly good at making herself compact. "So what's the deal with the cold, anyway?" she asked. "I mean sometimes you have control and the room feels normal, and sometimes it's fifty-five degrees and I can feel hypothermia setting in. What's going on?"
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"They don't get to have any of that stuff," Raina said with a shake of her head. "They're really paranoid about magic users. No technology, no personal items. If I wrote a letter, it would get opened and read by a magic user first to make sure there were no spells hidden in it, then they'd read it to my folks so they wouldn't get to touch the paper or anything. Pretty much all they get to do is sometimes watch a TV in a different room through a glass screen. They don't even get to be together." Raina tugged on the ends of her own hair and blinked hard a few times. "I'm allowed to visit twice a month, but they don't want me to go too often. They're afraid the field will stunt my power development. And it's so creepy..." She tugged a little harder, twisting blonde strands around her fingers. "They've promised me it's not true, that they'd never do anything to put me in danger or have me taken away from them. And they've got good lawyers. I just have to wait. And not punch stupid bitches like Madison hard enough to get me sent down there with them."
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Raina looked down for a minute, her nose disappearing under the cover as well. "They claim they found demonology texts and tools for wielding infernal magic," she muttered. "They claim that they found evidence of... of bad stuff my parents did, and other people had done, to gain power and wealth over the years. Like you need sacrifices and evil magic to keep the mayorship of a town of a hundred fifty people." She scoffed, but her heart just wasn't quite in it. "It's all supposed to come out at the trial, but of course they want to force a plea bargain so they don't have to show how weak the case is. That's why my folks are stuck in Blackstone, in an anti-magic field. It's like hell. You'd say almost anything just to escape." Raina shuddered.
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"It's a halfway house," Jessie explained, shifting uncomfortably in her seat, "for criminals with superpowers. They take people and make them ready to go back into society, so that they won't commit more crimes when they're released." She abandoned her waffles for a moment, petting Avro with both hands again instead. "Sometimes they're bad people who get parole. Sometimes, like Aquaria, they just don't understand the laws and get in trouble that way. Sometimes if they don't know what to do with somebody and they can't stay in prison, they get put there. But they teach, um, life skills and stuff, how to make easy meals, how to keep a checkbook, how to pay bills. I was there for twenty-seven months. This is my first day out." She didn't look at Kimber, choosing to focus instead on her very nonjudgmental quasi-feline friend.
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Jessie didn't seem to notice Aquaria coming in, and she definitely didn't notice the helpless human who had been knocked into the water along with the oversize birdcage. Her predatory attention was entirely fixed on Megalodon, just emerging from the cage. In an instant she was upon him, her movements almost too fast to see, her wordless yell enough to strike fear into the heart of most anybody. Unfortunately, the shark was too brave, or perhaps too stupid, to back down. She took a powerful swipe at him with clawed hands, but missed by the barest margin, to her obvious anger.
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Raina sat up and swiftly wrapped herself in the duvet, snuggling in and pulling one edge over her head so that only her face peeked out, then draped the rest of her blankets over her shoulders and lap. Merlin gave the human-size hat a curious look, then sat in it and pulled it up over his knees. "Okay," Raina said with a sigh. "You know my parents are in jail, right? They're awaiting trial on charges that they were trying to summon a greater demon from a hell dimension and gain its power, and that doing so would've put the whole world in danger. But nothing is proven, and nothing is gonna be proven, so Madison is just talking out her fat stupid mouth because she thinks having superhero parents makes her better than everybody else."
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There was a minute of silence from under the bedclothes, as Raina stopped doodling in her journal and was still. Across the room, Merlin ceased working as well, some sort of blueprint that involved a large vault door, possibly, and turned to regard Cathy as well. Finally Raina muttered, "Fine, but you gotta give me your blanket first." Cathy had a lovely, soft, warm cover on her bed, much nicer than anything Raina had on hers. "If I talk now, my jaw's gonna unhinge and fall off from chattering."
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"I was going to ask you the same thing," Raina replied with a wry twist in her voice, a voice that was somewhat muffled from under her pile of bedclothes. She'd gotten a half dozen extra of the thin and starchy institutional dorm blankets from somewhere, and was laying under all of them as she doodled in her journal. "I can't feel my nose, which usually means something's stuck in your craw." At Raina's desk, Merlin was operating his laptop while swimming in one of Raina's sweaters. He chirruped in agreement, rubbing his own nose with both furry paws.