Electra
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Freedom City Guidebook
Freedom City PBP: A How-To Guide
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"I tried to keep a foot in each world for a long time," Stesha admitted with a soft chuckle. "It wasn't until I had to go full-time on Sanctuary that I totally gave up my civilian job and my apartment. And it wasn't until my divorce got splashed all over the tabloids that I gave up my privacy. Most heroes do a lot better at balancing their normal lives and heroic lives. But it's still easy to forget how bizarre and downright frightening it can all be at first. Whether they go to the school or not, your kids will grow up knowing more about the metahuman world than most people ever do. That'll probably be good for them in the long run, even if it means occasional nightmares from understanding more than most kids their age. Children are so resilient, it's amazing what they can absorb and bounce back from that would break an adult." She took a drink as well, watching Ellis with calm blue eyes.
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Raina turned away from the mess she'd made, still shaky enough on her feet to lean against Anibal for support. With the simulation turned off, she could finally look safely at Riley, and when she did, her face was full of horror and recrimination. "You could've started by not killing any superheroes!" she snapped coldly. "Especially not somebody who was waiting for you to help him! He was just hanging there helpless and you... you..." She broke off when her stomach threatened to rebel again, turning to hide her face against Anibal's shoulder. "Can we just get the hell out of here?"
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Raina screamed in horror as the crossbow bolt flew inerrantly into the trapped hero's eye, like it wasn't even there, like he wasn't even a person. The fact that he was not, actually, a person was still in Raina's brain somewhere, but it seemed quite distant and unimportant compared to the shocking visual input. Then, the explosion... she had just enough time to see Dr. Metropolis' skull begin to fly apart before Anibal crashed into her and shielded her from the rest of the gory sight. She thought she screamed again, thought she sobbed, but everything after the noise of the explosion was muted, distant. She clung to Anibal's arm without even seeming to notice, her eyes huge in a milk-white face. "Oh gods, oh goddesses, oh gods," she murmured over and over again, but seemed to be about ready to pull herself together before she saw the chunk of face frozen directly in front of her. Spinning around, she made it about four steps away before bending over and vomiting.
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Since Jessie is already practically on top of Megalodon, she will use her move action for a Fast Startle. She gets a 29. If that succeeds, her Powerful Intimidate will put him at a -3 penalty. Her standard action will be a Power Attack for 2, barehanded. She's trying for lethal damage, having not internalized that this is somehow not a horrific people-eating monster, despite the monstrousness and the people-eating. Ugh, terrible roll. She gets a 14. If it hits, it's a DC 27 toughness save.
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"Here." Raina took back the granola bar and peeled it open to reveal its contents before offering it to Winifred again. "It's kind of like a cake with oats and honey and chocolate chips. You'll probably like it. Maybe not so much with the Doritos," she allowed after a moment's hesitation, "but you might, if you like salty food. But you've gotta eat after big magic, or you'll pass out." She opened the Doritos as well, took one and ate it to prove they were good, then passed the bag over. "Nobody here is normal," she told the girl, "but neither are you. When you're strange yourself, it's easier to get along with other weirdos than with normal people. May as well just sit tight and see what can be done for you, right?"
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"Nice kitty," Jessie assured Avro, carefully stroking the ruffled quills. "Good kitty. It's just a thunderstorm. We can use the rain." She scratched behind his ears, the points of his quills not able to penetrate the skin of her fingers anyway, and looked up as Kimber came over. "Yeah, I would like some waffles. I'm pretty hungry," she admitted. "I was nervous to leave Project Freedom this morning and I couldn't eat breakfast. It looks really good." She carefully freed up one hand from manticore duty to pick up a fork. "I'm not upset," she assured Kimber as she poured syrup liberally over the waffles. "It was just, um, surprising. Everybody at the group home had powers, but they said that once we moved out, we would meet mostly regular people. And I'm not very good at meeting people," she admitted ruefully, then took a bite. "They're good!"
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Raina's eyes narrowed as she watched Riley on the rooftop, trying to collect himself. "Something's wrong here," she murmured to Robin. "I think they're trying to screw with his head. When he and I were doing that school assignment, he kept talking about the Forest outside his home, and how it was so dangerous, but he lived in, like, North Bay somewhere. Do you think this is maybe what happened to his world?" She broke off and sucked in a sharp breath when Riley nearly fell, a spell jumping reflexively to her lips, but he managed to recover on his own. "They wouldn't pull a stunt like that, would they?"
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Jessie's terrible shriek of rage at seeing the bodies would probably have been enough to alert Megalodon to the problems with his plan, but she was already in motion anyway, flying across the room in one prodigious leap. She caught the massive hook holding up the birdcage to stop her flight, then locked her legs through the bars of the cage and pushed it loose of the hook, sending it crashing down to the water with another unearthly wail. It wasn't clear whether she'd taken notice of Dr. Ellis at all, or merely seen the large cage as a handy weapon against the monster in the water. Either way, it probably wasn't a great situation for the doctor.
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Jessie is going to use Leaping to cross the room and get up to the big hook thing holding the birdcage. She's going to hold onto it while pushing the birdcage down into the water, in the hopes of hitting the shark on the head. She will also scream as a free action, so maybe some of the others will hear her! Going to do an improvised weapon melee attack here, with a +1 to damage. She rolls a 21, so with the little bonus that's a DC 26 toughness save.
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"Roommate lotto, huh?" Raina mused. "That oughta come up with some screwed up pairings. How many tickets do we get to buy?" she quipped, then looked over to the new student. His trunk was even bigger than the suitcases Jimmy was hauling along, and he was looking harassed. "You're just in time, we're about to figure out where we're gonna live for the year. "I'm Raina, there's Huang, Cathy, Hannah, and Jimmy," she added, pointing to each in turn. "So are you hauling bodies around in that thing or what? You look like you're ready for your first year at Hogwarts." She smiled just enough to take the harsh edge off the teasing.
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"What the hell are you?" Paige demanded, reaching out with her mind even as she confronted the old woman. "You know something about what's happened to Emma, I can feel it inside your head. You're something like her, or you've got something possessing you both. Can't you see you're hurting her? Tell me what's happening so we can stop it before she kills someone or gets killed herself!" She could hear the shouting from far away, but locked her concentration to her target, determined to get some answers before it was too late.
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"This block is stupid and boring," Gina muttered, but her steps changed direction once again. If she kept acting this way, she told herself, she was just going to attract even more intolerable attention. She probably already looked like a complete freak, the least she could do was not make it worse. Somehow she managed to pick her head up and lengthen her stride a little, so that she only looked like a woman being led to the gallows. "I picked it for that reason. Nothing interesting happens here, nobody would ever look twice at it. That's why it's perfect, and why I never need to bother to go outside. Also I think my allergies are starting to flare up."
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"The tests are totally lame," Raina agreed, giving Anibal a reassuring pat on the arm. "If this had been a real world situation, she never would've been able to tag you like that. But hey, at least now we just have to watch Riley and then we do the group exercise, and then we're done. Hey, after we're done here, you want to go get some dinner?" she asked him with a quick, flirtatious grin. "I hear they're grilling burgers tonight, they'll probably be a lot better early than after they've been under the warmer for hours." She kept one eye on Riley to track his progress, but most of her attention was on more important matters.
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Jessie followed the others to the kitchen, but quickly lost interest in the cooking, instead curling up with the "cat" in one of the kitchen chairs. It was probably just as well, since Aquaria was getting in the way enough for both of them! She jumped at the first crack of thunder, her eyes widening, then settled back to her comfortable slump. "I guess it's a good thing we moved this morning instead of in the afternoon," she observed idly. "Maybe you can go outside and run around?" she suggested to Aquaria. "But you better keep your clothes on, people won't like it if you run out naked on the street."
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"Don't be sorry," Stesha encouraged, reaching her hand across the table to touch the back of his hand lightly. "Sometimes it helps just to have somebody to talk to, especially when it comes to making decisions about your children. I think maybe that's the hardest part of not having a partner anymore, you have to make all the decisions. And I think it was very brave of you to step in and take on that legacy instead of letting your kids shoulder it. When they're older, they'll understand and appreciate what you did for them, whether or not they ever become heroes themselves."
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"Some people might want to, Fred," Raina commented, looking from the portal to her time-displaced classmate, "but it would be pretty useless and stupid to try. There's basically an infinite number of multiverses spinning off each other all the time, so for every one you went and fooled around with, you'd probably end up spinning off another one that you didn't mess with, plus you've got the infinite number of other universes you don't even have time to explore. And that's even before you get into the fact that in most of those universes, there's nothing you can do that would even be helpful, or wouldn't make things worse. Sometimes you can go to another universe and give them like humanitarian aid, like you might after a big natural disaster, but you can't just try and fix their problems for them." Merlin nodded in agreement and chittered, his expression suggesting that it would certainly be disastrous if anyone were to attempt such an outside "fix" on Earth Prime, especially without detailed cultural context and understanding of all the problems the world has, and that the same principle holds true for other universes, no matter how obvious the solutions might seem from outside. "Yeah, exactly," Raina agreed. "But we can go and visit, look around and stuff." Her enthusiasm for that part of it seemed undimmed, despite the danger. "So can you show us how to make an anchor?" she asked Phantom.
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"And it's not as though they need to decide whether they want to be superheroes right now," Stesha pointed out. "Nicholson isn't going to make them sign a contract that they'll suit up and become heroes when they're of age. Right now the big decision for them is going to be more along the lines of what kind of social life they want to have, and whether they want to cope with the issues of hiding your secret identity from their school friends. They could want to go to hero school where everything's a little more exciting and more out there, or they could easily prefer to go to a mainstream school where they can be normal kids. Both options have good and bad points. Have you toured the school yet?"
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Now completely focused on her target, Singularity barely paused at the arrival of the new sharks. A large shard of glass from one of the mirrors made a handy weapon, and within seconds, the hallway was choked with dead sharks, one-two-three. It smelled like an aquarium abbatoir, but she ignored the blood coating her arms and continued her headlong rush into the maze. Several seconds and a bunch more broken mirrors later, she was almost startled to reach the end of the maze. Something in her head screamed "trap!" and she instantly dove for cover off to one side.
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"It's okay," Raina replied in an equally low voice. "You know they're all assholes, looking for any kind of weakness to get their hooks in us. Just don't ever let them see you cry." She glanced over to Dauntless, then back to Robin. "Tell you what, soon as I get my hands on some decent books again, I'll look up a finding spell and figure out how to power it. If it was your mom's and it was important, you should have it. It belongs to you." Raina's voice was maybe just a little too fierce on that last sentiment. "You all right? We can have Riley put an arrow into the simulator and shut it down for a few hours if you want," she offered with great magnanimity.
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Raina raised her hand again, watching the portal with open fascination and not a little envy. It was probably just as well she was so rapt, otherwise she'd have been much quicker to jump on Huang's dinosaur fascination. Merlin was paying careful attention too, still perched on Raina's shoulder, but he looked far more cautious than his human companion, almost worried. "If we do go into a portal, how do we make sure we can find our way back?" Raina asked. "Is there a marker we can leave, maybe some kind of spell, that will let us find our way back again? If we were to absolutely have to go into one and all that."
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Singularity will take 10 and use Takedown Attack on the sharks, then continue to run until she comes to the center of the maze.
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"I know there are some non-powered kids who go to Nicholson, and even Claremont Academy, the high school," Stesha offered. "Your guys wouldn't be the only ones if you decided to send them there. And it might give them some grounding for when they do come into their powers. But on the other hand, at a regular school they'd have peers who are more like they are now, not like how they someday might be. It's a tough call. Maybe you could ask them how they feel about the idea of going to super school without powers?" She cut a bite of pastry with the edge of her fork. "Sometimes I think it's just easier that Ammy's powers manifested so early. There's never any wondering about whether she'll be powered, whether she'll take after me or... or her father. I know for certain that as she gets older, she'll need training in some things. Of course, early manifestation tends to correlate with strong powers, so she'll probably still be a terror when she's older," she admitted, laughing a little.
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"I'm sorry," Stesha murmured. She'd only gotten the bare bones of Ellis' background from Taylor, but it was enough to evoke her greatest sympathy. "The learning curve with powers can be very steep. I moved to Freedom City almost as soon as I got mine, thinking I was ready to be a superhero, and boy, I was wrong about that. But I learned. Being around other heroes helped a lot. I still have plenty of unpowered friends, but there's just something about the company of people who understand what it's like to have this gift and this duty... it makes it less lonely. I think that may be the biggest reason so many heroes come to Freedom City, not for the action, but so they don't feel alone."
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"You're handling it very well too," Stesha pointed out with another small smile over the edge of her cup. "Getting powers and taking care of your family on your own in a weird new world, that can't have been easy to cope with. And yet here you are, just smiling and nodding at all my stories that sound so normal to me until the instant I say them aloud in a coffeeshop. Unless it's exploding cow day, I tend to forget how strange all of this is to people who aren't used to it. How long have you had the powers now?"
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"That's a hard decision for any parent," Stesha agreed softly, sympathy warm in her blue eyes. "The supernatural can be a dangerous world. Dangerous to our kids, and it can make our kids dangerous. You couldn't have known what was going to happen, and you wanted to protect them while they were small. And you've obviously done a good job, you've got great kids. They seem pretty comfortable with what they've seen of metahumanity so far. Do you think they'd prefer to be at Nicholson, or at a more conventional school?"