Electra

"I can bounce by myself," Jessie muttered sullenly, pulling her elbows in tight to her body and stabbing a piece of watermelon with her fork. "Not like she can, but I can." Part of Jessie's rehabilitation had included training in controlling her strength and power in every circumstance, which meant measuring her athletic ability and fighting skills. In her forgotten prime, Singularity had been a match for her dimensional counterpart, but years of incarceration and the removal of much of her experience had taken a serious toll. Jessie was a pale shadow of her heroic doppelganger, and likely always would be. "She's not really my sister." Another stab, and the piece of watermelon disintegrated beneath the tines of her fork. "Have you got all your stuff?"

This was a good offer, since no matter what else was going on, Jessie almost never turned down an opportunity for food. When that fact had been mentioned, Jessie had shrugged uncomfortably and muttered something about someday maybe there wouldn't be anything when she was hungry, a conviction probably born somewhere in the time she couldn't remember anymore. At any rate, Jessie unfolded herself and followed Aquaria down to the cafeteria, where breakfast was just being set out. Once Aquaria had her customary bowl of kippers and Jessie her fruit cup and oatmeal, they sat down at Jessie's favorite corner table, one with a good view of the whole room. "She might forget," Jessie suggested. "Or have to go save the world or something. We can't go by ourselves. We don't have a car."

There was no response from the other room, but if Jessie had been asleep, the banging on the door would've gotten at least a shout of surprise, and possibly a thud from Jessie falling out of bed, so it seemed safe to go in. Jessie rarely fastened the lock on her bathroom door. Inside, Aquaria found Jessie sitting on her bed with her legs drawn up and her arms wrapped around her knees, fully dressed and wide awake. She looked as though she'd probably been there awhile, possibly all night. The bed was perfectly made, hospital corners and everything, and all the drawings and paintings Jessie had stuck to the walls had been taken down and packed away. All the dimensional refugee's earthly possessions fit into the one black rolling suitcase that stood at the foot of the bed. "Are you sure this is a good idea?" she asked Aquaria. "I heard the weather is going to be lousy this week. Really hot and dry. That's not good for moving. We could wait till things are better."

I have been told to roll "something involving transform" so I did, and it was terrible. Miss A spends an HP on Gina's behalf so she can reroll it. And it's a nat 20, for a 32.

"Well, this is super-friendly," Fleur murmured, looking around and up with an expression of mingled horror and disbelief. "I really like what he's done with the place. Very Castle Grayskull." She looked around, then opened one of her pouches. "They're bound to notice us soon. Might as well not put our light under a bushel... as it were," she added, glancing towards the teenage hero beside her. "Anything bad starts to happen, you get behind us, Cerulean, all right?" With a practiced flick of her wrist, Fleur strewed seeds across the blasted ground, the tiny pellets making a soft sound like rain as they fell. The scent of fresh flowers began to perfume the air as the plant controller began to exert herself, rather beyond her typical displays on Prime or even on Sanctuary. She rarely concerned herself with putting on a show in either of those places, but here it seemed as though a benevolent demonstration might be in order. The first plants to sprout were tiny, a thick layer of dark green moss that blanketed the ground in seconds, covering a radius nearly the size of a football field all around them, exuding a pungent, earthy smell that only intensified as the groundcover blackened and decomposed into a thin layer of humus on the ground. Seconds later, dandelions sprung up to cover the same space, digging into the scorched ground with their inexorable roots, churning the earth before decomposing into it as well. It was like watching time-lapse photography, writ large. After the dandelions came other plants, larger plants. Trees began to spring up here and there, sugar maples, flowering cherries, serviceberries, trees that could handle acidic soil and a lack of consistent sunlight while still providing useful food, while between them bushes began to grow, producing blueberries, raspberries and other less immediately identifiable varieties. In less than a minute, the entire immediate environment was a small slice of paradise, or more accurately, a small slice of Sanctuary. Already the air was beginning to seem cleaner. "I guess that's one good thing about constantly reterraforming Freedom City," Fleur murmured to the others, "I've got plenty of the appropriate seeds on hand."

Wander was intently focused on the finishing blow she was about to deliver to the tottering mole-slug, but she looked up at Eclipse's shout, just in time to see the tower collapsing in her direction! The loud exclamation she made was not conveyed by her translating device, but the intent was still perfectly clear. Racing down the bloody hide of the monster, she cleared the area just as the first chunks of concrete and steel began to fall. She paused next to Roulette and Eclipse, who were themselves just out of the way of the carnage. "I _know_ Redbird wouldn't have directed charges be set like that. I'm going to give that idiot Corona a piece of my mind and let her choke on it." the ichor-soaked Terran growled. "We better haul ass before she gets any more bright ideas. Can I give you a ride?" When neither of her colleagues demurred, she scooped Roulette into her arms and directed Eclipse to hold onto her back, then took off again towards the base of the tower. "I'm gonna drop you with the troops," she told Eclipse, shouting over the wind of her own speed. "Don't let Corona get anybody killed before I get back!" She suited deed to word, leaving Eclipse standing next to the main group of troopers while she herself raced for the landing zone with the wounded Roulette.

Fleur studied Cerulean for a moment, as though trying to decide whether the girl was being sarcastic or not, then let it go. "I guess we should get going then," she told the others, rising and checking her pouches one last time. They were strapped on over her radiation suit now, and would be awkward to access with gloves, but she'd figure something out. "If anybody needs to use the restroom, now's the time. Let's get Hatfield and McCoy back together, we'll leave from the conference room in ten minutes." She snugged the blue hood of her suit up to cover her green hair and headed out down the hallway, then immediately stuck her head back in. "Oh, and if either of you have any food allergies, now's the time to speak up,"

"A little from Column A, a little from Column B," Paige told Starlight. "Nicholson and Claremont both keep very low public profiles, for the safety of the students and their families. A lot of times families find them through referrals and word of mouth. If a working hero spots a child or teenager with powers who needs training, they'll pass the word along in both directions most of the time. And if an incident makes the news, they'll almost always look into it and see if they can help. I know that there are tools they can use to examine children to determine the sources of their power and sometimes make educated guesses about what their skillsets are likely to be. I suppose they could be used to detect powers in a child who has yet to manifest powers yet, but they're not using them on the general population or anything like that."

Fleur de Joie Staff Meeting It had been a crappy day for Stesha, all things considered. Sure, there were some good parts. The advent of consistent warm weather and sunshine made her job on Sanctuary a lot easier, and having all the traveling heroes back in Freedom City had taken a lot of pressure off the FLA to fight crime and stop evil. A group of scientists, mostly grad students in environmental scientists and oceanography, had just arrived to have a look at the sadly neglected coastline and give advice and help on her remediation efforts, and she'd finally managed to round up almost all of her Freedom City-local teachers and instructors for coffee and a planning meeting at her home. It should've been a good day, but dammit, everybody was singing again. Stesha hated the singing. It was okay for some people. Ammy was cute as she could possibly be when she'd sung about her breakfast that morning, and until the instrumentals had started, Stesha had thought it was just an adorable preschooler thing. Getting her own backup orchestra had only encouraged Amaryllis, who had proceeded to narrate the rest of her morning, opera-fashion, until Stesha had dropped her off at the creche with her own riff on “So Long, Farewell,” from The Sound of Music. And it wasn't like Stesha didn't like musicals! She did! But she had vivid memories, the sort that hit in the dead of night when she was trying to sleep, just to make her squirm, of the incredibly embarrassing ditty she'd cut loose with last time the singing apocalypse had come to Freedom City. If she could've stapled her own lips shut for the rest of the day or week or however long, she gladly would have. It didn't seem fair that even leaving the dimension didn't seem to have insulated her from the effects this time. Not only had Ammy been singing (and she might've caught the bug in Freedom City and just brought it home like a cold), but others were singing too. Lots of others. Stesha groaned into her cup of coffee. “Hey, grumpypants!” Stesha looked up at the address and a nudge on the shoulder from her neighbor on the couch. Allison was teaching the middle grades in Springfield and Homewood this year, and in many ways she was a godsend, when she wasn't being ungodly annoying. Right now Allison was giving her an entirely too knowing grin. “You tuned out on the meeting, no pun intended. Tired out from the big insect production number earlier?” She was completely unfazed by the murderous glare Stesha sent in her direction. “Oh, is that what that was?” Mika was Ammy's regular teacher at the Homewood creche school, so Stesha knew her better than some of the others. Which made it all too easy to read the amusement on her face. “We heard a lot of buzzing this morning, but there were no alarms, so I thought it was just something going on at the hive. Were you in on that?” “Yes,” Stesha muttered into her coffee. She'd been grateful to only be in the chorus and providing special effects for the spectacular hive-wide rendition of Imma Bee that had disrupted the bees this morning, till she realized that a large field trip from Springfield was present to watch the entire affair. Whoever was responsible for this, she was going to hunt them down and do really painful things to them. “It was awesome,” Allison assured the other women, raising her mug in tribute to their host. “The kids haven't stopped talking, sometimes singing, about it all day. But I think we're getting distracted from the reason we've gathered together today.” “Right, yes, um, that's right.” Candace, the cultural anthropologist-turned-home ec teacher for displaced adults rifled through a stack of notes she had on her lap. “I've got a beginning weaving class starting up in the evenings in Mayberry that's drawing a lot of interest now that we've got most of the wool from the spring shearing spun into something useful. There's a couple of people who already know some weaving who are helping, and I'd like to start a weekend class in Springfield-” “That's great, but it's not what I meant,” Allison interjected with a wave of her cup. “I'm talking about the oceanographers.” “What about the oceanographers?” Stesha asked blankly. “I haven't asked them to do any lectures, we don't know anything about their findings.” “Maybe not, but we did see them when they portaled in yesterday and were checking out their diving gear,” Allison explained. “I believe the technical term is 'yummalicious.'” “Oh?” Candace asked, raising one interested eyebrow. “Mm-hmm,” came from Sophie, who taught the creche school at Springfield and was Allison's usual partner in crime. “As an amateur mathematician myself, I have to say that there is a statistically disproportionate number of attractive men in that outfit. Did you catch a look at the lead scientist?” “I thought he was like sixty,” Mika pointed out skeptically. “Silver fox,” Allison assured her. “And brains are sexy. PhDee-licious.” Stesha leaned over far enough to thunk her forehead against the coffee table. Allison gave her an encouraging pat on the shoulder. “Come on, boss, we've already talked all the lesson plans over by email, we know what we're going to be doing. You wanted us to socialize, right? We've had our coffee, now how about a little beach trip?” “The oceanographers are not for ogling,” Stesha protested, not lifting her head from the table. The words came out a little muffled. “We are professionals, we do not think with our hormones-” “Of course we don't,” Mika told her soothingly. “But we all live here now, and it's not exactly a big community, at least not for those of us who may go back to Freedom City one day. It doesn't hurt to blow off some steam by admiring the visitors.” “Respectfully,” Candace added. “Totally respectfully,” Allison agreed. “And don't tell us you couldn't use it too. You haven't done anything but work since Christmas and we all know it. We all appreciate it, god knows, but you need to relax a little, too. There's nothing wrong with having a little fun. You deserve it! Come on...” Suddenly there was music in the background, an increasingly urgent beat overlaid with single minor chords. “Nooooooo....” Stesha moaned, only to have herself hauled to her feet by Allison and Mika. They were both grinning, enjoying themselves. Clearly they were insane. “Come on, we're your friends!” Allison encouraged, with Mika offering an enthusiastic and oddly echoey“uh-huh” in the background, “and have we got a trip for you! Come on, overworked boss-lady, and leave the cowl at home!” And then there was singing. “Temperature is rising Job pressure's finally low, We're marshaling our forces The beach is where we'll go Cause on this day it's just you And all of your single friends For the first time in months and months, We're gonna meet brainy men!” By now, all the other women had risen to their feet as well, first humming along, then tapping their feet and swaying to the music. Now, though, everyone except Stesha burst into surprisingly harmonious song. That was one thing Stesha had to give the spell, it made most people sound good. Even when the songs themselves were sheer madness. “Those brainy men, how we love them, those brainy men, amen! We're gonna go out, We're gonna have us a look At someone who could write a book!” By now tables and chairs had been shoved aside, offering enough room for all the women to gather around Stesha and sing directly to her, smiling and holding out their hands invitingly. “All right Mother Nature, You're a single woman too! You're building heaven, But that's not all you want to do! Let go of that anger Leave the past behind Get yourself to the ocean shore Who knows what you might find! Like brainy men! How we love them, Those brainy men,every specimen! Doctor, teacher, geologist, Smart leads off our sexy list!” Allison gave Stesha a broad wink at that last one, leaving Stesha blushing furiously. But she couldn't say a damn thing because suddenly she was singing as well, belting out the chorus with everyone else. “For brainy men! How we love them, those brainy men, amen! Oh brainy men, Hallelujah for brainy men, amen! Those brainy men...” There was no sign the song was ever going to end without outside intervention or an appropriate fade-out, and Stesha was not sure how long she could cope. With a sign that was maybe just a little bit feigned, she opened a portal in one of her forsythia, large enough for all of them to walk through onto the ruined beaches of Sanctuary. “This is a terrible idea,” she finally managed to say, even as she walked through with Allison's arm around her shoulders and Mika hugging her waist. But maybe it was just a little tiny bit fun as well. (Music Source: It's Raining Men, by Paul Jabara and Paul Shafer, performed by The Weather Girls, 1982)

Fleur was quiet for a minute, rubbing her forehead with the fingers of one hand as she tried to work through the new angles of the situation. "I don't want you to do anything you're not comfortable with," she told Dragonfly finally. "I know they're most likely not good people, and the potential for abuse is high. If we help them, we could well be enabling them to do bad things in the future. But they're all probably going to die if we don't do something," she pointed out, spreading her hands helplessly. "I've been to worlds before where the bombs have dropped, and I've seen what it looks like after twenty or fifty or seventy five years. They're only a couple of decades into what is likely to be a horrifying and very slow end. I can help rejuvenate what growing facilities they have, give them more resilient seed stock that will handle cold and drought, but it's not going to keep them alive in a world where the temperature has permanently dropped and the sky is obscured and the oceans are dead. If three billion people died just in the war, they've probably half of that again in starvation and sickness. And I don't know a way to fix it." She dropped into a chair and looked over at Cerulean, her face bleak. "And maybe it is cheating, maybe it's meddling. But the people alive now didn't cause this. They're suffering for something that was done to them, and that there's no way they can fix or stop. But if they can leave, they might have a chance."

"Yeah," Stesha agreed, still looking a little dazed. "Yeah, I guess we should do that. The League will know what to do, I'm sure. I hadn't really wanted to get them involved if I didn't have to, not everybody is down with my extracurricular activities out here. You know, meddling with the fates of other dimensions, interfering and paternalism and all that, but this was my mistake, and I have to fix it. They deserve something at least close to the lives they would've had, assuming they hadn't been entirely overwritten in the time stream change and I can't even think about that because how many people did we erase by accident when we undid the knots in that timeline, and are we somehow culpable for that or is it balanced out by how many people were born and didn't die because there wasn't a huge insect invasion that erased half the major cities?" She seemed to realize she was babbling quietly and clamped her mouth shut, taking a deep breath through her nose. "I'll talk to the League," she decided, "and see if I can at least find them places to live. I would really appreciate if you'd keep looking into their legal status and what we can do to get them some identification and other stuff they'll need. I can't give you a lot for a retainer right now, but if you can give me a little time and keep track of your billing and expenses, I'll make sure you get paid."

Stesha grimaced at the reminder for just a moment, as much as the knowledge that her recent problems were in other peoples' minds as at the trouble itself, but almost instantly put on a smile overtop of it. "Not at all," she assured Gina. "I wouldn't want to be anywhere else! What better way to remember that life goes on, right? And if there's going to be any trouble, I want to be here to help. Um," she added, slightly tentative again, "would you like to go upstairs? I could pop you up there through a portal, no problem at all, and you could check in on them?"

~Keep going,~ Cyberknife encouraged Dragonfly, even as her own cybernetic presence showed the strain of the vast weight of nanites. There were just so many, their coding so dense and intensely focused, even their mere presence was almost enough to shove her back in the direction of her somnolent body on the ship. ~I think we're close to something.~ She could feel the other technopath at her "back" as she studied the massive knot of commands and directives, looking for the string to pull. There was something there, something really well hidden, an achilles heel that had been noticed and protected, but not...well...enough.. With a sudden lunge, she dove into the code with both hands, manipulating the data until she found that one weak underlying code and rewrote it into a self-destruct that would self-perpetuate, ripping its way through the billions of nanites like a plague. She pushed the last bit of new data into place, watched as it began to spread, then looked to Dragonfly. ~That's it! Let's get out of here.~

Miss A continues to work against the mass of nanites, this time with a straight up Computers check to try and get into their programming and start shutting them down. With the aid bonus from Dragonfly, She gets a 43.

"That does tend to happen when you patrol with Edge," Wander agreed dryly. "Way more interesting things happen when he's around, and that's really not always a good thing. But on the other hand, when he's on your side in a fight, you usually win." She watched the street for another minute, apparently satisfied by the progress the police were making in collecting the last of the evidence and leaving the scene. "I don't usually like to go out in public in the uniform if I don't have to," she admitted. "Sometimes I put a jacket on over it or something, but I haven't got one tonight. If you're hungry we could order in a pizza or something. Mark's not at your place tonight, yeah?"

"All right, perfect," Fleur declared, after the robot and the cyborg voiced no objections to the plan. Within a few minutes, Artoo was safely charging in a secured room, Vigil was waiting in the conference room with a tray of snacks in case he was hungrier than he'd admit, and the three heroines were off to the lab. Fleur was as good as her word in securing radiation suits for all of them, even if each one was emblazoned with the Freedom League insignia across the shoulder, and as far as protective suits went, they really weren't too bad. She called her people on Sanctuary and asked them to put together a box of supplies to hold three people for three days if necessary, and dug around inside a large fuchsia flower until she'd satisfied herself that she had a change of clothes handy. "I wanted to ask you, Dragonfly," she told the engineer, "do you think you might be able to come up with a couple of devices that could give these guys access to like one other dimension each, maybe not even the same dimension, but something where they could get supplies or even relocate if they wanted? I know a couple of places that are empty but okay, if you can deal with some hostile animal life anyway. I can't fix everything wrong with their planet, I know that, but at least maybe this would give them a way out or up or something," she suggested with a shrug. Away from the visitors, she seemed less certain and in charge, and rather more human.

Erin followed Trevor to the floor, kneeling next to him with her hands awkwardly smoothing her skirt down over her thighs. Her eyes were full of sympathy and unshed tears as she nodded. "He's in heaven now, and it's a really good place to be, but it's still not here with us," she agreed, and from her it was a statement of known fact rather than a platitude. "It's all yours now, but you're ready for it. He's been getting you ready all your life." She shook her head. "I don't know if you understand how proud he was of you. He was like you, didn't always say the words, but I could see it when he looked at you, how pleased and satisfied he was with who you are." She reached out and took his hand again, holding it tight. "And you know you're not alone."

Fleur gets a 17

"Well, at the very least we can distract them," Fleur agreed, her face grim. She threw a carelessly large handful of seeds into the encroaching army, the noise like a soft fall of hail against their armor. The antibodies totally ignored it until every one of those seeds suddenly sprouted and began growing, catching feet and legs and bodies in unbreakable vegetable bonds. Antibodies began falling, singly and in groups, some taking their neighbors down with them, and each one that fell was quickly mummified like insects caught in spiderwebs. "Where do you think those little arrow-shaped ships are coming from? Is there anything we can do to try and stop more of them from shooting over onto the station?"

~Working on it,~ Hologram responded, her face screwed up with great concentration as she attempted to concentrate despite the eye's baleful influence. It seemed diminished now, lessened from its oppressive presence of a moment ago, but it was still far from ideal conditions for intense mental effort. She decided to clear the field a little bit, ordering her captured antibody to attack its fellow yet again. This time the already-injured antibody crumpled and dissolved under the blow, crumbling out of existence with a soft whine as Paige turned her attention to the Eye. ~This might hurt,~ she broadcast ruefully, then went ahead anyway. Focusing her will into a sharpened spear, its point and edge gleaming with the slick black wrongness of entropic energy, Hologram launched it straight for that open eye with all her might.

"<You probably don't have to worry about Terra joining the Republic for a long time, if ever,>" Miss A commented cheerfully in flawless Standard Lor, confirming Sharl's statement of a moment earlier. "<We're independent sorts, and more than a little suspicious of organized groups. We haven't even been able to organize our own planet, much less unite to provide a single voice to a larger group. And thus far our dealings out in space are mostly confined to trying to stop disasters before they hit our poor little blue world.>" She smiled, shrugged. "<I'm sorry, I didn't consider that you'd be more comfortable communicating in Lor. And I think the compiled matrix will work just fine, Sharl, can you program in the parameters and get the carbodinium fabricating?>" She took another tool and began scanning the gauntlet again. "<Do you find yourself taking your armor underwater very often, or into highly acidic environments? Do you ever have to spend longer than twenty-four hours with the armor exposed to vacuum?>"

Wander looked down in the midst of her fight to see how the others were faring, and was simultaneously relieved and mildly annoyed to see Roulette and Eclipse still outside the settlement and on the field of battle. At least Roulette was alive, so that was a good thing. "Go!" she called again. The noise attracted the creature's attention, who responded by arching one large mouth in her direction. She waited till the last possible second before leaping away, letting it bite itself in the slimy throat with its own teeth, then bouncing back in to smash it with several hard strikes from her bat. It shrilled in rage and pain once more, but it was definitely beginning to slow down now, with little real fight left in it. "I've got this!"

Fleur will throw out a snare against the antibodies, shaped to try and get as many as possible, DC 25 reflex save to avoid.

Everything about this mole-slug is so gross! Wander will give it one more full power attack with acrobatic bluff for the move action DC 27 to resist the acrobatic bluff 1d20+7 for full Power Attack. That's a fail, spending an HP 1d20+7=23 Much better. DC 32 Toughness plus autofire.

"It's all right," Fleur assured Artoo, "the electrical systems here are pretty robust. I'll call someone to escort you to one of the labs where you can get plugged in. Vigil, if you wouldn't mind staying here till we're ready to go, that would be very helpful. The television gets cable and satellite, you might find something interesting to watch." She pulled her phone from a pouch on her belt, a blue and gold model emblazoned with the logo of the Freedom League, obviously a work smartphone, and handed it to Cerulean. "Go ahead and call from the hallway," she encouraged, "and just let me know if they need to talk to me about anything. My... I know someone who took several classes to space a few years ago, I can't imagine they wouldn't agree to this for a field trip. And we can definitely find you a suit, Dragonfly, the Freedom League keeps a good stock around in case of disaster response. You look like a women's medium, probably?" she guessed, finishing off her long litany of responses. "Probably better to keep that little box pocketed for now. Maybe you can come up to one of the labs with me and we'll talk about syncing up our frames of reference for dimensional travel?"