Electra

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Paige goes on 13

"The paperwork will keep for a few hours, and you'll be better prepared to look at it later," Erin assured him, sliding an arm around his waist as they walked toward the house. She wasn't entirely sure he wouldn't fall over without a little extra support. This time she avoided the stairs entirely, activating the garage door by voice command before steering him inside and through to the little kitchen that was probably properly called a summer kitchen or a butler's pantry or something ridiculous. It had a fridge and a microwave, that was the important part. She sat Trevor down at the two-person breakfast table. "I'll be right back, ten seconds." With a burst of speed that let her avoid the other Hunters in the house, Erin nipped into the main kitchen, grabbed a pizza box and three or four boxes of Chinese or Thai takeout, and a half-gallon of milk that had no lumps, then dashed back. As she began piling food onto plates and microwaving it, she looked over at Trevor. "So you talked to Mark and Joe and Eve already? That's good, I'm glad they've been helping you." She choked back more sorries for her own absence, figuring they could do nothing to help.

"So I take it that's not what you want anymore," Erin hazarded. "Not just the being a beard for a Lebanese arms merchant thing, but the only knowing how to be a princess thing. Mark makes a good salary with UNISON," she commented idly. "He's not rich, but it's not like you'd ever do without anything important if you decided you didn't want to work. You could do your own thing, maybe do more school if you wanted, maybe take up some good causes. You could stay home and have kids if that's what you'd rather do, or be a daytime hero, full-time it. Lots of options." She took another glance over the side of the roof, but it was still quiet.

Erin shrugged and debated putting Nina off with some vague platitude about the value of work, how everyone needed something to do, even the wealthy, but then she reconsidered. Nina was on the team now, and it had been a very long time since she'd had a close teammates relationship with another girl. She and Eve had been on Young Freedom together till they graduated, of course, but Eve's reserve was such that despite Erin's liking for her, it had been hard to strike up a close friendship. Nina had a lot of rough edges, but it did kind of feel to Erin like she really wanted to know something about Erin's life. So she answered with as much honesty as she could. "When I came to Earth Prime, I had basically nothing. A few worthless keepsakes and two sets of clothes that they ended up burning to avoid the chance of contamination. I was fifteen and had no identity, I had no choice but to live on charity. First the Freedom League, then the White family who you saw in Seattle, then the endowment at Claremont. I had enough, but barely enough, clothes, toiletries, school supplies, the basics I needed to get by. My friends would've helped me, but it's embarrassing to be so poor, and I hated it. I managed to pick up some odd jobs, working on Alex's computer project, babysitting a vampire kid, started making enough money to pay for a little of my own stuff. I met Trevor, started dating him eventually, but it didn't change anything. I didn't want to have to ask him for anything or have him realize how tight the money was, because it was something he never even had to think about, while I was wondering if I was going to be living in my truck after graduation. I could've told him I needed help, he absolutely would've told me to move in, but I needed to prove to myself that I could get by, that whatever Trevor and I had going was real, and not even a little bit of it was because I was poor and homeless otherwise and couldn't make it on my own." She shifted her stance, leaned her other shoulder against the chimney for awhile. "So I did it, I went out and found a job and an apartment, got myself some okay furniture and lived there for more than a year, taking care of myself and Charlie. I banked whatever I didn't have to spend, and I proved to myself that I didn't need Trevor or anybody just to get by, and that if I had to I could do it on my own. So then I was ready to move in with him, and that was good because I really prefer that to living on my own anyway. But I like my job, and I like knowing that I have it, even if I don't really need it. I need it for myself."

"Ah-ah," Paige scolded, giving her son an arch look. "You know the rules, first you must pay the terrible price!" Wrapping her arms around him, she gave him a fierce hug, then kissed his forehead despite the fact she had to stand on tiptoe to do it. "I'm glad you found time in your busy schedule to come visit poor old mom," she teased, turning him loose. "Your father has been warned about the hot sauce, whether he takes it to heart is anybody's guess. I've got bleu cheese dressing to cool them down if it comes to that. If you go out and kibitz with him over the grill, you might be able to spot him before he pours it on; I can never catch him at it." She reached into a drawer and pulled out another barbecue apron, this one proudly reading "It's not combustible unless you set it on fire!" a classic SuperCrime! catchphrase. She handed it over to Will and watched to make sure he put it on properly. "Our guest tonight is Starlight, a hero your father met who could use some more friends in the city. Be nice and no flirting, she's too old for you," she admonished with a grin.

Holly looked at the foundation and powder, both of them distinctly lacking in glamorous color and suited to her mother's slightly more olive skin tone. "You do it," she told Thelia, tipping her face up to allow for application of the makeup. "That's how they do it on TV," she explained, "all the stars have makeup artists who do the makeup for them. Or they should, anyway. My mom does her own for her show because she says she'd rather have a medic on set than a makeup artist, but that's lame. When I'm a TV star I'm going to have people do everything for me because I'll be too busy acting." She nodded emphatically, then gave Thaelia another inscrutable look. "Well if she needs punching, why don't you give her punching? You're a superhero, right?"

"I didn't see any alternate versions of you," Erin admitted, "but my interdimensional travel has gone way down in the past couple of years. And when I do go, it hasn't been to close copies of Earth Prime. Some of the universes I went to, could be you just hadn't met yet." She shrugged, settled herself into an easy slouch against a chimney. "Yeah, I like working for HAX pretty well. The pay and benefits are good, and the people I work with are okay. Sometimes the work is boring or annoying, but I guess that's why they pay people to do it, right?" She looked over at Nina. "You're a senior like Trevor, right? You graduate next month?"

"Yeah, we were both equally traumatized by it." Now Erin did smile, just a little bit. "Though one of the dimensions was like twenty-five years ahead of us into the future, and apparently we'd been divorced for years, and the other one I kind of got the feeling that it was partially just for publicity. So maybe it makes a little more sense that way, I don't know." She shrugged. "Definitely more universes where I wound up with Trevor, and I'm happy about that. I think he is too, he was really weirded out by the one where he had a kid with Sage, I mean Blue Fox, cause she's like his sister. That was the same one where Mark and I hooked up and had a kid and divorced, it was a seriously messed up universe." Maybe it was nerves, or maybe it was the absence of other teammates talking, maybe it was just the stress of a bad week, but Erin seemed unusually loquacious tonight. "We're getting close," she told Nina. "If my tip was right, we've got about fifteen minutes till they show up."

Erin raised a hand to her hair automatically, then lowered it, seeming annoyed with herself. "Might if I lived in the same time zone as the other Erin, but I like my hair the way it is. She and I look a lot less alike than we used to anyway, she didn't grow like I did, hasn't got any of the muscles. Jessie and I look more alike, and she decided she wanted to be a blonde. Which doesn't suit our coloring at all, but whatever. Never ran into any universes where I was a queen, but I ran into one where I was a guy, and a couple where I was dating Mark, so, you know, things can get really, really weird out there."

Erin hesitated. "We came to... an understanding," she finally said. "My doppelganger from Earth Prime and I will never really get along, but she's not a bad person. Just a normal person, and neither of us is ever going to understand each other. And Jessie is too damaged to really fight with, not without feeling like a bully. So there was no fighting, and we had cocoa together, and... it was okay." She sighed, taking to the rooftops as they entered Hanover's tech-centric industrial district, the lights of ArcheTech gleaming half a mile away. "There's not much of a story to it, really. I'm not from Earth Prime, I come from an alternate dimension where the Terminus unleashed hell and the heroes couldn't stop it. I was evacuated to Earth Prime and lived with that Erin in Seattle and her family for a little while before I came to Claremont. Jessie is the version of me who got abducted to Anti-Earth instead of rescued to Prime. We found her by accident and retrieved her a few years ago, but she's pretty messed up. It's just a lot of us to be living in one reality."

"I haven't patrolled with Edge since high school, really," Wander commented, "but that sounds about right. That luck controlling thing can be really useful in a fight, but it tends to weird up everyday life some. At least he's eased up with the 'I'm gonna get as high in the sky as I can and expect that one of my friends is just gonna be there to catch me' thing. She shook her head at the remembered antics, almost smiling for a moment before it fell away. "How's his mom doing? I haven't seen her in a long time, but I see the comics at the store pretty regularly. She okay?"

Erin nodded. "Patrol's still got to be done, criminals don't just take a break because... of anything." She leapt from the tower to the road bed, waited for Nina to join her in her own way, then set off in an easy jog half as fast as the cars that passed them on the bridge. "You've been out patrolling with Edge, right?" she asked conversationally, her breathing not even sped up from when she'd been standing still. "He's lived in the city all his life, got some of the rhythms down pretty good. But patrolling with him isn't like regular patrolling. If something is going to happen in town on any given night when he's out, it just happens in front of him, because that's his power. The rest of us have to go looking. I got a tip that somebody might be trying to rob a tech warehouse in Hanover tonight, was planning on going over to check it out."

Paige nodded, looking as though she might want to say something more, then apparently deciding she'd said more than enough already. Walking over to the sink, she handed Starlight a long wooden-handled spatula and an equally-long two-tined fork, along with a bottle of barbecue sauce. "He'll be yelling for all this stuff in a minute anyway, may as well get it out there for him now. And remind him about the hot sauce, unless you really like a burger that could set your mouth on fire. And could you send Holly in to help me make the salad? She's just trying to avoid kitchen work right now."

Five minutes past their agreed upon meeting time, a faint twanging noise announced the arrival of Monsoon's companion for the evening. Wander ran up the bridge cables as though they were a balance beam six inches off the ground, not bothering with the handholds until the very top where it was too steep to do anything but climb. She looked tired, which was fairly rare in a woman who could sleep once every three days and be no worse for it, but her face was drawn and her lips pursed tight and she didn't look as though she wanted to talk about it. "Monsoon," she greeted tonelessly, not aggressive but with no real enthusiasm. "Sorry I'm late. You ready?"

"He did it because it was the kind of man he was. I don't think he would've ever considered doing anything different," Paige told Starlight, that faraway look back in her face for a minute. "He was the best of the best, even the villains had to respect him at least a little bit, because no matter what, human life came first. I saw him, actually, on the second day of the attack. We were between waves, us and the guys from 1-800-JUSTICE, still together in Lincoln, before Jump died. Just absolutely wrecked, exhausted, and then he came down to talk to us for a minute, ask if we could keep holding the line. He was all torn up too, dirty and uniform wrecked and burnt along one arm, but just seeing him, realizing that the heroes had come back, we finally had some hope. The politics didn't matter, the line of BS from the mayor's office certainly didn't matter when people were dying. Freedom City and its heroes belong to each other, and nobody was a better example of that than the Centurion." She smiled then, ran a quick self-conscious hand over her short bob of hair. "Ancient history now, I know. Life goes on, and it's been more than twenty years. Stopping Omega didn't stop all the bad things happening in the city, it just got the heroes back in." She regarded Starlight from calm brown eyes. "Richard didn't tell me much of your story, but he says you've been trying to start a new life for yourself. I respect that. I know how hard it is, and it's even worse when you're doing it on your own."

Okay, what I'm thinking about for a Wiki template is like this: ====== (Character Name) ====== (Brief Summary of Character here, who they are, where they operate, what they are like) ===== History ===== (Character History Information ===== Powers ===== (Information about character powers. ===== (Sidekick, HQ, Etc) ===== (Other important wikiable information about your character. Copy and paste headline for additional entries) ===== Timeline ===== ==== (Enter 1st Year Character Active) ==== === (Enter First Season Character Active) === * (Insert first character thread, with link) * (Insert second character thread, with link) * (etc) * (etc) === (Enter Second Season Character Active) === * (Insert first character thread, with link) * (Insert second character thread, with link) * (etc) * (etc) (Copy and paste timeline for additional years)

"I'm going to have to keep the keycard," Miss Americana told Lynn, polite but very firm. "I'm sorry if it was a keepsake, but it's simply too dangerous to have laying around. We'll be patching our systems, of course, but it may well have been designed to trip traps in more than one building in Freedom City. We'll analyze it and destroy it before it can cause any more damage. You're free to take the rest of your things." She gestured to the small pile of personal effects on the table. "I apologize for how you were treated in the lobby, but I'm sure you understand the grounds for the misunderstanding. It's better to be safe than sorry with so many lives at stake when it comes to safeguarding the building. Was there anything else you needed to know?"

"Shhh, I'm not going anywhere, I promise," she murmured fervently, running her hands through his hair, then rubbing his shoulders lightly. "Whatever needs to be done, we can do it together. We're still here." She held onto him for another minute, not saying anything, not sure what to say or what to do, except that holding onto each other was keeping her from falling to pieces and she hoped it would work for him as well. "But maybe it can wait a little bit. I'm exhausted," she told him, which was not entirely untrue, though she was probably in far better shape than he was. "Been a couple of days of straight travel getting back to Earth. It looked like there were sandwiches and Chinese food boxes in the big kitchen, do you want to have some lunch and a nap with me?"

"I'm very sorry to have surprised you!" Paige said with an apologetic smile. "And please, call me Paige." She gave the intimidated older man her friendliest smile before gesturing in Wail's direction. "This is Keith Lamarr, he's an old friend of mine. He's a metahuman, and a teacher as well, high school. He was investigating something else going on in your neighborhood when we ran into each other." From the way the Howards' eyes had been tracking, she suspected they could not see the Scarab yet, and Paige supposed there was probably a reason the other psychic wanted it that way for now. "I'm sorry I'm running a little late, I hope we're not inconveniencing you. May we come in?"

Erin nodded, sorrow writ large across her face and in her eyes. She reached up and gently removed his sunglasses, setting them on the hood of the truck, then cupped his cheek in one hand. "I'm so sorry I wasn't here," she murmured. "You shouldn't have had to go through it alone." She hugged him again, kissed him very softly. "I didn't hear very much, we only got back about forty-five minutes ago. And I... I'd rather hear about it from you, when you're ready. How are you holding up?" she asked. It would be stupid to ask if he was okay. She studied him soberly. "You got hurt."

Holly took the moisturizer and looked at it dubiously. "It's just lotion," she pointed out. "It doesn't even have any glitter." Even so, she dutifully dumped a fair amount onto her hand and began rubbing it onto her face like sunscreen, leaving her cheeks and nose shiny and pink. "So one of his friends told you bad stories about him, and now he's mad at you? That doesn't seem fair. If I were you, I'd find the person who lied to you and make them sorry for it," she opined fiercely. "Really good, so they never do it again. Back at my old school, we had to do stuff like that all the time. There were a bunch of snotty girls who were all "oooh, your parents work on basic cable," but they were really just jealous because their parents were washed up or something dumb like producers or publicists. They got to go to better parties, but it's not like that means anything. I mean, when you're in second grade it's not like you get to do anything cool anyway." She snorted derisively, obviously far beyond the foibles of her youth. "Anyway, we would always pull pranks on them when they got too bad, make them think twice about being so nasty. Eyes now?"

Stesha made an odd face at the idea of encountering the dimension of Lucy's already-consumed food, but managed to dismiss it from her mind before it could root too deeply. "I have been very curious to know, what is it like to come from the time when you lived into the present of Freedom City? It seems like it would be such a big adjustment to make, but you've gone back to work, and you're doing hero work, and seem to be settled in so well. Have you found it very difficult? Were you able to find people to help you?" She was curious to know more about Lucy, but also curious in general how people could make the leap to Freedom City life from much less technological societies. She had future college students to think of, after all.

"Joseph, I'm here to help you," Gina promised. She was not nearly as persuasive here as when she was Miss Americana, but he couldn't see her, which allowed her to be at least somewhat convincing. "I promise, I'm going to do everything I can. We read the documentation on what happened to you. It was very wrong for anyone to do that to you. Anything that I can do to help you, I'll do. Was it you who chased the research team out of the building? Did they do something to hurt or scare you? They're very sorry if they did, they mean you no harm." She touched the glowing cobwebs with a careful "finger," trying to assess what they were composed of and if she might clear them away somehow without causing more damage.

"It wasn't any one big thing," Paige told her, then reconsidered. "Well, it was and it wasn't. It was a lot of small steps that ended in one big leap, I guess. The eighties were a weird time to be a villain in Freedom City." She smiled a little, reminiscing. "The costumes were tremendously weird. But the attitudes, the way heroes and villains acted, it was very different from anything before or after. A lot of the old villains were retiring, and the new ones were thugs. No style, no strategy, just smash and bash. We thought we were way above that, doing our villainy old school, stealing from the rich and giving to ourselves. We didn't like to hurt people, not civilians anyway. Throwing down with the heroes was different, we'd been raised to that, it was almost the fun part. But the heroes were different too. It was the Moore years, so they were breaking the law by upholding the law, so things were a lot less black-and-white. Sometimes the heroes did bad things. Sometimes, very occasionally, Richard and I would step in and save somebody who needed saving, tell ourselves we were still proper bad guys because what we'd done was illegal." Paige walked over to the big side-by-side refrigerator and opened the freezer, pulling out a pie from its depths. "It was fun for awhile, especially for someone like me who'd never gotten to cut loose and have any fun. But I realized I wanted more than fun, I wanted some kind of real life, the kind I'd imagined when I was a kid. We'd been doing drugs, mostly cocaine, and it started to scare me, losing time, going through crashes and withdrawal, having trouble controlling my powers when I was flying. I managed to get clean, but it took a long time. Richard was using more heavily and he didn't want to quit, and that was hard. Sometimes it felt like we were barely hanging on. Then my father killed all of my siblings and their spouses, came this close to killing Richard and I as well. We had to leave Freedom City and go on the run. I just about lost my grip entirely, and Richard started getting clean for me, so he could be there for me. It took him years to get all the way there. I was twenty-seven the first year we both made it for six entire months. We moved back to Freedom City, decided we'd figure out what to do next when we got there. We were just getting back into the whole merry-life-of-crime bit when the Terminus Invasion happened." She looked at Starlight with eyes that for a moment were bleak and haunted. "It was... you can't imagine it if you weren't there. Hell rained down, and it didn't matter if you were a good guy or a bad guy. Freedom City was our home, and we were still human beings. We'd been in a skirmish with 1-800-JUSTICE, and suddenly we were back to back with them, trying to keep Omegadrones from murdering everyone in Lincoln. Lot of people died during those three days. Heroes, villains, civilians. At some point we realized that we could've run, but at the same time we couldn't have. And that helping people, saving people, it was a lot more fulfilling than having fun and getting money. In the wake of the Invasion, the new Freedom League offered us amnesty if we'd retire from villainy, and we took it." She smiled, leaned back against the counter once more. "It wasn't quite as simple as all that, but it was the start. We had Will, moved out to California to escape my psycho family, started building a real life. I busked on the streets for awhile, sleight of hand and illusion magic for the tourists, and eventually that became a TV special, then the show. Nothing was fast or easy, but it happened eventually."