ic (OMTB) Interview: Jill O'Cure

[Gizmo]

"Well, we, ah..." Jill cleared her throat and raised the back of a closed fist to her mouth. "Sorry, I was going to say that... we figured out that Quickstep had been replaced with some sort of doppelgänger because Blue Jay had run into her after she remembered being on Earth last so we had some idea. And based on who had been taken..." She cleared her throat more forcefully and looked away from the camera. Her expression had gone carefully neutral. "Can we stop for a minute? Just need to... get my words in order, yeah? Sorry, I know I'm being a pain in the ass." She reached for the bottle of water she'd so far left untouched and twisted it open just to have something to do with her hands.

[Electra]

"You're doing fine," Paige assured her warmly, making a subtle gesture to the crew offstage. The two cameramen both stepped back a couple of feet and the sound engineer pushed her headphones down around her neck. "Take as much time as you need. "I know this can't be an easy thing to talk about, and I'm really very grateful to you for coming in." She took a drink from her own water bottle. "Worrying about yourself is relatively straightforward. Worrying about the people you love, that's so much harder and scarier." 

[Gizmo]

Jill grimaced and pinched the bridge of her nose with the manner of someone who had a lot of practice being hard on themselves. "I knew this was going to come up though and I thought I was good for it." With a long exhalation she took a sip from the water bottle. "It was probably the second most scared I've been in my life and the top end of that list is not family friendly fare. It's tough partly because the specific thing we-- the thing that I was worried about only totally makes sense if you know some, uh, personal stuff? Like who knows who and some secret identity stuff. Trying to figure out how to give an honest answer without, y'know, compromising anyone."

[Electra]

Paige nodded and leaned in towards Jill. "I know it's a complicated situation, just from things I've learned as an offscreen personality," she murmured. "You must have been beside yourself with worry." In public, Jill o Cure and the Interceptors in general had solid secret identities, with the exception of Harrier, who'd allowed his to become public when his wife had made her startling revelations two years ago. But as someone who was plugged into the school community and who had interviewed a lot of people surrounding the infiltration already, Paige was pretty sure she had a handle on the major players and where many of the infiltrators had been concentrated. "You can do your best to answer and we'll edit out anything that slips, or we can just skip right over the question and move on, whichever you'd rather do."

[Gizmo]

Jill took a long, slow breath in, held it for a few seconds, then exhaled just as slowly. "No, I'm alright. We're most of the way through the mounting existential dread and paralyzing anxiety part of the story and then it's just adrenaline-soaked, active terror which is way easier to talk about." Something in the return to her sardonic tone told Paige that the unexpectedly breached walls of emotional fortitude had been raised again and reenforced for the occasion. It may not have been the best way to deal with those complicated feelings but they weren't there for therapy. "If you want to run it back I'll give it another shot."

[Electra]

"Sounds great," Paige told her encouragingly. "You're doing really well so far." She looked offstage and nodded to the crew, who came back to their equipment to resume filming. After a few moments, the director gave her the thumbs up and she looked back to Jill. "Having to rough it in a dead world sounds like it was tough enough, even with some experienced friends along on the trip," she began, electing to slide past her earlier question. "But I imagine the Curator didn't leave you alone forever. What happened to get you off the Ringworld?" 

[Gizmo]

"At first we were just gambling that the recreation was accurate enough to include something we could use in one of the other cities, communication equipment or something." Hoping that there would be a copy of some super-team's headquarters with a functional interplanetary ship that wouldn't immediately get them nabbed out of the sky the second they took off had been a long shot at the time and sounded worse in retrospect. "We found out later that a big part of why the Curator hadn't found us by then is his attention or processing power, however you want to think about it, was busy elsewhere, so much that stuff started to stop working right on the Ringworld. Including one of the drone ships looking for us doing a nosedive close by enough that we could get to it and pop it open."

[Electra]

This was interesting stuff, Paige hadn't heard much of this from Quickstep or anywhere else. That young woman had been so overwhelmed by her experience on the ringworld that her recollections were mostly of how hungry and alone she'd been, and how glad she'd been to be rescued. She'd followed the older heroes unquestioningly, without much of an idea of what they were actually doing. "So even on the ringworld, you were able to tell that something was happening with the Curator?" she asked. "What did you do with the drone ship you captured?"