Bee Okay (IC)

[Electra]

The week before Thanksgiving, on a cold and drizzly Sunday morning, late enough to be after sleeping in but too early for lunch, Stesha worked up her nerve and gave her best friend a call. Not that it should've taken a lot of nerve to call her best friend, but things were... things were weird these days.

"Hey Taylor," she started the call, her voice sounding just a little odd. "I was just wondering, are you busy today? I've got this thing to do that I could use some help with. I don't think it should be dangerous, but I need some backup, just in case."

[alderwitch]

"Hmm?" Taylor's voice came over the phone line quickly, which meant the cell phone had been out of her pocket and somewhere close by. There was the faint noise of rustling blankets as she moved. "One second."

Doors open and shut since phasing with the phone in hand tended to lead to dropped signals. Neither of the grown ups slept anymore but JJ did, and usually during the day if he could manage it so Taylor had been taking advantage of the free time that had afforded her. Once the bathroom door clicked shut, she started the water up, phone pressed to her ear. "Of course, let me hop in the shower. Where do you want me to meet you?"

[Electra]

"Can you meet me by Providence Asylum?" Stesha suggested. "That's where we have to go anyway, and it's pretty easy to find. You've probably been there before, but it's out in Port Regal, on the south side of the city. There's a cemetery attached to the property, if you could meet me there, that would be great." She hesitated another moment as another concern presented itself to her. "Um, you're not allergic to bees or anything, right?" she asked Taylor.

[alderwitch]

Taylor laughed at that before quickly assuring Stesha, "Oh, no. I don't have allergies to anything any more. Comes with the not needing to sleep or eat or breathe. I'll be fine."

She nodded at the directions and said wryly, "I'm a Midnighter. I doubt there's a cemetery that I don't know in this city."

In short order, Taylor was changed and showered and after assuring her husband that she wasn't leaving the dimension,Phantom teleported to the location in question to meet Stesha.

[Electra]

When Taylor arrived, Stesha was already there, waiting by the largest crypt in the cemetery. She was in uniform, but she didn't look as carefully put together as she usually did when she went out. Strands of green hair fell down around her face, which seemed pale under her domino mask. She was looking around nervously until she saw Taylor, at which point she broke into a smile. "Taylor, I'm so glad you could come today," she said with great sincerity. "I've been putting this off, but I've got to do it now, before the weather gets any colder. The Beekeeper has a lair under Providence Asylum, can you even believe that?" she asked. "What kind of security do they have there?"

[alderwitch]

Phantom shrugged, the movement rippling her cloak out as it writhed along the ground. It was as translucent as she was, floating ghostly through the headstones. "Well, I think they're usually understaffed. I mean, even with lots of manpower, most super heroes don't sign up for guard duty let alone madman duty. I think it's just designed to fail but they do the best they can I'm sure. So, do you know where we're going or shall I scry it out?"

Phantom paused and eyed her, "Are you sure you want to do this today? I can probably take care of it if you need to call out. You don't look, well, yourself."

[Electra]

Stesha shook her head, pulling off the domino mask and stuffing it into her pocket. "I'm fine," she told Taylor. "Besides, I promised I was going to do this personally, so I'm going to do it. The Beekeeper left some of his bees in captivity when he was taken to jail, including the queen. I promised the bees that live on my world that I would bring her and the rest back to them, so they have a sustainable colony. I went to Blackstone, which is never much fun, and got the Beekeeper to tell me where they were."

She went up to the large crypt, pressing a hand against the door. "I know where they are," she told Taylor, "but I don't know if there are any traps along the way. I don't want to be stuck down there with the bees until the Beekeeper serves his sentence."

[alderwitch]

"Let me go first," Phantom suggested as she dropped to the ground and turned solid, her cloak flowing out behind her as the tendrils of its ragged hem writhed over the ground. Her glowing eyes flared as she extended her preternatural senses while she added, "Even if something can hurt me, I'll just regenerate and nearly nothing short of a god can trap me these days. If there's something I can't get out of, you can yank me back."

[Electra]

"All right," Stesha replied, digging a handful of seeds out of a pouch on her belt. She held them ready, little vines already beginning to grow and curl around her fingers as she followed her friend to the crypt. Even in the dead dry grass of the cemetery, the place where she'd been standing had formed a fairy ring of grass and flowers, even a few little mushrooms. She ignored that, keeping her attention on the matter at hand. "Just be careful. He's crazy, but that makes him tricky. I'm sure he was hoping to get a little bit of revenge out of this."

[alderwitch]

"I will be." Phantom assured her as she walked forward, her senses wide and alert for any danger but the guardian was much less concerned. She hadn't been around for the most souped up iteration of the BeeKeeper but intangibility and regeneration tended to make one cocky when it came to dealing with traps. "So, can we just blow through the doors or are we going to have to actually open them?"

[Electra]

"Blow 'em off," Stesha said with a firm nod. "If they cared much about this crypt, they'd have noticed when a supervillain used it to build his lair in. Not that I think Beekeeper is going to be out of Blackstone anytime soon, but I don't want him to have any secret hidey-holes to come back to, or other supersuits to climb right into." She hugged herself, looking resolute. "He's not going to come after me again. I just won't have it." She followed Phantom, staying at a safe distance to avoid any flying debris when Phantom did what she did so well.

[alderwitch]

Phantom shrugged, the gesture communicated in a ripple of fabric and agreed, "Okay." before she tore the doors right off of their hinges, letting them thump to the ground with a clang, "Now, let's see what's down the rabbit hole."

She stepped up onto one of the doors and over it, heading into the crypt itself. "I never like knocking anyways."

[Avenger Assembled]

Inside, the two heroines were greeted by the strong smell of honey in the air and distantly playing late 70s Muzak. What they found looked exactly like the stereotypical supervillain lair, right down to colored beakers on lab tables along the wall, half-finished weapons of doom that were clearly parts of the Bee-Keeper's most recent battlesuit, and a chalkboard covered with schemes. It was only on closer inspection that things started to look weird: the beakers were actually colored water, or gave a very convincing imitation thereof, and the chalkboard's equations and battle-strategies were dotted with occasional "Bee-Keeper+Fleur de Joie" doodled in hearts. There was, from down a narrow steel door along one wall, the distant sound of echoing buzzing, as if a very large number of very large things were making quite a noise.

[alderwitch]

"Creepy. A super-stalker." Phantom intoned after her gaze swept over the lair. "I don't think this needs to remain intact, do you?"

Phantom turned her hooded head back towards her friend, polite enough to ask before making with big boom noises. Her first instinct was to leave nothing useable just on the off chance but not everyone shared her feelings when it came to collateral damage. There was a reason, after all, that she worked with the Midnighters rather than the Freedom League. "Better safe than sorry."

[Electra]

Stesha shuddered as she looked around at the creepy place, hugging herself and looking even more sick to her stomach than when she'd started. "Robots, he's building robots," she murmured. "Just when I thought he couldn't get any worse." She looked over at Taylor. "I say smash it to the ground and salt the earth, but lets wait until we've got the bees first. They're my first priority, even if this stuff makes me want to retch. I think I hear the bees further on."

[alderwitch]

Phantom nodded, tossing one last wistful look over at the battlesuits just itching to be rendered back into their component atoms but she wasn't calling the shots today. She frowned at the reinforced door and pushed her cloak out of the way as she began to charge up a bolt of white hot energy in her palms. "This man put some serious work into his big locked doors."

Once she had a ball of energy too bright to look directly at, Phantom shot her hands forward to rock the steel door on its hinges. After another blast or two, the door hung wildly on its hinges, gaping open. Another gesture sent it spinning into the rack of powersuits with a satisfying clang. "But not enough."

[Electra]

Stesha hung back while Taylor did her work, careful to avoid any flying debris. "He obviously didn't know who he was dealing with. Which tends to be his problem most of the time, really." She flinched a little as the door flew across the room, resting her hands over her belt buckle. "Anyway, that's two birds with one stone, I don't think those suits are going anywhere soon. Let's see what's in there." She tossed a handful of seeds through the open door, sprouting them into traveling vines, then looking through them to get an idea of what was going on.

[Avenger Assembled]

Peering through the vines, Stesha was confronted with a scene at once incredibly mundane and at once incredibly bizarre. Inside the gigantic room her vines peered into, she was confronted with what looked like an unhappy group of prisoners: with downcast faces, they moved around the perimeter of the big layered cone where they lived, some listening to music from a built-in speaker system inset in the translucent yellow plastic walls, others watching television, still more tending to one round, stately prisoner who looked a lot like their mother. Outside, their guard sat at her own computer desk, a bored look on her face as she filed her nails.

But on closer inspection, the site was actually as bizarre as could be for all those prisoners were gigantic bees, kept in a mighty artificial hive the size of a multi-story building, looming as large as the high-rise which contained Stesha's flowershop on the bottom floor. The bees did not look particularly happy, but based on Stesha's knowledge of the giant bees she knew, none of them looked sick, not even the queen complete with shiny gold crown attached to the top of her head.

As for the jailer, it took Stesha only a moment to recognize an apified version of herself; a representation of Fleur de Joie cast as a bee-humanoid! (It also might be her imagination, but robot-bee-Stesha appeared somewhat more curvy than the woman she saw in the mirror in costume.) Bee-Stesha's shiny metal wings flashed as she hummed tunelessly, looking like a bored secretary in an office produced by a madman's dream, her desk set in the wide space that held the gigantic artificial hive.

[alderwitch]

"It wearing your face might make it a tad more difficult to convince them that we're on the side of right and good." Phantom opinioned but didn't seem overly concerned. "I say we teleport into the middle of the hive and blow up the jailer. I think that'll make it quite clear where we stand. Then it won't be so hard to explain why the robots are wearing your face: because he's insane."

[Electra]

"Blowing up the jailer sounds good to me," Stesha said very emphatically. She'd recited all of what she'd seen in a voice that had gradually grown tighter with anger and sickness. "I have a message to give to the queen that will hopefully convince her of our bona fides, but I want to blow that thing up anyway. And I have some serious words to say to the Beekeeper when I see him next. He's a sick, sick, sick man! Who the hell does this anyway?" Hearing her own voice made her realize she was precariously close to tears, so Stesha shut it down for the moment, took a deep breath, and went to stand near Taylor for the teleport.

[alderwitch]

"Someone who needs serious help," Phantom agreed and then paused before adding, "Or perhaps to be thrown off of more rooftops. Sometimes that helps."

There was a reason, after all, that Phantom had decided that Avenger made a good mate. Compatible combat styles was certainly one of those. Before more words could be exchanged, she reached out to circle her fingers around Stesha's wrist and deposit them neatly in the center of that room, facing the jailer.

[Electra]

Stesha wasn't usually too quick off the mark when it came to a fight, but this time her ire was up. As soon as they were in the room, she was extending her hands, vines shooting from the seeds in her fingers so quickly that the Robo-Bee-Fleur had no time to do more than blink before she was encased in a living blanket of green. "That's my face!" she shouted defiantly at the writhing mass as the robot tipped over and rolled ridiculously on the floor. "Nobody wears that but me!"

[alderwitch]

"This is Fluer, she's here to take you all to safety," Phantom explained, gesturing towards her friend with one gloved hand as she floated behind Fleur's back protectively on the off chance that the bees proved difficult to sway, "She was sent by others of your, er, hive and has a safe place to take you all to."

[Avenger Assembled]

The bees, as bees will, buzzed. "BBBUTT..." "QUIET!" roared the great queen bee, a gargantuan monstrosity of apian size and feminity who might have been the mother of a billion bees. Seriously, she might be, except the Bee-Keeper's lair didn't look that large. She couldn't rise, at least not without compromising her weighty dignity, so instead she gestured with one massive leg for the others to come closer. "IF ZZZZHE IZZZZ THE FLEUR DE JOIE," the queen buzzed in a voice like an insectoid pipe organ, "WE MAY GO. THIZZ IZZ A TERRIBLE PRIZON!" she expostulated.

"BUT MY QUEEN!" buzzed a nearby bee, "WHAT OF THE MAZTER! HE WARNED UZ OF HER TRICKY WAYZ!"

"HMM..." She stroked her mouthparts with a foreleg. "INDEED! HOW DO WE KNOW YOU ARE NOT MAD?"

[Electra]

Stesha opened a flower and shoved the wriggling robot into it, figuring she'd deal with that little abomination later, when she had the stomach. "I bring a message, oh queen, from your daughter, Bee-atrizz," she called, "who was sent from the hive and has gone ahead to prepare a place for you. She wanted me to remind you that though she is deformed, you always called her your mozzt clever offzzpring." Stesha carefully rolled the Zs passing along a little of the giant bee's distinctive accent. "She would like to remind you of the time that she discovered the mechanism for dispensing sugar water into your enclosure, and opened it wide so the water gushed freely. The Mazter was angry, but you had such a feast! She wants you to know that what is waiting for you is a thouzzzand timezz better than that, because it is real. She and the others are waiting for you. They miss you."