The Space Between (IC)

[Avenger Assembled]

"Actually, I was hoping we could talk," said Sharl, keeping close company alongside his fellow alien. Her homeworld was much further away than Tronik's new home, but on the other hand the metal shapeshifter was far more of this world than the boy of impulses and programs ever could be. Looking around, he leaned close to Indira and said, "So, hypothetically speaking...would you be interested in doing something more interesting than our homework tonight?" At her look, he said, "You're from far away, I'm from far away. There's a lot to see in this city that's a lot more interesting than our books, if you don't mind bending the rules a little. A lot of students get out and patrol as a group."

[Fox]

Indira raised her eyebrows, eyes going black for a moment between blinks. They didn't have pupils, of course (or anything at all to break up the void-like surface) but from the small motions of her head she was apparently glancing around for a moment. "Most things, I think, are more interesting than homework and books. A chance to...stretch my legs may not be so bad, though I would prefer that we were very careful. I do not think my parents would be pleased if they heard that I was sneaking out at night."

[Avenger Assembled]

"We'll be very careful," Sharl promised Indira, delighted to hear her cautious assent. The prospect of adventuring in the city, particularly alongside his new teammates, was a very exciting one. He wasn't sure exactly where Koshiro had in mind for them to go, but now that they had a team it was just a matter of taking the journey. He was always one up for exploration himself. "Why don't we meet in the, ah, zen garden, they call it, sometime around eleven? They're still rebuilding that, and all the shadows will make it easier for us to sneak around. Once we're all there, we can figure out exactly where we're going."

[Fox]

It was 10:45 when the window to room 404 opened just a crack to let Indira's silvery form slip through, collecting on the side of the building into a low-slung form whose dulled body and not-quite-smooth outline made it a little hard to track as it scurried down the side of the dorm and across the lawn toward the zen garden, belly so low to the ground that it brushed the grass as she silently slid and scuttled toward the rendezvous point.

[Avenger Assembled]

For a moment, Indira thought she was alone in the garden on her arrival: she could hear no human breathing or footsteps, and sense no such vibrations. All she saw was a laptop computer sitting by itself underneath a park bench, its screen dimmed to avoid casting any glow in the darkened garden. At her approach, the computer snapped to life, Sharl's face filling the screen. He started a bit at the sight of her, but had seen enough of Indira's true form that her face didn't freak him out. "Hey!" he said, his voice a low electronic whisper. "Glad you could make it." He grinned. "Our third will be here in a minute."

[Electra]

Moments after 11pm, the soft noise of footsteps heralded the arrival of the third conspirator. Koshiro was dressed in black jeans, a black turtleneck and navy hoodie, both as a means of concealment and in consideration of the sharp nighttime temperature drops of autumn. With only part of his face exposed, he was difficult to spot at all until he stepped into the pool of light cast by Sharl's laptop. He was a little weirded out by this view of his classmates, but affected indifference. "Hell of a meeting spot," he told Sharl dryly.

[Avenger Assembled]

"It's the perfect place," said Sharl, ticking points off on his fingers. "You have a reputation as a troublemaker, so teachers will buy that you come here to get centered, plus there's the ethnocultural thing which will help with idiots, Indira's known to be religious, and I'm a laptop somebody forgot under the bench." He grinned a little, then added seriously, "I know it's too early for us to go out yet, but we'd be crazy to go out into the city without making some kind of plan. Now, I've been to several different areas around the city with Miss A, so I've got a pretty good grasp of local geography." As he talked, little maps showing the Fens, Lincoln, and the Waterfront popped up on the screen around his talking head. "These are the three most promising areas for, uh, adventuring I've found. I did some checking, and we want to avoid Greenbank. There are a surprising number of tech-savvy people there, and the last thing we want to do is trigger a supervillain alarm or something."

[Fox]

"It is generally best not to get into fights with heroes," Indira agreed, shaping herself back up into something a little more humanoid (though she still didn't have her normal polished shine - too noticeable at night!). She blinked her three eyes at the screen, trying to translate the maps into a mental image of the areas...easier said than done, since she hadn't been out much.

"You still have not told me what it is, exactly, that we will be doing," she pointed out, glancing up at Sharl and Koshiro. "I am happy for a chance to...the phrase is 'stretch my legs'?...but the term 'adventuring' is very vague."

[Electra]

"Ethnocultural thing?" Koshiro asked Sharl flatly. "You know Zen isn't even Japanese, right?" He snorted, then turned his attention to Indira. "Urban exploration," he told her. "Freedom City's got a bunch of cool old abandoned buildings, mostly like down in the Fens where the gentrification assholes haven't gotten their hooks in yet. We're gonna go look around, see what's in them, how it looks and if people left stuff behind. Take pictures and stuff. Figured you'd be good because you can get into tight places."

[Fox]

Indira blinked, glancing around the garden, and taking a moment to reflect on whether or not she should think about coming there for some midnight meditations after all.... "I had not realized my religious preferences had spread that far. This is the 'grapevine', I think?"

"Exploration sounds interesting," she agreed, "though I think I will leave the picture-taking to you, as I cannot fit through small places while carrying anything. But I can be helpful there, and in reaching difficult places in general - I cannot fly, but I am quite good at climbing."

[Avenger Assembled]

Sharl coughed, and had the grace to look embarassed. Human ethnicities didn't make a lot of sense to Sharl, raised as he was in a monoculture that was a descendant of a multi-species civilization, and he had a feeling his attempt to make Koshiro feel included hadn't gone very well. "Uh, sorry. In any event, I have a lot of experience with that stuff back home; most of the tech is different, but I can still fly and go through walls." He took his shades off and rubbed his eyes. "Plus, I can make sure there aren't any hidden cameras in the buildings or anything." He called up an image on the screen next to him. "My idea was that we try the Old Fens Mission," he said, showing a fallen-down Gothic-looking church. "It's been abandoned since the Terminus Invasion, but it was locked up most of that time so it shouldn't have been looted too bad." Koshiro had walked past that building on his tour of the Fens, it was in a darkened neighborhood well away from the few police stations in the area.

[Electra]

"Locks aren't going to stop looters," Koshiro said flatly. "Crackheads have already gotten all the copper off that place, they've probably stripped the wiring too. Nobody's got any respect anymore. But it's a cool-looking building still. You got any idea what sort of security they've got? I didn't see any easy ways in, but with you and Wraith running interference, we should be able to find something. But I haven't got my kit or anything like that. All my stuff got confiscated, and I've only started replacing it. Bet you guys don't have ropes, flashlights, cameras, stuff like that."

[Fox]

Indira shook her head, frowning, in as much as one could frown without many facial features to speak of. "I do not require ropes for climbing, or lights to see in the dark, so I have never had a reason to own them. I suppose I could get a camera, though it seems like it would be a bother to carry around all the time; putting things inside myself is possible, but can be uncomfortable, and if the camera has metal parts I must be careful not to eat it."

She glanced up into the sky for a moment, pondering. "I do not imagine that any abandoned building would have security that could stop any one of us, much less the three of us working together. But it is a good consideration; we would not want to set off an alarm and end the trip early. We will have to keep careful watch of what we do."

[Avenger Assembled]

"I can shut off pretty much any alarm," said Sharl with a teenager's confidence, "but like you said, we don't actually want to get into trouble. I don't have any physical cameras," he added, "but as long as I'm connected to my server, I can send files back to it." He took what looked for all the world like a digital camera out of his pocket and held it up to the screen. "Why don't we spend a couple of days getting supplies?" he suggested. "We're all allowed off campus these days, so we'll be able to go shopping if we have to. We can get together again later in the month. From what I've heard, we don't want to be stuck out during the holiday. Strange things happen and it might draw attention to us."

[Electra]

"Yeah, can't go too close to Halloween," Koshiro agreed. "Police presence goes up, and there are more general assholes just running around wrecking things. We don't want to run into any of them, or end up getting blamed for any vandalism. I can probably get together the stuff I'll need this week, do a Saturday night mission." He thought guiltily for a moment of his limited supply of cash, and how he shouldn't be spending anything that could be sent home, but pushed that aside. All this stuff was stuff he could use again and again, so it was more like an investment than a splurge. "You guys free?"

[Fox]

Indira silently filed that bit of information away for later, pondering the implications of Halloween in a city known for villains as well as heroes.

"I believe I will be free," she replied, already writing off the homework she knew she was supposed to be doing that weekend. "I will not need supplies, but I can spend the time preparing and finding a good way to get out of Claremont without being seen. I suspect the security here is better than it appears to be."

[Avenger Assembled]

"I'll be free," said Sharl with a little shrug. "It's not my holiday, and it's not like I can eat candy anyway." He had a feeling it wasn't really a holiday Gina would like, given that she certainly wasn't going to have any of those costumed children at her door, so he wasn't worried about losing out on getting together with her. "The weekend sounds good to me. Why don't we get together on Saturday, make sure all is in readiness, and then...have an adventure?" He smiled, his confidence back now that all was going well ."It'll be great!"

[Electra]

"All right," Koshiro said with a curt nod. "Saturday, same time, same place. Look for good ways to get off campus, and think of something to tell Kimber," he instructed. "Don't tell anybody what we're doing, not to explain, not to brag, nothing. I'll look around and see if I can find more info on the building that might help us find a way in, or where the cool stuff to look at is going to be." He looked around a moment, obviously not expecting questions. "Good stuff." With that, he turned and walked away, back into the shadows heading toward the dormitories.

[Avenger Assembled]

Though he was concerned about being found out, Sharl wasn't particularly worried that week. This was hardly the first time he'd snuck away to go exploring, even if it was the first time he'd done so from Claremont rather than his parents' home on Tronik. Time in the computer lab gave him the email address of the head librarian at the small library annex in the Fens, while time visiting the mail room got one of his backup projectors sent there in a box of donations. The local librarian was overworked, by the time the donations were processed, Sharl would already have acquired the piece again. And from the library to the church was only a few minutes with as fast as he could fly.

The Old Fens Mission turned out to be a big, complicated building, the product of several different architects (and styles) over many years before having finally been abandoned and locked up some years earlier. The only map online was a decade and a half old, having been done by the assessors before they locked the place up. It was theoretically owned by the city, since no one had put any payment on the property in years. Getting in would probably be doable: there were several possible entrances, either in the roof or one of several doors at ground level.

[Fox]

Indira, who could neither e-mail herself to unsuspecting civil servants nor fly through the air like the acid-spitting moth-hawk, spent her time taking an awful lot of walks, always around the outside edge of the academy. By the time the rendezvous rolled around she had (or, at least, thought she had) a half-decent idea of where the cracks in the place were. Literal cracks, in fact: she'd been especially looking for areas where the walls had sustained some damage from some super-powered teen or another, and had found a couple promising candidates away from prying eyes; better to go through than over.

She showed up more-or-less on-time at the appointed place in human form, wearing a black turtleneck and a pair of dark brown khakis. Not that they were real clothes, of course, but she'd realized after their meeting last time that she probably stood out less this way, from a distance.

[Electra]

Koshiro arrived a few minutes later, dressed all in black with a hoodie drawn up around his face, his backpack slung over one shoulder. "Had a hard time getting out of the dorm, he reported, "no one ever sleeps in this damn place." Despite his difficulties, he was grinning, and looked happier than he had since he'd come to Claremont. Being out after curfew, being back on a mission made him feel alive in a way that going on school-sanctioned civilian protection gigs never really did. They were going to go see something maybe nobody had seen in a long time, they were going to find out what was in that old building. "Everybody ready?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"Ready," said Sharl from the cell he'd given Koshiro. When the signal was sent, he didn't stick around: he slipped back into the system and emailed himself to the assistant librarian at the Fens library annex, trusting that his colleagues would make their own way safely to the Fens on their own time. The "flight" to the Fens was easy enough, for all that it seemed to take forever as he squeezed his way through the narrow tunnels in space that were his visualization of the copper wiring that made up most of the local computer network. Once there, the old iMac on the librarian's desk flared to life and in the darkened library, the black-clad figure of Citizen made his appearance. It took Sharl just a couple of minutes to realize he'd forgotten to check the layout of the library annex, but a flipped lightswitch and opened interior door got him into the mailroom, where just as planned his emitter was in the package on top.

He made sure to conscientiously turn the lights off again before he left, taking a few moments to look around the small community library with its focus on childrens books and classical Earth literature, before carefully heading out an office window (which he also closed behind him) sent him out into the Freedom City night. Consulting the map of the city in his head, he headed straight for the old mission! It was a cool, damp night like many in Freedom City in October, with the promise of winter snow in the air.

[Fox]

Indira took a moment to make sure she wasn't abandoning Koshiro with no plan to get out and took off for the wall she'd been looking at earlier, sticking to shadows and cover as much as she could without drawing attention. When she hit the wall she literally hit the wall, barely losing speed as she strode straight into it and out the other side, her body turning to liquid metal and slipping through the minor damage some carried-away super-strong student had caused. Convenient, if not reliable...she had to imagine such things got repaired pretty quickly.

Once outside and a short ways away travel got much easier; she kept above or away from prying eyes, sticking to rooftops whenever possible to attract as little attention as she could. That, at least, she'd had practice with back in India, and there was a certain amount of satisfaction and joy in running and leaping from roof to roof, building to building, pole to pole as she made good time toward the Fens.

[Avenger Assembled]

The alien and the computer projection met up at the rear entrance to the Old Mission, the one that faced an equally deserted warehouse and had no working lights overhead. The dark and stillness of the abandoned neighborhood was a little intimidating, but surely there were no serious threats here to a Kinigosi warrior and her holographic buddy! Sharl nodded a cordial hello at Indira's arrival, by now at least a little used to the shapeshifting alien girl and her ever-fluid body. Maybe he hadn't grown up with people like that, but he'd certainly made an exhaustive study of her teammate now that they'd be working together. "Wraith," he said with a nod, not wanting to betray who the shapeshifter was when they weren't exactly on a standard patrol. After some consideration, he donned his shades (though not his chest symbol), since they didn't actually impede his vision at all in this artificial world. "Koshiro should be here momentarily."

[Electra]

The two teenagers actually waited for quite awhile before the last of their number managed to show up. Half an hour after they were scheduled to meet, Koshiro finally showed up, panting slightly, a tear in the leg of his pants. "Sorry I'm late," he muttered to the others. "Gotta find a better way off campus. Turns out the teachers sometimes don't leave till way later than I thought. And those hedges beyond the south wall are full of goddamned dagger thorns." He hitched up his backpack and looked up at the building. "Anyway, we're all here now, and we've still got enough time to look around. I think the easiest thing to do would be either for one of you to get in through some little hole and open this door, or for us to try the coal chute that's supposed to be along the south wall."