ic The Ghost and The Machine [IC]

[Electra]

Miss A's eyes widened at the display, and for a moment she seemed to be stunned to complete immobility by Ghost Girl's antics. Indeed, even after the show was over, it was several moments before the scientist blinked and seemed to shake herself, then gave the ghost a very polite sort of smile. "It sounds like you've been making a great deal of progress," she said faintly. Rising, she spent a few moments with her back turned, fiddling with the light tower and the machinery. "Now you have some temperature control powers as well, correct? Can you reduce the ambient temperature in the air in here without causing any damage?"

[Gizmo]

"Thanks, I had to practice that a ton!" Ghost Girl beamed at the praise, completely oblivious to any discomfort on Miss Americana's part. "The tough part is not getting dizzy. Oh, and making sure the eyeballs go back in facing the right way."

At the new request she nodded, closing her eyes for a moment and letting out a relaxed sigh, allowing herself to cease holding back the waves of unearthly chill that naturally rolled off of her being. The effect was immediate, the temperature in the lab plummeting and a light coating of frost beginning to form on the equipment closest to the ghost.

[Electra]

Miss Americana cast a slightly concerned look at the condensation building up on the machines, but the demonstration was actually quite helpful, so she let it continue while she took her readings. "Excellent," she murmured, shivering in a slightly belated fashion. "I think I'm starting to get some energy readings on the frequencies your powers seem to operate on. This is very good." She made notes on her pad computer, then looked up at the ghost once more. "I think that's enough of that, before we start tripping the moisture sensors in the room. Can you produce any other widespread environmental effect?" she asked curiously. "It seems the aggregate effect of your energy distribution over the entire room is easier for my equipment to pick up."

[Gizmo]

Reigning in on the permeating cold again with some effort, Ghost Girl considered for a moment. "Hmm. Oh! I can do this!" Rising up in the air slightly and pulling back, she widened her mouth until the ectoplasm of her face contorted again as if she'd dislocated her jaw and stretched her skin. From the gaping maw erupted a blast of icy wind as if a door had been thrown open to a terrible blizzard. The roar of the gale was almost deafening and where frost had been forming gradually before now the area in front of the apparition was coated in ice several centimeters thick. When she stopped moments later, her face pulling back into place as she worked her jaw back and forth, a sizable swath of equipment had been encased in a spiky, miniature glacier, horizontal icicles pointing away from her. "...um. Probably should have given you some warning on that, huh?"

[Electra]

Miss Americana seemed briefly nonplussed as she took in the frozen equipment, but she recovered quickly with a professional smile. "You may have voided a few warranties there, but this equipment is supposed to be rated for metahuman testing. It ought to be able to take a little ice. But yes, a bit of warning next time might be in order. We have special testing rooms for the display of powers that might be dangerous or destructive. Still, no real harm done," she assured the ghostly girl. "And the readings were good, before things started switching off." She rose and walked to one of the frozen pieces of equipment, tapping a perfectly manicured nail against the frozen block. "I don't suppose you can whisk the ice away as handily as you made it appear?"

[Gizmo]

Kimber ducked her head between her shoulder blades, sinking into her tattered reaper's cloak in chagrin. "I can't, I'm sorry! I can't really undo any of the stuff I do," she admitted, finding herself a little embarrassed about that now that she'd had reason to consider it. "Like, if I pass my hands through somebody, they'll start feeling really weak and cold? They get better but it takes a while! If I mess with electronic stuff like radios or computers or those new phones everybody uses now they're pretty much toast permanently." She knew Miss Americana was just gathering information but she suddenly felt like she was doing poorly in an interview or exam.

[Electra]

"All right, hmm." Miss A paused and considered for a moment, looking over the mass of frozen equipment. "Getting a set of detailed scans on you may have to wait for another day," she decided, her voice cheerful enough despite a shadow of annoyance in her eyes. "I'm going to get a maintenance team in here to take care of all this, then we can walk right over to the testing gymnasium down on the tenth floor. You can do whatever you like down there and I'll get some video footage of you in action. Every little bit of data we can collect helps to give a better picture of metahuman potential, after all!" She jotted a quick message to the staff on her pad computer, then gestured Kimber towards the door. "Right this way."

[Gizmo]

Miss Americana's lack of recrimination only seemed to make Ghost Girl feel worse, her body language dejected as she floated after the scientist, or at least as dejected as one could be while bobbing serenely through the air like a snowflake in a light breeze. "So, um," she began hesitantly as they moved down the hallway, willing her voice to be more cheerful and picking up momentum as she went, "do you get to study a lot of monsters? Or super people in general? I think Sharl said something about really high-tech prosthetic limbs but a lot of the time I'm not really sure what he's talking about or, well, I kinda tune in and out a little. Only a little!" The phantom held a finger and thumb less a few centimeters apart to indicate the infrequency of such a tactic.

[Electra]

"I leave the monsters to the scientists at Blackstone, for the most part," Miss Americana told the ghostly girl as they walked down a short corridor that was completely absent of people. "I don't consider anyone a monster unless they're doing monstrous things, in which case I want them in a more secure location than I can provide here. But we do see many different varieties of metahumans, along with all sorts of other creatures. Our founder, Dr. Archeville, was extremely interested in the cataloging and testing of metahuman potential, as are the scientists at the Albright Institute. For myself, that's not my life's work, but it is a topic of considerable interest."

She gestured towards a door marked "Prosthetics Lab 1" as they passed, and through the window Kimber could see a wide variety of artificial body parts being tested with high-tech machines in a scene that was at once fascinating and macabre. "This is my real specialty, the artificial prosthetics lab. We're trying to use technology to restore functionality to damaged body parts, the entire body part when one is gone, even in rare cases, the entire body when all has been lost save the mind. The more we learn about the way humans and metahumans can process energy of all sorts, the more efficiently we can make replacement parts that draw on that energy to function. I've been having great success lately with a double amputee metahuman from Uzbekistan whose powers allow for a sort of biofeedback..." She trailed off with a half-laugh. "But none of that can possibly interest you. The gym is jut this way."

Three more doors down the hall, she led the way into a very long, tall room lined with mirrors all along one wall. The opposite wall was marked with black and white stripes in horizontal and vertical lines, studded with numbers like strange rulers. There was some exercise equipment in the room, but it looked little like a typical gym. "I'm going to step out now," Miss A told Ghost Girl, "and observe from the other room. You may use any of your powers you like, so long as their range doesn't extend beyond this room, and I'll record it. All right?"

[Gizmo]

"Oh, I just meant like Universal Monsters not Nazis or Omegadrones or something crazy like that!" Ghost Girl explained with a little laugh. "Mainly undead folks are pretty okay with the 'm' word; I dunno if that's like reclaiming it or just 'cause a lot of us have sort of a compulsion to cause terror, y'know, but I guess it still sounds kinda bad to most people? Alive ones, that is."

Shrugging without concern, she turned her attention to the scientist's brief synopsis of her job. "Oh no, it sounds really neat! I haven't got any body parts, so I definitely get how important that kind of this is! ...not that I'd want to walk around in a robot body, but still." That didn't really appeal to her any more than possessing another person did but she supposed it at least had the virtue of being less meaty. Trying to imagine what a synthetic body made entirely of prosthetics would even look like occupied most of her concentration until the reached the testing facility. Giving Miss Americana a thumbs up, she floated inside and waited a few moments before calling, "Ready?"