Hell Comes To Missouri (IC)

[trollthumper]

Cavalier was still reeling somewhat from the sheer impact of the other guy's fists. Fragg, he was surprised there weren't any dents in the armor with a blow like that - or any dents in his head. There were still alarms blaring from the suit's internal warning sensors as he rerouted all available power to external capacity, hoping it might soften the next blow. And by the time the noise died down and he was fully aware, the guy who'd just taken a swing at him was screaming and howling with someone else's voice. 

 

He wished he could say this was the first time someone who'd tried to kill him had just started desperately rambling about the horrors of life. But that would just be lying. He could hear the pain in the voice, though, sense the bereavement in the speaker. Goddamnit, they thought they were doing the right thing. 

 

"We can fix this," he said to the two heroes. "We can find a way. But you have to help us. Keep this from spreading. We can get help in here as soon as possible." 

[KnightDisciple]

Cobalt Templar's giant frame was suddenly only almost giant-ish, and he was standing far enough back that Casey Jones wasn't leaning on him. His expression was mostly controlled, but there was a mix of confusion, freaking out, and...was that anger? Either way, the young man didn't speak up.

 

Instead, he opted to step back a few paces, cross his arms, and just watch the proceedings. He had responses to what this entity, person, whatever was saying, but he didn't think they'd be helpful, and frankly he was ready to be done with this. He had a trip halfway across the country to make before making another trip back across the entire continent. He wanted to wrap this up sooner instead of later.

[Electra]

"Peter, Peter, calm down," Miss Americana instructed, shaking Dr. Irons' shoulders lightly. "I understand what you were trying to do. You were always the hopeful one. We can help you get this under control, and figure out exactly where this power is coming from and what to do about it. The first thing you need to do, though, is wake up your own body, the one on the plane. Once your mind is back in your body, we can get started."

 

She looked at the doctor's uncertain face, pursed her lips and closed her eyes just for a moment. "Gina's waiting for you on the plane," she admitted. "She's my assistant, and she came with me because she was worried about you, but I made her stay back until we learned more about what was happening. She'll be glad to see you again. Stop the fighting and wake up, Peter. It's going to be all right." 

[Avenger Assembled]

All around town, the weeping quieted. A moment later, there was talking - shouts, exclamations of fear and joy, but from the sound and look of things whatever hold Peter Evans had had over the people of Blackwater (and surrounding parts of Cooper County) had been lifted. By the bridge, Stormchaser and Casey Jones paused in mid-confrontation with Cavalier and Cobalt Templar. Experienced heroes that they were, they seemed to understand the situation without it having to be explained to them. Their first thought was not for themselves, but for their teammate. "Aw, jeez, Thresher!" exclaimed Stormchaser, shooting a wild look at Casey Jones. "They were right on top of him when we-" She did indeed have an accent much less thick than the locals here in rural Missouri.

 

"He'll be fine," said Casey Jones reassuringly, "that young man has a lot of spark in him." He turned to Cavalier and Cobalt Templar and said, "Thank you, both, for making sure we didn't do any further damage." He smiled thinly. "This isn't the first time this has happened, but it never gets any easier. My colleague and I are going to reassure the townspeople that everything's all right now." And with that, he and Stormbreaker took off, heading for Blackwater's small city hall where they could more easily be seen by the crowd on the street. 

 

-----

 

The scene was much the same at the Evans house; people seeming to awaken from a light sleep with dreams of what they'd done, adults hugging their kids and each other as they took stock of the changed circumstances, kids happily embracing their restored parents. Tears and all, it was a happier scene than most of those that Gina had seen in her childhood. A startled Irons looked at Miss A then said, his eyes wide, "I...I gave a pretty heavy barbituate dose to the Evans parents. I'd better go check on their condition," said the doctor, grabbing protectively at the little black bag he'd been carrying before turning and almost running inside the crowded house. 

 

It was about that time that Steve's familiar voice came over Miss A's radio, broadcasting again through the plane. "The affliction has released who it held on the plane. And Peter Evans has awakened." 

[KnightDisciple]

Cobalt Templar sagged in relief as the two Barnstormers finally, actually came back, instead of the pretender who had been there before. He couldn't help the big grin on his face.

 

"That's fine, Casey. We'll try to regroup with the others."

 

It was only after they'd gone that he blinked and turned to Cavalier.

 

"Do you know where Caradoc and Miss Americana are? I, uh, don't have a headset on, and don't know their number offhand."

[trollthumper]

Cavalier turned to the two heroes, who seemed to be recovering from their slight case of possession. "Glad to see you're back with us," he said before the two took off. With that done, he turned back to Cobalt Templar.

 

"I know Miss Americana said something about Caradoc following an ambulance to Marshall," he said. "Don't suppose you know where that is?" Now that the chaos was over and everything had been resolved - at least, that was how it seemed - he felt a little out of his depth again. "Or... hold on, let me try boosting this signal..." 

 

It took a lot of effort to redirect the commlink on his armor once again - he really would need to talk to Mentor about getting an all-frequency connection put in, next time he was back on Citadel. "Hey, Miss A," he said, "everything seems back to normal here. We had a brief case of hive mind, but it looks like it's broken. How are you guys holding up?" 

[Electra]

"Copy that," Miss A replied to Caradoc's communique. "Let him know that, um, my assistant will be with him very soon." She looked around at the house, the people embracing, talking, shaking themselves free of their nightmare, and pressed her hand flat to the faded wallpaper for a moment. The air was stale and musty, with the sour scent of too many frightened people, but under it was the smell of paste wax and hairspray and burnt coffee that shot her right back to childhood. 

 

She closed her eyes and focused. Opening the band wider, she spoke to Cavalier and Caradoc at once. "I was able to isolate an unstable human telepath and we have him under wraps for the moment. He has no prior history of psionic talent, nor any genetic markers for metahuman tendencies, so let's keep combing that wreckage and see if we can figure out what triggered this. I'm- I'm going to be doing a wide recon sweep on silent running to try and pick up any radio signals, so don't expect to hear from me for the next little bit. Cavalier, Cobalt Templar, let Caradoc know when you're coming back to the plane." 

 

With that, she strode out of the house and leapt into the air with a force great enough to leave dents in the dirt of the backyard. She circled wide of town, touching down almost immediately in a scrubby windbreak between two wheat fields. Miss A made her way through the underbrush, ignoring the burrs that pulled at her designer jacket and slacks, till she found the dilapidated remains of a squatter's shack. It was in even worse shape than it had been six years ago, but it would do. Tucking herself up small, she crawled into the shadowed hideaway and closed her eyes...

 

...opening them a second later in the darkness of her hidey-hole on the airplane. 

[Avenger Assembled]

The shining knight was the perfect choice for Peter Evans to see as he awoke, the wide-eyed, pale-faced and thin-cheeked man looking up at Steve as if unsure if he was going to be saved or damned for what had happened in Blackwater. "Ye have returned to the land of the living, Peter Evans," he told the former patient seriously, "The one you seek will be with you soon." Your sister...For a moment, Steve was lost, out of character as Peter himself sat up and looked around the airplane, looking first at the shining knight Caradoc, then at Thresher, still in his costume, and at the medical staff on the plane. How could he tell this man of the love he felt for his sister, of the broken man and the broken woman who had found each other in the shining world of peace that was Earth-Prime? Perhaps it was better, with all these people around, that he could say nothing at all. 

 

"Come, let us go," he urged Thresher as he heard movement inside the plane, "the one he has lost has come for him." And with that, perhaps out of sympathy for another's plight, or perhaps because he was just looking for the liberated members of his own team, Thresher joined Caradoc in exiting the plane. "And you as well! Go, go!" Shining knight or not, there was a darker iron in the urgency in Steve's voice. Still recovering from their brief bout with mind control, the rest of the medical staff left the plane too. 

 

Once outside, pushing himself beyond the limits of his usual withdrawn nature, Steve borrowed a radio to announce "Cavalier and Cobalt Templar, I will await...ye, on yon runway." 

[KnightDisciple]

Cobalt Templar nodded as the instructions were passed along. He looked at the scientists still handling the wreckage from the crash.

 

"I'm going to go help out at the airport, just in case. If you guys and gals need anything just holler on the radio."

 

With that, the young man floated a couple of feet into the air, before rocketing up to at least 500 feet. From there, he was able to home in on the location of the airport. Leaving a trail of ethereal fire in his wake, he passed through the air at incredible speed, soon landing a few feet away from Caradoc and Thresher. He stopped for a moment to speak to the caped hero from Nebraska.

 

"Hey Thresher. Good to see you. Stormchaser and Casey Jones are in town, making sure everything's mostly back in order. You guys let us know if you need any help, okay?"

 

He seemed oddly familiar with the hero who should be a veteran compared to him, but otherwise genuine and friendly as he gave the man a friendly nod and moved on to Caradoc.

 

"Anything in particular you need us to do at the moment, or we just need to stand ready?"

[trollthumper]

Cavalier could only nod. Here he was, a little lost. The crisis was over, so there was that, and at least they knew where it came from now. It sounded like Miss Americana had it in hand, and with Caradoc there, they'd be able to keep it contained - and it sounded like they might have worked out some of their issues. Cobalt Templar was likewise in his element - he knew these heroes, and he knew how to relate to them. He took in the landscape, much calmer now, and tried to figure it all out.

 

What do you know. I come back to Earth, and Missouri feels alien.

 

"On it," he said over the headset to Caradoc, following Cobalt Templar's path through the sky.  

[Electra]

Once Caradoc, the pilots, and the last of the medics had filed out, Peter was left alone in the half-lit quiet of the plane for a moment. The ventilation fans hummed and somewhere a discarded smartphone chimed an incoming text. The gurney sat in the middle of the cabin and Peter sat on the gurney, his face pale from days of unconsciousness and his skin still purpled with seatbelt bruises under his white hospital gown. As he looked around, a muted click heralded the opening of a concealed door in the bulkhead.

 

Gina stepped out of the shadows and closed the door behind her, pausing for a moment with her hand still on the catch. She was smaller than Peter, younger, paler, but their hair was the exact same shade of dark blonde and their blue eyes were both set deep over rounded cheeks and flattened chins. When they were little, the two youngest Evanses had looked almost like twins. Now, Gina thought, they both looked like ghosts. She took a step forward and searched for words in her dry throat. "Hi Peter," she finally managed. "Been awhile. I'm glad you woke up." 

[Avenger Assembled]

"Oh my lord..." Peter's voice was dry and cracked, and he drank quickly from the cup of water left by his bed so he could talk. "Ah...Ah don't feel very good. Is that really yew, Gina?" Sitting up, he looked her right in the eye, his own deep and haunted. "Ah never wanted any of this to happen," he went on, looking guilty, a deep blush on his pale cheeks. "Mah wife, mah kid...Ah probably scared the livin' daylights outta them. And everybody else." He looked away. "Ah just thought if Ah could reach out and...and make everyone be nahce, then maybe everything would be okay again. Maybe Momma and Daddy would get back together, and maybe you would come back, and...Ah never did anything the first time, I wanted things to just be all right this time!" His voice cracked again. "And now Ah just made everything worse." 

-------

Steve fought a brief, mad urge to distract the others from entering Gina's private space by dropping his holographic disguise and fleeing at maximum speed. "I...let us look at the equipment as Miss Americana suggested, and try to figure out what led to...yon events and Peter Evans' telepathy. Where be ye olde Grue equipment?" Luckily the broken Grue equipment was close at hand, and soon it was spread out on the runway for both the newly-arrived Archetech scientists and the heroes to study. "I see communications equipment, a beacon, Grue warp parts...What here could give powers to a man with no powers at all?" 

[Electra]

"It's... it's really me," Gina managed, taking a few steps towards the gurney. His voice was still slurred from the coma, but otherwise he seemed cogent, which was a good sign. "Just, um, try and relax," she suggested, taking the cup and replacing it with a can of Sun Drop from the mini-fridge. It was his favorite, or had used to be, anyway. "It doesn't... um, I know, we all know you were trying to help. That you didn't mean, um, didn't mean to hurt anyone."

 

While her mouth wrestled with getting the words out, her hands were quick and professional, working on automatic as she checked his bandages and his pulse, checking the rest of his vital signs with her handheld sensor. Keeping her eyes down helped, she found, just so long as she didn't really look at herself. 

 

"You're recovering well," she told him as she touched his toes with a small metal probe to check for twitch movement. "You should be physically recovered in another day or two. Can you still sense the presence of other people in your head? Are you having any trouble with control?" 

[Avenger Assembled]

"I can hear them," he admitted, again with that guilty look, which made the years fall right off her older brother's face and suddenly he was the teenager swiping their dad's keys and getting ratted out by Charlie Jr. "But not real loud. It's...it's lahk they're talking in the other room, and I can just make it out through the walls." His eyes widened. "Wait, that can't be right, I thought one of them was thinking about you, but he's just thinking about dead Grue over and over again, he..." He shook his head, as if trying to shake his mind out of the cobwebs of other people's thoughts. "I...so this is what you do?" he asked her. "Working for a superhero like Miss Americana?" Like a lot of men, he said the name with a little extra appreciation. "I guess Freedom City's real far from Blackwater, huh?" 

[Electra]

Gina's eyes widened just a bit when he mentioned hearing someone think about her, but she managed to school her expression into a faint smile. "Doesn't get much further," she agreed. "But I like it there. I'm happy there," she added, checking the bandage where one of the techs had removed an IV drip. "Happier than I could be here."

 

Gina looked up, forced herself to meet his eyes by digging her fingernails into her own palms. "E-even if your control were perfect, it never would've worked. You can't... can't force people to love each other, or force bad people to be good. Maybe you can manipulate their actions, but it's... it's not real. Superpowers are amazing tools, and having them is exciting, but they can't solve everything." 

 

She dropped her gaze, uncurled her fists. "I... ArcheTech carries baffling panels on planes like this. I can set some up for you that will mute the mental noise and let you get some real rest." 

[trollthumper]

Cavalier had seen this happen before. Bio-weapons were one of those uncomfortable topics in the Cloud, an unfortunate martial tradition that some groups liked to cling to out of the sheer strong-headed belief that if they didn't, some bastard would (and often did). Of course, with all that mutagen-heavy ordnance lying around, waiting for someone to pull the trigger, there were, of course, side effects. Some of these side effects weren't entirely adverse and, with the right physiology, might produce something long-term and beneficial. And he'd read about their usage in the Sol system on Citadel. 

 

"The Grue do have weapons that bestow powers," he said. "And yes, I said 'weapons.' They're usually used for false flags and PSYOPS - 'Is your comrade way too perceptive and has a weird tinge to his skin? He may be an infiltrator! Time to purge the ranks!' Usually it's meant for short-term deployment, long enough for the knives to come out... but if you've got some potential, deep down, it might have a more lasting effect. It could be cured with proper treatment, or - if he thinks it could be more of a blessing than a curse - he could learn to live with it." 

[KnightDisciple]

Cobalt Templar nodded at Cavalier's words.

 

"Yeah, that jives with what the Archetech folks were saying. I mean, I've heard...rumbles...about this sort of thing, but nothing concrete. It makes a disturbing amount of sense, though. Sometimes all you need for a good psychological warfare operation is the suspicion of something of "the enemy". It's...not really pretty."

 

He frowned, like he was tasting something awful. Then he shrugged, the frown fading.

 

"Makes sense about unlocking potential, though. I guess in that case it works a lot like the other "triggers" that a lot of metahumans run across that activate powers. Either way, hopefully Archetech can help him either purge the abilities, or get them reigned in."

 

He glanced back toward the town.

 

"Do you think the rest of the family and town will be okay? Or will we need some psychic healers out here before long?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"I'm just so tired. I feel like I haven't slept in months." Peter lay back on the provided hospital bed, staring up at the airplane ceiling as Gina went to work. "Will they be able to fix me?" he asked. "I don't want to hurt anyone anymore, and I don't know if I could stop myself if it happened again. It was just so, so easy..." He looked heartsick. "I don't wanna lose mah kids because of this. I...I just want them to be happy. To have more than we had when we were that age." Peter hadn't been his mother's victim the way Gina had been, but then he hadn't really had a mother once the elder Evans had something to focus her own narcissism on. "I don't wanna be Psychlo the crazy Missouri truck driver. I wanna be a daddy." He looked over at Gina and said, "I'm glad you're happy, Gina."

 

---

 

Having left his radio link open back onto the plane, Steve was left with the uncomfortable position of continuing to perpetuate Gina's deception - as usual, it was not an area he excelled, either by inclination or by skill. "Well, then, ye mystery be...solved." No, I sound like one of those corsairs from the television! "Perhaps we should leave Peter Evans' treatment to the doctors while we use olde connections in Freedom City to find...mind-healers who can help bind these wounds?" Suddenly 'Caradoc's' rather unconvincing persona gave way to words said with real sentiment. "To be taken and used against one's will will scar even the gentlest of souls." 

[trollthumper]

Cavalier wasn't anywhere near an expert in psychic powers. He'd encountered them plenty of times, and had someone poking around in his head more times than he might be comfortable with, but they still remained in this box best labeled "For Other People." But he'd encountered a number of telepathic species and individuals in his travels, some with minor gifts, some with significant ones... and he'd also gotten a good glimpse of the kind of care that was required when they lost control of those gifts. It was extensive, to say the least. But those were terminal cases, ones where neural decay had led to an absolute inability to regain control. Peter was different. At least, he hoped so. 

 

"He'll get better," he said. "There's a specialist for everything these days. Odds are there's someone who can put him back in control." 

[Electra]

Even as shaken as she was, Gina's hands were efficient as she went to the bulkhead storage area and began drawing out the baffles hidden there. Emerson rolled out from under a table to assist her, and soon she was snapping the panels into place, creating a beige and silver wall around the gurney. Without a trace of psychic ability herself, she was relying on secondhand accounts that the baffling would work, but her R&D people were the best around. "We'll get you better," she told Peter, "I promise. I... I have connections, people I can talk to. Miss Americana, she'll help. Best in the world, best at everything." Gina scrubbed her hands up and down her face, marshalling her thoughts. "If they can't make this go away, they'll make it so you can live with it and be all right. Everything's gonna be okay." She patted his hand, quickly, awkwardly, almost as though she expected the touch to burn. "You... you get some rest now. We'll take off soon."