ic Incursion: Drop The Needle

[Electra]

Erin and Jessie walked slowly towards the kitchen, both listening to the noise of footsteps coming up the stairs. Erin, who had done all this before, braced herself slightly and managed a smile as Clarissa and Roger White entered the kitchen, Jessie just stared blankly. "Keeley Erin, this is such a surprise!" Clarissa began warmly, "we didn't know you were going to make it out here for Christmas!" Clarissa's face showed the slight uncertainty that she always had when dealing with her daughter's double, but she was obviously doing her best. 

 

"And Trevor as well!" Roger added, taking his cues from his wife, if just a bit too boisterously. "We've seen some pictures of the two of you in the newspapers this past year, looks like they're keeping you busy in Freedom City!" 

 

"Yes, it's so good to see you again, Trevor," Clarissa chimed in, then looked back to Erin and Jessie, who was inching almost imperceptibly backwards. "And you have another friend as- oh." She broke off as she got a good look at Jessie's face, seeing past the blond hair and hunched posture. "Oh." She looked back to Erin Prime, her eyes wide. 

 

Erin Prime raked her fingers through her nicely curled hair and shrugged uneasily. "Sorry, Mom, I probably should've told you before. There's, um, there's another one." 

 

Roger took a closer look at Jessie as well, his mouth falling open slightly. "How?" he asked, his voice slightly croaky. "How could this have happened again? When?" 

 

Jessie endured the scrutiny for a few moments, wilting further and further, till finally she could take no more. "YOU'RE NOT REAL!" she shrieked, then turned and raced up the stairs to the second floor, far faster than the merely human Erin Prime could've managed. 

 

Erin started to follow her up the stairs, but Erin Prime stopped her. "You know the story way better than I do," she pointed out in a low voice. "You talk to them and I'll go talk to the other one." 

 

"Jessie," Erin reminded her, folding her arms. "And that is a terrible idea." 

 

"No, it is a great idea," Erin Prime maintained through clenched teeth, "because it will also give me a couple minutes to talk with my fiance and explain why there are suddenly two superhero doubles of me showing up that I never mentioned to him before. Anyway, if she's anything like, you know, she'll be in the back of my closet and I just have to peel her out of there." She looked to her boyfriend, gave him a smile that was just a trifle manic. "Come on Erik, we can go give Jessie a little moral support." 

 

Erin glowered after Erin Prime as the latter escaped to the relative safely of the upstairs, but let her go. Jessie was very rarely violent anymore, and the likeliest outcome would be Erin Prime simply failing to pull her out of the closet that Erin herself had taken shelter in a time or two during her brief stay here. She raked a hand through her thawing, sopping hair and faced down the doppelgangers of her parents. 

[trollthumper]

Cannonade sat, trying to gather his wits. It had been a long evening, and he felt like he could use something strong than hot chocolate or "soft" cider. Still, he hadn't exactly had the hardest time, compared to everyone else. He'd gotten a glimpse of what was going on with Wander. He knew things were... complicated with her. But he knew any sort of intervention he could do right now would probably make things worse. Maybe afterwards, when things were calm - or she needed something she could hit that could (mostly) take it. 

 

In the meantime, he warmed his hands before the bonfire, feeling a lot better about things. He turned to Cobalt Templar and Aquaria. "You two okay?" he asked. "Anything you need a hand with?" 

[Gizmo]

With a soft grunt, Trevor unfastened his featureless mask and let it hang about his neck. The Whites had seen him without it before and the last thing the situation needed was the added awkwardness of someone present without a face. "Empirically infinite multiverse," he offered as a partial answer to Richard's question, moving to stand behind his Erin. This was an entirely different sort of tension than he was used to dealing with and he wasn't at all sure how to proceed. "Funny story from February-- Hhn. May not be the time. Or funny." Pressing his lips into a thin line he went silent once again, shifting his weight to his other foot uneasily and waiting for someone else to say something.

[Avenger Assembled]

"I'm worried about Jessie," confessed Aquaria, who appeared to be eating somebody's leftover Christmas dinner out of a Tupperware. Distracted by the stressful events of the day, she didn't bother with a spoon - instead her tongue would occasionally shoot out and grab a chunk of meatloaf or baked potato and swallow it whole. "She doesn't like to talk about where she's from, but she talks about Seattle when she's sleeping sometimes." She leaned forward, stretching out her back, and set the Tupperware down. With her legs folded beneath her and balancing on her arms, long fingers spread wide to support her weight, she continued eating while talking. "I hope she's not getting into trouble! She's my best friend. Once she's out of Project Freedom we're going to move into an apartment together, and I'm gonna have an office job where I can file things, and she's gonna be my roomate! It'll be totally awesome." 

 

"Ah, okay..." A little nervously, Erik headed upstairs after his girlfriend, shooting a curious look down at his family-to-be. "You know," he said just as an upstairs door closed behind them, "I don't really mind that-" 

[KnightDisciple]

There were still a couple of blue construct-toys being used in the background, and every once in a while a little futuristic orb floating around Cobalt Templar's head would fire a small bolt of fire into one of the wood piles to keep it roaring, but the big man himself was calmly working at a plate with several s'mores on it. He seemed to have quite the appetite, older-than-he-looked veteran or no.

 

"I'll let you know if I need reinforcements for the plate here in a couple minutes, but otherwise I'm good for the moment. Just waiting until the others have wrapped things up, really."

 

Cannonade could tell that a large part of the big blue guy wanted to go be with his friends, but considering that Erin, Jessie, Trevor, Mark, and Nina were all over there already, it was likely to be more than was needed for now. CT nodded at Aquaria's words.

 

"That sounds like a pretty awesome plan, Aquaria. And I don't think there will be much trouble, if any. Midnight and Wander will make sure everything's fine."

[Electra]

Erin reached back and grabbed hold of Trevor's hand, holding it with such precisely controlled gentleness that her fingers shook slightly with the strain of it. "Um, well you know how we talked with Dr. Franklin when I came to live with you guys, about universal splits and parallel dimensions and alternate realities and stuff? Like how I happened because something happened to split the universe, and your Erin and I had been the same person, but then we weren't anymore, we were two people in two universes? Jessie's sort of the same way, she and I were the same, but then there was a split, only she got taken out of her universe by some really bad people and her universe collapsed, so she doesn't exactly have a home universe anymore." 

 

Roger and Clarissa both stared at Erin, trying to parse that slightly rambling explanation. "But then how did she get here?" Clarissa asked tentatively, as though she weren't even sure what question she wanted to ask. 

 

"Um, okay, that's kind of a long story." Erin threw a helpless glance back toward Trevor, but made a game effort. "See, back when i was in high school, there was this reality controller who was interested in my team for reasons. He wanted to see if good was smarter than evil, so he took us and he switched us with our counterparts on Anti-Earth, which is like Earth Prime except everybody who's good here is evil there and vice versa. But I'm not from Earth Prime, and neither was my counterpart there, that was Jessie, so she wasn't exactly evil like the rest of them. But they hurt her, kept her in prison and made her fight for them." Erin deliberately elided over huge chunks of Jessie's story there, it was not hers to tell. "So some of my friends and I went back when we got the chance and rescued her and brought her to Prime, because she hasn't got anywhere else to go. I got some people to vouch for her so she could get into programs and stuff." 

 

There was a beat of silence. "Um, unless you meant "how did she get here tonight," in which case the answer is Edge teleported us out here to fight the giant monster trying to rise in the bay and its monster minions.We're not staying long, but she, um, she really wanted to see the house and you guys. But I think it was too much all at once." 

[Electra]

"She's wearing an orange jumpsuit," Roger observed quietly. "And some kind of blinking monitor. Is she dangerous?" 

 

Erin's smile was positively grim. "No more dangerous than I was when I lived here," she promised dryly. "You don't need to worry about it, she's not going to hurt anybody here. When Jessie got to Prime, she needed a lot more help than Claremont could give her, plus she was already almost too old. She's in Project Freedom now," Erin explained, once again deftly editing out the stay in prison, "it's like a halfway house for metahumans who aren't quite ready to make it on their own yet, for whatever reason. But she's going to graduate soon, she's done very well. They wouldn't release her if she were dangerous." 

 

"You said you were in high school when all this happened?" Clarissa pressed, seeming to shake off a bit of her earlier shock. "Why didn't you tell us?" 

 

"Erin thought... we both thought it would be better not to," Erin replied, falling on her  sword with barely a grimace. "There wasn't really anything you could've done to help her, and we didn't want you to feel guilty, or- or obligated in some way. I'm the one who decided to bring her here, I can take care of her." 

 

"It's not a question of obligation!" Clarissa burst out, her eyes flashing in a way Erin knew meant somebody was in trouble. "She's our daughter and we deserve to know what's going on!" 

 

"No," Erin replied quietly, taking her hand from Trevor's before she risked crushing it and folding her arms tight to her chest. "She isn't your daughter. I'm not your daughter. Our parents are dead, and nothing can change that. You're Erin Keeley's parents and she's lucky to have you, and I'm very grateful for the months you let me stay at your house, and for all the kindness you've shown me, but you're not my parents any more than Erin Keeley and I are the same person. Jumping universes changes everything, but it doesn't bring back the dead. Jessie was in bad shape when we brought her to Prime. Seeing you, maybe even just knowing about you, it would've destroyed her. I mean, you saw how hard it is just to be here now."  

[Electra]

The silence stretched for a minute, broken only by the faint sounds of talking and laughter from downstairs. Erin forced herself not to try and pick out voices, family members she hadn't seen in years. Clarissa picked up a bright poinsettia napkin and wiped her eyes, Roger cleared his throat. "Can we at least get a chance to properly meet her?" 

 

"it depends, Erin admitted. "She's kind of upset. We had a couple of hard fights before we came here, and then seeing everything and everybody, it was kind of too much?" 

 

"You fought about coming here?" Clarissa asked. 

 

Erin sighed. "Not fights like arguments, fights like fighting for our lives," she clarified. "There's bad stuff going on, dangerous stuff all over. The West Coast superteams are already deployed dealing with other situations, but there are enough student heroes and loner-types in Freedom City to defend it for awhile against most things, so when the robots started spewing out all over Seattle, the Liberty League came to help. The other members are all around somwhere," Erin waved a vague hand that could've included the house, the neighborhood or the entire city. "Jessie decided on her own to come here while we were doing mop-up. I don't know that she was ready. Maybe if Erin and Erik can pry her out of the closet, she'll come down." 

[Gizmo]

"Ancient prototype spider robots and a giant Frog-Bat-Lizard," Trevor supplied helpfully, raising his free hand to forestall the obvious question. "Exactly what it sound like. Also composed of mind-altering bile." Realizing that that might not be reassuring taken on its own he quickly added, "Don't worry. Distributed bleach-based antidote after shooting Christmas decorations." He floundered for a few moments, back and shoulders reflexively straightening into too-perfect posture as his expression defaulted to an unreadable collection of hard lines. "...hhn. Moved in together? Normal thing. Except for mansion. And talking motorcycle."

[Avenger Assembled]

Vaulting from house to house, Aquaria landed on the Whites' front lawn right next to where Edge and Monsoon were building something gigantic out of snow. "Coldcoldcoldcold..." Aquaria was starting to feel sleepy from the cold, and knew if she didn't warm up she'd curl up in the snow and sleep until spring if she wasn't careful. She pulled a red Santa hat she'd found down around her small ears, trying to keep her whole head warm. "Hey you guys! Is Jessie okay?" She'd followed the tracks in the snow, keeping a close eye on motorcycle and foot marks made at super-speed as she went. 

 

"She's probably okay," said Edge, sticking his head out from behind a snowman's head nearly as big as his torso. "She's in there with Midnight and Wander, they've got this. You wanna build a snowman?" 

 

"No, I'd better see if she's okay!" Aquaria hopped her way to the front door and rang the bell. With all the discussion inside the house, it wound up being a young cousin of Erin's (upstairs because she'd been using the potty) who answered the door - who answered the door to the sight of a froggy humanoid in a bulky orange outfit and Santa hat, said humanoid looking down at the small child with gigantic eyes set high in her head before asking, "Hey, have you seen-" 

 

"THE CHRISTMAS FROG!" The little girl dropped the book she was holding, which on its cover showed a frog in Christmas gear bringing a pile of toys to little tadpole children, and suddenly hugged Aquaria tight. "I LOVE YOU CHRISTMAS FROG!" 

[Avenger Assembled]

Upstairs, things weren't going very well. Erin and Eric were in her bedroom and quietly talking, but despite his interest in helping, there wasn't much Eric could do about this. Gentle and sweet though he was, Eric Buhari was a second-generation immigrant who lived in a prosperous, liberal part of the country. He'd never faced anything more serious than worrying about his grades or whether or not his girlfriend would say yes when he popped the question. As much as he wanted to help someone like Jessie, he just didn't have the tools. So he stayed back and let his Erin (and how many versions of her were there, anyway?) do the talking. 

 

"The other Erin was like you," she finally said, pitching her voice loud enough that Jessie could hear. "I know this must be scary and strange - and I wish I knew how to make it better." She caught a glimpse of what she thought was snow shifting off the roof outside, but stayed focused on her counterpart. "How have you been? I heard you were living in a new facility these last few years." 

 

-

 

"You're right," agreed Mark as he studied his creation, addressing Nina alongside him. "The black dye looks terrible in the snowman even if it is liquorice-flavored. All right, let's scrap the snowcone thing and just make a big sculpture. Ooh, maybe that hero snowman thing..." 

[Electra]

The awkward silence after Trevor's admissions was broken by the squeal of the little girl at the front door. Erin spun and reached for her bat, but managed to avoid drawing it when she realized there was no actual threat. Behind her, Roger and Clarissa were just confused, and from the sound of things, some of the people downstairs had heard the yelling as well. "Ah, hi Aquaria," Erin said, suppressing a sigh. "I guess you probably got cold waiting?" She turned to Roger and Clarissa for half-hearted introductions. "This is Aquaria, she's Jessie's roommate at Project Freedom, she helped us fight the monsters tonight. Aquaria, this is Roger and Clarissa White, they're the parents of the Erin, um, the version of me and Jessie who lives here." She looked past the frog woman, trying to see out the door. "Did you see everybody else? Are they with you?" She couldn't keep just a hint of dread out of her voice. 

 

Upstairs, things were quiet in Erin Prime's closet, aside from the occasional jangle of a wire hanger. Jessie had scrunched herself small in the back corner of the closet, down amongst the summer sandals of years past and the boxes of old pictures and mementos that Erin Prime had taken off the walls when she'd decorated her room in a mature collegiate style, but hadn't been able to get rid of. She picked halfheartedly through the box, looking at old pictures of Erin Prime in high school, all the old forgotten friends, nobody looking quite how she remembered them. Everyone so tall, so grown-up, even Erin. "How old are we?" she asked suddenly, the first words she'd spoken since coming up here. 

 

"What?" Erin Prime asked, surprised. "Um, twenty-two. We turned twenty-two in November." She turned her eyes to Eric, begging him silently to wait for answers a little longer. 

 

"That's right," Jessie replied, nodding though no one could see her. "I forget sometimes. They took away my bad memories and gave me Erin's instead, but it's still hard to keep track of time. It's been such a long time." She sighed and rested her head against the back wall of the closet. "You have a lot of stuff." 

[Avenger Assembled]

Erin considered offering to let Jessie take some of the stuff in there - then remembered the last time she'd let a version of herself pick through her things. At least it was all still there afterwards, she thought, doing her best not to think unkind, unhelpful thoughts about the early days of her other counterparts. "We could look at those things together, if you want," she tentatively said. "There are some things in there you could have." There, that was generous enough, she decided. "Did you get anything good for Christmas this year?" she hazarded. 

 

-

 

"Oh yeah, Edge and Monsoon are building something-" Erin stuck her head outside and saw that Edge and Monsoon were sitting on the arms of a gigantic snowman shaped like a generic superhero with cape and costume, the snow somehow dyed a cheery green and red to match the Christmas season. Towering as tall as the second story of the White house, the arms were as thick as the two superheroes were tall. 

 

"Hello!" Mark called with a wave. "Merry Christmas! We made you a giant snowman!" From up above, Erin's keen hearing caught Nina's "I don't think they actually like this, Mark..." 

 

"-and Cobalt Templar and Cannonade are still at the barbecue. Hello," she said with a tentative smile at the Whites, carefully not showing the extent of her gigantic mouth. "I'm Aquaria Innsmouth, and I'm from under the sea. Jessie's my best friend and I just wanted to make sure she's okay. You have a very big house!" she commented. 

[Gizmo]

Standing behind Erin, Trevor regarded the giant snowman in silence for several second before calmly retrieving his sunglasses from a pocket in his jacket and placing them upon his face. That done, he turned to give Redbird a significant look, the Night Cycle still parked where he'd left it. The autonomic machine intelligence managed to convey a hapless shrug into her tone of voice despite lacking any shoulders. "I cannot imagine what you think I could have done to dissuade them." The handlebars of the motorcycle turned on their own toward the towering sculpture and back to the door to the house, where Midnight could only grunt in agreement, glancing over to gauge the White's reaction.

[Electra]

For a long few seconds, Erin just stood and stared as new little disasters piled up around her. Aquaria the frog girl. Mark's completely inappropriate idea of Christmas presents. The houseful of people in the basement probably wondering what the yelling was about. Jessie hiding in the closet upstairs. The rest of the Liberty League god-knew-where, getting up to god-knew-what. She was tempted, extremely tempted, to go and evict Jessie from the closet just so she could hide there herself. She grabbed her own elbows and hugged them to her chest, looking helplessly to Roger and Clarissa as though they could solve any of this ridiculous mess.

 

Somewhat to Erin's surprise, Clarissa smiled at her and rose to the challenge. “It's very nice to meet you, Aquaria. I'm glad to hear Jessie has such a good friend at school. We like our house, though sometimes it seems very big now that Erin Keeley is off at school and Megan is so busy. It's nice to be able to gather everyone together for the holiday.â€

 

Meanwhile Roger looked outside as well, his eyes widening at the sight of the snow construct. “That's... that's something all right,†he managed. “The neighbors definitely won't be able to keep up with that. And the kids will probably be thrilled.â€

 

While the Whites graciously smoothed things over, Erin managed to regroup and get ahold of herself. There were no terrible noises coming from upstairs yet, and Mark and Nina could probably continue to amuse themselves relatively harmlessly for a couple more minutes before finding trouble. “We should... we should probably get out of your hair,†she offered to her erstwhile parents, trying her hardest to move towards the door without actually engaging any of her muscles to do so. “I'll try and pry Jessie loose upstairs...â€

 

“We'd still like to talk to her,†Clarissa reminded Erin. “Even if we aren't family in the strictest sense, you have to understand that we feel a connection. It doesn't sound like she's entirely well...â€

 

“She's not,†Erin said flatly. “She's... it's hard to explain. I didn't realize how lucky I was, despite everything that happened to me, until I met her. She's my bad road not taken the same way as I am for your Erin, but even worse. You know how things happened on my world, and how eventually I ended up coming to Prime. Jessie ended up on Anti-Earth instead, which is like a world where everything and everyone who was good is just as evil as they ever were good, and the bad guys are in charge of pretty much everything. They saw she was damaged and afraid, saw that she could fight really well, so they made her into a weapon.†Erin rubbed her forehead. “They had a psychic who got into her head and destroyed her memories, turned them bad or wrong so that she couldn't tell what was even real anymore, then set her to just... to just massacre people they didn't like. She was like a bogeyman and they kept her in a box when they weren't using her, and most of the time she didn't even understand what was going on.â€

 

Erin turned away from both of them, turned away from Trevor and Aquaria, so that the only safe place to look was out the kitchen window, into the dark and snowy replica of the yard her dad had looked into before he shot himself. “When we rescued her three years ago, she was practically feral. She could barely talk, barely remember her own name, and any little disturbance could trigger her to have flashbacks of these manufactured memories that would make her attack anyone around her. I had to arrest her and have her put into Blackstone, the super-prison, because it was the only place safe enough to keep her. She might have had to stay there forever, but we had a psychic too, and she stepped in to help. She, we... there wasn't anything left to save in most of Jessie's memories. They were too warped or damaged or just gone. It took months and months, but Psyche ended up wiping the slate clean, taking it all out and replacing it with the best copy we could get.†She touched her forehead again. “So Jessie has fifteen years of my memories, three years of her own memories of being on Prime, and almost four years of nothing at all. She gets confused easily. But it was enough to let her start to heal and get her out of prison. She's doing well now, and she might even get out of Project Freedom eventually. But she's never going to be entirely well.â€

 

The silence was deafening, broken only by Aquaria's soft voice in the next room as she spoke to the little girl, and the faint noise of home movies downstairs. Erin gave Trevor a helpless look. “I think it's time to start getting the team back to Freedom City. Can you get Mark to collect the others and get everybody home? We'll be ready to come along in just a few minutes.†

[Gizmo]

The brief pause before Trevor responded, looking at her with his expression unreadable, was testament to how much learning the full extent of what had been done to 'fix' Jessie had caught him off guard. He quickly decided that that was a discussion for another time, however and instead gave Erin a faint nod the barely extended past his chin before giving the White's a broader, polite gesture to excuse himself and stepping quickly outside. Catching Mark's attention he jerked a thumb in a generally easterly direction, assuming his meaning would be fairly clear. 'Overstaying ones welcome' might have been an alien concept for the gregarious reality manipulator but Mark knew better than to push even his prodigious luck when it came to Erin's family issues.

Smoothly swinging a leg over the back of the Night Cycle, Trevor waited patiently for the return trip to Freedom City. Even with personal matter weighing heavily he suspected their troubles with the malicious machines weren't over.