ic So Great a Cause (2015)

[Gizmo]

Ellie's sharp intake of breath could be heard even as she clapped both hands over her mouth in wide-eyed shock while her brother ran over the uneven rubble with deft balance and single minded purpose. By the time he reached the two women he'd already shrugged out of his greatcoat to reveal the bodysuit beneath, caked in century old dirt and streaked with blood that wasn't his own. Heedless of the broken pieces of building he slid down to his knees and draped the heavy fabric over Talya's bare shoulders while his free hand went to Min's back in a desperate attempt to provide comfort. "It's alright, we're alright, everybody's alright?" he murmured, the assurance coming out as more of a question than he'd meant as he tried to piece together what had happened while his half of the team had been trapped in the past. "I've got you."

[alderwitch]

Talya's body was warm and solid, and although the familiar heart beat in Min's ears pounded like it was threatening to give out, it was blessedly steady. The ex-thief, for her part, took a second to get her bearings, her attention first on the weeping dryad. Talya lifted hands that shook ever so minutely - one of the few signs of just how high the toll her resurrection took on her body to frame Min's face between her palms, her thumb gentle as it caught her tears. Her voice, more raspy than husky, offered a quiet, "I am so, so very sorry. Are you hurt? Were you hurt? How long was I gone?"

 

At Erik's footsteps, Talya lifted her head to take in the disaster that the battlefield had become in her time deceased. It was with relief that she noticed the returned Interceptors, Erik among them. The dinosaur was noteworthy, certainly, but a distant second to her rough headcount at Erik's question. "The woman - the sassy, pregnant one - were we fast enough?" She wanted to know when the thief failed to spot her among the heroes. Talya glanced up as the coat dropped over her shoulders, only then seeming to notice her own nudity. Of course. Magic, after all, didn't generally extend to incidentals, like clothing or hair care products. "Oh. Thank you." She paused, then before saying delicately, the effect only somewhat ruined by the slight tremor of her hands and the rasp of her voice, "I recant my earlier statements about the severity of the dumpster crisis."

[R. Bluefish]

Echo had pulled herself together, or at least, she had gotten up from the curb and was now wandering aimlessly around the scene of destruction. She kicked at a chunk of rubble and missed. Super-fights were certainly nothing new in Freedom City, to say the least. Even ones as destructive as this. But it was one thing to see them on the news, quite another to actually stand there, see the devastation firsthand, and know that she had been involved in it, however tangentially.

 

It was, despite what the comics had always led her to believe, not a good feeling.

 

She stopped a little ways off from the cluster of people around the woman who'd just been pulled from the rubble, standing there awkwardly, consciously keeping enough distance to not intrude on their moment. She briefly considered approaching to do a little uncomfortable but well-intentioned comforting back-patting, but quickly rejected the idea, partly because she was among strangers, and partly because she had no idea what you said to someone who had just been pulled from a collapsed building.

 

She coughed, waving dust away from her face, and spoke up, voicing the question on her mind. "What the hell happened here? We've been..." she tried to think of the best term, "temporally challenged for a while. Who was that guy who flew away when we got here?" She tried a halfhearted joke. "The King of the Dumpster People? Were the dumpsters behind everything all along?"

[April]

"I saw you die."

 

Those quiet words were the first Min spoke since Talya was pulled from the rubble.  The dryad still held onto the woman she had come to love though she was no longer armed and armored for war; her armor had long broke itself down and covered the earth in a vivid green patch of grass and flowers that had no business blooming so late in the year.  Min swallowed and buried her face into Talya's shoulder.

 

"I saw you die," she repeated.  "And I wanted break them, to bring them right to the brink and bring them back from it only to repeat the process.  And then, ultimately, kill them."  Min didn't sound sad when she said this, not really.  There was a flare of anger in her amber eyes when she thought back to Talya being turned into ash.

 

"You saved her," Min said, finally answering Talya's question.  "Liz is safe, Americana flew her out of here before," Min gestured to wreckage of battle, "before I lost my temper."

[Ecalsneerg]

Chris wheeled on the dinosaur, face ashen. "Liz was here?" Sensing something, the dinosaur began to growl a little, the rumble able to be felt by everyone in the vicinity. Chris stood up in the saddle to look down on the group. "Why? Why was she here?" His eyes tracked to the rubble, and the magnitude of the fight that'd gone on began to sink in. 

 

The dinosaur took a couple of steps forward, the ground shaking beneath its feet. "Where is she? Is she alright? WHERE IS SHE?" he demanded, knuckles clenched tight on the saddle, almost ready to lunge down and leap off the dinosaur.

[Electra]

With a fair amount of help from Steve, Miss A pulled herself to her feet and brushed herself off, looking surprisingly little the worse for wear after being buried under a fast-food restaurant. "She's fine," she repeated to Chris, "she's safe. She's with my people, we evacuated them all when the fighting started. They'll have her back here in just a minute." A quick radio call was enough to have the ArcheTech van headed back in their direction.

 

After looking around and assessing the situation, including a surprised look in Talya's direction, Miss A obviously deemed it safe enough to answer Steve's question, loudly enough to carry to most of the other travelers.. "When I got your call, I headed down here right away, and got in touch with the Interceptors who hadn't gone dumpster diving with you tonight.We all met up down here and started investigating the temporal anomaly. We were just working out a way to open it back up when Mastermind and a few of his people showed up. Darkness, Fire, Withering, and The Beast. Talya took a blast from Darkness that was supposed to hit Spellbound, and seemed to disintegrate, but it looks like she's going to be okay. I evacuated Spellbound, there was a fight, Mastermind dropped that fish and chips restaurant on us when he was starting to lose, and then they fled. Dragonfly managed to get the portal back open to let you all through again. It's good to see you back," she told him, then kissed him thoroughly. 

[Gizmo]

"Dios," Erik breathed thickly as with Min's words the  outline of what had happened while his group had been trapped in the past began to take shape. He was hit with the weird sensation of horror that something had happened to Talya and relief that she was there with them now, safe and in one piece, smashing into his already weary mind simultaneously from opposite directions. "I should have been here, I-- You come back, like Stesha, you-- Ah, gracias..." One hand went to this throat, finding the ring hanging there from a leather cord. Fingers wrapped around it tightly as he forced his breathing to steady.

 

Having made sure Mara was doing alright, Ellie turned to Echo, offering the other woman a weak smile. "Sorry about all the freaking out, it's been that sort of day," she drawled, her own footfalls a little heavy from weariness. "Can we get you a ride somewhere or--?"

 

"We'll bring her along to the school, everybody needs some patching up," her brother called from atop the rubble, not standing but turning his attention to the younger women for a brief moment. The leap of trust was out of character for him, he supposed, but he wasn't letting a single one of his people out of his sight, not just then. "Deputized, remember?"

[alderwitch]

Bombshell let out a small breath of relief as she had her answer. Sitting back on her heels, she retrieved her hands from Min long enough to slide Erik's great coat more fully into place and slip her arms through the sleeves and pull it closed. Her hands were far more steady as she fastened the rarely used buttons down the front with nimble fingertips. She nodded her head slightly to Erik's not-quite-question. 

 

"Close enough," she answered rather evasively before adding, more quietly, "The details don't matter right now. Later."

 

She added that last with a gentle squeeze of his arm, her fingertips lingering in a far more subtle show of affection than she'd bestowed on Min but no less heartfelt, before rising to bare feet on the rubble and offering her hands to Min in help rising that she really didn't need, "They claimed that they were trying to stop the Terminus or something of the sort that's the last thing I remember before... ahah," she dropped the words and added to Min, "You didn't, however, do anything undeserved, dearest, and what would have happened is an untravelled path. Instead you dug me from the rubble - for which I am very grateful. It is unpleasant digging oneself out from the ground. Especially when one lacks super-human brawn."

Edited December 15, 2015 by alderwitch

[Fox]

Dragonfly had been preoccupied with her creation while people indulged their well-deserved drama; apparently getting it started had been somewhat easier than getting it to stop, and she muttered a few words of what sounded like suspiciously foul Japanese before just shoving her hand in and bracing against one of the wheels as it spun. That earned her a quick jerk against her shoulder and a wave of something that washed up her gauntlet like a shockwave to blow one of the remaining plates off with a nasty popping noise, but it seemed effective: the device stopped moving, arcing the lest dregs of stored electricity against itself and whatever it had been grounded on as it whined to a halt.

 

Shaking her hand, she finally turned to take stock of things.

 

"....dinosaur," she noted, flatly. "....other people see that too, right? Or hit the ground a lot harder than I thought," the still mostly-armored wryly added, picking at the still badly-bent metal along her ribs. The cracked lens in her helmet emitted a well-timed flicker before dying out completely. "Who let him have a dinosaur."

[Avenger Assembled]

It was the first time Miss Americana had kissed Steve like that in public; but fortunately his armor was already open! For a moment he forgot it was a robot, forgot it was a radio connection between himself and Gina, forgot even the injuries across much of his body, and returned Gina's kiss with intensity, putting his hand behind her head and dipping her low. Perhaps they looked like a strange couple to the others; the scarred, brown-skinned warrior and the impossibly beautiful blonde scientist, but they were real lovers for all that. They had warred together, albeit at a great remove, and won the day. The moment did not last long - but the moment was very pleasant while it lasted - as was ever his fate. 

 

Even when the moment was done, he could not quite let her go. "I knew always I would return to you." He tried not to lean on her, not wanting to concern her with injuries that would only heal anyway. "Petty tyrants are an insufficient foe." 

 

"Mastermind is a powerful entity - a cosmic survival from the beginning of your species," he called to the others. "He was breeding the cybernetic saurians for use as an army against the collected forces of that era." More quietly, for Miss Americana's ears, he whispered, "What he did say about the Terminus?" 

[Ecalsneerg]

Geckoman lowered himself back into the saddle, relieved. She was safe. They were safe. Thank God. He put his face in his hands for a second, and took a deep breath, shakily raising himself back up as the adrenaline wore off. If anything had happened, anything at all... He took a few more breaths, letting the colour return to his face. Then he turned to Mara.

 

"I let me have a dinosaur! Poor Roary." Geckoman patted the great beast on its flank. "His owner was a bad man. He ran experiments on him. Awful experiments." He shrugged. "After we learned that, standard operating procedure. Fearless Leader hit some things, I steal the wheels, and well, I think he likes me." Chris leaned over the front of the saddle, vigorously rubbing the dino's scales with both hands. "Who's a good boy? You are! You are! Good giant dinosaur."