ic Final Exam (IC)

[Electra]

"How the hell am I supposed to talk down to you when you're ten times as smart as I am?" Raina demanded. "If I sound dumb, maybe it's because I am dumb!" She pushed herself to her feet, standing on the ledge to give herself the advantage of higher ground. For a moment, her face was all confused hurt before she packed it away again. "I don't know much of anything about where you come from, and I've tried to show you some of the good stuff about here, but the truth is that it's terrible here and now, and things are rotten at the core, and I don't know how to say it in a way that sounds smart." 

 

She took a couple of careful steps back when she noticed Fred's emotional turmoil, but didn't flee the scene entirely. "I don't know what you expect me to do." 

[Gizmo]

"I expect you to get angry because I cannot," Winifred answered, speaking slowly in an artificially low voice, cadence broken by deliberately even breaths. "Smith considers this sort of thing a largely typical Tuesday and Robin is too busy trying to take responsibility to get properly incensed but I can remain calm and collected and making pithy metaphors about firearms only so long as we are solving the problem." The head of her cane shook violently for a moment as one of the Victorian's legs nearly buckled underneath her but she willed herself to stay upright and in command of herself. "If you of all people are going to simply let this go without a fight I may very well lose my mind. I realize that may be something of an unfair imposition on you but there it is." After another pair of slow breaths she felt composed enough to allow a measure of grumpy irritation back into her voice. "And you're not 'dumb'. Don't say that."

[Electra]

Raina took a few more hasty steps backwards, glancing around automatically to see if anybody else was nearby who might be helpful or wind up as collateral damage. Not much of anything in either category, really. "I'll have Merlin look into it," she said quickly. "He'll figure it out, there's gotta be some clues left in the virus he isolated in the Doom Room. I don't know any of that computer crap, but neither does Mr. Archer, so he must've gotten it from somewhere. Maybe it's like the Foundry or something, they do a lot of stuff with electronics and bionics and whatever the hell else. They'd probably like to mess with the school." Her words came out faster and faster as she tried to calm Fred down, even as she reached into her pocket for the handful of feathers that would focus her flight spell and give her a chance to escape. She couldn't just go, though, somebody else might not try and talk Fred down. "Don't even worry about it, it's practically a done deal." 

[Avenger Assembled]

Over in the other room, Peyton was in fine form. You could imagine her giving a speech behind a barbed wire fence, analogue megaphone to her lips, shouting to a heavily armed crowd in fatigues. "Oh, I understand someone manipulated the system, but it's the failure state of that system that I'm worried about! Claremont told me that my son would be protected, that he would be safe, and instead he was locked in a room with some half-trained teenagers who nearly cut his head off! What the hell is going to happen to those children, anyway?" 

 

"The members of Next-Gen will be undergoing special training this summer," replied Callie Summers, whose tone had hardened noticeably after she'd taken a seat behind her desk and Alan Archer, still in his hospital room, had signed off some minutes earlier. "They will not be eligible for the volunteer squad for a period of at least six months, after while they will need to be recertified by the school." 

 

"Oh, they'd better!" declared Peyton. "God gave me two sons, Ms. Summers, and I'm going to do my best to make sure they both grow up without anybody murdering! I don't have anything invested in protecting your pocket-sized hero sandwich here, and if you can't protect my boy, so help me God I will take him home and I will raise him myself!"

 

At that, Riley rose to his feet, his face tight, and said "Scuse me," before turning and heading straight out the office door. 

[alderwitch]

Robin relaxed her stance slightly as Riley rose. She had remained, quiet and wary but observant of what had been said and left unsaid. As the last of her teammates went to leave the room, Robin said simply, "I should go look after 'em. Let us know what we're gonna need to do, I guess." She said, assuming there would be some sort of punishment, or lesson or at least further activity on her part. Probably therapy, considering how often she was sent to Dr. Marquez. Following Riley's vanishing figure out the door, she left it to the adults to work out whatever it was they would. As the door shut, Robing could faintly make out the cool undertones of the British woman maybe playing mediator but her focus was on catching up to her friends. 

 

Riley was the closest and it didn't take her long to catch up to him with long, quick strides, "Hey, you okay? Didja wanna check on Fred and Raina?" The offer to talk about whatever had made him bolt from the room was unspoken but present.

[Avenger Assembled]

As it happened, it didn't take long for Riley and Robin to stumble across the awkward tableau between Fred and Raina. With a hunter's instinct for sensing trouble, and a teenage boy's recklessness, Riley walked over and plopped himself down between the two of them. "Peyton-" he made sure, with great care, to say her name, "is havin' it out with Summers. I think between her and, uh, Bombshell," he wasn't really sure what the story was with Raina's martial arts trainer, but she seemed to be the closest thing to a parent figure Sparkler had that wasn't in jail. Even that was more than Robin or Fred had. "they'll figure somethin' out." He crossed his legs. "C'mon, let's talk. Archer's gone. They'll have somebody else in the fall. What do you wanna do?"