Athwart History (Closed)

[Obuzeti]

Elias turns a look on Jenna, then sighs and rises to his feet. He rolls his shoulders and neck, which produces a number of pops - and then he ambles over and drops an arm around Jenna's shoulders, and draws her into his side for a brief hug. "I'm on your side, kid," he says, gentle. "I won't burn your bridges for you - it's your choice whether or not you think this guy's worth your time, and I gave you as much as an edge as I could to make that choice. He doesn't know what to think, now, and it's your ball game now to play. To be honest you know more about what shit's going on in the Tower now than I do."

There is something approaching - what? Grief, wistfulness? - on Elias's face, but he squeezes her gently and lets go. "You got a key to the Coulee, right?" he says, sticking his thumbs into his pockets and letting the hands hang past. "You're free to camp out there as long as you like. You need help hauling all that shit from the base back? Or want to stop by your parent's place?"

He grimaces, faint. "I mean, shit, you're an open book, Jenna. If there was good news on that front I'd've heard about it by now. They're your parents, hon, and I don't know what my word on that would be worth, but anything's better than not knowing what kind of ground is beneath your feet. Fear paralyzes you better than anything else."

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

"I'm on your side, kid."

That makes Jenna feel a little better, not that she doubted it in the first place. Just felt...embarrassed that she was fighting with Tectonic instead of working with him like a proper teammate.

And...worth her time? Of course he was, wasn't he? Maybe?

...at least a little?

They were on the same side, she just had to convince him of that, get him to see she's working hard to do what she can and not purposefully trying to antagonize him or anyone else. He was a hero after all. With a family history in it.

But he was also a bully. Jenna had never liked bullies. And he'd wrecked her base. Well, she can't do much as his enemy, but might be able to improve things as a friend. He couldn't be all bad, and it would make things easier if he didn't hate her guts.

The cliques and the feeling of standoffishness at the Tower...it was a bit easier to understand now that she knew some of the weird and draconian things going on there. It'd get better though. She was sure of it.

"Yeah, you told me about the communicator-" She says, glancing down at it. "And...thanks. Really Elias, I'll try not to-I don't know, crimp your style. Without Laura's base I don't really..." She shrugs. He's probably figured that out already.

"Just a suitcase, it'll be alrigh-"

"Or want to stop by your parent's place?"

Eyes still on the communicator, Jenna falls silent. Her mother had been a wreck after seeing the footage of her in that burning city, and to not be able to call or assure her she was fine...

Well, that's why she'd gone there immediately after bailing on the Tower. Her father had stayed in the den. And then when she'd tried to call-

She couldn't be angry with him for hanging up on her. She had exposed them both to danger and forced them to move house. And she continued to ignore their wishes. She was a bad daughter.

"Ha, yeah..." Her throat is tight but she tries to shake it off and in a hurry. She finds a grin, shrugs. "I can make my parents proud or be Velocity Elias, not both." She spun it like one of her flippant jokes, but it rang a bit too true in her ears, and she tried to dismiss the topic.

"Anyway. I'm glad I came out to meet you Elias. Not just because you're awesome, but because I'm getting to extend my reach like I wanted. Beyond South Bend without abandoning South Bend." Focusing on that helps. She's doing the right thing in being Velocity.

She is doing the right thing.

"The good fight." Jenna repeats, and the grin fades to a more genuine smile. "And I'm going to do all I can for the little guy, always. We'll work on the Tower, and helping Sarah too." Things can be better in the hero community. They would be better.

She has purpose, and it's purpose she believes in.

 

[Obuzeti]

Elias nods. He doesn't bite his lip, or grimace, or comment. Instead he points at her communicator. "There's a flashlight function that can only be activated on Jenna's frequency - it'll unlock the door to the Coulee," he says. "Anytime, Jenna, you're welcome. My home is open to you."

He turns aside and nods towards the northeast. "I'm going to go check on Marie - I haven't heard from her on the radio recently, and God knows she'll bury herself in her work again if I don't prod her up and out of her funks. Get your stuff up there and make yourself comfortable, and see if you can't arrange a face-to-face with Sarah if you can. I don't need to be there, if it comes to that, but she needs someone that ain't in that Tower to talk to."

Adamant blows out a breath and nods, expression settling into resolution as his shoulders square and his accent thickens, the Southern burr settling behind his tongue. "This is a rough patch, but the hard work's still ahead of us," he warns. "We're going to be poking hornet's nests that've had more than a decade to fester. There ain't no one gonna be happy with us but the people we got with us. It's gonna suck."

He touches Jenna's shoulder with one hand, light. "But there isn't anyone I'd rather face it with," he adds, tender. "Get your stuff settled. We've got asses to kick soon."

He turns and keys his communicator, fidgeting with the teleporter he's got awkwardly stowed away on a belt-sling. "Hey, Marie, you cleared for visitors? I want to touch base and let you know what we're moving on now."

He can do that over the communicator, obviously, but that'd keep Marie at her safe, no-one-enters-my-lair distance and that'd ruin the point of trying to help her at all. What he hasn't mentioned is the backpack he's got stowed around a corner that he hikes up over a shoulder and unzips for Jenna to peek in; it's full of household supplies that Marie likely hasn't seen the use of since she went head down in her gloom-pit. Dusting wipes, air fresheners, more food that she probably won't eat, and a cat.

She's going the hate the cat.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

"Yeah...good idea." Jenna says about Marie, remembering the incident with the box, the hostility. "She uh, could use company."

About Sarah, she sobers up a bit, a nod. "Don't worry, I'll do what I can." Sarah had said she missed Elias. Maybe a reunion was closer than Elias thought. Either way, Jenna wasn't going to abandon the Tower. She was going to help. Somehow.

"But there isn't anyone I'd rather face it with."

Despite the warning, Jenna beams. Maybe Elias was right, but dammit-it was going to be awesome, working with him and Marie, doing some good. They'd do a lot of good! She can't wait to get started.

He turns to talk to Marie and Jenna hangs around just a minute, curious as he goes to retrieve a backpack.

Jenna's eyes widen on the backpack's contents. "...I hope she doesn't eat you." Jenna murmured, Ellie's wide eyed exclamation coming to mind. With that, an after image blurs-and she's gone.

Back through the communicator, Protagonist's voice flatlines in. "I'm listening, Halwell." She says shortly. Because indeed-they had the communicators.

Jenna reappeared before he'd even had a chance to zip the backpack back up. She offers two things silently-one of those plastic dancing flowers that were powered by light, and a navy blue cat collar with a bell on it. She's grinning, and then she's gone again.

 

[Obuzeti]

Elias takes the two doodads with a choked-off laugh, and stuffs them in the backpack as well to the muted sound of a meow. Then he fidgets with the teleporter a bit, inputs the coordinates for the loading dock outside Marie's base, and in a hiss of reality-static vanishes from where he'd been.

~*~

The hero grimaces as he emerges from the teleportal on the other side, rolling his shoulders. The sensation is like whole-body vertigo - at a guess, the inner ear has no idea of what to make of the sensation of instantaneous transportation, and throws the body out of whack in response. He staggers against the wall for a moment and lets his balance reassert itself over a minute or two as the cat idly sniffs him.

Then Adamant sighs, staggers back to a stand, and starts to disgorge his loot as he speaks. "Jenna's moving into the Coulee as we speak - some shit went down between her and her family, and Cid's second, this Tectonic kid, was being pissy in from of a camera on top of that. South Bend is probably going to be hot territory for awhile because of that, so you can probably expect to see her around a fair bit more."

The cat he circumspectly deposits in the warehouse above Marie's level along with the assorted cat supplies - litter box, food and water, a cat bed the works. He has no illusions that she'd refuse to take care of the thing, so he's sidling in from the oblique angle; he'll take care of it on the floor above, where it'll meander and be a living creature that Marie will gnaw on her liver about (and hopefully, learn to tolerate). Giving her a roommate would just light her off, but giving her a neighbor, even an animal one, is a lighter burden.

Then he pokes the elevator and leans against one of the walls as it descends, leaving the feline behind to explore its surroundings - the factory being a wonderland of vermin, tiny unexplored nooks, and vertical spacing for it to wander through. "I've asked her to set up a face-to-face with Sarah, hopefully I can at least talk at her some," Elias mutters. Here, away from the rookie, he can admit he's not looking forward to that. It needs to happen, but that doesn't make him less bitter about her choices. "That's going to suck. Cid's going to lose his shit over it too, half his credit is because he's got her on his six."

It's often unsaid, but Cid's actual combat ability and personal charisma are minimal in comparison to his skills at manipulation and PR. That's what Sarah brings to the table in spades, and he's always leaned a little on her legacy to get things done that he needs.

"What's this junior hero thing he's got the wards doing?" Elias asks, eyes closed. "Looks like a joke, to me. Or a good way to get hostage situations."

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Protagonist is not surprised when the front door sensor goes off, just annoyed. The teleporter might be more of a pain in the ass than she had considered-made stopping by all too easy. Damned thing wasn't a toy. Without even glancing at the corresponding monitors she hits a switch to unlock the bolted, reinforced door, and turns off the alert system for the building above.

Another switch activates the elevator. If he wanted to debrief in person, it'd be faster to let him rather than argue the point. That would be noise.

Just like this business about the wunderkind Paige and her parents. Noise. The bit about Tectonic however, less so. The Tower hardly did anything of note, but when they did send a team, it was often the once junior leaguer and his crew. Tyler Moore. Bedrock's grandson. Cornerstone hadn't been a slouch, either-and from what she had read of Tectonic in the old database, he certainly wasn't. And his abilities had probably only grown since-damned metahumans.

"No shortage of things to do." Protagonist finally says in response, considering the implications of a poor presentation-and perhaps a feud. Hn.

"I've asked her to set up a face-to-face with Sarah, hopefully I can at least talk at her some,"

Interpersonal relationships had never been the vigilante's thing. As effective as she had been in The Front, her focus, her unapologetic intensity, her brutality had made her something of a controversial figure, a near pariah within the League. But the Front was kind of like that. Dirtier work, more on the fringes.

And Protagonist was there when the Front needed her, and gone when they didn't. A fringe hero that was less hero and more vigilante bordering on terrorist that returned, always and as quickly as possible, to Samson and her war. She didn't do parties. She didn't do celebrations. She showed up to help do a job and she did it well, always. The amount of forethought contrasted sharply with the amount of violence she wreaked on the field.

Samantha Perkins, aka Invincibelle, had worried that one day Marie would cross a line too many. End up on a bigger wanted list than the corrupt city of Samson's. That one day, The League would have to bring her in, and put a stop to her brand of crime fighting. Maybe it would have come to that, eventually. Maybe not. Necessary evils after all, demons. The Front had needed Protagonist.

And maybe a little, Protagonist had needed The Front. Sam had seemed to think so, anyway.

But now more than ever, the woman's focus is the war. Nothing else. There was nothing else. And there hadn't been for eight years.

So Elias wanting to talk to Sarah made little sense to her. The other day she had venomously referred to Sarah as 'sleeping with the enemy'. It had been an emotional outburst after years of ignoring the bitter feelings of betrayal and anger that still somewhat clung, sticky and thick like tar, to her heart-or the hole where it'd been, once.

But Protagonist was in control again, firmly so. All facts, all surety if no comfort. Dismissing anything not vital, maximizing efficiency and efficiency only.

"I don't recommend that." Protagonist's voice is flat, the words immediate. It was a statement. Daybreak just wasn't what she used to be, and worse-she was a tool of the 'enemy', as impotent as anyone else in that damnable place. That's all she says though. He was going to do what he was going to do.

The elevator slides open and she turns off the communicator, his real voice carrying over the dull hum of the servers, striking her as foreign, strange. She doesn't turn around, doesn't lose speed or track of the multiple things she's doing.

She looks the same. Her hair was still damp from cleaning up and in that tight bun at the nape of her neck. She's in the athletic top and shorts, his box and its contents still in it's corner of the elevator where Jenna had returned it. There was an open bottle of some sort of protein shake at her left-it was still half full.

"Control." Marie answers immediately. "It was in the works before, but you back in the thick of things probably sped it up, and it's no accident they pushed for Laura's city, given that's Paige's home turf. Cid wants to be the only game in town, he doesn't want competition from you and he doesn't like independents-he's greedy."

A glance back at him. "I'm not sure he knew I was still active. Or even alive. Paige coming to Samson probably tipped him to that, first indication." Protagonist hadn't given instruction NOT to mention her, and on purpose. Maybe Paige wasn't the only Tower recruit potentially on the market.

And Cid becoming aware of her? That was no real problem to Marie. She hated Cid. Her operating and doing so without any cooperation or recognition of him or his organization was a big fuck you.

"Hn. I'm okay with that."

She finishes several tasks and sets something to compile, then sets the tablet down and shakes her head, a hand to her left wheel to turn her chair slightly. She's watching a different monitor, but at least was now in profile rather than her back to him. It also gave a good, nasty look to the worse off of her two legs. It looked like something large had taken a bite out of her thigh. And essentially, something had.

"Tower's near capacity. With what he's got, no reason to seriously recruit baseline humans." She'd been one of the few, back in the day-then again, a lot of people-citizens, villains, heroes alike-had thought she was some kind of demon. "He's already got public approval-they're still fawning over Daybreak." So why the breakfast cereal initiative? Marie frowns. She doesn't like not knowing things. She also doesn't like this.

"...I don't like it." A statement that had no real merit to it, but she says it anyway, turning fully to face him, frown deepening on the backpack. Was he going to camp on the fucking dock again?

 

[Obuzeti]

Elias shrugs at Marie's immediate denial as the elevator clicks open. He ambles to the side and drops his backpack, then starts digging through it as he replies, "Cid's power base is half built on Sarah; if I can even get her to start questioning him, a big part of his influence comes down. The Tower kids are loyal to her, not him, and even if all we can agree on is that we should still avoid each other, it'll be worth not having to deal with the Wards showing up and ransacking our places like they did Jenna's. We'll have enough issues without enemies we're not legally allowed to fight."

Out of the double-size backpack comes futon bedding, which Elias promptly tosses over Marie's cot. It was, ironically, hard enough to serve as the traditional tatami flooring, and bore the weight without shifting. Then he moves over to the mini-fridge and starts adding groceries to it, starting with the fruit left in the elevator, then moving on to dairy products (she'll need the calcium) and, in a concession to her predilections, a variety of vitamin supplements. He also sneaks in a carton of vanilla ice cream, not out of any real expectation that she'll eat it, but mostly so that she'll focus on tossing that out and ignoring all the other stuff.

"I think it's a mix between a PR push - not like Cid does anything else - and an informant campaign," Elias reflects, as he shuts the fridge and moves onto the last item in his backpack, a budget air conditioner that he sets beside one of the larger mainframes. If she can rationalize it as a cooling fan for the mainframe, she'll probably take it better, but that's another thing he's doubtful on. "If he's cottoned on to you being active again, he knows he can't beat you in infowarfare - that was always your specialty, and having the best tools doesn't make him a specialist in the field. He can get a better aggregate picture of local movement through a reporting campaign - and it'll probably also serve to keep the Wards busy and interacting with the locals, yet more PR."

He pops his neck and straightens up, taking in his changes at a glance. It's basic, but Marie won't let him give her anything directly at this point - instead, his best bet is to change her environment around her, and let the changes in comfort from that propagate through her attitude. Self-cruelty abides only in the absence of other options.

"Tweedledee reported in too," he says, referencing the most odd member of the old League, who'd never been anything more than their own informant at best. The humanoid anomaly traveled through reflective surfaces, but his sullen and disagreeable personality made him unreliable - he only shows up on occasion, but he remains a peerless spy. "Caliban called some kind of meet over in Norway. That's way too much heat for me to tangle with yet, but they're definitely responding. I think nabbing the teleporte-doohickey might have pissed somebody off."

Probably not the head honcho himself. In all his years, Adamant's never so much as seen Caliban irritated.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

His reasoning was solid and while Protagonist is doubtful it would work-the woman cynical as always-she supposed it was worth a shot. He made good points.

A ransacking?

Marie's gaze drifts to one of the monitors, considering that information. Infighting. She might be able to use that in some way...and it gave the kid a bit more credit. Might not be as entrenched as she had assumed.

That they had wrecked her base though...

Her eyes cut back to him as he starts unpacking. She's at first utterly mystified as he tosses some kind of padding onto her cot-and then irritated as he heads to the mini fridge-what the fuck was he doing? Her knee jerk reaction was to yell at him, even if she had already resolved not to give a damn if he saw her bare subsistence living conditions. Maximum efficiency, for a purpose only. She didn't need or want anything else.

And god dammit, he’s over there putting his fucking groceries in her fridge! The shakes had all the nutrients a body needed to keep it going-maintenance. That’s all it was, and all it needed to be.

"Halwell-" but he's still talking and she's more focused on the information, the task at hand than his bumbling around. How to turn it to their advantage. The expression on her face was caught between its normal impassive mask and clear and obvious agitation that shifted to calculating as he spoke.

"Sounds easily manipulated. A way to misdirect him." She honestly didn't give a damn if Cid knew they were operating or how the press would take it, but Elias apparently did. And he knew more about that sort of thing than she did.

Besides. She had been working at all this upkeep for when heroes reinstated themselves, and the public was part of that revival, just not a part she would know anything about courting.

Toned upper arms wheel the chair over as he’s setting up and plugging in an air conditioner unit. “The hell is that even going to do-” But then he continues and again her focus shifts, even if she's obviously bristling at all the crap he was dumping off down here.

" Caliban called some kind of meet over in Norway. That's way too much heat for me to tangle with yet, but they're definitely responding."

That makes her half forget all about her annoyance and distraction-even if it was making her a little twitchy.

Protagonist's mouth curves. It's not a smile-way too malicious to be a smile-but it's clear it was something she expected and was darkly pleased with. "I bet they are."

Caliban was no joke, but Marie had never been afraid of anyone in her adult life, and he was no exception. Protagonist had always been dangerous in that respect, in Samson.

However. Caliban eluded her more than anyone else had ever managed to, pre and post Rahab. A puzzle she lacked pieces, maybe even ability to solve. She had so little...before when she'd been active, when there had been so much to distract her, it hadn't been as big of a deal. But when the villains began to disappear into other countries and move on to new prospects, and in the eight years where she had done nothing but live and breathe information, the lack of information gathered on the villain was more than a little aggravating.

Protagonist did not like not knowing things. She liked going blind even less.

But unlike Caliban, the others were known and more predictable. Things were in motion, the scum was no longer safe, and better yet-they knew it, or at least were coming to suspect it.

"Good. I saw more than a few travel itineraries, knew something was up." She wheels backwards from the air unit, dismissing it for now. Maybe if she just ignored the shit he was doing, he’d stop. This was her space, but fuck it-if it made him feel better to park useless crap around that she wasn’t going to use, let him.

"As long as Cid sits in that Tower, it and everyone in it are just as impotent as he is. Not us. You hit the scene hard, that dock fight. And with you and the Velocity substitute wrecking havoc and making off with valuable tech-they know we're here, and they know we're not Cid's."

Marie considers. "Well, the girl isn't entirely Cid's, anyway. I'll line up our next target-we'll be building momentum, now." She was damned near predatory in her demeanor now, mind returning to business, the war as she wheeled back to the console.

 

[Obuzeti]

Elias smiles for a split-second, quick to smother it as soon as he turns back to a position where Marie can see him. Her focus on work is, as ever, consuming - what does it matter if he's nitpicking around her hideout in the meantime so long as he's bringing useful intel in the meanwhile?

Instead he ambles up beside Marie's wheelchair and seats himself, watching the master at work as she splices together half a dozen feeds of information - travel itineraries, stock shipments for their favorite luxuries, helpfully cross-referenced on another sheet, the bits and pieces of tech that make up their equipment traveling by secure courier across the states as they converge on a central location: reclaimed from the National Park Association, the island of New Alcatraz, out in the San Francisco Bay. Caliban had restored the fortress and turned it into his own personal haven; even the airspace around it was restricted, due it it being technically its own sovereign state. The island is a total black box and monitoring the amount of material moving in was about the only way of guessing what happened there.

"Any response from the others?" he asks, not really expecting anything. If he's been quiet the last decade, then the other surviving members of the League and its compatriots have been a living grave. He had heard nothing back since sending the signal out after his rumble with Nergal, besides these tentative communications with Marie. At the very least, he'd thought that her teammates would come to her aid.

Well, it's not like his had, either.

Adamant shrugs the thought away - he dislikes dwelling on that - and instead glances over at Marie with a cocked eyebrow. "Also, off topic, but when was the last time you had a real haircut, instead of this bowl thing you're doing to yourself? You can't tell me that was your first choice."

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Protagonist hardly knew what to make of his yet again taking a seat in her pit. All too aware of his presence, too-that had nothing to do with his bulk and everything to do with her self imposed solitary confinement. She'd had little more than the dull whirring of the servers and the faint electric thrum of the monitors for company, another person in her sphere was downright grating.

But he had been dead. She didn't let her mind travel too far down that line of thought-no need, no time-but he had crawled out of his grave, fought on the edge of it-and returned home to nothing.

...so he could sit here, if he wanted. She told herself it was better than risking him up top on the docks. Adamant didn't belong in Samson, after all. But...

Hn.

He asked a question and she was glad for the renewed focus on the war, even if she didn't have much for good news.

"Lana received your message." The wheelchair bound vigilante said flatly. Without taking her eyes off the tablet resting on her scarred and ruined lap, her left hand reached to press in yet another panel on the front of the console. A drawer slid smoothly out, clearly compartmentalized despite the lack of cushioned foam present in other drawers. Glow sticks, a few older looking, small electronic gadgets, a slightly rusted tin of black grease paint- it looked like Protagonist's equivalent to a junk drawer. She picked up a decidedly unimpressive piece of gunmetal colored plastic. The front bore a grate and a nondescript button, a metal clip on the back. Functionality and nothing more.

Her old communicator. It was still set to the Front's long dormant frequency. Presumably she had her League one somewhere too-there didn't appear to be a way to change what this one would pick up or transmit on.

"Wanted to know about the fight, about the kid." Her eyes flickered away from the tablet to narrow on the device. "Nothing since." She kept her voice flat and factual. The outburst on the docks...that hadn't been optimal or efficient. Noise, and she can ill afford noise. But even with her determination to feel nothing there's a taste of bitterness on her tongue and a flare of anger in her chest.

She set the communicator on the console and went back to the tablet. There were others. In hiding, retired, dormant. Gideon was running a farm upstate-not that she had expected the reserve Leaguer and sometimes Front hero seek her out. The coward.

"Not a people person." Protagonist asserted, an extreme understatement. No, not her. But Elias-people would rally to Elias. If anyone could bring their former allies back into the fold, it would be him.

She finished her task and began clicking through tabs on some new search when he said something about...hair? For a moment, it was half as if he'd spoken some other language and the woman needed time to parse the words. Given who it was addressed to, she might not respond to the topic at all.

But then, almost absently her left hand pulled the elastic loose from the bun at the nape of her neck. The choppy curls might not have been trimmed into a bowl cut, but it definitely had been hacked for function and not style. The curls were horrifically uneven, as if she'd uncaringly hacked the lot of them off.

Which is exactly what had happened.

Marie briefly considered what she'd done with it before. She had kept it long, usually in a braid. Nearly as practical, but still somewhat vain. Unnecessary.

This was a hack job, but it did the trick. She hadn't really considered what the result would look like-or entirely care...and yet she felt vaguely defensive.

"Short enough to keep clean, long enough to be pulled out of the way." Was the final, somewhat gruff response, a slow shake of her head as she moved to return the choppy 'hairstyle' to a ponytail, then a bun. A 'real' hair cut...the thought hadn't occurred to her in a long time.

"Teleporting to the docks...first time I've been outside in years." She admits, eyes moving to a monitor cycling through camera feeds of Samson. What little she needed came in through the tunnels via drones, and...well, this was it. This was her life.

She's been committed to her war on crime for a long time...but even Protagonist used to have downtime. Used to sleep a full eight hours when she could, catch the odd ball game on her crappy television set in a blue moon, dozed in that overstuffed recliner. Hell, there was a period she'd held down the day job, at the beginning.

The idea of any of that was foreign and almost laughably luxurious, now. Her eyes snapped back to the tablet. This was what mattered, all she cared about.

To punctuate the point- "And it was time I didn't have to spend." She practically growled. Him being here made her slightly more aware of how it all might look, but she didn't care. Let him see. Though...she didn't feel quite as venomous about it as she had when he'd first returned, knowing what she did, now.

 

[Obuzeti]

Elias stares at the communicator she'd set out. She probably hadn't even thought about it, bringing it out. Just dangling the conversation piece. Neurons in her brain clicking, starved for conversation, companionship all these years until she could barely understand what the urge was anymore, strange and alien. Marie is fumbling here as much as he is.

But he hears opportunity strike the door loud and clean, and his mouth slides into a fierce grin. The big man picks up the communicator and checks the battery and radio frequency - both clear - and bounces it once in his palm, eyes bright with amusement and fire, deep and dark and blue.

Adamant keys the radio with a smile, and barks: "Mic check, one-two-wake-the-fuck-up-Lana. Anyone still alive under the sea?"

Fuck awkwardness. Attack head-on and without fear. Have faith in the people he trusted. It's hard, after everything that happened. It's very fucking hard. And yet he feels his heart beating, thumping in his chest again. Can see his enemies again, and the allies he'll need. Feel the ride, the road to victory, harsh beneath his feet and the resistance he'll meet. Can see the struggle he'll have to face.

God, he feels alive again.

"Naw, naw," Elias says with a smile, side-eying Marie and making a valiant effort to keep a straight face. "It suits you. You always did have this trick for looking like you were about to attack somebody with an angle grinder. Now it just looks like you practiced with it first. This is completely believable, knowing you."

Look, maybe he's the heavyweight fighter, but Protagonist was bar none the nastiest fighter in the business. He'd seen her throw a fucking nail into a guy's open mouth mid-fight. He about swallowed it and spent the rest of the ruckus alternatively vomiting and spitting up blood. He'd chuck a car at her from across the street before he let her little hateful hands get ahold of him.

"Also, probably the wrong time to ask and highly likely to not even apply here, but what time zone is Atlantis in? Am I really waking her up right now?" Elias wonders out loud. "I would really bet it's difficult to get a layover flight there."

Refuge in absurdity percentages climbing. Ah, this feels familiar.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Her arm twitched, her first instinct to snatch it back. But...but this was half the point, Elias coming back. This was what he was good at, what the hero world sorely needed him for.

But Lana had -left-.

Protagonist dismissed the thought with a deliberate mental shake. Deep Blue was an asset, and if Halwell could pull her back into action their efforts would be that much stronger for it. The Atlantean had stirred in response to that video-so a straight communication might be the next step in returning her to the fold. She would wait and watch. The man would get results one way or another...however insane his methods might appear.

At his continuance about her hair, Protagonist's lips briefly curled into that faintly pleased, malicious expression. She'd been in the business of punishment, he had that correct. Never had made use of an angle grinder, but wouldn't have ruled it out if that's what became available in the right time or place, on the right piece of criminal.

The scum.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

The reports were the usual, and the usual was good-but hell if it wasn't boring. Lana kept her eyes focused on her brother's adviser as her mind drifted, wondering if it'd be a good night for exploring the languishing caverns for the thousandth time, or if the evening was set for more meetings such as these. She couldn't easily beg off of them-her brother was irritated enough with her refusing yet another suitor. She would do well to tow the line for now, play her part.

Which made it all the more dire when she felt the shell shaped communicator vibrate against her chest, the disturbance in the water drawing the gazes of her current company.

Why she had taken to wearing the thing again she couldn't quite-!

"Mic check, one-two-wake-the-fuck-up-Lana. Anyone still alive under the sea?"

The adviser openly stared, her brother glowered. THIS would be a lecture later, for sure. Lana plastered a fanged smiled on her face and rose from her seat, a dip of her head and a flattening of the fins on either side of her head, near her ear canal holes.

"...your pardon, my grace..?" She didn't wait for a reply before she darted out of the hall. WHY had she been wearing it again!? In the hopes that what, Marie would reach out? Yeah, right.

But this, this had sounded like-

"Elias? Elias is that you?" On the Front's line, calling her up on the heels of that last broadcasted message- her heart pounded and she poked her head from around the large pillar she'd taken residence behind-the large hall empty, the blue torches glimmering. She was alone, for now.

////////////////////////////////////

"Where did you find a Front communicator?" Even tinny over the radio, she sounded glad to hear from him.

Beside him, Protagonist's jaw tightened-but she said nothing, eyes on scrolling data on the tablet.

 

[Obuzeti]

"Yeah, so first off this is Marie's communicator, and she's right here next to me, so you've probably got about two more awkward sentences left before she shanks at least one of us," Elias replies, cheerful. "Marie, say hi."

He holds out the communicator to her for a moment, makes eye contact, then slowly reels it back and puts it to his ear. "Marie says hi. You know. With black stare of death. I shouldn't have to describe this to you."

For a moment, the manic energy cracks, and he smiles, real and brilliant. "God, it's good to hear your voice, Lana."

Elias laughs, a bright crack of laughter and then continues. "Yeah, I'm prowling everyone's back porch now. Shit happened - I threw it back to you - and I'm tired of playing on the back foot, so now I'm putting the feelers out. But honestly all my hero shit can take a backseat for now - you hanging on alright, reef girl? I never checked it out myself, but from what I heard you were real high up in oceanic politics. Something about like, VIP family or something. I'unno. Anhinga did your background workup and I can't read Spanish for shit."

The utter casualness of his approach, the warm regard and concern, slides beneath the barriers of time and distance, oozes right through barriers like warm, running water. He casually raises the specter of important issues, then dismisses them as insignificant compared to Lana's welfare and how she's doing. Brings up other members, who haven't spoken to each other for years, and reminds them of the family they'd made.

He doesn't do it often, because he really prefers letting people have their own complete choice, but Elias gets people on a primal, intrinsic level.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

"-shanks at least one of us."

Protagonist growled, a hellish sort of noise that might've sent a lesser man scrambling for the exit-and fixed him with one of her malevolent glares as he cheerily held the communicator out to her-then slowly retracted it.

"Leave me out of your social call." She ground out tersely, selecting a long flat circuit board from a thinner drawer before wheeling backwards with a strong push against the console. She grasped the wheels to pivot sharply-and took off for the towers of servers just as he melted into himself. Prattle. Prattle probably required, but Lana had left. She was no one's ally, anymore.

Hn.

////////////////////////////////////////

"Eh, in times of peace royal family members are mostly decorative baubles." Lana heard herself say, straightening up off the pillar to cast a suspicious glance around, mentally chiding herself even as she felt a pang of nostalgia and even...an odd type of homesickness. Homesickness?! She was home! She never belonged up there.

Anhinga...that long ago interview might as well have been a lifetime ago...but Lana remembered it clear as day. She'd been a fish out of water but eager to help, determined to bridge the gap between species-she'd talked too much and yet maybe not enough. Who could have guessed how it would all end.

...he said Marie was there?

"...it was a surprise, is all. The video. This call." She said slowly as she made her way to her quarters, trying to quell whatever was rising in her heart. The surface was not her concern. Whatever they were up to, it didn't involve her, it couldn't involve her. She wasn't a teenager anymore, she had responsibilities here and...well, things were different, dammit. She knew better.

"...you doing okay though? It looked like a nasty fight, even for you."

 

[Obuzeti]

Adamant didn't chase. Marie had been pushed hard already, and, more importantly, he had a job to do. Defaulting on that for personal sentiment wouldn't accomplish anything, and so he focuses on Lana instead. "That doesn't sound like a positive endorsement," the older hero comments, brow furrowing as he considers the disenchanted phrasing. "That sounds about one step below shitty day-job, if I'm honest. You at least doing one thing that's yours, right? Not just folding under for whatever non-royal fucks think the Royal Family should be doing?"

He chewed his lip for a moment, then nodded in response to Lana's statement. It may have been idle, but it deserved notice and recognition nonetheless. Every single one of his people did. None of them were trash throwaways or side characters. "Yeah," Elias says, quiet. "To be honest, it was for me too. Shit was bad after Lava Cthulhu. You got Marie out, and I appreciate that. I - didn't. I got stuck there."

Silence. His throat works, and he decides not to go into the details, and instead shrugs "I wasn't happy with my team when I finally got back. None of them looked for me. I guess they thought I was toast."

Elias knows, intellectually, he had been buried under nearly eleven thousand tons of still-superheated magma, ash, and the enormous reality-warping corpse of an abomination. Knows, intellectually, that they had seen him crushed and shattered by it, mangled into something unrecognizable. That last suicide charge, punching deep through the kraken's corpse, shattering the crust and causing tectonic shifts for miles around, his ruined form hurled by Daylight's full power like a spear from God - no one expected him to persist beyond that, he understands.

He gets it. He really does.

"I spent awhile coming to terms with that," Elias says with a shrug. That's not a topic for a fucking phone. "And I saw those two fucks just going at it, right in my back yard tearing shit up for no good reason, and I just couldn't ignore it. Took one of the new kids and made a run at 'em. It sucked, but we took them down."

He attempts a chuckle. It sounds rusty. "I always get the shit kicked out of me. That was no different. They had new tricks though, I'll give them that. I guess all the vultures and crows ain't been sitting on their hands all this time. They've gotten nastier, and stronger, and what was I doing? Hiding up in my hometown, being quiet and sullen and shit."

Adamant shrugs again, and his shoulders set. "I just thought, enough of that."

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

" You got Marie out, and I appreciate that."

Lana sunk into the seat before her vanity, suddenly tired. The woman in question certainly didn't seem to, but voicing that was likely to get the call terminated in a hurry, maybe even the communicator smashed.

Her fingers trace the shell as the silence hangs there, her brow furrowed. Stuck there...?

"It was a few weeks before I went home...Mystfyre fed me updates here and there until she retired." Gossip, mainly. Lana had counted Adamant among the lost too, initially. They all had. One more brilliant light put out in selfless sacrifice. She'd been glad to hear he was alive, but at that point she was already home disengaging from surface matters altogether, and then Myst retired. No more updates. No more calls.

Not until the message she couldn't bring herself to ignore.

"They've gotten nastier, and stronger, and what was I doing? Hiding up in my hometown, being quiet and sullen and shit."

Lana shook her head despite his being blind to that.

"We gave enough." She said seriously, almost before she could stop herself. There was no point in saying that. This was Adamant here...there was never 'enough'. And Marie-well Marie was obsessed, and motivated by very different things. If asked, she'd probably claim she wasn't giving up anything, just taking it from the 'scum' or whatever. God only knew what she was up to these days, but Lana doubted seriously she'd retired. With as ravaged as she'd been by that plane crash though...well, who knew with the miracle of modern and futuristic science.

She went on anyway. Even more inclined with the horrific mystery of what 'stuck there' might mean. "You gave enough. Living your own life isn't some kind of sin Elias, really. We put everything on the line time and time again and they still withheld information they had from us, sent us in half blind." She thought of the heat and the wrong in the water, the chaos everything had been. She thought of the aftermath and her disgust with the government-her betrayal, her anger, the resentment that drove her home.

She thought of her friends, their voices silenced forever. Marie's injuries, how she had had to lie about who they had on their intensive care unit. Enough. It was -enough.- Surface dwellers could police their own, it wasn't her problem anymore. She'd gone home, where she belonged.

...but did she? And what choice did he really have? Things were easier to ignore leagues beneath the sea. And if he had taken a break after...whatever had happened with him and Daybreak and Cid-how strange was it he'd flown back into action with a new Velocity?

"They've gotten nastier, and stronger..."

Intermingled with the words were the venomous ones Marie had spit at her years ago, the dire warnings and heated arguments against rest, against grief, against...

Giving up.

Lana frowned.

"So now you're putting together your own team?" Protagonist, a new Velocity, and Adamant. Sounded like a good start. "Still not..." Lana shifted. "I mean, you guys are going to have an operation separate from Daybreak and Cid, then?"

 

[Obuzeti]

Elias chuckles. "Lana, you have a kingdom to go back to, and a family that waits for you there," he says. "But for me, this is the only life I've ever had."

He leans back against the computer desk Marie had wheeled herself away from. "The government was the wrong way to go. You all - the Front, all of you - were right on that. I think that the government didn't know the full scale of what was coming, but I also think they knew that and sent us in as fucking canaries to find out what Rahab even was. I think they expected all of us to die, and when by the grace of God some walked away they did everything possible to forget we existed, except for whoever decided to kiss ass."

Names, unspoken.

"I don't know if it's a team, precisely," Adamant says with a shrug. "I just think we can't afford to sit up in our distant little ivory towers and pretend everything's fine anymore. I think my people - that's you, that's all of you - need to know there's rumblings, that they need to work out the rust and know they have help if rain and hellfire come down on them. I'm opening the Coulee to all of you. You want to come by, touch base, punch in some rascal skulls, my door is open to you anytime. We all got lives we tried to pick up after the fall, and I'm not asking anyone to drop all of it."

Elias's throat works audibly, and then he smiles anyway, wry and deprecatory. "I guess my point is I think I still have work to do, and while I don't have the right to ask, really, there's no one I'd prefer to have at my side than you. All else aside, maybe it sucked, but you tried to move on. That's strength in its own way."

His mouth puckers into a sour grimace. "And, honestly, I want someone like that to be a good influence on Jenna - the new Velocity. When she agreed to help me some shit went down. She hasn't got a home anymore, can't go back to the Tower and Cid and Daybreak. She needs . . . a woman's perspective, a friend to ground her. I'm tough, and Marie's fucking adamantium, but we're lifers in this business and we'll never move on. I want the kid to see that she's got choices, and her whole life doesn't have to be in the suit."

"Does that make sense?"

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Good, he understood. That would make it that much easier to tell him good luck and rebury all of this before she got carried away with the ghosts of her past, with the concerns of a world she had no place in, had once worked so proudly to protect.

"I think my people - that's you, that's all of you - need to know there's rumblings, that they need to work out the rust and know they have help if rain and hellfire come down on them. I'm opening the Coulee to all of you. You want to come by, touch base, punch in some rascal skulls, my door is open to you anytime. We all got lives we tried to pick up after the fall, and I'm not asking anyone to drop all of it."

Lana suddenly found she could not meet her own gaze in the mirror. His people...

He went on to the question she had perhaps arrogantly assumed was coming, and what's more-brought up the kid. Her right hand caught at mirror's lower right edge, files appearing in place of her appearance across the polished surface. She clicked on a folder and photos sprawled across the screen, pictures of their friends, of their family, of their people.

And there was her and Laura in the pool, the sunbathing speedster grinning as the two of them shared a toast to some small accomplishment or other-Lana couldn't remember what it was anymore. Like Laura, it had been lost to time. She swiped the images away, met with her own yellow gaze once again.

"...yeah, I guess it does. Give me...give me time to think about it, okay Elias? I...I'm not blowing you off, I just need...time."

She felt...ashamed? Something.

"Thank you for giving me a call. Um. You too Marie." She added awkwardly.


///////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Protagonist pressed in a button on the back of a server tower, ejecting a circuit board similar in shape to the tool she had in hand. Removing the circuit board she gave it a critical scan, inserting the tool and giving the handle on the end a quarter turn.

The lights changed from red to green, then back. She removed it, replaced the board-and then moved on to yet another tower.

She was listening as she worked. She didn't even need to be doing this bit of maintenance right now-she had it planned for eight o clock tomorrow-but it gave her something tangible, something necessary to focus on.

Something other than Lana's voice.

But her ducking of pleasantries and the radio call didn't mean she ignored the content of their conversation. Far from it-and among the various things that irked her was the idea of this venture serving to train the substitute.

Protagonist didn't entirely like that. Hn.

"Should keep the communicator." Regardless of how Marie felt about Lana, Protagonist knew what Deep Blue could do for the war effort, and it sounded like Elias had gotten through to her in a big way.

Her voice was flat and factual. Controlled.

Internally she felt tight and angry, the sticky hateful tar that clung to the space her heart should be. Warring with that was the jumbled strain of...something-as some of his words echoed back.

"I - didn't. I got stuck there."
"I don't know how long that was, buried in stone and ice and the blood of the dead thing we killed-"

She jams the next board back in a little harder than she meant to.

 

[Obuzeti]

"Take care of yourself, Lana," Adamant says, soft, and lets the call hang, and after he blows out a breath. He bounces the communicator in his palm for a moment, staring at nothing, then pushes himself up to his feet and wanders over to Marie, where he places the communicator flat on the arm of Marie's wheelchair.

"You're one of my people too, Marie," he says, and there's a visible moment where he fights with himself, his tangible, personal manner clashing with what he knows Protagonist prefers - thighs shifting, his hands open and release once. She's too observant to miss it, and he acknowledges the fight with a muttered curse as he turns to face the server bank beside her, conceding that he's pushed her boundaries too far in recent days, that he doesn't need to take her fragile personal space from her as well.

"Things aren't good between you and yours, but that won't always be so. We can rise above what ails us. We can conquer the challenges that have bettered us. I have failed - but I can rise again. And there will come a day when you walk from this place to bring grim justice once again. I swear it."

Elias taps the communicator with one finger. "I'll take one of these things from you the day you make one for me, Protagonist. This one's yours. This team is yours. No one gets left behind, ever again."

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

His words are noise and she remains mute, turning the handle back and removing the circuit board, her eyes on it-but also taking in his body language. She's tense, watching him in her peripheral vision- he struggles a moment before, maybe remembering what happened last time, choosing to face forward with a soft curse.

Noise...

There was probably something to say here, but hell if she knew what it was. The aftermath of the years is hard on him. She's hard on him. But then he speaks, and again she's struck with that echoing...something.

"Things aren't good between you and yours, but that won't always be so. We can rise above what ails us. We can conquer the challenges that have bettered us. I have failed - but I can rise again. And there will come a day when you walk from this place to bring grim justice once again. I swear it."

Hope, determination, visions of the good fight, compassion, light and love-it's all there, an untarnished and unbent lance through the murky cesspit that was the world, that was her. She studies the circuit board without actually seeing the circuit board, her teeth clenched.

"I'll take one of these things from you the day you make one for me, Protagonist. This one's yours. This team is yours. No one gets left behind, ever again."

It was almost painful. Maybe more so than the ravaged agony that was her lower half.

"I'm not anyone's 'people'. Least of all yours." There was no bitterness to the words. Not quite a rejection either. Just a matter of fact statement, a correction of a classification. Her eyes had left the tool and were boring through the communicator instead.

No, she was no hero. But Elias was, and he would rally those that were. Lana would return. She was sure of it-the Atlantean couldn't ignore a call to action, a request for help, not from Adamant. And the kid-it made sense he'd be thinking ahead. He was here to rebuild what was, and power to him. Good.

But she was here to strike at the scum, even if she had to do it through proxies.

Protagonist set the tool on her lap and gripped one of her wheels, picked the communicator up.

No one gets left behind...

She can't think on these things. She can't. This was all she was now. This was all she could stand to be. She wheeled backwards, refocusing. He didn't want to keep the communicator without her having one too. That was all well and good, but it had served its purpose-it would be best with him now.

"Needs to be you. Not a people person. Certainly no Adamant." That understatement again. "Our last meeting went...poorly." And another. She pauses, cutting him a glance. "Can clone it." That should satisfy him well enough. She'd route the frequency through her computer-she didn't have communicators on hand at the moment. Nothing she'd trust at this stage, anyway.

Back at the console, she replaced the circuit board, withdrew a small screwdriver with a specific, oddly shaped end for the likewise unique screws-and went to work. It wouldn't take long-once the casing was removed she could connect to it using the NFC reader she had in yet another drawer.

Which left the awkward emptiness of the hum of servers. Should say something. The new task gave her bandwidth to attempt, anyway. "...was in a coma." She says flatly, and somewhat out of nowhere.

Wait, what?

 

[Obuzeti]

Elias's head bobs in acknowledgement of Marie's clarification - not acceptance, nor resignation, merely his recognition that her opinion was different. Rather than argue, he merely states, "You're not a lot of things right now, Marie. Neither was I, once."

He opens his mouth to close business, give Marie a chance to gather her space around her again, when she speaks, a non sequiter that squeaks out into the silence and hangs, awkward and abrupt, more emotion packed into the naked statement than in anything else the heroine had said all day. The hair on the back of Elias's neck stands up, and he deliberately takes a breath and exhales it in steady rhythm, then ambles over to the other side of the server bank where Marie is working. Close enough to hear her breathing, see the sides of the wheelchair around the bulk of the machine, but just out of sight, himself. He slides to the floor and leans back against the opposite side, eyes sliding shut.

"Figured," he replies. "You - Grace - Machinist - you'd have never stopped looking. I didn't realize you made it until I was back in Indiana. Made the trek down to the Tower first by word of mouth, hitchhiking. My communicator'd been smashed, and no one outside the League really knew what was going on. I tried getting a casualty report through the local police stations and they told me the situation was hands-off. I still don't know what that means."

A well-timed push by a political opponent, probably, but that's not a game he knows how to play. He can never look at people by the numbers.

Grace had died when the medic center had been annihilated, of course. He never did figure out what happened to Machinist. The jolly fat man had been a frontliner like him though, armed and armored in technology both rickety and devastating - and yet for all that, still just a man of flesh and blood. At least he would have died quickly.

Small mercies.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

"Attempts at a cover up." Marie supplied, returning to fact. Something somewhere was settled however-she felt better. "Class action suit, smaller suits- some still going, even now." One, two, three screws. Hn. Needed a heat gun to soften the glue or she'd tear the wires out.

Whisper...Machinist...names she hadn't thought of in a long time.

"Some masks were no more fond of Cid than we were. Never reported back in, initially listed in the dead or missing. Took time to untangle." A pause.

"They never got it right, and neither could I." Could suspect, of course. Families with suspicions had stepped forward, joined the class action suit too. Some were opportunists looking to cash out. Others were shocked and devastated people learning the secret their loved one had kept. Could be the heroes without familial representation in the lawsuits were alive and well in their identities. Could be no one would notice them missing in the first place.

Much like if she had died.

"And then I could remember, but I couldn't move..."

She thinks about waking up in the hospital, fighting the drugs dulling her mind. She doesn't let herself think too long.

She wants to ask what he meant about being a puppet. About 'whatever moves me'. She'd nearly died, but he had actually died, and didn't appear certain as to why he was not still buried out there, crushed and broken and dead like so many others.

Like Sam.

But it's too much. All of it, too much.

The back peels off the communicator and she retrieves a small platform device from a drawer, switching it on and setting the small radio on it to scan and copy.

A beat, then two.

"...even if you had never come back to fight..." There was no gruffness to her tone, no sharp terseness. It was slower and less certain, as if she was straying into unfamiliar territory. "...It is good you are not on that list."

It didn't take long-the progress bar was no sooner on one of the monitors than it was filled and off of it, the vigilante reassembling quickly with the slightest of frowns, almost as if her brief foray into personhood had disturbed her.

 

[Obuzeti]

Elias grimaces. He'd known the politics were bad at the time, but he'd mostly left official documentation and contact to Cid, Lana, and Sarah, too busy running the League from the inside, hosting and moving teams across the country with the small fortune he'd been gifted along with the Coulee. Robert Master's legacy held him in good standing even to this day - he'd never struggled in financial matters since his encounter and subsequent deeding by the eccentric billionaire. "I'll have to dig around and see who's still alive and well," he says. "Leave that to me. Just about everyone gave me a way to get in touch at some point. You look into who threw all those lawsuits our way - follow the money. It was a long time ago, but that kind of financing doesn't come from nowhere, and it doesn't dry up. Let's step on that issue before it springs back up."

He's quiet for a moment, then stands up and brushes himself off, rolling his broad shoulders to work out the stress in them, the heavy weight of responsibility that he'd never really considered dropping.

"Thank you, Marie," he says, and turns to glance at her through the gap between two of the server banks, one blue eye steady and calm. "It's good to have you at my back again."

Then he turns and nods as he starts forward, heading to the elevator. "I'll be out taking care of Jenna's effects for a day or two and trying to get in touch with the rest of the League. I'll let you know when I'm going to drop back in."

When, not if.

 

[CurtailedAmbrosia]

Marie glances back as he speaks, catching his gaze and meeting it solidly before she turns away again, a curt nod.

She'll have something lined up by then, and he'd have something to report too. Hopefully good news...they needed anyone they could scrounge up. He hadn't been wrong in what he said to Lana.

Marie glanced to the old camera feeds of Samson.

But they were building momentum, now.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Tectonic stood in the back of his team's marked van, re-shifting his weight here and there as the vehicle moved over the neat city streets of South Bend, glowering as he stared out of the one way glass panel and at the impromptu signs and banners welcoming Velocity home.

The plan had backfired spectacularly. And it had backfired on his watch. If Cid had been here on that stage, Tyler was sure the situation would have been better salvaged. Instead, Paige made him look like a bumbling fool much like she was, and Adamant-well, Adamant stripped him of any legitimacy he might've had and then thoroughly stole the show.

Paige had blundered her way into making a powerful ally, and instead of staying put and getting the message with her demolished base and confinement, she was right back on the scene, operating loose and fast and now with a rogue veteran hero's stamp of approval.

Christ.

If she was going to be so insubordinate they should revoke her Tower membership. Tyler can't imagine booting the nation's newest sweetheart from the Tower being a good P.R. move, but he also couldn't imagine Cid standing for this, even if she was somehow in with Daybreak. Hell, he didn't plan on reporting talking to Adamant to the extent he had.

Which brought him to what Halwell had said about the adaptations of metahumans...and how he had related that to Cid.

Tyler drummed his fingers on his forearm. Paige was a problem, but not necessarily an insurmountable one. If she was running on her own but not in the way, what did it matter? Could get herself killed maybe, but that would just be a tragic ending to foolhardiness more than anything bad on the Tower or Cid. After all, he'd just publicly ordered her home and she'd ignored him.

Adamant might be rogue, but he was still Adamant. Tyler was fairly certain the beef between the two men had more to do with Miss Sarah than it did anything else. He couldn't remember independent heroes ever really being a huge concern to the League-except maybe that demon lady-but Adamant had always stood for good things. If he was intent on mentoring Paige let him-then she'd be his problem, not theirs.

Tyler settled on the tack he was going to take in his report and turned to give them orders when the red haired Mercury stiffened in the bucket seat behind him with a "Uh oh." And gave him an anxious glance.

"What?"

"Uh, did you let a guy named Timothy Veigh down with you when you talked to Velocity?" She had an article of some kind up on her Tower issued smart device, and Tyler felt his temper rising back from where he'd just settled it, taking the device.

He really wasn't looking forward to reporting in now.


////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////


Jenna had had a good night. She'd been all over and under and through her city a gazillion times, and while there hadn't been a terrible lot of action-there had been a lot of love and happiness to go around. Heck, even some for Adamant-she had a cake out on his table to prove it. It'd gotten a bit smooshed on one edge, but she'd fixed it back up good as new for whenever he got to it.

Jenna had made herself a bit at home-her purple suitcase was tucked neatly under the side table, clothes freshly washed and the case itself beaten free of the rock dust, a pair of yellow sneakers at the door, women's size five. She was sitting on the couch in her pajamas, a t shirt and capri set in a light blue color, llamas patterned on them with the phrase 'No Prob-Llama" emblazoned across the front of the shirt. She was playing with a cheap wooden paddle ball set she'd found in a side pocket of her suit case and munching on a piece of pizza. Both the ball and board were little more than a blur, the thwack of the small rubber ball sounding more like a woodpecker at speed. She was waiting for Elias to get home or to get sleepy, one of the two.

 

[Obuzeti]

The door to the Coulee opens, and Elias ambles through with a groan, letting the door swing shut behind him with a rumbling thud that indicates it's a hell of a lot more solid than it looks. "What a day," he groans, and drops his overcoat on a hook, then made his way over to where Jenna was obliterating a paddleball. He leans over and pulls her back against his side in a brief, one-armed hug. "Hey there, squirt."

The big man drops himself into the living room armchair nearest the door, where he starts pulling off the combat boots and setting them behind the backrest. "Get all your stuff in, get settled?"

He glances up on his way to the second boot, catches sight of the cake, and exhales amusedly. "And where'd the cake come from? Didn't everybody decide my birthday was the second of May?"

Old story, that - not inclined to share his personal history, and curiously enough free of personal documentation, Sarah had decided by fiat when his birthday was when he refused to tell anyone. It had become synonymous with the League itself, after some time, very nearly a holiday unto itself. Not observed these days, for obvious reasons. He'd gone along with it, because if he hadn't she'd have done it anyway and then spent all day setting off fire alarms and then watching him walk into surprise parties wherever the alarm was when he booked it there.