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The building wasn't much to look at, if one was being brutally honest. Like a lot of structures in the West End, it was two storeys tall, designed to be a place for business on the ground level with small living apartments on the second floor. The space for a sign was empty and evidently had been for a while if the weathering was any indication, not to mention the birds' nest tucked in between the top of the large placard and the window sill above it. The large windows were filthy enough to make them nearly opaque and the hinges on the door were probably going to need to be replaced altogether.

Despite all that, the young, dusty brown haired man in the wool-lined coat standing on the sidewalk in front of it, keys spinning around his finger jauntily, grinned broadly enough to show pearly teeth as he regarded the building. "Perfect."

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The brown haired youth leaned on his motorcycle a few feet back, wearing a brown leather jacket and a big orange and green striped scarf. He reached up to his nose to bring down the sunglasses from them an inch, letting his eyes scan up and down the building. Slowly, the vague grin on his face morphed into an expression of complete bemusement, followed by a grimace.

"Reeeeeally?" Chris asked sceptically. "Perfect?" He glanced back at his vehicle, as if considering getting on and driving really really fast in the other direction.

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"Yes," Erik confirmed, crossing his jacketed arms over the plain white shirt exposed beneath the coat. "Also: shut up." As usual, the fencer was coming across a little more confidently than he actually felt; Chris' concerns weren't exactly unfounded and the whole undertaking was a pretty extreme financial gamble considering the straits in which the Espadas family and to a lesser extent the Interceptors as a whole found themselves. Still, he had a good feeling about it, a better one than he'd had about their situation since the destruction of their previous brownstone home.

As the two young men regarded the building, they were joined by a coltish brunette with an obvious family resemblance to the elder of the pair. Crimson scarf peeking out from the collar of her black peacoat, Ellie Espadas tilted her head to follow the boys' gaze to the storefront as she walked up. "...really?"

"You're both terrible and I hate you," Erik groused with a flat expression, his head falling between his shoulder blades in annoyance.

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  • 3 weeks later...

The winter chill didn't appear to touch the slightly shorter--and somewhat more exotically colored--woman that trailed behind Ellie, despite being dressed lightly for the season. Willow's amber eyes surveyed the stout building, a gust of winter wind tugging sharply at her loose clothing and long white hair, as if making one more desperate bid to cause discomfort before quietly settling down.

The dryad looked at Erik, the slender snow white eyebrow framing the question on her gently angled features. "What is this place?" Willow asked, glancing back toward the building.

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Erik gave Willow a broad grin, dark blue eyes lighting up in the way they always did when someone had just delivered him a straight line. "Thank you for asking, florecita," he responded, bowing deeply from the waist and extending one arm with a flourish in an exaggeratedly courtly gesture. When he straightened, he threw out his other arm as well, indicating the building before them with his outspread hands. "This is soon to be the location of the Espadas School of Self-Defense and Swordsmanship!" The fencer turned to the others expectantly, looking thoroughly pleased with himself.

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Chris looked up at the building. Then down at Erik. Then up at the building. Then across at Willow. Then up at the building. Then down at Ellie. Then up at the building. Then longingly back at his Skink Cycle.

The young man looked his team leader dead in the eye, opened his mouth and... flapped it uselessly. He flapped his hands vaguely, and tried again. Still no words would come out. Panicking, he turned to Ellie, and gesticulated wildly at her brother.

"Words! Things! Snide! Words!" He dramatically pointed at Erik. "Things."

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"It's okay, dear, I know," Ellie reassured the distressed teenager in a level voice, reaching over to pat him on head as one would a confused canine. "I think what Chris is trying to ask," she addressed her brother is a light tone, hands casually in her coat pockets as she rocked back on her heels, "is what fantastical illicit substance have you been taking and why are you holding out on the rest of us?"

Erik regarded her silently for a moment, lower jaw setting at a disgruntled angle. Without breaking eye contact with his sister, the swordsman's fist shot out to slug Chris on the shoulder.

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Willow ignored Chris and Ellie for the moment, taking another look at the building. The dryad's amber eyes were slightly narrowed as they took their measure of the storefront. "It has possibility," she said after a time. Turning to settle her gaze on Ellie and Chris, she repeated herself.

"Think about it," the ancient guardian added. "Teach the sheep to become wolfhounds. We lack the resources we used to enjoy, if those we protect are able to better protect themselves it will allow us to focus on significant threats."

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Chris stepped up to Willow and draped one arm around her shoulder. "My dear Willow, what your crazy-ass boyfriend does with his free time is none of my concern. He can teach sheep to be wolfhounds, or fish to be frogs, or germans to be French. Self-defence school, good idea."

He took one step forward, and gestured with a flourish. "But how can one teach self-defence, I ask you." The young man flamboyantly swirled on the spot to turn to the group, arms waving wildly. "If one little punch or trip or missed throw would knock down an entire wall!?" Geckoman looked Erik dead in the eye. "Seriously, how much work is this place going to need? I've got school! Ellie's got school! You have a baby! Do we have the time to actually fix this up?"

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"Now if only we could teach the geckos to be quiet..." Ellie mused largely to herself, one hand on her chin and her eyes on the building rather than the conversation.

"At least somebody has a little imagination," Erik groused as he shooed Chris away from the visibly pregnant dryad so that he could place one arm around her back and bend down to kiss her briefly on the cheek. "And the building is not that bad. This is sturdy West End construction; got it where it counts! We can fix up what needs fixing up easily enough. ...we pretty much have to," the fencer admitted finally with a sigh, a little wear and tear showing though his expression of determined optimism. "Lacking our old resources is one thing, but we're circling the drain on 'broke', too. We need a base of operations, and I need a source of income, especially with another mouth to feed on the way. It's all win, trust me!"

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"Yeah," said Chris, rubbing the back of his head. "I sort of picked the Arborealair's location based on the assumption anyone using it had access to submersible aircraft, sticky hands, or highly expensive experimental teleportation technology we can't actually afford to replicate."

He turned to eye the building. "I suppose I could rig blast doors and bring over the spare defence lasers?" He genuinely felt bad the Interceptors couldn't use his base, but it genuinely wasn't really feasible to live in or use as a base of operations for the West End. And Lizzie hadn't relapsed in over a year and he didn't want to stress her out, but he wasn't going to say that out loud.

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Willow let Erik's arm pull her in closer, resting her head against his shoulder as he did so. The ancient guardian knew it was easy for the others to forget just how old she was, and that she had no true inkling about the sturdiness of any human construction, when to her eyes human lives (and sometimes civilizations) where akin to mayflies.

She reasoned it was probably a coping mechanism, no being likes being reminded of their own mortality. That thought hung in her mind a moment and she shivered involuntarily.

"The number of 'mouths to feed' will not increase, beloved." Willow demurred. "But Mouthy has a point, you are placing far too much upon your shoulders again. How can I, how can we, help?"

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"Lasers are your answer to everything," Erik chided with a smirk that seemed to draw some of the strain away from the corners of his eyes, though he turned his head subtly toward Willow as he felt her shiver against his side. He hoped the pregnancy wasn't doing anything to interfere with her usual indifference to the elements. "It's more an expression, florecita," he elaborated. "I'm talking, like... diapers and, y'know, other... Look, kids are expensive, is the point." Realizing just how out of his depth he was part way through the sentence had been unsettling, but the swordsman powered through. "Long term, it would be nice to have some stability and yes, I'm an old man, get off my lawn, et cetera, et cetera."

Reaching into his pocket with his free hand he produced a set up keys. "Now, do you lot want to see inside, or not?"

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"So old," nodded Chris sagely. "And yeah, clothes aren't cheap. Hell, if the kid is born with powers, maintaining any damage from them isn't going to be cheap."

He sauntered forwards towards the building. "Yeah, let's go see inside the place. But I'm warning you, if some rat or spider or vermin thing startles me, I jump, and my landing puts me through the floor..." He shook his fist in mock outrage. "Then you will feel my... well, not so much wrath, it's hard to lay down wrath while stuck in the floorboards, more... miffed-ness?"

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"Thank you, Chris, your level-headed reassurances are a rock in these stressful times, truly," Erik muttered at the mention of the baby's potential metahuman nature as he unlocked the door and opened with a slight hitch. Well, not much 'potential' about it, but maybe she won't develop any power right away... Ahhh inwardly screaming ahhh. Stepping inside, he flipped on the light switch, revealing a largely open space with a small half-wall forming a vague sitting area before the lager section of the room. The floor was already covered in thick, durable mats, but beyond that there was little in the way of furnishings or decor. The fluorescent lights overhead hummed softly but all lit up without fail, while a door to the left led to a narrow staircase upward and another at the back of the building led downward. "So...?"

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Inside the building there was a palpable sense of potential; it was more than just the mats and floorboards, the air of creating something new, something good, hung around those gathered inside.

Willow wrinkled her nose and cast a sidelong glance at Erik.

"I suppose sleeping in the woods is out of the question?" she asked, the hint of a chuckle lacing her question. To take any sting out of her playful remark she nipped at the swordsman's jaw before wandering deeper into the building, trying to get a real feel for the place.

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"Well hey, camping can be fun, right?" Ellie noted offhandedly, most of her attention on the interior of the would-be school as she paced about. It had taken some time for her to sort out her feelings regarding Willow considering the situation, but her brother seemed happy and actually motivated to attend to aspects of his life not directly involved with his rooftop patrols. If nothing else, she was grateful to the dryad for that.

"Hopefully it won't come to that," the elder Espadas sighed with a rueful smirk, watching Willow from behind for a beat before addressing the group as a whole. "We've got use of the upstairs apartments, too. There's a big one at the front, with enough room to be pretty comfortable, and a few smaller ones towards the back. Might be able to rent them out, but at the very least, no more crashing on Mamá's couch for our many vagrant friends." That had been one of the things he'd missed most about the brownstone apartment building: it had been a place they could offer to heroes in need of a fresh start or a place to stay while they put the pieces back together. This wasn't quite the same, but it was something. "I think you're going to be more interested in the basement, though."

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Geckoman rolled his eyes. "Man, we already ruled out the woods. You all need to get pilot's licenses so we can avoid these arguments." He swaggered forward though the door to scan the room, frowning pensively. "So... stylish? I guess?"

He wandered around the room, kicking at one of the mats. He ran a finger down the wall, before sniffing the dust which came off it. Then leaned forward and just took a huge sniff of the wall itself. "Eh, we're good, no one got murdered here. Cough. Or if they did, it was very clean. So, one criticism struck off! Unless this vaunted basement is... actually, let's not go there. Lead on, fearless leader!"

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Erik started to remark on Chris' unusual method of examination but decided against. Odd though it may have been, he'd learned to accept the genetically altered young man's phenomenal sense of smell as a legitimate asset and supposed it retrospect that a passing grade for the training space was a plus overall. "Good to know. Now come on already."

Leading the way to the back of the gym area, the dusty-brown haired fencer opened the door there and took the stairs down to a second, surprisingly durable looking metal door. Beyond that was a basement with a low ceiling that had clearly been intended as some sort of fallout shelter when it was originally constructed. Sturdy beams supported the floor above and the walls were lined with shelves which, while currently empty, could easily be imagined stocked with canned goods and other supplies. At told, it had about half the floor space of the ground level room, though it felt a touch claustrophobic due to the proportions.

The most interesting feature, however, was the desk close by the entrance stacked with a mishmash of ill-matching computer equipment, obviously pieced together from whatever had been available, including some scorched pieces which looked suspiciously like they might have been salvaged from the remains of their former brownstone home. On the monitor hooked up to the mess of circuits a familiar if unusually low resolution figure in a bright green suit beamed at the small group. "Well, aren't you kids a sight for sore eyes?"

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Chris squinted and bent down to look at the flaky old monitor. "Hey, VINCE, you're fixed!" He extended his arms to hug him, realised his mistake and settled for patting the monitor fondly.

"But what's with the bomb shelter? I mean," he shrugged. "Sure, it happened once, but if it happens again, are we liable to be aware of it quickly enough to get down here? As opposed to the more direct route of, I dunno, diving out a window or something?"

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"Good to see you too, chum, but watch the hair, huh?" Vince laughed merrily, apparently still in full possession of his particular sense of humour even with somewhat diminished living conditions.

"The bomb shelter was already here, smart guy," Erik answered the younger fighter's question. "Technically an 'alien invasion shelter' based on some of the stuff I found sitting around. The guy I'm leasing the place from didn't know what was in here; the doors were all locked and rusted shut. Luckily I'm good with locks."

Pausing in her inspection of the space, Ellie looked over with a raised eyebrow. "Since when?"

That drew another laugh from the AI displaying on the monitor. "Since he melted the lock right off with one of those fancy, fiery pig-stickers of his!" Vince's image flickered worryingly for a few second before reasserting itself wearing a brown, homespun robe and raising one hand to wave slowly in front of him. "The forced entry is strong in this one!"

"It's not exactly the old underground base," the swordsman in question admitted, "but it's a start."

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"Indeed," Willow murmured from across the basement.

Like she did above, the dryad had wandered off into the room, examining the sturdiness of the features in detail. She didn't really know what she was looking for and the nature guardian would be the first to acknowledge that she didn't know anything about human construction (except that, eventually, it collapses) but she was compelled to make sure it was safe.

Now she returned to the company of her teammates and extended family, bare feet padding across the concrete floor. "For one," she started, an impish grin forming on her face, "the Underground can't very well be called that anymore." The aftermath of the explosion that leveled the Brownstone, and subsequent cleanup had certainly exposed the Interceptor's old base to the sky.

"And the chances that this place is rigged to blow are pretty slim," she observed. "Whomever built this place didn't have self-destruction in mind."

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"'Rigged to blow', huh?" Erik repeated in a lowered tone, his smirk mirroring the grin on Willow's face. For all the dyrad's protestations about the strange ways of the modern world and her own slightly inhuman perspective she'd picked up a number of modern idioms with no discernible difficulty. The again, that probably qualified as an act of self-preservation given the verbose company she kept. "There's something to be said for the low-tech option, yeah," he continued, resuming his previous volume. "And I'm not just saying that because we're broke and it's our only option."

"There's a line about itty bitty living spaces," Vince quipped from the computer monitor, making a show of straining against the screen's cramped dimensions, "but it escapes me at the moment."

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  • 2 weeks later...

"Eh," replied Geckoman, waving a hand airily. "I don't have the spare parts for a more powerful system for here, but I can scrounge up a spare monitor. I keep a couple of custom ones on hand that don't irritate my eyes when I do the whole Predator trick."

He shrugged his shoulders. "For what its worth, I could probably persuade Liz to do a structural survey, you know, look for any weak points in the construction, make sure nothing's going to explode in a fiery ball of de-handsing agony and fire." For a moment, Geckoman's grin was comically over-exaggerated. "And you know, stick in some new doors and galvanise them so Captain Sword doesn't have to keep using his 'keys'."

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"Well, I wouldn't be too worried," Erik reassured Chris with blatantly forced cheers. "I'm feeling really confident about my new policy of not living in anything designed by an evil, psychopathic--" Ellie interrupted her brother with a light clearing of her throat and a raised eyebrow, causing him to let out a long breath and close his eyes for a moment before continuing. "Right, well. If Liz has time to take a look around, that would be great," he told the younger man. "She did a good job setting up your treehouse and we can use all the favours we can call in at this point."

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