Curious Key

Kat raised her hands carelessly. “It's not a problem, and it'd be nice to get out of the cold for a bit anyway.“ She'd been able to cross continents with a thought for longer than most people her age had been able to drive. Her powers had a lot of treacherous aspects, but slips had always been the simplest one, and tearing only a little more complicated. “I can get changed on my own, just let me know where you need to go.”

The smaller scale of Mali's request went right over Kat's head as her ears caught on 'how far' and the rest of her went about finding the answer to that question. Her eyes turned up and her brows furrowed. “I mean, give me a map of almost anywhere in North America and I can go there.” She said. “Anywhere else, and I'd need to do two slips instead of just one, but we'd be crossing borders and I think they usually get kind of picky about that.”

“That's good,” Kat said easily, “because I am totally self-propelling.” She had never bothered to get a license. Which normally worked out pretty well. Kat circled around the side and tried to peer at Mali's phone held up her hand and counted on fingers. “There's a pizza place a little south of town that's pretty decent . . . that's a burger place that my roommate keeps trying to drag me to . . . And they sell custard there, or . . ." Beat. “. . . I mean,” Kat rubbed at the back of her neck. “Technically, we could get pretty much anywhere.”

“Yeah!” Kat hesitated. “And besides, getting drunk can be a LOT more dangerous when you're . . .” While Mali was one of the rare unpowered individuals at Claremont, it had been no secret that Kat was not. “. . . You know.” “Antsy?” Kat feigned ignorance, putting on her best 'innocent' face. “I don't know what you mean.” For answer, she clapped her laptop abruptly shut and tucking it into her pack and bolting upright. Pulling her jacket back on, she moved her shoulders to let it fall naturally over her body. “Got anywhere in mind?” Kat tugged at her jacket as she met Mali's eyes.

"Partying just, doesn't sound like my thing, either?" Kat shrugged and leaned back into the sofa. "My roommate is determined to try to drag me out somewhere.” Her mouth shifted into something sly and insidious. “And she's welcome to try all she wants.” “I know what you mean. It's all studying and maintaining.” She rubbed at her wrist. “By the time all that's done, I just want to lay done, put on some headphones and forget the world exists for a little bit.”

When Mali mentioned Rudolf, Kat grinned insidiously, lifted a thumb—now glittering in black-red haze—over her nose. “You can say that again.” She said, voice raised to an obnoxious pitch. “We're just a bunch of useful freaks and weirdos who never learned to play nice with anybody normal.” Beat. Kat's face fell, sighed. “Too real.” She shook her hand, and the 'light' went out. “It's just so . . .” She waved her hands as she struggled to find the word. Snapped her fingers! “Jarring! We go straight from somewhere where weird and crazy was the normal, and then we're done and get sent out into . . . This.” Claremont did a good job. It prepared them as well as it could. They could fight off a super team, they could control their powers, they could operating with a secret identity. But adjusting to reality. That was hard to get. “So yeah!” She clapped, mouth curling into a half-smile. “It's great to see you. I mean it. What have you been up to?”

Small world indeed! Kat had tried to limit how much contact she had with her old Claremont friends, since she took off the cape. Seeing them had sent an electric terror through her. Now, though . . . Just like that, they were comrades again. No fear, no worry. It was nice. Maybe that was why the school therapist had kept bringing up the possibility she might be ready to go back into hero work, during her last year. "I see what you mean. Normally, anyone who comes outta Claremont sticks around here," she made a vague, wide gesture. "No way to avoid seeing someone, we're pretty . . . conspicuous." Kat looked left and right . . . Nobody. "I think this is my first time seeing someone else from Claremont just . . ." She made a face as she tried to find the word for it. "Hanging out?" Kat held up her hands and shrugged, you know what I mean. "Studying is the WORST." Kat played up her reaction as she whined, rolling her eyes hard. "Sometimes I wish Omega would come around and put my out of my misery so I won't have to write another essay."

Kat was so caught up in wishing to be just about anywhere else that the noise jolted her a bit. She turned, somewhat alarmed, and looked up to see . . . “Mali?” Pushing her laptop aside, Kat pushed herself up into a sitting position. She was wearing a pair of thick, dark-red leggings, brown boots and a white 'FCU' tee. A jacket, once draped over her torso like a blanket, had slid down into her lap. The young metahuman peered up at the not-stranger with bright red eyes, connecting a girl she knew with the woman who was standing in front of her. “Remember me?” Kat pointed a finger at her face as it slid into a half-smile. “Kat? From Claremont?"

Kat wished Algebra 2000 was as simple as rupturing reality. But—apparently—disintegrating homework was frowned upon. The FCU library remained sparsely decorated, even with Christmas looming near. It had the sleek, modern tint. Smooth and silver, with long bannisters and uncomfortable-looking benches lined the outside. Inside, on the lower two floors, was a coffee shop and rows of free-to-use computers and desks, partitioned from each other by glass walls. Above that, the shelves the extensive FCU main library divided the building into discrete parts, with conference rooms ready for booking online (and schedules booked full of students clamoring for one last study session), stacks of books and recycled furniture from other parts of campus that decided they'd deserved something better. Kat had staked her claim on one of the couches, plugged her laptop into the outlet beside it and curled up, too fed up with 'X's and 'Y's to care about her shoes on the cushions, laptop glinting blue light as the sun in the window across the room dipped a little closer to the city skyline, oranges and reds of the near-horizon fighting against the electric-white of the library's overhead lights. She made a soft, distressed sound and pressed her hand into her cheek, looking up from her computer and, longingly, outside.

“Good . . . That sounds . . . totally safe.” Kat tilted her head to the side a bit, tested her thoughts for sarcasm. Nodded slightly. “Like. Really, actually.” She grasped nervously at her wrist and fidgeted. Just sit back and enjoy the presentation, Kat. Put Warp away and pay attention. She took out her phone, opened a memo and started punching in some notes. But, she had to wonder . . . no one could really jump dimensions using this device. But, could she? She'd undergone so many examinations at Claremont, so many people sitting her down and trying to explain how exactly her powers worked. Maybe she could. But, in spite of how excited this Spence was about exchanging books, Kat couldn't imagine why she would want to try. One world had enough problems already. Why mess around with more? That reminded Kat of the prompt her professor had asked her to answer in essay. “So, what can we learn from all this?”

Kat pressed both hands over her eyes and exhaled through her teeth because blood and fire this felt /fishy/ but she couldn't tell if it was because something untoward was going to happen or just because she'd spent too long thinking like a hero. When she was in Claremont, Kat went on a day trip to an ordinary aquarium that got raided by men in scuba gear in a fancy sub and weird natical weapons. It was hard to take a walk down the street sometimes without wandering if someone was about to turn into a spider and spout some drivel about an unholy sacrifice, grabbing someone and trying to scale a skyscraper. So, it was hard for her to share Dr. Spencer's enthusiasm, but she couldn't say for sure her doubts had any foundation. Her first instinct was to throw her voice in with the other stranger, but dammit, scientists in Freedom went on weird experiments that would have Icarus raise their eyebrows every day, and usually it turned out fine. There was a reason that people like Dr. Spencer kept getting funding. Kat had no idea what the odds were between 'monstrosity that must be stopped' and 'boon to all humanity' was but it had to be pretty favorable. Still, she had concerns. “And, like, the stuff they send through. There's no diseases in it, sure, but it's not unsafe in other ways, is it?” Between blinks, she saw flares of red, dark power. Worlds burning. Skies full of marshalled Omegadrones, thick as a second cloud cover. The wails of— Stop. Breathe in. Breathe out. “Not everyone out there wants to make friends,” Kat said, eyes downcast. But this time her voice wasn't high enough to carry over the murmurs of the other students.

20Q

Warp (33) Straw Gods (5) Cool Cats (16) Peace On Earth, And Mercy Mild? (12) Winter Vignette Weirdo Origin Story Vignette Tyrant Heart Other Reputation

In most cities, a spatial distortion like this would have been a favorite of the students. Kat's too, probably, come to think of it. The crowd seemed invested enough—it takes a special kind of schooling to make a spatial distortion boring, and Dr. Spencer seemed to have skipped it—but in Freedom City, the spatial anomaly was just another bit of weird. When caped crusaders soared through the skies and battles with supervillains went down in the streets daily, your idea of what was 'normal' was a bit skewed. A spatial distortion was just another thing that was probably going to happen eventually anyway. Regardless, it was still a point of academic interest, since Dr. Spencer had come along to set up his dimensional viewer doohickey, Professors all over FCU had been sending their students to take a look. Most of the audience looked unfamiliar to Kat . . . She supposed that most of the students who'd taken Earth In The Multiverse Just wanted an easy A in the sciences and didn't care about the extra credit. Maybe that wasn't fair. Not everyone could get around as easily as Kat could, after all . . . Still, it made her uncomfortable, and she wasn't sure why. She did enough hopping around that it wasn't like spatial wonkiness really bothered her, but . . . Kat wasn't sure how she felt about this whole distortion business. It wasn't till she heard "—made contact—" that she realized what, exactly, was bothering her. Her hand shot up, but she didn't bother to wait for being called on. "So. Other worlds can talk to us through this wibbly, wobbly . . . space thingy." She chewed on her lip. "Is that all? Like, is that all they can do? Talk?"

Weirdo Mid-December, 2016 Winter had come to court Freedom, and in her infatuation she had gifted Freedom with the only symbol of love that she understood. The streets piled high with snow, the salt road workers spread across the earth doing no good under the sheer weight of the ice. The city suffocated, lights dimmed, cars clearing from the roads when they were not simply abandoned there, leaving the city desolate, frozen and shy when winter had deigned to kiss her. In the FCU dorms, snow sloughed of the slanted roofs and fell to the ground in clumps. The streets could not be told from the sidewalks, except for the carcasses of lost cars. One window, still lit, with the curtains drawn back. Framed in golden light, a girl peered into the storm from behind glass. Her dorm was tiny—far smaller than her room at Claremont had been, but she had been given to expect that, all things considered. It said less about FCU's dorms than it did about how much Claremont had spoiled her. All the same, it was quaint and warm. She sat upright on her bed, her laptop open and forgotten in her lab as she peered into the storm. She she bit at her lip and squirmed her toes, but no matter how much she wished, she could not see any real distance through the storm. She wore a set of headphones, connected to her computer. Kat felt something pelt her in the back. She ignored it. “—Storm is expected to continue through the night commuters are encouraged to stay at home accidents can be found—” Again. And a third time, more quickly. Kat sighed and pulled the headphones down so they dangled around her neck. Before she could manage anything, she heard “Can't you go one day without burying yourself in that crap?” Kat spun around in bed toward her roommate. She was a broad-shouldered and well-endowed giant of a woman, with a broad stance and a hard, intimating scowl, dark haired with a streak of purple. The sort of woman that left many blushing, tongue-tied and intimidated all at once. Kat rolled her eyes. “What's your damage today, Ril?” “What's MY damage?” Riley put hands on her hips and made a face. “You spend all day gods know where, or hidden up here with your headphones on like there ain't anything else in the world.” Ril crossed her arms and scowled. “No wonder you have no friends.” For a while, Kat had hated her roommate. She was in the way, and always so nosey. But after a while the nonsense slid off her like water off a duck. But this was just too much. “Rill. You jumped right past 'fussy' to 'terrible.' Either tell me what's actually bugging you or buzz off.” Ril huffed, but she didn't say anything. Kat fall back until she was laying on her back on her bed, head draped upside-down over the side. She stared soberly up at an increasingly baffled looking Riley. “I demand to be taken seriously.” To that, Ril barely managed to choke a laugh. “Weirdo,” she said, and finally stopped pacing, throwing herself back on her bunk. “Most of my teachers have called tomorrow off,” she admitted, finally. “But math is still holding off. Why? There's no WAY the buses are going to be able to run tomorrow. It's dumb.” Kat righted herself and shrugged. “You never know. There's probably some hero out there who'd be able to clear the snow out somehow, if it stops. Roads might be clean and dry tomorrow for all we know.” But Ril's hands clenched. “Freedom and its heroes,” she spat, her mouth twisting into a derisive line. Kat didn't understand her roommate's knee-jerk reaction toward heroes, though it'd been obvious from within an hour of rooming with the girl. Maybe this was an opportunity. “Why do you hate heroes so much?” “Hate?” A pensive look came over Ril's face. “No. I wouldn't say . . . You ever been to Bedlam?” Katharine shook her head. “It's a garbage-fire city.” And then Kat thought she COULD hear hate welling up. “Every bit of it is rotten. And you know what Bedlam has? Heroes.” Riley laid back, staring at the ceiling. “You come here, it's 'heroes' this, 'heroes' that, like they're the only thing that keeps this city above water. You know why Freedom is so great? It's the people. Like you and me, not those heroes they throw the spotlight at. If it weren't for the people, this city would be just as bad, but who gets the credit? Heroes. It just makes me so mad!” And it was clear that nothing Kat could say would change her mind, so she did not say anything. “—Pileup in west freedom, emergency workers can't to get through the snow, on—” Kat heard something through her headphones and held it closer to her ear, listening. She shut them off, closed her laptop and got up. “I'm going to go for a walk.” Ril gave her a weird look. “Where?” A smile. “Somewhere no one will bother me for listening to my music, for a start.” “UGH.” Ril rolled away. “Just get out of here.” So Kat stood up, stepped outside and shut the door behind her.

Content Reputation Chart 20Q HellQ Origin Story

Katharine Shade—Warp

"That's my line," Kat said, smiling sideways at Morsa. But the artifizoids were still firing down on them, and she had precious little time to spare for compliments. Kat flipped backward easily out of the way of two shots landed clean, raising her hand toward one of the artifizoids for a long moment. She bit down on her lip, considered, and smiled life a knife. Kat aimed lower and released a wailing lance of entropy from her fingertips that crashed into the catwalk beneath a pair of artifizoids. Darkness like a night without stars swept across it as the stuff of the Terminus at it from the outside in, until the walkway simply vanished out of existence, leaving the two robots in empty air and sending them plummeting into the chemical vats with a splash.

Dang. Let's roll! 7 . . . Actually, Kit has a rank of protection in her clothing that I forgot to take into account. So the roll is ACTUALLY 6. Let's spend a hero point on that. 16 So . . . I think she's 'only' bruised and dazed? Rolling concentration to see if she can't keep her high defense: 14. Ouch. I believe that makes her officially flat-footed.

Teleporting made the subtle art of conversation hard for Warp; while Heraldo and Fly were off soaring through the air off in whatever direction needed going, Warp needed to stay behind and pick a new rooftop vantage point to leap to. End result? Most of the time their fliers were too far away to talk to without shouting loud enough to the disturb the civilians beneath them. Still, there was plenty of time to talk with Tsunami. She, at least, didn't have the luxury of flight. Kat knew that Giang was nervous about leaving school grounds. Every kid at Claremont seemed to have some origin that made things more complicated. It was just the price they paid for being able to casually break the laws of physics, Kat supposed. "That was small stuff," Kat said, hoping to comfort Giang a little by belittling the dangers they rallied against. "If that's the worst we're facing tonight we'll be headed home early." As Fly made a midair stop Warp stole the opportunity to flash to the rooftop beneath, her eyes already looking for the next leap before she realized Fly's intended break. Kat tucked a hand behind her head and grinned. "Not that I saw," Kat announced . . . Though it was getting quite dark and night vision was not one of her talents.

And now that I've crawled out of my hole in the ground, Kat is going to try to attack a catwalk and drop some robots in the drink! She will be hitting it with a disintegrate and seeing what happens. Well . . . that's something.

Finals are now over, come what may. Hopefully I can get back into the posting rhythm again.

I should have posted in here before. Anyhow, for the next few weeks I have finals and I really want to put all the effort I can into it; so I will be busy. Sorry for anyone in a thread with me right now.

Warp did her best to pass her relief off as general good cheer as the topic turned from her schoolwork. "Imagine so," she said, stretching her arms behind her back. "Plenty of heroes will be watching the fens anyway." So might as well focus on other places, try to catch a criminal trying to make the big score before heading off at the Fens to hit thugs and muggers. Warp could get behind that. "Just say the word."