Stupid is as Stupid Does (IC)

[Electra]

"Oh no, please don't," Miss A cautioned him. "You must never do that around me or my equipment, it's very dangerous. It hurts me!" She gave him a frown so full of sorrow and pathos that even a man with a heart of stone couldn't help but be moved. "When we are done looking at your thinky, you can show me how you make the ball again. That's very interesting." She patted his shoulder soothingly and slid the scanner down to position it above his head. "Right now, just relax and think about bunnies hopping in a beautiful green field. Can you do that for me?"

[Supercape]

"Bunnies?" asked Supercape. He spent a good few moment mouthing the word with a furrowed brow, until his face brightened and he smiled from ear to ear.

"Hop - hops!" he grinned.

"No more lights pretty lady. Me not hurt you. Can we play later?" he asked excitedly, clapping his hands.

He looked sad for a moment "I wish my thinky was working again. Can you make it better?"

[Electra]

"Yes I can," she promised. "I just need a few minutes of you being very quiet and good. Can you show me how quiet and good you can be?" Miss A asked coaxingly. "If you're so very good, I will give you a piece of candy when I'm done looking at your thinky."

Even as she engaged with him verbally on his minimal level, most of her attention was caught up in the results of the MRI scan. It looked as though he'd been hit with some sort of focused light wave that had shorted out portions of his cerebellum related to higher functioning, essentially knocking them offline. It looked to be a temporary problem, one that would fix itself in days or weeks, but she wasn't about to wait that long. What had been done could be undone. She quickly began recalibrating a scanner to emit light waves in a certain frequency pattern, her fingers flying with speed and grace.

[Supercape]

Supercape sat patiently (for once) in the MRI scanner, twiddling his thumbs, and humming a movement from the Peer Gynt Suite.

"Me thinks me prefer something to drink. Red drinky stuff that taste nice and make you go giggly. Me thinks me likes that. Have you got any red drinky giggly stuff?"

He wiggled his toes in his boots.

He looked at Miss A and giggled. His own costume changed into a mirror image of hers and he started laughing "Me wearing pretty ladies clothes! hahaha! funny!"

[Electra]

MIss A snickered, for all she was only paying a little attention. Even a little of her attention was a formidable thing. "You're lucky I'm too nice to take a picture," she murmured, finishing her calibrations. "Okay," she told him, holding the scanner in the air above his head. "I want you to look at this very closely. It's going to make a bright flashing light, and then you're going to feel better."

Closing her own eyes to protect the sensitive optical sensors, she thumbed on the device and let it shine its focused light patterns right into Supercape's face!

[Supercape]

"Bright lights are very pretty!" remarked Supercape "all swishy-swirly.. patterns... of light... in repeating oscillations... do I detect a fractal composition underpinning the temporal variance? very clever! that would stimulate the mesolimbic system to counterbalance and residual opto-radial disturbance..."

He grinned and looked at Miss A. "Magnificent! I can't thank you enough! My thinky is back!" he sucked up the noodle trailing from his mouth.

He looked down at his costume.

"Oh dear" he muttered, blushing.

[Electra]

Miss A laughed, extending a hand to help him sit up. "I'm not sure that's a good look on you," she told him good-humoredly. "I much prefer you with your magnificent cape. How are you feeling?" She ran the scanner over him again, but things were looking much closer to normal now, brain function nearing 100%. "All the parts of your brain back into working order again?"

[Supercape]

Supercape quickly altered his costume to his regular outfit, although a few specks of Miss A's colours ended up on the tips of his cape and needed to be literally shaken out.

"Yes, I think so. May take a while to be absolutely tip top again, but everything seems to be in working order. I feel more like Stupidcape than Supercape right now. "

He wiped his mouth and looked around. "Its all a bit dim. I remember Dr. Simian, a light, and then it all gets a bit foggy, although I suspect that's a blessing. I have images. Of being a total ass as you yanks would say. "

He stood up. "What the hell happened?"

[Electra]

"You were hit with a beam that temporarily disrupted some of your neurocortical pathways, leaving you unable to access most of the higher functions of your brain for a little While," Miss A reported. "I was able to reverse the effects by recalibrating a scanner to basically reboot those sectors of your brain, and it worked quite well. Also, I had no idea you were capable of disrupting radio transmissions. You disrupted my communications quite thoroughly for a little while," she told him with a wry grin. "And probably that of a few hundred thousand Freedom Citizens."

[Supercape]

"Ah yes" replied Supercape. "The principle is easy enough. Electromagnetic pulse. I just shift a few subatomic particles around, loss of some matter, and it creates a very large pulse. Mainly light, but a huge radiowave burst too. "

He cracked his knuckles.

"Well, as you have all these sensors around... here, let me demonstrate..."

[Electra]

"No!" Miss A said with uncharacteristic sharpness. "You should know better! This is a working laboratory! If you want to experiment with your radio waves, the responsible thing to do is to find a shielded area and work in a controlled environment. Do you know how many delicate experiments you could disrupt with an incautious demonstration of a power like that?" She held up the scanner again and ran it over his head, as though searching for previously undiagnosed damage.

[Supercape]

"Yes yes, of course! what was I thinking!" muttered Supercape "clearly still recovering. Goodness, I hope I don't regress again. " he started getting anxious "what does the scanner show? any damage to the hippocampus? frontal lobes still intact? that was rather impulsive... prefrontal cortex dopamine levels still normal?"

He started breathing heavily. "No, no. Must get a grip. I'm sure its all fine. " He looked at Miss A "it is all fine up there isn't it?"

[Electra]

"I don't see any lasting damage," Miss A told him, "though you may want to consult a neurologist who has more specific experience with injuries to the brain. For now, though," she told him, "we still have work to do. Dr. Simian is trying to set his ray up on top of Freedom Plaza, and if he sets it off, the whole city could suffer what you did, or even worse. Give me just a second here..." She went to a big cabinet and pulled out a pair of what looked to be high tech safety goggles, and did something to them that involved exposing about half the wires and covering them with electrical tape. The lenses turned dark, like very powerful sunglasses.

She handed them over to Supercape. "These should protect you from the frequencies of light he was using in that beam," she told him. "Make sure to keep them on at all times, just in case. I have a natural immunity due to my hypercomplex brainwave functions providing neural path redundancy, so we should be able to take him down. You ready?"

[Supercape]

"Errr..." muttered Supercape "are you quite sure these will work?" he asked, uncertainly. "I'm quite fond of my thinky, to be perfectly frank. " He turned the goggles over in his hand. A piece of wiring fell off as he handled it, and swung loose on some duct tape. Despite the shoddy nature of the work, it seemed to have an electrical current, and if he peered through them, they did look very dark.

He put them on hesitantly.

"How do I look?"

[Electra]

"A lot less stupid than when you came in here, I'll tell you that much," Miss A pointed out with a rueful smile. "If we ever do this again, I'll try to find something more stylish for you, honest. But for now, we've got work to do." She led the way down the hallway to the back door, casting a single look towards a room with an electronic lock on the left side of the corridor. There was a brand new green Chevy Volt outside the door, but Miss A paid no attention to it as she vaulted into the sky, off to save the day again!

[Supercape]

Supercape quickly elongated his cape to its normal magnificence, and leapt into the sky behind Miss A. "Slow down!" he yelled, remind her again that he simply wasn't as speedy as her. It was tough work, shifting atoms behind him and in front of him, all the time making sure his own body "forgot" that gravity existed.

Still, he conceded, far better she met Dr. Simian before he did. He felt himself get sweaty just thinking about the ape...

[Electra]

Miss A did a wide loop to let Supercape catch up, admitting to herself that she was more distracted than she liked to let on. She wasn't at home, she wasn't safe, how was she supposed to concentrate all her attention at the task at hand? At least now she had a competent body to work with, but that didn't change the fact that her brain was locked into an empty room in an office complex, and who knew what could happen to her? While they flew, she called to Supercape, "Do you remember anything?"

[Supercape]

"Its all jumbled up and silly, but yes, I remember some stuff. Travelling in a car. Some woman feeding me noodles. You, not talking... asleep? did Simian affect you too?"

He started getting panicky "Did he affect you too?" he clutched his chest and started hyperventilating "are you sure you are safe... we you sure we are safe? what if we both loose our thinky?"

[Electra]

"I was fine," she assured him. "You remember the waldo-control gloves I used to defuse that bomb? I needed to use something very like that in order to repair the equipment damaged by your EM pulse. You thought I was sleeping, but I was merely concentrating very hard. My assistant had to corral you with food to get you to leave me alone long enough to finish working. I eventually sent her out to get more food just in case my focused-light beam didn't work. You were very insistent," she added with a half-smile. "Though I wasn't about to give you any alcohol."

[Supercape]

"Well she seemed quite handy at the lab, from what I remember. Which isn't a lot, of course. Was doing some fiddling about, so you must have trained her quite well. Perhaps a bit stressed out, but I guess I wasn't behaving myself. "

"I suppose I should apologise to her. You must introduce me at some point. "

Gathering his cape around him, he pointed to the Plaza. "As for our nemesis... are you sure you are safe from that idiot-beam?"

[Electra]

"She's not a people person," Miss A said dryly. "Your best apology would be a note, really, or I'll just pass it along. I'm perfectly sure I'll be safe, don't worry. Just don't unleash that EMP blast again. It's damned inconvenient." She climbed higher as they approached the tallest buildings in Freedom City. "Let's do the same thing we did last time, but better," she suggested. "You come in from the front and distract him. I'll swing in from behind and grab the gun. Once the gun is neutralized, you can take him down and we'll call in the Star Squad to take him back to the zoo. Good?"

[Supercape]

"Errr. Yes. Sounds a great plan!" Nodded Supercape, pressing the goggles very firmly on to his face.

"Distract him how exactly? Let him fry me brain again? Give him a banana?" he started twirling one of the wires on the goggles. "You are quite sure these goggles will work aren't you?"

"Ahem, not that I doubt the brilliance of your mind, of course!" he added, apologetically.

He clutched his chest and started hyperventilating. "I'm getting flashbacks!" he gasped. "I keep seeing bunny rabbits hopping all around me!"

[Electra]

Miss A swooped around to face him, stopping him in the air by the simple expedient of grabbing his shoulders and giving him a little shake. "Dammit, Quentin! Pull yourself together!" she snapped. "I need you with me on this! If you can't handle it, you get out of the sky right now and find a safe hiding place, because I can't be saving the city and babysitting you at the same time. Yes he shot you, yes it was scary, but it's over now, and he's not going to do it again, because we're going to stop him."

She looked him straight in the eyes, her face grim and her voice level. "Because if we don't stop him, he's going to do what he did to you to a lot of other people, and they aren't going to be as lucky as you. Some of them are going to get hurt. Some of them are going to die, unless we stop it. Are you with me on this?"

[Supercape]

"Ahem, yes of course, dear!" mumbled Supercape "right behind you. Or in front of you, or whatever. That gruesome gorilla shall not peril the city one moment longer" he waved his fist. "Its just I'm rather fond of my thinky, you know. Rather fond indeed!"

His magnificent cape sprawled out once again and grew even larger and more magnificent. "Onwards, to oblivion!" shouted Supercape.

"Errr... I mean to victory!" he corrected himself. And pressed the goggled once more tightly to his face.

As he swept forward to the Plaza, he could see Dr. Simian erecting an even larger contraption on the top of the building, a pulsating aerial twice, no, thrice the size of his prototype at the park.

[Electra]

Miss A watched him go for just a moment, her face full of concern, then with a shake of her lovely head, she flew away to take care of her part of the mission. She'd just have to hope that there was no damage she hadn't been able to see, and that he'd be able to overcome whatever trauma or lingering fuzziness remained, with the fate of the city at stake. If nothing else, she admitted to herself, he'd be a convenient target that would keep the mad monkey from using the big device until he was dealt with. Maybe that was only borderline ethical, but she was quite certain that the goggles would protect him from the idiot ray. Any other attacks, well, she was afraid he was on his own for that.