Tesseract vanished from her perch and in an eyeblink was among the attacking thugs. A gun had appeared in her hand in between jumps. Erupting out of thin air between two of the street toughs, she discharged the weapon once...twice. The sound of it going off was deep, and quiet...a subsonic round. Two of them were rocked by impacts, staggering back with red blossoms appearing on their abdomens. Not blood though. The rounds were non-newtonian gelatin in special capsules. Getting hit by one felt like getting punched by Arnold Schwarzenegger because of how the round flattened and expanded on impact...but it wouldn't penetrate skin, wouldn't do deep tissue damage. Tesseract wasn't executing criminals on the street. She winked out then before they could do more than stop and look around at her. Another gunshot; she was over on the other side of the group. They swung around again and she vanished again. Four times, five times...pop pop pop pop...she blipped around the alley unpredictably then vanished again, each time firing with incredible precision and accuracy to incapacitate rather than seriously injure or maim. The leader she avoided as well, just depriving him of his backup so the Silver Spider could finish the job!

Rochelle didn't make it home before something gave out. She felt dizzy, lightheaded, and the world was spinning around her. Concussion maybe, she thought feebly. Inner ear? Sounds did seem kind of muted. She caught herself when she fell but finally lowered herself to the rough asphalt of the street. The smell was awful; choking fumes from a neighborhood full of synthetics and plastics burning. Smoke inhalation? Shit. Despite all that, she didn't pass out. Not quite. There in the street, on her belly, trying to get her balance, the world bled into nonsense. Colors smeared around her, warbling and chirping. Roach unraveled, like a ball of yarn being pulled at. The world around her, the very thoughts and memories in her mind, unspooled and spaghettified and were pulled into a churning singularity between consciousness and unconsciousness. Memory was the first thing to knit back together. Memory of blurred vision, of inchoate sounds. Of warmth. Of smells. The first memory of a newborn child, crystallizing. It went on from there; Rochelle re-living herself. Knitting herself back into existence. Each moment was bright and fresh and clear, and she gradually found context for these early experiences as her infant senses became more able to make sense of her environment. The irony wasn't lost on her, when she reclaimed the capacity for irony. Once, seventeen years ago, she'd had to learn how to assemble a cacophony of random light and noise into images and sounds that had meaning. Now she was doing that again, only more. It was a mess though, a riot. Every sense screamed into her brain. On some level she knew this wasn't normal, she wasn't normal, nothing was normal. Roach wasn't lying on pavement, illuminated by firelight and moonlight. She was adrift on a vast ocean of energy, constantly oscillating between rest states. Quadrillions of electrons screamed at each other, stopping her from just falling to the center of the Earth through the surface. Radiation from across the spectrum beat a savage timpani on her back. Infrared, microwave, radio...and just a smidge of red and orange and yellow. Deprived of the shield of feeble human senses in the face of reality with its mask ripped off, Rochelle should have been scoured away to nothing. The dance of a million billion trillion quantum states in their wild bundles of entangled madness was too much for anyone, anything, to take in. Shutting it out, ignoring it, slamming the mask back down was the only way forward. But she didn't do that; she didn't know how. Instead she swallowed it. That bright ball of pulsing awareness was pushed back to the back of her head where it sat like the sun in the sky. Too much to look at directly, but illuminating everything else. And somehow, her subconscious managed to contain those overlapping infinities rather than being shredded by them. Roach opened her eyes. The world was blurry through her tears, like it had been when she was newborn. She propped herself up on one arm and used the other to wipe across her face, bringing everything into focus. The street, the neighborhood, was a disaster. Trees lay strewn about like matchsticks, most of them burned or even still on fire. Houses were in tatters; those that still stood at all. That first glance told her everything she needed to know. There was noise in the signal, but the way the trees lay, the direction that the houses had been scattered in as they broke... Rochelle looked up at the sky. There. The incoming space rock had exploded there in midair. Too close to the ground...much too close. There'd be a crater dug by the explosive force of it further in, but she wouldn't have to go that far to get home. She got to her feet somehow, despite feeling like she weighed five times more than she did. Roach already knew what she'd find. Two blocks closer to the blast center. More exposure, more energy reaching the ground. Her home was gone, pulverized as if by a hammer from on high. Her mother...probably not even recognizable as having been human in the ash and rubble. All of that streamed through her brain as she surveyed the scene for just a few seconds, but she moved forward anyway. Whatever had changed in her, whatever was different, she was still a frightened young human, and every instinct pushed her to try to find someone she trusted to face this with. =-=-=-=-=-= It was over an hour before emergency vehicles reached the place Rochelle was sitting in front of the remains of her mother's house. Firefighters were shocked to find a 'survivor,' and she had to explain she'd come from further out and found all this. From there it was an ambulance that did not take her directly to a hospital since the paramedic didn't find any immediate medical issues with her other than some bruises and other minor injuries that they treated then and there. The hospitals were already overflowing with people in much worse condition. She was taken to one of the temporary housing facilities being set up around the perimeter of the Impact Zone, assigned a cot and a lockbox, and...that was it. With only the clothes she was wearing, and the contents of her pockets, Roach was left on her own in the middle of a sports arena in Spokane, as the city struggled to cope with the magnitude of the disaster that had befallen it. Growing up, Roach had always been the kind of person who valued solitude. She'd always thought she just wanted to be left alone. Sitting there on a cot, in dirty sooty clothes with no one left in the world who knew where she was...and no one where she was that knew who she was...she realized that she'd never really known what being alone meant. Her phone was broken. She couldn't call her dad. Sooner or later someone would get around to her and ask if she had someone to stay with, but for now they'd found it easier and faster just to assume not. Rochelle took her phone out and looked it over. Yep. Still broken. Except... a sports arena would have certain supplies, cleaning supplies, janitor's closet; there were chemical reactions (snapshots of classrooms; formula on chalkboards, paragraphs from textbooks) that could make a sort of epoxy-glue type mixture; the cellphone screen can be removed, immersed on one side in the epoxy, cured...a temporary fix but it would let it function again if the actual screen elements weren't too damaged; and she didn't need the screen to work, just the keypad and internals...and all she needed was a screwdriver to get the case open, check the battery connections; those were the most likely to fail because of the impact from falling at the school, temporary repairs could be made with the same epoxy and a bit of spare copper; rip out wiring from a small electrical appliance if needed... Fortunately, no one really had time to keep an eye on her as she padded out of the makeshift barracks-style sleeping area and searched out a janitor's closet. Always one to take a locked door as a personal challenge, Roach had been picking locks since she'd been inspired to start learning to at twelve. She even had some improvised picks she'd made. The result wouldn't have made her much of a cat burglar, but a janitor closet wasn't exactly a sealed vault in a bank. And Roach herself was...different now. Focusing in, she could clearly make out the tiny scraping of metal on metal, visualize how that translated into tumblers moving. The door opened easily and quickly, and she found everything she needed inside. Even protective gear. Half an hour later, her phone worked. The device was half-mummified in duct tape, and the screen was still cracked, even if now glued together; the images that came up on it were a little blurred now and always would be...but none of that mattered. She could call her dad. For a second her hand trembled, and a memory of her mother's face surfaced. Tired, frustrated...that was how she looked when Roach had left to go to the school to wait for destruction. It would always be the final view she had of her. Black spots rose up in her eyes, and for that second all the emotions she'd stuffed away threatened to burst their pen and wash over her. Slamming that door felt bad...like she was slamming the door on a puppy who just wanted to play in the yard. Not now. In a few minutes. Dad first. Surely Shelly was all right. The odds it had been hit were tiny. A little town like that? Surely he was fine. Even so, it took a lot more effort than it should have to move her thumb to 'Call' and tap the repaired screen.

"Every god buys their flock," Maighan points out. "What do you think prayers are?" "I still think this whole thing is rather suspect...but my salvation yet lies on your path. I shall follow."

The first thing Rochelle felt was...warm. There was a smell. It was the smell of...basement? No just dirt. Dust. She coughed, and immediately was aware of another feeling. Oh yeah, that was pain. It flared along her abdomen, hot and bright, right about where her ribcage ended. And yeah, that warmth? That was really more...pressure. And the dirt? Well there was definitely smoke mixed in with it. She opened an eye, and saw clouds covering the stars. Weirdly shaped clouds. Long and thin and kind of angled like they were coming down from the sky towards her. At the sides of her vision there were jagged edges, dark shadows of something. Rochelle tried to move her arms and with some effort managed to verify they ached and were numb, but were still moveable. Trying sent another stab through her belly though. The dust smell was starting to get weaker...or maybe the smoke smell was getting stronger. A few more details filtered in as she pulled her arms and legs free. Fortunately she wasn't buried in rubble. Some chunks had landed around her and over her, but fairly small ones. Roach was no doctor, but after a bad minute or two, she decided her rib was probably not broken...it hurt, but she was breathing okay other than some pain when she inhaled deeply. And she had other incentives not to breathe too hard. It was the gymnasium. The wall behind the big scorecard on the long north side of the building had buckled and caved partway in. That in turn had made a big chunk of the ceiling and roof collapse. Oh hey, that must have been the part SHE was on! Fortunately the entire roof hadn't continued to collapse, or she probably would have been buried. But there was a fire licking through the partly-broken wall, and the shattered windows around by the doors. Her head hurt. It felt like someone had stuffed cotton into it. Her ears were ringing too much to easily make out the crackle of flames, but she assumed it must be there. When Roach tried saying anything, she could hear it muffled through her skull...but her ears were still very much traumatized by what had happened. What HAD happened? It looked like a bomb had gone off! She escaped out the locker rooms on the south side of the building, which seemed flame free. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. The school was ablaze. The student union was an inferno, and the two long class buildings near it weren't much better. The smaller 'temporary' buildings that had been moved in last year to help with student volume were off their foundations entirely, piled up against the cafeteria. Looked like school really was out forever. Still struggling to keep up with current events, Roach's brain suddenly latched onto something. The asteroid! The Visitor! It had missed, then come apart! The chunks, tumbling through the night sky in her binoculars... There had been a sudden blaze of light, and then a sound louder than loud. Like a thunderclap experienced from inside the lightning. Looking at the columns of smoke though, the distant orange glow cast against rising plumes, there were other places that had it worse. The school must have been a little ways from the impact site. It would have hit...to the north. Rochelle's heart stopped. North of the school. Oh. Oh shit. She jammed a hand into her pants pocket and fished her phone out, but the screen was cracked and lifeless. From the shockwave or the fall or something that had fallen on her...she didn't know. It didn't matter. And looking around, Roach could see there was no power anywhere in eyeshot. No streetlights, no houselights, no headlights. Adding insult to injury, her bike was gone too. She should have brought it inside! Or...would chaining it have mattered? Probably wasn't rated to survive meteor impacts...damnit... Unsteadily at first, but slowly getting her legs and feet back under her, Rochelle made her way out towards the bike racks. Past that would be the track and the field...then she could jump the fence, if anything was left of it, and try to get home on foot. Her mom might be okay. She could have gone into the basement. Or...or the bathroom; that was safer right? Her lungs burned from the smoke in the air, rising from the new suburban hell in front of her. Her bruised ribs throbbed and stabbed her. But Rochelle broke into a run anyway; the only one trying to get IN to the Spokane Impact Zone as the city awoke, the sirens started blaring, and the fires climbed ever higher.

Personal Information: Birth Name: Rochelle "Roach" McKendrick Identity: - Occupation: High School Student Marital Status: Single Physical Traits Height: 5'3" Weight: 103 Lbs D.O.B: March 15th 2011 Age (apparent age): 17 Gender: Female Ethnic Background: Caucasian Nationality (place of origin): American Eye Color: Hazel Hair Color: Brown (often dyed) Handedness: Right Appearance: Small, scrawny, scrappy girl with short brunette hair that she keeps trying different dyes on. Somewhat desperate to look older, Roach has gotten some piercings and wears some makeup...eyeliner mostly. She's not into 'feminine' outfits much, mostly because she thinks she looks like a 12 year old when she wears a dress. Personality: Rochelle has always been too smart for her own good, ever since she was a kid. It hasn't always worked in her favor. She finds it hard to work with other people her age or make friends. Impatient and abrasive, she has no time for people she feels hold her back, or who don't show interests in the things she's interested in. Of course, her interests are often fleeting; she is wildly curious about anything, everything, and tends to vanish down rabbit holes as she exhaustively researches things on the whim of a moment. Background: Roach was born in Shelly, Montana, where she lived with her father and mother for most of her life. Her dad and uncle owned a garage together where they worked on cars and farm equipment for the locals. Unfortunately problems on the business side led to differences between her parents that grew worse and worse, and they split up when she was fourteen. Rochelle went to live with her mother, and they moved west to Washington State. She had enjoyed a better relationship with her father than mother overall, but her dad was going through some issues by then, and wasn't sure he could take care of her. Until moving away, Rochelle had often helped out around the garage of her dad's mechanic business. She learned a lot from him not just about automobiles but other kinds of machinery as well. Drawing diagrams of machines, or even taking them apart or assembling them, is soothing to her now and help her control her otherwise volatile moods. Since leaving Montana, she's become more rebellious and less controllable, partly out of resentment (fair or otherwise) towards her mom and partly just out of characteristic impatience to turn 18 and finally be free to make her own way in the world, at her own speed, with no one able to hold her back. Unaltered Altered

"Happy eighteen birthday, wooooo..." Rochelle McKendrick sat by herself on the flat roof of her high school gymnasium. It was all gravelly so she'd brought a blanket up with her, and a thermos that she'd emptied the last of the red wine bottle she'd found in the fridge the other day into. Honestly, wine was kinda gross. Say what you wanted about 'woodiness' or whatever, but it always just tasted like spoiled grapes to her. But this was a special occasion. It was not, however, her eighteenth birthday. Not yet. She had a little ways yet to go on that, but Roach (a name she wore now as a badge of honor) had decided to celebrate it early. Because of the meteor, you see. Oh, she knew that it wasn't supposed to hit Earth. They'd been saying that from the start, a 'near miss.' The buzz online though was that this was bullshit. There were a lot of people out there with telescopes. Some of them knew math. Some of THOSE said they'd done calculations, and this thing was absolutely going to hit Earth. Then there'd been reports of some kind of weird lightshow, like an aurora, and now all the reddit threads were just a mess. More than usual, even. So now Roach was on top of her gymnasium roof, watching the bright light of the asteroid or comet or whatever it was get bigger, waiting for the world to end. Or not. Whatever. She unscrewed the cap of her thermos and took a swallow. Ugh. Just ugh. But she imagined she could already feel herself getting drunk. Was that tingle drunk? Was she getting dizzy? Woozy? Roach was pretty small, pretty skinny. She figured it'd hit her pretty hard, pretty fast. With no reference point though, she had no idea how to gauge how drunk she was. Fuck it. She took another gulp. Just vile. Overhead, the 'Visitor' glimmered. Roach looked up at it, trying to decide how she felt. It wasn't that she wanted to die, exactly...but the thought of it wasn't filling her with existential dread either. Everything was so fucked up. Maybe a reset would be good. The last time, the world had gone from big dumb dinosaurs hogging all the resources to human beings...doing the same thing. But humans had gotten further, right? Maybe the bug people that would rise after humanity's fall would be even better. It'd be cool if she could live to see it though. Maybe they'd make her their queen. Roach and the roach people. She wouldn't fucking...lay eggs for them, but that was what delegation was all about right? A leadership trait. Bug people would not be nearly as fucked up as humans were, Roach thought. They wouldn't split families over stupid arguments, or get shitty boyfriends or sink into depressive spirals or whatever. They'd just be cool little bug-boys. All the time. Roach lifted her thermos to toast the asteroid. "To my sweet little bug boys," she said, and with that swallow...still yucky...the wine was exhausted. There hadn't been much in the bottle left. The jewel in the sky was bigger now than it had been a week ago...hell, a day ago...but it wasn't looming, exactly. It was moving visibly across the sky, big enough to be more than a starlike point of light. It took another hour or so before Roach decided...it wasn't going to hit Earth after all. The internet was wrong about something, stop the fucking presses. Tomorrow would be just another day, where the teachers were petty know-nothing tyrants just wanting to retire, the kids were Cro-Magnon fucktards just looking for excuses to crush anyone they could, and...well, and home was home, with all that entailed. It felt like a weight around her neck, pulling her down. Any second now the gym roof would crack and cave a little, and then a structural support would buckle and down she'd go...down down down to the basketball court and smash through the polished floorboards with their fresh new paintjob into the plumbing, into the basement, and down into regions never mapped... Her descent into a mood spiral was interrupted when the asteroid, now more than halfway across the sky...exploded. The visible, slightly oblong, disc of it began to shed tiny bright flecks. Roach frowned and sat up, then reached down for the binoculars she'd brought. Looking through them, she could clearly see what was happening. It had fractured for some reason. What had been a singular mass was now a swarm of chunks of varying sizes, all expanding outward. On seeing this, her brain sort of rushed ahead of her. About half of its former mass was coming at Earth now, on various angles. The other half was being launched away. But! You could also divide it by the direction of relative motion, where half was being ejected ahead of its former trajectory; adding the energy of the explosion to the energy of its velocity...and half was being launched backwards, against its motion. So even the chunks that were now arcing away from earth...about a quarter of them were effectively losing varying amounts of velocity as well, meaning that a lot of them would be pulled back in by Earth's gravity later on. This wasn't just going to be an impact event. It was going to be a LOT of impact events, spread out over days or weeks or more. And Earth would probably pick up a few new moons too. Little ones. Where would they hit? That was way more than even Roach's math-attuned brain could determine from looking through binoculars. There were a lot, and they were all on different courses, so they'd hit...all over the place. Roach lowered her binoculars and lifted her phone to get a picture of the little starburst in the sky. It was unlikely that the phone would survive if she didn't...but it still felt like the right thing to do. Maybe the bug-boys would want to see how it happened someday. Maybe they'd excavate out some strata of rock that had been the school, and find this phone, next to a fossilized skeleton that was flipping them off. ...that'd be okay too.

"If they never come back, wouldn't the boat still be down there?" Maighan asks mildly as she strums a soft tune that echoes hollowly in the ancient halls. "Further, you'd be quite old even for a son of the earth, if the tales are any guide. You have the look of someone who's been cursed." She looks around the cavern, noting the ruddy, rusty staining on the rough stone walls. Iron ore perhaps? Or blood? Curious. "Did the 'forgotten gods' leave you here, hmm? To direct the greedy and foolish into their embrace?"

Gwen laughed quietly and looked around. It was just like Cassie to talk about her super-suit relatively freely, but then go all spy when it came to gossip. God, she was going to miss her. "I am...seventy-five, maybe eighty percent sure he's the spider-guy," she said, leaning forward and lowering her voice to a near whisper. "And we're classmates. Past that, no deal. Which is, honestly, refreshing. I'm not in the market right now, for a boyfriend. I've got enough balls in the air...and I immediately regret my choice of metaphor now." She grinned and reached out to put her hands around Cassie's, which were around her mug. "Nevermind all that. This is your day. Is there anything you want to do, or see...before you head off to your bright future?"

For her own sake, Maighan kept playing, though lowered the volume and intensity of the music to let it fade easily into the background, and not impede the conversation. It would be easy to forget she was even there, perhaps. Playing music, listening, and watching the conversation play out with those almost luminous green eyes. What she thought of this tale, she gave no sign.

Emi pressed the palms of her hands to her eyes for a second, trying to reboot her brain. Or something. It felt like that sometimes. "Yeah...I can poke through the cargo and storage. I need to hunt down the transponder anyway, and it's probably somewhere over there. Usually is." "But we're going to need a, uh, 'neutral' port to get this damage fixed. We can't just roll up on a law abiding shipyard with a hacked transponder and ask them to fix weapons fire damage. Frontier station, maybe. Far enough out that they aren't getting regular updates from civilization. Or an out and out pirate system..." Emi shrugged at that. "That has risks if we already have a bounty on us though."

Gwen laughed lightly at Marc's sudden maudlin tone. "You're going to miss crime? C'mon. What I want to know is, if superheros fight crime, and crime goes way down...what are they going to fight then? Will they just resign en masse?" She shrugs. "You have to wonder how many of them do it because they see a need, and how many do it just because it's fun. Or maybe a power trip." "...oh right, yeah, there was supposed to be another super that showed up. A girl, woo woo. Represent." Gwen lifted a fist, grinning. "No one I talked to knew what her name was supposed to be though. Maybe a newcomer or something."

Maighan took a moment after the fight to peer down the elevator shaft. After a moment, she worked up a mouthful of saliva and spat down it. If it ever hit the bottom, the splish sound was too quiet to pick out from up here. Even for her ears. As far as she could tell, killing the witch ended their obligations in this dank little pit. But she had a suspicion that these adventurers weren't going to settle for half measures here... So she made her way to the 'kitchen' where Brarga was plying his trade. Rather than help cook, Maighan took her instrument out and meticulously cleaned it, tuned it, then began playing a rather calming, pleasant tune. Music that evoked memories of one's childhood home, however far it might be away in space and time, glimpsed through the hyper-real colors and emotions of one's younger self. Pleasant, but with a bit of a melancholy ache to it.

"That spider guy? Uh..." Gwen took her phone out and tapped on the virtual keyboard. "Silver Spider." With a shrug she added, "Not really super into superhero culture, hah hah, but it's still kind of interesting to have them around campus. I wonder if I could have gotten him to answer a few questions." "Maybe next time. Hell, he might even be a student."

Flames bathed Maighan as they struggled against Tooli's ice magic, and the eladrin twisted nimbly aside, ducking low and coming in around the superheated jet. Her eyes shimmered into black pools as she hissed a syllable in the fey tongue, and a chill fell over the witch and sank into her bones. Maighan's sword whickered forward, thrusting under the sorceress' outstretched hands and dipping into her midsection before detonating with another concussive blast of sonic power. This time there though, there was something else. That chill was coming from her sword, and it seeped into the wound like a poison. Not so bad just yet, but promising pain, decay and death over time. "Flame against the Firstborn," she snickered. Her hair was barely singed. "Is this the mighty threat we came to vanquish?! Shall I face you barehaded, without spell or sword? Shall I slap you into submission as I would a child?"

"All right...I am securing the bridge," Emi said as she flicked the control to lock the door. "I'd check engineering first. If someone wants to stop us from taking off, that'd be the first place to do it." She abbreviated the preflight abysmally, basically just running the engine test and control test. The rest would have to wait until they were clear of the berth. Even before the flight control tower indicated they had clearance to take off, Emi was already cycling the engines up...ready to go the instant they heard. Or the instant the attack started threatening the ship. Clearance or no clearance.