Replacing What Was Lost

Through the process? Jude just closed his eyes. It was easier. Less interference, more focus, and after a little bit he actually had to nudge at Giltenn to help him focus. Human brains weren't really meant for that kind of focusing, for just fixating on a single scene or image for an extended period of time. It would be good practice for him, but it was also kind of boring, what with Erione doing all the actual work. Just sitting there, thinking about one or two things nonstop was...

Alright, it was just exhausting in a way that it really shouldn't have been.

It was probably a good thing Erione told him to look, because otherwise he'd probably have kept right on sitting there. His eyes popped open, his hand pulling away as he looked at the statue, staring at it for a long moment.

It was his father. As real as real life, only made out of glass. His father. The man he'd probably never get to see again, never learn the fate of.

Jude rubbed at his eyes, taking a moment to pull it together. He couldn't just do this every statue. He couldn't get all misty eyed. He rubbed at his eyes again, his voice a bit broken up even if he was holding it together.

"No. It's... it's really good. Just how he actually looks."

Telling yourself to get it together and actually getting it together turned out to be very different things. It wasn't as easy as thinking Jude, get it together! and being done with it. In fact, thinking that just made things worse, and Jude had to take several minutes to try and get himself together before they could move onto the next one.

The others were easier. Less emotional. He missed the others, but the way he missed them was different from the way he missed his father. We The People had been important to him, but they'd also sent him off willingly. They'd said their goodbyes. And even if they were dead, they'd died doing what they loved.

His father's fate had been less fortunate.

In short order, Jude wound Erione through a variety of people. A blond woman in her late twenties, her face hidden by a military-style helmet and a very clear America aesthetic. A white man whose face was almost entirely hidden behind a costume. But then a string of normal people - people's parents, normal and a stark contrast to the string of obviously heroes. He did Blade's last, with each seeming more bizarre than the last. A purple-skinned woman with a flirty grin. A man in a ridiculous gasmask, without an ounce of skin showing. And Finch: A mutated birdman with a beak rather than a mouth, with a face that not even a mother could love.

Their only interruption was when Angelo appeared briefly, sliding a pizza onto the edge of the table and leaving them be.

For the most part, it was just the number of memories. Many of those whose images he'd given Erione were people he'd met only a handful of times at most. By comparison, he had years of memories with his father, and a very hard time figuring out which represented him best. Sure, he was serious most of the time, but was that really how he wanted to remember him?

Jude worked on his pizza in relative silence, thoughts rolling through his head as he looked across the statues. They were all very well made, true to real life, and it was only after Erione stretched that Jude glanced up, wondering if that bothered him at all.

"Do you... want to know who they are? I wouldn't mind, if you were curious," he finally said. They were people he'd never met. Strangers. And yet in a strange way, Erione knew them.

So he was curious. And Jude was fine with satisfying that curiosity. Really, he'd kind of been looking for an opportunity to talk about them. To share stories about people who probably would never make it to the island. Who would always be separate.

Not dead, but separate. Trapped in some kind of quantum uncertainty. Neither dead nor alive. Existing or not.

Jude wasn't going to think about it.

"So those ones are Travis's parents," Jude said, gesturing to an older couple he'd made back to back. "I only really met them once. The other guy I made for him is Doctor Trevor. You know how Trevor's a big lizard some of the time? Back on our world there weren't any human shape charms or anything, so he was just always like that, and Doctor Trevor was helping him with that. He worked for AEGIS, which was the big government organization that dealt with superhuman stuff."

Travis's set seemed like the easiest place to start, and Jude swapped to Janelle's next.

"That's Janelle's dad, and that's her mom. Her mom was actually a big superhero over in Japan, but she retired. None of us really realized until way after the fact, but she was really cool. If you were going to pick one of the parents to be team mom, it would have been her."

Sort of.

"The third one is Red Mountain," he said, gesturing to what was very clearly a suit of advanced armor with a samurai aesthetic. "I'll get back to him, but he's kind of Janelle's mentor. One of her mother's old friends from Tokyo."

He reached out, carefully setting the Red Mountain bust aside as he sorted through them.

"Rory's mom and little brother," he said, opting not to really explain most parents as he set them aside, "and Breakneck. He was one of the New Sentinels--the big superhero team we were associated with--who used to be a villain. Rory was really close to him, but he'd been... out of touch a while when we came over. I never got to see his face, so I had to do it with the suit. I think she'd have preferred it without."

It was an awkward subject, and Jude was quick to move on.

"These three are actually for Blade. She's not on the island yet, but I'm hoping the scouts will pick her up eventually. Her whole thing is blending in, and she doesn't have any powers, so she's probably vanished into the civilian population with no idea the island exists. She was a villain--like, raised in that life--and she defected to join us. She had a lot of friends who were kind of on that side, like Teagan Queen..." Jude tapped the purple-skinned woman, "and Finch."

He didn't feel the need to tap the bird man for that one. Finch was pretty obvious, what with the beak and all.

"She also knew Armorer, who was someone I knew. His whole thing was that he made weapons and suits and stuff for almost all the villains. He was getting paid, but he also just kind of loved that kind of design work. He made the suit I wore, because my dad referred me to him. He was... Well, super nice. Not what you'd expect at all from a guy who outfitted supervillains, but it turns out..."

He reached over, pulling the Red Mountain figure over to rest beside the Armorer one.

"Turned out he was the same person as Red Mountain. I never got to hear the whole story, but around the time Red Mountain moved out of Japan something happened and gave him a magic split personality. Armorer knew about Red Mountain, but Red Mountain didn't know about Armorer, and we did this whole runaround of trying to keep that secret. I think we were pretty much the only people who knew the truth, and that was only because we saved Armorer after someone hit Red Mountain hard enough to knock him out."

It was confusing. And Jude at least realized it, giving Erione a sympathetic look.

"We all sort of varied. Some of us kept it a secret. Some of us told our parents. Blade didn't have a civilian life at all. I mean, my dad found out after a little while and let me go, but I didn't really have anyone else in my day to day life to tell. So I was kind of open about it, I guess?"

Not the most open, but one of the more open ones.

"We were a pretty, uh, villainous aligned team," Jude admitted. "My dad. Blade's mom. But also Charlotte having Red Mountain--who was armorer--and a bunch of other little ones. A lot of our villains were just kind of in it for the money, so it's hard to hate them. We didn't really get involved with, uh, idealogical villains. The ones who were in it for causes."

Generally bad causes, but that went almost without saying.

"The issue with Blade is she could be anywhere. We don't know if she'd be with her mother, or her father. We don't know who her father is, and even if we could track down her mother she'd probably be long gone. She could be in Japan, or America, or pretty much anywhere else. She's too much of a mystery."

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, as they said.

"I thought about that, but it'd take a lot of work. I thought about getting someone to make art of people from our world, so she could track them down after recognizing them. But it's not like she'd think to search for them - they'd have to get big first. Or be big. It's something I want to look into, but not easy to do."