[Sunny Slater]

"This is like, totally exciting!"

You're mission, if you choose to accept it...

"Bum bum da bum, bum bum da bum, da de da, da de da, dum dum!" Sunny sang the Mission Impossible theme as she soared through the air, twirling and turning as she made her way towards the destination where she was meant to meet the other hero. This was EXCITING! Being a superhero was always exciting. Sure, some heroes talked about burdens and responsibilities, but the truth was, being a hero was the COOLEST THING EVER. She got stylish outfits, got to be in the spotlight, she could fly, and her gravity field meant that her hair ALWAYS looked great, who wouldn't love it? But today was EVEN cooler! Because she had been recruited for a TOP SECRET GOVERNMENT MISSION! How totally AWESOME was that!?

It was pretty simple, and she had understood it the third time they explained it. In her defence, the first time she was redoing her lip gloss and the second time she was thinking about what new lip glosses she'd like to buy because they'd told her off for putting on lip gloss during the briefing and that had got her thinking about lip gloss. The point was, the third time was the charm. A government drone had crashed somewhere in the hills around LA. That was a problem for a few reasons. Firstly, the government weren't supposed to have a drone there. Secondly, people liked to go for runs, camping and other gross outdoorsy things that Sunny didn't understand in said hills, and that meant that somebody might find it.

The Government didn't want that. So they needed to find the drone fast. That meant recruiting members of the hero program who could cover a lot of ground quickly. They had assigned two. Gravity Girl, Sunny herself, who was possibly their premier flier. Fast, agile, and didn't tire, thanks to the nature of her gravity field. The other?

Well, the other was slightly different. The odds were that the drone had hit the ground hard. Hard enough to end up buried. If Sunny couldn't see it from the sky, they needed somebody who could find it underground. And that was why they had asked Menagerie to come along. Sunny hadn't worked with that particular hero before, but she figured it'd be fine. She was Sunny Slater, Gravity Girl, she was a cartoon and a supermodel and a fashion line and even had her own perfume now, this Megan girl would obviously know her, and they'd get along, and maybe she'd end up with another BFF by the time it was all over?

Arriving at the meeting point, Sunny descended from the sky elegantly, sun framing her so perfectly you might think she had selected her angle for maximum impact. You'd be right, of course. Making an entrance was superheroing 101. The cloud of perfume that forever surrounded her pink form seemed to descend with her, and she landed, albeit not fully. This rocky, dirty terrain wasn't something she wanted touching her towering pink stiletto boots, so she kept hovering an inch or two above the ground. She spotted Megan, who was clad in some kind of icky bone armour. It was enough to make Sunny hesitate from moving in for her usual hug that she greeted people with, and instead, she forced a simple smile to her face.
"Uh, like, hiya!" she smiled her best smile. "I'm Gravity Girl! Are you ready to TOTALLY find this drone thing?" she asked with the confidence of a teenage megastar, her hips cocked to the side as if posing for a camera that wasn't there.

Megan Daniels

"Secret agent bffs!"

ulla

[Megan Daniels]

Since becoming a Hero Megan had done all sorts of things she would never have imagined, acting in unusual situations as crime fighter, emergency rescue, and now for some reason crash site retrieval team. It would be a lie if she said she didn't think it was a rather curious thing to send two Heroes in, including one of the program's heavy hitters. Speaking of Gravity Girl, Megan was surprised and just a bit nervous to be working with such a recognizable name, especially given the person it belonged to was incredibly powerful from what she knew. She chided herself for being silly, she had met Paladin, for whom both of these things also applied, before and that had been fine. Perhaps then the issue was that she knew she'd be meeting her fellow Hero beforehand, while by the time she had even had the chance to process Paladin's fame she had already seen how... normal she actually was.

Whatever the case, it was a reasonable mission to send her on, she's been getter better at sensing bones through practice and could use that as a very rough kind of radar, though with her range of four square miles it was going to take some looking, hence the eyes in the sky. Menagerie adjusted her mask, though helmet might be a better word for the dark blue piece of one-way reflective material covering her face from just above her lips up, it's edges the same chalky white as what most people immediately seemed to term 'bone armor'. The armor contained only small linings of actual bone (tests had determined it made her more agile in the suit as sensing the bone made it feel more like an extension of her own body), but the rest of the material, some sort of plastic she didn't know the name of, was the off-white of fresh bone so it made sense.

A vibrant flash of pink came flying down, and Megan turned to see the alarmingly bright outfit of Sunny Slater, her presence also accompanied by an extremely strong odor of perfume that seeped into Megan's mask within moments. She gave a slight wave, adopting an impish grin "Hey! I'm Menagerie, pleased to meet you." she held out her hand to shake. She hadn't been given that much information about her partner but there was a note somebody in the program had jotted down for her saying 'It's probably best if you do the planning' "Yeah! So I'm thinking maybe you do a sweep over the area, look for flattened plants, damage to trees, turned over dirt, that sort of thing. Once I'm within a few miles I'll probably be able to find the exact location, and between you and my skeletons it shouldn't be too hard to dig up. Sound good to you?"

[Sunny Slater]

"This is like, totally exciting!"

You're mission, if you choose to accept it...

Sunny beamed her usual smile as the girl introduced herself, although it was perhaps slightly forced to distract from the horror of the bones. She paused for a moment, considering the girl's name. Men-ag-a-rie. That seemed really hard to say and Sunny didn't want to make a fool of herself trying, so she smiled again and offered up her own real name as a prompt.
"You can like, totally call me Sunny!" she smiled cheerfully, hoping that doing so would prompt the girl to reveal her own real name, which would hopefully be easier to pronounce. She looked at the extended hand to shake. Sunny didn't usually shake hands. It wasn't a 'girly' gesture to her. It was something boring businessmen did. She cautiously extended her hand, its perfect manicure and dainty pink nails clearly on show as she took the other girl's hand, and then she decided to just go for it, they were gonna be working together anyway, and grabbed the girl in one of Sunny's trademark, perfumey hugs. Bone armour probably didn't absorb perfume like regular clothing, but given how much Sunny wore it'd still be smelling of it for days.

"Um, so, like, I don't really wanna do any digging. I just got my nails done," Sunny answered to the plan cautiously. Of course, Sunny was in a constant state of 'just got my nails done' since she got a fresh manicure once every couple of days, but that was beside the point. "I can definitely look from the air, though!" she added cheerfully. She shot up into the sky in a streak of pink and perfume, hovered for a moment, and then flew back down again.

"Uh, what am I, like, meant to be looking for again?" she asked, blinking cluelessly. Everything looked the same from high up and she wasn't sure what the girl's plan was. Sunny didn't even know what a drone looked like, let alone what a crashed drone looked like! She hoped the girl would be able to offer her some advice. "I'm like, TOTALLY not an outdoorsy girl, so like, uh, I'm not really sure what any of that stuff you listed looks like," she admitted. As if anybody had to be told that Sunny's idea of the 'great outdoors' was the courtyard outside a shopping mall...
Megan Daniels

"Secret agent bffs!"

ulla

[Megan Daniels]

Megan could definitely see why Sunny wasn't going to be doing the planning, she had so far been extremely friendly but for one of the most famous Heroes out there it didn't seem like she was high on initiative or creative thinking. 'Everyone has their weak areas I suppose' thought the armored Hero as she was suddenly distracted by being caught up in Sunny's hug.

She kept up her grin saying "Of course. I'm Megan, at least when I'm not in action." Megan was trying not to cough from the heavy perfume in the air, it wasn't even a perfume she disliked the smell of, there was simply so much that it made breathing harder. She couldn't really complain too much though, Sunny's exhilaration was frankly refreshing after a long period of doing mostly rather humorless solo jobs. Then there was the comment on her nails... wait a second, didn't her powers mean it would be literally impossible to damage the nails or the polish on them? Eh, not her concern right now. Megan started moving to go after the girl flew up, only to pause as she almost immediately returned. This was going to be a good bit harder than she had imagined.

Letting out a slight sigh at having to tell somebody how to find a disturbance in the environment of their own home region she said "Alright, lets see... it might help if you flew a bit lower, maybe 10 or 20 feet above the treetops? Here, I'll show the sort of thing were looking for" Megan picked up a fist-sized rock and threw it as hard as she could into the ground, then pushed it with the toe of her boots until it was essentially hidden underground. The dirt around it had been turned over, the plants uprooted. "Imagine if I could do that with something the size of a small car, and that's about what the crash site's likely to be like. Oh and, if you have any more questions, you can use the earpieces" she said pointing at her own ear, hidden behind her hair and the thick straps of her mask "They should have put us on the same channel" she said absently, really hoping that got the point across.

[Sunny Slater]

Jan 5, 2021 12:35:15 GMT Sunny Slater said:

"This is like, totally exciting!"

You're mission, if you choose to accept it...

Sunny hovered, looking as Megan explained. Megan. That was much easier to say! Yeah, Sunny would definitely be calling her Megan from now on. It was better than that other word that Sunny had already forgotten because, like, it was SUPER hard to say.
"Megan is a super cute name!" Sunny beamed her support of said name where she hovered. But she knew that instead she had to focus on Megan's demonstrate, watching as she forced the rock under the ground and told Sunny what to look for.

"Uhhh..." It just looked like a pile of dirt to Sunny. Like every other pile of dirt. She was really not outdoorsy. But she didn't want to disappoint her new friend, so she nodded. "Right!" she said enthusiastically, before whizzing off across the sky to search. She touched her comm link at Megan's suggestion, beaming. "Ohhh yeah, I love my comm. Mine's built into my Gravity Girl earring," she explained, hand to the glitzy diamond and gold 'G' she wore in her ear. "What's yours like?" she asked, expecting it to be equally fancy.

She scouted the area with surprising speed, given, well, it was Sunny. She could fly, and she could fly fast, but after a moment she came to stop. She saw something. A big depression. A big, wet, brown depression in what looked like a pool of mud.
"Aw, c'mon, please be somewhere else..." she said quietly as she peered at it. She slowly hovered down, still several feet above the ground, peering at the muddy ruins. "Uhhh, like, I MIGHTA found it, but it's all muddy and I don't wanna land and ruin my boots..." Sunny communicated to Megan through her comm as she peered at the muddy mess. Yuck. You never got this at the mall or in her mansion, Sunny thought. This was why she was an INDOORS girl.

Megan Daniels

"Secret agent bffs!"

ulla

[Megan Daniels]

There was a certain talent Megan had that was hard to notice, even for her, and that was how readily she could adapt herself to other people's personalities, still acting true to herself but showing the parts of herself the other person would most approve of in the forefront. She didn't even do it on purpose, it was the natural result of both being able to read people well and (perhaps subconsciously) being really concerned about other people's opinion of her. So while most would have some difficulty standing the blatantly obvious shallowness and naiveté that comprised at least three quarters of Sunny's personality, Megan wasn't especially bothered. She beamed once again at the complement to her name saying with a grin "Thanks, I got it for my birthday" she said, grin broadening.

Megan... didn't really think Sunny had gotten the idea of what they needed to find even with a visual demonstration, but she was sure that the girl at least could notice something as distinct as a crash site from the air. She nodded in approval at her comms being built into the costume. The program provided small earpieces, and she had a few of them as spares, but making it part of your standard suit seemed the way to go. "Oh, nothing too special. It'd be hidden by my mask anyway, so I have it built into the mask". Though she shared the common opinion of the public that the Gravity Girl costume was rather tacky and that pink letters outlined in pink on a pink background were neigh-unreadable, she couldn't really say she disliked it. It had a unified and coherent aesthetic that matched the themes and persona she used. Costume design was a balance of practicality and display, and her abilities meant that as impractical an outfit as it would be for others to do heroics in, for her it barely mattered.

Taking a more leisurely walk around, mostly just waiting for Sunny's flyover, Megan's eyes looked skywards once she heard the slightest bit of sound from her earpiece, quickly able to spot the bright pink that definitely stood out among the blue and grey of the sky. "You don't want to land because..." she repeated softly, eyebrows furrowing "Uh, hang on, I'll come over to see".

Alright, to Sunny's credit it really was a lot of mud, not the tiny puddle her words had given the impression of, more 'this is practically a swamp' than 'it rained recently' sort of muddy. She looked over the muck, there did seem to be a bit of a drag like something large had crashed through it. "Hmm, does look right but I can't tell. Mud is too thin for me to tell anything, bones sink to the bottom, and so a disturbance in the mud doesn't create a disturbance in bones. There is good news though, if it is there it'll be easier to get out than if it was buried, I've got a trick I've been itching to try out that should get it out... once we determine if this is in fact the place and not an oddly located ravine"

[Sunny Slater]

"This is like, totally exciting!"

You're mission, if you choose to accept it...

Sunny paused for a moment when Megan said that she had got her name for her birthday. Why would somebody give her a name for her birthday? If Sunny had been a cartoon character, you would have heard cogs turning, before a sudden ding and she got it, and she broke into genuine giggles.
"Wow! That's really funny! I'm gonna remember that one!" she said, absolutely genuinely. And then she continued giggling. She liked Megan. Megan was funny, and fun, and she looked forward to spending time with her. Even if her weird bone suit was kinda gross.

Megan explained her comm unit was nothing special, which was no fun! What was the point of being able to have a comm unit built into designer earrings if you didn't bother and just built it into your mask?
"We should totally fix that!" Sunny suggested enthusiastically. "I could get you some special earring ones like mine, but with an M on for Mena... Menage.... Maniger...." she paused, giving up pronouncing Megan's superhero name. "For Megan!" she finished, delighted that they both started with the same letter anyway.

Megan arrived and investigated the muddy swamp pit, and seemed to agree that it might be where the crash had occurred. She wasn't sure though, and said that they'd have to confirm before they tried her new trick.
"Like, how do we find out? I'm not getting in the mud pit! What if I get stuck in the mud!?" Sunny fretted. Of course, while this might have been possible if Sunny didn't have powers (she wore those ridiculous boots and had the strength of a three year old baby), given that she could fly with the power of several times the gravitational pull of the Earth she could likely fly out of cement, let alone mud. That didn't stop her fretting though...



Megan Daniels

"Secret agent bffs!"

ulla

[Megan Daniels]

Gravity Girl had a hell of a reputation proceeding her, both in a positive and negative sense, but it could never have really prepared Megan for all of this. She'd never have ground to dispute the many people pointing out that Sunny was self-absorbed, materialistic, and naïve to the point of seeming slightly detached from reality. On the other hand it was also undoubtable that Sunny had a good heart, that she truly wanted to help people. She was so completely genuine in her thoughts and actions that Megan couldn't really stay irritated at her for not knowing common things or being opposed to even the most clean and harmless moments of contact with natural objects.

Megan wasn't precisely image-obsessed, but her anxiety over people potentially reacting negatively to her powers had gotten her into the habit of frequenting a few of the larger or most interesting Hero forum sites. It was through there that she'd discovered a rather amusing fact, there seemed almost no consistency in how news anchors read 'Menagerie'. She'd certainly heard plenty of people have minor difficulty with the semi-obscure word, but she'd never heard it butchered quite so thoroughly. "I'll think about it, reason I have it like this is because the mask would cover it anyway. Could be useful to have something more discrete if I'm around out of costume though."

Leaning down, Megan picked up a pebble and tossed it into the mud. It was fairly thin and watery, but not quite enough for the stone to fly through fast enough that if the drone was there the clink of metal would be audible. They'd need in moving faster than either of them could throw... "Hey, Sunny, when you're flying, how quickly can you come to a stop? I just had an idea" picking up a new pebble and holding it out she explained "If you flew up a good distance straight above this pit then dive straight down, and you carry a small object the whole time, if you let go of it before you start slowing down it'll keep going quite fast especially since earth's gravity is on our side here. It'll have the same sort of force that the drone crash would- it'll break through enough of the mud that if the drone is under there we'll be able to hear the sound of it hitting metal."

[Sunny Slater]

"This is like, totally exciting!"

You're mission, if you choose to accept it...

Megan seemed to consider Sunny's offer, which was great for Sunny, because while Sunny's favourite thing was buying anything for herself, she also loved buying things for other people, and having friends that she could go full-on girly girl with was a dream of her's (most girls, not even Ali, could really keep up with Sunny's obsessions). But getting custom made designer earrings for Megan sounded like great fun!
"Ohh, but then you wouldn't have to wear a mask! I mean, wearin' a mask, like, must totally suck. Nobody can see your make-up!" These were, of course, Sunny's priorities.

"Well, like, I alter my gravitational field, so technically I can stop, like, basically instantly," she answered. Well, as instantly we her brain registered the need to stop. Sunny could move pretty darn fast when she had to, but she didn't have super human reaction speeds, meaning if, say, something shocking happened in front of her, she'd probably be moving too fast to stop and fly straight into it because her brain didn't react in time, rather than her powers. She paused to consider Megan's suggestion, and then gave her usual ditzy nod and smile. "Like, okay! Makes sense to me! But, like, I'm stopping SUPER high away so I don't get splashed with mud!" she answered.

She took the stone, making an obvious 'ick' face as the dirty rock touched her hands, and then turned to lift up into the sky. She flew up a good two hundred meters or so, and then turned. And then she flew, full speed towards the ground, releasing the stone. Well, more accurately, she dropped the stone, because Sunny was a clutz with inch long acrylic nails and ridiculously soft hands and was concentrating on flying, but at least it meant that she could stop and pull back, leaving the stone to shoot down into the mud, where it splashed down.

Sunny was nowhere near though, as soon as she had dropped the stone she had whizzed up into the air, putting several hundred feet between her and the mud, she was so terrified of getting splattered...



Megan Daniels

"Secret agent bffs!"

ulla

[Megan Daniels]

"Umm Sunny... Not being able to see my face is the entire point of a mask" Megan pointed out, figuring it wasn't worth pointing out that she had no makeup on precisely because her mask would hide it anyway. "My powers... they scare a lot of people, I try to move past that as best I can but I already have a lot of critical eyes on me when I'm suited up, I don't need that attention following me when I'm not" she smiled very slightly. Megan was generally a fairly open and earnest person to begin with, and Sunny was hard to hide things from for her, not because the excessively pink-clad hero was particularly observant (she most certainly wasn't) but because she was so straightforward. Sunny didn't hide her thoughts and feelings at all, her exuberance was so genuine that despite her interests seeming copy-pasted from a list of stereotypes about teen girls there could be little doubt she really did want to be a lowercase-h hero.

Megan raised an eyebrow beneath her mask at Sunny treating a rock with a tiny amount of dirt on it like it was made of chemical waste, but it didn't surprise her too much at this point, she had picked it up and that was what mattered. Sunny let go of the pebble rather early but it was going more than fast enough still, the rock dropped through the mud like it was water, making a splash only a few inches high as would be expected from such a small object, and… clang! The sound of metal being hit rang softly, muffled by the mud but still audible. “It’s ah, safe to come down now” Megan called into her earpiece. “There's definitely something here. Nice work, I guess my part comes next”

Once Sunny had descended Megan looked at her, a serious expression on her face “Hey, could you please try to avoid freaking out when I do this? I’ve never done something this big before and I really need to be able to concentrate”. Taking a deep breath she walked to a large open patch of dirt, bending down to hold her hand against the ground. Strictly speaking she didn’t need to do this, she could use her power blindfolded and tied up if needed, but it helped her focus as she picked out a signal much larger than she’d ever tried to call before, tugging on the feeling. Megan’s legs wobbled a moment like a heavy bag had just been placed on her shoulders, and a patch of dirt about the size of a pickup truck went completely flat like it had turned to liquid. Floating up from below the ground came dozens of thick brown bones, snapping together as they reached the surface, within moments the enormous skeleton stood complete, a creature over ten feet tall with a pair of giant curving tusks. Her voice sounding a bit strained, Megan said “I think this should be enough to dig through the mud…”

[Sunny Slater]

"This is like, totally exciting!"

You're mission, if you choose to accept it...

For all of Sunny's flaws, judging somebody based on their powers wasn't one of them. She was actually a pretty fair girl, accepting everybody for who they were, and she couldn't understand people being mean to Megan because of her powerset. But obviously it was something Megan worried about. Fortunately, Sunny thought she had the perfect solution!
"But if you have cute make-up nobody can be scared by you!" she suggested. Okay, so Sunny was kind hearted and accepting, but, yes, she was still a clueless ditz that thought make-up and perfume could solve any problem. So maybe her suggestions weren't that helpful...

Sunny floated down from where she was hovering, beaming a smile when Megan told her she had done nice work.
"Ohhh, thankies!" She said, flying over to hug Megan in an incredibly perfumey hug (or, well, the best she could around the armour). She didn't often get told that she had done well. There was a reason for that, of course, but on this occasion, she was more than happy to hear otherwise.

When she was asked to keep back and give Megan some space, Sunny did so, flying up into the air as if it was a natural second thought for her. And then she watched as the ground tore open and Megan summoned the bones. Sunny wrinkled her nose. Not at the bones, no, but at the mud and dirt that was being churned up as they were lifted free. If she landed back there now, she'd get all that fresh mud all over her boots? Ew! Gross! No wonder people didn't like Megan's powers when they made that much MUD appear! Yuckity yuck yuck!

Still, the size of it was impressive, and Sunny flew to its face to inspect the huge skeleton, hovering before it. She made another 'yuck' face.
"Ewww, it's so dirty," she frowned. Of course, Sunny was the type of person who assumed all skeletons were bright white. She hovered up into the air, higher, looking down on the mud pit and Megan. "I'm staying up here in case I get muddy! Um, you can like, start digging with the skelington." Yes, she actually called them 'skelingtons'.


Megan Daniels

"Secret agent bffs!"

ulla

[Megan Daniels]

Sunny may not have had any remotely helpful advice about image (or just about anything else for that matter), but Megan definitely appreciated the attitude. In all the time she’d spent worrying she’d failed to realize that other Metas would understand perfectly well that she didn’t get to pick her power. “I’ll… consider it” she said as her fellow Hero flew down in a surprisingly deft way for somebody so clumsy at everything else and hugged her. Talking to Sunny was like being around an overexcited puppy, perpetually unhelpful yet still somehow impossible to really be upset by.

Keeping up her skeletons always put a strange sort of pressure on her, but never before had a single creature caused enough strain to be noticeable. It wasn’t really painful, it felt more like the strain of doing something mentally challenging for a while had set in instantly. Megan turned to the pit of mud as the mammoth took several huge steps toward it, the bones hitting dirt made almost no sound despite the creature’s size but the snaps of twigs and occasional clacks against rocks could be heard. Sunny’s comment of disgust startled Megan from her focus for a moment in confusion. “Haven’t you ever been to a museum before? There’s no dirt, fossil bones are grey or brown naturally” she explained before noting “Uh… need to focus here, I’ll pick this conversation back up in a moment”.

The mammoth reached the edge of the pit, placing one leg slightly into the watery mud, cutting through it easily. It stood in a position of bracing it’s weight, lowering its skull as the tusks cut through the muck. The curves of the tusks caught around the edges of the object, then it started pulling itself back slowly. Sunny had been right to be worried about being close by, the mud in the pit was quite thin and a small wave of it splashed to the edge, reaching up to the mammoth’s knees as it dragged a car-sized metal mass out of the put, too drenched in mud to be identifiable. Megan wasn’t even anywhere near the thing and she ended up with flecks of muddy water across her armor, she let out a long deep breath once the object was completely onto the ground and the skeleton seemed to vanish in a thin black mist. Megan’s body straightened as if she had dropped a heavy bag and she wistfully said “You’d think it wouldn’t be hard when you’re not the one doing the heavy lifting… but somehow it still is”.