[color=fff200][h2][center]Hornet[/center][/h2][/color]

Wow, okay. Looked like Shattercrash wasn’t the only person with an… abrasive personality here. They even came in three different flavours; Ethos seemed like the intentionally abrasive type, while Shattercrash gave off more of a [i]I just speak my mind[/i] kind of abrasive where she just didn’t care if she offended anyone. With Keystone she kind of just got the impression that he was always at the end of his tether and end up sounding like a jerk because of it; he seemed to be trying though, and his power sounded like a real downer, so Jessica would give him credit for that.

Even so, she didn’t know how she was going to be able to deal with any of them long term. Five or ten minutes alone with either Ethos or Shattercrash with no one else to talk to, or act as a witness, and she might just take a swing at them; damn the consequences. And even if she gave Keystone the benefit of the doubt his grouchy jerk act was going to get to her eventually; add to that the fact that his power sounded incredibly invasive and legitimately terrifying, plus the fact that he just pressed a knife to his own throat and [i]held[/i] it there like he was daring someone to do something about it…

Jessica didn’t want to spend more time around him than necessary. As harsh as that sounded.

[color=fff200]“Shit, that sucks.”[/color] It was only after the words slipped out of her mouth that she realised how they might come across and hastily stumbled out the next few words. [color=fff200]“Sorry! I mean, it seems like a useful power, both for the obvious and because pointing out our weak points means we know what to work on. It’s just… no, that sucks. It sounds like a lot to deal with, all the time.”[/color]

Other than him and Shattercrash, whose power Jessica already kind of knew, there were two people with Master powers. That explained why the earpieces were being pushed so hard; she wondered if they were designed specifically because of Ethos and the other girl, or if they would have been given to them regardless. Then there was big bird, who was obviously a Changer and even more obviously a giant pile of anxiety; their power was cool, if a little disconcerting to look at, but he was another person that Jessica couldn’t really see herself interacting with long term. Then there were the triplets, who had a whole bunch of different powers and despite being one person in three bodies, out of everyone somehow seemed to be the most normal.

Her only hope.

It was a strange group, to be sure. There were a lot of… intense personalities mixed together here and things were already starting to get a little tense. Jessica wondered how long it would be until things boiled over and if there was anything she could or should do to delay or prevent that. Usually she considered herself pretty good at dealing with people; making friends, soothing hurt feelings and stopping arguments were all things she could and did do at school. She’d had to, both as someone moving to a new city and also as someone who was part of a sports club; competitive teenagers could get a little worked up from time to time. But with this group? Jessica had no idea where to start, or what any of their problems were.

Well, actually no. She kind of did.

Jessica knew that she wasn’t completely fine after what happened to her. She wasn’t over what she went through. Sometimes it felt like she was, like it was in the past and the only thing that day had left her with was a scar on her face too large to properly cover up and a hole in her life where her friend used to be, and she’d feel like that for days or a week at a time. But then she’d have the nightmares again and she wouldn’t be okay, or she’d be in a situation where she felt cornered and she’d start to panic and the best solution her stupid scared brain could come up with to get away was to put [i]her fist through the cause[/i] even though that was an entirely inappropriate response to have in math class. And so far Jessica had been able to resist those impulses, except for the one time she put a hole in the drywall, and luckily she’d never thought to use her powers in any of those cases but she was really worried that one day she might and what she’d do to someone if she did. Like, putting her fist through something wasn’t an exaggeration for her; she could do it pretty easily.

She had a point to this. What was it?

Oh, right. She knew she still had issues after her Trigger event and probably would for a while. And a couple weeks after hers had happened and her dad had already done all of the paperwork to get her signed up as a Ward she’d been shown the standard presentations on what Trigger events were and how they worked, so she knew that everyone else in this room had gone through something similar but it was only now that she was in a room full of Parahumans that she was really starting to understand what that meant. Every Cape went through something really bad to get their powers and a lot of them probably still carried some baggage because of that.

This probably went a long way towards explaining why half the people in this room were assholes and the other half seemed like nervous wrecks. They were also mostly teenagers to be fair, but Jessica had been around a lot of teenagers and this group seemed to be beyond the average.

Food for thought.

[color=fff200]“Guess I’ll go next. I’m Hornet; I can teleport to people and then I can hit them really hard, for a little while. Temporary invulnerability and strength.”[/color]