"Hey, Haircut. Deafness wasn't one of the side effects." Amelia Warner (Amy) snorts before she can catch herself and quickly covers her mouth. She's just joined up with a team of heroes and villains, traveling through time on a ship called the Waverider, on a mission to save the world. Dr. Ray Palmer, a hero known as the Atom, is questioning if the Rogues should really be left unattended on a timeship. He shoots her a look and she tries to hide her grin.
Although not thrilled about being part of the B team, at least maybe the company wouldn't be so bad. They may be villains, but so far she is definitely enjoying Mick Rory's sense of humor. It makes her resent the fact that she's being left behind on their very first mission a little less, anyway.
It takes about five minutes after the A team disembarks to start the search for Vandal Savage (immortal psychopath) before Sara Lance, a vigilante and former assassin, suggests getting "weird" in the 70s. As they start to walk off the ship, she again has to bite back a grin as Mick tells Gideon (the ship's AI) to "shut it, metal mouth."
Criminal or not, Amy's starting to like this guy.
Amy starts to follow Sara off the ship, but stops in her tracks when Leonard Snart (aka Captain Cold and Mick Rory's partner in crime) turns around and tells her and Jax that they "aren't ready to run with this crew." While Jax (Jefferson Jackson, the younger half of the hero Firestorm) seems ready to actually listen, albeit begrudgingly, Amy isn't having it.
"I'm sorry, but I don't believe I was asking your permission to get off this ship." She smiles sweetly and lets her southern drawl come out a little stronger. "You can't make me stay here, though you are welcome to try, hun." She winks at him, and before he can answer she follows Sara back to quarters. Sara supposedly has the perfect outfit – Amy walks toward her own things to find something she can throw together quickly.
Not much later, she is standing in a very colorful bar drinking dollar beers with Sara, Leonard, and Mick "gotta love the 70's" Rory. Despite the fact that they seem to be an odd collection, she finds herself enjoying the company. They don't talk much before Sara asks Leonard to dance. He turns her down flirtatiously, but Amy feels a tiny spike of anxiety. Interesting. Sara turns to Amy and raises an eyebrow suggestively. Amy hands her drink to Mick and follows Sara.
It takes all of 45 seconds before a large guy comes over and asks Sara to "join him in the parking lot." Sara declines much more politely than Amy expects, until the jerk grabs her arm and calls her a "bitch." Amy feels a flash of anger and sees Leonard start toward them, but she barely has time to react before Sara breaks the jerk's wrist. Sara holds a hand up to indicate that she's got this, but Amy can see in their body language that Leonard and Mick are ready. She also doesn't miss the impressed look Mick gives Leonard when Sara starts kicking ass.
Not that Amy disagrees. Sara fights like a warrior goddess, and Amy may be straight but she can still enjoy the show.
It's not long before the fight grows larger, and Sara says she could stand for a little help. Leonard and Mick are quick to start throwing punches. Although clearly the least experienced fighter, Amy gets into a defensive position and follows her teammates into the fray. She sees a smaller man advancing toward her with a lecherous grin. Clearly he's looking for an easy fight, but despite her lack of experience she's not going to give it to him. She notices his bare arms as he approaches,
and suppresses a grin. What her assailant doesn't realize is that Amy is a metahuman, and her powers work better with direct skin-to-skin contact. She dodges as he tries to grab her, then doubles back and grabs him by the arm. She can feel the arrogance rolling off of him just before she lets him have it. What he failed to realize when he made the mistake of underestimating her is that Amy can not only feel the emotions of others, she can also manipulate emotions. She focuses on fear, pushing through until she sees his expression change. By the time he manages to get his arm loose, he has panic in his eyes and runs for the door.
She feels eyes on her, and feels a surge of pride when she sees Leonard watching her, seemingly impressed. Her teammates have managed to subdue several bar patrons, but are being pushed by the bartender to leave the premises.
Amy isn't thrilled with the idea to steal a car to get back, but she also isn't going to wander around the 70s alone. She figures that as long as no one gets hurt (or at least, no one innocent gets hurt) she can deal with a little theft in the name of team bonding. She almost laughs at the excited grin on Mick's face. They are all more talkative on the way back, and they all seem to be in pretty good spirits after the adrenaline rush.
The mood changes quickly as they approach the ship. It looks like a war zone. Amy starts to feel the prickling of anxiety, only some of which is her own. She takes a couple of deep breaths, blocking out the emotions of the other passengers as much as possible.
It is difficult sometimes as an empath, but she tries to minimize the amount she uses her powers on friends and family. She tries her best, as a general rule, to respect others' privacy and stay out of the heads and hearts of those close to her. She actually has a power-dampening bracelet that Caitlin Snow, a colleague she met in medical school, had given her-courtesy of Cisco. (Cisco, a tech genius, works with Caitlin and is also a metahuman.) However, she only wears that in places where she has a reasonable expectation of safety. Carousing around the 1970s, time-traveling with people she just met, doesn't exactly fit the criteria. Her ability to read and manipulate emotions is her greatest strength in a fight, especially if she's outmatched in terms of size.
Mick, thinking fast, rams the car into the person firing on the Waverider. As they all jump out of the car, Leonard quips that they went out for "one lousy drink and the rest of the team somehow managed to pick a fight with Boba Fett." In a calmer circumstance, Amy would have laughed. As it is, she is growing concerned about how they will get out of this fight. She tries to read the person firing on them, and to block out everyone else. However, it is easier to focus her powers on an individual (or, for that matter, to block out the emotions of an individual) if it is someone she knows well. Too many members of this team are still strangers to her. Aside from that, she knows there is no way she can get close enough to their assailant to try to touch him, even if she could find a way to get direct skin-to-skin contact. She dodges her way over to Captain Rip Hunter, the Time Master who recruited their team. She manages to make it back to the ship as she tries to stop the bleeding from the chest of the man accompanying Rip. She later finds out this is Aldus, the son of a prior reincarnation of Hawkman and Hawk Girl (Carter and Kendra in this life).
Unfortunately, when they make it to the ship's medbay it looks like Aldus is not going to make it. They also are just learning that Rip is not exactly who he led them to believe, and that he recruited heroes, vigilantes, and villains whose disappearance would have "minimal impact on the recorded timeline." Needless to say, emotions are running high. Amy is starting to get a serious headache trying to block out the rapidly changing emotions of everyone else on the team, not to mention sorting through her own. Still, she has sympathy for Rip Hunter, unable to imagine anything worse than losing a child as Rip had to the tyrant Vandal Savage.
As she sits with Sara, Leonard, Mick, and Ray in the cargo bay, Amy tries to sort through and
make her own decision without getting bogged down by the emotions of everyone else. When Ray starts to speak, she doesn't need her power to see how disillusioned he feels. Still she feels a surge of her own anger as he comments on their lack of importance and names Leonard and Mick as a couple of "good for nothing criminals." She feels a brief pang of hurt before it is dampened, though she isn't sure which of the men it came from (possibly both).
She is glad when Sara calls Ray on his description of their insignificance. When Sara brings up the power to change the future, and their own fates, the surge of hope she feels throughout the room is enough to convince her to go with the crew, "for better or worse." Besides, she has been wandering, somewhat lost since she developed her powers, trying to figure out how exactly she fits into the world anymore. She had wanted to be a doctor, a healer, for most of her life. When the particle accelerator exploded, she had to leave her practice behind. Ever since, she has been struggling to figure out who exactly she is supposed to be now. It feels nice to have a purpose again...despite the odds stacked against them.