The Smith genuinely appreciates feeling hope! 

He also appreciates being forty years younger. That's nice, too, even if he does age slowly. (Thanks, Mom.)

Maybe they can sort out this problem with the Tyrant after all.

Tidebringer does not have fast healing, and he appreciates all the minor damage of his years as a superhero disappearing a lot more than he appreciates being in his twenties instead of his thirties.

His usual feeling is - conviction, calm and silent, that there is a war to be fought, and the belief that he's the one to win it; a war for justice in the world, to fix all the world's ills. Hope, added on to that, is one more step in the right direction. He knows he's going to win. He's the wave of the future.

And he's happy to smile and nod and thank Musoka, personally, letting her know just how grateful he is for everything she's done.

The Survivor had not, in fact, planned to come. He does not actually age; the strength of a million men shores up his body, mending all harms suffered as soon as they are felt. Only once has he ever been injured, since he gained these powers, and that was by Livia's killing touch that no other man has survived.

(It left him grey-haired and starved and weak and meant he could touch his wife. He hates being grateful to Livia.)

But Minerva convinced him that he almost certainly had a number of vitamin deficiencies and old wounds that Musoka could heal that would otherwise drain his own reserves, which he might need the next time a crisis came, and it was very little added effort for her to heal an additional person since he'd want to be in Chicago anyway in case someone tried to murder Musoka. And so he came.

And he sticks firmly to his preexisting beliefs that he sees no reason why this is going to be great. His mind will not be controlled. It is his.

But even if his expression doesn't show it, he is feeling much better now that his health is optimal, instead of regeneration-constrained. Enough to give Musoka a curt nod of thanks.

Evenhand is actually in pretty good shape, but - 

He knows he's rolling the dice. He's known he's rolling the dice for a very long time, trying to operate in the Atlantic Six with no defensive superpowers, a bullet that can be fired at Solaris or Feast, totally powerless against anyone else. He's going to die, and he knows it, and he's accepted it.

Hope just means that he'll live a few years longer, that's all.

Paladin actually dislikes being younger, which is one reason she ends up looking thirty instead of sixteen, even as her health is fully restored to her. But being thirty... well, that's enough. She adopted her oldest daughter, when she was thirty. She can live with that. And if she has her reactions from when she was thirty, she'll just be a little bit faster to move, a little bit faster to heal, an edge that she is (briefly) confident will make the difference, for the weakest member of the Atlantic Six.

And Minerva, outside the worst of the blast radius, lives with it.

(Technically, she routes the processing power of the Minervas within the aura over to totally unrelated tasks where distorted outcome probabilities won't be risky, while having remote bodies make decisions for them, barring urgent threat spotting. But this, too, is a form of living with it.)

And everyone else also gets de-aged!

... There are an astonishing number of people who want to thank her, desperately, sometimes while crying, and sometimes also shake her hand, and/or blubber about just how much this means to them.

Also people who just want to thank her mundanely. Some of both, really.

...This is nice in theory, but in practice it's Very Overwhelming!

She smiles self-consciously, blushes a lot, and runs through her entire store of variations of "it's no problem, really, I'm happy to help", becoming visibly more of an Agitated Teenager about the entire experience until she runs out of people to acknowledge or someone rescues her from this situation!

That's Minerva's job, yes, rescuing her from this situation once the agitation is too severe.

She's very grateful for this! She'll apologize to the people still crowding her out and follow Minerva out of the room, sagging in relief once the door closes behind them.

"Yeesh, thanks. Does that part of the job ever get easier?"

"Everything gets a little easier when you know what to expect."

Pause.

"Not much."

She sighs incredibly dramatically.

"Well. 's worth it."

And, warmly, "Yes."

(Technically speaking, the statement 'not much' was false for Minerva, but only after she hacked her brain, which makes it not very relevant to Musoka forming accurate expectations.)

One thing that makes it worth it is power armor!!! 

Musoka is so excited about this. (Does it come in a box? does she get to tear into it like it's Christmas??)

It comes in a gigantic crate to the safehouse she spent last night in, delivered by a very large truck equipped to drop off most of a ton of steel and electronics (plus packaging) without needing a team of people to lift it. The box contains armor, padding, a kit for performing absolute most-basic maintenance (for anything more than that you tell the manufacturer to send a truck to pick it up and they'll tell you how much it will cost to fix it), and a user manual. The armor has VERY HEAVY ARMOR and moves like a tank and should not be used to sit in chairs and smells a little like a new car and has its own air and water supplies and responds to most anti-tank weapons with a metaphorical sneer and she can lift thirty times her own weight while wearing it without any trouble plus the mass of the armor itself and it is resistant to heat and radiation to the point where Minerva's lasers would basically be irrelevant and you can toggle the visor between translucent and projects-a-video-of-whatever-you're-looking-at and it has a built-in utility belt under the outermost layer of armor you can use to store stuff and it is VERY SHINY.

Oh, and it also has the color scheme Ceru designed for it!

POWER ARMORRRRRRRRR

(Ceru specified the paint job based on sketches Musoka had made a few weeks ago; a base of jet-black, accented with deep blue tron lines that converge on large circles on the chestplate and backplate, each of which contains a copy of the same simple sigil which adorns the ring.)

<Ready to try it out?>

<Yessssssssss!>

She attempts to climb inside and turn it on.

It will take a little work (or some manual-reading) for her to figure out how to open it up, but once she's done that, she can get into her powered armor and try it out!

The manual suggests that she do this standing somewhere there's nothing nearby that is valuable or easy to break. Does she pay attention to the manual?

Reading an instruction manual? When there's a shiny new toy suit of POWER ARMOR in front of her?? Not happening.

Luckily for Minerva's safehouse, Ceru received and fully reviewed a digital copy of said manual when she put the order in.

<The manual says not to turn it on near anything fragile or expensive. How about you get some practice with ring movement using the armor and float us outside before powering up the drivetrain?>