trans_9 | The Boys

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The Boys

Right, so they'd found out the deal from that...really weird stuttery kid. Blah blah sentient spaceship blah blah abducted from different worlds, and then the important part: No aliens. That made the whole...superheroing, defeating them, and getting home thing a lot harder. (And Kon, in particular, REALLY needed to get home. Actually, so did Bart. World-saving things had been going on).

In the meantime, there were other people here, and it'd be good to meet them. So Superboy, Impulse, and Robin were in Obs Deck, mingling with the other people there and whatnot.

Come on, come all, and get one, two, or all three while they're hot. (Which was always, in Kon's case, as far as he was concerned).

"Any other superheroes up in this ugly mother--" Wait, that AI thingy might get pissed off. "--ship? Mothership?" he called out as soon as they entered.

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Tim turned toward the voice that had called his name... and saw a young man he didn't recognize. Hmm. "Hi," he said with a bemused smile. "Have we met?"

"Uh."

He looked up. "Stacy, are these guys from the same 'verse as me?"

||Yes.|| was her answer.

Oh boy.

"We will in the future, I think?" Jaime said, with another glance at Superboy, who'd floated off to go talk to a pretty girl.

"What's the current lineup of the Titans, for you? There's been weird time thingies going on..."

"Uh, okay," Tim said, giving him a funny look. The idea of time travel here wasn't a complete shock, after all. Bart was still Impulse, and Kon had moved beyond angsting in solitude to doing something useful to--apparently--save the world. Which--cool.

"Titans right now? Me, Superboy, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Speedy, Beast Boy, Raven, and Cyborg. I'm guessing it changes in the future? Where I know who you are?"

Oh no.

Did he tell them? He couldn't tell them. He'd lectured Terry about the dangers of passing on information from the future and all that he'd warned him about was true. You could change everything.

Considering one of the things involved here was Superboy saving the world as they knew it, that was one thing that couldn't change.

"Speedy's here, and--she's not a Titan anymore, from when we're both from. I am." He held out a hand. "I'm Jaime. The Blue Beetle."

Who, for this Robin, had only recently died, but that didn't register at first.

Tim stared at Jaime, feeling himself tense up inside. That wasn't possible. He shook his head, frowning. "No, you're not." He had known Ted Kord. They'd worked together--been friends. No one could fill his shoes.

Oooow.

Jaime cringed, one eye half-shutting in a wince.

"He just died for you, didn't he. Timewise. It's been over a year, for me. Almost two, since he died." A deep breath. "I have his notes--he wrote down stuff about fights he'd been in, so it was like a journal, too. I read the bit with the Condiment King--he joked about stealing you away from Batman to be his sidekick. He liked you a lot--"

"Stop," Tim interrupted, wincing a little. That still hurt. There was no way he was going to leave Batman, of course, but if anyone might have been able to convince him... "Yes--it just happened. Can we... not talk about it?" There had been way too much death lately in Tim's life. He was trying not to dwell on it.

Much.

And there'd be more. Could he let there be more?

"Uh. Sorry. I--" A deep breath. "We're team-mates, when I come from. Me and you. Maybe not friends, but friendly at least."

And he kept glancing over at Kon, despite himself.

"Huh, really?" He looked at Jaime curiously. Now that the shock had had a chance to sink in a bit... "So, in a couple of years, we're... I'm going to assume Titans together? So--what? Is the team huge? I mean--we lose Speedy, but there are still seven more of us. You make eight. That's a lot of Titans." He followed Jaime's glance to Kon. "What--is something wrong?"

"Nothing. I, uh--"

Moment of truth. Did he tell the truth or lie? Did he risk changing time, changing his present--the very existence of their world, or...say nothing, try to convince Speedy to say nothing, and let Robin's best friend die?

Like he was supposed to.

Ted had written quite a bit in his notes about time travel...

Jaime was a horrible liar, but when it was part of a plan, like to defeat the Reach, he could do it. Perhaps a little too easily.

It sprang into his head almost fully formed.

This Plan was "Operation: Make Sure the World Doesn't Explode." It had multiple tangents and sub-plans, some of which involved trying to find a way to save Superboy if they could do it without wrecking the timeline.

Because he had a heart. He did. Sometimes he was ruled by it more than anything else. But this wasn't a time that he could be. He had to balance his desire to help people with his desire to help a whole lot more people. If a compromise could be found, he would find it, but for now...

Part of this plan, at the start, at least, involved lying. Something he hated to do.

He did it anyway.

"Superboy's not on the team either. He's off doing his own thing." Rotting underground and his soul kicking it in heaven made that technically true. "I've never actually met him."

Some honesty was thrown in. "Team is a little small actually. Some new faces. Everyone went their own way for a while after, uh, after the Crisis. A big, really bad thing is going to happen--and get stopped--but it's gonna mess a lot of people up. That's when I come into the picture--and then disappear again for a year."

Edited 2008-08-26 05:25 (UTC)

Tim nodded, accepting this explanation... for now. He'd want more details later. He couldn't imagine Kon leaving the team, except for the big brood-fest, which he'd said was over now. "I've heard a little about the Crisis. Kon mentioned it. Something about how he and Nightwing and Cassie are off to save the world."

He kept himself from wincing. Somehow. Miraculously.

"Yeah, it was kinda a mess, but ultimately, we won."

He was so going to hell.

Tim nodded. "Good." With something as big and... world-shaking as this sounded, he couldn't imagine any other outcome.

"So--everyone comes out of it okay?" he pressed. He couldn't help but ask. It sounded like his big brother, his best friend and another close friend were going into impossible danger. Jaime had implied that Kon would be all right, but Dick was... human, and fragile. Especially in comparison with his traveling companions, and while Tim knew he could handle himself... It would just be nice to be sure he'd be okay.

"Not...everyone? Big fight, in multiple places. Almost every hero was involved. I mean, I was involved, and I'd had my powers for, like, a day."

He rubbed his neck, figuring on what Robin was asking. "Nightwing is fine though, so's Wonder Girl..."

He'd already answered about Superboy, so...

"But I probably shouldn't tell you too much. Time travel's a fiddly thing."

Tim let out a low whistle. "Wow--sounds like we're in for a hell of a ride. Good to know they'll be okay, though, thanks."

"You're right about the time travel thing," he added with a slight grimace. "The last thing we want is to implode the space-time continuum because I know too much."

The guilt. OH, the guilt. Digging in like a knife. He could practically hear his mother chiding him for lying. Overriding that, however, was the fate of the world.

There was no WAY if Robin knew Superboy was going to die that he wouldn't try to stop it. They weren't best friends back home, but Jaime knew him well enough to know that at least.

"So... uh. Since that kinda strikes goings on back home as a conversational topic out of the question, you wanna know what we've figured out so far about this place? I've been exploring a little, with some like-minded explorey people."

Tim grinned a little at the awkward phrasing. "Sure--what have you and the other 'like-minded explorey people' found out?" The other guy looked seriously uncomfortable about something, but Tim assumed it was just the idea of damage being done to time by their talking--something that would have made Tim worry, too, had he been in Jaime's position.

Impulse didn't really count--whatever anyone said here was unlikely to change how he would act.

Technically, he WAS worried about damaging time and that was why he was so umcomfortable, so Tim guessed rightly, sort of. That guess likely seemed even more accurate because of how he relaxed when the subject changed.

"Well, the big theory going around is we've been recruited for some kinda army. Lots of superheroes, metas, armed forces people, cops, or people that are just...useful somehow are the ones that got grabbed. And me and the Doctor--very cool, very old alien time traveler guy--and Scorpius--very smart but very creepy guy who seems to be helping now, but I wouldn't trust him in the long run--were poking around this place in the city that looks like an MC Escher painting gone nuts. It leads to, like, this pocket dimension, with a creepy cathedral, and it's all created by this...thing. Evil force of, well, evil trapped in this huge black stone, guarded by these crazy living statues that move whenever you blink or whenever it goes dark. We barely got out alive."

He waved a hand dismissively. "Anyway, whatever grabbed us trapped it, too. It wants out."

He went on to explain, just slightly excitedly, because they'd discovered something akin to answers. "And that's not even the big clue to the whole puzzle, either. It's what we found while running from it that is."

Edited 2008-08-27 00:21 (UTC)

Tim made a face. He was already being courted by an army, and he was pretty sure he was going to say no. He was Robin. Robin worked for Batman, not the US Army. He listened as Jaime continued, raising his eyebrows. Wow. Sounded like this place was... really going to be interesting.

He tilted his head to the side in curiosity at the last statement. "What did you find?"

"We found a holographic log of one of the scientists studying the stone thing. Kind of his last moments. It was decayed--we couldn't tell what he looked like, but they were trying to use the evil thing in the stone as a weapon and apparently underestimated it. When the weeping angels came, they holed up in that room, trying to hold them off, and the scientist was trying to leave a message for his mate, and a warning that the thing in the stone was too powerful to control," Jaime explained.

"He also mentioned an attack on the ship outside, and that they'd lost communication with the rest of the ship since then--and he mentioned a war. There's some sort of war going on. I think those aliens grabbed all us, like they did the stone thing, but there was some sort of attack, and now, because of it, they're gone. The ship has an AI though, so it's on autopilot, maybe. Now the question is: what kind of war is it? We don't know if they grabbed us for something petty or evil or if it's some sort of fight against evil and they just sucked and didn't ASK us for help. We also don't know how long it's been since whatever happened to the aliens."

Edited 2008-08-27 19:44 (UTC)

"That... sounds a little like the plot to a science fiction movie," Tim said, trying to make sense of what Jaime had told him. "So... you think the ship's still doing its thing--grabbing new people to fight a war that may be over by now--because it's on autopilot? The crew is all dead--possibly because of the stone entity you found in the Escher place?"

Wait--"Weeping Angels?"

"Weeping angels. That's what the Doctor called the living stone things. They look like angels, and when you first see them, they look like this."

Jaime covered his face with both hands as they'd done, as if he was crying behind them, before dropping them again.

He explained, "They freeze the moment a living thing looks directly at them. The Doctor said they do that so they don't accidentally look at each other and freeze in place. But when it goes dark, or when you blink, they move. Luckily, they're trapped in there with the stone thing as far as we can tell."

As for the rest: "We're on a spaceship. I think we're in the plot of a science fiction movie." A pause. "As opposed to a superhero movie with a science fiction plot. I'm not sure I'm liking this whole genre shift here."

He shook his head. "I don't know if it's grabbing anyone anymore--but then it's hard to count the pods in the caverns, so for all we know, Stacy IS adding more people, but at the very least, I think we're being carried on wherever she was headed before whatever happened to the crew. I don't think the evil stone being killed everyone. It might've, but it was possibly just the scientific team studying it--the way he worded it...it's like they couldn't get help because something had already happened to the other people in the ship. No one answered their calls for help. If the stone thing killed everyone, they would've been the first dead, not the last."

Edited 2008-08-28 00:25 (UTC)

Tim shook his head in amazement at the description of the weeping angels. This place just kept getting weirder and weirder. "Do they do anything other than move around? Or are they just creepy?"

"I think I preferred my original genre, too," he agreed, making a face. "And--you're probably right about the deal with the stone thing not getting the rest of the crew. It makes more sense than what I was thinking."

"Um, apparently if they catch up to you, they kill you. The Doctor said they do something by sort of making you cease to exist, but in that place, judging from the alien bloodstains on the floor, they just killed them. Messily. They're also indestructible. I tried to blow one up with a plasma cannon and it was no go."

Now where did he GET the plasma cannon was probably a good question...

"That sounds pretty crappy," Tim said flatly. Note: leave the weeping angels alone and give them a whole lot of space. He did a double take when he registered the weapon Jaime had used. "Wait--plasma cannon?"

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