trans_9 | The Call

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The Call

Jaime Reyes voice sounds over the comm-rings--all of them--and it sounds very urgent.

« Everyone on the ship, listen up! This is Jaime Reyes, your local 'Blowing this pop stand' coordinator and escape facilitation engineer. I need everyone on the ship to come to the City, in front of the Precinct, immediately. Grab people who don't have their comm rings with them--and tell them to grab their comm rings, people who are sleeping, whoever you find, and try to make sure everyone on the ship knows to come. This is very important. This is "getting the heck out of here" important. »

When they arrive, they arrive to find the Command Staff waiting, and a tiny, tiny young man standing on stone ledge from a fountain, waiting for them.

Here goes nothing.

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Lois is there soon, looking really interested and ready to go.

"Bit of a cub scout for someone running this thing, aren't you?"

She doesn't mean anything mean by it, really. She's just critical like that, and Jaime is a tiny, tiny young man.

"Yes. But I'm also pretty good at cracking open alien spaceships and stopping alien conspiracies. Mostly by myself."

A pause.

"At some points, without pants."

He rubs his neck. "For what I couldn't figure out, I've asked smarter people to help me. Also, I'm very, very interested in getting everyone through it alive, so I think that's why the Command Staff trusted me with it."

Brenda sidles up to Jaime and puts her arm over his shoulder encouragingly.

"It's all true about the spaceships, not a word a lie. Trust me, Jaime's totally the guy you want in charge of this thing."

She gives him an encouraging smile that only shows a very small bit of how worried she is underneath.

More teenagers. Lois looks between them, wondering what kind of insane universe they come from that puts kids in that kind of position often enough to be experienced and good at it.

But as long as the Command Staff trusts him, well...

"Right. You know what? I'll take your word for it, because if I tell you that you're too young to lead a mission like this, I have to tell everyone else to get back to the status quo, which includes telling the speaking raptors that they're not people, and I don't think that'll go over well."

That's supposed to be a joke. She offers her hand to Jaime.

"Anyway. I'm Lois Lane. What's the game plan and can I do to help?"

Right to the point.

"The Metropolis reporter?" His eyes goes wide, as he shakes her hand. The Superman connotations are not so for him--he doesn't know Supes' secret ID or anything.

... her insane universe, apparently.

"Bingo," she says, pleasantly surprised. "I must be making a name for myself."

Yes.

"You look a bit...different. Younger, maybe. I've seen your picture before in the paper." With them thar journalism awards and all. "So either different time or different timeline, maybe?"

A pause.

"Anyway, uh, one, it kinda goes without saying that the secret ID thing is slightly off the record. Two, Lois, one thing I'm really going to need is people with clear heads to manage the group that stays behind. Considering your job and what I've read about you, I think you'd be one of 'em."

"Can't expose you if I don't know your superhero name, huh?" she says, with a smile, but then it's back to business. "I don't know what you've read, but I can shout orders better than I can write. But before you put me on Team Babysit, I can use a gun, I'm a black belt, I practically grew up in the military, and I can run really fast."

"Well, does it make you feel any better that it's Team Stay Alive? We can't all go in one group. Hard to stay mobile. But for all we know, after we make our way in, the ship might launch a full attack on the individuals holing up and taking refuge. That's why they're going to be doing it down here, away from Stacy's sensors. You'll need a gun--and you'll be given one. And if robot Nazi gorillas with jetpacks start attacking or something, we'll need people who can keep their heads about them and keep other people safe."

He explains, "It's not babysitting, it's protecting. That's why we're leaving just about as many metahumans here than we're taking. It's just for the badass people we're bringing with us, we need them to double major in hacking and other related skills along with being awesome enough to hold their own, since we can't have a huge, huge group. A lot of the metas going have those kinda skills too. But if you're just regular-flavored awesome, we need you to protect people. We're only taking a few regular badasses to even things out in case any power-nullifying goes on."

"Makes sense, but sounds like we're running a serious risk of getting one half cut off from the other," she points out. "What makes you think you aren't just charging into a dead end, or a trap?"

But protect Team Stay Alive?

Okay, she can be happy with regular-flavoured awesome. She reminds herself she isn't a primary-coloured blur with super-strength, nor a ridiculously-intelligent hacker-slash-mutant-therapist, nor a dude running around with a compound bow and a lot of bastardized motorcycle gear.

What she's got has to count for something, doesn't it?

"Count me in for it, though, kid. I'll do my best."

"That would be the possible bad part, yes. But if it is a dead end, if it's a trap, it's better to lose a smaller group than all of us. Everyone that goes as part of that group is going to be informed of the extreme risk, everyone that stays behind is going to be informed of their risk."

He shakes his head.

"The problem is there's no way to do this with no risk, so we just have to try our best to both predict and adapt to anything thrown our way. I do have a very good idea of what we're probably facing, as far as the security systems go. And we are going to set a few very brave people up as communications go-betweens to try to ensure communication for as long as possible. And we are going to have lots and lots of backup plans, that everyone is informed of on both sides. Ways of adapting to different scenarios."

She plants her hands on her hips and nods. She's surprised, to say the least, because all of that makes sense and he looks like he should be sitting in a high school classroom somewhere, probably taking spit balls to the back of the head.

"So it sounds like you really do know what you're doing," Lois says. That was obvious earlier on, really, but she just has to make it clear now or it'll bug her forever that she accused him of not having his act together. "I should just expect this from superheroes, no matter how fun sized they are, huh?"

"Nah, it's just being anal-retentive about planning and tactics is my one actual superpower."

Total lie. He's had to work at it: do research, read a lot of books on tactics, study Ted Kord's notes.

It's just funnier to pretend he didn't.

"Hey, not everyone can do the whole goes-fast and breaks-things routine. Someone's gotta fill in the other roles," she replies. "And it's better than something lame like talking to fish."

Sorry, A.C., it's lame.

"Aw, why's everybody gotta pick on Aquaman? After a while, you just start to feel sorry for the poor guy."

"MORE people have that power? Talk about short end of the stick. You can't even make a bad pick-up line out of it," she says, flippantly.

And then she pauses, and frowns.

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The Call

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