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I am Brainiac 8. I am your destruction.

Right now, Roy, when you're dying from suffocation, when the panic has begun to set in, this is the part when you remember... This is all your fault.

I killed Donna Troy to save the future. I suffered humiliation as that sweet, innocent robotic idiot.

No... You will not finish me. I have not crawled across centuries... Millennia... To be hobbled by a gaggle of half-ape mutations. You creatures of flesh! You will feel the fire inside those meat husks you call bodies!

Listening to those words, watching the destruction Brainiac 8 wrought, the pain she was bringing to her friends... Indigo almost can't make it through. She'd read enough on her omnicom about the Sensoriums to guess they might be able to do something like this, show her what should have happened. Stacy had confirmed it for her. But, really, coming out and watching it... It was a mistake.

But she had to do it. She couldn't bear the thought of hurting her friends. Of hurting Shift. But she had, and now she knew the size of it. Indigo hiccups a bit, watching the horror unfold in front of her, and tries to blink away the tears forming in her eyes as she watches Brainiac, Brainiac 8, Luthor, and Superboy tear into the collected Teen Titans and Outsiders. She ignores Superboy's private drama with Wonder Girl, it's not what she wants to know about. It's not her place to know about it.

She flinches with each energy blast thrown, with every punch that connects. The pair of Brainiacs are a fearsome team, she doesn't believe the Outsiders have a very good chance of winning. Indigo doesn't believe her body is that powerful, the true owner must have kept many abilities to herself. Still, she can't help but smile a little as she watches the others gain what seems to be the upper hand, for all of five seconds before Brainiac 8 unleashes some kind of sonic attack. Her face crumples as she watches that, and as the illusory Shift attacks the Brainiac, she covers her mouth with her hands.

"No. Nonono. Not him." She listens to 'herself' take over, begging Shift to kill her. It's like being punched in the gut, Indigo knows that this would hurt him. She makes a tiny, strangled noise as he turns 'her' into flesh, watching his own reaction to it. The way his face crumples as he holds 'her' to him.

"...Turn it off." Her voice is choked, tears welling up in her eyes. She can't help but think about how much that must have hurt Shift. Killing her. As the recording of another reality fades around her, she sinks to her knees. "I can't... Turn it off." Indigo runs a hand through her hair, grasping a handfull of it, and swallows. Hard. She's not used to feeling like this. She wasn't supposed to be feeling like this. How did people handle it?

In this one moment, she's probably more off-guard than she ever will be again.

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Her head snaps to look at Static, a little surprised that she hadn't sensed him. But, well. She'd been to absorbed in the hologram to be paying attention to her surroundings. Anywhere else, it probably would have been a fatal mistake, now it was just embarrassing.

She wipes the tears away and composes herself, standing. "I'm glad." She knows that they weren't all 'just fine'. A look at Shift's face right before she turned off the sensorium told her that. But if they were well physically, they'd eventually recover mentally. No one got to be a superhero without some form of mental trauma in their life.

"I needed to see for myself." She couldn't say why, really. But she did.

"It was a bad time for both the teams. But, they pulled through. Kind of. I can tell you what happens next, if you want."

Static knew it was a idea that would just cause her more pain, but, sometimes the pain of truth was what you really needed.

She considers it for a moment. If this were a case of outright time travel, she would probably refuse. But the entire thing is so convoluted, and there wasn't a universe to return to, so there was no point in not knowing.

Besides, she'd always been the curious type.

Indigo nods. "Please tell me."

"Nightwing felt the team had become too close; He realised he'd started to care more than he felt he should. So he left after the crisis. I don't know what happened to shift, but I know he left the team and Metamorpho joined. As far as a team goes, things went downhill. Jade got involved in a war in space with Kyle maybe six months later, and was killed. Grace and Thunder..... I have absolouteley no idea where they went after the team dissolved. Arsenal became Red Arrow and joined the Justice League. Batman reformed the Outsiders as his team after the crisis, but they were much better at staying underground, so I don't know what they were up to. Oh, and eventually, Nightwing became the new Batman." Static's words were steady, but there was compassion in his voice. They all survived, yeah, but it did change them all. Trying to downplay that didn't seem like a good idea, and he knew that the truth hurts. It always does.

It should be noted that, while Static is a geek and tracks these things, it doesn't mean he has a very good memory for specifics. Trying to keep watch is hard enough, trying to remember it after so long? Even harder.

She had predicted Nightwing would leave the team after an event like that. Shift... Metamorpho would keep him from doing anything drastic. Jade's death hurt, and she blinks rapidly upon hearing it. She'd liked Jade. Jade treated her like a person nearly from the first time they'd met. Arsenal's 'promotion' surprises her as well. Thunder and Grace's disappearances, she's not so sure about. Thunder would continue to be a hero, but Grace would probably go back to bouncing.

...Nightwing. "He's still Nightwing aboard this ship. He's from before becoming Batman, then?" One other thing nags at her as well. "Tell me about this 'crisis' you've mentioned." Beat. "Please."

"Yeah, Dickie on the ship is from during the crisis, actually. The second one, I mean. We've had two by my point." Man, there's always some world-destroying thing, isn't there?

"Come to think of it, realty-destroying is kinda the point of a crisis, so I guess this one counts as the fourth crisis, really. Anyway, not the point. You remember the big one back in '85? From my understanding, this one was a result of that. The other superman from that crisis, along with Superboy-prime and a guy named Alexander Luthor, survived that one by building a pocket dimension thingy. After watching us for some long, they kind went nuts and decided they needed to recreate their worlds, meaning build a new multiverse. The crisis was what happened when they tried to do that. I wasn't involved, so I don't really know most of the details... You'd probably be better off talking to Nightwing about what the buildup was, since he was there. Or maybe one of the Green Lanterns. Or the Flash. Or, Hell, Batman's on the ship too. I can tell you some of the bigger lines, though. Part of it was a space war, then there was a satellite floating around earth called Brother I that could turn people into creepy nanomachine fighters that were used against the heroes, then there was also the actual tower Luthor built in the arctic that'd make the worlds... Nightwing and Superboy took on the tower, and in the process of destroying it, Superboy died. A new multiverse was created int he end, but our world stayed the same; the new worlds just kind of grew around it."

Hey, he was a geek, but he was busy fighting his own little battles during all that. He wasn't entirely positive on even some of the details he gave...

"I've heard about the first Crisis and the Zero Hour incident." STAR Labs has a few files, after all. In the case that 'a few' means 'very thorough'. "I take it that 'our' Superboy is from before the third Crisis?"

He was, at least, from after the Brainiac 8 incident. Indigo was sure of that much, at least. "I'll ask someone else about the specifics when they have the time. Thank you." She was beginning to get a rough idea of all of it, but it sounded like there were too many new players on the field for her to make the finer details, like she'd predicted with the other Outsiders.

"Yeah, he's from right before the crisis, I think. Maybe during it. I'm not sure... he and I haven't talked much since I came aboard the ship. I made the mistake of standing up for Luthor, since he's not our Luthor. Of course, that was after I made myself seem insane to him and most of the other Titans by telling them some of the things that happen in the future... Apparently, I'm an idiot."

Virgil shrugged, like that explained everything. He certainly wasn't going to let anything else betray the hurt he felt by basically being abandoned by the rest of the Titans. Even if they hadn't met him yet... the Titans he knew would have embraced him and tried. These guys never even did that.

"Some people would find the future uncomfortable." Case in point right here, Virgil. "And then, from what I've heard Luthor say, some people don't understand that there are differences between these worlds." She's new, she may not be able to say much from experience, but she can make educated guesses. "I suppose that it all depends on your audience, and what they're prepared to hear."

"I think the real flaw is that people believe in immutable truths. Everything can be changed, if we try hard enough... the future isn't set in stone for anyone. Who knows? We get everything fixed, you go back to your time, maybe you don't go zainy-brainy. I go back to my time, it'd simply be a divergent timeline."

The idea of diverging timelines was one Static had become adjusted to thanks mostly to the ship... too many things didn't add up, even with people from his universe. So, diverging timelines and alternate universes seemed the best way to make sense of it all.

Otherwise, how could he explain people from different points in time from his same world being here, but supposedly all rescued as the world was destroyed?

"This ship already negates the theory that the Crisis of 1985 destroyed all traces of the multiverse." It was frustrating, seeing known science shot to shit like that. Indigo prefers it when things can be quantified, so they make sense in her robotic head. "I suppose that if all of our universes were destroyed, you'd be right. There's no logical reason for things to have worked out the way they did." After all, it makes no sense for the ship to go through time as well as dimensions just to grab the proper heroes. If it could why not just force it to go back and end the war prematurely?

"Well, the 'one world' theory was already shot to hell by the crisis in '05. That brought up about 52 total worlds, with monitors watching over them... I think that counts as 'our' dimension, just split into little compartments. I mean, Kyle and Donna went to most of those worlds, and they were all related to ours somehow, just...different. A lot of the dimensions we seem to have pulled from on the ship have no connection at all; totally separate. Really makes you think about quantum theory and infinite universal possibilities. Also makes me think that there must be some kind of world out there where they do all intersect; a Nexus dimension, apart from the bleed... everything must have started somewhere, right?" Static shrugged at the idea. It was silly, thinking that there might be a singular world where all of them existed in some form.

"Anyway, that's what leads me to believe in branching timelines as new dimensions. We'd all still fit together, but each world has a 'what if...' thing going for it. Time could also move differently... what takes five minutes here could take a month somewhere else, leading to, when the worlds are destroyed, people being pulled from what seems like different points in a timeline."

He sighed heavily.

"But I dunno. Too many 'maybe' things and simple ideas, and not enough evidence and proof. I don't like coming up with the reasons after things have happened... blows the scientific theory to hell."

"I wouldn't say that just yet." Her eyes light up, and beams of light flicker from them, forming several large, pink spheres in front of her. Inside those spheres are more spheres, and several of them overlap. She gestures at one of the larger spheres, with many smaller spheres rotating inside. 52, to be exact. "Say that this is our multiverse. If what I understand is correct, we're part of an overall megaverse."

She gestures, and the sphere encompassing them all zooms out, revealing more spheres with others rotating inside of them. Like a group of glass balls with hundreds of marbles inside each. "Which, in turn, is encompassed by the omniverse, as someone referred to it earlier. But what encompasses the omniverse? Perhaps there's more out there." And, suddenly, the picture zooms into two orbs circling each other, one spinning much faster than the other. "In any case, each universe should operate on its own speeds and physical laws. The various flaws in each one would explain why details are different in each one."

She pauses. "Or, at least, that's what I theorize."

"So we have the same base idea, you're just much better at phrasing it." He smiled. "And you have visual aids to back it up. Admittedly, I wasn't thinking as three dimensionally as you are... I was more looking towards them as branching paths; bit more linear, bit more quantum (headache that it is). But the concept holds."

There was a pause as he realised he'd just had a proper intellectual discourse with an android from the far future that had at least a level twelve conciousness (she was a Brainy, technically).

"Wow, I think this is the first real, honest science discussion I've had on the ship... I've been working with the engineers almost all my time lately." He grinned. "Cool."

She hesitates for a second, then nods, agreeing with his analysis. She blinks again, shutting off the holograms. "It only makes sense that, given our limited information, we'd end in similar theories." Indigo doesn't really consider herself to be a scientist of any sort, but she likes to think that she can make a few educated guesses.

"There aren't many scientists on board?" A shame, she thinks. Indigo likes most scientists she's met. Then again, she spent her first few days around them, so it's only natural.

"Well, there's a number of 'em, but most don't really give me the time of day. I've got a few things going against me, after all; I'm young, have a nasty habit of trying to be funny, and I'm a cape. Most scientists aren't real keen on the 'action nerd' thing. But, I am on the science and engineering teams. I just don't usually get to share theories quite like this."

"I see." A waste, she thinks, but she can see their point. STAR Labs dealt with his kind of hero often. And, while they didn't mind, actually enjoyed, helping heroes out... There was always a bit of frustration about it. "You shouldn't just hold things in. People won't think of you when it's appropriate to."

"You'd be amazed how often that happens. Really, you would." He coughed a bit, clearing his throat. "But, we're veering away from our original subject now, aren't we? Is there anything else about what happened you wanted to know?" There's another pause, as if he needed to build up some courage to ask his next question. "And are you going to be alright?"

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