1103/A Midsummer Night's Team...mate

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A Midsummer Night's Team...mate
Date of Scene: 23 June 2017
Location: Metropolis
Synopsis: Another Legionnaire is found!
Cast of Characters: Andromeda, Invisible Kid




Andromeda has posed:
        Summer evenings in Metropolis are warm and pleasant, and it stays light until well past what would normally be considered a reasonable hour for sunset.  Children stay out late to play; ice cream trucks patrol residential neighborhoods until the sun has sunk below the horizon; and it's here, in a well-manicured playground in an affluent section of the greatest city in the world, that the distress signal from a Legion flight ring leads.  At first glance it doesn't seem like the sort of place that any distress could be found. At second glance, it still doesn't.  At third glance… why is there a young woman in a red tunic and pleated blue miniskirt giving children flights around the merry-go-round, ten feet off the ground and at the sort of languid pace that wouldn't scare even the most boy or girl?

Invisible Kid has posed:
        As it happened, it was Lyle's turn at the monitors—and they were promptly left to the care of K.O.K.O. at the first blip.
        A slip-gate opens and… nothing comes out.  Nothing takes a few moments to get his bearings, coming in low along the shoreline, and finally quietly speaks into his communicator: "Invisible Kid here… come in, please?"  He sounds—optimistic?  Relieved?  Eager?  "I am tracking a flight ring, but can't identify or pinpoint the signal."  He can't even be sure he's being heard… but it can't hurt to try.

Andromeda has posed:
        A voice!  It's been… well, it probably hasn't been more than hours since there's been a voice over Laurel's communicator, even at the most pessimistic.  But sometimes that's long enough.  The young blonde woman completes the current circuit she's making, and descends gently to the ground, where she sets down her current passenger and gives the little boy's hair an affectionate tousling.  "I'll be back," she promises the children, and then suggests: "Now take a few steps away—all right, one more—"
        *BOOM*!  Oh, she's too careful to actually break the sound barrier in a playground, but the sudden whoosh of air as she launches skyward is pretty dramatic in its own right.  "Oh, thank goodness!  I thought I was all by myself here.  This is Laurel, and I'm over Racine—let me see if I can boost the signal enough to read out more clearly—"  She's no expert with this sort of thing, though.  She'll be lucky if she doesn't break it for good.

Invisible Kid has posed:
        "Laurel!"  Lyle flicks back into visibility and fusses with his Omnicom.  "Ngh.  The signal's plenty strong enough to pick up, it's just erratic.  The time journey seems to have messed them up, and Brainy's of the opinion that the Time Trapper messed with them further.  If he did, when I get my hands on him… ngh."
        He hovers more or less in place, maybe half a kilometer up, scanning the shoreline, and—*BOOM*!  "Ah, such subtlety," he says with a barely (or not at all) stifled chuckle, and heads in the direction of the noise.

Andromeda has posed:
        "There'll be a long line of Legionnaires waiting to get their hands on him, if he did," Laurel says, with what can probably be characterized as rueful good humor.  "And probably there still will be, even if he didn't."  But, knowing there's no need for her to fiddle with it further, she lets the ring be for the moment, swiveling around and scanning with her telescopic vision until—
        "There you are," she says, now that he's visible again, and, banking toward him, accelerates through the air in that direction.  "Subtlety's your specialty," she teases. "I'm just here to punch things."

Invisible Kid has posed:
        "I see you!"  Lyle remains in place; she moves a lot faster than he does and he'd be more likely to meet her one twentieth of the way rather than half.  "And you can still punch subtlely… well, okay, maybe not."
        He watches the trace on her ring as she approaches, and doesn't like it.  "Well, unfortunately, just what I expected.  No two rings have the same variance.  At least I can fix that once we get back to the cruiser."
        The grumpy look fades quickly, though.  "Good to see you again."

Andromeda has posed:
        "Brainy must be so peeved that they're not all working properly," she says.  "It's a good thing his anti-lead serum is still going strong, or I'd really be in trouble."
        Laurel agrees, vis-a-vis punching: "If I have to, although, really, even then it's not so much subtle as it is a tiny bit less—great galaxies!"  Her exclamation comes just as she's slowing down to approach Lyle in midair, and from her expression, something has taken her completely by surprise.  It doesn't take long to figure out what that might be, either: "But—you're not Jacques!  You're Lyle!  I thought you sounded a little funny, but—"  She blinks, wide-eyed.  Odds are good she's examining him on the microscopic level, and probably with her X-Ray vision, too, to confirm that this isn't some sort of funny joke on Cham's part.

Invisible Kid has posed:
        Lyle blinks and scans Laurel in turn with his Omnicom, slowly circling her.  "Hmmm… everything looks normal.  I… can't even think of the last time I saw Jacques.  What year was it last for you?"
        And then he looks up, eyes going very wide.  "I can't believe I never thought to make sure we were all dropping out of our timelines at the same time—that would explain a fair amount of the deviations in the ring signals!"

Andromeda has posed:
        "I hope everything looks normal—although now I'm really starting to get uneasy.  I'm not sure I'd be surprised if I didn't look normal to you, because you look—well—"  Here she trips over her own tongue for a couple of seconds in trying (without success) to find an acceptable way to say 'you look a lot less dead than you did when I checked last.'  And rather than say that, she just doesn't finish the sentence at all.
        Because here's a factual question she can actually ask.  "Year?  Well—the last thing I can remember it was 2997—but—you mean you think that we all got pulled back from different parts of the present?  I mean, different parts of the future?  I mean—"

Invisible Kid has posed:
        Well, that explains that.  "Uh, yeah, that would be why you're surprised to see me, then," Lyle says, in a tone that just might be meant to discourage further discussion of that subject.  He looks uncomfortable, and only adds, "It wasn't my choice."
        He eyes the readout with a half frown.  "I don't know.  It's a possibility.  We'll have to talk to Brainy, and I suspect there's going to be a lot of data to collect."
        Lyle's eyes unfocus a little in thought.  "Of course, it's also theoretically possible we're coming from similar timelines in different but closely related realities.  Or would that be too weird even for us?"

Andromeda has posed:
        "I'd better be careful what I say, then," Laurel intuits.  "Because I don't want to give away any secrets that're still in your future even if they're my past.  Can that happen?  Or, because it's already happened from my perspective, did I already tell you anything I'm going to tell you, and that's why things turned out the way they—"
        Here she breaks off and puts a hand to her head.  "I'm going to get a migraine if I keep thinking about this.  But I think the answer to 'is something too weird for Legion' is always 'no'.  Is it your Brainy that's here?  It must be, otherwise you would have picked up on this already.  Or a really close one to yours, anyway."

Invisible Kid has posed:
        "At risk of not helping your migraine any," Lyle says with a smirk, "if the realities are close enough, it may not even matter which ones we're from.  And… I may be the one who needs to be careful.  I came here from the early 31st century, not the late 30th, and anything more than that will probably confuse us both.  I might be from your future.  If we're from the same timeline.  If we're not…" and Lyle's eyes glaze a little again as he goes into 'theorizing madly' mode, "…it might make a difference which realities each of us come from even if they're very close.  Ngh.  Now I'm getting a headache."

Andromeda has posed:
        Laurel's downright baffled to find that he comes from her future, for obvious reasons.  She opens her mouth to object, but—well.  The more she thinks about it, the more disturbingly plausible it becomes.  Instead she says: "It's sounding more and more like there are similar but not identical timelines—which is really weird.  But also kind of neat.  I wonder how different some of the other Legions are?  Maybe there're some where they even let Khunds into the Legion!"  This suggestion is so obviously ridiculous that it makes her laugh, shaking her head.
        "I think I'm going to leave the theorizing on all this to Brainy.  And you!  And whoever else enjoys it.  But… now I'm really curious what you come up with."

Invisible Kid has posed:
        Oooh, don't throw Lyle a theoretical bone to chew, he's almost as bad as Querl when it comes to running wild with those.  It almost looks like it takes a genuine physical effort for him to not do that.  "Well, we don't know yet.  I don't want to commit to any one idea until we've got more data.  But it's not ruled out by a multiversial theory of the universe.  But just because it's not ruled out doesn't make it plausible."
        He sighs, surprisingly wearily.  "Well, we need a lot more data," he finally says.  "And you'll be happy to know we at least have managed a cruiser.  We don't have the engines on line yet, but it's a base of operations at least."  Lyle laughs, once.  "Especially since our base won't be built for nearly a thousand years."

Andromeda has posed:
        "Right," Laurel says, nodding.  "I'll be careful not to talk too much about the future… well, about my future, anyway—until you get it figured out.  The last thing I want to do is cause problems with the timestream—even if it's with someone else's timestream!"
        She brightens up upon hearing the good news.  "Now that's a stroke of luck, having a whole cruiser here.  I hadn't got around to thinking where I was going to eat and sleep just yet, but there weren't a while lot of prospects.  Is it in orbit?  Or parked on the ground somewhere near here?"

Invisible Kid has posed:
        "It wasn't luck," Lyle explains.  "Brainy engineered it from current tech, mostly by scaling up three-d printer technology and cleaning up old dead satellites."  He grins.  "It's a welcome piece of just-like-home, and he did an incredible job on it.  I don't think any of the rest of us could have pulled it off.  Well, I might've, but it would've taken a lot longer."

Andromeda has posed:
        She laughs, saying: "I should have known!  You're right as far as I'm concerned, though.  I can pilot a cruiser when the need arises, but trying to put one together—I wouldn't know where to start.  Although—maybe I can make it easier to get the materials needed to make it fully operational, at least.  Not that I think that problem would delay the two of you very long once you really got going on it."  She glances back down toward the now-distant playground.  "I owe a few more children rides—but I can't wait to see what your time's idea of a Legion cruiser looks like.  Wherever it is, I can meet you both there in—half an hour or so?"

Invisible Kid has posed:
        "Oh, if we can get the engines going, that would be fantastic.  It's either that, or I'm going to ask Wildfire if he minds being strapped to the back of the ship."  Lyle grins.  "I think he and I would both rather I not do that."
        He rummages a tool out of one of his belt pouches.  "Here, let me see your ring for a minute.  I can readjust it so the tracking subsystem works again.  Then you won't have any trouble finding the ship—and I can do a more complete re-adjustment there."

Andromeda has posed:
        The tall young woman willingly hands over her ring—perhaps a little too willingly, considering she's all by herself in a strange time, with no one but a teammate who isn't quite her teammate.  Of course, she can stay in midair without it, but it's a good thing she's not wrong about who she's giving it to.  That's Laurel for you: she's not much inclined to worry about things.  "Can you make the tracking system find this style of ring, also?  When you have more time, I mean," she clarifies.  "If there are any more of my Legion popping back into the Twentieth, we'll want to have an easier way to find them."

Invisible Kid has posed:
        "Twenty-first," Lyle corrects absently as he slips the ring onto a stubby metallic rod with a readout and several buttons on a flared-out base.  "The local year is 2025.  Ah!  Not perfect, but close enough!"  It didn't take long at all—the right tool for the job, apparently—and he hands it back over.  "It'll do until I can get it into the lab upstairs.  It's the temporal misalignment that's been causing the problem; if it weren't for that, we could pinpoint even a first generation flight belt to within a couple meters.  Besides, the ring design hasn't changed that much.  Why mess with success?" he finishes with a bit of pride.

Andromeda has posed:
        "Is it?  It looked so much like the Twentieth!  But then twenty or thirty years here or there, and it probably won't look much different to someone from a thousand years in the future," Laurel says.  Taking the ring when it's offered, she slips it back onto her finger and turns her hand this way and that: "Why indeed?  I don't think we'd look right without them."  She takes a moment to check that it is indeed tracking properly.  "Perfect.  Thanks for putting it right!  I'll be there before you know it.  In the meantime, say hi to Brainy for me?"  She'll pause long enough to catch any replies, of course—but likely as soon as she's done so, she'll be off back toward the playground with a *BOOM* of displaced air.