Somewhere to Hang Up the Duster (New Vegas x Justice League/Young Justice)
- Thread starter Poached_Egg
- Start date
- Crossover Sci-Fi Superhero
- Location
- Michigan, USA
Well, it tugged at all the right heartstrings, so imma give this a watch.
Travel to Distant Realities, Meet Fascinating People, and Punch Them
There were probably some chapters before this that merited this as well so this is arguably too little too late, but for what it's worth: Content warning.
—
Like all of the Old World's great cities, Phoenix was a graveyard, a grotesque monument to the souls that had met their end to the bombs. Tribals and the like tended to give cities like it a wide berth. Too many ghosts, too much death and pain in the soil. However, for the opportunistic, they were essentially a giant mineshaft. Except instead of ore, it contained veins of precious salvage and scrap. The Legion, for all their distaste of over-reliance on technology, was no less interested in the wealth of the Old World than their rivals.
So, when Caesar had brought death and pillage and rape to the Flaming Talon, the tribe that called the lands surrounding Phoenix home, he acted differently than usual. Rather than butchering the men of the tribe, he enslaved them. The women and girls were still claimed for the Legion, but the males of the tribe were destined to toil. While Flagstaff was Caesar's capital, the heart of the Legion's culture and civilization, Phoenix became the beating heart of its economy.
Civilization on a scale larger than a city state had yet to exist in Arizona and New Mexico, and so the ruins of the old states' murdered cities were ripe for plundering, Phoenix most of all. It became the center of all industry in Legion territory, and the beating heart of the obscenely prosperous slave trade that had thrived under the Legion's protection. Weapons and armor, tools and machines, all of them were scavenged or built in Phoenix.
It was a very carefully organized and managed Hell, with many thousands of slaves being worked to death in the salvage pits, or the workshops, or the plantations. It was fitting that Lanius would pick a Hell as his preferred pit to crawl back into, seeing as how he was a demon clad in the flesh of man.
Medicine Stick's rapport rang out in the rubble as the Courier took potshots at Legionaries in the distance. A grim sort of pleasure filled his heart as he watched some hapless recruit in the distance collapse in a shower of red. A hand touched the Courier's shoulder, and he jerked away reflexively, relaxing slightly when he saw that it was Boone.
"Here to give me a lecture about how I'm 'losing myself' like Arcade?" Six asked.
"No, I'm here to tell you dinner's ready."
"I'll pass."
"No, you won't. You're going to come back to base camp and sit by the fire, you're going to eat every bite of your dinner, and you're gonna make sure Veronica sees you do it. She's worried."
Six scoffed. "Great, another person to nag me." He glanced at him. "Don't tell me you're worried, too."
"No shit I'm worried. You know that I, of all the people on this planet, am not going to get weepy eyes and a bleeding heart over you wanting to drop more Legionaries. So when I tell you that you need to slow down, you know it's the God's honest truth."
"You think I can eat after that abomination? Sleep? None of that is happening until I hang that…fucker by his entrails."
"Take it from me, if you're going for revenge, neglecting your body is the dumbest thing you can do. How are you supposed to hang him from his entrails if you're stumbling around like a zombie because your dumb ass couldn't be bothered to sleep?"
"I don't give a-"
"This isn't a debate. You're going to get your ass up, you're going to come with me back to camp, we're going to get a bowl of cram-and-squirrel stew and drain it dry, then we're gonna get a knockout pill from Arcade and go to bed. When we wake up, we'll have fuel and energy to kill twice as many Legionaries as we did today."
Six looked away. "...If I sleep, I'll see it again."
"I know. You get used to it."
"...No time like the present to get started on that, huh?" Six got up, dusting himself off.
He turned around, and Boone was gone. In his place, a face destroyed by the sun stared at him, inches from his own. Fraying strands of gray hair hung in a tangled mess over the face. Over the eyes, the lenses of a pair of aviators were stapled into his flesh and bone. From his ruin of a mouth came his wheezing voice.
"Are you used to us yet?"
—
Six sprang up, his cold sweat being cleared away and reprocessed by the suit. Breathing heavily, he fumbled around for his lamp. The small set of guest quarters on the watchtower lit up, and Six stumbled out of bed, leaving the room and shakily walking towards the cafeteria, just to have somewhere to be that wasn't his bed.
"I'm so sorry, but I shocked you. I know you said to stop waking you, but this one was the worst you've had in ages. Please don't hate me."
He coughed a laugh. "Couldn't if I tried. You're a lifesaver. I think some old wounds have been getting opened up, and where I thought there was a scar from healing over, there was nothing but fester and pus."
"Couldn't you have gone for a less gross metaphor?"
"But then what would you have to make a snarky comment on?"
"You make an excellent point."
"Are you…bantering with your armor?" Calista asked, making the Courier aware of both the fact that she was also in the cafeteria, and the fact that his face was uncovered.
"Calista, I-!" He rushed to pull his bandana up and fumbled around for his aviators (trying very hard to not think about a certain set of lenses on a sun-boiled face in the process) only to realize he'd left them on the night stand. He turned, briefly considering shielding his eyes before deciding that it was stupid. She gestured for him to sit down across from her at her table, and he obliged.
"Are the rules of your culture truly so strict regarding revealing your face?"
"I mean, 'strict' is a strong word. There isn't like, divine punishment involved or something. My mother would definitely scold me for showing my eyes in front of an unaccompanied young woman, though."
"Once again, I must emphasize that I am actually a great deal older than you."
"Yeah, but normal-human years are kind of like dog years. I've experienced a lot more during a lot less."
She laughed. "True enough. Eighty years of life on paradise island is just eighty years of the exact. same. thing."
"I take it that's why you're also joining this 'Nightwing' character's secret club?"
"I know you don't have a lot of context, but I wouldn't need to be bored to take the offer. This is like winning the lottery. I can kiss that island goodbye and actually do something with my life. I get to see the world. Not 'Man's World', the world."
The tattered memories of the impoverished son of a prostitute who'd grown up in radioactive wasteland couldn't help but to produce a brief flash of bitterness in Six.
"Well, one could argue that you'd already won the lottery, what with you being born on the magic island paradise that gives you immortality…"
She actually looked a bit embarrassed, and Six immediately felt guilty.
"Hey, sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. Feel free to ignore it."
She smiled at him. "No, it's true. I'm truly blessed to be an Amazon, it is an exceedingly rare privilege. Still, it will be nice to finally age again. The island grants us immortality, while we stand on its soil. Which means that, given a few years, I can finally start looking like a proper woman and not like a highschooler late for her Algebra exam."
"Weirdly enough, I understood that joke, despite never having set foot in a highschool that wasn't a bombed out ruin. Well, except for one I guess."
She propped her elbows on the table and rested her face on her hands. "Do tell."
He shook his head. 'No, you're not dragging me into another story time. Maybe we'll chat about it sometime over a few dozen drinks, but for right now I'm pretty sick of wandering down memory lane."
Her smile faded. "Is that what's keeping you up? Bad memories?"
He nodded. "Yeah, something like that. What about you?"
"Just nerves. This is an incredible opportunity, but I'm so…me."
"You'll do fine. And besides, they'll be comparing you to me, so the standards will be low."
She chuckled and slapped him on the shoulder, which actually hurt a lot more than she probably intended, but Six valiantly suppressed the yelp of pain that almost passed through his lips. He got up to walk it off.
"What'll it be? Tea? Coffee?"
"I like to start the day with chilled water back home."
He dug around in the fridge. "Well, they've got 'sparkling' water, if you're feeling adventurous."
"Oh! I've always wanted to try that, I see it in the movies and it looks so…bubbly. Like someone managed to bottle water from a hot spring, but…y'know, cold."
"Are you a 'lemon-lime' kind of woman, or is 'watermelon splash' more your type?"
"Lemon-lime."
He walked back with two cans, handing one to her. Six looked at the bottom of the can incredulously.
"What a weird way to store a drink. Where the hell is the cap? Are we supposed to use a can opener?"
Calista took the can from him, flipping it right side up in the process, gallantly avoiding making a comment about it. "They do this in those dreadful beer commercials all the time, it's the same kind of can. You just pull the tab."
She demonstrated, and soon enough the pair were drinking their sparkling water. Calista took a swig, nodding as she swallowed.
"It's…flavored water with bubbles. I don't know what I was expecting."
"At least it doesn't make me more thirsty, like sunset sarsparilla."
"What is-...you know what? I'll just ask another time."
The two drank and looked at the planet below in companionable silence for a time. Calista broke it first.
"So…are you not supposed to show your eyes to anyone?"
"It's kind of like…stages, I guess? Your eyes are for your friends, so anyone you can call a friend you can reveal your eyes to…unless you're a man with an unaccompanied young woman, in which case, you're kind of considered a creep."
Calista blushed a little. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize the implication of-"
"Don't sweat it. It's not some sacred law or something, it's just a courtesy thing. It's like…I don't know, opening the car door on a date or something? It's 'gentlemanly' behavior. The sort of thing your mom talks your ear off about when you're a kid about to go on your first date while she combs your hair and tells you what a 'handsome young man' you are."
"I'll have to take your word for it."
"Why's that?"
"You are, quite literally, the first man I've ever met, remember?"
"...Good point. Anyway, it's not a problem, that's the main takeaway here."
"What are the other stages?"
He stopped to think. "Well, if your eyes are for your friends, then your face is for your family. Which more or less means it doesn't go uncovered outside of the home."
"What about…eating, and drinking, and…I don't know, spitting? Seems inconvenient and messy to have your entire face covered all day."
"I'm not particularly pious, so I just wear a bandana, but the proper face wrapping is hand made and designed so you can do all of those things without making a mess. I, however, just pull the bandana down."
Calista nodded, sipped her drink, and then her expression slowly changed to one of embarrassment as she continued thinking.
"So, uh, there's more stages after that, right? I would assume so, what with people still…you know, with there being children and all."
He squinted his eyes at her in confusion, until they widened in comprehension. "Oh! You mean sex."
"...Yeah, I mean sex." She sighed.
He laughed. "Nothing wrong with a little curiosity. Regardless of culture, we've all got one of two sets of equipment, at the end of day. Mostly."
"So…" Calista prodded.
He laughed again. "Oh, right. It's not as interesting as you'd think. Your eyes are for your friends, your face is for your family, and your body is for your spouse. As the sun rises and mom and dad - or whatever combination you prefer - go to bed, the wrappings come off. Unless someone's too tired, or has a headache, or worked too hard…"
Calista rolled her eyes. Six's eyes shone. "Look, no matter how many layers of clothing and sunglasses you have to get through, it's just the same silly bald ape underneath at the end of the day. We're all really not that different from each other…Well, ok, you're definitely pretty damn different, what with the immortality and all that."
Calista huffed. "I'm technically not even immortal right now! Besides, you're one to talk, mister 'I've had half my vital organs yanked out and replaced with machines.'"
"Hey! Most of those…ok the majority…some of those were involuntary. At least three, anyway."
"What, someone stole your organs?"
"My brain, heart, and spine, yeah."
"Why would anyone steal your brain? How would anyone steal your brain?"
"Long story. It was a journey of self-discovery, in the very literal sense."
"You don't get to 'long story' your way out of this one, delivery boy!"
"It'll have to wait." Batman said.
The pair turned to look at him in surprise and embarrassment.
"I-" They both began in unison.
Batman interrupted. "Save your breath. I don't care."
He gestured towards the cafeteria door. "You both woke up before your alarms, you both get to head for Mount Justice early. Get your things, I'll walk you to the Zeta tube."
Six raised an eyebrow. "What the hell is a Zeta tube?"
—
Maeja was a woman who could be described as many things. An ancient Amazon warrior, a veteran of the Second World War, a trusted friend of the Queen and her daughters, the Themysciran ambassador to the United Nations, and a leading voice for more open and progressive foreign and domestic policy. It was why she had been chosen to be the voice of Amazonian people to the outside world, as she was a good deal more fond of the outside world than the average Amazon. Unfortunately, there was another thing that Maeja could be described as, though none who could claim the right to use the term were aware that they could.
She could be described as a traitor.
In a wig, carefully applied makeup, and clothing that was the exact opposite of 'eye-catching', the millennia-old warrior was transformed into a different person. To anyone watching her at this moment, she looked like a professional woman of middle age, walking through the streets of New York City to what was no doubt some evening appointment or other mundane event. The building she entered was a small office building, carefully chosen to maintain a similar level of mundanity. This mundanity was one of the many ways that The Light hid in plain sight. Maeja smiled politely at the receptionist as she handed her a set of keys. Maeja did not know, nor did she particularly care, what the front business that operated in the building actually did, because it's true purpose was to give her means to contact her benefactors in secret when she was in New York on UN business.
She took the elevator to the basement, exited and turned left. At the end of the hall, a small office held a door which could be opened with the keys received from the receptionist. She sat at the desk, looking at the multi-monitor setup as the computer booted up without her input. A series of white silhouettes appeared, and the meeting could begin. She bowed her head, the only honorific or pleasantry that they ever bothered with in their meetings.
"Regrettably, my mission failed."
"Regrettable, but not unforeseeable." The lead silhouette commented.
"Your mission was but one of many objectives we hoped to achieve from the incursion we induced. We can hardly expect every single one of them to succeed." Another added.
"Frankly, any plan which hinges on the death of Wonder Woman to fully succeed was always a longshot. Would it have been preferable for Hippolyta and her line to have been expunged so that you could replace her? Of course. Does not achieving that mean nothing was gained? Of course not." The lead silhouette.
Maeja nodded. "True. I will have the Queen's ear now more than ever before. Her policies have directly led to a great many Amazonian deaths. She is a stubborn opponent of any kind of change, but she isn't made of stone. This will surely rattle her. Politically, we have still gained."
"And, of course, the subjects we gained in the aftermath are a boon unto itself…" Another silhouette mused.
Maeja didn't react. Her people had ensured that many of the most grievously wounded Amazons had been recorded as dead. They would be the first test subjects in the many experiments The Light would be performing to understand the nature of the supernatural enhancements that all Amazons possessed. There was a time when the mere thought of herself doing such a thing would have made her ill, but such weaknesses were well behind her now.
"I only regret that I cannot forge the army I dreamed of, and that we must resort to using scraps instead." She said with disgust.
"The scraps will suffice, for now. Your time will come, eventually. It will be good to already have a base of research built when it does." The lead silhouette placated her.
"How shall I proceed from here? Will I need to have my people set up another attractant device for the next incursion?" Maeja asked.
"No. It is unlikely that we'll be using the incursion technology again anytime soon. It's too loud, too disruptive. Many of our funding front companies lost a great deal of money due to the disruptions in the economy. It was a necessary expense, of course. Diverting the entire Justice League's attention for any length of time doesn't come cheap. The benefit of being able to operate openly for a brief time was worth the cost, however." The lead silhouette said.
Maeja nodded. While there were countless secondary operations, including her own, which were performed during the distraction caused by the incursion, the primary objective was the total dominance of the meta trafficking market, achieved through several very loud, very violent, and very public power plays that saw essentially every major meta trafficking ring come into The Light. All of which had happened while a major global catastrophe was in progress. Needless to say, the authorities (all of the authorities) were busy at the time.
The lead silhouette went on. "Most of the operations we executed during the distraction will likely remain unnoticed, but that was not possible for all of them. However, by the time the League makes sense of what happened, everything will have been carefully rehidden. They will have many suspicions, but no actionable intel. Such will be the case with Themyscira. They have no doubt already noticed the unusually large number of interdimensional entities that arrived on the island, for what appears to be an otherwise random distribution. Doubtless, they are already investigating, and they will likely determine that it is the Tartarus gate which drew the creatures' attention. They are documented as being attracted to any kind of dimensional transport device, even those constructed through sorcery."
Maeja nodded again. "They will find no evidence of the attractor device we constructed, I can assure you."
"Of course. For now, the gains we have obtained from your operation are sufficient. Continue to maintain a low profile. We will contact you when another opportunity arises." The lead silhouette brought the meeting to an end.
"Understood." Maeja bowed her head again, and the call closed.
It was disappointing to have lost the first real opportunity to seize hold of her country that she'd ever had, but it was unsurprising. As The Light had said, it had always been a longshot. Still, she was nothing if not patient. Millenia of life tended to teach one that skill. To end the stagnant, ineffectual leadership of Hippolyta, Maeja would gladly wait a very long time indeed, if that's what it took. A new era was coming, one where the strong would rule and the weak would serve. It was Maeja's life goal to ensure that her people would be counted among the strong.
---
The chapter was getting overly-long and was essentially just two unrelated parts, so I sawed it in half. As a result, next chapter should be soon-ish.
—
Like all of the Old World's great cities, Phoenix was a graveyard, a grotesque monument to the souls that had met their end to the bombs. Tribals and the like tended to give cities like it a wide berth. Too many ghosts, too much death and pain in the soil. However, for the opportunistic, they were essentially a giant mineshaft. Except instead of ore, it contained veins of precious salvage and scrap. The Legion, for all their distaste of over-reliance on technology, was no less interested in the wealth of the Old World than their rivals.
So, when Caesar had brought death and pillage and rape to the Flaming Talon, the tribe that called the lands surrounding Phoenix home, he acted differently than usual. Rather than butchering the men of the tribe, he enslaved them. The women and girls were still claimed for the Legion, but the males of the tribe were destined to toil. While Flagstaff was Caesar's capital, the heart of the Legion's culture and civilization, Phoenix became the beating heart of its economy.
Civilization on a scale larger than a city state had yet to exist in Arizona and New Mexico, and so the ruins of the old states' murdered cities were ripe for plundering, Phoenix most of all. It became the center of all industry in Legion territory, and the beating heart of the obscenely prosperous slave trade that had thrived under the Legion's protection. Weapons and armor, tools and machines, all of them were scavenged or built in Phoenix.
It was a very carefully organized and managed Hell, with many thousands of slaves being worked to death in the salvage pits, or the workshops, or the plantations. It was fitting that Lanius would pick a Hell as his preferred pit to crawl back into, seeing as how he was a demon clad in the flesh of man.
Medicine Stick's rapport rang out in the rubble as the Courier took potshots at Legionaries in the distance. A grim sort of pleasure filled his heart as he watched some hapless recruit in the distance collapse in a shower of red. A hand touched the Courier's shoulder, and he jerked away reflexively, relaxing slightly when he saw that it was Boone.
"Here to give me a lecture about how I'm 'losing myself' like Arcade?" Six asked.
"No, I'm here to tell you dinner's ready."
"I'll pass."
"No, you won't. You're going to come back to base camp and sit by the fire, you're going to eat every bite of your dinner, and you're gonna make sure Veronica sees you do it. She's worried."
Six scoffed. "Great, another person to nag me." He glanced at him. "Don't tell me you're worried, too."
"No shit I'm worried. You know that I, of all the people on this planet, am not going to get weepy eyes and a bleeding heart over you wanting to drop more Legionaries. So when I tell you that you need to slow down, you know it's the God's honest truth."
"You think I can eat after that abomination? Sleep? None of that is happening until I hang that…fucker by his entrails."
"Take it from me, if you're going for revenge, neglecting your body is the dumbest thing you can do. How are you supposed to hang him from his entrails if you're stumbling around like a zombie because your dumb ass couldn't be bothered to sleep?"
"I don't give a-"
"This isn't a debate. You're going to get your ass up, you're going to come with me back to camp, we're going to get a bowl of cram-and-squirrel stew and drain it dry, then we're gonna get a knockout pill from Arcade and go to bed. When we wake up, we'll have fuel and energy to kill twice as many Legionaries as we did today."
Six looked away. "...If I sleep, I'll see it again."
"I know. You get used to it."
"...No time like the present to get started on that, huh?" Six got up, dusting himself off.
He turned around, and Boone was gone. In his place, a face destroyed by the sun stared at him, inches from his own. Fraying strands of gray hair hung in a tangled mess over the face. Over the eyes, the lenses of a pair of aviators were stapled into his flesh and bone. From his ruin of a mouth came his wheezing voice.
"Are you used to us yet?"
—
Six sprang up, his cold sweat being cleared away and reprocessed by the suit. Breathing heavily, he fumbled around for his lamp. The small set of guest quarters on the watchtower lit up, and Six stumbled out of bed, leaving the room and shakily walking towards the cafeteria, just to have somewhere to be that wasn't his bed.
"I'm so sorry, but I shocked you. I know you said to stop waking you, but this one was the worst you've had in ages. Please don't hate me."
He coughed a laugh. "Couldn't if I tried. You're a lifesaver. I think some old wounds have been getting opened up, and where I thought there was a scar from healing over, there was nothing but fester and pus."
"Couldn't you have gone for a less gross metaphor?"
"But then what would you have to make a snarky comment on?"
"You make an excellent point."
"Are you…bantering with your armor?" Calista asked, making the Courier aware of both the fact that she was also in the cafeteria, and the fact that his face was uncovered.
"Calista, I-!" He rushed to pull his bandana up and fumbled around for his aviators (trying very hard to not think about a certain set of lenses on a sun-boiled face in the process) only to realize he'd left them on the night stand. He turned, briefly considering shielding his eyes before deciding that it was stupid. She gestured for him to sit down across from her at her table, and he obliged.
"Are the rules of your culture truly so strict regarding revealing your face?"
"I mean, 'strict' is a strong word. There isn't like, divine punishment involved or something. My mother would definitely scold me for showing my eyes in front of an unaccompanied young woman, though."
"Once again, I must emphasize that I am actually a great deal older than you."
"Yeah, but normal-human years are kind of like dog years. I've experienced a lot more during a lot less."
She laughed. "True enough. Eighty years of life on paradise island is just eighty years of the exact. same. thing."
"I take it that's why you're also joining this 'Nightwing' character's secret club?"
"I know you don't have a lot of context, but I wouldn't need to be bored to take the offer. This is like winning the lottery. I can kiss that island goodbye and actually do something with my life. I get to see the world. Not 'Man's World', the world."
The tattered memories of the impoverished son of a prostitute who'd grown up in radioactive wasteland couldn't help but to produce a brief flash of bitterness in Six.
"Well, one could argue that you'd already won the lottery, what with you being born on the magic island paradise that gives you immortality…"
She actually looked a bit embarrassed, and Six immediately felt guilty.
"Hey, sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. Feel free to ignore it."
She smiled at him. "No, it's true. I'm truly blessed to be an Amazon, it is an exceedingly rare privilege. Still, it will be nice to finally age again. The island grants us immortality, while we stand on its soil. Which means that, given a few years, I can finally start looking like a proper woman and not like a highschooler late for her Algebra exam."
"Weirdly enough, I understood that joke, despite never having set foot in a highschool that wasn't a bombed out ruin. Well, except for one I guess."
She propped her elbows on the table and rested her face on her hands. "Do tell."
He shook his head. 'No, you're not dragging me into another story time. Maybe we'll chat about it sometime over a few dozen drinks, but for right now I'm pretty sick of wandering down memory lane."
Her smile faded. "Is that what's keeping you up? Bad memories?"
He nodded. "Yeah, something like that. What about you?"
"Just nerves. This is an incredible opportunity, but I'm so…me."
"You'll do fine. And besides, they'll be comparing you to me, so the standards will be low."
She chuckled and slapped him on the shoulder, which actually hurt a lot more than she probably intended, but Six valiantly suppressed the yelp of pain that almost passed through his lips. He got up to walk it off.
"What'll it be? Tea? Coffee?"
"I like to start the day with chilled water back home."
He dug around in the fridge. "Well, they've got 'sparkling' water, if you're feeling adventurous."
"Oh! I've always wanted to try that, I see it in the movies and it looks so…bubbly. Like someone managed to bottle water from a hot spring, but…y'know, cold."
"Are you a 'lemon-lime' kind of woman, or is 'watermelon splash' more your type?"
"Lemon-lime."
He walked back with two cans, handing one to her. Six looked at the bottom of the can incredulously.
"What a weird way to store a drink. Where the hell is the cap? Are we supposed to use a can opener?"
Calista took the can from him, flipping it right side up in the process, gallantly avoiding making a comment about it. "They do this in those dreadful beer commercials all the time, it's the same kind of can. You just pull the tab."
She demonstrated, and soon enough the pair were drinking their sparkling water. Calista took a swig, nodding as she swallowed.
"It's…flavored water with bubbles. I don't know what I was expecting."
"At least it doesn't make me more thirsty, like sunset sarsparilla."
"What is-...you know what? I'll just ask another time."
The two drank and looked at the planet below in companionable silence for a time. Calista broke it first.
"So…are you not supposed to show your eyes to anyone?"
"It's kind of like…stages, I guess? Your eyes are for your friends, so anyone you can call a friend you can reveal your eyes to…unless you're a man with an unaccompanied young woman, in which case, you're kind of considered a creep."
Calista blushed a little. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize the implication of-"
"Don't sweat it. It's not some sacred law or something, it's just a courtesy thing. It's like…I don't know, opening the car door on a date or something? It's 'gentlemanly' behavior. The sort of thing your mom talks your ear off about when you're a kid about to go on your first date while she combs your hair and tells you what a 'handsome young man' you are."
"I'll have to take your word for it."
"Why's that?"
"You are, quite literally, the first man I've ever met, remember?"
"...Good point. Anyway, it's not a problem, that's the main takeaway here."
"What are the other stages?"
He stopped to think. "Well, if your eyes are for your friends, then your face is for your family. Which more or less means it doesn't go uncovered outside of the home."
"What about…eating, and drinking, and…I don't know, spitting? Seems inconvenient and messy to have your entire face covered all day."
"I'm not particularly pious, so I just wear a bandana, but the proper face wrapping is hand made and designed so you can do all of those things without making a mess. I, however, just pull the bandana down."
Calista nodded, sipped her drink, and then her expression slowly changed to one of embarrassment as she continued thinking.
"So, uh, there's more stages after that, right? I would assume so, what with people still…you know, with there being children and all."
He squinted his eyes at her in confusion, until they widened in comprehension. "Oh! You mean sex."
"...Yeah, I mean sex." She sighed.
He laughed. "Nothing wrong with a little curiosity. Regardless of culture, we've all got one of two sets of equipment, at the end of day. Mostly."
"So…" Calista prodded.
He laughed again. "Oh, right. It's not as interesting as you'd think. Your eyes are for your friends, your face is for your family, and your body is for your spouse. As the sun rises and mom and dad - or whatever combination you prefer - go to bed, the wrappings come off. Unless someone's too tired, or has a headache, or worked too hard…"
Calista rolled her eyes. Six's eyes shone. "Look, no matter how many layers of clothing and sunglasses you have to get through, it's just the same silly bald ape underneath at the end of the day. We're all really not that different from each other…Well, ok, you're definitely pretty damn different, what with the immortality and all that."
Calista huffed. "I'm technically not even immortal right now! Besides, you're one to talk, mister 'I've had half my vital organs yanked out and replaced with machines.'"
"Hey! Most of those…ok the majority…some of those were involuntary. At least three, anyway."
"What, someone stole your organs?"
"My brain, heart, and spine, yeah."
"Why would anyone steal your brain? How would anyone steal your brain?"
"Long story. It was a journey of self-discovery, in the very literal sense."
"You don't get to 'long story' your way out of this one, delivery boy!"
"It'll have to wait." Batman said.
The pair turned to look at him in surprise and embarrassment.
"I-" They both began in unison.
Batman interrupted. "Save your breath. I don't care."
He gestured towards the cafeteria door. "You both woke up before your alarms, you both get to head for Mount Justice early. Get your things, I'll walk you to the Zeta tube."
Six raised an eyebrow. "What the hell is a Zeta tube?"
—
Maeja was a woman who could be described as many things. An ancient Amazon warrior, a veteran of the Second World War, a trusted friend of the Queen and her daughters, the Themysciran ambassador to the United Nations, and a leading voice for more open and progressive foreign and domestic policy. It was why she had been chosen to be the voice of Amazonian people to the outside world, as she was a good deal more fond of the outside world than the average Amazon. Unfortunately, there was another thing that Maeja could be described as, though none who could claim the right to use the term were aware that they could.
She could be described as a traitor.
In a wig, carefully applied makeup, and clothing that was the exact opposite of 'eye-catching', the millennia-old warrior was transformed into a different person. To anyone watching her at this moment, she looked like a professional woman of middle age, walking through the streets of New York City to what was no doubt some evening appointment or other mundane event. The building she entered was a small office building, carefully chosen to maintain a similar level of mundanity. This mundanity was one of the many ways that The Light hid in plain sight. Maeja smiled politely at the receptionist as she handed her a set of keys. Maeja did not know, nor did she particularly care, what the front business that operated in the building actually did, because it's true purpose was to give her means to contact her benefactors in secret when she was in New York on UN business.
She took the elevator to the basement, exited and turned left. At the end of the hall, a small office held a door which could be opened with the keys received from the receptionist. She sat at the desk, looking at the multi-monitor setup as the computer booted up without her input. A series of white silhouettes appeared, and the meeting could begin. She bowed her head, the only honorific or pleasantry that they ever bothered with in their meetings.
"Regrettably, my mission failed."
"Regrettable, but not unforeseeable." The lead silhouette commented.
"Your mission was but one of many objectives we hoped to achieve from the incursion we induced. We can hardly expect every single one of them to succeed." Another added.
"Frankly, any plan which hinges on the death of Wonder Woman to fully succeed was always a longshot. Would it have been preferable for Hippolyta and her line to have been expunged so that you could replace her? Of course. Does not achieving that mean nothing was gained? Of course not." The lead silhouette.
Maeja nodded. "True. I will have the Queen's ear now more than ever before. Her policies have directly led to a great many Amazonian deaths. She is a stubborn opponent of any kind of change, but she isn't made of stone. This will surely rattle her. Politically, we have still gained."
"And, of course, the subjects we gained in the aftermath are a boon unto itself…" Another silhouette mused.
Maeja didn't react. Her people had ensured that many of the most grievously wounded Amazons had been recorded as dead. They would be the first test subjects in the many experiments The Light would be performing to understand the nature of the supernatural enhancements that all Amazons possessed. There was a time when the mere thought of herself doing such a thing would have made her ill, but such weaknesses were well behind her now.
"I only regret that I cannot forge the army I dreamed of, and that we must resort to using scraps instead." She said with disgust.
"The scraps will suffice, for now. Your time will come, eventually. It will be good to already have a base of research built when it does." The lead silhouette placated her.
"How shall I proceed from here? Will I need to have my people set up another attractant device for the next incursion?" Maeja asked.
"No. It is unlikely that we'll be using the incursion technology again anytime soon. It's too loud, too disruptive. Many of our funding front companies lost a great deal of money due to the disruptions in the economy. It was a necessary expense, of course. Diverting the entire Justice League's attention for any length of time doesn't come cheap. The benefit of being able to operate openly for a brief time was worth the cost, however." The lead silhouette said.
Maeja nodded. While there were countless secondary operations, including her own, which were performed during the distraction caused by the incursion, the primary objective was the total dominance of the meta trafficking market, achieved through several very loud, very violent, and very public power plays that saw essentially every major meta trafficking ring come into The Light. All of which had happened while a major global catastrophe was in progress. Needless to say, the authorities (all of the authorities) were busy at the time.
The lead silhouette went on. "Most of the operations we executed during the distraction will likely remain unnoticed, but that was not possible for all of them. However, by the time the League makes sense of what happened, everything will have been carefully rehidden. They will have many suspicions, but no actionable intel. Such will be the case with Themyscira. They have no doubt already noticed the unusually large number of interdimensional entities that arrived on the island, for what appears to be an otherwise random distribution. Doubtless, they are already investigating, and they will likely determine that it is the Tartarus gate which drew the creatures' attention. They are documented as being attracted to any kind of dimensional transport device, even those constructed through sorcery."
Maeja nodded again. "They will find no evidence of the attractor device we constructed, I can assure you."
"Of course. For now, the gains we have obtained from your operation are sufficient. Continue to maintain a low profile. We will contact you when another opportunity arises." The lead silhouette brought the meeting to an end.
"Understood." Maeja bowed her head again, and the call closed.
It was disappointing to have lost the first real opportunity to seize hold of her country that she'd ever had, but it was unsurprising. As The Light had said, it had always been a longshot. Still, she was nothing if not patient. Millenia of life tended to teach one that skill. To end the stagnant, ineffectual leadership of Hippolyta, Maeja would gladly wait a very long time indeed, if that's what it took. A new era was coming, one where the strong would rule and the weak would serve. It was Maeja's life goal to ensure that her people would be counted among the strong.
---
The chapter was getting overly-long and was essentially just two unrelated parts, so I sawed it in half. As a result, next chapter should be soon-ish.
Odd1todd89
The strange tightrope
- Pronouns
- It
thank you for choosing to write.
The Team (It's not a social club)
The major plot beats of Season 1 more or less happened in this story's universe (except the whole 'send some of the League out to do a little mischief on the other side of the galaxy' plot point), albeit with different sets of characters in (mainly in the League, the season 1 Team roster is essentially unchanged). The timeskip is the point of divergence. Many plot points that happened in Young Justice also happened in this story's universe (i.e. Jason Todd and Tula's death) but a lot of things are also different, most notably who joins the team/exists at all, and the ages of some characters. The most significant change is that the whole 'discovery of the meta gene' plotline happens (albeit earlier), except it's done exclusively by the Light, instead of outsourcing it to the Reach. Hence why some Metahuman characters exist earlier than they would have in normal Young Justice.
I've tried to streamline the roster a bit to avoid the thing that happened in the show which I think dragged it down sometimes. That is, having way too many characters to actually give them all meaningful amounts of screen time. I apologize if your favorite character didn't make the cut, I assure you it isn't because I hate them but because I didn't think I can write them in an interesting way or because their existence would torpedo this story's worldbuilding. Also, just because a character doesn't appear now doesn't mean that they won't appear later.
Members of The Team
-Nightwing — Basically unchanged from his show appearance, just aged up slightly
-Miss Martian — Essentially unchanged except that she has no subplot about abusing her powers and has altered her skin to her white martian heritage earlier.
-Superboy — Also unchanged, probably more so than any other character. Basically the same guy he was as of season 2, although not having his ex-girlfriend running around mind-raping people has definitely helped his temperment.
-Kid Flash — Didn't retire, unlike season 2, but otherwise he is characterized essentially the same way.
-Artemis/Tigress — Of all the OG team members, this is probably the biggest change this story makes. In terms of personality and backstory she's essentially the same character. The main difference is that, instead of retiring with Wally during the interseasonal period, she becomes Tigress. My extremely low-effort explanation is that it was essentially her equivalent of Robin's transition into Nightwing, with her transitioning from fighting like Green Arrow into fighting like herself, if that makes any sense. The real reason is that I want her character to become Tigress, but I can't just steal the original show's motivation since the Invasion plotline isn't going to be a thing, so I just followed Young Justice tradition and did it offscreen.
-Robin (Tim Drake) — Essentially the same character we see in season 2
-Beast Boy — Aged up slightly compared to his depiction in season 2, but otherwise essentially the same character (with maybe a bit more teen titans influence thrown in)
-Static — Ok, so I grew up with his show and want him to have more than the like eight minutes of screentime he got in YJ. Sue me.
-Batgirl — Basically the same character from the show.
-Bumblebee — Basically the same Character
-Guardian (Mal) —- Same personality, only difference is that he goes into the field sometimes as Guardian instead of being exclusively the Ops guy
-Arsenal (Roy Harper) — Instead of the League just kind of giving up on finding him (admittedly they did have reason to believe he was dead, but still) they just actually find him during the time skip (albeit the later end of it). He's already had time to get through some of that initial angst from season 2 so he's mostly just the funni grumpy brother that he was during that brief stretch of precious, precious screen time he was bequeathed by the benevolent writers in season 3.
Former Members (The living kind)
-Red Arrow (Will Harper) — Had essentially the same character arc, just accelerated a little. Currently busy being a dad.
-Aqualad (Kaldur) — Went out into the world to find himself after Tula's death
-Tempest (Garth) — Resigned from the Team and hero work in general after Tula's death, went home to Atlantis.
Former Members (The dead kind)
-Jason Todd — Our poor boy can't catch a break in any universe
-Aquagirl (Tula) — Same exact character arc as in the show (and game, apparently).
Team Mom
-Red Tornado — He just kind of fell out of the plot entirely after season 1 for some reason, despite being a pretty important and very fun character. In this story he is basically the designated den mother from the Justice League, although that's less necessary due to there being actual adults on the team now (which I assume is why they wrote him out after season 1, but that doesn't make me any less sad).
I've tried to streamline the roster a bit to avoid the thing that happened in the show which I think dragged it down sometimes. That is, having way too many characters to actually give them all meaningful amounts of screen time. I apologize if your favorite character didn't make the cut, I assure you it isn't because I hate them but because I didn't think I can write them in an interesting way or because their existence would torpedo this story's worldbuilding. Also, just because a character doesn't appear now doesn't mean that they won't appear later.
Members of The Team
-Nightwing — Basically unchanged from his show appearance, just aged up slightly
-Miss Martian — Essentially unchanged except that she has no subplot about abusing her powers and has altered her skin to her white martian heritage earlier.
-Superboy — Also unchanged, probably more so than any other character. Basically the same guy he was as of season 2, although not having his ex-girlfriend running around mind-raping people has definitely helped his temperment.
-Kid Flash — Didn't retire, unlike season 2, but otherwise he is characterized essentially the same way.
-Artemis/Tigress — Of all the OG team members, this is probably the biggest change this story makes. In terms of personality and backstory she's essentially the same character. The main difference is that, instead of retiring with Wally during the interseasonal period, she becomes Tigress. My extremely low-effort explanation is that it was essentially her equivalent of Robin's transition into Nightwing, with her transitioning from fighting like Green Arrow into fighting like herself, if that makes any sense. The real reason is that I want her character to become Tigress, but I can't just steal the original show's motivation since the Invasion plotline isn't going to be a thing, so I just followed Young Justice tradition and did it offscreen.
-Robin (Tim Drake) — Essentially the same character we see in season 2
-Beast Boy — Aged up slightly compared to his depiction in season 2, but otherwise essentially the same character (with maybe a bit more teen titans influence thrown in)
-Static — Ok, so I grew up with his show and want him to have more than the like eight minutes of screentime he got in YJ. Sue me.
-Batgirl — Basically the same character from the show.
-Bumblebee — Basically the same Character
-Guardian (Mal) —- Same personality, only difference is that he goes into the field sometimes as Guardian instead of being exclusively the Ops guy
-Arsenal (Roy Harper) — Instead of the League just kind of giving up on finding him (admittedly they did have reason to believe he was dead, but still) they just actually find him during the time skip (albeit the later end of it). He's already had time to get through some of that initial angst from season 2 so he's mostly just the funni grumpy brother that he was during that brief stretch of precious, precious screen time he was bequeathed by the benevolent writers in season 3.
Former Members (The living kind)
-Red Arrow (Will Harper) — Had essentially the same character arc, just accelerated a little. Currently busy being a dad.
-Aqualad (Kaldur) — Went out into the world to find himself after Tula's death
-Tempest (Garth) — Resigned from the Team and hero work in general after Tula's death, went home to Atlantis.
Former Members (The dead kind)
-Jason Todd — Our poor boy can't catch a break in any universe
-Aquagirl (Tula) — Same exact character arc as in the show (and game, apparently).
Team Mom
-Red Tornado — He just kind of fell out of the plot entirely after season 1 for some reason, despite being a pretty important and very fun character. In this story he is basically the designated den mother from the Justice League, although that's less necessary due to there being actual adults on the team now (which I assume is why they wrote him out after season 1, but that doesn't make me any less sad).
- Location
- Colorado
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well I didn't know I needed this but WOW this is absolutely something fantastic. Also I'm kinda hoping the League can whip up some kind of Comic Nonsense explicitly non lethal bullets for 6 so he can keep using Lucky. The man deserves the comfort of a Big Iron on his hip.
Travel to Distant Realities, Meet Fascinating People, and Punch Them - 2
Six shuddered as he stepped out of the Zeta tube, Calista behind him. He turned to her.
"Well, that was…less unpleasant than it could've been." he said.
"It takes some getting used to, but it's harmless." A man said.
They both turned to look at him. Six had hoped that his time in Themyscira was a unique occurrence, and not everyone in this world was significantly more attractive than the people of his world. Upon seeing the man in front of him, the evidence that his hopes had any merit continued to dwindle. Even with a mask obscuring his eyes, the man in front of him was the sort of guy they'd put next to some actress with a million-watt smile and fifteen minutes of fame on a pre-war perfume or makeup ad, as an example of the kind of ultra-desirable hunk a pre-war woman viewing the ad would attract if they'd only buy the latest useless product. Six sighed internally at the latest evidence of his peoples' deficiency.
Malnourished, irradiated people don't measure up too well in the looks department. Who could have guessed?
The man approached and shook both Six's and Calista's hand. "You must be Courier Six and Calista. I'm Nightwing, I lead this team."
He gestured to a man behind him in a golden helmet. "That's Guardian, he runs our ops and supervises our training." The helmeted man waved.
He gestured to a…humanoid robot? Never seen a robot like that before. "That's Red Tornado, our official unofficial League minder." The robot nodded.
Nightwing turned back to "Everyone else is either at school or working their day job, which suits me just fine. It lets us evaluate you in peace. So, we'll start off with a little sparring match, if you're comfortable with that."
Six and Calista looked at each other. "...Just like that?" Calista said.
Nightwing smiled. "Just like that. We've got all the time in the world to do a tour of the cave, show you your rooms, all that jazz. Right now, I just need to know what I'm working with. So, a sparring match, hand to hand, to start. Who's first?"
Calista and Six shared a look. "Do you think you can take him?" She asked.
Six scoffed. "Are you kidding me? I've fought tyrants, armies, cannibals, killer robots, the undead, and one time a giant robot scorpion…and I did it all with guns. I'm going to get my ass kicked, you go first."
Nightwing actually laughed, which kind of surprised Six. I figured he was a stern and broody Batman type.
Calista rolled her eyes and stepped forward. Nightwing nodded at Guardian, who brought up some kind of holographic display that spread out over the floor. Guardian spoke.
"Basic sparring program, first to perform a successful takedown gets the round. Best of three wins the match. Round start will be indicated with a buzzer."
Nightwing and Calista nodded and took up a position on opposite sides of the ring. A buzzer sounded, and Calista rushed forward and seized Nightwing around his midsection, trying to lift him up and over for a body slam. Nightwing squirmed out of her grasp with ease, doing a handstand on her shoulders that turned into a bodyslam of his own. The computer gave the point to Nightwing. Calista got up and went back to her starting position, looking more thoughtful than annoyed, to her credit.
The next round began, and Calista approached cautiously, throwing a few restrained punches. Nightwing took up a boxer's stance and dodged the jabs with little difficulty. Calista started getting more aggressive in response, until Nightwing seemed to pick a jab at random to deflect, delivering a nasty counter punch to Calista's face in the same motion. He went for a kick to follow up, which Calista deflected, before sending a wild haymaker of her own in an attempt at a counter punch. Nightwing caught her arm and moved in sync with her, pulling on it and sending her sailing over his head. She landed on the floor with a huff as the computer gave the match to Nightwing. He went over to help her up, and Calista had the grace to accept the offered hand, despite her obvious frustration.
"You're too reliant on your strength. Very common even in 'normal' strong people, nevermind super strong people. You overcommitted in the first round, but your compensation attempts in the second were nice. You lost your temper at the end there, that's what cost you."
Calista exhaled, before nodding. "I've always struggled with keeping a cool head in single combat, as my teachers made abundantly clear to me in my training."
Nightwing smiled. "Happens to the best of us. Experience can take the edge off."
He turned to Six. "Ok, your turn."
Six shook his head, even as he reluctantly took off his gunbelt and approached the ring. "I'm a gunfighter. Not exactly the preferred style for an organization that only does non-lethal fighting, I know, but it's where all of my actual skill is. I'm nothing special in a fist fight."
Nightwing nodded. "Yes, I've heard about you and your guns, and I've got a few ideas on how to make use of those skills in an acceptable way, but we're still going to train you up on hand-to-hand. But to do that, I'll need to know our starting point."
Six took his place in the ring, sizing Nightwing up. Even from such a tiny sample, Six could confidently say that Nightwing was objectively the best hand-to-hand fighter he had ever laid eyes on. Other than Rangers and Legionaries - who realistically tended to only do it as a supplement to their weapons training - formal martial arts training was not something that Wastelanders had either the time or the inclination to pursue, himself included. So, like most Wastelanders, Six fought in the ancient universal discipline known as 'Confused Barroom Brawl Style'."
Still, he considered it a matter of professional courtesy to at least try to win, even when he obviously didn't stand a chance, so he started forming a plan. His only real hope was surprise.
The buzzer sounded, and Six began walking calmly towards his opponent. Nightwing raised an eyebrow, before doing the same. Six raised his hands into a boxing stance, and Nightwing mirrored him again. Six waited patiently for Nightwing to strike first, and before long he was rewarded with a probing punch from Nightwing. Six received the punch on his forearm, and then a lightning fast jab shot out towards Nightwing at the same time. A textbook Scribe Counter, exactly as Veronica had taught him. Unfortunately, it was a fairly unoriginal move by Nightwing's standards, and he anticipated it easily, stepping into the punch and kneeing Six in the stomach.
Six went down, the wind thoroughly knocked out of him, but he still managed to ignore the pain and turn the fall into the beginnings of a Ranger Takedown, sending a sweeping kick towards Nightwing's feet. It didn't actually knock him over, because of course it didn't, but it succeeded in forcing the man off balance. Six capitalized on this, springing off the ground and into a brutal palm thrust, the second half of the Ranger Takedown. To his surprise, it actually hit Nightwing. It became less surprising, however, when Nightwing used the momentum of the hit to send Six into a vicious bodyslam.
He got hit on purpose, the tricky bastard.
The computer awarded the round to Nightwing. Six got up and returned to his spot. As subtly as possible, he tensed his muscles and established the proper footwork in preparation. No chance to outfight him, no chance to outfox him. The only thing to do was to bolt out of the gate with everything he had and turn it into a contest of raw animal strength. The buzzer sounded, and Six went out like a race horse. He was far from an expert fighter, but he was very fit and well coordinated. Speed was not his problem.
The move he had bolted into was one of the more interesting products of time he'd spent fraternizing with the Legion deserters that had trickled their way into the Mojave in the years since their defeat at the dam. He mainly did it out of a desire to force his wounded mind to remember the humanity of his enemies, no matter how much trauma was poured into it. However, he had also learned a few things from it. Mostly just interesting tidbits about life within the hellish ranks of the Legion, but also the occasional scrap of actionable intel. What Veronica had learned, however, was a good deal more unique.
She was very friendly and very outgoing and so of course she had joined him in his attempts at socializing with the deserters. She was also the single biggest enthusiast of unarmed combat that Six had ever met (though, in this world, that may be subject to change) so of course she had gotten to talking with the Legion deserters about punching and their preferred methods of doing so. She had learned of a move with a rather unsavory name, the 'Legion Assault'. Veronica, having claimed it for her own (and, naturally, altered it so that the primary attack it was based around was a punch rather than a palm thrust) had rechristened it the Mojave Blitz'.
As Six bolted forward, performing a hop at the last second. His entire weight through the force of gravity would be contained within the punch. Or, at least, that was the idea. And, for a rather mediocre combatant like himself, Six managed to perform the most perfect Mojave Blitz he'd ever managed (not that he got in enough fist fights to have a lot of data on the subject). Veronica would have been proud.
Even Nightwing seemed to be genuinely surprised at the bold rush. However, it quickly became clear that it was less the 'Wow, that's really impressive!' kind of surprise and more the 'Wow, I can't believe he thought this was a good idea' kind of surprise. He sidestepped the jump attack, and to his credit Six managed to not faceplant right then and there. He landed on his feet and swerved into a right hook…which Nightwing promptly caught, along with the hasty left hook that followed after. Nightwing kicked Six's feet out from under him, letting go of his fists at the last second to prevent him from breaking his fall.
The match went to Nightwing, to the surprise of no one, least of all Six. Nightwing held out a hand, somehow managing to produce a smile that was clearly amused, but not offensive or mocking in the slightest. Six took the offered hand and got up with a chuckle.
"You know, my pride compels me to remind you that in a real life or death fight, I wouldn't be making a fool of myself in a fistfight. I'd just shoot you." His attempt at a joke utterly bombed. All levity evaporated from Nightwing's face, and an awkward cough escaped from Guardian.
Jesus, I haven't killed the mood this badly in a while.
"...Are you serious?" Nightwing seemed to be genuinely asking.
"...No? Obviously not. Somehow, I think the odds of us ending up in a fight to the death are reasonably low."
Nightwing shook his head. "Not me, specifically. I meant in general. If your life is in danger, will you kill?"
Six pondered for a moment. I was wondering when I'd trip over this whole 'no kill' thing. Turns out it took all of…what? Two days?
"Well, my definition of a 'life-threatening' situation is probably a hell of a lot more constrained than a normal person, but…what do you expect people to do? When it's them or a bad guy, I mean. Die?"
Nightwing frowned, before visibly calming himself. "You'd be shocked at just how small the number of combat situations which have no other way out except lethal force is."
"That didn't answer my question." Six said. All levity had vanished from him as well. He'd known what he was signing up for, Batman had made the rules clear, but he was realizing, finally, that his perspective was a good bit more alien to their own than he'd anticipated. A rule to not kill made sense to him. The idea of someone dying for such a rule was…something of an outside context problem for him. In the Wasteland, it's kill or be killed. Ancestors knew killing took a toll on a man, him in particular. They also knew he'd tried his best to do things a better way, but even when he did he still kept a gun in his other hand, in both the literal and metaphorical sense.
Being willing to die at the hands of your enemies before you took their life…any Wastelander in their right mind would laugh until they puked at such a stupid notion. It was reckless, absurd, arguably selfish…and Ancestors preserve him, it was tempting. There was just one thing that wouldn't sit right.
Nightwing answered his initial question. "...This world is a swirling vortex of killing and violence. It always has been, and if you're the pessimistic sort, it always will be. But, when we show up…the killing stops. That is what sets us apart. The pursuit of that near miraculous effect is why we put our lives on the line for that ideal, why some of us have died because of it."
He sighed, and sadness mixed in with the determination. "We've never asked anyone to die for this. Hasn't stopped some of us from doing it anyway."
Six nodded slightly. "If it's just me, then I can live with this. Like I told Batman, it's…doable. But what if it's not me? What if it's some poor sap coming home from work who gets nabbed by whatever bastard we're fighting that week? If I have to make a choice between the bad guy and an innocent, then I'm choosing the innocent. Every time."
Nightwing hesitated, and Red Tornado jumped in, much to Six's surprise. "The League addresses such things on a case by case basis. The heat of combat is a dangerous place, and the League acknowledges that sometimes, on the battlefield, impossible choices need to be made."
Nightwing had to begrudgingly concur. "The goal of the training you're about to begin, and the reason that it will never really stop until and unless you retire, is to avoid such a thing from ever happening. As the man who taught me to fight was so fond of saying 'There's always a choice.' We train hard and we fight harder to ensure that that becomes a reality."
After a moment, Six nodded. "I can live with that…but I stand by my words."
After a longer moment, Nightwing nodded slowly.
Calista did a little wave. "I also agree to not kill people."
It broke the tension enough to elicit a chuckle from Nightwing that was only slightly forced. Guardian coughed again.
"Now that that's out of the way…who wants that tour?"
—
In the evening following a long day of orientation, in the privacy of his room, Dick and Barbara (who was returned from her classes by now) spoke of the day's happenings.
"I think what bothers me is…I don't really have an answer. When it's just me, well, there's 'always a choice', you know?"
Barb rolled her eyes. "Of course I know, I'm one of the only people on the planet who can say they do."
Dick smiled, but it soon turned into a frown. "My point is, in a hypothetical scenario where it's me or a bad guy…I just beat up the bad guy. But, when it's someone else…"
Barb gave him a surprised look. "Has this really never crossed your mind before?"
Dick shook his head. "It's not that it hasn't, it's just that…well, 'there's always a choice'."
"So what was different this time?"
"Because it wasn't coming from some super villain talking about how weak we are, or some general giving us the 'too dangerous to be left alive' spiel, or some pundit whining about us being 'bleeding hearts'. It's from…"
"Another hero?" She finished.
He frowned. "I suppose, yeah. Hard to call what he did on Themyscira anything else."
He looked at his hands. "I suppose what I'm saying is…from what little I've seen and heard of him so far, he's not some bloodthirsty weirdo on a revenge quest. If anything, he seems to regard killing almost as untenable as we do."
"But he is willing and able to do it when he deems it necessary…unlike us." Barbara finished.
Nightwing shook his head. "It's more like we never deem it necessary in the first place. 'There's'-"
"-Always a choice." Barbara finished with a smirk.
"But I guess seeing someone who I have no reason to believe has evil intentions look me in the eye and tell me if it was a choice between an innocent and a 'bad guy' they'd kill the bad guy - every time, he emphasized that. I don't know if I could make that choice."
"Of course not, you'd do what Bruce taught us - find our own choice." Barbara said.
"But…do we have a right to gamble with another person's life like that? An innocent's life?" He said, looking genuinely uncomfortable.
"Dick, we're not the police, or a S.W.A.T. team, or a military unit. We're superheroes. What sets us apart isn't our powers or talent or training, it's what we do with them. Killing is the safe way. The easy way. We don't take the easy way."
He nodded. "I know…but, I still don't know what my answer is."
She smiled. "If it makes you feel better…neither do I."
—
Six demonstrates his status as the world's okayest fist fighter, and the characters delve a little more into the eternal 'Superheroes and killing' discussion the internet loves and despises in equal measure. I realize that for many it is an incredibly played out discussion, but it is kind of an unavoidable topic for this story. The Justice League abhors killing. Courier Six, even in the most morally good (conventional) playthroughs, is a hardened killer. The friction there is inevitable.
I've tried to remain consistent with Six's characterization in this story: For him, being able to fight for the common good without killing is a dream come true, but the utterly ruthless reality of the Wasteland means that even a good man like him will have blood on his hands if he tries. So, the League's way of doing things is baffling…but intriguing. However, his attitudes still remain, and so he brings up one of the most challenging questions to the whole 'no killing, ever' superhero ethos: what if you have no choice?
Now obviously there's the more edgy cynical angle that is commonly taken in discussions on superheroes and killing (something, something 'All the people I've murdered, by letting you live' something, something), but I wanted to approach it from a more practical angle. Realistically, if put in a hypothetical scenario where they had to choose, wouldn't pretty much every superhero choose to save/rescue an innocent even if it meant killing a villain or leaving them to die? Most superhero media goes out of its way to avoid this question, and I think it's because the answer is almost guaranteed to be 'yes, obviously'.
To be clear, this isn't some attempt at a scathing critique of the superhero genre or anything to that effect. The whole 'no killing' thing is in my opinion integral to most superhero stories and worldbuilding. So many things (Batman being able to work with the police more or less openly, The Justice League being able to operate basically anywhere, the fact that vigilantism is tolerated at all, etc) depend on that rule for the world to just be normal nonsensical rather than completely nonsensical.
However, I got to thinking of what would happen in a slightly more 'realistic' (I hate that term) interpretation of the Justice League, where there is no comic writer to ensure that no situations arise which might challenge the 'no-killing' rule in an unbeatable way. In a world like that, how would the Justice League react to the inevitable deaths that would happen in the heat of combat, or in a desperate life-or-death situation, or just by plain accident? The answer I came up with is obvious in hindsight: They'd use their common sense.
In the messy chaos of an even slightly realistic world, deaths are going to happen that, according to the rules, shouldn't happen. In this universe, the League addresses such things one case at a time. You get in a life-or-death struggle and kill a villain out of desperation in self defense, should you get kicked out of the League? Common sense says, no. Killing is immoral, but so is punishing someone for doing their best in a desperate situation where lives are on the line. That's not to say they're happy about it, or that they don't go very far out of the way - much farther than most people would reasonably expect them to - to not kill. But, well, shit happens.
I realize that there's a good chance that one of the obscenely large number of comics out there in this property might have done something virtually identical to this (hell, Young Justice kind of does in season 3 with Black Lightning) but my comic knowledge is limited so I just wanted to lay out my thoughts on the topic.
This became ridiculously long for an Author's note, so I'm shutting up now. Thanks for reading!
"Well, that was…less unpleasant than it could've been." he said.
"It takes some getting used to, but it's harmless." A man said.
They both turned to look at him. Six had hoped that his time in Themyscira was a unique occurrence, and not everyone in this world was significantly more attractive than the people of his world. Upon seeing the man in front of him, the evidence that his hopes had any merit continued to dwindle. Even with a mask obscuring his eyes, the man in front of him was the sort of guy they'd put next to some actress with a million-watt smile and fifteen minutes of fame on a pre-war perfume or makeup ad, as an example of the kind of ultra-desirable hunk a pre-war woman viewing the ad would attract if they'd only buy the latest useless product. Six sighed internally at the latest evidence of his peoples' deficiency.
Malnourished, irradiated people don't measure up too well in the looks department. Who could have guessed?
The man approached and shook both Six's and Calista's hand. "You must be Courier Six and Calista. I'm Nightwing, I lead this team."
He gestured to a man behind him in a golden helmet. "That's Guardian, he runs our ops and supervises our training." The helmeted man waved.
He gestured to a…humanoid robot? Never seen a robot like that before. "That's Red Tornado, our official unofficial League minder." The robot nodded.
Nightwing turned back to "Everyone else is either at school or working their day job, which suits me just fine. It lets us evaluate you in peace. So, we'll start off with a little sparring match, if you're comfortable with that."
Six and Calista looked at each other. "...Just like that?" Calista said.
Nightwing smiled. "Just like that. We've got all the time in the world to do a tour of the cave, show you your rooms, all that jazz. Right now, I just need to know what I'm working with. So, a sparring match, hand to hand, to start. Who's first?"
Calista and Six shared a look. "Do you think you can take him?" She asked.
Six scoffed. "Are you kidding me? I've fought tyrants, armies, cannibals, killer robots, the undead, and one time a giant robot scorpion…and I did it all with guns. I'm going to get my ass kicked, you go first."
Nightwing actually laughed, which kind of surprised Six. I figured he was a stern and broody Batman type.
Calista rolled her eyes and stepped forward. Nightwing nodded at Guardian, who brought up some kind of holographic display that spread out over the floor. Guardian spoke.
"Basic sparring program, first to perform a successful takedown gets the round. Best of three wins the match. Round start will be indicated with a buzzer."
Nightwing and Calista nodded and took up a position on opposite sides of the ring. A buzzer sounded, and Calista rushed forward and seized Nightwing around his midsection, trying to lift him up and over for a body slam. Nightwing squirmed out of her grasp with ease, doing a handstand on her shoulders that turned into a bodyslam of his own. The computer gave the point to Nightwing. Calista got up and went back to her starting position, looking more thoughtful than annoyed, to her credit.
The next round began, and Calista approached cautiously, throwing a few restrained punches. Nightwing took up a boxer's stance and dodged the jabs with little difficulty. Calista started getting more aggressive in response, until Nightwing seemed to pick a jab at random to deflect, delivering a nasty counter punch to Calista's face in the same motion. He went for a kick to follow up, which Calista deflected, before sending a wild haymaker of her own in an attempt at a counter punch. Nightwing caught her arm and moved in sync with her, pulling on it and sending her sailing over his head. She landed on the floor with a huff as the computer gave the match to Nightwing. He went over to help her up, and Calista had the grace to accept the offered hand, despite her obvious frustration.
"You're too reliant on your strength. Very common even in 'normal' strong people, nevermind super strong people. You overcommitted in the first round, but your compensation attempts in the second were nice. You lost your temper at the end there, that's what cost you."
Calista exhaled, before nodding. "I've always struggled with keeping a cool head in single combat, as my teachers made abundantly clear to me in my training."
Nightwing smiled. "Happens to the best of us. Experience can take the edge off."
He turned to Six. "Ok, your turn."
Six shook his head, even as he reluctantly took off his gunbelt and approached the ring. "I'm a gunfighter. Not exactly the preferred style for an organization that only does non-lethal fighting, I know, but it's where all of my actual skill is. I'm nothing special in a fist fight."
Nightwing nodded. "Yes, I've heard about you and your guns, and I've got a few ideas on how to make use of those skills in an acceptable way, but we're still going to train you up on hand-to-hand. But to do that, I'll need to know our starting point."
Six took his place in the ring, sizing Nightwing up. Even from such a tiny sample, Six could confidently say that Nightwing was objectively the best hand-to-hand fighter he had ever laid eyes on. Other than Rangers and Legionaries - who realistically tended to only do it as a supplement to their weapons training - formal martial arts training was not something that Wastelanders had either the time or the inclination to pursue, himself included. So, like most Wastelanders, Six fought in the ancient universal discipline known as 'Confused Barroom Brawl Style'."
Still, he considered it a matter of professional courtesy to at least try to win, even when he obviously didn't stand a chance, so he started forming a plan. His only real hope was surprise.
The buzzer sounded, and Six began walking calmly towards his opponent. Nightwing raised an eyebrow, before doing the same. Six raised his hands into a boxing stance, and Nightwing mirrored him again. Six waited patiently for Nightwing to strike first, and before long he was rewarded with a probing punch from Nightwing. Six received the punch on his forearm, and then a lightning fast jab shot out towards Nightwing at the same time. A textbook Scribe Counter, exactly as Veronica had taught him. Unfortunately, it was a fairly unoriginal move by Nightwing's standards, and he anticipated it easily, stepping into the punch and kneeing Six in the stomach.
Six went down, the wind thoroughly knocked out of him, but he still managed to ignore the pain and turn the fall into the beginnings of a Ranger Takedown, sending a sweeping kick towards Nightwing's feet. It didn't actually knock him over, because of course it didn't, but it succeeded in forcing the man off balance. Six capitalized on this, springing off the ground and into a brutal palm thrust, the second half of the Ranger Takedown. To his surprise, it actually hit Nightwing. It became less surprising, however, when Nightwing used the momentum of the hit to send Six into a vicious bodyslam.
He got hit on purpose, the tricky bastard.
The computer awarded the round to Nightwing. Six got up and returned to his spot. As subtly as possible, he tensed his muscles and established the proper footwork in preparation. No chance to outfight him, no chance to outfox him. The only thing to do was to bolt out of the gate with everything he had and turn it into a contest of raw animal strength. The buzzer sounded, and Six went out like a race horse. He was far from an expert fighter, but he was very fit and well coordinated. Speed was not his problem.
The move he had bolted into was one of the more interesting products of time he'd spent fraternizing with the Legion deserters that had trickled their way into the Mojave in the years since their defeat at the dam. He mainly did it out of a desire to force his wounded mind to remember the humanity of his enemies, no matter how much trauma was poured into it. However, he had also learned a few things from it. Mostly just interesting tidbits about life within the hellish ranks of the Legion, but also the occasional scrap of actionable intel. What Veronica had learned, however, was a good deal more unique.
She was very friendly and very outgoing and so of course she had joined him in his attempts at socializing with the deserters. She was also the single biggest enthusiast of unarmed combat that Six had ever met (though, in this world, that may be subject to change) so of course she had gotten to talking with the Legion deserters about punching and their preferred methods of doing so. She had learned of a move with a rather unsavory name, the 'Legion Assault'. Veronica, having claimed it for her own (and, naturally, altered it so that the primary attack it was based around was a punch rather than a palm thrust) had rechristened it the Mojave Blitz'.
As Six bolted forward, performing a hop at the last second. His entire weight through the force of gravity would be contained within the punch. Or, at least, that was the idea. And, for a rather mediocre combatant like himself, Six managed to perform the most perfect Mojave Blitz he'd ever managed (not that he got in enough fist fights to have a lot of data on the subject). Veronica would have been proud.
Even Nightwing seemed to be genuinely surprised at the bold rush. However, it quickly became clear that it was less the 'Wow, that's really impressive!' kind of surprise and more the 'Wow, I can't believe he thought this was a good idea' kind of surprise. He sidestepped the jump attack, and to his credit Six managed to not faceplant right then and there. He landed on his feet and swerved into a right hook…which Nightwing promptly caught, along with the hasty left hook that followed after. Nightwing kicked Six's feet out from under him, letting go of his fists at the last second to prevent him from breaking his fall.
The match went to Nightwing, to the surprise of no one, least of all Six. Nightwing held out a hand, somehow managing to produce a smile that was clearly amused, but not offensive or mocking in the slightest. Six took the offered hand and got up with a chuckle.
"You know, my pride compels me to remind you that in a real life or death fight, I wouldn't be making a fool of myself in a fistfight. I'd just shoot you." His attempt at a joke utterly bombed. All levity evaporated from Nightwing's face, and an awkward cough escaped from Guardian.
Jesus, I haven't killed the mood this badly in a while.
"...Are you serious?" Nightwing seemed to be genuinely asking.
"...No? Obviously not. Somehow, I think the odds of us ending up in a fight to the death are reasonably low."
Nightwing shook his head. "Not me, specifically. I meant in general. If your life is in danger, will you kill?"
Six pondered for a moment. I was wondering when I'd trip over this whole 'no kill' thing. Turns out it took all of…what? Two days?
"Well, my definition of a 'life-threatening' situation is probably a hell of a lot more constrained than a normal person, but…what do you expect people to do? When it's them or a bad guy, I mean. Die?"
Nightwing frowned, before visibly calming himself. "You'd be shocked at just how small the number of combat situations which have no other way out except lethal force is."
"That didn't answer my question." Six said. All levity had vanished from him as well. He'd known what he was signing up for, Batman had made the rules clear, but he was realizing, finally, that his perspective was a good bit more alien to their own than he'd anticipated. A rule to not kill made sense to him. The idea of someone dying for such a rule was…something of an outside context problem for him. In the Wasteland, it's kill or be killed. Ancestors knew killing took a toll on a man, him in particular. They also knew he'd tried his best to do things a better way, but even when he did he still kept a gun in his other hand, in both the literal and metaphorical sense.
Being willing to die at the hands of your enemies before you took their life…any Wastelander in their right mind would laugh until they puked at such a stupid notion. It was reckless, absurd, arguably selfish…and Ancestors preserve him, it was tempting. There was just one thing that wouldn't sit right.
Nightwing answered his initial question. "...This world is a swirling vortex of killing and violence. It always has been, and if you're the pessimistic sort, it always will be. But, when we show up…the killing stops. That is what sets us apart. The pursuit of that near miraculous effect is why we put our lives on the line for that ideal, why some of us have died because of it."
He sighed, and sadness mixed in with the determination. "We've never asked anyone to die for this. Hasn't stopped some of us from doing it anyway."
Six nodded slightly. "If it's just me, then I can live with this. Like I told Batman, it's…doable. But what if it's not me? What if it's some poor sap coming home from work who gets nabbed by whatever bastard we're fighting that week? If I have to make a choice between the bad guy and an innocent, then I'm choosing the innocent. Every time."
Nightwing hesitated, and Red Tornado jumped in, much to Six's surprise. "The League addresses such things on a case by case basis. The heat of combat is a dangerous place, and the League acknowledges that sometimes, on the battlefield, impossible choices need to be made."
Nightwing had to begrudgingly concur. "The goal of the training you're about to begin, and the reason that it will never really stop until and unless you retire, is to avoid such a thing from ever happening. As the man who taught me to fight was so fond of saying 'There's always a choice.' We train hard and we fight harder to ensure that that becomes a reality."
After a moment, Six nodded. "I can live with that…but I stand by my words."
After a longer moment, Nightwing nodded slowly.
Calista did a little wave. "I also agree to not kill people."
It broke the tension enough to elicit a chuckle from Nightwing that was only slightly forced. Guardian coughed again.
"Now that that's out of the way…who wants that tour?"
—
In the evening following a long day of orientation, in the privacy of his room, Dick and Barbara (who was returned from her classes by now) spoke of the day's happenings.
"I think what bothers me is…I don't really have an answer. When it's just me, well, there's 'always a choice', you know?"
Barb rolled her eyes. "Of course I know, I'm one of the only people on the planet who can say they do."
Dick smiled, but it soon turned into a frown. "My point is, in a hypothetical scenario where it's me or a bad guy…I just beat up the bad guy. But, when it's someone else…"
Barb gave him a surprised look. "Has this really never crossed your mind before?"
Dick shook his head. "It's not that it hasn't, it's just that…well, 'there's always a choice'."
"So what was different this time?"
"Because it wasn't coming from some super villain talking about how weak we are, or some general giving us the 'too dangerous to be left alive' spiel, or some pundit whining about us being 'bleeding hearts'. It's from…"
"Another hero?" She finished.
He frowned. "I suppose, yeah. Hard to call what he did on Themyscira anything else."
He looked at his hands. "I suppose what I'm saying is…from what little I've seen and heard of him so far, he's not some bloodthirsty weirdo on a revenge quest. If anything, he seems to regard killing almost as untenable as we do."
"But he is willing and able to do it when he deems it necessary…unlike us." Barbara finished.
Nightwing shook his head. "It's more like we never deem it necessary in the first place. 'There's'-"
"-Always a choice." Barbara finished with a smirk.
"But I guess seeing someone who I have no reason to believe has evil intentions look me in the eye and tell me if it was a choice between an innocent and a 'bad guy' they'd kill the bad guy - every time, he emphasized that. I don't know if I could make that choice."
"Of course not, you'd do what Bruce taught us - find our own choice." Barbara said.
"But…do we have a right to gamble with another person's life like that? An innocent's life?" He said, looking genuinely uncomfortable.
"Dick, we're not the police, or a S.W.A.T. team, or a military unit. We're superheroes. What sets us apart isn't our powers or talent or training, it's what we do with them. Killing is the safe way. The easy way. We don't take the easy way."
He nodded. "I know…but, I still don't know what my answer is."
She smiled. "If it makes you feel better…neither do I."
—
Six demonstrates his status as the world's okayest fist fighter, and the characters delve a little more into the eternal 'Superheroes and killing' discussion the internet loves and despises in equal measure. I realize that for many it is an incredibly played out discussion, but it is kind of an unavoidable topic for this story. The Justice League abhors killing. Courier Six, even in the most morally good (conventional) playthroughs, is a hardened killer. The friction there is inevitable.
I've tried to remain consistent with Six's characterization in this story: For him, being able to fight for the common good without killing is a dream come true, but the utterly ruthless reality of the Wasteland means that even a good man like him will have blood on his hands if he tries. So, the League's way of doing things is baffling…but intriguing. However, his attitudes still remain, and so he brings up one of the most challenging questions to the whole 'no killing, ever' superhero ethos: what if you have no choice?
Now obviously there's the more edgy cynical angle that is commonly taken in discussions on superheroes and killing (something, something 'All the people I've murdered, by letting you live' something, something), but I wanted to approach it from a more practical angle. Realistically, if put in a hypothetical scenario where they had to choose, wouldn't pretty much every superhero choose to save/rescue an innocent even if it meant killing a villain or leaving them to die? Most superhero media goes out of its way to avoid this question, and I think it's because the answer is almost guaranteed to be 'yes, obviously'.
To be clear, this isn't some attempt at a scathing critique of the superhero genre or anything to that effect. The whole 'no killing' thing is in my opinion integral to most superhero stories and worldbuilding. So many things (Batman being able to work with the police more or less openly, The Justice League being able to operate basically anywhere, the fact that vigilantism is tolerated at all, etc) depend on that rule for the world to just be normal nonsensical rather than completely nonsensical.
However, I got to thinking of what would happen in a slightly more 'realistic' (I hate that term) interpretation of the Justice League, where there is no comic writer to ensure that no situations arise which might challenge the 'no-killing' rule in an unbeatable way. In a world like that, how would the Justice League react to the inevitable deaths that would happen in the heat of combat, or in a desperate life-or-death situation, or just by plain accident? The answer I came up with is obvious in hindsight: They'd use their common sense.
In the messy chaos of an even slightly realistic world, deaths are going to happen that, according to the rules, shouldn't happen. In this universe, the League addresses such things one case at a time. You get in a life-or-death struggle and kill a villain out of desperation in self defense, should you get kicked out of the League? Common sense says, no. Killing is immoral, but so is punishing someone for doing their best in a desperate situation where lives are on the line. That's not to say they're happy about it, or that they don't go very far out of the way - much farther than most people would reasonably expect them to - to not kill. But, well, shit happens.
I realize that there's a good chance that one of the obscenely large number of comics out there in this property might have done something virtually identical to this (hell, Young Justice kind of does in season 3 with Black Lightning) but my comic knowledge is limited so I just wanted to lay out my thoughts on the topic.
This became ridiculously long for an Author's note, so I'm shutting up now. Thanks for reading!
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- Location
- Indonesia
That question are just the kind that usually get the focus at the end scene of the episode. Yes, they're thinking about it but let's not make it the center stage. Not because It's not important, but because you would see the results only at "that" moments.
So... Let's not hopping for that to happen. But just prepare.
So... Let's not hopping for that to happen. But just prepare.
- Location
- Colorado
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I've not read it but from what I understand the original Intent of the "Maximum Carnage" story was to make Peter Parker grapple with this exact issue. It's a novelty in cape and costume comics but it DOES happen. Heck at one point Superman DID make a choice to kill General Zod(In the comics, not talking about man of steel movie and how they handled it.). He was hurt by it and regretted it came to that but it was a choice that the big blue boyscout himself made and he'd be willing to make again if he had to.
That being said i think you handled it very well. You didn't compromise the principles of the characters around Six but also didn't make them snap at a decent guy for just being honest about what he had to do to protect the innocent.
That being said i think you handled it very well. You didn't compromise the principles of the characters around Six but also didn't make them snap at a decent guy for just being honest about what he had to do to protect the innocent.
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Yeah, I tried to approach it with the idea that the League is primarily composed of genuinely good natured and compassionate people. I did that mainly as a reaction to a lot of other stories (and especially fanfics) I'd read where they're weirdly and aggressively dogmatic about killing and treat you like the lowest scum in existence for killing a homicidal maniac in self defense. I don't really like this, because I feel like the average hero in the League's fist instinct upon seeing someone killing out of desperation would be to console them and try to help them, not judge them. So, that's how I tried to approach it: these are good people, they believe in their ideals, but they're not stupid and they're not blind. For them it's an earnest belief, not a dogma.
Travel to Distant Realities, Meet Fascinating People, and Punch Them - 3
Six stood in the shower, feeling like some sort of decadent brahmin baron as the water washed over him. With most of the planet's water being in need of significant sanitation and de-radding before it was worth using, bathing regularly was a luxury in the Wasteland. Most couldn't hope to have anything more sophisticated than a simple basin of water every week or two, if that. Having the resources to fill a proper bathtub was a mark of civilization. Indeed, many tall tales circulated of settlements that had joined the NCR, not for its democracy or its military prowess, but because the republic could proudly boast that every city in its union had running water. More or less. Even the wealthiest of individuals would never dream of using something as wasteful as a shower. Yet here, in a world not all that different from his own before it had been bathed in nuclear fire, even the poorest of people could afford to pour gallons of water quite literally down the drain for minutes on end.
It was easy to look at the mounds of rubble and corpses that had once been bustling cities and despair at what Man had lost from his own insanity, but this? This hurt more than that, despite its seeming mundanity. Six of course knew, intellectually, that the Earth had been teeming with life and overflowing with fresh, clean water that didn't have radioactive ash and filth and decay floating in it. However, it was one thing to know that, and another thing entirely to witness it for himself. To see the flowing rivers, to hear the chirping birds and the gentle winds blowing through the leaves of the very much alive trees. Normally, on the occasions where he thought of the people who had lived before the bombs, he felt a vague sort of pity. For the moment, though, he felt angry. To know that his most distant ancestors had just sat by and let the fruits of the Earth slip between their fingers was quietly infuriating.
It put him in the mood to hit something, which was why he was happy to take up Nightwing on his offer to join him for early-morning training. He entered the large arena he'd been informed was the main training area, to see Nightwing, a dark haired young man who'd introduced himself as 'Robin' during his orientation, and a red haired young man he hadn't met yet, who had…a bionic arm?
Hardly the strangest thing I've seen since coming here, but still.
Nightwing greeted him with a smile. "Glad to see you here, Six. Basic summary of what we'll be doing here is that we'll be fighting off a wave of training bots until we beat them all or the timer runs out. It's as much a workout as it is training."
He gestured to the two beside him. "You've already met Robin, and beside him is Arsenal. Since it's your first time, we'll just use the basic program."
Six nodded. "Ok. Weapons?"
Nightwing smiled wider. "Well, I'm still waiting on a certain delivery before we can address that little surprise I spoke of yesterday when we were sparring, but truth be told the goal of this training is to keep our close combat skills sharp. You're free to use any weapons you think you can get away with, but I'd encourage you to take the opportunity to sharpen your other skills."
Six cocked his head. "But fists aren't required, right?"
Nightwing frowned slightly in annoyance at his advice apparently being blown off. "No, but like I said-"
Six held up a hand. "I was listening, it's just…"
He pulled his baton out of his pocket and let it snap open for effect. "I'm a mediocre fist fighter…but you never asked me about other kinds of fighting."
Nightwing's frown transformed back into an amused smile.
—
Courier Six was, privately, an incredibly talented hand with a machete. Like many of his skills, it was one he tried to keep out of the public eye. Anyone who had heard of him would know that he was an exceptionally lethal gunfighter, but most wouldn't guess that he was also a talented duelist. It never hurt to have a few secret tricks up one's sleeve, and Six had surprised a few raiders and Legionaries over the years who'd thought they'd had him disarmed and dead to rights only to find themselves carved open and left in a bleeding heap on the ground.
While it had a small niche as an extra-quiet option when he was on a stealth mission, it was ultimately still a talent he rarely had any actual cause to use. The days when ammo was a scarce resource to be used strategically were long behind him, and his preferred method of fighting an enemy up close was a handgun first, and literally anything else a distant second. Still, he hadn't wanted the skill to atrophy, and he had seen an opportunity to sharpen it during his brief endeavor to give himself more less-lethal options. The sonic emitter had been his main focus, but he'd also experimented with using a police baton, to see how transferable his skills were. The answer was: very. With the right baton, at least. He had to adjust his personal, informal fighting style to accommodate the fact that he was working with a baton intended to cause pain, but no actual bodily harm, rather than a sharpened hunk of cold steel intended to cut people open. The baton itself was a custom build with a saturnite core and a few other bells and whistles he'd thrown in. It was weighted and balanced the same as his favorite machete.
He had yet to find a good opportunity to test it in the field, as getting into machete range for a test was not worth the risk involved. So, in truth, he was quite eager to jump into the fray in a training simulation. Nightwing, Robin, Arsenal, and the Courier paired off. Arsenal with Robin and Nightwing with the Courier, each pair covering the other's back. Doors opened, and what seemed to be at least two dozen of the training robots entered the arena, most of them armed with some manner of non-lethal simulation of a melee weapon. They were a metal skeleton coated in some sort of 'smart gel' concoction that - combined with programming intended to make them react to 'injuries' received appropriately - made them a reasonable simulacrum of human opponents. Or, at least, that's what Nightwing had said.
The robots attacked with no real formation or intent, just approaching like a mob. Nightwing rushed in, escrima sticks swinging as he went on the offensive. Six followed, covering his back. Six may have had talent with the machete, but when it came to fighting in situations like this Nightwing still had vastly more experience. A robot lunged towards Nightwing's flank, swinging some kind of two-handed safety club like it was a katana. Six charged in and batted the attack aside with his baton. The machine's attention was fully on Six, along with about a half dozen other machines that had been occupied with the leaping whirlwind of pain that was Nightwing. He maintained focus on the robot in front of him, and cut loose.
He'd learned quickly in his efforts to adjust his fighting style that the best way to compensate for the reduced effectiveness of a baton over a machete was raw aggression. With his machete, he'd have already slashed the throat of the hypothetical human the machine was simulating, and then moved on to carve his way through the rest. With the baton, he struck twice. First to the stomach and - while the machine was doubled over in simulated injury - the second to the back. He'd considered going straight for the neck, but somehow he suspected that turning someone into a quadriplegic would be frowned upon as well, even if he didn't technically kill someone. It probably wouldn't break a person's neck with only one blow, but the fact that there was a 'probably' at all made it less than desirable.
As the robot collapsed in 'pain', he moved onto the next. It was charging him, but another was backing it up in a more subtle way that would become a simultaneous attack if he didn't compensate for it. So, he batted the charger across the face, stunning it and sending it to the ground. He then immediately pivoted and deflected the jab from what was obviously intended to be a simulated spear from the other bot. It threw the machine off balance (or maybe it just pretended to as part of the simulation? It got confusing if he thought about it too long) and Six took the opportunity to stomp on the spear. It worked like a charm, ripping the weapon out of the machine's hands. Six capitalized on the opportunity, beating the disarmed machine with a flurry of calculated blows that sent it to the ground. Before it had even finished falling, the rest of the machines arrived, two throwing punches and the other two swinging one handed clubs.
Six slammed bodily into the two unarmed machines, trusting his armor to receive the blows and his weight to knock them over. Both didn't fail him, and the machines tumbled to the floor. In the same motion, he parried the attacks of the other two machines in quick succession. As he regained his footing, it was clear that he'd only bought time. Fortunately, he was on a team, and reinforcements arrived. Robin charged at the two recovering unarmed machines and defeated them with a few precise blows from his staff. At almost the exact same time, Nightwing slid over to the opposite side of the arena, knocking over a set of bots attacking Arsenal in the process.
From there, the two pairs became one team, flowing back and forth freely as they maneuvered through combat. Eventually, Six knocked a machine back and Arsenal tripped it and then finished the job by hammering down on it with his arm after it crashed to the ground. The haze of combat lifted, and Six's logical brain caught up to his fighting brain and registered that the four heroes were standing alone, and thus the fight was over. Nightwing and Robin walked over, and Nightwing gave Six a faux-accusatory stare.
"I know I might have implied that the spar yesterday was fists only, but you could have at least mentioned that you were capable of this."
Arsenal nodded. "Your instincts are good, but your technique is…well not quite 'sloppy', but definitely informal. Have you had any formal training?"
Six shook his head. "No such thing in the Wasteland. Or, at least, not on my side of the Colorado. I've had some teachers, though. Well, sort of."
A youth with hair somehow as gray as an elder squatted in the sand with a man who was probably in his late thirties at most but looked like a graybeard after decades spent out in the elements. The youth wore simple traveling clothes, with a spare set (along with everything else he owned) stored in a simple backpack. He wore a refurbished handgun in a cheap holster on his hip. He watched the man through a set of aviator lenses, his expression obscured by a bandana.
The man, clad in the typical hodgepodge of leather and metal that adorned the average caravan guard, held his hand out over the weapons where they lay in the sand. He pointed at an assault rifle that was well cared for, but also clearly so worn that it had to have been made before the bombs.
"Your rifle's Plan A."
He gestured to an even older looking .45 auto handgun laying beside it. "Your piece is Plan B."
He gestured to a machete with an ornate handle inside of a hand-made bighorn leather sheath. "Your steel is Plan C."
He looked up at the youth and cracked a ragged smile. "Some guys don't value having a Plan C the way they ought to. Nothing on the planet more reliable than a good piece of well-tempered steel."
He gestured to all three weapons with a wave of his hand. "You won't use your piece as much as you use your rifle, and you won't use your steel as much as you use your piece, but the best guards - the ones that live long enough to get paid - train to be equally good with all of them. You up to that?"
The youth nodded.
"Good man. After the first raid on this train - there's always one on this sewer of a route - we'll peruse through the raider corpses and see if we can't find you a long gun and a decent hunk of steel. Just make sure you live long enough to do this, no heroics. Heroes don't get paid, yeah?"
Six couldn't say what the man's name was (though he was reasonably sure he'd known him before joining the caravan) and he couldn't have said where the caravan was going or what the name of the company was, but he remembered the conversation well. Along with the many hours of training with the man that had come rushing back in a jumbled mess of memories when he'd first picked up a weapon after getting shot in the head.
Six went on. "Yeah, I've had teachers, but no formal training. Just some pointers from guys who had been at it longer than me."
"Well, for 'just a few pointers' I'd say you're pretty good." Robin said.
Nightwing nodded. "I agree. With the right training - which we can and will provide - you'll be even better."
"I'm looking forward to seeing him in the ring on Tuesday." Robin said.
"What happens Tuesday?" Six asked.
"We have Tuesday night sparring matches involving the whole team. Powers and equipment are allowed. Weekends are for planned missions, weekdays are for school, work, training, and emergencies, and Tuesday nights are for making sure we're sharp and familiar with our teammate's abilities."
"And for working out any frustrations." Arsenal said with a smirk.
Nightwing sighed. "Unofficially…yes. The spars are under careful supervision, I should emphasize."
"Sounds good to me. Hopefully that little trick for getting to use my guns that you've vaguely alluded to will be here by then." Six said.
"Well, it's supposed to be delivered this afternoon, so ideally we can go over that as part of our agenda today. For now though, Miss Martian has put together a little unofficial 'welcome to the team' breakfast and there will be hell to pay if we're late." Nightwing said.
The four heroes made their way to the dining area.
—
Just a short little chapter I had in my head. Wanted to reintroduce the machete skills that Six demonstrated in the first chapter, and also sprinkle a tiny bit of characterization and action in there along the way. Thanks for reading!
It was easy to look at the mounds of rubble and corpses that had once been bustling cities and despair at what Man had lost from his own insanity, but this? This hurt more than that, despite its seeming mundanity. Six of course knew, intellectually, that the Earth had been teeming with life and overflowing with fresh, clean water that didn't have radioactive ash and filth and decay floating in it. However, it was one thing to know that, and another thing entirely to witness it for himself. To see the flowing rivers, to hear the chirping birds and the gentle winds blowing through the leaves of the very much alive trees. Normally, on the occasions where he thought of the people who had lived before the bombs, he felt a vague sort of pity. For the moment, though, he felt angry. To know that his most distant ancestors had just sat by and let the fruits of the Earth slip between their fingers was quietly infuriating.
It put him in the mood to hit something, which was why he was happy to take up Nightwing on his offer to join him for early-morning training. He entered the large arena he'd been informed was the main training area, to see Nightwing, a dark haired young man who'd introduced himself as 'Robin' during his orientation, and a red haired young man he hadn't met yet, who had…a bionic arm?
Hardly the strangest thing I've seen since coming here, but still.
Nightwing greeted him with a smile. "Glad to see you here, Six. Basic summary of what we'll be doing here is that we'll be fighting off a wave of training bots until we beat them all or the timer runs out. It's as much a workout as it is training."
He gestured to the two beside him. "You've already met Robin, and beside him is Arsenal. Since it's your first time, we'll just use the basic program."
Six nodded. "Ok. Weapons?"
Nightwing smiled wider. "Well, I'm still waiting on a certain delivery before we can address that little surprise I spoke of yesterday when we were sparring, but truth be told the goal of this training is to keep our close combat skills sharp. You're free to use any weapons you think you can get away with, but I'd encourage you to take the opportunity to sharpen your other skills."
Six cocked his head. "But fists aren't required, right?"
Nightwing frowned slightly in annoyance at his advice apparently being blown off. "No, but like I said-"
Six held up a hand. "I was listening, it's just…"
He pulled his baton out of his pocket and let it snap open for effect. "I'm a mediocre fist fighter…but you never asked me about other kinds of fighting."
Nightwing's frown transformed back into an amused smile.
—
Courier Six was, privately, an incredibly talented hand with a machete. Like many of his skills, it was one he tried to keep out of the public eye. Anyone who had heard of him would know that he was an exceptionally lethal gunfighter, but most wouldn't guess that he was also a talented duelist. It never hurt to have a few secret tricks up one's sleeve, and Six had surprised a few raiders and Legionaries over the years who'd thought they'd had him disarmed and dead to rights only to find themselves carved open and left in a bleeding heap on the ground.
While it had a small niche as an extra-quiet option when he was on a stealth mission, it was ultimately still a talent he rarely had any actual cause to use. The days when ammo was a scarce resource to be used strategically were long behind him, and his preferred method of fighting an enemy up close was a handgun first, and literally anything else a distant second. Still, he hadn't wanted the skill to atrophy, and he had seen an opportunity to sharpen it during his brief endeavor to give himself more less-lethal options. The sonic emitter had been his main focus, but he'd also experimented with using a police baton, to see how transferable his skills were. The answer was: very. With the right baton, at least. He had to adjust his personal, informal fighting style to accommodate the fact that he was working with a baton intended to cause pain, but no actual bodily harm, rather than a sharpened hunk of cold steel intended to cut people open. The baton itself was a custom build with a saturnite core and a few other bells and whistles he'd thrown in. It was weighted and balanced the same as his favorite machete.
He had yet to find a good opportunity to test it in the field, as getting into machete range for a test was not worth the risk involved. So, in truth, he was quite eager to jump into the fray in a training simulation. Nightwing, Robin, Arsenal, and the Courier paired off. Arsenal with Robin and Nightwing with the Courier, each pair covering the other's back. Doors opened, and what seemed to be at least two dozen of the training robots entered the arena, most of them armed with some manner of non-lethal simulation of a melee weapon. They were a metal skeleton coated in some sort of 'smart gel' concoction that - combined with programming intended to make them react to 'injuries' received appropriately - made them a reasonable simulacrum of human opponents. Or, at least, that's what Nightwing had said.
The robots attacked with no real formation or intent, just approaching like a mob. Nightwing rushed in, escrima sticks swinging as he went on the offensive. Six followed, covering his back. Six may have had talent with the machete, but when it came to fighting in situations like this Nightwing still had vastly more experience. A robot lunged towards Nightwing's flank, swinging some kind of two-handed safety club like it was a katana. Six charged in and batted the attack aside with his baton. The machine's attention was fully on Six, along with about a half dozen other machines that had been occupied with the leaping whirlwind of pain that was Nightwing. He maintained focus on the robot in front of him, and cut loose.
He'd learned quickly in his efforts to adjust his fighting style that the best way to compensate for the reduced effectiveness of a baton over a machete was raw aggression. With his machete, he'd have already slashed the throat of the hypothetical human the machine was simulating, and then moved on to carve his way through the rest. With the baton, he struck twice. First to the stomach and - while the machine was doubled over in simulated injury - the second to the back. He'd considered going straight for the neck, but somehow he suspected that turning someone into a quadriplegic would be frowned upon as well, even if he didn't technically kill someone. It probably wouldn't break a person's neck with only one blow, but the fact that there was a 'probably' at all made it less than desirable.
As the robot collapsed in 'pain', he moved onto the next. It was charging him, but another was backing it up in a more subtle way that would become a simultaneous attack if he didn't compensate for it. So, he batted the charger across the face, stunning it and sending it to the ground. He then immediately pivoted and deflected the jab from what was obviously intended to be a simulated spear from the other bot. It threw the machine off balance (or maybe it just pretended to as part of the simulation? It got confusing if he thought about it too long) and Six took the opportunity to stomp on the spear. It worked like a charm, ripping the weapon out of the machine's hands. Six capitalized on the opportunity, beating the disarmed machine with a flurry of calculated blows that sent it to the ground. Before it had even finished falling, the rest of the machines arrived, two throwing punches and the other two swinging one handed clubs.
Six slammed bodily into the two unarmed machines, trusting his armor to receive the blows and his weight to knock them over. Both didn't fail him, and the machines tumbled to the floor. In the same motion, he parried the attacks of the other two machines in quick succession. As he regained his footing, it was clear that he'd only bought time. Fortunately, he was on a team, and reinforcements arrived. Robin charged at the two recovering unarmed machines and defeated them with a few precise blows from his staff. At almost the exact same time, Nightwing slid over to the opposite side of the arena, knocking over a set of bots attacking Arsenal in the process.
From there, the two pairs became one team, flowing back and forth freely as they maneuvered through combat. Eventually, Six knocked a machine back and Arsenal tripped it and then finished the job by hammering down on it with his arm after it crashed to the ground. The haze of combat lifted, and Six's logical brain caught up to his fighting brain and registered that the four heroes were standing alone, and thus the fight was over. Nightwing and Robin walked over, and Nightwing gave Six a faux-accusatory stare.
"I know I might have implied that the spar yesterday was fists only, but you could have at least mentioned that you were capable of this."
Arsenal nodded. "Your instincts are good, but your technique is…well not quite 'sloppy', but definitely informal. Have you had any formal training?"
Six shook his head. "No such thing in the Wasteland. Or, at least, not on my side of the Colorado. I've had some teachers, though. Well, sort of."
A youth with hair somehow as gray as an elder squatted in the sand with a man who was probably in his late thirties at most but looked like a graybeard after decades spent out in the elements. The youth wore simple traveling clothes, with a spare set (along with everything else he owned) stored in a simple backpack. He wore a refurbished handgun in a cheap holster on his hip. He watched the man through a set of aviator lenses, his expression obscured by a bandana.
The man, clad in the typical hodgepodge of leather and metal that adorned the average caravan guard, held his hand out over the weapons where they lay in the sand. He pointed at an assault rifle that was well cared for, but also clearly so worn that it had to have been made before the bombs.
"Your rifle's Plan A."
He gestured to an even older looking .45 auto handgun laying beside it. "Your piece is Plan B."
He gestured to a machete with an ornate handle inside of a hand-made bighorn leather sheath. "Your steel is Plan C."
He looked up at the youth and cracked a ragged smile. "Some guys don't value having a Plan C the way they ought to. Nothing on the planet more reliable than a good piece of well-tempered steel."
He gestured to all three weapons with a wave of his hand. "You won't use your piece as much as you use your rifle, and you won't use your steel as much as you use your piece, but the best guards - the ones that live long enough to get paid - train to be equally good with all of them. You up to that?"
The youth nodded.
"Good man. After the first raid on this train - there's always one on this sewer of a route - we'll peruse through the raider corpses and see if we can't find you a long gun and a decent hunk of steel. Just make sure you live long enough to do this, no heroics. Heroes don't get paid, yeah?"
Six couldn't say what the man's name was (though he was reasonably sure he'd known him before joining the caravan) and he couldn't have said where the caravan was going or what the name of the company was, but he remembered the conversation well. Along with the many hours of training with the man that had come rushing back in a jumbled mess of memories when he'd first picked up a weapon after getting shot in the head.
Six went on. "Yeah, I've had teachers, but no formal training. Just some pointers from guys who had been at it longer than me."
"Well, for 'just a few pointers' I'd say you're pretty good." Robin said.
Nightwing nodded. "I agree. With the right training - which we can and will provide - you'll be even better."
"I'm looking forward to seeing him in the ring on Tuesday." Robin said.
"What happens Tuesday?" Six asked.
"We have Tuesday night sparring matches involving the whole team. Powers and equipment are allowed. Weekends are for planned missions, weekdays are for school, work, training, and emergencies, and Tuesday nights are for making sure we're sharp and familiar with our teammate's abilities."
"And for working out any frustrations." Arsenal said with a smirk.
Nightwing sighed. "Unofficially…yes. The spars are under careful supervision, I should emphasize."
"Sounds good to me. Hopefully that little trick for getting to use my guns that you've vaguely alluded to will be here by then." Six said.
"Well, it's supposed to be delivered this afternoon, so ideally we can go over that as part of our agenda today. For now though, Miss Martian has put together a little unofficial 'welcome to the team' breakfast and there will be hell to pay if we're late." Nightwing said.
The four heroes made their way to the dining area.
—
Just a short little chapter I had in my head. Wanted to reintroduce the machete skills that Six demonstrated in the first chapter, and also sprinkle a tiny bit of characterization and action in there along the way. Thanks for reading!
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- Location
- Colorado
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Oh I just realized. He can get baton training from Nightwing? Yeah he's gonna get good with that thing for sure.
Also side question. What helmet is Six wearing? Is it a modified version of the NCR ranger helm or what?
Also side question. What helmet is Six wearing? Is it a modified version of the NCR ranger helm or what?
Same style of helmet, but with his pip-boy computer parts integrated into it. So, he still uses a pip boy, he's just using his helmet's HUD as his interface.
Travel to Distant Realities, Meet Fascinating People, and Punch Them - 4
"Here, I'll show you the good stuff." Tigress (or 'Artemis' as she insisted on being called when not in her hero gear) led Six and Calista through the breakfast line, 'Batgirl' trailing behind them wearing normal clothes and sunglasses.
Does she really expect me to not recognize her if I see her somewhere else without her sunglasses?
He fiddled with his aviators and bandana, and paused as his brain caught up and he had the decency to be embarrassed.
You know what, I take it back. Glass houses and all that.
Tigress gestured at what looked like a stack of hotcakes and some manner of egg-fried toast he recognized from a fancy NCR hotel he'd made a delivery to once. To use an entire egg for something so simple and not even particularly filling was another one of the mundanities of this world that highlighted the deprived state of his own.
"I recommend grabbing a little of everything. I don't know how M'gann manages to crank out so much of this stuff and have it still be as good as it is, but she does." She said.
"The perks of only needing about half as much sleep as everyone else in the cave." M'gann said, floating by (because of course the space alien could float, why not?).
"Pardon my reach." She said as the pieces of breakfast food…levitated onto her plate. She noticed Six watching and probably sensed his surprise (since she could apparently read minds too, because why not?), which made an amused smile appear on her deathly pale face. She winked a red and yellow eye at him.
"Why does every alien species I've encountered so far seem to get superpowers and an immunity to everything that makes humans vulnerable, while humans are stuck being the 'normal' ones in the galaxy?" Six said with a sigh.
"Hey, that's not true! We're good at…something, I'm sure." Beast Boy eagerly jumped to the defense of his species, which was somewhat ironic, all things considered.
"Not being crippled by high temperatures?" M'gann offered.
"Or glowing green rocks." Superboy chimed in, not looking up from his food.
"And sometimes having a meta gene." Static said, pulling some utensils towards himself with his power, catching them, and then digging in.
"Ok, so we don't have any prominent weaknesses. And sometimes we get to roll the cosmic dice and get superpowers." Kid Flash - Wally - chimed in.
"We don't need any prominent weaknesses. You can just shoot us in the head and that usually does the trick.." Six said.
"Really? You, of all people, are going to say that?" Calista said with a laugh.
"I said it usually does the trick." He smiled back beneath his bandana.
Beast Boy scrunched his face as he scrutinized them, then he seemed to reach a realization.
"Wait, are you saying you've been shot in the head? How are you alive?"
"I must not have been using it at the time." Six answered idly as he speared some hotcakes.
Beast Boy looked prepared to argue, but Superboy - somehow anticipating this despite still not even looking up from his food - interrupted him.
"Let the man eat his breakfast in peace, Gar."
Beast Boy frowned, but still let it go.
Six sat with Calista, Artemis, and Batgirl at an empty table filled with toppings for the breakfast foods. Six looked at real, actual maple syrup. An expensive luxury good in his own world and apparently another mundanity in this one. Most astounding of all, though, was a simple bowl filled with what might as well be gold. Six pulled it towards himself, spooning a small amount and looking at it, mesmerized. Artemis gave him an amused smile.
"You like sugar on your pancakes? I think maple syrup is more than sweet enough on its own, but sugar addicts like Wally for some reason still feel the need to pour more on."
She looked at her other half at the table he had to have for himself to keep others out of the 'splash zone' as he ate an inhuman amount of food at an inhumanly rapid speed. A by now familiar look of amusement, love, and disgust was written on her face.
"He claims it's because of his metabolism, but I think that's just an excuse." she said idly.
She looked over and saw Batgirl and Calista looking at Six in mild concern, who was still staring at the sugar as he repeatedly poured it slowly back into the bowl and scooped it up again. She decided to break the awkward silence in his vicinity.
"Uh…are you ok?"
He seemed startled, and coughed lightly. "Uh, yeah, just…surprised, I guess."
Batgirl raised an eyebrow high enough to pop over the lenses of her sunglasses. "You're surprised…by sugar."
Six felt a little embarrassed that he'd been staring at some plant powder like an ape seeing fire for the first time.
"Yes. It's just…I've never seen sugar before."
Artemis was taken aback. She'd known from the briefing that he was 'not from around here', so to speak, but this was definitely not a cultural adjustment she'd expected him to have to make.
"Do you not have sugar where you're from?" She asked.
He made a 'so-so' gesture with his hand. "Sort of? We know it exists because of the pre-war records and we have other kinds of sugar from different sources, but actual, honest-to-God cane sugar isn't really something we can get our hands on easily. Sugar cane isn't a crop that does particularly well in most of the West, even without it being a nuclear wasteland. I've heard of prospectors finding some perfectly preserved container of pure cane sugar and striking it rich, or some greenhouse or hydroponics setup that tries growing it, but those are about the only sources of it I know of."
Batgirl was mildly intrigued at the possible insight into the Courier's world. "So, you can't trade for it?"
He shook his head. "Trade across the Colorado is barely in its infancy, and the only places that could conceivably grow sugar cane in any meaningful amount are way, way further east than that. I'm sure someone, somewhere, on my version of Earth is running a sugar plantation, but whoever that may be hasn't made contact with the NCR."
"Stands for 'New California Republic', right? What's it like?" Batgirl asked, abruptly changing the subject out of genuine curiosity.
"Well, I've done some reading on this world, and I've also just barely dipped my toe into actually living here. WIth that in mind, I'd say the NCR is a-...well, the folks back home have a word that fits particularly well here ending in '-hole', but as I understand it we're not supposed to say words like that in earshot of the, er, younger members..."
The three women smiled in amusement. "We get the idea." Artemis said.
Six chuckled. "Right. Anyway, before going further, I want to preface this by saying that NCR is the best thing to happen to the continent since before the bombs fell. It's a shining beacon of progress and cooperation in a sea of anarchy and ultra-violence. Despite my…disagreements with it, it is still the only large-scale civilization currently in existence in my version of North America that isn't run by slaving despots or other flavors of villain. It's the last, best hope for the continent. That being said, it's also a…y'know."
At their annoyed expressions, he elaborated. "Ok, so the thing about the NCR is that most folks in the Wasteland who aren't enemies with them tend to have rose-tinted glasses when they look at them. For them, the NCR is paradise. For folks like me, who have read enough to have an inkling of what the world before the bombs was like, it's doing its best, but it's still falling short. By your standards, I believe it's what would be called an 'undeveloped country'. It's the best place to live in the Wasteland…but the bar there is really low."
"Is it a better place to live than your own country? The Mojave Republic or wherever." Artemis asked.
"Confederacy." Calista corrected as she took a sip of her tea. She'd already grilled Six for whatever answers she could claw out of him during their time on the Watchtower, so she was reasonably familiar with the basics of his crazy world.
Six bit into his pancakes and thought while he chewed. "The Mojave is…a lot better than it used to be, I'll say that much. Vegas used to just be a mess of rubble and slums built around a tiny strip of preserved casinos. Now it's…well, it's still that, but at least you can walk the streets without an armed escort. And that was just the city. Back in the day, you couldn't go five steps outside of Vegas proper without some Fiends coming after you. There's still a few stragglers that come out of whatever holes they've been hiding in, but they get cleaned up real quick."
"Dare I ask…what are 'Fiends'?" Batgirl said, in between mouthfuls of French toast.
"They're not the sort of thing one likes to discuss over a meal, but it's short for 'Chem Fiend', or at least that's what I've heard. So, in your terms, a bunch of drug addicts who band together to ensure that the drugs keep coming. They got up to some particularly awful stuff, so I'm going to stop this line of inquiry here before I spoil your appetites."
"What happened to them?" Artemis asked.
"He happened to them." Calista said with a sad smile.
She'd heard some things about the Fiends from her conversations with Six on the Watchtower, and even with him very obviously censoring the details, but it had still made her ill. She wasn't a violent woman but, as far as she was concerned, the multiverse was better off when men like this 'Cook-Cook' were separated from their heads. It only saddened her to know that the nice man who'd saved her island was the one who had to live with it.
At the questioning look from the other two women, Six relented with a sigh. "Ok, I guess we're not stopping this line of inquiry. Long story short, I killed their leadership and killed everyone in what passed for their 'base of operations'. What little organization they had collapsed and the rest is history."
Artemis's expression was neutral. Batgirl looked uncomfortable. Six rolled his eyes beneath his aviators.
"Hey, you asked. Next time I try to steer us away from somewhere, let me do it. Otherwise we'll end up somewhere that makes you feel awkward."
Artemis held up her hands. "I don't feel awkward. It's your business, we shouldn't have pried for answers if we couldn't handle getting ones we don't like."
Batgirl looked even more uncomfortable. "I'm sorry, I-"
Six interrupted. "Don't worry, I get it. It makes you uncomfortable, because you're people with a lot of empathy. So you try to put yourself in my shoes…and you draw a blank. Because you don't know how you'd act in my shoes. You couldn't know. And that's scary. Don't lose sleep over it. Just be glad you live in a world where you get to be better than I am. And hold onto that world for dear life. Because if there's one thing you can learn from my universe's Earth, it's that basic decency, once lost, is damned hard to find again."
He held a hand over his mouth. "Oh sh-...shoot. That, uh 'D-word' slipped out at the end there, sorry."
Batgirl took the attempt at lightening the mood for what it was and managed a chuckle. "I think we'll manage."
The breakfast continued amicably, with everyone pointedly avoiding any further attempts at prying into SIx's past.
—
Six sat in the rec room after lunch, all of the handguns he kept on his person were arrayed on the coffee table in front of where he sat as he disassembled and cleaned them. Most of the other members of the Team were at school, work, or some other commitment. Those few who were in the cave had likely been too intimidated by his display to approach. Or, at least, Six assumed that was what had happened, since 'Bumblebee' had entered the rec room, said "Wow, that's…a lot of guns…" and then promptly left. He suspected she'd spread the word about that little interaction, as no one had approached him for a while after that. He'd been considering transitioning to his quarters to avoid causing any conflict (he knew, intellectually, that many in this world were apparently sensitive to firearms being in their presence, even if it didn't make any actual sense to his Wasteland sensibilities) but had been spared that indignity when Calista had shown up with a book under her arm and then plopped into the chair across from him to read it.
They had sat in a companionable silence after that, occasionally broken by Calista asking a question about one of his guns or some other idle chatter, until Nightwing entered the rec room and stood beside Six.
"I think your surprise has arrived. Come to the shooting range. Bring something in nine millimeter and some spare magazines for it."
Intrigued by Nightwing's words, Six hurriedly reassembled and stowed his weapons and went to the shooting range (which had very little actual shooting go on within it. Not from guns, anyway). When he arrived, Nightwing stood smiling in front of a stack of ammunition containers. One of the containers was already opened, and Nightwing pulled a bullet out of it and tossed it at Six. The Wastelander examined the round. It had essentially the same shape as a typical 9x19mm round, except it was made of different materials and colored very strangely. Six looked up at Nightwing.
"Some kind of rubber bullet?"
Nightwing nodded. "Same core idea, but fundamentally improved. This is the next generation of non-lethal rounds, courtesy of Waynetech. It's a quantum leap over rubber bullets and bean bag rounds and all the other old-school less-lethal munitions."
Six was skeptical . In his opinion, the words 'non-lethal' and 'firearm' didn't belong in the same sentence. He'd tried his hand at using some of the old Pre-War riot-control rounds he'd uncovered in his exploits, and they were about as reliable as a craps table. There was a reason that NCR riot police still used the eternally reliable batons and tear gas, despite the wealth of technology ostensibly available to them from Pre-War stocks.
Nightwing tossed him one of the rounds. "They call it a 'gel round'. The bullet is made of some sort of patented 'smart gel' substance that changes shape in response to electrical signals. They pack it into a bullet shape and use it as a projectile."
Six poked at the bullet. "It seems hard. Harder than rubber."
Nightwing nodded. "It's rigid when it doesn't have a current running through it. Once you fire it, it becomes active and goes soft. About three quarters of the way into its flight it expands into a kind of bowl shape. This creates drag to cut its velocity slightly just before hitting the target and creates a shape that distributes the kinetic energy over a wider surface area. That's the idea, anyway. Apparently, it feels like a particularly hard punch."
Six retained his skepticism. "Punches can kill."
Nightwing nodded in concession. "If thrown with enough force repeatedly in the wrong place, that's true enough. However, it's been carefully measured and tested, and as long as the target isn't physically infirm, elderly, or a child, the lethality rate is zero percent."
That definitely got Six's attention. An essentially 100% non-lethal bullet was an incredibly useful tool in his belt…which is why there had to be a catch.
"Downsides?" Six asked.
"It's more effective than almost every other kind of less-lethal round, but it's still got the same limitations. It's getting most of its effectiveness through pain, so if the target is on drugs or has other kinds of pain inhibitions it will have reduced effectiveness. It's designed deliberately to not break bones or cause other significant long term injuries, so you can't rely on disabling a target by aiming for specific anatomy." Nightwing said.
Nightwing picked up a handgun from the examples he'd gathered and opened fire on a target. The evidence of the hits came in the form of remnants of the gel's dye that had splattered where it hit. Six was surprised.
"The gun's action is able to cycle? Most non-lethals I'm aware of can't do that. Now it makes sense why you asked me to bring a magazine."
Nightwing nodded. "The velocity-reduction is done in-flight, so the chamber pressure remains essentially the same."
Six looked at the rounds in a new light. It wouldn't be a one-to-one transfer of his skills, and in terms of cold, hard effectiveness it was still utterly impoverished when compared to a live round, but the possibilities were revolutionary.
"Why isn't everyone using these?" He asked.
"If we're talking law enforcement, security guards, that sort of thing…Well, for one, it's still relatively new tech, it's still in the trial phase for most police departments and private firms. For another, they're incredibly expensive. For the cost of loading a typical single stack magazine with these you could buy a new gun. That massively inflates training costs, because the ballistics are very different from a normal gun so even a trained shooter needs a lot of practice putting rounds down range to properly transition their skills to the new ammunition. And, truth be told, it isn't really a proper replacement for live rounds. At its core, it's still just a pain compliance tool, not a magic knockout gun. It's fundamentally less reliable than an actual firearm, so it will probably only ever be a supplement to lethal force, not a replacement." Nightwing said.
"If it's so expensive, does that mean you're breaking the bank to train me?"
Nightwing smiled in amusement. "We've got a pretty big bank, and a…relationship with the manufacturer."
"What kind of relationship?"
"The kind that means we're going to get even more interesting toys in the future. They've barely scratched the surface of what they can do with this gel, and they've got ideas coming out of their ears over at their R&D department."
Six nodded and looked thoughtfully at the ammunition. Then he approached it and began loading an extended magazine with the gel rounds. Nightwing spoke again.
"Whatever gun you decide to use, it needs to become your permanent 'non-lethal' gun in your mind. You should never load it with anything else, for training purposes. You don't want to mix and match ammunition, then in the heat of combat reach for the gun only to discover that you had it loaded with live rounds."
Six considered that for a moment. He'd intended to use Maria, more because of the nine millimeter requirement than anything else, but he stopped to consider what Nightwing had said. Lucky was his go-to pistol that he could quickdraw with incredible speed, whereas Maria in his shoulder holster was his preferred general purpose auto-loader. Of course, between A Light Shining in Darkness and numerous other weapons on his person, he wasn't exactly going to have his firepower reduced all that much if Maria became his designated non-lethal pistol. So, he gave Nightwing a nod, and loaded up two extended magazines.
He approached the range and let loose. The difference from live rounds, in terms of handling, was much less notable than it would have been with rubber bullets, but it was still there. The ballistics were completely different, though. It would take practice to get used to it, and even more practice to be able to switch between firing live rounds and gel rounds seamlessly. Fortunately, he had plenty of free time.
Nightwing approached. "I've talked it over with the other senior team members and Red Tornado, and if you're comfortable being in the ring next Tuesday we're willing to allow you to take one firearm loaded with gel rounds into the ring - after we've triple checked that it's not accidentally loaded with live rounds, of course. Your lethal weapons will obviously not be going anywhere near that ring, because that's just asking for an accident to happen."
Six was shocked. "That seems dangerous."
Nightwing shook his head. "No more dangerous than any of the other equipment and super powers that we use on a regular basis there. And also a hell of a lot less dangerous than the fights we're doing all this training for in the first place. We also require protective gear in the ring."
"I suppose that makes some sense, but…aren't these kids?"
Nightwing laughed. "If child endangerment was the main concern here, then this entire team wouldn't exist in the first place. We operate under…special circumstances."
"...Fair enough, I guess."
Six looked down at Maria and pondered. He was curious to see how he'd fare in a fight against superhumans using his baton and what was essentially still just rubber bullets. He looked up at Nightwing and smirked beneath his helmet.
If pretty boy over there can hold his own against them with a pair of sticks and a winning smile, I think I'll manage.
—
Hey all, this chapter meandered a bit and was harder to get out, but we should be out of this arc after the next chapter or two, which will focus on this 'Tuesday fight nights' I've established as being a thing for this story's version of the Team. After that, the goal is to fully transition into a proper episodic format, with the team this arc establishes going on wacky self-contained adventures while larger plots occur in the background, emulating the style of Justice League Unlimited. How successful I'll be at writing in this format remains to be seen, but I'm optimistic.
Thanks for reading!
Does she really expect me to not recognize her if I see her somewhere else without her sunglasses?
He fiddled with his aviators and bandana, and paused as his brain caught up and he had the decency to be embarrassed.
You know what, I take it back. Glass houses and all that.
Tigress gestured at what looked like a stack of hotcakes and some manner of egg-fried toast he recognized from a fancy NCR hotel he'd made a delivery to once. To use an entire egg for something so simple and not even particularly filling was another one of the mundanities of this world that highlighted the deprived state of his own.
"I recommend grabbing a little of everything. I don't know how M'gann manages to crank out so much of this stuff and have it still be as good as it is, but she does." She said.
"The perks of only needing about half as much sleep as everyone else in the cave." M'gann said, floating by (because of course the space alien could float, why not?).
"Pardon my reach." She said as the pieces of breakfast food…levitated onto her plate. She noticed Six watching and probably sensed his surprise (since she could apparently read minds too, because why not?), which made an amused smile appear on her deathly pale face. She winked a red and yellow eye at him.
"Why does every alien species I've encountered so far seem to get superpowers and an immunity to everything that makes humans vulnerable, while humans are stuck being the 'normal' ones in the galaxy?" Six said with a sigh.
"Hey, that's not true! We're good at…something, I'm sure." Beast Boy eagerly jumped to the defense of his species, which was somewhat ironic, all things considered.
"Not being crippled by high temperatures?" M'gann offered.
"Or glowing green rocks." Superboy chimed in, not looking up from his food.
"And sometimes having a meta gene." Static said, pulling some utensils towards himself with his power, catching them, and then digging in.
"Ok, so we don't have any prominent weaknesses. And sometimes we get to roll the cosmic dice and get superpowers." Kid Flash - Wally - chimed in.
"We don't need any prominent weaknesses. You can just shoot us in the head and that usually does the trick.." Six said.
"Really? You, of all people, are going to say that?" Calista said with a laugh.
"I said it usually does the trick." He smiled back beneath his bandana.
Beast Boy scrunched his face as he scrutinized them, then he seemed to reach a realization.
"Wait, are you saying you've been shot in the head? How are you alive?"
"I must not have been using it at the time." Six answered idly as he speared some hotcakes.
Beast Boy looked prepared to argue, but Superboy - somehow anticipating this despite still not even looking up from his food - interrupted him.
"Let the man eat his breakfast in peace, Gar."
Beast Boy frowned, but still let it go.
Six sat with Calista, Artemis, and Batgirl at an empty table filled with toppings for the breakfast foods. Six looked at real, actual maple syrup. An expensive luxury good in his own world and apparently another mundanity in this one. Most astounding of all, though, was a simple bowl filled with what might as well be gold. Six pulled it towards himself, spooning a small amount and looking at it, mesmerized. Artemis gave him an amused smile.
"You like sugar on your pancakes? I think maple syrup is more than sweet enough on its own, but sugar addicts like Wally for some reason still feel the need to pour more on."
She looked at her other half at the table he had to have for himself to keep others out of the 'splash zone' as he ate an inhuman amount of food at an inhumanly rapid speed. A by now familiar look of amusement, love, and disgust was written on her face.
"He claims it's because of his metabolism, but I think that's just an excuse." she said idly.
She looked over and saw Batgirl and Calista looking at Six in mild concern, who was still staring at the sugar as he repeatedly poured it slowly back into the bowl and scooped it up again. She decided to break the awkward silence in his vicinity.
"Uh…are you ok?"
He seemed startled, and coughed lightly. "Uh, yeah, just…surprised, I guess."
Batgirl raised an eyebrow high enough to pop over the lenses of her sunglasses. "You're surprised…by sugar."
Six felt a little embarrassed that he'd been staring at some plant powder like an ape seeing fire for the first time.
"Yes. It's just…I've never seen sugar before."
Artemis was taken aback. She'd known from the briefing that he was 'not from around here', so to speak, but this was definitely not a cultural adjustment she'd expected him to have to make.
"Do you not have sugar where you're from?" She asked.
He made a 'so-so' gesture with his hand. "Sort of? We know it exists because of the pre-war records and we have other kinds of sugar from different sources, but actual, honest-to-God cane sugar isn't really something we can get our hands on easily. Sugar cane isn't a crop that does particularly well in most of the West, even without it being a nuclear wasteland. I've heard of prospectors finding some perfectly preserved container of pure cane sugar and striking it rich, or some greenhouse or hydroponics setup that tries growing it, but those are about the only sources of it I know of."
Batgirl was mildly intrigued at the possible insight into the Courier's world. "So, you can't trade for it?"
He shook his head. "Trade across the Colorado is barely in its infancy, and the only places that could conceivably grow sugar cane in any meaningful amount are way, way further east than that. I'm sure someone, somewhere, on my version of Earth is running a sugar plantation, but whoever that may be hasn't made contact with the NCR."
"Stands for 'New California Republic', right? What's it like?" Batgirl asked, abruptly changing the subject out of genuine curiosity.
"Well, I've done some reading on this world, and I've also just barely dipped my toe into actually living here. WIth that in mind, I'd say the NCR is a-...well, the folks back home have a word that fits particularly well here ending in '-hole', but as I understand it we're not supposed to say words like that in earshot of the, er, younger members..."
The three women smiled in amusement. "We get the idea." Artemis said.
Six chuckled. "Right. Anyway, before going further, I want to preface this by saying that NCR is the best thing to happen to the continent since before the bombs fell. It's a shining beacon of progress and cooperation in a sea of anarchy and ultra-violence. Despite my…disagreements with it, it is still the only large-scale civilization currently in existence in my version of North America that isn't run by slaving despots or other flavors of villain. It's the last, best hope for the continent. That being said, it's also a…y'know."
At their annoyed expressions, he elaborated. "Ok, so the thing about the NCR is that most folks in the Wasteland who aren't enemies with them tend to have rose-tinted glasses when they look at them. For them, the NCR is paradise. For folks like me, who have read enough to have an inkling of what the world before the bombs was like, it's doing its best, but it's still falling short. By your standards, I believe it's what would be called an 'undeveloped country'. It's the best place to live in the Wasteland…but the bar there is really low."
"Is it a better place to live than your own country? The Mojave Republic or wherever." Artemis asked.
"Confederacy." Calista corrected as she took a sip of her tea. She'd already grilled Six for whatever answers she could claw out of him during their time on the Watchtower, so she was reasonably familiar with the basics of his crazy world.
Six bit into his pancakes and thought while he chewed. "The Mojave is…a lot better than it used to be, I'll say that much. Vegas used to just be a mess of rubble and slums built around a tiny strip of preserved casinos. Now it's…well, it's still that, but at least you can walk the streets without an armed escort. And that was just the city. Back in the day, you couldn't go five steps outside of Vegas proper without some Fiends coming after you. There's still a few stragglers that come out of whatever holes they've been hiding in, but they get cleaned up real quick."
"Dare I ask…what are 'Fiends'?" Batgirl said, in between mouthfuls of French toast.
"They're not the sort of thing one likes to discuss over a meal, but it's short for 'Chem Fiend', or at least that's what I've heard. So, in your terms, a bunch of drug addicts who band together to ensure that the drugs keep coming. They got up to some particularly awful stuff, so I'm going to stop this line of inquiry here before I spoil your appetites."
"What happened to them?" Artemis asked.
"He happened to them." Calista said with a sad smile.
She'd heard some things about the Fiends from her conversations with Six on the Watchtower, and even with him very obviously censoring the details, but it had still made her ill. She wasn't a violent woman but, as far as she was concerned, the multiverse was better off when men like this 'Cook-Cook' were separated from their heads. It only saddened her to know that the nice man who'd saved her island was the one who had to live with it.
At the questioning look from the other two women, Six relented with a sigh. "Ok, I guess we're not stopping this line of inquiry. Long story short, I killed their leadership and killed everyone in what passed for their 'base of operations'. What little organization they had collapsed and the rest is history."
Artemis's expression was neutral. Batgirl looked uncomfortable. Six rolled his eyes beneath his aviators.
"Hey, you asked. Next time I try to steer us away from somewhere, let me do it. Otherwise we'll end up somewhere that makes you feel awkward."
Artemis held up her hands. "I don't feel awkward. It's your business, we shouldn't have pried for answers if we couldn't handle getting ones we don't like."
Batgirl looked even more uncomfortable. "I'm sorry, I-"
Six interrupted. "Don't worry, I get it. It makes you uncomfortable, because you're people with a lot of empathy. So you try to put yourself in my shoes…and you draw a blank. Because you don't know how you'd act in my shoes. You couldn't know. And that's scary. Don't lose sleep over it. Just be glad you live in a world where you get to be better than I am. And hold onto that world for dear life. Because if there's one thing you can learn from my universe's Earth, it's that basic decency, once lost, is damned hard to find again."
He held a hand over his mouth. "Oh sh-...shoot. That, uh 'D-word' slipped out at the end there, sorry."
Batgirl took the attempt at lightening the mood for what it was and managed a chuckle. "I think we'll manage."
The breakfast continued amicably, with everyone pointedly avoiding any further attempts at prying into SIx's past.
—
Six sat in the rec room after lunch, all of the handguns he kept on his person were arrayed on the coffee table in front of where he sat as he disassembled and cleaned them. Most of the other members of the Team were at school, work, or some other commitment. Those few who were in the cave had likely been too intimidated by his display to approach. Or, at least, Six assumed that was what had happened, since 'Bumblebee' had entered the rec room, said "Wow, that's…a lot of guns…" and then promptly left. He suspected she'd spread the word about that little interaction, as no one had approached him for a while after that. He'd been considering transitioning to his quarters to avoid causing any conflict (he knew, intellectually, that many in this world were apparently sensitive to firearms being in their presence, even if it didn't make any actual sense to his Wasteland sensibilities) but had been spared that indignity when Calista had shown up with a book under her arm and then plopped into the chair across from him to read it.
They had sat in a companionable silence after that, occasionally broken by Calista asking a question about one of his guns or some other idle chatter, until Nightwing entered the rec room and stood beside Six.
"I think your surprise has arrived. Come to the shooting range. Bring something in nine millimeter and some spare magazines for it."
Intrigued by Nightwing's words, Six hurriedly reassembled and stowed his weapons and went to the shooting range (which had very little actual shooting go on within it. Not from guns, anyway). When he arrived, Nightwing stood smiling in front of a stack of ammunition containers. One of the containers was already opened, and Nightwing pulled a bullet out of it and tossed it at Six. The Wastelander examined the round. It had essentially the same shape as a typical 9x19mm round, except it was made of different materials and colored very strangely. Six looked up at Nightwing.
"Some kind of rubber bullet?"
Nightwing nodded. "Same core idea, but fundamentally improved. This is the next generation of non-lethal rounds, courtesy of Waynetech. It's a quantum leap over rubber bullets and bean bag rounds and all the other old-school less-lethal munitions."
Six was skeptical . In his opinion, the words 'non-lethal' and 'firearm' didn't belong in the same sentence. He'd tried his hand at using some of the old Pre-War riot-control rounds he'd uncovered in his exploits, and they were about as reliable as a craps table. There was a reason that NCR riot police still used the eternally reliable batons and tear gas, despite the wealth of technology ostensibly available to them from Pre-War stocks.
Nightwing tossed him one of the rounds. "They call it a 'gel round'. The bullet is made of some sort of patented 'smart gel' substance that changes shape in response to electrical signals. They pack it into a bullet shape and use it as a projectile."
Six poked at the bullet. "It seems hard. Harder than rubber."
Nightwing nodded. "It's rigid when it doesn't have a current running through it. Once you fire it, it becomes active and goes soft. About three quarters of the way into its flight it expands into a kind of bowl shape. This creates drag to cut its velocity slightly just before hitting the target and creates a shape that distributes the kinetic energy over a wider surface area. That's the idea, anyway. Apparently, it feels like a particularly hard punch."
Six retained his skepticism. "Punches can kill."
Nightwing nodded in concession. "If thrown with enough force repeatedly in the wrong place, that's true enough. However, it's been carefully measured and tested, and as long as the target isn't physically infirm, elderly, or a child, the lethality rate is zero percent."
That definitely got Six's attention. An essentially 100% non-lethal bullet was an incredibly useful tool in his belt…which is why there had to be a catch.
"Downsides?" Six asked.
"It's more effective than almost every other kind of less-lethal round, but it's still got the same limitations. It's getting most of its effectiveness through pain, so if the target is on drugs or has other kinds of pain inhibitions it will have reduced effectiveness. It's designed deliberately to not break bones or cause other significant long term injuries, so you can't rely on disabling a target by aiming for specific anatomy." Nightwing said.
Nightwing picked up a handgun from the examples he'd gathered and opened fire on a target. The evidence of the hits came in the form of remnants of the gel's dye that had splattered where it hit. Six was surprised.
"The gun's action is able to cycle? Most non-lethals I'm aware of can't do that. Now it makes sense why you asked me to bring a magazine."
Nightwing nodded. "The velocity-reduction is done in-flight, so the chamber pressure remains essentially the same."
Six looked at the rounds in a new light. It wouldn't be a one-to-one transfer of his skills, and in terms of cold, hard effectiveness it was still utterly impoverished when compared to a live round, but the possibilities were revolutionary.
"Why isn't everyone using these?" He asked.
"If we're talking law enforcement, security guards, that sort of thing…Well, for one, it's still relatively new tech, it's still in the trial phase for most police departments and private firms. For another, they're incredibly expensive. For the cost of loading a typical single stack magazine with these you could buy a new gun. That massively inflates training costs, because the ballistics are very different from a normal gun so even a trained shooter needs a lot of practice putting rounds down range to properly transition their skills to the new ammunition. And, truth be told, it isn't really a proper replacement for live rounds. At its core, it's still just a pain compliance tool, not a magic knockout gun. It's fundamentally less reliable than an actual firearm, so it will probably only ever be a supplement to lethal force, not a replacement." Nightwing said.
"If it's so expensive, does that mean you're breaking the bank to train me?"
Nightwing smiled in amusement. "We've got a pretty big bank, and a…relationship with the manufacturer."
"What kind of relationship?"
"The kind that means we're going to get even more interesting toys in the future. They've barely scratched the surface of what they can do with this gel, and they've got ideas coming out of their ears over at their R&D department."
Six nodded and looked thoughtfully at the ammunition. Then he approached it and began loading an extended magazine with the gel rounds. Nightwing spoke again.
"Whatever gun you decide to use, it needs to become your permanent 'non-lethal' gun in your mind. You should never load it with anything else, for training purposes. You don't want to mix and match ammunition, then in the heat of combat reach for the gun only to discover that you had it loaded with live rounds."
Six considered that for a moment. He'd intended to use Maria, more because of the nine millimeter requirement than anything else, but he stopped to consider what Nightwing had said. Lucky was his go-to pistol that he could quickdraw with incredible speed, whereas Maria in his shoulder holster was his preferred general purpose auto-loader. Of course, between A Light Shining in Darkness and numerous other weapons on his person, he wasn't exactly going to have his firepower reduced all that much if Maria became his designated non-lethal pistol. So, he gave Nightwing a nod, and loaded up two extended magazines.
He approached the range and let loose. The difference from live rounds, in terms of handling, was much less notable than it would have been with rubber bullets, but it was still there. The ballistics were completely different, though. It would take practice to get used to it, and even more practice to be able to switch between firing live rounds and gel rounds seamlessly. Fortunately, he had plenty of free time.
Nightwing approached. "I've talked it over with the other senior team members and Red Tornado, and if you're comfortable being in the ring next Tuesday we're willing to allow you to take one firearm loaded with gel rounds into the ring - after we've triple checked that it's not accidentally loaded with live rounds, of course. Your lethal weapons will obviously not be going anywhere near that ring, because that's just asking for an accident to happen."
Six was shocked. "That seems dangerous."
Nightwing shook his head. "No more dangerous than any of the other equipment and super powers that we use on a regular basis there. And also a hell of a lot less dangerous than the fights we're doing all this training for in the first place. We also require protective gear in the ring."
"I suppose that makes some sense, but…aren't these kids?"
Nightwing laughed. "If child endangerment was the main concern here, then this entire team wouldn't exist in the first place. We operate under…special circumstances."
"...Fair enough, I guess."
Six looked down at Maria and pondered. He was curious to see how he'd fare in a fight against superhumans using his baton and what was essentially still just rubber bullets. He looked up at Nightwing and smirked beneath his helmet.
If pretty boy over there can hold his own against them with a pair of sticks and a winning smile, I think I'll manage.
—
Hey all, this chapter meandered a bit and was harder to get out, but we should be out of this arc after the next chapter or two, which will focus on this 'Tuesday fight nights' I've established as being a thing for this story's version of the Team. After that, the goal is to fully transition into a proper episodic format, with the team this arc establishes going on wacky self-contained adventures while larger plots occur in the background, emulating the style of Justice League Unlimited. How successful I'll be at writing in this format remains to be seen, but I'm optimistic.
Thanks for reading!
- Location
- England
If you're not living in a movie/comic the more accurate term is 'less lethal'.
- Location
- Colorado
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Damn she's really gonna expose him like this? Well like the fella once said, ain't that a kick in the head.
Also glad to see Wayne tech being bullshit as usual
Travel to Distant Realities, Meet Fascinating People, and Punch Them - 5
Nightwing, Miss Martian, and Superboy stood apart from the rest of the team inside of the training arena. No training robots were present tonight, just the twelve regular members of the team, plus the two new trainees. The more junior members looked at their most senior members - some with anticipation, others with resignation. There were many training and sparring scenarios used by the team on Tuesday nights, and everyone was always made aware of what it would be in advance, to give time to prepare (though sometimes it wasn't revealed, or was even an outright lie, for those training scenarios intended to simulate the enemy having the element of surprise). The scenario selected for this Tuesday night was popular with the ultra-competitive types and tolerated by the more mellow individuals amongst the team's membership.
"As most of you are aware, tonight's exercise is centered around fighting while outnumbered." Nightwing began.
"More often than not in this line of work, you'll find yourselves outnumbered or outmatched. That's part of the job. When innocent lives are on the line, we cannot, will not retreat. We take the fight we are given." Superboy continued.
"Fortunately, we don't fight alone. In a real fight, even when you're alone you can call for backup. Which is why the victory condition of tonight's sparring matches - for the disadvantaged side - is not to defeat their opponents, but to outlast them. If the defender lasts for five minutes, they win. If they are defeated by the offensive team before that, the offense wins." Miss Martian finished.
"Of course, if you think you can manage to win before the timer runs out, go for it." Nightwing said with a laugh.
"Everyone will have a turn on the defense and offense. Any volunteers for the first defender?" Superboy asked.
Several hands raised, Superboy surveyed them briefly, before making his choice. "Static, you're up."
The youth in question smiled in triumph at Arsenal, who rolled his eyes. Superboy surveyed the gathered heroes some more, a thoughtful look in his eye.
"Tigress, Miss Martian, and Six, you're on offense. Everyone else, into the bleachers." He said.
Six went to join his two teammates as they waited for the others to leave the arena.
"Smart." He said idly.
Miss Martian smiled. "How so?"
"Our little team's composition isn't random, it's tailored for Static. A flyer to hound him, and two ranged fighters to keep him from just playing keepaway. And none of us are particularly reliant on metal equipment."
"Caught onto that, did you?" Tigress said with a half smile.
"Not reliant on metal? What do you call those plates in your armor?" Miss Martian said.
"Saturnite, for the most part. It looks and behaves a lot like metal, but it's actually a type of polymer." Six said.
Miss Martian quirked an eyebrow. "...'Saturnite'?"
"Pre-war marketing is an enigma to me, too."
Further conversation was stopped by Nightwing and Superboy taking up referee spots above the arena.
"Take your positions…and begin!" Nightwing said, the two sides moving to take their appropriate starting places at his words.
The second Nightwing said "Begin!" Six had drawn Maria and dumped the entire magazine into Static. The young hero was caught off guard, stumbling with pain as a half dozen rounds struck him, collapsing into a ball as he rolled out of the way of the shots. As Six reloaded and Tigress and Miss Martian hot over their surprise quickly to try and capitalize on the opportunity he'd created. It looked for a moment like his little sucker punch of a quickdraw would end the bout before it truly began. He didn't really feel bad about using a dirty trick like that (when a relatively normal man fought superhumans he needed all the help he could get) but he knew ruining a kid's night with an underhanded suckerpunch like this would not win him any friends. He'd assumed the kid would use a defensive field like he did against normal bullets - the gel rounds conducted electricity and in theory should be affected by his powers.
His apprehension was such that Six was almost relieved when he saw Static pull a pair of heavy duty disposable batteries from his utility belt, his arms quivering as he drained their electricity dry and rapidly recovered from the pain as a result. After that, the kid was off like a racehorse, the collapsable disc he used to fly coming unfolded as he maneuvered to evade Tigress's incoming bolts. As more bolts were loosed at him, he raised a hand, electric power coursing visibly through it, only for him to curse in surprise and kill his altitude. He landed on the ground and rolled to his feet, the bolts sailing overhead
The kid gave a pained grin. "Polymer bolts? Between this and the suckerpunch, I'm starting to think you three have it in for me, specifically."
Six pulled out another magazine and loaded it, racking the slide. "Think of it as a complement. It means you're strong enough for us to come prepared for you."
He opened up on Static again, and was unsurprised when the kid stopped the gel rounds cold, eyes glowing with electricity. He took off into the air, narrowly avoiding Miss Martian's airborne punch as she charged him. He circled around up high around the two heroes stuck on the ground.
Six emptied the rest of his magazine. Static stopped the rounds again, huffing in annoyance.
"Yeah, that's enough of that."
His hands crackled with power and Six felt Maria fly out of his hand. Six didn't shed any tears at the weapon's parting. Its only real utility against Static, specifically, was in a surprise attack, and you couldn't expect to hang on to metal weapons for long when you fought Static. So yes, Six had expected to lose his handgun. In fact, he'd counted on it.
In the second or two that Static's focus was on Maria as he pulled it through the air, Six reached to his hips and drew two Dead Horse War Clubs (padded for safety and thoroughly tested by Night Wing to ensure Six didn't empty the contents of a kid's skull onto the ground with one of them) from where they'd been hanging, hidden beneath his coat. He instantly tossed the one in his right hand, and before it had even finished its trip to Static, the other club had been switched into his right hand and tossed as well. Many hours of training paid off for Static as he instantly dropped Maria from his power's influence and raised an electrified hand to seize the incoming projectiles in mid air with lightning (heh) quick reflexes. Unfortunately for the youth, he only belatedly realized that the missiles were totally devoid of any kind of conductor or magnetic material for him to lash onto.
He cried out in pain as the first club struck his upraised hand, but to his credit he didn't flinch or panic, and instead instantly cut his power from his disc again, dropping like a rock as the second club wooshed over his head. As he began to arrest his fall, his disc began to crackle from his power seizing hold of it again, only to be snatched out from under him by Miss Martian's telekinetic power. He rolled to his feet as he hit the ground and assumed a fighting stance. With his mobility gone it was practically a forgone conclusion, but one doesn't become a superhero by giving up.
Six pulled his baton and advanced on Static, Tigress and Miss Martian behind him. Static extended both of his fists out in front of him, and sent a powerful burst of electricity into Miss Martian, who was knocked out of the sky as the power stunned her. Before she'd even hit the ground Static was advancing on Tigress and Six, hands charged with electricity as he engaged them in melee combat. Six could admit to being somewhat taken aback by the youth's sudden aggression, but he rolled with it and attacked with equal aggression. His suit was insulated to withstand a direct hit from a pulse grenade, so a taser punch from Static was not even something he could feel. Tigress was not so well protected, and had to give the youth's charged hands a wide berth.
Still, having to simultaneously fend off Tigress and parry ruthless baton strikes from Six was no small effort, and when Miss Martian recovered and flew towards him, the conclusion of the fight became obvious. Flattened against the ground by telekinetic power, Static was subdued and the buzzer sounded. Six extended a hand to the kid as he was released from Miss Martian's power, and Static smiled and took it, getting to his feet.
"Sorry about the suckerpunch." Six said, still feeling like a bit of a dick.
Static grinned. "Hey, all's fair in love and war, or something. The whole point of these little fights is to keep us sharp, expose us to different tactics and combat scenarios. A real bad guy with real bullets wouldn't have hesitated either. I'd rather learn that here than in the field."
Good head on his shoulders, this one. Six thought.
Superboy stood up in the bleachers and called out. "Ok folks, don't get too excited. We've got a lot more fights to go! Next up…"
—
The evening continued, and Six was not chosen for the offense again. Eventually, however, his turn on the defense came.
"Offense is: Miss Martian, Guardian…and me." Superboy said with a half smile and a meaningful look in Six's direction.
Six's mind raced as he thought over the offensive team. Like all of the team compositions this evening, it was certainly intended as a direct counter to the defender. The exact details of how that was the case, however, would have to be puzzled out by Six on his own. Miss Martian and Superboy were obvious: they were the two most bullet-proof members of the team. Miss Martian was, in his opinion, the greater threat. A man could be avoided with the right technique, no matter how strong or fast, but evading telekinetic and telepathic attacks was a total crapshoot even for an expert, nevermind a complete novice working off of second hand info like Six was.
Guardian was a puzzling choice. Six was well known on the team by now as a mediocre hand-to-hand combatant, so a skilled fighter was an obvious choice to keep him off balance. But why Guardian, specifically? Nightwing was surely the better fighter, all things considered. The thoughts raced through his head on the way to the ring, but he silenced them as he entered. He needed to concentrate, if his plan was going to work.
—
As they waited for the signal to begin M'gann observed the mind of her opponent, or at least the surface level thoughts that it projected. To probe any deeper would be an extreme invasion of privacy, and worse: it would ruin the training. Every member of the team had training at resisting telepathic infiltration of their minds. It usually came in the form of mentally reciting random numbers or phrases repeatedly to create enough 'noise' to disrupt the telepath's own thoughts. There were more advanced techniques, but they usually required a level of mental discipline and deep meditation that a bunch of teenagers were just not going to achieve in the weekly hour-and-a-half training sessions she had with them.
In a 'resting' state such measures were ultimately just delaying the inevitable, as a determined enough telepath would wear down a non-telepathic mind eventually. However, in battle, where the telepath couldn't waste time trying to sort through the deliberately disorganized thoughts of their target, it could be effective against most telepaths.
Most telepaths.
The truth was, M'gann was holding back, quite a lot. She could have easily disabled almost all of her opponents this evening (except Static) with a sufficiently powerful psychic attack, but that wasn't the point of the training. She was a telepath amongst telepaths, to the point that even other telepaths were left in her dust. To expect the team to resist her attacks was idiotic. After all, they weren't training to fight her, they were training to fight the other, vastly inferior, telepaths that the bad guys frequently made use of.
So, she didn't just overpower her opponent's minds. Instead, she monitored her team mate's minds and waited to see when their anti-telepathic mental discipline faltered. When it did, she punished them with an unpleasant but ultimately harmless psychic jab that would disorient them for a moment but otherwise do no actual damage. However, with Six - who came from a world without telepaths as far as he knew and had not been with the team long enough to receive any significant anti-telepathy training - she would have to go easy. The point of the exercise was for him to learn, not for her to psychically bully him.
Still, she couldn't help but look with curiosity at his mind. She'd seen cybernetic minds before, but his lacked the…emptiness that she could usually sense in such minds. The sensation of touching a brain that was not…whole. His brain lacked any of the 'dark spots' she could brush against, where she could feel the cold machine taking the place of gray matter. It seemed the reports were accurate, the modifications to his brain were largely superficial-
What?
She felt it, a very small sensation, but a sensation nonetheless. Where once there had been only the fascinating web of bioelectricity that made up a brain, there was now foreign electricity being introduced. Six's brain broadcasted what sounded like…static? (Not the hero, but the noise). The signal to begin came from Nightwing, and M'gann heard an audible 'click' and physically recoiled as one of the loudest mental 'sounds' she'd ever heard was blasted into her mind.
—
Fallout New Vegas Radio - Lone Star
Six watched with satisfaction as Miss Martian visibly dropped in altitude, clutching her temples and groaning as the sound of a dead singer expressing his desire for a long-dead state was blasted directly into Six's neurons at maximum power. By all rights, Six should be the one experiencing the greater discomfort, and indeed having a song play very loudly directly into his brain was a very unpleasant sensation…but it was one he'd been getting himself used to almost from the moment he'd arrived on the Watchtower and started reading up on this world. Telepaths terrified him. The idea of someone who could just rummage around his brain like a scavenger picking through a dumpster was the stuff of nightmares. So, he'd endeavored to establish any and every defense against their threat he could.
From what he had scraped together from the global database thing that the denizens of this world called an "internet", the best defense a layman could hope to put up against a telepath was noise. Mental noise, to be specific. As loud and annoying as possible. Normal men would have been stuck mentally reciting a song or their birthdate backwards or something, but Six had a 'feature' that had been installed into his skull that could set him above the average lout: the ability to beam information directly into his brain, courtesy of the goodies that were left behind in his skull after his escapade at Big MT.
It was only sound and text (or, at least, he was pretty sure it was: he hadn't had the courage to try feeding his brain visual data), and was a skill that had minimal actual utility in his day to day life. He still had a (mostly) organic brain and so he could still only process the information as fast as he could if he were consuming it via normal means. Meaning, it was barely more efficient to take in the information directly through his brain than it was to simply listen with his own ear drums and read with his own eyes. Add to that the fact that reading without looking at the words with his eyes and hearing without his ear drums vibrating was a deeply unsettling experience, and it meant that it was an ability that he very deliberately avoided using.
But, it still had its uses.
He drew Maria and laid down a very liberal stream of fire on Guardian, who - in a credit to his training - was already dodging in anticipation of the attack after the warning Miss Martian's reaction had given him. Even as the gel rounds were still leaving the garishly decorated Hi-Power's barrel, Six's cyborg nature was coming into full swing. Between his visits to Dr. Usanagi, the Sink's heavily upgraded AutoDoc, and help from his more knowledgeable friends, Six's system of cybernetic enhancements was tuned to near-perfect synchronization. In his earliest days as a cyborg they had been little more than a series of individual mods hastily stuffed into his flesh whenever he scraped together enough caps and courage to do it.
Now? They were his edge, his leg-up over his foes. He could feel the adrenaline flooding his body with ice-cold clarity, his natural production carefully regulated and enhanced by the Reflex Booster to maximize the benefits of the powerful hormone and minimize its drawbacks. As Superboy rushed him with inhuman speed, Six managed to vault over the man like a matador over a charging bull, something that an amateur acrobat like him would probably not have managed without the un-naturally enhanced rushing river of hormones flooding his system, courtesy of the Reflex Booster and Hypertrophy Accelerator working in tandem. His more physical implants were somewhat obvious in their effect on his capabilities, those that enhanced his mind were much more subtle.
So subtle, in fact, that he barely noticed their contributions. It was the combined efforts of the Logic Co-Processor and Probability Calculator that ensured he 'knew' (in a way that felt more like instinct than true thought) that he'd have enough time to load another magazine, fire about half of it at a target of his choosing, (he'd spared himself the need to rack the slide despite its single-action nature thanks to diligent training that ensured he had left a round in the chamber) and then avoid Superboy's inevitable next attack.
It was the Optics Enhancer that ensured he could examine in perfect detail the obscured facial expressions and posture of Guardian, and it was the Empathy Synthesizer that informed him that the supposed apprehension Six was reading in his body language was actually feigned, and Guardian was moments away from launching an aggressive attack on Six. With this information fed directly into his instincts, Six reacted accordingly, changing targets from his first choice Miss Martian to the more immediate threat of Guardian. Six managed six shots at Guardian, who took one in the shoulder due to his surprise at Six's sudden change of targets, before ducking into a hasty dodging roll that ensured he only took one other round into his calf.
Six chose to forgo attempting a seventh shot, and instead turned to face Superboy's charge. He prepared to receive him, palming a goody he'd prepared just for the Kryptonian. Between the enhancements to his body and the Nociception Regulator dulling the pain, he merely felt like someone had smacked him on the arm when he deflected Superboy's punch, rather than feeling like it was almost ripped out its socket, like he should have felt. Superboy seemed to form the beginnings of an expression of bemused surprise before Six slapped his left hand against the larger man's chest and then dove away. The modified pulse grenade (begrudgingly approved for use against Superboy and only Superboy in the ring by Nightwing) unleashed its charge - adjusted by Six to draw it out for longer - directly into the Wayne Tech gel that coated its main output sections. The gel, being an excellent conductor, transferred all of that electricity into a very annoyed Superboy, who screamed his displeasure.
The funny thing is, Kryptonians make great conductors too.
Six bolted past the spasming form of Superboy, pausing only to slap a second pulse grenade onto his back for good measure. He did not want to underestimate Guardian, but Miss Martian was the much graver threat, and a threat that was rapidly adapting to the looping sound blasting into the psychic airwaves. Six threw a flashbang in Guardian's direction, confident in his helmet's ability to shield him from the effects and equally confident that it wouldn't delay Guardian for long, and then came upon Miss Martian. He felt a formless, invisible hand grasping weakly at his person, and he knew it was the effects of telekinesis.
The internet had said the only real defense a mere mortal had against a telekinetic mind was to stay moving. Telekinesis took far greater effort and concentration than telepathy, and so making oneself difficult to concentrate on was the best bet. He highly doubted that his little zigzagging makeshift acrobatics routine would have deterred a mind of Miss Martian's supposed caliber were it not for the obscenely loud fiddles currently sawing at her alien neurons. She'd managed to shut out the noise enough to scrape together something resembling focus, but it clearly wasn't enough to allow her to express her true power. Six fully intended to capitalize on that, and he emptied the rest of his magazine at her. The martian woman flinched and obviously didn't enjoy the experience, but was otherwise undeterred.
He felt the formless hand grasping for him again, and an unnecessarily flashy back flip ensured that it didn't get to second base with him. He briefly observed the alien woman as she flew sluggishly towards him, undeterred by getting hit by a number of gel rounds that would have left a human writhing on the floor. His gaze fell onto Superboy, getting to his feet, the two massive electrical charges - that would have probably killed or severely injured a human - that had been pumped through his system producing no visible effect other than an annoyed look on Kryptonian's face. Lastly, his gaze turned to Guardian, who approached Six, visibly favoring the leg that had taken a hit and struggling to regain his breath after the gel round to his armor had knocked the wind out of him.
Ancestors preserve me, aliens are such bullshit.
It was time for the ace up his sleeve. Or, in his coat, more accurately. He produced a lever action shotgun from the custom holster in his coat and immediately opened fire, not wanting to give his opponents an extra moment to react. The rounds were pulse slugs, modified to lower the chamber pressure (The normal pulse slugs were still decidedly lethal and thus completely off-limits for the ring). Of course, the Wayne Tech gel coated on the end of them ensured that they didn't need to pack any kinetic punch to do damage. Three rounds struck Miss Martian (Setting her on fire would probably not go over well so Six had to settle for generous amounts of electricity) and two struck Superboy. Their discharge didn't last nearly as long as the pulse grenades, but it was a hell of a lot easier to hit a telekinetic and someone with Super reflexes with a bullet than with a thrown grenade. Especially when they were caught off guard.
Unfortunately for Six, it was his turn to be caught off guard next, as Guardian lunged for him. He dodged, but not without Guardian seizing the lever action from his grip and placing it on the ground.
Nice of him not to throw it, it's an antique. The idle thought struck him, but was quickly buried in the deafening music still blasting into his skull. As he dodged repeated punches from Guardian the wheels in his brain turned. It was obvious to him now why Guardian was here. He was aggressive, far more aggressive than Nightwing, his current tutor and the only person he'd gotten any meaningful experience sparring against in the relatively short time he'd been at the Cave. Nightwing had a more cold and technical approach when on the attack, whereas Guardian just charged in and tried to beat the shit out of him. He still showed incredible skill and agility, but he had more raw power and aggression, which was perfect for what Six suspected Superboy had in mind: force him to either expend resources subduing the two heavy hitters, or Guardian.
Sure, the super-powered ones might be out of the fight for a short period, but he had nothing but a baton to fight Guardian with. By every metric, Six was dead to rights. Guardian was perfectly capable of kicking his ass, even without backup. However, Six had one advantage: no one currently in the ring had been present for the little pre-breakfast training sessions he did with Nightwing, Robin, and Arsenal. Which meant that the only person who knew that 'nothing but a baton' would carry him a whole lot farther than anyone realized was Six.
He leapt away from a powerful strike from Guardian, drawing his baton in the process. Guardian stared him down, Miss Martian and Superboy were in the background, the charges on the pulse slugs had seconds, at best, before they ran out. He could feel his cybernetic system firing on all pistons.
This is a good training exercise. Nothing like three-against-one to really get your fight or flight response kicking in.
He rushed in at Guardian, who was taken slightly off guard by Six's sudden shift out of an evasive posture into an offensive one. He parried a strike from Six's baton with his shield, but it instantly shifted into a strike from a different angle, which he dodged, only to have the baton recover and come at him again…and on it went, Six's attack was relentless. Guardian eventually had his guard broken, and a nasty wack to the shoulder sent him stumbling back. Six should have pressed the attack, but Guardian was spared further strikes by the recovery of Miss Martian and Superboy.
It was nearly instantaneous, as the electricity did no actual damage to their bodies. It was pain that had given them pause, not injury. So, they needed only a second or two to catch their breath, and then they were back in the fight. Six palmed some more pulse grenades, but he did not like his odds as he watched the two very powerful beings approach him with a newfound wariness on their faces.
They're wise to my tricks now. Throwing won't do me any good, Miss Martian is probably tensing in anticipation, waiting to catch any grenades I throw. She doesn't need to read my mind to know that's my only real play, because I'm not going to reach her in the air and Superboy is not going to be so stupid as to let me stick something onto his chest again.
He thought, and thought some more, and the magnificent machines in his brain ran the numbers and produced precisely jack and shit in terms of viable tactics. He tensed, the conclusion was forgone but he fully intended to lose while he was still swinging-
The buzzer sounded, and Nightwing's voice called out. "Time!"
His three opponents immediately switched from battle-ready warriors to young people giving a bemused look to the new guy. Guardian crack a smile.
"Saved by the bell." He said.
Six walked over to pick up his shotgun. "No arguments here."
Superboy walked over to Six, rubbing at his chest where the pulse grenade and pulse slugs had been.
"You had an awful lot of electricity-based weapons on you. I take it you did your homework?"
Six shrugged. "It was easier than getting meteor chunks or learning magic."
Miss Martian landed, rubbing at her temples. "Can you please turn off that music?"
Six was slightly embarrassed and he silenced the fiddles with a thought. "Uh, sorry. I tuned it out."
Miss Martian gave a half smile and shook her head. "I'm going to have that stuck in my head forever now, thanks for that."
"Music?" Guardian asked.
Miss Martian nodded. "He was broadcasting music, I'm guessing using his implants, directly into his brain. It was very loud."
"Not a bad trick, but it wouldn't have kept M'gann down for long." Superboy commented.
Six nodded. "I wasn't counting on it, it was just to buy me time."
"Well, it worked. Now go take a rest." Nightwing said, entering the ring. He looked at Superboy. "Who's next?"
Superboy drew in breath to call for the next round of fighters, and Six returned to the bleachers. The training and sparring went on well into the night, and in its aftermath the members of the Team made their way to bed and rapidly fell asleep, worn out from the experience.
—
Well, this was huge pain in the ass to write for some reason, so forgive the relatively abrupt ending and general weirdness of the pacing here. This is likely going to be the end of this little 'introduction to the team' arc, as it could very well go on forever if I don't cut it off, by virtue of the sheer number of characters in this universe if nothing else.
As always, thank you for reading!
"As most of you are aware, tonight's exercise is centered around fighting while outnumbered." Nightwing began.
"More often than not in this line of work, you'll find yourselves outnumbered or outmatched. That's part of the job. When innocent lives are on the line, we cannot, will not retreat. We take the fight we are given." Superboy continued.
"Fortunately, we don't fight alone. In a real fight, even when you're alone you can call for backup. Which is why the victory condition of tonight's sparring matches - for the disadvantaged side - is not to defeat their opponents, but to outlast them. If the defender lasts for five minutes, they win. If they are defeated by the offensive team before that, the offense wins." Miss Martian finished.
"Of course, if you think you can manage to win before the timer runs out, go for it." Nightwing said with a laugh.
"Everyone will have a turn on the defense and offense. Any volunteers for the first defender?" Superboy asked.
Several hands raised, Superboy surveyed them briefly, before making his choice. "Static, you're up."
The youth in question smiled in triumph at Arsenal, who rolled his eyes. Superboy surveyed the gathered heroes some more, a thoughtful look in his eye.
"Tigress, Miss Martian, and Six, you're on offense. Everyone else, into the bleachers." He said.
Six went to join his two teammates as they waited for the others to leave the arena.
"Smart." He said idly.
Miss Martian smiled. "How so?"
"Our little team's composition isn't random, it's tailored for Static. A flyer to hound him, and two ranged fighters to keep him from just playing keepaway. And none of us are particularly reliant on metal equipment."
"Caught onto that, did you?" Tigress said with a half smile.
"Not reliant on metal? What do you call those plates in your armor?" Miss Martian said.
"Saturnite, for the most part. It looks and behaves a lot like metal, but it's actually a type of polymer." Six said.
Miss Martian quirked an eyebrow. "...'Saturnite'?"
"Pre-war marketing is an enigma to me, too."
Further conversation was stopped by Nightwing and Superboy taking up referee spots above the arena.
"Take your positions…and begin!" Nightwing said, the two sides moving to take their appropriate starting places at his words.
The second Nightwing said "Begin!" Six had drawn Maria and dumped the entire magazine into Static. The young hero was caught off guard, stumbling with pain as a half dozen rounds struck him, collapsing into a ball as he rolled out of the way of the shots. As Six reloaded and Tigress and Miss Martian hot over their surprise quickly to try and capitalize on the opportunity he'd created. It looked for a moment like his little sucker punch of a quickdraw would end the bout before it truly began. He didn't really feel bad about using a dirty trick like that (when a relatively normal man fought superhumans he needed all the help he could get) but he knew ruining a kid's night with an underhanded suckerpunch like this would not win him any friends. He'd assumed the kid would use a defensive field like he did against normal bullets - the gel rounds conducted electricity and in theory should be affected by his powers.
His apprehension was such that Six was almost relieved when he saw Static pull a pair of heavy duty disposable batteries from his utility belt, his arms quivering as he drained their electricity dry and rapidly recovered from the pain as a result. After that, the kid was off like a racehorse, the collapsable disc he used to fly coming unfolded as he maneuvered to evade Tigress's incoming bolts. As more bolts were loosed at him, he raised a hand, electric power coursing visibly through it, only for him to curse in surprise and kill his altitude. He landed on the ground and rolled to his feet, the bolts sailing overhead
The kid gave a pained grin. "Polymer bolts? Between this and the suckerpunch, I'm starting to think you three have it in for me, specifically."
Six pulled out another magazine and loaded it, racking the slide. "Think of it as a complement. It means you're strong enough for us to come prepared for you."
He opened up on Static again, and was unsurprised when the kid stopped the gel rounds cold, eyes glowing with electricity. He took off into the air, narrowly avoiding Miss Martian's airborne punch as she charged him. He circled around up high around the two heroes stuck on the ground.
Six emptied the rest of his magazine. Static stopped the rounds again, huffing in annoyance.
"Yeah, that's enough of that."
His hands crackled with power and Six felt Maria fly out of his hand. Six didn't shed any tears at the weapon's parting. Its only real utility against Static, specifically, was in a surprise attack, and you couldn't expect to hang on to metal weapons for long when you fought Static. So yes, Six had expected to lose his handgun. In fact, he'd counted on it.
In the second or two that Static's focus was on Maria as he pulled it through the air, Six reached to his hips and drew two Dead Horse War Clubs (padded for safety and thoroughly tested by Night Wing to ensure Six didn't empty the contents of a kid's skull onto the ground with one of them) from where they'd been hanging, hidden beneath his coat. He instantly tossed the one in his right hand, and before it had even finished its trip to Static, the other club had been switched into his right hand and tossed as well. Many hours of training paid off for Static as he instantly dropped Maria from his power's influence and raised an electrified hand to seize the incoming projectiles in mid air with lightning (heh) quick reflexes. Unfortunately for the youth, he only belatedly realized that the missiles were totally devoid of any kind of conductor or magnetic material for him to lash onto.
He cried out in pain as the first club struck his upraised hand, but to his credit he didn't flinch or panic, and instead instantly cut his power from his disc again, dropping like a rock as the second club wooshed over his head. As he began to arrest his fall, his disc began to crackle from his power seizing hold of it again, only to be snatched out from under him by Miss Martian's telekinetic power. He rolled to his feet as he hit the ground and assumed a fighting stance. With his mobility gone it was practically a forgone conclusion, but one doesn't become a superhero by giving up.
Six pulled his baton and advanced on Static, Tigress and Miss Martian behind him. Static extended both of his fists out in front of him, and sent a powerful burst of electricity into Miss Martian, who was knocked out of the sky as the power stunned her. Before she'd even hit the ground Static was advancing on Tigress and Six, hands charged with electricity as he engaged them in melee combat. Six could admit to being somewhat taken aback by the youth's sudden aggression, but he rolled with it and attacked with equal aggression. His suit was insulated to withstand a direct hit from a pulse grenade, so a taser punch from Static was not even something he could feel. Tigress was not so well protected, and had to give the youth's charged hands a wide berth.
Still, having to simultaneously fend off Tigress and parry ruthless baton strikes from Six was no small effort, and when Miss Martian recovered and flew towards him, the conclusion of the fight became obvious. Flattened against the ground by telekinetic power, Static was subdued and the buzzer sounded. Six extended a hand to the kid as he was released from Miss Martian's power, and Static smiled and took it, getting to his feet.
"Sorry about the suckerpunch." Six said, still feeling like a bit of a dick.
Static grinned. "Hey, all's fair in love and war, or something. The whole point of these little fights is to keep us sharp, expose us to different tactics and combat scenarios. A real bad guy with real bullets wouldn't have hesitated either. I'd rather learn that here than in the field."
Good head on his shoulders, this one. Six thought.
Superboy stood up in the bleachers and called out. "Ok folks, don't get too excited. We've got a lot more fights to go! Next up…"
—
The evening continued, and Six was not chosen for the offense again. Eventually, however, his turn on the defense came.
"Offense is: Miss Martian, Guardian…and me." Superboy said with a half smile and a meaningful look in Six's direction.
Six's mind raced as he thought over the offensive team. Like all of the team compositions this evening, it was certainly intended as a direct counter to the defender. The exact details of how that was the case, however, would have to be puzzled out by Six on his own. Miss Martian and Superboy were obvious: they were the two most bullet-proof members of the team. Miss Martian was, in his opinion, the greater threat. A man could be avoided with the right technique, no matter how strong or fast, but evading telekinetic and telepathic attacks was a total crapshoot even for an expert, nevermind a complete novice working off of second hand info like Six was.
Guardian was a puzzling choice. Six was well known on the team by now as a mediocre hand-to-hand combatant, so a skilled fighter was an obvious choice to keep him off balance. But why Guardian, specifically? Nightwing was surely the better fighter, all things considered. The thoughts raced through his head on the way to the ring, but he silenced them as he entered. He needed to concentrate, if his plan was going to work.
—
As they waited for the signal to begin M'gann observed the mind of her opponent, or at least the surface level thoughts that it projected. To probe any deeper would be an extreme invasion of privacy, and worse: it would ruin the training. Every member of the team had training at resisting telepathic infiltration of their minds. It usually came in the form of mentally reciting random numbers or phrases repeatedly to create enough 'noise' to disrupt the telepath's own thoughts. There were more advanced techniques, but they usually required a level of mental discipline and deep meditation that a bunch of teenagers were just not going to achieve in the weekly hour-and-a-half training sessions she had with them.
In a 'resting' state such measures were ultimately just delaying the inevitable, as a determined enough telepath would wear down a non-telepathic mind eventually. However, in battle, where the telepath couldn't waste time trying to sort through the deliberately disorganized thoughts of their target, it could be effective against most telepaths.
Most telepaths.
The truth was, M'gann was holding back, quite a lot. She could have easily disabled almost all of her opponents this evening (except Static) with a sufficiently powerful psychic attack, but that wasn't the point of the training. She was a telepath amongst telepaths, to the point that even other telepaths were left in her dust. To expect the team to resist her attacks was idiotic. After all, they weren't training to fight her, they were training to fight the other, vastly inferior, telepaths that the bad guys frequently made use of.
So, she didn't just overpower her opponent's minds. Instead, she monitored her team mate's minds and waited to see when their anti-telepathic mental discipline faltered. When it did, she punished them with an unpleasant but ultimately harmless psychic jab that would disorient them for a moment but otherwise do no actual damage. However, with Six - who came from a world without telepaths as far as he knew and had not been with the team long enough to receive any significant anti-telepathy training - she would have to go easy. The point of the exercise was for him to learn, not for her to psychically bully him.
Still, she couldn't help but look with curiosity at his mind. She'd seen cybernetic minds before, but his lacked the…emptiness that she could usually sense in such minds. The sensation of touching a brain that was not…whole. His brain lacked any of the 'dark spots' she could brush against, where she could feel the cold machine taking the place of gray matter. It seemed the reports were accurate, the modifications to his brain were largely superficial-
What?
She felt it, a very small sensation, but a sensation nonetheless. Where once there had been only the fascinating web of bioelectricity that made up a brain, there was now foreign electricity being introduced. Six's brain broadcasted what sounded like…static? (Not the hero, but the noise). The signal to begin came from Nightwing, and M'gann heard an audible 'click' and physically recoiled as one of the loudest mental 'sounds' she'd ever heard was blasted into her mind.
—
Fallout New Vegas Radio - Lone Star
Six watched with satisfaction as Miss Martian visibly dropped in altitude, clutching her temples and groaning as the sound of a dead singer expressing his desire for a long-dead state was blasted directly into Six's neurons at maximum power. By all rights, Six should be the one experiencing the greater discomfort, and indeed having a song play very loudly directly into his brain was a very unpleasant sensation…but it was one he'd been getting himself used to almost from the moment he'd arrived on the Watchtower and started reading up on this world. Telepaths terrified him. The idea of someone who could just rummage around his brain like a scavenger picking through a dumpster was the stuff of nightmares. So, he'd endeavored to establish any and every defense against their threat he could.
From what he had scraped together from the global database thing that the denizens of this world called an "internet", the best defense a layman could hope to put up against a telepath was noise. Mental noise, to be specific. As loud and annoying as possible. Normal men would have been stuck mentally reciting a song or their birthdate backwards or something, but Six had a 'feature' that had been installed into his skull that could set him above the average lout: the ability to beam information directly into his brain, courtesy of the goodies that were left behind in his skull after his escapade at Big MT.
It was only sound and text (or, at least, he was pretty sure it was: he hadn't had the courage to try feeding his brain visual data), and was a skill that had minimal actual utility in his day to day life. He still had a (mostly) organic brain and so he could still only process the information as fast as he could if he were consuming it via normal means. Meaning, it was barely more efficient to take in the information directly through his brain than it was to simply listen with his own ear drums and read with his own eyes. Add to that the fact that reading without looking at the words with his eyes and hearing without his ear drums vibrating was a deeply unsettling experience, and it meant that it was an ability that he very deliberately avoided using.
But, it still had its uses.
He drew Maria and laid down a very liberal stream of fire on Guardian, who - in a credit to his training - was already dodging in anticipation of the attack after the warning Miss Martian's reaction had given him. Even as the gel rounds were still leaving the garishly decorated Hi-Power's barrel, Six's cyborg nature was coming into full swing. Between his visits to Dr. Usanagi, the Sink's heavily upgraded AutoDoc, and help from his more knowledgeable friends, Six's system of cybernetic enhancements was tuned to near-perfect synchronization. In his earliest days as a cyborg they had been little more than a series of individual mods hastily stuffed into his flesh whenever he scraped together enough caps and courage to do it.
Now? They were his edge, his leg-up over his foes. He could feel the adrenaline flooding his body with ice-cold clarity, his natural production carefully regulated and enhanced by the Reflex Booster to maximize the benefits of the powerful hormone and minimize its drawbacks. As Superboy rushed him with inhuman speed, Six managed to vault over the man like a matador over a charging bull, something that an amateur acrobat like him would probably not have managed without the un-naturally enhanced rushing river of hormones flooding his system, courtesy of the Reflex Booster and Hypertrophy Accelerator working in tandem. His more physical implants were somewhat obvious in their effect on his capabilities, those that enhanced his mind were much more subtle.
So subtle, in fact, that he barely noticed their contributions. It was the combined efforts of the Logic Co-Processor and Probability Calculator that ensured he 'knew' (in a way that felt more like instinct than true thought) that he'd have enough time to load another magazine, fire about half of it at a target of his choosing, (he'd spared himself the need to rack the slide despite its single-action nature thanks to diligent training that ensured he had left a round in the chamber) and then avoid Superboy's inevitable next attack.
It was the Optics Enhancer that ensured he could examine in perfect detail the obscured facial expressions and posture of Guardian, and it was the Empathy Synthesizer that informed him that the supposed apprehension Six was reading in his body language was actually feigned, and Guardian was moments away from launching an aggressive attack on Six. With this information fed directly into his instincts, Six reacted accordingly, changing targets from his first choice Miss Martian to the more immediate threat of Guardian. Six managed six shots at Guardian, who took one in the shoulder due to his surprise at Six's sudden change of targets, before ducking into a hasty dodging roll that ensured he only took one other round into his calf.
Six chose to forgo attempting a seventh shot, and instead turned to face Superboy's charge. He prepared to receive him, palming a goody he'd prepared just for the Kryptonian. Between the enhancements to his body and the Nociception Regulator dulling the pain, he merely felt like someone had smacked him on the arm when he deflected Superboy's punch, rather than feeling like it was almost ripped out its socket, like he should have felt. Superboy seemed to form the beginnings of an expression of bemused surprise before Six slapped his left hand against the larger man's chest and then dove away. The modified pulse grenade (begrudgingly approved for use against Superboy and only Superboy in the ring by Nightwing) unleashed its charge - adjusted by Six to draw it out for longer - directly into the Wayne Tech gel that coated its main output sections. The gel, being an excellent conductor, transferred all of that electricity into a very annoyed Superboy, who screamed his displeasure.
The funny thing is, Kryptonians make great conductors too.
Six bolted past the spasming form of Superboy, pausing only to slap a second pulse grenade onto his back for good measure. He did not want to underestimate Guardian, but Miss Martian was the much graver threat, and a threat that was rapidly adapting to the looping sound blasting into the psychic airwaves. Six threw a flashbang in Guardian's direction, confident in his helmet's ability to shield him from the effects and equally confident that it wouldn't delay Guardian for long, and then came upon Miss Martian. He felt a formless, invisible hand grasping weakly at his person, and he knew it was the effects of telekinesis.
The internet had said the only real defense a mere mortal had against a telekinetic mind was to stay moving. Telekinesis took far greater effort and concentration than telepathy, and so making oneself difficult to concentrate on was the best bet. He highly doubted that his little zigzagging makeshift acrobatics routine would have deterred a mind of Miss Martian's supposed caliber were it not for the obscenely loud fiddles currently sawing at her alien neurons. She'd managed to shut out the noise enough to scrape together something resembling focus, but it clearly wasn't enough to allow her to express her true power. Six fully intended to capitalize on that, and he emptied the rest of his magazine at her. The martian woman flinched and obviously didn't enjoy the experience, but was otherwise undeterred.
He felt the formless hand grasping for him again, and an unnecessarily flashy back flip ensured that it didn't get to second base with him. He briefly observed the alien woman as she flew sluggishly towards him, undeterred by getting hit by a number of gel rounds that would have left a human writhing on the floor. His gaze fell onto Superboy, getting to his feet, the two massive electrical charges - that would have probably killed or severely injured a human - that had been pumped through his system producing no visible effect other than an annoyed look on Kryptonian's face. Lastly, his gaze turned to Guardian, who approached Six, visibly favoring the leg that had taken a hit and struggling to regain his breath after the gel round to his armor had knocked the wind out of him.
Ancestors preserve me, aliens are such bullshit.
It was time for the ace up his sleeve. Or, in his coat, more accurately. He produced a lever action shotgun from the custom holster in his coat and immediately opened fire, not wanting to give his opponents an extra moment to react. The rounds were pulse slugs, modified to lower the chamber pressure (The normal pulse slugs were still decidedly lethal and thus completely off-limits for the ring). Of course, the Wayne Tech gel coated on the end of them ensured that they didn't need to pack any kinetic punch to do damage. Three rounds struck Miss Martian (Setting her on fire would probably not go over well so Six had to settle for generous amounts of electricity) and two struck Superboy. Their discharge didn't last nearly as long as the pulse grenades, but it was a hell of a lot easier to hit a telekinetic and someone with Super reflexes with a bullet than with a thrown grenade. Especially when they were caught off guard.
Unfortunately for Six, it was his turn to be caught off guard next, as Guardian lunged for him. He dodged, but not without Guardian seizing the lever action from his grip and placing it on the ground.
Nice of him not to throw it, it's an antique. The idle thought struck him, but was quickly buried in the deafening music still blasting into his skull. As he dodged repeated punches from Guardian the wheels in his brain turned. It was obvious to him now why Guardian was here. He was aggressive, far more aggressive than Nightwing, his current tutor and the only person he'd gotten any meaningful experience sparring against in the relatively short time he'd been at the Cave. Nightwing had a more cold and technical approach when on the attack, whereas Guardian just charged in and tried to beat the shit out of him. He still showed incredible skill and agility, but he had more raw power and aggression, which was perfect for what Six suspected Superboy had in mind: force him to either expend resources subduing the two heavy hitters, or Guardian.
Sure, the super-powered ones might be out of the fight for a short period, but he had nothing but a baton to fight Guardian with. By every metric, Six was dead to rights. Guardian was perfectly capable of kicking his ass, even without backup. However, Six had one advantage: no one currently in the ring had been present for the little pre-breakfast training sessions he did with Nightwing, Robin, and Arsenal. Which meant that the only person who knew that 'nothing but a baton' would carry him a whole lot farther than anyone realized was Six.
He leapt away from a powerful strike from Guardian, drawing his baton in the process. Guardian stared him down, Miss Martian and Superboy were in the background, the charges on the pulse slugs had seconds, at best, before they ran out. He could feel his cybernetic system firing on all pistons.
This is a good training exercise. Nothing like three-against-one to really get your fight or flight response kicking in.
He rushed in at Guardian, who was taken slightly off guard by Six's sudden shift out of an evasive posture into an offensive one. He parried a strike from Six's baton with his shield, but it instantly shifted into a strike from a different angle, which he dodged, only to have the baton recover and come at him again…and on it went, Six's attack was relentless. Guardian eventually had his guard broken, and a nasty wack to the shoulder sent him stumbling back. Six should have pressed the attack, but Guardian was spared further strikes by the recovery of Miss Martian and Superboy.
It was nearly instantaneous, as the electricity did no actual damage to their bodies. It was pain that had given them pause, not injury. So, they needed only a second or two to catch their breath, and then they were back in the fight. Six palmed some more pulse grenades, but he did not like his odds as he watched the two very powerful beings approach him with a newfound wariness on their faces.
They're wise to my tricks now. Throwing won't do me any good, Miss Martian is probably tensing in anticipation, waiting to catch any grenades I throw. She doesn't need to read my mind to know that's my only real play, because I'm not going to reach her in the air and Superboy is not going to be so stupid as to let me stick something onto his chest again.
He thought, and thought some more, and the magnificent machines in his brain ran the numbers and produced precisely jack and shit in terms of viable tactics. He tensed, the conclusion was forgone but he fully intended to lose while he was still swinging-
The buzzer sounded, and Nightwing's voice called out. "Time!"
His three opponents immediately switched from battle-ready warriors to young people giving a bemused look to the new guy. Guardian crack a smile.
"Saved by the bell." He said.
Six walked over to pick up his shotgun. "No arguments here."
Superboy walked over to Six, rubbing at his chest where the pulse grenade and pulse slugs had been.
"You had an awful lot of electricity-based weapons on you. I take it you did your homework?"
Six shrugged. "It was easier than getting meteor chunks or learning magic."
Miss Martian landed, rubbing at her temples. "Can you please turn off that music?"
Six was slightly embarrassed and he silenced the fiddles with a thought. "Uh, sorry. I tuned it out."
Miss Martian gave a half smile and shook her head. "I'm going to have that stuck in my head forever now, thanks for that."
"Music?" Guardian asked.
Miss Martian nodded. "He was broadcasting music, I'm guessing using his implants, directly into his brain. It was very loud."
"Not a bad trick, but it wouldn't have kept M'gann down for long." Superboy commented.
Six nodded. "I wasn't counting on it, it was just to buy me time."
"Well, it worked. Now go take a rest." Nightwing said, entering the ring. He looked at Superboy. "Who's next?"
Superboy drew in breath to call for the next round of fighters, and Six returned to the bleachers. The training and sparring went on well into the night, and in its aftermath the members of the Team made their way to bed and rapidly fell asleep, worn out from the experience.
—
Well, this was huge pain in the ass to write for some reason, so forgive the relatively abrupt ending and general weirdness of the pacing here. This is likely going to be the end of this little 'introduction to the team' arc, as it could very well go on forever if I don't cut it off, by virtue of the sheer number of characters in this universe if nothing else.
As always, thank you for reading!
Blasting music directly into your brain to give telepaths a headache? Brilliant! I also approve of seeing Six prepare a large number of less than lethal weapons to adapt his skill at guns and grenades for the hero business.
- Location
- Indonesia
I think fight scene are one of those that could have so many parts that sometimes some minor thing could make it feels off. I think writer usually getting good at day to day/interaction scene or fight/emotional scene, not often at same/best quality on both front.
Can't forget to say I enjoyed this.
Can't forget to say I enjoyed this.
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