Future Flung Light 2
The Vics shot. It was like a constant thunder storm right next to her ear as the smell of gunpowder, the mingled stink of rotten eggs and iron slamming into her like a wall of musk, a slight hint of oil and grease mixing together with it, acidic and foul. Used more to vaguely waving their barrels in the general direction of whatever poor bastard they were shaking down for money and goods than to aiming, at all, bullets filled the air like mosquitos. Some slammed into the stone tile, sending like sharp bits of shrapnel flying everywhere, opening little cuts on the downed thing that had gone toe-to-toe with Superman (and wasn't that a thought, that a man who had never existed here could return?), and managing to hit some of the light, which sparked as they shattered. The air was choked with a new smell, then, a punch and pinch of ozone.
And then one hit her.
And it bounced off. She yelled-- it hurt-- but it hadn't gone into her flesh, only left a bruise like she'd been hit by stone.
"No more standing around, let's move!" Superman-who-was-not, he was too small for her half-remembered, of nowhere memories, grabbed her and in an instant they were off, interrupting her reverie as she realized she couldn't be hurt by them, not in anyway that really mattered. He braced his shoulder and they slammed through the cheap plaster of the mall, breaking through one floor, two floors, three- and then all in an instant they were through, into the night air. She smelled, what did she smell? The smell of salt from the ocean, however-many hundreds of miles away, instantly cleaning out the smell of gunpowder. Ash, as the fire the Victorians left behind finally died out, was smothered by snow she could barely notice. And something...something...
"Ms.," the Not-Superman said again, "fighting him was harder than it should have been. I know you're new to your powers, and they're coming in all kinds of weird, but I'm gonna need you to fly on your own for a second so I can find our ride, alright? All you gotta do is focus on the air, and feeling for the well of solar energy." His hand starts to weaken as the exhausted Superman lets her go, and she can feel herself slipping. She focuses, hard, and she feels something and there's a sort of energy, a light, coursing through her body, making her feel weightless, unencumbered, one with the earth, her world, and all the beasts within. She only distantly realizes that he's let her go until she hears him tapping on something on his wrist.
A second later, a plane appears, no, uncloaks from nowhere, just in front of them. Shaped like a giant bat, and she does mean giant; it's not quite a jumbo jet, but it could probably hold a dozen, easy. Somehow it's hovering, and not like those fancy Russian jets-- there's no obvious mechanism, it just does. A second later a door opens, a sort of cargo bay she supposes. Inside there's a sort of short man in black and red, a small but bright red 'r' on his chest and a scalloped cape. "Well come on, Father says this thing can survive a rocket but I don't really feel testing it." They do, slowly but gingerly, even as down below the Victorians finally manage to point a floodlight at them. Not that it matters, a moment later there's a sound like whirring as they spontaneously disappear. "Jon?"
"I..." He flops down on a cot, turning on some kind of lamp that burns like a little sun. Despite the beating he just took, he seems to be healing quickly. Not five minutes ago his face was a mess of bruises and cuts from the nose out, now he's just scratched up, the sort of thing you shake off in an afternoon. "I found her Damian. Poisoned by radiation, unaware of her heritage, and powerful beyond all belief. She managed to scorch Weapon Z, and I didn't do that until I we'd been here six months." He manages to flip himself up, sitting heavy on the cot, his feet heavy resting on the floor. He manages to haul himself up as though finally remembering something and, stepping to what looks like a supply locker, starts pulling out bandages, applying them gingerly.
"You were looking for me?"
"Tell me, how developed is this world's theory of alternate timelines?"
"I--" She, they hadn't talked about it. But. But, for some reason, she remembers, what does she remember? Are they memories? "They're movie fodder but I could swear, I could swear for some reason I feel like I could give a lecture on them."
"Hm. Alright, then I'll make this straightforward. We-- Damian and I-- we aren't from this timeline. In ours we were examining a fault, a split, as something broke the strands of Hyper-Time, trying to massage the timeline to be more amenable to their interests. It's not unusual, and we weren't there, necessarily, to interfere, when an energy wave blasted our vessel-- this ship. We endured--"
"No thanks to my excellent piloting," Damian says, preening.
"-But were blasted through time and space and several dimensions orthogonal to both. Until we landed here, in this timeline, about a year ago. We've been traveling ever since, trying to keep our head's low, not causing too much trouble at least until my powers were back in full." He flexes and strength that should be capable of shattering steel like glass is lessened. "I was exposed to Kryptonite, a meteor of the stuff, and the radiation shielding failed against it. For a week I could barely move, for a month I was stuck piloting, like I said it was six until I could use my heat vision again." He manages to lift a metal crate with one hand. "Meaning we could finally start looking for our newest lead-- an extremely out of place Kryptonian girl on our bio-sensors."
She looks around at the cavernous pit of a ship, at the eight seats and the black matte metal surroundings. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Paranoia's for the bats," he says finally, "and the best way to build trust is to show it. And...I have had no-one to talk to with any depths except for Damian for the past year." He looks at his partner. "It got very tiring about four months in." His heart beat is-- well most of all it's loud, so absurdly loud, and fast as a horse on speed.
"-Tt. You're welcome for saving your life, Jon." He throws his hands up and stalks to the cockpit, door sliding open and shut, "I'll chart us a course out of here. See if I don't toss you over the Rockies."
"Jon, Jon," she says as their companion's boots clomp on the metal, "that's, why not Clark? Am I losing my mind?" She slides down as memories, images, feelings and scents and sensations flood her mind by proximity to this Superman. She rubs her face with her hands.
"No, no." He sits back down, finally all bandaged, and looks to her. "That's my father. We share the title these days. And now that Damian's gone I suppose we can talk without interruption. You see Damian and I have different plans. He thinks we should let this timeline develop as it will, just try and make our way back home in one of several ways. That we have no right to interfere, we don't even know what the real divergence that strangled the Silver Age of Heroes in its infancy was. Me? I say something different. I say this place is riddled with the kinds of improbabilities, idiocies, lies and atrocities that say somebody already interfered for the worse, and that it's our duty as the closest thing to subject matter experts to undo that, by putting our in waves in to cancel the first if necessary."
"And you need me for that?"
"Either way we need you. I have been damaged, corrupted by exposure to Kryptonite and we don't have the tools to fix it-- my heat vision is supposed to be red, and maybe blue under a white dwarf, not green. It's what's making reclaiming my power so difficult. We have the supplies to create synthetic grafts, bandages, more out of a simple scan-- if you'll consent to it." He looks out a window. "And when I'm back at my peak, I'm gonna beat those animals like a drum, even that big idiot, and then steal our way through one of several man made portals, back to our own timeline." He looks her in the eye, old blue eyes, unwavering. "But if you're up for it, we can do something else. You know about sonic booms?"
"I'm postapocalyptic, not illiterate-- they were what happened when a plane, or a shell, or anything went faster than sound."
"Sorry, but you'd be shocked how bizarrely eclectic knowledge has proven. In any case, a family friend is an expert in temporal dynamics like this, and he's never been overly open about it, but he once said there was something called a time boom-- what happened if you went fast enough to travel through time. Improbabilities, growing on improbabilities, spiraling outwards in fractals, growing on each other, like some demented sculpture. A failed marine ending up an agent to a restored Tzar, for instance. So we follow the stem of that demented weed to the root, and we pull, and we wipe it out, reverting back to a more normal time-stream, one where a would be Duce can't thrust the entire North American continent back into the 1920s." He wryly smiles, though with little humor. "Or maybe the 1720s."
"And why do you need me for this?"
"Because you're going to be faster than me, maybe even stronger than me. I don't know why, and I don't know how, but that's God's honest truth as I can figure. Maybe it's because you've got less carbon blocking the sunlight, maybe all the radiation in the atmosphere, maybe just random chance, but whatever the case you are going to end up able to break the Time Barrier when I can't. I can't promise anything concrete, but that should put a stop to all this, all the suffering, before it even gets a chance to start."
"Including my parents?" Fire, death, a scream, a scream she'll never not hear again--
"Perhaps. Time is a fickle thing. But I would say it is your best chance to get them back, yes."
"And would anyone even remember?"
"You would. As far as our most experienced can tell, as long as there's a causal chain then there is, if not an immunity to paradox and time-shifts, a sort of molding together." He starts waving in the air, sort of sketching out a diagram with his motions. "In short, since you who interfered with the timeline exited the stream and then reentered earlier, your sets of memories merge. It might take getting used to but, given time, you'll get them back."
"Then I'm in." Her hands unclench for the first time in hours as she finally lets herself sort of sage, deflated and tired, with that nasty new cut on her shoulder slowly healing. "I was going to say yes either way, but...I don't really have a choice in the matter now, now do I?"
"No. No I suppose not." He lays back down finally, still in his suit. "Now get some sleep. We can get your suit in the morning."
