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I'm looking for two or three other PCs to be a thread involving alternate universe counterparts of themselves. These are going to be friendly, or at least non-hostile versions; the focus of the thread is going to be Jay confronting the fact that there are no alternate versions of herself. EP has graciously volunteered to GM, so he has final say on things.

What: Master Mage Adrian Eldrich, in a ludicrous display, loses one of his manifold off-screen battles with monstrous, mystical madmen from beyond the veil! Not only is he conquered, but his body is turned into a facile puppet and his soul enslaved! Said conqueror(their identity unknown) promptly rolls into the World of Freedom, seizing the mystic reins unseen and and directing the dimension's very essence into one more suited to their will. They masquerade as the good-hearted magus to the rest of the dimension, but bit by bit, enough pieces fall out of alignment(weird things happening to physics when 'Eldrich' is supposedly fighting otherwordly beings; powers, people, places or memories altering at seeming random for the smallest fractions of seconds), enough clues are found by the wary or specially-attuned, for a smattering of Earth's denizens to realize something is very wrong. And that larger changes are soon to come. The thread starts with the rebels first banding together and pooling their discoveries, in conjunction with a rare public address by 'Eldrich'... Who: 3-5 PCs, PL open, no theme necessary. Alternate takes on said PCs welcomed. How: That's largely up to the players once they've gotten a game plan. Taking the fight to the Dark Lord, gathering support and power by public words and deeds, seeking aid from beyond Earth or the physical world, even pretending to ally themselves with the two-faced sorcerer, the options are all open. Depending on how play goes, it can skew anywhere from being a massive brawl against the forces of world-warping evil, a subtler, skill-focused game or anything in between or outside those boundaries.

Table of Contents Tensile Sojourner Hematite Knightfall Daybreak Mystery Midnight Dynasty IC

Jack Spade of Earth-Noir Jacqueline des Épées of Erde Sri Rik Espadas of Earth-Electrum Tom O'Hawk of Earth-3W Blaise O'Glory and Circuit of Earth-FC2 Jackolope of all Blades Earth A-Animal-1 Anthropomorphic hare who disguises his identity with a pair of false antlers Callie Burn Earth A-Gender-1 Exasperated den mother to her world's Interceptors Sri Rik Espadas Earth A-Improved-2 Spacefaring Star Knight bringing justice - and romance - to frontier worlds Cdr. Erica Espadas Earth G-Lor-5 Captain of the Ypres and the Republic's best hope against the Preservers Springheel Jack Earth G-Victorian-18 Steam-powered second-storey man with boots of brass and a heart of gold Pvt. 'One Eye Jack' Earth H-War-27 Close combat specialist of a ragtag commando unit operating behind enemy lines Old Man Jack Earth I-Future-52 Elderly mentor to the 52s, the gang ruling a dystopian, cyberpunk West End Jacqueline des Épées Erde J-Nazi-6 (Enemy) Sarcastic resistance leader thwarting the Reich in occupied Paris Tom O'Hawk Earth M-Tech-3 Professional steamboat gambler and secret agent of the President with a magic axe Frère Jacques Earth N-Retro-7 Jovial friar providing counsel to John of Aberdeen and his merry outlaws Jack O'Lantern Earth O-Eldritch-31 Friendly if macabre avatar of Hallowe'en, protecting children from true monsters Jack Spade Earth S-Low-39 Hard-bitten private eye kept alive by shocks of electricity and shots of bourbon Paul Perez Jr. Earth U-Isolate-1 Charismatic actor with a leading role in the Interceptors movie franchise Jack Knife Earth V-Malign-1 (Enemy) Psychopathic drug dealer merged with the spirit of murder Perseus Earth Y-Gorgon-13 (Extinct) Herald of the Gorgon, remade as an cosmic energy being of unthinkable power Joyeuse Earth A-Butterfly-7 Parisian vigilante raised by her father and hunting an elusive cat burglar The Orderly Earth A-Gender-1 Pre-med student trying to keep his sister and teammates in one piece Mallory Practice Earth V-Malign-1 (Enemy) Jewel Wasp's unhinged but loyal enforcer and personal assistant

Interceptors A teenager given superpowers in a freak accident is taken under the wing of the organisation of a mysterious man with the calling card of a Tarot card: The Jack of Blades. His team, the Interceptors, operate from a brownstone in New Jersey, working in secret to fight crime, iniquity and rogue superhuman foes! Cast: Initial team Erik Espadas/Jack of all Blades: James Roday - An initially mysterious yet charismatic man in a long coat and bandanna mask, he has the ability to form energy swords. A very secretive man, over the course of the series his family, and the past tragedy of the Interceptors, is revealed to be a big factor in this secrecy. A keen tactician and skilled swordsman, he is proud, confident, brash, and likes to flirt with the ladies. Later in the series, he falls in love with Willow. Chris Kenzie/The Gecko: Joe Dempsie - The audience surrogate, and a washed-up high school drop out with strong regenerative powers, the ability to crawl on walls and a keen sense of smell. He is rescued from near death by Jack of all Blades, and recruited as an Interceptor initially grudgingly (but later shown to be part of Erik's need to protect others). He soon shows a keen detective mind and learns to fight. While he's in his Gecko costume in the first episode, he later tends to wear a green leather jacket and his signature orange goggles. Chris has a sharp wit, and a fondness for goofing off which tends to put him at loggerheads with Jack. Mara Hallomen: Sarah Jones - An emotionally stunted genius with an array of gadgetry and a computer room in the Brownstone. Her computer room. While able to use technology in the form of a visor and gauntlets to fight in the field, she excels in the field of providing information and gadgets for the team's current mission. She is a little wary of Jack and Chris's loud natures, but gets on much better with Mona. Mona Teymourian/Fulcrum: Bahar Soomekh - The Team Mom, a tall and striking woman of Persian heritage. She has unexplained superhuman strength, endurance and running speed, and is able to make powerful leaps (though not true flight). She vaguely resents Jack for his actions driving her old boyfriend out of town, but understands why he did it, and as his old babysitter, maintains a fondness for him nonetheless. Towards Mara and Chris, she acts much more supportively. A genuinely moral and good person, she is the least likely to engage in any form of questionable action. Later additions Ellie Espadas: Silvia Tovar - Erik's little sister, and a powerful biokinetic. While the younger sister who Erik is overprotective towards, she is clearly the more mature and is unafraid to remind Erik of this. Her fledgling relationship with Mara is a recurring plot thread. By the end of the series, she has progressed from recurring character, to regular, to member of the team. Willow: Lesley-Ann Brandt - An ancient being awoken early in the series. With great power to control plant life, and formidable regenerative capabilities, she is an aloof woman not entirely acquainted with modern life and struggling both with it, and her attraction to Erik. Her presence overtakes Chris's in the role of someone to exposit on advanced technology to. She is the Herald of the Gorgon, and plays a pivotal role in the finale. Episodes (Italics denote important parts of myth arc) Season One: Gorgon Season Two: Vigilantes Future Season plot arcs: - The Houses of Suits arrive to take the city for their own. - The demonic invasion, and Jack's infection by hellfire. - Spellbound and Chris keeping their involvement secret. - The rise of the superheroic era.

September 7, 2012 Sharl wasn't sure what to make of the assignment he'd gotten from Ms. Harcourt, Claremont's hardworking science teacher, but he was there anyway for the "special team project" she'd invited him for. As more of his teammates arrived, it soon became clear that most of Young Freedom, and even one or two faces outside of it, had been invited along for the elective. They were in one of Harcourt's science labs, and Citizen found himself studying the homemade equipment with undisguised fascination as more people entered. _Could she really have made one of these out of household items?_ he thought with a little amazement as he drifted around a big kitbashed cylinder of electronic parts in the center of the room. "Come on in, everybody!" called Harcourt as more students entered. "Those of you who were asked to bring bags, and that's everyone who could, make sure you have those before you find a seat. This will be an overnight trip, and you need to be self-sufficient."

April 2012 It's a typical day at Hallomen's Advanced Experts. The boss is working on a consulting project sent her way from Blackstone Prison, where a seized artifact from a long-imprisoned prisoner has begun to malfunction. Dr. Gateway was briefly a terror in the early 1990s; a former archeologist whose alien battlesuit allowed him to banish his enemies into the Zero Zone, Gateway actually soloed against the Freedom League for a while before Daedalus succeeded in deactivating his stolen technology and freeing the policemen, bank tellers, and superheroes he imprisoned there. Gateway's been in jail ever since, the death of one of his early test subjects having given him a life sentence. With his suit deactivated and the man himself in jail, he had slipped out of the public eye. Until now. It's coming up on the second time the Gateway suit will become active in Mara's custody, and while she works on it, her two top security guards are hanging around in the event that the formerly dangerous piece of supertech comes to life in an inopportune moment. You can't be too careful when it comes to get sucked into another dimension. Looking confident in his security guard uniform, Steve stood by the door with Erin, drinking break room coffee from his new mug. "Your young man's blend is very flavorful," he commented to Erin as he watched Mara at work. "You should give him my thanks."

Freedom College, Freedom City, USA Friday, January 13th, 2012 The last class of the day had let out, at least as far as Carson was concerned. And he was glad; the first week back after winter break was always hard. The students never wanted to focus. Luckily, he'd managed to get them involved in a few simple exercises and focus that nervous energy into something other than spitballs and love notes. "Just another day in the office..." "Mister Keefe, sir?" "Hm? Oh, yes, uh...Jessica, wasn't it? What can I help you with?" "Well, I just wanted to give you this book. It's got some short skits I'd like to try doing in class this semester." "Hm. I'll take a look and see what I can work in. Let me see....That's odd. I've never heard of this author before." "You wouldn't have, not here." "What? Why...oh, my head." The contact chemical that coated the paperback took hold, and Carson started to bonelessly collapse. "Jessica" calmly caught him in deceptively small arms, before pulling out an odd-looking metal and plastic disc that she slapped on the middle of the teacher's chest, before gently laying him on the ground and gathering his papers up. The disc started to beep faster and faster, but she still had enough time to extract his keys. "I'll make sure these get put away, Sir. It's the least I can do..." And with a flash of light and a sound like tearing silk, Carson Finbar Keefe was gone from Earth Prime.

Continued from >The Earth Died Screaming Earth-EZO1 was a stark world of grim horror and sere beauty. Redbird's fast flight over the western United States showed them a world of dead cities and empty ruins beneath. Most cities had burned by now in their long untended period; Boise, Denver, St. Louis, and the rest were shells of what they'd once been. Streets were clogged with the rusting shells of cars and debris, and even unburnt buildings had begun to sway and fall. They were, at least, too high up for any lingering smells from beneath, though most of those had faded with the years of quietude. On another day, they might have appreciated the natural beauty beneath: the Misssissippi free of man's pollution, trees growing where cities had once been, a herd of bison stampeding beneath them in Missouri, what distinctly looked like a lion watching them as they skipped through Appalachian peaks in the Carolinas. But there was no time for that now, not with where they were going. Undersea was all quiet darkness as Redbird, with Midnight's skilled hands on her handlebards, took them beneath the waves. The ocean was dead of people; the Atlantean genocide having been one of the first outbreaks of the hero flu, but here too there were fish at play and the sunlight passing through the waves. There was life here, if no human life, and a vast universe beyond them. This world was more than just a tool for saving all reality; Earth-EZO1, for all its horror, was a world worth saving too. As they passed under the water, lit only dimly by the glow of Redbird's lights and the shimmering blue of Corbin's cold fire, Mark looked around at all the faces of his friends, thinking about the people underneath the masks. Erin, Trevor, Corbin, Eve, and their new friend Red Falcon, who with his plasma rifle would be defending Redbird even if they all had to leave it behind. They'd all come so far, over so many years and so much time, and now they were about to face their greatest challenge yet. They were approaching the river now, Edge riding behind Sage in one compartment, Cobalt Templar and Red Falcon on another side, and Midnight grim and determined behind the wheel with Wander behind him. For just a second, Mark closed his eyes and saw his mother's face, then his father's. Goodbye, Mom. Goodbye, Dad. And then they were erupting out of the water and Freedom City was given over to the forces of Hell: grim Terminus towers rising where once the Pyramid Plaza had stood and on the site of where City Hall had been, the downtown of Freedom City transformed into a Terminus hellscape of firepits and belching machinery: and as Redbird roared towards the battered bulk of Freedom Hall, he saw the Omegadrones beneath look up. "Let's do this! For Freedom!"

Continued from >Leaves from the Vine Earth-Z-Omega-1 Edge froze in shock as the toppling tower came down right where he was! Unable to dodge in time, instead he stood his ground and fired back. "NO!" His eyes glowing black, he fired straight upwards as the reality of this dead world warped around him at his will. He would not die because of a falling building! Mark Lucas would not let this, or anything else, stop his friends in their efforts to save all of existence from the dark machinations of Omega! At his command, the falling debris broke around him like a tide breaking around a rock, the so-small clear zone around him the only island of sanity beneath the avalanche of falling steel, concrete, and glass. A falling brick bounced against his back, knocking him to his knees, but Mark did not fall as the collapsing debris fell around him, his powers warping the very air and very rocks to keep his friends from being buried by the avalanche, even if he wasn't able to save all of them from the damage produced by the collapsing Needle. Before he even focused on the aerial battle, he called out over the echoes of the collapse, "Young Freedom! Sound off!"

Continued from >Familiar Faces Earth C-Future-2 With just enough warning to grab what they needed, Young Freedom slipped from one world to another in the early morning light of a clear summer's day. Within moments, they found themselves in a new world: this time in suburban Kingston, right under the WELCOME TO KINGSTON sign installed just a few years ago by the City Council. Pulling his costume all the way on, Mark pushed his thoughts about his father out of his head and looked around. It looked like everyone was dressed and in costume, though no one had had much warning about getting their clothes on and ready to go. For a moment, he thought they'd somehow solved everything and gone back to their world: Kingston in 2035 didn't look that different. Sure, the car in the suburban garage they were next to looked electric and had the sleek, efficient lines of something from a science fiction movie or car company special showroom, and sure the billboard down the street was a shimmering spectacle of light. It took him a few moments to take in the black. Black banners were hanging on every house, each with a date emblazoned in silver: 6/21/2034: NEVER FORGET! Turning around, he gasped at the sight of Freedom City; shining towers rose high in a monument to futurity, but every single one was under repair, with the marks of devastation visible even from this distance to his inexpert eyes. What had happened here, and what were they rebuilding from? Before he could react to the grim monument in suburbia and the recovering city before them, suddenly there was a cascade of light in front of them on the green lawn and five superheroes formed up out of what was obviously a very advanced teleporter's beam. In the lead of the largely female group was a >tall brunette in white and blue, a pair of dice on her costume's chest showing snake eyes. Next to her was a >muscular young man in all black, long ribbons extending from the back of his head like a novel kind of cape, a familiar symbol on his chest. Next to him was a young woman >Corbin almost recognized, her face like the young woman he'd met who claimed to be his daughter, but with a costume subtly different, more like Quo-Dis' than anything else and cast in purple from the ring on her finger. In the rear were two older women; >one with green hair and a purple and black outfit, and behind her a gleaming metal battlesuit with waving metallic tentacles like a robotic octopus. The group eyed each other for a moment before the ring-bearing girl said, her serious look suddenly cracking to pain, "You'd...you'd better be who you look like!" "Stand down, Vril Knight," said the dice lady, giving her ally a serious look before looking at the others, shooting a wide-eyed glance at Erin and Mark before mastering her own facial expression. "I'm Lucky Strike. Welcome to 2035, Young Freedom. We've been briefed on why you're here and we've located your target. Please, remember that you're from the past of an alternate world." It sounded like she was talking to her own team as much as Young Freedom. "You can't...you can't change what you see here. This is Midnight, Vril Knight, Amaryllis, and Fusion. We're here to help you get to Freedom Hall safely." "Call me Psilent," replied 'Midnight', his voice raspy and dry, with just the faint hint of a French accent. "While he's here."

Continued from >The End of the Beginning Earth-M-Lucas-1 Young Freedom left the grim darkness of an Erde morning and found themselves beneath a blue, sunny sky. They were in a clean, well-maintained alley in what was clearly downtown Freedom City: the trashcans all had their lids, none of the windows were broken, and there was no sign of Nazis. Visible to their left was the Pyramid Plaza, the triple towers rising high against the clear morning sky, the American flag flying high overhead. For a moment, anyway, those of them not familiar with other dimensions could think they'd all gone home. That was, at least, until the black Pontiac Firebird Trans Am came roaring down the street opposite, and the first blasting sounds of funky disco came their way from its overpowered speakers. Outside, the streets of Freedom City looked to be pulled from the pages of the 1970s seen through a warped modern lens: men with elaborate mustaches and half-open shirts that showed off their hairy chests walked alongside ladies in brightly-colored wide-hemmed bell-bottoms, over their heads computerized billboards advertising a too-young Farrah Fawcett starring in the latest Michael Bay movie. The streets were certainly more diverse than they'd last seen, with muscular black men with magnificently coiffed hair in the company of ladies with impressive afros: indeed, from the lady speaker on the corner calling for equal rights for all men and women to the hippies playing in the park, it looked as if someone had gone around and collected as many oppressed minority groups as they could and dropped them on the funky streets of Freedom City. Suddenly, a startled exclamation came as a policeman walking by the alley spotted the quintet of dimension-lost heroes. In a hammy Irish stage accent that nonetheless sounded all too real, he exclaimed, "It's...it's...oh mother of Mary, it's Counter Freedom!" He took out his whistle and blew it as hard and loud as he could. "I knew you crazy criminals would be back one day!" he called, whipping out his gigantic belt radio as he backed away from the teens. "You just stay back! The Freedom League will set you whippersnappers right!"

Continued from >Worn-Out Places The black dots faded, leaving behind them an ominous natural darkness. They were all standing on a cracked concrete floor, the distant sound of rumbling machinery and gunfire echoing in their ears. The air was rank and still with the heat of summer, and the sound of scuttling rats was at least as loud as the noise outside. And inside they were: the room around them seemed to be a damp, ruined basement, with only the broken remnants of stone steps leading up to ground level. As the heroes walked closer to the steps, thin rays of moonlight stabbed through the edges of the ruined ceiling. The bits of rubble shifted and moved under their strides, stirring up full regiments of fleeing rats in their wake. It was Trevor who recognized where they were first, thanks both to his piercing gaze and a sudden, nagging familiarity with the room. They were in the basement of the Rothsteins, the elderly Jewish couple who lived in the same sprawling block of mansions as his grandfather, a convival enough bunch whose main virtue as neighbors was being too busy with their poodle-breeding hobby to worry much about their elderly chemist neighbor and his quiet grandson. Standing in the rubble of their home, looking fresh enough to have been destroyed just a few years ago, it wasn't hard to guess what had happened. For his part, Edge led the way: with a gesture from him there were new stone stairs to climb, and he was up pushing open the door to gaze out at the scene outside. And what a scene it was: three night-black helicopters were whizzing by overhead, making a beeline for the shape of a very familiar house, leading the way behind a half-dozen armored vehicles coming out of a darkened city with a broken skyline lit only by searchlights. The Nazis were out in force tonight, and they were heading straight for the Midnight Manor. The helicopters were going to be in range of the Manor in seconds...

February 1, 2011 Earth-Prime This is exactly where Young Freedom belongs. It's been raining for days now, what was once drizzles transforming into thick, heavy drops that come as part of a torrential downpour, turning what should have been a lovely flowering of spring into a cold, sopping wet bog. Exposed grass is wet and the earth beneath it muddy, and the city's levees have been shored up along the Wading River. All that wouldn't be so bad, except that's not just happening here. What was a joke for meteorologists last week has become all too serious today: it's raining everywhere. All through New Jersey, all through New York; across the East Coast and across America. The entire continental United States is under the biggest storm system anyone's ever seen, maybe ever heard of, and the rain is getting worse. The natural assumption, of course, is that culprit is the villainous Dr. Stratos, the wicked weather manipulator. The League is off dealing with that, leaving the city in the hands of its teen heroes. Edge stood by the levee, watching with worry as the river level slowly rose. He was doing all he could to keep the water level down, standing on the dam and draining away the water as it came in, a thousand improbable accidents sending the water cascading downriver and into the Atlantic, but he wasn't powerful enough to stop a storm this big: maybe no one was. Trusting that the rest of Young Freedom was busy, either helping with the sandbags or assisting the engineers reinforcing the seawall in other ways, Mark looked up to see the familiar shape of the Pegasus spaceplane dipping low through the storm, heading for nearby Freedom Hall. _Thank goodness!_ Edge thought. _The League is here!_ That was when a tremendous lightning bolt came ripping out of the storm, heralding a massive tornado that came roaring down after it, and before Edge could do anything, bolt and tornado both struck the plane, shattering it to a thousand pieces in a jagged-edged explosion that tore open a violent hole in the sky. As the engineers and volunteers around him started to panic, Edge threw up barriers in the sky, falling debris vanishing in circles of mist as the Pegasus came tumbling down, shouting to his teammates for help... --- February 1, 2011 Earth-No Designation (aka, 'Earth-Paragons') "Oh my freaking God!" As the League's plane broke into pieces and vanished, leaving behind a shimmering purple void that had to be provenance of paragon powers, Edge shouted in surprise as pieces of the falling plane began tumbling to earth all around him: he pushed his powers to the utmost to deflect them, sending showers of debris falling away from him, away from the hard-working engineers and volunteers below. It had been an awful few days as unprecedented weather disasters swept the nation, as rumors of terrible paragon powers unleashed began to terrify a frightened populace; he'd seen reports of lynchings in Texas and Arkansas, and televangelists speaking grimly of the End Times. It wasn't the end for Mark, but despite his best efforts, people around him were dying, even as the scream of the waterspout in the river filled his ears. It was all over in a few terrible seconds, and though he'd saved many people, he was surrounded by disaster! Whipping out his cellphone to call up the linked phones of his teammates, Mark yelled, "Listen, you guys! I need help in City Center right now!" Claremont's young paragons had been divided up through the city to help deal with the rising water, the better to promote their individual Q-ratings while each of them combatted the threatening disaster that was so baffling to both the Freedom League and the Vanguard alike, indeed, to all the scientists and supers working for the government. "The Pegasus just blew up!"

In our world, when his son and his friends rejected the Utopia he'd built, a grief-stricken Rick Lucas recognized the error of his ways and fled into the multiverse in shame. But in a world perilously close to this one, when his son and his allies attempted to overthrow the worldwide dictatorship he'd constructed in order to put the Lucas family in command of the world, a bitter, vengeful Rick Lucas fled into the multiverse to plot revenge on his wastrel son and his callow gang of hooligans at the Syndicate Academy Two Weeks After the Events of 'A Trip Between Two Worlds' Duncan Summers listened as a rather battered Psyche told her story, the young telepath recovering far better than most students would have after the experience she'd had. Erin's sudden nighttime assault had nearly killed the sleeping Alex, only Psyche's incredible mental speed letting her reach into Erin's mind and shut down her attacker. It had only taken him a few minutes of evaluation to confirm what Nurse Joy and Ms. Harcourt had already told him: this Erin White, with the blood under her fingernails and haggard face, even in psychically-induced sleep maintained by the best psychics at the school, was not the Erin White of their world. And that particular disease seemed to be catching. Luckily, the school was prepared for that. Though dopplegangers of Kid Cthulu, Rift, Midnight II, and Edge had all appeared in bursts of magical energy around campus, the new inter-universal security system that Mrs. Harcourt had installed in previous weeks had worked like a charm. Though the dopplegangers had unfortunately escaped from campus, he was completely confident that Young Freedom, the Alterni-Teens, and the Next-Gen would track down the warped, morally inverted doubles of his students. It's a good thing we're prepared for incursions, thought Summers, bending down to pet the unhappy cat curling his orange tail around the headmaster's cane. If we were oriented towards offense rather than defense, who knows how long they could have kept up the imposture? -- Mark Lucas rarely had particularly elaborate dreams. Indeed, usually he didn't remember anything about them. Tonight, though, his REM visions were exceptionally unsettling. He was confronted by a vision of his father: not the father he knew, but a grim, furious version of Rick Lucas with a goatee and eyepatch, wearing a black and red leather uniform as he confronted his son. His 'father' informed him that he and his friends were being tested, tested to see if good really was better than evil, if courage was a stronger talent than cleverness. He wasn't alone, he realized: Erin, Trevor, Blake, and Warren were all there too, each as paralyzed and mute as he was in the dreamscape! Before he could respond, he was suddenly plummeting into a deep black void... -- Mark woke up in bed, starting awake with a cry, and then nearly fell out of bed entirely when he realized he wasn't alone in his room. Or his bed. "Dreaming about that witch again?" asked Daisy Gibbons. The beautiful blonde prom queen yawned and stretched, giving Mark a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "Don't worry, Pathos and Assault aren't going to harsh your buzz today, not unless those Loonies get their heads handed to them ahead of schedule. Are you getting up?" "Uh...yes?" Mark looked around wildly, staying in control of himself by sheer force of will. Don't panic. Figure out what's going on. Daisy wasn't actually naked, thank God, but she was in a skimpy harem-girl outfit that didn't look like comfortable pajamas. She had scars on her body that looked new, some on her stomach and some on her back, where a large S-brand was clearly visible. A more thoughtful man might have panicked, but Mark was all about rolling with what was going on. "All right," allowed Daisy, her bare shoulders relaxing as she slid out of the king-sized bed and headed for the kitchen. When the hell did I get a kitchenette!?! thought Mark as Daisy went in, the door she opened showing that Mark and Mike's dorm room had been transformed into a suite as big as a luxury hotel's. "Bacon and eggs as usual, and..." She stuck her head back in the room and gave Mark a stare. "When did you shave off your beard?" she asked him. "I'm trying something new," Mark improvised as he sat up, trying to figure out where his pants were. Surely all this black leather couldn't be his. "Do you like it?" he asked her, giving her a half-smile. "I like anything you do," Daisy told him without hesitation, something behind her eyes closing off as she stuck her head back in the kitchen. Something in her eyes even got through to Mark, and he felt a little sick. Oh God, did I actually go to Hell this time? C'mon, none of it was illegal and everyone had fun! When Daisy was gone, Mark started looking for his clothes in a hurry, and his commlink to go with it. Last time he'd gone to Hell, his friends had come to rescue him. If that dream had been a reality...well, he owed them all his life already.

Simultaneously with the moment Young Freedom met Talos... Earth-Prime Detention It all happened shockingly fast. One minute they were all in their cells in this bizarre , soft little freakshow of a world, cooling their heels or raging over their imprisonment, bound by unbreakable snare, nullifying fields, or simply encapsulated in unfamiliar bodies that didn't do exactly what they wanted. A moment later, with a crack of light and noise, the electronic doors on every cell shorted out, and automatically rolled up. Outside the doors, in the corridor that connected them all, stood their fierce, fearless leader of the Young Imperial, a cocky smile on his goateed face, the unconscious body of a young woman face down at his feet, blood leaking from her covered nose and mouth. "GENTLEMEN!" Hex gave a terrible, evil laugh. "It seems that I have...gotten lucky with this one. Bwahahahaha! Come, let us make our escape and return to the land of civilization. Once, that is, we retrieve our other friend. The one who the poor, poor little Lor girl here was keeping sedated."

Earth-XX September 3, 2010 Trailing her usual aura of good feelings and cheerful optimism, Marcie Lucas walked through the halls of Clairemont Academy with a smile on her face and a spring in her step. For once she wasn't in uniform, either her Edge costume or the blue and gold of Clairemont's cheerleading squad; rather in a pink sweater and blue jeans that wouldn't have looked out of place on a girl her age back in the 1950s. Maybe her mother's disappearance a few months earlier had changed her life for the worse, but she wasn't going to let that get her down! Books under her arms, she headed into the nearly-empty science building. "Hey, Aaron!" she said with a cheerful wave as she caught sight of the hunky loner Aaron White, walking into the same corridor of the science wing that she was. Aaron wasn't exactly her type: she preferred guys like that hunky Zach Harris, even if he was a little too angry for her tastes, but she could see why so many of her friends secretly had the hots for the dimension-hopping powerhouse. He certainly filled out his uniform well! She ran after him, her Sketchers squeaking slightly on the tiled floor. "Are you taking the expanded physics class too? Isn't it cool that-" - Earth-Prime September 3, 2010 "...we can get out of the whole first semester of senior physics just by being here for a few experiments! I guess it's more important for us to learn about super-science than boring stuff like physics." Mark grinned at Erin as they headed inside. "Looks like we're here first." Ms. Harcourt was there to greet them both, nodding a polite hello. "Mr. Lucas, Ms. White! Nice to see both of you." She smiled. "I always appreciate volunteer assistants. I'll be especially glad to have someone here who's as resistant to trans-dimensional radiation as you are, Erin. Why don't the two of you get started setting up the equipment," she said, pointing to the large Y-frame set against one wall, "and I'll get the others going when they arrive."