Backstage Pass [IC]

[trollthumper]

Liberty Park

Saturday, January 12th, 3:45 PM

There was food in the bag, but it wasn't for her.

Eliza Oxum sat on the blanket, waiting for Sharl. They'd had a couple of dates over the last few months; the night at the drive-in had been a great first start, and there'd been the usual tours of coffee shops, nightclubs, and the occasional art gallery. Sharl's company was always great, and they'd always had a good time together. But talking to Sharl, there had always been the sense of a disconnect. This wasn't his world, after all - his world was one of ones and zeroes, of inhumanly tall towers and a swollen red sun. The earth was something entirely different to him, something he didn't quite understand.

She looked down into her bag - chips, soda, black bread, peanut butter, cheese, and a few muffins. And in addition to that, chalk, a bag of soot, a box of matches, some frayed wires, and a piece of obsidian she'd bought from the Museum of Natural History. Today would be a good day to show Sharl that this world had its ones and zeroes as well.

[Avenger Assembled]

Arranging the date hadn't been easy for Sharl, given how busy his schedule was with activities he couldn't discuss with Eliza, even if he did really like her. But he liked Eliza and wanted to spend time with her, and the chance to take his mind off other dimensions and electronic liberation. He took the bus over from Miss A's laboratory, having gotten her begrudging consent, and was right on time when it came time to see his girlfriend. "Hey, Eliza," he said, walking over with his hands in his pockets. He knew that Earth's climate was being significantly distorted by primitive fossil fuel byproducts leaking into the atmosphere, but though it made him feel a little guilty, the warm January day was fairly comfortable given Tronik's unique weather patterns. With his projector on and his systems connected to the world, he looked as normal as anyone else. He leaned down and, taking a chance, and kissed her. What the hell, who knew where he'd be a week later?

"Nice to see you again. So, I was asking around, and I heard if a girl is offering to take you somewhere you've never been before, it's really cool." He grinned.

[trollthumper]

"I'll have to keep that one in mind," said Eliza. "Though I don't think that rule applies to landfills. Well... automatically applies to landfills. Some trash heaps are supposed to have interesting spirits about them..."

She shook her head, and reached into the bag. "Anyway... I know I've gone on about the world I live in. Talked about the Courts, the orders, the long chains of fealty among the invisible ones. And you've been real patient listening to me talk about it, and I thank you, Sharl. It's just... interesting to share this stuff with someone who's not family." She pulled the piece of obsidian from her bag; it wasn't exactly going to screw up anyone's day, but it had enough of a point on it that it would serve its purpose. "Never really gotten a chance to show this stuff off, though. I mean, there was that bit with the fame spirit, but if we just limit to the ones who want something..."

She began to carve a small circle into the earth, ringing it with ripples not unlike waves. "What I'm saying is... would you like to see the world behind the world?" She looked up from the carving and right into Sharl's eyes; she looked slightly flushed, almost a little embarrassed. "I mean... no big deal if not. There's supposed to be a good DJ spinning at Fireworks tonight, if that's more your speed."

[Avenger Assembled]

"Sure," said Sharl readily, though part of him was worrying that Eliza was going to try to convert him or something. Learning that she and her family viewed their interaction with extra-dimensional intelligences through a magical paradigm had nearly put him off dating her entirely, but then he'd done some hard thinking about how stupid it was to throw someone over because of how they saw the world. He'd spent his whole life, up until he'd left Tronik, with no idea what the real world was like; what if his friends had cut him off for that, or if Miss A had never given him any freedoms of his own? Besides, she was really pretty, and it wasn't as if her problems weren't real, she just wasn't looking at them right. Besides, those creatures she always talked about sounded interesting, and she certainly was interesting herself. "Do I need to bring a battery?" he joked.

[trollthumper]

Eliza smiled. "I think you should be fine," she said. "I haven't made the trip all that often, but when I did, my cell phone kept working all right while I was over there. Not that I made a lot of calls..."

She reached into her bag for a bottle of water, then cracked open the cap and upturned it into her hand. The water poured out and solidified into a column, suspended in place by will alone. She waved her hand, and the water split off into a fine mist that gathered in the circle. Through it, Sharl could see light dancing off every droplet, casting a rich tableau. Eliza took his hand, and led him through the curtain.

On the other side of the mist, the park appeared pretty much the same, though the people who had been walking through the park seemed to have been replaced with indistinct phantoms, shadows cast on a distant wall. The rest of the park, however, was a lot more lively. The wind blowing through the trees seemed to be carrying whispers... and in the distance, some of those trees were slowly striding across the grass. The wind itself looked much heavier in places - solid bits, almost bird-shaped, flocking together and drifting with purpose. In the distance, the buildings of Downtown Freedom seemed to loom a fair bit taller, with figures like silent gargoyles looming atop.

"Welcome to backstage," she said.

[Avenger Assembled]

Sharl frowned uncertainly for a moment as he walked around, taking in the scenery with a look that wasn't exactly skeptical but was certainly uncomfortable. This was all terra incognito for him, and magic at that, but his eagerness to embrace new things had driven him to take this leap with a girl he really liked. Can't let her seem I'm a little bit scared here...He reached down and took Eliza's hand without really thinking about it. "This is...new," he said a little nervously, squeezing her hand. "What am I looking at here exactly?" he asked her. He eyed the flock of 'birds' overhead, reminded of data loose in the wide datastreams of this world. "And is anything hostile? Because I dealt with that noble lady okay, but I don't think I can take all of them on..." he said, half-jokingly. "And what are those things on the buildings?"

[trollthumper]

Eliza smiled; Sharl was taking the whole experience rather well - and the way he took her hand certainly was nice. "What you're seeing is... well, it depends on your perspective," she said. "To us, we'd see it as a reflection of ours, where things we see and experience everyday take on texture, depth, and awareness - almost human awareness, in a lot of cases. To the inhabitants, our world is the reflection - everything's backwards, and there's no depth perception. It's like..." She reached for a metaphor she'd picked up from research. "To us, our world's the program, and this is the language that helps it render. To them, our world's a photograph of theirs."

She gazed across the landscape. "What you need to know is that the inhabitants here correspond to things in the real world," she said. "Most of them are peaceful, if you don't poke them, but like any habitat, it's got a few predators lurking. Those --" She pointed to the things in the air. "--are sylphs. Air elementals. Probably low in the hierarchy, given their size and grouping." She pointed past the sylphs to the things lurking on the buildings. "And those... I guess 'gargoyles' would be the best way to put it. Spirits of stone, steel, and glass, which means they love the skyscrapers. In fact..."

Eliza smiled. "Maybe we should go out into the city. The urban reflection's an incredible place. Just watch out for the cars; they can get pushy."

[Avenger Assembled]

They headed out towards the city, walking hand in hand in the brave new world Eliza was showing Sharl. He was quiet, almost tentative, but paid attention as she pointed out the sights of the spirit world. "Back where I'm from," he said quietly, in a rare confession of something he hadn't always been subtle about, "we're taught that all this is just..." he waved. "superstitious nonsense. The kinds of things a culture leaves behind when it learns how to fly through space, or the first time it makes contact with an alien civilization. There's nothing like this there, no spirits waiting behind the corner, no creatures from other dimensions. There's just us. And you," he added, with a look at Temperance.

[trollthumper]

Eliza smiled. "I've got to admit, I'm not really familiar with worlds beyond this one," she said, "so we're in the same boat on that one. I'm aware that there's a lot of other places - alternate universes, afterlives, divine realms, and places like your world. But I've mainly dealt with this one, and backstage isn't that far removed from it. Intertwined, more than separate."

They came to the lip of Liberty Park, and the city sprouted up around them. Here, the road flowed like a concrete river; stout men made of asphalt and concrete walked its borders in the likeness of a road crew, prodding the road with street signs like barge poles to keep it moving. Great metal beasts on four limbs that ended in rounded paws strode across the shivering stream, with purrs and roars exactly like engines. More of the indistinct people strode the sidewalk, but some people were fully visible. Sharl quickly realized the visible ones were fairly archetypal - here a policeman, here a businessman, here a paramedic - and had a presence to them that most humans lacked. More spirits, just a lot more anthropomorphic. And in the air was a song that resounded to him, a song of telephone poles and cell phone towers and WiFi ports. The city communicating, and communing, with itself.

[Avenger Assembled]

Sharl tried to remind himself to be polite and not ruin something that obviously had a great deal of meaning for Eliza, for all that his heart was pounding in his chest in a way that belied his electronic nature. "So...can we talk to them?" he asked, a moment before pushing past his fear and greeting it like any other teenage boy: head-on! "Hello, Officer!" he called as he approached the archetypal figure of the policeman, falling back on how he'd seen his friends interact with cops. Without calling them names behind their back, obviously. "Officer, I was looking to try and find Canal Street from here. Can you help me?" he asked ingenously, hoping he wasn't about to find himself in the middle of a brawl with these phantoms from another dimension!

[trollthumper]

The officer turned to Sharl, giving him a quick study before nodding. "Certainly," he said; his manner was warm but not boisterously so, restrained and utterly polite. "Take a left onto Lamont, walk down three blocks to Granada, take a right and head up two blocks. Canal should be right --"

Behind him came the sound of shattering glass. Eliza turned to see a little cherub with bright yellow skin, black pole wings, and red and green eyes reeling in mid-air, shards of red crystal falling from his hands. One of the roaring car-beasts had decided to run the light. Before it could get up enough speed to take off, however, a metal cuff - in the colors of a car boot, no less - appeared around one of its limbs. The car bucked against its bonds while the officer spirit wrestled to exert control.

"Nothing to... worry about, folks," he said with a grunt. "Just a... routine... traffic stop..."

Temperance studied the car as it fought against the grip of the boot. It was panicked, but not just the type of panic one would expect from someone desperately risking arrest. This wasn't a sports car or some other vehicular daredevil; it was a four-door sedan. But something had compelled it to break the laws of traffic. And from down the streets, she could hear a rising murmur amongst the other cars.

"All right," she said. "That's... not really normal."

[Avenger Assembled]

"So the car did...something bad?" asked Sharl, feeling a little lost as he stood there in the warped reflection of Earth-Prime, though doing his best to adapt. I went from one reality to another before I was even a superhero, I should be able to handle this no problem... "Should I try and get in there and see what's going on?" he asked Eliza. "Or...is it something the driver is doing?" he went on, trying to think out what seemed to be the logical consequences of this place. "If no one is making the car break the law, then it must be the human being inside it." He knelt down and peered through the windscreen of the car, remembering the weird anthropomorphic movie he'd seen about sentient automobiles roaming some sort of grim post-apocalyptic landscape he'd seen over Christmas. "Weird. Does the policeman on the other side need our help?"

[trollthumper]

The inside of the car-thing revealed several seats, done up in rich leather - and apparently respirating. There was no driver, just a wheel that twitched and swiveled as the spirit tried to get out of its bonds.

"We don't need to worry about the other side," said Eliza. "Well, okay, maybe we do need to worry about the other side, but not to that degree." Explaining the spirit world was always tricky; she remembered her dad working it into her slowly, ranging from bedtime stories to "spirit-watching" trips through the city to the occasional field trip into the world itself - and even then, it had taken a few years for her to completely get it. "Not everything in the spirit world is an exact match. I said they correspond to things in the real world, but it's more like they correspond to the idea of things in the real world. It's like that painting of a pipe that has 'This is not a pipe' written underneath it. Like, the policeman isn't a policeman, but the idea of a policeman, and the way that people view them."

She approached the car while reaching for the Camelback under her coat. She coaxed some water out of it, about a cup's worth, and swirled it about in her hands. "I come bearing an offering," she said. "Your radiator must be pretty damn hot after all of that..."

The car spirit didn't seem to pay attention; it was still fighting to break free from the cop, who was already radioing for backup. "Damn. Must be really panicked not to accept a free offering." She studied the car. "One of those newer models. The physical version would have a GPS or some sort of onboard computer... which means this one might have the spirit of a computer..." She looked to Sharl. "I think we might be entering some unexplored territory here."

[Avenger Assembled]

Aaah what? Sharl wondered if those seats were about to grow teeth and a tongue and feed for a moment. But there was a crisis and he was a hero; he was also out in public (sort of) with his girlfriend and couldn't wuss out now. He said, "You deal with the spirits out here, I'll deal with whatever's in there. If I can, I'll signal you through the radio, or just kick out whatever's possessing the car. I don't actually know how things will work in here as far as my powers, but there's really only one way to find out." He pulled open his trenchcoat and his chest symbol flared to brilliant blue life- the wifi, the symbol of the electronic networks that bound human civilization together just as much as it did Tronikian, a symbol of civilization, order, and progress. "This is a job for CITIZEN!" He winked at Eliza and jumped inside the car, vanishing into its systems with a little pop. Was that too pretentious? I hope it wasn't too pretentious.

[trollthumper]

The car's insides were... much more vague than Sharl might have imagined. There was the framework of an internal system, but the borders seemed to blur and shift. The territory was familiar enough, though, even if the landscape was slightly strange. There was in fact a "computer" at the heart of the car, its wires and chips more a set of ephemeral organs and nerves. At the center of it all sat a man in a business suit, sunglasses, and driving gloves. He looked like he'd be a cool customer, if he weren't currently trying desperately to tug at the phantasmal nerve endings and work something out of the corpus of the car. He was muttering under his breath, again and again; as Sharl got closer, he could hear what he was saying.

"The city in the city, the city is the city, the city is much smaller and much larger and is hungry..."

[Avenger Assembled]

"Greetings, friend," said Sharl, automatically adopting Citizen's persona. "What seems to be the trouble here?" Aaaaaaah Floating in mid-'air', he divided his attention between the tense man and the situation all around them. Please don't talk in irrational magic flim-flammery! he thought worriedly. Passing that back and forth to Temperance was going to be weird; it was tough enough with Kimber, and Ghost Girl wasn't somebody he was hoping to make out with once the day was over with. "I saw you were having some trouble with your car? Do you need a tow?" 

[trollthumper]

"My car?" The man in the business suit looked over to Sharl, confused. He took a step forward and poked Sharl's chest with one gloved hand. "How did you get inside my head?" He then shook his head. "Is this what happens when you get consumed? You start to feel the other guy moving in? Or am I just so scared that I've gone nuts?" 

 

Sharl could sense that the man was becoming slightly more stable. Slightly. "Well, if I am going nuts, at least I'm feeling okay about it. If you aren't a part of my operations, then my name's SGZCZ43D13S812715." He gave Sharl another study, as if seeing something else. "No... you really are something else. Did you sneak in here to hide? Because you can feel it too, right? The city out there... it's not right. It's not as it should be. There's something in it."

[Avenger Assembled]

"I'm from outside," said Citizen agreeably, not wanting to alarm the gibbering dimensional thing any further. At least it wasn't hostile, just an alien creature confronted with another alien - who could hold that against it? He went on, trying to get something productive out of this strange conversation to take back to Eliza on the outside. "I'm not the same kind of thing you are, but don't worry, I'm a friend. I'm working with superheroes and we're trying to fix whatever's going wrong. So something's in the city," hazarded Sharl. "Do you know what it is? Is it a creature like you or something different?" 

[trollthumper]

"Huh. We don't usually get many from outside in here. Are you the solid outside, or the higher outside? Because if I'm talking to one of Hephaestus's buddies or something, then please tell me if I'm saying something stupid. And you're with superheroes, huh? Don't really get a chance to see many of those. I mean, I see the hero spirits flying through the air, but you're lucky to get a glimpse of what they look like..."

 

The car spirit cleared its throat. "But. Yeah. The... thing." He took a deep breath, then continued. "It's... odd. It's like one of us, but I can't remember anyone seeing it. At least, anyone who can remember talking to it... But we feel something to it. It's like... like when the Doctor arrives, and walks through this domain. This feeling passes over everyone, that everything is in place. But this time... there's just this yawning. This... draw. Like things would be so much better if we were where it is."

[Avenger Assembled]

"All right, well, I'll see what I can do.. You hang tight here, and I'll go find my friend and we'll see if we can deal with the monster." Outside the computer, figuring that this was a crisis bigger than a jammed-up vehicle, Citizen 'popped' into view again and relayed the conversation to Temperance. Sharl had a good memory and was trying his best, but it was pretty obvious he didn't really understand what was going on. "So I guess there's some kind of void...thing, floating around this dimension? Something like Doctor Metropolis? I don't know!" He threw up his hands. "I don't know what we'd see if we went back to Earth-Prime. It's really weird. The guy seemed nice enough if you want to talk to him, he was a little weirder than most things I've met in a computer but not that strange." 

[trollthumper]

Temperance looked out over the city; the car spirit was finally relaxing, and the officer spirit was starting to release the restraint on its tires. "The urban spiritual landscape tends to draw its share of predators," she said. "Spirits of decay, spirits of crime, even the occasional forest elemental who gets really ticked off about expanding suburbs... a void, though? Haven't really heard of something like that. In fact, I'd be quick to say that's definitely not a good thing." She gazed off down the city block, trying to peer past the flow of traffic and the highrises to see what might be in the distance. "Given that the car's trying very hard to not go that way... maybe we should check it out. I mean, it's probably completely reckless and more than a little dangerous..." She smiled. "...which means it's right up our alley." 

[Avenger Assembled]

"I'll follow your lead," said Sharl agreeably, still looking around the warped cityscape. "Do you think we'll be able to see it?" he asked Eliza as he floated off after her. "Or is this one of those things only you can see?" Sharl was confident that she wasn't making up what she saw, since he had ample experience with people with senses far beyond his own. Even if their interpretation about what it was differed, it would be crazy yo think that this wasn't real. "I have some experience with voids in reality. In my experience, that means there's something there," he said with a significant look Eliza's way. "Just something that the viewer can't understand with their eyes, so they look right past it." 

[trollthumper]

"If I'm being honest, I don't know what I'd see, either," said Eliza. "There's a correspondence between the physical and the spiritual, but it's a bit topsy-turvy. Sometimes an impact shows up in the physical before it shows up in the spiritual; sometimes it's the other way around. Building burns down, it might take time for the place to collapse into a wreck; spirit of disease dances around a water main, may take a time for the fever to show up." She started walking down the street. "Best way to find out is to go thataway."

 

It took eight blocks before the signs started to appear; by twelve blocks, they were unmistakable. The spiritual traffic started to peter off, the pedestrians thinning out - or, the closer they got, walking at a speedy pace. Even the gargoyles on the buildings above started to vanish, clustering in smaller and smaller numbers until the townhouses and skyscrapers were bare. Soon, there was nothing on the streets but the bare apparatuses. Stoplights, traffic signs, bus stops, manhole covers, apartment buildings and corner stores - but all the lights were off, and as far as they could tell, there was no one inside. 

 

"This... is the exact opposite of normal." 

[Avenger Assembled]

Sharl hesitated for what felt like forever as they studied the scene, then snapped his fingers as if coming to a conclusion. "It's fake! Don't you see it?" He pointed to the corners of the little square of nothingness they were in, the places where the traffic lights didn't quite line up with each other, where the sidewalk seemed to bend, and all the other places that had made the already sensitive program all the more suspicious. "It's some kind of illusion, or fake city block, or...the nothing isn't a nothing!" he exclaimed. "Something's _behind_ this." 

[trollthumper]

Eliza scanned the streets as Sharl shared his revelation. She likewise realized just how off the whole thing was - while there were areas of desolation in every city that would carry over into their spiritual side, they were never as empty as this. Even a Skid Row or a Fens would have a spirit of poverty, decay, or - if the universe had a wry sense of humor - tumbleweeds hanging about. And then there were the little things...

 

"The street signs," she said. "They don't make any sense." She pointed up towards one of them; indeed, the name on it wasn't so much a word as it was a random collection of symbols, cut and pasted from many different alphabets. "And these streets have no yellow lines. Like they're supposed to be one way, but there are no signs that'd indicate it. It's like someone made a city after reading about them in a really dry book. There's got to be --" 

 

She was interrupted by the sound of every door on the street flying open. Out of the various townhouses and the apartment buildings came people of every shape and stripe - young, old, male, female, every ethnicity and shape. Some were dressed in business clothes, other street clothes, other the uniforms of urban professionals. One of them, dressed in a friendly blue suit and with hair that could have deflected a bullet, stepped forward and let loose a smile unlikely to be found in nature. "Hello!" he said. "We're here to be your city."