ic Back In The Day

[Electra]

"He may be the only one on the island," Paige allowed quietly, automatically stepping back to give Richard the best camera angle on the saurian sentient. "The field team's been all over the place and they didn't see any settlement, and that canoe's built for one. But I can tell he's not a loner, and I don't think he's particularly far from home. I would guess there's a settlement on the mainland and they come here to fish."

 

She lifted one shoulder in a tiny shrug. "Either way, they have ten days left to live. The impact is going to vaporize everything within a thousand miles of here. We have the opportunity to gather some interesting data to take back home with us, but that risks disrupting their last days. And it's really damn depressing." Paige frowned. "This is why we never go back to visit doomed civilizations. Way too easy to get attached." 

[Thunder King]

Crimson Tiger had to laugh. It wasn't a mocking one, just amused. His energy was kind of infectious. "I dunno. Didn't have a direction in mind. Forward until we see something interesting? I mean, No real trails or anything. Just whatever we happen to be able to walk over. Sound like a plan?"

 

She was amused at him. He was definitely a more interesting person when he wasn't trying to flirt all the time. She tilted her head in a pretty random direction. . "Picked at random. This way."

 

"You know, I think we might want to see what they are about." she said, picking up the telepathic message. "I mean, it could be a fairly big deal."

Edited April 29, 2014 by Thunder King

[KnightDisciple]

Thoughtspeed had been zipping along the direction they'd chosen, stopping every few seconds to eyeball something or another. With the cameras back at the camp, he'd opted to extend his helmet; the design didn't completely eliminate the muggy feeling in the air, but it helped just a bit, alongside the airflow from running around at high speeds.
 
And then his mother told him to go back to the campsite.
 
Now, Paige Psion-Cline was the sort of mother who brooked no funny business, and in a situation like this, out in the field, on a shoot, normally Will would just follow orders.
 
But today was a bit of a perfect storm. Will was on the double-high of being near a pretty older girl he wanted to look cool in front of, and being 65 million years in the past in the time of dinosaurs. Add to that the fact that all the other heroes would be at the beach anyways, and that his mom had sent them all the coordinates, meant that he didn't think it was too big of a deal to at least check it out.
 
"Let's swing by the beach on our way back to camp. If they ask, just say it was on our way."
 
His helmet had retracted when he spoke, and he gave a grin that was 100% his father.
 
"I'm not great at being super-duper sneaky, but they won't see me, and they're pretty distracted. I can go ahead a bit and send you mental signals to let you know it's clear to move forward."
 
As he spoke, Will faded from view. Unless Mali objected, he'd mind-speak to her as he moved off toward the beach.
 
--I can't run too fast or they'll hear me. But it should just take a minute to get there...--

[Avenger Assembled]

On the beach, the dinosaur hunter went about his work with glee, practically dancing from clawed foot to clawed foot as he speared a half-dozen scuttling blue crabs, and then (with a lucky toss) one of those sneaking microraptors that had come too close to the melee. When he was done, he gathered up the crabs and loaded them into a woven net bag he'd kept inside the canoe. When that work was done, he took the speared microraptor and knelt before a big flat rock nearby. He then began efficiently butchering it with his own front claws, spreading the meat out as he went. As he went about his work, he began tossing his long, scaled head back and forth in a high, rhythmic hiss and snort like a crocodile's breathing - that after a moment became apparent for what it was. 

 

-Christ almighty, he's singing-. 

 

The work didn't take long, after several minutes, the raptor licked his clawed fingers and tossed the viscera he'd separated out onto the beach, where the surviving crabs immediately made a beeline for the tasty meat. With that done, he headed back towards the canoe, long tail switching behind him, and began to clamber inside. 

 

"I can go after him," said Richard quietly. "I'll wait till he's out of sight, then take off the direction he headed. If I do a recon, we can see what else is out there." 

[Thunder King]

Mali was too curious as to what his mom wanted everyone for to just go on walking. Could be a bad thing, could be a big deal. Better to go back and at least see what was happening before resuming her exploring. Will was, well, Will was an excited guy. She figured if it weren't a big deal she could just resume her exploration later.

Edited April 29, 2014 by Thunder King

[Fox]

"Knowing more would definitely be good," Gaian Knight agreed, watching the raptor's practiced hunting habits with a certain level of fascination. He had to wonder what it - beings like it - would have become if not wiped out. What kind of society did they have?

"I'm going to tell you now that I'm not keen on the 'let them die' option. If we'd known ahead of time we could have stayed away, but we're here now and theoretically in a position to do something about it. Just letting a bunch of thinking, feeling creatures get wiped out - by no fault of their own - doesn't sit right, even if that's how things would play out normally."

[KnightDisciple]

William had arrived around the time the dino-man had finished spearing the crabs, and in enough time to catch the whole spectacle of spearing and butchering the microraptor. At first, he was fascinated, and maybe a bit creeped out.

 

Around the time the being started singing, his still-invisible self stood up straight and sent another message back to Mali.

 

--He, she, it...they're doomed. I mean, it's like a week until this place gets flattened. Disintegrated. There's no way that dino-person or his tribe would make it out of the blast radius. But...argh.--

 

He was suddenly visible. Within moments, he was next to his parents on the small cliff overlooking the beach. Their "hiding spot" hadn't been much further away (they had likely remained unnoticed due to the adults fixating on the sapient dino person).

 

"We're gonna do something for that guy, right?"

 

Ah, childhood innocence.

[Electra]

Paige jumped when Will appeared next to her, a rare occurrence for a psychic mother, but she'd been very distracted. "What, you mean those of us who are not grounded?" she replied, but without any real heat. "I'm afraid it's more complicated than that," she went on, turning her attention back to the busy saurian. "There is nothing we can do to save his world. There is nowhere in this world that we can move him and his people to that isn't going to be extremely on fire in just a few days. The history is already written." 

 

As the dinosaur began packing up the spoils of his hunt, Paige caught his happiness and eagerness for home and had to turn away. She looked at the men around her instead. "Even if we found a way to pick them all up and take them to the future, would that be doing them any favors? It's not their world. Where would they go, what would they do? How would we ever explain any of it to them? What if they couldn't survive the pollution? We could be trading a quick and painless death for drawn-out agony and fear." 

[Avenger Assembled]

"Hey, I'm not one for philosophy," said Richard, putting up his hands and (after a bare second) putting up his camera as well. With the film crew busy filming the satellite launcher on the other side of the island, there was no use catching an argument between heroes on film - even over something like this. "I just know that screwing around in the past is a screwy business. Even if the mother of all rocks is going to blast this place to kingdom come." He stepped away from the group. "Be right back. You're with me, boy," he said, jerking his thumb at Will. "We'll be back before your girlfriend knows we're gone." And with that, the world slowed down to a forest of statues in the long-gone jungle, and he was off! He kept it slow, the better to let Will keep up, tracking slow, broad circles over the deep green-blue sea that would one day become the Gulf of Mexico. He kept his own council as he ran, the world around them a frozen glimpse of a place that would be gone as if it had never been. _Thirteen days..._

 

Fast-Forward and Thoughtspeed found the town readily enough, easily outpacing the dinosaur fisherman. Twenty miles or so away, it was on the far side of another island, one with particularly thick forests. Mindful of how tricky these situations could turn, Richard kept them both away from the town proper - they did their recon from a nearby islet, using their pocket binoculars. It was a strange place to human eyes - a rookery of dinosaurs built in a beehive shape, rising two or three stories above the treeline, with smaller houses in the same pattern scattered throughout the island. The smaller buildings, some of them right over the waterline on stilts, looked to be crafted mostly of reeds and grass (at least on the outside) - while the big 'nest' was crafted from packed earth and chunks of the limestone so common around here even before the asteroid impact that was due to change everything.

 

"Looks like maybe two thousand. There are a hell of a lot of them in that big nest thing, and just little groups out in the little houses. I don't know what they're eating, except more fish. Thoughtspeed, what do you think?" 

[KnightDisciple]

Will had shrunk back a bit at his mother's proclamation.

 

"But you even sent us the coor-"

 

And there was the Follow Up Glare, at which point the boy wisely shut his pie-hole and stood there. And then his father wanted him to follow him on a scouting trip. He was overjoyed at not only getting to run but getting to escape his mother's baleful glances. 

 

As they started running, he spoke up.

 

"She's not actually my girlfriend, Dad. Just a friend right now. And she graduates in, like, a month."

 

He fell silent for the rest of the run, sliding up next to Fast-Forward and looking through binoculars as well. He huffed out a sigh.

 

"I think it sucks enough that all the regular dinosaurs have to die, and it sucks even more to see an actual civilization sitting here about to get turned into subatomic ash in a week. I think this trip suddenly got a lot less fun."

[Thunder King]

Mali saw what they saw, and lowered her eyes. She didn't speak, at least not for a few moments. Truth be told, she didn't know what to do. Could they save the dinosaur people? They could, theoretically. Possibly, maybe? They'd traveled through time. But what if they couldn't handle the modern era? What if they screwed the timeline up? Then there was the whole cycle of reincarnation, the natural order. The way the world worked in her belief. It was evil to end a life, but should she try to preserve what nature and fate condemned?

 

"I...I don't know what to do." She said quietly. "But I'll help do whatever you guys decide to the best of my ability. However we decide to do it." She didn't even know if anyone heard her.

[Avenger Assembled]

If Thoughtspeed had been an adult hero with his powers, Richard might have sent him into the city to do some high-speed recon - but he wasn't about to send his son into some alien dinosaur city without some serious adult backup. This might as well be an alien planet, he thought. Giant bugs, pine tree jungle, must be 110...He pulled at his sweaty shirt collar. And a nice people who we're never going to get to know. "Let's get the hell out of here." They went back the same way they came, after a short detour to circle the island and see what they could see. Even on the return trip, cameras still running, they were still far ahead of their friend the Fisherman. Fast-Forward circled the latter as they went back, almost compulsively filming in what would have looked like nothing more than a freak wave to the dinosaur as he intently rowed his way home. 

 

Back on Isla del Supercrime, he rejoined the other heroes - hardly doing more than nodding to the young lady who was evidently just his son's friend. "I don't know anything about primitive cities," he admitted, "especially not weirdo dinosaur burgs. It looked like most of them lived in that nest thing," he repeated, showing the digital pictures he'd taken. "so I don't know for sure how many there are. Or if there are other cities, on other islands. Goddamn time travel," he added, briefly feeling his age. "All we were supposed to worry about here is getting eaten by a T-Rex!" He sighed. "I think we should try and film what we can. We went to a hell of a lot of trouble for this place, and there's no point in letting it all to go to waste." He looked back at the island they'd left behind. "Those dinos back there too. That's not gonna make it on the show, but we can at least make sure somebody remembers them."

[Fox]

"That's...a few more than I was hoping were around," Gaian Knight admitted, grimacing down at the shots Thoughtspeed had gotten. A whole nest....Fleur would kill me, even if it could be done. "Nothing's ever simple, is it? As depressing as this whole thing is, I'd love to know more about them. Heck, Tiamat could probably talk to one, if we could manage it without risk to the crew you brought here. ...heh, and if we could convince her to not just declare herself Dragon Queen of the Lizard People."

"Joking," he added, glancing up. "...probably."

[Electra]

"We're going to lose the light soon anyway," Paige pointed out, looking around at the other members of the group. "There's not much we're going to be able to do at night, certainly not safely. Let's get back to camp and talk to the crew about all of this, have some dinner and rest on it." She turned and began to walk back towards camp, her own hand-held camcorder jouncing lightly from its shoulder strap. The world around her was still quiet, but now that she knew they were there, the dinosaur village was a distant smear of sound and light on the edges of her mental map.

 

Two thousand living, thinking beings, with no idea that their lives would not only be ended but wiped out of history in a matter of days. Two thousand beings who had been dead for millions of years, whose death had paved the way for the rise of mammals and eventually humans, then metahumans. It would be the height of hubris to attempt to change anything that was going to happen. There were so many ways something could go wrong on either end of history. Strange how hard it was to remind herself of that right now, though. This was why she never visited the sad parts of history in the first place! Paige massaged her forehead with her fingertips and resolved to do an extra half-hour of meditiation before bed. She was going to need it. 

[Thunder King]

Mali honestly had no idea what to do. This was not what she imagined happening. She knew that the meteor landed and destroyed the dinosaurs. She knew that this place was going to virtually vanish from the Earth in only a short time. It was easier to swallow that fact when there weren't sentient beings in the area.

 

Still, she had no ability to save them, herself. Even if she could somehow communicate with them, could they leave the blast radius? Probably not. Could they survive the coming climate change? Also unlikely. Even if they escaped the blast radius, they would be trading an instantaneous death with a prolonged annihilation. Choking and starving, suffering for days, weeks, months or even years. It made her shudder to think.

 

All in all, if it was decided that they should be saved, it wouldn't be her that could do it.  It was the will of fate.

 

Crimson Tiger's mind was full of thoughts and ruminations on the fate of these beings.

[KnightDisciple]

Will was unusually silent, both on the run back to the others, and in the ensuing conversation. He gave an amused snort at the "Queen of the Dragon People" joke from Gaian Knight, but otherwise he was introspective and (for him) slow to react. The entire situation appeared to have shaken him.

 

On the one hand, his parents were smart people who know both their own limitations, and the limitations of the broader methods available to the heroes.

On the other...they seemed almost...casual about the idea.

 

His mother mentioned the evening, and possibly sleep. How could he sleep easily tonight, knowing that there were untold thousands, or more, sapient beings who had less than a month before they died utterly?

 

How could he, a self-proclaimed super-hero, sleep well knowing that he wasn't supposed to even try to do anything?

 

What kind of a trip had this turned out to be?

[Avenger Assembled]

Fast-Forward put his game face on and did some footage with the launch team, talking with the excited graduate students from CalTech about how their portable rocket launcher (a big, boxy truck-sized rectangle with a small missile mounted to the top) would let them take the first pictures of the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs. It wasn't easy to focus on this when his mind kept going back to those dinosaur villagers, but they all had a job to do. If there was anything life as a villain, and then a celebrity, had taught him, was that the show had to go on. He stuck close to Paige throughout the rest of the day, knowing his wife's tension even without their psychic link, and trying to take some of the weight off her shapely shoulders. 

 

When the light had changed, they all gathered around a fish cookout (the footage from that day's fishing was going to air alongside a Deadliest Catch special in the fall, he knew) - the perfect opportunity to break the news to the crew. The camera crew and Supercrime! staff were sobered by the news of the nearby dinosaur village for a while, at least at first, but they were professionals too - trusting the super-types to handle this, the conversation soon turned to the best ways to get footage of the nest and the nearby dinosaur huts, with the general consensus that either an invisible super-scout, or one of their new camera drones, was the best way to get the job done. 

 

"Get some sleep, Will," Richard suggested to his son as the light faded, the alien sky overhead impossibly vast and filled with stars, the few electric lights nearby the only sign of civilization..at least on their island. "We gotta big day tomorrow." 

[Fox]

"Of course I could talk to them," Tiamat conceded, her normally-impressive voice quieted to a low rumble as the camp settled down for the night. She had, by no coincidence, settled her considerable scaled bulk down directly between the camp and the forest. If nothing else, the presence of such a large predator would hopefully deter any but the bravest of would-be forest lurkers and scavengers. "It's the gift of tongues, Knight; 'all languages' means all languages. I confess I don't know what I could say, though."

Gaian Knight sighed, reclining in an earth-made chair and looking up at the sky. "That's...yeah. Just knowing more about them would be something, I guess, but the whole thing just...it isn't right. They never had a shot - they're thinking creatures cut down too early. I feel like we have to do something."

"People die. Peoples die. It's the way of things, Knight. Not that it ever stops you," she added, snorting. The dragon turned a crimson eye upward, watching the stars, and chuckled. "Any of you. You're a stubborn people. You'll think of something, or you'll fail, and either way we'll be home and all we'll have is memories. The world continues to turn, Knight, with or without raptors, men, or dragons."

[Electra]

Paige woke at dawn to the buzz of her alarm, giving Richard a nudge to get him out of his sleeping back before joining the crew assembling for coffee and breakfast over the campfire. It was going to be a great day for filming; the gray predawn sky was clear enough that the meteor approaching Earth shone in the sky like a small moon. The sight was more viscerally unsettling than it would've been this time yesterday, Paige decided, but she still didn't have any answers. Instead, she started talking with the camera guys about planting a few stationary surveillance cameras around the village to collect some footage. By the time the other Clines and the expert guests began to emerge for the day, she'd put together a crude camoflage net made of leaves and vines for the cameras. "Didn't expect to need any hidden cameras for this gig," she admitted wryly. 

[KnightDisciple]

William Cline had been told to get plenty of sleep. He'd gone to bed early in his tent.

 

He had only partially succeeded. He'd slept, but it was fitful. He tossed and turned for half the night.

 

His father had said they had a "big day", and the team had been talking about invisible scouts. He knew that meant he was quite possibly going to be called upon to move among the dinosaur village with a camera, an invisible witness among these primitive people. 

 

He was going to be asked to watch them, and do absolutely nothing to change anything. Not that he could change anything.

 

Not exactly the sort of thing to make it easy for a young, idealistic superhero-in-training to sleep peacefully. 

[Fox]

Gaian Knight didn't look like he'd gotten a lot of sleep, but he'd recovered at least a bit of his good mood - how much of it was genuine and how much was for the sake of everyone else remained to be seen. He made himself as useful as he could, giving the crew a hand with anything and doing his best to discourage curiosity into the whereabouts of his scaled companion.

"She got hungry," he'd dryly note when someone asked. A loud crash and the ensuing final cry of one of the area's larger herbivores prompted an addendum: "I don't recommend going out there 'til she's done, though. It'll have been quick, clean, and not a meal you want to watch if you're planning on keeping yours down."

[Avenger Assembled]

After another fish breakfast, Richard and Will suited up and zipped off the dinosaur island - Richard reluctantly hanging back to let his stealthier son plant the hidden cameras in the dinosaur city. And city it was; the communal nest turning out to hold hundreds upon hundreds of young dinosaurs engaged in a variety of activities. Some were sharpening sticks en masse as an older, feathered dinosaur paced among them, calling out syllables in a hissing voice and occasionally smacking one with his tail. Across the room, a big ditch in the middle of the room turned out to be the 'cafeteria' - other of the fish-raptors (as they had been dubbed) were eating what looked like a communal store of fish, crabs, and the occasional wild plant, with a few hardy souls tossing in salt crystals and what might have been small rocks to season the 'pot'. The smaller huts scattered throughout the island were obviously families - single-pairings (with the occasional exception) with young dinosaurs or eggs. Their friend the fisherman was one of these, recognizable by his distinctive orange headscales and feathers, in a small hut with another dinosaur near the beach nearest Isla del Supercrime. There were statues and hissing barks that might have been singing, children chasing each other down footpaths or around the beaches. It was a bit like walking through a Polynesian village - if the villagers were all omnivorous raptors. 

 

"They're ravens!" said Cliff, one of the scientists on the launch team, as the group on the island gathered around the live feed from the team studying the dinosaurs. "They pair off to mate and have babies, then the kids go live in flocks. Damn!" As grim as the fate facing these dinosaurs was, the scientists on the crew were studying them with fascination, frantically taking notes and arguing amongst each other over what they were seeing. They paused to let Paige do some footage around the launcher itself, talking about the upcoming deployment, while Richard and Will left their cameras behind to zip off to the mainland to do their "speed test" alongside the dinosaurs they had come to study. By mid-morning, they'd been gone for about an hour, long enough for the boys to be at the mainland of North America by now, even as truncated as it was by the high ocean waters. It was hot and steamy and the bugs were out in full force -

 

And then suddenly, directly over the island, a greenish-brown icosahedron the size of a large house suddenly appeared out of nowhere from the thick Cretaceous air, arriving with such subtlety that it wasn't until birds began frantically screaming that most of the people on the island looked up to see the unidentified flying object hovering directly over their heads! 

[Blue Rose]

Sam, for her part, ended up out of the loop for most of the day. On getting to the island, she found one of the little raptors away from the flock, and with a little brain magic to calm her down, she had a new playmate. She got the psychic call to gather when it came in, but at the filming crew's insistence, they kept rolling. 'Girl playing with adorable dinosaur' is easy to cut in for filler, and they may be able to fit in a minute on trying (and failing) to teach the little lizard how to play fetch, and then she turns in early before word comes back about the new find.

The little dinosaur's name is Lucy.

At breakfast, though, it's all the buzz, a whole tribe of walking, talking (sort of, presumably) lizard people.

She goes to Paige, half-eaten granola bar still in hand. "Hey. Morning. So..."

Y'know, there really aren't many graceful ways to start this conversation. "Ihearyoufoundabunchofdinosaurpeopleyesterdaysowhat'stheplan?"

[Electra]

Paige blinked at the torrent of words from the young superheroine, but she hadn't spent most of her life around speedsters for nothing. "We're gathering more information right now," she told Sam honestly, her hands still busy with the camera rig she was assembling in her lap. "Richard and Thoughtspeed have gone to the mainland with cameras to learn more about the village and its inhabitants. We want to learn more about their level of sentience and technology, and more about how they live. We're still discussing whether there's any feasible way to help them, but the outlook isn't great right now," she admitted. "At the very least, we can ensure they aren't lost to history anymore. Come over to the tent with me, you can watch the live feed."

 

They arrived at the tent in time to see some of the footage from the village, all of which was replayed and immediately put into the editing computer for better analysis. Paige was too caught up in work to notice what everyone else was doing for most of the morning, right up until the point where the giant shape began to block out the sky. All of a sudden, she was very interested in knowing where the nearby heroes were. ~Hey everyone,~ she sent telepathically to the local group, ~we've got company. Or possibly trouble. Or both!~ She projected the image of the icosahedron, even as instinct had her raising her camera and recording it. 

[Avenger Assembled]

After a moment's pause, the twenty-sided craft overhead seemed to settle into place directly over the camp. There was a slow shimmer of light in the air in the middle of the time travelers' camp, one that made the air crackle and pop with static electricity and the electronics in the camp fizzle and wash out in static. They were all familiar with teleportation, Kit more than most, but this was no superpower or magic spell. It was clearly a slow, deliberate technological process, the very stuff of the air itself being reformed into something else entirely. Animals near the camp hissed and fled in terror, a brief pandemonium in the jungle as even insects zipped away as fast as they could. The shimmering electrical glow, orange and gold against the blues and greens and browns of the jungle, gradually resolved itself into three humanoid figures - either machines or space-suited creatures, given their mechanical forms and flat, reflective, nearly featureless faces over huge round heads. As the cameras came back to life, the lead figure, who towered at nearly nine feet tall above its two companions, stepped forward, head rotating a spine-cracking 270 degrees with a click-click-click as it took in the group, first backwards and then forwards.