ic Can't Change Time

[Avenger Assembled]

Kyogen flicked her wrist and a blade sprung into her hand - expressionless behind her porcelain mask, she drove the blade into the base of Cho's throat without breaking stride. "Quiet, child," she said bluntly, "adults are talking." The blade sunk into Cho's flesh, poison dripping from the wound, but soon became stuck in Cho's invulnerable skin, ultimately doing no more than a papercut. "Ah, damn," she said, sounding as annoyed as if she'd stubbed her toe, "I liked that knife." 

 

"Heyheyhey!" Clock Queen was exclaiming, her weapon in her hand like lightning, "Settlethehelldownyou-" 

 

Suddenly, the near-fight between the villains was interrupted by the arrival of the heroes - or as close as South Africa had these days, anyway. There were four of them; an armored man in orange, white, and blue, a woman in a black and white insectile costume, a dark-suited figure snapping open a rifle, and a woman in jeweled robes just in the middle of saying "-port!" 

 

"All right, you lot!" said the armored figure, exclamations of "Voortrekker!" coming from the already-fleeing crowd, the policeman Thoughtspeed had rescued leading the escape. "We've had enough of you, you bloody Yank criminals! It's time to put an end to your reign of terror. Today the Jet Patrol unites and fights for a free, WHITE South Africa!" And with that, the battle was on. 

[Avenger Assembled]

Cursing at super-speed, so fast her words sounded like a shriek, Clock Queen snapped open her blades - a long, sharp sword that glittered with clocks along the center line of the blade and a smaller main gauche in her off-hand. Together, the two weapons looked like the minute and hour hands of a particularly gaudy clock. "Notreadyforthis!" Moving like lightning, she zipped around the park impossibly fast, her body a barely-visible blur before she came up behind the grinning Huntsman and drove her balled fist into the back of his head with a crack audible yards away, then slashed the blade along his back, drawing blood and cutting deep. "Noguns!Don'tyouknowanythingaboutsuperfights!" 

 

Meanwhile, the Jet Patrol's own speedster went into action - sensibly avoiding the fastest thing alive, Rain Spider zipped forward (her great speed looking almost pokey next to the impossibly fast Anna Cline) and hurled a punch at Errant that knocked him backwards, smashing the unaware teen directly into a tree behind him. "Stay down, luv," she said with a strong British accent, "this ain't no bloody place for kids, Coloured or otherwise!" Kyogen, the deadliest assassin in the world, had meantime disappeared entirely from everyone's view. 

[KnightDisciple]

Thoughtspeed had to actually process that the Jet Patrol had made such a cartoonishly racist statement in their entrance. Still, he supposed it was the 80s, and you took what you could get. 

 

At least Cho hadn't been hur-

And then Errant got smacked so hard he hit a tree and went unconscious. He grit his teeth; part of him wanted to chase down Rain Spider, but there were still civilians in the line of fire, and Clock Queen seemed the only one who actually cared about that. So he opted to try and make things less crowded with civilians. Timeline be damned. But even as his feet started to move, his mind fired off a tight-beam message to his impulsive comrade.

 

--Cho! Get Errant and get to a safer spot! We're outgunned and outnumbered if we're gonna try to take them ALL on! He's out cold and a sitting duck! I'm going to try and get innocent people out of the fight area!--

 

Indeed, he was a black-and-green blur as he raced all over the immediate area of the park. People who had been tripping over their own feet found themselves moving more steadily (at least for a couple of steps). Those on the ground found themselves standing. Words of hasty encouragement urged them to keep moving, keep running, get out of the area. Officers of the peace in the area were given more forceful words that they needed to get people out. 

 

Thoughtspeed was not his father. He was not his grandmother. But he was fast. He just hoped that today, he was fast enough.

[TheAbsurdist]

"Unf!"  The blow was staggering with the speed behind it, and he couldn't bring up his telekinetic interference in time.  She hit him hard, and sent him skidding with the carried momentum into the tree, hitting his head and making the world explode in stars and red.  Slumping to the ground, his hands going to his head as nothing really made sense at the moment.  He was conscious, just not all together there.

[Avenger Assembled]

Voortrekker opened fire on Clock Queen from the air, machine gun bullets harmlessly chewing up the scenery around the speedster, hardly posing a threat to the nearly superluminal time controller. But he did post a threat to everyone around him, as richochets flew wildly in the air, one even hitting the staggering Huntsman in the leg. "Jesuswatchyourself!" exploded Anna Cline as she zipped around the field faster then most human eyes could follow, easily evading the bullets trying to bring her down. "Youpeoplearecrazy!" Sure enough, the mystic in the company of the Jet Patrol proved no better - firing a blast of searing red energy from a ring on her finger that missed all the heroes but, with a rush of heat and sudden smell of acrid smoke, set much of the park ablaze all around them. 

 

"Burn, heretics!" she cried in a voice that did not sound entirely healthy. "South Africa will be cleansed of your taint!" 

[RobRX]

With Huntsman taking hits, Cho knew who to take out first. Clenching her fists, orange-red energy could be seen building under the dark Claremont suit as well as her hands. Then, it spreaded and kept glowing up her arms. Joining the hands together, Cho projected a beam of entropic energy...which unfortunately did not hit anywhere near her target but rather just destroyed the environment half vaporizing half-melting everything the beam caught.

 

"Aw, damn it!" she shouted, having missed yet again. Seems she still had to learn how to aim that.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Really-" 

PUNCH 

 

"Getting tired of-" 

 

CRACK 

 

"You stupid thugs!" 

 

Clock Queen took Huntsman down fast and hard, spinning around to slice his holdout pistol in half even as he tried to draw it from his ankle, then backhanding him hard enough to knock out teeth and send him collapsing to the ground in a boneless heap. She really was, just as she'd always assured Will, the fastest thing he'd ever seen in her prime. 

Errant, down and nearly out, wasn't doing so well - Rain Spider, the speedster on the Jet Patrol, was closing in on him, her intent impossible to read behind her helmeted faceplate. "Time to pay the piper, colored boy," she said seriously, as she stepped towards him. She punched at his head, hard, her blow cracking the tree behind his head as she missed by inches. "Hope you're-AGH!" Suddenly she was gagging on her own blood as a knife erupted through her neck from the back and out the front, Kyogen's arrival silent, sure, and deadly. 

 

Rain Spider fell to the ground, gagging and writhing, if not dying then damn close to it. This close, Errant realized two things - the suit Rain Spider was wearing, underneath the rapidly pooling blood, was the same black costume Downtime had been wearing back in 2014 - and that the brutal tyrant who had haunted his nightmares had just saved him. For her part, Kyogen chuckled and yanked out her blades. "If you want to go fast, struggle more," she encouraged the convulsing super-agent at her feet. "Spreads the poison more." 

 

Looking over, Clock Queen cursed. "Damn it, Jade, was that really necessary?" She sounded annoyed, but not particularly put out - it was the same tone, Will remembered, that she'd used the one time Holly had played the flushing game with her upstairs toilet in Florida. 

[KnightDisciple]

Will had been making high-speed circuits of the park area for the last bit of time, his presence little more than a background blur to the back and forth chaos of the fight. He had noticed that Cho had decided firing half-blind at the Jet Patrol ranked higher than getting a fellow student out of danger.

 

--Damn it Cho! Get Errant and get-****!!!--

 

The last word was half-thought, half-shouted as Kyogen rammed a knife through Rain Spider's neck. The woman was still alive, though. Alive for a few ticks on the clock. That's all he needed. 

 

In a blur, Thoughtspeed was crouching over her, his hands gently grasping her neck. His voice was soothing in her mind and only her mind.

 

--Calm down. Calm down. I'm here. I'm helping. I won't let you die.--

 

And then, with a surge of green light around his body, Will pushed his gift into the woman, at least partially. The raw kinetic power he had, the power that gave his body speed and formed weapons, was partially granted to her. Instead of big, flashy effects, he focused on strengthening her body and granting it a superhuman metabolism, and in incredibly-accelerated rate of healing. It might not totally purge the poison, but it would do enough for her to survive until he got her to an ambulance.

 

With both grace and surprising alacrity, he had Errant secure over one shoulder, and Rain Spider over the other. He spared Clock Queen and Kyogen a glance. Somehow, Anna Cline knew the mysterious youth under that helmet was smiling.

 

"Pardon me, ladies, these folks need to leave the party for now."

 

And then he was gone in a blur of motion, racing for the edge of the park, his path darting back and forth as best as he could with his extra weight, looking for an ambulance, a doctor, a medic, someone. 

[TheAbsurdist]

Errant was breathing, though still a bit stunned from the initial blow.  Only to find himself aware of Thoughtspeed running away from the fight, until they were a good bit of distance away.

 

"I am fine, you jackass, set her down, we need to get her.  Because she will try to kill her again!"  He didn't have to say who he was talking about, Kyogen had already tried to kill Cho once today.  He lifted his head, and though it hurt to breathe, he reached out towards her, and her sick, venomous thoughts, and he got inside her.  He felt sick.  Or it was the kick.  Maybe he was concussed.  But the hope was that he could twist her about, he could stop her ,and let someone do something horrible.  To the horrible woman.

[Avenger Assembled]

Up in the sky, Voortrekker and the Red Mystic played a macabre game of catch . From a wrist-mounted launcher, Voortrekker fired a missile at his teammate, who in a matter of seconds caught the anti-tank weapon in a flaming red energy construct. Charging the missile with unholy crimson energy, she turned on her nearest enemy with lethal force and hurled a burning barrage that was at once unholy fire and screaming armor-piercing charges towards the Terminus-empowered teen. The bombardment struck Cho in the stomach and set her costume ablaze with a quickly-extinguished flame, knocking her back a step and scorching even her super-tough skin. "No more second chances!" called the Red Mystic, even as the excess of her bombardment went flying over Cho's head and right out of the park, slamming into the ground (and the civilians) on the other side amid screams and explosions!

 

Will's heroic actions, without a doubt, saved Rain Spider's life. The dying woman, who'd been gagging up bubbly, foamy blood as he ran, suddenly gasped an unbroken breath and sat up, eyes wide behind her colored eyepieces as Will sat her down in front of the nearest ambulance. Right in front of a South African police officer who, with gun drawn, spun around and faced him down. Now, Will's dad had taught him all about cops and how you should never really trust them, but Will's own life had been pretty sheltered up to this point in a lot of ways. So even with his reflexes, he didn't realize the cop had fired, yelling, "It's bloody one of them!" before the round ricocheted off his visor, only his last minute reflexes saving his life. Except that now he was looking at the world through a crazy-quilt pane of broken plastic and cracks!

 

He could see one thing though that was all too familiar - an electric blue radiance crackling between himself and Rain Spider - crackling, he realized, between himself and the costume the lady in question wore - which looked identical to Downtime's super-suit in 2014!

[RobRX]

In the heat of the moment, completely surrounded by dangerous individuals about and ready to kill her, Cho finally snapped. Her instincts kicked in at full force. Survival. Considering the things a normal human body can do in moments of distress and anger, the potential for one fueled by entropy.

 

Cho's body quaked as she unleashed the power of entropy in a completely different way. It wasn't intentional in her part, the result unpicked. It was a raw, uncontrolled release, fired at random in hopes of achieving some result in halting or even stopping the battle that raged around her. Everything around her distorted, ever so briefly, darkening and seemingly rotting before being reduced to nothing but distorted ashen shadows...before reverting to normal, the effect seemingly being only mental. A terrifying sense of dread and despair swept all around Cho, who then half-collapsed, breathing heavily as the floating red and black crackles and dots slowly vanished into the air.

[Avenger Assembled]

Zipping around faster than lightning could strike, Clock Queen dodged her way out of the psionic eruption of entropic energy, cursing at the unfamiliar sensations. As for Kyogen, Cho distinctly saw the masked-face woman turn and take the hit full in the face even as the grass shriveled briefly around her - but the iron-willed future dictator looked unaffected by her power. Clock Queen was instantly in motion when she saw her comrade staggered by the psychic assault, grabbing her by the arm, and Errant felt a sudden cascade of super-speed racing through his mental link with the future dictator, breaking their mental connection (and his hold over her) as her brain accelerated beyond his ability to grab it.

 

Up in the sky, Voortrekker and the Red Mystic had been nearly directly overhead for the blast and they'd both taken the full brunt of the effect. "Agh! Kill you! Kill all of you!" Voortrekker landed directly in front of Kyogen, who'd been left exposed by the blast and Clock Queen's arrival by her side and advanced on the villain, firing an machine gun volley that tore through the trees behind them and ricocheted through the now-fleeing, panicking ground beyond. "Kill you-"

 

For her part, under siege and in mortal peril, Kyogen flipped up her knife and - 

 

stabbed Voortrekker through the left eyeslit of his suit. Screaming in agony, he erupted upwards, his weapons firing wildly, the Red Mystic in close pursuit, skidding wildly over the crowd and just over Thoughtspeed and Errant's heads, sending a volley of machine guns bullets ripping through the all-too-human flesh around them. As people screamed in terror, the heroes could only watch in sick horror as the linked figures of the mortally wounded battlesuit and the mystic trying to save his life flew over the nearby houses and slammed into a nearby commercial block with a blinding flash of red light and a deafening BOOM that knocked everyone off their feet! 

[KnightDisciple]

Will gave a wordless noise of surprise as the gun fired, and uttered another one of those words his parents had probably hoped he'd never learn as he only just managed to avoid the bullet hitting his head. Which was important, that's where his think-meats were. He was clearly so panicked he had swung back around to sarcastic calm, even as his initial spin lost control and he dropped Errant, the back of the helmet striking the ground. Cracks started to spread throughout the entire helmet, and as his momentum kept bleeding off in that bouncing roll, the helmet flew apart, his eyes thankfully safe from harm, but a few shards slicing into his cheeks. He probably wouldn't scar. Probably. 

 

"You ******* idiot I was trying to help! Are you so ****in blind you missed me evacuating civilians from the-"

 

And then there were bullets and missiles everywhere, and somehow, Will's instincts meant he tackled the trigger-happy policeman out of the way of a cloud of shrapnel, before staggering to his feet and blurring into motion. He raced around, trying to get helpless men and women out of the way of the line of fire, until the two "heroes" flew off to a spot a few blocks away, where they apparently exploded.

 

Once more he was knocked from his feet, but quickly was back on them and racing toward Cho's location, his form shining with desperate green energy. 

 

He refused to think about the already-dead people he'd seen just moments ago. The people screaming in agony at their terrible mortal wounds. More people than he could ever get to in time. But maybe he could at least make sure Cho was okay. It was his bloody fault they were here in the first place, if he could get her over to Errant those two could stay safe and maybe he could still save some lives.

[TheAbsurdist]

He hit the ground ungainly.  Ribs bruised.  Probably.  

 

"Thoughtspeed."  He didn't need to add the rest, he was thinking the same thing, they needed to get Cho out of there.  His thoughts went to something else, he felt it... their pain, fear...  His composure slipped, his anger flared to life, as he closed his eyes, and he felt them, all around him.  And then connection was made, tears starts to run from his eyes, as the feedback of others emotions hit him.  It was the first time he had done something like this, so he was overreaching by quite a bit, and his power became visible.

 

They a collective breath came.  And then another.  As his power reached out.  And he tried to stop the screams, the bleeding.  Their eyes glowing blue to match his as this happened.

[Avenger Assembled]

Cho felt a hand grab her wrist and suddenly she was accelerating, erupting out of the park and the carnage inside to take her place alongside Errant and Thoughtspeed. Outside the park things didn't look much better - Errant's tremendous effort had saved lives all around them, but the smell of death and fire was everywhere. Clock Queen, Cho's savior, looked around and called, "I'm gonna find Kyogen and get her out of here! You kids get the hell out of this place!" She looked at the fire and death, shook her head, and distinctly said, "No hero..." before she turned and bolted out of sight. As she ran, lightning crackled in the air, pulled from Thoughtspeed to Rain Spider's suit and back again, and before the South African super-agent - or anyone else, could react; there was a tremendous flash of light that enveloped the three time travelers! 

 

And then they were, all of a sudden, back on the waterfront of Freedom City - the sky overhead was dark and spattered with the few stars that shone through a city's glow and they were surrounded by groaning Yakuza thugs - and for a moment, it was as if they had never left at all. 

[KnightDisciple]

Will, still standing, stumbled as the world flashed around them, and then suddenly they were back, like it had never happened...except Will's helmet was still gone and shattered, and his suit stank of fire and blood and death. He blinked his eyes behind the mask, spots fading from his vision after a few moments.

 

He took just a moment to consider the piles of beaten criminals, before making up his mind. He closed his eyes and stretched his mind out, farther than he had for a long time. But instead of deafening an entire city, his mind zeroed in on just a few people.

 

Headmaster Summers, and any of the still-awake staff, especially any in the office of said Headmaster, would receive a simple mental message tinged with both exhaustion and...it wasn't fear, but at the very least, it was disquiet.

 

--This is Thoughtspeed, myself and two others need assistance at--*insert address/location here*--, please hurry.--

[RobRX]

Cho merely looked around, confused, as they were seemingly back where they had started. Everything that had previously hapenned was something akin to a blur, a dream or perhaps a waking nightmare. It had been one crazy, confusing mess.

 

Breathing heavily, she tried to asses the situation, arms glowing once again as she prepared to fire another entropic blast if need be. "W-we're back, right? Tell me I'm not crazy!"

[Avenger Assembled]

Historian's Note: 

 

ABDUL SULTANI is still hale and hearty at the age of 101, though now a younger man has taken over as imam at the Lion's Head Mosque. He attributes his good health to his daily walks around the city, noting with a smile that "You meet all sorts of interesting people there." 

 

CLOCK QUEEN, aka Anna Cline, left the Crime League after the Battle of Capetown. She took her son Richard back to Freedom City to stage one last big score - but in the fall of 1981, just a few months after the battle, she and Richard were caught by POF-SWAT, an ultraviolent police "supercrime" unit whose commander would go on to head Freedom City's police department during the Moore years. It was Clock Queen who gave Roy Allquist his trademark facial scars - after he had put the restraints on her. 

 

KYOGEN, aka Jade Harper, returned to her native New Freedom after the Battle of Capetown. Shortly thereafter, following on the death of Othello, the President of New Freedom, she seized power in a bloodless coup d'etat. Her absolute rule, marked by cruelty and dogmatic politics, would last until her death in 2007, whereupon she was succeeded in power by her daughter Leah. Her remains lie beneath a marble statue built along New Freedom's shoreline, where a ten-meter likeness of Jade Harper looked out over a frozen Antarctic sea with blades in hand, always on guard to defend the nation that bears her indelible stamp to this day. Pictures of the Harpers appear in all New Freedom classrooms and private homes, and the long, tedious series of political ramblings she wrote during her time as President are required readings for New Freedom students. 

 

PAULETTE PSION was murdered along with all but one of her siblings and their spouses, by her father, Professor Parker Psion, on November 1, 1989, leaving her three-year-old daughter Frances behind as an orphan to be raised by Psion himself. She was just twenty-nine. Frances, embittered by what she believed to be her mother's murder by the Atoms and by her grandfather's twisted upbringing, is better-known by her super-name - EMBER PSION.

 

RAIN SPIDER, aka Paula Van Der Berg, retired from the Jet Patrol in 1981 thanks to extensive injuries suffered during the Battle of Capetown. Like South Africa's nuclear program, the team disbanded itself (and destroyed its assets) to avoid becoming property of the new post-apartheid government in the early 1990s. In 1993, Van Der Berg was the only member of the former South African super-team to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 1995, she was killed rescuing President Nelson Mandela from a super-assassin hired by some of her former allies. At her request, she was cremated and buried at sea with no ceremony. Her suit was stolen a few years ago by the American super-thief who now calls himself Downtime.