ic Savage History

[Raveled]

June 29th, 2016

McNider Memorial Hospital, Freedom City, New Jersey

Afternoon

 

Miras flinched as bullets chewed away at the ceramic tiles at the corner she was facing, chips and shards of pottery slowed and deflected by her magic. The intermittent roar of gunfire echoed and rebounded through the underground parking garage, setting off several car alarms as the terrorist kept the superhero pinned down. After a solid minute of deadly shots the gunfire fell silent; Miras peaked out of cover and noted that the terrorist, a young woman in a bright red tee-shirt, Kevlar vest, and bandanna, was fumbling with her gun. The musical magus didn't know much about guns, but she knew that they eventually ran out of bullets and that this might be her only attempt to talk the other woman down.

 

"This is your best chance to surrender," Miras called out. "You can't win anymore. We found the anesthesia you swapped out with nerve gas, every hospital in New England is checking their supplies. You're pinned down here, and Fast-Forward is upstairs taking care of the last of your super-suit back-up. You're not going to win here, give up and come quietly!"

 

"Shut your bourgeois mouth!" the woman shouted back. "This hospital is a monument to capitalist greed, a place for sick people to be bilked of more money. If the doctors here really cared about people, they'd be out on the street! Saving lives! Not stuck in board meetings arguing for funding." The terrorist loaded another magazine in her weapon and aimed at the pillar that the superhero was hiding behind. "And you really believe that I shouldn't be here, then come out and stop me, pig!"

 

Miras rolled her eyes at the notion and settled in as more gunfire streamed her way. Bullets were a finite resource; she just had to muster more patience.

[Avenger Assembled]

Fast-Forward was not in a playful mood today. Contrary to what he'd assured Paige that morning, going off and heroing wasn't helping as much as he'd hoped. 

 

"You boys think you're real big hitting a hospital, huh?!" Richard appeared behind the armored figure in black, his face set in a scowl. "Buncha lousy punks!" He moved fast, grabbing the man's arms and directing them upwards, the tasers on each wrist discharging directly into the heavily insulated neck. The other man, in matching low-grade sub-MAX armor that had been spray-painted white to match the grey, was just turning around when Richard turned to face him. 

 

"This place is fulla sick people, and kids, and families, and they don't need your political crap!" He grabbed the heavy guns out of the man's built-in holsters, what looked like dual armored Desert Eagles, and smashed them, butt-first, into the man's jaw, again and again, at speeds that in local time equaled something like the impact of a jet in flight. "Stick! It! Up! Your!-" Richard stepped back, grabbed both skulls, and slammed them together at sound-breaking speeds. He did it again - then when both men were stunned, he stripped them naked and left them tied together with surgical tubing. 

 

He nodded in satisfaction and ran downstairs, zipping right past Miras and reappearing just a few feet behind the armed woman she was bantering with. When he locked eyes with her, he was smiling, arms spread and jacket open wide. 

 

"Hey, sugarlips, go ahead and point that thing at me. C'mon - I dare you." 

[Raveled]

The terrorist turned quickly, startled to find Fast-Foward standing behind her. "I won't be caught in with your capitalist mockery," she shouted, backpedaling away from both speedsters. "You'll never stop me or my compatriots. We'll be immortalized in the annals of the revolution!"

 

Miras raced out from her hiding spot and appeared in front of the woman, her hands up and empty. "No one's going to have good words for someone who tries to kill folks in hospitals. You're not going to get a statue in the park for this."

 

The woman raised her weapon, smiling in a shaky, crazy way. "That's where you're wrong. This whole building is going to be my monument."

[Avenger Assembled]

Fast-Forward poked the woman in the nose - and suddenly the would-be terrorist froze stock-still. "Hey, look, now you're a statue in the park! Dumbass." He did not seem like the cheerful TV host at all today. Zipping backwards, he turned to Miras. "Gotta watch her," he commented, "sometimes they can think their way out of that, but types like this don't know the meaning of hole card. If she was hiding mind powers, she'd have been broadcasting her little playground speech here to the whole block." His speech was fast and choppy as he blurred around the room, only Miras' powers letting her keep up with his motormouth. He was searching the terrorist as he spoke, mindful of explosive vests and similar fripperies. He'd learned a lot of things in the 80s and 90s, back when Freedom City had been the one-stop-shop for the worst terrorists of the day. "All right, she's clean. You wanna get the rest of the place?" 

[Raveled]

Miras took a breath and nodded curtly, zipping away as she folded space around herself. The terrorist was practically stripped down; the only thing she was carrying was more bullets and a keychain with a plastic flower on it. The flower matched one used on the trucks of a national florist franchise; several of which were parked in the underground garage, she slowly realized. She ran over to one and yanked it open, and the color slowly drained out of her face. "Richard, they're full of bombs." The floor of the vans were packed full of bricks of plastic explosive, neatly packed and all wired up to something with a lot of blinking lights.

 

The speed wizard quickly unpacked the first truck, then the second, and then just had to pause and stare at the pile of explosives. "There's four more trucks," she whispered, her mind overwhelmed by the gross, blind destructive power on display. "Why do they need so many bombs? Why would they... Who could even imagine..." She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to center herself. "I don't... I don't think we can disarm them, Ri-- Fast-Forward. We need to get them out of the building. But we don't know how much time it left before they explode. Okay, I have a plan."

 

Miras blurred over to a pick-up truck and grabbed a blue tarpaulin from the back of it, laying the plastic sheet out flat on the ground. She picked a piece of chalk from her pocket and began drawing symbols and arcane markings on it. "Pile them in the middle," she said, scooting around on her hands and knees as she worked. "I can slow them to a crawl, buy some time at least."

[Avenger Assembled]

Fast-Forward, professional that he was, decided to back the younger woman's play. He did as she asked, moving with impossible speed of his own as the bombs that had been there, and there, and there were all now suddenly on the tarp, stacked neatly together so that no toppling induced by gravity would lead to an explosion. 

 

"Backup plan is I lock 'em all down," he told her, so fast it would have sounded like a single high-pitched whine to anyone outside their bubble of accelerated time. He watched her work, faster than any normal wizard he'd seen going about her work - but still maybe not fast enough. 

 

"Gonna speed you up - add my speed to yours, so you're gonna go quick. You'll be faster than me - so talk slow so I can hear you. Hang on." He knelt down and put his hand on the back of her leg - and suddenly the air around Miras seemed to go still and rarified. The world, always in slow-motion thanks to her powers, slowed to a nigh-imperceptible crawl, as if everything had been put on pause. Or, rather, as if she had been put on fast-forward. 

[Raveled]

Miras had the tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth, her whole being bent to the task at hand. As she added to the mystical diagram, the ambient magical energy of the world began to flow around her. The smallest ebbs and flows of mystical power were caught in the symbols like sea water in a tide pool, charging them and filling the air with a feeling like static energy. The magus reached out to make the last few adjustments and a sharp crack of electricity jumped from her fingers to the grommets punched in the tarp. It was getting hard to breathe; her own bubble of magically sped-up time was interacting with Fast-Forward's mutant abilities and overlapping oddly, making it so she had to think about every movement carefully. If she just moved on instinct, she went almost too fast to control. It was like running down a hill and being constantly on the edge of toppling over.

 

Carefully, slowly, but in a blur of speed to anyone existing outside the bubble of time magic and mutant speed, Miras climbed to her feet. She griped one edge of the tarp and whispered the words that set the magic spell in motion. A blue dome began to glow around the explosives piled in the center and a low, almost subsonic thrum sounded through the underground garage. She licked her lips and spoke carefully, making sure to fully enunciate so that Fast-Forward understood her. "Now we need to get them to the river," she said. "If we can get them into the water, when they go off they won't hurt anyone." She gripped the tarpaulin hard enough to turn her knuckles white and tensed her legs, ready to run.

[Avenger Assembled]

Man, this is what it's like for Paige half the time, thought Richard. What he said out loud was "Go!" 

 

As they ran, things slowed down until they both were traveling at his usual velocity - after all, boosting Miras now would just risk ripping the tarp in half with catastrophic results. They ran together through a Freedom City slowed to a crawl, Richard taking the opportunity to compose a mental message to his wife. 

 

Hey honey. Still working on the thing with the bombs - we should be just about done here. Should be home soon. Love you! 
 

Sure, they were at risk of being blown to kingdom come - but he'd been in much worse situations than this and he'd come through all right. The important thing was, whatever happened, between the two of them they could contain any explosion. The hard part was going to be making sure they themselves came through all right. 

[Raveled]

Miras and Fast-Forward moved in synch, each of them being careful not to get in front of the other. To the rest of the world they were an effortless, green-blue-black blur, but Miras was laboring. Keeping the enchantment on the bombs going and keeping her own magic under control while adjusting to Fast-Foward's borrowed speed was wearing on her, and the added stress of the bombs wasn't helping. She rejoiced inside when she saw the choppy waves of the Wading River. The pair of them stopped at the edge of the embankment and heaved the whole package into the water. Miras sighed and relaxed, letting the magic run out.

 

Except it didn't go anywhere. In the perverse logic of the world, now that the energy wasn't needed it refused to dissipate. The entire world went blue and the edges of her vision started shaking; she turned to Fast-Forward and tried to step back from the edge of the river, but it felt like her legs were encased in gelatin. She opened her mouth to shout but suddenly the entire world seemed to rush away from her, contracting to a single blue point, before exploding. As the whiteness washed over her with a roar and a rush of air, the pressure in her head expanded a thousandfold and she passed out.

[Raveled]

It was dark for awhile, and when Miras opened her eyes the first thing she noticed was the quiet. There was no siren of emergency services; no screams of panicked crowds; not even the usual hustle and bustle of city life. The only thing that broke the silence was the occasional birdsong, and the far-off sound of something rhythmically striking the ground. She sat up and looked around her, noting immediately that she wasn't in the city anymore. All around her were trees, unbroken virgin forest stretching in every direction. She turned around and saw Fast-Foward sprawled out on the ground, then turned back as the striking rose to thunder. A group of men riding honest-to-Allah horses broke through the treeline and quickly surrounded her, pointing swords and guns at her and Fast-Forward. Miras went very still and slowly raised her hands in the air. She wasn't sure that bullets could actually get past her powers even at such closer range, but she didn't want anyone to start firing.

 

 

She was staring at the men, noting their old-timey clothes and the smell of horses (the smell of horses kind of overwhelmed everything) when a man on a steel-gray horse with steel-gray hair trotted up to her. He didn't have a weapon drawn, but every single one of the horse riders watched him. "Speak your name, witch, or in the Lord's name we shall cut you down!"

Edited July 16, 2016 by Raveled

[Avenger Assembled]

Fast-Forward had landed on his back - and probably pulled a muscle there. All he knew was that it hurt like Hell - and sitting up to see a bunch of Puritans staring at him certainly didn't help matters. Ah, dammit, not again! Wait, no, this is Jersey, not Boston. What the hell? Okay, I'll just have Paige wipe their minds - oh, right! Goddamit. He had been in a bad mood when the day started - things were no better shape now. Well, better not kick their asses until I know we don't have another choice. 

 

"I am Dick Cline, sir, and this is my Turkish maidservant Miriam," he said with smooth authority to the horserider. "Are...are there witches in this village, good sirs?" he demanded, his eyes widening as he looked from one face to another. "I saw no signs as we approached, did you, wench?" he asked Miras, a tone of alarm in his voice, his tone bizarrely like a suburban father who'd heard from the cops that suspicious characters were lurking in the neighborhood. "In God's name, if we can help your search, you need but speak it." 

[Raveled]

One of the riders snorted in time with his horse. "As truth, you say. We all heard the thunder, and rode here, and now we see you dressed in that. Will you tell us next that you were intending to hunt snow hares?" He gestured towards Fast-Foward's leather jacket and white bodysuit, a far cry from what the rest of the riders were wearing.

 

"Righteous!" The steel rider barked out and the mouthy rider cringed. "Keep a civil head in your tongue, boy. We know not who they are or whence they came." He returned his heavy glare to Fast-Foward and Miras again. "Though you did appear in thunder and a flash. I will ask again, are you with the evil that has bedeviled our homes?"

 

"We are not with any sort of evil," Miras insisted. "We don't even know where we are right now. We're... a little bit turned around."

 

"You are in the forests outside of Freedom," the steel rider said. "Freedom City, as they seem to be calling it now."

[Avenger Assembled]

Richard Cline had spent less than three years of his life in a classroom - but he'd spent his childhood and adult life screwing around in the timestream. He thought fast. What the hell is going on here? As was his usual style, though, his thoughts did not appear on his face. Instead, Richard suppressed a chuckle, looking from one face to the other in the crowd. "Sirrahs, I thought you meant madmen and women who cavort beneath the Maypole under the influence of cheap spirits - I thought I might cover my servant's eyes so she need not see such tomfoolery. But if you are concerned about witches and the Devil, I do not mock your concerns," he said to the steely rider, "but I am a man of the 18th century," he said, keeping his voice diplomatic. "I had thought witchcraft and incense the work of popish priests and slovenly peasants, not men of the modern age such as yourself. Has something happened in these parts?" he asked, his tone again growing serious. "Miriam and I have had little luck these last few months, as you can see we sold our horses back in Philadelphia to pay our tavern fare. If you have troubles in these parts, we would not be a burden to you." 

[Raveled]

Steel rider fixed Fast-Foward for a minute before speaking. "A month ago I believed the same, sir. Then animals appeared at the edge of town, slaughtered in Satanic fashion. And then... the children started disappearing."

 

Miras felt her heart skip a beat. "Children are disappearing? Have you found... anything?" She didn't want to say what was at the forefront of her mind, but images off late-night news programs marched through her mind.

 

The rider glanced at Miras but kept talking to Fast-Forward. "Nothing has reappeared yet."

 

The other riders grumbled among themselves, shifting their steeds and their weapons uneasily. "Those damn savages. They must have took out children, doing all manner of heaten things to them."

[Avenger Assembled]

For his part, Richard was glad there was no talk of an "infernal woman and her bastard brat", or the other things he'd overheard when getting too close to the eras he and his mother had visited in his youth, back when they'd sometimes hidden from Freedom's heroes by hiding in the depths of history. Dealing with his mother in her prime was not something he needed to today. "Well, ah, if savages are on the warpath, I'd hardly want to try the walk back into the countryside again, especially at this late hour. If you gentlemen don't mind, my servant and I will just be on our way into Freedom. We are but poor traveling entertainers, not the sort of folk good Christian men like yourself need worry about." If he remembered right, the area had begun acquiring the name of Freedom City around the time of the Revolutionary War - but without a political signifier he wasn't about to mention what side they were on. "Are we close enough to the city to be there by nightfall?" he inquired, knowing that he could be in China by nightfall if he wanted - going the _other_ way. 

 

 

[Raveled]

The horse riders shuffled unquietly, their weapons pointed at no one in particular, obviously ill at ease. They were tense and wanted to blame someone, but neither of these people before them was doing anything to provoke them, and they weren't quite ready to attack innocent travelers. Finally, the steel ride spoke. "We'll walk you back into town," he said finally. "These woods are not as safe as they used to be. Come along."

 

Before long the group was riding through the forest, Miras and Fast-Forward hemmed in by the animals and the narrow path they were walking through the forest. Miras kept shooting glances out from under the cowl of her hood, taking in the antiquated clothes and the fearful glances at the treeline; she was sure that she could run if push came to shove, but she didn't know where she would be running to. "Richard," she whispered, "what the hell is going on? Who are these people? How did that bomb land us in a freaking museum piece? Where are we?"

[Avenger Assembled]

Richard glanced quickly up at their escorts and sighed, really missing his wife's telepathy. "These nice men are going to walk us back into Freedom - that's what the Patriots hereabouts have begun calling all the little towns in this area now that they're fighting the British. There's been a lot of fighting, so watch yourself." He hmmed, quickly turning over words and phrases in his mind. "This has happened to me lots of times, don't worry about it.We can get where we're going once these nice Christian gentlemen get us back to their homes." He frowned, then went on, "It's damned peculiar that they're worried about witches - something must have spooked 'em bad. We're about eighty years after Salem," he tugged unconsciously at his neck, remembering his youthful visit there, "and people hereabouts think that stuff is yesterday's news."  

[Raveled]

"Witches? Salem? Eighty years? Richard, are you telling me we're in the..." She broke off and tried to remember disjointed details about a part of American history that had never affected her before, when they rounded a bend and saw the city laid out before them. Her jaw dropped as she took it in, the wooden palisade near the harbor, the brick-and-timber buildings that rarely rose more than two stories off the street level, the smoking chimneys everywhere, the herds of animals being driven through the streets, and the smell and sounds and sights of tens of thousands of people living without the benefits of automation or computers.

 

The group traveled down to the city proper, individual riders peeling off here and there to stop at individual stables or go off to their own homes and their own errands. Before long they were just left with the steel-eyed rider and the mouthy one; they drew up at a tall house with a clear view of the bay and the tall clipper ships in the harbor. The older rider dismounted and handed the reins to the younger one. "Temperance, take the horses around and see that they're watered and fed. Then you may join us inside." The boy rode off obediently and the man addressed them both. "You can call me Charity Moore. I know not what you need from this town, but as a Christian man I cannot in good conscience leave you out on the street. If you have need of it, there is a bed for each of you in my home."

[Avenger Assembled]

Never one to turn down a stranger's hospitality, Richard automatically accepted Charity's offer, not surprised to hear the man's family still adhered to Puritan standards of naming. Geez, he must be unhappy - this town's full of sailors, and taverns, and probably soldiers too if we're anywhere near where I think we are. Of course, the private space available in a house this size turned out to be much less than he or Miras would have expected in the 20th century - Richard would be bunking in the same space as Temperance, and no one seemed to find that idea particularly odd. It was also a reminder, as Charity showed them Miriam's hammock in the barn, which was also where the maid slept, that New Jersey had not yet abolished slavery during the American Revolution. Begging a copy of Charity's almanac at least got them the year, something Richard studied alongside Miras in the dung-filled (by 21st century standards) street. The past, as it usually did in Richard's experience, stank to high heaven. 

 

"Well," said Richard thoughtfully, "no real reason to stick around here. He'll just forget about the jerks that ducked out without our promised song and dance show." He looked curiously at Miras, checking for her opinion. 

 

 

[Raveled]

Miras sat on a bench next to Richard, watching the life of the town around her dumbly. She had pushed back the cowl of her robe, but she was still in floor-length green; turning back into her street clothes would likely attract even more attention. She was having a hard time absorbing the fact that she was two-hundred-years-and-change in the past, in a Freedom that wasn't a City yet. She distantly toyed with the idea of running down to Pennsylvania to meet George Washington or up to Boston to see Benjamin Franklin, but she felt like she had to approach the idea carefully. If she totally dove into the implications of being in the past, she might just have a breakdown.

 

Richard's words shook her out of her reverie. "You're being pretty blase about this," she pointed out. "Aren't you surprised at finding yourself in Ye Olde Colonial Times? I did not wake up today expecting to be pushed back to a time before the invention of the steam engine!"

[Avenger Assembled]

Richard grinned. "Don't you ever watch my show, kid? We go back in time all the time." He leaned back against the rough brick that was their bench's back. "It's how my powers work. I don't really have speed like the Rockets do, my ma and me just mess around with time so our little bubble's going faster or slower than everybody else's. I must have been, huh, nine or ten first time I traveled on my own. My ma was taking me back in time even before that happened, though." He watched, across the street, as a passing vendor tried to ply her watercress and other fresh greens to the houses she was passing. "Time travel's hard. Going back and seeing people who have it hard, and knowing you can't do much to fix it..." He shook his head. "It helps to remember that everything you're seeing has already happened. Think of yourself as a tourist, not a resident." 

[Raveled]

Miras put her head in her hands as she tried to absorb it all. "All the way back to the... I can't believe it. I was worried about buying groceries while hungry, now I have to worry about bringing polio or tuberculous back?" She took a deep breath and immediately regretted it. If she was in the far past she had to handle it the best she could, which meant focusing on the issue at hand. "And what do you mean we can't fix it? Richard, these Pilgrims are going to attack the natives, maybe wipe them out. Do you really think a bunch of American Indians are kidnapping kids? Going all the way into town and mutilating cattle for the hell of it?" She shook her head. "You might be okay with waiting for your wife to bring around the family time machine, but I'm not going to sleep well tonight knowing I could have stopped a native massacre and just walked away from it.

[Avenger Assembled]

Richard gave Miras a look. "Oh, c'mon, I didn't even go to school, kid, and I...okay, here's the thing." Acquiring a piece of chalk from nowhere in particular, he began drawing on the sidewalk. "First of all, we are way past Pilgrim times. Charity and his family are nice but they're the local version of those guys in the office who want to give you copies of the Watchtower." He sketched out little men in Pilgrim hats, then scratched them out with big Xs. "Like I said before, this is American Revolution stuff, you know, Minuteman, the first Lady Liberty...?" He shrugged. "Anyway, there was a lot of fighting around here about now. Battles going back and forth, massacres...who are we to decide what's okay and what's not okay?"

 

He sketched out a few more crude battle scenes as they went, then drew an arrow to their north. "Right now George Washington's burning down the Iroquois - and Thomas Jefferson is sticking it to a teenage girl he can whip if she says no. Should we run around and fix the whole eighteenth century just 'cause they don't act like we do? That's not a good way to start. What about the guys who come back to 2016 from future times, should we let them tell us how to live?" He settled back on his haunches, and suddenly looked tired. "Look, kid, I don't want to lecture you about morality. I'm no prince or nothin'. I just don't want to open the door to time travelers screwing around whenever they feel like it." He hesitated. "The witch thing still bothers me, though. Those guys were spooked as Hell - and that's damn weird. You got any magic? I got a little."

[Raveled]

"Yeah, I've... I've got a little." She opened a gloved hand slowly, being careful not to use any of her power. The last thing she needed was to have an actual witch trail spring up around her. "I can do time stuff, yeah, and I can make myself go fast when I do it. I've never used it to go back in time, though. And I never... Never thought I'd be back this far." She sighed and looked around. Everyone on the street seemed too concerned with their own lives to spare more than a glance at the strangers in the strange clothes. "I don't even know if it's still Ramadan, for me. How does a liturgical calendar interact with time travel?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"Hah-hah, I'm not really the right person to ask about religion," said Fast-Forward with a shrug. "I mostly go to synagogue with my wife and kids anyway." Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out a leather-bound book Miras didn't recognize, but one that fairly crackled with magical power. "Listen, I know this has been a crappy time for you," he said apologetically. "Normally I don't take anyone back with me when I accidentally time-skip, so this is my thing. I tell you what - there's a spell in here that lets me chase down magic if I need to. Why don't I run this, and we can try and track down that witch before the locals close in on her. Maybe they're not gonna burn her at the stake or something, but bad stuff happens in a war. We can tell her to get out of town before the goons close in."