2013.09.27 - Timetych 5: F*** You It's the Helm of Nabu

LEGION ROLL CALL: Kid Quantum II, Booster Gold, Cos WHERE: A multitude of unlikely locations, also, Legion HQ WHAT: Jazmin and Amethyst and their scrappy kid annoyance, Lori Morning, actually *manage* to get a ride from Fate back to the twenty-first century. Yay, home! RATING: PG-13 (language)

LAST TIME, ON AMETHYST, PRINCESS OF LEGION WORLD-- wait, no. THE LEGION OF GEMWOR-- uh.

Last time, after Jazmin and Lori spent a few offpanel days skipping randomly around in various timelines, and after Amy landed (via Mordru sidetrack) in 1939 on the floor behind them, the mismatched trio decided 'sprock this noise, we're gonna get a ride home'. Good idea: going to find Doctor Fate! After all, it's prime JSA territory, here, two years before America entered the Second World War. Bad idea: not calling ahead.

So now we rejoin our bravely irritated heroes on the doorstep of Kent Nelson, staring at Jared Stevens, the Man Called Fate.

"Get in here," he says, gesturing inside and stepping back from the door. "We should talk, yeah."

There are, in 1939, precious few telephone books and even fewer telephones available to a motley crew of teens, pre-teens and all of them girls. Jazmin quirks a brow at the 'gentleman' who has opened the door. "Well.. somehow I dont think /you're/ from around here. Who are you?"

Utterly immaterial of the fact that /they/ knocked on /his/ door, she still feels obliged to ask.

Amy Winston, Princess of Never Learned to Walk in Heels, stands awkwardly on the threshold of FATE. It is slightly more disappointing than the other threshold of FATE she's stood on, which involved a non-Euclidean tower.

The (currently blonde) teen is in the lead because she 'knows' Doctor Fate, according to her. The Doctor wouldn't actually know her by sight at this time, but she didn't tell Jazmin and Lori that. She's depending on Doctor Fate having the same 'omg you're a lord of order' revelation as last time.

This is not Doctor Fate. This is a man with an ankh tattooed over his eye. Amy never knew Kent had a sidekick.

"Um, sure, yeah," Amy mutters, taking her steps slow and methodically. She is a dextrous woman, but, like, heels, right? Yeesh. The teen looks over her shoulder to give Jazmin a 'come on' look.

There's a lot of squinting going on. "Fate," the guy tells Jazmin, even if him squinting makes him look even more like a pencil with a troll head instead of an eraser. "If you're legal you can call me Jared. Except for you--" he points at Amethyst, glowering, shutting the door after Lori, "--you stay over there. Away from me. I don't need the headaches and the refrigerator invasions and the orange jewel guy or whatever, and-- yeah. Uh. And a kid." He crosses his arms, scowling down at Lori. "I don't even know what the hell your deal is. Anyway--"

One hand flung up as he swings around, not-matching his way across the neat and pretty living room, "I'm in the middle of a really stupid crosso--/mess/, but I know Princess Amethyst doesn't damn well belong here any more'n I do, so I'm gonna take a wild shot in the dark and guess neither are you two."

He pauses at the kitchen door, eyeing them over his shoulder.

"Your hair's cool," Lori supplies, "but your arm is gross."

"/Moving on/," says Fate, trying to steamroll back into 'too busy for this crap', "Make it quick so I can finish up and get the hell out of here."

"Legal?" Jazmin quirks a brow, but does step inside. "Or legit. I can assure you I'm legit. Legal? Depends on who you ask, and if you ask any of the sproking /morons/ around here..." She cuts herself off before the cranky spills over onto their /gracious/ host. She takes a breath and centers herself again. "We are aiming to also get the hell out of here. And out of now."

"Hey, screw you too!" Amy says, crossing her arms and setting her jaw. She sticks next to Jazmin and Lori.

Blatantly ignoring JARED FATE, which is going right to the top of her horrible names list, she leans over and speaks to Jazmin: "Is time travel just, like, twenty-four-seven people harassing you about things you didn't do?"

She punctuates her sentence with a glare at Jared. "We're from 2013. Doctor Fate is a friend of mine and he could send us back. Can you, or was that tattoo more of a bad decision at three AM type thing?"

In the middle of being about to snappoint at Jazmin and say something cocky and pretty much hit on her, Fate /stops/, because Amethyst just said something ridiculous. "Don't you have /time machines/ by 2013? God, spare me the future." And then he steps back and reaches to put his hands over Lori's ears, and she's already wrenching away and scowling as he bites out at Amethyst, "Fuck you it's the Helm of Nabu. I hate time travel. You're not even evil yet, are you. I /really/ hate time travel. Go out the back door."

He gets out of the way of the kitchen door by dint of going to grab Kent and Inza's bottle of freshly delivered milk and drink right from it, pointing at the lace-curtained door into the backyard. "Get out of here," he says with the world's pissiest milk moustache.

"Yeah, pretty much. With a healthy dollop of people you dont know assuming that they know you /oh so well/ because they knew a version of you in another time. It's a pain in the arse." Jazmin concurs with Amy and then turns her attention back to Jared and snorts with bare amusement. "What's out the back door, and dont even get me cracking /started/ on the inannities of twenty first century technology. You have /no/ idea."

"We do! It's called magic!"

Amy hesitates. She doesn't stare at Jared, but at his tattoo. She knew this, she realizes. She knew it was the Helm of Nabu before she walked inside. If only she could reach out with that feeling and--

"--come on," she says, sullen. "It's really a portal. Let's get out of here."

The teen carefully makes her way over to the door and stands beside it, waiting for Jazmin and Lori to enter first.

Certainly Jazmin isn't staying /here/. Door number one is a far better option, even if it /is/ a portable hole, or a portal to the ooze dimension. Ideally it really is a time portal, and even more ideally it's one that goes /somewhere useful/. Either way, Jazmin isn't so far behind Lori in stepping thorugh it.

Until he leaves, Amy gives Jared the patented princess glare which, to him, probably looks like the patented dark queen glare. They're very similar.

She follows Jazmin and Lori through the door, politely shutting it as she goes, but this is still Dr. Nelson's house and that guy is like her magic grandpa.

1939:

Going through that door-- what the girls see? For a moment, a long moment that's more like a long moment on an event horizon than an awkward pause, there's the rainbow striped tubes of the time stream;

ANYWHEN:

as they float along on something like a magic invisible moving sidewalk, an enormous wooden ship passes them like a Jules Verne spaceship in the ether, and Snapper Car leans over the edge of it and sort of stares for a second, then cups his hands over his mouth and yells, "Hey, aren't you--"

NOW:

The Moving Sidewalk of Time is apparently at an end, because Booster and Rokk and Skeets are all in the hall and there's a projection of a bunch of colored lines and threads and afterimages, energy residue, et cetera; Rokk looks about sixty and Booster looks like he has a headache and Skeets looks like a put-upon robot, and *that's* where the three time travellers basically fall out of the wall.

The first thing that happens might as well be in slow motion: Rokk wide-eyed and shaking his head, hands up, with a NOOOOOO starting to form on his lips, and Lori crashing right into him, yelping in startlement.

The second thing that happens is that there's a flash of white light and a FRINK! sound, and Lori's vanished again and Rokk's not old anymore, but he's on the floor looking completely poleaxed.

But then he looks up at Booster, eyebrows lifted. "I /told/ you you could do it."

The projection filling the hallway with various traces and patterns of color gets a sudden update at the new influx of chronal and other energies. It is starting to look like a three dimensional Pollock painting. Skeets, who is doing the projection, floats up and back. Booster also hops back and into the air, where he remains floating, holding his hands up in front of his shoulders as if he were showing them for surrender. "I swear I didn't do anything!"

It's not a graceful landing. It's made doubly less graceful for the heels and the skirt and the /lady/ clothing that suits Jazmin about as well as the past did when she comes tumbling in only a blink after Lori, into the flash and FRINK! and lands upon the heap of Rokk on the ground with an audible ooof of not really nailing the landing. At least Rokk is softer than the floor to be landing on.

Amy does not see any part of this magical journey. She is keeping her eyes closed because she is fed up with all this. When someone start to yell at her, she shouts back: "NO."

The great thing about using magic to keep yourself steady on heels is that when you come flying out of a wall, you don't end up on the ground in a pile of twisted limbs. Amy floats there, arms crossed, tiny purple lights dancing around her feet to indicate that she is indeed magical and not possessed.

"What a dick," she announces. Amy is so angry that she takes some time to frown rather than elaborate. Eventually, "I mean that other guy. In fact, several other guys."

She looks down at Rokk, purple eyes flashing. "So, is this Mordru dude going to be harassing me more? Does he have a future-wiki page I can read?"

"Uh--" says Rokk, after he says 'oof'; he looks like he's trying to decide whether he wants to help Jazmin extricate herself from him and make Amethyst wait, or answer Amethyst first and potentially get in trouble for having a hot teenager sprawled on him. Also that was bright and Lori's gone and Booster's claiming things and it's all a lot of information for someone who's suddenly less deaf.

So he answers while helping Jazmin extricate herself, then gets to his feet. "Yeah. It's even up on my omni right now. You can borrow it, just don't take it out of HQ." Quick glance sidelong at Booster. "Teasing, bro." Then hapless look at Jazmin. "What the hell happened? Nice dress."

Once it is clear that he has not somehow broken the space-time continuum, Booster lands and offers Jazmin a hand, to help her up from the Rokk pile. "Man, what the heck was that all about? We were doing this," he gestures around at the holo-projetion, "And Cos was... well, not to put too fine a point on it, but Cos was old, and we were discussing quantum collapsing points and temporal elasticity and then you guys fell out of the air." Booster looks over at Amy, confused and concerned. "What several other guys? Were you guys in some kind of dickery conclave?"

"Thanks." Jazmin takes Booster's hand and with Rokk's assistance, gets to her feet. Even in heels. "Old? Like older than usual?" She glances from Booster to Rokk and back again. "Flash and boom. Playing hopscotch in the time stream, except that I wasn't driving. Lori was along with me, as a kid, and then once we'd just about settled in the past, Amy landed at our feet. Literally. She actually got the chat with Mordru."

Amy snappoints (it's contagious) at Jazmin. She floats down to the floor, tapping her necklace. One flash of light later, the teen is back to her more gothy self.

"First, I have no idea who that woman was who grabbed me, but I don't really know what's up with the Dreaming. Second, this guy who I'm told is Mordru started ranting about how I wasn't yet worthy, and he went on about some junk like 'it is right and proper' that I be with him and I needed 'the essence' or whatever, then the dude just up and slapped me!"

She exhales, looking toward the ceiling to collect her thoughts. "Oh, and he knew my first name, so he didn't get me confused with another Princess Amethyst. Um--okay, then I suggested we go to find my friend Doctor Fate, but there was this complete ass-copter there named Jared who had a tattoo made out of Fate's magical helmet?"

Amy looks utterly incredulous of her own story at this point and shrugs, spreading her hands palm-up. "Yeah, I know! Like, what? Anyway, he had a time portal so here we are. Also, don't wear heels. They suck."

She waits a beat, glancing across the room. "Where's Lori?"

"Ugh," supplies Rokk, brushing himself off. "And yeah I was like sixty or something. I've been him before. Usually only when /time breaks/ or something, but whatever, nothing to worry about." He's currently paying more attention to the patterns of the lines and where they messed up, and the ? spaces which now have their own colors, than to the confused mild distress and indignance. "She's gone. Probably back into the middle of whatever the hell she was doing before she got diverted here. She'll be fine. Um. Mordru's a problem though, yeah. And I know what the deal is with the hand that grabbed you. My theory? That was an early warning. So who'm I to argue with telling you all about your potential futures?"

Booster is trying to follow all of this, but what he mostly gets out of Amy's story is, "A dude named Jared had a Fate helmet tattooed on his ass?" Well, he is not going to judge someone on that. He waves a hand, saying, "Okay, what I want to know is, are these dudes going to be further trouble? We really don't need someone doing a lot of time crapper stuff when we already have all these stretched and tangled time-lines going on. I'm sure I don't even need to say that."

"He wasn't /that/ bad." Jazmin protests with a shrug and then a smirk. "Direct. I can respect direct." She blinks, squinting into the patterns of the lines to try and make sense of it. She reaches a hand up, pointing at a space with a vermillion colour, freshly added. "That doesnt look good." She seems fairly comfortable in her heels. "I don't remember knowing Jared. Tattooed on his face, Boost. Practically the same thing."

"He melted down the vessel of a Lord of Order and injected it into his face," Amy insists. She gestures toward Booster. "Ass tattoo would be funnier though, yeah."

The teen rubs her temples. "Can I, um, let you guys worry about the time thing? Doc Strange assigned me a ton of homework and I'm getting ready to lead an attack on Hell, so I'm pretty busy. I can help if you really need me, though."

"I'm sure it's gonna be trouble. I'm sure it's /related/ to the mess that this place is. I'm equally sure that we really can't worry about it right now. Jaz, I defer to your leadership; thank God, I'm going to bed," says the now-totally-exhausted-looking Rokk. He unhooks his omni from his belt and hands it over to Amy. "Just shove it under my door when you're done with it. Brainy put a thing on the side that makes it go English. You're smart, you'll figure it out. Night guys."

What? Questions? Permissions? Worrying? /Not his problem/. Heh heh heh.

Booster decides to just bypass the whole question as to what Jared may or may not have tattooed on his face and/or ass. He focuses on other matters. "We'll keep all this," he gestures at the holo-projection, "For our records, just in case. Oh..." Booster points at Amy. "Is that related to the angel thing? Hey, Rokk," he calls to the departing Cos, "Remember, I was asking about whether angel punching was okay but Garth told me to shut up?" Booster gestures at Amy again, as if this should explain absolutely everything.

"Rokk, I kinda hate you right now." Jazmin comments quietly as she reaches a hand out to stall his progress only a moment with a squeeze of his arm that's completely at odds with her words.

"Yeah ask me in three hours," Rokk calls over his shoulder to Amy after Jaz lets go his arm-- all that really gets her is a grey-tired smile-- "if I don't at least sleep for that long, I'll probably punch a kitten to go with your angels." Around the corner: out of sight.

"Yes, it's going to be trouble. One might argue that it continues to be trouble, as we all got dropped here in the first place. Thank you for your help Amy, if you need a hand in.. er.. Hell, let me know." Jaz pauses a moment, blinking at Booster. "/Punching Angels/?"

Amy takes the omni with a mumbled 'thanks.' She's more concerned with it than the little tussle that develops over Rokk leaving, but Booster brings her attention back.

The teen looks up, eyes wide. "Huh? What?" Booster indicates Jazmin, so Amy looks in her direction. "Um. Angels are assholes?"