2013.09.26 - Timetych 1: Legion Leader Down!

LEGION ROLL CALL: Lightning Lad, Booster Gold, Cos WHERE: Mission Monitor Room WHEN: Sept 25, 2013 WHAT: The Legion begins the hunt for Jazmin Cullen.

Rokk's in the monitor room, scrolling through results from searches he had the Legion's systems scour for. At least six of the display divisions are occupied with it, and he's running his hand through the projections, picking up anything he sees that shows even a hint of promise and dropping it into a seventh display. Looks like a lot of plain text, and a lot of old photographs with blurbs. Most of it seems to be centered on the tri-state area, though two of the upper displays are running rapidly through global sorting.

This is no feet-up business. This is intent, and his coffee cup's been empty so long it's dry.

"Oh, hey, Rokk..." Booster Gold, who popped into the monitor room just a moment before followed by Skeets, walks over to where Cos is working. "I was wondering, does the team have any... I dunno, any -guidelines- or rules with regards to beating up angels? I'm asking, because I beat up some angels." He rests his fists on his hips, looking at the displays. "Kind of wondering if that's going to cause any religious issues with anyone... what are you doing?"

The message had been simple:

Garth-- sorry, bro, this falls to you because you're Deputy, and, well. You'll see when you watch it.

RES HALL 1 No activity. No activity. No activity. Jazmin walks down the hall toward her quarters. She puts her hand up to the access pad, and then looks up and toward the direction of the camera in surprise. Abruptly a short blonde figure with shoulder-length hair, wearing a hockey jersey and shorts and big sneakers, comes into view-- running like a bat out of hell, arms in the air. Jazmin puts up her hands, starting to say something, brows creasing with alarm-- at the second of impact, there's a rainbow flash of light. Empty hall. No activity. No activity.

I can't raise Jaz, and I can't find her ring's signal. Unfortunately, I also can't find Brainy. And we're dealing with time travel. Any ideas?

Responding to this as soon as he was able, Garth goes up towards the monitor room, brushing past Booster quickly. "Rokk, still no sign of Jazmin? All I can think of is that this has to do with the Time Trapper. Has the monitors turned up anything about that kid?"

"... angels?" comes Rokk's absently baffled voice; he's got a hand full of glowing text, paused in the action of copy-and-pasting, and he glances over his shoulder. Finally the word actually percolates through his brain, and it's followed by the rest of what Booster just said, and he blinks. "It's never come up," he says, eyebrows up, dropping the text in that seventh display. "Why did you beat some angels up, what were they doing? And what makes them angels? ... it wasn't Zauriel, was it?" Another glance over his shoulder, dubious, and then the older Legionnaire spins his grav-chair around--

--just in time for Garth to come in. "Oh, so, I see you've stopped calling the Trapper the 'Time Amoeba'. Thank heaven for small favors," the Braalian says wryly. Then he gestures at the monitor bank and dims all but two. On the one closer to Booster's side, the clip of the kid running into Jazmin and disappearing them both in the hall is on replay; on the one closer to Garth's side, there's a hyperlinked report on one version of Lori Morning, dated 2995. Dry as it is, Rokk probably wrote it in his younger years. It's connected to one done by a different version of Rond Vidar, highlighting transferrence of time-energy.

"Jaz got nabbed by the dink," he explains to Booster, "and they're away into the timestream. Given how completely sprocked this time stream is, all bets are off, but I'm looking for patterns and likelihoods anyway. Also, tells. If she's anywhere or anywhen she can leave a message we're likely to see that won't screw with history, she'll do it." Then he glances between the both of them. "It probably has something to do with the Time Trapper, yeah. But I don't know which one."

"Wow, hi to you too, Garth," Booster says, as the redheaded man interposes himself. He explains to Rokk, "The angels were attacking Princess Amethyst and Dr. Strange. I tried to talk things out with them but it didn't work. I mean with the angels, not with Amethyst and Dr. Strange, they're pretty open to having discussions. So..." He gestures at the data on display. "I've heard you guys mention the Time Trapper before but I still don't really know who or what that is. Regardless, does this girl follow -timelines- or does she move dimensionally? It's kind of an important distinction."

"Oh hey, Booster, when did you get here... never mind, we've got a problem here. Are the Angels going to wipe timelines out of existence? Is it -urgent-? No? Then let's deal with... with whoever this Lori Morning is."

Squinting at Rokk's profile, ignoring his jibes, the Winathian peers. "Lori Morning...? With... Rond Vidar but not OUR Rond Vidar?" He pauses. "Come to think of it, what happened to Rond...? He disappeared? So did Brainy. Ugh..."

Nudging Booster, Garth sums up the Time Trapper: "Time Trapper... bad news. What does it matter whether she follows timelines or dimensions? Are you... wait, it says transferrence of time-energy here, Rokk. What... did chronal energy get transferred into -her-?"

"Well-- jeez, Boost, I got nothin'. I've always fought on the side of the angels," Cos tells Booster, deadpan. Nevermind his eyes briefly glimmer with teasing amusement. Then he lifts his hands defensively at Garth -- yes, staying on task, okay okay -- and snap-points to the image of the girl in the old profile. "She, as she was here, never time travelled by herself. And if you mean dimensional as in like the Fifth Dimension, no, this brand of weird's always only been timelines. But there are a *lot* of timelines. And when we're in the past like this, in the not-necessarily-correct past, all kinds of novel headache differences get introduced. I mean, we're already /in/ an alternate history. She could be in her /own/ history. See what I mean?"

Then Rokk reaches to separate the report and the profile into two different displays, and highlights the one Garth's asking about. "This dirjwaffle Chronos-- the David Clinton one, not the Walker Gabriel one-- made a deal with the devil to get better time travel powers. He sure did! Problem was, it aged him rapidly when he used it. So he figured out a way to jam his extra year accumulation into other people. Picked up a bunch of kids, shunted the energy off into them one at a time, left them something like eighty. Lori he only got partway with-- he was stopped when she'd gotten to about twenty. Funny thing is, at twenty?"

Rokk activates a third display now, and brings up some comparison images. A woman in an impossible set of heels and a silvery bad-taste bathing suit and a huge cape, and giant bone epaulets, with the same platinum blonde hair as the kid. Then a picture of, apparently, that same woman, but in a more standardized thirtieth-century-style bodysuit with a short jacket and a long ponytail, hanging out with Mon-El, who, right then, was dressed as Valor. Then a picture of a hooded woman in purple with her hair wrapped, and mystical symbols on her, and infinity signs and stuff, and a Legion belt around her waist, but the same jawline and mouth and nose as the other two pictures. "These are all iterations of Glorith, who's probably the dumbest Time Trapper."

Beside them, he pulls up a picture of a twenty-year-old Lori in the same hockey jersey, fitting her somewhat better, with a protoplasmic glob of something on her shoulder; both of them are waving at the camera, and Lori herself is grinning brightly. She's got the same face as Glorith. "After Rond snagged the excess chronal energy out of Lori on her eleventh birthday, the Glorith Trapper handed her an H-Dial. She tried so hard to join the Legion..." he trails off.

"Uh, it matters kind of a -lot-, Garth," Booster says to him, with a look askance. "Hey, who here navigated the time stream to travel here -on purpose-? Show of hands..." He raises his hand, looks around, then pointedly says to Garth, "Oh hey, look, only me." Folding his arms, Booster explains to Garth, "The difference is, if she follows a -timeline-, then looking for current evidence of her existence in the past could work. If she jumps dimensions... and an alternate timeline is technically another dimension... then we're not going to find evidence in the historical record."

Booster turns his attention back to Rokk's superpower-point presentation, and he says, "Ugh, I hate dealing with quantum uncertainty. That's a -lot- of math and I'm more kind of... visually oriented. So since you seem to know at least a version of this chick, Cos, do you think she snapped them through time on purpose? Or was it an accidental push?"

"Looks like Rokk found information on her anyway," Garth comments as he looks through the reports. "Though if they haven't shown up historically or in any of our records, that's... what does -that- mean Rokk? She can't have hopped into any of -our- timelines on our records, is that it?"

Now Garth frowns. "So how do you figure out -which- anywhen?"

"That," Rokk points to Garth at the last bit, "I have no idea. But what do I know, I'm just an ex-jock history nerd. We haven't got Brainy or Rond or Lyle, but we -have- got Booster here, and he's our best bet as a solid reference point, not to mention the current most experienced at this junk. We've also got friends outside the Legion. I know Amethyst's looking for help with something that /might/ involve Mordru, and Mordru and Glorith /have been/ an item in the past. Or at each other's throats. You know how that crap goes.

"Also, magic. Her time travel stuff is magic," he adds, nudging his chair around and looking up at Booster. "Glorith's, I mean. Which means Amy might be help with this anyway, since I haven't seen Dragonmage or Kinetix or Mysa around, either. She can probably tell if there's magical traces in the hall there. As to whether or not it's an accident? Well-- Lori-the-kid wouldn't do something like that on purpose. But someone could have made her do it, or herded her into doing it. There's a list of usual suspects, but the only way we're going to be able to narrow it down is by getting more information on /this/ event."

Last thing, he grins back at Garth. "What, you've never been in an unstable timeline before? If she hasn't subjectively left a message yet, it won't objectively become discoverable here until she does."

Booster rubs his chin, frowning a bit. "It sucks, it's like being lost without a map." There is a long pause, and then he snaps his fingers and says, "Wait. -Actually-." He gestures at the computer terminal, saying, "A while back, I left some information about my journey here, as well as a lot of visual data when in the timestream. I dunno if you ever looked at that stuff, but the footage includes stuff from just before I landed here. So it'd show the lines that radiate from this era into the past. If uh... Lori? Was that her name? If she follows timelines then she probably just followed one of those."

"The report you filed a while back when I... oh yeah." Reaching out to summon up a blank screen and then call up Booster's report, Garth considers it. "We could overlay the reports, compare which might have the most recent chronal activity, and try and match up the times of when Jazmin and Lori's intersected, can't we?"

"I did! But man, you know... that stuff doesn't make sense to me anymore. I can't process it. I mean, hell, I can't even time travel on purpose anymore without attracting a whole sprocking nassload of attention from the chronal powers that be," Rokk says, slouching into his gravchair. "But that sounds great to me, if you can do it. I'm going to keep scanning for tells-- tells in /everyone's/ omni-uploads, since they've all got their own universe's data on them when people get here-- and stay on the monitors. If anyone you talk to has questions about Lori, or about what I know about any of this stuff, I'm available-- but uh." He squints up at the other two. "I *am* actually on *assigned* monitor duty right now, so if you're gonna do that comparison stuff, go do it somewhere else."

After Garth brings up the data, Booster pokes at some of the visual footage, tracing some lines that are invisible to anyone who does not have any chronal sensitivities. "Well... yeah, I can see that this is complicated to look at in this format. We'll start processing it... Skeets and myself, I mean... and make a model from what we can get out of this. That'll be way easier to correlate with whatever else we can pull up. And we'll also go to the spot where Jaz got disappeared, there should still be temporal energy traces there and we want to read that before it dissipates."

"Right. Okay, gentlemen, we have a plan. Let's get to it."

... there's something scary about Garth when he's being serious now, is there?