Last Daughter of Krypton: Legion IC

[Varshanka]

Allana - the Past

A hundred voices sang as one, rich with harmonic sympathy, reciting words that had been handed down for generations. Rededicating themselves to the Order of Truth. Each of them was a Knight, but none of them wore their traditional armour, shield, and sword. Instead they wore the simple robes of a novice initiate. Pure white and unadorned by either Clan, rank, or heraldry.

Here and now.

They were all equals.

There were no Champions, Heroes, or Girls. Here and now they were all Knights of the Order.

And in front of them Knelt Allana Lang of the House of Kent. Initiate to the Order.

Around her stood a gathering of Knights, each of them marked in one way or another by their challenge to her right to join the Order. And just like each Knight that had knelt here in the centuries before her, she had accepted their challenges and won. They hadn’t treated her different, not for the shape of her body, or the color of her skin.

And she’d taught them a lesson or two as well. She was faster, harder to hurt, and just as ruthless as any of them. But she had Honor as well. She’d held back death blows, even thought it was allowed. She’d bandaged wounds of her enemies after the challenge was over. She’d neither taunted nor criticized her opponents, no matter how much they tried to goad her, she’d never taken the bait.

And she’d passed their tests, and as the last words of the oath slipped from her lips she was one of them. Not just a Knight of the Kingdom, but a Knight of the Order.

Through the centuries they had changed their name. The Order of Truth. The Brotherhood of Light. But behind all those names they had one name.

The Order.

 

[AmenRa]

The Manhunter

As J'onn had finished speaking to The Sandman and to the others gathered around, the weight of what he had spoken dawned upon him.

What if this was indeed the end of all things he knew?

J'onn, although unreasonably powerful, was still a living being, and like all such beings, he could be destroyed.

This battle yet to come was in his future, of that he was certain. The when and where and how was unknown, but he knew things would be revealed in due time.

And for that, he must be ready.

In his personal life as well as in his role as a Manhunter.

All this meant he had something he needed to give; a gift to bestow, another legacy to impart to someone dear to him.

And, if things came to pass at the end of all of this where he stood once again triumphant as the weight of the scales of justice, then it was all for the better. For then he will have given of himself and his secrets and his knowledge to her, the one, his truest love.

I have something I need to show you, he sent to her through the telepathic bond they now shared. It is time for us, Liz, to spend a few moments alone.

Come with me to my home.

Come with me to Mars.

 

[Abraxas Winterlight]

the Tardis

"Only two? Well, the first has a simple answer that is really very complex, and the other even more so. My name is Daniel, and I am the Representative of a Higher Power. A player in the Great game that has many pieces, and many moves left to complete. I am a child of Love, laughter, and Light. I, like you, meddle. I nudge things in the proper direction when I can, when He allows it.

I am the Scion of Heaven, and I was sent here to nudge you onto a task that is so very very important that we could only entrust it to someone who has known what you have. Pain, loss, and victory in the mouth of defeat. Over your long life you have known the range of human emotion, felt as they feel, mourned and laughed with them. You have what it takes to do this task."

He stood up, and moved over to the man in the coat. The last of a line of ancient and powerful beings. He placed his hand on his shoulder, and looked into eyes that had seen the width and depth of Time itself.

"As for what you are to do, well, you are going to wake the most powerful Icon in this reality. The one that is the key to all things about to come, and one who does not even realize she is the keystone.

You are going to wake up the Scion of Earth, Kara Zor El."

He walked back over to the controls then, giving them a glance and flipping a few levers.

"But first, there is something you missed that you need to see. It will cause you some pain I am afraid, but also will let you give up something that has been weighing you down. I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry, but I have to do this."

In silence the blue craft came to rest, and the door opened. A cold wind blew in, and flakes of snow swirled around the two men.

Out the door could be seen many many graves, and at the bottom of the hill they had landed on a funeral was in progress.

"It is time to say goodbye to your daughter James."

 

[Varshanka]

Squire Lang

Leaping of the fallen squire, his lifeblood pumping from his neck, Allana grabbed a knights fallen blade and charged. She had no right, no authority. She wasn’t trained enough, she didn’t have the skills. She didn’t have the sanction of the Knighthood.

But she had anger. She had drive. And she had Faith.

Her blade swung, slicing past the knights sword, slipping around his shield and armour, piercing his armour as it scrapped upwards and between plates. The knight screamed as the sharp blade punched into his chest. And with a gasp his eyes widened inside his helm, a bolter rising to fend off the wicked girl child that was his death.

A dagger, punched through his wrist armour, ripping through steel and tendon, muscle and sinew. Scrapping between bones it twisted, the wild squire snarling with hate. Bone bent, and snapped. Finger twitched and opened. And the bolter fell from destroyed fingers.

Scooping it up Allana grimaced with hate, the bolt round made a small neat hole in the fore helm, and a big bloody mess on the wall as the rear of the helmet detonated. Bone, metal, and gore splattering in a sickening wet splash.

Dropping to her knee she spun and fired again, not really knowing why. Only that she felt something bad behind her. The first round ruptured a knights knee, the bolter kicking upwards. The second round blasted a hole through his hip, he toppled sideways, his mouth opening his pain, blade clattering on ferrocrete steps as his hand grasped at his hip. The third bolt punched though his upper right chest, air wheezed through the hole in his lung. Gasping as he collapsed, falling down the steps he rolled like a limp metal doll. The clatter and clang loud in the passage.

Stepping to the side, Allana chased the corpse, kicking it faster as she gave chased. The knights that were coming up became clogged with the corpse, but that didn’t slow Allana. Instead of pausing and waiting for the knights to pass the dead armour, she leapt over it, the sharp blade passing between armour and helm. Helm and head rolled forwards, another foreign knight felled by an enraged squire.

A blade flashed for her head and she felt the ringing clang rip up her arm and into her shoulder. The pain followed a second later. Her hand tingled with shock and pain, and she desperately wanted to let go of the blade, but it was the only thing that would save her life.

Tightening her grip she grimaced in pain and lunged forwards, closing inside the knights reach, her unarmored knee slammed into the side of his armored one, the pain flashing lights inside her skull, but it was enough to push his leg outwards, and for a slim dagger to drive upwards, between steel armored plates and into the a man’s most sensitive of places.

The knight screamed. Oh, how he screamed, like a small girl child being covered in worms. High pitched and shrieking through her skull. “This is my home, you bastard,” she said, twisting the blade and pulling it out. Blood ran like a river, the femoral artery severed in an instant.

Vomiting the knight collapsed, dead before his armored form finished clattering. Gasping for breath Allana looked up, waiting for the fatal blow to fall on her head, shoulders, or neck. But it never came, the last knight falling forwards across his comrades, a quarrel bolt sticking from between his shoulders, the tip tickling his heart.

“Squire? Are you injured?”

“No, Sir Knight. I am not injured.” She replied, looking at the Knight of the Realm, and the squire behind him.

“Good, then find your Knight. The enemy is routed and retreating, we follow with a charge that will make sure they never try this again. Filthy Skarans.”

 

[ChasNicollette]

Gl 2261.

I have something I need to show you, he sent to her through the telepathic bond they now shared. It is time for us, Liz, to spend a few moments alone.

Come with me to my home.

Come with me to Mars.

She moved towards him, the shadows that clothed her eyes in lieu of a mask glimmering softly in their own unlight.

This was hardly the time for frivolousness.

But if not now, then when?

She smiled one of her rare rare smiles.

And glanced at this new Batman, whom J'onn trusted all but implicitly, and this new Sandman, whom J'onn treated with respect.

"The kids are all right," she murmured. "But. Keep an eye on them for us?"

She turned to face J'onn, and she touched her forehead to the top of his chest, and placed her hands upon his hips, and breathed in the scent of him with eyes closed.

"Allons-y," she suggested, which had been her grandfather's battlecry long before it had been that of The Legion.

"Let's go."

 

[ChasNicollette]

The Doctor. (written with Abraxas Winterlight and his Wraith)

The Scion of Heaven introduced himself, and The Doctor fought against his own scepticism, raged against this... idea given flesh.

There had been a Devil once, long ago in a history that had now only ever happened for The Doctor. And this Devil claimed he had been chained by Disciples of The Light before Time had even held sway. The Doctor had always meant to ask about them. Find out about these Disciples of The Light.

Apparently he was in the presence of their high priest. Their Chief Apostle.

"'Daniel,'" he murmured. "I ran into another bloke with that name. Not so very long ago. You'd like him, I think."

He stood up, and moved over to the man in the coat. He placed his hand on his shoulder, and looked into eyes that had seen the width and depth of Time itself.

The Doctor had joked about taking the last room at The Inn at The First Christmas, he'd pointed out that he'd known what had happeend at The First Easter, he'd been a rooftop away when a carpenter's son had had that fateful conversation with Nicodemus, he'd helped Mary and Joseph look for that brilliant little twelve-year-old whilst that brilliant little twelve-year-old had been roundly defeating the temple intelligentsia in a remarkable theological pub quiz.

But he'd never looked a Scion of The Light in the eyes before.

And they were such beautiful terrible eyes.

He could see Daniel's timeline overlap with other men, other women, wholly human but wholly holy, reincarnations; he'd had the same sensation, or similar, gazing upon Khufu and Chay-Ara when he'd run into them in this world's past. Life after life, the same but different, theirs had overlapped off into the future, Daniel's... Daniel's reached back into the eternal past. One of those lives had been that brilliant little twelve-year-old, that carpenter, that Christmas, that Easter. And there had been others.

Regeneration, he realised with a mix of startlement and bemusement, doesn't begin to cover it.

He was talking: "As for what you are to do, well, you are going to wake the most powerful Icon in this reality. The one that is the key to all things about to come, and one who does not even realize she is the keystone.

You are going to wake up the Scion of Earth, Kara Zor El."

The Doctor smiled grimly, understandingly. "That's funny. We were just talking about Her."

He walked back over to the controls then, giving them a glance and flipping a few levers.

The Doctor watched Daniel again with that mingled jealous prickle, gently touched another part of The Console and again felt his ship's gentle reassurance.

'Where are we going?' he wondered, echoing a novel by a Christian author. 'Where are you taking us?'

As if reading his thoughts, or perhaps his timeline, Daniel replied to The Doctor's unspoken queries: "But first, there is something you missed that you need to see. It will cause you some pain I am afraid, but also will let you give up something that has been weighing you down. I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry, but I have to do this."

In silence the blue craft came to rest, and the door opened. A cold wind blew in, and flakes of snow swirled around the two men.

Out the door could be seen many many graves, and at the bottom of the hill they had landed on a funeral was in progress.

His eyes rested on the stones and the snows and his hearts caught in his throat, he couldn't breathe, respiratory bypass system be damned.

"It is time to say goodbye to your daughter James."

He didn't say a word. He only gave The Scion of Heaven a darksome, bitter look.

He'd died before his daughter, his human life had. And he'd always meant to come back. To explain. But he never had.

He'd avoided seeing this. He'd run from it as though his soul had depended on it.

But just as he had needed to be a Time Lord to help save this Universe as it was now, he had needed to be human for awhile.

And it seemed that, for whatever reason, Daniel needed The Doctor to remember what that had been like.

Single-hearted and short-lived and containing just the merest barest hint of his true self, his soul-- if you could call it that --transposed into a modified Chameleon Watch. But he'd lived a real life, day after day, the one adventure he'd thought he could never have.

And it had been. An adventure. Right to his last breath.

And then he'd heard a familiar voice-- and he'd staggered into The TARDIS--

--he'd left his daughter behind.

Taking a breath, and gathering his coat around him once more, he gave Daniel one more last lingering look, and then the sole of a green Chuck Taylor found the crunch of snow. It was cold. Not quite as cold as The Ood-Sphere, but cold as it ever got in a Kansas winter.

He tugged at his coat collar and he put his hands in his pockets, and he stood and watched for a moment. And then walked closer.

A voice was singing.

A beautiful voice.

Ceri and Alec Greystone stood with their father, who appeared incongrously old. (Liz was gone, gone to enslavement and eventual adventure. And there were others, of course, friends and family and grandchildren and legends, but these were the ones on whom The Doctor's eyes focused. These and one other.)

Their mother lay, silver-haired and beautiful, hands folded over her heart, in a coffin suspended over a grave not far from where they'd buried Ceri McCrimmon.

Ceri Greystone was the one singing. She looked so very much like her mother, and in turn like their long-descended Jaymie. She had her mother's powers, and she had her mother's voice.

She sang, and it was eerie in the hush of the snow-swept space.

The Doctor staggered, there, leaning hard upon a gravestone, tears pinpricking at the backs of his eyes. He remembered holding Rose for the first time, utterly bewildered, completely unsure what he'd helped wright. He remembered reading her storybooks, he remembered fighting with her mother, he remembered them leaving him in Keystone.

...he remembered their reunion, the stolen car, the train accident, the explosion. He remembered trying to teach her how to fly and he remembered her taking a header off of the roof.

He remembered gathering with her and with others around Ceri McCrimmon, an arrow in her heart, and being told with her to be what he was born to be, such a prophetic statement.

The tears ran down his face and his eyes clenched shut as he hovered there on the fringes of that mourning clan, and he reflected on the morbid coincidence of his having worn black today.

...he remembered his mother in his human life, a curious aspect of the retroactive continuity that had embedded his human self in this timeline while it was still solidifying around him, Rosemary Hamilton. And he remembered the other woman after whom he'd named his daughter.

...Rose Marion Tyler.

His knees quaked and he clutched at the spot on his chest between his two hearts and he barely stayed standing. It hurt.

It hurt when the ones you loved aged to dust and you were left standing, always always the only one left. It hurt so very very much, the crushing guilt of the ultimate survivor.

He remembered burying other children. From a timeline long gone. He remembered his own Mum and Dad and brother and rival and Jenny and Susan.

A whole timeline had passed away and he had survived and even the people here that he loved, so very many of them had died and he had gone on without them.

This was his daughter. This beautiful daughter, this was his.

The preacher was reading words, Alec was hugging young Ceri and had his hand on his father's shoulder. They were beautiful words, somehow Norse and Christian and Everything Else all at once, the funerary rites of The Remnant, they'd read the same words at Rose's mother's funeral.

He hovered there at the edge, watching his beautiful daughter lay there in the coffin amidst the swirl of snow. And he took solace, that while in his own world there had been no Heaven that he'd ever found, no sacred great beyond that he'd ever gate-crashed, in this world there was a place for souls to reside that aspired to greater than this life.

And she would go there. She belonged there, her Narnia. She always had.

The preacher closed the great book he carried, and from somewhere music began to rise, another song, a theme for Rose.

Alec moved away from his sister and his father and gently closed the coffin as the notes rose up to the winter sky.

The Doctor's fingers trembled, holding tight to the stone beside him, and he watched in enraptured agony as the coffin slowly lowered into the sacrosanct earth.

Tears blurred his vision, and he sobbed achingly.

"I love you," he mumbled. "I love you, Rosy. Be good. Be a-- be a good girl."

She sank to the bottom of the lovingly-carved pit, and Ceri Greystone stepped forward and dropped a flower, a single rose, white and red, fire and ice, onto the lid of the coffin.

The Doctor shuddered and sighed and wiped at his face, and his vision briefly cleared, and he saw...

Looking first at his daughter, and then at his son, the aged Kyle Greystone then turned his gaze upon those there gathered.

"I love you all," he spoke, in that voice he had that was kind when it wanted to be and booming when it needed to be. "Just as she loved you."

He wore a ring that glinted in the half-hearted winter sunlight, and he removed this ring, slid it from his finger. As it left his fingertip, he shimmered, and flickered, and there stood not an age-old man but a man of 25, lantern-jawed and blond and with piercing bio-luminescent lavender eyes. He had disguised himself with mortality with a chameleonic bauble, but he shed that disguise.

"I'm sure you'll do just fine without the both of us; I can't stay here without her."

...there came the sound of a haunted house moaning, and even the graves seemed to tremble, and when the shadowy smoke cleared from where Kyle stood, Wraith stood in his place. "Carry on. Be brave when the world tells you to be afraid, and find strength in all the things the world calls weakness."

"'Become who you were born to be.'"

...and again the shadows moaned as they claimed him, and this time he did not emerge. He was gone.

The Doctor murmured, standing a little bit taller, just a little bit: "'Further up and further in.'"

And slowly, hugging himself, rubbing his arms, he turned and limped back towards The TARDIS, little aware if anyone saw him.

Behind him on the snow, into one of his shoeprints, landed a black feather, far too large to belong to any Earthly raven. And then, having lingered for a moment, it blew away.

 

[AmenRa]

The Face of Mars

She turned to face J'onn, and she touched her forehead to the top of his chest, and placed her hands upon his hips, and breathed in the scent of him with eyes closed.

"Allons-y," she suggested, which had been her grandfather's battlecry long before it had been that of The Legion.

"Let's go."

They had moved out of the Legion building, and with a whirlwind of speed that threatened to bend the space/time continuum itself, J'onn J'onzz took them towards the Heavens.

Liz had her own Ring, a Ring of power itself, yet J'onn now bathed her in a quiet azure glow from his Ring as he cradled her against him. Their forms seemed to be unified as the atmosphere of Earth gave way to the nothingness of space, and as they headed into the stars beyond they left behind a trail of blue.

It was to the Red Planet he took them, traveling there directly, and making orbit around Mars once before he swiftly brought them through the planet's night terminator to its barren soil. A view of the myriad of domes heralding the planet's multitude of atmosphere encased living and working areas could be seen, as well as connecting tubes between the domes for transport vehicles. All of this, however, was bypassed without a glance from the Martian Manhunter as he allowed Liz's feet to softly touch the ground at the base of the giant Face of Mars.

Some scientist had theorized this structure had belonged to an ancient race that once inhabited this world. And, over the years, scientific expedition teams in environental protective suits had attempted to study the Face and gain access to it.

None had succeeded.

Yet when J'onn J'onzz stepped to the plain wall that faced where he and Liz touched down, there appeared a doorway, like a rectangular crack in the Face's stone side. And J'onn placed a hand against this door, his hand now oddly having only four fingers, and the door slid backwards and up.

J'onn beckoned Liz into the doorway, and once she was inside, the door sealed itself and a soft lighting came on from high in the mist above them. Then, an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere formed itself around them, and J'onn disengaged the blue light that had protected the Green Lantern thus far.

The room where they now stood was large and comfortable. There were seating cushions arrayed about the stone floor, and a pit in the center that held a curious flame of green fire. There were statues along one wall, clearly of Martians long since past, and each of them wore a uniform similar to that which J'onn was recognized in most of the time. On the walls of the semi-circular room was engravings of Martian script, and pictographs not unlike the heiroglyphs seen in Egyptian pyramids. Above them, a foggy mist seemed to hang, illuminated from beyond by an unseen lightsource that gave the room a tranquil quality. And, just beyond them on the other side of the room was an archway that seemed to lead farther into the Face's depths.

"This place," J'onn told her as he took her hand in his, "is sacred to me. As it was to my people so long ago. In this place, in the space where you now stand, is where I took my oath as a Manhunter, so doing before the eyes of the Manhunters before me," he indicated the statues, "and my mother stood just there," he nodded his head to an area near the fire pit.

"The flame burns here now, as it always has, since time even I do not remember," he told Liz. "It is the Flame of Justice, and it burns green for the right and not for the White, but once it burned red like the planet itself. So when the Curse was upon us, the Flame changed of its own accord, and has burned green ever since." He said nothing more about the Flame, because it was something he could not explain.

He looked down at her with his red eyes and he smiled, and he took just a moment to place a small kiss on her lips.

"But come, and see," he said as he pointed to the archway on the other side of the room, "because as much as there is history here, there is even more than you could imagine in the next room, in H'ronmeer's temple."

 

[Wyldfire]

And the catch up begins.

~Deep space~

"Empress I have news from that outlying sector of space you wanted watched. Message relaying." At the second thought the message was replayed to her.

Tharok reached out and picked up the glass of wine next to his hardware. Taking a drink he redirected his thoughts before the Empress answered. He scratched that task off his list and took the time to go over the same list for his next quarry. Mother box? No, too much work. The cursed weapons of Crimson? Too out of date and too specific. The Obsidian Orb of Talok? Possible. But enough magic for now. Time for some quality time.

He began the search engines. Search subject: Slaver disintegrators. Stasis boxes. Pak weapons of war. And the massive search engines went to work.

Tharok laughed to himself as he took another sip of the wine. "The Coluan would never admit it, I know, but my gear is as good as his. He just can't stand that his pedigree is more purely evil than mine. He should just embrace what he is. Maybe I ought to see if I can't just manage to give him a push in that direction sometime very soon."

"That dear Tharok is a marvelous idea." came the smooth voice of the Five's leader. "But there are others on that team I believe we could draw in more easily. Send coordinates to Mano and the rest of my Legion. We shall meet there and make the Starheart mine."

"On it Empress. Meet you there."

 

[Wyldfire]

Vi had just seen Gim off to the big meeting and was in the proccess of checking on Ord's condition when a portal opened.

...and into the Medbay, the portal closing behind him as it was apparently rerouted back to The Hall.

Glancing hesitantly at Element Lad and Shrinking Violet, he no longer felt nearly so confident as he had done. He stood over the damaged Dawnstar and held up his hand, flexing his fingers, implying the metagene he'd inherited from his predecessor Uno.

"Hey," he attempted. "Can I help?"

Violet was just about completely tired of portals opening in the Medbay and was about to go into livid detail at the intruding sproking cadet When Dawnstar's readings went off the chart and the winged Legionnaire shrieked as she sat bolt upright. She looked about the med bay and then noticed the new additions to her costume.

Before she could make any sort of comment or ask any sort of question a voice blew through her mind like a warm comforting wind "Let the newest of my fellow corpsmen know that you are his Falcon now. Let J'onn know he has this generation's incarnation of the bride"

She shook the voice out of her head as best she could and asked "How long have I been out?"

 

[Wyldfire]

Back in the cheap seats.

Jed had managed to work his way back to the rest of the cadets, glad that the attention of M'onel had left him for more important matters. He'd gone back into his comfort zone with the rest of the never will bes and never could bes. He knew he was kicking his self needlessly but in some regards it was true.

He was the oldest of the academy members to have never gotten the nod to move up to the main team. Lamprey, Crystal Kid, and Nightwind's powers were a bit too specialized to make the team and Grev had his cousin ahead of him. Caroline had been one of their class of students, but she'd made the team like they all had known she would. That left slow old farm kid Jed looking like the rube.

And here it went, no sooner had he thought of her and she spoke up, being all beautiful and motivational. Jed just kept back with the rest of the cadets and quietly promised God above that he would make sure Caroline was as great as she would be. That she would shine as brightly as her ancestress.

No matter what he had to do, she would be safe and the best hero in the entire U.P.

 

[Wyldfire]

Geardome. I see where you guys are going.

Shvaughn was still decoding the intercepted message when she picked up another and then two more. The first new one was apparently an answer to the first, then a reply and a transmission to a third vessel.

The five were in three groups. Now just to figure out where they were going, because they were in fact going somewhere. All three ships had all changed course and a quick triangulation of the courses gave her only one real target location. And that location had two inactive flight rings on it as well as a big red DO NOT ENTER sign on it by the U.P., The Lallorian coucil, the Khundian Empire, and the Dominators.

Her voice shook as she piped it through to the meeting room "Umm, guys? I know where the Five and a whole Legion of Super Villains are going. It's got to do with why the Batman is here too. We need to get the whole team to the location of the Starheart."

 

[Wyldfire]

The Themyscira Museum. More old timers to fly thread.

She walked through the museum with a purpose. She'd done as she had sworn she would when the time was here and now it was time for her to gather her two candidates for the heart.

She walked past the statue of Hippolyta and ran a hand along the hem of the gown it wore. "You know mother, there are times I feel I failed you by letting our nation be subsumed into Man's world." She continued her course to the area she hated the most in the entire place. Her exhibit.

The first thing she had to face was that costume. What had ever made her think that had been a good idea, pandering to the flaws of man. Oh she'd tried justifying it but honestly she had been vain. Most of the women in Man's world couldn't have worn that costume. Pure amazonian vanity was all it was. She looked over the (she thought at least) gaudy displays of the things she had achieved. She looked away before she saw what she felt was her greatest betrayal. The signing of the Unification accord that unified the nations of Earth into "Earthgov". She was sure that if Arthur had been alive Atlantis would never have signed that piece of work accord.

She found what she was looking for in all of the frippery of her life. It almost slithered out of it's containment to get to her. A gift from a now deceased race that had visited Earth long ago. It was the Lansinar disk. It hadn't seemed to be sentient when she received it but since the time of the race's passing the disk had picked up a personality of sorts. Almost like a dog's or a horse's. She knew she would need it for this journey and it seemed more than happy to oblige her.

At the display of the various Wonder girls she stopped. She looked at the figure that had been Cassie. Her second ward, Cassandra Sandsmark. Demi goddess daughter of Zeus. She had been such a good kid. Pity that she'd had to die saving the world like so many of the younger heroes had.

Her revery was broken by a young red headed woman. "Grand aunt, you called for me?"

Diana's heart caught in her throat as it did anytime her Niece caught her off guard. She looked exactly like her grand mother, exactly like Artemis. She composed herself and replied "Yes Morenna, I did. It's time. Time to see if you have the heart and courage for Uncle Alan to feel safe passing the mantle to you."

The young red head made a small pout, looking towards Diana's old costume. "I'd rather have your old mantle Aunt Diana. I would make the Earthgov remember the Themyscirans, Make them remember the Wonder woman."

"And what did I tell you about that dream little one? You are not yet a woman and you will not wear that shameless thing." she pointed instead to Donna's old costume. "That will be the one you may wear if the heart chooses another. With the name to go with it."

"So we are going to bring Aunt Donna to see if the heart will be able to save her? To see if she might become the next Sentinnel?"

Again Diana's face flinched. "Yes child we are. I promised her the day that I shattered that accuresed Black Diamond that I would one day find a way of seperating that damned spirit of evil from her soul."

As the two continued discussing what the trip would entail they walked. Out of the museum to the terrace that was large enough for what was to come. As they arrived a pair of young museum interns had brought forth the New Genesis stasis chamber. In it was a young raven haired woman in a black body suit with red stars up the outside of her legs. Marring the beautiful face was a black crescent moon shape. The mark of Eclipso.

Diana tossed the disk into the air and it began to contort and stretch. It continued this and became more and more transluscent as it took on it's eventual invisible shape of a vessel not seen since the grand age of the League. Diana and her charges would travel to Alan in an invisible Javelin.

 

[ChasNicollette]

The Doctor.

He lurched into The TARDIS, and this time, as he pulled the door shut behind him, as the lock clicked into place behind him, he didn't even bother removing his great coat.

Kicking the snow off of his shoes, he walked up the gangplank to The Console, his amulet gleaming, the crystal heavy in his pocket.

"Right," he declared to Daniel without looking at him. "My turn next. Quick pit stop."

He snapped a series of switches tick-tick-tick-tick, and he spun a dial, and he thumbed a calibration plunger hard.

He smiled grimly. "There's another place I've been meaning to visit. And while we're walking down Memory Lane, I think I should get to call a few of the shots, eh? Time Lord's prerogative."

A little shake of his head, and after they'd safely, quietly dematerialised, he snapped the primary brake back on and That Noise filled The Console Room with grinding, wooshing, moaning echoes.

He smirked a little smirk, I don't come into Your House and tell you how to chase out moneychangers, hmmm?

When The TARDIS landed, The Doctor squinted at Daniel. "Stay indoors. Just be a mo'."

And then explained, without explaining: "I need a drink."

...and stepped out into a snow that was nothing like Kansas snow.

Well. Almost nothing like.

********​

The door creaked open a few moments later, and he came in carrying a pair of incongruous-seeming drink trays, each loaded with four drinks, and a virgin banana daiquiri in a takeaway cup kind of cradled in one of his arms. Eight different kinds of drink plus one.

"Sorry," he frowned, squinting at Daniel. "Sorry, took longer than I thought."

He kicked the door shut and glanced down at himself. "(Erm. Did you want anything? Only I'd need more hands, and since I haven't regenerated into a hermaphrodite hexapod...)"

Jogging over to The Console, he set the drink trays down on the bench seat, snapped a cup-holder out of The Console itself to place his daiquiri in, and then tossed his coat away. He spun to face Daniel and, game face on, offered The Scion of Heaven a puckish grin.

"Right then, where were we?"

He paused, affecting a pondering pose. "(Barcelona?)"

Then snapped his fingers, pointed at Daniel. "No! Right! North!"

He slammed down a lever and The TARDIS launched into motion, and he grinned up at The Time Rotor as it surged up and down in the column at the centre of the room.

"(Lots of planets have a North.)"

 

[Varshanka]

Allana - Hall of the Legion

Returning to M’Onel, Allana said nothing, considering everything. Worried that she would fail. Fail them, the Holy Church, the Order, her comrades – both old and new, and for some reason, she was afraid she’d fail M’Onel. Her eyes, hidden by the cowl of her cloak had a haunted look to them, a look of inner pain and torment.

Standing beside him, penitent, she waited for words of scorn at her audacity to speak to the Master of the Chapter, the Lord of the Legion, without permission or request. The soft material of her cloak whispered as she walked, swirling around her feet as she came to a stop, silent. Penitent. If she wasn’t struck down for her audacity, she’d show this Legion what it meant to be a Knight of the ORDER!

Finally speaking up she whispered, "I apologize if my words or actions have brought disgrace or shame upon thee."

 

[ChasNicollette]

Tattered Remnants.

(( Definitely, definitely not canon.

Just a little writing exercise. ))


"And who are you supposed to be, little girl?" Tharok sneered, narrowing his human eye at the figure before them.

"I am that which remains," replied Carrie Brown-Drake, crouching in the entryway to the lobby of The Themysciran Museum, grimly regarding The Fatal Five.

The Empress snorted. "If you say so. I say we take this remainder and divide by zero..."

The Remnant unslung her bow, and nocked an arrow.

"Very well then."

"By the numbers."

The Emerald Eye had already unleashed a massive cannon-bolt of green energy before The Empress had even finished her dismissive gesture, but Carrie was already moving, firing the arrow at what passed for Validus' face even as the gargantua loomed over her, crackling with psychoelectric force...

...the arrow splintered against the transparent pane that made up Validus' massive forehead, and Validus-- screamed, juddering and shuddering as he stood there, clutching at his jawline, clawing at where his eyes would have been.

...cerebro-scrambler arrow.

Effective against a being that is all brain and no thought.

It was, of course, just a delaying tactic. But in a no-win situation like this, stalling itself was a victory.

Without even slowing down, The Remnant reached for another arrow, and even as she did so, she spoke: "Omnicom. Xmit function. Access keyword Prometheus, filename neural chaff."

"Execute."

Scowling, The Empress commanded The Emerald Eye to reach out and crush The Remnant in a glowing green fist, just reduce her to a smear...

...but then...

...then she couldn't...

...funny noises and jangly lights, what was-- what was she-- it made no sense--

--The Eye's construct flickered and decohered before it could form, and The Eye regarded The Empress bewilderedly: "Mistress. Eye am confused."

"I need," The Empress mumbled, rubbing her temples. "I need only moments-- my will is-- my will is indomitable--"

Neural chaff effective against Green Lantern Kyle Rayner in 21st Century.

Stood to reason could work against Empress.

Another delaying tactic.

The second arrow that Carrie had nocked hurtled across the room towards Tharok, and he caught it effortlessly in his cybernetic hand. "Pointed sticks. You'll be using rocks to start fires next."

The Remnant didn't rise to his bait-- she just immediately fired another arrow.

...his hand was full. ...he couldn't catch this one. ...it went right into his cybernetic eye. And started to vibrate. To emit a squealing sonic cry that used his own metal skull as an echo chamber, jarring his every servo-motor at the same time as the hypersound battered the equilibrium of his own inner ear...

...he fell to his knees, teeth chattering.

By the numbers. Next we have--

Mano lunged at The Remnant, his sword cutting her bow and bowstring clean in twain. "You little witch, let's see you make mischief without that."

The Remnant reeled back, evading his blade and his touch, just barely, just barely, his right hand's fingertips grazed her cape and singed it...

"Acceptable," she replied. And drew her own swords.

Their confrontation took barely seconds, two masters at bladecraft, him lashing and flashing at her with his sword while she parried frenziedly with her wakizashi...

...and then she deflected a strike, and as he adjusted his stance, she counterstruck...

...carving a Z into the chest of his environment suit.

Mano squawked with rage and surprise, lashed out at her with his right hand while he could still breathe and stand and fight...

...but she dropped one blade, caught his wrist with an aikido flourish, and powered a kick hard into the center of that Z.

He skidded back, tumbled to the ground, gasping for breath, but without a sound Carrie's hand went to her belt pouches--

--and flung a trio of small red-and-gold shuriken at him.

Birdarangs.

The shuriken struck Mano as he lay on the ground and blossomed into a oozing, sticky substance that glued him to the floor, sealed the leak in his suit, and kept him from lifting his hand to his own defense.

...specifically, gooparangs.

"You little sprock!"

"Yes," The Remnant agreed.

But she was already focused on what was coming next--

"Hrrrrraaaahhh!"

The Persuader's axe blurred through the air where she had been standing only seconds ago-- only the added evasive capabilities of her Legion Flight Ring kept her head on her shoulders.

"I'ma enjoy hacking you to pieces," The Persuader growled. "I ain't no lightweight."

"No," The Remnant agreed.

The Persuader was a force to be reckoned with.

She drew one of her guns-- the guns of The Crimson Avenger, leveled it at his masked face.

The Persuader harrumphed. "Yeah, that'll help."

She fired.

Without even blinking, he sliced the bullet out of the air. The bullets of these guns had been known to crack open Dilustel armor, even wound The Icon, the one called Supergirl. But that axe, that impossible Atomic Axe...

She fired again.

He moved towards her even as he clove that round in twain, she could hear him chuckle.

She fired again.

The Persuader swatted the bullet away as though swatting a fly.

Her free hand moved, again darting to her belt, another birdarang flew at the villain, one more step and he'd be in swinging distance with the axe...

...he sliced the birdarang with even less effort than he'd sliced the bullets.

...and he raised that axe over his head.

And the Remnant laughed. A small, short, gruff sound. "Hh."

"Yeah," The Persuader snorted, "you'll be laughing out the other end of your neck in a minute."

And then pinpricks began to light up along the surface of his uniform, around his mask, upon the bare portions of his skin. "What the spr--"

--the marble floors cracked under him, and with a snarling bray of disbelief, he collapsed to the ground, to his knees, barely able to lift his own arms, let alone the axe.

Electrogravitic nanite swarm encased in 'rang. Designed for use against superstrong airborne foes, pinning them to Earth. Still in prototype stages. Successful test.

And yet... and yet... The Persuader's high-gravity upbringing made him the toughest of tough customers, he began to force himself back up, to quiveringly lift the axe again, to grit his teeth and power upwards...

The Remnant narrowed her eyes at him.

"Reverse," she decided.

...and with a startled scream, The Persuader shot skyward, blasting up through the ceiling of the lobby and up and up and away...

Science Police would probably intercept him in the atmospheric shipping lanes, he'd never hit orbit.

Probably.

...but The Remnant didn't have time to rejoice at The Persuader's defeat, not for one second, because.

Because Tharok managed to reach up with trembling robotic fingers and yank that arrow out of his robotic eye-socket, crushing the sonic arrowhead. And then he began jamming the neural chaff transmission, which revived The Empress.

And The Empress used The Eye to stabilize Validus' scrambled brain...

...all in the space of a second.

...but a second was all The Remnant needed.

Her hand flew to her belt, drew her grapnel, her grapnel launched...

...the cable looped around The Emerald Eye and with a scream of effort The Remnant hauled...

...whipped The Eye like an Olympian's hammer-throw into the open roaring mouth of Validus...

...The Remnant's other hand still held a gun of The Crimson Avenger.

She fired.

Her bullet drilled into The Eye just as it landed in Validus' mouth.

The Eye exploded, green concussion and green cacophony and green Apocalypse. Validus toppled like a chainsawed redwood, and the shockwave that burst from him knocked Tharok and The Empress and The Remnant alike ass over teakettle...

...the room trembled and smouldered, its ancient marble pillars rattled by the blast, and in the wreckage, bleeding and bruised, The Remnant staggered to her feet, and drew both guns now.

"Is-- is-- that sufficient?"

********​

"Holy sprock," Cosmic Boy opined, eyes wide, watching from the observation deck as the simulation room faded to blank walls around The Remnant.

Garth, meanwhile, punched the sky with both fists. "The Mark of sprockin' Zorro, man! I'm still geeking out about that!"

Saturn Girl shook her head. "It doesn't matter that The Eye would recohere, she still technically took its life, that's a little bloodthirsty for Legion deputization."

"Yeah, agreed," Rokk nodded, glancing at Imra.

Jazmin scoffed lightly. "Fine, I'll go tell Timber Wolf and Catspaw to pack their bags."

("The Mark of Zorro," Garth wheezed with laughter, clapping Brainy on the back-- Brainy, of course, looking extremely put out that his simulation had been bested, he must not have perfectly grokked the tactical algorithms.

"Zorro nuthin'," Wildfire retorted, "did you see those fireworks? I still got afterimages on my sensory wavelengths!")

"It's worth noting," Batman 3010 pointed out, pale lenses half-lidded, as Cos asked Vi to go patch The Remnant's hurt, "that I actually didn't have any part of her training."

Allana regarded the Robin-colored madwoman with a certain... understanding. "But this training. It includes elements of The Ancient Order of Saint Dumas. She is truly a Knight, in her way, or at least a Knight in training. Mayhap I couldst--"

Batman cut that off with a gesture. "Ohhhhh, no, M'Lady Lang. You wanted a cadet to be your Squire, you got the sun-helmeted guy. Besides, if anyone's going to 'fix' The Remnant, it's me."

Allana grimaced. "Verily. I suppose Aztek be not entirely useless, though his pagan mythology maketh little sense."

[Well,] Olivia opined in Jason's ear, [isn't that just pot and kettle.]

Jason had to remind himself that guffawing randomly totally didn't go with the whole Batman mystique.

 

[ChasNicollette]

M'onel, Dream Girl, et al. Assembly Hall.

(( We now return you to your regularly scheduled continuity, already in progress. ))

Returning to M’Onel, Allana said nothing, considering everything. Worried that she would fail. Fail them, the Holy Church, the Order, her comrades – both old and new, and for some reason, she was afraid she’d fail M’Onel. Her eyes, hidden by the cowl of her cloak had a haunted look to them, a look of inner pain and torment.

Standing beside him, penitent, she waited for words of scorn at her audacity to speak to the Master of the Chapter, the Lord of the Legion, without permission or request. The soft material of her cloak whispered as she walked, swirling around her feet as she came to a stop, silent. Penitent. If she wasn’t struck down for her audacity, she’d show this Legion what it meant to be a Knight of the ORDER!

Finally speaking up she whispered, "I apologize if my words or actions have brought disgrace or shame upon thee."

Lar had been, to say the least, profoundly moved, by the revelation of The Martian and his great triumphant call to arms.

And when people experience emotion that profound, they process it in different ways. Some sing praises, hallelujahs, others kneel with their fist over their heart and their head bowed... others still simply stand stunned into the silence of awe.

M'onel had missed Earth's great Ages of Heroes, the time of the secret Society, the rise and fade of The League...

...but he was watching the coming of a New Age, and he could feel it in his unbreakable bones.

When Lang returned to him and turned to him, he gazed at her in bewilderment for a moment-- it took even his accelerated neurology whole seconds to dislodge itself from that sense of wonder and to regain traction on the present.

"What?" he frowned. "No. You just-- swore an oath of Valor."

"If I dared ridicule you for that, well, let's just say I'd be the world's worst hypocrite."

********​

It was then, despite all the other chaos, all the rest of everything going on, that green light pulsed in a corner of The Hall...

...and the contingent from Steeple emerged.

"What?" Merick's Ghost blinked, looked around. "Okay, so, I don't always arrive precisely when I mean to, but that was weird."

"Steeple's constellation of black holes," Nura shook her head resignedly. "Skewed your trajectory on its w-axis, the temporal aspect of your vector." She shrugged, her slender shapely shoulders rising and falling. "Brainy'll explain it later, that's just the abridged version."

But then her eyes darted away from the others, and swept the crowd, and found Powergirl right where she thought she'd be.

"Excuse me," Nura apologized, her bright and optimistic face suddenly burdened with glorious purpose, and hurried towards the inherited Kryptonian.

"Caroline," she murmured as she approached. "Things are going to start falling like-- like old Earth dominoes, now. They're going to need you at The Fortress, and sooner would be better than later."

 

[ChasNicollette]

Element Lad, Aztek. Medbay.

Vi had just seen Gim off to the big meeting and was in the proccess of checking on Ord's condition when a portal opened.

...and into the Medbay, the portal closing behind him as it was apparently rerouted back to The Hall.

Glancing hesitantly at Element Lad and Shrinking Violet, he no longer felt nearly so confident as he had done. He stood over the damaged Dawnstar and held up his hand, flexing his fingers, implying the metagene he'd inherited from his predecessor Uno.

"Hey," he attempted. "Can I help?"

Violet was just about completely tired of portals opening in the Medbay and was about to go into livid detail at the intruding sproking cadet When Dawnstar's readings went off the chart and the winged Legionnaire shrieked as she sat bolt upright. She looked about the med bay and then noticed the new additions to her costume.

Before she could make any sort of comment or ask any sort of question a voice blew through her mind like a warm comforting wind "Let the newest of my fellow corpsmen know that you are his Falcon now. Let J'onn know he has this generation's incarnation of the bride"

She shook the voice out of her head as best she could and asked "How long have I been out?"

Dawnstar's awakening may well have saved Aztek's life, but even with that helmet obscuring most of his face, Element Lad could still see the confusion in the cadet.

Jan held up a palm to his fellow holy man, and shook his head lightly. Now would be the time for reverent silence rather than petitions and questions and the laying-on of hands.

Cuatro hesitated, then nodded, hands going to his sides.

Addressing Dawnstar's question, Jan tucked his hands into the sleeves of his crossed arms and smiled a faint little smile.

"You have been out," he explained, "not terribly long, but longer than we would have liked, and longer still than would sit well with you. But you are back with us in the moment, and that is all one can ask for."

 

[ChasNicollette]

GL 2261. The Face of Mars.

They had moved out of the Legion building, and with a whirlwind of speed that threatened to bend the space/time continuum itself, J'onn J'onzz took them towards the Heavens.

Liz had her own Ring, a Ring of power itself, yet J'onn now bathed her in a quiet azure glow from his Ring as he cradled her against him. Their forms seemed to be unified as the atmosphere of Earth gave way to the nothingness of space, and as they headed into the stars beyond they left behind a trail of blue.

It was to the Red Planet he took them, traveling there directly, and making orbit around Mars once before he swiftly brought them through the planet's night terminator to its barren soil. A view of the myriad of domes heralding the planet's multitude of atmosphere encased living and working areas could be seen, as well as connecting tubes between the domes for transport vehicles. All of this, however, was bypassed without a glance from the Martian Manhunter as he allowed Liz's feet to softly touch the ground at the base of the giant Face of Mars.

Some scientist had theorized this structure had belonged to an ancient race that once inhabited this world. And, over the years, scientific expedition teams in environental protective suits had attempted to study the Face and gain access to it.

None had succeeded.

Yet when J'onn J'onzz stepped to the plain wall that faced where he and Liz touched down, there appeared a doorway, like a rectangular crack in the Face's stone side. And J'onn placed a hand against this door, his hand now oddly having only four fingers, and the door slid backwards and up.

J'onn beckoned Liz into the doorway, and once she was inside, the door sealed itself and a soft lighting came on from high in the mist above them. Then, an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere formed itself around them, and J'onn disengaged the blue light that had protected the Green Lantern thus far.

The room where they now stood was large and comfortable. There were seating cushions arrayed about the stone floor, and a pit in the center that held a curious flame of green fire. There were statues along one wall, clearly of Martians long since past, and each of them wore a uniform similar to that which J'onn was recognized in most of the time. On the walls of the semi-circular room was engravings of Martian script, and pictographs not unlike the heiroglyphs seen in Egyptian pyramids. Above them, a foggy mist seemed to hang, illuminated from beyond by an unseen lightsource that gave the room a tranquil quality. And, just beyond them on the other side of the room was an archway that seemed to lead farther into the Face's depths.

"This place," J'onn told her as he took her hand in his, "is sacred to me. As it was to my people so long ago. In this place, in the space where you now stand, is where I took my oath as a Manhunter, so doing before the eyes of the Manhunters before me," he indicated the statues, "and my mother stood just there," he nodded his head to an area near the fire pit.

"The flame burns here now, as it always has, since time even I do not remember," he told Liz. "It is the Flame of Justice, and it burns green for the right and not for the White, but once it burned red like the planet itself. So when the Curse was upon us, the Flame changed of its own accord, and has burned green ever since." He said nothing more about the Flame, because it was something he could not explain.

He looked down at her with his red eyes and he smiled, and he took just a moment to place a small kiss on her lips.

"But come, and see," he said as he pointed to the archway on the other side of the room, "because as much as there is history here, there is even more than you could imagine in the next room, in H'ronmeer's temple."

J'onn's shielding her was... unnecessary. One of her Ring's most basic functions was life-support, especially for space travel. But it was a chivalrous gesture and despite Liz' own self-sufficiency she appreciated that gesture.

Especially, considering-- a Blue Ring was, when allied with a Green one, even more powerful than Liz' supposed Most Powerful Weapon in The Universe. J'onn's Martian abilities combined with the power to summon Hope to nigh-omnipotent effect made him so far above her on a cosmic scale... and yet J'onn spared the time and energy to make her not just safe, but comfortable.

And speaking of things that were beyond her...

...she was nearly a thousand years old, but J'onn's lifespan dwarfed hers and they now stood in the presence of things older even than he was.

She was a daughter of The Remnant-- not the strange, violent creature that stood now beside Batman 3010, but the ancient tradition of priestly warriors that guarded that which made the world better, the holiest of things and the saintliest of people --and she could feel the sanctity of this... sacristy, feel it in her skin, in the flickering of her Ring's Light. This took her breath away, despite the presence of a supportive atmosphere.

Listening quietly to J'onn's intoning exposition regarding the purpose of The Flame, Liz could only pause and revere.

Then she glanced at him.

"Morphic fields," she murmured. "I remember a friend of my family's. I never did learn his real name, everyone pretty much just called him 'Buddy.' But my grandfather sat with this Buddy and discussed at length the nature of these psychic, predictive energy fields that pervaded the evolution of life. There were these monkeys... and if enough of these monkeys learned a new skill, then all the monkeys learned that skill. A paradigm shift in the morphic field."

She extended her Ring hand, her left hand, and did not quite touch The Flame. "This is the morphic field of Mars, or its effect: echoing back the changes in you, the spirit of your planet, of your race-- when before it burned Red, a fire that would harm you, now it mirrors the changes in you as a pledge to love you and cradle you and keep you safe."

Liz smiled faintly, her smile that was barely a smile at all, but to one both familiar with her and with possession of Martian senses, it was as bright as a Ring's neon glow: "I know a thing. Or two. About the lives of planets. Just a thing. Or two."

She turned to him, and gazed at him, and reached up to touch his face with the fingers that had nearly touched The Flame.

"Show me everything. Your world is my world now. I would know more than just a thing or two about you, about here."

 

[ChasNicollette]

The Doctor. North.

The Clever Blue Box moaned and throomed, and the sound systems somewhere in the ceiling of The Console Room sang a song of their own...

...specifically, The TARDIS had just finished playing "For The Glory of Love," and had just now launched into a very passionate rendition of "Sweet Caroline," bum bum bum.

The Doctor arched an eyebrow up at that ceiling, and shrugged amiably at Daniel.

"Ahhhh, don't mind her, she's been doing this all day," he tutted. "Still," he mused, "'have you ever had one of those days when something just seems to be trying to tell you somebody?'"

...The TARDIS faded to a solid stop, and The Doctor bounded for the doors, coat on his shoulders and virgin banana daiquiri in hand, emerging therefrom into Arctic winds with a grin on his face.

"I can't tell you," The Doctor mused, "back in my heyday, back in my prime, in my original frame of reference-- how rare it was to find snow, proper snow, snow that wasn't the ash of burning spacecraft or produced by an artificial atmospheric excitation... and now, now look at me, three stops in a row I've been in snow! That's brilliant, brilliant number, three, always did like that number."

He shoved one hand in a pocket and turned to grin back at Daniel as he waited outside The TARDIS, grinned back at Daniel and then gazed up at The Fortress--

--it loomed above them, crystalline spears and spires and a world of endless wonder, a warehouse and a shrine to a world long lost and the knowledge of all The Known Galaxies.

"Brilliant," he reiterated, though he wasn't any longer talking about the number three.

 

[ChasNicollette]

Batman 3010, Tomorrow Woman, et al. Assembly Hall.

Shvaughn was still decoding the intercepted message when she picked up another and then two more. The first new one was apparently an answer to the first, then a reply and a transmission to a third vessel.

The five were in three groups. Now just to figure out where they were going, because they were in fact going somewhere. All three ships had all changed course and a quick triangulation of the courses gave her only one real target location. And that location had two inactive flight rings on it as well as a big red DO NOT ENTER sign on it by the U.P., The Lallorian coucil, the Khundian Empire, and the Dominators.

Her voice shook as she piped it through to the meeting room "Umm, guys? I know where the Five and a whole Legion of Super Villains are going. It's got to do with why the Batman is here too. We need to get the whole team to the location of the Starheart."

"The whole--" Batman began, then paused. "Under most circumstances I'd think that seemed excessive, but I tend to agree with the disembodied voice." He smirked a wry little smirk. "I've had a good history with disembodied voices."

[Yeah, try and butter me up,] Olivia scoffed.

"Regardless," Batman gazed coolly at Cosmic Boy, "it seems like time is short."

"Yes," The Sandman seethed contemplatively, as the lenses of his masked face looked impassively on as The Last Daughter of Naltor spoke earnestly with Caroline Harrison, "sand runs through the hourglass quickly now."

 

[AmenRa]

She extended her Ring hand, her left hand, and did not quite touch The Flame. "This is the morphic field of Mars, or its effect: echoing back the changes in you, the spirit of your planet, of your race-- when before it burned Red, a fire that would harm you, now it mirrors the changes in you as a pledge to love you and cradle you and keep you safe."

"Yes," J'onn agreed. "It is that which I am."

Liz smiled faintly, her smile that was barely a smile at all, but to one both familiar with her and with possession of Martian senses, it was as bright as a Ring's neon glow: "I know a thing. Or two. About the lives of planets. Just a thing. Or two."

She turned to him, and gazed at him, and reached up to touch his face with the fingers that had nearly touched The Flame.

"Show me everything. Your world is my world now. I would know more than just a thing or two about you, about here."

Taking her hand he led her through the archway. The room beyond was not so much a room as it was a cavern: it appeared rounded on the sides, yet with symmetrical columns running up the walls. There was great distance between the walls, and in places there were murals that had been painted long, long ago. There were scenes of the tranquility of a once-inhabited world of oceans and mountains and volcanoes and red sand, paintings of the Martian people, and stories of the birth and death of a civilization.

The ceiling could not, like the room before, be seen. It was cloaked in the mist as before and illuminated from above. There were lights below, as well, shining from an unseen source. Huge stone tables stood in the room immediately near the archway through which they had passed. Farther, in the center, was a simple stone monolith.

"Once, this was the center of leadership and worship for my people," J'onn explained. "I have since turned it into a sort of museum," he added as he indicated the stone tables with a finger.

The tables held artifacts gathered from all over the galaxies. Some were from Earth. On one table sat a large chest covered in gold with an ornate lid upon it. Upon the lid sat two golden cherubs that faced each other, their wings folded forward and touching. Near this, carefully laid on a silken cloth, was the head of spear which appeared to be of 1st Century Roman design.

"Many of these things are too powerful to have been left to the haphazard discovery by Man," he noted.

On another table sat a stand that held a curved dagger with an ornate hilt. There were Kryptonian symbols etched into its blade.

Near this dagger was a prop from the original Star Trek TV series. It was one of the hand phasers carried by the Enterprise crew. The plastic model had been perfectly preserved in the temple's atmosphere. J'onn looked to Liz out of the corner of his eye and merely shrugged as he passed by it.

J'onn stopped at a smaller table occupied by only one artifact. This, laid on a silken cloth like the spear, was as old as unmemorable time. It was a warhammer, with a large metal head and a handle wrapped in braided leather and metal. Upon the head of the hammer were ancient Runes inscribed into its face.

"This one was given to me by its owner," he said, "with the request to keep it until it was needed again. He asked me to keep it secret. To keep it safe."

There were many other pieces scattered and on display about the room. J'onn pointed out some trivia about some of them as they passed them by. Soon, though, they found themselves standing in front of the monolith at the vast room's center.

"There are energies here," he told her, "ancient spirits. They watch over this place, and over the things that I keep here. The God of Fire no longer holds sway in us, in my people, as once he did. No more does fire cloud our eyes or make us weak.." J'onn closed his eyes. "If you listen, you can hear them."

Faintly, from deep within the temple, came voices in song. They were soft, and the tune melodic and sang the way only Martians can.

"I am the last," he stated. "Yet my people live on here, their energies keeping this place, this part of my world, alive. I am bound here, to this place, to the energy and power that is Ma'lacand'ra. So long as this world lives, then so do I."

He pulled her close and whispered, "For everything this place has, it has always been missing a piece. There has always been something that had been left out or misplaced that would go together to make this place whole. To make me whole." J'onn looked deep into her eyes. His own flashed a small glow of red. "I now know what the missing piece is."

It was then the Martian Manhunter bent slightly and took Liz's face in his hands and kissed her.

 

[ChasNicollette]

GL 2261. The Face of Mars.

"Yes," J'onn agreed. "It is that which I am."

"You are Mars," Liz processed, with a quiet dawning amazement. "And Mars is... you."

Taking her hand he led her through the archway. The room beyond was not so much a room as it was a cavern: it appeared rounded on the sides, yet with symmetrical columns running up the walls. There was great distance between the walls, and in places there were murals that had been painted long, long ago. There were scenes of the tranquility of a once-inhabited world of oceans and mountains and volcanoes and red sand, paintings of the Martian people, and stories of the birth and death of a civilization.

Amphibious aboriginal frog-kings...

...pyramids full of gold...

...tentacles and telepathy and civil war and psychic plagues...

...H'ronmeer and L'Zoril and B'arzz O'oomm, oh my.

It was beautiful.

The ceiling could not, like the room before, be seen. It was cloaked in the mist as before and illuminated from above. There were lights below, as well, shining from an unseen source. Huge stone tables stood in the room immediately near the archway through which they had passed. Farther, in the center, was a simple stone monolith.

"Once, this was the center of leadership and worship for my people," J'onn explained. "I have since turned it into a sort of museum," he added as he indicated the stone tables with a finger.

"You always were the one archaeologist," Liz murmured softly, "that my grandfather never laughed at."

The tables held artifacts gathered from all over the galaxies. Some were from Earth. On one table sat a large chest covered in gold with an ornate lid upon it. Upon the lid sat two golden cherubs that faced each other, their wings folded forward and touching.

Liz' eyes widened.

The Ark of The Covenant.

...I'm pretty sure.

Near this, carefully laid on a silken cloth, was the head of spear which appeared to be of 1st Century Roman design.

Liz' eyes widened even wider. Her fingers trembled.

The-- Spear of-- what this meant to-- superheroes-- the problems that it had caused-- and J'onn just-- had it?

"Many of these things are too powerful to have been left to the haphazard discovery by Man," he noted.

Liz managed to keep her voice even. Mitigation of her emotions was kind of her signature bit, after all. "You don't say."

On another table sat a stand that held a curved dagger with an ornate hilt. There were Kryptonian symbols etched into its blade.

Green Lantern hesitated when she saw this one, too.

Was this the same dagger? Raya-Sen's (nee Raya Ro-Zan) dagger from the ancient days of Krypton, the magic weapon that helped her survive The Phantom Zone?

...no, it couldn't be. Could it?

She resisted the urge to scan it with her Ring.

Near this dagger was a prop from the original Star Trek TV series. It was one of the hand phasers carried by the Enterprise crew. The plastic model had been perfectly preserved in the temple's atmosphere. J'onn looked to Liz out of the corner of his eye and merely shrugged as he passed by it.

A twitch tugged at the corner of her mouth, another of her trademark nigh-invisible smiles. And she did not contest, not with breath nor countenance nor even thought, that this should be given pride of place alongside artifacts of such venerable origin.

(She almost expected to see The Holy Grail around here somewhere, but she supposed that that would prove anticlimactic for a certain Knight of The Holy See.)

...but she did see a sort of Holy Grail. Not far from where the phaser sat, between a display of The Bayeux Tapestry and Dan Garret's Blue Scarab, there was parked... a car. Silver and steel, with gullwing doors and a license plate that read "OUTATIME." It was one of the most beautiful things she'd ever seen.

J'onn stopped at a smaller table occupied by only one artifact. This, laid on a silken cloth like the spear, was as old as unmemorable time. It was a warhammer, with a large metal head and a handle wrapped in braided leather and metal. Upon the head of the hammer were ancient Runes inscribed into its face.

"This one was given to me by its owner," he said, "with the request to keep it until it was needed again. He asked me to keep it secret. To keep it safe."

Elizabeth Kara Greystone was again given pause. Such stories from her childhood. She never had known Ceri Gwyneth McCrimmon-- but her mother, Rose herself, had never failed to be breathless when telling tales of the thundering god with Elizabethan speech.

"How did you get it here?" she wondered, not unreasonably. "You're worthy of lifting it, aren't you? I would not be surprised."

There were many other pieces scattered and on display about the room. J'onn pointed out some trivia about some of them as they passed them by.

...not many of these pieces were particularly self-aggrandizing. But Liz couldn't help but notice, in a glass case, the issue of The London Daily Planet in which a certain interview by Chloe Anne Sullivan had first appeared.

And there were a pair of ancient nightvision goggles. Liz didn't immediately recognize them, though the inscription on the plaque read "Peter Carlos Ross, M.D.," and this name she knew fondly.

Soon, though, they found themselves standing in front of the monolith at the vast room's center.

"There are energies here," he told her, "ancient spirits. They watch over this place, and over the things that I keep here. The God of Fire no longer holds sway in us, in my people, as once he did. No more does fire cloud our eyes or make us weak.." J'onn closed his eyes. "If you listen, you can hear them."

Faintly, from deep within the temple, came voices in song. They were soft, and the tune melodic and sang the way only Martians can.

For all her fantasist leanings with constructs and her heritage as a descendant of The Remnant, Liz had not often made time in her life for spiritual things... but here she stood, in the Martian equivalent of a katric ark, and she found herself profoundly moved, deep in the core of her neuropsychic net.

Her Ring seemed to glow even brighter at the sound of those songs, the songs of the ever-blowing winds and the ever-shifting sands, the songs of The Fourth Planet, named for two gods of War, and this brighter glow was not the influence of J'onn's Blue Ring on her Green Ring's power supply.

The sound of those songs made her braver just to hear them. Made her fear even less.

Just as J'onn and his species had overcome their primal phobia of flame, so too did Liz feel, in this place, that she could overcome the greatest of her terrors.

"Yes," she murmured, simply. "I can hear them. 'You Are Not Alone.'"

"I am the last," he stated. "Yet my people live on here, their energies keeping this place, this part of my world, alive. I am bound here, to this place, to the energy and power that is Ma'lacand'ra. So long as this world lives, then so do I."

He pulled her close and whispered, "For everything this place has, it has always been missing a piece. There has always been something that had been left out or misplaced that would go together to make this place whole. To make me whole." J'onn looked deep into her eyes. His own flashed a small glow of red. "I now know what the missing piece is."

It was then the Martian Manhunter bent slightly and took Liz's face in his hands and kissed her.

She watched him as he spoke, and recoiled not at all as he drew her close.

And she complained not one whit not one jot as he kissed her, and she kissed him back, and tasted the dust upon his lips with the flesh of hers. The white gloves of her uniform rippled and peeled and faded away, and she reached to graze her bared fingertips across the chest of his own uniform, the shoulders of him, reached up to trace the ridge of his brow, even as she kissed him back.

She kissed him a long, long time, though she knew he could kiss her for longer still-- eschewing the very breath of life, as he could --even without the atmosphere in here, and their respective Rings' life support. When she drew back from his mouth, licking her lips at the residue of his kiss, it was not from lack of wanting to continue, but to murmur a reply.

"Far be it from me to claim you are anything less than complete unto yourself," she mused, bared Ring hand cupping his cheek. "But if you were to be missing a piece, and were to find it-- I am gratified that it was me."

And then she reiterated: "You Are Not Alone."

And she kissed him anew, luxuriatingly and exploringly, for as long as time and circumstance would permit.

 

[Wyldfire]

(( Definitely, definitely not canon.

Just a little writing exercise. ))

(((To see if I still have the chops or if I've lost them.)))*Wyld*


"And who are you supposed to be, little girl?" Tharok sneered, narrowing his human eye at the figure before them.

"I am that which remains," replied Carrie Brown-Drake, crouching in the entryway to the lobby of The Themysciran Museum, grimly regarding The Fatal Five.

The Empress snorted. "If you say so. I say we take this remainder and divide by zero..."

The Remnant unslung her bow, and nocked an arrow.

"Very well then."

"By the numbers."

The Emerald Eye had already unleashed a massive cannon-bolt of green energy before The Empress had even finished her dismissive gesture, but Carrie was already moving, firing the arrow at what passed for Validus' face even as the gargantua loomed over her, crackling with psychoelectric force...

...the arrow splintered against the transparent pane that made up Validus' massive forehead, and Validus-- screamed, juddering and shuddering as he stood there, clutching at his jawline, clawing at where his eyes would have been.

...cerebro-scrambler arrow.

Effective against a being that is all brain and no thought.

It was, of course, just a delaying tactic. But in a no-win situation like this, stalling itself was a victory.

Without even slowing down, The Remnant reached for another arrow, and even as she did so, she spoke: "Omnicom. Xmit function. Access keyword Prometheus, filename neural chaff."

"Execute."

Scowling, The Empress commanded The Emerald Eye to reach out and crush The Remnant in a glowing green fist, just reduce her to a smear...

...but then...

...then she couldn't...

...funny noises and jangly lights, what was-- what was she-- it made no sense--

--The Eye's construct flickered and decohered before it could form, and The Eye regarded The Empress bewilderedly: "Mistress. Eye am confused."

"I need," The Empress mumbled, rubbing her temples. "I need only moments-- my will is-- my will is indomitable--"

Neural chaff effective against Green Lantern Kyle Rayner in 21st Century.

Stood to reason could work against Empress.

Another delaying tactic.

The second arrow that Carrie had nocked hurtled across the room towards Tharok, and he caught it effortlessly in his cybernetic hand. "Pointed sticks. You'll be using rocks to start fires next."

The Remnant didn't rise to his bait-- she just immediately fired another arrow.

...his hand was full. ...he couldn't catch this one. ...it went right into his cybernetic eye. And started to vibrate. To emit a squealing sonic cry that used his own metal skull as an echo chamber, jarring his every servo-motor at the same time as the hypersound battered the equilibrium of his own inner ear...

...he fell to his knees, teeth chattering.

By the numbers. Next we have--

Mano lunged at The Remnant, his sword cutting her bow and bowstring clean in twain. "You little witch, let's see you make mischief without that."

The Remnant reeled back, evading his blade and his touch, just barely, just barely, his right hand's fingertips grazed her cape and singed it...

"Acceptable," she replied. And drew her own swords.

Their confrontation took barely seconds, two masters at bladecraft, him lashing and flashing at her with his sword while she parried frenziedly with her wakizashi...

...and then she deflected a strike, and as he adjusted his stance, she counterstruck...

...carving a Z into the chest of his environment suit.

Mano squawked with rage and surprise, lashed out at her with his right hand while he could still breathe and stand and fight...

...but she dropped one blade, caught his wrist with an aikido flourish, and powered a kick hard into the center of that Z.

He skidded back, tumbled to the ground, gasping for breath, but without a sound Carrie's hand went to her belt pouches--

--and flung a trio of small red-and-gold shuriken at him.

Birdarangs.

The shuriken struck Mano as he lay on the ground and blossomed into a oozing, sticky substance that glued him to the floor, sealed the leak in his suit, and kept him from lifting his hand to his own defense.

...specifically, gooparangs.

"You little sprock!"

"Yes," The Remnant agreed.

But she was already focused on what was coming next--

"Hrrrrraaaahhh!"

The Persuader's axe blurred through the air where she had been standing only seconds ago-- only the added evasive capabilities of her Legion Flight Ring kept her head on her shoulders.

"I'ma enjoy hacking you to pieces," The Persuader growled. "I ain't no lightweight."

"No," The Remnant agreed.

The Persuader was a force to be reckoned with.

She drew one of her guns-- the guns of The Crimson Avenger, leveled it at his masked face.

The Persuader harrumphed. "Yeah, that'll help."

She fired.

Without even blinking, he sliced the bullet out of the air. The bullets of these guns had been known to crack open Dilustel armor, even wound The Icon, the one called Supergirl. But that axe, that impossible Atomic Axe...

She fired again.

He moved towards her even as he clove that round in twain, she could hear him chuckle.

She fired again.

The Persuader swatted the bullet away as though swatting a fly.

Her free hand moved, again darting to her belt, another birdarang flew at the villain, one more step and he'd be in swinging distance with the axe...

...he sliced the birdarang with even less effort than he'd sliced the bullets.

...and he raised that axe over his head.

And the Remnant laughed. A small, short, gruff sound. "Hh."

"Yeah," The Persuader snorted, "you'll be laughing out the other end of your neck in a minute."

And then pinpricks began to light up along the surface of his uniform, around his mask, upon the bare portions of his skin. "What the spr--"

--the marble floors cracked under him, and with a snarling bray of disbelief, he collapsed to the ground, to his knees, barely able to lift his own arms, let alone the axe.

Electrogravitic nanite swarm encased in 'rang. Designed for use against superstrong airborne foes, pinning them to Earth. Still in prototype stages. Successful test.

And yet... and yet... The Persuader's high-gravity upbringing made him the toughest of tough customers, he began to force himself back up, to quiveringly lift the axe again, to grit his teeth and power upwards...

The Remnant narrowed her eyes at him.

"Reverse," she decided.

...and with a startled scream, The Persuader shot skyward, blasting up through the ceiling of the lobby and up and up and away...

Science Police would probably intercept him in the atmospheric shipping lanes, he'd never hit orbit.

Probably.

...but The Remnant didn't have time to rejoice at The Persuader's defeat, not for one second, because.

Because Tharok managed to reach up with trembling robotic fingers and yank that arrow out of his robotic eye-socket, crushing the sonic arrowhead. And then he began jamming the neural chaff transmission, which revived The Empress.

And The Empress used The Eye to stabilize Validus' scrambled brain...

...all in the space of a second.

...but a second was all The Remnant needed.

Her hand flew to her belt, drew her grapnel, her grapnel launched...

...the cable looped around The Emerald Eye and with a scream of effort The Remnant hauled...

...whipped The Eye like an Olympian's hammer-throw into the open roaring mouth of Validus...

...The Remnant's other hand still held a gun of The Crimson Avenger.

She fired.

Her bullet drilled into The Eye just as it landed in Validus' mouth.

The Eye exploded, green concussion and green cacophony and green Apocalypse. Validus toppled like a chainsawed redwood, and the shockwave that burst from him knocked Tharok and The Empress and The Remnant alike ass over teakettle...

...the room trembled and smouldered, its ancient marble pillars rattled by the blast, and in the wreckage, bleeding and bruised, The Remnant staggered to her feet, and drew both guns now.

"Is-- is-- that sufficient?"

********​

"Holy sprock," Cosmic Boy opined, eyes wide, watching from the observation deck as the simulation room faded to blank walls around The Remnant.

Garth, meanwhile, punched the sky with both fists. "The Mark of sprockin' Zorro, man! I'm still geeking out about that!"

Saturn Girl shook her head. "It doesn't matter that The Eye would recohere, she still technically took its life, that's a little bloodthirsty for Legion deputization."

"Yeah, agreed," Rokk nodded, glancing at Imra.

Jazmin scoffed lightly. "Fine, I'll go tell Timber Wolf and Catspaw to pack their bags."

("The Mark of Zorro," Garth wheezed with laughter, clapping Brainy on the back-- Brainy, of course, looking extremely put out that his simulation had been bested, he must not have perfectly grokked the tactical algorithms.

"Zorro nuthin'," Wildfire retorted, "did you see those fireworks? I still got afterimages on my sensory wavelengths!")

"It's worth noting," Batman 3010 pointed out, pale lenses half-lidded, as Cos asked Vi to go patch The Remnant's hurt, "that I actually didn't have any part of her training."

Allana regarded the Robin-colored madwoman with a certain... understanding. "But this training. It includes elements of The Ancient Order of Saint Dumas. She is truly a Knight, in her way, or at least a Knight in training. Mayhap I couldst--"

Batman cut that off with a gesture. "Ohhhhh, no, M'Lady Lang. You wanted a cadet to be your Squire, you got the sun-helmeted guy. Besides, if anyone's going to 'fix' The Remnant, it's me."

Allana grimaced. "Verily. I suppose Aztek be not entirely useless, though his pagan mythology maketh little sense."

[Well,] Olivia opined in Jason's ear, [isn't that just pot and kettle.]

Jason had to remind himself that guffawing randomly totally didn't go with the whole Batman mystique.

Shvaughn couldn't help herself, and besides it wasn't fair that Querl should withhold from the team. "Excuse me," the voice came from the intercom system, "That was a very nice simulation, however a certain teammate has been holding informational cards to his chest and I just happen to have access to those files."

She paused to annoy them then continued. "If I may continue the simulation with the accurate data?" Not waiting for a reply she brought the simulation back online.

Too high to have heard the little sprock the persuader noted the glow points. Stupid nanites. He made strokes over himself as if he were shaving with the axe. The nanites sizzled and died. The Persuader plummeted through the atmo, angling himself into air traffic. As he fell past an air transport he hooked out with the point of the atomic axe and piered the hull of the vehicle. The axe point tore through the hull but it had cut some of the velocity. He flung himself, breaking the axe free and landed on a civilian craft.

"Hello little victim." He said as he flung the screaming woman from the vehicle and began to arrow back towards the museum.

Tharok scrambled through the debris to where Mano was trapped. Micro lasers extended from several points on the robotic side of his body and began freeing the deadly hand so Mano could continue to free himself. "Remember that this is an amazonian museum. Amazonian weapons have interesting properties."

The remnant got a clear shot and fired through his robotic shoulder. Tharok tumbled away, but it was a controlled tumble. Auto repair functions were already online and his own nanites were replicating damaged systems. He would stay down until he was back to peak, but he would keep the teams internal communications online.

The Empress was in agony. Her precious had exploded and she'd felt it. She was going to make this upstart hurt just as fast as she could. She closed her eyes and summoned them. the helm and cloak of Fate. She rose, the helmet covering the fury in her face but not her eyes. She cast one hand out and an ankh shaped bolt of power flew towards the Remnant barely missing her with her dodge. The other cast out towards her fallen titan "Rise Validus." Validus shuddered and twitched and began to rise, a malignant green glow coming from the head dome forming into the image of an eye.

"Eye am online Misstress" came from the ordinarily nonspeaking lips. "I live to serve." And with that the brutish beast began grabbing at and blasting at the tumbling dodging figure. The Remnant kept out of the beast's way but it was not as lumbering as it had been. It had gained speed and an almost animal cunning.

At every chance Remnant fired the guns into the beast. They were hitting and hurting what had been Validus but all she was managing was to slow it. She had to keep every ounce of her attention on staying out of the clutches of the now ever slowing beast. She finally had it about to go down when out of no where something flashed in front of her and she felt the twin thuds as the barrels of the guns spun away. "Did you fraggin miss me babe?" came the growl of the persuader.

She also felt the other behind her. She shifted and drew the blades once more. One blade parried the axe haft, the other the themysciran blade Mano had borrowed. Mano's hand was a micrometer from contact and the simulation froze.

"Do we see what has been missed?" Shvaughn/Gear asked.

 

[TearsoftheWorld]

Maybe it was the human genes in her that kept Caroline so pumped up for what was about to come. A fiery spirit dwelt within her, and she was finally accepting what it meant and took to be a superhero. This was to be their legacy. She turned towards one of the Legionnaires nearby and offered a warm smile after her acute hearing picked up him saying that someone like him was rather useless on the field of battle.

This was to be their legacy... not just hers.

"No power, no matter how small, is useless. Even the smallest light shines bright in the darkness."

Caroline wasn't entirely used to being a leader, but it was in her blood. Somewhere, deep down, beat the heart of a champion. She would make her family proud.

"Caroline," Nura called out as she approached the hybrid-Kryptonian. "Things are going to start falling like-- like old Earth dominoes, now. They're going to need you at The Fortress, and sooner would be better than later."

"The Fortress?"

The Fortress?

What business did she have there?

Caroline looked at Dream Girl for a moment, perhaps to wait and see if there was anything more to be told, but after another moment the golden-haired Legionairre sped away faster than mortal eyes could follow. Something important was happening or was about to happen, but there were a few things that Powergirl needed to do before heading out.

Caroline backtracked to the Hall and located Brainiac 5. Without missing a beat, she came right up to him and pulled him in for another kiss, only this time she wasn't doing it to prove a point or show off or anything.

This was real.

It was the kind of kiss that made Caroline's leg kick up a bit, and she leaned in to him with one arm against his back and the other behind his head. She finally pulled back just a bit, resting her forehead against his with her hands tightly grasping his.

"I have to go. Just wanted to make sure I said goodbye," she said with a smile, and just as quickly as she arrived she was gone, leaving a small gust of wind behind to mark her departure.

Okay... so maybe there was only one thing she had to do before leaving.

 

[Wyldfire]

Jan held up a palm to his fellow holy man, and shook his head lightly. Now would be the time for reverent silence rather than petitions and questions and the laying-on of hands.

Cuatro hesitated, then nodded, hands going to his sides.

Addressing Dawnstar's question, Jan tucked his hands into the sleeves of his crossed arms and smiled a faint little smile.

"You have been out," he explained, "not terribly long, but longer than we would have liked, and longer still than would sit well with you. But you are back with us in the moment, and that is all one can ask for."

She quirked an eyebrow under the cowl. Jan wasn't one of the outgoing type, but she did detect a bit of humor in his tone. She let a slight smile cross her lips as she said "I know I have been down too long," she focused and felt her. She felt the the Empress. "I have her in my sights. Shall we gather the team and make war upon her?"

She strode out of the Med bay towards the meeting hall. Vi let out a low whistle. "Mommas got new toys and a sproking mad on to use them. I feel sorry for the Empress when Dawny gets her hands on her."