knowhen | EVENT ONE: JUNE 21ST-28TH

I know who she is. I just don't think I've said more than ten words to her in my life.

[Nita leans back against a support and slides down to sit facing Robbie, bare, be-winged legs curled in front of her so she can hug them and rest her chin on her knees.]

I--Robbie, this might be rough, okay? I'm totally not bringing up anything to hurt you on purpose, but I gotta to explain what's going on.

[That's basically spelling out "Stamford" in six-inch capital letters, but what choice does she have?]

I'm from...before. Before everything. The Sphinx messed with the timestream and pulled me into the future. My future, I mean. Your present. It was this weird pocket dimension, and Richie and Chris were there from the present, and Black Bolt and Doc Richards and me were from the past. We fought the Sphinx--two Sphinxes, actually, it was so messed up--and we won, but when he died everything started unraveling and people were getting sent back to their own times. Rich grabbed me and pulled me out with him, because he didn't want me to go back.

["To die," she doesn't say, but she's thinking it and he must be, too.]

And everything in the pocket dimension was so broken from the two versions of the Sphinx having two Ka Stones at the same time that somehow me not going back to when I came from didn't change history.

[So yes, that is in fact weirder than alternate timelines or the High Evolutionary's mad science fair.]

I worked with her for awhile. As teachers, if you can believe that.

[He doesn't say anything in response to her statement that she's not picking topics to hurt him, but... his mind goes exactly where she thinks it does. It's the only "before" that matters.

He waits out the explanation with a blank expression. Robbie understood the words, probably more than most people would. The look on his face only changes when his eyes narrow at the mention of Reed Richards and his eyebrows shoot up at two Sphinxes.

Then again, if you're going to believe that one of your best friends successfully pulled his dead girlfriend safely through time and space, what's a second Sphinx?]

I wish it had changed history.

[If she hadn't been there, if she hadn't gone to chase down Nitro... no. He wasn't going to think about this. It wasn't Nita's fault.

Robbie pulled himself into a crouch and powered back up. He looked both ways down the hallway below them.]

We're wasting time. Were you heading for the Cortex?

Robbie, what the heck?

[She dumps that on him and he immediately want to charge back into a fight? All is not well. Nita goes instantly from seated to hovering, ankle wings fluttering in the still air.]

You don't wanna talk, fine, I can't make you. At least tell me who Faira is.

[She thinks he owes her that much, at least.]

[He wants to hit things. Namorita should know how that feels. He doesn't jump off the catwalk and go bouncing along the hall, although he's intending on it. The holographic message hasn't been forgotten - it's just been on hold.]

What the heck, Robbie? What about what the heck, Nita? What the heck, Rich? I saw Rich after. [There was only one after, too. Unfortunately, Robbie isn't aware that he saw Rich before the fight with the Sphinx.] He talked to Vance, too. You can't tell me that he couldn't have let us know that you were all right.

[There, one of them's mentioned the elephant in the room. Nita isn't supposed to be all right, and, yet, here she is. She was whole, right down to her wings.]

Faira claims she's Namora's servant and that she's looking for you. She could be your twin.

--Rich is dead.

[...Oops. She'd meant to work her way up to that one more slowly, but, well, it's foremost on her mind lately, and Robbie's not exactly making this conversation easy.]

Edited 2014-06-22 01:39 (UTC)

[He couldn't breathe. It was so abrupt; it hurt so much. Another one. Rich was out there somewhere in the galaxy, being all space coppy. That's how it was supposed to be.

He wasn't supposed to be dead.

Robbie was going to throw up if he had to open his mouth. No one ever tried to break the news gently. It was the first thing he'd found out when he woke up restrained in a hospital bed. Your friends are dead, and it gets worse.

Well, he didn't have to stay here and hear about how it gets worse this time. Robbie lets himself fall off the ledge and goes bouncing up the hall, accumulating speed with each rebound. He makes sure to crash into all three of the aliens that Nita had been fighting for good measure.]

Oh, no.

[Nearly all her information on the present is secondhand, from people who've been in space or barricaded inside a lab for years on end. She hadn't realized just how badly off Robbie really is...and she's just made it worse.]

Robbie, don't you go charging off into a fight without me!

[He might not be able to travel in a straight line, but she can, and she zips down the corridor after him.]

[Hey, he travels in lots of straight lines. None of the cool kids commit to one continuous direction.]

We were already in a fight! I'm only skipping the cutscenes.

[Charging off into a fight is exactly what he's gone and done. It's preferable to failing to come up with anything positive to say in response to that. He is going to ignore it. Forget it. Robbie might have gotten a head start, but he didn't accelerate enough to keep ahead of her. When she would have caught up with him, he's a corridor and a half ahead of where they were and currently surrounded by half a dozen alien gorillas. Their fingers are actually tentacles, he notices as one whacks him in the face like a squid sledgehammer.]

Edited 2014-06-22 02:21 (UTC)

[And suddenly he's bantering again? What the heck? She's going to corner him somewhere he can't bounce off...after they take care of the squid-rillas.

Not that it would have hurt Robbie, but she objects on principle to anyone hitting her friends. Nita slams into the one that hit him with all the momentum of her two hundred-plus pound frame moving like a Boston driver who knows there isn't a speed trap coming. She and the gorilla slam into the wall together, leaving another person-sized dent and some theatrically sparking frayed wires, but only one of them gets back up again.

It's not the gorilla.]

Excuse you, only I get to pick on my friends.

[Robbie's not as nearly as bothered as she is by being hit. It's actually more useful to him in a fight to get hit by something that strong, and he's rammed into two of them with the transferred force while she had to get all fancy and put one through a wall.]

She's lying. She doesn't get to pick on me either. Too bad you don't hit as hard as she does, banana breath. You might as well surrender now, cause I know she's already pissed.

[Banana breath may not exactly translate, but it's evident from the chest-beating that they know they've been insulted.]

Sorry, I didn't catch what species you were. Do whatevers eat cheese? Because I really want to use 'cheese eating surrender mon-

[One of the gorillas pulls out a gun, and Robbie only just makes it behind an arch before the laser fires through where he was.]

Nita! The monkeys have space guns!

Edited 2014-06-22 02:48 (UTC)

[Bullets she doesn't care about. Lasers? Lasers are bad.]

Oh, sh--

[Nita's fast and agile, but not fast and agile enough to dodge beams of light, and even as she springs back into the air, she's wincing in anticipation of the burning when they hit.

Burning that never comes as the beams bounce off the force field that's suddenly glowing green around her.]

...Okay, that's new.

[Robbie shouldn't be fast enough to dodge light rays either, but, what he thought was seeing two beams of light fire was, he will perhaps realize in the future, seeing the same beam twice. For now, he doesn't give a shit how he got under cover, what matters is that they are in fact, both currently sheltered.

Although Namorita's particular cover is frankly a little alarming.]

That wasn't me. I don't do green. Uh - I'm not really sure what to blame that one on. Could be you being a temporal anomaly. Could be a secondary mutation. Big fan of those, I keep hoping Vance changes color. Could be whatever the hell a Ka stone is.

[Robbie sticks a hand around the wall, intending send another barrage of energy balls at the invaders, but a laser grazes his hand, scorching the edge of his palm.]

Guess what. [There is absolutely no humor in his voice, which is tight with the pain of the burn.] Turns out I'm not ray gun proof.

Like I need more mutations.

[She read about that whole "Kymaera" thing and does not approve.

Nor does she approve of her fragile human friends getting shot.]

Robbie! Just--stay behind cover while I figure this out!

[There are several seconds of silence from Nita, punctuated by the zap of laser guns and the angry howling of gorillas whose laser guns aren't doing anything useful.]

...Uh. They can't hit me, sure, but I have no idea how to hit them.

[Ladies and gentlemen, the New Warriors!]

[Hey, he's not usually fragile. That doesn't count. Space guns are a special exemption. He can shield against kinetic and concussive energy blasts just fine.

Robbie waits patiently for a few seconds, listening to the blip blip of the weapons and the increasingly annoying screeching, which he swears is going through his entire nervous system to his hand and making it throb in rhythm.]

Because bubbles aren't made for punching through! And they're my schtick!

[Stepping out from his hiding spot, Robbie sends a blast of bright blue energy at the remaining gorillas. He's careful to keep Nita out of fire. Even with ... whatever she's doing, it's not worth the risk. Unfortunately for the corridor, that means that the destructive force isn't going down the empty hall, but into the wall.

The gorilla's don't fare so well, lying unconscious under rubble.

Neither does the wall. Several of the rooms along the right hand side are much more of an open floor plan. It doesn't look like anyone was inside them. Robbie hadn't thought there would be, with a contingent of invaders in the area.

It's quiet for several seconds, until one final girder breaks off on one end and slowly squeeeeaks its way down the floor.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, the New Warriors.]

You look like Vance.

I'm way hotter than Super-Tights.

[The retort is automatic. She's much more interested in where her unprecedented ability to shield herself comes from, and where Robbie's unprecedented ability to fire horribly destructive, non-bubbly energy blasts comes from.]

I'm.

Not sure how I turn this off.

[It feels almost as though she's clenching a muscle she has no control over, like some kind of psychic cramp from moving too suddenly.]

How do you make the kinetic field go away?

Well duh.

[The answer is also automatic. She's totally hotter than he is, and she has Robbie's permanent vote for the cover of the Swimsuit Edition.

At the request, he gingerly steps through the rubble until he's standing on a giant metal chunk. He knocks on the energy field with his left hand and sighs.]

I... don't. It's always there; it kicks up when I get hit. It's not something I think about. But - I guess it has something to do with the fear-tension-pain cycle, so I'd say relax? The monkeys are down, no other threats in sight. You don't need the bubble. You're safe. If anything turns up, I've got it. You can relax.

Sounds reasonable. It's just--all my powers are physical. I've never had to think about them before.

[But her hybrid powers give her amazing control over her body. She can extend that by analogy, right?

Nita shuts her eyes and relaxes every last muscle...which makes her drop out of the air as even her ankle wings droop. At least it works. The glow of the psionic shielding vanishes as she falls in an undignified heap atop the debris Robbie created, and the slight discomfort of the landing isn't nearly enough to trigger the force field again.]

Oof. Gonna have to work on that.

4 point oh. The Croatian judge really nailed you on the landing.

[He really wants to relax that much. He's too exhilarated from the rush of fighting alien squid gorillas with ray guns.]

Man, I can see-

[Why Rich does it. That's what he had been about to say, but the fight's not distracting him anymore. The new information comes rushing right back into his head. Rich doesn't do space fights anymore. It's a struggle to keep the right tone in his voice.]

-myself getting thrown into debtors' prison already. I don't have the money to pay for this kind of collateral damage. We should keep moving.

[Before anyone comes upon them and blames them instead of the monkeys.]

[Distracted by her own thoughts, Nita doesn't pick up on Robbie's little pause.]

'Sokay, I'm good for it.

[Probably? Her titles and holdings almost certainly reverted to Namor, and he's never been able to say no to her.

She rises back into the air and offers him a hand to carry him out of his debris field, her long ponytail falling over her shoulder as she leans down.]

Since when do you shoot huge blue blasts, Robbie?

[He takes her hand and allows himself to be lifted and towed. He hadn't wanted to mention things like structural integrity when she was trying to calm down, but getting clear is a good idea.]

I understand my powers better now. It's still kinetic energy.

[He's hedgey about it. If she's from when she said, he wants to keep her in the dark about as much of what's happened as he can. Nita doesn't need to know. If he doesn't tell her, then she doesn't have to lose anyone but Rich.]

Not like you suddenly catching a wicked case of TK.

[Too late. She's already been to Earth and read the Wikipedia article on Stamford.

After someone explained Wikipedia to her.

And the Internet.]

I think it's the Infinity Gem. It's the only thing different between now and the last time I got into a fight, and believe me, it would have come in handy then.

[She sets Robbie down where the undamaged decking starts, and lands to walk beside him.]

Sounds far-fetched, I know--what could shatter an Infinity Gem?--but it's the only explanation I've got.

[Maybe they hadn't explained Google to her. He will still hold out hope that she hasn't googled his name. The Wikipedia page was bad, but the comments on news articles and blogs were far worse. Unmoderated vortexes of vitriol, that's what they were.]

Has it been inside you long enough to work? I really have no idea why I thought that would matter. Infinity Gems are something for the Avengers to handle. Not us.

[Except the Avengers were apparently smart enough to not get hit with flying shards of crystal, which is more than either one of them could say right now.]

It's not the only thing different. Were you here? Maybe something's give off a radiation that effects Atlanteans. I wasn't there. I doubt the pink gorillas were there. It's not like I'm making bubbles. Er. Not new kinds, anyway.

They're a source of unfathomable cosmic power. I don't think there's a waiting period.

[Yeah, she has only slightly more of an idea of what she's talking about than he does.]

I...actually was on the version of Knowhere from our universe, right before--

[Just going to assume they're from the same universe because she needs a friend. And not going to discuss Rich because she can't deal with that right now.]

--well. I've been here before. There weren't any Infinity Gems involved.

Probably not. There's not any waiting period if you get caught in a lab accident and doused with energy from another dimension, either. That's a tip in case it ever comes up.

[Yeah, he knows pauses like that. Robbie can't handle taking about him - he's still barely handling talking to her without flinging his arms around her and never letting go. He knows that he'd fall apart if he did, so he helps steer the conversation back to the present situation.]

Which way do we go, then? Where's the stupidly obvious place that everyone would try to hide that the hostiles will definitely think to check? Where's the space station equivalent of under the bed? And when we find that, where's a smarter place to hide people?

That Kree kid on the holo mentioned something about the observation deck, which is up in the eyes.

[In case you'd forgotten you're in the skull of a dead space god.

She shakes her head.]

I dunno, Robbie. They're supposed to have the Luminals--space Avengers, basically--protecting the station, plus the security chief [who is a talking psychic Russian dog] but I haven't seen anyone besides you who isn't acting like an invader. Something's gone even more wrong than usual. I'm not sure there is a smarter place.

EVENT ONE: JUNE 21ST-28TH

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