knowhen | EVENT ONE: JUNE 21ST-28TH

[For those who can manage to do two things at once, fighting is still an exercise in what the hell is going on. The only difference is that it's less about where Robbie is right now and more about the people he can see fighting at the other end of the corridor.

That would be where someone who looked a lot like Nita (... his life was suddenly full of women who looked like Nita) was throwing someone who looked a lot like Tigra into another cat-person. Did the Atlanteans and the cat-people have a thing that he didn't know about? It made a weird sort of sense. Fish. Cats.

Running to help one of them (he's not sure which one, but he's got another 50 feet to figure it out), Robbie skids to a halt after Namorita goes hurtling past him in the other direction, where she slams into a wall and slides to the floor.]

N- Faira!

[He catches the name at the last second, not wanting to get yelled at again for calling her Nita. The decision's made for him. If that's Tigra, she can handle herself for now. He's over at the Atlantean's side quickly, relieved that she's aware enough to be angry. The wall is pretty banged up. He leans over and offers her a hand up.]

Don't tell me. You've got a chunk of a magic gem inside you, and you've been teleported to a space station on the edge of the galaxy.

["Faira" means nothing to Nita beyond being just another name that could as easily be surface or alien as Atlantean, so she doesn't react until Robbie makes it to her side and starts being Robbie at her. She looks up at him, surprised, but with a smile creeping its way into her expression, and takes his offered hand.]

Heya, Toothpick. When did you bounce in?

A couple of minutes before my new James Bond wristwatch told me we're all gonna die and then went kaput. Q just doesn't make'em the way he used to.

[He helps hoist her to her feet, and then it visibly clicks on his face what she's said. Robbie's upper body leans back at the realization, but he doesn't let go of her hand at all.]

... what did you just call me?

[Please don't be a Skrull. Please let this be some stupid payback practical joke that Vance came up with. Just not a Skrull.]

[Nita doesn't need the help at all, but she puts some weight on Robbie's arm while getting smoothly to her feet so he feels useful.]

Your nickname, Toothpick.

[His terrible, terrible nickname.]

[Thank you for making him a part of this, Nita.]

Nobody calls me Toothpick anymore, Faira. You've known me what, five minutes? Who told you to call me that? Vance? Aracely? This is about the Namorita thing, isn't it?

[He doesn't look pleased to be having this conversation, but there's more pressing concerns. Like the pink gorilla that's now barreling down the hall at them.]

Your dance partner wants another waltz. Can I cut in?

My name's Namorita, dude. It's always been Namorita. Who's Faira?

[Something occurs to her.]

Oh my god, this better not be some parallel universe thing.

[She is so sick of parallel universes--but it can wait, she guesses, watching the gorilla charging with about as much concern as she would have shown an angry Chihuahua. That last hit was just a lucky shot.]

...Yeah sure, all yours. Yell if you get in over your head.

[He's already in over his head, because there's a Skrull in front of him and Magilla Gorilla incoming. Robbie cannot deal with both of them at the same time. He directs a cascade of bubbles towards the primate and then tightens his grip on her arm.]

You are not Namorita. You've been telling us not call you Nita, over and over again. I finally get it right, and now you're starting in one "Who's Faira?" You're Faira!

[He groans at the suggestion that it's a parallel universe thing and drops her arm. She could be right. It makes more sense than a Skrull.]

No, you're right. It's probably another universe thing.

Edited 2014-06-21 23:12 (UTC)

[Rather than snap back at Robbie, Nita points up at the girders crisscrossing the empty space where a ceiling should be, shadowed and inaccessible to anyone who can't fly, and a reasonably good location for private chat, as long as none of the participants are scared of heights.]

Look, let's blow this joint before King Kong Junior over there wakes up and we can talk. Stuff's been all kinds of weird for me lately and it'll probably clear things up for you if I explain.

[Ordinarily she wouldn't wait for agreement before throwing an arm around his waist and flying off with him, but nothing's ordinary anymore.]

[No acrophobia here. He nods at the suggestion, wondering if her all kinds of weird has a chance to top talking to your (dead) friend and the whole Mount Wundagore episode that he'd been in the middle of before getting thrown into this episode.]

Yeah, go for it. I - that wasn't Tigra you threw earlier, was it? In my universe, it's not a good idea to go throwing Avengers around unless you're planning on flooding New York City.

[Oh Robbie little do you know. Nita picks him up one-armed and takes to the air.]

Tigra? [What even.] No, I think it was a guy.

...I sucker-punched Cap once, but he was being mind-controlled at the time.

[She settles lightly onto a girder almost wide enough to qualify as a catwalk and lets go of Robbie. In his Speedball form she can't tell that he's any different (read: all grown up) than he was the last time she'd seen him.]

[He snickers at the Cap comment and settles down to sit on the beam. If it's going to be story time, they might as well be comfortable.]

Sometimes, he deserves it. Anyway, Tigra's an Avenger.

[Robbie depowers and looks up at her without the orange tinted lenses. She really does resemble Namorita or Faira, whatever she wants to call herself now. It almost hurts to see. He rolls his shoulders as a physical cue to let it go.]

When you say things've been weird, how weird are we talking about? Weirder than the past couple of hours? Weirder than bipedal, talking house pets?

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.

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