legionworld | Imagine There's No Heaven

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Imagine There's No Heaven

Who| Rich Rider and YOU
What| Laying face down in the grass in Central Park like a goon
Where| Central Park in the Habitat area of the ship
When| Same day he woke up, natch
Warnings/Notes| Nothing really.

Rich hated being told to slow down. There was a part of him that was screaming at him to be on the move. After all, there had to be 8X8 planetary distress calls to answer; this universe was supposedly as much of a mess as his was.

But the medicos here refused to budge on the "you need rest and time to adjust, especially since you need to adjust to the prosthetic arm" thing so here he was resting and trying to adjust. Kind of. If tooling around the whole ship without stopping was the same as resting and adjusting. Because he couldn't seem to stand still.

Admittedly, even just walking was hard. The Nova Force was still there -- he could feel it -- but it was definitely diminished somehow and that meant his invulnerability and superstrength were gone. Without that pinpoint precision and body awareness it gave him at full capacity, his extremities were a little numb and he was clumsy as anything, just like he was the last time he'd lost the Nova Force.

So after a whole day of pacing around the ship from place to place -- and constantly tripping over his own feet as he did it -- he walked through Central Park (Central Park! Made just for him, reconstructed out of old historical records!) and tripped one last time over his own feet, practically falling on his face in the middle of Strawberry Fields, not far from the "Imagine" John Lennon memorial.

Then he just...stopped. Finally. Because he was alive and he felt grass on his face. How long had it been since he actually felt grass? So he kicked off his boots and socks, too, digging his toes into it.

He'd almost forgotten what grass felt like, but it was itchy and smelled green and earthy and non-sterile in the way everything in space didn't. And as itchy as it was, it was...nice.

Apparently, the Human Rocket could slow down for at least a little while. How 'bout that?

Since he was focusing a bit more on the grass and the light artificial breeze, and his own breathing (he was alive, he was breathing) he wasn't focusing on how it looked to be a grown man face down in the middle of a field.

Truth be told, it looked pretty ridiculous.

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"Fake sun's more sun than I usually see this in, so I guess I can't complain." He flopped down to sit on the grass, dropping his bo staff next to him and leaning back on his hands.

It looked a lot nicer by day. And when he didn't have to constantly watch his own back - to be fair, that probably made it look even better than the light did. It wouldn't be accurate to say that Donatello disliked the ninja lifestyle, or that he wasn't content with it, but sometimes? Things got old.

Just walking around the ship without getting funny looks, being able to sit here in the middle of a New York that was completely lacking in people to stare or scream or cause some kind of commotion at having a giant turtle in their midst - it was pretty nice, he had to admit.

"Same. With how much time I spend rocketing around in space, I don't really get sun often. And it's not as if I ever have time to soak up some rays at the beach --"

Rich finally turned his head to look at who'd joined him. Whoever it was sounded young, and --

-- and that was a ninja turtle. He was sitting in a Central Park on an alien ship with a ninja turtle. At first his brain did a full stop, screeching to a halt, like it always did when he ran into something exceedingly strange. Then there was that little voice in the back of his brain that always chimed up when reality got this weird, and it said, You're friends with a talking, telepathic, Russian cosmonaut dog. This is your life now, deal with it.

And then all was well, because he was friends with a talking, telepathic, Russian cosmonaut dog. And friendly with a talking raccoon who loved shooting things with guns bigger than he was. And he'd heard stories about that talking duck guy back home on Earth. Everyone had heard stories about the talking duck guy.

So his brain settled down again, quietly accepting that yes, this was his life now, and he held out a hand for shaking, still laying there on the ground.

"I'm Rich Rider. I also go by Nova."

He wouldn't let on that he'd already guessed who the turtle guy was. For one thing, he wasn't 100% sure he was right because hey, alternate universes. For another, it might cause some kind of existential crisis or something. Better to never mention it at all and just have his inner ten-year-old self quietly scream in joy in the back of his head.

Edited (whoops missing words and stuff sorry) 2016-01-03 08:32 (UTC)

The question of what this guy was doing facedown on the ground was still up in the air, but Donatello ignored it to reach out and shake his hand.

"Donatello."

(The question of "why facedown in the grass" probably had a less interesting answer than the many other questions on his mind, after all.)

"So, what do you think the odds are that out of infinite possible locations in infinite possible universes, they'd grab multiple people from New York?"

"About as likely as most of the superhumans in a world spontaneously all popping up and establishing themselves in Manhattan. As in, a lot more likely than you'd think. When it comes to crazy stuff like this, back in my universe, New Yorkers are always in the middle of it."

Always.

He was one of the only a few humans that got into messes up in space and he was a New Yorker. Even places that barely had Terrans had at least one.

Deciding that laying on his face when talking to someone was kind of rude, Rich turned on his side and propped his head up with his hand.

(Just look at that. A ninja freakin' turtle. It was a funny lil' universe sometimes.)

"This girl Cammi that my friend Drax looked after always made fun of how I told people in space about where I was from. Long Island, Earth. She said it sounded like the title of a sci fi novel. I guess it is a little Heinlein, huh?"

"I always figured my world had a pretty good reason for most of the mutant population winding up in the same place, at least."

Well, maybe more like two reasons, and their names were Baxter Stockman and Oroku Saki. Not that the Foot's operations had been in any way limited to only New York, but the best way to stay on top of things was to focus on the place they were happening, and then it became kind of a chicken-or-the-egg situation.

"If everyone who's busy trying to play God doesn't start from the same place, it's just that much harder to try and steal each other's work, for one thing." (And of course, the accidental byproducts of their work don't have the means to just pack up and set themselves up halfway across the world just like that, either.)

"I'm guessing your world's mutants are more of a people-mutating thing than people born with mutations, huh," said Rich. "My world has a little of both."

A pause.

"Lots of people getting their powers from toxic waste or radiation or aliens giving them powers. That kind of thing."

His planet really did have a crazy high metahuman population. That was part of why some aliens felt it wasn't even worth the effort to invade. Every single invasion that had been attempted had been fought off because there were just too many metas to beat.

"Lots of people."

"It's mostly an animal-mutating thing so far, but I figure a nutjob like Stockman would think animals to be easier to keep control over than people." Less of a potential trail, easier to replace...

Stockman hadn't planned on them getting enough of the psychotropic serum to start thinking like people, of course, but Donnie couldn't really complain about that lack of foresight.

"There were at least a couple of mutants that started human and just had the animal DNA brought into the mix, though." Bebop and Rocksteady for sure, but...well, who knew about Bludgeon and Koya. (And who cared, really.) "But as far as we know, there's only maybe...fifteen, twenty of us out there, total."

"Must be tough," Rich said sympathetically. "Being that small a group."

The assumption that the world wasn't exactly a welcoming place to mutants like Donnie went unsaid. Even if he hadn't been familiar with his story, he'd have assumed it.

"I mean, mutants -- the kind that are just born with genetic mutation and get powers from it -- they have it rough in my universe. They're a minority and...well, you know how those things go sometimes. Some of them accidentally hurt people when their powers manifest at puberty so people treat them like garbage."

He couldn't stop bitterness from coming into his voice. Extreme bitterness.

"Some of my best friends are mutants and I don't get it. I'm ten times more dangerous but people look at me different, just 'cause it's public knowledge I got my powers somewhere else."

"A small group wouldn't be bad if half of them weren't jerks, thugs, or possibly terrorists."

It's said with all of the blunt teenage attitude that he usually saved for when he thought his family was doing something particularly stupid. There was no love lost between the Hamato family and any of the mutants still working with the Foot (and Donatello least of all), and then Hob...

...well, he was never quite sure what to make of Hob, and that was the problem, even if Slash and the others seemed okay.

"If you had to get it somewhere, instead of just being born with it...it's easier for people to think of you as like them, probably." That was the dividing line he was used to seeing, anyway. Hob didn't trust humans - even the ones who became mutants later. They'd chosen it. They didn't wind up that way because someone else had decided they were worth less and thus fair game for science. What did the accidents like them have in common with Bebop and Rocksteady?

Edited (repetitive sentence structure be gone X() 2016-01-12 08:54 (UTC)

That sounded rotten. Rich generally was comfortable with rolling around with jerks, thugs, murderers, and terrorists, but things got weird in space and it made for very strange bedfellows. (Sometimes literally bedfellows, in Gamora's case). And he had a whole species back home that was just like him, with plenty of good people he cared about.

"That might be it. With people getting powers from somewhere else there's also less of that existential 'humanity is being replaced' stuff people get all worked up about, too." He rolled his eyes. "But it still don't make sense when here I am able to blow up a moon if I sneeze the wrong way."

Actually, the difference was deeper than that. It wasn't just about raw power.

"Hell, I'm probably less human than you, even if I don't look it," he said. "Mutants, they've got a quirk or two of the DNA that's different, but they're still mostly human, and I'm guessing yours has to be at least pretty humanlike for us to even be having this conversation. Meanwhile, I'm changed all the way down to the molecular level."

He held out his flesh and blood hand and a little orb of orange-yellow energy appeared there, pulsing like it was alive. His eyes also glowed a faint blue.

"I don't even have proper DNA anymore. My body's pretty much just a not-so-fancy, human-shaped container for this. It wouldn't even survive if I didn't have it in me."

The Nova Force wasn't really something he was all that interested in understanding the nature of. It was what it was. It was in his body, it was a part of him, and there was a part of him that wanted it to always be a part of him, because that was the little spark inside him that made him a Human Rocket, made it so he could help a whole lotta people. Honestly, it needed to always be a part of him because now he'd become too changed to live without it.

But eggheads like his little brother Robby were always fascinated by the science behind it and he figured Donnie might be interested in it, too. So he offered it almost like a toy he could play with, hoping he might enjoy it.

Edited 2016-01-12 15:45 (UTC)

"That's got to say something about how weird your life is when you're less human than someone who hatched in a pet store."

Probably a pet store. He assumed a pet store. But being an ordinary turtle was kind of a weird jumble of memories that didn't really string into a narrative the way everything about the mutagen did.

He leaned forward, gaze fixed on the energy, although he didn't move to touch it. Donnie was scientist enough to have plenty of ideas about what could happen when you just messed around with things you knew absolutely nothing about.

(Which wasn't to say it wasn't tempting.)

"So when you say survive...does it burn out without a host, or is this going to be even weirder than I'm already expecting?" It was an unusual word choice for something that was (he presumed?) just pure energy as opposed to...sentient. Or not sentient but at least alive somehow. Humans survived, animals survived. Plants survived.

Energy?

Not how he'd have put it.

"Weirder, maybe. Depends on how weird your life is, don't it? S'aaaaall relative," Rich said with a little grin, something that softened the eeriness of his glowing blue eyes. "This is the Nova Force. It's a living energy source. Not sentient, just...alive, something that can live in people. It used to power a whole civilization called Xandar, a world in the Tranta system in the Andromeda galaxy. It was a very, very old, very advanced civilization. Lots of different species living together with the native Xandarians in peace." They'd had some enemies, but the Skrulls were a lot of peoples' enemies. "They were aiming for the same thing the UP seems to be aiming for."

The light flickered on Rich's face as if it was the warm light of a campfire, even in the light of the false sun.

"Probably back before humanity had that 'fire' thing on lock, the Xandarians created the Nova Force and created a supercomputer to control it: the Worldmind, a computer that held all of their culture and knowledge. Since the Nova Force was pretty much limitless and self-regenerating, they split it up into pieces and gave it to soldiers to protect Xandar. And over time that group changed from being Xandar's militia to being a police force, one that protected people all over the galaxy. Thousands of species from thousands of worlds all working together for the same cause."

A pause.

"A little like the Legion, I guess."

This was strange, telling this to someone new. Back home, he'd explained to enough people on Earth for them to know what the Nova Corps was, and everyone in space knew about them and knew they were gone.

Sometimes, though, it felt like he was the only one that understood the weight of that. It felt right to tell someone about Xandar, especially a bright-eyed, little teenager that seemed to be burning up with curiosity.

The play of expressions across Donnie's face suggested he was trying very hard to wrap his brain around a living energy source.

What was it generating energy from? If most living things needed to burn energy to function...what kinds of functions did it even have, if it didn't appear to have any of the usual things that anything with a body had to worry about? Respiration? Circulation?

How did something that formless -

He was doing his level best not to just interrupt the inspiration part of the story with a million science questions, though, but even if it was rather inspirational (an entire galaxy getting its crap together enough to unite like that was an amazing thought, for someone from an Earth that was still as far as possible from doing the same, after all), he couldn't quite keep himself from finally letting the pot of questions boil over with the most simple, direct one possible -

"But how does it work?"

"Unfortunately, you're asking the wrong Rider brother. My little brother Robby knows a lot more about it than I do. He's the big shot MIT grad that studies alien tech. Or if I still had Worldmind with me, maybe she'd be able to explain it."

He looked at the fire in his hand.

"All I know is a dying Xandarian Centurion named Rhomann Dey chased a space pirate named Zorr to Earth, and he gave his chunk of the Nova Force to a random Earthling, so the planet'd have a chance against Zorr. I was just this dumb seventeen-year-old nobody and it hit me like a bolt out of the blue. All I got was juuust a little sliver of it but it was enough for me to became a human rocket. All of a sudden I had all these amazing powers that I could use to help people."

But that was a long time ago.

"But a few years back, there was a war. A really terrible war. And Xandar fell."

He closed his hand and snuffed the light out and the glow in his eyes faded.

"I was the only one that survived it. I was the only Centurion left that could take in the Nova Force and the Worldmind so it didn't fall into enemy hands -- and I had to take in all of it. Something that powered thousands of Centurions and starships and planetary habitats."

He gestured to himself.

"The Worldmind changed me so I could hold it all, all the way down to the molecular level. That's why I need the Nova Force to survive now." Because even if he looked human, on a molecular level, he was more vessel than human being. "Sometimes it feels more like I'm a star just wearing a human skin."

When he was using the Nova Force for something big, like a stargate or something hugely explosive, it felt almost like everything inside was just slipping outside of him. Hell, maybe that was why he'd dissipated into energy after the thing with the Cosmic Cube instead of just dying.

"I wish I could tell you how it works but I'm just guy from Long Island." He thought back to Robby and how excited he'd been to have some time to study the Nova Force after he'd become a Nova, too. "If you ever wanna go crazy with a scanner sometime, though, you're welcome to. I'm an open book."

Edited 2016-01-13 09:10 (UTC)

A star wearing a human skin was such a poetic way of putting it. Donnie wasn't really one to zero in on poetic; he was usually too busy trying to pick things apart on a different level, but...something about the way Rich was describing it felt a little bit like talking to the Fugitoid again.

Hearing things that didn't make any sense to him put in ways that made him feel a little silly for questioning.

(Not silly enough to stop questioning, of course. Nothing ever stopped him from that.)

"You really wouldn't mind?"

Being treated like an object of science was - well, he could understand the objections, having been on the wrong side of it himself once upon a time.

"Way I see it, the more big brains know what's going on with my molecules, the less trouble I'll be in if something ever goes wrong -- and something always goes wrong."

Because that was his life. It was a mess.

"The last time what happened was I lost the Nova Force and then I basically only had days to live afterward because my body was breaking down so fast. I was lucky that a friend of mine was able to give me the source of his powers until I could get it back."

He didn't see Donnie as the type to make him feel strange about it.

"Besides, you don't really strike me as the type to get all dehumanizing --" Wait, maybe he needed a better word for that, to include nonhumans like Donnie himself "--ah, de-personi-isizing--about it."

"Well, you're making sense about it."

Donnie loved people who made sense.

"Has anyone here tried to scan you yet? I think the first order of business should be seeing if there's anything remotely close to the Nova Force on file with the medics here, because if they've dealt with anything close, they might already have a better idea of how to deal with it if something happens than we'd get starting from scratch."

"They did some basic scans, but nothing in depth. But, uh, they definitely didn't know what to make of it. They said some people in this world have powers where they have some kind of living force -- take Umbra, for instance -- apparently, she has something called a Darkfield? Which...is something people have in my universe, too, actually. The Darkforce."

Asylum had used it as a weapon against them, back when the New Warriors had always clashed with Psionex.

"But nothing exactly like it. And like I said, the more people that that keen a look the better. You sound like a bright kid."

The corner of his mouth quirked. "To be honest, with asking all the questions you remind me a lot of my lil' brother Robby. He was building robots out of toasters when he was like four. And he had tons of questions about the Nova Force when I finally fessed up to my family about having it."

As much as he liked the idea of lots of big brains having an idea of how to maybe help him if he lost it again, most of this was seeing a curious youngster that reminded him of his bro and being willing to indulge him.

Edited 2016-01-24 09:26 (UTC)

"I think I just drive my brothers nuts with it, half the time."

Okay, so maybe he didn't always have the best timing to get distracted on a scientific tangent, but in his defense, they didn't always have the best timing to get focused on all the grudgestuff, either. And questions were important, whatever they were about.

The entire situation with the Technodrome had proven that much, however messily.

"I'm not sure how much I'll be able to get out of it, because it's pretty far out of what I've seen before, but that's no reason not to try."

"Yeah, my brother did a lot of that, too. Driving me nuts with it."

He grinned a huge grin, thinking back to the time Robby had appropriated all the pots and pans in the house to try to build a mecha. All Rich had wanted was a pot to make himself some mac n' cheese but nooooo...

"But you should'a seen how he was as a Nova. Worldmind said she hadn't seen intuitive gravimetric force-skills like Robby's in seven generations. He even held a Strontian -- we're talking an alpha level war criminal -- pinned for two hours. Strontians are some of the strongest aliens in my universe because their powers are based on confidence. The woman he pinned? Had killed thousands of people."

Rich tapped his temple.

"It was that big ol' brain of his. Made it so he could do crazy things when he had power over gravity. Give his brain an inch and he'd use it to run a marathon."

Slowly, so Donnie didn't think it was an attack, Rich reached out and tapped Donnie's forehead with one finger.

Boop.

"That's always way more useful than muscles or being walking supernovas. It's never the powers that matter, it's what people do with 'em."

He looked a little surprised at the boop.

(He got over it fast, though.)

"Powers aren't going to get us back home."

- well, okay, maybe not entirely accurate, given that Brainiac's intelligence was enough to qualify as a superpower, and Donnie's existing mechanical skills weren't really developed enough for the task yet (although he was sure he could damned well get them there, if that was what it came to), and the weird, much more complete understanding of the tech here that he had was definitely a power, but...

...it was the principle of the thing, okay.

"Nope. It's gonna be brains and nerve. That's what it always comes down to."

That was how they'd won the war. They'd been just smart enough and just brave enough (some would say "suicidal enough") to get close enough to Annihilus and take him down.

Donnie seemed pretty prepared to take some of that on -- finding a way out of this. For someone so young, it was a lot of responsibility to take on and to Rich, that was impressive.

"Y'know, for someone so young -- 'cause you can't be older than your late teens, right?" It was hard to tell from his size alone when it didn't seem to correspond entirely to how humans were, but his voice didn't sound adult-like. "This don't seem to be phasing you that much. But it sounds like you have a pretty interesting life back home, too."

It was still a special thing, though, for a teenager to just roll with the punches and he liked Donnie's earnestness. Not every teen hero managed to pull it off. Nova knew of some that would've caved if they'd had to fight in the Skrull-Xandar war like he had, for instance. Hell, he'd lived through a few battles that were so traumatic that the Xandarians had wiped his memory of them, so that he only remembered them years and years later.

"Not...even that old, technically, but that's the mutagen talking. We grew up kind of fast."

And not only because of the mutagen, really. They'd been able to understand things much sooner than their chronological age would have allowed, but they'd been forced to put that to the test right away. It felt like they'd been going a mile a minute ever since they escaped from Stockgen, and even the things that should've been victories just seemed to lead into still more fighting.

"Interesting's a pretty nice way to put it. But this isn't my first trip to another dimension...it's just the first one that didn't start with getting shot at."

Though he had full faith that they'd run into that snag soon enough, whether they liked it or not.

Rich grinned.

"Always a plus." He paused. "Never lasts long, though."

He'd been to an alternate dimension or two in his day. He'd even faced an alternate of his own brother, who'd been the Nova protecting Earth in another dimension. He'd failed and then taken it on himself to kick him around in his timeline until he was strong enough to protect his own Earth from the same threat.

"Shouldn't be that bad here, though. Sounds like a standard hero gig, and that can be tough but it's better than some of what I've dealt with any day. Least we weren't pulled into a war."

Again, in his case.

"Or into fighting Lovecraftian, tentacle oogety-boogeties." He raised and wiggled his prosthetic hand. "That's how I lost this. I'd like to maybe keep all the other ones, if it's all the same to everybody. Apparently, limbs are kinda a limited supply? That's kind of a thing."

Despite the fact he was talking about, you know, losing limbs, he didn't seem too fussed. Mostly, he was just glad he was alive to even joke about it.

Edited 2016-02-06 09:38 (UTC)

Donnie's face scrunched up a bit. "We had one Lovecraftian...thing under New York and that was plenty for one lifetime."

That, honestly, had been what he'd consider one of the worst fights they faced, perhaps because the nature of their opponent meant that so little of their training seemed to really matter. Technodrome had been hell, yes, and he had no desire to take another sledgehammer to the shell, but everything they knew had come together into a plan that worked, albeit with a few wrenches thrown their way. The Gauntlet had been bad, but that had been the culmination of everything they'd ever trained for. Preparing made a difference.

Shub-Niggurath had been nothing like that. It still felt like they'd just scraped through on luck more than anything.

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Imagine There's No Heaven

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is the boop okay?

absolutely! c:

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