Imagine There's No Heaven

[iamresponding]

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.

Comments

[iamresponding]

"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."

[nerdninja]

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.

[iamresponding]

"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."

[nerdninja]

"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."

[iamresponding]

"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.

[nerdninja]

"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."

is the boop okay?

[iamresponding]

"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."

absolutely! c:

[nerdninja]

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.

[iamresponding]

"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.

[nerdninja]

"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.

[iamresponding]

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.

[nerdninja]

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.