legionworld | Earth Field Trip [MOD PLOT]

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Earth Field Trip [MOD PLOT]

Who| Anyone who wants in!
What| A field trip
Where| New Metropolis on Earth
When| After the steampunk pirate meme.
Warnings/Notes| N/A

Earth is the multicultural jewel of the United Planets, a world known for its diversity and culture. It's a place where people can find almost anything: any technology, any food, any style of clothing from any world. It's also a place people can learn about other species, from the planetary cultural centers that can be found there -- where aliens engage in cultural practices from back home and share them with others, to theaters and entertainment venues where music and entertainment events, to stadiums where people can catch alien sports like Magnoball, to museums filled with all different works of art from myriad worlds.

And if there is a city that best represents what Earth has to offer, it's New Metropolis, on the North American continent, where both Earthgov and the UP Council are located.

[ooc: ooc info and requests are here!]

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The threshold hub is awful busy today and that means they have a slight wait until they'll be waved through for the trip. Timber Wolf is using this time to tell everyone about Earth.

"So here's the deal. You're allowed to leave whenever you want and go wherever you want, but we know some of you aren't familiar with our universe or traveling to other worlds or the level of technology. So juuuust in case you find yourselves in over your heads with anything, we figured I'd hang around the city so I'm right there if you need a hand. At least for your first trip."

A little boy is with him, dressed all in white, and he peeks around from behind Timber Wolf and smiles. He has a gap-toothed little smile, like many eight-year-old's.

"'Sides, I gotta take the cub here to grandma's," Timber Wolf goes on. He rolls his eyes slightly. "She's the president of the UP and for some dumb reason she thinks that means she has the right to be a bossy, sprocking piece of--"

"Da," says the boy. "I thought you said sprock is a bad word."

"--A bossy lady. She thinks she has the right to be a bossy...lady about me getting him there exactly on time for his visits." He musses the boy's hair, mostly as a distraction from what he just said. "Anyway, while we're waiting for a navigator, I can answer any questions you have about Earth. I'm from Zuun, by way of the 'Bor, but I've been to Earth often enough."

This city is the crown jewel of the UP and that means there's lots to do and see. Right now, thanks to climate control, it's a perfect day, no rain showers scheduled, a balmy 21 degrees Celsius, with a slight, artificial pleasant breeze. Some possible sights:

Cultural Centers
Interested in alien cultures? There are many cultural centers run by aliens from a variety of UP member worlds where you can learn about alien culture and history, and sometimes view live performances of theater, music, and dance.

Museums
Art museums have art from a variety of worlds and some of it is perhaps incomprehensible to people new to this universe. Modern art has gotten even stranger over the last millenia. But don't worry, some will find familiar works by some of the ancient masters, like Vincent Van Gogh, Leonardo Da Vinci, Frida Kahlo, and Pablo Picasso. Patrons will also find sculptures with impossible dimensions, restored clips of ancient movies and other media, as well as art made with soft and hard-light holograms.

For those not inclined towards art, there are history museums, with ancient Earth artifacts like automobiles, televisions, and Apples (primitive Earth computers that were barely more than calculating machines). Perhaps you might take interest in such strange artifacts as the "floppy disk," a form of data storage that held a miniscule 1.44 MB of storage!

Old Metropolis
Want to try alien food? You can find absolutely everything in Old Metropolis, where all the best restaurants and bars are located. Just make sure to let your server know your species and pay attention to the menus to make sure the food and drink is safe for you to consume. And watch out for those alcoholic beverages -- synthehol doesn't taste noticeably alcoholic, so it's very easy to forget you're drinking it. Also, don't expect to find many meat products -- the UP is heavy on the vegan food and soy substitutes. At most, you can maybe find lab-grown meat in some specialty restaurants off the beaten path.

Old Metropolis is also the best place to find shopping. Here you can find art, clothes, and countless other items to buy from countless worlds.

Sports Exhibitions
There's a magnoball exhibition in town, where people can see one of the most exciting sports in the galaxy, one where Braalians can show off their powers in high stakes games of magnetic skill. Sports fans can also catch Earth's most beloved sport -- Robo-ball. Baseball's changed over the years and that means trying to hit baseballs past robotic obstacles. One thing hasn't changed: you can still get old-fashioned Cracker Jax from one of the hovering vendomats just like in olden times!

Superhero History
For those interested in superhero history you might enjoy the Hall of Justice Museum, a museum dedicated to the heroes of the past. The Superman wing is one of the most complete, with statues of Superman with the various costumes he wore through his life and archival footage, images of news articles, and infomatics about his many accomplishments. The rest of the super-family is represented here too, with sections of their own, honoring the accomplishments of the various Supergirls, and other heroes that were part of the S-family, such as the hero known as Steel. The Superman II section is especially complete, thanks to Superboy visiting the 31st century. It chronicles his life rising up from being a Superboy into being Superman's equally beloved replacement.

But there are more heroes than the Supers to learn about. You can also explore a recreation of the Batcave and learn about the mysterious Bat-clan, visit the Wonder Wing and learn about the Themysciran hero and the sisters she accepted into her Wonder family -- all heroes in their own right, and see the holographic Memorial of the Last Martian, honoring the great hero and last survivor of Mars, the Martian Manhunter, who mysteriously disappeared at the end of his life.

One of the great things about the threshold system is that traveling to other parts of the planet is as simple as stepping through a threshold gate and following your Kwai guide.

This means the world is your oyster and you can spend the day in other cities and places around the world before returning to New Metropolis to be guided home.

Those interested in the Legionnaires that came before them can visit the Lost Legion Memorial, a memorial dedicated to the many lost Legionnaires that died in past conflicts or were assumed dead due to the conflict last year. The memorial is a massive holographic construct, over 50 feet tall that switches between images of the many Lost Legionnaires.

Information kiosks are located around the memorial so people can learn about the each of the missing Legionnaires. If you push a button, you'll get a random profile to learn about the life and accomplishment of a Legionnaire that was lost.

The new Legionnaires have an open invitation to visit the UP Council hall and speak to representatives from a variety of UP worlds.

Or even Madame President herself, Winema Wazzo!

The UP Council hall itself is even worth a look. The massive circular hall has many floating platforms and a center platform where the group can be addressed. At the center is a large statue that represents the UP, a large golden globe with stylized sculpted planets attached to it.

If there was one thing that got Hal's attention, it was the chance to find some new shit to rib the rest of the Justice League about whenever he made it home from all of this.

So the Hall of Justice Museum was the natural first item on the agenda, and while he wasn't sure if Rich was sticking with him out of genuine curiosity or simply because he knew there was bound to be some alcohol in the future by the time they made it to the exit, the company was appreciated either way.

Everything was better with someone to rant to about it.

"I'm impressed, honestly," he said, poking at a mock-up of the computer terminals in the Batcave. "They managed to make Bruce look kind of reasonable instead of like a pathological dickhead."

~~he loves you, spooky. really.~~

Rich grinned.

"And I thought my friend Thrash was bad. You know, with the whole gloomy, vengeful vigilante shtick." He figured he ought to explain a little more. "Thrash's superhero name was Night Thrasher. He led our team, the New Warriors. Mostly black costume, endlessly hostile attitude, major chip on his shoulder. He got better over the years, though."

The smile that followed those words was a little sad and fond. It was a smile many a superhero had probably had on their faces when talking about the friends that were gone.

"Anyway, now I'm just glad he didn't hold our practices in a damn cave."

"With bats. As much as it looks like dramatic embellishment, the bats were absolutely there."

Hal dropped into the chair in front of the console, leaned back, and put his feet up on the keyboard. Exactly the kind of thing he'd never, ever get away with in Bruce's presence. Sure, it wasn't the real deal, but come on - like he was going to pass up the chance?

"Night Thrasher, though, damn. That's a name that screams 'compensating for something' if I've ever heard one."

"Hey," he said, only a little defensively, "at least he wasn't running around dressed up like a giant rodent. I've seen some ridiculous costumes in my day, but that is...that's something."

He went on, "Thrash's was a little more generic. Just a combat suit with vibranium mesh and a bunch of gadgets. And escrima sticks." He briefly smirked, clearly having to hold a laugh in. "And there was the skateboard."

He struggled to hold another laugh in. "The rocket-powered skateboard."

That was when a mental image suddenly popped up in his head and he lost it a bit. He held a hand over his mouth, but couldn't stop the laughter from tumbling out.

It was almost a giggle. Almost. Like one of the boyish giggles he used to make before the war, when he was teasing Nita or messing with the Toothpick.

It was also the kind of laugh that made him sound like he was a little out of practice with this laughing thing. Like it happened, but not nearly enough, or nearly as much as it once had.

"Imagine if --" snort "--imagine your friend there." He gestured towards one of the mannequins with a replica costume. "Your bat-friend. On a bat-skateboard. Like bats all over it. Maybe the front is kinda bat-shaped. A rocket-powered, bat-skateboard."

He laughed again, plopping down and sitting on one of the consoles because why not, his arms crossed.

"This little crossover needs a name. The Bat-Thrasher? Grimbat the Thrashman? Ooh, ooh, Night-Grim the Batslasher-Thrashman." He said the second name the way you might say the name of a couple that combined their last names when they got married. "Hyphenated."

Edited 2016-03-02 10:32 (UTC)

Parker hates the buddy system. She doesn't even care for it much when her buddies are in the same reality that she is, but she hates it when they're not. Still, she's enjoying the opportunity to get out of Legion World, and art museums are places where you can mostly ignore your buddy and enjoy the art.

Or, in Parker's case, enjoy the art and go into raptures over the security systems.

"Would you look at the motion sensors on this thing!" she says, clapping her hands together in delight. "I have got to get someone to let me look at the schematics!"

Edited 2016-03-02 10:44 (UTC)

"Um."

Marinette had been dutifully following Parker through the city, because buddy system, right? It was best that they followed the buddy system since everything was so unfamiliar. And she knew the women was another Legionnaire. Naturally. So she'd just followed along.

The thing was, the lady that she was following hadn't, you know, introduced herself or anything like that, she'd just sort of started talking. And now they were looking at security systems in a museum like they were casing the place.

Which she was pretty sure was illegal?

"So," she said awkwardly. "...Who are you again? Other than another Legionnaire! I know that. I just mean. In general."

Because she'd kind of just...followed along because hey, grown up, right? Probably a good idea to follow along with a grown up.

"I'm Marinette! So maybe you can tell me your name since I told you my name and then we can look at art." Another pause. "And security systems! If that's what you want to do."

It was good to know the name of someone you were apparently accidentally casing a joint with.

Under her breath she muttered, "Just so I know the name of what will possibly be my future cellmate."

"Batboard. It's a batboard." Hal choked back a laugh. "You have to master the stupid portmanteau if you want to properly name a batgadget. Maybe a few little clips built in to hold all the batarangs..."

Hopefully these two never really met. Either Hal and Rich would die laughing, or they'd just die when Bruce and Grimthrashman caught up to them.

Parker abandoned her inspection of the museum's security to regard her 'buddy' for a moment. Her relationship with teenage girls -- or at least teenage girls who weren't already engaging in criminal activity -- was still fairly fraught. One job where she'd had to babysit an entire team of cheerleaders hadn't done much to change that. This 'Marinette' might not be a cheerleader (maybe. Parker honestly wasn't sure how you could tell if they weren't wearing uniforms), but she also definitely wouldn't have been at home in a chop shop either.

"I'm Parker," she answered. She leaned forward and reached out to pat Marinette's upper arm and give her a reassuring smile.

"I am very good at what I do. We won't get arrested," she said softly, then straightened up again. "Let's go see what kind cool spacefuture stuff they have around that statue over there. Also the statue, since it's there. I don't think I know the artist, not from this distance."

Dipper had found himself in a strange new place, without his sister, unsure of what his place in all this was. With nothing else to hold onto that was familiar, his instinct was to cling to anything he could that made it feel like he was where he was supposed to be.

So he was more than willing to be the personal tour guide for someone else in a museum where he actually knew what stuff was. There was little else in life that Dipper loved more than explaining things.

"That right there is a floppy disk," he explained. "Used for information storage in computers -- like our omnicoms -- in the ancient times of the 1990's. It could only hold 1.44 megabytes -- which is a really, really small amount of information. Our omnicoms can hold that times a few million, probably."

He pressed his hands against the glass to look at the faded plastic artifact inside.

"Those were dark days, those 90's," he said with a slight shudder, thinking of the few tiny, tiny documents the floppy could hold. "For many, many reasons."

Oh, look, Thad, it seems that you have a new buddy inviting herself to hover around you. Marinette was still feeling a little insecure in such a sprawling and strange city and it was reassuring to be around other Legionnaires.

So when she saw Thad in the Hall of Justice, she started to hover near him, without really saying anything about why. Doo de doo, don't mind her. Hanging around near you and following you from room to room. Doo de doo.

If Thad turned to look at her she'd just give him an awkward smile.

Hiccup couldn't resist the urge to roll his eyes.

"Dipper, apparently I come from the actual Dark Ages. We don't even have indoor plumbing. So, this is pretty impressive, if a little less impressive than everything else."

"Okay, but you don't understand. The 90's were a time when apparently everyone tried to make things 'rad' and 'all that' and that meant --"

He spotted something else, and gestured to it.

"--that. It meant the creation of things like that."

It was a VHS tape of Cool as Ice.

Dipper walked over and looked at it closely, shaking his head, wondering who the heck the curator of this museum was. Seriously.

"It's just so sad. I know this is supposedly a universe where mankind faced years of darkness and a total breakdown of society in this 'Cataclysm' that happened 500 years ago--" according to some of the exhibits anyway "--but really if you think about, the tragedy had already begun," he said reflectively. "Slowly -- and then all at once."

Edited 2016-03-07 05:53 (UTC)

At first, he thought it was just a coincidence that he kept seeing Marinette. The Hall of Justice Museum had to be a place plenty of the newcomers to this universe would be interested in, and the two of them just so happen to show up at the same time and took a similar route through the building. Not a big deal.

But when he'd eventually doubled back through the halls to head back to the area dedicated to the Flash, he caught sight of her again.

Okay, this was no coincidence.

"Did you need something?"

Rich didn't choke back his laughter. He just chuckled openly.

"Puts it all into perspective, don't it? The whole dressing up in ridiculous brightly colored costumes thing. It's wild thinking there are worlds where that ain't the norm."

He gestured at the room around them.

"Obviously, yours ain't one of 'em, but some of the other people that got pulled in are from places without superheroes."

She was totally going to steal something. 'I am very good at what I do. We won't get arrested' wasn't the same as 'we're not going to steal something.'

Marinette just followed along anyway because hopefully she could be a Good Influence (tm) to keep Parker out of jail.

"Okay," she said in a tiny squeaky voice.

"I was just following you."

Then she thought about how that sounded like she was stalking him.

"I just mean since everything is so unfamiliar, maybe it would be a good idea to stay with people from the ship? So I was just...staying near you."

Buddy system! Not stalking!

"It's weird to think of a place that doesn't need them." Hal folded his hands behind his head, leaning back further in the chair and looking at the ceiling, the fake rafters full of fake bats. "Weird, but...good."

Of course, it was equally possible that some of those worlds needed them and simply didn't have them, but that crossed the line from strange to depressing, and so he wasn't putting much thought into that. They didn't have them because they didn't have to deal with cosmic fear entities or invading starfish parasites or telepathic criminal gorillas. They could just...be normal people and deal with normal people problems.

"But I accept no blame for ridiculous costumes, because I sure as hell didn't design the uniform." He'd gotten pretty fond of the Green Lantern uniform, honestly - perhaps because he'd had to fight harder than any other Lantern for the right to keep wearing it. "You know, now that I've actually had to put one on the normal way instead of my ring generating it for me every time I need to change? Whose idea was the tights trend, seriously. Hiking those things over your quads is such a pain in the ass."

"I think you're being a little dramatic." He of all people would know, given his expertise in being dramatic.

"But" Hiccup said, taking a better look at the poster next to the tape, "I will grant you that this Vanilla Ice person is vaguely disturbing in ways I can't quite put my finger on, so point to you. Seriously, I thought some of the Legion uniforms were clashy, but whatever he's wearing is just wrong."

"...I don't know this artist at all," Parker said after peering at the statue for a minute or two. "I'm not used to not at least recognizing the style of art that's in a museum. Being in the future is so weird sometimes."

She glanced over at Marinette, who couldn't have looked more suspicious if she'd been trying. Parker wasn't planning on stealing anything from this museum (at least not right now; maybe if someone needed the kind of justice she dealt in back home), but just looking at the girl made Parker feel antsy.

"So what do you do?" she asked, drawing on her supply of team-approved appropriate small-talk questions. "Back home, I mean."

"Beats me. I didn't design most of mine, either. The monkeysuit's always been generated by my powers, too."

Yet another thing their respective Corps had in common. It was interesting how many similarities there were, especially in the little things.

"I dunno, the only time the skintight clothes have ever made sense to me is for the fliers, because it's less drag and wind resistance, for the really flexible martial artist people that need clothes that are easy to move in but hard to grab onto, and for the people that just plain don't like wearing clothes."

As one does.

"Like with Namorita -- my other...uh. Not-ex? Ex? Eeeh, you know how it is -- I died and she's a quantum anomaly. Anyway, she was Atlantean and was used to living underwater, so she basically went around all the time in the equivalent of a bathing suit," he said with a grin. "That made sense to me. That made a lot of sense to me."

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Page 1 of 5

Earth Field Trip [MOD PLOT]

The Trip Over

New Metropolis - Don't forget the buddy system!

Elsewhere

The Lost Legion Memorial

The UP Council

for rich

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Hiccup

Thad

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