Adapted from the Green Ronin Adventure by Steve Kenson
with Paul & Jennifer DK
Write up by Ant L. (Team Archivist)
Last Episode
As the chronal energy dissipated, the Balance found themselves standing in an arid area, dry red clay beneath their feet and reddish rock formations dotting the horizon. The air was hot and dry and the sand was roasting. They immediately noticed the wreckage of a vessel, now a twisted and broken heap of metal, glass, and plastic. From the damage, it looked as though something had smashed it into fragments rather than the result of a crash. They also noticed that Tempus was no longer with them: the time thief was again nowhere to be seen.
The temporal coordinates were clearly off enough that they appeared to have arrived days after Tempus, causing them to become stranded.
A group of riders, dressed in late 19th century Western riding gear complete with weathered Stetsons, came over a nearby rise and loped towards the team. However, the riders were not mounted on horses, but on smallish dinosaurs, ‘deinonychus’, they thought, walking on their hind legs. The dinosaurs wore saddles and bridles and were clearly trained as riding animals, although their large sickle-like claws and sharp teeth were still evident; hence their colloquial name, Terrible Claw.
They appeared to be in the era of the cowboys in pre-isolationist United States of America but time was clearly out of sync with their known history. Why aren’t there Time Watch agents here trying to restore the time line? Where was Danni for example?
To add to their issues, meta-abilities didn’t manifest on Earth until 1909. The team thankfully still retained their powers but no-one else should have any in the here-and-now unless they were time travellers who’d previously travelled after that event and who’d been genetically transformed. The Balance (and Tempus) would be, should be the only Metas’ in this timeline!
“Nice day fer it,” the lead rider drawled. “Y’all can help us hunt through this scrap…after you hand over your valuables, that is,” and he and his men drew their guns.
Now
Having stood and watched as the cowboys made their way over to them, the long-standing trio of Akira, Banshee, and X-Ray decided not to make any moves against the ‘dinoboys’ – information was always more useful than violence, after all – but Celestus took a different view, folded his arms across his powerful chest, and slowly rose into the air.
One rider, eyes wide and mouth open, quickly took aim and fired his six-shooter at Celestus. Akira shook his head, noticing the nervousness spreading through the posse; the fearful always tried to destroy the source of that fear. Understanding seemed so distant, a curse never to be broken.
A slight alteration in his trajectory and the bullet missed its mark; not by much, but enough.
“That was not a friendly thing to do,” Celestus called out, with the same severity of an angry parent berating a small child.
To the cowboys it seemed as though Celestus was indestructible, and the fear showed on their faces. The shooter was trembling so much that Akira thought he would surely drop his pistol.
Banshee, sensing that things could get out of hand very quickly, shifted into her phantom form, intangible, immune to physical harm, and shifted her essence to amplify the fear that the cowboys were feeling. The effect was visceral; the deinonychus reared up, squealing, and two of the riders fell heavily to the dusty, dry earth.
X-Ray followed that with a high intensity heat beam that struck the ground a few feet in front of the group, fusing sand into glass, heat and dust smothering the men and dinosaurs. The sole rider clung on desperately as his deinonychus turned and ran, a roar calling the other two to follow; they were well clear before the dust settled leaving two shaken cowboys looking up at four very different strangers in town.
“Nobody kill them until we’ve had a chance to torture some information out of them!” Akira said, a wicked smile on his lips.
Their guns forgotten on the hot sand, the two men began to crawl backwards, seemingly too scared to stand up.
“They really are the most troublesome and unfriendly people!” Celestus said, catching the wink in X-Ray’s eye. A gesture from Akira saw the guns scatter across the ground before rising into the air, yards away from the men and now totally useless as the barrels pointed into the sky.
“Look,” he said, staring directly at the two cowering men, “you are entirely at our mercy. Where have you come from? Have you got a hideout nearby?”
One of the men managed to gather his wits enough to say, “We…we’re from Red Rocks. We’re the law in Red Rocks, Arizona,” he added Arizona as though it was somehow a marker, defining Red Rocks as different from, say, Red Rocks, Utah, or some such.
“Bedrock?”
Banshee nudged Akira in the ribs, “Red. Rocks.”
“Ah! Where are your badges?”
“Red Rocks never got around to issuing badges,” the man said, not sure what to make of things, “the Lady doesn’t like them.”
That was the bone to Akira’s dog.
“Who is this ‘Lady’? Does she have a name?”
“Well my brother, Will, and I, we work for the Lady, and the rest of the gang work with us.”
“Does she run the saloon, or something like that?” asked Akira.
No-one saw it, but at that moment X-Ray had an epiphany…
“Hell, she runs the town!”
“Yes, okay, but where can we find the Lady?”
The man was suddenly flustered, “I… I don’t know…I’m not there at the moment…” His face was fearful; he probably thought his ignorance was going to get him killed, “She’s not always there,” he added, hopefully.
Banshee whispered into Akira’s ear like a naughty schoolgirl.
With a smile he asked, “Have you seen a funny little man with goggles?”
The cowboy thought for a moment.
“Are you talking about Clint?”
Akira didn’t break pace, “Is he in town?”
“He is, unless they’ve strung him up yet.”
At this, even Akira raised an eyebrow, “Oh, right, what’s he been charged with?”
“Theft.”
“Theft? What did he steal?”
“Whiskey.”
“Whiskey?” He turned to Banshee, who nodded knowingly, “Yeah, that sounds like Tempus, doesn’t it?”
Akira looked back at the two cowboys, “You can lead us back to Red Rocks, can’t you?”
“Well, yeah, but…you’ve seen what you’ve done…you’ve scared our rides away!”
Akira had a quiet chat with Banshee, from which the men heard ’we can fly them there’, then Celestus took a step forward pointing at the wreckage away to their left.
“How long has that been there?”
“About a week,” came the reply, “the town’s a couple o’ miles west of here, we saw lights when it arrived. My brother, Will, told us to come check it out. We were told to look for a glowing ball, ‘bout so big,” he held his hands out, about a foot apart.
Celestus flew over to the wreckage and began to fly over it, back and forth. He determined that great kinetic force had broken the vessel apart, and that there was no sign of discharged fuel or an energy source of any kind that he knew.
Akira joined in the search. There were no organic remains visible, but he recognised several pieces of tech; they were very similar, albeit larger to devices he had seen on Danni Psipher’s time travelling armour.
“I’m going to try something…” Akira shouted to Celestus, settling into a trance-like state and freeing his consciousness as he touched a shard of wreckage…
The vessel was a Time Watch cruiser, a time-travelling ship far beyond 21st century technology. Time rolled back around Akira and he saw the craft arrive seven-days previously, all light and silence, a figure emerging from a doorway… goggles, rocket pack, sidearm, flashy costume…a superhero of some sort, Meta or not. As the pilot looked around him, a huge dinosaur, seemingly a T-Rex, though evidently larger by half at least, runs at the craft, attacking it in a frenzy. Akira now understood what had happened to the time-ship, and as the vision faded, he noticed the figure flying away towards… “Bedrock.”
However, the figure in the vision was not Danni, the female Time Watch officer, and the costume was not an official Chrono-suit.
Akira relayed his vision to the rest of the team, and minutes later they were all flying towards the town of Red Rocks, the two cowboys in tow, held aloft by telekinesis and anti-gravity fields. The screams were awful to hear.
It only took a few moments to overtake the other rider who now was seemingly back in control of his deinonychus and going with all speed back to town. His grandchildren (assuming he lived long enough to have any) would love hearing his bedtime story of the two flying cowboys that passed overhead, ‘shoutin’ an’ a’ cursing’ at the top of their lungs…
A few miles later and the team arrived at Red Rocks, and discovered it was not a typical Western frontier settlement, although it was like something out of an old Western: a single, dusty street ran between a series of low wooden buildings including a smithy, stables, and what looked like a saloon. The wind stirred whorls of dust and sent tumbleweeds rolling past. The air had an odd, dry smell to it that was like the reptile house at the zoo, which made sense once they realised there were more saddled deinonychus’ around, along with triceratops and stegosauruses, some of them pulling wagons or carts, others clearly being herded into split-rail corrals.
The stables in town were like nothing they had seen before, set up to house deinonychus’ instead of horses. The upper story of the stable was a roost for pterodactyls, able to come and go through the upper doors. The stalls were a bit more like cages, although the dinosaurs were domesticated and trained, and the troughs contained raw meat rather than fodder. There was also tack and harness and saddles for the riding dinosaurs housed there.
A split-rail fenced corral behind the houses had a number of pens stocked by various herd dinosaurs, primarily triceratops and stegosaurus. The beasts were fairly placid and well-trained, since the fence wasn’t much more than a polite suggestion to them. If something were to truly panic them, the resulting stampede would be a serious threat to life, limb, and property.
A small white church with a steeple sat at the end of the street, for the faithful of town and the surrounding area to attend services.
The town of Red Rocks could scarcely be called such by modern standards. It consisted of a double row of buildings facing a central dirt street with the chapel at the far end of the street from the “entrance” to the town. X-Ray flew around the town; he was looking for false buildings, like something out of Blazing Saddles, but he was disappointed. Until he saw the saloon…
The Red Diamond saloon was the town’s watering-hole, featuring a bar with barstools, several tables, and even a piano.
Something was going-on in the little town, as a small crowd of people were gathered at the far end of its main street. As Akira, Banshee, and Celestus flew towards the gathering they could see the tall, unmissable shape and dangling noose of a gallows. As they reached the back of the crowd they saw a hooded prisoner was being escorted out onto the platform by two men. One of the men pulled away the burlap hood off the prisoner’s head to reveal… Tempus!
He spotted the trio almost immediately.
“Hi guys, good to see you. You wouldn’t happen to have any booze on you, would you? I’m dying, literally, for a drink..!”
Celestus flew down and landed right next to Tempus and the two hangmen; that’s when he noticed that the men held rifles that were obviously far too modern in design to be 19th century weapons. He surmised that they could even be plasma blasters, if the energy flux coils were anything to go by, and he realised that they were the same kind of weapon used by the Shadow troops.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” said the alien prince as he landed, the gallows platform creaking as his weight settled on the timbers.
“Who in hell and tarnation are you?!”
“My name is Celestus. I see that you are about to execute my friend. Is there anything I can do to change your mind about that?”
The other hangman raised his blaster rifle at Celestus, whilst his cohort seemed to be struggling with the idea of a flying man.
Celestus eyed the rifle disdainfully, “Please don’t do that, it is very unfriendly.”
He sensed that the man was about to fire anyway and stepped deftly to his left; the plasma bolt shot past him and dissipated a few yards over the crowd’s heads.
Celestus thought about the new powers he had ‘inherited’ and the glowing blade formed around his hand; a sharp flick of his wrist saw the psi-blade touch the man’s chest, and with a quiet groan he dropped his rifle and sank, unconscious, to the floor of the platform.
Celestus turned to the other hangman, “Please do not repeat your friend’s mistake…”
The man began to crouch, one hand still gripping Tempus, the other slowly releasing the rifle onto the flooring.
“Now, as I asked previously, is there anything I can…legally…do, to make you change your mind?”
A burly, bearded man pushed his way to the front of the crowd and pointed right at Celestus.
“My name is Will Tallant, and I run this town!”
Turning around to face the man, Celestus said, “Pleased to meet you, Will. Can you answer my question?”
Tallant spat. “The simple answer is ‘no’. This guy stole whiskey from the saloon, an’ he’s gonna hang fer it!”
“Supposing I pay for the whiskey?” offered Celestus, raising an eyebrow in anticipation, since he had no idea about money, “or may I make restitution in some other way?”
“Ya got money?” Tallant asked, a glint in his eye. He took a silver dollar out of his trouser pocket and flicked it into the air. It spun, gleaming in the sunlight, before he caught it again.
“Or maybe y’all can show me how you fly? You got one o’ those devices, like the other guy? He used it to have fire come outta his back! He used it to fly!”
Celestus feigned confusion, “What other guy are you talking about?”
“The guy I told you about!” shouted Akira, oblivious.
“So,” Celestus continued, casting a scowl at Akira, “what happened to this man with fire coming out of his back?”
“He flew away, towards the hills…” Tallant waved an arm vaguely westward, “we drove him away, ‘cuz we’re the law in this town! An’ even you… you… silvery… creature… have no right to interfere with the law! The Lady made me…”
“I’m afraid we really have no choice,” Celestus interjected, “you have no idea what we are trying to deal with.”
Tallant snorted, “Well, we know what we’d have to deal with if you weren’t here. And that would be the Lady…”
“Would it help if I spoke to this ‘Lady’?”
“The Lady ain’t here! The Lady is up in them thar hills, chasing after…” Celestus didn’t allow the man to finish.
“I suggest we head to the hills,” he said to Akira and Banshee, “that’s where everybody else seems to have gone!”
An ear-piercing shriek rent the air, forcing townsfolk to cower and cover their ears – around them, weapons exploded, as Banshee’s vocal powers focussed on the weaponry and split it apart. That was enough for a lot of the crowd, many of whom decided that they had seen more than enough devilry for one day and scurried away, some hurling derisory comments at Tallant; he may have been the law in town, but it seemed he wasn’t a particularly popular choice.
A few townsfolk made their way to the Red Diamond saloon but stopped dead in their tracks as two members of the Tallant gang flew through the main front window in a shower of glass and playing cards, landing with a thud and a splash in a water trough at the edge of the boardwalk. A couple of Triceratops took offence briefly, before continuing to drink around the groaning men.
X-Ray had seen the gallows stage, and the rest of the team heading to it, so decided to indulge himself in a little bit of live-action role-playing while he had the chance to do so. He had pushed open the swing doors to the saloon and sauntered straight to the bar, ordering a bottle of whiskey (just for fun; Brian really wasn’t a spirit drinker, much preferring a real ale, but…hey, this was a western…) and, when asked “fer a dollar sixty”, pointed right at some ne’er-do-wells in the corner and said, “Them good ol’ boys’ll be buying my whiskey from now on!”
Needless to say this did not go down well with the ‘good old boys’, so X-Ray bopped one of them on the nose and shouted “Fight!”
The rest, as they say, was history…
Akira cast his favoured spell of invisibility and flew around Tallant to the gallows platform, snatching the burlap hood off the flooring before flying back to Tallant and pulling the hood over his head.
Looking on, Celestus saw Tempus lift into the air, as Akira grabbed his former teammate and pulled him away to, relative, safety. Suddenly, Tempus vanished from sight altogether.
As the sounds of the barroom brawl wafted across the street, Celestus flew across to see what was happening. Peering inside he was just in time to see the barman wallop X-Ray on the back of his head with a new bottle of whiskey; a step ahead of the game, Brian had put his force field up before he had started the fight, and the bottle simply bounced out of the barkeep’s hand, smashing into a row of bottle at the rear of the bar.
Celestus collared X-Ray shortly after he had thrown the two fellas through the window.
“As fun as this appears to be, it really isn’t helping!” he pointed out.
With a sigh, and obvious disappointment, X-Ray capitulated, but managed to flick one finger at the sole cowboy still standing, catching his jaw and sending him floorwards. A slight celebration was in order as he strutted out of the saloon, a clenched fist and a silent “Yes!”.
Back across the street, Tallant had removed the hood and pulled a pistol on Banshee, who was sticking around to make sure he didn’t cause any more trouble. She was intangible, so he couldn’t have hurt her, but he didn’t know that and pulled the trigger with a sneer on his face. Thanks to her earlier shriek, the gun was damaged, and it exploded in his hand. He screamed; Banshee couldn’t tell if he had lost a finger or two, but there was a lot of blood.
Before his disbelieving eyes, Tallant saw Banshee change into Mary, who looked at his bleeding with and tutted, “Dear, dear! That looks nasty!”
She began to tend to his wounds, even though he was hopping from foot-to-foot and screaming blue murder.
“I think it’s time to go!” said Celestus, as he led X-Ray towards Mary.
Over the short-range Bluetooth ability of their Commdots, Akira said, “Come on guys, I’ve got Tempus. Let’s get out of here and up into the hills to look for this Lady!”
“I agree!” said Celestus, in a voice that was hard to ignore.
***
Akira brought Tempus down to the street near to Banshee. Finishing a makeshift bandage for Tallant, she sent the man on his way. As Celestus and X-Ray joined them, Akira got Tempus to talk.
“Yeah, temporal interference separated me from you guys and landed me here, in Red Rocks, a good day and a half earlier. It disrupted my ‘passport’,” he pointed towards the bracelet device on his wrist, “it has been unreliable at best ever since I arrived; barely functional, in fact. I was caught by the Tallant Gang and interrogated by the Lady.”
He blew his cheeks and shook his head, “Man, she is a truly terrifying woman…She was interested in someone who sounded like Dr. Tomorrow, and she seemed to know more than would be expected about him and his technology. Trouble is, I don’t know anything useful about this current situation, and they locked me up! This morning I heard the Lady had left town and Will Tallant decided to make an example of me. Enter you guys…”
“Okay, time to head out to the hills,” said Celestus, as he noticed a group of four townspeople walking towards them. The Balance were turning to walk away when a thin, bearded old timer shouted for them to stop, “We gots sumthin’ to tells y’all!”
The man, and his friends, spoke almost in turn, describing how a man fitting the description of Doctor Tomorrow had been in town a couple of days ago. Another stranger arrived soon after, looking for him, and there was a shoot-out at the old corral; the first man literally flew away, fire coming out of his back, smoke trailing over the horizon northwards, towards the hills. The other stranger left town on foot, headed in that same direction.
Celestus surmised, “It sounds, from the townsfolk’s descriptions, that Doctor Tomorrow’s jetpack was damaged.”
“And the Lady?” Akira asked the old timer.
“She upped an’ follered ‘em!”
Thanking the folks for their help, The Balance bade them farewell, and headed off north.
***
Celestus took point, drifting high above the ground to get a good view of the terrain around them. The rocky hills and mountains to the north of Red Rocks were a lot of terrain to cover; this was not going to be an easy task.
An hour or so later, Celestus spotted what he thought was a natural fissure at the foot of a large hill, partly encased in a timber scaffold. He quickly realised that the opening had been worked by hand; an old mine opening.
A short time later Tempus got excited. “I may have something!”, he shouted. “Something with a chronal core headed in this same direction…”
Celestus re-joined the others and told them what he had seen. Following the rough direction the trail led them to the foothills and low canyons of a dried out river. In the cliff-face ahead they saw the shored-up entrance to an abandoned mine, damaged and splintered. As they got closer, they could see the glint of an iron narrow-gauge rail track, probably designed for push carts.
In front of the entrance to the mine was a large, raging Tyrannosaurus Rex!
It seemed as though the dinosaur wanted to get into the mine, and that it had been smashing at the entrance, causing the damage they could see.
“I thought I saw a large shadow earlier,” mused Celestus.
The beast nudged the scaffolding with its thigh, rocking the structure, which seemed ready to collapse at any moment.
Akira turned to Celestus, “Could you try to distract it, draw it away from that entrance?”
The alien prince sped away, re-appearing seconds later in front of the Tyrannosaur’s face, “Coo-ee, Mr Little Arms!”
He flew elaborately before the beast, slowly but surely gaining its attention and its ire in equal measure. But the plan worked, and it slowly followed him away, trying to snap him with its mighty jaws.
“Flare!” shouted Celestus, and the others turned their heads, knowing what was coming.
The area was lit with a flash like lightning for a brief second. When they looked again, the T-Rex was roaring with pain and frustration, its head thrashing from side-to-side – it was blinded, if only temporarily, and the team took their chance.
As they dashed across the distance to the mine entrance, the team noticed that the T-Rex wore a narrow harness on its upper torso, indicating that it was not a wild animal, but a trained pet of some sort.
The Balance entered the opening, pausing briefly to allow Celestus to join them, and as their eyes adjusted to the darker interior of the mine, they saw lanterns hanging at regular intervals along the chiselled walls, glowing with a soft greenish light. Several metal supports shored up the fragile mine tunnels, floor to ceiling, looking as though they had been installed in the recent past.
Ahead they saw a central open area with three branches leading off from it. They were wondering which to follow when the sound of blaster-fire echoed towards them from the central tunnel.
The mine was dimly lit by the lanterns, containing green crystals that glowed softly. X-Ray provided some additional white light from his hands, helping them to see that the passage off to the team’ right had collapsed some fifty feet further down, and the passage to the left led to an escape tunnel to the top of the cliff-face above the mine.
The central passage led to an open cavern with several other tunnels leading off from it, where they saw Doctor Tomorrow facing off against the stranger who had apparently attacked him in town two days ago!
The tunnel opened into what may have been a natural cavern, expanded and reinforced; the stalactites on the ceiling that disappeared into darkness above supported that conclusion. Several other passages extended off the chamber and there were ore carts, wooden crates, and old mining tools scattered about.
Doctor Tomorrow, looking somewhat injured and worse for wear, crouched behind one such crate on the far side of the cavern, blaster in hand. Closer to the middle of the chamber was a tall figure in a long duster coat and wide brimmed hat. A gleam of reddish light flashed from his eyes, his face in shadow, as he levelled one arm towards Dr. Tomorrow, a massive futuristic blaster weapon now visible in place of his arm, energies gathering around its barrel.
Doctor Tomorrow turned towards them revealing facial features and a body shape that, were it not for the neat blonde hair of Doctor Tomorrow compared with the white unruly hair of Tempus, showed that they could be identical twins – could they be the same person from different parallel universes?
The attacking red eyed creature fired an energy blast that incapacitated Doctor Tomorrow, causing him to drop prone behind the crate he was using for cover. The chronal core, a glowing sphere banded with chrome-like metal, about eight inches in diameter, rolled out from behind the crate as the time-traveller fell.
This happened about fifty or sixty feet away from The Balance, and as his would-be Exterminator walked towards his fallen foe its other arm changed into something like a sheet of metal from which protruded several cruel-looking blades; this thing was no Meta, but a robot or cyborg!
Celestus acted quickly, aiming a psi-blast at the Exterminator. It did not flinch, ruling out the possibility of an organic brain.
“It’s a droid!” he shouted.
Banshee shifted her molecular structure, passing through a crate in front of her, flying to Doctor Tomorrow. She reached him, turned substantial again, and grabbed the chrono-core. The Exterminator was quick, its blaster-arm firing an energy beam that scorched the ground where Banshee’s hand had been a micro-second before. She touched her other hand to Doctor Tomorrow, turning him, herself, and the core insubstantial.
X-Ray shifted position, getting a clear line-of-sight to the Exterminator. He fired a radiation blast that struck the robot in its head, melting the bio-synthetic flesh from its face, leaving a robotic head for all to see.
Tempus turned to leave but Akira grabbed hold of him firmly, a shake of his head warning Tempus to stay still. A heartbeat later they were both invisible, and Akira spoke words of power that produced his signature mystical bolts that sped towards the robot, disrupting some of its circuits as several chunks of armour were blasted away from its chassis.
Banshee followed that with a shattering shriek, its effect against non-living materials evident as more of its outer shell was blasted away, sparks flickering from the damaged circuitry.
As the robot staggered under the onslaught from his comrades, X-Ray retuned his EM frequencies and pummelled it with ionizing radiation. The robot was now visibly struggling to maintain its operating procedures and wobbled shakily on its feet – crackles and pops could be heard as its energy cells misfired.
It tried to defend itself as Celestus crashed into it, one punch glancing off its now featureless head and tearing its blade-arm from its shoulder joint. The apparatus crashed to the dusty ground, sparking and spitting electricity as it rocked.
Although Akira could not be seen, another of his mystical bolts tore into the Exterminator’s chest. The armoured pectoral panels were blown into glowing fragments as its CPU was melted into liquid gloop, and the chassis expired with a clang as it hit the floor.
Immediate danger past, Banshee called for X-Ray to examine Doctor Tomorrow; Brian quickly diagnosed dehydration and a lack of food as his main issues, otherwise he was uninjured apart from a slight scorching where the stun-beam had hit him.
In the silence that followed, the team heard a sound from one of the tunnels that led away from the large central cave.
“What we need,” X-Ray whispered straight at Banshee, “is someone stealthy…invisible, insubstantial, to take a look at that.”
Banshee rolled her eyes, “Okay, you hold the glowing metal ball…” and she thrust the chrono-core into Brian’s steady hands.
Banshee didn’t get far into the tunnel before she hit a force field that stopped her dead. That didn’t happen very often, and meant that the field had a multi-phase frequency component to it.
Standing at the entrance to one of the other tunnels, X-Ray fell victim to a sneak attack by a large muscular woman, heavily scarred and tattooed or painted, seemingly a neanderthal armed with a meteoric iron club too heavy for a modern day man to wield. He held his ground, trusting his force field to protect him from the brute force attack which, in truth, it did; he suffered no injury from the heavy club but it nonetheless smashed through his protective barrier. He felt, sensed, abnormal energies around the club, unearthly, celestial wavelengths that were new to him, and then the woman had grabbed the chrono-core and vanished, taking the alien club with her. Unharmed, X-Ray staggered back into the cavern wall, winded and confused.
“But… that went through my force field…”
Akira quickly reached out with his mind, finding that the woman had re-appeared outside the entrance to the mine, thoughts of reaching the T-Rex in her head.
“She’s gotten hold of the displacement device!” Tempus shouted, “She’s time-skipping! She’s travelling to one dimension’s timeline and coming back again. That’s how she got through X-Ray’s force field; she put her weapon into the same space but a nano-second before he got there, and because there wasn’t a force field in the other dimension, that’s what disrupted it.”
As Tempus finished speaking, the chamber began to glow with a faint flickering orange light…it was filtering down the entrance tunnel, increasing as they watched.
The team raced to the small cavern that led to the entrance tunnel, seeing the woman in the distance patting the T-Rex on its hind leg. X-Ray carried Doctor Tomorrow in his arms, the time traveller caught part-way between consciousness and sleep, head lolling. Celestus ran as quickly and as carefully as he could along the tunnel, reaching the flickering light source to see what he decided was a fuse, sparking and sputtering as a large flame made its way towards a bundle of reddish candle-like sticks…
He reached out and grabbed the sticks just as the flame licked the first of the dozen candles…and was engulfed in sound and fury!
He felt himself falling, a sensation of wind and heat, then the pain of impact…he opened his eyes to find himself half-lying, half-sitting on the dusty floor of the small cavern at the end of the entrance tunnel, having struck the narrow cavern wall between two of the tunnel openings, his teammates either side of him.
“Ouch.”
His costume would need to be sonically-cleaned in the near future, but remarkably he was not badly injured, having suffered just a few minor burns. Smoke rose lazily from several blackened areas of his uniform.
He blinked…and realised that the entrance tunnel was buried under tons of collapsed rock.
“To the left!” said Akira, referring to the side tunnel they had looked into earlier.
White light sprang up around them as X-Ray lit the way. Banshee took over duty looking after Doctor Tomorrow, turning them both intangible and flying out through the hillside. She broke through into sunlight and immediately noticed a bright glinting of metal on the hillside…
A slight rumbling began inside the mine, and the rest of the team began to hurry; the sounds of further collapse echoed past them as they emerged part-way up the hillside, seeing the woman…possibly The Lady… carrying the chrono-core about twenty yards further up. At the top of the hill they saw more glinting metal – another device was already in place, presumably waiting for the chrono-core to be attached to it.
The team were awed to find the sky black with roiling clouds, flickers of oddly-coloured lightning flashing overhead, winds whipping and roaring through the desert, and thunder cracking and rumbling.
With a knowing look between them, Akira and Celestus took flight, bringing Tempus with them, and headed towards the hilltop.
The storm made movement more difficult and dangerous. The chase wound its way up the hill as though flying through treacle, a heavy, sticky miasma seemed to fill the air. They pressed on, battling to keep moving forward, over the area of Magic Mesa itself, along its sides, and on to the top. Rain began to fall, dripping slowly past them, silvery in appearance, an abnormal shower for an abnormal event.
Banshee was nowhere to be seen.
Somewhere, somewhen, they heard Tempus screaming, “TIMESTORM!”
The broad, flat top of the mesa was several hundred yards across, dominated by a single feature: a large metal platform holding a machine that looked like a complex metallic orrery. Its various glinting rings were rotating in a whirling motion and a blue-white glow of energy was building up within it. Lightning flashed out from the dark clouds overhead, illuminating and shadowing features and landscape in dramatic contrast, and thunder boomed out across the desert.
Now an arid hilltop; now a jungle; now a rolling mass of black cloud.
Tempus Fugit – she was using the landscape to hide herself.
“You are too late!” The Lady yelled contemptuously. “My temporal orrery was already activated! It was drawing upon the mystic nexus of this place and the shifting sands of time, an alignment that wouldn’t otherwise occur for a thousand years! Soon all of the mystic might of the Earth will be mine to command and this timeline will be a reality forever!”
Banshee suddenly appeared next to her comrades, seemingly struggling with the environment as well, but still holding on to a now awakened Doctor Tomorrow with all her might.
Then, inexplicably, The Lady on the mountain top became six versions of herself, as other timestreams intersected with the one they were currently within.
Unbeknownst to The Balance, The Lady was using the chronal core in concert with her orrery to “bend” Time.
Tumbleweed, sections of wooden timbers, rocks, the T-Rex… anything whipped up into the maelstrom was drawn to the summit of Magic Mesa, dissipating as it entered the Time Vortex.
Celestus yelled over the raging storm to Tempus, “What is happening?”
He shrugged as he held onto his goggles, “I’m not sure, but I think that machine is tracking temporal anomalies. And this is one hell of a temporal anomaly!”
There was a thunderous crack and a flash of energy from the orrery that appeared to surprise even The Lady. Cracks ripped through the surface of the mesa itself, beginning to spread out from the device, a similar blue-white light pouring up out of them.
“No … No!” The Lady cried in panic as a blast of crackling energy leapt out, like electricity going to ground. The Lady stiffened in shock and cried out, despite her previous seeming immunity to pain, pinned there by the coruscating power.
Then cracks began appearing in the air, as if reality itself was a crystal mirror full of rapidly spreading fractures.
“The continuum is fracturing!” Dr. Tomorrow called out over the noise and the thunder, now awake enough to sense the madness around him.
“Stop it!” he pleaded, “Whatever you do, you must stop it!”
Ahead, The Lady had fallen to her knees, sobbing, blue-white energy washing over her in waves.
Celestus pushed harder than he had ever done before, and suddenly found himself gripping the chrono-core, standing in solid ground. He looked back; his teammates seemed as far away as the hilltop had a few moments earlier. But reality was changing with every heartbeat, and with a surge of strength he found himself back with the team, passing the core to Doctor Tomorrow with urgency and hope.
Tomorrow spun the sphere once, found and clicked a set of coloured buttons in one quadrant, and a shimmering force field sprang to life around him.
“Destroy the device!” he shouted, “Then get in here, fast!”
Celestus stepped into the field; X-Ray turned to the summit, as did Banshee. The orrery was floating upwards; X-Ray sensed that gravity had flipped, but his power automatically compensated for that kind of situation and he remained where he was, unlike Banshee who found herself struggling to stay afloat in one place. Akira grabbed Tempus and stepped into the field. Banshee unleashed her shattering shriek against the orrery; X-Ray fired an intense focussed beam of ionizing radiation at the machine; neither waited to see what effect they had, but jumped into the field, instantly cutting off the terrible sounds of the timestorm outside.
A high-pitched whine issued from the orrery as it glowed, brighter and brighter. The world seemed to shatter, colourful fragments scattering, falling, disappearing into endless white nothingness … as did The Balance.
***
EPILOGUE
The chaos that ensued with the malfunction of The Lady’s orrery and her attempt to control the time flux and the mystic nexus…
The team, swirling through a storm of chronons, found themselves being chased through time and space by two Hounds of Tindalos! They were terrible to behold, and they left the team in no doubt that being caught by them would be no good thing.
Celestus used his psi-blast against one of the Hounds, quickly followed by a shrieking wail from Banshee; the Hound roared and slipped through a fold in the vortex, entering another dimension and vanishing.
Akira dispatched the other Hound in similar fashion, and then everything changed again.
The team were violently deposited on a city street, much to the shock of the locals. They had landed in a stereotypical ramshackle city on the shore of a large tropical island. The locals, dressed as pirates or in well-worn 18th century clothing, stared at them with wide, unbelieving eyes, and as they looked around they realised that, once again, they had misplaced Tempus and Dr Tomorrow.
Luckily, they heard the locals speaking English, and The Balance were able to strike up a conversation. They discovered that they were on the island of Libertalia (better known as Madagascar to Mary), and that the ramshackle city they stood in was the pirate sanctuary of .Libertalia (pronounced as Dot-Libertalia), seemingly sometime in the past (or the future?).
However, the environment had been seemingly warped by temporal energy dragged in by Tempus, shifting its progress closer to his future era, or possibly even Doctor Tomorrow’s. The result was that the historic pirate haven of Libertalia was now leading a technological revolution in a world where magic co-existed alongside mechanical and electronic devices, if the small dragon flying past them, seemingly restrained by a young mage using a mystical leash, was anything to go by.
The city shifted back and forth before the teams’ eyes, the constant changes caused by the chronal radiation that they had supposedly left behind.
A rider on a horse shifted to a hovercycle mid-stride, a clock tower became a power reception dish, and the stink of horse dung was replaced with the smooth feel of plasticrete streets before changing back. However, none of the locals were aware of the changes. To them, their current reality had always been the way it was, even if it was centuries different only moments ago.
Some areas were more stable, a mishmash of the Golden Age of Sail and some sort of Cyber Revolution; pirates and revolutionaries wore jury-rigged cybertech and peculiar gadgets, and checked their palm-decks for criminal opportunities.
***
DOCTOR TOMORROW
Born in Coventry in the United Kingdom in an alternate timeline where under the Anglo-German Alliance the Axis powers and their allies, including the United Kingdom won World War II, Tomas Morrow (his paratwin from another timeline was Tomas Morgen) was genetically created to be an Aryan ideal. Instead, he turned against his corrupt, fascist government and worked with a rebel group to steal experimental time travel technology. Travelling back in time to the start of the War, “Doctor Tomorrow” helped to ensure the defeat of the Axis. He was then recruited by the mysterious Time-Keepers to become a Guardian of Time, using his skills and technology to protect the continuum from threats and develop a temporal police force which became Time Watch.
Alerted to a temporal incursion, Doctor Tomorrow travelled back to Arizona in the late 1800s, but his time-ship was damaged by a temporal storm and then attacked upon arrival by a giant dinosaur and wrecked. He managed to escape, but when he found his way to nearby Red Rocks, he found the town was under the thumb of the Lady of Scales and a gang of outlaws working with her. He was also stalked by the android Exterminator. Doc led the android out of town rather than risk anyone else and holed-up in an abandoned copper mine nearby, hoping to repair his damaged equipment. Both the Exterminator and the Lady tracked him down and tried to eliminate him.
THE LADY OF SCALES
The Lady of Scales was a primitive Neanderthal human who became immortal and physically powerful through exposure to an alien meteorite, in a timeline where an asteroid strike did not kill off dinosaurs, but they were instead allowed to evolve alongside mammals, such that the giant lizards have existed throughout human history. People in this world have adapted to the presence of dinosaurs, including domesticating them as hunting, riding, and herd animals. The Lady earned her current name from her skill in domesticating and training the great lizards: Once, her tribe rode dinosaurs across the plains and conquered other tribes and communities. The Lady “sleeps” for long stretches of decades or even centuries, and has awoken in 1876 only to realize someone was tampering with time. She intends to combine the shifts in the continuum with seizing control of the mystic nexus of Magic Mesa for her best advantage. Millennia old, the Lady cares nothing for the lives of mortals other than how they can serve her, as they should, given her sacred nature.
She seeks to use the unleashed temporal energies of Gaviel’s interference to gain control over the mystic power nexus of Magic Mesa, cementing her control over this era of history, if not all of it.
EXTERMINATOR-INFILTRATOR DROID
The Exterminator was an advanced nano-built android from some alternate future, either created by the mysterious Futurekin or repurposed by them as a weapon. It was sent through time programmed to carry out a specific mission, often the elimination of a target posing a threat to the Futurekin’s plans. The Exterminator was a relentless and ruthless opponent that knows no human compassion, only the fulfilment of its mission. It’s ability to cover its artificial appearance with bio-synthetic flesh allows it to blend-in to the local environment, assuming various disguises until its technological components tear through its outer cover to carry out its mission.
TEMPORAL ORRERY
An orrery is a mechanical model of the Solar System that shows the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons according to the heliocentric (Sun-centred) model. The Lady’s version was a thousand times more complex and tracked timelines, temporal paradoxes and fading, splintering possible realities and paradoxes.
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 