ya_assemble | [AI] The Study

Teddy expelled air in a faint 'wuff' at the nudge, slitting his eyes open to try and take in his surroundings without revealing that he was awake. He didn't have very much practice with being kidnapped, but not immediately revealing that he was awake seemed like a good idea.

What he saw didn't help him much though. Just a plain white room, empty except for him and the person standing over him, with the vaguely familiar voice. He couldn't quite place it, but...

"Not a Skrull," he answered, rolling over out of immediate kicking range before climbing to his feet. Now that he had a better look at his fellow (?) captive though, he could put a name to the voice.

"Noh-Varr, right?"

"Yes. You're Hulkling of the Young Allies, yes? You and your friends freed me back when I was a captive of the Cube."

He'd wanted death then. He'd wanted it all to end. He'd suffered so much that the idea that he might escape the pain without dying became a ludicrous one. But instead of the release of death they'd given him freedom and life.

"You and your teammates were largely ineffective against me but you may be of use here."

That was almost a compliment, saying he was possibly maybe useful.

"What's the last thing you remember?"

"That's me," Teddy answered with a wry twist of his mouth. He'd seen Noh-Varr around here and there, mostly on the television. He was running with the Thunderbolts as far as Teddy could tell, and the Young Allies didn't tend to go on many missions where the Thunderbolts were likely to show up.

"I was at Defenders' Tower," he said, scanning the room for some sort of entry or exit. This place hadn't been built around them when they were out of it. "Any idea where 'here' might be?"

"I was in my human disguise at a concert of the music artist Rihanna. She was singing a very rhythmic song in the Eurodance genre about sadomasochism."

He blasted at the wall with his nega-bands and they simply absorbed it.

"This doesn't appear to be a standard physical prison and we were taken at unexpected times instead of in the middle of battle. Whoever or whatever brought us here seems to have specifically targeted us during our free time."

'At a Rihanna concert' wasn't exactly where Teddy expected Noh-Varr to get grabbed from. But then, he supposed that would make it one of the best places to be if you were technically on the run from the government.

"I'm not seeing any doors," Teddy added, kneeling down to knock on the floor. The material absorbed the sound of his knuckles almost completely. "...Psychic intrusion?" he guessed, looking up at Noh-Varr. "Though I'm not sure why anyone would put us together." Or why they'd have him hallucinate Noh-Varr, if Noh-Varr was some kind of construct. There were a lot of people who'd be more disarming for Teddy than Noh-Varr.

He stood up and pinched himself, just to be safe. Nope, not dreaming.

"Not psychic intrusion. Even if my mental defenses could be overpowered, by now I've experienced it enough to recognize such a violation."

He'd been hurt by a whole lot of bad people.

Noh-varr pressed his hands against the walls, trying to feel for any difference.

"We are both aliens. That may be the common tie."

The moment he said it, a door opened, to an equally white hallway. Whether it was random or because he'd figured out something was difficult to tell.

"Stay close," he said, taking out his alien ray gun and moving forward through the door.

Teddy rolled his shoulders, reinforcing his armor plating, and flexed his clawed fingers. Considering what had happened to him the last time he'd encountered Noh-Varr for any length of time, he really hoped they weren't here because they were both aliens. Aliens on Earth had a distressing tendency to not be treated like people.

"That's creepy," he muttered, but fell into a flanking position behind Noh-Varr, making use of his training to pick a position where he could watch Noh-Varr's back and the way they'd come. Just because they didn't see any other doors didn't mean that there weren't any.

"If we were captured by FIST or the other government forces responsible for making aliens on the planet disappear, we'd likely already be facing torture and experimentation," said Noh-varr as they walked through the long, bright highway. Teddy hadn't said a word about it but Noh knew they were both thinking it. "This is something else. Possibly a pocket dimension?"

The hallway suddenly shifted in front of them and got longer.

"The recent Crisis left the world dimensionally unstable. It's possible that some interndimensions have latched on to our new reality, hungry for existence, hoping that the instability means they can leech off some corporeality."

Edited 2015-02-28 07:13 (UTC)

"That's something that can happen?!" Teddy asked, less disbelieving and more horrified. "Dimensionally unstable" wasn't much of a surprise, but the idea of things out there that could choose to "leech corporeality" off of their reality sounded like a really bad idea. Especially when other realities could apparently kidnap them.

It certainly didn't help that it made him wonder if the people who'd snapped back into the Crisis had really snapped back.

"What do we do if it's that?"

This was so beyond Teddy's paygrade.

"Hope that whatever has us just wants information and a few vestigial dregs of reality and that there isn't something here that wants to suck our existence from our very bones, until our souls are dead and the material that makes us matter is stripped away, leaving us hollow ideas of the beings we used to be."

Isn't he a right ray of sunshine?

"Or if it is that, we just kill it. A lot. We do a lot of killing of it."

The hallway just kept lengthening.

"Hm. Turn back the other way again."

Edited 2015-02-28 07:40 (UTC)

"I am really, really good at punching things," Teddy offers, because the yeah, ray of freaking sunshine. No point in borrowing trouble.

He checked back over his shoulder again. They hadn't even left footprints behind them, but it didn't look like the hallway had forked as they'd passed through it or anything.

"Are you expecting different results than familiar territory?" he asked, but he was already moving back the way they'd come.

"No. And yes." A pause. "And no."

He started walking the way they came, back to the door that had closed after they left the white room.

"I expect that nothing will be expected."

He kicked open the door to a large and colorful room. It was filled with candy. Candy trees, candy pathways, a chocolate waterfall. All of it was melting, oozing, as if the place had been abandoned, and the air was filled with the sickly sweet smell of candy death.

"One of your more whimsical earth movies seems to have been regurgitated all over this room." He'd actually seen that one! Annie had showed him it. "This is the one with the deranged lunatic owner of a confectionery corporation that murders innocent children in dramatically ironic ways based on their vices, yes?"

Edited 2015-02-28 08:00 (UTC)

"I didn't know they did a horror movie based on Willy Wonka," Teddy answered, peering incredulously through the door. He was getting all kinds of education in things that he didn't know enough to make sense of today. He supposed that they at least wouldn't starve in this weird pocket reality.

"...So, is the thing we need to punch to go back home likely in there somewhere?"

"I have no idea but at least it's a way forward."

A very, very sticky way forward. So far nothing seemed to be attacking them, at least.

So far.

"I have a question," he said to Teddy as they walked. Light conversation, you know. "Why did you and your friends not kill me back in the Cube?"

Teddy misplaced a step into a puddle of gooey caramel at Noh-Varr's question. It had just come out so...casual-sounding.

"Well, first of all, Young Avengers don't kill," he said, pulling his foot loose and attempting scrape the caramel off the bottom of his boot. It worked about as well as attempting to scrape dog poop out of the deep treads and he huffed in annoyance. "Second of all, Young Avengers especially don't kill people who are being forced to do things by evil whackjobs who think vivisecting people is okay."

He pressed his lips together in a thin line. "Vision said that you were really screwed up, and that he could put you back together. We all liked the sound of that better than killing you when what you'd done wasn't your fault."

(It had been months since referencing Jonas had made his voice crack, but remembering what had happened to his teammate -- and the way Nate had dismissed him -- still made his fingers flex and his claws sharpen.)

"I thought so. I wanted to hear you say it out loud. I wanted to know how consciously moral it was."

Because it was all so confusing. Because so much of it had hurt.

"Since I arrived on Earth in this dimension - and in the last dimension I was in - I have been constantly victimized or used in some way by humans. At one point, on the alternate Earth I was at, after my crew was killed, I wrote '#&%& you' in letters several blocks high. So they could see it by satellite."

He added, "To express my agitation."

Obviously.

"Then I wound up here in this world and was captured by the Warden of the Cube."

Out of one fire into the next. More hurt. More suffering.

"I know it shouldn't be, but the moral development of some of the people of this world continues to be surprising to me. I've been trying to...escape my earlier impressions."

He was healing, after all his time finally being free, especially after finding a new purpose in helping people and in stymieing the Luthor administration.

Edited 2015-02-28 08:45 (UTC)

"I'm sorry about what happened to your crew," Teddy said. Judging by his own reaction when Billy had faded out of reality, he probably wouldn't have been nearly so articulate in a similar situation. "And I'm sorry about what the Warden did to you." He noticed that he'd pressed a hand to his own stomach and forced it back down to his side. "That guy was a #&%& of a human being."

"Yes. Yes, he was what you would call a #&%&. I'm relieved you didn't have to suffer at his hands as long as I did."

If that had happened, if they hadn't been rescued, if he'd brought them in only to have them languish in torment because he'd brought them there...

Well, he'd already wanted to be dead before they were there. It wouldn't have helped the feeling.

Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them all.

The Kree Way - the Kree Way of his Kree - was supreme.

"I am...better. Than I was."

Hence the intensity levels going down a bit. And the lack of rage. Those things started to go away when you healed from grief and trauma. It wasn't that hard for them to be provoked again but for now, he was much calmer.

"My teammates and I have been fighting Luthor's forces to prevent any other aliens from being taken in like we were. Ones that are unaffiliated with superteams or other forms of protection have been demonstrating an uncanny ability to suddenly disappear off the face of the planet."

They were almost through the candy room now and still no attack. All they had to do was take a lemon drop path through a field of over-sized gummy bears and there was a door on the wall at the end of it.

"I was...pretty much unconscious for everything," Teddy said, a bit uncomfortably. What he'd been through hadn't been anywhere near as bad as what the others had been through, really. He'd just been sore and a little out of it, but not so out of it that he hadn't been able to stop Xavin from doing something she (?) would have regretted. Xavin had had her (?) neck broken. Karolina and Billy had been forced to watch the Warden cut him apart. And, well, Noh-Varr had gone through things way, way worse.

And speaking of Xavin and Karolina...

"Do you know where the others are being taken?" he asked, brows knitting. "I've got some unaffiliated friends and I don't know how to get in touch with them." He'd seen Karolina losing a fight with Match; it had cut away before he took her down so he was hoping that meant that she'd escaped, but...

"No. We haven't pinpointed where they're being held yet. It's one of our top priorities."

Breaking them out was number two on the list.

"We've been attempting to save them before they're taken in at all. Who are you worried about? We may have already helped them get into hiding."

They'd saved quite a few, called in a few of Songbird's favors, and gotten them into hiding across the globe.

Edited 2015-02-28 09:34 (UTC)

"Karolina Dean and Xavin," Teddy said. "They're from Los Angeles. Karolina, she's, I think she said Majesdanian? She's human-looking, but she lights up like a rainbow. And Xavin's a Skrull, with Super-Skrull powers."

He pauses on the path, because he can't both keep an eye on the giant gummy bears and look hopefully at Noh-Varr for information on his friends.

"Ah yes, they were our allies for a time. Xavin was surprisingly tolerable for a Skrull. We worked with the two of them before the rest of their friends returned from the Crisis. The Majesdanian is now safely with her teammates, the ones that call themselves the Runaways. Xavin was pulled back to the Crisis by the dimensional slingshot effect, as some heroes are."

Almost there to the door...

But boy had it been too quiet so far.

"Xavin has access to my computer's teleportation unit. Once she returns to reality, she will have the capacity to teleport away from harm if she needs it."

Teddy grins, relief flushing his system of some of the tension he'd been carrying with him since he woke up in the strange mostly-empty white room. He tries to gather some of it up again, eying the gummy bears with suspicion, but it's hard to maintain.

"That's great. I mean, not that Karolina and Xavin are separated, but I saw a recording of Karolina trying to fight Match, and I was worried. Thanks. And...thanks for looking out for everyone. It can't be easy being on the run all the time."

"You had good reason for concern. Match is a monster complicit in countless acts of terrorism and violence committed by the Luthor regime. He must be destroyed."

That much he was sure of. He'd have given him the benefit of a doubt and assumed he was under the government's thumb like he'd been but the man was far too glib and cocky. He didn't act like someone brainwashed and in constant pain.

"Being on the run is simple necessity. Much of what Luthor and Osborn are doing is cloaked with an air of legitimacy. To prove anything, the Defenders would have to break the law and risk losing their charter. All of us are already criminals and most of us escaped various government-sanctioned teams and would be eliminated for that fact regardless of what we did. Since we're all already criminals and on the run anyway it doesn't matter if we break the law in the name of exposing the current regime. If we uncover anything that the Defenders can legally intercede on, we can simply direct your attention to it."

[AI] The Study

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