ya_assemble | [LN] New kid on the block

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[LN] New kid on the block

Kon had taken it on himself to welcome a lot of the new people. Part of it was he was a natural social butterfly, now finally able to flit around and meet people again after a very long time of being treated badly and being kept in isolation.

Part of it was the abject delight of being able to introduce people to Santa's Freakin' Workshop.

And part of it was because people made some pretty hilarious bewildered faces sometimes.

In any case, Kon noticed Peter when he arrived in the workshop - he was good at faces after so many missions where he'd had to memorize targets from their files - and immediately took it on himself to pop in and give him a welcome.

"Hey there, you look new. Has anyone given you the brochures?" He walked over to a nearby table near the lounge area and picked two up, handing them over.

One of them was titled, "Myth-hood and You: How to handle not being whatever species you were anymore" and the other was titled "Saving the Universe for Dummies: A handy how-to guide."

He'd worked very hard on them. The yetis had even printed off a ton of copies for him on a little printing press.

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'Bewildered' was a pretty apt word for how Peter looked right about now. Sure, Red and Sandry had already mentioned that this was the North Pole to him after they brought him here via giant glowing bubble. And after the attack of creepy demon horses. And after Peter discovered that, since his life obviously didn't suck enough already, his powers were gone.

All of that still hadn't quite had enough time to sink in. Although Peter also suspected that there would never be enough time for it to sink in. He was still hoping that all of this would turn out to be some kind of horrible dream, but what were the odds of that, with his luck?

But hey, here was someone coming along to give him brochures that would explain just how much the universe hated him. Great. "This happens often enough that you need brochures?" he said, raising an eyebrow. (No, he wasn't panicking inside. Nope, not at all.) "I...wait. 'How to handle not being whatever species you were anymore'...I'm not the same species?!"

(Okay, so maybe he was definitely panicking.)

"Hey, it's not as bad as it sounds. Why don't you have a seat and I'll explain some of it, okay? Some answers might make the whole thing less freaky."

The brochures would explain the rest.

"And trust me, as someone who's done this whole saving-the-universe, traveling-to-other-dimensions song and dance, I can say as far as interdimensional superhero shenanigans go, this place ain't that bad. And you've got people here that'll watch your back."

And there was a way out. (Hopefully.) If they could manage to save the universe.

"Trust me, answers would definitely be nice right now...but I am pretty sure this is all still going to be freaky as hell."

Peter sad, glancing at the brochures briefly before processing exactly what the guy had said. "You've been to other dimensions? Seriously? Like the Fantastic Four? How did you travel from one universe to another? Did you ever go to the N-Zone?"

Yes, Peter Parker was...a nerd.

Kon raised his eyebrows at mention of the Fantastic Four. New kid was either from his world or some alternate of World B-before-the-merge. Interesting.

"I went through hypertime, actually, but both that and the Negative Zone got warped by the Merge so people can't access it. The Bleed's what people have to dip into to access other dimensions now and only a few people can do it."

Yes, he knew about the Negative Zone.

"If you know the Fantastic Four, we're from at least similar Earths. A little while back, during a big Crisis, my Earth actually merged with the Fantastic Four's - or at least with a Fantastic Four's. Post-cataclysm, it's one big smushed up planet with all the heroes from both worlds banding together to fight the bad guys and bring back order."

He held out his hand to new dude. "I'm Superboy. My friends call me Kon."

"Oh man, that is so cool. I don't think I've ever read anything about hypertime though, or the Bleed though...do you know how it works? What was it like? If only a few people can go into this Bleed, does that mean it's like an inborn ability you have to have, or is there any technology you can use to access it?"

He shouldn't be asking so many questions, really. Aunt May would probably yell his head off for being so rude. But oh man, here was a guy who had actually travelled through other dimensions, and was talking about scientific concepts that were completely new to him! How could he not ask questions?

"Are you serious? Your world merged with a world that has the Fantastic Four? Oh man...you realise what that means? If there's multiple worlds with the Fantastic Four in them, then that means that there's not just other dimensions, but parallel universes!" Peter grinned from ear to ear. This...okay it didn't make all of this worth it, but it made it suck a bit less, that's for sure.

"Uh, and I'm Peter. Peter Parker. Um, are you sure you should be telling me that you're...Superboy?" Not someone Peter had ever heard of before, but that kinda made sense if his world wasn't Peter's.

"You're asking the wrong guy about the science stuff. I wasn't the guy that engineered the interdimensional travel, I was the guy the scientists strapped to the equivalent of a nuke that got sent off to fix the big catastrophe going on."

He scratched the back of his head.

"And I go by Superboy because I've been doing the hero thing here rather than the secret ID thing. Although there's kind of no point to keeping a secret ID here - and now I'm getting ahead of myself. Okay. Let's just start with the basics."

They were very heavy basics.

"Right now, you're in a different universe. Obviously. Some dumb villain opened this mystical door a crack and accidentally let this oogety boogety eldritch horror from outside time and space into this world. Its name is Kuk and It's trying to get the rest of the way into this universe, destroy it, and use it as a stepping stone to destroy all of existence."

"Oh," Peter said, his shoulders slumping. He should have expected, really: awesome and amazing new scientific marvels, and no way to actually find out anything about how it works. Of course.

As for 'no need to have a secret ID here'...well, Peter definitely wasn't sure how he felt about that. Even if he was in a completely different universe...he didn't know if he could just stand up and declare that he was Spider-man. And what would even be the point? Would anyone even believe him, when he'd lost almost all his powers?

He wanted to ask about that, but there was no way to do so without revealing that he'd had powers to lose in the first place.

"Let me guess, this oogety boogety eldrich horror also likes sending creepy eye-glowey horses to attack people?"

"Yep, and to make things extra confusing, so does the dumb villain that opened the stupid door. They can create these constructs out of this nightmare stuff. Usually the night-mares - and yes that is a pun - are Pitch's lackeys but Kuk seems to like his fearlings taking on that form, too."

Now for the big, confusing part.

"Now here's the big, weird 'why we're here.' In this world, a lot of us are fictional characters. That doesn't mean we're not real. You ever hear of the many-worlds theory? Everything has to be real somewhere - the places where things are real are where we're all from. But if everything is real somewhere, dimensions where writers just coincidentally keen on to our life stories and write them up thinking it's all fiction are real too. This is a world where we're all fiction to the people here. Writers just chanced on our stories thinking they were creative when really they were just writing down someone else's reality."

Edited 2015-03-16 10:54 (UTC)

Peter blinked. "Okay. I was...not expecting that explanation. There are people writing about me? And my life?!"

God, the idea was disconcerting. He wanted to keep his life private, not publicly distributed for entertainment. (Like that stupid movie, urgh.) And if Kon was right, he really wouldn't be able to keep who he was secretly, because it would be written in a book, or in a movie, or whatever, for anyone to see.

And that wasn't even the worst of it. "How do you know it's not the other way around?" he said quietly. "How do you know that what they write doesn't control what we do?"

"Because we're all here. Ain't nobody out there writing some massive crossover with a kajillion different characters, that'd be ridiculous."

Seriously, what kind of nerds would be sitting there cramming a bunch of random characters together?

"The Guardians - the people putting us up here - have this chick who understands the magical nature of their world pretty well. Katherine, aka Mother Goose. She studies it. She said what's happening is Kuk wearing down the walls of reality means kids in this world are subconsciously pulling in heroes and villains - the people they hope will protect them and the people they're most afraid of. Belief and fear were already powerful in this world - hence why we're all holed up in Santa's Workshop. Old Saint Nick is the real deal here. So's the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Jack Frost, the Sandman, Anansi the Spider - they're all real here. These immortal beings that bring kids gifts and joy. They protect them, too, from evil, from things that would try to hurt hem - like mythical superheroes. Those are the Guardians. Only a few of them are still free, the rest got captured by Kuk."

He went on, "The magic changed us all, all us people from other worlds, into myths, into beings that follow the rules in this universe. The Guardians have taken us in and we're all trying to fight Kuk and save all of existence. After we beat him, Katherine thinks the people that got yanked here be able to revert back to whatever we were before and go back to our home universes."

"Good point," Peter said. That would be completely ridiculous.

"Okay, I'm going to...not think too much about the fact that you just named dropped both the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy there, because if I do that I think I'll end up needing to hyperventilate into a paper bag for a while. But what you're saying is...we ended up as stories here, and now because of that we've been pulled here to be what, myths? What does that even mean? I mean seriously, how can you be a myth. The whole point of myths is that they aren't actually real!"

"You're gonna have that hyperventilating into a bag feeling a lot here but it fades, I promise," said Kon with a smile.

"As far as being a myth goes, myths here are...people that belief changes. Take Santa, for instance. Apparently he used to be a normal dude here but he kept doing such amazing stuff that stories started to spread about him. And because this world runs a little different, where belief has power, it made him stop aging and gave him superpowers. He was a living legend so the belief changed him to fit the bill. He got stronger and faster and harder to kill. He was able to stop time so he could visit every house in the world in one night. Same thing happened to the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, except they were just magical creatures beforehand, but it made them even more powerful. It made them able to sometimes do the freakin' impossible."

He went on, "Kuk broke the world a little and now belief and fear are more powerful here, beyond what they were already doing to people. So the kids here have been reading and watching our stories and subconsciously reaching out for us, wanting us to protect them. That's pulling us in and changing us to be myths like the Guardians. We all stopped aging, we heal faster than normal, most of the people here are more durable than they used to be. Some people that had no powers before have powers now."

He shrugged.

"For me and my girlfriend we were so stacked powers-wise that we actually took a hit and are less powerful, but supposedly as we get kids to belief in us we'll probably get them back - or get different ones."

"Wait, so what you're saying is that we're in a universe that runs on belief? Seriously?" Peter tried to think about how such a thing could even work, scientifically, and...came up with absolutely nothing. Which didn't mean that there wasn't an scientific explanation - trying to figure out the reason for things you didn't understand yet was the whole point of science - but this was still seriously out there.

Maybe it was the sort of thing the Dr Strange could explain, but even if he wasn't in an entirely different universe he didn't exactly know Strange like, that well. Also his house gave Peter major heebie jeebies.

And while it was good to know that loosing powers here was a thing (not that it happening to him didn't still suck like hell), he wasn't so sure on Kon's explanation for it. Because while Peter had some nice powers and all, he wouldn't say he was stacked. He wasn't Susan Storm, or Professor Xavier. He wasn't the big leagues, no way.

Not to mention... "Wait, we stop ageing? I'm going to be stuck in the middle of puberty forever?!"

Oh god. And what if he were stuck here for years? Decades? What if when he got back home, everyone else had gotten older and he was still too young to even vote? He couldn't be stuck at the same age while MJ kept getting older!

"Not forever," Kon said, and he said it was just as much a promise as a fact. "Look, this thing we're fighting? This evil being? He's pushing it. Either we're gonna beat him in the next year or so or we're gonna lose. Which is scary in its own right - but this isn't something you'll be trapped in forever."

He added, "And we've had people go home and come back - since sometimes we get this weird dimensional slingshot thing going - and they said no time passed back home after they left or it was hardly any time at all."

"Oh, thank God," Peter said, breathing a sigh of relief. "I mean, not about the 'beat-him-in-a-year-or-die thing, because that really sucks. But the dimensional slingshot thing. That's great. Because my life is already complicated enough without my girlfriend growing older faster than I am."

And if was dead in a year...to be honest, that wasn't anything new. Peter had already wondered more than once whether he'd make it to the end of another year.

"This guy...Kuk? What is his deal? I know he wants to destroy all of existence and all, but...why? Not to mention, how."

"That's the kicker - we don't know. He - It - is something weird and old and ancient. Like Lovecraft stuff, you know? Unknowable. We can't figure out Its deal other than It wants to get in, break this world, and move on from there. The fearlings that can talk talk about It making everything back into the void, bringing it all into Itself so maybe It's one of those weird supernatural things that want to suck everything in and make it part of whatever It is."

Not knowing everything about their enemy was part of the problem.

"That's why it's been so hard to fight It. We can't figure out Its game other than It's been putting some dangerous people and monsters in the world and talking about ending it all. If we knew why, maybe it'd be easier to fight It. And we don't know what exactly It'll do if it manages to open the big magical door holding it back all the way but all signs point to doom."

He added, "Mabel and Dipper, two of the kids here, come from a universe where there's this demon that follows them around and sometimes messes with them, one that claims it can see into other dimensions and stuff. They said that when they fell into this world they had a weird vision of this horrible void and the demon telling them some creepy prophesy. It said, 'The doors are opening. The last forsaken door will bring the longest night and the children will weep as the world ends.'"

Which was...pretty damn intense for two little kids to have to deal with on arrival but they hadn't had it easy from the very start.

"Okay, I am now officially really creeped out," Peter said, trying to suppress the urge to shiver. He didn't quite manage it. "But if you don't know how to even fight it...how do you fight it? Even if we're all now powered by the power of belief..." (Had he said that? He said that. And actually meant it. Oh god, what is his life?) "...what can we actually do here?"

He'd been seriously outclassed more than once as Spider-man, but this? This was taking it to a whole new level.

"Well to start with, we can stop him from turning kids into fearlings," explained Kon. "Which keeps his army from growing. And we can fight the minions he picks up from other worlds."

A pause.

"But as for going on the offense, we're still figuring that out. Mostly we've been trying to find any old books or beings that might know more about Kuk. In the past, it looks like It was worshipped as some kind of dark god so there may have been a time It almost got into the world before - and that means someone figured out how to shut It out again until Pitch opened the door a crack. If there are any records of that hidden away somewhere, if we can find them we might be able to shut It out again."

"He...he turns kids into those things?" Peter said, horrified. And if those nightmarish horses had been children once, what did that mean when they fought them? Were they going to have to kill what used to be children in order to save the ones that were still alive? "That's...that's...we have to stop him!"

But no one knew how, and what on Earth could he even do to help? He didn't even have his powers anymore!

"I...I can read books," he said quietly. It wasn't exactly the same as fighting, but it was better than nothing. "I don't know what else I could even do, but I...I need to do something. To help. If that means going through old records or whatever, then...then that's what I'll do."

"I can introduce you to the nerd herd then. We've got a couple guys that do research. One of 'em's pretty smart - he's like this monster hunter back home. And this kid named Dipper, his power is he got this weird magic book from this world bound to him. It has a lot of potentially useful stuff in it but they're still trying to make sense of it using the library here. Santa has like this huge library and sometimes people pick up artifacts and old books and stuff while we're out there, too."

He added, "You also have powers. Or will have powers once you get a believer or two - and there's a kid Jack knows that's willing to believe in new people as soon as he's told about them. Everyone gets powers or has their powers changed. No one has to fight if they don't want to, because there's more ways to help than fighting, but there are people that can train you if you do."

He explained, "As it stand, bare minimum, you'll have the standard set. All of us can read and write any language. We're all pretty hard to damage and heal crazy fast. We're all more agile and have better reflexes and speed than normal humans. For people like me it's been a killer downgrade but everyone's a lot sturdier than the average person is."

He added, "And if you had powers before and got downgraded, you get them back with believers. I've picked up at least a few and now I can lift a few more tons than I could when I first got here."

"Oh man, you would?" Peter said. A nerd herd! His people! "That would...that would just be so cool, really." When had he last worked on anything, really? Oh god, it was probably his web shooters. But as much as all of this sucked, maybe it was a chance to actually use his brain again.

The news about powers was...well, he wasn't quite sure what to think about it. It really didn't feel like he'd gotten an upgrade in agility and reflexes and speed. Was it just that his own powers were so much more powerful that even being a little bit superhuman felt like nothing? The idea was kinda unsettling, to be honest. And while he was glad to know that he could get his powers back...what was he going to do about them? He could just let people think they were his myth powers. But then how was that any different to revealing that he was Spider-man? Functionally, the end result was the same.

Fact is, trying to keep a secret identity here really would be useless, but...he still didn't know if he could just let it go either.

"Getting some powers would be cool," he settled for saying. "And if I get ones I can fight with...I'll fight. Although all I seem to have gotten so far is a headache. What kind of powers do you have, though? How'd you get them? And you can really lift a few tons?"

"I'm a clone of the guy who's pretty much my world's greatest superhero. He's Kryptonian, an alien species, and basically one of the most powerful people on the planet. Half my DNA is from him, half of it's human."

A pause.

"And frooom his archenemy." He wasn't ashamed of it anymore. It sucked but it was what it was. "But he's a genius, at least, so the human half ain't that shoddy, either, even if that DNA probably wasn't so great at creating moral fiber."

He started ticking off fingers. "Here, I have the fast healing, relative invulnerability, flight, super-strength, super-speed, heat-vision, super-hearing, and X-ray vision."

Yes, that was a downgrade for him.

"Back home, I have all that, but it's all way, way stronger. Like a rocket launcher can do some damage here when it couldn't back home. All of them are way weaker here. Back home, I can lift way more and I'm really, really invulnerable."

He still had a wide variety of powers but everything was dialed down. Slower speed, lower strength, less invulnerability. He could actually get hurt in fights, couldn't lift nearly as much, and would actually have to struggle to move fast enough to catch a bullet.

"Back home there's also the microscopic vision, telescopic vision, super sense of smell (not as cool as it sounds because it means rank stuff is way more rank), super breath - which is where I can freeze stuff by blowing on it or create like a crazy strong wind with my breath. Tactile telekinesis, which is like normal teke but I have to be touching stuff to affect it, although I practiced enough that sometimes I was able to use it like normal teke. I was still working on that one. That's one of my strongest ones - before I had all the others, all I had was that when I was fresh out my cloning tube. For maybe the first four years I was around? And then in the last two or three years all the other powers kicked in."

Yes, he was only about six and a half. Technically.

And yes, he had a buttload of powers.

Edited 2015-04-11 02:40 (UTC)

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[LN] New kid on the block

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