ya_assemble | [LN] Accidentally in Love (Backdated to April Fools Day)

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[LN] Accidentally in Love (Backdated to April Fools Day)

Brooklyn New York.

Not a particularly silly place, nor a place known for love running rampant but to the locals it would seem particularly strange today in both respects.

It started with a car accident. Two people both claiming that the light had been green in their favor. They started out shouting looking ready to rip each other apart...then they were passionately making out on top of the wreckage of their cars.

Things got more interesting as people seemed to be spontaneously hooking up all over the city causing a complete slow down as business ground to a stop, traffic, even schools were shut down as no one could convince the teachers to stop making out in the broom closets and bathrooms.

It became pure chaos however as Coney Island began to tear itself apart much to the enchantment of it's onlookers. The famous Farris Wheel that had long been a piece of the skyline was overworked from how many couples were using it and it broke from it's supports rolling along the boardwalk and into the city streets.

This was no series of random happenstance. No this was the work of a mischievous spirit. One who was currently lurking behind a couple unseen as she made kissy faces behind them.

"Go on do it! Kiss! Kiss! You know you wanna!"

Harleen Quinzel had been a spirit before, and had harnessed her abilities as a spirit to do the same thing back in her own world. Finding herself apparently a ghost once more she decided to forgo an existential crisis and cause a little chaos. It had been far too long and frankly these poor saps were just the victims of what was almost two years of pent up madness.

Harley had been to other worlds, she had seen people she loved and cared about die horribly until she too had died horribly and pointlessly in a war that nobody really wanted.

She had lived other lives hadn't she? There were memories that drifted fleetingly in and out of her mind but at the moment what was strongest were feelings of regret and loss. Feelings that she was burying under shameless shipping.

"That's it! Almost there! Kiss the girl! Like the crab said go on and kiss the girl!"

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Richard Rider had died and gone to...Brooklyn? That was heaven? Brooklyn? He was pretty sure he was dead. You didn't exactly become a giant dimensional door using the Nova Force and a cosmic cube and come back from that kind of thing. Except if he was dead, he sure was still in a hell of a lot of pain. Oh, and missing an arm. That was kind of important.

And he was in Brooklyn. Suddenly. Magically. And none of the people he called out to answered him. So was this heaven? Was he a ghost? Was it the afterlife if you were still missing limbs and it hurt like a bitch?

"If Brooklyn is the afterlife, I'm not sure how I feel about this," he muttered to himself.

||How do you think I feel about it?||

"Worldmind?! But I left you behind. Outside the Cancerverse." Rich tried to sit up but was so dizzy he didn't get all the way there. He slumped back on the bench he was laying on.

||And yet here I am, wherever here is. One second, I was shutting down for a reboot because my connection to you and the Nova Force was gone, the next second I'm...here.||

"Did you maybe die too?"

||I'm a supercomputer, Nova Prime. I don't know if I can die the way a mortal being would. There's just shutdown, there's...not whatever this is.||

"You're a computer with millions of personalities of dead people inside you. I don't know, maybe that means there are some parts of their souls in there, too. Without the Nova Force..."

||I might have gone into permanent shutdown, I know.||

"What is this? It looks like Brooklyn, back on Earth. What are your sensors saying?"

||That's just it, other than what sensory information your body's relaying to me, I'm blind and deaf. My sensors aren't working and neither are many of my other higher functions. When it comes to regulation of the Nova Force, I'm registering that you're only carrying as much Nova Force as a Denarian would. You don't even need my help with that.||

Rich tried to shoot up again to a sit but another dizzy spell hit and he had to lay down again.

"Where'd the rest of it go?!"

||I don't know!||

"It didn't just hop out of me, sprout legs, and walk off!"

||Right now, I'm as in the dark as you.||

Rich reached his hand up and pulled off his helmet.

"Great." He pushed a hand up and wiped the sweat off his face. "I'm bleeding to death on a park bench, no one can see me when I call out to them, apparently, I don't know where I am, don't know how I got here, I'm not even sure I'm still alive, and I'm not even running at full capacity." A denarian. He only had as much Nova Force as a denarian. "I need to get to a hospital. Can you tap into anything? Internet? GPS? Comm lines?"

||I...I can't.||

"Okay, stumbling around until I either find a hospital where people can see me or collapse and die it is," he said, forcing himself upright. That was when he saw the Coney Island ferris wheel rolling down the street. "You've gotta be kidding me."

||I'm pumping you full of endorphins and meds to help with your low blood pressure, at least, but Rich -||

"I know," he said, putting his helmet back on. Stopping an out of control Ferris Wheel with one arm? That was a challenge. One he was so not up for. "How am I supposed to do this one handed?"

||I can help you form an arm out of gravimetric fields, but it's going to be very crude and rudimentary - and it's going to hurt when it presses against the stump but it'll need something to ground it.||

"Just do it."

Something that only vaguely took the shape of an arm sprung out from his stump. It was agony using it, feeling the field press against the open wound but it was all he had to work with right now.

He stopped the out of control rolling of the Ferris wheel after an almost embarrassingly difficult struggle, managing to break and re-weld parts of it by projecting energy from his eyes so that it rested against a building and two cars. The people couldn't see or touch him so he broke and unhooked the actual hanging gondolas and flew them down to the ground one by one. When the last person was safely on the ground, he started looking around for the cause of the ruckus.

"There has to be something or someone behind all this..."

||Rich, down there.||

"Where?"

||Turn your head left again. That woman in the costume.||

"I see her." She was standing behind two people sitting on a park bench, yelling at them to kiss, and just like that, they suddenly did.

Rich flew down to street level, slightly wobbly from blood loss. The stump where his right arm should've been made it abundantly clear why he was having trouble staying upright.

"Hey, you! What are you doing to those people?" It looked like some kind of psionic or pheromone-induced attack. "Stand down. I am Nova Centurion #11249-44396. Under the terms of the Nova Corps Pan-worlds Jurisdiction Treaty, you have the right to surrender now or suffer immediate penalty. Do you understand these terms as I have explained them to you?"

Edited 2015-04-10 11:43 (UTC)

Harley's head snapped around curiously, raising an eyebrow when she saw the one armed man shouting her way. Straightening up she cocked her head to the side studying him.

"Nova what now? And how can you see me?" She fired her questions back at him opting to ignore his question for now. "Are you a ghost too?"

"Possibly? I have no idea what we are right now other than something no one else can see. I don't know why we can see each other."

Were they ghosts? Could a ghost be missing an arm and still bleeding? He had no clue.

"I'm a Nova Centurion. I'm -" What was a good way to describe it? "I'm a space cop. But I can arrest people in more places than space. You're attacking people with some kinda psionic power or something."

He gestured at her with the fingers of the hand he still did have as he landed on the ground and took a wobbly step towards her.

"Knock it off."

This is your cease and desist warning, Harley.

Not that he presented much of a threat. He had a still-oozing stump and looked like he'd gone a few rounds with Darkseid.

Edited 2015-04-11 01:02 (UTC)

Her curious face fell into a look of irritation "All the ghosts in the universe and I get stuck here with a crippled space cop with a bucket on his head. Just my luck."

Rolling her eyes she took a defensive stance.

"Well you're gonna need more then a finger wag to keep me from having fun Captain Cosmo. I just got my butt kicked for the greater good so I think I've earned myself a little fun. Don't think that just because you're disarmed that I won't put you in the dirt! I'm pretty handy even without my favorite toys. You start a slap fight with me and you'll come to some serious 'arm." Then she cackled because clearly that was the funniest string of amputee based puns ever.

"I should nail you for the arm puns alone but last warning."

||Rich, you're injured. You're not up for engaging anyone right now.||

"Kinda have no choice, Ko-Rel."

||Disengage and find medical attention. You can come after her again later.||

"Yeah, and how am I supposed to find her again?"

Apparently, the other ghost-person was maybe someone who belonged in Arkham, too, judging from the argument he was having with himself as he stood there. And the other voice's name was possibly Karl?

Harley's head tilted curiously then shrugged.

"Alright officer crazy helmet head. You and Karl asked for it." Her hand groped aimlessly behind her reaching for the trashcan she was standing near but then a curious thing happened...

To Nova it would appear as though she was pulling something out from behind her back like a cartoon character. To Harley it felt as though her hand was brushing past silky spider webs where the tips of her fingers brushed over a familiar and solid handle.

Appearing from out of nowhere, Harley drew an oversized wooden mallet from behind her back. The handle was half as tall as her and the head was so thick a normal human would have trouble wielding it. Harley however just seemed more confused by it's appearance holding it easily in one hand.

"Well...is it too late to make an armed and dangerous joke?"

"Yep," he said, rocketing towards her.

Quite literally, he was rocketing towards her. The man was impossibly fast. He'd always been called the human rocket for a reason and even if he wasn't at full capacity - or even at the capacity of a Centurion - he still had incredible aerial speed.

And he was so gonna get her for all the stupid arm jokes.

Harley was not expected for that level of speed. Knocked clean off her feet it was all she could do to keep hold of the hammer.

"Hey no glomping on a first date!" She wheezed trying to suck more air into her lungs. She swung her hammer down at the ground hard to flip their trajectory and hopefully throw him off her.

"Tackling," he said, as he was flipped. He still landed on his feet, skidding to a stop, though he wobbled a little at the end. "It's more tackling. And, sorry, you're not really my type."

Green chicks. Kinda had a thing for green chicks. And Atlanteans.

He rocketed at her again, this time planning on diverting at the last second to try to angle in for a good swing at her back.

"Yeah well you wouldn't be my first choice of dance partners either!"

As it so happened Harley's plan was similar to his and she braced herself to leap out of the way at the last second. So she was surprised when he diverted and she shot into the air like a grasshopper only to wind up perched on a lamp post.

"You know Officer, you ain't lookin' so hot. And that's not just a comment on my personal preference for green gals with red hair."

Seems they had that much in common at least.

He landed again, mostly because he barely had the energy to keep himself in the air. The stump was starting to hurt less - not that he knew it but his myth powers were finally letting it heal, but he'd still lost a lot of blood and going a few rounds with Thanos had taken its toll. These really were injuries he needed to sleep off.

That was why when he skidded to a stop again, he stumbled to his knees, trying to catch his breath.

"Yeah, thing of it is, I can't just let you go around messing with people's heads," he said. "I mean, come on, for all you know, you might accidentally zap two siblings. You're gonna traumatize somebody."

And it was his job to protect people.

It wasn't personal at all on his part. Rich was not someone that played at Officer Friendly just to be a bully. He just couldn't let her mess with people like this, plain and simple. If he could stay conscious, he'd try to stop it.

Edited 2015-04-13 00:09 (UTC)

"Ugh." Harley rolled her eyes in an exaggerated fashion. "See this is why no one likes cops. You even take the fun out of being dead. I mean so maybe I've made a few bad connections with whatever my cool new ghosty powers are. Love is always better then being alone."

Somewhere in her head the psychologist part of her pointed out that she knew better and that was a very telling comment just then. The rest of her mind shouted to shut up.

"And a little trauma is good for the spirit. Builds moral character." She lowered herself to a relaxed sitting position on the lamp post.

"That being said, I may be a wicked villainess but it's not as much fun beating on you when you already look deader then a ghost should. I'll take a break for now and you can ya know...not die. Sound fair?"

Unlike many cops, he was just a little bit flexible sometimes.

"...Yeah, I'll take it."

He went from kneeling to sitting in the grass, trying to catch his breath.

"'Sides, you're the only one that can see me and I'm the only one that can see you. Something tells me we should be trying to figure out what the hell happened instead of fighting each other."

The sitting wasn't quite enough.

||Your blood pressure's tanking.||

With that, Rich flopped right over into the grass, drawing up his knees so the blood flow went to his head, tilting his head and keeping an eye on her in case she attacked.

"What's your name, by the way? I'm Nova. But you can call me Rich."

He wasn't so much with the secret ID thing anymore and it was a common enough name.

And villainess or no, she seemed mostly harmless. As far as he could tell, the runaway Ferris Wheel seemed like some kind of accident from people crowding the thing rather than her overtly messing it up. And it wasn't most villains that'd offer a reprieve instead of going in for the kill.

So Rich did what a lot of cops didn't do and decided to to talk to her like a person.

She gave him a moment to get comfortable while he focused on not dying and then sprang nimbly from the light posts to land on the ground as gracefully as if she had wings.

"Harley Quinn, but you can call me Harley." She passed back her own name in exchange. "I'd help you with that mess of a stump you have there but I don't have any bandages...or do I?"

Her mind drifted back to that strange sensation she'd had when she pulled her hammer out of thin air.

Deciding that she had nothing to lose (Even if Rich did) she groped around behind her back and once again felt the creepy sensation of gossamer webs stroking over her hands as she felt around in a pocket of nothingness.

Just as she was about to stop something brushed her fingers, something cloth! She seized it and began tugging.

Like something from a magicians basic act Harley produced a long string of silk scarves tied together in different colors. Looking fairly surprised and pleased with herself she held them out for him to inspect. "I couldn't do this last time I was dead! Maybe I leveled up!"

To trust or not to trust.

"I'm not sure if I should trust you getting in close," he said. A pause. "But what the hell, I'm still mostly invulnerable and I already died once today. I figure that means my odds of doing it again are slim. Lightning doesn't strike the same place twice, et cetera, et cetera. If you're willing to give it, I'd appreciate the help."

He pulled off his helmet and collapsed it into a clothlike material that he tucked into his belt. His skin was very pale underneath.

Then he reached over and started peeling the bandages off, wincing the whole time.

"I didn't exactly get this wrapped up under ideal conditions."

You know, what with a rampaging Thanos right nearby.

"Did you die, too? Before ending up here? We should try to figure all this out."

They needed to figure out what this place was.

Edited 2015-04-13 04:49 (UTC)

Harley chuckled because he wasn't entirely wrong, he probably ought not let her get that close. But as he accepted the scarves she took a seat on the head of her mallet while it rested on the ground.

"Yeah I think so? I remember I was running distraction for some friends of mine trying to complete a mission. Undermine a big oppressive evil government thing. Just another Tuesday really. And I remember I was shot in the back and...well here we are. So I guess they must have killed me once they caught up to me." She shrugged her shoulders. "Too bad, I was kinda hoping for a more public execution. Maybe some live on air torture so I could say my goodbyes."

He got the rest of the bandages off. The bleeding had slowed to a trickle but the stump was a mess of clots and nastiness, although it didn't seem infected. Yet. The scarves seemed a lot more sanitary than a piece of Drax's ripped clothing, at least.

He tried his best to re-bandage it one handed so the woman didn't have to touch his blood. It wasn't easy.

"Blue blazes, that sounds terrible. What planet? I need to figure out if it's in my jurisdiction. Hell, I might pay a visit even if it isn't."

He paused.

"Not that I'd be able to do anything about it if this is the afterlife. Which it sounds like it might be. Before this, I was trapped in the Cancerverse, a screwed up dimension that was ruled by Lovecraftian nightmares. With a mad god and evil versions of most of the other superheroes I know. I used a reality-altering device and my powers to get my friends back to our universe and make sure the bad guys there couldn't get their hands on the cube, but I'm pretty sure it killed me."

So that was both of them dead.

"But if we really are dead, why'm I still bleeding?"

Edited 2015-04-14 01:32 (UTC)

Harley laughed at his reaction and grinned leaning closer to him with bright twinkling eyes.

"Oh brother you don't even know the half of it. The things Panem has done in the name of keeping power over their people? Gruesome even by my standards. And those standards are pretty low." She'd have plenty of time to tell him if they really were dead.

Listening to his own story she whistled looking suitably impressed "I've tangled with people that are pretty tough but I dunno if I would call them gods. The devil kicked me outta hell once though. That was pretty funny."

Sometimes even Harley had to reflect upon her life and just ask, why.

Bouncing back to the question at hand she shrugged her shoulders "In my experience, hell is a lot more effective at torturing you. So it would be worse then missing an arm and talking to some crazy chick. So if we're not dead what else could it be?" She tapped her chin thoughtfully.

"Ooo! Maybe this is a shared dream!" She cheered and then pouted "Aw no that doesn't work. You're in pain. Dreams aren't supposed to hurt."

To hell and back, huh? He wondered if she deserved to actually be there and if it was really hell. Like the actual hell. But right now wasn't the time to ponder about that. She was the only one that could see him and he was injured. Since the war he'd become someone that was comfortable with very strange bedfellows as far as allies were concerned and whatever they were facing, they probably had a better shot of dealing with it by working together.

"Something else then," he said. He gave her a little grin. "One thing all the craziness in my life has taught me is in my line of work, there's always a 'something else.' You ever see 'The Langoliers'? That TV miniseries based on the Stephen King story? People on the plane fall asleep and wind up in this frozen world, with all the other passengers gone, that's supposed to be the day left in the past. Like what's leftover after time moves on. And these creatures eat it all up. Maybe this is something weird like that. A pocket dimension. Something outside the normal universe. Stuff like that is real."

There was always something stranger than than good or bad, heaven or hell. There was always an other. Something outside the realms of normal.

God, bandaging this was a pain.

"Think you can pin the end of this to my shoulder? I'm having trouble getting it wrapped, I just need the end to stay put and maybe you tying it off when I'm done."

OK, This guy was starting to grow on her. She grinned wryly at his reference and when he asked for her help she saluted.

"Well I'm a shrink, not the right kinda doctor. But since I'm all you've got I guess I can make an exception."

Rolling up her sleeves in an elaborate and pointless fashion she took hold of the silk in her gloved fingers and tied it into a bow. The colorful scarves were now stained with blood and Harley chuckled.

"I've never tried to get blood out of silk. I'm guessing those things are done. But since I don't really know where they came from no biggie."

Before long they got it wrapped up nice and tight and tied up all tidy. It wasn't what he needed but for some reason the pain was slowly going away, like it was healing fast on its own, and it was still better than nothing.

"So I'm guessing that means pulling things out of nowhere like you're a living cartoon character is a new thing for you?"

That might be important if this place gave her new powers.

"For me, it did the opposite and took some powers away. I'm running at a way lower capacity than usual," he said, finally sitting up, hoping to slowly get himself vertical again. "Usually, I can take out a star destroyer by sneezing in the wrong direction."

Edited 2015-04-16 10:08 (UTC)

She whistled sounding impressed and bounced to her feet offering him her hand so he could pull himself to his feet.

"I'm no star destroyer er...destroyer. But usually I'm a tough cookie. More then normal humans. The last place I was stuck in was so cheap though they took all my extra strength and stuff away. Seemed to think I might turn against em for some silly reason." She rolled her eyes cheekily.

"I wonder what else is back there." She mused reaching behind herself and rummaging around. There was no indication her hand should be anywhere but behind her back but there was the sound of many things being sorted through with comically exagerated crashing sounds.

"Heh heh heh, this is so cool."

He took her hand gratefully and got unsteadily to his feet.

"Had a teammate that could do that hammer-space thing. He had some kinda pocket dimension he could reach into. He literally was a walking cartoon character. It was weird."

Slapstick was totally one of the weirdest heroes he'd ever met.

"We should get moving, maybe see if we can find someone else that can see us."

"Well, then, today's your lucky day."

A man in a white suit and fedora started walking up, with a bright, wide, smug grin on his face. Flanking him were three, dead-eyed teenagers in hockey gear.

"Of course, by luck, I mean bad luck. But in the grand scheme of things all luck tends to be bad luck in the end."

Edited 2015-04-17 06:35 (UTC)

And following the well-dressed chap and his entourage is a very large diving suit carrying an anchor. Given the weight of his steps, and the clanking of his armor, it's kind of a mystery how he kept quiet getting here, but mystery-solving time is not right now.

He takes a place behind the man in white and says nothing, but he makes a menacing, growling sound as he adjusts his grip on the anchor slung over his shoulder - it echoes, somehow, like a voice not of this world.

Of course as fate would have it Harley wouldn't have long enough to contemplate how amazing it would be to be a living cartoon character. Because suddenly there's a mobster looking kid and his goon squad complete with some kind of underwater abomination that Harley felt would probably require it's own quicktime event if this were a video game.

"Well yeah, but that's the joke ain't it? What's lucky for some mook is a really bad day for someone else. Sometimes a lot of someones..." She laughed weakly.

As glad as she was to see more people who could tell they existed, she wasn't too keen on his entrance. It sang proudly of smug super villain superiority.

"Nice hat." She added conversationally.

"Are you kidding me? It's uglier than mine," joked Nova, taking his helmet out of his belt and popping it back into shape and onto his head.

"If you're going to gloat, let's get it out of the way."

He didn't actually care, but it would either give them the opportunity to find something important out or punch someone mid-sentence.

Or, if he opted to be smart and not waste time with it, it'd clue them in that they were fighting a smart enemy. That was the beautiful thing about villainous gloating. It said so much regardless of whether the villain said a lot or very little.

Edited 2015-04-23 05:48 (UTC)

"Well, I certainly considered doing so, but honestly? You're not going to be around for much longer, so gloating seems kind of pointless. Boys, Nautilus? Get 'em."

The Stygian Triplets skated towards Harley, the long haired one aiming to body check while the one in the blue jersey swung his stick at her.

Meanwhile, Azrael pulled a massive gun from behind his back, and fired at Nova.

Hooray, it was a smart villain.

Nova didn't have time to react to the shot, especially with how clumsy he was and how his reflexes were off and that meant he was blasted back by it, tumbling end over end through some bushes.

But far from being down and out, he popped up suddenly, the energy he'd absorbed from the blast humming in a yellow halo around his body. He aimed his hand at Nautilus, firing a yellow energy blasts out at the gap in the being's armor where its eyes were visible.

He was left staggering and smoking after.

"Well, that hurt a little."

Really, it had hurt a lot.

||Rich you're not going to be able to survive redirecting the gun's energy on a regular basis at a Denarian's level.||

He took to the air, where he was far more agile.

"Harley, think you can handle the Children of the Corn there while I take on the walking tank and gun guy?"

The shot got an annoyed noise from the titan, and his eyes flickered out into darkness for a few moments. Once they came back, they were angrier-looking than before, and he started a slow windup with the anchor, and eventually tossed the thing in an arc toward Nova. Despite the slowness of the actual toss, the thing moved with reasonable speed once it left Nautilus' hand. The clinking of unwinding chain accompanied it as it flew.

"Leaving so soon?"

Harley let out a yelp and spun around the first one only to get tripped by the stick of the second one. Falling head over heels only Harley's extremely bouncy acrobatics saved her from total humiliation as she rolled backwards once she hit the ground and sprang back to her feet.

"Oh Puh-lease. Hockey ain't even a real sport. It's basically just a bar fight with ice skates on. I could handle punks like this before I became some kind of ghost."

From behind her back she produced an oversized pistol with a cork in the barrel and took aim at the closest boy firing the cork like a rubber bullet at his head.

"Oh come on," Azrael griped, "Just once, I wish you people would stand and die with some goddamn dignity."

He took aim and fired at Nova again, not particularly caring if the superhero used the blast to hit Nautilus.

Demonic minion #1 went down, but not out, just looking a little dazed from the hit. #2 and #3 charged after Harley, snarling, swinging their sticks down towards her head.

"Never done it before, not about to start now," Rich called out. "And worse people than you have tried to kill me."

Nova dodged the anchor - and a blast from the smarmy guy. It was good that he didn't care if he hit Nautilus because Nova was using that. When it came to spatial reasoning and using his surroundings against an enemy, Rich was a pro, and one of his strengths was getting the enemy to accidentally hit each other with friendly fire.

He grabbed onto the anchor, planning on using the momentum of the hulking being drawing it back to add some oomph to a kick, but tried to make it look as if he planned to use it to swing Nautilus into something to throw him off.

Edited 2015-04-30 03:16 (UTC)

The sticks came swinging down on air as Harley Cartwheeled out of the way. In a blur of Red and black she hit the ground with both hands and launched herself feet first at the two aiming to knock them into each other.

"Dignity is over rated chump! I'm more about having fun!"

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[LN] Accidentally in Love (Backdated to April Fools Day)

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