Robbie "Walking Disaster Area" Baldwin ✘ Speedball (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
isahellofadrug) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ya_assemble2016-06-12 01:45 am
isahellofadrug) wrote in ya_assemble2016-06-12 01:45 am
Entry tags:
It'll Only Get Better From Here
"Uhhhnnnnnnnnooooooowhyyyyy."
That quiet whine was brought to you by Robbie Baldwin. Whining was a perfectly natural reaction to what he'd just been through and he'd have argued the point if there was anyone there to argue with him.
Not that he could see if there was anyone else there, because his vision was blacked out and he was only just starting to get it back. It felt like his nose was bleeding, too.
Whatever had happened, it had been bad. One second Robbie had been bouncing through the hall in Mt. Wundagore, heading to the kitchen to have dinner with the other New Warriors and Jake Waffles -- the next, he'd felt like he'd slammed into a wall at 500 miles per hour. Then he'd felt squeeeezed like something had tried to cram him into a two-dimensional space even though he had three dimensions. His kinetic field was still crackling with pent up energy from...whatever had happened.
The last time he'd felt like this, like he'd been slammed into something and had his kinetic field fried had been --
"AAAUGH!" Robbie shot upright, screaming.
It had been when he woke up after Stamford. For a moment, he had a mini heart attack, until he realized that he wasn't sitting in the twisted, exploded remains of Mt. Wundagore. As far as he could tell, with his dim vision, it was some kind of bleak landscape that looked like an alien planet.
That quiet whine was brought to you by Robbie Baldwin. Whining was a perfectly natural reaction to what he'd just been through and he'd have argued the point if there was anyone there to argue with him.
Not that he could see if there was anyone else there, because his vision was blacked out and he was only just starting to get it back. It felt like his nose was bleeding, too.
Whatever had happened, it had been bad. One second Robbie had been bouncing through the hall in Mt. Wundagore, heading to the kitchen to have dinner with the other New Warriors and Jake Waffles -- the next, he'd felt like he'd slammed into a wall at 500 miles per hour. Then he'd felt squeeeezed like something had tried to cram him into a two-dimensional space even though he had three dimensions. His kinetic field was still crackling with pent up energy from...whatever had happened.
The last time he'd felt like this, like he'd been slammed into something and had his kinetic field fried had been --
"AAAUGH!" Robbie shot upright, screaming.
It had been when he woke up after Stamford. For a moment, he had a mini heart attack, until he realized that he wasn't sitting in the twisted, exploded remains of Mt. Wundagore. As far as he could tell, with his dim vision, it was some kind of bleak landscape that looked like an alien planet.
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Which were technically the normal state of being, in space, but half a second before that it had been too bright and too loud, because his - not his father - had set off the detonator, and the Chitauri ship was exploding, and Sam had...made it out? Not made it out?
Quiet of space, or quiet of being dead, who knew.
You've got to wake up, Sam.
Okay. If it was "wake up" and not "go toward the light," that was probably a good sign. He groaned under his breath, rolled onto his side -
- why was he able to roll onto his side, when he should've been free-floating in zero G?
He sat up with a start, reaching in front of him for someone who wasn't there. "Dad?!"
Of course his father wasn't here. Of course he'd been dreaming. Why would anything ever go right for him?
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It wasn't his dad but the voice was one Sam'd heard before. Robbie dragged himself to his feet, jogging over to him with wobbly steps, still barely able to see, and dropped to his knees next to him.
"What are you doing here? Are you okay?" Robbie wiped the blood from his bloody nose off his face. "Did you get the number of that truck that hit us?"
Maybe Sam'd seen what'd happened to them.
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How the hell was Robbie out here - wherever here even was?
"Shouldn't you be on Earth?" Sam reached forward to grab Robbie's shoulder - no, he wasn't hallucinating, he was warm and solid and definitely there. "I was in the middle of Chitauri space, I dunno how many light years away that is but it's a lot, okay - and then the ship exploded, and..."
And then?
He shrugged. "Dunno after that. I guess I got knocked out."
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He went to make kinetic energy bubbles with his hand, just to check that he could, but instead of making his usual bubbles, there was a spark and an explosion as his field released up pent-up kinetic energy. Fortunately, the force of the explosion was mostly directed at Robbie, hitting Sam hard enough to, at most, knock him over.
Robbie went careening off, bouncing into one rocky structure, then into another, and then into a mound of black dirt, skidding several feet until he finally came to a stop.
"Oooowwwwwww."
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(Nothing really felt as bad anymore, after you'd been punched by the Hulk.)
He sat back up, quickly. "Are you okay?!"
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"Are you okay?"
He'd ponged off so fast he hadn't seen how hard the explosion had hit Sam.
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He didn't really mean it as an evasion, but even if he was physically unscathed, Sam wasn't really sure if he could honestly call himself okay.
On the other hand, waking up on a weird planet he didn't recognize and didn't know how he'd wound up on definitely wasn't ideal circumstances for a guy to process everything bad that just went down, so he was probably about as okay as he was going to be for a while, until it actually caught up to him.
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Robbie gingerly climbed to his feet and held out his hand, as far away from himself as possible, cringing away from it. This time, instead of a spark and explosion, golden kinetic energy bubbles shot out from his fingers.
"Whew. Okay, now that any powers malfunctions are out of the way, we need to figure out where we are."
He looked around.
"I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. This looks like another planet or in another dimension." He cringed. "Probably another dimension. What just happened to my field was weird."
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Another planet? Sure, whatever, normal Tuesday. But another dimension was going to be a lot harder to find his way back from, and honestly, all Sam really wanted after seeing his father's clone blow himself up was to go home and hug his mom.
Though there was an easy enough way to confirm if they really were in another dimension, he realized after a moment. Ask the helmet. "Hey, can you get me current coordinates?"
There was a brief pause, and then a loud groan from Sam. "Yeah, okay, sounding like the other dimension is it."
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"We should get the lay of the land and then figure out what to do next."
Trailing a stream of golden bubbles, Robbie bounced up on one of the large rocky spires near them, hanging on with one hand, propping his feet against it so he could dangle and get a looky-loo. His eyes went wide.
"Oh motherfff--of pearl."
Baby New Warrior. No cursing for his sensitive baby ears.
"I don't mean to alarm you but apparently the laws of physics are just polite suggestions here? And that's never a good sign. We need to get out of here and fast."
A place with twisted physics was a much worse place to be in than a random other planet/dimension. They couldn't even trust in the natural laws of science in a place like this.
If Sam flew up to join him, he'd be able to see for himself -- a landscape that was twisted and wrong. Areas of it folded over so they were upside down as compared to the rest of the land, yet gravity was apparently so screwed that things still stuck to the surface of the upside down parts. There were fields of strange debris, broken structures that looked like fragments of completely alien buildings, and downed spacecrafts of all types. Some areas had what looked like the remains of alien plants and trees, but they were all dead and brown.
And where the land opened up to what should have been sky there was just...nothing. It wasn't a bright sky, or a sky that was light-colored, it was nothing. Pure void. There wasn't even dark matter for it to be black, and looking into it for too long had a way of making someone's brain nearly shut down.
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He'd been a lot of places. Seen some pretty weird stuff on other planets. Sam was used to bizarre landscapes that would make the average Earthling stop and stare; you got used to that stuff after the first dozen planets or so.
But some things were constants. Gravity might be stronger or weaker on other planets, but it behaved the same way. So something like this...it didn't speak to any kind of planet that would normally exist. Another dimension did make more sense the more he saw. It would explain how they got there from completely different places with no memory of the journey.
...those spaceships, though.
"So where'd the people in the ships go?"
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Behind them, back on the ground, a voice called out to them, interrupting him.
"Hellooooooooo!" it said.
Robbie sighed and said to Sam, "See? See?"
He turned to look down, swinging around but not letting go of his grip on the stone. The figure below was a horrific being, that looked like it was made of smooth, carved chalk. It had no face, yet it could still talk, and every few seconds, it blurred as it stood there, in a way that made it uncomfortable to stare at for long.
"Hello down there, friend! Can I call you friend?" Robbie said genially, holding his free hand to his chest. "Because we really could be friends. You wouldn't happen to be some friendly otherdimensional person that knows the way out of here, would you?"
"Naaah," the figure said genially, tilting the hollow framework that passed for a head. "I'm going to devour your souls. I'm the Faceless. This is my dimension. Hi!"
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Rhetorical question. It was definitely too late for him to take it back.
He was watching it, trying to figure out how it talked without a face or a mouth (he'd definitely seen species that had other ways of vocalizing, but most of those still involved anatomy he didn't see here), but every time it blurred, his head felt like it was spinning.
Well, okay, it might be giving him a headache just by existing, but on the other hand, at least it was polite enough to introduce itself before...before stuff they were definitely not going to let it do.
"Hi," he replied, lifting to hover a little higher off the ground, because no. "That's, uh, really not gonna work for us, so we'll have to pass."
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A pause.
"Or add them on, as it were. You two aren't ones that started with that much darkness inside. You were all in 4-color, bright and crisp inside your white panel space -- one, a fresh start with a fresh face, the other, laughter and a light heart until all the little children burned to a crisp. This place will add on grimy layer after grimy layer. Your armor," he said to Robbie and Robbie's eyes popped open wide. To Sam he said, "or layers of hardship. You're not like the other one, the one who went to war. Not yet -- and even he escaped the dark, because of the fire inside him. But no one escapes this place. No one. And when you've gone to war here and never come back, I'll be there in the end. To suck the ink out of your outlines like marrow from your bones."
"Nova?" Robbie said slowly, his eyes still nearly bugging out of his head. "You fly faster than I can bounce. You know that armpit thing fliers do to non-fliers, right?"
They needed to get out of there. That kind of crazy talk meant this was not someone they wanted to attack.
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The first part, though -
- was going to have to wait.
"Yeah," he repeated again, this time sounding much more in the present. Run (or fly, as it were) now, decode weird creepy monologue later. He swooped in, grabbed Robbie under the arms, and started flying - fast. "I really hope you wore your deodorant today, dude."
He didn't have a path in mind, beyond "not running into things" and "away from the creeper." Nothing was jumping out as a particularly safe place to hole up and get everything straight. Downed spaceships: no, he'd seen Alien and weird shit could be hiding on those. Dead greenery: no, might have dead or undead wildlife. Like that vicious bunny rabbit from that one Monty Python movie.
Place where the ground turned into the ceiling: kind of big and glaring, wasn't it?
"Okay. We're flying. Now what?"
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But Sam was relying on him here. He was the experienced hero. He was the adult, even if he was barely an adult. He was the former Avenger (sort of? He'd never really worked out if teaching at the Academy counted). He couldn't act shaken or scared. Maybe Sam had gone traitor on them and gone reservist as a New Warrior to become an Avenger, but he was still a teammate and a friend -- and he was wearing that stupid bucket. He had to keep his shit together to help him.
Robbie drew in a deep breath to calm himself and then went into grown up mode.
"The ships are facehuggings waiting to happen and the underbrush could have something nasty hiding in it, so fly us towards the wreckage of that city. If we stay near the tops of the ruins we'll have defensible high ground and we can move around by flying or hopping from building to building to avoid going through the streets where we can get ambushed."
Robbie didn't really have to explain his reasoning but in between having to explain his choices to others to make it clear they weren't impulsive and stupid anymore, teaching his students at the school, and guiding some of his less experienced teammates more recently, it was force of habit.
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Which meant they had to be sure they didn't leave him anyway.
He picked out a likely looking candidate from among the buildings and slowed to a hover just above it, letting Robbie go before touching down next to him.
"So. Uh. You got any theories on what he meant about other cosmic entities throwing us away like...whatever it was?"
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He scratched the back of his neck as he knelt there.
"Speaking as someone who's been jerked around by reality-altering threats before, it's possible one went to grab us and do something with us, wasn't careful about where it tossed us, and this thing snagged us instead."
Robbie shrugged.
"It's just a thing that happens. Being pulled to other dimensions. Having reality be rewritten. That kind of thing."
He said it like it was perfectly normal for reality to be randomly altered by something.
"We need to try to find other people that aren't that thing, to see if we can work together to find a way out or a way to take it down. But we have to do it in a way where they don't see us first, in case they're hostile. I know it probably sounds ridiculous coming from a guy who travels around with a sparkly gold aftertrail, but we need to go into stealth mode."
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He'd have to keep the Nova Force toned way down, to move around without being obvious. There might be a worse duo for a stealth mission somewhere out there, but Sam couldn't name it.
He reached to scratch the back of his neck. "So...do we just find someone and watch to see if they do any weird bad guy stuff before we make contact?"
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Robbie's powers weren't much more conducive to stealth than Sam's, although he could name a worse duo.
"The only pair that'd be worse at stealth than us are Dazzler and that X-chick whose power is shooting fireworks. Do you think you can carry me around without glowing blue? I can't bounce without the bubbles."
This was always the kind of thing Night Thrasher had handled back in the day, but well...
Robbie tried not to hold onto that thought.
"And yeah, that's the plan: find, observe, possibly befriend, work together, escape. Something tells me that if that thing is messing with people, it's going to be pretty obvious if anyone's gone 'round the bend and started indulging in some good ol-fashioned ultraviolence."
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He'd never tried to tone it down all that much; it had never been a priority before now. Usually it was already obvious that he was there, and he had more to gain from speed and brute force than from trying to be sneaky. There was a reason Kamala had called him a flying jackhammer.
"I think I might be able to get it down lower if I keep my speed down. If we have to make a fast getaway, then I'll probably be back into blindingly obvious mode, though."
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Robbie stood up and held out his arms.
"Armpit me." A pause. "And be super grateful you're a flier. Getting armpitted is the worst."
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Since that was what he'd decided to pick on, though, presumably Sam had no complaints about the actual plan. He took off just enough to hover a couple of yards above the rooftop, and reached down to grab Robbie. "Try not to like...squirm around, though? It messes with my balance."
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He tried his best to keep still though. Successful armpitting depended just as much on the person being carried as it did on the flier.
"That's always been my dream, to perform the great dances of Earth history for the masses of probably-cannibalistic wasteland wanderers. I was always destined for greatness."
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The voice would be familiar to them both and looking up they would see Vance floating above them with a concerned look on his face.
He'd been in Mt. Wundagore as well, since that was where the New Warriors were operating out of these days. He hadn't been in uniform, though, so when he'd woken up after feeling like he'd had the entire mountain dropped on him? It was just in jeans and a t-shirt.
He dropped down, setting down on the roof next to them. "Let me guess. You guys got the welcome speech from the weird guy with no face?"
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And made a little erk noise.
"Uh, not that I'm not glad to see you or anything, except the more people are here, that's kind of bad even while it's good." Backup was good, safety in numbers was good.
But nobody wished being stuck in a weird alternate dimension with creepy soul-sucking monsters on somebody they liked, even if it was kind of lonely otherwise.
I know this is ancient but I'd love to continue it if you guys are
Whoops. Sorry if that blew up any illusion of competence there, Sam.
Not that his plan had been a bad one necessarily but Robbie inherently knew, deep down in his bones, that no matter how logical his plans were, no matter how much experience he had, that if he was the only one in charge of getting his younger teammate safely home, he'd mess it up.
Look at how the the whole thing had gone down with The High Evolutionary. If it hadn't been for Vance coming back with the ol' one-two teke punch, the world would've been doomed.
"Useless failure" was practically written into Robbie's DNA.
With Vance around, now they at least had a chance.
"Give me a lift with the teke already, will ya? Getting armpitted is the absolute worst."
Vance's glowing teke wasn't all that stealthy either but he could at least dim it pretty well if he needed to.
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The team had stayed alive long enough for Vance to be able to do that one-two punch. That was a win, no matter how you cut it.
"I know, I know. More people, bad idea because it's more danger. On the other hand, it's not like you guys wished for me to be here, so let's just make the best of a bad situation." Which this most definitely was.
He wrapped his teke field around himself and Robbie, raising an eyebrow at Sam. "You want a lift or you want to go under your own power?"
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Which was more practical, anyway. The more Vance had to handle at once, the worse off he'd be if something jumped them.