ya_assemble | [LN] Dangerously Genre-Savvy [closed to Nico]

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[LN] Dangerously Genre-Savvy [closed to Nico]

"Inspector!" Rafa cried out, as the Inspector's ship crash landed in the purple jungles of Khalafross. Clad in his traditional animal skins, he was an imposing figure, even despite the fact that the Inspector was taller than him. "The danger light blinks! Rafa can see with the eyes of the ship! Our most hated enemy comes for us: Blorgons!"

Native to the planet Tumantis, Rafa was one of the Tessujex, a subgroup of the people known as the Suveteem. In the Inspector's adventures, he had discovered that the Suvateem were actually descendant of a crashed space exploration survey team. (Their name, in fact, was what "survey team" had devolved into over the centuries). The Tessujex had evolved from the animals on board that had accidentally been exposed to mutagens during the crash and developed human intelligence. (Hence the name Tessujex, a twisted version of the words "test subjects.")

After the Tessujex were used as slave labor for centuries, the Inspector was responsible for making the Suveteem realize that the humanoids among them were not the superior species they'd once thought they were and that their claim that they were descended from the gods was false, the Tessujex finally had a chance of being treated equal in their society. After that, Rafa, one of the Tessujex's most noble warriors and resistance fighters had declared that he would follow the Inspector to the end of time until the debt could be repaid, especially if it meant the Inspector could teach him the ways of peace after a lifetime of battle.

"We must leave! Quickly! And fight them in the jungle. Rafa knows the way!"

They had no way of defending themselves on the ship and there was no way to repair it while the Blorgons were on board.

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Nico climbed to her feet, rubbing her shoulder -- she really needed to figure out how to not hurt herself falling at some point. The portal had closed before anything buggy could get in after them.

"You okay?" she asked Abed awkwardly, trying to stand over him without, you know, standing over him like she was trying to intimidate him. Face-covering wasn't the usual reaction to Santa's workshop...

Abed peeked through his fingers.

"Why aren't you gone yet?" he asked flatly. "I'm ready to stop hallucinating now."

He clamped his hands over his eyes again.

"Especially since this is a rerun. I already had a Christmas special delusion before."

He was ready to wake up now.

"It's not even an original one like last time, where it was an exploration of the medium as homage rather than plagiarism. This is directly ripping off a mediocre Dreamworks movie and inserting other completely random canons into it wholesale. While mediocrity is pretty much all Dreamworks can aspire to - barring How to Train Your Dragon, which is an animated masterpiece better than anything Pixar's ever done, and anyone who disagrees with that can fight me - I usually have more creativity, higher production values, and better writing in my psychotic breaks."

Two thumbs down. One and a half stars and they were mostly only because he got to be a Green Lantern and fight side by side with a ninja turtle and a Marvel Comics hero from a beloved cult classic.

"This one sucks."

Edited 2015-01-21 07:44 (UTC)

"You're not having a psychotic break," said Raph, reaching back to see if anything was stuck in his shell.

He could've sworn, as they went through the portal, that something had hit it and he'd felt a strange little twitch of pain under his shell, but he wasn't finding anything there. No ninja stars or throwing knives or anything like that.

"You're close to maybe giving us one since you've pretty much been the biggest pain in the butt person we've needed to rescue since we've gotten here, and only about half of what you say ever makes any sense, but this is real. We're real."

"Speak for yourself," Nico said to Raph, "you weren't here when Mabel single-handedly took out Jack and Bunny with her kitten fists. You also missed the guy who stabbed me in the leg and threw himself into traffic."

She looked down at Abed again. "But yes, what he said. You're not having a psychotic break, we're real, you got pulled into an alternate universe because some idiot here decided to open the door for something big and bad that's breaking reality."

"If it's real, that's even worse," Abed said, hands still over his eyes. "If I'm stuck in some alternate reality with various fictonal characters in some vague plot to save the world, that means I've been sucked into a bad crossover fanfic premise. Booooo."

He shook his head.

"I'd rather be pants on head crazy than living the kind of life that, if it was written about online, would be followed up with 'R&R, i'm terrible at summaries, no flames plz.'"

A pause.

"The crossover aspect in and of itself is pretty great, though."

If they were real...

Raph just stared at Abed for a moment and then turned to Nico.

"That's nerd stuff, isn't it. It sounds like the kinda stuff Donnie talks about. Do you speak fluent enough nerd to translate, by any chance?"

"Gee, thanks," Nico said, rolling her eyes at Raph and finally crouching down next to Abed. "You mind going to see if Bunny or Jack are around?"

She was fine with bringing new people here, but explaining the whole thing? Above her pay grade. She turned back to Abed.

"Yep, it's a dumb premise, but it turns out that bad premises happen in real life all the time," she said. "I was kind of annoyed by it too, the first time it happened to me."

After the mind-numbing terror had worn off, at least.

"You're fictional and a figment of my imagination. Or if you're real you live in a universe that's had superheroes since the wild west. Statistically speaking, your chances of getting splashed with mutagenic chemical waste, getting bitten by a radioactive spider, or, at the very least, needing to be saved from falling debris in a superhero fight are ridiculously high. Everyone in your world has latent potential for metahuman powers because cosmic beings experimented on humanity back when humanity was young. Your entire world - and even species of human - was engineered for weirdness, even if you're real and it wasn't engineered that way as just fiction."

Abed's hands were still over his eyes as if he was hoping that if he spent enough time not looking at everything that it would go away.

"I'm just a guy from Colorado and in my world, there are no superheroes and no magic, getting bitten by a radioactive spider just gives you a necrotic skin infection, and getting splashed with chemical waste just gives you cancer. Bad premises happen but they're car accidents, war injuries, strokes, cancer, terrorist attacks. Nobody gets great power and great responsibility. No one has to save the world."

And he'd wanted to. He'd always wanted to. He'd wanted all that to be real - and he still did - but this was too tempting. Even after escaping the illusions of earlier, he didn't trust this. This felt like the dream that the other dream had been in, in a dream within a dream.

The fact he wanted it to be real so badly was the reason it was a bad idea to accept that it was.

"I want this to be real - even if it's a stupid premise. I've always wanted things like this to be real. Fiction always made more sense than reality. It has structure, it has rules. It was usually better than things really were. That's why I can't trust this."

It wasn't even that he didn't understand what was going on. He did. He already did even if he didn't know the specific macguffin that had to be dropped into a volcano, or the specific villain that had to be fought with his new superpowers.

He knew how these stories worked.

He was just pretty much terrified that it was all just in his head.

Edited 2015-01-22 01:15 (UTC)

Nico grimaced unhappily. She had some idea of how to talk to people who didn't want this situation to be true. How to talk to someone who didn't want to believe it because they wanted it to be true was right back out of the things she knew how to respond to.

(And she was just going to ignore the parts about humans being 'engineered for weirdness'. Something to deal with later.)

"Look, I get that it's weird, but this is actually happening," she said as comfortingly as she could. "And it's not going to have as many rules as you might think it does, because shows and movies and books cut out everything that's not important. But this is real."

"Well, that's just depressing," said Abed flatly, finally pulling his hands away from his eyes.

If it really was real having it be grounded by reality's rules instead of fun adventure rules just sucked all the fun out of it.

He sat up, dragging himself over to lean back against a couch, holding his hand to his chest, still obviously in a bit of pain. Then he peeked down his shirt and quirked an eyebrow when he saw that the puncture wounds were already healing.

Then he looked at the ring on his hand, creating a rudimentary construct with it. Just a square. Apparently, it was fairly difficult to use.

"If this is real then I'm not human anymore, am I."

At least he was accepting the possibility of it being real now.

The construct disappeared.

"What species am I? Do I still have a heart or is it multiple heart-like organs? Am I immortal? If I'm immortal, is it the kind of immortal where the only way to kill me is chopping my head off? Does this mean I get a sword?"

Edited 2015-01-24 02:18 (UTC)

"Only if you're already good with one."

Bunny arrived just in time to hear the question about the sword, but not early enough to hear about the mediocrity of his canon.

The smell of blood caught his attention. At least it wasn't Raph or Nico's again.

"Where're you hurt?"

It was a bunny.

It was a talking bunny.

It was a talking bunny from an animated flop.

Abed flopped his head backward onto the couch.

"This isn't happening. This is not happening." He pressed both hands against his eyes, clearly upset.

A ninja turtle and a Marvel hero? That was cool enough that he wanted to accept it. The Easter Bunny? Too much. Far too much. He'd already done a holiday special.

Abed pointed at Bunny, the other hand still over his face, trying to find some way of expressing his discontent over Bunny's existence. Now he actually seemed angered by all this, although his voice only sounded mildly more annoyed.

"Pixar's better. The pacing of your movie was terrible, the Easter scene should have been cut, and it deserved to be a box office failure. Pixar's better.

"Excuse me?"

The stuff about box office failures and Pixar meant nothing to him, but the comment on Easter, even just to a scene regarding Easter, was a grave insult.

He looked at Raph and Nico, gauging their level of irritation compared to his. Why anyone would have a special enmity for Easter was beyond him, and some of the new recruits didn't take well to being here at all.

"I only caught about 10% of that. Who're we dealing with here?"

"His name's Abed Nadir," said Raph, trotting up next to Bunny. He'd dragged Bunny along so fast he hadn't managed to explain everything.

"He has some kinda power ring as a myth power. Right when we found him, Benedict attacked him, sicced some kinda creature on him that attached to his chest. It made his imagination almost tear up reality around him and it sucked him and Nico and I into a bunch of movie and TV scenarios. But then we helped him fight off the influence of the bug and got it off him in the real world."

It had been a bit of an ordeal.

Abed went back to holding his hands over his eyes.

"I'm done with this dream within a dream bit. I'm going to try going to sleep here to wake up in the real world. Not my favorite trope but it's better than the one where you have to die to do it."

With that he slid down to the floor and curled up on his side facing the couch, hands held over his ears, his back turned to them.

Somebody wasn't coping well.

"Right. Good job then, you two." Once again, it sat poorly with him that Nico and Raph had been in that much unsupervised danger, but the lava demons under Singapore hadn't been about to seal theirselves away, and nobody could deny that Raph and Nico were exceptionally competent together.

"Right, look mate, you can sleep all you want in a moment," he said, returning to Abed. The kid was rude, but he was also a lot more disturbed than many of the other new Guardian candidates had been, and he was injured. "I can't promise you won't still be here when you wake up, but I can promise you don't have to do anything but sleep 'til you're back home if that's all you're up for. You'd better lemme patch you up before you sleep, though." And check for poison or lingering magic, but saying that would only freak the kid out more.

"Come on, Nico," said Raph to his friend. "We oughta leave this to Bunny."

With that he led Nico away.

"If you touch me," came Abed's muffled voice, "I'm going to insert a hamfisted rabbit joke like 'should have turned left at Albuquerque' into every other sentence I say to you the entire time you're near me."

It was the best defense he could think of. He figured that if he himself was a giant, talking rabbit, he'd get annoyed with that very quickly.

"You're just the manifestation of my subconscious desire for familiarity after the normal social fabric of my group of friends was changed."

By Troy leaving.

"Better save 'em for Jack. I won't get any of them."

Being oblivious to pop culture made a few of Jack's jokes fly right over his head, but he'd learned to identify the sound of them.

"Wrong, mate. I'm the manifestation of my own self, and the whole fabric of the universe changing is what brought you here." He decided to put a hold on attempting to check the kid over, to try to get him to calm down first. "Besides, if you were looking for the familiar, would your subconscious really manifest the Easter Bunny as a six-foot-one master of t'ai chi?" Bunny cocked an eyebrow. "Usually when you mortals try to give me an image, you throw in more top hats."

Which . . . why? Just, why.

"And pink. Which is fine - I like pink - but I never understand the top hats."

Hats would get in the way of his ears please people.

"Barring the brief psychotic episode I had where I saw everything as a Christmas special, my imagination tends to make things cooler and edgier rather than overly saccharine. So yes, if my subconscious was manifesting a version of the Easter Bunny, he would be a martial artist mythic superhero. I'm surprised you didn't hop into the room carrying a machine gun," Abed said into the couch.

He took in a few deep breaths.

"We're talking. We're having a conversation here. Why isn't all this going away? This needs to go away. If this doesn't go away my friends won't be able to protect me this time and I'll finally get institutionalized."

He said it so matter-of-factly that it was abundantly clear how much of a consistent threat it'd been throughout his life.

"Maybe I should just stop fighting it. Let's face it, I've been dancing on the edge of that cliff for a long time now and without Troy I probably won't be able to function. Everything he said in the other delusion about me being able to take care of myself would only have really meant something if I'd been able to actually break free and I didn't. I'm still here. You're still here."

A pause. "My dad will probably be relieved."

"See? Machine guns are not my style. Told you I was my own," he joked, though there wasn't much levity in it.

Abed's words made him more solemn, still.

"I'm sorry that's all stuff you have to worry about."

Not "I'm sure that's not true about your dad," not "I'm sure you're not crazy."

He had no reason to believe Abed didn't know his own life and its own pathos well enough.

"But this, right here, this isn't a mental illness manifesting. I dunno what proof I could give you of that, and I'm sorry I don't. Here's what's likely to happen, though. You'll stay here, you'll stay safe from whatever it was you had a run-in with out there, and at some point, you're likely to find yourself back home. It happens a lot around these parts."

Or the universe would end. But Abed finding himself at home was more likely. People came in and out of this temporary Guardianship so frequently.

"You can pretend this never happened, but if anything as strange as this has happened to you before, this is the one that you don't have to doubt your senses over. If I find some way to prove that to you, I will."

He paused, considering.

"Who's Troy?"

"My best friend."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Our other friend Pierce died and left Troy $14 million dollars but only if he traveled around the world on Pierce's boat and became his own man. Troy said he needed it. He wanted to find himself."

He went on, "When Troy was about to leave, I had another one of my psychotic breaks and all of the floors in the school looked like lava. We had a giant schoolwide game of 'the floor is lava' and I tried to make it so we'd play the game forever so that he'd stay with me. It was a lot less crazy than the other times but it was still crazy. Because I'm crazy. This is happening because I'm crazy and if I can't make it stop I'll lose everything."

Edited 2015-01-24 06:35 (UTC)

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[LN] Dangerously Genre-Savvy [closed to Nico]

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