All Bobs Must Die:

They had to try their best to do this thing incognito. After all, the plan was get in, get the shard, get out, and while several of them were total unknowns in this world, three of them ran the risk of being recognized by some of the resident superheroes and supervillains since they were from a similar dimension and had equivalents here.

Nightwing, not so much since he usually wore a mask, but Cassie and Kon didn't wear masks as part of their costumes, and Kon especially wore a very familiar face. He was younger than Kal but still approaching adulthood now and that meant his cloney resemblance to the current de facto ruler of the world was pretty uncanny now.

That was why Kon was in disguise. He was wearing his usual jeans, black long-sleeved shirt, black boots, and black gloves. But he had a dumpy, shapeless, brown jacket over top of it all, a blue baseball cap, and a pair of dorky, large-framed glasses. Fortunately, spring was only just starting in this world and hadn't quite chased away the chill of winter so they could all bundle up with clothes that made them look innocuous.

The magical door had appeared in an alley, against a nondescript wall. As soon as they were all through and had closed it behind then, Kon peered around a corner to see if he could recognize where they were by the city's night-time skyline.

"Looks like Gotham." A pause. "It's hardly recognizable, though. I've never seen Gotham this clean."

He squinted instinctually, trying to peer around some more with his X-ray vision and found it working in full when he usually struggled with it back in the Guardians' universe. He held up his hand and poured on the teke, creating a field around it.

"My powers seem to be stronger here for some reason. The ones that are limited in the Guardians' universe are back, like my teke. You guys feeling the same? Most of us are superheroes or equivalents in our worlds. Being in a superhero universe might be amping up our powers or something. Maybe making the belief stronger."

It all ran on narratives, right? Stories? This was a story superheroes were supposed to be in.

The thing with superspeed and cooking was that it was great for food prep but it still took just as long for things to cook as they always did. Kon had tried heatvision in the past, to speed things along, but that'd always had disastrous results. Using it to warm food, though, that worked and that was how he reheated the first batch of fried chicken he'd made after he finished the last batch. He also used it to reheat the gravy.

It was a proper gravy, a creamy sawmill gravy. He was crazy proud of his gravy. He'd never been able to replicate Ma's cooking 100% but he sure came close with the gravy.

The lounge area had lots of comfy chairs and was an ideal place for people to relax and hang out while eating fried chicken so he set up shop near all the comfy couches, putting down plate after plate of fried chicken and biscuits. The biscuits had been made in a massive batch and had been left warming in the oven so they nice and warm and flaky.

He danced around as he finished cooking his massive chicken dinner to one of those ipod stereos. He had an ipod full of girly pop that he'd nicked from the lab. At first he thought it was maybe Honey Lemon's but when he saw that the playlist names had somehow been programmed in Interlac, he figured out it was Lyle or Brainy's. In the past, their inclination towards girly pop music was something he might have ribbed them over but now? Now he danced around and sang to Katy Perry's "Roar" like nobody's business.

Between the music and the smell of delicious fried chicken and biscuits, most of the myths at the Pole would come see what the fuss was about but in case some of them didn't, Kon had made a whole tray of biscuits as a treat for the elves and he used them as a preemptive reward for getting the others.

"Go, my minions!" he cried out, tossing biscuits to them. "Go and get the others so they may feast!"

Out of gratitude for the delicious biscuits, they saluted him and spread out to bring everyone's attention to the glorious spread. Anyone that came to see what the fuss was about would be treated to an early dinner of delicious fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, and for the vegetarians among them (like Lyle and Brainy), grits, collard greens, black-eyed peas, and mashed potatoes.

Yes, he'd gone all out. It was almost Easter and that meant a few people would be having an Easter here instead of with their families, right? So it'd be a good one. He also figured doing it before Easter was a good idea in case Bunny needed their help or something on actual Easter Day.

When people started showing up, they were treated to the sight of a rather spectacular feast and the sight of Kon dancing around between the lounge and the kitchen as he finished making one last boatload of gravy and cleaned up. He was wearing an apron that said 'Kiss my grits!'

"Go ahead and tuck in," he said to people as they started showing up. "It's Before-Easter Dinner! And while I can't claim I'm as good a cook as the lady I learned to cook from, who I learned to cook from is a genuine Kansas farmer so it's still finger-lickin' good."

[ooc: Mingle thread! Pop music! People! Chicken! This is a nice little post for all the characters to mingle. Start up a little subthread for your characters and then tag around to other people's! It's set after all the recent intros so all the newer characters can participate and meet everyone.]

Kon was excited. As soon as Mikey said Manny had given the word that a woman wearing an S on their chest had showed up, he'd been psyched.

"I wonder if it's Linda. I haven't seen her in ages; she retired from superheroing a while back and dropped off the radar. Or it might be my cousin Kara. There's been a couple Supergirls."

He brought the sleigh down towards the location Manny had given, Aurora, Nevada, an abandoned ghost town. The rickety buildings that were still standing looked like they were made of driftwood, dry and lifeless.

Kon was reading at relative superspeed. It wasn't at his usual brisk pace, because he found that the limitations of his powers meant he couldn't retain the knowledge for more than a few minutes at his usual speeds, so he had to slow it down a little, but he was still thumbing through far faster than some of the others were taking just to go through the study guides they'd quickly procured.

"Is it just the fact I'm reading this as superspeed or does this story make no sense?" Kon said, as he thumbed through page after page.

Another reality shard had fallen away and now that their brands had signaled it, it was time to go dimension-hopping. Fortunately, it was a very small shard in the middle of the wilderness in Siberia and the area of effect was spreading slowly, so they had time to prepare.

With his otherworldly wisdom, Manny had managed to help out on this one, communicating some clues about the world they were about to enter by flashing the image of a cover of a book.

A fairly terrible book. Apparently they were entering the world it was based on.

So they were doing their homework as they geared up to go and trying to make sense of the senseless.

"So what I'm getting from this is this is a world where you're not allowed to have more than one personality trait? I think? Under pain of death, you have to be a one-dimensional character."

"Tommy used to work on the docks
Union's been on strike
He's down on his luck...
It's touuuugh, so too-ouugh"

Kon was singing, his voice somewhat delirious and horribly off pitch because he generally couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.

Because why not, right? It felt good to belt it out. It was just sort of tumbling out of him.

It was monstrous, what happened in the training gym. Catastrophic. That was what happened when someone like Kon didn't hold back. Even at a more limited capacity than usual, he'd still wrecked the place; clockwork robot parts were strewn everywhere, some of the obstacles had been broken, although the magical fields that supported them at the higher training levels kept him from totally trashing them all.

He'd gone for about four hours with the thing set at the highest level, level 20, working himself into exhaustion and the program had finally registered that he was getting too beat up and stopped automatically, magically sensing that the workout was moving away from rigorous and bruise-ey to genuinely harmful.

"Gina works the diner all daaay
Working for her man,
She brings home her pay
For loooove, for loooooove"

Where he lay in his little impact crater in the wrecked floor, clothes tattered, sweating buckets, bleeding slightly from his eyes (his heatvision had been left flaring about an hour too long), Kon was lost in a haze of self-hatred. The abject rage had died down, but what was left was a sheen of self-loathing that'd been left behind like greasy residue in its place.

"She says, 'We've gotta hold on to what we've got.
It doesn't make a difference if we make it or not.
We've got each other and that's a lot.
For loooove we'll give. It. A shot.'"

It was funny how each time something horribly traumatic happened in his life, he kept thinking nothing could ever feel worse. Accidentally get some poor dude killed showboating and playing up the fame thing? Couldn't get worse. Get betrayed by some sick, psycho older woman who was toying with him? Couldn't get worse. Watch his first love die? Couldn't get worse. Lose a mentor? Couldn't get worse. Get conscripted to be a medic holding people's guts together in a war, get tortured on Apokolips, watch a friend get traumatized as a part of him died, get brainwashed and attack his friends, actually freakin' die...

It always got worse. The never-ending trauma congo line went on.

"Whoooooa, we're half way there
Whooooa, livin' on a prayer
Take my hand and we'll make it - I swear
Whooooa, livin' on a prayer!"

The gym was mostly soundproofed but anyone near the lower levels might have heard the thunderous booms and zappy noises from his training/smashing session, what with some of them shaking the foundation of the place. They'd gone quiet now. He'd forgotten to lock the door, which meant if anyone walked in they'd be forced to listen to his terrible singing.