THE GONE-AWAY WORLD [modplot]

[letsgolegion]

Who| Those who signed up
What| The "Gone-Away World" plot
Where| The planet Tezeram
When| The same time as "The Ninth Gate" and "Total Eclipso"
Warnings/Notes| child endangerment

The Legion cruiser breaks apart upon entry to atmo. It just can't fight its way through the warped reality of the planet, through the willpower of the many criminals on Tezeram willing its destruction. But the Legionnaires own willpower and thoughts factor in, from the moment they're close enough to the planet to start influencing the "stuff" that makes up everything on Tezeram's surface.

So even though the ship rips apart, they don't die. Instead they find themselves down on the planet, separated into pairs that have to find their way towards the criminals behind all this, and find their way to each other. If they try to will the Legion cruiser back into being, they'll find it's impossible. They must defeat the criminals responsible for all this, and join together to will the cruiser back into being at the same time.

Comments

[letsgolegion]

It's just stupid enough to work. The problem with a world of imagination is that not all criminals actually have any imagination, especially not the mooks assigned to guard the outpost.

So no, they don't expect a military vehicle to just roll up the wall and into their base in a glorified hamster ball. They're also not expecting stun grenades and they're sure as hell not someone to play merry hell with gravity.

That means the two of them burst onto the scene fairly explosively, and mooks go flying or slam down into the ground due to suddenly now weighing 400 pounds. They have a clear shot at a massive door that leads inside into the main part of the outpost, but someone's imagined that it's made out of inertron, the hardest densest substance in the universe, so they're going to have to imagine their way through or around that.

[nofortunateson]

While Cortana is busy making elegant origami out of whole reams of the standard accepted textbook of physics, North is focused on two main beliefs - that a Warthog is absolutely capable of rolling along a rigid sphere, and that the two AI on the team are capable of doing whatever they please, whether or not he could have even conceived of it beforehand. So the vehicle rolls right up the wall, down into the compound, and forward into the fray. The whole time, Theta's on the lookout for any remaining forces who look less than absolutely bewildered or panicked, pivoting the mounted gun at the rear of the vehicle and shooting through the flickering gaps in the shield that he's engineered countless times when the shield was still an armor enhancement entirely under his control. Per Legion rules, he isn't firing the standard-issue armor-penetrating rounds - instead, there's a full-auto barrage of miniature fireworks mortars bursting just close enough to their opponents' faces to take care of disorienting the ones still trying to struggle on through Cortana's attentions.

When they hit the ground - the actual ground, not a temporarily flipped point of gravitational pull - North pulls a hard turn toward the door, whistling a low slide of almost-admiration as he rolls up tapping the brakes. "Well okay then." A key, maybe. Or a really, really impressive explosion, though- hell, depending on how much further inside the kids are-

"No, it's okay!" He can catch the vague shape of the thought, the familiar patterns North's brain lights up in when he's thinking of how to take something down or take it apart, and he's just as sure that there's absolutely no need for it. Doors are made to be opened - and there's always a teammate, always a friend, right there and ready to get them inside so they can help finish the job. They're on a team - and that means trusting that there's someone there to handle the stuff that you can't do.

"It's gonna open."

I have been summoned

[unrecovered]

And the door swings open.

There's something to be said for the power of will and imagination on a world that allows for the bending of reality. Currently, that something is, "if you believe hard enough, you too can yank a friend from a different planet where the laws of reality are concrete to perform a simple but necessary task for you here!"

This is, of course, how Wash found himself on Apokolips one moment and in front of a control panel God knows where the next with a sole directive at the forefront of his mind: open the door.

Which, after a moment, he does.

The directive disappears, and he has a single moment to ponder where the fuck he is and how he got here before he follows suit, returning to Apokolips in the blink of an eye.

What the fuck.

[steelandtemper]

Things that don't occur to Cortana: the possibility that their doorman is really, actually Washington and not a doppelganger summoned up by Theta's perfect AI memory, down to the IFF signal that suddenly appears in her perceptions. Wash vanishes before he can clarify the matter, so it will have to remain a secret until they're all back on Legion World comparing mission notes.

"Man on the inside, huh? I was just going to turn off the strong nuclear force." See if your hyper-condensed matter can hold up to a sudden absence of gluons, criminal scum. Oh well, maybe she'll get a chance to try it on the way out.

"Now where are those kids?" Cortana asks no one in particular, and drums her fingers on the dash. Wishing the place out of existence and into open tarmac would hit up against the wills of every one of their opponents, which might prove too much even for the galaxy's most willful AI. Instead, she imagines every wall in the place turning transparent.

[nofortunateson]

Proud as Theta is of getting that right, he is what he is - and the thought of utterly disintegrating some fortifications appeals to the part of him that remembers why he was made in the first place. "Ooh! Can we do that before we leave?"

Despite sharing a few neural walls with Theta, North absolutely does not see that one coming. No sooner is he twisting in his seat to make sure he's seeing what he thinks he's seeing than Wash blips right out of existence, leaving an unmanned control panel and an open door that he rolls the Warthog-ball through before someone can catch on to what's happening and shut them out again. He doesn't floor it immediately - partially because not long after the walls go clear, he bumps them up into and along one, the sphere skittering and scraping along invisible concrete as he rolls them along the length of it with the warthog tipped onto a lazy diagonal. Course correction's a secondary concern and something he trusts Theta to lean into, he's scanning the field as quickly as he can put it together, into and out of thermal range until he spots a pair that's smaller than the others, lit-up in brighter oranges and reds on thermals, and outside of that matching in a way that immediately jumps out in a sea of subtly different silhouettes.

"Two o'clock?" he checks, already heading that direction, because if he's seen it then Cortana's already had time to double-check.

[letsgolegion]

While the Legionnaires are facing off against the wills of every criminal in this place, said criminals have forgotten that their wills aren't the only ones shaping it, and that the wills of the Legionnaires aren't the only ones combating them.

The existence of the Legionnaires in the complex reaches the children. Rooms away, the criminals in the room react to the fuss outside and say just a little too much about who's attacking where the kids can hear, and so they know three groups of Legionnaires are coming from different directions.

Baela and Claeton Trivv grew up on stories of the Legion of Superheroes. They idolized the Winathian Legionnaires Spark and Livewire until they disappeared with the rest of the missing Legionnaires. They have the full collection of Legion action figures at home, every last one, and lovingly add new figures when they're made of new Legionnaires. They still play with the figures of the Legionnaires sent home and hope they'll come back someday. (Claeton still loves his Spider-Woman figure and Baela's favorite is still Great Saiyaman).

And the thing about worlds based on thoughts is that narratives are a natural part of existence. Even though life is random, senseless, and often harsh, the human mind needs to make sense of it.

This has turned into a story of the good guys coming in to save the day, and it's one that the twins believe in much more strongly than the criminals believe in their narrative of actually winning.

The fortress shifts. The way isn't entirely clear - the group of Legionnaires have quite a few mooks to mow down in between them and the kids. But the room the two children are trapped in suddenly morphs and shifts so that there are three entrances to where they're stuck in their cage, with easily breakable doors, perfect for good guys to break through to save the day.

Time shifts too, so that despite however long it took them all to get there, the various teams of Legionnaires are poised to get into the room at the same time. The criminal masterminds behind this plot - unconscious of even doing it - also conveniently spread out so that there's a group of them in front of each entrance.

Three doors. Three teams. Three clusters of villains. It's all neat and tidy. But the Legionnaires still have to imagine up one hell of a party crash to overpower the criminals they're facing.