Chapter 1: Crash Landing

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The world jerked around her, pushing Tracer from her stupor. She gave her head a short shake hoping it would loosen the daze, but it hardly helped. Figures. Getting a quick slam to the back of the head often left her feeling like this for hours. If only Winston were around so she had someone to complain to.

A quick scan of the room revealed boxes, more boxes, and fancy pair of large, circular handcuffs binding her to the wall. Not really her style, these ones.

She closed her eyes again and listened. The deep hum reverberating through the walls and warming her chest told her she was in a vehicle. A slight sway in her stomach felt too smooth or quick to be from something on land or ocean.

She smiled. Just what she had hoped for, a flying Talon ship. And she was trapped somewhere in the middle, no chance of escape, and weaponless at the same time. Christmas had come early after all.

A door in front of her flashed a shadow and a man stepped in. Not a particularly handsome man, or a very intelligent looking one with his smirking eyes focused on just her and with a laughable lack of attention to his surroundings. He clearly had no idea what was coming.

"To have caught an Overwatch agent, and Tracer herself, no less!" he said, his high pitched voice barked like a whiny poodle. "Hardly as exciting as I had hoped." Right he was. Tracer had practically laid herself in front of him in order to be caught. How a man like this made it up past foot soldier in Talon's tiers is beyond her comprehension.

Four men followed in after him, armed to the teeth with knives strapped to their chest and a beastly gun hanging from their fingertips. She might have been scared if the cheesy helmets didn't scream big-fat Talon lackeys.

The things Tracer endures for the sake of good and humanity. Good thing she had a schedule to keep.

"Oy, I think I got on the wrong flight. I was on the seven thirty heading for england?" she said, giving a chuckle.

The poodly man flashed an eyebrow and then stepped aside, revealing a gangly figure cast in shadow. He took a step closer, revealing a face of breathtaking contortion. It was as though someone had hit him with a tree branch, then a log, and finally topped it all off with a little bit love from someone's truck tires. Simply, the bloke wasn't a very good looking fellow, with pieces of flesh sitting about his face in strangely twisted chunks. And speaking of chunks, Tracer felt a few dancing up from her stomach at the sight of him.

The man smiled, a horrifying demonstration of twisted flesh, but his eyes remained as cold as chilled ice, "I've heard you were a funny one," he said, his voice sounding deep and smooth, unlike his face. That actually surprised her.

"So you like my jokes? I got more of them."

"I'm certain. Though I'm more interested in hearing how you found out about this ship. It would seem we have a faithless mole." She really wished that smile would go away now.

"Not really sure what you mean," she said, pulling on every ounce of her training to appear innocent, "I was on my way downtown when this man knocked me out cold."

The man's eyes turned into a stony stare. He wasn't buying it, and he knew that she knew it. "Again," he commanded with a chill that almost touched her spine.

"Well Blimey, if I knew, do you really think I would just tell you? Give me more credit that that, pah-lease."

The ugly fellow stared a moment at her before he turned to the poodle man and waved him to walk over. They began to whisper in a tone too quietly to hear, but Tracer guessed it had something to do with torturing or brainwashing her to get information. She decided this might be a good time to start the plan.

Well, she had already started the plan, but this definitely was the more risky step compared to the first which involved getting beat up, knocked out, and finding herself captured on a talon ship, all while trying not to get killed in the process. Winston had argued for days about the sheer stupidity of it, and he was right. She was sure to find herself mucking up the situation somehow along the way, but that didn't stop her. A mucky situation gave her a challenge that any lady like herself needs to stay entertained.

She risked a look at the six guards. Even at six, they wouldn't be an issue. The issue would be the man in front of her. He was no mere chap and a leader amongst the lackeys, unlike the poodle man. That meant he would be an unpredictable threat. She decided from now on she would only call him by one name, and one name only. One that would remind her of the dangerous mystery behind this man's identity.

"So BarkFace," she continued, looking up at the man. "You going to tell me where we're going?"

The man didn't even flicker with an emotion at the name calling. "At this moment," he said, "We are flying fifteen thousand feet heading north."

That was interesting. Not the bit on their height and direction, but that he said anything at all. Everyone knew she was pilot and had some basic understanding of her abilities, so only an idiot would have given her that kind of information. He didn't seem too idiotic, but there the information flew freely. Was it a trap?

"Well that doesn't much help me, now does it?" She managed a scoff and flicked her head to the right in a display of mock irritation. Meanwhile, she started counting, tapping her finger against the cufflink.

"Sir, why not question her now," poodle man blurted in a near whine. "I have methods we can employ right here without my tools."

Barkface glanced at him. Tracer couldn't make out his expression, but whatever it was, it caused the other to back down and tuck his tail between his legs, if he only had one. This ugly fellow sure had a way with stares, though with a face like that, couldn't be all that hard to manage.

He slowly turned back to Tracer, his eyes tight and still. "Tell me, Tracer, you're notorious for finding yourself out of sticky situations. Is that not true?"

She had to count faster now. It was hard, but she could tell she was nearly in rhythm. It had to be perfect in timing, and perfect timing was her specialty.

"I think," she said slowly, trying not to lose count her mind, "that there's something to be said of my noggin' and tight spaces."

Barkface grunted, "It certainly does."

Tracer resisted the urge to frown. The man was making small talk with her. None of responses he made didn't follow the evil-lacky-script she'd come to expect form Talon. But at this point, it didn't really matter.

She figured out the timing.

"Love to stay and continue this little chat, but I got a date with your navigational computer. Cheers!" and she tapped into her power.

The world froze and dropped to a glowing shade of blue, as though she had been swallowed in a sapphire gem. She could see through the walls, the skies outside of them and the ground far below. She could make out endless desert, running off in both direction with a spec of something silvery huddled in the distance. Probably a small city.

The shackles slipped through her, along with the wall, and she found herself moving back in her own timeline. A lot of people didn't know that she was completely aware of her own slippage back through time, and she could control the speed of it as well. It allowed her to scope her surroundings before popping herself into a tight spot that had been perfectly safe seconds ago. But it had it's danger zones.

Slipping back in time was like setting a timer. Set it for five seconds, she pops out five seconds backwards. Set it for one, she pops out a second later. For whatever reason she could not at any time ever move backwards and just jump out at will while reversing. Winston didn't even know why, and that meant she didn't have a chance of figuring it out herself. It did mean she had to know exactly when to pop out, especially in a flying plane, where timing means ending up in the room behind her or outside the ship plummeting towards the ground. Not the best place to be.

The world flashed like lightning bolt as she found herself in the middle of the navigational room which was rather boring square with two columns. A shelf of computer monitors and controls lined the walls. Two men stood on either side of her, staring blankly, probably confused at the popping sound and the sudden appearance of a british woman.

She blushed, "Sorry, have a hard time holding that sound in, if y'know what I mean."

The men paused, clearly still confused and she didn't give them a second to think about it another time. She dropped to a crouch, swung out her leg, throwing the first off his feet and onto his back with a satisfying grunt. The second guard tried, he surely did, but it was hopeless. She zipped backwards, finding herself crouched right behind him. Seeing as she was already in the position for it, she rolled onto her back and gave him a right good kick in the bum, sending the man flying forward and landing on top of the other.

She stood up and waddled over to the two scrambling dorks. At this point, two swift, carefully placed kicks knocked them out. She sighed, looking around and seeing the room empty of any conscious fellows to fight. She had hardly tried and the battle was over.

She frowned a moment, looking around the room, almost as if she expected to see someone standing in the corner, staring at her, but it was empty. She shook her head and walked up to one of the consoles. It was a thin beam of hope that had brought her here. Her contact had been right about a few things, where the Talon chaps would be and most likely be and that they would bring her to a ship, but this moment decided everything else. If this ship was the one she thought it was, it held the information to lead her to the first clue as to where the Slipstream had inevitably crashed.

Tesla had a problem. He laid back in his chair, feet propped up and carefully avoiding a stack of papers on the fine mahogany desk of one of Oasis' finest ministers. And despite all this plush and pizzazz, he still couldn't quite get comfortable in leather chair.

The older man sitting on the other side of the desk had a long, scraggly beard, powdered with a dusty grey. He had a scrunched up look about his face like crumpled paper. He didn't seem to notice the feet placed so rudely on his desk, but that was because he had given them a hard stare half an hour ago the second Tesla had plopped them on the table.

In truth, Tesla did feel bad about had had just happened. It wasn't one of his worst mistakes he had made, but it definitely wasn't one of his best. The problem was he couldn't afford to look guilty, even if his stomach twisted a bit as the tight look in the minister's face got a little tighter by the second.

"Tesla," the man started, his voice crackling only slightly with the touch of age, "this is definitely an explosion."

Tesla sucked the feet off of the desk and let them plop to the floor and then leaned forward all in one casual motion. "It was more of a burst."

The older man raised a brow, "and how would you characterize an explosion against a burst?"

Tesla tapped his chin, nodding as if he we actually taking that question seriously. "Explosions are so much more elaborate and destructive."

The minister nodded and pulled up a sheet of paper. He slipped on pair of reading glasses and cleared his throat. "Four light constructors destroyed, seven computers destroyed, twenty two types of monitoring equipment have become-," he paused, frowning, "have become permanently unusable. Well, that's certainly one way of putting it. I suppose this is the part," he said, tapping the page where it must have been written, "where you ripped the paper out of Blenn's hands and began writing it yourself?"

Tesla nodded immediately. No point in denying it.

The man leaned back in his chair, the lines on his face wrinkling more deeply around his eyes, casting disfigured shadows. He just sat there, staring at the paper silently, and letting that silence dig deeper and deeper into Tesla's twisting stomach. After a good long minute, he raised his eyes towards him.

"You've certainly given me quite the challenge this time, Mr. Dorn, I'm just not sure why you persist to torment me. You are not unaware of the situation in which I am placed when this continues to happen. Do you see that stack there?" he said, pointing to a rather large stack of papers on the right side of his desk, pages sputtering out in random places.

"I did notice them," he replied, trying to keep the disdain from his voice. He hated paperwork, that's why Blenn did it all.

"Those are all the projects being submitted to the Foundation of Budgets." Tesla figured only Oasis could come up with such a terrible name. "Not a hefty amount, wouldn't you agree?"

Tesla nodded again, he did that a lot in these discussions.

The minister pointed to a shelf on his left, full of folders and another spat of sputtering papers peaking out from folder the size of chemistry text books, as though there were all desperate to get free. "That is all the paperwork submitted to the FB just collateral damage from your experiments."

Tesla frowned and stared to his left, flicking out a lazy finger pointing towards another shelf, "You moved it away from the shelves of my half completed projects and budget extensions." Those shelves were hopelessly jammed with paperwork. He felt pride in that one.

The older man sighed, and shook his head. It was usually the sigh that finally got Tesla to shut up. He let his head fall only slightly. "I know this isn't good minister, but they say progress takes a long time, they just forgot to mention that it's expensive too and hard to budget."

"It certainly is that," the minister said, grinning slightly. Tesla felt his spirits raise just a little. "Do you at least feel like you're making progress?"

It wasn't the first time the minister asked, but it's one that he rarely felt ready to answer. His experiment some twenty levels above them had gone horribly wrong; not unusual. But for every failure there was often just a spike of data, a glimpse into the wirings that made up the fabrics of their universe, that would be quickly followed by an explosion. Despite all that trouble, a glimpse was about as revealing into the universe as a book summary was to the plot twist in a book.

No, despite all his efforts and many burnt eyebrows, Tesla had to finally admit it to himself. Years of this wasn't just weighing on the Ministry of Energy anymore, it was beginning to weigh on him too. He could feel it as he woke up in the mornings. The thought of it made his heart feel like it dropped half an inch.

Finally, he let out a heavy breath. "I'm getting information, but there seems to be laws keeping me from piercing through. I know it's there, it's touchable, and it's infinite, but I don't know how Albert did it. Still don't." The words moved through his teeth like acid and twisted his stomach into a full knot.

The minister let out a forced coughed and cocked a brow, "Albert, eh?" the man said, eyeing him and shifting as though someone had given him a hard chair. "Well, Albert, had a lifetime to figure it out. You can't expect to make his achievement overnight. But surely you've made some progress. Is there nothing else left to try?"

And that was the final cue, the guillotine to all of their conversations. "I have," he said. At this point, Tesla frankly didn't have anything else to share. He was hitting the wall he had been hitting for the last several years, and nothing was going to just pop out of the sky and break it open.

The man stood with him, but Tesla was already halfway to the door. "Hold, Tesla, and listen." he only stopped once his hand rested on the handle. "I know what this project means to you and your family. I know what it means to this world. You've made more progress in this research than anyone else, and if anyone has even a chance in this blasted tower of making a breakthrough, it could only be Albert's own son."

Tesla held the cool knob, the metal chilling his skin pleasingly, and the words settling and untying that knot he felt. He actually smiled. Slowly, he half turned to the minister, not feeling brave enough to face him, just in case something wet and salty decided to make its way out of his eyes.

"Thank you," he whispered, before opening the door and slipping through it.

Whatever problems they thought Tracer couldn't handle, they were wrong. She could take an army the size of a city, single handedly, weaponless. Well, maybe not weaponless, but blimey would she try. It would take at least half the ship's crew to get through that door. So she let herself feel a little more than offended when not one bloke came blasting through the doors, barrels blazing with plasma shells and smoke. Nope, apparently a classy british lady such as herself wasn't worth the time or bullets.

She could have been good with that, up until the lights started flashing red, a few explosions sounded, and an eerie whistling sounded started getting louder and louder throughout the ship. The light feeling in her stomach started growing along with just a pinch of panic.

The ship was definitely beginning to fall and she needed to get her information fast.

She had set a small black cube on the table, apparently a nano computer that held a portion of Athena's program, or so Winston claimed. It would be enough to hack into any console she'd come across. The blimey scientist could have at least told her how long it would take.

"Science can't be rushed, it can only be encouraged," she could almost hear him say, to which she grimaced. She was literally a cosmic personification of the word rush. And how does one encourage a nano computer.

She tapped the small cube lightly. "Oy, you can do it buddy! We could be crashing any minute and explode into smithereens, but I bet you got it all under control, Love!" she stared at the cube, feeling a sensation of embarrassment wash through her body. "Winston…" she whispered as a silent cure.

Something hot flared across her face and everything grew silent to her right. She ducked down behind the console half expecting an explosion, but the sharp ring exploding in her right ear told her all she needed to know. Someone nearly shot her square in the head.

She risked a peek around the corner of the console and saw three men pour into the room, with a fourth standing at the door, gun raised. She counted herself lucky that he had missed when she had practically been a sitting target. Where Talon drew up these curb suckers, Tracer didn't want to know.

They were enclosing on her fast, giving her a second at most to think, but that's all she needed. She tapped into her power, feeling her own timeline rushing through her chest, circling into the device, and without even thinking, she sped it up.

The rest of the world slowed. The wailing alarm dropped in depth, sounding like a grown man yelling. She looked around the room, her eyes moving like heavy bowling balls in her eye sockets, a strange side effect of speeding up time. The three men falling towards her like statues were spread out expertly. As much as she loved to belittle them, the Talon were not all fails and flops. These blokes could rightly trap her. She could down all three of them, but the fourth in the back wasn't moving. He could easily gun her down the moment she stopped to take down any one.

All these amazing powers pouring through her body, and she still felt stuck. If only the man in the back with his gun lowering weren't there.

Her heart felt like it jumped in her own chest, he's lowering his gun?

Although the world moved like slugs around her, the man was definitely lowering her gun. She couldn't wait, not even in a millionth of a second.

It would happen like lightning. She moved around in a flash, crouching, knocking the first man off of his feet and forcing him to fall on top of her. He became a nice cushy pillow against a few bullet from his supposed friends and buddies. She slipped through the air and appeared next the second, pushing his firing gun into a spray of death towards the third and then knocking the head of it into his chin. That guy wouldn't be getting up anytime soon.

She twisted around, grabbing a discarded gun and zipping to the side, hoping to miss whatever shot was coming her way from the fourth, and then found something cold, hard and pointy touching her lower back.

"Turn around slowly," the voice deep reverberating voice spoke behind her. Barkface.

She slowly turned around to find a craggy faced man, noting his piercing blue eyes hidden behind some bulbish looking eye sockets, as though something had him in the face with a bat in each eye, twice, and stomped on them just to be sure. This really chap wasn't a looker.

Her eyes slowly dropped to the guns touching her stomach, grip out facing her. And not just any guns, her pistoles.

She frowned, "Oy, the gun goes the other way, Love."

The man merely stared at her, expressionless. Or angry. Or happy. Hard to say with a face like that. It could be a trick, but it was an awful one, since the first moment she met him he confused her. If it hadn't been for his clue about their descent, she might have accidentally rewound herself into the top floor or outside the plane all together. With that info, she could adjust easily. Now she found that a little hard to excuse as coincidence.

The man move the other hand out to the side, fingers open, a gesture of disarmament. No point in denying it now. He wanted her to take the guns. She took the set and immediately pointed it at him, but as soon as she grabbed the gun, he turned and starting walking towards the door.

"The ship hasn't much longer before the engines reach critical heat levels, less than a minute," he called back just as he passed the door, "We'll be over Oasis in just a few seconds. I suggest you take what you've come for and leave immediately. You won't have another chance."

The ship rumbled and shook, nearly sending her flying off her feet. A part of her wanted to run after the man and knock him out, but what good would that do? The ship certainly felt like it was about to blow up. Her eyes were drawn to the cube sitting on the console, flashing green. The loading was done.

She ran towards it, gripped it, and slipped backwards in time, fading through the ship and watching it sail away in the air. Not a second later, it exploded. Her last gleaming thought was towards the man onboard who had saved her life before her whole world crashed into darkness.

Tesla cursed as he slipped into his large executive suite. His room looked like something that had barely survived the first omnic crisis, with clothes smeared across everything like shrapnel from a bomb, which in his case wasn't too far from the truth. The room had endured a few small explosions in its time.

He sighed, picking one of his white shirts up and tossing it to the side for effect. He really should clean up his place, or have Blenn do it. He made his way across the battlefield, conveniently ignoring the white cylinder sitting in the middle of the room, and stopped at the three windows overlooking Oasis.

Oasis was a masterpiece of human engineering, a figurative sculpture of gleaming hope out of a hopeless, dry desert landscape. It had taken many brilliant minds and very interesting sponsors with deep pockets to make it all possible. But despite inconsistent background of how the city came about, it didn't stop it from being blindingly beautiful.

Light glimmered like gold on the water resting hundreds of feet below him. Then, sitting like monuments on the waterbed were the different scientific ministries in all their might and glory, basking in the silver glow of the sun. They seemed like small ancient palaces sitting on flooded islands, all polished and clean, made of fine stones and metals. It often made him forget he was housing in the most impressive piece of them all. The gilded tower hotel.

It wasn't just a hotel, of course. The ministry of tourism wouldn't let anyone call it anything else for commercial opportuntiy reasons. It certainly had the most luxurious suites to be found in the world with the most elaborate and impressive views of the desert ever to be found, conveniently forgetting that it really was just a desert. But every other level had it's ministry of science doing its thing, whatever it was. He only knew of his level.

The skies were turning orange with dusk on its way in. The dunes glittered in the setting sun, like specs of fine metals had rained across the land for miles and miles.

Turning back to the room, he couldn't almost remember being back at his Mom's home with the walls decorated with heirlooms and expensive paintings. But even then, living in the mansion of his parents, life didn't feel any less fake than it did now. The expensive woods and marble floor felt surreal after having been surrounded by it for year. He swallowed it and tried to ignore the feeling.

He slid off his jacket and threw it onto the couch to the left of the window and noticing again for the millionth time the white cylinder sitting in the center of the room. He couldn't ignore it forever.

Normally he would just let it sit there to constantly remind him how far he'd come, and how far he still had to go. It was a machine half finished by his father. All the scientist, including himself, had researched the thing particle by particle, and that wasn't figurative speech. They had literally taken a particle scan of the entire machine and scanned it, hoping it would reveal the inner workings of the device.

However, he knew something no one else knew about it, and today he didn't feel like he could keep it a secret much longer.

He stood up to the device, seeming like a solid piece of white painted metal. It felt as though it starred back up at him, peering into his soul, begging him to operate it. If he could get it to work, everything would change as the minister predicted. Why wouldn't it? They were talking about limitless, exhaustless energy. Even though also meant poking a hole through space and time, a minor detail. The machine could create a small, portable hole through space from which an infinite amount of energy could come through. It didn't even have to be very big. All of it very feasible except for the whole part where one cuts right through the fabric of everything..

His heart raced, the memories fluttering to life in his mind's eye. He could see his father creating the first one, a small metallic cube glowing brightly with white smoke. His father reached in and held it out, smiling. Tesla remembered that day fondly as he raised his hand and stared at it. That day had changed Tesla world forever.

The memory faded, and he was left to remember that he couldn't do what only his father had done. Lucky for him, no one else had gotten nearly as close to creating the battery like his father had either.

"Limitless energy, huh?" he whispered, staring at the cylinder through his fingers. He didn't know why he decided to do it in that moment, but before he could think, his hand was reaching inside and opening a small compartment at the top. He reached in and pulled out a silver ring and closed the compartment.

He should tell Blenn in case everything went terribly wrong. He should wait. But something inside snapped with that memory, the smile on his father's face as he stared at his greatest invention, perhaps the greatest invention ever.

If he somehow did manage to poke a hole and get energy pouring through from one reality to another, how would he regulate it? The ring. It was something of his own creation and quite the ingenious design. It could regulate nearly anything and acted as a safety net between whatever world he poked into and the one he was quite fond of, this one. The idea of tapping limitless energy caused problems the same way bombs did with structures and, well, life in general.

His hands began to shake as they held the ring. By removing the ring, nothing would hold the machine back. The safety net worked both ways. It kept the machine from reaching full power but also protected him and his experiments from killing him in case he misused the device. But that was ten year ago. He had run thousands of experiments and understood the technology perfectly. So what kept him from just flipping the switch now?

When his father had passed, he put the ring there immediately to protect the device. No one but him knew it wasn't apart of the original device, so no one questioned it. But he knew the reason was just for self preservation, it was for fear. His father had kept his research close and no one could touch his machines except for him. The idea of handing the machine over felt like betraying him, but the weight of his thousands of failures weight on him today more than ever.

He reached over and flipped the switch.

The wind gave a ravenous howl all around her, screaming at her to wake up. She jerked, blinking her eyes and suddenly becoming aware of how windy it was.

"Blimey, again? I just did this," she grumbled, rubbing her eyes.

Tracer loved the wind, but this was ridiculous. She tried to stand up, but the world span around her at the motion, reminding her she shouldn't have had that plate of fish and chips before getting intentionally mugged.

Intentionally mugged.

She jerked again, flattening herself immediately as the memory flooded back. The oxygen must still be a little thin at this level, she didn't even realize she was falling. The explosion must have given her quite a whammy.

"Blimey," she said again, looking at the ground below. Luckily she was falling towards a city, that much she could tell immediately. The words of Barkface started echoing back to her mind. In her frustration and confusion, she nearly forgot, but it blinked back into her mind. "Oasis," she mouthed.

Priority one, find a place to land. Priority two, don't die while doing it. Most people think it's the other way around, but those people haven't ever taken a good spill out of a plane before, and this was her second time. She risked a look at her chrono accelerator, and her worst fears were realized. The blue glowing essence within flickered. The machine needed to recharge. She whipped her head up. "No time to waste then," she giggled.

Her target became clear. A tall, cone stack tower stood near the center of the city. She directed herself towards it, gliding through the air and riding it like a feather; a heavy feather with no aerodynamics. Her eyes scanned the many levels looking for openings, and there were a few. The places seemed to still be under construction, with exposed panels and metal frames peaking out from all over the upper floors.

She felt like slamming her first into her head. She wouldn't make it into any of the open floors in time and her chrono accelerator would burn out at any second. The building zoomed towards her and she would have only one chance. Her window came into view, the only one she could feasibly break through without totally killing herself before she had a chance to rewind.

The window enclosed. Three hundred feet. Two hundred feet. One hundred feet. She quickly flipped in the air and huddled into the fetal position, allowing the side of her body to absorb the brunt of the impact. It felt like hitting a cement wall just before it crumbled. The air knocked out of her and she could feel several somethings burst and crack inside of her as she tumbled, flopped, and slammed against a person in the room. A person?

Her vision was twisted and fading fast. She glanced up to see a white cylinder glowing brighter and brighter and noticed she couldn't close her eyes from it. They had become unresponsive. Darkness began to creep up around the corners of her eyes. She was dying. With one last ounch of hope, she tapped into the chrono accelerator and hoped there was energy left.

She pushed the feeling into her chest and had something quite unexpected happen. Everything flashed white and abruptly exploded, and then froze. For a true blue first she moved back in time slowly and with control, almost as if she were moving her limbs in real time, as opposed to reversed time. She felt as though she could stop at any time.

Her body rolled back, the pain inside her zipping up and disappearing with a blink. She bounced up and down off the floor, slid and twisted lengthwise, and then floated up to the window. She let go and that instant. Everything responded in kind.

The explosion sucked back into the center of the room where the cylinder stood. She flew forward and hit the ground, rolling, but not with nearly the impact as it had been moments ago.

Tracer had learned something unique about her powers. Every time she rewound backwards, she lost just a tad bit of inertia from the point that she left off. Her timing landed her to instant at which she had hit the window when a partial of the impact was absorbed. The combined moment and loss of inertia from the rewind made hitting the ground feel more like falling down a set of stairs as opposed to hitting a wall terminal velocity. One tends to be a little more dangerous than the other.

She stood up, expecting her suit and finding it cut-less. One of winston's greatest creations, an elastic that refused to slice open no matter how sharp the object.

At the other end of the room a man groaned and lifted himself up.

"Did a yellow woman just crash through my window, or am I going crazy?" he said, holding his head and looking around the room. He noticed the broken glass and then followed it to the shattered window. He then shrugged and nodded, as though less than impressed. "I've seen worse redecoration. Always thought my room could use a little more bling."

He stood up and led his gaze from the stream of glass to her. The man was a bit of mess, wearing something of a lab coat, his hair standing up all of his head as though someone had thrown a grenade in his face, and surprisingly tanned skin for his home-body-like appearance. But his blue eyes seemed to peer out from beyond the silver lined spectacles sitting on his nose.

"Well, Love, I planned a part in your room and sent in invitation, but it may have gotten lost in the fall. Air mail isn't so reliable these days."

He adjusted the glasses and tapped his cheek lightly. "Well, the jaw still works," he then rotated left and right, bent downward and back upwards. "No pinched muscles, that's a relief," he said with a chuckle. The man was surprisingly calm for having just been hit by a flying woman.

"So," he said, finally making eye contact with her, "you are?"

Tesla was just grateful to be alive at this point. He was sure that the device would explode, ripping a hole through the local universe, and kill everything within a few parsecs. But in reality, that was the worst case and very unlikely scenario. More likely he would just have to move out into another suite following the aftermath.

The woman rested both hands on her hips and gave him a once over. Something about her seemed vaguely familiar. The yellow jumpsuit, the glowing thing on her chest, and the black hair that seemed to stand up all on its own. "Oh," he said, tapping his chin thoughtfully, you're one of the window cleaners, am I right? I haven't seen you guys in a week."

The woman's eyes grew a little wide, "You really haven't the faintest of who I am?" she said, the level of scoff in her voice irritating him slightly. "You get out much?"

"Well, I mean," he said, looking back at the broken window, "you do this to a lot of people, I'm guessing?"

She burst out laughing, grabbing her stomach and tumbling back towards the open window before catching herself. "No, Love, guess I just didn't think I'd meet someone who didn't. It's a treat."

"Glad to have- uh- treated you. But seriously, who-," he stopped as sirens began wailing out in the distance, echoing. Something in the distance exploded loudly. His wristwatch beeped and he tapped the side to answer it.

"Hey, Minister, ever-,"

"Tesla!" the voice cracked loudly from his wrist. He nearly grabbed the thing to throw it off. "Are you alright? The surveillance camera's have picked up something crashing onto your level. I think it may be your suite. Are you there now? Surveillance identified the object as a woman, a possibly dangerous fugitive."

He couldn't help but freeze, slowly raising his head to the woman who cheerfully bowed at him. It was at this moment that he realized two pistols were holstered to her body. He sighed tiredly. He needed to be more perceptive.

"Yeah, wrong number, or level- whatever. Let me know how that goes," he tapped the watch, ending the call.

The woman flashed him a look of surprise. He held up both hands, "look, I don't want trouble. It's been a busy day and you don't look like a mass-murderer. Probably a mercenary though? So just go about your business, and we'll call it square." He expertly left out the fact that she wouldn't get very far. Two feet out the door and the surveillance bots would be on her in a matter of minutes. Reinforcements would arrive, and he wouldn't have to give it a second thought for the rest of his life.

However, security would be the clean up clean up crew in this case. Whoever this woman was, she had the ability to survive crashing through those windows without a scratch, which means he likely was the only person capable of handling her. He just needed her to turn her back and hoped she wouldn't notice him readjusting his sleeve.

The woman eyed him a moment, and then shrugged. "I suppose I'll have to thank you later. Look me up sometime."

She turned and headed towards the door, leaving herself exposed. With a quick flick of his wrist, two small triangle shaped projectiles shot out and latched onto either pistole with ease. He held out his hand and both guns came soaring off her sides and falling right into his grip. He quickly wielded and pointed them at her.

She froze in place, slowly looking at her empty holsters and then raising both hands towards the air.

"Blimey idiotic," she muttered.

"Hey," he said, feeling a little offended, "I thought that was pretty good."

"Not you, Mate. Me." She sighed irritably. "I guess I'm a little out of practice. How did you do that, anyhow? You haven't moved an inch."

He tried not to smile more broadly, but couldn't help it. He'd been practicing that move for years in the making. "Trade secret, I'm afraid."

"We make a pair a then, I have one two."

A flash of blue light zoomed towards him. He tried to pull the trigger, but his fingers froze, and before he knew it, the light hand him on his back, with a knee pinning him to the ground and a rather smarmy british woman staring down at him. He wished he could smack that smile of her face.

"You're augmented too?" he said.

She shrugged, "Sort of," she held up both pistols and slowly lowered them towards him. "What's your secret?"

He eyed her a moment, trying to judge her bodies stance on him. She was leaning too far forward, which made this next trick a little too easy. He floated up, pulling himself towards the ceiling. The guns flew past his face as she flipped forward and spiraled off of him.

His body came to a slow stop as he let go of the pull and then let himself carefully, expertly, and quite stylishly land back on the floor, hands on hips. He nodded to himself. "I'm still pretty good at this, aren't I?"

She popped an eyebrow at him. "Mister, you seem to forget who's got the gun." She began to raise them, but it's aim jerk and twisted away. She frowned, gripped her gun tighter, and began raising again, but this time they span out of her hands, slid off to the floor, and slammed into the wall behind her.

"Telekinesis!" she yelped excitedly, twisting back to the guns and then shooting a look of surprise at him. "Blimey that's good." She look genuinely impressed, it almost made him drop his guard.

"No, not telekinesis, don't be silly, it's gravity! You can create gravity wells. I know a woman who can do that. But why am I not feeling the effects?" She did an odd wave with her hands back and forth like some exotic dance. "Not gravity?"

For a moment, he let his guard slip, mostly because she had her back half turned from him, leaving her partially vulnerable. And she didn't seem stupid enough to just let that happen, and it didn't quite feel like a bate. Was this woman really more interested in his abilities than the fight at hand?

"I use magnets," he said hesitantly, dropping his shoulders. He didn't know what to think.

"Magnets, where?" she said, looking around the room.

"Here," he patted his chest and then his arms. "Everywhere. I'm augmented with electrical magnets through my whole body. I can pull and push things at will. I also attached two MicroLatches to your pistoles earlier, just incase there weren't enough magnetic metals in your gun for me to push. They can stick to almost anything with incredible force."

He raised his arms and the guns slid back past her and stopped at his feet, and then pushed them back to her until they rest near her side.

She looked confused. "You sure went to a lot of effort to keep these out of my hands. Now you're giving them back?"

This time he shrugged. "Maybe I'm going crazy, but the fact that we're making conversation and not still banging fist and knuckle, leads me to believe you're not going to kill me. Why?"

She eyed him a moment, not even making a move towards the guns. "Why didn't you shoot me?"

Despite his hope, she had noticed. In that moment when she had moved with inexplicable speed, his fingers had frozen, unable to pull the trigger to defend himself. A flash of emotions stuck to his chest like oily sandpaper, rubbing slowly at him from the inside. There were memories tied to guns he wanted to forget.

"It's a long story," he sighed and let his guard down finally.

"Doesn't seem like you're terribly new at this. Your reflexes weren't-," she smiled, shifting her weight to the side and gripping her chin, "too terribly slow."

He laughed and nodded, "Well, let's just say it was a matter of career choices. So what now. You run away, I don't stop you, and we pretend this never happened?"

A stare came from her eyes he didn't expect. They seemed to look into him, past his lab coat and down deeper into his soul. "You could come with me," she said.

He found himself without words, a rare event."Go with you, a fugitive? I don't even kno-," he stopped as she stepped towards him and held out a hand, a new charming smile on her face.

"Lena Oxton," she said, eying him, "Pilot and protector with a pinch of calvary between both."

"Whatever that all means," he said, taking the hand and shaking lightly, "I'm Tesla Den, scientist, loner, and arsonist apparently," he said, glancing back at the cylinder to their side. A white, hazy smoke rose from within, glowing sharply in the sunlight. He had hoped it would work this time. The metal frame was odd and contorted, as though it had suddenly melted and frozen back into a solid piece. That would be something he would need to look into.

"So," she said, stepping up next to him, "no that you've gone awkwardly silent on both of us. What do you say?"

He shook his head, ignoring the glowing haze, "You're serious. I'm sorry, but why?"

She tilted her head to the side and zipping in a flash of light from where she was to directly behind the cylinder, putting herself between it and the broken window. "I get feelings about people, I guess you could say. Somethings about you is screaming something."

He frowned at where the blue streak had formed. "I can't tell if you're moving really fast or teleportation. What is that?"

"A little of both. You've got your fancy magnetism, but I myself have sort of a problem with time." She tapped a glowing circular device on her chest. Little circles of displaced light dance around the center, ticking away like some elaborate digital clock.

He shook his head, a million questions pouring into his head. Who in the blasted name was this Lena Oxton? Why did she keep making him these offers? What did she mean a problem with time? And why was the smoke still glowing when she stepped in front of the window, blocking the setting sun.

Glowing smoke? he thought, staring at the haze, only noticing that the smoke was less of a haze and more like millions of gassy tendrils reaching up into the air and swirling around. His heart thumped wildly in his chest. He'd heard of this phenomenon before, even seen it. He remembered it.

His hands grabbed at the edges of the cap that sheltered the inner component. He scratched at the edges, desperate to tear it off, but the metal hand melted over the lip, sealing it.

He shot two MicroLatches, one at the top cap and one at a nearby support beam. It would be strong enough, he hoped, to handle the force. He reached up his sleeve and flipped a small switch. The metal screeched loudly and then ripped off, smashing into where the other latch rested on the beam.

He shoved his head over the lip and saw a small, white glowing cube. The tendrils reached up from within and spiraled like a distant, glowing galaxy. His breath abandoned him.

"It's worked," he gasped. "It actually worked."

"What worked?" a voice said from in front of him. He shook his head, quickly returning from the abyss of his own shock. "Love, you alright? What sort of thing is that right there? Looks futuristic."

"We go to go!" he nearly yelled, dread pouring into his stomach like oil on water. This was bad, very bad. The world wasn't ready for this. He wasn't ready for this. "Sometime around now would be good."