Everything so far was making for a refreshingly calm and relaxing day aboard the Waverider. They were docked in the temporal zone and after the long string of recent missions just about everyone took the opportunity to get some extra sleep or simply work on any personal projects. It was just what the team needed; some time to themselves. Sara couldn't remember the last time she had stayed in bed until noon, although on a time ship that is nothing more than a figure of speech, but the point is still there. Ray also made good use of the time, as he still had a few finishing touches to make on his new suit. Mick was probably the only member of the team not content with the rare situation, but he managed to entertain himself with a daylong marathon of explosion-based movies. As the down day was winding to a close and the team was just sitting down to dinner, meatloaf as there are only so many recipes that are good for feeding the entire team, the aberration alarm sounded.
"Ugh," Sara groaned as the seven of them pushed away their plates and vacated their seats. "Should've guessed."
"Should've known better that we can't get one day off." Jax grumbled as the group began making their way towards the library.
"What are you guys complaining about?" Mick asked, "We finally get to see some action."
"Haven't you been watching action movies all day?" Stein questioned the arsonist.
"Exactly, I'm itching for a fight." Mick replied as they reached their destination and gathered around Nate's temporal seismograph.
"Don't get ahead of yourself Mick, we might be able to get away without everything going wrong." Sara warned,
"Yeah right," Jax snorted at such a farfetched idea, but Ray, on the other hand, shrugged.
"There is a first time for everything." He said, always the optimist.
"Ok," Nate interrupted the discussion as he began reading the coordinates that his machine had been able to trace. "Looks like the aberration is originating from… California 1906."
"Are you sure?" Ray asked almost as soon as he heard Nate's announcement, "Because that's the time and place of one of the biggest natural disasters in American history."
"And for those of us who spent most of our school years in Juvie, that would be what exactly?" Mick questioned from where he stood at the back of the group.
"The Great San Francisco Earthquake." Nate supplied, "It was a 7.8 magnitude, resulted in enormous fires all across the city, and the death toll is still uncertain but thought to be well over 2,00 at least." He explained, "In simple terms, it was bad."
"And something tells me it's about to get even worse." Amaya deadpanned, one didn't need to be a historian in order to determine that one of a country's most devastating events being messed with could yield cataclysmic results.
"So let's go check it out," Sara ordered before making her way for the door, the others following right behind her until they all reached their jump seats.
When the Waverider touched down the crew found themselves flying over some woods with what appeared to be a small town off in the distance, not a city like San Francisco.
"I thought you said we were going to San Francisco?" Mick questioned Nate while Sara landed them in a small clearing of the woods.
"I thought we would be," The historian spluttered as they touched down and removed their restraints.
"Well this is where the coordinates led us," Sara assured him whilst walking over to the holotable and bringing up their current location. "And we are currently… 20 miles from the city."
"What are we doing way out here?" Amaya questioned and Sara shrugged.
"Guess we'll have to find out, what's the date of the earthquake?" She asked, turning her attention to Nate.
"April 18th, 1906." He supplied before Sara turned back to the charts displayed on the screens of the table.
"Ok, looks like we've landed on April 16th, in the middle of the afternoon. So that gives us about a day and a half to figure out what's going wrong." She declared and so it was without any further discussion that they all made their way down to the fabrication room.
"Where is everybody?" Amaya questioned after they had left the Waverider and headed to the nearest town. The place was practically deserted, not a living soul was anywhere in sight. The windows of just about every shop displayed an open sign and yet there was no one wandering the sidewalks or anything.
"Don't know," Nate replied as he looked around and took in the vacancy of the town. "Maybe we should stop in somewhere," he suggested.
"There's a bar," Mick said immediately, pointing to a building not too far ahead of them and breaking off from their group in the direction of it.
Sara rolled her eyes before following the pyro and the rest of the team followed suit.
By the time they reached the entrance of the building Mick was already seated at the bar and ordering his first drink, the first of many if he were to get his way.
"I'll keep an eye on him," Amaya volunteered before anyone could say anything about Mick, and made her way across the rather large room to sit beside her teammate.
The bar wasn't anything fancy, just a dark interior filled with tables and the counter running along the wall opposite the entrance. A few of the tables and stools were occupied by people the Legends could only assume were regulars of the establishment and so far no one had paid more attention than a glance to the strangers who entered, which was almost always a good thing when it came to this particular team of time travelers.
Taking advantage of the fact that no one seemed to be giving them a second thought the group went and sat down at one of the vacant tables, with Sara and Ray taking it upon themselves to go up to the bar and get some drinks.
"This is odd, isn't it?" Stein observed as he took his seat.
"Odd?" Jax questioned skeptically, "It's the middle of the day and there's barely anybody around, I know it's a Monday and people are probably at work but still." He said just as Sara returned, alone, with their drinks and passed them around, ignoring Stein's obvious discomfort over the fact that his young partner was now of drinking age.
"Well Ray made a friend," she informed them, cocking her head back over towards the bar where Ray was chatting rather seriously with the bartender. "Hopefully he'll be able to tell us if it's normal for the streets here to be deserted during the day."
"Then what are Mick and Amaya doing?" Nate asked before he took a sip of his beer, not seeing why those two needed to be so far from the rest of the team if they weren't doing anything useful.
Sara glanced back over her shoulder at the two once she had sat down before turning back to her own drink and shrugging.
"First date?" She guessed, though it was very hard to tell if she were serious or not. In any case Nate practically choked on his beer while Stein rolled his eyes and a sly look crossed Jax's face as he too spare a look over at the distanced teammates, suddenly aware of how much they tended to gravitate towards one another.
"Anyone want to make a bet on them hooking up?" He asked gleefully and Stein was beginning to look more and more disappointed by the second.
"We did not come here to gamble on the private lives of Ms. Jiwe and Mr. Rory, Jefferson." He reprimanded his young partner.
"Besides," Sara began; taking a peanut from the bowl in the center of the table and using two fingers to crush it open, popping the nut into her mouth while her fingers continued to fiddle with what was left of the shell. "Amaya's from 1942, and I don't think they were much for hooking up back then. That being said she has picked up a lot of habits that to her are futuristic…" The blonde thought aloud, "I give it two months." She finally decided on and Jax grinned wickedly, understandably thrilled to have someone encouraging him.
"You're on, I'll bet a month." He countered and the two shook hands, the other two clearly wanting nothing to do with their little wager.
Meanwhile, over at the bar, Ray had decided to ask the bartender about the mysterious lack of people in the town and when the man confirmed that it was not in fact normal before walking off to tend to another customer he decided to stay sitting there at the counter. Eventually the bartender finished with the patron and, seeing that Ray had not rejoined his strange friends, returned to his section of the counter.
"No one knows how it started," he began with a rather solemn look coming to rest across his features. "But almost a month ago the first attack came from the very edge of town. Mr. Patton has always been a very calm man, never seen him so much as raise his voice. But then his daughter showed up to the seamstress's shop with a long gash across her face." He began darkly, "She looked like she had been attacked by an animal, and she insisted that she had."
"But it was her father?" Ray guessed, a sinking feeling settling in the pit of his stomach.
"Yes and no," the bartender replied before he continued with his tale, and the more he went on the crazier Ray thought he was. But yet when all was said and done he couldn't help but consider the story. He is a time traveler after all, crazy isn't exactly something that he can carelessly rule out.
"Thank you," he said once the bartender had finished, rising from his seat so that he could go relay the information to the others.
"You and your friends might want to consider moving on, and quickly." The other man warned while polishing a glass and Ray nodded before finally heading over to the table where his friends, still minus Mick and Amaya, were gathered.
"Well it's about time," Nate said as his genius friend sat down, "What did the bartender have to say?"
"And do you want in on a bet?" Jax piped up, still giddy about the prospect of making things a little more interesting around the ship.
"No thanks, I'm good." Ray said, obviously shaken by whatever it was that the bartender had told him. "He said, and this is going to sound completely insane, but he said that some of the people in this town have been turning into werewolves."
The entire team stared at him, completely silent. He waited for one of them to say something, anything, and finally after what seemed liked forever Sara answered his prayers.
"Werewolves?" She asked skeptically, "You think that the people here are slowly becoming a city of werewolves?"
"Not slowly, quickly." Ray corrected,
"Dear God he actually believes it." Stein said in shock, he and the others still looking at Ray as though he had completely lost his mind.
"We've seen zombies," the scientist said in his defense, "We've seen mutant hawk people, we used to fight alongside two demigods for crying out loud! And you two are capable of merging into one person who is able to light himself on fire!" He exclaimed, gesturing wildly to Jax and Stein as Sara leaned across the table to put her hand on his shoulder in an attempt to hold him still in his seat.
"Ok calm down, you're getting a little excitable." She warned in a hushed tone, looking around to make sure that nobody had heard anything that he had just said. Fortunately most of the bar's other patrons seemed to have left by now and the bartender either wasn't listening or didn't care. The same could be said for Mick and Amaya.
With a sigh of relief Sara settled back into her chair, "Ok," she said, "You're right. We have seen some pretty crazy things, and a town full of werewolves does sound like a hell of an aberration. So did your new friend give you any kind of lead in this?" She asked and Ray nodded.
"He said that the attacks started almost a month ago, and that ever since then the number of wolves has grown each night. More and more people wake up disoriented every morning, a lot of them with blood on their hands. A lot of people are quarantining themselves to their houses, either for their own protection or…" He trailed off, licking his lips and rather uncomfortable with this whole situation. "Or the protection of others." He continued, "Some of the first people who were affected are being held at the local asylum, most of them have supposedly gone insane from the confusion and guilt over the things that they've done in wolf form, but he thinks a few of them might still be able to help us." He said and it was all too obvious that the other four were still very skeptical about his idea, but with no other lead as to why they're here and, as Sara said, the possibility of werewolves being one hell of an aberration, it was going to be their best bet.
"Mick, Amaya." Sara called as she and the boys stood up, "Let's go."
"Where we going?" Mick asked, him and Amaya hopping off their stools as the rest of the team walked over to them. He wasn't too sure that he liked the smirk on Sara's face; as such an expression almost always meant trouble whenever it came to her.
"Maybe you'd know if you had been listening." She mocked before following the rest of the team out the door, all of them content to let Mick and Amaya spend the entire walk to the asylum in curious silence.