Disclaimer: Still don't own Batman, DC comics, the DC animated universe, Static Shock, or Young Justice.
I will be trying to update quicker than I have been in the past but once again I can't make any promises. I'm taking a break from cons until after the holidays so cosplaying won't take over my life again, at least for a while.
I did a little research on DC's multi-verse and holy AUs Batman, I think I might've gotten Terry a little more lost than I had realized. I was able to find a website with every single official "Earth" in the DCU pre-infinite crisis, post Infiniti crisis, pre-52, the current timeline etc. let's just say there was a lot more than I had realized.
To keep this, sort of, simple Terry's home world is based on Earth 12 which is where the DC animated universe is based. This includes Batman the animated series, Justice League, Justice League Unlimited, Static Shock and Batman Beyond. The Young Justice world, which is where Terry landed, is Earth 16, although there seems to be a few different versions of Earth 16 to begin with. The current Earth 16 where Terry is currently a guest is based on the animated series. There was a comic series called Young Justice that the show was based on but they did make a lot of changes, even in the initial lineup. There is also another comic series that was based on the cartoon and is considered canon since the producer, Greg Weisman, worked on it. As well as the comic, Young Justice Invasion, which takes place between seasons one and two of the show. More will be explained about the different dimensions in the story and I'll have some notes afterwards just a help clear a few things up.
Worlds away
Earth 12:
Bruce Wayne the once mighty and infamous Dark Knight, Caped Crusader, or simply the Batman stared at the monitor in front of him feeling utterly powerless. Back in his prime when he was still Batman he was many things but powerless was never one of them. Even fighting alongside his fellow super-powered heroes everyone was quick to realize that while he may not have any superpowers he was never powerless. But after his current protégé had been shoved through a portal to an unknown world powerless was all he felt. The blasted machine that Timecode had used to try and escape back to his time wasn't made right to begin with and since Terry fell through the portal while it was still broken the villain could have sent him just about anywhere. So no amount of interrogation or even mind reading was going to tell him where Terry was.
And so Bruce Wayne, the former Batman, was forced to call for help. And Batman never liked to call for help unless it is absolutely necessary, this was one of those times.
"Oh, now I see what he was trying to do but then why did he use an interlocking mechanism when a bilateral circuit would've been so much more effective?" Bruce's guest mumbled to himself as he had been doing for the last few hours while examining Timecode's device.
"Have you found out anything?" Bruce called out to his younger companion making him snap out of his train of thought and sit up, a little too quickly.
"I think I've officially found a brand-new arch nemesis- OUCH!" The man exclaimed hitting his head on the underside of the machine he was working on. "Can you have an arch nemesis if you've never actually met them?"
"Focus Gear." Bruce said his voice a little gruff with irritation. Richard Hawkins formally Richard Foley a.k.a. Gear was possibly the smartest person on the planet but his rambling could easily get on anyone's nerves.
"You know, we're all alone in the Bat Cave right now and we're both out of uniform you could just call me Richie, or Richard if you still think that's too juvenile." To most people Bruce's face appeared to have remained emotionless but Richie saw the little twitch in his eye when he mentioned Richard.
"Gear is fine." Bruce stated.
"This wouldn't have anything to do with my first name being the same as Di-"
"Gear is fine." He said more sharply effectively ending the conversation before began. "Give me a status update."
Richie sighed but let it pass, he was here for a whole different problem. "Well, our boy Timecode made a real mess, a real dangerous mess. His old time machine, the one that sent Virgil to the future 40 years ago, was originally meant as a one-way trip. He couldn't get around the paradox problem so he felt that by simply only sending criminals forward and not back he could get around that. And he did, in a way, but when he sent himself into the future to escape from justice he found it much more difficult to return home to the past. In other words, the math he used in the programming was horrible at best. He's lucky it worked at all, it could have easily torn a hole in the time stream. Even with unlimited materials he simply didn't have the right calculations to get himself back to the past without creating a paradox."
"You didn't seem to have too much of a problem when you were 15 years old." Bruce commented recalling the reason he called Gear here in the first place.
"I also remember after getting Virgil back home you giving me a very stern lecture on never playing with time travel again, even though you were the one who asked for my help. And here we are again. Funny isn't it?"
Bruce's growl reminded him that he was getting off track. "Anyway, after practically rewriting the laws of quantum physics, and not being able to publish any of it, we were able to avert a time paradox by making sure that we were prepared 40 years later when Virgil would once again come to our time."
"Yet I seem to recall him mentioning something about you gaining weight."
"Ah, but that was one of the more brilliant parts of my plan! Virgil didn't actually meet me in person because you sent me on and errand that turned out to be a wild goose chase, thanks for that by the way, so once I invented the holographic Shock Voxes I programmed it to show myself as overweight if anyone tampered with them. This way I get to keep my six-pack," which he said patting himself on the stomach proudly. "And it helped catch several bad guys since we knew that fat Richie was a fake Richie. All done paradox free."
"That's all well and good," Bruce said rising from his chair and walking towards Richie. "but how does any of this help us find where Terry went?"
"That's the tricky part." Richie rubbed his eyes, he had been staring at a screen too long again. "Because Timecode's paradox equations were so off he never would've made it into the past even if it was working perfectly. Time traveling is very tricky especially if anything is changed. Things are changed, you create paradoxes, these paradoxes could either rip holes in the time stream, create false memories of a time that never existed, even create entirely new worlds altogether or in some cases can even destroy the old world by making even the simplest of change. And those are just some of the risks."
Richie's revelations were nothing new, it was something Batman had had to live with ever since Lord Chronos had been screwing around with the time stream back when he was still younger and still Batman. He remembers coming to a time when Gotham look just like this and meeting his future self and the future Batman a.k.a. Terry McGinnis. But no one besides him and John Stuart remembered the events that nearly destroyed their entire world. He could never be sure if this world was actually still the original or if it was an entirely new one that wiped out the old. His best hope that the memories were a false one that was created after he fixed Chronos's device but he can't be certain and he may never be certain. But he pushed the thought aside and focused on the mission at hand, bringing Terry home.
"I know all of that but what I need to know is, where is Terry and can you bring him home?" Gear didn't answer right away he ran a hand through his hair as if thinking how to phrase his answer.
"I'm not going to lie to you Bruce your new Batman is... I'm trying to think of a more polite word then screwed."
"I didn't bring you here just for you to tell me that there's nothing you can do. I brought you here to help me find Terry."
"You don't understand Bruce, I'm not saying I can't fix this, I'm not even saying I can't get him home but the problem is he could be anywhere within the DCU, countless worlds each of them with almost infinite alternates. I could be looking for 100 lifetimes and still never find him."
"What do you mean by DCU?"
"Well in multi-verse theory DC is our sector the "U" stands for universe. A while back somebody tried to categorize the different Earths with a prime Earth that supposedly is where all other Earths, at least for our sector, were born. Think of it as a seed, it grow stems and roots, each stem grows into a branch, each branch grows twigs, each twig grows leaves, the leave bear fruit, the fruit bears seeds and the process just keeps going on and on until the end of time. It's been theorized that there is an "Earth Zero" or Earth Prime, where every single Earth exists but none are real, they simply exist in the form of fiction. That's one theory anyway, no one's ever been to Earth Zero and returned to tell about it.
"Earth One is the mainline, one that is constantly changing and has even reset more than once. Only a few years ago someone tried to change the past in the mainline and it set off a flashpoint paradox with the changes radiated not just after the change but before as well. They managed to fix it, sort of, but there was still a lot of damage left. Earth One is still the mainline but everything changed, people's histories, origins, personalities, races, thought patterns, everything. New heroes were made, some survived others died and some just simply ceased to exist. It may be Earth One but everybody calls it the 52's. Supposedly because there were 52 different stories going on or took 52 weeks for this to be created, or someone could have just been playing poker I'm not entirely sure." Bruce didn't like hearing about problems in the mainline, trouble tended to flow from it.
"And our world was compromised by this as well?"
"Not as much as some other worlds, we were lucky, we weren't very close to the mainline and Earth 12 wasn't affected as much." Gear reassured him.
"So that's where we are, Earths 12?" he had always wondered.
"Tactically we are in DCAU Earth 12 A FF X #9442372-
"I get the point." He knew that number was a lot longer but didn't really need to hear the whole thing.
"Anyway the number of numbered Earths and even each lettered Earth we've been able to catalog and confirmed are in the thousands, all have infinite numbers of Earths or alternate dimensions that spawned from them like that the old tree branch scenario I was just telling you about. Take the Justice Lords for example, that was an alternate world based on the main Earth 12's A line."
Bruce frowned, "I would've thought the Justice Lord's world was an entirely different world than our line."
"Nope, it was just an alternate version were several things happened differently that led to the heroes of that world taking over. Now Earth Three, that dimension has all their morals reversed: good is bad, bad is good, the heroes are evil, and the villains are righteous. I sincerely hope he didn't end up there, can you imagine what an evil Batman would be like?"
"I'm more worried about the current Earth One or the 52's. I know enough about multi-verse theory to know that the current mainline tends to bleed into other worlds and I take it from your description the current Earth one is not very pleasant."
"That would be an understatement, but yes, elements from that world could cross into others more easily than most making even more worlds for Terry to get lost in. Do you see what I'm trying to say here Bruce?"
"The way I see it you have to narrow your search pattern. You don't seem to think he's gone out of our sector DC, find out what the device is capable of, and find out as far he could have gone, from there it'll be easier to narrow down."
Richie put a hand on his chin, he seemed to be deep in thought. "I guess we could use Dr. Seuss method."
Bruce raised an eyebrow, "And that would be…"
"The way to find a missing something is to find out where it's not. But Bruce, that's still going to take up a lot of time and I can't be sure if the world he's stuck in is going faster or slower than ours. He could be there for years and here it might only be a few days or vice versa."
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
Richie sighed as he looked over at the device and fought the urge to kick it. "I suppose if I got Timecode's notes I might be able to figure out where he went wrong and narrow the search a bit more."
Bruce nodded going over to retrieve them. "They're here in the lab I've also got the recording Terry use before he cut off communications. It's not much, but we've worked with less."
Richie still looked less than enthusiastic about the prospect of once again rebuilding a broken Time Machine that had turned into a dimensional portal generator. "When I was a kid, just starting out as Virgil's sidekick-I mean partner, we both looked up to a lot of heroes but Batman was always my favorite. It wasn't because you were the infamous Dark Knight or even because you had no superpowers and had to rely on your brains, it was because you seemed to be able to do the impossible. That's essentially what you are asking me to right now. The amount of work, time, and luck I'm going to need to even attempt to pull this off is just blowing my mind, and that's saying something." Richie looked almost disappointed at his own realization. "This really is impossible and I'm not Batman."
Bruce looked at the younger man already in his mid-50s, his blonde hair dyed to hide the gray but they could still be seen in his eyebrows. He had no part in mentoring Gear or Static he just kept an eye on them as they learn the ropes for themselves. But that didn't stop him from silently encouraging them on the right path. Bruce Wayne awarded both of them scholarships to fine schools and awarded Richie with the internship at Wayne Tech Industries after he graduated from MIT after barely 2 years. It proved a useful investment much of Batman's modern technology was based or realized on gears designs and knowhow. He left when Powers took over even though he was offered a small fortune to stay.
It was important to Bruce that this smart mind was given a proper outlet, too many other brilliant scientists became criminals or used their knowledge in ways they never should have. Richard Foley was one of the few that never swayed and it was why he was asking this brilliant young man to do something no one had ever done before. He gave Dick and Tim all the training he could but in the end he failed them. He kept his distance with Virgil and Richie and they flourished. It wasn't fair, but few things in life where. But one thing was for sure, he wasn't going to lose another partner.
"You're right, you're not Batman, but I don't need Batman right now I need Gear. Everything is impossible until it's done once. That's how I made the impossible happened, I did things nobody else had and I pushed myself beyond my limits. Now it's your turn."
Richie stated at the man he had idolized for years. Bruce Wayne, Batman thought he could do this, there was no hesitation or wavering in his voice and that 14-year-old kid inside of him was both jumping for joy and praying he wouldn't let his personal favorite hero down.
He looked back at the machine and then back to Bruce Wayne. "I'd better call my husband and tell him I have another special commission job." Which was code for superhero IT work.
Bruce nodded, "Tell Virgil it might be a long job."
"Oh believe me, I know this is going to be a long job I was kind of hoping he'd come over to help, the more people searching the better the odds."
Bruce frowned at that. While he knew Gear could benefit from additional help there were very few people with the knowledge and the clearance to actually assist him. Bruce may be an old war horse but he was a very unpopular one. He had burned a lot of bridges over the years and there was one thing he was never very good at, apologizing. Especially when he was right, not a lot of people wanted to hear the truth and when he was at fault he certainly didn't want to admit it. Virgil Hawkins a.k.a. Static Shock was not very happy with him mainly because the last job he had asked Richard to do kept him away from home for quite a while. This time would be even longer.
"Hey Virg… Yeah another special commission project… Oh nothing big, Bruce is just asking me to rewrite the laws of quantum physics again."
Bruce had a sick feeling in his gut that his once solitary quiet cave was about to get a lot more crowded.
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Earth 16:
Terry sat on a chair in the Bat Cave nursing a couple of chamomile tea. Normally he preferred coffee but after realizing he had just jumped dimensions with no feasible way of returning home he needed something to calm his nerves. Dick had been with him most of the time only disappearing every now and then to inform Batman of the new situation. Bruce was not going to be happy about this.
Terry glanced up at the glass case that held the uniform of the second Robin, Jason Todd, who died at the hands of the Joker. He couldn't help but wonder what else was different in this world. It seems so similar when he first got here by now the differences were glaring. He felt so stupid for not realizing that the Time Machine shouldn't have worked or least questioned why it did.
He looked away from the case and suddenly Batman and Nightwing were at his side. He didn't hear them come in but he had been a little distracted. Nightwing glanced between his mentor and his new friend and decided to break the ice.
"It's going to be all right Terry will figure this out." Terry raised an eyebrow as if he was unable to believe that any one person could have that much optimism. "I didn't say it was going to be easy. Let's just start with protocol."
Terry groaned and put down his teacup. "Yeah, since the protocol for time travel is to keep your mouth shut while dimensional travel you have to give as much information as possible. Slag I've lost so much time!"
Batman was unfamiliar with the word "slag" but after years of having Dick make up his own words and have them catch on he was used to it. He did suspect it was a curse though.
"Then let's not waste any more. The Justice League has been analyzing the data from your suit when you first came over and we have a theory."
Terry perked up at this, any theory was worth listening to. "A good theory or a bad theory?"
"A possible helpful one. From what we've gathered we suspect that you landed in the right place and time just the wrong world."
"How is that helpful?"
"It means that despite how different our worlds were there was something that connected them. The machine couldn't go directly back into the past, so it veered off but it still searched for something close enough to its original destination."
Terry thought for a moment than his eyes widened in realization." The Joker kidnapping Robin!"
Batman nodded. "That's what we suspect at least. We believe that your world and ours shared this event and that's why you ended up here."
Terry tried not to get too hopeful it was only a theory after all but it was the best one they had. "If that's the case then I'm going to need to tell you everything about what happened to Tim in my world." Terry glanced at Nightwing and saw he was shifting uncomfortably but made no moves to exit the room.
"Keep in mind I don't know all the details just what I've heard from the people in my world. My Bruce covered the event up pretty good and there were no files for me to look into later. I should also warn you that this event didn't just hurt Tim it affected everybody." Terry looked directly at Dick as he said the last part but the other man didn't waver.
"I know this isn't going to be easy to hear," said Dick trying to reassure Terry, "but it's in your past and you've made a change for the better here. I want to help you, we want to help you." Dick announced as he stood by his mentor who placed a hand on the younger man's shoulders. The image was meant to be supportive but it just made Terry feel sad. The dynamic duo no longer stood together in his world, they haven't for a long time. Maybe this world would be different or maybe it was just too soon, he hoped it was the former.
To be continued…
Next time: Terry opens up about what really happened to the Bat Family in his world and Batman of Earth 16 makes a shocking discovery.
Please read and review! -Shiroi Misa
Quick notes: Sorry if all the multidimensional talk got a little confusing but if it was simple then Terry would have no problem going home and where would the fun be in that? Forgive me if I don't get all the technical details 100% correct I'm pretty much going by my observations since I haven't read every single DC comic in existence. The names Gear used for identifying dimensions "Earth One", "Earth Two", "Earth Three" really exists and is how DC names the multiple Earths with the heroes have gone to. The 52's is DC's current universe and it really did get completely reset after the events of "Flashpoint"
I even tried coding the worlds to narrow it down even further. For example: "A" stands for animated, meaning this universe is based on the cartoon version, "C" stands for comic universe, "FF" is a fanfiction, "TV" is from a TV live-action show, "M" is for movie, "I" is for imagination, "X" is a crossover, "N" stands for novel, "U" means it's unknown or unwritten. I'm sure there's more but if you hear someone referring to these code letters that's what they mean. Still confused, just asked me I'm still tring to figure some of this out myself.
