Shadow Lass and Ultra Boy

Jo jumped awake with a start, still in his uniform. Cos was yelling in his ear.

No, not yelling; he realized. He'd just forgotten to take his ring off before he fell asleep. The 'yelling' was him sleeping with his ear over the ring.

Between cursing himself in his head and rubbing his ear, it took a minute for the message to sink in.

The day off?

This was no time for a day off.

He got his morning coffee and sat himself down at the monitor board console. Cos and the rest might think that a giant catastrophe meant that no crime was going to happen, and that was usually true.

But there had been panic and rioting in the streets all across the galaxy when the news had first come out about planets getting digitized. It might be that everyone was too relieved to try anything. It might be that they were all still scared. It might be that they were all too busy rebuilding and repairing and giving everything a once-over now that the madness was gone.

But he hadn't lived to grow up on Rimbor by taking that sort of thing for granted.

"What do you mean, he's gone?" Tasmia yelled at Jo. He had seen the blip on the screen that told him she was back in the building. He'd gone down to meet her.

Jo was starting to regret that now. "Invisible Kid and I did not break off our mission on Khundia just to come haul your butts out of mortal danger, find out we missed it, and then find out we also missed our friend disappearing into thin air!"

"You also missed a meeting about what we were going to do about the guy," he told her.

"They could have waited!"

"No one knew you were coming back."

"Of all the-" she said angrily under her breath. "When a catastrophe so huge that even the people outside the galaxy pick it up happens, what could have possibly possessed any of you to believe we weren't rushing to get back here?"

"No one's been really here lately, if you know what I mean," Jo said. "Where is Lyle, anyway?"

"Went dashing off to find his boyfriend and Brainy, of course," she told him. "What a day he'll have. Now stop changing the subject."

"I wasn't changing the subject," he said defensively. "And all you've been doing is yelling at me. Would you like some hot chocolate or coffee or something?"

Tasmia considered snapping at him again, then realized that, strangely enough, she really would like some hot chocolate. "Fine. Go make me some chocolate, Jo."

"Cool," he said, as they walked to the kitchen. "You know Cos gave everyone the day off?"

"He what?"

"I know, that's what I thought," Jo said. "But then, I also thought that he was yelling at me, but that was just me sleeping with my ring on."

"You never change, do you? Tell me again what my dear friend Tinya sees in you?"

"No clue." He grinned. "I'm just grateful she pays attention."

She listened to the silent building for a moment. "That does explain why it's too quiet around here."

They reached the kitchen and Jo started heating water. "Too quiet? Yeah. And I'm the only person here who seems to think that just because we take a day off, the rest of the galaxy is too."

"Actually, they are," she told him. "It's been really quiet everywhere these past two days. All the places that weren't obliterated, at least."

"Digitized," Jo said absently. "Then what about the rioting and the panicking?" The water finished heating and he dropped the chocolate into it.

"Only on the planets that were in the projected flight path. All the other ones, the only ones we could manage to switch ships at to get back here? They were panicking quietly indoors."

"Hm." Jo tapped the spoon he had been using to stir the chocolate into the water with on the side of the mug and handed it to her. "Here you go. One hot chocolate."

They sat in silence while she drank, taking in the uncharacteristically messy kitchen.

"So," Tasmia said, putting her mug down. "Clearly, I've missed a lot while I've been gone. Spar with me while you talk?"

Jo looked at her seriously. "You're sure no one's going to make any trouble?"

"The alarms will go off, you know," she reminded him. "So are you or not?"

He shrugged. "Sure. Been too long, anyway."

They were going to spar in the training room, as usual; but Jo took a look in before they opened the door and saw Nemesis Kid and Sun Boy in there.

He didn't want to get involved with two of the most caustic members of the team, and especially not after their recent behavior. He and Shadow Lass went up to the roof instead.

Tasmia squinted in the bright, warm sunlight of mid-morning as she emerged onto the top of Legion HQ. She didn't particularly like the sun; but she could live with it. Looking at everything during the day was certainly interesting enough to make up for the positively enormous difference between light levels on Earth and back on Talok. She had always meant to ask Jo if could see past humans' visible spectrum with his ultra-vision switched on, but somehow it never seemed right to ask.

Jo had been clearing away the tables and chairs that the Legion kept on top of their headquarters in the warmer weather. He stowed the folding chairs into a compartment built into the tall supplementary solar-power fins attached to the top of the tower, packed with meters of wiring and tubing that channeled every speck of power in the building.

He finished and adopted a fighting stance. "So, what do you want to know first?"

She pulled her hooded cape off and stuck her gloves into her belt. "I just managed to miss what could have been the fight of my life. Where do you think I want you to start?"

Jo blocked her as she aimed a high kick for his face. She was starting off traditionally for this fight.

"Well, it wasn't as interesting as you'd think," he told her. "The giant evil egomaniacal robot was more interested in trying to psych us out than really fighting. I thought we spent way too much time trying to destroy bits of it instead of really getting anything done."

"'Giant evil egomaniacal robot?'" Shady asked skeptically, countering his punch.

"You didn't hear about that?" he asked, aiming for her abdomen. She moved fluidly out of the way and chopped at the back of his neck.

Jo ducked and continued. "The guy went and enslaved the Hivemind to make himself a huge body. It was kinda creepy."

"So, were you just panicking from the danger or were you really the only person thinking about battle strategy?" Tasmia asked as she attacked his side. He brought his arm up defensively and tried to push her off-balance. She fell to the ground and rolled away, coming up on her feet.

"Hey, you know me, Shady. I see a problem, my brain goes 'hit it!'" Jo tried to ram her with his shoulder and she used his momentum to launch herself over his back. He headed face-first for the ground, but managed to turn the fall into a somersault. "But I also know when I'm outgunned. That was a problem you couldn't solve with punches. At least Violet pulled herself together long enough to go through the computer memory and pull up some sort of shielding stuff that would work against it."

Tasmia raised her eyebrows as she evaded his next attacks. "Violet, pulling herself together? Maybe other people think she's a shy little thing, but she's not the type to go and have a nervous breakdown at the first hint of danger. She was the only one willing to investigate Andromeda, remember?"

"Yeah, well-" Jo's breath huffed out of him as Shady scored a hit. "No one thinks that anymore. Her personality's come out with a bang, now. Dunno why. I guess she just got used to us."

"Or she realized that Cosmic Boy wouldn't freak out if she showed off her military training."

"Maybe. But be careful with her for a little bit, okay? She fell really hard for Brainy while you were gone. She's hurting."

"What?" Jo used the distraction this news caused her to get in a glancing blow to her jaw. Her head jerked to the side with the force of his strike, but she recovered quickly. "How did that happen?"

"No one really knows, I think. All we know is she takes a mission or two with the guy, and all of a sudden she gets really obvious about it. 'Course, he doesn't notice; 'cause he's dense like that and he's doing the exact same thing."

"Are you trying to tell me," Tasmia said between strikes. "That Violet and Brainy actually fell for each other?"

"I am absolutely serious," Jo said with conviction. "Go ask anybody."

"Hn." Ducking down, she rammed her shoulder into him with a particularly viscous blow to his abdomen. "I hate it when I miss things because I was on a mission."

Jo felt the air whuff out of him and smiled grimly. They were fighting dirty now. This was the fun part.

Both of them agreed to a break some time later. They sat together on the waist-high protective barrier around the edge of the roof. The sun was past its zenith, at a position that told Jo it was sometime in mid-afternoon. He was sufficiently worked out, in a way no other sparring partner would give him. Tasmia was the one person he could trust not to hold back when fighting, and the one person he trusted to get out of the way in time in case he accidentally lost control of himself.

Of course, he could always fight Karate Kid now; but the newcomer didn't know about dirty fighting, so far Jo knew. And he wouldn't pull something like that on a friend.

Shadow Lass restarted the conversation that had waned when they had started getting serious. There simply wasn't enough concentration either of them could afford to spare during fighting like that.

"We got off topic. Was your fighting really that bad?"

"Actually, yeah," he admitted. "It was more like running a relay than fighting a battle. People were going out in trios and pairs to try and hack bits off, but they just reformed. You'd think we would have thought of that, with all the times we've fought alongside Brainy and his self-healing stuff."

Tasmia shook her head. "Hindsight is ever accurate. Since you brought it up, I assume that you have some better ideas of how it could've been done?"

"A lot. We could have always gotten Violet to short-circuit the evil robot, but nobody thought of that."

"From what you told me, that might have been a good thing."

"Maybe. Tinya could have done something like that too, but obviously that didn't happen. Gim was probably big enough to punch him out, but I guess the shielding sort of blocked that. Cos could've twisted everything up, there was enough metal around. Dirk could probably have made a big enough sun flare to melt a bunch of stuff, and Drake might have. Together there should have been no problem. Jan or Condo could've done a lot of damage."

He rested his chin in his hand and thought. "Star Boy could have made a gravity well, maybe; and Tyroc could just scream and shatter everything."

"Vacuum of space," Tasmia pointed out.

"Well, what's Jan for? He could change it all to oxygen or something. Maybe Chameleon could've come up with something to change into that would've helped, and maybe Tenz could've eaten everything. Heck, we had the cruiser! We could've just gunned the guy down!"

Jo sighed with frustration. "The problem with that fight was that nobody was really sure what to do. Nobody felt really comfortable fighting in the first place and then nobody was really thinking. And there weren't a lot of people who could actually help out with that. I know I couldn't've, for all the powers I've got."

Now Tasmia thought. "And Brainy was always the planner. There's that, as well. You think him gone will keep making that difference?"

"I'm betting on it. Going to schedule extra training for myself. You're welcome to join."

"I might take you up on that."

They sat in comfortable silence for a little while, enjoying the feeling of being fully exercised.

"Being –digitized, was it?" Tasmia asked cautiously after the silence, trying to be tactful.

"Yeah," Jo confirmed. "Something about matter deconstruction. But there's not a whole lot to say. You just were and then you remembered you weren't and everything was sort of back the way it was before."

"That sounds… pleasant."

"Absolutely. It's just as well you missed that part."

The silence returned and stayed until the sun disappeared behind the skyline of the city. Tasmia eventually wandered back downstairs to input her report to the computers. Jo stayed on the roof until the city lights came on for the night, watching his home.