Chapter 11
"Technical Difficulties"
Dirk tossed a very mechanical-looking piece of equipment carelessly over his shoulder. It caught the dawn sunlight creeping through the windows as it arced towards the floor.
Dawnstar caught it.
"Would it not be a better idea for you not throw important parts of our transportation around?" she asked.
"Transportation?" Dirk snorted. "It's trashed. Junked. Falling apart. Utterly destroyed. Beyond repair!"
"It held up long enough to get us home. Surely it cannot be that bad?"
He threw up his hands.
"It's worse than that! I can't even begin to fix this! It needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, practically!"
Dawnstar put the ship part down carefully as Sun Boy kicked part of the hull in frustration. Farther down, a panel broke off and crashed to the floor.
Element Lad looked up as Dawnstar and Sun Boy walked into the kitchen for breakfast.
"How are your wings this morning?"
Dawnstar twisted around and checked the bandages, stretching her muscles slightly.
"A little better. The stitches have stopped pulling so much."
"I can't believe he used bullets," Phantom Girl muttered. "He must be a sadist."
"I didn't know those still existed," Lightning Lad complained. "They're illegal at least, right?"
"They are not," Dawnstar told him. "We use them still sometimes on Starhaven. But it is very, very rare to see them anywhere else. I had thought the only ones off-planet were in museums."
"How is the work on the ship going?" Cosmic Boy asked. He was seated firmly across the table from Lightning Lad.
Dirk's face fell.
"It's not going. I'm not sure it can go."
"You just have to ask Mr. Brande," Marla Latham said. "He funds you, and he won't mind paying your expenses. He doesn't mind at all."
Triplicate Girl shifted in her seat.
"We don't want to impose on him, Mr. Latham…"
"We need to be able to solve these sorts of problems on our own," Rokk said firmly. "We can't be waiting for repairs from a shop to get done. It would be better if we could handle this all right here."
Saturn Girl was giving Colossal Boy a thoughtful look.
"Gim?"
He looked up from his food, expression a little distant.
"Hm?"
"Are you awake this morning?"
He smiled at her.
"Yeah, I'm awake. Just thinking."
Imra moved her chair closer.
"About what?"
"Don't you know already?" There was good humor in his voice.
"It's nice to ask," she told him, smiling slightly.
Gim straightened up in his chair.
"If we got ambushed and kidnapped in our own ship, what's to stop it happening again?"
"About that-" Tyroc started to say from his other side.
"No, it's okay. It takes more gas to knock me out than most people. It's not your fault I was the only one awake when Orion and his people got on board."
"Still," he said. "And what about here?"
Gim gave him a questioning look.
"Here?"
"Yeah, in this building," he elaborated, gesturing at the walls. "You remember that Lyle kid? He walked in here and nobody noticed until he wanted us to. Outdoor markets have better security than us!"
Sun Boy looked at him for a moment and then shrugged.
"He's right."
"The ship is important, too," Cos reminded everyone.
"We should be able to shoot at stuff," Garth said.
Dream Girl looked at him.
"That's your priority? Really?"
He ignored her.
"I think these are good points," Blok put in.
"I think we should have another audition," Dawnstar said. "For technical types."
The Legionnaires looked at each other.
A week later, the tryout announcements had been sent out and people were showing up for auditions.
Triplicate Girl and Phantom Girl stood at the large window overlooking the area in front of Legion Headquarters.
"Wow," Phantom Girl said, looking out over the crowd. "That worked really well this time."
Lyle Norg looked around furtively before letting himself become visible again and stepping out into the square from the alley.
His parents were going to kill him for showing up, but that didn't matter right now. What mattered was that the Legion was holding auditions; and that he was going to get in.
He looked around again and saw that he was standing a few feet away from a tall blonde girl who was scowling angrily at everything, as though the very ground itself was deeply offensive to her.
"Are you here for the tryouts, too?" he asked.
She snarled something at him in a language he'd never heard before and he backed off.
"Okay, okay. I was just trying to be friendly."
Lyle ambled towards the larger crowd, then decided to stick to the edges of it when he saw the press deeper within. He skirted the group and ended up near the wall of the building, in shadow from the climbing sun.
There was a rotund boy sitting up against the base of the building, trying to engage a small girl, head resting behind her drawn-up knees, in conversation. He went over.
The boy looked up as he approached.
"Hey there. You're here for tryouts too, right? I'm Chuck."
Lyle smiled at him, liking his easy manner.
"What else is anyone around here for? I'm Lyle. Who's your friend?"
Chuck looked at the girl with a pleading expression.
"I dunno. I can't get her to say anything."
Lyle took a step around Chuck and knelt down to look her in the eyes. Hers were purple and barely visible between her pitch-black bangs and the arms encircling her knees.
"Hey there," he said, smiling. He held his hand out. "I'm Lyle."
She looked at him and blinked a few times.
"I'm Salu."
Her voice was surprisingly husky and a few octaves deeper than he would have guessed.
"Nice to meet you! Where'd you come from?"
She scooted away a few inches.
Lyle smiled again, this time the expression not quite reaching his eyes, and turned back to Chuck.
"Awfully quiet, isn't she?"
Cosmic Boy and Dream Girl had joined Triplicate Girl and Phantom Girl at the window.
Cos looked out at the crowd with a bit of trepidation.
"There are a lot more people this time!"
He turned to Dream Girl.
"You didn't say there were that many! Some warning would have been nice!"
She shrugged. "I thought you'd be pleased."
"What are we supposed to do if we get a call in the middle of auditions?" he demanded.
"We won't. Trust me on this one."
Something was nagging Lyle.
"Just a minute," he told Chuck, who had been in the middle of a sentence.
He stood and took a few steps so that he could see into an oddly-angled corner made by the different sections of the building, creating a small alcove.
"Are you spying on us or are you just generally lurking?" he asked.
The hooded person didn't look up.
"I'm not lurking and I am not spying. I'm protecting my eyes."
Lyle craned his head in an attempt to look up the hood.
"Really?"
The person in the cloak looked up, revealing a delicate blue face darkened with shadow, completely black eyes set behind escaping tendrils of black hair.
"It's a lot brighter here than I'm used to. I'm still getting used to it."
Lyle pursed his lips for a moment, thinking.
"Talokian, right?"
The girl raised an eyebrow at him, the gesture almost lost in the darkness under the hood.
"You can tell without seeing the ears?"
"Xenobiology is my specialty," he told her. "I'm-"
"Lyle. I heard."
She extended a hand out from under her cloak. Darkness streamed off it in thin strands.
"I'm Tasmia."
Lyle took her hand and shook it firmly.
"The Shadow Champion of Talok VIII has come to try out for the Legion? I'm impressed."
Tasmia glared at him, her grip tightening.
"You-"
"-can't learn about xenobiology without knowing a bit about culture, too."
She let go of his hand and hers disappeared beneath the cloak again.
"I think you know too much."
He shrugged and smiled winningly at her.
"I try."
It was hard to tell, but Lyle was pretty sure she rolled her eyes.
"If you're such a know-it-all, go talk to him," she said, jerking her head farther back into the alcove. Someone was sitting on a small bench placed there.
Lyle whistled softly to himself.
"You look…hm."
Sun Boy tilted his head and bit the inside of his lip.
"I give up. What's with you?"
Cosmic Boy looked at him, still shocked by the sheer number of people outside. He was feeling a little out of his depth.
"Haven't you seen the crowd outside?" Saturn Girl asked.
They were standing in the room they'd used for tryouts earlier in the year. Most of the rest of the Legionnaires were already seated, and Marla Latham had found himself a chair and was sitting comfortably in an out-of-the-way corner.
Dirk shook his head.
"It's huge!" Phantom Girl said, spreading her arms.
"Much bigger than five people," Dream Girl said, going to her seat. "It's going to take a while to get through everyone."
Cosmic Boy turned to Saturn Girl.
"I didn't think there'd be this many people when I agreed to hold more auditions!"
She held up a hand.
"Everything is going to be fine. We're just looking for technical people, remember? If anyone shows up who's outstanding, we can take them, too. I think you're worrying too much. Nothing is going to go wrong."
Lyle stood, hands in his jacket pocket, too surprised to say anything.
After a minute or so, he walked over the bench.
"Y'know, if someone had told me an hour ago when I was sneaking out of the house that I was going to meet a Coluan, I would've laughed at them. Well, after I'd figured out how they see me when I was invisible."
The boy on the bench kept his arms crossed and resolutely ignored him.
Lyle perched on the bare area of the bench, made to sit two people.
"I'm Lyle. Who're you?"
Without so much as glancing over, the boy pushed him off the bench, sending Lyle tumbling to the ground.
He propped himself up on his elbows and regarded the boy.
"Did I get too close or something?" he asked in Coluan.
Now the boy looked –no, glared- at him, with an expression similar to that of the girl Lyle had passed on the way towards the building.
"Are you really arrogant enough to consider yourself to be proficient in speaking that language or are you simply idiotic enough to not have noticed how utterly atrocious your pronunciation and syntax are?" he asked icily.
Lyle stood and dusted his pants off.
"Ouch. And I was just about to suggest I introduce you to Salu- you could both sit in silence together. I think you would have enjoyed it. But you and Snarling Girl back there would work better. You could bite each other's heads off."
On Weber's World, President Winema Wazzo stood in the hallway outside the conference room and let herself lean back against the wall. She sighed.
Her Chief of Security looked over at her.
"You're going to need to get back in there in a minute, Madame President."
"I know, I know, Ontiir," she said. "But I still can't shake the feeling that is a very bad idea."
"It's what they're accepting, Ma'am. This is possibly the biggest step forward for them in centuries."
Winema rubbed her temples.
"I know, I know that, too. But that doesn't mean I have to like it. It feels too much like we're being bullied."
"We might be a bit, Ma'am, but surely that's better than war?"
Ontiir checked the time and reached for the door.
"Your break is over, Madame President."
"Okay, who've we got next?" Garth asked.
Lyle stuck his head into the open doorway and waved.
"Hey again, Legionnaires."
"Oh, it's you again."
Lyle entered the room.
"What, you're not happy to see me?"
Saturn Girl looked down at him sternly.
"Does your father know you're here?"
He looked at her in surprise.
"You're kidding, right? Of course not!"
President Wazzo exited the conference room again, the meeting at an end, and walked to her office. Ontiir left her to walk through the door on her own.
"They could have at least given some warning," she grumbled to herself. "It could almost be considered underhanded."
She sat in her chair a few moments and reviewed what she still had to do.
Well, if she didn't do it now, she'd never find the time. And it had to be dealt with now, anyway.
She reached for the button used to place calls.
Tyroc looked over at Triplicate Girl.
"Are these things always like this?"
Triplicate Girl looked at the long black scorch mark adorning the wall behind them and shrugged.
"The last one wasn't."
Garth peeked up over the edge of the table.
"I hope they aren't all like this," he grumbled. "Are there still more people?"
"Plenty," Nura said. "Don't worry, you'll like this next one."
He pulled himself back into his chair just as the door opened hesitantly. A small girl walked into the room.
Saturn Girl felt Cosmic Boy's sudden stab of alarm.
:Rokk?:
She's Imskian!
Imra frowned as the girl started to answer the questions Element Lad was fielding to her.
:It doesn't matter. We're not going to let planetary politics dictate to us who we let in. And you shouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions about people based only on where they come from.:
I don't usually, but-
:It doesn't matter if you're from Braal and she's from Imsk and your planets have been fighting nasty wars on and off for the past few centuries! She's come to try out, she's going to get fair billing!:
Nura leaned back in her seat as the Imskian girl exited and looked down the table towards Rokk.
"You're getting a call, Cos. Go answer the phone."
"You said there weren't going to be any missions today!" he protested, standing up.
"It's not a mission- it's the President. The lady who let you have a job? Go talk to her."
Sun Boy looked around nervously.
"Is it just me or are the shadows getting deeper?"
"It's not you," a girl said, walking into the room and flipping her hood off. "That just happens when I'm around."
Dream Girl sat back in her chair and covered her mouth with a hand, as if she was thinking.
"The Shadow Champion of Talok VIII," she remarked to Blok, sitting next to her. "I know I saw her coming, but still. I was not expecting that when I went to sleep last night."
:You didn't tell her to come?:
She's Talokian, Imra. She does what she wants. I highly doubt I'd be able to order her to do something even if I did know her personally.
Cosmic Boy answered the call. The President's face came up on the screen.
"Um, Madame President-"
"Do you still have your 'auditions' going?" she asked quickly. She looked a bit harried.
"Yes," he told in her confusion. "There's lots of people this time-"
"I just made an agreement where one of the terms was that you take a person in that crowd today."
Lightning Lad had taken over the auditions while Cosmic Boy was busy.
"I think we need better organization next time if things are going to stay this big," he grumbled, searching through the pages of notes on the table for a blank space to write.
The door on the opposite side of the room slammed open.
The Legionnaires looked up as a tall blonde girl strode into the center of the room, and stopped- arms crossed, feet planted firmly apart, expression stormy.
No one spoke for a moment.
"And you are…?" Triplicate Girl said eventually.
The girl stood stock still.
"Laurel Gand."
Her voice and speech was a little off, as though she wasn't used to speaking Interlac.
"And you're from…?"
"Daxam."
Oh, that's why she's so grumpy, Tinya remarked privately to Imra. She's worried about getting contaminated from us filthy little aliens.
Saturn Girl picked up.
"What do you call yourself?"
Laurel kept staring fixedly at some spot on the wall behind their heads. She was silent.
"We take on new names for use in the Legion," she prompted.
Laurel was silent for a few moments more before speaking.
"Andromeda."
"He doesn't look like much," Sun Boy confided to Tyroc.
"Hey," Lightning Lad said unenthusiastically. "Who're you?"
"Chuck- Charles Taine," the boy said.
"And… you do what?"
"Just watch."
He took a step back and started to inflate.
Saturn Girl's chair made a loud scraping noise as she leaned back in shock.
Garth just stared.
"O-kay then…"
Cosmic Boy entered the room deep in thought about ten minutes later and returned to his seat.
Everyone but Dream Girl stared at him, waiting for an explanation.
Eventually he seemed to realize everyone else's attention.
"Was there someone from Daxam yet?" he asked.
"Yeah," Sun Boy told him. "This really angry girl who looked ready to destroy something."
Rokk nodded absently.
"Okay. Fine. Who's next?"
"Aren't you going to tell us what the call was about?" Triplicate Girl asked.
"We've been ordered to take the Daxamite girl."
"What?" Lighting Lad demanded.
Cosmic Boy looked at his teammate.
"The President made an agreement with Daxam that kept them from attacking UP shipping lanes that means we have to take her."
"Why should we be forced into that?" Garth demanded. "What does that have to do with u-"
"They had to make the agreement in the first place because Daxam was attacking the shipping lanes because we saved that transport ship and all those people from getting blown to pieces!" Rokk yelled.
He took a shaky breath while everyone was busy being stunned and settled into his chair.
"Now- who's next?"
It was almost mid-afternoon when they got to their last audition.
Phantom Girl was holding a silent conversation with Saturn Girl when she looked up.
Holy-!
"Oh, hey!" Triplicate Girl said enthusiastically, half-rising out of her seat. "Couldn't you have called and said you'd be coming-"
It's a Coluan! A Brainiac! Right there! How'd he get on this planet?
:We're not talking about this right now,: Saturn Girl said firmly. :This is a discussion for later.:
She cut the conversation off, but was intrigued. As the boy answered questions, face impassive, she reached out towards his mind-
:GET OUT OF MY HEAD!:
He hadn't moved so much as an inch, but it felt like he turned and hit her in the face. She jerked back in her chair a slight bit. It made a small scraping sound against the floor and Dream Girl glanced questioningly at her for a moment.
Imra frowned to herself. The mental shove she'd gotten was unexpectedly powerful and focused. Where had he learned to do that? How had he learned to do that?
"Do we really have to take that Daxamite girl?" Luornu complained. "She spent the whole time glaring at everything. Clearly she doesn't want to be here, so why let her on the team?"
"We have to, or we break galactic peace," Rokk said. "I don't want to talk about her anymore. What about Lyle?"
"Well, he didn't sneak up on us this time," Sun Boy admitted. "That's better than before."
"Do we really need that much more of a reason for Chief Norg to hate us?" Gim asked pleadingly.
"No," Tyroc said.
"What about that Bouncing Boy guy?" Triplicate Girl asked.
"He inflates," Lightning Lad said, using his hands to illustrate. He still sounded a little unsettled by that fact. "And that's it. I hope that's it. I don't think people are supposed to stretch like that. Anyway, what good is inflating?"
"I liked that Shrinking Violet girl," Colossal Boy said. "She seemed nice. A little shy, but she's Imskian. She'll know how to fight, right?"
Cosmic Boy flinched. No one noticed.
"If we're going to look for fighters, I say we take Shadow Lass," Tyroc said. "They know how to fight."
Sun Boy muttered something about the dark.
"I thought we were going to be sticking to 'technical types'," Dawnstar said. "If we are still holding to that, then I say we must take Brainiac 5."
It's later, Imra! Tinya thought fiercely. They're off discussing the people who showed up, and now we need to discuss this!
Imra reached out and linked minds.
Yes? Jan asked, sounding a little confused. Is there something you wanted to say?
We need to talk about this Brainiac 5, Tinya said firmly.
Do we really?
Yes, we really do, Nura!
He came and auditioned and caused no trouble, Blok said.
Yes, but are we going to let him in?
There was silence.
:We should give him a chance.:
Imra, I want be sure that you're absolutely sure about this, Tinya said carefully. You think it's a good idea to give this guy a chance? When he's clearly not bothering to hide the fact that he's a Brainiac?
:Some things you can't hide, Tinya.:
And about this 'not hiding' thing- where's everyone else?
:I didn't include them.:
What? Jan asked, surprised.
:No one else had made the connection, and I don't see any reason to tell them if they don't figure it out for themselves.:
Is not telling them really a good idea? Nura asked uneasily. Won't they just get mad?
:Us not telling them means they can make an unbiased decision. Which we can't.:
Do you want us to listen to them on this, then? Jan asked.
:Give their views about it consideration. You need to judge the people who show up on what they can do, and less on who -or what- they are.:
Tinya didn't feel totally convinced.
Just tell me you have a good reason to think that we aren't all going to get murdered in our sleep or something.
:I never felt any- wrongness- from him.:
Wrongness?
:It's hard to describe to people who can't feel other's minds. It's… you know how it feels when you wake up and for a minute you can't remember where you are? Or the way you feel inside when you're really, really angry? It's like both of those together- off-balance and a sort of dark blackish-red.:
Dark blackish-red? You feel in color?
We're going to let him in, Nura said firmly. And he's not going to cause any trouble. Well, major, destroying-the-world trouble that I can see, anyway. And I'm one of the best.
:We need to give him a chance. Everyone deserves that.:
An half an hour later, everyone was done debating.
"Are we really done now?" Lightning Lad asked. "This has been going on forever."
Phantom Girl rolled her eyes.
"It didn't even take up the whole day."
"It feels like forever. The last audition was over like that."
"There was only the five of us, then," Dawnstar reminded him.
"Well, we've only taken five people this time and look how long it took us!"
"Enough complaining," Cosmic Boy ordered. "Everyone is agreed? This is the final list?"
There were nods around the table.
Cosmic Boy put his notes down, then reached back quickly in an attempt to keep them from toppling off the table.
"Good. Let's go make the announcement, then."
As the Legionnaires left, the notes littering the table finally slid to the floor in a flurry of rustling paper.
When the paperslide settled, the paper on top was Cosmic Boy's final list.
NEW RECRUITS
Invisible Kid
Shadow Lass
Shrinking Violet
Andromeda
Brainiac 5