Disclaimer: I don't own Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey, Phoebe, or ANY of the League.

Feedback: I'd appreciate it.

AN: Whenever I say 'the gang' I'm referring to the Friends characters, just to clear that point up.

Sean Malloy-1: Sorry; typing error. Won't happen again.

Krisian Rose: Oh, Hyde will be showing up, but it'll take a while; Jekyll needs to prepare some of his serum first, since he left it all back in his time. Fair point about Joey; I'm mostly assuming that, at some point or another, he just picked up a couple of the books and flicked through them (Or he walked in on someone reading one of them, or something along those lines), and he might have gone to see 'The Time Machine' (You know, the one with Guy Pearce and Samantha Mumba) in the cinema. [By the way, thanks for the Slinky!]

The One Where They Help Save the World

"OK," Ross said, as he put Emma down beside one of the sofas before joining the rest of the gang; he and Rachel were sitting on one of the chairs, Chandler and Monica had taken some seats over from the kitchen area and were sitting on either side of them, Joey and Phoebe were sharing a couch with... Hartdegen and Nemo (Ross was still doubtful that they were who they said they were, but was starting to become convinced), Skinner and Jekyll had taken another couple of kitchen seats and were sitting around the opposite chair, and Mina and Sawyer were in the chair. "So, would you mind telling us who you all know each other?"

"Yeah, that is a major question," Monica added. "I mean, you guys are pretty much all known about from the books, but you're from totally different books, different 'authors'... even different genres! How did you all meet?"

"Well, in a nutshell, we were bought together to save the world, m'dears," Skinner said, scratching the back of his neck as he spoke. "Specifically, to stop some nutcase from kicking off a world war."

Rachel blinked in surprise. "Save the world? You mean... you're superheroes?" she asked Sawyer.

"Superheroes?" Sawyer asked, sounding slightly curious, as though he was trying the word out like it was a new shoe he wasn't sure about. Then he nodded and looked over at Rachel. "I like it."

"Wait a minute," Chandler interrupted. "I get what Nemo, Skinner and Hartdegen would contribute in a fight, but what about you three?" he asked, looking over at Mina, Sawyer and Jekyll. "I mean, a guy who went around a river in rafts, some woman who once fought a vampire, and a guy who can turn into an evil midget? What good does that do anybody in a combat situation?"

Sawyer blinked at that statement- he wasn't used to people he'd never met knowing that much about him and his friends- but he got over it fairly quickly.

"Nice point, Chandler, but your information about us is inaccurate," he said. "I'm a spy for the American Secret Service, Jekyll's modified his serum over time so that Hyde's now more of an engine of mass destruction than a snowflake that likes to start avalanches, and Mina... well, care to demonstrate?" he asked, looking over at the woman.

Mina nodded, stood up, blinked, and then leapt up onto the ceiling.

The gang leapt up onto their feet, "What?", "Ah?", "How?", and "Oh my god!" sounding in the air at the sight.

Phoebe looked from Mina to Sawyer in a daze. "How... is she... Dracula?" she asked.

Sawyer nodded. "Mina didn't quite recover from his bite," he replied to Phoebe's incomplete question. "She can control the bloodlust up to a point, and she channels all of the powers that Dracula's bite has given her into saving lives and working with us."

"He is correct," Nemo said, looking at Phoebe. "I can assure you, you six can feel free to trust Mrs Harker with your lives."

"Ah," Monica said, as Mina landed on the ground in front of her and sat back down in her seat. "Well... that's good. Yeah, good to know that we're helping someone who drinks human blood!" she yelled, sounding slightly hysterical.

"C-calm down, Mrs Gellar-Bing," Jekyll said, raising his hands and standing up, trying to project a claming air. "You don't need to worry about Mina's appetite; she fed shortly before we came through the time portal. And even if she was hungry, I c-can assure you she won't drink anyone unless they attempted to kill us." He sighed. "Whom we may be encountering soon enough..."

Joey looked up, his face suddenly as white as Mina's own.

"Wait a minute; you're saying we might encounter people who want to kill us?!" he asked, sounding absolutely terrified at the idea.

Sawyer sighed deeply and looked at Joey. "You're not in any immediate danger, Mr Tribbianni," he said. "Anyway, at the moment, we need to fill you in on the more immediate points you need to know; namely, why we're working together."

Monica nodded. "Yup," she said, looking around at her friends. "Don't know about you, but I'm interested in the answer to that question."

"Well, we were bought together by a man who claimed to be an agent of the British Government, to begin at the beginning," Skinner said from his seat. "The world was in a spot of bother thanks to some nutjob criminal called the Fantom, who was trying to start a world war by kidnapping scientists to construct various kinds of weaponry, and also attack countries while pretending to be another country. The only way to avert it was a secret conference of world leaders that was being held in Venice, but they needed good security, so the agent- chap who called himself 'M'- bought us together. His original team only called for six of us; me, Mina, Nemo, Jekyll, Allan Quartermain, the world's greatest hunter, and Dorian Gray, an immortal aristocrat. We ran into Sawyer when we were cornered in Gray's library, and he joined us after a little talk with Quartermain."

"Wait a minute... You worked with Dorian Gray?" Rachel said, leaning forward to stare at the League. "As in, the guy who made a wish that a painting would age for him, rather than him aging himself?"

"Oh, he got a book as well?" Skinner asked, smiling at first. Then his face fell. "Damn; you just can't outdo that bastard at anything."

"No, hold on a minute here; you met Dorian Gray?" Chandler asked. "As in, you worked with a man who's probably still around in the present? A man you could just go to and ask for help in dealing with this crisis?"

"Unlikely," Mina said, coldly. "Not only did Gray turn out to be a traitor, but I killed him later on in single combat."

Ross blinked. "Not meaning to contradict you, Mina," he said, still sounding slightly sceptical that she was who she claimed to be, "but, if you're telling the truth, how do you kill an immortal?"

"I showed him his painting," Mina replied. "The magic of the painting would only last so long as he never looked upon it himself, otherwise his missing years would catch up on him all at once, and he would instantly die."

Chandler looked up, slightly surprised. "That's new," he said. "I read The Picture of Dorian Gray when I was younger; they didn't mention that feature of his painting."

"Well, things change over time," Sawyer said. "Anyway, we saved Venice from the Fantom's plans, but then we discovered that the Fantom was actually M- the man who recruited us." Noting the gang's stunned expressions, he smiled. "You're wondering why the Fantom would recruit us to stop the Fantom? Simple; in the war he was going to trigger, he intended to wield the greatest weapons of all. The power of the League itself."

"What?" Joey asked. "You mean he tricks you into doing things that help him when you think they'll help the world?"

Chandler rolled his eyes and looked over at Joey. "Either that, or he acquires samples from them that allow him to copy their powers?" he suggested.

Joey shrugged. "Well, that too."

"You guessed correctly, Mr Bing," Nemo said. "The Fantom had stolen Mr Gray's portrait shortly before we recruited him, and forced him to act as an inside man in the League. He photographed my Nautilus, stole a sample of Doctor Jekyll's potion, and acquired skin samples from Mr Skinner and blood samples from Mrs Harker. He then planted bombs on the Nautilus, leaving us for dead."

"Would have been correct, too, if it weren't for the fact that I'd started sneaking around after Gray when he accused me of stealing Jekyll's serum," Skinner smiled. "Coupled with the fact that Jekyll managed to turn into Hyde and activate the emergency pumps, we not only survived, but managed to intercept M before he could sell off our powers to the highest bidder."

"We even discovered his real identity," Sawyer added. "Professor James Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime. I assume you know the name?" Looking over at the gang, he noticed the stunned expressions on the faces of Ross, Chandler and Monica, and smiled. "I see some of you do. For those who don't, Moriarty was the arch-enemy of the detective Sherlock Holmes, regarded by those who knew him as 'the Napoleon of Crime'."

"Sherlock who?" Joey asked.

Phoebe smiled and patted his arm. "I'll fill you in later, sweetie," she said reassuringly. Then she looked over at the League. "So, how'd that fight go?"

"Not too badly," Mina replied. "As I have already mentioned, I defeated Dorian Gray, Mr Skinner planted bombs to destroy the base, Nemo and Hyde freed the Fantom's hostages, and Agent Sawyer and Mr Q. dealt with Moriarty." She sighed a little at that. "That was the only part of the attack that didn't go according to plan."

"Huh?" Monica asked. "What went wrong?"

"Quartermain got stabbed in the back," Sawyer said simply.

"Oh," Rachel said. What else could she say? She'd never read any of Haggard's books, but an old boyfriend of hers had once been a big fan of the writer's work, and she'd flicked through them a couple of times when she had nothing better to do. She'd never thought much of Allan Quartermain as far as his novels went, but Quartermain himself had always seemed a fairly likable character. "I'm... sorry," she said to Tom.

"Thanks," he smiled at her, allowing himself a few brief moments of sadness before his face adopted its professional expression again. "Anyway, I took Quartermain's elephant gun and took out Moriarty before he could get away. We buried Allan in Africa, where he'd spent most of his life, and then decided to go around the world, no longer hiding in the shadows from it, but using our abilities to protect it. We met Hartdegen along the way, along with another man we call Terry Nator, and we have a couple of reserve members in the event of an especially difficult crisis." He shrugged. "Been going pretty well so far."

Ross coughed. "Well, that's... interesting," he said, looking like he was more ready to believe their story than he had been at first. "But that still doesn't explain what you're doing here when you should have died last century."

"Well, that's where it gets awkward," Hartdegen explained. "We're not entirely sure what happened ourselves. All we know for sure is that, for some reason, someone from the future- well, our future, your present- is trying to wipe us out. We were attacked by someone in a remarkably high- tech suit- by which I mean that it was remarkably advanced even for this time- who claimed to be 'an emissary of the wronged one'. We managed to defeat him, but it was a close call; one of our number, Terry Nator, was severely injured, and my time machine was badly damaged. With no other alternative, we took his time machine, and managed to use it to send us to his time." He looked around at the apartment. "Of course, the machine was destroyed when we arrived here, so there's no way we can use it to track down the mastermind of this whole operation."

"But... you're sure you're in the right time?" Chandler asked.

Hartdegen nodded. "Oh yes; I'm pretty sure of that. I had to improvise with the location we were sent to, since I didn't want to end up in his headquarters, but I left the date we'd be going to the same as it had been."

The gang looked around at each other, as though trying to decide what to do now. Then Joey looked over at the League, a curious expression on his face.

"So, what do you need now?" he asked.

The League looked over at Sawyer. He sighed, rubbed the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb, and then looked up at the gang.

"First order of business; we need your help to get some clothes," he said. "Secondly, we gather our resources together- weapons for most of us, some new samples of Jekyll's serum, that sort of thing- so we're at full power for the actual attack. Next, we need to work out who's behind these attacks, and what their motive is for them. Finally..." He sighed. "We attack whoever's behind this." He looked up at the gang. "We'll need your help for that last one. There's no way we'll be able to deal with whoever this is by ourselves; if they can afford to make a time machine, they must have several henchmen. Think you'll be prepared to go that far?"

Phoebe raised her arm. "Um, actually, I'm not all that in favour of killing people- which I assume will have to be done, what with the guns and all-, so, could I sit that one out?" she asked.

Ross looked over at her. "Pheebs, if these guys are killed, who's to say what it'll do for history?" he asked. "We're talking about people who went around saving the world; what would happen if they die before they should have? We have to help them any way we can." He looked at the League. "Let's go shopping."