Disclaimer: I don't own Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey, Phoebe, or ANY of the League; I just own the plot and the bad guy.

Feedback: The more I get, the faster I write.

The One Where They Help Save the World

Instantly, the League and the gang shifted into combat positions, Sawyer and Chandler drawing their weapons while Mina bared her claws and the rest raised their bars, Nemo drawing his sword as they faced their new…

Well, they could only assume it was 'foe' in the singular; for all they knew, it could be two or more people in front of them. The two guns seemed to be held at about the same height, but that could just be a matter of good teamwork or a bad view.

"Who are you?" Tom asked, taking charge as he held up a hand to warn Hyde to stay back; until they could determine who, or what, they were dealing with, Hyde's admittedly rather effective approach to tackling new foes could do more harm than good, especially with Hartdegen and Phoebe's lives at stake. "Are you the reason we're here?"

"Indeed," the voice said; now that the group was listening, it was noticeable that this voice was female, although tinged with a madness that would put some of the League's adversaries to shame. "My name is Kaitlin, and that is all you shall learn from me for the moment."

"Ah, come on, not even a little hint as to what you've got against these guys?" Joey asked, indicating the League with one hand as he held the bar in the other. "I mean, what are you, an immortal? Or were you just related to one of their adversaries?"

There was a pause for a few moments after that, eventually broken when Rachel turned around to look at Joey incredulously.

"You know what the word 'adversaries' means?" she asked him.

Joey looked back her defensively. "Y'know, just because I don't know many big words doesn't mean I don't know any, Rache!"

"Excuse me," the voice said from behind Hartdegen and Phoebe. "But I believe that you wanted to know why I wish you all dead?"

"Oh, yeah, that's right," Rachel said, raising the bar in a defensive posture. "So, what was it?"

"Well, if you must know…" 'Kaitlin' said, sighing slightly, "your friend there got it right on the second guess; I am related to two of the League's future adversaries."

Sawyer blinked in surprise.

Well, that was unexpected… he thought to himself.

"Hold on a minute; they haven't met your… ancestors… yet?" Ross asked, suddenly taking charge and staring at the midpoint between the guns in confusion. "But… why are you doing this? I mean, if the League don't encounter those guys, you could change things so that you're never born!"

"Yeah, what he said!" Phoebe cried out, her voice betraying the panic she felt at her and Hartdegen's current situation. "Do you really want to cease to exist for some guys you'll never meet!"

"That would be a small price to pay to ensure their greatness lives on!" 'Kaitlin' cried out. "They were incredible men…

"And you," she yelled, apparently covering the whole League in this statement, "were responsible for them failing to achieve their dreams! If you had never existed, they would have succeeded, and this world would be a better place for having been guided by their wisdom!"

"If we thought it necessary to fight them, I find it unlikely that such a thing would be the case, Miss Kaitlin," Nemo said, his sword raised as he waited for the opportunity to strike as soon as he could. "Now, let our friends go; at the very least, Miss Buffay has never done a thing to you."

"She helped you all, murderers!" Kaitlin screamed, jabbing the gun into Phoebe's back. "For that, she shall-"

And then Phoebe kicked out behind her, striking something that none of the people watching could see and sending the guns flying into the air, as something invisible struck the ground with a loud thump.

"Run!" Phoebe yelled, and the others didn't waste any time; they simply gripped whatever it was that they were using as a weapon and ran down the corridor, away from the invisible figure.

"OK, that was just weird!" Monica said, as she glanced over at Hartdegen inquiringly. "Any ideas who she could be related to? I mean, is the invisibility thing genetic or what?"

"Genetic?" Skinner asked, looking over at Monica in confusion.

"As in, would your kids be invisible if you had any?" Monica added, as they rounded a corner and began to run down another long corridor.

"How the hell should we know; time travel isn't a common practice for most of us, you know!" Hyde yelled, from where he was running in front of them; as the largest member of the group, he'd automatically shifted to the front of the group when they'd started running. "We've never had reason to figure out what happens to us in the future!"

"Come on, just shut up and keep running, we're nearly out…" Chandler said, as they rounded a corner, charged through a door…

And found themselves in the middle of a large room, filled with both high-tech machinery and several various assorted armed henchmen, who turned to look at them all in confusion.

"Oh crap…" Ross muttered, as he stared around at the vast army before them. "We're in trouble."

It was Joey who made the first move in the 'fight', pulling out his iron bar and holding it over a large piece of machinery covered in blinking lights.

"OK; nobody move or this gets it!" he said, trying to sound threatening, although he almost looked more nervous that Rachel did.

Sawyer groaned. "Joey, you can't destroy anything here; don't you remember, we kind of need the time machine these guys have to get home?"

"Oh yeah…" Joey said, sheepishly. "And, lemme guess, we don't know what that is?"

"Yes, unfortunately," Hartdegen said, sighing. "We have a problem…"

"Which, fortunately, we don't share," one of the men said, raising a gun and pointing it at the group, followed closely by the other men.

"Now then, you can either come quietly, or we shoot you all now and leave your bodies in the garbage," the man said, smiling at the League and their friends. "Your call."

Sawyer sighed as he looked around at the men facing them; only about twenty men, each one armed with a large gun that packed a far greater punch than anything he knew from his time, and, on his side, all they had were two guns, a vampire, an invisible man, an eight-foot-tall mass of muscle, one martial arts expert with a big sword, and about six or seven men and women armed with metal bars, as well as a baby being held by one of the men holding a gun.

Overall, not brilliant odds.

Unless he changed the dynamics of the situation.

Looking up, he saw two long lights hanging above them, connected to the roof by thin cables. They didn't look that thick, and the odds of him pulling it off were slim…

But, if he didn't at least try it, their chances of survival were practically nonexistent.

He raised his gun and fired a spree of bullets at the nearer of the lights, tearing through the cables that held it up. As sparks spread out from the cables, the main light crashed to the ground, throwing up dust and small pieces of rubble that briefly blinded the gunmen facing them.

"Chandler, fire!" Sawyer called out back at his new friend.

Although shaken at the sudden collapse in front of him, Chandler, to his credit, didn't falter; he just raised the gun and fired at the gunmen with Sawyer, their weapons tearing through the men before they could even fully process what had just happened. Those men who weren't killed by the gunfire were immobilised by bullets in the arms or legs, and even if the wounds weren't fatal, there were still enough to keep them out of action for a while.

Once the guns clicked on empty cartridges, Chandler and Sawyer threw the guns off to the side and looked back at the others.

"Everyone OK?" Sawyer asked.

"We'll all fine, I think," Hartdegen said, looking around at the others; nobody was injured, although Rachel and Phoebe were staring at the sight in front of them with horror-struck expressions.

"Wh… what… just… happened?" Rachel asked, looking at the sight before her in horror.

"Put simply, we saved us from getting turned into Swiss cheese," Chandler said, as he looked over at the gunmen before turning back to the door, which had been shut and locked by Joey and Skinner during the commotion. "Look, shouldn't we get moving; that invisible wacko'll be coming after us any minute!"

"Look, I don't think there's no way to open the door from that side now that it's locked at this side; we've got some time, at least," Skinner said, before looking around at the equipment in the room; fortunately, none of it had been damaged by crossfire. "So, what're all these things?"

"Computers," Ross explained, at he walked over to the nearest device and, examining the screen, began to scroll through the documents on the computer. "They're used pretty often in this modern world, actually. Maybe they'll have some explanation about how to…"

His eyes widened.

"Oh my god!" he said.

"What?" Skinner asked, walking over to glance at the screen over Ross's shoulder. "What have you- OH MY GOD!" he said, looking at the screen in horror. "That's the invisibility formula!"

"What?" Hartdegen said, as the rest of the group looked over at the teacher and the ex-thief in surprise. "You mean… our foe was able to duplicate that?"

"Yeah, it looks like it…" Ross said, as he scanned down the page, awe on his face. "My field isn't really biology- or physics, for that matter- but I can see how this process works… I think…."

"Let Hyde and I take a look," Hartdegen said, as the two of them moved towards the screen. "We may be a bit out of date by this time, but we're still the most knowledgeable about the human body and physics in our little group. Maybe we can find something out that we can use when we get back home…"

"You mean… like a cure?" Skinner asked, looking over at them hopefully as Hartdegen and Hyde took up positions around the screen.

"'Maybe' is all Henry has to say on that front…" Hyde said, as he began to scan the formula on the screen. Even he had to admit, this was a very impressive piece of work. This bit of the formula turned the blood's pigmentation from red to colourless… The feature that stopped the subject's cells from absorbing light…

Hartdegen frowned.

"That's odd…" he said, looking at a certain part of the formula.

"What?" Joey asked, looking at the professor inquiringly. "What's odd?"

"There's something here that doesn't make sense…" Jekyll said, as he reached up and tapped the section of the formula that was puzzling him. "This bit here… it seems to contain instructions to stop something happening."

"What?" Mina said, walking towards the screen to look at it herself.

She frowned. "That is odd…"

"Any ideas what it's stopping?" Sawyer asked, looking at his vampire lover curiously.

"Yeah; do I not have to worry about having kids or something?" Skinner asked, as he shrugged his way back into his clothes, which he'd given to Joey shortly before they'd broken out of captivity.

"No, it doesn't stop your body doing anything; it seems to stop the serum itself from doing something…" Mina said, as she studied the equations on the screen curiously. "I am not an expert biologist by any means, but I think this bit of the formula somehow manages to…"

She looked over at Skinner in confusion. "… let your eyes keep on absorbing light?"

"What?" Monica said, looking at Mina in confusion. "You're saying his eyes are visible? They certainly don't look it!"

"No, no, they're invisible all right- they don't actually reflect the light they absorb- but they are definitely absorbing light…" Mina mused, as he looked at his friend curiously. "I wonder why…."

"Um, suggestion?" Rachel said, raising her hand. "I don't really remember my high school science, but I'm pretty sure something was mentioned about the eyes needing to absorb light in order to see stuff; maybe this is what lets Skinner actually see anything?"

The others all looked at Rachel for a few moments; her friends also adopted a very… incredulous, to say the least… expression, as though they couldn't quite believe she'd worked that out before any of them.

"What?" Rachel said, noting the way they were looking at her. "Just because I work in fashion doesn't mean I can't know something about science, right?"

Eventually, Sawyer broke the silence, looking over at Mina and Skinner.

"So… is there a way we could use that against our foe?" he asked them. "I mean, if we've got the formula, couldn't we whip up a version of it that doesn't leave the eyes free of the serum?"

"Maybe…" Mina said, as she looked at the formula on the screen curiously. Then she sighed and looked back at the others. "I could do it, but it's irrelevant anyway; we don't have anything that we could use to make the serum."

"Um… guys?" Joey said, from where he'd wandered over to a cupboard on the opposite side of the room. "Would this work?"

He opened the cupboard, revealing a large assortment of chemicals and beakers. "I think these guys probably used this place as a lab or something similar."

Mina walked over to examine the chemicals briefly, and then smiled up at Joey.

"Perfect, Mr Tribbianni," she said, nodding in approval. "Thank you."

She glanced back at the others as she began to pull out the equipment. "Mr Skinner, I'll need your assistance in preparing the serum; Mr Gellar, see if you can find some way to get us a version of that formula on paper and we'll take it from there. The rest of you, get these henchmen tied up and make sure they can't interfere. Professor Hartdegen, see what you can do about figuring out which of these machines controls the time machine; we'll need it when we're done here."

As the League and their friends began to get down to business, Ross turning back to the computer to try and find the printer, Mina could only hope this worked.

If not, she wasn't sure how she and the other League members would get home; advantage in numbers or not, an invisible foe was still a dangerous foe, especially one as mad as this 'Kaitlin' woman seemed to be.