The Symphony of the Physics Police
Chapter 3: Infinite Exposition
Though it had been two years for him, Bob found himself reliving his first two trips through the void between dimensions as he was beamed, this time not so unceremoniously, into a place where chaos was quickly gaining footing.
Now, a few words, before the action, about Order and Chaos—the two fundamental elements of the universe.
Neither can prevail over the other, or the universe will end. Should Order reign, then all time would freeze because time and change are one in the same. But should Chaos gain the upper hand, then all existence would be a murky mess. What is a Ford Prefect one minute could be Trigon the Terrible in the very next.
This is the goal and eternal motivation of the Physics Police. That is, to keep balance between Order and Chaos. Anytime the laws of physics are broken, more chaos is generated. And nothing generates more chaos than traveling between dimensions improperly (other than young children.)
Of course, all of this Joe had explained to Bob during their two years in the Time Chamber, and Bob had come to accept it as obvious. He still, however, refused to train himself and learn to wield his ki or chi energy. Therefore, an alternative method had been taken.
"This is a what?" Bob had asked Joe.
"It's called a Ghost Portal."
"And what does it do?"
"Well," Joe said, "Its primary function is to produce superheroes with ghost powers. It also has an auxiliary function of serving as a gateway to the world of the dead."
Bob had just stared at Joe.
"You want me to walk into a portal that will lead me to the realms of the dead?"
"Not while it's on," Joe told him.
"What good will it do off?"
"Well, we turn it on while you're in it," Joe replied.
"WHILE I'M IN IT!" Bob's eyes grew three sizes and his brow fell to indicate a level of indignation that Joe had seen far too many times before. Bob clearly had been frustrated and had wanted to injure somebody. Joe had seen it in Bob's eyes.
He loved it.
"Yes. While you're in it." Joe's smile had been sadistic.
"What good will that do?"
"That's how it makes superheroes. Just trust me on this, will you?"
In the end, Bob had reluctantly agreed to stand in the middle of the high-tech device. "Now what?"
"There should be an 'on switch' inside it."
"What kind of idiot puts their on switch INSIDE the machine?" Bob had scanned the walls, quickly finding the green button labeled on.
"I plead the fifth," Joe had said, glancing at the rather large man in an orange jumpsuit who had built the machine. He had looked like he enjoyed fudge. Lots of fudge.
Bob, against his better judgment, had depressed the button with his right pinky finger. To this day, nobody knows why he used that particular finger, but if the answer is ever found, it might give us some profound insight into Bob's character.
Or maybe he was just scared out of his mind to use an important finger. You decide.
After the button was fully depressed, the portal's gears had begun to spin, and several panels had lit up. And Bob had screamed and howled as ghost energy was literally written onto his DNA...
0000
In Universe TG-3S-8473-TM, John was busy getting his butt handed to him by Majin Vegeta, the prince of the Saiyans who was now converted once again to the side of evil by Babadi's magic spell.
John flew up and shot down some energy beams, but they missed their mark and went flying off into the ground, almost vaporizing the Joker. "That was a close one!" yelled the murderous clown. "Watch where you're dodging those things!"
"The Prince of the Saiyans will never fall to a weakling such as your self," Vegeta told him.
"I'm a Saiyan too, you know. We're like cousi—" But before John could finish the simile, Vegeta punched him in the mouth and sent him flying into a nearby rock face, which crumbled under the impact.
"Pathetic. You're even more of a clown than that clown over there," Vegeta motioned his head towards Joker.
"I resemble that remark," Joker quipped.
Majin Vegeta landed and, with a flick of his wrist, blasted away the rubble that had piled around John. The Physics Cop stood up, bloodied and weary from the fight.
"You are another one of those Physics Police do-gooders," Vegeta realized suddenly. "Well, I'll have you know, that Audit Gun of yours won't work this time. Bulma had me cut off from the Brief family fortune when I blew up the Tenkaichi Budokai stadium and killed all those people."
I hope, Vegeta added in thought only.
"What about THIS!" John jerked out his reality checker, a device that, when used, would strictly enforce all the laws of physics (not including Murphy's Law and the Law of Probable Desirability)...
It would normally prevent anyone, Physics Police and civilian alike, from doing anything that violated the basic tenets of the universe. Practically, it would negate Vegeta's considerably fighting power and make him nothing but an ordinary, albeit extremely spikey-haired, individual.
Unfortunately for John, Vegeta had experienced this before, and as soon as he reached for it, Vegeta blasted it out of his hand.
SSKRWW! The charred plastic and metal fell to the floor.
"Ah, crud." John cursed.
Vegeta charged at him, his fist drawn back and glowing with energy...
Suddenly,the smell of ozone wafted through the air, and a small red door opened up. And Joe blurred out, slamming into Vegeta, drilling several fists into his abdomen and face, and kicking him into a conveniently placed boulder.
Before the portal closed, it also spat out another humanoid figure that John didn't recognize.
"Hey, Joe! How's it been buddy? And what the kriff took you so fracking long?"
"I had to train the new recruit here," Joe answered. He thumbed towards Bob. "John, meet Bob; Bob, John."
The un-introduced shook hands.
Then Joe said, "You look rather beat to a pulp."
"Oh, really?" John's voice was thick with the sarcasm one speaks with when another has spoken the painfully obvious.
Again, Joe loved it. Not that he didn't care for John; quite the contrary. John was probably his best friend. But that didn't stop Joe from enjoying annoying the crap out of him anymore than Joe loved to annoy the rest of creation.
"Second Wind, then?"
"Sure," John said.
"What's second wind?" Bob asked.
"Stand back."
Bob complied, and Joe and John stood side by side. Joe raised his hand, and in it appeared a small blue flame, that he hurled outward—and it began to swirl like a tornado, consuming both John and Joe, and lifting them off the ground. A few flashes of light and some fading wisps later, both landed. Joe looked a bit more fatigued; John's wounds were mostly gone.
"It's a healing technique. I use a bit of my chi to realign the physical structures of our bodies. If I use too much, I pass out or die." Joe shrugged and stretched a minute. "And I run the risk of realigning his body to be exactly like mine. Of course, I'd need a power boost of more than 10000 times my current level for that to happen, so there's nothing to worry about." After a beat, Joe added ,"Except me dying, of course."
Majin Vegeta staggered to his feet and shrugged off his pain. "I will not be defeated so easily!"
"Let's finish this," John said. He and Joe assumed a wide stance and cupped their hands together.
"Makankomeha?" Joe asked?
"Sure," John said.
"MA-KAN-KO-ME-HAA!" Joe and John forced their hands together simultaneously, releasing the combined distinctiveness of the Kamehameha wave and Piccolo's Makankosappo (AKA Special Beam Cannon, to you dubbies out there)...
The powerful corkscrewing wave/beam slammed into Majin Vegeta and consumed him, blasting him back into the remains of the boulder and exploding. When he fell the the ground, he was almost, but not quite, completely unconscious.
"Will I learn to do that?" An amazed Bob gaped.
"Sure you will," Joe replied. "Now go ghost and possess that guy before he passes out. You can't overshadow the unconscious."
"Right," Bob said. "I'm FEELING PHANTOM!"
White rings encircled Bob, and suddenly, a negative image of what he'd been wearing when he was zapped by the ghost portal materialized on his body—a rather superheroey get up with a short cape, a spandex suit, and white mask that was now black. His eyes also transformed from their natural grey to glowing green.
"Well," John smirked. "I have to admit, he's got the look. But, Zarquon, he needs to work on that Battle Cry. It's painfully hilarious."
Bob's body suddenly became see-through and he entered Majin Vegeta, and stood up.
"Better than Magically Delicious," Joe joked. It was an inside joke between him and John, involving the horrors Joe had experienced living in the Lucky Charms fandom for more than a year when his communicator had been destroyed by a shooting star marshmallow. Let's just say that "Not Work Safe" doesn't even BEGIN to describe it.
"Can we get this over with?" the Saiyan prince said in Bob's voice.
"Sure, Sure," Joe sighed. He removed a small communicator from his belt. "Yo, Sammy," he said. "Make us a portal out of here."
"Sure thing," the voice replied.
Bob's confiscated Saiyan nostrils detected the smell of ozone, and once again the perfectly round red hole in reality made itself visible.
"What about the Joker and Join?" John suddenly asked.
"We'll have to split these dimensions back up anyway," Joe said. "They should go back to the right places when we do."
"Right. I knew that," John lied.
And then the three disappeared into the portal.
0000
John, Joe, and Bob arrived back at the Physics Police headquarters shortly after departing Universe TG-3S-8473-TM, and quickly reset the transporter to heal and then beam Majin Vegeta back to his home dimension.
Unfortunately, it was soon discovered that what his quantum signature indicated was his home dimension wasn't nearly far enough along timeline-wise for Majin Vegeta to even exist. In fact, if John, Sam, and Joe were to be believed, another Physics Cop named Phil was already at that very moment confronting that very version of Vegeta in a Pokemon Universe.
"What's that mean?" Bob asked.
"It means that he's also from the future in addition to being out of place," John explained. "That is how he knew what my reality checker was."
"Can we fix that?" asked Bob?
"Of course, but now we have to readjust the fourth dimension setting on the transporter, said Sam. "Sam pushed a few buttons and then said, "Done."
Vegeta disappeared in a blue beam.
"Now to separate the Universes that Join fused," Joe said.
"How?" Bob inquired. He inquired a lot.
Joe sighed deeply. "We really need to invest in some sort of training programs. Recruiting offenders just tends to lead to paragraph after paragraph of exposition."
"Yeah," said John, "but without this exposition, nothing will make sense to the readers."
FOURTH WALL UP, PEOPLE! A voice boomed from above.
"Sorry," John and Joe said in unison.
"Was that... the Author?" Bob blinked.
"As I was about to say," John interjected, "the answer to you question is simple: tachyons."
"Tachyons?"
"Yes. Tachyons. Any time you have a spacial anomaly, a temporal vortex—anything that cant' be fixed with duct tape can be fixed with Tachyons. A few years ago, Marvel and DC universes fused together into an Amalgam universe. How'd we fix that? Tachyons."
Sam got done prepping a device in the corner near what looked like a Stargate.
0000
Now, before I continue, a word about Sam. Sam was a Russian man in his mid twenties, about five-foot-nine. He had no hair on his head and wore a small hat that didn't really manage to cover up his baldness. A small mustache framed his lower face. However, the most striking and noticeable feature about Sam was that he was a cyborg.
Not just a person with cybernetic implants, mind you. Most of his body was metal, made of a combination of Durasteel and Plasteel, and capable of lifting up to twenty metric tons in normal gravity.
0000
The tachyon cannon that Sam set up finished warming up.
"Excuse me, if you don't mind me asking," Bob said, "But how did you become a cyborg?"
Sam flushed. His accent was not thick when he said, "I'm really rather embarrassed to say."
The four men continued on in silence.(They weren't the only ones in the room, mind, but they were the only one working on the case this fic has been discussing so far.) The gate opened, and Bob asked yet another question.
"What's that?"
"An interdimensional viewer. It displays only the first and second dimensions of the target universe or universes and let's us administer Tachyons to them uniformly." Sam got finished with his last minute adjustments, and fired the cannon at the portal.
The universes broke apart, and, as predicted, the anti-chaos feedback of the Jurais returning to their own home universes also blasted Join and Joker to their proper places.
"Talk about convenient plot devices," Bob smirked.
AHEM! Bellowed the voice from earlier.
"Being silent," whispered Bob.
0000
Three days later, Bob and Joe were busy betting on Pazaak games in Javyar's cantina in the lower city of the planet Taris. "I'll raise you 250 credits," Bob said, studying his hand. He had gotten quite good at the ancient form of Sabaac played 4000 years before the rise of the Galactic Empire. As long as the Sith armies didn't take interest in his probably odd life-signs, he would be safe.
Gelrood, Bob's opponent looked up. "You're testing you luck, child."
Bob smirked. He had a zero, a two, and a three—an Idiot's Array. The object of the game was to reach 23, much like modern Earth's blackjack. And only an idiot would think a 0, a 2, and a 3 made 23... Which by some odd logic meant the cards automatically won.
Bob laid his hand down. "Ha!"
"What kind of idiot are you?" Gelrood asked. He placed his cards on the table as well, and revealed a nine and a ten—nineteen. "You have just five and you bet that much?"
"Bob!" Joe cut in, "You moron! There is no Idiot's Array in Pazaak. That's only in Sabaac."
Bob's eyes shot wide as saucers. "Ah, stang. I forgot."
"Stang isn't a swear word in this era, either," Joe whispered. "It's a brand name of backwash. I'll have to explain you you how exactly the obscenity of that word came about some time. Terribly funny story, really..."
Just then, Bob and Joe felt their Physics Police com links buzz within their pockets.
"What now?" Joe asked Sam.
"We have trouble. Someone has illegally jumped into the Universe P3-TN-8439-FR... It's a Futurama universe. I don't have any details other than that the rip is really clean. We might be dealing with a minor deity here."
"This place is really crowded because of the Sith Quarantine," Bob said. "You'd better make the portal somewhere inconspicuous."
"It's in the Black Vulkar base," replied Sam.
"Good. We'll be right there..."
By the time they made it to the portal, (which had inadvertently been opened in a locked storage room within the Vulkar base) Joe and Bob had decided that Revan's job would be considerably easier in this dimension...
0000
"We're ready, Sam," Joe confirmed.
"Alrighty, then." Sam chuckled. "Fasten your seat belts and prepare to enter the year 3000!"
"Where did the foreign object land?" Bob asked as Sam readied the transporter.
"New New York.
"Then I'll get to meet Bender! YES!" Bob said gleefully.
Of course, if Bob had been conscious of the Law of Probable Desirability, he might not have been so happy about that...
0000
The Physics Police Personal Handbook defines the Law of Probable Desirability as follows:
The probability of an expected outcome is the multiplicative inverse of it's level of desirability, unless the containing story is within five-to ten seconds of it's climax. Then the law is either reversed or negated entirely depending on the inherent reality factory of the given universe.