The Symphony of the Physics Police
Part Six: Kicked in the Ashe
Joe and Bob stared down thief foe, the massively powerful combination of Bender, Brainiac, and now Lord Frieza H. Kold, ruler of the Galaxy. This did not bode well at all. Ashe… the being called itself. The substance that anything in its path would become.
Joe quickly reached for his communicator, and dialed up the Physics Police HQ. "Samir" he shouted. "This is Joe. We need help. YESTERDAY!"
"Will do, my friend." Sam said, pressing several buttons on the console he sat at.
Suddenly, Bob and Joe gasped as their time-loop belts, which they had neglected to take off after destroying the source of the time discontinuity, discharged a field of green energy around them. The cloud formations changed in the distance, slightly, and Ashe moved just a bit farther away.
"Bly me…" a new but familiar voice came in from beside them. Joe turned to his left to see John standing beside him, his Super Saiyan form activated. The Ultimate Warrior was a pinnacle of strength. How he had gotten there, Bob couldn't begin to guess.
But Joe knew.
"Let me guess," he said. "I asked Sam to send you here 'yesterday'… So he sent you here… Yesterday... Literally."
John nodded. "And the 'you' that made the request forgot to take your time belt off, and probably don't remember the plan we developed on the way here."
This would explain the other differences, Joe thought. The clouds were moved more because more air was displaced at the destruction of the Kami lookout. Because now retcon dictated that John had done it rather than Joe. And Ashe was farther a way because of simple prudence in the presence of a Super Saiyan who doesn't particularly like you.
"That's about the size of if," Joe agreed in a voice of pure melancholy.
"Then," said John, "we shall have to improv. Bob."
"What?"
"You stay back. This thing is undoubtedly very deadly, so Joe and I will do the heavy lifting. If you get an opening, throw an Ecto-Kamehameha at it?"
"A what?"
"Combine the wave with your ectoplasmic energy."
Bob blinked. "And how the slime am I supposed to do that?"
"They're your powers!" Joe blurted. "Figure them out! Use the Force if you have to."
John looked back. "You could also use the Physics Police Handbook. Kamehameha is in Chapter 42, page 41. Energy synthesis is pages six through nine.
"Right…" Bob trailed off, pulling out his PP Handbook. Joe had told him that it was now a formality and that he wouldn't ever really need it, so he'd completely forgotten about it. Bob began using the datapad's touch screen to select the right pages, and bookmarking them for quick reference…
Meanwhile, John and Joe charged forward, blasting towards Ashe. The android responded by dodging out of the way and blasting back at them with a series of energy beams. Joe dodge up and John dodged down, both returning fire with ki blasts. Ashe blasted straight up, avoiding the blasts, then changed direction really quickly and blurred forward, hitting Joe in the chest. Joe went flying backwards and flipped over, then through a Buster Cannon (a signature move of Trunks) at Ashe.
Ashe charged right into it, the flesh on his chest sliding away to reveal another energy-absorption panel. How had one of THOSE gotten into Frieza's chest?
While the Buster Cannon was being absorbed, Super Saiyan John blasted forward, slamming a fist through Ashe's compound head and then slicing off his arm with a beam of chi that then tore through Frieza's spaceship in the distance, making the thing even less space worthy than it had been after Vegeta was through with it.
The damage didn't last, though. Ashe's head quickly reformed, and he reattached the arm like it was nothing.
"Of course," Joe muttered. "He's largely made from nano-machines because he started as Brainiac from the animated universe."
"That," said John, "totally fracking sucks."
"Yeah it does. It almost sounds like his abilities were measure to always be just enough to avoid obliteration by a Kamehameha or something."
"That would be too convenient," said John. "We can never have it easy."
"I suppose noaaahhHggh!" Joe's last word turned into a scream as Ashe blasted forward and grabbed his throat, then flew upwards into the atmosphere.
John followed, priming a Masenko as he went, and then hurling it in front of Ashe and detonating it when Ashe tried to dodge it. The explosion shook Joe free of Ashe's grasp, but also burned him a bit.
Joe shot John an angry glare, then proceeded to attack Ashe, slamming into his chest with an Eagle Kick and proceeding to beat the zark out of him.
Ashe responded by exploding with power, the blast knocking Joe and John away from him. The fired again, from two different sides, but Ashe adapted, opening up more hidden energy absorption units under his wrists, and absorbed both chi beams, then blasted towards John, pounding him with a series of punches and kicks, then slashing him across the chest with a sharp protrusion from his arm. Gritting his teeth, John jerked back and blasted Ashe in the face…
But the hybrid cyborg quickly healed.
Guys, thought Bob at the other two, I've learned telepathy—this is so awesome!
Shut up! Joe thought back, loudly. This is no time to flaunt your abilities. Wait… I have an idea.
Me too, thought John. Bob, hold on a minute. Me and Joe are going to hold Ashe in one place, you blast him with the biggest Ecto-Kamehameha you can muster. Start charging it!
Bob panicked, his thoughts rushing around for a minute before responding. Shoot, I knew I was forgetting something. Telepathy, Energy, Kamehameha… Ah, here we go. Alright, so I just cup my hands together and say Kamehameha? That's it?
Yes that's it, you moron! shouted Joe. Now do it!
Right, sorry.
John and Joe blasted forward and grabbed Ashe.
"Kaiyo-Ken!" Shouted Joe, suddenly surrounded by a red glow. "Do it now, Bob!"
Bob transformed into his ghost form and cupped his hands together. "Right, Okay. Here goes…"
"Kamehame…ha.." he said quietly, thrusting his hands forwards. A small blue beam appeared ahead of him and fizzled out..
"Bob! Do it bigger!" shouted John. "You have to put some oomph into it!"
"Ugh," he said. "I know, I know, but it's just so… so anime. I can't stand it."
"Bob!" shouted Joe, "Hit him hard or he's gonna get away!"
Bob cupped his hands together. Joe was right—if he didn't do this, he didn't deserve to meet Batman or Zaphod Beeblebrox or Wonder Woman—he really wanted to meet Wonder Woman.
"KAME… HAME… HA!" Bob shouted with a wince, thrusting his hands forward again. The ectoplasmic energy of his ghost-form combined with the chi of the Kamehameha wave, and a green beam lanced forward, straight towards Ashe—there was no way he would miss, it was dead on target…
Suddenly, Joe blinked when something on Ashe's head changed—a light went from flashing red to solid green, and his Brainiac symbol began to glow.
"Good bye," he said. Suddenly, the entire being glowed yellow, then vanished like scan lines on a television… This had the unfortunate side effect of creating a vacuum in the space between Joe and John, right where Ashe had been. The resulting pull of the vacuum jerked John and Joe together just as the Kamehame wave hit, locking both Physics Policemen inside!
"OH SNAP!" Bob shouted! "Crap! Crud! Darn it!"
He tried to shut of the wave and suddenly realized he didn't know how. Panicking, he began to shake his arms really fast. "Turn off, turn off you little prick!" he shouted at his hands, but to no avail. He began flailing his cupped hands wildly, but the beam flowed with them, acting like a whip, which Bob hastily slammed at the ground, hoping to knock the beam off his hands with sheer force…
Suddenly, just as the head of the beam slammed into the ground, the tail ended at his hands, and Bob's energy drained, forcing him to revert to normal. In the distance, the head of the beam crashed into the ground, exploding into a massive ball of energy that consumed half of Frieza's ship…
"I'm in big trouble…" Bob said. "Very big trouble."
"You're in big trouble!" Joe said to Bob. "Very big trouble!"
"I already know that," Bob said, wincing as he helped John and Joe out of the crater into which he had blasted them. "Because… You got vaporized…"
"And," Joe added, "because the villain got away. Because you waited to fire until AFTER he had finished assimilating Frieza's mind."
"In a job like this," John said, "hesitation can be disastrous." His tone wasn't forgiving, but much less caustic than Joes. "It's something you'll get with time. Assuming that Ashe doesn't destroy time."
"Hey," Joe barked. "I'm the cynical one here. Don't steal my modus operandi."
"Sorry," John said. "Say, does anybody hear something beeping?"
The three got silent for a minute, when they suddenly realized that it was Bob's com-link. Joe's and John's had both been shorted out by the energy wave, but Bob's was still working. The recruit removed it from his belt and activated it. "Unit 30X6B333 here," Bob said.
"I know who you are, Bob," said Sam on the other end. "What happened? The time-loop was fixed, and I sent in John to fight that thing that took over Frieza—what is your status now? I've lost signal for both Joe and John…"
"We're fine!" Joe shouted at Bob's comlink. "Give me that." Joe jerked it from Bob's hands, and wiped his other wrist across his spikey brown hair—he must have looked horrible…
"You look horrible." Sam said. "What happened? Get in a fight with a bag of charcoal again?"
"That was a very unique circumstance," Joe muttered. "No, our new recruit here through a Kamehameha at the villain."
"How does that effect you?" Sam asked.
"He mistook me and John as 'the villain.'"
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"Well…."
"What?"
"What is the status of the villain now?" Sam asked in exasperation.
Suddenly, John burst in and pushed Joe to the side, taking the communicator. "Uncertain," John said. "We had a bit of a… strategical error and Ashe escaped."
"Ashe?" asked Sam.
"That's what this new fusion of Brainiac and Bender is now calling itself. Ashe. No title or surname. File it under 'threats that could potentially destroy the multiverse.'"
Sam muttered something in Russian. "Another one? Just great. Alright, I'm going to bring you home and we can track him from here. HQ out."
"Okay," said Sam. "I've got the computer working isolating interdimensional channels…"
The four Physics Police men crowded behind a massive super-high-tech computer, watching as the system worked, showing 'overviews' of the traffic through multiple universes since Ashe had vanished from Namek.
"So, what exactly are we looking for?" Bob asked, starting up a smaller-scale similar sequence on a nearby smaller computer…
"The pathways must be scanned one at a time to prevent an flux in chaos or order. We're looking for any pathway that has a single unauthorized access in the past few minutes. That's the most likely path. I'd explain why, but the math is very complicated."
"Riiiiight," Bob answered. "So, why not just like, randomly press in a number and hope it works?"
"Because there are thirteen trillion universes to scan," Joe said. "The computer's way is much faster."
"….Point taken." Bob sighed, tapping two numbers, four and two, on his computer as it scanned. He hadn't intended to interrupt the search progress, but the screen suddenly displayed a blinking light, even as it made a loud noise. "Oh, crap, what have I done now?" Bob blurted.
"What did you do?" Joe demanded, suddenly beside him…." Then, his jaw fell as he stared at the screen. "Um…"
"What?" John asked.. "What did you do, Bob?"
"I just pressed some numbers and it started buzzing!"
"W…what?" Sam said, running over… He studied the screen for a moment, reading the displayed information with an incredulous look on his face." By George, you've found it! He took Interworld Route 42 from Namek to… Some world I've never heard of." Sam's smile reflected in the monitor grew wide, and he slapped Bob in the back. "Good job, my friend."
"Um… Thanks?" Bob said, not believing what he'd just done… "Why didn't the main computer scan this path?"
"It's not well known. It's not been used since whole Gilgamesh debacle. It's not a sure thing that its Ashe, but we'd need a blinking sign to be more certain." Sam ran over to the teleportation controls and began keying in Ashe's destination coordinates… "What were they again?"
John read them off. "JP-MNH-324-PMN. Not familiar with it either."
As Sam started keying in the coordinates, Joe's face went white. "This is not good."
"What?"
"I know what universe this is. And I know what Ashe must be after… We have to go, NOW. I'll explain on the way."
John nodded, and ran over to the teleportation pad, followed by Bob and Joe. "Samir, take us in."
"Energizing, Captain," Sam said with a smirk. "Oh, yeah, O'Conners wanted to see you after you finish this Ashe thing…."
Joe facevaulted. "What about?"
"No time now," John said. "Beam us, worry about Joe's career later."
"Right." Sam pushed the slider bar forward, and suddenly, the three fighters were gone in a beam of light. "Here they come to save the DAAAYYY!"
The group materialized high in the air, which was no problem for John and Joe. Bob, however, wasn't expecting it, and began to fall before he remembered that he was half-ghost and started floating haphazardly around the other two. "What exactly are we looking for?" he asked.
"Hold on…" Joe closed his eyes tightly, concentrating as he turned. Bob remembered it was something he'd talked about in his training—the ability to sense strong energy signals generated by the chi of all life. And because Ashe was physically mostly Frieza, he had a lot of chi.
Bob eventually looked down to realize that they were above a medieval countryside—medieval Japan, it seemed. Samurai clashed below while a group of armored warriors fired primitive bamboo-tube guns into their ranks, while a group of villagers fled through fields rice ponds. A young man road through on a caribou and took out several soldiers with an arrow, actually managing to shoot somebody's head off.
Wait… why was he on a caribou?
It's an elk, John thought at him.
Well that made sense, if it was an elk. No wait, that still didn't make a lick of sense, darn it. Why did anime have to be so illogical?
"There!" Joe blurted, pointing towards the west. "Just what I was afraid of. He's after the Deer God!"
Joe blasted off, leaving the confused John and Bob staring at each other. Both turned up the throttle all the way to catch up to Joe, and started interrogating him on what was going on.
"He's after the opening to a prayer? That's a bit dang metaphysical even for anime?"
"No," Joe said. "Not the DEAR GOD, the DEER God. The animal Deer. Call it the Forest Spirit if you like. Shishigami, Spongebob Godpants, whatever. Just HURRY!"
"What is so bad about this Deer God?" John asked…
"We're not sure what it is—some sort of demon, alien, creature from the future—nobody knows. In the anime Princess Mononoke it is shown to have the power to give life and take it away with a touch. If Ashe is able to harness its powers, we are totally screwed."
"It still sounds like a horrible pun," Bob complained.
Joe frowned at him and scanned the valley and forest below. "There's Irontown, we can't be far… ….THERE!" Joe pointed towards a clearing, with strange lighting… "Swoop down, go into the forest. Element of surprise," Joe said. "Tear up the forest if you have to—the apes will plant more trees."
At breakneck speed, Joe blasted into the woods, tearing through the trees, John doing the same not far behind and Bob phasing through them in his ghost-form, until the got to the clearing.
But it was too late. In the middle of the clearing , a giant deer's body lay, propped up with its heads in Ashe's hands. The grass and flowers all around the dear were withering and dying, and the death was spreading outward from the epicenter where the Deer God was. The creature itself writhed and struggled to get free, but was futile—Ashe was projecting some sort of energy field around the creature, preventing it from getting free.
"This is the end of the line, Ashe!" Joe blurted. "Let that thing go and surrender."
"Negative-, replied Ashe. "The Knowledge of the Multiverse must first be obtained, and offspring produced, before we expire."
"That's what it wants? To pull a Brainiac, have a kid, then die?" John said. "Not much in the way of originality."
"The worst threats rarely are," Joe said. He turned to Ashe. "We will use lethal force if you persist. Cease this at once. Your programming has been contaminated. You are malfunctioning."
"Negative. We are Ashe. We are a synthesis of many into one. We will prevail where Brainiac, Bender, and Frieza could not. The Spirit that Claims Life and Death as its own must join this collective." Ashe's eyes flared, and Bob, Joe, and John charged forward, readying themselves to pound and pummel Ashe into oblivion…
Fire crackled on the dead plants below as the auras of the three Physics Police fired up, and all of the charged, converging on Ashe…
Suddenly, a sonic boom sounded nearby, and a glowing red meteor flew out of nowhere and struck John and Joe, blasting both of them into the woods beyond… Bob goggled. "Wasn't my fault this time!" he shouted.
Ashe, thankful for the distraction, ripped the head of the Deer God off and threw it several feet away, then transformed its left claw into a weapon immediately, blasting the entire head into atoms with a wide-energy beam. This also caused the Deer God's body to decay into some sort of oozing, pulsing liquid that began consuming the plant life that hadn't been burnt up, and also accelerated the rate of decay throughout the now-defile sacred clearing… Death was spreading all around—good thing Bob was half ghost.
Ashe transformed its right claw into a nozzle device, and reached into the soup the Deer God's body had become, and began sucking it up…
"NO!" Bob shouted, blasting forward in attempt to stop Ashe. "Darn it, stop winning! You're the villain!"
Before he could make contact with a punch, Ashe turned the hand that had vaporized the Deer God's head towards Bob, blasting the ghostly hero in the chest, sending him flying backwards. "Your interference is unwanted and futile. Further interference will result in lethal force…"
Angered, Bob reached his hand out and fired an ectoplasmic energy wave into Ashe, blasting him away from the Deer God's corpse, then flew above what remained, blasting it with a Kamehameha. "Absorb that," Bob barked. The beam struck Ashe, tearing the flesh of one of his arms, but leaving a metal skeleton underneath.
"Very well," Ashe replied, cupping his hands. "It seems like a most useful attack. Ka.Me.Ha.Me.Ha."
A red wave lanced out from Ashe's hands as he thrust them forward, blasting Bob backwards into a tree. "Negative," Ashe corrected itself. "Attack requires large amounts of latent energy present in the body. This slows muscle response time. Computing possible remedies for this drawback and preparing for World Jump."
"What?" Bob blurted, getting up despite his aching back. "You're jumping again? Well guess what! We can track you! We have a machines that can monitor the entire Multiverse back at Physics Police HQ, and monitor all the routes you can possible travel! That's how we tracked you before. We just isolated the routes out of Namek and found you. We'll do it again!"
"Assimilating information," Ashe said. "Tactical analysis complete. What is the location of the Physics Police HQ?"
"I'm not gonna tell you!" Bob blurted…. "It's against the…hand.. book.." his sentence trailed off.
Because suddenly, he realized what he'd just done—he'd given Ashe information that would make it IMPOSSIBLE to track him now! NO! If he new the mistake he'd made, he'd make sure it didn't happen again! Idiot!
"Very well. We will spare your life in return for the information with which you have imparted us. Stay out of our way, human. Lethal force will be used in the event of further interference."
And just as suddenly as he had on Namek, Ashe vanished in a yellow blur.
Bob quickly found John and Joe in a crater. "That's twice in one day I have to help you out of one of these," Bob complained..
When, suddenly he blinked. John and Joe were not alone in the crater. There was another with them—whatever had been inside that glowing red meteor blast that had hit them. At first, Bob had thought it was Mr. Mxyzptlk, the imp from the fifth dimension that had so often confounded Superman… It was only about 3ft tall, and sported a fedora, and had popped out of nowhere…
But that was where the similarities ended. This creature's fedora was brown, and it wore a similarly brown jacket that fell to his—Bob assumed it was male—knees. It wore khaki shorts as pants (but, because of his own height, the shorts covered his whole legs) and a yellow T-Shirt, and on his feet he wore just bland grey boots…He had a massive nose, and his left eye was a swirling vortex instead of an eyeball. It also possessed buck teeth and it's tongue flopped out of his impossibly spherical head.
"Um… Who is this?"
"No idea…" John scratched his head through his massive pile of Saiyan hair. "Did you take out Ashe."
Bob gulped, and looked at the ground. "He… got away. But I did manage to destroy most of the Deer God's body."
"Perfect," Joe muttered. "Just perfect." He then examined the newcomer, his eyes really annoyed. "It looks like a six-year-old tried to draw Indiana Jones while on an acid trip," Joe commented. He turned to the being. "Excuse me…" he said. "But, um… who the valberknelking kriff are you?"
"Hey, no need to be so rude," John said.
"Ieeeyuuuts OooowKAAAaayyy," the being suddenly blurted. "IEEEYYYEM SOOWRTUV UUUUUSED TOO THAYYUTT BYEE NOWW."
Everyone stared at him for a moment. Then two more.
"What did he just say?" Bob asked.
"Beast me," John said. "I have a Universal Translator in one ear and a Babblefish in the other and that still didn't make a lick of sense to me."
"MAIIYEE NAAYYEEM IYUZ EEDDIYUT MAYYUN," said the creature.
"Did he just introduce himself as Idiot Man?" Bob said with a facevault. "Idiot Man? What the shell kind of name is that?"
"Again," Joe said. "I point out the obvious. Acid trip."
"He doesn't seem to be intoxicated," John said, "Just really stupid."
"YYUUP," said Idiot Man, continuing in his strange dialect, which I will no longer try and reproduce. "I have on of theme there low Eye-Cues. Pleased to meet you all, though."
"How did you get to this world?" Bob asked listening closely and hoping he could make out the words.
"I came from another dimension. Ya see, when I was elected leader of my nation, they cast a magical spell on me that means any time something too lethal for me to survive happens, I just pop into another plane of existence instead of ceasing to be alive, or dying."
"Well, that was informative if not a little redundant," Joe said. "If Ashe got away, we have to get back to HQ anyway and track him. We'll try and get the little brain sore home too while we're at it."
"Joe, please, he's of low intelligence, not oblivious."
"John, he said he was used to it. I think. Doesn't matter…" Joe removed his newly refurbished communicator from his belt. "Sam, can you read me? We need a rift home. Bob screwed up again."
"Hey!'
"Just be thankful he doesn't know about Interworld Lanes. We can still track him as long as he doesn't learn how to avoid it."
"Um.." Bob said nervously….
"What?" Joe asked sharply.
Bob gulped, and then confessed his earlier blunder to the two other officers. The reactions were about what you'd imagine. Let's just say that John's left Bob unable to eat solid food for a month and Joe's was even worse…
Of course, we're just saying that. It's not true, but as to what they really did, you wouldn't believe me if I told you.