Legendary Scorpio
Chapter 3
"No! Stop moving Scorpio!" Mysterious voice… run down laboratory… ominous feeling that something bad is about to happen… yep. This is gonna be one of those days.
Not only that, I'm surrounded by the Furious Five. All of them! "We warned you, bug." The leader yelled to me. "Mess with our plans, and we eliminate you!" "You drove a hard bargain, Señor Crazy-Pants," I taunted. "But I had to back out of that deal. See, I'm a superhero. Protecting the city is all part of that deal. It's quite a bundle, don't you think?" Mistress Snake tried to whip me with her tail, but I jumped out of the way and hung upside down from a lamppost. "Oh come on! You like making deals, here's a good one I know you can't resist: Stop terrorizing Metropolis, I won't constantly have to kick your tails." I saw Mistress Snake grin. "You are quite the amusing bug." She caught me with her tail faster than my spider sense could warn me and started flinging me around like a baby playing with their toys. "Oh come on, lady! This suit doesn't have a built in barf bag!"
"No! Stop moving Scorpio!" 'What was that?' I shot a strand of webbing at Mistress Snake's boyfriend just in time for us to end up about 200 miles out of Death Valley. Mistress Snake pulled me close to her face. "Where have you taken us, Scorpio?" "Ugh… one, take a breath mint. Or fifty." I finally broke free of her grasp and jumped out of tail's reach. "Two, even if I knew where we were, let alone how we got here, I wouldn't take the Gruesome Twosome with me. That's you guys, in case you didn't know." Lord Gruesome growled at me. "I should kill you where you stand, bug." "Oh, I'm so scared. You're just afraid I'm gonna smash your pretty little face in." I was facing down The Tiger and not even flinching. "Stop it, both of you!" Mistress Snake stepped in between us. I definitely did not expect her to break up a fight between me and her gang… "She's right." Let alone hearing myself speak those words.
After looking around and gathering my wits, I was finally able to give us a location. "This place looks like Death Valley, but it's not a million degrees." "Can't you stop cracking those unfunny jokes?" The Tiger said to me. "What can I say? The ladies love the jokes. But this time, that wasn't a joke. I have absolutely no idea where we are." I looked at the comm link on my wrist. There was no signal. I pulled off my mask and put two fingers up to the comm in my ear. "This is Jake Smith to the Watchtower," After the hospital, The Tiger and Mistress Snake already know who I am. I didn't care that I took my mask off in front of them. "I repeat, this is Scorpio to the Watchtower." Static. "Does anybody copy?" More static. I pushed a button on my wrist comm. "Scorpio for an emergency transport to the Watchtower." Even more static. I put my mask back on before I turned around to face the Gruesome Twosome. I don't know why, they know my identity. It just feels right. They are my enemies after all.
"I'm not getting anything." I said to them. I heard a loud rush, like the JL's jets flying behind me, so I turned back around. "Of course you aren't." A group of humanoid aliens, led by a human, flew towards us on hover scooters. "That's because you're in the future." Time travel. That didn't even phase me anymore. So without skipping a beat, I asked, "How far?" "100 years." The leader responded. That was a new one. The furthest forward I've traveled was 5 years, and that was because Chao Lingshen tried taking me as far as I'm at now. "You were supposed to come alone, but physical contact between two objects, plus your constant movement threw our coordinates off. It took us half an hour to find you." I looked to Mistress Snake and The Tiger. "It wasn't my fault. The Fearsome Five jumped me and Mistress Snake tried crushing my ribs again." I looked back at the leader of the group that found us. "How'd you find us, anyway?" "We heard your communications, Jacob. We're glad we found you, because we need your assistance in a very urgent matter."
Half an hour later, The Tiger, Mistress Snake, and I were taken to the group's headquarters. "Tobias." I looked at The Tiger with confusion. "My name is Tobias." "I am Jacqueline." I looked at Mistress Snake with equal confusion. I wasn't so much confused about them telling me their names as I was about why they were. "We're working towards a common goal now. We're to get back to our own time." The confusion left my face and I finally understood what they were doing. "But mark our words," Jacqueline hissed. "Once we go back to our time, our truce is ended and we shall be enemies again." I gulped nervously. Of all the enemies to get stranded with, I had to be stranded with a snake.
"Hang on…" I walked into the control center of the rebel group's headquarters. "Hey Reggie," He turned and looked at me. "I have a couple questions." He made a motion with his hand that seemed like he gave me permission to ask. "You may not know this, actually I'm certain you don't, but back in my time, a girl that traveled back from the 22nd century tried to expose both my identity and magic to the world." He perked up. That's not a good sign. "Ah, you mean Chao Lingshen." That took me by surprise. "You know who she is?" He nodded and took me over to a machine. "I do in fact. I've actually seen her succeed." He took a tarp off of a box looking machine with a viewport similar to a penny arcade machine they had in the 50s. "That looks like a 50s penny arcade machine." "That's because it is." He said with a grin. "I purchased this machine trinket from a store that specializes in old fashioned novelties. I just so happened to turn it into a machine transcends the boundaries of space and time. Whenever a shift in the timeline happens, this baby records both shifts up to the point of the shift." He lost me at transcends. "Meaning…?" "Meaning you, my friend, have been a very naughty boy. Messing with the laws of time." He said with a sly grin that did not sit well with me. "Is that why you brought me here, Reggie? To arrest me and erase me from the very fabric of history?" He looked at me. I couldn't tell what he was thinking, and that made me scared. It must've shown on my face, because a minute later, he burst out laughing.
"What's so funny?" "You should see the look on your face! It's priceless!" He couldn't stop laughing. But after a while, he was able to regain his composure. "Are you kidding? You've done more for the future than you could possibly imagine. You've changed timelines so much that the timeline should be askew!" Then his face turned somber. "Which is… the one reason we brought you here. You've messed with the timeline so much that it's created a monster. A monster capable of going through time. Chao was the purveyor of the creature. Usually, minor changes, such as going back to give a person an idea, but Chao… she revealed magic and Scorpio's identity to the world. That stirred the beast from its nap, but you going back and stopping the missile from destroying Metropolis was the key that finally unlocked the beast's cage." He looked outside the window. "Those aliens and I are the only survivors…" I looked out the window. "Death Valley… it wasn't a million degrees…" "Because you aren't in Death Valley. You're in Ohio… or what's left of it."
I stared out the window. 'Ohio…' "Did it start here?" I asked Reggie. "Yes. Nobody knows why, since the epicenter started in Japan, but the beast was born in Ohio." He replied. "When?" "80 years ago." "So… the Strikers never stood a chance?" Reggie placed a hand on my shoulder. "I'm afraid not. Your old team was one of the first victims, rapidly aged into dust." I looked down at the remains of Ohio with my hand on the glass. "We beat it… does that return everything to normal?" Reggie shook his head. "But I have a theory. The time keeper records all of history, all the shifts, all the twists, all the everything. I assume that if we expose the beast to the machine, it ought to destroy it." I looked at him. "You assume? You made it, didn't you? But it makes sense. Two time paradoxes touch; they cancel each other out. Poof, time goes back to normal, Ohio, America, they all get saved. Again." Reggie nodded. "Makes sense." "So how do we do it?" I looked at the penny arcade machine, trying to come up with a plan. I felt the familiar buzz come from my head. "I have an idea." I heard Tobias say from behind us.
"It has nothing to do with you killing me, does it? Cause my head told me so." "As much as I would love to see you dead," Tobias said to me. "It does not involve death of any kind." He then looked at the machine. "It does, however, involve a really big boom." The rest of us looked at the machine too, then I got an idea. "Like a big bang. I get what you're saying." "More or less." Tobias remarked. "It needs time to prepare. And by the looks of the shield," He looked out the window. "Time, ironically, is a luxury we cannot afford." I dashed to the window. "Oh crap… that thing's getting in." The creature was pounding and thrashing on the shield and Reggie ran to a computer monitor. "We don't have any time left at all! That shield's giving out any second!"
"How quickly can you turn that machine into a bomb?" Tobias asked Reggie. "I can't." I turned to him. "What do you mean you can't? You said you made it, didn't you?" "Exactly! I didn't build it. That, my time-lost friend…" On cue, the doors to the main hallway opened up to allow a familiar figure to walk in. "Is her department." "Chao Lingshen…" I glowered. "Well… well… well… Scorpion Warrior, I presume?" I grinned. "I haven't called myself that since the kryptonite missile. Which would've been your doing." Chao walked over to the machine. "Don't get your briefs in a twist, Jake. I'm on your side." Then she opened it up. "If it wasn't for you, we wouldn't be in this mess." "How fast can you turn it into a bomb, Chao?" Reggie asked her. "Five minutes, tops." She replied quickly. "Good, cause the shield's almost dead!"
"I will go and distract him." Jacqueline quickly announced. "You can't!" Reggie called out to her. "One touch and you're history. You'll never have existed at all, erased completely from history." "Jacqueline and I are 3,000 year old spirits. We'll survive." Tobias announced. "Maybe so, but what about your hosts?" Reggie remarked. "Besides, you're bonded to your hosts. They disappear, and so will you. The Furious Five will never have been formed. Besides…" He looked at me. "We need somebody who time doesn't affect. Who do we know who's jumped around and messed with the natural order of time?" "Okay, smartass. Say I do kill the beast. What happens then? Everything that I changed after the missile becomes unchanged?" "Well it's better than letting that thing roam free. If it escapes the earth, the whole universe is doomed. That's why I pulled you here. If I hadn't, you would've died." Reggie said to me.
A loud alarm sounded. "Shield's dead! Jake, you have to stall it!" I nodded and catapulted myself through the window and I introduced the beast's face to my left foot. Speaking of feet, the beast slid quite a few. I then backflipped off its face to get some distance between us. "Come on, big boy! You feed off the time stream, then try me!" The creature regain its composure and charged at me. Then I caught it by the snout and pushed it back onto its back. It got back on its feet again and looked at me. "This is fun. I've always wanted to be a rodeo clown." I charged at it and slid underneath it, catching its front feet with a couple strands of webbing. "For a timeless entity, I did not expect it to look like a minotaur." I ran up onto its back and shot some webbing down onto the ground and tied it into a bow in order to trap it there. I then jumped ahead of it… only to see that the webbing was not able to hold it down. At all. Because sand is loose… and doesn't have a solid mass… and I am so stupid for even considering thinking that would work. "Jake! Bomb's ready!" I turned towards the compound to see Tobias chuck it towards me. "Great!" I called back. I was able to turn around in time to see the creature charge me. Then slam into the machine, creating a huge explosion.
Some time later, I woke up to Chao helping me up. "It worked!" She called out. "I don't understand, though. Shouldn't the bomb have sent us back to our times?" I asked her. "Nope. It's true that the creature and the machine making contact with each other would cancel each other out, but we never accounted for you. You're a human time paradox, Jake." She lost me. "You shouldn't be able to remember the things you do, but you do. That helped make a copy of Reggie's machine. All of time has stayed due to the changes you made to it, Jake."
A while later, we were having a celebration in Reggie's new, amazingly awesome lab that didn't look like the run down, barely working, junked wreck of a lab that we were in. Chao went back to Mars in the middle of it, though. "You three ready to go back?" Reggie asked Tobias, Jacqueline, and me. "We talked it over, Reggie, and we would like to stay, Tobias and me." Reggie and I looked at them. "After looking at this place," Tobias began. "I don't want to fight anymore. We grow tired of it." I offered my hand to them and they both shook it. "Well you guys, it's been weird." It truly has. "Jake, are you ready?" I nodded to him. "But… before I go, I never got to ask my second question." "Go ahead." "You know more about me than you let on. Why is that?" "It's simple." Reggie turned to his monitor and started pressing some keys. "I'm your grandson."
Not a second after he said that, he pushed a final button on his monitor, sending me back to my own time period, leaving me to have my reaction in the middle of the Watchtower. "YOU'RE MY WHAT?"
All the superheroes just stared at me. It took me a while to realize where I was. I just looked around and saw all the eyes of all the superheroes who were in the Watchtower look at me. My wife, as of two months ago, Karen, came around a corner and walked up to me. "Jake? Are you okay?" She asked me as she put a hand up to my forehead. Everyone went back to what they were all doing after a few seconds. "Karen… lemme ask you something in private." We walked over to the teleporter room and warped to my apartment. As I was getting dressed, Karen was the first to talk. "Where'd you go? I haven't seen you since yesterday." I looked at her confused as I took the costume's top off. "Yesterday? So… yesterday, I was fighting the Furious Five, then I disappeared, right?" "That's about it." She said as she gave me a kiss. "That's the thing… you might not believe me, but… I was in the future." Her eyes went huge. "You were? Spill everything. What was it like? Did you meet our children?" In her excitement, she ruined my news. Then she slapped her hands over her mouth.
"Our children?" I asked her, with complete and total confusion on my face. "Are you…?" She couldn't hide the huge grin behind her hands and she nodded, holding up two fingers with her hand. Two? The last time I saw her was apparently the day before yesterday. I dropped Robin off in Jump City two weeks ago… so… "Two months?" Karen nodded again. "We're having a baby?" I excitement asked. She couldn't keep her excitement and hugged me tightly, nearly breaking my back. "OW! Karen… I'm not Superman anymore… can't… feel… back…!" Then she let me go. "Sorry! I was just too excited!" The big smile on my face turned into confusion. "So what was your news?" "Well…" I said to her. "You were half right." I told her everything and she had nothing but excitement in her face.