So… I'm back to trying to post at least one new thing a month, and here I am, in the literal last hour of November (in my time zone, anyway), trying desperately to keep the promise I made to myself. I'm not 100% sure what I'll be posting for December, but I'm thinking either my first 'Moon Knight' fic, or my first 'Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings' story. Something MCU, anyway. But for now, here's a little Arrowverse!

This is set in between 'Housewarming' and 'The Cold Factor' in my 'Long Way Home' series, so during the time skip between Seasons 1 and 2 of 'Legends of Tomorrow'.

I admit, I was not aiming for their revenge to be so silly when I first started writing this. And I may or may not have come up with the details of their plan and written the vast majority of this fic less than 24 hours before posting.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own 'Legends of Tomorrow' or any of its characters. The 47 Rōnin and the people associated with their story were real historical figures, and are also therefore not mine.

WARNING: Vague mentions of bestiality, but not by any of the characters.

WORD COUNT: 2,179

Monday, September 5th, 1960

"So glad this is finally over," Jax moaned as he trudged up the ramp and into the cargo bay, "I just wanna sleep for a week."

"Seconded," Sara sighed, leaning against Len in exhaustion.

The Legends had had a harrowing week, dealing with Time Pirates whose meddling had set off a butterfly effect that would have caused the formation of the Republic of Mali to not happen. They were so tired right now, they wouldn't even be able to recount how it all happened, just that it ended in a big fight with the Pirates, and that the timeline was left relatively intact at the conclusion, which was good enough for them, thank you very much. And now they were all returning to the Waverider, all but two exhausted and dragging their feet.

The first exception was Ray, who credited his current energy levels to an obscene amount of coffee and energy drinks, and who also freely admitted that all that caffeine was bound to wear off soon, so he was also mentally preparing for the inevitable crash and planning to get to his bed as soon as possible.

As for the other exception, well, he was waiting for them on the bridge…

"Alright, everyone," Rip announced, "Strap in!"

"Wait, what?" Mick grumbled, blinking confusedly.

"I beg your pardon?" Stein asked, barely managing to keep his manners despite his exhaustion.

"We have a new Aberration in eighteenth-century Japan that needs to corrected quickly. So, we need to get going."

Ignoring the resounding chorus of groans, the Time Captain strode over to the pilot's chair and sat down, already charting their next course.

Monday, July 27th, 1702 (Genroku 15, on the Eleventh Day of the Sixth Month – 元禄十五年六月十一日)

The Aberration was definitely one that would have a large cultural impact. Somehow, someone had slipped important information to a court official named Kira Yoshinaka, specifically a vague warning that Ōishi Yoshio would pose a threat to his life in the near future. Why was that important? Because Ōishi Yoshio was the leader of the famed Forty-Seven Rōnin, who killed Kira in revenge for the death of their master. Their vendetta would go on to inspire many kabuki plays, television shows, movies, and other forms of media. With Ōishi's death, the assassination would never succeed, and the tale of the Forty-Seven Rōnin would be, if not forgotten, then at least drastically altered.

So they had to intercept the messenger who carried the warning and replace it with something vague and neutral, as the messenger would notice if it simply went missing. That wouldn't have been so bad if Rip hadn't gotten the date wrong; they were all set up at a market square that the messenger would be passing through, ready to create a planned commotion that was supposed to result in him briefly losing his bag, creating the opportunity to pull off the switch.

However, because Rip had gotten the date wrong, the Legends had spent the whole day – literally sunrise to sunset, and longer – loitering in the market waiting for the messenger that never came. They'd gotten more than enough curious looks, as an obvious bunch of foreigners who hung around the specific area for hours on end with no evident purpose. And then Mick had fallen asleep in someone's vegetable cart…

He really hadn't planned on it, but that was the inevitable result of finishing an exhausting mission late at night and then time-jumping to early morning with no rest period in between.

Even though they had taken shifts watching the courtyard, Rip always had something for the people off courtyard duty to do. Whether it was making repairs or modifications to yet another part of the ship, or scouting the roads to see if the messenger was finally coming, if it "needed" to be done instead of sleeping, they were asked to do it.

All in all, their first day was a failure, and the Legends as a whole were a very angry and irritable bunch. And that was something that Rip Hunter would soon learn to fear…

It started with Len. Literal days of non-sleep had taken its toll on the crook, and while he was no stranger to all-nighters in pursuit of a score, this was taking it too far, in his opinion. The spark of the idea formed when – while taking a shift in the marketplace with Jax on the second day, he was treated to the younger man's grumbling complaints about all the repairs Rip was having him do. Specifically, the Captain currently had him working on the doors to the newly-refurbished library. Jax went on about the mechanisms that opened and closed and locked and unlocked the doors, and how annoying it had been to replace more than half of them. At least now he was nearly finished the job.

Len had given his watch partner a considering look, and then asked if the kid would mind showing him how the doors worked.

Then there was Ray. The inventor, throughout the course of their temporal heroics, would occasionally have fits of inspiration and tinker with the futuristic devices that littered their time ship. The holographic projectors were a particular interest of his, and he had spent countless hours in the lab until he finally managed to replicate one of his own. He had then "treated" the rest of the team to a hologram-produced version of some future science documentary that only Stein really understood, let alone liked.

Len had cornered him after coming off his shift with Jax, asking him if he could play anything in particular, or if it had to be filmed with holograms in mind.

From there, the team's resident Klepto had spoken to his partner, to his girlfriend, and to the Professor, and they all agreed that something had to be done. It had taken careful work, having to either discuss their plans with their comms muted while off the ship, or disguise their activities as something else while on board, in order to prevent Gideon from catching on, as Len estimated a fifty-fifty chance that she would tattle on them.

(Well, Maybe sixty-forty. Gideon was known for being rather stern with them when they disregarded her medical recommendations and went and did something that slowed the recovery of whatever injuries they had received. Therefore, the odds were in favour of her agreeing that Rip's actions were endangering the health of his team and siding with them.)

They still managed to complete their mission on the second day. Mick started a brawl with one of the foreign traders in the market (as they didn't need the entire town turned against them, which was more likely to happen if he messed with a local), the messenger had come through and been forced to stop his horse, lest he trample an innocent person, and Len had swapped the Aberration-inducing message with their fake one while under the guise of helping calm the frightened animal.

When they got back, they accepted Rip's congratulations on solving the latest Aberration with eye-rolls and gimlet stares.

Then, Jax had claimed he'd gotten a second wind, and that he was going to finish up the last modifications to the library doors. He also invited Len to help him, so that he could learn how they worked, while Ray and Stein scampered off to their lab to discuss the latest experiment Ray had been working on (some kind of new protective casing, or perhaps it was the new, long-lasting battery). After a change of clothes, Sara had poked her head into Rip's parlour (where he was wide awake at this hour, having managed to get some sleep in while the rest of his team had not, the bastard) and asked him if he could help her find some small throwing knives that she had lost. She was pretty sure it was in the library, and he had been doing a bunch of organising in there, and she suspected that he had moved her knives around without realising it.

On their way there, Rip passed Ray and Stein in the hallway, the two scientists finally heading off to bed. (If Rip had paused to think about, he would have realised that they were coming from the direction of the library, and not the lab.) Right outside the library, Jax had one wall panel open and was showing Len the different parts and what they did, such as pulling the lock out of place or allowing Gideon to control the moving parts. Rip barely paid them any notice, and he and Sara began to search the library, although Rip soon grew tired of the task and suggested that Sara just get Gideon to fabricate him some new ones.

Her response was certainly not one that he had expected. Before Rip could blink, Sara had flipped him over her shoulder and onto the floor. She bolted out of there, tripping the motion sensor that Len had set up while Rip had been distracted. A hologram projector whirred to life, displaying an animal that Rip would much prefer to never see again anytime soon: an alpaca. Memories of their disastrous mission in Peru (although certain other Legends had different opinions on the meaning of the word 'disaster', in this particular case) came unbidden to his mind, and Rip scrambled up with a colourful swear.

He marched over to the door, fully intent on demanding what the bloody hell had possessed Sara to attack him in such a manner, only for the door to slide shut and lock itself in his face. He slapped the door once before turning around (suppressing a shudder at the now-screaming alpaca hologram) to exit via the other door.

Except, unfortunately, that door was also shutting and locking itself in place. It seemed that, whilst Mr. Snart had been examining the moving parts he had just been shown, Jax had gone over to the second door to do "one last inspection" before heading to bed.

"Gideon!" he snapped, "Let me out of here!"

"My apologies, Captain," Gideon's voice echoed, "But I am afraid I am unable to do so. Misters Jackson and Snart have removed the mechanism that controls the locks, and they have also unplugged the cables connecting me to the doors' systems."

Rip fumed. "And why the bloody hell would they do that?!"

"If I had to guess, Captain Hunter, it may have something to do with the fact that you have forced your entire crew to stay awake for more than seventy-two hours." For an AI, Gideon was using quite a sardonic tone of voice at this time.

"Seventy- It hasn't been that long, has it?!"

"Indeed it has."

Shaking his head, Rip rubbed his temples, already feeling a headache coming on. The loud noises coming from the holograms – now displaying multiple alpacas trotting around the library – was decidedly not helping, so he decided that the first order of business would be to shut the infernal device off. He soon located the projector, but was dismayed to find it covered in some sort of protective casing, made of the strongest materials known to man thanks to a little Firestorm transmutation.

"Doctor Palmer wants me to pass on the fact that he wishes you luck trying to access the holographic projector," Gideon chimed in, "He also adds that the battery powering it is a new design of his, capable of lasting more than sixty hours at the current rate of power usage."

Just when Rip thought it couldn't get any worse, the holograms then shifted to something much more… adult-oriented. More specifically, something geared towards a small subset of adults who enjoyed viewing encounters between humans and various members of the animal kingdom, such as the alpaca.

(Mick had explicitly warned Haircut not to view this section of the video loop when he edited it together. "It's sure as fuck not my thing," the arsonist had clarified vehemently, "but I know where you can find all the weirdest shit on the internet, and this is gonna melt his brain.")

Meanwhile, Gideon continued as if there was nothing wrong with the scene playing out in front of her horrified Captain. "The Legends have informed me that someone will come to release you once they have all gotten a minimum of eight hours of sleep. I would recommend an appropriate amount of grovelling and apologising, as some have been discussing leaving you in place for a longer period of time."

In the end, it took twelve hours for the better-rested crew finally freed their sleep-deprived and frazzled Captain. They then told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was to pick a time zone and stick with it, allowing his team to have something resembling a normal sleeping routine. Rip himself had difficulty sleeping after a non-stop loop of alpacas for twelve hours, and eventually (grudgingly) admitted that he had made an error in judgement.

Just, please, please, please… No more alpacas.

Ever.

THE END

No, I'm not gonna explain the alpaca thing. It was mentioned in Chapter 9 of 'The Cold Factor', and I have every intention of leaving it as a Noodle Incident forever. Feel free to let your imaginations run wild!