8FOLD: Daylighters # 8, "Tempus Fudge It"

[Tom Russell]

As humanity prepares to join the war in space, alien agents work with
fifth columnists to weaken the earth's defenses. They are opposed by a
decentralized network of superheroes and specialists, the DAYLIGHTERS,
whose efforts are guided by the sophisticated AI network MEDUSA. But
Medusa, and the Daylighters, have been compromised...

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|_____/ \__,_|\__, |_|_|\__, |_| |_|\__\___|_|  |___/
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              |___/     |___/  [8F-196] [PW-41]

      # 8 - TEMPUS FUDGE IT

------- MISSION: BLACK HILLS ---------------

Pam Bierce, LOOP, age 31.
Chronomancer. Isolated for six years during which she was presumed
dead; still adjusting to her new life and mystical time travel
abilities.

LOBSTERMAN, age 45.
Super-strong monster. Ex-villain serving time in prison, on work release.

Dan Washburn, STRIKEOUT, age 37.
Throws objects with great speed, force, and accuracy. Accountant.

Lola Brodeur, DUST DEVIL, age 23.
Cyclonic cyborg. Student.

------- FEATURING --------------------------

Derek Mason, BLUE BOXER, age 26.
Accident-prone gadgeteer largely retired from field work. Founder of
the Daylighters, concentrating on big picture solutions.

Kate Morgan, SHIMMER, age 29.
Phases through solid matter. Concert pianist. Presently trapped on the
other side of a mirror by Rainshade, who is impersonating her.

--------------------------------------------

Derek had described the costume machine as being something akin to a
3D printer, but that wasn't particularly helpful since Pam didn't know
what a 3D printer was. If they were around in twenty-oh-eight, they
were almost certainly nerd stuff and she was too busy doing bounty
hunter stuff. But however the thing worked, it worked, and within a
few hours of finalizing the design - simple black and white, with a
very slight hourglass motif - she's pulling it on. Once she puts on
the mask, the only bit of her skin that's exposed is the lower half of
her face.
   She finds Derek in the kitchen, pouring over the laptop he uses to
run his business. Pam stands in the doorway, lazily striking a pose:
"Well, squirt? Whaddaya think?"
   Derek glances over at her, then mumbles: "You look very nice."
   "Very nice?" says Pam. "I was expecting you to drool a little. You
used to be such a pervert."
   "Yes, well." Derek shifts uncomfortably. "I've realized that in the
past that my behavior and comments toward my female friends and
colleagues hasn't always been appropriate, and am trying to be a
better person."
   "You realized?" Pam raises an eyebrow.
   "Claire realized it for me," says Derek. "But I really am trying to
be better, and not say things like, 'geez, Pam, it looks like you were
poured into that'."
   "That's more like it," Pam grins. She sits at the table. "Speaking
of Sexy Gandalf, where is she?"
   "I'm not sure," says Derek. "She'll disappear for a few days at a time."
   "I've noticed."
   "Some kind of magic thing," he shrugs. "I honestly can't follow
half of the stuff she tells me."
   "You don't listen, you mean."
   "No, I listen," he insists. Pam thinks she's struck a nerve. "I
just don't have a head for it. Give me something that obeys the laws
of physics, I'm your guy. There are no rules for magic, so there's
nothing for me to hold onto."
   "No rules, huh?" says Pam.
   "Well," says Derek. "Claire says there's one rule. Magic should
always have a cost."
   "If you don't mind me making an observation?" says Pam.
   "Go ahead."
   "You guys are a weird couple."
   "I guess," says Derek. "Longest relationship I ever been in though.
So something's working."
   "How long is that?"
   Derek squints while he counts in his head. "Ten months."
   "Ten months," repeats Pam. "That's your record? I thought you and
Knockout Mouse would've been together longer than that."
   "Yes and no," says Derek. "Like, cumulatively, yes, but it was
never more than four months at a time. We, uh, we broke up a lot. Can
we like not talk about my love life anymore?"
   "Well, we ain't gonna talk about mine," says Pam.
   "Maybe it's time you put yourself back out there," says Derek.
   Pam shakes her head. "For six years it was like I was the only
person in the world. I kinda forgot what other people are like.
Sometimes it's still surprising to hear a voice that isn't mine. It
doesn't feel real."
   "Are you getting overwhelmed, being around people?"
   "No, it's not that. I like being around people. I like going on
missions, actually. There's something that we're focusing on, and that
keeps things on a sorta superficial level. I think that's what I need
right now. I don't know if I can handle someone, you know, touching
me."
   Saying it makes her feel stupid and vulnerable. And that's not who
she wants to be. The mancer's mark glows underneath her glove.
   "Maybe it's time you put yourself back out there," says Derek again
for the first time.
   "I'll think about it," lies Pam.

She feels more comfortable around Derek - he's basically the only
person from her old life still kicking around - but not comfortable
enough to actually talk to him about anything that matters. Part of it
is that he doesn't feel like the same Derek. He was so awkward and
hesitant way back when, so needy and so angry, and now he has a sort
of quiet confidence. That came with a cost, though. His eyes are
always worried and sad. He's twenty-six going on forty.
   And part of it is that she doesn't feel like the same Pam. There's
something empty and restless that gnaws at her insides, something that
didn't used to be there six years ago. It's easier to focus on things
that are tangible and external, so she throws herself into that, into
tooling around the kitchen and going on missions.
   While on one of those missions, Strikeout explained how Derek
assembles teams. Generally, there were one or two key individuals that
the whole thing was built around - people with situation-specific
powers or expertise. "But then he fills out the roster with utility
players. Folks whose powers are generally useful in most situations.
There are a lot of those, and so he just looks at who isn't busy and
plops them in."
   Pam's powers fit that bill, and she ain't busy. She's travelled
more in the last few weeks than she had her whole entire life before:
Moscow, Paris, Buenos Aires, Lemuria, et cetera. She's teamed up with
Knockout Mouse, Julie Ann Justice, Fahrenheit Man, Dinosaur Princess,
et cetera. Defeated Doctor Despair, King Kudzu, the Living Ballad, the
Flying Dutchman, et cetera.
   She's good at the job, though how much of it is actual skill and
how much of it is having the ability to call a mulligan whenever she
wants, she doesn't know. But she was good at her old job, too.
Likewise, everyone she works with seems to like her, and that had also
been the case way back when. And so, it's when she's running around in
a goofy costume and time-traveling her way out of one impossible
crisis after another that she feels the most like her old self. The
most normal.

A few days later, Derek needs to fill a slot and Pam has a whole lot
of nothing scheduled, so one costume change and one teleport later,
she's meeting Strikeout, Dust Devil, and Lobsterman in the black hills
to investigate reports of a cyborg t-rex.
   "Wouldn't Dinosaur Princess be good for this?" she asks Strikeout.
   "She would be, but she's attending Cascade's wedding in Lemuria,"
he explains. "But we got the big guy in case things escalate." [1]
   "Big guy Lobsterman," says Lobsterman.
   "I figured," says Pam. "I didn't think it was this one." She points
to Dust Devil casually. Something sad flickers across the girl's eyes,
badly hidden behind a forced, gawky smile that's all teeth. The head
is too big for her body, the same way her smile is too big for her
face. But it's not really her body: it's a wire skeleton, metal and
plastic in earth tones, the limbs too long and too thin, the torso
just wide enough at the shoulders to support her neck and tapering to
a point before snapping into the pelvic joint that connects the legs.
The only thing that looks human is her face and her neck.
   Probably she's been pointed at a lot, and surprise-surprise, it
doesn't make her feel great. Pam immediately regrets it; with a
swallowed breath she takes it back, and it never happened at all.
   "Lobsterman punch stupid dinosaur."
   "Maybe," says Strikeout. "Remember what we talked about last time?
About using our words first?"
   "Baseball man dumb. Dinosaurs don't words. Dinosaurs dumb. Dumb
like baseball man."
   "Strikeout. You can call me Strikeout."
   "Baseball man," says Lobsterman with a nod.
   "I don't like being called baseball man."
   "You only baseball man that Lobsterman friends with." With one of
his huge claws, he rubs his lower chin. "Also Verlander."
   "Look, Lobsterman," says Strikeout, "we just don't want you
punching this thing as soon as it shows up. We need to get a handle on
what the situation is. We don't want a repeat of when you punched that
ambassador."
   "Dinosaur not ambassador."
   "No, that's not the point," begins Strikeout.
   "Ambassador confused Lobsterman. Was his fault."
   Strikeout buries his face in his mitt.
   "Well. It was."
   "It's just that, punching isn't always the solution to every problem."
   Lobsterman laughs. "Baseball man dumb. Punching best solution.
Lobsterman punch dinosaur."

The first step of the plan is called "early warning reconnaissance".
The chances are that as soon as they see the cyborg t-rex, said cyborg
t-rex will see them, and given the speed of a t-rex (cyborg or
otherwise!), that might be too late. So as soon as someone spots it,
Pam will wind back time a full three minutes (or as near to that as
she is able) and alert everyone to its current location. The two boys
go one way, and the two women another.
   At somewhat regular intervals, Dust Devil takes to the air, winding
herself like a top and then spinning upward. When she attains the
proper altitude, her top half stops spinning while her legs and
independent pelvis joint keep the dusty cyclone going. Then, with a
few spinning spurts, she descends.
   "Nothing yet," she says, her French accent heavy. She looks at Pam.
"You've been very quiet."
   Pam shifts uncomfortably. "I just don't have a lot to say."
   "Most people ask questions. How did it happen? Can you eat, do you
go to the toilet, can you make love, do you feel anything? Do you
sleep? Do you dream? Do you miss being human?" She smiles, all teeth
again. "As if I ever stopped. How much of you is human: they're
looking for a percentage. Do you wish you had died; you're so brave,
if I was you I couldn't handle it."
   "That sucks," says Pam. She wishes she had something more profound
to say, but she doesn't. "That really sucks. That's kinda why I didn't
ask. I figured it was your business and if it was something you wanted
to talk about, you would."
   "I don't mind talking about it," says Dust Devil. "It's just that
people either ask me questions and make their little comments, or they
just don't talk to me at all, because they're afraid they're going to
say the wrong thing and make me fall apart." She raps her chest. "It's
very sturdy, I assure you. I'm not so fragile."
   Pam nods. "So, one question."
   "Okay."
   "What's it like? Up there?"
   "To fly?" She beams. "There are no words for it. Not even in
French, and we have words for everything. I lost a lot," she sweeps
her spindly hands over her long mechanical body, "but I got the sky in
return. The sky is worth it." Her smile settles into something warm
and lingering. "Thank you for asking. It was a wonderful question,
Loop."
   "Call me Pam."
   "Lola," says the girl. With that, she spirals up into the sky
again. Quicker than before, she returns. "What luck," she says. "I
found the big monster, maybe three or four kilometers that way."
   Pam unwinds the strands of time, and she and Lola become strangers
once again.

Kate doesn't know how long she's been on this side of the mirror.
Hours, days, weeks? She doesn't get hungry; there's no food even if
she did want to eat. She's tried to sleep, but nothing happens, and
she doesn't get tired. There are no clocks, and without her Medusa she
doesn't have a way to keep time. The light outside the window never
changes. She opened the blinds once, and she doesn't remember what
happened, but she knows not to do it again.
   She glares at the mirror. Tap it twice, Rainshade had said, and we
can talk. Kate doesn't want to talk to her. Kate won't talk to her.
She won't give her the satisfaction.
   You'd be surprised who you'll talk to when you're lonely, Rainshade
had said, but here's the thing: Kate ain't lonely. She can handle
being alone. What she can't handle is being bored, and being confined
to this tiny mirror universe apartment where she doesn't have to (and
can't) eat or sleep, where she has no concept of time passing, is
going to drive her bonkers. Is driving her bonkers.
   It takes her one minute and thirty seconds (or close enough for
horseshoes and hand grenades) to complete a circuit of the apartment,
walking through each room in turn. She knows because she counted
locomotives the first time around. Her body doesn't get tired here, so
she can simply walk, counting each circuit, and bingo, she has a way
to keep time going forward. Forty times around is an hour, eighty
times around is two, nine hundred sixty is a day, six thousand seven
hundred is just shy of a week.
   But at some point after that she finds herself walking and not
counting. What was the last number she remembered? Was it seven
thousand? Was it eight thousand? Was it twenty? She doesn't know. She
should have been making tally marks.
   Maybe there's a pencil or pen in that box of books. She digs in,
and no such luck. It's too much for her, and she starts crying, and
the minute she starts crying she remembers the last time she cried.
When she lost count the first time.
   The first time?
   Yes, she thinks to herself, the first time, there definitely was a
first time. Maybe this was the second time, or maybe the third, or the
eighth.
   "I can't keep doing this," Kate says to nobody. "I need to do something."
   She finds a tarot deck, and for a short, indeterminate, untrackable
amount of time, that's something: flipping over the cards, examining
the illustrations, pretending she has any idea what they're supposed
to mean. She gets bored of it rather quickly - she starts bored, and
only gets more bored. Soon she's not even looking at the cards, just
idly flipping them onto the floor, then scooping them up, shuffling,
and flipping them again. She happens to look down, and every card she
has flipped over is the Queen of Cups: every card in the deck is the
Queen of Cups. Was that always the case? Or did the cards change?
   She looks over at the box of books. Maybe it's not the first time
she's done it. Maybe before she dismissed the idea out of hand; she
can't read the books, they're all printed backwards on this side of
the mirror. But whether this is the first time or the eighth, she
takes out one of the books.
   It's hard at first, and slow. By the time she gets to the end of a
line, she's forgotten what came before it. Getting through the first
page is an agony; the second, a triumph. But after some time - how
much time, she'll never know - it becomes as natural as reading on the
right side of the mirror.
   After finishing the first book, she starts the second. It's in
French, and she definitely flunked French in high school, but she
remembers enough words that she can figure out the gist of it, and
soon she begins remembering words she never knew in the first place.
   As she puts the finished book aside and digs into the box once
more, she sees a book that wasn't there before. It's an old book, the
pages delicate, the letters unlike any she has ever seen either
backwards or forwards. But she reads it just the same, and to her
surprise, she understands every word.

The next step in what Strikeout insists on calling his "playbook"
involves hitting the big galoot with enough tranquilizer to knock it
out without killing it. "We can't kill it; I promised Dinosaur
Princess," Strikeout explains, half-kidding and half-terrified. "Loop,
we're going to have you do the honors." He hands Pam a ginormous dart
gun.
   "Aren't you supposed to be good at aiming things?" says Pam.
   "Throwing them, yes," says Strikeout. "Not so great with a gun. I
hear you're a crack shot, though."
   She's about to remind him that he actually saw her work firsthand,
in the sewers of Buenos Aires. Then she stops herself: that big fight
never happened, not anymore. She's the only one that will ever
remember it. [2]
   With Medusa's help, Strikeout picks a spot for the ambush. "Dust
Devil will cyclone me up," he explains, "and I'll bean him with a
baseball so he comes running to us. Both the Devil and I can engage
with it at what I hope will be a safe distance, keep it occupied long
enough for Loop to seal the deal."
   "What about Lobsterman?" pouts Lobsterman.
   "Lobsterman, I need you to hide over there," says Strikeout.
"You're going to be our secret weapon."
   "Lobsterman secret."
   "If something goes wrong, you need to come out and come out swinging."
   "Lobsterman punch dinosaur?"
   "Yes, as a last resort."
   "Lobsterman knew baseball man his friend."
   "Alright," says Strikeout. "Let's get this show on the road."
   Lola wraps her metal arms around Strikeout's chest from behind and
lifts him into the skies. It makes Pam dizzy just looking at them.
Once they're in the air, he winds back his arm. Pam sees the white
something move and blur like the streak of a comet, and a second after
it leaves her field of vision, she hears a rumble. At first it sounds
like thunder, but there's not a cloud in the sky; it's a roar.
   I've heard a t-rex roar, she realizes. And I'm going to see a
t-rex, and then I'm going to shoot it with darts.
   "Lobsterman punch dinosaur!" exclaims Lobsterman, running in that
general direction.
  "Lobsterman, no! Not yet!" calls Pam from her hiding place.
   In the distance, she hears him shout his name. A moment later, the
rex comes stomping into the ambush zone, carrying half of a Lobsterman
in its gnashing robotic jaws.
   There's something wrong with it, Pam realizes as she starts to wind
back time. Yes, he's got a lot of metal parts, very much a cyborg, but
the parts that look organic look sick and decayed. Dead. A cyborg
zombie t-rex that just killed Lobsterman.
   Pam takes them back to the moment just before the rex got pegged by
the baseball. This was a mistake, and she knows it was a mistake when
she did it. Once she winds back to a particular moment in time and
hits play again, once she creates a new timeline, she can't rewind
past that point. She should have gone back further to begin with. She
would have gone back further, but she was acting on instinct, reeling
from the shock and revulsion of seeing Lobsterman's body like that.
   And he's going to be like that again if Pam doesn't do something in
the next twenty seconds or so.
   "Lobsterman!" she calls to him, fighting to be heard over the roar.
"Lobsterman, don't do it! If you do it, I won't be your friend!"
   He shrugs. "You not Lobsterman friend anyway. Lobsterman punch dinosaur!"
   "Medusa, quick," says Pam. "Will the dose kill him?"
   "No," says Medusa. Pam pulls the trigger and Lobsterman collapses.
   "You tranked Lobsterman?" says Strikeout as he and Lola touch down.
   "Long story," says Pam. "He'll be fine. If he doesn't move, the
t-rex can't see him."
   "That's not actually true."
   "Another reason we should have Dinosaur Princess."
   "We use what we got," says Strikeout. "Devil, can you move him out of sight?"
   She nods and skips forward, turning herself into a sideways cyclone
that speeds toward Lobsterman's body on the other side of the ambush
zone. It is just before she picks him up that the rex's head appears
and snatches her out of the air.
   Lola starts to scream, but never finishes, and in the space of a
breath, she's in the sky again - in that place for which she has no
words - and Strikeout is throwing his baseball to get the rex's
attention.
   "Strikeout," says Pam through her Medusa comm, "heads up, I have to
trank Lobsterman before the rex can see him."
   "What?" says Strikeout.
   "What?" says Lobsterman, immediately before he collapses in a pile
in the shadows.
   Lola and Strikeout assume their positions on the ground.
   "By the way," says Pam, "pretty sure it's a cyborg zombie t-rex."
   "Noted," says Strikeout.
   A moment later, the dinosaur rushes into the ambush zone. Strikeout
immediately begins pelting it with one baseball after another. He's
holding back; he could easily throw these things at close to the speed
of sound. But if he did that, he risks killing the rex instead of
taking it alive.
   The rex has no such qualms however, and swiftly turns its attention
toward the little thing that's irritating it. Strikeout takes this as
his cue to fall back.
   At the same time, Lola is whirling her mechanical arms at
incredible speeds, each generating its own tiny cyclone. She holds out
her arms and a blast of wind slams into the rex's metal face.
   It recoils enough to give Pam a clean shot at its organic chest.
She doesn't miss.
   Neither does he go down.
   She shoots him twice more; she figures if three is too many, she
can always wind that last one back. But three isn't even enough. Nor
four.
   "Medusa?"
   "If it is a quote cyborg zombie t-rex unquote, there might not
actually be organic material to tranquilize. It might be all machine,
moving the rest of it as a sort of puppet."
   "Great," says Pam.
   The rex brings his foot down on Lola, crushing her to bits. Then,
she's in the sky again, Strikeout in tow.
   Only instead of starting again just before he threw the baseball,
it's starting again just after Pam shot Lobsterman. This is the other
problem with Pam's powers; if she uses them too often without a break,
the time that she's able to jump back grows shorter and shorter.
   She throws the trank gun to the ground. "The rex isn't alive, it's
all machine, can't be tranked."
   "Then we have to destroy it," says Strikeout. "No one tell Dinosaur
Princess I said that."
   This time around Strikeout is playing for keeps. Boom! Boom! Boom!
One white blur after another cracks through the air, and then rips
through machinery and flesh. Thud! Thud! Thud! As they fling out of
the other side, Lola flits out of their way, dodging them nimbly,
slamming the rex's big ugly head with pulses of wind and dust. The rex
snarls and snaps its jaws, but Lola keeps out of reach.
   That's when its cybernetic eye glows red, and a beam of light rips
through Lola's head with a wet red sound. Before her lifeless body has
the chance to hit the ground, she is dodging Strikeout's supersonic
baseballs.
   "Laser!" yells Pam.
   Lola dips down just in time, and takes the calculated risk of
flying under the rex's belly. As she comes out the other side, a swat
of its tail sends her flying into a rock, splitting open her skull.
   "You gotta stop dying, kid," says Pam as Lola dodges the rex's
laser. "Watch out for the tail."
   This time she does, and as she flings herself skyward, she calls
down to Strikeout. "Dan, I need some moons!"
   Gently and quickly, he lobs a series of baseballs to her. She
catches them in her wind, and they spiral around her. And then all of
her is spinning, not just her legs, but all of her, like an electric
drill, and she dives into the rex's back.
   There's a sound like shears chewing into cement, and the baseballs
fly out of the rex from the inside. In a matter of seconds, the rex
comes apart at the seams, split in two.
   Lola emerges from its chest just before it splits, landing on the
ground. The metal parts of her body are severely damaged. She can't
walk, let alone fly. And that's when twenty thousand pounds of cyborg
dinosaur lands on her.
   "No," says Pam, and she takes it back, but Lola is already in the
rex. She tells her to hurry, to get out of the way, but the girl isn't
fast enough.
   "No," says Pam, but Lola is already on the ground, the body of the
beast already coming down on her.
   "No," says Pam, but Lola is already gone.
   "No," she says, again and again, leaping back a second, a
half-second, the flutter of an eye, a heartbeat, again and again like
a broken record, until it seems that time isn't moving at all.
   "No," she says, and everything hurts: the mark on her hand, the
blood in her veins, the air in her lungs, and everything is white and
then everything is black.
   "No," she says, and now Strikeout is asking Lobsterman not to call
him baseball man, and Lola is standing to the side, apart and alone.
   "You're alive!" Pam rushes in and squeezes her metal body.
   "I don't think we've met," says Lola, wide-eyed.
   Pam lets her go, and the moment she does, everything starts
spinning. Strikeout helps her sit down on a rock.
   "I didn't know I could do that," she mumbles.
   "Didn't know you could do what?"
   "It's a cyborg zombie t-rex," says Pam. "With laser eyes. The
tranquilizer won't work. It's not alive."
   "Then we need a new plan," says Strikeout. "We'll work on that
later. Right now we need to make sure you're okay."
   "I just need to catch my breath a minute," says Pam.
   Strikeout frowns.
   "What?" she says.
   "I'm no expert on this magic stuff. But I don't think it's supposed
to glow like that."
   Pam is about to tell him that the mark on her hand glows all the
time. She looks down at it, and expects as usual to see its intricate
lines glowing faintly through her costume. And it does that, only it's
not just a little circle on her hand. There are glowing lines
stretching out into her fingers, curls winding their way up her elbow,
parallel bands of light climbing up to her shoulder.
   Her whole arm is glowing. Her whole arm hurts. It never stopped hurting.
   Pam shudders. Everything goes white, and then everything goes black.




COPYRIGHT (C) 2020 TOM RUSSELL.

Medusa created by Drew Nilium and Tom Russell.