Post by redsycorax on Sept 12, 2023 2:25:04 GMT
On November 9, 1979, Earth-382 experienced a devastating nuclear war that eventually obliterated all humanity on that tragic world. The alien Mysta was the only one who survived the gradual, heartbreaking demise of most of her colleagues within that Earth's premier metahuman team, the Law Enforcement Executive- Flame Girl (Linda Dale), Hangman (Bob Dickering) and Captain Flash (Keith Spencer). In the end, only Mysta and her intangible fellow LEE member Unknown were the last ones left to mourn the deaths of their valued and loved comrades in arms and then their whole world. For the last few years, Mysta has been living on Earth-500 as a member of the Justice Alliance of America. But now...
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JAA SEABASE:
On her own former alternate Earth, someone who would never become a young British soldier and singer named James Blunt had died when London was destroyed in the nuclear exchange that caused the long, tormenting twilight that heralded the end of humanity on that Earth. Here, on Earth-500, where prudence and reason prevailed, though, Blunt had grown to maturity and served in the Central European War when the Czech Republic and Slovakia bloodily burst asunder in the nineties. As did his other iterations who had served in analogous or different theatres of combat, he recorded a song called "No Bravery." It had made a deep impression on Mysta when she had first heard it and she remembered those last grim months in Charlottesville, North Carolina when Keith, Bob and Linda succumbed to radiation poisoning and one of the last surviving groups of humans on the irradiated, dying planet slipped away silently into the night until all that was left were howling winds and echoing slamming doors and tattered and scorched curtains testimony to the utter void where there had once been a vibrant, maturing species. Like many another refugee or resident alien who had made this world their adopted home, she mourned what she had lost. Fortunately, she wasn't alone- her new Justice Alliance colleagues Captain Thunder and Lightning Girl originally came from Earth-964, a similarly devastated alternate Earth whose humanity had succumbed to the funereal darkness following its own tragedy in 1964, leaving them its only survivors apart from Atticus Svoboda, an insane predatory insane scientist. But unlike Willie, Bella and their other Earth-3 colleague Evelyn Dent (Three Face), she didn't integrate as well into her newfound community.
And then, as she was listening to Blunt's mordant masterpiece, Mysta looked up to see her LEE colleague Unknown standing there before her...
"Unknown?!"
"Mysta, you must come with me. There has been a development back in our universe of origin."
"All right, but...what? The Earth we called home is a dead, irradiated wasteland. Our Law Enforcement Executive comrades died agonising, undeserved deaths from radiation poisoning. There's nothing left there."
Rai Ramirez, the Atom, happened on the scene: "You're Myz' former colleague, the Unknown, aren't you? She's told us a lot about the Law Enforcement Executive."
"Rai, do you want to come with us? Unknown, is it safe?"
"Yes, Mysta, it is. His white dwarf matter condensation technology alters his molecular biology, rendering him immune to any residual radiation risk."
Mysta gasped: "What do you mean, 'residual?' I wish it were otherwise, but the environment back home on E382 is deadly. It will take thousands, perhaps millions of years in some cases, for the radioisotope contaminants there to decay down to safe, manageable levels."
"No, Mysta. And I have a welcome surprise for you..."
EARTH-382: MOUNT MORIAH LEE INSTALLATION:
As the Unknown, Mysta and Atom arrived in a place that the alien expatriate lunar colonist had never expected to see again, there were indeed some startling and welcome 'developments' awaiting her. "Myz! Welcome home, old friend!" Flame Girl hugged her former associate, who returned the embrace. Then shock and bewilderment took over:
"Linda!?! Ted?! Keith?! Unknown and I saw all of you perish. We buried you. We mourned you. But... but this isn't a virtual reality simulation, I could tell if that were the case. Or holographier images. Or clones, or androids. None of this makes any sense...oh." Mysta looked at the main viewscreen then, at the fifteen satellites in Earth orbit, and the image that they relayed to the LEE. When she had last seen it, the image had been a hard grey ball of dead stone and grey seas, lifeless and devoid of motion or movement. But now, it was blue and green and brown and bountiful once more.
"What happened? Why are there no signs of the nuclear holocaust that we all went through?"
Captain Flash (Keith Spencer) cleared his throat:
"There's a reason for that, Mysta. When I say it never should have happened, I mean exactly that. You may remember my old opponent, the Mirror Man?"
Mysta frowned: "I always thought that was a misnomer, given that you subsequently found out that he was from a secondary universe and not from a 'mirror world' at all, Keith. Are you saying he was behind what happened?"
"Exactly. Given that he also fought the LEE several times, you'll remember why he was so interested in our own universe."
"Yes, his own secondary universe lacked sufficient total critical mass and was about to encounter entropic death or a 'big crunch.' Wait a minute. Are you saying that he precipitated the War because it might have provided his own with an energy transferal?"
"That's precisely what it did."
"But Keith, no-one was left to reverse it. It worked."
"Actually, that was only a temporary reversal. Mirror Man lacked the ability to make it a permanent or durable development. It only took a cataleptic reaction from a time traveler in the Tau Ceti planetary system to cause the whole configuration of that timeline to amend itself and revert to the way it should have been. As matters now stand, the USSR didn't launch a first strike nuclear attack on the United States on November 9, 1979. Charlottesville didn't become the largest surviving community on the former US east coast. History went on its path. We're about to attend President Carter's second inauguration once this is dealt with." The Unknown responded.
"How did that happen?"
"Oh, the US Air Force and a special forces detachment launched a venture called Operation Eagle Claw to get those hostages out of the Tehran US Embassy. It worked. Iran's in a state of civil war, but we've managed to secure their oil production and distribution centres."
"I'm not sure that's going to be feasible in the long run." Hangman commented ruefully.
"But there is a problem with all this, Mysta. You see, all of us have retained conflicting memories of what happened to us in the timeline we averted. It's meant the number of suicides has skyrocketed and we've had to deal with the consequences of having witnessed nuclear war at second hand 'first hand.' It's meant multilateral progress on comprehensive nuclear disarmament, but we're concerned that Mirror Man might try to claw back this reprieve his own inability to follow through has meant for us."
Mysta came to a decision: "All right. You don't have to ask. It's enough witnessing all of you alive and well again and this world whole and vibrant."
"MIRRORWORLD":
< Oh no no no...> Once there had been a being called "Mirror Man," a tyrannical overlord of a secondary universe attached to that of Earth-382. Once, it had sought to engineer a nuclear war and use its prodigal energies to revitalise its nearly spent sub-universal entropic negativity. It had been unable to permanently secure the result and as a consequence, its fate was now sealed. With the assistance of Professor Rai Ramirez of Ivy Town University and his expertise as a physicist, "Mirror Man's" secondary universe was forever closed off from permeability and interpenetration with Earth-382. And as a consequence, the last individual left within his erstwhile parasitic sub-cosmos, "Mirror Man" opened its mouth to scream, but then it noticed the steadily encroaching darkness and obliteration of even the residual energies within its realm. In an instant, it felt itself falling through a void as its one-time kingdom collapsed, a sensation that would never end as it became frozen in a time loop.
EPILOGUE: LEE HEADQUARTERS:
"No, Rei. I'm not coming back. Can you see why? I've always missed this place. It was my adopted world, I loved and cherished it and then, it was gone, in a matter of months. I only came to E500 because I had to, because I thought I could never come back here. But with this miracle and the restoration of this world, I've regained what I thought I'd irreparably lost, eternally so."
"Yeah, amiga, I can see your point. I'm glad it worked out for you in the end."
"There's another point, I'm afraid, Rei. With "Mirrorworld" permanently sealed off from this one, it means that the events of the last year or so never took place and that the old timeline, in which the LEE died from radiation poisoning in a post-apocalyptic twilight Charlottesville, never took place. Because I'm an alien, I'm the only one that will remember that those events ever took place, given that my humanoid neurobiology differs from yours. The others won't, nor will most of the general population. But as I'm still a member of the LEE, however much I'll treasure my time with the JAA on Earth-500, I'm going to stay here."
"I'll miss you, Myz. I'm sure the others will, too. Perhaps we can visit some time?"
Mysta nodded: "Give my love to Kronos. And goodbye for now." And with that, the Atom's transmatter device took him back to his alternate Earth of origin, as Mysta turned to resume her old life with the Law Enforcement Executive on her beloved Earth-382- home at last.
EPILOGUE 2: JAA SEABASE:
"Thanks for passing that on, Rei."
"There's something else, though, folks. Mysta isn't the only one quitting. So am I."
THE END [3.20 PM, SEPTEMBER 16, 2023]
++
JAA SEABASE:
On her own former alternate Earth, someone who would never become a young British soldier and singer named James Blunt had died when London was destroyed in the nuclear exchange that caused the long, tormenting twilight that heralded the end of humanity on that Earth. Here, on Earth-500, where prudence and reason prevailed, though, Blunt had grown to maturity and served in the Central European War when the Czech Republic and Slovakia bloodily burst asunder in the nineties. As did his other iterations who had served in analogous or different theatres of combat, he recorded a song called "No Bravery." It had made a deep impression on Mysta when she had first heard it and she remembered those last grim months in Charlottesville, North Carolina when Keith, Bob and Linda succumbed to radiation poisoning and one of the last surviving groups of humans on the irradiated, dying planet slipped away silently into the night until all that was left were howling winds and echoing slamming doors and tattered and scorched curtains testimony to the utter void where there had once been a vibrant, maturing species. Like many another refugee or resident alien who had made this world their adopted home, she mourned what she had lost. Fortunately, she wasn't alone- her new Justice Alliance colleagues Captain Thunder and Lightning Girl originally came from Earth-964, a similarly devastated alternate Earth whose humanity had succumbed to the funereal darkness following its own tragedy in 1964, leaving them its only survivors apart from Atticus Svoboda, an insane predatory insane scientist. But unlike Willie, Bella and their other Earth-3 colleague Evelyn Dent (Three Face), she didn't integrate as well into her newfound community.
And then, as she was listening to Blunt's mordant masterpiece, Mysta looked up to see her LEE colleague Unknown standing there before her...
"Unknown?!"
"Mysta, you must come with me. There has been a development back in our universe of origin."
"All right, but...what? The Earth we called home is a dead, irradiated wasteland. Our Law Enforcement Executive comrades died agonising, undeserved deaths from radiation poisoning. There's nothing left there."
Rai Ramirez, the Atom, happened on the scene: "You're Myz' former colleague, the Unknown, aren't you? She's told us a lot about the Law Enforcement Executive."
"Rai, do you want to come with us? Unknown, is it safe?"
"Yes, Mysta, it is. His white dwarf matter condensation technology alters his molecular biology, rendering him immune to any residual radiation risk."
Mysta gasped: "What do you mean, 'residual?' I wish it were otherwise, but the environment back home on E382 is deadly. It will take thousands, perhaps millions of years in some cases, for the radioisotope contaminants there to decay down to safe, manageable levels."
"No, Mysta. And I have a welcome surprise for you..."
EARTH-382: MOUNT MORIAH LEE INSTALLATION:
As the Unknown, Mysta and Atom arrived in a place that the alien expatriate lunar colonist had never expected to see again, there were indeed some startling and welcome 'developments' awaiting her. "Myz! Welcome home, old friend!" Flame Girl hugged her former associate, who returned the embrace. Then shock and bewilderment took over:
"Linda!?! Ted?! Keith?! Unknown and I saw all of you perish. We buried you. We mourned you. But... but this isn't a virtual reality simulation, I could tell if that were the case. Or holographier images. Or clones, or androids. None of this makes any sense...oh." Mysta looked at the main viewscreen then, at the fifteen satellites in Earth orbit, and the image that they relayed to the LEE. When she had last seen it, the image had been a hard grey ball of dead stone and grey seas, lifeless and devoid of motion or movement. But now, it was blue and green and brown and bountiful once more.
"What happened? Why are there no signs of the nuclear holocaust that we all went through?"
Captain Flash (Keith Spencer) cleared his throat:
"There's a reason for that, Mysta. When I say it never should have happened, I mean exactly that. You may remember my old opponent, the Mirror Man?"
Mysta frowned: "I always thought that was a misnomer, given that you subsequently found out that he was from a secondary universe and not from a 'mirror world' at all, Keith. Are you saying he was behind what happened?"
"Exactly. Given that he also fought the LEE several times, you'll remember why he was so interested in our own universe."
"Yes, his own secondary universe lacked sufficient total critical mass and was about to encounter entropic death or a 'big crunch.' Wait a minute. Are you saying that he precipitated the War because it might have provided his own with an energy transferal?"
"That's precisely what it did."
"But Keith, no-one was left to reverse it. It worked."
"Actually, that was only a temporary reversal. Mirror Man lacked the ability to make it a permanent or durable development. It only took a cataleptic reaction from a time traveler in the Tau Ceti planetary system to cause the whole configuration of that timeline to amend itself and revert to the way it should have been. As matters now stand, the USSR didn't launch a first strike nuclear attack on the United States on November 9, 1979. Charlottesville didn't become the largest surviving community on the former US east coast. History went on its path. We're about to attend President Carter's second inauguration once this is dealt with." The Unknown responded.
"How did that happen?"
"Oh, the US Air Force and a special forces detachment launched a venture called Operation Eagle Claw to get those hostages out of the Tehran US Embassy. It worked. Iran's in a state of civil war, but we've managed to secure their oil production and distribution centres."
"I'm not sure that's going to be feasible in the long run." Hangman commented ruefully.
"But there is a problem with all this, Mysta. You see, all of us have retained conflicting memories of what happened to us in the timeline we averted. It's meant the number of suicides has skyrocketed and we've had to deal with the consequences of having witnessed nuclear war at second hand 'first hand.' It's meant multilateral progress on comprehensive nuclear disarmament, but we're concerned that Mirror Man might try to claw back this reprieve his own inability to follow through has meant for us."
Mysta came to a decision: "All right. You don't have to ask. It's enough witnessing all of you alive and well again and this world whole and vibrant."
"MIRRORWORLD":
< Oh no no no...> Once there had been a being called "Mirror Man," a tyrannical overlord of a secondary universe attached to that of Earth-382. Once, it had sought to engineer a nuclear war and use its prodigal energies to revitalise its nearly spent sub-universal entropic negativity. It had been unable to permanently secure the result and as a consequence, its fate was now sealed. With the assistance of Professor Rai Ramirez of Ivy Town University and his expertise as a physicist, "Mirror Man's" secondary universe was forever closed off from permeability and interpenetration with Earth-382. And as a consequence, the last individual left within his erstwhile parasitic sub-cosmos, "Mirror Man" opened its mouth to scream, but then it noticed the steadily encroaching darkness and obliteration of even the residual energies within its realm. In an instant, it felt itself falling through a void as its one-time kingdom collapsed, a sensation that would never end as it became frozen in a time loop.
EPILOGUE: LEE HEADQUARTERS:
"No, Rei. I'm not coming back. Can you see why? I've always missed this place. It was my adopted world, I loved and cherished it and then, it was gone, in a matter of months. I only came to E500 because I had to, because I thought I could never come back here. But with this miracle and the restoration of this world, I've regained what I thought I'd irreparably lost, eternally so."
"Yeah, amiga, I can see your point. I'm glad it worked out for you in the end."
"There's another point, I'm afraid, Rei. With "Mirrorworld" permanently sealed off from this one, it means that the events of the last year or so never took place and that the old timeline, in which the LEE died from radiation poisoning in a post-apocalyptic twilight Charlottesville, never took place. Because I'm an alien, I'm the only one that will remember that those events ever took place, given that my humanoid neurobiology differs from yours. The others won't, nor will most of the general population. But as I'm still a member of the LEE, however much I'll treasure my time with the JAA on Earth-500, I'm going to stay here."
"I'll miss you, Myz. I'm sure the others will, too. Perhaps we can visit some time?"
Mysta nodded: "Give my love to Kronos. And goodbye for now." And with that, the Atom's transmatter device took him back to his alternate Earth of origin, as Mysta turned to resume her old life with the Law Enforcement Executive on her beloved Earth-382- home at last.
EPILOGUE 2: JAA SEABASE:
"Thanks for passing that on, Rei."
"There's something else, though, folks. Mysta isn't the only one quitting. So am I."
THE END [3.20 PM, SEPTEMBER 16, 2023]