Post by DocQuantum on Jun 12, 2017 1:34:13 GMT
Chapter 1: All Through the Night
by Libbylawrence
Earth-Two, September, 1986:
"I just want to run away! I don't want to be here anymore!"
The words were an all-too-familiar refrain to a teenager named Cindy Reynolds, but they carried a certain poignancy as the pretty girl stood alone in a park. There were other people strolling through the pastoral setting, but most of them were paired off in groups of two or more, and their very togetherness made Cindy feel more alone than ever.
She noticed them, of course, and she saw them and heard them. Their laughter and their small gestures of companionship or intimacy intruded on her thoughts in spite of her preoccupation and her sorrow. She had always been a keen observer of her surroundings. She couldn't help but watch and listen, absorbing even the smallest details of the world around her, the world she had so often felt excluded from by both her feelings and her inclinations. She had always been that way. Even as a child, she'd been bright and intelligent, but she'd also been peculiar, or at least different from other kids. She could become lost in her own fantasy world at times, since her imagination had always been more welcoming than the world she didn't always want to accept as her reality.
Cindy whispered to herself, "Stranger on a stranger world! I don't belong here. I'm like Dorothy in Oz, or Alice in Wonderland, but there are no ruby slippers to take me back home, and the only rabbit holes I find lead me to one nutcase after another who wants to rule the world!"
She referred to the fact that this world was not really her world of origin. This parallel Earth had been given the name Earth-Two by some of the heroes she'd heard about, and while it was like the Earth she knew in many ways, it still lacked the things that made her feel secure or at least reminded her of home.
Yet had home itself ever been secure? She remembered growing up in a suburb of Detroit called Birmingham in Oakland County, Michigan. Her dad Herbert had always been a jovial man who enjoyed simple pleasures like watching television shows from his younger days, or listening to old music on the radio. He worked hard at a factory as a plant manager, and he loved his wife and children, but he never seemed to embrace the modern world so much as he merely endure it while longing for a nostalgic past that may have only existed in his daydreams. He wasn't a cruel man, but for some reason as the years passed and the small disappointments of life added up into a bigger heartache, Herb Reynolds expressed his feelings with a loud and angry voice. He yelled and yelled, and his wife Marion responded by yelling back or just slamming the door to their room and weeping.
Cindy didn't understand why her parents fought so much, but she sometimes felt as if it was her fault. If she was a better girl, then all would be well. If she was smarter, or a better athlete, or knew just the right thing to say or do, like the kids on one of Herb's TV shows, their house would be a real home. She tried to be good, but she was curious, and she had questions about everything that she saw and heard. These questions just made things worse. Cindy realized that it was easier to just run away and hide. When the shouting started, she would run into her own room and crawl inside a small closet with a favorite doll or stuffed animal clutched on one small hand. She would escape into her own little world until the shouting finally stopped.
"She's so unusual!"
That was how a teacher had once described Cindy during a recess period on the school playground. The teacher hadn't meant to be cruel, and hadn't even noticed that little Cindy Reynolds was within earshot of her hushed tones. When Cindy wanted to get away and hide, no one could see her. This talent came about from the years she spent hiding in a closet or under a bed or trying to fade into the background at family holiday parties when her folks were shouting or trying to hide their own strife behind a façade of merriment, while Cindy was left alone to try to avoid her Uncle Lonny and his heavy hands.
Uncle Lonny was drunk all the time. She had heard him described as being sick, but she soon learned from watching and listening as she always did that he was really drunk on cheap whiskey every holiday, and that was one reason he seldom staggered out of his own room at her grandmother's condo. When he did emerge, he often found Cindy, and the way he hugged her or touched her made her feel funny. It was a sense of shame -- one more reason why she felt as if she was bad or was never able to measure up to what might possibly make her parents happy. She was bright, but she was a little girl, and she didn't fully understand why the adults in her life weren't capable of being what she needed them to be. All she knew was that she could hide until things got better.
The hiding became easy when she suddenly manifested a mutant power to literally conceal herself through a form of camouflage. She didn't turn invisible, but she blended into her environment. She didn't know why she could suddenly do it. She didn't know if doing it was wrong or right. Cindy just did it again and again until it became a way of life. She did recall her grandmother once saying something about their Romany ancestors and magic in the blood, or something about a gypsy heritage.
Cindy thought gypsies were fortune-tellers or pickpockets in old movies. She didn't know what Romany meant for sure. She just shrugged and accepted her powers as being more proof that she didn't fit in or belong with other folks. As she grew, she matured into a strikingly attractive girl, and that meant more problems for her as new feelings about boys and about the changes in her body and emotions separated her from those around her. She couldn't talk to her folks about how she felt. She just couldn't open up like that. Wouldn't her feelings confirm how weird she was? Wouldn't that give her mom and dad a reason to reject her? She was better off hiding.
Finally, one night she'd had enough. She heard the shouting start, and though she tried to drown it out with her beloved portable record player and the new album by Candi Roper, she couldn't make the noise or the pain stop. She had always been all too aware of everything that went on around her. She couldn't help but see and hear every detail. The very traits that marked her as exceptionally bright also made her feel more vulnerable. Cindy ran away. She didn't just hide this time. She ran into the night and never looked back. She only knew that she had to put distance between herself and the shouting.
Eventually, Cindy made her way by bus to Detroit itself and settled into a nomadic life on the streets around Cameron Street. She saw and heard more than she wanted on these vibrant streets where rival gangs clashed, loud music echoed off the old buildings, and voices with many different accents mixed into an urban symphony. Sometimes, Cindy liked it. She liked the ancient old woman Mother Window, who seemed to rule the neighborhood. She gave Cindy food on more than one rainy night. She liked hearing the music that came from the boombox carried by a kid named Paco Ramone. He was a Lobo, but his older brother Armando ruled the gang, and Paco was always more serious about his dancing, his rapping, and his imaginary way with the ladies.
She watched them. She made up stories about them. She thought of some of them as figures in stories that her keen imagination had made up on the spot. She sometimes thought of home and her folks, and she cried. The tears were real, as were the emotions that caused them, but Cindy herself began to disappear behind a façade of her own creation. She was now only Gypsy. She took food and clothes to survive. Her powers made it easy to steal, though she only ever took what she needed to survive. Finding a library, she realized it was really easy to steal books. She read voraciously, and lived in the fantasy world found in the pages of the only home she could claim. Then everything changed.
Gypsy noticed that colorful sights and sounds were coming from a factory that had been closed since the recession in the 1970s, and she wondered why new figures were coming and going in and out of the building. Slipping inside, she found something out of a sci-fi movie, or worse. The old factory concealed a multi-level bunker full of computers and odd crafts and communications equipment like some government building. She began to watch it more and more, until things became really strange.
Several costumed figures eventually settled there and made it their headquarters. She recognized some of them from TV and newspapers. Aquaman was a broad-shouldered, handsome man with a regal manner and an oddly quick temper. Had he always been that way? She didn't think so. The Elongated Man and his lovely wife were famous, too. Ralph Dibny was a celebrity, and was funny, and she was drawn to how elegant his slim and well-dressed wife Sue was. Gypsy wished she could move with that kind of natural grace and confidence.
She admired the muscular man called Steel, alias Hank Heywood III, and grinned each time she saw the loud but well-meaning Vibe, the same former gang member Paco Ramone from down the street. He had called to her once or twice, but she had always eluded him. She was intrigued by the Martian Manhunter. He was an alien, but he wasn't scary. She could tell he was kind and understanding, and he knew a thing or two about how it felt to be an outsider. But he couldn't get too close to him, since she had learned early on from overhearing the heroes' conversations that he could read minds. Zatanna the Magician was really pretty, and she carried herself as if she was always on stage. Gypsy would have liked to have had her potent charm and quick wit. She remembered seeing the black-haired beauty on a TV special once years before.
Finally, Gypsy stared in awe at the final member of what turned out to be a new version of the Justice League of America. She gazed with appreciation at Vixen, and wanted nothing more than to look like her. Vixen had been a supermodel, Mari McCabe. The African beauty moved with a sultry grace and natural athleticism all her own. She laughed loudly, and smiled with brilliant white teeth and a perfect smile framed by bright red lips. Her eyes were large, and her hair was just amazing.
Gypsy followed Vixen more often than she did the others, and grew more careful, since something about Vixen made her realize that she just might be able to detect the lonely girl in spite of her powers.
Eventually, she helped the heroes with a crisis, and not only did they not turn her away, but they made her one of their team. She didn't look like what a heroine should look like. She still wore a patched green skirt and tattered peasant blouse with heavy earrings and bracelets. She tried to make her hair look like her heroines from Rock TV, but all she managed to do was create a lot of volume, and shape her hair with copious amounts of hair spray. She didn't wear shoes, but after so many months on the streets, she didn't miss them.
In between the danger, the fun, and the lessons on how to be a heroine, Gypsy bonded with her teammates and found herself torn between a desire to be accepted more fully and have real friends, and her own lifelong need to protect herself from loss or rejection by hiding her true self. Vixen understood. She could spot a phony a mile away, and she reached out to Gypsy and showed her kindness. This enabled her to give the teenager a sense of safety. Vixen actually liked Gypsy, and didn't want anything from her. Vixen and Zatanna didn't get along for some reason, and Sue Dibny stayed close to her husband. When they were together, there really was no room for anyone else, since their bond was so deep. Cindy didn't mind, since she came to love being with Mari.
"Your eyes will look too large and too wide, like those on a fish if you use a light pencil on the edges. Try a darker shade, like this!" The advice on makeup came one quiet night in the bunker when Vixen took time to give Gypsy a mini-makeover and teach her some things about style and hair that only a model would know.
They made time for these special "beauty nights" whenever things were peaceful. They bonded over simple moments, and shared love for music and books.
It had been a dream, and yet, like all dreams, it had ended too soon. A cosmic Crisis had shattered the JLA and had stranded Vixen, Vibe, and Gypsy on a parallel Earth, where they were forced to serve a secret government agency controlled by Hank's mean grandfather.
She shook her head and looked around the park. She wasn't here for the natural beauty. She was here to mourn her friend Mari, who had gone missing and was presumed dead on one of the missions she and Cindy had been forced to take for Commander Steel. He was the one who brought her to this alternate Earth for reasons too bizarre to contemplate. He was crazy. She sincerely believed he was insane.
In any case, Mari was gone, leaving an emptiness in her heart. The revelation of her death had left her crying all through the night when she learned of her death. This park was the place she chose to visit to feel closer to her and to mourn for her. The sixteen-year-old girl wept softly and blended into the environment, even as she longed to find a way to make this nightmare end and run back home.
by Libbylawrence
Earth-Two, September, 1986:
"I just want to run away! I don't want to be here anymore!"
The words were an all-too-familiar refrain to a teenager named Cindy Reynolds, but they carried a certain poignancy as the pretty girl stood alone in a park. There were other people strolling through the pastoral setting, but most of them were paired off in groups of two or more, and their very togetherness made Cindy feel more alone than ever.
She noticed them, of course, and she saw them and heard them. Their laughter and their small gestures of companionship or intimacy intruded on her thoughts in spite of her preoccupation and her sorrow. She had always been a keen observer of her surroundings. She couldn't help but watch and listen, absorbing even the smallest details of the world around her, the world she had so often felt excluded from by both her feelings and her inclinations. She had always been that way. Even as a child, she'd been bright and intelligent, but she'd also been peculiar, or at least different from other kids. She could become lost in her own fantasy world at times, since her imagination had always been more welcoming than the world she didn't always want to accept as her reality.
Cindy whispered to herself, "Stranger on a stranger world! I don't belong here. I'm like Dorothy in Oz, or Alice in Wonderland, but there are no ruby slippers to take me back home, and the only rabbit holes I find lead me to one nutcase after another who wants to rule the world!"
She referred to the fact that this world was not really her world of origin. This parallel Earth had been given the name Earth-Two by some of the heroes she'd heard about, and while it was like the Earth she knew in many ways, it still lacked the things that made her feel secure or at least reminded her of home.
Yet had home itself ever been secure? She remembered growing up in a suburb of Detroit called Birmingham in Oakland County, Michigan. Her dad Herbert had always been a jovial man who enjoyed simple pleasures like watching television shows from his younger days, or listening to old music on the radio. He worked hard at a factory as a plant manager, and he loved his wife and children, but he never seemed to embrace the modern world so much as he merely endure it while longing for a nostalgic past that may have only existed in his daydreams. He wasn't a cruel man, but for some reason as the years passed and the small disappointments of life added up into a bigger heartache, Herb Reynolds expressed his feelings with a loud and angry voice. He yelled and yelled, and his wife Marion responded by yelling back or just slamming the door to their room and weeping.
Cindy didn't understand why her parents fought so much, but she sometimes felt as if it was her fault. If she was a better girl, then all would be well. If she was smarter, or a better athlete, or knew just the right thing to say or do, like the kids on one of Herb's TV shows, their house would be a real home. She tried to be good, but she was curious, and she had questions about everything that she saw and heard. These questions just made things worse. Cindy realized that it was easier to just run away and hide. When the shouting started, she would run into her own room and crawl inside a small closet with a favorite doll or stuffed animal clutched on one small hand. She would escape into her own little world until the shouting finally stopped.
"She's so unusual!"
That was how a teacher had once described Cindy during a recess period on the school playground. The teacher hadn't meant to be cruel, and hadn't even noticed that little Cindy Reynolds was within earshot of her hushed tones. When Cindy wanted to get away and hide, no one could see her. This talent came about from the years she spent hiding in a closet or under a bed or trying to fade into the background at family holiday parties when her folks were shouting or trying to hide their own strife behind a façade of merriment, while Cindy was left alone to try to avoid her Uncle Lonny and his heavy hands.
Uncle Lonny was drunk all the time. She had heard him described as being sick, but she soon learned from watching and listening as she always did that he was really drunk on cheap whiskey every holiday, and that was one reason he seldom staggered out of his own room at her grandmother's condo. When he did emerge, he often found Cindy, and the way he hugged her or touched her made her feel funny. It was a sense of shame -- one more reason why she felt as if she was bad or was never able to measure up to what might possibly make her parents happy. She was bright, but she was a little girl, and she didn't fully understand why the adults in her life weren't capable of being what she needed them to be. All she knew was that she could hide until things got better.
The hiding became easy when she suddenly manifested a mutant power to literally conceal herself through a form of camouflage. She didn't turn invisible, but she blended into her environment. She didn't know why she could suddenly do it. She didn't know if doing it was wrong or right. Cindy just did it again and again until it became a way of life. She did recall her grandmother once saying something about their Romany ancestors and magic in the blood, or something about a gypsy heritage.
Cindy thought gypsies were fortune-tellers or pickpockets in old movies. She didn't know what Romany meant for sure. She just shrugged and accepted her powers as being more proof that she didn't fit in or belong with other folks. As she grew, she matured into a strikingly attractive girl, and that meant more problems for her as new feelings about boys and about the changes in her body and emotions separated her from those around her. She couldn't talk to her folks about how she felt. She just couldn't open up like that. Wouldn't her feelings confirm how weird she was? Wouldn't that give her mom and dad a reason to reject her? She was better off hiding.
Finally, one night she'd had enough. She heard the shouting start, and though she tried to drown it out with her beloved portable record player and the new album by Candi Roper, she couldn't make the noise or the pain stop. She had always been all too aware of everything that went on around her. She couldn't help but see and hear every detail. The very traits that marked her as exceptionally bright also made her feel more vulnerable. Cindy ran away. She didn't just hide this time. She ran into the night and never looked back. She only knew that she had to put distance between herself and the shouting.
Eventually, Cindy made her way by bus to Detroit itself and settled into a nomadic life on the streets around Cameron Street. She saw and heard more than she wanted on these vibrant streets where rival gangs clashed, loud music echoed off the old buildings, and voices with many different accents mixed into an urban symphony. Sometimes, Cindy liked it. She liked the ancient old woman Mother Window, who seemed to rule the neighborhood. She gave Cindy food on more than one rainy night. She liked hearing the music that came from the boombox carried by a kid named Paco Ramone. He was a Lobo, but his older brother Armando ruled the gang, and Paco was always more serious about his dancing, his rapping, and his imaginary way with the ladies.
She watched them. She made up stories about them. She thought of some of them as figures in stories that her keen imagination had made up on the spot. She sometimes thought of home and her folks, and she cried. The tears were real, as were the emotions that caused them, but Cindy herself began to disappear behind a façade of her own creation. She was now only Gypsy. She took food and clothes to survive. Her powers made it easy to steal, though she only ever took what she needed to survive. Finding a library, she realized it was really easy to steal books. She read voraciously, and lived in the fantasy world found in the pages of the only home she could claim. Then everything changed.
Gypsy noticed that colorful sights and sounds were coming from a factory that had been closed since the recession in the 1970s, and she wondered why new figures were coming and going in and out of the building. Slipping inside, she found something out of a sci-fi movie, or worse. The old factory concealed a multi-level bunker full of computers and odd crafts and communications equipment like some government building. She began to watch it more and more, until things became really strange.
Several costumed figures eventually settled there and made it their headquarters. She recognized some of them from TV and newspapers. Aquaman was a broad-shouldered, handsome man with a regal manner and an oddly quick temper. Had he always been that way? She didn't think so. The Elongated Man and his lovely wife were famous, too. Ralph Dibny was a celebrity, and was funny, and she was drawn to how elegant his slim and well-dressed wife Sue was. Gypsy wished she could move with that kind of natural grace and confidence.
She admired the muscular man called Steel, alias Hank Heywood III, and grinned each time she saw the loud but well-meaning Vibe, the same former gang member Paco Ramone from down the street. He had called to her once or twice, but she had always eluded him. She was intrigued by the Martian Manhunter. He was an alien, but he wasn't scary. She could tell he was kind and understanding, and he knew a thing or two about how it felt to be an outsider. But he couldn't get too close to him, since she had learned early on from overhearing the heroes' conversations that he could read minds. Zatanna the Magician was really pretty, and she carried herself as if she was always on stage. Gypsy would have liked to have had her potent charm and quick wit. She remembered seeing the black-haired beauty on a TV special once years before.
Finally, Gypsy stared in awe at the final member of what turned out to be a new version of the Justice League of America. She gazed with appreciation at Vixen, and wanted nothing more than to look like her. Vixen had been a supermodel, Mari McCabe. The African beauty moved with a sultry grace and natural athleticism all her own. She laughed loudly, and smiled with brilliant white teeth and a perfect smile framed by bright red lips. Her eyes were large, and her hair was just amazing.
Gypsy followed Vixen more often than she did the others, and grew more careful, since something about Vixen made her realize that she just might be able to detect the lonely girl in spite of her powers.
Eventually, she helped the heroes with a crisis, and not only did they not turn her away, but they made her one of their team. She didn't look like what a heroine should look like. She still wore a patched green skirt and tattered peasant blouse with heavy earrings and bracelets. She tried to make her hair look like her heroines from Rock TV, but all she managed to do was create a lot of volume, and shape her hair with copious amounts of hair spray. She didn't wear shoes, but after so many months on the streets, she didn't miss them.
In between the danger, the fun, and the lessons on how to be a heroine, Gypsy bonded with her teammates and found herself torn between a desire to be accepted more fully and have real friends, and her own lifelong need to protect herself from loss or rejection by hiding her true self. Vixen understood. She could spot a phony a mile away, and she reached out to Gypsy and showed her kindness. This enabled her to give the teenager a sense of safety. Vixen actually liked Gypsy, and didn't want anything from her. Vixen and Zatanna didn't get along for some reason, and Sue Dibny stayed close to her husband. When they were together, there really was no room for anyone else, since their bond was so deep. Cindy didn't mind, since she came to love being with Mari.
"Your eyes will look too large and too wide, like those on a fish if you use a light pencil on the edges. Try a darker shade, like this!" The advice on makeup came one quiet night in the bunker when Vixen took time to give Gypsy a mini-makeover and teach her some things about style and hair that only a model would know.
They made time for these special "beauty nights" whenever things were peaceful. They bonded over simple moments, and shared love for music and books.
It had been a dream, and yet, like all dreams, it had ended too soon. A cosmic Crisis had shattered the JLA and had stranded Vixen, Vibe, and Gypsy on a parallel Earth, where they were forced to serve a secret government agency controlled by Hank's mean grandfather.
She shook her head and looked around the park. She wasn't here for the natural beauty. She was here to mourn her friend Mari, who had gone missing and was presumed dead on one of the missions she and Cindy had been forced to take for Commander Steel. He was the one who brought her to this alternate Earth for reasons too bizarre to contemplate. He was crazy. She sincerely believed he was insane.
In any case, Mari was gone, leaving an emptiness in her heart. The revelation of her death had left her crying all through the night when she learned of her death. This park was the place she chose to visit to feel closer to her and to mourn for her. The sixteen-year-old girl wept softly and blended into the environment, even as she longed to find a way to make this nightmare end and run back home.
