Legion World Forums LEGION OUTPOST Bits o' Legionnaire Business (2) Some Few Details...

from Legion of Super Heroes 125
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The rift looked like a vast white emptiness, an emptiness that was tugging insistently at him as he, Jazmin, and Drake approached. The marvel of his Legion Flight Ring kept him from tumbling in. They picked a point at which they could hover, and as his eyes adjusted to the white, he began to make out the bolts of energy with which Drake leapt to wrestle. He set to work and narrated his efforts in the hope that it would nurse Jazmin back from the panic she was fighting.

He heard her get to work and saw her focus restored. He also heard her convey the effects of the tarnium he was creating, so he restricted his focus to that task. Every floating molecule, every random ion, he flipped up or down to the rather sublime form of tarnium. In the process, he forced them to congeal into fist-sized clumps and to dive into the rift, forming a raining tube of tarnium around the two of them.

Jan spoke with Jazmin but kept his focus restricted primarily on transmuting everything he could find. It was easy at first. The rift had destroyed several spacecraft and drawn in their debris. Jan could barely transmute one bit of flotsam before another would assert itself into his attention.

Drake was lost.

Jan reached the point of exhaustion and held. He had done it before—kept going when he should have stopped or shut down. Grief or exhaustion, he had learned that he could keep going, even if what he did and how he interacted with the world seemed little removed from the actions and character of an empty husk.

What bore more of a threat to their task was the approaching exhaustion of his raw materials. He let his powers branch out further than ever before and sent whatever fragments he could find hurtling toward the rift.

Without warning, something drained him. Jolted out of his trance, he looked toward the object that had appeared suddenly very close and very large within his transmutation field. It was the outpost. Its shields must have come down, and Jan saw by the gash of pinkish color that he had transmuted part of its hull to tarnium before he withdrew his powers. He barely had time to see that, for the brittle tarnium that now bisected that outpost’s hull collapsed in an instant, and Jan shuddered at what he had done to his friends inside the section now heading directly for him and Jazmin.

He knew she and he and whoever was left in the outpost were heading into the rift. Maybe if anyone else were left they could close the rift themselves, but he had to try and save the friends he had just doomed. He grabbed Jazmin and flew towards the oncoming outpost.

“Jan what–”

“I’m sorry Jazmin.” He hoped that she heard him even if she was already well encased in a sheath of tromium that he was transmuting to protect her. Next he focused on the outpost itself. Every last part of it had to become tromium, and every last part of himself too.

They reached the hull, and Jan shifted the plate before them into helium so that they could pass through. Inside, he shifted the helium to tromium, put Jazmin gently down beside him, touched the deck, and concentrated. Tromium, the one substance Jan hoped could make it through the rift intact, spread through every inch of the outpost. He spread it out of the room he had landed in, out into the corridor, and beyond, into adjacent decks. He stopped when he sensed carbon and concentrations of water. Those he coated with a thick layer of the green tromium crystal but left what was inside unchanged.

He finished, and just had time to note it before the newly transmuted outpost was jolted fully into the rift. It accelerated and kept accelerating while the deck bucked and turned. Jan held on to whatever he could reach. He held and waited, passing again past the point of exhaustion and well into the realm of fear. He hoped that the outpost would not shake apart. He hoped that the acceleration would end. He hoped that his friends were still alive, and he looked through the sheath of tromium to catch Jazmin, her frozen stare watching him.

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It did finally stop. Utterly.

Jan had become accustomed to shifting the elements of his body. So it did not bother him that his consciousness inhabited a construct of pure tromium. What bothered him was that, when he shifted his body back to its normal state, it felt no different. There was no movement, no process. He could move and think, just as he could if he were made of wood, but his blood, his breath, he could tell that it had all stopped. So had the clocks and the outposts systems.

He kept the others in their cocoons of tromium but had little doubt that, should he take them out, they would be nothing more than unmoving statues. He gathered them together in a central equipment bay, avoiding any glimpse of their faces.

He counted his hopes. One: that someone would get them out of this. Two: that he would find a way to get out of it. He spent a long moment envisioning his first hope. How the rift would have closed because of Jazmin’s efforts and because so much mass had passed through it without being consumed. How someone, maybe Lyle, would work out a way to track them. How the Legion would find the outpost, wherever it was, and bring it home.

Then he got up and started to work. He looked outside but could see nothing beyond a cloud of pink tarnium. At least, he knew that everything that had gone through the rift had ended up at the same spot. None of the outpost’s computers would tell him where that was, though. They were lifeless. He stared at the displays that should have told him their location. He saw himself looking back.

Jan chose to prepare first for the end result of both of his hopes. He gathered scraps of debris from the plentiful supplies scattered throughout the outpost. He piled the scraps on the deck, and, as they turned purple and crystalline, he recited.

“Hello. I am Jan Arrah, of a planet once known as Trom. I am also known as Element Lad, a member of the Legion of Super Heroes. If you can hear and see me, it is because your vital signs have triggered images stored within the palean memory-crystals all around. My meaning is conveyed empathically, though my actual words may be alien to you. You are inside a remnant of the Legion Outpost, which has been caught in a cataclysmic cosmic event. A rift in the fabric of space-time has thrown this section of our outpost across a vast distance. I am encoding this record of our accident in the memory crystals, while I still have time. Whoever you are, I hope you will hear my story with compassion, and render any assistance that may still prove possible”

He stopped transmuting, made the motions of a sigh, and walked out. He toured the outpost assessing the structure, stitching together its shell, and fading it back from tromium to the metal alloys of its memory.

He worked until he had no more to do. Jan guessed that it had taken a day and recorded more into the memory crystals. When that was done, he took some consolation in that his body was not registering the ache and exhaustion he knew it should be feeling. He stopped to rest anyway, sitting near a viewport that offered, as all the rest did, an expansive and unmoving field of tarnium.

He needed to see where they were. So, he concentrated, and the tarnium outside shifted from pink crystal down to helium. He stopped. Something else else new happened. He tried it again and stopped. He was getting a rush. Changing tarnium into such a basic element released energy and, for the first time, some of it flowed back to him. It felt good. He changed and moved the crystals aside reaching for the edge of the field. He was tempted to reach out and continue transmuting all of the tarnium outside, but then he focused on what was coming into view beyond the field and froze.

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Jan looked quickly away and stumbled from his seat. When he regained his senses he was in an adjacent hall. No windows here. He waited. The mental agitation that had broken him away from the window was slow to die down. Even as it began to ebb, he noticed further evidence of the oddity in which they were trapped. His costume had frayed and, in places, torn. Hair, longer than what he had moments before, tumbled into his vision as he looked down at his physical state.

He closed his eyes, opened them, and checked again. He chose to not deny the facts. First, he was at that window for much longer than it had seemed. Second, entropy was still at work in this realm. He found that he was happy to have this. This was something that could distract him from what he had seen outside. It reminded him of his physicality, even if what that physicality now brought with it was so alien to him.

He used this newfound knowledge as a tether and tried to face up to what he had seen out there.

Outside was infinity.

Was there any sense to it? Jan’s mind sped in circles as he tried to come to terms.

They were outside of time.

They had been flung a distance in space. That’s what stargates do, after all. And the rift began with a corrupted stargate. The rift had thrown them across space. Jan had seen new constellations and nebula and races. He had seen it all and all at once because the rift had not only thrown them to this new place, but had thrown them outside of time. From their unique vantage point each instant in the lifespan of this new place could be viewed.

Jan had seen but a fraction of a fraction of that lifespan. As he now looked back on what he could remember, he realized that they must be surrounded by the lifespan of this particular point in the universe. Everything that had gone through the rift had stopped here in this bubble outside of time.

Jan tugged to stretch his uniform and used the tether of his physicality to bring him back from the impossible scope of what was out there. That tug tore a bit more of the frayed material. They were outside of time, but somehow entropy still had its hold. Things would decay. Eventually this bubble would contain nothing but a uniform mass or particles, if not less than that.

The universe need not ever worry about them. All would always go along as usual on the other side of this bubble. Inside, for Jan and his friends, the bubble would be a tomb. It all slowly sank in. Saving his friends, Jan hoped, would be as simple and as difficult as breaking that bubble. He had learned so much, but seldom had felt more helpless.

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Jan eventually determined a few things about his strategy. He would have to use the outpost itself to pop this bubble. It was the only thing in here that had enough mass. He would also have to aim the outpost at just the right spot in time. Jan took it that the trajectory of the objects inside the bubble was simply frozen, and so he could determine that trajectory and send the outpost moving in the same direction. Finally, to turn the outpost into the projectile he needed, he would have to use the only two forces available in this place, his transmutation abilities and entropy itself.

Working out the precise trajectory took precise measurements and calculations. He tried at first to coax the computers to process the information for him. It wouldn’t work. He could not force any reaction that would make them accept new information and not deteriorate that information as soon as it was stored. He was able, though, to pull information out of the computers. At least, he could do it once. After that, the files, and in some cases the computers themselves, were decayed past the point of any hope.

These new elemental combinations he was using, the physics of piercing the time bubble, the very bubble-outside-of-time itself; each of these pulled at Jan’s attention. He would work and contemplate on one or the other and feel the potential for getting lost in it. More than once he would go to the door of the storage bay that held his friends and force himself to focus on their time together. It didn’t make it any easier, but it reminded him of how often they refused to leave their destiny up to fate—how often they struggled to make things come out right. It kept him focused on doing the same for them now.

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Without computers, he used scraps of papers and even bulkheads to figure out how to propel the outpost and what direction to propel it towards. But, he needed some practice before the real thing. If everything worked, whatever he would practice with would re-enter the normal universe, so he decided to use copies of the palean memory crystals he had been recording. Perhaps someone would stumble across them, learn of the outpost’s fate and give them assistance. He made a few compact copies easily enough and lingered only because practicing meant he would have to go outside. He would once again chance a glimpse at the very bubble that surrounded them.

He prepared, telling himself to focus on propelling the crystals, not on what was actually visible of their destination. He knew the trajectory they needed to follow, so seeing their destination wasn’t necessary, only keeping them on track was.

Walking outside and across the hull was easy at first. The perimeter of the bubble wasn’t even visible through the cloud of tarnium surrounding the outpost. He plotted and marked on the hull where he would have to launch the crystals. He took one crystal and held it in front of him at what he had calculated to be the right angle. Then he let go. The crystal stayed where it was.

For the next part, he closed his eyes. He had to clear a path through the tarnium, but he didn’t need to see it. He simply held out his hand at the angle of the crystal and began transmuting the tarnium along that path into helium. Even more than the first time, the released energy flowed into him.

He relished the feel of it, the awakening sensations it brought before it drew to a close. He could sense that the path he created through the tarnium cloud was clear and prepared to open his eyes but focus only on the palean crystal in front of him. It didn’t work. Instead his attention was caught by fairly shapeless glowing wisp further ahead in the path he had just made.

He thought of Drake, then of how long a being of pure energy could last in an environment where the only operating physical process was the release of energy, and finally he re-focused on the crystal in front of him—another of his friends’ life on his conscience.

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His practice sessions went well. A few of the first crystals did go astray and shoot off to who-knows-where. But in time he was able to transmute one part of the crystal in such a controlled manner that the released energy steadily propelled it through the barrier. He had done it. It was only as he was climbing back into the outpost that he noticed his hair was falling on his shoulders and his clothing was in virtual tatters.

He stopped and let himself think. He could think back to times when his attention did slip from the crystal to the barrier beyond it. Times when he could discern trillions of instants in the life of the universe. He grew even more hesitant because he could remember that the universe he saw did not always seem to be the same one. He could remember subtle variations that had apparently held his attention for longer than he knew.

They had hardly seemed more than moments at the time, but the barrier had stolen his attention for untold lengths and introduced new doubts about his plan. It was this mixture of success and failure that propelled Jan through his final steps. For the second time, he entered the bay that held his friends, encased in what could be their sarcophagi should he fail. This time, he did look at each of them, asked all of them for luck, and left the room trying to not think of all the things that could go wrong. For the final time, he recorded his actions in the palean memory crystal still onboard the outpost. Then he crawled back outside the hull and sealed the hatch.

Now he went to the opposite end of the hull from the path it would take. The fuel to propel the outpost would be the hull itself. He focused on the proper sequence of transmutation and began to work. It felt like more of an eternity than he had ever encountered—even here—but it finally began to move. As he was building that movement, Jan let his mind wander to his plan, or rather, his hopes that the mass of the outpost piercing the barrier would destroy this bubble. The memory crystals hadn’t, but they had been so much smaller. Something else else as large as the outpost would hopefully damage the barrier beyond repair and send everything—the outpost, Drake, Jan, the tarnium—spilling back into reality. He wanted more than anything to see that work, but the momentum he was building was getting more difficult to control.

Now he did focus every ounce of his power and concentration to his task. Every part of him reacted to the movement and trajectory of the outpost, every fiber jumped to conjure the precise reactions needed to keep it going in the right direction. Until, finally, he could stop.

He felt a true wave of exhaustion rush over him. He lost hold of the outpost as physics and weightlessness began to manipulate matter again. Still, he managed to turn and see that the outpost was rushing forward now with all the tarnium debris and everything else that had been in the bubble. Soon he would be out too, and he could wake his friends and they could head toward home. The time bubble would be no more.

And it was with that thought that he turned to look at what was left of the barrier and amidst its jumble of images saw a new instant in time. As he let himself see what that instant held, he regretted it all.

That's quite a fascinating look at what has got to be one of the strangest Legion stories yet. You supply a lot of the missing details from the post-Rift/pre-Progenitor story, yet manage to remind us (through those blanking-out periods Jan goes through) that this is not any reality that we can know or understand.

It's a big job to take on that out-of-time/eternity universe. I must confess that I had just glossed over the gaps and wrapped them in some hazy recollection of what happened - too hard to think about what's beyond the edge of the universe! However, you did a fine job of dealing with it head-on.

And thanks for bumping the Imra story - somehow I missed it the first time around.

Awkward Pause Boy, you have a rare gift for storytelling! These segments on Jan's experience left me absolutely cold! I could feel the desolation & loneliness that his sacrifice was about to bring Jan. Amazing!! Thank you so much for posting this.

Thank you Fat Cramer and Varalent (again). I'm very pleased that both of you enjoyed my attempts.

This is great APBoy, I really enjoyed reading this (and part 1 again).

More soon?

Thank you, Harbinger.

More? I hope so. But I can't say when.