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Timelines and Where-Realms

Part 3

for Taiko and studley-destiny

by Draconicon

Unfortunately, dealing with Necromiter himself didn't solve the problem of all the possessed and semi-possessed figures that he had kidnapped. Though the majority of them were cops, there were some criminals that had been in the cop cars being taken to prison, and once Necromiter lost control over them, the ghosts were more than willing to start wandering around looking for new hosts. Studley was able to intercept most of them before they left the graveyard, but that still left at least a half-dozen of them wandering around, looking for hosts and more chances to cause mischief.

So much for a light day, Studley thought as they dragged the fifth of the six criminals back to a specialized car for this sort of thing. Still, at least it's interesting.

The possessed almost seemed like they were having fun when they were being chased, and he supposed that they probably were. They hadn't had bodies for some time, and this was probably like being a kid again, getting to go back to a playground that they had almost forgotten and getting the chance to enjoy themselves again. When they were caught, the possessed were surprisingly innocent, allowing themselves to be collared and taken away. It was almost like they were operating under the rules of a game, where they were 'caught' and tagged out when they were finally apprehended.

As he marched the mole in question into the van, he shook his head. Shutting the back door of the vehicle, he cocked his head at Nor.

"Does this sort of thing happen often?"

"Possession? Not usually on this scale, but occasionally. Why?"

"You have a van for it. The city has a van for the possessed."

"...And?"

"...I guess that answers that question."

It was a weird thing to see that a city was actually prepared for the eventuality of ghosts getting out and starting to take over people. It was weirder to see that they actually had a vehicle for processing them and keeping the possessing ghosts from getting out and just grabbing a new host. Either they had had a lot more of this problem than Nor was telling him, or there were mad inventors all over the city that would take any chance to sell a patent somewhere. Considering the number of supers and gadgeteers that he had seen running around the city, he was more inclined to think the latter.

Shaking his head again, he leaned against the back of the van as the rest of the professionals got in. They were going to take this guy down to the station for proper processing, encouraging the ghost to leave with the help of a few other supers, and then -

The wolf's ears pricked up as the radio in the front of the van went off. Some sort of police bulletin, something about other missing person reports. He blinked, looking around the back of the van at the driver.

"What was that about missing persons?" he asked.

"Dunno. Just more guys missing than we could account for at the graveyard."

"...Huh."

"You want to take that?"

"Any other leads?"

"Not yet. Can't blame you if you don't want it. It'll get kicked around for a while until someone takes it."

Which was all the more reason for him and Nor to take it, he supposed. Studley nodded, and the driver called it in, saying that Nor and the newcomer would get on that. The van drove off a moment later, and Nor fixed him with a level stare.

"What?" Studley asked.

"I have patrol tonight."

"I'm sure we can wrap this up quickly enough."

"Yeah, but..." Nor shook his head. "I'll stop and get some extra strength coffee before the patrol, I guess."

"There you go."

"Just don't volunteer me that fast next time? I'm trying to keep up with a lot of stuff right now."

"Noted. Now, what do you think's going on?"

"Well, you heard the radio, not me. What did you hear?"

Studley passed on what little he had picked up. There were other missing people, ones that had apparently gone missing either during or shortly after Necromiter's little spree through the city. They hadn't been on the same route that the large stallion necromancer had been on, however, so possession didn't seem quite likely, at least to the wolf. Nor seemed to agree, as well.

"Did you get anything about who was going missing?"

"Not on that bulletin."

"Do you have a phone?"

"Sure."

Studley pulled out the flip phone, and Nor blinked at it as it was revealed. He shrugged.

"Never did like the look of the new flat ones. Always liked the ones that didn't call until you flipped them open."

"Fair. Let me make a call."

Passing the phone over, Studley leaned back against the wall of the alley they were in, slowly tilting his head back and looking towards the heavens. He half-expected to see the tiger looming over him on the rooftops, and rather wished that he would see that. The damn cat was going everywhere, dodging him at every turn, and he was starting to get pretty damn sick of it.

That cat's got answers, and I'm not letting him go next time.

He had been nice. He liked to be nice, because that usually got him something nice in return. However, he wasn't going to be jerked around like this.

Nor's call didn't last long, and when the mule handed the phone back, he had a twisted-up look on his face. Studley recognized the expression of someone that had heard something that he didn't want to hear, and he shook his head.

"How bad?"

"Pretty bad."

"Want to elaborate on that?"

"Everyone that was taken was a professor of something or other."

"Doesn't fit with what Necromiter wanted, that's for sure. He was all about the brawn."

"Right. Which means it's someone else, someone that wants a lot of very smart people."

"Got someone in mind for that?"

"A couple, but I want to see if anything was left behind. The nearest guy disappeared just five blocks down, about an hour ago."

"Let's get going, then."

They showed up at the apartment with nothing, not even a warrant, but there were no cops on the scene. They were probably busy taking care of the last few possessed folk still on the streets, all things considered. Nor and Studley looked at the apartment door until Studley leaned forward and shouldered the door. Not hard, not enough to really rock it off its hinges, but enough to bounce it past the lock.

"Do that often?" Nor asked.

"Breaking and entering? Oh, occasionally. Not as much as I used to."

The place wasn't damaged, nor was there much more than the average mess of a lived-in place. Studley sniffed the air, though, and he caught a strange smell. Something almost like ink, which was weird, considering that the professor that lived here taught history. History of art, admittedly, but still history, and that didn't lend itself to the kind of ink that the place reeked of.

At least, to him. He didn't see Nor reacting, so he imagined that it was partly down to his own slightly more hyper-active sense of smell. Canine things.

They spread out through the apartment, looking in the bathroom, bedroom, and through the living room. Studley was about to flip the couch over to check under it when Nor hissed.

"What's the matter?"

"Found something."

"Must be something pretty damning if you're sounding like that."

"Yep."

The mule held up a strand of hair, one that looked like it might have come from a stallion's tail rather than from someone's head or other part of the body. It was long, chestnut-colored, and it looked like it had come free over natural reasons rather than being pulled out. Nor turned it with a narrow-eyed stare.

"Parlour. It's gotta be."

"Mind filling me in on this guy? Does he have a spider motif?"

"...Oh, right. Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly?"

"Yeah, bad joke, I guess."

"Sorry. Distracted. Last time we met...wasn't great."

"Sounds it. Is he going to be a problem?"

"Depending on whether he's got a new tattoo gun already, maybe."

"...You're going to have to fill me in a bit more than that, Nor."

"Walk and talk."

They left the building in a hurry, with Nor writing out a series of different addresses based on the names that they'd gotten from the police as they did. The mule was surprisingly good at multitasking, managing the stairs with ease while not tripping down them, and talking, and writing all at the same time.

"Parlour's more of a gadget man, except that his gadgets verge on being magical in their own right. They do things that should be impossible."

"That sounds like what most gadgeteers do, anyway."

"Most of them don't tattoo other people onto their bodies and gain their powers."

"Oh. That's how it works."

"Yeah. Last time he made a tattoo gun, he had all but perfected it. If he'd gotten it right, he would have been able to make it so that the power never wore off, and everyone that he tattooed onto himself would have been a prisoner to his body for eternity. And he would have had their powers for about that long, too."

Studley nodded. Definitely someone that would be better off with that piece of equipment removed. He could imagine that there would be a lot of problems dealing with someone with powers that flexible.

Truth be told, he could have used that item when he was just coming up through the hero world. There were times when taking an enemy and making them part of him that way would have been rather enjoyable, and more than slightly useful. There were a lot of powers that had been lost to the universe due to a lack of options at the time, and having a way to both contain an enemy and take advantage of what they could do would have been...well, that would have made his job insanely easier.

"You said 'had all but perfected it.' What happened?"

"I got rid of it."

"You think he's got a new one?"

"I think that's exactly it. And I think that he's abducting all the brainiacs because it means he can keep improving it. He doesn't just draw on powers. He draws on strength, on brains, everything. It means that he's literally the sum of his parts when he's gotten a lot of them together."

"I don't suppose there's a time limit?"

"There was."

"You don't think that he'll have that this time?"

"I think that he's learning, and he's trying to make sure that his opponents can't just outlast him like last time."

"Question. Why wasn't he in jail?"

"He was. He must have gotten out."

"Mind calling to confirm that?"

"Why?"

"Just to make sure that we're not on a wild goose chase, make sure that he's not being framed for it, that kind of thing."

"Alright, alright...good points..."

As Nor pulled out the phone to make a call, Studley caught sight of something moving out of the corner of his eye. It was little more than a slight twitch of a tail, but he caught the sight of stripes, and he growled as he realized that there was another feeling of something appearing and disappearing. That damn tiger had been right around the corner, possibly listening in on the two of them.

Or...at least on Nor...

He doesn't notice me until I'm right in his face. That probably means that he can't track me, either, but he can track Nor. Which means that he's tracking Nor to keep a basic idea of where I am...but why?

That was the part he didn't know. The tiger was starting to get on his nerves, and he really wanted an answer as to who the hell he was. Time travel wasn't something that the average person should be messing with, and it really shouldn't be something that had even the slightest chance to work on him. This particular tiger, however, was better at using it than most, better at moving in and out of the timestream at will, and more than that, staying in one place while being somewhen else.

It was theoretically impossible, but then again, so was he. The fact that two impossibilities were in the same space annoyed him and intrigued him at the same time.

The call ended, and Nor tossed him his phone back. Tucking it back into his vest, Studley cocked his head to the side.

"Well?"

"He's out, alright. Broke out this morning, and the guard that was supposed to be watching him was all the way on the other side of the city."

"Someone with resources helped him, then."

"Probably. And not exactly subtly, either."

"...Hmm."

"Hmm?"

"Just something weird..."

"What?"

"Just...two cursed items being stolen in one day, and one of them from the person that stole it first. And now, there's Parlour out there, working on a new gun..."

"You think that this is all connected?"

"I was, until it got this sloppy."

Because if it was the same operator, then there was every reason to believe that there was someone trying to gain a leg up on their competition with more gear, more different toys that they could use against other supers. That said, if it was the same person, they had gone from canny and sneaky to being rather obvious, and that implied that there was a different person involved with this one.

Or someone that was just trying to throw them off.

"Where would he go next?" Studley asked.

"Well, if he had all the people that he wanted, he'd be at one of his workshops," Nor admitted. "If he didn't, then he'd still be hunting for more people."

"How many went missing again?"

"Um...twelve."

"Is that enough for him to make something?"

"Probably. Barely, but probably."

"He the sort of person to hurry it along?"

"...Yeah. Yeah, he is."

"Then where's the nearest workshop?"

The nearest wasn't any good, and neither was the second-nearest. They ended up finding all kinds of gear there, and Studley was honestly surprised at the sheer level of techno-wizardry that the stallion was apparently capable of keeping hidden from the city, but there wasn't anything useful. He called the police, letting them know about their pursuit, but Nor was leading the charge from one workshop to another.

They leaped from one rooftop to another, Studley grunting slightly as his boots hit the next roof.

"In pursuit of Parlour's workshops at the moment, have back-up standing by."

"They're not going to be coming for this," Nor said. "This is super-business."

"Yeah, well, following procedure."

And at the very least, it meant that the police would know not to get in the way if they weren't going to show up. Less worries about collateral damage that way, and a hell of a lot less to worry about if Parlour powered up enough to start needing extra measures.

Studley knew that he could handle most things, and he doubted that there was a hero or a villain in the city that could go 1v1 with him. That said, there was a big difference between fighting someone one on one, and fighting an entire city in the same sort of way. He imagined that Parlour was smart enough to have studied most of the different powers that he could absorb from other people, and if he had, that meant that it wouldn't be like dealing with someone that swapped bodies with someone that hadn't practiced with the powers before. This would be fighting someone that knew what they were doing and was all too eager to lay down the smackdown.

If that happened, he might have to stop holding back as much. As much, heh.

The wolf smiled as they dropped, only to yelp as the building they were falling on suddenly grew. They went from falling towards a rooftop twenty feet down to slamming down hard on an office floor that hadn't been there before. Nobody looked up as Nor kept running forward. Nobody seemed to mind the fact that there was a mostly-naked mule jogging between the cubicles on the way to the windows on the far side of the building.

Studley shook his head as he followed along, his knees aching slightly from the sudden impact, but not enough to stop his forward momentum. An office worker idly opened the windows straight ahead of them and the two heroes jumped through, landing on another building slightly further down.

"Ugh. Does that happen a lot?" Studley asked.

"Yep."

"How do you plan a route?"

"You don't. You just react as fast as you can."

"Chaotic. I love it."

The wolf chuckled, trying to get a feel for when the city might be changing, when it might suddenly rear up or fall down in front of him. There were little signs, he started to realize, but he imagined that he was only getting it because he was so different to the average person. They would never feel that slight tugging, that feeling of order being defied, of the little shifts and shakes and -

The stretches.

Studley gritted his teeth as he felt a sudden pull in a very different way. All the other changes had been very minor, something that he could easily miss and even more easily ignore, but this time, something changed hard. He felt like the city had been yanked in a different direction, the buildings changing their arrangement, going from a grid-shape of streets below to something more like a spiral.

They were being directed, he realized, pulled along a different route. Studley looked at Nor.

"You felt that, right?"

"It was...definitely different."

"You noticed it, though?"

"Yeah."

"That's what's been going on all day."

"What, the city changing?"

"No, this thing with that tiger. I mentioned him yesterday?"

"The weird guy?"

"...Yeah, now that I hear that out loud, that really doesn't narrow it down, does it?"

"See?!"

Another leap, another landing, this one involving a tuck and roll to keep their forward momentum going. The city changed again, this time spinning in a different direction, pointing them towards a warehouse. Nor blinked.

"I...I was going to skip that one, but...well, guess it's close enough to check now."

"Why were you going to skip it?"

"He had that one stripped last time he was arrested. I didn't think he'd go back to it."

"Well, let's find out, hmm?"

At the very least, the city was accommodating them now, taking them where they needed to go. It wasn't as good as teleportation, but he doubted that there was anyone in the city that could pull that off. He shook his head, keeping up his loping run and making sure that he didn't tire himself out too much in the process. If he was going to deal with a person with too many different superpowers to count, then he wanted to be fresh.

And if he was going to deal with that tiger, he wanted to be sure that he was ready for it. Dealing with time travelers was a pain in the ass, mostly because you kept having to pin down just where they were going whenever they disappeared. Well, when, anyway.

"You said that the tiger was doing this?" Nor asked.

"Nothing this big, but something like it."

"What do you mean, something like it?"

"He's a time traveler, or something. He's here, but he's also some-when else. He keeps messing with things, trying to adjust this or that and...well, if he's responsible for this, you'll probably see him sooner or later."

Studley rather wanted Nor to see this guy at this point. He was starting to think that he might be a little crazier than usual without someone else to back him up. But if the tiger was the one warping the city around now, then that meant that he was either the one responsible for all the thieving, or he was on their side. One or the other, it meant that there was a confrontation brewing between them.

They reached the edge of the tall buildings, making their way down with thumping leaps to the shorter buildings, and then to the streets proper. Despite being near the waterfront, the traffic wasn't that heavy, and as a matter of fact, it was almost as if they were being directed away from the warehouse. Studley could feel that stretched feeling in the air, slightly different he realized from when the tiger had been doing it. Something else besides that feline was responsible...

Unless Parlour had managed to take the tiger's powers and was trying to use them for his own purposes.

That was an idea that he really didn't need right at the moment. Shaking his head, the wolf ran over to the fence between the street and the warehouse and vaulted over it. Nor followed, the mule's hooves clicking on the concrete as they walked up to the front door.

"Any security around here?" Studley asked, glancing left and right.

"Nothing that I remember. He mostly kept up the payments and made sure that people didn't have a reason to come around."

"So, it's basically just defended by being a secret?"

"Pretty much."

"The cops should have stripped this place, right?"

"They did, but he doesn't need much. Ink and a gun and a subject; that's it."

"Explains the ink smell back at the professor's place..."

They reached the front door, and Studley rested his hand on the large piece of metal. He could almost feel something on the other side, the stretching feeling getting worse. There were two different feelings now, one exactly the same as what the tiger had been doing around him, and one that was slightly off. The same sort of power, the same sort of strange pulling and pushing that he had been getting when the city had rearranged itself, but it was a different sort of flavor, seasoned, more aged.

This city keeps getting weirder. Heh. I guess it's not so average after all.

"On three?" he asked.

"Sure."

"One...two..."

Three. The door banged open with a mutual kick from the two of them, and the wolf and the mule stepped inside. Nor checked the ceiling as they stepped through, while Studley reached down to his waist in preparation for using his blades.

Neither was needed. There were no traps, no minions, no extra security. The walls were bare of any real equipment, though it must have been pretty recently stripped considering the dust marks and the shapes that were still present against the sheet metal that made up the walls. The floor was dusty, the windows were dirty, and there was nothing in the great warehouse except for two figures in the very center.

The first must have been Parlour. The chestnut-furred stallion stood rather tall, and he was, unsurprisingly, bare chested. He had a few tattoos on him already, mostly photorealistic versions of different people, though there was a white birthmark on his chest that seemed to be the framing device for some of them, allowing the swirls of people to circle around that. He was tense, however, tense and stiff and - though perhaps only to Studley's eyes - frozen in place.

The second was the goddamn tiger.

"Nor?" Studley muttered.

"I see him."

"The horse, or the tiger?"

"Both."

"Good. I'm not more crazy, then."

"That, or we both are."

"Trust me, if we were both that crazy, this city wouldn't still be here."

"...I'll take that as a compliment?"

Yes, and not a thing that tells you more than it should about my powers, Studley thought as they walked forward. The tiger looked up, cocking his head to the side. At first, he seemed almost pleased to see the mule, but then his eyes found Studley again, and he grimaced.

"Not. Again."

"Yep. Again."

"You are becoming a serious problem."

"I think that's you. What the hell are you doing to him?"

"Getting rid of his tattoos. If you will excuse me."

The tiger turned his back, and as he did, the tattoo of a honey badger started to lift up and off the stallion's chest. Parlour gasped, his eyes going wide for a moment, but that was all the movement that the stallion seemed capable of in that moment. He sputtered for breath as the tattoo lifted up from the flesh, almost like it was peeling away. The color faded, turning it sepia, then black and white, before utterly disappearing, leaving the stallion unmarked.

Nor shook his head in a momentary tremor, but Studley was the one that ended up holding his head and stomach. The feeling of time being ripped open and then changed like that really, really messed with him, leaving him nauseated as the world took to correcting itself.

"What...the hell...did you just do?"

"I made sure that he didn't find that professor. A simple shift; a delivery of cruise tickets for the week before, and he was not in his apartment to be taken."

It might have been a simple shift, but it was messing with more than just the fabric of reality there. It was messing with the gun in the horse's hand. One little shift, then another, changing how it was built, altering the upgrades that it had received, and more.

Studley's eyes fell to the tattoo gun, and he got the same feeling from it as he had gotten from the skull that Necromiter had been using. It was more powerful than just a piece of tech. Whether it was the whole gun or just a part of it, he didn't know, but there was something almost supernatural about that thing, something that didn't belong in this city. He took a step forward -

"Stay where you are," the tiger said.

"I don't think so."

"I have to reverse this before -"

"I said, I don't think so. Not this time."

The tiger turned his attention away from the stallion, Nor said something in the background, and then -

The lights went out.

Studley stopped in place, his eyes adjusting to the darkness quickly, but not quite quickly enough to make out more than a silhouette darting through the black towards the imprisoned Parlour. There was something, a feeling almost like telekinesis, that slipped between the tiger and the horse, grabbing for the gun. It slipped, and before Studley could react fast enough to stop it, the gun was gone.

The lights came back on, whatever had been draped over the windows over the top of the building fading in that moment. A quick glance confirmed that the tattoo gun was gone from Parlour's hand, and the culprit had already pulled a runner.

"...Lovely," the tiger said, gritting his teeth and taking a deep breath. "One more of those objects stolen away. One more problem in the timeline. And one more interruption that could have been avoided if you were not so inquisitive as you were."

Barely aware of Nor moving to the wall of the warehouse, Studley focused his attention, his irritation, and every bit of curiosity and annoyance that he felt towards the tiger. He could feel the stretching starting to happen, the beginning of a disappearance, but this time, he denied it. He allowed a portion of what he really was out, allowing his chaos to spill out and break the order that the tiger was building around him, that the tiger used to slip away.

The feline's body suddenly solidified, no longer in the process of fading, and more importantly, no longer in the process of its perpetual changing. He watched the tiger's eyes widen, and he smiled.

"I'm not what you're used to dealing with."

"...No, you are not."

"And you are going to answer my questions."

"No. You will release me."

"After you answer my questions."

While the tiger's body couldn't fade, that didn't mean that he couldn't start pulling other tricks. A blur of tigers started appearing around the stilled one, four, sixteen, sixty-four, the group growing, each one slightly different from the rest, older, younger, stronger, weaker, all different, all from different timelines and -

Not sufficient for him.

All variety, all changes, followed a logical pattern. Everything, every altered timeline, every altered event, every conceptual piece of existence, was based off of the logical extension of what it could be based off of a prime piece of existence. All thinking beings worked from that point, gradually changing what they started with, or adding onto it, or doing things that would allow them to differentiate themselves from that core.

What Studley did to that tiger was cut logic out of the equation. There was no logic; there was chaos. And in that chaos, there could be no progression. There could only be mutations, or the prime.

The tiger's doubles disappeared, collapsing into the prime, and the prime tiger fell to his knees and shrieked with pain.

The End

Summary: Studley and Nor find out that something else was going on while they were dealing with Necromiter, and track down an old villain.

Tags: No Sex, Half-Nude, Mule, Tiger, Horse, Wolf, Super, Superheroes, Novus Ager, Series, Reality Shifting, Detective Work, Mystery,