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Post by BornToRun on Oct 12, 2008 6:27:34 GMT -5
We're retconning the previous Superman #10 from this continuity. That story will be continued over at Vanguard Comics, by myself and Gabe, but here at The Multiverse, we've got an all-new, all-different...
Earth Eight Superman
Issue #10: Starry, Starry Night
by Russell Burlingame
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Post by BornToRun on Oct 12, 2008 6:28:18 GMT -5
The bar had just closed, Bibbo had gone his way and Conner was standing around the corner, waiting for his employer to be far enough gone that he could safely take to the sky. He watched the corner carefully as he slowly lifted off the ground. It wasn't always necessary, he didn't think, to fly in full costume. This late at night—or early in the morning, depending on your perspective—it would be fine to just quietly drift through the air with a dark jacket on. Make no noise, call no attention to yourself, and no sober person is awake at 4am anyway, right?
He was lost in these thoughts, and about ten feet off the ground, when in front of him the air was split by a bright, white light. An instant later, a large, transparent sphere appeared in front of him. A man in cargo pants and a white t-shirt was at what appeared to be some kind of control panel, flanked by a man in a blue-and-gold jumpsuit with a floating, golden-colored...something...behind him. Conner vaguely recognized the man as Booster Gold—it must have been one of Clark's memories, though, as there wasn't a lot else there. Gold was older than Conner remembered, too, and not as lean. The men were flanked by a strange-looking figure. He wore white boots and gloves, but beyond that, his entire body—head included—appeared to be a black field of space and stars.
Conner sighed. “I suppose there's no chance this isn't a job for Superman?” He asked, and started opening his shirt while he touched down on the ground in the alley.
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Post by BornToRun on Oct 12, 2008 6:29:00 GMT -5
Minutes later, the man who called himself Rip Hunter was explaining that he—as well as his companions here, who he named as Booster Gold, Skeets the flying robot and Starman—was from about twenty-five years in the future. They were, he explained, trying to ensure that their future actually happened.
“At present,” Hunter explained, “there's a bit of an...anomaly...in the timestream. If we can't remove it, eventually it will do substantially more damage. When we're from will cease to be, replaced by a savage world where Booster's best friend will be betrayed and killed by a trusted adviser.”
“What is it I can do for you?” Conner asked.
“We need you to intercept Kal-El's ship before it crashes in the Kents' North Forty,” Booster blurted out.
“What?!”
“Booster here,” Rip interrupted, “is talking a bit out of school. Yes, it's true that we need you to prevent Kal-El's crash. But there's a problem. Someone has placed a kind of chronal wormhole in the way of his fated ship. Before he strikes Earth, Kal-El will be shunted back in time.”
Skeets spoke up, his tinny robotic voice surprisingly human to all but Conner's sensitive ears. “His ship will not crashland in 1985, as it should,” Skeets explained. “He will, instead, crashland in the year 1938. As a result, Superman will become an inspiration to an entirely different generation of heroes. A group called The Justice Society will rise up around him, and they will take on Hitler's war machine.”
“What's so bad about that?” Conner asked. “You're saying that Superman will stop the Holocaust?”
“It sounds attractive, I know,” said Rip. “But it can't happen. If Superman crashlands in 1938, he'll be too old and out-of-practice to continue his fight for justice in the 1980s. Without him, the next generation of heroes will turn out markedly different. Led by Booster—whose motivation in the early days was mostly money—and the Blue Devil and Green Lantern, who seek fame and adulation, the heroic community will become, essentially, spoiled kids.”
“Trust me, young man,” Booster chimed in. “You don't want an entire generation following my clumsy lead. Plus--” he paused for effect, “...do you think they had cloning in the 1950s?
“I don't follow,” Conner said.
“You won't exist,” Starman said. “If Superman's career ends in the 1970s, then he'll never meet Lois Lane, or James Olsen. He'll never team with Batman to prevent the murder of Alan Scott. He won't have the strength to battle Doomsday. And no one will see him as relevant to today's culture.”
“If Superman first appeared in 1938,” Booster said matter-of-factly, “nobody would have cloned him.”
“...Oh,” Conner said.
“If we succeed at this,” Rip Hunter told him, “you won't even remember this meeting. Are you ready to go?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Booster chortled. “...That's what I always used to say, eh, Rip?”
And the time sphere blinked out of existence, carrying Starman, Superman and the Time Masters with it.
The timestream was a blast of colors. Conner couldn't really understand what was going on around them, so he tried to keep his eye on the monitors. A strawberry blonde with pretty, smiling eyes and crow's feet, who dressed remarkably like Booster Gold, stood beside a skinny, wrinkled, white-haired old man in a red tunic, emblazoned with a yellow star logo on its left breast.
“Goldstar, Rik Sunn, this is Conner Kent, the Superman of the early 21st Century,” Rip said into the monitors. Conner, these are more of my team.
“Rik Sunn?” Conner said, “Wasn't there someone by that name recently involved with a disruption at Studio 60?”
“That's ancient history to me, boy,” Sunn told him. “Time travel is a bitch; do try to keep up.”
“Rik is invaluable to me, Conner,” Rip assured him. “Things in California went as they had to.”
“Fair enough,” Conner told him, “I'm going to try not to think too much about...” he paused. “Well, I'm not going to think much about much of anything if I can help it this whole trip.”
“Probably not a bad plan, kid,” Booster told him, and slapped him on the back. “Don't worry, this stuff gets easier as time goes on.”
“What does,” Conner asked him, “Time-travel or superheroics?”
“Yes,” Booster and Starman said in unison.
The time sphere blinked out of the timestream and appeared in what Conner recognized as a Smallville wheat field. Rip turned off the sphere's internal lighting and touched down as quietly as possible.
“Remember,” Skeets told the heroes as they disembarked, “1930s Kansas is not a place that's used to spacecraft, time-travel or costumed metahumans. You don't want to be seen if at all possible.”
“Not coming?” Conner asked.
“No,” Rip said definitively. “Skeets is the hardest one of you to explain away if somebody does catch a glimpse. He'll stay here with me in the field, because if a UFO crashes here, our job will be to get Booster to lift it aboard before the Kents arrive. Ideally, though, the battle will be fought and won in the skies. If we can keep Kal-El from coming through the wormhole to begin with, we can avoid any of the messy consequences of us trying to reassert reality after he ends up in the wrong spot.”
“So it's really just me and Starman here who are going to try and...”
“...and SAVE THE TIMESTREAM!” Starman said triumphantly, and bolted into the air.
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Post by BornToRun on Oct 12, 2008 6:29:32 GMT -5
The two heroes floated in the sky. They could see the wormhole, but not through it. Neither of them dared touch it, and Starman said that he didn't have the power to seal it up, so it was really a matter of waiting until the craft bounced through, and then using tactile telekinesis and some kind of ill-defined gravity power that Starman had tried a couple of times to explain to Conner to bounce it back.
“The ship's auto-pilot will course-correct as long as it's in the right time and place,” Starman explained. “There's really no need to worry about it bouncing back out into space and the baby dying in the void and the world being completely without him—and you—forever or anything.”
“Wow,” Conner said, “You're just a bundle of happy thoughts, aren't you?”
“Thanks!” Starman chirped.
They stood for a long time in silence.
“When I'm from, there are real Kryptonians,” Starman said finally. Before Conner could react, a figure in a red costume and a green cape smashed into him.
“What are you doing?” The man demanded. He had a yellow star on his chest, and carried a gold rod that was about two feet long in his hand. He slammed into Conner and bounced off, then stood there in the sky, looking confused. “Who are you people?” He asked.
“I'm...Superman,” Conner said. “This is Starman. Who are you?”
“He's not Starman,” Theodore Knight demanded. “I'm Starman!” It was then that Conner looked down and saw more men he recognized from Clark's memories: The Flash, Jay Garrick. Wildcat, Ted Grant. Iron Munro. Phantom Lady. These were the heroes of the Golden Age. These men fought Hitler.
“Wow,” Conner said, mostly to himself. “Iron looks young.”
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Post by BornToRun on Oct 12, 2008 6:30:02 GMT -5
Ten minutes later, the field generator that Ted Knight had invented was shut off. Masks were shed, hands were shook, and Conner and Starman explained to the fledgling All-Star Squadron that if they had succeeded, then yes they could have brought the most powerful hero of all time to their own aid...but he wouldn't have been old enough to assist them until long after Hitler had been defeated by good-old American ingenuity. They sat, then, and shared war stories—literal and figurative—with the men for hours. Conner was particularly chummy with Iron Munro although, per Rip's instructions, he didn't tell the young man why. When the sun began to rise over 1938, Starman and Superman bid farewell to the founding fathers of the superhero game, and promised that they would see them—all of them—again one day.
When the time sphere blinked back into existence in the alley where the Time Masters had first collected Conner, he tumbled out of it. His DNA wasn't fully Kryptonian, and he had just come off of a number of nasty battles, only to have a full day and a half of working and no sleep. He was glad tat they brought him back to closing time at the Ace o' Clubs, because at least now he could return to his apartment and grab a shower, and some sleep.
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Post by BornToRun on Oct 12, 2008 6:30:21 GMT -5
He waved a friendly goodbye to the Time Masters and took back to the air, this time in costume, heading back toward the apartment on Clinton. He closed his eyes and took in the rush of wind, but a second later there was a crackle in his ear.
“Superman?” He heard Iron's familiar grizzled voice in his ear. This was “Old” Iron—the one he'd met last week, not the young man he'd just had a drink with. “Superman, if you're hearing this, then it means I'm dead.”
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