Young All-Stars

Times Past, 1943

When Sidekicks Unite

by Blackwolf247

On a summer’s day in 1943, three millionaires and their young wards gather for a social visit. But when Robin the Boy Wonder, Sandy the Golden Boy, and Speedy the Boy Bowman are kidnapped in their secret identities and held for ransom, they must outwit their kidnappers without any of their usual crime-fighting tools!

• Chapter 1: Death on Horseback

• Chapter 2: Unsolved Mystery

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Without another moment’s thought, Dick Grayson, Sandy Hawkins, and Roy Harper launched themselves at the gunsels holding them hostage. Each of them had experience fighting adults and, frankly, were not that far from adulthood themselves. It was a quick fight, and shortly only the three youths were standing.

“Dick, any idea where we are?” Sandy asked as he tied one of his foes up with some rope.

“No. This area doesn’t look familiar,” said Dick. “But I suspect if we take their truck and go down that road, we’ll find ourselves somewhere familiar soon.”

Roy sat rubbing his head. “Seems odd going into action without my costume on. Mine’s in Oliver’s car.”

“Ours are in Dick’s, so we three are gonna have to handle this as ourselves for a little while,” Sandy said. “Hey this goober is still conscious. Time to interrogate.”

“Right,” said Dick. “Good thing we, uh, Blue Boys are not known for killing people.”

“Can’t be known for what there ain’t no witnesses to,” Sandy said, slapping the semiconscious adult. “Come on, you — talk.”

***

Elsewhere, Oliver Queen regained consciousness just as he spotted a bicycle coming toward the cars. Just then, the purple mist reappeared, and the Confederate officer was once again there. “Beware! Beware! Danger!” Then, just as suddenly, he was gone. Queen felt himself being checked over by a rather portly man.

“Mawster Queen, it’s me, Alfred — Mawster Wayne’s gentleman’s gentleman. Are you seriously injured, sir?”

Queen’s head was pounding, and his mind was in a daze, but except for some minor injuries, he seemed to be in good condition. ”What brings you this way, Alfred?”

“Mawster Dick and his friend are overdue in returning to the manor, so I decided to look for them,” said Alfred Beagle. “Gas-rationing being what it is, it seemed prudent to use my cycle as compared to the car. I say! I just spotted a note, sir.”

He picked it off the Wayne vehicle and handed to Queen, who studied it. “Damn. Someone’s kidnapped the boys and wants a ransom. I, uh… Ow! I think we had better head back to Bruce’s place and, uh, report this to the police.”

“Yes, sir. Good idea, sir.” Alfred started to turn his bike around.

“We’ll take my car, Alfred,” said Queen.

“Oh, jolly good show, sir. Say, an arrow — how interesting.” He picked it up and handed it to Queen. “Might be a clue, sir.”

Queen looked at the green arrow. He didn’t know if Alfred knew his identity as Green Arrow, although Bruce certainly did. But if he did, he was certainly discreet about it. ”Right. Thanks, Alfred.”

***

“All I know is the boss paid us to take you rich kids. Said we’d get a couple thou each. I didn’t know you was the fighting type. Oh, my head!”

Roy smirked. “Now you know how I feel. Who’s your boss, anyways?”

The hoodlum shook his head. “He calls himself Rag — just Rag, not mister, or captain, or anything fancy. He’s new, I think.”

Dick looked around at what seemed to be a very desolate area. “Where are we?”

“Not far from the ruins of the old battlefield,” the hood said. “Before I hadda drop outta school to get a job, I remember we visited this place in school — well, the battlefield, at any rate.”

“Battlefield?” Sandy asked Dick.

“Yep. A small band of Confederate guerrillas had pulled a daring raid pretty far north,” said Dick. “One of Bruce’s ancestors led a counterattack. Legend has it that almost everyone on both sides vanished, never to be seen again. No one knows why.”

Roy said, “Bet there was a purple mist involved.”

Dick nodded. “Probably. Captain Andrew Wayne was one of the ones who vanished. Fortunately for me, he already had two sons when that happened. OK, we head for town, call Bruce, and, uh, better tell the police about these guys. Getting dark. Bet Alfred’s getting worried.”

“Hey, you just gonna leave us here?” the hood asked.

“Sure. Nothing around here to eat you that I know of.”

Dick responded, “Come on, guys. Let’s roll.”

The three boys headed for the army truck they had been brought in to this remote location, and as they approached it, Sandy yelled, “I’m driving!” He climbed into the driver’s side. Roy and Dick climbed in on the other side.

Looking around, Roy picked up a comic-book. “Hey, Captain Marvel! That’s swell! But what kind of name is Pinky for a boy sidekick?”

The three youths looked around, making sure it was all clear to pull out, and Dick indicated which direction they should drive. Since they were closer to Gotham City than Wayne Manor, their plan was to drive into the city, alert the authorities as to the location of the captured baddies, and call Bruce.

“Maybe we should bring them with us,” suggested Sandy.

“No, they’ll be OK here,” Dick responded.

***

At Wayne Manor, Bruce Wayne and Wesley Dodds listened to Oliver Queen as Alfred treated his wounds.

“Think we should suit up and go looking for the boys?” asked Wes, alias the Sandman.

“No, not yet,” said Bruce, alias the Batman. “But taking a drive in our civvies would be OK. Alfred, that purple mist story sounds familiar. Didn’t you tell me once about seeing something like that?”

“Yes, sir — in France during the last war. Always was a mystery to me, Mawster Bruce.”

***

Meanwhile, where Dick had left his car, two off-duty G.I.s were walking. “Hey, Willie, look — this car’s got its keys in it and a full tank of gas. Wonder where its driver is.”

“Don’t know, Joe. Maybe we had better take it into town and turn it over to the police. ‘Sides, that’ll get us back to base a whole lot quicker.”

They climbed in and drove toward town.

***

The Rag, as he called himself because of the ragged costume he wore, was in the meantime driving to meet his cronies when he spotted his other truck heading toward him. He slammed on the breaks and leapt out, pulling his machine gun with him.

The three boys also stopped and jumped out.

“How?” cried the Rag incredulously. “You three are more problems than you’re worth!”

He raised his weapon, but before he could unlock the safety, all three of them were on him like mustard on a hotdog, and he was quickly subdued. Roy pulled his mask off. “James Thatcher!” he exclaimed.

“Who?” Dick and Sandy asked the smaller youth.

“Oliver’s representative to the Army. He’s in charge of weapons sales, which explains why the pistols we found were from Queen Manufacturing.”

“Stupid kids! I had to pick three athletes to kidnap!” snarled Thatcher, a balding, skeletal, thin man. “The ransom would’a been my ticket out of this stupid war!”

Dick laughed and said, “Well, so would have been doing your job, bringing the Axis down that much sooner!”

“You tell him, old son!” Sandy said, slapping the slightly shorter Grayson on the back.

***

Later, at stately Wayne Manor, three reunited crime-fighting duos were relaxing after a fine dinner Alfred had fixed for them.

“The state boys rounded up Thatcher’s men, and the Gotham boys in blue have your car, Dick. Couple of soldiers turned it in, so all’s well that ends well,” Bruce said.

“What about the mist and the Confederate officer?” Roy asked.

Oliver shook his head. “That is indeed an odd mystery, but not one we’re going to solve tonight.”

“Indeed,” Wes said. “I plan to ask the Justice Society members to see if they have any information on it, but we may just have to file this mystery under unsolved.”

Bruce nodded. “Wouldn’t be the first one.”

The End

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It was an early summer’s day in 1943 when millionaire Bruce Wayne — secretly the crime-fighter known as the Batman — walked toward the front door of his mansion. Just as he reached for the doorknob to open it, the door bell chimed. Since he was already right there, he opened the door immediately.

“Wes Dodds! Good to see you!” said Bruce, a surprised look on his face. Seeing the young man next to him, he grinned at the boy and said, “Hi, Sandy.”

“Bruce Wayne, you old stick in the mud!” replied a smiling Wes Dodds, who was secretly the Justice Society of America member called the Sandman. “Answering your own door? What happened — your butler get drafted?”

“Hi, Mr. Wayne,” said Sandy Hawkins. “Is Dick here?”

Just then, Alfred Beagle entered the foyer, followed by Dick Grayson.

“Sorry, Mawster Bruce,” said Alfred. “I was in the kitchen and didn’t hear the door.”

“It’s OK, Alfred. I was just going to check on our gardeners.” Turning to his friend, Bruce said, “Fortunately for me, Alfred is exempt, being a veteran and all, but I lost most of my groundskeepers to the army. The people I have now do a good job, but they’re older, so it takes them awhile.”

Dick walked forward and said, “Hi, Mr. Dodds.” Looking at Sandy, he grinned and said, “Hey, string-bean. I see you’re still around. ”

Sandy chuckled. “Haven’t fallen off of any buildings yet, bird-brain.”

Bruce turned to Wes and said, “Oliver Queen and his ward will be here later today. Come on in. Alfred will get your bags.”

A few minutes later, Dick and Sandy entered the study, where the two men were talking either munitions manufacturing or the Dodgers game coming up later that day on the radio. Dick wasn’t sure, not that it really mattered to him.

“Bruce, Sandy and I are going into town,” said Dick. “I want to take him to Pop Tate’s for a milkshake.”

Wes looked at Bruce and smiled. “Couldn’t Alfred make them milkshakes?”

Bruce looked thoughtful, then replied, “Yes, but I doubt he has any teenage girls in the kitchen.”

“Aw, Bruce…” Dick stated in mock exaggeration.

“You have girls in Gotham?” said Sandy, pretending to look astonished.

“A few,” Dick responded. “And soon even electricity. Come on — let’s see if we can put some flesh on that skeleton of yours.”

“Be back by five. I’m expecting more company,” said Bruce.

“Yes, boys. You know Roy Harper, don’t you?” Wes asked. “He’s about your age.”

“Yeah, Wes,” Sandy said. “Met him at summer camp last year. He’s all right, but he’s no junior super-duper like bird-boy and myself.”

Wes looked at Bruce and winked, but since both of the youths had their backs turned to their mentors, they completely missed it.

On the way to the car, Dick said, “I do know some nice girls. If you’re polite, we may get dates for this weekend.”

“Hey, I can be polite. I didn’t insult Hawkgirl at the JSA Christmas party, did I?”

“No, but I bet you couldn’t look Wonder Woman straight in her big blue eyes.”

“Her eyes are blue?” Sandy asked, semi-jokingly.

***

The two youths were in the Wayne roadster, and Dick was telling Sandy about the time how, when he was first learning to drive the Batmobile, he nearly wiped out a very startled farmer just around the corner. “Right about where that smoking car is…” he looked at Sandy. “Hey, wait a minute!” Dick parked, and the two boys jumped out.

“This is Mr. Queen’s car,” Sandy said.

Dick looked inside and spotted a bleeding, unconscious Roy Harper. “Sandy, get the first aid kit out of my car. He doesn’t look too bad. I may be able to help him here.”

At that moment, a figure on horseback appeared near the boys. He was dressed as an officer of the Confederate Cavalry of some eighty years before and cried out, “Beware! Beware! Death comes calling!” He then vanished as quickly as he had appeared.

Any other teenaged boys would have been scared out of their wits, but Robin the Boy Wonder and Sandy the Golden Boy had seen far stranger things in their day. They’d almost expected something like this to happen; whenever the Young All-Stars got together, odd things always seemed to happen.

“Weird,” Sandy said, nonplussed. “Well, my costume is in the backseat if needed.”

“Mine, too,” said Dick. “But right now I want to take care of Roy.”

Dick cleaned the wound. A cut in the forehead had a tendency to bleed a lot, but it wasn’t serious. Roy started to regain consciousness.

“Green Arrow! Look out, it’s Purple–” Roy began, then faded into unconsciousness again.

“Holy secret identities!” said Dick.

“Do you suppose our young friend is Speedy?” asked Sandy.

“At the moment he isn’t. As for him being Speedy, well, it’s possible. Those two are from New York City, and our little buddy is a redhead. Still, New York must have a lot of — Hey, maybe he is. Outside, of All-Star Squadron meetings, I never worked with the Green Arrow and Speedy, but I did like them.”

A sudden explosion rocked their world, and it came from nearby.

“OK, that shakes me up,” Dick said, and Sandy nodded in agreement.

In a grove of trees nearby, a shadowy figure watched. “Soon, you spoiled rich kids. Soon.”

The explosion worked to bring Roy Harper to consciousness. ”Oliver?” He looked up and saw Dick Grayson looking at him. “Dick?”

“Yes, Roy, it’s me. And Sandy is with me, too. What happened to you and Mr. Queen?”

“We were attacked by — and this is gonna sound strange — but there was this Confederate officer on a horse,” explained Roy. “He warned us of danger, then vanished. And then this purple mist appeared, and now you guys show up. Ow… my head is killing me.”

Sandy Hawkins handed Roy two aspirins and a canteen with water in it. ”Hope this helps, little buddy,” he said kindly.

Roy sat up and took the pills, gulping down water. ”Thanks! Oh, and by the way, I grew some since last we met.”

Dick helped Roy out of the car. Standing next to Dick, he was still a couple of inches shorter than the Boy Wonder, but not as short as he had been last summer. But then, Dick and Sandy had grown, too.

“We’re pretty close to home,” Dick said. “I think it would be a good idea to get ahold of Bruce. Maybe he and Wes can find Mr. Queen.”

Roy shook his head and immediately winced from the pain. “Oww. That was dumb.” Then he looked at his friends. “I don’t know if they can do anything, really. But I suppose it would be a good idea. Mind if I look around a little first?”

Sandy popped up from the other side of the car. “I found an arrow. Say, it’s green!”

“Huh? A green arrow — that’s odd,” Roy stated, looking at the ground.

“Well, Roy, considering you were trying to warn the Green Arrow of something purple, and you just mentioned a purple mist, maybe not so odd. At least not to Sandy and me.”

“Dick? You’re talking in riddles.”

“Easy, Roy. Sandy and I think you’re Speedy, the boy bowman.”

Roy looked like he was going to protest, but then finally nodded. “You got me. Why? Who are you two — Little Boy Blue and the one of the Blue Boys?”

“Nope. I’m Sandy the Golden Boy, and Dickie is Robin the Boy Wonder.”

Roy looked stunned, then said, “Yeah, makes sense. When I saw you guys at All-Star Squadron meetings, I thought you looked familiar.”

“If we can solve this mystery ourselves, well, that’ll be a big boost for us Young All-Stars,” Dick said. “OK, Roy, you take it easy. Sandy and I will look for clues.”

A second explosion closer to the cars sent all three teenagers to the ground, covering them with dirt and knocking them unconscious.

A tall skeletal figure dressed in ragged clothing suddenly appeared, holding an army-issue machine gun. Several men in gas masks were behind him. “Take ‘em. But don’t rough ‘em up too badly. Their parents will pay big money for their return.”

“Right, boss. What about their cars?”

“Leave ‘em. Will help when I send the ransom notes later.”

***

Unseen by the motley band of criminals in a copse nearby, a bleeding blond man tried to rise to his feet, his expensive suit filthy and covered with blood and grime. He raised his head, caught a bit of what was going on, and passed out again.

***

Dick Grayson woke up in the back of an army truck, tied but not gagged. Out the back he could see the country rolling by. Sandy Hawkins was still out but talking in his sleep. “Princess Diana, you have the most beautiful blue eyes!” he muttered. “I have never seen eyes so blue! The junior prom? I’d love for you to be my date.”

Roy Harper’s soft laughter brought Dick’s head around. ”They never searched us. I got an arrowhead in my pocket that can cut these ropes.”

“Good idea. Odd they put us back here with no guards, though, isn’t it?”

“Must be amateurs,” said Roy. “Hey, string-bean awakes.”

“Uh, hi, guys,” said Sandy dazedly. “Where are we?”

“Nowhere near Wonder Woman,” Dick said, grinning. “I can assure you of that.”

Roy had nearly cut through his ropes when the truck stopped, and the three boys found themselves facing several men with pistols aimed at them.

“OK, youse boys, come quietly, and we won’t have to hurt you none.”

Dick stood up, followed by the others. He didn’t recognize the immediate surroundings, but judging from the sky, they weren’t far from where they had been captured. His one question was, Now what?

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The Brave and the Bold: Whiz Kid and Savant

The City of Truth

The Race crossover

by Dan Swanson

It’s hard to be a couple of teenagers in love — especially when one is a superhero and the other is a super-villainess! Savant decides it’s time to face the truth in a unique way — by bringing Whiz Kid and herself into an advanced simulation in which they can live new lives free from all worldly burdens for a short time, so they can really figure out how they feel about each other. But even this worry-free simulation comes with its own set of consequences, and truth is not always easy to learn!

• Prologue: Simulations

• Chapter 1: Playing God

• Chapter 2: City in a Bottle

• Chapter 3: Second Life

• Chapter 4: The History of Candor

• Chapter 5: The Adventures of Nightbird and Flamewing

• Epilogue: A City of Lies?

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Within instants Whiz Kid returned to Henrietta King’s laboratory, although this time he was moving at invisibly high speed. His presence would certainly be noted, however, as the bottle city of Candor simply vanished from the lab.

Only a few seconds later, Alfred Beagle was helping him set up Candor in its new home in the Batcave. John Garrick gave him the entire story, including Henrietta’s fictional backstory and everything he had learned during a super-speed, ultra-thorough investigation of the bottle and its supporting equipment, using some of the advanced equipment he had access to as a member of the Junior JSA. In particular he had made sure that there was no way for Savant to continue to monitor events or people inside the city or even to locate it.

***

That night in his bedroom in one of the sleeping cars on the campaign train, John awoke in a cold sweat as a realization suddenly hit him. When he had come back from Candor, why had Savant’s teammates already been there watching the video transmissions from inside Candor? Had he remained unconscious long enough for her to have rounded them up, or had they been watching the whole thing from the beginning?

Savant had the modus operandi of playing mind-games with guys. It wasn’t usually with young guys like him, it was true, but that was how she made her living. Was this whole thing just another example? He didn’t believe it; he really liked her, and he really wanted to trust her. But how could he know? How could he ever know? Heck, how did he know that the whole Candor thing wasn’t just an illusion? After all, her father the Brain Wave had been capable of creating extremely advanced, detailed illusions that had fooled even the Justice Society on a few occasions in the past. Sure, the bottle city was physical in nature, since it was now on display in the Batcave, but he could not know whether he had actually manipulated one of the Candorian bodies or merely thought he had.

He resolved that the next day he was going to have a serious talk with his folks about the nature of reality. And then he would talk to some of the members of the JSA about how to protect himself from illusions and mental control in the future. He figured that Doctor Fate and the Spectre in particular ought to have some good advice.

The End

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“One thing I don’t understand, Hank…” Dollface and Faust both looked a little dismayed at John Garrick’s easy use of the Dolly’s nickname for Henrietta King; nothing good could come out of a romance between their leader and one of the good guys.

“Only one thing, Johnny-Boy?” said Henrietta, a hard edge in her voice; he had called her by her brother’s name for the first time. “You really are a genius, aren’t you?”

Whiz Kid ignored her teasing. “Why would you put a deadly monster into your bottle city? I thought you cared about the people there?” He was clearly puzzled and concerned.

“Oh, Godzilla, there, isn’t really dangerous. He’s a strict vegetarian, and he’d never actually threaten anyone. He’s just there to provide the Candorians with a scare and a challenge every now and then.”

“Um, Savant, if Godzilla’s a herbivore, why did he just eat that dog?” asked Stretch O’Brien, concern in his voice as his wife Maggie turned away and retched. “And his tail just wiped out that whole building — I hope nobody was inside!”

“Oh, no! Something’s wrong!” Something very like horror played across Henrietta’s face, and John realized that she wasn’t just pretending.

“Can you use your powers to control it?” he asked, thinking fast.

“The temporal-distortion grid interferes with my powers. There’s nothing I can do!”

“Look! Here come the heroes!” Dolly yelled. “Boo-ooo!”

On the screen, a brightly colored flying vessel flashed past the monster’s head, distracting it.

***

The city wasn’t Tokyo or New York, and the countryside didn’t look familiar at all. Somewhere deep in Godzilla’s mind, the monster knew it was lost. But it was hungry, and from previous adventures with these bipedal animals, it knew they made a tasty snack. The dog had been good but far too small to do anything more than whet its appetite. It also remembered that in the past, the bipeds always initially ran away, but they always returned later and attacked. They weren’t dangerous, never anything more than annoyances, but their flying allies had nasty stingers. Deciding to eat and run before they could set up their attack, it exhaled a cloud of poisonous vapor at the fleeing figures on the ground in front of it, and strode forward to gather up its meal.

Never before in its memory had bipeds reacted as these did. They leaped into the air, prodigious leaps carrying them far out of reach of the monster’s breath weapon. It roared in anger and then began pursuit. It could move much faster than the jumpers, and it would catch them and pluck them out of the air like ripe fruit from a tree — although here in the bottle, the trees weren’t quite real trees, and this seeming reincarnation of a famous movie monster had never eaten fruit.

A brightly colored flying thing flashed in front of the monster’s face, distracting it, and it turned to follow the vessel’s flight path. It was a stubby cylinder that appeared to be about forty feet long, ten feet in diameter, with wings that appeared much too small to support it, tapering to a point in front, with a very large jet in the back. It was colored a wild mixture of red, orange, yellow, blue, and black.

Godzilla began pursuing it — this flying thing was just the right size to make a good meal. The flier pulled ahead, then stopped, hovering in place, and spun in the air to face the monster. A panel in the front opened, exposing a cannon, which immediately fired a package of some sort. The packaging sloughed away, revealing a net, spinning and expanding as it flew toward the monster’s face.

Inside the car, Henrietta’s alter ego Nightbird had just fired the multi-blaster. The largest net package they carried would wrap up about four Candorians, but it wasn’t nearly large enough to entangle the monster. She was puzzled. “With all the years of preparation we’ve done, why haven’t we developed gear for fighting a monster? Everything we have is designed for use against other Candorians! That net might slow it down a little, is all…”

Indeed, the net flew rather slowly. It was designed to capture a leaping Candorian, trapped by gravity and the laws of physics into moving along a ballistic flight path. The monster saw it coming and slashed at it with its left paw. The electrical charge on the net discharged, and the monster’s entire foreleg went numb. It was a much better result than Nightbird had expected.

With a roar, the monster turned back toward the hovering plane, and the pilot — John’s alter ego, Flamewing — sent it roaring away. He had to perform some fancy acrobatic maneuvers to keep away from the clouds of acid the monster breathed out, and at the top of one loop, Nightbird fired her ejection seat.

“Jungar, I’ll keep his attention on me while you get the last of the spectators out of harm’s way!” she radioed as she flew to the ground. Landing in front of the beast, she stood with legs spread, arms outstretched, leaning slightly backward, and then she seemed to grow until she was even larger than the monster. The monster charged this new danger, not intimidated in the least at facing a larger foe.

Godzilla rushed toward the athletically built woman in the gray and green armor, the colors of the nocturnal nightbird. It breathed acid at her, but she was unaffected, so it switched to a physical attack. Almost faster than a normal human could see, the beast’s tail whipped around and slashed at Nightbird’s head.

The giant heroine seemingly vanished completely, and the monster spun partway around and stumbled, off-balance when the tail didn’t meet any resistance. She reappeared, now behind the monster, and quickly lifted its tail high off the ground. Off-balance as it was, it fell sideways and crashed heavily to the ground. Before it could recover, she delivered a quick kick to the side of its head.

Meanwhile, Flamewing had piloted the Nightflame — their flying vessel — toward the few Candorians who had not yet fled and warned them away using the external loudspeaker. Putting the plane on autopilot, he used his jetpack to blast into the air, roaring toward the battle. In flight, he really did resemble the flame-colored flying reptile from which he took his code-name.

The monster was just getting to its feet when he flashed by. From a handheld weapon, he fired a dart at the monster’s snout. The dart trailed a line that unreeled from the gun. It impacted the monster’s jaw and stuck, and Flamewing quickly began wrapping the snout shut with the line by speeding in tight loops.

Godzilla stumbled again, its tail flailing wildly. The giant Nightbird, an illusion created by the heroine’s mental powers, disappeared as the tail accidentally struck her, and she was sent flying. Regaining its balance, the monster used the claws on the non-numb paw to shred the line on its snout — a line that had been designed to restrain Candorians, not an angry monster. Flamewing tumbled through the air and barely regained control before he smashed into the ground. He realized he was right on the edge of panic. Nothing in their lives of training had prepared them to fight a monster like this. And she thought Reeki might be seriously injured or even dead. Then, with a great deal of relief, he heard her voice.

“Jungar! We’ve got to come up with new tactics! We aren’t prepared to fight monsters — but we don’t have time for anything fancy!” She flashed into the air, flying close enough to the monster that it started following her. “As long as we can keep it following us, the city is safe, and we’ll have time to figure it out.”

Suddenly, his panic was eased. Wasn’t that just like his partner — always alert, always thinking. Together they’d figure out something.

***

Back in Gotham City, Savant’s friends were peppering her with questions while she banged away at her keyboard, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

“Wow, Hank, the way Nightbird flipped that monster was neat!” said Dollface. “How did you give her super-strength? Do you have powers like that, too?” Dolly was ecstatic at the display from her friend’s alter-ego.

“It’s called tactile telekinesis, Dolly. I’ve got it, too, but it isn’t nearly as useful for me. It works so much better for her because they are all so much smaller. Even Godzilla is hardly the size of a flea’s egg.”

“Speaking of Godzilla,” Whiz Kid said, “what’s up with him?”

“I think I know what happened, but it should have been impossible. Look!” She typed a command, and the view on the monitor switched to one of the Godzilla movies, showing the monster walking out of the harbor and attacking a major city. “Bluestreak is a monster movie buff, and he left his videotapes here, since I told him it was possible to digitize them and store them on one of my advanced computers. Somehow, my genesis computer – the one that created Candor and everything in it — used the Godzilla movies as the basis for this giant monster instead of building it the way I programmed it.

“But that means that someone other than me was messing around with my computer. Whoever it is must know my password. But how could anybody know that? I’ve never told anyone, and never written it down anywhere!”

“Gee, Hank! And who’s smart enough to use your computers, anyway?” Dollface asked.

Faust interrupted, a little annoyed, “Can we figure this out later? We were just getting to the part where the monster eats the heroes, and I want to find out what happens!”

***

Candor:

“None of our regular routines will work on a monster this size, Jungar!” The roaring of the monster forced Nightbird to use her helmet radio, which allowed the Gotham City audience to listen in. “You make sure he keeps following us while I try to figure out some way to beat it!”

“But, Reeki–”

Nightbird cut off her partner’s response. ”Jun, I’m trying to think. Do your job!”

Flamewing slowed and aimed his rocket-pack at the monster. The flames didn’t seem to hurt it, but they did draw its attention, and it increased its pace. Jungar nudged his partner into a slightly new direction. Pacing them through the air was what seemed to be a crystal ball, and within it a miniature monster battled with even smaller versions of the Candorian crusaders. Nightbird was using Savant’s mental powers to try to work out a winning plan of attack.

***

Back in Gotham City, Dollface smirked at John Garrick. “He’s pretty whipped, ain’t he? She likes ‘em like that!” It wasn’t clear to Whiz Kid if Dollface was referring to Nightbird or Savant. Henrietta King was not happy with her friend.

“Shut up, Dolly! You know that Jungar and Reeki are not John and I. They are artificial beings with computer-generated personalities.”

John thought she was protesting too much. “You did say you chose them because their personalities were similar to ours…”

“She did – muph-thumph-thamp!” Dollface’s mouth was suddenly muffled as Stretch O’Brien elongated his arm and covered her mouth with his hand, but Faust managed to stick his two cents in.

“She didn’t tell you she made those two personally?” he asked, seemingly only mildly interested but always playing the manipulation game. “Hey, look what’s happening now!”

***

Candor:

Once again, Flamewing was trying to get his partner to listen to him, and once again she was blowing him off.

“Look, Jun, this is important. If we can’t beat this monster, it might devastate the city!” said Nightbird. Whoa! Watch it!” A massive blast of flame obliterated her crystal ball, stunning her into silence.

Flamewing quickly took advantage. ”Damn it, Ree, listen to me! When you come up with some way to defeat this monster, what are we going to do with it? Tie it up with the bird-arangs and bird-ropes and leave it for the police?” She looked stunned at his suggestion, since she obviously hadn’t thought that far ahead. ”Why do we have to beat it, anyway?” he continued. “Why don’t you just use your powers to convince it to go home — and stay home, eating fish from now on?”

Nightbird had obviously been about to explode in anger, and then she paused and thought for a second. Then, still without speaking, she stopped her flight and turned to face the beast. She glared at the monster for a couple of seconds, and it stopped roaring, turned, and headed straight for the sea.

Flamewing summoned the Nightflame, and as it flew toward them, the two heroes were clearly involved in a highly animated discussion.

***

But in Savant’s Gotham City apartment, the broadcast was shut down, and Henrietta King turned to her friends. “Once again, the Candorian crusaders save the world!” she announced brightly. “Anyone for pizza?”

Without the distraction of the video battle, John Garrick was suddenly struck with the incongruity of his situation. What was he, Whiz Kid — a member of the Junior JSA — doing sitting down with some of his team’s worst enemies? And was he really about to break bread with them? Their presence here might be legal right now, but he was sure they’d be on the wrong side of the law again soon.

“I really have to be getting back,” he said. “We’ve got another political rally scheduled tonight!” He turned directly to Henrietta. “Thanks for a really… interesting time! I’ll call you later!”

“Don’t forget me!” Whiz Kid heard Dollface call after him as he vibrated through the door and went on his way.

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Long ago, on a world far, far away, in a process that is common throughout the universe, life evolved. And eventually a species of warm-blooded bipeds arose to dominate that world. Other species had superior physical characteristics — there were other animals on this planet that were bigger, stronger, faster, more agile, and more adaptable to environmental extremes — but this species was able to dominate because of their superior intelligence. They called themselves Dyrons, which meant intelligent bipedal mammal in one of their own languages, and they eventually called their planet Kutti, which meant, simply, home.

The Dyrons multiplied, spread, and started a civilization that grew to girdle the planet. They were neither exceptionally peaceful nor exceptionally warlike, and though they had a number of wars, these wars never seriously impeded the growth of civilization and the advance of technology.

On the very eve of their long-anticipated space age, disaster from the sky laid low the proud Dyron civilization. A rogue white dwarf star wandered into Kutti’s solar system, and the gravitational effects on the system and especially Kutti itself were devastating. Kutti was wracked by earthquakes, violent volcanic eruptions, dangerous weather, and deadly climate changes as the sky filled with soot, smoke, and dust — driving the planet into nuclear winter. Billions of Dyrons died in the disasters and the plagues and famines that followed.

Then the rogue star swept on out of the system, and the worst of the disasters lessened, the earthquakes stopped, and the Dyrons began the long, painful process of recovery. By now most of the planet was uninhabited and largely uninhabitable. Still, due to some freak of geology, there was a small region in the middle of the largest continent that had been spared the worst of the devastation, and it was to this region that survivors came for refuge. Some were able to make it there on their own, though millions died in the trek, and others were gathered in by desperate search and rescue teams. It was the last hope of the proud Dyronian civilization.

The gathered refugees each provided what they could to the rebuilding, and their tremendous efforts paid off. A city grew where there had been nothing, and the wilds around were transformed into food-producing farms. The Dyrons soon began to rebuild their civilization as the chaos around them started to subside. They called the city Candor.

It was touch and go for many years, but after about a hundred years of unceasing labor by all the survivors and their descendants, society’s survival experts declared that a threshold of sorts had been passed. Life would not be easy for any Dyron for hundreds of years yet to come, but it now seemed likely that the race would survive. For most of that hundred years, Candor could have been wiped out by even a couple of minor disasters coming in sequence, such as a bad crop-growing season followed by an extra-harsh winter, but no longer. There was a short celebration, and then people returned to work; as a race, they no longer had the capacity to celebrate.

And then the other shoe dropped. The rogue white dwarf had not passed totally through the system — it had been captured by the gravity of their sun into a very long-period orbit and was now heading back into the system. Within no more than a few months, it would return, and this time it wouldn’t just disrupt Kutti, it would actually collide with the devastated planet. After the heroic effort to build Candor and save their lives and their civilization, they were all going to die anyway, no matter what they did.

The only escape was by space, but there wasn’t time or remaining technology to build a space ark large enough to carry all the residents away from Kutti. A team of scientists, led by a genius named Rayniac, came up with a solution.

By studying the gravity of the white dwarf, Rayniac was able to develop a shrinking ray, and one of his colleagues developed a flying saucer. Sacrificing himself for the future of his civilization, Rayniac flew the flying saucer over Candor, used his shrinking ray, and placed the shrunken city into a bottle with an attached life support system. He then fled into deep space before the final disaster. He wouldn’t live to see it, but his computer-controlled saucer would search until it found a planet that would support Candor and the Dyrons.

Meanwhile, in the bottle city itself, all was not well. People began to resent their fate, and some blamed the scientists. There were demonstrations that escalated into riots, which escalated into deadly civil war, and civilization fell.

All contact between Rayniac and the miniature city was lost during the war. It had now been about a hundred generations since the end of the war, and technology had recovered to about the level of the 1950s on Earth, but contact with Rayniac had never been restored. Eventually, the Candorians lost their history. All that remained were legends of a great disaster in the distant past, trapping them in some kind of gigantic prison.

***

“Well, John, what do you think?” Henrietta King asked as the history concluded. She had spent long hours developing the background of Candor, and she was proud of the ingenious details she had created.

John Garrick was much less impressed. “There are an awful lot of holes in it, Henrietta. What about time dilation? How did a scientist on a planet that never even achieved space travel invent an interstellar vessel? How–?”

She interrupted him, angry as he pointed out these holes. “Geez, John! It’s frigging fiction! Give me a break!” She paused, drew a deep breath, and composed herself. “There’s a differential time-field built into the bottle itself, OK? The scientist was the greatest genius his race ever produced — and he was working to save the race. He achieved something extraordinary, all right?”

John was impressed that she had realized the problem of time-dilation and already planned for it. But he wasn’t satisfied. “Well, I’m just wondering — it seems as if the Candorians would ask the same kind of questions. Why don’t they?”

“They are programmed to believe their legends, and the first generation is programmed to not be very curious.”

She looked troubled, though, as she continued. “Still, that won’t last. Their life experiences are already altering them, and they will quickly become more curious about their past. I planted clues that will allow them to figure out the history you’ve just seen — recovering their lost history, as it were, and any discrepancies will be attributed to the chaos following the civil war. I hope–”

“I’d say that this society is about to enter a period of crisis, then, yes?” he asked. She nodded, agreeing with him. ”People who have been programmed to believe they had a complete life up to today are going to start realizing that they don’t like where they are or what they are doing. The personality of the librarian, for example, might be better suited as a politician, the stand-up comedian might realize he wants to be a medical researcher… that sort of thing. Right?”

She was slow to answer, afraid that he would become even more angry with her. But there was no way to avoid the truth. “Yes, that kind of scenario is likely. You’re right, there could be chaos! I’m sorry, John, I had no idea what I was doing!”

John shrugged. “I’ve figured that out. Since it’s too late to stop you, and we can’t simply destroy Candor, we need a plan to help these folks. Fortunately, you have a genius for a boyfriend…” He said this hesitatingly, but she didn’t contradict him. “And I’ve got a great plan! One thing, though — when we get out of here, I’m going to give the bottle to someone who’ll take good care of it.” This was not a polite request; it was a demand. And again, Henrietta didn’t contradict him.

“So, let me tell you my plan, and then let’s get started!”

***

They worked together for several hours, the two of them. These artificial bodies were not only incredibly strong (in their own milieu, at least) but also had fantastic stamina. Henrietta’s construction computer had equipped the top-of-the-sky aerie with every instrument, tool, or device her inventive mind could imagine, and the two young geniuses made effective use of most everything around them. While they were working, neither said a word about their relationship or their future, though each mind was filled with burning questions. Finally, all their preparations had been made, and it was almost time for them to return to their own bodies.

“You know, John, once we leave here, we can never come back,” she commented sadly. “These bodies will have developed their own unique personalities, and if we take them over again, we’ll not only disrupt their lives, but we might give away the big secret, too.”

John was overjoyed; he had come to that conclusion hours ago, but for him it was a morality issue, and he was uncertain that her morality would lead her to the same conclusion.

She continued, “The Candorians will eventually figure out their origin on their own, but I’d sort of like them to have a couple of generations of real life and real accomplishments behind them first. Stuff they can point to that proves that, regardless of their origin, they are real people.”

“We could animate some other bodies, couldn’t we?” he asked. He knew the answer but wondered what she would say.

“No — too many issues, and you know what they are!” He did. In particular, they would have to tamper with the memories of those new bodies, just as they were tampering with the memories of their current bodies. Even though he couldn’t see any alternatives, he was extremely uncomfortable doing that now. His parents had warned him about playing God, and he was learning more about the incredibly difficult responsibilities one took on when assuming that role.

“You don’t seem to have any such qualms about using your powers on other humans!” He hadn’t meant to say that, but suddenly it popped out. Well, it was an ugly fact, and it was bothering him, so it was best to get it out in the open now and deal with the consequences, even if it meant he would lose his girlfriend. He hoped he wouldn’t gain a nemesis in her place.

He had been sure that she would respond in anger. But she was thoughtful, instead. “I was thinking about that myself. It’s not totally true, you know. I have never used my powers on you or anyone else I care about. And I never will.” He nodded, doubtfully.

She continued. “I know it’s strange to you, but to me, most other people don’t matter. They are basically selfish, scheming nonentities who would take your last nickel and leave you for dead as soon as look at you. There is no such thing as an unselfish human being, John — take it from a telepath; I know!”

John realized he had know this about her all along, but his heart sank into his shoes when she actually stated it. He had hoped that her experience with him and with the Candorians might have changed her. Now it seemed that it hadn’t. But she wasn’t through.

“I guess,” she continued, disbelief creeping into her voice, “I’m feeling maternal about the beings in Candor! Birds and bees!” She used one of Dollface’s favorite exclamations. “Me, feeling maternal? It’s hard to believe!”

She laughed, but John didn’t join her. “Henrietta, before you got to know me, I was just another one of those selfish, scheming nonentities, wasn’t I? I don’t think you feel that way about me anymore. How can you be sure that everyone else wouldn’t turn out the same if you go to know them?”

In the middle of his sentence, an alarm went off. Henrietta jumped to a control panel in front of a bank of TV monitors while he was still speaking, and John was never sure if she had heard what he had to say. He suspected she had but hadn’t wanted to listen, so she’d used her powers to create a diversion.

“We need to return to our own bodies now! A wild monster has somehow made it into the city streets, and our alter-egos are needed!” She slapped a switch, and John’s awareness of the world snapped off like a lightbulb that had just burned out.

***

When Whiz Kid recovered consciousness in Gotham City back in the real world, he was lying in large cylinder. The hinged upper half of the cylinder was made of transparent Plexiglas and was now swung open. Almost instantly, he heard a voice whisper in his ear. It was Henrietta’s voice through a speaker.

“It’s about time you woke up, sleepyhead! You won’t be able to move for a few minutes, but that’s just a side-effect of the transfer process. Join us as soon as you can; we’re in the TV room, watching a special broadcast from Candor. I think you’ll enjoy it!” She laughed. “Oh, and don’t try to capture any of us — you would get in more trouble than it’s worth, since we’re all legally free right now. Wouldn’t look good for the son of the leading Presidential candidate to get busted for false arrest, would it?”

A mixture of cheers and boos came over the same speaker. When they quieted down again, Henrietta continued. “I’ve adjusted the temporal differential grid embedded in the bottle to keep things from starting until you get here, but the rest of the crowd is getting impatient. And I can’t keep Stretch from your popcorn much longer!”

Not far away he could hear cheers from a group of young people who appeared to be watching a sporting event. He immediately blurred into super-speed and was relieved to find that he had his full powers back. Apparently the transfer paralysis had worn off faster than Savant had expected.

In the TV room, he found the people who had been cheering, now seemingly motionless due to his super-accelerated state. He saw Savant and her friends and criminal partners Dollface and Faust, as well as Stretch O’Brien and a very pregnant woman who must be his wife. These members of the Junior Injustice Society were all in costume, seated in front of a giant TV screen with popcorn and soda, watching a monster movie.

Probably cheering for the monster, Whiz Kid thought with disdain. The monster looked familiar, so he looked closer; it was motionless. This must be a live feed from Candor! So that’s what Henrietta had meant about the temporal differential grid — she slowed downtime in the bottle when we left, so we can watch the first real adventure of the Candorian champions, Nightbird and Flamewing. Those were the names of the heroic alter egos that their Candorian bodies had when given their own set of false memories. It had been John’s suggestion that they become the city’s superheroes, and surprisingly Henrietta had not objected with anything more than a smirk.

Growing up as the son of the Flash, John Garrick had learned a lot about Earth-One not only through his father but through his Uncle Barry, the Earth-One Flash, who had regaled him with heroic tales of the Justice League of America and their allies on that world. Knowing something about that world’s Superman, John had recalled the existence of the bottle city of Kandor and had inwardly marveled at the similarly named counterpart that Savant had created with little to no knowledge of that parallel world. John knew that Kandor had its own champions, Nightwing and Flamebird, and he had suggested names based on them. He decided to let Henrietta think that he came up with the names Nightbird and Flamewing himself; there was no sense making her feel like she’d been caught up in the parallelism that often occurred between Earth-Two and Earth-One. Meanwhile, Henrietta had supplied their alter egos’ civilian names: Jungar and Reeki.

The monster looked familiar, very much like something he’d seen many times — Godzilla. And it seemed to have similar powers to that famous movie monster. Right now, slowed to immobility on the screen by the temporal differential grid and his own accelerated senses, it was belching a cloud of something toxic at a group of fleeing bystanders. John was relieved to see that the battle was occurring on the outskirts of Candor rather than downtown. Apparently he and Henrietta had left in time for the two heroes to intercept the monster outside the city.

His plan was working, yet he had rather hoped that the tiny titans could have had some easy cases before they had to battle anything really dangerous like this monster. Henrietta had left them with memories of an heroic life, with cases based on her own life as well as John’s, but there was no substitute for real experience. Well, he and Henrietta had done their best, and even the best, most experienced heroes had been rookies at one time in their careers.

Kicking into an even higher speed, Whiz Kid zipped off to FBI Headquarters in less than a femtosecond and quickly checked out the most wanted list. And he saw, incredibly, that Dollface and Faust were both out on parole, Henrietta’s current sentence was suspended awaiting a legal appeal by her lawyer, and Stretch had some kind of probationary pardon from the government. They were all — right now, at least — legal.

So he decided he would join them, pretend they weren’t villains, and enjoy The Adventures of Nightbird and Flamewing. He decided not to let Henrietta know about his almost-instant recovery or that he had already checked up on their bona fides. He walked into the TV room at normal speed.

“Hey, sleepyhead! You’re just in time — the credits have just finished!” joked Savant. She swatted Stretch’s elongated fingers away from a bowl of buttered popcorn. “Maggie, can’t you keep him under control? Or do I have to blast him with my liquid nitrogen squirt-gun? Plastic gets really brittle when it’s cold, Stretch!” she warned. “You wouldn’t be nearly so unbreakable then!”

Whiz Kid looked at the five villains appraisingly, and they looked back at him, each side warily waiting for the other to make the first move. As he had expected, it was Dollface. However, he would never in a million years have guessed what she was about to do.

“Hey, blue and blurry! Better think twice before you touch us!” Dollface said indignantly. She jumped to her feet, then flipped over to her hands, then back to her feet again, faster than anybody but John could follow. “We’re all here legit!” She did a cartwheel, ending right in front of him, and handed him some papers. “Check it out before you start any rough stuff!”

She leaned over and whispered in his ear. “I could sorta go for the rough stuff later, if you know what I mean…” And she was back in front of the screen.

Whiz Kid was stunned. Had Dollface just hit on him? Henrietta was looking tolerantly amused, but there was a thundercloud literally floating over Faust’s head. Stretch and Maggie hadn’t even looked away from the screen.

“Good group!” Henrietta said approvingly. “C’mon, John, have a seat. Action’s about to start.” And as she patted the sofa beside her, John couldn’t help but to flinch at her use of his real name in mixed company, even though Whiz Kid was publicly known as John Garrick, just as his father Jay Garrick was known to be the Flash. Dolly turned her head, a big smile on her face. “On the screen, Dolly!” Henrietta practically shouted in exasperation.

In some sense, it was a case of déjà vu – John and Henrietta sitting down in front of a big TV screen, watching a drama together. Only this time, it wasn’t fiction. This time, lives were on the line.

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Something was making John Garrick uneasy. “Henrietta, you are going to be putting us back in our own bodies, right?”

Henrietta King smiled seductively. “I have… plans for you first, John, but eventually, yes, we both go back to our old selves — with some new memories and something to look forward to when we come back again.”

There, that was it. “What will happen to these bodies when we leave? Will they just lie around in some kind of trance or something?”

Henrietta was startled. “Why, I don’t know, John. I hadn’t thought about it. Hold on…” John could almost hear her brain whirring at high speed. Then her expression changed — her eyes widened, and she looked very solemn, and then, to his astonishment, she started crying.

He pulled her close, and she sobbed against his shoulder for a minute or so. Finally, her crying subsided, and she was just sobbing every couple of seconds. He had not dared talk to her while she was crying — he had no idea what was wrong and had no idea what to say. But it seemed as if holding her and staying quiet had been the best answer, even though it tore at his heart to see her cry.

“So, what’s the matter…?” he stopped abruptly. He wanted to call her something other than Henrietta, some kind of pet name, but he didn’t know what she answered to. Hen and Etta seemed somehow disrespectful.

“Oh, John, I’ve done a terrible thing! You might not know, but I had a terrible childhood.” In fact, he did know, but now didn’t seem like the right time to tell her he had spied on her during childhood using his time-viewer. “I interrupted Mama’s career, and she never wanted a baby, and she hated me, but she kept me around because she didn’t want to spoil her image, and sometimes the men she was seeing would bring me gifts that she could trade for drugs, and she used to lock me in a closet to keep me away when her boyfriends would come over, and… and… oh, I just hate to even remember it.”

Once again, he realized the best thing he could do was just hug her, and he did. She sobbed a little, but she seemed to be over the worst of her crying.

“As bad as I’ve turned out…” she continued; he shook his head, and she pulled back and looked him in the eye. “Stop it, John — you know the truth. I’m a super-villain, and you know it. And I did it on purpose, to get revenge on my mama and the world! And I’m not going to give it up, either, even for you! But as bad as I’ve been, even after everything I’ve done, I’ve never hurt a child. And I always vowed I never would.”

John Garrick was at a loss for words. What could he say now that wouldn’t sound fatuous? Several possibilities came to mind. “You don’t have to be a villain, you know?” Of course she knew — she’d just admitted she did it deliberately. “That’s very noble of you.” Hell, if she was really noble, she’d give up being a villainess and become a hero. “It’s OK.” Bull — it wasn’t OK. “We can worry about it later.” It was already too late for that; he’d had his chance five minutes ago — a chance a lot of guys wouldn’t have passed up, but he had. He wondered if he would regret that decision for the rest of his life.

Since he couldn’t think of anything useful to say, and saying nothing seemed to be working, he continued to say nothing. And once again she kept speaking.

“When we leave these bodies, John, they are going to continue their own lives — but they will have our memories. I promised never to hurt any kids, but I’ve just brought to life a new kid — the one I used to be, and the one this body will remember being, who suffered the same things I suffered. I just created a kid who has felt every pain and torment I’ve ever felt. And it’s going to be even worse for her — she’ll know that she was never real until I made her, and that all the good things I remember, that I’ve made for myself, she’ll never have a chance at. She’ll remember that she is smaller than an ant — that she’s so tiny she would be totally insignificant to a real human. That she lives in a frigging bottle, for God’s sake!” She couldn’t go on, and she broke down into sobs.

John had earlier had an inkling of some of this when he’d scolded her for playing God, but he hadn’t any idea of the full dimensions of her folly. And he realized just how terrible life would be for the John he left behind when he left the bottle — a young man who remembered growing up in a loving family surrounded by wonderful friends, a life populated by heroes and fueled by promise — a life he could never return to. This place wasn’t a fantasy, it was a nightmare. Suddenly, he was close to crying himself as he realized the horror that they had unwittingly created — for two living beings who would soon believe that they were Henrietta King and John Garrick, but who would never be able to live their own lives.

Henrietta felt the change in his body — the warm confidence of his embrace replaced by slack muscles as horror struck him. She pulled her head back and looked at him, and in a voice totally devoid of emotion, asked him desperately, “My God, John, what have I done?”

John was thinking hard. Even without his powers, he was supposed to be a genius, wasn’t he? What good was being a genius if he couldn’t solve the tough problems? He had a glimmer of an idea when he realized he was thinking at super-speed. Maybe he did have the rest of his powers in this body as well, and they had just taken a couple of hours to manifest. He zoomed away down the length of the gigantic hangar, except that he almost immediately fell headlong, as his body wouldn’t move nearly as fast as his mind commanded it to.

There must be a mental aspect of my powers, he mused to himself, that is decoupled from the physical aspect, and which moved with me when I was transferred into this mind and body. He thought a while longer and then deliberately slowed down his thoughts.

Henrietta was just now reaching down to help him to his feet. He grabbed her hand and pulled himself up. “Henrietta, I want to try an experiment. Would you do me a favor and try to hit me?”

She had been on the point of being angry, anyway. Did John realize the opportunity that he had just turned down? She didn’t come on to just anybody. Well, wait, actually she did, didn’t she? But that was all a meaningless revenge game — this was real. When John offered her the opportunity, she took it and swung at him without any warning. He easily dodged, which made her more angry, so she swung again — and once again he easily dodged.

Savant wasn’t some slow, feeble weakling, especially in this body, and she was intrigued enough to forget her anger. “You have your powers back! How did you do that?” John waited warily for a second, then responded.

“Not really,” said Whiz Kid. “I’m not moving much faster than you are. But I am reacting much more quickly. Somehow, I can speed up my thoughts, which speeds up my reactions. Your punches seem to be in super-slow-motion to me, and I react instantly, so even with a just a little above-normal speed, I can dodge pretty well.”

He paused for a second or two for thought. “If you had your powers, could you erase our memories from these minds? You said that you had already programmed false memories into all the minds in Candor, so you would be just returning them to their earlier state.”

“If I had my powers, I probably could. At least, our memories would seem to be no more than daydreams. And they would still have our personalities — I designed them to be a close match, and the longer we inhabit these bodies, the more the brain will adjust. But that’s OK, isn’t it?”

She looked so vulnerable when she asked this that he had to hug her again. “Of course it’s OK!”

Reassured, she continued. “I would have to set the transfer machine on a timer and wipe the memories of being us from them just before we vanish back to our own bodies. And I’ll have to give them some other memories to replace ours and explain what they are doing here in this hangar. But, John, I don’t have my powers in this body.”

John smiled at her. “I think you do. Your powers are mental, and they are actually tied to your mind — and your machine transferred the essence of your mind into that body. We both retained our genius, and I just discovered that I was thinking at super-speed. If the mental aspect of my powers was transferred, your mental powers must have been transferred as well!” John wasn’t as absolutely certain as he was trying to sound, but if he couldn’t convince her, the rest of his plan wouldn’t work, either. “Try to use your powers.”

She was uncertain, but it couldn’t hurt to try. “OK, we’ll start with something simple.” She tore a strip of cloth from her already-short skirt and handed it to him. “Blindfold me.” He did, although he was having a hard time concentrating. She sure had great legs.

“OK, now jump away far enough so I can’t hear you. Then move around, and I will turn to keep pointing at you. Sensing people nearby was the first manifestation of my powers when I was young.”

He jumped about a quarter-mile away, and then jumped again and again in other directions. By now he had circled about a third of the way around her. She was turning slowly, her arms outstretched, palms out — and she was turning the wrong way. She went through a half-circle and hesitated.

“It’s not working, John!” she called to him. He didn’t say anything, and she kept turning. “Hold on! Why, you rascal!” There was joy in her voice, and she turned to face him. “There you are! Just try and hide now!” She dropped one arm, but the other was pointing directly at him. He moved — running, jumping, and hanging from some pipes near the ceiling — and she was unerring. Shortly, she tired of the game. “OK, that works. Come back in now!”

She took the blindfold off as he approached. “Why, thank you, John! You actually have pretty great legs yourself!”

He blushed. It was the first time that he knew of that she’d actually used her powers on him. She caught that thought, too. “I’m sorry, dear. Now that I know my powers are back, I promise I won’t invade your privacy again. This is great, John. You just saved Other Savant from years of pain!” She stepped closer and gave him another big hug. With his super-enhanced reflexes, he could easily have avoided her, but he didn’t want to.

Whiz Kid also didn’t want to get sidetracked again, and he knew he might if they continued to celebrate the partial return of their powers. So he moved away. “What should I call you? Is there some other name you prefer? Henrietta is such a mouthful.”

He immediately regretted his choice of words, but she smiled and winked at him. “Dolly calls me Hank, but she only does it to irritate me, because it’s my half-brother’s name. You could call me honey if you want. But never ever call me Hen or Etta!” There were daggers in her voice, so he resolved to stay away from those pet names.

“OK, Henrietta it is, honey!” They both smiled at that. “So you said you had a background story for Candor. What is it?”

“Ah, I was hoping you would ask. I’m rather proud of my history. Have a seat while I show you… The Illustrated History of Candor.”

She led him to a bank of control panels that included several computer monitors. A few quick keystrokes on a keyboard, and a video began to play. John suddenly realized with a start that the video was not in English, and that he and Henrietta weren’t talking English, either.

“Darn, John, I lost the bet with myself — I have thought you’d have figured it out an hour ago.” At the look of anger on his face, she hastily added, “Nope, not reading your mind; just simple logic.”

One of the control stations was actually some kind of auto-chef. Savant dialed up popcorn, and they sat back to watch some historical fiction.

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A few days later, John and Jay Garrick were talking privately.

“I talked to Lana, and she did some investigating in and around Gotham City,” Jay mentioned. “She hasn’t found any evidence of insect mind-control, other than her own.”

“I’m pretty sure she isn’t working on mass human mind-control either, Dad. If I’m right, she’s experimenting with artificial intelligence.”

He looked so unhappy that Jay asked him, “What’s really bothering you, son?” John looked surprised. Before he could respond, Jay continued, “C’mon, John, who knows you better than I do?”

“Dad, I ought to be out looking for her. She’s committing crimes, and I know about it — and I’m supposed to be a superhero, and superheroes aren’t supposed to let the bad guys commit crimes.”

Jay became serious. “Unless you think she is really up to something dangerous, I’d like you to continue to keep a low profile until the election — or at least until we get through this current tabloid firestorm. (*) There are a lot of superheroes in Gotham City. How about just filling Batwing in and letting him handle it?”

[(*) Editor's note: See DC Universe: The Race, Book 3: Dirty Tricks.]

“C’mon, Dad, Jason couldn’t handle her mental powers!”

Jay was thoughtful. “He’s been trained by the best. I wouldn’t be so sure. Still, who could?”

“Probably Amanda; she could command her star sapphire to protect her mind. Maybe Mina, too, since has her own telepathic powers, but they still didn’t stop Coral from falling under Faust’s spell. (*) But together they’d be stronger.”

[(*) Editor's note: See Junior JSA: The Junior Injustice Society.]

“Well, ask them to look for her, then, and to come to you for help if they need it. Or, if you think it’s necessary, take action yourself.”

John thought about calling in his friends for quite awhile — a few seconds from a normal perspective, but much longer to the super-speedster known as Whiz Kid. Originally, he thought it was a cop-out, but he reluctantly decided to follow his dad’s advice.

But it didn’t pan out; the two young heroines searched for a few days and didn’t find anything. And then the Savant-related thefts stopped, and Coral and Star Sapphire went on to other, more exciting cases.

The unease in the back of John’s mind didn’t lessen when the thefts ended. Eventually it reached the point where he couldn’t stand it any longer. His father had told him to act if he felt it was necessary. He made preparations to make a social call on his one-time girlfriend.

***

Whiz Kid awoke with a start. The last thing he remembered was speeding toward Gotham City, looking for Henrietta King. How had he gotten into bed? Had the whole thing been a dream? But something was wrong.

“Wha–?! This isn’t my bedroom! What’s going on here?” With those words he leaped out of bed and, vibrating furiously, ran through the wall of the room to see what he could find out.

Well, actually, he tried to do so. His vibrations didn’t work, and he slammed into the solid wall at top speed and slumped to the floor, stunned by the impact. It took him a few seconds to recover, which was almost as stunning — if he had really run into a wall at super-speed, he would have expected more damage, both to himself and the wall. Something was definitely not right here.

He realized that he ought to have broken his shoulder, at least. He flexed his shoulder, and the pain was almost gone. Then he stopped moving, once more stunned beyond words. His hand was not really his. He had a jagged white scar on the knuckles of his left hand, and the scar was gone. He also realized he wasn’t wearing his own clothes. When he realized who had to be behind this, he heaved a sigh of relief.

“Henrietta, I don’t know what you’re up to, but I know it’s you. Put me back in my own body now!” he yelled.

The door opened, and Henrietta King walked into the room, but a subtly different Henrietta. Her hair color was slightly lighter, and she was a little taller, with a more voluptuous, womanly figure. “Why, John, I built that body just for you. Don’t you like it?” She pushed a button on the wall, and a section of the wall turned into a full-length mirror.

Like Henrietta, John realized that he was subtly different. His shoulders were a little wider, his face shaped slightly differently, with more of a square jaw, and he was slightly taller as well. Actually, it wasn’t bad, and then he realized what she had said.

“You built this body?! Henrietta, I want to know what’s going on, now!” He put all the fire he could muster into his voice, remembering the times his parents had raised their voices with him while he was growing up. Henrietta didn’t seem to react to the tone of command in his voice, but she explained anyway.

“We are both part of a computer-created simulation, John! I created these bodies ‘specially to resemble us and then temporarily moved our consciousness into them. Neither body has any super-powers — I wanted to see how the two of us would interact if we were just a normal couple.”

“So you downloaded us into some kind of virtual reality? And don’t you think putting the two of us alone together is kind of artificial?” Privately, he was astounded at the level of detail she had managed to program into this single room and their bodies. This environment was absolutely indistinguishable from three-dimensional reality, and his body felt real, though he had run smack into a solid wall without picking up a bruise — he seemed to be partially invulnerable. He wondered with a smirk what other improvements Savant might have made over the originals.

“Why, John, I wouldn’t call this a virtual reality at all. I’d call it an artificial reality — which is a totally different thing.” There was mischief in her smile; he was missing something, but he didn’t know what. “And who said we’re alone? Come with me!”

He was confident that she didn’t have enough computing power to extend this illusion much beyond a couple or rooms, and then it struck him again. She could be mistress of illusions if she chose. “Henrietta, you told me before you’d never used your powers on me. I demand that you stop using your powers on me now!”

She laughed, gaily. “Silly boy, I already told you, I don’t have any powers in this body. This really is part of my simulation.” They stepped out of the bedroom and through a beautifully furnished house. As she led him through the front door, she waved her arm to encompass the whole scene outside. “What do you think?”

John was stunned to see that they were on the outskirts of a tremendous city — very futuresque and extremely detailed. Cars without wheels floated down the streets, and there were dozens of people in his field of view. “Mercury’s winged sandals! This is amazing!”

Henrietta kept John so busy he didn’t have time to think, dragging him on a whirlwind tour and using a control panel on her belt to call a flying car for their use. John noticed that he and the other people around all had similar controls on their own belts. Before they got into their sky car, he studied the people around them.

“So all these people are simulations? They look pretty realistic.”

She smiled, pleased at his interest. “Why, thank you, John. I developed a set of parameters to define a person — five thousand in all, and each parameter can vary over a wide range. Sort of like a genetic code for my sim-people, if you will. My computer then designed each of these by varying each parameter according to a set of rules. Five thousand different parameters isn’t really enough to fully specify a human being, but once they become self-aware, it will be hard to tell the difference.”

“Are you out of your mind? You’ve designed self-aware simulations? What’s going to happen to them when you turn the simulation off? It will be the same as killing them!” John was recalling his recent conversation with his parents about playing God. And here Henrietta was, playing God with a vengeance. John estimated that he could see several hundred of these sim-people, and a city this size could easily be home to millions.

“How dare you judge me?” Henrietta’s voice was flat and cold, conveying her anger that he would disapprove of her efforts. “I’ve told you repeatedly that this is not a computer-generated artificial reality. I thought by now you’d have figured it out.”

The sky car zoomed upward. Miles above the city, John noticed a shimmer in the sky, and as they drew closer he realized that the city was enclosed in something. He had trouble with the contours for a moment, and then something snapped into place; he was looking at a bottle — a big water bottle — from the inside. He must be less than the size of an ant.

“Yes, John, the truth. Not a virtual reality, an artificial reality. Not a computer simulation, but a computer-created city in a bottle, populated with computer-created artificial beings. The city of truth – the bottle city of Candor!”

Above them, a sliding door the size of a football field slid open in the bottom of the cork to the bottle, and Henrietta guided their flying car inside. They were in a the single biggest room John had ever seen, probably a quarter-mile high and several miles across. As the sliding door closed, she landed near some kind of control and monitoring station, which had many television screens. The view on the screens constantly changed, showing all aspects of life in a futuristic city that John assumed must be Candor.

The young scientist in John was fascinated, although the humanist in him was silently screaming. How dared she play God like this, not only creating a species of living beings but then spying on them? He realized he needed to find out more before he made any judgment. Henrietta clearly wanted to show off her new toy, so John hardly even had to ask questions.

“The Candorians are living beings, their bodies composed of artificial organic materials I originally grew in my lab. Because they are so small, the internal structure of the bodies is much simpler than humans, so even though they look human, inside they are not. But they are completely mammalian, warm-blooded, reproducing sexually and bearing live young who require significant attention from their parents. The process of making babies is pretty much identical to the human style, and they seem to enjoy it at least as much as humans do.”

She smiled seductively, and John blushed. She thought it was appealing and very cute, and she realized that she was deliberately teasing him — and thoroughly enjoying it. But she changed the subject slightly anyway, as she was also having fun boasting about her accomplishments. John had the intellect to understand what she had done as few other men would.

“An organic brain this small would be too tiny to be intelligent. The brain of every Candorian is non-organic, a highly advanced nanotech device, almost alive in its own right. I hesitate to call them computers, as they don’t compute — they think, just like we do. I’ve built in a subconscious and generally tried to model them as closely as possible to a human brain. I’m pretty familiar with human brains, given my powers, and I think I’ve done a good job. You’re thinking with one of these devices now. What do you think?”

Again John was stunned. As far as he could tell, his mind seemed completely normal. This technology was incredible — far beyond anything the science he knew was capable of.

“I’ve programmed each Candorian with a plausible shared history, and they each have a complete set of memories of their lives. As time goes by, their artificial memories will fade and be replaced by real memories, and they will never know that they are artificial creatures. And the next generation will be created the normal, human way. In fact, it’s happening now.” She pointed to one of the screens with that same seductive smile, and he blushed again and quickly looked away.

“Pregnant Candorian females require a special diet so the inorganic brain can grow as the baby develops. Each brain is closely matched to the body it develops in, and they can’t be transplanted to other bodies, so Candorians have limited lifespans just as humans do. But there are distinct advantages to the simpler biology. There are fewer things that can go wrong with Candorian bodies — they are much healthier, and they heal faster. And because of the square-cube law, they are much stronger in proportion than humans and much more damage-resistant.”

Without warning, she hit John across the face with a wicked backhand blow — not a slap, either. She was incredibly strong, and he tumbled backward until he banged into a wall. In his own body, bones would have broken, he would have been in incredible pain, and he would probably have had a bad concussion, at least. In this Candorian body, he felt almost no pain and suffered no damage that he could tell. He wasn’t sure how he felt about getting hit by his sometime-girlfriend like that, though, even though she was just proving a point.

He was going to have to do a lot of heavy thinking, but he decided to put off his emotional reactions for a short time. Then he wondered if his ability to separate his emotions from his thought processes was a human ability or a Candorian ability.

“In human terms, of course, Candorians are about as strong and tough as fleas. But in their own milieu, we have Superman-style powers!” To demonstrate further, she jumped and easily touched the ceiling a quarter-mile above, then landed lightly. “Square-cube law — I can fall miles and touch down more lightly than a feather!”

She leaped toward him and touched him, fairly lightly this time. “Tag! You’re it!” And she leaped away. John was at the point of being overwhelmed by Candor, and he welcomed the chance for some mindless exercise. For a good half-hour, they chased each other through that gigantic hangar. Henrietta had more experience in her Candorian body, but John was used to having super-powers. For a short time, she was mostly able to escape being tagged, but he quickly became more adept. They swapped being it for awhile, and finally John launched himself perfectly, intercepting her in mid-leap, and the two wrapped their arms around each other and eventually tumbled to the ground together, laughing.

The laughing stopped when they reached the ground, but there was still mutual activity as it became something a bit more passionate. After a few minutes, however, John reluctantly pulled away.

“What’s the matter, John?” Henrietta was distinctly displeased at his reaction.

“There’s just too much going on right now, Henrietta. I can’t stop thinking. I’m sorry. You know we shouldn’t be doing this…”

“John, we aren’t really doing anything except sharing a fantasy! This isn’t really you or me. Think how incredibly free we can be, right here, right now! There’s no one who can tell us what to do, nobody we have to behave for, nobody will ever know except us! You know, as a human, I can barely stand to have any man touch me — even you. But here, John, I can leave my trauma behind and be whoever I want to be! Don’t you see how perfect it can be? We can have here what we can never have outside!” She was practically pleading.

And the argument was very persuasive. In a sense, this experience really was nothing more than a shared fantasy. Nothing they did here could affect their human bodies. What happened here would stay here. And yet he knew it wasn’t that simple. The memories wouldn’t stay here; they would follow him for the rest of his life. Still, would that be so bad? He felt that he and Henrietta deserved to be happy together, and he knew she was right — it would be difficult for them to share anything outside in the real world. Why not take advantage of this opportunity? He had to admit, it was one of his fantasies on the verge of coming true.

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Savant was too smart for anyone to keep secrets from her, and she couldn’t even keep secrets from herself. ”Henrietta, you silly girl — you’re looking for truth, aren’t you?”

This was an amusing concept to her. She had long ago concluded that it was better not to know the truth; better to accept the various half-truths and outright lies that made the world go ’round. In her experience, the truth always hurt. Why would a girl like her ever want to learn the truth? She realized she was still keeping secrets from herself. She searched her mind again — yes, it clearly had something to do with John and her relationship with him. But her subconscious was being stubborn, and not letting this secret go without a fight.

Henrietta King wasn’t in the mood to fight with herself. She knew that sooner or later, she would wrest this guarded secret from her own mind, and that was enough. She went back to her hobby.

She was almost ready to begin putting her theories into practice. She had quickly realized that no single computer on Earth, or even a collection of computers, had the power to do what she wanted. She was trying to simulate people. Since each person is different, no single computer could drive a simulation of several different people simultaneously. And she wasn’t talking several people, she was talking a city’s worth, at least. Each simulated human would require its own computer, and each of these computers would be more complex than anything ever designed yet. Yes, it was a perfect challenge for a girl who had adopted the code name Savant.

First, though, obtaining money, then acquiring materials, then designing and building the necessary equipment, and finally creating her simulation. It was time for a little exercise.

She headed into the exercise room. Dollface was sparring with one of her latest pets. The man, now an actor, had an extensive background in martial arts, and it looked as if Dolly had finally met her match. He couldn’t quite match her speed or agility, but he was much bigger and stronger — and he had realized that he was fighting for his life. As Savant entered the room, he landed a spin-kick to her thigh, and Henrietta heard what sounded like bones breaking. Dolly fell to the mat, which actually helped her escape his next attack, and she rolled and was back on her feet in a second.

The man’s expression became even more grim as he realized that Dolly’s enhanced healing ability was going to keep her healthy long after he became too tired to fight back. His only chance would be to disable her long enough to make a run for it. He was looking around for a weapon when Savant interrupted the fight. He froze in place as she took over his mind. And she used her telekinesis to protect him from Dolly’s next savage attack.

“Dolly, how many times do I have to tell you — no more killing! You know what a pain it is to straighten things out afterwards. And one of my favorite movie stars? If you can’t follow the rules, I’m going to have to ask you to move out.”

“Well, poison piss to you, too! A girl just wants to have a little fun, you know? And you sure aren’t any fun lately!”

Savant turned to the frozen actor. “You! Beat it! You were just putting the moves on Sydney Mayflower–” This was a famous woman who lived in the same building, although in a less-expensive apartment. “–and she threw you out when you didn’t measure up. That’s all you remember!” He was gone in a flash. Years later, Henrietta would realize sadly that after this moment he had never made another movie. She turned to Dollface, eyes literally blazing with anger.

“Uh-oh, if looks could kill…” Dolly started to say before she dropped to the floor and stopped moving for a second, then leapt to her feet.

“I forgot, your looks can kill. I’m sorry, Hank, I’ll be more discreet in the future!”

“You, discreet?” Henrietta was incredulous. “You have the same acquaintance with discretion that Faust has with modesty — none to speak of.” The flames flashing from her eyes faded, and she started to smile. “We’re going to have some fun now! I’m off to make money the new-fashioned way — by stealing it. You want to come along?”

“Just try and leave me home, Hank!” Dolly responded eagerly. She was bouncing around like an excited chimpanzee. “Let’s go! Where we going?”

The two put on stylish trenchcoats to cover their costumes and were soon walking into one of the most expensive hotels in Gotham City.

“Why here?” Dollface wanted to know. “We’ve passed dozens of banks and jewelry stores.”

“I thought we deserved a little fun, too. Check out what’s happening here.” Henrietta pointed at the hotel’s event calendar for today. “What could be more fun than robbing the richest of the rich in Gotham — and watching the Dalenchipps at the same time?”

“Hubba-hubba!” Dollface responded with feeling. “Now you’re talking!”

Savant had seen a story about this upcoming event in the Gotham Gazette society news a month or so ago. Designed to raise money for the Bangladesh flood relief effort, it was an invitation-only event, and only those who could easily afford the $10,000 cover charge were invited. Since about a hundred of the richest women in Gotham City, New York, and Metropolis were expected to attend, the organizers hoped to collect over $1 million, just from the cover charge — and the Dalenchipp dancers who would be performing had pledged to donate ninety percent of their tips. Invitations had been the hottest item in Gotham high society for the past two weeks, when someone who had been invited but wasn’t interested in attending realized it was all right to give the invitation to a friend. This had quickly started a bidding war, and there were unconfirmed rumors of invitations being sold at ten times the cover charge — discreetly, of course.

Savant and Dollface didn’t have invitations, but that didn’t slow them down even a little bit. Savant’s powers got them in the door, and a couple of rich old dowagers in the front row of tables suddenly realized they would be safer from heart attacks a couple of rows back. The two super-villains were not the youngest women in attendance, and they were not underdressed, even in their skimpy costumes.

Henrietta hadn’t originally planned to attend the performance. Instead, as soon as the doors were locked, she had planned to mentally stun the crowd and take their money. Bet when Dolly caught a glimpse of the performers milling around, waiting for the speeches to be over, she had looked pleadingly at her friend. They weren’t in a hurry, so Savant had smiled and nodded, and they settled back.

They had to sit through some stupefying speeches and endure a horrifying stream of slides and videos, showing the dead, the diseased, and the dying. Somewhere in the middle of the third speech, Henrietta started to feel some doubts about their mission. Being the daughter of a single, drug-addicted mom, even a supermodel, had not been a picnic, yet the kids in these pictures were worse off on their best days than she had ever been in her life. She used her powers to read the minds of the organizers, and she saw that this whole thing was legit — the money really would go to the Flood Relief Fund.

She turned to her friend and smiled ruefully. “I’m sorry, Dolly, but we can’t steal from this event.”

One of the dancers was paying close attention to Dollface, but she turned to Savant and smiled. “Don’t be sorry. I knew from the moment we walked in that you’d change your mind. Even so, I haven’t had so much fun in… well, weeks, anyway!” She turned back to her new friend. Savant wondered where she had gotten the high-value bills she was using to attract and distract him — but with all the other women around them flashing so much money, she realized it was a silly question.

At the end of the evening, the proceeds were totaled, and it was announced that they had collected over three million dollars for charity that night. And the hotel announced that they would match the donation. Everyone cheered, and it was a perfect ending for a wonderful evening, except Dollface looked very sad.

“What’s the matter, Dolly? Your new friend blow you off?”

“Well, sort of. I know I can’t give him our unlisted phone number — and he never gives his number out to anyone! If you give him your number, and he likes you, he might call you — or he might not. What a swell-head!”

Savant had to laugh. “He’s just protecting himself, sweetie — from girls like you, in fact!”

Dollface thought about that for a few seconds, and she smiled, too. “I assume we’re going to knock over a bank or something on the way home?” When Savant nodded, she smiled. “Neato, groovy, outasight!”

***

They picked a bank; fencing gems and jewelry would take too long, and Savant wanted cash right away. Savant used her telekinesis to prevent the alarm from tripping, and it didn’t take long to open the safe with the same power.

Dollface looked around the vault with interest. “I just love money, you know, Hank? I wish we could take it all, but how would we carry it?”

“Don’t worry, Dolly, we can come back for more when the first batch is used up. Grab as much as you can carry, for now. Maybe we’ll bring a few of your pets along next time to help us carry even more. And stop calling me Hank!”

They filled the special pouches that lined the inside of their coats, and only a few minutes later they were back at their apartment. “Well, that was a fun diversion, but I’ve got to get back to work,” Savant told her friend.

Dolly made a face and stuck out her tongue. “Well, I’ve got to check on my pets. See you later!”

“Remember, Dolly, no more killing!”

***

On the Jay Garrick for President campaign trail, John Garrick was glad for once that the train tour forced everyone into a specific schedule. Tonight after dinner was scheduled as family time, and the Secret Service detail would keep everyone out of the family car. The teenaged John wanted some private time with his folks. The three were sitting in the library in comfortable chairs, surrounded by the old books that his parents Jay and Joan Garrick loved so well. There was a lull in the conversation, and John filled it.

“Dad, have you ever thought about changing the past?”

His parents were virtually dumbstruck, and there was silence for a few seconds. Then Jay spoke cautiously, thinking back through all of his adventures as the super-speedster known as the Flash. ”Of course I did, son, when I was younger. Who hasn’t thought about what the world would be like if, for example, Hitler had never been born? Not many people really have the power to make changes like that, though you and I are among those few that do.” John acknowledged this with a nod, and Jay went on.

“But I’ll tell you what — it is one of the single most dangerous things you can think of, John. I tried it once, back in the ’50s, in fact, exactly that scenario — preventing the birth of Hitler. I went back to Austria in the nineteenth century and tried to keep Hitler’s parents from meeting. I was ready to carry his mother off to America when I was stopped by someone named Destiny.”

“There was somebody in the nineteenth century who could stop you?” John was surprised. “I thought there weren’t any super-powered people until the late 1930s!”

“A common misconception, son. It seems as if there have been people with super-powers almost as long as there have been people. Why, there’s a fella known as Immortal Man who’s lived a thousand lives or more over many centuries, having different super-powers each time. Anyway, Destiny — who wears a hooded purple cloak and carries the Book of Destiny, which is connected to his wrist by a huge chain  – isn’t exactly a human being, as far as I can tell, but more of a Spectre type, though he doesn’t take a direct hand in things like Jim Corrigan does. In that way he reminds me more of the Phantom Stranger from Earth-One. Destiny can see what the future holds, and he shows himself only at times when humanity is in the crossroads. He showed me a future without Hitler, and it was far worse than the future I had already experienced.”

Jay shuddered as those terrible memories rose to the surface of his mind. The puppet ruler that Vandal Savage had raised up instead of Adolf Hitler had been even more dangerous than Hitler, even more so when this puppet ruler had managed to kill Savage and discover many of the secrets of the Illuminati. Backed with these secrets, he had been able to prolong World War II for decades. Destiny had showed the Flash that World War II was still going on in the mid-1950s and had hinted that it would last at least another forty years — and he had refused to tell the Flash which side would eventually win.

“Dad, that same thing happened to me, almost exactly. I went back in time, and Doctor Fate stopped me by showing me the future!”

Joan broke in. “John, dear, why did you want to change the past?” said his mother with concern. “What terrible events were you trying to erase?” In a few minutes, John had told the whole story.

His mother was upset. “Just because you have super-powers and you’re a genius, John Garrick, doesn’t mean you are smart enough to play God with other peoples’ lives for your own selfish reasons! I thought we’d raised you better than that!”

John, who hadn’t even considered that his motives were selfish, was about to protest, but his father stopped him. “She’s right, you know. You wanted to change Henrietta so she would be more to your liking. What gives you the right to decide what’s right for her?”

“Look, guys, it didn’t happen, and I learned my lesson. Can we talk about something else? I think Henrietta’s up to something dangerous.” Jay and Joan glanced at each other. Jay winked, and Joan nodded.

“I’ve been trying to keep track of her from the news stories,” continued John. “I know I could find her in just a few seconds if I really wanted to, but she knows where I am — and if she wants to talk to me, she can. From the things she’s stolen, I’m afraid she’s experimenting with nanotechnology. Suppose she builds something that lets her take over the minds of insects? She could be almost unstoppable!”

To some people this might have sounded ridiculous, but controlling an army of insects could give Savant tremendous power. There were people who could be killed by as little as one bee sting. A swarm of army ants could kill anything in its path. Flocks of locusts could easily disrupt travel by car and truck, smashing into windshields and blinding drivers. Insect eavesdroppers would be impossible to stop. An insect could even disrupt complex electronics by crawling onto circuit boards and creating short circuits. The insect would die, but there were always more insects for the next mission.

Joan Garrick was thinking about this, and she shook her head. “It doesn’t fit, John. She uses her mind-control powers on people, mostly on men, and she’s always had good success. From what you’ve told us, you were her only failure, and she never actually used her powers on you. I don’t think she would change her M.O. that drastically unless her old methods had failed her.”

John thought it through, and his mom was right. He was wondering what else he had done wrong recently, when Jay spoke up.

“Though that could be devastating, if it is what she is really doing, dear,” said the former Flash. “I think we ought to check it out. If Henrietta is experimenting with insects, our friend Insect Queen – Lana Lang — should be able to find some kind of evidence. Meanwhile, John, as Lana investigates the insect angle, I want you to figure out how nanonic mind-control transceivers would work, and figure out a defense against them.”

“Thanks, Dad! I’ll get to work right away!” John felt much better. Even though he had almost messed up twice, his folks were taking him seriously. And his father had just entrusted him with a very important responsibility.

“Can it wait, John?” his mom responded. “I made a surprise dessert for tonight, and I was hoping we could all watch a little TV together. The Cosby Show is supposed to be really good tonight!” John laughed and turned on the TV, while Joan headed to the kitchen to serve up homemade apple pie and ice cream.

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Continued from Showcase: Whiz Kid: To Save Savant

“Birds and bees, Hank!” Dollface was mad, but she just couldn’t bring herself to swear at her best friend — the friend who had busted the two of them out of prison again, only last month, the friend who continually found them such swanky places to live, rent-free, such as this penthouse apartment in the ritzy section of Gotham City. ”You gotta get over Johnny Be Good, you know? You’re no fun at all anymore, Hank!” She did a couple of cartwheels and a flip, landing in front of her friend.

“I’ve told you to stop calling me that,” said Henrietta King, alias Savant. “Hank is my brother’s name.” (*) She was sitting in an office chair, staring blankly at a computer screen.

[(*) Editor's note: Henrietta King's half-brother is Hank King Jr., alias Brainwave II of Infinity Inc. They are both the offspring of the late Dr. Henry King, the super-villain known as the Brain Wave, though they have different mothers.]

There was more activity on the screen than in the room. The display, far more advanced than any contemporary computer gaming systems from the late 1980s, seemed to show a stylized city from directly above, and moving figures scurried around the screen while the city changed. Within minutes, it had grown from a small town to a bustling transportation hub of roads, railroads, airports, and seaports. As skyscrapers sprang up, along with power plants, shopping centers, suburbs, and slums, it was like watching hundreds of years of history in only minutes.

“Ah, Dolly — if only life was as easy as winning at this pointless simulation!” Savant responded sadly. ”I saw all the terrible things men did to my mother — controlling her through her addiction, using and abusing her for their pleasure, never concerned about anything but their own gratification.”

Dollface was stunned to see tears on Henrietta’s face. Savant had always been the hard-as-nails tough girl, caring for nobody and nothing other than establishing her rep.

“I promised I’d get revenge on all men for what they did to her! That I’d never care for anyone other than myself, that no man would ever touch me. I’d be rich and famous, and they would all come crawling to me, begging me for a smile — and I’d use my powers to rob them blind and make them love it, and then at the end I’d give them back their real memories and release them with nothing! And then he came along and spoiled it all!”

Dollface awkwardly wrapped her friend in her arms. Like Savant, she was also pretty much a stranger to compassion. She wanted to help her friend, but she had no idea how. She thought about pointing out that Savant had searched out John Garrick, not the other way around, but she had a better idea.

“I can kill him if you want! Oops! That was… gasp! the wrong thing… gasp! to say… wasn’t it?”

There were gaps and gasps in her speech because Savant was using her power of telekinesis to hurl small objects from around the room at her, and Dollface was doing her superhuman best to dodge them. She fell bonelessly flat to the floor as a clock flashed through the space where her head had been, then sprang catlike into the air to avoid the long extension cord that was trying to wrap around her neck. Unfortunately, this put her right into the path of a whizzing alabaster egg, which bounced off her forehead, and she dropped to the carpet, stunned.

Savant laughed. “Serves you right, you nasty witch!” Then her face twisted in concern, and a large tumbler of whiskey rose from the sideboard and poured itself over Dollface’s face. The girl awoke, sputtering, as Savant broke into a full-fledged crying jag.

“Oh, Dolly! I’m sorry! What’s wrong with me? I’m acting like… like…”

“Like a lovesick teenage girl?” Dollface filled in for her. And she ducked again as the tumbler shot at her face. But it missed, and she sat up. “Geez, good thing I rolled with that shot.” She licked her lips. “Hey, good whiskey! But don’t you know it’s illegal to serve alcohol to a minor?” She was relieved to see Savant force a sickly smile to her face.

“Dolly, you need to learn to be less bloodthirsty. Once they’re dead, they’re not much use any more, you know — you can’t tease them anymore, and they can’t give you any more gifts. And you can’t make them suffer anymore, either.”

She actually shuddered. Dollface played with men the way cats played with mice, and Savant was willing to bet that most of her pets would have been happy to die. ”Thanks for cheering me up. I’m OK now.”

“Why, Hank, you say the sweetest thing!” Dollface did a somersault, ending in a handstand, and hand-walked out of the room. ”I’m going to order a pizza!”

“You pay the delivery boy with real money this time — and don’t invite him in!”

The last couple of times, Henrietta had needed to use her mental powers to straighten out the pizza-delivery situation. The kid with the counterfeit money was pretty easy — all she had to do was make him misremember where he got it, but as for the big, handsome guy Dolly had played with — she’d had to stage a phony car crash and alter his memories and those of a half-dozen other people as well. She’d actually considered changing Dolly’s personality to make her a little less cruel, but she was squeamish about using her powers on her friends.

What she needed was a hobby. And it had to be something a lot more complex and realistic than computer simulations of growing cities.

Actually, she had to admit that the city simulation was an interesting concept. It was just too simplistic, even if her simulation was still more advanced than anything available to the public. She thought about it for a while, then pulled up a software design program she had created, took out a couple of pads of paper from the desk drawer, and set to work.

***

A few hours later, she leaned back in her chair, filled with a glow of satisfaction. She had decided to create a real simulation, and it would be infinitely more complex than the feeble thing running on her computer. In fact, her computer was part of the problem. In order to be meaningfully complex, a good simulation needed a lot more computing power than she currently had available to her. She would have to start from scratch. She could see that she was going to have to develop new techniques and make significant improvements in the state of the art of nanonics — the technology of very small things.

Even though her new hobby was interesting, it still couldn’t keep her mind from wandering to thoughts of John Garrick. Well, that was all right; when she finished, she would invite him by to show him her new toy. She knew he would be totally impressed. One of the reasons she liked him was that he appreciated her intelligence, and she was sure that there was no one else who could have come up with this project.

She and Dolly had pretty much spent most of the fortune of her current benefactor, Senator Oldwealth Bigbucks. Of course, this was an alias — Henrietta always depersonalized her benefactors by referring to them by derisive nicknames. He’d paid the rent on this place for a year in advance just before he had assigned the lease to Henrietta, so she and her friends had a place to crash for the next year, unless they were rousted by some hero, but they were starting to run out of cash.

Bigbucks was still going to provide her with some fun, though, even though his run as benefactor was about played out. Under her mental influence, using his power as a Senator and his legendary reputation, as well as a little blackmail and extortion, he had managed to secretly gain control of much of his family’s wealth. And next week he was going to publicly donate every penny of that fortune to a group of charitable organizations who worked to prevent abuse of women and children. It should be a real treat, watching that family try to recover their money, as she had made sure they would have no legal recourse. The legal battle would go on for years.

Still, this simulation project would require lots of money — and she expected that it would be at least as interesting as the soap-opera saga of Senator Bigbucks and his family. Where was she going to get the money?

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Showcase: Whiz Kid

To Save Savant

The Race crossover

by Dan Swanson

Two years ago, Whiz Kid fell for Henrietta King, the super-villainess known as Savant, and first loves are never forgotten. Now John Garrick has a plan — he will go back in time to save Henrietta before she’s even born! But will changes in time save Savant or threaten the world? Guest starring Doctor Fate!

• Chapter 1: An Encounter with Fate

• Chapter 2: Alternate Fate

Return to Earth-2 titles. Return to Junior JSA stories.

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The Tower of Fate, 1967:

John Garrick saw the whole thing in his mind as if he, like Nabu, was a nigh-omnipotent, godlike being. He could draw back his attention and get the big picture or zoom in and get local details.

***

The alternate reality:

It started simply enough. Just as the other models were about to tell Zeta Harris about the miracle weight-control drug, the other Whiz Kid knocked on the door of the models’ lounge, then scurried down the hall to the next corner. Zeta opened the door, and no one was there, although she saw John’s back disappearing around the corner. She went back into the lounge.

“Just a prank by one of the boys,” she told her friends. “Say, what’s the matter, Pinya? You’re all white!”

Pinya was shaken by how close she had come to being caught, but she’d had close encounters before. “I just realized we’re going to be late for a really big gig! Gotta run. See you later?” She’d try again tomorrow, although she’d be a little more careful.

“Sure. I’ve gotta head to a client site for some pictures as well! Have a wonderful day!” Whiz Kid had invisibly reentered the room, and when he heard these words, he smiled in satisfaction. It was a job well done, and he started back to the future. This had been easy.

***

Meanwhile, back in the Tower of Fate:

“See, Doc, it was simple!” said John. “I don’t know what you were worried about.”

Doctor Fate’s voice was even deeper and more disapproving than before. “Nothing about time travel is ever as simple as you think it is, youth. Continue to observe!”

***

The alternate reality:

Satisfied, Whiz Kid had returned to his own time, but when he checked his scrapbooks, there was no change to the news reports regarding Henrietta King. Nothing had changed. His time-scope showed that all he had done was delay Zeta’s first use of cocaine for a day. Those other two hadn’t given up just because of a small scare.

Using the time-scope to check up some more on them, he discovered the reason. Both of them worked for a ring that smuggled cocaine into New York. They distributed to their model friends, and they made more money from coke than they did from modeling. He would have to find a way to keep them away from Zeta.

He would have to go back in time to an earlier period, but do what? He would expose them and get them arrested. That sounded right. Not only would he save Zeta and Henrietta, he would also be saving all those other models as well. He wanted to avoid a third trip into the past, so he planned this one more carefully.

***

The Tower of Fate:

John Garrick was proud of his other self for working out the details so quickly, and also of all the good that Whiz Kid would do for the world. And one nice result of Doctor Fate’s intervention was now that he knew in advance of the failure of his first effort, when this movie show was over, he could skip past his failure and go right to the good part.

Nabu saw the sly smile on John’s face. He remembered when, half a million years ago, as a Lord of Order he had been sent to Earth from the planet Cilia and himself had shared the same kind of brash confidence John was filled with now. He regretted how hard the upcoming tableau would hit the youngster, but John had to learn to accept reality. There were some things that were beyond the scope of his powers.

***

The alternate reality:

In 1964, three years earlier than his first visit to New York, the modeling agency had a poltergeist. The employees sometimes overheard bits of conversation. Pinya and Alexetta kept misplacing things. And unfortunately for them, the other employees started finding those same things, such as a small mirror covered with white dust under a desk, or a razor blade and a plastic straw dropped in a trash bin that was then accidentally knocked over, spewing its contents onto the floor. Also found were little plastic bags the size of a fingertip supposedly incinerated, but the incinerator stopped working, and the repairman had to take it apart.

One of the employees confronted the two drug distributors in private, hoping he could help them without getting them into trouble. But that proved to be a fatal mistake. The police investigated the murder, and the two models were eventually caught and imprisoned, pending trial.

The drug scandal destroyed the modeling agency. Zeta Harris wasn’t discovered for several more years, and she was never as famous in the alternate reality as she had been in the original reality. A few years later, the night that Dr. Henry King, alias the Brain Wave, had met her at a wild, cocaine-fueled orgy, he had met someone else instead. Henrietta was never born.

***

The Tower of Fate:

“I see,” John mused sadly. “You can let me go now, Doctor Fate. I understand. My good deed helped Zeta stay clean. But it killed that other guy, and Henrietta will never exist in that reality.”

“Yes, John, I believe you do understand. Though the ripple effect of this action would continue to grow in that alternate world, I don’t believe you would benefit from further observation.”

John almost rebelled but then remembered that he had doubted the ancient sage earlier and had been flat wrong. “You’re right, Doctor Fate. Thank you. I’m sorry; I’m pretty shook up. I would have killed two people if you hadn’t stopped me.”

“Your human logic is limited, young Garrick. My own logic tells me otherwise. Still, your instinct is correct — those who attempt to change their pasts usually produce results that they ultimately find less desirable than the original conditions they are attempting to change.”

“Thanks for the save, Doctor Fate!” said Whiz Kid, and the ancient mage that was Nabu bowed his acknowledgement. “I guess I’d better go home now.”

“Please seek the further counsel of Doctor Fate if you have other questions, youth.” With a wave of his hand, John was sent back to his own time in 1988.

After a moment of silence, Doctor Fate seemed to be talking to himself, but it was merely Nabu communicating with Kent Nelson.

“It is a relief that he gained wisdom without requiring full knowledge of the phantom reality,” said Nabu.

“Yeah, it was close,” said Kent. “My God — who would have thought that such a small action would lead to such devastation? Who could have ever guessed that the Flash could be so deadly?”

“The rage the followed the death of his wife at the hands of Brain Wave was fearsome, indeed. Without the restraint of his sanity, there are few who could match his power.”

In the phantom reality, without Zeta Harris to distract him, the Brain Wave had accidentally killed Joan Garrick during the commission of a crime. The Flash had gone on a murderous rampage, killing first Henry King and then all other super-villains he could locate. With his speed, almost a hundred were dead before Superman tried to stop him. What the Flash had done to Superman in that reality was beyond incredible.

“Do you think we should tell Superman that Jay can vibrate his body at the frequency of kryptonite radiation?” Kent asked. “Or should we thank our lucky stars that there’s a way to stop even our most powerful mortal hero if he ever turned on us?”

“It is something of an understatement to call the loss of Superman luck, don’t you think? The true good luck in this case is that we convinced John Garrick to abandon his quixotic quest, and none of those terrible things will happen.”

“After all the time we’ve shared Doctor Fate’s mind, you still don’t understand humans very well, do you?” Kent Nelson was amused. “This quest wasn’t nearly as idealistic as your quixotic label makes it sound. Twenty or so years from now, Henrietta King will become John’s first love, and he won’t give up easily. I’m sure he’s back in his own present, thinking of some other quixotic way to save her.”

Continued in The Brave and the Bold: Whiz Kid and Savant: The City of Truth

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Continued from DC Universe: The Race, Book 3: Dirty Tricks, Chapter 4: Daddy’s Girl

John Garrick, alias Whiz Kid, had come up with a plan to save the teenaged super-villainess Henrietta King, alias Savant. He would go back in time and change the crooked path of her life, effectively saving her from ever having become a super-villainess.

Now that he had a plan, it was time to get started. He knew that other speedsters could travel in time by moving really fast — faster than light. But he wanted a better understanding of the theory before he actually tore off into the past, so he took a few seconds to ponder time travel. One advantage of being the world’s fastest kid was that he could spend several hours of subjective time in pondering over only a few seconds. And being a genius on top of it, he could pretty much puzzle out anything when he set his mind to it.

Still, this was going to be a difficult mission. Just as the Pauli exclusion principle prevented two electrons from occupying the same orbital at the same time, there was a similar exclusion principle of time travel — the same being could not physically exist more than once in the same universe during the same time interval. When he emerged into his own past, he would manifest as a phantom, able to observe everything but affect nothing. It would be the same if he traveled into his own future.

He realized with interest that this presented a lot of potential paradoxes. Suppose he went back to a few weeks before he was born and hung around — when he was born, would the older John or would baby John suddenly become a phantom? What decided which version of him had precedence in a particular time period? He was deep into consideration of this issue, and he was starting to sense a pattern behind this phenomenon, when he realized he was straying from his self-imposed mission. He could always explore this aspect of time travel later — one thing that being Whiz Kid had given him was plenty of was time.

Since Henrietta wasn’t much older than he was, he wouldn’t be able to change her life much, since time traveling within his own lifetime would turn him into a phantom. So he would have to go back before he was born and change the lives of her parents, Zeta Harris and Henry King. He decided he’d be smart about this — he would have a plan before he went back in time, rather than just showing up and winging it. So he needed a time-scanner to pick the right time.

A flurry of activity followed that thought. The TV, his Atari 5200 video game console, VHS player, the mobile phone, and his fancy PC were all torn to shreds, and then most of the components were reassembled into a weird device. It looked like two TVs sitting on a pile of electronic junk, with several antennas and a makeshift control panel that had knobs, dials, and two keypads — a normal computer keypad and a smaller phone keypad — and a joystick. He felt bad; his Concurrent 7700 Professional Computer had been one of his favorite possessions. But he could probably put it back the way it had been — probably.

***

Later:

Whiz Kid raced around the world, moving from west to east, pushing himself to his limit, faster and faster — easily faster than he had ever moved before. He circled the Earth more than seven times in a single second, right at the very edge of the speed of light, vibrating furiously so he didn’t smash into anything. Still, he could tell he wasn’t quite traveling in time yet. He pushed even harder, and he knew he’d gained a little more speed, but only very little. As his speed approached the speed of light, every little increase in speed became exponentially more difficult.

Now he knew why his dad, and the Earth-One Flash as well, didn’t break the time barrier every time they ran this fast — raw speed wasn’t enough. With their virtually unlimited strength, Kryptonians had the power to break the time barrier on their own, but pure speedsters such as himself needed an extra boost. Well, he just happened to have the solution with him.

He was carrying version two of his perpetual motion device, smaller and more compact than the original, which was already heavily modified from Savant’s original, and to which he had also added a few extra features. (*) Shortly after Henrietta had used the original to send Superboy through time, he had realized that it wasn’t really perpetual — it would stop working when the average temperature of the universe reached a couple millionths of a degree above absolute zero. But that wouldn’t happen for trillions of years, so perpetual was as good a term as any, and a lot easier to say than that it would work until the eventual heat death of the universe. He touched the switch, and the jolt from the extra power felt like smashing through a solid granite wall. Suddenly, the universe around him changed drastically.

[(*) Editor's note: See Junior JSA: The Junior Injustice Society, Chapter 5: Perpetual Motion.]

Whiz Kid had been moving at super-speed across a normal, if blurry landscape, but there wasn’t any landscape any longer. He seemed to be in an infinitely long tunnel, the walls of which were alternately banded black and white. There were no colors anywhere. He glanced down to see that he, too, was colored only black and white. It was a good thing there wasn’t anything else to see, because he would not have been able to make sense out of anything complicated. This time tunnel effect was not unexpected. He’d theorized that he would see something very similar to this and had planned for it.

He knew that each band indicated a single day, and that each band he passed, moving in this direction, indicated that he was one day farther back in the past. He pressed another button on his perpetual motion device, and a sensor-based counter was activated. He increased his pace until the black and white bands became a gray blur and then waited for the counter to vibrate, signaling that he should slow. As he reached the correct day, the sensor turned off the perpetual motion machine, and John fell back through the time barrier onto Earth in 1967, twenty-one years earlier.

Whiz Kid slowed as quickly as he could and ended up in New York City. Just in case he had to appear as a civilian, he whizzed through a Goodwill Thrift Store for some ’60s clothes, leaving a small gold nugget as payment. Carrying the bundle of clothes, he then headed for the address of a fancy modeling agency. He knew that the career of Henrietta King’s mother, the supermodel known as Zeta, had begun with that agency a few years ago, and his time scanner had showed him that another significant event in her life would occur there today.

Along the way he passed a mugging, which he stopped with a quick super-speed karate blow to the side of the mugger’s neck. A block farther on a building was burning, and the fire department was still on the way. He raced through the building at invisible super-speed, carrying people and pets out. It only took a second to clear the building, and then he began running around it at super-speed, creating a vortex that drew air away from the building, snuffing the fire from lack of oxygen. He wasn’t surprised to see Wonder Woman approaching, also at super-speed, but before she could notice him, he blurred away.

He had to run past the United Nations building, and he was stunned to see that there were large crowds around it being held back by police and several squads of soldiers. He saw teams wearing padded body armor carefully entering the building and overheard them talking about a bomb. He detoured through the building and quickly found that bomb. A quick examination, and he pulled a wire loose. There was no way this bomb could go off now, and he was back to his mission.

Finally, he reached the modeling agency. His time-scope had showed that some of the older models were just about to introduce Zeta to a drug that would, according to them, help her keep thin. They said that they used it all the time, and they swore they wouldn’t have been successful without it. John knew that Zeta was only instants away from what would become a long-term addiction to cocaine, an addiction that had turned her from a sweet, cheerful girl from the country into a domineering, abusive witch of a mother who would make life hell for her unwanted mutant daughter.

If John could prevent Zeta from becoming addicted, Henrietta’s childhood would be much happier, and she wouldn’t turn to crime. At least, that was his plan. For certain, even if he didn’t actually help Henrietta, saving her mother from the ravages of addiction was worth doing.

As he vibrated through the wall of the building, his universe changed again. He was no longer in the agency building in New York. After a very short instant of disorientation, he recognized where he was — in the main chamber of the Tower of Fate, Doctor Fate’s sanctum in Salem, Massachusetts. John Garrick had only been here once before. Shortly after his powers had first manifested, his dad the Flash had taken him on a get acquainted tour, and he had been introduced to many of his world’s heroes — his dad’s friends and allies.

He stood on a platform surrounded by a shimmering wall of force — magical force, he recognized from the vibrations. Facing him outside the barrier was Doctor Fate himself. But as soon as the figure spoke, he knew it wasn’t Doctor Fate as he knew him in the present, an amalgam of Kent and Inza Nelson. No, this Doctor Fate was the ancient Lord of Order known as Nabu.

“John Garrick, you are about to make a grievous mistake. Mortals should not attempt to change the past. Even an immortal such as I, a Lord of Order, shudders at the possible consequences!”

“How did you bring me back to the present like that?” John was confused; he respected the power of magic, but he was sure even magic couldn’t breach the time barrier that easily.

“This is not your present, though it is mine! I have not brought you through time, youth, but merely through space. However, while we converse, time as you know it in your universe is in abeyance. I will release you into the same instant — and at the same place — as you were when I gathered you for this conversation.”

“So how do you know me? I haven’t even been born yet!”

“I am Nabu. I am Doctor Fate. I know what I need to know.”

“Yeah, sure. I get it. Nigh-omnipotent, godlike being and all that, right? So I’m impressed. But how about letting me out of here so I can get back to what I was doing? Or am I gonna have to get out of here myself? I will, you know.”

“I will release you shortly. But first, I would like you to consider the consequences of your plan. Any change to the past, regardless of how small or trivial it seems, may have vast and wide-ranging effects on the future. For example, you are engaged on a mission of mercy — but what you do today may cause misery for many billions of beings!”

“OK, time to let me go. That is just so ridiculous! All I’m going to do is keep one girl from becoming a coke-head! Henrietta is important to me, and I am going to do this.”

“Once more I ask you to reconsider. I have seen the new future, and it is extremely… unpleasant. I suggest you take the word of Nabu that once you see the new future you will change your mind — but that you will also regret seeing that new future and wish you had listened to my advice sooner. What I show you may haunt you for longer than you think.”

John was somewhat daunted. Nabu was, indeed, a nigh-omnipotent, godlike being, after all, and he knew his dad had respected Doctor Fate even when they disagreed. Still, John was stubborn, and his first love was intimately bound up in this.

“Either show me or let me go!” he demanded. John would have sworn he heard the Lord of Order sigh. But Doctor Fate said nothing, merely waving his hand.

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Easter Sunday

by Immortalwildcat, Starsky Hutch 76, Gamma Xmen and Andrew Troy Keller

Five Easter Sundays. Five superheroes. Five stories connected only by one theme. For many people, Easter Sunday means a special time for family and reflection on one’s faith. And in some cases, it can mean other things entirely. Featuring the Sandman, the Spectre, Power Girl, Wildcat, and Arrowette!

***

The Sandman: Times Past, 1985: A Higher Power

An Easter Sunday story

by Immortalwildcat
published April 5, 2003

Wesley Dodds (the Sandman) has been an atheist his entire life. Will the simple faith of a small child change his mind?

The Spectre: The Specter of Easter

An Easter Sunday story

by Gamma Xmen
published April 17, 2003

The Spectre’s mission on Earth is one of vengeance, but what form does that vengeance take on the sacred day of Easter?

Power Girl: The Waynes and the Kents

An Easter Sunday story

by Andrew Troy Keller and Starsky Hutch 76
published April 15, 2003

Kara Zor-L (Power Girl) reminisces over her first Easter with the Wayne family and realizes how far she’s come since then.

Wildcat: Setting Down Roots

An Easter Sunday story

by Immortalwildcat
published April 17, 2003

Ted Grant (Wildcat) finds inspiration in an unusual source to begin a new life for himself and his wife, Irina.

Arrowette: Attack of the Fifty-Foot Bunny

An Easter Sunday story

by Starsky Hutch 76
published April 23, 2003

Star City is under attack by a 50-foot-tall bunny rabbit. You won’t want to miss seeing Arrowette and Flare take it down!

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