“Who?“ A voice answered in that space. “Crossroads? From where? I don’t recognize you...” The voice replied cautiously.
“I am Allyson,” she replied, adding all the “flavor” of her home universe to her name. “And I need your help.”
“Allyson, I am Alysia,” the voice responded with her own universe’s “flavor.” “I am in no position to help anyone right now. My universe is on the brink of destruction and it all we can do to stave off the end.”
“I know, Alysia, I know. Somehow I crossed into your universe and ended up on the BADGE Space Station. I found the recording Nova left. What I don’t know is what has happened since that message was recorded and what I can do to help.”
“Standby, Allyson,” Alysia replied and went silent.
Allyson waited a few minutes, the complete silence and darkened corners of the room making her jumpy. Allyson decided to activate the viewing screen and see what the planet lloked like from orbit. That image of the white-blue marble always cheered her up. The view screen came alive and it’s harsh light threw shadows from the work stations and defunct robots across the room. Rubbing her eyes from the sudden glare, Allyson could see that the planet was laid out before her, but something was wrong. Where she expected to see city lights dotting the continents all she could see was darkness. She remembered what Nova had said about the world’s power supply and was saddened to see it visually.
Allyson gave a huge sigh and reached to turn of the viewer when a suddenly a hand fell onto her shoulder. Allyson jumped, screamed, and dimensional-skipped across the room, her heart pounding in her chest. Immediately taking up a defensive stance, hand out and ready to deliver a blast ofenergy at her attacker.
Standing by the command console was a petite, Asian-American woman in a superhero outfit very close in design to the one that Allyson normally wore – a red and black jumpsuit with a utility belt.
“Whoops! Sorry, Allyson! I didn’t mean to startle you like that. I’m Alysia, glad to meet you!”
“Oh ...hi....,” stammered Allyson, her hand on her chest trying to slow her heart rate and breathing down.
“Listen, I would love to chat with you here, but we need to get out of here before Lady Quark finds us. Believe you me, you don’t want that to happen. So saying Alysia dim-skipped over to Allyson, put her hand on her shoulder and dim-skipped to somewhere else. Before they left the station, Allyson caught a quick glimpse of a pair of glowing red eye looking at them from the darkened doorway of the commander center.
Well, not a pair. There were three glowing red eyes watching them as they disappeared.
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Allyson fell to her knees as they materialized in a small unfurnished room.
“Sorry about the rough ride,” Alysia apologized. ”I had to skip us all around the world as fast as I could to make sure they couldn’t follow us.”
“They? Lady Quark?”
“Yeah, they almost caught us. I could see their eyes as we skipped, so I took a lot of detours on the way here.”
“Where is here?” asked Allyson.
“Just a little way station on the way to our final stop,” Alysia snickered.
“What’s so funny...ahhhhhhhh!”
The floor suddenly dropped away and the two Crossroads fell down a shaft. The bottom of the shaft of was gently curved and it shunted the falling heroes into a tube with a sufficient declination that they continued to slide downwards, eventually ending up in a well-appointed capsule. The capsule had comfortable seats which the heroes took after untangling themselves from their arrival. Allyson grumbled about the chute, but Alysia just smiled gleefully.
“Again, sorry, but your expression was hilarious!”
“Whatever. Where to now?”
“Nova apparently has little safe houses that no one else knows anything about throughout the entire world. He’s kind of paranoid,” Alysia answered.
“And you should be too, Alysia! Hasn’t recent event taught you that?” Nova’s voice said from a speaker overhead.
“You’re right, sir. But you’ve had these little hidey-holes long before you ever formed BADGE.”
“My life has taught me to always have a Plan B. I reasoned that if a Plan B was needed, then I should also prepare a Plan C, D E, F and so on. It has served me well over the centuries,” Nova replied sagely. “On to business. Allyson? May I call you Allyson?”
“Um, yes sir!”
“Thank you. Allyson, as things stand right now,. we aren’t going to win. I hate to be so blunt, but sugar coating it isn’t going to change it. BADGE doesn’t exist anymore. Our Leagues and headquarters have all been overran and destroyed. We lost about 90% of all our meta-humans. Of the super-powered extra-terrestrials we had, some were killed and the others decided to leave and go home, or at least elsewhere in the universe.”
“We can’t save the Earth, but, hopefully, we can save the rest of the universe.”
“How, sir?” Allyson asked as the capsule slid to a halt and the doors opened.
“Come with me and I’ll show you,” Nova said from the capsule doors.
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Continued...
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