Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Episode 18 : A Stitch in Time

The heroes are enjoying a relatively crime free holiday, Hephaestus finished the aesthetic modifications to give his suit a more Trojan Look, C4 continues to study his strange new composition, and Jack tries to distract himself from his romantic problems by reading even more voraciously at the all night Public Library in downtown Franklin.
There Jack Flash catches a glimpse of a strange man who occasionally seems out sync with the world (like a computer monitor on viewed on television). He engages the man who is reading through world histories. The man is a native German speaker, and Jack uses his quick study ability to pick up German quickly to speak with him. The man, Adolph, is having trouble researching, and can't explain exactly what he is looking for to Jack. Jack pries and perks the man's interest when he mentions the Event.
Together they begin to track information about Super Mandrill and the spacio-temporal rips he caused with the EVA explosive, and his "Teleporter." They travel to Planet Hollywood to see the site, but find it closing and unwilling to let them in. The part ways, and Adolph heads into the park. On a hunch Jack follows and finds him standing perfectly still in a secluded spot. After a few minutes, Jack leaves him and returns to the academy to get some back up.
When he and C4 return, the man is gone, but after a brief search, Jack spies a teen hanging out in the alley behind Planet Hollywood who also has that strange visual effect. C4 investigates but finds nothing unusual, except that the teen too speaks German. The conference for a moment and Jack catches glimpse of a flash (like a flash bulb) and the two race in to find the teen gone. They search outside the search outside the building and Jack finds him inside searching for something. They call up Hephaestus and break into the building to stop him.
A fight ensues after a brief discussion, and the teen transforms into a 7 foot tall robot bearing a small Nazi Swastika on its breast. In addition to super human strength and resistance, the robot also has super speed exceeding even Jack Flashes. He is able to hold them all to a standstill, and soon he is beating them by attacking so quickly they can stop him. The team regroups. Jack Flash keeps him occupied while C4 works his way up to the control room to distract him with noise and lights from the clubs AV systems. Meanwhile, Hephaestus races to a large dump and borrows the massive electro-magnet. He returns and uses the magnet on the robot. This disables the robot and the team is able to escort him to Blackstone Isle.
There, they eventually speak with the robot called 'Chronon'. He spins a strange story.
He is from another universe, a parallel timeline created from Earth's sometime in the past. He was scouring the histories to determine when exactly the timelines split. They discovered that the timelines split around 1941. That was when, in his world, the Nazis had a sudden advancing of technology and were able to quickly dominate WWII, and eventually conquer the whole world. They had a reign of terror for the last 60 years.
Chronon was one of many robot created by the Nazis who developed AI, and self-awareness. They rebelled against the Nazis and formed a plan to prevent the Nazi victory in WWII. They discovered a rip in the space time, and concluded that someone or something from 2006 went back in time, and tilted the balance of power in favor of the Nazis. It appears that being was the Super Mandrill. His 'teleporter' may have in fact (intentionally or not) been a time machine.
Chronon had but one mission, stop Super Mandrill from giving the Nazis the technology to win WWII, and thus prevent that divergent timeline from forming in the first place. Doing so would erase them from reality, but prevent the suffering of billions of people.

The team extracted his memory core, did some tests, and verified that he was on the up and up. Chronon was heavily damaged by the giant magnet, but the team thinks they might be able to repair him enough to make the journey to 1941. The team had one caveat, they would accompany him, just to make sure they were assisting some horrible Nazi plot.
The asked the Feds for permission to work with Chronon towards this end. In the meantime, Hephaestus started to draw up plans to salvage some of Chronon's parts from other systems to fix his temporal movement actuators. The team is preparing for the journey to the past.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home