03 | Text

[khajidont]

[This is Jaime's first post to the network as Blue Beetle, and the name displayed on the tablet has changed accordingly. For any hackers out there, it can't be linked back to him as he's not actually using his tablet; he's posting directly from his armour.]

Hey. Blue Beetle here.

I know that after all this, the last thing we're thinking about is the UE's soldiers, but something's been bugging me. Everyone who was on the distraction team with me, you must have noticed the new soldiers, right? They didn't have anything like them on Elmer's world, and I'm pretty sure that war was an all-hands-on-deck sort of deal.

The normal soldiers were really well equipped as it was, but these ones must have been metas. They were stronger, and faster. It was so busy on the field that I don't know whether or not I was seeing ones with different powers or if they all had the same skillset going on, but the ones I noticed could fly and had elemental powers.

And they were small. Like children.

[Which is deeply off-putting.]

I'm not sure what their deal is, but consider this a heads-up for what the UE's got in store, and the kind of technology we might find on them. For some reason, I don't think an army full of tiny meta-soldiers is something they just managed to find one day. If any of you ran into them too, I think it'd be good if we could get some sort of list of how much they can actually do.

Oh yeah, one last thing. Since we don't exactly have space suits around here yet, if there's any maintenance that needs to be done outside the base, let me know. I'm guessing we don't have a whole lot of people who can breathe out there, and my suit's built for space travel.

Comments

[khajidont]

Oh yeah.

[...he didn't even think about that oh my god how are they going to make a plan time travel sucks so much.]

Have you done this whole time travel thing before?

[trustycrowbar]

In a way I have, yeah. But it wasn't so much a matter of actual travel and velocity, as much as being lifted out of the timestream and sort of dangled, there. I didn't have much of a choice at the time, so it wasn't as though I could build a better method.

[khajidont]

I have no idea what being lifted out of the timestream is supposed to mean.

It doesn't sound fun.

[trustycrowbar]

It's difficult to describe. Just leave it that I was put into suspension, in every single sense of the word.

When I woke up again, twenty years had passed. The results of my actions in the past were laid bare in ways that I couldn't have possibly foreseen at the time. I guess you could say it was good practice for the mechanics of cause-and-effect here.

[That's one generous way to put it anyway.]

[khajidont]

And I thought one year was bad.

Twenty years. That's insane.

[trustycrowbar]

Yes. Yes it was.

One year, you said? Did something like that happen to you?

[khajidont]

Yeah, it did. Have you ever heard of the Bleed?

[trustycrowbar]

No, I haven't. What is that? I can't say it sounds pleasant, whatever it is.

[khajidont]

It only sucks if you don't know what to do with it. It's basically this place in space that connects all the dimensions together. Only time gets kind of wonky there. You can spend a couple hours in there and come out a year later.