exsilium | video.

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Hi, I'm Kate Bishop, and I'm a superhero. [There's a pause before she goes on.] There's a chance that doesn't mean much to many of you. There may even be some of you questioning the legality of vigilantes, but I'm not the type that goes too far. There's a reason why we kind of prefer "superhero" over "vigilante" anyway. For those of you who do know them, I'm an Avenger. But that's meaningless here. And I'm not really here to ... brag, either.

[Her voice is warm either way. There's a reason why she's here.]

Back home, I've got a like-minded group that tends to go on missions like the ones here. I was hoping to form something like that. It won't be the same, but I've got a couple teammates and not the whole set. We'd do pretty well for ourselves, but we need a couple more helping hands. So that's why I'm here. Well, partly.

[There is a question she has about this whole alternate earth business, but she'll get to it. She really wants a cohesive unit working together, as that seems to be the best way to proceed forward.]

The other goal I'd like for our group is to mobilize and help people in need. I can do this myself, and I'm planning on it, but more hands at the deck might help out. We don't just need this in missions, and from what I've read, we don't know what's gonna come next. I know it's risky to put together a group like this with how people come and go, but I'm prepared to deal with that. Plus, I don't just back down from something. I'm kind of stubborn that way.

If you've already got something like this going and wouldn't mind a few more people, I'd love to chat with you. I'm an archer mostly, but I have other gifts. One member is a ... [a trickster? How does one even sell Loki?] ... well, I'm sure he's good at something. And the final is an alien with advanced knowledge of technology that he might share. He's also got bug DNA and is extremely flexible. [That last bit. She really had to add that last bit.] So let me know.

The other question is: in the annals of this world, have people of Earth found evidence that they existed? Back home, alternate Earths like this usually mean ... alternate versions of us, which can either be a good thing, or a very, very bad thing. I'm thinking bad, considering the state of things. I was just wondering.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ Why did Dick have to be a teenager? He might have known something as an adult. ]

Physical cosmology and quantum mechanics goes beyond my paygrade.

It'd go above mine, too, but it's something you'd need to know the basics of. That said, I'm not exactly the one in my group with those basics in my back pocket. I lead, they handle that stuff, I make sense of what it means for the next step.

Figuring out the next step is always the issue here. Not sure if you've read up on it, but the notes on the UE's research into space and Project Chimera?

I haven't looked into those, but they sound important.

I'm sending it over.

[ In about ten seconds she'll be getting this file. ]

Are these current with ... this world? This UE?

Unknown. Some points may be, some may not.

Maybe step number one should be figuring out what's still accurate.

Right. We've never had much intel to work with, but it's something to look into.

Yeah, I'd almost like for it to be accurate, but I've seen time travel change things within ... minutes before.

Then the question is: how do you stay on top of information that you're altering all the time?

Trial and error, have very good files of the reflections of the changes, ensure there aren't too many dramatic changes at once. I'm guessing.

But in practice, you watch your friends disappear and hope you can reverse it.

It's as traumatic as it sounds.

[ Her response is delayed by several minutes, almost as if she walked away from the conversation.

That's not the case at all; Kate sits with the tablet in her lap, staring long at the keypads. ]

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

[If Kate were someone else, she might worry about the time, but in practice, she's the type of person to send a response through her tablet and focus on someone or something else in the mean time, passing that amount of time quickly. She's both good at being productive and good at killing awkward spans of time.

Mostly.

Clint kind of kills her awesome skill at that on a regular basis.]

Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be what's happening here. It's suggested that we're exceptions, but I think it's more that they've got an algorithm that makes ripples kind of happen differently. Not sure how. I'll check in with this AI to see.

But I'm not exactly going to convince them to change it up.

[ There's a reason she locked the conversation between them; Stanley doesn't need to see this. Nobody else needs to be privy to what she needs to tell Kate. ]

There was a child who disappeared a month back. An Exile.

[She grasps that, too. At least to some degree, though definitely not the specificity of the reasoning. This is something meant to be private.]

Is that the only time?

Probably not. The more we accomplish, the more the Exiles change. It's possible we might be erasing them, which hasn't sat well recently with others.

So for all we know, a mother could lose her child in an instant without knowing why. That sort of thing. An extremely depressing example, but one I'm not sure we're considering.

We managed to reverse it for my friends when that happened, but it was still ... bad.

How bad?

Buckle in for your most superhero-esque story you'll ever hear. [She only phrases it that way to make it lighter. But she knows it fails—the effort is lost on her, anyway.]

My group came together because the Avengers disbanded. I told you that. But the more complicated version was that a time traveler came to the past to try and escape his past. When he got there, he looked up a group of potential Avengers. That led to my friends Billy, Teddy, and Eli. They once crashed my sister's wedding, and after Eli tried to think he was better than me, I ended up helping them.

I took off to join them. I was determined. Skipping ahead ...

Said time traveler, Nate, turned out to be the teenage version of one of the Avengers' worst enemies. He wanted to skip going home, and when he did, it dramatically changed the course of events in the timeline for the Avengers. The trick was to force him to go back home anyway. To follow that path.

He came back one day. And ... I'm skipping details again, he turned out to be on that path. It was subtle at first, but something happened. [Her best friend died. And he killed the person trying to reason with him. Things she's not going to mention.] And he left. His last words were pretty super villain-y.

So, bad. One bad thing. Then another bad thing.

Very little good.

Also a whole lot of terrible inevitability.

I'm sorry.

[ It makes her wonder, however. ]

Wonder if some can really escape fate.

[That makes her think of Clint, of the life he used to live.

It also makes her think of Tommy, of Eli, of Noh-Varr.]

I'd prefer to think so. I'd like to think if Nate stuck around, he'd have done so, too, but it'd be at the cost of everything. Kind of like being thrown to his own wolves. His own demons.

Nathan Summers?

[ Or a different Nate? ]

Richards. No one you'd know. I assume, anyway.

Not familiar, you're right. Nathan Summers is familiar with time travel. I'm not sure where or when he's from, but he's a veteran.

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