DIRK: [ARISE]

[evenindeath]

Of all the places to wake up, 'dumpster' had not actually been in Dirk's top thirty list. Of course, once he realized that's where he was he considered that had been an error in judgement on his part. It was where he belonged and thus should have been number one on his list.

"HAL?" he said, his voice a raw and rough croaking to his own ears, but his sunglasses skewed on his face showed nothing but the sky above, a bright night lit by a moon and too much light pollution from the city around him for any stars. He brought an aching arm up to right his sunglasses and give them a tap, the the bare bones of his Heads Up Display on them became visible, flickering in and out of focus. "HAL?" he asked again, but there was no answer. It said he was offline with no signal available.


The past - however long it was came back to him in flits and flashes, what lead them here. Him here, anyway. Finding our that what his friends went through was a beta run for the whole thing, that it had already failed once and they were an attempt to restart under more favorable circumstances. That their game was a null game too in different ways but unfortunately just enough overlap that the plan to make a working game between the two of them wasn't going to work. What was there left to try, a third attempt where they would likely once more end up with more problems and no solutions?

Dirk had been careful who he proposed the plan to and how he said it. Jake was the driven type, charismatic - it didn't matter he couldn't figure out how to pull it off himself, if he suggested it people would be more likely to listen, to try.

"Do you think there's a way to get out of the game entirely?" Dirk had asked Jake in what passed for late one night on a meteor where they'd taken refuge, time and day having no meaning.

The question had been posed seemingly carelessly, but it had stuck in Jake's mind like Dirk knew it would. Soon enough they were all working together on 'Jake's' new plan to try and find a universe beyond the games entirely.

There was no guarantee it would work. No guarantee they'd go to the same place, or even... anywhere.

But what other option did they have?


And now Dirk was here, in a dumpster.

It smelled terrible in a weirdly unfamiliar way to him. It was the kind of terrible that came from cramped living conditions of too many people in one place, and he had literally never experienced that before. When he managed to push himself up and crawl out of it (and get all the ... leavings... off of himself) just looking to the other end of the alleyway where cars went back and forth gave him pause as he thought that every single one of those had at least one person in it. Watching for just a couple minutes, more people walked by without a glance in his direction than he'd ever seen in one place in his whole life.

Wherever they'd landed, it wasn't his home. Not when he knew it.

Distracted by that utter culture shock, he managed to miss the sound of someone coming the other direction until they spoke.

"Hand over your money - anything you have on you," the gravely voice ordered, and Dirk turned slowly to see the barrel of a gun staring him down, and attached to it a man that could either be twice his age or a little younger with a hard life behind him. Dirk was guessing the second was more likely.

"Are you fucking deaf? Hand. Over. Your. Cash. Fucker!" the man repeated when Dirk just continued to stare at him.

Oh, this? He'd seen this in plenty of movies. He knew how to handle this.

"Yeah, no," Dirk said, with a careless flick of his wrist his clothing glitched and blurred into a different but similar set, his pointed sunglasses doing the same to be a fully face covering gas mask. The people who fought crime always wore masks in those stories, right? From the same place his new clothing came from he drew his katana.

He was used to enemies that put up a fight to someone on his level, and maybe would be over-estimating this guy's abilities.

Comments

[lazarusinred]

Oh great an alien, or worse. "That kind of 'not from around here.' I don't know what kind of shit planet you're from, but Earth is pretty big. Gotham, and it's cloudy personality, are just a tiny part of it." Not that it felt tiny to Jason. It felt inescapable.

As he spoke he matched the stranger's lean toward possible violence. It was too familiar to miss. "So what, out for a joy ride of asskicking?" His mask hid his own grin as he added, "Should I be worried?"

[evenindeath]

Dirk wondered mildly if he was supposed to keep everything a secret. Time travel wasn't his expertise, though he'd seen plenty of movies on it. Not knowing the date, this timeline could even be miles off from the one that lead to the future he lived in, too. He didn't know how to talk to someone who wasn't already 'in the know'.

No, that wasn't exactly true. Dirk was well versed in teasing out information rather than giving it directly. In times of stress, it was easier to fall back on old habits, too.

"Beat me in a fight and I'll tell you, how about that?" he offered. If he won, hopefully whatever was left he could hook up to one of his devices and pull information from.

[lazarusinred]

When fighting an unknown opponent it was important to only show them as much as you needed to. Jason drew his pistols with a fluid motion. Fast, but not as fast as he could be. Light on his feet he fired a first volley of gunfire at his from out of town opponent.

Don't think. Make the move.

"Yeah I can do that."

[evenindeath]

Dirk had various forms of armor stashed away ready to be called upon just as your bog standard desire to be prepared to an almost paranoid level, of course. In every time he sparred with Jake, though, Dirk had preferred speed to armor for keeping himself from being shot full of holes.

Speed he had in spades, no pun intended.

He became a blur of movement, dodging the first few shots and parrying the next several with lightning fast swings of his sword, coming in low and fast to swing first at Jason's legs. Immobilization before disarming.

[lazarusinred]

He knew it. He fucking knew it. The bastard could parry bullets. All these sword assholes could. Which he did realize was hypocritical of him.

Just jumping over a low sword sweep with an opponent this fast would be a mistake. Once you were in the air it did not matter how fast you were. Unless you could fly. Which Jason could not. He waited until his opponent committed to the strike before executing an acrobatic flip over the blade, finally demonstrating his own speed.

"Not much of a talker, huh?"

Finishing the flip on his opponent's sword arm side, Jason used his momentum in a downward strike. Aiming the butt of his pistol at the back of his opponent's head.

"That's okay. I'm used to doing the smart remarks."

[evenindeath]

Of course the anime looking motherfucker could parry bullets with a sword. Of course he could. He could also sing the Friendship Is Magic theme song from memory.

It was a smart move, and behind his mask Dirk grinned. Definitely a better fight to be had here. He twisted out the the way to avoid the strike from the guns but didn't quite manage to avoid it fully, sharp edge of the magazine catching him on the back of his shoulder hard in a way that promised a vibrant bruise later if it didn't manage to actually break the skin.

He rolled away, tossed his sword from one hand to the other so he could give his shoulder an experimental roll and feel the pain blossom through it. Yeah, he'd need a bit before it could be his primary sword arm again.

"You haven't paid for that show yet, sweetheart," he said, the smile in his voice audible. He'd just been focused on the fight, but yeah - this guy was the type to get his information through talking to his opponents while they battled, wasn't he? "Gotta win, first."

He was programmed well, Dirk wondered who made him. He really hoped he didn't have to completely destroy him. Oh well, diving in with another attack, attempting to disarm this time.

Literally.

[lazarusinred]

Ambidextrous too. This guy was the whole package. If the package you wanted was also trying to hack your limbs off.

Don't think.

The sword came in a sharp arc and Jason caught it with the edge of one of the pistols. He did not stop the momentum of the strike, but let it move forward, along his forearm. A bright, unexpected line of pain lit up his arm. The blade had managed to strike home at least a little bit. His hand spasmed causing him to drop the pistol, but it did not matter.

He pushed forward, bringing him masked face to masked face. And his other pistol into his opponent's stomach. He could feel the blood flowing down his arm and his heart in his chest. "Are you going to make me pull this trigger... sweetheart?"

[evenindeath]

It was a reckless move, letting Dirk's blade catch his arm like that. It was incredibly sharp - as sharp as all those anime loving weirdness liked to pretend katanas really were, because it wasn't one made from human hands but a machine that ran on what do you desire. It was the kind of thing someone with skin to save wouldn't do, which made it all the more shocking for Dirk to see the line of bright red blossom and seep from where his blade had come in contact.

Whether or not he could have dodged back before Jason got in close didn't matter - he was distracted by the sight of the blood, too slow to slide away before he was caught between this person and the brick of the wall behind him, familiar press of the barrel of a gun as intimate as a lover's touch through the thin threadbare fabric of his shirt.

So close, his eyes were barely visible through the tint of the lenses of his mask, the way they widened to see the blood, drawn to stare at the injury before back up to Jason's mask.

"You're human?" Dirk asked, shocked.

[lazarusinred]

It was impossible to stop the memory of screaming back to life. Of forever being changed. Different. Set apart from everyone else in a way Jason could never articulate. Whatever expression he wore was hidden by his mask and from himself as he struggled to understand how he felt.

"Yeah I'm human," Jason said, indignant.

[evenindeath]

Don't take that indignant tone with him. With another flick of his wrist his sword was gone, back into the invisible between space that the items stored in his sylladex occupied.

"I thought you were a fucking robot," Dirk points out, matching the indignant tone for indignant tone. It was a reasonable assumption for him to have made, asshole. Absolutely anyone in his unique set of circumstances would have made it!

[lazarusinred]

Neat disappearing sword trick. Some kind of dimensional tech? Or magic. Damn it, it was probably magic. Magic was always drawn to magic and magic was in Jason's bones.

"Robot? Why would you-?" Jason paused in the middle of his question and holstered his pistol in a fluid motion. He pressed the release on his helmet and slipped it off his head. All without giving Dirk an inch of breathing room. "See? Very fucking human."

[evenindeath]

Dirk would call it tech but… yeah it was basically magic.

He felt oddly bereft when Jason put the gun away, acutely aware of the places it had been pressed against him a moment before in a way that he hadn't been when he thought Jason was just a robot.

Fucking human, yeah. Dirk drew a breath, didn't take his own helmet off right away so he could make sure his face wasn't doing something weird first before he reached up to loosen the snaps on his own mask, taking it off to return Jason's stare for stare, bright honey-orange eyes practiced at looking indifferent even if he spent most of his life with nobody to look indifferent to.

Without the helmet, the paler scar tissue around his neck was visible, circling it fully, an incongruently blank spot amid skin otherwise peppered with freckles.

"Well I stand corrected then fellow human. Fuck, honest mistake."

[lazarusinred]

There was the unacknowledged fact that an ordinary human would have not preformed like either of them. Jason's eyes flicked over Dirk's features compiling his mental impressions. Orange eyes were not the strangest thing Jason had seen in a person of, shall we say, enhanced abilities.

Dirk's stare was indifferent, but Jason's was challenging. It was what he knew best.

"So, fellow human, what should I call you and should I be worried about you?"

[evenindeath]

That challenge in Jason's stare made Dirk want to draw his sword again, to start the fight back up - to do anything with the way it made his heart pound and the adrenaline come flooding in again.

He said he'd tell his story if this guy won, so sure.

"Dirk Strider," he said. He didn't bother to put his hand out for a shake, but they were still standing six inches apart anyway. "I didn't come here to cause trouble."

The corpse a few feet behind Jason came to his mind again and there was the barest cringing expression for a moment.

"... that was an accident? They tried to mug me. I thought they'd be tougher."

But he wasn’t particularly remorseful either.

"... what about you? You this world's Guardian? Have a name?"

[lazarusinred]

Jason noted the tension that Dirk still held and and told himself that was why his heart was still racing away. The easiest of answers was always, ready for a fight.

"The guardian of this world?" he asked with a short laugh. The laugh faded to a mild smile that did not change his eyes. "Nah, that would probably fall to one of the League assholes, and they'd have to fight about who got the title. Me? I just do what's right, especially when it isn't pretty. I'm called Red Hood, but you, you can call me Jason."

[evenindeath]

Jason, five letters such a damn normal name. Hadn't heard one of those in a while. Red Hood - rH - he ran through his memory quickly but that didn't fit any naming conventions he was familiar with either.

Had they done it? Really gotten out?

Another dozen questions flitted through Dirk's mind before being dismissed, they gave too much away. If he asked about his friends and they were still undiscovered it revealed their possible existence, he'd need to confirm if they were found first some other way.

If they were even here. Shit - what if they hadn't even ended up in the same reality? It would explain why he couldn't get a hold of anyone. Conversation across realities wasn't exactly easy.

"So, 'Gotham'," Dirk pronounced the city name like it was a foreign word he was mimicking a native speaker saying, in spite of his accent being all the Hollywood Lack Of Accent you got on any American television program. "Where exactly is that - and when is it?"

Explaining anything about himself needed some context first to figure out what to say.

[lazarusinred]

Time, space, and dimension traveling was remarkably familiar to Jason. Without that context the questions Dirk was asking would seem more suspicious. Still suspicious. Even so, some part of him wanted to believe that Dirk was not here to cause trouble. He could not let himself listen to that.

"Your timeline didn't have a Gotham? Lucky. United States of America?" Jason caught some recognition there and continued. "East coast-ish. About six hundred miles west of Metropolis. Forty and change east of Blüdhaven. Last I checked we were still in the 2020s."

Sometimes some fucker started messing with time again and your memory of what year it was and the year everyone else thought it was did not match up.

[evenindeath]

Absolutely none of those place names sounded familiar. The year - way off for everyone. If he was remembering correctly, it had been 2011 for Jake and when things started to go Wrong for Earth. Wrong enough to leave only two humans left alive by the time Dirk and Roxy entered the game in 2425.

He looked around, but there were indeed no drones blocking out the sky, just light pollution. He switched his gasmask out for his sunglasses - a glitched blur between being one thing and the next, like reality realized it had made a mistake and was correcting itself. Sliding the glasses back on, he still couldn't get the HUD to turn back on. He was going to actually have to find a place to get his tools out and do some repairs.

"What about - Austin, Texas? Rainbow Falls, New York?" He asked, voice carefully neutral, even indifferent still. Letting yourself show emotions meant you Lost, even if you didn't know what you were playing.

Shit was he on an earth so different aside from humans and English it was completely different?

[lazarusinred]

More interesting magic tricks, and more mundane tricks. Anything that obscured the eyes was a method of hiding the kind of tells you could not consciously control. These sunglasses were so fucking fancy he had no doubt they were more than just colored glass. Dirk might not realize it yet, but he would not stand out much in Gotham.

A list of names usually meant something to the asker. At least one of those had to be important to Dirk. However, it did not hurt Jason's position to answer honestly.

"Never heard of Rainbow Falls, but doesn't mean it's not out there. Austin, Texas, yeah we have those. State of New York, still there."

An Earth very different, but also very much the same.

[evenindeath]

While they weren't so tinted to completely obscure everything behind them, one really had to be within six inches to track the movements of his eyes behind the dark pointed lenses.

Dirk had to wonder if this was some kind of game of chicken they had going - what the win was, what constituted losing. He tried to not think about how few humans he'd been in this close physical proximity to in … ever…

"It's up by Lake Ontario, north side of the state," Dirk said automatically. Though in his and Roxy's time the lake was long gone, the falls themselves too, everything under constant raining fire.

So, hell, maybe Gotham and Bloodhaven and all that did actually exist once upon a time for his world too and just weren't talked about in any of the media that was left. Dirk hadn't been overly concerned with the world that was beyond what directly applied to what he needed.

"... I'm from a different reality. The universe I'm from was a doomed one, and I was working with others to find a way out after we realized we couldn't recover it. Guess it worked for me, at least. Didn't figure I'd wind up on a version of my home planet's distant past," Dirk explained, unsure if Jason was going to believe him but projecting that unwavering certainty his words would be seen for the truth they were. "So if I wanted to get in contact with one of those 'Justice Assholes', is that a possibility?"

[lazarusinred]

It was a scenario that Jason had already been calculating. There was no surprise to keep from registering. If Dirk was not being honest, well the truth always had a way of making itself known.

"Doomed reality refugee, huh? I'm going to save you some trouble and tell you now that if you came here to change something, that something is not going to happen in this timeline. That's how it works apparently," Jason said in casual tones. "But yeah I could get you in touch with someone from the Justice League of Assholes."

[evenindeath]

Dirk's eyes narrowed behind the sunglasses, lips pressing together into a shadow of a sneer before he could get his own face back in order.

"Yeah - I might not be the Time player but I'm not a fucking idiot, I know how the causality of stable loops work," Dirk replied through gritted teeth. "Besides, if the apocalypse that lead to basically destruction of humanity in my world was going to happen in this one it would have started ten years ago for you."

[lazarusinred]

Jason's eyes narrowed in return, but he did not bother to try to hide it. An escalation of nonsensical anger was also something he was used to.

"I don't know what you mean by 'time player' or 'stable loops,' but when people end up here from other realities it's because they wanted to change something. It's not always about stopping an apocalypse. Whatever change you wanted? Congratulations, you have it."

[evenindeath]

"I assure you, I fucking don't," Dirk replied unable to hold back a snarl. In the vast universes of things he wanted, ending up here and now only accomplished 'don't be stuck in a dying universe with the conditional immortality that promises you'll be there to see and experience when entropy leaves nothing left'.

And even that was a maybe. This universe could be dying too, just more quietly.

"The Time Player, the- you have no idea what I'm talking about," he realized before he said much more. "... we wanted out of the game, well - out you get."

What would even work now? Hys sylladex was operating just fine, the rest he'd need to test methodically to see what the limits were. If they existed.

"... what I want," he said after a moment, that forced indifference and calm returning, covering the still simmering anger, "-Is to know if anyone else made it out too. Seeking out a world's Guardian is the most basic first quest, if that's the Justice League of Assholes, I expect anyone who showed up here would have tried to contact them."

He made it sound like little more than professional interest. He didn't even call any of them his friends.

[lazarusinred]

Please address the actual JLA as the Justice League of Assholes. The thought warmed Jason's heart.

Players, quests, guardians, game. Some understanding could be built, but Jason felt a guide book short. A guide book and a full novel series short.

"This isn't a make-a-wish world. Didn't say you would keep getting what you want. You got out. Great. I can help you with what you want now."