by The Eurostar
"Don't tell me you're leavin' me behind even this time?" shouts Beer-Drinking Lad, squeezing the can of beer in his right hand.
"Yes, I am," says Rhyme Guardian. "You are still on monitor duty. You are the one appointed to call in the reserves if problems arise. You are in charge here while we are away, Lad. The safety of the world is in your hands... and you would exchange all of this for being a fifth wheel on our expedition?" Rhyme Guardian's face is deadly serious.
"Umm... no, I didn't mean... but, Rhyme Guardian, you see... I would like to move sometimes... I am always here."
"Because you are the best suited for this role, Lad. No one else could do as excellent a job as you can!"
"Well, Rhyme Guardian... thanks." The tall and goofy meta, one hand scratching his own head, went toward the monitor room.
Rhyme Guardian sighs. "Okay, are you all ready? Let's go. Lioness, do your work."
The tall, dark-skinned metaheroine begins to whisper the arcane words of a complex spell. Slowly, the world around the eight MBLers begins to fade, like a morning mist at the rising of the sun behind the horizon, revealing a disturbing reality.
"I don't like this," whispers Disco Stave.
"Me neither," says Zed.
It was like seeing through newly cleaned glasses. You see the same, but more clearly, more crisp, with all the textures, the wrinkles, the roughness formerly smoothed over by the patina of dust over the glass.
"The colors are wrong... too muted," says Johnny.
"And the contours... all gone," observes Patrick.
"What kind of place is this?" asks Rhyme Guardian.
"It's the future, Rhymer. If you were expecting a post-holocaust world, I guess it's a big surprise," whispers Lioness.
"It's lot worse, Lorena." Rhyme Guardian wipes the dust away from one of the small windows, looking in the direction of Thunder City. "Look over there. No skyscrapers at all, only small buildings. Seems Thunder City is not the big town it was in our time." Suddenly, Rhyme Guardian turns back to face Lioness. "By the way, what day is today?"
The woman closes her eyes for an instant and then reopens them, looking straight at Dan. December 15, 2003." The woman's face is astonished. "I don't know why we landed so late. One sec -- I will try to bring us back to the precise spot!"
"Wait," orders Rhyme Guardian. "We can use this... deviation to our advantage. We can study the past of this present, so that we can go back to 2001 knowing what we have to expect."
"Excellent idea," says Zed. "What do you suggest?"
Rhyme Guardian snorts. "Let's put our civvies on. We're going to Washington."
Washington, D.C. December, 2003:
The fingers pass slowly over a name engraved in stone. "Patrick Walker. Died October 24, 1972." A thin, cold veil of water freezes the finger. Smasher retracts them, closes his hands in fists and puts them at the bottom of his jacket pockets.
As he walks away from the Vietnam Memorial, his eyes crosses Rhyme Guardian's own. "The past... is all fucked up, Rhymer. I died in Saigon!"
"Yes, we saw it. Let's go, Zed and F7 have returned from the Congressional Library. We have to hear what they've discovered."
A few minutes later, the eight MBLeaguers meet around a bench in the park, the big obelisk looming in the distance.
Johnny Monolith sits on the bench and chews a hot dog, trying to hide his rock-like skin under the turned up collar of a brown trench coat. Disco Stave sits next to him, drinking a cola. The others -- Rhyme Guardian, Agent F7, Patrick "Smasher" Walker, Zed, the Cadet -- are standing around the bench. A few yards away, beautiful in a long white coat, the Lioness looks at the steel-gray waters of the bay, her long, black hair ruffled by the wind. Sparse snowflakes begin to fall.
"It's confirmed, guys," says Agent F7. "It's not the future that has changed, it's the entire time stream. It's worse than what the words of Prometheus X could have led us to suspect."
"The past... it's completely different," explains Zed. "There were no metas in the Second World War. No Mysterymen Board Society, no All-Adventurers Squadron, no Sidekick Auxiliary Squadron. And, more recently, no Seven Senses. There were no metaheroes at all before the 1990s. The metagene was discovered only in 1996!"
"And it has caused panic across the world. Metas are feared and hated. There are discriminating laws even here in the U.S.," adds Agent F7.
"Impossible!" exclaims Steve.
"No, it's true! Even now, there is a global metahero force who claim to not have people with the metagene among their ranks." The face of Zed, as he says this, is disgusted.
"And nobody remembers the MBL?" The raucous, inhuman voice of Monolith seems out of place in the nearly deserted, peaceful park. "There is no MBL?"
"Well, that's not quite true," Lioness speaks without turning, still watching the snowflakes dying in the waters of the bay. "There is an MBL: the Metahuman Brotherhood for Liberation, brutal murderers who hide their thirst for blood behind false claims of freedom."
"How do you know, Lory?" asks Rhyme Guardian.
The witch turns back. "I went to an Internet cafe and surfed for less than an hour. This MBL is a terrorist group that has committed small robberies, killing many people, and then did a spectacular act of terrorism in Orlando, Florida, earlier this year. Easily enough, I have tracked their origin to a little band of misfits that hid for some time in a traveling circus, whose presence in cities coincided with big robberies at banks and museums. After the circus was destroyed in Mandelovia, those people created a sort of firm specialized in archaeological expeditions, called, it seems, MBL: Metahuman Business League. I discovered an old Internet site advertising the company. Then, all of a sudden, at the time of the first terrorist strike, they changed the name of the company. But their faces and powers are the same, at least for some of them."
"And you think they might be behind the damage to the time stream, Lorena?" asks the Cadet.
"I don't know. But they are the MBL. They are our counterparts in this new reality, so there must be a connection."
Rhyme Guardian nods. "It's true. It's always like this, it's like when we had to face the Dark MBL. Okay, people, let's go. Lorena, where are they based?"
"The Caribbean. The island of La Perdita. They now call themselves Vanguard."