Inside Out, Upside Down [IC]

[Dr Archeville]

"I think I've seen this movie," the not-as-revolting revenant remarked when seeing the Overlook Hotel-esque corridor. "Watch out fer elevators."

He knelt down and patted the invisible dog beside him, "ya get her scent from that amulet shard, boy? Think ya can find her?"

A confused whimper sounded.

"Hrm, if'n yer spooked'a this place, it must be bad. Don' you worry, boy, we'll all get outta here, safe 'n' sound. Now, ya got her scent? Think ya can track her?"

The spirit dog began to sniff about.

[angrydurf]

Ouroboros watched as Dead Head and his faithful mutt began the search, "For the time being I think Mutt is our best option." he said with a nod to the invisible spirit creature. He looked back to Avenger, "We will find them. The denizens of this place clearly stand against us but they must obey their rules." he said sagely, "They can interfere but not directly oppose us. If Mutt can not find the way there are other methods." his face turned slightly at that as they were risky but may yet be necessary.

[Dr Archeville]

Mutt sniffed here and there, as if he was finding and losing the trail over and over again. As if what was beyond the doors was changing.

Dead Head followed, looking over the numbers on the doors. "20090807... 20060606... 20000101... 19991231-... waitasec... ," He stopped, spun around and looked at the doors again, then back to the group. "They's all dates! See: this one ain't 'one nine nine one two three one', it's 'nineteen hun'red an' ninety-nine, twelve, thirty-one'. Year, month, day. An' it looks like all the ones down this hall is from before lil' Jack were born."

An' tat one's a date I know well, 'cuz that's the date I first died.

His eyes went wide, and he looked back and forth between Avenger and Phantom, "ya don't think they gone ta before you two got together an' prevent you two from hookin' up, do ya?"

[Electra]

"That's impossible," Wander said, holding her bat defensively as she watched the hallway behind them for ambushes. "Time travel doesn't work that way. Even if you travel in time and change things, you just create a new alternate reality. The reality as it happens is still there. I asked Psyche about it, and she would understand time travel theory if anybody does. Just changing the past shouldn't have made Baby JJ disappear." She sounded like she wished she could be totally certain of that.

[angrydurf]

Ouroboros paused gazing at the doors in mild concern, "Yes ..." he murmured in response to Dead Head as he examined the doors. "Most unusual." he was stirred from his musings by Erins explanation, "Well that is true for the general case." he agreed as he continued to examine the doors curiously but careful not to touch any of them, "There can however be only one Phantom." he explained, "There are other Taylor Chuns to be sure but any event directly related to Phantom can change and cease to be." he unconsciously flexed his hand with the missing pinkie. He turned to the group then, "That however is not the case with my youthful self." he said with surety, "At least not yet. You all remember him and of course the pictures had not faded." he said quite pleased, "Of course there are those who say there are always remnants left behind..." he shrugged as if discarding the idea, "Regardless if they are so willing to bend the rules they could have just blocked our entry my pull is not so great to overcome denial if issued." he explained, "So the question is why have we been brought here? Or are we merely following in the footsteps, and why would she have been brought here?"

He spoke a few words of quiet latin his eyes glowing with blue green light as he gazed from those gathered to the doors each in turn.

[Avenger Assembled]

"That's the one," said Jack, pointing to the door for the first week of August 2009. "Taylor and I didn't expect to fall in love," he confessed. "I asked her out...because I was lonely, and because it seemed like she had no one she could really talk to." And because her costume showed off those god-given gams. "If something had interfered back then, we'd have just drifted apart the way I have with most of the rest of the Knights now that the team is dead. That's the one. That's the door. Everyone, watch yourselves." And with that, he threw the door open wide!

[alderwitch]

For those who could perceive the magic of it, the moment that Jack's hand closed on the knob, the time-magic surrounding the door sank into place. The portal in the door frame opened onto the late night skyscape of Freedom City in a balmy June. Beyond the door stop, there was a sharp drop as the door opened in mid air, hanging even but outside the panoramic windows of pyramid plaza. Inside the dark building, they could see the dark figure of a man talking on his phone alone in the empty room. It was very much like looking right into Jack's memory, except, of course, they were outside Jack's head.

This vantage point did allow them to see shadows that twisted along the windows of the Plaza, dark figures comprised of shadows and shot through with flashes of light. Everyone here, save Erin, would be familiar with the Void-scape inside Phantom's cloak to recognize the ghosts as being formed from such.

JJ would experience another of that twisting sensation, as if his essence was being pulled from him. His left hand vanishing like his pinky had earlier.

When the heroes crossed into that world, they too would find themselves ghostly, like the figures.

Jack - the Jack of this moment in time - appeared oblivious as he talked on his cell phone.

[Electra]

Erin took a moment to get used to the feeling of flying, but her simulator training had been thorough enough to even include scenarios where she was weightless. Once she had her bearings, she assessed the scene, then looked to Ouroboros to make sure that these were things that needed to be attacked. They sure looked like they did, but sometimes she got that wrong when magic was involved. When he nodded, though, she lost no time in rocketing forward. With quick, sharp movements of her bat, she dispatched ghosts left and right, finally feeling as though she were actually doing something to help JJ.

[alderwitch]

They were almost too easy to dispatch, puffing into nothingness as the bat whirled through them and vanishing with the sort of pop of pressure changing as they left. JJ would be able to understand that sensation as the little rifts closing as what ever power that was animating them dispersed. Clearly the creatures had some malevolent intent but each was a connection to that vanishing realm of the Void and JJ felt his innate connection ripping a little further with the loss of each scrap of Void stuffs.

[Avenger Assembled]

For his part, Avenger showed no hesitation when it came to killing the monsters that had taken his wife away from him. If he was slower than Erin, it was perhaps only because he drew out the fights with the ghosts long enough to see them suffer and hear them shriek before dispatching them. When there was one left, he slammed it into the wall, holding it by the throat with a red fury in his eyes. "Listen to me. I want you to send a message to the power that dispatched you. God you may be; Modrossus you may be. But if you take my wife and son from me, I will hunt you to the ends of the Earth and beyond the fabric of reality and I will rend your flesh from your bones and taste your blood in my mouth for I am Jack Faretti, wife of Taylor Chun, scion of the line of Dracula, and you are nothing but a flickering ghost hiding from a world that's passed you by" He released the ghost. "Now. CRAWL HOME."

[alderwitch]

The figure shuddered and shrieked in Jack's iron grip but it wasn't going anywhere. Beyond his rage, the younger version of himself was closing his phone with a smile and turning to greet an equally younger version of Taylor as she stepped out, looking shy and awkward in her pantsuit. Both figures appeared oblivious to the phantom battle raging outside the windows. What Mutt would notice, was that the scent of Taylor was present as was the power of her magic and JJ would see that while the Void did not exist for him, it still existed for this version of Taylor as she stepped out of it without a problem and into the Earth Prime of the past.

When Jack released the figure, it cringed against the window and then went slinking towards the location that Taylor had just teleported into, behind the elevator shaft where there was a faint ripple in space. A place where past and present touched. The Void construct slunk along the floor and oozed back towards that ripple, heading home just as it had been ordered to do.

[Dr Archeville]

"We jes' gonna sit 'round an' twiddle?," Dead Head exclaimed as he headed towards the ripple. "we's followin' it to the one what sent it, right?"

Mutt barked at the ripple, fading into view as he did.

The revenant stopped before hitting the anomaly, and turned back to the others. "Uhh... we is followin' it... right?"

Man, this whole place makes my head hurt!

[angrydurf]

"Yes, Make haste." Ouroboros intoned solemnly and flew towards the ripple himself. "I should have seen it sooner." he lamented to his comrades trying to exert himself to hold the rippling remains of Phantoms portal open for them all.

"Even Heshem couldn't truly seal the void." he explained quickly, "Particularly from me as I am part of it." he added with a rueful look to his slowly vanishing limb. He drew his focus tighter hoping to buy them time, "But that I get from my mother, she is one with the void and the eye is her connection." he expounded as if this all should be obvious, "When she broke it the Void didn't draw back it began to fade. Some connections are stronger than other though and time is not so mutable as that. So the void did exist therefore we can go there through here." he explained excitedly, "That's why the dimension of doors became temporal." He said with a shake of his head kicking himself for not putting it together sooner. "Now Hurry I don't know how much longer I can hold this."

[Avenger Assembled]

Avenger looked at the others and spoke frankly. "To raise you hands in defiance of a god is no small thing. I damned myself years before I met any of you, but you all have the option now to go home and live your lives safely. What we're facing here in rescuing Taylor isn't just defeat. It's death itself. A death beyond any others we've faced before...including you, Burt," he added with a frank look at Dead Head. He squeezed his hands into fists and added, "As for myself, I died years ago." With a feral growl, he launched himself between dimensions, propelled into mortal danger by thoughts of Taylor, Jack Jr., and everything he'd given up and gained up to that moment. This was a time for prioritizing, away from a predator's lusts to a human's love. What was his own death, anyway, when faced with the loss of so much?

[Dr Archeville]

Dead Head was about to say something when Avenger went on about facing Death -- "Death? I've had tea with Her plenty'a times," "Man, we've already faced a whole world'a vampires, what could be worse?," "Death? Must be Tuesday," and other irreverencies -- but when he looked right at him and called him by name, that shut him up. His antics were meant to lighten up others in the face of Finality, to dispel fears of Death, but sometimes humor was not an appropriate defense.

Well, maybe one, tiny jest.

"Hey, I was pushin' daisies 'fore you was, sonny!," he called out as he ran into the rift, "an' if ya think I'm lettin' you face Final Death alone, ya got another thing comin'!"

[alderwitch]

Each of them tumbled weightless through the Void before landing on soft turf. For JJ, the sensation of being whole was almost overwhelming as the expanding emptiness inside him filled with that connection to his native dimension not unlike a dislocated limb snapping into place. They were floating in a place that JJ might remember although the others less so. It was the soft grassy asteroid floating free in the Void that had been where he vanished too when threatened since infancy. Not much larger than the grounds outside the manor itself and covered with a soft grass that defied biology since there was no sun here and the only water was in a small cool pond in one corner.

"Jack!" Taylor called, getting up quickly to her feet and gathering her infant son into her arms, "JJ! Over here!"

She leaned towards them but took no steps forward, as if rooted in place.

[angrydurf]

"Death is not so much the worry..." Ouroboros mumbled but from the looks of things he was going to be unmade if he stayed so he too propelled himself through the breach.

As he gained his footing within the void the he fixed a calculating stare on his mother and younger self before his eyes went wide as he looked beyond them. "That is not good." he murmured quietly as he moved towards Taylor ushering the others along. He offered a weak smile to his mother, "I dare say she underestimated your temper." he said lightly as he examined the turf beneath their feet quizzically.

[Electra]

Erin wasn't so sure about Jack's assertion that anyone who wanted to could go back now, but in any case, she'd already come this far and death held few terrors for her. She'd rather stay alive though, all things considered. She landed on her feet after the long fall, and was immensely relieved to see little JJ, unharmed and with his mother. It was plain, though, that the peril was not yet over. Using her staff to test the ground, Erin tried to pick her way over to where Taylor and JJ were stuck.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Taylor!" Avenger literally didn't touch the ground as he flew to her side, his body exploding into mist, then recoalescing as he embraced her and the baby. "" he promised her in a whisper of an old Slavic language spoken only by mystics and vampires doing business with each other, "" And from his tone of voice as he tried to move her, or take their baby from her arms if that failed, he damn well meant every word of his rather grandiose threat.

[Dr Archeville]

Dead Head landed with a soft thud after the fall through the Void, leaving a nice corpse-shaded indentation in the ground. He picked himself right back up, shoved a few errant bones back into place, and made his way to Taylor and JJ.

Dang, 'Venger can move. Wait, why ain't she movin'? Is this place centered, anchored, 'round her? Or 'round baby JJ?

Unslinging his shovel from his back, he made a beeline towards them, keeping an eye out for any more of those shadow-creatures.

"I'm guessin' this is gonna take more'n jes' diggin' the ground out from under ya..."