ic Hotsy-Totsy Nazi (IC)

[trollthumper]

Cannonade had a hell of a lot he wanted to say. So much bile, so much anger, so much for this woman who treated the venom she spat like it was a private joke. But the more he heard about Ratner's life on the other side, the more that anger started to abate. She was another tool of a Nazi empire that had somehow managed to perfectly realize its brutality. She was disposable, made a perfect agent and cannon fodder by the kind of medical minds that probably exalted Mengele. He felt a poisoned sort of pity looking down at the extradimensional agent.

She still made a choice. To go along with it, to organize all of this. Like the Freedom League wouldn't have granted her asylum.

His face was stone. "Then I guess we'll have to send enough of you back, bleeding and broken, that they finally get the message."

[Electra]

Listening to Ratner made Erin's skin crawl, both with annoyance at the attitude and just from the general ickiness of everything about her. She'd actually met very few people on her two trips to Erde, and had never really gotten a chance to examine the attitudes of the people who toed the party line. It was unpleasant, to say the least. One part of the diatribe got her attention, though. "What do you mean, skin grafts?" she asked. If this wasn't actually Greta Ratner EJN1, and the Nazis of Erde were performing plastic surgery to send doppelgangers through, that could change the game once again.

[Avenger Assembled]

"I wasn't born with superpowers," explained the girl, still shooting nervous glances at Midnight and Cannonade. Fear was at war with arrogance, evidently two powerful emotions in the Nazi agent. "They're running out of super-agents, you know, now that the Reich has fallen past the Mississippi, but that's okay because they've got a lot of corpses. Ours, theirs, everyone's. I saw it once, and the have so many they can't even fit them all in the bunker anymore. They took cells from four different bodies, grafted them, and planted them inside me." She looked away. "I was the only one who lived, got the powers, and still looked like a person at the end. The others, they weren't so lucky."

[trollthumper]

That helped blunt the more disquieting elements - that the Reich, once dominant, was falling to outside forces, piece by piece. But that desperation gave way to new and exciting atrocities. Cannonade was trying to picture it all, and found it hard to keep his gorge from rising. They were subjecting their own agents to every sort of desecration in some sort of desperate plan to turn the tables. The things Ratner must have seen over there... and the things she would've done to make sure that broken empire of hers didn't fall.

"So the empire's planning on some lateral expansion," he said. "In the name of the righteousness and superiority of the white race, you guys turn tail and see if you can head next door. That's just freaking beautiful."

[Avenger Assembled]

Suddenly, unexpectedly, the young woman before them screamed. "Schiesse, just take me to jail!" she exclaimed, reaching up and tugging at her hair. "I can't take your hero eyes on me, judging me!" She looked away, balling her hands into fists. "None of you know what I grew up with. None of you can understand what it was like. To see the camps, to see the bombings, and to know what would happen if I failed my masters. I did what I had to do to survive and to protect my family. If you want to judge anyone, judge the fools who live in this paradise of a world and still listened to what I had to say. You can't corrupt the good, and you can't fool those who don't want to believe your lies already."

[Gizmo]

The persona of Midnight was one of cold retribution, unfeeling and unrelenting, impossible to sway or evade. One might have assumed that stemmed from the lack of empathy from the men behind the mask, but that wasn't the case. Trevor had inherited from his grandfather a belief in the basic goodness of humanity, that anyone had the potential to make the right choice and do the right thing, given the chance. That meant that he could appreciate the unthinkable situation Ratner had been placed in since birth.

It didn't mean he was sympathetic. That potential for good came with a responsibility and whatever the circumstances the extra-dimensional woman's decisions lay on her own head even if there was blame to be spread elsewhere as well. "Don't need to judge you," he intoned in his gravelly voice, betraying no emotion. "Already judged yourself."

[Electra]

Wander studied the miserable girl, her face cold. Too many versions of her had been placed in too many unthinkable situations for her to be particularly sympathetic to this dimensional traveler. "You still didn't answer the question," she pointed out. "How many infiltrators from Erde are there, and who are they trying to replace? If you're cooperative, we'll put you in jail here and let you stand trial for murder. It's no more than you deserve, but it's a hell of a lot better than if we send you back where you came from. We're civilized here, and nothing your world does is going to change that. Who else came over?" she demanded again.

[Avenger Assembled]

Despairing, and with no allies, ultimately not even herself, the Nazi agent finally confessed, or all she knew at any rate. She almost certainly was from Hope's native timeline, a place where Nazi rule had been consistently undermined for decades by the organization put together by Midnight in the 1940s, and had recently begun to collapse all-out now that the Midnight Resistance had technopathic biotechnology to destroy the Nazi superweapons, and now that they carried weapons like the Cobalt Ring and the Eye of Argon. But while life had grown better for those liberated, for those still trapped under the tottering American Reich that ruled roughly from the Mississipi to the Rockies, things were very bad: starvation was common as Nazi leaders hoarded all they had for themselves, leaving their subjects to die in the name of the master race, and epidemics and other disasters were common among a people too poor and hungry to rebel. Everyone expected the Reich in Berlin to attack them at any moment to prevent the further spread of the American rebellion, killing even their allies to avoid such a cancer.

"There are thirty-seven of us that I know about," she finally said, "I can tell you the names of some, jobs of others here. It's surviving Axis agents, people like me who were taken off the street, and others." She shook her head, a look of defeat on her one lovely face. "It doesn't matter anymore what you do to me."

[trollthumper]

Cannonade's hope flagged at Greta's description of just how bad things were within her little portion of Erde. Even when on the ropes, the bastards in charge were willing to starve out their own suspects if it meant they didn't have to go hungry during the long upset. The people wouldn't be able to organize and fight back of their own accord, given mass malnourishment - which would at least provide a good opening to this Midnight Resistance, if they could actually find a way to get a foot in the door. And then there was always the chance that the core of the Reich, still strong, would just let the US burn in order to protect itself.

You can't just charge in there, he told himself. You're just one guy. You don't know what they've got, or who might get hurt if you make a scene. That did little to assuage him, of course. Trying to distract himself from that nagging voice, he turned to the others on the League. "I've still got my contact at AEGIS," he said in a hushed voice. "I think he'd be happy to set up a proper prison."

[Electra]

"It's probably a good idea to call," Wander murmured in agreement. "This is bigger than we can deal with, and I'm sure other agencies are going to want to talk to her. AEGIS is as good a place as any to start." She turned back to the imprisoned Nazi. "Even in prison," she said flatly, "you'll be better off here than you would be back on Erde. Cooperate with the authorities, prove you're remorseful for the things you did, and maybe you'll even get out of prison one day." Even with the murder charge hanging over her, Ratner had a pretty good case for having committed crimes against her will. Erin wasn't sure how she felt about that, but it was better than sending anyone, even a criminal, back to certain death in another universe.

She looked over to Midnight. "We probably ought to clue in the police to what really happened at the concert, too. Somebody will need to be on top of spinning it so all the Neo-Nazis don't go even crazier."

[Avenger Assembled]

Mark Lucas's after-action report to UNISON:

So we took Ratner away, and Midnight took charge of getting the word out about what she'd been doing. Telling the police what to look for when tracking down Ratner's associates as well as those other Neo-Nazi supervillains we rounded up seems to have done the job on a local level so far. I've passed on the information we've gathered in the main body of my report so UNISON agents will be able to keep an eye out for any more infiltrators from Erde. It sounds like things are very bad over there. One way or another, I don't think they're going to be a threat for too much longer.

The strangest thing actually came well after we'd put Ratner away. I still have a contact address through the Freedom League from my days as an active hero operating out of Freedom City, even though most of it just gets routed directly to Geneva these days. I got a letter from a man named Zach Trumbull, a man I barely remembered from the concert, but who evidently remembered me pretty well. Evidently he and his wife had gotten a chance to see what real superheroes are like when we were saving them from the bad guys, and they wanted to tell me they were wrong about us. They included a little drawing of the Liberty League that their daughter made.

attached is a crayon drawing of the various members of the League, rather stylized thanks to a child's eyes: Cannonade's tremendous helmet, Edge's shiny costume, Wander's big bat, and Midnight's big red eyes, smoky body, and fangs 

We beat the bad guys, and I think maybe we won some other battles too.