The Joke's on You

Azure felt genuinely bad about falling off the wagon this time. It wasn't like the first few times she tried to quit drinking, back when the only person she had to disappoint was herself; she had Venus Ascendant as her sponsor now, and the thought of having to call up the most noble and compassionate woman on the face of the planet and admit to her that Azure had gotten so blackout fucking drunk last night that she didn't even remember the first drink ate at her soul like acid. To have to hear that maddeningly calm and sympathetic voice ask her what happened, and to have to say she didn't even know... Azure let out a sigh that was almost a sob.

She really thought she'd been making progress, too. That was the worst part. She'd joined the Liberty Squad as a reserve member--okay, technically speaking she'd been placed in the custody of the Liberty Squad as part of a plea bargain negotiated by Venus Ascendant, but she'd been genuinely useful a couple of times and it had really done a lot for her imposter syndrome to find out what a shitshow the team was whenever you spent more than five minutes with them--and she had maybe even kind of helped save the world from the Punishment Detail. And to find out that she'd apparently decided to celebrate that victory by getting blind drunk somewhere and falling asleep naked on a rooftop... it stung the pride she didn't think she had anymore.

Just when she thought she was going to sink so deeply into self-pity that the only cure might be another drink to help her forget all the other drinks she already forgot, Azure finally began to notice a few things. The first was the absence of her ankle bracelet. Not that she'd ever actually tried to remove it or anything, but Captain Tomorrow had explained at pretty great length just what kind of titanic forces it would take to even so much as scratch the advanced monitoring device the Liberty Squad was using to keep an eye on her during her probationary period. To find it simply gone, without any memory of what happened to it or how it had vanished, felt wrong in a way that an alcoholic blackout couldn't explain.

The second was the totality of her absence of memory. She'd assumed it was due to drink, because Azure had plenty of experience waking up with that kind of hole where the previous night's events had been, but usually at least a few of the more vivid details came back to her. Or the early ones, when it was just a little buzz and she'd managed to convince herself that she was fine for another shot or four. But the more she tried to think about it, the more Azure realized that she couldn't remember literally anything after she watched Imperil's lifeless body smack into the center of the Grand Concordance. The invaders from a foreign timeline had simply vanished, and then....

Oh shit. The Concordance had vanished, and the people who weren't native to the Liberty Squad's timeline had been sucked away with it. And Azure, for all that she'd made a few friends in that universe, was never truly part of it. Her memories probed gingerly at that instant when the dimensional rip collapsed, and found only a rainbow-tinged agony that defied her every effort to comprehend it. Whatever had happened, it wasn't something a human brain was supposed to experience, not even one as psionically-augmented as hers.

She wasn't in the same reality anymore. She wasn't in any timeline she knew--her own had been destroyed years ago by the Paradox King, leaving her with no native universe to return to. And any belongings she had... her clothes, her monitoring device, her wrist comlink, anything she could use to contact someone on the Liberty Squad and let them know about her dire plight... they'd all stayed back in their home dimension. She was completely on her own.

And when she looked around, she noticed the third thing. A statue almost two hundred feet tall of a man she didn't recognize, looming high over a New York City that looked like it had been rebuilt by the Beatles at the height of their psychedelic phase. "Ohhh, fuck," Azure muttered, suddenly wishing for the simplicity of an alcoholic bender.

The first thing she needed to do, she decided, was find some clothes. Azure had never really bothered much with modesty, but she'd learned the hard way that nothing made you stick out like a sore thumb quite so much as being naked when everyone else was dressed, and that went double when she looked at the murals decorating every wall and saw purple-haired people dressed in paisley bell bottoms and loose flowing shirts as if the Sixties had never ended. Or as if the Sixties had only just started here, she thought absently; Azure had no real proof that time flowed at the same rate in every universe. Maybe it was always 1969 here, and Woodstock never ended.

She floated silently off the roof she was on and down into the alley between it and the next building over, looking in through windows in the hopes of finding an unoccupied apartment. "Oh thank god," she muttered, glancing in on a bedroom with a mess of clothing scattered all over the floor next to a stained mattress and a bong roughly half Azure's height. She pressed her hand against the pane of glass and used her tactile telekinesis to relax the rigid molecular structure until it tore like plastic wrap.

Once she was inside, Azure winced to discover that she'd somehow found the home of the single most waifish individual in the whole of New York. The only way to make the outfit appear even remotely as if it fit was to undo some of the weave of the fabric with her powers, which made the shirt and pants she chose appear more than a little translucent. But Azure solved that by putting on a couple of layers, and with a few minutes of determined effort she was able to dress herself and leave the same way she came. She even managed to smooth the glass into something approximating its original shape.

With her immediate issues of concealment resolved, Azure drifted gently down to the ground and racked her brains for the identity of any superheroes who'd been active since the 1960s. The Liberty Squad wasn't around back then, and although she thought there might have been a predecessor group of some sort, she didn't know anything about them. Doc Frontier was still a graduate student, the Rescuer wouldn't even find the Parallax Key for another couple decades, and Eris wasn't even a gleam in her mother's eye yet in this reality. Even Venus Ascendant--

Azure rounded the corner, attempting to blend in with the crowd, only to notice just a little too late that the murals hadn't been fanciful in their depictions. Every person, each and every last person on the street around her had bright purple hair and skin that was paler than pale. They all looked at her with wide staring eyes and dilated pupils, their smiles widening until they stretched their faces into painfully contorted grins. And then, as one, they all began to laugh.

It wasn't a pleasant sound. It was something like a scream broken into fragments, a wild and unearthly cackle that rebounded and resounded off of every building until Azure wanted to clutch her hands to her ears to block it out. She knew what it was instantly, even if she'd only seen it in a video in the files of the Liberty Squad the day before the worst nightmare she ever had. All these people--a whole city block's worth, maybe a whole city's worth, maybe even a whole world's worth--they'd all been dosed with a complex psychedelic drug that induced hallucinations, suggestibility, and mutagenic physical side effects. It built up in the brain with repeated exposure, causing permanent psychotropic alterations. Not that Azure wanted to be ableist about mental health or anything, god knew she didn't have a lot of room to talk, but... but there was no other way to put it. It drove people mad.

This wasn't a world where the Sixties never ended. This was a world where everyone in New York was high on Mary Pranxter's Electric Kool-Aid. And they all knew immediately that she was the only one in town not in on their private joke.

All that flashed through her head in less than a fraction of a second before she shot straight up, flinging herself into the air with her tactile telekinesis faster than she ever thought possible before hurling her own body as far away from New York as she could get. If this was a parallel universe where Mary Pranxter had successfully warped an entire city into following along with her twisted sensibilities, then it only stood to reason that any superheroes that had counterparts here had also fallen into her thrall. And with that laughter ringing out like an alarm bell throughout downtown Manhattan, it was only a matter of time before somebody's super-senses picked it up. Because from what Azure remembered from the Liberty Squad's files, Priority One for Mary Pranxter was always--

"Hi sweetie!" Adventure Girl called out, swooping up behind Azure and keeping pace with her with almost ludicrous ease. "Let me guess. Peer pressure, right? Someone gave you a pill, told you it would make you boring and square, and you didn't feel comfortable saying no to saying no?" She sounded relatively lucid, but Azure knew that didn't mean much; Mary sounded lucid too, in her own warped way. Sufficient doses of Electric Kool-Aid created a kind of alternative sanity somewhere on the far shores of madness, a sanity at right angles to the rest of the world but one that functioned in its own weird way. At least except for the part about cheerfully treating the entire human race as nothing more than a bunch of lab rats for improvements to the formula.

Oh, shit, that statue was Timothy Leary, wasn't it? Azure always forgot he wasn't the inventor of the Learyware party in any other reality.

She realized that reason probably wasn't going to do much good here, not when Adventure Girl's hair was already a deep shade of royal purple, but she also knew she wasn't going to fare any better in a straight-up fight, either. Adventure Girl had only two weaknesses, xenonite and magic, and Azure didn't know how to get either of those things. Talking was her best bet. "I know this is going to sound weird," she said rapidly, holding up her hands in a placating gesture, "but I'm really not from around here. I kind of stumbled into this universe, and I--"

Adventure Girl snorted. "I know, babe," she said, her dilated pupils glowing with unearthly energy. "I can see your molecules vibrating from here. I mean, I can see everyone's molecules vibrating, all the time, because the master frequency of reality is the opening chord of 'Purple Haze' and Jimi Hendrix really understood the nature of quantum dynamics because he was one of the secret masters of the universe, but yours look like they're slowed down just a little. You didn't hit this world on purpose. You were going somewhere else and you...." She smacked her fist into her open palm, creating a minor shockwave that buffeted Azure's skin. "Bounced."

Azure let out a breath she didn't even know she was holding. "Exactly," she said, scarcely daring to think about how well the conversation was going. "I bounced into your world, and I, I mean, I'm happy to bounce right back out again, so if you could just maybe talk to your version of Doc Frontier about finding some way to reconfigure my, um, vibrations or whatever, so I wound up on Earth... um, shit, it's the one that has Brexit and Candy Cane Oreos and nine Fast and Furious movies, I don't know the number...." She knew she was babbling, but she didn't like the way Adventure Girl was starting to look at her and she was terrified of what might happen if she stopped talking. "So I can get back home," she finished. "Adopted home. My real home is gone."

Adventure Girl flew closer, gripping Azure's wrist. Even ninety tons of tactile telekinesis couldn't exert enough pressure to shake it free. "Well, Doc Frontier's Public Narc Number One around here, for starters," she growled, steering Azure into a wide loop back toward the city. "And if we're going to all the trouble of retuning your vibes, why not make you a permanent guest here? We've got all the amenities, from free concerts in the park to all the drugs your brain can handle and then some. And if it's a home you want, I'd be happy to make you feel right at home with me and Mary. The colors you turn reality are pretty tight."

She pressed harder, pushing Azure toward a factory that belched out thick clouds of purple smoke. "Oh, I know, you're not down with our vision yet, but we can change all that. You might think whatever funky powers you have will keep the drugs out of your system, but you still need to breathe sooner or later. If I hold you in one of the Hotboxes long enough, you'll tune in, turn on, and drop deep for Mary. Then we can really get you good and fixed up. Trust me, you're going to love what she's got cooked up for you. In fact...." She leaned in, planting a kiss on Azure's lips that was as erotic as it was uncomfortable. "It's going to blow your mind."

Azure struggled, but she might as well have been a newborn puppy arguing with its mother; the energies of the Parallax Key remained among the most powerful in any existence, and Adventure Girl's body radiated with them. Azure was helpless to stop the purple-haired woman from flying her straight into a small room that sealed shut with an ominous clang and began to flood with a thick, purple gas. "Not long now, babe," the smiling villain said, cheerful menace dripping from every syllable. "Then you'll understand. You'll want everything we're giving you, I promise."

Azure believed her. She could taste the drug on her tongue, feel her senses beginning to frizz out around the edges of her perception despite her best efforts to telekinetically steer the individual molecules of chemical ecstasy away from the receptors in her brain, and it was expanding her consciousness in ways she'd never thought possible. She saw rainbows in the corner of her vision, rainbows that reminded her of the journey that brought her down the yellow brick road to this reality, and with every new breath she found herself experiencing that memory in more detail. She could feel her body vibrating now, every quark dancing to an unheard rhythm, and she smiled blissfully at the ways that the drugs bounced and bopped to their own syncopated beat as they interacted with her atoms. It was amazing stuff, and all Azure wanted to do was take lungful after lungful and surrender to the transcendent high....

And with a last burst of lucidity, she realized exactly how to get away. She used her telekinesis on a quantum level, interacting with her own body at a scale that she'd never really thought about before and slowing her atomic vibrations down that tiny microscopic fraction of a nothing to retune them out of this universe. She had no idea what she was doing--there was some inchoate intuition that guided her, some frequency that felt natural to her even though she couldn't possibly say why or how--but the effect was immediate and intense.

The drugs ceased to exist in the same universe she did. So did Adventure Girl. And Azure felt her mind and body descend into a rainbow scream as she plummeted out of existence again.

THE END (?)