Trouble Alert!

A Checkmate agent hands Lex Luthor a cell phone.

"Yes," he snaps. "Yes. Why, no ... we don't have a Checkmate armored response team available. It just got shredded."

He covers the phone and looks at the assembled Subs.

"Our secret robotics lab under Mount Rushmore is being ripped open by Sinestro," he says, deadpan. "Washington was unforgivably weak, but I've always had a soft spot for Lincoln ... putting down rebellion decisively. Both their busts are going to be gravel before long ... anything you want to do about it?"

I'm From Washington, And I'm Here to Help You

Lex Luthor is a brash, confident businessman who got elected President by promising to make America safe from supervillains. He is well known to distrust and dislike Superman.

Vina gives a measured smile to the Leader of the Free World. I don't think she's standing close enough to him to easily extend a hand.

"Mr. President, they seem to be calling me Lady Hawk. But I am new at this. I must say your Checkmate agents are very brave."

"Put tin and electricity up against superpowers? You bet they are, Lady Hawk," says Luthor. "I inherited Checkmate from Jimmy Carter -- I've upped their tech, but the guts are ALL THEIRS!"

"They haven't told me about you people, though. You've got an S symbol on ... you're not by any chance from Krypton yourself?"

Vina smiles shyly, "I guess you could say I was adopted, Mr. President."
To the others... "We'd best get this guy to a holding cell."

Wherever that would be. She has no idea so she's looking at the guys. A Tolkien nerd and not a comics one. Or, since it's real here, a superpowered one.

Chin-Su extends his hand - from where he's standing - in a simultaneous show of manners and a demonstration of his power.

Ian is gobsmacked that the actual President of the United States is approaching and addressing him and does a poor job of hiding that fact.

"D-Doesn't appear to be the real deal. I believe the Joker might have an explanation as to why one of his minions has kryptonian powers."

Quinn is mostly apolitical, and he doesn't trust politicians. He's pretty uncomfortable right now, so he just kind of hangs back and makes sure no other baddies show up. He's not at all obvious in his red costume and silver shiny shield ... but still.

"Yes, we'll interrogate the Joker," says Luthor. "For all the good it will do. There's something strangely compelling about that one's madness ... it almost starts making sense after a while."

"And if the Justice League doesn't have an appropriate holding cell for this Super-Joker, to coin a name, the Department of Extranormal Operations can certainly give it a try. We've got a few ideas percolating against the day when Superman might go rogue, or someone from the old home town with a grudge might show up ... it's happened before. And we don't always have Superman to hide behind, do we?"

"So just leave him with me, and I'll take care of it. Although, if he does break out despite all our efforts ... how do I call you? The same Justice League signal device as before?"

Book 'Im, Flasho!

JimBob stretches a hand over and tries to rip the Joker face from his shirt.

Vina flares her wings to land and slaps a mind-cuff on Zipperneck.

Quinn positions himself behind Zipperneck (not directly behind, but a couple steps back and where he can't be seen by Zip) and prepares to grab him if he makes a move to fly away or run. He'll use the spear as a choke if he can.

Ian hears Roy's call out, and positions himself between Roy and Vina in case the Kryptonite Ray does strike out. He even remembers to phase back in so that he can absorb the blast.

Zipperneck's eyes flutter open, after that massive whack he took.

During the eye-fluttering, however, Vina has put a mind-cuff on his head and JimBob has snatched the Joker face off his shirt. There's a scar there, too.

Roy shuts down the eager, evil green Kryptonite glow from his ring.

Now, Zipperneck wakes up, his recovery from even the mightiest blow truly superhuman.

His mind, however, is not apparently the hyper-organized supercomputer that Superman's is. No, not so much at all, really. He looks around, groggy and confused, and stays groggy and confused.

Vina knows the mind-cuffs will make him passive unless slapped or shouted at really hard. He can be led to wherever his destination is, but cannot follow verbal instructions.

Across the White House lawn, flanked by two Checkmate agents, comes a confident bald man in a very nice black suit.

"Lex Luthor, Mister J'Onzz," he says, nodding to Ian. "Your people don't shake hands, I'm told. I don't know your friends here, but I'm seeing an obvious theme: Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, and ... a karate maiden from anime, I believe. No, wait, fighting games. Chun ... Chin-Su. They made a movie out of it with Jean-Claude van Damme. He's surprisingly shy in person."

"So, many congratulations on apprehending this kryptonian clown show so quickly. Let me ask: is he Superman transformed somehow, or someone else who got Superman's powers? His clothing marks him as an Earthman; at least, I certainly hope no other planet has a Joker besides ours!"

Justice From Above!

Quinn watches the conversation from a distance. "So, what," he mutters to JimBob and the others, "we're just talking to him now? I'm all for settling things peacefully, but he's sort of a 'hit first, ask questions never' kind of guy. We should be ready for anything."

JimBob chuckles. "Well, we've got him monologuing. That's half the battle right there. Although Ian's providing a pretty good distraction for us right now. Who's our shapeshifter again? I feel like the likeness of Lex Luthor would be useful right about now."

"Pretty sure that was Ian . . ." Quinn turns to the others. "Anyone have kryptonite handy? That's green, right? Can you do it, Lantern?"

Roy says, "As far as I know, if it's green, I can do it!"

He concentrates, and a bright, searing, sizzling, acid-tinged green WRONGNESS begins radiating out of his ring.

Everyone exposed to it feels revulsion, as though in the presence of something that simply SHOULD NOT BE.

"Uh-oh ..."

JimBob is not a fan of wrongness, and will therefore hide behind the nearest rock or tree, stretching himself if necessary to be completely blocked from exposure.

"Can . . . can anyone hold that thing . . . until we need to use it?" Quinn stutters, crouching as low as possible behind his shield. "Or . . . I don't know . . . throw it at the . . . bad guy?"

"Huh. I guess you do have an S-thing going on there," Ian says, squinting to make out the letter from Joker's expression. He then takes a quick peek to see if Vina is still planning on swooping down and decking the villain.

"As far as who I'm going to call, I don't think 'Bad Cop' is fair. Let's just call her 'Harsh Dose of Reality Cop'. And she wears the S better than you do."

Vina shrieks down out of the air, her Hawk wings making a keening scream as she clocks Zipperneck in the jaw with her elf-gloved fist.

SMACK! Ripples of shock radiate outward in the debris of the street, and every car on both sides of the street leans away from the punch, before rocking back on its springs.

Ian feels the shockwave pass through him. If he had a cape, it wouldn't ripple, which is too bad.

Zipperneck's head turns ninety degrees, making the scar on his neck flame crimson* as he drops to the street, stunned, but not out.

Everybody gets one round to move and attack, or something else that takes about as long as move and attack. Play one verse of a song, slap together a sandwich, stack ten cups. Or, y'know, something useful; that's allowed, too.

Green Lantern calls out, "Vina, get clear! This kryptonite ray will likely affect you, too, with its terrible poignancy!"

Because let's be honest here: none of you were about to say "poignancy." It was Roy or nobody.

A Checkmate agent in kevlar and spandex (not battle armor; we saw how that went!) steps forward and scans Zipperneck with a supermarket scanner.

"Power level 700 millisupers!" he calls out. "He's not out yet!"

*It doesn't actually flame. In a superhero game, you have to distinguish between literary license and weird science, because they both sound the same.

Good Cop

Vina says, "I do?" She looks down at a very scripted gold S on a green tabard. That wasn't there before...

"Maybe I -do- have some of Superman's powers. It's...complicated. Can you tell Mr. Luthor, Mr....?"

"Rumlow. Brock Rumlow," says the guy. "I'm an agent of Checkmate. Kind of the government version of you guys? For when you aren't around. Which, I'm glad this ain't one of those times!"

"Go on. I'm good. Go take care of business."

Vina then drops him, and goes off flying to punch Mr. Zipper-head-super-guy in the kisser. Rumlow lands in Chin-Su's interlaced fingers, whose springyness is such that he doesn't fall very far at all once he hits them.

The Flash comes buzzing up. It's hard to see him because he's flickering back and forth as new ideas occur to him.

"HeyItookcareofCaptainColdthat'swhoitwasCaptainColdandthemosquitoeswerehallucinations! Whew. Just like heat can cause mirages, intense cold can warp the air layers to create hallucinations. Flash fact!"

Ian breathes a sigh of relief as Vina and Chin take care of the public servant.

"With super speed, he could have killed that guy if he wanted. I'm going to go find out what his issue is."

Ian then phases through Ray's green bubble and sets down (still phased) about 10 yards away from Zipperneck. "Sounds like you're on the clock," he says, with his hands raised and open. "Feel like telling us why you're trying to do this the hard way?"

Zipperneck raises his head, which just makes the scar more obvious.

"I gone about as far as I can in the Jokerz mob; I get any bigger, Joker and Harley are gonna get excited an' kill me like they do when you get to be one a the personal henchmen. And hey, Superman's gone, right? So I'm the baddest thing on the planet. I figure I get to be the boss, too."

"Coulda killed Joker, I guess. But where's that get me?"

He fingers the scar on his neck.

"Nobody's gonna kill me now, though. Not while I got the S."

And, indeed, the Joker face on his shirt is kind of pentagonal, with the grin distorted into the familiar S shape. Kind of. It's really a stretch. You wouldn't notice unless he'd told you.

"So how we gonna do this, flying guy?" Zipperneck wants to know. "Cause I got some demands to make. S'gonna cost Lex Luthor a lot to be my friend today ... what are you, the good cop? I gotta see who you got to be the bad cop. Cuz ... Superman. He even got killed once, he got back up. Who YOU gonna call?"

Who IS This Guy?

If the popped armor guy is within stretchy-reach, Chin-Su reaches his arms out towards him to retrieve him and bring him back to the group.

What goes up must come down. Lady Hawk flies to intercept the now non-armored hero as he plummets.

Looks like Government Armor Guy is in good hands! Chin, he got thrown so far up in the sky that you can't reach him until he's on the way down. Fortunately, if Lady Hawk can slow him down (she can) you can bring him the rest of the way. Which means she doesn't have to land, which saves time.

I'm just sayin' .... when you're fighting a guy with super-speed, saving time can be important.

Chin-Su weaves his fingers into a net to catch the fella wherever LadyHawk chooses to drop him.

Vina tells the guy she's planning to drop him into a net.

He says, "Thanks! Here I thought Mr. Luthor''s anti-Superman defenses were paranoid ... but at least we tried."

"So, are you from Krypton too? Reason I say that, the President''s got three more Superman defenses in play, so you might find your powers getting a little unreliable ... which could be way up in the air like we are now."

"Nope. These are Thanagarian wings. Mechanical. I would think they'd be fine."

She is kind of amused he did not notice the wings.

"Isn't Superman one of the good guys? Of course, that didn't look exactly like Superman."

"Yeah, I know, right?" says the guy. "But the President thinks Superman might turn evil one day, or get mind-controlled. Glad this joker isn't him."

"Well, who is he?" Vina asks.

"What, you don't know either?" says the guy. "He's just some whackjob with super-powers, that's all we know!"

"Reason I said Krypton, is you're wearing the S. But I guess that's smart, right? Keep the bad guys guessing."

The Trouble in Washington

"Whatever we do," Quinn says, "I don't think we should split up. I'm thinking we're all kind of new at this, so teaming up sounds like a good idea. So whoever votes for DC, hands up!" He raises his shield.

Vina raises a gloved hand, on which a small bird is contentedly roosting.

Chin-Su shrugs and raises his hand. Then stretches his other hand over to behind Greg and raises that one to make it look like Greg is voting, too.

Ian raises his hand to make five, er four. "Let's hope the Secret Service figures out quickly we're there to help."

Roy shouts, "Green bubble!" and encases everyone in a green bubble. Therefore, everyone looks green, because only green light can get through.

And WHOOSH! The five substitute Leaguers are surrounded by blurred ground and a brighter, but equally blurred, sky. There's no sensation of motion other than visual, which could cause motion sickness, except that the ring takes care of that.

The green bubble comes to rest in front of the Capitol building, which seems fine except for the police cars lining up in front of it. So Roy whisks the bubble over to the White House, in front of which three tanks are stacked one on top of the other.

One's upside-down.

Spheres pop out of the lawn just inside the White House fence, projecting green beams of light. They zap the tank stack, causing a guy in a leather vest and Joker t-shirt to step out from behind it. He's got remnants of white makeup on his face and a livid, angled red scar across his neck, which appears to have been accentuated by makeup.

The green illumination makes the guy look really corpse-like, even discounting the makeup.

"Beams," he says, his voice slightly grating. Apparently it's a real scar.

"Zipperneck ain't got time for beams," he says, and thin red lines of searing heat stab out of his eyes, tracking across the spheres and exploding them one by one.

A guy in black and gold powered armor leaps over an abandoned panel truck to land just next to Zipperneck. The armored guy, with an American flag on his shoulder plate, swings a chrome-steel quarterstaff which hits Zipperneck right in the side of the head, and flashes as it unloads a massive taser charge into his exposed skin.

Zipperneck seems to blur, and the guy's armor flies apart, each piece going a different direction, while the guy inside the suit pops high into the air like a flipped penny.

"You keep this up," Zipperneck says, "an' the Prez is liable to get killed. And that'd piss me off."

...And That's Who I Am and What I Can Do

"I only share Chin-Su's good looks - not so kuch in the leg-blurring, kung-fu fighting, fireball-throwing department. Just Plastic Man, to my knowledge. Speaking of!" Chin-Su suddenly remembers what he saw in the base. "Is he around here? The real him? The hero-tracker said he was on a mission in this city."

"Oh, uh, I'm Quinn. Uh, I mean, the PELTAST!" He brandishes his spear skyward and holds his shield in the manliest fashion he can think of . . . which is kind of just holding it like a shield. "But DAMMIT. Captain Sparta would have been so cool!"

He's wearing a belt with a couple of weird items attached that don't quite go with his shield and spear. "I chose the Wonder Woman sigil," he says, adding a little sheepishly, "she's my girlfriend's favorite. But I picked up these other gizmos at the observatory cuz, well, Batman's *my* favorite, and I figure, best to be prepared, right?"

Quinn gives the shield a little shake. "So I think I'm the brick. That Superman guy grabbed Supes' sigil and then took a couple swings at me in the hotel parking garage, and I held him off pretty good. He's dressed like the Joker, or was, and I'm not really into judging people but I think he seemed like kind of--" his voice lowers to a whisper -- "an a-hole." He looks around to make sure he didn't offend anyone.

"So anyway, I vote Washington. I owe that fella some payback."

Vina says:
"Looks like the freezer king might be your...I mean Flash's villain, Captain Cold. I go with whoever needs me... but we better get on it."

Roy says:

"So your shield is able to resist the Joker fan. That's good to know. I think a Green Lantern ring can stop Superman, if the WILL is there. But cool as Green Lantern is, I've never been tops at forcing my will on people. Or, uh, on green light, either."

Vina pulls out her Hawk scanner and holds it to her head.

"The JLA Monitor Room says Plastic Man is in deep space. "Beyond All Galaxies" is actually what it says. But Elongated Man is here in Midway City. Apparently they're not the same guy?"

"No indeed!" Roy says, raising a finger dramatically. "The Elongated Man is Ralph Dibny, an amateur detective who discovered how to make his body stretchable through methods he has never revealed. But he does have a public identity, and resides right here in Midway City!"

He notices the looks he gets.

"What? I may be a Marvelite, but I read the papers."

Roy thinks to himself, "I wonder if I could make Iron Man with this ring."

Everyone hears his thoughts. But apparently he can't tell that he's broadcasting telepathically.

"Whatever we do," Quinn says, "I don't think we should split up. I'm thinking we're all kind of new at this, so teaming up sounds like a good idea. So whoever votes for DC, hands up!" He raises his shield.