The Stone Age: Prisoners of the 21st Century!

(any apparent delay in posting may be due to time manipulation)

"Uh . . ." Quinn says. "I've seen a lot of movies about time travel; does that help? Like, if we say we're going to help you, and really mean it, that means if we succeed then you can go back now because we already helped. And if we didn't succeed then we never will, so our help doesn't matter. There! I think I solved your problem."

He eyes Van-Darr. "As for their memories, yeah, some erasing would probably be a good idea. Maybe his too," he says, nodding at Anthro.

"Hold up," speaks Chin-Su. All this timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly mumbo-jumbo has gone a bit over his head, but something in the preceding conversation caught his ear.

"Who is the Time Trapper? Does this... Iron Curtain specifically exist in 2050, and if so, can we go to that time to bypass it?"

"The Time Trapper? He's the most heinous time-travelling villain of them all," says Ultra Boy loudly. "When the Legion first invented the Time Bubble, we found out about the end of the universe ... and we tried to prevent it, because that's what heroes do!"

"So the next time we went back to visit Superboy in the 20th century, the Time Trapper set up the Iron Curtain of Time at 2050, preventing anyone from going forward or back through that date. Karate Kid was stuck in the 20th for years!"

Karate Kid smiles.

"It wasn't all bad," he says. "I learned to wax cars."

"Anyway," says Ultra Boy, "our buddies in the 30th century went forward to clobber the Trapper and free us. Which they did. Then we tried to go forward and get the Trapper in his fortress at the end of Time, but he set up another barrier in the 75th century! And try as we might, we haven't been able to breach it yet."

"So yeah, we can take you guys home to the 21st. We just can't get home ourselves."