15963/Look out for Nobody

Look out for Nobody
Date of Scene:	27 September 2023
Location:	Lobby - Titan's Tower
Synopsis:	Larry and Jane of the Doom Patrol visit Titans Tower to inform the Titans that they shouldn't arrest a villain who doesn't exist.
Cast of Characters:	Kay Challis, Larry Trainor, Jinx, Irie West

---

Kay Challis has posed:
    Is there a collective noun for superheroes? If so, it probably depends on the team. A group of Avengers is no doubt an 'assembly', while a multiplicity of Titans might be a 'togetherness'. Doom Patrollers though? It's probably an 'argument'.

    "We could have just called them," says one half of this particular argument. "Or, you could have called them anyway. I don't like using phones. Rita should have just called Garfield instead of going off to talk to the Justice League assholes. Or better, both. While we stayed at home."

    This particular half of the argument of Doom Patrollers is Jane, and she's the driver on this particular mission; the vehicle in question not being some sleek, black supercar as might be expected from a normal superteam, but rather a battered and hippyish old camper van that looks barely drivable and may never leave the lot of Titans Tower under its own power.

    The camper van matches the driver, who does not resemble the typical superhero. Her idea of a super costume appears to involve jeans, basketball boots, a T-shirt so faded as to be no longer readable, and a black net shrug. Her appearance lacks the glamor of the stereotypical superheroine, though she is wearing enough eyeshadow for a small flock of goths. Despite her obvious lack of enthusiasm for the visit, she's first out of the van and straight over to buzz the door, which she does so repeatedly and often, as if this is the greatest emergency in the world. Probably the only reason for her apparent enthusiasm is so that she'll want to get home quicker.

    The buzzer at Titans Tower gets rung fairly often, but the Tower AI sends most visitors away without ever bothering to sound the buzzer inside the tower. Others who ring it may get cleared and their presence made known to the occupants of the tower after explaining to the AI why they are there. A smaller number are known to the system and bypass any AI interrogation; people known to the team, members of other superhero teams. The result of Jane's incessant buzzing is an annoying bell going off in the lobby, and a notification sent to the T-Com of anyone currently present and awake at Titans Tower, informing them that 'Jane' and 'Negative Man' of the Doom Patrol are here, and ideally Gar should be sent to deal with them if he's available.

Larry Trainor has posed:
The other side of the argument is a man who looks like he had the worst encounter with the most vicious cat in the world: he's wrapped in bandages from head to toe. Due to the proximity of a certain holiday, one migh tbe forgiven for thinking this might be one of those grownups who don't know when to quit treat-or-treating, but for the fact that he is wearing clothes on top of his mummy outfit: an avaiator jacket and boots, an olive turtleneck, slacks and fingerless gloves. Also, a pair of arther fetching goggles in black. All black.

"Maybe, but Gar's- you know, we owe the kid more than just a call. He's family, and he has a tendency to brood and stay away." Wait, he IS talking about Gar, right? "Rita probably wants us to check up on him and have us deliver the news in the same stroke. Kills two birds with one nuke. Since I didn't have time to check on him the last time I was here because they had to deal with..." waves his hand, "Aftermath."

Larry follows Jane, always a few steps behind, purely out of habit. Sometimes you want to be clear of throwing distance.

Jinx has posed:
"What the fuck is a Doom Patrol?" Jinx had lowered the book on magic she was reading just to look at the buzzy message on her T-com. "Gar!..." Yelling out his name is redundant since he'd get the buzzy message too. But no green guy or animal is making his way out past the common room.

"Eh" A shrug of her shoulders and she heads toward the elevator. With her new magical reserves she flicks her finger at the button and presses it well ahead of her arrival so that it conveniently is right there for her arrival. Does she wait for anyone else? nope.

The elevator doors ding again as they open up in the lobby. A hand is run through her pink hair as she stares at The Mummy and some random punk girl. "Yo whatever it is you're selling we've already got one," she shouts at them as she approaches the doors.

Irie West has posed:
    It's true that the Tower gets all sorts of visitors during the day, and almost all of them are turned away, which is why when the T-Com announces that there's somebody at the door, Irie looks a little confused. Who the heck do they know that would come knocking on their door especially at this time of night?

    With a sigh, Irie closes her laptop, grateful for the chance to take a break from college prep, and zooms down to the front door, passing Jinx on the way. "Hi, Jinx!" she says before answering the door. "Hello? What's a Doom Patrol?" With the way her eyes keep going to Larry it's obvious she's just dying to ask about the mummy-man but she isn't //completely// without manners.

Kay Challis has posed:
    "That's my point," Jane replies to Larry. "Gar is /Rita's/ family. She should be here. Sending us to talk to him instead counts as child cruelty or something. Wait, okay. Gar's not a child any more, but you know what I mean. She's his /mom/. She just didn't want us turning up at the fucking Hall of Justice instead. Just because of that /one/ time. The doors all came back the next day anyway, I don't know why people keep reminding us of that."

    This minor diatribe continues despite the fact that door has been answered, and thus for the first fifteen seconds or so after the door is opened, Irie and Jinx are greeted only by Jane's back and argumentative voice. When she turns back to the door she jumps back with an "Aaaah!" of surprise. "What do you guys want?" she demands of Irie and Jinx angrily, having perhaps forgotten for the moment that she's the one ringing at the door. "Also, who the fuck are you?"

    Jane steps neatly back, hiding slightly behind Larry. "Neither of them are green," she tells him. "I don't know them. You deal with it!"

Larry Trainor has posed:
"... he's more than just Rita's family, fer chrissakes, the kid grew up with us, we're his-" Larry's voice gets that *edge* when he is annoyed, and he often gets annoyed around Jane, even though he doesn't want to get annoyed with Jane, which only makes him annoyed at *himself*, which doesn't help things one bit. "Yes, yes, but it would have helped if the doors had come back to their respective places, not all in one big-"

He pauses, and lets out a long, exasperated sigh as Jane begins retreating after having insulted... whomever answered the door. No, that wasn't Gar. By any stretch of the imagination. Mummy Ma-- NEGATIVE MAN takes two steps to circumvent Jane, and one step to move forward, and clears his throat.

"I'm sorry. We're the Doom Patrol..." he looks at the two, "Is, er... Troia, or Nightwing or-" an adult, he thinks, but doesn't say it, "Starfire, in, at the moment?"

Jinx has posed:
Jinx folds her arms and watches with slightly amusement as Jane retreats away from the doors leaving them with, "Listen Arnold Vosloo, all the old ones are off right now doing.. stuff." She raises an eyebrow at the familiarity with the original team names.

"So you get us. The pretty fast one and me, the ex-con." She refolds her arms and repeats, "And you interrupted a really good read on the electromagnetic properties of poltergeists. So - whatever it is just get to the point or I instruct the big laser guns to shoot at you."

Jinx has no such command over the laser guns. They're there, for sure, but it's a very empty threat. She just got up on the wrong side of the bed. It's a good thing Irie is here to balance things out.

Irie West has posed:
    Irie narrows her eyes suspiciously at Jane. "I'm Irie. Kid Flash." Already she doesn't like these people. She folds her arms and sets her jaw and tells Larry. "No. //We're// the ones answering the door. You still haven't told us what a Doom Patrol is. Do you, like, go around and look for doomed things?" Her eyes narrow even more. "Or maybe you work for Doctor Doom? Because I can tell you right now that if you do, you can just march yourselves that way before we come and kick your butt!"

    And then Irie, being Irie, gets distracted by something Jinx said. "Poltergeists have electromagnetic properties? Does that mean you can stick magnets on them? Or... OH! Maybe you can build one of those ghost traps you see in Ghostbusters! But then you'd have to store it somewhere, and that's just asking for somebody to come and shut it off, and then you have a Gozer situation on your hands and nobody wants that."

Kay Challis has posed:
    Jane takes a determined step forwards when Jinx threatens them with lasers, but fortunately catches herself and brings herself to a halt before Larry has to intervene. She contents herself with a threatening Finger of Warning pointed in Jinx's direction. "You think we fucking *want* to be here?" she demands, as if anything Jinx had said had implied that in the slightest.

    However Jane does not elaborate on this point because Irie introduces herself. "Oh right, I remember you. Kid Flash." She turns to Larry again. "The kid who joined a bit before Gar did, remember?" She looks back to Irie, questioning. "Ollie West right? Only fucking crazy people try to store poltergeists inside of ghost traps, Ollie."

Larry Trainor has posed:
Larry stops short when Jinx speaks, because he senses that he is in the presence of a fellow spirit of snark, and that things could get very dicey this side of Elaine Stritch if he's not careful. "Er, not quite there, kid, but close enough." He glances at Irie. She does not look like an Ollie. He looks back at Jane. "Or somewhere in the vicinity, you're in the neighborhood and looking for the right house, but haven't found the address yet."

Sharp inhale. Slow exhale. Like the Doctor taught you, Larry. "Look, we don't work for Doctor Doom, we don't go around dooming things. We- we're the people Gar grew up with. We're his family, sort of. His mom- Rita -is part of the Doom Patrol."

He pauses and looks at Jinx, and then at Irie, and the slow realization hits him. "He's never talked to you about us, has he." It's not even a question.

Jinx has posed:
"Hey Irie did I ever tell you about that time I had a blind date with Victor Von Doom? ... no I don't think I have. I will have to tell you -all- about it. He only talked in the third person. It was hard not to crack up laughing constantly."

Jinx casually banters to Irie despite the Doom Patrollers just standing there. She -likes- Irie, so it's no big thing for her to confess that strange evening curiosity. She can see the humour in it all too. Her eyes wander off for a moment back to the Hellclub and then she snaps back to Irie.

"According to this book they do. They can make the lights flicker and toss things around the room. I suppose we could put magnets on them in that case." She nods her head to the younger speedster conspiratorially as an idea starts to form.

Her attention snaps back to Jane, "Who the fuck -wants- to be here??" She throws up her arms realising immediately that there is a huge lack of context for Jane as to who she is and why she's here. "Ollie.." Her lips contort and she stifles back a snicker. Nope, it got out.

"And hey we don't go throwing around real names around here. Code names only for /strangers/. I'm Jinx and nope.. sorry. Never heard of you. Listen Rocketeer. Let's say for the sake of argument that you're not full of shit yeah. I'm sure Gar knows where to find you. If that's all you want then sorry he's not home. He's probably off having an orgy with meercats or something at the zoo."

Irie West has posed:
    "Hey!" Irie protests putting her hands on her hips. "//I// want to be here! This is the closest thing to home I have!" She turns to Jane and scowls, "And if you didn't want to be here, then you wouldn't be here. Unless, like, there's somebody putting a gun to your head, which I don't see. Or it could be one of those little microbombs implanted in the base of your skull, in which case you've come to the right place. And it's Irie. //Irie// West."

    She gasps at Jinx, though. "You went on a blind date with Doom? How would that even happen? He doesn't seem to be the kind of person who'd go on a blind date. I think he'd manipulate everything so that he would find the //perfect// partner and, I'm sorry Jinx, I like you but you're not that." She purses her lips thoughtfully, "Oh! You must be pulling my leg! Ha, ha. Good one, Jinx."

    "But no," she says, turning to Larry. "He didn't mention you guys at all. Or Rita. Come to think of it... he's never really talked about his past at all."

Kay Challis has posed:
"Of course he doesn't talk about is much," Jane replies to Larry, distracted from Jinx and Irie again, to whom she gives a 'one moment' finger gesture. ". "He escaped. He's happy here. Why would he want to pick at old wounds? It's not about you, fucking Jesus Larry. Let the kid have fun with his friends. "

    "Wrong," she tells Irie. "We didn't want to be here but we came anyway because we had to. Because Chief is away and Rita always tries to take charge of things with Chief isn't around, and she told us to come here. And the alternative was going along to the Halls of Justice, which sucks ass."

    She reaches into a back pocket of her jeans to pull out a heavily folded and creased piece of paper, which she starts to unfold.

    "We came to warn you not to arrest this guy," she explains. "Or if you have already nabbed him and put him in a secure cell, to let him go. Or if you've already got him and sent him away with the police or whatever, tell us. It's vitally important he doesn't get arrested."

    She finishes unfolding the paper and shows it to Jinx and Irie. It's a print-out with some biographical notes on someone, with a mugshot image that's entirely blank. Not a blank face -- there's simply nobody in the photograph at all. "This guy. If you see anyone who doesn't look like this, you need to tell us."

Larry Trainor has posed:
"The halls of justice, from which you are banned for at /least/ two years, you mean," Larry adds in between Jane's paragraphs. He's good at timing, sometimes. And, because his mind works the way it does, he adds, in a low voice: "Did she call me a... Armand Barstool? Do you know what that was about?"

When Jane produces the mug, he adds, "It's very important that you remember what he doesn't look like. We've been tracking this guy and he could be real troble."

In the back of his mind, he thinks about the fact that Gar didn't even talk about Rita, and what that could mean. "And don't give me the smart lip, kid, Gar's fine to throw. Everybody knows his name. He's public. Like... like... " snaps his fingers. Or he tries to. Bandages don't snap. "The woman with the hair and the-" gestures vaguely in an hourglass figure, "Her."

Jinx has posed:
Jinx looks at the blank piece of paper and then back at Jane with an incredulous expression on her face. "Are you havin' a right laugh. Don't arrest nothing? blank man? Is it a bird, is it a plane, no it's an empty piece of paper.."

She looks at Irie side long and says, "And I thought we were the weird ones." Her attention goes back to Jane and she opens her mouth lifting a finger.. then lowers it and shuts her mouth. She looks Jane up and down seeing the same kind of clothes she used to wear.

"Sure. Whatever. We'll keep an eye out for mister nothin' there. We'll give your chief a call if your imaginary villain rears his ugly head. Got it? good?" She is studying Jane now. Studying her like she hated being studied by people when she was an orphan. She knows it stinks but when weird knocks on your door and you're /Jinx/ you know the bad luck brought them to you.

"No but for real - what's the deal here?" She looks back to Larry since he seems the calmer of the two. Then she does something she rarely ever does - she dips a hand in to her pocket and takes out a card with her phone number on it. "I do weird. I do magic. If you actually need help then I'll leave the snark parked at home."

A thumb is given to the lobby behind her, "Home." Her lips press tighter together as she gives Jane a conflicted look. "We'll even tell the rest of the team not to think about what this guy doesn't look like."

Irie West has posed:
    "We //are// the weird ones," Irie stage whispers back. She then leans close to peer at the heavily folded paper. "Ummmm..." she says, obviously confused. "I mean, pretty much everybody doesn't look like this guy? Is there a guy? I mean. He's invisible right? I haven't seen an invisible guy lately. Well," she says, making a flopping hand motion, "of course I haven't //seen// him. But unless he snuck in without us noticing then he isn't here. I'm sure the Tower's defenses would have picked him up. They've got infrared and sonic and all sorts of other sensors so I doubt hiding here would be all that easy."

    She looks a bit surprised when Jinx offers her card over to the strangers. If Jinx of all people is taking them seriously then... She looks back at the paper and considers their words and hums thoughtfully. "Hmmm. Is he, like, a hole in your memory? Kind of always sitting on the periphery, where if you look at him directly you won't see him, but if you //don't// look at him you'll catch him out of the corner of your eye? "

Kay Challis has posed:
    "He's not /our/ imaginary villain," Jane explains to Jinx with mild exasperation. "He's the imaginary villain of some asshole comic book writer from Detroit. And he won't be nothing if you arrest him, that's the whole damn point. He's /trying/ to get arrested, which is why you gotta watch out for him. Because being captured by super heroes is basically the defining characteristic of a supervillain, so if you arrest him then you're helping him become real. How are you not getting this?"

    She turns back to Larry. "How are they not getting this? This is pointless, Larry. I told you this would be pointless. We should just go back to the manor and wait for the others to return. This is pointless, it's obvious they haven't seen him."

    Jane crosses her arms sulkily over her chest and turns away. "You explain it," she says to Larry, apparently having given up. "Cliff should have come instead of us," she complains to herself. "He's good with kids." A statement which entirely ignores Jinx obviously being distinctly too old to be called a kid and reality.

Larry Trainor has posed:
"Jane, no, Cliff /shoudln't/ have come, he would have-" Sigh. Larry Trainor being the more tethered one of any group is always a big cosmic joke to him, but he does try very hard not to get angry at Jane. Out of all of the Doomies, the kid had probably suffered the most- and that was saying something.

"Try to be understanding, Jane. They have to deal with simple things- like a villain taking over the world, or an alien invasion, or getting lost inside black holes." Yes, he has kept up, some, "This sort of stuff isn't in their wheelhouse."

He glances at Jinx and Irie, "Well... sort of, Kid Flash." He waves a hand, "You need to be on the lookout for... rumors, about a villain. Stories getting told, over and over, enough details that it might be believable, and might lead you to where some nasty guy may be doing something that might require you to stop him... but it's going to be both convincing and not -quite- there. Like what you described- out of the corner of your eye, except your eye is your mind. He'll desperately try to slip into any crack that makes him more real to you. That's when you need to worry, because he's going to start getting detailed."

Jinx has posed:
Jinx twists her lips in to a wry smirk at Jane. "So now we get the details. Huh. A concept trying to become real? Well that's... that's a new one for me." She looks at Irie and whispers to her, "I wasn't joking about Doom."

"Okay. So. Portents and all that. Got it. Would it help if we read this Detroit guy's comics? there must be a particular idiom for this villain that'll give his dastardly deeds away. And then we can just ignore them."

Jinx is invested now. This is weird. Right up her ally. But she doesn't want to lean in too hard because then they might ask her to help. Then she'd have to act all aloof else someone might start to realise she actually is totally in to this hero shit.

"We'll let Gar know his b.. rother.. and sister? uh.. stopped by. Uncle? Aunt? Whatever."

Irie West has posed:
    "Hey! I'm not a kid!" Irie protests, putting her fists on her hips. "I'm in college!" A beat. "Well, I've done my SATs and I've applied for all the colleges and sooner or later they'll get back to me and accept me, but I'm //pracitcally// in college!"

    She softens a bit as more is explained, though. "I get what you're saying. It's weird, but I get it." She glances over to Jinx. "I mean, if we read up on his villains, doesn't that help define this imaginary villain even more, which would make him even more real?" She looks back at Jane and Larry for help. "It seems the best course of action is to just kind of... ignore it."

Kay Challis has posed:
    "I'm bored," Jane announces. She is briefly enveloped with a shimmering, and when the shimmering passes she looks a little different. There's no sense of there having been a moment of transformation, so much as the sense that reality might have noticed it made a mistake and surreptitiously tried to correct itself before anyone really noticed. Whatever the reason, she seems like she might be a little taller and thinner, and is definitely blonder, with all the hallmarks of a peroxide addiction.

    Also her voice is different, a little more nasal and higher pitched, and suddenly sporting a very different accent. "Boooooored", she repeats. "Like, God! This is soooo /old/." She cosies up to Larry, slipping a hand into the crook of his arm. "Let's go hooome Lar! I gotta... you know." She gives makes a snorting gesture, gives a laugh that would best be described as a giggle, and in a stage whisper confides "I got some hidden at the manor that Jane doesn't know about."

    She turns to Jinx and Irie, suddenly breaking into a rather vapid-looking smile, and waves to them. "SO great to meetcha both, but we gotta scoot. Let's do this again some time! Look after Jane's van, okay? Bye-eee Kid Flash, good luck with college! You'll like /totally/ get accepted, don't worry! Bye-eee... uh... Scottish girl, good luck with... Scottish things!"

    There is the soft *whump* of displaced air as the pair vanish, leaving the lot empty but for Jane's slightly steaming camper van -- and sparing Jinx from gaining any useful idiomatic information on the villain, thus sparing her from getting more involved.