It's all upside down

Having landed on the outskirts of Metropolis, our friendly group cheerfully loaded into a truck with the S.T.A.R. Labs symbol on the side and drove off in the direction of the huge snow-white egg rising in the center of the city. In principle, if Lex Luthor hadn't created a deadly hybrid and his company hadn't been stripped of its rights to research alien technology, we'd have had serious problems getting into Superman-powered vessel. Lex's security is one of the toughest in the world, and one of the toughest to beat. And, with the latter, she was so good that she could easily ignore the signal for a general evacuation of the building, due to the discovery of an alien microbe, which should be activated by Cyborg. Plus comes, a bunch of high-tech toys and state-of-the-art security systems capable of giving any burglar a hard time.

Our squad, of course, would not be able to use such an arsenal: a couple of illusions in my performance, or Batman's soporific gas, or just scatter them all, sending Diana and Aquaman ahead, but then, one way or another, we would have to confront the guards and the troops who arrived to help us, losing precious time. Therefore, it was decided to quietly infiltrate the Kryptonian ship, using all our strengths.

During the flight, we worked out the plan carefully, paying attention to every detail and assigning roles intelligently. Thus, Barry, with a slightly spell-altered appearance and a fake access card, acted as the truck driver, Cyborg hacked the security system to add the speedster to the list of employees and launch a general evacuation, and everyone else sat quietly in the van like mice.

The last one was handled by our magnificent five, but Barry and Victor almost ruined everything. One of them decided to do a Schwarzenegger impersonation and said: "Ye-es, sir," with a strong German accent when he handed the pass to the guard, and the second, because of the slow Internet connection, took almost thirty seconds to connect to the checkpoint's computer to enter new data.

I should note that thanks to illusions, the driver could have been literally any of us, except for Cyborg, who was busy with important business, but Bats decided to give this role to the speedster, so that he would feel himself a part of the team and would stop to feel bad about "losing" to the parademons. Fortunately, the guards, tired for the day, did not pay attention to the strange behavior of the driver and, after checking the documents and confirmation from the system, quietly let the vehicle into the territory.

Parking the car at the south entrance, our magnificent seven finally got out into the fresh air, and Victor sounded the general alarm. While panicked scientists and other local employees were hurriedly leaving their workplaces to the accompaniment of flashing red lights and quiet siren wailing, following the evacuation points, we calmly walked through the sterile secondary corridors of the "Egg", made of some frosted glass with a cool backlight. After passing a couple of biometric scanners embedded in the powerful steel sealed doors, which pathos opened at our approach, the awesome team of superheroes climbed into the alien ship.

"Victor?" Cyborg's father, who had managed to get to Metropolis first, suddenly met us at the entrance.

There was a pause.

I was about to hit the scientist with a disorientation spell when suddenly the radio in his hand beeped loudly.

"Sir, was there really a break-in? Should we cancel the alarm?" came over the speaker. "Sir, are you there?"

"No, no... I was wrong. The systems are working properly... They did detect..." his face twitched strangely for a moment, as if with a toothache, "an alien microbe. So put all the employees in the far quarantine zone for now," he replied a little sluggishly, keeping a surprised look at our company.

Anyone here would be a little shocked to find people in a secure facility who had clearly escaped from a cosplay party.

Huh, we got: a scowling man in a bat suit; a dark-haired hottie in an armored red-and-blue sylor-fuku and gold tiara; a blonde cutie in a red-and-black cheerleader outfit; a hairy metal man with a piercing stare, encased in a tight-fitting armor of green-steel color, as if composed of many large scales, and with a trident in his hands (yeah, Aquaman disappointed me a bit when he got this cheesy thing); a young guy in a red protective suit with a yellow zipper on his chest, reminiscent of those worn by the participants of motofreestyle; a tall Cyborg, looking as an action figure that children love so much; and finishing this wonderful composition was a slightly pale smiling green-haired gentleman in an elegant purple three-piece suit and a weighty cane in his hands.

"Sir, should we call in a Delta team?" the radio came back on.

"No, I'll be right there to organize. The germ could have seeped into the main rooms, so no one is to return without my permission. I repeat, no one is to return without my permission," the scientist finished giving instructions and stepped aside, allowing our group to proceed.

The interior of the Kryptonian ship was a monotonous dark corridors, along which the researchers stretched lighting from diode lamps, but the center of the whole structure looked quite unusual.

Still, few people would expect to find a room in the heart of an alien transport with a pool filled with a thick, yellowish liquid. And for some reason this place just made me think of a Zerg maternity pool, where some advanced civilization had installed its high-tech devices.

"It's time," Bats said sternly.

"Yeah," I nodded and reached into my pocket, only to pull out a white rabbit a few moments later. "Oops, wrong."

"Mrh..."

"Ha-ha-ha, come on, frown! Keep it simple," I advised, finally pulling the right corpse out of my pocket.

"Now is not the time."

"Eh, I hope you know what to do next," Aquaman complained, helping to lower the dead body into the yellowish sludge.

"This should work," Cyborg said confidently.

Approaching the alien control panel, Victor first scanned it with a wide beam from his cybernetic eye, then produced from his palm a suitable key glowing with a mysterious blue light.

As soon as it docked, a pleasant female voice came straight out of the panel, announcing the successful activation of the systems.

After a dozen seconds, the disabled man opened his only normal eye, looking up at Bats.

"The ship says the Mother Cube is hostile. I can restart the protocols, but Luthor's experiments have knocked out several capacitors and power lines."

"Can we use human language," asked Aquaman.

"There's not enough charge to wake you up."

"Oh, then let's go to the spaceport," I rejoiced. "There is a rocket launch planned, so we'll ask NASA to take one more passenger on board."

I still didn't like the idea of entrusting such a delicate matter of resurrection to an obscure box that the ship said was still hostile.

"I can try..." Barry said suddenly, making me regret again that I'd been too soft on him. "I hate to break this rule, but when my speed approaches the speed of light... Well, stuff happens... Anyway, I generate a lot of electricity. With enough acceleration, I can come back and power this place... Here. I can wake up the Cube, if we still want it..." he finished uncertainly, stifling under my piercing gaze.

"We want to, go ahead," Bats said without a shadow of a doubt.

Flash looked at Cyborg, who nodded affirmatively in response, whereupon the speedster disappeared in acceleration, heading for the far end of the ship.

"I don't like this," I grumbled unhappily.

"Keep it simple," Bats clapped me on the shoulder, heading off to secure the box in the huge claw left over from Luthor's experiments.

Soon the preparations were complete. The cube was suspended above the pool, Flash took a low start, Cyborg prepared to overload the ship's systems, Superman was slightly submerged so he wouldn't float in the thick sludge, and everyone else prepared to witness the miracle of resurrection.

"What's the matter?" Bats asked, noticing Victor's darting gaze.

"The ship... It's afraid. Begging me not to awaken the Mother Cube. I think he realizes the Steppenwolf will come after that."

"We know that too, go on."

"Good," he nodded, putting both hands on the control panel. "Flash, I'm starting the countdown."

"Copy that," the guy's chipper voice came from the speaker in his ear.

"Five."

"It's a bad idea," Aquaman grumbled, and I was in complete agreement, but we're kind of a democracy here.

"Four."

"Can we stop?" I suggest without much hope.

"Three."

My words were successfully ignored.

"Two... One..." the superhero suddenly froze, a drop of sweat rolling down the human part of his face and his single eye widening in horror.

"Couth..." after a long second, Cyborg breathed heavily, gulping air greedily with his mouth like a beached fish.

"Victor?" Barry called out.

"No... We shouldn't..."

"We should? I will now."

"No!" Cyborg exclaimed, but it was too late.

Flash had gone into acceleration and couldn't change his goal, and the claw had already released the crate from its grip, sending it flying free, according to the given directives.

There was no time to think, and no way to stop the speedster, but there was something I could do. There was only one spell in my aura, so I sent it forward, pumping it full of mana and spicing it up with life energy.

~Skr-r-r-r-r~

With an unpleasant crackling sound, the falling box was enveloped in sparks of discharge.

~Boom~

Barry fit into the wall on the opposite side of the pool, making a neat hole in it.

A moment more, and the Mother Cube, covered with purple columns and electric discharges, would have touched the surface of the mysterious Kryptonian slurry, but suddenly it crashed into something invisible with a thud and froze.

"The future has been altered, the point of convergence of probabilities has not been passed," the ship announced emotionlessly.

"What was that?" Bats was the first to stop, staring suspiciously at Cyborg's shaking mechanical hands.

While I was carefully retrieving the glowing box hanging on the platform of the magic shield, Victor was saying some pretty entertaining things.

I don't know if the Kryptonian vessel can actually predict the future, but according to the visions Cyborg visited, if we brought Superman back to life with the Cube, things would end very sadly for our planet. Cyborg described it as flashing pictures in my mind and after my urging, even showed a couple, creating a hologram of the memories.

A dead Diana, with two bronze coins for Charon placed over her eyes. Themyscira on fire with alien ships hovering over it. Chained Amazons standing near a huge bonfire.

A ruined Atlantis (at least, I'm not aware of any other high-tech underwater city) whose defenders are being slaughtered by a huge gray humanoid firing strange lasers from its eyes. They zigzagged after their target until they hit it exactly in the head, instantly sending it to the other side of the world.

And, as the end of the whole fucking thing, the figure of Superman, brutally punishing the few human rebels. I have to say, the dark uniform suits Clark much better than the red-and-blue tight tights, but it's not necessary to destroy humanity for the sake of a change of image.

And the weird thing is, the fucking idiot was going to withhold this important information from us and just give us the generalities, talking about some global danger! Like some vague visions conjured up by an alien ship. Fortunately, I'd been annoyed enough to heal Barry's pulled leg, though with the metal wall smashed through it, it should be a mess of bones, so I didn't hesitate to explain to this alternatively gifted man how wrong he was.

"I see," Bats said gloomily, scrutinizing the video and immediately pointing out many clues that helped to confirm its relative authenticity. For example, the appearance of some of the Amazons that Diana and I were familiar with, or the architecture of the Atlantean city.

The man in black latex then activated his walkie-talkie and asked Oracle to organize everything needed for Plan B.

"Plan B?" asked Harley interestedly, voicing my thoughts.

"The glass flask with the possibility to darken the glass is already ready, the launch of the necessary shuttle will start in three hours. In that time, we must get to the spaceport and hand over the body to the astronauts," the superhero outlined our immediate plans.

"Hmm... Isn't anyone confused by the fact that the box is active, but Wolf isn't in a hurry to take it?" I'm voicing a thought that's been bugging me.

~Boom~

The floor beneath my feet shook a little.

"Okay, that's out of the question. What do we do?"

"Joker, can you create the fake Cube again?" Bats clarified.

"No. You could say it was a one-time thing."

"Then here you go," he handed out two miniature dark pucks to each of us. "We need to kill Steppenwolf or make him retreat, but before we do that, we need to put these tracking devices on him or the Parademons to calculate the coordinates of the base. If things get really bad, this Mother Cube can be sacrificed."

Assembly was swift. The corpse of the Kryptonian into my spatial pocket, the box back into the cage that Victor had been carrying all this time, a simple buff on each member of the squad, then a quick run through the steel corridors, and now we were out on the street, facing a small army of parademons led by a horned knight. Of course, there was still a small layer of police and special forces between us, but they were enough to hold off the winged masses for a while.

"Give me the Mother Cube and I'll leave," Steppenwolf's loud voice boomed over the plaza.

"Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, won't your face crack? Why don't you tell us all to fold our legs and surrender to slavery?" A simple weave helped me reach the freak to express my outrage.

"That would be the best outcome, but I've learned enough about your culture to know you won't give up without a fight," he drew his axe from behind his back in one motion. "Personally, mage, I offer you service to Darkseid. He has come to appreciate your skills."

"What skills?" I asked in surprise, glancing at my comrades.

"Is he a girl by any chance?" Harley suddenly clarified, also raising her voice.

"Not that I know of," Wolf replied calmly, not at all confused by the strange question.

"Shit, that doesn't add up," she twitched her earlobe thoughtfully. "Mr. J, what other strengths do you have besides being a divine fuck and getting into trouble?"

The audience froze, and even the sounds of the city somehow quieted down, for the voice amplification was still going on.

"Hey, I'm not gonna have sex with Darkseid!"

Bats carefully covered his face with his palm, Diana gave me a strange look and blushed a little, Flash and Cyborg were staring at each other in surprise, as if they were constipated, though in the case of the latter it was physically impossible, and Aquaman was trying not to laugh, clamping his hand over his mouth.

Steppenwolf decided to add fuel to the fire.

"I'm sure, for faithful service, the lord could keep you satis..."

~Bah~

A revolver shot interrupted General Darkside's propaganda speech, which had obviously gone somewhere wrong.

"Pha... What's that..." the mighty figure swayed slightly as it inhaled the cloud of gaseous potion released by the bullet that shattered against the framed axe.

Damn, he's strong.

"What the fuck are you all doing?! Kill the bastards!" I was the first to attack, tossing a napalm grenade into the cluster of enemies and firing my revolver again, but this time with sanctified bursting bullets that made the skulls of the anthropomorphic bugs explode with glee.