CALVIN CITY: Five men in dark coats and hats step out of the Housatonic River and onto the shore, not far from the Calvin Historical Society Museum. They and their clothes are bone dry, as if they had never been in the water at all. Seeing the museum building, they begin to walk towards it, very slowly. The men have no faces.
THE DREAMING: An otherworldly woman in a grey chiton, looking like a Greek statue, appears in the dreams of Alex Kostas, the hero known as the Olympian. Her name was once Echo, and she shows Alex her story, a story that has been woven into the tales of many others since she vanished from the world, but which belonged to her.
The truth of Echo’s story is this: She was a dryad, a spirit of the woods, who had sworn chastity and service to the goddess Athena. Her beauty drew the unwanted attention of Apollo, and in his ardor the amorous god pursued her night and day, until her life became a nightmare, an endless race to escape his power. Echo prayed so intensely to Athena for release that the goddess swore to save her, though she knew that even if Echo passed into the realm of death Apollo would pursue her. Athena was a young goddess then, still testing the boundaries of her power and her domain within the world, and she invented a means of saving Echo, but one that required the aid of Morpheus, the god of dreams and stories. Though Morpheus was highly unwilling, Athena used means as ancient as they were unnatural to compel him to do as she bid—an action that would later cost her dearly—and Morpheus gave Echo permanent release.
He destroyed the very idea of Echo. Not only did he remove her from existence, but he blotted her from the world as if she had never existed at all. But Athena and Morpheus remembered what they had done. What little of Echo existed—a few snippets of her voice in the distance, the faint impression her beauty had left upon a river she’d gazed into—they took what and placed into a statue, carved of Athena’s memory of the dryad’s final supplicating prayer. The hole in the world where there had once been Echo was sewn shut by Athena and Morpheus with immortal skill, and other than her name—which the Greeks gave to the disembodied voice that cries back from emptiness—it was as if there had never been an Echo at all.
Until now. Now, the shadow of Echo that remains in a hidden corner of the Dreaming—where the Lord of Stories hides his own unhappy memory of what was done in Athena’s service—has sensed someone tugging at Athena’s stitches upon the fabric of the world. A mortal magus, a man of great power, is investigating the fate of the woman who never was, and perhaps to drag her—kicking and screaming—back into the world. Prescient in her immortal non-existence, Echo knows that the visit of a modern Oracle to her statue is the sign that heralds the magus as he comes for her.
Painting her story across Alex’s dreams, she reveals that in the 21st century, her statue stands in the Calvin City Historical Society Museum. As a hero in the mode of the ancient world, tied to the Olympians and Athena’s father Zeus, Alex Kostas is her only hope, and she begs him for aid. Alex swears to help her before he returns to the waking world.
As she-who-was-Echo begins to fade, she thanks Morpheus’s successor, the new Dream King, for helping her to contact Alex. But he will not accept her thanks, saying he is only compelled by the ancient knot tied by Pallas Athena. He finds the erasure of the very idea of a living being an unconscionable crime, one he is ashamed to have any connection to.
ALEX KOSTAS’S APARTMENT, CALVIN CITY: All at once, Alex awakens from his late afternoon nap and springs to his feet. Mere seconds later, he is in a cab.
“Calvin City Historical Society Museum, please,” he tells the driver. “And I’m in a hurry.”
THE CALVIN CITY HISTORICAL SOCIETY MUSEUM: Tien Shi, secret martial arts adventurer and newly hired head of the Museum’s Asian History wing, is told that someone is looking for him, a woman in a wheelchair. He heads out to the Greek wing where he meets Oracle, in person as Barbara Gordon, for the first time, in front an exhibit on Delphi. She explains that she has a program which tracks mentions of superhuman crime in the media, and that in just the last few weeks the number of mentions connected to Calvin City and Ivy Town has risen sharply, to be comparable with Gotham City or Metropolis. Knowing that Tien Shi has settled in the city, she is asking him to put a team together from the various superhuman heroes in the city, who are currently working separately. She says she can make some resources available to him and his teammates if things work out. Tien Shi is a little concerned that Oracle may have brought unwanted attention with her unannounced visit, but he agrees.
Suddenly, Alan Penn—the hero known as Rush—enters the room. A history teacher in his civilian identity, Alan has one of his classes here on a field trap, and as he passed by the Greek wing he recognized Tien Shi from their earlier team up, and so he has left the class under the leadership of his graduate assistant, Tim. Introducing himself to Tien Shi and Oracle, Rush reveals his own superheroic identity, becoming the first recruit for Tien Shi’s team.
IVY UNIVERSITY: Across the Housatonic River from Calvin City, the Witch-Boys Hezikiah Dare and Klarion Bleak creep across the campus with their familiars. Klarion says he has unfinished business in an alternate future that could profit them both, and so Hezikiah has agreed to use his powers to interfere with some time distortion experiments on the campus to create a portal that will send Klarion forward in time.
Also on campus are Descent and the Cybernaut. Both have heard through various covert channels that today the Killer Croc is going to be transferred into a secure holding facility on the campus. This is being kept secret to prevent a public outcry, but Killer Croc is to become a part of the experiments of the controversial research psychologist Dr. John Kingfisher, who seeks to cure the criminally insane through a new and more human form of radical therapy than has previously been tried. Descent is here on orders from Amanda Waller, who still hopes to take possession of Killer Croc for the Suicide Squad. The Cybernaut is here to prevent Amanda Waller from getting her hands on the cannibalistic, dangerous metahuman.
As the two watch, a SWAT Team van pulls up and two dozen armed police officers get out to secure the route across campus they’re using to transport Croc. But as they do so, the Cybernaut notices black clad figures crouching on the rooftops of nearby buildings, and recognizes them as ninjas working for the League of Assassins…
THE CALVIN CITY HISTORICAL SOCIETY MUSEUM: As Oracle prepares to leave, Alex Kostas arrives at the museum and sneaks into the restroom to transform into his superheroic identity as the Olympian. He encounters Rush, who recognizes him, and then tells Rush, Tien Shi, and Oracle that someone is coming to attack the statue of Echo in the Greek wing. Oracle now determines this is an even better team to leave the scene, but before she leaves, she informs the Olympian that there is already a hero with that name, a former member of the International Ultramarines who also happens to be the disgraced national hero of Greece.
The Olympian has little time to take this information in, however, as within moments of Oracle’s departure, the Greek wing is invaded by five faceless men in coats and hats.
IVY UNIVERSITY: It’s all out battle between Descent, the Cybernaut, and the ninjas, with the surprised SWAT team members scrambling to survive. The Cybernaut fins himself fighting the assassins almost single-handedly, as Descent seeks to defeat a single ninja by stealth and capture him to be interrogated by Amanda Waller.
Hezikiah sends his familiar, an unnatural looking Martian spider, to harry the ninjas as well, but he and Klarion take advantage of the confusion to sneak into the museum’s physic lab, where the time experiment is reaching a crucial point.
THE CALVIN CITY HISTORICAL SOCIETY MUSEUM: As Rush transforms into his superheroic identity (which takes about a picosecond), the faceless men are revealed to be unloving constructs made of supernatural candle-wax. As the three heroes battle the constructs, each of the Candle Men ignites in flame, revealing a candle-wick in each of their heads. But eventually, the Candle Men are defeated and extinguished, leaving five molten lumps of wax standing in a circle on the opposite side of the room from the Echo statue.
IVY UNIVERSITY: Descent knocks a ninja out, Hezikiah’s spider paralyzes one with poison, and the Cybernaut fights off the rest. Killer Croc’s transport has already fled the scene as the SWAT team aborted the transfer, so the ninja’s mission is already a failure, and they disappear amid smoke grenades and hurled shuriken. However, they also fail to kill their captured comrades and prevent them from being interrogated.
Descent grabs his captured ninja and quickly flies high up into the air above the city to avoid attention.
BENEATH IVY UNIVERSITY, IN A HIDDEN PHYSICS LABORATORY: As the physicists distort the time field, Hezikiah uses his vibration control to drastically alter the experiments effect. Suddenly, a portal to the future opens, and Klarion shouts “Forward! To conquest and the world’s end!” as he leaps through it. But the portal soon destabilizes, and explodes with a sudden dispersal of blue energy waves. All the power in the both Ivy Town and Calvin City goes out.
In the blacked out lab, a figure appears—Lex Luthor! He is clad in a glowing orange energy replica of his warsuit, he wears a an orange ring, and his bald head is ringed with bizarre diodes. Luthor’s voice is stangely mechanical as it speaks: “Analyzing data… atmospheric pollution levels dramatically decreased—orange light power is decreased by half, indicating another wielder of the orange light is present on the planet—primitive transmissions detected. Conclusion: I have been transported through time, back to the year 2010.” With that, Luthor blasts his way up out of the lab and back to the surface.
IVY UNIVERSITY CAMPUS: On the surface, he flies into the air and sends a loud a powerful signal that nearly deafens the super-senses of both Hezikiah and the Cybernaut.
At that instant, high above the city, Descent sees a giant spacecraft appear familiar from new coverage of the recent attack on Metropolis: the ship belonging to the extraterrestrial conqueror known as Brainiac.
THE CALVIN CITY HISTORICAL SOCIETY MUSEUM: The blue waves of energy from the disrupted time experiment in Ivy Town pass through the museum… but when they hit the statue of Echo, they bounce back the opposite direction and there is a blinding flash of flight.
Suddenly, aged, darkened versions of Green Arrow, Black Canary, Connor Hawke and (if one looks carefully) the ultra-tiny new Atom (Ryan Choi) appear. This strange Black Canary immediately points at Tien Shi and shouts “You! Lord High Assassin of the Morningstar! I’ll make you pay for your betrayal!”
IVY UNIVERSITY CAMPUS: Surveying the scene, the being that appears to be Lex Luthor sees the SWAT members as well as Cybernaut. “Hello, local law officers. I require your assistance. I will broadcast my needs electronically, so that other agencies may comply.”
At that moment, a voice transmission goes out over several different local radio and television frequencies. “This is the Brainiac-Luthor Team, a superior life-form and Primary Programming Officiant for the Tyrant Sun Hegemony. I am in your timeline seeking five wanted fugitives from the Justice League Underground. Hand them over to me at once or I will proceed at once with the removal of this urban area to my ship for further examination.”
Far above the city, Brainiac’s ship extends its tentacles…
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