The End - [Active / Open]

[daisychainmods]

Characters: EVERY CHARACTER in Manhattan!
Content: It's time to say goodbye...
Location: The DRT Room on board the Ultimatum.
Time of day: The remainder of time
Warnings: Expect some sadness, tears and hopeful promises...
Notes: This thread will be party-style. You are free to make your own subthreads, and know that you can tag into ANY SUBTHREAD

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[ihasadeathray]

Billy was mentally compiling a List of Things To Do When He Got Home (it was a very important list, which is why it mentally capitalized, and involved such things like "find something decent to eat" and "change out of these clothes he'd been in for the past few days"), when a call of "Horrible-san!" broke through his thoughts. Only one person called him that.

"Flonne!" he said, turning with a wide grin -- and then a hundred-something pounds of fallen angel promptly tackle-hugged him straight to the ground. His head smacked against the deck of the ship and the wind was knocked out of him and there might be bruises later but that didn't matter right now because dude, it was Flonne who he hadn't seen in forever and she was okay.

"Well, I guess you're doing pretty alright yourself," Billy croaked out, pulling himself up to a somewhat upright sitting position. "I helped ruin a giant corporation forever and I hijacked their technology for my own purposes, I think that counts as a pretty villainous act." When put it like that, it sounded pretty evil instead of kinda heroic. Hopefully. "What about you? What have you been up to?"

[ninxninxnin]

"I am!" she chirped in reply. Oh, good, he was okay, and wow did he sound like he'd been busy. It was probably a good idea to get off him now.

She scooted over and sat next to him, listening intently to his list of evil deeds. "Wow," she breathed, "you are a good villain!" She hadn't quite put together that the aforementioned technology was the DRT, but hey, that would come later. In the meantime, he'd asked her a question. "Oh, I was up here with Laharl-san and Etna-san blowing up ships and planes!" Because to Flonne, that was a completely normal answer. She pointed to a smoldering wreck of a battleship that was somehow still afloat. "That was one of mine," she said with just a bit of pride. She'd missed using her combat magic, and that had been a nice change.

"Oh!" She'd almost forgotten! "I have something for you!" She rummaged behind her, finally pulling several sheets of crumpled and battered paper from seemingly nowhere. She'd been carrying these around for a while, but this was the first time she'd run into Doctor Horrible in a long time. She smoothed them out as best she could and offered them to him. "Here!" They were covered in drawings done in crayon (mostly pink), showing pictures of what was unmistakably a giant robot. One of the papers detailed plans to build it (and also showed off Flonne's remarkable lack of mechanical knowledge), another had a list of parts (to include "head," "arms," and "laser beam"), and the third showed a few "action shots" - giant robot walking, running, flying (evidently there were rocket boosters in its feet), beating up Clover, and about to step on a small stick figure labeled "Hammer."

"Now you can build your giant robot!"

[ihasadeathray]

The cool thing to do would have been to play off his (not so) evil act as being just another day on the job, but Dr. Horrible couldn't hide just how pleased he was by Flonne's compliment. He would never admit it, but what she said meant a lot to him.

Billy twitch-blinked in surprise at the "blowing up ships and planes" remark, and he followed the line of her arm out to sea and over to the destroyed battleship. It was a wonder the thing hadn't sunk yet from all the damage it had sustained.

"That is so cool," he said, saying it even as he thought it. Sometimes his mental filters just failed and whatever was on his mind just came out without any protective censoring, but at least this time he wasn't blurting out anything embarrassing. He squinted back at the boat. Flonne had done that? He'd known she was powerful, but it had never occurred to him just how powerful she was. Whoa. "I am seriously impressed."

He was again taken aback when Flonne announced she had something for him. He took the papers almost gingerly, as though handling them too roughly would be enough to lose them forever. Given the state of the things, though, he felt entirely justified. They'd probably been with her when she was off blowing stuff up. He went over the papers, the carefully laid plans and the drawing of the robot stomping on his nemesis, and suddenly something knotted in his chest and made it somewhat difficult to breathe.

"We're going to build this thing together one day," he said. His voice caught a slightly ragged edge in the middle, but he soldiered on, hoping she didn't notice. He traced the cute pink crayon lines depicting the greatest, most amazing apocalypse known in the history of mankind. It would take a lot of work, and the physics of the thing was going to be a nightmare to work out, but he didn't care. "And when we're done we're going to take it for a test spin and beat up Captain Hammer and take over the world, and it will be the best thing ever."

There was another promise in that statement that went unspoken, but that didn't diminish it in the least. He was going to find her again, and he wasn't going to let something as paltry as different dimensions or alternate universes stop him.

"That's the plan
Rule the world
You and me
Any day ♫"

[ninxninxnin]

"Thank you!" Flonne beamed. "Laharl-san and Etna-san did most of them, though. I only got a few." Of course, given the number of ships and planes, "a few" was somewhere in the triple digits. That didn't matter too much to her - Tagruato's cavalry going down was the important thing, and she'd been glad to get a part of it.

She smiled as Doctor Horrible looked over the pinkblueprints. Oh, good, he did like them. She completely missed the rough patch in his words, mind already running ahead to building plans. "Of course we will, Horrible-san!" she replied cheerily, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "I'm not very good at actually putting things together, but I can hand you tools!" Because people building awesome things always needed someone standing off to the side to hand them tools, right? "And of course it'll be awesome! Giant robots are always awesome!"

Of course, she had to find him in his world first, but that shouldn't be an issue, right? All she had to do when she got home was tell the dimensional gatekeeper where she wanted to go and- oh. That was a snag.

"Horrible-san?" she questioned. "Can you tell me where you're from? Because then I can tell the dimensional gatekeeper and she can find you and I can visit you!" Of course, to Flonne, this was all very obvious and commonplace. She hadn't considered the fact that it might be a bit out of the ordinary for her companion.

[ihasadeathray]

Waitaminute, what? Dimensional gatekeeper what?

You could almost watch the gears of his mind grinding as he tried to make sense of those casual words and their implications and see the exact moment everything connected. Here he was, getting all emotional upset slightly understandably distressed because he was going to miss her and it would be a while until he could build a working transporter that wouldn't turn anything it transported inside-out, and it turns out interdimensional travel was common where she came from and it wouldn't be an issue at all.

Kind of embarrassing, if it weren't so awesome.

If he could get a reading on her dimension's energy signature and lock onto it, then he wouldn't be flying blind when he tried to teleport over. That would be one of the biggest problems when it came to building the teleporter -- dimensional travel wasn't exactly a regular occurrence in his world. Or an at all occurrence, for that matter. He just didn't have any way to find out where he was jumping, but if Flonne made contact first, he could log her coordinates so he didn't end up in an alternate universe where everything was made of cabbages or something. On top of that, he wouldn't even need to build another transporter in her dimension.

So awesome.

"Uh, I'm from Earth," he replied, realizing that maybe he'd stayed silent for just a little too long and maybe he'd better get back to answering her. Then he specified where he lived: North American continent, the United States of America, California, Los Angeles, and his home address. He didn't think just plain "Earth" would cut it when it came to stuff like this.

"And where are you from?" he asked. He'd never asked before, and besides, it was probably a good idea to find out what he was getting into before he crossed over.

[ninxninxnin]

Flonne blinked as she watched Doctor Horrible process what she'd just said. Maybe not everyone had a dimensional gatekeeper...but they were pretty common, weren't they? Well, in the Netherworld they were, but Doctor Horrible wasn't from the Netherworld...

She snapped to attention as he spoke. "Right!" She listened dutifully as he gave her his information - wow those were long coordinates - then rattled it off, once back to him and several times at a quieter volume. This was important and she'd need to remember it when she got back home.

Speaking of home, "I'm from the Netherworld!" she responded cheerfully, then backtracked after a moment of careful thought. "Well, I was from Celestia, but then I went to go live with Laharl-san, so I guess I am from the Netherworld now!" It was the very, very abbreviated version, but it worked, at least for her. Doctor Horrible was from the human world, right? He'd know what she was talking about.