You should probably read The Origin of Red Rocket and Tom Atomic before you read this story; it takes place in the middle of the Origin story.

Here is a picture of Aki Amazing.

Shortly after the second giant wave crashed to shore, some policemen appeared on the beach and suggested that everyone should evacuate, as more and larger waves were known to be on the way. Most folks did indeed evacuate, but in the confusion, nobody noticed that Aki stayed behind. When everyone was gone, she headed back to her own house and picked up her backpack. She was leaving soon, and everything she needed to take with her was already packed.

Her own house would shortly be demolished by one of the larger waves. It would be knocked off its foundation, the natural gas pipe would break and the house would fill with gas. A little later a broken power line would spark and Boom! that's the end of that nifty little beach house! She had picked it specifically because of this upcoming event - she wanted to be sure she didn't leave any traces when she moved on to her next job.

She also knew Tomas's house would survive all the big waves. Tomas had given her the key when he and Red Rocket had headed out, so she decided to leave her pack in his guest room until she finished the job. From her pack, she pulled out and donned a belt and pair of crossed bandoliers, each of which had a number of pouches attached. From one of these pouches she pulled what looked like a transistor radio, although it had a small TV screen built in. She pressed a button and then said "Show Upcoming Scheduled Events".

Text appeared at the bottom of the small screen and scrolled upwards, pulling more text behind it. "Scroll Stop" she said. The top line was flashing; it was showing her that she needed to start on her next task right away.

She clapped her hands together once and said, loudly, 'Tomare!"

From her perspective, everything seemed to stop moving, and dead silence descended. She turned a dial on a box that was attached to her belt and rose smoothly into the air. She turned towards the northeast, and, moving a slider on the same box, she drifted smoothly forward, passing through the wall as if it weren't there, and then accelerating out over the water.

The scene outside was incredible! It was like looking at the most realistic painting ever. Yet another gigantic wave had been sweeping shoreward, but now it was stopped, about a half mile away. A bolt of lightning was frozen in the sky, reaching halfway to the ground. There was still no sound, still no motion. She passed a very brave bird who appeared to be struggling against a fierce wind, and yet was floating motionless and unsupported 60 feet above the lake.

After a timeless interval (how can you judge time, when there is no time?) she spotted the unmoving Coast Guard boats, and in the distance, Red Rocket and Tom Atomic, frozen in the sky, above a giant turtle, also stationary. She landed on the largest boat, and passed through the walls into the radio room. She stuck her head through the radio cabinet and examined the vacuum tubes inside.

Finding the tube she wanted, she concentrated until her hand was solid and pulled the tube from its socket. She allowed both her hand and the tube to return to their insubstantial condition, and withdrew them from the radio cabinet. She opened another pouch and pulled out a seemingly identical tube, which she then inserted into the socket. She dropped the original into her pouch, and then smiled as she crossed another item off of her checklist. Wow, if only all her little 'chores' were so easy!

The replacement vacuum tube appeared to be identical to the original, but it would cause this radio set to broadcast static on the Squadron of Justice frequency, effectively jamming transmission on that frequency for many miles around. There were indeed some fledgling super heroes monitoring that frequency, but they could not be permitted to interfere. After an hour, the vacuum tube would fail and even the most detailed inspection would never show that it had been doctored to jam radio transmissions.

This adventure needed to be handled by Red Rocket and Tom Atomic, with no help from anyone else. Red Rocket had to realize that he actually still did enjoy being a hero, and Tom Atomic had to get over his overconfidence. She knew Master Man would arrive later, but that was fine; by the time he arrived, the dangerous part of the job would be done.

She looked at her miniature 'TV'. Her next task needed to happen about 3.5 minutes in the future. In nice weather she would just have dropped back into 'real' time and set her alarm, but she would just as soon skip the cold and wind. She followed the directions provided by her hand device to the next location.

Since she was moving through 'zero time' there wasn't any hurry. So she inspected the turtle monster with interest as she flew in that direction. She hoped her next action would save its life. She knew that if she could influence events as she hoped, it would have a very interesting life ahead of it!

When she reached the right place, it was, of course, not the right time. She was exactly 3 minutes, 27.35 seconds early. She wasn't sure she could make quite that precise a jump, but she could definitely get closer than she was now. She concentrated and then moved her right hand in a rainbow motion. When she finished, she again brought her hands together with a clap and the command 'Tomare'. She checked her device again and was pleased to see that she was early by just under a second of real time.

Red Rocket had his gauntlet back on and there was a look of intense concentration on his face. He was trying to adjust his plasma thrower to work as a disintegrator. Aki had run computer simulations that suggested 4 possible outcomes, all with about equal probability. Rocket would be cautious enough and everything would work exactly as he hoped, or, he would burn his hand off, or he would kill himself, or he would kill himself and Tom Atomic (as well as the monster). In other words, the probability of a disaster outweighed the probability of a useful outcome by about 3 to 1. It was Aki's next job to insure that none of the disasters occurred.

She knew Tom Atomic well enough to know that he would be very uncomfortable with one of his inventions being used outside of its design parameters, and if he lived through this adventure, he would redesign the plasma thrower to work as a disintegrator and he would make it fail-safe. So she just had to make sure it didn't misfire when Red Rocket used it today.

What the simulations didn't show, quite, was the best way for Aki to intervene. That's why she was on the spot and observing events closely.

Her hand device (really, a Personal Achronic Assistant, or PAA) showed her that she was still about a second too early. Well, short jumps through real time were easy. Red Rocket and Tom Atomic were concentrating on the 'hot spot'; if she moved away from them they would never notice her popping into real time and then back into zero time for less than a second. She clapped her hands and said 'Stato!' and then almost instantly clapped them again, accompanying them with 'Tomare!'. She checked the PAA and saw that her timing was perfect.

She had to do this right the first time. The way her powers worked, she couldn't go back and undo or revise her work - if she messed this up, everyone would have to work with the consequences. Sometimes she could make other changes after an error, and still achieve the desired results. Tom Atomic's stay in the hospital was the result of one such error - she had changed the trajectory of the bullet so it had missed him, but she hadn't counted on the massive radiation dosage that he had been exposed to as a result. She had spent a long interval in zero time after that, trying to figure out how to salvage her mission!

In zero time, Aki took some time to reflect. She had learned long ago that if something was bothering her, she needed to address it as soon as possible. She had thought that she had worked through the pain of Tomas's hospitalization, but if it bothered her this much, she needed to settle it before she made any other mistakes. Her mind drifted back to that traumatic experience...

*************************************************

The alarm on Aki's PAA went off, and she quickly moved into zero time. Sometimes her job was distasteful, but she was looking forward to this. It wasn't often she got to assist in the origin of a new super hero team!

She drifted out through the wall of her apartment, and headed towards the nearby campus. With zero time, she didn't actually need to be close to the scene of the action, but she always tried to minimize the possibility of error. Even with the assistance of Paca (her private name for her PAA), the timing of her next intervention had to be exact.

She drifted into the lab used by Todd and Tomas, and saw a scary tableau. Because she was in zero time, no one was moving, but Todd and Tomas were facing 4 gangsters with drawn pistols. She was only a second or so away from the first shot, and she was a little disturbed that Paca's alarm hadn't come a few seconds earlier - she had specified to the computer to leave her a safety margin, but Paca's definition of `safety margin' was not always in agreement with her own. At least the bullet hadn't yet been fired.

She wasn't in a hurry, now, though. In zero time, she had lots of time... She closely examined the entire room, from several angles, making measurements and taking notes. Every detail was identical to her practice simulations.

The sims had indicated a variety of potential outcomes to this scenario, but they could all be summed up in 2 broad categories:

* Tomas is missed by the first shot, and he and Todd attack and subdue the bad guys. In this scenario, after the heroes of Earth-S disappeared due to the Suspendium trap, Todd and Tomas would decide to form a heroic team to help fill the void left by the missing heroes. One of Todd's descendants figured significantly in one of the alternate futures of Earth-S, and Aki hoped to insure that this particular present led to that particular alternate future.

* Todd and Tomas would both be killed, an outcome that would produce serious negative consequences for Aki . Todd wouldn't have _any_ descendents. She might be able to mend the damage by tweaking the timeline so that someone else fulfilled a destiny not her own - but it would take the home office researchers years to figure out just how to do that. And, she would feel terrible about depriving someone she didn't even know of her chance to fulfill her own destiny.

Without any intervention at all, the sims suggested that the category 1 results were slightly more probable than the category 2 results. It was Aki's job to eliminate the uncertainty, and make sure that the first bullet would miss Tomas. He and Todd would then take care of the rest on their own. She had tested various solutions in her training simulations, and the best solution involved slightly deflecting the bullet. She was glad she hadn't arrived a second and an instant later - the closer the bullet was to Tomas before she took action, the more difficult it would be to make sure it missed him.

Aki had another power she called `stretch time'. She could alter her own perception of the passage of real time. She could make the world seem to move more slowly (and thus she moved more quickly) and she could also do the reverse, although she rarely used this power. Because, the more she changed her perception of real time, the harder it became for her to actually affect events in real time.

When she stretched time enough so that she was able to watch a bullet in slow motion, even the air resisted her! Every movement felt like walking upstream through fast-moving water, and she had to struggle just to breath. And if she moved too fast, she risked dangerous burns from air friction.

She made her preparations in zero time. She positioned herself in the path of the bullet, and put on a breathing mask she pulled out of one of her pouches. Finally, she realized that she was just fidgeting and had no more reasons to stall. She braced herself and slid out of zero time into stretch time.

She saw the bullet emerge slowly from the gun, followed by a blast of smoke. Paca quickly estimated that at the current stretch level, it would take about 40 minutes of subjective time to reach Tomas - plenty of time to do what she needed to do!

If she could remain conscious long enough! No matter how hard she tried, she could barely force air into and out of her lungs. If the mask hadn't been supplying pure oxygen, she thought she would have passed out already! She moved her hand slightly to try to touch the bullet with her finger. The effort it took to make that small movement was incredible - it felt like her arm was buried in wet sand! Straining, she eventually managed to lay her finger gently on the bullet. She could feel it slowly spinning and moving forward even more slowly, and she gently pushed on it. For several seconds, it resisted her push, but her gentle pressure eventually had an effect, and she felt the bullet change directions slightly.

It wasn't as easy as it sounds. Even with the mask forcing pure oxygen into her lungs, she started to feel dizzy. The gentle push with her finger tired her as much as if she had been pushing a primitive, World War II era automobile the length of a football field. Paca quickly confirmed that the bullet would miss Tomas, and she slipped gratefully back into zero time.

She was so tired, she let Paca steer her flight back to the apartment. She slipped out of zero time and into bed, and was asleep in seconds.

So she wasn't around when the bullet smashed into the gamma ray machine, making and breaking just the right connections to unleash a massive torrent of radiation. As we've seen, Tomas received a fatal dosage and the thugs weren't far behind. This was something that the sim designers had never even suspected might happen!

About an hour later, Paca used the alarm to wake Aki. She was groggy, but she knew Paca would never wake her like this unless something was wrong.

"Mission Status!" she commanded.

"Mission status critical. We messed up, luv! I've been monitoring their primitive data channels" which is how it described radio, television and even telephone, "and Tomas is in the hospital with a fatal case of radiation sickness. We go home now, it's an even bet whether they fire us or shoot us. Wanna see my sims?"

The PAA was not supposed to be sentient, but Aki was sure hers was developing a personality. Sometimes it even got a little fresh, and she was certain that aspect wasn't part of the original programming! She sometimes thought that some of the equipment maintenance guys back at the home office were messing with her, but she couldn't be sure. Paca was the single most advanced computing tool ever developed, and no one was quite sure what its limits might be...

"No, you idiot computer! I want to see the mission status update! What happened?"

"There is no need for insulting names, luv!" She must have been imagining the hurt tone in its voice! "That `black box' on the lab bench behind him seems to have blown up when the bullet hit. Never did that in any of the sims, though! It's not your fault."

"OK, Paca, it's not my fault. Fine. Now that we've got that figured out, what happened? And how are we going to salvage this mission?"

Chapter 24

Paca was very pessimistic about saving this particular mission. "There is no known cure in this time period, and we can't use up-time technology. We are going to have to withdraw and let the home office come up with some other alternative."

Aki was stubborn. "Paca, I'm not willing to accept that. I'm going to find a way to overcome this, and you are going to help, not give up!"

"Yes, Mistress Aki! Your every whim is my command!"

"Damn right, you smartass machine!"

Real time was passing, so Aki moved again into zero time. Long stays in the very strange environment of zero time became first uncomfortable and then quickly unbearable, but it would be maybe 40 subjective hours before she started noticing the effects. During those subjective hours in zero time, no time would pass in the real time world of Todd Drake and Tomas Thomson. So, if she came up with a good idea, she could implement it without delay!

She started off with a little detective work. She floated back to the lab where the shooting had happened, and examined the entire scene again. This time, she realized that in her sims, only the outside appearance of the gamma ray generator had been simulated. Nobody figured the functionality would be important...

Well, when she got back, she was going to have a pointed discussion with the director of the research department! This was not the first time she had experienced mission problems due at least in part to poor pre-mission intel. She was the only time-traveling agent the organization had - you would think that they would realize her value and do a better job of preparing her! Especially after what had happened to Lelila, her predecessor.

It didn't improve her temper any that Aki insisted on blaming this one on herself. The organization's regs didn't actually require it, but she should have remained here for another few minutes to verify her results. She had been careless! She had been on this assignment longer than any previous assignment, but that was no excuse!

So she was determined to fix this one herself, but she was equally determined to make darned sure that this kind of mess never happened again!

She couldn't just hop back in time and try again. Her powers prevented her from ever being in the same exact time twice. So she had to work with the current situation.

She reviewed her mission goals. The primary goal was to cement the probability that Todd and Tomas would worked together as a super-hero team. They should have a 15 year-career together. Todd was slated to retire in 1968 after Tomas died during a rescue operation. Along the way, Todd would marry and have a couple of kids. It was extremely unlikely that he would ever meet his future wife if he didn't become a superhero, and equally unlikely that he would become a superhero if Tomas died.

She could only see two options. Either figure out a way to save Tomas's life, right now, or admit defeat and jump back to own time and let the home office figure it out. After a little reflection, she decided that she actually really only had one option...

She couldn't go back and prevent the accident. It was also already too late to shield Tomas from the gamma rays. The only alternative seemed to be to find some way to cure him - some way that would be within the home office rules.

No future medicine. No medical nanites. Was there anything available in this era? The only thing she could think of was in this era that even had a chance was the anti-crime drug...

Aki asked Paca for a complete report on everything that was known about the drug. Maybe, just maybe, it could save Tomas's life! Paca had some interesting information, but not exactly what she wanted to hear:

"Nope, struck out again, darling! Barr only made 3 doses, and we've never been able to duplicate it. Lelila got us a sample, but the molecules in the sample are scientifically impossible. The home office scientists think there was some magical intervention or that Barr had some sort of unsuspected psychic powers. Anyway, those scientifically impossible molecules had a half-life of about 14 months. So the anti-crime drug in Todd's possession is worthless."

"Paca, do you enjoy giving me bad news? No, never mind, you'll only deny having any emotions." She could sense a wisp of a plan floating in the back of her mind. She needed some more information. "Does Todd still have his vial? Does he know it's no longer effective?"

"I can only make assumptions based on the history we were trying to ensure. In that time line, when Todd and Tomas decided that they wanted to be super heroes, they tried to analyze Todd's potion, and discovered that it was no longer active. So they built powers into their costumes instead. Given this information, my assumptions are, yes Todd still has his vial and no, he doesn't know that the drug is now inert."

"Paca, that's great news! We'll just go back to 1946 and use zero time to switch the active drug with some placebo, and then we'll switch it back here in 1953!" Aki was very enthusiastic. "And" she thought to herself, "since there is no record of Jim Barr ever making another batch of the stuff, I can add a few drops of own time Panacea Potion to make sure it cures Tomas, and no one will ever know."

"How do you know that Todd will think of using the anti-crime drug in time?" Paca wondered. Although it had lots of information, and could think really fast, it had no imagination.

"That's not a real problem, is it? From what you told me, he's already contacted Bulletman and Bulletgirl for help catching the bad guy. That has to remind him of the drug, right? And if it doesn't, I'll think of some way, myself! After all, I'm not the organization's top field agent for nothing!"

Maybe she was imagining the sarcasm in Paca`s voice. "I should remind you that you are the _only_ field agent in the organization, but I predict you will only ignore it anyway. So instead I'll warn you to exercise all possible caution - this mission is starting to resemble Lelila's last mission, and you know how that turned out."

Aki shuddered as she remembered it. Before Lelila's last mission, history showed that the Hindenburg had remained in service until it was shot down by the Allies during the Fall of Berlin in 1945.

"But she was trying to send a message to her earlier self. I'll be particularly careful not to leave any traces! And it's not like I haven't lived in that era already. In fact, the timing is practically perfect. So that's the plan, Paca! Instead of trying to scare me, start figuring out how to help make it run smoothly."

"At your service, my dear!"

"Smartass!"

Together they worked out as safe a plan as possible. Aki had already spent 2 years in the World War 2 era, where she had been the school science teacher who fostered Todd's interest in magnetism, and also invited Jim Barr to be a judge at the school science fair.

She sometimes spent some vacation and relaxation time in the past eras after an assignment was completed, but she had not done so in 1944. The primitive attitudes towards anyone who was 'different' and the way women were treated (even though she sensed changes occurring), along with the civilian hardships due to wartime rationing and the knowledge that brave men and women were dying every day, combined to make this a particularly unattractive era to her.

She also had not liked having to use Holographic Image Disguise Equipment (HIDE) the whole two years, disguised as a WASP. She was paranoid that it would fail while she was teaching her class, or somebody would surprise her when she temporarily turned it off for rest or maintenance... and a Japanese woman, who had been using a disguise to teach in the New York City public school system would probably not get a fair trial in 1944.

So she had left 1944 as soon as possible after the 1943-1944 school year was over, pretending she had a better job offer on the West Coast. This meant there was no reason she couldn't jump back to 1946. She didn't know the exact date Bulletman gave Todd the vial of anti-crime drug, but she knew it was sometime in winter.

Paca had a set of mobile sensors called a `Mobile Observation and Notification System.', or MONS Each of the sensors resembled a baseball card. Paca could direct them to fly, and they could adhere to any flat surface, and then automatically hide by using their own HIDE system to emulate the nearby background.

So the final plan was simple. Jump back to about August, 1946, use the HIDE to reactivate her earlier identity so she could draw upon the bank accounts she had set up in that name, and use the PacaMONS to spy on Todd. Once Jim Barr gave him the vial containing the anti- crime drug, use zero time to swap the drug for a placebo.

She had to stay in 1946 until mid-December, but there were no hitches. She retrieved the active anti-crime drug and jumped back to 1953. She returned a split instant after she had left. She had Paca redeploy the PacaMONS, and while it was engaged in the task of directing them to the selected locations and making sure they were properly camouflaged, so secretly sprinkled a few drops of Panacea Potion into the anti-crime drug. Instants after Todd recovered his vial of what he thought was the anti-crime drug, she had replaced his vial of placebo with the vial of active drug, and history took it's course from there. She so loved it when a plan came together!

She stuck around for a few more days this time, and when she was sure that Tomas would live, she jumped back to own time. Her intuition told her that she had nudged this new time line into a path that was acceptable to the home office, (especially after their foul-up!), but they were really going to have to collect new information and run some new sims.

**********************************************

Aki's mind skipped forward among her memories of the past... (this time travel stuff is tough to write about, and think about, both for the author and for Aki! The language just isn't designed for it!) She had been assigned other missions while the researchers were collecting more information about the altered time line, and about 3 own time years later (and about 7 subjective years for Aki), she had been reassigned to the `Todd and Tomas' case.

Her first task was to learn the new history of the Todd/Tomas time line. Compared to the one she had been attempting to promote, there were some interesting changes.

In the now-existing time line, Tomas's near-death experience had convinced him that he didn't really want to be a super hero. He had dropped out of UC and joined a detective agency.

And Todd had already decided he didn't want to be a super hero any longer. He would go on to receive his PhD in chemistry and then return to the University of Chicago as an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry.

Tomas would consult with Todd on several of his cases. The two eventually decided to form their own detective agency, which they named TnT Investigations. Todd would eventually get married and have kids, but he wouldn't meet the right woman, and his many-times removed descendent wasn't quite right for the historical role that Aki was trying to preserve. Tomas would marry, but never have children, and when his wife died of old age while he was still young, he joined a monastery.

The boffins' new sims predicted that Aki could easily nudge this reality into a slightly different path, in which Todd would again meet the right woman and have the correct descendents. "Easy for them to say!" she had thought at the time. "They aren't the ones who have to live in a primitive era!"

Chapter 25

Keeping Red Rocket from blowing things up was easy. In zero time, she used a small daub of a quickly-evaporating putty to block the hydrogen nozzle of Rocket`s wrist plasma thrower. During the dangerous early stage, when the hot spot was out of the mixing chamber but still close to Rocket's wrist, the nozzle was completely blocked, and by the time Rocket tried to ignite the hot spot, the putty had totally evaporated.

Except for a few loose ends, this was the successful completion of Aki's mission. Red Rocket and Tom Atomic could handle it without further help.

She flew back to the beach in zero time, and she welcomed Red Rocket and Tom Atomic home with a hot dinner. Tomas wanted to try to repair her house, but Aki told him that she had decided weeks ago to move on; an art museum out on the West Coast had accepted her application as an associate curator of sculptures. She had an airline ticket in hand, and she had already packed before the giant waves struck. She had no furniture; the cottage had come furnished. And there was really no reason to try to save anything. The owner might as well collect insurance. She needed a ride to the airport tomorrow, and Todd was glad to drop her off on his way back to school.

Just before she went to sleep, she smiled. She was pleased with this new time line, even though it had been so difficult getting it started. The world still got a new heroic team, even stronger than in the other time lines, and she liked Tomas's heroic name in this time line best. In the other time lines, he had chosen H-Bomb and Atom Smasher. Yuck!

Not only that, she had actually saved Tomas's life, 18 years in the future! In the other time lines, he had died in 1971 during a rescue mission. In this time line, he would be severely injured during that mission, but the super powers granted him by the anti-crime drug would save his life. Although it would take more than 15 years before he was fully healthy again, he would return as a solo hero in early 1988.

And most importantly of all, Todd married the `right' woman and had the `right' descendent.