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Lieutenant Victor Sabien decidedly did not want Jack and Trixie in his office. Again. But after what they had to say he decidedly did not want them leaving on their own terms, either. Face reddening, fists clenching, another ulcer forming among what must now have been countless others, he lumbered after his least favorite ever-present pains-in-the-ass, finger poised for a trademark scathing beratement, and stepped through his office door.
Captain Omar Khan decidedly did not want anyone in his office. In a city like this and a police department with a reputation like this one, anyone who came to talk to the Captain in person meant yet another impossible predicament for perhaps the only honest man left in the city to solve. On this particular day, unfortunately, a great deal of people had passed through his office, and Captain Khan was more ready to finally be leaving his office than he might have ever been in his life. He turned off his work-comms, just barely refraining from using it to bash his own head in, pushed wearily away from the desk, prayed that none of his officers would ambush him on the way out of the building, and stepped through his office door.
Chief O'Malley decidedly did not want these vigilantes in his city. He’d said it once, he’d say it a thousand times. Unfortunately, he’d also been handed five different reports of evil-superpowered nonsense just in the past day, and god help him he knew at least one of them would eventually lead him either to an impossible hostage situation or a secret meeting on a rooftop to beg the Red Panda for assistance. He decided the second option was, regrettably, preferable. Holding tight to his last shreds of dignity, O’Malley pressed the ever-taunting button under his desk, glared once more at the stack of supervillain cases on his desk, and stepped through his office door.
Sir Caroline decidedly did not want to be in this… well. No matter what name it might have had in a world before desktop computers and secretaries and fax machines, for the purposes of the Break Room it was still an office, and Sir Caroline definitely did not want to be there. Though she may have managed to avoid the paperwork associated with her new position thus far, she couldn't avoid it forever. Or so Queen Mira had said - Caroline was still cautiously optimistic. After about an hour of cataloguing arrests and monster encounters with as little concealed disdain as she could bother to muster, Caroline decided she was finished for the day. Throwing an accusatory glance at the messenger-bird that waited patiently on the windowsill to collect the finished report, she stood resolutely from her desk, pushed the mountain of papers to the side, and stepped through her Office Door.
And it really was a Capital-D Door, at this point - at least from the perspective of the Break Room. A narratively convenient interdimensional portal really ought to have a capitalized name, after all.
The room the Lieutenant, the Captain, the Chief, and the… Sir stepped into was grey. It was also white and blue and varying shades of eggshell-yellow, but for the most part to the casual observer it just looked grey. Vaguely uncomfortable-looking chairs were scattered lazily about on a tackily-patterned linoleum floor that didn't appear to have seen a mop for the better part of a decade. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, one slightly dimmer than the others and looking like it might start ominously flickering at any moment, and the ceiling itself looked like the very first place one would check when inspecting a building for asbestos. At one end of the room, a plain white sheet cake sat on a cheap plastic folding table, flanked by a pile of paper napkins and disposable forks. Hanging on the wall above it was a limp banner, patterned in what was probably supposed to look like confetti. It read:
"Welcome, Long-Suffering Fictional Policepersons and Associated Archetypes! Take a Seat! Have Some Cake!"
"What." said Caroline, O'Malley, Khan, and Sabien in varying degrees of bafflement, fury, and resigned exhaustion.
"What?" they chorused again, this time in very similar degrees of bewilderment, suspicion, and well-concealed fear as they noticed each other's presence for the first time.
Caroline was the first to act, drawing her sword in a flash and realizing too late she couldn't physically point it at all of them at once. She settled on pointing it extra threateningly at some midpoint between the three other people in the room.
"Who are you, where am I, and how did you get me here?"
The three men stared at her, then at each other, then at her giant-ass fantasy sword. Sabien’s face somehow seemed to turn an even deeper shade of red as his jaw clenched enough to crack the teeth of any normal man who did not experience this kind of stress on a day-to-day basis. Khan fought through his bone-deep exhaustion to settle into a stance that was somehow both disgruntled and concerned.
O’Malley just looked indignant.
“I might ask you the same question! Who do you think you are, kidnapping the chief of police like this? We do not stand of this sort of supervillain gimmickry in the city of Toronto!”
“What the hell is a Toronto? Is that where we are? Your magic stronghold infested with monsters, no doubt. I’ll have you know, cretin, that you have made a grave mistake in capturing a knight of the Second Citadel, and when I escape I will leave none of you disgusting creatures alive. Do we understand each other?”
“I’m just going to step in and say we almost one-hundred percent do not, miss…?” Sabien offered, raising the bushiest of eyebrows and gesturing for the mysterious angry sword lady to provide a name. Caroline growled and angled her threatening sword in the direction of his neck.
“That is Sir Caroline of the Second Citadel, sorcerer. That must be what you are, isn’t it? Sorcerers or witches or beasts in disguise. It is no matter. I ask again: Where. Are. We?”
“I believe what this… very red man is trying to say,” Khan said through a beleaguered sigh, “is that none of us know what the hell is going on here, and we would appreciate it if you would put down your…” he glanced at her weapon and pinched the bridge of his nose in what almost looked like pain. “sword, and let us all talk this out like rational human beings. Would that be okay with you, Sir Caroline?”
As Caroline’s scowl twitched even deeper, O’Malley took the opportunity to search behind him for the door he entered through. He found he was not nearly as surprised as he should be that it was no longer there. Sabien seemed to have discovered the same thing, and was now looking around wildly in slowly-growing panic. Caroline took this all in and allowed herself a rare moment of self-reflection and awareness as Quanyii’s voice echoed in her mind: You can’t just go around stabbing anyone who threatens you, sweetums – how could you torture them for information then? Leaving aside for the moment that torture was beneath her and Quanyii knew it, Caroline got the message. She slowly lowered her sword so that it was no longer actively pointed in the general vicinity of anyone’s head, but kept it out of its sheath.
“Fine. I can tell that you all seem just as trapped here as I am. Let’s talk.”
O’Malley frowned. “Well, that’s all very well and good, but if you aren’t a supervillain, and neither are either of you,” he glanced at Khan, who was nodding and still pinching his nose, and Sabien, who was staring forlornly at the blank wall where his door had been, “then what could we possibly have to talk about that would make any kind of sense at all?” The room was silent for a few moments, and then Khan spoke up.
“Well, there is a welcome banner. And some cake.”
This seemed to snap Sabien out of his confused reverie and he blinked blearily up at the words on the banner.
“Fictional policepersons? What in god’s green earth is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m going to hazard a guess and say it means us,” intoned Khan.
Sabien made a choking noise, like he was trying to be furious about something but couldn’t quite figure out what that something should be. Caroline just frowned.
“And what, pray tell, is a ‘policeperson’?”
“I don’t know about the rest of you, but that’s my job – Captain Omar Khan of the Hyperion City Police Department, for all that it counts for much.”
“Well, I’ve never heard of a Hyperion City in my life. Sounds like something out of a bad science fiction story. Or some superpowered wacko’s speech about the utopia they plan to build out of the ruins of my city,” grumbled O’Malley. “And anyway, I’ve never heard it called a policeperson before. I’m a policeMAN, thank you very much – no offense, ah, Sir Caroline.”
Khan squinted at O’Malley. “What century are you living in? That sounds like the kind of uselessly gendered language they say people used back in ancient earthen days.”
O’Malley made an offended sound, ignoring the way Sabien glanced confusedly at Sir Caroline when Khan said the word “ancient.”
“Ancient earthen? What, are you trying to tell me you’re from the future? Or – oh, dear God. Are you an alien? I don’t think we’ve had one of those before.”
“Before?” Sabien blurted. “And you’ve had the other thing before?”
“Well, it was never confirmed really, but I know more about what that lunatic the Red Panda gets up to than he thinks.”
“You’ve dealt with a panda monster that uses time travel? How did you defeat him?”
“A panda – what?”
“Now hold on,” Khan interjected. “I am not an alien. I live on Mars – that’s about as close to earth as anyone gets nowadays.”
“A Martian!”
“What? No, the Martians died thousands of years ago. We think.”
Sabien looked a little faint.
Caroline looked about ready to start swinging her sword again. “Earth? Mars? What in the Saints’ name are these places you speak of? Where do you hail from and –” she glanced at the strange clothes they wore with a mildly disgusted look on her face – “when?”
“That’s actually a fairly good idea. What year do you all think it is? I’m Toronto, 1932.”
“Los Angeles, 1949. What the blazes is going on here?”
“No, wait, this could be helpful. I’m in Hyperion City, like I said before. Year 301,527.”
Caroline scowled. “This is ridiculous. None of those places exist. I should never have asked. The important question is, how do we get out of here?”
Silence filled the room once more. The letters on the banner seemed to taunt them. “Take a seat! Have some cake!” it said. Sabien, Khan, O’Malley, and Caroline looked at each other. And at the banner. And at the cake.
Two hours later (at least as far as they could tell with no measure of passing time), the cake was halfway gone and four world-weary law enforcement professionals slouched in chairs arranged in a circle, watching Sabien take his turn blubbering furiously about self-important private eyes with no concept of legal procedure. Caroline and O’Malley took in the tale with the same fascinated horror the others had given Caroline’s account of the obnoxious four-armed lizard that almost started a war. Khan just nodded in sad understanding.
Sabien was interrupted suddenly by a small ding! from seemingly nowhere, echoing between the walls.
“What in the name of –” before he could finish his sentence, a swooping noise filled his ears, and the room was gone. And then in four separate places all across the multiverse: in Los Angeles, Toronto, the Distant Future and the Distant Past, four law enforcement professionals took in the other side of their office door. They took in the plastic fork and the paper napkin and the cake crumbs in their hands. They glanced around to check if anyone had seen them. And they looked skyward with the most long-suffering expression a policeperson may ever be observed to make.
Two weeks later, O’Malley, Caroline, Khan, and Sabien could almost pretend they had forgotten about the whole incident. Sabien was in his office, ready to chase again after Jack and Trixie. Khan was in his office, more ready than ever to go home. O’Malley was in his office, ready to head reluctantly up to the rooftop once again. Caroline was in her… office, staring daggers at one of the Queen’s birds as she pushed out the door.
And suddenly once again, the room was grey.
"Welcome, Long-Suffering Fictional Policepersons and Associated Archetypes! Take a Seat! Have Some Cake!"