JLE: Fertility Crisis

Based on the Justice League Europe arc running from issues 25 to 28. Now told without any damn censoring.

Beeps, boops, and subwoofer booms filled the air. The control room of Justice League Europe was now a video arcade for an audience of two. Booster Gold and Blue Beetle, alias Ted Kord and Michael Carter, sat on a pair of beanbags before the mighty viewscreen that usually depicted the Earth and all that might be happening to it, natural or unnatural, on a given day.

Now, with the screen split between Ted and Booster, it showed their characters’ valiant attempts to outflank, outgun, and outsmart their computerized adversaries.

“I can’t believe how realistic this is,” Booster noted. “I’ve seen skies exactly that gray in real life. And the buildings, the streets—this is exactly like Cairo! Wait, we’ve been to Cairo, right?”

“I’ve just been to Bialya,” Ted replied.

“Same difference. This could be our photos from that trip. Except no one’s wearing gaudy costumes, they’re all in black and camouflage and gray and brown…”

Ted blinked. “It’s so realistic. Wait, no it isn’t. In real life, there’d be all kinds of superheroes there. And I bet they’d all be wearing colors and capes and trunks…”

“Yeah, but come on, they can’t include superheroes. Then whoever played as Superman would just automatically win. Everyone would just play as Superman.”

“Not me. I’d play Wonder Woman.”

Booster looked at him askew. “You’d play a girl?”

“Look, if I’m going to be looking at someone’s behind for six hours…”

Booster held his hands up defensively. “Hey now! Superman wears a cape! And trunks!”

“So you like the mystery,” Ted noted sagely. “The tease, the hints which fire the imagination—”

“I do not! I don’t have any imagination!”

Booster’s character was shot and exploded by a grenade launcher. Booster hung his head.

“Now that’s totally unrealistic,” Ted said. “I bet a real grenade launcher would blast you into pieces, not just send you flopping around like a Raggedy Ann.”

“Hey Ted.”

“Yeah, Booster?”

“You think this is what we’d be doing if we hadn’t bungled that Evilutionist thing?”

“We didn’t bungle crap!” Booster protested angrily. “The Titans were there too! And the Suicide Squad! Even the Doom Patrol! We might be screw-ups, but we can’t be big enough screw-ups that Superman and Batman and all the rest can’t unscrew what we screw! Heck, even J’onn is enough to keep us reasonably balanced between screwed and unscrewed!”

“You must’ve had a screw loose to time travel back here and get neutered like the rest of us. Why do we want to look at Wonder Woman anyway? Can’t do anything about it…”

“We never could do anything about it,” Booster mused thoughtfully. “What would be your pick-up line if Diana were here right now? ‘Hey, good-looking, did you know I’m as fertile as the rest of humanity’?”

“That actually would be a good pick-up line if I were still fertile. ‘Hey, baby, I’m not quite the last man on Earth, but I might be the last who can get you pregnant!’”

“Except for the whole one percent of the population that’s fertile too. Which includes all the superheroes that were fighting Evilutionist when he set off that shockwave thingey. And they all already have six-pack abs and perfect teeth, like they need help getting laid.”

Ted paused the game and sighed miserably. “How is it neither of us can do anything with women and we’re still obsessing over women?”

“I don’t know, Ted. Maybe it’s a cosmic… synchroneity… thing. Back when we were fertile, all we did was sit around and play video games. If, now that we’re infertile, we started going out and meeting women, the universe would be all out of whack!”

Ted groaned and laid back in his beanbag. “Why me? Why did I have to get stuck on perimeter duty when there was a shockwave thingey about to go off?”

“Hey, at least you didn’t have crowd control. I’m infertile because I had to make sure no one got trampled to death. If Americans could just form a line, I wouldn’t be shooting blanks! Bet those lucky sods in Justice League Europe didn’t have to do crowd control…”

Ted sat up again. “Hey, you’re from the future. When is this whole mess going to get sorted out? It just doesn’t feel right, being all… impotent.”

“It’d feel a lot better if you didn’t use that word!”

“But when does Mr. Terrific or the Spectre or Dr. Fate or someone fix all of this?”

Booster shrugged, “I don’t know, man, I wasn’t a history buff. I actually tried to time-travel before Superman showed up and steal his thunder, but I got the dates wrong. And I entered the wrong date wrong too; I thought Superman showed up sometime in the Thirties.”

“The 1930s?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I remember reading something about him fighting the Japanese, but maybe Supes is just a bigot.”

“What if you showed up in 2020 and Superman had been around for like a hundred years?”

“I’d hope he was going to retire soon. I hear his replacement is real lame. Marches in pride parades and stuff. Whines about the environment.”

“Yeesh. And Supes was on such a roll with Supergirl and Power Girl.”

“Yeah, man. What I wouldn’t give to mentor two hotties like those!” Booster squinted. “You know, I really don’t remember anything like this in the history books.”

“Booster, the only thing you do seem to remember is that Superman might hate Japanese people.”

Booster set his controller aside. “But that brings up two possibilities, right? Either I forgot about this whole fertility crisis, or I’ve gotten sucked into a Hypertime alternate universe… thing.”

Ted put aside his controller too. “A universe where we—err, that is, everyone—failed to stop the Evilutionist instead of rocking him like we did the Sun-Eater and the Monarch and all those guys?”

“Yeah. You’re always hearing about how superheroes changed the past to keep Hitler from winning and stuff. Maybe this time, someone screwed around so that Hitler won the Great War.”

“World War II,” Ted corrected.

Booster gasped. “I don’t even want to think about a timeline where Hitler won both those wars.” He grunted. “Not that it’s much better being in a timeline where most of humanity dies out while a few lucky SOBs get harems.”

“Probably Barry’s fault. Dan Garrett told me that whenever they found out someone had screwed up the timeline—”

Booster interrupted him with a wretched sob.

“Booster? Are you crying?”

“No!” Booster sniffed. “It’s just I came all the way back through the centuries to be in the Golden Age of Heroes and instead I wind up in some… some… Elseworld! It’s just not fair!”

Ted patted him on the shoulder. “If it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure that means that somewhere in the main timeline there’s another you.”

Booster wiped his nose. “He better not have a bigger dick than me.”

“SCOTT! SCOTT FREE! MISTER MIRACLE, WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL YOURSELF! WHERE IS THAT MAN? A WIFE SHOULD KNOW WHERE HER HUSBAND IS AT ALL TIMES! IT’S NOT LIKE I ASKED HIM TO MARRY ME!”

Big Barda barreled into the room, all seven feet of her, and all the more imposing for how every inch of her bristled with muscle.

Well, perhaps not every inch.

For at the moment, she wasn’t wearing her usual battle armor or even the casual clothing she would brandish so as not to stand out in the suburbs she was trying to thrive in. No, at the moment Barda was wearing a floor-length trenchcoat. Closed though it was, her long strides repeatedly threw open the split in its hem, displaying legs like Greek columns. Not even a single hair obscured the luster of her healthy tan or the evident softness of her bare skin.

And though the trenchcoat was buttoned up from the collar down, the collar itself buttoned far below her neck. It struggled to close over her ample bust, the awe-inspiring fullness of her breasts shoving her lapels aside and all but bursting out into the open as every step made their abundance jostle and jump.

Barda wore heavy leather boots as well, but somehow they didn’t break the spell of her tightly closed trenchcoat holding back her wonderfully curved and supremely muscular body. It was unlike Barda to dress up sexually. It was unthinkable to imagine her in high heels.

“YOU TWO!” Barda stampeded her way between the boys and the viewscreen, where she stood with her legs akimbo and her hands on her hips. “On Apokolips you’d both be electro-whipped for dereliction of duty! But of course, standards are more lax here. Still, if I thought that you were sitting on your big butts while my husband was in danger--!”

“Big?” Booster muttered.

“We’re not!” Ted assured her. “There’s no emergency! We’re on monitor duty and if there was an emergency, there’s a little light that would be flashing, which it’s—” Ted quickly checked. “Not!”

“His is big, sure, but big butts plural?”

“No emergency,” Barda growled, sounding a little wistful. “Good. But where then is my husband? Don’t tell me I have to find Oberon for an answer—that little man is even harder to find than Scott!”

“Maybe you could get Oberon to wear a bunch of green and yellow and red,” Ted suggested, trying to be helpful.

Barda glared at him. But then, there weren’t many ways she looked at him except glaring.

“Does she think it’s big because it’s muscular?” Booster wondered. “I have been using the Thigh Master—hey, whoa, watch it!”

Barda’s booted foot was very close to where Booster had set down his controller, but while her heel had landed, her toes had yet to touch down.

“Is there something you have to say about where Scott Free, the light of my life, the future father of my children, the key to my unbridled pleasure… has gotten himself off to?” Barda asked.

“Yeah. Kilowog said he had a thing, so he asked for Scott to fill in for him at the European embassy. Rewiring the security system and whatnot.”

“’Key to her unbridled pleasure’?” Ted repeated.

Barda tossed her head about. Her hair—a long curtain of satin-black softness—flew about her shoulders. “Thank you, Booster,” she said, a note of sincere gratitude in her voice. “I will remember this should the day come when you feebly cry out for my Mega-Rod to join you in battle.”

“When wouldn’t she join us in battle?” Ted wondered. “Hey, Barda, would you not join me in battle?”

Barda was already on her way to the teleporter tubes.

“Why do I have to feebly cry out?” Booster asked. “Can I cry out in a strong and manly way?”