DC x Marvel

Mumbo was relatively satisfied with the way his life was taking him. He had been conducting in the Jump City Orchestra for a good time now; he had an apartment, which he filled with various musical themed knick knacks and instruments (he didn’t play himself much anymore, but he still liked to collect); he went to the grocery store every Wednesday. Normal, in other words.

Aside from a few interruptions, namely that incident with the Titans and Punk Rocket crashing his performance a few years ago, it was all normal and that was alright. If he felt a pang or two every time he saw a flier for a magic show, or if the spot on his desk where his top hat used to be felt particularly empty, well, the scars of the past were not so easily healed and it wouldn’t do to forget his past misdeeds entirely. Instead, he just tried to exist as he was now. Wandless, magicless, normal.

He was humming a little tune of his own composition, something light and airy and if he had to put lyrics to, maybe something about the mystery of the mundane. It kept him occupied as he hobbled his way on the crowded sidewalks.

The skies were cloudy, but it wasn’t forecast to rain, so he only had his jacket as luck betrayed him. He shucked it over his head to use as a makeshift umbrella and hurried on, careful not to bump into any of the other passerbys. Luckily he wasn’t far from his destination. He swept past the double doors of the symphony center.

“Hey, Martin, leave your jacket over there.” The receptionist, what was her name, pointed over to an alcove with a rack of umbrellas. Martin nodded and doffed his outer shell. He bundled it into a little corner so as to not get anything else wet. “Bit of a shitty day, huh?” The woman, whose most notable feature was the relative largeness of her hazel eyes in comparison to the rest of her face, asymmetric and discordant in a not unappealing fashion, was always like this. Martin remembered, ah, hmm.

“True, true, my dear. Let’s see if a little music will brighten our day.” Ah, that was it. It was always a bit like coming back to himself. He had to warm up his thoughts before he could start performing.

The receptionist half-politely laughed. She too was an actress in a sense, and so in turn, “You know I can’t hear anything out here.” The soundproofing was well established in a venue as old and as well-funded as this one. He nodded with a slight upward turn of his lips and having finished the little scene, exited and entered through another set of doors and then a few more sets of doors through winding hallways to the musica proper.

Great booming emptiness greeted him. Mahogany walls encircling, rows and rows of velvet chairs, and up in front, the stage, replete with instruments and people. Martin liked to be fashionably late, just a little, so in this and every performance here he was the last to arrive. He strode up to the stage and gave a theatrical wave of his white gloved hands before taking up the wand, the ordinary wand made of ordinary wood. He had conditioned his artists to not break the silence beforehand. It was bad luck, an invitation to chaos. Instead, just let there be silence before the sound.

He tapped the desk with his wand. A signal of intent. And then with a, “Five, six, seven, eight,” the practice session began in earnest. With a snap of the wrist, the brass began to play. And then with a flick, the winds. Another, the strings, and finally, the boom of the percussion. He moved in time and the band matched his rhythm. A beautiful, expected, as planned, excruciating agony of what was to be for the rest of his life.

Martin staggered. Not his hands, which kept moving of their own accord. No, it was internal, some inner mechanism that in response to the sheer crushing normality of the surrounding stimuli, grinded to a stop..

He wouldn’t even be here if he wasn’t **** to pay restitution for his thefts. His stupid, idiot, plans. Sure he had gotten off light in comparison, had blamed most of his actions on the wand, which was half-true and had in turn half-reduced his sentence, but he’d be penniless for the rest of what remained of his unremarkable life.

And he knew now, of course, that it was his own damn fault. But it had been so enticing, that brilliant flame of ambition, of chaos, of magic. He thought, as his hands moved and moved in looping circles of pre-planned, rote motion, that given the opportunity, most would have taken it, succumbed to the undeniable lust of the arcane.

His shoulders slumped, just the tiniest amount. The music that filled the air was so, so pedestrian. A classical piece, for the old granite minds of the city’s rich and famous that were going to be sitting in those empty seats this coming Saturday. Something that had been performed a thousand million times before and would be a thousand million times again, and his hands that moved to direct its performance were just the cogs in a grand and terrible machine.

He wanted out. Anything. Any minor trifle of unexpected outcome. Let that musician over there, yes, the one with the blond hair and pretty blue eyes, he couldn’t remember her name, let her accidentally drop her saxophone and let it clatter to the ground in cacophony. Let that musician, the one playing the flute, start cursing his cheating wife and this misbegotten gathering and storm off in a dramatic exit.

Let that old fool, yes that one on the podium, what was his name, let him curl into a ball on the floor and start weeping openly. That would be quite the show, wouldn’t it? Something these plebeians had never seen before. Yes, perhaps, during the show itself, not just this practice.

Only, only, it wouldn’t be the same. It would be just something that could happen. Something within the bounds of reality. There would be no magicked gloves singing show tunes, no people turned into animals that he could pull out of a hat, no grand finale where the villain beats the hero for once. There would only be old Martin Jones, the ex-villain and now somewhat talented conductor.

So it was, to some surprise, that Mumbo, and the rest of the orchestra, and in fact, the entire world, heard a gentle tapping.

*Tap* *Tap* *Tap*

“Is this thing on? Checking, checking, ah, haha. You guessed it. It’s me, Mr. Mxyzptlk, the fifth dimensional imp, here to make things interesting. You can hear this, right? Good.” Mumbo’s hands stopped moving after the first few words. He had never heard of such a person or thing, and was blissfully unaware of the breadth of the broadcast. In fact, he would have imagined he had finally gone mad if not for the shared look of confusion on the rest of his fellow’s faces. “And by interesting, I mean super interesting! Haha. Give me a moment, yes, right there. Okay, good. And… voila! Notice anything yet?”

Mumbo looked around. He didn’t. Everything apart from the mannerisms of the band was exactly as it had been a few moments ago.

“No? Well, look again, haha. I’ve mixed up your dimension and another. They don’t call me the imp of imps for nothing. And I won’t unmix them until you get me to say the name of the third dimension’s version of me backwards. An old twist on a classic! Anywho, I’ll be around, but don’t look for me otherwise you won’t find me. Oh, and dimensional mixing isn’t a simple process. Some items may have gotten misplaced in the shuffle. Toodles!”

*Scritch*

The sound of a microphone shutting off abruptly filled the air before vanishing into silence once more. And then a chorus of cries of disbelief and muffled, hurried discussions. The people of Jump City were used to superhero shenanigans, but this seemed on another level than the usual small-time local mischief.

And it was that Mumbo noticed six small, almost missable, shards of multi-colored crystal had affixed themselves to the tip of his conducting wand, glinting enticingly under the stage lights.

“Huh.” He looked at it, really looked at it, as if his stare would reveal the secrets of their sudden appearance. When nothing happened, he gave his desk an experimental tap.

*POOF*

A black top hat with a silver band popped into existence. Oh. He tapped the desk and this time it turned into a hat, matching the appearance of its smaller cousin. Oh. That was new. He hadn’t been able to do that before, at least not in the real world. His greater magic had been limited to the illusionary world of the wand.

This act, of course, had been noticed.

“Martin?” What’s her name asked. “Did you do that?”

“Me?” Was it him? He supposed it had been. As the arm that moved the wand, as the mind that provided the idea. It didn’t seem real, and, and that was what was so fantastic about it! He remembered, ah, what it had been like. “Yes… yes! I did. Oh, I feel like singing!” He waved his wand and a puppet copy of himself, clad in magician outfit and blue-skinned, rushed onto the stage with a clipboard in hand.

“Places everybody.” It wobbled back and forth with noodle arms. “The show’s about to start!”