The Linear Ones: A DC / Marvel Crossover Story

A crossover event unlike any you've seen before, and a love letter to both Alan Moore's Watchmen and Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Someone is murdering time travelers and speedsters in the DC multiverse, and hardly anyone has noticed. Meanwhile, one of the Endless has gone mad, affecting reality in a myriad of unsavory ways. All of spacetime begins to unravel. The only chrono-kinetics left alive in the entire DC multiverse must find a missing hero from the Marvel's Earth-616... somehow. When all seems lost, an unexpected and powerful ally reveals they've been trying to help all along.

I know the broad strokes of the plot, and many of the characters I'll be using, but I'm going to try to let the characters go wherever feels right from scene to scene. In other words, I use my improv training when I write, so this is going to be a wild ride :-D I've deliberately left out some more well-known characters, partly because they're too powerful and partly as a personal challenge.

Notes: This story presents an alternate ending for Doctor Manhattan, because I just didn't get what the writers of Doomsday Clock were thinking. These events begin right after the events of The Button. You don't have to read The Button first, but the story might be a little more fun for you if you do. *The Linear Ones* isn't compatible with the ending of Doomsday Clock, because it requires Doctor Manhattan to still be alive. The easiest way for that to happen is to move a version of Kal-El from one universe to another, then raise and/or train him personally.

While it's true that everything ends, every ending contains with itself the seeds of a new beginning.

*The Linear Ones* contains spoilers for the following comics: The Sandman (75-issue run by Neil Gaiman), Watchmen, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Marvel vs DC, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Time Masters: Vanishing Point, Flashpoint Paradox, DC Universe: Rebirth, The Button, and Doomsday Clock. Proceed at your own risk.