After Tony literally kicked him out the window, Joey simply floated through the night sky toward Queens.
It was Christmas, after all.
He couldn't exactly freeload at someone else's mansion overnight.
The Amazo android core remained in his hand, and the more Joey thought about the future, the more confused he became.
Why didn't the Fantastic Four recognize him at all?
And how exactly had Tony turned into a cold-blooded conqueror in the future?
If Joey had truly existed in their past for an entire year, there was no way nobody would remember him.
Both Joey and his Superman form had been revealed right in front of them, yet the Fantastic Four had treated him like a complete stranger.
Then again, they had even forgotten the true identity of Doctor Doom due to magical tampering.
Forgetting Joey too wasn't entirely impossible.
The multiverse itself represented infinite possibilities.
Anything could happen.
A Doctor Doom powerful enough to dominate the entire multiverse wasn't even particularly strange by comic-book standards.
What Joey couldn't accept was the possibility that such a monster might exist because of him.
If saving his own universe meant condemning countless others to destruction—then what exactly would that make him?
And now, he had been handed a chance to save those future universes.
Because before Reed Richards disappeared, he had given Joey one final proposal regarding the Amazo core.
First: To avoid triggering an even worse paradox—and to save Joey's own universe—the Amazo robots had to be created.
Which meant Joey still needed to hand both the core and its technology over to the current Tony Stark.
Second: The future Fantastic Four and the surviving resistance fighters challenging Doctor Doom and his nearly perfect Amazo army head-on was pure suicide.
They had zero chance of winning.
But…
What if the Amazo robots weren't actually perfect?
With Reed Richards' level of intelligence, he had managed to design a preliminary algorithm—a hidden backdoor program—in the final moments before the paradox dimension collapsed.
The code was incredibly subtle.
If Joey refined it slightly and embedded it into the Amazo core from the very beginning, almost nobody would ever discover it.
It would remain dormant until the exact moment in the future when the Fantastic Four launched their final battle against Doctor Doom.
At that point, Reed would activate the hidden protocol and cripple the entire Amazo network—giving the doomed resistance forces one tiny chance at survival.
One opportunity to break through the robot army and confront Doctor Doom himself.
The problem was—
Joey didn't know whether he should actually do it.
He slowly rotated the Vibranium rose in his hand.
Under the rushing airflow high above the city, the metallic petals produced an even deeper, more mesmerizing resonance than when Tony had demonstrated them earlier.
And then Joey remembered Tony's words.
The confidence in his voice.
The promise that they would save Joey's universe together.
Joey genuinely didn't know what to do anymore.
…Forget it.
For now, he shoved the problem to the back of his mind.
After all, that was a problem for the future.
And before that future arrived, he still had plenty of time to think.
Why not do what Tony suggested?
Why not enjoy one proper Christmas night first?
Even if he and Starfire were both outsiders who didn't truly understand the meaning of Christmas—having a day dedicated entirely to happiness and fun still wasn't a bad thing.
So Joey extended his senses, searching for Starfire.
And immediately discovered that the little idiot was still trying to imitate him by mass-producing artificial diamonds.
At this rate…
Ah.
Speak of the devil.
Starfire had just finished selling two large diamonds at the underground black market.
The moment she stepped out the back entrance of the bar hosting the operation, she found herself surrounded in the alleyway.
A group of armed gang members had blocked both ends of the passage.
"Yo, what you got in that bag, little lady?"
The rapid-fire speech, the crooked swagger and stance, the meaningless tattoos and dangling charms, the low-slung jeans hanging halfway down to their knees…
From dozens of kilometers away, watching these painfully familiar gang members, Joey couldn't help but sigh. Times may have changed, but the criminal underworld on this world still looked exactly the same as he remembered.
These gangs rooted in marginalized neighborhoods were even less organized and disciplined than the mobs back in Gotham. In some ways, they were harder to deal with than the mafia families who spent all day playing cat-and-mouse with Batman.
Take the casino janitor Bruce had dealt with before—Jack White. A perfectly ordinary man who'd gotten tangled up with a mafia family like the Maronis.
Once someone with real authority like Penguin personally spoke to the higher-ups in that family, the entire Maroni organization naturally kept their distance from the poor cleaner.
But gangs like the Crips and Bloods? That was a completely different story.
They grew wildly within minority communities—decentralized, chaotic, with no real hierarchy or discipline. These idiots would pull guns and kill each other over different-colored caps and jackets, or because somebody flashed the wrong hand sign.
There was no big boss who could keep them in line with a single order.
If an ordinary person got targeted by them, it was like bone-deep rot—you wouldn't escape until you were dead.
Good thing Starfire wasn't ordinary.
She lowered her sunglasses slightly, pushed up the brim of her wide sunhat, and glanced toward the sky.
"Seriously? Your girlfriend is getting robbed by armed thugs and you're just watching from up there?!"
A red cape descended from the sky.
Joey's gaze swept across the faces of every gang member present.
"Take a guess which lucky sons of bitches are spending Christmas in jail this year."
"RUN!"
The instant the apparent leader shouted the order, the gang members who'd been acting all aggressive moments ago scattered like frightened birds, sprinting in every direction.
They weren't stupid.
This lunatic had been all over the news yesterday after punching half the rooftops in Queens red with blood. Nobody in their right mind thought a few street punks could take down a monster like that.
Joey casually blew two breaths in the direction they fled.
Ice materialized out of thin air, freezing their pant legs solid to the ground and trapping every would-be robber in place.
After borrowing one of their phones to dial 911, Joey scooped up Starfire in a princess carry—since she refused to reveal her true form by flying openly—and left the alley, a location hazardous in every possible sense of the word.
Bathed in moonlight high above the city, overlooking the glittering nightscape of New York, Joey—still weighed down by heavy thoughts—decided to focus on something else for now.
"So where's my reward for saving the damsel in distress?"
"Isn't the reward right in front of you already enough?"
Taking the bouquet of vibranium roses Joey handed her, Starfire giggled brightly, her eyes curving into crescents as she leaned up and kissed him.
"As thanks for 'saving' me and giving me such a beautiful gift, you're allowed to claim your reward from me anytime, anywhere."
The second Joey heard that, his hands immediately started getting adventurous.
"Your words, not mine!"
"No!"
Sensing the atmosphere between them heating up at terrifying speed, Starfire instantly began regretting her phrasing and smacked away Joey's wandering hand.
"Joey, not here!"
Apparently, she wasn't quite open-minded enough to express her love under the moonlight above New York City.
Rejected, Joey wrapped an arm around her waist and began ascending higher into the sky, flying away from where the moonlight fell.
"If we can't do it beneath the moon…then let's go above it."