Star City- Heroes of Tomorrow IC

[Lunaramblings]

"Yeh were expecting me. I heard rumors that Cassandra had more foresight and insight than most people with the use of their eyes, but this is a little ridiculous. Who are yeh?"

The man grins. A truly kind and warm gesture. As they settle into their seats he reaches out and begins pouring the tea. Rather than take a cup for himself, he pushes both toward Ceri,"Help yourself. Ladie's choice. My name is Alan. Alan Scott. Who I am is a very complicated story. But perhaps I can give you the short version.

Alan waits for her to take her cup and then takes the other and applies an ample amount of sugar from the small bowl but leaves the milk. "I assure you the milk is not poisoned, I just prefer my tea black. Many years ago, I was an archaeologist, like yourself. I did a lot of work in Asia. Mostly trying to rediscover lost dynasties and such. I was only marginally successful. On one trip, I was taking a train in the Yangtze River Valley. Getting from one remote site to another. I was on the Nanjing-Tongling line. No one is quite sure how, but the train was derailed. Initially, there were 13 of the 37 people on board who survived. We spent a month in less than hospitable conditions and several others were claimed by hunger, injuries, exposure. I decided that I would try to find help. I set off leaving the last 5 survivors to try and hike to a village, not that there was one around unfortunately. After a couple days of hiking I was forced to take shelter in a cave complex from a series of incredibly powerful storms that swept the area. It was in that complex that my life would be irrevocably changed." Alan takes a long sip of his tea before continuing.

"I finally found remnants of a lost civilization like I had wanted. There was this temple. Unlike any that I had ever found. In the temple I found what appeared to be a handful of Jade artifacts. A lantern and a ring. The entire ring was formed from the Jade. I waited there. Studying the temple. After a couple of days, I started to hear it. Whispers. I chalked it up to hunger. Lack of sleep. But they persisted. They wanted me to put on the ring. And so I did. And when I did, I felt power. Unlike anything I had ever known. But I also heard the voices clearly for the first time. The ring was alive. It told me of it's past, of how it came to be. And it tasked me with becoming something more. The ring gave me the power to save those people. And from that day on I used it to be a protector of the oppressed. I have been many places. I have seen many things. And as insane as all this sounds, I have even been to worlds and realms beyond what science acknowledges. I began to collect items that I knew needed to be safeguarded from those that would use them for great evil. Items that many would say are Magickal in nature, though not all are truly Magick, some are quite mundane, just much more advanced than human minds can understand. Like the items you are here looking for."

 

[TertiusHuman]

Venom

He had a few times come to points where his skin crawled from the spaces he was in, but this was ridiculous. Not only did he push through water and slimes of various smells and feels, he knew exactly where his elogated body was at any given moment. Not that it was wrong to know where his body was, it just felt wrong. And of course when they emerged into the sewers, the symbiote stayed in the sewage water.

John knew that this was the best since they could not be certain where eyes were and slogging through the sewer could be just an exercise in futility, but it would have been better for his own sanity. He felt like some sort of jellyfish and then even not that could describe like what it felt to go from full-grown human to some slimy blob. This action did seem to wake up more of the symbiote's memories and new images flickered through his mind. They were one in the true sense, if he wished, they could have climbed out of the water and walked, but he knew that this would work for their own purposes.

They slipped into the outflow from a building and oozed their way upwards, it didn't take long for them to make it to the top level slipping through sewage pipes. The highest floor having only one access, the hand wash basin. It took only a few minutes, but even when he stood on solid ground once more, he wanted to dust himself off.

First we find the repair room, neutralize and then we move outside.

He nodded his agreement to this plan and again felt his body stretch into tendrils and they once more flowed, only this time into the air regulator system.

 

[ChasNicollette]

"Telephone Line," by Electric Light Orchestra. (Ceri)

The man grins. A truly kind and warm gesture. As they settle into their seats he reaches out and begins pouring the tea. Rather than take a cup for himself, he pushes both toward Ceri,"Help yourself. Ladie's choice. My name is Alan. Alan Scott. Who I am is a very complicated story. But perhaps I can give you the short version.

"Ceri," she replied. "Ceri Grant." And because her name was Welsh, Celtic, it had no soft 'C,' and she pronounced it 'Kerry.' "And yes, I've heard all the jokes." She paused, eyeing the teacups, contemplating The Sicilian Stand-Off, complete with iocane powder, or perhaps just powdered glass, and then took a cup for herself. She cupped her hands around it, enjoying the warmth, but didn't drink from it. "Thank yeh. Pleased to meet yeh."

Alan waits for her to take her cup and then takes the other and applies an ample amount of sugar from the small bowl but leaves the milk. "I assure you the milk is not poisoned, I just prefer my tea black. Many years ago, I was an archaeologist, like yourself. I did a lot of work in Asia. Mostly trying to rediscover lost dynasties and such. I was only marginally successful. On one trip, I was taking a train in the Yangtze River Valley. Getting from one remote site to another. I was on the Nanjing-Tongling line. No one is quite sure how, but the train was derailed. Initially, there were 13 of the 37 people on board who survived. We spent a month in less than hospitable conditions and several others were claimed by hunger, injuries, exposure. I decided that I would try to find help. I set off leaving the last 5 survivors to try and hike to a village, not that there was one around unfortunately. After a couple days of hiking I was forced to take shelter in a cave complex from a series of incredibly powerful storms that swept the area. It was in that complex that my life would be irrevocably changed." Alan takes a long sip of his tea before continuing.

Ceri watched him quietly. The story was starting to sound like something that Jones nutter from Connecticut would go on about-- as though anyone who wore that much tweed could be that much of a bad-arse. It was nearly impossible to imagine the neat-as-a-Mary-Poppins-pin Alan Scott trudging through Anhui Province as a typhoon bore down on him. But she sat. And she listened. And she waited.

"I finally found remnants of a lost civilization like I had wanted. There was this temple. Unlike any that I had ever found. In the temple I found what appeared to be a handful of Jade artifacts. A lantern and a ring. The entire ring was formed from the Jade. I waited there. Studying the temple. After a couple of days, I started to hear it. Whispers. I chalked it up to hunger. Lack of sleep. But they persisted. They wanted me to put on the ring. And so I did. And when I did, I felt power. Unlike anything I had ever known. But I also heard the voices clearly for the first time. The ring was alive. It told me of it's past, of how it came to be. And it tasked me with becoming something more. The ring gave me the power to save those people. And from that day on I used it to be a protector of the oppressed. I have been many places. I have seen many things. And as insane as all this sounds, I have even been to worlds and realms beyond what science acknowledges. I began to collect items that I knew needed to be safeguarded from those that would use them for great evil. Items that many would say are Magickal in nature, though not all are truly Magick, some are quite mundane, just much more advanced than human minds can understand. Like the items you are here looking for."

His story had not disappointed-- the madcap fever dreams of an archaeologist for whom "x" had never successfully marked the spot. A failed treasure-hunter.

And yet... he didn't sound like a con artist. And there were things in this world that defied the dreams of her philosophy-- the fact that her thought-dead husband and her beloved daughter each had these transformative mobile handsets went far enough to prove that, even if there weren't aliens and superhumans plastering the tabloid news cycle 24/7.

She hadn't heard of any "long-lost civilization" discovered in Anhui Province, at least not in any of the journals she'd frequented. But she did vaguely remember a legend of a jade lantern somewhere between The Xin Dynasty and the return of The Han Dynasty, a prophecy of death, life, and power. ...but verisimilitude did not equal truth, no matter how good the forgery.

She sat back and she gazed hard at Alan Scott, squinted at him. "Yes. The items I'm here looking for. They would fit that description, wouldn't they? Magic, with a 'k' or not-- sufficiently advanced technology--"

Ceri grimaced and shook her head. "I thought at first, when Cassandra mentioned that yeh were an 'Engineer,' that perhaps yeh were some kind of telephone engineer, some communications expert, someone who could tell me how these Dials ticked. Hell, maybe yeh were one of these 'Operators,' living on Earth in human form. But I see now that Miz Craft was just making a pun on yehr being a train engineer, or perhaps that yehr name is 'Mister Scott.'"

She shrugged quietly. "Still. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The Dials. Can yeh help me find any? Even if it's just one, the idea that I could save one of them-- like the parable of the starfish-- I might save my daughter, too. it's a matter of life and death and power."

 

[Lunaramblings]

"Ceri," she replied. "Ceri Grant." And because her name was Welsh, Celtic, it had no soft 'C,' and she pronounced it 'Kerry.' "And yes, I've heard all the jokes." She paused, eyeing the teacups, contemplating The Sicilian Stand-Off, complete with iocane powder, or perhaps just powdered glass, and then took a cup for herself. She cupped her hands around it, enjoying the warmth, but didn't drink from it. "Thank yeh. Pleased to meet yeh."



Ceri watched him quietly. The story was starting to sound like something that Jones nutter from Connecticut would go on about-- as though anyone who wore that much tweed could be that much of a bad-arse. It was nearly impossible to imagine the neat-as-a-Mary-Poppins-pin Alan Scott trudging through Anhui Province as a typhoon bore down on him. But she sat. And she listened. And she waited.



His story had not disappointed-- the madcap fever dreams of an archaeologist for whom "x" had never successfully marked the spot. A failed treasure-hunter.

And yet... he didn't sound like a con artist. And there were things in this world that defied the dreams of her philosophy-- the fact that her thought-dead husband and her beloved daughter each had these transformative mobile handsets went far enough to prove that, even if there weren't aliens and superhumans plastering the tabloid news cycle 24/7.

She hadn't heard of any "long-lost civilization" discovered in Anhui Province, at least not in any of the journals she'd frequented. But she did vaguely remember a legend of a jade lantern somewhere between The Xin Dynasty and the return of The Han Dynasty, a prophecy of death, life, and power. ...but verisimilitude did not equal truth, no matter how good the forgery.

She sat back and she gazed hard at Alan Scott, squinted at him. "Yes. The items I'm here looking for. They would fit that description, wouldn't they? Magic, with a 'k' or not-- sufficiently advanced technology--"

Ceri grimaced and shook her head. "I thought at first, when Cassandra mentioned that yeh were an 'Engineer,' that perhaps yeh were some kind of telephone engineer, some communications expert, someone who could tell me how these Dials ticked. Hell, maybe yeh were one of these 'Operators,' living on Earth in human form. But I see now that Miz Craft was just making a pun on yehr being a train engineer, or perhaps that yehr name is 'Mister Scott.'"

She shrugged quietly. "Still. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The Dials. Can yeh help me find any? Even if it's just one, the idea that I could save one of them-- like the parable of the starfish-- I might save my daughter, too. it's a matter of life and death and power."

Alan looked long and deep at Ceri. He was not easy to read. But he was clearly studying the woman. But it was as if he was looking beyond her mere physical form. Into her very being. Finally he smiled. After taking a long sip from his tea he set the cup down and reached for a box on a nearby shelf. A small, ornate mahogany box with brass and ivory fittings. The sort of thing that would have looked more at home in a Victorian mansion than in the back of a shop.

"My dear, I am afraid that I do not currently know the whereabouts of any of these dials. Though I have heard rumors. Supposedly one has recently come from Asia, though whom bears it and their current whereabouts I do not know. There is also a very unique situation I am monitoring but I am currently unsure if it is a dialer or something else. But when I learn more I will definitely contact you. But all is not lost. Not yet.

Alan fusses for a moment with the box. As if reluctant to hold it longer than he must.

"There is indeed a matter of Power. Of Life. And most certainly of Death coming. I can feel the shifts and the vibrations all along the spectrum. I don't know exactly what it is, but some great darkness is approaching. And it will be a very dark time. And it will be souls like you that will lead the way. Hope is a beacon Ms. Grant. It is the light that guides us when all others have failed. It is the hand that lifts us when the weight of the world has crushed us to the dirt. You are such a beacon. And when the time comes, you will shine brighter than a thousand suns. Ms. Grant, I know that this must all seem very strange and make very little sense, but I assure you, it is all very real. Now, if you would, I would like you to accept this. It is not a gift, because it was yours all along."

With a soft and gentle smile Alan places the box in the middle of the small table. He then picks up his cup and drains it. As he sets the cup down, a small mote of light emerges from the back of the room, swirling as it moves forward it is soon a smallish old figure. A small man. It smiles and nods to Ceri as it clears Alan's cup and saucer.

"He is a domovoy. I suspect given your heritage you may have heard of them. He was a gift from a dear old friend. He served in my friends home for many years. Now he lives here with me. He is most gently I assure you."

As Alan finishes speaking the smallish old elfin man smiles and bows slightly before picking up the box and bringing it to Ceri, setting it gently in her lap and bowing gracefully again before dematerializing.

 

[ChasNicollette]

"Mr. Blue Sky," by Electric Light Orchestra. (Ceri)

Alan looked long and deep at Ceri. He was not easy to read. But he was clearly studying the woman. But it was as if he was looking beyond her mere physical form. Into her very being. Finally he smiled. After taking a long sip from his tea he set the cup down and reached for a box on a nearby shelf. A small, ornate mahogany box with brass and ivory fittings. The sort of thing that would have looked more at home in a Victorian mansion than in the back of a shop.

Those eyes, those eyes. Inscrutable, inexplicable, unfathomable. He didn't make her skin crawl to look at her, but she felt a gravitational shift in her soul, like she was being tugged in and from directions that had no names in three dimensions.

But the box-- that was a beautiful bit of carving-- the Antiques Roadshow in her brain automatically tried to place it and date it, could she identify the patina on the brass--

--completely oblivious to the bookended imagery, the fact that her daughter's anti-hero plant-form had encased a terrible dark weapon in a "box" made of this exact same breed of wood time and time zones away--

--she gazed at that box with the same sort of gaze that Alan Scott had just gazed at her, illegible analytical insightful twenty thousand leagues--

--she didn't have X-ray vision. What was in there?

--oh, wait, Scott was talking, what?

"My dear, I am afraid that I do not currently know the whereabouts of any of these dials. Though I have heard rumors. Supposedly one has recently come from Asia, though whom bears it and their current whereabouts I do not know. There is also a very unique situation I am monitoring but I am currently unsure if it is a dialer or something else. But when I learn more I will definitely contact you. But all is not lost. Not yet.

Her heart rose and sank so many times during that paragraph-- he knew of the Dials, he believed in her quest, but all he had to give her was answers in fifty shades of vagary. A Dialer that might not be a Dialer-- a Dialer from somewhere in the largest populated continent on Earth that was now somewhere else--

But all was not lost.

Ceri found herself reminded, instinctively, intuitively, of a show she used to watch with Rose-- The Dead Zone. Every so often, the psychometric protagonist would have a vision of a terrible future he was determined to stop, and he would say three words, somewhere between a catchphrase and a mantra: There's still time.

There's still time.

Alan fusses for a moment with the box. As if reluctant to hold it longer than he must.

"There is indeed a matter of Power. Of Life. And most certainly of Death coming. I can feel the shifts and the vibrations all along the spectrum. I don't know exactly what it is, but some great darkness is approaching. And it will be a very dark time. And it will be souls like you that will lead the way. Hope is a beacon Ms. Grant. It is the light that guides us when all others have failed. It is the hand that lifts us when the weight of the world has crushed us to the dirt. You are such a beacon. And when the time comes, you will shine brighter than a thousand suns. Ms. Grant, I know that this must all seem very strange and make very little sense, but I assure you, it is all very real. Now, if you would, I would like you to accept this. It is not a gift, because it was yours all along."

Ceri's eyes didn't know whether to widen or narrow.

Her heart didn't know whether to rise or die.

'Standing on the edge of something much too deep.'

'You were always here, waiting for yourself to arrive.'

Become who you were born to be.

With a soft and gentle smile Alan places the box in the middle of the small table. He then picks up his cup and drains it. As he sets the cup down, a small mote of light emerges from the back of the room, swirling as it moves forward it is soon a smallish old figure. A small man. It smiles and nods to Ceri as it clears Alan's cup and saucer.

"He is a domovoy. I suspect given your heritage you may have heard of them. He was a gift from a dear old friend. He served in my friends home for many years. Now he lives here with me. He is most gently I assure you."

As Alan finishes speaking the smallish old elfin man smiles and bows slightly before picking up the box and bringing it to Ceri, setting it gently in her lap and bowing gracefully again before dematerializing.

Ceri still hadn't touched her own tea. And she was seven times as hesitant to open this box. But she couldn't help but murmur-- she wasn't sure what he meant by her heritage, given that her heritage was Celtic, Cymru, but she did know just enough Russian to get herself in trouble, and she hoped to God that this was a Russian domovoy and not Polish or Slavic or-- "Spasiba, tovarisch."

And even as her head whirlwinded at this world she had wandered into in her daughter's footsteps, this world of fairy tales given life and incomprehensible spectra and specters--

--even as she doubted her own sanity--

--even as she planned for the worst--

--she hoped for the best--

--and she opened the box.

There were two things in the box.

One glowed with a light the color of a cloudless sky in the noonday sun, and bathed her face in it through the open mouth of the lifted lid.

The other was a handwritten card, neatly folded. She opened the card, and read it aloud.

 

[ChasNicollette]

"Eclipse," by Pink Floyd.

loneliness + alienation + fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery ÷ condemnation ÷ misunderstanding × guilt × shame × failure × judgment n=y where y=hope and n=folly, love=lies, life=death, self=dark side

Supergirl.
********​

Just touching the box that held the Hellspore was like touching an Anti-Sun.

Not just draining her, like Dr. Light had done a few minutes ago (had it been only a few minutes?) but flooding her with a dark light that ate away her strength, her heart, her soul. A blackness, a tangible shadow, across the very face of her being.

loneliness + alienation

...the last of her kind.

...The General of Fort Rozz.

...Mother, Father, Allura and Zor-El.

...even baby Kal-El was gone, probably collected and catalogued by some rogue Coluan curator AI.

...she took solace in solitude but there was a fine line between solitude and isolation and this was a weight she could scarcely bear.

+ fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery ÷ condemnation ÷ misunderstanding

Tears poured down her face, and her grip on the box became white-knuckled as she sank despairing to her knees on the roof of the hospital.

She remembered Vartox on her very first mission with The DEO, telling her it would be an honor to face The Martian Manhunter rather than this fragile female. Remembered struggling to be good enough even as his atomic axe trembled inches from her blazing eyes.

Remembered the betrayal and fury in Alex' voice when she had saved that plane, ridiculing her for putting herself at so much risk.

Remembered Win's gradually-building resentment at being always a friend and never a lover, his descent into mad supervillainy.

Remembered the look of loss on James' face when she told him she was moving to Metropolis.

Remembered every time Hank Henshaw had glared at her and spat scathing remarks when she couldn't live up to his impossible, xenophobic standards.

Remembered being swallowed by time outside of time and darkness beyond depth when her pod drifted into The Phantom Zone. Gone for forever ever.

"I can't," she mumbled. "I can't do it."

J'onn.
********​

× guilt × shame × failure × judgment

J'onn J'onzz was very, very old.

Even his closest friends on Earth had no idea quite how old.

He had spoken of the paratexts before, the telepathic oral history of the Martian species, and this had been real, part of the collective memory of his race.

But he didn't need them.

He remembered the salvation of B'arzz O'oomm, Bio Armor Jade Warrior, because he had been there. Remembered the tribal elders, one of the first of The Manhunters, because he had been one of them.

Remembered the terrible civil war with the insidious faction of Pale Martians because he had fought against them.

Remembered The Guardians of The Universe and their pledge to exorcise the creators of the "demon stone," because he had seen them with his own eyes and touched their minds with his.

And in all these millions of years of life, J'onn had seen such terror and sadness.

Observed the Pale Martian Hyperclan's imprisonment in the furthest reaches of The Phantom Zone, a pit deeper and darker even than Fort Rozz.

Done battle with his mad, malefic brother.

Watched H'ronmeer's Curse burn his whole race out of the stars, and with it his wife and daughter and his adoptive niece M'gann.

Beheld the great gem Krypton crumble under its own weight around its own poisoned heart, shattering like poisoned green glass in the night before being swallowed by its beloved red sun, and with it so many friends he had come to cherish.

Felt the inexorable pull of The Erdel Gate drag him to this place of fragile, short-lived, damaged creatures who worshiped heat and flame...

...the cold sick horror of The Anti-Life Equation seeped in through the cracks and synapses, trickled into his metamorphic flesh, crept through his veins like poison, infection, cancer of the blood.

He couldn't help but watch it climb up his arm from his hand's grip on the boxed Hellspore, couldn't help but stare in fascination into an abyss that gazed also.

Couldn't help but start to drown in the negative emotions and indelible memories of a million lifetimes of man...

n=y where y=hope and n=folly, love=lies, life=death, self=dark side

self=dark side

self=dark side

...but J'onn J'onzz was the master of his own mind, a creature of adamantine will, and his flesh was a function of that will, his body obeyed his thoughts right down to the molecule.

And in a million lifetimes of man, there were so many good memories.

Marrying his wife.

Holding his daughter for the first time.

Adopting his niece, saving her from her troubled family.

Thwarting evil alongside B'arzz O'oomm, charting the cosmos alongside Jor-El and Zor-El and their beautiful, mighty wives.

Rocking baby Kal-El to sleep.

Telling stories of Mars to young Kara.

Watching the moons rise above the impossible golden citadel of Z'onn Z'orr.

Freeing the genetically-engineered slaves of Titan from The Hyperclan.

Becoming an urban legend superhero, and allowing himself to be photographed for the first time by a young boy named Jimmy Olsen, leading to Olsen's Pulitzer.

Finding Kara again, when little Kal-El had been long since lost. Helping her find her adoptive human parents, her sister, helping her pick a human name.

And the memories of gold trickled through him, warring like antibodies with the malignant cells of Anti-Life, transmuting that lead wherever they met like a hundred million microscopic Philosopher's Stones.

self=/=dark side

self=?

...self=light to the light

The box cracked and crackled in his hand.

And the Hellspore within ticked over and then quietly put itself out of its misery, growing cold as a mere stone and even more inert.

J'onn glanced up, found Kara with his amazing vision, saw her struggling.

"Kara Zor-El," he murmured. "Linda Lee Danvers. Remember who you are."

Supergirl.
********​

Kara's eyes snapped open with a start as J'onn's beautiful red-sand voice echoed in her ears, and she squared her jaw, unlocking the code that Jaime Reyes had given them--

--sunlight found her pores again, infused her soul--

Rao be with her.

Cythonna be damned.

--remembered the first time she stood atop the water-logged fuselage of that plane, remembered the sounds of dozens of cameraphones snapping her all drenched and dressed in black, remembered the joy of knowing what she was meant to do, who she was born to be--

--remembered Alex' time capsule from her birth-mother Allura-El, the joy of seeing that face again--

--remembered who she was.

self=daughter of hope

life=love

love=truth

hope=/=folly

you + are + not + alone

...it was a candle in a midnight typhoon and it was as blown out as soon as it was lit, but it was enough, it was enough--

--and with a roar of effort and triumph and power and passion and life, Kara Zor-El crushed the Hellspore cube to picocircuitry dust in her hands and in her mind, and its fire was forever extinguished.

"Oh," she breathed.

"Oh, God."

She staggered, tried to steady herself.

"Oh, holy fuck."

Managed a smile like a prisoner in solitary catching a glimpse of a gorgeous sunrise through the bars of her cell.

"Okay."

"Two down."

"Five to go."

Redwood.
********​

Tracking the stench of Hellfire throughout the dank stank of sewage, throughout the endless labyrinth of pipes, throughout the wreckage strewn by the titanic powerhouses that had clashed above ground--

--Redwood rounded the last bend and found her own Hellspore Box waiting for her.

She gritted her teeth.

Flexed her hands so that her knuckles cracked.

"Right, then."

"C'mere."

And she lunged out with her green green hand and wrapped it around the waiting cube.

And plunged into darkness.

 

[Nevyn_Black]

Jaime glances down at Grant. "If this turns me evil, I just want you to know. I'm killing and eating you first."

He reaches out with his mind, letting Khaji control the teletechnic connection.

....He remembers her blue eyes more than anything. Those electric blue eyes, so hot and sparkling with her inner fire. Like lightning inside her, so hot...hot enough to warm her golden skin...he can feel her fire, and it warms him. He longs to touch her, to embrace that living, snapping thing in those gorgeous blue eyes...

Then he remembers the sounds of her and the other. The scent of her aroused sex, his musky scent filling the air of the shower, the merging of their voices and the sounds of their bodies slapping together...and he feels the pit open inside himself. He falls into darkness...

Loneliness. It has always been something that follows him, like a ghost. Despite Khaji Da, the isolation has always been there. He remembers the first time he felt friendship, when Paco first came into his life, and then Brenda. How happy he had been to have friends! For many years that happiness sustained him...until his life was complicated by the coming of the blue scarab. Until tragedy struck his family. Until he lost his mother...then his father...then Paco to a life of crime...and Brenda to a life of government service...leaving him alone again...

But wait. Not alone. Khaji was there. Always there. They were one. They were the Blue Beetle. And ""BLUE IS THE COLOR OF HOPE!"

With every fiber of his being, J'K'Aime pushed his will and his hope against the rising tide of dark loneliness and despair, blasting it with the light of hope, until it gave way, leaving the Hellspore dormant and dark in it's box.

Panting, Jaime triggered his sub-vocals. "One down, guys...on the ground. We can do this."

 

[ChasNicollette]

"Childhood's End," by Pink Floyd.

Grant.
*******​

Jaime glances down at Grant. "If this turns me evil, I just want you to know. I'm killing and eating you first."

"Look whose eyes are bigger than his stomach," Grant chuckled softly, then glanced down along himself as though surprised to realize he had been bound in thorny vines, as though he hadn't processed the concept before that moment.

"...huh."

And then he started chuckling again. "Why, Brer Fox! I was born and raised in The Briar Patch!"

Supergirl.
********​

Panting, Jaime triggered his sub-vocals. "One down, guys...on the ground. We can do this."

Three down.

Kara tucked her hair back from her ear and nodded, relieved to hear Blue's exhausted but triumphant voice. "Good work, good work-- everyone. But no time to rest on our laurels, okay? Redwood's taking on the fourth cube, which leaves three more for the rest of us. J'onn, you get the one at The University of Pittsburgh. Blue, there's tons of traffic gridlocked onto The McKees Rocks Bridge because of the fight we just had with Grundy and Light and Grant, the city's at a standstill, I need you to take out that Hellspore before it eats those people stuck in those cars. I'll get the one at the airport."

"You're not wrong, Blue, we can do this. Keep hope alive!"

J'onn.
*******​

Like Kara, like The Flash, J'onn could cross the globe in less than an eyeblink, crossing the city was less than a thought to him.

He descended in front of Thackeray Hall with his cape whipping behind him like a flag in a hurricane, and a fist that could crack moons reached out and took hold of his next Hellspore Cube.

"Yes."

"Let us show this 'Master' that we are slaves to no-one."

Darkness enclosed him.

Supergirl.
********​

The gates of Pittsburgh International Airport were laid out in an approximate 'x' shape, and at the heart of the 'x' there was an Airmall full of stores for shopping and other services-- a place to spend money and time while waiting between worlds. Kara's next Hellspore hovered right above that Airmall, right above the center of the roof.

The threat was clear-- every instant that the Hellspore was activated, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people would die, even if it were stopped immediately, extinguished somehow right after going off, so many lives would just be gone.

It became that much more paramount to stop it.

"We kneel before no Generals," Kara vowed.

And she, too, grasped the cube that levitated there, and took the weight of the world in her hand-- like so many times before.

Darkness enclosed her.

Redwood.
********​

Redwood was at a disadvantage. Well, even more of one, right out of the gate.

She had reached her cube after Kara, Jaime, and J'onn had defeated their first wave.

And the boxes, as Chris Grant had suggested, were "teknoactive," meaning they adapted to any factor that attempted to prevent them from accomplishing their program. Including, ah-heh, the power of positive thinking.

And thus, as part of the second wave, she faced upgraded defenses. A more powerful, self-aware firewall. Anti-Life supplemented with elements of The Omega Sanction: The Life Trap.

It closed around her mind like a shell, trapping her in there with it.

loneliness + alienation + fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery ÷ condemnation ÷ misunderstanding × guilt × shame × failure × judgment n=y where y=hope and n=folly, love=lies, life=death, self=dark side

"Yeah," Redwood growled against the pitch dark from which The Equation whispered insidiously and sensuously, "heard that song before and tuned it out. Play it again, Sam."

"It never happened," Robby replied, stepping out of the darkness into a circle of light beside Redwood, looking hale and hearty and whole, with the light of genius still dancing in his eyes. "You never beat the code in your head."

"It never happened."

Redwood... hesitated.

Not a lot could make Redwood do that.

"...what?"

J'onn.
*******​

"It never happened, Uncle J'onn," M'gann murmured, emerging from the black and standing before him.

"What did?" he blinked, recalculating, recalibrating, applying new layers of telepathic filters to root out any neural malware that this digital telepathy might have implanted.

"Any of it," she replied, the freckles she'd chosen to adorn her preferred form standing out in stark relief against her pale green skin. "You never adopted me, and I languished in Pale Martian culture while clinging to Green Martian beliefs. Eventually I gave in to the brainwashing, and my identity was scrubbed, and when The Hyperclan rose again, I fought alongside them to my last breath."

"You never escaped Mars," M'gann pressed. "No magical portal opened up, no deus ex machina Erdel Gate wormholing you across time and space to a nearby blue wet world. You're hallucinating all of this. A literal fever dream, a hallucination taking place between sparks of a dying brain as you succumb to H'ronmeer's Curse alongside your wife and daughter-- the raging pyrokinetic plague causing not just your powers but your whole metabolism to break down, neurological functions crashing as your body can no longer process metaATP. Your consciousness is winking out of your cells one by one and with every gasp your little mind palace collapses more and more. Why do you think you've had this impending sense of doom for six weeks? Why do you think you keep getting caught in fiery attacks, Salem, Pittsburgh? You know what's happening outside of you. To you. It's seeping through."

Supergirl.
********​

"It never happened," Alex murmured as she stepped out of the dark.

Weary, already shaken, Kara backstepped, narrowed her eyes at her adoptive sister. "...never happened?"

"You never made it to Earth. Never met me, never met our parents. Never got that shining moment of glory, supporting that whole passenger jet with your bare hands and roars of effort."

"Never defeated The General of Fort Rozz, or any of the escaped extraterrestrial prisoners. Hell, they never escaped, there was no General-- an archenemy with your mother's face? How psychological is that, how unlikely? Never happened."

"When your ship went off-course into The Phantom Zone, when time stopped around you, the most perfect perfect stasis, you never got out again. You just stayed, trapped with the greatest villains of a dozen hundred worlds, The General and The Pale Martian Hyperclan-- you're a guardian angel locked in Hell by mistake, fed illusions of a life unlived by a neurotech learning system using incomplete sensor scans of distant Earth to stimulate your dreaming brain now that you've decades since exhausted its memory banks of VR education."

"You're lying," Kara shook her head furiously. "You're a lie. You're a fiction concocted by a machine born to kill worlds, and you're scared that I can save this one, so you're trying to crush my spirit with these lies."

"Crush your spirit?" Alex shook her head, surprised. "Linda, honey, I'm trying to open your eyes to the possibilities. You're in a world constructed out of virtual shellgames. A neuro-interactive dreamworld. You've been here for almost three decades, and there's no way out. But think-- think-- if you could take control of that dream, make it lucid, you could live the life you always wanted, you always deserved. Here in your little floating egg you could make Krypton live again, your mom and dad, your aunt and uncle, your cousin, your friend from The House of Zan, your parents' friend from The House of Sen, crystalline utopia untouched by war or green poison or the encroaching fires of Rao. You were sent from your dying world in hopes of making it live beyond its death and destruction, can't you see how truly you can make that hope come true?"

"A tiny little pocket of Kryptonian Heaven, curated by your beautiful mind."

"Would it be so bad?"

J'onn.
********​

"Would it be so bad?" M'gann wondered.

"I know you miss your wife and daughter terribly. You've lost so much. I know you feel guilty for surviving when no-one else did. Your imaginary friends on Krypton, perishing when their world shattered, only added to that. The friends you've lost during decades on Earth only added more. In your head, here in your mind, you've become the ultimate survivor-- which means you're carrying the ultimate case of survivor's guilt."

She reached out and cupped her uncle's face, grazed his green green skin with her gentle green fingertips. "It's okay to rest now, Uncle J'onn. It's okay to let yourself slip into H'ronmeer's embrace, no need to twist and gnash any longer in one of Lord L'Zoril's nightmares. We could be together again. The whole Martian species could be together again, our whole collective consciousness, in that place that civilizations go when they die."

"You could see M'yri'ah. You could see K'hym. I know they miss you. I know you miss them. I've missed you, too."

As M'gann touched his face, J'onn realized that tears were running down his cheeks, red like blood or Martian sand. Tears were such a human affectation-- he had been among them so long. ...or... or had he? The mind was powerful, and his mind had been powerful even for one of his species, could he really have created this neoconsciousness for himself, a thought-palace to die in?

He reached up and touched her hand, cradled it in his mighty fingers, reached out and slid his hand into the red of her hair-- an affectation of her own, she really did find humans and their television fascinating-- and cupped the side of her freckled face.

"I have missed you, also, M'gann. I would like to see you again."

"To see my beloved and my child."

"To sing with my people again The Songs of The Sands."

"To relinquish my spirit to peace."

His voice trembled, he closed his eyes, he bowed his head.

And touched his forehead to hers.

"I am so tired."

Redwood.
********​

"Would it be so bad?" Robby hypothesized.

"What," Redwood mumbled, her fingers clawing through her spiky red hair. "What wouldn't be? What never happened? What're ya saying? That I... that I couldn't beat the message my daddy implanted in me, that I'm still standin' in that hallway watchin' an elevator that'll never come, paralyzed as yer snapped like a twig, as poppa-dearest unleashes his virus on the world and activates all them lost Dials fer evil?"

Robby chuckled affectionately, and stepped up to her, hands on both of her shoulders as he gazed into her face. "Oh. Oh, Rose. You always did have such an imagination. You contain multitudes, you always did. I never stopped being impressed by your mind. I had this real-world scientific knowledge, but God, you could dream like no-one else."

His hands slid up to cradle her face, apparently uncaring that she was made of arbor and vegetable and muck.

"You're not in that hallway. You're standing in my lab. You just pressed a button on your phone that kind of looks like an 'H,' and you've imagined a whole world spinning out of that moment. It's a ten-year-old 4G smartphone holding onto a last gasp of lithium life because Raymond Palmer could make a gadget like nobody else, not some lost weapon from a war that spans realities and reroutes timelines like it's changing the course of rivers. It's just some shitty UI that hasn't had a patch in a decade. It's just a phone. You could sell it online to a collector."

"But there's no dozen-or-so yous from parallel worlds waiting to help you solve your problems. It's just you and it's me. But would that be so bad?"

"None of this 'I've finally found my purpose, this is my Joseph Campbell journey,' but that's okay. Lots of people never ever figure out what they want to be when they grow up. But we would be together. Like before. Like always."

Redwood twitched, and she reached up with both hands, grasped Robby's hands.

"I don't... I don't wanna be alone, Robby."

"I can't do this without ya."

"There's nothing to do," he reminded her. "Just live your life. Life our life together. We'll sell that museum-piece phone to some hobbyist and scrape together three months' worth of salary and I'll get you a ring, and we'll have matching initials forever. That wouldn't be so bad at all, would it?"

Leaves started to flake away from Redwood.

She started to wither, to shrivel, to dry up and brown like an apple.

The red spikes of her hair started falling out like pine needles.

She trembled. Green chlorophyll tears waterfell down her ridged cheeks.

"No," she mumbled.

"It wouldn't."

"I don't... I don't wanna be alone."

(As Redwood's link to the lifeforces of the world started to ebb, as darkness began to swallow her soul, it rippled out into the landscape.

Lawns blackened.

Zoo animals and pets stirred restlessly, stared out their windows. Some of them growled at nothing.

Trees stirred and drooped as far away as Robinson Park in Gotham City, and Ivy Pepper-- Poison Ivy-- narrowed her eyes at the unexpected blight afflicting her babies.)

Grant.
********​

(The briar bonds tying down Chris Grant parched and crumbled around him. Squirming around in their embrace, struggling against dozens of cutting thorns, Grant managed to undo his belt buckle... and to stab a hole with the prong into the now dry brittle wreath. Snapping his way out, brushing the hedge off of him, he staggered towards the block of rotting mahogany wood as he bled from dozens of tiny cuts, scooped up that block of wood and kept walking.)

Redwood.
********​

(The Red and The Green withdrew from Redwood, severing all but the barest link to the astral planes of animal and plant-- fearful that if Redwood gave in entirely that the pollution of Anti-Life would seep throughout the planet's collective subconscious.)

Redwood sagged.

And sank to her knees, clutching at Robby's lower legs.

"I don't... I dun... wannnaaa... beee alone."

...and the whole Redwood template flickered around her and abandoned her and she was just Rose, just Victoria Rose Grant, exhausted on the dark floor in front of her boyfriend.

But then another voice replied from out in the darkness, hard and digital around the edges: "'These lines of lightning mean we're never alone. Never alone.'"

And with the whining whir of servos and the thump of tank-weight footsteps, Cannon-in-D stepped into view, red eyes glowing, mighty hands curled into fists.

"Founding principle of that Life Equation, ennit?" Valkyrie M wondered, as she stepped out of the black on Rose's other side.

"You," Submersive intoned, stepping out beside Valkyrie M, Benthesikyme across one shoulder,

"Are," Element Girl drawled lazily, stepping out beside Submersive,

"Not," LodeOut declared definitively, beside Element Girl,

"Alone," Constant-C mumbled, managing a brave smile as her glowing form emanated green light in the blackest night.

The Koan harrumphed as her black-clad form coalesced, touching the brim of her hat, clearing her throat. "Hurm. Basic principle of Zen. 1 + 1 equals 1. Even as we detach, we are connected. Even as we refuse to compromise, to surrender, we are a gem in the mosaic. Not featureless unending homogeneity like this 'All is One in Dark Side' heresy. But Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, all to make the whole."

Rose shook her head at all these faces, she'd never seen them from the outside before in person, only ever in footage or the mirror. "But you're all just voices in my head. Schizoid conjurings of an overactive daydreamer. You don't count. You're not real."

"'Of course it is happening in your head,'" a tall thin, brown-haired woman replied, Rose didn't know this one, dressed in a white suit and tie and a long brown coat, her smile gentle and forgiving, and anciently wise, quoting as though from Scripture, "'but why on Earth should that mean it is not real?'"

"The last sentence of Page 723, Book 7," ShadowPax noted. "Important number, that 7, even amongst the people of Shadow. 'True things happen in sevens,' my priestess always said to me, whenever I would pay attention."

Redwood rustled there, still wilted, still trying to grow back as if after a long winter in high desert. "Payin' attention's important, Rosy. Can't be caught unawares, an' it's yer senses that'll tell ya what's real, not some pretty-face ghost in a black box from a world what can't even spell 'Apocalypse' right. An' ya know we're real. Ya've always known."

A black-haired woman all in green, carrying a bow and wearing a blindfold, another one that Rose didn't know. "He said it himself," she noted, gesturing to Robby's shade. "You contain multitudes. Some might call this madness, but it is from such madness that you can draw strength. Your diversity of perspective is manifold."

"Many of the fundamental forces of your universe," a tiny, dragonfly-winged lady with a wasp waist and a bad-ass cyberpunk asymmetrical bob haircut and a helmet under her arm, another new face, exposited informationally: "are the effects of higher-dimensional forces vibrating down into your own. Gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces-- local human science knows of four fundamental forces, but there are seven. The seventh is freedom, and it manifests in this dimension as The Speed Force. But you need not be a hyperkinetic avatar of the lightning in order to channel the fundamental force of freedom. You need only be yourself. All of yourself. All of yourselves."

Roentgen-Ray Rose stepped up to Rose, nudged Robby away with the butt of Taranfollt, and held out a hand to help Rose up. "My Lady. Thou dost reinforce thy spirit with the speaking of songs, dost thou not, with meditation upon yon lyrics? How long hath it been since thine spirit has felt this relief? Listening to thy playlist upon the roof of The Brownstone was halfhearted at best-- speak to me now the words of a bard, and know that thy heart is full again."

Rose slipped her hand into Roentgen-Ray Rose's, and smiled a lopsided, weary little smile. "'My life would suck without you.'"

Roentgen-Ray Rose nodded as though impressed. "Thus sayeth we all." And hauled her to her feet.

"And what about my life?" Robby demanded, looking more than a little panicked, he hadn't expected to be out-numbered. "Wouldn't my life suck without you? Wouldn't your life suck without me?"

"Yeah," Rose nodded sadly. "Yeah, it would. Yeah, it does. It always does and always will. But it comes down to what I'm more afraid of, right? If something scares you, you find a way to be brave if the alternative scares you more. And yes. Yes, yes, I'm scared to go on without you."

She stepped towards Robby. Reached out to take his hand.

"But if I'm going to choose a world I think is real, I'm going to choose the world where I learned to sacrifice what I care about to make that world a better place. I can't imagine never learning that lesson-- I can't imagine a life that would scare me more than complacency."

"I love you," Robby mumbled, his eyes full of betrayal, of ache, of tears, his teeth clenched with uncomprehending emotion.

"I love you too," Rose nodded, blinking back tears of her own. "And you'll always be a part of me, just like my Heroes."

"But I choose freedom."

self=variable

life=love

love=truth

hope=/=folly

you + are + not + alone

And she surged out of darkness, surged back into the real world, surged back into Redwood's waiting wisp-thin body, and The Green and The Red flushed back into her, too, restoring Redwood to glory--

--the rustling whispering endurance of The Green--

--the frothing, rabid hunger of The Red--

--thorn claws sprung out of her hands--

SNIKT

--and she slashed the Hellspore Cube into ribbons.

"HRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!"

She stood over the scrap of the cube as it dissolved, and the Hellspore with it.

"'Freedom,'" she snarled.

"'Whatcha give is whatcha gain.'"

Four down.

J'onn.
*********​

M'gann closed her eyes, turned her head from side to side, dwelling in the feel of her uncle's forehead against hers. "If you are so tired, Uncle J'onn, then it's so simple-- just rest. Leave the Solar System to these tiny brave crippled humans. Your time, the time of Mars, it's done. Just sleep."

J'onn laughed a tiny little weary laugh, with deep earthquake bass.

"Yes. In the end it is a simple choice."

"'I have promises to keep.'"

"'And miles to go before I sleep.'"

M'gann blinked, her eyes snapping open. "What?"

J'onn's eyes opened, too, but they were ablaze with crimson energy and it was like watching a sun's corona yawn, red red iron oxide light scorched M'gann from existence--

--in the real world, the backflash of J'onn's eye blast lit up the face of Thackeray Hall, and the Hellspore Cube before him evaporated into ash.

Five down.

Two to go.

"'Miles to go before I sleep,'" J'onn repeated, infra-sombre.

Supergirl.
********​

"No," Kara murmured, wiping aggressively at the tears that streaked her face with the heel of her hand, "it wouldn't be so bad. Especially if-- especially if you could be there. And mom and dad. And maybe their cousin Carol from Boston."

She took a trembling breath, and fixed Alex with her gaze. "But see, here's the thing. I can't give up. I can't. I'm never just going to lay down for this. Even if you're telling the truth that I'm still a teenager sleeping in a pod in a time-stagnant murky subdimension, I'm not staying put for that. I'm going to wake up in that little egg and I'm going to break out of The Phantom Zone and I am gonna live. You know this. You know so much about me, inside and out, you have to know this."

Alex considered this for a moment, and nodded slowly. "Yeah, I guess I do. So let's be straight with each other. Here's another thing: you're too weak to rise up against and defeat my programming. You're too exhausted from beating the previous cube and that ridiculous mote of Life Equation that that Reach Scout gave you is all used up. Any moment now I'm going to eat your adopted planet and your soul along with it."

Then she ran her tongue around her teeth. "Of course, I'm sure you won't go down without a fight. Might even cost me a significant percentage of efficiency, that's no good. But you'll still lose. Unless."

Kara arched an eyebrow, crossed her arms. "Unless... what?"

"Unless you give your life," Alex mused. "In exchange for me shutting down. Give yourself over to Anti-Life, all your pride and dignity and legacy and 'hope,' and trade it for the seven-plus billion human lives on this planet and all those countless animals. 'Greater love hath no-one than this.'"

Kara hesitated.

She could feel the fatigue in her soul, in the core of her being.

...could she make it?

She was stubborn as Hell.

But could she make it?

Without costing the Earth?

...what was it that she should lay down her life that the whole planet might live? Wasn't that what all good superheroes were supposed to do? What was she supposed to do?

"I," she shook her head, clutched her skull with both hands. "I don't know--"

"You'll even get to keep that little fantasy-world we talked about," Alex suggested. "A little bubble of delusion between nanoseconds of time where you can exist forever with your people as The Master takes hold of you. In a sense, you would save both worlds for the price of-- well-- you."

"It's that or Judgement Day for The Pale Blue Dot, and you'd still get overriden and overdriven by Anti-Life. Might as well go quietly."

Kara clenched her fists so tightly her knuckles cracked like repeater cannonfire, and she roared helplessly and bitterly into the unending blackness.

...and then she sank to her knees, her scraped knees with her tattered leggings, her hands falling limp and open by her sides.

"Do it," she sobbed.

"Do it."

"Shut the Hell down."

"And take me with you."

"Just let the world live."

"Just let the world live."

Alex smirked faintly. "Well. I can only promise that I won't destroy the planet."

"At best it's a stay of execution."

"But 'where there's life, there's hope,' right?"

"Always did love that punchline."

And Alex plunged five fingers through Kara's forehead straight into her brain and cold black sick twisted horror rushed through her bloodstream and straight to her eight-chambered heart.

loneliness+alienation+fear+despair+self-worth÷mockery÷condemnation÷misunderstanding×guilt×shame×failure×judgmentn=ywherey=hopeandn=follylove=lieslife=deathself=darkside

self = dark side

ALL = ONE

Kara twitched and gurgled. Her eyes turned black and deep and empty, the trackless gulfs between galaxies, void and devoid.

In the real world, Kara's flying form slumped sideways to sprawl on the roof of The Airmall and didn't move again.

The Hellspore Cube with which she had been dueling, true to its bargain, deactivated and disintegrated.

But Kara Zor-El, Linda Lee Danvers, could only mumble: "All is one."

Six down.

J'onn.
********​

Levitating above Thackeray Hall, J'onn snapped his head around so quickly that he created a small sonic boom.

His red red eyes were wide, and horror of another kind gripped his own heart.

He scarcely believed it. Had it all been for nothing?

All was lost after all.

"My compatriots," he murmured on the telepathic/subvocal channel.

"My-- fellow heroes," he shook his head, and his heart broke in his chest beyond shapeshifting's ability to repair.

"Supergirl is down."

"Supergirl is down."

 

[Nevyn_Black]

Jaime touched the Hellspore in it's box...

And the world died.

He stood upon a blasted, blackened wasteland, with some minimal remnants of what used to be Pittsburgh. Radiating out from him was nothing but charred, blackness, metal melted instantly to puddles with soil flash burned into sheets of jagged black glass. The Reach Infiltrator...the Reach traitor...the Blue Beetle...more powerful than any other. More powerful than all the heroes and villains of earth combined.

Jaime Reyes, destroyer of worlds.

"This is what you always were. Even your creators never understood your nearly infinite potential. But I did. The merging of the consciousness of Jaime Reyes with the Blue Scarab, then corrupted and freed by the Anti-Life Equation. And look, Jaime...look at what you did. The entire Earth a blasted ruin. Her heroes defeated and destroyed by you...impressive."

Slowly...as if stuck in a dream, but terribly aware that he was wide awake, Jaime looked at the figure standing behind him. What he saw was a huge man-like shape made of darkness. The sight of him brought with it an overwhelming despair.

"This isn't real. It's just some mind-fuck from the box"

"Oh, but it is real, Jaime Reyes. You know that. You've always known. This is the potentiality that rests within you. Even the Kryptonian Girl couldn't stop you, if you let loose your full powers. Nothing in this universe could, perhaps. That is why I chose not to play any more mind games with you. For you see...you could even defeat HIM."


Jaime shook his head, raising clawed talons to cup the sides of his face. He felt fuzzy...like his whole body was buzzing with energy. "What are you talking about? Who is Him?"

"You know WHO. You could defeat him Jaime, and take his place. You could rule the Universe and be The Master."

The shape slowly faded from shadow into light and there stood a massive Reach Soldier, slightly iridescent beetle shelled armor a familiar pure black and royal blue.

Jaime fell to his knees as if in slow motion. He raised his eyes to a lead grey sky of boiling nuclear winter and howled his denial and despair;

"Noooooooooooooooooooooo......"


The power of his voice caused the entirety of reality itself to ripple in a vast tidal wave, blowing the image of himself into a million sparkling shards, like a shattered mirror, the blasted plains of Pittsburgh quickly following.

Jaime found himself kneeling on McKee's Rocks Bridge, the Hellspore and its box mere grey ashes heaped in his cupped hands, the voice of J'onn saying in his ear:

"My compatriots," he murmured on the telepathic/subvocal channel.

"My-- fellow heroes,"

"Supergirl is down."

"Supergirl is down."

For one moment, Jaime knew that they had lost after all. But then he stood, his form flaring in a royal blue corona of fire brighter than the sun. Cars were pushed back by the energy of the fire. The Blue fire of hope.

J'K'Aime flew into the air and crossed the city toward the International Airport at just under the speed of light, arriving near instantaneously. He saw her there, her beautiful, perfect form. And from within himself, he summoned everything he was...all that he had the potential to be...man, machine, hero, villain, god, devil, LIFE AND MOST OF ALL HOPE AGAINST THE DARKNESS!!

He shouted one word, a name, with all his soul;

"KARRAAAA!!!"

 

[ChasNicollette]

"R-Evolve," by 30 Seconds to Mars. (J'onn/Supergirl/Rose)

The sky was dark.

When had it gotten dark?

Had the Cubes caused the sky to gloam over as part of their destructive programming?

But no, no, J'onn narrowed his eyes, he could see the stars across the sky through the shroud of light pollution that emanated from the city-- he could feel the spinning of the Earth, could observe the planets of The Solar System in their endless waltz. Much time had passed, as though approaching the Anti-Life firewall of the second wave of cubes had been like entering the event horizon of a black hole. Time had stopped for them, slowed... and now it was scant hours before dawn the following day. What else had they missed?

All of this rushed through J'onn's hyperintelligent brain in less than the beat of a speedster's heart.

Then a cry reached his ears.

"KARRAAAA!!!"

Supergirl-- Kara Zor-El-- Linda Lee Danvers--

--actually stirred, as though she could hear that mighty cry as though from a great and terrible distance.

But she did not waken.

"...all is one," she replied.

...and then in a blur of incalculable verdant fury, J'onn arrived, kneeling beside Kara and glancing up at Jaime.

"Blue Beetle."

"I did not know that you had come to care so deeply for Supergirl."

"Though, truly, she has that effect."

"My power is indeed great, and I have my own 'fanbase' in The Southern Hemisphere and in Japan-- but no-one inspires as universally as she. If she has fallen, can The Earth be so far behind?"

Across the city, Redwood's vines crawled up through the pipes of a small diner, emerging with a slithering sound from the drain of a handwashing sink before rapidly coalescing into the bestial, arboreal shapeshifter. The busboy who'd been about to wash his hands backpedaled hurriedly, eyes wide, but Redwood ignored him, jumping to the tiled floor in a crouch and running, hunched and predatory, for the nearest fire door.

"Supergirl's down? Damn, I didn't think Th' Beauty o' Steel had a 'down' settin'."

She emerged into the alley, glanced skyward.

"Also, what's wi' th' sky? What's a gal gotta do t' get a lil' photosynthesis around here?"

"Much time has passed, Redwood," J'onn replied. "Hours and hours. You must see to your father-- make certain that he is still secure after all this time. Beetle and I must work quickly if we are to save Supergirl."

Redwood tilted her head, cricked her neck. "Sure. Yeah. Best o' luck."

She inhaled deeply. Somewhere in the distance, she smelled blood. Chris Grant's blood. "On va voir," she growled, and sprinted off into the night like some Baskervillian amalgam of a bloodhound and a jungle cat.

J'onn fixed Jaime with his gaze.

"She is behind a wall of darkness even deeper and more insidious than even the walls around the Hellspores. A tar pit for the soul. But there remains the tiniest spark of life in her, like a single grain of sand from a beach a mile long."

"I cannot reach her."

"...unless."

"That trumpet-blast you used to defuse Christopher Grant's dark approximation of Captain Marvel. It rattled his very soul, shook him deeper than his very core."

"Do this again. Do this to Kara."

"Get me a foothold, Jaime. Get me an opening."

"I can save her."

"I can keep the promise I made to her mother so very long ago."

 

[Nevyn_Black]

J'onn fixed Jaime with his gaze.

"She is behind a wall of darkness even deeper and more insidious than even the walls around the Hellspores. A tar pit for the soul. But there remains the tiniest spark of life in her, like a single grain of sand from a beach a mile long."

"I cannot reach her."

"...unless."

"That trumpet-blast you used to defuse Christopher Grant's dark approximation of Captain Marvel. It rattled his very soul, shook him deeper than his very core."

"Do this again. Do this to Kara."

"Get me a foothold, Jaime. Get me an opening."

"I can save her."

"I can keep the promise I made to her mother so very long ago."

Jaime dropped to his knees beside J'onn and took hold of Kara's hands with his own, the suit retracting to reveal his own human form, still glowing with the eerie blue light. Tears fell from his eyes as he looked on her beautiful face.

"She saved my life, when no one else could hear me, John. She came down from the sky and she carried me up...away from the dark of deaths door. I thought she must be an angel. I still think she is. Of course I care for her. If someone needs to be taken, then let it be one who has blood on his hands. Let it be one who has sinned, for she is without any, as far as I can tell."

Jaime closed his eyes and his form swelled with the blue light, bright as any star burning. And from all around them, the air sang a song. Not a loud blast of violent judgement this time, but instead, a soft and haunting refrain...a yearning and a calling of one heart to another, one soul offered in return for one lost. The song played from all around them, as if the earth spoke with the voices of all, channeled through the powers of the Blue Beetle, who was now much more than his creators ever imagined. This was not a show of power, but a humble entreaty.

And The Song Played for the Girl of Steel.

 

[TertiusHuman]

Venom

It is so much easier to attack when even the deadliest person doesn't know you're there. The attack was fast, powerful and over in seconds, they didn't even need to hulk out. It was one of those moments where everything just went smoothly and you wondered why you ever wondered that it would go anyway else.

The replacement parts was secured and inside of that dimension that the symbiote liked to call "somewhere". They slipped from the room, found a vending machine and emptied it of candy. It was not for energy, it was to quench the need for brains.

He finally understood why they had removed a head in their previous battle, it was a lack of Phenethylamine, since the easiest way to gain enough was through human brains, the moment that they lost control of their symbiotic relationship, the symbiote's hunger and need took over, while they felt no regret about that action, the both of them did wonder what either Green Arrow or Artemis would have to say about it...the thought of Artemis actually looking disgusted made the both of them cringe.

Leaving a heap of wrappers in the nearest dustbin, they slid up to the roof. The ninjas was there alright, and as they watched from the shadows, the symbiote proved that there was another memory still unexplored. Tendrils started to snake away, tracking and tracing, finding the pajama people and keeping track. Soon the whole team guarding the roof was under surveillance.

Again they struck without warning and without mercy, grabbing the nearest limb and slamming the bodies into the roof, they felt the shudders of the impacts through their feet and a wide grin spread over their face. This was kinda fun. The tendrils withdrew, leaving battered bodies behind, they were not dead, just not in any position to fight or cause any other mischief.

This time the control panel was operational, they connected the plugs, switched on the main power grids and watched as the board of LED lights started to flicker to life and allow communications to suddenly spring to life. Well they had spare parts and there was another tower just waiting to be repaired. It took them a jump and a few swings to get underway to their last target and they were able to report: "Venom. Second target activated. Returning to first to do repairs. Out."

 

[ChasNicollette]

"Is There Anybody Out There?" by Pink Floyd. (Chris/Rose)

Earlier.
*********​

"Look whose eyes are bigger than his stomach," Grant chuckled softly, then glanced down along himself as though surprised to realize he had been bound in thorny vines, as though he hadn't processed the concept before that moment.

"...huh."

And then he started chuckling again. "Why, Brer Fox! I was born and raised in The Briar Patch!"

Then the heroes each plunged into their respective portable Apokolitpian oubliettes, and Grant was alone.

This didn't last long.

The authorities descended.

A lot of authorities.

Pittsburgh PD and FD, FBI, DEO, ARGUS, all along down the alphabet. No-one could agree whose jurisdiction it was, especially amongst the Feds. Even the United States Geological Survey had shown up, complaining in a panic that the high-amplitude combat had destabilized the localized tectonic structure and that this was only getting exacerbated by the artificial earthquake activity coming out of Gotham City.

One police captain was losing his shit over a civilian cellphone video of Supergirl straight-up executing a perp (the unis couldn't agree if it was Mammoth or Solomon Grundy; the audio was all distorted and they couldn't hear what the perp had been shouting). Yeah, it looked like Supergirl was doing it to save a little kid who had somehow wandered onto the battlefield-- all these weird lightning strikes kept pixelating the image and it wasn't clear where the kid had come from or where he went-- but Supergirl was killing now? What the Hell kind of world was this?

DEO was calling dibs because "that mass teleport effect doesn't match any terrestrial experimental military signature, not even The Chinese," and the clash between a Blue and Red Beetle just screamed warring alien factions. ARGUS was calling dibs because of known terrestrial supervillain involvement, as opposed to "speculation of alien involvement." The FBI had open warrants on Arthur Light that predated his time as an official supervillain. It was all a great and terrible mix.

And none of them knew what to do with the Villain Dialer tangled up in a snare straight out of Sleeping Beauty. Facial rec identified him as Chris Grant, sure, but things got fuzzier from there. Because the footage damning him in the Halo incident had been digitally reconstructed, it wasn't technically admissible in courts of law-- though its exoneration of Rose and Robby had been largely unquestionable. There was the Hell and high havoc that he had wreaked today in National City, Metropolis, and here-- plenty of newsreel and cellphone footage to back that up-- but how did you charge and try a villain who became other people to commit his crimes?

And as they argued, long hours into the night, Chris Grant lay there, still trapped. Still patient. Still with the air of a man who has had a distinct break with reality and has been waiting for things to start making sense again.

And then, radiating out from the miasmic event horizon that had trapped the sylvan berserker Redwood, there came a disruption to The Red and to The Green. Plants and animals collectively recoiled for miles around-- including and especially the plants extruded from Redwood herself.

(The briar bonds tying down Chris Grant parched and crumbled around him. Squirming around in their embrace, struggling against dozens of cutting thorns, Grant managed to undo his belt buckle... and to stab a hole with the prong into the now dry brittle wreath. Snapping his way out, brushing the hedge off of him, he staggered towards the block of rotting mahogany wood as he bled from dozens of tiny cuts, scooped up that block of wood and kept walking.)

Considering that Grant had been basically motionless for hours and hours, perhaps the two uniformed officers assigned to stand guard over him could be forgiven for not realizing at first that he'd gotten free and was making his escape-- but they got after him pretty quick.

"FREEZE! GET DOWN ON THE GROUND, HANDS ON YOUR HEAD!"

"DROP THE DOORSTOP AND GET DOWN ON THE GROUND!"

Despite his injuries, despite being stiff from hours of inactivity, he burst into a sprint with the speed of madness-- dashed into an alley as a half-dozen cops whirled to chase him--

--approached the perimeter set up around the impact crater that Grundy's initial double-smash punch had made hitting Supergirl and J'onn, another couple of cops and their squad car with yellow tape and wooden barriers, whirling to face him as they heard shouts through the air and over the radio--

--but before the first one could get his gun drawn Grant was on him, cracked him across the face with the mahogany block, fractured his skull, sent him down like a sack of chubby donut-fed potatoes.

The second one manage to draw his gun, but Grant whirled and flung the block at his face, the cop had to duck--

--and then Grant was sliding across the squaddie's hood and had crushed the cop's throat with a single, blurred punch. As the cop wheezed and crumpled, Grant grabbed the gun out of the cop's hand, scooped up the fallen block of wood, and darted off again.

The next few moments were a mangled strangled tangle of chaos and shouting, of missed gunshots and parkour escapes. Grant seemed tireless, fearless, heedless of his umpdozen cuts, almost demonically possessed in his mission.

Two uniforms and a Major Crimes detective managed to chase him into a blind alley--

--but by the time they caught up to him, he was gone, vanished from the urban equivalent of a box canyon. Like a magician, or a ninja.

A few minutes later he walked onto a gas station a few blocks away, bold as brass, shot a man filling up a gas can for his generator (the power had been knocked out in quite a few blocks' radius by the big fight and it took time to get these things going again), and walked off again with the full gas can. The process took all of about five seconds.

A few minutes after that, a panicked homeless man with a disposable cellphone called 911 with reports that a man had walked into the underpass where he and a number of squatters lived, had unceremoniously thrown a block of wood into a steel barrel used for fires, and then dumped a gas can on it for accelerant.

Anyone who'd yelled at him in protest had gotten a gun in their face and zero verbal response, just cold hard ice-blue eyes set off by fiery ginger hair.

Then, after a few moments of burning, he'd shoved over the barrel with his foot, scattering the fiery contents across the ground of the underpass...

...and from the flames scooped up an old-school cellphone that lay amongst the cinders completely unscathed.

And then he'd walked off as though he'd just bought a bus ticket and was walking to the stop.

"I knew them old Nokeeyers was tough," the old coot sputtered to the 911 operator. "But damn if they built 'em things ta last!"

After that, authorities could find neither hide nor hair of Chris Grant for hours.

In fact, it was Redwood who found him. Sniffing the trail of his blood and sweat, once she'd gotten free from the fiendish device that would have devoured the world.

Soon.
********​

Grant was standing on the roof of a building next to a celltower on the corner of 6th and Liberty, a daringly close walking distance from the original fight.

And he was yelling into his phone.

"--no, look, just put me in touch with Requisitions, I still have active mission status--"

"--no-- no-- fuck-- don't put me on hold-- I've just spent the last--"

And then he roared, threw his phone skittering across the rooftop, swore, dropped to his knees, punched the rooftop hard enough to bloody his knuckles, and let out an incoherent scream.

"While I can empathize," Redwood growled, crouching on the lip of the building's roof, glaring at Grant with narrowed eyes, "as it seems customer service is Hell's fergotten Circle no matter what universe yer in, mebbe disarmin' yerself was not yer smartest move ever."

Grant laughed faintly, didn't look up at her, didn't flinch at the sound of her voice. "Yes, my Dial doesn't have the same quantum tethering that yours has. Though I suppose you'd have noticed. Would have made things much easier for me. Could have just walked away from the block of wood and found the Dial back in my hand, for instance. Wouldn't have had to choose between my Anti-Life Drive and my Dial when I was fighting Open-Window Man last month. And on and on."

He tutted, glanced down at his bloodied knuckles.

"If I'd just had access to that Anti-Life firewall software, I could have fed it into the local cell network, infected The Eastern Seaboard, it wouldn't be the whole world-- but I could at least accomplish my mission in part, corrupt all the nearby Dials. But it seems my fears were correct. I've been stranded here. I imagine that I've been burned with my InterGang contacts, too. What a shame-- I could have done it! But they won't even listen to me!"

Redwood jumped down the short distance from the building rim, stalked towards the kneeling Grant as he ranted and blathered. Stood over him. "M'heart bleeds."

"Well, no it don't."

"But yours is sure gonna in a minute, here."

Claws popped from one hand, held low. SNIKT.

Grant still hadn't looked at her.

He just gazed over Pittsburgh's darkened skyline, expression sort of... wistful.

"It's funny what you think about when you can't go home again."

"There was this girl with me in Boot Camp. Beautiful redhead, real knockout, you'd have liked her. Kay, we called her. I wonder whatever happened to her."

"So on top o' everythin' else," Redwood drawled, "ya cheated on yer wife wi' a ginger side piece in some faraway black hole place? Gotta be honest, Mom's probably gonna wanna divorce. Here, I'll save ya th' trouble."

She clutched his hair with her fingers and raised that claw hand high.

 

[ChasNicollette]

Dante's Prayer.

Kara Zor-El's robe billowed in the wind as she stood on a balcony overlooking Kryptonopolis, and she gazed lovingly up at the golden sun of Sol.

All was well.

"Ten years," her mother's voice resounded behind her, and Kara turned with a grin to face Allura. "Ten years to the day since you and your cousin Kal combined Earth Science with your Fortress Seeds and bridged spacetime to bring Krypton to an opposite counter-orbit around Earth's sun. Ten years since that same alliance of sciences stabilized Krypton and gave it new life, and since interplanetary accords forged peace on both worlds. Five years since we recovered Argo City, and restored Kandar-- this is an auspicious day."

The dark-haired beauty stepped forward and slipped her hands into her daughter's. "You must be so proud. I know that I am. The proudest mother and aunt on our allied worlds."

"I was just an agent, Mother," Kara shook her head. "Just a factor in calculations light-years in length. It is my worlds I am proud of. Both of them. For rising to the glory of the moment, and making possible a renewal of life the likes of which neither of our histories had ever seen before. Sol's golden light giving undreamed-of power to all Kryptonians. Kryptonian science repairing the long-damaged genetic code of the human race, restoring to all of them the metagene previously only found in a fraction of their population, that they might share in our power--"

"--my adoptive human cousin from Boston, I think she might even fly faster than me, now, you should see her--"

Allura squeezed Kara's hands. "They are going to begin the ceremony soon. The lighting of the seven torches. Kal is waiting. Your father, your aunt and uncle-- your human parents and sister-- come."

They turned and walked hand in hand into the great halls of The Science Council, the great round room where all the mightiest minds of The High Houses of Krypton met-- sometimes with an honorary Councilman from their adoptive twin planet Earth. (Most recently Martin Stein had been accorded that honor, others had included Barry Allen, Raymond Palmer, John Henry Irons, Curtis Holt, Ryan Choi, Virgil Hawkins, Leo Quintum--)

Allura glanced sideways at Kara as they walked. "Will your elusive lover be in attendance, I wonder? I have been longing to meet them, after all. You're so mysterious about them, even down to the use of pronouns."

"Mother--!" Kara sputtered, turning pink around her lightly-freckled cheeks. "You know that they value their privacy, and that old habits are hard to break."

"Oh, I know," Allura chortled, turning her laugh to the high crystalline ceilings. "Oh, I know. But this person that causes you to glow with as much passion as Sol fills you with power, I would thank them. Perhaps someday, when they are ready."

"Someday," Kara nodded easily, bobbing her head, a lightness to her step beyond even her ability to defy gravity. "Someday."

At the heart of the centermost Council chamber there stood a pedestal where once The Council would try war criminals. Instead now around the pedestal there stood seven torches, one that would burn every main color of the humans' visible spectrum-- all seven colors of the rainbow.

Waiting there stood a delegation of all The High Houses of Krypton, The House of El, of Sen, of Zan, and on and on-- and with them stood her younger cousin Kal-El, in formal dress robes and tugging at his collar uncomfortably.

Kara smiled as she saw him across the floor, and her added joy caused an extra swing in her arm where she held hands with Allura. "Oh, he always looks so adorable in blue."

Kal glanced over his shoulder at them, and lit up, beckoning to them-- Jor-El and Lara and Zor-El were already about to ascend the podium to give a great speech--

--but then a rumble shook all of Kryptonopolis, shook all of Krypton, and a rush of bewilderment moved through the gathered crowds.

Kal frowned, glanced around--

Kara and Allura shared a startled look.

"The core instabilities," Kara frowned. "Could they have resurfaced?"

"Impossible," Allura shook her head sharply. "The chronogravitic halo has a half-life of--"

The rumble came again, harder, louder, and then a massive chasm ripped through the heart of the Council Chamber, a crack of doom carving between Kara and her cousin.

Instinctively she leaped, crossing the distance in a single bound the way that she might traverse the height of Earth's tallest skyscraper-- but gravity went sideways, solar wavelengths fluctuated, she tumbled, skittering across the floor--

--Kal-El dove to reach for her but his fingers were just out of her reach--

--another chasm split the floor and she watched in bubbling, twisting, gut-wrenching horror as her cousin was pulled away from her again, there in the knotted, madding crowds--

--Kara hesitated.

Put her hand to the floor. Felt the temblors with all the heightened sensorium available to her as a Kryptonian under a yellow sun.

"Can you hear that?" she wondered.

But no-one was listening to her.

A whole planet where everyone had super-hearing, and no-one was listening to her.

No-one could hear it but her.

"It sounds like--"

"--Loreena McKennitt?"

********​

On the roof of The Airmall of Pittsburgh International, J'onn's eyes lit up grim.

"Yes."

"A crack no wider than a nanofilament, but you have shaken it loose."

"I see the way."

And he plunged phased fingers into Kara Zor-El's skull.

 

[ChasNicollette]

"Closer to The Edge," by 30 Seconds to Mars. (J'onn/Supergirl)

Cold.

So cold.

An infinity of night without a single winking sun.

I have flown between spiral arms of The Milky Way, and gazed into the trackless gulfs between galaxies.

And never have I known cold cold dark this complete.

But in this darkness I can glow.

A pale red dot.

He waded into Kara's mind.

And he nearly drowned.

But with every step, he drew closer.

With every step, he drank in the poison that enslaved her.

His will was mighty. His mind formidable.

He could reconfigure his very brain to stem the pitch black slick.

To hold his own until he could reach the dying ember that glowed at the core of Kara's cortex.

He had only moments. But he would fly forever if he had to.

********​

The Council Chamber quaked and roiled, thundered and trembled...

...and the glassy ceiling caved inward as a massive figure, green dressed in blue and red, powered down through it and landed on an intact expanse of floor. Even in the presence of Kryptonians, this being exuded raw power nigh-unparalleled.

And with ruby red eyes glowing like twin Raos, he swept the room.

An older, handsome Kryptonian dressed in black, Var-Sen, forced himself to his feet amidst the gravitational flux and photonic shifts, and set his jaw. "J'onn J'onzz, Brother to Krypton, Last Son of Mars, you come with fire in your eyes and doom in your step. Do you come to save us?"

Beside Var-Sen there stood now too a beautiful blonde woman named Raya Ro-Zan, Var-Sen's betrothed and beloved, her hand finding his, and J'onn gazed at her sadly for an instant before turning his gaze to Var-Sen.

"I come to save, Var-Sen of The House of Sen."

"But you are beyond my reach of rescue, though I pray you have found a Heaven beyond the thought-palaces of neoconsciousness."

He clasped Var-Sen's shoulder, touched Raya's cheek, turned and gazed for a moment at Kal-El, so grown up now from his babyhood, so like his father Jor-El.

"All here, I cannot save-- save one."

"I am called 'Light to The Light' in my trueborn tongue."

"It is she who is The Light."

"And I will be The Light to her."

And with a rush of flight and wind, he alighted before the fallen Kara Zor-El.

And offered her his hand.

"...come with me if you want to live."

Panicked, bewildered, Kara glanced around, saw her mother's face--

--the face of her father--

--her beautiful younger cousin, he took so much looking after--

--she couldn't just leave them--

"Kara!" J'onn roared, grasped her shoulders, shook her as though trying to waken her, and her startled gaze locked onto his face.

Dripping black was starting to pour down from the shattered skylight and crawl up through the cracks in the floor, starting to drown everyone around them in cold darkness like an oil slick on Arctic seas.

"Please."

"'You are alive. So live.'"

"Let me save you."

"Put your trust in me."

"One last time."

Kara slipped her hand into J'onn's, and gazed at him with heartbroken tears in her wild-yonder eyes.

And she breathed: "I trust you, Uncle J'onn."

J'onn trembled for a moment like even that phrase-- Uncle J'onn --was a blow to his mighty heart.

But then he threw an arm around Kara's shoulders, put a fist up to the sky, and launched back up into the umbric morass.

********​

To J'onn's mind, all of this had transpired across eternities.

To the outside world, to Jaime Reyes' observation, it might only have taken heartbeats.

But J'onn drew his phased hand back out of Kara's head-- her eyes turned blue again, the black sheen that had covered them seeming instead to come away from Kara's brain clinging to the tips of J'onn's fingers.

J'onn staggered, dropped to one knee, clutched his head with his clean hand.

The blackness climbed his fingers, his arm, tracing capillary and sinew, wreathing green green flesh in dark dark dark.

Kara vomited noisily, panting for breath, incoherent, barely-conscious.

"...mother..."

"...Kal?"

J'onn glanced up at Jaime.

And managed a thin, weary smile.

"You said-- can it have been so long ago--"

"--you said, 'if someone needs to be taken, then let it be one who has blood on his hands,' 'let it be one who has sinned.'"

"I have sinned enough in my time. Killed in the name of freedom and salvation."

"And in the folklore and superstition of this world, there is an apotropaic tradition-- 'The Sin-Eater.'"

"I have extricated Kara Zor-El from Anti-Life. But I cannot prevent its overcoming me in turn. I can delay it... long enough. But I cannot overcome it."

His gaze never wavered from Jaime's.

"There is no-one living in this world who is sinless, Jaime. And you would do well to remember that perhaps you need not be sinless to strive for the good-- to fight that neverending battle for truth and justice. Indeed, there are times when sin and justice are forced to be uneasy brothers that justice may prevail."

"Remember that."

"Err on the side of Hope, as you carry that light within you-- hope for the best in this world and in all beings."

"But Hope is nothing without The Will to do what must be done."

"Just as I have done what I must do."

He looked then to Kara, placed his unsullied hand on Kara's perspiring brow, even as the darkness claimed his torso, his shoulders, crawled down his legs.

And he murmured a prayer of Man: "'And for thy peace I pawn my own soul. ...Amen.'"

And then he forced himself to his feet.

And then he put both fists to the sky.

And with the effort it would take to drag a moon from the mouth of a black hole, J'onn J'onnz forced himself into the air, aiming for as uninhabited corner of the galaxy as he could think of--

--if this Master was to make him a puppet indeed, let him be out of reach of those that he might hurt or kill or cause to fear...

He streaked out of Earth's atmosphere, out into the penumbra and the umbra of night, rapidly increasing in speed, accelerating even faster than a Kryptonian.

Ah, yes, it was true that they were approximately equal in raw power, a Martian and a solar-charged Kryptonian, but a Martian had advantages that a Kryptonian did not-- such as the power to control one's own molecular density with inwardly-directed telekinesis, auto-telekinesis. Thus, as one accelerated towards the speed of light, and one's mass drastically increased-- such were the strictures of relativity-- J'onn could force himself intangible, force his mass to be negligible instead-- will his mass to zero over and over again even as acceleration to light speed and beyond tried to drive his mass into the infinite.

This took skill and discipline few Martians could master even in the best of times, and now it was a labor akin to dragging the millwheels of The Universe.

But J'onn pressed on. Faster and faster.

Towards the sanctuary of some cold dead rock orbiting a cold dead star that his sacrifice might not be turned against him, might not prove in vain...

Faster and faster and faster and faster--

--his molecular structure vibrated terribly, agonizingly, caught between relativistic stresses and J'onn's own mighty force of will--

--he could see the planetoid just ahead of him, mere astronomical units away--

--but the strain caught up to him in the same instant that the infra-sombre clutches of Anti-Life seeped into his heart and his frontal cortex.

The Martian Manhunter was gone.

 

[AmenRa]

"On The Turning Away", Pink Floyd.

It would have been a fiery cataclysm to shake the very foundations of a world to its core.

Though, this world was cold and dead. Nothing but barren rock that had withered away at the surface into sand. It was a powdery sand much like that of Earth's moon. It was cold and devoid of atmosphere and tinged with blue light from its star. Yet, the star's light didn't so much shine upon as it did trickle.

Blue suns are cold suns.

The Last Son of Mars crashed into this lifeless planetoid in a detonation that would crack the small world to its core. The super heated friction of his passing impact turned a portion of the planet's nickel-iron core to liquid and it spilled out into space.

The force of impact would move the world several thousand meters from its orbital cycle. Fortunately, there was no life here. It was the reason J'onn had chosen this place.

The liquid metal that had been the planetoid's center cooled in the cold vacuum. It congealed and hardened around the split of the rock's surface, patching together its wounds. Fragments of the planetoid floated, now, hanging above its surface like jagged teeth split from the maw of a great serpent.

And, as the nickel-iron core once again cooled it trapped within it the thing that had hurt it; the invader who had come to kill it with unbelievable speed and terrible ferocity.

Conscious thought had escaped him long before he even struck the planet's surface. The war within him had been fought and rested and fought again, and its effect on his physical form had been geometrically increased by the speed at which he had traveled.

J'onn J'onzz took no notice as he became entombed in this lifeless rock's core. His eyes had been closed for some time, yet his hands remained balled into fists. His consciousness was gone, now, within itself and nowhere at all. And there was nothing but a husk of the once great Manhunter that stood frozenly encased in meters of solid metal.

Even as the planet's core cooled, the last remaining vestiges of the power that made him who he was seeped from him. It trickled now, unhindered by nothing except the physics of metal and Martian physiology.

He did not know. J'onn J'onzz had left himself already, and all that was physical, all that was tangible, was what remained.

The Light to the Light was alight no more.

____

When a light goes out in the universe it is noticed.

Such as it when a star ceases to shine.

Light years away, on the planet Oa, the Guardians of the Universe were engaged in a usual debate when they all went silent. They each looked upon the other in turn, and one's eyebrow went aloft as the dawning of recognition became him.

Across the ether of space and time, beyond that which we call the mortal plane, a watcher stood as sentinel on a rainbow bridge. His sight and senses saw, heard, and felt. He cast his head down and breathed a heavy sigh.

A Doctor somewhere in the universe pulled from his pocket a watch, opened it, and then closed it again. He mumbled something, and then turned his attention to the sky.

The sentient planet Mogo rearranged his foliage from the lantern shape he normally flowered and made it into an "X".

A Spider-Man's senses tingled, and he stopped atop a building and took off his mask.

And, across the galaxy, another watcher saw and felt. This one, though, spurred his craft with a thought towards the place. For in this place he sensed power. He was drawn to power, and power such as this, trickling though it may only be, was power extreme.

 

[Lunaramblings]

Sportsmaster laughed, a short, sharp bray of a sound. "Let's be real, Pretty-Boy. Most all of the players here would just slow me down. But I'd be real surprised if any of you trusted me by myself in the dark without a fight."



Throughout Jim Gordon Senior's revelations and illuminations of the past, Sportsmaster made a visible point of perusing and memorizing the map before him, ostensibly comparing it to his own memories of the region's topography. Of particular interest was that bridge and that river. If Sportsmaster had ever heard of these events, even if it was just from headlines during his own youth here in Gotham City, he betrayed about as much emotional reaction as a locker door.

But once Gordon turned away, overcome by decades' worth of feeling, Sportsmaster spoke up, half-glancing up at Gordon as he did so: "You know, Commish, there's plenty of dads who'd give their eye teeth to see their own kids display that kind of initiative. It's go-getters like your boy there that make a dynasty. You oughta be proud instead of cryin' into your Flutie Flakes."

He straightened a bit, then, and squinted. "All the same, there's that damn gnawing at your gut when you realize your kid ain't playing for the same team as you anymore, that they've burned your best playbook and walked straight out of bounds. Can't help but wonder where you went wrong."

...was that... sympathy? From the sociopathic mercenary? ...close as he'd ever get, blink and you'll miss it.

The moment passed, then, and Crock grunted, waved this away dismissively. "Slaughter Swamp. Hnh. Went to plenty of sports camps when I was a kid, had to sit around all these campfires listening to the same inane damn stories-- the legends say that once, long ago, witches from the lost colony of Roanoke made a pact with a devil in Slaughter Swamp. Some stories say it was The Spirit of The Goat, others say it was a demon bat-- others say it was some dark Faerie king without a throne-- but the point is-- nothing ever dies in Slaughter Swamp, not really, or anywhere in Gotham. It always comes crawling back in some twisted form or another. It always comes back."

He harrumphed. "Bullshit stories. Urban legends. Fairy tales. Stupid kids trying to psych each other out over s'mores and Gatorade. I never put any store in that superstitious shit, anymore than I believed it was a pair of lucky socks or taking a knee in the end zone that got me a win. I wouldn't spare it a second thought, old man."

Gordon looked at Crock with a strained look. He seemed like he wanted to respond, but just didn't have it left. Instead he shakes his head slightly as he turns and walks way.

Bullock follows quickly behind, but not before glaring sharply at Crock.

The Arrow surveys the maps before he speaks again.

"Sportsmaster, you and Nightwing take the lead. It looks like according to the map here there are a couple places that were refugee areas, being held down by Joker and Penguin's men mostly. I think it wise to try to bring everyone to a more defensive position. I know Nyssa and she will pick off these places one by one if we leave them. Nightwing, Sportsmaster, play nice. Ladies, lets go. There was a bus out front, that is our ride."

The two girls nod. Both clearly not trusting their voices after the reveal of the skeletons in the Gordon family closet. But both still determined enough to push on.

 

[Lunaramblings]

The car's forward acceleration allowed it to deftly evade Queen's blast, much to her startled chagrin--

--and when Jack had regained his balance after damn near taking an arrow to the eye, he found his sightline blocked against the weakest-seeming target in the flock of white hats by the broad side of that fantastic automobile.

The car was a momentary obstacle, if that-- The Royal Flush Gang were airborne aboard their flying cards, after all.

But add to that the Japanese gentleman's sudden metamorphosis into an armored, almost insectoid-looking warrior--

"What in blazes--?" King sputtered, wheeling about on his flight deck, the fact that this newcomer had avoided his killing blow was vexing enough, but this nonsense?

--this was a pretty solid distraction.

Distraction enough for Artemis to gather her mom up in her arms and help her into the open car door. "I know this goes against everything you ever taught me about getting into cars with strangers-- especially weird-ass strangers that look like a Donnie Darko Power Ranger whose cars are straight ripped off of Knight Rider 2000--"

"Artemis," Paula alerted, "behind you!"

But Artemis quite literally had her arms full-- not that it mattered-- before she could so much as glance over her shoulder, Paula-- muscle memory like it was yesterday, nerves like steel struck by lightning-- had drawn Artemis' reserve crossbow, loaded it and fired--

--the arrow speared over Artemis' other shoulder just as Ten swooped overhead, hurling a card--

--arrow met card in mid-air right as it left Ten's hand, both were explosive--

--the combined force of the detonation knocked Ten ass-over-teakettle, right off of her flight deck, sent her tumbling to the road below. She didn't fall far, and she landed with professional skill on blind instinct, and her uniform protected her from the worst of the harm--

--but she landed heavy and landed hard and she didn't move again right away.

Artemis blinked, astonished. "Still got it, Mom."

Paula smiled wearily, and then glanced at Artemis askance. "'Knight Rider 2000?'"

Artemis grimaced, growled a reply through gritted teeth: "Fuckin' Cisco."

Then Jack swooped 'round overhead, casting a quick glance at Ten-- and then locking that red laser eye onto Artemis and her mother.

With a cry, Artemis kicked the car door shut, dove for her bow, came up firing, trying to keep Jack off-balance--

--but with grim zealotry (and perhaps a bionic HUD target-assist) Jack blasted arrow after arrow into splinters.

********​

Ace's flight deck crashed to the ground and shattered, but both Ace and Vixen landed yards away from it with a cratering thwoom, wrestling, clinching, each struggling to get leverage on the other--

--Ace's elbow clipped the side of Vixen's head, knocking her off-balance, then a fist the size and consistency of an anvil crashed into her jaw, driving her skidding back fifteen feet and ringing her skull like a bell even through the ELEPHANT strength.

Vixen managed to recover almost immediately, but even in that instant, hatches opened in Ace's back and shoulders, unfolding laser cannons and missile launchers--

"Always with the upgrades," Mari harrumphed, slapped The Totem--

FLEA.

--and jumped almost 50 feet up as Ace's hardware turned the spot where she'd been standing into a firebomb light-show inferno.

Arcing down, Vixen clenched her teeth and leaned, aiming to land right on Ace, slapping The Totem once again--

ORCA.

--but even as she fell, Ace glanced up at her, and his boots flared to life, rocket boosters igniting--

--he launched to meet Vixen in the air, and the impact rattled Vixen right down to her bones--

"You can fly even without the card, you damn cheater?" Mari scoffed, ramming a knee into Ace's chestplate and managing to dent it a little. "Talk about stacking the deck!"

********​

"And what, pray tell," King glowered, sword still bared, as he and Queen hovered side-by-side ten feet above and in front of the newcomer in red, "are you?"

"Can't be anyone who's anyone if we've never heard of him," Queen snarked, and aimed her scepter at the strange red creature's chest. "Not that it matters. Everything burns."

And she unleashed another storm of plasmic flame directly at the armored combatant.

Once Paula was safely deposited in the car, the doors flip shut, and it is surrounded by an aura of energy as it peels off escaping the fray. For now. Moving impossibly fast in it's Speed Transformation the Car zipped through the destruction at speeds that even The Flash might give props.

As King and Queen made their move, The Driver made his. A steering wheel like device in his hand became sword and wheels manifested from his feet as he began blazing his way through the street, dodging blast after blast from Queen and her scepter.

As she did so King moved in to bring his sword to bare.

The Driver used his speed to shoot up over some debris and coming down with a mighty slash of his Drive-Blade. King was no slouch, but neither was the Driver. The huge over hand slash was enough to stagger his foe.

With lightning quick skill, the pair slashed and jabbed and cut at one another. With King now in the fray Queen had to use more precision than brute force. Every time The Driver would get an edge, she would swoop in with blast after blast of plasma.

With a quick roll, The Driver came to his feet as a grappling hook like tendril shoots from his belt, snaring Queen and pulling his infront of King's next barrage. So fast. So unexpected. King was able to pull his strike, and Queen was able to get her scepter up to block, but the force sent the scepter spinning away into he gutter.

As this happens, The Driver's chest piece fires blast after blast into her back. Knocking her to the ground and out cold. In his fury King charges. As he does so, The Driver pulls another item from his belt, slapping it into the wrist mount a robotic voice calls out from the device. "Tire Kokkan! RumbleDump!"

From the distance a Yellow Tire shaped chest piece shoots to The Driver, and with it a drill like arm cannon. The Drill Arm pulls him toward his target as he parries with his blade, driving heavy strike after strike with the drill, tearing away the protective armor of the King. Using the Speed of his form he evades and creates distance as the battered King takes a knee. "Maybe you are more formidable than you appear. So be it Driver. We shall pick this up at a later date." King lunges and grabs Queen's scepter. He then tumbles to her side and pulls a card from his belt. "Your not the only one with tricks on their belts Kid. Time to go."

King slings the card in front of him. Toward The Driver. The card grows massive as it turns into a shockwave of plasmic energy. While The Driver is easily able to absord this impact with little real harm, it gives King the moment he needs to summon his flying card, and take to the sky, darting away with the Queen in his arms.

 

[ChasNicollette]

"The Requiem," by Linkin Park.

A Doctor somewhere in the universe pulled from his pocket a watch, opened it, and then closed it again. He mumbled something, and then turned his attention to the sky.

In Washington, DC, before the mighty, beleaguered Capitol Building, sat an old, white-haired man in a wheelchair. He twitched and he spasmed, as he suffered a form of palsy, but his trembling fingers drew out a pocket-watch, old and broken and disused. He opened it and gazed at the watch's face, with jagged cracks across the glass, hands askew, and he looked sorrowful.

He clapped the watch shut again, and mumbled: "This moment was scheduled to occur."

He turned his head towards the skies over The Beltway and he gazed with somber solemnity into the wide wide dark night.

And then he turned his wheelchair and rolled himself with trembling hands towards The Capitol Building's nearest handicapped access.

********​

A Spider-Man's senses tingled, and he stopped atop a building and took off his mask.

In the city of Gotham, a man called Johnny LaMonica, The Black Spider, swung on a strand of sickly orange web and landed in a crouch on one of the innumerable grotesques (not gargoyles, gargoyles are fountains) that adorned the Gothic architecture of the anachronistic city.

But then he stopped, and pulled off his mask, showing his burned, disfigured face-- alarm bells were ringing in his brain, frequencies he little understood, a collective unconsciousness shared by all spiders and spider-powered metahumans. His spider-powers gave him a link to The Red that fostered in him an extrasensory perception that most often manifested as a "danger sense," an instinctive awareness of personal danger. But sometimes it told him other things... and now it gave him pause. It spoke to him on a level he didn't usually deal with, full of longing and ache and mourning and sympathy.

He normally dealt in violence-- one of the few actual metahumans in the employ of The League of Assassins --but this was like a pang of conscience, of humanity, of being better than himself, and he didn't like it at all.

Then the Network communicator in his ear chirped-- somehow, Goldface had given them tech that would penetrate this blackout --and he takked it. "Go for Black Spider."

"The Daughter of The Demon is off-grid and not responding," a sub-lieutenant in The League hierarchy alerted him, "so it falls to me to tell you that one of the disabled communications points has suddenly awakened. We suspect 'superhero' involvement, and that they may be attempting to repair the other hub as well. Dispatch them immediately, for the honor of The Demon's Head!"

Black Spider hauled his mask on, straightened it. "Yeah, yeah, save your sermons, preacher, I'm on it, I'm on it."

He glanced once more at the sky, squinted behind the lenses of his mask, and addressed the stars, the weird jingling in his spider-sense rather than the voice on the other end of the radio. "Whoever you were, hope you burned out instead of fading away. Now stay the fuck out of my head."

TWHIPP, he fired off a webline, and swung off across the darkened skyline of New York's Ugly Stepsister.

 

[ChasNicollette]

Can't Stop the Signal. (Felicity)

Inside that selfsame Capitol Building, Senators and Congresspeople clashed, humanitarian interests lobbied... but it seemed to be all for naught.

No-one could recall a time in recent memory when a joint session of The USA's bicameral legislature had run so late into the night, so deep into the dark before dawn, and still battle waged for the soul of Gotham City and of a nation.

Off to one side of The House Chamber, an exhausted Felicity Smoak stood practically hugging an XXL DC Jitters coffee with both hands, trying to talk shop with a bunch of DoJ and FBI guys while the arguments raged.

"...it all goes back to Waldo Glenmorgan, really, that guy from Metropolis who was friends with Nikola Tesla back in the day? If it wasn't for him, we never would have had hand-held cellular telephones as early as The 1970's, flatscreen monitors, home PCs, any of that stuff, sure it plateau'd for awhile but then we made more breakthroughs in the 2000's, and all of it goes back to him. He was like-- Nostradamus-- or-or-or Milo Rambaldi-- or like Nik Tesla himself-- one of his letters to Charles Babbage described the concept of a search engine--"

The lawyers and agents in suits were staring at her, bewildered by her string of words, but she couldn't stop now, logorrhea mode activate, she had to steamroll to get to her point and besides that one guy in the back was doing this slow nod like he grokked her--

"--but even today, even with the advances we've made in facial recognition-- a subject to which I have personally devoted, like, a significant percentage of the last decade, hunting down and mining data to find perps and victims-- we still find anomalies. Me and my fellow Whovians call it 'spacial genetic multiplicity,' the appearance of identical twin-like doppelgangers decades apart and with no direct genealogical connection. Felix Faust doesn't count, he's lived forever and lots of places, lots of identities-- but the Queens' old family doctor had a twin in a hero cop from right next door in Seattle, my friend Sin had a double of her own who was a murder victim-- there was The Electrocutioner--"

She shook her head sharply. "My point-- I have a point-- my point is that even with this vast futuristic technology we have at our fingertips, even now that The Law of Accelerated Returns has accelerated-- we can't use it as a crutch. The key is still human decision-making, still instinct and intellect, still keen judgement and conscience-- if we don't use our information-gathering tech with all of that stuff in mind, we might as well just be banging rocks together and ooking--"

An alarm bleated in her earpiece, and her eyes went wide.

"Um."

"Right."

"Excuse me."

Leaving those bewildered fellows even more bewildered behind her, she whirled and hurried around the rim of the Chamber floor where Bruce Anthony Thomas Wayne stood consulting in hushed tones with two, three members of the Presidential Cabinet.

Pinching the right arm of her glasses, the brown-haired former blonde activated an Augmented Reality system based on the HUD of Ray Palmer's various A.T.O.M. armors-- data scrolled by in front of her eyes relayed to her from her earpiece. She really needed to sit down with a laptop or a tablet, like, immediately, but this would be enough for her to crossref and pinpoint for now.

"Sir, uh, Mister Wayne," she tugged on his sleeve.

"You asked me to let you know if we got a hit on, uh, that site."

 

[ChasNicollette]

Match Play on The Back Nine. (Sportsmaster)

Gordon looked at Crock with a strained look. He seemed like he wanted to respond, but just didn't have it left. Instead he shakes his head slightly as he turns and walks way.

Bullock follows quickly behind, but not before glaring sharply at Crock.

Crock's facemask covered the vast majority of his expressive range, so he didn't betray much response, if any, at either Gordon's strain or Bullock's disdain, he just met their eyes with his own, soulless gaze.

But a microexpression specialist might detect, in the squint of those eyes, a modicum of smug satisfaction. He'd cut deep, and he'd proven a point, even if only to himself.

He had no time at all for weakness-- not in this business.

The Arrow surveys the maps before he speaks again.

"Sportsmaster, you and Nightwing take the lead. It looks like according to the map here there are a couple places that were refugee areas, being held down by Joker and Penguin's men mostly. I think it wise to try to bring everyone to a more defensive position. I know Nyssa and she will pick off these places one by one if we leave them. Nightwing, Sportsmaster, play nice. Ladies, lets go. There was a bus out front, that is our ride."

The two girls nod. Both clearly not trusting their voices after the reveal of the skeletons in the Gordon family closet. But both still determined enough to push on.

Sportsmaster gave Nightwing a long, appraising look, and eventually nodded a gruff, reluctant nod to himself.

"Yeah, you'll do, Pretty Boy. You'll do."

"Now, c'mon."

"We're on Eastern Pain Time, here, and it is Crock O'Clock."

 

[ChasNicollette]

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. (Artemis/Tigress/Vixen)

Her eyes were hazel, actually. Not blue.

But like many people with hazel eyes, Artemis Crock's irises had an iridescent quality to them-- they looked different colors in different lights, and sometimes seemed to even change color with the person's mood. So sometimes, yes, her eyes seemed blue.

(If you could only see how blue her eyes can be when she says when she says she loves me.)

Her eyes seemed blue now.

Once Paula was safely deposited in the car, the doors flip shut, and it is surrounded by an aura of energy as it peels off escaping the fray. For now. Moving impossibly fast in it's Speed Transformation the Car zipped through the destruction at speeds that even The Flash might give props.

Those eyes narrowed as the car stormed off, momentary disgust boiled in her that she'd just put her mom into this guy's car that they had no idea who he was.

But in the front seat of the Tridoron automobile, Paula Crock opened her hand to reveal a tracking arrowhead blinking there in her palm, having been pressed there even as Artemis had bundled her mother bodily into the car.

It didn't matter if this guy was a white hat or a black hat, if he tried to make off with Artemis' mother, Artemis would find her again. She was The Goddess of The Hunt.

But she couldn't afford a backwards glance, she was too busy exchanging fire with Jack-- and he was aggravatingly good a shot, maybe even better than the Jack that had been with The Royal Flush Gang at the Halo robbery.

Artemis gritted her teeth, kept firing.

********​

"Ahhhhhnn!" Vixen growled as Ace's fist slammed into her jaw, sending her reeling.

Okay, if this guy can handle ORCA strength, gotta up it, gotta switch, gotta go-- I dunno-- HUMPBACK WHALE, or GIANT SQUID--

...but then a whisper seemed to hush across her mind's ear, a whisper in her ghost, like that presence that was helping her mitigate the negative effects of The Totem was actively talking to her now. In a voice... in a voice that sounded so very much like her mother...

Mari. You are better than this.

You are thinking in the heat of battle, letting your enemy dictate the terms of your combat.

But look. Listen. There are other ways to defeat your enemies than by brute force. You have access to the ashe, the life force, of the entire Animal Kindgom, and you wear the gift of a Trickster God. Perhaps if you combined strength with agility--

Mari threw herself hard to one side with her ORCA strength, dodging another barrage of laser-fire, panted with the effort. Okay, let's say I'm listening. GORILLA? Would that even scratch this guy?

Yes. But not just any gorilla.

Mari squinted. And tapped The Tantu Totem.

GORILLA.

But this time, as the template swam into place, as the morphic fields billowed into alignment, that presence reached out and-- tuned it-- fine-tuned it, zeroed in--

--it was kind of like channeling that weird CHEETAH template with super-speed back in Keystone--

--a specific CHEETAH, a superCHEETAH, this was a specific GORILLA--

--a metaGORILLA--

--it was Grodd.

Exposed to the same darkmatter energies as the first wave of metahumans in Central City, he was physically augmented-- he could catch and absorb the impact of The Flash's trademark supersonic punch, after all--

Ace's fist blurred for Mari's head but she leaped forward to meet it, caught the punch like Grodd had caught Barry Allen's, and the street practically rippled under them as she felt her body instinctively add just enough give to her powerful frame. Her fist popped up, ready to haymaker a counter-punch...

...but Grodd's power wasn't just physical, it was mental-- psychic.

And as Vixen's brain began to interpret not just five senses, but six, she realized--

--there was a mind inside this Ace. A human mind!

It wasn't just a robot, like previous Aces had been.

Grodd's vicious intelligence was also in play, and Mari instantly remembered every word of a file she had read a month ago on the Halo robbery, and the specs they'd gotten away with-- according to Static-- had been schematics for a specialized armored design, an extrapolation from the same O.M.A.C. design that had inspired The A.T.O.M. They must have used it!

And with near-eidetic quality, Vixen remembered every line of those specs, having glanced over them a month ago with the rest of it. Remembered one particular function.

And she ran her tongue around her teeth, waggled her eyebrows at Ace, and--

--exerted her mind--

--extended her influence--

--pressed her mind into that of Ace's pilot--

--and thought a single, incontrovertible word: "EJECT."

She felt the pilot's mind give off a panicked squeak, and all of a sudden the back of the armor split open and launched the pilot high up into the sky with a scream...

...somewhere up out of sight the Ace Pilot (hah!) must have triggered some kind of autopilot intercept, because then Ace's rocket boost kicked in and it launched up after the hapless flyboy, vanishing into the night on a column of flame.

Mari smirked up at the contrail. "Bedtime for Bonzo."

********​

Artemis was running out of arrows, patience, and time.

She wasn't sure how much of the ten minutes and ten seconds of shrinky-dink arrow-time they'd burned up here on this battlefield, but it was more than she'd like, and she wasn't looking forward to having Nyssa al Ghul and her scary-ass non-verbal hench-lady come back after them.

Jack's laser scorched a glue-bomb arrow out of the air, vaporizing the glue before it could even properly deploy--

--and Artemis grimaced--

"So done with you."

Fired her magnesium flare arrow and threw her arm up in front of her eyes--

--like with Ten, Jack blasted the arrow right in front of him--

--like with Ten, the ignition went off right in his face--

--no explosion, as such, but bright bright bright light--

--the mask was polarized and the HUD certainly would auto-compensate for light levels but the mask only covered half of his face--

--the magnesium light flash blinded Jack's exposed eye in an agonizing coruscation and he screamed--

--Artemis' eyes were narrowed to a squint to shut out the firelight but it was enough, she could see enough, she knew right where his face was--

--she drew an arrow and fired--

--hit him right in the laser-eye with a taser-arrow--

--the mask caught the worst of it but still any neuro-link that mask had was not gonna be fun for his central nervous system--

--he stopped screaming and started gurgling and fell off of his flight deck in a crumpled twitching frothy mess.

King slings the card in front of him. Toward The Driver. The card grows massive as it turns into a shockwave of plasmic energy. While The Driver is easily able to absord this impact with little real harm, it gives King the moment he needs to summon his flying card, and take to the sky, darting away with the Queen in his arms.

--it was right about then that Ten managed to lurch to her feet, and got a flight deck under her, and she swooped to catch Jack and fly after King. "Always the electricity, with Jacks. That'd be funny if it wasn't so pathetic."

They weren't gone more than a second before Artemis drew an arrow-- her last explosive arrow, and only one of about five arrows she had left after Jack had played shooting gallery with the rest of her quiver-- but damn if she wasn't gonna make it count--

--and pointed it right at The Driver's head.

"Okay. Time to bring my mom back. Don't even fuck with me on this, okay? You got some slick moves and more tricks up your belt than some Bats I could mention but the lady in the car comes back. Now. Or I give you a flat no patch-kit in the world is gonna fix."

Vixen arched an eyebrow.

"I'd take her seriously if I were you. I can read minds right now, and I really don't think she's bluffing."

 

[Zet_Cross]

Leon takes the red car from his wristband. "Nice Drive." His armor disappears in a flash of red.

The eyes on his belt flash. "The Tridoron is already on its way back. If you don't believe me just check the signal you placed in it." The voice seems to have come from the belt.

Leon holds up his hands. "No need for hostilities. We're both on the same side. I'm Tomari Leon, a special investigator with GCPD. They don't know about the whole Kamen Rider thing so lets keep that between the three of us."

 

[ChasNicollette]

Touge no Hashiriya. (Vixen/Artemis/Tigress)

Leon takes the red car from his wristband. "Nice Drive." His armor disappears in a flash of red.

Vixen squinted. Even without Grodd's intelligence enhancing her own, she was plenty smart in her own right.

And she couldn't help but notice the thematic similarities between this guy and Rose Grant. Switching powers with a watch, flashes of light-- red instead of green, but still.

Made her wonder.

The eyes on his belt flash. "The Tridoron is already on its way back. If you don't believe me just check the signal you placed in it." The voice seems to have come from the belt.

Artemis squinted. "I don't usually talk that close to a guy's crotch this soon after meeting him, but that tracker was an investment, it's not gonna do crap until we get communications back up--"

She hesitated as her earpiece bleeped, a ping from the tracker.

Huh. Tower must be online.

Leon holds up his hands. "No need for hostilities. We're both on the same side. I'm Tomari Leon, a special investigator with GCPD. They don't know about the whole Kamen Rider thing so lets keep that between the three of us."

Artemis' cheek twitched. "...why does everyone always come out to me?"

Then she lowered her bow, took the arrow off the string, but held the arrow between her fingers in the same hand that held the bow. Her other hand, she slung a small PDA out of a pouch, glanced at the screen. An overhead map of Gotham showed a whisper-faint, weak-as-Hell contact blinking-- but moving closer with each blink.

"Okay, that's affirm."

Mari moved closer to Leon. "You don't seem to be a tango and you helped us against those Flush Gangers, so I'm not going to read your mind without permission. But my brain is razor sharp right now and I remember a New York Fashion Week last year, seeing an article from The Asahi Shimbun in Japanese about a colorful armored sentai hero aiding police."

She swung out her hand to shake and bow.

"I'm Vixen, this is Artemis, we're with The Justice Society. You might want to suit up and stay suited up. There might be more supervillains and assassins where that came from, and if a dirty cop spots you..."

Artemis was searching the street looking for Tridoron's headlights, looking for her mom. "Also our car got blown up and we could use a ride. I slowed down the Assassins' boss-lady but she's probably gonna be pretty pissed off when she and her entourage catch up."

 

[AmenRa]

"Children of the Sun", Billy Thorpe

"Of all the souls I have encountered during my travels, his was the most....human."

Thor Odinson said as he looked out over the Sea of Asgard. From his vantage point, high in the balconies of the tower of the palace, the sea appeared to simply stop where the horizon line of black stars and space began.

"He will indeed be missed," surmised Odin All-father.

"And," his son asked, "what of Earth?"

"Midgard has protectors, as it always has had. As it always will have. Ours is to leave it be for now."

"Yet," his son continued, "it is a part of Yggdrasil. Is it not our responsibility?"

Odin looked at his son with his one good eye. "Once," he answered, "we came as gods among them. Now, they no longer have need of us. Earth has yet to comprehend the vastness of other realms, of other possibilities. It is best we keep to our own." And, with that, Odin turned to go back into the palace.

Thor extended his hand over the sea, and crushed something in his fist. He opened it to allow the gentle breeze to blow the remains of an Oreo cookie away.

_____

The Traveler had arrived.

His craft had stopped just at the small planetoid. He observed how the lifeless rock bore a scar through its center and how jagged pieces of it hung in a loose orbit around it.

The power emanating from this place was tangible. He could feel it.

He extended a silvery hand. With the gesture of will a convergence of blue-white energy erupted from his fingers and shot into the rock before him. No form of physical matter could withstand this barrage of energy. The scar in the planet's center opened and a humanoid shaped form encased in metal was revealed.

With a thought he brought his craft to it. He extended his senses, touching tangible and intangible, reaching deep within and without.

Yes, this was the source of power. This was what had gathered his attention in the first.

His silvered hand extended again. The nickel-iron that encased the physical form of J'onn J'onzz began to dissolve. This action, for the Traveler, was trivial. As said, no physical matter could withstand his energy. Metal was a simple construct and could be taken apart at the sub-atomic level when struck with sufficient power.

The Traveler had more than sufficient power, for his was the Power Cosmic.