Administrative Mishap [Supergirl/Worm]

[StoneSaint]

I'm a little late to the part, but this finale was incredible, and you've done an incredible job on Administrative Mishap! I'm looking forward to whatever your next project is.

 

[OxfordOctopus]

Hey guys, due to a mix of things and also me just... sincerely really needing this break, I'm hoping to get the first epilogue out between the 14th and 28th of September. I know that's a way off, and I know that's a fairly open-ended time frame, but I'm dealing with a lot of growing pains without having Administrative Mishap as such a central part of my schedule anymore, on top of getting really into some stuff I've been putting off reading/playing/etc since I started writing. I'm still working on them, but it's a lot slower for me than usual.

Thank you for your understanding. I hope I can get those final few chapters out soon!

 

[Dark as Silver]

I don't understand? Administrative Mishap no longer being among your highest priorities means its being defered for other things and this will have an effect on the schedule?!?
I am shocked, this was totally unpredictable.

 

[ScissorSlipper]

Sept 14-28 is still a lot sooner than I thought! I hope you develop a good schedule.

 

[WhoAmEye]

Hey guys, due to a mix of things and also me just... sincerely really needing this break, I'm hoping to get the first epilogue out between the 14th and 28th of September. I know that's a way off, and I know that's a fairly open-ended time frame, but I'm dealing with a lot of growing pains without having Administrative Mishap as such a central part of my schedule anymore, on top of getting really into some stuff I've been putting off reading/playing/etc since I started writing. I'm still working on them, but it's a lot slower for me than usual.

Thank you for your understanding. I hope I can get those final few chapters out soon!

Click to shrink...

There is no rush whatsoever. Addy will drown you in Saturday's plushy goodness if you dare think otherwise!

 

[cj.jedi]

I tentatively agree with the above that fighting Rhea didn't quite feel right, unless she was immune to mind control. I don't remember anything saying she was immune, but if some sentences were put in to that effect, then I think it would be perfect.

That said, I have highly enjoyed this fic, thank you very much for writing it!

 

[OxfordOctopus]

EPILOGUE 1
[GUIDING LIGHT]​

"Thou who hast been given the privilege of reading these words, know that this book is as much a record of our sins as it is a book of history. Internalize these words, accept them into your marrow, and do not make the same mistakes that we did, so that the future might one day be brighter than the legacy we leave behind us.

We were the first to be born of the nascent universe, and we were the first for many other things—the precursors to all that would come next. We were the first to cross the abyss between stars with our physical bodies, we were the first to settle new planets, seed new life, and see the universe for what it truly is.

Our sins are, correspondingly, as countless as our achievements.

Once, we had been one people, unified, with different views and opinions, yes, but one. Once, there had been no Guardians, no Ambassadors, no Controllers. Once, we had simply been Maltusians.

Once, we were an empire, and we did as empires always do.

May one day the universe and all of its many gods forgive us, for we will never forgive ourselves."

—Opening passage to the Book of Oa, penned by Kalop Karlan Kanot, First Scribe of the Guardian faction.

---

[THAAL SINESTRO]​

Reality buckled and stretched. A single moment extended into infinity.

Then, with the painful relief of setting a bone back into its socket, it broke.

Technicolour light shattered, releasing him from its grasp with a lurch that he could feel in the marrow of his bones. He felt, more than saw, their reentry into real space: laws and physics, all the many things that constituted what they, at least, understood as reality slamming into him with none of the minimal softness usually afforded to jumps.

Suddenly, there was noise again—though this noise was nothing so natural. It was a yawning, distorted roar that deafened his ears, coming not from vibrations in the air, but rather the vibrations in the fabric of reality, created as the knots they had made out of spacetime and relativity lurched shut with a bone-rattling crack behind them, sealing the hole they had just punched through.

Suddenly, there was a sense of motion; proprioception returned to him with a wave of potent nausea, riding up his spine and making his skin break out in sympathetic sweat. He didn't have much time to savour it, either, as a shockwave soon followed, rattling up through the ship and slamming into what remained of its tail end, jerking the ship into a swing and briefly threatening to roll the entire vessel over onto its top.

Then, there came sight, taste, more and more of what exposure to hyperspace simply didn't allow. Rainbow-stained whorls burst into existence at the corners of his returned vision, ever-retreating, but briefly branded into the iris all the same. Thaal blinked once, and tried not to think about how his sight had, however briefly, tasted like salt.

Beyond the whorls of light, the remainder of his ship came into view. Yellow sparks burst from blown-open metal panels all across his surrounding environment, occasionally lost behind the ghostly images that clung to the edges of his perception, of grasping hands with no set amount of digits, and faces with no features to speak of, but could nonetheless mouth words at him.

The rest of his senses were shotgunned back into him in short order. Touch - the feel of metal beneath the pads of his fingers - smell - burnt flesh and ozone - and more and more and more until all of him was, finally, returned.

It was very nearly enough to bring him to his knees.

His every nerve screamed in tandem, as though freshly born anew. His head erupted in agony from the commingling of overwhelming smells, sights, and sounds, and a fiendish pulse took root at the tips of his fingers, something he only recognized a few moments later as his own heartbeat, which somehow managed to feel alien to him. The pain was everywhere, but in that respect, Thaal was not unused to pain, and it brought him a sense of lucidity, tore his mind away from the vacancy it had been trapped in when in hyperspace and the overwhelming burst of sensory noise that had shortly followed after escaping it.

Vomit swelled in the back of his throat, and burned the roof of his mouth.

He swallowed it down, between gasps of air.

People die when they're exposed to hyperspace. Hyperspace was, as far as anyone could tell, raw chaos: un-reality, or perhaps something that simply sought to decohere reality. The deeper you dove into hyperspace, the less reality had a hold on you, with the average ship going fairly deep down to ensure they could bypass certain more fundamental constraints of reality, such as the exponential energy problem when pushing ships to speeds near to or beyond the speed of light.

But that, in a lot of ways, was the reason why people died when exposed to it: hyperspace didn't care about physical laws, and thus, those unfortunate enough to experience it perished, torn apart on a fundamental level and usually reduced to literally nothing, leaving no trace besides the memory that there used to be a person there.

But, then, most ships had containment fields, ways to separate the people inside from the chaos outside. His ship had lost its own when it had nearly been scuttled by an exploding chunk of crystal the size of an asteroid. They hadn't had the time to repair it, and honestly, they hadn't thought it would need to be repaired in the first place. Not until it was too late.

In the end, they needed to rely on the in-built containment field on their rings—and it was not perfect. There were steps to using it, constructs they taught you how to mould and create from emotional energy to further contain yourself from the acidic quality of hyperspace. They hadn't had the time for any of that, so they had gone in with just the basic shielding, the one provided by default.

It had not been a mistake—he was still alive, if not unscathed, but he would never again try to brave hyperspace without a more complex containment field.

Partial hyperspace exposure took days, sometimes weeks, to recover from. He wasn't sure how long it would take himself or whoever was still left alive to heal from it, but considering his heartbeat still felt like it shouldn't exist, he didn't think it would be on the shorter end.

Slowly, almost in concert with his senses easing down from screaming in agony to merely profound discomfort, the motion of the ship ground to a halt, as did the ominous creaking from the metal surrounding him. Lights flickered on overhead, and a gust of air jerked through the vents with a raspy rattle.

Distantly, an alarm began to wail, barely audible somewhere deep in the ship.

If he had to guess, that had probably been the alarm for a lack of available batteries - slaves - for the central battery. None of them would have survived the jump, not without protection, and he didn't have the time - or motivation, frankly - to give them that kind of protection.

At the very least, he could comfort himself with the fact that the several hundred slaves would leave behind little trace of their existence. No blood, no corpses to jettison, no broken, empty-eyed subservients to pass along to whoever might want them, now that their value had been fully extracted. Just the empty cages and cells he had kept them in.

He blinked a few more times, banishing the last of the whorls from his vision, and drew his eyes down to the terminal he had clenched his hands on. The monitor was lit up, but for a moment, he could decipher nothing on the screen—none of the text, the images, nothing. It was incomprehensible, a gap between himself and observed reality. Not because it was broken, he could recognize the symbols, the shapes, but none of it clicked.

Then, with another pulse of pain that jolted down from the crown of his head and took root somewhere below his jaw, he could read again.

The display indicated that there were no attempts to contact them, no hailing ships, not even a dot on the radar or a picked up, far-away signal. He blinked again, slower this time, when he realized he was not upset or surprised by that fact. It took him a moment of reorganizing his thoughts, shifting pieces around inside of his mind, before he could figure out why.

Right. He had not expected any—the jump target had been to a place that had no activity in the first place, to give them a chance to chart their course and flee the retribution that was going to come. With that piece back in place, the rest of his immediate memory and context swarmed in with it, nearly drawing out a gag as he could all but feel the thoughts batter, kick, and dislodge other existing trains of thought to reassert themselves about where they had been, just seconds before the jump.

Blemishes swam in his vision again. He swallowed down more acid, though the burn never abated.

They had arrived in a sector in a way that would be, to most people within the immediate vicinity, like announcing your presence by detonating a moon, to borrow a recent experience. It had been a destructive re-entry, the kind that people started wars over—the kind that got everyone in a sector rushing to your exact location to ask what you thought you were doing. Had this been anywhere else, he probably wouldn't have even been able to gather his wits before the ship would have been surrounded by fleets from every interstellar nation in the sector.

But as he glanced up from the terminal, to his trembling fingers clutching tight to it, and then, finally, up to the viewport ahead of him, he saw none of that. No ships, no warp sites, not even a star being obscured by passing transit. It was empty, void, and he knew all the constellations that painted themselves across this stretch of the universe.

Sickeningly familiar was the best way to describe them. Nostalgic, not so much, but it sat somewhere between nostalgia and trauma; a past he had escaped from and triumphed over, but a past that had, nonetheless, permanently altered who he was.

After all, you can only be tortured by Manhunters once before the experience sticks with you, and he had been tortured far, far more times than once. He had spent months trapped in this sector, set upon by the malice-driven, robotic monsters that the Oans had created, yet failed to fully exterminate.

This was Sector 666. The dead zone. The sight of potentially the worst war in universal history, and a war that had taken place so far ago in the past that even the ruins of its battlefield had started to erode in a vacuum. The war was so old at this point that the sector had been barren of life - at least theoretically - longer than it had ever been host to it.

Breathing in, then out, Thaal knew there were his allies - his corps - behind him, picking themselves up, collecting their wits as much as he needed to. Some were still on the ground, reflected in the glass of the viewport, but nobody moved to help them. Weakness was not, precisely, tolerated in the hierarchy, though he hardly thought being disoriented coming out of hyperspace exposure was evidence of being weak.

All the same, he let them stew, let them wait. He had to be sure he could speak a sentence without slurring his words before he addressed them, because the same policy of rejecting weakness applied to him: he could show none, not without risking a coup following the tragedy of their failed attack on Earth.

Jumping to this particular sector had been necessary to avoid a longer-term coup, one from dissent and a lack of confidence in himself that would have definitely come if he had jumped into a sector which was occupied in any capacity. They couldn't win another fight—flee? Perhaps, but not without it being them fleeing in defeat, and another lost fight at this point would certainly put his command into question.

He had time to regather himself and ensure loyalty among his troops, all because he had jumped here: to the place where his fate had changed, to the place where the universe still sported an open wound; the one sector in the universe, even including the sectors so close to galactic centers people rarely bothered to make maps on account of the shifting orbit of stars and black holes, that was utterly barren of life.

It had not always been that way, and for once, Thaal was willing to take the Oans' word on that.

Nobody came to Sector 666 in an attempt to fill it with life, either. The barriers were already high: all of the planets within the entirety of the sector were barren of life and more to the point largely incapable of supporting life even when terraforming efforts had been made. But what made it truly uninhabitable was one thing: there were no Green Lanterns assigned to the sector, and for all that was a boon for them, it was a boon for little else.

People often assumed the Green Lanterns mostly acted as interstellar cops, and in some sectors, that was true. But they had higher duties, the ones Thaal had been initially drawn to, when he joined. Green Lanterns handled the threats that sidled into the sector that nobody else could manage. That was, in most ways, their principal job: holding the gate against entities from beyond the stars, things that nobody could truly be expected to fight directly.

But Sector 666 went unpatrolled, so it was congested with those same threats. What life did exist in the sector had mostly been driven there by a lack of available options elsewhere, and all of them were monsters, things too dangerous to let live. Somewhere in this same sector was the last remaining collection of God-Eater Kuloom, who had retreated to this place once everywhere else had started hunting them with vast armadas and superweapons. There were dimensional beasts, because there was simply nobody around to put them down. There were flocks of Star Conquerors and Black Mercies, the remnants of old, artificial intelligence systems that had very nearly developed into ecophagic hazards before being dismantled and driven to extinction in every place but Sector 666.

The reason why no criminal - whether slaver, pirate, or otherwise - came here to avoid the Green Lanterns was because they were the smallest fish in a pond terribly unsuited for their presence. An entire squad of Green Lanterns were, in every fundamental way, an inconsequential threat when compared to even one God-Killer Kuloom, and the last tally he had been made aware of, there were nearly fifteen in Sector 666.

On top of that, there were anomalies—injuries from weapons of war so far advanced they eclipsed what the greatest minds of the universe had developed. Stars which were half-dead and spewed hideous amounts of radiation from their exposed innards, dead planets with canyons so deep they reached the outer core, black holes broken off from any kind of understandable orbit, and that now skirted through the void of space, swallowing anything that had the misfortune of running into its path.

Scars of war so deep that it reminded him of the abomination that had burst free of Earth's moon.

Thaal breathed in, let it out.

Then, he turned from the viewport, and towards the scene behind him.

The deck of the ship was very nearly in ruins. Over half of the terminals were offline, or showing skewed, warped colours across normally pristine screens. Like the front of the ship, metal panels had been blown open, revealing the interior cables that moved energy throughout the ship, and at the far back, the door leading out of the deck and onto the elevator refused to fully shut, leaving a thin opening that he could see through, not that the interior of the elevator was bright enough to make anything out, however.

Just fifteen yellow ring bearers remained. Fifteen members of the Sinestro Corps, down from so many more. Most of them had made it to their feet by now, with only three remaining on the ground, still collecting themselves, and even the ones standing up weren't all in good condition. Some of them were hunched over, features twisted into pain or discomfort, while others masked it better, spines straight and eyes forward, but with a tightness in their jaw that belied just how hard they were trying not to show what they were feeling.

All that remained of what had been a much larger collection of yellow ring bearers was just his reserve, a combination of logistics-focused members and some of his best, who he had kept behind to avoid playing all of his hand. The best of his corps he had sent down were all dead—Amon Sur, his apprentice, he knew for certain, but if he had to make a guess, the twins, Yecaki, and the others that had gone down with him were probably dead or captured all the same. Things had gone so badly on that planet that someone had even set off the ring scatter protocol, which had robbed the Daxamite ring-bearers in the entire system of their rings, an event that had set the entire Daxamite fleet against him in just one single moment.

He hoped whoever sent out the signal felt it was worth it, if they were even still alive. He, however, would be burdened with their folly. He had been forced to escape without many of the protections he had hoped for, on account of the Daxamites turning on him as he was preparing to pull his corps out of the system.

All of the ones who remained had hyperspace sickness, just as he did. All of them would need rest.

Now, he needed to tell them they wouldn't get it.

Because there were countless rings, now scattered across the universe. Rings that he would have to track down, bearers he would have to induct into his corps, as he expected the rings to choose wisely. He had spent the most time on that part of the AI modification, and he expected to see results. But he would not be alone in chasing them down: the universe would not just be on the hunt for him and his compatriots, it would be on the hunt for the rings, too, whether because they wished to seal them away or use them as the weapons of war they could most certainly be.

It didn't matter. They would not be permitted to have them.

But the protection afforded to him and his own by being part of the Daxamite Empire was gone, and honestly, it was probably worse than that, because he was ostensibly the last remnant of the Daxamite Death March, and people wanted that snuffed out as much as they could. Bad memories lingered like that, and nobody wanted to be reminded that the Death March had even happened. Some wouldn't even feel like it was over, until they could kill or imprison every last individual involved with it. They were alone again, but the stakes had become much higher.

He stared at the ones who remained and bit the bullet.

"We have lost," he said matter-of-factly, keeping his tone blank. He wasn't even sure he had the energy to make something out of his voice, to rouse even hints of hope or bitterness. "Today was a failure, and not a small one."

His words had the predicted response. They rippled across the remaining yellow ring bearers, their faces twisting with fear, frustration, horror, anger. That was the double-edged blade of the rings, he supposed: they drew on fear, whether provoked in others, or drawn from the self, and that resulted in a sharp selection bias, which was only truly compounded by the fact that he had chosen people to join his break-away corps based on their own willingness to betray the Green Lanterns in the first place.

The ideal candidate was someone who could master both the fear they held and the fear of others, and channel it to productive ends. That was the goal he had behind the rings, the focus, the intent. It was where he drew his power, balancing those two forces, and it was why he wielded power far beyond what he did when he was a Green Lantern and relied on willpower.

But reality had given him none of that. Good candidates for the rings simply needed to be someone who was driven by their own fear or the fear of others, and truth be told, the universe was not lacking in people like that. The quality, however, varied.

What it meant was that before him stood cowards, sadists, and autocrats; the kinds of people who would not think twice about stabbing him in the back for their own safety, which they would always place above the safety of the corps or the mission. Some, like Yecaki, had been of a similar mind to his own, knowing the purpose behind the fear played a larger part than being warriors of fear.

But Yecaki was dead or captured and so too were all the others who had shared in his more enlightened vision of the power of fear.

Some of the people before him would need to be culled soon, potentially even within the next standardized day or two.

That was a sacrifice he was willing to make.

"It was not a glorious loss, and neither was it one we can so easily recover from. We are, once more, alone—with just ourselves, our faction, just as we had been within the Green Lanterns, yet we lack the veneer of secrecy we once had. We found opportunities with Daxam, but Daxam failed us, and now we have lost what little protection they provided. These are losses we must accept, first and foremost, because to reject reality is to refuse to act on the present, and to do that is to behave the same way as the failing corps we left," Thaal continued, watching as heads tilted up, eyes glanced his way, and hope - ever-so-insidious - crept into some of their craven gazes. Direction, he would give them that much, and kill whoever did not find it sufficient. "Today, we have seen the face of chaos and uncertainty tear itself into our universe like a plague. That crystalline behemoth is the enemy we oppose, as are the rabble and chaotic masses that such a thing protects. We have seen the face of the thing we have all made oaths to fight, and now that we know its face, we can find methods to kill it. We must be stronger - we must be better - to defeat it."

"What even was that monster?" A voice rasped, coming from some of the few still on the ground. Svak ad Nua, a member of the Kuada Nath, a kind of fish-like species with long, finned tails, and colourful scales, though most of hers had gone dull and ashen in the aftermath of the jump.

"Frankly? I do not know. I do not think even the Oans know, or if they do, they have been even more negligent in their duties than we already know," Thaal told her, told them all. He would not burden the blame alone, not today. "That is a class of entity that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the eminent threats of the universe. What I do know is that it oozes broken sun radiation, and that it was pitted against us, perhaps to protect Earth, or perhaps simply because it refused to have our authority supersede its own on who controlled the planet. Whatever it was, it was powerful, it was versatile, and it is our enemy."

Thaal let that sink in, watching their gazes. Nobody said anything, they just digested his words.

Good.

"We cannot kill it as we are now, with our broken vessel and those of us who remain. An entity like that calls for a crusade, and we have no army to make one. But we are not lost, not yet—we have survived it, when it sought to destroy us. We have the tools to repair, and now, we have the time and space to get away from our enemies, so that we may yet lick our wounds." He kept his eyes closely on the crowd, watching for any reaction, feeling for their fears. "We will rebuild, but to do that, we must continue to survive. We have to stay ahead of the baying dogs that would seek to wipe us from memory and take our tools for use in their chaos. We must make the time we need to find the new yellow ring bearers, and bring them into the fold."

He turned away, a scuff of his boots against metal tiles. Dramatics, yes, but as he folded his arms behind his back, he could not call it inefficient. The intent of every yellow ring bearer on the ship fell on him, focused, intense, unable to break free of his orbit.

Unconsciously, his own eyes traced the constellations that he had once stared upon in his time under the Manhunters' tender mercies.

His skin crawled.

He loathed them all. He would see each of those stars snubbed out into dust, if given the opportunity.

"We are in this sector for that reason alone. As I informed you before we jumped, this is Sector 666, and it has threats and enemies that can and will attack us if given the opportunity. That said, it lacks the armies of our most immediate enemies, which means things here may not seek us out, unless we start looking for them. We all know the history of this sector—each of us here, at one point, was a Green Lantern, and there are no sanctioned Corps members here to slow us down. We will find no enemies or friends in this place, only animals, and things best left undisturbed." Breathe in, breathe out. He had to force himself to do it, his body still finding basic cycles unusual and foreign. "But some things we must disturb, to remain uncaptured. Our reentry location can and will be found, and they will track our trail until the ends of the universe, even into this sector, despite all the laws against it. Other nations will gleefully do the same, for they now have an excuse. We cannot let them chase us, we must slow them down, and in this sector, there is an opportunity—no, not just an opportunity, but a curse. We will find such a thing on the only planet in this sector to retain any life: Ysmault, the former throne world of the Empire of Tears."

It had been on that planet that the Manhunters had forced him to watch as they tortured every other member of the squad he had been sent with to death. They had done it in front of him, in front of the others who knew their turns would soon come, but more than that, they had done it in front of five, horrid, twisted beings.

The Inversions.

They had done it in front of them so they, too, would suffer, but not because they wailed at the sight of torture.

No, Thaal knew they suffered because the Five Inversions had wanted, so desperately, to do the torturing themselves.

The Manhunters had been said to have gone rogue, but the way it had been explained to him was of a rational twist in their logic, driving them to purge and destroy, as no life could be said to be safe when following the rigid laws that increasingly locked up their programming.

But, then, something that merely purges does not torture another person as they had done to him. They weren't apathetic, they weren't even rational. He had killed them in the end because they had spent all of that time torturing him and his peers and stretched the entire affair out, giving him the time to gather his power and find a moment to strike back. Had they decided to kill him even a day earlier, he would've died.

Because they didn't, he destroyed them all.

The Manhunters he had met were cruel, gleefully sadistic, taking joy in the suffering of others. Another lie, given up by the Oans, clearly. He had never spoken of what happened on that planet outside of the abstract, even when the Oans had come begging for his answers. He had told them... enough.

But he had never told them what was whispered in his ears. He had never told them that he knew the unabridged truth of the War of Tears, the extinction of an empire, given to him by the Inversions.

Nobody knew that he knew that the Oans had once been Maltusians, and they had once ruled over vast stretches of the universe.

"You all know of Ysmault, we all had the same training, the same background in the stories told to us by the Oans. They told you no lies, but they also told you few truths. You know of dates, times, choices and arguments, but not the core of that war, not the core of what the Empire of Tears truly was," Thaal continued, his throat dry, his mind a haze. There was a weakness in him that threatened to bring him down to his knees, but he pushed through it, drawing on his own fear, the trauma, the horror of those moments in his past, and focusing himself with it. He could see the glow of his ring in his reflection. "I will fill you in on those truths, as we travel, but know that it is not another empty planet. It is void of functionally all life, yes, but the barest traces of it refuse to die there—just five individuals, out of what had been a planet of trillions, who persist. They are the most ancient enemies of the Oans, of their perverted sense of order. They are not our allies, and you will understand why as I explain them to you, but they are a threat to the Oans."

A beat of silence.

"We will go there, and free them. I know how to," Thaal said slowly, words like ash. "They are not entirely unaligned with our goals, but make no friends there, do not make any agreements, and allow me to do the talking. With them freed, they will slow down any attempt to follow us, and in ideal circumstances, they will keep the rest of the universe preoccupied. With that, we will jump to Ranx, where no Guardian or Green Lantern is foolhardy enough to claim authority, and there we will begin the process of tracking down our ring bearers."

He would also spend some time on Ranx, contacting and working with the Weaponers of Qward, his only real remaining contact or partial ally he knew of. He did not like the Qwardians, or what he was about to unleash on the universe. Releasing the Inversions was insanity, an act of chaos that he felt forced to do, whereas the Qwardians were a society of people who thought driving holes into higher universes was a smart idea, and every bit of help he gave them only served to further their goals.

But to survive?

Thaal had done so, so much worse.

"Everyone, to your stations. I need two people in the battery room to check our fear concentration, and return to me when you've identified the current levels. We do not have any time to hesitate."

Footsteps banged behind him, people jerking into motion and moving around, collecting themselves as best they could, in preparation for a trip to a place Thaal had hoped he would never see again.

It gave him a moment to think, to dwell on Rhea, just for a moment. He could recall the presence he felt in hyperspace, the emotional entity - another secret the Oans had kept from them all, but one that had been whispered in his ear by those same Inversions - who had reached out to him in desperation, trying to find another anchor to free itself with.

He had not listened to its honeyed lies and fear-mongering. That entity, he could see, used fear to create chaos, an endless abundance of it. If he had given himself over to it, that thing would have taken all he had worked for and turned them into a band of maddened cultists, creating chaos and insanity across the universe.

Thaal saw a better universe. He saw fear used to crush uprisings, he saw regions torn apart by war forced into peace, controlled by a central authority. He saw the problems of the universe under his yoke, knowing that if they ever tread too far beyond what was allowed of them, it would be their death.

He saw a unified universe, curbed of its worst excesses through fear. One with that same emotional entity trapped for him to use, to exploit, all to empower the order he knew was needed, the same order such a being would disrupt.

What a shame. Had Rhea won the war, and still been subsumed by that entity as he had planned, the cage he had created to hold it would've guaranteed him an engine of order that would perpetuate itself far into the future, instead of simply being used to extract fear from tortured slaves and prisoners to fill but a pittance of what its true capacity was capable of holding.

Instead, Rhea had blundered. A powerful, unthinkable monstrosity had shown itself to the universe, and he had been forced to turn around and flee. She had lost—Thaal had lost his gambit, and with her loss had gone the chance of manifesting that entity in an environment that let him immediately shackle it, wherever it might have come from.

But, then, he certainly wasn't about to let it parasitize his own body.

He was, after all, not an idiot. Or, at least, not as much of an idiot as Rhea was, when she had taken the ring he had pre-modified to have most of its limits stripped out and programmed to specifically choose her.

She had thought it was fate, evidence of her capacity for fear.

He had known better.

---

"One must put things into context to understand the ramifications of the Psion-Dominator war on our contemporary history. For all that some may disagree on the exact importance of the war, the academic consensus is nonetheless clear: it was a pivotal point in the progression of the Milky Way.

Consider that at this same time, the Green Lanterns had come to their initial agreements with the Reach, which forestalled their continued expansion into the greater universe. While in the future, the Reach would begin to flout the spirit of the agreement in favour of interpreting the text in a literalist fashion, it still slowed them down for the next several thousand years, and still to this day prevents them from using the same tactic of rapid colonization they employed near the start of their growth.

Much the same, Imperial Krypton was in one of the worst states it had been for nearly all of its history, with shrinking borders, an ongoing civil war, and an increasingly isolationist public, who were torn between the rhetoric of the imperial state and their observed reality.

In the wake of these two things, a power vacuum was left open and available for anyone to claim it, and several sides rushed to do just that. The Idnikaos Conclave, in its infancy, sought to expand its borders between the sector it had mostly come to occupy, while the Vega Republics and the Empire of Dominion both sought to do the same.

In another universe, perhaps, the Vega Republics and the Empire of Dominion never came to blows, and spread, unabated. They would have swept over the nascent Idnikaos Conclave, driven straight into the more populated sectors closer to the galactic core. Had the alliance between the two nations remained, I doubt the universe at large would have even been capable of regaining that lost territory, either.

Contemporary sources during this period paint a picture of expecting exactly this, in fact. Military tacticians and politicians alike have left behind transcripts depicting unease and fear about the incoming expansion of these two states. The Idnikaos Conclave, at several points, even considered making itself a vassal to the Vega Republics, as the risk of being invaded was growing too high, though they never committed to the act, on account of the required number of yearly sacrifices for the Vega Republics' ongoing genetic modification research.

Until this point in history, the Vega Republics and the Empire of Dominion had been more than eager to trade and cooperate with each other. They represented the central authority in much of their occupied sectors, and more than that, were the engine that fuelled the slave trade that was, in virtually all other parts of the universe, dying out as the mass production of robots continued to grow. This artery of slavery allowed them to depopulate planets and move them elsewhere, selling off entire species to one side or another for whatever purpose they might have for them, and collecting species that were, to them, desired over what might have originally inhabited the planet they had taken control of.

The Vega Republics preferred planets or slaves which were genetically mutable and adaptive, without many existing abilities (or preferably none at all) as they liked to tweak and modify base species genetically to their preferences, something which is significantly less easy the more complex a given being's genetic abilities are. By comparison, the Empire of Dominion mostly conquered planets occupied by weak or easily suppressed psychic species, and culled anything that did not easily get suppressed in their hivemind. Both preferred weak and submissive client species, and that authoritarian stance was what unified them in the past, as well as their sense of superiority.

However, as much as we can tell, their close alliance was the poison that destroyed them, in the end. They played off of each other, encouraging each side to be their worst, and over time, this led to a political shift that ultimately put them at odds with each other. Their political ideologies, once flexible enough to cooperate - despite generally opposing one another - were petrified into the extremist positions we see now: the Vega Republics viewing unfiltered, mutative experimentation as an ideal, and the Empire of Dominion arguing for a position of genetic purity untouched by any kind of mutative strain. Both were fundamental, eugenicist positions, but until now, they had not been pitted against each other.

Ultimately, however, these tensions would prove to be too much, and the alliance would rapidly fragment and break down. 34,000 years ago, the Psion-Dominator wars would begin with a sudden and violent burst of destruction.

And that war would end an era of the universe. It would be the last time that the Kuloom wandered space, hunting as they wanted. It would be the start of the modern emergence of smaller, planet-states that occupy much of the territory both Psions and Dominators once controlled.

But, all the same, it would be war, first, before any of that could happen, and it would be a war that would leave behind far more than just ruins."

—Chapter 1 of A Treatise on the Psion-Dominator War, written by Caivra Rehses, 3rd Officer of the Strategic Corps of Ran.

---

[JOHN STEWART]​

Surrounded by the dark void of space, John Stewart floated, his body soft and relaxed.

There was a certain kind of freedom that came with flight, but especially one with weightlessness, with the way that his ring had turned the harsh, impassible vacuum of space into something more inviting, less dangerous, more like water in which he could swim. He wasn't above letting himself enjoy it, either; the closest he had ever gotten to this were the few scraps of quiet and peace he had found during his military tours, usually sitting in the back of a busted-up vehicle as it rattled down wide, open corridors, wind dragging at his face.

There was no wind up here, but for a moment, it was the same, and he was at rest.

Glancing to the side, John watched as Xaw floated behind him, a silent companion as they both waited. Guardian Appa and Korrak - his attendant - had both returned to Oa a few days past, which had just left him and Xaw to be the welcoming party.

Further behind them both was Earth itself, the thing he had grown up on. It was all blue and green and white, as healthy as it could be, when he knew that, had things gone any differently, it could have been reduced down to a barren sphere, torn open with war scars. It was surrounded by a slightly flickering membrane—the shielding array that was still being worked on, still being fixed, with better estimates putting its full return to functionality at another two or three weeks. Still, most of the holes were gone, with the few that still remained positioned directly behind them.

Debris floated in a loose orbit around the planet, most of it barren scraps—chunks of slagged metal and flak, as well as the bones of what had once been ships of war. Most of the debris from the battle had already been removed, both to avoid having it drop onto the planet's surface and to stop White Martians from gaining access to it. What was left over after everything important had been hauled away now hung like a tail, leading back in the general direction of the moon.

Which was. Well.

Still purple.

John found himself staring at it, not for the first time today. There was a nervous kind of itch in his jaw that made him want to roll it and grind his teeth, but he stopped himself. He'd been - belatedly, he would stress - brought up to speed on why the moon was purple by Guardian Appa, before he left, and he was not... enthusiastic about it.

Across the moon had grown several new crystal spires, though none so tall as the ones that had been there since the battle. They were, in her words, 'handling the issue' by doing something to attract and then bind the radiation into something that could be more safely disposed of. To her credit, the moon did look fractionally better than it had at the start, with some regions now being incredibly dark purple instead of pitch black, which he had on good authority was incredibly fast progress, if Guardian Appa had not been lying to his face.

...He could still see the crater, though. Again, he felt like that might be unfair, because she was clearly trying, but it was transparently obvious even when he was standing on Earth that someone had torn open a crater that covered over an eighth of the moon and then hastily filled it in with discoloured rubble. It left him feeling uneasy, less because he didn't trust Addy to do the best she could to clean up after herself, but more that she had this kind of power in the first place.

It always reminded him of the documentaries he'd watched about Project Manhattan.

Speaking of Addy, he glanced away from the moon, out into the rest of the solar system, and towards Venus. That was where the rest of the battle's debris had gone - along with a large number of lower-orbit debris from human-made satellites and other things they'd launched into the outer atmosphere, which Addy had claimed 'since she was there she might as well clean up that too' - towed along by her giant crystal drones.

Drones. Plural. None so large as the one that had erupted from the moon, but she had revealed it was, in no way, shape or form, alone. He didn't know how many, and Addy certainly wasn't eagerly offering the number up, but if he had to ballpark it, the other drones - ranging in size from a car to an uncomfortably large asteroid - numbered above five-hundred, but below a thousand.

It had been hard to count them all when she'd made them descend on the debris like a pack of vultures and begin hauling anything even remotely useful off. She was apparently studying it at the moment, though few people seemed all that enthusiastic about her decision to monopolize all of that technology.

Small mercies that Addy's response to being yelled at was to ignore the person in question and usually just fly off.

Then again, he didn't really know how many of her interactions with politicians were like that. He had tuned out the politics of the situation after someone tried to name Addy the 'God-Empress of Earth', whatever that meant.

The debris, alongside Addy's 'custodians' - as she called them - were orbiting around Venus for the moment. It was one of the very few planets where nobody would mind if her largest custodian influenced or partially disrupted the tectonic balance of the planet. That had been a very real issue people had been worried about on Earth—to say that Addy's largest custodian had disrupted the tides would be significantly underselling it, considering at one point Japan was getting tidal variance that would not have been out of place in the Bay of Fundy.

There were other things to it, he knew. Nobody in the solar system claimed Venus - it was simply not useful to any of them - but they did have resource extractors hidden around various uninhabited planets, like the gas giants in the solar system, extractors which were owned by both Titanians and Martians. They used them, alongside asteroid mining facilities found as far out as the Oort Cloud, to fill the resource requirements their planets otherwise couldn't meet.

That and there were... supposedly entire communities of alien refugees and drifters living in the Oort Cloud at the moment, using asteroids as bases and eking out what life they could. It apparently wasn't a hugely pleasant life, considering its distance from the sun, but they did exist. Supposedly.

So Addy had chosen Venus. It was really the only option she had left other than dragging all of the debris down onto Earth and studying it there, which really wasn't realistic.

He looked away again, back to the Earth.

It had been over a week since the Daxamites had failed to conquer Earth.

After the execution of their leader, a large chunk of the Daxamites had surrendered, but a lot also hadn't. The ones who hadn't had lashed out in every direction, drove themselves towards Earth, Titan and Mars in a fury, and caused chaos throughout the inhabited planets in the solar system. Most of it was dealt with by now, but remnants remained on Earth and in small pirate groups that the local authorities - specifically the White Martians who held the most control over that slice of the solar system - had unsubtly told him not to get involved with. At all. Or else they'd execute him.

The ones who had tried for Earth, though, had been... handled. That was about the best way to phrase Addy's response.

The ones who had surrendered, by comparison, were being held on a Titanian outpost, perpetually depowered by red sun generators, and were awaiting extraction by interstellar authorities, to be tried and convicted for their role in the invasion.

That, however, would not be the end of their trials, as a slave tribunal had been set up. Slavery was, by the Green Lantern standard, expressly illegal, a policy that had been introduced following a massive war in the Milky Way that Xaw was still explaining to him in what little free time they had. Particularly, crimes that would normally carry certain sentences, if done against slaves, carried dramatically more severe punishments, and though it varied from sector to sector, as most laws did, it could turn even fairly innocuous crimes into years-long imprisonment.

And, frankly, John had his doubts that the Daxamites had been all that innocuous in the things they had gotten up to. He'd been to nearly every refugee camp for the former Daxamite slaves - the ones they'd found, anyway, several battle groups were still missing and nobody was sure if it had been because of Jax-Ur, some of the local alien criminal groups, or just because the aliens feared immediate death if they turned themselves in - and the things he'd heard... they were best left unmentioned.

All he would say was that, as was the case for most examples of slavery, systemic cruelty was a feature, not a mistake.

There were other issues too, of course. The slave soldiers that had turned themselves in were understandably wary, and the planet was even more wary of them, considering they had been involved in the invasion, even if not under their own free will. The political climate was dicey, and while most people could rationally say that they understood the aliens had very little agency in being used the way they were, very few could accept that emotionally. There were a lot of calls for blood, or to at least treat them as prisoners.

There was a plan in motion to get all of the former Daxamite slaves off of Earth and onto several Green Lantern refugee planets for resettlement. Unfortunately, that plan was stuck in a deadlock, on account of the endless number of other duties that took up the majority of his time.

To say that the time since the invasion had been rough would be a patronizing understatement.

Here was a fact he didn't like to dwell on: three percent of the global population - or two-hundred and ten million people, approximately - had died in twenty-four hours.

It was a number so large, a concept so abstract, that the only reason it hadn't reduced itself to a statistic in his mind by this point was the fact that John was spending the better part of his days digging graves.

Not only had the death toll been the highest of any conflict or war, but it had also outstretched the death toll of World War Two collectively by a factor of three. In a span of time that was over two thousand times less than World War Two.

There were literally not enough graves to bury people in, not enough space, not enough people or time or energy to do any of that. Worse yet, the death toll hadn't even been spread out—most of the deaths had come from attacks on concentrated civilian centers, like major cities, which had erased entire fractions of some nations' populations in an instant. Some places had lost their entire governments in the attacks, alongside most of their workforce.

Had the death toll been spread out, as bleak as it would be to say, it would have been better. But it wasn't. In twenty-four hours, six critically small ethnic groups had died off, a chunk of the Amazon Rainforest was actively on fire - though Supergirl and Administrator were handling it right now, so he doubted it would remain that way - and at least one country had ended up so depopulated after the attacks that there was an ongoing debate with what few people were even left over if they should remain a country at all.

And that was just the current deaths from the war. There were absolutely going to be more deaths, knock-on effects, from this. Nobody could even begin to estimate the number of people who might die in the next few years, but between the hazardous waste landing all across urban areas from crashed ships, massive infrastructure damage plunging hundreds of millions into homelessness, rapidly spreading disease from the concentration of dead bodies that didn't have holes to bury them in, the wars expected to spring up due to weakened countries alongside shattered ecosystems and geographic boundaries, widespread famine from massive crop loss, and all the trauma that would invariably arise from this and cause ongoing social issues, he did not think it would be a small number.

But these were all problems that could be faced, potentially even solved. The problems that couldn't be solved could be mitigated, and that's what he and Xaw had been working on since the rubble had settled and Daxam was, truly, defeated. It was why he was out here today, floating above the Earth, rather than working on the mass graves for the countless number of people who died when part of the Andean Highlands had been dropped on top of Ecuador.

Most of the effort and resources back on the planet were being fed into the global refugee crises, working with peacekeeping forces, distributing needed resources like water and food, and finding homes for the numerous people now at risk of dying of exposure.

But there was just so much to do, and John had been doing a lot of it, because he had the power to do so. Most of the others had chipped in too, certainly—Addy, Supergirl, even Layla and other people who owned flight-capable ships were doing a lot, but this was a world of billions, and each of them had other things they needed to take care of. Addy was embroiled in a half-dozen political problems and dealing with the actual ruins of the war, Supergirl had been caught up fighting the remaining guerilla cells of Daxamites terrorizing South America and the Mediterranean, and the others could only do so much on their own.

The alien community had come out to help, but it was, again, another drop in the bucket. Helpful, but not enough, it would never be enough with just them. The bucket was too big, their needs too large, and maybe if he'd had the chance to train at Oa before all of this had happened, he'd be handling it better, but that hadn't happened. He would end up on Oa sometime in the future, he knew, but not before Earth was at least stable enough that he wasn't needed at all times.

John had slept twice in the last five days, and for no longer than four hours each time. From what he knew, everyone else was working on about as much sleep, including Addy and the rest, but also first responders, medics, and even civilians, who couldn't help because they needed help.

He wasn't so caught up in himself that he couldn't recognize when he - when they all - needed help. Titan was still a few weeks out from having the supplies to help, because Titan's population was utterly dwarfed by Earth's, and the less said about potential White Martian help as of this point, the better.

So he had asked for help from elsewhere. John had called for backup, and he was not shy in saying as much.

Turning back, John less saw, and more felt, reality begin to split apart. A gate of emerald green slowly clawed itself into existence, starting first as a pinprick of light, then widening, a yawning mouth of technicolour light coming into existence, framed by a ragged, shifting corona of green.

He could feel himself tense, a flicker of adrenaline and pressure riding up his spine. The sight of it wasn't exactly like the portal the Yellow Lanterns had fled through, but it was close, only different in terms of colour and looking a bit more stable than the ones they had used to retreat.

Still, the sight of it alone had him on edge, gnawing at him. He swallowed down a lump in his throat, breathed in, then out, ignoring the fact that he couldn't feel his own breath further than the invisible, skin-tight field that provided him oxygen, as maintained by his ring. It was just like how the sound of someone opening a can of soda, or setting off fireworks, had him on edge after his tours and his time in the national guard, during the Gotham Riots.

He kept breathing slowly, in, then out.

The battle was over. Stand down.

The gate pulled itself tall and wide, and out of it came not one Green Lantern, but ten, who flew out from inside, banishing the spheres of green light they had constructed around themselves. He glanced over them, finding any number of alien species, but pausing, caught a bit off-guard, as he noticed Korrak among the group.

Korrak caught his gaze and nodded politely, before floating off to the side, away from the gate. The rest of the Green Lanterns, some of which shot off salutes or waves towards Xaw - which at least meant they knew his mentor, if nothing else - followed suit, pulling aside as the gate continued to grow ever-larger, stretching open with a sound like the creak of hard leather being bent.

It grew continuously, and John watched in silence until, at last, the nose of a ship pushed through the firmament of technicolour smears that defined the interior of the portal. It was slow, at first, inching further through the portal, before with one sharp lurch the entire ship started to slide smoothly through the opening, out into real space.

John could recognize what the ship was immediately. Not because he knew the type of ship - he knew very little about them, honestly - but because, as with many other things, some designs were rather universal, and there were only so many ways to make shipping vessels more efficient.

The freighter ship pushed fully out of the portal, emerging out above Earth in full. It was a long, exceedingly tall vessel that resembled something between an eighteen-wheeler and a shipping vessel you'd find on Earth's oceans, painted a combination of green and black. It was, in comparison to either of those things, significantly larger, large enough that he had to crane his head really far up to even catch sight of the underside of the ship's nose.

The gate behind it groaned as another ship pushed through after it, the first freighter ship pushed forward by thrusters near its tail, making space for the next ship.

A third followed the second, and then a fourth.

In silence, John watched as twelve of those ships in total pulled out of the gate, before finally, with a weary groan, the portal slammed shut.

The convoy of vessels hung off to the side, daunting by sheer size alone. All across the vessels were windows and other viewports, some of which had faces peering out through them. The sailors on the ships pushed out from inside, swarming across the top and open deck, clad in space suits and other equipment to let them grapple and scamper around the surface, working on repairs or checking up on various parts of the ship in a practiced, almost ritual fashion. They all wore green uniforms, even their space suits, with black accents and a patch which displayed the Green Lantern symbol, though none of them had a ring, and altogether, there were at least tens of thousands of them, with more undoubtedly just out of his line of sight.

"They are the Green Lantern Support Corps," Xaw's voice chimed in, John turning to find Xaw staring at the ships appreciatively, before returning his attention to John with a smile. "We may be granted immense power, but we are only single people, and as a result, we can only do so much. We are deficient in some areas, and excel in others, and the Support Corps are meant to make up for our weaknesses. They are all paid volunteers, each of them going through rigorous, prestigious training in specific areas we need additional workers in. Things such as engineering, supply management, staffing vessels, administrative duties, and yes, even combat, among many others. We train them at no extra cost, but in return, they pledge themselves for at least a tenth of their total lifespan, with some variability we offer for those who have less specifically finite lifespans. For a human, that would be ten years, as an example. After that, they may leave and use their skills elsewhere, but many stay on, as we pay well, and they know they are doing something good."

Xaw paused, then.

"That and it's common for rings to seek out Support Corps members. It's not a huge increase, and limitations do apply—some people are merely unsuited for a ring, and it will not go to them if that is the case, so it is not as though being a Support Corps member will guarantee you one, but it is a known phenomenon."

That made a lot of sense, actually. John knew logistics, it was part of his job when he was on his tours, and he'd always wondered in the back of his mind where the full extent of the Green Lanterns really was. Sure, his ring could do a lot on its own, more than entire fleets of workers in some instances, but the issue was that it relied on his own willpower - something he could run out of - and he could not be everywhere at once. If he was working on one project, he could not be working on others, and that problem would only be amplified across the distances that being the one Green Lantern overseeing an entire sector would create.

Glancing away from the ships, he looked down at the ten Green Lanterns arrayed just a short distance away. It still said a lot that repairing a lot of Earth's immediate infrastructure was only expected to require twelve of them across the entire planet.

But something like shipping resources on this scale? That was an area that they were, like Xaw said, a little more deficient in. It made sense they had an entire logistical core behind it, and he was a little more confident in the Green Lanterns for having that. If they didn't, well, he'd be worried the entire axis of the organization would be predicated on putting individuals in single sectors and expecting them to be able to handle every aspect of its protection and aid.

Sure, he could probably tow that amount of tonnage with a construct, but he'd probably end up perpetually chanting his oath into his lantern to keep doing it after a point.

"They're critical components of our organization, so treat them well. Some of them may have moons in their eyes, desiring to become a Green Lantern, like yourself, but most grow out of that in a year or two. Most of them are simply here to help," Xaw explained, smiling wider. "That is the beauty of it all. You do not need a ring to help, and it is perhaps for the best that not everyone who wishes to help gets one in the first place. As good as we are at making shelter for the world, the Support Corps will keep them warm, fed and healthy, both mentally and physically."

John felt himself settle just a bit more. He didn't like admitting how much good logistics made him feel better, but he was who he was.

It made him look back to the ships in thought. The reason they were getting twelve ships instead of three or four was because there had been a donation drive set up for Earth, by other interstellar nations, especially those hit by Daxam. This was combined with the unthinkably vast bounty Earth had collectively acquired - or, well, arguably Addy had acquired it, but she'd immediately told Guardian Appa that 'Earth could have it' - by putting an end to the Daxamite Death March and specifically killing Rhea, and altogether came out to be a lot of money that could be spent on a lot more food, on account of bulk pricing and hefty discounts the rest of the universe was offering them.

Between all of this, they had enough capital to support feeding the world for as long as they needed to get back on their feet. They'd have to get used to the alien grains and fruits, though, even if all of them had already been approved for human consumption.

All the same, it would keep people's bellies full, and if he had to guess, someone would eventually figure out how to make booze out of it, and then it would be swiftly adopted as all staple crops were once humanity was done fermenting it first.

It was a relief. The sight of it was a tangible weight off of his shoulders. He knew it had been coming for over two days now, but seeing it in person was different.

Seeing it in person gave him hope.

Ahead of him, the rest of the Green Lanterns flew towards them as a pack, coming to a stop just a few paces away.

"Hey, quick question—you're the Lantern for this sector, right? They didn't hand this off to Xaw," one of them called one, a yellow-skinned, bony-looking alien with a head like a lizard.

John paused. "Yes, I am," he replied, not sure where this was going.

The other Green Lantern nodded. "Yeah, good. We just need to know—we were briefed there was a second moon, made out of crystal, which orbited this planet? We were told to keep away, but none of us could find it. Was there a miscommunication?"

They were probably thinking of Addy's custodian. "It's near Venus now, or the second closest planet to our sun," John explained, feeling almost awkward having to say as much. Stellar bodies generally didn't work that way, in his experience, and it was still somewhat uncomfortable to tell someone that a local one had a habit of wandering away. "It moved away from the moon and Earth after it became clear it was causing tidal and seismic issues," he added.

"Oh," the lizard alien said, entirely nonplussed. "Alright then."

He was expecting a bigger reaction than that. Was this kind of thing common? Somehow? Actually, he wasn't leaving this up to chance, even if he felt like he wasn't about to like the answer to that question. "Why doesn't that surprise you?"

The other Green Lantern laughed, a noise picked up by a few of their compatriots, but it at least sounded mostly good-natured. "You get used to it," they said glibly. "Most of us are still new, because of the war, but—well, stellar bodies that move of their own volition aren't that weird."

"I haven't had a chance to talk to Mogo for some years, but you can say they're a known entity in the universe regardless," Xaw picked up, floating forward with all of his arms folded in front of him. "They are a great person, just one that happens to come with a gravity well."

That was... somewhat ominous. "Right," John allowed, pushing the thoughts into the back of his head. "I'll keep that name in mind."

Xaw just smiled at him in silence.

Refocusing, John looked at the group of other Green Lanterns. "Korrak, I assumed you were with Guardian Appa. Is everything alright?" he asked, and he really hoped Korrak didn't get demoted or something. He knew the battle for Earth was really nasty and messy, but Korrak did a lot to help, and he'd feel awfully shitty if all Korrak got out of it was some kind of administrative punishment.

Korrak just smiled. "Yes, everything is fine. I was released from my duty with the Guardian until all of them can come to a decision about Earth, and I decided to help with the refugee efforts. I am not in any trouble, and I am here to see the last of this war through. I will be the one to bring the captured Daxamites back, when I am recalled, which I expect may be soon."

"Good. Alright, for the rest of you, I'm going to set down some really basic guidelines. I'm not trying to order you around, and I know I'm not your leader, but I do know what's been happening on Earth, and how you might be received, alright?"

The group nodded.

"Earth has just experienced death on a scale and in a timeframe that has been until now literally incomprehensible to everyone living on it. Dead bodies rot in the streets or beneath rubble, because over two hundred and ten million people died within a single planetary day. Clean-up is expected to take a long time, and a lot of people are deeply traumatized because of the death on this scale.

"The human population here is already somewhat used to aliens, and has integrated some of them in certain countries, however prejudice and conflict still exist and are ongoing, especially in the wake of the invasion. They will be wary of you, so try to be patient and gentle. More than that, I'm going to tell you this outright: before we build any houses or infrastructure, we're going to need to dig some graves. Xaw told me the rings should be able to identify anyone we find, and I'll send you the basic design for a headstone that most cultures use, and on which I want to encourage you to put their names. Humanity takes handling our dead very seriously, and if you're unsure about how a burial should be done, just ask me.

"Otherwise, basic burial practices are simple: it's a seven to twelve foot rectangular hole, with the body arranged horizontally. If there is somebody nearby who can claim the body, please talk to them first, before taking the body to be entombed. You'll need to make the hole in the ground around nine feet long and four across, just to be sure it can fit everyone we find. We don't handle our dead the same way across the planet, so some might ask for cremation, and I ask that you try to work with them if they bring it up. That said, simple burials are at this point the safest option, and... we need to put aside some cultural desires and religious rites for the time being, as otherwise, what's left of humanity will die from disease outbreaks.

"That's why these graves need to come first, even if they're only temporary—the risk of disease from exposed bodies continues to rise as they rot, and it's causing an immense emotional toll on... everyone." Including himself. "After we get most of that done, I'll guide you around to the places where we've marked off areas to build temporary cities, and then we'll have to move in and start cleaning up existing cities, when people have a place to stay. We'll talk about specific locations when we get to that point.

"Finally, if you're a psychic, yes, that presence is one person, and her name is Administrator. She is strong, and may be intimidating to you, but she is one of the heroes who protected this planet. I've been told you can get used to being in her radius, but that for a while, it might be disorienting. Please... don't bother her that much. She's as busy as we will soon be, but if you need to contact her, simply do so directly and don't beat around the bush, as she really dislikes people being vague. Don't act subservient either, as that will probably just annoy her.

"Also, before anyone else gets around to misleading you: Administrator is not a god, or divine, in any way, shape or form. She asked me directly to tell you this when I told her about calling for back-up, and I want you to respect that decision even if people currently experiencing extreme trauma have begun to latch onto her and treat her that way regardless. There have been a few... cults that have cropped up, unfortunately, but no matter how people are acting, she will want you to treat her like a person, not a deity. I'd also advise against bringing up that topic to her, as she's unimpressed about it."

There was another round of nods.

John breathed out.

"Then, welcome to Earth, and we appreciate the help. If you'll follow me, I'll lead you down now."

With that, he turned, finding Xaw smiling proudly at him.

Heat prickled at the back of his neck, but he didn't resist it.

Firming his shoulders, John headed back down to his planet, trailed by a convoy of supplies and helpers.

---

"One of the reasons why we were the first, as explored in past chapters, was our technology. Technology we powered using the emotional spectrum of energy. Anger, will, hope, love—every part of it played a part in our technology, and it allowed us to forego more crude rockets or other forms of basic propulsion. Before even that, we waded through the universe with our own bodies, capable of self-sustaining even in the vacuum of space, with our flight, slow as it was, nonetheless capable of carrying us across those vast distances, given enough time.

We had, by this point, come to understand that we were the first true form of sentient life to come into existence in the greater universe. Life itself? No, by this point we had found countless planets with alien life, but only a fraction of it was sophisticated, and none of it could think. Most of the time, what we found were planets covered in bacterial slime, the earliest stages of life, with multi-cellular organisms being far less common.

The first sentient thing in the universe? Also no. We knew that things older than us dwelled in the universe, but these are things without physical bodies, and who do not align to the same kind of existence we, of fleshy bodies, minds and souls, experience.

We - the Maltusians - are not the same as mortal species, I will grant, but then we are of the same idea and principle, and among those, we were first.

We knew that we would not be alone, not forever, but all the same the math we used put the time when the universe would be flush with life to be far, far into the future. We merely had to wait, but in that time, we began to discuss: what would be our role, as Maltusians, for these fledgling species? What should we do, when we first meet something that can think and emote? How should we approach that interaction, when our species and culture would already be impossibly ancient to what would be but fledgling civilizations?

Like oil and water, it was here that Maltusian society began to separate out. Opinions were things we always had, and our species had no shortage of political strife in our past, either. We might not have mirrored the exact circumstances of most alien species to come into their own in the universe, but we had our eras, all the same, and in those times we fought as all sentient species do over ethics and ideologies.

But this was different. This was a question of morality, of fate, of duty.

Three broad factions formed, split among three opinions, though with varying degrees of severity given to each position between individual members. These were the Ambassadors, the Guardians, and the Controllers.

The Ambassadors sought emotional unity and cooperation, with no restraints. The Ambassadors saw that we, the Maltusians, were just one people, one thing, and there was so much more to be found in what else the universe gave birth to; new cultures, new gods, new people, and potentially even new emotions. They wanted to seek out new species, to ensure they did not have to endure the same growing pains our own species did, and to catalogue and connect all of the known universe, so that strife could be handled through discussion, debate, and ultimately, compassion.

We, the Guardians, sought isolation. We wanted to remain separate from the universe, as we knew that it was not our role to play with mortals who, at their oldest, would still be so terribly young and finite. Our place was not with these species, but it was also not completely disconnected from the universe—we wanted to remain separate from their politics and cultures, yes, but not separate from them as living beings. We didn't want to unduly influence new life or cultures, not when the risk was that we would twist them in our image. As our name suggested, we sought to protect the greater universe from the things that still remained after the birth of reality: those monsters from beyond, things that slipped through the interdimensional gaps, so that life may flourish unabated.

Finally, the Controllers sought total rule. They argued that not only had we, the Maltusians, been around the longest, and thus held a superior perspective on the universe, but that we were first, and our claim on the universe was older than most evolutionary trees. They saw the potential of other cultures, ones which did not spend the same kind of consideration to their environment or peers, as destructive and dangerous, and sought cultural assimilation when it came time to meet with a new species. In the future they envisioned, they argued, we would be the firm, guiding hand of a unified empire, one which could be guided to do the right thing by our species, who would rule over all by virtue of our seniority and genetic abilities.

These groups were simply just groups, political alignments, and opinions. It did fragment our society, yes, but never severely enough to be anything but the Empire of Maltus. For the longest time, it was only ever theoretical—we called it philosophy, for that was what it truly was. We had not yet practiced what we preached because there was nobody to practice it on, and for the longest time, our conflicting views could remain harmless by never being acted upon. We could debate them and discuss them, all without the danger and faults that each position inherits actually impacting anything but our own opinions.

And then, we found the first sentient species other than ourselves that we would meet, and those opinions became schisms.

They called themselves the Miir. Short, incredibly durable for their size, of silver fur and with two arms, two stubby legs, and an armoured, exceedingly powerful tail which they used for self-defence, mining, and object manipulation. They were, by all accounts, an already diverse collection of cultures and beliefs, and built their homes from hexagonal mud bricks.

In the end, we only managed to catalogue sixteen distinct cultures out of hundreds.

Each group sent down emissaries, individuals intending to handle interaction with the species on the planet. These emissaries came to blows with one another, and it set off a civil war that nobody had ever known was a possibility until now. Three Maltusians died on the planet, enough to be a tragedy, the biggest murder in the history of our people for the last two hundred thousand years.

We would turn three deaths into countless more, before long.

Our civil war would shatter the stability of our empire, it would rip across that planet and the resulting fight would decimate all life on it, taking with it the Miir, driving them to extinction. Each side blamed the other, but who was at fault does not matter.

We all were. We just didn't care.

We turned our emotional energy-powered technology against each other. Anger, once used to power thrusters, powered bombs. Fear, once used to maintain awareness of hazards and as on-board security, became a memetic weapon that we plagued entire cities with. Hope, once used to lull our children to sleep and ensure their dreams were kind, was used to riddle entire population centers with aggressive cancers by making people never stop healing, even if they had no wounds.

In our use of these tools, our over-production of these emotional wavelengths, we lured in things we as a society had only just theorized. We brought forth into the light of day things which had only been impulses, minds that dwelled in the fabric between reality and the Glow.

Parallax birthed itself from self-cannibalism and drove a hundred worlds to madness. The Butcher manifested in empty space and the shockwaves of its emergence made sectors burn themselves alive with civil strife. More and more came with each passing moment of the civil war. Ophidian, the Predator, Proselyte, Adara, and Ion would all ultimately be lured into physical reality during this period. Even the emotional entities we now consider positive ones - such as Ion - were fundamentally born from our bloodshed, our arrogance to act as though we could dictate the fate of life, and our refusal to back down.

Each of these beings of raw emotion was drawn in by us, unleashed by us, and made us all the worse.

We destroyed so much of ourselves that we only further defined the valleys that now existed between our people. We lost all of our most ancient elders, the ones who had been around since our people first discovered metal tools, leaving us a society of orphans.

The Maltusian Civil War would end in a stalemate, ultimately. Each side was too devastated to continue, too busy managing the more violent and toxic manifestations of the emotional spectrum to spend the time and manpower on civil strife. The thing we were fighting over was a thousand years dead by this point, for our immortality only served to compound the time we spent killing each other.

The factions would come together, all of us battered, all of us wounded, but desperate to stave off the things we had lured into this universe. We would agree to recreate the Maltusian Empire, but one with three autonomous regions, one for each faction. We would let Maltus itself remain a haven for all three factions, and where we would raise our children, to let them choose, when they came of age, whichever faction they might desire to be part of.

It would be another three-hundred-thousand years before we started seeing the first nascent mortal species, and witnessed the wars they fought against themselves and others in the early universe. Repeating our mistakes, falling prey to the monsters we unleashed.

But we never gave up our empire, and in doing so, we would repeat the same tragedies as before."

—"Ancient History" section of the Book of Oa.

---

[APPA ALI APSA]​

Appa stood before his peers, watching silently as they discussed the verbal report he had finished giving.

The discussion was, by the looks of it, rather spirited.

Every Guardian was present, even the ones so often spirited away to other worlds, doing their own projects. They had all been recalled, and considering the state of affairs, no amount of their grumbling could reasonably hide the fact that they could see the danger too.

To say that the crowd was massive by Oan standards was an understatement. They were arranged across terraced seats placed against a back wall, full of faces he hadn't seen in millions of years, and many more who he had, but wished he rather hadn't. Most of the ones he hadn't seen were the Guardians who refused to partake in politics, keeping to their personal projects instead.

Altogether, though, opinions on his actions were fairly evenly split between positive and negative sentiment. A small victory, in the grand scheme of things.

The majority of the negative opinions came from the conservative faction of the Guardians, the ones who hewed much closer to standard protocol and refused to allow the proliferation of Oan technology under any circumstances. Most of them were old, like him, and with living memory of the War of Tears, or failing that, memory of its immediate aftermath.

Frankly, Appa had not expected to earn the favour of the conservative faction. If anything, he expected that, if he was going to end up unseated and exiled, it would probably be by their hands. His history of service would stop them from executing him, but little more than that, considering he had done what, in their view, was very nearly unforgivable.

If that did happen, it was a cost he was willing to accept.

The discussion continued in front of him with no sign of abating or including him, just as it had been doing for the last hour and forty-five minutes. That was just today's count, though, because, in practice, they'd been debating this for four days at this point, just with breaks between sessions to manage their other duties.

Guardians gestured, gesticulated, argued and bickered with quite some passion, pointing out their side and rebuking the others, only to be met with the same.

If the average interstellar citizen saw this, they'd be baffled by the sight of it. The show of emotions, the expressive faces and jabbed fingers like an angry retailer at a meat market were absolutely not what most associated with Oans as a species. But, then, the reason why they behaved this way in private was because it was exactly that—private. The Oans weren't beings devoid of emotions, for all that they might become blunted with age. They were, instead, masters of control over their emotions, as evidenced by the fact that despite a lot of expressiveness going on, there wasn't really the same kind of furor that came with passionate debate that you might find somewhere else, with younger minds and even younger cultures.

That was because his people knew to remain calm, to remain centred. To remove all emotions was to be like the Controllers, and their ending had not been a pleasant one. Conversely, to remove all rationality was to go blindingly mad, so they didn't do that either. A happy medium could be achieved by balancing the two, and it was something most Oans had an infinite amount of time to practice.

But they still did project the apathetic, unemotional mask to the rest of the universe, even if it was patently untrue. It was the easiest approach, frankly, it helped keep distance between themselves and others, and safeguarded them. This, right here, was nothing you would see anywhere else but on Oa, in the Halls of the Guardians.

It was home, for as much as he could have a home, with Maltus gone.

It was a comfort, even if the discussion playing out before him could swing to the point where it would be the last time he stepped foot on Oa. This was what the Oans were, this was what they had forged out of their legacy, and it was far, far better than what had come before. Passionate voices, passionate gazes, all of it honed into a controlled edge by years of practice and knowing what would happen if you let either side of a sound mind - rationality or emotionality - overtake the other.

This was his universe. Just one planet. Because the rest of the universe was not made for him, it was not made for immortals, generally, but it was even less meant for species like them, whose stature never came close to matching their true power.

He felt better, on Oa. Saner, less shaken, with his feet back on soil that was familiar to him. It was not Maltus, it would never be Maltus, but then neither would Earth's many vistas compare to the vistas he had seen on his planet before it had burned away in the growth of its star.

At the highest point in the room, Ganthet raised a single hand, silencing the entire debate. His eyes flickered across the crowd of Oans, slipped over to Appa, then returned. "The ongoing discussion gets no closer to actually solving what we have come here to discuss. We are here to decide if our peer, Appa Ali Apsa, should be indicted for his actions, and if so, to what extent he should be punished. We cannot come to such a decision if we sit here and bicker, and I will be calling the vote soon, regardless of if any progress is truly made. In pursuit of allowing for final thoughts, and permitting this process to move forward, who here has questions or queries for our peer, on his conduct on the planet known as Earth?"

Punthio Purap Puzap, a member of the conservative faction, rose from his seat, his eyes pinned on Appa. Ganthet made no move to stop him, so Punthio cleared his throat. "I understand the situation was complex, and I can sympathize with the circumstances you found yourself in," he began, voice nasally and a dim reminder that Appa lived on the opposite side of the planet to Punthio for several reasons, and his voice was maybe only fifth on that list. They had never gotten along, especially not after the Ad-Alai Accords had gone through. "Especially with the re-emergence of the yellow light, but did you truly have no way to acquire that ring without giving over such a great concession? Surely you could have thought of some other way to acquire it from this... Administrator, without handing over our technology to exactly the kind of being that could potentially reverse-engineer it?"

Potentially? Appa had no delusions that Administrator wasn't working her way through that piece of technology as they spoke. He might even ask Ion - if he got the chance, anyway - if Administrator had already managed to get into contact with them.

The better part of half of the amassed Oans turned to give Punthio several less than impressed stares.

To their credit, it was a profoundly stupid question. Ah, yes, why could he not simply wrestle away an object from an impossibly powerful telepathic with interuniversal transit abilities? Surely that wasn't a monumentally stupid thing to ask out of someone.

But, then, this was why he didn't like Punthio, because the man knew exactly what he was doing. He was playing devil's advocate, and he was not subtle, nor was he unaware of the debatable logic in his question.

"If you believe that to be the case," Appa said slowly, staring right back at him. "I give you all the privilege in our bountiful universe to go to Earth on your own and... reacquire the ring I gave in trade to Administrator. I, however, am capable of rational thought, and know better, so I will abstain from attempting suicide by way of a higher-class being."

Punthio stared at him narrowly. That was the type of comment that would burn bridges, and considering Oans were immortal, burnt bridges could only be rebuilt with a lot of time and patience. Grudges stuck around, when you had millennia to dwell on them and no impetus to actually address them.

But, then, he had burned that bridge millions of years ago, so he did not need to give a shit about playing up the part of the resigned, sorrowful Guardian.

He certainly relished the chance to put Punthio, however briefly, on his own ass.

"We're also not here to debate either of those things, to be clear," Ganthet interjected, shooting them both a look of warning, his voice edged with annoyance. He had planted his fist beneath his chin and was watching the ongoing discussion with what could only be described as an exceedingly exasperated expression. "I can acknowledge the chance of getting the entity known as Administrator to hand over that ring absent some kind of repayment to be virtually nonexistent. To argue otherwise is both beneath us and profoundly asinine, and you should all know that from just the verbal report. What we are here to debate is not what-if, we are here to ask if our peer's decision to give up a ring was one that merits indictment, absent any extant properties or complications. Was a crime committed, in our peer's decision, and if so, what shall our sentence be?"

"Speaking of those rings, may I inquire after what we have learned about them? I have been left out of the loop," Appa interjected.

Ganthet levelled a flat look at him. "Is it relevant to this conversation?"

...Not especially. "I am mostly just deeply curious," he admitted. "If I am to be exiled today, I would like to know what came of that, if nothing else."

Ganthet's expression didn't change any. "That isn't relevant to the current topic, however... with consideration to the fact that you may not have an opportunity otherwise, I will allow it."

"I have an objection to that," Punthio said, rising back to his feet.

"And you will keep it in your pocket, peer Punthio," Ganthet told him with no small amount of annoyance. "I could see that you were part of the reason why the engineering bloc could not come to a comprehensive decision on our peer's choice. Appa has stood around for some time now, patiently waiting for us to finish, and I would rather allow him a small privilege than continue this indignity. Sit down."

Punthio sat, looking unimpressed.

If Appa did die or get exiled today, he was at least going out on the most exciting, delightful scene he had witnessed in the last quarter-of-a-million years.

"May I?" A voice called out.

Ganthet waved idly.

Azeo Arpep Altar stood from where she had been sitting, some short ways away from Ganthet's seat. She was their master engineer, and belonged to the same generation as Appa and Ganthet both did. "Our investigation has already concluded, we just did not have the time to pass along relevant information before this tribunal. We have discovered the following: the Weaponers of Qward were the ones to modify the rings, as evidenced by their style of tampering found throughout the internal components, and the rings themselves have had a number of functions stripped out with some new ones added in exchange. A number of these rings show evidence of being completely dismantled and reassembled, so there likely now exists comprehensive diagrams of the rings as a whole, and thus an abstract concept of how to create more of them. Finally, the baseline AI on all rings you retrieved have been modified severely, and the emotional dampeners have all been mostly disengaged, leaving both the bearer more vulnerable to the effects of fear than our own are vulnerable to the effects of willpower, but conversely allowed to draw in significant amounts of fear from surrounding sources."

Appa was briefly struck by the most horrifying of emotions: he was, however temporarily, relieved it was the Qwardians this time.

If nothing else, that alone was indicative of the current state of affairs. To be glad that it was just the Qwardians who happened to get their hands on their technology, rather than the Shatepac, or the Broken Sun Company, both of which were known to play around with the emotional spectrum whenever they found a way to start probing at it.

That wasn't to say the Qwardians were good by any stretch of the imagination, though. Them having access to this kind of technology was a huge issue, mostly because the Weaponers of Qward were a semi-official military arm of the Qwardian state, consisting of arms manufacturers who rose into power after they - the Guardians - had stepped in to handle a crisis that the Qwardians made.

To abridge the story, the sector the Qwardians evolved on had exceedingly thin boundaries between dimensions, which lead to a much higher rate of dimensional beasts emerging. The Qwardians, in their infinite wisdom no doubt completely unaffected by their semi-frequent contact with said dimensional beasts throughout their history, had learned to take advantage of the thin membrane of reality and started punching holes into higher dimensions. Most of the time, you would not think that a lower-dimensional entity would have even a small chance of surviving in a higher dimension, as Dezo's Constant dictated that lower-dimensional entities did not ascend when rising into higher dimensions, unlike how it was when higher-dimensional beings were truncated into lower-dimensional ones, but the Qwardians had weaponized their own lower-dimensional state to start hunting things in the higher dimensions.

Yes, the Qwardians went into higher dimensions so complex and unintuitive it drove people mad to even graph out the physics, and they went there mostly to hunt trophies and hone their weapons against things which were well beyond anything they could find in the third dimension.

They had even managed to develop some weapons that could truly hurt some of the more inviolable dimensional beasts.

But that had come at the cost of their dimensional drilling only further destabilizing the sector, and that caused a rapid rise in emergences of dimensional beasts across not just their own sector, but surrounding ones. The most conservative estimates put the death toll for their drilling in the tens of billions.

The Guardians had stepped in, put a stop to it, and the Qwardians hadn't taken it well. Their resistance to any kind of regulation had evolved from there, and now they were a constant pest to them, but a threat to virtually all life elsewhere as a result.

Azeo sat back down, when it became clear he had no questions for her.

Appa turned his eyes back to Ganthet. "How is the state of Parallax's containment?" he asked bluntly.

Ganthet paused, staring at him.

Appa had not been on the mothership of the Daxamite fleet at all during or after the war, but he didn't have to be to feel Parallax's near-total emergence into this part of the universe. He knew the feeling of the monster better than most, considering he still had scars - both physical and mental - that ached whenever he got near to its prison, and that had burned like boiling pitch when it had tried to claw its way out on that ship. The headache it had left him with had nearly been crippling for the time it was attempting to manifest.

Ganthet, finally, breathed out. "We were at a sixty-four percent failure chance before the incident ended. Given another few minutes, it's entirely possible Parallax would have slipped our control entirely. Worse yet, while Parallax appears to have fallen back into a state of dormancy, it is regaining power at a far faster rate than it normally did after past escape attempts. The Wardens of Fear predict Parallax will have several opportunities to free itself in our immediate future, and will likely target a host channelling yellow light, as it did this time. If it succeeds, it's not entirely clear whether or not we will have the ability to put it back into its prison."

Appa digested that for a moment, and watched as his peers did the same.

Ganthet's eyes never left him. He knew what Appa was doing, but then, Ganthet seemed to be on his side for this debate, so he was willing to lean on the politics a little more for this.

"This is why I made the decision I did, on that day," Appa said, speaking aloud, watching as the eyes turned back to him. His decision had been right, it had been just, and he would not be a simpering coward if exile came for him. He would stand by his actions; it was only right. "I know there is immense danger in giving our technology to a being like Administrator, and I know better than most of you the threat she can pose. But the alternative, as pointed out before, was to do nothing and let her keep that yellow ring. Unavoidably, it would have been something she would have delved into, it is not a matter of if she would pursue answers about the emotional spectrum, simply when; she told me as much. I was left with a choice: to allow her to poke at Parallax, or redirect her to Ion, and hope she learns to stop digging, after that point. You may judge me for that decision, and I will bear it, but at the time, I made the decision I thought would best safeguard the universe into the future."

"That does not change the fact that you broke an edict, Appa. We keep to those for a reason, you and I are both old enough to know that," Punthio said, though without much of his vitriol.

"Yet... our peer only gave over a prototype—less reliant on a lantern, certainly, and that may pose a threat, but the power generation capacity on those rings is abysmal as a result," Egden Erli Erla, another conservative faction member, spoke up. "He did not hand over a modern ring, with AI and rapid charging methods. He gave her a ring with a limited amount of energy provided per cycle, which vastly reduced its ability to be used without long-term collection of energy. That would forestall much of the abuse it might be used for, if we assume the worst will happen."

"The threat is not in the ring itself, we've established this over and over again. It is in what she may produce once she figures out how it works!" Dezo Deko Dertap snapped.

"Unless I am mistaken, which I doubt I will be in this instance, I do not think she will be able to intuit a modern emotional well-matrix out of the old cyclical engine," Azeo pointed out placidly, though her voice came across as a bit stiff. "They're completely different accumulation systems, to the point where I would hesitate to call the two rings the same type of device. They might do the same thing, and look similar, but the prototype ring is... half a billion or so years behind on development, and is working from a very different baseline of intended function."

"We know what even our most primitive technology can do if put in the wrong hands. None of this changes the nature of Administrator's threat," Dezo stressed, glancing across all of them. "And with access to willpower? She becomes even more of a threat, and you have caused that."

He liked it better when Dezo was too busy with his studies to bother with politics. "But is she a threat to us, or to others, peer Dezo?" Appa asked blandly. "Or is she just something we do not control? Because, as my report indicated, Administrator is sedentary and protective of Earth, but otherwise largely unmotivated towards destructive ends. She is certainly not suited to be a Green Lantern, no, but then what immortal ever is? Mogo is the only immortal who has remained in the Corps without taking thousands-of-years long sabbaticals and completely abandoning their duties. They are, by all accounts, the exception to the rule."

"Peer Appa does have a point," Dele Denen Deldin allowed, speaking up before Dezo could get another shot off. "Administrator is an immortal and not a simple one. From what he has told us, we have little reason to think she'll start disrupting interstellar cohesion or begin waging war, and we do have the means to ensure she keeps to our expectations. Our peer has described her as someone who appreciates propriety and procedure, not unusual for an immortal, but we should, perhaps, approach her in that light: as an immortal who has glimpsed into the truth of reality. I believe she might appreciate us approaching her in an unofficial capacity, and while she might not be new to immortality, procedure dictates we still go through the motions, such as giving out the immortality pamphlet, among other things, and attempt to find a common ground with her."

"Curious proposal—treating this as a simple immortal incident," Ganthet replied, sounding engaged for the first time since the discussion had started. "Please, expand if you can."

After a moment of glancing around, Dele rose to a stand from her seat, breathing in, then out. "My peers, I am worried less about how exactly this plays out as I am with how we will respond to this over the long term. I apologize for my crassness in saying as much, but our peer has done something legally reprehensible, a crime so old it dates back to the founding of the modern Guardians of the Universe as an institution. Yet, I still agree with his decision to do so, as I believe it was the morally correct thing to do, given the circumstances, and I understand his logic behind it." She glanced around the room, pausing briefly on Appa, before looking away again. "I, personally, am more comfortable with Administrator coming into contact with Ion than I am with her coming into contact with Parallax, who we know can compromise even incarnated forces. We, in a sense, all feel this way, even if some of us may be hung up on the decision to do this in the first place, and in that same way, I believe we all know how this will play out: we all know, rationally, that our peer did the best he could with the given circumstances, and we all accept that a very long time ago we agreed that laws are not completely static, and should not be static, when both emotions and logic should take part in any decision.

"And more than that—allow me to ask, what occurs if we keep this pretense and exile peer Appa? What does that resolve? We have lost one of our most senior, but it has not changed the fact that Administrator now has a ring, and will likely begin to break it down and understand how it works. That ring shall not simply vanish from Administrator's hand if we send our peer Appa into exile. Shall we go over to Earth and do as mortals do, and wage war against her for it back? Shall we send her a polite note? Or should we squabble in the dirt over a ring that has already been used, and over a world that she already protects? What benefit would be found in those actions? Can we even say in confidence that we can suppress her, collectively, if her apparent capacity for growth is as peer Appa has indicated?"

There was a ringing silence in response to that. Appa found himself among them, at a loss for things to say in reply to that.

Dele Denen Deldin was a neutralist, rarely taking sides and mostly overseeing cultural disputes and arguments, as well as managing the personalities and histories of various peoples across the universe. Her area of expertise wasn't logistics, but it was people, and perhaps, Appa supposed, they all forgot for a moment there that they were not avatars of willpower, but rather people with a duty that only they could bear.

"And more to the point, if we desire a suitable punishment for peer Appa, we already have one ready," Dele continued, unabated.

Appa felt his stomach twist. Surely she couldn't mean—

"As I said before, I believe we should approach this as we would with other immortals. A new immortal she might not be, but Administrator does appear to be new to this reality, if nothing else, and looks to be making a power base for herself, to protect that which she cares about. She is alone, without many - or possibly any - peers, and sending someone down to engage with her as equals may let us arrive at a compromise or at least become more comfortable with her having access to that technology. We could guide her, or at least give her advice, and we can form bonds, as we should be doing more often with immortals." Dele paused, glancing across the room again, before nodding once. "More than that, the sector Earth is located in was one of the hardest hit by the Daxamites, and it needs additional oversight, but it won't be an easy administrative task to manage, especially not with the rampant proliferation of the meta-gene on Earth, which we will need to observe to avert active calamities. Who is better than our peer, Appa? He has the most experience on Earth, he is one of our best administrators and a skilled historian. We should not call this exile, or banishment, but rather another duty—to allow our peer to manage the fallout of his own actions, and to act as a familiar face that Administrator may be more willing to work with than one of us, who she does not know."

No. Absolutely not. He just got home. They couldn't do this. "What of the Yellow Lanterns? I had expected to help hunt them down."

Appa would have been gutted by the exile, despite his better attempts at hiding that fact. It would have hurt, worse than anything else could have, to be made twice an orphan—once for Maltus, once for Oa—but there would have been dignity in that. It was an outcome he had mulled on, considered, and accepted on his way back. If it came to that, he would accept, even if he wished with all of his heart for it not to be the case.

Being sent to oversee Earth and the corresponding sector would not be as bad, but it would lack the dignity of exile. Even in exile, he would not have stopped trying to help—he would have travelled and done as much as he could, just as he did now, but without the backing of his people. It would have been lonely, but it would have been purposeful.

Earth, though—that was a different discussion. That was an indignity, that was dealing with being suffocated by the psychic presence of Administrator. As much as he might be partial to her personality, her existence - to him, at least - was like standing next to a precariously large volcano that occasionally rumbled and spat up smoke. Even if he knew the volcano was more than capable of moderating itself and had very little risk of going off, his instinct - one only honed throughout his life, mind you, as Administrator was the exception to the rule as far as he was concerned - told him quite the opposite.

There was opportunity on Earth, in Sector 2814, to do something meaningful, to help a part of the universe recover. That said, it was - however juvenile this might paint him - not the place he wanted to be meaningful in. Leave that to the others, who handled cultural contact and interactions with immortals as a matter of course. He was a historian, a bureaucrat, barely even combat-viable in comparison to some of his peers, but useful to them if they needed to navigate otherwise uncharted parts of the universe, as a result of his bounty of knowledge. This was certainly not his place to be.

Ganthet glanced his way, and the expression on his face, however subtle it might be, was not promising. It was the expression of someone who saw and understood the distress Appa was experiencing, but had little to no interest in actually doing anything about it. "The Wardens of Fear have overwhelmingly voted to mobilize for the first time since Parallax's initial capture, to track down those bearers of the yellow rings, alongside a company of Green Lanterns, and snuff out the light of fear once more. It is, in that respect, handled, and your help would not be necessary nor beneficial in the long-term, considering they have training in tracking down traces of the glint of fear."

"Even so, I am uncertain I will be of much use for my peers if I am stationed on Earth—" Appa tried, only to realize he had shown too much of his hand.

He had shown he did not want this, when he had been quietly accepting of his exile before now.

His peers could smell the blood in the water.

Like hungry Sable Lurkers, they descended on him all at once.

Dezo stood from his seat. "The conservative faction would like to call a vote now, per our peer Dele's suggestion," he announced.

"Granted. May I assume your faction votes in favour?" Ganthet asked, barely looking up.

"You may," Dezo replied.

Please, abandoned gods, no. He just wanted to go home, to his house, and take a long rest. He didn't want to go back there, he just got here—

"All who approve, show of hands," Ganthet instructed.

More than an eighty percent majority of hands went up.

Appa's stomach fell somewhere down past his feet.

"I have observed this decision. As voted, Appa Ali Apsa, Third Scribe, will be sentenced for his actions on Earth: he will oversee Sector 2814, with special considerations for maintaining observance over Earth and its emergent immortal, the entity named 'Administrator' or 'Addy Queen', while providing basic introductory information and discussions that we grant all immortals who we make connections with, alongside information we disseminate in the event of an immortal touching upon the truth of reality. He will remain stationed on Earth, with the ability to move throughout the sector, until such a time where either an emergency draws him elsewhere—only privileged in the event of a council agreement—or when the council votes with a sufficient ratio that the situation in Sector 2814 has been resolved and returned to a state close to or better than where it was preceding the arrival of the Daxamites. In that time, Appa Ali Apsa, Third Scribe, will be barred from all political engagement, as per our regulations on voting outside of the sector, and we will be reviewing his conduct over a period equivalent to fifty Earth years, to repeat until he has either failed in his duty, or until he has accomplished it."

A chorus of agreements rose.

"Approved," Ganthet said, the word like the falling of the headsman's blade.

Appa glowered at him. "So be it," he ground out, trying to keep his own disappointment and weariness to himself. "I will take this burden, but I expect actual knowledge on Administrator this time, Ganthet. I cannot go in blind a second time, not after what I observed. Give it to me in private, if you must, but you know what she is, and so must I."

Ganthet stared at him for a moment, the request hanging in the air like the cry of a bell.

Then he inclined his head. "Also approved. You have two days' worth of time on Oa, before you will be expected to return to Earth. I will inform you of her nature in that time."

---

"The initial years of the Psion-Dominator war were defined by attacks which, today, would be illegal by virtually all standards of interstellar war, even those imposed by both the modern Psion and Dominator nations. These tactics were heavily frowned upon, even at the time, however, the existing authority of the Vega Republics and the Empire of Dominion had kept any standardized laws surrounding the use of biological warfare severely limited, and even less adhered to by interstellar polities, in large part because both the Vega Republics and the Empire of Dominion used those kinds of tactics with notable frequency.

While both sides would unleash a large variety of existential horrors, we know of two which made the most impact: the Psion Sterility Plague, and the creation of the Star Conquerors.

The former of the two occurred first and was in fact the act that started the war itself, with the Dominators engineering a genetics-modifying pathogen and discreetly exposing a large number of traders and their vessels to the disease. These vessels would land across all but a scant few Psion-controlled planets, and spread the disease like wildfire, rendering most, if not all, of the Psions completely sterile.

The Psions would barely survive the immediate biological attack - which was swiftly followed up by an invasion by Dominator forces - due to existing technology allowing them to engineer themselves a form of pseudo-immortality. Much of the species died from complications the engineered plague caused regardless, but what was left of the Psion race was now functionally immortal, and deeply resentful as the Dominators started to rapidly take over and exterminate all sentient or mutated life on once-prosperous Republic-controlled planets.

In retaliation, the Psions would engineer the Star Conquerors. These psychic parasites were not originally designed to be psychic themselves as far as records tell us, merely cognitovores, but by this point, the Psions had given up the pretense of ensuring their own creations couldn't wildly self-mutate, and when this newly-engineered life form came into contact with the first of the Dominators worlds, it would tear out the psychic ability of at least three existing slave species and graft it onto themselves like a virus stealing genetic information from a host.

The Star Conquerors would go from being a biological weapon to an interstellar threat, and rapidly proliferate, washing over Dominator space much as the Dominator's plague had in Psion space. In that time, the Star Conquerors would kill the Hivemind Authority of the Dominators, the single ruling body that had kept the species unified since their early-industrial period, and result in her many children squabbling over who next took the throne. Without a centralized government, or easy access to their peers with their psychic network infested with Star Conquerors, over 70% of all living Dominators would die within the next three decades.

By the time the war had been running for just that time, the Psions would be so few as to be considered nearly extinct, and what was left of the Dominators - and their shattered lineages, with much of the 'pure genetics' that they so preoccupied themselves with taken out of the gene pool due to the Star Conquerors - would be reduced down to bare fractions, barely eking out an existence on some of the few planets not yet visited by the Star Conquerors.

The Star Conquerors would continue to rampage through space, swallowing entire worlds and proliferating exponentially, threatening not just the remaining Dominators and Psions - who had, by this point, completely lost control of their creations - but also all known life in at least three hundred sectors.

It was only understandable, then, that the Oans - not the Green Lanterns, who had been actively attempting to manage the crisis since its start - stepped in.

In half a year, they would put a complete and total end to the war. The sterility plague would be reversed as much as it could be, leaving the Psions immortal, but barely capable of reproduction due to extremely diminished fertility that they never found a way to fix, and the Star Conquerors would be mostly exterminated. They would establish terms between the two sides, bending the arms of both the Psions and the Dominators until they relented, and making sure neither of them ever tried to repeat the things they had done on the scale they had done them on.

They could not change the quality of these two nations. The Dominators would continue to enslave and destroy vast swathes of the universe in pursuit of a genetic purity which was, by this point, far beyond their grasp, and the Psions would still regularly partake in the kind of scientific malfeasance that has most of the species blacklisted from near-core sectors. But the Oans claimed they did not, and would not, commit genocide to ensure something like this would not happen again, so they left the ashes left over from the war and departed, having mended the situation as much as they could.

The Psions and the Dominators, even today, would never recover to their heights. The Psions are a dying species, barely able to repopulate, and the Dominators, when not busy with succession crises, are long separated from the planets they once colonized. While both can be in no way considered weak - as they, to this day, maintain middling-sized interstellar nations with large militaries - neither can they be considered anything but a pale ghost of what they once were, and what they once promised the universe in their dominance.

That does not change the fact that between just two nations, over a thousand worlds were left completely and utterly barren of life, and another two thousand more would take hundreds of years before they could be resettled."

—Chapter 4 of A Treatise on the Psion-Dominator War.

---

[MOGO]​

Mogo opened their eyes.

Or, well, they opened them as much as an eyeless planet could open nonexistent eyes, but the comparison was apt.

Awareness came in a burst, a sudden clarity as they took in their surroundings for the first time in quite a while, now that they were thinking about it.

All around them was the inky darkness of space, only broken up by the trail of galaxies and stars that hung far, far into the distance; blooms of colour and light that were otherwise absent in their immediate vicinity.

Ahead of them was a black hole, something they had been orbiting around for a while now, with what little light that still percolated the region warped irreversibly by the event horizon. They had been absorbing the trace radiation emitted by the black hole, while occasionally dropping meteors in to siphon off the more dramatic bursts of energy as the objects were shoved into near-light speed velocities, but that was mostly to keep their reserves full if ever needed.

Idly, they pinged, reaching out past themselves, to the unbound rings floating throughout the universe. All signs came back positive, though the absence of numerous rings still gnawed venomously at them. There weren't as many missing rings as there could be, however even one ring going missing was cause for great alarm.

They had gotten confirmation from the council as to what happened to them. They were weapons of fear now, due to a rogue faction within the Green Lanterns.

Mogo had some regrets about past decisions, in the face of that. They had guided rings to each of those renegades, and clearly, they had erred.

They ignored thinking about it, for the time being, focusing instead on the rings in transit. Many, many more rings had been unbound in the recent past, enough that Mogo had become largely preoccupied with said rings, just managing the movement they made and who they ended up flying to. Between the Death March and several wars a few galaxies over, Green Lanterns had died in droves, not an unusual fact of life, but a sad one all the same. Green Lanterns lived to die for good causes, in some respects.

It was Mogo's role to ensure the rings found suitable bearers, but it wasn't just that. They handled communication, information catalogues, translating new languages and keeping databases up to date, especially when new information was added. They managed a lot of the rings' communication relays and networks, with them, in a way, at the very center of it.

Mogo was in many ways the minds of the rings, and it was a role they had taken willingly. It was not a role imposed on them, even out of necessity: the rings could exist entirely absent Mogo, they just did so... poorly, very poorly. Rather than Mogo's careful balance of giving rings out to ones who would fit best with current political environments and temperaments, without their guiding touch, rings simply sought out the largest sources of willpower it could feasibly find.

They, in a sense, curated. They ensured rings did not go to people who would exacerbate certain cultural wars or racial tensions, or at least not in the favour of the side that was doing the oppressing. They catalogued information gleaned from every ring to accomplish this, which gave them the dubious honour of being possibly the most politically-savvy intelligence in the entire known universe.

Truth be told, Mogo didn't really do much else, either. They loved their role, so why would they need to? Mogo had long ago accepted they were more of a watcher, an observer, than a truly active participant. They watched the universe, they catalogued, they recorded and learned, because what was better than that? Certainly, some people might say 'alcohol' or 'sex' but those two things were some of the few things that were truly foreign to them, as they could not really experience either, not that they felt like they wanted to in the first place.

They were a vault of knowledge and culture and life. They knew of political machinations, plots, schemes, forgotten planets and even more forgotten people. They knew of spacer culture, planet culture, religion and belief because, to learn, all you had to do was listen.

And let it be said, Mogo had a lot of ways to listen.

They loved people. They loved life too, yes, but less than people, because people made things, they made culture, they made more things that were almost life unto themselves because people kept making more about those things. Cultures changed and shifted because people never stopped making them. They could communicate, engage, and discuss, they had ideas and thoughts and dreams, passions just as Mogo had them.

And, perhaps more than that, Mogo liked doting on them. They hadn't always been aware, and by the time they had become aware, their planet only had the ruins of past civilizations. Whatever had once lived on their rocky surface had died a long time ago, or left, the evidence had never been conclusive. In the time after, Mogo had reached out to whoever had landed on their surface, to talk and share and discuss. Eventually, a Green Lantern had come, and more had been spoken, and before long, even more Green Lanterns had come, and then the Oans had too.

After that, they opted to join the Corps, because it would let them be as they always had been.

Lately, Mogo had seen a lot. Today, they had been awoken for the first time in a long time, truthfully, because the things that occupied their attention were finally coming to an end. The Death March was truly stopped, and the wars elsewhere were finally dying down with a lasting, neutral peace on the horizon. They didn't have to juggle rings so often, and so that gave them time to themselves, which they spent now, thinking about what they could be doing.

It was a time they could use to explore, too. They hardly needed to be somewhere to do their duties, it was just that when you had to juggle so many things and keep track of so many information feeds, it was easier to enter a sleep state and orbit around a stellar body.

Mogo preferred black holes, not because they were good at producing energy - they were not - but because they did not have a habit of going supernova when they were busy. It was always embarrassing when that happened.

Thinking back, they recalled the crystals they had seen, the being so much like them.

Administrator. That had been what the systems designated her as—such information given freely by the Guardians.

Times were changing, Mogo knew. The glint of fear returned to the broader universe, though Parallax appeared to still be bound - Mogo was fairly certain they would know if that wasn't the case, considering Parallax still wanted to eat them after last time - but by their estimate, it had come close to escaping the Guardian's net, and now, people were rushing to adjust and change.

Mogo was not unfamiliar with change. They quite liked change, really.

Slowly, down in their core, Mogo drew on the vast engine of willpower—themselves. Their core churned, shifted, and all across their surface, their body woke up.

Green light poured up, pushing through tectonic boundaries, spilling forth and reaching the ring sitting on Mogo's surface, entombed in a single temple, to the species that they had once been host to, but would never know the name or identity of. Willpower roared, and beneath their soil, life erupted, bursting free from where it had been hibernating.

Forests bloomed across their surface, driven on by the light. Animals rose out of containment chambers designed to keep them in stasis, paws bounding against the stone as they returned to their normal behaviours, despite thousands of years having passed since they were last awake. Their oceans glowed emerald, drawing the light up and up as Mogo's ring responded to their will.

With a pull, Mogo disengaged from the black hole's orbit, idly reaching out to drag a few chunks of broken planets - shattered by some long-ago supernova - into its boundary using a pair of summoned constructs. The pieces began to drop and spiral, turning into smears of magnesium light as gravitational forces dragged them to ever-higher speeds, Mogo siphoned off a bit more from it; a snack for the road.

With one last lurch, Mogo pulled away entirely and started off in a direction that was snagged on their mind. Towards someone who might, just maybe, be like them.

They would not go close to Earth, no, but they could project an avatar once they got close enough. They were too big to do that, they'd disrupt solar systems, and that would not be an ideal way to greet a peer.

They wished to know about Administrator, and an avatar would let them talk with Administrator, not to mention learn about her.

Did she love people, as Mogo did? That and so many other questions burned in their mind, and they were excited to ask them.

Hopefully, they would get some answers.

And, even if they didn't, well—it was probably better that Mogo greet Administrator first, before someone like Ranx or one of the sentient war worlds did it for them.

---

"At the start of this section, we spoke of the Manhunters and the tragedy that followed their creation, as well as our complicity in helping to create them. We spoke of how, in the years when the sun Maltus orbited around became too large to let life sustain itself on the planet, we scattered remnants of the Maltusian people came together to decide on where to go next, and it was there that we set the stage for the horrors that would follow. A unifying project to keep our empire alive, to keep the idea of an ancient Maltusian identity as anything more than a historical footnote.

We wanted to make something good. To make something that would keep the legacy of Maltus alive, even as its empire had shrunk so severely, so completely, that the most populated planets were the ones we had defined as factional homeworlds, Oa, Okaara, and Zamaron.

And we spoke about how, in our pursuit of this goal, we created monsters. That our hopes and desires to produce something good were fundamentally flawed, because the Manhunters went mad, and created the graveyard that would, itself, birth the Empire of Tears.

We then covered the war with the Empire of Tears, the composition of their armies, and the moment when we realized this would be a war of extermination, one way or another, because if we did not kill them, they would kill all of us, and move on to everyone else in short order.

Now, we speak of the aftermath.

I want you, reader, to put yourself in the shoes of a Maltusian, in this instance. What few of us were left, anyway.

Our planets were dead, and so too was an entire sector. Sector 666 had already once been culled of all life by the Manhunters, but we had remade it after destroying the majority of the remaining Manhunter units. It was a project for our entire species, our own people planted the trees we recreated from trace genetic material. We returned the animals that the Manhunters had purged by way of fire and hate. We had reintroduced every last sentient species that had been wiped from the planets of the sector, all of it with the care and patience of a parent, for it was the least we could do to repent for our crimes.

These were not our children, but we had, in many ways, birthed them all the same.

The Empire of Tears combined their use of magic with the technology they had taken from us, whether freely given by our hands in guilt, or by salvaging the ruins of our long-ago civil war, so old it predated the genetic lineage of the entire sector. Such weapons of war could crack planets, render them permanently barren to life, and we responded to those weapons with our own.

At the end of the day, once they had been used on us, we did not care to mitigate the destruction we created by using them on others.

We bleached worlds with these weapons, stripping away the necessary building blocks for life. We cracked open planets to let their mantle and outer core feel the exposure of deep space, permanently destroying any internal tectonic activity and snuffing out magnetic fields, which in turn shredded any remaining atmosphere that might have survived our violence. The Empire of Tears responded in kind, but they wielded weapons that originated from us, used our technology, and if nothing else, you should know that we, the Maltusians, were unmatched in our capacity to destroy the things we created.

Just as we had used our own hands to plant the trees and return life to these planets, it was with our own hands that we committed genocide. We refused to be annihilated, and so, we had to annihilate another.

The war eventually pushed entirely into Sector 666, shielding our remaining planets from the crossfire, and by the time we were done, we were culled down to numbers lower than nearly any time in our species' recorded history, and an entire sector was simply empty. Where there had once been life, now remained a void.

The only things to persist were the Inversions, our own demons, made from our mistakes, which we bound to their throne world of Ysmault, where they remain to this day, undying. We could find no way to kill them, and we certainly tried our hardest to do so.

By the time the war was over, my hands - my soul - were stained so thoroughly that I can recall it taking years to recognize myself again in the mirror. My peers, as far as they would tell me, felt much the same.

So, imagine yourself in our shoes. Imagine looking out from beyond the world you were likely not born on, for the world you were born on was so old as to be swallowed by the star it once orbited, and know that you would only see tombs. Tombs of our own people, but more to the point, tombs to both our best intentions and life as a whole. It didn't matter if you were an Ambassador, Guardian, or Controller: the skeletons were all Maltusian, as were the mistakes we made, and the ideologies we claimed to carry.

We saw no value in what happened. No worth, no importance, just dust and ash, left over after a war with an empire we created through our negligence and the cruelty of our own creations.

The Empire of Maltus had persisted for billions of years by this point, and for what? For its tragedies to be as vast as its age? For its mistakes to simply compound into rot?

People looked upon themselves, on the institutions they took part in, and felt only shame, anger and weariness. It marked the age and era of our greatest mistakes. For, at the end of the day, the best any Maltusian could say about the Empire of Maltus was that its horrors were as great as its triumphs, and we had some incredible triumphs.

Who, then, wanted the Empire of Maltus to remain? Who saw a point in it remaining in the first place? It was an institution that lacked the people to run it. It was an institution that had done nothing but harm to the greater universe. It was an institution we kept returning to, time and time again, even though with each return we made, we hurt the universe in ever-worsening ways.

It was an institution that had stained our species with the horror of genocide so completely that many of us could no longer recognize who were even were, or why we were here. We had been so tainted by our choices, by our neglect, our pride, that we could no longer see the greater meaning to life, the plans we wished to see, the triumphs we once heralded.

What use were those things, when we had become as anathema to life as the vacuum of space?

History is a thing that is built on itself. Just as I was entrusted to write these words after the deaths of the prior writers of this book, who perished during this very same war, so too is the future entrusted to assemble itself on top of the past. The recent past eventually becomes mythical, and the foundation on which you build your next monolith to history, the next story and era of who you are and what you have done with the privilege of life.

All the same, nobody wanted to build yet more on the rotten foundation that we had just made for ourselves. The history of the Maltusian Empire was a graveyard, and little good comes from building a home atop the tombs of the people you have wronged.

All we had left was our throne worlds, Oa, Zamaron, and Okaara. A few outposts on other planets, yes, but most of them were unmanned because there was simply nobody left to man them.

For the first time since we had first destroyed that world, Maltusians unified. We were all in agreement: the Empire had to die, for the Maltusian people, and the universe, to live. To do otherwise would be to let an infected wound fester, until it ate us, just as it had so many other things.

And in this decision, we would change. Schisms would become literal borders, and new nations would form, with new identities. The Guardian faction would become the Oans, the Ambassadors the Zamarons, and the Controllers, though they refused to be called anything but Maltusian, we would refer to them as Okaarans. All named after the factional capitals we now mostly inhabited.

All of us would agree to dismantle our past creations, the megastructures and weapons we used to fight in defence of planets that no longer had anyone living on them, and had been used against us by the same Empire of Tears we had just annihilated. We would leave nothing to chance: no weapon left unaccounted for, no relic of our bygone imperial golden age left whole. We would tear out the advanced engines from our warp gates that the rest of the universe relied on for space travel and scrap them. Our ships would be decommissioned and left as planet-sized husks orbiting otherwise empty stars, devoid of anything useful besides the baser materials they had been made from.

We would not erase history. We would not remove the tombstones, the evidence of the war, or the death that came from it. We would ensure anyone who looked upon those planets we once occupied, now surrounded by rings of debris, would know that something evil had occurred here.

But we would take everything else.

We would leave nothing behind for someone to abuse the way the Empire of Tears had.

Then, we retreated. Each of us pulled back to our new throne worlds—to Oa, to Zamaron, and to Okaara. Here, what was left of our bloodied species would consider, individually, where to go next, and what kind of existence they wished to have. None of us would expand aggressively, not even the Controllers, the most expansionist of our people, because of our weariness of imperial power, of unchecked war and control. Instead, at most, we would expand out a few stars in either direction, and even then, it was rare.

The Maltusians had been, for a very long time, dead. We just never bothered to accept that fact. We refused to acknowledge that our people were separated by cultures which broke apart billions of years ago. But, in this moment, the Maltusians died in truth, and what was left were simply the fragments, who now knew better than to yearn for the past.

We let the name of our species, the one thing that had been left unchanged since we emerged from the earliest flickers of cosmic life, die, just as we had let so many innocents die before us.

It was, truthfully speaking, for the best."

—"The Empire of Tears" section of the Book of Oa, written by Appa Ali Apsa upon taking up the role as Third Scribe of the Book of Oa.

 

[OxfordOctopus]

God, so... uh, hey fellas. This is out a bit later than I wanted, and I've got a little bit of bad news about epilogue 2: it's in progress, but it's delayed.

To make a long story short, this was intended to be released last week. Then Hurricane Fiona happened, and I lost power for the bulk majority of that week (and lost all data connection, so I couldn't even read) with intermittent outages for days after we got power back. So I was all like, alright, a week-long setback sucks, but I can muscle through this. I will post this chapter this week, and finish epilogue 2 this week as well!

Well, that didn't go to plan either, because I have spent the last few days suffering prolonged asthma attacks which, to be clear, makes writing really damn difficult. So, no dice there, I hope I will have recovered enough by the end of this week to start writing again, but even if I have, this week's kind of a bust for me.

So probably no epilogue next week. Maybe the week after that, or two?

You're getting this first epilogue before I finish writing the second one because I didn't want to delay this any longer, and if my condition takes a swing towards the worse, I am out of comission for a while, and I really don't want this story to collect dust in that time. So, here it is now. Enjoy twenty-thousand words.

In advance, I apologize for any errors or odd phrasing. As you can see above, my ability to write most of this was... fraught, and while I did my absolute best, I cannot guarantee things haven't slipped my net.

Regardless, I hope you enjoyed! One to two more epilogues to go after this. Thank you all for reading.

Edit: right, forgot about this. I did some fairly moderate editing to the Oan backstory to better fit the narrative and because I think the original schism between the Oans and Zamarons (literally coming down to 'men rational, women emotional') was fucking stupid and a relic of its time, as evidenced by DC's effort to include female Oans in more recent GL stuff. I fleshed it out more in a way I hope is interesting and explores this species of precursors in a meaningful way. So, no, this isn't canon DC stuff, it's my own blend. Hope that's okay.

 

[Krazyfan1]

Thank you for part 1.

I hope Mogo and Addy become good friends.

 

[notthepenguins]

Goddamn. That is one hell of an epilogue, and a really excellent communication of the Oan condition.

 

[Pinklestia]

Is okay, try to rest and recover.

 

[CrystalPylon]

Mogo and Addy platonic ship
I can see it, the potential for wholesome cuteness on a scale only planet sized beings can accomplish

 

[Criminalpidgeon]

MOGO! He's one of my favourites. He's not used much sadly.

 

[shepsquared]

Huh. I guess Mogo does socialise, if it's the right person.

 

[Dark as Silver]

such as giving out the immortality pamphlet

Click to shrink...

They have one of those?
"So you're going to outlive your sun. - An Oans guide to philosophy"

Thinking back, they recalled the crystals they had seen, the being so much like them.

Administrator. That had been what the systems designated her as—such information given freely by the Guardians.

Click to shrink...

Appis: I'm only giving out the immortality talk. You're going to have to figure this one out yourself.

 

[I_S]

Damn, at 20k words less a an epilogue and more a short sequel.

This whole story and especially this epilogue really makes me want to engage with dc as a sci-fi setting divorced of some of it's more comic books elements.

Maybe a regency esq exploration of imperial krypton or something.

 

[Caiuz]

Now I'm sad that Season 2 is the end for a long while.

 

[Dark as Silver]

Now I'm sad that Season 2 is the end for a long while.

Click to shrink...

Season 1: I dunno, just writing stuff and following canon.
Season 2: Healthy and unhealthy ways of grieving as demonstrated by a neuro divergent crystal and space Hitler
Season 3: Dating for asexual sentient planets.

 

[Stratagemini]

An apt day to release this on. This is a great epilogue. I really enjoyed it.

 

[Kadmus]

- Mogo & Addy planet buddies is the universal adventure slice-of-life comedy we all need.
- Appa being all 'oh no the honourable woe of being exiled- wait, what do you mean "you're being punished with cleaning up the mess you made"? i didn't sign up for this bullshit' is hilarious.
- Big oof on the scale of death, but it's less than it would have been so yay I guess? Also Addy has her own Endbringer cultists.
- Sinestro what are you doing. I understand this is basically how you can describe his entire character?

Also take all the time you need etc. Asthma fuckin' sucks and every time I get mine under control I'm reminded that no, constant brain-fog and having to strain for every breath is not actually normal.

 

[Marked_One]

I wonder what would have happened if we reacher the end of the multiverse and the merge of it. If it ended happening.

 

[cj.jedi]

EPILOGUE 1​

Administrator is not a god, or divine, in any way, shape or form. There have been a few... cults that have cropped up, unfortunately, but no matter how people are acting, she will want you to treat her like a person, not a deity.

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*incoherent chanting around a crystalline, possibly radioactive, pentagram*

 

[Roth963]

*incoherent chanting around a crystalline, possibly radioactive, pentagram*

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It looks like a pentagram only in your primitive dimension, for a higher forms of life, this is obviously a multidimensional geese art.

 

[R4d6]

It looks like a pentagram only in your primitive dimension, for a higher forms of life, this is obviously a multidimensional geese art.

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Wait, wouldn't it still look like a pentagram to Addy though?
She isn't the same kind of multidimensional entities as the Zurgills were.
The Zurgills were proper higher-dimensional entities. Addy is a 3D entity spread across multiple parallel 3D universes.

 

[Roth963]

Wait, wouldn't it still look like a pentagram to Addy though?
She isn't the same kind of multidimensional entities as the Zurgills were.
The Zurgills were proper higher-dimensional entities. Addy is a 3D entity spread across multiple parallel 3D universes.

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Being spread over multiple 3d makes her 4d, she is on a different axis of the higher dimensions, they existed across time.

Plus, she can see the future and past, if she worked for it, so she can appreciate the geese even if it was pained across time.