Life Ore Death - DC Feruchemy [Young Justice]

This alternate Ferris is an interesting character. I like that you've made her distinct from Renka but with enough influence that the descendant idea works well.
I admit to being quite concerned about where that Hemalurgy use was going. It wasn't until the end that I remembered about the interaction with M'gann's telepathy.

Thank you kindly ^^. It was a bit of a balancing act figuring out "okay, how much would alternate universe Ferris be different growing up as a Twinborn 300 years later, and how much should still be Ferris Classic," but I think I did okay. And I'm glad the Hemalurgy use came off as kind of concerning. Yeah, she's 'only' using it to make the mental equivalent of surgical incisions, but it's still Hemalurgy.

If she's not already a feruchemical Zinc savant, she's on the edge of becoming one, on account of all the compounding she's done over the years. As a result, she can squeeze more out of her acuity taps than even just compounding would allow (sort of like we saw with a certain Gold compounder in Era 2), but if she's not tapping at least a trickle of acuity she suffers 'brain fog' that makes it difficult to focus and string thoughts together.

I like to imagine the resonance of allomantic and feruchemical Zinc as an increased ability to read (and to a lesser extent, consciously project) microexpressions and body language. Not on the same level as Cassandra Cain, but the same sort of thing (in fact, if the two met, they'd probably be able to have a semi-fluent 'conversation'). Beyond the slight increase in perception and decision making time that comes with tapping acuity, this is part of why Alishwym can hold out against highly skilled martial artists.

I've mentioned she has a spike earring, but I'm still on the fence if it's Renka's Nemold spike, passed down as an heirloom. Currently leaning towards 'yes, but even if there were still atium around to burn the spike would have lost most of its charge over the last few centuries.'

There's actually not that many people descended from the Lady Feruchemist, all things considered. Ruin's touch on that family line isn't incredibly strong, but it's enough to make having children consistently difficult. Counting Alishwym, she had 16 living descendants at the time Alishwym got sent to Earth.

She was born in the Village (to a non-Ferring Terris mother and a Smoker father from Elendel) but ran away and skipped out to the Roughs in the fallout of the '16 day compounding incident.' Looking back she admits it was a pretty stupid move, made in an emotionally compromised place, but it's the move she made and now she gets to live with that. She made one visit back to Elendel and her family since then, less than a year before her relocation to Earth.

Among many, many other (mis)adventures after she ran away, she temporarily fell in with a koloss tribe. This may or may not have advanced her understanding of Hemalurgy further than it would have been otherwise. She also speaks (one of) the koloss language(s) now.

Her best friend growing up wasn't actually any of the other Terris children, but Tillin, a boy about her age who lived near-ish to the Village and was a Sparker like her. The two of them used to play a game where a third friend would tell an incredibly stupid joke and they'd try rioting each at the same time. Whoever laughed first lost.

Since she doesn't have access to duralumin feruchemy, she just had to brute-force study English. Quite a lot of acuity was tapped in the process.

Superman helped Alishwym get settled in here, she counts him among her first friends on Earth, and they stay in touch, but she's not his sidekick. A big part of that is just because she lacks the physical enhancements here that would let her keep pace with him. Canary's the one who's more or less taken Alishwym under her wing (and wouldn't that make for an interesting dynamic with Artemis and Red Arrow), and as a tribute to her, this Ferris' costume looks more like an armored version of Canary's with a mistcoat instead of a jacket. Batman would've theoretically made a better mentor given the Zinc compounder skillset, but he keeps his secrets tightly enough that he didn't feel comfortable taking on a new mentee, especially one with as many unknowns attached as Ferris.

She's a decent shot with a rifle, especially when she's tapping high acuity to help fine-tune her aim, and knows her way around a handgun even if she's not as experienced with them. The only reason she doesn't carry (yet) while in costume is because she's deferring to more experienced heroes while she gets her bearings. If the issue of lethal force were to be brought up she'd point out, in order: Artemis' and Robin's explosives, Superboy's fists, and the catastrophic internal damage that Black Canary's scream is capable of inflicting. If they can be trusted to show discretion on when those levels of force are applicable, she trusts herself to know when to break out the bullets.

Bonus: Corny lawman stories and other pulp novels are a guilty pleasure of hers, and she had a bit of a schoolgirl crush on (the fictionalized broadsheet version of) Wax. She has never met Wax. She has met and interacted with Wayne, but he was in disguise at the time.
 
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Very cool! I enjoyed that a lot! Though, I haven't read a Mistborn book recently enough to have remembered what her powers actually did while actually reading, but it still flowed and made enough sense to get by.

The idea I had for a crossover I had was a skilled hemalurgist who tried to "ethically" source animals for their spikes, but I forgot how I tried to justify their existence given the general lack of hemalurgical knowledge while still presenting them as good. I'd doubt there would be enough hemalurgy in Spook's book to be useful without a lot of experimentation, so who would be doing it? I think the thought I had was a mentor somewhere on the scale from bad, but nice to the kid, to being an abusive scumbag, that's who the character could have learned about hemalurgy from.

Opens up some interesting doors re: mentor relationships in YJ at least
 
Welp, I've finished my re-read of season 1 (it was quite enjoyable on the whole), and I've still got the rough idea of the later bits, so now feels like a good time to get down some of my guesses, speculation, and ideas, in no particular order:

I'm still drawing an absolute blank on L8's potential identities, but I've compiled what I've been able to glean below. Part of the trouble is that while world-hopping isn't terribly uncommon in DC comics, I can't really think of any villains for who it's their main shtick, either.
  • Is male
  • Has a sensitivity to dimensional divides like what happened in Children's Hour
  • Swears, at least with a migraine, so not a completely straight-laced character
  • Is working closely with Savage on long-term plans
  • Arrived on Earth-16 before Ferris did
  • Has "seen" what happens when either Barry or Wally are badly harmed, and that's why he wants to avoid going after them until there's no chance of reprisal
  • Has 'blind spots' in his knowledge, including the name and expertise of Aqualad's mother.
  • Is too cautious to have used Hemalurgy for himself, possibly in part due to Savage not sharing everything he knows about it.
  • Has the technology to detect cross-dimensional transitions.
  • Notes that he wouldn't be based on Earth-16 if he were successful elsewhere (implicitly in parallel universes)
  • Is possibly connected to the people who broke into Batman's safehouse in Inspire, Respire, Expire part 1, going solely off the dimension-hopping and the fact that it's an unresolved plot thread (speculation)

Seeing as the Light is already in the business of creating spikes, I have a feeling Renka might appropriate a handful of those to help fix up Match. Something like two zinc, one copper, maybe? Something like that?

Speaking of Kryptonian clones, I doubt we've seen the end of the Light's plans in that area yet. For example, we might get some variant of a Cir-El Supergirl, with or without human DNA in the mix (and if so, it might or might not be Lois' DNA). We might also see a Death of Superman arc featuring a Light-created Doomsday, maybe as a full-Kryptonian Koloss, maybe as a full-Kryptonian clone with a dose of kobra venom, or maybe a mix of both.

I'm not sure if Oblo is still looking for atium alloys, but if so, maybe one that speeds up and slows down your heart rate. I know that meshes with at least a little Cosmere stuff, since deadeye shardblades synch up to the user's heartbeat to be summoned. Maybe atium-cadmium, if it's not already taken?

We know how strongly opposed Renka is to becoming a fullborn, but I can picture her becoming a gold compounder, and maybe a nicrosil compounder to go with it. From a support standpoint, shareable feruchemy and especially shareable gold feruchemy are, I think, her most valuable abilities.

Neither would have been accounted for while this fic was being written or planned since it went on hiatus before the relevant cosmere books released, but I do have some interesting things to note from Rhythm of War and Dawnshard. For Rythm of War, we know that a shard exists called Valor, which is pretty hilarious in retrospect given the existence of Nth metal and its alloys (not that they think they'd actually be connected beyond possibly aligning Intents) (actually I just realized it's doubly hilarious, since iirc Renka thought Honor and Cultivation, if combined like Harmony is, might form Valor). The second is that Dawnshards and the Life/Anti-Life Equations strike me as quite similar, being key universal commands that shape magic in interesting (and almost certainly dangerous) ways, to the point I think that L/AL might be the DC equivalent of Dawnshards here.

Speaking of Life and Anti-Life, there was something interesting that stuck out to me when Renka was discussing them with Highfather (though I only have fuzzy memories of the specifics). It was something to the effect of the Life equation not necessarily being good just because it was opposite the Anti-Life Equation, which is fairly evil. Kind of like how the 'opposite' of a Q can have its tail in any of the other three corners, depending how you flip it. Whether she was right about that or that I'm not sure (on New Earth the LE was a pretty good thing, in regards to free will and such, but on Prime Earth Kyle Rayner used it to brainwash a whole bunch of people), but what it did make me realize is that I think Preservation's Intent would map to Anti-Life just like Ruin's. One could say Leras did a relatively decent job of resisting corruption, but on a purely Shardic level, Prevervation doesn't care about the actual living part of life. Its ideal Cosmere is just as lifeless as Ruin's is, it's still a single unchanging state, it's just that in Preservation's case the frozen moment happens before the heat death of everything. Now, that said, I think Harmony's Intent would map to the Life Equation, at least as described by Highfather:
"That is a sense of it, yes, but not the entirety. It is ideally every being's autonomy, collectively, if the concept makes sense to you."

"All potentially crashing against one another, but free to do so or to choose not to do so?" I checked.

"It is also the understanding that choosing to not do so is best for you as well as others. I have heard one description of it as the mathematical proof that life is worth living, where you substitute in certain interpretations of positive, beneficial, or benevolent ideas for variables and values, using signage to denote how they relate to each other. I would say more…."
Compared to:
The point is Harmony, creating a way for as many as possible to make their own choices. -Sazed in Alloy of Law
So I think it's a sort of a double-negative thing. Preservation is Anti-Life, and Ruin is Anti-Life, and they're opposites of each other, but you make them play nice together and it cancels out their worst extremes and you get yet another opposite of both across a different axes, Harmony, which aligns with Life.

Speaking of Harmony, I can't quite remember if we've gotten a direct statement of Intent for him in the same way we've gotten "In time, we all fall to Ruin" and "Preservation remains forever the same." If not, one worth considering might be "All things work together in Harmony."

Ignoring all the other ripples already in effect, whenever the time skip does occur, Renka is such a hard-counter for the Scarabs that it's not even funny. She's a developing magical demi-goddess whose portfolio is over metal (and as we've seen, technology as a tangent or parallel to that) and breaking things. Scarabs are technological creations susceptible to getting broken with magic. It's like she's custom-built for taking them off-mode. As a result I expect that if Impulse even comes back in the first place, it will be for a completely different reason than show canon.

That said, if you don't feel like sleeping tonight, imagine the Reach (or other alien races) snooping out secrets about Hemalurgy from the Light. Actually, we don't even really have to imagine, we've already got a worse scenario in fic canon: Apokalypse knows at least that Hemalurgy exists, and will likely have no qualms burning through 'resources' to test the specifics. Probably the only limiting factor is how many spikes a spiritweb can take and the fact that DARKSEID IS not interested in creating anything that could potentially challenge him.

Not that I have any real reason to believe this, but I kind of wonder if the meteor that empowered Savage was a cast-off fragment of the Third World here, when it mostly-metaphyiscally split into New Genesis and Apokalypse.

I know that a good bit of the above already dip into Season 2, but I might do one more of these once my re-read is all the way through.



Also, here's some non-LoD-specific thoughts on what different invested arts could do on Earth-16:

LIGHTWEAVERS/TRUTHWATCHERS. This one legitimately terrifies me, if only because of all the applications I can think of for the Illumination surge in DC, since it controls waveforms and at least partially touches the Spiritual Realm. Red/yellow/blue sunlight? Waveform. The emotional electromagnetic spectrum? Almost certainly a waveform. Lasers and short-wave radiation (which Brandon Sanderson has confirmed Lightweavers could manipulate if they knew about them)? Waveforms. The fact that the multiverse all occupies the same physical space and is only separated by the frequencies at which the different universes vibrate? Vibrations are a waveform, so congrats, your Radiant can now hop between Earths. (Sidenote, out of the original team I can picture Robin, Miss Martian, and Artemis all as potential Lightweavers). The main difficulty would be finding a way to power it, provided Earth having so much word-based and oath-based magic doesn't let you just conjure up some Stormlight by reciting the first ideal or something.

A singer on Earth-16 could also be interesting. They'd likely be able to, at minimum, hear the rhythms of the emotional lights. Wonder how they'd react to telepathy. And if there's anything on Earth they could bond with for new forms, in the absence of spren. What happens when a singer puts on the helmet of Fate?

Actual awakening aside, someone with enough Breaths would have the potential to wreak havoc on secret identities, because they could compare skin/hair/eye/voice tones with perfect accuracy.

Selish investiture is interesting because, while you'd normally require the right proximity to its country of origin on Sel, on Earth-16 rune magic is already a thing. And if it doesn't just work automatically, you might be able to strike a deal with a Lord of Order (who have a degree of overlap with Devotion and Dominion) to help you power it. AonDor could be useless or broken depending on the proficiency of whoever get dumped on Earth. Forgery is really interesting to me, because it's just such a time consuming and, frankly, useless art on its own in a fight. However! It would be really useful with enough prep time, because of how soulstamps can change abilities and even heal injuries that other cosmere healing has trouble with (since it's changing the target, instead of just pushing them towards an existing ideal that may or may not include injuries). Plus, exchangeable power upgrades. It would, for example, be bad if the OC just doped themself up with kobra venom in Drop Zone... but what if they made a soul stamp for a version of themself where they did inject it, and as a result can switch back and forth between their Mammoth and normal forms at will? And that's not even getting into things like using hyper-accurate graphical software to design soulstamps and then either 3D-printing them or cutting them out with a laser.

Sand Mastery would depend entirely on whether or not the Sand Master brought Sand with them. They'd have to be real careful about collecting their sand when it was expended, or else find a way to cultivate the lichen on Earth sand. The good news is that Earth has enough ambient energy floating around that the sand would recharge over time. If I had to guess, probably the closest to 'standard Team power level' out of all the investiture we've seen, barring Ferrings and Mistings.
 
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