infinityDivided
Prince Of Doom
- Location
- USA
I'm surprised the Life Equation treats Will, Fear, Avarice, and Rage are implied to be negatives. Aren't they part of life? As in, literally sourced from the Life Entity?
Project: Gamer Ver. 2 (Young Justice/Gamer/Multicross OC)
- Thread starter Mister Ficser
- Start date
- Location
- England
Because the people who came up with it were dumb... (If they weren't the equation wouldn't be the way it is and would actually affect the emotional spectrum in a meaningful manner... Which if memory serves we never canonically see it do)
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SiegfriedisOP
Calamity Demon King of Time
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The Life Equation = My hand + Goose Neck
Magos Tractor-1
Archmagos Dominus
- Location
- Somewhere in Mars, Olymus Mons probably
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Ladies and Gents, DC's new Lord of Chaos.
In current DCdom, the former driver of the Tank in WW2 has replaced Jeb Stuart as the Ghost of the Tank, and his nephew, Great nephew? Has taken over as the driver of it. Dunno bout the rest of the crew.
No idea of its status in this novel.
dhasenan
always lowercase
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The Red Robots are running on DOS?!
- Location
- Spain
I remember hearing in a podcast that the MS-DOS interface (command.com, common commands, and batch files, "filename.ext" file format) was inspired on a mainframe OS that he used to develop Microsoft BASIC in, when he was a student (an OS for PDP-11, bit I don't know which one). PDP-11 (1970) is an evolution of PDP-8 (1965), and those from the original DEC and IBM mainframes from 1960.
Just because it looks like DOS it does not mean it can't be quite advanced (for it's age): Red Tornado appeared in 1968.
- Location
- Paradise, Hawaii
Is the Tank a Classic or an upgraded version? As in, if Alchemist comes across the Tank and restores it?
Red_Faux
私を終わらせる
- Location
- 'Straya M8
Well. I had a point at some... point. But I might as well post it anyway. And please, burn me at the stake for any mistakes I missed in my... insanity.
Just wanted to point out that, so far, Wonder Woman, as in actual Prime Earth Wonder Woman is the most powerful entity within the entire DC Omniverse? Apart from the Source and the Presence obviously.
World Forger Wonder Woman, at the end of "Death Metal", kills The Darkest Knight, who kills Perpetua, the otherwise most powerful. So Mainline Wonder Woman, with a power up, is the top dog so far.
Though, technically, the Last Sun killed him as a environmental hazard. Which doesn't really make sense at all, as Kill-All (The Last Sun) while a uberversion of DC One Million's Golden Superman, and hence VERY powerful, was created BY the Darkest Knight, who is above Perpetua, who themselves was above the Empty Hand, who again was above the Overmonitor.
And ALL of them are really below Dr Manhattan, the actual OCP he is, despite the fact that TBWL defeated (albeit he cheated) Batmanhatten.
But DC scaling is wack. VERY very wack. The upper end gives DBZ a run for its money.
All in All, Tracy is an OCP a step above Dr Manhattan, so he really is an abomination.
World Forger Wonder Woman, at the end of "Death Metal", kills The Darkest Knight, who kills Perpetua, the otherwise most powerful. So Mainline Wonder Woman, with a power up, is the top dog so far.
Though, technically, the Last Sun killed him as a environmental hazard. Which doesn't really make sense at all, as Kill-All (The Last Sun) while a uberversion of DC One Million's Golden Superman, and hence VERY powerful, was created BY the Darkest Knight, who is above Perpetua, who themselves was above the Empty Hand, who again was above the Overmonitor.
And ALL of them are really below Dr Manhattan, the actual OCP he is, despite the fact that TBWL defeated (albeit he cheated) Batmanhatten.
But DC scaling is wack. VERY very wack. The upper end gives DBZ a run for its money.
All in All, Tracy is an OCP a step above Dr Manhattan, so he really is an abomination.
Broovian
The Patriarch of Oblivion and all it contains.
- Location
- The cesspool of New York and Loving it!
I didn't grok that until this post, I thought he was referring to him not being the original green lantern from his team.
- Location
- U.S.
wonder how Al and Dr Manhattan would interact?
Lycanthromancer
The Arcane Fuzz
- Location
- USA
Not well. Alchemist doesn't have a very high opinion on the Blue-Man Nude.
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It was the classic Sherman Tank, still perfectly functional. It runs on magic, remember, teleporting around to where it is needed.
Congratulations Jim. I'm very glad you remembered the whole Life Equation. Welcome back to the land of the living.
Wonder what Terra's reaction to This Is
Chapter 242
Project: Gamer Ver. 2 Alpha Build 2.4.2
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
_________________________________________________________________________
Batman did not want to perform any kind of interview, especially a debriefing, in a greasy-spoon diner of all things.
But he assumed there was a reason, a purpose for Alchemist to bring him to one.
Batman's gaze slid across the startled patrons, their lunch interrupted by the appearance of himself, Robin and Alchemist. Some had frozen in the act of biting into a burger, others had some greater measure of control as they simply stared.
One man in particular was holding a dripping spoon of mashed potatoes, butter dribbling down to his pants as he sat in a frozen stupor.
"Order whatever you want," Alchemist said as he sat down at the front bar. "I'll cover lunch today."
Batman's eyes narrowed under his cowl. Every choice so far that Alchemist had made ran contrary to Bruce's own interest. This was incredibly public, there were already a dozen phones held up and recording.
That...
"Coffee. No cream or sugar," the dark knight demanded as he sat down next to the mage. "And a slice of apple pie."
Robin looked askance at him for a moment before the boy simply shrugged and made his own order, "I'll take a strawberry shake?"
"...You got it, Sugar," the woman at the till said after a moment of confusion. "And what can we get for Metroplis's favorite wizard, hon?"
"Today's special," Alchemist told the woman, a lopsided grin on his face. "With water, please."
Bruce waited, thinking and listening to the people murmuring and whispering around the diner until his coffee arrived.
No cream. No sugar. Pitch black, just they way he preferred.
"Alchemist?" Batman began as he watched steam gently rise from his overcooked coffee. "What happened?"
"...You know, normally I'd do the whole cryptic wizard thing. Start off with some useless vagaries, give you a cryptic response that could mean anything so it's functionally worthless," Alchemist explained, pausing briefly to take a long sip from his freshly delivered glass of ice water. "But I think things are far enough out of hand that it'd be disrespectful for me to play that card."
Bruce took a cautious sip of his scalding coffee as he waited for Alchemist to gather his thoughts.
"...I went to Bialya to try and track down some exotic materials. I've got something I'd like to put together and I had a lead on something that would accelerate the effects but it's rare beyond belief. Probably less than ten good samples of it on Earth at the moment." Alchemist leaned forward as he talked, resting his elbows on the bar. "No luck starting out but that's hardly a surprise, all told."
There was a brief pause in things as the waitress, Dotty, placed a large glass full of pink ice-cream in front of Robin.
"First place I checked, everyone had been murdered. Ugly scene, bodies had just been left out to cook under the desert sun. Person in charge of the place, they'd been shot through the stomach and left to die." Alchemist's explanation didn't stop Robin from sipping at his shake. The boy had been living in Gotham for years by this point. "I stopped for a bit and made sure the people there got a decent burial before I moved on. The next lead I'd found pointed me towards Alegrab, so I got moving."
There was another pause as Dotty came back from the kitchen and placed a plate with a slice of apple pie in front of Bruce. His keen ears could hear people nearby snapping photos on their phones as he calmly and deliberately cut into it with the provided fork.
He'd been here before, back when he'd tried to coerce Superman into taking in Superboy. It reminded him that his efforts on that front had failed while Alchemist's own hadn't.
Because Alchemist had treated Superman as a man while Bruce had treated him as a super.
"...What was the significance in burying them?" Bruce asked as he held a bite of pie on his fork. "Did you know them?"
"No, I'd never met them before," Alchemist admitted quietly. "They were Bialyan soldiers, killed in service to their country. Just leaving them out, rotting under the sun or feeding wild animals... It would've been disrespectful."
Bruce put the pie in his mouth and bit down, the apple filling exploding in sweetness.
"I made my way towards Alegrab, needed to work on my next step. Got picked up by a couple of people that were headed there themselves. Nice people, a woman and her son. And that's when things went weird-"
"Alchemist!" Lois Lane's voice loudly interrupted.
Batman didn't bother to turn around and face the door.
For one, he rarely got to enjoy any sort of indulgence that didn't have some kind of hidden purpose behind it. That he didn't set up.
Two?
"Lois!" Alchemist shouted back, spinning around on his stool. "What are you doing here?"
"When I heard that you were in town? I dropped what I was doing and ran right over!" Bruce could hear the woman panting, probably being quite literal about running to meet them.
He could also hear her flipping through a notepad, ripe and ready to get an interview.
"Well, pull up a seat. Superman swears this place does a mean burger," Alchemist told the woman, false levity in his voice as Lois did exactly that.
Glancing over, Bruce could see that the woman already had half a sandwich sticking out of her purse. Which made a bit of sense- It was night time in Bialya but that country was about eight hours ahead of Metropolis. Right now was probably Miss Lane's lunch break.
Lois Lane wasted no time in grilling the mage... who wasted no time at all in telling her the same story he'd told Batman so far.
Exactly what Bruce figured Alchemist had intended. The woman was an internationally acclaimed muckraker, talking with her would get Alchemist's side of the story out and in everybody's hands within days.
The U.N. was going to be livid.
Bruce took a sip of his coffee.
It wasn't the sort of play he would have gone with, no, but he could definitely understand Alchemist's intentions.
-----
"Lantern Jordan!" a deceptively deep voice commanded the second the Green Lantern accepted the communication after functionally fleeing from Batman's probing gaze. "Do you require assistance?!"
"No!" Hal was quick to tell one of the top-most commanding officers of the Green Lantern Corps. Which one, he wasn't sure. They all sounded alike to him. "No, no. We're handling the aftermath of something, that's... Why did you call me so fast?"
"Lantern Jordan, your ring is programmed with a series of emergency protocols," one of the Guardians began to explain after taking a deep breath. "Some of them are for the safety of the individuals you would interact with. Some are for your own safety. An emergency alert is programmed in each Lantern Ring in the unlikely chance that a Lantern may come in contact with any form of technology originating from certain species."
"So that torture device, that came from one of these guys?" Hal asked, rubbing his chin with one hand as he contemplated that information from his place hovering high in the sky. "How'd it get to Earth, then?"
"Torture...?" the voice on the other end of the channel trailed off slowly. Hal waited patiently for whichever Guardian it was to actually review all of the data instead of just responding to the alert. In the meantime, he began to try and query his ring's database for any information on this 'Matrix of Agony'.
What he got was a resounding 'RESTRICTED' blasting straight into his brain.
"Please, Lantern Jordan, do not do that again," a voice that Hal actually recognized asked. "Those, too, are logged and filed."
"Sorry, Guardian Ganthet. I figured I should maybe look up what it does since it was used on an ally," Hal explained, then silently winced at the draw this brief conversation was taking on his ring's charge. He'd scanned Alchemist at eighty-five percent and it had already dropped down to seventy.
"We see that. We also see that the victim is still alive." Ganthet saying that really did not fill Hal with confidence. The only reason they would remark on that would be if it were, in some way, remarkable. "The few times that we've seen the aftermath of these artifacts, normally the victim would expire due to a series of stress responses. Applying that to our model of a human and... most likely, your heart would explode or else you would suffer some form of extreme organ failure."
"...I think I really need to know some of the background on what's going on, here," Hal admitted, a deep frown marring his face. "If some alien empire is supplying these kinds of weapons on Earth, we need to crack down on it."
"If it were so simple, Lantern Jordan, we would gladly authorize you," Ganthet calmly denied him. "The danger these forces represent cannot be overstated, however. If you were to actively begin targeting their efforts within your sector, they would in turn focus their attention on you. This has proven quite disastrous for other Lanterns in the past."
"And they won't target us if we incidentally interrupt their operations?" Hal didn't like trying to argue with the Guardians. Most of them, once they made up their minds, could not be swayed or convinced of any other opinion.
"They... hmm..." Ganthet trailed off in a mutter rather than immediately responding, meaning he was actually thinking about what Hal had said. "What you say does have merit, Lantern Jordan. However, the decision of the council remains-"
"...Sir?" Hal asked after several tense seconds of silence.
"Belay that," Ganthet stated, his voice far more grim. "Lantern Stewart's ring has just sent us a Priority White Alert."
"...Priority White?" Hal asked, reaching around with his ring-free hand to scratch the back of his head. He'd never heard of that one.
"Priority White refers to an anomalous energy source, not unlike the green light of Will," Ganthet explained. "And it was just invoked within passive scanning range of Lantern Stewart."
"...I have no idea what's going on," Hal admitted before silently sighing and extracting a notepad from his ring's subspace storage. "I was trying to figure out what happened on Earth when you sent me a call and now I think I know less than when I started."
He wrote down several lines, things he was going to have to try and keep in mind.
"I will explain what I can," Ganthet said over the subspace channel. "When I arrive at your planet."
"Wait, you're coming here?"
"That is what I've said, is it not?" Ganthet's voice carried just a bare hint of amusement in it. More than the other Guardians would ever bother with. "Worry not. Arrangements will be-"
The Guardian's voice cut off abruptly as Hal Jordan had another warning beep into his mind from his ring.
--Charge Remaining: 25%--
--Subspace Communications unavailable--
Inhaling sharply through his nose, Hal Jordan angled himself back down towards the Earth and began to descend.
Twenty-five percent was more than enough to maintain a full day's worth of work. Under normal circumstances...
But these were definitely not normal circumstances.
And he'd really, really prefer to not have his power ring cut off his flight while he hovered in the stratosphere.
-----
Lois Lane's pencil flew across her notepad as Alchemist talked.
Soldiers captured by their enemy? Both sides falling under the sway of a powerful psychic? A city that had been completely emptied of civilians?!
This story would be on the front page of every newspaper the world over!
"-of course, the pyrokinetic couldn't really get through one of my defensive spells, one that keeps up a bubble of fresh air around me. I pretty much just ended up walking around them until they went hypoxic and went deeper into the facility that'd been dug out under the castle. Which, y'know, I kind of want to know how that got built? I mean, hundreds of tons of dirt, thousands of meters of concrete, purpose-built facilities? During a war? In the middle of Egypt's largest target? I just don't get it," Alchemist rambled, posing a very good question that Lois knew wouldn't make it into her article.
"There are a number of metahumans who market their talents specifically in construction," Batman cut in, nothing but crumbs left of his all-American apple pie.
"Yeah, like the Carpenter? In Gotham?" Robin offered, two empty glasses in front of the boy as he worked on his third milkshake. "Though, I don't think she's a metahuman."
"Doesn't much matter, she's a good example," Alchemist told the young boy. "Anyway, after that I found some kind of focusing or aiming tower at the end of the halls under Bialya. I went in, found a boatload of people glued to the walls and had to go down a whole lot of stairs before I found myself face to face with this nutjob in a purple robe. Had four people around himself. Some woman with a golden headdress and a transparent shirt, some military guy with a full plate of scrambled eggs and two others that... Look, the psychic in control of everyone started talking, throwing a temper tantrum that I was interrupting some search or seance for some made-up outer gods. The usual H.P. Lovecraft kind of things. Nutjob has a pair of his thralls stand up and look all lovingly at each other then he does something to 'em and this, I'unno, force of some kind shoots out of them and into this artifact the psychic has. Then another light shoots out of -that- thing, straight up through the blast doors in the ceiling and it rips open this great big hole in the sky."
Lois waited patiently as Alchemist took a sip of his water, his burger and fries no longer anything more than a few salty grease stains on his plate.
She was being used. And she knew she was being used.
But it worked to meet her own interests. A... mutually beneficial arrangement, of sorts.
"Thankfully, I've picked up a few tricks of my own. Here, watch this-" Alchemist told her after he'd set his glass back down. With a snap of his fingers, a tiny hole opened up in the air in front of Lois's face, offering her a view out into a sea of stars.
Lois carefully fed her pencil into the hole and then leaned around to see that, no, it wasn't simply an illusion.
"That's... amazing," Lois mumbled breathily. "What is it supposed to do?"
"Until we can figure out how to close the hole in the sky, wherever it leads to, at least it'll have a plug on it. I can't say for sure where the psychic was trying to go but I kind of doubt we want whatever is there to come here." Alchemist paused for a moment and looked at his empty glass of water before plowing on. "Well, I think that upset what's-his-name-"
"Psimon," Batman interrupted, offering a name for Alchemist and Lois alike to use.
"-that upset Psimon because he threw a bit more of a tantrum. This whole time the guy would turn around and stuff without moving his legs but, y'know, I've seen how geisha are trained so I know it's possible to do that by just taking a bunch of tiny steps. Except, yeah, he wasn't doing that. At all. Instead of legs? There was just this great big red tentacle and it went through the floor," Alchemist continued to explain. The entire saga was just crazier and crazier as things went on. "Good news, right about then one of my spells went off and teleported all of the soldiers throughout the palace to Cairo. Bad news for the Bialyan ones, I guess, but it's better than what Psimon did to everyone else. Y'see, I mentioned how I couldn't find anyone throughout the city when I looked? Well, Psimon ripped up the platform we were all on and I found 'em. He'd, uh, grafted a lot of people into one huge mega-body. And there were thousands of people plastered to the walls, chanting the names of these made-up gods up until then. When he went all stripperific, though, he sort of... absorbed everyone."
"Absorbed everyone?" Lois asked, her pencil pausing as she looked up to meet Alchemist's eyes. As light as the man's tone was, the look on his face was anything but.
"They were drawn into the main body underneath of Psimon, a giant thing that was vaguely humanoid but didn't have eyes, a nose or even any lips. They all fused into it, their flesh melting as they sank until they were just a mess of heads and limbs sticking out of it. They were all chanting, screaming or crying. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen but it's in my top twenty." The silence in the diner was deafening.
That thing, even the vague description Alchemist had offered her, it had to be a thing of nightmares.
And it didn't even break into his top ten?
"What's your number one?" Robin asked, genuine curiosity coloring his tone.
"Hmm... I think the Juggernaut actually holds that honor," Alchemist said, leaning to the side to look around Batman and at Robin. "It's a kind of bio-weapon that was forged in the image of a fallen god. It would absorb people to use as fuel, just creating one would depopulate a good sized city of its women and the people that became part of it were trapped, blind and nearly senseless except for the perpetual feelings of agony that filled their every waking moment."
Lois was glad she'd already eaten. If not, her appetite would be well and truly lost.
"Anyway, Psimon- he seemed really protective of the artifact he'd used to open up that portal so I made an effort to take it from him. I didn't know what all else it could do, especially not in the hands of a madman. That idea went... poorly." Alchemist paused as the waitress, Dotty, brought him another glass of water. Taking a long draw from it, he kept a hold on it as he continued to tell his story. "Thankfully, around then is when Red Tornado showed up, along with two other androids to help out. They distracted Psimon and I managed to steal the box and break it. It seemed to work since it made Psimon a lot less coordinated, the elemental attacks from Red Tornado, Inferno and Torpedo all started to cause real harm. Once Psimon was disabled enough, we made our way up to the top of the tower and then Red Tornado and Inferno did this massive combination attack, turning the whole tower into a kiln."
"...What about the people that Psimon had absorbed?" Lois asked, her stomach doing flips that had her tasting bile. "Were any of them rescued?"
"If that were possible, Red Tornado and Alchemist would have done everything in their power to accomplish it," Batman cut in, answering before Alchemist could. Turning to face him, Lois could see that he was actually looking at his communicator instead of her or Alchemist. The grim turn of his lips, even more dour than usual, painted a painfully stark picture. "As it is, the people that Psimon had fused into himself seem to have been overwritten by Psimon himself. The other people of Bialya..."
Batman held his communicator towards Lois and she could see that he had a picture on it. One that had to have been taken recently, showing a portion of something made of legs and an absolutely massive pile of bones next to it.
Human bones.
...Small human bones.
Lois calmly placed her notepad in her purse. She put away the small recorder she'd been using to catch everything Alchemist said. Then she stood up and very calmly excused herself to go to the bathroom-
And, not for the first time while she was trying to cover a news story, lost her lunch.
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
_________________________________________________________________________
Batman did not want to perform any kind of interview, especially a debriefing, in a greasy-spoon diner of all things.
But he assumed there was a reason, a purpose for Alchemist to bring him to one.
Batman's gaze slid across the startled patrons, their lunch interrupted by the appearance of himself, Robin and Alchemist. Some had frozen in the act of biting into a burger, others had some greater measure of control as they simply stared.
One man in particular was holding a dripping spoon of mashed potatoes, butter dribbling down to his pants as he sat in a frozen stupor.
"Order whatever you want," Alchemist said as he sat down at the front bar. "I'll cover lunch today."
Batman's eyes narrowed under his cowl. Every choice so far that Alchemist had made ran contrary to Bruce's own interest. This was incredibly public, there were already a dozen phones held up and recording.
That...
"Coffee. No cream or sugar," the dark knight demanded as he sat down next to the mage. "And a slice of apple pie."
Robin looked askance at him for a moment before the boy simply shrugged and made his own order, "I'll take a strawberry shake?"
"...You got it, Sugar," the woman at the till said after a moment of confusion. "And what can we get for Metroplis's favorite wizard, hon?"
"Today's special," Alchemist told the woman, a lopsided grin on his face. "With water, please."
Bruce waited, thinking and listening to the people murmuring and whispering around the diner until his coffee arrived.
No cream. No sugar. Pitch black, just they way he preferred.
"Alchemist?" Batman began as he watched steam gently rise from his overcooked coffee. "What happened?"
"...You know, normally I'd do the whole cryptic wizard thing. Start off with some useless vagaries, give you a cryptic response that could mean anything so it's functionally worthless," Alchemist explained, pausing briefly to take a long sip from his freshly delivered glass of ice water. "But I think things are far enough out of hand that it'd be disrespectful for me to play that card."
Bruce took a cautious sip of his scalding coffee as he waited for Alchemist to gather his thoughts.
"...I went to Bialya to try and track down some exotic materials. I've got something I'd like to put together and I had a lead on something that would accelerate the effects but it's rare beyond belief. Probably less than ten good samples of it on Earth at the moment." Alchemist leaned forward as he talked, resting his elbows on the bar. "No luck starting out but that's hardly a surprise, all told."
There was a brief pause in things as the waitress, Dotty, placed a large glass full of pink ice-cream in front of Robin.
"First place I checked, everyone had been murdered. Ugly scene, bodies had just been left out to cook under the desert sun. Person in charge of the place, they'd been shot through the stomach and left to die." Alchemist's explanation didn't stop Robin from sipping at his shake. The boy had been living in Gotham for years by this point. "I stopped for a bit and made sure the people there got a decent burial before I moved on. The next lead I'd found pointed me towards Alegrab, so I got moving."
There was another pause as Dotty came back from the kitchen and placed a plate with a slice of apple pie in front of Bruce. His keen ears could hear people nearby snapping photos on their phones as he calmly and deliberately cut into it with the provided fork.
He'd been here before, back when he'd tried to coerce Superman into taking in Superboy. It reminded him that his efforts on that front had failed while Alchemist's own hadn't.
Because Alchemist had treated Superman as a man while Bruce had treated him as a super.
"...What was the significance in burying them?" Bruce asked as he held a bite of pie on his fork. "Did you know them?"
"No, I'd never met them before," Alchemist admitted quietly. "They were Bialyan soldiers, killed in service to their country. Just leaving them out, rotting under the sun or feeding wild animals... It would've been disrespectful."
Bruce put the pie in his mouth and bit down, the apple filling exploding in sweetness.
"I made my way towards Alegrab, needed to work on my next step. Got picked up by a couple of people that were headed there themselves. Nice people, a woman and her son. And that's when things went weird-"
"Alchemist!" Lois Lane's voice loudly interrupted.
Batman didn't bother to turn around and face the door.
For one, he rarely got to enjoy any sort of indulgence that didn't have some kind of hidden purpose behind it. That he didn't set up.
Two?
"Lois!" Alchemist shouted back, spinning around on his stool. "What are you doing here?"
"When I heard that you were in town? I dropped what I was doing and ran right over!" Bruce could hear the woman panting, probably being quite literal about running to meet them.
He could also hear her flipping through a notepad, ripe and ready to get an interview.
"Well, pull up a seat. Superman swears this place does a mean burger," Alchemist told the woman, false levity in his voice as Lois did exactly that.
Glancing over, Bruce could see that the woman already had half a sandwich sticking out of her purse. Which made a bit of sense- It was night time in Bialya but that country was about eight hours ahead of Metropolis. Right now was probably Miss Lane's lunch break.
Lois Lane wasted no time in grilling the mage... who wasted no time at all in telling her the same story he'd told Batman so far.
Exactly what Bruce figured Alchemist had intended. The woman was an internationally acclaimed muckraker, talking with her would get Alchemist's side of the story out and in everybody's hands within days.
The U.N. was going to be livid.
Bruce took a sip of his coffee.
It wasn't the sort of play he would have gone with, no, but he could definitely understand Alchemist's intentions.
-----
"Lantern Jordan!" a deceptively deep voice commanded the second the Green Lantern accepted the communication after functionally fleeing from Batman's probing gaze. "Do you require assistance?!"
"No!" Hal was quick to tell one of the top-most commanding officers of the Green Lantern Corps. Which one, he wasn't sure. They all sounded alike to him. "No, no. We're handling the aftermath of something, that's... Why did you call me so fast?"
"Lantern Jordan, your ring is programmed with a series of emergency protocols," one of the Guardians began to explain after taking a deep breath. "Some of them are for the safety of the individuals you would interact with. Some are for your own safety. An emergency alert is programmed in each Lantern Ring in the unlikely chance that a Lantern may come in contact with any form of technology originating from certain species."
"So that torture device, that came from one of these guys?" Hal asked, rubbing his chin with one hand as he contemplated that information from his place hovering high in the sky. "How'd it get to Earth, then?"
"Torture...?" the voice on the other end of the channel trailed off slowly. Hal waited patiently for whichever Guardian it was to actually review all of the data instead of just responding to the alert. In the meantime, he began to try and query his ring's database for any information on this 'Matrix of Agony'.
What he got was a resounding 'RESTRICTED' blasting straight into his brain.
"Please, Lantern Jordan, do not do that again," a voice that Hal actually recognized asked. "Those, too, are logged and filed."
"Sorry, Guardian Ganthet. I figured I should maybe look up what it does since it was used on an ally," Hal explained, then silently winced at the draw this brief conversation was taking on his ring's charge. He'd scanned Alchemist at eighty-five percent and it had already dropped down to seventy.
"We see that. We also see that the victim is still alive." Ganthet saying that really did not fill Hal with confidence. The only reason they would remark on that would be if it were, in some way, remarkable. "The few times that we've seen the aftermath of these artifacts, normally the victim would expire due to a series of stress responses. Applying that to our model of a human and... most likely, your heart would explode or else you would suffer some form of extreme organ failure."
"...I think I really need to know some of the background on what's going on, here," Hal admitted, a deep frown marring his face. "If some alien empire is supplying these kinds of weapons on Earth, we need to crack down on it."
"If it were so simple, Lantern Jordan, we would gladly authorize you," Ganthet calmly denied him. "The danger these forces represent cannot be overstated, however. If you were to actively begin targeting their efforts within your sector, they would in turn focus their attention on you. This has proven quite disastrous for other Lanterns in the past."
"And they won't target us if we incidentally interrupt their operations?" Hal didn't like trying to argue with the Guardians. Most of them, once they made up their minds, could not be swayed or convinced of any other opinion.
"They... hmm..." Ganthet trailed off in a mutter rather than immediately responding, meaning he was actually thinking about what Hal had said. "What you say does have merit, Lantern Jordan. However, the decision of the council remains-"
"...Sir?" Hal asked after several tense seconds of silence.
"Belay that," Ganthet stated, his voice far more grim. "Lantern Stewart's ring has just sent us a Priority White Alert."
"...Priority White?" Hal asked, reaching around with his ring-free hand to scratch the back of his head. He'd never heard of that one.
"Priority White refers to an anomalous energy source, not unlike the green light of Will," Ganthet explained. "And it was just invoked within passive scanning range of Lantern Stewart."
"...I have no idea what's going on," Hal admitted before silently sighing and extracting a notepad from his ring's subspace storage. "I was trying to figure out what happened on Earth when you sent me a call and now I think I know less than when I started."
He wrote down several lines, things he was going to have to try and keep in mind.
"I will explain what I can," Ganthet said over the subspace channel. "When I arrive at your planet."
"Wait, you're coming here?"
"That is what I've said, is it not?" Ganthet's voice carried just a bare hint of amusement in it. More than the other Guardians would ever bother with. "Worry not. Arrangements will be-"
The Guardian's voice cut off abruptly as Hal Jordan had another warning beep into his mind from his ring.
--Charge Remaining: 25%--
--Subspace Communications unavailable--
Inhaling sharply through his nose, Hal Jordan angled himself back down towards the Earth and began to descend.
Twenty-five percent was more than enough to maintain a full day's worth of work. Under normal circumstances...
But these were definitely not normal circumstances.
And he'd really, really prefer to not have his power ring cut off his flight while he hovered in the stratosphere.
-----
Lois Lane's pencil flew across her notepad as Alchemist talked.
Soldiers captured by their enemy? Both sides falling under the sway of a powerful psychic? A city that had been completely emptied of civilians?!
This story would be on the front page of every newspaper the world over!
"-of course, the pyrokinetic couldn't really get through one of my defensive spells, one that keeps up a bubble of fresh air around me. I pretty much just ended up walking around them until they went hypoxic and went deeper into the facility that'd been dug out under the castle. Which, y'know, I kind of want to know how that got built? I mean, hundreds of tons of dirt, thousands of meters of concrete, purpose-built facilities? During a war? In the middle of Egypt's largest target? I just don't get it," Alchemist rambled, posing a very good question that Lois knew wouldn't make it into her article.
"There are a number of metahumans who market their talents specifically in construction," Batman cut in, nothing but crumbs left of his all-American apple pie.
"Yeah, like the Carpenter? In Gotham?" Robin offered, two empty glasses in front of the boy as he worked on his third milkshake. "Though, I don't think she's a metahuman."
"Doesn't much matter, she's a good example," Alchemist told the young boy. "Anyway, after that I found some kind of focusing or aiming tower at the end of the halls under Bialya. I went in, found a boatload of people glued to the walls and had to go down a whole lot of stairs before I found myself face to face with this nutjob in a purple robe. Had four people around himself. Some woman with a golden headdress and a transparent shirt, some military guy with a full plate of scrambled eggs and two others that... Look, the psychic in control of everyone started talking, throwing a temper tantrum that I was interrupting some search or seance for some made-up outer gods. The usual H.P. Lovecraft kind of things. Nutjob has a pair of his thralls stand up and look all lovingly at each other then he does something to 'em and this, I'unno, force of some kind shoots out of them and into this artifact the psychic has. Then another light shoots out of -that- thing, straight up through the blast doors in the ceiling and it rips open this great big hole in the sky."
Lois waited patiently as Alchemist took a sip of his water, his burger and fries no longer anything more than a few salty grease stains on his plate.
She was being used. And she knew she was being used.
But it worked to meet her own interests. A... mutually beneficial arrangement, of sorts.
"Thankfully, I've picked up a few tricks of my own. Here, watch this-" Alchemist told her after he'd set his glass back down. With a snap of his fingers, a tiny hole opened up in the air in front of Lois's face, offering her a view out into a sea of stars.
Lois carefully fed her pencil into the hole and then leaned around to see that, no, it wasn't simply an illusion.
"That's... amazing," Lois mumbled breathily. "What is it supposed to do?"
"Until we can figure out how to close the hole in the sky, wherever it leads to, at least it'll have a plug on it. I can't say for sure where the psychic was trying to go but I kind of doubt we want whatever is there to come here." Alchemist paused for a moment and looked at his empty glass of water before plowing on. "Well, I think that upset what's-his-name-"
"Psimon," Batman interrupted, offering a name for Alchemist and Lois alike to use.
"-that upset Psimon because he threw a bit more of a tantrum. This whole time the guy would turn around and stuff without moving his legs but, y'know, I've seen how geisha are trained so I know it's possible to do that by just taking a bunch of tiny steps. Except, yeah, he wasn't doing that. At all. Instead of legs? There was just this great big red tentacle and it went through the floor," Alchemist continued to explain. The entire saga was just crazier and crazier as things went on. "Good news, right about then one of my spells went off and teleported all of the soldiers throughout the palace to Cairo. Bad news for the Bialyan ones, I guess, but it's better than what Psimon did to everyone else. Y'see, I mentioned how I couldn't find anyone throughout the city when I looked? Well, Psimon ripped up the platform we were all on and I found 'em. He'd, uh, grafted a lot of people into one huge mega-body. And there were thousands of people plastered to the walls, chanting the names of these made-up gods up until then. When he went all stripperific, though, he sort of... absorbed everyone."
"Absorbed everyone?" Lois asked, her pencil pausing as she looked up to meet Alchemist's eyes. As light as the man's tone was, the look on his face was anything but.
"They were drawn into the main body underneath of Psimon, a giant thing that was vaguely humanoid but didn't have eyes, a nose or even any lips. They all fused into it, their flesh melting as they sank until they were just a mess of heads and limbs sticking out of it. They were all chanting, screaming or crying. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen but it's in my top twenty." The silence in the diner was deafening.
That thing, even the vague description Alchemist had offered her, it had to be a thing of nightmares.
And it didn't even break into his top ten?
"What's your number one?" Robin asked, genuine curiosity coloring his tone.
"Hmm... I think the Juggernaut actually holds that honor," Alchemist said, leaning to the side to look around Batman and at Robin. "It's a kind of bio-weapon that was forged in the image of a fallen god. It would absorb people to use as fuel, just creating one would depopulate a good sized city of its women and the people that became part of it were trapped, blind and nearly senseless except for the perpetual feelings of agony that filled their every waking moment."
Lois was glad she'd already eaten. If not, her appetite would be well and truly lost.
"Anyway, Psimon- he seemed really protective of the artifact he'd used to open up that portal so I made an effort to take it from him. I didn't know what all else it could do, especially not in the hands of a madman. That idea went... poorly." Alchemist paused as the waitress, Dotty, brought him another glass of water. Taking a long draw from it, he kept a hold on it as he continued to tell his story. "Thankfully, around then is when Red Tornado showed up, along with two other androids to help out. They distracted Psimon and I managed to steal the box and break it. It seemed to work since it made Psimon a lot less coordinated, the elemental attacks from Red Tornado, Inferno and Torpedo all started to cause real harm. Once Psimon was disabled enough, we made our way up to the top of the tower and then Red Tornado and Inferno did this massive combination attack, turning the whole tower into a kiln."
"...What about the people that Psimon had absorbed?" Lois asked, her stomach doing flips that had her tasting bile. "Were any of them rescued?"
"If that were possible, Red Tornado and Alchemist would have done everything in their power to accomplish it," Batman cut in, answering before Alchemist could. Turning to face him, Lois could see that he was actually looking at his communicator instead of her or Alchemist. The grim turn of his lips, even more dour than usual, painted a painfully stark picture. "As it is, the people that Psimon had fused into himself seem to have been overwritten by Psimon himself. The other people of Bialya..."
Batman held his communicator towards Lois and she could see that he had a picture on it. One that had to have been taken recently, showing a portion of something made of legs and an absolutely massive pile of bones next to it.
Human bones.
...Small human bones.
Lois calmly placed her notepad in her purse. She put away the small recorder she'd been using to catch everything Alchemist said. Then she stood up and very calmly excused herself to go to the bathroom-
And, not for the first time while she was trying to cover a news story, lost her lunch.
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- Location
- Raleigh, NC
oof, poor Lois
Huh, don't recognize the reference. And more relevant to the chapter, man, talk about news bomb, a whole damn news nuke
Here you go. Legend of Legaia was a great game back in the nineties, had a lot of fun and innovative ideas especially its combo battle system.
It also had three living dungeons with two of them being filled with people that were fused to the walls and conditionally immortal so they could be fed upon to power the dungeons they were trapped within.
- Location
- 47° 09′ S, 126° 43′ O
Maybe after that they will understand why the human lanterns are so problematic and give them a little leeway ?
