Alright, look, y'all.
There's lots of reasons to fire a mining laser at a planet in the DC-verse. It's fairly common from what we can tell. Further, as far as we know, that reason has never been "to release the monster hiding inside it". Yes, we know what it is because we're immersed in comics meta-theory every day and can check the wikis, but I think everyone's vastly overstating how obvious this is. It's not suspicious that Paul barely remembered in time, it's arguably suspicious in-universe that he thought of it at all.
It's really not.
The Starros have had basically one motivation thus far. To propagate their race and claim more slaves.
Their individual lives don't seem to really matter to them, but the previous 'normal' star conquerors seemed determined to protect the red chaos one.
Because magic is a new evolution that will be
incredibly valuable to their entire species if they can get a Red Starro off-world and allow it to propagate.
Paul even pointed out that they might call for a Mother-Star in their first appearance. When he had to convince the green lanterns that Star Conquers were even real.
He also described it as a potentially apocalyptic threat. More on this later.
Now, in this arc, if they'd taken the clustership and fucked off into deep space, then maybe they were planning to flee earth where they are a recognised threat to go find some planet inhabited by helpless primitives or pre-sapient animals where they can build up their numbers and evolve some bigger forms to try to take on the galaxy again.
But they didn't.
They stopped at Pluto, even though they
must have expected pursuit, given how the Earth-lifeforms have been combating them so far. Then they fired a giant laser at the planet.
This means that the Starros consider it worth the risk to their lives and the potential loss of the unique advantage that these new forms provide to the entire species, to fire upon whatever is hidden on pluto.
So either it's something that desperately needs to be destroyed (something even Starros are afraid of) or it's something that won't be harmed and will be 'acquired' instead by being fired upon.
And then the planet started moving. Sure, tectonic shifts due to the mass eruptions, whatever.
Except the eruptions stopped and the movement continued.
And then the planet started showing up on
empathic vision.
This should have been a BIG FUCKING RED FLAG. Because it means that either Paul somehow managed to break his soul vision to the point where it's showing him things that aren't there, or there's something alive on Pluto that is shielded from him, moving, big enough to move significant chunks of a planet's mass and valuable enough to star conquerors to risk dying and losing their handful of only magical star-hunters.
There's
one answer. Only one thing could possibly be so valuable.
It's a big fucking Starro, and they're trying to free it to either conquer the earth for them, or atleast to cover their escape.
And he ignored it.
And he
continued to ignore it as the ship started to move towards the planet (or the planet towards the ship, he never bothered to check) while casually musing about how maybe they're moving because of 'invisible scry-warded thrusters' pushing them towards the planet, but he never bothered to check or do anything to course-correct the ship.
And he
continued to ignore it as the soul-vision flash happened
again, and then when he'd worked out what it was, he played around with a Star-Mother construct and asked Kori about her mental barriers, instead of screaming into his comms about the emerging star-mother to the Orange and Green Corps, to get as much backup as they can provide before this thing eats his entire planet and enslaves his species.
So yeah, Paul's threat assessment in this arc is way more lax than it was when Starros first showed up, when he explained to Guy that they were a civilisation ending threat that enslaved multiple entire species, and that the Green Lantern Corps had to throw into suns to dispose of.
Given that a star-hunter is so telepathically powerful that
Miss Manhunter takes that form for a power-boost, and those are IIRC "fifteen meters from tip to tip" then something roughly the size of pluto (2370000 meters across) is almost certainly going to have the power to just shut down every brain within a couple of thousand miles.
It's posturing for now, flexing it's muscles and yelling 'I awaken' but I fully expect the opening of tomorrow's chapter to be it brainfucking everyone in the vicinity hard enough that they lose consciousness.
Good thing Paul wears a spacesuit under his ring-generated forcefield, otherwise he'd probably just instantly die when his ring shut off.
Assuming everyone effected doesn't just have their liquidifed brains pour out of their ears, I mean.
I don't think Mr Zoat is actually going to reduce a bunch of the cast (including the main character) to vegetables so suddenly, but that's how I expect a planet-sized telepath would fight. Just outright crushing the puny ant-sized minds of those around it into dust with zero effort.
Now, "planet sized" is a bit deceptive. It's not
earth-sized. Pluto itself is only two-thirds the size of the moon.
But "moon sized" is still pretty respectable, given that the only other thing of comparable scale that scale I can think of is
The Death Star.
Atom might be ok, since he has no organic brain, but it could still likely rip him to itty bitty shreds with telekinesis at this range.
Lantern Manga Khan
might be good, since both his brain and his body are... like a weird cloud thing?
I'm not really sure what they can do to that.
I expect everyone else to be defeated by the first paragraph of the next chapter.
Edit: i'm not using wikis or any meta-knowledge beyond what Paul has access to.
It's
obvious what they're doing, going by nothing more than their apparent motivations in their previous arcs, and the fact that they stopped fleeing to try to blow up pluto, for seemingly no reason, and Paul's orange-vision picking up a flicker on pluto, directly after having had his orange-vision blocked on the cluster-ship.
There's something alive on pluto. Magic-using starros can block his empathic vision.
The living thing on Pluto is big enough to survive getting hit with a giant planet-cracking laser.
And most damningly,
the Starros thought it was worth risking being captured or killed to shoot at.
It's a starro, it was always going to be a starro.
I
knew what this was a chapter ago, and I heavily suspected
two chapters back.
Paul is usually more on-the-ball than this.
I suspect either a big telepathic field set to make people ignore the weirdness about the planet, or a spell cast on the ship.
