"No, with the Absolute Dominion in orbit I can use a hush tube. You sure it didn't react to your magic?"
"Not that I can see or feel."
As if it were infused with the very concept of Concealment.
"Only one way to find out for sure."
A hole in the universe opens just below me, and I drop down into… Darkness, illuminated only by Sinestro's glow. "How's he treating you?"
She grimaces, pulls it off her right middle finger and tosses it to me. I pull it onto my right ring finger.
Begrudging functionality, I suppose. Out of courtesy for Grayven, or has she learnt some measure of talent with
Fear?
"That bad?"
"Apparently I'm 'barely adequate, despite my upbringing'."
Heh. I suppose that's damning with faint praise, coming from
him.
"Would you rather be an excellent fit for a dictator who believed that order could only be maintained through fear?" I peer around, the darkness-. Wait.
Ping.
"I was wondering when you'd notice."
"Can you see better than me?"
"Only if I make an effort. Does that mean there's someone here?"
So... Is the whatever-this-is not as deserted as they initially thought, I wonder?
"No necessarily. And since we're not being inundated by parademons or aero-troopers, I tend to doubt it. Not sure how the system is powerful enough to mess with us like this." I frown, then shake my head. "Which is odd, because a system that can do that would be valuable and worth defending, particularly if it wasn't stripped for parts. But it isn't being defended."
Artemis readies an arrow. "Don't speak too soon." Death Awaits.
Or it's been declared obsolete. Or whoever created it was killed without telling anyone it
existed.
"Obvious question, through. There's no outward sign that anything's here-."
"Where did other-you hear about it. If you still don't think he built it himself."
And then erase the memory as best he could? That's going to
extremes to hide something.
"A sufficiently traumatic head injury might just erase the memory, but that doesn't… Sound right." I walk over to the closest wall and place my left palm against it. Bow To My Will!
The stygian blackness pulls back a little, but scans still aren't telling me much. Mother Box?
So it doesn't recognise his authority. Perhaps he'll have to
exert himself?
Ping.
Great. Looks like we're in a store room of some sort. The few remaining crates are neatly stacked in the corner, no obvious detritus left around the place. No particular feeling from anything.
"Not much to see anyway." Indeed, looks like they arrived in the custodial closet.
Oh.
"One possibility does come to mind, given the state of the outside."
And it's clearly bad, if you're reacting like this. Are you sure you want to poke this?
"Anti-Life research. Do we need to leave?"
"No. Incidental tertiary exposure shouldn't do much to us, though if we confirm it we'll need to leave and destroy the place from orbit."
With prejudice. The last thing you want is
that kind of trouble getting out.
My frown deepens as I shake my head, lifting my hand off the wall and armouring myself. No lock on the door, just a requirement for a minimal level of spiritual power. Easy enough to manage
"So if it's not that..?"
No locks? Presumably this was a place for one or two trusted workers, then.
The door opens, the darkness retreating once more to… Reveal a laboratory? A small one. The
machinery is a garish combination of purple, yellow and green and… I can't immediately call to mind a New God with that colour scheme. Evil colours, though, so
that fits. A
red and orange helmet that I'd be insane to try on sits on a small plinth, while a larger circular platform stands empty on one side. Teleporter? Fabricator? Viewing platform? Miniature safe room?
Ah, Kirby art at it's finest and most abstract. Something nearly every adaption fails to do
justice.
Naturally, there's no control panel.
Ping.
"I think I know what this was used for..."
Artemis comes in behind me, eyes darting around. "Is it doing that now?"
Ping.
"No, thank the Source."
I find myself shaking my head again. "I don't know about that. I mean, yes, that technique could work, but why would anyone put a machine designed to resurrect New Gods away from Apokolips?"
Artemis glances at me. "You said we couldn't be resurrected."
Well,
that's a hell of a thing to find buried under a slain world...
"I definitely can't, you probably can't, because our souls will merge with the Source upon our deaths. That doesn't mean that we can't be cloned, just that… We wouldn't get much out of it." I move a little closer to the platform, trying to draw upon Other Grayven's earliest memories. "Darkseid had a team… Working on the problem. They never really solved it. They got to the point where the duplicates weren't totally mindless and could be taught, but they lacked the spiritual force of the originals." I smile. "That's one of the reasons how I know that I'm me and not a duplicate, despite merging with Other Grayven."
And leaves a worrying opening for him to force his way back into dominance of your shared form. If
Conquest can overpower
Acquisition...
"So they were making copies here?"
"Something like that. You couldn't make duplicates to use as infiltrators because they wouldn't have the knowledge or spiritual presence. You couldn't use the system to make powerful New Gods immortal for the same reason. Baron Bedlam's multiple plastic bodies were as far as the research got, as far as I know."
Baron Bedlam, though information is sparse on that wiki (The alternatives are Outsider foes of Prince Brion Markov.) But I could see him coming out of something like
this.
I walk over to… Because of course there's no control panel. I walk over to a group of levers and haphazardly placed unmarked buttons, hoping that Mother Box will be able to do something with it.
Ping.
"To borrow a phrase: 'It's all Greek to me.'"
Well, keep trying.
"How does he work?"
Probably something akin to a hive-mind - every body having the same mind, without dissent.
"As I understand it, his consciousness isn't attached to any one body. He'd still die if all of his bodies were destroyed, but losing the odd one or two isn't more than an inconvenience."
"Any idea why Other Grayven wanted it? Or why it was abandoned?"
Backup bodies? Or maybe... The ability to be in more than one place at a time might be
useful for a conqueror. Direct control on multiple battlefields and war-zones simultaneously.
"No. None." I take a closer look at the machine to see if anything springs to mind. "As far as I recall, he didn't know what was here. Only that it was something New God."
"You don't think he got made here?"
...One problem with that theory. And she's living in challenger Mountain.
"No, the memories I got from him distinctly include his childhood."
"But that wouldn't mean he wasn't, right? They could have copied a child and then just let him grow up normally."
...Huh. I suppose nothing says Grayven's mother actually
bore him in the old-fashioned way.
"True, but there's no obvious benefit. I mean, he could have been an experiment to see what would happen, and… Darkseid wouldn't just throw him away if that's what happened because he might learn something out of it. But we're Darkseid's sons. Every memory I have of Apokolips includes us being referred to like that, and if…"
No.
A moment of self-doubt, Renegade?
Mother Box, Sinestro, scan for my genetic material.
Lantern Grayven, you already know.
...Oh, this is heading into a big old pile of 'Nope'.
"Oh."
"What?"
"I have no memory of being here before, but there's genetic material from-." Why were there crates in the store room when everything else-? "From me here."
'Me' as in the Earth-Prime human
you started as, or 'me' as in the local Grayven's body you're inhabiting?
A construct claw grabs a crate and yanks it over to us before cutting it open.
A dozen foetuses with copies of my own face blankly stare up at me from their preservative jars.
And there's the '
Nope'! Noping all the way
out of there would be a good idea now!