With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

8th January
14:13 GMT -5

"…total bollocks. How can Vercingetorix not be a notable source on Vercingetorix?"

I nod sympathetically as Robert, Tula and I trudge through the thoroughly evacuated Harriman State Park. "To be fair, you don't have any way to know for certain that he was telling the truth."

"Oh, because Julius Caesar is more reliable? That's basically the only other contemporary source. Is it more reliable because he wrote it down? I mean, he's been dead for two thousand years, it's not like he's got any reason to lie about it."

We start across the Lewis Brook, Robert and Tula using magic to walk across the surface while I float just above it.

"Except pride, possibly?" He starts to open his mouth, and I raise my right hand. "But I do see where you're coming from. People marking essays should be flexible enough to realise that there are some students who can speak with the dead."

Tula's frowning slightly. "I thought that your abilities were focused around the manipulation of the classical elements. How are you able to speak with the dead?"

"Oh, yeah, but it's the Celtic mythology.. thing. Connection. It takes a bit of an effort, but I can visit Otherworld if I go to the right place and do a ritual. Haven't tried going anywhere else, but since that's where Vercingetorix is I didn't need to." He shakes his head. "Apart from Great Granddad I haven't summoned anyone."

I land as they step up onto the shore.

"I thought that Otherworld was somewhere souls went temporarily?"

"Ahh… Well… Pre-Christian paganism wasn't a unified religion or anything. So there's a bunch of different beliefs about what happened. You can get reincarnated from there, but that's true of Erebos, isn't it?"

I nod. "Yes."

"He told me that he didn't want to get reborn in case he ended up as a Roman. Now he just likes the peace."

"I would be very interested to meet-."

A wave of mud two metres high leaps at us! Tula uses her water armour to generate a barricade of ice, Robert raises one of rock and I generate a construct barrier.

"Mister Hagen!"

The mud splashes onto our barricade then hardens as Mr Hagen uses it to pull himself upwards. I realise that it's his left hand as his right turns into a granite hammer and smashes down! Robert dives out of the way while Tula's tattoos glow, a stream of ultra high pressure water blasting at his arm and severing it at the wrist! Which doesn't stop the hammer, so I send a construct up to meet it and slow its descent. The first few ablative layers give as intended, and the hammer hits my barrier without the strength to crack it even slightly.

"How do you see-"

The ground beneath us erupts, the earth throwing us into the air! Robert uses air magic to catch himself and hover, I fall back towards the ground and use my armour's kinetic shield to absorb my momentum and Tula controls her descent using jets of water.

"-this helping you?"

So Mr Hagen lunges up through the airborne soil and swallows her whole.

Robert's eyes widen in horror, but there isn't actually much to worry about. Mr Hagen's body is only as dense as regular soil unless he exerts himself, and he doesn't have any internal organs. Unless he's developed some sort of countermagic-

Mr Hagen pulls himself into a roughly humanoid shape beneath us and grins smugly.

-technique, he's not doing anything to Tula that her water armour can't take.

"Tasty. How about you both leave me alone, and I think about giv-"

His abdomen starts to bulge.

"-ing her…" He looks down. "Huh?"

His torso explodes, bursts of high pressure water blasting free! Tula lands, then walks free of the mud-and-felled-tree covered blast zone with a scowl on her face.

"Ow."

Mr Hagen's distorted head is still more or less in one piece, and the mud which he's made part of his body is slowly oozing back towards him. I scoop him up with a construct and bring him up to my level.

"Mister Hagen, could we have a civil conversation now?"

There's a slight shift in the mud as he grows a neck to prop himself up slightly.

"Or what, you shoot me with your ray gun again?"

I sigh as Tula flicks the last of his mud from her armour.

"Mister Hagen, you were trying to kill my friends. While I do regret the level of force I used to bring you down, you have no grounds for complaint."

"Do you know what that felt like? My whole body going hard-. Numb. And then I couldn't hear anything or see anything but I couldn't stop thinking and imagining…"

"And you recovered."

"You call this recovery? I'm made of mud!"

"It beats being dead, Mister Hagen. But I'm more interested in what you want to do going forwards."

I take a closer look.

"I'm not telling you-."

"I'm afraid that Ra's al Ghul is already dead." He stills. "I don't think your employer knew while you were an active Shadow, but I can see people's desires. Ra's al Ghul is dead."

"He gets better."

I shake my head. "Not this time. Whoever did it made sure there wasn't a body."

He stares at me for a moment. "You do it? Or did he finally piss off the bat-."

"After I calcified you, I went to Infinity Island and shot him in the head. He got better from that, but while he was out of action I wrecked the island's defences. The League took care of the rest. Ra's escaped, but a little while later several groups received an anonymous tip about his location." One of them was the Russian government. It appears that having Dmitri on the League has caused them to re-evaluate how much intelligence they share. Even they're not sure exactly what happened as the Spetsnaz unit they sent at the time didn't come back, but we finally got a look at the site where the Master of Shadows died. "High end incendiaries were employed to ensure that there were no recoverable parts, and the League of Shadows has been dismantled."

"What about Talia?"

"Going after her won't help y-."

"NOTHING'S GUNNA HELP ME! I'M A FUCKING LUMP OF MUD!"

"There's always hope, Mister Hagen." I pull one of the lesser H-Dials out of a pouch and hold it out to him. This one has four buttons, and is almost certainly Wizard's work. "Please press the buttons in the order H-E-R-O."

He stares at me for a moment, then extends his prehensile tongue and splatters it against the buttons in sequence.

And his head and a good portion of the surrounding mud vanishes, replaced by a bearded black man in blue jeans and a yellow shirt.

"The… Fuck..?"

He hold up his hands and stares at them, back and front. "This isn't me."

"Better or worse than being mud?"

"Better. But… Why do I think my name's 'Speaky the Super Ventriloquist'?"

"The dial can turn you into a metahuman for one hour a day. I have three."

He looks up at me as I descend to ground level. "One hour? What good's an hour?"

"It lets you interact with people as a human while we work on a permanent fix. Obviously, the aim is to restore your original human body. This is just to show you what can be done."

"And what d'you want?"

"Co-operate with the police. As long as you do that, I've worked out an agreement where you will spend your sentence in a laboratory rather than a prison. We'll work on restoring your humanity."

"Oh, great. So you turn me back and I spend the rest of my life in Belle Reve."

"Given what you've gone through, and the fact that you weren't considered reliable enough to be sent on assassination missions, I suspect that you would get a lesser sentence. Alternatively, as a man of clay you don't actually age. If we were able to improve how that aspect of your physiology works, you might decide to stay like-."

"Fuck you I'm staying like that."

"I believe that people should have the right to modify themselves however they like. If you want to go back, that's up to you."

"If I co-operate."

"Indeed. But do you think you're going to get a better offer?"