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

Maybe it was damaged enough that some of its functions, like its knowledge of the hosts biology, were gone, or it thought it wasn't a priority.

 

My inner murderhobo is pleased with the outcome. Moar lootz.

 

Thank you, corrected.

Certainly, if it had a few minutes during which it didn't need to make other constructs. And knew it could do that.

 

Actually it does have the data.

Remember, Shards don't need to know the "how" of a thing, they just need to know what the thing does. And hard light constructs and matter transmutation are old hat for Shards which means they could simulate everything a power ring could do outside of Emotional Entity sudden power-ups.

 

It would be highly inaccurate because someone using emotional light gains a transient property to their mental processes. Green Lanterns being able to maintain focus in spite of chemicals turning their brain to mush and things like that. It makes it hard to know exactly how much someone is able to focus on their constructs, and thus how powerful they are. Also, would a shard be able to accurately map the brain of someone inside a ring energy shield anyways? If not, then every time you use your ring you become very hard to predict

 

Oof. Not a planet-killer, certainly. But that would not have been pleasant for the planet if it had all been allowed to hit. I'm picturing a chain of explosions running down to the surface, leaving something akin to the after-effects of Tunguska.

Spoiler: Commentary spoilered for length

So, not wearing it on that arm. Indeed, it may not be attached to any limb. We've seen OL use his rings while they were embedded in his skull and chest...

Green Lanterns only wear theirs on a convenient extremity out of habit, after all. Though it does make recharging easier. So if you don't need to recharge, well... And amusing that the exploding gun is the only real damage OL took in this fight.

To be fair, any amount of anti-matter in something meant for close combat is probably too much. For exactly this reason. Even as a suicide charge, it's excessive.

And since it's not trying to smack him with Green Constructs right now, it presumably needs the host's brain working to do so...

Is this really the time to be playing mad scientist? Last thing you need it the Scarab Warrior waking up in the middle of it and trying to gut you. Again.

Logical enough. Place it amongst the rest of her most heavily-armoured organs. After all, a Ring may be tough, but it can still be broken...

Well, now. Interesting to have it confirmed she's the same as the crew, but I'm more interested in the fact that he's exhibiting enough Will to get a response from a Green Ring. Then again, it's an atypical example of such...

Okay, the Ring must be designed to operate on far lower levels of Will than the standard model. An interesting choice, Guardians.

Now, what to tell her... Lie, and claim it was destroyed or otherwise lost? Worth taking the reputation hit if he's found out? probably not.

Joy of Enlightenment. You're able to bypass the minimums other Lanterns need to learn. Unfortunately, that would naturally interfere with other colours. Probably cause mixed signals...

And thus we see why the Greenies went wonky. Mental realignment? Nasty.

Well. That doesn't bode well.

And that's not the worst thing they've done, though the very worst came out of the New 52. It's probably a good thing, in this case, that his brain is optimised for Avarice...

Give the Guardians an Inch, they'll take a Parsec...

Nice. Almost as satisfying as smacking people around, stabbing Kai Leng or headbutting an uppity Krogan.

Besides, the Controllers, and Hinon especially, should be able to reverse-engineer it, without the mental drawbacks.

Well, besides you. And congratulations on indulging your inner Larfleeze and grabbing the 'Shiny'.

With any luck, that will be forthcoming.

Ironically, the wizards would probably have the most success, given the canonical Khaji Da scarab. Still, he doesn't remember that.

Heh. To be fair, the Darkstars usually aren't working with the safety net of a Power Ring. And are usually too busy trying to not die to worry about preserving their enemies' bodies.

Well, shit. That's going to be a running gag, isn't it? OL keeps getting close to collecting a Scarab only for something to prevent it. Self-destruction, outside assault or just plain bad luck...

Probably not going to take much effort, given the shitshow the Reach unleashed, 'rogue unit' or not. I foresee the Yuna government putting more restrictions and sanctions on Reach trade in future...

So, all the shooting's done. Well, at least you got some loot out of the fight. Hopefully all this will count towards a successful mission when all is said and done. I still bet Dox will not be happy (when is he ever?) but Hinon will likely appreciate the Ring.

---

Double Space.

 

And don't forget Sybarite.

Though they can wear them in other places if it's not possible to do it in the usual place.

Paul is easily distractible.

He can use other emotions to wield a ring, like Violet, and in this line of work a strong will is necessary.

Maybe something like the green version of Indigo rings.

An interesting idea, maybe if this isn't such a dubious scheme of the Guardians then maybe they wanted to recruit more people to wield rings, but due to lack of strong wills that was difficult so they decided to make something that doesn't rely on such a strong will.

I don't know.

Some of the Controllers, like Hinon, helped with the fucks up of the Guardians, like the creation of the Psions.

And they also made their own, like Larfleeze.

Because making one emotionless army wasn't enough.

There's this interesting idea that a fan made in a project called Earth 27.

In it the Guardians basically wield all the lights, minus White and Black, like Ganthet wielding Blue, and the Manhunters exist, but here they're mostly various sapient beings that serve a law enforcement role with the GLC, minus the rings.

A lot of characters that had the name Manhunter in the comics, like Martian Manhunter and that one woman, are actually members of the group.

Maybe the Guardians should try something like this before they go all robot army.

Granted I think Lobo was a member, so it's not perfect.

I'm now imagining him trying to catch Scarabs with a Pokeball Hinon made for him.

He's gonna catch them all!

Maybe if Paul one day brings him the head of Brainiac, or the body with the head so he can take it of, then he'll be happy.

 

You can actually store anti-matter... well not safely since it's one of the most volatile things that exists, but safer than you'd expect. All you've got to do is make a charm-matter variant (you can also go strange-matter if you're feeling a bit off your rocker) and store the regular charm-matter in a separate containment unit separated from it's negative counterpart by a wall of regular matter.

It might not be the most efficient thing to do in the middle of combat, but if you're using it right then anti-matter isn't (quite) as dangerous as it seems.

Edit:I am bad at putting words in the right place apparently.

 

Thank you, corrected.

Surely anti-matter is no more volatile than matter?

 

I mean... you're not wrong, but consider the following.

(Also anti-matter in the presence of it's paired opposite, me taking a joke too seriously because I find it funny, yada yada.)

 

I imagine that anyone can activate any color of ring, but you have to be able to reliably direct the required emotion well enough at a high enough level for your constructs to be strong enough and to keep anyone else from summoning the ring off of you.
Having a green ring that auto-boost your will probably risks creating another Malvolio.

 

Far from just them. There is a significant trend in the modern mainstream that no authority can be good. No organisation can be uncorrupt. No heaven can be benevolent.

 

I think I found some old errors.

Every other mention of Jiang of the Chinese Standing Committee on Metahuman Affairs has him called Chairman. Is Chairman the correct term?

 

Thank you, corrected.

 

I just noticed. Shouldn't the Story Only part be over the first date of the Episode?

 

Not... Really. I mean, by normal shard "perfect simulation, perfect precog" standards sure, but a working model is easy enough. Shards can do psychology and run predictive models based on observed behaviour and observed abilities just fine; as an example, Contessa has a reasonable mostly-accurate model of Eidolon that she can use to predict and work around him. Esoteric Emotional Shaman Bullshit would trip it up when it came up, but after a few months of observation the day to day stuff would be trivial to accurately predict.

 

When a Thinker power encounters a blind spot, it doesn't power through blindly as though the blind spot weren't there. If that were the case, Dinah Alcott never would've been able to predict the apocalypse that drives the plot in the final arc. Having his power sabotage him in such a manner indicates that the fanfic you derived your reasoning from was more interested in screwing over Coil than a consistent portrayal of Thinker blind spots. Not a bad thing for that story, since I suspect that screwing over Coil was more important to that story than consistent Thinker power mechanics, but between this and the Tattletale knockout, I'm concerned that you're less interested in being true to the crossed setting and more interested in going Perfect Lionheart on a story you've never read.

Considering that there was talk about Grayven possibly crossing into Worm later, I find that concerning.

 

Am I bit confused here. Did he sacrifice the Scarab to save the Host?

I thought for a moment he would create a Beetle here...

 

Hmm, save the Host remains for study perhaps.

Tho, if it worked right, the Scarab would be linked to a suspended brain and not self-destruct, while having no capabilites

 

Anti-matter and matter explode when they come into contact with their opposite, resulting in a lot of hard gamma. Antimatter is "more explosive" than regular matter merely because we have shit-tons of matter around to react with. In the antimatter universe, matter would be considered the explosive. But the thing is, antimatter will only react with the exact same quark or lepton. Water doesn't react with anti-water. Oxygen doesn't even react with anti-oxygen. It's the electrons, the up quarks, and the down quarks that interact. So if your matter containment vessel is made of charmed matter, replacing up quarks with charm, down quarks with strange, and electrons with muon leptons, then it should be safe to handle upped antimatter with it. The uh, downside of that is that charmed matter really really really likes to both decay into upped matter particles and also undergo cold fusion.

Edit: I mistakenly said that the tau was the charmed lepton. It is not. The charmed lepton is the muon. The tau is the topped lepton.

 

Shards can reproduce that too. There's plenty of parahumans that can survive their brain getting mushed. Hell, when you clone a parahuman, the copy can slowly and partially reproduce the original's memories, regardless of the original's status. And that's for individuals whose power normally doesn't have anything at all to do with creating copies, regrowing heads or transferring or manipulating memories. Dealing with the idea of a personality being saved on an unreachable substrate of reality is really not that hard yo grasp for them.

 

It was a suicide run so host didn't have to last long.

 

Thank you, corrected.

It's not so much 'going Perfect Lionheart' as having not read the original work or the pages of Word of God that are needed to make sense of it. I don't claim to be any sort of expert on Worm. That's why I'm not writing a Worm story. I'm certainly not interested in reading all of that to marginally improve three segments in this story.

I don't remember exactly how that particular fic -Taylor was a Saiyan- handled all of it. I... Vaguely remember it being something about Coil starting his simulation after she left Earth and that shard's particular restrictions excluding her for the duration, while Dinah gave a calculation at one moment in time which would change based on what was in range at that moment. But I could be wrong and I'm not rereading it on that site.

 

If it's just three segments, is it really that important to include? It doesn't sound like it'd be likely to contribute anything to Grayven's personal story, and writing stories about settings one hasn't read is a sort of willful laziness that's already endemic among Worm fanfics without a writer as prolific as yourself dipping his toe in.

 

Ah, when I made my comment about charm-matter/anti-matter I was referring to an anti-matter variant that annihilated with charm-matter (both of which I presume that the Scarab is fabricating on-site since I can't imagine that they carry anti-matter around all the time), not the container being made of it.

If that's me not understanding how this all works than I'll blame me not being a particle physicist, and maybe not listening as well as I should have during an Isaac Arthur video.

 

No, the bit with the Lord Protector was just three segments. I haven't written anything about the Renegade in Worm, and probably won't. In any case, he'd be in Colorado and the precise mechanics of Coil's power would be irrelevant.

 

I really like this explanation for how the ring works- it's certainly better than how the comics did it. Direct mental alteration does fit when a lot of what green rings rely on is knowing how to do things- and the more complex and detailed a given fix is, the more willpower it requires (which can result in things like John Stewart breaking his ring when he tried to reassemble a planet because he had too much willpower)

Newer GL comics (ie: Stuff occurring during [redacted]) I think I've heard of a couple instances of green rings healing without relying on detailed knowledge of how to do it, but from what I recall everyone and their mother basically tells the GL in question it's impossible.

Generally I imagine you'd really just want a ring that doesn't require willpower to do it- aka, literally anything else (well, maybe not yellow except for battlefield triage)- because it seems like a feature of will directed rings that you need to precisely know what's going on. That's why Soranik Natu can heal with a ring- because she's a doctor and she does it 'manually'.

Meanwhile, Paul can just want it really hard, a Star Sapphire can just encase you in crystal and it'll take care of some of that, and blue rings are optimized for healing and other frankly bullshit manifestations and ratio of 'effect to ring charge'. Saint Walker, in one of his first blue lantern appearances, fixed a failing main sequence star using his ring- and I very much doubt he knows literally anything about how stars work.

In the comics, these 'prototype' rings were said to mentally alter their wielder so they 'became what they most feared' in order to force them to overcome it. Except it kind of didn't really do that? It actually made them experience intense avarice going by the actions of those who wielded them.

I could totally see mental alterations to make better [specific color] constructs being a thing, because the alterations to make someone really good at a given color's constructs would by their very nature would have to be color specific. Every ring makes constructs in a different way- though I suppose there is enough commonality that you might be able to make a generalized 'info' package that a ring could write onto users' brains to jumpstart their training.

Stuff like boosting intelligence, pattern recognition, and ye olde tutorial of 'hold emotion A while imagining thing B'? of course it's still rewriting someone's mind, which is problematic, but I could see a lot of lanterns taking advantage of something like that voluntarily if given the choice and if the downsides weren't so severe.

 

I was totally looking forward to OL getting a Jail Broken Scarab and green ring. I am now sad.
More conventional power-ups like those would be somewhat superfluous but yoinking the enemy's supergear is always awesome.

 

That's all stuff Shards can already do, not through the same methods as power rings mind you, but as I said before, as long as they can model the "what" the "how" of a thing doesn't matter so much.

And Yes, Shard sensors could, many of them are extra-dimensional in nature.

Mind you, all of this is kind of moot since Zoat refuses to actually read Worm and continually ignores Worm canon to have his SI run around as an unopposed unstoppable force there.

 

The problem is that channeling an emotional spectrum color results in behaviors that are not the result of any physical processes that can be observed. Green Light causes you to have increased willpower, by an undefined and inconsistent amount. This means that while you can generally model what their decisions will be by modeling their brain when it isn't channeling the emotional spectrum and their abilities by observing them while they are channeling the emotional spectrum, you cant accurately account for how channeling the emotional spectrum will influence their personality, decisions, and construct strength.

You could make a general model that is mostly accurate, but frankly, the emotional spectrum is most unpredictable when someone is pushed against the wall.