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

Age is literally just cancer. All possible types of cancers, killing your body in a war of attrition, losing every single battle, but only needing to win once to win the war, meanwhile the body's resource mechanisms lose redundancy after redundancy.

 

What the hey! That's an odd time to update, and I should probably have looked in earlier. Damn 'Champions Online' event grind...

On the upside, your current arrangements allow for a matter of uncertainty involving the likelihood of you staying dead. Besides the obvious 'fresh cloned body to transfer to', there's the whole Greek Underworld thing, which sufficiently powerful or blessed heroes can just walk out of...

Spoiler: Commentary spoilered for length

Dangit, OL, flashing your tattoos to people again. I guess it has been a while since you showed them off, though. And to clear any confusion for the American readers, he's talking about his underpants there.

As the Reach laments, he's made himself very hard to kill. Or rather, very hard to keep dead.

Heh, Green Lanterns do get the short end of the stick on that front, don't they? And at this point... Regaining a ring should be a lot easier than ever before. At least until he reaches the point where he doesn't need one at all.

That is an interesting way to look at it. Certainly, if you're capable of respawning into a fresh, undamaged body, at what point does repairing the old become counter-productive?

So he doesn't even need 'Wholeness Rightfully Assumed' anymore, because he's turned it into a persistent effect. Well, except for the times he takes more damage than the passive heals at a time..

At this point, there are no veteran orange Lanterns besides OL. And Larfleeze, but he likely doesn't want anything to do with the Orange Light if he can help it.

Hey, now! You do not talk about a Thanagarian's wings like that, OL...

You're damn lucky she didn't start shooting at you.

Presumably she keeps the scars as reminders of how she suffered those injuries, whether as a failure or a justified success.

Never mind the physical injury involved. Those things must have a lot of blood flow. Even with the ring healing the wound, that would also throw off all her proprioception. Imagine losing a large chunk of body mass, outside your centerline, and see how hard it is to stay upright as you compensate for a weight that's not there anymore.

So much for 'does not fear...'. And that fear would get you killed, Dul.

It might cause a bit of a mess in the library, which you're all still standing in, unless I missed a change of location...

'Oh, thank the heights, he's not actually going to do it....'

...No. How is that what you take away from this demonstration? Seriously, Dul, it's like you're trying to grab the wrong end of every stick.

...To test their ability to heal themself, or to remove a weakness? In either case, that ain't healthy.

Because Ragnar's sort of settled in as the drill instructor of the Corps, hasn't he? You'd hope he could teach the rookies to heal themselves without any kind of painful display...

And they're pretty big targets. A much larger surface area in the front or back arcs than their bodies, honestly. Surprised there aren't more wing injuries, or is this why they favour melee combat? Less chance of missed shots crippling someone?

That would be awkward, unless the prosthetic were precisely matched to the original in terms of weight and aerodynamics...

Ah... That honestly makes it worse... At least people missing a leg don't need to get the other removed to get replacements.

What's really impressive is that those three-thousand-year-old wings are still intact, instead of having rotted away long ago. I would assume the Nth Metal is doing something to preserve them, since even the best-preserved corpses - Egyptian mummies - from that era look pretty bad.

Ah... You're afraid of being lessened, Dul. Being reduced to something inferior to what you were, in your eyes. If she can internalise the desire to preserve that, she'll be a lot stronger.

I hope Dul thinks hard on this revelation. And especially hope that she doesn't do something drastic to correct it...

Well, looks like she needs some alone time too. Boy, if OL meant to break them down like that in order to build them back up stronger, then he's doing well... If he didn't, well...

...Did you seriously just make Onik doubt whether even being an Orange Lantern is what he really wants? Good grief.

I am getting the feeling Graf Toren is now regretting his decision to take part in this little exercise. I mean, OL's three for three in making his students suffer horrifying personal revelations... Let's at least hope they can find themselves becoming stronger for it. Or this will have been something of a wasted trip.
( Also seconding the curiosity at the early post, Mr Zoat. Not going to be home and awake at your usual posting time?)

 

After watching Rick and Morty I can't help but imagine all of the clones trying to kill each other.

He's very slow at learning things.

Paul isn't all that good at picking up social cues

Paul is like that guy women sleep with and then regret it for the rest of their life, at least when it comes to some of his teaching methods.

 

Thank you, corrected.

House-sitting for parents. I don't really get enough time in the morning to do a normal update.

 

You misunderstand. FTL is inherently harder than stopping or reversing aging.

It makes him more self-aware, and it makes him more aware of the emotions of others.

 

Yes, it has made him self aware of his desires and the emotions of others, but it still hasn't increased his intelligence or given him exact knowledge on how he should respond to others emotions or how he should respond in certain situations.

 

FTL is also the sort of technology that can be transferred from species to species without alteration. Medicine, less so.

 

The technology, sure. The infrastructure and industry? No. Sure, you can buy an FTL ship from another civilization, but that does not give you the infrastructure, industry, expertise, etc, to make them yourself or even maintain the one you have.

And while the medicine would obviously differ to some degree for other races, the knowledge that clinical immortality is entirely possible would not.

 

Which is why

Paul: "Yeah... I'm going to need a bit longer to work on a proper motivational lesson for that. But, uh, good on you for realizing it? Next. Please."

 

Thank you, corrected.

 

Mr Zoat, some corrections from the latest:

Too many lines there.

...but you allowed your fear of losing your wings...

Have you been worried about losing your wings before now?

 

So... The same problem Paragon himself has... Well... That's certainly not going to be an easy fix...

 

Not quite. Cellular senescence can be seen as a defense mechanism against cancer, but the parts associated with aging which involve various plaque build-ups in your tissues, aren't. Cells dividing into wrong types isn't exactly cancer either, although it's related.

 

Yeah, the extra line had me reflexively searching for invisitext.

 

I -still- think Siskin is still alive. He was an elemental, having his shell destroyed shouldn't have killed him, and I doubt Fate had the time to properly annihilate him considering the circumstances.

 

Since we're talking about biological immortality (damnable flesh prisons) at the moment, I feel it would be pertinent to mention that there is at least one species on Earth, a jellyfish, that has actually evolved something that functions close enough that the difference is a moot point.

But, while I agree that the interstellar civilizations that can create matter and energy out of effectively nothing not all being immortal, augmented super-people is stupid, sci-fi writers also totally fail in most cases to understand both the scale (a fully industrialized Sol would house tens of quadrillions and be able to output the entirety of The Imperial Navy, Star Wars or 40k, in a single day for example) and implications of the technology of their universes, so the fact that the comic book sci-fi civs don't do any of the stuff we totally can under currently known science isn't much of a surprise.

Gotta' have that easy conflict on hand for your stories about Righteous Face Punching after all.

Edit:Spelling.

 

Nabu was an extremely powerful and experienced magic user, so he may have honestly completely destroyed Siskin in such a short time.

I think it was mentioned that they couldn't find a trace of him, so that could confirm that he's permanently dead.

 

Did anyone else feel like this just got incredibly heavy out of nowhere?

 

I give one more chapter until something explodes and Paul has to deal with some eldritch abomination or other while talking about feelings.

 

Sometimes I manage to forget that the mild mannered British man is just absolutely fucking covered in tattoos,

 

Mr Zoat, I was rereading Episode 107: Back Door and it got me wondering. Has Inviolate!Lex left the Renegade's universe yet, or is he still around?

 

Thank you, corrected.

I wish I'd thought of that.

He's still around. He's taking advantage of the relative calm to do some upgrades.

 

What I personally think is that Nabu didn't have the time to completely destroy Siskin, so he just ripped his soul/elemental body to shreds, like what happened to Paul's soul. The remaining pieces then flowed back to the plain of fear, as that seems to be the thing foreign energies do when they lose their connection to the material world. It was also implied by Sephtian while they were testing Siskin's golem body that there was still quite a lot of power left after Nabu originally tried to kill the terror thing. This makes it more unlikely that a single move from Nabu could completely destroy Siskin.

What I consider to be a quite good outcome is that some of Siskin's pieces remained semi sentient. They could then go around and piece themselves back together from whatever else remains, just like Paul did with his soul. Siskin would likely lose a lot of the humanity he had left, especially if he had to get used to living on the plain of fear. If his consciousness did remain, he could prove to be quite the formidable elemental, as he already has experience with attaching himself to foreign fear sources, and he won't struggle as much with motivation, focus, and logic like other elementals seem to do. I also think that Parallax is currently being held in the green central power battery, so the central entity of the plain of fear won't even be present.

 

So Sinestro replaced the Abbott, huh didn't see that coming.

 

Lots of fun ways to charge a ring so long as the emotion involved is nearby, or you are Orange and can convert near anything into orange light.

 

Did I miss a thing?

 

Glad I'm not the only one who had that as a first thought. I can understand why the Illustres is not suspicious, supposedly this is a secure planet and so his guard is down and besides not actively using his empath abilities the "abbot" has a green core protecting his feelings and thoughts. But still, that guy is suspicious as fuck right now! What with the questions and his reactions!

 

He did know what an apple was.

 

And the reaction to Kalmin's name. Nobody outside the Green or Orange Lanterns should know that name, counting the Guardians and Controllers. Except Alan and some others on Earth, the only other person who would know Kalmin's name is Sinestro.