[Archive] With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Story Only)

14th February 2013
16:09 GMT -5

No one on the bridge, either. Tuppence and a few of the unpowered prisoners are shoving those we captured into their cells while Mahkent recovers the gamma gong. Eiling, Kadabra and Standing Bear have come with me, Kadabra because I need someone other than me who can interface with the systems and the other two because I'm not convinced that I can trust them out of my sight.

I can feel the fear on the other ships.

"They're pulling away."

Eiling frowns. "Explain that to me. They outnumber us. Why are they leaving?"

Kadabra smiles. "Because they know that they're in teleporter range. And they know that you can kill them easily if you can reach them."

I nod. "I don't know whether they're fleeing the system or just getting out of teleporter range, but neither is acceptable. Interface."

Eiling nods. "And let me guess: they didn't scuttle the ship because they don't want to make that easy. Should still have been able to flash their drives."

Cables radiate out from my body and bury themselves into each of the consoles.

"'Top Secret' information wouldn't usually be on bridge systems, it would be on the commander's personal computer. The belligerent parties in the Antares system are so close to each other that it's not possible for them to keep 'Secret' level stuff secret from each other, and decentralisation means that there isn't any one location to flash."

Warm up the drive systems. And weapons, because they've got their shields down so they can devote power to drive systems. Pop turrets and target capital ship drive systems.

"Kadabra, are you able to interfere with their systems?"

"Tricky." He walks over to the communications suite and waves his wand around. "There's only so much I can do with a conventional communications array."

I nod as our primary guns begin tracking targets. On ships like these that use ion thrusters there's only so much you can do to armour that part of the ship. Like with weapons, their role requires them to be exposed in a way that bridges and engines don't. I'd like to fire right away, but the guns are cold and need more time to be readied to fire. Something that would be easier with a trained crew, though given that the Dhorians aren't bothering with weapons at this stage perhaps I'm misjudging.

"Do what you can."

Weapons charging…

I've got sensors, though I can't see where the Dominion's gate is supposed to be. Assuming that Truggs was telling the truth, which I probably shouldn't do. The Dhorian ships still under their control have started pulling away but they're hardly in a position-

This ship doesn't have an interdiction field generator.

-to get away.

Eiling walks over to the main screen. "So it's a stern chase. How does that work out for them?"

Weapons charging. Preparing to fire…

"Not great. None of us have shields or weapons active so that we can start our drives faster. There's only so much power the drives can turn into acceleration, so once that's-"

I feel the shields start activating on their ships.

"-ready they'll activate shields. Darn it."

He raises an eyebrow.

"They got their shields up just before I got weapons ready."

I retrain the guns so that they're focusing on a single ship, and fire them.

And.. I've been spoiled by having access to a fleet built with Maltusian and Coluan technology. Most spacefaring species don't have weapons that powerful or accurate. The ship I aimed at saw that they were being targetted and started using their manoeuvring thrusters. Combined with the weak containment systems in the guns themselves, that means that I'm not getting enough hits to actually damage anything. Even at basically point blank range. Explains why they do boarding actions: shooting each others' ships just takes too long. I could aim at the smaller ships, but they're already pulling ahead and they're smaller targets anyway.

Deactivate guns, transfer power to rapid engine start up system.

Eiling looks askance at me. "If we're in the same class of ship, how do you plan on catching them?"

"I don't. I plan on teleporting onto their bridge and wrecking them. There's no real benefit in grabbing the small ships so we can ignore those. Of the twelve capital ships three of them are our size and the other eight are slightly smaller. I suspect that if we take the three largest then Volgar Zo will be on one of them and we can force the rest to surrender in exchange for me not adding another count of genocide to my charge sheet. Kadabra?"

"I would be concerned about them having another gamma gong, but otherwise it sounds plausible."

"Everyone got a gun?"

Three nods.

"We were caught by the gamma gong the first time because we assumed that we were heading up for a peaceful discussion. This time we'll have the drop on them. The gong has to be exposed to be used. If you teleport in and see one, shoot everyone near it and grab it yourself as fast as you can. Kadabra, are our sensors good enough to lock on through their shields?"

"No, but their teleporter network is still active, as are their communication channels. I'm already inside, and… I have it. We can now use their sensors to teleport."

"Impressive work. In-."

Tuppence walks onto the bridge. "They all got done put in cages. When we gettin' the rest?"

"Ah, now, if you're up for it Kad-."

"I believe I know where Volgar Zo is. Only one ship is at the centre of all fleet communications."

"Good show." I hand a spare gun to Tuppence, but I get the impression that she's not all that familiar with them. "Ready?"

Three nods.

"Kadabra, give us a countdown."

He waves his wand and creates a shimmering column around us. "Three. Two. One."

I raise construct armour and rope darts.

"Now."

There's a flash, and we're surrounded by surprised Dhorians. I fire my darts, impaling the ones standing next to instrument panels. Tuppence throws herself at the closest marine, shoving her.. right hand into his arm before using him as a blunt instrument to bludgeon his comrades. Eiling is very clearly watching for a gamma gong, carefully maintaining his awareness as he strikes anyone within arms' reach. Standing Bear-

"Stand down! We surrender!"

-has gone for Zo himself and is currently standing with one hand around Zo's neck having already ripped the teleport system out of his armour.

"Everyone stop." Eiling does so immediately, Tuppence gets a couple more swings in before discarding her weapon as I approach Zo. "You will signal the rest of your fleet to surrender as well if you want your species to survive the week."

Clearly terrified, he nods in agreement.

 

14th February 2013
18:36 GMT -5

The assembled heavy cruisers point their guns down the gravity well and open fire, moon rock evaporating as the plasma hits the moon surface. It will take a while to dig down to the Dominion gate structure, but it inevitably will reach it. And then we'll have to keep an eye out for future infiltration attempts, but until then there won't be any more attacks from that avenue.

Zo told me that they had only one gamma gong on the fleet, and while I haven't gone room-to-room I certainly haven't seen any sign of there being more. Apparently, they're very resource-intensive to make, and it was only going to be used to contain prisoners. Plenty of time to check later.

The Dhorians have been loaded into two cruisers that I personally ripped the guns off, given a message to play in case Hyathis sends her fleet to finish them off on the way home and told to get out. I can see them heading for the edge of the interdiction zone now. It won't be a comfortable trip, but they'll make it. In a few months.

Eiling is watching the guns ravage the lunar surface.

"Lantern, are these ships American ships now?"

"Legally, their status is in limbo. The Dhorians declared war against Earth, but the disposition of any property would depend on the results of the final peace treaty negotiations. I'll be pushing for the Justice League to take full control of them, because it's legally far simpler. And less likely to cause friction between Earth nations in the post-Anti-Life period."

"Everyone who took part in this mission except you is American."

"And Abra Kadabra. Who… Still isn't an American citizen."

"He isn't?"

"He's a time traveller, so he isn't a natural born citizen, and then he was a convicted felon… But that's not the point."

"Isn't it? You know what the Chinese do with their metahumans, don't you?" I nod. "You could have gone to them. They'd probably have let you write your own ticket. You stuck with the Justice League. And sure, they're your friends. But is that why?"

"It's generally right to be on the side without concentration camps."

"Yeah. But it's not just metahumans, is it? Free speech, rule of law, free trade… All the things that makes America great. You spend most of your time on Earth in America. You signed up with an organisation that's run by Americans for a reason. I'm assuming it's because you like the way we do things."

"I like the way you do things when you do them like you're supposed to."

"You don't like me, you don't like what I do. Fine. Nate's lucky to have people on his side like you."

"No, it's not that. You want to sell weapons to America's enemies for whatever reason, I wouldn't care all that much. And your explanation made a lot of sense. My issue is what you did to Major Adams."

"That was the best I could do. It wasn’t like I had an entirely free hand. Once Lemar and Yarrow decided to try and kill each other, I had to keep everything quiet."

"Why not clean house? After Lemar was dead, arrest Yarrow and Polk and have them killed while escaping. Then have the official report blame the three of them for the smuggling-."

"Officially there wasn't any smuggling. And it had to stay that way if the C.I.A. was going to get its money."

"Then come up with something else. It's not like Adams had a motive either."

Eiling shakes his head. "He'd have kept investigating. I'm not going to try and tell you that it played on my conscience for decades or anything like that. I've seen better men killed for less, and some of them were on my side. But given the objectives, there wasn't any other way to handle it."

"And did the C.I.A. do anything useful with that money?"

"Damn good question." He snorts. "I'd say 'no', but I didn't know that at the time."

"Same principle. I'm sure that whoever used these ships to throw an asteroid at someone you don’t like would think they were doing the right thing. As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to pull the trigger in a situation like that, you better be right. Because the default setting shouldn't be 'ruthless bastard', it should be 'follow the rules'."

"How's that working out for you?"

"Reasonably well." I shrug. "I trust the League not to do anything disastrous, even if I'd rather that they pushed a bit harder sometimes. I don't trust the various parts of the United States government to do the same."

I look over his shoulder at the lunar surface as the guns finally break through to the Dominion gateway, smiling as it's destroyed.

Cease fire.

The guns stop shooting.

"That it?"

"Until next time. Hey." He looks around. "You'll actually get a pardon out of this, won't you?"

"Yeah. I'm too useful not to. Won't get my rank back. Won't get my kids back. But I'll get 'freed'. How long am I going to live for, anyway?"

"Between the stem cells and the Danner Formula, at least another century. Possibly longer. Possibly a lot longer. So I expect we'll be seeing a lot of each other."

"And I'll be seeing a lot of Adams. Great. So what's next?"

"If you're in need of a place to go?" Truggs strolls in, smiling smugly. "Then what's next is-."

"No. And don't pretend that was a fluke: you were obviously lurking by the door."

"No?"

"I have a plan for removing the Anti-Life from Earth. Unless it fails, there's no need to evacuate people."

"Do you need the ships for this plan of yours?"

"I need the resources that would otherwise be spent on checking potential colonists for Anti-Life infection. The ships would only be used as a distraction."

But the gong might be genuinely useful, if we can work out how it functions.

"What if they're already ready to go?"

Breathe. Breathe.

"That may be acceptable. Take it up with Batman when we return to Earth. Enjoy your stay in the prisoners' suite."

"Not the first time."

"Glad that you're happy. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to report in."

He waves with exaggerated disinterest, and I fly down the corridor a way to get a little privacy.

"Orange Lantern to Lantern Gardner. I have a… Situation."

 

14th February 2013
20:48 GMT -6

"I thought… Things felt strange." King Orin runs his right hand down the side of his face. "Like I was-." His hand continues downwards as he pulls himself together, balling into a fist as it reaches the nadir of its descent. "What exactly has he done?"

"He hath caused you and your people to sleepwalk through the lives of your forebears. Shaded, we imagine, by his own beliefs and prejudices. There is not a place in Atlantis where 'Pureblood' and the 'impure' live at close quarters."

"Damn it."

I hunch my shoulders and make a circling motion with my right hand. "Given how things are, I could probably… Ah… Use my own power to fix things… But-."

"That would mean you mind controlling my people."

"It's more of an unnatural mental influence. But that's why I asked rather than just doing it. Alternately, I can perform the awakening on you, and you can do it."

"No. No more mind control. If there's a lingering problem afterwards, we can deal with it when we need to." He walks over to the window, looking out across Poseidonis towards the sea. "God, I never thought I'd get a view like this."

Behind him I wince, and wait for him to reason it out.

"It won't last, will it?"

"Neigh, it will not." Luna takes a step closer. "In truth, We are surprised that it has survived the removal of the Caliph's support. We can only imagine that it is of supreme importance to Ahri'ahn."

"It's not just him. This has been a dream for a lot of Atlanteans." He turns back to us, frowning at Nabu. "Is that something you can keep going?"

"Only by leaving your people half-consumed by the Dream. This subverts the natural magic flow of the world. It could only be maintained with an external power source of great power."

"Or." I raise my right forefinger. "Your people could put the effort into making it happen gradually. You can't tell me that Atlantis doesn't have spells for making things float. Or for making aquatic volcanoes erupt. Heck, I can get you an asteroid if it comes to it."

"That would-." He pauses and shakes his head. "Do you know how much of what I'm feeling are my own feelings and how much is a left over from Ahri'ahn? I grew up in Maine. I never thought that Atlantis should be anywhere but the sea floor before."

Luna nods. "Ahri'ahn still holds the dream over much of Atlantis. Until we confront and defeat him, We may only bend it a little. We suggest that you place a hold on important decisions until you are truly free."

"Alright. What's the plan? And why aren't I having this talk with the Justice League?"

"Ah, basically, I'm tough enough to survive hostile magic without being so overtly magical that Ahri'ahn would immediately detect me."

Luna nods. "And We are an expert in dream magic. Giovanni Zatara is powerful, but he lacks Our particular skills."

I nod. "And my absolute faith. Plan is, you turn up to your regular consultation as if you're still dreaming and lamp him. If that doesn’t work, Luna and I will be one floor-punching away."

"'Floor punching'?"

"Look, this place is going to be wrecked by the sudden change in water pressure when it sinks again. Don't worry about the hole I have to make to reach you fast enough to stop one of the planet's top five magicians disintegrating you."

"Okay, that's-" He nods. "-a reasonable point. How much damage did he do raising Atlantis?"

"Not a lot. We were all over that. No one's going to hold the actions of one wizard against Atlantis as a whole." Hm. "Do you have a good place for us to hide?"

"Who else have you woken up?"

I shake my head. "No one. It would have made sneaking around harder and risked tipping off Ahri'ahn. And people should wake up by themselves after he's defeated."

"Defeated or dead?"

"Given his power level and the potential political fallout from taking him alive, I was planning on killing him."

"He's the founder of our magic traditions. The only reason why Atlantis still exists today."

I nod. "Yes, he's definitely outlived his usefulness, I agree. I suggest denying that you ever clarified that point and 'blaming' me."

"Are you sure that he's not being influenced by anything else?"

"Sure? No. But anything powerful enough to influence him… Well… Not a lot we can do about it at short notice. And… Honestly… Has anything he's done been out of character? For an Atlantean noble of his era?"

"Perhaps not. Alright, I've completed my appointments for the day, but I can get Ahri'ahn to discuss…" He frowns, the thoughts of his Dream-self colliding with those of Actual Arthur Curry. "Vassalage reform? That was-?"

"I imagine that his views on democracy are a little dated. Luna, do you have-?"

Luna hands him an enchanted lollipop stick. "Break this when it is time for us to intervene."

He nods. "I wouldn't visit his workshop, not while I was under his control. I'll call him to the east wing drawing room. Do you know where that is?"

"Yes. We'll be lying in wait."

He nods distractedly. "Maybe I can find out where he was going with all of this."

"I wouldn't recommend risking yourself to assuage your curiosity, but it's your life you're risking. Don’t forget to dismiss your guards just in case things spill over."

He nods, then turns away and marches out of the royal apartments.

"Is this what it is like?"

I turn to Luna. "Is what what what's like?"

"Being a 'super hero'. We had largely assumed that it was something like being a knight errant, but no mere knight would be trusted to do what we have done today."

"Pretty sure that Celestia would dump it on Twilight."

"Not without a great deal more notice and preparatory material."

"I don't remember her getting a fat lot of preparatory material before being sent to fight Sombra. Didn't even get the Elements."

"You need not argue that point with Us. Having considered your viewpoint, we are in agreement."

"Twilight and maybe Rainbow Dash count. At our level, superheroism is about highly skilled and powerful people dealing with otherwise intractable problems that would otherwise cause widespread devastation. Both of us needed our full range of skills and resources to get this far, and our combat abilities will be tested before too long. There aren't many things that would require people in our weight class to apply themselves like this, but it's nice to be around when they come up."

She nods, looking pensive. "We think that We may desire… To participate in such incidents more often. To… Beat off the rust."

I smile. "I was rather hoping that-."

"And We believe that Our Sister may similarly wish to engage in such pugilistic events."

"Maybe Kal-El's got something for her."

 

Ken World

12th July 2023
01:10 Local Time

At the risk of sounding like I've absorbed entirely too much local culture, I can't help but have a little skip in my step. Another success. Another group of oppressed people convinced that they can be more than they are. And another group sneaking into the back of the evacuation lorry to begin a new life somewhere where they can be more than their horribly misandrist society would allow them to be.

And based on normal response times I've still got a good half an hour before the bane of my existence turns up. And we should all be long gone by then.

I knock on the cab door, and a balaclava-covered head sticks out of the window.

"Boss?"

Professional driving is one of the few occupations the men of this blighted land are allowed to perform, so I could recruit help for that part of the job relatively easily. Trucker Ken is still maintaining his cover as… Well, as Trucker Ken, but he's happy to spend his free time freeing his brethren. Since the truck is the only thing he's had for the majority of his life that actually makes him happy, I…

Just made myself a little depressed thinking that sentence.

"I think you're about loaded. I'll check for waverers and then give you another knock."

"Ten-four, boss."

I stroll down the side of the lorry. This is a major life decision, and it's not surprising that even those Kens -and occasional Bens and Ryans and Randys- who are receptive to the idea aren't immediately willing to abandon their lives to jump in the back of a dilapidated lorry on my say-so. Even after seeing what Kens could achieve under Sigma Ken's leadership. And some are so unused to making their own decisions that they lack the will. But tonight, it looks like Farmer Ken is getting talked out of it by Gardener Ken and Gardener Ken Two.

"…even show us what it's like over there, man."

"So it's a challenge. That's the whole point. Do you want to spend the rest of your lives rearranging your Barbie's flowerbeds because she's changed her mind again? Because I want to farm animals that don't just look cute, but taste good too!"

"Gentlemen?" The three of them turn to me. "Is there any information you want me to give you?"

Farmer Ken shakes his head regretfully. "No. I think we're done here." He clambers up into the back of the lorry, Catwalk Ken giving him a hand up.

I nod, focusing my attention on the farmers. "No pressure guys, but we're not going to be coming back this way for about a year. In or out."

Gardener Ken Two turns away immediately, while Gardener Ken One spends a few moments looking at the lorry before shaking his head.

"Alright. You know where we meet if you need to talk to someone."

I turn away and close the rear doors of the lorry, trapping those Kens who are making the journey inside. Slide the locking mechanism in place and then-.

"Boss! Problem!"

Hot Nerd Ken dashes over, some sort of beeping computer tablet in his hands.

"I'm picking up a pressure wave and it's… It's her, isn't it?"

I check the reading, but there's only one other possibility and that clearly isn't Fighter Pilot Barbie. Just doing her pre-flight checks would take longer than this. But how did-?

A flash of brightly coloured hair in a nearby copse of trees suddenly clears that up. The two young sidekicks realise that I've spotted them immediately and duck back before turning to run.

No point chasing them. Damage already done.

"Hot Nerd Ken, get in the cab. Tell Trucker Ken to drive safely and to avoid drawing attention."

"But-but she's coming!

"Won't be the first time. I'll hold her attention. Go."

He sprints, and a moment later I hear the door open and then slam closed.

Right. I close my eyes for a moment, focusing my mind on the obligate-platonic fraternal love I feel from the community I've helped build. I think this is how the Zamarons do it as well, but as I launch myself into the air and towards the oncoming pressure wave it's the guys I'm thinking of.

She's got better vision than me, of course, and I'm not going to waste time on a detailed scan. I know what she looks like, and I need to focus on the shield and cudgel I'm going to be using in this fight.

Okay, yes, she's heading for me. I go for height and fly… Left, away from the direction Trucker Ken will be driving. Not too fast, don't want anyone to think that I'm trying to get away or anything, but not so slow that I can't evade when she-.

Evade!

Superhero Barbie zooms past, right fist reducing the edge of my shield to dust!

"Morning, Super Sparkle."

She turns, using her flight to arrest her momentum. She got super agility as part of her power package, and I know from painfully won experience that her three dimensional awareness is flawless.

"That’s not my name. What are you doing here, Brown Haired Ken?"

I can't help but smile. "Your hypocrisy never ceases to amuse me, Super Sparkle."

She draws her right hand back, a glowing pink ball forming at her fingertips.

"Are you kidnapping Kens?"

"I am not committing any crime. Which I imagine is why President Barbie sent you instead of Policewoman Bar-."

"That's Police Barbie!" She puts her hands on her hips. "And where is your assigned Barbie!?"

I shrug. "I honestly don't know. So far I mostly prefer the company of Kens anyway."

Which technically isn't a male/female distinction. I'm pretty sure that I'm the only one on this planet with reproductive organs.

"You should not be doing this."

"You're not this stupid, Super Sparkle. Try and be a little empathetic. How would you feel if you were treated like you treat your Ken?"

"Anyone who tried that would be very sorry."

I wait, but she's just doing that nearly-scowling thing that appears to serve as her war-face.

"Well, that's how just about every Barbie treats just about every Ken. And the Kens don't have super powers, so they're just deciding to leave. If you-."

"But Kens aren't Barbies. They're accessories. They're… Kens!"

"I'm sorry that you-."

Her head explodes! The echoing bang of the anti-material rifle shot reaches me a moment later as her body begins to fall to the ground.

W-what?

"Gotcha, bitch!"

Shit, track and down, landing just in front of the.. gynoid in the camouflage gear who's disassembling her gun.

"What, that was supposed to be a false flag?"

"Nah, brah." She pulls off her balaclava shows… A Barbie-like but legally distinct face. "SAS Sindy at chor service. Dun't seem loik bein' Ken's werkin' awt for yah. How's abaht bein' a Paul?"

"Oh… Kay?"

 

14th February 2013
21:03 GMT -6

Luna stares into space for a moment, her eyes turning white. Then she blinks and looks at me.

"He has arrived."

I nod, relaxing my metaphysique to try and reduce the chance that he'll feel any disruption. Wonder if Orin will be willing to trade copies of whatever Ahri'ahn has written since he got back to Cranius by way of restitution?

I mean I… Could assimilate him. I'm not… Keen on it, but that's a lot of information to lose to death. The alternative is simply killing him and… Some sort of necromantic ritual? I doubt that calling him away from Orcus's domain would-.

"We have a… Question."

"I quite understand if you don’t want to kill him-."

"Neigh, the sorcerer has earned his fate. It is more… When We were in the Dream realm, Our costume was clearly designed to draw the eye to Our mammaries and hips."

"Yes, it was. I believe that particular outfit is used for a form of exotic dancing."

"Your eyes were not drawn." Um. "Nabu looked, briefly. An instinctual response whose purpose We imagine that he barely remembers. Caliph Haroun al Raschid most certainly looked. We understand that Our equine form doth not hold your eye, but We had assumed that this.. bipedal form was more to your tastes."

"It's.. like I told you. I'm more cerebral in my arousal."

"There is 'cerebral' and then there is this." Her face falls a little. "We are quite put out that you do not find Us attractive at all."

"Luna, we're about to fight an ancient magician together, having infiltrated his home, robbed him of his power and thwarted his schemes." I step closer to her, leaning down as I intrude on her personal space. "I'm one metaphysical harmonisation away from tearing-."

Her head jerks up. "The trigger-."

"Right-oh."
My Might Cannot Be Contained!
I push off the floor, slamming into the ceiling and breaking through, sending stone flying in all directions as I enter the drawing room! Ahri'ahn looks a little more weathered than he did when he attacked Aberance, but glowing streams of water are already looping around his forearms as I form a fusion cannon in my left-

"Foul villain!"

Ahri'ahn withers, hair going from brown to white, flesh receding-.

I fire as Orin darts out of the way, Ahri'ahn barely being able to form the water into a defensive sigil-. Works though, my brilliantly burning beam blasting it to no effect-.

Ugh. Something in my throat and lungs, blocking, choking. Good job I don't need to breathe.
Eternal Labour.
Luna's got her spear out and is manoeuvring around to the left. I heft my daiklave and go for another shot as Ahri'ahn recovers enough to wave at Luna… Expanding the space between them and raise a gold-coloured sceptre to parry my swing. I knock him back, but between what's clearly a casting aid and his aged stick-like arms that should have either knocked him flying or crushed him.

He takes a moment to glare at me. "Creatures like-."

He dances to the side, body momentarily shifting into water as Luna teleports in behind him and swings her spear! Runes along the blade glow with freezing light as it narrowly clips his aquatic form, a tiny amount of water breaking away from the mass and freezing on the point. She follows up by turning that ice into a tiny cloud which she uses to fire a bolt of lightning at Ahri'ahn as he reforms.

Nice to see that Lightning Dust's lessons haven't gone to waste.

He batters it aside with a sword made of vapour but can't block my punch! This time he does go flying, wards in his clothing shunting furniture aside as he tumbles, landing face first on the floor. I leap after him, bringing my daiklave around for an overhead swing! His head comes up as the sword comes down, his body turning to water once more to flow away but I knew you'd do that!
Conquest Hungers!
Spears of orange light slam into the floor, furniture and Ahri'ahn's aquatic body, turning it faintly orange as I have a crack at assimilating him. It won't work of course, but-

"Unable to comply. Identity theft interrupted."

-he can only focus on so many things.

He reforms, or tries to. Some parts of his clothing are still water and are pinned by my spears. And his flesh hasn't fully reformed either, lending him a truly disturbing appearance. I order the spears not currently impaling him to swing in his direction, his eyes widening-.

He raises his right fist and then closes it, my constructs shattering and his body becoming more fleshy.

"I am not-!"

My yellow ring glows as the people of Atlantis begin to wake up and I use that extra oomph to pepper him with energy pulses. He winces at the first few as I charge across the room, then tries to raise a shield spell of some sort only for it to shatter as Luna's spear flies through the space it occupies. A flick of his wrists and some sort of liquid-. Acid, sprays out, eating through the stone of the floor and walls but mostly being neutralised by the spells on Luna's armour.

The glow of my ring brightens. He's losing his grip on them. Unfortunately he's also throwing off Luna's curse. His hair darkens to his original brown and his flesh becomes a little more vibrant.

"Not so easily-!"

Luna teleports behind him, catching her spear and spinning it at his side. A rune appears in the air next to it and it stops-
Bolster True Friend!
I swing my daiklave around, scything towards his chest only for a rune to shimmer into being and halt it-

And for a moment I feel.. every person in Atlantis. Every person in the world. All those sworn to be or willingly serving my purpose. And I feel Luna, her desire to fight with me, to share in my successes and failures!

-the runes fail, Luna's spear piercing Ahri'ahn's left side while my daiklave slices across his chest!

"Agh!"

Luna pulls her spear back, keeping it in him to neutralise his ability to magic himself out of this. I raise my daiklave for an overhead slash with my right hand while drawing the Sword of the Fallen with my left. Ahri'ahn grabs the haft of Luna's spear with his left hand and pushes himself off it while raising a shield with his right-.

Luna blasts him with lightning!
We Strike As One.
He shudders and wheezes as the air is forced from his lungs, his rushed shield failing to stop my descending daiklave! It bites into his left shoulder and keeps going, slicing through the middle of his chest and exiting through his right hip! He collapses, blood spurting and ruined organs falling onto the drawing room floor.

He stares at me with a look of absolute hatred for a few seconds before I put out his eyes with the Sword of the Fallen.

Haaaah.

I make eye contact with Luna. Armour's a bit beat up and there's a minor wound on her left cheek…
Your Wounds Are Mine.
My goodness.

"He's dead, then." Orin comes a little closer. "We'd better get ready for the cities to sink again."

"Can we leave that with you? Luna and I have…"

For someone not attracted to bipeds she's certainly breathing lustily enough. I can feel her desire.

"Something we urgently need to take care of."

 

15th February 2013
09:03 GMT -5

I dumped Volgar Zo's personal effects into the hold of the ship that we gave them to fly home with, minus anything that might contain useful data. As a result it's bare walls, bare bed and a bare desk and that's about it. Matter transmutation with a yellow ring appears to be more difficult than it was with orange rings, but with a little effort I manage to produce a glass containing a cool brown liquid.

Tuppence takes it, not looking entirely convinced.

"Sorry, new power ring."

"You ain't gaht no beer?"

"I could look around the pantry. The Dhorians do drink alcohol, I'm just not sure how it tastes to the human palate."

She shrugs, looking for somewhere to sit. I gesture to the desk chair, making a construct chair for myself.

"So…"

"What happened t'that..? Gong.. thing."

"Teleported to a Justice League holding centre before the first of Luthor's people came up." She frowns, confused. "Luthor's involved in quite a lot of criminal activity, and has been intelligent enough that it's been quite hard to prove any of it in court."

"Lex.. Luthor?" She frowns. "Y'all sayin' he's a criminal?"

"No, as I said, he hasn't been convicted of a crime."

She clearly doesn't get it.

"Alright, see, there's overt crimes, like those you and your brother committed, where no one's in any doubt that you're the ones who did them. You might outrun the pursuit, but if you ever got caught then you'd get convicted. Same with the Sivanas; Doctor Sivana Senior might try and hide what he was doing in a particular place and time, but he's generally perfectly happy for everyone to know that it was him who unleashed that giant robot. Then there's covert crimes, where something happens and it's not clear who did it, or even if it was criminal in the first place. For example, an elected official having a consultancy fee paid to an off-shore holding company they own and are the sole employee of for work relating to their district."

"Whut?"

"Okay, so an elected official probably shouldn't accept money for work for companies in their constituency, because it makes it look like they're taking a bribe. And when they get paid money it 'should' be paid to them and taxed at the appropriate rate, but if it gets paid to a non-US company then it's possible to avoid quite a lot of tax. And best of all, neither are necessarily illegal and both are quite lucrative. Especially when you compare them to the risks and rewards associated with smash-and-grab jobs."

"So he's secret-. Not-caught-yet criminal?"

"Yes."

She frowns. "What's he dun?"

"He's tried to have Superman murdered a dozen times or so. Plenty of financial chicanery, which may not sound impressive but it's made him a great deal of money. We're reasonably sure he was involved in that mass child murder thing a few years ago, though that connection's a little more tenuous. But I… Fear that we're getting away from the point."

She looks away, takes a sip of tea and then pulls a face before putting the glass down.

"I didn't lihk bein' froze up by th' gong."

"Yeah, I… I hate being powerless, too."

"Y'all gaht out of it."

"True, but it was a near thing. I don't think it would have worked if Icicle wasn't there."

She looks at me incredulously. "Yeah. Raht."

"No, seriously. I'm nothing like as good with a yellow ring as I am with orange rings. I could have frozen that whole room and been stuck there until I died. From dehydration." Hm. "Actually, I don't know it if would have stopped me recharging my ring, so it's possible that I would have stayed alive on an increasingly empty starship while Eiling, Icicle and Kadabra died of asphyxiation or dehydration."

Her face falls slightly.

"But they wouldn't have done that to you. They wanted to use you as a weapon. There wouldn't be any point in killing you."

"Ah ain't.. immortal. Raht?"

"That's correct. You can live a very long time and in good health, but you're not immortal. All of Hugo Danner's original Sons of Dawn died."

"'cause they got sick."

"Yes."

"Ah've bin in a lotta faghts. Got hurt sometimes." She looks away for a moment. "But ah ain't never been… Just… Stuck."

I nod sympathetically. "Not a lot of fun, feeling powerless. Especially when you're.. used to being able to change things."

She sort of nods and shrugs at the same time.

"Ah know the voice is… Anti-Life. We all geht it. Ah even… Talk ta Tommy abowt it, some."

"About being a weapon?" She nods. "We are… Basically using you as a weapon at the moment. I understand that helping people isn't really… Something that motivates you, but is there… Something that you want to.. do, outside of violence?"

"Dunno. Never thawt aboud it. An… Then ah… Ah nearly-. Ah felt like ah'd nevah get the choice."

"Now's not a great time for a voyage of self-discovery, but you nearly got pardoned after your last brush with heroism. This time it's a certainty. I can get you a tutor if you want to give school a try-. Kadabra's probably going to be busy learning magic."

"Ah ain't really one fer schoolin'."

"It was just a suggestion. And it could be different if you're doing it because you want to rather than because you're told to. I know that you're doing alright in Belle Reve's educational program. But hey, you can spend a few years smashing boats and seeing if anything appeals to you."

"How d'y'all stop a gamma gong?"

"If I knew how to block a gamma gong I wouldn't have been paralysed myself. Now that we've got one, I… When this is over, I could try having a look at it. Basically, I don’t know."

She nods. "An… Y'all know why Tommy gehts somethin' outta this an' ah don't?"

I shrug. "You're different people with different drives. Being able to protect people makes him feel good about himself. If you really don't feel the same way… Then… You don't. It might come when you expand your social circle outside of violent criminals, build actual social relationships… Or maybe you'd do better in an organised structure. Once you're free then you can volunteer for my organisation if you want. Heh, and if that doesn't work there are some mushrooms I can recommend."

She frowns, then shakes her head.

"Ah'm sayin' 'no'."

"Good call. Anything else you want to talk about right now?"

She shakes her head, getting up with her tea untouched after the initial sip. "Thanks."

"No problem. If you want to talk about anything, you know where I am."

 

15th February 2013
16:21 GMT -5

I try flexing my right arm, trying to test the range of motion. It's… It's actually about as good as my own power armour, but my armour wasn't designed to be something I could fight in. It was designed to be ablative. This is nothing like as tough. I suppose I should just be glad that the armour is flexible enough to cope with my size: most Dhorians are noticeably smaller than me.

The legs… Between their digitigrade legs and cloven feet, Dhorian leg armour isn't wearable by a human. And adapting them with a yellow ring is a lot harder than doing it with an orange ring would be. I've settled for bodging together shin guards and keeping my original boots.

And now the hard part.

"Orange Lantern to Abra Kadabra."

"Kadabra here."

"Do you have a moment? I'm about to take a look at my rings."

"I have tied the ship's computer to my implants, so it should be safe for-"

There's a quiet crackle and a slight breeze as he teleports to my location.

"-me to spend time away from the bridge."

"LexCorp not creating too much work?"

He hesitates for a moment. "Orange Lantern, I honestly believe that they are just glad to be away from the Anti-Life. Whatever Lex Luthor might want to do in other circumstances, I honestly believe that he's trying to help."

I look down. "Maybe."

"They were asking about bringing their families up here." He hesitates for a moment. "I know that you have a solution, but… They have children."

"And Mannheim's got a robot that can teleport up here whenever it wants to, and there aren't any child-sized space suits. Based on its demonstrated power, it could snap every one of these ships in half inside five minutes."

He nods slowly, right hand stroking his goatee. "Why has it not done so?"

"Mannheim might not know. He might not care. Or there might not be enough of Mannheim left to care."

"Darkseid does not care about Earth."

"We're mildly interesting, but he's conquered or razed worlds before. All he wants is to learn about the way we react to the Anti-Life." I sigh. "Which is the one problem with my plan, assuming that it works."

"We will become 'interesting'."

"I was always planning on killing Darkseid eventually. But we're nothing like ready yet. I.. don't even think we can distract him. But Earth can't survive like this, so… Just have to deal with it, I guess."

He nods, waving his wand at the area around me and creating a weak plasma field.

"I can monitor your brainwaves. I can detect signs of the Anti-Life in most people. But… Your thoughts are unusual."

"Oh. Um, while I've got you alone… How are you handling it?"

He smiles faintly. "There is little that the Anti-Life can use to get into me. I have almost everything I want, and after this? I will have everything that I want. All it accuses me of doing is trying to justify my criminal behavior."

"You sure? Because if there's anything you want to talk about, I'm right here."

"It… Ah. Also has some observations about my life before I returned to this era. It may be true, but as far as I'm concerned it doesn't matter."

I nod approvingly.

Alright.

Visual inspection. I use my fear of losing my rings to float them out of my pouch and put them down on a workbench. Other than a slight dimming of their orange glow I can't see anything off about them.

Alright, you. Show me-.

External Motivation = External Control

Quieter than before. Though that might just be because I'm not wearing them.

"Could you hear that?"

Kadabra shakes his head. "What does it say?"

"External motivation equals external control. It actually relates to the concept of eudemonia, where even Aristotle had to accept that even a virtuous person might have their life wrecked by bad luck."

"And for a man who wants to change the universe, someone might unleash the Anti-Life on his homeworld."

"I'd get it if I'd acted against Apokolips, but this genuinely isn't my fault."

"Perhaps." He narrows his eyes thoughtfully. "But I don't remember anything about Apokolips showing an interest in Earth during this part of its history."

"Did the Reach have dealings with Apokolips?"

"The records I have show that they thought of Apokolips as an enemy. But…" He shrugs. "I don't know if that was how the record always was. But if it was not you and it was not me, why would Nylor Truggs involve Apokolips?"

"I wouldn't assume that we're the only time travellers. And it might have been some sort of convoluted series of knock-on factors. An-anyway, there are two basic ways to neutralise this. Accept it, or contradict it. Accepting it would mean accepting that we live in networks of causation constantly acting on one another and that things outside me do control me about as much as I control them. The Apokoliptan risk there is Darkseid-. Or Mannheim just saying 'and now that control is mine'. To refute it, I would need to believe that I control what I want, and therefore can disregard the external whenever I want. The problem there is that it implies I have no fixed character and so neutralises the 'I'."

"And would allow Darkseid to tell you to become something else, since you accept that possibility."

"Yep."

"Are there no alternatives?"

"My solution will cleanse my rings, as long as they're close enough to Earth. But I need either another Orange Lantern or an Indigo Lantern, because I assumed that I would be providing the orange. I could try having the Ophidian eat the Anti-Life infection, but that sounds like a bad idea."

"It sounds like the most sensible thing to do would be to dispatch one of these ships to Vega or the Alignment and reach an Orange Lantern from there. They could communicate with Maltus or come here themselves when you need them."

"Assuming that just having an Anti-Life infection in my rings isn't messing something significant up, yes."

External Motivation = External Control

"Or I could use the yellow ring to fly there myself. Which would mean that I didn't have to rely on LexCorp. But. There are two other clones I made myself, and Mannheim could have made more still. I need to learn how to deal with successful Anti-Life infections or I'm going to have to bench myself for the rest of the campaign."

External Motivation = External Control

I slide the yellow ring off my finger and reach for my rings.

"So what?"

 

15th February 2013
16:25 GMT -5

I can feel it, as I slide the rings onto my fingers. The structures of my desire networks, being… Pressed. Surrounded by something that's applying a constant compressive force without there being anywhere else for the structure to move to.

External Motivation = External Control

Oh, alright. I'm Anti-Lifed. The thing pressing against my desires and forcing them into shape is the 'external motivation'. I can feel that pressure, that discomfort, in a way that I couldn't before. Was it always there, and I just couldn't see it? Or is it just the result of the Anti-Life getting its hooks in my soul?

Both, obviously.

Because the thing about the Anti-Life is that it's true, but how you respond to that is up to you. Because it's not the whole of the truth. Certainly, the external pressure affects my desires, but depicting that pressure as being this oppressive is simply wrong. It doesn't force me into shape, it gives any of these structures meaning. There's no point in fighting if you're not fighting for something.

It's not a hostile thing. It's not self versus environment. We're not so rigidly separate from our environments, our cultures, our tangible realities. I would be a radically different person just from growing up somewhere different even if I was biologically identical. Heck, I've met versions of me who were not merely genetically identical but shared a little under three decades of life experience, and some of them were very different people to me.

There is no prison. It pushes against me, I push against it. That is the nature of things.

External… Motivation…. =…

"Equals external existence, you worthless waste of quanta."

The rings on my ring fingers are glowing properly. Glow brighter, form a sword and shield construct… Yes, good.

I turn to Kadabra. "Well?"

His face is unusually still. "Who were you talking to?"

"The Anti-Life."

Now he looks uncomfortable. "Is it intelligent?"

"Not as far as I know. But that was pure anthropomorphism on my part. My brain?"

He wiggles his wand. "It… Matches the records I have for your usual patterns of activity. But… Do you have some sort of subspacial memory expansion?"

"No. But my mind uses the orange light for some things, not just my brain. Is that-?"

"Ah. Yes. Those parts of your thoughts I cannot properly detect."

I dismiss my sword and shield and replace them with a railgun. Test the charge… Yes, that works. Subspace pocket… Still filled.

"Do you think that you could defy the Anti-Life in the field?"

"Not immediately. It's just-. Suddenly there's an alien perspective in your mind. It's not something I can casually ignore right away."

"But it isn't affecting you now."

"I… Should probably get checked over by an actual professional, but I think that's correct." I gesture to his plasmic circle and he dismisses it with a wave of his wand. "And… I should probably do something about my armour."

"It's still in Washington. What's left of it."

"No, it's-. If I can get nobbled like that, then my old design rationale doesn't apply. I need something I can move in, not just something that can take a hit."

I look down at my legs, the orange glow already reformatting my ersatz leg armour into something properly integrated. A few other systems could do with an upgrade, but it's a generally solid design.

Okay, while that’s happening…

"Illustres to Controller Hinon. Please respond."

Nothing. Not even the static I got last time.

"So do I fly out, or do I stay here because I think they're deliberately isolating me?"

"Based on my analysis of your personality, you'll stay. But I don't think that's wise."

"I do need to get back in touch, otherwise they won't know when to send Orion. But that can wait until I've spoken to Guy or one of the other Lanterns in person. Or I can build a-."

"Ahh, Orange?"

I instinctively glance at the speaker. "Yes, Truggs?"

"It's Batman."

"What's Batman?"

"He's here. Ahh. Just teleported up."

Oh. I was expecting him to call ahead, but… Fine.

"Kadabra, can you teleport us to his location?"

He nods and flicks his wand. There's a crackling hum, and then we're… In the ship workshop. Batman is talking to Eiling, but cuts himself off and turns to us.

"Orange Lantern. It's good to have you back."

"That desperate, sir?"

"Frankly, yes. You said that you have a solution?"

"Combine the power of seven different power ring colours and funnel the resulting white light through the Anti-Life transmission network. That should expunge it completely, as well as undoing some of the damage."

"Do you have the rings?"

"Couldn't get an indigo ring, but I think we can probably bypass that using the Medusa Mask. Please tell me that we still have it."

"We don't."

Darn.

"Several of our holding centres were overrun before we could dispatch anyone to secure them. They usually had contacts amongst the superheroes who worked in their cities, and those superheroes were usually members of the Alliance of the Just. Is there another alternative?"

"Summon the Proselyte. Though that would have its own problems. Summon some other sort of compassion elemental… Summon Rachmiel the angel of mercy, love and compassion… Get hold of an actual Indigo Lantern. That's about it."

"Zauriel has informed us that no other angels will make themselves available. And I agree with you about the inadvisability of summoning an emotional entity. Another elemental is possible; consult with Zatara to see if there's anything that will work. Otherwise, try to locate the Medusa Mask. Obviously, removing the Anti-Life from Earth should be your top priority."

I nod. "Sir. I'll get right on that."

 

15th February 2013
16:52 GMT -5

"Sir?"

Batman looks up from the astronavigation console. Interesting that the LexCorp people aren't avoiding him. They don't even look nervous about him being here. I assume that's because Lex's conflict with the Justice League happens way above their level. Or that they've had a rethink after the third global disaster in three years.

"Yes?"

"Reviewing intelligence files. I've just got up to the… Mannheim's visit to Gotham. Has everyone..? Recovered? I know they've been cleared for.. active duty…"

He nods. "Yes. It was traumatic at the time, but with counselling and with help from Doctor Mist, everyone affected has made a full recovery. I've also made it clear that they should never have gone anywhere near Mannheim without Justice League support."

I nod. "The information they gained on the Anti-Life-."

"Could have been gained just as easily with far less risk. If we directly confront Mannheim, it will be with the full strength that we can bring to bear and not with one teenaged kryptonian." He looks thoughtful for a moment. "I should probably make you aware that the whole episode has prompted me to rethink my own approach to crime fighting."

"Sir?"

"You're aware that I originally chose the emblem of a bat because one flew through my study window after my first night out after returning to Gotham."

Ah…

"Holly Robinson is currently in a Justice League safe area. I believe that you mentioned it to her."

Yeah, I… Think I did.

"But I didn't tell her that she was the one who stabbed you. Did-?"

He looks away for a second, then looks back at me. "I hadn't realised. The most serious injury I suffered were bullet wounds from the police officers who arrested me. I'd almost forgotten about the underage prostitute who stabbed me. How did you work that out?"

"I asked about Holly's personal history. It came up when we were talking about when Selina got out of that line of work."

"Mm."

Okay, I think he bought it.

"Did you read the part about how the Anti-Life causes the emergence of city bosses?"

"Yes. I hadn't realised that it would work like that, but it makes sense."

"That's actually what made me reconsider the way I work."

"Sir?"

"The Anti-Life effectively rewards brutal strongmen and gang leaders. Tyrants, whose power is backed by force and by the fear their lootenants feel in them. After Robin was exposed to the Anti-Life I realised that I could easily have become a city boss myself."

"I don't think it would be a good idea, sir."

"No, it wouldn't. The day… Holly stabbed me was the day I decided to use the image of the bat to inspire fear in the Gotham criminal underworld. It was… Effective, for a time."

"Sir?"

"It can't have escaped your notice that the Joker isn't afraid of me. He regards mass murder as a game. I don't think there's any level of intimidation that I could bring to bear that would dissuade him."

"No, sir. He's mental."

"Having people afraid of me didn't stop Riddler, or Two Face. It didn't even stop Penguin or Catwoman. Gotham isn't as bad now as it was when I started, but even the regular gangs treat being hospitalised by me as the price of doing business rather than something to actually fear. Joining the Justice League should have made me reconsider how I operated, especially when I started talking to Superman-."

"Sir? I'm not.. sure.. where you're going with this?"

"It would have been easy for me to work within the confines of the Anti-Life, when that's the absolute last thing that I want. So I've decide to change some parts of the way I work."

…

"So… You're not treating criminals as a superstitious and cowardly lot?"

I get a mild frown, but he shakes his head. "I don't think they're more superstitious than anyone else, and I've had enough criminals pick fights with me when the only thing on the line was their pride to know that they're not cowardly. Not all cowardly, at least. It was really more that they weren't committed, and I saw plenty of people in the Gotham City Police Department who equally lacked that commitment."

"So you're..? Abandoning fear as a tool?"

"I think the Earth has seen enough fear."

Well… That's a… Problem. I mean, who's my backup option? Crane? I-.

Wait. Power Ring -16. He could do it, and he owes me, and apparently he's up to something with his version of Supergirl, so... Okay. Okay. Not a complete disaster.

Batman's looking at me.

"Is there a problem?"

"Bit of a surprise sir, but I'll live. Um. Okay, I've got a couple of possible locations to check out. Who's available to back me up?"

"Just Eiling's squad. Having you operate out of these ships should be fine in the medium term, but bringing anyone else here risks drawing Mannheim's attention."

I nod. "I agree. That was the reason I gave for not sheltering the crew's families."

He hesitates for a moment, looking a little uncomfortable. Then he nods.

"That is the correct decision. Keeping them out of the way will be more effective than putting them in a military facility like a warship. Have you decided where you're going to start looking?"

"The Medusa Mask was in S.T.A.R. Philadelphia, so I may as well start my search in that area. It will probably be easier to investigate on my own and call the others in if there's a fight."

He shakes his head. "Don't go alone. Take at least one member of your squad with you."

I nod. Kadabra would probably be most useful, but I need him here to operate the ship. Eiling is the most disciplined, so I should leave him behind to take charge of the others. Standing Bear isn't in any mental shape to enter an Anti-Life infected region. That leaves Mahkent and Tuppence. Mahkent doesn't look like a baseline human, so if I'm going to be sneaking around then Tuppence is the one I want.

"Will do. Anything else?"

"Make sure to report what you encounter. We still don't know exactly what Mannheim or his agents are doing, and every piece of information could be vital."

"Understood, sir. I'll let you know how it goes."

 

15th February 2013
17:16 GMT -5

Tuppence looks distracted as we walk through the old headquarters of the All-Star Squadron. While the old Justice Society headquarters in New York is a museum these days, this place just got repurposed by some part of the labyrinthine mess of the United States's defence imbroglio. The meeting room where the greatest superheroes of their generation met up is now a lecture theatre, and the gymnasium is now a canteen.

"You doing alright?"

She recognises what she was doing and tries to cover it up. "What is this place?"

"This is where the superheroes involved in World War Two used to be based. Blue Lantern showed me around once."

He didn't think much of the place. The Trust running the Justice Society's museum makes sure to leave the structure pretty much as it was, just upgrading the lights and wiring. The Defense Department -or whoever runs this place- didn't do that, so there isn't really anything he could point to and say 'I remember when'. And I got the impression that he wasn't too keen on the War Department in general.

"So?"

"Just making conversation."

The place is empty now, unlike the Pentagon which is in full operation. Mannheim might have full control but he still needs a command structure and logistical management. I wonder if they evacuated, or followed orders that moved them somewhere else? Or if they were all killed. No obvious blood stains on the lino floor, and enough dust that I doubt that anyone is still coming in to clean it. The heating is still working but that's all automatic.

"Y'all think that mask thang is in heer?"

"No, almost certainly not. But this building is shielded enough that the people outside shouldn't be able to detect our teleportation. And I was sort of hoping that there might be a few holdouts."

"Dun look lahk it."

"I don't know. We haven't checked the entire building yet."

She rolls her eyes. "Jus' have Atom do it, so's we can do somethang else."

"Mister Atom's drones don't have the capacity of a power ring, so I'm sorry, but you'll have to put up with it for now." Because while my ring scans say that they're telling me everything, somewhere like this, I can't assume that's actually correct. "Though well done for adapting to the use of drones in warfare."

"Beats doin' ev'rythang mahself."

Management offices are a dead end. Rune stone doesn't glow, no 'unscannable' spaces or suspiciously effective automated defences. The safes that were still closed only contained normal secret documents. A couple looked like they'd had their contents burned, but that's no use to me. I take scans of the surviving documents and D.N.A. traces, just in case it turns out to be useful.

So down we go.

Tuppence is still frowning, but now she's frowning at her environment. "Where'd alla the people go?"

"I don't know. If I had to guess, they stayed at home. Or they were Anti-Lifed, and Mannheim had no interest in this place."

The next floor has offices, meeting rooms and the aforementioned lecture theatre. I can't detect anyone-.

Hm.

I float up to a ceiling-mounted camera and use a construct knife to remove the housing. Heh. There's a ward on the interior, and now I can scan it properly I can see the more advanced sensors that it has in addition to the simple digital camera. I don't recognise the design, but it's easily good enough to detect me using my ring. The camera feed is going to the server in the basement, but the other sensor-.

There's a puff of smoke as it burns itself out. Why did-?

Oh, I see. That part of the spell is designed to break down if the cowling is removed. That's some surprisingly sophisticated arcane technology for America.

"Someone spa'ing on us?"

"Since we're in their building, it's not really 'spying'."

That suggests LexCorp to me, but it doesn’t prove it. And of course ninety five percent of LexCorp's work is perfectly legal and another four percent is legalish. Nothing strange about wanting a better security camera.

So much I don't know.

I restore the circuits as best I can and then replace the cowling. Probably won't work, but at least it should make it easier to replace the enchantments. Then a whole lot of fairly generic rooms that match with what I saw last time. Nothing registers as magical, nothing has the wrong internal dimensions and there aren't any people.

"This is borin'."

"That's life, I'm afraid."

I lead the way down the stairs to the ground floor. Garage, shooting range, gym and canteen. The range is our best bet for finding anything odd, and I've seen seven more cameras modified like the one I first identified. Most of them are normal. Not sure why only some are altered or why it's those ones in particular; none of them were in particularly significant locations. Maybe the aim was to get complete coverage of the building? That should be possible, but… It's not like this is a fortress or anything.

Or is it?

I stick a construct probe through an interior wall, then an exterior wall. And then a few more of each. I examine the samples while Tuppence ducks down so that she can look out through one of the exterior holes.

"Y'all not like windows?"

"I was wondering whether or not this building had been covertly fortified. If they'd lined the walls with armour panels of something exotic. Doesn't look like it. It's just normal brick."

I repair the walls, to Tuppence's disgruntlement. Then I enter the range, bypass the lock on the armoury door and take a look at some of the weapons. There are a few LexCorp pieces, but various parts of the US government have been putting contracts for next generation weapons out to tender so that isn't strange either. And there's a WayneTech version of the stun gun Guy's been using ever since he found out he was allowed a sidearm. High reliability, low lethality. Maybe that's what they were doing-

"Can ah jus' take these?"

-here.

"Actually, yes. This gun is very unlikely to kill-."

I turn and see the plasma cannon she's picked up.

"That gun is very likely to kill anything you hit with it, it's relatively fragile and we don't have any way to reload it. And we're supposed to be sneaking around, so-."

"Put it in youwer ring… Pocket.. thing."

"You really want it?"

She aims it in the general direction of the-.

"No, no." I tether it with a filament and send it into subspace. "Okay. I'll carry it." Ah… I grab the maintenance handbook and subspace that as well. "Maintaining it will be your job. I hope you enjoy reading technical documentation."

She shrugs. I hadn't realised that she acted up when she got bored, but in retrospect perhaps I should have considered that possibility. I also hadn't considered whether or not Danner enhanciles could get foetal alcohol syndrome, but as far as I know their mother didn't start drinking until after they were born.

"Alright, we just need to check the basement and then we can start canvassing-."

The intercom clicks.

"Orange Lantern. What are you doing here?"

 

15th February 2013
17:24 GMT -5

"Trying to find an artefact called the Medusa Mask." I try using empathic vision on the intercom, but it's warded. And I imagine that it would go up in smoke if I opened it to try and study it. "Who am I talking to?"

"Father Time. I'm the head of a US government organisation called S.H.A.D.E."

I nod. I remember them from the Seven Soldiers comic series, where they somehow managed to be the only superhuman intelligence agency to function against the Sheeda. Probably because they were so small no one remembered to close them down. I think Father Time got killed by Adom during his rampage, but I don't remember anything other than that.

"And you're still you. That's quite impressive."

"I've been through worse. Why do you think that it's here?"

"Its last recorded location was S.T.A.R. Philadelphia. It's probably not still there, but this is as good a place to start looking as any."

"The Justice League is a little late on doing housekeeping. This horse bolted a month ago."

"This isn't housekeeping. This is a way to win."

"With the Medusa Mask. A device that can alter people's emotions."

"I believe there's a little more to it than that."

"Like what?"

"Like that's need to know and I'm not telling someone whose identify I can't confirm over an open microphone."

"Heh. Fair enough. I'm not exactly shy, but everything here is set up so that if it gets interfered with, it stops working."

"Okay?"

"In the case of my little hidey-hole, it stops working explosively because I couldn't take the risk of getting contaminated."

"And I assume that there isn't a window..?"

"On our budget? I'm impressed there's a door."

"Do you know anything about what happened at S.T.A.R.?"

"I had a guy on the inside. He… Should have had devices on him that would make him able to resist mind influence effects, but we couldn't test it in situations like this. I haven't heard from him since just after it happened."

"And what did he say?"

"That a bunch of guys in bulky helmets were attacking the place, and some of them were wearing uniforms of superheroes from the Alliance of the Just."

"Yes, that was just a way for Mannheim to get as many superheroes in one place as he could so he could Anti-Life them at his convenience."

"So he's probably dead, but if he isn't, he's the best placed to help you out."

"What's his name?"

"Agent Abraham Carlyle." I access their database. "He looks-."

"Quite a lot like Uncle Sam. I'll take that as a good sign. Any idea where he might be if he's not at S.T.A.R.?"

"His apartment? We're not one of those agencies that has hidden bunkers all across America just so we can go to ground."

"No?"

"We've got a list of bunkers no one else is using, and the occasional fallout shelter that we picked up cheap when no one else wanted to buy it. There's one under the Philadelphia Museum of Art and another in the Philadelphia Water Department Field Office. Nothing else in state."

"Do you know who's in charge of the local Justified?"

"It's not me."

Tuppence snorts with amusement. "Y'all think maybe getting' stuck in a hole weren't such a great plan?"

"Sure. Just give me ten billion dollars and I'll make sure it never happens again. Who exactly is in charge now, anyway?"

"Effectively? Bruno Mannheim. Nathaniel Adams in nominally in charge of the parts of the US government that are free. The US Constitution wasn't really written with this in mind, something that I take as an insult to the country of my birth."

"Ah-heh."

"Batman and Mister Atom are splitting coordination duties, but I've only just got back to Earth. I don't know exactly how things are set up."

"More than I know."

"Do you have anything useful on hand that could help us?"

"Probably. But it all needs to be configured for the user and I'm a little short staffed right now. You're in the armoury? Help yourself, for all the good it will do."

"Y'all know who made the big laser gun?"

"If you mean the heavy plasma gun, it was made by Alva Industries. The engineer who worked on it here's a guy called Brian Thompson, but he hasn't been back since this all happened."

"See if ah kin fahnd him."

"Thank you for your help, Father Time. I'll let you know if we get anywhere."

"Not like I'm going anywhere."

Right. I send my power armour into subspace and switch over to shabby-looking street clothes. I've got lighter armour on underneath, though it's nothing that will take a serious hit. My force field generators join my armour in subspace because a random bloke on the street wouldn't have something like that. Tuppence is already ready to go.

"Okay. If anyone asks, we were here to plunder the kitchens."

She frowns. "Anyone ask, ah'm gunna punch 'em so they don't ask agin."

"That… May be situationally correct, but remember that we don't know who's in charge here. I'd rather maintain cover for as long as possible. And I don't think that you can fake being as weak as a woman of your size should be."

She grunts in acknowledgement, and I decide that that's as good as I'm going to get. Main door is that way, but I think it would make more sense to go out via the car park. Less chance of someone seeing us.

Not many cars in here. The security gate is locked down, but a few seconds with a power ring will fix-.

Tuppence has stopped.

"Tuppence?"

She's looking at a rather nice hatchback, which-.

"Ain't stealin' if it's an emergency."

"It would draw too much attention. Fuel deliveries haven't been happening and the power supply isn't regular."

She grunts in acceptance as the front gate opens and we advance into the city.

 

15th February 2013
17:48 GMT -5

The roof of the Philadelphia Museum of Art provides excellent views of the city. And the sight is…

Interesting.

The roads have been cleared, and there are lorries driving around on the city's roads. I can also see buses parked up next to warehouses and parks which are being converted into farmland, presumably to transport workers to and fro at the start and end of the working day. Over on the other side of the river the area around the Anti-Life broadcaster has been fortified with concrete bunkers and sniper nests, all of which are manned. I can see several helmeted Justifiers there, though I don't know if they're there in a leadership capacity or serving as elite fighters.

We're not far from Washington, here. This place is wired in to Mannheim's infrastructure.

"We gunna take that down?"

"No. That would attract too much attention."

Her face twitches, and she looks for another target for her aggravation.

"I'm sorry, but this really is a sneaking around sort of mission. If we need something broken, things have gone badly wrong."

"Fahn."

No one hanging about on the street, unlike Gotham. I suppose that's what happens when there's a broadcaster this close. There are guards wherever there are people, but the people being guarded don’t look up or around.

A little slice of Apokolips.

The question is, how do we find someone to get basic information from? No one stopped us on the way over here, but the lowlies wouldn't stop someone and the guards… Not sure. Maybe they assume that we're going to get Anti-Lifed if they just leave us alone?

We need to either make contact with someone or find Agent Carlyle.

De-helmeting one of the Justifiers might work, but it would almost certainly alert all of the others. And… We're here now.

Alternately, we could go to S.T.A.R. and try and get their surveillance records. That would tell us who looted the place, and that might lead to where they're being held. But S.T.A.R. is at the other end of the city and I don't really want to try teleporting point to point.

Although…

"Okay, so we're looking for the Medusa Mask." I lead the way back to the roof access and inside the building. "How would you go about it?"

"Fahnd someone fancy-lookin', break bones 'till he squeals."

"What if he doesn't know?"

She shrugs moodily. "Fahnd someone else when yer done."

"And if he screams and all his friends come running?"

"Saves tahm."

We walk down through the public areas, heading towards the storage rooms in the basement. No effort has been made to loot or defile the place, and no effort has been made to preserve it either. It's mostly in reasonable shape, but there's a wet patch where a window has been propped open and rain has gotten in.

"Not really practical."

"I dunno. Why you askin' me?"

"Because someday, Tuppence, you're going to be in a position where you have to work out how to do something like this, and I won't be there to do it for you."

"Ain't mah thang."

"Well, we can have a deep and personal conversation instead if you like. You know, last I heard, your mother was three months sober, and-."

"Ahh! We could-. Blend in real good in those farms? Geht a Justifier helmet and take out the Anti-Life stuff, wear it around and ask who the local bowss is?"

"Good ideas, except that if the guards are awake they'll see that we're not under Anti-Life control. And I'm reasonably confident that the Justifiers can do the same."

"Y'all got that Anti-Life thing in yer rings, raht? Could that work?"

Hm. "I honestly don’t know. It might, but it would be a risk that we couldn't assess in advance."

"Huh?"

"I'd have to put myself in that mindset, walk up to them and hope that they couldn't tell the difference. And that it wouldn't start working for real."

"Geht someone who can read their mahns?"

"Reading the minds of the workers could work. Anyone higher than that and you'd risk the telepath getting Anti-Lifed."

I generate a key card construct to get us into the staff area, swiping it through the card reader and pulling the door open.

"Cameras? They gaht cameras, raht? Watch 'em, follow where they go."

"That's a good idea. It wouldn't risk exposing us, my rings can analyse the pictures faster than someone reviewing them manually and it could give us an idea what else was going on in the area."

Staff entrance is that way, preservation work that way, staff canteen… Long term storage, that's what we want.

"Agent Carlyle, if you're in here, we're friendly!"

"Y'all already thawt a'that. Ain't that raht?"

"Yes, but I've been doing this a bit longer than you."

"If it's so smart, how come we ain't doin' it?"

"This was closer. And we do need to find him."

The entrance to long term storage-.

"Notice anything odd?"

Tuppence blinks at the forklift truck, the large workspace and the roller shutter door which would grant the forklift access. Then she notices what I noticed.

"There should be a card reader thang. It's gawn."

I look at the small rectangular hole in the wall next to the regular door.

"Yes indeed. Two obvious possibilities. They were having maintenance done and it didn't get finished-."

"Someone broke in. No dust 'round the door."

I smile at her, and she nearly smiles back.

"'No dust' means that they came in and out a lot. Otherwise there would be discrete footprints. Now, remember, if he's in here, he's probably going to be jumpy and certainly isn't expecting company." I extend filaments into the hole and trigger the mechanism to open the door. "So don't take it personally if he shoots us."

She shrugs as I pull the door open and-.

Oh dear.

 

15th February 2013
17:54 GMT -5

Smoke doesn't billow out, because the ash has long since settled. A small amount is kicked up by the increased airflow, causing a wave to waft from the doorway and pass over the floor. The remains of wooden packing crates are just about visible in places, as… Are human remains. No, in a place like this those should have been completely disintegrated-. Lack of oxygen? No, no, this room contains valuable and highly flammable material. The fire outpaced the sprinklers for a while. I can see patches where the soot was washed away from where it landed, but there's no drainage so it eventually just dried out again. Which suggests that the local water main has been turned off. Or… There's some other obstruction stopping it flowing into this building?

"So where's the bunker?"

Are there enough skull fragments or genetic residues for a reconstruction? Not one I'd want to depend on, but I don't think any of them are Agent Carlyle. Shame about the collection.

Hm.

Sprinklers aren't tied to a fire alarm that could be deactivated with the press of a button. It's a purely mechanical process. When the glass gets hot it breaks and then there's nothing to stop the water spraying out. The system isn't quick to trigger -unlike smoke alarms- but once it does it keeps going until the water pressure gets too low. A fire could burn in the face of that quantity of water, but only if it was very hot.

I scan the floor. Yes, chemical residue. Someone used incendiaries. The humans remains aren't good enough to tell me if they were shot first. Looks like a… Grenade? Though it could be some sort of custom mine. Not laser or plasma-.

Tuppence waves her right hand in front of my eyes.

"Just trying to work out what happened."

"Is he deyed?"

"Probably not."

She stares at me for a moment, then gestures ahead of us. I blink.

"Ev'rythang's burned up. Ain't gonna burn ahgeyan. They're deyed. There any more traps?"

"Not that I can detect. And this looks low tech."

Alright, I suppose that it doesn't exactly matter…

I walk inside, Tuppence just behind me. I.. step around the human remains, but beyond basic respect I don't think there's much point in preserving the scene of the crime. Actually…

I wave my right hand, a wave of orange gathering up the ash and melting the exterior of the mass into a container for the rest. I deposit that out of the way and then gather what I can of the human remains, laying them out off to the side.

And then I close my eyes and bow my head.

"I commend the souls of these poor unfortunates into the care of Lord Hades. I pray that he judges them generously, and that they find peace in his realm."

"… Oh."

I open my eyes to see Tuppence closing her eyes and bowing her head.

"You don't need to do that. You're not a Hellenist."

She raises her head to look at me. "No, but… I thawt we were…"

"Oh, sorry, you can say a prayer if you want. I… Just didn't think you were religious."

"Ah didn't think you were."

"I've been to Heaven and met the gods I worship. I say prayers to help the souls of the deceased reach their afterlife, and I've proven that it works. I have no 'faith' because I've never needed it. I made a deal and I'm sticking to it."

She frowns, not knowing what to make of that. "So how come you sent an angel to look aftah Mom?"

I shrug. "He was available, persuadable and capable. Ah."

"Whut?"

"I believe that I've found the 'bunker'."

I stride across the now-cleared storage room and over to a heavy metal door. There are actually several, and the rest look like they're vaults for holding the most valuable objects. This one on the other hand isn't wired up like the rest, and I can't scan the interior. Or rather, I'm getting… False but unconvincing readings, like there's a weak deception spell on the place but it doesn't know how to lie convincingly to a power ring scan. I could probably destroy it, but I'd rather not just go around destroying things when there's no need.

Tuppence grabs the door and-

"Tuppence-."

-rips it out of the frame with a screech of torn metal and a crack of fractured brickwork!

"For goodness-."

"Ah, you bothered looking for me."

A somewhat dishevelled man steps out of the darkness, a copy of the weapon I'm holding for Tuppence held unsteadily in his hands.

"And here I was looking forward to drinking my own urine again."

"That's a bit odd, Agent Carlyle. Can I offer you some actual water instead?"

His eyes narrow slightly. "No helmets, and you sound coherent. So either I'm hallucinating again, or-."

He shoots Tuppence in the centre of the chest, plasma beam blasting her across the room!

"Or you found another telepath!"

The recoil makes him stumble back, but he tries to bring his gun to bear on me as I form a railgun and load a crumbler round.

"No way would the real Orange Lantern-."

I shoot out the main electrical power cable to the primary capacitor, causing the hydrogen feed to shut down automatically.

"Read the manual? Because I did."

He looks at the gun as Tuppence picks herself up and checks the burns on her abdomen. Nothing too serious.

"Ah, nuts." He tosses his weapon aside and takes a step back. "I guess-"

He twists his lower jaw slightly to the side-.

"-I-."

I zip forward and clamp his head in a scold's bridle construct before he can bite down on his… Yes, cyanide tooth. A flash of orange and I've replaced it with a regular tooth. Check for other suicide devices… Nothing. Check his general health…

I dismiss the construct. "When was the last time you slept?"

"I can sleep…" He wobbles. "-when I'm dead. Or rather… I can't, because you can't sleep while wearing a behavioral regulator."

"That's what you're using to keep the Anti-Life out?"

"Something… Something like that."

"Okay." I raise my rings towards him. I can't replace sleep, but I can deal with some of the consequences of constant wakefulness.

He blinks hard twice as the effect hits him.

"Whoa. Okay. Shit, is she-?"

Tuppence prods her fully healed stomach, then scowls at him.

"Guess that thing needs to go back to the drawing board." He sighs. "Okay. What do you need?"

 

15th February 2013
17:59 GMT -5

"You got anything to eat that's not gift shop-?"

I deposit a nutritious bowl of stew on the tiny table in his 'bunker', along with a spoon. He grabs the bowl-.

"With the spoon. And eat slowly; you're not starving yet but your stomach probably isn't used to normal food."

"Right." He pushes the edge of the spoon through a piece of beef and scoops it up with a dash of gravy. "Yeah."

"So." He looks fairly alert as he chews, but he keeps it in his mouth longer than simple refuelling would require. "What happened at S.T.A.R. Philadelphia?"

"When the..? Anti-Life hit?" I nod. "Everyone freaked out. I kept-. I mean, we don't get trained for that exact thing, but I've been attacked telepathically before. I got to the senior researcher, snapped her out of it, and we started up lockdown procedures. I was… At the time, I assumed that it was a limited attack against S.T.A.R. Philadelphia rather than..."

He takes another small scoop and stares at it morosely for a moment.

"Guess we all got used to the Justice League just.. fixing stuff. I mean, right away."

"The Sheeda rather demonstrated that it doesn't just happen."

"We were still looking into how we needed to change after the Sheeda." He hiss-laughs with feigned humour. "In case you're wondering, 'increase organizational resources available to non-League superheroes' was on the list."

"And I'd have agreed with it. But please, I need to know-."

He shakes his head. "We didn't-. Nothing much happened for about… Three hours? Most of the staff were… Kind of functioning by then. I thought they were shaking off the attack. Heh."

"Were they?"

He stares into my eyes. "You know the Anti-Life doesn't work like that. You don't overcome it. You either learn to live with the feeling or you get-. Pulled under by it."

"And your… Regulator?"

"I can't get pulled under. That's all. It doesn't make it go away. And every time I nearly…" He shudders. "It's pretty obvious I got the beta test version."

"It's not common issue to S.H.A.D.E. agents?"

"I don't think I'm technically a S.H.A.D.E. agent… It says 'N.S.A.' on my badge.." He shakes his head and takes another scoop. "Doesn't matter. Anyway. Three hours. After the first hour I started making calls. Didn't get an intelligent response from anywhere. The next step was to arrange a transfer to a vault, but I didn't know how possible that was. With everything that was going on…"

I nod. "A reasonable decision, under the circumstances."

"Yeah. So, a couple of superheroes turned up. We were in lockdown, so even with them being on the authorised list they weren't allowed in. Shouldn't have been allowed in." He shakes his head again. "People inside opened the doors. Head of Research removed the lockdown."

"It didn't require your authorisation?"

"That's S.H.A.D.E. for you. We don't have a lot of official power, but people listen to us because we know what we're talking about. But my name wasn't on the list of required authorizations." He shakes his head. "You've seen what they're like. A word from someone… Higher up the Anti-Life chain, and they just do it. I don't-."

He takes another scoop of stew.

"Don't what?"

"America. Americans. I always figured that we'd do better if something like this happened. More independent, more independently minded than other people. Less prone to groupthink. So are we?"

"Not so you'd notice, though that might be because Mannheim is focusing on America. Thanks to Teth Adom, Kahndaq's probably doing the best. What happened after the researchers let the Justifiers in?"

"What do you think happened? Security was working for them. The scientists were working for them. My regulator kept me out of it… Don't know why they didn't kill me. I grabbed that gun and… Fled. Couldn't secure any of the artefacts. As… Far as I know they're all still there."

"Are they secure?"

He shakes his head. "They've got the run of the place. And that was more than a month ago. I don't… I've stuck my head out a few times, but the place is locked down by… Justifiers, you call them?"

"The ones with the helmets. It transmits Anti-Life signals right into their heads, like one-person transmitters. While it's on, you can't talk them around. The Justice League's been destroying the factories where they make them, but removing them in a fight isn't a simple matter."

He nods.

"So is the equipment still on-site?"

"As far as I know. But it's not like I can keep the place under constant watch. For all I know they've moved the equipment all around the country by now."

I nod. "We'll still have to check. Is there a secret way in?"

"The aim of a good security procedure is to stop people sneaking in. Best I can do…" He gets up and rummages around in a briefcase. "Here." He turns back with a couple of lanyards. "These are security passes. Assuming that they haven't gone through the whole system with a fine toothed comb they should still let you in. You'll still have to come up with something for human security yourself, but that'll handle the automated systems."

I take them from him and hand one to Tuppence.

"Thank you. Are they just carrying on their work?"

He shakes his head, picking up the stew again. "I don't know. They knew my face, so I couldn't risk getting back inside."

"Any particularly notable objects I should know about?"

"There were a couple of Sheeda weapons. This isn't the main site for Sheeda equipment, but there was so much that some things ended up here. Ah… Some samples of Scarecrow's fear toxins and… Drug-related things. Sorry, I only… I don't remember everything."

"That's fine, we'll make do. Do you need anything else?"

He shakes his head. "No. And there's nothing else I can do in Philadelphia anyway. If you're going to take care of S.T.A.R., then I think I'll try getting to Fawcett. Or away from the cities, anyway."

"That's probably a good plan. But don't risk yourself unnecessarily. I'm planning to have this resolved in a couple of weeks, and as long as you've got potable water you can survive that long in here."

"Yeah, I don't like the idea of hanging around and waiting for someone else to take care of things. It's un-American. Even if all I can actually do is get myself out of the way, I'll take that over sitting on my ass."

I nod. "I can respect that. Best of luck to you. Tuppence, we've got an infiltration to plan."

 

5th June 2000
18:12 GMT -6

It's strange, walking through Alliance headquarters like this. Most of the personnel are… I don't know if they're deliberately staying out of my way or if… Well, between Rinaker's betrayal and newly enthroned Director Walter Logan's new direction, they're 'considering their positions'. I doubt that he's looking at a palace coup; with Trueblood dead there isn't really anyone who might want to mount a direct challenge who has the internal support to be successful in doing so. But if enough people just quit, either because they think the organisation is illegitimate or because they don't want to reach an accommodation with aliens, then it will collapse and some branch of the American government will absorb its assets.

The two agents on guard duty outside of Director Logan's briefing room shift uncomfortably as I approach, but maintain their discipline. The left one nods.

"You can go right in. The Director and his other guest are waiting for you."

I'm not sure why Director Logan wanted to talk to me personally. Chauf's head of the Conduit, Mab rules the Banshee, Dorn leads the vampire… Contribution, and Jerich will be heading back to his people's homeworld just as soon as he can repair his hyperdrive. I don't have the authority to speak for anyone except myself. I don't even have the authority to speak for Percival.

Oh well.

I push the door open and step inside the meeting room. The Director smiles politely and nods at me from his position at the head of the table, while Dorn… Sits, on the far side of the table. He isn't using a disguise so his serpentine tail is awkwardly draped over his seat to avoid him towering over us. His face is expressionless, his eyes staring as if he were trying to pierce my faceplate.

The tip of his tail twitches slightly as my armour brightens slightly.

"Thank you for coming, Green Knight." The Director gestures to a chain opposite Dorn. "Please, take a seat."

Maintaining my robotic demeanour, I pull out the indicated chair and sit in it.

"As I said after we defeated the shadoen, I want to bring all of the alien inhabitants of the Earth under the Alliance's umbrella. And a part of that is… Resolving any outstanding disputes that might prevent people from working together. Mister Dorn has asked me to arbitrate a peace settlement between you and his Family."

I turn my head to look directly at Dorn, his face expressionless.

"You have been quite effective at attacking our operations. I want to know what it will cost me for that to stop."

I clasp my hands on the table before me, then remain motionless for a few moments. Then I move my right hand and reach down to pick up the text-to-speech machine one of the Alliance agents gave me as a replacement for my notepad when their sign language interpreter admitted that he didn't understand BSL.

My right hand glows green as I bypass the keyboard.

"Nothing."

Dorn's eyes flick to the Director for a moment.

"That could be interpreted in two different ways."

"We will never be friends. But your Family stepped up when you could have hid or fled. You have earned my forbearance."

"Oh." He doesn't really smile, but his posture relaxes a little. "That's-."

"But there are conditions."

He actually stays relaxed. "I had assumed. What are they?"

"Your Family stepped up. Intracom. Other unaligned vampire families remain targets."

Now he smiles. "When is the cut-off?"

"Two weeks."

The Director looks slightly puzzled. "Pardon me?"

Dorn turns to look at him. "The Green Knight has apparently decided that I'm the best person to lead not merely my family, but all vampires on Earth. I was planning on trying to pressure the others into accepting my leadership anyway, but being able to include protection from the Green Knight as part of the package will strengthen my negotiating position. He has built up quite a reputation." He turns back to me. "I assume you want something else as well."

"All thralls are to be released and compensated."

"That's a.. Hard sell."

"It is necessary. You are public now. Your technology will be in high demand."

The Director shakes his head. "Releasing advanced technology to national governments is risky. I haven't even briefed the President on what exactly it is that we have."

Dorn looks mildly pained for a moment, then waves his left hand. "We can withhold weapons technology if that's what bothers you. Intracom computer systems are still generations ahead of-."

"No. Weapons are necessary. We need to be ready for the next shadoen fleet."

The Director regards me levelly. "Do you have intelligence?"

"Analysis of shadoen computer systems. It will not come immediately, but they already know that their ships were destroyed. The next fleet will be assembled within a few years. The Alliance is not designed to manufacture advanced weapons in sufficient volume. Intracom could."

Dorn grins. "Just selling off our existing stock alone could-. We could easily cover the costs of liberating our thralls. And we can compensate the.. poor unfortunate souls so cruelly enslaved by my predecessor."

Director Logan is significantly less sanguine about the idea than Mr. Dorn, but cautiously nods. "Subject to normal arms trading laws."

"Everyone saw the fleet, Director Logan. The cat is out of the bag. The horse has bolted. Those laws will be changed if it means panicking countries get what they think they need. Let us not pretend that you are not using that panic as well."

He nods resignedly. "It might take a little pressure off the Alliance if the US army could buy from a private company."

Dorn eyes me curiously. "This isn't what I was expecting. I assumed that you'd want a pound of flesh."

"The Earth is more important. However, since you are now committed to legitimate business practices, I will expect anyone who breaks the law to face punishment under established law. This is clemency, not immunity. In exchange, I will hand over vampire criminals to established authorities rather than killing them myself."

Dorn nods. "I imagine that they would prefer that. Today does seem to be the day for intelligent men to be honest. And I have no use for the unenlightened."

"I will also require your support on one matter."

"Name it."

"If we are integrating resident aliens into human society, it follows that they should be allowed to participate in policing the agreements we are signing."

"I thought this was a treaty agreed between signatories. If I have a problem with something, I will speak to Director Logan directly."

"That is impractical. We must become one civilisation, otherwise the trust we require will not exist. If the nature of vampire civilisation on Earth comes to too wider attention, it is likely that our agreement will be superseded by the wrath of the masses. Ultimately, Intracom must become a business that happens to be vampire owned and managed, rather than an extra-territorial hanse. We must all be committed."

He thinks for a moment, his eyes growing distant.

"You want me to find vampires to train as Alliance agents? Director?"

Director Logan nods slowly. "I wasn't going to rush that, but I'm not against the idea. As Robert Peel said, 'the police are the public and the public are the police'. If we're integrating our societies, that means vampires taking part in government and civil society."

He tilts his head slightly to the left. "And the Conduit will be similarly committed?"

"Yes." I dismiss my helmet. "We are."

 

15th February 2013
18:32 GMT -5

A brief application of orange light gave Tuppence a military uniform, and she's got dour down without any added training. I've duplicated the dress and face of a researcher from the Gotham branch of S.T.A.R. Labs named Doctor Alistair for myself , and I can duplicate their knowledge base reasonably well through the use of my power rings database. None of it will pass detailed examination if S.T.A.R. Philadelphia can check a central database, but… Someone with a key card already inside the building and dressed correctly? It's unlikely that anyone would check in detail under normal circumstances. If they do and I can't talk my way out of it? Then it goes from a stealth mission to a combat mission.

"Cain't y'all jus' wipe their computers?"

"Not the usual easy way with my ring. I could build an electromagnetic pulse generator and activate it to fry every circuit for miles around… And leave it in active mode so that they couldn't just connect to an external database to double check."

"Raight. That."

"Except an E.M.P. going off just before we turn up is a really obvious sign that we're up to something, and S.T.A.R. Labs may well be shielded against electromagnetic radiation at levels that won't melt people too."

She frowns-.

"Oh, you'd be fine. You're tough enough and heal fast enough that you could take it. But my general feeling is that if we have to kill a million people then it would probably be better to just back off and have a rethink."

"Uh… Huh."

Okay, rings in my pocket, put the car in gear and pull out of the car park. I don't drive a lot and my car has a slightly different control setup but I can just about remember how these things work. Indicate, turn, ignore the instinctual feeling that I'm on the wrong side of the road and accelerate. The buses appear to be driving within normal safety parameters, so I do the same. It's interesting to have to look at my surroundings rather than using ring mapping. No other traffic around, but given the more limited number of traffic cameras in Philadelphia compared to London I don't think I need to worry about them checking my precise point of origin.

A few minutes of safe driving and we're pulling into the car park of S.T.A.R. Labs Philadelphia. We passed a few guards in the street but there doesn't appear to be anyone on duty here.

Tuppence goes to open her door and then hesitates, looking at me for guidance. I give a very shallow nod because there are cameras on the front of the building, and she exits the car before coming around and opening my door. I step out of the car and begin walking towards the front door of S.T.A.R. Labs Philadelphia without looking back, trying to emulate the odd facial expression of people who accept the Anti-Life. It's… Mostly blank, but there's a slight hint of both happiness and ferocity that… Doesn't naturally occur in sane people. People who don't particularly have anything going on in their heads but will happily throw themselves at anything that they're told to.

There's a 'clunk' behind me as Tuppence closes the door, and then she walks after me. Her pace is slightly faster than mine so that she'll catch up, but not fast enough to draw attention. I guess she's learned something since she got out of Belle Reve. Or she's just been watching spy films, I suppose.

The card reader is mounted on the side of the door, and there doesn't appear to be any other mechanism to check my identity. The card should be enough, and there's no reason for the person I'm pretending to be to put his other hand in his pocket, but this is a potential point of failure.

I swipe the card and push at the door.

The magnetic lock doesn't disengage and I reach up to swipe my card again-.

There's a buzz and a light changes from red to green as it opens.

Back to calm, I push it fully open as I stride inside, Tuppence following behind-.

"Halt."

A.. robot that puts me in mind of the ones Bialya…

It wasn't Bialya. It was Mannheim. That's why Queen Bee agreed to see-. Getting rid of competition? Or just.. trying to concentrate power in Adom? I'm not sure.. why-. Not relevant right now.

The robot is pointing some sort of Apokoliptian weapon at us. I could easily evade with my rings and Tuppence could either dodge it or tank it, but it makes more sense for our characters to comply.

"Present identification."

I hold up my card, face forward. I hear a slight rustle of fabric as Tuppence gets hers out and does the same. The robot deploys a sensor to scan each of them before returning it to its housing.

"Personnel authorised. Explain presence."

"I was ordered to come here."

"Inadequate."

"I do not ask questions. Mannheim is."

"Acceptable. State purpose."

"S.T.A.R. Philadelphia holds materials relevant to the Demonic Metamorphosis Nectar research program. I was dispatched to confirm its location and transfer it to S.T.A.R. Gotham."

"Logged. Continue your assigned task. All is one in Mannheim."

"All glory to Mannheim."

The robot doesn't retreat or lower its guns, but why would it? It's in the best place to do its job. Right, main storage is that way, but that's one of the places where other people are likely to be, and the more people we run into the higher the chance of getting identified. The research laboratories are next to it, and have the same problem. Even if I can just open the door with this key card.

But I can check the lists of objects in storage from anywhere inside that same section, including the hot desking office. It's probably in use; nothing I've seen suggests that the Anti-Lifed people don’t value record keeping. But people won't be anything like as alert there.

So I lead the way away from the reception area as if I was heading for main storage, then take a turning just before I reach it and head toward the office block. A few people pass us by, but they only give us a dead-eyed glance before continuing with their own tasks.

I keep looking blank. Tuppence is giving them suspicious looks, but that works for her character.

Another swipe of the card, and we're in to the office. Let's see. Need a desk that's not immediately in anyone's direct view, but doesn't look like I'm trying to hide. And a view of the door, because if we're spotted they probably won't escalate to destroying the entire building before trying a squad of soldiers and a couple of robots first.

That one, that will do.

I sit down, slide my key card into the slot and then touch my ring to get access to Doctor Alistair's log-in details. Give it a moment… And I'm in. I can navigate the records easily enough because I've used this system when logging objects recovered from supervillains. They don't appear to have made any changes, but I wouldn't necessarily know if they've set up something to notify someone if anyone accesses a particular record. Would the Apokoliptians care about the Medusa Mask? I wouldn't have thought so, but I can't be certain.

So I check for objects that relate to my stated purpose first. No demonic tissue in storage at all. Drugs… Yes, quite a lot, and they're experimenting with more in a way that I'm sure is going to cause more problems later. Venom, Blockbuster, Fever, Tar, Smilex, Danner Formula, and a few things I'm not immediately familiar with.

Nothing relating to Devil Jizz, which is a mercy.

Now I switch to the relic archive. Medusa Mask… Listed as missing. As of… The date of the Anti-Life broadcaster activation.

But… Missing. They wouldn't list it as missing if they'd taken it themselves. Would they? That wouldn't make sense. Can I call up security footage from here? That would help cover the stuff that Agent Carlyle didn't-.

The door opens, and I navigate away from that page as a guard walks in. For a moment I think it might just be a patrol, but then he walks towards me with purpose.

"Doctor Alistair."

"Yes."

"The boss will speak with you. Follow me."

 

15th February 2013
18:42 GMT -5

We're not heading towards the Chief Administrator's office, or the Head of Research's office. If I remember the interior layout correctly we're heading toward… Aquatic research? Yes, that sign confirms it. I can't ask who the city boss is, because there's a good chance that that's something that I would instinctively know if I was who I'm pretending to be. I assume that the reason for an escort is… Because I wouldn't automatically know where they are? Or the layout of the building?

Can I ask the guard questions? No, no, that's probably not a good idea.

So what can I do? Both empathic vision and power ring scans are bad ideas in close proximity to Anti-Life sources, even if I could probably walk it off. Any reaction from me would be an outward sign that something was off with me.

"Cards."

We each scan our cards as we enter the aquatic research centre. The main pool which they use for depth testing is just down the corridor, and the cheap floor carpet has been replaced by water resistant floor tiles. The front desk isn't manned, and the guard leads us directly past it and towards the pool area.

I try listening for some sort of clue, but I can't hear-. No, there's a faint splashing sound. There's something in the water, but I can't tell what. Can't see in the door windows yet-.

"Wait here."

The guard doesn't point to anywhere in particular so I just stop where I'm standing. Tuppence does the same as he walks through the doors into the pool area, the awkward angle not giving us a good look inside before the doors close behind him.

Hm. Artificial lights make everything look a little orange. I'll take a small risk.

I reach into my pocket with my left hand, touching one of my rings while being careful to desire the absolute minimum of environmental shield. Then I send a filament into the floor looking for a computer cable. There should be-. Yes, there it is. Spoof a terminal, enter log-in details, request surveillance records for the period of the initial take-over… Available, good. Download.

Compliance.

Have to go through that later.

The doors open again, the guard coming as close as he needs to in order to trigger the mechanism.

"Come."

I walk forward obediently, entering the pool…

Room.

That's not Nanaue Sha'ark. The proportions are slightly out and his head's a little too large. And there's a faint striped pattern across the scales on his back, and… He's appreciably larger.

And I've never seen Nanaue bite someone's left leg off.

The poor woman he's holding in his right hand doesn't really react as her blood pours out of the wound. This shark-man doesn't chew… Most likely because he can't, but he gives the leg he just bit off several chomps to… Make it a little more digestible, I suppose?

Then he stops, meat hanging from his mouth as he stares up at her. She appears to have lost consciousness-.

**Bah.**

A ray of brilliant white energy erupts from his forehead, striking the bleeding stump of her thigh and cauterising it. Then he tosses her onto the poolside, where a couple of laboratory technicians await his direction

And now I know who this is. The Shark. Karshon, for the sake of avoiding being confused with the dozen or so villains who named themselves after sharks. And the entire city-state of Nanaue. Fought Lantern Jordan several times, mostly out of a desire to become the deadliest thing around.

**What's the point if they can't feel fear? It's like feeding on carrion.**

He mashes his teeth together a few more times, then raises his right hand to his mouth to push the remaining meat in as he swallows. The woman… Should survive. She lost consciousness from loss of blood, but the bleeding has now stopped. Except… Anti-Life exposure can increase the rate of shock fatalities, as the injured party doesn't have any motivation to keep living. And… It probably disrupts background magics as well.

Karshon isn't a particularly good telepath. He can project emotion well, but none of Jordan's reports made any mention of him using subtlety. I probably don't have to worry about him rooting around in my mind. But I keep my left hand near my power ring anyway.

**You.** He twists in the water, looking down at me and raising his right hand to wash the worst of the blood away from his mouth. **Do you have something for me?**

Wait a.. second. He doesn't feel Anti-Lifed.

"Lord?"

**Do you want to fight me?**

Yes. "No."

**Then address me as Karshon. You are human krill. Being acknowledged by you insults me.**

"Karshon. I was not ordered to bring anything to you."

I could ask what he was expecting, but that seems like a degree of initiative beyond what someone who is Anti-Lifed should show.

His mouth opens slightly, and I can see the blood and flesh that still coat his multi-rowed teeth. But with him, the bite isn't the most dangerous part. It's the telepathy, followed by the speed and strength. He's actually more likely to throw a punch in a fight than waste time biting, and he's more likely to force alien thoughts into your mind than either.

**Your potions are the only reason why I let any of you live, and they sent you here without one? I should kill you and then go to Gotham to eat your boss-krill.**

My instinct is to defend myself. If this were a normal criminal organisation, that's what Dr. Alistair would do. But we're supposed to have been Anti-Lifed. I wouldn't have the sense of self-preservation to do that.

"Yes, Karshon. We live for Mannheim, we-."

**Silence.**

Sharks don't have facial expression, so I don't get any feedback in that regard. He's not human and has no human ancestors, so I can't rely on any sort of body language analysis. Given how close he is, I'm… Not sure that I could raise an environmental shield strong enough to block his first attack. If he attacked physically.

He wants to fight strong and brave people and break their will. Fill them with fear. That was why he kept throwing himself at Jordan for as long as he did. As I'm presenting, he has no interest in me at all. As I actually am, he'd be very interested in fighting me, but I'm trained to turn telepathic probes aside and he hasn't had any formal training at all. Jordan's descriptions made him sound relatively clumsy, only having an advantage because green power rings are unusually susceptible to that sort of attack.

**You have nothing.**

I do actually have a small sample of Devil Jizz from a raid I carried out last year. I've got no idea what it would do to him, but if it gets me out of his presence…

I tap my ring and move the sample vial out of subspace and into my pocket. He doesn't appear to notice the brief glow, but I don't suppose that sharks have particularly good colour vision. I then take the vial out and hold it up to him.

"This was something that I was studying. But if you have need of it then it is yours, Karshon."

There's a grey blur and he's out of the pool and snatching it out of my hand, knocking me away painfully. Ow. I don't think anything's broken, and it wouldn't be in character for me to respond anyway.

**Better.** He turns away and gets back in his pool. **Go back to whatever you were doing.**

"Yes, Karshon."

Without much expression-.

"Karshon, do you want us to remove the woman?"

Tuppence's face isn't as blank as mine, but she's doing a respectable job, under the circumstances. Speaking up was a risk, but to be honest he doesn't seem all that concerned with exactly how we behave.

**Yes. Get that waste of time out of my sight.**

I give Tuppence a tiny smile and a tiny nod of approval as she walks around the edge of the pool to recover his victim. I can replace her leg just before we leave, but now we need to get somewhere out of sight and go over the video logs.

 

15th February 2013
18:50 GMT -5

The closest office is.. actually the Chief Administrator's office. No one else is in the area, so I open the door with a brief application of power ring and stride inside as if I own the place. Tuppence carries the woman in after me and after a brief look around deposits her on a chair in the corner.

"We-?"

She closes the door and then goes around closing the blinds. Then she does a quick manual check for anything she might have missed.

"We safe?"

I touch my ring and take a sound deadening field generator out of subspace. I could take a enchanted stone, but… Someone around here knows their way around magic, and while a S.T.A.R. researcher might have something to isolate sound, they wouldn't have a custom produced Atlantean magic tool.

There's a camera in the room, but it doesn't record sound.

"As safe as we're likely to get inside enemy territory."

"Who the fuck was that?"

"He's a mutant shark. A psychic. He fought Green Lantern a few times. Don't know how he got here, but it's not a huge shock."

I log in once more as Doctor Alistair and bring up security camera footage from the day of the take-over.

"An' what the fuck did-? You was jus' gunna leave her to geht et."

"If necessary. But he was pretty clear that he wasn't going to eat her."

"Kin y'all… Geht 'er a new leg?"

"Yes. But if I do that here and now it'll be a bit obvious."

My eyes move from the recordings playing on the screen to Tuppence and she stares at me.

"What? Surprised?"

She nods.

"Tuppence, there are superheroes like Superman who are genuinely lovely people. People who always try to see the best in people, always pull their punches… Outside of a completely apocalyptic situation at least. I am a good deal more ruthless. I helped you and Thomas because, one, you're not that bad a person and two, I had the time and resources. Here, we're trying to save the planet. If that means that I have to watch a few people get eaten then that's what I'll do, because the world's more important. Do you want to watch this?"

She hesitates, and then walks around the desk.

"Oh, and… It was a risk, but good work getting her away from him."

She shrugs, shaking her head. "Ah ain't gonna let her get eaten. What we lookin' at, anyhow?"

I point. "This is where the Mask was being stored. They weren't doing any tests on it that day, but we should be able to track where it goes."

"How come you ain't usin' yer ring?"

"I am, but purely analysing this with my ring would make detecting me a little easier. I'll just use it to-" I increase the playback speed until the figures on the screen blur. "-speed things up… And…"

We reach the point where the Anti-Life broadcast started, and people react in line with what we've seen. Some collapse, some just sort of rock back and forth and others keep doing what they were doing before, only… Without the focus they had only a moment before. It's all silent, so I can't hear any moaning…

Wait.

Ring, find Agent Carlyle.

Compliance.

The recording jumps… Forward, showing… Showing him enter the building with the key card he gave me.

"Stop. Was he in the building at any time before that?"

The images jump… A couple of days before. He's talking to… A member of the aquatic research team. Rewinding… Yes, he's meeting them in their office, checking over the facilities…

No meeting with the Head of Research. Or Chief Administrator.

I mean, I can only check what the cameras saw. They don't have full coverage. And if they spoke on the telephone…

Tuppence is frowning too.

Okay, okay, where did he go after he entered the building?

"He wuz lye'n."

"Yes indeed he was. But I don't know why."

I move the screen back to his point of entry, and then play at times five speed.

He walks in… Clearly knows where he's going, and isn't affected by the Anti-Life. That… Tracks. Unless-. No, no, if he were under the influence I'd have… Felt it.

I think.

But in any case I think I know where this is-.

He walks into storage with a trolley, and… The interior camera shows him loading stuff up. I see the Mask for half a second-. No, he's not just grabbing everything. He's going for specific things. He knows where things are.

So… Did he have this planned and was just waiting for an opportunity? Did he.. know in advance that it was going to happen-.

The shark. The first time Jordan fought him, he found a way to turn him back into a normal…

I enter the database, looking for records on aquatic creatures and… Mutagens. Jordan never found out exactly what it was that turned a normal tiger shark into Karshon, but-.

They had him. A tiger shark. He was here in normal animal mode.

Carlyle recovered the mutagen from the vault. He-.

The Head of Research appears to have regained some of his wits. He says something to Carlyle, who draws a gun and shoots him. Fatally.

"Asshole!"

"Depends why he did it. He's a baseline human: he can't just bulldoze past obstacles like we can."

It's a bad angle, but it looks like he's… Yes, that's Karshon, mutating from normal shark to his augmented form. He and Carlyle appear to have a short conversation. Which suggests that Karshon maintains his memories while in animal form.

And then Carlyle heads out of the building, shooting anyone who tries to stop him. I watch as Justifiers enter the building through the front doors. He spots them and recognises… Something about them, and he turns and runs. They pursue, but security cameras aren't good at getting the details in fights like this. He pulls out some sort of short staff and waves it and most of the Justifiers go down.

And then we lose them as he heads to the roof exit.

"He jus' robbed the place."

"Maybe. He didn't have that stuff on him when we met him. It's possible that someone else has it, but either way he's got some questions to answer. And we still need the Mask."

I log off the computer and stand up.

"Let's get out of-."

"'fussssssh'"

 

15th February 2013
18:54 GMT -5

Red blood sprays out of my.. neck-.

Going dark…

Get the… Ring-.

…

"-up!"

Hu-?

I'm-. I'm over Tuppence's shoulder, being held on my one-.

I glance up, see a scientist point some sort of ray gun at us and fire a construct filament to grab it out of her hand!

One arm. We're not far from the office and-. The alarm's going off.

"I'm good."

She tosses me aside and I fly next to-.

Her chest and neck are covered in blood, and her right hand joins her left in clamping her neck. I grab her with a flight aura and zoom down the corridor. Scan for… Great, just about everyone I can scan is heading this way. Can't detect Onomatopoeia and I can't pick up anything outside of the building.

"W-what was that?"

No storm drains near here, and I don't want to get trapped underground. Go out through a wall or head to the roof? Wall route… Can't get a clear scan of some places and I'll run into some people in any direction. Route to the roof looks relatively clear.

"Cover's blown and the Mask's not here. Time to leave."

I begin flying us towards the lift and she glares at me, her hands tightening their grip.

"Tell me-!"

"His name's Onomatopoeia, and he makes things happen by making the sounds they make."

Scan the office-. Yeah, he made my-. Our jugulars burst. Ring's on my finger-. I grab the other one and put it on as well, then form a construct compression bandage.

"Tuppence, it was a small cut and you heal fast. Let go. If it's still bleeding then I'll deal with it."

She takes a couple of breaths to steady herself and then pulls her hands away-

We're going more slowly than we should. Don't know why. Can't feel an Anti-Life infection… Don't know.

-and partially solidified blood oozes between her fingers and down her neck but the wound itself appears to have sealed itself. I generate a crumbler ram and slam it into the lift doors before flying us through the hole and up the shaft. A quick orange glow removes the worst of the blood from her neck and takes a mirror out of subspace so she can check it.

"See?" Her eyes lock onto her reflection and she stares at her neck for a good two seconds. "You'll need to eat more later, but the Danner Formula makes you heal fast."

She nods and I put the mirror back into subspace before slamming my crumbler ram into the top floor lift shaft door. "Ah ain't never been cut lahk that before."

"Me neither. You put my ring on my finger?"

"Yeah."

Interesting. "Didn't think about putting it on yourself?"

"Gawd no."

"'wup poof'"

I stop us in the air, looking out at the ladder up to the roof.

"What-? Y'all heard that, raht?"

"Yes." Construct armour and railgun. "Lethal force authorised."

"No she-yet."

I fly up the ladder, bulldozing the exit and looking for my target. Tuppence jumps up through what's left a moment later. He's-.

"'boof'"

I slam face first into a fucking mime force field! I take a sound suppression system out of subspace and throw it-

"'kssssh'"

-at him, only for its battery to explode and electrocute all of its delicate internal components.

Lasers.

They-

"'poof'"

-miss completely as he teleports away scrambler!

…

Don't know if I got him, but I rather doubt it. Even if I was in time, his teleportation is probably magic-based and I can't stop that.

Enhanced optical scan upwards… Yes, there are Mannheim-controlled jets within view but even if they turn this way they'll need time to reach us. I grab Tuppence again and fly up-

"'woom'"

-and straight into a faintly glowing barrier which… Appears to have covered the entire city. How is-

"'krack'"

"A-AGH!"

Tuppence's right shin is now… Bent at ninety degrees forwards. Mine is too, but a quick flash of orange fixes that. Onomatopoeia is… There, finally spotted him. Smoke grenades and lasers, and then drop down out of his line of sight and hope that he needs to see us to use his ability on us.

"You regenerate! Push it back into position!"

"Wha-?"

She's not doing it. I generate a leg support construct around the break.

"This will hurt. Ready?"

She nods, the pain making tears leak from her eyes. The Danner formula doesn't do anything about the pain if you actually get hurt, other than fix the injury faster. So I-

"Ah-!"

-force the bone back into position and then create a metal clamp to hold it in place while she regenerates.

Bullets fired from the ground hit my construct armour and her skin, doing nothing but remind me that there isn't a safe place in Philadelphia.

Where do we go now?

 

15th February 2013
18:57 GMT -5

Justifiers are heading this way from across the city. I'm manoeuvrable enough that I can avoid most of them, but I'm more worried about being hemmed in. Burrowing underground to escape the bubble over the city seems like the best bet, but we need the Mask and I still don't know where it is!

Alright, hologram generator. Stick one on the building there and another there, drop smoke and use a third to hide our location as I head… Towards the Philadelphia Water Department Field Office because we should still check it. Close to a wall because you can't perfectly disguise a sphere with holograms without cutting down the angles it can be viewed from. I have no idea how Onomatopoeia perceives the world, so… Just have to try avoiding him.

"Where we-?"

"Shh. Quietly."

"Where we goin'?"

"The Philadelphia Water Department Field Office. We can't really keep searching for the Mask while they're all riled up like this, so we're evading."

"How much trouble we eeyn?"

This part of the city is mostly two-storey buildings, so I change my flight pattern to float just over the roofs. That should limit the angles from which we're visible.

"Eh. I'm pretty sure I can get us out of the city by burrowing down and getting out from under the barrier that way. But…"

I try scanning for Agent Carlyle, and… Get nothing coherent. Infrared gets me more useful information, but only really shows that people are spreading out, both civilians and Justifiers. Searching for us. I see… Children, leave the nearby houses and blankly stare about in response to some impulse relayed through the Anti-Life.

"Without a lead, we might have to scrub the mission, which is going to make things… Difficult."

There's no reply as I land us on the Water Department roof.

"Tuppence?"

She looks like she's about to…. Throw up? Curl up in pain?

"Tuppence?"

"Get… Gettin' worse."

The Water Department is another two-floor building and has no roof access. There are a few people inside, but when you've got a mind control economy some things can be ignored.

Can't see Onomatopoeia anywhere…

"I'd never broken a bone before I became a superhero. I guess that was your first time as well?"

She nods, breathing hard and squeezing her eyes shut.

"It ain't… Tawkin' about that."

"What's it talking about, then?"

"Lahk… How we already lost, how all we c'n do is watch ev'ry one who already got taken over do what Mannheim wants."

"Oh, yeah, fixing human civilisation after this is going to be a lot of work." Though I'm kind of looking forward to it. There's so much room for improvement! "But Mannheim's making a rod for his own back here. Darkseid would be fine in a universe where he's the only thing that can think, but all Mannheim is doing is turning himself into an extension of Darkseid. He's already stopped existing in any meaningful way. You, on the other hand, are still here, so really you're doing better than him."

"Aha ain't-. Lahk… Ah did some stuff, but ah figured… Stuff lahk this happened, the Justice League would deal with iht."

"We are. Darkseid doesn't really care about this world; Mannheim won't get given anything that he doesn't already have." I shake my head. "Creation is harder than destruction. I could make everyone in this city… Except maybe the Justifiers… I could make them want anything I want them to want. But that wouldn't free them, just make them my puppets rather than Mannheim's. And then he'd almost certainly turn up in person, so even if it wasn't pointless it would.. be... Self destructive."

That doesn't seem to be working. I think I'm doing 'reassurance' wrong. When your emotions are overwhelming you, I doubt that a well-reasoned rational answer is really the answer.

So I hug her instead.

Not grabbing her hard, not… The way I hug Jade or anything like that. Don't want a repeat of Zatanna. Just friendly reassurance sort of thing, in the hope that my close presence will calm her down. From her heart rate it sounds like it's working a little.

Ah… Give it a moment..?

"Feeling better?"

She pulls away, nodding grudgingly. "Ah hate this. Ah hate feelin' this."

I nod. "Quite understandable. Ready to go in-"

Her head jerks up, blinking. "It's gawn."

"-side… Ah, did you have some sort of grand philosophical revelation? Because if so, congratulations."

"N-. No." She shakes her head, frowning. "Ah don't think ah did, anyhow. How would ah know?"

"Did certain things that confused and bothered you before not bother you anymore?"

"No? Ah ain't gaht a voice gowin' awn about it no more, but that awl still… Ah mean, it's a problem, ain't it?"

"Okay." I frown. "Just a second."

Keeping the hologram projector on me and projecting a random section of sky, I fly upward, looking towards the city centre. People… People have stopped moving. Some of them are sort of looking around like… Like they've just been freed. The Justified are still moving, but there's a bit more… Uncertainty. I… Don't know what could have done this. The broadcaster is still there-.

The force garrisoning it… Doesn't appear to be there any longer.

Magnify.

A lot of them left, presumably to look for me and Tuppence. The rest are very dead, Karshon standing blood-covered over their remains.

I guess he wasn't Anti-Lifed, then.

Someone… Agent Carlyle, is standing by the broadcasters with the Mask on his face. Is he using it to disrupt the broadcast? I didn't realise that it could be used to do that by itself. If he's freed the whole city with it-. I mean, it's got possibilities as a technique but it's probably just going to bring Finality Man down on our heads.

Looks like Karshon's saying something to-.

**All will fear me.**

A cry goes up from the city, a scream from the mouths of the people who had been ground under by the Anti-Life for so long. Below me Tuppence crouches down, arms wrapped around her knees. Others out across the city cower or try to hide while the Justified start running or jumping in vehicles to get back to the broadcaster as fast as they can.

And Karshon starts to grow.

 

15th February 2013
19:01 GMT -5

Karshon started at about two metres tall. He doubles that almost immediately and then keeps going. Two Justifiers who were in the immediate area step out from behind cover and open fire with automatic rifles. They don't do any damage that I can see. Karshon… Doesn't just blast them with a psybolt. Instead, he dashes over to them, grabs them in one oversized hand and-.

Ah.

I think he was trying to pull their helmets off. Unfortunately he took their heads off with them.

He drops the bodies, his head angling towards the direction which the largest concentration of Justifiers are coming from.

So he's definitely not the city boss. He was just… Openly infiltrating, because Team Anti-Life just assumes that if you're not attacking them then you'll fall to the Anti-Life eventually, and the people who do aren't good at questioning. So is Onomatopoeia in charge? I have no idea what the sound of a giant shark's bones breaking are.

Okay, majority of the city… The people aren't having a good time of it but only the Justifiers are immediately in danger. Tuppence first.

I drop down, quick-fabricating a spy drone and sending it towards the broadcaster. Tuppence is exactly where I left her, dropping into a foetal position. Fortunately, she doesn't pull away when I put my right hand on her left shoulder.

"Karshon has-."

"Ah-huh ah-huh ah-huh…"

Mentioning his name made it worse. Okay.

"He is on the other side of the city fighting Justifiers. He's not coming here and doesn't know where we are. You're relatively safe."

Okay, her eyes are focusing a little better, but it's clear that she's still nearly out of her mind. She can't fight like this, or even act as support. I could try flooding her with orange light, but that sounds like something that would leave her pretty messed up. What else-?

I use a quick burst of sonic energy to check that the Water Department building has the internal structure that the plans suggest. Mostly, one reinforced cellar isn't to official specifications. I drop down to look in a window and all of the staff are in the same position as Tuppence. They aren't in any position to report our presence and I can't see anyone wearing a Justifier helmet. Good.

I rapid-fly to the door, unlock it and rapid-fly inside, dodging around obstacles until I reach the well-locked door to the out-of-spec basement. The locking system is a bit more advanced than the one on the entrance door, but isn't particularly complicated. A quick application of ring and I'm through, into… A disused store room. Another scan… There, there's a hatch going down into the utility tunnels, but the room below it is far larger than it needs to be, and the floor here is reinforced. A moment's work with the ring and then fly down.

**Know absolute terror.**

Looks like a room an engineer might pull an overnight stay in. Open up the cupboard… Yes, there we go. A couple of devices marked as 'behavioral regulators'. Might be a good idea to give one to Batman for mass production, but-. There's a manual, good. Scan it, and then fly back to Tuppence.

Oh my. I don't need to magnify anymore. Karshon is clearly visible, his body now large enough that I can see him around the tallest buildings in the city. He fires a psybolt at something, but one of the Justifiers throws up a purple beam of their own at it and the psybolt veers off course.

Is he trying to bring Mannheim here?

Alright, connecting the regulator up. This part goes around the neck-.

"Tuppence, I'm putting something on you to try and block the effect."

She's just… Staring blankly ahead at the moment.

And this part goes along her spine… And on.

No obvious change in her behaviour. Check the manual… Oh. Her Danner-enhanced tissue is probably blocking the radio waves better than normal flesh. But I can fix that…

Tuppence sits up, suddenly aware!

"Back with me?"

"That-that-." She takes a couple of breaths. "What the fuck was theyat?"

"Agent Carlyle used the Medusa Mask on the Anti-Life broadcaster, creating mass fear. Karshon has-." I look past her, and he's-. I just point. "I knew that he liked fear, I didn't realise that it literally made him stronger."

"What now?"

"Um. Good question."

We still need that mask. The people under those Justifier helmets are probably mostly good people, and Karshon definitely isn't. On the other hand… Just killing Mannheim and/or Finality Man would represent a major victory. It would be like… Using the Elements of Harmony on King Sombra. You still need to actually have the Crystal Fair, but there's no longer any sort of hurry.

Do I think he can pull it off? Don't know. No way to know.

How would I fulfil my own objective? Fly over there, destroy the broadcaster and take the Mask by force. Then burrow out and leave Agent Carlyle and Karshon to their fates. That would temporarily free the local people from the constant Anti-Life broadcast, though the Justified would have it up and running again in a few days. And there are so many Anti-Life broadcasters on the east coast of America that it isn't really practical to evacuate them, which is why that isn't standard practice.

So what if I don't destroy the broadcaster and just nobble Agent Carlyle?

He'll almost certainly be killed if I don't evacuate him as well. Morally… He made a choice whereas the Justified thought they were signing up to be superheroes. Saving one of them is a better option. Karshon would probably shrink down, and… He'd have to choose between going down fighting and running for the shoreline. It's close by, and he could easily make the swim. The city would still be Anti-Lifed, but the only immediate threat appeared to be Karshon himself.

Someone fires a heavy plasma weapon at him from a building, and he responds with a psybolt that turns the entire building to rubble.

Or I ally myself with Karshon, defeat the Justified with a minimal number of casualties, remove their helmets and wait for a larger counterattack before deciding whether to leg it or not.

I don't think I can beat Finality Man… But can we? I don't know how tough Karshon is like this, but I don't feel any reservation about letting him tank its attacks and then falling back if he can't take it. The only wrinkle would be Onomatopoeia, but engaging him at range when he doesn't have a mob to set on me seems like a viable solution.

Small extra risk, much better optimal outcome. Assuming that Agent Carlyle and Karshon cooperate. I think it… Might even be WSWD.

"We're going to help the giant shark. Ready?"

"We..? You shuwer?"

"No, but it's the least bad option. I'll talk to Agent Carlyle, and if they're both hostile… Grab and de-helmet Justifiers while Karshon keeps them occupied."

She looks a bit sceptical, but nods. "Okay. Y'all think it's best."

I tether her with a flight aura and rise-.

"'poof'"

"Darn it."

 

15th February 2013
19:01 GMT -5

Laser turrets, infrared auto-targeting and sound suppressors.

Compliance.

Where is-? Standing in the middle of the road, ducking behind an abandoned car as the lasers begin burning through the chassis.

Construct grenade launcher with flashbang grenades.

Compliance.

And fire. He'll see the attack coming and almost certainly have something to block it, but he can only say one thing at a time. I point at his location.

"He's there. I'll keep him pinned."

Tuppence snarls. "Fahnally."

She crouches and then leaps, flying through the air and-. And cracking the roof we're standing on so that the roof of the room beneath us collapses, fix that. Tuppence herself lands in the road about half way to Onomatopoeia as the grenades-

"'tink'"

-land on and around him without detonating. I keep firing, because if it keeping his mouth occupied then it's doing its job. Tuppence-

"'blah-heeeeeeee'"

-grabs a motorcycle and throws it at him just as he sets off a flashbang before it leaves the barrel. An error on his part, as my construct armour has auto-sensors and dimmed my vision the moment it happened, and it didn't do anything to stop Tuppence. Her bike hits the roof of the car he's hiding behind, bounces and then clips him as he dives aside!

And into the path of my laser turrets.

One bores into his chest-. He's armoured, but it looks like its just steel rather than steel/ceramic and a laser will heat it up nicely. Another hits him in the leg and-. No armour there, it's just burning flesh. Another hits his shoulder and the last one doubles up with the first and hits his chest as well. Justifiers can usually cope with pain but that's quite a lot of burning.

At least it stopped him blocking my flashbangs.

'Blah-heeeee' indeed.

That makes him shake, spasming in a way that must be an automatic reaction because Justifiers who get hit with those don't usually react so strongly. Tuppence reaches him a moment later and I cut off the lasers just as she grabs his helmet in both hands and pulls it apart!

She's done that before. Fingers in the right spot to gain leverage, breaking the helmet in the right places to avoid stabbing the head underneath. She then grabs hold of the remains and crushes them, destroying anything that could be used to broadcast the Anti-Life.

Then she flicks him in the forehead, sending it back into the tarmac and stunning him.

She stands over him for a few seconds, breathing hard.

"This guy was jus' fah'n us 'cuz a' the Anti-Life, raht?"

I rise off the roof and fly over to them.

"Not sure. He helped out Klarion before the mass child murder thing, but I wasn't ever sure how much of that was him and how much whatever Klarion did to him. Simple solution."

I form a construct railgun, load a mageslayer round and fire it into his chest… At low velocity. I'm not trying to kill him here. I dimly… Feel something change as the round hits… Not sure if that was the whole of the enhancement spell-. Shoot him again.

This time he just jerks in response to the impact.

"No more sound effects."

And without the helmet he should be affected by the same fear projection that's paralysing everyone else. I take a careful record of his face just in case he becomes a problem later.

"Right, let's go."

Karshon doesn't appear to have gotten any bigger, but he certainly hasn't gotten any weaker.

**Hah!**

He appears to have decided to stop attacking, and…

I turn my empathic vision up a little.

Yes, it looks like he's trying to wake up the fear inside the Justifiers, pushing against the black shell of Anti-Life from the inside. Anti-Lifed people don't really fear-. Or rather, don't fear in a remotely normal way. Some of them are still attacking him, but they've lost coordination. His efforts are definitely doing something, though they aren't being freed by it. I don't think that can work but I don't know that it can't work.

**Hello, little orange light.** His left eye is taller than I am, and it's currently locked onto me and Tuppence. **Are you going to make this interesting?**

"I wasn't planning to. I'm actually here to pick up the artefact that Agent Carlyle is using."

**That would be a problem. For you.**

I shake my head. "No no. I'm happy to take it after this whole thing fails. Carry on with what you're doing. It's a valuable learning experience."

**I'm trying to break their minds with the most horrifying thought that they can comprehend.**

"Right, but they've already been Anti-Lifed. That's like trying to let the air out of a flat tire. You might get some, but it's not really going to change anything."

He eyes me for a moment, then points at one of the Justified staggering around near his feet. Ring, compare visible uniforms and anything you can scan with known superhumans,

Compliance. Files available.

**That one. Bring them up here.**

I dimly recognise the man, and my ring fills me in. Amazing Man Three, currently having his body mimic steel. That makes him strong and tough, just not giant shark strong and tough.

I send a construct harness down to grab him. And use the fact that Karshon's focusing on me and his chosen Justifier to covertly deliver Tuppence to ground level.

**The helmet. What does it do?**

"It's like an Anti-Life broadcaster, but for the wearer."

**Not part of the network. That is why they don't feel fear.**

"Yes. Most of them aren't even broken like some people are from regular exposure. A surprisingly large number become functional again after the helmets are removed."

Karshon turns his head so that he can get a better look at Mr. Clay.

**Disappointing. This one smells brave. Take the helmet off.**

I take x-ionised blades out of subspace and carefully cut it off him, though between the Anti-Life exposure and fear projection he's pretty out of it.

**Unfocused. Like this I would crush him easily.**

"True. But if I free all of them, that is likely to attract Mannheim's personal attention. He's… I think that he's got more personality than they do."

**Or I could fight you, Lantern.**

"You can do that afterwards. But you need me to remove the helmets."

**Perhaps.** His mental voice sounds pleased. *Do it, Lantern. Show me their master so that I can break him.**

"As you wish."

 

6th June 2000
07:32 GMT -6

I get more than a few strange looks as I walk through the Conduit's 'liberated' ship. It used to belong to Intracom, but Dorn has the sense not to try and demand its return. I'm not… Entirely sure what class it is; I haven't seen enough ships to really have an idea how space combat really works in this universe. But it has guns, shields and a stealth system and that means that it could wipe out, say, the entire Chinese air force unless they got a lucky near-miss with a nuclear explosion.

I wasn't ever able to find out exactly how many ships like this the vampires have. I don't think it's a great many. I'd guess that each major Family started with one, and… Intracom probably picked up an extra or two when they defeated their rivals. But that is just a guess. Vampires don't appear to be inclined to wage wars openly.

Be interesting to see how that changes now.

The bridge door opens for me and I walk inside. The trasgu manning the shield controls glances up instinctively at the motion and then returns his attention to his console. Then looks right back up, eyes wide. Conversations drop off around the bridge as everyone gradually shifts their attention from their tasks to me.

I give them a little wave, then make my way to the command dais where Chauf and Peisinoe are waiting for me. Chauf's arms are folded across his chest and his eyes are narrowed, while Peisinoe just looks stunned.

I smile at them. "I can talk, too."

The trasgu at the primary weapons console winces, makes a frustrated punching gesture and then passes a few coins to the faun on point defences.

I stop just before reaching the dais. Jerich and I were on the outside during the actual fight, but I was up there as a member of the command staff during the planning phase. But… I need to regain trust before I assume that position is still mine.

"The Director wanted to make sure that I wasn't about to go around slaughtering the vampires. We've come to terms. I assume-."

"He talked to me first." Chauf stares into my eyes. "Explain this. What you are."

"I don't believe that it's necessary to be personally affected by an injustice to find it unjust. And it's hardly the first time that humans have worked with the Conduit."

"You've gotten further than they did." He shifts position slightly. "If you're really the Green Knight, you're the oldest human there is."

"No. My mentor was the original Green Knight. He's retired now, but when I expressed an interest he was willing to share his power with me."

I completely let go of my construct armour, the whole suit evaporating around me. And then I hold up my right hand and display the glowing power ring.

"What species is your mentor?"

"I don't think they have a name for themselves. They come from a planet called Maltus. He… Ah. He told me that humans called him a leprechaun."

Chauf nods. "Is it just him on Earth?"

"As far as we know. According to him, the rest of his species wouldn't want to live somewhere this primitive."

"Why did you hide your face? We hide because we need to live on a human planet. That's not a problem for you."

"Right, because the Alliance would have left me alone after they confirmed my species. Half the people they're letting out of that Alliance prison black site are human. People who saw things or learned things they weren't supposed to, or got in the way. The ones who weren't buried in the desert with a hole in the back of their head like the original General Rinaker, anyway. Sure, I'd probably have been safe if I'd stayed out of it all, but I wasn't going to do that."

"Why now?"

"I don't want to pretend to be a faceless mute for my entire life. With Director Logan taking over, we're all a lot less likely to be targeted, so I thought that a show of faith was in order. Incidentally." I smile at Peisinoe. "You could totally seduce me."

Sirens can mimic human facial expression perfectly, but I've noticed on some occasions that she has to think about it. It's not automatic, and she tends to be a little too expressive when she makes the effort. She's not expressing now. "I'm not sure that I want to."

I clench my right fist and recreate my armour. After all this time holding the image in my mind is easy.

She doesn't look impressed. "It was a plasma construct all along."

"No. It's stranger than that. It's a manifestation of exotic energy formed into this shape by my will."

"Plasma's fairly exotic."

…

I mean, that's technically true. Matter is usually described as being either a solid, a liquid or a gas. How many people could name two more states of matter?

I turn back to Chauf. "What are we doing now?"

"We are waiting to see how Earth's governments react to any of this. You know how widely spread we are. Queen Mab already decided to communicate with the Irish government through Sh'lainn. But not everywhere is as friendly as Ireland."

I nod. "It might be worth us taking pre-emptive action."

"I thought you made a deal with Dorn."

"I did. The vampires are going to have an internal 'discussion', and you know how that usually goes."

He nods, smiling faintly. Dorn is going to be cleaning house, and he'll probably be doing it more thoroughly than I would be able to due to having better intelligence. Vampires being distracted with killing each other always makes life in the Conduit easier.

"I said I'd give them two weeks. But that leaves the oni."

Chauf nods. "I didn't see any oni when the shadoen invaded. Or lycanthropes from any pack other than Ruck's. The oni are usually our enemies, but lycanthrope packs just do their own thing."

"The packs might not be aware of what's happened here, and a lot of them only commit petty crimes anyway. The oni are a bigger problem."

"Why do you want to go after them? Conduit-aligned groups in Japan just avoid their cities."

"Because this whole.. thing. We know what groups are independent of each other and who works together, but most humans don't. If there are a major group of non-humans working in organised crime and eating humans, then that's going to make the rest of us look bad. Unless we're the ones who deal with it."

"You think we should invade Japan?"

"No, not invade. 'Freelance police'. I think that this ship can stay high up in the atmosphere while a few of us go in on the ground. I've wanted to try Jerich's approach to this sort of thing for a while."

Chauf finally lets his arms drop. "Pretend to be superheroes?"

"Actually be superheroes. You've got superhuman strength and toughness. You look sort of like Ben Grimm. Might need to.. work on a costume, but it would be great for public relations and the Japanese are culturally primed to accept that sort of thing." I look at Peisinoe. "How do you feel about maid costumes?"

"They're not easy to fight in. The skirts are too heavy." She blinks, slowly. "Or do you want me to dress like a Sailor Moon character?"

I nod. "It might help."

"What's wrong with a Power Ranger costume?"

"It's a bit generic, and prevents people watching from seeing… Your full charm. And Sailor Moon fights demons every week."

"That's ridiculous. I-." She noticed Chauf looking thoughtful. "No."

"I used to read Fantastic Four comics with my father. Green Knight is right. We could do that. If we're going to be able to integrate, it would be good to earn public trust in case we had to free our people from human governments."

I nod. "And the oni are perfectly manageable. The only reason I haven't gone after them before is that the vampires were more of a problem."

"Fine. But I pick my costume."

 

15th February 2013
19:18 GMT -5

**Where is the mute?**

I remove the helmet from the last Justifier… Don't recognise her. Not that that means much. Aside from the fact that even Batman doesn’t have a completely comprehensive database of all metahumans in America, the Alliance had the effect of encouraging a lot of metahumans who hadn't got into the vigilante lifestyle to stick their toe in.

I prop her up next to the others. Since the fear broadcasts are still going on, none of them are remotely functional. I could start making behavioural regulators for them all, but I don't know any of these people and I doubt that any of them will be any use against Mannheim even as a distraction. Better to let Karshon use them as fuel and try evacuating them later.

"Do you mean Onomatopoeia? Because I'm pretty sure that he could talk."

**He makes noises and things happen.**

"Not any more. I removed his helmet before I spoke to you. Why?"

**He attacked me before. I wanted to fight him.**

"He attacked you here? After you got your body back in S.T.A.R. Labs?"

If he was the city boss… Did he take offence at Karshon hanging around? Was that his job? Between Klarion and Mannheim I doubt that his brain was in any fit state for rational thought.

**Yes. Where is the Green Lantern?**

"Ah, the one you used to fight? Not sure. His ability to move large numbers of other people around is too useful to keep him anchored in one place."

**He cannot defeat Mannheim?**

"The rest of-. Most people are adversely affected by the Anti-Life. I couldn't help but notice that you aren't. Is that due to your psychic-?"

**I'm a shark. Humans have emotions. Dreams. I'm a shark. I have targets. Prey. I don't have what it's attacking.**

"Oh."

I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised. His brain is 'shark plus', not 'ape in shark body'. Atlanteans who look like fish are still humans with fish bits stuck on.

**Why isn't Mannheim here now?**

"I don't know. There are a lot of possible reasons. He might have better things to do. He's more interested in testing the Anti-Life than in normal conquest, so it's possible that he actually finds this useful rather than threatening-. Actually, can Agent Carlyle extend the fear affect to other broadcasters?"

**We couldn't test it. We weren't sure that this would work.**

"Mm. Well, with all of the Justified down and everyone overwhelmed with fear, Mannheim should be able to feel it. If what we think we know about his abilities is true. Unless…"

The barrier Onomatopoeia set up over the city is still there. That's not too surprising; if his power survived Klarion's death then there's no reason why the manifestations of it wouldn't survive the power itself being destroyed. I'd be surprised if it was able to block Mannheim's senses… Or if it hadn't been doing that as soon as it was erected.

"Could you back up a bit?"

**No.**

"Most of your power is coming from Agent Carlyle and the Anti-Life broadcaster. If Mannheim shoots either of them with his omega beams, you'll be back down to normal size."

**Then you defend it. You're planning to flee from him anyway.**

"Ah, alright."

I drift up and over his colossal head, heading towards the broadcaster. Tuppence is lurking close to it, while Agent Carlyle appears to be completely focused on his work. I form a railgun construct and aim it upwards, loading a mageslayer.

"Three, two, one, firing."

I fire, the round blasting upwards and hitting the dome. A moment passes, then I see it start to thin.

Okay. If he couldn't feel us before, he certainly can now. But I still don't know-.

BOOM!

I instinctively form a graviton deflator construct, but in this instance the aim is to let it come through. I'm only going to use it to limit its tactical mobility. But a gradar construct detects the boom tube as it opens in the distance. I create a target reticle in front of Karshon so that he knows where to look.

That's Finality Man alright. It looks… It looks like they added a little more armour since we fought in Bergen, though that could just be added cowling for additional weapon systems. It just stands in the air, looking down at us imperiously as the boom tube aperture behind it closes.

**That is not Mannheim. Why send an automaton?**

In Bergen it used the Anti-Life directly, manifesting into the universe to neutralise my defences and heal itself. But there aren't any remaining Justifiers here, and the broadcaster is radiating fear. That… Might be why it's staying back. It's not stupid. Even the most dangerous thing on the planet can be destroyed if engaged properly. With me here, flooding the area with Justifiers to use isn't really an option. They don’t have an unlimited supply of them, even if Mannheim doesn't care whether they live or die on an individual basis.

**I will make do.**

Karshon glares, a spatial distortion forming around his forehead. It builds for several seconds and then a colossal psybolt blasts from his forehead! It burns through the air towards-.

Finality Man raises its right hand and space warps, the psybolt bending around and shooting right back into Karshon! He takes the hit, staggering back a pace and tearing up the frontage of an office building.

Ring, message to Karshon: do that again.

Message sent.

Karshon's head half-turns so that he can give me the eye, but a new -slightly smaller - psybolt begins to build. Aim the graviton deflator-.

BOOM!

Fireitfireitfireit!

The new boom tube opening under Finality Man collapses an instant later, but a figure in bulky power armour has already flown through. The… Head-enveloping torso section appears to include an Anti-Life broadcaster, slightly larger than the usual Justifier helmets though far smaller than the broadcaster base stations.

And then a graser cannon deploys from the armour and I recognise Socialist Red Guardsman as he fires directly at Karshon, who takes the hit with a small wince before firing back. I activate my graviton deflator at the same time. Finality Man tries to bend the attack back once again and fails, the shot striking its torso armour and… Doing nothing that I can see.

Ah. Last time it was a matter of precisely disrupting its attacks so that the flashback damaged its internal mechanisms. We'll have to see-.

Karshon leaps into the air, straight towards Finality Man!

 

15th February 2013
19:21 GMT -5

I usually experience a degree of 'bullet time' in combat thanks to the rings accelerating my mental processes… If not completely transferring them from my brain to the orange light. But it's just a little extra thinking time, rather than anything truly radical. But now I focus. I need extra thinking time in a fight like this. I already know that I can't drain it. I already know that it can give random Justifiers the ability to hurt me with normal guns no matter what barrier-type defences I use to protect myself.

And I-.

It's Socialist Red Guardsman, a man who combines all the worst aspects of supervillain and state-sponsored superhero. A murderer dozens of times over, even if his total kill count isn't anything like mine at least the people I killed weren't on my side at the time! If I could justify killing anyone here it would be him and not the robot!

Railguns.

Compliance.

Tuppence could take hits from his graser before Mannheim upgraded him, based on its peak energy output and her observed resilience feats. Now, I don't know. The Chinese had trouble precisely focusing his energy output and I somehow doubt that Apokolips had the same problem.

The orange light for the railguns crawls into place as I'm reminded that Karshon can actually fly at high speed. Nothing like Superman or even Diana, but faster than we've recorded Finality Man moved.

Actually…

Ring, message to the Justice League. Finality Man is in Philadelphia. Initiate other operations at your convenience.

Compliance.

I watch as Socialist Red Guardsman flies closer, dropping down under Karshon's flight path. Unlike Finality Man -where I have to wait until he starts an attack and then disrupt it- the issue with Guardsman is that breaching his suit is actually pretty easy. It's just that I don't want Philadelphia irradiated and everyone here killed.

Bit curious that Mannheim cares about that, but maybe this is an automated response. We don’t really know how intelligent Finality Man is-. No, no, he's always been in a position to carry out mass killings. It's a choice on his part. Perhaps he won't take hostages because that would mean acknowledging that we have power that he needs to guard against?

I'm drifting. This is a problem with this level of acceleration. I get… Disconnected. Reality is otherworldly. Things don't seem real, except they are.

My railguns have nearly fully formed.

Guardsman's gun starts to glow. Still nothing much from Finality Man. Was the intent to bring through more than that? I don't know.

But I do know how to deal with a graser. It has to deploy to fire, and his flight systems haven't improved all that much. Track and fire with crumbler-

"Anti-Life justifies their actions." Inalienable Truth.

-rounds and I remember that! I dodge down as Guardsman fires, the line of his gamma beam slashing across the city. His manoeuvring thrusters must be very good if he's moving at a-.

I'm at normal speed. I don't know why but-.

Railguns fire, crumbler rounds screaming towards his cannon as lasers aim for his canopy, not to pierce it but to ruin his vision. Karshon closes with Finality Man as the god-robot's eyes glow red-.

Retrain railgun, solid shot, fire.

Compliance.

"TT to Orange, ah need ta worry 'bout these guys?"

Scan-.

"No, the Seven Deadly-"

Karshon fires a psybolt's face-. Fire the graviton deflator just in case.

"-Brothers are just-"

A tiny red flicker is all the recognition I get that the Omega Effect has been disrupted, and some sort of shimmering energy field deploys around Guardsman's body. The crumbler rounds that were on target are destroyed in a puff of decaying matter.

"-human martial artists."

Okay, what did Guardsman do?

Gamma-irradiated particles detected.

How would-? Plasma. A diffuse plasma field charged by his body's radiation. He melted the crumbler mechanism before it could trigg-

He drops his shield to slash his ray across the sky again. I evade but Karshon takes a nasty burn across his side… Which heals almost immediately.

-er.

Karshon's psybolt hits Finality Man in the face a second before he rams him, biting down on the giant robot's right shoulder and frantically gnawing on it. Finality Man raises his left hand, pointing it at Karshon's right eye as it glows-

Cold beam.

The plasma charge winks out, Finality Man simply trying to punch Karshon in the eye instead and finding his hand parried by a psybolt.

"Slippery little-."

Behind me, Tuppence is having trouble getting to grips with the Brothers. Fortunately, they've decided to focus on her rather than charge the broadcaster. A little of their natural arrogance shining through despite their new helmets.

Guardsman flies up behind Karshon and points his gun directly at his back. Karshon's trying to tear through Finality Man's armour, but there's no visible progress yet. Giving him the yellow ring might help, but there's no way I'm risking it. Instead I stick a rocket booster construct on my back and blast myself towards Guardsman, grabbing him with a construct claw and turning him as he goes to fire.

He's got good trigger discipline though. Only about a tenth of a second's worth of gamma beam actually gets fired, hitting Finality Man on the left pauldron. And unfortunately, the boost he's getting from the Anti-Life doesn't appear to work on his ally. Guardsman lashes out, trying to destroy my claw-construct. I let the construct shatter and aim my railguns at his cannon. Solid shot and fire, full automatic!

Compliance.

His plasma field crackles, but the solid slugs don't have any delicate mechanisms to disrupt. They're on target, but the armoured cowling is resilient enough-. Got it! Hit the graser mechanism itself and snapped off the end part. Don't know if that's a mission kill, but from the way Guardsman is snarling through his faceplate I'd guess that it's out of commission.

He lunges through the air at me, and I retaliate with a kinetic amplification baton, swinging in down onto his faceplate and sending him careening towards the Philadelphia streets below us. I use the opportunity to check on Karshon-.

Finality Man has gotten his hands on Karshon's jaw and is gradually forcing them apart. They're already off his shoulder, and-. There's some damage, but it's nothing like enough to make me think this is a viable way to destroy the robot. Karshon chomps, his jaws pulling free of Finality Man's grip and a psybolt hitting the area damaged by his bite-.

Finality Man's eyes glow solid slug! Fly up, try to-!

The red lines zigzag and hit Karshon in the forehead, an energy field enveloping him.

Ah…

I gain more height to get a clearer shot and fire everything: cold beams, railgun rounds of all types, orange light energy pulses… Nothing does anything and Karshon is… Shrinking.

Alright then. You want to kill Mannheim.

Finality Man shudders, Karshon-. Who has somehow been returned to the form of a normal tiger shark, falls to the ground as Finality Man flies at me.

 

15th February 2013
19:24 GMT -5

I back off, upping the pressure. I reach out to the networks of desires across the Earth, feeling that small part of everyone who has even the slightest sense of self left, and I share it with Finality Man. This is what it feels like, knowing that if you had the power, you would kill him.

Finality Man slows, his eyes flickering, and something feels… Lighter. Immediately I throw out a construct fish tank to catch Karshon and pull him back to me. If there's anything left of his intellect then I can't detect it. I was vaguely aware that the Omega Effect could be used as more than a disintegration ray, but this is the first time I've seen it used like that.

"Tuppence, Karshon's down. We're pulling out."

"Busy!"

But it's not just Mannheim they want killed. It's you as well. Feel their desires as your own.

I fly back, keeping the trembling robot in view as I retreat to the Anti-Life broadcaster. Agent Carlyle is still standing next to it, the battered and broken forms of five of the Brothers lying around its fortifications. Tuppence is fighting-. Yeti. Hu Wei. With a mouth that's much bigger, claws that are much longer, and a berserk fury more intense than anything I've seen records of. He slashes at her wildly, forcing her to back up as she looks around for something to use as a projectile or lever. Her forearms are bleeding from where she's battered his attacks away. He's… Faster than her.

The control mechanism he usually wears around his neck is missing. No easy way to shut him down.

But he's not wearing a helmet.

I form a sonic cannon and fire a beam of ultrasound directly at his head. He cringes, aborting a leap that would have seen him tearing into Tuppence. She steps forward and punches, sending him flying into the river bereft of several broken fangs.

"He is superior." One True Existence.

Finality Man looks down at me and I can't even touch it any longer. His eyes glow and it raises its hands-.

I fire, solid slugs impacting its eyes as it tries to fire its Omega Effect. It might be possible to do something clever like lead the beam around so that it hits Finality Man, but there's already something around here that's messing with my top speed and that beam moves fast. The plasma fields get a neutron ray but… Something's different. That should have messed with the containment field. It doesn't. The plasma field dissipates harmlessly without any flashback into his internals.

"Get Carlyle."

Tuppence dashes right over to him. "Hey! We gotta get gone!"

"I… I can see…" He turns away from the broadcaster to face her. "Everything!"

Tuppence punches him in the face-. Then winces, nursing her fist.

"I can see you!"

Tuppence punches him in the diaphragm, causing him to fold up. She then hits him on the back of the head, rendering him unconscious.

Finality Man looms closer. He's keeping his Omega Effect ready but not manifested, so there's nothing for me to disrupt. Shooting him in the eyes… Crumblers, mage slayers, lasers, plasmas of various kinds… It's not doing anything.

Tuppence pulls the mask off Agent Carlyle's face.

Okay, that's available. I can't supercharge myself without risking the Ophidian. Given that Finality Man wasn't doubled over with fear I'm going to assume that he's immune, at least on the face of a neophyte user.

I need to leave.

I toss Construct-Lantern Colin Thornton out of my ring. "Destroy the robot."

"Yes, Master."

Orange-tinted hellfire surges around his hand and leaps at Finality Man, and… Actually manages to damage his armour. Finality Man waves his right hand and generates a massive wave of kinetic energy, but Thornton just teleports around it.

Right. That should keep him busy for a minute or two.

I fly down to Tuppence, wrap a construct claw around the broadcaster and crush it into fragments. Then I grab Amazing Man with a construct and pull him over. I.. can still read him. No more fear generation and no more Anti-Life… He's recovering, but not fast enough. I take a purple healing ray out of subspace and shoot him while at the same time using my rings to reset his physiology to normal resting standards.

"Amazing Man!"

His eyes focus for a moment, his arms batting away my constructs.

"What the..? Hell was..?"

"The Alliance of the Just was a front for Intergang. You were mind controlled by the Anti-Life Equation. Are you functional?"

"Yeah, I remember." He looks around, then makes the mistake of looking up. "Oh, God."

"So, I was wondering what the limits on your material replication are." I take a small bar of orichalcum out of subspace. "Can you copy this?"

He takes it from me and holds it for a moment.

"What is this, gold? I… Ugh." The steel-colour of his body turns into the shimmering gold of orichalcum. "It's a soft-. This isn't soft."

"No, it's just about the hardest thing there is. Except for-"

Thornton has opened portals to… Something, and tendrils glowing with purple light are stroking Finality Man in a way which is stripping away slivers of his armour.

"-his armour. Do you know if you can adapt to that?"

"I…" He reaches down and picks up a fragment of Justifier helmet. "No. My power doesn't even think this stuff is matter."

"Right. We're pulling out, then. I-."

"Wait, what about-" He looks around at the other former Justifiers who are just starting to stir. "-them?"

"The same thing as everyone else. They'll have to wait until we can destroy the network. We don’t have the-."

"Embrace finality." Life Means Death.

Finality Man's eyes flash, the Omega Beam hitting Thornton, and-. Turning him back into a man. His eyes widen as he falls, arms waving as he tries to produce some sort of magic to halt his fall-.

I catch him first, extending filaments to Amazing Man, Agent Carlyle and Tuppence.

"Moving now."

I blast us into the air, heading for the edge of the atmosphere as Finality Man drifts to the wreckage of the Anti-Life broadcaster, considers it for a moment and then fires an Omega blast which… Repairs the broadcaster instantly as if it had never been destroyed. Then it looks up at us, watching from just over ground level before the clouds obscure its view.

Boom!

And then he leaves, and all I can do is head to the ships.

We got the Mask. But I'm not sure how we're going to be able to use it if we have to get past things like that.

 

8th June 2000
22:57 GMT +9

"Kill them! Kill the interlopers!"

The Japanese economy has had its ups and downs, and right now it's in a major down. I'm not exactly certain why it happened, but the summary I read in The Times made it sound like the Wall Street Crash of 1929: people put too much money in a class of investment that lacked the underlying strength to sustain it. But the collapse in demand and the desire of those banks which had repossessed property to sell them for desperately needed cash meant that a lot of property became available and a fraction of their original value.

"I want them all dead!"

And the oni invested.

They also had a line in buying slave labourers from North Korea and dosing them with watered down vampire venom to keep them compliant, which is-

Fire from yakuza security guards hits my shield and loses all of its kinetic energy as I advance on their position.

-how they've been able to make a huge profit on manual labour intensive work. They don't need to pay them and they won't ever complain. I think they paid for them in more watered down vampire venom, but we haven't really investigated that end of the trade.

Behind me, Peisinoe sings a hypnotic song to keep the workers entranced. It costs them what little sense of self-preservation they have left, but it's the only reason why they haven't tried swarming us when their boss ordered them to.

The thugs before me duck back to reload and I take the opportunity to storm forward, truncheon construct at the ready. One spots me and drops his gun in favour of drawing a knife, but my superior reach makes it child's play to smack his hand and force him to drop it. He backs off, but my second strike hits him in the diaphragm and adds electrocution to blunt force trauma.

The second has been reloading while backing away and aims his gun at my vision slit. Since I'm wearing construct armour rather than metal armour the 'slit' isn't actually either a hole or a weak point, but I'll give him marks for situational awareness. Slam the truncheon into the head of the one on the ground and then leap at the one shooting me. I don't try to evade; bullets missing me might hit someone else. He switches to one handed firing as I cross the intervening space, trying to open the door behind him without looking around.

It doesn't work, but does allow me to concuss him with a body slam.

"Useless ingrates. Shuten, get down there and deal with this!"

I tap my communicator. "Peisinoe, I've dealt with the last of the guards. Start bringing the prisoners up. The police should be here in a few minutes."

"You're supposed to call me 'Nure' when we're playing at being superheroes."

"None of us speak Japanese." Hm. I put construct restraints around the guards and open the door, striding out of the warehouse and onto the dock. Might as well carry-.

Dodge!

I throw myself towards a nearby mooring as the concrete around me explodes! I land on my face, scrambling back onto my feet and trying to see through the resulting concrete dust. There's a… Large shape, and… I need to keep its attention to stop it from going for Peisinoe and her charges.

An energy pulse hits its centre of mass, to no apparent effect as it strides out of the dust. A… Woman? Seven feet tall and made of solid muscle. And then her image inducer glitches out and I see an… Oni-like figure, but with red skin, a crest of five separate horns and… Eyes scattered apparently at random across her head, torso, arms and legs. She? The hologram blinks back in, showing a body that the greatest Viking-descended female bodybuilder in the world would envy. The actual body only wore a pair of tight denim shorts, any breasts that she might have merged into the oversized pectorals. The illusion wears a vest and denim trousers, as well as metal-studded leather bracers and quite a lot of piercings.

"Green Knight!" She points at me, grinning. "I will eat your brain!"

Hose.

I stick a green pipe into the ocean waters behind me, taking in as much as I can-.

She leaps at me, mouth open and grinning and right fist pulled back. I dart into the air and then expel the water at pressure, slashing the stream across her body!

She grimaces slightly as she lands, crushing the pier under her feet before jumping back onto the dock.

"My eyes are just as tough as the rest of me, foreigner. Which is a lot tougher than you!"

"Tough? Maybe, but can you fly?"

She puts her hands on her hips, and-.

Fzzzzap!

The hit knocks me into the water, down to the bottom of the bay and then deeper into the silt! My construct armour's cracked and leaking water, and I-.

"BLOOBBLOBLOBBB!"

A hand grabs me and throws me, and I'm back in the air and flying into-.

OOF!

The side of a warehouse hard enough to dent the metal. Armour!

"We're a space-age species, Knight!" Shuten pulls herself out onto the dock, still grinning as her image inducer glitches in and out. "You think we haven't put anything in orbit?"

"I had hoped."

"No such luck! But I've got an offer for you! Stay on the ground and I won't use it! They hardly ever let me have a good fight! And get your sword out!"

I pull myself out of the wall and drop to the ground, marking the location of the satellite weapon.

And as Shuten advances I tap my communicator twice.

"Hakai no jikanda!"

Our sub-orbital support falls from the heavens and slams into her, Chauf having left behind his plasma cannon because he didn't want to 'besmirch the name of Ben Grimm'. Which probably has something to do with why he's wearing a blue jumpsuit with a number 3 on it. The two of them roll along the dockside, wrestling for supremacy.

"Peisinoe, you might want to take the back door?

"Yes, I worked that out for myself."

I generate a palisade shield and a pair of rocket boosters and set off for space, a brilliant trail of superheated exhaust washing over the struggling pugilists as I head towards the orbital weap-.

It hits my shield and as it maintains the beam I'm painfully aware of what something like that could do if it was actually aimed at a city. I can't dodge it. I've got to tank the whole thing and hope that it melts or empties its capacitors before my construct finally breaks down.

My shield will not break down. It will endure. I will endure.

My shield does break as I leave the atmosphere, the… Particle beam? Trying to burn through my armour next. I can feel it giving, melting, cracking and failing but too bad for them because I can see the satellite! Energy pulse!

The shot slams into the gun, punching clean through and shutting down the beam. It also sends the satellite into a spin, giving me a clean shot at the power plant on the opposite side. The whole assemblage explodes in a viscerally satisfying way and I take a moment to appreciate it before heading back to the surface.

 

15th February 2013
19:46 GMT -5

Mr. Clay takes a look around the ship's prison hold.

"I didn't realise that the Justice League had space ships. Or are these yours?"

"Some aliens decided to take advantage of Earth's distress to kidnap some metahumans. We stopped them." I offer him the Mask. "Okay, try this?"

He takes it with a frown. "You know I don't get-."

His skin shifts to match the colour of the Mask. He opens and closes his left hand a couple of times.

"Is it-?"

"No. Sorry." He shakes his head and offers it back to me. "It's just bronze. Whatever makes that thing work, I don't get it when I copy the metal."

"Thanks for trying anyway."

And now our first prisoner. I walk down the gangway until I'm in front of his cell, then press the 'communicate' button.

"Mister Thornton. You appear to be alive again."

He's kneeling in the centre of the cell, hands on his lap and head bowed. He's muttering some sort of evocation, but from the lack of heat build-up in the cell's spell eater I'm going to guess that it's not working.

He appears to reach that conclusion a moment later, opening his eyes and glaring at me.

"I will end you for what you did to me."

"Or not. But can we agree that it would be best-."

"No. No. You fed me mind body and soul to your pet snake, and then spat me out as a slave. "

"And you're taking it personally despite having done far worse to far more people-."

"I make a paradise of Purgatory. Do you know what it was like before I got there?"

"We've spoken to your sister and corroborated the events she described-."

"You stopped me. Twisted me. I don't care about the cattle; you did it to me."

"Ah. Well, don't worry, we Orange Lanterns understand personal vendettas. But old-you would have blasted past that ward like it wasn't there. What seems to be the problem?"

He closes his eyes again and goes back to his chanting.

"You register as completely human to my scans. No real magic presence. The Omega Effect appears to have brought you back as human."

"It's temporary. Temporary. It-. I've been bound before."

"No need to worry there. Without your power as a demon lord, I don't have any need to assimilate you again. Enjoy your chanting."

I press the button again to end the dialogue, and step away from the cell. He's focused on his chanting to the exclusion of all else. If the Omega Effect did what I think it did, then he should have the same access to magic as a neophyte magician. Those are only dangerous with an artefact or access to sacrifices, and he has neither.

"Orange Lantern?" Mr. Clay looks mildly concerned. "Can you explain that? You..? Assimilated him?"

"I can turn people into constructs. It's usually irrevocable. When the League went to Belle Reve to make sure that the inmates stayed out of Mannheim's hands I decided that a Demon Lord was too dangerous to hold, so I used the ability on him."

"And the big robot undid it."

"Finality Man turned him into a human. He's never been a human, he just looked like one."

Agent Carlyle is sitting on his bench. His head is bowed as well, but it's more in defeat than focus. His head comes up as I approach and press the communication button.

"Agent Carlyle. Would you care to explain?"

"It's our job."

"I'm going to need a little more-."

"Cultivate exceptional assets and deploy them in exceptional situations. You got a power ring, I have a giant shark man."

"You lied to me about what happened."

"I haven't been briefed on you. I don't know how you'll react to whatever situation occurs. I needed you out of the way to have the best chance of success."

"And you didn't think to ask me for intelligence on Finality Man's abilities?"

"I.. can't say I was entirely firing on all cylinders at the end there." He looks away for a moment. "Where are we? I can barely hear the Anti-Life here. Some sort of Justice League safe house?"

"A starship. If we can't liberate Earth, it will be used to carry out an evacuation."

"Damn."

I wiggle the Medusa Mask at him. "Fortunately, with this, that might not be necessary. In a sense, what you did is a proof-of-concept."

"How?"

"We're going to use a wider range of emotions and more power. The aim is to force the Anti-Life out of peoples' minds entirely."

"Will that work on Mannheim? Or the robot?"

"Don't know. To be honest, I don't exactly understand what happened to Mannheim to make him the way he is. The robot I've got a plan for."

"And you couldn't have done that just now?"

"The people involved would need advanced warning and preparation time. I was just there to acquire the mask. Honestly, I was taking an unnecessary risk even letting you have your attempt."

"Then why did you?"

I shrug. "It might have worked. I'm not omniscient. And knowing that they Justified the Great Ten is useful."

He nods. "Am I getting out of here?"

I scan him and use empathic vision. Nothing stopping me and he looks fairly normal.

"Could you explain what you were shouting just before Tuppence knocked you out?"

"I…" He frowns for a moment. "I was a bit… Okay, this is… It was like… I could see things associated with their emotions."

"Okay. I can do that. But why were you shouting?"

"I don't know exactly, but since I hadn't gotten any sleep for a couple of weeks I'm going to say it was a bout of sleep-deprivation induced megalomania." He stiffly pulls his legs up onto the bench and lays down. "Put the shield in 'opaque' mode and leave me for a couple of days, will you?"

 

9th June 2000
08:23 GMT

The rune stone sits on a nearby table as Chauf stares at the screen, watching a report from Japan's leading news broadcaster.

"I don't know what they're saying, but they all look pretty happy."

There's a short clip of him dragging the semi-conscious Shuten over to a clearly bewildered police officer, the crowd behind him more interested in taking pictures than in the wider political considerations. Or personal safety considerations. I drop down a moment later and Peisinoe and the former slaves a few moments after that. That seems to get them moving, and we more or less back off and let the emergency services do their thing.

I nod. "They're basically playing the tropes to the hilt for amusement value. Probably because they have no idea how else to play it. The shadoen attack was only a few days ago. Director Logan might have informed world leaders, but that knowledge hasn't spread out to the general population yet. That's why this is so important."

Peisinoe doesn't look impressed. "But what about the oni?"

"Again, they're perfectly fine with the idea that some aliens are hostile. But superheroes fighting evil, winning and not causing too much property damage in the meantime is a far better angle than-."

An image of a government official from… The National Public Safety Commission, which is an ominous-sounding name. It's just a clip from a full interview that they're showing this evening, but…

"He's not offended by us showing up. He's saying that the government was briefed on-. Ah, 'the possibility' of aliens hiding in their country, and that they're satisfied that we're doing the right thing. I don't know whether that's what they're saying in private, but that's the official stated position of the Japanese government at the moment."

Chauf considers that for a moment.

"We should talk to them directly. Might help if we give them more information than the Alliance is." He presses a button, dismissing the news coverage as it goes onto economic matters and calling up our information files on vampire occupation. "Green Knight, do you know anything about vampires in Japan?"

"There aren't any, as far as I know. The oni were too entrenched. Might start being a problem now, but as far as I know even the vampires not aligned with Dorn are trying to avoid making any move that could be considered provocative." I shrug. "I've been occupied with vampires and the Alliance. Are there any major nexuses of non-human criminality? Because if this is a job we can get done in a month or so, I can focus on building up our intelligence on the state of things on other planets."

Chauf nods. "The lycanthropes, but that's just individual packs doing their own things. They're not organised like the vampires or oni."

"So we could just pop by the pack leader for a chat without coming in heavy?"

"That would be better. I've had dealings with a few packs, and a lot of them just want to avoid being noticed. Their short lifespan means that they can't hide in one place for long because it gets noticed. Can't cope with human school systems for the same reason."

I frown. "Yes, I was… Wondering about that? How the heck do lycanthropes maintain a technologically sophisticated society?"

"They're not just physical mimics. They copy skills as well. If a pup hangs around engineers or scientists for the first few months, they pick up everything a lot faster than anyone else. But they can't send them to school because human schools give general educations and specialise later."

I nod. "Okay. Anyone else?"

Chauf looks pointedly at Peisinoe.

…

She pointedly doesn't look at him.

"O… Kay. The other issue is human on alien crime. I expect there's going to be a spate of thefts because just about anything of alien origin is going to be highly valuable and there isn't a legitimate route to ownership yet."

"Yeah." Chauf nods, still looking at Peisinoe. "That sounds like it could be a problem."

She keeps it up for a few moments before finally turning fully towards us. "Fine. Some members of my species have used their mesmerising power to make stealing easier. There are only a few places on Earth where we live in any numbers. We should probably talk to some of the community leaders in India to make sure that things don't get out of hand."

"Okay, but… I.. feel like I'm missing something."

"In that part of the world, sirens used to be a bigger problem than lycanthropes."

"That was a long time ago. They gave it up when humans grew too numerous."

I nod. "But some of the cultural traditions might still hang on. It's a potential flashpoint if someone does something stupid. Do they have any advanced technology?"

She shakes her head. "No. The last time I visited, they were even more primitive than the Indian humans."

"You mean.. 'rural Indian humans', right? Because there's a fairly large split in India between-."

The stone shimmers and we switch our attention to it. I move it to a clear area on the floor and feed a little of the green light into it. A moment later space shimmers, then Queen Mab, her bodyguards Shateera and Sheenta and Princess Sh'rain appear from thin air. Banshees don't really do 'timekeeping', not having clocks or watches, so we've just been hanging around waiting for them.

Mab manages to only grimace slightly at being surrounded by metal, while the others… Sh'rain looks a little nervous, Shateera seems disinterested and… Sheenta is giving me the evils. Not too impressed about me concealing that I'm human, I imagine.

Chauf steps forwards. "Queen Mab. Welcome on board."

"Chauf." Fair enough. He doesn't have a title. The Conduit hasn't ever really been that formal. "Green Knight. Not hiding your face, I see."

"No, your majesty. At this point it would be counterproductive."

She returns her attention to Chauf. "I want to make a deal wid you. Sh'lainn tole me about what you've been up to in.. Japan. The Green Knight here tole me I should do the same last winter, but I didn't pay him much mind. And now his master is telling me the same t'ing."

That's honestly news to me. I didn't know that she and Percival were on direct conversation terms.

Chauf nods. "How can we help?"

"Sh'rain's been wanting to get out and about on her own for a while. And she needs more experience dealing peaceably with other peoples. I want her to join you."

"We could do that." Chauf looks down at Sh'rain. "Does she want to join us?"

"I do. Sh'lainn's learned a lot since she left home, and I want t'do the same. And what you're doing, I want t'make banshees look good as well."

Chauf nods again. "Alright. You won't know anything about ships or weapons, but can you fight?"

She raises her hands, glowing balls of plasma materialising as she floats off the ground and her hair goes in all directions. "Troy me."

Right hand behind my back, I generate a small energy pulse. Banshees tend to fight like flying artillery: no real armour and once they're in position they don't usually dodge. Sh'lainn's learned the value of mobility and cover, but a sharp introduction will help underline that this isn't a game and injury and death are real possibilities.

I bring my hand around and release, sending the energy pulse flying at her chest-.

Where it's blocked by a glowing green shield.

"Hey!" She glares at me, eyes still glowing. "What's the big idea!"

I look at Queen Mab. She looks away.

Well. I had wondered.