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

Im pretty sure Paul would just develop a soul out of order magic after a day or two, like the lazarus pit the Helmet of Fate channels a lot of magic into a human body but he would be exposed to it constantly and not just a couple hours a day. Meaning he would develop a soul much faster then anti-green lantern Paul.

 

Not if Fate taking over would just kill Paul. At one point it was specifically noted that Nabu looks for hosts with magic power for some reason whenever possible.

 

Spoiler: Some Possible Corrections?

I think this needs a question mark, unless her tone was a statement with just implied question.

American spelling is 'authorization'.

'Among other things' I believe.

This one I think does require a question mark.

It should be 'it would make sense', I think.

There's two 'that' in this part of the sentence, maybe 'also say that they are holding the staff hostage'.

I think there is a missing hyphen in front of Zatanna to connect with the previous hyphen, that seems to be the convention.

It should be 'I look around at everyone.'

I think Doppelgänger is one of my favorite episodes of the whole story, including the teaser segments, and I love this episode just for the chance to see Earth -14 again. It got me out of lurking again and I had to reread the aforementioned episode. I do hope we get to see an encounter between Power Ring Blue Paul and Orange Illustres Paul so they can have another private chat like the first time. I think it's the only time that the Illustres has been completely honest with another individual; at least that was my impression. Ironic when it's just himself.

Oh, as an aside, is it just me or does Zorina appears a bit Tsundere-ish?

 

Because like with his Earth 16 counterpart, his ring has no AI support. He assumed for a very long time that it was unique. Power Ring Green's gauntlet also has no database. As such, Capo Scott doesn't know what its limits are.

 

The reason is because the magic of Doctor Fate is not only the magic of Nabu but also depends on how strong the host is. He explains that he was unable to defeat Klarion when he faced him at the Tower of Fate because his host(Wally) was to weak.

 

Makes da sense.

Personally, I would LOVE for Baul and Zorina to be out of contact BECAUSE they are in a different universe, even more so if their honeymoon is in earth 16, and they are using the opportunity to contact Lex Luthor and network with him. Why? Because there shouldn't be that many crisis left to stomp in Earth 16, so giving our Paul another reason to interact with earth - 14 a place that is apparently constantly on fire, would help to make things (IE this fic) more interesting.

Also I wonder if the universe of earth - 14 is more stable than the standard 16 one... Guardians are dead, but they were apparently off the deepend and evil, so a plus... Good guy the REACH and their scarab police being a force of good would also be fun if Blue Bettle is ever introduced and Paul + the team go to earth - 14 during a few episodes (blue Bettle meets Black Bettle as a good guy space cop trying to keep da peace).

 

Man, Liquidated is such a good euphemism. Especially for a 'Management' themed group.
Cuz you know that there's probably one or two guys who literally had to be liquefied to get rid of them.

Also, I really don't see any reason why OL's immediate plan of action wouldn't be to get Wilson out of office (since he's a nutjob) then have the entire Syndicate arrested.

Peace between two factions might be the ideal status-quo for the syndicate, but Paul comes from a universe where you don't just let criminals live in peace.

 

Now I'm not sure if this got covered in the comments, but how exactly did the Management manage to jump universes? If I recall Power Ring Blue gave Paul the schematics for dimension jumping jammers to stop future incursions, unless those jammers only worked on the specific variety of dimension jumping that he and the Young Offenders used to get over that one time.

 

Your guessed correctly.

We have had criminals for as long as we've had laws. Why do you assume that 'free range' criminals would be less bad than a single unified group?

See previous comments about the places with the most superheroes being the places where they're least needed.

There was an amusing comment from a character in 'The Delirium Brief' by Charles Stross, where a police officer who moonlights as a superhero remarks that by definition criminologists can only study unsuccessful criminals. Truly successful ones tend to legitimise themselves in ways I can't talk about on this board.

 

Is a world of assholes that has the whole planet run as if it was Al Capone Chicago.

They are also all supervillains and not the sympathetic kind.

You can if is historic like the Dutch West India Company. Know as West India Company for short .

 

Lack of resources and coordination, I assume.
If it's not even worth trying to destroy organised crime, then why do superheroes on earth 16 target the mob and organisations like The Light, when they'll just be more 'free range' criminals cropping up later?

Just because it's an endless battle to stem the tide of shitty people doesn't mean you stop doing it, otherwise the whole world will be overwhelmed.

The 'ideal' for this world is probably to crush the syndicate completely and build the Justice Underground into something public and powerful, like the Justice League.

Sure, the league itself isn't ideal, as shown by OL's own actions in 16, but unless he's willing to devote literal decades to this universe instead of say, a month or so, then pulling it up to a level where it can sustain itself and the local heroes are something to be aspired to instead of a desperate resistance force always on the verge of being destroyed, is probabably the best anyone can hope for.

 

As mentioned in the bit with Richard earlier, the point of fighting crime is to reduce it to a level at which existing institutions can deal with it, preferably while re-engineering society so that the causes of crime are removed as much as possible.

The only reason to stop organised crime over disorganised crime is that they're more likely to be ambitious than random thugs. And the Syndicate just had its knuckles so thoroughly rapped that they're destroying their own weapons and assassinating their own members to prevent further escalation.

 

I mean, does that seem likely to continue as the route forwards? Are they going to stick with racketeering and gambling and other mostly harmless vices, or are they going to build up some power and make a push for control over the entire country again?

They've had a taste of glory, of the 'good old days' where the bad-guys were untouchable and the good-guys were running scared.
I expect them to keep making pushes back towards those days over and over so long as even a single member who personally experienced the 'golden age' is still around, and possibly for decades afterwards.

I absolutely expect organised criminals to be massively more ambitious and harmful than disorganised ones.

Them 'liquidating' their assets doesn't feel like 'downsizing' so much as 'restructuring'
They're taking what they have left and finding the best way to use them in the new status quo. Anything that can't be used will be removed and the resources assigned to it will be reassigned somewhere more useful.

They got rid of their superweapons so that they couldn't be used against them, not because they wanted to be unable to cause mass casualties if doing so ever became something they felt they could profit from.

The sorts of people who join this kind of organisation...
I don't see them as the kind of people who give up because someone bigger or stronger than them rapped them on the knuckles.

No, they wait until the person responsible for said rapping turns their backs and then they smash them in the back of the head with a brick and curb-stomp them while they're down until there's nothing left of their skull but mush.
And then they turn to the rest of the class, who saw them get chastised, and they make sure to remind everyone that they're still the biggest and the meanest around so that nobody gets any ideas.

Traditionally, that's how organisation crime groups have always dealt with being 'punished'.
At the moment they don't have the manpower to keep escelating, so they're going to go underground, buy some time and build up their strength.
Give em time? Turn your back on them? They'll be right back where they were before.

You have to destroy the Syndicate. Not just as a 'threat' but as an organisation and an entity. Otherwise it'll keep spreading like a weed and every five or so years they'll make another push to take over the country.

That's completely aside from the day-to-day crimes that they presumably do. Like drug-running, people smuggling, prostitution, maybe a little organ harvesting, and your standard murder-for-hire stuff.
All stuff that leaves broken lives or corpses in their wake.

Al Scott says they're only really doing one 'objectionable' thing, but he has to be lying because they're a goddamn crime syndicate.
They're not a social club. Slade isn't attacking them because they're meeting up with their friends and playing poker in dark rooms.


At best they're not currently hurting many people because they don't have the resources or organisation to actually manage, but a truce would give them time to change that.
At worst there's still business-as-usual operation on the lower levels, but Al doesn't consider that 'objectionable' because that's the norm for him. He is an archetypal mob-boss, after all. They don't give a fuck who they squash or who they hurt to raise money.

There aren't very many victimless crimes, and the ones that do exist tend not to be as simple as murder-for-hire or as profitable as getting teenagers hooked on cocaine and then putting them to work in brothels until they OD.

Helping an organisation like this to regain any kind of grip on the country when it's already this far weakened and so close to being overturned for good would be completely unconscionable.

I don't really see how this 'build a truce' thing is either feasible or in OL's best interests, unless the plan is for OL to magically convince them all to go straight, and even then it'd result in a bunch of multiple-time murderers and kidnappers and rapists going free and facing absolutely no consequences.

There's probably a bunch of offices full of people who did nothing but move money around, and they'd probably be fine with a decade or so jail-time each for being mob-accountants or money-launderers or whatever.

Pretty much every Made Man has dead bodies on their hands though, and they need either life in prison, or the death penalty.
Like, real old-school 'bring out a row of nooses' style, and just do them all at once.

This includes the kiddie-team who mostly seem to be remorseless murderers, from what we saw of them.
Not sure about Baul himself. He seems to have just been trying to keep them from killing even more people. Making the best of the shitty situation he was in. Objectively speaking though, it's undeniable that he did help them maintain control and aided their resources, although the fact that he talked Ultraman out of building the planet-bomb earns him some good-will.

Prison-time. Almost certainly.
If he's caught.

If it were me, dealing with an alternate version of myself who got stuck in that situation, I'd probably pity him enough to give him a new face or fly him off-planet somewhere. Somewhere where he didn't have to play denmother to psychopaths just to survive.
S'not fair that he'd get away with the shit that he was a part of, just because he's me, but I never claimed to be unbiased or objective.

On the other hand, he still cares for these people despite them being unabashedly evil, as sort of stockholm syndrome, I guess.
So letting him loose with a power-ring and a grudge after jailing or executing a bunch of his friends would probably be a huge mistake.

 

Which is fine, as long as you don't mind the 150 million or so deaths it would take to make it happen.

 

It's better then helping them and being part to killing or putting in positions worse then death many more times that.

Also you're kind of forgetting the whole "afterlife" thing.

 

Dont the made men only number in the dozens, and they generally dont really seem that powerful, I cant really see how they could cause a death count high enough to justify to not go after them.

 

Retaw si alobe.

 

Ouch. Point taken.

 

Ok, but that makes Owlman seem much more insane, if the Syndicate could have wiped out a large part of the population without actually endangering themselves, why did he ever consider a bomb a sensible choice.

 

He didn't want the bomb for the reasons he stated; that was just a cover to get the other heads on board with the construction. He wanted the bomb in order to blow up every possible reality by transporting it to a "root" reality and blowing it up, which would apparently destroy every reality derived from it.

 

That would require creating life, which their particular brand of magic doesn't have the ability to do.

 

That would settle the question of “are viruses alive”, at least in Earth -14.

 

How does it distinguish what is "alive"? A virus is just a few proteins predisposed to self-replication. I can see magic not being able to create souls, but it can't replicate a relatively simple pattern of molecules?

 

I mean... They already knew the answer to that question given The Divided represents such life.

 

I mean, he DID already colony drop the Citadel. How's that number stack up?

I don't see any real reason to help what's left of the Syndicate survive. But that's me.

 

Less, but they'd mostly be innocent bystanders rather than Citadelians.

 

While you're probably correct, I simply have a personal rule. If I can't manage at least competent entertainment level, then I see no reason to bother. I freely admit to being far more of an entertainer then an artist. I don't write because I like to write (I'm perfectly capable of watching the "Movie" of my writing in my head) in as much as my brain tends to pop out ideas, and I like to write things that people enjoy.

On the other side, I lack Zoat's impressive DC knowledge, and I haven't actually watched all of Young Justice.

An SI of me would also be handicapped by being...me. I've never been diagnosed, but I don't think people would enjoy reading me swinging between my manic and depressive moods.

Well, perhaps. Again, it was my idea for me more than anything as I am more of a fantasy guy then a tech one.

However, my idea was that despite the soulless part, and vulnerability to magic, an Earth Prime brain is simply too "alien" for Nabu to take over. (My personal headcanon being that Earth Prime natives are natural reality warpers on a universal scale, as they are literally the "Authors", and so when pulled into the descending comic-verses, those universes themselves force the SI into a "character mold" such as a Lantern to keep them from noticing and exploring said fact.)

Plus, with the soulless "empty shell filling with magic" part, I thought to make that a weakness. As in, the longer the SI wears the helmet and thus channels mystic power, the more they "Fill up". Which in turn leads to crippling pain and perhaps other issues if they continue past full up. Thus, they are on a time limit.

Which I thought would be a good counterweight to a fully aware SI being Dr. Fate. Who, as I am familiar with, is a Superman Level flying brick AND THEN adds top level magic on top of that.

Fair enough.

 

Wat.

 

I tried. It lacked Orange Lantern, so I lost interest.