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

[Mr Zoat]

which I will not be buying, unfortunately, for what I shall call 'personal reasons).

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You can say 'the author was accused of rape'. It's fine.

So, uh, Mr. Zoat, as the prime expert on the WTR version of Dream of the Endless, a being who is basically the inspiration for the Nobilis… would you be willing to speculate as to his reaction to… well, this particular flavor of nonsense? He was willing to bargain for Suleiman's Globe and Shakespeare writing a few plays for him; mortal riches are of no interest to him, but he seems willing to trade… as long as it doesn't harm his realm…

I just have no idea where Raksha-items fall in that list. They belong to universe-warping fae/story monstrosities, outside of creation, but those same monstrosities tend to lack cosmic might when running up against a callow youth with a stick and a bit of iron. And you mentioned a world where Paul's orange ring became an infernal exalt, so I'm kinda curious as to your thoughts on my particular lunacy.

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I don't even know what a raksha is. The Dream isn't Wyld in the Exalted sense. Dream probably wouldn't mind someone building something in a corner of it where not much was going on, so long as it didn't mess up anything else. But... I can be a bit puritanical where some things are concerned, and I'm not sure that stuff from Exalted is really compatible with the laws of Universe 16 without a lot of Primordial assistance.

 

[Razorfloss]

Dream is… interestingly limited, and I wish I could read more of Sandman (which I will not be buying, unfortunately, for what I shall call 'personal reasons).

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You can always buy second hand if you don't want to support the author. Failing that the sail the seven seas.

 

[Mr Zoat]

31st August 2013
09:28 GMT -5

We follow him into the laboratory, where… A bit less mad sciencey than I was expecting. Multiple hologram screens show… Mass spectroscopy results, scans of alchemical tomes and… Shipping routes? So not mad sciencey and more mad detectivey.

Artemis looks around. "Is Robin hiding under the desk?"

"Ah, no. He helped with the shipping stuff, but I'm the guy whose been trying to turn alchemy into an actual science."

"Ah…"

"You know what I mean, Oh El. And until Atlantis finishes that Dream research, this…" He gestures around to the screens covered in arcane lore. "This is probably the most complete guide to alchemy on Earth."

Artemis looks surprised and a little impressed. "Really? And you've been doing this..? Two years?"

"Not just me, but… Yeah. Most alchemists I've spoken to are mostly interested in… Basically, they do it like it's a ritual. Follow the exact steps, maybe learn from other alchemists… But they don't try and work out why any of it works in a structured kinda way. But between the records I've gotten hold of and Kord Industries' chem lab… I don't know everything, but I know a lot."

"Okay. Blow our minds."

"Ooooookay. So, firstly, I had to eliminate chemical effects. So if there's a chemical in a… Ah, 'potion', that actually has something to do with whatever the potion's doing, I gotta try and eliminate that. Because if the potion… If it's supposed to make something burn really well and one of the ingredients is eucalyptus sap…"

"Yeah."

Artemis raises her right forefinger. "English major. What's wrong with eucalyptus sap?"

"Highly flammable. The eucalyptus tree's lifecycle involves growing quickly, having fire-resistant seeds, and then burning everything around it to death. So if you ever wonder why Californian wildfires are so bad, imported eucalyptus tree are about fifty percent of the reason."

"Right." She nods. "If it's gunna burn anyway, it's not magical fire."

"But it might be magic enhanced fire. Turns out a lot of potions are mostly just enhancing things a couple of the ingredients do. I actually-." He gestures to a cabinet. "Found a way to make myself go faster. Doesn't last all that long…"

"Not found a way to make yourself go full Flash speed yet?"

"Eh." He sighs dejectedly. "Its probably easier to just purge myself and then take the full formula. Unfortunately, nullifying a change like this that's been in place for years is actually kinda hard. Like, really hard."

"My offer to clone you a replacement body and transplant your brain is still available."

"That's actually worse. If you did that, my brain would still be super fast but the rest of my wouldn't. I wouldn't be able to run, and if I tried taking the Garrick Formula again… It would probably work on my body, but my brain would be trying to go at three different speeds at the same time. And ah… Uncle Barry made me clear out the mouse cages after I tested that. And the back wall. Had to really scrub."

I grin. "What was the mouse called?"

He gives me a flat look. "Dude."

"We could try it anyway. I'm pretty sure my soul transfer technique would for-."

"No!" Artemis slaps me on the arm, triggering my kinetic barrier. "No exploding brains!" She points assertively at Wallace. "No exploding brains."

"Believe me, the mouse was plenty. Look, the point is, once the lab techs finished the mass spectroscopy on the emotion potions and we knew what chemicals were in it, I could compare the effects with all the things I knew could cause those effects and had those elements in them."

"So you know how they work?"

"Ah, yeah?"

"Could you make them yourself?"

"Ah." He looks around the laboratory. "Not with what I've got here, but, yeah? Why?"

"It's not patented."

"Sure, but I clearly didn't invent it. Even if the guy who did goes to prison, they're still gunna be the legal inventor."

"Unless they were working off alchemical tomes more than twenty years old. Because if that's happened, they're going to be too busy to set up a generic medicines company and no one else has the know-how."

Wallace looks at me uncomfortably. "I don't really wanna start out being a drug dealer, Oh El."

I'm sure that my eyes are glowing as I open my mouth-.

"Yeah, I get everything about what the pharmaceutical industry does from Jay, but can we focus?"

"Sure, sure."

"Anyway, there's only so many ways to force people to feel emotions, and outside of a couple of things they just don't last. But once you add in the correspondence effect that you found on that Tim guy, I worked out what they were actually doing."

Artemis nods. "Are they like, sucking the emotion out of one person and putting it in another one?"

"No, if they were doing that there's have been emotionally burned out people turning up by now. Far as I can work out? They're finding people who are already feeling that emotion, dosing them with something to make the correspondence ritual work, and then the potion the people at the other end get mostly just connects the two together. There isn't actually all that much difference between the content of the different doses."

He gestures at the table where the samples are set up-.

"Why's the one-?" / "How come-?"

Artemis and I stop, both of us having noticed that one of the vials has changed colour quite significantly.

Wallace follows our gazes, nodding. "If we're lucky, that just means that the potion has passed through their system, or they're not feeling the right emotion any more. If we're not, then it probably means that they're dead."

"Can we track the link?"

"We can't. You need someone who can actually cast spells for that, and it's possible that they've warded their home base. Or that the people they're getting the emotions from don't even know they're getting dosed. But like I said, there's only so many ways to make this stuff, and the League's got records of just about everything going into the United States."

Wallace looks at me-.

"It's me, isn't it? Cadbury Logistics. Someone's using the portals."

"Well, it's not shipping and it's probably not air freight." He leads us over to one of the holoscreens, showing the links made by a particular group of portals. "Someone working in or around one of these portals would have easiest access to everything they need. I don't know which one or exactly where they're doing it, and since I don't know exactly how much of this stuff is getting made I don't know if they're hand-carrying it or they're bringing in truckloads of reagent, but that's where we need to start looking."

"I own the company, but I'm an absentee manager. Might be better to ask Mister Queen to have a chat with the local managers. Ah. have you told Batman yet?"

Wallace gestures to the computers. "He already has access to all this. And so does Mister Atom. I haven't sent a report yet. Why?"

"Given how he's behaving, I worry about things that might make it worse." I sigh. "Alright. Who do we know with a heavy goods vehicle license?"

 

[CrazyNoVa]

When it comes to Paul and Wally, one's clearly being a bad influence on the other, though I can't tell which one it is. Either way, Artemis is slowly losing her sanity.