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

[Mr Zoat]

3rd August 2013
01:05 GMT

"…recorded at the reliquary itself, which means that we have a definite date for when Savage was up and about again."

Darkstar Click Click-Click makes a slow and steady series of clicks, which my ring helpfully informs me is a sign of bewilderment rather than actual speech. "He survived having his body torn apart, and those parts being exposed to vacuum and falling through the atmosphere to your planet's surface."

Jade and I nod together. "Yes. " / "Uh-huh."

"How?"

"Based on what Klarion said, he may be able to regrow his entire body from his amygdala with no or very limited memory loss. Presumably, he uses some sort of non-standard memory storage and has access to some form of exotic energy to fuel his regeneration, but that's speculative. And, yes, people have tried burning him to death before to try and destroy him completely so there wouldn't be anything for him to regenerate from… It didn't work."

Larksh nervously licks her eyes. "How will we kill him?"

Jade shakes her head. "You won't." She then calls up his file on their holodisplay. "We don't carry weapons that could do the job. The important part is that he isn't invulnerable. He isn't much tougher than a normal humanoid, though he is a lot more determined. Since he knows that he'll recover from any injury he takes, he will keep going until he physically can't."

She looks pointedly at me.

"If you encounter him and can get a message out, notify me, or if you can't get hold of me one of the other Orange Lanterns. Even if physical destruction can't kill him I'd like to give assimilation a go. Failing that… Dump his brain in acid, in such a way that we can replace the acid on a regular basis. Thread barbed wire though the regrowing mass so that he gets brain damaged. Throw his remains into a sun or a black hole. Dump him somewhere in deep space and then lose the coordinates."

Calpri shimmers, indicating a desire to ask a question. I nod. "Which would you prefer?"

"Assimilation. Absorbing fifty thousand years worth of memories won't be much fun, but it will give me vital knowledge of his recent activities. Lantern Son of Great Mother could probably handle that part more easily. And obviously, don't put yourselves at risk unnecessarily. I'll be perfectly happy if he gets to spend the next five billion years working on his tan. It might be interesting to talk to him afterwards."

Jade nods. "How does this affect our priorities?"

"Up to you. If you think the best use of your time is to head to Daxam and investigate there, then do so. If you think that it's not, then don't. I don't know enough to set priorities."

"But you're most worried about Batman."

"I am, but that doesn't mean that I'm weighing things properly. If he's actually mind controlled and Savage is involved, following up with Savage might be the best thing to do."

"Is that likely?"

"I wouldn't have thought so, but last week I would have said the same about Superman and he nearly killed me." Jade nods. "Anything any of you need from me right now?"

Negative gestures from everyone except Jade, who nods. "I have a personal query."

Her eyes flick in the direction of the teleportarium. I nod, and gesture to the corridor with my right hand. She leads the way and I follow-.

I accelerate, matching her pace and reaching out to catch her left hand in my right. She gives me a slightly surprised look, but graciously tolerates the imposition.

"I've missed you, too."

"If I could go back in time and kill Mannheim before he could tie me to Earth for so long, I would."

She smiles faintly. "You mean you can't?"

"No, we're on Dragonball Zee rules now. All going back in time would do is create an alternate timeline unless I got the Time Trapper onside first."

"Isn't she a version of me?"

"A version of you who never met me before that whole mess happened. Unless she's already been replaced…" Ah… "Though 'already' isn't.. really…"

She nods. "I understand."

We reach the teleportarium and she turns to face me as the door closes. Her eyes drift down to where I'm still holding her hand, and then back up to my face.

I nod, raise her hand slightly and take hold of it in my left hand as well.

She makes a quiet but amused-sounding snort.

"It's not flowers, but-"

I fabricate an inordinate quantity of flowers and deposit them around us.

"-it's-." She takes a moment to take in the flowers, her head still but her eyes absorbing everything. "Nice."

"So, what's the question?"

"Am I stuck on Venus for the whole investigation, or can I actually tell Mom that I'm here?"

"As long as you don't mind using your accrued leave time. I doubt that anyone is going to check up on you too closely."

"And the rest of my squad?"

"I can set up a zeta tube to Ungara. The weather's lovely this time of year, and there's no travel between Ungara and Earth."

"What if they need to go to Earth?"

"They can tell people that they're un-men. Or weird biological experiments." I shrug. "Or just say they woke up like that one day. People will probably believe that. It'll only be a problem if their exo-mantles get seen."

"Because Batman knows what exo-mantles look like."

"I'm not.. sure, but the Green Lantern Corps certainly does and he can just ask them. What time zone are you on?"

"I think it's somewhere in the Pacific. I'll be back to Eastern Standard in a couple of days." She smiles. "Taking me somewhere nice?"

"All of you is nice." She snorts quietly. "But I certainly intend to. Um. Your apartment."

"Is it on fire?"

"No, it's-."

"Was it on fire?"

"It just… It doesn't smell of you any more, and I've been living in Bir Tawil… I just wondered if you'd given any thought to what you wanted to do with it."

She thinks for a moment. "What's the Gotham property market like?"

"Pretty bad, but the few companies with ready cash have been buying up job lots. Historically, this sort of thing usually causes a baby boom. And if the fiscal forecasts I've been reading are correct, Mannheim might have saved government pensions schemes."

"How?"

"They're effectively pyramid schemes, but since old people died disproportionally often their liabilities dropped a lot. We're nearly solvent enough to afford new old people."

She winces theatrically, but can't quite stop herself smiling. "That's awful."

"I try. Now, if you'll excuse me-" I raise her hand to my lips and kiss it. "I have to go and buttonhole Lex Luthor."

 

[Mr Zoat]

3rd August 2013
20:12 GMT -5

"Orange Lantern." Lex presses a button on his desk and the window slides open. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

I float into his office. "Poor work-life balance? I thought you'd be in your apartment, or… Out somewhere, at this time of the evening."

"Metropolis nightlife has taken something of a hit lately. And Superman's exploits in Texas have caused me a good deal of extra work."

"Yeah-." Oh dear. "Has someone thought to explain to you what that was about?"

"I was told that I'm not getting my ship back."

"Darn it. Ah-."

He stands up from behind his desk, heading towards his minibar. "Can I offer you something to drink?"

"Do you have any mango juice?"

He freezes for a moment. "Ah-?" He checks. "Yes, actually. With vodka?"

"No, just the juice, please. I don't drink alcohol."

Through the gap between his right arm and his back I see him contemplate the… Mixer-sized bottles of mango juice. Oh, whoops. He twists the lid off the first couple and pours them into a tumbler, then uses tongues to add a few ice cubes… Then adds a few more, and a third bottle, and appears to give up. Then he pours himself a finger of whiskey in another tumbler, adds two ice cubes and then turns back to me, gesturing towards the seating area with is whiskey hand.

"Please, take a seat."

"Thank you."

I head over to the expensive-looking chair that would probably convey a wealth of information to someone from the right social set, but to me just indicates that just because it's expensive does mean that it isn't slightly uncomfortable to sit in.

Lex puts my mango juice (which I'm going to need to drink within the next minute or it's going to get too dilute to really taste) down in front of me and then sits back, taking a sip of his whiskey.

"So. Superman's uncharacteristically direct behaviour. I take it that the ship was kryptonian, then?"

"Yes. It's called the Doomsday and used to be their flagship, prior to them becoming isolationist. The bit you found was only part of it: for some reason Admiral Dru-Zod decided to break it into parts before hiding them."

"Oh?" He smiles faintly. "Are you off on a quest to reunite the missing pieces?"

"No, that's already done and the ship's been brought to near-ready status."

"'Near' ready?"

"The one member of the kryptonian stellar navy I knew the location of left Earth over a year ago, which means that the local kryptonians are having to learn how to operate the greatest warship their people ever built from scratch. It's like a farmer from rural Kentucky being put in charge of an aircraft carrier, only more so."

"Surely Supergirl or the other one have some familiarity with kryptonian systems?"

"And that Kentucky farmer may have a boat for catching crayfish; it won't help with the aircraft carrier."

"So the ship has gone from being studied by the Earth's greatest experts in alien technology to a metaphorical Kentuckian agronomist."

"It's a warship; we don't really need it right now."

"We might. I know that an alien vessel entered our system unannounced a few days ago."

"And they were escorted out without much difficulty. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be nice to be able to control it, I'm just saying that it's not high-urgency. A small attack can be beaten off by Earth's Lanterns. A large attack isn't going to be disrupted by one more ship."

"Perhaps. But please let Superman know that my people are available to help."

"I will."

"Now, about his behavior…"

"That was-."

"Mind control? There's a.. pool running in Security."

"Kind of?"

Lex looks thoughtful. "I think that was.. Jenkins…"

"A member of Superman's family a lot of generations back was an arsehole called Kem-El. He… Basically, isolationism wasn't a new ideology when the Science Council mandated it, but Kem-El was some sort of ultra-puritan. I'm sure that I missed a lot of the cultural context, but he dosed some people who wanted to establish a primitivist commune off Krypton with a retrovirus that messed up their photoreceptors, and also used them to conceal a last resort A.I. system called the Eradicator Program. It was designed to load itself into the brain of any kryptonian exposed to it and cause them to share Kem-El's attitudes."

Lex raises his eyebrows. "Which in practice means..?"

"Recreating Kem-El's vision of Kryptonian society. I'm not entirely sure what that was, but it started with killing Kon-El and Match."

"I hadn't realised that Krypton had such strong anti-miscegenation laws."

"As far as I know, they didn't. Kem-El appears to have been… Uniquely unpleasant."

"What did he plan to do with me?"

I take a sip of mango juice, using a small construct to hold the ice out of the way. "Nothing."

"Oh?"

"He didn't mention you while he was under the influence. If you've got any kryptonian technology I suspect that he'd have sent Eradicator androids to recover it, but his intent was to recreate Krypton elsewhere. As I understand your… Problem with Superman, him permanently removing himself from Earth would have resulted in you ceasing to care about him."

He nods slowly. "I see."

Because that would actually have been a pretty good deal for him. I doubt that he's strongly attached to Conner or Mitchell, and while losing the ship would be expensive, getting rid of Superman is priceless.

"How was the unnatural mental influence undone?"

"Arsenal smashed the base unit. Overwriting someone's mind is a very difficult technical feat; the existing thoughts constantly try to reassert themselves. Once it lost the ability to reinsert itself, he went back to normal fairly quickly."

"Was that the only instance of the Eradicator Program?"

"As far as I know. But if the mechanism to bypass a kryptonian's judgement exists, it can exist in other places. He's going to be a bit more careful with his exploring from now on."

"That sounds like it may be wise." He takes a sip of whiskey. "Why is it that you're telling me this?"

"Because I don't want you to think that this was Superman showing his true colours or that the League had an army of kryptonian robots and I suspected that no one else had bothered having this conversation with you."

He smiles wryly. "An astute surmise on your part."

"And.. I.. thought that being sociable wouldn't hurt. How is your work in Chong-Mai going?"