Post by redsycorax on Sept 10, 2018 5:46:35 GMT
Kara Zor-El of Earth-28 cast a sidelong glance at her counterpart Kyle Rayner of Earth-14, now dressed in combat fatigues and remembering nothing of what had happened in an earlier iteration. He was still his world's Green Lantern but there had been an attempt to cultivate a Superman clone, Overman, against the original, one of the two survivors of the former Justice League of Assassins in that grim, post-apocalyptic world.
They were well past the portal that marked entry to this configuration of alternate universes now, the fifteenth such cluster they had gone through on their mission to catalogue possible risks to the safety of the greater multiverse. Kara missed the previous iteration of Kyle, but had decided not to tell him about the sudden change in outfit, past and personality that she had gone through.
"And this one is?"
"Earth-666" Kyle said, reading it off his power ring scan.
"Oooh, ominous. Wonder if it'll be as marvellous as that Earth-616 we visited earlier?"
"Who was that old dude hanging around with the major moustache whenever the local metahumans showed up?"
"I have no idea, Kyle. Gave me the creeps somewhat. Anyway, he was left behind when we left there. Phew. The turbulence around here is somewhat strong as if it'd gone through a period of instability recently. Any heads up?"
"There's a fair amount of magic in the vicinity, so you need to have me along. Okay, that's weird. I'm also getting a 'null' sign from the Heisenberg Alternate Probability Index."
"At least it isn't fluctuating wildly like it was when we came across that time looped world which Earth-0's Green Lantern Corps was exploring. Wonder why they had those folks in red livery with power rings of their own around?"
"Entering phase with this AU...now."
The Earth that met their eyes had seen better days. Granted, it seemed prosperous and whole, but Kyle whistled as his power ring pulsed: WARNING. RADIATION HAZARD AHEAD.
"Whoa. This world can't have had a nuclear war, so..."
"Limited nuclear exchange. New York's not there except for a crater in its vicinity, and neither are Minsk, Shanghai, Dusseldorf, Birmingham, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Riyadh, Pretoria, Delhi, Karachi, Kyoto, Canberra and Brasilia. And the Amazon rainforest is burning, sea levels have risen and their West Antarctic ice sheet isn't there." Kara said as her telescopic vision fed her the images.
"Is this one of those alt Earths where Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union is ascendant?"
"No. Global dictatorship. Run by someone named Hira Scarlett. Oh. A female global dictator. That's an interesting change. Oh, what a cliche. Check out the satanic imagery. Yet they execute those who violate their chastity and blasphemy laws. Uh, Kyle?"
"Kara?"
"She's looking right back at us and I don't like the look of that smile."
"I'm getting an interface with the Guardians of this universe. Blue blazes, Kara. They were destroyed by this world's Hal Jordan."
"Like the Parallax character from Earth-0 you told me about? The one who cannibalised the rest of his Corps' power rings and Central Power Battery and went ape$#!*?"
"Missiles underway. Hey, this world is a twentieth century analogue and they have transwarp capabilities?! Get behind me, Kara. There's kryptonite in that stuff. And it's from your universe."
"How?! It'd be useless against the local Kryptonians, if there were any. I don't see Rao 666 where it would have been, or any super earth mass worlds analogous to my home world here."
"Hang on..." There was a moment of intense, blinding light, and then the two ultra terrestrial visitors to Earth 666 were falling from orbit, high above that world.
Hira Scarlett smiled to herself:
"Retrieve the alien woman and galactic police officer...Mr Jordan. Or would you prefer Sinestro?" Clad in the yellow livery of the Sinestro Corps, Hal Jordan shot skywards toward the otherwise barely discernible falling dots on the distant horizon...
Cue: Diana Prince strode down the corridor toward the office of the World President, her shield reflecting the sunlight, her sword sheathed at her side. She brushed back a stray strand of hair. There was something dead about her eyes as she embraced Hira Scarlett:
"Mother. It's so good to see you again."
"Diana, my dear. How was your tour of duty in the Middle Eastern Wastelands?"
Cue: In the waters around Atlantis, bodies swirled in the miasma of toxins that now shrouded Posiedonis and Tritonis. One of them was still recognisable as the corpse of Arthur Curry, the onetime King of Atlantis.
Cue: Ray Palmer emerged from hiding, expanding his shrunken body and bursting through the corpse of an enemy of the regime. He brushed the remains of blood and gore from his suit and smiled, through the scar that covered his face. Good. ARGUS would be pleased with one of its deadliest agents latest kills.
Cue: In Gotham Cemetery, a numbed Alfred Pennyworth stood in front of the three graves of the Wayne family as he had done every day for the last twenty-seven years. He owed that to Thomas and Martha Wayne. And poor little Bruce, who had died with his parents.
Cue: Wally West tore through the bodies of his latest set of assailants and exulted in his speed and strength as Bullet. More enemies of the Order dispatched. Excellent. It was good to be alive and seek revenge against the murderers of his parents and Barry and Iris Allen.
Fission, Termagent and Bullet assembled to witness their new metahuman prisoners as Hira Scarlett stared darkly down at the two women:
"Who are they?"
"One appears to be an alien, while the other is carrying an alien artefact."
Termagent nodded:
"Yes, I remember. I dispatched one alien invader, Abin Sur, carrying a ring-shaped alien weapon very much like the one that man is wearing."
"You were the only one who could stop it, Diana. It contained microaccess barriers and momentum buffers that would have neutralised Wally and me. What about that alien woman?"
"She's from an alternate universe. They both are, actually. We need to kill them, all of you. If we let them survive, they will become a grave threat to the peace and security of our world."
Termagent unsheathed her Amazon sword.
Abruptly, Kara raised her head and her eyes shone scarlet as she focused her heat vision on the sword. At the same time, Kyle raised his power ring and stunned Wally and Ray. They broke the chains as Hira Scarlett gritted her teeth:
"What the hell-?"
"Your totalitarian nightmare ends here, lady."
"This is not your world. You know nothing of how it operates. Or the extent of my abilities."
"Leave my mother alone." Diana hissed, interposing herself between the dictator and the suddenly liberated altworlders. Kara sighed:
"So what happened here? Did you storm Paradise Island and kill Queen Hippolyta? Does Diana even know what happened to her real mother?" Kyle queried.
"Hippolyta was too inflexible. And I did nothing. The United States was responsible for the nuclear destruction of Themiscyra, not I. I am not a genocidal butcher."
"C'mon. This whole world resembles a hoky paranoid fundamentalist Christian apocalyptic fantasy. I mean, guillotines, religious persecution, barcode personal identification tattoos, ad nauseum. Seriously?" Kara said, indicating the outside world.
"Well, yes, I am aware of its correspondence to that fictional trope elsewhere. In other universes, you are naught but popular entertainment fantasy characters. You have no right to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign and isolationist alternate Earth to your own."
"I tend to have a thing about ruthless tyrants. Hate them." Kara strode forward. Abruptly, she was caught in a green kryptonite particle beam crossfire. She fell..
As Termagent picked up Kara's lifeless body, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner stood motionless. Haira sneered down at the Kryptonian's corpse and rolled over her corpse:
"She didn't suspect a thing. She was oblivious to the fact that the reiterated Earth-14 had no Green Lantern resident on that post-apocalyptic world, unlike its prior iteration, and it was easy to dupe her. Yes, Diana, my daughter? What is it?"
"Then why are Ray and Wally...dead...?"
Haira shrugged: "Sadly, in any war, there are casualties. The deception was necessary to lull Interceptor into a sense of false security. Regrettable. They served the Babylonian Empire well. They served with valour and will receive a full state funeral."
"Is...what the alien said true? That you deceived me?"
"No, Diana, I did not. You've seen the war footage. Hippolyta declared Themiscyra..."Paradise Island"... neutral during the Second World War and as a consequence, President Garner decided to test the first thermonuclear device on its soil in December 1944, fearful that it might break its neutrality and assist the Axis Powers. It was his doing. You've seen the newsreels and documents."
And of course, from that point, things played quite well into our hands. In this universe, Krypton orbited too far from Rao to ever evolve life, and so, when it exploded in 1917, there was no intelligent life there and no "Kryptonians" to travel to Earth. Without an alien metahuman, other distortions crept in. Franklin Roosevelt died in 1943, leaving John Nance Garner as President. He was nowhere near the stature of his predecessor and as a result, panicked when informed about the Manhattan Project. It was ...'fortuitous'... that Steve Trevor found Themiscyra on a reconaissance mission and that Hippolyta made the wrong decision, that Joe Chill shot dead the entire Wayne family in Crime Alley, and that Richard Nixon succeeded Eisenhower as president, leading to his imprudent decision to intervene in Hungary in 1956 and trigger a Third World War here.
That left Diana in my hands. Nixon died in the nuclear holocaust and so did most of the successive US presidential candidates for several decades afterward. So, no Kennedy, no "Camelot", and the extermination of the USSR soured the European Union on future military collaboration due to the collateral radiation damage, especially in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It was easy for Nicolae to weld the successor European Coalition together into One Nation Europe, as an ascendant power against the battered and bruised United States. Which wasn't, in this universe. The civil rights debate went badly wrong here too, resulting in a state of virtual civil war and martial law for much of its sixties. In Cheyenne, there was massive government corruption under President Agnew and a consequent coup. Then Nicolae and I stepped in and took this world for our own.
Farewell, dear Kara. With you dies any hope the Multiverse has for resisting my implacable momentum toward revolution, and my destiny as absolute ruler over all Creation.
THE END
They were well past the portal that marked entry to this configuration of alternate universes now, the fifteenth such cluster they had gone through on their mission to catalogue possible risks to the safety of the greater multiverse. Kara missed the previous iteration of Kyle, but had decided not to tell him about the sudden change in outfit, past and personality that she had gone through.
"And this one is?"
"Earth-666" Kyle said, reading it off his power ring scan.
"Oooh, ominous. Wonder if it'll be as marvellous as that Earth-616 we visited earlier?"
"Who was that old dude hanging around with the major moustache whenever the local metahumans showed up?"
"I have no idea, Kyle. Gave me the creeps somewhat. Anyway, he was left behind when we left there. Phew. The turbulence around here is somewhat strong as if it'd gone through a period of instability recently. Any heads up?"
"There's a fair amount of magic in the vicinity, so you need to have me along. Okay, that's weird. I'm also getting a 'null' sign from the Heisenberg Alternate Probability Index."
"At least it isn't fluctuating wildly like it was when we came across that time looped world which Earth-0's Green Lantern Corps was exploring. Wonder why they had those folks in red livery with power rings of their own around?"
"Entering phase with this AU...now."
The Earth that met their eyes had seen better days. Granted, it seemed prosperous and whole, but Kyle whistled as his power ring pulsed: WARNING. RADIATION HAZARD AHEAD.
"Whoa. This world can't have had a nuclear war, so..."
"Limited nuclear exchange. New York's not there except for a crater in its vicinity, and neither are Minsk, Shanghai, Dusseldorf, Birmingham, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Riyadh, Pretoria, Delhi, Karachi, Kyoto, Canberra and Brasilia. And the Amazon rainforest is burning, sea levels have risen and their West Antarctic ice sheet isn't there." Kara said as her telescopic vision fed her the images.
"Is this one of those alt Earths where Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union is ascendant?"
"No. Global dictatorship. Run by someone named Hira Scarlett. Oh. A female global dictator. That's an interesting change. Oh, what a cliche. Check out the satanic imagery. Yet they execute those who violate their chastity and blasphemy laws. Uh, Kyle?"
"Kara?"
"She's looking right back at us and I don't like the look of that smile."
"I'm getting an interface with the Guardians of this universe. Blue blazes, Kara. They were destroyed by this world's Hal Jordan."
"Like the Parallax character from Earth-0 you told me about? The one who cannibalised the rest of his Corps' power rings and Central Power Battery and went ape$#!*?"
"Missiles underway. Hey, this world is a twentieth century analogue and they have transwarp capabilities?! Get behind me, Kara. There's kryptonite in that stuff. And it's from your universe."
"How?! It'd be useless against the local Kryptonians, if there were any. I don't see Rao 666 where it would have been, or any super earth mass worlds analogous to my home world here."
"Hang on..." There was a moment of intense, blinding light, and then the two ultra terrestrial visitors to Earth 666 were falling from orbit, high above that world.
Hira Scarlett smiled to herself:
"Retrieve the alien woman and galactic police officer...Mr Jordan. Or would you prefer Sinestro?" Clad in the yellow livery of the Sinestro Corps, Hal Jordan shot skywards toward the otherwise barely discernible falling dots on the distant horizon...
Cue: Diana Prince strode down the corridor toward the office of the World President, her shield reflecting the sunlight, her sword sheathed at her side. She brushed back a stray strand of hair. There was something dead about her eyes as she embraced Hira Scarlett:
"Mother. It's so good to see you again."
"Diana, my dear. How was your tour of duty in the Middle Eastern Wastelands?"
Cue: In the waters around Atlantis, bodies swirled in the miasma of toxins that now shrouded Posiedonis and Tritonis. One of them was still recognisable as the corpse of Arthur Curry, the onetime King of Atlantis.
Cue: Ray Palmer emerged from hiding, expanding his shrunken body and bursting through the corpse of an enemy of the regime. He brushed the remains of blood and gore from his suit and smiled, through the scar that covered his face. Good. ARGUS would be pleased with one of its deadliest agents latest kills.
Cue: In Gotham Cemetery, a numbed Alfred Pennyworth stood in front of the three graves of the Wayne family as he had done every day for the last twenty-seven years. He owed that to Thomas and Martha Wayne. And poor little Bruce, who had died with his parents.
Cue: Wally West tore through the bodies of his latest set of assailants and exulted in his speed and strength as Bullet. More enemies of the Order dispatched. Excellent. It was good to be alive and seek revenge against the murderers of his parents and Barry and Iris Allen.
Fission, Termagent and Bullet assembled to witness their new metahuman prisoners as Hira Scarlett stared darkly down at the two women:
"Who are they?"
"One appears to be an alien, while the other is carrying an alien artefact."
Termagent nodded:
"Yes, I remember. I dispatched one alien invader, Abin Sur, carrying a ring-shaped alien weapon very much like the one that man is wearing."
"You were the only one who could stop it, Diana. It contained microaccess barriers and momentum buffers that would have neutralised Wally and me. What about that alien woman?"
"She's from an alternate universe. They both are, actually. We need to kill them, all of you. If we let them survive, they will become a grave threat to the peace and security of our world."
Termagent unsheathed her Amazon sword.
Abruptly, Kara raised her head and her eyes shone scarlet as she focused her heat vision on the sword. At the same time, Kyle raised his power ring and stunned Wally and Ray. They broke the chains as Hira Scarlett gritted her teeth:
"What the hell-?"
"Your totalitarian nightmare ends here, lady."
"This is not your world. You know nothing of how it operates. Or the extent of my abilities."
"Leave my mother alone." Diana hissed, interposing herself between the dictator and the suddenly liberated altworlders. Kara sighed:
"So what happened here? Did you storm Paradise Island and kill Queen Hippolyta? Does Diana even know what happened to her real mother?" Kyle queried.
"Hippolyta was too inflexible. And I did nothing. The United States was responsible for the nuclear destruction of Themiscyra, not I. I am not a genocidal butcher."
"C'mon. This whole world resembles a hoky paranoid fundamentalist Christian apocalyptic fantasy. I mean, guillotines, religious persecution, barcode personal identification tattoos, ad nauseum. Seriously?" Kara said, indicating the outside world.
"Well, yes, I am aware of its correspondence to that fictional trope elsewhere. In other universes, you are naught but popular entertainment fantasy characters. You have no right to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign and isolationist alternate Earth to your own."
"I tend to have a thing about ruthless tyrants. Hate them." Kara strode forward. Abruptly, she was caught in a green kryptonite particle beam crossfire. She fell..
As Termagent picked up Kara's lifeless body, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner stood motionless. Haira sneered down at the Kryptonian's corpse and rolled over her corpse:
"She didn't suspect a thing. She was oblivious to the fact that the reiterated Earth-14 had no Green Lantern resident on that post-apocalyptic world, unlike its prior iteration, and it was easy to dupe her. Yes, Diana, my daughter? What is it?"
"Then why are Ray and Wally...dead...?"
Haira shrugged: "Sadly, in any war, there are casualties. The deception was necessary to lull Interceptor into a sense of false security. Regrettable. They served the Babylonian Empire well. They served with valour and will receive a full state funeral."
"Is...what the alien said true? That you deceived me?"
"No, Diana, I did not. You've seen the war footage. Hippolyta declared Themiscyra..."Paradise Island"... neutral during the Second World War and as a consequence, President Garner decided to test the first thermonuclear device on its soil in December 1944, fearful that it might break its neutrality and assist the Axis Powers. It was his doing. You've seen the newsreels and documents."
And of course, from that point, things played quite well into our hands. In this universe, Krypton orbited too far from Rao to ever evolve life, and so, when it exploded in 1917, there was no intelligent life there and no "Kryptonians" to travel to Earth. Without an alien metahuman, other distortions crept in. Franklin Roosevelt died in 1943, leaving John Nance Garner as President. He was nowhere near the stature of his predecessor and as a result, panicked when informed about the Manhattan Project. It was ...'fortuitous'... that Steve Trevor found Themiscyra on a reconaissance mission and that Hippolyta made the wrong decision, that Joe Chill shot dead the entire Wayne family in Crime Alley, and that Richard Nixon succeeded Eisenhower as president, leading to his imprudent decision to intervene in Hungary in 1956 and trigger a Third World War here.
That left Diana in my hands. Nixon died in the nuclear holocaust and so did most of the successive US presidential candidates for several decades afterward. So, no Kennedy, no "Camelot", and the extermination of the USSR soured the European Union on future military collaboration due to the collateral radiation damage, especially in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It was easy for Nicolae to weld the successor European Coalition together into One Nation Europe, as an ascendant power against the battered and bruised United States. Which wasn't, in this universe. The civil rights debate went badly wrong here too, resulting in a state of virtual civil war and martial law for much of its sixties. In Cheyenne, there was massive government corruption under President Agnew and a consequent coup. Then Nicolae and I stepped in and took this world for our own.
Farewell, dear Kara. With you dies any hope the Multiverse has for resisting my implacable momentum toward revolution, and my destiny as absolute ruler over all Creation.
THE END