The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

I looked on and listened in from the distance after Hal Jordan was brought in the beam of light back to the location of the ‘crashed ship.’ The test pilot was shocked after coming face-to-face with an honest-to-goodness alien, but took it in stride with his total fearlessness. Abin Sur told him that they were recruiting, he was an ideal candidate for the Corps, and offered him the position, with the caveat that they had to leave quickly, as a great danger was coming, drawn to his Ring, and he could not remain here and endanger this world.

Hal Jordan accepted, with a single request that a message be sent out to his friends to say he was safe, and off they flew into the stars in an arc of green light.

I watched them go from down below. Abin Sur had cleaned up the ground wreckage, damage, and the radiation, so there was no sign he had ever been here.

He also wasn’t aware of the changes to his Ring and Lantern yet.

I opened my palm, and the Yellow Ring gleamed there, ready for use.

Green Lantern Rings could replicate themselves, after all.

I’d drawn the Yellow impurity out of his Ring, which would set a precedent for the Yellow before the Weaponeers of Qward were allowed to do so. The Yellow was going to be free, but not at the hands of a bitter Sinestro, whose fears of the Emotional Spectrum and desire for control would combine to make him one of the great enemies of the Green Lanterns for some time. In the future I knew, he would try to become the maker and leader of the Yellow Lantern Corps, but I was going to try to send him down another road.

I wasn’t going to become the Avatar of Parallax or anything, but one thing that a lot of the comics writers had been lazy about was the ideal for a wearer of a Yellow Ring.

For most of the Rings, an ideal wielder either had an immense amount of the Emotion tied to the color for the Ring, or a great need for it. The latter was typical of the Indigo and Violet colors of Compassion and Love, respectively, at least until they were harnessed properly.

Many writers liked to use the idea that the Yellow Rings worked best for those who could command great Fear... which was like tying eligibility to Charisma and Intimidate checks. The problem with that was that there were plenty of things and conditions which could inspire fear, and had nothing to do with sapient thought. A T-Rex charging your way could inspire absolute terror, too, and what about a Sun-Eater moving down on your planet?

No, no, that was silly. Useful, but silly. I had no doubt that Intimidation served as the control vector for the Yellow, as true Intimidation was literally about the skill of manipulating fear.

But eligibility? The best people at controlling fear... were those who had great fears of their own!

You didn’t need great fear to have great willpower, although willpower could control fear. But willpower neutralized fear, ignored it, sidelined it. It was as much about focus as determination.

Controlling great fear, that was something else!

I was Dauntless, sure, and was immune to the effects of fear. Also, I had the Ward of Heaven’s Aura of Courage, and I knew Valor, making me incredibly resistant to the effects of fear.

But none of those got RID of fear.

I was a very, very smart person. Being smart meant I thought all the time. Being as smart as I was, with all the things that I had seen, meant I had anxieties, worries, doubts, and apprehensions that scaled way, WAY up there.

I worried about the health of all the kids of my Dupes and Clones. I was anxious about the enemies made and if they’d act back there. I thought anxiously about random events happening I couldn’t control, profound and very real Fate and Chance fucking around with me for laughs.

I was apprehensive of cosmic forces pursuing mad schemes at scales beyond human thought, I was afraid of sun-destroying predators and planet-killing forces coming to pick on us, and I was terrified at the notion of universe-ending headcases pulling off shit for laughs, while Things Outside Creation looked on, desiring to dance upon the bones of the universe.

I had gargantuan amounts of fears. More than any normal person could actually comprehend, really. Fear slumbered inside me, while my telepathic sensitivity had introduced me to all the unreasonable phobias of the worlds, the instincts and emotions of minds smaller than my own, comprehending how they worked, understanding them and how to use them.

I had a lot of Skill Ranks, and advancing from Twenty-Five there to Thirty here gave me five more Ranks to my Limits in the ones I wanted and needed as my base.

Psychic Reformation meant I could focus on Feats to make those even higher, right in concordance with Diplomacy and Sense Motive.

I reached down and picked up the Yellow Lantern I’d made, also formed from the impurity drawn out of Abin Sur’s Green Lantern Battery.

However, I had taken Artificer Levels, and how a Lantern worked was not beyond me in the slightest, cosmic tool ‘that could only be made by the Guardians of Oa’ or no. I wasn’t going to use their clumsy design, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to have the normal limits on Ring usage and stuff.

The golden marquis-cut eye-shaped design of the Watchful Order of the Guardian Eye, complete with carry loop, rose from my grasp to hover at my shoulder. Without preamble, I placed the Yellow Power Ring into the middle of the Eye, and it glowed.

I was a Ringlord. I didn’t need to be touching a Ring to command it. This one was already tied to me.

As for the Oath? I definitely wasn’t going to use whatever Sinestro might have invented. There was a better one, long known in the Power of Ten... Mithar’s own Litany of Fear!

“When death is nigh and the end is near,

Where terrors walk and the dread appear,

I wield your doom! Shed a golden tear,

Feel my power, and know the dark of fear!

A thousand horrors, a million screams,

Master your fears and CLAIM...YOUR...DREAMS!”

This Light was not yellow, but Golden, as Fear and controlling Fear came full circle.

I opened up my other hand, and the inert, unpowered Green Lantern Ring there, also Cloned off of Abin Sur’s own, waited there; without power it was no different from any other ring.

I infused it into my Lantern, giving the Yellow Lantern a shade of Green inside it, allowing it to capture and store any Green power I came in contact with... and giving it a link to the Master Power Battery of the Green Lantern corps, where Parallax the Yellow Avatar was imprisoned.

I could use the Green power of Will really, really well, given my Concentration modifiers and Will Save. Turning this Lantern into a multi-spectrum Lantern was not outside the limits of my capabilities, and so that’s what I had done.

Green was Will, Yellow was Fear, but fed with the silver, gold, and rainbow of the Wrath of Heaven, it was all Gold. Gold was Truth and Valor when they came together!

We’ll see what I could do with them. Blue would add Hope to the mix, and I’d have a Lantern of the Words of Creation... possibly a true crystalline Emerald Light.

There was a pulsing node of Green power under the ground here. The insectile attacker calling itself Legion (translated from Chkt’skkttr’pszykh, actually), secure in its hivemind-driven strength and yellow carapace, would be coming here to kill another Green Lantern, and instead it was going to find... me.

The race was a devourer of worlds, mundivores who expanded mindlessly and savagely, and had died out when the Lanterns simply sealed their worlds and they starved to death after eating out their ecology. They had naturally blamed the Lanterns for dying off, their spirits agglomerating into the last of them and finding they had the power to break free of the planetary Seal upon them, whereupon they went hunting Green Lanterns and murdered them in revenge.

I was not an overly kind and merciful fool, and I wasn’t going to imprison this thing, just so it could break out again. World-eaters slaughtering whole populations didn’t earn that from me... unless Lady Death was just going to send them back if I killed them, which basically meant offing them was little more than a short trip to the brig.

No, I was going to kill this Legion, and it was going to be very surprised I could do so, and that without using the Lantern hovering at my shoulder.

After that, well...

If I was right, this was America in the 60’s (if Hal Jordan’s outfit was any indication, at least), in a DC-style universe and multiverse, NOT a DC-adapted Marveldom...

Did it have a Justice Society? I had my doubts. I would have to find out the status of the main constant of a DC-universe, which was basically the fate of Superman. If there was a JSA, that meant the Big Three of DC-dom had been around and active in the 40’s, a big shift in their later incarnations of Earth-1’s Silver Age and the retelling of their stories in the 70’s and the like.

It also meant that the Crisis on Infinite Earths, the first massive reboot in comicdom, was going to be coming, and here I was, an outsider, already present to do something there.

I would also be here at the start of the whole process.

Did this place have a Sama and a Briggs? If so, when had they come in, and what had they done? They could have determined what kind of place it was by running into some of the older mystical entities, like the Spectre, Dr. Fate, Lords of Order or Chaos, or even the Amazons of this place.

Well, if they existed here, I could find them soon enough. There was no rush. I had a bug to crush, and we’d see where things went after that...

------

The Legion insectoid was dead, chopped into multiple pieces. It had taken longer to get here than I had expected, meaning Abin Sur’s lure had faded away, and it had lost track of the Emerald energy.

It had thought that going on a rampage would draw Abin Sur out. Instead, it drew me, and it found itself facing Golden light, not Emerald, and it was cut apart and its path of destruction halted.

I burned its corpse away, noting that I was somewhere on the West Coast at the moment... was this Coast City? Huh...

People were giving me peculiar looks as I backtracked along its trail of destruction. Given their fashion choices, this was somewhere in the 1960’s, so that did not surprise me. Only after a moment did I realize it was because of my skin color, with the hair color also throwing them.

Did they know much about superheroes? I couldn’t be the first, could I? Surely they had to have some exposure to them, even if the heavy hitters had not arrived. It was probably racism in the air, and I just groaned to myself at what I was going to have to put up with, even as I reassembled buildings from shattered brick, wood, and glass, put some cars back together, smoothed out some roads, fixed some light and electrical poles, and generally put the property damage to right.

A crowd had somehow managed to gather by the time I was done. A couple even had old-fashioned cameras.

“Wow, lady, how are you doing all that?” one particularly brave guy yelled up at me.

I glanced down at him. “Divine power, Mr. Frenix!” I replied to him, waving once, before heading up and away.

The crowd cheered despite themselves as I did so, and the shocked Mr. Frenix just gaped that I’d known his name.

“Did she say Divine?” someone asked aloud.

“Wow, she sure looked like a goddess!” another man managed to say.

“Sounded like one, too!” a Hispanic woman grinned up at the sky.

“I got a picture of her!” a fourth proclaimed, waving his camera. “I got a picture of Divine!”

--------------

And so began the career of Divine, the woman who would start off the heroic age on this world, leading it to a new and brighter future. It would be only a short couple years before Superboy stepped onto the world stage as Superman, rumors of a Man-bat made the rounds in Gotham City, and an Archer in the docks and alleys of Star City, or the crimson blur of the Flash was running around Central City.

Within five years she would be the wealthiest woman in California, and within ten years the entire world, director and owner of the most technologically advanced companies in the world: Dynamic Labs, Dynamic Enterprises, and the Dynamic Foundation.

Asked why she had not called them ‘Divine Labs’ and the like, she replied, “My businesses are to benefit you, not me. They don’t need my name on them to do the job right.”