hal "highball" jordan ◎ green lantern 2814.1 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ringslinging) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
legionworld2016-02-11 01:04 am
ringslinging) wrote in legionworld2016-02-11 01:04 am
Entry tags:
another time, another place
Who| Hal Jordan and whoever wanders in
What| That good old new arrival confusion.
Where| Observation deck.
When| After Whistling in the Dark.
Warnings/Notes|
Hal thought he'd been having a bad day. Week. Month. Whenever the last time he'd been able to take his ring off and not think that the world was going to end if he tried to get a catnap. When trying to keep Larfleeze out of trouble in Las Vegas was the easiest task on the to-do, that was never a good sign. And yet now he'd take a hundred Larfleezes in as many capitals of rampant debauchery, because that had still made a lot more sense than finding himself in what was, apparently, a good ten centuries ahead of his own time, with no idea how it had happened or when he was going to be able to get back and get the job done.
It was the things that were familiar, not the things that weren't, that made it all so awkward.
Half of what he'd heard so far had been in one ear and out the other - probably not really helped by the fact that he should've taken a little longer to sleep off the concussion, but when Hal Jordan decided he was done staying in bed, good luck keeping him in one place. He needed to think, and he needed to not do it there - so he'd made his way out, wandered the corridors, and when he'd spotted a sign marking the way to the observation deck, he'd taken it.
Stars changed, he knew. But not as fast as everything else, and not so dramatically that he could look at the sky in front of him and know what was wrong, unlike everything else in this picture. The second question he'd gotten out was where are the other Lanterns?
(The first, of course, had been did I win?)
And the answer only brought more questions - questions that needed to be asked, whether he was going to like the answers or not. The words were on the tip of his tongue to just ask his ring before he caught himself, sighed, and pulled the omnicom out of his jacket pocket. There was still a ring on his finger, but he wasn't sure he was going to be able to start thinking of that Legion flight ring as his ring.
Only one ring got that title, and it was gone.
"Where's Oa?"
The voice that answered him from the information network wasn't the one he was trained into expecting, either. Wrong pitch. Different tone. Not right.
"No current data. Last recorded entry on planet Oa dates to..."
A long damned time ago was all he could really hear in those numbers. Heavy sigh. He slumped against the rail, eyes still on the stars.
"Okay. Let's try something easier. Where's the best place around here to get a beer?"
What| That good old new arrival confusion.
Where| Observation deck.
When| After Whistling in the Dark.
Warnings/Notes|
Hal thought he'd been having a bad day. Week. Month. Whenever the last time he'd been able to take his ring off and not think that the world was going to end if he tried to get a catnap. When trying to keep Larfleeze out of trouble in Las Vegas was the easiest task on the to-do, that was never a good sign. And yet now he'd take a hundred Larfleezes in as many capitals of rampant debauchery, because that had still made a lot more sense than finding himself in what was, apparently, a good ten centuries ahead of his own time, with no idea how it had happened or when he was going to be able to get back and get the job done.
It was the things that were familiar, not the things that weren't, that made it all so awkward.
Half of what he'd heard so far had been in one ear and out the other - probably not really helped by the fact that he should've taken a little longer to sleep off the concussion, but when Hal Jordan decided he was done staying in bed, good luck keeping him in one place. He needed to think, and he needed to not do it there - so he'd made his way out, wandered the corridors, and when he'd spotted a sign marking the way to the observation deck, he'd taken it.
Stars changed, he knew. But not as fast as everything else, and not so dramatically that he could look at the sky in front of him and know what was wrong, unlike everything else in this picture. The second question he'd gotten out was where are the other Lanterns?
(The first, of course, had been did I win?)
And the answer only brought more questions - questions that needed to be asked, whether he was going to like the answers or not. The words were on the tip of his tongue to just ask his ring before he caught himself, sighed, and pulled the omnicom out of his jacket pocket. There was still a ring on his finger, but he wasn't sure he was going to be able to start thinking of that Legion flight ring as his ring.
Only one ring got that title, and it was gone.
"Where's Oa?"
The voice that answered him from the information network wasn't the one he was trained into expecting, either. Wrong pitch. Different tone. Not right.
"No current data. Last recorded entry on planet Oa dates to..."
A long damned time ago was all he could really hear in those numbers. Heavy sigh. He slumped against the rail, eyes still on the stars.
"Okay. Let's try something easier. Where's the best place around here to get a beer?"
no subject
"Rich Rider. I also go by Nova." Or 'Nova Prime,' but the 'Prime' had no meaning here. Back home in his universe it marked him as the last Nova, the one that had started to rebuild the Corps anew. Here it was just a fancy title nobody really understood or needed to hear.
He let go of Hal's hand. Fortunately, he'd only squished it a little.
"Green Lantern, huh?"
It was a name that called out to him from a very nerdy childhood. Not that he'd ever read his comics but when he'd gone to the comic shop for his sci fi comics, he remembered occasionally seeing a green-suited champion of justice staring back. He'd never been interested enough to pick them up. He'd liked sci fi but cops in space had never really appealed.
(Now there was some irony for you.)
He said nothing, same as with Donnie. This whole thing was weird enough without making people question their existence or something.
"Now there's a superhero name if I ever heard one." He liked the implications of it. "People eat that stuff up. The names that make it sound like it's all about lighting up the dark."
Everyone seemed to find his own pretty appropriate. What could brighten the darkness more than an exploding star?
"This your first time at the rodeo or do you got experience like I do?"
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"You think the name says light, you should hear the oath." The oath laid it on thick enough that you either found it fantastically inspirational or you found it ridiculously over-the-top.
(Hal was more than a little biased in belonging to the former category, of course.)
"Pushing two decades, by now." He was never sure if putting a number, even a rough one, to it made it seem longer or shorter. The sheer number of things that had happened in all that time, the changes he'd seen in the world, the universe, the Corps...
Himself.
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"I was lucky I wound up a Nova Centurion mostly by accident. They never formally swore me in and teeechnically that meant I wasn't actually beholden to any Command decisions. Technically."
He squinted at Hal curiously, leaning back against the railing of the Obs platform. He crossed his arms.
"'Green Lantern' doesn't scream military -- too hopeful. And you don't carry yourself like you're just a superhero, like the kids running this whole outfit."
They were good at what they did, for sure, and it was definitely clear that they trained extensively, but they still didn't carry themselves like soldiers or cops.
"You're a cop, aren't you."
He seemed quite pleased with the idea of that.
no subject
He liked this guy so far.
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Rich beamed now, turning around and leaning his elbows on the railing, taking a nice, long look at Earth below. It was a comforting sight even if it wasn't his Earth or even his time period. The continents had this great habit of staying exactly where they were supposed to be.
"The Xandarian Nova Corps, which I was a member of while there was still a Corps -- that I was the only member of for a while -- is my universe's intergalactic peace-keeping force." A pause. "Was. Is."
Another pause.
"It's complicated."
God, was it ever.
"Anyway, I've been a Nova Centurion since I was seventeen, minus a year or so in there where I lost my powers. Not necessarily a good one for most of that time, but a Nova nevertheless."
no subject
For him, though, probably more complicated than for most of his comrades. If Rich had been the only one for a while...it sounded like he'd gotten the bulk share of complicated in his universe, too.
Maybe less like Hal and more like Kyle, though.
no subject
"Yeah, well, two decades, you said? That's plenty of time for a whole lotta 'complicated. Sometimes I can't believe I'm only a bit past my first. Bet I'll have just as many stories to tell as you when I hit my second."
A pause.
"If I live that long. I'm not really banking on that."
It was said in a strangely casual way, and it was probably not a sentiment many Green Lanterns held. After all, how could their rings even work if they were already that defeated?
But that was just how some people were. Live fast, die young, live a good-looking corpse, that was how the saying went, right? Rich knew he couldn't even bank on the last one. Look at how he'd died the last time -- dissipated into energy. They didn't even have anything pretty to bury.
He'd pretty much forgotten it wasn't normal to talk that easily about dying, though. He and his friends and allies had gotten awful maudlin and prone to black humor during the war. It took him a second to realize that was a little bit of a dark place to go and he tried to recover.
"Not that I plan on kicking it anytime soon, but I've seen or been part of a statistically improbable number of eleventh hour miracles. Sometimes you wonder when your luck's gonna run out." He looked down at Earth and thought about some of what he'd said to Donnie, about the possibility of something with intelligence bringing them all, something powerful -- and not necessarily benevolent. "And with our whole situation, well...to quote a legendary space smuggler of some renown: 'I've got a bad feeling about this.'"
no subject
But he knew perfectly well that sometimes, that wasn't enough.
Sometimes, it just came down to whose will was stronger, and that didn't always have a thing to do with who was on the right side.
no subject
"My friend Starlord -- he's one of the ones that really taught me the ropes back during the war that I...fought in."
There was the briefest pause there, because Rich wasn't sure if he should say "fought in" or "led." He felt awkward about "led," so he dialed it back a little.
"Anyway, he told me one time, 'If death comes your way and won't let you pass, you make sure you scream right back in his face.' Which doesn't sound all that impressive until you factor in that Death is--she's like an actual entity. That we sometimes see. One of the cosmic abstracts. She's kind of terrifying."
He grinned.
"Anyway, I think my crowd would get along with yours." He paused, as he put more thought to that. "Weeell. You know. Minus the fact most of my crowd is murderers and crazy people, with titles like 'the accuser' and 'the destroyer.' But that was really all that was left of the good guys after the war. The ones that didn't lay down easy."
Another pause.
"Space is a little Wild, Wild West back home. Like, the lawless way, not like the really bad movie."
no subject
With the company Hal had been keeping lately, the levity (however brief) was more than welcome. Half of the Lanterns from the others Corps either had no sense of humor to speak of, or their humor was based on a completely different cultural context and that amounted to basically the same thing.
"My crowd is a little more uptight than yours, probably. But it feels like I've spent more time working with the nutjobs from the rest of the spectrum than with the other greens lately, anyway. Trouble with our own Death entity."
If Nekron wasn't enough of a common cause to get everyone on the same page, just about nothing would do it.
no subject
"Well, if your Corps is intact, that makes sense. The Nova Corps had some pretty uptight people before the war. Not us regular schmoe Centurions and Denarians but the Commandants and top brass were ridiculous. You wouldn't believe some of the things I got demerits for, like changing my uniform a teeny bit while superheroing on Earth."
One part of that piqued his attention.
"What do you mean 'spectrum' though?"
no subject
That was always an awkward story, since he'd been the one who took them down to nearly nothing in the first place.
Explaining the emotional spectrum sounded like a pretty great change of subject, actually.
"The emotional spectrum is the source of power for Lanterns - all of us. Green is will. It's at the middle, it's balanced. You start moving out towards the colors on the ends, you get emotions that have more and more influence over the Lanterns who wield them. Go towards red, you pass through fear, avarice, and then get to rage. The other way, towards violet, you have hope, compassion, and finally love. There are Lanterns for all of them - greens are the only ones doing the space cop thing, though. The others have their own agendas."
no subject
He was fully aware that his own world had plenty of things that were more or equally ridiculous. (And that was why he was trying to hold laughter in).
"So. You have multiple groups of...Lanterns. Powered by feelings? Like, there are people whose powers are literally powered by love. They fight bad guys with the power of love."
Okay, he couldn't not tease at least a little. A tiny bit.
"So what's it like living in a really, really weird commercial for Skittles?"
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They didn't call the love entity the Predator for nothing.
no subject
"Oh God, breakup-fueled superpowers. There's a horrifying idea. But you're preaching to the choir, pal. I dated -- and broke up with -- a woman named Gamora. She has a title, that everyone in our circles knows her by."
Rich presented it with a little flourish of his hands.
"'The deadliest woman in the galaxy.'"
He grinned.
"Accurate title. Very, very accurate title. The only reason I don't take the attempted murder personally was I did technically have warning, and 'cause she was infected by the Phalanx at the time. But I'm not sure that evil robot mind control was the only thing fueling it."
no subject
"Yeah, I think I've got the better deal with Carol. If I've survived five break-ups without her really trying to kill me, I think I'll be fine for whenever the next one happens."
no subject
"Five? Blue blazes."
He hadn't even broken it off with Namorita that often and their relationship had been the epitome of on again off again.
no subject
It was always complicated.
no subject
Most Beyonce songs, really.
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"Hey, you're the one that said it, not me." Don't pin the stupid joke on him! There were plenty of other Beyonce lyrics he could've been talking about. "Must be one hell of a woman for it to get that complicated."
Just like Namorita. Not that he and Nita had broken up that many times, but, well. They'd broken up almost as many. It had gotten kinda complicated like that -- and even more complicated still after he saved her during that thing with the Sphinx.
no subject
Where Rich's gaze went down to the planet, Hal's went up, to the stars.
"But trying to hold anything down when I never know when I'm going to be called off-planet for a month or three? That's just a headache." If General Stone weren't well aware that Hal was Green Lantern, he was pretty sure he'd have been discharged from the Air Force long ago.
(There were definitely issues at work other than "life is uncertain," but Hal was very good at pretending that wasn't it at all.)
no subject
A pause.
"I barely ever had time to even slow down. At one point after the Annihilation war, I was getting distress calls in the tens of thousands. Most of them 8X8s -- planetary distress calls. And I was the only one around to answer 'em."
He looked upward, racking his brain to measure the time. He didn't have Worldmind in his head anymore to instantly calculate things for him.
"I was away a solid year dealing with it all." He snorted. "It worked the same in reverse, naturally. I left all that time, came back, and it was Earth that'd all gone to hell. It's always no-win."
no subject
He still felt pretty bad about that, honestly. Considering Kyle had been the only Lantern watching over the universe entirely because of Hal's own actions. Parallax was an explanation, not an excuse.
no subject
"S'good it got restored at least." Because the alternative -- that a similar corps was taken out -- was a disheartening thought. His shoulders might've drooped even more if he'd heard that it wasn't restored. "I was trying to recruit when I...well. When I died."
His eyes rolled upward, as if to imply that death was just so ridiculous.
"Not that it stuck. There's a team called the X-Men that seems to have people dying and reviving every other year. Whenever someone else like me comes back we joke that they must've left the door to the afterlife open."
Off that subject now. Little did he know he was accidentally tripping over another sensitive subject instead.
"What brought it down? Your corps?"
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