YOUR CHARACTER'S DCUO STORY

I can hear the crescendo building in that final paragraph. I think you nailed Lex in terms of his character and how he would handle a situation like the one you put him in....all about himself. What really stood out to me was how well you painted Sinestro and Hal as these equal and opposites to each other, simillar to a Ying Yang. Glad to be catching up on your stuff. You can tell that you know your Lanterns and love writing them. Looking forward to more Ms. Benz.

Awesome read friend. The time travel and the explaination of things seeming similar yet different on different versions of the same world was very nicely handled. As I stated to Ms. Benz, I feel bad for being such an absent supporter of people's writting efforts. I think this catches me up. I thought the way you tied this into previous works was very well done. In fear of soundling like a Fan-boy, the work you have done with Gallius and making the not only galactic but multi-dimensional scale setting you have, is nothing short of impressive and you can tell you really love these characters. I am looking forward to seeing where Gallius ends up next. Looks like he somewhere around day 1/ground zero of the exobyte shower from Braniac if I read the ending correctly.

Thanks Bern! Very much appreciated! I would really like to do something soon involving our characters again, Nomad , Mina, Bern and whoever else wants in. We shall see. Thanks for the feedback. You rock.

Hey there Bern! It's been a long minute No worries about being away and not being able to read up on our stories. Life can do that. I myself was guilty of that. Work and life has been keeping me away from the DCUO forums that it wasn't until Nomad jokingly pointed it out that I realized it was time to check back in. Still, I very much appreciate the support from you and everyone else on my writing. And yes, the Blackest Night is nearing its climax, so its all coming together nicely. Hopefully if I don't have anything to interrupt me this week, I will be posting part 3 of the chapter

So I have been thinking of re-doing Bernie and crew's stories to reflect more of what I am intending to put in the comic(s) I am working on. I am not sure if that would constitute a "Re-boot" or a "Re-do" or a "Ret-con" but either way, I am going to make some time and start writing a story that reflects more of my intentions with the comic. I am going to try a few things differently in terms of how it reads and it's themes. In advance, I hope you all enjoy it.

Let's move away from the "Re" terms, and start calling it a "Mulligan"

Hey Everyone
So it's seems I jinxed myself because as I was doing the finishing touches on my latest writing last Thursday my laptop all but froze. I rebooted it but ended up in a black screen with the dreaded words, DISC READ ERROR. I took it to a friend who know computers and, yep, my hard drive was shot. Since I needed it for work, he installed a new one but he kept the old hard drive where all my writings, notes, pictures were saved so he can try to recover them

Hope your friend is able to recover your work
After older brother died, mum got his work laptop, it was passworded and Linux, so she took it in to a computer repair place where a friend worked hoping they could figure out a way around the password, they misunderstood what mum wanted and simply replaced the harddrive and through out the locked one (or kept it or something)

One of the things brother was working on at the time of his death, was True AI, he claimed to have finished the theoretical side of it, butt with the loss of the HD, there is no way to work on the practical

Agent 026

"Good morning," Officer Dudley Brighton offered with upbeat enthusiasm.

"Get bent," Officer Caleb Davis replied. The words he wanted to use were far more colorful, but the Sergeant had already chewed him out twice this week for creating an 'inharmonious work environment', and Davis hated talking to the brass at Stryker's almost as much as he hated the inmates. To be fair though, with thirty-three years logged as a prison guard, the grizzled old man hated just about everything and everyone. Slamming his locker door shut with a loud clang, Davis startled the rookie officer dressing next to him, doubling up his duffle bag with his uniform in it and slinging it over one shoulder before stomping his way angrily towards the time clock. Davis hated life in general, and nothing ever made him smile.

"How many days you got left?" an inmate shouted from the E wing as Davis marched past them from below.

Davis extended his middle finger in a rude gesture. "One hundred eighteen," he fired back without bothering to look at whoever it was trying to talk to him. Only 118 days until retirement, and then the angry old man could sit on his front porch and spend the little remaining life he had left screaming at the paperboy and the garbage man and anybody else unfortunate enough to have a route that brought them too close to his crumby Little Bohemia home.

A weight lifted from his shoulders the moment he left the prison grounds. Life as a prison guard had left him on constant high alert. He never felt comfortable, not even in his own home. He trusted no one, seeing only the worst in humanity, and generally bitter towards the entire world, he took the brief moment outside the prison walls to breathe a sigh of relief, and then unlocked his junky '84 Chevy Celebrity for the long commute home through the Metropolis rush hour traffic after having worked a sixteen hour overnight shift. It'd take at least ninety minutes just to cross Metropolis, leaving him with about four hours to sleep before he turned around and came right back in to work for another miserable day. At least home was quiet. Since the third divorce, and now that his kids were moved out and never spoke to him, he had 220 square feet of peace and quiet, only occasionally interrupted by the gunshots outside in the dive neighborhood where he lived. Davis didn't care; he just wanted the entire world to leave him alone.

Dumping himself unceremoniously into the broken-down seat of his sedan, he shifted only is left side so that the springs poking through the seat would stop stabbing into the back of his right thigh, and then fiddled with his car for seven minutes, pumping the gas and holding the break, jimmying the ignition back and forth until the old heap finally turned over and fired up. It was three minutes faster than yesterday, and those three minutes changed his life.

Because of those three minutes, Davis hit the red light at Main and King Street. He was stuck behind two other cars, one of which was filled with teenagers playing loud rap music on a stereo worth more than his car, with the base turned up so high that it all just sounded like buzzing and instantly reminded him that he had been living with a headache for the past seven months. Davis spent a few moments grinding his teeth together, and then simply decided to pull into the drive-through of the corner Jitters and buy a cup of coffee, simply as a creative way of skipping the corner light and spitting himself out onto King without waiting on the obnoxious young hooligans.

Some girl with tattoos on her hands and a face full of piercings reached out through the window to hand him his cup of coffee. Davis instantly disliked her. Part of him wanted to make a sarcastic comment about what piece of equipment must have exploded in her face to result in the two pounds of metal junk hanging off her skin, but then he considered that in all likelihood she had already spit in his coffee, and his cutting remarks would only make her feel justified in being a young piece of trash. He took the cup of brown sludge and pulled out onto King Street, saving himself thirty seconds at the red light.

Piercing-face had, in fact, spit in his coffee, remembering him from the last time the bitter old man had come through with his bad attitude. Davis drank it anyway, and clinging to the phlemn in the bottom ring of his cup, was the microscopic exobyte, trapped in the young girl's saliva as she lashed out against the old man. Down the hatch it went, and rapidly it set to work within Davis's blood stream. Approaching the King Street bridge, he merged into traffic seamlessly, catching the perfect placement behind an ambulance, which then cleared the rush hour traffic in his path while he followed them practically bumper to bumper, skipping much of the gridlock traffic that had grinded to a halt around him. When the old Chevy began to overheat, he cranked up the heat, creating a makeshift exhaust vent that prevented him from breaking down. As he pulled into his parking lot, for the first time in seven years, he managed to drive over the obnoxiously large speed bump the city had installed, and did it without scraping the undercarriage of his car. Then he parallel parked perfectly, and at that point he knew something was not normal.

He saw the entire world in an entirely new light. It wasn't just a cesspool filled with awful, terrible people, destined to make everyone miserable until their inevitable death. The rest of humanity was not some sort of plague sent specifically to torment him. They were all simply cogs in one greater machine; nobody was special or unique. Everything and everyone fit together like a puzzle to create a world where some select few could do anything they desired, while the rest of humanity scurried about like busy drones, their only purpose in life being as the worker ants to be directed by those truly important.

Mathematics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, millions of years of knowledge flooded the blue collar worker's mind, stretching and expanding his intellect beyond anything he had ever imagined. He could see thought; he could taste intellect. The genius of Bruce Wayne, of Lex Luthor, of Thomas Morrow and Ray Palmer, Ultra-Humanite, the Brain, Dr. Sivana and Professor Ivo, all blended together into a wealth of knowledge and embedded into the mind of a grouchy old prison guard. Davis couldn't sleep, frantically working on using his sudden intellect to solve all of the world's greatest problems.

The next day, when he checked into work at Stryker's Island Penitentiary, he produced a set of hyper-reactor nuclear fission gloves, and vaporized ninety-one inmates on the molecular level before his fellow officers were able to restrain him. The young guards insisted that murdering inmates was wrong, that Davis had gone insane, but the grizzled old guard could see the truth. We are all part of the same genetic compost, organic manifestations of a complex ecosystem in which individuality warrants no special consideration. The criminal element of Metropolis soaked millions in taxpayer dollars to be cared for at a level greater than what was afforded America's combat veterans or homeless, with ignorant politicians guaranteeing convicted criminals ridiculous 'rights' to privileges such as cable television and recreation. Davis set about to right the wrongs, determined to reset the errors of society, recycling these failed society abherations into their base elements so that the world could try again to make something productive from them. The Metropolis Courts would have locked Davis away for years as a mass murderer, had Brainiac's bottling ships not selected that moment to enter orbit, encasing massive amounts of the city for removal and abducting many of the exobyte infused citizens.

It was the brave and heroic billionaire philanthropist, Lex Luthor, who rescued Davis from the bottling ship, along with dozens of other potentially useful assets. With Davis's newfound intellect, he could see that Luthor only intended to use the people, that his 'Project Everyman' was taking these new exobyte exposed people and turning them into foot soldiers for Luthor's own agenda. Simply put, however, Davis didn't care. He accepted his own place in the world as an agent of change, eliminating those who disrupted the balance of society without regards for 'rights' or 'feelings' or 'morality'. He realized he was no one special, simply a nameless, faceless cog in the wheels of Luthor's plans, but as Agent 026 under Luthor's agenda, Davis had the opportunity to kill criminals, and that was all he really wanted in life.

That day, Agent 026 smiled.

I just got around to reading this. I really like the idea of Davis and his power set not being something that is typically associated with the game, but rather the intellectual properties of a lot of those characters. Really nice turn around to the use of the new found abilities. The idea of him "Snapping" and going full shoot first and ask questions later is cool. That kind of lifestyle [prior to the exobyte] would take a toll on anyone and it would almost force you to shut off certain parts of your being. I think you portrayed Davis really well and I say that because as I read him, I was like "Yeah, that makes sense" and "Yeah, I think that's how somone would act in that situation". I hope you do a follow up and more to this. Thanks for sharing.

Ugh! That is no bueno.

After much time, my friend was able to recover everything and transferred my files safe and sound. Let's just say my reaction after getting the news was like....

Your friend deserves a reward

Well I did buy him a six pack of his favorite beer and paid him even though he declined

Subject: Mina Lyubov
Real Name: Mina Kuznetsova
Blackest Night
The Prixiam of Space Part III

Enter: Space

Within the cold white recess of the moon, Superman lays in a deep crater within the Mare Tranquillitatis aka the Sea of Tranquility. Whereupon the sun slowly rising over shining it light upon him. At that moment, he suddenly begins to receive communication via his comm from the Watchtower which causes his eyes to snap open. Getting back to his feet, the man of steel sees in the distance the change in the tide of the battle, “Looks like Hal made it.” However, he then sees the American flag nearby, laying on the floor of the moon, knocked over due to the force of his crash landing, and realizes he’s standing where Apollo 11 landed back in 1969. The man of tomorrow raises the flag and re-plants it and takes a moment to look upon it before contacting Oracle via his JL commlink, “Oracle, this is Superman. What’s the status?”

Not far from the central battery, the heavily damaged Braidmen flagship thunders on, little more than a tattered hulk, while outside, the area sparkles and flares with blasts from the battle. Within the engineering bay of the ship, Nol-Anj seeing how close they are, tells everyone, “Alright everybody! This is far enough. Get yourselves outside, our allies will be waiting to take you to safety.” As ordered, the crew set what’s left of the defense systems on auto before they leave. Doing the same, Mina walks up to her injured friend and tries to help her up to leave, “Alright Nol-Anj, let’s get going.” However, the Braidmen leader, in turn replies, “I’m not coming with you.” As Mina and everyone are taken aback by her statement, Mina tries to convince her to not do anything drastic, “What? Nol-Anj, No. It’s suicide. Weren’t you going to have the auto-pilot on this thing, I mean…I can’t leave you to die!” The injured Star Sapphire, turning to Mina, replies, “The auto pilot has been damaged. And the blasts out there in the battle is too heavy. The ship will never hit unless I manually pilot it.” However, a crewman suggests to his Khaleesi, “But madam, we can set the engines on maximum and take our chances. You must come with us…” Yet, having already made her decision, Nol-Anj sternly tells everyone, “Enough! What you suggest is too much of a risk. The lives of so many of our brothers and sisters have been sacrificed. I will not let them go alone. And even if I wanted to, I would not live long enough to complete the journey home,” whereupon she reveals that her wound was still bleeding all this time. As a result, her remaining crew shocked by this are frozen in disbelief. However, the Braidmen leader hands one of her crewman something, “Deliver this to Captain Granack,” and then tells them, “Now go!” Though saddened, the crew nonetheless follow her command and as everyone took their leave, she tells Mina to hold a moment. Once alone, Nol-Anj tells Mina, “You know…every action I have ever taken was for the greater good of my people…however right or wrong, I have stolen, killed, and conquered…but in meeting you…reminded me when I was once chained and betrayed…which is why I freed you from Luthor…and in being around you…I gradually opened my heart to someone I could call a friend.” Mina in turn walks up to Nol-Anj and replies, “Not just a friend. A sister,” and as both women exchange smiles, they hug one another farewell. The Star Sapphire from Earth then departs, flying outside to meet the others. As she flew, she glances back at the Braidmen ship and prays, “Lord, grant your blessing upon Nol-Anj.”

Meanwhile, both Hal Jordan and Sinestro charge the corrupted Guardian which escalates the fight to insanity; with various acrobatic fast blows and an array of constructs and blasts. Summoning what power she has, Scar in an unrelenting fury fires onto her attackers. However, the synchronized attacks of the two Lanterns strike the corrupted Guardian, blow after blow, causing her to fall back. As the other Lanterns watch the fight, Saint Walker amazed, remarks, “Hal Jordan and Sinestro are fighting like one!” Alongside of him, Atrocitus crossly remembers a similar coordinated assault which ended in his defeat at the hands of Jordan and Sinestro. As the fight continued, the yellow Lantern realizes that Scar is becoming weary and as such, goes on the offensive. The guardian in turn tries teleporting, as a way to evade him, but luckily, one of his constructs is able to skewer her hand which he quickly uses to pull her towards Jordan, who lunges in, kneeing her to the face. Infuriated, Scar loses her composure and instead attacks the duo head on. However, anticipating her reaction, the two Lanterns move out of the way, whereupon Indigo-1, instantly teleporting in front of her, fires a powerful blast from her staff, hitting the Guardian. As the corrupted guardian is blown back from the strike, Carol Ferris, Saint Walker, and Atrocitus join the Indigo Lantern and fire a salvo of blasts that shoot past Sinestro and Hal Jordan, that strike Scar, sending her even further and crashing onto the Central Battery. Not letting up, the green and yellow Lantern speed towards the injured Scar, with Hal creating an F22 Raptor jet construct that drops several bombs onto the corrupted being which is followed up by Sinestro, using a giant mace construct, bludgeons the struggling guardian with a powerful blow. However, the burnt and blood-soaked Scar, somehow still alive, returns the favor with a blast of energy bolts from her hands that both Lanterns shield themselves from but the force throws them back hard. The other Lanterns in turn provide them some cover by firing at the guardian which causes her to teleport and now attack Saint Walker, Carol Ferris, Indigo-1, and Atrocitus.

The Prixiam of Space Part III continued...


Sinestro, quickly shaking off the attack spots out of the corner of his eye the charging Braidmen ship and tells the Green Lantern, “Jordan! Throw me at her!” Understanding what he plans to do, Hal encases Sinestro in a hammer throwing construct which he quickly swings and turns until throwing it with such velocity that sends the encased Yellow Lantern speeding towards Scar. With her fighting the other Lanterns, the corrupted guardian does not see him coming at her with now a spiked shield construct, which smashes into her and rams her towards the charging battleship. Not far behind, the Green Lantern, tied to two jet fighter constructs going supersonic is able to catch up to Sinestro and aids him in driving their foe back. The corrupted guardian desperately tries to move and counter but Hal and Sinestro immediately envelope her with chains and hooks. And with tremendous speed the duo smash Scar straight onto a spear like prow of the Braidmen ship, impaling her. Shrieking in pain as the skewered guardian bleeds profusely, she tries to pull herself out with difficulty. Her eyes while dripping dark blood, wells in hate, at the realization of her defeat and the danger the central battery is in. Knowing what’s coming, Scar, with her last ounce of power, reaches out her hands towards the battery, “You…have won nothing…”

As they tumble and quickly regain control, Hal and Sinestro remain suspended in space watching as the ship continues its collision course. However, they are interrupted and pulled away by Mina, who encases them in a violet sphere. Surprised and glad to see to her, Jordan remarks, “Mina! You made it!” The Star Sapphire, flying away from the area as fast as she can, with them in tow, worriedly replies, “You know me…but Hal, we have other things to worry about,” which she then contacts via her ring, “Carol Ferris. Tell everyone to get clear from the area! I repeat! Get as far as you can! That charging ship’s warp reactor is about to explode!” Back within the smoking secondary bridge of the battleship, Nol-Anj grimly faces the oncoming Central Battery and her death. Clinging to life, she defiantly smiles, “I Nol-Anj, Star Sapphire of the planet Dekann, daughter of Khal Guderian, and Khalee…no…Prixiam of the Braidmen, spit my last breath at thee!” and aims her craft before vanishing within a bright light that changes into a gigantic explosion that impacts the battery and widens, gobbling everything within its vicinity.

Now that is going out in glory! :double_salute:

Thanks Dark. I had something in mind on how to have Nol-Anj make her grand exit but thanks to you and other fellow writers, it helped me make it an honorable end. So to you sir, thank you

Reminds me of both The Valkyrie's death in "Battle Beyond the Stars" and Robin's death at the end of the first (or was it second?) season of "Robin of Sherwood"
Heroic deaths to save the lives of others

Nice to see that grody Scar finally taken down.
Nol-Anj's demise was expected as she we went out in a blaze of glory. She has perished . . . or has she?

I have something out shortly. Nice job Ms. Benz.