legionmissions | IN BRIGHTEST DAY - Mod Plot [LOG POST | 4

The construct wasn't unguarded. Countless reds and yellows swarmed around it. Clearing a path to the construct wasn't going to happen without a fight.

When we left Sam Alexander last episode, he was claimed by a red ring, reducing him to a mindless rage-zombie capable of nothing but angry noises and spewing flaming blood at the people he once called friends.

Yeah, he didn't get better.

Even as chaotic as the battlefield is, finding him is easier than one might expect - largely because the path of destruction he's cutting is indiscriminate, and he's just as likely to take out yellows as the greens and their allies, truce be damned.

Rich's face was still a mess but thanks to Soranik Natu, it'd been fixed up enough to keep him in the fight. His skin was still blistered but the parts that had been open burn wounds had been sealed up, albeit artificially. With the med tech back at Legion World, he'd likely be able to get his skin regenerated well enough. So it didn't matter for now.

His helmet was also damaged, with places where it'd melted slightly but it was still better than nothing at all. It'd protected quite a few parts of his face from Sam's ragespew earlier. And it was one of the most recognizable things he could wear to try to get through to Sam, to help him recognize who he was. If he could just get him to slow down for a second, there was a chance he could trap him in a construct long enough for one of the blues to help fix him.

The green wall that Sam suddenly would find in front of him had multiple walls behind it, ready to curl around him in multiple spheres he'd have to burn through.

Rich was visible through the translucent constructs.

"I don't care if you set my face on fire and I don't care about who gets in the way."

He wasn't letting the reds keep him in their grip, especially since there was a risk they might escape and just keep him. He wasn't letting Sam become lost to that not-life.

"I'm not giving up on you, kiddo." His voice got softer. "It's gonna be okay. I promise."

He would save him. He would bring him home. Really home. He'd look out for him long enough to get him back to their world and his family, then he was going to help him find his father to make that family complete again. That was just fact. That was pure faith. That was hope that would have to be clawed out of his cold, dead hands.

That hope, and the hope he'd caused in more than one world, was enough to make an errant blue ring, lost thanks to the unfortunate death of its owner, start to whiz towards him.

Edited 2016-07-27 10:54 (UTC)

There was no intelligent response from Sam, of course. Only a growl as he threw himself towards that wall with a torrent of blood.

The first layer of the wall went down easily. The second (and more) layer behind it was unexpected (in as much as Sam could be said to be expecting anything, in his current state, which wasn't really the case), but he didn't hesitate, trying to plow into the wall through the haze of his own ragespew even as the extra layers bent in to trap him.

[RICHARD RIDER, OF EARTH. YOU HAVE THE ABILITY TO INSTILL GREAT HOPE. WELCOME TO THE BLUE LANTERN CORPS.]

The ring slipping onto his hand came as a total surprise, and for a moment, he felt like he'd suddenly been shot with adrenaline. Having the green and blue rings at the same time felt right and wrong at the same time. Right because one was fueling the other, wrong because it felt like almost too much to wield at once.

So he let go of the green, focusing on the blue, and the green shot off, looking for a new owner. The blue light replaced the green, curling around Sam, even as he burned through the construct barriers.

Rich'd heard what the blue rings could do and instinct had him reaching out. Just as Sam burned through the last construct wall, before he could ragespew in Rich's face again, Rich held up his hand and produced a construct from the ring.

"Everything's gonna be okay."

Rich's way of saying: All will be well.

The construct took on a form that would give Sam the most hope...

The form taken by the construct would likely come as no surprise to anyone.

Another Nova - taller than Sam, with a more powerful build, and clearly older. Scruffy around the edges, could probably use a shave. But despite the differences, the resemblance was obvious, not only in his features, but in the way the construct moved forward, a mirror of Sam's own reckless charges. It stopped just short of Sam, as though waiting to be recognized.

Sam froze, staring for long seconds, like the gears in his head were madly turning and trying to produce - something. Recognition. Understanding. Anything.

And then he said the first coherent thing he'd managed since the red ring forced its way onto his finger. "Dad?"

The construct held a hand out, and that was all it took for the dam to burst. Sam surged forward, faster than if he were attacking - aiming not for an opening or a weak point, but for his father's arms.

The construct held Sam tight in its arms, and it was a promise of what was to come. Once Sam got through this, once he got home to his universe, he'd have a chance to find his father again -- and he'd have help this time.

The blue light fought the red infection, all the way down to the molecular level. As the blue light that made up the vision of Sam's father poured into Sam's body, leeching the red infection out of him, new arms replaced that of the construct's, as Rich swooped in and swept Sam into a hug.

"Let it all go, Sam. It's not you, kiddo." Sure, he could be a little tetchy sometimes, but he wasn't this ragey. Not naturally. There was a reason the violet ring had chosen him, after all. "We'll find your dad, that will become real -- but you gotta be you for it to happen. Just let all the anger go."

That vision of hope could come true, it could come to be, but he had to be himself again for it to happen.

Somehow, the red burning out almost hurt worse than being a Red Lantern had - like he hadn't been able to comprehend how painful and wrong it was until the blue light was burning it out, pulling him back towards himself. Sam gasped, shuddered, leaned into Rich. He felt like he was on fire from the inside out, and God would it just hurry up and burn out already -

Everything's gonna be okay.

He didn't want to be mad all the time. He was mad so much of the time. At school. At supervillains. At himself.

Being mad was exhausting.

As the blue light burned away the last of the red, the tension drained out of Sam's posture and he went limp in Rich's arms.

Rich knelt down and cradled Sam in his arms. He frantically shoved off his helmet so he could press his ear against Sam's chest.

He heard Sam's heart skip at first, but then it started to sound normal as the red infection went away. It started to beat healthy and strong.

Rich sighed in relief, and lifted his head, cradling Sam close, shielding them both protectively in blue light as Sam recovered. He pushed Sam's helmet off too, so he could see his face, and make sure color was coming back to his skin. The reds were all so pale, probably because they were puking out so much of their blood.

"Rise and shine, munchkin. You're missing all the thrilling heroics."

He knew Sam hated the short jokes, but that was all the more reason to tell them right now. He was hoping to annoy him back to consciousness.

It was also just their thing now, the teasing. It was the same kind of teasing that'd gone on between Rich and his brother Bobby. This was a disturbing and traumatizing thing that'd happened to Sam and he wanted him to come out of it and see that some things were exactly the same, comfortable and safe. Rich knew Sam'd be upset about burning his face -- if he could remember it -- and he wanted him to know from the get-go that nothing had changed.

If there was an easy way to get Sam's attention, even when he was still only halfway conscious, short jokes were definitely it.

"Shut up, Dick," he mumbled, eyes still closed, though he was starting to stir. "At least 'm not a -"

His eyes opened, and whatever he was going to call Rich never made it out. For a long moment, nothing made it out; he stopped, mouth hanging open, and just stared. Rich looked like hell.

Rich looked worse than hell, honestly.

"...I did that," he said numbly.

"No," Rich said softly, shaking his head. "The ring did that."

As far as Rich was concerned, the blame was squarely on that stupid ring and whatever stupid Red Lantern had created it. It was also the fault of that psycho that Dipper said had attacked them.

"Don't you dare blame yourself. You didn't know left from right with that thing on. The red ones are supposedly one of the most brain-washy."

He added gently, "And that happens, in our line of work. I've had it to happen to me. Got all Borged up."

Maybe it sucked but he wasn't the first hero to get all mindborked and he certainly wouldn't be the last, so at least he wasn't alone.

"My face'll get healed up just fine, the med-tech's good here."

Edited 2016-08-22 08:00 (UTC)

Somehow, the quiet way Rich said it made it sound like he was going to accept even less of an argument than if he'd gone the authoritative route.

(Or maybe he just knew that the authoritative route was even more likely to get Sam trying to argue.)

"But that had to hurt."

It was probably the understatement of the century.

"Eh, I've had stuff burned off before. You get used to it."

Sad but true. Yes, it'd hurt like hell, but not in a way he was going to carry with him or anything.

"What bothered me more was worrying about you. I was afraid they'd run off with you and that I'd never be able to find you again. That you'd be stuck like that."

He pulled him close for a hug.

"All that matters is that you're safe. I know that whole thing was probably disturbing as hell, but you're gonna be okay. They can't mess with your head anymore."

No way was he letting one of those rings even get near Sam again.

So much for deflecting.

Because while Sam was genuinely worried about what he'd done to Rich, there was also the fact that focusing on Rich meant he didn't have to focus on what had just happened to him.

It had been disturbing, and exactly how disturbing was still catching up to him and he wasn't so sure he wanted it to.

He took a deep breath, leaning into Rich to bury his face in his shoulder.

Dipper, it turned out, made for a dapper little villain, but that was largely because of what he'd faced in his fear lodge.

Bill Cipher. In defeating the horror of Bill and taking all that horror as his own, to use against other people, Dipper had become much less hesitant in using things Bill had touched. That meant he'd chosen the costume he'd worn when Bill had possessed his body and it meant that Bill and his henchmaniacs could now be found among his construct monsters when Dipper had left them out before.

That was his now. He'd conquered it and now he could use those images to cause his own fear.

As Dipper launched waves of monsters against the allied greens, blues, indigos, and violets, he laughed maniacally. It wasn't the maniacal laughter of a supervillain, though, it was the maniacal laughter of a child enjoying themselves. It was the same kind of laughter that came from someone watching their sibling get beaned by a water balloon, like the tearing claws and gaping maws of his monsters were all just part of a game.

In a way, they were. The brainwashing of the yellows had turned the memories of his life upside down and torn all the fun out of it. His parents were now horrible people, his beloved Grunkles were insane kidnappers, and his sister had been ripped out of it entirely. Now that all the love, joy, and fun of his past had been taken away from him, he had to make his own fun.

He frowned at a screaming Green Lantern that went down under a pile of biting gnomes.

"Is this really how it's going to be? I just want to play, but it's like all you Green Lanterns can't keep up." He floated sideways. "What's that saying about youth? It's about wasting the old? I'm pretty sure that's what it was."

"Playtime's over Dipper."

Hiccup had seen more than a few terrible things in his life. As a Viking, it was an occupational hazard. Seeing a good kid like Dipper twisted into what he was now had just taken the top of the list.

"I don't want to fight you, but I will if I have to. Don't make this any harder than it needs to be." Beside him, Toothless let off a warning growl.

Hal hadn't been able to get Dipper out of the Sinestro Corps' base, and that was going to be eating at him for a while. But there was no way he was giving up on getting the kid out of the yellows' influence, and so he'd been shadowing Dipper across the battlefield, looking for an opportunity.

Hiccup was better than an opportunity, though - Hiccup, he was sure, was equally invested in getting the kid back out of this mess, so Hal placed himself on Dipper's other side, but in talking range.

"I hate to be the bad news guy, but he's definitely gonna make it harder. Sinestro Corps hazing is nasty stuff."

"Hal! Buddy, hey. You know, it's really a shame I have to kill you for not actually joining Sinestro. What's that all about?"

Dipper shook his head ruefully.

"And Hiccup, you're here, too! It's like a who's who of people who pretended they actually cared about me."

That was the only way they could make him like this -- altering his memories, making him see his past in a different way. They didn't take his time with the Legion away, they just made it into something else, something that hurt. Combined with a new fake past filled with disappointments, suffering, betrayal, and neglect -- and the real horrors that they'd left in -- they'd changed who he was. And the light of the yellow ring pouring in and heightening his aggression made it so he wasn't even questioning all the falsehoods.

"It wasn't really hazing, that's way too light a word for it," Dipper said, twirling around in a little circle theatrically. "They opened my eyes, Hal! They made me realize what I am and, even better, what I could be. I don't have to be that scared little kid facing the apocalypse alone anymore."

Alone. Because they'd twisted his memories of Soos and Wendy and his grunkles -- and taken away the memories of the main person he'd faced it with.

"There was this...hole." He looked a little lost for a moment. "Where...where someone or...something was supposed to be."

A hole that almost had a shape, almost -- no, no, there'd never been anything or anyone there. He'd always been alone. Unhappy. Bullied and abused and unloved. And there'd been a gaping void in his life because of it, an emptiness nothing could fill.

"And now it's filled with the yellow light," he said, dragging his hands down his face in delight, scratching his own skin with his nails, as if he didn't even register the pain. "Now everyone else gets to feel small and afraid--"

He held out both arms.

"--and I finally get to have fun for once!"

A swarm of flying, cursed Egyptian super termites burst out of him, the first wave of yellow constructs he sent their way, pelting at them with all the ferocity of a swarm of locusts. That was only a distraction, though, meant to block their vision temporarily. The next wave was full of Lilliputtians, the tiny golf-ball people that had tried to kill Pacifica and-- just Pacifica. They attacked with tiny, pointy golf ball pencils and even little swords. Each one individually wasn't that strong but lots of them stabbing all at once had the potential to do damage, and the way they swarmed made them hard to get rid of.

Edited 2016-08-25 09:24 (UTC)

"BREAK!" The dragon and human pair dove to the side in opposite directions, Hiccup bringing up a shield to block, while Toothless fired plasma-blasts at the Lilliputtians.

Hiccup was very, very glad he'd had the foresight to swing by Dipper's room. Originally he'd only done so to find something that would help the younger boy focus past the influence of the ring. Now, it looked like it would be their best chance of stopping him.

"Hal! I have something that might snap him out of it! We just need to get through this mess first!" He called over, before focusing back on Dipper.

If Dipper wanted to play this as terrifying, then Hiccup would oblige. He wasn't, by nature, inclined to spread terror and chaos. That was okay, however. He knew people who were. A yellow Hideous Zippleback appeared from Hiccup's ring, a pair of twin riders aboard.

"Dude, we're all, like, yellow and stuff. Cool. Though this does raise some interesting existential questions..." the Tuffnut construct said from his position on Belch's head.

"Very true. Are we merely figments of Hiccup's overactive imagination, or is he somehow channeling us from worlds away?" added Ruffnut on Barf.

Hiccup pinched the bridge of his nose. "Does it really matter as long as I'm giving you free range to blow things up?"

Ruffnut fired off a crazy grin. "Not even a little."

Screaming a warcry, the quartet charged into the fray, spraying explosive gas everywhere in the general vicinity of the golfball creatures, and setting it off with a spark.

Edited 2016-08-26 03:19 (UTC)

Hal called up a gigantic flyswatter, sweeping back dozens of locusts and Lilliputtians with every swipe.

"There was something a lot better than yellow in that hole before, kid," he said, still beating back waves of tiny monstrosities with the flyswatter. "You just have to remember."

But maybe Hiccup had the ticket to help with that, if they just made it through the next five minutes.

Dipper shielded himself with his ring but the explosive distraction provided by the twins meant he was losing his grip on the masses of constructs. He decided to consolidate into something larger and less complex than masses of tiny things, and the termites and Lilliputtians faded. What he summoned next was the worst monster he could think of, Bill Cipher in one of his more grotesque forms. It reached out towards Hiccup and Hal and their constructs with its many arms, trying to crush them all or stuff them in one of its mouths.

Dipper stood on the top of the pyramid, briefly balancing there on one foot, the way a teenager might balance idly on the curb of a street when they were bored.

"Something that filled the void. What, my parents? Who didn't want me, and let me know it every chance they got? The crazy uncles that kidnapped me? Other kids bullying me all the time? A psychotic demon following me around and trying to ruin my life?" He rolled his eyes. "If you think this is going to be the part where you somewhow lure me to the good side with warm fuzzies and happy thoughts that remind me of my humanity, you'd be wrong."

If they needed any more confirmation that his memories of Mabel had been taken away, they had it now. He didn't mention any ways his sister was awful because he didn't remember her at all.

"I guess you could say that me taking all that out on the world is unfair." A pause. "Because it is!" he chirped cheerfully, and then his expression suddenly dropped to something hollow and lifeless. His voice was bitter as he said, "But it's better to be feared than to be...nothing."

No muscles, no brains. Face it, you're nothing without this.

The construct monster raged, screeching an unnatural cry that sounded more like pain than anger, and his teke-field crackled around him like fire, blending in and out with the aura from his ring.

"Just a nobody to everyone," he said distantly, and a few tears trickled down his face.

Then he suddenly smiled a smile that showed far too many teeth.

"But people can't ignore me now."

Edited 2016-08-28 07:31 (UTC)

"What did he say? I was ignoring him," Tuff piped up as the twins' Zippleback swung out of the way of one the arms.

"Not helping Tuff," Hiccup ground out. Maintaining a yellow construct with an indigo ring was hard. It was far enough beyond his general nature that he'd had to imagine the twins perfectly, right down to their argumentative natures, to get it to work.

"You try paying attention when you're being attacked by a giant whatever-that-thing-is," Ruffnut complained, even as she directed Barf to spray more gas at Bill.

While Toothless rendered an assist by lighting up the gas himself, Hiccup focused back on Dipper.

"You're smarter than this Dipper. You know the ring messes with people's heads. Think it through, why is there a hole in your memories?"

"This isn't an either/or situation. You don't have to be feared or nothing. You were doing a pretty good job of that before, you know."

Lots of arms. Something that could keep lots of arms busy?

A gigantic octopus materialized in front of Dipper's construct, although its number of arms was - well, definitely not eight, at the very least; new ones kept appearing until it had one grappling with every one of the arms on the pyramid construct. Definitely not biologically accurate.

But hey, who cared? Maybe Arthur. Who wasn't here to.

"There's no hole in my memories and I wasn't -- I wasn't --"

All of a sudden, he heard a little girl's laughter and then nonsense words.

"Womp womp."

It was so familiar, like he'd heard it a million times before, but he was sure he'd never heard that voice. He looked around frantically but there were no little girls in sight. None of the Winathians were nearby. They were evacuating away from the monstrous fire construct in another direction.

Now that he was distracted, Hal's octopus construct was successfully tangling up all of the arms of the pyramid, and where he floated at the top of the pyramid, Dipper's expression started to grow hazy.

"I wasn't --"

He wasn't important before this. What was Hal talking about, him doing a pretty good job --?

"I was searching one of the garbage chutes for evidence that might have been thrown away and someone hit me from behind and -- the evidence! I found this."

He'd helped, didn't he? During the assassination attempt on Enkemet, he'd helped do the hero thing, and he'd also helped free the Spectre -- but no, that hadn't happened.

...Had it?

They were lying. His time with the Legion had been a disaster and there wasn't anything missing from his --

"Check it out, Dipper! I successfully bedazzled my face!"

"Stop it! Shut up!" His head was swimmming and he held it in his hands. "You're just trying to confuse me! It's just a trick!"

He started hyperventilating and huffing out a terrified mantra to himself, one of the things from his real memories that had stuck:

"Trust no one. Trust no one. Trust no one..."

But the pyramid monster was fading slightly as his concentration faded and he was too distracted to make it keep fighting back. If they wanted to get close, now was their chance.

Hiccup flew closer, the construct of the Thorstons fading away. Toothless looked on warily, ready to attack if Bill started moving again.

"This isn't a trick Dipper. You know it isn't." he said as he slowly opened a pouch on his armor, pulling out a small pink-and-purple object.

"If your sister were here, I think she'd want you to have this."

Hiccup held Mabel's friendship bracelet out on the palm of his hand, waiting for Dipper to take it.

Hal kept his focus on the constructs, keeping the pyramid under control and not relenting even when it wavered. A burst of the wrong emotion could still ruin their day, and Hiccup had the other end of things covered.

Dipper didn't take it from Hiccup's hand with his own hand. A construct lashed out and snatched the bracelet away from him. By the time he took it in his fingers, he was so numb that he couldn't even feel the texture of it against his fingertips.

But he heard things, and he saw things, flashes, memories changing. That Valentines Day that he got teased and hid himself in a broom closet suddenly shifted so that a Valentine was slid under the door, a heart made of many other Valentines all stuck together. He flipped it over and saw the words 'For my favorite brother.'

Childhood afternoons spent locked in a closet changed to sunny afternoons outside, the two of them lost in neverending games of pretend, usually where he was some enterprising explorer and she was a mer-unicorn fairy princess.

A terrifying summer, trapped in the attic of a crazy relative, morphed into attic mini-golf that he nearly always lost.

"Awkard sibling hug?"

"Sincere sibling hug."

"Pat pat."

They'd paved over everything else with darkness but they couldn't do that with the memories of her. They'd been too bright and happy. She was so bright that she'd shined right through. So they'd ripped her away and tried to make him overlook it, but he could see it now. He could see the shape of the hole she'd left, and that hole started to get filled with a chirpy voice and endless laughter. With hugs and noogies. With neon colored band aids placed on his cuts and scrapes with careful hands that were too small to belong to a parent.

"Mabel," he choked out. "She's real. She's --"

Of all the things they could've stolen from him, they'd chosen the absolute worst.

The pyramid construct faded. The yellow aura around him dimmed. The blue field of his teke drew inward. But it wasn't him powering down -- it was the way the sea drew back away from the shore before a tsunami crushed everything in its path. He opened his mouth to scream but they never got a chance to hear the sound. The boom of his telekinesis detonating cracked like thunder and made loud shrieking noises, like rockets going off, as explosive force cascaded outward from Dipper in every direction. It wasn't enough to truly hurt them, but it was still a massive blast of energy that pushed everything around him away.

When the blinding white light faded back into blue, when his teke fields finally stopped exploding outward, he was kneeling in a crater where the pyramid had been, still holding the bracelet in trembling hands.

Tears were dribbling down his face now, without a sound, as he awkwardly fastened the bracelet to his wrist.

That was when the violet ring found him, lazily circling around him, landing lightly on his finger like a butterfly landing on a flower. His blank expression didn't change but the conversation of the rings made what was going on under the surface clear.

[MASON PINES, OF EARTH. YOU ARE CAPABLE OF GREAT LOVE. THE LOSS OF THE MEMORIES OF YOUR SISTER NOW LEAVES A VOID IN YOUR HEART.]

[CONFLICTING EMOTIONAL RESONANCE REGISTERED.]

[YOU HAVE BEEN WRONGED BUT THE LIGHT OF THE STAR SAPPHIRE CAN FILL THE HOLE OF YOUR BROKEN HEART AND THIS HEARTBREAK CAN BE AVENGED.]

[ABILITY TO FEEL LOVE OVERRIDING DESIRE TO CAUSE FEAR. TARGET SENTIENT REJECTED. SECTOR SCAN FOR REPLACEMENT INITIATED.]

[WELCOME TO THE STAR SAPPHIRES.]

The tears dripping down his face turned crystalline, and then he was encased in crystal, like all the others that'd gotten violet rings had been. When the crystal broke, his eyes were glowing violet, and he floated into the air, looking almost like a puppet being jerked by its strings.

The light of the Star Sapphires could be dangerous in the wrong hands, especially when it tapped into the vengefulness that sometimes came of being heartbroken. Right now the ring was the one that was driving and that wasn't really that much better than before. But he didn't try to attack them or fly off and attack anyone else, because he was just too out of it.

He wasn't Dipper the Legionnaire anymore, and he wasn't Dipper the Yellow Lantern, either. He was multiple people at once, a jumble of fake lives. He was a twitching mass of vengeful anger and broken memories, fueled by the hurt the Star Sapphire rings sought out and took advantage of.

They'd done what they wanted, they'd reached the real him that was buried in there, but that meant that the real Dipper was now trying to interact with the world after someone had taken a hammer to his mental architecture. It was like looking out from the inside of a broken mirror.

"Trust...trussst no. No one," he slurred, trying to say the same mantra as before, but he couldn't get it right this time. He forgot the way words were supposed to sound and each one stretched out in his mouth before it died on his tongue. "Trust one. No one. No -- trussst one."

The only upside was that now he was so out of it that knocking him the heck out would be easy enough. He was pretty much defenseless, a ball of instinct and emotion trying to react to what was going on around him but failing miserably.

"Mabelll. Mabel. Trust one. One. No. No one. Trust Mabel. One..."

Edited 2016-08-30 06:17 (UTC)

Hiccup didn't really want to do this to Dipper, but they couldn't have him hovering there in the state he was in. Both the ring and years as a Viking were telling him there was only one truly compassionate thing he could do in this situation.

"Sorry about this buddy," Hiccup said, speeding forward, staff brought to bear. With one fell swoop, he brought it up, and swung it firmly down on Dipper's head.

Hal winced as he saw Hiccup move forward, but there was really no getting around it - so he moved forward, too, flying low and positioning himself to catch Dipper when he fell.

The hit connected and Dipper dropped like a brick.

A few errant tears dripped down his face, but then he was silent and still, and shivering violently in Hal's arms even in unconsciousness.

Edited 2016-09-03 02:30 (UTC)

Prime's armor had been damaged because of previous fights. That meant that if they fought hard enough, they could finally destroy it -- and possibly finally take him down.

It wasn't impossible to break into the giant construct that was burning the planet. Once the good guys broke in, they didn't have any components to break or engine to destroy -- they had to defeat the Lantern themselves that were creating it and fueling it.

Giant monster? Jason's got this. Though, admittedly, he'd much rather have an entire team backing him up right now, it's still easy for him to fall into old habits. Despite being done up as the Green Ranger, the feeling of using the Dragon Dagger, or rather using his power ring to simulate the Dragon Dagger, is still too unfamiliar. It's draining, actually building something rather than just whipping up shapeless shields and attack beams, but after a bit of work he finally manages to form his first actual construct: a giant, mechanical Tyrannosaur.

And not, to the irritation of many paleontologists, a particularly accurate one.

At only a hundred and thirty feet tall, he was still dwarfed by the massive construct of the reds and yellows. Still, he had to do something to slow it down. "I'll do what I can to slow this down and crack this thing open! You guys figure out how to actually stop them!"

A single ringslinger's willpower versus more than a dozen powered by hate and fear wasn't going to last very long without help, but it didn't slow Jason down from charging the beastly leviathan and tackling it head-on. At the very least, he could slow down its progress. Even if only for a few seconds.

"Seriously? I wasn't expecting something like that," He began to really think Jason had been younger than he assumed before. Kids loved dinosaurs, he thought. Hell, he even remembered. In his adulthood though Aizawa had let that temperament slowly drain away. Even so, his first inclination was to assist by any means necessary. Stealth was meaningless in what they were doing. There was no way to sneakily knock out a gigantic beast like that.

The least he could do was play by different rules. As the gigantic creature clashed against Jason's construct, Aizawa's ring flashed and a cascading violet flow of sand formed underneath the beast's feet. The things could float, but even in the air--they imitated the motions of running on solid ground.

The benefits outweighed the risks. Aizawa could capitalize on collective imagination. If one stepped on ice, they would expect to slip. It was a natural thing to be concerned about even with an active imagination. Not surprisingly, 'I'll slip was an easier concept to force in someone's mind than one might have thought. The Lantern's ability to fly was tied in with imagination, but there was a limit to those things.

To top it off, they were emotional constructs. Their laser-like focus on destruction and putting their powers into destruction should have been easy to manipulate.

"Put weight on it! It's off balance, so don't let it recover!"

To boot, Aizawa knew he had to face those things directly. The projection powers the creatures possessed were one thing he couldn't do anything about, but the other innate powers? His erasure could deal with those. With his eyes wide--Aizawa focused his erasure ability on sealing the beast's psychic abilities all at once, all while looking to use the projected sand made by his ring to further cripple it.

It didn't take long for the confusion of battle to set in as the fighting started. Corpsmen of various colors fought bitterly against each other, and what initial battle lines that had been drawn slowly dissolved as the battle went on.

In one chaotic corner of the melee, a young Green Lantern and a furious Yellow Lantern fought to the death, each parrying the other's constructs as the battle went on. Suddenly, a sound like thunder echoed nearby, and a black streak sailed towards the ground, trailing a black, noxious-looking mist behind it. For a moment, it was enough to make even the Green Lantern and Yellow Lantern cease fighting just long enough to see what was happening.

The black mist began to spread, enveloping many of the Lanterns fighting nearby.

One Red Lantern's roars of fury were suddenly silenced as the mist overtook him. Moments later, his desiccated corpse tumbled out of the mist towards the ground. An Indigo Lantern raised her staff just as the mist approached, but she too fell victim to whatever lay within, her lifeless corpse tumbling out of the mist.

In moments, the mist overtook the Green and Yellow Lanterns. Disoriented, the young Green Lantern looked around, trying to see what was happening around her.

That was when she saw it. Clutching the Yellow Lantern's throat in a vice-like grip stood an imposing, black-clad figure, its other hand covered in black-red fire. The figure and the Black Ring it bore spoke in unison, their combined voice twisted and terrifying.

[FEAR. I WILL TEACH YOU WHAT IT MEANS TO FEAR THE DARK.]

In an instant, the hand clad in black-red fire phased through the Yellow Lantern's chest, and in moments his body began to shrivel and desiccate, as though life itself were being drained from him.

The Green Lantern, young and inexperienced, wavered for a moment, before biting back her fear. Blasting Alexander with all her might, she opened up her comms to anyone in the area.

"To all allied Lantern Corps, I'm engaging a Black Lantern at the western edge of the fighting. If anyone could give me a hand, I could really, really use it!"

The blast had knocked Alexander off balance for only a moment. Recovering in an almost disinterested manner, he tossed the corpse of the Yellow Lantern aside as he turned back to the young Green Lantern.

[THERE IS NO NEED TO RUSH, CHILD. THE ABYSS CONSUMES ALL.]

[OOC: This will all be one thread, so everyone jumping in will be fighting him as a group. Have at!]

IN BRIGHTEST DAY - Mod Plot [LOG POST | 4 | BEWARE MY POWER]

GENERAL FIGHTING

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closed to Hal and Hiccup

Re: closed to Hal and Hiccup

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cw: character having a psychotic break

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HARD MODE

THE CONSTRUCT

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BLACK LANTERN ALEXANDER