The woman was still glaring at him in irritation as the rope started glowing. He glanced at her. “Is it ready?”

  “No falsehood may pass your lips while touching it. Speak. Explain your involvement with the attempt on Batman, the crippling of Flash… and this group you brought here. Be thorough.”

  He nodded. “Well then! I didn’t try to have Batman killed, or Flash crippled, and was genuinely surprised when it happened. I figured it was someone from Ascension as soon as I heard, however, and the one that was with me confirmed that as soon as I looked at him.”

  Eyeball inhaled for a moment. “Now. Who all came with me from Andromeda. The only ones from earth originally are me and Ascension. Ascension’s founder was a soviet super-science project to spread communism to the world and ensure the Soviet Union didn’t fall to fascism. The rules behind Ascension, in summary….”

  “Number one. Ensure the survival and advancement of humanity. Number two. Ensure the people as a whole control production and not wealthy oligarchs. Number three. Ensure the Soviet Union remains a communist nation.”

  He glanced at Superman. “Two and three, there’s some wiggle room, especially since the Soviet Union no longer exists. Number one is an absolute. Everyone in Ascension would die for humanity, and if there was hesitation, it would be to ensure their death actually helped save them.”

  He held up the lasso and squeezed it. “I trust Ascension more than myself, most of the time. My motivations can be scattered and imperfect. I like violence. I like women. I like feeling like a hero, and a badass. On a certain level, I like when people are scared of me. But deep down, I agree with Ascension’s first priority, and the only time we’ve come into conflict on that is with non-human civilizations; at one point they felt the safest course for all non-humans would be to wipe them out. I disagreed.”

  Wonder-Woman seemed to have calmed down. They were listening intently at this point.

  “Anyways. There’s three factions other than Ascension I brought with me, all from Andromeda. Each of them a bit unique. Two of them…. I first ran into on the same world, for the same reasons.”

  He sighed. “There used to be a giant government that ruled the heart of Andromeda. Wanted to conquer the whole thing. They were humanoid, sort-of. The bone structure was wrong, and most of them looked way too scrawny, but two arms, two legs, head, torso, so forth. If it weren’t for the lack of hair and the number of eyes, they could almost pass for a horribly disfigured human. They felt the only races that should exist were the ones related to them, and considered everyone who wasn’t them ‘the Swarm’, and wanted them all dead.”

  “...The Jernal and the Forstagers were both victims of theirs. Individually more powerful than most Republic members, or humans for that matter, their homeworlds were mostly obliterated, and only a few survivors of each remain.”

  He glanced behind himself at the Jernal soldier; Doborik.

  “Doborik here is less than two years old, but is already a Jernal adult. He can move and think so fast that to him, humans are almost standing still. Faster than Doomsday, slower than you or Flash. They couldn’t face his people on the ground, so they obliterated them from orbit and used machines to enslave the few survivors..”

  Doborik gave a nod. “The Demon-slayer speaks the truth. I never knew a home but on his ship, and my parents are adorned with the scars from all the implants the demons put in them. Our people hope someday to slay enough of his enemies to repay what he’s done for us in ending the Demons.”

  Eyeball chuckled. “It was a team effort.” He glanced at Superman. “Mostly Ascension, and their founder, to be honest. There was actually a separate faction that went way further than either me or the ones who came home were willing to. If not for them, I’d have just done some damage and still be there, fighting. Anyways….”

  He gestured at Sweeps. “The Forstagers had been mostly wiped out by the Republic… and what was left was being farmed for food and for the silk they cocoon themselves in. Despite many more of them being alive, their genetic issues are almost as serious because the Republic selected survivors based on… flavor profile, resulting in almost all of the survivors being related.”

  Sweeps let out a low, beautiful trill, as if a string quartet was playing a segment of a symphony. “The Seer has saved us. I will never be as capable as my parents, but I have high hopes for my children.”

  He shrugged. “Anyways. The last group are the Shoork. Two aquatic species of aliens from the same world… one related to the founders of the Republic, the other not. The main reason I brought them along is because thanks to their aquatic environment the muscle structure of the female Shoork most closely resembles human women out of all of the…” His mouth worked. He struggled to stop talking. “Descendent species, and if all of humanity was gone I figured I might as well bring along a few pretty girls.”

  “...Ahem. That was one of the motivations, and apparently the main one. All of them want to establish colonies here in the Milky Way, and I intend to help with that, both in helping them setup beachheads here in the Sol system as we create places for human colonists to expand to, and in finding them worlds they can claim for themselves or share.”

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  He chuckled. “Jernal, humans, and Forstagers can all live on the same sort of world, so cooperative living arrangements would be easy for them, while the Shoork need a level of humidity and water flow we would consider oppressive. Since the Forstagers can live in places we humans would consider inhospitable, they’re the easiest ones to make homes for. Anyways.”

  “The Shoork mostly like me and consider me honorary royalty. The Jernal and Forstagers view me as an almost religious figure. Ascension views me as an ally who generally gives advice its willing to listen to and so long as I don’t lie to it, and keep humanity’s best interest at heart, it will likely continue doing so. While all of us could be dangerous to certain specific humans, our presence increases the chance of humanity thriving and surviving going forward.”

  He thought for a moment… and nodded. Released the rope. “That should be enough to give you a good idea.”

  The group looked at each other… and nodded. Superman stepped forward. “We need Ascension to stop its assassination attempts. If you can convince them of that, we can work together going forward, so long as the individuals responsible are handed over to the authorities to be punished.”

  Eyeball coughed. “Not sure if you were paying attention, there. If I ordered the Jernal or the Forstagers to do something, or not do it, they’d probably go along.”

  Sweeps leaned forward. “We only live because of the Seer. It would only be right that we die for him.”

  “...I’d prefer you live for me. Still. The Shoork will obey me in anything reasonable. But Ascension built that starship I flew here in. They are a collection of post-human superintelligences that range from cyborgs to full-blown AI who don’t have some sort of central leadership structure, just some very strict rules that they bake into the hardware they think with to make sure none of them betray the core principles.”

  Superman frowned. “You’re saying you can’t stop the assassinations.”

  “Don’t you have more important things to worry about? People die every day. So long as its just individual killers going after people and not some sort of alien invasion, why do you even care? How about we talk about something that really matters; the plan for handling Darkseid and Trigon.”

  The group exchanged looks. Eyeball was almost completely certain that they had something planned for if Ascension kept going, but were likely willing to delay it til after this ‘Apokalips vs. Azarath’ cage match they were trying to setup.

  ***

  The meeting room on the watchtower was much larger, and had a far more diverse crowd, than was usually present at meetings on the DragonSlayer.

  “Okay, so. Here’s the basic plan. If you look at this without understanding the two forces, Darkseid has the advantage in this fight. He’s got some magic-users on his side, as well as advanced technology and numbers; we’re talking about a city-wide planet of over a hundred billion ‘people’, and an unknown but large military. Trigon hasn’t conquered anything close to that in size before. But…..”

  Raven looked around at the gathering. “My father is empowered by darkness and evil. He can create new lesser demons from the souls of the dead if they died in a sufficiently painful fashion. If he arrives there with the intent of conquest… the numbers will swing over to his side within hours, at most, from the trillions Darkseid has slain… and he himself will be almost unstoppable. I doubt Darkseid himself will have the capability to harm him without quite a bit of backup.”

  She grimaced. “I can make the portal, if you get me to Apokalips. I can pretend to have fully gone over to my father’s side, and he will gladly embrace the opportunity. Now, we have two problems with this plan…”

  “First. That ward Eyeball made is the key to retaking Azarath from Trigon. Its impressive. It could even stop Trigon now, something I’d normally consider impossible; the US military could invade Azarath with Captain Atom at the head and that ward alongside them, and my father would either flee or die. I don’t know if it could stop what Trigon could become after eating Apokalips, though. So… we either need to somehow amplify the ward beyond what it is now, or we need to intervene mid-fight, once it looks like Trigon is winning. We want a long bloody stalemate, rather than a clean victory.”

  “Second…. To really convince my father this is a gift rather than an ambush, I’ll need to embrace parts of myself that I normally hold back, that can emerge in moments of extreme anger and desperation. If I do… I can be just as strong as him, and almost as dark. You may need to kill me, as well. And if I’m the one who helps amplify the ward, I may be able to find a way around it.”

  “If we play it right… an absolutely devastated Apokalips will struggle but eventually wipe out Trigon’s forces, after losing most of its own. I will need anyone willing to help clean up what’s left, and of course, someone to augment the ward in a way I know nothing about.”

  She looked around the room for a moment. “Shall we get started?”

  Eyeball nodded. “I built the ward to begin with. If we had someone who absolutely hated Trigon, we could let them be the focus instead of Medusa for a while. The ward was substantially more effective against the Olympians because of her justified anger at Athena and company. If we took someone who was similarly angry at Trigon, the ward would be just as effective against him and his ilk, without any upgrade.”

  A woman wearing an absolutely ridiculous outfit… but one that he could appreciate… stepped forward. His HUD helpfully labeled her as ‘Zatanna’. “I can check things out. Trigon has plenty of victims we can recruit, and I can help solve any power issues as well.”

  A soft digital beep. The redheaded Ascension cyborg, Abby, laid a single armored gauntlet on the table. “I’ve studied the information thoroughly, as has the rest of Ascension. This plan seems overly complicated, and not really needed. Cyborg, would you be willing to use the Boom Tube for us a few times? To Andromeda, and to this Apokolips place?”

  Cyborg frowned. “Well, yes. Why? What’s in Andromeda?”

  “At latest counts, a fleet of millions of Ascension warships and hundreds of billions of Ascension troops. All willing to lay their lives on the line for humanity. You get us there, we’ll solve the problem; even if they were needed for peacekeeping efforts in Andromeda, humanity comes first.”