Nothing Ever Happens In the Ghost Zone

Vina discovers Sinestro floating in the Ghost Zone.

"Enjoying the book?" She had left him with a Kindle loaded with Lord of the Rings.

"Sauron is allowing himself to be distracted by what he expects to see," says Sinestro dismissively. "Still, this allows his enemies a chance to prevail where their strength could not. It could be likened to the chances of the Guardians against Darkseid of Apokolips, or the heroes of the First Age against the Mageddon weapon."

"Yes, it could," she allows. "So, you no doubt have a plan to escape."

"Indeed. I believe the Ghost Zone to be subdimensional rather than superdimensional, so that all points in the universe correspond to the same point in the Ghost Zone. Thus, all separation is relative. Anything entering the Ghost Zone, or transiting through it, will encounter all other things within it, though not all at the same time."

"So we wait for someone else to come in ..."

"Overpower them, and steal the keys," says Sinestro. "Exactly. It is not an original plan."

"Well, then, we'd better make sure we're all in the same place, right?"

She hefts the Green Lantern Pig under one arm and puts her other side against Sinestro.

"So we all teleport at the same moment."

"Yes, ah, you do realize we are not on the same side," Sinestro demurs. "The Hawk Police have never cooperated well with the Yellow Lantern Corps. You don't fear, you see, and that inhibits our power."

"But you're not a Yellow Lantern any more, are you? And I'm not really a Hawk Police elf."

"Hmm, no. I am not. The Yellow Lantern Corps was fearful and fissiparous, each concerned with his own plans and projects. I am better apart from their ranks entirely."

Vina also has the bat full of stars. "And you know about this, too?"

"It is a glyph from New Genesis, the home of the New Gods. It embodies the essential spirit of a hero, probably an Earthman from its shape. Whoever "reads" the glyph adopts the essential energy of that hero, including his powers, aspect, nature, and destiny."

"But," he adds, "it has not melted yet, so you have not read it into yourself."

"I don't really know how."

"Nor do I. But someone does, or he would not have sent his minions to acquire them. The patron of the Injustice League no doubt knows how to read the glyphs, acquiring the powers of their subjects. Tell me, is there one for Superman? I have often thought I could accomplish far more than he has with those powers. Kryptonian underachiever."

Indeed, Vina recalls there was one for Superman, but none of the four fans chose it. And Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Plastic Man and Batman were unaccounted for. Someone with all those powers could be pretty dangerous ...

... but she's not at all sure she ought to admit that to Sinestro.

Iced Like a Cake

Quinn tries very hard to smile a greeting while encased in ice. He tends to think of Bizarro as a lovable scamp rather than a troublemaker. Also he's starstruck. Yes, even for Bizarro.

(Smiling while frozen is stiff and painful, but possible.)

Jimbob pulls his arms out of the ice like sleeves, and into his own body. Then he pushes forward on just the ice in front of his chest with both arms, trying to break through.

KRISSH! The ice falls down and breaks.

The Flash was already saying,

"Oh great. Bizzaro! Hey Bizzaro!

Me am no afraid of you! Me am never going to run away from you, because you am worst hero of all time! Me am going to stand right here and fight you and never use super-slowness to take what you hate and put it into middle of ocean"

Greg then zips off in a blaze of crackling red energy in a straight light, and then hides.

Bizarro smacks his head with his palm.

"Oh yes! Thing I love is gone?" He opens his fist, looking at the pulsating item therein. It looks like a golden capital A, but upside-down it would look a lot like a trident.

"THERE it am not! Me was told not to give it to Scarecrow, so me definitely not going to do that!"

Bizarro leaves the ground suddenly, scans around with visible waves of super-vision, and lands on the rooftop where the Batman villain, the Scarecrow, lies wrapped halfway around his own jaw.

"Hey, Scarecrow! Bizarro am no scared of you! Also, here, don't take the thing secret master whose name is Libra and whose address is 174 Estate Way in Flint, Michigan said not to give you!"

The Heroes Meet

JimBob scrambles to his feet and attempts to straighten his Chin-Su costume. "Wow, the real life Flash!" he gushes, walking over to Greg and holding out his hand. "It's a real honor to-..." He stops and squints. "Wait, you're not Flash! You're the guy from the hot dog line at the Con. What're you doin' out here?"

Glancing up, he sees the other arrivals. "Nevermind, we got company." He assumes what he hopes is some sort of fighting stance.

It's a really wobbly, as in oscillating Slinky, kind of fighting stance. Moving fast while stretchy is hard!

The figure in red and gold drops to the ground near Chin-Su and fat Flash. He tries to do it in a cool, "summoned from a bolt of lightning" pose, kneeling behind his shield and rising slowly like a badass.

"Hey guys!" he gushes, out of breath from excitement. "Oh man. This is so great!" He looks around. "Where's the bad guys?!"

JimBob points unsurely at the new arrival. "Not you? You missed the Octosaur, which I think I must have killed somehow. Maybe it breathed through it's tentacles, and I managed to smother it. Which... also disintegrated it..." He frowns for a moment, and then nods confidently. "Yeah, that must be it. Anyhow, the name's JimBob Dunkleman. Pleased to meet'cha!" He holds out a still stretched-out arm for a handshake the consistency of warm chewed gum.

"I'm Quinn!" says the warrior, unreservedly taking JimBob's hand and shaking it with enough vigor to make it wobble so fast it blurs. "But you can call me 'The Peltast'! I mean we're in costumes and all (and I love yours, by the way, though I prefer her alternate pink one) so it seems like hero names are the thing, right? I mean, the ring gave us powers, so it probably wants us to act accordingly? I think that's best." Quinn has the mildly unnerving habit of making excessive eye contact, and he's staring earnestly and maybe a little too personally at JimBob. "Oh man. OH MAN! I AM SO EXCITED RIGHT NOW."

JimBob's eyes grow to the size of dinner plates. Literally. It would be comical if it wasn't horrifying.

He seems to be having a little trouble with power-control at the moment.

"Cooool name! I hadn't really thought about it. I guess I'll stick with Chin-Su, for now. And yeah, her pink one is good, but it's not this slimming." JimBob stretches his torso until it's as thin as the ridiculously-proportioned video game character.

"Oh! Where are my manners? Over here is Flash. Or, New Flash? DadBod Flash? What're you going by, guy?"

For once, the Flash is unable to respond in time, because the other guy in the sky streaks down!

"Goodbye, Peltast! Goodbye, Chin-Su. Goodbye, New Flash or DadBod Flash! Me am Bizarro. Me am imperfect duplicate of Superman," he explains.

"And Superman get along REAL WELL with other heroes!" he says.

WHISSSH! His eyes glare blue and everyone freezes solid, covered in several inches of ice!

"Superman have heat vision!" Bizarro cries cheerfully.

Newcomers Overhead

Two new persons arrive overhead.

One is mostly in red, with a Greek-style helmet, a brilliant mirrored gold shield with a shining silver edge, red tunic, lace-up boots, and a spear. He's flying, rising and falling like a bird, or actually, more like a kite.

The other is mostly blue, with a red cape, chalky white skin, red boots, red trunks, and a weird symbol on his chest that looks like a crooked square with a red number 2 on it.

Neither of them sees Ian, of course, but both see Greg and Jimbob, the more so because they're the only ones in the street with the Octosaur gone.

Villain DOWN

"Target acquired," Ian murmurs, before turning himself invisible and leaping off the teetering rooftop towards the villain. A stiff punch to the head did wonders towards deterring Sinestro. Let's see how it works against this Wizard of Oz reject.

SMACK! The guy has absolutely no idea the invisible Martian Manhunter is falling towards him, buffed up with shapeshifted muscles, until he gets sledgehammered into slumberland!

He drops like a freaking rock.

Instantly the octosaur vanishes. This leaves Jimbob stretched out in a very complicated shape around nothing, and the Flash goggling at his hand, where the radioactive green glow spiders have also vanished into nothingness.

Ian could give the guys a thumbs up, but they can't see him.

Wait ... the guys, plural? Who's the stretchy dude in the Chin-Su costume?

Chin-Su ... there can't be TWO neckbeard truckers who dress like the belle of Battle Wizard Academy X, can there? In which case, they sort of know this guy ...

My God, It's Full of Stars

Vina absent-mindedly pats the pig on the shoulder while picking up the batwing.
"Sorry," she says as she gazes into it, "I -was- raised on a farm. We have rescue pigs. The folks are vegan." She's still fascinated.

The stars in the batwing seem to twinkle, then grow brighter ...

WHOOSH!

Everything turns white.

Vina, and the pig, are floating in an absolute void which is solid white in all directions. As far as the eye can see, whiteness.

It looks a lot like the Ghost Zone, actually ...

Shadow Thief No More

The Shadow-Thief dives for the Bat icon.

So does Vina, like a proper Hawk-er-Lady.

"Henh!" sneers the Shadow-Thief! "With but a twist of the dimensiometer in my other hand, I can become fully solid again, and pick up the icon before you!"

Which he does. A half a second later, Vina slams into him with her big metal wings curling over her head and knocks him cold.

The Shadow-Thief's hand falls open, and the Bat gleams on the black satin of his glove.

Circe, on the other hand, is not happy.

"GRUNTING ANIMAL THAT YOU ARE!" she rages, and points her stabbing forefingers at the Green Hog hovering outside. Actual bolts of lightning explode from her fingers, slapping Vina with painfully loud thunderclaps.

The swine ably parries the thunderbolts with catcher's mitts made of green energy.

Then one mitt folds into a gigantically oversized boxing glove, and punches Circe all the way back to the fellowship hall, knocking over a table of children's crafts.

The Swine of Space Justice drops to the floor and trots over, grunting, to see if she's all right.

The Tattooed Man groans and rolls over.

"S'a pretty tough Lantern y'got there ... " he mumbles, holding his jaw. "Bu' Libra gave us this gimcrack to try out if all was lost ... an' it looks like it's right about time!"

He holds a small cylindrical device, covered with orange radiating fins, and pushes the button on top of it.

ZZZRAKK! The Tattooed Man, Shadow-Thief, and Circe all turn into black outlines with white lines of force outlining their bones from within. Then the effect fades, and they go limp.

They're not dead, but weirdly, all the Tattooed Man's tattoos have faded to greenish-blue smudges, like pale imitations of themselves.

The pig with the ring comes over and nuzzles the gadget, now inert.

Showdown in the Shadow City!

Vina says,

"Well, somebody has to be in charge, don't they? And you came at HIS command. I assume you're following his orders."

Vina looks puzzled.

"Odd for a goddess, though. I thought you didn't put up with that kind of thing."

Circe frowns. She gestures with a be-amuleted arm, and the shadow wolf vanishes.

"Circe is no one's minion," she explains firmly. "Libra and I have an agreement, and these others are helping us as well. It is rare that the gods' fire falls to Earth, so I am willing to work even with such as these."

"You just let her go --" says the Shadow-Thief in shocked amazement.

Then WHAM! The door bulges inward as a massive rolling pin rolls the front wall down. It's made of green light, of course, and it rolls Circe over. The Tattooed Man is also rolled in, having been flattened by the rolling pin (comic-book flattened, not actually flattened!) and swept along with it.

Outside, a large hog floats in the air, wearing a Green Lantern ring on its trotter.

"Oink, weeink!" it exclaims. The rolling pin becomes a cartoon hand pointing at Shadow-Thief.

Is the pig saying "get him?" Or "look, there's the shadow guy!"

Regardless of his porcine intention, the Tattooed Man's hand opens and drops a black bat onto the floor. It gleams like polished steel, but in its depths twinkle stars, as though it were a gateway to eternal night ...

The Shadow-Thief exclaims, "You FOUND it!" and dives for the bat.

Like a Monster Out of Nightmare

"Bad idea", Jimbob thinks to himself, staring into the epicenter of the Octosaur.

He wraps just his torso around the two tentacles enough to secure them, which frees up his hands and feet. He uses his hands to free the Flash, and his feet to grab two more tentacles and hold them in place.

“What happened with my truck?” he wonders. He did hear a shattering, grinding crash, but he didn’t see any damage to the Octosaur, and unless it’s made of vibranium, he should have seen a big ol’ truck-shaped bruise, at the very least.

But that’s the least of his worries, as the glowing green bumps rising on his flesh detach, form legs, and start crawling up and down his limbs like radioactive spiders!

Oh, and the Flash is covered with green glowing spiders, too.

The Martian Manhunter takes the rope hand off from the Flash, and flies his end up to the top of the office building that is tilting and about to collapse. He quickly ties it taut around the most secure structure there, whether it be a lightning rod or water tower. Between being wrenched by the falling building and being run into by the Trusty Trailer, hopefully they can stun the beast long enough for the Flash to escape.

The ringing laughter then reaches his ears, and he searches for the origin of the mirth. Perhaps, just perhaps, he can confront the source of the creature and defeat it that way.

There, on a rooftop, is a man dressed in burlap rags with a pointy burlap hat and a face made of straw, with a crude face painted on it. He’s just loving this whole Octosaur thing.

"Ha ha ha ha ha! Cringe, heroes! Show your adoring public how you handle REAL fear! Ah, ha, ha ha ha ha ha!"

And Behold, There Comes A Hero! Another One.

So, remember that time at the Long Con, when you were in line for hot dogs?

A rather large man with short, greasy hair and a 5 o'clock shadow that runs all the way down his jowly neck approaches.  Also, he's wearing a blue dress in the style of a popular female video game character.

  "Howdy!  The name's Jimbob Dunkleman, I'm a 38 year old truck driver from Indiana...  BY DAY!  But as you can see by my outfit, by night I am CHIN-SU, expert martial artist competing in a brutal tournament to win enough money for her grandfather's medical expenses.  YA-TA!"

He does the karate pose-dance step that Chin-Su is famous for. If all you saw was his shadow, it's pretty accurate.

Well, that guy is back, and he's still dressed as Chin-Su!

JimBob guns the engine of his Trusty Trailer, making a beeline for the Octosaur.  Grabbing his steering wheel lock, "the club", he wedges it onto the accelerator.  Cranking up "Radar Love" on the radio, he gumbys his way out the driver side window, stretches both arms over the front of the cab, and walks his body backwards to the back of his trailer, so that his stretched arms go the entire length of the truck.  He is preparing to catapult himself at the Octosaur as soon as the truck makes contact with something(be it the Octosaur itself, or some form of barrier).

The human rubber band unstretches with a SNAPP! And wraps himself around the tentacles which are pulling the Flash, so they can't pull away from each other. This prevents the Flash from being pulled apart.

However, the Flash's plan to remove his shoes is stymied by the fact that the Octosaur has him by the neck and the waist, so he can't bend over to reach his shoes. And no, he can't stretch his legs that far. C'mon.

But now, held by the springy contractileness of JimBob the human Slinky, the Octosaur cannot rend! So it tries to grab JimBob with its other tentacles. JImBob is hard to get hold of. It's flailing sucker-tipped octoflesh vs. rapidly flexing coils of blue lace and Chinese ribbons.

The Octosaur glows, and sickly green nodules pulsate on its limbs. They emit green light of a particularly sickening hue, literally sickening JimBob and Greg!

And somewhere, a voice laughs and laughs ...

(It isn't me, your humble narrator. I hope the good guys win!)

Who Rules the Shadow?

 

Vina:

"So... you three were chosen to take Sinestro's place? Or, are they your minions?" She says the last rather loudly. Through charmingly gritted teeth.

"Surely they can't follow you to Mordor, though... that's just your pocket dimension, isn't it?"

"Sinestro? Hah. That poser," sneers the Shadow-Thief. "He was never all-in on this Injustice League idea. Libra just brought him on because he's Green Lantern's chief enemy. Actually the sailor's a lot better. Sounds like he's about finished with your Lantern, whoever he is."

And indeed, the green glow from outside has gone out.

"Look, just stay out of my way, Hawk-lady. Libra's fixed us up with a special gimmick to use if you heroes get the drop on us, but it might just blow you away, so ... just blow."

And he turns his back on Vina, while his shadow wolf hand continues to hold her in place.

The door opens by itself, and Circe storms in. Literally. There's a storm outside now.

"MINIONS?" she demands.

Octosaurian OVERKILL!

After dashing about, moving civilians out of harm's way, Greg sprints into the nearest sporting goods store to get some rope. Flying out of the store, he rushes headlong for the beast, and in the blink of an eye, ties the rope around one tentacle and uses his "work at super-speed" power to lash the rope around the other tentacles to connect them all to a single line. Knowing that he probably isn't strong enough to do anything other than connect the tentacles to a rope, he looks for Ian to give the end of the rope to ...

"HeyIan,GrabTheRopeAndPullThisThingOutOfHere!"

And zzzip! He jerks to a stop.

The Octosaur has dribbled some kind of a glue all over the street in front of itself, and Greg is stuck fast! Two massive tentacles come down and grab him, one around the head, one around the waist, and start pulling him in both directions!

OH NO! COULD THIS BE THE END?

It's ... the Octosaur!

Ian comes through the teleporter after Greg, fully expecting not to see Greg. "Okay, whatever it is that's causing... that," he pauses, as the unending wave of civilians continues to rush past, "is probably going to take a little bit of muscle to deal with."

Ian looks for a picture in the gym of a boxer or other suitably strong person, maybe a poster of Ted Grant, and tries shifting his muscles to emulate the pugilist's body. "I guess gyms really are the place for getting fit," he quips. Finding a mirror, he quickly grows a short beard, tweaks his nose and chin, and changes his eye-color before heading out the door.

As for the obstacles between him and the disturbance, the new Martian Manhunter finds himself with a plethora of options. Unless Greg is waiting to give him a lift, Ian will phase-fly up over the disturbance and buildings to get a better look at what he's facing.

It's a purple-gray flattish dinosaur, like a brontosaurus with an octopus for a face. It's currently pulling down a couple of light poles, while tossing a delivery van out of its way and curling a mighty tentacle into a manhole cover, ripping part of the street up.

Metropolis Special Crimes Unit is on the scene, raying it with red-sun radiation in case it's from Krypton and soaking it with stun gas from backpack-mounted sprayers. Not only is it not hurting the octosaur, it's not even reacting as though aware of their existence.

Strike the Shadow!

Vina says: "First one's name's Carl Jenks--the Shadow Thief. The tattooed fellow can do something similar with his tats--that's Circe. We'd best plug our ears."

She does so. And then, moving very quickly, smashes the plate glass windows and grabs Shadow Thief, shooting an arrow off over his head as she does so. A really bright one.

The Shadow-Thief flinches as the flare arrow sizzles over his head. He wobbles, too, as his shadow is rapidly deflected away from the moving light source.

And he sways directly into Vina's path! She unloads a mighty mace-swing which contacts weakly, as though hammering a hanging cobweb, but the Shadow-Thief reels back. Apparently some of the power of the blow transferred to his shadowy form, and he wobbles as though drunk.

But then he rallies, waving his hands at Vina and casting a shadow of a wolf's head, which bites!

Vina finds her wings pinned in the wolf's jaws. The Shadow-Thief, smirking, balls his other hand into a huge shadowy fist ... .

Green light washes the windows from whatever Roy is doing outside. There's yowling and screeching and a grinding noise like a bulldozer ... but the green light reduces the Shadow-Thief's fist to a little bump on the jaw.

The wings are still pinned, though. If they were real wings and not mechanical, this would really hurt!

Oh, Right ... Injustice LEAGUE. As in more than one.

The Hawks' information (that was passed down through the ring earlier) doesn't have anything on this guy, does it?

Indeed, he’s a Hawkman villain!

The Shadow-Thief is Carl Jenks, a burglar who stole a dimensiometer from a scientist’s lab. It allows him to turn sideways into another dimension, leaving only his shadow behind.

His shadow is weakened by light, but cannot be dispelled fully because Jenks himself is in another dimension where light does not exist. He can angle his arms to project darkness from that dimension, smothering all light. And of course, he can see in the dark.

However, animating shadows which can actually touch people is not an ability he has displayed before.

Jenks is a sneak, which is why he’s in the storefront. It can’t be illuminated from above, which makes Vina’s flare harmless to him, and no one can swoop down from overhead. His usual combat M.O. is to glide up behind a hero, become solid, and clock him over the head. That said, his USUAL tactic is to run away.

“Hawkgirl,” snarls the Shadow-Thief. “I might have known. You’d never catch me if I bolted, but I can’t do that this time. Hey, lovebirds! Get out here. The Hawks have come calling.”

Two figures emerge in the gloom outside the storefront. One is a regally tall woman, gowned in green with gold bracelets and weird, coiling purple hair. Her arms jangle and glitter with amulets. Her feet are bare.

The other is a bare-chested man, with blue tights and high brown boots. He wears a mask, but he is covered in blue-black tattoos from the backs of his hands up to his face. He is holding a jackhammer in both burly arms.

The Hawks’ crime files identify him as Abel Tarrant, aka the Tattooed Man. He can touch his magic tattoos and cause the thing pictured to come to life, like a living utility belt.

No idea who the woman is.

“Do not anticipate the future, Shadow-Thief,” declares the woman imperiously. “Circe of Melos loves whom she chooses, and no man shall choose her mate!”

She gestures, and the alley fills with furry muscle. Apparently two alley cats have transformed into eight-foot-tall Bigfoot cats, grinning in anticipation.

“An’ as fer me,” says the Tattooed Man, “I already got a girl in this ‘ere port. So you just tend to what yer good at, Shadow-Thief, while me an’ the witch ‘ere ‘andle th’ Hawks.”

He touches the back of his hand and a double-mounted machine gun appears, all blue-black like the ink, braced on a tripod.

“Where is the better ‘alf, anyway? Circlin’ around be’ind us? Well, I come prepared for ‘is tricks.”

Roy hisses to Vina:

“I think this guy’s a Green Lantern villain or something! He must be the best they could come up with after we nailed Sinestro ..."

Army of Darkness, Army of Light

The flare does indeed disperse the shadow-Vina, and forces the other shadows back into the corners.

Roy points out, "Shadows? Well, I do happen to have a weapon actually made of light, so yeah, I'll take that challenge."

He shines the green light in a beam, brushing all the shadows into a corner and holding them there.

"Vina? Anything you want from these guys?"

But Vina has already noticed the shadows swinging away from the light beam, and followed their angles to a storefront church down the block.

And behind its picture window, a shadow is standing in the assembly hall, gazing malevolently at Vina and stroking its shadowy beard ...

Then shadow witches fly out of the sky, assailing Roy from all directions!

When Peter Pan Goes BAD

Vina and Roy arrive in Opal City in late afternoon, with the Sun already a big orange ball over the steaming bayous. Long soft shadows overlap Opal’s quirky mansions like the claws of some spindly shadow-being.

Also overlapping the streets: narrow elongated shadows of cackling witches in witch hats, clawing at the windows EXACTLY like the claws of some spindly shadow-being!

A hipster cop with an earring runs past, his shirt in bloody shreds. His own shadow glides up the wall behind him, passes him, then steps out into the street and swings its two-dimensional fingers, knocking him to the ground!

The cop, eyes crazed with fear, fires a shot into the shadow. The bullet pocks an old brick façade across the street, having passed right through the shadow without slowing.

Suddenly another shadow looms up. The flash of the cop’s gun has momentarily thrown the Leaguers’ shadows into sharp relief. And the winged shadow of Vina, cast on a clock tower down the block, is HUGE …

And it nocks an arrow as long as a bus.

The View from Grant's Gym

Greg and Ian teleport down into Metropolis. As it happens, the teleport tube is in the back room of a gym on Siegel Avenue, one of the main drags. So they’re only a couple of huge Metropolis-sized blocks from the problem.

But they’re not. Because the street is wall-to-wall people fleeing the actual disturbance, a few blocks away.

Now, that’s the cross street leading east. The north-south avenues are just full of cars, like they always are, except now, they can’t move because of the fleeing crowds.

Metro Police officers in white shirts are directing the drivers to stay back, so the crowds can escape. They’re good at crowd management here.

Then, as they watch, one of the shining towers on the skyline lurches sickeningly forward, as though pinched at the base. Office furniture sprays from shattered windows, but no people, so perhaps the evacuation serves a purpose.

So. Three blocks from the disaster. About six rows of buildings between you, depending on how you choose your path. Line of sight utterly obstructed.

Plans?

Second Case: Four Villain Eruptions!

The Trophy Room contains exhibits neatly labelled. The Black Lantern, the Zeta Beam Mirror, the Gamma Gong of Kanjar Ro, Starro’s Pearl Core, and other things that apparently everyone in the Justice League already knows about and therefore need no explaining.

But I mean, really: what’s a Hyperclan Glider Ship? Who really needs the Water of Hronmeer? What’s a Ring of Volthoom? To say nothing of Superwoman’s Magic Lasso, which sounds like a classification error.

The Shaggy Man is a huge hairy humanoid, like a Bigfoot with huge sharklike red eyes. The warning label says DO NOT EXPOSE TO OXYGEN. Good to know.

The Infinity Horn? The Madbomb? Prometheus’ Anti-Utility Belt? IF? The Hidden Wheel of Abnegazar, Rath, and Gast? What are all these things?

The Monitor Room contains a huge viewscreen on which the status of the Leaguers is listed. All the League members are listed as NEW GODS MISSION – DEEP SPACE, while reserve members the Atom, Captain Marvel and Firestorm are listed as INACTIVE.

Meanwhile, Sinestro’s eyes start to focus again. With a willpower strong enough to make him among the best of the Green Lanterns, he probably can break free of the Hawk Police’s mind-cuffs. Indeed, only the sock on the jaw followed by the van over the head made him loopy enough for the cuffs to last this long.

Roy hurries up.

“My ring can’t affect Sinestro or his power aura directly, but the cuffs are outside his yellow ring’s protection,” he reasons. “So if I amp up their power very gently, I can probably …”

Sinestro wobbles again, his dazed stupor returning.

“Huh!” says Roy. “That actually worked.”

Vina has detected four arcs of cosmic energy, spiraling down from very deep space to land in Metropolis, Opal City, Central Africa and Mega-Tokyo, the Tokyo-Osaka megacity.

And already the Mission Monitor Board has lit up with news that a gigantic eight-armed dinosaur is running wild in Metropolis Central Avenue, while Opal City battles an invasion of cackling ghost witches …

"I don't suppose there is any ghost-catching equipment there?" Vina asks hopefully.

She adds, "This is not how I expected to get a guy on my arm. If there's no really good holding cell for him here, I guess it will need to be the Ghost Zone. Sorry, Sinestro..."

If no one volunteers having seen a holding cell, she will steer him to the Ghost Zone entrance.

"Huh?" Ian says, finally diverting his attention from the scene before him. "If there's anything useful against ghosts, we may be able to look it up on the computers. It's a pity we don't have a Cyborg with us.

"Or a Superman, come to think of it. Why do I get the feeling we're really going to regret not having a Superman?" Ian walks over to the monitor and sees the notices about the giant dinosaur.

"Oh, that's why. Do we want to head to Metropolis first once we send Sinestro... where are we sending him again?"

Vina walks/flies Sinestro to the entrance to the Ghost Zone.

Puts him in. "I know you can get out of that mind-cuff as soon as we stop powering it up."

Looks a little sad. Lets him go. Closes the door.

"Oookay. Any Ghost busting equipment? We really should get going."

"I don't see any proton packs or ek-meters on display," Ian says, looking through the hall. "Maybe we can get some hints on how to fight the ghosts by dealing with the oversized dino first."

"Yep, we'd better get on that. You guys coming?"

"Wait, what?" exclaims Roy. "We're not splitting up? The Avengers always split up!"

"And there's four crises, and four of us ... hey, we already have one arrest ..."

"...I guess we can try them solo..." says Vina looking a bit unsure. "I'll do the ghost witches. I know a little about that stuff from the SCA."

Ian: "We've also had about an hour to get used to our powers, not to mention the Injustice League members likely heading to these spots as well.

"What if we split the difference and send two groups of two?"

 "Fine by me!"

Vina checks her gear and heads to the tube for Opal City.

Ian nods, and follows Greg down the tube to Metropolis to try and deal with the dino.

So This One Time In Line for Hot Dogs, This Happened ...

A rather large man with short, greasy hair and a 5 o'clock shadow that runs all the way down his jowly neck approaches.  Also, he's wearing a blue dress in the style of a popular female video game character.

  "Howdy!  The name's Jimbob Dunkleman, I'm a 38 year old truck driver from Indiana...  BY DAY!  But as you can see by my outfit, by night I am CHIN-SU, expert martial artist competing in a brutal tournament to win enough money for her grandfather's medical expenses.  YA-TA!"

He does the karate pose-dance step that Chin-Su is famous for. If all you saw was his shadow, it's pretty accurate.