Darko
Connoisseur.
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This should either be '5th' or you should put this over the spoiler with the link.
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i thought the controllers were a group of maltusians that used the orange light of averice instead of the green light of will. didnt they form back when all the factions were still on maltus?
i thought the controllers were a group of maltusians that used the orange light of averice instead of the green light of will. didnt they form back when all the factions were still on maltus?
Thank you, corrected.Nice to see him displaying his knowledge of earth culture and ability to speak soundless languages such as ASL. Though why he chose now to demonstrate his abilities is a mystery.
Harold didn't think to ask these questions.
Thank you, corrected.'points'
maybe 'it always'
'or something'
'have been'
maybe 'nowhere'
'taken'
maybe 'beings'
Yes. Comic Appa was nothing like that.I always thought he was one of the more assholish ones.
Though that may be because of the animated series.
I don't remember what the Renegade said, but Appa probably knows better than he does.I thought it was just a million, given what renegade said during an interview.
I don't remember what the Renegade said, but Appa probably knows better than he does.
The Green Lantern Corps has been around for at least a million years.
Oooh, a Guy interlude? Interesting. I wonder what he's looking into...4th July 2012
21:28 EST
This, this is not something I'm ever gettin' used to.
I mean, I'm sure you've had people give you honest respect. The League, for example, especially after losing the 'jackass' and 'idiot' reputation... Having relative strangers give it, without knowing what you've done or how you earned it? I suppose that's less familiar.On Oa. Not 'cause I'm gettin' trained, or gettin' some sorta bullshit health assessment, or gettin' yelled at in person. On Oa, wearin' the cape an' sash that comes with bein' on the Honor Guard… An' the couple a' other Green Lanterns I fly past 're actually lookin' impressed.
It feels good, but it feels weird, too. Don't wanna get all 'self-sabotagy' or nothin', but I'm not sure… I'm not sure how t' deal with it. Random people tellin' me I'm great is nice but it's no big deal. These 're… Other Lanterns. Vets, some of 'em.
Quite the assemblage of stuff. Guess whoever owns this space is a bit of a hoarder, with eclectic tastes... And honestly, if you don't feel you've earned what you have, then you deserve to have it all the more. Because you still feel like you need to be better. Better than being prideful and arrogant only to break when it's stripped away.I don't think I've earned this yet. Paul said somethin' about not having earned his ring when he got it, and… Yeah. I dunno about Hal, but I don't think I've earned my sash yet. Earned the ring, yeah. But the jury's out on the sash. But I'm here and Hal isn't, so maybe I'm closer than he is.
I wave my right hand through the door sensor, then wait. Not at attention or nothin', but I doubt-. The door opens, and I walk inside. It's… Not as big as I though it'd be. Yeah, there's a touch a' mad science lab, but there's a whole bunch a' museum pieces… Statues, stuff like that, all around the place like he put 'em down and forgot about 'em.
Ah, one of the most.. alive.. of the Guardians. One who hasn't cast aside what it means to feel things other than Determination. I doubt most of his colleagues would bother with such a jumble of things."Honor Guard Lantern Gardner."
Guardian Appa Ali Apsa smiles. Not a little polite smile, but like he's genuinely pleased to see me. He floats up from his platform desk thing and the mini-lantern in the middle of it and flies over to his little… Highchair thing. He point at the humanoid-size chair opposite.
But you've never felt that level of respect for them, have you? Still, I bet Appa enjoys the refreshing attitude."Won't you sit down?"
Talkin' to Guardians is… Kinda awkward. Most Lanterns call 'em 'Master', which… I mean, yeah, they're the masters of the Corps, but always felt kinda weird.
I expect Appa just wants his guests to be comfortable. From what I've heard, he's got a nice relaxed attitude to leadership.Wish I'd been there when John first heard it.
"Thanks fer takin' the time t'meet me, boss."
Like this. He probably is busy, but he takes his responsibility to lesser races seriously, so his door is always open.I walk-. Ah, pick my way across the room and take the chair. I guess for someone his size who's used t' flyin' around it's pretty easy, but fer a guy my size it's kinda awkward. An' I know Guardians are real busy and he's probably got about a thousand things he needs t' be doin' right now…
"Not at all."
Like I said, most of the other guardians have forgotten how to live. Ganthet and Sayd still have a little space left for things other than Will, but not nearly as much.Most Guardians are… Not cold. Not alla them. Ganthet and Sayd are okay. But… Impersonal. Like a doctor of somethin'. Not Appa. He learned some actual people skills sometime in the last million years.
"What was it you wanted to ask me?"
And Appa is the sort of guy who I expect would have had objections to what happened. I mean, he probably agreed that the Martians needed to be contained, but had different ideas on how they could be."It's about Mars."
"There's not much I can add to the record you already have. I didn't personally take part. There were more of us-"
Recriminations and regrets? Must be a lot of them deep down in four or five billion years' worth of memories...He looks away for a moment, which is the kinda humanity the others don't do.
-back then."
Wait what? I mean, I remember something vague about that... An alien he worked with?"Right. See… I talked with Paul one time… He told me that he knew things about our friends that they didn't know themselves. One of them had a kid he didn't know about, another one accidentally killed someone… When I asked him what I didn't know about me… Turned out someone I really admired was actually about five different people, an' they used t' swap 'em out after the last one died."
...Okay, not the most tactful of responses... But hey, Guardian. It wouldn't be right if he was entirely compassionate, after all.
Oooh, is someone getting suspicious about What OL Knows? It's about damn time, really.And then there's stuff like that, where a guy older than mammals remembers stuff about your culture. I barely remember stuff about Californian culture.
"Yeah, kinda like that. I guess after that, and the Ophidian and Vega, I should have thought about it more, but he kinda implied that he knew stuff about the Green Lantern Corps that isn't in the ring database."
Gee, it's too bad Green Rings aren't allowed to enhance memory. Plus, he didn't have that much contact with OL outside of training sessions early on, did he?"Yes, he's a curious individual, isn't he? Did he mention this before he made contact with our Controller cousins?"
Did he? I don't really remember the details, just that there was some sorta insinuation. Early on, that wasn't what I was payin' attention to. Nah, can't remember.
It appears Appa is himself suspicious...
And such minimal oversight that you didn't stop anyone moving in later, despite it being the Spectrum equivalent of a toxic waste dump... And yet people still trust the Guardians with shit... Probably because they're damn good at covering it up."So? Is there more? I mean, we let loose that Malvolio guy, an' I'm pretty sure you're gunna send the Honor Guard after him." I shrug. "An… How come I didn't know about him? I'm on the Honor Guard. We're the guys you have t' deal with stuff like that."
"Guy, the Green Lantern Corps has existed for just over three billion Earth years. During that time it has done a huge amount of good. However, on some occasions, mistakes have been made. Or, simply hard decisions taken where there was no good answer to be had. In the case of Larfleeze, we enacted a policy of containment which saw him restricted to an area of space which at the time contained no life."
Not through any direct action.. for the most part, anyway."My Sector's got some life in it."
"And did Paul do it any harm?"
In other words, stand back, watch and trust that he's not a second Larfleeze. Bet that burned some of the more Will-marinated jackasses."Not ex-. No."
"Forcing the issue would have risked making him the enemy of the Corps. If he fought us, I believe that the Corps would have won, eventually, but the damage would have considerable. And with the Corps unable to fulfil our other commitments and with new recruits trying to protect their Sectors, the damage spreads. As it was, we felt that giving him some room was for the best."
Yes, do tell...
That's what comes from dominating the sector through force of will, I guess."We allowed him to keep his ring as part of an experiment to see how your species interacted with a power ring. And given how his adopted Sector fell apart without him, I doubt that we'll be rushing to contain him."
"Did I..? Miss some part of the handbook?"
Ha! Every bit of this is amusing. Just the thought of a near-divine being... Going on a road-trip with Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen for a week or two..."Hm." Appa folds his hands across his lap. "When I was on Earth, Oliver Queen tried explaining the rules of Ice Hockey to me. I even bought the complete rulebook while I was there."
Still kinda pissed I missed out on showin' a Guardian around.
Well, that's not really sporting, is it? Besides, would you trust little kids to have a good idea of how hard to hit without actually hurting?"Yeah?"
"And yet, no where in the rulebook does it mention what a 'smart penalty' is. I doubt that young humans being introduced to the game for the first time are told 'if it looks like the other team are going to score, hit the person with the puck with your stick'. Are they?"
Ah, flounder, American, flounder! So long as a Lantern, and he's still so provincial, at least about Earth...
The longer the operating time, the more potential for fuckups. And when you're operating on a galactic scale, some of those fuckups can be big..."Three billion years, Lantern Gardner. We have made many mistakes in that time. Some of them… Devastating. Krona's was the worst, but there were others not far off. The most common are relatively trivial, when a Lantern misassigns blame for a violent conflict and intervenes on the side of the belligerent party. Thaal Sinestro earned his repudiation but in the grand scheme of things the actions which led to it weren't that great. But take as a whole, such things represent perhaps a billionth of a percent of the sum total of the Corps' deeds. Did Paul tell you why the Controllers separated from the Guardians in the first place?"
The fact that five beings survived the culling, and went on to conquer a whole region of space, is probably above Guy's paygrade even now...I shake my head.
"Before the Green Lantern Corps, before the Halla, we at first attempted to spread universal law and order through the use of specialised androids. They were called the Manhunters. We Guardians pride ourselves on both our rationality and our selfless service to the wider universe, and we foolishly assumed that one led to the other. That a purely rational species would relate to the universe in the same way that we do, without the need for introducing convoluted value systems. We chose a Space Sector in which to test them before a galaxy-wide implementation and a few hours later they killed nearly every living thing in it. Burned the whole place down to the bedrock."
If only some of your brothers and sisters hadn't ignored that lesson. But people will be people, no matter how powerful.Shit.
"That was the second worst thing we've ever done, surpassed only by Krona's misdeeds. And afterwards… A little under a third of us left, forming the Controllers. And.. that is why I'm the Guardian I am today. That oversight made it painfully apparent to me that embracing pure cold rationality left holes in our ability to understand the universe. In the way being other than us think. So-"
If not for his devotion to Will, he might well have found another light to follow... Something more lively...He looks around.
"-this. I embrace other cultures, other points of view, because I do not want to ever have anything like that ever happen again because we didn't consider something we should have done. And while we don't advertise that one billionth of one percent, we can't forget it."
So, Guy sort of becoming Appa's personal agent, to some degree. Certainly, Appa trusts him more than the others would, blinded as they are by Green.He nods at his mini-lantern.
"As a member of the Honor Guard you have access to our unabridged records. A full accounting for everything that has ever gone wrong would take a few years to go through, but I've loaded in a summary. And if you've got any questions, I'll do my best to answer them."
Best Guardian. Because he accepts that he can (and has) fucked up over the eons, and he will make up for it in the future...He signs.
"Though I can't promise that either of us will like all of the answers."
Seems unlikely"As a member of the Honor Guard you have access to our unabridged records. A full accounting for everything that has ever gone wrong would take a few years to go through, but I've loaded in a summary. And if you've got any questions, I'll do my best to answer them."
The League, for example, especially after losing the 'jackass' and 'idiot' reputation..
Ah, one of the most.. alive.. of the Guardians. One who hasn't cast aside what it means to feel things other than Determination. I doubt most of his colleagues would bother with such a jumble of things.
But you've never felt that level of respect for them, have you? Still, I bet Appa enjoys the refreshing attitude.
And Appa is the sort of guy who I expect would have had objections to what happened. I mean, he probably agreed that the Martians needed to be contained, but had different ideas on how they could be.
And such minimal oversight that you didn't stop anyone moving in later, despite it being the Spectrum equivalent of a toxic waste dump... And yet people still trust the Guardians with shit... Probably because they're damn good at covering it up.
Ha! Every bit of this is amusing. Just the thought of a near-divine being... Going on a road-trip with Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen for a week or two...
Best Guardian. Because he accepts that he can (and has) fucked up over the eons, and he will make up for it in the future...
his child hood hero was the sidekick to a soldier guy who was too nut to be affected by the Spear of DestinyWait what? I mean, I remember something vague about that... An alien he worked with?
Hey @Mr_Zoat dumb question, but aren't Space Sectors really big, like super fucking big, being a semi-conical slice of space centered on Oa encompassing a large swathe of the Universe? Why is everyone talking like their smaller than a galaxy? I know Krypton and Earth are in the same galaxy but different sectors, but that's like slicing a pepperoni pizza and getting a little bit of pepperoni split between two slices, a galaxy being the pepperoni in this analogy.
If you changed this for the story, could someone let me know so I don't make a jackass of myself in the future commenting on it, if not then shouldn't it be 'inter-galactic' when referring to sectors rather than 'galactic'.
A Guardian I actually like... that's a first.He sighs.
"Though I can't promise that either of us will like all of the answers."
I've added the date to the Contents page.This should either be '5th' or you should put this over the spoiler with the link.
Wait what? I mean, I remember something vague about that... An alien he worked with?
No one reads the FAQ.
Wait... there's a FAQ?!?
I don't know if I'm remembering right but I think not even the Guardians have the unabridged history of the green lantern corps.Probably at least mostly unabridged as the Guardians have no idea how much Paul knows or how he knows it, best not to keep to many secrets from him lest it blow in their faces.
i thought the controllers were a group of maltusians that used the orange light of averice instead of the green light of will. didnt they form back when all the factions were still on maltus?
Canonically, the Controllers had nothing to do with Avarice. That's something fic-specific.
It's probably worth noting, for those who have based their conception of the Controllers on this fic that, in canon, the Controllers... well, they're not the good guys.
I mean, c'mon, it's right there in the name. If you have two groups, one who calls themselves "The Guardians" and another who calls themselves "The Controllers", and assuming both names are earnest and non-ironic, which one is more likely to be the good guys?
The Guardians destroy entire civilizations accidentally because of good intentions gone wrong; the Controllers destroy entire civilizations on purpose, because someone in that general neighborhood did something they consider evil (in one instance, "neighborhood" literally meant "in the same galaxy"). The Guardians are most known for the creation of an interstellar police corps; the Controllers are most known for the creation of super-weapons that can destroy stars.
IIRC, the final split with the Guardians occurred after the Manhunters wiped out an entire sector, not because of the loss of life, but because the Guardians refused to continue using the Manhunters.
The Controllers have had two corps in DC canon before: The first one was the Darkstars, which they decided had gone too independent (this was when John Stewart was in charge), so they just turned off their powersuits while the Darkstars were fighting for their lives vs. Grayven, and most of them died. The second was the Effigy Corps, in which the Controllers kidnapped people and turned them into mindless meat-puppets under their control, before that got shut down by Kyle Rayner.
I think you've got that backwards, but I don't have the comic page on hand right now.IIRC, the final split with the Guardians occurred after the Manhunters wiped out an entire sector, not because of the loss of life, but because the Guardians refused to continue using the Manhunters.
I think you've got that backwards, but I don't have the comic page on hand right now.
Canonically, the Controllers had nothing to do with Avarice. That's something fic-specific.
It's probably worth noting, for those who have based their conception of the Controllers on this fic that, in canon, the Controllers... well, they're not the good guys.
I mean, c'mon, it's right there in the name. If you have two groups, one who calls themselves "The Guardians" and another who calls themselves "The Controllers", and assuming both names are earnest and non-ironic, which one is more likely to be the good guys?
The Guardians destroy entire civilizations accidentally because of good intentions gone wrong; the Controllers destroy entire civilizations on purpose, because someone in that general neighborhood did something they consider evil (in one instance, "neighborhood" literally meant "in the same galaxy"). The Guardians are most known for the creation of an interstellar police corps; the Controllers are most known for the creation of super-weapons that can destroy stars.
IIRC, the final split with the Guardians occurred after the Manhunters wiped out an entire sector, not because of the loss of life, but because the Guardians refused to continue using the Manhunters.
The Controllers have had two corps in DC canon before: The first one was the Darkstars, which they decided had gone too independent (this was when John Stewart was in charge), so they just turned off their powersuits while the Darkstars were fighting for their lives vs. Grayven, and most of them died. The second was the Effigy Corps, in which the Controllers kidnapped people and turned them into mindless meat-puppets under their control, before that got shut down by Kyle Rayner.
Actually, it was just Hinon. Every other Controller that linked up with the Orange Light Fountain only did so after Paul proved her gambit was a success and the two retrieved it from Larfleeze.The controllers didn't use the orange light in this fic either. Only Hinon and her brother did at the start, then when Paul went to Maltus and woke up Hinon it was determined her experiment was successful and that helped her and her brother recruit a few more controllers... Then Paul got the light fountain and even more controllers joined Hinons faction... Still the Orange light aligned controllers are still barely over a dozen (maybe two tops) and other controller factions and non aligned individuals exist in Maltus like the one that gave burning Martian powers to that human guy.
The controllers didn't use the orange light in this fic either. Only Hinon and her brother did at the start, then when Paul went to Maltus and woke up Hinon it was determined her experiment was successful and that helped her and her brother recruit a few more controllers... Then Paul got the light fountain and even more controllers joined Hinons faction... Still the Orange light aligned controllers are still barely over a dozen (maybe two tops) and other controller factions and non aligned individuals exist in Maltus like the one that gave burning Martian powers to that human guy.
Actually, it was just Hinon. Every other Controller that linked up with the Orange Light Fountain only did so after Paul proved her gambit was a success and the two retrieved it from Larfleeze.
No the controller that took Paul to where Hinon was sleeping was part of her faction as well, he just moved on to do other things because she was a un unresponsive vegetable, but he admitted he took the time to check on her every once in a while.
"A good will tour. Showing off what Orange Lanterns are capable of to the adoring masses." She look around the room-. Has she.. dyed her feathers? Several primaries are now orange rather than the pale grey-. "How was your fest-? Are you staring at my feathers?"
Noticed this when looking for a specific part of the Heaven arc."No. I'll take a flotilla and make a good will tour."
"That's.. not really a thing, on other planets. Turning up with warships doesn't exactly shout 'friends'."