With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

and from what might be potentially happening with OL's construct strength, Desire didn't take that well

 

I don't watch a lot of conventional tv. Movies, tv series, etc. You may have just pushed me over the edge to checking this out.

 

Wait did Paul just have trouble stop a couple railgun shots? Tf?

 

his little talk with Desire and John little pep talk is making the snake running the wheel inside his head go slowly

he not in the right brain space right now

 

Uhm to who did Desire speak about what? He should worry about this, like, a lot, right?

And was this the first OL beside Paul to reach the Honden?

 

Whoops, was that a crewman dying or a construct collapsing? Either way, at least the guns are temporarily disabled. Now, to worry about the shells already in flight. Not a fun way to play catch, is it?

Spoiler: Commentary spoilered for length

Even melting or shattering them will just leave hypersonic shrapnel flying. And while that's not quite on the KKV scale, it's going to make a mess.

Ah, the classic Portal trick: "Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out."

Probably looking to cause the widest level of destruction he can. After all, dropping all his shots inside a kilometer or two wouldn't mess up as big an area as spreading them out. Same logic as a shotgun...

Moving at the speed of thought, and still talking too? Now this is a high-level Lantern in action.

And apparently acting like a superhero is making him act like one. Too much focus on a single target, when if he was fully-focused, he'd have been able to snatch all of them in one motion...

...And apparently, he's not even thinking laterally. Could he not subspace them, like he did that missile in Rhelasia?

'Probably' is not close enough, OL. This isn't horseshoes and hand-grenades.

Well, at least he's getting some results...

Whoopie. So all Hesk's men are mind-whammied.

Anything you could plan to use against a rebel, an enemy could learn to use against you...

So much for being remembered as heroes, anyway. Though by now they're past caring.

Yeah, that would make quite the hellacious kaboom when it hits. And then any chemicals and fuel in the area will add to the fireworks...

...Because Hesk's ship is still able to do things. Sloppy, OL.

And gravity, though I suspect they'll still be moving well above escape velocity heading up...

Screw aiming for the top, 'just good enough' is much easier.

Oof, did one manage to hit home? That's gonna leave a mark.

Nested catch-nets, until you can actually stop it?

Still thinking too small, OL. Multiple tubes all linked to one exit, just be sure to offset the timing enough to prevent tele-fragging...

Ah, the old 'which one first?' dilemma.

Better to not let them die in the first place, after all.

Excusable. Having a falling star heading right for you would make anyone panic a little.

Well, at least he got most of them...

Oh, right. His backup. Right in the nick of time, Mr Big Damn Hero.

Oooh, nice. Not quite Enlightened, but he must be real close.

Well, that ended better than expected. And Lantern Xor revealing he's gained a few levels in badass Orange Light Shaman. Man, though. It looks like that little tet-a-tet with the monochromatic one did a number on his focus somehow. He may need a few days to get his head back on task. Of course, they still have the mind-whammied fleet to deal with before that.

 

Yes.

See, this is the obvious result of LePaul being forced into a confrontation he doesn't care about and has no personal stake in.

Now see, a normal human could just trick themselves through that. But LePaul mindbroke himself so much it utterly cripples him.

 

He can't muster much of a desire to protect the Guild.

 

The stuff with John and Desire has nothing to do with him performing less effectively.

What he does is fueled by how badly he wants to do things, and the fact of the matter is that he just doesn't give enough of a shit about the Spiders for him to be able to muster up the kind of focused avarice needed to go all out.

That's literally it.

That said, honestly, I was kind of hoping for a big failure here. He could do with a few more out and out failures to properly motivate him.

 

‘to’ (in italics)

’now’

 

Oh dear.... I just realized that Desire can take away desire from Paul... That's... That's going to need a back up ring.

 

You are aware that saying somethinig is a railgun doesn't tell you anything about how powerful the shots were, right? You can make a railgun of any size and power output. These are big railguns.

Thank you, corrected.

 

Go Lantern Xor! I love that honorable lug. And he extended into the Hondon.

Paul really is struggling. I wonder if mind control, like his first thought, would have worked or wouldn't have been as powerful as Desire's work.

 

Desire was merely checking in because of Paul's problem.

And the problem isn't - just - 'no interest in defending the Spider Guild'.

The cause of Paul's performance issues is John Bloody Constantine, comma, 'being friend of'.

 

I kind of hope that the lesson Paul gets from this is that he can't be the 'traditional hero', as that's just not who he is. I understand that he wouldn't like to become something like Commander Scott, but he doesn't have to try so hard to do what a standard DC hero would try to do.

 

...subspace the projectiles. He’s done it before. Even if they’re very big railguns, that should not stop him.

 

Yeah, um. I sort of forgot about that.

I'll come up with something.

 

You don't really need to, he's just had a encounter with an Endless. That he's a little off his game is not surprising, cue up one rather embarrassed Illustres in the debrief.

 

Guess the Orange Corps got its first Honour Guard.

 

Yeah that was my second thought

 

Entirely reasonable, and it even works as an in-universe explanation. That is, with his frantic pace and screwed up headspace, Paul forgot about it too!

 

And modern nuclear warfare. The old nine-to-twenty megaton "city destroyer" bombs and missile warheads went out of vogue in the late 60s because it was realized that, since the blast effect of an explosion drops off proportionally to the square of the distance from the burst point, it was more efficient (in terms of nuclear material required--and thus cost) to destroy large soft targets like urban centers by blanketing the area with several small (~250-500 kiloton) weapons than hitting them with a single one large enough to flatten the entire target area. And given how much smaller such weapons could be, you could then pack enough of them into an ICBM's nose cone to be able to hit more than one target at a time, so you didn't need as many missiles to cover all the targets (which really became valuable when the SALT talks started in the 70s).

Panic is always a valid reason. The human mind isn't always the best at considering all the options rapidly; Paul could have simply been a bit overloaded (combat has a habit of doing that to people, even veteran troops) and latched onto the first solution he thought of, which didn't leave him with time to think of alternatives if he wanted to enact it.

Sure, it'll make the after-action review embarrassing and painful for him, but AARs are always embarrassing and painful, because there are always better options you could have taken, but just didn't think of in the heat of the moment. (The whole point of an AAR is to dissect all the decisions you made and figure out what you could have done better, so that you know what to do the next time you face a situation. This is, of course, what leads to the old pilot saying that "An accident investigation is conducted by a group of nonflying experts who take six months to itemize every mistake made by a crew who had six seconds to do anything," but the point is to learn from the mistakes made by said crew, so that you only make new mistakes if you find yourself in the same situation.) Take his needing to act right away to stop the bombardment, combined with human brains tending to work serially rather than in parallel (so we tend to come up with one idea at a time instead of an instant full menu of options) and Paul being off his game from his little encounter with Desire, and I don't see anyone rationally blaming him for just not thinking of it until afterwards.

 

Does anyone else get the feeling that Paul is going to be doing a fair amount of ‘plan out the fight in accelerated time’ in the future? The embarrassment from missing the subspace solution is surely going to smart.

 

Hah!
Good old Comicbook "I forgot my own abilities" syndrome.

Also, apparently a Giant Spider has replaced Zoat sometime between when OL first simply subspaced railgun slugs and now.

(Related, can subspacing preserve momentum? Subspace some large fast thing headed towards you, and send it back out headed towards the original sender, still large and going fast...)

 

The obvious is they are too big and traveling too fast for him to do that.

 

I remember Paul subspacing some pretty big stuff in the past, so I dunno about that stopping him, but the speed sounds like a feasible reason. Has he ever subspaced something that was moving at (presumably) dozens of kilometres per second?

(I am responding to Vaermina)

 

Keep in mind, for the effects feared we should be talking a schoolbus sized chunk of solid metal traveling at hundreds of kilometers a second.

Or something smaller, that's going a lot faster.

 

No, because he's already matching velocity. Could be that the plasma field the heat is generating would make it difficult to attach a tether, or the Spiders using interdiction fields that block subspace.

 

I’ll be honest, OL’s subpar performance recently isn’t making me any more of a fan of this whole “man with an enlightened sense of his own desires is suddenly extremely hesitant” arc

Right now the only satisfying thing ending to this arc I can see is OL realising that he was right before and while he doesn’t want all heroes to be utilitarian like him he is infinitely more effective when he is one and leaves the more conventional heroism to other people