Two Cities, Two Masks

Batman had, somewhat reluctantly, agreed to modify his plan. He would enter the space shuttle he technically owned in costume, with an overcoat thrown over; it embarrassed him slightly that he had forgotten that was how Bruce got between his base and the action without being noticed, at least sometimes. It was helpful, perhaps more so that he had ever realized before, to have Alfred around to bounce ideas around. Maybe I should try to get someone to help me when I go back. I don’t know if I had anyone.  

When the fancy car he could not quite identify arrived at the launch zone, he got out, hopefully without attracting too much attention to himself. No one seemed to notice as the faithful butler drove away, probably to return to the manor and the cave. While he was inside the shuttle, however, he could expect precisely no help. 

Having sent a text from Bruce’s phone to the employee in charge of boarding that the mystery man in the overcoat was supposed to be there, he expected he was going to have to explain that eventually, but maybe Zatanna could help him take care of it. Come to think of it, though, if the reds are using the shuttle to escape, someone must be letting them pass, even if they do have tickets. Looking suspicious is never that much of a problem in Gotham. 

“Thanks,” he said as someone waved him past on his hastily forged ticket. “I was wondering if this would work.” 

“I do my best not to ask questions in this town. I’m not from here, but I’ve learned.” 

“Right, well, best of luck with that.” 

For takeoff, the passengers were strapped in to their seats and he caught sight of the enemy as well as their two hostages in a seat in front of them. It was not the right time to make his move; they were on guard. The ideal time to attack would be well after they were out of the atmosphere, when they least expected it. Most likely, they don’t intend to kill people even if they have to hijack the shuttle. They said to the hack lawyer, or they thought they said to him, that they didn’t come here to kill people. 

It was something that reminded him that while he certainly did not agree with their current leader, or those he allowed to serve under him, they were more like anti-heroes than villains, at least when they were trying to get what they wanted out of other entities. Technically, everyone on this shuttle could be a hostage of theirs. That’s part of how they get Zatanna to behave in the first place, they've always had more hostages so that she couldn’t sacrifice her life even if she wanted. 

The countdown blared from outside, starting at twenty. Peter really hoped he could justify the hopes of the magician, and he reminded himself that she would probably not take any drastic measures until she saw him. Did she know that I was there? Maybe Guy signaled to her somehow. 

During the actual liftoff, it was an experience he had never known before, at least he was pretty sure. Despite the fact that the prospect of being an astronaut must have appealed to him as a child, if he ever went into space, it had only been while acting as a hero, and under specific circumstances where he doubted he would have paid attention to the manner in which he was taken up. Only recently, he had been taken across great distances with the power of the lantern rings, but in that case it was really more like swimming, and they had the boom tubes to get him past the discomfort of atmospheric exodus. 

A loud voice told them that it would be permitted to move about in a matter of minutes. They’re not going to wait for that. As long as they have power in their rings, they have a means of surviving in space, and they don’t have to worry about the momentum. At the same time, they had not yet accomplished their objective. If they flew out of the shuttle only a few miles from Earth’s surface, they would not really reduce their chances of getting spotted by the League or the greens that much in comparison to just flying off from the surface. What’s their plan, then? Hijack the shuttle and fly it all the way there? 

As absurd as it sounded, he supposed that was really their only path to victory. They had to have some way of making sure no one on the shuttle contacted any of their enemies. Maybe if they surround it in red light, they can cut off all communication, or at least they could observe it. As long as they know when someone is trying to call for help, no one would try to press the silent alarm. 

They were weightless. Getting out of his seat like everyone else, he took advantage of the confusion to remove the overcoat and baggy pants as the Red Lanterns were making their own kind of distraction. Fighting his way to the front in zero gravity, he locked eyes with Guy, praying that his plan was going to work, even though he had no indication of it so far. It seemed Bleez was escorting the other hostage to the front of the shuttle, probably to ensure no one with long range capabilities would try to destroy part of the ship in an attempt to rescue her. Jack noticed him after the door closed. 

“Batman? I must say, I did not expect you here. I think I shall need no help to deal with you.” 

“That’s where you’re wrong, Lantern,” Peter said. “You’ll need your other hostage to win.” 

“A pitiful trick for a pitiful crime fighter,” Jack observed. “Fitting. Your green friend will not be able to help you, not without this.” He showed that he had the green ring on his other hand. ”Can’t quite get it to work, a pity, really, but I don’t really need it.” He created a red sword out of light. 

“We’ll see about that.” 

Dodging the sword strokes, he fired his grapnel gun, then the other, with his opponent sidestepping one, then the other, finding himself in between the two cables, both lodged into the wall separating them from the cockpit, probably the only safe part of the shuttle for him to hit. 

“You missed,” Jack announced. 

“Not exactly.” 

Jumping, he pushed both buttons at once and pulled himself toward the enemy into a kick right as the red sword was making a downward stroke, flickering out just in time. The expression that his opponent wore asked how it was possible as he pushed himself over, chaining together a series of punches, but they were ineffectual; he was just moving the other guy backward. He responded with a savage blow of his own as soon as he was flying under his own power again, but now he was breathing heavily. The red ring informed them that it only had so much power left. 

“You can’t win against a lantern,” Jack asserted. He could only think of Zatanna disagreeing. 

“Yes, I can. I can beat both of you.” 

The blue lantern ring he had picked up at the autopsy flew out of his belt, stopping right in front of him in the air. It had about half a charge left. A mechanical voice came out of the ring. 

“Peter Parker of Earth. You have great hope in your heart.” 

“Thanks for noticing,” he said, grabbing it and putting it on. Immediately he was enveloped in blue light and the appearance of his costume changed; the accents were blue and the bat symbol was warped to look more like a Blue Lantern Corps insignia, and because he was in the presence of a green ring, he could create constructs, though he would try not to reveal that. 

“This changes nothing,” the Red Lantern asserted. “You’ve never trained to fight with the power of a ring- not that you have any. All the blues ever do is fly around.” 

“Why don’t you find out for yourself?” he asked, creating a thin, high-tensile construct of blue light, strong, but almost impossible to see, like a spider’s web. Throwing a Batarang at the enemy, it was easily deflected by a red construct; he noticed that the enemy had a tendency to make indefinite shapes. Throwing another as he was forced to back up, Jack taunted that he was going to run out of tricks and gadgets, and that was all he was. Slashing after him with the broadsword of light, he was frightening the other passengers, but not hitting them.  

“You’re a fraud. No human has ever been chosen as a Blue Lantern!” He missed again with the sword as Peter moved the length of light he had created, finding it as difficult as described. ”According to everything we’ve read on you, you’re too full of fear. You’ve even been seen with a yellow ring-” 

“Then you’ve made-” He dodged again. “-one miscalculation.” 

“And what’s that? Do you have some other high-tech gadget-” 

“I wouldn’t call this high-tech.” 

Right as the thin blue light attached to the green lantern ring, surprising the Red Lantern, he grabbed one of the Batarangs floating in the air and brought it down on the man’s third flexor tendon in his forearm, preventing him from contracting his ring finger, taking a decisive punch in the process, but pulling off the ring as he flew backward. 

“You took my little collectible,” he said. “No matter. Even if you know how to use one ring, there’s no way you can use another.” 

“Oh, I can’t use it,” he said, loading the ring onto his grapnel gun. “He can.” Firing the gadget right as Jack swung the sword at him, his opponent instinctively dodged, just as he had hoped. Guy grabbed the ring, having cut himself free of the seatbelt with a floating Batarang. A stray thought told him that one of the reds must have used a ring to mess with the release mechanism, keeping him from getting up normally. 

A spike ball of hard green light distracted Jack long enough for Peter to grab him and punch him a few times, using his ring to shield himself in the process. The shuttle was probably seized by the other lantern, based on a flashing signal from the cockpit, but he reminded himself that he was not in an airplane, and would not be feeling any change in direction. He took another hit, thankful that his suit absorbed a fair bit of it, but the next one he managed to grab on the way, and he could only thank the thousand fights he must have survived thus far. When Guy, hit the enemy from behind, the fight was over, but there was another fight remaining. 

“Did you get my message?” 

“I think so, yeah. We’ll have to move quickly, though. There’s no telling how much time we have left. I don’t know where they got the extra ring to put on Zatanna, but there’s no way it has a lot of power left on it; not if they’ve had it on Earth for a long time.” 

“You’re probably right. Don’t even worry about Bleez when we go in there- it'd be better if we had a distraction.” They both looked at Jack, but he was knocked out; there was no way of using him in a distraction even if they could get him to go along with it. There was no more time to think about it, though. 

Batman fired the electronic disruption at one of the signals that that had been flickering from the cockpit, not able to tell whether they were being manipulated to make the passengers think nothing was wrong, or whether it was the still-conscious pilot trying to communicate that everything was wrong. I never suspected that the reds would be able to hijack the shuttle without anyone noticing. Maybe Jack had a distraction planned. Well, whether or not it was planned, it happened. 

At the very moment that the disruptor went through, the green construct another spike ball, beat against the door. Because the reds had never threatened Guy with Zatanna’s life, they could not assume that she was a valuable hostage for him, and though there was no telling what was going through Bleez’s mind, her immediate response would not be killing the magician; someone still had to pilot the shuttle out of the sector for her plan to work. 

With a wordless scream, the Red Lantern surfaced from the front, creating constructs with which to fight the Green Lantern, who was staying on the defensive. It was already established as a rule that she could not simply use the people on the shuttle as hostages, not if she had no intention of killing them, and Peter already knew what she had said to the hack lawyer. At the same time, all Guy had to do was to maintain a wall between him and the front, and his ring had almost a full charge on it; there was no way that Bleez could keep attacking him until she got through the wall of hard light. 

Batman, however, was already past the wall, and hiding behind the door to the cockpit. Grabbing it as soon as the red came out, he pulled himself in, counting on Bruce’s anti-detection technology in case the ring had motion or heat sensors, not that it was likely that its owner would devote energy to that.  

“Zatanna,” he started, nearly out of breath. “They don’t have hostages. Everyone is safe- for the moment.” 

“One moment is all I need.” 

Flying past him glowing with red energy, she cast a spell making the enemy fall asleep right as she was turning around. Almost immediately after, though, she looked unsteady, more so than was expected for being in zero gravity. Must’ve been drugged or something. When they were on the move with her, they had to keep her from getting ideas on the way. Guy rushed over to her with his own ring. 

“Let’s get the ring off right away,” he said. “I need you to use your blue energy to extinguish the flame in her heart- I know that sounds weird, but-” 

“It’s okay, the ring can guide me through it.” The mechanical voice spoke to him as he bathed the heart of the magician in blue light; the green ring was creating a hologram of what was going on. It was strange to him that her actual, physical heart was not functional while wearing the ring, and that her whole circulatory system was effectively replaced by the ring, but he supposed that red rings were substantially different from green and blue rings, which were almost the same.  

Nothing was said as they practically watched Zatanna’s heart start beating again. Gradually, her blood was purified and oxygenated, and her organs seemed to be working as well. It was like she was dead and coming back to life, from the lowest level to the highest. They waited a moment to see if she would regain consciousness, but it seemed like they would have to wake her. 

“Go up to the front and see if the pilot’s all right,” Peter said. “If not, you might have to contact someone to help get us all back to the ground.” 

“Okay, you see if she wakes up.” 

He knew that it was a standard practice with comatose patients to test their responses to pain by pinching their thumbs, but he hardly saw that as necessary. Tapping her on the shoulder after it seemed her breathing had returned to normal, her eyes fluttered open and she looked around for a moment before kissing him. It was such a shock that he did not even respond. Though it was a childish response, and possibly insulting, he actually wanted to wipe his mouth off. 

“Are you quite all right?” she asked. 

“I mean, I should be asking you that, but yeah, I just suddenly got the feeling that I’m a married man in the other world,” he said.  

“Well, if I ever needed greater certainty that you were not the regular Batman, that was it,” she said, smiling a little. “I’m glad your love is so strong that you remember your partner even now.” 

“Do you know anything about my situation?” he asked. “I hate to make things about me, but I feel like I’m more and more likely to make things worse as long as I’m here. I might have an advantage in being able to use a blue ring, but I don’t know that I can solve all the same problems that the regular guy can. Gotham needs him, and I don’t really know what’s been going on in my world, but I feel like it needs me just as much, or at least some people do.” 

“The Red Lanterns did not explicitly forbid me from using magic, so you could say that I put some feelers out. I have an idea that there was a dimensional rift recently, and I have a suspicion that has something to do with what happened.” 

He filled her in on Zalmoxis, or what he knew, and she nodded along, having heard of the name and having some idea of what he had been doing, though what she had heard was that he had been a sorcerer rather than a scientist. Peter shook his head. 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if people have heard different versions of the story over four thousand years,” he said. “To be honest, I really couldn’t call him a scientist just because he used some machines, not unless you could explain how they worked according to existing scholarship on the subject, and I really don’t think there is any. I’m pretty sure that if you yank out someone’s soul and put it in someone else’s body- what even is that, theoretical physics? Neurology? Theoretical neurology?” He shook his head. “Machines or not, he’s no scientist.” 

“I see. It’s possible that since the original Zalmoxis has been using many different bodies, in many different worlds, that he left behind some clues to his process, and someone else picked them up.” 

They continued to come up with ideas about possible explanations, ignoring the relieved passengers when the pilot turned out to be fine and announced that they were all going to go back. Guy did not return, not right away. Batman revealed that his own allies had been tracking down what they believed to be the mad scientist. 

“It’s possible that he’s at the end of his life,” Zatanna said. “Before he dies, though, he should be able to tell me enough so that I can replicate the transmigration of souls that he managed to engender. Well, he should at least know whether he used a Torquavian theory or...” She seemed to trail off into thought.  

“Those are definitely all words,” he said. Guy returned and dropped a bomb on them. 

“Larfleeze probably isn’t in the sector.” 

“How do you know?” he asked, figuring that there had been a transmission from Jordan, or perhaps their headquarters.  

“There’s no evidence. The whole reason we thought he was here was because of the orange energy, but Hal found the source of the energy reading, and it was a construct.” 

“Can the constructs ever be far from the ring?” 

“With the orange ring, we think so. They’ve been spotted in different sectors before.” When he thought about it, that pretty much guaranteed that the solitary Orange Lantern could be in a different sector from one of his constructs. The evidence that they saw could be explained with the existence of the construct, so there was no more reason to think Larfleeze was in the sector with Earth in it. 

“I was wondering something, Zatanna. It’s not about my situation. While you were wearing the red ring, did you have a good understanding of its powers?” 

“If you’re asking me if I think it could destroy a power batter of some other color, it’s entirely possible. The destabilizing energy is the greatest strength of the red light. That said, I have no idea how they would find it. Though I command reality-warping magic, I cannot tell them how to track down their least favorite color.” 

No one said anything for a moment. It stood to reason that the magician would be annoyed at the reds for making her a hostage, and it also made sense that she would understand their rings better than anyone else present at the moment, if their functionality seemed more magic than scientific. Maybe the green and blue rings are the same, though. Maybe they just seem scientific by using specific terms and really there’s no way of explaining what they do according to what we know. 

Though there was still plenty of work to do, and they were not even landed, Peter thought it was appropriate to celebrate at least somewhat. Though he was sure he had taken a different approach than Bruce would have, he managed to resolve the situation, at least for the most part. He felt reasonably confident that he and his allies would be basically satisfied with his performance. Perhaps he had even bought them some time with the appointment of Poison Ivy as a guard over the Asylum. Whatever there is left to do, though, I’m sure that Bruce and his friends would rather have him get back to it sooner rather than have me take care of it and put off switching back with him. 

Guy and Zatanna had taken to their separate conversations, the first speaking into a lantern communicator, the second speaking into a Justice League communicator, and the only thing that crossed his mind was that Hal probably had one of each. Well, I don’t envy the guy. I don’t think I’d want to be that busy. I think I’ll stick to dealing with one city and then maybe if one other group needs my help, they can call me. 

He thought about using his own radio to get in touch with his allies to see if they had found Zalmoxis, but he was sure they had; Bruce had trained them as detectives and in the matter of days since he had come to their world, he had no reason to doubt their abilities. They had roughly the same amount of information he had on the subject, and though they all had busy schedules, they probably would prioritize getting their old friend back. Though he had done a decent job, he was not as trained or knowledgeable in ways that were relevant to fighting injustice in Gotham, and he was sure that, loath as they might be to admit it, they missed him. 

“Did you come up here with us?” a passenger next to him asked. It seemed she was having as much trouble calming her rapidly beating heart. “You’re the temp Batman, right?” 

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m really good at not being noticed, though. I hope Wayne doesn’t mind.” 

“I’m sure that he’ll think it’s better than the shuttle getting hijacked by aliens,” the young woman said, shrugging. “What’s going to happen to them? Does the British guy get to stay here?” 

“I’m not sure. I don’t normally get to weigh in on these things.” 

“Oh. Is what they did illegal?” 

“Uh, they kind of went against the other lantern corps, but I don’t know that they’re explicitly not allowed to do that. What’s probably going to happen is their leader is going to deny telling them to do anything they did, which might actually be true, so there’s nothing the greens can really do to the reds, but maybe these two get some nominal punishment from the League.” 

In truth, he was not even sure how that entity settled scores, even though he was part of it. That made him remember that he had to return the blue ring, since he doubted Bruce wanted to be a part of the Blue Lanterns. He also technically kind of stole it, though it was not as if the victim had left it to an heir. 

“Hey, Guy, can you give this back to the blues next time you see them?” he asked, removing the ring and holding it out. The green nodded without disconnecting from the call in his communicator. “Okay, thanks; you’ve been a huge help with everything.”