The Nth Metal gave them powers and centuries of life—and locked them into a dependence on the metal itself.
The arrangement compounded over the ages. A faint resonance had developed between bodies and metal. The longer the metal stayed in contact with a person, the more its purity bled out.
Metal was life to them. To hold the throne, the Empress turned her ambitions on the Wolf Tribe refugees who had come to her for shelter.
The slaughter began. The Wolf Tribe was stripped of the last metal they had, and from there sank into the beast-state.
Even then the demand stayed brutal. The Empress went after the metal owned by her own civilian tribe-folk. By now, she alone still retained her full combat strength and the four thousand five hundred years of lifespan; some of the surviving tribe-folk had already passed through dozens of generations here.
They'd had their eyes on Earth, too. But the real world had no Nth Metal—staying there only made them weaker. Repeated invasions of Earth had bought them nothing but a handful of harpy legends.
Wait to die. That was the only thing on the Empress's mind now.
"What do you know about the Bat Tribe?" Thea had the full picture of Hawk World; now she circled back to the real point of this whole operation.
At the mention of the Bat Tribe, the Empress had to dig through her memory, and a thread of fear glinted in her eyes. "They're devils. Demons crawled out of hell."
The Empress's speech came in stops and starts, packed with descriptors and a tendency to circle the same idea. It took a while for the group to piece it together.
The Bat Tribe had crossed into the Iron Age while everyone else was still using bronze weapons. Maybe Batman's style had rubbed off on them; they liked to operate after dark, in black cloaks, before driving a sharpened piece of iron into the enemy's heart.
They had the most Nth Metal of the four tribes. But they ran on secrecy—they barely communicated with the other three, and after leaving Earth they cut contact entirely. Even so, the Empress was fairly sure some of their people had stayed behind on Earth.
Thea took that one to heart. In the modern era, you could see their fingerprints behind plenty of famous assassinations: some obscure nobody kills an important figure, and history shifts along some predetermined trajectory.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated. Itō Hirobumi assassinated. Lincoln assassinated. And Bruce's parents, in that alley—history brutally rewritten, a quiet thread running behind every one of them.
They were doing everything they could to push Bruce into becoming Batman. Whether Batman founded the Bat Tribe first, or the tribe slid into human society and engineered a chain of events that produced Batman—who was the first cause and who was the consequence, in the face of time itself, meant nothing.
The female Justice League's expedition wrapped up successfully. Plenty of Earthlings the Hawks had taken were freed, but the Hawk prisoners still needed sorting.
Dig a pit and bury them: clearly not on the table. Letting them walk also wouldn't do—they'd been crossing over to Earth from time to time to grab people to torture. Their hands were soaked in blood.
Lock them up: it would take an oversized power-suppression prison, and at that cost they might as well just be left back in Hawk World. As for stripping the metal and reducing them to ordinary people—that wasn't humane either; without the metal, half this group would be dead in three days.
Lois eventually pitched it: freeze them all. Wait until humanity cracked the metal's secret, lift the curse, and then send them to prison to serve their sentences.
Thea vetoed that. Too much trouble.
She called Superman in, and they used a very Kryptonian solution on the Hawks: she had them thrown into the Phantom Zone. Zod and Faora had been in there before. The Phantom Zone had no real concept of time—perfect for long-term storage.
Hawks and wolves dealt with, Thea bundled every resource on Hawk World and took it with her. The metal left over had pitiful purity; only the few pieces the Empress had been wearing came close to usable.
A glance at the pitiful-looking Hawkman and Hawkgirl had her parceling out some of the higher-purity stock for them. She gave Barbara a piece too, for research. Whether Barbara would later turn it over to Batman wasn't her problem. Most of the rest she kept for herself.
Then a wave of the hand: she pulled the world origin out clean and poured it into her own pocket world.
She didn't spare Bear World or Wolf World either—pulling a small, crystalline ball of brilliant white light out of each.
The Bear World's was the smallest of the three: its world had died so long ago the origin was nearly spent.
The Wolf World's was a little better, though not by much.
Hawk World's was the best and the most complete. Maybe because the Nth Metal had been in that world for so long, a faint metallic gleam laced the origin too.
All three globules went into her own world. The whole world doubled in size. Thea took a look and let it sit. It was still a pocket world—hadn't yet evolved into a universe. It was still in its accumulation phase. When all the conditions came together, the world would start to contract, and a true Big Bang would mark its formal birth as a universe.
Earth's internal cleanup was still in full swing. Moira had rolled out fresh policies—guns-for-food among them. The reason couldn't be a straight gun ban, of course. The White House line was that aging firearms posed an accidental-discharge risk to the public, and that recovering old guns and ammunition was a matter of citizen safety.
A new personal records database had also been set up. Anyone who had worked in nuclear, chemical, polymer, or atomic physics—high-end technical fields across the board—was now being re-filed.
If they made it to the relevant government office for a quick check-in once a month, they'd receive an additional stipend, jointly funded by the major global conglomerates: Queen Industries, Wayne Enterprises, and others. The stated aim was to protect these people and keep them from being seized by terrorists.
While Earth was busy clearing its internal threats, Thea had just gotten home when news hit her hard enough to send her teleporting straight to Odym, the Blue Lantern homeworld.
"A Lantern Entity is missing." That was Saint Walker's report.
"Which Entity? When? Who did it?"
Saint Walker was clearly carrying guilt. He stammered through it before the picture came together.
After the expedition to Earth-3, everything had been quiet, nothing out of place—until yesterday, when he'd suddenly noticed his own Blue Lantern energy had dropped by a sizable chunk out of nowhere. He'd checked the ring several times. The ring was fine. His own emotions hadn't wavered. So what had gone wrong?
The group puzzled over it for a long time. It was only at the very end that they realized the Entity that lived inside the central battery itself was missing.
The number of people who could communicate with Entities was small to begin with. The central battery sat where it always sat—nobody was idle enough to wander over and check whether the Entity was still home.
The Entities, for their part, didn't punch a time card in the morning either. They had vanished quietly, without anyone noticing, for who knew how long now—and exactly when they had disappeared, no one could actually say.