Yue

 4th February

20:17 GMT -5

Mister Scott nods as I enter the observation room. "You got some good ideas there. Using someplace no one wants as a fallback point. And we were already shutting down mosta Owlman's boondoggles anyway."

I nod back, then turn to his bodyguard. "Olympia, you're the blood knight of the group. How would you feel about heading to Africa or South America to kill people for money?"

"It would be a welcome change of pace from hiding as we are now."

Zatanna regards her with distaste. "I thought that your.. Syndicate was trying to avoid direct confrontation. Were you on Doctor Chaos' team?"

"No. It was clear to me that Doctor Chaos was merely using us for his own ends, rather than trying to rule the world as the head of the Syndicate. And I will not be used by a shade."

"Do you think your fellow blood knights would go for it? Or would they just take it as a sign of Management weakness?"

She stares at me haughtily. "Why do you call me a 'blood knight'?"

"The term refers to someone who fights for the joy of it. In context, I'm talking about the members of the Syndicate who can't do 'subtle' or 'white collar crime'. The ones who need to fight-"

And I suddenly understand Owlman. At this point, Bruce Wayne could do the world far more good as CEO of Wayne Enterprises than as Batman, but he can't stop going out and crusade-caping. Owlman could have been richer and more powerful by doing almost anything other than building an apocalypse bomb, but… Once he knew how to build it, he had to build it. Had to use it. Not because it was a good idea, that wasn’t the point…

"-and will act out if they can't."

"I am not a petulant girl who cannot control her battle-rage."

"So are you giving up on forcing Wonder Woman to eat her own intestines? Because a purely rational person would settle for killing her efficiently."

"She rendered me insensate with my own spear!"

Mister Scott chuckles, quietly and menacingly. "Think you're making his point for him, doll."

Olympia snarls quietly to herself, turning her face away from both of us.

"What's the arrangement for moving Dame Carol out of here?"

"Gas, magic bindings, then moving a variable endpoint door somewhere we won't want to go again and throwing her out. Olympia, why don't you go get her ready to move?"

Olympia turns and marches from the observation room.

"And Zatanna? We'll need you to move the door."

Zatanna nods slowly. "Because this is Shadowcrest, isn't it? I haven't really…" She places her right hand on the wall, closing her eyes as she… What, connects to the house's magic? "Since it's just me and Dad, we haven't really experimented with everything it can do. But if my.. family has so many magicians here…"

Mister Scott shrugs. "I'm sure they won't mind throwing in a spell book or two as a thank you present if you pull this off."

Zatanna doesn't look particularly pleased at the idea.

"What are we supposed to call you while we're in company?"

"Depends on how you wanna play it, son. You can call me 'Al' if you want us to be friends. Capo Scott if you want to make a business case for why we should try making peace with President Wilson. Or Power Ring if you want to appeal to the masses as supervillains and give them a target to crush. I'll respond in kind." He waves his right hand nonchalantly. "It's all about getting them into the right head space." He looks thoughtful for a moment. "Hey, ah… I've been wondering… Whatever happened to your me?"

"I got him a new lantern. He rejuvenated and joined the Justice League."

"Hah! Ah, you shouldn't ah said that. Now I kinda wanna go fight him. See which of us aged least gracefully."

"See, this is exactly what I don't get about supervillains like you. What's the point?"

"Point? The point is to be, son. It's not complicated at all."

I shake my head. "The nearest thing I've got to a rival on Earth Sixteen is a man named Nylor Truggs. He steals pieces of schizo tech and then develops them for wider use. I think he's planning on using what he's collected to fight against an oncoming alien invasion."

"Sounds like a superhero to me."

"He murders the people who own any technology they're not using to his satisfaction."

"Sounds like a really focused superhero. We had this guy called Brother Love who used to mind control people who.. weren't getting along. Course, that was back in the sixties…"

"He murders them as a point of principle; they don't use what they've got so they don't deserve to live."

Mister Scott nods, smirking. "Now that sounds more like a supervillain."

"But how does it make sense?! Why do you people.. do these things? There must be.. some.. reason I'm not seeing."

"Well, sure. Sure there is, son. Of all the books I've read, all the plays and films I've watched, no one put it quite like George Orwell. 'Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.'"

"Nineteen eighty four. I never grokked it. The social control stuff… Sure, totalitarian governments use their control to reinforce their control. That makes sense. But real world dictators have a high quality of life. The Inner Party make their own lives objectively worse every time they do anything. And as far as I could tell, their own anti-technology policies would eventually remove their ability to maintain their control. I mean, I'm not Kantian, but that's… Just… Dumb."

"You.. sweet, innocent boy." He shakes his head fondly. "I don't know if I can explain it to you. How did your Alan Scott get started? Let me guess, he was… Driving a train someplace, someone held him up and he.. tripped over his ring?"

"His employer tried to blow up the train he was working on for the insurance money."

He nods. "I used to work the railroads too. 'Till I realised how much money I could make holding 'em up instead. Built up a decent stake but the law was on my tail. Cornered me and my guys in an old railroad shed we were using for a bunkhouse. I grabbed an old train lantern to brain a guy with…" He shrugs. "And as I killed 'em one by one, I started to feel their fear, making me stronger."

"Conditioning. The ring conditioned you. You made them afraid, it makes you feel good-."

He shakes his head, visibly frustrated by my comment. "No, no, come on. Do me the courtesy of letting me have my own motivations. My ring lets me feel fear, it doesn't make me feel anything about it one way or the other."

Or so I'm sure you'd like to think.

"After I killed 'em all, I took all my money, went to Gotham and invested, bought a.. radio company. I was rich and powerful, and when you're rich and powerful most rules are things for the little people. And it wasn't enough. I kept a secret identity for years, not because I made money out of it, but because I wanted to do… Whatever I wanted. I wanted a sort of power you don't.. get from money or connections. I wanted people to look up at the sky and pray that my yellow light didn't fall on them. The money was just a way of reminding people how powerless they were. Hell, half the time I just burned the stuff. Easier than working out how to fence it. Your.. Alan, did he ever run with a posse?"

I nod. "The Justice Society."

"I founded the Crime Lodge. A club for people like me to meet up and brag about things. To hang around the only other people like us, who.. lived like we did. And maybe push each other a little further. People came and went, but a few of us… We made that place, made it untouchable. Made ourselves untouchable."

"My Alan gave it up because of a senate investigation. Why did you quit?"

"Same reason I told Ultraman his whole Syndicate thing was doomed from the get-go." He sighs. "We got too big."