Paula was going to stay in her apartment for a while; the last thing I needed was to start kidnapping hero's parents. That was one of the best ways to get mind wiped or phantom zoned or whatever else they had in their arsenal.
She intended to start getting back in shape sooner than later, and if there was time she'd help teach Orca and Mike. I'd made her physically fit, but she'd have to regain her skills. I'd have to find a place for training; the woods might be all right as long as I had bugs watching for intruders, but a lot of people wandered the woods and you could hear a surprising distance.
People with enhanced strength tended to make a lot of noise, which was one reason I couldn't have the training in the caverns beneath the motel. I'd put a lot of effort into those and I also didn't need them to collapse. They were filled with my trump cards, the beginnings of my army. They were still growing, my legions, and they creeped Mike out, but he hadn't rejected them entirely. I was feeding them with insects from the surrounding area and it was working out well.
A quick trip through Bobo's bar took me to New York. I didn't bother stopping by Ted's; I'd already restarted lessons with him.
Instead I flew toward Westchester, activating my invisibility amulet. Notice me not was good with humans, but not as good with machines. The last thing I needed was to be caught by some traffic camera and trigger an alert in a government computer or something.
Luckily Westchester was only twenty five miles from Manhattan, so I arrived at my location in twenty minutes, although using an app to find the address took longer.
I switched the amulet off to let it cool down and then I walked from the alley around to the front door. I was wearing my own face, although I'd covered myself with a glamour for anyone watching the place.
Touching the doorbell, I waited.
Alan was over a hundred years old by this point, but he looked like he was in his seventies. He moved a little slower than his apparent age would have warranted though.
Ted had never told me what had helped retard the age of him and his teammates from the Justice Society, but whatever it was had been pretty effective. He'd had a couple of hero kids, Jade and Obsidian, who were probably in their early thirties, which suggested he'd been pretty active even later in life.
He reached the door.
It was on his hand, the ring, although it was covered by a glamour to make it look like a wedding ring. I was getting pretty good at seeing through glamours if I wanted. Most Fae could, though they often preferred to live in the dream and didn't bother. According to Ted Alan's ring wasn't tinkertech like the rings the other Green Lanterns used but some kind of magical artifact so powerful that his daughter had inherited its powers.
An artifact so powerful that it changed your DNA just by using it sounded potentially risky to me.
He noticed me looking at his ring and his hand tightened into a fist.
"Mr. Scott," I said. "My name is Taylor Hebert. I'm a healer among other things."
He stared at me for a moment.
"Probably best that you come in then," he said. "Ted's talked about you a couple of times. Best not to let the neighbors see you. Gladys is a busybody that liked to peek in on everybody."
Gladys was actually having a nap at the moment despite it being barely five o'clock.
None of the neighbors had been looking outside, but I didn't say anything. I suspected that Batman knew I was Skitter, but I didn't know how much he'd spread that information.
"How much do you know about the Parliaments?" I asked as I stepped into the house. It had the typical smell a lot of old people's houses had, musty and strange.
Alan led me to a faded upholstered couch and I sat down on it. He took a seat in a chair across from me. He didn't offer me anything to drink, which probably meant something.
"There's a bunch of them and Swamp Thing is the avatar of one of them," he said. "I used to work with Doctor Fate so we probably heard a little more about the mystic side of things than the modern league. I've heard that Constantine and Zatanna tend to keep tight lips about things these days."
I shrugged.
"Sometimes ignorance is protection," I said. "There are things out there that won't come after you if they don't notice you looking. On the other hand, sometimes ignorance is a bad idea."
"So is it the Red again?" he asked. "They were acting up back in the forties, animals going all crazy."
I shook my head.
"It's the Black," I said. "Also called the Rot. Pretty much wants the zombie apocalypse, and they've already killed thousands of people. It's going to get worse. Precogs say the end of the world is in less than a year."
He frowned.
"Why are you coming to me? I'm retired… even the League doesn't call me any more."
"I think you still have something to offer," I said. "And I can make you young again so that you don't feel like you're about to bust a hip just getting out of your chair."
"Heard you could do that," he said. "What makes you think I'd want it? I've had a pretty full life."
"Most people your age have kids that are dying off," I said. "They probably barely know their great grandkids; families split up and its easy to lose track, especially if there are a lot of them. But your kids are still pretty young and you didn't get a chance to know them for most of their lives."
His hands tightened on the faded edges of his sofa.
"Ted's been talking."
"I could buy you time," I said, leaning forward. "Time for them to have relationships, to have children. Time to get to know your grandchildren. You'd actually feel good again."
"The world has changed," he said. "You buy me fifty more years and what'll it be then?"
"Buck Rogers?" I asked. "Flash Gordon maybe?"
He smirked for a moment, then scowled.
"The whole world is going to shit."
"Yeah," I said. "That won't change either, unless people step up. People keep trying to keep things the same without pushing to make it better, so every time evil wins that becomes the new status quo."
It wasn't entirely true; there were organizations that were always trying to make things better, but usually they tried to make things better for one group at the expense of another. Congress pushed for bridges to nowhere and other pork projects for their states while essentially stealing from the rest of the country.
It took a gallon of gas to make a gallon of ethanol, which gave worse gas mileage than just using the initial gallon in a car. Sugar produced four gallons for every gallon of gas used. But sugar was produced in foreign countries and those farmers couldn't vote in America. Corn farmers voted a lot in the US, so corn was put in gas tanks, raising the prices for food and cattle fed with corn and gas itself.
It made the world worse for everybody except the corn farmers, and a lot of changes people pushed for were like that.
And that was people who weren't just making rules to hurt people they hated.
"The world just makes less and less sense every year," he said. "They wouldn't ever have put things on television or the radio like they do now. People have gotten ruder and politeness and respect are just gone."
I'd heard once that people who moved to a different culture were often enthralled at first, but that after time all the alien elements started to catch up with them. They started to crave things that had been normal for them before.
How bad would it be when you couldn't just take a plane and go home, but instead your home was gone forever?
My situation was different; the changes were apparent, but it wasn't like I'd moved to China or something. This world still had heroes and villains. Most things were the same; I was still in America in the same year. I mean, sometimes the changes were irritating, or even a little unsettling but it wasn't that big of a deal.
I occasionally had dreams of being back home with Dad, of talking with Lisa, of being with Brian… even of spending time with Rachel. I occasionally had cravings for Fugly Bobs and then remembered that it was gone.
But for the elderly it was a bigger deal. The world got more and more alien every year while they stayed the same. More and more of the restaurants, actors, music and other things they loved vanished forever to be replaced by new, alien things that weren't the same, or maybe even felt offensive.
People tended to remember first times the most vividly. The first visit to Disneyland was memorable, but the tenth time just blended in with all the others. It was part of the reason time seemed to go faster as you got older; first times tended to be fewer and fewer, and the rest tended to blur together.
Older people tended to do less and less, especially once they retired, so first times were even rarer for them. It was tough to have new experiences in your living room.
Ted was adapting, staying in the moment instead of living his life in the past or the future. It said good things about his chances. Older people who stayed active stayed healthier and happier while those who didn't do anything tended to fade away.
Alan was more like most tired old people; he seemed like he was fossilized in one moment in time. His furniture looked like it hadn't been updated since the nineteen fifties. The pictures on the wall were all old timey.
Would he even be able to handle another half century?
"Every time the world gets better it's because somebody stepped up and took a risk… because they pushed for change. What was the quote about evil and standing by and doing nothing? What would have happened if your generation hadn't stood up to Hitler?"
"I had my time," he said.
"I can give you more," I said, holding my hand out.
"And what would you want for it?"
"Be ready, keep your ring charged...assuming it even needs that. Maybe get with Ted and practice a little. I don't have to change your outside appearance unless you want me to. Or I could make you look like Superman if you're into that. You probably shouldn't though because his villains could probably crush your skull while you're at the pharmacy."
He chuckled a little.
"I'm not going back into the business," he said. He held his hand out. "But I would like to have a little longer with my kids. I was a little afraid that you were going to try to get me to join a team or something."
"I think somebody like you would feel like you were playing basketball on a team with kindergartners," I said. "And that would make you a little hard to deal with."
"We had discipline back in the day," he said. He was silent for a moment. "But there might be some truth to it. I'm certainly not ready to join a team."
"Maybe you could be an instructor one day a week for some of the younger teams," I said. "I've heard that some of them have terrible death rates. Ted takes on students now and again"
He frowned.
"I'm not sure how skills with a ring would translate…"
"You've got experience," I said. "You've seen things the youngsters can't even imagine. If you want young people to respect the previous generations you've got to let them get to know you. Show them how to not die; we're going to need every hero on deck if we're going to get through future trials. If we get through them, you can always go back to watching old episodes of Gunsmoke I guess."
"I like MASH," he said.
"A show about people fighting a never ending war with a sense of humor," I said. My grandmother had liked it too. Ironically the show had lasted longer than the Korean war had. "It seems like the kind of thing you'd like."
His lips quirked.
"All right," he said. "Maybe I've got one last fight in me."
He held out his hand, the one that wasn't wearing his ring, and I took it.
Physically he was only in his seventies despite being over a hundred.
"Your kidneys were failing," I said.
Everyone's kidney function decreased after the age of forty, and that worsend after sixty, but his were particularly bad.
"I know," he said. "Zatanna wasn't able to do much. The ring keeps it from progressing and I wasn't aging much while wearing it, but I gave it up for years. I didn't realize I was getting sicker until the ring warned me when I finally did pick it up. I don't take it off now."
"You have prostate cancer," I said.
If it was the slow kind of prostate cancer they often didn't even bother to treat elderly men because odds were that age would kill them before the cancer did. A disease that would kill a hundred year old man in twenty years wasn't much of a concern.
"The ring keeps it in check," he said. "The enlarged prostate was the bigger problem. Pretty much every man gets it and it makes going to the bathroom a bit...problem."
Men's prostates continued to grow throughout their lives. That eventually started blocking off the urinary tract; it seemed like a bad design. Ears and noses kept growing too; hopefully agelessness stopped that or by the time a man was a thousand all that would be left of him was a prostate with elephant ears and a nose. He'd look like Mr. Potato head.
"Well, not anymore."
"Woah," he said. He stared at me.
"Kidneys filter out poisons from all the food you eat. Your body was stewing in those poisons, and I imagine that you haven't felt good for a long time. Your ring kept them from getting worse, but didn't clear them out."
The look in his eyes was sharper now.
He'd been ill enough that it would have affected his thinking. I wouldn't be surprised if he'd been depressed too. I'd cleared those chemicals out of his head.
That part wouldn't last, not without making changes to his brain I wasn't comfortable with yet, but depression was a combination of all kinds of things. Getting active and getting out and spending time with people was supposed to help.
"A little like what you were talking about with evil keep moving the goalposts," he said. His glance was much sharper. "The world's been poisoned and just gotten used to it."
"Yes," I said cautiously.
That was an analogy that could get us all in trouble. He was a hero for his day, but what people thought was OK then often wasn't OK now. Racists and bigots used the term poisoned all the time in reprehensible ways.
"How old do you want to look?" I asked. "I've made you twenty five internally."
He frowned.
"Maybe five years younger?" he said. "People might confuse that for me living better and getting out more. Ten years and they'd definitely notice."
It was done quickly.
He rose to his feet quickly and headed for a mirror beside the front door.
Staring at his face in the mirror, he hummed.
"I think I'll take your suggestion about training," he said after a moment. He glanced up at me. "You're putting a team together?"
"What makes you think that?" I asked cautiously.
"You can give people powers," he said. "Ted said you offered some to him. Person who can do that would be awful tempted to do something like that. It'd be a big responsibility, being able to find good people to give powers to. It'd be a bigger responsibility trying to lead a team."
"I've led one before," I said. "More than one."
He nodded.
"I'll get with Ted and we'll see about getting your people some lessons."
"That would be great," I said.
It was more than I'd expected, really. I'd mostly been hoping to get him back in the game because his ring would keep him from getting infected by the Rot as long as he was wearing it. It being magical might make it more effective than the rings the rest of the Lanterns wore.
"You might keep your ring on," I said. "It'd be easy for one of the infected to come by and slip something in your tea or something."
"You think I'm British or something?" he asked. He smirked. "In my day we drank coffee, and we drank it black and unfiltered."
"I thought that was cowboys?"
He shrugged.
"Things were different during the Depression," he said. "I'll wear my ring and I'll keep an eye out for any infections. My ring can scan for that kind of thing. I'll make periodic sweeps here and in New York some nights. Might give us a heads up if things go south. I'll get in contact with the other Lanterns and suggest they do the same thing."
"If we can get a sample we might have one of the tech guys make a detector," I said. "Luthor's willing to work with us, and his people might be able to whip something up."
"Enemy of my enemy eh?"
"He doesn't want to be a zombie," I said. "Or dead. That's a decent motivation."
"All right," he said. "I guess I'll look forward to working with you when the time comes."
I shook his hand.