From the perspective of the cosmos — or from the tier of beings like the Monitors — this was cause for celebration. In their eyes, a universe scaling upward was like a farmer watching his corn grow taller than expected. A result this good deserved to be documented. It deserved to be replicated on a large scale in the future.
From the perspective of any individual, or any deity, however, finding yourself with a brand-new roster of enemies out of nowhere was nothing short of a disaster.
"Is there any way for us to strike first?" The target she had in mind went without saying.
Highfather exhaled slowly. "Believe me, I've thought about it. But that universe has been sealed off in layers. The flow of time inside runs completely differently from ours. There's no way in — not now. It could open in ten years. It could take a hundred thousand. I genuinely can't tell you. Creating a universe is beyond the limit of my power."
With the full picture clear, and the question in her head answered, Thea moved to say goodbye.
Highfather was gracious about it — told her not to carry the weight of this alone, not to let it become a burden.
"The human transported away by the Omega Effect must be located as quickly as possible," he added. "The longer he drifts in the timestream, the greater the damage to the timeline. And if he somehow finds his own way back to the exact moment he left — under his own power — the entire universe will be destroyed."
Thea stopped. "Why?"
"The Omega Effect is a primal force — it carries the energy of origins. Every time it transports this human, that energy accumulates. If it traces his path back and returns to your point in time, a paradox forms. The origin fires back into itself. The explosion from that contradiction would punch through three or four universes without slowing down. The first universe in the chain would have no chance whatsoever. Do you understand?"
Thea was beginning to understand. This was essentially a high-end causality weapon. The beam fired from the source, threading through the timestream, looping back to the point of origin — cause without effect, effect feeding back into cause. The math didn't resolve. It detonated. And Bruce Wayne had accidentally turned himself into a walking bomb. The kind that could take out several universes.
She said her goodbyes to Highfather with a full mind, and stepped back into the Batcave.
"Miss Thea — our Master—?" Alfred looked up the instant she materialized.
"He's dead." She wasn't in the mood to soften it.
Alfred went pale. She caught herself. She didn't actually want to bury the old man under that.
"More complicated than dead, actually. I don't have a clean answer yet." She tried again, measuring her words.
The Omega Effect alone was enough of an unknown. Her Eye of Obliteration layered on top of it produced a combination nobody had mapped. Two forces interacting — unpredictable outcomes at every level. Darkseid might have been able to explain it — but that option was obviously off the table.
What she could work out: the Omega Effect would fling Batman across the timestream at random. Today he might land in the Stone Age. Tomorrow he'd wake up in the trenches of World War II. That was entirely possible.
And the Eye of Obliteration, whose function was to erase a person from everyone's memory — operating in the timestream, where there was no one else around to forget him — would turn inward. He'd forget himself. Textbook amnesia.
She let out a slow breath. She could only model the surface interactions. The deeper effects were beyond her to predict.
Untimed, random displacement through history. Each jump came with a memory wipe. A normal person would be finished after two. But she trusted Batman's endurance. He would find his way back. Her task was the opposite: stop him — or, if it came to it, kill him in the timestream.
If there was any other way, she wouldn't go there. He was an old friend, years running. But she had no choice. Universe or Batman. That choice wasn't hard.
"Don't expect Bruce to walk through that door again," she said, and rested a hand briefly on Alfred's shoulder. Then she left the Cave.
Tracking through time wasn't the obstacle. The obstacle was that Batman's landing point — which century, which timeline — was entirely unknown. Stumbling around blind was pointless.
She didn't call anyone. The Justice League couldn't help with this. Diana was with her student. Bringing Wonder Woman into a conversation about the Monitors — beings who managed universes the way farmers managed fields, whose ships larger than the Milky Way ran on infant universes for fuel, who could unmake a cosmos with a casual gesture, who treated the gods she knew as roughly equivalent to crop pests — would do nothing but break morale. She'd reached that tier of perspective herself, and even she'd needed time to process it.
She released a faint pulse of her soul-force. Every person in the immediate vicinity stopped registering her. Thea lay back on the grass of a city park, center of Gotham, and stared up at the sky. Warm sunlight filtered through the clouds and fell across the ground. The city smelled green. Around her, people hurried past in every direction, living their ordinary lives — and she lay among them like something left behind by a different world.
Go home and think. That was the plan. She was already getting up when a low, calm voice spoke beside her ear.
"I can help you. That's what I came here to do."
She turned.
Standing not far from her was a tall figure in a blue-and-gold bodysuit, blond hair swept back behind flight goggles. Booster Gold.
He's looking for me? Thea was genuinely puzzled — and not in a flattering way for Booster. Her soul-force was active. She was invisible to most people who walked this earth. Very few people could pierce that concealment — and Booster Gold wasn't one of them. And when she looked more carefully, she noticed his focus wasn't quite fixed on her — his gaze was sweeping the area, not landing.
"I can help you. That's what I came here to do." He said it again, word for word.
Thea didn't move. Around Booster, the surrounding crowd had noticed him. The murmur started spreading.
"Booster Gold! Can I get your autograph?"
"Booster Gold — what's your type, what are you looking for in—"
A cluster of middle-aged women closed in, peppering him with questions, voices overlapping into noise. In the middle of the chaos, Booster was scanning desperately, craning his neck, calling out twice more: "I can help you. That's what I came here to do."
Now she was curious. She snapped her fingers. Both of them vanished from the crowd and reappeared at the roadside.
"You're looking for me?" she asked.
Booster visibly relaxed at the sight of her — a real, full-body exhale. "That's right. I came specifically for you. Trust me — I can help."
"Help me how? I'll be honest with you: I don't see how you solve my current problem."
"I can. You need to find Batman. And I can help you do that." He said it like he meant it.
Thea looked at him carefully — and the legendary memory of a deity found something. This Booster Gold was not quite the same as the one she'd met recently. Small differences in the suit. And more importantly, his eyes. The usual lightness, that easy irreverence — gone. What was there instead was intelligence. Quiet, practiced, unassuming intelligence.
"You're a different Booster Gold, aren't you." Not quite a question. "The senior model. You came back from — the 25th century? Further?"
She would never have guessed it from the outside. But apparently this man was quite the time traveler in his own right.