Lex Luthor tilted his head back and studied the sky again for a long moment. "The blood-red veil's covering everything, but there's still faint sunlight bleeding through. And the sun here rises in the west and sets in the east." He said it with absolute certainty.
"Hey—found you a book." The voice came out of nowhere and made the assembled dignitaries jump. The Justice League members recognized it immediately: the Atom.
He could walk right through the camera frame without a second thought. Nobody could see him anyway.
Lex picked the book up off the ground. Everything on Earth-3 was unknown territory, and books were one of the best ways in. The team had agreed on it beforehand.
It wasn't a thick volume—more like a primer, complete with illustrations. Lex started flipping through it casually.
Two pages in, he was grinning. A strange, amused grin. His fingers blurred through the pages, and inside thirty seconds he'd finished the whole thing.
He held the book open for the dignitaries to see, narrating as he went. "Now this is fascinating. Children's reader. Historical stories. And the history here is—unrecognizable. In this world, Christopher Columbus was an American who discovered the European continent. In the Revolutionary War, the American army surrendered to the British. And the actor Abraham Lincoln assassinated President John Wilkes Booth. Ha!"
A sense of surreal absurdity settled over everyone watching. Every detail contradicted what they knew.
"Look at this—their central government building is called the Black House. Built on what we call the European continent. Ha—I'm dying!" Lex flipped to a particular page. The building in the illustration was shaped exactly like the White House, except the coloring made it look as though it had been scorched black in a fire.
The artist had real talent. Thick smoke billowed around the Black House, and the whole image radiated a palpable sense of wrongness.
"Now this—this is considered a masterpiece by one of their so-called national treasure artists. Looks like something half-human, half-beast." Lex flipped through and held the page toward the camera: a blood-red creature that looked skinned alive, jaws wide, claws out, devouring something. The composition was genuinely skilled. The subject matter made your stomach turn.
Back in the Hall of Justice, the faces of both the politicians and the heroes darkened. No matter how you looked at it, a half-human half-beast atrocity like that had nothing to do with justice. Evil had seeped into every corner of that world.
Lex flipped to the last page. The illustration showed a man in a blue bodysuit with a red cape, hands on hips, soaring through the sky with a cold, predatory gaze. "Heh. Look who it is—our old friend. Let me see what they call him here. Ultraman. What a charming name."
Clark's face went iron-cold. Being needled by Lex Luthor was not something he enjoyed. Thea covered her mouth and laughed softly. Diana shot her a curious glance. Ultraman? A perfectly charming name indeed.
A children's book could only offer so much. Lex had gone through the whole thing, and the bulk of it was just a broad historical overview, with Ultraman mentioned only in passing.
He stepped out onto the street next, hood up, walking briskly with his eyes darting everywhere. It wasn't nerves. It wasn't a weak constitution. It was just how people walked on Earth-3. The few pedestrians out all had that same glint in their eyes—wary, always half a second from striking, half a second from being struck. They feared the ambush and wanted to be the ambusher.
Predator and prey swapped roles by the minute here. The will of the world itself rewarded wickedness—the more you did, the more influence you gained, the happier the world became.
If you wanted to do evil, the world smoothed your path. If you wanted to do good, it would throw every obstacle it could at you, right up until you ended up as a corpse.
With every government official on the planet watching, Lex gave a live demonstration of a classic Earth-3 method for asking directions.
He studied the foot traffic for a moment and picked his mark.
Then he tucked himself into a dark side alley and lay down on the ground, both feet poking just far enough out of the shadow to be visible. Every now and then his legs gave a little twitch, like a terminal patient whose body was about to give up.
A thin-looking pedestrian came walking past. Lex's faint twitching caught his eye. A plain corpse was worthless—people died every day in this city, and anything valuable on a dead body got stripped inside ten minutes. But this one wasn't dead yet. And those shoes looked like they might be worth a few bucks. He turned into the alley to see what else could be lifted off the mark.
Nice shoes, he thought. Could pawn those at least. While he was calculating who to sell them to, the soon-to-be-dead man on the floor exploded into motion. A syringe slammed into the pedestrian's jugular, and a moment later the man was being dragged into the shadows like a dead dog.
The whole sequence was fluid, unhurried, practiced. It didn't look like the work of a super-billionaire at all. It looked like a veteran of the streets.
The Justice League members watching this petty crime unfold in real time felt vaguely uncomfortable, but nobody said anything. Lex had kept his hand light enough—nothing lethal.
Superheroes weren't saints either. Batman had left half of Gotham's criminal population paralyzed from the waist down, and nobody condemned him for it. For that matter, plenty of people didn't consider folks from parallel universes to be people at all.
The interrogation was quick and unremarkable. Truth serum was something the average human being simply could not resist, and within minutes Lex's captive had emptied himself of everything he knew.
The history really was unbelievably warped. Most of the famous figures still existed—they'd just done entirely different things.
Lex's focus stayed locked on the Kryptonian. He asked a long string of questions about him. According to their prisoner, this world's Ultraman had arrived on Earth roughly thirty years ago, and he'd taken an already rotten planet to a whole new level of rot.
Throwing money into crowds just to watch the riots. Building a network of cronies to form an organization: the Crime Syndicate.
He used super-hearing to monitor the entire globe, and he incinerated every last righteous soul he could find with heat vision. Brutal methods—but it cowed the world. Crime became the dominant order of things.
The prisoner made a point of mentioning that Ultraman had a massively advanced spaceship parked in orbit above the Earth. The AI aboard it monitored the planet twenty-four hours a day.
"Is the advance team in danger?" Moira asked immediately. As a charismatic political leader—whether she meant it or not—showing concern for subordinates in harm's way had become instinctive.
Thea had been absorbed in her Two-Dimensional World research lately, and she shook her head: she didn't know. She turned instead to Batman, who'd become something of the League's unofficial number-two spokesperson.
Batman was unruffled. Thanks to Thea's arrangements, this administration had the closest and most cooperative relationship with the superhero community on record. He answered calmly. "Relax, Madam President. We've analyzed the differences between the two realities' human populations. Our vibrational frequencies don't match theirs. Unless someone's specifically listening on that frequency, we can't be detected."
Moira nodded, satisfied, and the group turned back to the livestream.