In Gotham, the Joker had committed himself to the cause through his own particular methodology.
Bombs in public squares. Live footage of the results, broadcast across every channel with a signal to hijack. And his personal specialty: disguising himself as a true believer, walking into Rao's inner circles, and opening up with automatic weapons and rocket launchers at close range.
Several of the alien-origin followers received his most concentrated attention.
In a single day, five of Rao's twelve high-ranking priests were dead. Four of the five had possessed active metahuman abilities. All four had proven entirely useless against the Joker. Three consecutive traps were laid for him; three consecutive traps were identified, turned around, and used against the people who'd set them. The counterattacks cost the organization a meaningful number of its best operatives. The followers were so thoroughly disoriented they couldn't track his movements at all.
The report reaching Rao from his surviving priests was blunt: unparalleled intelligence, completely unpredictable behavioral patterns, and—notably—not susceptible to the blessing under any conditions they'd been able to identify.
Meanwhile, the city of Gotham, which had been slowly, painstakingly recovering its equilibrium, went back to being a war zone. After several rounds of contact, even Rao's most devoted followers had developed some fear of the man with the chalk-white skin and green hair. And yet the Joker clearly treated the entire thing as a game—he'd push a situation into genuine chaos, then pull back and savor it. The moment Rao's priests managed to restore a semblance of order, he'd step out again to play another round.
Three days of back-and-forth, and several of the priests were approaching complete breakdown. They had to escalate to Rao directly. He was currently busy leading his followers in clearing snow and chipping ice.
The black blizzard had run for three straight days before Rao managed to disperse it at full divine output. But dispersing the clouds didn't solve the underlying problem—it just moved things into phase two. Metropolis was freezing. Midday temperatures sat below negative twenty degrees Celsius (roughly negative five Fahrenheit). The streets were sheeted in ice, and movement was difficult. Only the most devoted believers had shown up for outdoor duty, and even they were visibly unhappy about it.
Rao was not about to be seen personally wielding a snow shovel. That was a task for the congregation. Obligatory manual labor in subzero conditions, however, tends to strain even sincere faith, and grumbling was inevitable.
He had no choice but to stay out there with them, using his divine power to help the citizens clear the snow. That kept him occupied in Metropolis and entirely off the Gotham situation.
In the end, Rao's reputation for the impossible held. He burned through an extraordinary reserve of divine power and, at the end of five days, managed to restore Metropolis to something resembling normal.
Those five days weren't uneventful.
Booster Gold had found Diana and Barry and brought them back. They'd ended up in the thirtieth century. Diana had been involved in the founding of the Legion of Super-Heroes; Barry and Iris had been rather productively occupied in the interim, and medical confirmation now indicated they were expecting twins—a boy and a girl. Time travel had introduced complications serious enough that Iris needed to remain in the thirtieth century to term. Barry came back. Iris stayed.
Diana's return gave Thea an idea.
"Time travel," Batman said, as soon as she outlined it. "You're thinking of going back to deal with Rao in a prior era. But would eliminating a past version actually change the one we're facing here?"
Thea even thought, not without a certain malice, that he really should have become the Question—the man asked far too many questions.
Thea turned the question over. "I'm genuinely not sure about the causal implications. There are rules about these things. But Rao's situation is unusual enough that I think it's worth investigating." She kept the explanation vague. What Thea mainly wanted was to see how Rao had concentrated the life force of living beings onto himself. According to the Guardian Archives, Rao was a natural-born Kryptonian who had lived two hundred years and died. What she was looking at now had lived for hundreds of millennia and ascended to godhood. Something had made that possible—some device, absorbing his followers' life force to replenish himself. Find it, destroy it. Pull the foundation out from under the entire structure.
"You're going to Krypton." Batman had mapped it in under five seconds.
"Krypton!" Kara, who had been sitting somewhere between listless and catatonic, snapped upright. "Can I go? I'm not exactly useful here right now, and —"
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have to.
Looking at Kara—deflated, searching for something to hold onto—Thea didn't have a good argument for leaving her behind. She tried twice anyway, warning her: "I'm going to Krypton in its ancient era—completely different from the one you remember." Kara held firm both times. Thea gave in.
When she saw Lena starting to prepare as well, she added quickly: "Krypton's atmospheric composition in that era will be roughly Earth-standard. The gravity, however, is approximately ten times Earth's baseline, which means—"
She let the implication complete itself.
Lena was not coming.
"I'm going." Batman said.
"Same." Lex said.
Both at the same time. Both entirely serious.
Ten times baseline gravity wasn't a problem, apparently—they both had more than enough black-tech to handle it. But she was only taking one of them. Lex, under any circumstances, was not a person she was willing to introduce to ancient Krypton. The potential for timeline destabilization involving the early detonation of the entire planet was not a risk she was prepared to take.
The final group was Thea, Batman, and Kara.
Clark stayed behind. His direct combat utility against Rao was limited, but his credibility with other heroes was not—and he could also persuade ordinary people who still hadn't accepted the "blessing." Diana would serve as the primary engagement force if things escalated on the present timeline.
With the arrangements settled, the three of them boarded the Council's time vessel and set a course for two hundred and fifty thousand years prior: ancient Krypton.
Minimal surface vegetation. A red sun, low and wide in the sky.
Something resembling a wild boar was rooting around in the underbrush when it walked into something invisible, stopped, squinted at the apparently empty stretch of ground in front of it, and fled at speed.
The ship dropped its cloaking. The hatch opened. Kara ran out first.
The red sun hit her immediately—abilities gone, the enhanced vision and strength and flight simply absent. She squinted against the unfamiliar quality of the light. But the air, the smell of the soil, the particular weight of this sky—even two hundred and fifty thousand years before the planet she remembered, something in her recognized it.
This was home. A different home, an older home. But home.
Batman followed at a more measured pace, adjusting parameters on the wrist-mounted unit integrated into his suit. From a distance, he looked nearly identical to his normal configuration. The suit was doing considerable work under the surface. "The gravity really is intense," he said.
Thea walked out and looked around without any particular expression. Ten times gravity registered as ten times gravity—inconvenient, somewhat—but not what she'd call a problem.
The Krypton of this period had no advanced weaponry. It had no superhuman physiology either—the red sun saw to that. The population was effectively pre-industrial, organized at the tribal level. The only real threat was Rao himself, if he tracked them back across the timeline. Beyond that, this was about as safe as field operations got.
She studied the horizon. "Southwest. That's where Kandor is—Rao's original tribe. The light of Kryptonian civilization."
Batman glanced in that direction and registered approximately nothing. Kandor, Toronto—the distinction wasn't particularly registering for him at this moment.
Kara said the name quietly, twice.
They started walking. The gravity made mechanical transport unreliable, so they went on foot. Batman peeled off ahead to scout—his particular skill set was ideally suited to arriving undetected.