Knight of Wonder
Act II
Scene 2: Democracy Inaction
The heights were always a little dizzying. At least, Diana found that no matter how many times she went up to the Watchtower, she always found the view from the engineering room viewport to be slightly sickening. There was Earth below, a delicate jewel suspended in the vast dark of space. One couldn't help but draw a comparison to the Watchtower and the League, a lone beacon of hope against a never ending sea of evil that lurked just out of view in the depths of space. And now, thanks to Lantern Stewart, Diana knew all too well the nature of the evil that was marshalling at the edges of space to unleash itself upon the shining world far below.
A state sized cloud formation slowly drifted into the Atlantic, revealing a view of the American East Coast. Diana glowered as she shoveled another spoonful of the oatmeal that was her first meal in over a day into her mouth. The sight of the American capital caused her thoughts to drift back to yesterday and her frustrated attempts to meet with the President.
She had arrived at the White House after making the three hour trip by ferry and car from Gotham City. Keeping up the appearance of normalcy, Diana had discovered in her time with the League, was key to keeping people calm. The delay caused by her conventional travel, however, meant that she did not arrive in Washington until late in the afternoon.
She stepped out of her car and walked up to the guard at the gate who let her in without much ceremony. Despite her rather common attire of a T-shirt, sweater and bellbottom jeans, the guards had seen her enough times in the company of the rest of the League to know to permit her. That, and the White House had been outfitted with all manner of special sensors that would detect via infrared, radiation, X-ray and other means if she was, in fact, some kind of shape shifter or imposter. One couldn't be too careful these days.
As she wound her way through the corridors of the White House, Diana soon found herself in the waiting room where a grumpy looking receptionist was determinately trying to focus his attentions on his newspaper and not on the analysis of the Vice Presidential debate playing out on the little TV in the corner. Sometimes Diana found the pettiness of men to be pathetic.
Just as she arrived, Clark was walking back into the waiting room from the hall that led to the Oval Office. "Clark!" she greeted. "I didn't think I would find you here. Did you meet the President?"
Clark nodded. "I did. He's in a chipper mood today, but I'm afraid you've just missed him. He was about to head to the situation room when I left."
"Oh," Diana deflated. "How did he look? Do you think he might have time to meet with me later?"
Clark shrugged. "I don't know Diana. I mean, he seemed to think it would be nothing but you never know with him these days. His aide certainly looked concerned enough. You can try waiting but you may not get to see him today. What did you want to see him about?"
"Important news from the Lantern Corps," Diana explained. "John asked me to let people know."
"Aren't you going to tell me?" Clark asked as he walked over to the receptionist's desk to sign himself out.
"I was planning on it," Diana said defensively. "I wanted to work my way down the chain of command first and as much as you might think it, you are not number one."
Clark brought himself up from the desk with his hands held up in a gesture of supplication. "Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that you should have come to me first. It's just that John is my friend too. I just want to know what he thought was so important that he needed to send you to speak with the President. Ah, but it'll be okay I guess. I'm holding a meeting of the full Justice League minus Green Lantern and Batman tomorrow morning. You can tell everyone about it then if that's okay."
As Clark finished speaking, Diana couldn't help but notice his warm, country boy smile that the American populace found so appealing. It was almost like Clark was carved from some schoolboy image of what the ideal American male should be and then given life. In a way, Diana found this a little disturbing, especially since she had never really considered herself to be nearly as flawless of an example of a woman.
"Yes, I suppose that will do just fine," Diana agreed. "It will be better than having to chase everyone down. Still, does it have to be at the Watchtower? You know how much I hate going all the way up there."
Clark gave her an apologetic look and started for the door. "I'm afraid it has to be there. It concerns the Watchtower directly." As Clark reached the exit, he turned back and directed, "And attendance is mandatory Diana. Don't go pulling any stunts like Batman to get out of this." With that, Clark swung himself out the door and into the hall beyond.
Diana shook her head slowly as she walked over to the desk and signed the name "Diana Prince" into the meeting register. As she did so, she heard the receptionist mutter to her from behind his newspaper, "So that was the big man himself huh. He seems like a bit of a hard ass."
As Diana stood up from the desk, she thought a moment before responding, "He can certainly be… pretentious at times," before she went over to take a seat and watch the men on the television try to out ego each other.
There Diana had sat for hour after hour, until the sun started to set and she decided to give up. Now Diana sat glumly in the engineering room of the Watchtower, her back to the rotating wall that constantly spun around and around to give the Watchtower its artificial gravity. She had to admit that she still felt a little snubbed, especially since the President would always go out of his way to accommodate perfect Mr. Clark Kent. So she had brought her oatmeal all the way down to the engineering room in order to get some solitude. Clark might have had the President and a polar ice fortress, but at least Diana could have her oatmeal and the engineering room.
In the middle of her brooding, however, Barry poked his bright blond haired head through the porthole and said in his sing song voice, "Meeting is about to start. Better get topside!" before he zipped off to the next part of the station.
Diana let her spoon clatter down into her bowl as she let out a frustrated sigh. It had been a trying twenty-four hours. Then she tossed the bowl aside and it went spinning an abnormally distant way before it clattered down at the end of the nearby table. The low gravity in the space station could be a constant hazard.
After drifting through the portal out of the room and down the succeeding hallway, making occasional stops to launch herself back into the air with her foot, Diana came to the entrance to the conference room. Like most of the rest of the rooms on the Watchtower, the walls of the conference room were lined with white padding and recessed lights that gave the rather small space dominated by the oval conference table in its center a rather daytime-esque feel. This was by design, however, since there were certainly times when the cold darkness of space could certainly feel particularly depressing. Sticking out at intervals along the walls were various flat screens that showed status reports on various disasters and emergencies around the world so the League would not be entirely disconnected from events that might require their attention while it was distracted in conferences.
It wasn't long before the rest of the members of the League showed up. Diana took a seat near the back of the room and turned her head to see Barry sitting at the other end of the table where an empty chair had been literally less than a second ago. He was followed by the ethereal form of the Martian which drifted through the far wall before becoming solid mass again to take a seat near Diana. Finally, the haggard looking form of Clark came slinking around the corner to take a seat at the head of the table. He was looking thin, Diana remarked in her own thoughts, with the bags under his eyes and the increasing length of the beard on his face giving evidence to the probability that he had been spending too many consecutive hours trying to tend to all the world's ills. Diana wished he wouldn't feel like that welfare of the earth was his responsibility, but at a certain point, his unique ability to deal with its most severe problems was undeniable.
"Is this everyone?" Clark asked to the assembled League members.
"I'm afraid so," the Martian answered. "John Stewart is at New Genesis right now in an important meeting with High Father."
Diana crossed her arms expectantly. She realized right then just how in the dark the rest of the league was to John's news.
"What about Batman?" Clark asked. "Why isn't he here?"
"Why isn't he ever?" J'ohnn quipped to a laugh from Barry. "He refused to come."
Clark looked especially irked by this news. Bruce's refusal to attend to routine League business was ever the source of frustration in him. He could make the whole world bend to his will except for the Dark Knight and perhaps, Diana assumed, this was a source of pleasure for Bruce. It also didn't help that Clark insisted on calling him Batman. He hated being called that.
"I'm afraid Bruce is not quite feeling himself today," Diana explained to the group. "He had a nasty run it with a Gotham street gang that left him a little worse off than normal. He sends his regrets about being unable to attend."
The skeptical look on Clark's face just about clearly indicated that he did not believe that Bruce regretted being unable to attend for a second, but Clark refrained from his usual snide remark about the situation in favor of, "Well if that's everyone then I guess we'll get started. I've called you all here today to discuss a matter of great importance. I just got through meeting with the President of the United States yesterday and he said that his negotiations with the Russian premier have hit a snag… over us."
Barry let out a annoyed sounding "psh!" before asking, "What the heck do they want this time?"
Clark took a big, audible gulp before saying, "They want us to decommission the Watchtower."
Barry's eyes went wide. "What?" he almost shouted. "They can't make us do that? Why would they even want to? Our group has done work in both countries! I thought the point of those negotiations was to make the world safer."
"I feel inclined to agree with Flash on this one," the Martian said in his low drone. "This kind of action would presage a world markedly less safe."
"Hear me out fellas," Clark insisted. "I think this might be a decent proposal. I think the solution for us is in the Fortress of Solitude."
Barry looked suddenly intrigued. "What, you saying you're going to move us in there? It's a little chilly there isn't it?"
Clark cracked a smile. "You know, I can't deny that it does get a little cold at times, but think of the benefit. By our decision to put up with that cold, we can help rid the world of a very different kind of cold: the cold war."
"What, exactly, is the offer on the table?" the Martian asked.
"The Russians dislike having a space station originally built to defend against them still floating around in the sky. We take it down and they'll agree to wholesale nuclear disarmament."
J'ohnn cocked an eyebrow at this prospect, a visible gesture which, given his otherwise stoical nature, belied an intense interest on the part of the Martian. "Now that is interesting," he admitted.
"You got that right," Barry agreed. "Did they say what kind of timeline they wanted?"
Clark shook his head. "No but I got assurances from the President's office that we would be receiving one in the next few days."
Diana could see the resistance to the idea in the minds of Barry and J'ohnn start to melt away. It was with no lack of a sense of duty, then, that Diana answered Clark when he called for her opinion next.
"What do you have to say about this Diana?" he asked. "You've been silent during this entire discussion and I'd prefer to be fair and gauge the temperature of the whole group."
"Well thanks to absences that's already an impossible task, even for you I dare say," Diana almost spat back. She figured she sounded particularly like Bruce in that particular moment, and perhaps not without justification. Knowing what she knew in that moment, Clark's proposal was almost enough to make Diana feel sick, and this time she was pretty sure it had nothing to do with the rotating of the station's artificial gravity generators. In a way, Diana fancied she was finally being able to get a sense of Bruce's intense dislike of Clark and the superman's blind adherence to ideology and the directive of his superiors.
Ignoring the surprised look on Clark's face, Diana leaned over the table and reminded the group, "Be that as it may, I have news that each of you needs to hear. Lantern Stewart arrived in Themyscira not too long ago with urgent news regarding Darkseid. Observations from Oa have revealed that he is amassing a vast fleet near his base of Apokolips. It is a fleet created for a single purpose… to destroy the home of Kal-El."
Diana's gaze burned into Clark as he sat back in his seat and digested this new piece of information. At length, he seemed to regain his composure. He sat back up in his chair and said, "Okay, that's news to me. Still, now that we know about this threat, we can go over how to deal with it in our next discussion. Right now we need to focus on the issue at hand. External threats should not be allowed to dictate the path to world peace, however dire they might be. If we abandon our principles in the face of external threats, then we have already lost that which we are trying to defend."
"Sage words as ever," Diana admitted, "However if we also abandon our defenses in the face of external threats, then we won't even be in a position to defend anything!"
"We are not here to discuss battle tactics!" Clark yelled as he stood up from his chair and made a sweeping gesture. "We are here to discuss what I think is a fair trade: an end to nuclear standoff for the dismantling of the Watchtower. Now my vote is that we take this deal and work on the Darkseid issue separately. Who's with me?"
For a moment, there was nothing but stunned silence. Then, slowly and not without a sense of hesitation, J'ohnn raised his hand. Barry shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his eyes darting back and forth between Clark and Diana. At length, he bellowed, "Ah screw it!" and he thrust his hand into the air.
"Very Well," Clark acknowledged, his voice growing low, "Meeting adjourned."
