Chapter 4

(Oz)

The She Ah Vog flew erratically into the Speed Force because of Orion's miscalculations. Po knelt to one knee because the pain from the shifts in planes raced through every nerve of his body. Even with his godlike powers, he couldn't bear the pain. If he felt ill from the miscalculations, he assumed the weaker, ungodlike Trilobites would die from the dangerous radiation that penetrated the ship's hull. Pink, Trilobite blood dribbled from both of his eyes as he gasped for life, and a loud alarm on the front panel beeped loudly. Every breath he took caused pain. "Orion! Orion! Why hast thou tricked us?" He lamented as he placed both hands on the ground, and cried by his command chair. He felt a heavy weight on his chest as the ship crossed into the new plane. "All we wanted to do was save our Momma from the Speed Force, and bring her back to the Celestial Kingdom"

The temporal steel kept the occupants inside of the vessel virtually safe, at least from the harshness of space, but due to the miscalculations, crossing over to the Speed Force nearly stole the life of everybody on the ship. Po moaned as the temperature inside the vessel continued to rise, and blood dripped from his ears. All the occupants of the vessel were passed out on the deck and in their perspective areas, but not Po. The digital display had a blurry image of Orion on it, and she was in her holographic form.

"Is this your plan or the plan of the Great Mother to do this to us?" Po asked as blood continued to pour out of his eyes. "You'll do everything to protect Ptah and the La family image." He laughed for a moment. His voice was brittle and his lips quivered. "What does it matter now, Orion? What does any of this matter?" He said as he passed out on the floor.

The ship moved through the Speed Force at warp two for over six days before Po'Darro gained consciousness. Running over to the sink at the rear of the vessel he threw up in it and moaned for a moment. Pouring a cup of cool water over his sapphire face, he felt it would help him with the grogginess. It took him a moment to adjust to the lights on the deck, and then he noticed Orion on the screen.

"Po'Darro, I'm sorry, son, for giving you the incorrect codes to enter into the Speed Force safely."

Vo lay faced down on the floor, and when he rose to his feet, he wiped the dried, pink blood from his nose. He then asked, "Are you communicating with Orion?"

"No," Po said calmly, "It's Orion's hologram, but it's from the Neuronet. She has the same life memories as Orion. Oh. She's also a trickster and a liar."

"Don't think that my tricking you was a malicious act, Po," Orion's hologram said, "I did this to make sure Ptah wouldn't kill you the way the Great Father killed Veo and me nearly four million years ago." She paused for a moment, and then said, "Ptah was a young god in those days, and he loved Veo and me with all his heart. We were married on a planet called Dora, and he loved me in a way that I thought couldn't exist. But when the Great Father found out where I was, he killed my son and I. Ptah placed our minds in the Neuronet and then uploaded us into these sophisticated flying discs. Now, after all these years, Ptah is now more like the Great Father than he cares to admit. Ro'Dan has my mind. Even though she birthed you and your siblings, I consider you my children. And I'll be damned if I let him kill you while I have a say." Suddenly, the She Ah Vog came to an immediate stop. "If you look out your west viewport, you will see the planet called Ozario. This rock flows with milk and honey. It will nourish you and your descendants for eternity."

"What if we don't want to fly down there?" He asked. Looking at Orion's hologram with anger, he sat back in his command chair, interlocked his fingers, and sat his hands on his lap. Since he was dealing with her hologram, he didn't think she had any significant power. The real Orion was considered a god too. "Vo, prepare to jump to lightspeed!" He ordered.

"I anticipated you'd be defiant, Po," she said. She looked down at the ground for a moment and didn't make any facial expression at all. A loud explosion happened in the engine room, and the ship began a rapid descent to the planet. "Prepare your crew, Po," Orion's hologram said, "I've destroyed the engines of the She Ah Vog. Ozario will be your home for the rest of your lives."

Bri leaped to her feet and ran over to her chair. Immediately, she punched in several codes and then sighed. "Crew! We're making a crash landing. Strap in," She said over the intercom. "Po! Vo! Strap in! We'll hit the planet's surface in about two minutes."

"I'm sorry, my babies," Orion's image said calmly, "You will never be able to escape this world. I do this for the love I have for you."

Current Time:

James pushed the black button on his watch and his armor disappeared into a small backpack that he wore. Underneath the suit, he had on his loose-fitting club shirt and black, well-groomed dressed pants. His leather dress shoes weren't fit for the terrain, but he thought his enhancements would balance it out. If the clothes didn't suffice, he always had the ability to put back on his Guardian suit.

When it came to his Guardian persona, the Vulcan wanted James to continue to wear the suit even though he didn't think he needed it to protect him from bullets. Whenever James and JJ discussed the uniform, he stressed to James the importance of keeping up the Guardian image. His steel skin couldn't be penetrated by ordinary weaponry, at least not in the test Cadmus performed on him; they shot him with a fifty caliber machine gun and the bullets bounced off his chest. In addition, Supergirl slammed a tank into James, and it broke in half. He had proven that he had the Kryptonian, protective skin and strength.

According to the Vulcan, the Guardian was a symbol of what the human spirit could accomplish, at least before Rachel injected him with the Superman formula. He often put emphasis on the armor so the public would think the Guardian's armor protected him instead of him being imbued by the formula. As long as the people thought James was fully human, they would have hope. Even before JJ returned from Africa, he suggested James never let the world see him be other than a human being.

"The world has Supergirl, Superman, J'onn, and even me, but the human race can't identify with gods," he said with a grimace, "We defy gravity, bring people back to life, and do all these inhuman things, and it scares them. But you, James Olsen, you put on your armor and you keep it on. That way mankind always knows they have one of their own fighting for truth, justice, and constantly paving the way for humankind to grow better."

The Vulcan wanted the world to see James as a human being who stepped up and took responsibility for protecting his community. Unfortunately, James knew that most people couldn't relate to Supergirl or Superman because they weren't from Earth and couldn't bleed when living under a yellow sun. It was nearly impossible for the average human being to identify with them. But due to the future threats against the world, it was in James' best interest to take the Superman formula to give him the attributes of a Kryptonian. Due to the formula being highly experimental on humans, he had a hard time keeping his rage under control.

He looked around the sapphire forest for a moment and didn't recognize anything at all. All the plants had a blue hue to them that he couldn't identify. Not only was the terrain unrecognizable to him, but he didn't discern the stars and their patterns either. Everything around him seemed out of place, and as far as he could see, it was nothing but blue vegetation. He looked up into the sky, beyond the trees, and at the three moons, and then paused for a moment. "That's not right. That's not right at all," he said softly, "What world is this?" The night sky had a greenish glow, an emerald glimmer completely foreign to the world that raised him, but at the same time, he knew he wasn't on Earth any longer. It was obvious.

The trees stood tall and ominous, and in some ways, almost threatening. He could feel the heat, a humidity that felt oppressive in nature; it was the same heat he felt when he flew into the upside down funnel. Off in the distance, he heard some animals rustling around and howling, but he didn't recognize the species. For a moment, he wiped the sweat off his forehead and then used his powerful vision to see the unifacecorns off in the distance. "That can't be right," he whispered under his breath. He watched the white beasts with the one, long horn in the middle of their heads graze in the sapphire vegetation.

At first, he thought the tornado must've thrown him miles from the dance club because he didn't see it at all, but he quickly realized he must have gone through some kind of black hole in the verse. He heard JJ discuss the possibility of other dimensional gateways with Winn, but he ended up tuning out most of their nerd talk. He recalled JJ saying, "There are seventy-two-dimensional rifts on Earth and five in the continental United States, but he couldn't discern what was on tfacehe other end of any of them." At the time, he thought JJ was just bragging about his massive wealth of knowledge after receiving his memories from what he called the Neuronet. In fact, nothing looked like Metropolis, Kansas to him and that was disturbing. "Lena!" He screamed. His voice reverberated throughout the forest, and he noticed he didn't see one bird in the area. After yelling for a few minutes, he realized that she probably wasn't in the area, and if she was, then she wasn't conscious. He hoped that she'd have fallen through the same rift in space and time as him, but she didn't. He feared the cyclone might have overtaken the club and did what the murderers couldn't: kill everybody in it and around it. He had no way of knowing if his girlfriend was safe or not.

James flew straight up in the sky at the speed of sound, and as soon as he traveled about fifty feet up into the air, thousands of large locusts attacked him. When he flew about thirty feet into the air, he could hear the beasts' wings breaking the wind and causing a popping sound. By the time he found his footing, the wings of the creatures beat against his body and he knew he was in danger, so he kept flying. Even though the bugs couldn't penetrate his steel-like skin, the power of the wings slapped him in the chest and face, and it hurt. The stench of the beasts caused him to cringe; they clung to his body like they detected a pheromone and he tried to twist and turn to knock the animals off him. The creatures were about five feet in length and two feet thick with a wingspan about the size of a small car. They had front legs with crab-like pincers that they used as weapons and tried to penetrate his steel-like skin. One of the creatures grabbed onto his right ankle and the pain rushed to his head. At first, he thought he heard it crush his leg, but the animal's pincer fell off. He broke it trying to tear off James' right foot. He reached down, grabbed the animal by its thick head, and crushed it. It sounded like he was crushing wood with a machine. The putrid smell emanating from the animal was tantamount to a pile of elephant dung. When the brain matter dropped on his right pants leg, it ate through it like acid. It sounded like sausages cooking on the stove as the acidic goo ate through his clothes. He flew directly into a tarn about half a mile away from his location to wash the corrosive substance off his leg. It was the first time he dealt with a creature that had acid for blood. When he hit the pond, a large serpent-like reptile surfaced; it had three heads with six eyes and built like a Soviet tank. It dove into the water, and then when it re-surfaced, it had James in its mouth, shaking him like an old, ragged doll. "Let me go," he screamed. It tried to tear him apart, but the hero reached into the monster's mouth and tore off one of its heads. Its blood flew straight into the air and reddened the immediate area around the tarn. By killing one of its heads, it terminated the entire animal. It fell over next to the tarn and James collapsed on the right side of it.

"Olsen, you aren't in Kansas anymore, buddy," he said to himself as he lay on the ground next to the dead creature and looked up at the emerald sky. His right pants leg was completely missing at that point and he felt somewhat helpless. When he looked up into the night sky, at the emerald skyline, he could now see the swarm of large, deadly locusts patrolling. There were thousands of them, maybe even millions of them, and he knew there was no safe way to fly through that many beasts with acid for blood. In any case, he'd have to foot it instead of flying through the air. But off in the distance, approximately a mile down the road, he saw a house in the middle of a wide cornfield. Quickly, he washed off the dragon's blood and darted for the small cottage.

The three moons gave off enough light for him to see things clearly, and with the help of his enhanced vision, he could see the small, wooden cottage located in the middle of the cornfield. It gave him some relief knowing somebody else existed in the area. Immediately, James noticed the area was void of any birds or other flying creatures outside the locusts. He realized the flying beasts dominated the sky.

It looked like the occupants of the small dwelling had thick linen on the windows, keeping prying eyes from seeing inside, but James had the ability to see through the walls. When he looked inside the house with his x-ray vision, he saw a young woman with black hair putting a log on the fireplace. She had a soft visage, at least from where he stood. It was a medium-sized log that she let burn slowly. He watched her for only a moment. When he stepped onto the front porch of the wooden cottage, the lights turned on instantly. Due to the way the brightness hit him in the eyes, it caused him to squint. And when he did that, the young lady opened the front door with a laser rifle pointed directly at his face.

"What do you want, miscreant?" She asked with a scowl on her face. He could tell by her eyes that she had seen a lot of fighting in her life. Up close, her visage was stern, but she had a softness about her. "I won't pledge my loyalty to the Tin Man without some security." He stood in front of the woman with his missing, right pants leg, and tried not to aggravate the situation. He was still somewhat wet from falling in the tarn, but he wasn't dripping wet.

"I'm James Olsen," he said calmly as he noticed that the woman wasn't human at all. "What is this place? Who is this Tin Man?" He looked directly at the laser rifle and knew it wasn't anything like he had seen in the DEO. When he saw her, he made the assumption that she was indigenous to the planet and that he was a foreigner.

"Great Ptah!" She exclaimed, "Did you come through a rift in space and time too?" She lowered her weapon and then looked James over for a moment, astonished that she met a fellow traveler.

"I think so," he said with a grimace. Immediately, he noticed that she mention JJ's actual name, the name he used when he was a god known throughout the universe. "I was in Metropolis at one point and now I'm here."

When she invited him into the house, he noticed that she had ridges on her nose, pointy ears, green eyes, and thick eyebrows. Her complexion was light brown with long, straight black hair. A nice aroma of peaches reverberated throughout the entire house and it reminded him of JJ's crib. Other than that, she resembled Lena Luthor to a certain degree. "My name is Tre'Yan Pitnick. I'm from Vega Star," she said calmly, "I came here through a black hole nearly three years ago after the Battle of Vic Beg on Moxia. A laser blast damaged the warp core on my ship and I didn't have the power to escape the black hole that brought me here."

"I'm not familiar with any of those planets you named," he said with a grimace. "We have aliens on Earth who are refugees from around the galaxy, but we haven't conquered space travel yet."

"That's odd," she said, "The folklore from my planet plainly states that Ptah traveled to Earth to advance the huemonds eight hundred thousand years ago. In the old verse, he added the huemonds to the Neuronet before the entire race died out. He then put them on a planet called Gaia in the old text. I believe that was your Earth."

"I am human," he said calmly, "But I never heard such a story."

She laughed. "Your world must've been affected by the Great War in ways that stunted your growth," she said, "You should've been traveling in space for thousands of years now. If the huemonds have failed to advance, the Destroyer will eradicate your species and add it back to the Neuronet." He paused for a moment because he thought back to the reports about more people dying than being born. "The Destroyer doesn't eradicate life with violence. He uses a weaponized disease that impedes people from replenishing itself. Most worlds don't even know they've been chosen for annihilation until it's too late."

"That's happening now," he said, "It has begun on Earth."

"It's too bad," she said with a grimace, "A people can change and the Destroyer will rescind the plague. Unfortunately, I don't recall any race surviving the Destroyer's wrath according to my studies of the ancient text."

"What is this world with three moons?" James asked calmly.

"Ozario," she said with a smile. "We're on some kind of celestial plane that exists outside of time. It's like a prison inside the god containment unit called the Speed Force. There's really no way out. This entire world, this Speed Force, and all the planets within its wake are products of Ptah's technology. The inhabitants call this rock Oz."

"Wait? This is Oz, like in the Wizard of Oz?" He asked with a look of disbelief.

"Oh. You are from Earth so you're familiar with Dorothy Gale?" She asked. "Tavi said she returned to her world with the help of a witch, and they wrote a magical story about this place."

"That's right," he said, "I grew up on the story, but I thought it was pure fantasy."

She laughed for a moment, and then said, "Tavi talks about his adventures with Dorothy, that Earth lady, all the time. She actually left Oz and sold her story for a lot of money. As far as I know, she's the only person who ever left this plane, but she was a foolish girl and returned because of love." She smiled for a moment, and then said, "Love is a powerful drug. I think most creatures in the verse are fools for it."

"What happened to Dorothy?" James asked.

"The Tin Man," she said with a scowl on her face. "After he killed the Wizard, the Princess of Oz, and the Tins, he took the throne and ruled from Emerald City. Dorothy loved Tavi, but the Tin Man loved Dorothy. He killed her when she wouldn't take his hand in marriage and banned Tavi from the kingdom. When she returned, the Tin Man killed all his rivals and destroyed the machine that opened up rifts in space and time. It was all to keep Dorothy here. But when she didn't reciprocate his advances, he fed her to the water beast that lives in the tarn down the road."

"What's with the locusts?" He asked as he pointed up to the sky.

"The Tin Man's pet guards," she said with a grimace. "The only force against him are the witches who fly through the air on engine powered brooms. He ensures none of them can attack his kingdom from the sky. The locust and their corrosive venom would kill a witch within seconds of contact. He's a dictator." She turned the wooden log in the fire, and then said, "I was hoping with the power of Ptah that a rift in space and time would send me home." She laughed for a moment. "Well, in a few minutes I expect the Water Beast to feed on my corn," she said, "The Tin Man loves that creature and pays me a stipend to let it feed on my garden." She looked back at James for a moment, and then asked, "What happened to your pants leg?"

"One of the locusts attacked me," he said with a grimace.

"What? While you were on the ground?" She asked with a look of concern. "They never fly that low."

He paused for a moment and then said, "I flew…"

"Are you a warlock? Do you have an engine powered broom?" She asked as if she anticipated the answer to be yes.

"No," he said with a grimace. "Some beings can just fly."

She gasped for a moment. "Are you a celestial being like Ptah?" She asked.

"No," he said, "But I do know him."

She laughed. "You jest?" James sat on the couch and enjoyed the nice, peach aroma throughout the small home. Tre'Yan looked out the side window for a moment and then looked down at her watch on her left wrist. "Something isn't right," she said in her soft voice. She looked back at James, and then said, "The three-headed beast hasn't come for its nightly meal of corn." She walked across the room to a small round table near the kitchen. There was a vase on the table full of water. "Would you like some water to drink?"

"Yes," he said calmly. "What's wrong?" He asked. "You appear nervous."

She looked over at him with a nice smile and then said, "The three-headed monster hasn't come for its corn. I fear it might have killed one of the munchkins from the small village to the east of here." She paused for a moment and then sighed. "I hate when things don't go accordingly."

James knew he killed that beast but didn't want to say anything about it. Earlier, she said that the monster belonged to the Tin Man and he needed to know how committed she was to him before he revealed the beast was dead. "Maybe the munchkins slew it," he said.

She laughed for a moment, and then asked, "The Tin Man's pet? Nobody would do that knowing the consequences of such an action." She handed James the water and he gulped it down. "You're really thirsty, Mister Olsen."

"Yes, I am," he said with a smile. "I haven't had anything to drink for hours now."

"The monster could've nibbled from Tavi's corn, but I doubt it," she said, "He usually wouldn't eat from his farm until the next season." She sat on the couch with her glass of water and then said, "We usually try to give the three-headed monster what it needs to live without hunting," she said, "For example, I have unicorns on the edge of the property when he wants meat. That way he doesn't have to feed on the munchkins."

"Unicorns?" He asked.

"Yeah! I, too, was shocked by the unicorns because they had all died of a disease thousands of years ago in the Dark Corridor," she said, "It's written that Oa unleashed a plague that killed the unicorn population to hurt Ptah. In Vega Star's folklore, Ptah often fed on the flesh of the unicorns after a long day of courting the ladies. If the three-headed monster hasn't fed, then it'll feed on whatever it comes across."

After talking to her for nearly an hour, he realized that her love for Ptah perturbed him for some reason, especially since he knew JJ was Ptah. He didn't want to question her beliefs, but he wanted to understand her view of the god. "Is Ptah the primary deity on Vega Star?" He asked.

"Yes," she said with a smile. "He's responsible for the Speed Force. We believe when we've done bad deeds throughout life that our souls are trapped in the Speed Force for all eternity. All the worlds in the Dark Corridor worship Ptah on some level."

"So, you think he will save you?" James asked calmly.

"Either him or Orion," she said, "I often dream of them as all good people of Vega Star do."