Chapter 58

Green Lantern found Spider-Man and Tahiri lying on the floor near the place where the three of them had teleported into the alien ship. They were both unconscious. Spider-Man was missing his mask. Hal saw it lying on the floor several feet away.

Hal checked Spider-Man's pulse. He had a pulse, but it was very weak. Then Green Lantern scanned Spidey with his ring, and instructed his ring to give him a damage assessment. The ring quickly reported that Spider-Man had a couple of broken ribs, a severed patella tendon, and was suffering from the effects of a highly toxic serpentine venom. The ring added that the Spidey's body had already began to heal the concussion and broken ribs, but it concluded that without immediate assistance the venom would be fatal. The Wallcrawler's body was working to remove the toxin, but he had received a massive dose. Hal quickly pointed his power ring at Spider-Man and willed his ring to remove all of the venom from his body and assist with the healing of his injuries.

Then Hal kneels beside Tahiri. He checks her pulse. She has no pulse.And she isn't breathing. Hal uses his ring to detoxify her bloodstream, ridding her body of the paralyzing venom. Then he uses the ring to restart her heart and her breathing. When Tahiri opens her eyes, she looks up at Hal and smiles.

Tahiri: "Now you show up, after we did all the work."

Hal: "How do you feel?"

Tahiri: "Like I got run over by a herd of banthas. But I'm not paralyzed anymore."

Spidey: "Is anyone going to ask me how I feel?"

Tahiri: "Spidey! You're alive!"

Spidey(checking his own pulse on his wrist): "Yeah. Seems so."

Hal teleports himself and the others back to his ship.

Tahiri: "What about the Yuuzhan Vong?"

Hal: "We're taking them to Zenoma Sekot. Now that their warmonger leaders have been taken out, they should settle down peacefully."

Tahiri: "You found Sekot?"

Hal: "My ring did. I just instructed the ring to search for a sentient planet."

Tahiri: "And it found Sekot just like that? It took Master Luke months to find it."

Hal: "Well, first the ring started telling me about Mogo."

Tahiri: "Mogo?"

Hal: "Mogo is a sentient planet that exists in my universe. He's also a Green Lantern so the ring has a report about him in its database."

Tahiri: "Oh."

Hal: "So I told the ring that I was looking for a different sentient planet that exists in this universe. A few minutes later, the ring had found Sekot."

(Later after they have dropped the Yuuzhan Vong off on Zenoma Sekot.)

Spidey: "Hey, Hal."

Hal: "Yeah?"

Spidey: "There's something I've been wondering about."

Hal: "What's that?"

Spidey: "Why did your counterpart in the other DCU timeline go crazy and you didn't?"

Tahiri: "I was wondering about that too."

Hal: "Oh, Superman and I figured that out before we left New York. In the reality that Superman came from—I guess you could call it the mainstream DCU—my counterpart was possessed by a fear entity called Parallax. The Guardians had imprisoned Parallax in the Central Power Battery on Oa."

Spidey: "Fear entity?"

Tahiri: "Well, fear is the path to the darkside."

Hal: "It was awoken by my archenemy Sinestro when the Guardians imprisoned Sinestro in the Central Power Battery. Then after Parallax awoke, it possessed my counterpart. It needed help to escape its prison. The key difference between our two realities is that in my home reality the Guardians didn't imprison Sinestro inside the Central Power Battery so therefore Parallax wasn't awoken."