In 2001, I came up with an idea for a self-insert novel about a superhero with an power ring that was a blatant Green Lantern ripoff. I cleverly shifted it to vaguely defined "energy" and had totally-not-me dress in black and silver, because I was 12 and light refraction indexes.

Over time, I broadened the concept. For one thing, the SI hasn't had my name for most of a decade, and I think of him as an entirely separate person. He also has a supporting cast and an actual goal in the planned first book. The following two would each follow an (original) member of his team and the series would involve a plot to kill heroes and save the Tri-State area.

Like many aspiring writers, I haven't actually written the books. I know, broadly, what the plots will be about, and have notes scattered all over the place, but nothing substantial. I'd post it as a web serial, but I'd have...difficulties with and donations. (I probably should've given the money back to that orphanage.)

So, recently, I had a dream involving a clear, plastic power ring that I found in a store. I distinctly recall dream-me thinking, "boy, this would make good fodder for a Lantern Self-Insert like I'm reading all the time on Spacebattles."

And then I woke up, and I had no idea what my powerset might be.

Then I thought "not plastic, crystal. And what does a crystal do? It refracts."

And then I threw in the supporting characters and put them in a setpiece from the first book, buuut turned up a bit. As is my tendency to think in references.

And here we are. This is only going to be a one-shot, since I can't be arsed to change formatting between the SB version and the FFdotnet version for every chapter, and I don't have any long-term plot in mind. This is just a proof-of-concept. I don't think I'd be able to make an actual book out of this without DC suing me unless I used the emotions from Inside Out or something.

At which point I'd risk being sued by Disney, which would be much, much worse.


Prism Ring: Any Color You Like
(or; There and Back Again)

It's a beautiful day in Silver City, California. The sun is shining, the skies are clear, and people are fleeing in terror from a bank robbery.

Admittedly, the robbery involves powered armor, magic, and high-powered weaponry, but details.

My ring's Passive Information Gathering is gathering information about the woman on the rooftop below me. Actually, it's Active Information Gathering, but I like the looks on people's faces when they work out the acronym.

Green Priority: Does AIG Insurance exist in this world? Or is it AIG Financial? Whatever.

Item added.

Merci, ring.

The sniper, PIG says, is French and genetically modified, to the point where her skin is blu-

Wait a second. Does she, as the kids say, got the booty?

As it happens, she dooo.

Oh, this cinches it. I'm either at the whim of some Random Omnipotent Being, or I'm in a lantern self-insert fic. In fact, I'm in a self-insert fic set in the self-insert universe I started creating when I was 12, where I can feel free to do things like blatant Overwatch character ripoffs. And fitting my love of puns, not-Widowmaker is literally on overwatch.

Then again, la belle madame is herself a fusion of Black Widow and Hawkeye, so there's a serious question of how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Well, nothing for it but to disarm her in a suitably intelligent way.

"Ahem," I cough.

She doesn't notice.

"Pardon," I say, a little louder, in my best French accent.

She jerks up from the scope, her rifle already collapsing to carbine form. Unfortunately for her, I've been absorbing her focus for the past several minutes, and it's simple enough to upshift that green will into golden fear.

It's either that, or turn it into hope, and that's the last thing I want her to feel. Shame I can't turn her will against her directly.

I'm not sure what she sees, when she looks at me. Perhaps her dead husband. Perhaps whatever They did to her. Whatever it is, her rifle falls from her nerveless hands, her mouth hangs open, and a tear falls from her eye.

I look away as she starts babbling, and force myself not to disable the ring's translation. It's all desperate words of apology, she made a mistake, it wasn't her, it wasn't her, they did it, she couldn't help herself-

Yeesh.

I take her fear and upshift it to avarice,

(mineminemine)

which I use, briefly, to subspace the fancy rifle she used. Even with the Prism Ring's computational ability assisting me, I don't dare use it, because it sure doesn't have a "stun" setting.

I have this image, suddenly, of me blowing off a cop's arm, a civilian's head, hitting the fuel tank of a car with a baby in the backseat-

Okay, shake off the fear. Put the ring in neutral, which limits it to a life support forcefield, comms, and computing (not even flight, can you believe it?), and turns it from orange to its neutral greyish-translucent. Safety-Cuff her. Alert the cops. Survey the situation.

It's not looking good for the home team. The out-of-towners have someone holding up a half-dome shield glowing with what are presumably magical runes in the direction of the cops, while some mooks load a truck, and the guy in the flying tin can mops up anyone trying to sneak up on the blindside, occasionally tossing missiles and bombs just to keep the po-po honest. It's a complete shutout, or no-hitter, or sticky wicket, or whatever the applicable metaphor is.

I'm not very interested in sports.

The ring tells me that the truck doesn't appear to be weighed down by the moneybags being piled into it, which probably means it's bigger on the inside, which indicates either high-tech or magic. What information it gathered about magic users is scattered and incomplete and contradictory, for some reason.

I'm not sure why they're robbing a bank, when the suit alone would be worth more than the few tens of thousands or whatever is kept in the vault. Heck, the truck would be worth more.

Yellow Priority: Is there anything this could be a distraction from? Did they go after the safe deposit boxes? Oh, and do more in-depth research into magic.

Items added.

Danke, ring.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can batter down the shield with my almost-out reserves of will without Phony Stark taking me to task. If I try to fly around it, with my limited skill, there's a good chance I just punch out all of Gandalf the Greedy's blood, and that does not make for a good first impression for the cops. And if I attack his armored compatriot, I open myself up to magic attacks. In short, they'll cover for each other, and if the mooks get involved, ooh, ooh, this could get messy. Fly away with the truck? I might run out of will, Tin Man would chase me and I couldn't fight him off, and that still leaves the rest of a crew as a threat. Maybe I could use my ace in the hole someh-

I spot movement. A young Asian woman built on the lines of Ronda Rousey is moving towards the robbers. They don't notice her, because she periodically turns into rubble, a grocery bag, a wallet-

I can see one of the bad guys actually stop to think about going to get it, while holding a giant bag of money. Amazing.

And then she's in among the sheep.

They're armed, of course. High-tech laser thingies, blow right through a cop car if they had time to shoot. (Hence, Widowmaker on overwatch. She's even been keeping their escape route clear, by stopping any cop cars before they got close enough to block the road.) But they don't have time to even notice the girl before she's right there, and pulling weapons out of grips and applying leverage and occasionally shifting and by the time Aluminium Man has cottoned on, she's standing in a pile of knocked out bad guys, breathing heavily, a slight smile on her face.

It's nice to see your creations in action.

She's a shapeshifter, a trained martial artist since she was old enough to walk, adopted, an unlicensed hero as of, presumably, a few seconds ago, and the only thing different from the way I wrote her is the name. Olivia Aldrin. She's using her real face, oddly, even though in the book's outline she uses a composite Asian face when on the job. Now when I say she's Asian, I mean Asian, not just what used to be called "the Orient". She's mixed. Adopted by an American family after an earthquake that destroyed all records of her parentage. Her foster dad is-

Well.

Spoilers.

I ask the ring to look for a white teenage guy with blonde hair and grey eyes nearby. He's with the civilians, handing a kid to his mother, and then looking back at the bank robbery with concern, where Flying Man is about to unload on Liv -

"Ring! Two User-level accounts with comms privilege, and Overclock!"

Okay, let me explain. In The Book I Am Writing, "Saul Moss" eventually grants his teammates access to a sort of bullet-time conference call that allows them to plan. (It's like Accelerated Perception from Mr Zoat's With This Ring", except I did it before it was cool.) The blonde kid, named Gabe here, apparently, has the ability to see probable futures. (Again, like Dinah from Worm, except I did it - nevermind.) This makes him a good tactician, and obvious choice for team leader.

I'm pretty sure he didn't see getting roped into a high-speed Skype call running on a magic alien ring coming, though.

An instant later, from the world's perspective, just before Iron Pan (look, they can't all be winners) gets target lock and goes Justice Rains From Above!, a shot glances off of his helmet, knocking him to the side and spoiling his aim. It is, of course, delivered by Gabe, who unlike me, does know how to shoot, even if it's through a high-tech rifle recently owned by an uncannily-good French sniper. His power helps with that.

At the same time, I use the fleeing crowd's fear downshifted to will, and quickly fly right up to the shield.

"Hey," I say.

The magician looks at me for a second. He's greedy. Very greedy. Probably planning to Dark-Knight-opening-sequence everyone else as soon as they're clear of the cops.

You know how they say you see red when you get pissed? In this case, it was literal. Angry crimson bile comes spewing out of my throat, so this insect's own upshifted avarice is eating away at his shield. he tries collapsing it to a smaller, full-coverage shield, but nope, that's gone too. And as his primary emotion shifts to fear, I let up on the firehose. Despite my anger, I'm still rational enough on some level to wonder how much Pepto I'm going to have to take for that kind of heartburn.

And then the macro Gabe wrote activates, the ring goes green, speeds forward, catches him in a chokehold, and holds him until he falls asleep while he thrashes ineffectually. Like most wizards, he didn't put ranks in Unarmed Combat. Very sad.

Meanwhile, the Man in the Iron Suit has recovered, to find a certain blue assassin where Liv was, clutching at the bloody hole in her side.

"Gavin?" she says, staggering toward him. "Cherie?"

He cuts thrusters and drops to the ground, catching her in his arms as she falls. Looking around wildly, he sees me, Safety-Cuffing his magical partner.

He could've escaped. He could've just seen the heat coming around the corner and walked - or rocketed - away with her. There were two problems with that.

The first one, as you already figured out, is that his girlfriend was catatonic on a rooftop, and he was holding Liv.

The second was that Liv and Gabe had bought me just enough time to upshift his love to compassion, exposing him to every emotion in the area. Even getting the bleed-off sends me reeling, but it was either that or downshift, which would send it right out of the emotional spectrum.

Sure is strange how the emotional spectrum just happens to fit within the human-visible electromagnetic spectrum. And what about Green Lanterns like Rot Lop Fan, who uses an F-Sharp bell instead of the green light? Would my ring just change pitch? Is there some sort of infrared or ultraviolet lantern? What would a magnetic or FM lantern do?

Oh, right, the supervillain.

He falls to his knees, crying.

The ring estimates that he'll be incapacitated for 27.93114 minutes. I call the cops in, and bleed off their will, shifting it to hope to heal anyone in the area who needs it, letting the ring triage.

If they need me to get him out of the suit, I can make a construct can-opener or something. I hope. I've been having terrible luck with constructs. I could just as easily end up opening him.

As for now, I'm just gonna collapse in front of the bank, if nobody minds. After a few seconds, Liv joins me.

"Good job, champ," I say. "Good effort."

She looks at me sidelong, brow furrowed. "How did you know those things?"

I wave a hand at her. "Magic space ring."

The logo on the ring, FYI, happens to look like a greyish linework version of the Google Chrome logo, except with two segments instead of one. It's not symmetrical like all the other corps, unless you count rotational symmetry. I'm thinking a whirlpool. Or...something else. I'm sure it'll come to me.

I detect Gabe approaching, slipping through the gaps in the police perimeter like water through a sieve. It must be nice for Liv to have someone who cares about you like that.

Of course, everyone who cared about me was in another universe I might never get back to.

Funny thing about the ring; to prevent bootstrapping loops (I assume), any emotion shifted from the wielder is much less powerful than those gathered from others. So my yellow despair only came out to a trickle of green will. I stored it anyway.

Red Priority; find out if "Saul Moss" exists in this universe, as well as the villain of the piece. If I was writing this, and there's a good chance I am, I'd change up everything so me wouldn't know what to expect, so me could screw I over and make it entertaining for our readers.

Items added.

Thanks, ring. Sorry for the confusing pronouns.

I could delay any existential conundrums until later. After determining my hero codename. "Mood ring" is a bit too...disco. Maybe "Prism"? I can't even call myself a "Lantern" because I don't actually have a power battery. Yet.

Gabe had ditched the rifle someplace the cops would be statistically likely to find it - natch - and approached Liv at a run. She didn't get up for a hug, so he just settled for an uncertain "...hey."

She smiled up at him. "Hey yourself. I'm fine. Worn out, but fine."

He gave a wan smile, and sat down next to her. "Me too."

I tried not to smile. Ah, young love. They'd jump into a fight to save complete strangers, but they couldn't admit their feelings for each other. Just like I wrote 'em.

Interesting.

I lie down, and close my eyes.

But that sure wasn't going to be my problem.

"Have you ever tried shawarma?" I say, pretty much involuntarily. "I don't know what it is, but I want some."