At the mention of the Queens, the patriarch let out a quiet, contemptuous laugh. "Moira Queen wants to finish her term and leave behind a glowing legacy. A woman blinded by vanity." He paused. "As for her daughter—she's a superhero. 'Guardian of humanity' is practically her religion. Let them keep their charming ideals and watch over their little planet. Ha."
The other elders joined in with varying shades of laughter. From where they sat, they had seen through everything. The Queens—mother and daughter—were throwing away real power for the sake of reputation. Naive. Foolish. Hardly worth their respect.
One elder with sharp triangular eyes then raised the idea: why buy at all? On a suitably dark night, couldn't they just send people in and take what they wanted?
The room responded with collective scorn. The man clearly hadn't thought it through. These were aliens. Their technology was centuries ahead of Earth's. Even if you successfully seized a warship, who would fly it? These were vessels over six miles (10 km) long—not bicycles you could just ride off on. The Alliance sold warships with a full training package. They provided all the learning materials and guaranteed instruction until the crew could operate the vessel independently. Go ahead and steal one. See who teaches you to fly it.
The families quickly reached consensus: what the others had, they would have too. No debate. Buy.
Thea, of course, knew exactly what they were thinking. This was all unfolding precisely as she had engineered it. She understood the younger generation thoroughly—their ambitions, their pride, their hunger. Use those instincts well, and even the most fortified walls break from the inside. The arrow was already nocked. They had no way to step back now.
They were pouring staggering fortunes into cosmic warships. They weren't going to just park them at home and use them as theme parks. Or take supermodels on joyrides through the hold.
You want greed? I'll give you a meal so rich it chokes you. Load your families onto those warships, take your assets into the stars, and go conquer something. That's the plan.
Did they really think every alien in the galaxy was as courteous as Grodd? Grodd, who frightened even himself when he lost his temper? That was the show they'd put on for the cameras. The universe was nothing like that.
If these wolf-packs won out in the stars, they'd absorb some of Earth's pressure. If they lost? Well. That was nothing to do with Thea.
Events unfolded exactly as expected. The families mobilized, pooling centuries of accumulated reserves to buy warships. Thea applied pressure from behind the scenes—feeding narratives to media outlets she controlled, framing the situation as a new Age of Exploration, and stoking ordinary citizens' outrage at these wealthy dynasties getting an unfair head start. The more the public complained, the more determined the old families became. You say we can't? Watch us. By the end of it, they were comparing themselves to Magellan and da Gama with full sincerity.
Under Thea's quiet direction, the old families collectively purchased six of the ten warships. World governments, with all their military might, managed only four. The scale of wealth suddenly on display made the families' centuries of hidden influence impossible to maintain. They had no choice but to step back into the open—and into the crossfire of a very angry public.
They spent weeks dealing with one wave of denunciation after another. Then, a month later, the DuPont family led a heavily armed expedition against a planet not far from the solar system—a world whose civilization had barely reached the agricultural age. Against weapons from Earth, backed by alien firepower, they had no answer. The DuPonts routed them completely.
Word of that first victory slipped back to Earth. The other families were electrified. Driven by their impatient heirs, one dynasty after another launched into the stars.
"Finally." Thea sat back in her office chair, ankles crossed on the desk. "Those old fossils are gone."
Driven by greed, they had abandoned Earth like it was yesterday's garbage—leaving only skeleton crews behind to watch their properties—and charged into the cosmos with flags flying. One family had even declared, on their way out, that the stars were their destiny.
To steady their resolve, the first few planets Thea had quietly pointed them toward were a mix: some genuinely challenging, some barely past the Bronze Age. All of them within the families' capabilities. All of them real victories waiting to be had.
As for what came after? Thea could only offer limited attention to that.
Earth was what mattered to her. No reason she could fully articulate, no logical framework—this place was simply the center of the universe. The divine power she drew from interactions here versus anywhere else wasn't even comparable. One unit of divinity in space; ten on Earth. Those old families thought Earth was a polluted backwater. They had no conception of what this planet meant—to her, to Diana, to Darkseid, to the multiverse itself. That was the unbridgeable distance between their perspectives.
She hadn't used force. She'd let them leave of their own free will. Even the Phantom Stranger's crowd—those self-appointed arbiters of divine law—couldn't find anything to object to. Everything she'd done was clean by both the written rules and the unwritten ones.
Between them, the old families had acquired six fifth-level warships—warships that hadn't been Thea's to begin with, having originally been seized by the Sinestro Corps and Deathstroke's crew—and in exchange had handed over something extraordinary.
"Alright. Tell me," Thea said to her secretary. "What did we actually get?"
The secretary could barely contain her excitement. She held up a thick stack of documents and began reading.
"Queen Group shares recovered: 17%. Wayne Group holdings increased: 19%. Rotech Industries: 26%..." She continued through the major corporations, then: "In addition to the above, you now hold controlling interests in 19 pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, 14 aircraft production companies, 9 shipbuilding firms... and 13 media companies."
"Krupp, the Springfield Armory, Beretta..." She listed them one by one. "You hold significant shares in all of these. For 12 of them, you now hold a majority."
"Remaining assets—real estate spanning the globe, islands, private castles, oil fields—are still being tallied."
"Our payment," the secretary said, then smiled quietly, "was the Queen Group's full stockpile of steel, petroleum, and rare earth metals."
She was a member of the Indigo Tribe, and she understood exactly what she was looking at—Thea taking from her right hand and giving to her left, without losing a single thing. Every asset the families had handed over came back into the Queen family's own ecosystem anyway. Meanwhile, Thea had baited a pack of greedy fools into volunteering to go risk their lives in the most dangerous corners of the universe.
The families thought they'd outmaneuvered everyone. They had no idea: Blackest Night was coming. In a few years, the entire universe would face a reckoning, and their odds of surviving it were essentially zero. Their wealth would change hands whether they agreed to it or not. The only difference was timing.
"It looks like a lot," Thea said. "At this scale, it's really just numbers."
She had no intention of sitting on it. The fortune needed to go back into circulation—social redistribution of wealth accumulated by dynasties over centuries. That was the real work ahead.
Over the following days, she and Moira pushed hard. The government rolled out a comprehensive package of policies incentivizing and subsidizing manufacturing—especially mid-tech production. Humans began reverse-engineering alien goods at every level. Wealthy consumers bought the originals; ordinary people bought the knockoffs. Thea was not about to admit she'd learned this particular strategy from a certain country's legendary approach to mobile phones.
But it worked. The manufacturing surge drove employment up sharply. People who had been drifting suddenly found themselves pulled into factories—no degree required, just a functioning mind—and able to afford, for the first time, real stability. A house. A car. An actual future.
Most ordinary people had no idea what had caused the shift. They only knew that ever since the aliens showed up, life on Earth had gotten better.