No ambushes. No hidden mechanisms. The energy rod was theirs without a fight.
Then the old question surfaced again: what to do with it?
It was clearly a tech-based weapon. Both Batman and the Atom—the League's resident tech experts—fell into reflective silence. They wanted it badly, but neither trusted themselves to keep it secure. If word got out and it ended up in the wrong hands, the consequences would be catastrophic.
Batman's mind went immediately to the Joker. The idea of the Clown Prince of Crime learning that someone was sitting on a device capable of vaporizing the Earth was simply too horrifying to contemplate.
"Forget it. I'll take it," Thea said, reaching up and plucking the hovering rod from the air.
No one objected. The battle was over, the threat neutralized—and the mountain of loose ends that remained was staggering. The alien spacecraft. The clone army of identical women. Five hundred freshly penitent prisoners. A planet-killing energy rod. Any single one of these problems would have overwhelmed a normal person. Only Thea, with her connections threading through every level of government, could actually manage all of it.
She brought everyone back to Earth aboard the ship, offloaded the spoils to the Management Committee, and watched the other heroes head cheerfully home—leaving Thea to handle every last detail.
Diana had tried to slip away with them. One sharp look from Thea was all it took; she hunched her shoulders and stayed to help.
Thea decided the Demostars had a natural affinity for Buddhist practice. In ancient terms, they were what you'd call spiritually predisposed—even Helspont, their former leader, had already developed traces of magical power. Ignoring his unfortunate face, if you dropped him into the tenth century, he'd have passed for a high monk. She made a quick trip to the mountain summit, placed two sealing arrays over the cave, and locked it permanently.
The five hundred reformed prisoners were easy to sort. Two hundred were dispersed across various major construction sites—their formidable physiques put to good civic use. The remaining three hundred were assigned to Damien Darhk. Once the chief villain of a very bad year in Star City, now a prisoner of the Women's Justice League, the man had an unexpected talent for land management. Thea had already secured a sizable plot out in Nevada. With three hundred muscle-bound aliens handed over to him, off they went to grow corn.
The twenty-plus original Demostars aboard the spacecraft were also compulsion-treated. Their accumulated knowledge proved valuable—they were divided up and distributed to various scientific research departments.
The clone situation was the real headache. Humane disposal was off the table. Inserting over a hundred identical women into civilian society or any government agency was obviously impossible. Cloning was still a hot-button ethical debate in the current era; there was no way to roll them out publicly without triggering a firestorm. Thea laid down a simple directive: house them for now, and enroll every survivor in special operations training. Their loyalty would, of course, be to the Queen family.
The spacecraft itself went to the scientific research center operated by the Firestorm duo—Martin Stein and Jax. Thea had personal interest in its cloaking technology and intended to have it reverse-engineered.
The two stone golems were hauled back to the magic school, where she set them up as objects of study for newer students—a vivid illustration of what their predecessors had managed to build.
"And this?" Diana pointed at the energy rod resting on the table between them.
Thea rested her chin in her hand and let her mind wander. She couldn't leave it on Earth—too many variables, too much risk. Space wasn't ideal either; she didn't want to hand it over to the Highfather. Where did that leave her?
And then it hit her. The old wizard Shazam's Rock of Eternity.
She grabbed the energy rod with one hand and Diana's wrist with the other, and brought the Amazon warrior there like she was presenting a prize.
The Wizard had been sealed away—his divine power slowly being absorbed—and the place had been deserted ever since. The Rock of Eternity looked exactly as she'd left it last time: residual traces of magical combat still scored into the floor.
"What do you think? Not bad, right?"
Diana spent a moment genuinely feeling out the properties of the space. Even with her composure, her expression faltered. "Something is wrong with the time and space here. And there's another quality to it I can't quite name."
"Yes. This place is the central node of the multiverse. I once tried to move it into our own universe—no matter how much force I applied, it didn't budge an inch. That's when I realized what it was actually hiding."
The cosmological significance was beside the point right now. Thea found a box, tucked the energy rod away inside, made a quick survey of the premises, and headed back to Earth.
A crisis triggered by what had started as a recreational outing for the Women's Justice League had been quietly strangled before it ever reached the public. Ordinary people continued living their ordinary lives, entirely unaware.
Reports were written. Records were filed. Evidence was tagged, boxed, and sealed. When the entire procedure was complete, the secret of the Demostars was locked away in the Management Committee's classified archives—the door shut, the key turned, as though none of it had ever happened.
Priscilla's original body held no particular interest for Thea. Voodoo was a different story. The woman had found a way to weave her signature style of movement into genuine combat—an impressive feat, and a natural fit for the performing arts tradition. After basic agent training, Thea sent her to the magic school, where she was placed under Master Constantine's instruction to study more advanced "theory."
Time moved. By the end of March, the International Justice League had officially been established.
Booster Gold took command. Vixen, Fire, and Ice joined as the core trio of founding members, followed by the Soviet superhero Rocket Red and the enigmatic Iron General from a nation that preferred not to be named. Notably, the international team also featured its own Green Lantern: Guy Gardner.
Like Hal Jordan, Guy was from Earth—in fact, he'd been Abin Sur's second choice for the ring, passed over originally in favor of Hal. But the Darkseid War had claimed four Green Lanterns, and three of those rings had flown off into the cosmos. The fourth had stayed on Earth. By fate or coincidence, Guy Gardner had been standing in the right place. He picked up a green power ring and became Earth's newest Lantern.
What made Thea and Diana exchange a baffled look was that Batman had somehow squeezed himself into the roster as well. Bruce Wayne had walked into the International Justice League with the unspoken air of a man who was clearly in charge and fully expected everyone else to accept that.
The International Justice League looked impressive from the outside. On the inside, it was a bureaucratic nightmare. Seven members, each answering to more than twenty supervisors firing off contradictory directives in every direction. Their reputation couldn't hold a candle to the main Justice League's, and despite extensive media campaigns, they'd failed to build genuine public trust.
Vixen, Fire, and Ice had all complained to Thea directly—if they'd known how tangled the internal structure was, they never would have waded in.
Leadership pressure from above, zero motivation from the team. Booster Gold, stuck holding it together, was in an impossible position.
By contrast, something else that happened around the same time deserved a line in the history books.
In early April, the vast Ebon Trade Alliance entered the solar system. Both the government and the military immediately issued statements confirming it was a peaceful convoy.
The public was not stupid. Their response: And how exactly do you know that?
At first, the official answer was: classified, your clearance isn't high enough. Then came a flood of strategically mixed truths and half-truths—the Apollo moon landing, the recent construction of the Mars base—all of it designed to create the impression that those in power had been playing a very long game, and that everything was under control.