The Danvers sisters needed a little time to arrange things, and some people lived too far away to come quickly—Yavara, for instance, lived deep in the South American jungle. Others had work to deal with: Renee Montoya and Maggie Sawyer were both cops, so the gathering was pushed to the weekend.
Two days later, in the Hall of Justice, Thea welcomed new members to the League as one of its founding members.
Green Arrow Oliver Queen and The Atom Ray Palmer officially joined the Justice League.
The original Batman had been replaced by Dick Grayson—no one in the room objected to this. That said, the new Batman had no advanced tech (none whatsoever), no money either, which made him roughly ninety-nine percent decorative. Thea had privately concluded they should just keep him around as a mascot.
The other slot that changed hands was the Green Lantern position. The Guardians of Oa had reached their absolute limit with Hal Jordan. They'd forcibly recalled him to the central planet to await reassignment, and handed the ring to a newcomer: John Stewart, a former Marine and a Green Lantern—and Black.
"You're not exactly giving me a friendly look, young Green Lantern." Thea swept the room with her gaze and caught the new GL glaring at her. Was he always this worked up?
"You lead the Yellow Lanterns, and the Yellow Lanterns are evil!" the newcomer said, visibly irritated.
"Ha." Thea laughed, and quietly stopped Diana and Oliver with a small gesture—she signaled she had it handled.
Her laughter rang through the entire hall. "That line was clearly fed to you by those Guardians—and they sent you here to replace Hal Jordan? Their political maneuvering is as clumsy as ever."
It was a precisely aimed opening move. Hal, despite a long list of aggravating habits, had gotten along extremely well with the rest of the League. He was close friends with the Flash and the Green Arrow—genuine ones, by all accounts. When word went around that he'd been politically maneuvered out, the room's collective gaze toward John Stewart turned cold almost instantly.
John Stewart hadn't even registered that Thea was using Hal's goodwill to isolate him. He kept going, cataloguing every sin of the Yellow Lanterns.
"The Yellow Lanterns sacrificed enormously in the last great war. They are not evil." Diana was on her feet. If this man couldn't back up what he was saying, she was going to provide a lesson.
Thea pulled her back down. When you can win with two sentences, why raise a fist?
"You keep saying the Yellow Lanterns are evil. Do you know who founded them?"
"Don't try to dodge this—I know it was Sinestro." The new GL squared his shoulders, as if he'd just seen through an obvious verbal trap.
"Right, exactly—evil Sinestro. That's the version the Guardians gave you, isn't it?"
John Stewart nodded, with the expression of a man for whom the name Sinestro was a contamination of sacred ground.
Thea almost laughed out loud. "What the Guardians probably forgot to mention is that the extraordinarily powerful ring on your hand right now? That's the one Sinestro wore when he was still a Green Lantern."
The expression on John Stewart's face moved through a remarkable sequence—disbelief, suspicion, and then something close to dread. It was hard to read on his face, but it was there.
"Something this evil—why haven't you thrown it away? Buried it? Destroyed it?"
She pressed on. "These Guardians of yours—defenders of justice—I wonder if they mentioned that before the Green Lantern Corps existed, they built another interstellar peacekeeping force. The Manhunters. Those Manhunters went rogue and slaughtered every intelligent lifeform in an entire sector of space. The Green Lantern Corps was built precisely because of that catastrophe. Mr. Stewart, are you aware that the survivors of that sector founded the Red Lantern Corps? That they want revenge against the Green Lanterns? Do you consider those survivors—people who lived through that massacre—evil?"
"Seventy-nine planets. Nearly a hundred and fifty billion intelligent lives, slaughtered by the force you call champions of justice. As a member of Oa's honor guard, Mr. Stewart—clearly a man who follows every rule to the letter—I assume you'd say those lives deserved to die?"
It was a devastatingly precise line of argument. Thea knew perfectly well that the massacre had nothing to do with the Guardians themselves—Krona had engineered it from the shadows—but John Stewart didn't know that, and neither did the Guardians. That was all she needed. Tearing into him was effortless and, frankly, a pleasure.
And she'd made a point of naming his background: honor guard. By-the-book. Follows orders. In a room full of people who had built their entire careers around not following orders, that wasn't going to age well for him.
She finished without waiting for a reply. Her lips formed a single quiet word: Idiot. Then she turned and leaned in to speak softly to Diana.
The rest of the League regarded John Stewart with varying degrees of unease. The new Green Lantern sank back into his seat, expressionless and thoroughly humbled.
The atmosphere in the hall was distinctly off. The sharp-tongued Hal was gone; the perpetually combative Batman was gone. Nine people exchanged a few brief words and wrapped up the meeting.
"How is your student coming along?" Thea asked as she and Diana walked out of the Hall of Justice and strolled down the street, unhurried.
At the mention of her student, Wonder Woman's expression shifted into something unusually troubled. She thought for a moment, choosing words carefully. "Overall, she's fine—but she has absolutely no sense of urgency. Training her is like pulling teeth. I was very dedicated at her age."
Diana punctuated this with a small, decisive punch of the air.
"Don't rush her. She's young—she'll get there." Thea smiled like a fox with a secret. "Besides... if I remember correctly, you weren't exactly a model student at that age either. You used to sneak off to play whenever you could, didn't you?"
Diana cut her a look. The meaning in her eyes was perfectly legible: how would you know anything about my childhood? When I was playing in the mud, your family hadn't been born for eighteen generations.
Thea flicked her wrist and conjured an image in midair.
Young Diana—tiny and adorable—was clutching a stuffed animal around a corner, eavesdropping on her mother and aunt. Hippolyta and Antiope were deep in a worried conversation. The girl's bright eyes filled slowly with tears she refused to let fall. She squared her small shoulders, went back to her room, locked every toy she owned in a box, pulled out a little blade and a little sword, and began drilling alone.
So much for being dedicated from a young age.
"Oh!" Diana immediately dispersed the water-mirror projection and looked around sharply, confirming no one had seen. She exhaled with visible relief. "How did you even find these images—?"
"Ha, ha, ha—" Thea was delighted. The moment Aurocore Eye 2.0 had come online, she'd traced the river of time and combed through Diana's entire childhood. She'd found a truly excellent collection of embarrassing moments. Whether this constituted abusing her position was, Thea felt, simply not a question worth asking.