I can’t believe I’m getting up this early to type this crap…
Your original scenario left open a HELL of a lot more entertaining possibilities for me to play with for Zod’s defeat, Fenris. I had a notebook by my bed full of ideas: “Zod lured to Z’onn Z’orr White Martian prison”, “Batman with Atom’s size changing belt attacks Zod from inside”, “Infects Zod with modified kryptonian viruses from Kandor’s equivalent of the CDC”, “Batman uses mind device to transfer consciousness mind into a fleet of Smallville Superboy robot,” etc.
My favorite idea: a mere 7 hours into Zod’s 24 hour deadline, Batman shocks Zod by announcing over the airwaves he’s ready. Wearing a modified circa 1985 Lex Luthor battlesuit with vaccum-suspended hollow-tipped antimatter pulse cannon (to try something different than the typical /red solar radiation/magic/kryptonite attack) and time perception-enhancements somehow keyed to Flash’s perception, (to counter Zod’s superspeed tricks) Batman launches a desperate suicide attack on Zod, that has a certain degree of menace but another, secret ulterior purpose: to make SURE that, if defeat was imminent, Zod killed him ONLY under certain controlled circumstances in a place of Batman’c choosing. Sure enough, in the heated battle, Batman does manage to seriously wound Zod yet gets killed. Victorious yet suspicious, wounded yet no fool, Zod inspects Batman’s remains with his microscopic and X-ray vision to make sure that, yes, it’s really Batman, not a clone, not a robot, not a shapeshifting Martian, that he’s really dead, etc. Satisfied, Zod flies off to lick his wounds and conquer the world. Unknown to Zod, the ground where Batman falls is actually an early Lazurus pit of Ra’s Al Ghuls’s, held in biochemical stasis by Batman – which was unwittingly ACTIVATED by Zod himself with his super-vision, as per Batman’s REAL plan… The pit slowly resurrects and heals Batman, leaving Batman to crawl out of the ground. SKIP TO: Six months into the future… Zod has installed himself as absolute lord and master of Earth, and has forgotten all about that lowly human Batman, who suddenly launch a new, unexpected attack on Zod using stealth alien technology to bypass Zod’s senses and pummel him helpless.
THERE. Wasn’t this dramatic?
THEN you had to get all cute and add that &@#!! impossible scenario!
Man, I started to cuss.
But then I thought about it logically:
In Earth’s future, Zod gets the Miracle Machine from the Legion’s headquarters. In the past, he seals Earth from all outside influence by creating an impassable and indestructable force shield. FURTHER he makes it impossible for any dimensional access to Earth to occur. Now, if it were TRULY an impassable, unbreakable force shield, logically, NOTHING could get through it, no even sunlight. Without sunlight, temperatures would plunge to subzero in a matter of hours and all life on Earth would end in a matter of days. Which means, ultimately, the 1) Legion could not have existed. Which mean the Miracle Machine would either 2a) Not exist or 2b) Not have been in the Legion’s possession. Equally logical, 3) Zod wouldn’t have been able to get the Miracle Machine ANYWAY because thanks to the nature of his wish, Earth would STILL have been surrounded by the force field in the Legion’s future! (The Iron Curtain of Time, if turned on, only means the Legion couldn’t go into their OWN future)
All of this meant (da duh duh DAH) time paradox!!
It is Batman’s clearest proof that Zod’s wishes are doomed to failure, if he could only think of the best tactic.
(Fenris, you could argue Hypertime, the Time Trapper’s ‘bubble dimension’, and all of that, but I think most of us geeks reading this would see that the future Earth and past Earth you described existed in the same time continuum. Especially with Wish #7.)
My current thinking along this lines is simple, and similar to one suggested earlier by E-Sabbath: (Thanks, bud!) Batman, realizing the paradox within MINUTES (hey it took me two days and Batman’s smarter than me), and seeing that Zod is heavily relying on not his own superpowers but a device from the Legion’s era to keep superheroes from stopping him, decides to fight future impossible science with far FAR future impossible science. Ignoring the screams and fears of Gothamites who are now trapped in a sunless world, Batman takes a sample of his most futuristic weapon at hand – the machine-and-superhuman-infecting Solaris Virus from DC ONE MILLION – his one active sample held in an active/inert loop in a small Bat-temporal displacement device that somehow survived the Gotham quake intact and was also somehow passed up by Ra’s Al Ghul’s men when they looted the Batcave for those JLA protocols (For critics who want to argue this, it’s the 21st century Morrison-Batman from DC ONE MILLION, ok? He’s that paranoid. He’s got a centrifuge and a teleporter he built himself, he can’t have a lousy time device? And this version has preserved dangerous doomsday items before, like Starro’s drones)
Batman activates the temporal device to launch itself into orbit and its self-replicating 853rd century virus payload at the last known coordinates of the 30th century Miracle Machine. Since it didn’t take long for Batman to figure any of this out, he only needs to send the machine back… oh… an hour or so at the most, at the exact instance when the force shield is activated.
Irony: thanks to the nature of Zod’s wishes, NOBODY – not even his Zod’s Time Zone buddies – can use their vision powers to peer past the force shield. They have no idea what’s going on on Earth.
Batman’s gambit works! ( Duh.) The device appears in space by Zod. The shoddy and crude engineering represented by the 30th century Miracle Machine is no match for the sheer crippling power of the 853rd century Solaris Virus. Immediately, the MM begins to malfunction. Zod can SEE and FEEL his wishes come undone. Zod pisses his pants. Bad move, the vacuum of space. One by one his ridiculous MM-powered conditions fade… except ONE…
“4) No matter what Batman does, he always loses from now on. And no “Well, he tries to help me so when he loses he hurts me” type crap. His ultimate goal, even if he convinces himself otherwise (via self-hypnosis or that kinda crap) will always fail.”
Well, because Batman’s “ultimate goal” has always been to stop evildoers but to take them alive in the process, and this, is Zod’s fatal flaw in reasoning. As the last lingering effect of the Miracle Machine holds, this aspect of Batman’s plan DOES, in fact, fail. All the other wishes fade, but the Solaris Virus turns from the malfunctioning Miracle Machine… and infects Zod.
Zod immediately passes out in the vacuum of space. Unconscious, he can no longer hold his breath. The vast quantities of air he trapped in his super-efficient super-lungs in order to survive in space escapes his body – and Zod dies from both asphixiation and collapsed lungs.
Ultimately the Solaris Virus takes over the force shield projector and it, too, malfunctions – shutting it down – allowing sunlight to shine over Earth again. Then the virus drifts towards earth.
How Batman manages to stop this rampaging 853rd Solaris virus that now threatens to shut down Earth is a long, boring story I don’t feel like getting into. But he does. By himself. During his lunch break.
Later, Batman relates his story to Superman. Superman can’t believe it. “Zod wasted all that universal potential – all that cosmic power – just to try and stop YOU. Why? What was he so afraid of?”
“Beats me,” said Batman with a shrug. “I’m only human.”
HA!
–Askia
Batfan with the Bat-plan GAHWDAMN, m’man.
) it’s a mix of the gravity and the “yellow solar radiation” that does it.
