FAQ

This FAQ is also found on the first post of Thread 12[1]

What is this about?

With This Ring is a Self Insert (SI) story in which an individual very much like the author finds themselves in a fictional setting, in this case Earth 16. He is equipped with the pyjamas he was wearing when he appeared and an orange power ring.

What is Earth 16?

Earth 16 is the setting of the animated series Young Justice, the associated comics and that game we don't talk about. The number serves to differentiate it from other versions of Earth created by DC comics. For example, Batman: the Animated Series, Superman: the Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited take place on Earth 12. The SI's planet of origin will be referred to as Earth Prime.

Yes, that's a very Earth centric way of listing parallel universes.

Earth 16 is similar to pre-Flashpoint Earth 1, with some of the more extreme power sets toned down a bit. Superman is very strong, but he can't juggle planets. The Flash is very fast, but he can't run backwards or forwards in time. The Justice League has been together as a group for seven years.

How often do you post?

For over two years this story has updated daily. I aim to maintain this. Help me.

How does this story deviate from canon?

While I have tried to keep the story as true to the original series as possible one or two things have slipped by. For example, it is strongly implied that Alan Scott died some time before series one while here he is alive and serves as a major supporting character. In this story Donna Troy is known to Wonder Woman and has worked with her for several years while in the series (due to some sort of legal dispute) she never made an appearance and didn't start working with Wonder Woman until after series one ended. The 11th of September attacks never happened in this version of the setting due to the radically different post World War Two Middle eastern history which gave rise to entirely different countries.

As to what else is canon, I have made use of things written by the series' co-creator Greg Weisman's website, stuff from the Young Justice comic and quite a lot from wider DC canon.

Further deviations will occur as the SI causes changes that would not have occurred without him.

What does Renegade mean?

The morality system of the computer game Mass Effect describes aggressively assertive actions as 'renegade' and friendly and diplomatic actions as 'paragon'.

The SI is mostly paragon, going to considerable lengths to get on with everyone he meets. The Renegade parts of the story describe a version on him who made some rather different choices, and the results thereof. Renegade sections will usually have the date and time written in red.

Strongly renegade aligned decisions will be indicated with the renegade star-in-a-circle image.

Strongly paragon aligned decisions will be marked with the paragon wing-in-a-circle.

Please note that the main SI's paragon decisions are usually not marked in this way as there would be too many of them.

As of the present time none of the actions that have taken place in the Renegade timeline have affected the main SI's timeline and vise versa. Yes, this means that you can skip them if you like.

Renegade episodes are largely taken from the point of view of the Renegade. Again, at the moment they have not directly affected the main SI's timeline and I presently have no plans for them to do so. However, you may struggle to understand the SI segments in these episodes if you do not read the whole thing.

How are power rings made?

The hard way. Unlike in the older comics the power rings in this setting do not have the 'deputisation protocol' that briefly made a reappearance during Blackest Night. Forging a power ring or a personal lantern is a work that requires incredible spiritual discipline and technical skill.

Yellow rings

Green rings

Why are some parts of the text coloured?

Power rings require intense emotional focus to use well. To demonstrate this I have taken to colouring parts of the text to match the emotional resonance; yellow indicates that the person is feeling or provoking fear, for example.

What do different colours of power ring do?

Please note that a good deal of the below only applies to this story and is not normal DC canon.

• Reds get red light blood vomit. That stuff will wreck pretty much anything. They can also take huge amounts of physical damage, being held together with red light. That's at least in part countered by the fact that they usually don't bother protecting themselves in other ways.
• Orange gets assimilation and its variants.
• Yellow constructs get reinforced by the fear they and their user generate.
• Greens get minimal mental alterations.
• Blues recharge from ambient hope.
• Indigos can do long range teleportation and have some access to the other colours.
• Violets can cause the violet light to manifest as a super strong mind altering crystal.
• The rings used by the Anti-Green Lantern Corps can drain green rings for power and enhance the wearer's willpower at the cost of giving them a fatal brain hemorrhage after 24 hours.

What volume of space does the Green Lantern Corps patrol?

In this story sectors are relatively small, certainly far smaller than one 3600th of the Universe. All parts of the galaxy not specifically excluded by treaty have Lanterns assigned to them, as well as parts of intergalactic space and good chunks of the two nearest galaxies. Within a Sector forty-fifty inhabited worlds is the norm. Outside this area a major problem may well receive the attention of a Honour Guard strike force, with perhaps a garrison if the problem looks to be ongoing. The Corps is slowly expanding (Rot Lop Fan's homeworld is a highly radioactive place in intergalactic space) but the bigger it gets the harder it is to run and there aren't more Guardians to whom the existing ones can pass on responsibility.

What's with the invisible text?

Several characters use something called God Speech to communicate, most notably Mister Miracle, Big Barda and Grayven. Strictly speaking I should show this with a vast piece of psychedelic artwork but I'm just not that good an artist. In any location where New Gods are speaking it is probably worth selecting the text to see if there is anything to read that is hidden from mortal eyes.

I have also used invisible text for chess notation.

Are you going to cover the years in between series one and two?

Jumped up elementals help me, yes. This means that the story will be very long.

What to do in the event of a spelling error

Though I am a native English speaker I am not immune to making mistakes in my writing. Feel free to post any spelling, grammar or continuity errors you see in the main thread. However, in some cases I will not be able to correct the main thread if that thread has been locked so it is probably best to only remark on errors in the Story Only thread.

I also have... Let us call them 'grammatical idiosyncrasies'. These are not errors but intentional deviations from the norms of written English. For example, I use '..' to indicate a short unplanned pause in speech, while '...' indicates that speech trails off and stops. I also spell the exclamation 'whaw' rather than 'wow', due to the fact that as far as I am concerned it isn't a proper word but rather an attempt to write a noise and so should be written exactly as it sounds. I use speech marks at the end of paragraphs even when the same person will continue speaking in the next, because otherwise I lose track of the fact that it is speech. There will be other examples as well.

Speed Force?

Take it away Mister Weisman.

I'll admit I don't understand the Speed-Force. It comes after my time, so to speak, but I'll ask again, if there's a speed-force, does that also mean there's also a strength-force or an archery-force, etc.? What makes the concept necessary and not just unnecessarily complicated? I've not personally read the materials where it first appeared, so I have NO OPINION of them, but no one's ever been able to explain it to me OUT OF CONTEXT in a way that didn't cause me to make a 'yucky' face. And AGAIN, I'll restate what I've stated many times since, which is that no one on Earth-16 has HEARD of the Speed-Force. If you want to believe it's there, but they just don't know about it, more power to you.

What's this about a game..?

Way way back many threads ago, I made a joke of implying that this story was a novelisation of a playthrough of a Young Justice RPG. Since then, several other posters have taken the idea and run with it. If you see a reference to a game, they are most likely doing that. Alternately, they might possibly be talking about the actual Young Justice game, but that happens far less frequently.

So... Spacebattles?

On the 30th of December I received a one day ban from Spacebattles. This was due to me posting the following: 'I've seen the film, and I'm still not sure how a government backed paramilitary counts as a rebellion.' This fell afoul of the then Spacebattles policy of coming down hard on anyone talking about a film that may possibly involve... Wars. And maybe Stars. My opinion is that this was complete overkill, and after my appeal was rejected I decided to move the thread to Sufficient Velocity. It will not be going back.

Scry Wards?

At a certain point in the story, the SI notices that he's finding it harder to locate people by power ring. The Doylist reason for this is that being able to find anyone he wants wherever they are is completely story breakingly powerful. The Watsonian reason is a nifty little magic trinket called a scry ward. Scrying is a form of magic remote viewing designed to locate people and objects. A scry ward is an artefact designed to make this either harder or impossible. It turns out that the mechanism used by power rings when they perform their basic scans is supremely vulnerable to being disrupted by these wards, and that weak versions are easy to mass produce. This means that sufficiently capable people can still hide, while still allowing the SI (and the Renegade) to use other ring-based techniques to try and find them.

Apparently necessary disclaimer

The views expressed by a character or by characters in this story do not necessarily reflect those of the author. There are no author mouthpiece characters, only individuals with their own perspectives and opinions.