Young Justice: Gotham City
September 17th, 2010
I considered my options. Ozpin’s notes told me that Jinn could apparently answer any question as long as it did not pertain to the future, but I had my doubts. The idea of a truly omniscient artifact was simply too…much. There had to be some sort of limits.
I had a few theories of what they may be. Perhaps Jinn possessed some powerful version of the gift of Sight, or a rare talent for divination. If Remnant truly was a creation of the Brothers, as was the Lamp, then perhaps she had been in some way imbued with all the knowledge of that Plane but nothing beyond. Or maybe she used a combination of scrying and other information gathering spells, combined with the Lamp’s ability to slow time around it, to simply think up reasonable-sounding answers.
Unfortunately, verifying any of those theories was difficult. I could use my question to do so, but that wouldn’t necessarily tell me anything if I asked the question directly. It was more than likely that Jinn was not permitted to share such information. I could also try to work out limits by asking questions that slowly narrowed down the limits of her abilities, but I didn’t exactly have extra questions to work with.
Thus, at least for now, I would operate on the idea that Jinn could answer any question, though I would take her words with a grain of salt no matter what answers she gave me. I’d heard too many stories about cursed gifts and self-fulfilling prophecies to take this being purely at its word.
However, that once more left me with the question of what exactly I should ask. I’d thought up a plethora of ideas over the past week, but they all generally fell into one of several categories. The most obvious choice was trying to use the question to solve a problem facing me right now.
There were a few of those, some of which were likely more easily solved than others. The most obvious was the question of how to share memories between the copies in my Spark and the real creatures whose Blueprints I had taken. It was a slightly niche ability, but giving Zatanna the chance to experience what I saw on other planes was a heartwarming proposition.
In that same vein, I could potentially do one better. Instead of bringing back memories to share with her, I could try to learn how to bring her with me. That was almost certainly going to be harder to do than just transfer memories, but it would also be far superior in the long term. Even knowing that the experience would eventually be given to the original, there was something hollow about spending time with Zatanna’s clone, a dull ache in my chest that made me long for my darling witch.
There was also the question of my own home. Without a link to the Plane where I’d been born and no true way of navigating the chaos between Planes, it was entirely possible that I would never be able to return, a prospect that felt deeply unsettling. I tried not to think about such things too much, but I missed my family. I missed my friends. I missed my teachers, Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, and all the little comforts of home. Dorea probably thought I was dead, as did my parents. Had they had a funeral for me? Had my name been blasted from the family tree for shaming our family name? Who was the new Lord Black? I had so many questions, and I had no idea if or when I’d ever find those answers.
Alternatively, I could instead try to use the creature to learn knowledge which would be impossible to figure out for myself without exploring other Planes or meeting those who had. Jinn clearly had experience with Planeswalkers so she was uniquely suited to answering questions about them.
The most obvious such question would be something like ‘What is everything you know about Planeswalkers’, but questions about the Brothers themselves and topics such as how they’d apparently stopped other Planeswalkers from visiting Remnant were also rather tempting.
Finally, there were the more…unconventional questions that might work. Things like asking about how the relics had been created with the idea of using that information to alter or duplicate them. Asking what knowledge she could give me that would be most helpful to me without actually asking the question that would give me that knowledge. Asking about how she acquired that knowledge with the idea of potentially learning to do the same.
Ultimately however, I knew exactly what I was going to ask. If it didn’t work, that would be upsetting, but not a disaster. If it did work, then the potential payoff was simply worth the opportunity cost.
First however, there was something that I needed to try. Jinn was floating in front of me, an inscrutable expression on her face as she stared at me with her faintly inhuman eyes. I took a rapid step forward and jabbed my wand towards her chest, magic thrumming down my arm and through my wand.
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Jinn tilted her head to the side and watched dispassionately as my wand simply pierced through her skin as though she was nothing more than an illusion. I reached out, trying to feel for something, but found nothing instead. It was like just waving my arm through air, not even the odd chill of a ghost.
I took another step forward and my hand simply passed through her, my wand and hand both fully submerged inside her body. Once again I tried to channel magic between my free hand and my wand, but there was nothing there to move through, just air.
Jinn’s lips pulled into a small smile. “An amusing attempt,” she told me smugly, “but whatever you are trying to achieve, it won’t work. Call it a freebie. This is just a mirage. Little more than smoke and a trick of the light. My true self remains where it has been for years beyond count.”
I clicked my tongue. Annoying. “I see.” It would have been amazing to gain a Blueprint of this being, but it seemed that would be just too easy. Well, fair enough.
I took a step back, lowering my arms to hang by my sides. I bowed my head slightly. “My apologies. I had to try.”
She laughed again, but there was a hint of menace beneath the musical peals of her voice. “I would expect no less from your kind. Now ask. I tire of you.”
“Very well.” I took a deep breath, mentally going over my words again. Ozpin’s notes had mentioned that Jinn responded best to short, to the point questions. Longer, more complex requests tended to make her give away less information, not more, but phrasing was important regardless. “Jinn,” I asked, “How can I successfully loosen or remove the time restriction on how often you can answer questions?”
Jinn stared at me for a long moment. Her eyes narrowed and the wisps of smoke billowing around her lower body like a skirt boiled, tiny bits of blue smoke rising up from it like sparks. “Ah, I see. And now you show your true colors. How like one of your kind to reach for more and more even when all you could desire is shoved into your hands. Even my short years of rest are too much for you to bear.”
She rose to her full height, her feet inches from the floor and her hair brushing the ceiling. Blue mana rose from within the Lamp, flowing into her body and then vanishing into nothingness. “Listen well, Planeswalker,” and she spat the word like a vicious curse, “Deep within the Blind Eternities lies the myriad plane of Rabiah. One-thousand-and-one reflections drift together and infect all Planes they touch.”
Jinn spun, raising her arms out to the sides, and smoke billowed off her body in waves that swiftly filled the room. Light swirled through the smoke and the room around me changed. A moment later it was as though I stood in the space between worlds, the endless nothingness stretching out all around me.
Before me hung exactly what Jinn had described. A cluster of planes grouped tightly together in an enormous mass drifting together through the nothingness. I rolled the words that Jinn had used over in my mouth. The Blind Eternities. It was good to have a name to put to the nothingness.
Jinn continued, and the scene changed. We hurtled towards and then into the planes, only to emerge high above an endless desert of golden sand. “Buried deep within the Sea of Sand lies the staff of great king Suleiman, lord of Djinn.”
There was a momentary image of a dark-haired, heavily-tanned man wearing golden armor over purple robes. In his hand he held a simple wooden staff with a golden snake wrapped around the top third. Then he was gone, and only the staff remained lying on the sand. Winds blew and it was swiftly buried, vanishing beneath a mountain-like sand dune.
Jinn reappeared, standing directly in front of me on the sand and looming over me like a giant. “Bring the staff before me, and my binding can be altered freely. My prison may have been crafted by the will of your kind, but my oath is one imposed upon me by my King. By his will, I would have no choice but to speak and speak until nothing remains of me but smoke and dust.”
The world around me swirled again and light turned to blue smoke, leaving Jinn floating back where she started. She smiled, showing two rows of pearly white teeth. “May your bones bake for all time beneath the scorching sun, Planeswalker. I wish you the worst of luck.”
And then her body dissolved into smoke and flowed back into the lamp. The blue orb at the center of the golden filigree dimmed and the lantern shrank down until it was barely larger than my hand. It dropped like a stone, stopping only a fraction of an inch above the ground and bobbed up and down like a piece of driftwood before finally coming to a halt.
I pursed my lips. That could have gone better. I had a feeling that Jinn, if that was really her name, didn’t particularly like Planeswalkers. If, as I now suspected, the Brothers had in some way bound her within the lamp millenia ago rather than created her from nothing, I could understand her dislike, but it was still rather annoying.
I shrugged. Well, it had been worth a shot. Hopefully I’d still be able to eventually learn something from studying the Relic itself, and perhaps a century from now Jinn would be feeling more agreeable. Or maybe I would even find this Rabiah. It seemed like a pretty unique plane, the sort of place that would stand out even from the outside.
For now however, evening was approaching and I had promised Zatanna that I would try to visit her during her lessons in Poseidonis. I was looking forward to seeing her, and perhaps I’d even have a chance to check in with Queen Mera about some of the rewards we’d discussed previously. Plus I wanted to finally check out the Conservatory’s version of Hogwarts’ restricted section.