Power Battery Ring Constructs

Every morning — or what counted as morning, depending on which part of the galaxy Hal Jordan happened to be in — he did the same thing.

He held his ring out. He pressed it to the surface of his power battery, a device shaped exactly like an old-fashioned lantern, glowing green from within as if someone had captured a small star and put it inside. And he said the words.

"In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil's might beware my power — Green Lantern's light."

The ring flared. The charge ran up his finger and through his hand and all the way into the center of his being. It did not feel like electricity. It felt more like purpose — the sensation of knowing exactly what you are supposed to do, vivid and bright.

And then he went to work.

The ring could make anything. That is the honest truth of it, and it takes a while to really understand what "anything" means. Not just weapons, not just shields — anything that Hal could picture with enough clarity and hold in his mind with enough belief.

He had been a pilot his whole adult life, so his mind ran in shapes that moved through air. His first constructs, when he was new to the ring, were almost always jets — elegant green aircraft that could out-maneuver anything in atmosphere, climb to altitudes where engines would fail, execute turns that would rattle a normal plane to pieces. He built them as instinctively as a painter reaches for a brush.

But as the years passed, his vocabulary of constructs grew.

He built a dam once — a full, working dam, fifty feet of green energy, fitted perfectly across a flooding river in New Zealand while the real dam was being repaired. It held for six hours. He held it. Every second of those six hours, his ring was channeling his willpower, and he had to stand on the riverbank and not let his mind wander even once. His arm ached. His head ached. The dam did not waver.

He built a pair of hands — enormous, green, careful — to catch a skyscraper that had lost its foundations in an earthquake in Istanbul, holding it steady for seventeen minutes while the engineers evacuated everyone inside. He had never caught a skyscraper before. He figured out the grip pressure in the first fifteen seconds.

He built a bicycle for a kid in Sector 2814's fourth inhabited world who had never seen one before, just to see the kid's face. The construct lasted about three minutes before he released it, but the kid laughed for the whole three minutes.

The Guardians had once asked him why, when so many other Lanterns constructed weapons, he so often built tools.

He had thought about it for a moment.

"A weapon solves the problem in front of you," he said. "A tool solves the problem before the next one arrives."

The one rule was simple: doubt made the constructs fade.

He had learned this in training. Not from a lesson, but from the first time a construct failed when he needed it. He had been building a shield to protect a civilian on Oa from a stray energy blast, and just as the shield formed, he had a fraction of a thought: what if it's not strong enough? The shield flickered. The blast hit the edge of it. The civilian was fine, but shaken, and so was Hal.

Afterward, his training partner Kilowog — a huge, rough-voiced Lantern who had taught a hundred recruits and frightened every one of them — sat beside him and said, in his lowest voice: "Ring don't care about your muscles. Ring cares about your head. What you believe, that's what it makes."

Hal had spent the next month building things he was certain of. Certain the way a pilot is certain of physics — not because it's easy, but because he'd tested it ten thousand times and it always held.

The certainty grew. The constructs held longer, hit harder, held more weight, responded faster.

A Green Lantern's power is, in the end, a kind of argument. An argument the ring makes with reality: here is what I believe is possible, it says. Here is what I am willing to hold on to.

And reality, in the face of that argument made with sufficient conviction, usually agrees.

Hal Jordan refilled his ring every morning, said the words that were not a spell but a reminder, and then went out to build whatever the day needed.

He carried an entire galaxy's worth of willpower in a small green circle on his finger.

He never once thought he wasn't up to it.