Reply to Gog's Comments
First, let's start with the most important point. No, it's not the fog, although I'll defend that argument below. The fog is mostly to keep Gog's team from being able to plan for what my lower-level guys will do. The most important thing is
Loki's ability to stay hidden while taking down Zemo, and he can do that by lots of means, not just fog. So I'll start with that:
Loki vs. Zemo
My point is Loki wins this fight, because he can strike at Zemo from a hidden location, without Zemo being able to strike back. Even if the fog fails to hide Loki, he can hide in lots of other ways, most notably by hiding out in another dimension and sending attacks across the dimensional barrier (which I showed multiple scans of him doing in my writeup). (In case anyone is wondering, it's also perfectly legal for my characters to leave the battlefield for another dimension, which I confirmed the multiple times during the season that I had Darkchylde taking the battle into Limbo. The only rule is that our prep-time has to happen on the battlefield.)
So that leaves several questions:
Can Loki attack Zemo from another dimension?
Like I said, I already showed scans of this, and anyway Gog agreed.
Dark Gog said:
It's true that Loki never even has to even be on the battlefield to strike.
(Gog asks what alternate dimensions Loki can access Asgard from, and so far as I know there's no real limit on it. Obviously he's acted between Asgard and earth before, but on the rare occasions he's had reasons to go to other dimensions he's also been able to send spells back to Earth. I think he did so from Dormammu's dark dimension, for instance. And even if there are some dimensions Loki can't get to directly, Darkchylde could certainly send him there.)
Can Zemo attack Loki in the same way?
Gog thinks so:
Dark Gog said:
The flip side, of-course, is that that holds equally true for my own team.
But that contradicts what he explicitly told me before the fight, which is that Zemo
can't attack someone
unless he knows where they are.
XFanTim said:
How close does [Zemo] have to be to someone in order to use his powers on them?
Dark Gog said:
Probably line-of-sight or knowing where the target is.
So Zemo can't hit Loki unless he's somehow able to locate him in whatever of the innumerable dimensions Loki is hiding in (where he may also be invisible or shape changed or god knows what to boot).
Gog perhaps thinks Zemo doesn't need to know where his target is if he's just raining down energy blasts or something willy-nilly. He suggests as much:
Dark Gog said:
Both parties here can probably reign death a hundred different brutally efficient ways with little effort.
But (a) This won't help him hit Loki if Loki is in another dimension, and (b) this wouldn't be allowed anyway, since he'd be just as likely to hit a regular as an uber. (Gravity has the same problem -- he can't crush the whole battlefield without hitting the regs, and anyway that wouldn't hit Loki if he's off in another dimension.) He has to know where the regs are to do this, but we'll get to that below when I address the fog thing. Back to Zemo and Loki.
Would Loki be able to find Zemo while he's hiding out in another dimension?
Well, of course. Zemo can be located by magical scrying, just like Loki was able to instantaneously locate and check up on Thor on multiple occasions, even though Loki was off in Asgard and Thor was on Earth. Here's
one example, and here's
another
With the Eye of Agamotto, Loki's power to find people is even greater.
Marvel.com states the eye can "track both corporeal and ethereal beings by their psychic or magical emissions". (It's also worth noting that Loki has the Eye for at least 150 years, meaning he's more experienced with it than Dr. Strange himself.) Loki himself tells us (in Thor #68 / 570) that it "allows me to stay in touch with any Asgardian warrior or mortal I choose." In Thor #69/571, he immediately locates Thialfi and Jordahl and teleports them to the palace, even though he didn't even know exactly who he was looking for, just that he was looking for the people who'd got in a fight with his underlings. In Thor #70/572, Kya (a mage) is trying to spy on Loki with a scrying spell and he immediately detects it, forcing her to break the connection before he locates her. In Thor #74/576, he thinks a storm is a little suspicious, so he says "Let the Eye of Agamotto reveal those who might secret themselves from Loki." and immediately dectects Kya, who had been magically causing the storm. Those are all instances of Loki finding someone when he
didn't even know exactly who he was looking for!
Would Zemo be able to find and attack Loki?
So clearly Loki can locate Zemo, and clearly Loki can attack Zemo. And Gog himself said Zemo has to know where Loki is if he wants to attack him. But would Zemo be able to find Loki?
Well, why the hell would he? First, even if they totally get around my ability to obscure his future vision of the battlefield, there's no way he could know which of the innumerable
alternate dimensions to look for Loki in.
He doesn't have some power that's equivalent to Loki's ability to magically scry for a person's whereabouts -- in fact it's been made very clear that Zemo has to
choose where he's looking (and in what timeline), which is why he can overlook things. Furthermore, Gog
stated very explicitly that Zemo's senses are "largely unaltered" by the Moonstones except for "skimming possible timelines". Plus, Loki could hide out somewhere
outside of time like Darkchylde's Limbo, where I doubt Zemo's senses would even work properly. (For what it's worth, I also very much doubt Ares could spy on Darkchylde's Limbo, which is a realm fully under her control).
I also want to reiterate that even if Zemo did have some magical scrying power, Loki can sense and counter such attempts to spy on him, as he did against Kya.
Would Loki be able to take down Zemo?
So it's pretty clear Loki is more equipped to find Zemo and strike against him than Zemo is to find Loki and strike against him, but the question remains whether Zemo can block Loki's attacks.
Gog asks whether Loki can affect Zemo before bringing down his shields. First, I think we're getting ahead of ourselves quite a bit here -- since when does Zemo have any kind of shield that can block telepathy? I asked Gog if the Moonstones gave Zemo any defense against telepathy, and the only scans he posted in response didn't show anything that looked like a telepathic attack to me. So far as I know, Zemo has never used the Moonstones to thwart telepathy, and why would we think he could, when the Moonstones really just control gravity. Admittedly, "control gravity" is being interpreted very broadly, more like "control time and space", but I still don't see what that has to do with telepathy. Regardless, we made a very clear decision early in the season not to assume anyone has telepathic defense unless they've been explicitly shown to have it. (This was in reaction to the way telepaths had been rendered useless by everyone assuming mages, etc., could grant their whole team telepathic immunity.)
So far as I know, the only real defense to telepathy that Zemo has is his diadem, a piece of technology that Loki can either disable or destroy in numerous ways -- and anyway, it's been overloaded by far lesser attacks than Loki's. Loki's telepathic assault, even across dimensions, was so powerful that Dr. Strange (amped up by an amulet) only barely managed to stop it. (
scan) And that was before Loki had the Eye of Agamotto, which amps up his powers (as Loki explicitly stated in Thor #73/575, and which particularly
enhances mental powers.
By the way, if Gog is claiming Zemo is stopping Loki based on some power he absorbed from Ares during prep-time, I would have to strongly question how much power Zemo could actually absorb before pushing himself over the tuber bar. I'd say all our ubers are pretty much at the threshold before taking on any additional powerups.
As for
ordinary forcefields blocking telepathy, that's nonsense. If it worked against Overmind that one time, then maybe that says something about how Overmind's telepathy works (or about that particular writer's take on things), but in general a forcefield isn't a defense against telepathy. Off the top of my head: Xavier psi-blasted Magneto into a coma, in spite of Magneto's high-level forcefield. When Jean Grey had lost her telepathy and only had telekinesis, one of Apocalypse's "Riders of the Storm" was able to majorly screw her up telepathically right through her telekinetic forcefield. Stryfe was able to telepathically muck with Jean inspite of both here telekinetic forcefield and the fact that she'd be trying to resist telepathically. Juggernaut has an extremely powerful protective forcefield, and yet he's totally vulnerable to telepathy once his psi-proof helmet is removed. And in the DC Universe, hasn't it been established that Superman has a protective forcefield just over the surface of his skin? And yet, people like Despero have been able to mess him up telepathically. Those are just the first few examples that pop into my mind -- I'm sure there are many more.
The bottom line is unless it's been shown that Zemo's forcefields block telepathy, it makes no sense to assume they can. And if it has, I assume Gog would have told me when I asked if Zemo had telepathic defense.
Incidentally, my backup plan if it turned out Zemo did have some great telepathic defense would be just to teleport him, separating him from the Moonstones. Loki can teleport him the moment he detects him, as he did to Thialfi and Jordahl in Thor #69/571. I know Zemo has used the Moonstones when they were out of his grasp, but they always seemed to still be in his general vacinity, like line of sight or so. If Zemo were teleported to another
dimension, there's very little reason to think he could still access the Moonstones. I also don't see any reason why Zemo's teleportational powers (which are gravity based), could be used to disrupt Loki's teleportational powers (which are magic based). They're two totally different things. I grant that Zemo could teleport himself back right away
if he were still in touch with the Moonstones, but he wouldn't be.
Of course, there are also many instances of people teleporting past forcefields.
Would my takedown of Ares work?
Dark Gog said:
Ares will not simply shrivel-up and die the moment he is out of touch with his own time. The page that Tim presented is in turn a direct reference to Ares' first encounter with Wonder Woman, wherein the subject at hand was not so much the absence of humanity as the complete wipe-out of all life on the planet as a result of nuclear war, and even then, while indefinite, the process clearly took some time.
And that's exactly what I'm talking about -- sending him back in time to a time before there was
any life on Earth. Not just human life, but
any life. Ares
explicitly stated that if Earth were left lifeless, then all the gods of Olympus would perish. As if that weren't definitive enough, Ares whole defeat in Perez run, the reason he stopped his effort to create World War III, is because he foresaw that this would end life on earth, and thus would destroy him. He saw this while trapped in Wonder Woman's golden lasso, so it
had to be the truth. (
scan 1,
scan 2,
scan 3)
So that's two different writers (Perez, Rucka), telling us in as certain terms as possible, that Ares on a lifeless earth suffers a speedy demise. The fact that there's still life elsewhere in the universe clearly doesn't save him.
Being away from Earth in the future, or the fact that Olympians could sever their connection to Earth and survive, is all beside the point. If we ask
What happens if Ares is on Earth at a time when Earth has no life? the answer is explicit in the comics -- swift, unavoidable death for Ares.
But for the sake of argument, suppose I'm wrong. Suppose Ares could somehow survive being on a lifeless Earth. My team would
know he had survived, and could deal with it accordingly. Darkchylde's Limbo is outside of time, essentially connected to all times (which is why she can teleport through time as well as space). So if Loki goes over to Limbo, he could scry into the past just as easily as the present. He could look in on Ares and make sure he had indeed perished. And if he didn't, Darkchylde could port Loki back through time to finish off the drastically weakened Ares. (At the very
least, he'd be drastically weakend by being placed on a life-less, and thus conflict-less, world. Gog has had Ares grow more powerful over the course of the battle from increased conflict, so he can no doubt
lose power at approximately that same rate.) Loki could even finish off the weakened Ares in a non-violent way, to avoid accidentally empowering him. Trapping him in magical stasis or teleporting him into a magical prison or simply overwhelming him with a magical sleeping spell once he's sufficiently weakened.
My team could likewise use this ability to check up on Ares to make sure he hadn't left behind any messages, or to destroy any that he did leave behind.
By the way, the whole sending Ares through time thing is just my clever coup-de-grace, it's hardly essential to defeating Ares. Magus is a tough match against Ares to begin with, and even if Ares started to gain the upper hand, Magus could still stall with powers like phasing, or by hopping through portal after portal and forcing Ares to try to chase him down. And all Magus has to do is last long enough for Loki to beat Zemo (which I'm quite convinced he would for all the many reasons I gave above), after which it's two on one. If Magus is a tough match for Ares, then Magus plus Loki should be able to beat him on raw power without needing any fancy tricks.
Just to review, Magus is a Thanos-level character. In fact, he had the upper hand on pre-resurrection Thanos, who while weaker than the current version was still powerful enough to utterly defeat a team of Avengers and Avengers-allies that included Thor, Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Adam Warlock, Moondragon, Captain America, etc. When I say utterly defeat, I mean Warlock was killed and the rest were all captured and imprisoned. Magus was also shown to be far more powerful than the present day Warlock, who's basically a Silver Surfer level character with numerous high-end feats.
Ares is a major powerhouse, but if he's leaps and bounds above the Magus, much less Magus + Loki (w/ the Eye of Agamotto), then he's the most over-powered uber in this thing by a wide margin. I think he was allowed on the assumption that he's
not ridiculously powerful to
that high a degree.
By the way, as far as Ares "counter-spelling", I'm sure he's done so against mortal mages like Circe, but that doesn't mean he's going to be able to stop Loki's magic. Talisman counters magic too, but when she "cancelled" Loki's Fire Fountain spell all that happened was it blinked out for a fraction of a second and then turned back on and blasted her into a wall. (
scan) And personally I'd say that in terms of magic (as opposed to physical stats) Loki is above even Ares,
especially when Loki's power is amplified by the Eye of Agamotto (which was explicitly stated to amplify Loki's power in Thor #73/575).
Note that at this point, I still haven't discussed the fog
I figured the whole fog thing would be one of the more controversial points in my writeup, and while I think it's fully defensible (see below), my point is I don't
need it to beat Gog's ubers. It's more to prevent him from gaining too much of a tactical advantage against my regs. But really, if I beat the ubers there's no one else on his team that can hope to stand against my ubers, and my team's victory will be assured.
I'll get to the fog in a minute, but first a few other quick points.
Zemo amping up his speed with time manipulation . . .
I question how much if at all Zemo can amp up his speed without making himself tuber. Didn't we discuss this point with the uber mages a while back? I think it was said that they couldn't amp their own speed substantially without crossing the uber bar. (Whoever it was who had Hourman and was forced to give him up -- Corp, maybe? -- felt especially strongly that the mages shouldn't be able to pull this stuff.) Zemo with his half-a-dozen instant kill attacks should be no more allowed to do this than they are.
Also, if we really want to play that way, Loki could go to Darkchylde's Limbo, which is outside of time, and from there he could strike against Zemo at
any point in time. Being able to send your attacks to any point in time trumps superspeed, I think.
Ares using avatars . . .
I'm not quite sure what that means. Creating new characters? Or amping up existing ones? Either way, it's not allowed -- you're either violating the five character limit, or violating the limit on how many you can have at each ranking.
If we are going to let Ares amp up his teammates, note that Loki is at least as good at amping people up. Obviously, he's made ubers like Absorbing Man, but he's also amped up a minor side-show mind reader into an extremely high-level psionic. I could post scans, but for now I won't bother, since like I said I don't really think it's allowed.
Bleeding Hades into Asgard . . .
I didn't really think we're allowed to outright change the battlefield into a different one, which is what that would amount to. But if we want to go that rout, Darkchylde could open a massive portal like she did in Inferno and let Limbo flood into Asgard. In Limbo, Darkchylde has Sorcerer Supreme type magical abilities (in fact, I think she is considered Sorcerer Supreme of that dimension.) The problem with bumping her up in ranking could be circumvented by having Magus absorb her soul like he did in our previous fight (since he can use knowledge -- including I assume magical knowledge -- of people he absorbs). Loki and Darkchylde's magic in a Limbo/Asgard fusion would be basically unbeatable.
Personally, I think that's pushing things way too far, but no more than transforming Asgard into Hades.
Reply to Gog's comments continued below