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The air in the Watchtower's briefing room was thick with a tension that even the usually unflappable Batman seemed to feel. John Constantine, leaning against a console, a trail of smoke curling lazily from the cigarette perched between his fingers. He had just delivered a rather definitive and unwelcome pronouncement.
"Alright, listen up, you lot," he began, his voice a rasp. "You asked me about summoning the so-called 'Ghost King." And let me tell you, it's impossible." Utterly, completely, bloody impossible."
Superman, ever the optimist, raised an eyebrow. "Impossible, John? Surely there's a way. A ritual, an incantation..."
Constantine snorted, flicking ash onto the pristine floor of the space station. "A ritual? Oh, there's a ritual, alright. Nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine "9.999.999.999" steps. And that's just for starters."
Wonder Woman crossed her arms, a frown creasing her brow. "That's an absurd number. "What kind of ritual requires so many steps? "That sounds… designed to fail. " She wasn't sure why or how anyone or anything could do so many steps.
"Bingo, it's designed to make you fail, love," Constantine replied, a grim smirk playing on his lips. "Every single one of those steps has to be done in a precise, unyielding order." Miss one, forget one, or even sneeze at the wrong moment or forget one word or move wrong, and you're back at square one. And you've only got an hour to complete the whole damn thing."
A collective groan rippled through the room. Flash whistled. "An hour? For ten billion steps? That's, like, a nanosecond per step!"
"Precisely," Constantine said, nodding. But that's not even the kicker; any step takes like 10 minutes at least. The final stages, the last few hundred steps, they're... well, they're not for the faint of heart. "Or the living, for that matter." He paused, letting the implication hang for the heroes. "They're dark. Cruel. Things no decent person, or even a half-decent one like myself, would ever actually do. They ensure that if you do somehow manage to get that far, your conscience, or lack thereof, will stop you dead."
A sudden, booming laugh cut through the somber atmosphere. Captain Marvel, who had been quietly listening, stepped forward, a wide, almost childlike grin on his face. "Yeah, you can forget it." The latter ones will make sure that you and everyone around you who knows the final rituals will die. That way you will be taken to any afterlife, not even to the right one."
The League stared at him, bewildered. "How do you know that, Captain?" Wonder Woman asked, her brow furrowed.
Billy Batson, in his powerful form, scratched his chin. "Oh, I, uh, heard it from a friend. "A ghost friend, actually." He chuckled, the sound echoing slightly. He was complaining about how easy it was to summon his king. Said Pariah Dark, always grumbling about how anyone with a half-decent spellbook and a bit of ectoplasm could just pop him out of the Ghost Zone for a chat. He wanted to 'fix' it, make it truly impossible for just anyone to bother him. He has to do paperwork and more busy stuff and then be called by mortals."
A flicker of understanding crossed Batman's face. "Danny Phantom." He did remember that Hero, he wasn't part of the League as he doesn't leave his town.
Captain Marvel winked at Batman. "Yeah! He was going on and on about how Pariah's summoning was practically a walk in the park compared to what it should be. Said it needed more hoops, more impossible tasks, more... despair. So we just let him put all the ideas into a notebook and make the summon spell that way."
He then paused, a thoughtful expression replacing his grin. "And you know, it's amusing. My patron, Zeus, King of Olympus? And for me, summoning him is easy. One word and BAM, there he is. But for anyone else? Not so much. "It's almost like the easier it is for the chosen, the harder it is for everyone else."
A mischievous glint appeared in his eyes. "So, maybe Danny and Pariah have a point. If you want to make a summoning truly impossible, you make it so easy for the right person and hard for anyone else. Zeus sometimes grumbles about how easy his summoning is for certain, shall we say, less-than-reputable sorcerers. Maybe I’ll have a word with him about making a few… adjustments. For his own security, of course.”
The Justice League looked from the unperturbed Captain Marvel to Constantine, then back again. The idea of two incredibly powerful, almost godlike beings actively complicating their own summoning rituals just to avoid annoying visitors was not what they thought it would be.
“So, to be clear,” Batman finally interjected, his voice a low growl, “you’re saying we should simply… not attempt to summon this Ghost King?”
Constantine flicked his cigarette butt into a nearby disposal unit. “Exactly. There’s a reason some things are best left undisturbed. And this one is one of them.”
Superman looked around: "At least, we won't have the fear of villains summoning them then, at least."