It takes forever and a day for someone to notice, but after decades of crime fighting, the Justice League finally catches onto the fact that—-
Batman doesn’t seem to be aging. At all.
Sure there are some lines on his face but anybody with as many children as him would have them. And yes, he does complain of back pains every now and again, but he’s been doing that since the day the JLA first formed, so who knows.
Come to think of it, his gaggle of kids don’t seem to be a day over twenty-two either. None of them. Even Nightwing, who should be well into his fourties’ (fifties?? Sixties???) still looks exactly the same.
The JLA decide to investigate.
Which isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do, because it’s Gotham, and every single person in that godforsaken city is bloody insane as they come to find out. (With a side dish of plausible deniability to boot)
Underappreciated fantasy trope: Eldritch beings referred to with only an unsettling phrase or with a phrase after their name. Path of Exile does this excellently but the Shadar-Kai in Forgotten Realms is great too.
Idea: The Matrix, being a parasite that uses the Primes as it’s hosts, slowly turns the Primes into eldritch horror-ific beings, and the forms they hold in front of people to make them appear normal are actually just a ‘cloaked’ form for their ‘true’ form (Maccadam from CV for example). This happens to all the Primes, it just usually takes a long time even by their standards to build up enough, and usually the newer/younger ones are like baby horrors.
Another idea: Rodimus, having been born in the primacy essentially as Optimus’s son, has grown up with them, and seen them in their true forms from a young age. It is now impossible to freak him out with them, because before Hot Rod could walk, he looked Nova dead in the face in it’s true form as it cradled him in it’s arms, and cooed up at it. Optimus now says that to Rodimus, they’re not horrors, they’re eldritch wonders. He genuinely looks at them and believes some to be quite pretty. Or he calmly/casually asks if Op thinks Quintus’s Subnautica octopus ass could fit in a flower vase, because octopuses don’t have bones, and this is long dead ghost, so it’s gotta be possible, right? (Op just wants one normal conversation about the Primes with his son. one. that’s all he asks (while snorting laughs but that’s beside the point-).)
In short: The Primes are eldritch horrors in their true forms + Rodimus isn’t bothered in the slightest about this fact.
Went straight for the oil pastels without any planning. And it went kinda Ok I thought, until the whole finished thing absolutely didn't. I'm not going to post it anywhere 😂 Still like this part though 😁 Reminds me of that passage on the dawn of colour photography in my favorite Discworld book. «...well, “flesh-coloured” was a bit of a tricky one in Ankh-Morpork, where if you picked your subject it could be any colour except maybe light blue, but the faces of many of the bystanders did suggest that a particularly virulent plague had passed through the city. Possibly the Multicoloured Death...»
*the TV is freaking out*
Nyarlathotep: Don’t worry, you have to treat an electronic like you treat a patient on life support.
*unplugs the TV, then plugs it back in again. nothing changes*
Nyarlathotep: Yeah, that didn’t work with my grandma either.