Pocket Universe Primer

In April 2995, the Earth, still under the secret control of the Dominion, was devastated by a series of disasters resulting from a Dominator program called “Triple Strike.” Triple Strike was intended as a contingency plan in the event that control of the Earth was irretrievably lost, but it was triggered prematurely by the renegade Daxamite Dev-Em,¹⁴ destroying the Moon and laying waste to much of Earth’s surface (Adventures of Superman #478 and Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #19). In the chaos that followed, the Time Trapper’s duplicate Legion, which had not yet been mind-wiped, was freed from the Weisinger Chambers (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #20). The duplicate Legionnaires soon joined forces with their older selves to liberate Earth from the Dominion (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #34–35).

The two Legions then began to investigate how they had come to be. They presumed that one of the groups was a copy — possibly clones, possibly displaced in time. The younger “SW6” Valor set out into the timestream to explore the latter possibility, only to disappear (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #37). In fact, he had been transported to the 20th century, although his comrades would never learn his fate.

Glorith had by that time made her way back from the end of time and begun a new, more personal quest. Still infatuated with Valor, she concocted a scheme to win his affections while he was a young man in the 20th century, years before their original meeting (Valor #12–16). Unfortunately, Glorith miscalculated badly: The young Lar Gand once again resisted her advances and her interference led to his death. Valor’s demise, at a time before his critical role in history had been fulfilled, had catastrophic ramifications for the timestream (Valor #17). An effort to force the 30th century “SW6” Valor to relive his life, taking his younger self’s place, only did more damage to history (Valor #18–21).

Somewhere outside of the flow of time, the lord of entropy watched with satisfaction. His erstwhile replacement had made the mistake he had been waiting for.

Meanwhile, the Legion prepared for a preemptive strike on the sorceress. They had recently defeated Mordru, leaving him weakened and defeated on the Sorcerer’s World (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #48), and they knew that without Mordru to maintain the balance of power, Glorith would soon run out of control (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #52).

The Legion engaged Glorith in a pitched battle on Baaldur. They suffered heavy casualties under the onslaught of Glorith’s time-distortion powers, which reduced some of the Legionnaires to children and aged others to senescence. Fortunately for the Legion, however, Glorith made the same mistake that Mordru had weeks earlier: She attempted the same trick on new Legionnaire Devlin O’Ryan, unaware that his power was to reflect any attack back on the attacker. Struck by her own power, Glorith was overcome (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #53).

Believing their foe to be vanquished, the Legionnaires departed to lick their wounds, but Glorith’s problems were only beginning. Still weakened, she was confronted by the Time Trapper. He had finally returned, he told her, and had come to claim what was his. He drained away the power she had taken from him and left her for dead (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #53). Only through a great effort of will was she able to transport herself to safety.

The Trapper’s return did serious damage to the timestream, causing severe historical anomalies. At the Time Institute, Rond Vidar looked through the Time Viewer only to discover that the future — the 31st century and beyond — was gone, a black void quickly spreading backwards in time (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #57).

Realizing the seriousness of her situation, Glorith resorted to the one desperate stratagem that the Time Trapper never considered: striking an alliance with Mordru. Finding Mordru on the Sorcerer’s World, Glorith restored him to youth, restoring all of the power he had lost. Together, the two eternal enemies raised a toast to the future (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #58).

Together, Mordru and Glorith traveled to Shanghalla, the cemetery asteroid, where the Legion was gathered to mourn the recent death of Laurel Gand (in Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #59). The two sorcerers unleashed an army of the Legion’s old enemies from throughout history, including many who no longer existed in the current timeline — a warning sign of the rapidly disintegrating timestream.

During the battle, Glorith and Mordru captured Rokk Krinn (Cosmic Boy), who Glorith’s collection of prophecies warned was somehow crucial to the crisis in time. The two sorcerers were not sure what role Rokk was destined to play, but decided that it would be safer to keep him under wraps until it was all over (Legionnaires #17).

Meanwhile, the temporal crisis threatened to destroy New Earth. The planet Earth had been destroyed three months earlier in the wake of the war with the Dominion (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #38); 94 of its ancient cities had been covered with environmental domes launched into space, orbiting the remains of the mother world in a loose agglomeration called “New Earth.” Now, those cities, their structures already weakened by years of neglect, were crumbling.

To save them, R.J. Brande devised a radical solution: enlisting the aid of Valor, Dev-Em, and the “SW6” Laurel Gand, he attempted to replace the Earth by bringing its twin, the lifeless Earth of the Pocket Universe, into the real universe. The Pocket Universe Earth, he hoped, would provide a stable base for the cities of New Earth and might one day be terraformed to restore its original condition. Unfortunately, owing to the slightly different physical laws of the Pocket Universe, the other Earth proved to be unstable, threatening to explode at any moment and take New Earth with it.

A new problem quickly emerged, however, that was far more dangerous than the unstable Pocket Earth: As the crisis in time escalated, many people, including some Legionnaires, began to change, becoming alternative versions of themselves from other timelines or winking out of existence entirely (Valor #22).

Unconcerned about the fate of the Earth or the apparent disintegration of time, Mordru and Glorith returned to Baaldur with their captive. Rokk, however, fled from them, accidentally entering a portal to Glorith’s Infinite Library, a pocket dimension in which time virtually stood still. Realizing that the portal could not be reopened from either side, Mordru and Glorith left him trapped there and went on to the next stage of their plan.

The two sorcerers attacked the Legion’s new headquarters on the asteroid world Talus, in search of an item essential to their scheme: the Legion’s Time Beacon. This cosmic lighthouse, which had once stood in the Time Institute in Metropolis to guide time travelers home, was now made to serve as a beacon of a different sort. Unaware of the damage they were about to cause, Mordru and Glorith used the Beacon to summon the Infinite Man back from his endless journey through infinity. When he appeared, they divided his power between them, giving them the might to reshape the universe in their own image (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #60).

Inside Glorith’s Infinite Library, sheltered from the chaos outside, Rokk Krinn discovered Glorith’s journal. He learned of his mysterious importance to the crisis in time, that his destiny was in some way intertwined with that of Mordru and Glorith’s greatest enemy. Glorith’s journal could not tell him what that destiny was, but it revealed something else of more immediate importance: The Infinite Library was the repository of all the spells, scrolls, and magical artifacts that were the source of Glorith’s power and her control over time. Determined to find a way to escape, Rokk sat down and began to read.

On Talus, the Legion fought a losing battle against Glorith and Mordru, who attacked them with an evil alternate Legion from the new timeline he and Glorith were trying to create. Finally, Mysa Nal (the former White Witch), allied with the disembodied power of the Lord of Order once called Amethyst, managed to separate Glorith from Mordru, destroying their new timeline. Furious beyond all reason, the two frustrated sorcerers swore that if they could not rule the universe, they would destroy it.

In the Infinite Library, Rokk read through scroll after scroll, practicing spells through endless trial and error, slowly learning to control his own aging and the flow of time around him. Finally, he came to the end of the Infinite Library — only to come face to face with the Time Trapper.

The Trapper revealed that he, too, had studied the Library of Time, eons before, and learned of the crisis in time. He claimed that he constructed the “Iron Curtain of Time” as a bulwark against the temporal chaos and that his original intention was not to destroy the Legion, but to save it. Each change to history, however, pushed him further and further from his original timeline and he had grown increasingly deranged in his desperation to restore time to its original course. As time fragmented, it enabled “lesser powers” like Glorith and Mordru to carry out tampering of their own, exacerbating the original crisis.¹⁵

Now, the Trapper claimed, he had rediscovered his original purpose and had come for Rokk, who was destined to be the key to repairing history. He knew Rokk very well, he said, and could be “most accurate” about the details of his life. With that, the Trapper slowly removed his hood (Legionnaires #18).

On Talus, the fluctuations in history worked to the Legion’s advantage, bringing about the unexpected reappearance of Superboy. In that moment Valor, his hopes renewed by the Boy of Steel’s return, realized the key to defeating Glorith. He told her that if she would end the battle he would go with her, as she had always wanted. Swayed by a thousand years of unrequited love, the sorceress hesitated — just long enough for Superboy to knock her out. With Glorith unconscious, the Legionnaires managed to channel all of the Infinite Man’s power into Mordru, overloading him with more energy than he could control. While Mordru was distracted by an attack by the most powerful surviving Legionnaires, Saturn Girl issued a telepathic command, compelling him to teleport himself into the heart of a planetary core. There, once again entombed, he was helpless.

Unfortunately, the last planet that flashed through Mordru’s mind as he lost consciousness was the unstable core of the Pocket Universe’s Earth. Now the sorcerer’s uncontrolled energies caused the core to ignite, hastening its inevitable and cataclysmic end.

After a last rallying cry to his one-time comrades, Superboy vanished forever,¹⁶ followed a moment later by Valor. The remaining Legionnaires vowed to use their remaining strength to somehow save not only the Earth, but all of history (Valor #23).

Returning to the solar system, where they struggled in vain to prevent the destruction of the Pocket Universe’s Earth, the Legionnaires were startled by the arrival of Rokk and the Time Trapper. To the Legionnaire’s astonishment, the Trapper offered them his help. As proof of his good intentions, he again removed his hood, revealing him to be none other than Rokk Krinn himself: older, scarred, but clearly the same man.¹⁷

The Trapper explained that the only way to end the fragmentation of history was to re-integrate the surviving Legionnaires with their young temporal duplicates. One by one, the Legionnaires embraced their doppelgangers and winked out of existence, until finally only the three founders — Rokk Krinn, Garth Ranzz, and Imra Ardeen — remained. They said their good-byes and then, as the Earth died beneath their feet, they clasped hands with their younger selves. With tears in their eyes, they faded from view as their entire reality ceased to exist (Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #61).

At last, only the Time Trapper remained to meet his destiny. A moment later he was attacked by Hal Jordan (Parallax). Parallax drained the Trapper’s remaining power to fuel his efforts to recreate the universe in his own image, and the Trapper was finally destroyed (Zero Hour #1).

Post-Crisis Legion Continuity …

Footnotes