Nth metal (also called ninth metal) is a special metal with gravity-negating effects. A step ahead of the Eighth Metal yet one league behind the Xth.
History[]
It is native to Thanagar, the home planet of Katar Hol and Shayera Thal. Among the unusual properties of Nth metal is the ability to negate gravity, allowing a person wearing an object, such as a belt, made of Nth Metal to fly. In addition, Nth metal also protects the wearer from the elements and speeds the healing of wounds, increases their strength, and protects them from extremes in temperature.
It has many other properties that have yet to be revealed in full. It has been implied that the apparently magical abilities of the Thanagarian super-villain, Onimar Synn, all stem from his unique mastery of the properties of the Nth metal. These powers are augmented to a god-like level in the Rann-Thanagar war when he builds himself an artificial body made of the substance. It is also used as shielding around the engines of all Thanagarian Warbird ships.
In ancient Egypt a Thanagarian spaceship made of Nth metal crash-landed, to be discovered by Prince Khufu and his betrothed, Chay-ara. Exposure to Nth metal forced Khufu and Chay-Ara into a cycle of reincarnation. In the Twentieth Century, they were incarnated as Carter Hall and Shiera Saunders, the original Hawkman and Hawkgirl. As Hawkman and Hawkgirl, they wore Nth metal belts, made with the help of Thanagarian Paran Katar, father of Katar Hol, when he was visiting Earth.
Many years later, Carter and Shiera's son, Hector Hall made a suit of armor made of Nth metal and took the name Silver Scarab as a founding member of Infinity, Inc. The suit provided him with protection from attacks, allowed him to fly and to project solar energy blasts, and let him lift great weights. Members of the Legion of Super-Heroes wear flight rings made of an alloy of Nth metal called Valorium.
After the Source Wall was near destroyed when the Justice League used it to stave off invasion by the Dark God Barbatos and his twisted Acolytes. All Nth Metal forms throughout reality have become super active due to various energy forces flooding in from the Multiverse, the surviving denizens of Thanagar using the Absorbascon device through the Martian Keep to recreate their broken world and restore it to glory.
Powers and Abilities[]
The Nth Metal grants the wearer/wielder various unique abilities, including;
- Gravity Negation: Grants the ability to modulate gravimetric fields and adjacent effects for various purposes. Such as allowing the wearer to carry objects 20-70 times heavier than what they normally could.
- Flight: It's anti-gravity properties also enable it's user to fly unaided.
- Heat Generation: The metal generates a heat aura, sufficient to keep a man alive under Arctic conditions.
- Self-Sustenance: The Nth Metal used by the Hawks enables them to survive in all but truly inhospitable environs, from the near limitless cold of the sunless side of a planetoid to the lifeless recess of deep space.
- Symbiosis: The metal bonds to and vastly augments the physical dexterity of the host wearer, even restoring lost physical attributes which recede over time.
- Metamorphosis: Pure Nth Metal bonded to a host can shape and form into weapons or armor with adaptive features at their command. It will even move to protect the wearer from oncoming assaults against their person.
- Regeneration: Its restorative powers are such that Nth Metal allows its user to regrow missing body parts.
- Reincarnation: Another unique property of Nth Metal is its ability to habitually revive it's prominent wielders across the ages repeatedly. The user also remembers everything from their past lives up to the point of their rebirth.
- Resurrection: The metal can also restore the host after total biophysical desiccation, restoring life to a dead body, or even physically reintegrate its user at a bio-molecular level.
- Recall: Weapons forged through Nth Metal have the capacity to function without the need of physical handling, Carter Hall showcased such effects through his old Thanagarian Mace by making it fly around in whatever direction he willed it too.
- Magic Negation: In recent continuity users can physically interact with as well as disrupt the presence of ghostly entities, magic creatures, and even break enchantments.
- Energy Transference: Nth metal has the power to absorb and store vast quantities of energy for later redistribution.
- Energy Construct Creation: Hawkgirl could use her Nth Metal wings to project hawk like energy projections for protection and other such effects. But doing so required the help of an outside factor to coax the energy within to accomplish this.
- Molecular Reconstruction: Kendra used the energies her past lives bequeathed to reshape her old bludgeon into a flaming sword emanating with primeval energies to slay a meta-adaptive dragon.
- Power Augmentation: The metal has the effect of greatly enhancing a user's powers, Despero having used it to augment his already considerable physical and mental capabilities beyond the norm.
- Emotion Control: Nth Metal has the capacity to effect psionic influence on those who venture near it, the Nth Metal Man is able to affect empathic effects upon those around him in order to manipulate their actions and decisions.
- Adaptation: The symbiotic metal has the capacity to adjust and augment itself in order to better aid its wearer with new abilities.
- Healing Nullification: Can weaken the recovery abilities of its user's foes, allowing the user to deliver killing blows.
- Cosmic Awareness: The dark metal variant has the quality of sharpening a users senses to the point that they can see beyond the membrane of reality. The metal also has the capacity to view a persons truest self and secret desires to those whom wield it.
- Reality Alteration: Nth Metal has the potential property of manipulating reality on a quantum level. While in the light of the prime mutliverse, it has the capacity to change the nature of existence however the user wishes too.
- Dimensional Travel: Dark/Nth metal can be used to breech inter-dimensional barriers to traverse across the multiverse and beyond.
- Portal Creation: The metal can also trigger portals to and from other dimensions across the multiverse and the world forge.
- Chronokinesis: Hawkman discovered that there are cross temporal properties to Nth Metal, as it was through the metal he and his lover Kendra gained the power to be reborn across time and space.
- Time Travel: Throughout his journey of self-discovery, Hawkman realized the Nth Metal in his possession could also be used for the purpose of traveling back & forth through history in order to contact his past selves. He also learned to utilize such effects to call forth an army of other incarnations across reality to battle against the Deathbringers.
- Summoning: Hall managed to call forth an army of numerous past selves from his former lives across time & space in order to aid him against the threat of his former comrades. His militia of other selves ranging to and from the farthest corners of the galaxy and back; stemming from Earth to Rann, the Fourth World, Krypton, the Microverse, Earth-3, The World Forge and more.
- Transformation: Due to the metaphysical nature of the material in her wings, Kendra Saunders learned she could use the Nth Metal in her wings to disperse into a flock of raptors manifest from the souls of all her past incarnations.
- Dimensional Travel: Dark/Nth metal can be used to breech inter-dimensional barriers to traverse across the multiverse and beyond.
Notes[]
- In Pre-Crisis continuity, Ninth Metal existed in the Earth-Two universe, where it had no known extraterrestrial background. Nth Metal existed on Earth-One, and was used primarily by Thanagarians.
- Post Rebirth Nth Metal is revealed to have originated within the Dark Multiverse, being an incomplete facsimile of the purer 10th Metal sent back to the dawn of time by Barbatos.
- After Dark Nights: Metal, it is stipulated that the main composition in The Bleed comprises of Nth Metal. Indicating said existential membrane either originated from or is an alt. source of the alloy; hence its name.
Trivia[]
- Nth Metal is a non-conducting metal.
- In the DC Animated Universe, Nth Metal's atomic number is 676.