The Hands, also known as "Super Celestials" or "Unseen Hands", are celestial beings from beyond the Source Wall, responsible for the creation and maintenance of the infinite Multiverses within the Greater Omniverse.
History
Not much is known about the origins of The Hands, except that they are tasked to start Multiverses throughout the Overvoid using Connective Energy born of The Presence, of The Source. These beings birth a reality and then die, given themselves to the baby Multiverse. The bad seed among them, Perpetua, refused to die and created her Multiverse using Crisis Energy. Her goal was to create a Multiverse with no memory, one that would live forever in a self-renewing loop of its own importance. A Multiverse that would prey on others, absorb them and forget them, vampiric and eternally devoted to her. She thus traveled through the different dimensions of her Multiverse in search of beings rich in potential if correctly exploited and her research took her to Earth, the center of the Multiverse, where she experimented on the inhabitants of the planet with those of the neighboring world, creating an army of immortal Apex Predators to fight eternally in her name. After her children, the Brothers Three learned of her plans to twist the Multiverse, they alerted The Hands whose response was to sent the Cosmic Raptor to imprison Perpetua, her Great Army, and the Totality of the power she had selfishly hoarded in the Source Wall. Perpetua's Multiverse was then restarted, but this time with Connective Energy.
Dark Nights: Death Metal
After Perpetua was freed from the Source Wall by Lex Luthor, she transformed him into an Apex Predator like her former army's members. She used him and his legion to twist the Multiverse's balance of justice and doom and defeat the Justice League of Earth 0; in the end, Perpetua restored her Apex Predators' army to defend herself and its creatures from the Hands' vengeance.
After being advised that her enemies were saved from total annihilation, Perpetua allied herself with the Batman who Laughs, an evil Batman from the Dark Multiverse who proposed her to supercharge her with the eternal Crisis Energies from his realm so she chose him as her new right hand.
While Perpetua was moving through the Multiverse, the Batman who Laughs became an almighty God after his mind was transplanted into the Batmanhattan, a Dark Multiverse being who possessed the Connective Energy of the omnipotent Doctor Manhattan. The fresh-born Darkest Knight planned to use his newfound strength against the Mother of the Multiverse and, after that, to kill the Hands and conquer every other multiverse.
The Darkest Knight redirected the Crisis Energy from Perpetua to himself and gained more power which he then used to battle her. As the Multiverse was expected to die, the Hands sent there one of their heralds; the Chronicler, a being who was tasked to describe the history of dying multiverses and their final death.[2]
After finally killing Perpetua, the Darkest Knight confronted a Forge of Worlds-empowered Wonder Woman and took her to the Creation of the Multiverse; then, they reached the End of Time where the Darkest Knight revealed her the truth about the Hands: the almighty rulers of the Omniverse had already decided to destroy the Multiverse as its inhabitants had gone too far, causing one Crisis after the other too many times to be spared from annihilation. The One who Laughs proposed her to ally with him as he was going to kill the Hands, before they could annihilate the Multiverse, and conquer the Omniverse.
Diana refused and ultimately killed the Darkest Knight, thereby accepting the final fate of the Multiverse; however, the Hands were so surprised by her selfless choice to save Them that They spared the Multiverse and its inhabitants while, at the same time, restoring all its iterations and also allowed Diana to ascend to an Higher Plane of existence.[3]
Powers
- Nigh-Omnipotence/Divine Empowerment: The Super Celestials were granted unlimited power by The Source, being the almighty rulers of the Greater Omniverse capable of originating or consuming Multiverses, although after giving birth to a reality, they are believed to return their energies to The Source. Perpetua, the rogue among them, feared that if they discovered her actions, they would come to enact Cosmic Judgment on her and her Multiverse. The only known beings capable of either rivaling or surpassing them are Perpetua, Darkest Knight, The Presence, The Source.
- Energy Construct Creation: As the Super Celestials are granted Connective Energy by The Source to start a Multiverse, they use these energies to shape their reality into a format intended to evolve and ascend within the Greater Omniverse.
- Reality Alteration: The Hands have the ability to alter reality on a multiversal scale, as Perpetua feared that if her siblings, The Hands, came to discover her actions, they would come for her and erase her and her multiverse from existence.[4]
- Resurrection: The Hands can restore a destroyed Multiverse, as displayed when they recreated the Multiverse and restored everything and everyone of that reality as a reward for being saved from the Darkest Knight by Wonder Woman.[5]
- Metamorphosis: The Hands have the ability to manifest themselves to other beings through physical appearances, as seen when one Hand took the form of Wonder Woman of Earth-Two in order to interact with Diana.[6]
- Size Alteration: These super celestials beings are bigger than the Multiverses.
- Dimensional Travel: The Hands are capable of traveling across the Multiverses in the Overvoid. The Hands can also move freely through the Timestream, as they once reached the End of Time to witness Diana's last stand against the Darkest Knight.[7]
- Immortality: They have actually lived approximately trillions of years in the Omniverse, and will continue to do so even into the future.
Notes
- Although not officially confirmed, "The Hands" and the "Judges of the Source" have been used interchangeably throughout the story, as Justice League Vol 4 22 referred to the Judges of the Source as those whom Perpetua's children had alerted and those whose judgment was coming on the Multiverse, while Dark Nights: Death Metal Vol 1 7 and Dark Nights: Death Metal Multiverse's End Vol 1 1 attributed this to The Hands.
See Also
- 1 Appearances of The Hands
- 1 Images that include The Hands
- Team Gallery: The Hands