All Sleeping Kings/Heroes vs Thanos' Endgame army

[BitVyper]

Everything happens as usual, but the moment the big battle starts, the MCU's heroes are replaced with all of Earth's mythical sleeping kings and heroes, along with any pals/knights/armies they are alleged to have kept in their myths. Objectives are the same as the movie; everyone has all relevant information that the Avengers had about the various setpieces and macguffins. How do they do?

I realise this brings up the typical questions of what stories count for some of them, so feel free to use your imagination, just say what interpretations you're talking about.

[Pendaran]

I see you have given me an excuse to talk about Finn of the Fianna (a slumbering hero) and the sequence with the Lad of the Skins, who totally worked for him for a while. Otherwise known as an incident where a bunch of heroes with not shabby supernatural capacity stare in slack jawed awe and terror in the way pre crisis DC heroes would at Doctor Fate, constantly questioning if whatever the hell they were seeing was actually happening.

So the Lad of the Skins shows up and offers to hire himself out to the Fianna and they're all "lol, whatever kid" and while going out hunting with them he goes into the bogs on his own and essentially depopulates them of animals. At this point the Fianna go "uhh.. you better get rid of this guy Finn, I'm pretty sure he breaks the power curve of our entire myth cycle by a ridiculous amount." Finn is all "Yeah, right, how about you tell him to go." *crickets* "Uhh.. what if we give him some impossible task that will get him killed!"

So they do that. So the Lad of the Skins proceeds to Hulk style jump across Ireland to the shore where he needs to sail to impossible quest land from as the first sign that no one has adequately prepared for this level of anarchy. Then, because the Lad of the Skins is not hax enough yet, he takes a couple of sticks, and transforms them into a sailing ship because shut up. Do you want to tell him he can't do that?

He sails to impossible quest land, where simply from the hundreds of ships around it there are thousands upon thousands gathered for some feast that he needs to take the magical cauldron from. He manipulates the laws of hospitality, grabs the cauldron, and again, between him and his ship is a horde of staggering proportions, he proceeds to move so fast back to his ship that no one is able to even try to stop him.

Then, as if breaking the fourth wall to comment to the audience, the Lad of the Skins is all "but was it really satisfying for me to just do that by some kind of nonsense superspeed? Here, let me turn PIS on my speed and go back and fight everybody by myself" So he does and he beats the living crap out of everyone. Once again, armies in the Fenian cycle in this writeup are given numbers in the tens of thousands at times. But the Lad of the Skins has already established that he's, hell, I don't know, a DC green martian that got lost in mythical Ireland for a while or something. No, that only explains something he later does, that doesn't make sense of the sticks to ship thing.

Anyway he gives Finn the magical cauldron and given that he was being sent to his death, I imagine there was some very awkward and nervous praising of him and some "we definitely expected you to come back! that party banner says 'welcome back Lad of Skins!', we definitely did not hastily paint over a 'Thank god the Lad of Skins is dead!'"

Some time passes and a random mystical voice from a lake tells Finn he has to give the cauldron back or get ready to fight its legal owner and his massive army, and obviously if there is anyone you listen to, it is random mystical lake voices, what's wrong with you. Sadly the Lad of the Skins is all "eh, my contract is up, I don't work for you anymore." Perhaps in response to Finn having some off text freakout, he decides to be a sport and offer him this convoluted way he can make the Lad of the Skins' wife agree to have him do more work for Finn, because apparently she has to agree to that.

So then the Lad of the Skins, remembering that for Rumbles purposes a feat is better if you do it more than once, beats up that entire army, by himself, again. Finn, who is normally the protagonist of this entire myth cycle that is named for him, is accompanying the Lad as basically his sidekick on the Lad of the Skins: The Legendary Journeys for this because at this point why not. Why would Finn even suggest he is the main character at this point.

So on the way back the Lad of the Skins runs into his previously unmentioned archnemesis and look, other than the twig ship magic, he's been mostly comprehensible as some kind of physical monstrosity. So obviously him and his nemesis have a fight where they shapeshift into a bunch of crap while trying to kill each other. Also fighting each other ages the various forms they change into (from children to old people, young horses to old horses, puppies to dogs, etc). I don't see why you think that isn't the perfectly logical narrative choice.

Anyway they kill each other in the shape of birds and then through various convoluted means his wife, who is the daughter of a god because of course she is, brings him back from the dead and they go off to, I don't know, the First and Second Ages of Middle Earth where he'd blend in slightly better but not really. The Fianna basically do a "let us never speak of this again". But! He still counts as Fianna in Finn's view.

Now, I'm not saying the Lad of the Skins could do much to Thanos, his strength is kind of nebulous other than that jump over Ireland thing.

I am saying he can probably waste all of Thanos' footsoldiers by himself and in not a lot of time as far as freeing up the awakened kings and heroes and their forces to focus on other things ;p

[Pendaran]

Oh, and Bernardo Carpio, in some variants of the stories about him, is being held in place by mountains that are trying to grind him between them and such is his durability that, well, no. Whenever he shrugs his shoulders against them, earthquakes happen.

That's a level of strength and durability that just blows well past anything in the opposition.

I suppose you could argue he's less slumbering and more trapped in place though.

[Pendaran]

Vainamoinen count for this?

[Beadle]

*Tries to think of mythical Odin feats*

*gets distracted and does something else instead*

[BitVyper]

Well that's the first I've heard of the Lad of Skins, so that's already making the thread worthwhile

Sailing away on a boat to one day return definitely counts, so Vainamoinen's good

I suppose you could argue he's less slumbering and more trapped in place though.

I mean I was gonna count Merlin, so...

[Pendaran]

In that case, the Lad of the Skins clears the footsoldiers and puts a sword through Ebony Maw (doing that bit first really), Bernardo Carpio goes to beat up Thanos, and Vainamoinen otherwise puts anyone still alive on the enemy side to sleep with magic singing, which takes care of the crew of the ship overhead certainly and who all else.

[jetengine]

Does Arthur get all his equipment? Cause if so once he's up from his nap he's effectively unkillable with Excaliburs sheathe so he'll just get to killing.

[Sharpandpointies]

...I'm liking this Lad of the Skins fellow. ^_^

[Pendaran]

He is delightful for how completely the hell out of nowhere he comes from in that cycle of stories, stays long enough to shatter the overall story power curve into ten million pieces without even an explanation, and then returns to the hell out of nowhere. It was like some brief, insane crossover took over the Fenian cycle.

[Sharpandpointies]

New author for that arc, I'm guessing. ^_^

[Pendaran]

Chronologically the Fenian Cycle is supposed to come after the Ulster Cycle (the one with Cu Chulainn) and thereby is supposed to have heroes performing on a lesser scale more or less in the way the heroes of the Iliad were held as less potent than the generations before them and etc. And for the most part that is the case.

Someone completely forgot to send the Lad of the Skins the memo to remind him of that.

[Pendaran]

The closest comparison I can think of would be if, with absolutely zero reasons ever given, MCU Thor showed up in the Defenders for a single episode, operated at full tilt power on everything in his way, and then left at the end of the episode as the rest of the cast just sort of stared and mumbled "... what?"

[Sharpandpointies]

The closest comparison I can think of would be if, with absolutely zero reasons ever given, MCU Thor showed up in the Defenders for a single episode, operated at full tilt power on everything in his way, and then left at the end of the episode as the rest of the cast just sort of stared and mumbled "... what?"

Nice analogy. And, you know, I would have loved to see that. ^_^ Would have been an awesome episode, and I would have enjoyed Danny punching him to no effect.

Because MCU Danny would.

[Beadle]

Nice analogy. And, you know, I would have loved to see that. ^_^ Would have been an awesome episode, and I would have enjoyed Danny punching him to no effect.

Because MCU Danny would.

Oooh, you fibber.

You’d want to see it because Thor would have knocked MCU Elektra’s head clean off her shoulders, which would definitely have warmed the cockles of your heart.