Anyone watching Kara in that moment would have thought that she needed to be committed. It was barely 8AM and she was pacing back and forth between the living room and her bedroom, talking to herself as she worked through plans A through Z to remove her red power ring. She had more options than she thought that had, but now she had to figure out one that was most likely to work.
Tonight was the night. Tonight, she was get rid of her power ring once and for all.
She returned to her bedroom and stared at the wall to her left. The giant pieces of butcher paper that had been hanging on that wall for the past several months, the ones that had mapped out and outlined her study plan for her board exam, were no more. Once Nora had taken the board exam, she had pulled her study plan down as soon as she had come home. With test results not expected to be out for several days, the last thing she had needed at the time was yet another very in-your-face reminder that she was waiting for some Big Important News.
Since then, the walls had remained bare—that is, up until this morning, when Kara had woken up in a frenzy and had started to work out the different options that she had at her disposal. On one piece of butcher paper read the following words in bright red marker:
"Objective: remove the red power ring without dying."
On the next piece of butcher paper, and on the piece after that and the piece after that, were loose notes and scribbles about her various options that she had written down as she brainstormed various approaches. Kara stepped back to look at her handiwork, her brow furrowed in thought as she continued to work through this. "What am I missing here?" she asked out loud. Pork Chop whined in the distance; the giant dog was huddled on his doggie bed in her room, trying to catch some ZZZs while his human appeared to be doing something very, very important, and very, very early. The topknot that had once sat upon Kara's head had devolved into a messy monster of its own, and she was still padding around the apartment in a zip-up hoodie and pajama pants.
She scanned the notes for the millionth time and scoffered. "This isn't working," Kara grumbled. She walked over to Nora's desk and sat down in the big, comfy chair. She pulled her legs underneath her so that she was sitting cross-legged before she started rooting through the various drawers and hiding places in and around the desk. Soon enough, she'd found the Stabilo pens and index cards that she was looking for. She adjusted her glasses and got to work.
On the first note card, and with appropriately colored pens for each Lantern who would play a role, she wrote out the original plan that the Lanterns had devised the night before: Kara would remove her ring and go into cardiac arrest; Carol would stabilize her; Kyle and Simon would work together so that Kyle's blue power ring could cleanse and heal Kara and then they could all go celebrate or go their respective ways or whatever it was that they'd decide to do. She capped the red pen and sat back in her chair to look at the notecard again. The instructions were in her own shorthand, but they made sense to her and that was all that mattered. "Okay," she mumbled. "Plan one done."
Pushing the Plan One card to her left, Kara pulled out another blank notecard but held off on writing anything down for now. But what if it didn't work? She thought. What if something went wrong with the blue power ring? What if it didn't have enough power or if Kyle didn't have enough control over it yet? She closed her eyes and tried to imagine where they would be in the process if that didn't work.
"Ring off, heart stabilized," she spoke out loud. "Blue ring doesn't work. Still dying." Kara thought about the conversations she'd had with the other Lanterns in the past day. "Still dying," she repeated before pausing for what felt like a full minute. "And then Simon steps in and does his thing."
Her eyes flew open and she began to scribble the same shorthand onto the second notecard. Satisfied with her work, she stood up to stretch again and keep her blood flowing while she thought through any and all other possibilities. Kara wandered through the living room and mindlessly tidied up as she went, adjusting throw pillows and folding blankets and picking up glasses that had been left out from the night before. As she juggled the glasses in her arms on the short watch to the kitchen, she felt another knot form in her stomach and a lump in her throat. Anxiety, you're a jerk.
She set the glasses in the sink and rinsed them out before reaching for the sponge that sat in a caddy in the corner of the sink. She allowed herself to get lost in thought as she sudsed and scrubbed and suddenly, another part of her plan clicked into place. She finished what she was doing, set the glasses on the drying rack, dried her hands on a nearby towel, and rushed back to her room.
She didn't even bother to sit down this time and began to scrawl her shorthand on another blank notecard. If Simon's healing wasn't enough, Koriand'r could step in and hit Kara with a novablast. It was all of her solar energy in one big, concentrated blast—surely that was just as good as a trip to the sun. Her brow furrowed in thought again. "If Kori has to use a novablast on me, then everyone else needs to get out of there ASAP," she mumbled as she continued to think aloud. The Lanterns could get themselves out of there assuming that their rings were working, but if they weren't— "Bruce!" she shouted. He could teleport them all out of there, Kori could do her thing, and then she and Kori could meet up with the others once all was said and done.
Kara finished writing and set her pen down. She felt like she had cracked some kind of code and gathered up her notecards and some tape to stick them to the butcher paper. A few minutes later, she had a plan and two contingencies laid out.
She immediately ran to the bathroom to vomit.