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Begone, ye self-insert bishounen and Mary Sues, ye wise-cracking sidekicks and all-powerful new villains!
- Karkadinn
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/The Watchtower
2016, October 12, 19:08 EDT/
"A-choo!"
"Gesundheit."
Barbara weakly lowered the crook of her arm from her nose. "Thanks, Atom."
/Perth
October 6, 23:59 Australian Western Standard Time /
Rain fell from dark skies, obscuring the city and isolating the small suburban house where the old woman lived. In short, it was a dark a stormy night.
Inside the house were the works: Candles, chalked pentagram on the floor, plenty of black velvet, and of course the grimoire. A particularly old and ugly one of its kind, bound in human skin and written with human blood. The woman, on the other hand, didn't exactly fulfill the stereotype of the cackling old crone: A short, slender old lady with rimless glasses and short grey, dimples amid the wrinkles and a simple gold wedding ring on her hand. For the occasion she'd put on the same black dress she wore to her husbands funeral.
Seeing the seconds tick down to midnight, she read from the book. The words were ancient Sumerian, the content vulgar and the length of the speech took up the entire minute before the antique grandfather clock would strike twelve. But the message was simple: "Come."
As the last word was uttered, and the bells rang through the small house, the woman's long unknown but considerable talent for magecraft... unfolded, in the blink of an eye, and by side effect of its actual purpose acted as an excellent lightning rod.
Lightning struck the tiled roof and thunder rattled the windows. Light bulbs around the house sparked and died, the witch's laptop, which she been too preoccupied to think to unplug, made a small noise and fizzled, never to turn on again, and the fuses melted. The living room kept its low candlelight, and the pentagrammed circle was now occupied.
The woman hesitated to speak for a few seconds. She had never summoned an infernal being before, and this one didn't look much like she'd expected. Shorts, T-shirt, bottle of mineral water in hand and breath heavy, except for a few details it looked much like a teenager that had just been running for exercise.
"Are you the jeweled one?" she asked. It looked cross.
Seeming to catch its breath, it sighed. "Guess I am."
That was all that was important. "Then you will serve me, or I will cast you into oblivion, devil."
It gave her a flat look and one raised eyebrow. "With that spell book?" Then it stepped right across the barrier - the magic circle drawn on the floor and infused with magic - which instantly turned black and started smoking. Before the old witch could recover from the shock, the girl-shaped devil took the tome from her hands and swung it hard into the side of her face.
The senior citizen when down like a sack of beans, but managed not to break a hip. "I'm sorry! Forgive me, great one!" she desperately pleaded now that something had clearly gone very, very wrong.
A foot to her solar plexus stopped her from doing much else but curl up. "'Great one?' No one talks like that," the infernal thing said, sounding nothing more than mildly resigned. "And I'm a demon, not a devil."
/The Watchtower
October 14, 06:08 EDT/
"Lex Luthor has been abducted. Just now," Jonn informed the superheroes around him, sitting around the well-spaced opservation room with a spectacular view of earth through the enormous windows. He'd been reading Lindsey Davis when the message showed with a low and melodic "beep". At the wall opposite to Earth, in the middle of a row of large holo-screens showing various international news channels, one constantly updating holo-screen displayed simple rows of written alerts. And flashing at the top, having just displaced the storm warning for the South China/West Philippine Sea:
"12.06: Lex Luthor abducted from LexCorp Tower, perpetrators unknown."
Silence reigned. For five seconds.
"Is Superman there?" Hawkwoman asked.
"He's in Egypt," Hal Jordan answered.
Jonn had busied himself and got a satellite picture through from the League's network: The screen on the right from the alert list now showed a silvery spire jutting up above the early morning Metropolis skyline, the L-shaped roof immediately recognizable, and three-quarters up a single blemish in the otherwise perfect facade. A zoom-in on what looked like a luxurious bedroom revealed a warped but unbroken window behind the king sized bed, apparently pushed out of its frame and deposited safely inside rather than tossed to the hapless commuters below.
"Someone just flew into his room, picked him up and left?" Hal considered. Then he levitated out of his chair, put a glowing green lid on his mug of coffee and flew into the Zeta tube at the left end of the room. His voice rang out from the speakers in the ceiling: "I'll see if I can pick up any air traffic, people-sized."
In the meantime, the Martian had rewinded the footage: And right enough, a figure in some kind of full body suit and a motorcycle helmet did just as Hal guessed before taking of in a south-south-western direction, at a speed that would quickly give the pajamaed man in its hands a bad case of hypothermia. Jonn relayed as much to the Green Lantern.
Red Arrow rose from his seat, going the Zetas. "I'll be on the crime scene."
"I'll watch your back," Shayera added, following.
Jonn considered waking several more superheroes to look for Luthor, but it seemed wrong to go all out to help one of their enemies. He instead called Doctor Fate, who never slept anyway, to stand by in Metropolis for back-up.
/Metropolis, Lexcorp Tower
October 14, 06:37 EDT/
When Red Arrow arrived at the front entrance to the skyscraper, Shayera had already been to the airspace just outside Luthor's bedroom and taken a dozen snapshots. She was waiting for him at the large sliding glass doors and as expected, the Leaguers were held back in the lobby. The pretty receptionists and imposing, black-suited men were all very polite about it, but also possessed the kind of stubborness the prospect of losing your job tends to inspire.
MCPD officers arrived a few minutes after Arrow and Hawkwoman to ask if the alert they'd received as per standard procedure from the League was correct in reporting a citizen abducted. At that point the security personnel had to call their superiors upstairs, who sounded like Mercy Graves and told them to keep their mouths firmly shut, allow no one anywhere near the 56th floor, and to contact the emergency legal team regarding the authorities. Roy heard all this by tapping his earpiece into the local frequency.
So he called the League's own 24/7 lawyers to fence around with Luthor's, which lasted for about two minutes before it was firmly established that the suits were legally obligated to inform that a crime had probably been commited, and yes, there was a distinct possibility that a superpowered individual might have been involved, which meant that the case went federal. Of course, it was going to anyway, considering that the Secretary General of the UN was the abductee.
Forensics were called in, Hal Jordan had long since given up trying to spot anyone who shouldn't be in the Metropolis airspace, and the vultures descended with rolling cameras and no clues. The steadily growing throng of journalists were shown to the door by security (who graciously allowed the Leaguers to continue waiting inside), and half an hour later agent Walker and agent Pilgrim arrived to officially take over the investigation. Arrow and Hawkwoman still weren't allowed topside, but with the bug placed discretely in one of Agent Pilgrim's pockets, that would be alright.
A League-employed technician was quickly dispatched to a neighboring roof-top, small parabolic antennas set up to receive and transmit, and from 55 floors above, Miss Graves voice soon spoke through Red Arrow's earpiece.
What the ominously named cyborg assistant could tell agents Walker and Pilgrim wasn't much more than the League could have surmised with what little they already had: Several alarms had been tripped early in the morning, and before Graves or any other of Mr. Luthor's bodyguards could reach him, the tycoon was gone without a trace.
The technicians reported no signs of blood, minimal (effective) resistance from the victim, and that the armored glass had been pushed in, by hand, in one go. No fingerprints. Superman was mentioned, and rejected by virtue of his alibi in north-eastern Africa. That still left a few more known superhumans with the capability of pulling this off, and an uncomfortable percentage of those were League.
Arrow recorded everything, still sitting in one of the lobby's sofas in the waiting area to the side, reading the Time magazine that had been lying on the minimalistic coffee table and squeezing a gripmaster. The early birds going by on their way to work paid the winged woman at his side a few more stares. One or two even looked about to pick up the long, golden-brown feather she had shed, lying on the blue-grey carpet by her feet, but so far none had worked up the courage. One of the receptionists would likely be able to sell it for a few thousand bucks later.
Walker, Pilgrim and the techies (carrying the bent and cracked window) stopped by on the way out to inform that the bureau wouldn't require any assistance with this investigation beyond maybe answering a few questions later, Roy fished back his miniature toy, and Shayera ordered jasmine tea: The two of them would stick around for a bit longer and see if management decided to talk to them anyway. It wouldn't do to walk out now like they'd already got what they came for.
Two solid hours after the apparent abduction, the Light had apparently still not managed to return one of their own, and the two superheroes were about to leave when a uniformed woman with strangely heavy footsteps approached them.
"Come with me," was all Miss Graves said before she turned right back around toward the elevators. Red Arrow and Hawkwoman followed.
The elevator ride was silent, but not so awkward as one might have expected. Listening devices were likely installed here by any number of parties. Mercy stood straight and expressionless at the back of the spacious enclosure, Red Arrow leaning against the wall to her right and the winged woman taking up the left with arms crossed. Enemies so close to each other and so far from able to unleash the violence. In mere seconds a small bell chimed, the doors opened and the three of them stepped out into a hallway, down the hallway and through another door which Mercy locked behind them.
It looked much like any normal conference room: A single oval table with ten simple chairs, a large whiteboard and the outer wall made of one-way glass, providing an impressive panorama of Metropolis . As if by magic, or more likely in-built remote controls, the windows went black, the lights dimmed and the projector on the ceiling lit up the whiteboard with the view of a standard Windows desktop. While mercy remained standing, her guests took an uninvited seat and watched the screen accessing an external harddrive and open a video file seemingly by itself.
Roy was only slightly creeped out by Luthor apparently taping himself sleeping, but the ostensibly hidden camera did get a good look at the kidnapper as she did her thing. It seemed like a 'she' to him, despite her build being mostly hidden under full, grey-and-blue biker leathers and her face behind a black-visored helmet. She came in, yanked Luthor out of bed while he fired several shots into her center mass, slapped the hand-laser out of his hand, took him under one arm and flew out again.
Strength and flight were some of the most common powers out there, but of the metahumans they knew existed, the female appearance narrowed the suspect list down to four, and they were all League: The Wonders and the Martians.
"Your boss' buddies not helping out?" Shayera inquired. Mercy had withheld this crucial bit from the FBI, so she or the Light must have decided it was too valuable to show to just anybody. But now she was. Roy supposed this was all an overly elaborate ploy, or Mercy was getting desperate. A lot of things could happen to an abductee in two hours.
The cyborg shook her head slowly. "This is all I know."
And that seemed to be that. With a copy of the video file in one flash-drive, the two superheroes left the enemy's castle.
/The Watchtower
October 14, 15:03 EDT/
"J'onn was in Tongli, watering his flowers; Diana was in Themyscira, her mother and several amazons attesting to that; M'gann and Casandra were still sleeping, alone, and neither of them tape themselves," Batman summarized. "After examining the footage, however, we can also say with certainty that the perpetrator is at least five centimeters shorter than Wonder Woman."
The woman herself didn't look too impressed. "We don't need alibis. There is nothing linking us to this crime besides our powers, and any number of unknowns out there could have those."
With the expanded roster of the Justice League, not everyone could be fitted around the Big Table, as it was called. And with the Team moved to the super-atmospheric HQ, it had grown too big as an organization for everyone to be informally included as equals. It simply wasn't practical. Instead, a chain of command had been implemented, and only the highest ranking leadership was seated in this particular, low-orbit conference room.
"Nobody likes internal investigation, but it has to be done," Black Canary, current leader of the Justice League, insisted.
"Do we have any actual leads?" Flash asked. "Useful ones, that we can follow up on?"
"No," Batman answered. "The perpetrator left no fingerprints or DNA, the leathers and helmet could have been bought in a number of shops, in half of the countries around the world, or ordered over the internet. They flew at approximately 120 kilometers per hour, and had disappeared completely before we got the call. No one has reported seeing them or Luthor, and no ransom demands have been made so far."
"She came, she took and she left," Flash mumbled dryly under his breath.
"What about enemies?" Captain Atom suggested. "He must have had plenty of those, besides us."
"We're looking into that angle, and have convinced the FBI to share with us," Canary said. "We're still waiting to hear back from Batgirl, but no news so far." And no news were no results.
None of the assembled superheroes said anything for a bit, but the elephant was very much there with them, breathing down their necks. Hawkwoman were the one to say it: "This is all very interesting, but is it our problem?"
"It's a crime, committed by a metahuman," Superman countered. "That means we have to bring the perpetrator to the authorities."
No one contradicted that. End of discussion.
"Is there anything we can do that we aren't already doing?" John Stewart asked.
No one put any ideas on the table.
"We keep our eyes and ears open, and we carry on. Meeting ad-"
The sound of running footsteps interrupted Dinah, followed by a hard, fast knocking on the large steel door at the end of the room. Heads turned and saw the door opening at Canary's "come in", and Aqualad quickly stepped inside, saying: "Computer, display orbital camera number 14-A," with no explanation to his superiors. But they didn't stop him, seeing the urgent look in his eyes, instead looking to the hologram-projected screens now emerging above the table.
Camera A on satellite 14 was supposed to monitor Infinity Island, HQ of the League of Shadows. There was nothing on screen but ocean, swirling and frothing, under a thick cloud of dust which slowly drifted away in the ocean wind.
"What the..." Flash muttered.
"Hera," breathed Wonder Woman.
"Computer," Aqualad spoke again. "Rewind two minutes."
Infinity island appeared, exactly as the last time the people in the meeting hall had seen it, lonely and fortified in the ocean. It remained so, for 17 tense seconds. Then it exploded. One moment it was an island, and the next, with no flash of flame, a grey cloud obscured it completely. The cloud then seemed to grow and deform in a single split second, and then once more, but less so.
"Shift to 14-C," J'onn commanded, and the screens switched to a view that wasn't mostly taken up by the island, but would also monitor the waters around it for a kilometer in each direction. With the 45-degree angle, the mushroom cloud was clear to see where Infinity Island had been mere minutes ago.
There was shock, and then a single name: "Queen Bee."
A flurry of activity broke out. Wonder Woman stood abruptly. "Shayera."
"Right behind you."
"Zatanna, how fast can you get to the Watchtower's hangar?"
"J'onn, get QB on the line."
"Kaldur, put every available spy-sat on Al-Qawiyah! All of it, but especially the palace!"
"Just get there, out. Arthur, we need to search that crater for anything. Miss Martian, get to the Watchtower hangar, now, out."