Please note: this story is on indefinite hiatus. When I first started writing fanfiction, I had in mind to introduce a bunch of OCs who had been kicking around in my head for well over a decade. The problem is that when I started writing, I didn't have a concrete plan beyond 'retell Knightfall the way it would have gone if Psion Force had been there'. I had a few key scenes I wanted to work in. I knew how I wanted the final chapter to go. I did not, however, sit down and really figure out how to pull it all off. Somewhere along the line, I ran out of steam. And then, some of the scenes that I'd envisioned for this fic began to pop up in subsequent stories. A conversation between Bron and Callie got tweaked and turned up in Giri--only it was between Bruce and Alfred. Some of Tabitha's lines started coming out of Dick Grayson's mouth. I also started rereading this and realized that as I got more into ficcing, my writing style changed. I'm not going to say 'matured' because that's subjective. But I do know that if I tried picking up now, later chapters would probably have a markedly different tone. I don't honestly know if I'll ever come back to update this fic, although anything's possible. Also, if you're a new reader, the last chapter isn't an evil cliffhanger it's more... well, like The Empire Strikes Back--it ends at a natural spot but you know that there has to be more. It's just that in this case... there isn't.
Psionverse 1: Knightfall-Knightrise
Disclaimer: I own Psion Force. DC owns Batman, Oracle, The Stable, Nightwing, Alfred, James Gordon, Gotham City (And we think Bruce is loaded!) and all other characters. I'm using them without permission, but I'm not making a cent. So there!
Timeline: Knightfall. For those of you who read my first story, Mayday, this story takes place four years later.
A/N: We are introduced to Oracle's fellow computer-experts in Birds of Prey 63.
A/N: Pirkei Avot, or "Ethics of the Fathers" is a religious text, one of the tractates of the Oral Law. On its simplest level, it's a collection of wise sayings from some of the greatest Rabbis who ever lived.
Prologue—Thoughts Under a Cornice at Two A.M.
"What's an average kid like me doing way up here?" I thought. That's the title of a book I loved when I was a few years younger. It takes on a whole new meaning when you're sitting on-no, correction, under the roof of an eight-story apartment building. Of course, that kind of setting really does call the whole "average kid" idea into question, now, doesn't it?
Funny, I had this idea that Manhattan was all skyscrapers and high-rises. Sure, there are a lot of them, but that's not all there are. A few times, I've peeked into Bronwen's art books. She's into that. She'd love this. Cornices on the roof, sculptures like something out of Grimm. I'll call them gargoyles, because it seems to me that a lot of these old buildings are supposed to be festooned with them. But maybe they're dragons, or griffons, or goblins. I wouldn't know. Anyway, just under the cornice of the south face of the southwest corner of this building is a ledge. Two of these mythical monster- things are sitting on it. And me. I'm the one in the middle, hoping my costume blends in. It should. The cloak is gray—that sort of bluish gray that granite takes on at dusk. I used to wear a brown one, but things change. Sometimes, they change slowly-like the way paint fades; sometimes they change in the time it takes to hear a news report. Brown shows more dust, anyway.
I have a few names. The one I go by outside of Midtown is Tabitha Aaronson. In Midtown, at least around Mooney Avenue where most of the kosher groceries and restaurants are, I'm Golda. That's my Hebrew name. Technically, Golda is a Yiddish name. It would be Zahava if it were Hebrew. I like that better. Evidently Mom didn't. To a select few, all of them computer-savvy, I call myself Yellow. I'm not really a hacker, not mainly, but I've managed to come up with some protective measures to keep you from getting caught if you do manage to break in to Norad. I started calling myself "Yellow," for a couple of reasons. I've made friends online with similar talents. In point of fact, calling that bunch 'computer-savvy' is like describing a Stradivarius as 'having a nice sound to it.' We're a core group of six. Four of the others are calling themselves Red, Blue, Pink and Green. The other one uses a halo as a signature and goes under Angel. Having a name that was practically a color already made it easy for me to choose that as a handle. "Yellow" just seemed to fit in with that bunch better than "Gold." We've stopped emailing each other recently; it was getting too risky if my security safeguards should ever fail. Now we stay in touch mainly by voder. Clean-room protocols all the way. Of course, none of that explains the cloak and cornice ledge. Maybe it would help if I mentioned that I'm able to pass through solid objects, wear Kevlar six nights out of seven and call myself Umbra when I do?
Actually, that would only explain the cloak. Fair enough. I'm sitting on a ledge that gives me a good view of a one-bedroom apartment next door. I'm waiting for the light to go on, telling me that the occupant is home. He hasn't been for about three days. Of course that means I haven't been home either. Gotham to Manhattan is a little long to commute. That's really too bad because New York is unfamiliar territory and unfamiliar territory makes me nervous. I got in by Greyhound, because it cost the least, left the soonest, and gave me plenty of time to look at city maps and pocket guides. They help, kind of like reading books on winning chess strategies. In other words they're interesting, but no substitute for playing.
I know. I'm babbling. When I'm nervous, I do that. Let's see, where was I? Right, I'm sitting on a ledge in Manhattan, snuggling up to a stone monster, which may or may not be a gargoyle. I'd say, 'so far so good', but that actually sounds kind of sad, doesn't it? Whatever. That's sort of in keeping with why I'm in a strange city, keeping strange company. It's business, not pleasure, and definitely not happy business.
Green told me—hold on, rewind a second and let me say over—Oracle told me that this is where Dick Grayson, formerly Robin, formerly leader of the Titans, currently Nightwing is living.
That was, well, maybe not too too surprising—Green being Oracle, I mean. I'd had dealings with her in both capacities-it just took me a while to connect the dots. I'm lying. It was something stupid. See, like Ben Zoma says in Pirkei Avot, one who is wise is one who learns from all people. It makes sense. Call it the lion and the mouse revisited. You never know when you might need help, and often the one assisting isn't the first obvious choice. Anyway, I may just be the expert in electronic and anti-hacking safeguards, but there was this one time that I came up against something I hadn't seen before. Hey, it happens. Fortunately, or so I thought, it happened to me in my capacity as Umbra. Over the last little while or so, I'd been contacted by someone styling herself Oracle. (I know now that it's 'herself'; at the time, I didn't.) She'd volunteer little bits of information, things like who just got out of Blackgate early, whether any of Penguin's dummy corporations had made any unusual purchases, tiny pebbles in the river of crime, spreading their influence like ripples.
Yeah, I know, that sounded like I read too much. Mea culpa. Anyway, I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask if this Oracle person had any insights. Given a few hours, maybe I could have cracked it on my own, but this character seemed to know everything else. Okay, I admit it. I was being lazy. Sue me. Oracle told me she didn't have what I was looking for handy, but if I could give her some time she'd get back to me.
That night, I got a communication from Green, asking me whether I, Yellow, knew the answer to the question which I, Umbra, had asked Oracle earlier. That sort of thing kind of makes a girl think. I mean, sure, Oracle could have asked Green, who turned around and asked me, but I didn't think so. Call it instinct, call it an ear for speech patterns, call it me picking up telepathy through osmosis, but in this business, sometimes you have to play your hunches. So I played mine, set out to trace the owner of the P.O. box I'd shipped Green's software to, and sat back to wait for the results. It took a while longer than usual, but eventually they came in. When they did, I did a double-take.
All right, just for the record, I know that a secret identity is supposed to be pretty far removed personality-wise from the, shall we say, 'public'? Fine, let's call it a public identity. There's plenty of precedent for this: Percy and the Scarlet Pimpernel. Don Diego and Zorro. Henry, the mild-mannered janitor and Hong Kong Fooey. The list goes on. So, knowing this, when I find out that someone has a heretofore-unsuspected side to him or her, I don't know why it should surprise me. But this did. I wondered whether the police commissioner knew what his daughter was doing. Not my lookout. I thought things over, and then reached for the phone book. Sure enough, there was a listing for Barbara Gordon.
She picked up on the second ring. "Hey, Oracle! This is Yellow," I chirped. "We need to talk."
That was last year. Four nights ago, we were listening to Misty's Moonlight Sonata on the radio. That's the local classical music show. They were doing a piece on talent in Gotham, and they'd taped Maybelle's renditions of three Chopin etudes. Bran and Jill had come for supper and stayed for the debut. The plan was to listen until Maybelle's piece came on or until the program ended, whatever came first, then hit the streets and take down a few more punks. Ten minutes into Misty, WGKN interrupted their program for a late-breaking news story.
"This is Ron Llewellyn live in Robinson Square, where a man in a costume, styling himself Bane, has just hurled the Batman from..." we listened, shocked. I think we were waiting for someone to shout 'April Fool'. This wasn't happening.
"I need to get there," Callie said suddenly. We all looked at her. "I'm a doctor, now. I can help. But I need to know where he'll be taken." She looked at me. "Can you find out?"
I nodded, and motioned for her to follow me up to my room. As she got up, the others started moving, too. "Suit up, gang," Bran said. "Gotham's going to go nuts tonight. Let's get cracking. Cal," he hesitated. "Sophie?"
My oldest sister, Sophia, a.k.a. Spectrum, has been on reserve status for more than seven years. She couldn't get a baby-sitter, or she would have been here tonight. With Batman apparently out of action, and most of Arkham's worst still at large, I agreed with Brandon. We were going to need all the help we could get. Callie thought so too. "Bronwen, call her. Tell her she's on standby until further notice. Tabitha," she turned to me, "lead on."
I turned on my computer. As called up my e-mail, Callie dashed to her room and came back with her costume. She started changing behind me. I got through to Oracle.
"This is not a good time," said the synthetic voice on the other end.
"Agreed," I said quickly. Before she could cut me off, I made our offer as clearly and concisely as I knew how: "We know how to get to Wayne Manor and my sister is a doctor." If that made any sense to her, then she would know exactly why I was calling. And, sure enough...
"Put her on and I'll patch this with Alfred!" Green said in her own voice. (Yes, I still think of her as 'Green.' It's how we met, it's who she was even before she was Oracle.)
I got up. Cal sat down in my seat. She looked at me. "What do I ..."?
"Just talk." I grinned. To Callie, a computer is a glorified typewriter that saves her a fortune on liquid paper and makes really good graphs and charts. For anything else, she asks me.
I got my costume out from the closet and remembered I had my arm-guards recharging in the basement. I headed downstairs to get them. Halfway down, something hit me. Nightwing. Someone had to tell him. And from what I'd seen, it didn't look like anyone would. I thought back to the last few months. Batman hasn't been on top of his form for a long time. I don't know what's responsible. Burnout? Mid-life crisis? Too many hours playing Tetris? Scratch that last one, it could only happen in an alternate reality. I'd offered to help him a few times. He'd practically bitten my head off. It kind of reminded me of Callie as a teenager. Hey, if you juggle being a student, de facto single mother, leader of a team of vigilantes, plus all the normal stresses of being sixteen, well, sooner or later you start to drop a few balls-or lose a few marbles. So yeah, I was worried. Batman's path and mine don't cross very often-maybe that's why we usually get along, but somehow I felt that if he was under that much pressure and not calling for help, now that something worse had happened, he was going to try to keep it hidden as long as he could.
That was none of my darned business, I know. Sure, he was being stupid, but that was his lookout. Except... Except, right now, we didn't know how badly he was hurt. Bane had just thrown him off the roof of the Bob Kane Art Museum, and he'd hit the pavement hard. News reporter Ron Llewellyn hadn't been able to get close enough to give an eyewitness report, but had presumed Batman's condition "critical." Well, duh.
Nightwing hasn't been in Gotham much, the last two years. He'd helped Naiad and me take down about fifteen thugs six months ago (no, we're not crazy enough to go two against fifteen-whenwe spotted them, they were only six, but they turned the corner and things got ugly). I'd asked him at the time how Batman was. That was probably a mistake. Nightwing had been smiling, up to that point. He just told us that they hadn't talked lately. Now, he didn't say 'end of discussion' in words, but the temperature dipped about ten degrees, and I didn't think it was El Nino.
Cal went through a period when she was younger (I think it's called 'adolescence'), when she rubbed everyone the wrong way. It pushed Bran into leaving home at fifteen and globetrotting for about four years. That's when he picked up the krav-maga, among other things. It made me want to run away from home about a million times—or find my "real" mother. But I think we knew, even back then, that, when the chips were down, if we were needed, we'd be there in a New York minute. And, if Batman... wasn't going to be okay, Nightwing had to be told. (Yes, I know he's Dick Grayson. Once you know who Batman is, the rest sort of clicks into place.) It wasn't a question of whether he would forgive me for sitting on this sort of info. If anything ever happened to Callie, or any of my siblings, after we'd had a major falling out, I knew I'd never forgive myself if we didn't get the chance to make it up. And, in the absence of telepathy, without a complete understanding of how Nightwing thought, and whether his reaction would be the same as mine, I was going to use the data at hand and assume that he would want to know.
I went back into my room. The window was open and Silver Dragon was gone. I turned back to the basement to get my arm-guards. Downstairs, the rest would be changing into costume and checking their gear. For a moment I hesitated. Gotham was going be Arkham tonight: a total madhouse. I wasn't doing the team any favors by ducking out on them. Callie was going to kill me. But for now, she would assume that I was with Pathwarden and the rest of the team. He would think I was with her. This was the best chance I was going to have, if I was going to go through with this stupidity. I phased the rest of the way into the training complex in the basement, bypassing the changing rooms. I grabbed my gear, and threw an eight-pack of chewy granola bars into a knapsack. The costume followed.
When I called Oracle from the bus terminal, she wasn't exactly thrilled with my idea. She didn't try to talk me out of it, though. And she did give me Nightwing's last known address. I was in Manhattan three hours later. I found a youth hostel in the area, and checked in. If Dick doesn't show up by sunrise, I'll head back there and catch a few hours sleep. I hope Callie won't be too mad.
Hold it, what's going on down there? Back in a minute!