Chapter One: Opening

A night of patrol turned to madness, and perhaps the only madness was what that this sort of thing was normal. Heavy boots tramped across the rooftops, dodging and dashing to avoid rapid fire shots of flitting bullets, all the while trying to find an opening in which to secure the objective. The objective being, to foil an obligatory bank robbery.

"Hey, where'd he go, boss?" cried the whiny voice of Big Grins Billy, a minor gang member. He held his old-fashioned tommy gun up as he nervously bit his tongue.

"He's still up there, so quit yappin' and keep shootin'!" yelled the large man under the yellow fedora, apparently being the one whom 'boss' was attributed to. The gangsters were cornered in the alley next to the brick bank building and were trying to force their way out before the police came and surrounded them. Already sirens could be heard, but the police were not very high on their list of worries at the moment.

"Is it true he eats th' bodies of his victims like a Drac' or somethin?" said Big Grins stupidly, which gained him a cuff on the head by another member.

"Stoopid, dat's zombies, not vampires. An' anyway, he's nothin' but a man like youse dimwits and me, and a man that can be whacked. So keep your eyes up on them roofs and whack 'im good!" yelled the green pinstripe-suited Terry, whose nickname was ironically the Whacker.

The streetlamp went out with a slight crackle of glass and the five gangsters panicked and shot wildly everywhere, and Big Grins yowled and grabbed his foot. "Yah doofus yah got me in the toe! Who did it!? I'll knock 'em a good one and show yah worse yah—" He stopped yelling when he realized that there was silence. He blinked in the darkness and held his tommy gun up nervously. "Guys?...Uh, guys? Where…where'd you go?"

His primal fear of Batman got to him and he began wildly shooting in a circle, yelling, not caring if any of his teammates got in the way. "Yaaaahhhhh! Take that, Batsy! Yah can't creep me out with this scary stuff, yah rodent! Yer nothin' but a man and a man can be killed!"

"So can you," a deep, raspy voice hissed in his ear, the hot breath cooling in an instant as he gasped and saw no more.

The next thing the gangsters knew that they had a collective headache and were in the back of a paddywagon, with a certain dark knight looking down on them from the tip of an old gothic building.

"Hey!" yelled Big Grins before the police closed the doors of the paddywagon. "Hey, he didn't kill us, we're alive! Hah ha! Timsky was right, the Bats don't kill!"

A Batarang sang through the air and embedded itself in the metal next to Big Grins head. He gaped, stared at the shiny metal thing, and fainted dead away.

"Way to scare 'im," laughed the brightly clad figure next to the man on the rooftop. "I mean, he had to have taken a dump right then and there. I know I would have. I mean if I was in his place." Robin looked at the humorless face of his mentor. "Not that I'd be gangster or anything. You know. Hey, it was funny!"

"You were a little late," said Batman gruffly, who took one last look at the loud and busy police scene below him before stalking across the office rooftop. "I had to take them all out by myself."

"I was on a date! A date, you know, that thing you go on and have fun?" Robin rolled his eyes under his mask. "It's a rare thing for me, and these idiots had to go and ruin it by deciding to rob a bank. You know how stupid the excuse I gave—"

"Robbing a bank. It's odd, no one's robbed a bank in three years," mused the brooding figure, who looked out over the opposite end of the rooftop. "They know we patrol at this hour in this area, how uninformed and idiotic had they…they must be from out of town. Robin, get back on the computer and run a background check on one…Big Grins Billy and—"
"Big Grins Billy? Kind of vague, about half the old-fashioned gangsters in this city have that name? Couldn't the police tell you anymore?" Robin sighed, coming up to the edge of the rooftop himself. Batman seemed to brood and think best when he was on the edge of something, apparently. "But seriously, criminals like that don't just up and waltz into town and take over someone's turf—they were organized, they were gangsters. They had to have known someone here. So maybe someone set them up?"

"Exactly," there was a hint of pride in Batman's normally stoic and emotionless voice. Tim Drake was more of a detective than ever, even more so than Dick had been. "And that's who we find. This might just be a random incident. But I have a feeling it's not."
Batman was reaching into his utility belt for his grappling gun when Robin spoke up quickly. "Wait! There's someone else down there, in the alley!"

The caped man dashed over to the other end of the rooftop and perched silently with his younger partner as they watched a blond woman walk into the alley.

"How did she get past the pol—" Robin began but Batman put a finger to his mouth to immediately shush the kid. The woman didn't seem to notice their presence in the darkness above her, as she walked calmly and confidently into the alley. She was wearing a shockingly bright white trench coat-like garment. The bags of money had been left there for evidence and had not been photographed yet. She picked them up almost lazily and gathered up fallen wads of cash as she placed them into another open bag. Slinging the sacks over her shoulder, she calmly walked right out of the alley and into the busy police scene. Astonishingly, no one stopped her, and she made her way out in front of the bank and kept on going.

"I don't think she works for the city…" muttered Robin. A nod from Batman and the two were off, and lept across the alleyway and onto the steep roof of the bank. The rubber soles of their shoes struggled to grip the fancy shingles of the arched roof as they climbed onward, but they made it up and across and onto the next alley, over and onto the next building.

"There she is!" hissed Robin loudly as he prepared to jump of the edge of the building, hoping to cut the woman off at the sidewalk. She glanced sharply upwards.

"Where?" Batman reached the edge a half a second later, but the sidewalk below was full of onlookers and rubberneckers, hoping to catch some of the excitement of the bank robbery.

"What…" Robin looked confused. He rubbed his temples. "Maybe I drank too much caffeine today. I could have sworn those people…weren't there a second ago. She was there by herself!"

Batman stared long and hard at the crowd. There were too many people, and the blonde in the white coat was nowhere to be seen, up nor down the street. She had disappeared completely.

"Thanks, Robin. She heard you."

"Barely."

"She must be meta…" A small sigh barely escaped from under the dark cowl. "Or really good at blending into crowds."

"Yeah, must be," Robin still looked confused.

"Maybe…" the other man stroked his chin, which was sandpapery from lack of shaving. "…I'm assuming she might be an illusionist of some kind. That crowd probably isn't real…"

"We can find out," Robin grinned mischievously and tossed a couple of smoke pellets in the air, catching it with his gloved hand. He glanced down, and gasped. "Hey, they're gone!"

"See," Batman murmured, and the sidewalk was quiet and empty once more. He was a bit annoyed, he didn't like his mind to be messed with—after all, it had been messed with enough in recent times by the likes of those kinds of people, and look at the consequences of that—and he felt a bit annoyed at himself for letting his mind and his eyes be fooled so easily by a simple illusion, whether it be mental or possibly chemical. He sniffed the air, then opened a small kit from his belt to sample the air.

"Hey, Batman, I can do that for you," Robin offered. "Why don't you go?"

The latter nodded, handing the kit to Robin, and without another word, leapt off into the night.