Author's Note: This is something I've been working on for the past week trying to get back into writing. It was just an idea that came to me explaining where Donna might have been since the New 52 started. To be honest I haven't really kept track of the new canon and I can't really say I'm a fan of it but its been an interesting project for me to work on. Hope you guys like it.
For as long as anyone could remember the world around us has been in a constant state of flux with massive cosmic upheavals rewriting the very fabric of reality every few years, nothing ever stayed the same and yet in a paradoxical scene…it did. Reality was altered every few years in minute ways never really enough for the masses to realize what was happening other than a cosmic battle that threatened their very existence. In almost every case it involved a supervillain with near omnipotent powers that wanted to recreate the universe in their own image to which the Justice League and every superhero alive would battle them for the fate of the universe with the villain creating some kind of cataclysm that came within a hair's breadth of destroying the world and fracturing reality until some time/space mumbo jumbo set in and restored everything to an approximation thereof. It was annoying…especially when you retain all knowledge of these events. Donna Troy happened to be one of those people; in fact she was its caretaker. Ever since the latest Crisis, Donna has been monitoring the multiverse and its current state from afar, very far, as in not in our universe far.
You see ever since Barry Allen and Professor Zoom managed to break the entire universe in Flashpoint, Donna has found herself jettisoned from her native universe to the old Olympian God outpost known as New Cronus and has been forced to watch and detail events as they happened which as it turns out was tied to her previously adopted role as the Harbinger who functioned as a historian of the multiverse. Since then the universe has been reset yet again but this time into a much darker incarnation than before. This universe was like nothing Donna had ever seen before, nor one that she wanted to believe as fact as most of her friends, family and former teammates had been altered by the event. Some for the better, others not so much and still others would face much worse. The Titans as she knew them were either in shambles or didn't exist at all. Indeed any previous mention of the Teen Titans in all its incarnations had been stripped from the record as she searched her golden information orb to try an locate a file on her team and couldn't find one. Only one team has been known to exist in recent times focusing on their previous protégés who are otherwise unconnected to each other and are in fact total strangers in the new reality. And the same could almost be said of any other member previously associated with the team.
According to her orb the newest team of Titans comprised of Tim Drake, Cassie Sandsmark, Bart Allen and Conner Kent. The inheritors of their previous mantles (Red) Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash and Superboy all of whom were vastly different from the versions Donna knew, sporting radically different designs and personalities from when she'd last seen them. With Cassie and Conner's the most self-evident, the former now a metahuman thief and the latter a genetically engineered sociopath and didn't function well as a team, while other former teammates such as Roy Harper and Starfire had their own problems. Roy now had both arms again but now considered a superhero washout working along with the equally disgraced Jason Todd now operating once again as Red Hood and their teammate Starfire who has suffered further emotional trauma and sates it with meaningless sex. On a more distressing note, she doesn't seem to remember Dick or any of the other Titans and can't tell one man apart from another. While Roy was driven out of his mentor's company and sank into an alcoholic depression before he was saved by Killer Croc of all people and helped straighten out his act. Jason seems to have joined some sort of warrior cult but is even kilter and more stable than the last time she met him. Dick Grayson is now Nightwing once more, but is now descended from an ancient order of assassins known as the Court of Owls to which he was unaware of and used Haley's Circus as a training ground for the Court's elite agents known as Talons. Dick was thankfully spared this fate when Bruce Wayne took him in and became Robin at age 16 before changing his name to Nightwing three years later and was now living in Chicago.
Having restarted his career as Nightwing, Dick was now six years young in the new timeline and sporting a grim and grittier red and black costume with a massively…hideous bird symbol on his chest and scarlet lens flares in his mask. Now Dick was never the grim and gritty type in the original timeline and she was fairly certain he wouldn't wear red again or anything that made him look evil other than that one time he was pretending to be even though no one ever bought it. That whole Renegade act was something she'd like to forget ever happened. Seriously even Deathstroke was embarrassed by it, and yet strangely enough it actually worked. If only because of how completely baffling the entire stunt was, he managed to convince Rose Wilson, Slade's daughter to his side and join the Teen Titans.
She also couldn't help but notice that the new Dick is several inches shorter than before. Something she was certain the old Dick wouldn't like, I mean who wants to wake up one day and find yourself five inches shorter? But alas, shortness and terrible costumes were the least of his worries. But then again he always had a crappy fashion sense no matter what universe he was in. Seriously have you seen his outfits? It's the reason why Mad Mod designed his suit in the first place. And also couldn't help but notice he was missing the sleeve stripes and fingers everyone loved so much, but she was getting off topic. The new suit seemed to be made of some kind of light body armor like the rest of his family with Batman-inspired scallops on his gloves and boots, it seems as though his brief time as Batman might have influenced that…her mind was wandering. Donna shook her head and focused at the task at hand as she viewed images of the universe from the orb.
She touched the image of Dick in an aerial dropkicking position as the image played of him fighting criminals in a warehouse setting and using a far more aggressive fighting style using shock rods in his nightsticks to cripple thugs in dark clothes and jackets as the man in charge of the operation surveyed them from the catwalk as Dick struck down another thug and turned to face the man in question who seemed to be the Ventriloquist and Scarface before throwing his nightstick at the duo as they opened fire with a machine gun as the electric weapon pinned Scarface's throat to a girder directly behind him as the Ventriloquist looked on in horror as he came up after them. Another scene later showed him inheriting the deed to Haley's Circus on the late owner's deathbed telling him the secret of Haley's Circus and then later fighting one of his former friends turned hired killed named Saiko. While another image showed the Joker terrorizing the Bat-family in his latest and most lethal vendetta against them to date. It also showed an image of the Joker having his face cut off by an inmate known as the Dollmaker and being delirious with pain and ecstasy before the faceless Joker began his murderous campaign against the Bat Clan and poisoning all of Batman's former wards and sidekicks as they fought the Dark Knight to the death in Jokerized form, while another one showcased the Joker squeezing iodine into Alfred's eyes as he screamed, she covered her mouth in fright and ended the image, before another one showed Barry Allen in a modified costume with yellow lighting bolts running all across his suit while he battled the altered Rouges gallery who now had superpowers in this universe including a now-sleeveless Captain Cold who was trying to freeze him alive.
Another image showed Barbara Gordon confined to a wheelchair while showing her engaged in intense physical therapy and lifting herself out of her wheelchair slightly under her own power before prowling the rooftops as Batgirl once more. The next image then had the fully armored Batgirl frozen in fear as a gun was trained on her abdomen where she'd had been shot and paralyzed by the Joker years before Commissioner Gordon shot the man in question from the side taking out his left shoulder as he stood in the doorway in a brown trench coat as Barbara looked on in horror. A few seconds later a new Ventriloquist had shown up on the image screen and was a grotesque female figure with long dark hair stringed over her eyes and a new puppet that was unrelated to the original duo stood menacingly on a warehouse catwalk as Batgirl stared up at her.
Another scene whirled around the front of the orb showing Red Hood and Arsenal standing back to back with Starfire overhead as they battled a horde of zombie warriors in a barrage of firepower, Jason clasping a single pistol in both hands while Arsenal shot his trick arrows behind Jason with Starfire providing cover fire overhead, while another one showing Superman and Wonder Woman in their new forms with the former running from police in a t-shirt and jeans with a cape before plowing through a police barricade as bullets rang everywhere while Wonder Woman was showing wearing a modified costume wearing silver highlights on her corset and pants flying over Paradise Island and a more muscled appearance than before. And then flashed forward a few years as Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, The Flash, Aquaman, Wonder Woman and Cyborg battled Darkseid and the forces of Apokolips as the newly minted Justice League. The timeline accelerated further showing the formation of the newest Teen Titans, the creation of Superboy and his subsequent battle with them under the auspices of N.O.W.H.E.R.E. A shadowy organization bent on irradiating young metahumans before moving on to the big leagues. Along with there personal army of metahuman soldiers known as Ravagers and featured some of her former teammates. The most noted were Rose Wilson, Beast Boy, Terra as well as a mutilated version of Lillith Clay who had her eyes sewn shut. While Rose ironically enough hasn't taken the name of Ravager yet, she worked as one of the organization's enforcers and was Superboy's handler. Who would later rebel and splinter off into their own group of Ravagers as enemies of the organization that imprisoned them, while Superboy later joined the Teen Titans.
Donna paused the image as it lay transfixed on Conner who was now wearing a red and black bodysuit with excessive highlights and an S Shield displayed prominently on his chest. They were all so different from before, so horribly warped and twisted from the people she knew. It was almost heartbreaking for her to see some of them in this state, and here she was the same as before in her extra dimensional sanctuary. And brought up images of the rest of her colleagues including Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Nightwing, Starfire, Arsenal, Cyborg, Tim Drake, Damian Wayne, Kid Flash, Supergirl, Wonder Girl, Jade, Kyle Rayner, Hal Jordan, Ravager, Wally West, Garth, Raven and others. And was forlorn when she saw how much they'd changed and touched the image of Dick Grayson as it played out a brief snippet of his new life before switching to another one of Arsenal that unfortunately for her showed Roy and Starfire in a compromising position with rhythmic moans coming from Star as she abruptly changed as her face flushed and wished she hadn't seen that part. And flitted through some other files of her teammates to assuage what she just witnessed, it seemed as though the deeper she dug the worse it got.
She had to go back to the source and see where it all went wrong; she began pulling up images of the Flashpoint and the suspected source of the disaster Professor Zoom. Zoom, Eoboard Thawne as he was known was a criminal from the 25th Century that became Barry Allen's most hated adversary and has been out to destroy him and his family time and again and was responsible for many of the tragedies in Barry's life, through a series of time paradoxes Eobard was able to circumvent events and play them to his favor thus rewriting Barry's personal history as well as his own, it was during this time he was able to draw power from his own personal nexus of speed related powers he called the Negative Speed Force. It was this feat that would elevate him to a universal threat; in creating a hellish alternate reality known as the Flashpoint that left the world completely devastated. A number of Justice Leaguers, their mentors became bloodthirsty analogues. The most disturbing of which were Batman, Aquaman and her sister Wonder Woman. The former who had remade Gotham into a fortress and killing criminals as he pleased, while the latter two were engaged in a brutal war with each other that ravaged the planet. With Western Europe sunken by Aquaman and the United Kingdom raised above the oceans and turned into New Themyscira by a genocidal Wonder Woman.
In truth it was a war born out of treason as Arthur and Diana were to be wed in an arranged ceremony only for her mother to be killed by an Atlantian assassin thus starting the war and from there the world as we knew it fell apart with half the world destroyed and casualties in the tens, even hundreds of millions as the war waged on. It was too much for Donna to stand as she was tempted to switch out the imagery but continued watching hoping to gain insight as to how Professor Zoom was responsible for all of this. She felt like she had been staring at the images for hours as she fast forwards through events trying to find the thread, only then did she learn that Zoom in fact was not responsible for the cataclysm, despite all evidence to the contrary pointing to him he was not responsible. And zoomed in on the image of Barry and Eobard as the Reverse-Flash told his nemesis how it all happened with sadistic glee, as it turns out Barry himself was responsible for it when he traveled back in time to prevent Professor Zoom from killing his mother which had somehow fractured time and created the Flashpoint reality. Eobard merely reshaped it to its current state.
But that doesn't make sense. How can Flash's interference create such a horrific timeline? Donna furrowed her brow as she probed deeper into the info sphere's database she had to unravel this. Maybe, just maybe if she could figure this out, she can find a way to reverse the timeline that succeeded it. She continued to sift through files trying to find the connecting thread until she reached the end and saw Barry being subtitle manipulated by a woman in red to combine three universes into one creating the New 52 timeline as she narrowed her eyes. Who on Earth was that?
She needed answers, and it looked as though these two would be the key. Now all she needed was a way in. She had been studying the properties and functionality of her info orb since she got here and she thinks she may have finally have it figured out. And input the access command that would take her into the New 52 universe, as an alien script appeared in the display and transported her to the Prime Earth in what be an adventure she will never forget.
Author's Note: All right so what did you think of that? I tried to cover all the major points of the New 52 as well as Flashpoint, so I apologize for giving away any spoilers. Let me know what you think.
Please review generously,
The Green Gallant.