PART ONE:
"The Pint-Sized Speedster"
Tim Drake couldn't believe the ridiculousness that some sites on the internet published. Even with a prominent site like G-TMZ; they had to go and make a fool of themselves, he thought. It was a popular site for celebrity gossip, news, music, and the latest in hype within Gotham City. But after the latest stunt they pulled, posting a poll on which Superhero had the best looking butt, he seriously questioned its vitality anymore.
More than 350,000 people had voted. In the end, Nightwing won by a relatively healthy margin against Red Hood. Oddly enough, Red Robin — Tim Drake — ranked ninth. After he read that, he did a foolish thing, and he saw for himself what everything thought was ranked best at #9, and stood in front of a mirror to admire what people thought was so extolling. He was in great shape, more so than any seventeen year old. But he always wore a cape or wings, so how could anyone see his butt? Almost immediately, he stopped the childish idiocy and went back to work.
He felt his eyes droop involuntarily for a moment as he sat at the Batcomputer. He had pulled an all-nighter again. Next to him in a trash bin were three empty cans of Red Bull energy drink. But he wondered if his body was getting used to it. When he pushed himself too hard, energy drinks seems to have the opposite effect, draining the little energy he had in his reservoir further. Nothing was a replacement for sleep.
Sleep, he thought. I need sleep…
But he needed to finish the task he was doing, collecting groups of fragmented files from a hard drive that suddenly became corrupted. Overuse or an error within processing, either one could've caused the corruption. The files were too important, so it needed to be done.
As he wrote some code and transferred more fragmented files, the screen momentarily became blurry as his eyes crossed from tiredness. He blinked several times to refocus, then rubbed them with two fingers.
I know, I know, he told himself. But I can't stop. And I'm out of energy drinks. Bruce is depending on me.
As he continued to type, his eyes drooped once more, his mind fuzzy, and a hand slipped to an unwanted spot on the keyboard, unknowingly adding a few undefined characters to his programming data stream, and an error message popped up.
"Damn!" he said angrily. "Focus Drake!" He slapped his cheeks to wake him up. He needed coffee, some sort of mind stimulating drug. Yes, coffee — black coffee, that would wake me up. But as he turned his chair, the world began to spin unnaturally. And he found himself without the strength to even stand up, he was totally exhausted. Okay, you win. Would it matter if he took a quick catnap?
And whether if it was decided or not, Tim Drake's exhaustion suddenly hit him like a ton of bricks, and the moment he closed his eyes, he fell into a deep unconscious sleep.
x x x
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Tim Drake as he slept, the Bat Cave was just about to receive an unusual visitor — followed by a red streak. It entered from one of the tunnels that lead to the maze of sleuth-ways that comprised the Bat Cave system, and zig-zagged from place to place, stopping and moving with the speed of flash lighting.
It never stopped in one place for more than a nano-second. Its manner of speed was sped up by 1000 times, forcing others to see it as nothing but a red streak out of the corner of their eye, seconds after it had been there. But its concept of time was slowed down, however, as it raced through this unnatural speed force of time. The world seemed to slow down as it raced through the world. It was fast, but the world was slow.
The Batmobile: "Impressive!" Moved on.
The Trophy Gallery: "Glorious!" Moved on.
Batcomputer: "Severely out-dated!" Moved on. "Hello, Sleeping Beauty…" Tim Drake was snoring.
The visitor then entered the Armoury and looked at the vast assortment of weapons housed within it storage vaults, there were no locks; the Bat Cave was its own super lock. "Weapons are for non meta-humans," it said. Moved on.
Then the visitor went to an adjacent room — where they stored all the uniforms, or the changing chambers.
Admiration struck the visitor when it gazed upon each suit and uniform proudly displayed behind a series of oblong chambers of glass. These were obviously the less used suits, or uniforms that were no longer used, or had its purpose for a single purpose solely, and they were put out for display to be admired and remembered. The visitor could understand that. History was always something to remembered, never to be forgotten.
History was very important. Without it, mistakes of the past and will be repeated. And yet with each generation, they always were repeated. It never failed.
The visitor zipped from chamber to chamber, stopped, viewing each Batman and Robin suit displayed: "Too bulky…Nah, not my style…Too flashy…" He laughed to himself at that remark.
Then he came to the Nightwing costumes, and stopped for more than a nano-second to look at a stylistic black and blue armour version. The visitor didn't know for what purpose it was originally created for and for what bad guy it was used against, but it was all too familiar to his gaze, nonetheless. "I know you…" it said. "They'll find you missing soon if history repeats itself, and history always does."
Suddenly, he heard an alarm. "Oops, it found me…must've triggered the alarm. I stayed in one place too long."
And the visitor zipped out of the room and into the main cave.
x x x
At first the Bat Cave's alarm sounded like a dull muffling as if Drake had cotton shoved into his ears, but after a few moments it progressively became more acute as his senses awakened by its alerts.
A computerized voiced warning sounded:
INTRUDER ALERT!
INTRUDER ALERT!
INTRUDER DETECTED!
INITIATING SECURITY PROTOCOLS!
The screen in front of him flashed with a warning. This woke him up fully and his fingers raced over the computer keyboard in front of him. "Identify intruder, computer," he ordered out loud. But the computer could not.
Drake immediately shut off the more extreme components of his new security system, one of them was the particle stun beams. If it hit the intruder it would immediately render him unconscious. It was part of Drake's security protocols, ever since Cat Woman had broken into the Bat Cave unabated. Drake didn't want the computer to accidentally hit him as it tried to follow this mysterious foe, so he turned it off.
He brought up a real-time map and he was dumbfounded when the security system kept pinging different locations of the intruder, seconds after it had been at a certain spot, as if the computer itself was confused by its location. Whatever it was, it didn't stay in one place for long.
Was it something he hadn't found? Something the computer didn't recognize?
Over the course of several weeks in the caves, he spent cataloging every species he would possibly find — animal and insect — so his new early warning dedication system wouldn't trigger itself with every provocation after several false alarms. Did he miss one?
Drake swung around in his chair as a fast breeze whisked past his head, his hair blowing. Then he saw it, a red streak out of the corner of his eye, faster than the average eye could see, darting from place to place.
"Kid Flash? Wally? Is that you?" Drake asked.
Wally West (Kid Flash) wasn't wearing yellow these days, instead he wore an alternative red costume, and a flashier version of his old one. Superheroes often changed their look from time to time. Had Wally come for a visit? Maybe the computer didn't recognize him because Drake had programmed in Wally's perimeters and had scanned a picture with his yellow costume instead? Or, was Wally just moving too fast and the computer couldn't identify him? Okay, a small glitch, Drake thought. He would need to install better stop motion perimeters.
The red streak suddenly stopped. But instead of Kid Flash, it was a pint-sized speedster. He was the same height as Damian, approximately, and maybe the same age. If Drake had to estimate, Tim would say the speedster was just under five feet tall, say: four feet, six inches. He wore a skin tight red and white striped bodysuit, fingerless gloves, and over his eyes was a lightly tinted yellow visor probably to keep the "speed winds" out of his eyes. Finishing off the ensemble were golden metal wings that attached to the side of his head piece and a coif of thick brown hair blossomed from the top of his head. The kid was muscular for his age as if he were a professional gymnast.
Drake knew exactly who this speedster was, but he was shocked to see him here, and in this time era.
He silenced the alarms, returning the computer back to normal status. This was no enemy. He was an ally.
To be continued…