One

Disclaimer: I Only own Leslie, the plot, and any other ocs.

Warnings: None

Gotham certainly was… different.

The weather was warmer, something I couldn't be sure that I liked or not. People swarmed the sidewalks, swaddled in light jackets as they went about their day. I dimly regretted my own heavily insulated coat. I tugged slightly at it, grimacing as it clung to my frame like a second skin due to the sweat that had accumulated during my brief foray out of the car. Having lived in Colorado Springs, Colorado my whole life, I hadn't expected it to be as warm and balmy as it was at the moment, and I had foolishly not prepared accordingly to the difference in temperature. Despite my discomfort, I refused to take off my coat and continued to study my new surroundings.

The sky appeared to be a dull gray color, something I took a small comfort in. It reminded me of the short winter days back in Colorado, and I was secretly glad I would have some reminder of home. Dotting the skyline stood tall and menacing skyscrapers. I found myself fascinated as I took in the dark behemoths, a sense of awe prickling at the back of my head. Lowering my gaze further, the pollution that I could only associate as being a byproduct of city life, created a slight haze-or maybe it was fog?- that swirled around the lines of traffic. Car horns constantly went of as drivers cut each other off in a ruthless race to some unknown finish line. It was another thing I wasn't used to.

"Leslie, are you okay?"

I blinked and looked over at my frazzled mother as she stumbled out of her car. She wasn't exactly the most graceful person on Earth and being cramped up in small space for 15 hours was certainly no help to her balance. My father, a thin and partially balding man, slipped out of the passenger side and peered worriedly over the hood of the car. When my mother steadied herself, my father visibly relaxed and made his way to the trunk of the car.

Realizing that I had yet to reply, I hastily plastered a smile onto my face. "Yeah mom, I'm totally fine. Just you know, taking in the sights and sounds."

My mother chuckled as she straightened out her clothing and looked around the area as well. I could tell that the smile on her face was strained, and that she had a disproving glint in her eyes. Gotham was too dirty of a city-both morally and physically I internally mused- and it was not up to the standards she set up for her darling baby girl. I felt a twinge of protectiveness as I anticipated her to voice her disapproval. Gotham, while it wasn't the prettiest of places, or the safest, it did hold a particularly good University, and I had spent the past year and a half working my butt off so I could get into their robotics program.

Before my mother could speak however, My father came around from behind the car and joined us on the sidewalk with a suitcase in each hand. My mother leaned over and snatched one of the suitcases from my father and turned to give it to me. I accepted it with no complaints.

"Well we finally made it," my father remarked as he surveyed the area.

"It's… dirtier than I expected. I guess that if this is what you want Leslie, I can't exactly complain...though I still wish you'd reconsider Gotham of all places," my mother said with an underlining of the disapproval I had expected.

"It is. What I want. I wanted to go here, remember? It's got some of the best robotics professors in the country, mom. It also has Wayne Enterprises like down the street," I hastily defended.

My parents had always lived in the relatively spread out city of Colorado Springs, and when they both settled down to raise a gaggle of children, they both fully expected those children to love it as much as they did and never leave. When my older brother, Daniel, graduated from high school though, their plans were ruined as he moved halfway across the country to San Diego. While my parents took a few months to get used to the fact that their little flock of kids might not want to live in Colorado their whole lives, they eventually warmed up the idea and begrudgingly accepted it. Of course, I should've expected that they'd raise a fuss over my own plans.

Ever since I was little, I've had a fascination with all things technological. The subtle sound of the constant electricity humming within a machine always calmed me down. I could spend hours tinkering with my laptop, and I seemed to have a natural penchant for fixing any of the electrical problems in the house since the age of thirteen. My family found it odd, but as the years passed, they chose to ignore the fact that their second eldest child wasn't quite reason I say this is because of one incident back when I turned twelve.

The TV, normally an ornery beast that barely worked half the time, often times calmed down in my presence and worked for the hours I spent watching it. It would be slightly static filled as Daniel or Nicholas, or Nicky (depending on who you were talking to), my younger brother by 4 years, watched saturday morning cartoons. However, whenever I walked into the room and plopped myself on our threadbare carpet and in between my siblings, the TV would miraculously start showing a clear picture. Generally as a result of this, my brothers allowed me sit in and watch whatever I wanted. The day after my twelfth birthday instead found Daniel, who was a hormonal and irritable fifteen year old, and I in the middle of an argument.

I forgot what it was we were arguing about. I dimly remember always getting into a little spat with him over the littlest of things during this time in our lives. We could have been fighting over how he had been in my room earlier and stealing my music CDs, or I had wanted to borrow his computer without asking. Either way we on that day we were both grumpy and snappish with one another.

My mother had been in the kitchen whipping up waffles (they're a guilty pleasure of mine), little Nicky and Dawn, my younger sister, sitting eagerly on the bar stools next to the island in the middle of the kitchen. My father had been off running errands for my mother. Everyone but Daniel had been accounted for, and I had been tip-toeing around when I finally found Daniel reclined on the couch, remote loosely gripped in his hand.

I paid no mind to the fact he was attempting to watch Friends, and instead swooped in and snatched up the remote to change channel.

Remesient of a spluttering old car, Daniel pushed himself up with his elbows. "H-hey! What, what do you think you're doing?"

I plopped myself unceremoniously onto the carpet as I replied, "Changing the channel, duh. I want to watch the new episode of Spiderman."

Now keep in mind, Daniel normally let me do whatever I wanted when the television was concerned. However, because of our spat earlier, Daniel got off the couch and said. "Well that's too bad. I was watching TV first, so I get dibs on what I want to watch." With that the angry mousy haired boy had reached forward to grab at the remote.

I rolled away from him before he could get it. I quickly stuffed the remote into my pajama pants and crawled behind the couch. I ducked underneath the wires that connected to the speakers behind the couch and made an attempt to squeeze myself out the other side. Daniel, letting out an annoyed yell, had dived after me. His hand wrapped around my ankle and he tugged at it. I gave out a yelp of pain as I felt the bone pop in his hand.

Now, two things happened after that. One, I felt a shock, one that you would feel if you had rubbed your socks on the carpet rapidly and touched something metal. It stung briefly, but after a split second passed, I felt the wires around me curl tightly around my body and yank me forward. "What the hell!" Daniel screamed as he dropped my foot and scrambled out from behind the couch. I landed ungracefully on the other side of the couch and felt the wires remove themselves from my body and slither back behind the couch.

The second thing after that was a horribly high and piercing shriek from my brother.

I heard the clatter of something being dropped, and I looked up as my mother rushed into the living room. Behind her, Dawn and Nicky peered around the corner and watched as our mother swiped at the golden strands of hair that escaped her sloppy bun and hung in front of her panicked eyes. "What happened?"

Daniel, who was whimpering as he cradled his hand, stared at my mother. He bit his lip and shakily replied, "S-something shocked me."

My mother sighed in exasperation. She strode for and gently took Daniel's hand. I pushed myself off the ground and inched over to look over the damage too.

On his hand was an angry burn mark sitting on the corner of the back of his hand. My mother tsked. "I told you guys to stop roughhousing, haven't I?"

I nervously rubbed at my bottom lip and nodded along with Daniel.

Huffing my mother reached her hand out to me and curled her fingers in a beckoning motion. I reached into the hem of my pajama pants and pulled out the remote. I then handed it over to my mother and winced slightly when she slipped it into her back pocket.

"Now I know it's your birthday, Leslie, but I am tired of you two fighting over the stupidest of things. So, if you both can't get along and share the television, I guess you both can't watch it," my mother murmured with a condescending look. My brother and I looked at one another but said nothing. My mother then went about tending to the burn while I drifted into the kitchen.

After that Daniel acted just a little bit different around me. He would act skittish and was eager to do whatever I asked of him. Both of us knew what actually happened behind the couch. Some freakish occurrence had caused the wires to somehow respond to my distress and help me escape from Daniel. While it had caused a brief pain and a lasting fear of the unknown in him, it had planted a seed of curiosity and slightly worry in me.

Somehow through some weird twist of fate my senses seemed to become attuned to all things containing an distinct electrical current. After the fiasco on my birthday, I began to notice it wasn't just the television or those wires that heeded and obeyed to my wishes and presence. Lights would turn on or off at the briefest of thoughts, my brother's laptop (which I might add soon became my own when Daniel went off to college) would work faster than its normally sluggish pace.

Then of course there was the whisperings and energy of the machines and electricity. It wrapped itself around nearly everything around me. The slight hum that had accompanied me during my younger years seemed to amplify as time went on; it was almost like the machines and electric currents had voices of their own. It took time, learning how to decipher the weird tinklings, warbled hums, and impressions I received, but boy did I learn it. (And by learn it, I mean I worked my toosh off so I could...ahem...get an edge up on exams. I mean, do I really need to know who was elected in eighteen-something?)

It took me a while, but by the time I was seventeen I mastered the art of understanding my machines, and I quickly learned codes and robotics to better understand how to utilize them. No one in my family commented on the strange happenings that would occasionally slip out, like how I knew Dawn had a new boyfriend because she'd been texting him all day, or how I seemed to know everything at the spur of the moment (smartphones connected to the world wide web? The true pinnacle of mankind). Not to mention the random power outages when I was mad, or when my Nicky's nintendo would suddenly run out of battery within the span of two minutes when I was sad.

No, everyone just accepted it as a fact of life. I was fine with it. I mean, I like attention and all, but I'm not sure if I want to become a science experiment, or a target for some supervillain. As far as everyone else knew, I just happened to be really passionate about technology.

Which is why my mother shouldn't have been as disapproving as she was when I got into one of the best robotics programs, which also happened to be endorsed by none other than Mother-freaking-Wayne Enterprises.

Giving a resigned sigh to the fact I was not budging from my decision, my mother waved us all forward. "I suppose we should go get you settled in then."

The faded lettering above the building's door revealed that we currently were in front of one of the dorms for Gotham University. The Gothic structure caused a flutter of excitement to appear in my stomach as the true meaning of this moment settled on me. I, Leslie Marvy, was here, following my dream, and on my way to become one of the best robotics engineers in the world.

Now, if only I could, you know, graduate.

Wow, new story. Sorry for the people who were reading my old one. I just lost my muse and I couldn't deal with my writing and yeah.

Anywho, this is my new voyeur into writing fanfics about comic book related things (cuz im total trash lol). I'm super nervous about messing up characterization and what not, so it'd be helpful on pointing out what i need to fix or whatever.

This is gonna be a mix of the batman comics, so ya. I messed up on the timeline when i made this, but I figured, hey I'm the author, I can have a little liberty on ages and what not right? (i mean mashing new 52 and pre-boot is confusing so cut me a lil bit of slack)

Also sorry for like the super short and lackluster first chapter. I just wanted to establish a bit of background before I started.