Crime increases as the nights get warmer. It is a rule that holds true in nearly every city in the world, excluding those where winter is defined by slightly fewer people getting sunstroke. And so it was that springtime, a time traditionally associated with love and bunnies and new life, was more personally seen in the Wayne household as a time to put on the extra-bulletproof armor and hope that no one got too seriously hurt on their little outings.
In between the usual offenders' fun and games - Ivy's perennial battle with humanity, the Riddler's never-ending battle of wits, and Croc's habitual battle to pull a heist without totally fouling it up - Batman and Robin investigated every lab that they could sneak into. They'd been in nearly half of Gotham's labs at this point, with no sign of anything illegal.
Rather, anything unexpectedly illegal. A few of the pharmaceutical labs had mysteriously sprouted secret rooms containing all sorts of highly illegal happy chemical brain-death, and one or two smallish general labs were caught synthesizing toxins and poisons for the busy criminal mastermind on-the-go. One lab, which was suspiciously over-inhabited at eleven PM, seemed like a sure thing for information - that is, until Batman and Robin burst in only to find a bunch of henpecked men playing poker in the staff room.
Finding the cause for all these mutations was going to be tediously difficult, particularly since new mutants showed up every few days. Besides, the newspapers hadn't reported many accidents lately, and of those, every single person that had been seriously injured had ended up in the hospital. The Bats were no strangers to tedious difficulty - in fact, that was basically the description of any detective's life - but they simply didn't have any more time to waste in empty labs. If they couldn't find the cause, they'd just have to search out an effect...
The sand creature had had a terrible couple of days. Picking itself out of the garbage dump had been...well, it imagined that a solid person would have been incredibly revolted to roll around in that kind of filth, let alone have it forced deep into their cellular structure. Taking a bath in an abandoned bathtub full of rainwater had seemed like a great idea, at first - until it realized that it had dissolved into a helpless puddle of thin sandy soup. But as the sun baked the water right out of it, it was able to re-form enough to glop onto the ground, leaving only a thick blob of hideous brown sludge in the bottom of the old tub.
It had padded back into town, looking for...what? It couldn't remember. It couldn't remember anything - a home, a family, a name - and the lack was very irritating. If only it could remember, it reasoned, it could go home and figure out what had happened to it!
Going out in the daytime had been almost as bad an idea as taking that bath. All it wanted was to look around in peace, which it could hardly do if cars insisted on throwing themselves into screeching piles of metal when it had barely stepped onto the sidewalk. Sure, it was fun to see all that shiny metal go crunch, but it had business to attend to! It was on a mission, and it was in no mood to deal with crashed cars or screaming people. It had given up and settled on an abandoned rooftop, where it could watch the world go by and wait for everyone to go home.
It had been there long after sunset now, dangling sand-lumps over the edge of the roof in a crude imitation of legs. The wind fluttered something made of fabric in the darkness behind it. It ignored the sound, focusing on the tiny thread of memory that it had managed to coax out of its sandy brain. Something about...silver. Something shiny and silver.
"What are you doing?" a voice growled angrily from behind it. It was just as attention-grabbing as the fabric noise had been. What was silver and shiny? "Answer me." Shiny, silver, and...it had a tail! Wait, what was a tail?
The grinding skrunch of a fist connecting with its side drove it out of its reverie. It twisted its head necklessly around to regard a black-caped figure scowling as he tugged at a fist that was jammed inside several hundred pounds of living sand. It looked down at the man with mild interest. Then, with sand rippling in a shrug around its shoulder region, it turned its head back to look down at the street far below. Shiny. What was shiny?
A black metal thing on a rope whizzed out of the darkness and wrapped around its neck. It plucked the metal thing up in two pincers, loosening sand around the rope so it could draw the thing closer to its eyes, and examined it. It was a black...mouse? Bat! It was a bat! A black, sharp, shiny...a shiny thing with a tail!
"What happened to me?" it asked the man trapped arm-deep in its side. The man paused in his struggles and looked up at him. "You've got the shiny thing!" it said excitedly. "I remember a shiny thing! It...it didn't look like this though." It wilted. "It was smaller. What's wrong?"
"My arm," the man growled softly.
"Oh! Sorry." It loosened the sand enough so that the man could pull his slightly crushed arm free. "But do you know what happened to me? I mean, why I'm sand?"
"What were you before?"
"I...I don't know," it said. "A thing like you, I guess. A...a man?"
The man in black flexed his fingers experimentally. "Who were you before?"
"I don't know that either," it said dejectedly. "I don't even remember my name. You have a name, don't you?" it asked wistfully.
"Batman."
A tiny tease of memory tickled its brain. There was something familiar about that...it sighed."That's a nice name. I wish I had a name."
"We could call you Sandy," came a voice from the fire escape just below the rooftop. Batman and the newly-christened Sandy leaned over to see Robin's cape sticking out of a puddle of shadow in the corner of the walkway.
"You have a friend!" Sandy said, delighted. In one swift move, sand coiled around the young crimefighter and lifted him into the air. As Robin came into view, they could see that his skin was splotched with reds, greens, and yellows. "Hello!"
Robin wriggled as politely as possible. "Can you put me down?" he hinted, looking at the fifty-story drop below his feet.
"Sure!" Sandy agreed, setting him gently on the rooftop next to Batman.
"I thought I told you to stay in the car," Batman said grimly.
"To watch the Condiment King?" Robin snorted. "He'll be out for another two hours, at least. Besides, the car's locked down."
"What's a Condiment King?" Sandy asked.
"Don't ask," Robin grumbled, swiping at a bit of dried relish on his arm.
"Can you remember anything?" Batman asked. "Any names? Dates? Places?"
Sandy concentrated. "The shiny thing...it was little, and kind of round," it said, forming a relief picture of the shiny thing on the surface of a vast sandy hand. "And it had a long tail..."
The vigilantes examined it. "Like a locket?" Robin asked.
"Yeah! A locket!" Sandy beamed. "And...a striped shirt?..." It shook its head slowly. "I don't know. I thought for sure I knew who I was earlier, but it turned out that I was just thinking of some movie." It brightened. "Do you two watch movies? Do you want to go see one?"
"Maybe later," Robin said cautiously.
Batman twitched a fold of his cape away from his ankles."You remembered a movie?"
"Yeah! I mean, I remember seeing a movie. In a theater," it added. "It takes a while. I'm still trying to figure out how to make the sand in my head work. It's like, I see something, and then the sand remembers where to go on its own. I know it works like that," it continued excitedly, "because I saw some people walking, like you, and then I remembered how to do it with legs and everything!" It lurched to its feet, gesturing excitedly as they morphed into something very similar to a pair of Bat-boots. "See, look how good I am!" it announced, proudly raising one foot off of the ground and standing for a moment in a pose reminiscent of a ballerina in an arabesque.
A warm summer breeze blew gently around their ankles. Sandy, who hadn't quite yet remembered how to balance, waved frantic arms as the wind pushed it off of the rooftop. A rope with another shiny bat-thing on the end whipped around it again. This time, though, the rope went taut when it fell too far - and the rope promptly jerked right through the sand of its middle and cut it in half.
The bisected bits of Sandy hit the ground with a double wham as the crimefighters followed it earthward on grapnel hooks. Sand splattered over the street, mounding in the pair of craters it had made when it had landed. The sand rippled and slowly gathered itself back up into Sandy, who grinned a relieved smile at its two caped companions. "I'm okay!" it said cheerfully.
Batman put a hand to the left pointy bit of his funny-looking hat. "It's Joker," he said tersely to Robin. "At the diamond exchange."
"Can I come?" Sandy asked excitedly. "I want to meet your friend!" It was taken aback by the icy glare of rage directed in its direction.
"Stay on the roof," Batman growled angrily. "We'll be back for you. Just stay here and don't get into trouble, all right?" He readied a grapnel.
"Let's go!" Robin chirped happily.
"You're not coming either."
"But..." Robin protested.
"Condiment King's got to go to Arkham. I can handle the Joker," Batman said, launching the grapnel and sailing away into the night.
Robin sighed and rolled his eyes. "Just so you know, Joker's not anyone's friend," he informed Sandy.
"Well, can I come with you?" Sandy looked back up at the rooftop so far above them. "It's lonely up there."
"We'll be back tomorrow, okay?" Robin said, patting Sandy with a friendly hand. "You can hang on until then, right?"
"I guess," Sandy muttered, slumping into a dejected pile on the ground. When it looked back up, the boy had vanished. It sighed and slouched over to the fire escape, pulling itself effortlessly back up the floors with a pair of pseudopods. Stay here? When everyone else was out having fun? Sandy sulkily shoved itself up onto the rooftop and sprawled in a heap, staring upward at the stars. Well, waiting until tomorrow wouldn't be too much trouble...if it had to wait that long.
It smiled as a bright speck of light shot across the sky. Maybe tonight wouldn't be so boring after all.
(to be continued)