A.N: Hey, guys! Sorry for the update time -- I've been caught in that big snowstorm that's been on the news lately. I've pretty much been trapped in my house without power for the past week, though I am much better now, thank you. ^-^

wawaboy2: Hahaha. Yeah, I had a fun time seeing just how little information I could reveal about everyone's past. It was quite the emotional rollercoster, I think. Hope none of you needed too much Kleenex. ;)

Everyone else (sorry, I guess I just snubbed you :P): Thanks, thanks, thank you very much, thank you, and thanks again. ^-^

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Chapter Six

Gar's alarm went off at precisely 7:57 and, the earliest possible time he could think of for getting downstairs at 8:00. With a kind of practiced ease that came from long pre-school experience, he wriggled into gym shorts and a shirt, jammed his toes into a pair of running shoes (he could always tie them later, he reasoned, if he really had to) and started running downstairs, shifting into a green-spotted cheetah for speed, before calmly opening a steel-coated door in the basement, helpfully labeled GYM. With a sinking feeling, he saw that a digital clock conveniently located on the wall read 8:01. Rachel raised an eyebrow. Gar made a face. He would need to work on his speed-dressing. He had gotten out of practice over the summer.

The gym was covered in metal -- steel, or some steel alloy, by the smell of it. The floor and all the walls were a uniformly dull gunmetal-gray color. Gar wondered faintly if Batman was colorblind. The ceiling was very high up, and a complicated network of rafters and pipelines started about fifteen feet above his head. The entire room resembled an abandoned warehouse, not some kind of high-tech training facility that he expected from one of the most badassed heroes in the world AND possibly the richest man in the country.

He looked around the room to see Rachel's eyebrow was still located somewhere near her hairline."Stop looking at me like that," he finally snapped. "Jeez. I was only like a minute late." Rachel's eyebrow lowered, but she was still looking at him in that infuriating sarcastic way that she seemed to have and... "I know he said not to be late! And I'm not even the one who's really late. Batman and the Boy Wonder aren't even here yet! Ow!" he cried. In an instant, a mass of metallic-looking cables had crashed into him from somewhere in the ceiling, binding him to the wall. Kori giggled slightly.

"Wanna bet?" asked Dick, dropping from the rafter-maze on the cieling. He was wearing his retarded little retarded-kid Colorful Spandex of Retardation, as Gar had creatively dubbed his costume. Gar could faintly detect the smell of drying sweat on it, and made a face. Dick had obviously been here for a while, possibly an hour. So much for his whole Dick-Grayson-is-at-least-as-lazy-as-a-normal-teenager-and-enjoys-sleep-as-much-as-aforementioned-teenagers theory, he thought. Kori giggled some more. Anyway, at least Batman wasn't going to be chewing him out. He had heard that that man could be scary sometimes...

There was an almost noiseless thump as someone else landed on the dirty-warehouse floor. Not surprisingly, considering his luck, Gar saw that it was Bruce Wayne in full Batman regalia. "I told you to come at eight o'clock. It isn't that early, Garfield." Gar begged to differ, but stayed silent. "I even told you specifically not to be late. Don't do it again." Yikes. Another Patented Batman Ice-Cold Death-Glare was judiciously dispensed in Gar's general direction, making him wince. Does this guy practice making scary glares in the mirror all the time, or something? Gar wondered if all heroes went through a face-practicing stage, or something. He had too, when he was ten. He had a very scary leopard-face that he could make now. He distinctly remembered looking at the mirror and deciding exactly how scrunched up he should make his nose and...

Gar realized he should probably say something. After at least ten seconds' pause, he managed to say "I'm sorry. Uh, it won't... happen again?" He was squeaking. Damn that cracking voice. Damn it to hell.

A quick glance past Rachel's face revealed a satisfied look. A double-take glance and Rachel was blank again. He wasn't even sure if he had imagined Rachel's smugness or if he was being paranoid. Jeez. That girl and her faces. I think I'll go insane if she keeps doing this. While he was still contemplating the possibility of his imminent descent into clinical paranoia, Batman started speaking.

"We're going to start by training your freerunning in the mornings. While both Starfire and Raven can fly, and Beast Boy can if he's in a bird form, we do a lot of running on Gotham's rooftops. I am not going to have any of you slipping and falling to your deaths or some similar nonsense when all it takes to avoid that is a little gymnastics training. Gar got the distinct feeling that Batman's definition of "a little" was probably pretty different than most other peoples'.

Once he was done, Batman opened a steel door in one of the side walls and disappeared for a moment. After a few seconds, the steel on the wall that Batman had gone through lifted up into the ceiling, revealing an enormous Plexiglass window in front of a panel, which had dozens of controls on it. He flipped a couple of them, and to Gar's amazement, part of the floor started shrinking away. "What the f--" Victor sputtered, as the section of floor he was on started rising in the air. Suddenly they were all standing on a miniature cityscape-slash-obstacle-course-looking... thing. Gar had no idea what it was precisely, but the fact that the floor had just turned into a bunch of five-foot tall pretendy skyscrapers was pretty amazing. Scratch that about the abandoned warehouse, Gar thought. This place is kick-ass awesome.

Batman's voice came over some speaker or other in the wall. "You're all going to follow Dick. Do exactly what he does. I mean if he does a quadruple-flip mid jump, you do one too. If you break your neck, I'm awfully sorry." Gar raised an eyebrow. 'Awfully sorry?' As an afterthought, Batman fiddled with a lever behind the window, and the bottommost floor tiles started sprouting blue mats like they were growing grass.

Then Dick started sprinting down a row of floor-blocks. With a start, Gar realized he was supposed to follow, and he did, miming every leap, handspring, and assorted tomfoolery that Dick performed, wondering exactly how this assisted their speed. The others followed, with degrees of enthusiasm ranging from even-more-excited-than-normal in Kori's case to downright drudgery for Victor, who, being made of metal, was not precisely lithe and nimble.

Evidently Gar, who had done a lot of running through Forston, the little city that he'd guarded, was much better than the others, bar Dick, who was evidently some kind of gymnast freak anyway, and Batman, who was obviously far to Batman-like for him to surpass. Kori, at any rate, kept forgetting that she was supposed to be running, and would end up flying absentmindedly over half of the course. She looked almost crushed every time Batman called her out for this. Gar felt a little sorry for her. Korina Anders (or Kori'andr, as he supposed was her real name) could certainly be a little spacey sometimes.

The had spent what felt like an hour running around the constantly-shifting cityscape beneath their feet, and Gar became increasingly uncomfortable and even a little sweaty, much to his disgust. Dick was barely even breathing through his mouth, much to Gar's chagrin. Rachel was probably getting tired too, but Gar remembered she had mentioned the ability to heal herself and, he realized, she could probably flush the lactic acid out of her bloodstream with ease. That, or she was just in much better shape, than, for example, him. Gar doubted this. He had been running on rooftops since he was ten, albeit often in animal form, so he wasn't really sure it counted.

Vic was doing the worst. In fact, after the first half hour or so, he started sweating, and the water on his skin got in one of his systems. Obviously, this was not a good thing. There had been a bright flash as one of the wires in his arms short-circuited, and, cursing, he sat on the ground and started tweaking at it. Gar was pretty sure, though, after a half hour of him tweaking the same precise spot on his arm, that Victor was just hamming it up so he wouldn't have to cartwheel through the course. Pretty smart, actually, he thought, feet pounding, his breath coming to him in increasingly large gulps. He was really starting to get tired now. Jeez, is Gotham even big enough that we would spend an hour running on the rooftops before we got where we were headed? he thought.

As if on cue, Batman came back into the room. "All right," he said. "You can all stop now." Dick, hanging on a rope, dropped to the floor. Rachel sat down, breathing heavily, though not looking to be in too bad shape, and Kori gave a strange happy/surprised noise before sitting eagerly on top of a floor-block. Victor, not far from Gar, jumped up to his feet, looking very happy, his "broken" arm forgotten. Gar coughed and nudged him, pointing. Sheepishly, Victor's arm went limp again. Gar wondered if Batman had noticed; although knowing Batman and his awesomeness, he probably had. Rachel raised yet another eyebrow. Gar wondered how many more eyebrow-raisings it would take before she could lift weights with that thing.

"You'll all be in better shape soon enough," Batman sighed. "We'll all go to the weight room now. We're going to start a training regimen to keep all of you in shape. Fighting insane mutated criminal masterminds is not something you want to do if you can only bench-press your own weight, or however much you kids can."

"Wait," Gar whispered, "I thought bench-pressing your weight was actually pretty good." Vic shrugged.

"I don't know, man. All I know is that anything is better than learning how to do some sort of gymnastics routine."

"Victor, stay here with Robin. Robin, why don't you give Victor a few pointers on... well, just give him some pointers on everything." Vic looked outraged. Gar, after a pause, looked outraged too, to make Victor feel better. Dick carted Victor away and they sat in a corner. Evidently Dick was trying to teach him the basic mechanics of a sommersault. Gar stifled a laugh, producing an extremely undignified snort instead. Curiously, Rachel's eyebrow stayed firmly in place in the normal eyebrow location of her face, he noticed, and then he realized that he was on some sort of permanent Rachel's-Eyebrows-Watch or something. Not a good sign. No, definitely not.

Batman led them into another part of the gym, a room that was gray-walled with black-tile flooring. In it, there were dozens of expensive-looking shiny metal weight-training systems. Free weights sat in racks in one corner, and half of the room was filled with medicine balls, floor-ladders, dodging cones, and dozens of physical-therapy thingamajigs and gizmos that Gar was not familliar with. Gar had never even seen some of them before, and half of the machines he had no idea how to work. As a thirteen-year old boy, Gar had never exactly had much weight-lifting experience. In fact, he was pretty sure it was unhealthy for someone of his age to start heavy lifting. Compressed bones' growth plates, or something.

"Excuse me," he interjected. "Isn't it unhealthy for someone of our age to start heavy lifting? Compresses bones' growth plates, or something," he said. "I am only thirteen," he added. "And I definitely have some growing to do. I mean, I hope so." He was still just short of five feet. In fact, he was one of the shortest boys in his class, much to his chagrin.

"We aren't going to be doing much heavy lifting -- not for muscle mass specifically. What we're going to do is conditioning, using a lot of the physical therapy equipment over there," Batman explained, gesturing. "I don't want any overexertion injuries, and to start off, we're just going to work on strengthening muscle groups for stability, things like that. Injury prevention stuff, mostly. When you're a little older we'll probably start more serious lifting." Gar winced. He could already tell he would be feeling their earlier run tommorow, and the thought of doing serious anything with a potential sadist like Bruce Wayne was... cowing. To say the least.

"Do any of you know how much you can bench press?" Kori raised a meek hand. "Kori?"

"Once, I lifted a bus," she said meekly. "I am not sure how much it weighed, though," she said, looking apologetic. "But it was filled with people. And most of them were what you would call... 'clinically obese.'" Gar winced again. Fantastic. With a girl who could probably lift cars with her pinky finger, a robot man, and another girl who could move almost anything with her mind, as well as Batman and all the Batmanny awesomeness that being something as awesome as Batman entailed, he was probably going to be the weakest of them. Then he realized he could turn into a Tyrannasaurous rex. That made him feel a lot better, though he didn't think a T. rex could bench-press much of anything with its stubby little arms. Dick, at least, wasn't very special, which made him feel better. It wasn't like he was Batman or something. Yet.

"Oh. Well. I'm sure you can still benefit from, um, some... elastic band rotator-cuff exercises," Batman said, tying two things that looked like glorified rubber bands to a pole. "Hold on to this and rotate your shoulders outwards. Stand far enough back so that they feel pretty taut." Tongue between her teeth, Kori picked up the two bands and walked to the completely opposite corner of the room. Gar's sensitive ears could pick up a faint groaning from the elastic. Cheerfully, Kori pulled back as instructed.

The band broke, snapping violently towards the other side of the room, with enough force to knock one of the littlest weights off its rack. Gar coughed raucously for a few minutes, hiding his laughter. Batman glared (though not much more than usual, Gar thought sarcastically). Kori gave a muffled giggle. "Sorry!" Gar caught Rachel rolling her eyes.

They called off the rest of their training, before eleven o'clock, which was when they were supposed to stop. Gar had a feeling Batman would not be used to training anybody other than a completely normal human being. They all mooched around the Manor, drinking Pepsi and eating some really delicious candied-pineapple thingamajigs that evidently Alfred had made himself. He and Victor spent most of their time playing video games (though Gar suspected Victor of cheating... his current theory was he used "machine brain-waves" to rig the game... or something. At any rate, he knew Victor couldn't be winning fairly because Gar was pretty good at video games, or so he thought.) Rachel sat on one of the many luxuriously padded couches and read a very dusty-looking book, not dissimilar to the one she had read on the plane. Kori sat in a chair and observed all that was going on with a kind of fascination that Gar did not quite understand, and he wondered how long Kori'andr had been on this planet. Eventually, Dick, the only other one, entered the room and watched Gar and Vic play their game. Gar wondered if he would be able to bring himself to ask to join. As it was, Dick was promptly ignored, both boys' focus completely on the television.

At noon they all had lunch. Alfred had made some sort of vegetarian chili, only it was much better than vegetarian chili, because it was amazing. Gar had three bowls of it, though part of him wished he hadn't, because the bowls had been pretty big. And chili did contain beans, after all. Everyone else had eaten a lot of it too, which was as bad, and he had a very sensitive nose.

At 2:00 they were scheduled to train again. This time Dick was the only one training them; he asked everyone to fight him individually. Rachel was the first one to go. Everyone cleared away and watched.

The very first thing anyone noticed after Kori (the unofficial referee) told them to go was a very scary-looking crackling mass of obsidian encasing Robin, rendering him completely immobilized. "I'm pretty sure I just beat you," Rachel said dryly, just before one of Robin's gizmos exploded near where she was standing. There was a very bright electric flash, a little like a taser, and Rachel fell to the ground, the hem of her basketball shorts a little burned. While Rachel was on the ground, Robin had leapt straight up into the maze of rafters and pipes above their heads.

This hiding away was evidently pretty useless against Rachel, because a quick scan of the emotional signatures in the room revealed precisely where Robin was. Another black flash and she had removed Robin's belt. (Gar wished he had a picture, he was pretty certain he could make this look very suggestive with the right wording.) "Don't do that again," she said, calling the belt to her hand. As soon as her hands closed around it, it delivered a very nasty-sounding crackling shock to her, making her yell. Dick dropped to the floor, grinning. He said something, which was probably provocative in some way, but Gar couldn't remember what, because after that something very scary happened.

Rachel's eyes started glowing white, and she floated into the air, gym clothes billowing, before a steel tile in the floor ripped itself out and started hurtling at Dick. Before it got more than ten feet from Robin, though, the gray-skinned girl collapsed on the floor, the glow in her eyes fading, and the tile crashed into the ground. Gar made a mental note to never let Rachel get all glowy on his ass, because that would mean he would probably be in for a beating.

Rachel was on the floor, panting slightly, before she looked up and saw the enormous gaping hole in the floor and the machinery that moved it. "Azar," she muttered, before standing up. "I need to go," she said, in possibly the flattest voice Gar had heard from her, and then there was some sort of black thing that went on around her and when he blinked his eyes she was gone.

And that was that. They didn't really do much else the rest of the day, and Rachel was nowhere to be seen. Gar spent most of the day trying to teach himself to twiddle a pen through his fingers.

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Coming up: Will Garfield Logan's long-held dreams of becoming a champion pen-spinner be realized?

Oh, and if anyone knows what the "get all glowy on his ass" came from, let me know. You can have an imaginary hug then. Except, you know, that would probably be a little weird. Maybe a brownie point instead.