Ugh. While a good idea if you want a Totally Not A Gun, nonlethal crossbows are just plain awkward to make. And here I was, running simulations and making diagrams on my LexCorp room's more powerful computer, trying to design a whole collection of them.
The issue came up when Corben, who I was currently keeping out of the way with ample orchestral television and whatnot, had been discussing what gear he'd be using. At first I'd considered nonlethal rounds. Then I considered that firstly, Batman would be mildly irritated by having to be on a mission alongside a guy lugging a gun around, and secondly, I would somehow have to get a hold of one of said guns.
True, it wouldn't be too hard considering the nonsense I'd got up to with my secret base (or secret bases, seeing as I had Corben's hidey-house on top of the normal stuff), but I was a lot more comfortable secretly buying computers than assault rifles.
So I'd ended up working on something from scratch. Corben had been somewhat miffed… until he actually had one of the things, at which point he'd requested a full set.
The gist of it was that once I'd made some bits for carbon sequestration and molecular printing, all I needed was to add chips and computing and suddenly you're pulling hyper-accurate crafted-for-conditions bolt shafts from thin air to deliver your nonlethal rounds. The concept was similar to a Mass Effect gun- those ones used batteries to make up for a lack of propellant and material, while these crossbows… also used batteries to make up for a lack of propellant and material, but not quite to the same absurd degree.
Damn my unfortunate lack of superscientific bullshit.
But while electrically-enhanced pellet-loading crossbows of doom were awesome, they were also being designed from the ground up. My current effort with the machine crossbow was pretty much a stack of the electrical strings, and I was trying to convince the electromagnetism to end up with the magnetism from each string working on the next one to effectively chain momentum.
So basically I wanted a man-portable gatling crossbow without any spinny bits, which kinda defeated the point of calling it a gatling crossbow. Not a multi-day problem, it was more fiddly than difficult, but still. It was a lot more irritating than the shotgun crossbow.
(Just you watch. I'll make them so reminiscent of guns that I'll end up offending Batman anyway.)
As I continued fiddling with variables, I looked up to see a notification on the computer. "Boop," I mumbled, opening it up.
The screen opened up with a familiar face- or, rather, lack thereof- tilting the camera this way and that, looking rather similar to Doctor Ivo's own fumbles with technology. "Oh, it's working," muttered the Question, before he spoke up. "Hello, Miss Luthor," he greeted.
"Question," I greeted pleasantly, deciding to let my programs iterate the crossbow for a while. "You running one of your crazy-yet-inevitably-correct conspiracy theories again?"
"I wouldn't call that much of a Question," he replied. "I've got a few of my own, in fact. If you have the time, of course?"
"Of course," I responded. "You can only plan to counter the government's psychic superweapon research for so long, after all."
"First Question," he said flatly. "Was that a joke, and if not, do you mean the one in Nevada or Alaska?" There's more?
"Hmm… Very astute," he replied. "The Alaskan one is just a front for the Mongoose Cult. It's a negligible threat."
"That's… good," I said.
"Indeed." He adjusted his hat. "I'd hate to see you encounter them too soon."
"And what defines when 'soon' is over?" I asked him, honestly curious.
He grunted in thought. "Well… The most obvious would be when rounded aglets come into fashion again," he replied. "Simple enough."
"I see, I see," I said, completely unable to link the information together in any rational way.
"You don't get it," the Question noted.
"Nope!" I cheerfully replied, plastering a smile onto my face. "Not at all."
"Think about it, then," he said, putting a hand to his face (or lack thereof) with a sigh. "I do mean it when I say it's simple enough. Next question?"I nodded. "What would you consider to be your favourite dinosaur?"
"It oscillates," I told him. "Usually between Neovenator and Eotyrannus, but I think Dryptosaurus is my favourite right now."
"Could you give a brief summary on them?"
"They're all theropods- err, meat-eating dinosaurs," I amended. "The former is a carcharodontosaur- a smaller relative of things like Giganotosaurus or Carcharodontosaurus. A blade-toothed dinosaur, to summarise. The latter are both distant relatives of tyrannosaurs with massive hands, which is ironic, because…" I paused my ramble to waggle my fingers in imitation of a certain famous giant theropod. "Y'know. Rex hands."
"...Interesting," said the Question, as if that actually meant something. "Any particular reason for the dryptosaur?"
"It's like the other two, but more patriotic," I responded. "East Coast versus UK. They're all pretty similar otherwise."
He nodded. "Just one or two more questions, then. Your favourite Super Singer?"
"Pink," I said. "I have much better taste than most people my age."
"Ah," the faceless man said, sounding like he'd come to a conclusion. "Then that brings me to the final Question. Have you checked your security systems in the past…" The Question paused to scribble on something. "...twenty minutes? I suggest you do so, Miss Luthor- I'll talk to you later."
The screen clicked off before I could inquire further. "...Check my security?" I asked myself, frowning.
I opened up a new tab that I wasn't really supposed to have- the monitors seemed normal at a glance. I switched my analysis program over to the past twenty minutes' security footage for a moment.
It immediately highlighted a sequence of rooms that, I realised with growing dread, lead directly to a certain room I'd rather not have anybody entering.
"...Sonovabitch," I swore, locking my computer while the program chugged along. Then I grabbed my welder and shoved my pockets full of random potentially-helpful bullshit. I'd need it.
Now, as far as not creating any supervillains went, I'd been pretty good so far.
I mean, yes- Nora Fries had, begin finger quotes, unexpectedly gone into remission and then mysteriously disappeared, end finger quotes, directly after I'd deprived my father of a potential Metallo. As had Mr Freeze and a quantity of his henchmen. So in the near future, the creation of Metallo, But A Ballerina Chick Or Something was reasonably likely.
And yes, I had distinctly been lacking in the whole 'keeping my formulae secret' up until the point some electrician had been given a modified version and promptly started trying to vomit on Superman. And by 'modified' I mean 'hypertrophied without regard for sanity or good scientific method'.
But those were both things I could quite easily- and, in fact, did- blame Father for without any feelings of guilt or other moral repercussions myself.
Letting somebody run directly into my workshop and either use my 'let's get unlimited psychic power!' machine or steal something for later use? Yeah, no, I thought. I've just beat up my first supervillain. No way I'm getting interrupted on that. I pushed a button to call the elevator- it was the fastest way down there.
When it didn't respond, I checked the systems on my phone. Whoever this was, they wanted to cover their tracks- for the brief time before I noticed, they'd hacked both the security and the elevator. Of course, I had a lot more experience with that sort of thing.
It took less than a minute for me to be heading down and stepping happily out onto the right floor. Not an issue, to summarise.
The guns on the other side, however?
They were more of a problem.
I ducked behind the side of the elevator with Bat-trained reflexes as they opened fire, unbelievably loud in the enclosed space. Fuck, I thought, ears ringing, as they closed down again. I have no idea if I'm bulletproof for normal guns, let alone LexCorp security!
It was at this point I noted two things.
One, the bullets that had entered the elevator didn't ricochet and hit me, despite the inside of an elevator being a ridiculous place for that to not happen. By all suggestions, the bullets simply… weren't bouncing, at least not to a dangerous degree.
Two… I looked down at the equipment I'd brought, and grinned. I have a safety welder, I thought.
Now, the guns were on a different system to the one I hacked so regularly, which was a testament to the preparation of these invaders. (The live guns were a point against them simply being given permission to fuck with me, considering that Lex had hired freaking Deadshot to protect me from Vital if worst came to worst during that whole fiasco.) However, I still knew precisely how these guns' automatic targeting systems worked- after all, I'd stolen it for my own work before.
I burned a few shapes in the side of the elevator, and then cut the piece off entirely. A moment later, I was pushing it up the side of the inside wall, welding a side into place, and then swivelling it out and giving it one last weld before the guns could knock it off.
The guns were thunderously loud- but this time, I was crawling underneath what they recognised as the perfect target, and I bypassed them easily. Whether it was the bullets or the sheet material that didn't bounce, I wasn't sure, but I carried on regardless- cutting open the floor and organising a nice burnout of the local subsystem in the process.
As I set the burnout off, I heard an explosion, and winced. Whoops. Good thing they're not dumb enough to invade LexCorp while Father's in, or he'd probably have heard that.
I carried on. There were a few more barriers- mostly of the 'large locked door' variety- but really, they weren't an issue when I had a welder and a direct route to half the electronics they'd messed with. I didn't know precisely how they'd removed everyone else from the premises- after all, you'd expect to see at least one security person by now, since they seemed to have bargained on not being noticed up until they figured out I'd been tipped off- but they'd done a pretty good job, which meant it was just me and a straight line to the psychic room as the locked-down doors opened before me.
I checked my phone as I got close. They're watching the door. It seemed to be a woman- lean, heavily armed, and wearing clothes that were simultaneously suitably-covering for combat and too tightly-fitted for me to describe without complaining about how ridiculous it looked for what seemed to be a secret agent to dress like that.
After another moment, I checked the reconstructed, unhacked video. She'd been wearing a labcoat earlier, with another face and some sort of fully-clothed body suit over herself to look like a wide-bodied, rather jovial woman rather than the woman who was aiming a shotgun at the sheet my welder was cutting from the door.
It was a damn good disguise- I was impressed. I'll have to check that out later.
Her finger was hovering over her gun's trigger, from what I could see in the cameras. For all she knew, I was some sort of supervillain technopath monstrosity- her perspective had been her control cutting out, the guns ceasing to function, and the sound of something silently approaching save for the opening and closing of doors. I wasn't jealous of her.
That said, I thought as I prepared my own ploy, I'm also not particularly sympathetic.
As I cut the last part away, there came a noise like someone slamming a heavy book onto a table. The shotgun pellets ricocheted down the empty corridor behind me, and I considered myself fortunate that apparently our own security systems were specifically designed to not do that.
Then I opened the door, raised an instant-freeze pack- one of those little knicknacks I tended to stuff my pockets with- and pressed the button. It was fortunate that the welder was, in fact, a LexCorp safety welder, suitable for children. Otherwise it wouldn't be nearly so easy to weaponise.
It exploded, and the agent- Catsuit will do for now, I think- gasped as a burst of ice froze her arm in place. Her leg lashed out with a kick, aimed for what would have been my face had I not in fact been a small child rather than the sort of combatant she'd expected. The rough ice surfaces were concealing her vision, and she might have had some on her face, too- she was relying on reflex, and that was precisely the worst thing to do when something messed your expectations up as badly as fighting a small child (if she'd even figured it out) did.
Catsuit wrenched her arm, and the ice shattered- but not before I'd altered the settings slightly and raised a chalk to my welder. A plume of dust followed up on the last hit, and she fired her shotgun blindly- and unfruitfully, as evasive techniques based on smokescreens of one type or another were most certainly something I knew. She coughed, turning away and raising her free arm in a guard to try and clear her throat- she couldn't fight if she was choking on powder, after all.
I wasn't one for a fair fight, so I took the opportunity to slip underneath her guard, grab her gun, and punch her at roughly eye-height.
Understandably, she crumpled with a squeak. The door to my science room was already open- I dashed in behind her to grab the last thing I needed, grabbed something from the desk, and raised the gun behind me.
Catsuit was already in my sights, having lunged after me. She didn't freeze, despite looking down the barrel of a shotgun- she dodged to the side, and her fist began to move in a way that was going to hit me right in the schnozz.
At least, it would have, if I didn't dodge- which gave me the perfect opportunity to stick her full of the sedative I'd grabbed. Thank God I'm too lazy to clear up properly.
She stumbled- I'd been using fast-acting stuff. After all, you had to when you were experimenting on psychic, disembodied brain tissue. As she turned around, it looked like she'd had a little much to drink. "The fuck did you just put in me, you little bitch!?" she hissed, and I looked up into her hawkish face.
In lieu of an answer, I kicked her in the shin, and she fell on her ass. I smirked, deciding to take a page out of my father's book. "The name isn't 'little bitch', madam," I said clearly. "The name. Is. Lena. Luthor."
She staggered to her feet, holding a wall for balance. "You're just a kid," she said, her words more like curses than parts of a sentence. "What do you think you can do to me?"
"I know exactly what I can do to you," I replied.
She leaned forwards, having to catch herself on a desk as she did. "Go on," she said mockingly.
My smirk grew into a shit-eating grin. "I'm telling Daddy," I said, and I stepped out of the way as she fell over.