"Hope, though much harder to find this time around, is every bit as valuable and every bit as important"

- Times of Heresy'sfirst mantra

"Fuck me, I hope I never take as long and write something this difficult ever again"

- Times of Heresy's second mantra.

Times of Heresy has been a real mental and emotional rollercoaster for me, and it's really weird to think it's finally over. It's been my attempt to subvert my own creation, vent about politics, reflect on my love life and a lot more stuff I'm hoping to cover. All of my writings are personal, but this one in ways I usually only feel about my original creations. It's a piece I at once feel is more flawed than its predecessor, but that I came out considering the superior work. Even beyond my time spent writing fan fiction and taking my other works into consideration, this was probably the hardest piece I've ever written. In some ways these issues were conventional: I was treading into a lot of new territory, I was trying to maintain the quality they taught me to keep in grad school, stuff like that. But it was also a heavy experience in the way reality affects creativity, my own drive, stuff like that. Needless to say there's a lot to unpack.

From the top-

As conventional storytelling is one to suggest, the beginning is a good place to start. From 2014-2015 I wrote the original Angel of the Bat at a time in which my drive for my personal writings was at a low. I felt like it was a story worth telling that never got its chance to shine, poured a lot of my heart and soul into it, you probably read that one before this one, you know how it went. I wasn't sure how I felt about doing a follow up back then, but I was at least open to the idea if something good enough came to me. My Angel-verse did continue to exist in my head at the time. My barely-started crossover with Ms. Marvel as a multi-faith team-up was actually started somewhere in here, but I wasn't pleased with it, deleted it and reuploaded it later, only to again leave it sitting. Maybe I outta get back to that sometime here soon.

Beware the Batman was also started around this time and I made it a decent ways in before I slapped that in my indefinite hold bin too. That plot, which I mentally proposed as "The Ultimate Batman-less Batman Story" did not focus heavily on religion, but was set in this same continuity, complete with a Catholic Cassie married to Sadie. That story was most plagued by the sheer number of times I had ideas and ended changing them later. I do have a clearer plan for that story if the urge ever hits me to return to it, so that's something.

Times of Heresy was actually an amalgam of two different sequel ideas I was mentally kicking around before I decided to begin. The first I was tentatively calling, "Cain and Abel" which featured prototypes of the characters who would eventually become Lipov and the Odmience. The "Abel" in the title referred to the idea of Cassandra and the prototype Odmience having this simultaneously bitter but also sibling-like relationship, due to both being raised the same way. The main cornerstone of that story was the idea that people are capable of change, which would be evident when Cassie redeemed the Odmience at the story's end, very similar to the "Only a monster if you choose to be one" message of this story. My second idea would have featured a new gang of superheroes coming to Gotham, seeking to do good but having a hardassed religious zealot stance to them. Cassie and the Bat family had to contend with them as they served both as vigilantes and as new voices opposing various social issues. These "Crusaders" as they were did things like protest outside of abortion clinics and obstruct Pride parades, the latter of which especially tore Cassie up about the different sides of her personal identity. Eventually, the crusaders were dropped, the role of obnoxious but law abiding zealot went to Gram and Cassie became the hardassed hero, even if we never saw her trying to demand any social change.

In every variation the original plan was that the story be more episodic. Individual chapters were supposed to read more like comic book issues than pieces of a book, but that style never really suited me, I eventually found.

I think it's pretty obvious within the story itself, but the changing world of political discourse and its relationship with religion was ultimately what made me decide I wanted to tell this story. In most political matters, I am very left-leaning, not in defiance of my commitment to Catholicism, but because of it. I grew up in a wealthy family, but my parents taught my siblings and me a lot about giving to the less fortunate. I have a number of gay friends whose love lives I believe are every bit as real as mine is. And Times of Heresy came to my mind as I grew increasingly frustrated with the likes of the supposedly pious continuing to defy the Bible's words about helping and being kind to others, avoiding greed and other such acts as the like of Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson seemed to guilty of. It should come as no surprise that I utterly despise American president Donald Trump, and the continued support he receives from the religious right after his hate-mongering, bigotry, classism and personal infidelities just sickens me. So yes, Times of Heresy contained a lot of anger venting.

The Elephant in the Room-

Before I go any further with this reflection, I feel there's something I need to again address, though some who have followed this story long enough surely already know. In October of 2016, I proposed to my girlfriend of eight years, we moved in together a month later, spent about six months planning our wedding and then she broke up with me in an entirely one-sided ordeal. The end of said series of events, without exaggeration, ruined my life for a while. I bring this up here because it's inevitable she is going to come up a fair deal in this reflection, as an inspiration for some events and a suggestor of others. I don't want to go into the real life events a whole lot if I can avoid it, but to not mention her altogether and the impact it had on some of the story would leave this reflection incomplete. I don't actually think any major events in the story were altered as a result of this, but I certainly did channel in some of the associated emotions to certain parts of the story.

"Times of Heresy" as a Title

"Heretic" is a fun word. It's a staple insult of fundamentalist villains, it rolls off the tongue nicely and it's got this great pop to it. It was the simple entertainment value I found in the word that elevated my interest in "Heresy" and eventually made me decide it was worth being my subtitle.

"Heresy" has an inherent "You should know better" edge to it, it implies a willing disobedience. The meaning is double-edged in this story. The first time the phrase gets dropped, Cameron Gram is arguing that Christians who don't follow his stringent set of rules and practices are the heretics. Not dissimilar to how Jesus was considered a heretic by the Pharisees of his time for curing the sick on the Sabbath. The Pharisees were a bunch of religious authorities who had become too obsessed with petty rules and drunk on their own influence, Gram is much the same and eventually he drags Cassie down with him. In the conventional sense of "defying religious traditions," the "Times of Heresy" refer to the beginning of the story.

But "Heresy" has a secondary meaning here. To be heretic can mean to act in defiance to religious tradition, but it can also mean to act contrary to religious morality. The two ideas are often very closely intertwined, but are sometimes at odds. To resist the idea an adulterer should be put to death defied Hebrew tradition, but to continue to not argue for peace in place of violence would be a failing of morality. Though both meanings apply, the true "Times of Heresy" in question here are the points in the middle of the story in which Cassandra is consumed by her hatred and self-loathing, despite knowing deep down that they are wrong.

Inverting my Original Work

In a number of places and different ways, Times of Heresy was meant to invert the ideas I presented in the original Angel of the Bat. The main villain of the original was a big, scary monster man who really only viewed Cassandra as a curiosity standing between him and his real goal. Lipov is a petty, frail-bodied man driven exclusively by his thirst for revenge and the Odmience is his broken-willed enforcer. In the first story, Cassie very nearly gives up her faith when it seems incompatible with her identity. Here, she spends a while giving up her identity in the name of her faith. Since I wasn't planning on doing any sequels when I wrote most of the original story, I didn't set up anything I could pay off later, so I opted instead to just mess with the themes I had already established.

A More Human Narrative

Compared to the original, Times of Heresy is supposed to be a more "human" take on storytelling. Which is funny, because this is the one that has college students in power suits with ridiculous abilities and self-destruct switches. What I mean by this being the more human story is that what you see is what you get in a lot of cases here. There was another ambiguous encounter with Jesus planned in the story's early stages (something I'll get into later) but was ultimately removed. Things like Cassie's relationships with Sadie and Monsignor Ryan that were presented as wholly positive in the first story are presented as more flawed here. And even Cassie herself, who was of totally pure heart the first time around, reveals that she's susceptible to corruption.

Influences from Reality-

As mentioned before, the plot's even more political this time around, particularly in the negativity Cameron Gram is built around. Cameron Robert Gram is named after actor Kirk Cameron and televangelists Pat Robertson and Billy Graham. He has elements of each man's personalities, along with little sprinklings of Joel Osteen, Ken Ham and Dinesh De'Suza here and there. Gram was actually the most frustrating character for me to write because I could never decide if he was too over the top or not. It felt like every time I figured he had become too negative or too forceful, one of his inspirations would say or do something dumb to just reinforce my opinion. Our religious pundits felt at times like exaggerated cartoons, so I figured I was allowed to do the same with my pastiche of them.

Gram's overwhelming negativity isn't exactly a trait that's obvious in any source of his inspirations. Kirk Cameron and Joel Osteen both present themselves as very charming and good spirited. In the case of Billy Graham, I actually believe it, to a degree. The first name Cameron was with me for a while before my ex suggested taking a dig at Billy Graham as well, which I decided to do with relatively little research on the man done. Graham was, I believe, a better man than those who came after him. He was an outspoken voice for Civil Rights, he taught a lot about the virtues of kindness and generosity, stuff I genuinely admire. But I don't regret bringing him into all this because ol' Billy Graham is also the father of the modern televangelist movement, which I feel has very much made salvation out to be something that can be bought or sold and sees its preachers seriously exploit the struggles of their faithful for frivolous gain. And, if nothing else, his son Franklin Graham very much is worthy of fierce critique.

Among other real-life events that influenced this story, one of the most powerful was that situation a while back involving a fake Planned Parenthood video that Carly Fiorina brought to national attention and tried to use to level against the health care institution. In case anyone has forgotten, this action had at least some impact in provoking a crazed gunman to shoot up a Planned Parenthood in his neighborhood and kill multiple people. I recall being absolutely furious by the whole thing and asking Fiorina on her Facebook page if she was haunted by the ghosts of those innocent people. Ineffective, but cathartic, I assure you. When someone with a news station did attempt to confront Fiorina about it, she went on the total defensive and acted as if she had absolutely no part in what had happened. A similar scene happens between Batgirl and Gram in his station's parking lot, in which he rants and raves that what happens because of what he said isn't his fault and he will not be blamed when some sick individual takes him out of context. This point ends up being one of the most major in the plot- that when you are a public figure, you affect people, sometimes in ways you don't mean to. And for that reason figures of influence should choose their words and actions carefully. The fact that Gram is horrified by the consequences of his actions when he sees them almost felt like too much credit to give the religious right, but I try hard to be an idealist. I'd like to hope that, if a lot of bigots saw just how ugly the things they want really are, they would turn away in horror. Perhaps not in every case, but this is a work of fiction after all.

The Monster You Choose to Be

While I hit on a few different ideas over the course of this story, the notion, "You are who you choose to be" is the most significant. While still developmentally stunted in a few different ways, Cassandra is nearing adulthood in some of her faculties at this point in the timeline, she is responsible for her own decisions. And whatever those decisions are, they have consequences. Cassie chooses not to have sex with Sadie and has to live with their breakup for a while. She chooses to save the Odmience from drowning and then has to live with his ungrateful response. She ends up dealing with these consequences very negatively, when she also chooses to start taking Cam Gram's preaching to heart and lets it infect her relationships and actions. Even Steph has to deal with this theme when her arrogance gets the Bunker impounded and she's reluctant to go to Bruce for help with the Cam Gram case. And the story eventually comes home to roost for Lipov, who very much is a monster by choice, and the Odmience and Gram, who finally decides to stop being ones.

In my outlines, everything from the Cassie-Sadie breakup through the Odmience's escape from the bunker was labeled, "Cassandra and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day," both to amuse myself and homage the Joker's infamous mantra from The Killing Joke that everyone is just one bad day from being him. Cassie doesn't become like him of course, but it does only take an exceptionally bad day to shatter much of her outlook on life and send her in a downward spiral it takes most of the rest of the story to recover from.

The Odmience is a character who has spent years totally under Lipov's control and feels he has no agency. Lipov never gave him anything of his own in his life, and when he ran away to try and find something more, Lipov tore it out of his hands. I don't believe the Odmience is responsible for any of the terrible things Lipov made him do and I believe the years of abuse rendered him totally complicit. It is only when Cassandra talks to him like an actual human being as Sister Katya did that it even seems to occur to Odmience he could choose to defy Lipov's will. The final confrontation is still brutal and I wanted all of the great action moments to still be there, but they were more of a diversion than anything else. Empathy was what undid Lipov, not violence. Love trumped hate… And speaking of a different sort of love…

Love, Sex and Everything in Between

One of the prospects that interested me the most in the planning stages was the opportunity to expand on Cassie and Sadie's relationship. In some ways, this is the closest thing to a straight-(ha ha)-forward romance I've ever written. The question of sex obviously crossed my mind quickly and, while I'll keep the details as limited as I can, personal experience did have a big part in that plotline. A tip for any writers out there by the way- Never never never never NEVER under any circumstance name a character you may one day write a sexual scene about after your beloved dog. Don't. Just don't.

The matter of sex was an extreme balancing act for me because it's one of those religious matters I am actually a bit of a traditionalist on. I don't take issue with other people having sex, I don't judge, I don't look down. But I've spent a lot of my life genuinely wanting to believe what I was taught back in religious education: sex is a pleasure one should reserve for marriage.

It is difficult to be a person for whom sex is expected and not deliver. In my case I am a man, and men are, in our society, often expected to be sexual creatures. In Cassandra's case, she is a woman in a lesbian relationship three years before same-sex marriage will be legalized in her state. I'm certainly less familiar with the expectations in that situation, but marriage won't be viable in the foreseeable future and Sadie's past girlfriends have, it's implied, been more inclined to have sex much quicker. Cassie and I both have/have had girlfriends whom we care about deeply but don't want to have sex with before marriage, and we both have/had girlfriends who are very frustrated by that.

Despite my own reservations about sex, it was important to me to not demonize Sadie for having sexual desires and not feeling a need to restrain them. Teenagers and adults have sexual wants and it's not my place to tell anyone not to act on them. Until things start really going downhill for Cassie, she feels much the same way. If Steph had mentioned that she and Tim had sex before Cassie had her freak out, I don't think she would have thought much of it. The whole reason I confirmed Steph and Tim's relationship had become sexual was to ensure the reader understood that I wasn't trying to condemn premarital sex, I was just framing it as a personal choice. One that Cassandra chose not to make.

The presentation of consent was likewise something I spent a lot of time mulling over, because it's more complicated here than it would be in a lot of other stories. From Sadie's perspective, Cassie might be a little developmentally stunted, but the biggest thing separating them is a language barrier. Cassie hasn't explained the truth of her history yet (I can only imagine what that conversation will eventually be like…) and Sadie is under the impression Cassie understands the meaning of their intimate encounter. If Sadie did know Cassie's history, I can guarantee she wouldn't have started touching her sexually until the two had a number of conversations beforehand about Cassie's readiness. But as is, Sadie initiates a sexual encounter and keeps asking Cassie if what she's doing is okay. Despite her confusion on some things, Cassie keeps giving her affirmative consent and Sadie does stop immediately as soon as she hears Cassie say not to go any further. It's still kind of an icky situation, but both women are doing the best with what they have.

Bit of a side tangent here: I find the "almost sex scene" in Chapter 15 to be kind of narmy to look back on. It's written the way it is in the hopes of not taking chances with the site's mods and fear of going too far with characters who are still minors, but I think it could have gone a little further. A female friend of mine joked with me that no one's breasts were sensitive enough to go on about touching like I did and yeeeeeaaaaah, it's probably safer than it needs to be.

Getting back on topic: No one ever told me my avoidance of sex would be an issue in a relationship. I suppose that reflects a younger, more naïve me who'd been taught by old stereotypes that women didn't crave sex. No one bothered to tell me that it would turn into the impetus of so many fights and tears. I streamlined the events, but Cassie's struggle trying to save her virginity with a partner who has different values comes from personal experiences.

Sadie's talk of "Being on different pages" is something that came very directly from a lot of exchanges with my ex. She used to say a lot that I was directionless in life, that I had a lot of dreams but didn't often invest in them. She wasn't exactly wrong, but considering she burned the bridge with me after I had proposed and moved in with her, it's a shitty sentiment to think back on. Cassie and Sadie's disconnect goes in a different direction, namely that Cassandra has unrealistic expectations of their future at this point in their relationship and that Sadie is mostly trying not to think about building anything at all. In the end the two learn a lesson in communicating with one another and get some time to reflect on what went wrong before they try again.

As a last note here, my previous statements that Cassandra is pansexual still hold. My ex, a bisexual, felt it was important that, if I was going to put Cassie in a failing relationship with Connor, her sexuality shouldn't be the reason. This was to encourage visibility among those whose sexuality is non-binary and it is a decision I still very much agree with. Probably helps that since Connor is asexual, he's another person that can be counted on the spectrum.

Faith on a Personal Level

As is probably obvious from my engagement coming apart and other hints, my life's taken a very strange turn. For the first time since I was a kid, I let myself be mad at God for a while. I knew I was never the perfect Catholic, but I tried so hard. I went to church every Sunday, abstained from meat every Lenten Friday, prayed before every meal, insisted there was no good reason we shouldn't have a Catholic wedding. And aside from all of that I loved her with all of my being, as my equal, my partner and my most precious friend. And all of that disappearing in what felt like in an instant did do its job in testing me for a while.

But faith should not be based in rewards. At least, not in the conventional sense. I believe in God and in Catholicism, I believe in life after death, but Heaven is not a reward granted to the faithful. It is a gift, freely given. And so likewise I do not believe happiness in this life is a reward for good behavior. Happiness is the positivity we make of our lives on Earth.

Since this was supposed to be the more "human" narrative, it ended up being the place to examine faith apart from the supernatural, a concept that is wildly fascinating to me. And in that vein, the greatest religious crux of Times of Heresy is the idea that Catholicism is neither magical nor karmic. Believing in God and praying doesn't fix every problem in the story and doing everything right doesn't guarantee misfortune won't befall you. Again, Cassie isn't ready for sex, so she says no and unintentionally hurt Sadie emotionally. That doesn't mean she should have just kept her mouth shut, it means the situation had no good solution. And she later saves the Odmience's life after he falls into the ocean only from him to attack her for it later. This is a hard pill to swallow that I thought was worth examining: life doesn't always reward you for doing the right thing. So, with that potentially nihilistic thought, what are we supposed to do then? And where is God supposed to fit in?

Well, as proposed by the story, my solution is we need to do the right thing anyway and let God take care of the rest. If Sadie wasn't able to respect Cassie's boundaries when Cassie told her no, she really had no business sticking around in their relationship. But Sadie does respect the no, breaks things off for different reasons and the two are eventually able to reconcile. Likewise, it is only because Cassie saves the Odmience that, in spite of his escape, she is eventually able to redeem him. Life is obviously not this simple, but I believe that more often than not altruism breeds more altruism. More givers and more kindness in the world will create even more givers and even more kindness, even if it doesn't come back around to the first giver directly.

And does God sort out the rest? I'd like to believe so, even if it is in ways we don't always understand immediately. I don't believe God told the bearded man to attack Lupe, but I do believe he may have gently pushed Cassandra toward the alley where it was happening. Maybe that's cheating, but it's at least open to interpretation. The Angel stories are meant to be open to secular readings if one wishes to read them that way.

The point is that I don't believe God will secure you a promotion at work if you go to church every Sunday. I don't believe your lottery numbers will improve if you volunteer at a soup kitchen. And I no longer believe preserving one's virginity and planning a traditional Catholic wedding guarantees a happy, successful marriage. But I do believe going to church can be positive for introspection and humbleness. And that more soup kitchen volunteers means fewer people are hungry, even if it's only for one night. And that the decision to have or not to have sex is still deeply personal, and it's no one's choice but one's own if they choose to abstain. People, religious and secular, should not do good things in expectation of reward and instead view their actions as rewards in and of themselves. It takes a lot of faith to believe that good will truly multiply, but I am a person of faith to begin with.

Individual Character Analysis

The Returning Cast:

Cassandra

Writing for Cassie a second time was difficult because I had a base I had to build off of. Cassie had to be better rounded and a better communicator in this story as a result of additional months of study and personal improvement, but she's still well below the rest of the cast. It was easier to write her dialogue and the like in the first story because I could stick to my method of, "Remove every unnecessary word." This time around her speaking had to sound just a little more natural and she needed to have a firmer grasp on her newly found religion. Again, that was a tricky balance for me.

The true heart of this story is the very simple question, "What if Cassandra Cain had one bad day?" in the manner proposed by The Killing Joke. I didn't feel like the story really had legs to stand on until that was the question I was asking myself, but then I got really excited. Writers are all kind of bastards in that way: we like to watch our characters suffer.

I'll admit, Cassandra's struggle with whether or not to have sex is a bit of an unusual conflict, and, as alluded to before, was largely chosen because it's something I've struggled with myself. But Cassie didn't have years of religious and public education telling her contradictory things about her body, so I can understand if a reader feels like it comes a little out of nowhere. Still, I do feel like it's justified in other ways. Sexual pleasure is something she's had very little exposure to and it, coupled with her more extreme sense of feeling, is presented as overwhelming. That, when combined with Monsignor Ryan's words to her that she's expected to preserve her virginity, makes her very cautious of the prospect of physical love with Sadie. This doesn't exactly get resolved in the story itself, but I think between her reconciliation with Sadie and knowing that Steph and Tim have slept together, she's not feeling as negative about the whole thing. In my mental Angel continuity, Cassie and Sadie do eventually get married, but I think it's up to the reader to decide if they ever had sex before or after that.

Cassie has the somewhat unusual story arc of starting on the right path, losing it, and finding it again. I'll be the first to admit, I'm always afraid to trust my readers to just read and let things play out, so it was a difficult thing to force myself to do. Not that I think you guys don't deserve to be trusted, I just knew I was dealing with something that had the potential to be fiercely unpleasant for the readership. I tried very hard to drop in little kernels of reassurance that the change wouldn't stick. Cassie still feels empathy for the Muslim woman and child she saves, even if she's trying to act otherwise. Stephanie is around to assure us the way Cassie's acting towards her opponents and even her friends is really not okay. And, after an arduous struggle, she does manage to get back on the right path again. It felt like a huge risk and it got really uncomfortable to write at times, but that's the price you pay for a redemption narrative.

All of this was planned pretty much before a single word made it to the page, but the timing almost makes me laugh in the darkest kind of way. Cassie and Sadie's fallout happened very close to my own breakup and I wondered if one fan wasn't paying super close attention and wondering if I had a change of heart and decided to throw away my support for the LGBTQ+ community. Not so, I happened to be hurt horribly by one bisexual woman, no one is to blame for that but her.

Stephanie

Still very much the second most important character to the narrative, Stephanie's got her own struggles throughout Times of Heresy that tie her intrinsically to Cassie's arc but also build off the themes of the first story. Because of the DC Relaunch, we never got to see much of what became of the relationship between pre-Flashpoint Steph and characters like Bruce and Cassandra after she became Batgirl… and I am aware DC Rebirth confirmed the relaunch characters and their pre-Flashpoint selves are the same characters, yada yada yada, that's beside the point. I'm referring specifically to pre-Flashpoint Steph. Whom, I will remind you, is my favorite comic book character.

Though her tenure as Batgirl deviates a lot from how it happened in Bryan Q. Miller's 2009-2011 run, similar elements are still there. Steph has spent basically her entire vigilante career being told by Batman that she was doing everything wrong and the sudden liberation she feels in the Batgirl uniform is tricky to deal with. And since Bruce is still around in this continuity, she feels like she's still trying to prove she can handle herself to him and ends up being her own undoing. In this way, Steph's Batgirl arc deals heavily with her accepting she can't always handle everything on her own and she shouldn't be too stubborn to ask for help. The first story dealt with Stephanie finally forgiving Bruce for their tumultuous history, this one deals with her finally learning to trust him again.

Stephanie's presentation here was also kind of cathartic for me at this point. If asked what trait is the single most important when writing Stephanie Brown, it is that she never, ever, gives up, not on a job, not on a friend and not on hope. A reminder that at the end of Miller's Batgirl run, she overcome a lungful of Black Mercy, which can cripple freaking Superman, through her indomitable willpower. A fact that seems sorely lost on the post-relaunch likes of Scott Snyder and James Tynnion IV, who have reimagined her as prepared to run away from Gotham in Batman Eternal, calling Cassandra "Barely a person" in Batman and Robin Eternal and willing to totally dismantle the Bat-family in Detective ComicsSHEESH. I haven't read much that includes her since then, but all of those moments were real slaps in the face to me over and over again. So I wrote Stephanie the way I think she's best written. She's still not the smartest, she still screws stuff up and occasionally she's shortsighted. But she acts how she does because of her sometimes spotty track record with her boss and later out of love for her best friend. I think Steph's got the biggest heart in the Bat-family and that's how I write her.

Though Tim's not in this story a lot (to the point this will serve as his character examination), we do get a few more details on where he and Steph are at at this point. They have definitely had sex at some point between stories (in the Bunker no less) and she's ready to marry him whenever he's ready to ask. I'm not exactly advocating for this mindset, I know most high school relationships don't make it (believe me, I know) but theirs is a bit more of an unusual case, as I acknowledge in the story proper. They've been working together and defending one another for years as superheroes. And, as much as I know I try for realism in other aspects of my storytelling, I don't go into the negatives of that a ton. I love them as a couple in the comics, I like this as wish fulfillment.

At one point in the planning stages, I considered giving Stephanie a crisis of her own sexual identity and coming to terms with the fact that she did, indeed, have feelings for Cassie. I'm actually very relieved I opted to cut that. Platonic friendship is extremely important and I feel like I haven't written enough women strictly as friends. You don't need romantic feelings to worry about a dear friend's mental health. Still, you could read it as a little homoerotic if you cared to, particularly Steph's outburst when she says Cassie's turned into a total bitch, which, I think, does almost read like a bit of a lover's quarrel.

Regardless of any of that, I think Steph always tries to see the best in people. That's what gives her an important dynamic when Cassie slips into extremism and it's what allows her to resolve things with the Reapers after becoming public enemy number one for them.

Sadie

Sadie was difficult to write in this story while sticking to the framework I'd previously established. If there is ANY major event from the first story I'd like to retcon at this point, it might be editing the nature of Cassie and Sadie's first meeting. I'm aware that saving someone's life does not mean they're automatically obligated to love you forever, but it makes Sadie's reason for breaking things off at the point she did look a lot worse than they would in a normal relationship. Theirs still ISN'T a normal relationship, since Cassie doesn't understand some aspects of communication and intimacy, but from Sadie's perspective it seems simpler than it actually is.

Considering how late she came into the picture in the first story, to the point she and Cassie hadn't even hooked up until the epilogue, it was fine for me initially to just treat her as "Cassie's girlfriend" and little else. That had to change for Times of Heresy. I'll grudgingly admit I made her a bit of a hipster (as much as I hate that word) because I thought it would make for an interesting dynamic with Cassie, who doesn't really understand subversion or art all that well. As salty as I got about Tynnion IV in Steph's analysis, I've been a touch bitter that he writes Cassandra as well as he does and admit her fascination with ballet makes a lot more sense than me trying to tie her into visual art. Anyway back to Sadie- I'll admit, I didn't ground her interests in things that I myself am especially close to and fear they may not have been represented well. I also kind of got the feeling reading reviews early on that my readers weren't exactly crazy about her. That's disappointing, since she's an original creation and all, but with some rereading and reflection, I kind of get it. It feels like there wasn't enough there to bridge "Cassie's girlfriend" into a character in her own right. It was cool that Cassie was in a same-sex relationship, but more for the idea than for the two characters. It was sad to see Cassie deal with a breakup, but only because breakups in themselves suck, not because people were especially attached to the couple. If reviews are an accurate indication, this did get better in the story's second half, but it was still something frustrating to deal with. Romance isn't one of my strong suits at this point, but I really wanted to give it a try here.

Bringing conflict into their relationship was another hurdle I feel like I kind of tripped over. The trouble with their dynamic in Times of Heresy is the fact that I more constantly portrayed Cassie as the victim while giving her no negative acts of her own. In a relationship that ends up being reconciled with "We both messed up, we both need to communicate better", Cassie doesn't have a ton to apologize for. The pressure Sadie talks about doesn't really turn up much of anywhere besides the sexual encounter and I regret that. There was a scene I went back and forth on where Sadie would have turned up with a nose or a lip ring or something and it would have creeped Cassie out and led to a fight or something (based on a regrettable personal experience...). I guess the reviews indicated readership was feeling positive about Sadie by the end, but she feels like a well of missed opportunities to me.

None of this is to say I'm totally unhappy with how her character turned out. I think her struggle of "failure to communicate out of fear of souring a good thing" is something a lot of people deal with in their relationships at some point or another. It's problematic, but I've certainly been that person before and I totally know how it feels.

I believe Sadie thought moving in and out of Cassie's life was going to be a lot easier than it turned out to be. I think she came in without a lot of expectations and thought she'd be able to walk out when things got sour and get on with her life. But Cassie left an impression and Sadie really did end up feeling loved. That's what makes her want to try again, personal differences be damned.

Bruce

Like the first Angel, Bruce/Batman is largely left to serve a side-role in Gotham. In one part this is to keep the focus on Cassandra and Stephanie and in another, I sometimes have a hard time figuring what to do with him. I'm not really sure what he was so busy doing with the Justice League for the first half of the story, I just needed him to be away so I could show the ups and downs of the Bat-Family trying to defend Gotham without him.

In a story like this, Bruce's role as a parent is what's most important to the plot. There are only a small handful of scenes when he's out in the Batman suit at all, so he's a lot more busy playing support to the rest of his team. I absolutely believe he tries his hardest to be a good father toward his adopted children, but sometimes the fact that he hasn't raised any of them from birth makes things complicated for him. I think Bruce would like to believe the relationships in his life are more static than they really are. "Stephanie and he reconciled, so he doesn't think they still have issues to be resolved." "Cassandra is acting unwell, but she's not going to do anything too out of line." That things are different than that troubles him.

Despite his relatively few appearances and some turmoil, Bruce/Batman are around to remind us of what we're supposed to hope for from our heroes. He's still here to serve and protect first and save as many people as he can. In the end, that's what it's all about.

Monsignor Ryan

This story's greatest failing is the absolutely criminal lack of Snowball. That joke out of the way, I'll get earnest.

Monsignor Ryan was both a difficult and somewhat painful character for me to write this time around. He was another idealized concept from the first story that reality had to ensue for here. Monsignor Ryan's inspiration passed away some time ago, so I really don't know what he would think of how I represented him here. I always wanted to believe he was a compassionate, empathetic man and I still hold on to those feelings, but there had to some breaking of the pedestal.

Although they never interact, Cameron Gram kind of serves as the monsignor's counterpart in this story. Though the reference isn't intentional, Monsignor Ryan ends up hitting the nail on the head with Gram when he says some religious authorities are more than content to have their influence without having empathy. The monsignor is extremely sympathetic to the feelings of his congregation, Gram mostly revels in what he perceives as moral superiority. But even if the monsignor is the better of the two, he still represents my belief that the church has failed to play catch up with the issues of today. And probably has been doing so for a very long time.

Both of my parents were divorced before they married one another and I was born. If not for those divorces the church can still prove so judgmental of, I wouldn't be alive. The Catholic Church runs a number of good, effective charities for women with unwanted pregnancies as alternatives to abortion, but it continues to resist easily accessible contraceptives, the single most effective way of preventing those pregnancies to begin with and thus, lowering abortion rates. And we're currently in this bizarre gray area where homosexuality is acknowledged as a natural phenomenon that isn't sinful in itself, but is when you commit "homosexual acts." Like… what the hell? I suppose progress is progress, but this is a weird time to be Catholic.

Monsignor Ryan represents my begrudging frustrations here. I believe, at least ideologically, the church is doing better these days, but it's still not where it needs to be. It'd be really nice if the old priest could tell Cassie, "There's nothing wrong with what you're feeling, and I'm going to join you in this fight for your dignity and respect," but it also wouldn't have felt genuine. Ryan will keep her secrets and not refuse her Communion, that's better than some other priests would do. But he still falls short of casting off his outdated and ineffective ideals, which keeps him from being as truly good as he aspires to be. A little more on that later…

New to the Plot:

Victor Lipov

Victor Lipov was designed to be the antithesis to the Seraphim as far as villains go. The Seraphim was a religious zealot, Lipov is secular. The Seraphim always just viewed Cassandra as one more thing between him and his true opponent, Lipov saw her as a goal in herself. The Seraphim was physically very imposing, Lipov is hardly much of a fighter at this point. But they do both like elaborate plans that involve blowing things up. I solemnly swear that if the third Angel story ever gets made, there will be no threats of explosions in the climax.

I'll admit, even I don't find Lipov all that interesting. He's an obsessed revenge nut with no really lofty aspirations for his life. He's a little like Wile E. Coyote, if you ask me. He's so focused on his endgame he really isn't interested in anything else, and he'll only tolerate his own specific line of events. He's so concerned with beating his old mentor at his own game he gives no thought to the massive amount of time and resources he's wasting or what simpler ways he could be getting what he wants.

I think the shroud of mystery that hangs over Lipov is my favorite part. If you were hoping I would clarify anything, I hate to disappoint you, but I think that's better left to interpretation. I personally do interpret Lipov's assignment to kill Cain for conceiving Cassandra to be the truth, but it's there for readers to think otherwise if they care to.

I've joked to myself before that, "Everything I ever needed to know about conflict I learned by watching Looney Tunes." Lipov is an almost Wile E. Coyote-like character, in that his existence seems to revolve around a single task to which he will go to absurd lengths to accomplish. The potentially profound moment when Cassie asks him what he really intends to do with his life after his revenge was partly inspired by the short "Soup or Sonic," in which Wile. E. Coyote finally catches a super-sized Road Runner and questions what the hell he's supposed to do then.

It's maybe a little contradictory that the narrative I intended to be more "human" has a main villain who I'm comparing with a Warner Brothers cartoon, but in this case I wanted the villains to have less focus. This is an internal struggle more than anything else, Lipov and the Odmience are just here to keep things rolling.

Rafal/The Odmience

Batman stories tend to feature a lot of dark reflections of their heroes. Bruce alone has a number of enemies who also came from wealthy households and grew up with vast power and influence (Penguin, Black Mask, Hush) or otherwise represent the character if his life had gone in a slightly different direction. Cassie even sort of gets her canonical reflection opponents in the form of Mother's army of Orphans in Batman and Robin Eternal. But I felt like we'd never really seen a villain whose shtick was, "Cassandra's upbringing, but it worked." It seemed like a good building block to construct a new antagonist from.

I do treat the story Lipov told about his origins as canon, but that still tells us very little. Rafal has no official birth name and only the barest in the way of a personal identity. Lipov is the only person he had any form of extended contact with in his formative years and his training from hell took a toll on his mental stability. Even after he escapes Lipov we see he has extreme difficulty with social interactions and feels like he's constantly forced to defend himself. To compare again, the Seraphim seemed to revel in what he did, the Odmience is only willing because he feels he has no other choice. At the end of the day, he really is a scared child who has never been taught how to do the right thing.

From the start I wanted the final battle between Cassie and the Odmience to be subversive. I love a long, hard beatdown as much as the next Batman fan, but I felt winning a fist fight against an opponent like the Odmience wouldn't be fulfilling. In earlier mental drafts, Cassie would have conceded that the Odmience really was her superior and she knew she wouldn't be able to beat him by force. That idea was cut and the question of who was superior is left ambiguous because it was important he be defeated the way he was, whether he could have been stopped with force or not. In Cassie's use of the name Rafal to humanize him, surrender and pummeling at his hands, she taps into the inner humility that Lipov long denied him. He chooses to stop being the monster Lipov made him.

David Cain

I'll admit, settling on Lipov's motivations was tricky for me because, well, who exactly would care that someone is trying to kill David Cain? He's one of DC's coldest bastards, but he really isn't so in a Joker, James Gordon Jr. or one of those guys. Cain's done terrible things, it's tempting to want to see him meet a terrible end. So the real experiment was internal pondering if care toward his daughter and regret is enough to make him worth sympathy. Not redemption, just sympathy.

At the end of the day, in David Cain's original incarnation he never let go of his soft spot for his daughter, one that I don't think came from intention. When Cassie first shouted at him to "Stop!" back in their first storyline together, Cain was moved to tears. Across all of their confrontations over the years, he's always been careful to try not hurting her too badly. He keeps this same attitude in this story. Cain has openings to potentially kill Cassie in their fight on the Final Offer, but doesn't. He pleads with Lipov to leave her out of their feud when he's captured. And he seems to even praise Bruce for the job he's done as a better parent. He's glad his daughter didn't end up following in his footsteps after all. And, in his last moments, he saves her from sharing his fate in the burning church.

But is any of this enough to make a reader feel for him? This is still a character who put his daughter through absolute hell growing up, take money to kill and, in this storyline, betrayed his apprentice who stood up for him. David Cain is unquestionably still a bad guy and he sure as hell knows it. In his last breaths, he laments his sacrifice will be one of only two good things he did with his life. So what are those two good things ultimately worth?

In an earlier outline, I was going to have Bruce comfort Cassandra after Cain's death, where they would have the conversation of Cassie insisting, "I had to save him" and Bruce suggesting, "Maybe you did." I felt this was out of place even as a comforting mechanism, especially with the decided lack of references to Heaven in the rest of the plot. When all is said and done, no, I don't think Cain did deserve to be saved.

But, as I've referenced before, faith isn't about what is deserved. Cassandra goes to save him and may have even tried to save Lipov, if it was at all feasible to do so. I don't know if her act would have put Cain on the path to redemption, but he did find it in him to save one life after the many he'd taken. I don't know what is waiting for David Cain when he has to face Saint Peter at the gate, but for Cassandra's attempt to save him, he saves her back. It fits the themes mentioned earlier about good being rewarded with good. Whether it can truly apply to a beast like him is up to the reader.

Cameron Gram

Getting back to the monster you choose to be, Gram probably deserves a few more words here, despite how much he was referenced earlier. Like the other villains, there is a certain, anti-Seraphim quality that underlines Gram's character. As is referenced early on, Gram being a self-righteous, judgmental bigot while also being within the law makes him intimidating to Cassandra. It seems natural that the person talking the loudest and with the most passion may be the one most invested in their faith. Gram's been a Christian much longer than Cassandra has, he can point to Biblical phrases to prove his point, he has Jesusy bumper stickers, clearly all of these things reflect the deep content of his character (not!) In spite of Billy Graham being his surname's inspiration, he's got more in common with Billy's son Franklin, in that he's so obsessed with what he's against he doesn't actually seem to support much of anything.

What Gram longs for, even if he himself doesn't realize it, is a world where someone like him could be on the top again. From his perspective, a lot of pesky minorities of different religions, sexualities and skin tones are demanding that they too be treated like human beings. As the saying goes, to the privileged, equality looks like oppression.

Nonetheless, Gram's character evolution ultimately bears a message of hope, even if it is one I fear can only affect so much. I had to wonder to myself, would Carly Fiorina still be so adamant she had nothing to do with that Planned Parenthood shooting if the killer looked her in the eyes and said, "Thank you"? There was a thought I read about once that the nuclear launch codes should be stored in the heart of a secret service member, so the president would have to kill one person directly before issuing the order to kill thousands with a bomb and that kind of stuck with me. If these people with their awful, bigoted mindsets had to witness what they said they wanted, would they still support it? It's an unfortunate reality that many still would, but I'd prefer not to think all of them. I continue to try with all my being to believe people are far greater in their capacity for good than evil, and we should be accepting of that shift if we ever witness it in someone. People can change. It's our place to fight injustice wherever it should crop up and do everything in our power to make the world better for those who are treated unfairly. But we must also believe that even our greatest enemies could change. Fight them every step of the way, but do not be defiant and don't lose them in your gloating if they decide you were right all along.

Zsasz

While I'm trying to keep these characters in something resembling order by impact, I thought I should bring up Victor Zsasz here and get the darkness associated with his scene out of the way so we can move on to more uplifting things.

I'm always a fan of some genre-bending mind screw in a storyline like this. If you've read the first story, you may remember the nightmare sequences brought on by the Seraphim and how the plot turned into a bit of a horror story for a while. While I made sure to keep Zsasz in the back of the reader's head with occasional references, the scene between him and Cassandra is meant to feel like it came out of nowhere. It's meant to be unsettling, it's meant to be upsetting, it's the ideal culmination of the awful part of the arc Cassie was going through.

Zsasz felt like the ideal candidate to be the villain who forced Cassandra over the edge. I have little in the way of reading history with Zsasz, but was pleasantly creeped out by him in the Arkham video games. That's what I was trying to emulate here: his unsettlingly steady voice, his almost Hannibal Lector-like mannerisms, all that jazz. He certainly has an appeal to him, but he's also simple and underutilized enough that I felt like I could use him as fodder.

That was a decision I really stewed on a lot before it finally happened. Initially I just wanted Cassie to beat Zsasz into a coma and have to face the terror of how close she had come to killing him. But I ultimately decided that I wanted to take advantage of the fact that I don't have a comics mandated status quo to keep up. I've actually written plenty of other work with heroes who have no particular qualms about killing, so it was kind of funny to me to make such a big deal out of it here. I won't get into the argument about whether killing a killer is wrong here, but I personally think Gotham is going to be better off without Zsasz in the picture. But regardless of if he should have been killed or not, it shouldn't have been Cassandra who did it. It shouldn't have been someone who was so long defined by her search for another answer—any other answer. Cassie was right, Zsasz did deserve to be punished harshly, but it didn't do her any favors to be the one to carry that out.

Connor

I actually had some interest in bringing Connor Hawke into the narrative back in the first story. As he and Cassandra have had some strong stories together and he is probably DC's most popular Buddhist character, I thought he and Cassie had the potential for an interesting dynamic back in the first plot, but I didn't end up following through with it. It wasn't intentional, but Connor's envisioned role probably ended up going to Nightwing, just another character of non-Catholic faith giving Cassie some support and love. And the fact that he was another character who disappeared after the New 52 relaunch made me want to reintroduce him in a work of my own. Even if plan A didn't pan out, he's given a real and much larger role here.

As I've admitted before, I've never been the closest follower of any of the Green Arrow cast and I may have bitten off more than I could chew by having them so deeply involved in the plot. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed the Arrow stories I have read and was always charmed by Connor during his tenure with the bow. He's mostly stoic but lighter sides of him peek through sometimes, and above all else he's just trying to be a really good guy. Like most writers (save for Chuck Dixon), I chose to depict Connor as asexual. It felt like it added to the dynamic between him and Cassandra when they're sort-of dating and allowed him the chance to live up to his mantra about wanting to decrease suffering in the world. And, as mentioned, it was something he'd had experience in before with Mia. Connor loves his friends when they don't know how to love themselves.

Lupe

(I want to apologize ahead of time if I misuse any terms or reveal some misunderstanding in the following section. I am a Queer-allied, cis, heterosexual male and I am trying my hardest)

Of any character in the story, Lupe probably changed the most from beginning to end and frustrated me at various points in between. I'm rather thankful her appearance is so relatively short lived, because playing the long game with her while I was changing my mind so much would have been a total pain.

The earliest idea for the character who I mostly referred to in my notes as, "The Ghirardelli Lady" was a male-to-female transgender person I considered not giving a proper name, but always referred to in some part of my mind as "Chris." She had a similar but not as developed role as Lupe and I initially thought I could do everything I wanted with her in about two chapters. She would have been attacked as well but the plan was for it to be far more violent, to the point of being hospitalized. An exhausted Cassie would have taken her to the hospital, dozed off from a tiredness I never figured out and had a maybe-dream, maybe-real conversation with Chris similar to the one she had with Lupe, she'd wake up and the nurse would tell her Chris died in her sleep. I'm frankly more than a little ashamed of the forced and tragic nature of this original plan and that's why I kept going back to it to try and make it right. Chris was about as blatant a "character as plot device" as I've done in a while, almost as bad as the "She's totally Jesus" overtone of the thing. And yes, she was totally Jesus. That was something else I wanted to get away from. I take no issue with the prospect of a trans Jesus, I think there are a wealth of interesting story possibilities there, actually. But as I've said before, Times of Heresy was supposed to be a more human story at its core than the original.

Several factors influenced my final decisions about Lupe. For one, as a Latina there was already some built in shorthand that she grew up Catholic. I wanted Cassie to have another person with at least a Catholic background to interact with, since it would later reflect on their similar situations. Emilio, Lupe's husband in all but legal documentation, serves to bait and switch Cassie while she's struggling with her sexuality. She envies what looks to be their perfectly healthy, hetero-normal relationship only to later learn that Lupe was born male.

In revising the nature and end result of the attack, I hoped to better empower Cassandra and get Lupe out from the drudgery of tragedy-fated queer characters. Cassie witnesses something that is terrible and, after much too long dealing with her moral compass sliding around, finally decides she already knows full and well what the right thing to do is. Lupe, still all in one piece, gets to talk to her about her struggles with her identity and her belief in the real beauty of the human soul.

The Reapers

If you were aware from the get go these guys were not original creations of mine, you're pretty awesome.

The Reapers, for the unfamiliar, were Bryan Q. Miller's attempt to give Stephanie a rouges gallery in her solo books before the DC Relaunch dashed away his plans back in 2011. They are the reoccurring villains of the storyline "The Lesson" and I always thought they were a major case of missed potential. I don't blame the fantastic Bryan Q. for that, I think he did his best with the time allotted him. The Reapers, in the pages of Batgirl, were a bit of a nebulous evil organization of Gotham U students in power armor funded by the Cluemaster... Somehow. I've read those comics multiple times and details are still hazy to me. I needed some characters in the story who could serve as fight scene fodder since Lipov and the Odmience didn't have anyone else allied with them, and thought it would be fun to include this team of mostly forgotten supervillains.

Bryan Q.'s template didn't exactly give me a ton to work with. Only two of the five Reapers had names and civilian designs that got a little elaboration in the original comics. I gave the suits origins with HIVE because I felt it gave them some history in the greater DCU. It also seemed in-character for HIVE to distribute power armor to seemingly random college kids just to see what damage they would manage with them. The five still don't have a tone of personality, but I tried to give them a little more than Bryan Q. could squeeze out. Xane/Slipstream is still obnoxious and straightforward like his comic counterpart. Tracey/Melody/Harmony (see the trivia section below) is still impulsive and a poor planner. Richie/Figment had no real personality or even a given civilian name in the comics, so I decided I could do the most with him, giving him a gadgeteer genius vibe and his own reservations about serving Lipov. Miles/Jabberwocky (who was just "Jabberwock" in the comics, but the mistake stuck) was mostly just depicted as a meathead because that's mostly what he was. We never really even got a solid idea what his armor did, so I just went with super-strength. And Jill/Miranda is meant to read a bit like a bitchy valley girl commanding her friends around, again because the comics didn't give me much to work with. Her powers are also ill-defined, so I ended up saying she's got a bootleg Lantern ring.

It was fun to have these guys around for fight scenes and to depict their own internal struggles going along with Lipov's plans. Like Odmience, it isn't a straightforward fight that beats them, it's forgiveness and empathy from the opponent they've made their number one enemy.

Some morsels of trivia-

- The cat Ali is based off of a pair of animals whom I loved dearly. One was a little street cat my ex took in and named Marmalade and the other was a gray and white dwarf hamster we raised in the short time we lived together named Albus. Both have sadly passed, but like my beagle Sadie, I wanted to memorialize them in a work of mine.

- Several moments in the fic were directly inspired by Christian rock songs. "Darkest Part" by RED fueled much of Cassie's fundamentalist phase. "Treasure" and "All Around Me" by Flyleaf set the tone for the Star City chunk of the plot. "Stronger Than You Think" by Fireflight choreographed the final battle with the Odmience. If this story has a theme song to me, it's "Furious Love" by Veridia, which I also mentally played for Lipov's last stand. And, if these were credits, "Made to Glow" by Shine Bright Baby would be playing over them. I am incredibly smaltzy, but at least I acknowledge it.

- The description of this story doesn't mesh well with the story itself and I should seriously write a new one.

- Bruce's frustration over odmience being too obscure to build suspicions around mirrored my own anger about finding a demonic creature that so perfectly fit what I was looking for only to realize they're barely mentioned in their own mythology.

- "Rafal" was chosen as the Odmience's given name because of its equivalence to Raphael, who is not only the angel associated with healing, but is an exclusively Catholic character due to the Book of Tobit being apocryphal among Protestants.

- If you examine the description of Tim's Red Robin uniform in the first scene he turns up in it, you may note it doesn't match the costume most associated with the character before or after the relaunch. My Red Robin costume is a transplant of the suit Tim wore in the Unternet storyline of the Red Robin books, which is kind of a Robin-Nightwing fusion suit that happens to be my favorite look for him.

- I wasn't reading Batman comics when Philo Zeiss was first introduced and later totally abandoned in the early 2000's, but it seemed bizarre to me how he seemed to just come and go. I know not every Batman villain ends up sticking, but it seemed like the writers were hoping they were on the verge of creating the next Bane. I reflected this in his one scene appearance against Connor and Cassandra, in which he rants about how powerful he is but how totally he's been forgotten.

- Cameron Gram occasionally has a pair on his show he refers to as, "Gary" and "Phil," who are the fictional counterparts of a pair of Christian conspiracy nuts with the same names who I only know about from Brad Jones' "DVDR Hell: Deception of a Generation" which I highly recommend for a good laugh at some truly amazing asspulling.

- The heavyset woman with green hair in the tea house who briefly talks to Stephanie is based off a friend of mine named LJ, who I'd like to dream will stumble across this some day independent of my mentioning it.

- There was something of an abandoned plot point in the phrase "Trouble in paradise." It shows up twice, once in the tea room when fictional LJ puts Stephanie on Cam Gram's trail and later when Lupe and Cassie first open up to one another. The phrase, in my head, indicates a little "push" either from the character conscience or from God, depending on how you'd like to interpret it. To have gone all the way with it would have probably involved Cassie herself saying it upon seeing the bearded man and Lupe in the alleyway, but I felt it would have hurt the tension of the scene.

- Lian Harper is only in this story because, after how rotten DC has been to her and her lack of appearances even after her death was retconned, I wanted to assure readers she is happy and healthy in my continuity.

- As I mentioned in an earlier note, I wasn't actually aware of the supporting Green Arrow character Mia Dearden when I started writing this story. She actually ended up suiting my purposes surprisingly well as a bait-and-switch tactic for Lupe. I set up some initial tension between Mia and Cassie in the hopes readers familiar with her would think she'd have a more direct hand in Cassie's redemption. I wanted the suspicion to be that Mia would open up about her time being a prostitute just to get by and the fact that she has HIV, both of which would be difficult for Cassie to reconcile while still being stuck in her judgmental, Gram-influenced mindset. And also because I decided I quite liked her once I discovered her.

The Future of the Angel Series

The last thing I want to put to page before I finally call this thing done is what, if anything, is still to come for my Angel of the Bat writings. I'm not really in a position to make promises at this point, I've got my own still unpublished work that really need to start taking priority in my writing life again. I know I've been talking about them forever now, but I'm about to make some honest to God pitches here soon. And it's hard to say I'll have the time and energy for fan fiction while I'm finding a home for my opus series. Nevertheless, I still do, absolutely, have ideas about this series.

The crossover with Ms. Marvel remains out there, still barely started but with a lot of ideas I was extremely pleased with going in. Beware the Batman has a solid storyline I feel I could go forward with without making any alterations halfway through. And, because I am one of the everybody who loves trilogies, I do have an idea of what I would do for a third Angel story if I felt like it. To offer just a tiny bit of insight, this possible third entry would be pretty different from the first two. I think it will require travel beyond Gotham fairly early on and keep far away. That would also mean separating Cassie from the rest of the Gotham cast, but there would be a new ensemble of DC characters from some very unusual places that would serve as the story's ragtag team of protagonists. In the same vein Times of Heresy was more human, I think this story is meant to be more fantastic, though just as meaningful. And, after stories of Protestant Evangelical antagonists in some capacity, this story would feature a Catholic as its main villain and finally feature what I feel are the failings of my own branch of faith at the forefront. But again, that's if I get around to writing it.

If I don't have it in me to make a home for these stories myself, I may see if there is anyone else interested and pass them my notes and my blessing. After all, Angel of the Bat was an idea I adopted from Gail Simone and didn't come up with myself. Maybe that would be fitting.

I don't know what lays ahead for this series and I don't know what lies ahead for this world I'm just one tiny writer in. It's a turbulent time to be a Catholic in my country right now, not because I fear for myself but because I am disgusted by the injustice that continues to happen to others. But I know, from messages I've received and reviews I've read, that I've done even just a little bit to spread hope in addition to entertainment. At least one experience a reader said they had with my work brought tears to my eyes. This is why I write: because I think I have something to say and something that will be meaningful to others.

Fight and protest injustice wherever you see it. Be that source of compassion to someone who needs it. Make the choice to stop doing wrong to others and strive for a better future. Be an altruist, your reward will be the better world we all get to live in.

Thank you all for taking this journey with me and God bless. This is Michael Joseph Tharnish Roby, signing off.