I:
Roughly two hours later, the crab-legged mecha lay collapsed onto the pavement of the port of Opal City, slightly obstructing traffic but no longer a threat. Knight, looking slightly drenched, was staring up at its bulk with a sour expression when he overheard a disturbance some distance away.
"Curse you, Captain Thunder! I curse you and your kind!"
"It's Captain Wonder, Tad. Just like it was the last three times."
"STOP CALLING ME TAD!"
"Well, I'm not going to call you Sivana, for pity's sake. I think your grand-dad would start rolling in his grave if I did that ..."
"Shut up! JUST SHUT UP!"
Will shrugged, and turned to fly towards Knight's position as the mad gynecologist was forced into the police hovercar's back seat. "Y'know, I never have quite gotten why he doesn't just blow my secret identity," he said to Rick as he settled to the ground. "We knew each other growing up, so I know that he knows ..."
"A secret isn't a secret if you tell anyone else," Rick commented, turning to look up at the robotic vehicle.
"Good job figuring out how to shut this thing down."
Rick sighed. "Well, it really came down to what you'd already told me about The World's Worst Wicked Scientist's actual abilities with mechanisms."
"He's an okay mechanic, but he doesn't have the resources or talent to build something like this," agreed Will.
"So he must have salvaged it, and given that it's clearly aquatic in nature, it almost had to be Atlantean in origin. It's just a good thing that the language is the same in both my world and yours," Rick muttered, continuing, in his thoughts, /given that almost nothing else is./
"I'm a little surprised that you let Katana yell the override commands at it, instead of doing it yourself," he confessed.
Rick turned back to look at the other members of the team, resting some distance away across the water. "Job one of the leader of a team is keeping everyone involved. Dad never quite got that, unfortunately ... Fly me over to them? I think I need to have some words with Ms. Mason."
II:
Diane looked up briefly, to see Knight and the Captain descending towards them, then looked back down again before they landed, watching the water drip off her nose.
"First of all," he said without preamble, "I want all of you to know that I think we all did a good job in stopping this thing before it could do any major damage. Katana, I'm particularly impressed that you were able to recover quickly from realizing that your attempted hamstringing' of the robot wasn't going to work."
"I have never seen such swift self-repair. The technology involved is quite remarkable," she replied.
Typical, thought Diane, give her sort a compliment and they completely ignore it. Twit.
"That said," Rick continued, and Diane clenched her jaw as she waited for what she knew was coming. "I have a big problem with your actions, Terra."
Diane had already opened her mouth to justify what she'd done, when the fact that he'd addressed someone else
"Me?" Tara almost-squeaked. "What'd I do? I kept pelting the damn thing with as much as I could while --"
"That's not the problem. I have a problem with your decision to let Diane attack that thing on her own, while you hung back and watched."
She stared at him, clearly bewildered by this. "I didn't know that her thing wasn't, y'know, going to work!"
"Neither did she," Rick acknowledged. "That's why I'm not giving her a lecture about jumping the gun. As far as either of you knew, diving towards the mecha and transmuting a cylinder of its internal workings to hydrogen gas as she fell through it was going to work great.
"But when it became clear that it wasn't working, and that Element Woman --" Diane flinched at the name. "-- had fallen all the way through the mecha and into the water, you just hung around up here and continued to try brute force techniques. You didn't even check to see if she was all right. And given that she can't swim, that could have been fatal."
"I didn't know that she couldn't swim, either!" Tara protested.
"Did you ask?" Rick fired right back. "Did you consider that if she succeeded, she'd end up in the water, and maybe you should find out if your partner would be all right in that event? Did taking any safety precautions occur to you?"
"Why aren't you taking her to task for any of this crap?" Diane felt a disturbing impulse to chime in with a "Yeah!" to accompany Tara's demand.
"Because I'm pretty sure that she's already thought most of it for herself," he answered smoothly.
Where did he get off assuming anything about her thoughts! And why the hell did he have to be right?
"Anyway, and this goes for all of you: if I send you out in partners, I expect you to look out for one another. Captain, you and Katana did well on that, this time. You two --" This to Tara and Diane. "-- need some work. I'll be scheduling teamworking classes, starting tomorrow."
"Aren't you going to say anything to me about what I did?" Diane heard herself ask.
He turned and looked at her for a moment. "Would anything I had to say to you make a difference?"
She thought about that, when she wasn't sneezing, all the way back to their base.
III:
"Well, that was an embarrassing interlude," Lorraine noted as she examined the mechanical schematic hovering in front of her.
"Things are going to be rough, our first few times out. I warned you about that when we discussed this."
Richard wasn't making excuses, she knew, or engaging in told-you-soing. He was simply stating the facts as he saw them, which was one of the reasons she'd decided to entrust both their fates to him. "And I suppose that I should have expected that remarkably few of our opponents will be criminal geniuses, as opposed to geniuses gone annoyingly awry," she agreed.
She turned to look at the video display that filled her suite's wall with his face. "Speaking of which ..."
He closed his eyes and sighed heavily. "She's popped up already?"
"It happened well before even I had projected, but yes. The Harlequin executed the armed robbery of a major Network cafe while the owners were celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of its opening. No one was hurt, but she escaped with a few thousand dollars, and -- this part is strange -- a single board from each of the cafe's terminals. Do you --"
"Start monitoring for virus-like programs," Knight interrupted. "Her first move will probably target key pieces of the city's infrastructure. Expect one of her big guns to be named after one of the chemical compounds of Joker venom; if you don't already have the formula, you can probably find it somewhere in the old GothamPD-dot-net server. After the cyber-attack, she'll choose a primary target; not something directly related to city function, but one that'll have been hit collaterally by the damage already done. A bank, probably one of those within walking distance of city hall. I'm not yet familiar enough with Opal's layout to guess which one."
"Been through this before, I take it?" Lorraine asked after he seemed to have run down.
"Yes," he said without further amplification. "What about the mecha, Lorraine? I'm pretty sure Aquaman will want it back."
"King Arthur," she replied emphatically, "can ask for the device if he wants it returned. In the meanwhile, we're going to be examining it."
"Lorraine," he said, frowning. "Atlantean technology isn't that far advanced over what's available contemporarily. What are you planning on doing with it?"
She smiled widely. "All kinds of neat stuff," she answered, and cut the connection.
IV:
Who did he think he was, anyway?
Obviously, he thought he was the boss of her. And, really, he was kinda right about that.
But still, who was he to treat her that way?
Better question: who was she to object?
Tara squeezed the pillow more tightly around her ears, wishing strongly that it would keep out the voices in her head, as she lay face down on her cot's mattress.
The thing of it was, she knew that Knight was right about what he'd told her about teamwork. And she'd been good at it, once upon a time, except for the whole planning-to-betray-and-murder-them-all thing. If that had been her, at least.
Agh.
Tara finally let go of the pillow, rolled over onto her back, and looked around at the room designated as her "quarters". Hah. Try "eighths". It was a pretty spartan room, though Knight had assured her that she was welcome to bring in anything she liked to improve the decor. Of course, since she didn't have anything ...
The right thing to do, she finally decided, was to go to Knight and tell him that she realized that he was right, admit that she had a long way to go, and say that she looked forward to the teamworking classes. Even if she actually felt like the classes would be like dentistry without anesthesia.
But, suiting her actions to her intents, she slid off the bed and walked toward the room's door. It opened with a press to a pad beside it, sliding up into the ceiling instantly and silently. Very efficient design, she noted as she stepped halfway out the door.
And then stepped all but a sixteenth of the way back, peering out to look at Rick and Will, standing outside the latter's quarters and talking quietly. She noted with amusement that even outside of his Captain Wonder identity, Will still had a more muscular physique than Rick. Neither of them seemed to have noticed her, so she decided to take the opportunity to eavesdrop.
"I honestly don't know," Rick was saying. "I think we've got a good mix of talents and attitudes here, but ..."
"But what?" Will asked after a moment. "You're the guy who's done this before, man."
He shook his head, a seemingly weary gesture, "I've built a team out of people who were already part of a larger organization, and wanted to be a team, regardless of whatever difficulties they might have with one another. I honestly don't know how he did it with a bunch of people who'd never worked together before, and weren't really joiners to begin with."
Who was he, Tara wondered, and then suddenly guessed.
"Well, he did," Will replied, gently parodying the near-reverential tone with which Rick had spoken the pronoun. "And I believe you can do it too. Just gotta give it some elbow grease, like Nuncle Dudley used to say."
"Yeah," Rick agreed quietly. "I guess. Thanks, Will. It's good to know that someone believes." He was quiet for a long moment, and then spoke again. "Um, so, anyway ..."
Will shook his head in great amusement. "You old romantic, you," he said as he leaned forward to kiss Rick on the lips.
Gosh, thought Tara, numbly. Suddenly, things made so much more sense. She watched as Will drew Rick into his room, and the door slid shut.
"I guess he's going to be a little too busy to accept my apology," she said aloud.
"Yes," came a tense voice from her side.
She quickly turned to see that Diane was also leaning out from her own quarters, and that the other woman's face was pinched with something like anger and confusion. "Something the matter?" she asked.
"No," Diane replied, as terse as before, and still looking hard at the closed door of Will's room.
"Oh, I get it," Tara said, her smile widening as she thought of a truly amusing joke. "Feeling a little lonely yourself, huh? Well ... my door is open."
Diane's gaze snapped in Tara's direction. "If you ever suggest anything like that, ever again, I will turn your blood to acid and watch you die." She whirled around to stomp back into her room, and the door (presumably) slid shut.
Nonplussed, Tara kept looking at where Diane had been standing for a moment, before shaking her head and walking back into her own quarters. "Gotta teach that girl to take a joke better than that," she muttered as her door closed.
And then there was silence.
THE END OF "Who Watches"
To Be Continued
Author's Notes
Sorry for taking so long on this, and sorry again for cutting out the action sequence -- but I'm really not very good at writing them.
Next up will be a chapter featuring guest appearances by a number of the new Justice League, as depicted in "Project A-Ko: DC Universe 2045", by shanejayell.
See you then.
Roughly two hours later, the crab-legged mecha lay collapsed onto the pavement of the port of Opal City, slightly obstructing traffic but no longer a threat. Knight, looking slightly drenched, was staring up at its bulk with a sour expression when he overheard a disturbance some distance away.
"Curse you, Captain Thunder! I curse you and your kind!"
"It's Captain Wonder, Tad. Just like it was the last three times."
"STOP CALLING ME TAD!"
"Well, I'm not going to call you Sivana, for pity's sake. I think your grand-dad would start rolling in his grave if I did that ..."
"Shut up! JUST SHUT UP!"
Will shrugged, and turned to fly towards Knight's position as the mad gynecologist was forced into the police hovercar's back seat. "Y'know, I never have quite gotten why he doesn't just blow my secret identity," he said to Rick as he settled to the ground. "We knew each other growing up, so I know that he knows ..."
"A secret isn't a secret if you tell anyone else," Rick commented, turning to look up at the robotic vehicle.
"Good job figuring out how to shut this thing down."
Rick sighed. "Well, it really came down to what you'd already told me about The World's Worst Wicked Scientist's actual abilities with mechanisms."
"He's an okay mechanic, but he doesn't have the resources or talent to build something like this," agreed Will.
"So he must have salvaged it, and given that it's clearly aquatic in nature, it almost had to be Atlantean in origin. It's just a good thing that the language is the same in both my world and yours," Rick muttered, continuing, in his thoughts, /given that almost nothing else is./
"I'm a little surprised that you let Katana yell the override commands at it, instead of doing it yourself," he confessed.
Rick turned back to look at the other members of the team, resting some distance away across the water. "Job one of the leader of a team is keeping everyone involved. Dad never quite got that, unfortunately ... Fly me over to them? I think I need to have some words with Ms. Mason."
II:
Diane looked up briefly, to see Knight and the Captain descending towards them, then looked back down again before they landed, watching the water drip off her nose.
"First of all," he said without preamble, "I want all of you to know that I think we all did a good job in stopping this thing before it could do any major damage. Katana, I'm particularly impressed that you were able to recover quickly from realizing that your attempted hamstringing' of the robot wasn't going to work."
"I have never seen such swift self-repair. The technology involved is quite remarkable," she replied.
Typical, thought Diane, give her sort a compliment and they completely ignore it. Twit.
"That said," Rick continued, and Diane clenched her jaw as she waited for what she knew was coming. "I have a big problem with your actions, Terra."
Diane had already opened her mouth to justify what she'd done, when the fact that he'd addressed someone else
"Me?" Tara almost-squeaked. "What'd I do? I kept pelting the damn thing with as much as I could while --"
"That's not the problem. I have a problem with your decision to let Diane attack that thing on her own, while you hung back and watched."
She stared at him, clearly bewildered by this. "I didn't know that her thing wasn't, y'know, going to work!"
"Neither did she," Rick acknowledged. "That's why I'm not giving her a lecture about jumping the gun. As far as either of you knew, diving towards the mecha and transmuting a cylinder of its internal workings to hydrogen gas as she fell through it was going to work great.
"But when it became clear that it wasn't working, and that Element Woman --" Diane flinched at the name. "-- had fallen all the way through the mecha and into the water, you just hung around up here and continued to try brute force techniques. You didn't even check to see if she was all right. And given that she can't swim, that could have been fatal."
"I didn't know that she couldn't swim, either!" Tara protested.
"Did you ask?" Rick fired right back. "Did you consider that if she succeeded, she'd end up in the water, and maybe you should find out if your partner would be all right in that event? Did taking any safety precautions occur to you?"
"Why aren't you taking her to task for any of this crap?" Diane felt a disturbing impulse to chime in with a "Yeah!" to accompany Tara's demand.
"Because I'm pretty sure that she's already thought most of it for herself," he answered smoothly.
Where did he get off assuming anything about her thoughts! And why the hell did he have to be right?
"Anyway, and this goes for all of you: if I send you out in partners, I expect you to look out for one another. Captain, you and Katana did well on that, this time. You two --" This to Tara and Diane. "-- need some work. I'll be scheduling teamworking classes, starting tomorrow."
"Aren't you going to say anything to me about what I did?" Diane heard herself ask.
He turned and looked at her for a moment. "Would anything I had to say to you make a difference?"
She thought about that, when she wasn't sneezing, all the way back to their base.
III:
"Well, that was an embarrassing interlude," Lorraine noted as she examined the mechanical schematic hovering in front of her.
"Things are going to be rough, our first few times out. I warned you about that when we discussed this."
Richard wasn't making excuses, she knew, or engaging in told-you-soing. He was simply stating the facts as he saw them, which was one of the reasons she'd decided to entrust both their fates to him. "And I suppose that I should have expected that remarkably few of our opponents will be criminal geniuses, as opposed to geniuses gone annoyingly awry," she agreed.
She turned to look at the video display that filled her suite's wall with his face. "Speaking of which ..."
He closed his eyes and sighed heavily. "She's popped up already?"
"It happened well before even I had projected, but yes. The Harlequin executed the armed robbery of a major Network cafe while the owners were celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of its opening. No one was hurt, but she escaped with a few thousand dollars, and -- this part is strange -- a single board from each of the cafe's terminals. Do you --"
"Start monitoring for virus-like programs," Knight interrupted. "Her first move will probably target key pieces of the city's infrastructure. Expect one of her big guns to be named after one of the chemical compounds of Joker venom; if you don't already have the formula, you can probably find it somewhere in the old GothamPD-dot-net server. After the cyber-attack, she'll choose a primary target; not something directly related to city function, but one that'll have been hit collaterally by the damage already done. A bank, probably one of those within walking distance of city hall. I'm not yet familiar enough with Opal's layout to guess which one."
"Been through this before, I take it?" Lorraine asked after he seemed to have run down.
"Yes," he said without further amplification. "What about the mecha, Lorraine? I'm pretty sure Aquaman will want it back."
"King Arthur," she replied emphatically, "can ask for the device if he wants it returned. In the meanwhile, we're going to be examining it."
"Lorraine," he said, frowning. "Atlantean technology isn't that far advanced over what's available contemporarily. What are you planning on doing with it?"
She smiled widely. "All kinds of neat stuff," she answered, and cut the connection.
IV:
Who did he think he was, anyway?
Obviously, he thought he was the boss of her. And, really, he was kinda right about that.
But still, who was he to treat her that way?
Better question: who was she to object?
Tara squeezed the pillow more tightly around her ears, wishing strongly that it would keep out the voices in her head, as she lay face down on her cot's mattress.
The thing of it was, she knew that Knight was right about what he'd told her about teamwork. And she'd been good at it, once upon a time, except for the whole planning-to-betray-and-murder-them-all thing. If that had been her, at least.
Agh.
Tara finally let go of the pillow, rolled over onto her back, and looked around at the room designated as her "quarters". Hah. Try "eighths". It was a pretty spartan room, though Knight had assured her that she was welcome to bring in anything she liked to improve the decor. Of course, since she didn't have anything ...
The right thing to do, she finally decided, was to go to Knight and tell him that she realized that he was right, admit that she had a long way to go, and say that she looked forward to the teamworking classes. Even if she actually felt like the classes would be like dentistry without anesthesia.
But, suiting her actions to her intents, she slid off the bed and walked toward the room's door. It opened with a press to a pad beside it, sliding up into the ceiling instantly and silently. Very efficient design, she noted as she stepped halfway out the door.
And then stepped all but a sixteenth of the way back, peering out to look at Rick and Will, standing outside the latter's quarters and talking quietly. She noted with amusement that even outside of his Captain Wonder identity, Will still had a more muscular physique than Rick. Neither of them seemed to have noticed her, so she decided to take the opportunity to eavesdrop.
"I honestly don't know," Rick was saying. "I think we've got a good mix of talents and attitudes here, but ..."
"But what?" Will asked after a moment. "You're the guy who's done this before, man."
He shook his head, a seemingly weary gesture, "I've built a team out of people who were already part of a larger organization, and wanted to be a team, regardless of whatever difficulties they might have with one another. I honestly don't know how he did it with a bunch of people who'd never worked together before, and weren't really joiners to begin with."
Who was he, Tara wondered, and then suddenly guessed.
"Well, he did," Will replied, gently parodying the near-reverential tone with which Rick had spoken the pronoun. "And I believe you can do it too. Just gotta give it some elbow grease, like Nuncle Dudley used to say."
"Yeah," Rick agreed quietly. "I guess. Thanks, Will. It's good to know that someone believes." He was quiet for a long moment, and then spoke again. "Um, so, anyway ..."
Will shook his head in great amusement. "You old romantic, you," he said as he leaned forward to kiss Rick on the lips.
Gosh, thought Tara, numbly. Suddenly, things made so much more sense. She watched as Will drew Rick into his room, and the door slid shut.
"I guess he's going to be a little too busy to accept my apology," she said aloud.
"Yes," came a tense voice from her side.
She quickly turned to see that Diane was also leaning out from her own quarters, and that the other woman's face was pinched with something like anger and confusion. "Something the matter?" she asked.
"No," Diane replied, as terse as before, and still looking hard at the closed door of Will's room.
"Oh, I get it," Tara said, her smile widening as she thought of a truly amusing joke. "Feeling a little lonely yourself, huh? Well ... my door is open."
Diane's gaze snapped in Tara's direction. "If you ever suggest anything like that, ever again, I will turn your blood to acid and watch you die." She whirled around to stomp back into her room, and the door (presumably) slid shut.
Nonplussed, Tara kept looking at where Diane had been standing for a moment, before shaking her head and walking back into her own quarters. "Gotta teach that girl to take a joke better than that," she muttered as her door closed.
And then there was silence.
THE END OF "Who Watches"
To Be Continued
Author's Notes
Sorry for taking so long on this, and sorry again for cutting out the action sequence -- but I'm really not very good at writing them.
Next up will be a chapter featuring guest appearances by a number of the new Justice League, as depicted in "Project A-Ko: DC Universe 2045", by shanejayell.
See you then.