Each vine-being had specific orders grown into its brain, implanted there one might say. Pick up precisely one flowerpot from the greenhouse, drop it off on the outskirts of town, and move on to part two of the plan.
The greenhouse door silently swung open. The vine-beings crawled across the floor, slithering and writhing over one another as they went. They descended on the pots en masse, climbing over the top of those that had already stopped in order to reach an unclaimed pot for themselves. The chaos was disturbingly quiet.
The battalion of plants departed in clusters, preferring to travel with those that had grown next to them. Soon the roiling mass of green was gone.
Ivy walked cheerfully back to the greenhouse. The smile on her face turned to a frown when she walked inside and saw the fifty or so cherry red flowerpots winking merrily at her. There hadn't been enough vine-beings to carry them all.
Damn. So much for the fun part, Ivy thought as she started carrying the pots out to her car.
Quite a while later, the small pink car was crammed with foliage and a few other useful items. Ivy slid carefully in. The leather of her coat caught on a broken edge of a pot and the vine tipped sideways. She caught it in a desperate save, her elbow landing on the horn.
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE....
She returned the uprooted vine carefully to its pot, started the car, and headed off to the east side of town. It was a depressing drive, past nothing but concrete and metal. There were no plants to be seen, save a few weeds lurching out of the cracks of the sidewalks. It was a comfort to have all of her babies in the car with her.
She arrived at the outskirts of Gotham proper. She began to drive slowly in a circle around it, stopping every few feet to deposit a flowerpot on a section of bare earth. Where there wasn't bare earth, she tore away the refuse with a crowbar and a shovel.
Almost two in the morning now.
She placed the last flowerpot carefully in its location, noting that the vine babies had completed their part of the circle. She could see some of the other flowerpots in the distance, faintly glimmering in the moonlight.
She got back in her car and put the key in the ignition. It stuck and wouldn't turn. She slapped it once, twice, and it finally consented to rotate and start the car. She drove quietly, without fuss, to the very center of town.
A series of skyscrapers stabbed high into the air, shining brightly against the darkness of the night. Ivy parked behind one of them and slid out of the car. She withdrew a common vine sprout from her pocket and tossed it down onto the asphalt in the alleyway.
It wormed down into the cracks. She could almost hear it questing for the dirt. As it hit the soil, it turned a brighter green and started to thicken, leaning up against the building for support. Ivy waited until it was thick enough to support her weight, then placed a boot delicately on one outstretched tendril. Two more tendrils shot up, and she wrapped her hands gently about them as the vine elevated her to roof level.
The bitter fall wind snapped her leather coat about her ankles as she disembarked the helpful vine. The leaves quivered in the wind. She patted it, then strode determinedly to the center of the roof. She raised her hands, pivoting slowly in a circle.
It would be the trickiest thing she'd ever pulled off. It would be the biggest job ever. It would be the best thing for plants since fertilizer.
She strained as hard as she could to reach her babies, one at a time, to reach those little red flowerpots on the edges of town. She pushed herself as hard as she could, falling to her knees with the effort. They were starting to grow, starting slowly, so slowly...
She felt one of the vines shatter the constrictive walls of its pot. It was growing almost uncontrollably fast without her direction, which meant it had tapped into the specially-fertilized layer of soil that lined each flowerpot.
She felt, rather than saw, the activity around that one vine. A vine-being was there, holding a liberated pane of glass from someone's window, sharp edges blunted with a quick layer of duct tape. It held it carefully in place next to the vine, which grabbed it tightly and wrapped around the edges.
She bent her will to the next flowerpots. One by one they burst. Slowly, slowly she felt the city being surrounded. It was taking so long...
The final flowerpot burst.
She fell backward, her legs turning to jelly beneath her. It was all up to the vine-beings now. They'd steal the glass, they'd place it, and her vines would grow and grow...
"Poison Ivy." The words were flat and forbidding. She whirled, still sitting, to see the Batman at her back.