Finding out that I had accidentally wandered into a supervillain's lair was quite a surprise. It certainly had been a wake-up call. If it was ten years ago, I would have never wandered into an abandoned conservatory in Gotham.
For the next few days, I hung out in Poison Ivy's hideout. She didn't tell me her nom de guerre, and I was very careful not to let on that I knew it. She was surprisingly nice. It was really fun looking at all the plants and hearing her talk about them. I didn't have the sniffles anymore, so I spent a lot of time in the 'safe' areas of the conservatory. There were other areas that I was forbidden to visit, and I wasn't going to disobey.
Dr. Isley had been wonderfully hospitable, and I wasn't going to sabotage our friendship and get myself eaten by giant carnivorous plants just to satisfy my curiosity.
At the moment I was working on setting myself up for the future. Aside from creating a new identity, I was also using my technical authority and a few back doors in their system to gut Daedalus incorporated financially. The main reason was to get more money, but revenge was a nice bonus. Most of it had been bought up by Wayne Enterprises and Lexcorp. I seriously doubted the old geezer was going to be able to get much back, especially from a cutthroat like Lex Luthor.
It wouldn't take long for me to get a new name and identity. Doctor Isley had helped me. I had chosen Norman Osborn as my new name. I had been feeling silly then. It wasn't like anyone in this universe would get the reference either, so I could get away with it.
I was leaning against a tree and surfing the web. As it turns out, this 'abandoned' conservatory had pretty good internet. I had a couple of windows up. The computer wasn't the greatest, but I could still access the stock market while watching cartoons. I had about ten years of TV to catch up on and a lot of money to invest.
My meals lately had been pretty unbalanced. It was a mix of beef jerky and fresh fruits and veggies. Doctor Isley asked me why I had so much and she laughed when I told her. Apparently, she didn't eat much other than what she grew herself, but she was happy to help me enjoy Doctor Mason's food.
In the future, I was going to get myself a home and go to school. It wasn't like I had to, but I had my reasons. I didn't want to impose on Doctor Isley, and if I was honest, I needed my privacy. I also wanted some social interaction with kids my age, even if I had to suffer through school to get it. Memories aside, it felt like my mental age had degraded, not to mention how my imprisonment had made my social skills suffer.
The weather was nice. It was sorta sunny out, which was about the best I could expect from Gotham. So far the night had been always cloudy, and it would only occasionally clear during the day. I kind of get why the bat signal was considered a dependable method now.
Dr. Isley was usually busy, so I was by myself most of the time. I didn't need much sleep, which made the days pretty long as well. On the other hand, there was plenty of stuff I could do now, along with stuff I needed to do. I wouldn't be getting bored for a while yet, but I would get stir crazy if I didn't leave soon.
Luckily, I had started my new 'hobby' as a superhero.
The night couldn't come soon enough. In the end, I really couldn't wait, so I just made sure that Dr. Isley wasn't around before sneaking off. It was just before sunset, and the light was already dreary and dim. It felt like the sun didn't have the stamina for a full day and gave up early.
I made sure I was a good distance from the conservatory before finding a hiding spot to transform. Sneaking around here was both easy and surprisingly tricky. There never were that many people around at night, but those who were had the kind of wariness you only got from criminals and people who had been forced to live around criminals.
It took a bit, but I did find an opportunity to hide away and transform. I started sweating biomechanical armor that formed into my goblin persona. I threw out another glob of the stuff, and it bulged and swelled into the form of my glider. Once I was fully transformed I hopped onto it and zipped off into the night.
At first, I had just flown about, looking for any crimes in progress. The obvious problem with that is how reactive it tends to be. If I plan on making a difference, I was going to make it a big one. Stopping muggers would be a bonus, but my goal was to punch the source of the problem.
Societal problems don't have a face per se, or at least none that could be punched, but there would always be people who make the problem worse and people who make the problem better. I had money and strength now, so there was a lot I could be doing to make the world a nicer place.
The drug lords would be a good place to start. My 'parents' probably wouldn't have sold me if they hadn't been addicts who'd given up on life.
Finding them was proving to be tricky though. This was the town that Batman operated, so the smart criminals were good at hiding. There was more to it than that though. I was quickly discovering how ...unique, Gotham's underworld was.
All the supervillains in the city meant that the normal crime lords couldn't operate here. Sure, the mafia was really dangerous, but guys like Two-Face and The Penguin were more so. That wasn't even counting metas like Killer Croc. Supervillains filled niches and pushed out all sorts of competition.
The criminals of Gotham were split between nobodies and the supervillains and their henchmen. Random muggers and tiny gangs were too unimportant for the supervillains to get rid of, but the groups that were normally considered the big leagues, the mafia and the like, had all left for greener pastures.
It was weird, but the costumed crazies actually lowered the crime rate. Of course, it was still Gotham, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. That weirdness meant I had two choices for targets. Muggers or the people that regularly tussled with freaking Batman. Now, I may be a low-level superhuman with a crazy biomechanical super suit and glider, but I'm not stupid.
I was sticking to thugs for now.
Even in a place like Gotham, crimes weren't constant or easy to find in time. Still, it wasn't hard to figure out the patterns. The times people left work, the spots where the seedier parts of the city bordered the better parts and a dozen other factors influenced things. If I put it all together, I could figure out the places and times where the criminals and victims encountered each other.
I may not have a supercomputer in a cave, but I did have a super brain given to me by evil scientists using mad science drugs and boosted by some crazy space cube. That was enough to let me guesstimate the best places to patrol. I had stopped a little over half a dozen crimes every night since figuring things out.
I hadn't met Batman yet, but then again, I hadn't expected to. The Justice League existed here, and even if it didn't, Batman had a healthy rogue's gallery. The caped crusader probably had his hands full. A guy like him would still patrol regularly, just to put the fear in the creeps of Gotham, but he wasn't out here every night.
"...!"
My ears perked up as they detected some distant shouting. I triangulated it and zipped off towards its source. If there was one thing I liked about the dreariness of Gotham nights, it was that the sullen silence of the city meant that any noise was easy to hear. The sound I heard came from a half dozen teens menacing some old office worker. I drifted over the ruckus quietly, keeping up out of sight.
At first, they seemed content to mock the poor man. They jeered at him in that nasty, high schooler way. They made fun of his receding hairline, his beer belly, and his age. It wasn't nice, but they weren't physically injuring him. Then one of them pulled a knife.
Before they could get too close, I produced a trio of my razor bats. Their blades popped out and started spinning like buzzsaws when I flicked them downward. They let out high pitched squeals as they cut through the air and sank into the concrete with little 'thunk' sounds. The man and the teens jumped. One even dropped his knife. They all looked up to see my brilliant grin.
"Hello gentlemen, mind if I 'cut' in?"
Most of them had tensed up. Even their victim looked nervous about my presence. One pointed a finger up at me, exclaiming:
"Shit, it's a meta!"
I started and opened my eyes wide, pointing downwards.
"Shit, it's Captain Obvious!"
I let the silence draw out for a few moments before stepping off my glider and landing on the ground. This was starting to be one of my favorite moments in stopping crimes. That moment where everyone focused on me, trying to decide whether to be scared or not, felt great. I let a smile slowly grow on my face till it was wider than humanly possible and the teenaged thugs decided, yes, they were scared.
"You lot haven't done much more than be a bunch of shitty teenagers. Honestly, acting like this? You guys deserve a bit of a beating. I'm leaving the choice up to you though."
A few of the more defiant ones twitched and the most scared of the group were unwilling to leave the safety of their little group. It was a good opportunity to try and give them a wake up call. I let the smile fall from my face and jerked a thumb back at the man behind me.
"This guy, he's the kind of man that goes to work every damn day and gets the shit done that no one else does. He's the guy who earned his place in life with years of effort and no small amount of grit. You guys are just a bunch of shithead teenagers who got so scared of the future you stopped trying and settled for lashing out to make yourselves feel better. You're being petty, nasty idiots. Life's about second chances, so I'll give you ten seconds to get out of my sight."
I got to five and pulled out a razor bat. The click of the blades appearing set them running. As soon as I was sure they were gone I slipped it away and turned to the older man.
"Hey, you alright?"
"Uhm… Yes, thank you."
I kept my smile small and inoffensive as I had my glider lower down to waist level. I plopped on the edge of a wing. The man was breathing heavy and looked like he was seconds from an asthma attack.
"Listen, do you need a ride home? I'll fly it low and slow if that makes you nervous."
For a second I thought he was going to refuse, then he nodded, although hesitantly. He walked over and pulled himself up next to me. I lifted the glider so his feet were just a few inches off the ground.
"You know, you're the first person I've carried on this. I really ought to be giving a beautiful young woman a flight on this thing while singing Disney songs, but hey, what can you do?"
He snorted but didn't say anything. The glider's hum made a nice background noise as I hummed 'I can show you the world' under my breath. We didn't get very far before the man caught his breath and asked to be let down. He probably didn't want me seeing where he lived. There was no doubt that he was thankful I saved him, but paranoia was a survival trait in Gotham.
Something flickered at the corner of my vision, but I didn't catch what it was. It probably was my imagination, but I decided to speed up a bit as I left to avoid being followed or attacked. It could have been a windswept newspaper, some more stealth-oriented supervillain, or the Bat himself. Either way, I wasn't going to waste this nice night trying to find out.
The rest of the night was relatively quiet. I stopped a minor robbery before it started and two more muggings. I could see why the other superheroes did this regularly. It might not be the most efficient use of my time, but man does it feel good.
I couldn't keep this up forever though, at least not just this. I needed to take steps to prevent, not just act as a cure. Convincing people like those teens not to take a step down the wrong path would help, but there was no guarantee that they would listen. The teens were a good example of that. I seriously doubted they had listened to whatever I said.
Still, I planted the seed, so they would at least remember it.
What I needed to do was take away the reason people committed crimes. Everyone, from supervillains to random thugs, had something that happened to turn them to crime. If that was solved, it was possible that they would never hold up another bank or steal from another museum.
Poison Ivy was a good example. She wasn't a bad person, but the event that turned her into a superpowered eco-terrorist was traumatizing and made her hatred for humanity in general and males specifically much, much worse. Combined with the nature of her powers and it was a wonder that she wasn't worse. There were things I could do to help her, but they were difficult and expensive.
I would do what I could for her though. I owed her enough to at least try.
