DISCLAIMER: Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to delay writing chapters in a single bound... it's the not-owner of Young Justice, the amazing clcman!
Chapter 7: Shaping Up
"You have reached your destination" the GPS said as Robin and Artemis pulled up in front of a reasonably nice-looking apartment block. There was nothing obviously out of place.
"Dr. Cassidy's apartment number is 433" said Alfred. "The Batcomputer is processing the building's blueprints now."
"We'll go around the back" said Robin.
"So, 'Mr. Zsasz'. He's just a guy with a knife, right?" asked Artemis as they drove their motorcycles to the parking lot behind the building.
"A very... motivated man with a knife" said Alfred over the radio. "Humans are capable of quite a lot when they care nothing for others and have nothing to lose."
"Sounds like Red Arrow" Artemis muttered, scanning the building's windows with a pair of binoculars. Everything seemed quiet.
"Moneypenny, can you call Dr. Cassidy's phone?" Robin asked, bringing up a holographic layout of the building on his wrist computer.
"I tried once we realized she was a potential target" Alfred replied. "It rang several times and then went to voicemail."
"Maybe she's out" Robin suggested, hoping but not betting that that was the case.
"Doubt it" Artemis said, zooming in on what they'd concluded was Cassidy's apartment. "Lights are on. Curtains closed. I think someone's home."
"The latest SuDTraD ping just came in" said Alfred. "Zsasz is in the building."
"Hang on" Robin said, wrapping his arm around Artemis's torso and firing his grappling gun.
"Hey! I have my own ways up!" Artemis protested.
"I know" Robin replied. "Breach for me, will ya?"
Then he hit the button on the grapnel and the two hurtled into the air.
If he was being perfectly honest, Wally had expected her to be taller.
Kara Zor-El, Second-to-Last Survivor of Krypton, was a lot more slender than her cousin or his clone, though close inspection revealed muscles that looked plenty firm. Her hair was blond, and went down to her shoulders in a messy way, like she didn't really know how to deal with it. Or maybe that was just a Kryptonian style. Wally didn't know. Her skin was pale, which accentuated her bright blue eyes as they darted around the room, absorbing every detail of every inch of space like a wide-eyed tourist in a foreign land. Which she was, in a sense. For clothing, she wore jean shorts and a white T-shirt with the Superman logo on it, presumably bought from a regular Earth store and not worn from Krypton or provided by Project Cadmus. Stuff like that was all the rage with teenage girls these days.
In a flash (literally), Wally crossed the room and was next to her, waving rapidly.
"Hi, I'm Wally, though you can call me Kid Flash. Welcome to the Team!"
The girl blinked a few times before returning the wave in an identical, frantic manner. "Hi Kidflash" she said, pronouncing it as one word. "I am Kara Zor-El. I see you are very jet."
Wally stopped waving and cocked his head. "Jet?"
"Jet... speed... rush..." Kara seemed to be stumbling over the words, like she was flipping through a set of cards, looking for one in particular.
"Fast?" suggested Wally.
"Yes, fast" said Kara. "My eyes almost could not keep up with you!"
"You'll have to forgive her language skills" said Superman, who had emerged from the zeta tube alongside her. "It appears Cadmus used their Genomorphs to put English into her head, but she's still not used to actually using it."
"Yes, yes," said Kara, smiling. "Your language is very nice, but it has much too many words for the same thing. No cheriz, like in Koryn." She nudged Superman with her elbow.
"Uh... what?" asked Rocket.
"'Koryn' is the Kryptonian word for the Kryptonian language" said Superman. "Cheriz is a key value in Kryptonian society, translating as, uh, normally I go with 'elegant simplicity'. The idea that more advanced things should be simpler, not more complicated."
Maybe it'll be easier if we talk like this thought-spoke M'gann through a newly-created telepathic link.
"Gah!" Kara shrieked, jumping back and raising her fists. As she looked around in terror, her eyes glowed red.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa" said Superman, trying to calm her down. "That was just Miss Martian's telepathy. She wasn't trying to hurt you."
"Yes, yes, of course, cousin" said Kara, wrapping her arms around herself and shaking like a leaf. "One of your friends would never try to hurt me."
M'gann put her hands over her mouth in a combination of shock and horror.
"Omigod, I am so, so, SO sorry!" she blurted, making absolutely, positively certain that she was using her mouth and not her mind. "I knew I should have asked first! I was just thinking that telepathic communication skips over language, so you wouldn't have to worry about word choice."
"You have to understand, a lot of her time at Cadmus was spent under psychic control from their Genomorphs" said Superman. "She not used to friendly telepathic contact."
"Oh, of course" said M'gann. "I was just trying to help."
"I know you were" said Kara. "It is fine. I need to practice speaking this language anyways. I am certain a skilled warrior of Earth like yourself would never harm someone without intention. Only an unqualified fool would do that."
M'gann flinched but said nothing.
"Hello, M'gann" said Black Canary as they settled into the new Shrink Room, which was rapidly becoming more heavily used than the old one.
"Hey" said M'gann quietly. She was in her human-like 'Megan' form, an image she hadn't dropped since they'd returned from Germany. Canary couldn't help but wonder if the appearance was functioning like a security blanket for the girl, helping her cope with the trauma she'd faced.
"Well," M'gann said, "At least it wasn't my fault this time."
"The Simulation?" Canary asked for confirmation. When M'gann nodded, Canary quickly moved on to prevent her from dwelling on the time her psychic powers had traumatized the Team.
"Let's start with something, and I can't believe I'm saying this, straightforward - losing the Bioship. As I understand it, Martians have a different relationship with their technology than humans do."
"Not all of it," M'gann said, "but valuable organic creations, yes. It's a necessary side effect of telepathic control. Bioships are organisms, even if they have skeletons of metal and eat radiation from a reactor. They have nerves, synapses, senses. Their emotional capacities are limited, their memories more limited still, but they are alive, and a telepath who connects with one will feel that."
She looked down.
"Of course, if something can live, it can also die. A telepath who connects with one will feel that too."
"You felt it die?" Canary asked.
"Yes, or pretty close to it" said M'gann. "The shock when the Bioship's bow hit the ground knocked me out for a bit."
"You uncle has said that he expects to get another bioship for the Team soon, but I'm going to take a wild guess and say that bioships are kind of like regular pets - a replacement is never exactly the same."
M'gann nodded.
"If I may ask, what did it feel like? The ship dying?"
"I don't know if the death itself felt like anything, but the pain beforehand definitely did. It snapped in half, Canary. It was on fire."
The Martian looked up at Canary. "I certainly know how that feels, since Sportsmaster tried to torch me not too long afterwards."
"Being set on fire is, of course, an awful, awful thing for anyone to experience," Canary said, "even if there is no lasting physical damage. But I understand it is especially bad for Martians, correct?"
"You have to remember, Mars is a lot colder than Earth is, so we already don't do great in hot temperatures" M'gann began. "Then there is the effect it has on our bodies, on our cells. Being a Green Martian means having telepathic control of every cell, every organ in your body. Not 100% control, of course, but quite a lot. Losing control of that, like what fire does to us, is like what being paralyzed or drowning probably feels like - a rational fear combined with a primal, subconscious panic. Fire has always held a place of fear in our culture - the great monsters of our myths are fire demons, for example, and the Martian god of fire is the most wicked and threatening of them all. I always thought it was a little silly, growing up, but now I definitely know why."
"Are you certain that between the fire and being frozen and your other injuries, you are fully healed, physically speaking?"
M'gann nodded. "I'm sure. I can reshape my flesh at will, remember? Stuff like that is pretty easy to fix."
"Of course, but as we all know, your shapeshifting hasn't been at 100% capacity in the last few days."
M'gann looked down and hugged herself. "Yeah. That. Sounds like the bad guys have anti-shapeshifting drugs now. Lucky me."
"Do such things exist on Mars?" Canary asked.
"A little bit, but we mostly use psychic countermeasures to force Martians into their true forms. It's easier, if probably more painful."
"Still, I find it curious that Vandal Savage and company knew that those drugs would have that effect on a Martian. We also know that they had airplanes that seemed to have Martian camouflage on them and they were able to target the Bioship, even while it was camouflaged. I know this is a little outside of our area of discussion, but you can see how Batman is suspecting..."
"...That a Martian is involved with them somehow?" M'gann continued to stare at the ground. "I can't say it's impossible, of course, but Martians are very attached to our home planet, not just as a home but as a sacred land. Most are very reluctant to leave it, especially for a soggy, hot, overcrowded world of mouthtalking oneforms like Earth." She paused for a second. "No offense."
"But you came all the same" Canary pointed out. "Why was that? It couldn't have been easy to leave most of your family and almost everyone you've ever known to live on a world where you are forever an outsider, shapeshifting or not."
"It wasn't as hard as you'd think" M'gann said. "I wasn't too close with any of my siblings, I was 47 and needed to start doing something with my life, and I'd watched a ton of Earth television, so yeah, I had some idea what I was getting into. Plus a chance to work with Uncle J'onn, the great hero of both Earth and Mars, and ambassador for our people."
"It would also be a good chance to start over" Canary said.
M'gann flinched. "W-what do you mean by that?"
"Sometimes, M'gann, when humans don't like where their life is at, they move to another city. Everyone they meet is new, and not a soul knows anything about what they were like back home, so they are free to reinvent themselves however they want, without worrying about whatever their reputation was before. If a person can do that with a few hundred miles of distance, you can imagine what 100 million miles will do."
"I... No, no, that's not- I mean..."
"I want to emphasize, M'gann, that going to a new place and reinventing yourself is not a bad thing, in of itself. Everyone has the right to choose to live their life how they want to, and to be who they want to be. I just don't want you to feel like you need to pretend to be someone you're not. The Team and the League WILL accept the real you, whatever you look or sound or act like. The reason they like you now isn't because you're pretending to be a girl from an old TV show none of them ever heard of. They like you because they know you, and, more than that, they know what you are like when it really counts, when lives are on the line. They know you are willing to risk your life to save people of a species other than you own, on a planet other than your own. And that means that, whatever else, the real you is a pretty good person."
M'gann continued to stare at her folded hands for several seconds, before she sighed, closed her eyes, and a wave of green washed over her skin.
"Just because you can hide something doesn't mean that you should" said Canary. "Your shapeshifting abilities are a wonderful gift. Don't let them be a curse as well."
M'gann frowned for a second, her eyes still closed, but then began to change further. Her limbs stretched and lengthened, her hair retreated into her scalp, her skin lost all pigmentation. Her face puffed and expanded, her clothes shifted from a skirt and blouse to two red bands forming an X around her torso. Her spine arced as she gained a foot of height, while her hands and feet narrowed, her fingers merging to form two new digits, the length of her old forearms.
Black Canary stood there, expressionless. It helped that she had seen this form before, but she had already prepared herself - whatever happened, she could not allow anything resembling fear or disgust to appear on her face. Doing so, however accidental, would crush M'gann, just as she was at her bravest.
Finally, after a full minute of metamorphosis, her newly shaped bones still adjusting to their joints, the tendons and ligaments stretching and contracting, the Martian opened her eyes.
Hello, Black Canary she said telepathically, her mouth with its primitive vocal chords perfectly still.
My name is M'gann M'orzz.
Hello, M'gann Canary thought back. It is nice to finally meet you in person.
Artemis was halfway from the ground to Dr. Cassidy's apartment's glass sliding door before she'd processed what Robin was talking about and had drawn what she really hoped was the correct arrow.
When this was over, she was going to smack Robin almost as hard as if he were Wally.
Artemis loosed her arrow into the glass door rapidly approaching them. The arrowhead sank deep into the glass and activated its sonic transmitter, releasing a slight hum precisely calibrated for its unusual effect on glass. In less than a second, the sliding door cracked, the glass separating into thousands of tiny pieces, all barely holding together. A light shove would be all it would take for the window to crumble.
Artemis and Robin hit it with far greater force than "light shove."
An avalanche of glass shards exploded into the room, though the sonic arrow had made them small enough that they wouldn't cause much harm if they hit someone. Robin and Artemis, on the other hand, were very much prepared to cause harm. Only the slightest observation of the scene was needed to notice the large, bald, shirtless man covered in tally mark scars and holding a knife standing over a shocked, redheaded woman lying on the ground. Unfortunately, the shatter arrow seemed to have given Zsasz a second of heads-up, and he ducked under Robin's batarang toss, spinning, grabbing a nearby wooden chair and hurling it at the teen heroes.
Robin ducked back outside while throwing another batarang at Zsasz's knife hand, while Artemis dodged by stumbling further into the apartment, slipping on some of the glass shards and tumbling over Dr. Cassidy's bed.
"Real professional, Crock" she muttered.
Zsasz stomped on Dr. Cassidy's chest, pinning her down as he drew a pistol that he must have stolen somewhere from his waistband and fired several times at Robin. The Boy Wonder dashed along the apartment balcony, realizing too late that he had made a mistake - that half of the glass sliding door was intact, and while Zsasz's bullets could get out, Robin couldn't get back in without circling all the way around, a rather tricky thing to do while under fire.
"You won't deny me this, Robin!" Zsasz shouted, stabbing downwards with his knife while keeping his head up and gun hand firing, a sign of either a truly practiced master of the knife or an utter lunatic.
Artemis emerged from her unexpected gymnastics by the bed in a crouch, firing an arrow without hesitation. Zsasz's knife hand was much too small and fast to hit directly, but, assuming she picked the right arrow, that wouldn't be necessary.
Sure enough, though the arrow struck Zsasz's shoulder, the polyurethane foam that exploded from the tip was enough to cover his entire arm, sealing it and his knife hand in rapidly hardening green goop. Zsasz howled in frustration, this new development distracting him long enough for Robin to reverse direction and hurl a batarang through the bullet-damaged glass, knocking the pistol from the killer's grip.
Artemis was already charging him and saw no reason to stop until Zsasz batted away her swing with his foam-covered arm and kneed her square in the jaw. Artemis spun a full three hundred and sixty degrees in midair and landed in a pile of glass shards.
Robin leaped up and grabbed the top of the doorframe as he swung back into the room, allowing him to pass over Artemis and throw a bolas, which wrapped itself around Zsasz's face, the rope covering his eyes and the weight throwing him off-balance. Not the bolas's traditional use, but Robin would take it.
Back on the ground, Dr. Sarah Cassidy had had enough. She had worked two jobs to put herself through medical school so that she could help the nation's most vulnerable. She'd transferred to Arkham to serve her city by rendering the patients held within harmless to themselves and others. She'd worked hard to understand their problems and desires so that they could be treated, as much as most of them resisted. And what had been her reward? Long hours, an inconvenient commute, the mockery of Gotham's press, no less than three dates ended once her place of work was mentioned and a psychopath stalking her, breaking into her apartment, pinning her to the ground, choking her, trying to stab her and killing her cat. Cassidy had always been considered patient ever since she was a child, but even she had limits.
With a roar of pent-up fury, Cassidy slammed her foot into the side of Zsasz's knee. The joint bent in a way it wasn't supposed to and Zsasz, already off-balance from Robin's bolas, toppled to the ground.
Before Zsasz could even hope to react, Robin was on top of him and jabbed a taser into the back of the man's neck. Once Zsasz's non-foamed hand was handcuffed to a nearby table leg, Robin felt confident enough to go check on Dr. Cassidy and Artemis.
"Are you alright, ma'am?" he asked, helping Dr. Cassidy up. "Sorry about the window."
"It's fine, it's fine" Cassidy said, still sounding rather shaken. "I knew Zsasz was obsessive, but this... Oh, God, I'm going to have to change my address because of this, aren't I?"
Artemis slowly dragged herself to her knees, brushing glass from her face. Fortunately, the shards were small enough that they stung but didn't seem to be piecing the skin, but Artemis's wasn't in the mood to celebrate her relative good fortune.
"Graah!" she growled, slamming her fist into the ground. "That sneaky son of a-"
"And who might you be?" Dr. Cassidy asked.
"This is Artemis" said Robin. "Subcontractor. Batman sends his regards."
"Very funny, Boy Blunder" Artemis said, standing up fully and wiping off more glass. As if smashing through a window and immediately tripping over a bed wasn't embarrassing enough.
"Well, you should keep her on" Cassidy said. "She's good. Even if she is a little clumsy."
The doctor winked at Artemis, who gave a little smile against her will. If she was going to keep doing work in public alongside Robin, she couldn't bring anything other than top form. No exceptions.
"I can't believe Zsasz got out again" Cassidy huffed. "I know Arkham may not have the best reputation with the public, but we're better than this. For him to get out of his cell, off the island and all the way over here without being intercepted..."
"Well, the SuDTraD tracker is still working" Robin pointed out. "So that's a plus. Still, we got the alert from GCPD, not Arkham. Why didn't they notice the escape?"
"I have no idea" Cassidy said, digging through her cabinet for something to drink. "But I assure you, we will go over every possibility. If for some reason the warden doesn't, trust me, I will."
Zsasz shook and the three flinched, but the serial killer wasn't trying to get up.
He was chuckling.
"Tell me, Zsasz" said Cassidy, leaning down but staying out of his reach. "How did you get out? You know we'll find out eventually."
"I'm sure you will" said Zsasz. All emotion had drained from his voice, the high he gained from his murder attempt wearing off. "But it'll be too late."
"What are you talking about?" Artemis demanded.
"No... I won't ruin the surprise. He'd hate that." From any other villain, there would be a sneering arrogance to those words, but Zsasz sounded as if he was simply stating basic facts.
"Who would hate that?" Robin asked.
"It took me a while," Zsasz replied, "but now I see what he was up to. Very clever, that man is. I won't interfere."
Artemis put her boot on the back of his neck. "Answers, Tic-Tac-Toe. Now."
"Oh, nothing, nothing" said Zsasz, chuckling again. "Don't mind me. I'm nothing but a drowning worm, adrift in a dark sea."
From that moment until the GCPD finally arrived and strapped Zsasz down on a stretcher, Robin, Artemis and Dr. Cassidy were unable to get another word out of him.
"Is he normally like this?" Artemis asked.
"Muttering to himself? Sure" said Cassidy. "But it's different this time. He knows something."
"Have you checked in at Arkham?" Robin asked one of the GCPD officers.
"Just got off the phone with them" the officer replied. "They say everything's fine there. They don't know how Zsasz escaped yet, but they're working on it."
Robin frowned. This situation wasn't necessarily unusual when dealing with escaped Arkhamites, but nevertheless...
"Officer, with all due respect, my friend and I would like to escort Zsasz back to Arkham. Just to make sure he doesn't cause any more trouble."
"We what?" asked Artemis. Robin ignored her.
"Whatever. Suit yourself, Robin. We're depending on you whenever the big guy's not around."
"Thanks" said Robin, smiling. "We won't be the slightest trouble."
Author's Note:
Disclaimer: Every single Kryptonian word I use is made up on the spot, with not particular rhyme or reason to it.
Hi. I figured, if the actual show could resurrect itself, so could I! And who knows? I might actually update this time! (Is what I said last time, before I didn't update for over a year. It's different now. I promise.)
I haven't actually gotten around to watching any of Season 3 yet, but it's exciting nonetheless!
As a note, the way I am viewing Martian shapeshifting is like this: things like skin tone, hair, facial features, muscle size and other "cosmetic" elements of the body are all pretty easy for the Martian to change. Consequently, Martians also have a de facto healing factor, as they can shapeshift wounds back to their original forms, up to a point (after which they start running out of biomass/water). Things that get into skeleton-changing are doable, but more complicated, requiring more focus (though once a Martian's skeleton is changed, they can keep it like that pretty much indefinitely). This is why M'gann's White Martian form is uncomfortable to shift into and out of, but she can stay in her human/"Green M'gann" form pretty much forever. But that's just reshaping bones that already exist. Something dramatically removing or adding bones is much harder, if not impossible. So M'gann can't turn into a pile of goop to slip through a hole (she's not Clayface, after all), and adding or subtracting full limbs would be very difficult. (Yes, I remember that time she made tiny arms appear out of her body, but I'm doubting that those had full bone structures to them, would have lasted very long without concentration, or would be capable of carrying much weight.) This also means that M'gann does not have stretchy arms (she's not Plastic/Elongated Man, after all). Hopefully this all makes sense and is consistent enough with the show.