In the course of my life as a tiny mad scientist, I have been through numerous situations. I have punched a guy whose skin was the same colour as that of Barney the Dinosaur, I have been kidnapped by a lobster man, I have frozen a (presumable) corporate spy's hand to their face, and I have eaten vast quantities of excessively sugary food.

Yet no situation has been quite as infuriating as actually having a good time on my holiday when I'm supposed to be panicking about random memory loss.

Complaining about the food? No, I love food and it's all incredibly flavourful. Complaining about the weather? It's gorgeously sunny and that anti-kryptonite ant DNA has the mundane utility of immunising me against plain ol' sunburn as well. Complaining about there being nothing to do? As well as general tourist stuff like tours and swimming, it's one of the most geologically-complex places in the world, and fossil-hunting here is following in the footsteps of Aristotle himself.

So yes, Ihave been having a blast and regularly having to remember to keep glaring about that fact. Because what's the point of being a small child if you can't unreasonably sulk?

Of course, being an easily distracted person, I regularly forgot to perform the aforementioned glaring.

"-well, they were these great big massive animals," I rambled, going on about pliosaurs for what must have been the millionth time. "And they lived in the middle of the ocean."

"Ooh, like sea serpents?" questioned Deva.

"Sorta, but their relatives were the noodly ones that look like Nessie," I responded. "These ones were big enough to eat them- there's one fossil that shows a pliosaur must've lunged from below and ripped its head right off! Like a shark, except bigger, a reptile and generally just not very much like a shark."

Deva laughed. "Ah, sharks are marvellous creatures!" she said. "We have little ones here, with big tails like a whip." The big woman giggled. "None like the one that handsome father of yours keeps, though..."

Right, I thought, I'm moving the conversation on and never thinking of that expression on her face again. "So anyway, these big pliosaurs often have strange injuries on the tops of their heads. You see it in cats and dogs, where they bump their heads on the undersides of tables. But…" I shrugged. "They're in the middle of the ocean! There's literally nowhere to bump their heads! Unless aliens were taking boating trips to Earth a hundred million years ago or something?"

She chuckled at my failed attempt at humour- then clicked her fingers. "Ah, that reminds me!" she exclaimed. "Mr Luthor was saying he's finally got a deadline for the end of construction, which means we can head up to that lovely little island soon! And then you can head back from your holiday once it's done, dearie!"

"Oh!" I replied. "That'll be good. I haven't talked to Tim in ages, and I haven't seen if Superman's punched anything recently, either…"

Deva put a finger to her chin, thinking hard. "Well, I did hear something about him meeting some alien fellow tomorrow," she told me. "The government made contact after LexCorp found transmissions from outer space. How exciting!"

That's Brainiac, I suppose? I noted. Damn, I'm going to miss all the excitement. "I'm surprised he didn't just do it all himself," I said. "That's how he usually does things."

She rolled her eyes dramatically. "Sweetheart, if his building's not working, he's not going to be able to do anything with it," she informed me. "It's just good business sense, really. He has a great sense for many things, really…"

The woman paused, and looked me in the eyes for a few moments. I raised an eyebrow, having added the time five seconds previous to my memory blacklist already.

"You know, I've been wondering," she said with as much thoughtfulness as I thought she was capable of. "I spent a long time looking at your father's eyes…"

Stop iiiiiiiit, I thought, extremely maturely. Stop swooning at my biological progenitor, it's grooooss.

"...and they're so bold, so dark! But yours are lighter," she pointed out. "Much lighter! Almost silvery..." She giggled. "I'm sure you'll have boys falling over you with a glance when you're older!"

"Eww," I said, vocalising the opinion this time. Deva laughed at that, somehow managing to guffaw while remaining at a conversational volume.

"Oh, that's what they all say," she chuckled as soon as the real laughter had passed. "But trust me, when you're a teenager, you'll be wrapping them around your finger… But I'm getting distracted! I do hope you don't mind my gossip, but…" She dropped her voice to a stage whisper. "Who did you get those eyes from?"

I had a brief mental image of myself in a baby carriage, being pushed by an adoring giant ant, with Lex Luthor's arm wrapped around the arthropod adoringly.

At this rate, I internally groaned, my memory blacklist is going to need more paper.

Suppressing a shudder, I shrugged. "I didn't look up the non-Luthory bit of my family tree," I told her honestly, though that was- of course- completely unrelated to her question. If she happened to assume I'd said something relevant, well, that was her fault really.

"Ah," she replied disappointedly- before straightening up again, full of enthusiasm. "But there'll be plenty of time to gossip later! We have a boat trip to plan!"

I nodded, glad to be back to the previous topic- the current one had been giving me too many reasons to invent brain bleach. "Right," I agreed. "What's the island called?"

"Oh, it doesn't have a name," she replied. "Not something you'd use outside of paperwork, anyway! It's often concealed by sea fogs. I believe that's why your dear old father was so interested in it!" She laughed. "He does like his secrecy, doesn't he?"

I rolled my eyes. "You have no idea."

"Well!" She stood up, hefting her heavy-looking handbag from the floor as she did. "There'll be plenty of time to gossip on the boat. We'll be headed out on…" She counted the days on her fingers. "...Thursday- I'll have my secretary make a list of things to bring for you."

I blinked. "You have a secretary?" I asked.

Deva laughed again. "My dear, did you think I just sat around here all the time? No, just most of the time," she added, amused by her own words. "I have a whole company to vaguely look over once in a while!"

She turned, still cheery, and headed out of the room- leaving me to ponder some things.

Ms Stattaco had been correct- honestly, I had just thought she sat around all day. Her diplomatic abilities seemed like what had impressed Father, especially seeing as she'd somehow managed to keep me from glaring at everything and anything. It had certainly impressed me, considering I generally had a much more negative opinion of people who occasionally treated me like a cuddly toy. On further thought, though, Lex wasn't the sort to have a high opinion of diplomats.

So that raised a question I hadn't really been giving all too much thought to- why did she impress him?

My mind immediately went to the same place as every other thought I'd blacklisted today, at which point I carefully filed the blacklist into a mental blacklist of its own. Once that task was completed, my regularly-scheduled trains of thought were fortunately able to resume.

Anybody who had both gained and kept Lex's approval was, as a general rule, somebody who was doing at least something that was unpleasant. And seeing as I had literally been living in her house, it would be prudent to know.

Doubly-so considering I still didn't know if our destination was Themiscyra.

And yet… I'd been keeping a track of what both mine and her bodyguards had been up to, and the lack of anything suspicious had just made me even more suspicious. If something had gone wrong with the Psychicotron- which it had, current lack of obvious cerebral hemorrhaging notwithstanding- and the people assigned to my safety hadn't noticed, they weren't doing their job and I wanted to know why.

I trotted up the stairs to my room, and pulled something out from under my desk.

The phone I'd created possessed a lot of extraneous parts, and the stuff in my pockets had included a few Lenatech batteries and a screwdriver. Since nobody was actually going to be able to figure out what on earth anything in my phone did, I'd hid a few gadgets inside- in this case, I popped off the case and carefully retrieved two halves of a single, small tracking device.

That was the situation- I wanted to know what both her and my guards were up to, and I only had the resources for one. Alas, it hadn't been big enough for two- the reciever had taken up most of the space that I hadn't already cannibalised for a seashell-testing kit.

...What? I'm a reasonably-moral mad scientist at the seaside. It's not like I can attach lasers to sharks while I'm here.

Still, while I wasn't regretting the new ideas I'd had regarding how to make extremely practical tiny adorable armour, I'd rather have had more than one tracking device to use. They weren't designed to last long- after all, the whole 'picking a tracking device out of your clothes' trope was ridiculous but had a tendency to inevitably result in the trackers being found anyway.

To avert this, they worked for no longer than a day. I could tune it a bit, but inevitably, their own charge made them crumble into dirt by the end of their appointed lifespan. At that point, perhaps it'd be mistaken for something harmless like a cigarette butt.

With my luck they'd still be found out.

I huffed in irritation. I was suspicious of the people around me, but my suspicions were that they were doing something suspicious rather than that they were doing anything in particular. And really, active investigation needed more than just suspicion- it needed a hypothesis to confirm or deny, and right now, I had precisely zero of them.

The best thing, of course, was to ask myself what Batman would do in this situation.

Yes, I know- I could just call him, but I'd kinda gotten distracted by having a holiday and now I was too embarrassed to call him about work stuff in the middle of it. Besides, this was probably a test of some sort that I was expected to perform.

Because Luthor. Sigh.

So, what would Batman do?

...Well, I thought, Batman would just have more trackers.

I prodded the seashell testing kit I'd left on the desk with my screwdriver. "Stupid technology," I muttered. "Not being available without an arbitrary level of resources…"

Hearing footsteps coming up the stairs, I clicked my phone lid back on. There was a knock on the door not a moment later.

"Come in!" I called.

One of Deva's bodyguards pushed the door open. "Ms. Luthor," he said respectfully- I recognised him as Deva's bodyguard Queen (no relation to the famous one). Ms Stattaco had apparently met him being fired as a bouncer due to… okay, I hadn't really listened after that point since I'd been distracted by a polychaete I'd subsequently caught in a jar for a little while, but she'd probably been implying the man was at least somewhat sympathetic.

Also the fact he had both shared a last name with Green Arrow and had managed to avoid failing horribly at anything in particular made him my least-unfavourite bodyguard by default. But I digress.

"Mr Queen," I responded politely, nodding, and fastening the screws on my phone again. "Did you need something?"

He frowned minutely. "Deva would like to know if you have any activities planned for the island," he stated. All business, that guy was- I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if he turned out to be a robot or something.

"Does she have a map?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"I'll just bring a bit of everything and figure out when I get there," I told him. "Thank you for asking, though."

"We'll carry it onto the boat closer to the time," he replied. "Tell Deva when it's ready."

"Of course. Anything else?" I asked. He shook his head, and the door shut softly as he left.

Hmm… Doing tests on the island might be a good way to figure out if anything's odd here, I considered. I can make it there, and find out if anything's wrong with the island when I arrive...

I shook my head. There were- of course- some obvious flaws in this plan.

Firstly, I was still being pretty passive. If it turned out that going to the island in the first place constituted a problem- be it on purpose or just by not knowing that it may or may not be an island covered in glorified sexists (extremely honourable and heroic ones with great respect for peace and whatnot, but still technically sexists)- then I would be having an issue.

Secondly… okay, yeah, that was basically my entire problem. But really, the only reason I was being passive was because I couldn't decide on an appropriate hypothesis to try and test. If there was a reason for me to not go with the Batman school of superheroics and just pre-plan everything in advance, my prediction skills were probably it- everything else suited me just fine, but planning in advance? No, thanks.

But, I decided with a sigh, it's a good idea anyway.

From a mental look over what little information I'd been given, I was putting it down as 'probably not Themiscyra'. That island was certainly greek and mythological, but it wasn't protected by fogs- it was protected by… something that wasn't fogs, because there was a distinct lack of fog by all accounts (including out-of-universe animated ones).

So this was probably somewhere else.

"Mmph," I mumbled to myself, repeating my thoughts out loud to try and push my thoughts off their current train and onto the next station. "There's fog, and Father found it interesting enough to buy…"

That seemed like a worthwhile train of thought. What does Father like? I questioned. And why would he buy the island?

Well, the obvious answer for what he liked was 'anything he could sell to the military'. So that narrowed down what his goal might be.

And, notably, this whole series of events didn't happen without my existence. So what changes to his decision-making have I made recently?

Again, there was an obvious answer. And it was backed up by his own words- he'd mentioned about magic, hadn't he? It's considered to have great mythological significance, he'd said, a possible holy site for the Hellenic religions. If it was a confirmed one, he'd have stated it outright- and if it had convincing evidence for being a source of something militarily-interesting, he'd have already sent somebody over to investigate.

So it wasn't Themiscyra, as established by the fog's presence. And it wouldn't be some one-off artifact of power, either- there wasn't any profit in that, after all, was there?

If there's something there, it's either researchable or reproducible, I thought, face scrunched up in thought. What's a reproducible military weapon in greek mythology…?

For the third time, there was an obvious answer. Obvious? Definitely. Correct?

Hopefully. Or hopefully not, I amended, considering the wildlife we'll be seeing if the guess is correct after all.

But either way, I had something to prepare for.

Heading out from my little guest bedroom, I knocked on the adjacent door. "It's Lena," I called.

The door opened. "Ms Luthor," said one of my own guards, doing an admirable job at looking professional after I'd interrupted their game of… I peeked further around the corner.

...Is that a game of Xenocards? I asked myself, blinking.

He closed the door on what may or may not have been a children's card game. Oh, right. I looked up at him, and smiled sweetly. "Hello, Hank," I said, smiling as sweetly as I could. "I don't suppose any of you would mind escorting me to the nearest library? I want to get a little bit of light reading done…"

I didn't know what Batman would do for information-gathering on Deva or the bodyguards right now. But if my suspicions were correct...

Well, even if I was wrong, it would be entertaining anyway to read up on mythological monsters.