Chapter Twenty-Two
"So, Nightwing… What are you gonna call your new biometal?" Beast Boy asked.
"It's stronger than Titanium but lighter than steel but stronger than Titanium… Are you taking suggestions?" Beast Boy asked. Nightwing took out his earbuds, sighing. He had been hoping for some time alone with his thoughts, but Beast Boy seemed adamant.
"Sure… What are your thoughts?" He asked.
"What about Upyourtanium?"
"…" Nightwing looked at Beast Boy, seeming to ask if he was really being serious about his suggestion. Beast Boy simply grinned at Nightwing as though he was convinced it was a great idea. Fortunately, Raven seemed less inclined to humor Beast Boy's jokes.
"Really? Upyourtanium?" She asked. Terra giggled at Raven's response.
She had thought Beast Boy's suggestion mildly amusing, but not really funny enough to actually suggest.
"What? It's a good idea!"
"In what universe! Teen Titans Go?" Nightwing demanded, actually quite annoyed by Beast Boy's flippancy.
The other Titans looked at him, seeming not to get the joke. Raven seemed to get it, though because she snickered under her breath.
"Hey, come on! I dunno what Teen Titans Go is, but I get the feeling you're implying it was a stupid suggestion."
"Beast Boy, I'm not going to give the metal a joke name. I appreciate the effort you put into the joke, but it's not the name I'm going to use for a metal that hopefully will find a great deal of use not only for bonding to people's bones, but for infrastructure as well. I'm working on enhancing the metal further, making it all but impossible to melt save in insane temperatures."
"But wouldn't that make it impossible to shape?" Cyborg asked. Nightwing shook his head.
"No. It's biological and semi-intelligent. A simple command word will cause it to become pliable. Watch." Nightwing said. He then said, "Yield.", and then used his telekinesis to fold the metal over and over again, shaping it into a blade, shaping the curve of the blade and commanding the telekinesis to form an edge on the blade.
Nightwing then said another command word. "Harden." He then grabbed it and attempted to bend it again, but found it all but impossible. The team was duly impressed by his new metal.
"How many times can it harden and yield?" Cyborg asked. Nightwing smirked.
"As many times as you want… Until you say 'Harden Permanently'. After that, it won't yield again. Watch. 'Yield'." Nightwing said, using his telekinesis again with no results.
He then handed it to Raven, who used telekinesis, pyrokinesis as hot as she could make it and then plasmakinesis, continuing to try to bend it. None of them worked.
"Currently, it melts around 2,500oC, hotter than steel, and I'm looking to make it even lighter and stronger. Damian… Do you want another sword?"
"Why don't you just keep these swords? You've made at least three by now!" Damian protested. Nightwing shrugged.
"I don't really use swords. I can, I suppose. But for the most part, I use Escrima Sticks, Tonfa, other blunt weapons. Your skill with a sword is great. I'm sure you could stand to have a sword for every occasion… Or for every timeline… Whichever you prefer."
Damian raised an eyebrow at Dick's referring to different timelines, but didn't say anything. He figured it was just something weird Dick was doing to confuse him.
"Well… Anyway… I don't want it. You keep it." Damian said. Dick shrugged.
"Fine… I was gonna get in contact with Bruce soon… I'd like to test my pills on more people than just the Titans. See how it affects Batman…"
"I'm not sure he'll accept them. Bruce Wayne earned his body, he earned his strength, he earned his abilities. He's brilliant and he trained for almost twenty years and continues training daily to keep himself in shape. I'm not sure he'd want to take a shortcut like this." Damian said. Dick nodded.
"I had thought about that. But this arguably isn't a shortcut. He still has to train to control his new abilities. His level of control is already great.
"But this will be a whole new challenge for him. We'll see. I'll teleport the offer into his mansion. If he doesn't want it, he can command it to teleport back to me. I won't force him to do anything. However, we could use him at enhanced power since there's a chance Raven's father could come back." Dick said, heading out of the room and starting to write a letter.
Dear Bruce,
It's been a whole new adventure, a whole new challenge to begin mastering my new abilities, and working with my team to master theirs. We've all been doing quite well with it. Damian especially has improved monumentally in the months that we've spent in our time dilation training chamber. Furthermore, it seems like Raven suspects that her father may be coming back sooner rather than later This is something we need to prepare for.
So far, I've already sent enhancement pills to the other Titans. They are not steroids, I assure you. They're simply biomass pills programmed to enhance the user's abilities and grant new abilities related to their current ones when they enter the body. They're completely harmless. Thus, I have sent you a full three cycles of the pills as well hoping that you would help me test their effectiveness on someone who has already reached the true peak of human capability.
Your speed, strength, knowledge of martial arts and technology, detective work are already far beyond that of any normal human. I want to see how you will do if your abilities were elevated beyond human potential. In addition, your cunning would prove a great asset if Trigon were to attempt to destroy Earth again. I hope that you will accept the enhancements.
If you don't want them, send the pills back by saying "back to Dick". If you want them, send me a letter saying you've accepted them. Write it on the back of this page and say "Send to Dick." That's all it requires. Cool, right? Well, I've already rambled on too long. I hope you'll respond favorably. I put the instructions for the pills in the first pill so you'll immediately know what to do. I also added a few extra sheets of paper in case your letter runs over a single page.
Nightwing
Bruce looked at the bottles of pills. Dick had been very busy. He had also sent a sword that looked like it was made no metal Bruce had ever seen. He took it down to his laboratory and observed the sword on the molecular level.
"Fascinating. It's a biological metal… Carbon molecules exist in it, but it's clearly stronger than any metal compound that exists, even depleted Promethium. It seems much lighter, though.
"Perhaps it could be used to create a new suit for me. I'll have to ask him about this." Bruce said, taking a pen and writing on the back of the letter Dick sent to him.
Dear Dick,
I'm very impressed by your results. What do you call the metal you made the sword out of? Is it a metal of your own creation? What are its statistics and can it be molded into a suit that will be strong but flexible? I will take the pills. However, I want to know what the end result will be before I do. Is there any chance of my abilities becoming too great to control? For instance, what are your allies' abilities now?
Please respond as soon as possible. Thank you.
Bruce
Dick nodded as he read the letter, and thought about how he would increase the strength of his Soskotium. He wanted to make it approximately ten times stronger than it was, but also approximately three times lighter so that it weighed about as much as aluminum. He went down to the lab and, with Raven's help continued to fiddle with his alchemical serums, finally creating one that he was sure would produce the results he wanted. He poured a large amount of it in a tank and watched as it solidified.
He then took it out and commanded it to yield, turning into a suit to Batman's specifications, making it light and flexible. However, he put it on himself and told Raven to attack him, to try to cut him, shoot him, anything she could think of. Raven nodded and attacked, using both magic and physical weapons to strike Dick, finding that nothing cut through the suit, even a magical molecular blade that she created specifically to do so. Dick nodded, and added the cowl and cape.
He made sure the cape would release if Batman commanded it to in order to prevent injury. He then further added biofeedback functions into the suit, making it more high tech than any suit Batman ever had, adding weapons into the suit; spikes on the suit that would fire like shuriken, a rocket inside the glove that could attack as well, and other abilities, including X-Ray goggles in the eye holes and spiderlike spindles in the gloves' palms so he could scale sheer surfaces.
Many functions were added and eventually, he wrote out an entire guide, including how to care for the suit, how to repair it if some of the mechanisms broke down (which was unlikely), all its functions, including vulnerable areas and areas that would take some practice to work the stiffness out of. It included an entire picture of the assembled suit that pointed out all its functions, much like an anatomical chart of a body or a skeleton. It showed where the suit could be charged and where it displayed the battery life.
In fact, it ran primarily on kinetic energy. As long as Batman was moving, his suit would be charging from the friction that the suit created, but it could withstand immense amounts of friction without heating up or wearing out, it had an invisibility function and a function that could tap into his Central Nervous System and as much as double his strength if necessary. The suit would read his stats and be able to tell if he was in enough danger to require extra power.
Finally, after finishing the suit, he wrote a note.
Dear Bruce,
This suit is far more complex than your old suit. It's essentially armor that looks like clothing. The suit is made of thread, but the thread is made of Soskotium, the metal I sent you. I have also given you an alchemical pill that will bond your skeleton with Soskotium 2.0.5-3. It's a new type of Soskotium I created, the same kind as your suit. It's approximately 20 times stronger than Depleted Promethium but half as heavy as aluminum.
As a result, it should feel like you're wearing nothing at all. Write me back with information about whoever is your newest Robin… You always have one, don't you? I would appreciate it if you would put specific emphasis on his or her abilities specifically as they apply to the composition of the suit. Thank you. Good luck.
Dick
Dick sighed, teleporting the suit to Bruce before heading out of the room and going down to the training room, where Beast Boy was practicing. Nightwing watched as Beast Boy transformed into over 10,000 quarter ounce wasps and 500 quarter pound rats. He was getting really good at his swarm transformations. Terra was there, and seemed quite impressed. He had overstepped his weight limits slightly, but his regeneration was powerful enough that he had a little wiggle room in there.
Next, his swarms reconvened into one person, and Beast Boy turned into a dragon that Nightwing estimated weighed around 55 tons. Its wings spread out more than five times the length of its body. Beast Boy breathed jet black flames that Nightwing could feel all the way from the doorway. Next, he turned into a huge swarm of around one million wasps that weighed one ounce each and around 200,000 quarter pound rats. Nightwing's eyes widened.
He remembered when Beast Boy couldn't even transform into a hundred rats and struggled to become fifty. Now, he was turning into thousands upon thousands of animals. Finally, Beast Boy transformed back into himself, and bowed to Terra, who clapped, seeming extremely impressed. They both turned to Nightwing then.
"Hey, Nightwing! If the enemy destroys some of the insects vermin that I turn into, will that prevent me from turning back?" Beast Boy asked. Nightwing shook his head.
"Unlikely. Unless they destroy more than half of the creatures comprising your mass, it's unlikely that it will severely injure you. In addition, you can communicate telepathically with other animals in approximately a five mile radius.
"Rats, wasps, mosquitos, ants, mice, squirrels, and so on. All of those, and more will respond to your call if you command them. It may take some time for them to get there, but within ten minutes, you should have a fairly large army of vermin ready to attack enemies on your behalf and to obfuscate you from your enemy. It would make it difficult to determine which rats are you and which rats are just rats if there are hundreds of thousands of rats, squirrels, wasps, and other nasty-ass vermin attacking, right?"
Beast Boy's widened excitedly. As he started to answer, a letter appeared in Dick's hands. Dick unfolded the letter.
Dear Dick,
Thank you for the new suit. It fits me perfectly and I'm reading the instruction manual very carefully so that I'm ready to use it by this evening. My current Robin is a young woman of about 13 years by the name of Carrie Kelly. She was apparently friends with Damian, and gave him acting lessons at one point. I'm not sure of her actual relationship with him, but she seems somewhat annoyed that I moved him all the way across the country like I did. Has Damian said anything about her?
Either way, her main skill is in acrobatics. As I understand, she's an avid Freerunner. Even before she became my newest Robin, she was highly skilled in acrobatics, having been on the team in school and going Freerunning most mornings, practicing Parkour in the evenings. She's extremely intelligent and is learning advanced combat and other martial arts quickly. She seems to take best to Capoeira, though Taekwondo and Hapkido also seem to be fairly natural to her.
She has parents, so I'm being more careful than usual with my Robins, since we obviously can't afford to have her die in combat. That's a headache I just don't need. The majority of her job is serving as a distraction and training right now. She's in 8th grade and in honors classes, so I have to leave time for her to do her homework of course. Normally, I would home school any Robin of mine so that training could take precedence, but certain exceptions must be taken in this Robin's case.
Anyway, she needs a suit that will grow with her, since she's still growing and one that allows for more flexibility than mine does. Preferably, it will be lighter than mine as well. Thank you for your assistance. Perhaps you can work with Lucius Fox in creating more gadgets for my war on crime. Thank you again.
Bruce
Dick nodded, reaching out telepathically to the rest of the Titans. He left a clone of himself with the Titans to train.
"Damian, Titans… I need to go back to my laboratory to create the suit for Batman's newest Robin. I'm leaving a clone with identical memories and knowledge as me."
"Who is Father's newest Robin?" Damian asked, seeming concerned.
"A girl named Carrie Kelly. He said she gave you acting lessons and that you were close."
"We were… Sort of… Mm… Dating… I wish father would have told me that he was using her as his newest Robin… She's nothing if not skilled enough, but I worry for her safety." Damian said, seeming concerned and slightly embarrassed at everyone's stares. "Is she doing alright?" He asked.
Dick looked at Damian, seeming surprised.
"Bruce didn't mention how she was doing, only that she was already skilled at Parkour and Freerunning, and that she was naturally talented at Hapkido, Taekwondo and Capoeira but that he had to temper the amount of training he was putting her through because of her studies. She's mostly acting as a distraction and working on her training right now. I suspect she's doing fine.
"You should write to her. I can teleport the letter to Bruce to give to her… Or Alfred if you prefer."
"Give it to Alfred. I don't trust Father not to read it first."
"I'll send the first letter to Alfred, then when she writes back to you, I'll take the letter and use her genetic signature to send future letters straight to her. You didn't even tell Bruce that you were dating her, did you?" Dick asked. Damian shook his head.
"I never felt right telling him. You know Father, his whole life is about either his war on crime or his next one-night stand. I don't think Father would understand my feelings for Carrie. She's special, not just some girl I'm using to relieve myself and pretend to be normal for a few hours." The rest of the team just stared at Damian, like they had never really seen him before.
