Author's Note: Right off the bat, I'm going to say that this could be a short one, at under 1,000 words. But make no mistake, there WILL be good stuff here. Or bad stuff, depending on how you look at it. But I guess it's best just to let it speak for itself.

Bruce spent most of the day in his private office, lost in thought, trying to think of potential leads that he could use to track down Hugo Strange. However hard he tried, though, he found nothing. Strange had covered all of his tracks; Bruce found no suspicious financial tracks, and as far as he could tell, Strange hadn't formed any connections to his peers, having interacted with them just enough to avoid suspicion. He was so focused on his research that he barely noticed Diana entering the room.

"Did you find anything?" She asked peering around his shoulder at his computer screen.

"No."

"But you're not giving up, of course?"

"Not a chance. I'm catching him. Tonight." Bruce said stubbornly.

"How on Earth do you plan to do that without any leads?"

"I'll find a way. I have to."

Diana sighed and closed her eyes. "Alright..." She said thinking carefully. "If you can't find any leads to Strange, then maybe..."

Bruce's face lit up as she spoke. "The Joker! Diana, that's brilliant!" He began typing furiously. "Strange is using Joker and his crew as muscle for his operations that his private security can't handle alone. If I can find some of his old crew members who might be in the loop, they could lead me to the Joker and Strange!" He was frustrated that he hadn't thought of it first, but was too excited by the new lead to care very much. He forwarded his list of at-large Joker associates to his cowl's computer and quickly stood up. "Brilliant!" He repeated, kissing Diana on the cheek as he rushed over to the grandfather clock that concealed the entrance to the Batcave.

"Wait, Bruce."

"Hm?" He said distractedly, already entering the time that would open the cave.

"First, I want to talk."

Bruce reluctantly pulled his finger back from the hand of the clock and turned to face her. "Alright. I'm listening."

"Bruce, we've worked together for years now, and I like to think that we're good friends. But maybe we could be... Are you listening?"

Bruce's eyes had narrowed, and he was no longer looking at her eyes. Instead he was looking outside the window, where he'd notice the long, thin shape of a rope; the type of rope that one might use to rappel down the side of a tall building. Without pausing to think, he grabbed Diana's wrist and yanked her to the floor. "GET DOWN! CLOSE YOUR EYES!" He shouted. Just in time, he managed to slam his own eyes shut and cover his ear with his free left hand; as his right was occupied with keeping Diana's face on the floor, he pressed his right ear into his shoulder.

The sound of shattering glass filled the room as the shards of the window fell over the pair of them. Even through closed eyelids, Bruce could see the blinding flash of light, and the meager protection that his hand and shoulder offered was nowhere near enough to protect him from the enormous bang that echoed throughout the room. Bruce opened his eyes, but he still couldn't see; it was as though the world was covered by a white sheet. For several seconds, he was too disoriented to move, his balance having been thrown off by disruption of his inner ear fluids.

He was slightly protected by the precautions that he'd taken in covering his ears and eyes; Diana had had no such luck. While Bruce was able to recover enough to stand fairly quickly, she remained too dazed to move. As soon as Bruce's eyes had cleared up, his worst fears were confirmed; they were surrounded by a group of seven of Hugo Strange's Tyger guards. Bruce instinctively moved to cover Diana, but outnumbered and disoriented, he stood little chance.

"What are you doing here?" He asked slowly, hoping to buy himself a bit more time to recover. The soldiers weren't falling for it; they all charged forward at once, attacking from all directions. Bruce immediately noticed that none of them had drawn their weapons, instead favoring nightsticks and stun batons. Bruce managed to grab a stun baton from one of the soldiers; he gracefully swung it around, hoping to catch a few of them off guard. All of them jumped out of the way as though they'd been expecting the move. The fight was very brief, and continued in a similar fashion. Every punch that Bruce through was swiftly countered, and he was quickly defeated. While he was fighting, he heard a sickening crack; one of the guards had hit Diana over the back of the head with a nightstick, knocking her unconscious.

"No!" But he was to late; while he was distracted, he felt a splitting pain in the back of his head, and fell to the floor in a daze.

"Both targets subdued, sir." One of the guards said into a two-way radio. The voice that responded was a most unwelcome one.

"Excellent work, Captain." Said the smug voice of Hugo Strange, slightly distorted by radio static.

"What now, Sir."

"Bring her here. Make sure to sweep for surveillance equipment, and make sure that you are not followed. Leave no tracks, Captain."

"Roger that, sir."

Bruce gritted his teeth and did his best to stand; before he could get up, he saw one of the guards nightsticks swinging towards his face, and felt no more.

Author's Note: I hate to leave you guys hanging like this, so I'll try to update again as soon as possible. I don't like cliffhangers much, but this was the last stopping point that I'd get to for a while. Anyway, I'll get back on this as soon as I have time; maybe tomorrow. Also, I've finally bothered to read the full text of the email notification that I get for every review, and realized that there's a much easier method for responding to reviews. So from this point on, I'm going to be using that unless the review points out something that other readers could benefit from me addressing. For example:

The Fiery Apprentice: I probably should have mentioned that Batman's back to using his standard Batsuit; the other one was just a prototype that he was using while Nightwing had the original. It wasn't an actual replica of the Beyond Batsuit; the way I'm imagining it, he was inspired by the capabilities that he saw when he travelled to the future with GL and WW, and is putting a bit of work into replicating it and using to technology to improve his (as we should see fairly soon). But it was realy just a bit of a reference to another part of the series that I'm not planning on doing very much with, like the Max Schreck reference a few chapters back (I'm not planning on including him in the future- I didn't really even like Batman Forever very much. I have no idea why I did that in the first place, other than the fact that Christopher Walken rules). So long story short, Batman's back in his standard DCAU suit, and the Beyond one won't come into play for a long time (hintedy hint hint). As for the binoculars... Yeah, I should have thought of that. At least it's not a major plot point. And I'm glad you liked the bit with Alfred, I was worried that it was a bit heavy-handed. I tried to play it carefully, but there was some stuff that I really wanted to shoehorn in before things kicked up again.