Disclaimer: The characters portrayed herein belong largely to DC comics, which I understand to be a subdivision of AOLTimeWarner. This is a large, multinational corporation. I am not. Therefore, most of these characters are not mine.
My brand spanking new computer, on the other hand, is mine **beams happily** (and it actually reliably switches on! Wheee!)
NB: a gentle reminder; in Twenty-verse Young Justice is still around, and while Tim's not a member of the Titans he's been to the island at least once. (He's also punched out Arsenal and threatened Donna with bloody retribution so won't be winning any popularity contests there anytime soon.)
Aftermath VIII
He could, of course, just have asked. It would certainly have been far and away the simplest option. They probably would even have said 'yes', if only in some misguided attempt to help him 'settle his inner demons' or somesuch. He suppressed a smirk at the thought. If only they knew.
Next best, obviously, should have involved manufacturing an excuse, another plausible and logical reason for his interest. Possibly even digging up a relevant case of his own from the files or more likely from the Titan's more outre offerings. Anything to justify a trip up to the Archives.
What he was doing wasn't even a distant third - or fourth - on the inventory of rational ways and means. In fact, it was so far down that list that it was close kissing cousins to utter insanity.
But, and he allowed himself a slight grin, it was also fun.
From a certain point of view.
And realistically? he probably had Shishou to 'thank' for that mindset; the man's love of mischief was legendary within the Mireba clan. He could almost hear the other's voice, then, ghosting through his thoughts and causing his lips to twitch into a real smile. Taking one look at the situation, Shishou would have laughed, ruffled his hair, and said something like, //why Little Bird, no thanks are necessary. Look at what you're doing as a result of being my student; You're having fun! That's a great compliment to my teaching.//
It hadn't quite been intended that way.
Anyone else - sane, or even, he would wager, moderately impaired - would have baulked at undertaking the activity he was currently engaged in with his usual sanguine aplomb.
Then again, for most humans, the JLA base on the moon was an inaccessible watchtower safeguarding the planet; first, best, and often last source of Earth's protection, it was as jealously guarded as most major military institutions, despite the forbidding remoteness that was its primary defence.
So, naturally, with those things in mind it'd taken him just under an hour to break in.
He sighed. An hour was pretty good, really, though it would have been less than that, except that he wanted to maintain some modicum of secrecy about his visit, if only to practice the valuable sneaky time skills the Shishou had taught him. (And it was the Shishou; Batman had given him the basics, but the Shishou had raised that to an artform. And then taught him, fractured and splintered though his psyche had been, how to enjoy the thrill of whole-body movement and the quieter warmth of fine skill, the rushing delight of ability - and ability tested - as a reward in and of itself rather than merely a means to an end. )
The Shishou he'd learned from, sparred with, and been befriended by seemed physically incapable of not enjoying the mischief that laced his life, no matter wether that mischief came in the form of serving tea to a prominent industrial family's self-styled princess, or teaching a little lost bird how to pick triple-sealed electro-optic locks in null gravity. (And they were only triple-sealed. Looked like someone - possibly the Flash or Green Lantern - had gotten lazy about activating Batman's supplementary security measures.)
He wondered how his Shishou's legendary delight in mischief had fared when - if, if, he reminded himself - he'd been The Crimson, then tore his thoughts away from the idea and back onto the task at hand. It was certainly challenging enough to occupy his attention, and answers were why he was here anyway.
****^^^^^*****^^^^^^
Earlier.
He'd used, after careful consideration, the Titan's teleporter to make it to the moon. It was simple common sense; though the security on the small island tower rivaled that of the White House, it was still earthbound, and with breathable atmosphere.
Well, breathable once he'd finished with the SCUBA gear he'd used to support himself after hitching a ride on the outside of one of the transport capsules that ran between the island and the city for the convenience of flightless Titans. Beastboy hadn't even noticed the slight slowing of his transport as it shifted the very minimal extra weight of the current boy wonder and the capsule itself had simply compensated; it had long since been digitally programmed to allow a wide range of weights for the green shapeshifter, who was not above transforming into a house cat to sleep on the seat for the trip home, or a kangaroo to bounce impatiently through the small cabin on the way out.
I'll have to speak to Dick about that at some point. Tim mused. Though in all reality most of the Titan's regular stable of foes simply smashed their way into the tower with various degrees of panache, it was always theoretically possible one of them would grow a brain and discover the value of subtlety. //Though Beastboy is the only Titan who gets a two hundred kilogramme weight variance programmed into his passenger recognition profile at the security check-in on the dock. That's a lot of beer and pizza.//
The capsule had gotten him safely past the water-based defenses, though he'd let go just before the routine external surface scan had run over the transport prior to docking. Wedging himself against the clamp that held the cabin firmly for the scan, he watched impassively as the green light beams traced over the surfaces he'd clung to like a limpet only seconds before. As the docking door met, sealed and opened to disgorge an oblivious Beastboy into the tower, Robin neatly pulled himself around the clamp, heading for the beach that girded one side of the island. By coming in with the transport, he'd bypassed most of the security netting and underwater sensors that guarded the pleasure area, and it was simplicity itself to take a deep lungful of air and then slip off the SCUBA tank and slide his small frame through one of the tidal equilibration channels that kept the island's base stable in the face of it's changeable watery surrounds. A brisk, minute-long swim and he was surfacing behind the diving rocks of the beach.
He'd carried his full set of lock-picks, a digital override, and even a small EMP generator (with a twenty centimeter effective radius - the latest in a long line of bat toys) to get through the deceptively welcoming glass doors into the main building, but in the end all he had to do was walk in.
Well, climb in across the ceiling, behind Starfire as she ducked inside, grabbing something that Robin could only assume was fertilizer for her Tamaranian garden before she headed out again. Quietly releasing the suction caps on his hands and knees, he slipped silently to the floor and began a gentle lope through the corridors.
Security was fairly minimal once inside the tower itself, and he supposed that made sense. It wouldn't really do for klaxons to sound every time Lian, for example, left her room to wander to the bathroom or kitchen. But still, even with the necessary evasion of the multiplicity of security cameras, it did make it a little too easy to get to the transporter room.
Cracking the locks on the chamber was child's play as Robin simply didn't; leaving them alone, he instead loop-fed the security feedback from the standard safety override line to the central computer, then activated the emergency access. No signal was sent to the monitor room, and he walked right in.
A digital patch he'd created on one of Oracle's subsidiary systems allowed him to enter his data onto the teleport database as an anonymous - but allowed - passenger authorised for one round trip and with that he rematerialised several thousand kilometers away on the moon base.
*****^^^^^^^**********^^^^^^^^^^^
The Justice League's Moon Base library annex was one of the most well-stocked superhero-oriented hardcopy databases in existence. Not least of all because it was a tremendously secure site (In theory, anyway) but also because of the frequent need of the Base's usual occupants to research some of the more obscure - and highly sensitive - aspects of villain-dom, often at very short notice.
As Tim himself had been known to comment, in the current digital age, nothing on any computer was truly safe. So it was that the most sensitive of reports and treatises were written out by hand or typewriter, and then locked into the extensive filing system of the Moon, if they were documented at all.
It was generally suspected that the Batman kept a duplicate archive in the Batcave, and that this was what enabled him to keep spookily current with the latest in supervillainy, (and make his hero-gone-bad contingency plans) though the theories concerning how he got the duplicates - especially after he'd left the JLA - ranged from grim to downright bizarre.
Tim knew the duplicate Batcave archive was a cleverly perpetrated fiction. It did not exist, and never had.
No, the Batman's duplicates were hidden far better than that, and the security for that site would have been far harder to crack than merely breaking into a moon base. Raiding the moon for the information he needed was good practice and good fun, raiding Batman's copy of the archive would have been sheer suicidality.
Not that he hadn't been half-tempted to give it a go anyway.
But time was growing short; though Huntress' investigative efforts had rapidly met a finite end, his own had opened a veritable can of worms. And it was the sensitivity of the information he sought; the potential for it to threaten one of his adoptive kindred clan, as well as to initiate some doomed but well-meaning intervention from the Batclan that comprised his second self-appointed family that lent a special urgency to his mission. He knew the Batclan still watched him closely, and though they supported him unstintingly, he rather doubted that their trust would extend to what would appear to be an unhealthy obsession with one of the criminal underworld's more accomplished mass murderers.
His research within the JLA satellite was to be short, and highly targeted. That was fine; the less esoteric information he had already obtained from earth, and frankly Robin had deemed it unlikely that the world's heaviest-hitting defense force would have much information on the comparatively small-fry assassin, especially since The Crimson was not known to have ever targeted a Costume. No, this little enterprise was more about the final bits of information necessary to test a hypothesis than the raw data required to formulate the theory.
The clues that formed that base data were there, if one chose to look, and the story they told, while not pretty, was none the less compelling.
The Crimson had been ruthless, efficient, and not without a certain grim panache. There was no evidence of his training, nor even any period of up-and-coming butchery that Robin, with all his information gathering genius, could detect. No, The Crimson had simply exploded onto the scene some years ago, taking a minor criminal group he was in service to to the dizzying pinnacle of the international vice rackets within months; his unique style of slaughter, coupled with some singularly remarkable political maneuvering by the then-new female clan head had established the clan's grip on the triads as unshakeable.
Then, the newly-fanged triads had, under the machinations of this fresh leadership, given the Mob a serious run for their money in both the United States and, more tellingly, Europe, with a combination of blood and promise.
They'd been poised to conquer if not the world, then at least that portion of it that was held by the seamy underbelly of illegality and immorality. Triumph had seemed inevitable, with even lone hold-outs such as the antecedents of King Snake and his ilk succumbing.
Then it had all crumbled; the Crimson had vanished with as much panache as his arrival - a hail of blood and fire and debris as he took out a building in the process. That the leader of the clan that had held his allegiance had died as the building burned was a discovery Robin had been unsurprised to make.
The body was only partly charred and still intact enough to be identifiable. There was no mistake on that score, both dental records and genotyping confirmed it. With a certain grim amusement, Robin recalled his own 'death'. But the genetic studies undertaken at the time make that prospect substantially less likely. Not impossible, but less likely.
No bells had rung when he'd tracked down the names of the loose conglomerate that now ruled the clan, but it was when digging up information on the ex-leader's known affiliates, that Robin struck pay-dirt.
As it turned out, the consort of the deceased triad leader was not simply a hanger-on, a fact that could have been assumed - and indeed that error had been made by Huntress - by his lack of direct involvement with the shady side of the clan's business. In point of fact, had one simply followed the documentary evidence, it would seem that the woman had been pointedly not only keeping him out of the thick of things, but well away from even the periphery of anything vice-related.
Unlike Helena, Robin did not assume it was out of some misplaced sense of love or virtue on the part of the triad's then-new leader, some desire to keep her lover's hands clean, deny him any awareness of the criminality that supported his lifestyle.
So he looked.
He dug, beneath the surface, beyond the respectable consort of an equally 'respectable businesswoman'.
He shattered the first fake identity like it was glass.
The second and third took a little longer.
The fourth identity he found left him breathless with shock, though only for a moment. A moment after that, and he had begun collecting the equipment he would need to undertake something he'd previously only considered as an intellectual exercise. The tools he required for a little spot of B and E . . . of the JLA's Moon Base.
Demons - like devils, the Endless, and occasionally Muses - could be summoned, bound and compelled.
Forced to do almost anything by their masters, save enjoy the experience.
Forced to grant wishes of wealth and power, forced to destroy if that was their skill.
Forced to kill.
//We are not so very different after all, Shishou.//
The dull horror of his discovery had deepened into a slow, banked rage all the more potent for it's very subtlety by the time Robin found the requisite file.
//Felix Faust,// he mused, scanning the pages with rapid thoroughness, //it seems past time we had a little talk.//