October 3rd, 06:30 PM

"You really think they're doing something illegal to get their results?," Robin asked Batman.

They were standing on a rooftop across the street from MinaTech labs. Before the first of the year, neither one of them had ever heard of MinaTech. It had started out as a small organization in a dusty and ill-reputed corner of Gotham, but had steadily been moving up in the world. MinaTech was beloved by the news, as they had more than once come out with a cure for a 'popular' disease.

But Batman suspected foul play beneath that benign veneer. It had been bothering him for months. He had tried to get into the place legally, offering funding under the name of Bruce Wayne, but MinaTech would have nothing to do with him. And that bothered him a great deal. What kind of lab turned down money with no strings attached?.

Either crooks or fools, and the scientists at MinaTech had met with too much success to be fools.

"Finding cures for two entirely unrelated diseases inside of four months is highly improbable," Batman growled "developing a new formula for crop growth and developing a pet-safe insect repellant at the same time and in the same lab...," he trailed off.

Impossible was not a word he took lightly, though it was evidently the only one properly suited to the topic at hand. Robin didn't know much about scientific research, but he believed Batman. Besides, it made sense really. If diseases were so easily cured, they would all have been done away with long ago.

"You think they're faking the results?. Buying people to test the formula?," Robin guessed.

"We won't know for sure until we get a look at their records, which are in that building," Batman replied, unnecessarily adding "follow my lead,"

Robin hadn't spent much time working with Batman since he was just over thirteen, before the beginning of the Team. The past two years had seen them growing steadily more distant from one another as each went his own separate way. But Robin had not forgotten his training as a sidekick.

He fell into old habits fluidly, shedding the time apart like a second skin and returning to his old ways with ease he would not have expected. Yet it was not so strange. Robin was accustomed to taking orders from Aqualad, to following a team leader. It wasn't so very different from being a sidekick.

They fired their grappling hooks at the building across the way, and swung out over the thin traffic of early evening. The sun had just set, the night had not fully made its presence felt. A hush seemed to fall over the world at this time of day, as though the Earth was mourning the disappearance of the sun and anticipated the coming of the stars of night with some trepidation.

They got into the building without setting off any alarms. The lab was closed to the public, though a few camera crews had been allowed through over the months. The blueprints for the building were not public either, but Batman had managed to gain access. It didn't tell him where any security devices might be, but knowing one door from another would speed up the process of investigation.

They split up to conduct a more thorough and swift investigation. Robin was just as glad for it. Batman seemed not to have realized how much had changed in two years. How very little Robin needed his help now. Robin could defend himself as well as any member of the Justice League, and his years of training as a detective had served him well as he gained experience with the Team. He could go unnoticed almost anywhere, disappearing into the thinnest of shadows. He did not need a hand to hold, nor a voice to explain what he ought to do.

The night was just beginning, and Robin was full of enthusiasm for the task at hand. The world had been oddly quiet the last few weeks, which was why Robin had come with Batman on this little venture. He was fast growing bored. Of course it was a good thing that there was no evil to fight, that the world was not under threat of destruction. Of course that was a good thing. But Robin's energy was boundless, and it had to go somewhere. It also made him uneasy when the world got too quiet. Something awful was bound to happen.

He went in one door and out another, searching each room and its equipment like an excited dog, poking into every nook and cranny on the off chance that there might be something of significance there. Unlike a dog, however, Robin was very careful about what he touched. If he didn't know what something was, he left it very much alone. He knew that a mishap with science equipment could prove fatal. Besides, he wasn't here to play with lab gear, he was here to find records, to copy them so that they could later be read by himself and Batman, to discover the true source of MinaTech's success.

There was a rustling sound as he entered a dark room. Robin froze, wondering if there was someone here aside from the guards at the front desk. They probably patrolled the halls from time to time, but there was no reason for them to enter a room with no windows if the door was closed, nor was there cause for them to turn off their flashlight.

Listening, he tried to identify the source of the sound. He let his breath out after a moment as his brain finally identified it as the sound of a rodent in a wire cage. Moving around, Robin used the light of the hall to identify the row of cages in the corner.

Rats, mice, rabbits, a number of insects, all neatly labeled on the front as to what they were and what they were for. The sight of them made Robin's skin crawl. He knew that drugs had to be tested somehow, but he didn't like coming face to face with the subjects of those tests. For some reason, a black rabbit on the end caught his attention.

It was too dark to read the card pinned to its cage, so it wasn't that which drew Robin to examine it more closely. No, there was something... different about it. A wrongness in its way of moving that could not be explained by injury. There was a small lump on its neck, which could have been almost anything for all Robin knew, but he suspected it must be a tumor of some kind. Its fur was matted and there was a strange look to its eyes, a look no rabbit ought to be capable of.

The rabbit was slowly shuffling around the back of its cage, making an odd grunting noise. When Robin approached, it turned its head to look at him. Its next move was so sudden and unexpected that Robin jumped back. With a snake-like hiss, it lunged towards him, throwing itself bodily against the bars of its cage, forcing its claws as far through the door as it could, snapping its jaws like a vicious dog. It leaped back and then lunged again, a tiny squeak of fury escaping from it as it did so.

Robin had stumbled backward into the side of a desk. The items on top of the desk rattled at the disturbance and he quickly turned to right them all before any fell off or made enough noise to betray his presence. The rabbit continued its attack on the cage bars, willing to tear itself apart just to get at him. When he finished righting the items on the desk, Robin looked back at it.

The rabbit had gone strangely quiet, its teeth hooked onto the bars of its cage door. It was panting heavily, its body trembling with rage rather than fear, wild eyes searching for a target upon which to vent its savage hatred of all that lived and breathed.

Robin knew he'd found something. That this rabbit's behavior meant something. He could feel the malice coming off the small rodent in violent waves, and knew that there was something terribly wrong about it. He didn't know much about rabbits, but his instinct was that this was not how they were meant to behave. And he had learned to trust his instincts more than his knowledge.

"I think I found something," Robin whispered into his radio "in science lab 4,"

"Stay there," Came the stiff reply.

As if Robin was going to wander off. Robin shook his head, doing his best not to be irritated. He meandered around the room, taking thorough note of its every aspect, looking for anything else of interest that might be found here. In the far corner, he discovered a cage which held a python about four feet long in it. The snake had been curled up, its belly evidently comfortably full for the month, but on seeing the intruder it raised its head almost like a cobra.

Robin knew before it happened that the snake was going to strike at him. Its open mouth closed on the wire of its cage and it thrashed in obvious frustration. The snake's activity stirred up the rest of the animals, who began to scamper around and squeak in alarm, all of them being favored food types of snakes. Robin knew the danger before he heard the footsteps in the hall.

The noise was bound to attract someone's attention. He looked for a place to hide, but there really wasn't anywhere to go. He slid into the shadow of the desk. When the door flew open, the security guard saw no one. Nothing was amiss, save for the animals going crazy.

"It's just the damn python again," he told someone on the other end of his radio "why anyone would house a snake next to a bunch of rodents is beyond me,"

"Well make sure," came the gruff reply "we really don't want anybody messing around in there,"

"Yeah, yeah," the man grunted, but did as he was told.

He clicked on his flashlight, whose bright beam cut a swath through the darkness. Robin ducked lower instinctively, even though he was behind the desk and out of sight. The guard stepped into the room, closing the door behind him.

The rabbit screeched like a banshee, and the python beat its head against the wall of its cage. All the other animals continued to scramble about in panic, but the guard took no notice of them. He swung the flashlight beam left and right, then sat himself down on the edge of the desk.

"Damn animals, making noises at all hours for no reason," the guard growled to himself, feeling around in his breast pocket for something.

He withdrew a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, and Robin cringed. The man was evidently going to stay for a bit. But that wasn't what bothered Robin the most. No, it was the smoking near lab equipment. Only a fool smokes near materials which may or may not be flammable.

The man lit a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth before putting away the pack and lighter. He'd put his flashlight down on the desk, it shone at the closed door to the lab. Robin, for his part, settled in to wait. He'd been stuck like this before, and knew it was better to just wait for the man to go away than to try and sneak past him. He was in no hurry to get out. Besides that, Batman hadn't gotten in yet.

Smoke curled up towards the ceiling, spreading through the air in a sickly cloud. The animals gradually grew quieter as the black rabbit and python exhausted themselves. And still Robin waited. He only half expected what came next. The smoke from the cigarette wound its way through the air and wormed its way into the sensors of a smoke detector mounted on the ceiling.

It wasn't long at all before the detector went off, a shrill alarm slicing through the quiet of the night, shattering the faux peace which had come over the lab. The guard sprang to his feet, knocking the flashlight off onto the floor, where it spun wildly. The animals began to shriek again, climbing the walls of their cages, panic and alarm showing in the whites of their eyes.

Robin, for his part, stayed perfectly still, knowing that the alarm was nothing to get excited over.

The beam of the flashlight spun about wildly, blinding and dazzling him, as well as the guard, who seemed unsure as to what kind of alarm had actually gone off. He was pulling out his nightstick with one hand, grabbing for his radio with the other.

"What the hell is going on?!," he demanded, finally getting hold of his radio.

In his excitement, he dropped the cigarette. Robin watched tensely as the flaming object fell to the desk, then bounced, flipping through the air. He followed its progress with his eyes, and saw that its trajectory would send it into a collection of lab equipment on a shelf, which was labeled as flammable.

Robin switched gears. Hiding was no longer paramount. Getting out was of chief importance.

"Look out!," he lunged from behind the desk and gave the guard a desperate shove towards the door.

They fell against it, and Robin had no time to open it. The first explosion was small, but loud. Smoke filled the room in an instant. Flames sprouted from the shelf, spreading across the floor like a fiery liquid, creeping up the walls like vines.

Batman burst in and took the guard in hand, dragging the man by his vest out of the flaming room. Robin followed at once, but hesitated in the doorway. The animals were still in there. The evidence of something being amiss in MinaTech labs. He turned back into the smoke-filled room.

"What are you doing?," Batman was suddenly right next to him in the dark.

"We have to get the animals out," Robin explained breathlessly, already choking on smoke.

Batman did not question this, but took hold of several cages, prying them free of their housing and hauling them out through the door. Robin followed, starting with the python cage. The two heroes hurriedly passed the cages on to the guards. There was no time to do anything else, not if they wanted to go back for the rest of the cages. It took three trips to get them all out. Batman redirected Robin to download information from a computer in the next lab over while he himself finished getting the animals out.

Black smoke billowed through the halls, foretelling the coming of the ravenous fire which was to follow. Fire spread from room to room as though the walls were drenched in gasoline. Robin was almost finished with the computer when a second explosion rocked the building.

Robin was thrown to the ground, and rolled just in time to avoid being crushed by a falling beam. At once he scrambled to his feet. It was time to get out. He found the door to lab 4 was blocked. Calling through it, he realized Batman was still inside.

Forgetting his own safety, Robin set to work pulling the rubble out of the door, flinging chunks of concrete and steel beams. His gloves protected his hands from the heat, but his face and arms started to feel the fire's sting as flames lapped around him hungrily.

He made a big enough opening to crawl through, and found Batman pinned beneath a pile of cement, steel and crushed animal cages. The bodies of several small animals littered the floor, including that of the black rabbit, which had been torn open from throat to tail by a sharp piece of twisted metal.

With Robin and Batman's strength combined, they managed to lift the beam pinning Batman. Thus freed, Batman dug a bigger opening in the door and both of them slipped out. They fled as explosions echoed around them, announcing that the fire had found more flammable material elsewhere in the building. The whole place was coming down, and coming down fast.

The stairs down were blocked, so Batman and Robin went out the way they'd come in, up to roof level. Employing their grappling hooks, they swung to the relative safety of the building across the street, and observed dispassionately as fire trucks arrived to put out the blaze.