Four hours later found Red Tornado gaining distance on the island. He hadn't intended to leave Star City after noting Batman's response to the meteor. The initial course of action he had decided on was to leave a recorded message for Batman at the beginning of John Smith's post lecture office hours and then transition into patrolling the city promptly at five o'clock (the time of day with the statistically highest rates of bank robbery). But as John Smith answered student emails and scanned the last term paper in need of grading (which was then stored for the customary several weeks before it could be returned to its writer, in keeping with the habits of the average university professor), the meteorite alert on Red Tornado's open tasks list persistently drew Red Tornado's attention. He had made note of Batman's airship departing from the landing site several hours earlier in the day, and felt confident in the assumption that Batman's brief sojourn there could only mean that all was well. Nonetheless, Red Tornado waited for affirmation to arrive so that he could put the continuing, computerized concern to rest.
Stuart Martha, that reputable authority on human customs, stated that it was an unfortunate fact of life that sometimes one's dearest acquaintances might be kept away from the phone on a busy day, and that it was important not to let the absent ringing keep you from enjoying your own.
As such, it wasn't difficult for Red Tornado to tell when he arrived at his destination, even if he hadn't had a running account of his progress toward the island ticking away in his head. A considerably sized hole made up of recently overturned earth became immediately visible amid the island's greenery as he came close, long before coming into landing range. Red Tornado began the process of allowing the speed of the wind tunnel from his lower abdomen to slow down as he coasted lower to the ground, altering his position from horizontal to vertical as he prepared to stand on the outer cusp of the clearing where the hole had been made.
It was entirely unexpected and completely improbable when an abnormally large, insectile leg crashed into Red Tornado from behind.
As his body crashed into the ground with an audible clunk that denoted the durability of his circuitry, Red Tornado swiveled his head around on his shoulders, looking up at the assailant that he already knew to be too large to be a natural component of the island's eco system. He came to the instantaneous conclusion that his faith in Batman's dedication had been misplaced.
He wasn't so much concerned for his own safety as he rightened himself, as he was for that of the irregularly large arachnid busily hissing and arranging its legs into an attack position across from him. The lower portion of Red Tornado's casing was quickly gummed over with a glob of thick white webbing while he estimated the proximity that the creature must have been to the meteorite at the time of impact for it to have experienced the exposure that it evidently had, to have grown so large. When Red Tornado finally did come to settle on a course of action the webbing, while being justifiably strong, having come from the body of a colossal mutated spider, was still relatively easy for his mechanical limbs to break.
He lunged backward from the spider as a second shot of webbing issued forth, and activated his wind jets to take flight again as the creature followed up the failed assault with a second peculiar hiss issued from beneath a pair of raised forelegs. The remaining six tensed themselves in preparation for the offensive leap that served its small species so well in the insect world.
Injury to creatures obstructed by the meteor's landing had not been Red Tornado's objective when he determined to go to the island. However, he concluded that there were few alternatives that would effectively resolved the situation. As he gained altitude for an aerial attack, Red Tornado extended his forearms in preparation of activating the dual wind tunnel generators in his wrists, but found them still gummed with excess webbing. He gave a test whirl to break the substance before making his attack, but no sooner had his manufactured humanoid hands began to rotate, than a rouge call issued from the foliage now below him.
Red Tornado looked down.
Below him, a humanoid blur ejected itself from the trees that had been at his back when Red Tornado had been on the ground a few seconds earlier—in a surplus of free movement that was bolder than the perpetrator's uncovered state of dress would have merited. As a cautionary protocol, Red Tornado promptly terminated his plans to attack. Rather than engaging the spider, the new arrival was positioning itself in the clearing just a few feet away from it. While Red Tornado watched, the human raised his hand in the air, and inexplicably, the spider was raised off the ground with it.
The spider appeared to glow orange, and wriggled its legs questingly after the ground, and then its shape began to dissolve—which, Red Tornado's programming told him in turn was completely improbable. He could tell that the heat signature of the spider was still present in the same space it had been occupying, but none of his other sensors could pick up any indicators of its presence. Its heartbeat, and even its shadow on the ground became absent. Red Tornado lowered himself back to the clearing's floor as quietly as his jets would permit and made his way closer to further observe the practice unfolding.
As he did so, he heard the human speaking, "Hey now, easy! Easy! We'll get you fixed up. I just need a—yes!"
The apparent human put out his other hand toward a nearby bush while Red Tornado observed, stationary, without a comment to make, and a green speck of glowing light rose out of the leaves. He was only just able to zoom in his line of sight and enhance the image so that he could identify the shape in the center of the green as that of a common gnat, before its diminutive form was also dissolved into its bare molecules.
"Perfect. . .!" And then, the strange man brought his hands together. "I hope you're not squeamish about moving down the food chain!"
The two swirling mists of former creatures came together in time with the man's hands, mingling and re-solidifying them into something not quite fit to be defined as either. A comparatively small creature the size of a baseball, with wriggling legs and a set of wings, was released back onto solid ground when the lights faded, and quickly fled into the jungle.
Red Tornado was still assessing the likelihood of the convoluted particles resembling themselves into an entirely new entity while the seemingly responsible human being was brushing dust from his hands, despite the fact that he hadn't made physical contact with either creature. Red Tornado was unsure of whether to call what he had just witness a possible travesty, or an example of what Stuart Martha would praise as "thinking outside the box."
The man turned to him without looking after where his creation was headed. "Well, I don't think I'd have much luck melding you with anything prowling by."
The man extended his hand into the air between them. Red Tornado recognized the gesture from his studies on human manners, but found himself accessing the person in front of him before responding.
While he was wearing a mask, the majority of his person was left visible by the sparsity of his dress, and as such Red Tornado was able to analyze the characteristics of the man's expression and body language and determine there was no malice or mockery in the gesture. The man himself appeared to show signs of benevolence in the lines of his smile, visible under the fabric of his mask. The mask itself represented the largest article of clothing in the man's costume, the only exception being the man's boots and a large piece of cloth that was more dangling from the man's belt than being used to garb it. Red Tornado's assessment of human norms in regards to modesty suggested that most would be uncomfortable. But norms in hypocrisy also demanded no mention be made, as he wore comparably less on his own structure. That this person was attempting polite discourse was apparent, but Red Tornado was wary of participating in handshakes after a failed attempt that had taken place some weeks earlier, when Batman had introduced him to an acquaintance with the ability to distort the shape of his body, and found that his mechanical grip was nonetheless capable of inadvertently crushing the bones in the elastic man's body. Red Tornado looked over the body mass of the man in front of him now and attempted to discern whether he would be in danger of the same error.
If the human man thought him rude with his delay, it was not relayed in his mannerism. The masked man went on with his hand still out, " B'Wanna Beast, friend. And you are?"
Red Tornado grasped the offered hand moderately with stiff fingers that did not fully curl. "Observation: You are endowed with super human abilities."
The man began to laugh. "At least with that much!"
"Continuation: Your powers raise considerable questions of morality. In subduing the spider, you fused it with a neighboring creature. By human standards, a bystander." Red Tornado noted the cheery look on the other being's face taking on the stilted quality of a paused tape.
"Hm? Oh, the fly. I suppose you could say that, but neither creature was harmed, which is more than I can say for your method, and—"
Red Tornado's audio receptors continued to register the other hero's words, but his line of sight slid marginally to the right of his face and then zoomed in on the forest across the way from where they stood. The foliage appeared to have been disturbed there, branches hanging broken from the trees or scattered upon the grass, that appeared as if it might have been flattened—although it was too far for Red Tornado to accurately pick up such a detail. Even so, he had never known Batman to disturb the environment in such a way while landing his aircrafts.
"—now the terrified big guy's close to being back to his normal size while the fly has a few more days added onto his lifespan. A perfect compromise, more or less," the man who called himself B'Wanna Beast was concluding in his defense to an observation that was not intended to cause offense, but Red Tornado couldn't begrudge him for hearing one. He was incapable of using human inflection.
"Observation," Red Tornado said in turn, "'Compromise' does not fit the situation."
"Hey now!"
Red Tornado might have expected his commentary to spark another bout of defensive dialogue, but instead B'Wanna Beast was surging off into the clearing in an abrupt course of action that Stuart Martha would have considered the height of rudeness.
Red Tornado followed after him. B'Wanna Beast went to stand on the outer edge of the crater that was the meteor's byproduct in landing. He appeared to be staring into it.
"Something came out of there," he said.
Red Tornado came up to the edge of the crater beside him, though the masked face did not turn to look in his direction, not that Red Tornado looked for it, as he had already logged an internal observation that polite conversation was not a high priority on this stranger's list of ongoing tasks.
If Red Tornado were capable of frowning, he would have done so. He looked down into the hole, silently surveying the imprint that the extraterrestrial object had made, and quickly came to the same estimation as the eccentric on his right. There were a number of factors that could have caused concern. One was the sheer size of the crater, larger than what Red Tornado had estimated. Another was the way that the meteor inside it was cracked open like an egg.
Red Tornado activated a screening feature in his visual receptors, and in doing so was abruptly able to pick up a pattern decorating the bend in the displaced earth, faint though the latter traces were when they continued into the drier topsoil of the clearing, and identify it as an abundant series of tracks. The entire side of the crater had been swept over, as if by soft, wide feet resembling more closely that of the giant sea snail than humans. Though human footprints were discernable among the shapes as well.
All the while as Red Tornado conducted his scans, he detected the stranger scurrying like a rodent around the edge of the hole, hulking down into the soil on the other side. His fingers appeared to hover over the malleable sediment without touching it, and it seemed a logical estimation that this man was coming to the same conclusion that Red Tornado already had himself: whatever had come out of here had had human assistance.
The meteor itself appeared to have been spherically shaped, with some indentations that were the result of weathering the atmosphere of a thriving planet such as Earth during a headlong decent. But for all that, spherical the object was, and Red Tornado's systems were crunching the numbers on the probability of such a shape coming to be when traversing the littered abyss that was space.
Red Tornado came around the edge of the crater. There was one set of human prints to the side, clearest to see in a mount of damper earth that had been displaced to the dryer sediment of the forest clearing by the impact. They went off to one side alone and grew more sparse the further they went. But when he followed them, he believed that he could make out the faint impression of a rounded bat icon in soil that was nearly as dry as sand, the lines as loopy and wide as what a child might write in a sandbox. Other lines that might have been a part of Batman's landing gear could have been there as well, but Red Tornado could not conclude them. Only that this landing site was well away from the island's greenery, and more in keeping than what Red Tornado had observed of Batman's preferences.
To make the comparison, Red Tornado went to the potential landing site that he had observed earlier. There, the imprint of landing gear was more clearly discernable, but bigger than what Red Tornado knew Batman's single seating craft to employ as well.
Small details, but Red Tornado found them perplexing nonetheless.
Over on the far side of the crater, B'Wanna Beast looked up at Red Tornado. He did not ask what Red Tornado had found, but frowned and followed the crater tracks with his eyes. Red Tornado did so as well. When he came to where his temporary companion stood, he understood. The tracks lead over the bend of the crater and made their way down the incline from the clearing to the beach below, and then disappeared amid the lapping waves.
Over the course of the night after, they'd scour the island and come across a sparse handful of other creatures that had been warped by the after effects of the alien object's radiation, and B'Wanna would likewise cure them in his obscurely controversial way, and Red Tornado would continue to process the inkling alert from his human-centric drives that told him he ought to be disgusted by the display, though his more logical programs had trouble understanding why. At no point would they find further evidence of the alien creatures that had come out of the meteor, even when the stranger went galloping into the water in search of them. Red Tornado himself, being made of metal, had a complicated relationship with water.
Red Tornado would take samples of the meteor back to Star Labs for testing, but it was obvious that whatever had needed their attention had already come and gone some time ago. Red Tornado left B'Wanna Beast standing on the beach, having turned down an offer of flying him back to the mainland. Red Tornado's thoughts turned to Batman. The meteor had arrived hours earlier, and had cracked open presumably well before their arrival, providing so much time for the creatures to move on. Batman's part in the events was questionable. And as all evidence indicated, whatever was inside had escaped into the sea.