Chapter 5 – Hawkgirl in Training

Part 1

"Wait here. I have to go pick up my companions and then I'll be right back," stated Hunter.

Kendra just meekly nodded. Back at the nightclub, she and her friends had known better than to even seriously consider dancing with white boys and now she had just sat on a white guy's lap inside that weird machine within the glass bubble. And she had done it with her dress in tatters. She was still more than a little freaked out.

She stood and watched as the hatch on the machine closed, the guy gave a final wave, and then the sphere turned a solid white before blinking out of existence. What had she gotten herself into? She had gone along only because he knew of Princess Chay-Ara and had shown her the belt the girl from her visions had worn. But she had never expected to end up here, wherever here was.

She was in a huge room. One side was a wall of tall windows, which were almost blindingly bright from the amount of sunlight they were letting in. It had been the middle of the night only seconds earlier back in New Orleans. Where had the man taken her?

Sweeping her gaze around, she discovered the walls and ceiling were formed from giant logs, a large bearskin rug adorned the center of the floor, and a variety of animal heads were mounted on the walls. It looked like the central hall of some grand ski lodge like she had only ever seen in the movies or in the issues of Life magazine Mrs. Patterson kept in the front parlor. However those places always seemed to be teeming with people, but this space was utterly vacant.

Although she didn't see anyone, she could hear music, but it was unlike any with which she was familiar. She waited several minutes for Hunter to return, but when he didn't, she followed the sound to a wide set of double doors set in the right wall - after doing what she could to secure the remnants of her dress with the few remaining buttons and her hands. The doors were standing wide open and she moved until she could see through them. The room beyond was obviously a library with two-story tall bookshelves lining the walls. A big stone fireplace dominated the opposite wall, but on what was obviously a warm summer day, its hearth stood empty and cold.

A long heavy wood table stretched down the center of the room. A blonde woman in a scandalously short red dress, which stopped a good nine inches short of her knees, was leaning over the table with her back to the door. She was doing something with a long row of machines unlike anything Kendra had ever seen before. They were all displaying moving images like a row of movie screens, but the images were impossibly bright and the screens looked almost as thin as a sheet of paper. The music seemed to be coming from the area where the woman was working.

The woman must have sensed Kendra's presence as she abruptly straightened and turned. She was wearing glasses that made her look studious and slightly less intimidating.

"Hi, I'm Felicity. Ah, Felicity Smoak," she said while stepping forward and extending her right hand. "You must be Ms. Saunders."

Kendra still felt almost in a daze. She automatically extended her own hand, momentarily forgetting it had been holding her dress closed. "Ms.?"

The blonde's hand was cool and her grip firm.

"Oh, that's right they didn't use that term then. So, how about if I just call you Kendra?"

Kendra nodded. "Where am I?" Then she gestured towards the table before remembering the state of her dress and quickly moved her hand back to where it could clasp the gaping material, "And what is all this?"

"We are at Bruce Wayne's ski lodge in the Catskills. Apparently, Hunter has had dealings with him before and arranged for us to use this place since it is out of the way, but still not too far from Gotham and Metropolis.

"I'm just here to set up the IT gear and then I'll be heading back to Starling. And let me tell you, I can't remember the last time I have seen such an antiquated network and internet connection. At one point, I thought it was actually going to be using dial-up. I'm just glad I brought along some gear to set up a satellite connection, although it means the latency will be a bitch."

Kendra just stared at the woman. Other than the references to the Catskills, Gotham, and Metropolis, she had no idea what she was talking about.

"We're . . . we're actually in New York? I've never been out of Louisiana before."

"Yeah, we're in New York. And I've never been here before either. Well, the Catskills I mean. While I was going to school at MIT in Boston, I visited both Metropolis and Gotham, but I've never been here. I almost wish it was winter so I could spend a day on the slopes before heading back to Starling. Of course, it is probably for the best it is not winter. The only time I have been skiing was when I was in college and, klutzy me, I managed to break my arm. Eight weeks in a cast and it was such a pain trying to use a keyboard. And, of course, it would be during the semester I had the advanced C++ class with thousands of lines of code to write."

Somehow the blonde seemed to manage to say all that in a single breath. By the end, she was craning her head to look around Kendra towards the open door leading to the great room.

With hardly a pause she added, "And where is Hunter anyway? He should have given you the tour rather than just leaving you to wander around on your own."

Kendra gave a helpless shrug. "He just said he was going back to get the others."

Felicity suddenly looked at her sharply, "What others?"

"These two women, they saved my friends and me from this large group of drunken sailors. You wouldn't believe how they could fight; I've never seen anything like that. And you wouldn't believe how they were dressed either," Kendra said. Then she glanced down to the other girl's extremely short skirt and then back up to the cleavage on display. The girl wasn't particularly well-endowed in the boob department, but the dress somehow managed to take advantage of every inch she had. "Well, maybe you would believe how they were dressed, but it was like nothing I have ever seen back home."

They were interrupted by a flash of white light from the Great Hall.

"That must be Hunter, now," stated Felicity. Then she gestured towards the doorway. "Let's go see who these other friends are."

Kendra gave a small nod and then just followed the other girl. She was feeling more and more lost by the minute.

As they entered the Great Hall, the three others were still in the process of extricating themselves from the tiny sphere. The blonde still might as well have been naked. Kendra was almost tempted to avert her eyes, but she knew she was never going to understand what was going on, if she spent her time staring at her shoes.

As the blonde finally straightened up, the girl beside Kendra suddenly froze and let out a startled gasp. Then she ran forward and pulled the other blonde into a fierce hug not noticing or at least not seeming to care about the other girl's attire.

"Sara. My God, is it really you? How is this possible? I saw you dead with arrows sticking out of your chest. I helped Oliver, Digg, and Laurel bury you. And that was almost two years ago."

Nyssa turned and stared hard at Hunter. "What is she talking about? Sara was only dead for six months when I used the Lazarus Pit and that was only a couple of hours ago."

"You're in 2016. That is when I needed your help."

Kendra had followed Felicity over, but had moved over nearer to Hunter and Nyssa, still feeling uncomfortable being too near the barely clad Sara.

"What do you mean 2016? That's . . . that's not possible," whispered Kendra. For a moment she wavered and thought she was going to faint like some character in a movie.

Hunter stepped closer and put an arm across her shoulder to steady her. "Sorry. I didn't have time to make it clear earlier. I'm a time traveler from the distant future. A truly evil man, Vandal Savage, is going to gain control of the planet and plunge the world into an era of darkness unlike anything ever seen, if we don't stop him. One of the key Nexus points in this struggle is 2016 and I'm recruiting people to help me in the upcoming battle. Some of these people are from 2016, but many are from other times and places although I have brought you further forward in time than most. You were the closest reincarnation of Princess Chay-Ara I could find. I figured you could cope better with a seventy-three year jump forward in time than some of your earlier incarnations from a hundred or two hundred years earlier. At least you would already be familiar with things like cars and aircraft.

"And that's why I selected this location to help you acclimate. The amount of futuristic high tech here is less than what you will encounter in most other places."

While Hunter was talking to Kendra, Felicity finally pulled back from the tight embrace in which she had been holding Sara. And when she looked into Sara's face, she saw no sign of recognition, only a hint of embarrassment at being hugged by a complete stranger.

"Sara, don't you recognize me? It's Felicity. I know we weren't like best friends or anything, but we worked together, off and on, for months."

Sara shook her head. "Sorry."

Felicity turned and threw a questioning look in Nyssa's direction.

Nyssa stepped closer, still rattled by Hunter's comment which indicated they had jumped roughly eighteen months into the future.

"Sara has almost no memories of her old life from before . . . from before her death," explained Nyssa.

Felicity's eyes flicked between the two women. "Ah, is there any chance she will get them back?"

Nyssa shrugged. "I have no idea. I've never heard of anyone being resurrected by the Pits after being dead so long. She seems to have little scattered tidbits of memory, so I'm hoping something will jar them loose. But so far that hasn't happened."

Felicity nodded. If seeing Nyssa hadn't triggered Sara's old memories she didn't know what would, except, perhaps, an encounter with Oliver. However she and Oliver were finally in a good place. She didn't want to risk upsetting that if Sara saw him and remembered her old feelings for him. On the other hand, she hated seeing Sara like this; she was almost like a ghost of her old self.

And then, when she glanced at Sara again, what she was wearing finally registered. "Good god, Sara, we need to scrounge you up some clothes!" exclaimed Felicity.

Sara looked down. "I suppose. Truthfully, it doesn't matter that much to me, as long as it's white. And it's not like I'm naked like I was while I was in Hell."

Felicity shot another questioning glance at Nyssa.

"Sara believes she was in Hell and being tortured the whole time she was dead. And now she sees demons everywhere, who she believes have been sent to drag her back there," Nyssa explained with a visible shudder.

"Just because you can't see them, doesn't mean they aren't real," insisted Sara. "And I don't think they are all sent just to get me. Some of them were probably sent to keep me under observation, but others are on Earth for entirely unrelated reasons, like the ones I saw in Ancient Egypt."

"You've been to Ancient Egypt?" asked Felicity, her eyes darting between the two women and then on to Hunter. She hated being kept in the dark. How could she use her special talents to locate useful information if she didn't have all the data? And Hunter had only told her he was going to fetch Kendra Saunders, not that he was going to pick up Sara and Nyssa, too, and then take a side trip to Ancient Egypt.

But before anyone responded to her question, Hunter jumped back into the conversation. "Felicity, maybe you can take Sara upstairs and find her something more appropriate to wear and perhaps Nyssa and Kendra, too." He paused and pointed to the stairs at the back of the Great Hall. "I've laid out some clothing for them in the second, third, and fourth bedrooms on the right side of the East hallway. After everyone has had a chance to grab a shower and a change of clothing, how about you meet me back down here and we'll make a start on getting Kendra flying before we break for lunch?"

Felicity glanced at the other three women. Sara was just wearing a diaphanous negligée. Nyssa was missing her normal outer layer of clothing, but was at least decent. Kendra was in an ancient out-of-style dress that Felicity only now noticed was torn open in the front and was only held together by the girl's hands. Definitely, all three of them looked the worse for whatever recent adventures they had been experiencing.

"Fine," replied Felicity towards Hunter. "But you better give us at least thirty minutes."

Part 2

Kendra stared into the mirror in dismay. How could she join the others wearing this?

The shower had felt wonderful and it had seemed to wash away the lingering traces of their encounter with the sailors. And the shower and the rest of the bathroom hadn't felt much different from the bathrooms back home.

But the clothing was a completely different story. At first she had been certain this room had to be intended for one of the other girls. However Felicity had looked in all three bedrooms and assured her this one was hers.

The pants, if they could be called pants, were of some black stretchy material that was unlike anything she had ever felt. Once she managed to pull them on, they were skin tight and perfectly conformed to her body, accentuating every curve. The only thing she had ever felt that was remotely similar was the one pair of silk stockings she had ever owned. They had been a gift from her parents on her nineteenth birthday, which had been shortly before the American entry into the war that had quickly brought an end to personal luxury items like anything made of silk.

The top was of some similar material except yellow in front and black on the sides and back. Whatever the stretchy material was, it did a good job of supporting her breasts. Of course, the embarrassing thing was that the top seemed to cover her breasts and little else. It stopped no more than two inches below the bottom curve of her breasts leaving her entire midriff bare. And the back was even worse, just a couple of wide straps behind her neck and across the middle of her back.

She twisted and turned in front of the mirror before shaking her head. Even the swimming costumes worn in Hollywood movies set in exotic places like Rio or the south of France didn't reveal as much skin as this tight outfit she was expected to wear.

But what choice did she have? It was either this or put on her tattered old clothes, which weren't much better. Obviously, after seeing what Sara had been running around in, the dress Felicity wore, and now this, bodies were expected to be much more on display here than back home. She hoped she would adjust, because at the moment she just wanted to hide.

Deciding she couldn't just linger in her room, as much as she wanted to, Kendra moved over and quietly opened the door. Sticking her head out, she discovered the hallway was clear and slowly stepped out. She didn't know why it made her momentarily happy, as she was going to have to interact with the others while wearing this and it didn't really matter if it was in the hallway or down in the Great Room.

Kendra discovered the others were already all assembled, leaving her the center of attention as she descended the stairs. She tried to distract herself by focusing on what the others were wearing. Hunter was still in his old fashioned suit and Felicity was still in her little red dress. She felt a little better when she saw Nyssa and Sara were sporting similar skin tight outfits. Nyssa's outfit was a burgundy color and additionally she was carrying a fancy looking bow in her left hand and had a quiver of arrows and a long sword strapped to her back. Sara's outfit was completely white and she had her familiar staff in her right hand and a pair of short swords on her back.

"Ah, good, you're here," said Hunter in her direction. His eyes ran up and down her body and then he nodded. "Excellent, you look just like the old recordings I have seen."

Kendra was momentarily taken aback yet again. There were movies of her in this getup? She wished she could just crawl under some rock.

But Hunter's gaze didn't linger on her body. He turned his attention to the leather satchel that was still slung from his shoulder. After lifting the flap, he pulled out the black metal-looking belt he had first shown her back in New Orleans.

"Let's move outside where we will have some more room and then you can give the belt a try."

He headed for the front door and the women all trailed along behind. Kendra noticed Felicity had what looked like a small, miniature version of the machines in the library in her hands and that most of her attention seemed to be focused on it.

The front door let out into a wide circular drive. At the moment it held a single automobile and it was unlike anything Kendra had seen before; just one more thing proving she was a long, long way from home.

Hunter led the way to the far side of the circular drive where it turned into a single lane heading downhill, away from the house. Kendra guessed it extended the equivalent of about six blocks before it took a turn and disappeared into the trees. She let her gaze sweep around. The house was built near the upper end of a long narrow canyon. The canyon walls extended up at least a couple hundred feet and were almost completely obscured by pine trees.

"Right," said Hunter, who had apparently followed her gaze. "As long as you stay below the crest line, you should be able to practice flying without any outsiders seeing you."

Then he stepped forward and wrapped the black metallic belt around her waist. After stepping back, he added, "The main buckle has a recessed button which will cause the wings to deploy."

Kendra ran her hands along the surface of the belt, rather than moving straight for the button. The belt felt surprisingly light where it rested on her hips; certainly it couldn't weigh more than a couple of pounds. It was hard to believe that it could somehow contain the giant wings she had seen in her visions. But she had seen Princess Chay-Ara deploy and stow the wings more than once.

Finally, her finger sought out the activation button. It found it unerringly like she had done it a thousand times before. And with that motion she truly felt connected to Princess Chay-Ara for the first time. That ancient girl was a part of her, as were all the other women from her visions.

The wings flowed forth, with just a slight tingling sensation running up her back. However the helmet was much more disconcerting as it flowed up the back of her head and then down over the top until it hid the upper half of her head except for her eyes. Once it was in place, the helmet felt light, it didn't impede the movement of her head at all. However the most surprising thing was that the helmet somehow seemed to enhance her vision. Now the trees at the far end of the canyon sharpened and she could easily pick out squirrels and birds moving about in the branches at a distance that had to be approaching two miles.

Quickly, Kendra pulled her gaze away from the distant trees and back to her immediate surroundings. Her companions wore expressions which seemed to range between awe and anticipation. Her outlandish clothes no longer appeared to hold anyone's attention as their gazes were all fixed on either her wings or her helmeted head.

She was here to fly. She had seen Princess Chay-Ara do it countless times in her visions. She tried to fly, but at first nothing seemed to happen. Eventually, after nearly a minute and with sweat beading on her brow under the helmet, she realized she had levitated until her feet were about six inches above the ground, but that was it. Her wings weren't flapping and she wasn't moving up or in any other direction. Finally, when she quit trying, she slowly sank back to the ground.

"I . . . I can't do it," Kendra said, a sob almost forming in her throat. She had seen Princess Chay-Ara fly and it had seemed so effortless. But she could barely move.

"There, there," said Felicity in a supportive tone. "You at least got off the ground on your first try. That has to mean something."

"I hope you don't mind," began Hunter. "But in case this happened, I brought in someone to provide expert advice. Would that be okay?"

Kendra nodded, wondering who else Hunter might know who could fly. And if he already knew someone who could fly, why had he recruited her? The only other person she could think of, who could fly, was Prince Khufu. But if his reincarnation was already here, why would Hunter want a simple girl like her?

Hunter raised two fingers to his mouth and let out a piercing whistle that seemed to echo down the valley for almost thirty seconds.

Kendra had expected someone to join them from the lodge, but noticed how Hunter's eyes were sweeping the sky. She quickly joined him and it took only a moment for her enhanced vision to spot something, something that was absolutely impossible.

"Holy Mother of God," she whispered, louder than she realized.

Immediately, everyone else followed the direction of her gaze.

"Holy Shit!" hissed Felicity. From Nyssa, Kendra only heard the sound of her bow being drawn and from Sara the sound of her staff thudding to the ground as her matched swords rasped from their scabbards.

"Stand down, everyone," said Hunter in a commanding tone. "She's an old friend and ally."

An impossible creature was racing towards them. And it wasn't until it got close that they realized it was enormous. It landed lightly, which was impressive considering it had to tip the scale at something approaching a thousand pounds.

The creature was a sphinx – like the giant stone figure that had stood near the pyramids in Egypt since time immemorial. It had the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle, and the head of a beautiful girl. The lion's body was much larger than any natural lion, with a shoulder height reaching eight feet above the ground and a body that stretched to almost twenty feet, not even accounting for the flicking tail. The eagle's wings had to span sixty feet, and the woman's head was in proportion with the rest of its body.

"Guys, this is Fah. She was created by a mad scientist up in the 33rd Century. After I rescued her, she has aided me on the occasional adventure. Fah, may I introduce Felicity, Sara, Nyssa, and Kendra. Kendra just got her wings and could use a little advice on how to fly."

"Ladies, it is a pleasure to meet you," said the sphinx with a surprisingly high pitched soprano voice and a nod of her large head which was adorned with a lion-like mop of blonde hair. The only thing about her face that didn't look perfectly human, excluding its much greater size, was the eyes. They were a solid gold with darker flecks and vertical slits for pupils like those of a cat.

Kendra almost freaked out when the giant creature began to speak. Its head had to be at least twelve feet above the ground, or at least until it crouched down on its haunches and even then, she had to look up to look into its face. How could such a creature, an amalgam of beast and human speak, or even exist?

"Hello, ah, Fah," Kendra got out with only a slight stutter. But if Hunter was expecting her to work with the creature, she was going to have to at least talk with it. "It is nice to meet you, too."

"Hunter called me in because he thought you might have trouble with flying for the first time. Is that the case?" asked the sphinx.

Kendra nodded. "I tried and tried, I really did. But all I did was lift a few inches from the ground. I couldn't even get my wings to flap."

"I think it is probably a simple case of overthinking things rather than letting it happen naturally. I mean do you think about every motion when you need to stand up and walk across the room? No, of course not, you just do it. I think the same thing applies here.

"So instead of thinking about flying, how about we just do a quick race," continued Fah. She climbed back to her feet, gazed around, and then lifted a forepaw and pointed towards a distant tree. "See the tree that was killed by the lightning strike? Let's see who can be the first one to touch the tip."

Kendra looked in the indicated direction and quickly spotted the tree in question. Her newly enhanced vision told her it was a mile and a half away.

She turned her attention back to the sphinx and watched it crouch down slightly. Then with a thrust of its legs and a powerful sweep of its wings, it was in the air. The sudden blast of wind from its great wings almost bowled everyone over.

Within seconds, the sphinx was a hundred yards away and accelerating rapidly.

Kendra centered her attention on the distant target, flexed her knees, and then launched like the sphinx had done, all the while half-expecting to end up on her face in the dirt. But instead, she quickly realized she was ten feet above the ground and climbing. She let out a quick laugh that was half excitement and half terror.

Part 3

Hunter led the way over to some benches along the front of the lodge in the shade of the portico so they could talk while they watched Kendra learn to fly.

"How can someone like Fah exist?" asked Felicity, her fingers busily tapping away on her tablet. "Melding together the physiologies of a lion, an eagle, and a human should be impossible let alone doing it and achieving something of that size. And by simple aerodynamics, even sixty foot wings shouldn't be able to support a body of that mass."

Hunter reached over and rested his hand on Felicity's to stop her fruitless research. "Felicity, not now. Some things you just have to accept on faith or just trust what your eyes are telling you. Science in another 1200 years will be able to achieve many things that would seem impossible now in the same way a modern passenger jet or even a simple thing like a car would be impossible for someone living in the time of the Crusades to accept."

"What about how Fah got here?" asked Nyssa, remembering the tight squeeze when she and Sara had been jammed into his machine. "No way did both you and her fit into your little time capsule."

Hunter sighed. They had more germane topics to discuss, but it was probably worth a minute or two to answer these questions so they could give him their full attention later.

"No, Fah arrived here by an alternate method. My original time travel device, the prototype if you will, was more in the form of a portal device that could open doorways through time. It worked, but the big drawback was that it required a lot of equipment back at my lab. And all doorways had to originate from my lab. I could open a doorway to the 33rd Century and have Fah travel from there back to my lab. I could then open another doorway from my lab to here. But it always required one end to be in my lab. If you happened to be on the far side of the doorway when the device was turned off, you could be stranded. Therefore, my portable time capsule is generally more useful to me.

"Now, I think that is enough on that topic for the moment. We have other fish to fry," Hunter continued by way of changing the subject. Then he turned and looked in Nyssa's and Sara's direction. "I recruited you ladies first because I have a small task you are ideally suited to handle before things will be in position for the main event."

"And what is this main event?" asked Felicity. "You arrived in Starling a week ago and all you have said is that this Vandal Savage is on a course to conquer the world and that we need to stop him. How can I help without any details?"

Hunter shook his head. "I've been in the time travel business for a long time and trust me, having too much knowledge about the future, your immediate future, is never a good idea. If you think you are guaranteed to survive at least until some event say a month from now, you might start taking stupid chances that will get you killed and therefore change everything. That's why it is important I don't give away too much."

"And, truthfully, I don't know all the details and if we are successful in stopping Savage, then the timeline will be altered and my knowledge will stop being accurate. So I am only going to give out a few tidbits to get you started and you are going to have to figure out the broader picture and what to do for yourselves."

He paused and turned back towards Nyssa. "Your sister is in possession of some information that will be key to how we proceed."

"Wait a second, I don't have a sister," Nyssa said with a shake of her head.

"Half-sister then. Her name is Talia al Ghul, although at the present she is going by the name, Miranda Tate. She is currently the acting CEO of LuthorCorp while Lex Luthor is running for President."

"How can I have a sister I've never heard of?" asked Nyssa with a confused expression on her face.

"Ra's sired her a long time ago. I don't have any exact details other than I know she was already an adult in the year 1798. She had a falling out with Ra's somewhere in the early part of the 19th century and I don't believe they ever crossed paths again. But she must have planned well ahead and managed to take one of the Lazarus Pits with her, as she has looked thirty ever since."

Nyssa couldn't believe what she was hearing. She had a sister and that sister was well over two hundred years old. She knew her father had lived an extremely long time, but not that he had had another child way back then. And once he had put Oliver on the course to succeed him, why hadn't he ever mentioned a sister before it was too late? Possibly he thought she was long dead. But no, her father would never make a mistake on a subject as important as that. If he had had a report his other daughter, this Talia, was dead, he would have verified it ten different ways before accepting it.

"What do you need us to do?" asked Sara, breaking Nyssa's spiraling thoughts.

"Felicity, is the device ready?" asked Hunter.

Felicity nodded. "It is in the library with the rest of my gear. I had to get Cisco from S.T.A.R. Labs to help with some of the details and to get the device down to a manageable size. You will need to get the device within eighteen inches of Tate's main computer on the seventy-fourth floor of the LuthorCorp Tower in Metropolis and keep it there for approximately four minutes. It should then pull the data we need from her computer or whatever storage device of hers that is holding it."

"So why do you need us?" asked Nyssa, trying to stay focused on the situation even though what she really wanted to do was to borrow Felicity's tablet and google her sister. "Can't you use your time capsule to jump you straight into her office?"

Hunter shook his head. "Luthor is a right paranoid bastard. He has electro-magnetic shielding installed throughout the tower. My time capsule won't materialize inside that building."

Hunter turned more fully in Nyssa's and Sara's direction. "We need to acquire the data tonight, as Miranda will definitely be out of the building attending a rally for Luthor's campaign in Gotham. My thought was to use Fah, as she won't show up on Luthor's radar systems. She can drop you on the building's roof and then pick you up after you complete the mission. But I'll leave the tactical details up to you, in case you have some alternate idea for how to best penetrate the LuthorCorp Tower."

Nyssa's eyes flicked to where the giant sphinx was still cavorting in the sky above with Kendra. Could she, could they, really ride on Fah's back like Bellerophon had ridden Pegasus in the ancient myths?

End of Chapter 5

Coming Soon – Chapter 6 – A Tale of Two Sisters