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Chapter 86 – Gotham DawnAlex was totally surprised — not — when Batman snapped, “I work alone.”
She just told him, “Oh, sure, that’s what you say now, but I know better.”
He fumed, “You think you know me better than I know myself? Isn’t that a little presumptuous? Or are you claiming you have psychic powers — other than your TK — or perhaps you can see into the future?”
She calmly said, “No. But back in the spring, I went into an alternate universe to help stop a hellgoddess, and one of the people I met was … you. An alternate you. That’s why I knew you were Batman, and how I knew a bunch of stuff about how you operated. And that’s how I know an alternate you has done the ‘I work alone’ surliness routine a lot, but he keeps protecting kids and helping out loners and giving hope to people who just don’t have any hope anymore. I know that other Batman has had sidekicks he’s trained, and sidekicks he’s training now, and people he tried to push aside but failed. In fact, one of them called it the ‘Bat family’ even though you keep claiming you’re a lone wolf … Besides, I can get you past Falcone’s guards, and I can get you back out, and I can cover your back without anyone seeing me.”
Alex watched him. He was thinking about it. He didn’t want to think about it, but he was thinking it over.
She told him, “You want to protect innocents and civilians. Me, too. But I’m not a civilian, and I can handle stuff you couldn’t come close to dealing with. If you want to worry about civilians, worry about Julie, who I don’t think you’ve been all that nice to, even if you’re protecting her from way nastier stuff.”
He said in that gravel voice that sounded so much like other-Batman, “When you’re not paying attention, you sound like you’re seventeen. You might want to watch that.”
She shrugged. “It’s way easier to just do the act while you’re in superhero clothes, instead of all the time. You get to be a real person, with real friends.”
He growled, “I’ve made my choice, and I don’t need a kid half my age to second-guess me.”
She pushed. “Fine, but I’ve seen the other you, and he’s not a happy guy, even with a woman in his life who knows his secret and goes out of her way to protect it. You’re a genius. Think about how to slowly let playboy Bruce evolve into someone you wouldn’t be ashamed to hang out with.”
“This is none of your business!” he snarled.
She insisted, “Maybe, but I want it to be. Everyone needs friends. And if you’re going to be Bruce Paine, Really Drunk Lech, you’re going to need some friends, maybe on the superhero side, who know the truth about you. And …” She studied his face, and it dawned on her. “Hey! I just had another idea! I know someone who could impersonate Batman when you need Bruce and the Bat to be in two places at once. Or maybe you need both of them to be in the same place at the same time! He’s about your size, and he’s got the manly chin thing going on, and he’s got serious martial arts skills. Maybe he could even take you in sparring. And he’s a really nice guy.”
He complained, “It sounds like I am going to be sinking deeper and deeper in debt to you, until you own me, body and soul. Is that what happened to you?”
She frowned at him. “Wow, you’re really not earning any brownie points here, you know that?”
He growled, “Earning brownie points is not exactly on my to-do list.”
He did have a point. Other than the ones on top of his mask. She sighed. “Okay, I’m being totally a hypocrite here. When Colonel O’Neill’s people asked if they could ‘have a chat’ with me, I was just as suspicious as you are now.” She looked at his expression and revised that. “Well, maybe almost as suspicious as you are now. Or half as suspicious as you are now. But I was really suspicious. I didn’t give them my real name, or Acid Burn’s real name, or anything. And they were pretty suspicious of me. I was the first superhero they’d actually met. They’d fought mutated monsters, and a couple super-powered villains, but no good guys. And they were smart enough to figure out the drug that I probably got my powers from tends to make a lot of its users go ‘cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs’, so not a lot of reason to trust me, either. So Jack took me along on a mission. The mission to save Klar.”
He noted, “Invisible teenagers. That would be Bloomington, Illinois, which ended with you rescuing a bank full of hostages from two unstable invisible supers.”
She smiled. “Right! I should’ve known you’d figure that out. Well, we worked together really well, and when things got nasty, we saw that we could really depend on each other. And then Jack also figured out who Acid Burn has to be, and went and talked to her. When he asked her what she wanted from him, she asked him to take her out to dinner. And they ended up playing a quiz game in a bar, and getting really stupidly drunk, and … she sort of took advantage of him even though he’s trying to be the ‘take your time and get to know each other’ kind of guy. So they’re dating now.”
“Your computer hacker and this military black ops guy. Sounds unlikely.”
She admitted, “Well, he’s way more handsome than you’d expect from hearing he’s an Air Force colonel, and she’s way, way prettier than you’d think from hearing ‘super hacker’. She’s a lot more ‘Acid Burn’ than you’d suppose, not counting the goth clothing and the bad attitude and the ginormous Angelina Jolie lips.”
Crud, it was pretty much impossible to get him to smile.
She followed him back into the penthouse, into a secret room off the master bedroom, down in a secret elevator that wasn’t on the floor plans Willow had found, and into a little garage that had to be down near street level, since it had cars. It had a jet-black, low-slung thing that looked like it ought to be running at Bonneville Salt Flats. Probably what Selina had called the ‘batmobile’. The garage also had a cornsilk-colored panel truck that had a sign on the side that said ‘Gotham Flowers’ and ‘we deliver 24/7!’ underneath that. And there was a fancy, pimped-out car that looked like it belonged to some kind of gangsta who wanted people to think he was super-cool. Plus a few other vehicles.
A stiff-looking older man with an old-fashioned mustache and a painter’s cap was already sitting in the flower truck. Batman opened the side door and leapt in. Alex flew in before he could slam the door in her face.
She guessed, “Hi! You must be Alfred. I’m Terawatt.”
Batman growled, “I couldn’t get rid of her.”
She smiled. “You have no idea how hard it can be to get rid of me. Persistence is my middle name! Actually, it’s Louise, but you don’t have to tell anyone that.”
Alfred gave Batman a raised eyebrow from the front seat. Batman growled, “Apparently, it is. She told me her secret identity, since she knows mine. And she’s persisting in tagging along even though I’m going to face down Falcone in his lair.”
Alfred said in a dry British accent, “That seems ill-advised.”
Alex gave him another smile. “It’ll be a breeze.”
Batman frowned. “Hardly. He has a walled estate. The walls are topped with razor wire and sensors. The grounds are constantly patrolled by four guard teams with attack dogs. The house has a state-of-the-art security system. He has a dozen hard men on duty inside the house at all times. Even his cook and valet and butler are soldiers in his organization. Getting in will be … intricate. Getting back out will be worse.”
Alex insisted, “Maybe you should trust me on this. I can get you past the guards, into the house, and up to Falcone. I can drop any guards you don’t, and I can knock out security cameras and alarm systems. I can also hide in places where a human obviously couldn’t be, so Falcone will never know I came along for the ride. And he’ll never be able to figure out how you got in and out, which ought to really freak him.”
“I still don’t like it,” he growled.
Alex just said, “Oh, I got that part already. Like ever since you walked out onto your patio.”
Batman looked at Alfred and snapped, “We need to increase our security, including cameras to spot anyone flying in … or parachuting in.”
She agreed, “Good idea. And you know, I’m not the only flying thing in the world now.”
Alfred told her, “We did note your battle with the individual who hurled fireballs about. That was rather impressive.”
Alex added, “Well, Danielle Atron has escaped from prison and has her powers back, so she may be able to fly by now.”
Batman snarled, “The part about her powers wasn’t released to the public.”
Alex shrugged. “We dosed her pretty hard with antidote, so we thought we had her. But she may have dosed herself with GC-161 and then antidote dozens of times until she got the power set she wanted, so she may be pretty resistant to the stuff by now.”
“And her powers are …”
Alex explained, “Mine. Lightning blasts, maybe more powerful than I can do. Telekinesis, probably a lot more powerful than mine. And the shapeshifting into a silver blob. She doesn’t have the practice with it that I do. If she figures out that flight is as easy as applying telekinesis to yourself, then she’ll be flying, too. I was a complete moron. It took me four years to work that out. When I recruited Acid Burn and showed her my powers, she thought of it in like a minute.”
Batman asked, “And what am I supposed to do if Danielle Atron or some of her minions attack my city?”
Alex told him, “That’s what the SRI is there for. Just call Jack. He can have someone here in an hour or two with antidote. And you can try it on me, if you ever need to.”
Batman growled, “That makes me doubt that it would work on you.”
Alex just shrugged. She sort of suspected she might get a Danielle reaction. Complete loss of powers, and then they might come back fully over the span of a couple weeks. But there was no way of telling except trying it out, and she didn’t want to risk losing her powers forever, just when people really needed her the most.
Her tPhone buzzed, so she popped it out and flipped it to speakerphone. “Terawatt here.”
It was Jack. “Hey, Tera, I just wanted to call in and make sure Mister Paine wasn’t being a royal pain to you.”
She rolled her eyes. “I have it on speakerphone.”
“Cool! Is he as suspicious about us as you thought?”
She said in mock exhaustion, “Yes, Jack. Maybe even more so. But he’s got a little op he needs help on —”
“I do not.”
“— even though he won’t admit it, so I’m going to go help him out, and then I’ll meet you at the tarmac.”
Jack said, “And good call on the Poison Pill. Her real name is Dr. Pamela Lillian Isley, radical ecobiologist and plant geneticist and plant-o-philiac. We have no idea what she did to herself, or to those plants, but that green coloring isn’t Rit dye. And she no longer has fingerprints, so Billy is freaking about that.”
Batman growled, “Dendrophilia is a recognized paraphilia. It’s an unnatural form of sexual arousal to trees. It’s unlikely that’s what Dr. Isley actually has.”
Jack went on, “So guess who Pammie’s old major prof was. She had two, I betcha can’t guess one of ’em.”
She groaned. “Oh, no, not Maggie Walsh!”
Jack smirked so much she could hear it over the phone line. “Yep! And you know what else? I’d love a couple of those bat-grapple gun systems, if you’ve got extras. Action Girl would go ape for them. I’ll tell her they’re called bat-ples. Or brapples.”
Batman protested, “They take a great deal of practice and hand-eye coordination to use effectively, not to mention a great deal of upper body strength.”
Jack laughed. “You do know we’re talking Action Girl here. There’s a picture of her next to the phrase ‘hand-eye coordination’ in the encyclopedia.”
Alex frowned. “Don’t exaggerate.”
Jack insisted, “Well, there should be. We all know she’s faster than Batman, stronger than him, and probably has much better hand-eye coordination. Plus, she’s half his weight. And Acid Burn showed her Mortal Kombat, so you know she’d use the things as weapons, too.”
Batman coldly asked, “Doesn’t putting these children on the front lines of a deadly battle bother you?”
Jack dropped the silly act. “Hell, yeah, it bothers me. Action Girl’s only sixteen. She shouldn’t be thinking of anything rougher than cheerleader practice and getting the boy she likes to take her to the next dance. Instead, she gets to worry about whether her DNA predisposes her toward really hideous diseases, some of which might not even be human diseases, or if she can control her muscle memory enough not to kill someone who just walks up behind her and taps her on the shoulder. Or half a dozen other supremely nasty issues. I could no more keep her out of stuff like this than I could beat her in a footrace.”
Alex told Batman, “And there’s no way he could keep me out of these things. I was already superheroing a long time before his officers contacted me. Klar’s the only one he could keep out of stuff, and Klar’s eighteen already. Plus Klar is now friends with Jack’s son, so if Jack wasn’t treating Klar right, he’d be in big trouble on the home front.”
Jack added, “And my girlfriend would kick my ass, electronically speaking.”
Alfred stopped the truck. “We’re here.”
Jack asked, “Hey, is that Alfred Pennyworth up there?”
“Sir? Do I know you?”
Jack said, “No, but I asked Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson about you, and he said you were a hell of a good SIS agent back in the day, you should look him up the next time you’re in Merry Old, and there was no way he’d let me peek at your files.”
That reminded Alex of something. “Oh, by the way Alfred, if you still have some contacts in the Double Ohs, would you put a word in for me? They’re trying to press a new guy into taking on 007, and he doesn’t want to. If you could ask them to lay off, I’d really appreciate it.”
Alfred stiffly said, “Excuse me miss, but if I had such contacts, I certainly could not use them to interfere with internal SIS matters that I left a long time ago.”
Batman growled, “Do you just stick your nose in everywhere you can?”
Jack chortled, “It’ll seem like it until you get used to her.”
Alex glared at the phone, but answered Batman. “No more than you do, buster.”
Jack snickered at her answer. “Hey, she’s got mad skillz, as the cool kids say these days, so let her show you what she can do. She’s saved my life a few times, and the lives of my people, not to mention the lives of everyone in Rome and Tokyo and Philadelphia and all of Arizona, so you may need to have her on your speed dial someday. Hey, Tera, I’ll see you when you wrap up, and I’ll make sure we’ve got plenty of food for the trip to go see Janet. Over and out.”
Alex put her tPhone away, and she waited for the inevitable questions.
Sure enough, Batman asked, “Plenty of food? Trip to see Janet? You’re using code phrases?”
Alex explained with a sigh, “More like smart-aleck phrases. My big weakness is the calories I use up when I wield my powers. So I need to eat like three teenagers. Jack knows this, and tries to keep food handy when I’m around. And the trip to see Janet? It’s a jet trip back to his main base. To see Dr. Janet Fraiser, who wants to give me a full check-up since I haven’t had a regular check-up since I was twelve. Once I got my powers, my biochemistry changed drastically, and I was afraid to let a doctor find out. If you spend any time talking to Jack, you’ll find out he’s pretty snarky for a military guy that Acid Burn says is probably going to make general in the next two to five years if he doesn’t die in action first. Or get court-martialed for smarting off at some general.”
Alfred cleared his throat. “We are now in the driveway of a house whose back yard abuts that of Mister Falcone. So it is only a hundred fifty yards due south to a secure wall.”
Alex said, “Perfect. Batman, it’s time to put a little trust in me.”
“What does that mean?”
She smiled at him. “You’ve seen my silvery morph. I can take other people in it, and I can move at about forty miles an hour, and I’m pretty much not noticeable in the dark. I’ve gotten past guards and dogs before. All you have to do is open the car door and take my hands.”
Batman obviously didn’t trust her, but he also wasn’t going to show any fear. He stuck his hands out, and she took them in hers. His eyes widened as she pulled him into her morph, and then she was puddling out of the truck and puddling across the grass toward the high brick wall.
It looked more like a wall you’d see around a prison. Really high, really solid, no handholds, and huge coils of razorwire all along the top. Ick. She puddled right up the wall, oozed between two sharp strands, and zoomed down the wall. Then she puddled across the ground to the house. She puddled under the back door and rushed up the wall to the ceiling to avoid security cameras. Then she oozed into the air conditioning ducts and zoomed around until she found Falcone’s office. The guy was giving some underling a bunch of orders, including more stuff about finding out what the Bat was up to, because the guy was bad for business. Wow, that was a surprise. Not.
Alex oozed out through a floor vent, snuck under Falcone’s desk, and used her telekinesis to break his phone line and the wires going to the big emergency button Falcone had under his desk. Alex moved through the ducts until she was in the hallway outside the office door. There were two goons on duty outside the door. Once the underling was long gone, she slipped out of the duct and zapped both guards unconscious. She let Batman out of the morph, and she whispered, “I’ll be right here. Just step outside the door and I’ll grab you, and we’ll take off.”
He stepped over the unconscious goons and closed the door behind him. Only a few minutes later, he stepped out of the room and stuck a rubber wedge under the door so it wouldn’t open. She grabbed him and they vanished into the ductwork again.
They were back at the truck only a couple of minutes later, and no one had seen them despite the big alarm that Falcone had sounded. Alfred drove away quietly and waited a couple minutes before he asked, “Did all go as planned?”
Batman growled, “Falcone didn’t want to cooperate with the Bat, but I made him see the light. He’s backing away from the call-girl ring, and Batman will be closing it down over the next several days by personally putting each of the girls out of business.”
Alex started, “Acid Burn could just —”
“No. I have this under control,” he snapped.
“And a major crime boss is just gonna knuckle under, when he can get a bunch of big, important names and blackmail them.”
He growled, “Falcone is scum. But he’s brutally protective of his family. And it would not be good for his family if word got out that his son and daughter sometimes use the same prostitute. At the same time. Or that his daughter is a lesbian whose violent psychosexual proclivities would land her in prison if she didn’t have daddy’s protection.”
Eww and mega-eww. When Willow had said those guys were icky, Alex hadn’t realized just how icky they could be.
He added, “The Batman is going to have a few chats with some important people and tell them they were nearly blackmailed by a crime lord, and he may let some call-girls know that this would be an excellent time to retire.”
Alex was checking her mapping app on her tPhone, so she had a pretty good idea when the truck was as close to the air force base as it was going to get. She finally said, “I’ll just get out here. Thanks for the ride. Acid Burn will have our phone numbers and email addys and stuff to you by now. So even if you don’t want to work with the SRI, or with me, just remember you can call me for emergency help if you ever need it.” She turned her head. “And Alfred, you can call me or Acid Burn, too. If something ever happens to Bruce Paine or Batman and you need an emergency double, I have a guy in mind who’s about the right size, and he’s trustworthy, and he can even do the martial arts stuff.”
She used her telekinesis to slide open the side door of the truck, and she leapt out into the night.
* * *
Batman watched her fly off, and he slammed the side door closed. He grumbled to Alfred, “She was certainly … irritating.”
Alfred carefully said, “Yes, sir. But I noted her powers are quite remarkable. Perhaps you should consider using her assistance on occasion.”
He growled, “I need to learn a lot more about her. If she really did meet a version of me from another universe, she may have information about me that I don’t even know about myself. That could be … problematic.”
Alfred asked, “Did she give you a quid pro quo?”
“Yes, she revealed her secret identity, and gave me access to her private hacker, and gave me access to the SRI.”
Alfred dryly pointed out, “I did notice that the SRI seemed rather unconcerned that you knew about them.”
He said, “That may be indicative, or it may be a double bluff, or it may be pure arrogance. We’ll have to see which it is.”
Alfred added, “And you might have to deal with a man who uses humor as a weapon.”
Batman groaned. “That would be all I need. Some laughing joker who pesters me mercilessly.”
He flipped open a control panel on the wall opposite the side door, and he flipped several switches. He smiled to himself when he saw that the tiny bug he had planted on her was signaling her flightpath. She was aiming for the closest military base with an airstrip.
He listened in as she landed. She said, “Hi, Jack! Hi, everybody! Oh, crud, that bruise looks terrible! Oh, wait, don’t say anything yet.”
Then there was roughly half a minute of silence, until he heard Colonel Jack O’Neill say, “Yep, you were right again, Tera. One tiny little bat-shaped bug, right on your boot.”
Terawatt told him, “Yeah, the other Batman did that to his girlfriend, and he even trusts her. So I figured he’d tag me the first chance he got.”
Jack said, “Looks like a nice design. I think I’ll turn it over to Billy and his little pals.”
Klar said, “He really hates it when you call him Billy.”
Jack laughed. “Well, DUH, if he liked it, I wouldn’t bother. When he gets that stick out and he stops treating you like you don’t know anything, I’ll think about switching to his real name.” Then Jack’s voice grew so loud that Batman knew Jack was holding the bug up to his lips. Jack said, “Say goodnight, Gracie.”
Action Girl replied with a Scandinavian accent, “Goodnight Gracie.” And the bug went dead.
Alfred dryly mentioned, “It appears that Terawatt does know you surprisingly well, sir.”
Batman sat back and pored over the data that ‘Acid Burn’ had decrypted for him. The information on the Falcones had already proven incredibly useful. The rest was mainly going to tell him who was likely to be vulnerable to blackmail in the future.
And now he was going to have to be concerned about supervillains, too. This was his city, and he was not going to allow supervillains to take it over, no matter what. Even if he had to call on Terawatt for help some day.
He rode with Alfred in the secret elevator, up to the secret room in the penthouse. All he had to do now was take off the uniform and go to bed. And take a couple of ibuprofens as well, because Bane hit like a semi truck. He really wanted to know just what Action Girl was, because there was no way she was a normal human. Bruce Paine was at the very high end of the scale on athleticism and kinesthetics, and had always been the strongest kid in his grade thanks to Alfred’s training, but Action Girl weighed perhaps half of what he did, and she could probably bench-press Bane. He had a feeling that Terawatt would tell him, if he just put his trust in her first. But trust was a difficult thing to earn.
He stepped out of the elevator and began removing his costume, while Alfred hung up the components and set garments aside for cleaning. Once he was down to his shorts, he reached out for his robe. It was handed to him.
Alfred had already stepped out with the laundry.
He started to react, when Julie’s voice came from the closet behind him. “I wondered what the heck you were up to, because men? Don’t treat women that nice when they’re drunk. At first I figured you were gay, but you never looked at guys that way when you were drunk. And then I watched you. You don’t really drink, do you? You always find a way to get more booze, and then go through the motions, and then ditch it somewhere. So then I realized I was the one passing out every date. You were drugging me.”
He glared at her. But he had just ruined the cover he had spent years building. He might need to call Terawatt after all. In the next ten minutes.
Julie continued, “Tonight I didn’t drink the soda Alfred brought me, and I just pretended to fall asleep. You guys are not like normal guys, you know that? So I watched you turn into Batman, and then I watched you meet up with the flying woman — that was Terawatt, wasn’t it? — and I just waited for you to get back.”
“What do you want?” He couldn’t help the Batman’s bass growl from creeping into his voice.
Julie said, “I thought about that while you were gone. The first thing I thought of? Blackmail. Not a very nice person, am I? And then I thought, why would I want to do that? You’re the only person who’s out there, really trying to help people like me, or the other women in the ring. You’re the one out there, stopping Falcone and the other mob bosses. So I figured it out. I want to help.”
He growled, “You’re the third person tonight who’s said that to me. It’s becoming a trend.”
“Who else?” she wondered.
He admitted, “Terawatt, and one of her team. She has an invisible man who was moving behind the scenes, taking out Bane’s minions.” He wasn’t going to reveal more about Terawatt and her team. That wasn’t his secret to reveal. He was going to figure out who Klar and Action Girl really were, just because he needed to know what kind of people they were. But he wasn’t going to tell anyone. Klar would be easy, because he had to be a teen who was no longer at that high school in Bloomington-Normal. But Action Girl was presumably Northern European, and he had no starting point to search for her, other than Terawatt’s trip to Berlin.
“So you do need help, and I can help you with your cover story. You’re a real hero, and you should get the kind of help you deserve.”
He growled, “Julie Chandler, this could turn out to be dangerous.”
She rolled her eyes. “Like being a call-girl with the Falcones hovering over me like vultures isn’t a lot more dangerous? Do you have any idea what Sofia Falcone does to the ‘girls’ she hires? Some of ’em can’t walk back out of that mansion the next morning. The whole ring lives in fear of being the girl who gets that next call.”
He told her, “I dealt with that tonight. The Falcones are going to back away from the ring, and Sofia Falcone is not going to be allowed anywhere near any of you anymore, and I am going to dissolve the call-girl ring over the next two weeks, including warning off all your clients.”
Julie insisted, “Most of them can’t afford to ‘retire’. Hell, I can’t afford to retire, and I haven’t really started.”
He said, “You’ll buy them out, one by one. I’ll make sure you have the cash to do it. They won’t know I’m behind it.”
She nodded. “That’s workable. It’s not like they’re BFFs who get together to chitchat all the time. Most of them want to get enough money and leave the business and never have any contact with the rest of us ever again. But there are plenty of other call-girls in the area, and not all of them have the discretion of our group.”
He nodded back. “All we can do is warn these men who insist on going to prostitutes that they risk being blackmailed or being forced to commit crimes.”
She suggested, “Some of them, you could tell their wives, too, and let the little missus blackmail the guy into not seeking out call-girls anymore.”
He scowled at that idea. It could go wrong in so many ugly ways.
She said, “But I can be your cover story from now on. The brainless bimbo who thinks you’re fun and funny and entertaining. The excuse you use whenever you want to leave a party. And I can help. There have to be people who will talk to me who won’t talk to the Batman or Bruce Paine or any of your minions, like that Malone guy, who has to be on your payroll given how he lined me up with you just when you’re taking the ring down and throwing a spoke into Falcone’s big plans.”
“Don’t worry about Malone,” he muttered. He was going to have to trust her if she was going to be his … colleague in this. He slid into the patois that Malone used. “I goddit all unda control.”
Her jaw dropped open. “Oh. My. Gawd. How many other covers do you have out there?”
He admitted, “Two right now, and Alfred has set up half a dozen others for future use.”
She grinned. “Any of them need a piece of arm candy? Maybe a cheap blonde?”
She had spotted that anyone she impersonated would need to look very different from Julie Chandler. That was a good sign, even if he didn’t want to admit it. He frowned. “I don’t think you’re prepared for undercover work. It’s stressful. It’s dangerous. And you don’t know how to defend yourself.”
She frowned. “Being a call-girl is a lot more stressful and dangerous, and I wouldn’t have anyone at my back if things went desperately wrong. And I do know how to defend myself. Mom made me go through this ‘street fighting self defense’ course, and I also have a brown belt in Brazilian jujitsu. And I can learn more.”
He sighed inwardly. He never would have considered this if he hadn’t had to deal with Terawatt. But it was possible that ‘Alex’ was right and he did need more support. It was also possible that he needed to make some different choices. Some choices that Terawatt and her people would not expect, otherwise they might be able to predict too many of his future moves based on what she knew of that other Batman out there.
He made sure he was speaking again in Bruce Paine’s tones, and he said, “I could use your help. But if you’re going to be working with me, I’m going to want to train you in martial arts.”
She grinned. “That would be great. And I’ve decided I’m going back to mom’s maiden name. From here on out, I’m Julie Madison.”
—
A/N: Julie Madison is the original Batman girlfriend, from way back in the early 1940s comic books. She established the trend of sexy women who get sick and tired of Playboy Bruce and leave him because he won’t better himself. For such a smart guy, Bruce can be a real idiot when he works at it.