Shadows of Angels, part 21, R

[Daughterof_Evil]

-Hello again everybody. It's been awhile since I've last been here, due to some computer problems, and I've had some time to think things over. I believe it is my responsibility at this point to change the rating of this story from PG-13 to R. I have thought this over very well, and I am convinced that the content of this story (both present and future) is of the R rating. I hope this doesn't inconvenience you in any way, and I thank you all for your continuing support of my writing. Thank you.-
***
“ I didn’t expect for it to work so quickly,”

Mullen’s eyes fell to the girl, standing on the emeraldine back yard watching as her mistress played a meaningless game of croquet with several older men. Mlle. La Touga was entertaining three business men today, all of whom were collectively courting her for stock advice. Mullen and the other Intergang members had been reduced to hiding in the guest house.

Lockhardt lowered his hi-tech binoculars. “ Yes, it indeed worked quickly.”

Mullen folded his arms and leaned against the wall, smirking slightly. “ She’s perfectly docile now. Malleable to any order.”

“ Congratulations. You’ve successfully broken her spirit.”

Alerted by the tone he had taken, Mullen stopped smiling. “ Is that digust I hear in your voice?”

The binoculars shattered as they hit the wall, the left lense breaking into pieces. The impact triggered the night vision, and the hollow sockets glowed faint green.

“ Of course I’m disgusted!” yelled Lockhardt. “ Was it your ‘silent partner’s’ idea to torture a twelve year old girl!?”

Mullen put his hands up. “ Lower your voice,”

“ She’s malleable to any order, is she!?” He began to pace the room frantically. “ But what if she’s lost her fighting spirit!? Then where will you be!? All you’ll have then is a robotic maid!”

Mullen kept his resolve, lowering his hands. He looked down at the ground, his eyes hot as glowing embers.

“ So what if it was Luthor’s idea. It sure beat the hell out of the alternative solution. That man put a lot of money into her.”

“ And what of the man she nearly beat to death?”

“ His appendix almost burst. He lost an eye. His jaw is stapled. He’ll live,” Mullen was much too nonchalant. “ He’s just lucky she didn’t have the katana. She could have hacked him to pieces.”

“ But she’s being held accountable for things other than that, right? Like the deletion of Asmodeus’ computer work,” implied Lockhardt.

Mullen nodded.

“ Fraulein Behm must not be very happy about this deal.”

“ She’s livid. In fact, she went into town just to get away from her. As you know, she was the most avid supporter of X’s execution.”

Lockhardt nodded in recognition, stroking the beard of his snowy goatee.

“ So when will you test her?” he asked, still not looking at him.

“ As soon as possible.”
***
“ Do you like it?”

X stared into the mirror, into the face of a girl impossibly pale and green-eyed. Her hair, instead of being in its usual nest of gelled spikes, had been styled by the Mlle. as she sat there like a dress-up doll. Now her short dark hair had been straightened out and formed into a dome over the back of her head, the front of it coming in a solid wave over her right eye. It was shorter in the back, anyway, showing the nape of her graceful white neck.

“ Yes, it is very nice. Thank you,” she murmured softly.

“ And you like the earring?” Mlle.’s finger came up to X’s left ear lobe and touched the small teardrop pearl bauble hanging there. For some reason, there was only that one earring; her other ear was empty.

“ Yes. It’s quite nice.”

Mlle. swirled the chair around so that X faced her. She had discarded the giant white hat she’d been wearing out in the sun with the businessmen, but the white frilled dress remained. X had been strategically dressed in a black short-sleeved frock with a wide scoop collar of grey Chantilly lace, a gigantic grey silk rose pinned against her collarbone.

“ I bet you feel much better now, pet,” Mlle. said, smiling widely. Every pearly tooth in her mouth was set perfectly.

“ About what, Mademoiselle?” questioned the girl.

“ You don’t want to go about and fight anymore?”

She blinked pleasantly. Her face was completely calm. Utterly empty of thought or trouble.

“ Why would I want to do that, Mademoiselle?”

Her mistress’s smile grew wider, it was now quite possible to see back to her perfect molars. Her lips gleamed oil-black with the most fashionable of anti-social cosmetics.

“ That is a good thing, mon petit X,”

She took her hand and tugged her up from her chair, trailing her behind her like a dark ghost bound to her forever. They traveled from Mlle.’s private bathroom, through the room with its impeccably made bed that had been tossed to oblivion by the lovers that morning, and into the hallway.

“ Asmodeus is angry with me for telling him to stay in the guest house,” pouted the French woman, the actual sticking out of her bottom lip visible in her voice. “ He’s locked himself in his basement.”

They trundled down to the first floor and took the dark back hallway that led to the kitchen. Laying a finger over her lips, Mlle. put her hand on the wrought iron knob and opened up the door, disappearing into the dark. The bluish haze of light at the end of the stairs beckoned to X, but she could not force herself to go on. Mlle. trespassed into the blackness on her own.

The click even she could hear from the top of the stairway. She rushed down and turned on the ceiling light.

Asmodeus sat at his chair in his company of computers, a Magnum glowing silvery as its barrel pointed directly at Mlle.’s head. She was astounded, standing there with her eyes wide and her chest heaving with breath. There was no expression on Asmodeus’s face. His grey t-shirt was stained with a halo of sweat around the neckline. Coolly, he replaced the Magnum in the shoulder rig strapped across his back.

“ ****, Asmodeus!” Mlle. cried.

“ I’m sorry,” He sounded genuine. “ I thought you were somebody else, sneaking up on me like that.”

He stood and opened his arms, and Mlle. raced into them, holding him tight. He looked over her shoulder and stared directly at X.

“ I thought she was a maid now,” he said coldly.

“ She’s okay now. She’s my assistant. She can answer the phone,” Mlle. said gently, her voice muffled by her lover’s shoulder.

He let go of her, and, still grasping her hand, strolled up to X. Mlle. tugged on his arm.

“ Oh, Asmodeus, leave her alone,” she cooed.

He leaned over just a bit, so he was eye to eye with the girl. She could see every miniscule scar that marred his handsome face. She wondered absently how many pieces of debris they had had to pick out of his skin.

He wagged a finger at her. “ You be a good girl, eh?” he advised, his London accent syrupy and crude.

Mlle. laughed behind him. “ Yes,” promised X.

He smiled. His smile was something cool, silky, something that could strangulate hope from a living being. It was the smile he’d smiled at her the day he had unlocked her from the box they had put her in. The one with the chicken wire.

“ Good girl,” he said, standing up straight. He pushed past her, tugging along Mlle., who grabbed her hand as she passed. The chain of human connection moved along upstairs, past the kitchens, past Lockhardt, who was speaking into a cell phone in the hallway.

Mlle. let go of her right outside the bedroom. “ You go and help the cook with dinner, okay?”

X nodded and made her merry way down the hall as the doors shut behind her. Lockhardt pulled her aside once she’d passed him.

“ Are you doing well, Little X?” he asked.

“ Yes, quite, sir,”

He nodded. She continued to the kitchen.

The day was placid, predictable. X bounced from person to person doing everything they told her to. She baked bread, made phone calls, folded clothes, broke into a sixty pound safe with several bobby pins, and helped Faust Uberstahl to electronically count and sort bills that added up to probably ninety thousand American dollars.

Later in the day, after Asmodeus had retired to his basement to continue with his work, X received word that Mlle. needed her. She went upstairs and found her mistress in her underwear trying to find her wayward earring under the bed. X found the tiny gold hoop tossed behind the bedside lamp and laid out an avocado green shantung silk pantsuit for her to wear to a business conference in the city. The sun was beginning to falter in the sky. It was safe for X to venture out. She had been told by Mullen to avoid the sun for a few days to keep from overheating again.

After Mlle. left, X was alone to fill the time with her own means. The windows along the hallway outside Mlle.’s bedroom were all open, letting in the sunlight and the faint wafting scent of crushed hay. The birds were silent. As she strode past the last window in the hall, she heard a tight popping sound, and something very quickly flew by her head. She turned and stared at the tiny dart imbedded in the wall, its end tufted with a white feather. X pulled it out and stared at its razor tip. A droplet of a clear, yellowish liquid condensed on the end and dripped off, thick as syrup.

Within seconds, three more darts had very quickly zipped past her face and stuck in the wall in a neat row, their feathers trembling. The fourth X caught between her two first fingers as it tried to hit her in the eye. She hit the opposite wall and crept up next to the window, clasping the poison dart gently in her hand.

She whirled around and jumped up onto the thin window sill, crouching as she stuck her head out the window. A person in a black suit was clambering down the branch of a thick, ancient oak outside the house. She climbed out the window and jumped in a graceful arc to land on one of the tree’s sturdiest limbs. The leaves didn’t even tremble, despite her weight.

Holding the dart between her first two fingers, she swept her arm wide, aiming down. The assassin turned upward and knocked it away at the last possible second with a blonde wooden blow gun, loosening his grip and scraping down the trunk to hit another branch. X took a leap and landed on another branch farther below, the soles of her boots grating on the tree bark. Without stopping, she took another jump, landing on the same branch as the assassin. He stared at her. His hair was blonde and spiky above a mask tied over his face. He grappled with the blowgun tied to his waist. A decisive kick sent it into the cloud of leaves surrounding them.

“ Who are you?” she asked, crouching on the branch. It swayed with her weight. The slight groaning of the straining wood was low and quiet, barely audible, like the beating of a heart.

“ I-I...Mullen sent me,” he replied. “ Hey, I don’t think this branch can hold both of us,”

The second he finished his last word, the groaning of the limb stopped, replaced by a sharp crack and the bright smell of broken wood. An arrow-true neural impulse sent X flying up and into a backwards somersault as the branch snapped from the tree trunk and cascaded towards the ground thirty feet below.

She landed feet-first on the plush grass miliseconds before the assassin and the tree limb crashed into the turf.

The assassin, contorted among the twisted remains of his former perch, looked up into the sky to see the young girl standing over him, the sunlight creating a halo around her dark form.

“ I asked who you were,” she said.

He groaned and writhed his malformed right arm, not answering.

“ His name is Malcom Tate, and he’s in reconnaissance,” said Mullen behind her. She turned and looked at him as he approached, calm and orderly. He bent over Malcom and ripped the mask off of him, revealing a face with sharp, high cheekbones and eyes so bright blue they shined white. He squinted into the waning sunlight.

Mullen handed her the mask. “ You are still talented,”

She bowed to him. “ Thank you, sir,”

He snapped his fingers next to her face. “ Now go inside and wait for your mistress,”

Obligingly, she did as she was told, retreating inside as the would-be assassin tried to pull himself out of the wreckage of wood and leaves. For the first time in an entire day, she could feel something. And all the drugs and torture in the world couldn’t take it away from her.

[Panther]

I know I'm in grave danger of repeating myself buuuuut....


Wowie!!!! Oh wow DofE! What great description! And how the plot thickens! (I know have said that before but I gotta say it). I am VERY worrid at this point for both X's mental and physical health. Any chance of some memories in teh near future? PLease please plesae? Or at least the news from Gothom?

Well, must go, keep it up

Kara

[Susie]

I don't know if I feel glad for X and the fact that, for the first time with Mlle, she wasn't being tortured or comanded...it was like she was a regular person- human. And then I began to realize (even before I read the part with the assassain) that she could probably never be normal again- not with the past and the present that she has been subjected to. She is human, but barely and with everythingthat Mullen and other do to her the human part of her is slowly being killed. I enjoyed the part with Mlle because she was human and she was a young little girl. That's one reason why I enjoyed her with Robin because she became a young person and not a killing machine.

I can't wait to see what happens with her now that she is supposed to be human and yet she still has outside forces that aren't allowing her to be completely that.

You really just keep spinning a wonderful tale that I can't wait to read more of.

[Daughterof_Evil]

I'm very touched that X's condition worries you, and I remember months ago you said something similar, about how all of the drugs can't be having a good effect on her system. I took that to heart. It's almost like she's a real person, like you or me, and this is her real life. I've pasted into the storyline several things I've read in books and magazines and seen on news programs about child slavery across the world. It's shocking to see parents sometimes selling their children for 20 or 30 dollars because they don't have enough to buy food. I wondered what it would be like if one of these children was, say, sold into battle slavery instead of as prostitutes or maids.

Thank you for your kind words. They mean so much to me. And I can't wait til you return to Prince Charming, though I can be patient for now. You just left it in such an awkward spot, I get anxious every time I think about it. Thanks again.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thank you for what you said. I wanted to humanize X a tiny bit, to really emphasize the tragedy of what's been happening to her. It really helps one to understand some of her decisions later on. I was watching The Manchurian Candidate last night, and I realized even before it was over that the main characters were almost exactly like the Intergang members, even though these guys were in the US Army. They were hypnotized into doing something that could physically and mentally destroy them, and committed to ideals and actions that weren't exactly theirs. It's very easy to underestimate the price of human life when you see it thrown away all the time. So that's why I gave X a short breather from battle. She needed to experience life on a level that didn't include killing.

Thanks for what you said. It was very kind. I'm glad you enjoy the story.

[Panther]

DofE

I agree its good to have X expereince life outside the battlefeild so to speack. I think, though, that she showed more sighns of being human before the post before last when she nearly killed a soldier. She did it becuase she was upset, angry, envoius - she was showing EMOTION. Something robots don't have (with teh exception of a few of Asimov's). However, I'd say she's headin dangerously close to cyborg teratory. Something I've found in SF is: robots are tools - cyborgs are loose cannons. If you're interested in 'how to make a cyborg' cheack out Kage Baker's Company series - a series of books about time traveling cyborgs. She puts in a lot of descriptions on the changes the Dr. Frankenstiens playing God make on their pateints(sp).

Thanks for being so patient about Prince Charming. I really can't get Olivia out of my head. The Midwinter's have developed into such interesting characters I think I might be tempted to write another story about them. I wonder if anyone else would be interested in haering more of them? (I hope so, I've gota really good idea)

later

[Daughterof_Evil]

I actually love SF, especially in anime and things. I was seriously considering getting the Kage Baker series a few months ago but forgot about it until now. Thanks for the reminder! And I checked out some Asimov last night at the bookstore, but got blinded by the William Gibson stuff. You should read him, he's very talented and he pretty much started the cyberpunk movement in SF. I just finished one novel of his called Neuromancer. You would like it, I think, because it's mainly about robots and how intelligent we could design them. There are these two AIs, Wintermute and Neuromancer, who have been built by this very prestigious family company. They are exactly the same, except on one plain: Neuromancer can feel actual emotion, while Wintermute has to "steal" emotions by patterning himself after a selected person. It's very good, kind of dark and gritty.

Speaking of weird, twisted anomalies of nature, have you ever read Brave New World? I'm currently on that, seeing as how politically charged it is these days. Do you have any other suggestions for SF reading? I'm relatively new to the genre and for now I'm just winging it! Thanks!

P.S. If you really like SF written by female authors, I suggest reading Women of Wonder, both the Contemporary and Classics. They're collections of short SF stories and really good!

[Daughterof_Evil]

-Hello again, kiddies. I've noticed that more people have flooded to the fanfic center and some of you have returned to writing the stories we all thought were lost forever. Good for you! But some of you (glares at Panther) haven't picked it up again. Oh well, I'll wait patiently. In the meantime, read this installment of Shadows of Angels. But I have to mention quickly that it has some graphic violence and the ever-present drug use, so please use caution.-
***
In the innumerable days she had spent at the La Touga maison since being taken from her intensive psychological torture, X had never once thought about missions, or assassinations, or even America. Her mind was locked in the present, never worrying or wondering about time or what would happen to her in the future. The days went by uncounted. For now, she was Mademoiselle Cerise La Touga’s pet, and nothing else mattered other than pleasing her mistress.

That was why she kept it a secret the night a man -a redhead with sunglasses- visited Mlle. after everyone was asleep. It took X a lot of thinking to remember his name -Langston Matthews-, and when she did, it brought back a flood of lost memories from the LexCorp lab. Mr. Luthor. Danru. Dr. Vale. Umberto Calivez. Professor Peterson.

When Langston Matthews silently left, so early in the morning that the sky was already tinged pink with the dawn, Mlle. brought X into her room and sat her down on a chair.

“ Little X,” she began, “ you must not tell Asmodeus that another man came here tonight, okay?”

X nodded. “ Yes, Mlle.”

Mlle. tugged her blue silk bathrobe together over her tan chest, looking around as if she were frightened. “ You really must not,” she reminded her. “ Even if he tortures you,”

“ Yes, Mlle.,” X swore again.

That night, Langston Matthews returned. That was the night when the fields, gone silver in the moonlight, glowed with the light of fifty flashlights bobbing through the hay. X watched them from an open window outside Mlle.’s bedroom. It was the exodus of Intergang members, leaving for Paris under the cover of dark. Some would be taking a train (whether as cargo or passengers), others would be stealing cars. Still others would be taking planes, though the risk was high.

“ We will be leaving soon as well,” Mullen told her truthfully the next morning, as he stood with her in the empty kitchen. The cool muzzle of the lancet lay against the skin of her right arm.

“ We will go to Paris?” she asked.

He nodded, pulled the trigger of the lancet gun. A flood of Macchina wound through her veins, triggering flashes of violent memory. Her thoughts began to slur. In the haze of her mind, she could see the boy in red, bleeding.

“ Robin,” she murmured, still lost in the drug.

Mullen’s eyes went wide. He took her shoulders in his large hands and shook her, once.

“ What was that?” he asked.

A single bead of sweat ran from her temple and down her face to her chin. Her head fell back, and the drop of sweat fell to her collar.

“ What did you just say!?” he demanded.

She whispered something inaudible. He let go of her, she staggered back a foot or so. Mullen reached inside his vest and pulled out an old-fashioned syringe and a vial, then prepped it full of clear solution. X rubbed her eyes with her palms, muttering.

He grabbed her right arm and stabbed her in the wrist with the needle, injecting its contents in one motion. He threw the syringe into the chrome trashcan next to the woodblock.

X’s eyes began to droop. “ Mullen-sensei, what was that?”

He touched her face lightly. “ Just something, my dear,”

Her right arm spasmed first, then her shoulder, then the entire right side of her body went into an involuntary seizure. She fell forwards, shaking violently, and Mullen caught her up in his arms and charged out of the kitchen to put her to bed.

Later, she wouldn’t remember anything. She would only wake up in the supply closet that doubled as her bedroom, the door closed. Mlle. sat on a bucket as if it were a throne, filing her burgundy nails and blowing on them every few seconds.

“ Mistress?” she muttered, sitting up and rubbing her head. Her skull was fractured with a flash migraine that pulsed at an artery just below the surface of her brain.

Mlle.’s eyes clicked over without her turning her head. Her mouth was still open in an O from blowing the file dust from her nails. She grinned at her.

“ Are you feeling any better? Mullen said you fainted,” she said.

X stared at her. She could sense the Macchina circulating in her system. Though she had slept off most of its effects, its presence was still represented by the pull of her muscles.

“ I must have,” she said, throwing her legs over the side of the cot. “ How long was I out?”

Mlle. shrugged, standing. She was dressed in a black sleeveless polo top and a khaki linen skirt, her manicured feet strapped into tiny sandals.

“ It’s been a long day, who can tell?” she asked, opening the closet door. The hallway was empty. There was no busy sound of Intergang members bustling through the bottom story of the house, no smell of freshly fired gunpowder or the inevitable musk of tobacco smoke. The mansion was desolate.

“ Everybody cleared out,” said Mlle. leading X downstairs by the hand. “ The only ones still here are Mullen and Asmodeus,”

Mlle. pulled X into the dining hall, its green wallpapered walls decorated with massive tapestries, the room dominated by the gigantic, ancient dining table. It was twelve feet in length, enough for fifteen guests. Mlle. plunked her down at one of the chairs.

“ Nevig wanted me to tell you how much he appreciated your work for him,” she said. “ He had to leave very early this morning with the last wave of refugees.”

X bowed her head into her lap. “ It was an honor serving him,”

Mlle. smiled at her in a funny way, without showing her teeth. “ It is so like you to say that.”

She strolled patiently from the room, in the direction of the wine cellar, and didn’t come back.

The housekeepers had been dismissed for the day, and the manor was silent, as if only ghosts lived there. The grandfather clock somewhere in the deep, rich recesses of the house chimed out the hour and half-hour. Every so often, there was a sound from upstairs, like the scratching of an animal, but X ignored it. The afternoon came in the dining room windows and laid down across the room in thick sheets of golden light.

As she had been told time and time before, X left the room for a cooler portion of the house. She found herself, inexplicably, wandering through the mansion, her fingertips brushing the moulded walls as if to keep her balance or direction. She placed one patent-leather pump foot in front of the other, guaging her steps. Her mind was still fuzzy with Macchina. She stumbled several times, always catching herself on a doorframe or a wall. Cold droplets of sweat gathered on her forehead, though for what reason she couldn’t tell.

She finally stopped at the main staircase and sat down on the final step, wiping her temple on her lettuce-edged black linen sleeve. She stared down into the runner carpet, a mosaic of blue and red and green woven into a vineyard pattern. The white tassles of the rug were slightly yellow, the braids just barely frayed. She couldn’t understand why it mattered to her, why that particular detail of the rug stood out in her mind.

Through some auditory miracle, she heard the soft, gentle sound coming from Mlle.’s chambers. She sat up straight and craned her neck, then slowly began to ascend the stairs. Strangely enough, the fingers of her right hand began to tingle slightly.

As she went, the sound became more distinct, and it spelled itself out the way Mullen’s words had been translated at the bottom of the scenes of tortuous violence. It was a beckoning, a call. Somebody was sweetly, melodiously calling her from upstairs, and she staggered up the steps to reach them. In some hideously demented part of her brain, she was convinced it was the boy in red.

X stopped in the hallway outside Mlle.’s room. The curtains of the hall windows had been pulled closed. The door was open just enough to let a crevice of warm, yellow light out into the hall.

“ X...?”

She paused, her own breath stuck in her throat.

“ X...”

She took a step forward, her foot making a dead, heavy sound on the carpet.

“ X, could you come in here please?”

The voice, she now remembered, regaining her senses, was that of Asmodeus, the tang of his misused British accent hanging on every word. He was quiet, addressing her in a tone he had never once used with her before. Obediantly, she went inside.

Asmodeus stood against the far wall, his lithe form silhouetted against the white of the window. He looked over at her, dejected, sad, yet a casual, slightly insane smile laid about his face as though plastered there by accident.

“ X,” he said, nearly giggling, “ I have killed your mistress,”

He dropped the knife, and it hit the ground with a splatter of red. The bed had been stripped, the pillows lying in a heap against the headboard, the comforter tossed in a corner, the sheets crumpled in a bleach-white wave down the side of the mattress. Swathed in them upon the floor, like a newborn child, was Mlle., her eyes open and lips parted. One naked arm lay stretched out toward the window as if still entreating her killer for mercy. A circular stain of red surrounded her body. The bedsheets were dyed bright crimson.

X stumbled backwards. Asmodeus took a step toward her. She turned and found herself suddenly running, tripping, falling down the stairs. A blank flash of razor sharp pain assaulted the nerves in her chest. Still, she picked herself up off the ground and kept running. She blasted through the breakfast room door, out onto the porch, cleared the edge in a leap a gazelle couldn’t have mimicked. She hit the ground on all fours, jumping to her feet. This entire time, she was distinctly aware that Asmodeus was chasing her. She could hear his breathing, his footsteps pounding behind her. Blind with animal fear, she swerved into the endless fields of golden hay that had trapped her days before, seemingly in another life.

Sweat poured off her face, and as she crashed into the yellow hay, microscopic fragments of it took flight and flew into her eyes. The pain in her chest increased to a simple malfunction in her pain receptors, transferring the sensation into the actual beating of her heart, the agony throbbing along every main vein and artery. The millions of different stimuli hit her in a barrage, but her battle-worn mind absorbed it and used the excess endorphins for fuel to evade her captor.

Her foot hit a snag in the grass. She stumbled, tried to right herself. It was time enough for the one-hundred fifty pounds of her persuer to smash into her, grappling for her. She hit the hay on her side. A ninja impulse forced her to scramble for a weapon. Asmodeus’s frame towered over her, haloed in sunlight. X’s fist closed on a piece of polished wood and in a moment she jumped, swung and stabbed.

All but one of the pitch fork’s tines missed him completely; the third impaled his upper arm. He stared at her. The brown eyes were clouded, vacant. Was it remorse, pain, rage?

He knocked the bloody pitch fork away, falling over. He grabbed her as they fell into the grass, a bloom of grey birds rising from the field at the startling noise. His heavy arm hit X in the chest and pinned her to the ground. She shut her eyes, knotted her fists. She would kill him if she needed to.

Minutes passed. She pried her eyes open. Asmodeus lay on his side next to her in the grass, his right arm crossed over her chest, hand holding her shoulder. His eyes were open. He was breathing. His face was less than four inches from her own.

“ I have killed your mistress,” he said quietly. One eye gleamed strangely.

She trembled. The pain in her chest was absent, not actually gone but pushed out of rank by instincts. Her vision was blurry, and every so often it was jagged through with something like static. Tiny grey birds were still fleeing the field, clogging the sky, the beating of their wings like sheets caught in the wind. A few white moths flitted around them. One landed on Asmodeus’s sweat-soaked temple, its antennae testing his black hair. He didn’t brush it away.

A few minutes later, after the awkward silence, he pulled himself to his feet, wrenching X up by her shoulder. He dragged her through the hay, back towards the house. They stopped at the side, next to the immense garage.

He chose an indiscriminate green pickup truck, one commonly used by the La Touga gardener, its back still littered with the twisted carcasses of dead plants. He tossed her in the side passenger seat as he worked to hotwire it, hunched under the hood, the sleeves of his casual dress shirt pulled up past his elbows. Inside the cabin, she leaned her head against the glass of the window, sweat dribbling down the white sailor collar of her dress. Her clothes felt too tight suddenly. She was too weak to fight him, and in no condition to run for it. There was nothing she could do but sit there.

Finally, the engine roared to life. Asmodeus jounced into the cabin, pulling the truck from the garage carefully, as if afraid to damage it. He threw it into a complete turn-around and they shot off down the dirt road, flanked on both sides by fields of hay, the La Touga maison growing smaller and smaller behind them.

[Sable Phoenix]

This series is just too good, DOE. I really admire the way you have made the reader absolutely loathe every supporting character in the story (except Lockhardt, who has a sort of world-weary regality about him despite being a killer). The debauchery and moral nihilism displayed by each and every one is somewhat disturbing. You can't help but want X to just up and run for it some night--I wonder why she doesn't.

Just a couple things: First, I forget why Intergang had to abandon the mansion in such a hurry. And second, when is Batsy going to show up? I can't wait to see what happens when he takes on Intergang.

[SilverKnight]

Sweet. You're a kick ass writer DoE, you know that? You're extremely talented, and yet I could pick out your writing anywhere. >shrugs< It's *THAT* good. :) I'll be waiting for the next part. >waves<

[Daughterof_Evil]

I always knew you were a guy.

Anyway, I want to express my supreme thanks that you have found this story entertaining. I know it isn't the nicest, kindest, or most morally capable story, but I've worked hard and am truly delighted that somebody other than myself has enjoyed it. As for your questions, Intergang members can't stay in one place for too long without risking exposure, and there were a good fifty of them at the La Touga maison. So fleeing was the only smart thing they could do. And about Bats. Well, he'll show up eventually, trust me. It's rare that I write a story without the Bat crew somewhere in it, even though their presence is somewhat second-rate right now.

Thanks again!

[Daughterof_Evil]

I could pick out your writing anywhere, too, SK. You have a unique talent that's hard to follow and hard to copy, and your storylines are competent and exciting. One never knows where you will take your characters. I read your OT post about stereotyping writers and thought it was very true. Sometimes you have to give a little and add something unexpected to keep the story fresh. Hence the untimely exit of Mlle. ( Not that it was totally out-of-character for me to kill someone off)

When are you going to pick up some of your Batman-Superman stuff? You got me so involved in Jade and then you went off and started Mental Lapse. Not that I didn't thoroughly enjoy it, but I always prefer BTAS/TNBA stuff to BB. Of course, you work in any environment. Thanks for the wonderful things you said about my writing!

[Daughterof_Evil]

-Hello again, kiddies, and welcome to another wild, debauched, morally bankrupt episode of Shadows of Angels. It's been awhile since I've posted anything, and I'm really terribly behind. I'm glad you other guys have started posting again. Anyway, this episode contains the lyrics of the songs Ain't it a Kick in the Head? by Dean Martin and It Don't Mean a Thing by Ella Fitzgerald.-
***
He had flipped the radio on once the sun had gone down, then twirled the tuning knob in a desperate search for some suitable soundtrack to their escape. Eurotrash pop music, French talk shows, garbled underground punk spewed out before he paused at one station. Slowly, he replaced his hand on the wheel. The station identification blurb ended and a raucous big-band sound came from the speakers amid a haze of fine-grained static.

“ How lucky can one guy be,
I kissed her and she kissed me.
Like a fella once said, ‘Ain’t love a kick in the head?’,”

The cabin of the car was suffocating. X rolled down the window and leaned against the door, her hair caught in the wind. The pain in her chest, radiating now throughout her entire body, was excruciating. She had used up her allowance of endorphins, and her brain had left her body to flounder for itself.

Asmodeus sung quietly along with the Dean Martin coming from the radio, tapping his fingers along the steering wheel.

“ You like Dean Martin, Little X?” he asked suddenly. He was in too good a mood.

Her voice came out raspy. “ Yes,” Peterson had listened to some Dean Martin mixed in with the Nat King Cole and the Billie Holiday.

“ He was a good singer, for an American. I can’t tell why they might be playing him on a French station. The French hate Americans,”

She blinked into the dark fields lining the road. They hadn’t passed another motorist in thirty minutes. She had a sinister feeling that Asmodeus had taken some secret French backroad to avoid being chased.

The Dean Martin ended and the deejay came on, his French fluid and precise, the kind old-fashioned Parisians spoke. By the sound of his voice, X could tell he was in his mid-fifties.

“ What’s he saying?” Asmodeus asked.

He didn’t speak French. Figures.

“ He’s saying that they’re having an American classics marathon. Tonight only.”

The deejay eased them into some Ella Fitzgerald. X crossed her arms over her chest, tightly enough to try to stifle the pain beneath her sternum. Her clothes were soaked through with sweat. She shut her eyes.

“ It don’t mean a thing,
if it ain’t got that swing,
doo wop, doo wop, doo wop...”

“ What’s wrong with you?” Asmodeus asked, not taking his eyes off the road.

She swallowed. Her saliva was thick. “ Nothing,”

“ You sick or something?”

She didn’t answer. After the Ella Fitzgerald, there was old Tony Bennet, and after that there was Elvis. Asmodeus liked the Elvis the best. He sang along to it, his accent making Viva Las Vegas sound perverse.

“ Are we going to Paris?” X whispered, just loud enough so he could hear.

Asmodeus refused to reply until he had finished the song. Then he sat back and said, “ Eventually,”

X began to tremble. The insufferable heat had given way to brittle cold. As much as she tried to convince herself of it, this was not Macchina withdrawl. She had been given her dosage that morning, and though she knew she wouldn’t get any more for that night, the shaking and pain wouldn’t set in for another twenty-four hours. A vein in her forehead pulsed just behind her widow’s peak.

The Beatles came on with Eleanore Rigby. The sound was sad and detached. She tried to sleep, but both fear and agony kept her from rest. It became hard to breathe. She slipped out of the truck, out of her body, though she couldn’t tell if it was sleep or just loss of consciousness.
***
The passenger door opened. X fell out of the cabin, hitting the pavement with a crack and waking instantly. Asmodeus stood over her, looking tired and angry. The sky was navy blue behind his head, the silken color of predawn where the stars hadn’t quite disappeared yet.

“ We’re out of gas,” he said.

As he pulled her up off the road by her arm, her senses returned to their original acuity. Her nerves were frayed with the well-traveled route of pain. Her heart throbbed. Asmodeus tugged her along the edge of the road, then let go of her arm and let her walk on her own. The asphalt was still hot beneath the soles of her shoes.

“ There’s a little town up ahead,” he said, gesturing abstractly with one hand at the darkish blur in the distance. A shoal of cobalt-grey clouds hung lazily above it, foaming at its edges in the threatening foreward of a thunderhead.

As if the other physical ailments weren’t enough, X’s stomach ached with hunger. Her mouth was dry. Every step made her right leg tingle before going slightly numb.

“ Where are we?” she asked quietly, her head hanging down. Lifting her chin burned too much energy.

“ Somewhere near Vernon,” he said. Again, he waved a hand toward the blur of a town. “ The Seine is somewhere over there,”

The sky began to burn a greyish-pink in the east, thawing off the blue of night. The pickup had disappeared behind them. X had noticed before leaving it, out of all the things, that Asmodeus had pried off the license plates with a jack knife.

Spatters of water began collecting on the shoulders of X’s black dress. As they went, the light drizzle became a sparse storm, large drops of water smacking the pavement around them. Asmodeus looked up into the clouded sky and laughed.

“ God is spitting on us!” he cried, almost joyfully.

X crossed her left arm over her chest and clamped her hand around her other upper arm. Her sleeves were already soaked through. Droplets of water ran down her chin in a stream, mingling with the dry, senseless tears spewing from her eyes.

“ There is no God,” she said definitely. Her wet hair hid her downturned face.

“ You shouldn’t be so pessimistic,”

She sank to her knees, her tights soaked through the moment they touched the wet pavement. She could barely feel her feet. Asmodeus walked about a meter before stopping and looking back at her.

“ What is wrong with you?” he asked her again, his voice acidic.

She muttered something. He came up to her and grabbed her wet, teary face in his hands, jerking her head up so she looked him in the eye.

“ What!?” he yelled. “ Can’t you walk!?”

X didn’t speak. The hem of her black dress floated in the pool of water surrounding her legs.

Grumbling something, Asmodeus hoisted her up and threw her across his back. He slumped immediately from the weight.

“ You’re damn heavy, you know that?” he said.

She shut her eyes. The rain flooded directly into her face.

“ It’s all the mechanics in you,” he reasoned, as if she hadn’t known. “ It makes you very heavy,”

Water filled her shoes. The roar of rain was deafening, like static. He didn’t talk to her, or if he did, she couldn’t hear him.

They came into Vernon while the storm was still churning around them, the heavy clouds blocking out the noonday sun. The streets were desolate. The homes, shops, buildings were indescript, and X made no effort to memorize anything about them. She did as Asmodeus told her, sitting on the curb as he popped the hood on a blue sedan parked in the street.

Before hotwiring the car, he went to the driver’s side door and took two tools from the pocket of his pants. One was a small, light wrench, specialized for picking car locks, and the other was a silver pin. He opened the door within a few seconds, then went back to the hood.

He glanced over at X. “ Go and get us some food,” he ordered over the steady sound of the slowing rain.

She got up and staggered down the sidewalk, reading the signs painted onto the glass doorways. Her body was completely numb with pain. She stopped at a boulangerie, gazing in the window, sheeted with rain, at the day-old pastries crammed into the display. She pressed her fingertips to the glass, feeling only the cold, no tactile sensations at all. She was a ghost, devoid of feeling or emotion.

There were no attendants at the counter, a glass tube filled with pastries and breads, some as delicate as rare insects. The tiny brass bell hung on the door knob attracted no one as it rang, so X simply grabbed a few pains from the window display, stacking them in her arms like firewood, and left.

Asmodeus had already finished with the car, and it sat humming at the curb. The moment she got in, he took off down the main street before she could even close her door.

“ You didn’t run away,” he said quietly. For the first time since the day they left the La Touga maison, he seemed to be showing some amount of remorse.

She looked out the window. Crystalline rivulets of rain slid horizontally across the safety glass.

“ It’s because you have nowhere to go,” he answered for her.

She nodded. He grabbed a loaf from her and bit into it savagely, making a face.

“ Day old bread,” he muttered.

They had left Vernon within twenty minutes. X curled up in her seat and fell under again, not sure if she was sleeping or not. She didn’t dream of the boy in red, but instead of a group of shadowy figures conversing in rapid Japanese. There was no basis to the dream. The ghosts, their faces hidden by smudges, talked in a circle. She was a spectator, without thought or feeling. Somebody wrapped her in a blanket. She could only remember being coccooned in white, warm, safe. She opened her eyes. The French countryside blurred by. It was increasingly harder to see.

Asmodeus saw her awake. “ I killed her,” he said, speaking of Mlle.

She parted her dry lips, her mouth parched. “ You loved her,”

He smiled. A strange, slightly sick smile. “ Yes. Do you know what it is to be in love, Little X?”

She blinked at him. A stress-induced tear ran down her face from one oddly swollen eye. She tried to shake her head. Her neck was stiff.

“ Of course you don’t know what it is to be in love,” he said, accusatory. “ You’re just a child. A toy. You’re Mullen’s pet machine,”

She struggled with the knot of her sailor collar, the heat suffocating her.

“ The radio is broken,” he said abstractly.

She dropped her hand from her neck, letting her head hit the window. The glass was cool and smooth. A greenish fracture bisected the upper right hand corner from the rest of it. A light film surrounding the break suggested it had once been mended with plastic tape.

Consciousness became a veil, deceptive and easily broken. She had dreams wide-awake that she mistook for things that just happened. When she really did sleep, her dreams were violent. The boy in red was nowhere to be seen, and she had the panicked idea that she had killed him. At one point, Asmodeus stopped the car and tossed her out onto the road, yelling that she was possessed. He turned around and came back for her five minutes later after imagining what Mullen would do if he said he lost her.

They changed cars twice more. X always sat by, dumb, as Asmodeus hotwired them. He shocked himself on the first, the wound pink and malicious across his palm. The second attracted the attention of a police officer when its alarm went off. He commented, in broken English, about the state of health X was in. They knocked him out with a tire iron and sped off into the quickly setting sun.

Her dreams danced with kings and queens and a pale man in a purple suit. For a stretch of time, she had convinced herself she would be guillotined. It was night when Asmodeus parked somewhere and opened her passenger door, dragging her out by her shoulders.

“ Welcome to Versailles, Little X,” he said sardonically, cursing her for her weight.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Hello old friend, it's been a insultingly long time since I've responded to one of your posts. I apologize for this, I've had barely enough time to post my own, let alone read too many other's. Also, if you haven't guessed it already I'm as lost as ever, especially since the new server doesn't carry the old boards. I've lost Breakdown, as well as the plot forming first chapters of your story. It's horrible! Soooooo, I was wondering if you'd kindly up-date me.

The Artist is nothing without the gift, the gift is nothing without work. - Emile Zola

[Daughterof_Evil]

Well, it depends on how long ago you stopped reading. I'd really have to know that before going into any lengthy descriptions, since this story is getting very long and I haven't even gotten to the climax yet. If you can remember, please let me know.

But thanks for showing up to comment. I know all about time constraints. I'm suffering one right now. Ja ne!

[The_NewCatwoman]

As retarded (no offense to anyone) as this might sound, I left off at the part where X had just woken up, after she had that seizure.

Ahhh, don't hit me!:D

That sounds too stupid, and believe it or not, I was kinda embarrassed all this time to ask you.

I am officially a loser!:p

[Daughterof_Evil]

-So.

What is there to say that already hasn't been said? As Maya Angelou noted, " We are speechless, but with words." Life has changed for us Americans. We feel pain. We feel helplessness. We have hope.

I know every one of us awoke on that day several weeks ago and thought we were still asleep, still dreaming. I called my oldest brother in New York City and found he had woken up to watch the Towers fall out his bedroom window. And still, every time I think about it, my heart beats a little faster, breathing becomes a little harder. I can't seem to forget, or even think about much else. I, like a lot of others, feel violated.

That's why I had serious reservations about continuing this story. I have had to think very hard on it, and I have asked numerous people close to me for their advice. Their shared opinion? We cannot let them win. We cannot let this act, no matter how terrible, how disturbing, destroy us.

So I'm going on with this story. I'm crying right now, and I don't know why. There are a lot of reasons. Innocent people have died, and maybe more will die, not only in this country, but in others. I think about the rescue dogs the most, though. The ones in New York, looking for people, and how their trainers say they begin to feel like they've failed because they never find anyone alive.

I'm sorry. I have to get on with it.-
***
Mullen strolled leisurely through the hallway, his footsteps marking grim notes on the marble floor. The backround static of Intergang voices rebounded through the corridors. A door shut down the way. A person in black, shielded by the shadows, moved towards him.

“ And what do they say?” Mullen asked, his quiet voice amplified by the surroundings.

Lockhardt at first didn’t answer. He was wearing a pinstriped black vest over a grey shirt and black slacks. The chain of his pocket watch glittered against his side.

“ A heart attack,”

Mullen sighed, joining his hands behind his back. “ And she’s alive?”

“ Barely. She’s conscious, on a respirator,”

“ It looks like I’ll need to call Luthor,”

Lockhardt looked disgusted. “ Do what you will. But what will happen to her in the meantime?”

Mullen looked up at him. His hair was still bleached from his flight from England, a sick blonde-brunette amalgam.

“ Take her to the Land of Broken Toys,” he muttered.
***
The warm edge of morphine bit heavily into the pain radiating through her veins, sliding lightly through her body like the touch of an angel. The specialized air that hissed into her mask through the ventilation tube smelled slightly like fluoride.

The room was entirely grey; grey steel and glass cabinets, grey linoleum on the floor, grey-painted ceiling. A bubble of light stood out from a lamp in the corner. A steel tray gleamed with dozens of tiny instruments next to her head. Somewhere, in the haze beyond the roar of frantic thought, she could hear the beeping of an EKG.

The door opened, letting in for a moment a burst of unfiltered sunlight. The doctor appeared above X’s head.

“ Hello, how are we doing?” she asked. Her voice was British, Portsmouth maybe. Her hair was short and honey blonde, and gold earrings glittered at her ears. She was still young, but mature in the lines that laced the delicate skin around her crystal blue eyes.

X couldn’t move. They had strapped her down.

“ Is the morphine working?”

X blinked twice, like they had told her to. The respirator tube was thick and obstructive in her windpipe.

“ That’s good,” She marked something on her ever-present chart. More people were coming into the room. They lined up around her bed and took hold of the metal frame, pushing her out the door. The halls blurred by. She had no time to take anything in.

“ We’re just going to keep you here for awhile,” Dr. Waltham said behind her, trying to be comforting. The smells of disinfectants and anesthetics disappeared, replaced with a musty, dirty stench. The room was dark, closed-in. Small lamps lit up tanks of greenish water filled with half-eaten cadavers. One of them had a gaping chest, white bone and purplish flesh sawn away to reveal a grotesquely swollen baboon heart.

They shoved her into a corner, her bed hitting a contorted mass of steel with a clatter. They yanked her away, just enough so her peripheral vision took it in. An IV stand, its four arms decorated with half a dozen bionic limbs in multiple versions of disassembly, each of them hanging by the reddish cords of their neural connectors. One of the dead metal fingers brushed her cheek.

The others left, abandoning Dr. Walthom and X. The doctor sat lightly on the bed, folding her hands on her lap.

“ X,” she said, “ you had something called a myocardial infarction. Do you know what that is?”

She blinked twice. The words had once come up in one of Vale’s medical journals.

“ Yes,” Walthom looked into her lap, covered with a soft-looking cashmere skirt. “ It’s very rare for someone your age to have a heart attack, but now I think I understand why.”

X sat very still, letting the spit and hiss of the respirator speak for her in the lonely silence.

Dr. Walthom placed a warm, delicate hand on her shoulder. They had stripped X down to her underwear and wrapped her in a pink hospital smock. “ The loss of blood flow has partially damaged your heart. I’m a cardiac surgeon, X. I have to operate on you.”

X closed her eyes and shook her head side to side violently, the respirator tube snaking along her exposed collarbone as she did. Dr. Walthom placed both hands on her temples, restraining her.

“ You have been under a great amount of distress lately,” she said. She smelled like sweet-bitter perfume. “ This surgery won’t be easy on you. But, hopefully, with your advanced regenerative abilities, your recovery time will be at a severe minimum.”

Dr. Walthom got off of the bed. “ I’ll be seeing you a little later.”

Then she turned and strode through the hellish darkness, disappearing as the doors shut behind her. X, locked away in the stagnant black speckled with the light of illuminescent corpses, could not cry.
***
Asmodeus scanned the crowd silently from behind dark glasses, his bandaged fists shoved into the pockets of the leather jacket he had borrowed. The crowd melded, thinned out, then changed shape entirely. A woman with a distinct Metropolis tan and a cheetah-print scarf wrapped around her slim neck was strolling down the way with the dangerous gait of a predatory animal. She had seeked him out with milky brown eyes shielded by beige lensed sunglasses. Held stiffly at one side was an anonymous white cooler plastered with biohazard stickers.

She came up to him and extruded one hand from the wide sleeve of her jacket, clamping her fingers around the meat of his upper arm. He winced, and she pulled him along.

“ If you move, or make a sound, you’re worse than dead,” she growled at him in a low whisper, barely moving her lips.

He succumbed, letting her steer him along the corridors. They finally paused at a tiny in-airport bistro. Asmodeus spilled into his chair while his companion slid silkily into hers.

She sat the cooler on the table between them.

“ Do you mind?” Asmodeus asked sulkily. “ I don’t like the idea of that thing being so near me,”

She stuck out her jaw. “ And I thought they beat all the pickiness out of you,”

“ I didn’t come here to chat,” he said quietly, leaning close.

She flicked the cooler with one finger. “ Take it.”

Asmodeus gingerly took the cooler and dropped it carelessly on the floor beside him.

“ Don’t you even care about what you were sent here to do?” Mercy asked him. A waiter approached; she waved him off abstractly.

He propped his chin up on one hand bandaged in futile white. “ The little meat puppet means nothing to me. Personally, I think we’d all be better off if she was dead.”

“ Lex put a lot of cash into her.”

“ Five million, I hear.”

“ Between the bionic prosthetics, the neural tinkering, the gene therapy, her bill’s running higher than that. A lot of the stuff in her is in a trial stage, you understand.”

He reached into the jacket and fished out a generic debit card.

“ Everything asked,” he said simply, pushing it across the tabletop.

The card disappeared into the breast pocket of her trench coat. It wasn’t particularly cold out, or even cool at all, it was just the anonymity that the disguises provided them that outweighed the discomfort.

He took the cooler in one hand and got up. “ I better get this to them,” he said, laying a flat palm on the side.

She checked her watch distractedly, ignoring him.

“ Always lovely to see you, Ms. Graves,” he said sarcastically, brushing his temple with a casual and incompetant salute.

He turned and left the bistro just as the waiter attacked Mercy again. She ordered a cappucino but left before it arrived.
***
The operating room was white, sterile, tiled in creamy Italian ceramic. Large lamps swooped in from all directions, then blazed on and blinded her. The bright light brushed her naked skin. A cool hand in a latex glove rested on her forehead.

“ X, it’s me, dear,” The voice was Vale. For a panicked moment, she confused him for Peterson.

Her grey-haloed green eyes wandered to him and settled there, frightened. He came around the side of the operating table. He was dressed in blue scrubs, a white mask tied over his nose and mouth.

“ I’ve come to help Dr. Walthom,” he said soothingly. “ Make sure she doesn’t disturb any of the nueral connections in your chest cavity.”

The respirator wheezed, flushing more oxygen into her lungs. The doors batted open behind her and three men entered, surgical assistants in green scrubs. One checked the valves on a half dozen tanks just out of X’s sight. The two others made an inventory of the implements to be used in the procedure. The second surgical tech placed two electrodes on her temples with sticky grease.

“ Those are to disable you regenerative abilities during the surgery,” Vale explained. “ They emit an electromagnetic charge that temporarily immobilizes the nanobionic factor in your bloodstream, making it easier to operate on you. Other wise we couldn’t cut you open without you healing it every time we use a scalpel.”

Another figure entered swiftly, with the grace of a cat in persuit. Dr. Walthom stopped at X’s side.

“ We’re going to begin now,” she said. The anesthesiologist hooked a tank of gas into X’s respirator tube. “ Try counting down in your head from one hundred,”

X’s eyes darted about. Her vision blurred. She forgot to count, watching the doctors stand perfectly still as she barely lingered on the edge of consciousness, knowing what they would do once she was out. The edges of her line of sight phased inward, reducing to a pinprick. She listened to the beats of the EKG become the actual heartbeats within her, then nothing.

Somebody switched on speakers imbedded in the wall. Opera music flooded out. Something sad, Germanic. Tristan und Isolde.
***
“ Did you reach the system?”

Barbara glanced up from the terminal, her graceful fingers poised above the keyboard.

“ Just barely,” she replied, returning to her work. The screen exploded in complex hacker codes, and a small box popped up. A download bar began at once to reduce itself.

Barbara stretched her arms behind her head and leaned back. “ See,” she told Tim, “ just a matter of who’s doing the talking.”

He folded his arms crossly over his chest. “ I can’t believe it. I’ve been trying all week on that thing.”

She shrugged. “ So what’s this for anyway? I hear Bruce’s investigating Intergang again.”

“ When did he stop?”

She looked up at the screen, her face multiplying the bars of code. “ I don’t know, I just figured...after what happened in Metropolis,” She pretended to be disinterested.

He hopped atop one of the side terminals, his regular perch. “ I know, you guys figure I’m traumatized or something,” he said ungratefully, folding his legs.

Barbara glanced over at him. “ Tim, you don’t always have to act like nothing gets to you. That’s Bruce’s job.”

He hunched his shoulders. “ Just never bothered me.”

“ That assassin girl...you cared about her.”

He stared at her from under a lowered brow. “ She was evil, Barbara.”

“ Or just the spawn of it.”

The download completed with a long beep. Barbara tapped a key and a grainy sequence of security tape began to play out in a six-inch by six-inch square on the screen.

Three people emerged from a gangway and into the terminal, stopping at a customs desk to check in. One appeared to be an elderly man, Nevig Lockhardt. Another was a young girl, her face obscured by a wave of dark hair over one eye. The last was a middle aged man. Suddenly, in an act so fast the camera depicted it only as a flash of black, the girl grabbed the middle-aged man by his hair and broke his head open over her knee. The camera depicted the spray of grey matter as a neat splash of black. She took Lockhardt by the hand, like a frightened child, and fled.

A second camera filled in, following them automatically out into the open airport. A plainly dressed man drew a gun on the two escapees. Another flash of black, the girl had blown off half the Interpol agent’s head with one kick. They ran, the dead agent toppling to the floor, and abruptly the camera went off-line as it was blown to pieces by the bomb in the plane.

“ Go back,” Tim said, gesturing at the keyboard. The computer rewound it until he told it to stop.

“ Half speed,” It ran again, the sequence of the mercenary child killing the armed Interpol agent. It was still too fast.

“ Fourth speed,” he demanded. This time, the movements were precise. The girl, whose face was never really clear due to the distortion, jumped up, brought one leg in while jabbing the other out. Her foot hit his head at an exact point, the brains exploding out the back of the head in an arch.

“ That’s incredible,” Barbara breathed, sickly fascinated. “ A hit like that takes immense power and precision. She would have to hit at an exact angle, and an exact moment, with the most strength she could muster in mid-air.”

He was uninterested.

“ I hear they still train kids for that,” Barbara said, a touch of envy in her voice. “ Imagine, giving that kind of power to children.”

“ Computer, access combat style reference,” Tim said. The screen filed through, a cursor popped up. Ever since Bruce had started his crusade, he’d been storing files of battle practices to better understand reasons of motive and impossibility.

“ Match style with the same qualities of projection and delivery,”

It came up with three video files. Two were Capoeira training movies, the third an ambiguous scrap of security video captured in a Japanese loft space.

“ Play #3,”

A stairwell, painted bright white, half-demolished as though somebody was reconfiguring it. A large dark object fell from the top of the screen and struck the floor, something soft. It moved spasmodically. Tim realized with a turn of his stomach that it was a man. A dark stain was spreading around the corpse.

“ Wait, there’s audio,” Barbara said, hitting a key. The sound came in extra loud, as though somebody had previously jacked up the speakers. The static was deafening. Then-

“ Oyaji! Papa?!”

A small, dark person ran into the camera sight, screamed in an animal tone. A child ninja, nine years old at the most, and a girl. She shrieked over and over again in a language he couldn’t understand, a frantic salad of French, Japanese and what sounded like Russian. The native tongue of panic.

She pulled at her father’s arm, trying to wrench him up off the floor. She let go, screaming at him angrily in Spanish. From his mundane days of Spanish class in school, he discerned something about not leaving her alone.

A person entered from the left, appearing from the shadows left by a jagged hole in the wall. The girl jumped straight up to his eye level, delivering a kick to the face in a mere second. His head exploded. The girl dropped down into a crouch, then stood abruptly.

“ Miku-sempai!” she screamed.

“ Hari! Hari!” The call, a woman, was offscreen. The little girl ran. The screen broke into static, then flat black. The Cave was silent.

“ I feel...sorta sick,” Barbara muttered.

“ When’s that from?” Tim asked quietly.

She checked. “ Bruce filed it in nearly six years ago. They never really figured out who these people were, but the style distinctly says Afro-Brazilian/Chinese/Korean.”

He propped one hand up on his palm, his elbow resting on his knee. “ And there aren’t any other matches?”

“ The closest were those Capoeira movies. But those were drastic, unusual for the genre,”

He leaned back, lowered his eyelids. “ Hari...”

“ A ninja child. Probably Japanese, raised as an assassin,”

He shrugged his sudden apprehension away. “ I guess. Do you think they’re the same person?”

“ It’s a small chance.”

“ The style’s the same.”

“ The style that was probably taught to dozens of other young people. Both of them were just products of the manufacturing line,”

“ One of them’s probably dead by now,”

“ Maybe,” She looked over at him, eyes a friendly bright blue. A sad, appreciative smile lay on her mouth.

“ It’s a thankless job, Tim,” she said. “ And it’s hard to understand, and hard to do, and hard to justify.”

He sighed. “ Yeah, I know, ‘but we do it anyway’.”

She grinned at him. “ Go suit up. We’ll go for a ride.”
***
The German opera wailed in the backround. The bright spray of red cut through the air and splattered a surgery tech. The fumbling of suddenly numb fingers, the cold, calculating clatter of steel equipment.

“ Dammit, clamp that artery!” Dr. Walthom screamed at one of the nurses. Sweat stood out on her forehead. A male nurse stumbled in, hands shaking, and hurriedly thrust a clamp into the scarlet mess, trembling through a series of metallic cords winding in a complex web through her chest cavity.

They stood back. Red dripped from the sausage gloved hands of everyone attending. The floors, walls, surgical equipment were gorged with blood. Flecks of red clung to the ceiling above them. The EKG was silent, turned off as the heart-lung machine pumped for the absentee organ.

Dr. Walthom took a look into the gaping, bloody maw of X’s chest.

“ We can still do it,” Vale said. “ Just use the piggyback procedure.”

“ They both wouldn’t fit, not with all this other stuff in here,” she snapped, accusatory. The Liebestod was loud, clear, and bloodless around them.

“ It will fit. Believe me, worse things have happened.”

“ She’s lost too much blood,” The fourth unit dripped into her lifeless body now. X’s face was paste-white, serene, unknowing. A tiny, almost unnoticeable trickle of blood was winding down her top lip from her nose.

“ Dammit, Walthom, I’ve worked too hard on this girl to let you kill her now,” Vale growled. He commandeered the instruments, sewing and snipping in the gout of bright red. “ Suction!”

Liebestod circled again. And again. It kept going until Vale had finished with the surgery, Walthom had sewn up the gaping hole of X’s chest, and the surgery assistants cleaned up. Her heart was pumping blood back into her body. She had been resurrected again.

[Panther]

Ohhhhh D. of E. I wish I could hand you a kleenex. :(

I wept for the people who died on the 11th and I wept again tonight when I reached the words 'Tristan und Isolde'.

Thank you for continuing the story. Now more than ever your words are important.

We are finally seeing Gotham again! And the cameo of Mercy was unexpected but great; Luther seems to be pulling strings in the background. Interesting. The dialogue between Barbara and Tim was very poignant. I sympathize with Tim, but will he ever have the courage to again say the name of the girl who broke his heart? I was thinking just the other day the irony when you first introduced us to her how she was at a graveyard - in a coffin. her life seems to be almost upside down and backwards. Having a heart attack at Versielle doesn't bode well. That place has a BAD rep. But since you read the Scarlet Pimpernel (yeah! I'm so glad you did!) you get the idea. Thank you again.

And, again, I leave off with my usual plea for X to get her memories back.

My thoughts go out to those who are suffering.

[The_NewCatwoman]

I am so lost.:(

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thanks for the understanding. I was nervous that it was too soon to continue, but you've assured me that I was right in coming back.

I always loved henchgirls, you know? Mercy, Harley, the Female Furies. They always fascinate me. I had to put Mercy in there because it just seemed like a task that Luthor would only trust her to do. And you're right about Versaille having a bad, really, bad rep. I love French history. I hear you're a history major. That's great! I want to be a history or arts major when I get to that whole college thing. What drew you into history? I know you've got a great mind for remembering things, that's a no brainer. I have to give you immense credit for the job you did on Returning the Favor, the installment where Tim punches Dick in the face. That was beautifully done.

I should go now. Please figure out your Midwinter BB story soon! I'm anxious to read anything of yours!

[Daughterof_Evil]

I wrote you a private message explaining everything. Check your PMs, it's probably there.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Yeah, so now I'm up to freakin' speed, thanks!

"Puka Shell Power!":D

[Daughterof_Evil]

-I can't believe it's part 25 of this story and I haven't wrapped it up yet. I have this feeling that this story's gonna be a lengthy one, so hunker down with your popcorn and Raisinets and get ready for the long haul. This part has some mild stuff in it, drug use and lots of weapons, some pieces of psychological torture, but that's it. I'm being nice.-
***
Nerves, muscles, the veins pumping her life’s dear blood seemed to reattach themselves to her brain. The sensations of feeling, the slim, cool sheets beneath her fingertips, the soft plastic of the oxygen mask strapped over her face. The metallic taste on her tongue. The sweet smell of purified, recirculated oxygen.

Her eyes reconnected last, opening gently to the hushed, soft semi-darkness of her room. She picked one arm up and pulled the oxygen mask off of her face. Her body was strangely, pleasantly numb.

A hand cupped over her own, one worn rough from metal surgery and intricacies beyond belief. Vale placed the oxygen mask back over her face, pulling the elastic strap around the orbit of her skull. She leaned back on the hospital bed, the plastic cover of her pillow crinkling.

Vale took up a seat on a sliding chrome stool next to the bed. In the corner, lapsed half into the shadow, Dr. Walthom brooded.

“ Are you feeling well, Little X?”

She nodded. The neon agony in her capillaries had subsided, replaced with a dull, dumb pain running straight down her breastbone.

“ This will be hard to understand,” he said, “ but I have to explain it. Mr. Luthor didn’t want me to tell you, you see.”

She sat silently. Three different bags of mysterious solution hung on her IV stand, dripping directly into her arm.

“ When you came to us, nearly four months ago, we took some of your DNA in case you needed some, well, ‘spare parts’.” He smiled sort of oddly, in a pleasant way. “ That’s why we kept your rib. From the marrow, we extracted DNA, used it to coax a few stem cells to multiply, and used those to form heart muscle.

“ The process of vat-growing your new heart was accelerated with hormones, so you had a fully-formed adult heart in just over two months. Because of your active combat lifestyle, it was genetically improved, made slightly larger and more durable than the heart of a normal child your age. The perfect genetic match between you and it would cut down on the chance of rejection. We had planned to replace your old heart with it two days ago, but there was a problem.

“ The surgery lasted too long, and we never had the opportunity to replace your old heart. We could only put your new heart in, with the old one beside it. They both are beating inside you right now.”

She stared at him, then at Dr. Walthom. The room was silent. Carefully, she placed her hand to her chest, fingers trembling. Beneath the thin hospital smock, she could feel the still raw line that cut vertically through her bare breast.

Gently, she could feel the twin beats of her hearts. One to pump the blood in, the other to push it back out into the lungs.

Her eyes blurred, hot tears spilling down her face and collecting on her oxygen mask. She let out an animal sob, curling up into a ball on her side, clasping her hands over the top of her head.

Vale and Dr. Walthom left her alone, shutting and locking the door behind them. X continued to weep until the morphine wore gradually off, and she lay back on her bed, feeling the spasms of excruciating physical pain as she fell into a dreamlike semi-consciousness.
***
She awoke as arguing outside in the hall broke in, the door flying inward from Mullen’s kick. Vale tuttled behind as Mullen strode swiftly to the bed. X pushed herself to the other side, eyes wide with fear, bringing her knees up to her chest.

He grabbed her right arm in one thick fist and whipped from his pocket a lancet of Macchina.

“ I think you should wait at least a week,” protested Vale.

“ I need to know now,” Mullen growled. He pressed the lancet to the inside of her wrist. X’s chest heaved with breath.

“ Her heart would fall out on the floor,” the doctor argued.

Mullen injected the drug with one sweep. The vein of her arm stood out against the skin, purplish and sick. The Macchina hit her brain in a single electric shock, the muscles of her body stiffened, and she let her head fall back. Her eyes rolled back in her skull. Mullen grabbed her shoulders and held her up as she gasped in pain. He wanted so to hurt her. His fingers were deep in the hard flesh of her arms.

Vale pushed him aside and pulled his stethoscope from around his neck, pressing its flat, cold disk to her chest. Sweat condensed and ran down her face in large beads, her gasps rose to hyperventilation. She shut her eyes tightly, regulating her breathing carefully through her mouth.

He stood back, lacing the stethoscope back around his neck. “ You’re slowing your heart rate voluntarily.”

“ What?” cried Mullen.

Vale looked over at him. “ She’s slowing her heart rate. She can control involuntary reflexes.”

Mullen stared at her. X’s face had become a mask of perfect, pure serenity, white and impassive. Her eyes were shut, creating a smooth curve of the eye socket, the dull light making grey shadows under her eyebrows. Her face gleamed with sweat. A vein stood out in her neck, but her present beatific state made even that seem like a thing of immense peace.

“ It’s Zen,” Mullen muttered. He felt like hitting her.
***
They left Versailles immediately after X was strong enough to walk around her cramped room and moved into a warehouse in the outer suburbs of Paris. X wasn’t exactly aware of the transition; Vale had sedated her shortly beforehand and she didn’t awake until three hours afterward.

The next week was a frantic variety piece of extreme training exercises, a test for her new heart. The wounds of surgery were healed in three days, the tissues and bone and cardiac muscle grafting themselves wholly back together. She was running laps a day later, fueled by massive amounts of Macchina. That same afternoon, she began sparring with other Intergang members, beating every one of them in succession.

Her days were endless hours of combat, weight lifting, and weapons training. She found she had a built-in reflex for dismantling an assault rifle in a minute and a half. There was seemingly no end to her mysterious store of knowledge, though the novelty had worn off and each new experience was now just a necessity.

“ Try that button on the side,” advised Mullen’s new weapon’s manager, a thirty three year old Haitian-American woman named Darby Whitacre. Her skin was a dark, rich brown. She had bright brown eyes and short, crisp golden hair like spun marzipan. She was constantly dressed in red and black, and Asmodeus had said something about her being a lesbian. X couldn’t figure out why it mattered. Asmodeus had been demoted anyway, his position just barely hovering above X’s.

X did as she was told, tapping the red button on the side of the automatic rifle with her thumb. The secondary barrel exploded in a burst of propane fed fire that shot out a good ten feet. It died down as she removed her thumb, leaving behind a coil of transparant smoke and an incinerated plastic mannequin across the room.

“ That was fun,” X admitted quietly.

Darby grinned in a way that exposed a pair of sharp, bright canines. “ You’ve got a knack for weaponry,” she said. “ That’s what makes it fun,”

Weapons was followed by several hours of sensory deprivation exercises, where she was locked in a lightless room and left to fight assailants that came at her from the dark. She analyzed their weight, stamina, and attack style by sound, smell, and tactile contact with her opponents. When she succeeded in that, they moved on to a separate exercise, cutting out the auditory sense as well by blasting speakers with the soundtrack of a thundrous rainstorm, blotting out any sound of an oncoming attack. The experiment was a victory. They found X could rely completely on her keen sense of touch to fend off an ambush.

They had finally managed to return X’s katana to her, though it was only for a short bit of time. The jade bauble from the hilt still hung around her neck, tucked under the black army fatigues she always wore, as if commending her for her survival. The two were inseparably linked now, a piece of X herself, though every day she was reminded that she was barely worth mental consideration. Mullen insisted that all she was was a tool, a weapon for them to use as they wished. Shortly after her transplant, Vale tattooed a tiny green number into the inside of her left knee and left elbow, not to mention into the piece of skull behind her left ear. It was X001, her identification code.

Her schedule was the same every day, though it frequently shifted hours to throw off her circadian rhythms and mentally dismantle her innate human dependancy on night and day. She was deprived of natural sunlight. Before “retiring” at the end of her day, she spent an hour studying Bakrim Yoga in a room heated to one-hundred and five degrees to condition her cyborg body to extreme weather possibilities.

She never really slept; the Macchina and massive amounts of caffeine they fed her eliminated the need for mental rest. At night, she was locked in a tiny room, strapped inside a box of steel expansion grating. An electric clamp was fixed to her left hand, two electrodes glued on at the corner of each eye. Just out of sight behind her head, a television played an endless cycle of violent images, splashes of brilliant, gory color flashing across the walls. Mullen’s message was different this time, in French, though the English translation was foremost in X’s mind.

“ You are the perfect killing machine. You, your body and loyalty and honor, are apart of the organism that is Intergang. There is no need for personal thought to burden your mind. You belong to Intergang. Humanity does not matter.”

Her food was hyper-nutritive, created especially in complex labs to be high in vitamins and energy, but, ultimately, tasteless. Though the food was processed to the extent where most flavor was removed, her sense of taste had been further hampered by the drugs they gave her intravenously. Her life was defined by order, method, and an unflinching sense of duty. There came a time when, locked inside her psychological conditioning chamber late at night, her streaming tears came not from sadness but from the simple fact that she had lost control over her physical self, just as Mullen had said she would.
***
Helen turned toward him. “ Mr. Wayne,” Her teeth were pearly white.

“ Agent Arroway,” he nodded, shaking her hand as she stood. “ Please call me Bruce,”

“ Then I insist you call me Helen,” she shot back, sitting again so the knee-high slit of her earthen-brown, high-collared, sleeveless cocktail dress ran a slice of coco-colored skin up her lower leg.

“ Touché,”

She took a sip of her purplish wine. “ So, I heard you wanted to talk with me about something?”

“ Not really,” he admitted. “ I just wanted a chance to see you,”

She shrugged. “ I should have known. What man meets an FBI agent in a fancy restaurant without having something other than business on his mind?”

He smiled, just barely, and it was gone in a moment. “ Give me some credit, Helen,”

She looked him straight in the eye. Her black twists had been tied up in a high knot on her head and fixed with gold pins.

“ Now tell me the truth, Bruce,” she said in a low murmur. “ You didn’t give me all the information you had on Isabella Mariocelli,”

He took a gulp of ice water. “ I thought you were in Gotham for Geoffrey Mullen.”

“ As long as I’m here,”

“ How long have you been with the Bureau?”

She quirked a dark eyebrow at him, but answered anyway. “ Seven years.”

“ I bet in that time you’ve been all over the place, asking questions, getting led into corners.”

“ It comes with the job.”

“ What made you take it?”

“ I didn’t pass the examination to get into the CIA,” she answered.

“ I seriously doubt that,” Again, the barest flicker of a smile.

“ I meant the physical examination,” she said sharply. “ I had a tumor in my lung. I did paper work with them until I got transferred after my operation.”

“ I see,”

“ What about you, then?” she questioned. “ The company and everything,”

He stared into the halo of light around the red glass votive in the center of the table. “ No doubt you’ve already heard the story,”

“ Sure, but I want to know how you feel about it, Bruce.”

He looked up at her. “ It’s all in the past now.”

Sensing a downward shift in the evening, Helen looked out the window. Their table sat next to a floor-to-ceiling pane of thick plastic that peered out over Gotham. Through the jagged edge of buildings, they could see the glittering mass of the bay, veiled with the poisoned red night sky.

“ I always heard that Gotham was just this open wound,” Helen said quietly.

“ Just a generalization about this city,” Bruce contended. “ It can actually be quite pleasant sometimes. I can see the sun rising over the bay from my house in the morning.”

“ I grew up in Seattle, so there wasn’t much chance for us to see the sun rising.” She smiled. “ Sometimes, my mom would get home from work and we’d watch the sun set up on the roof.”

The waiter placed a wicker basket of bread on the table and asked if they were ready to order. They weren’t, and propped their menus open while talking to make it look like they were trying to decide.

“ So you have good memories of your mother?” Bruce asked.

Helen nodded. “ She died a couple of years ago. A stroke. Can’t say it was a surprise, since she raised us on her own,”

“ I’m sorry,”

She smiled. “ It’s okay. I’m bringing the conversation down. So...how old’s your ward, Timothy?”

“ He’ll be fifteen in a few months.”

“ Ah, the age of girl problems,”

He laughed shortly. “ You have no idea.”

“ I bet he’s a handful.”

“ Yes. Tim came from an inner city neighborhood in downtown Gotham. But he’s taken the transition fairly well.”

“ It’s great to see somebody in your position doing philanthropic work.”

“ It’s a little more than that. Tim’s like my son now.”

Helen looked around. “ Do you want to leave?”

“ More than you can imagine,”

The stench off the bay was terrible, like chemicals and acid rain and the accumulation of several centuries of industrial waste. Though the water gleamed like liquid onyx in the night, the red of the sky caught in the ripple of its waves, Bruce knew that in the day its color was putrid brown. The boardwalk creaked and groaned beneath their feet.

“ I guess it can be kind of beautiful,” Helen said quietly. “ All the chaos, all the disorder-”

“ All the evil,” Bruce said in a tone she had never heard him use before.

She looked over at him, eyes glittering. “ I still don’t understand why you can be so forgiving,”

Bruce loosened his tie. “ And you can’t. Not after what happened to your first partner.”

She looked down at the ground. “ You did some checking up on me.”

He nodded. She was quiet for a few minutes. The only noise was the lapping of the bay.

“ It was Mullen,” she said. “ He was in the country, in D.C., and we had cornered him. Me and Agent Young. Mullen shot first, then me, then Perry. Then Mullen shot again, and didn’t stop, even when Perry was dead, his head splattered all over the place. He got away. They took me off of field work for awhile. Then I got Agent Carter.”

“ You have a stake in this,”

“ I know it sounds like the stereotypical revenge motif,” she went on. “ You know, FBI agent wants vengence for her dead partner. TV movie of the week. But this is so ******* real.”

Her arms hung limp at her sides. She was incredibly beautiful, with a soft, angelic profile, like a bust sculpture of Nefertiti. Bruce, reacting on some impulse he couldn’t even name, reached over and took her hand in his own. They stood there, hands clasped, for a few minutes.

“ I had a good time tonight, Bruce,” Helen said as her taxi pulled up. No matter how he insisted, she refused his offer to have his chauffer take her to her hotel. Something about the government footing the bill.

“ I’m glad you could get out,” he said.

She smiled. “ Next time, we’ll try not on false pretenses,”

“ Agreed,”

[witness]

i cringed after reading the part with the two hearts. i finally understand just how inhuman she really is now. but, she does have a full name now. X001? does this mean that once this one dies they would actually dare to try to re-create her again? is she the test subject of a possible army of x's all under intergang's thumb to do their dirty work?

i also enjoyed helen's point of view. i caught the last few chapters of your last story, so i really didn't know how she would have fit in until now. you've done exceptionally well with this chapter. i look foward to the next one.

[Panther]

Well i really don't know wheather to say this is just par for teh course or to remark upon my jaw hitting the floor. I take it back - NOW X has reached hell. However, I keep a saprk of hope that she still has got some humanity buried deep that they haven't removed yet. ALthough I hae to admit the two hearts made me feel slightly queasy.

The tatoo was an interesting touch. I had been thinking about that show 'Dark Angel' right before I read that. Have you seen it? It's not bad (for Fox). NEway, those tatoos are scary and the 001 makes me nervous. WHy does it makle me think of the phrase 'first of a kind'?

I'll be interested to see what happens in Gothom....

[Daughterof_Evil]

Glad you liked the part about her new moniker, X001. I thought it would make her seem more inhuman, like a military machine, if her name was a code. The heart transplant was a last-second addition...I was nervous about the believability.

Which story were you reading? Was it Broken Wing? I wasn't sure about where I could include Helen...the moment I thought her up I really liked her so I had to give her something special. She's sort of Special Agent Dana Scully/ Detective Olivia Benson.

I read the first part of your new story and thought it was great. I really have to spend more time here or I'll never catch up. But thanks for the great comments. I'm excited that you're interested in where it's going!

[Daughterof_Evil]

I knew the double-heart thing would make some people slightly woozy, but I saw something on this news entertainment show a year ago about this college student with two hearts, one her original and one transplanted. I knew then I had to include it in one of my stories or my head would explode, so I gave that creepy fate to X.

Yes, I have seen Dark Angel, and I was a rabid fan until I gave it up last season. You're right; it's not a bad show. I just don't like James Cameron. Most of the show's ideas (the beautiful yet pastless heroine, the tattoos, the mysterious government genetics projects, even the show's name) were taken from a graphic novel called Battle Angel Alita (the picture under my handle is from a cover of the manga). I actually got the tattoo idea (and many other slightly twisted ideas) from there: the main character Alita is an amnesiac cyborg who becomes a bounty hunter, and when she is initiated, they laser-inscribe a barcode on her brain. Later on in the series, when Alita becomes a reconnaiteur for the government, her name is changed to A-1 and she is essentially "owned and operated" by the government.

Anyway, just thought you'd like to know. Battle Angel Alita is my very favorite graphic novel, and if you like my story, you should check it out wherever they sell graphic novels. I am Yukito Kushiro's greatest advertiser. Thanks for the wonderful comments on it. AND I CAN'T WAIT TIL THE 31ST FOR THE NEW MIDWINTERS!!!

[The_NewCatwoman]

Good Lord! I blew off an hour's worth of homework, and Tony Hawk for Playstation to read this total masterpiece. I'm never going to get to bed early enough. Sorry I didn't get to it sooner, it seems my days on this computer are numbered. Whenever I get on, I end up staying on for like hours at a time, and then I loose my privledges, but there's always the library.

Also:
Ever since I started reading the Batman mainstream comic instead of the cartoon spin-off, I've had a harder time picturing cartoon Bruce, with kick-ass comic Bruce's fine butt in his place. Makes for better graphics, which definitely helped with this story. I was absolutely glued! Thanks for the picker-upper, I've been kinda down lately.

[Daughterof_Evil]

A total masterpiece!? Are you delirious, woman?

All joking aside, thanks for saying that. *tiny grin*

I know what you mean about the comic versus cartoon Bruce...they're like night and day. Even in the old series Bruce wasn't what he was in the comics, and he's way too old in BB to even be considered a sex object. I have to admit I run on a different "animated" (for it is animated in my head) style than TNBA, which is when this is supposed to be taking place. It's stuck somewhere between the comics, the series, and anime. Though Tim can stay the same, 'cause he's just too cute to change.

Thanks again for your hallucinatory review, and for risking your computer priveleges to read it. That was really lovely of you.