he wasn't entirely wrong.
People's eyes tended to slide over people with visible handicaps. I'd seen people treat people in wheelchairs as though they were invisible. They avoided eye contact, looked over their heads and tended to speak to whoever was pushing the wheelchair if they spoke to them at all.
Society treated them like they were invisible, and the same could be said of people with other disabilities.
"I'm not normal," I said finally. "Why would I expect anybody else to be? And I knew a guy made out of metal once...he wasn't a robot, just a guy, so what's a few scales compared to that?"
She was holding her dress against her, and she looked at the closed door.
"I'm glad you helped him," she said after a long moment. "He deserved to get better."
"So do you," I said.
I swapped her clothes for the blanket and she lay down in the bathtub, covering herself with it.
"Is this going to hurt?"
It was a sign of her desperation that it wasn't the first question she'd asked. She sounded a little nervous though.
"I'm going to put you out," I admitted. "It wouldn't have to hurt, but I'm going to have to dissolve bones and regrow them and you'd probably see and feel weird things happening just under your skin if you looked. It's going to take a while too, a couple of hours at least."
The last thing I wanted to do was talk about acting for the next couple of hours, especially since there were a lot of shows here that hadn't existed back home. There were apparently a bunch of famous actors I'd never heard of, even though we had some pop culture in common.
"Good thing I didn't have a shift at the hotel," she said.
"Waylon checked before we even started this," I said. "Keeping this many shrimp alive in a bucket is going to be tough as it is. I can't work with dead shrimp, so every dead shrimp is a quarter ounce that you don't gain."
"Those aren't buckets," she said, glancing over at the containers. "Those are…."
She slumped over.
"And she's out," I called out to Waylon.
"I'll keep watch," he said.
"Might as well watch television," I said, taking the girl's hand again. "This is going to take a while."
Interesting.
Systemic hypoplasia had caused her to stop growing at the age of five. It was causing other, hidden issues in her heart, in the enamel of her teeth and in her eyes. From what I'd heard from Waylon she had enough pride that she wouldn't have shared that kind of thing with him.
I repaired those issues and made her younger before I popped the lid of the container and started reaching for shrimp. I could have used roaches, but I'd have been dealing with infections and other issues and I wanted to keep the separation of my identities clear.
Dissolving my own bones would have been painful and left me helpless, but I certainly wasn't willing to try it without trying it on somebody else first.
Screwing up on my own body would leave me helpless; I wanted to make sure the process would be seamless before I changed anything.
I'd pulled the blanket away moments after the woman had gone to sleep, pressing shrimp against her flesh and watching it sink in.
Grabbing around inside the bucket, I noticed that the only shrimp left were dead shrimp.
I grimaced and picked up the container filled with water. Twenty three gallons of water filled the container, meaning it weighed more than I did even before I'd lost limbs. I picked it up and set it down further away, moving the second bucket closer. The room was tiny enough that it was an issue.
Pouring it into the bathtub would work, but it'd leave Mary Dahl stinking of shrimp, which would mean I'd need to bath her before she woke up. I wasn't interested in that. Plus the dead shrimp would stop up her drain, which she wouldn't thank me for.
"Everything all right?" Waylon asked.
"Just switching containers," I said.
She'd been three and a half feet tall before all this. The amount of live shrimp we'd managed to gather was only going to let me add a foot to that. It'd leave her still short, four and a half feet, but I was giving her a more mature face. Her body would be like a short twelve year old's, and I gave her the beginnings of puberty.
She'd dreamed about being a mother, according to Croc, about being an actress again, about a lot of things.
I could make her fully adult at the height she was, but I wanted her to grow another foot in the next three or four years. I grimaced.
She'd probably need some explanations about how to deal with certain female necessities. I hadn't signed up for that, but I wasn't willing to just let it go either, even if she was twice my age.
"Wake up," I said, jolting her with a touch. I'd replaced the blanket.
She stared at me, looking confused.
A touch left her more awake.
"We had enough shrimp to make you grow a foot," I said. "Physically you're twelve now."
She looked down at her chest.
"I've got boobs!" she said.
I'd barely given her anything, but she seemed genuinely excited.
"You should continue to develop for the next three or four years and grow another foot. You can probably expect to develop a figure relatively similar to your mother's."
"What's the catch?" she asked, experimentally moving her legs and wriggling her toes.
"It'll feel like you're walking on stilts until you get used to the legs," I said. "Which means you'll probably fall down a lot until you get used to it. I'm not sure how long that'll be. You weigh twice what you did before, and you're going to feel that. You're going to start having to deal with menstruation. Men are going to start getting creepy over the next few years."
"Some of them already were," she muttered.
"Well, it'll go from a few of them to most of them," I said. "You were good looking as a child, you'll be beautiful as an adult."
She tried to rise to her feet clumsily, slipping in the tub and falling.
"Fuck," she said. "I feel like I weigh a thousand pounds."
"I improved your muscles to deal with the weight, but it'll make your reactions off."
"I've got to see," she said. "Let me see the mirror."
"You are a foot taller and forty pounds heavier," I reminded her. "You need to be careful until you get the hang of it."
She stepped over the tub and grabbed my hand before falling forward, almost into a tub of dead shrimp.
As she finally reached the bathroom mirror and grabbed the edges of the sink to hold herself up, I picked up one of the tubs and started pouring it into the bathtub. There was a layer of dead shrimp at the bottom, which I was careful not to pour into the bathtub, even though that left water in the tub.
I did the same for the second tub, even as Mary continued to stare at the mirror.
"I look like my mother when she was a kid," she said.
"You'll get to enjoy that awkward stage," I said dryly. "Puberty and feeling like you aren't yourself in your skin. It should settle down in a few years."
She lunged at me despite being naked.
"Thank you! Thank you!"
I froze.
My hands stunk like shrimp and she was naked, so I just held them out and away.
"Sit on the toilet and get dressed," I said. "I need to wash my hands pretty bad."
"Oh, right," she said as she pulled away from me.
There were tears on her face and I looked away.
As I washed my hands repeatedly she dressed herself in the sweat clothes. She struggled a little getting her legs into the pants, the new length of her legs confusing her a little.
"This is gonna be weird to explain at work," she said as she awkwardly slipped the clothes on.
"The famous healer did it," I said. "Just be sure to mention to your coworkers that if they blab about it the Joker's boys might come around."
"Why?"
"Because they're assholes," I said.
"Well, that's true," she said. "Some of the customers might notice though."
"You're behind a counter a lot I bet," I said.
"Yeah."
"Most people don't pay that much attention to the help," I said. "Especially if you were on a stool behind a counter. You're still short, for now anyway."
"Why'd you do this?" she asked.
"Waylon asked me," I said. "That's it."
"People don't just give things away for free."
"Waylon's helped me out a couple of times," I said. "And this...counting transit time and time at the fish market... this is three or four hours out of my day. It's about the same kind of investment as helping a friend move into a new apartment."
"So I owe you pizza and beer?" she asked.
"I'm not into beer," I said. I made a face. "It tastes like piss. I think you have to be a masochist to drink enough to the point that you like it. Plus, I've got a healing factor, meaning it wouldn't even get me drunk. It'd be a waste of money."
"Alcohol's not so bad if you put it in a fruity drink," she said. "Not that it ever took more than one to get me plastered. I just hated asking for a Virgin drink. Plus, bartenders always looked at me funny."
"Yeah," I said. "Well, they'll still look at you funny for the next ten years or so."
She was silent for a long moment, glancing at the mirror beside me.
"Are you sure there's nothing I can do for you?"
"You're basically a normal person with a plucky can do spirit," I said. "If you were still in the villain game maybe you could give me a heads up about all the people that want me kidnapped or dead, but Waylon says you are out of it."
"I am," she said. She grimaced. "I was never really in it for money or anything. My counselor says it's not healthy for me to keep lashing out at people for things they aren't responsible for."
"You just wanted people who cared about you."
"Yeah," she said. "My time on the TV show was the only happy time I could remember in my entire life. My co-stars were great to me. I shouldn't have kidnapped them."
"And then you were helping Waylon," I said.
I'd guessed that she'd worked with him as much out of loneliness as anything else.
She nodded.
"Well, the good thing is that Waylon can actually go out in public now," I said. "And he's got a crappy car."
"He get a license?" she asked, sounding surprised. "Where'd he even learn to drive?"
"I'm teaching him," I admitted.
His tail alone would have made driving difficult before. He would have had to remove the front seat and drive from the back like I'd heard a few professional basketball players had to do when they'd chosen small cars.
"I'll be doing the driving on the way to get your clothes," I said. "Don't worry."
"I'm going to need new shoes," she said.
"We brought you one pair," I said.
"How do you know they'll fit?" she asked.
I didn't say anything.
Her eyes narrowed.
"Did you change the size of my feet just so they'd fit the shoes?"
I shrugged.
"The saleslady told us this was the most common size for girls your age; we said we were donating to a charity. The most common size means you'll have a lot more choices than if you had weird off size feet. And if you find some shoes you really like, I can resize the foot."
"You'd have to dissolve my bones?"
"I've heard there's women that have done worse for fashion."
"Huh," she said.
"Well, lets go shopping."
"I thought the money would go farther," Waylon said, sounding stunned.
"It's the pink tax," I said. "Women's clothes can cost up to fifty percent more than similar men's clothing. The average is closer to seven or eight percent, but we also don't get good pockets."
It wasn't just clothes either; things like razors and deodorants and personal care products were more expensive too. Sometimes it was even the exact same product only in a different color.
"And kids clothes are as expensive or more expensive than adult clothes," Mary said. "Trust me, I've worn the same size for thirty years."
We'd had to keep her from falling several times, and she'd knocked things over expecting her arms to be shorter than they now were, but she was getting better hour by hour.
"And it's not like you've had to worry about much other than pants," Mary continued. "And I was the one that bought your last three pair."
"How'd you even find pants for a nine foot tall guy?"
"He was only seven foot when I first met him," she said. "And there's places where you can get clothes made custom. Expensive as hell, but hand tailored always is."
"Went to a Big and Tall store when I was smaller than that. I was wearing shirts back then and shoes sometimes. Freaked the staff out, but I tipped Ok and made sure to show up close to closing in the middle of the week so I didn't drive too many customers off."
"I'm surprised you bothered," I said.
I idly looked at Mary's Bat-Meal toy. It was a barely recognizable Red Hood.
She'd ordered the kid's meal without thinking. I'd ordered extra to make up for the fact that she was going to be hungry. She'd have to get used to bigger portions and increased hunger.
New clothes every year, higher food costs, female menstrual products… life was going to be more expensive for Mary Dahl from now on. On the other hand, looking more normal might mean more job opportunities. Even in the Protectorate Case 53s had been subtly discriminated against, especially if they were female and ugly like Gully.
"I looked more human back then," he said. "Wore a lot of hoodies; in the dark I could get away as just this big guy in a hoodie, at least until they got closer. It wasn't like I wanted to go around with my pants falling off toward the end."
Right.
"My luck, my pants would have fallen off and the prosecutor would make it into some kind of sex crime, and then I'd have to report for the rest of my life. I'd have ended up eating two or three probation officers."
"Probably better to not make all the little kids have questions about anatomy every time you show up," I said.
"Horses run around without pants," he said irritably. "And nobody complains about the poor children."
"You aren't a horse," I said.
There was an expression on Mary's face. She'd lived with him for a while and presumably had seen things. I hadn't really paid that much attention to some parts of his anatomy when I healed him. Maybe I was wrong.
"And women's bodies aren't as uniform as men's are anyway," I said. "And the sizes are different from brand to brand."
"There's some of that with men," he protested.
It was true that mens' bodies differed from each other, especially with obesity involved. But women's bodies just tended to vary more, and a lot of designers only made their clothing for stick thin women. I'd been a stick thin woman once I'd lost my pot belly, and I'd been model tall, but I'd heard enough of the Wards complain about it to know.
"How long did you spend getting new clothes after your recent transformation?"
"Forty five minutes," he said. "And then more time with the shoes."
"We just spend four hours," I said. "And probably bought half the clothes that you did."
"I couldn't just find a size that fit and buy a dozen of the same shirts in different colors like I'm sure you did," Mary said primly. "I've got a whole new body and everything fits different."
Waylon had sat outside with the bags while we'd gone to stores.
I'd always hated clothes shopping myself; there had been a lot of frustration about clothes not fitting and I'd hated going in and out of the changing room so often. But shopping with Mary Dahl had been fun; she'd taken so much joy in being able to wear clothes that she'd never had access to before.
"I had a nice conversation about football with some of the other guys outside," he said. "Not that I ever paid that much attention to sports, but just agreeing with people helps. There was this one guy that said the Gotham Knights are a terrible team."
"We'd have been doing a lot better if the Joker hadn't killed half the team three years ago," Mary muttered. "And he didn't even kill the shitty players… it was the good ones. It pissed Cobblepot off; he had this whole betting scheme that was going to make him a mint."
"I'm surprised he's still alive," I said. "Football fans are pretty vicious, I've heard, especially the gamblers."
"He gets rushed off to Arkham for a few months and people calm down," Waylon said. "Relatives of the people he killed are still mad, but most people just kind of forget or give up. You have to be pretty mad to risk the crap he'd do to you if you failed."
"Angry or crazy?" I asked.
She shrugged and grabbed a fry off Waylon's plate. "Either one really."
I stiffened.
"Is there a villain dressed like Willie Wonka in town?" I asked casually. "I've been going over all the gangs to watch out for and I seem to remember that one."
"Tetch," Waylon said. He grimaced. "He runs the Wonderland gang."
A short guy dressed like Willie Wonka was at the front of a crowd of people. A closer look showed at least a hundred elementary school children in the center of the crowd surrounded by adults. The adults were carrying a variety of improvised weapons. He was dancing around, even though there wasn't any music, and I had bugs close enough that they'd have heard if he had music blasting in earbuds.
He was imitating Harold Hill from the Music Man, pretending to direct a band of children who were pretending to play musical instruments.
Right.
The Mad Hatter.
He was some kind of Tinker/Master, considered genuinely crazy.
"They're involved in human trafficking and black market tech," Mary said. She grimaced. "Some nasty stuff that'll melt you down to the bone. That's what they do when he'd a little more lucid than normal. When he's crazier… well, he's bad news."
"He's worked with the Joker before," Waylon said. "Injected me with things that made me mutate faster and made my mind start to go."
His fist tightened, and he grimaced.
"He's a deviant," Mary said, scowling. "He kept hitting on me in Arkham. He obsesses over girls and kills them when they don't live up to his original Alice. He killed her too."
She shuddered.
"He's been known to force people do drown themselves in the sewers in large groups," Waylon said soberly. "And he's part of the reason people don't wear more hats in Gotham. He's got tech that can control your mind from a city away if you wear one of his specialty hats. He can control you from close up if you even get within sight of the hat."
"He's bad news," Mary insisted. "He's as crazy as Joker is."
"How do the heroes even beat him?" I asked. "If he can control everybody."
"Get the hat and destroy it," she said. "But he's been known to have smaller devices on his person just in case."
"We should probably get out of here," I said.
They both stared at me.
The crowd was coming in our direction. The last thing I needed was to have to fight Waylon while I was fighting the Hatter. He was strong enough that it'd be a problem.
"It's getting late," I said. I coughed. "And we're close enough to Mary's apartment that I figure you might walk her home."
Mary's face reddened, and Waylon nodded slowly.
"Might be good to stretch our legs," he said. "Mary needs to get used to walking. You'll leave the car back in the garage?"
"Yeah."
The path back to Mary's apartment was perpendicular to the two groups and would take them out of the line of fire.
I wasn't going to face the Mad Hatter directly; I'd be a fool to do so. To the best of my knowledge I had no special resistance to Master powers, and Master powers weren't the kind of thing you could willpower your way through.
Blindfolding myself might work, but Tinkers constantly upgraded their gear. I couldn't assume it'd be any different here. He might not have the same weaknesses this time he'd have had every time before.
Even working through my bugs was risky.
There were people like Mama Mathers who had power even when viewed indirectly.
At the same time, I had a feeling that something terrible was about to happen, and most of the people in the battle would be innocent pawns. A man who would drown crowds of people and then mind controlled a group of children wasn't somebody who could be allowed to continue what they were doing.
The first priority was knowledge; he had the hat, but what other tools did he have on his person? If he had a second mind control device, how hard would it be to destroy it or at least get it away from him?
I had gnats on him already, crawling around inside his jacket.
Three devices were on his person. That was difficult. I didn't know enough about his mind control. If he had to speak it would be relatively easy. I could fill his lungs with bugs and make my swarm loud enough that it would be difficult for the people he was controlling to actually hear him.
But if it was a psychic power, even an artificial one he could make the people around him suicide
I hesitated.
People that were on the street turned and stared at him for a moment before stopping and waiting for the rest to move.
I froze as my bugs noticed a distortion in space on a nearby rooftop. They could smell someone waiting there, not moving.
Were they an assassin waiting for me?
For a moment I was tempted to swarm them, but bugs showed that they weren't carrying a weapon. They did seem to be using some kind of binoculars.
"He has three devices in his coat and one in his hat," my bugs whispered in his ear.
"Jesus," I heard the voice say. A pair of binoculars appeared in midair and fell to the flat rooftop. They had a bat insignia branded on the side."Way to sneak up on somebody."
What was it with billionaires and branding?
"Signal, right?" I asked.
He was braver than a lot of people anyway. His voice didn't waver.
"Yeah," he said. He shimmered into view for just a moment, a black man in a bright yellow costume. It was a costume meant to be seen. Was the costume deliberately yellow to be obnoxiously visible?
I'd left a visible cloud of insects hovering low on the roof.
"You Skitter?" he asked after a long moment.
"Yes."
"I'm surprised you haven't already swarmed him," he said. "He picked up the kids five blocks back. I've called in reinforcements, but he's got a literal army of hostages."
"I don't know enough about his mind control. Does he have the victims commanded to kill themselves if he is harmed? Will they smash their heads into the walls until they die?"
"That's… not how it works. Not usually anyway. He's always had to give verbal commands before, but tactics and tech changes. It's an arms race between heroes and villains at the best of times."
My bugs were already moving. The mind controlled drones didn't even notice the insects swarming by their feet.
"How are you not controlled already?"
"I can do things with light," he said. "It keeps me from getting a detailed look, but I can still make out most of what's happening. How about you?"
"Bugs don't have human vision," I said. "It serves the same purpose."
It meant I could probably fight in person if I had to.
"Don't kill him," he said.
"He's a murderer and a rapist," I said. "The world would be better off without him."
"You'd traumatize the kids," Signal said.
"I always traumatize everybody. It's part of my power," I said. "Why wouldn't I stop him permanently? If we stick him back in Arkham he'll be back in what, six months, drowning people and raping Alices."
His hat came off as thousands of insects rose behind him and snatched it off. Stinging insects bit his hands as he tried to reach inside his coat.
I had insects stinging his eyes and tongue; there was a risk that he'd suffocate, but I wasn't worried about that as long as he couldn't speak.
Insects were weaving silk, but it wouldn't be enough. It would have been a lot easier if he'd been standing still somewhere having a conversation, but he'd been dancing around.
The hat flew up to us.
"You know how to work this?"
He glanced back down at the crowd.
"Shit! You started already?"
The hat landed beside him. He dropped down and grabbed the hat, fingers working insistently before he held the hat up and a massive flash went off.
Below us the crowd reacted as though they'd been hit by a sledgehammer, a collective gasp and people started running from the back. I could hear screaming from the crowd.
There was a sound of a shot, then another, then a third.
Shit.
Several of the people in the crowd had been carrying concealed weapons, and it looked like two or three of them were emptying bullets into Tetch.
"That wasn't me," I said. I paused. "You'd think this would happen more often."
I'd seen what they were about to do. I'd been worried that Tetch would have plants in the audience, people who would take children hostage once the mind control wore off. I'd detected the guns, and I'd been poised and ready to do everything I could to keep them from slaughtering children.
Seeing their chosen victim, I'd decided not to intervene. It had been a split second decision, and I wasn't unhappy with the results.
Tetch had needed to die, and apparently a lot of people in the crowd agreed with me. Some of them were kicking his corpse.
Whatever he'd done had enraged a lot of people.
Signal was already swinging down to try to rescue Tetch.
The men who'd shot him were already running away, blending into the crowd of screaming children, but the crowd that was beating him even included a few children.
I watched to make sure that the crowd wouldn't turn on Signal; violent crowds could turn ugly fast, even against people they considered heroes.
Emotions ran high and inhibitions were low in groups, and people would do things in groups that they'd never do on their own. We'd been warned about crowds repeatedly in the Wards.
Most people were relatively good people, but crowds tended to be ugly outside of venues where they were having fun, and sometimes even then. Most people would never set their neighborhoods on fire, or attack the police, or try to kick someone to death, but crowds did that kind of thing all the time.
There was something about human nature that tended to divide responsibility in groups. A single person would never try to urge a suicidal person to jump, but it sometimes happened in crowds, even as police negotiators were trying to convince the person not to.
Signal was apparently popular, which spoke well of him. He was able to stop people from attacking Tetch, and he bent to the task of trying to save him.
I'd seen enough injuries to know that it wasn't impossible, but the growing pool of blood under the body suggested that it wasn't likely.
Slipping away, I headed for Waylon's car.
It was a battered 1990 Ford Explorer that looked like it had been in a couple of supervillains fights, battered and ugly, more rust than metal. It had more than a quarter million miles on it, but it still ran and Jason assured me that the basic structure and engine were sound.
Pulling carefully out in traffic, I avoided the blocks where children and adults were still filling the streets as they ran.
Heading back to the halfway house, I was surprised to see lights from a police cruiser behind me.
I'd seen them, of course, but I'd been obeying all the traffic laws and there wasn't anything to differentiate me from any other vehicle on the road.
Hopefully they were after someone else.
I pulled over and they pulled over behind me.
Right.
The Gotham police department were notoriously corrupt. They often worked with the gangs.
I began pulling insects from the surrounding area.
Two heavyset white officers approached me from behind.
One of them knocked on my window with a nightstick and I rolled it down.
"Do you know why we pulled you over?"
"No," I said.
"Your headlight is out."
How would they even know? Cars of this model and age didn't leave headlights on during the day.
"It's not," I said.
I heard the sound of a crash as the second officer smashed his nightstick into the right passenger side headlight.
"It is," the officer said. He smiled, a nasty expression on his face. "Let me see your license and registration."
He didn't notice the sounds of insects getting agitated everywhere in a nine block area.
"I don't suppose any of this is going to show up on the cameras, is it?" I said, my voice sounding tired and resigned.
The officer chuckled, a nasty sound.
"Gotham doesn't have the budget for cameras in the car, or for body cameras. Lucky for us."
"That IS lucky," I said, letting my frown widen into a wide smile.
He grabbed for his gun.
"Step out of the car!" he screamed.
His partner was coming around the vehicle with his gun drawn as well.
I reached for the door and opened it, and the man stepped back gun still pointed at me.
"Hands up!" he screamed, even as his partner yelled "Get down on the ground!"
It was a thing police sometimes did, screaming conflicting instructions so that no matter what the suspect did they could be charged with resisting an officer. It'd even give them an excuse to shoot, although without cameras they barely needed the excuse.
Juries tended to give cops the benefit of the doubt on witness stands, and prosecutors had to work closely with them so they tended not to press as hard. It made lying a lot easier.
I raised my hands and lowered myself to the ground.
The first officer grabbed my hand, wrenching it behind my back. A surge of will and I felt his sudden dead weight fall across me.
"Carl?" the second officer asked.
"I think he's having a seizure!" I yelled. I shoved him off of me. "You need to roll him on his back and make sure that he doesn't swallow his tongue!"
I was lying, of course. People were physically unable to swallow their own tongues, and objects in the mouth could crack teeth. They could also break and get into the airway and cause all kinds of problems. The guy was heavyset enough that a stroke would have happened sooner or later, although he wasn't actually prone to seizures.
The seizure I was giving him was fake; the stroke that resulted because of it was real.
The second officer panicked, shoving his gun back into it's holster. I helped him roll his partner over.
"Why'd you guys target me anyway?" I asked as I touched the second officer on the hand. Another surge of will started a cascade of biological processes. It was a lot quicker and easier to damage the body than to heal it. The body had a lot of interconnected parts; throwing a wrench in the works was easy. "I'm poor as shit."
He hunched over, grimacing suddenly.
"Too many hot dogs and donuts maybe," I said in his ear. "A heart attack was almost inevitable. You've probably been on the edge of one for a while. All this excitement just… tipped you over the edge."
He grabbed for the walkie talkie on his belt, but I put a hand on his and he couldn't move.
"Who are you working for?" I asked in his ear. "I could call for an ambulance if you're honest, but otherwise you're going to fall over on your partner and you'll die here. A lucky break for me, but in this neighborhood people are likely to strip you and urinate on your corpses. Especially if you guys are as big a dicks as you seem."
"We're not working for nobody," the man said, grimacing. "Just making a little extra on the side."
"You're lying!" I hissed in his ear, tightening my grip on his wrist. "I know the scam. Plant some drugs on a guy, steal his car and any money he has on him and sell the car at auction. You stick most of the cash in your pocket and the department pats you on the back for the car."
It was called civil asset forfeiture and it was as legal here as it had been back home. Some departments had twenty percent of their budgets supplied by taking property from people who hadn't even been convicted of anything.
There'd been cases of police in Louisiana robbing tourists on the highways.
It was possible to get the property back, but it took years in court. There'd been numerous cases of businesses folding when owners took a week's deposits to the bank and had them all stolen by the police. Lawyers to defend the case cost even more, and the cases often took years. They got their money back but they'd lost everything in the meantime.
Most people ended up not even contesting the charges because of the cost.
"The problem is, my car is a piece of crap," I said. "People that drive cars like that don't have any money. Why were you targeting me?"
"Because you looked like a bitch," he said, grimacing. "The partner's going through a divorce and you look like his wife. He just wanted to let off some steam. Kids like you are too stupid to complain and you're easy to intimidate."
"So he wanted to yell at me, rob me and then let me go?"
"Depending on what we found," he said. "There's a thirty percent chance that any car we find actually has drugs in it."
"That's not the whole story, is it?"
He grimaced.
"There's some thing happening with the Mad Hatter and a monster crowd down south. You'd have to be an idiot to get involved with something like that."
I patted him on the neck.
"That wasn't so hard," I said.
He took a deeper breath as his pain got less.
I tapped the hand of his partner on the ground and he stopped seizing.
"Did you call this in before all this started?"
"Y...yes we did," he said.
He was clearly lying.
"You guys really need to take better care of your health," I said. "Your heart is feeling better right now, but I've heard that those come and go. If you don't go to the hospital now you'll probably die. Oh, and you should probably stop using cocaine; it's hell on the heart."
I grabbed his walkie talkie from his belt.
"Code ten double zero, officer down!" I said, using his voice. "Officer Williams is having seizures and I think I'm having a heart attack. Send ambulances to 1403 Westwood and Branch."
His eyes widened and he stared at me.
"They'll be here in three minutes," I said.
My face started melting.
"Now, if you were to talk about this to anyone, it could go way worse," I said. I leaned forward and he flinched. "I can become anybody, and I can get to you anywhere. You'll wake up with me at the foot of your bed one day, while your pretty blonde wife is oblivious beside you."
I'd seen the picture on the passenger side of the car through my bugs, but he didn't know that.
"She might be interested to know who you are cheating with too," I said.
I could smell two women on him. The fact that I could smell the same woman on the other cop was interesting.
"Are you sleeping with his bitch of a wife, or is he sleeping with yours?" I said rhetorically. "I suppose it doesn't matter. I'd just forget that license plate; I mean, once people start having heart attacks it starts happening a lot. And you've just maybe avoided dying to this one."
I doubted he could remember by this point; stress did odd things to memory.
A touch made his eyes blurry. They'd stay blurry for at least another ten minutes.
I leaned toward him.
I could smell an acrid scent from his lap.
"I mean, being a cop is pretty physically vigorous. Maybe you should consider sitting behind a desk or getting a safer job."
Leaning in even farther, I whispered in his ear.
"I'll be watching, officer Williams. You live in that house on Asher street, right?"
He shuddered.
A touch and his vision went blurry. He wouldn't be able to take down the license plate if he wanted to, and it'd resolve itself in ten minutes.
They'd run tests on both officers, and they'd find the cocaine in William's bloodstream. He really had been abusing it, and getting the money from his habit was probably part of the reason for his shaking people down.
His partner didn't have drugs in his system, but he was probably filled with resentment toward his wife and toward women in general. I'd read that forty percent of police families experienced domestic violence, although that percentage included verbal abuse. Something like ten percent of the wives had claimed to have been physically abused in the previous six months and a similar number had claimed their children were abused in the same time period.
There was a lot of misogyny in the police force, as well as a lot of racism and simple arrogance and desire to bully others. It wasn't all cops, but there'd been studies showing that when a single bad cop was moved to a better district his peers there started acting worse.
I couldn't imagine how bad it'd be in a place like Gotham, where the majority of the force was bad. Good cops would either quit, try unsuccessfully to get transferred, or find themselves having "accidents" on the job.
Justifying your own actions was human nature. People did it all the time.
Both of those cops were likely to end up on disability for the rest of their lives. It was easy for me to justify permanently hurting them because it'd get them off the force and ultimately make the people they were supposed to serve safer.
On the other hand, I'd enjoyed bullying them.
I'd have enjoyed killing them even more. However, I had an agreement to help the Justice League, which came with it a tacit agreement to try to limit myself to their rules of engagement. I couldn't keep killing people, not in my Elixir persona at least.
It wasn't like Justice League members hadn't killed.
Wonder Woman had snapped Maxwell Lord's neck after he'd mind controlled Superman and had threatened to use him to slaughter millions. Video of her doing it had been sent out to the world with relevant parts of the dialogue missing. She'd been prosecuted by the International court, although charges had been dismissed.
According to Jason, the other members had given her nine times of hell about the whole thing despite the fact that she hadn't had much choice.
A mind controlled Superman had almost killed her and there had been no way to depower Lord or free Superman from the mind control. She'd grown up in another culture as a warrior, and so she was much more willing to kill than the rest.
John Stewart was a former soldier and so presumably willing to kill at least to some degree. John Stewart didn't even bother with a secret identity.
People like Superman and Captain Marvel were so powerful that they simply didn't have to kill.
It was strange that Batman, the very weakest of them and as a result the most likely to need to kill was the one with the strongest code against it. Jason hadn't been willing to go into the reasons behind it much.
But if I was going to work with them I needed to kill less.
Those cops were bullies, but they presumably weren't out murdering people. Maiming them was enough. They'd be off the streets and the world would be a little better. Also, someone's marriage was hopefully ruined too.
I was never this vindictive in my old life.
I grimaced as I drove off.
I'd have to get the headlight fixed sooner than later or I'd be constantly harassed by more cops. The problem was that most of them would probably just be doing their jobs. I still wasn't sure how ironclad my new identities were and I didn't want to test it with a traffic ticket.
At the edge of my range I heard the sound of a massive crash.
I turned immediately, moving relay bugs so I could get a better look.
Damn.
People fleeing from the Hatter's scheme were milling around the road, and it looked as though a tanker truck had swerved to avoid some of them, jumped a curb and plowed into a poorly constructed three story building, which was starting to collapse.
The building had murals painted on the outside, of flowers and suns and happy animals dancing. It was a daycare, and I could hear children screaming inside.
The whole building had shifted backwards and the rear entrance had collapsed behind tons of wood and concrete. The tanker in the front hadn't exploded yet, but I sent insects forward to see if they could smell any leaks.
I pulled to a stop a half a block away and I jumped out. There were cars everywhere and I couldn't park without blocking the street.
Construction workers were milling around , uncertain what to do.
We had to stop the tanker from exploding. A tanker explosion of that size could overturn cars, set surrounding buildings on fire and kill a lot of people. I'd had experience with tanker explosions in my time as a Ward. It had never ended up well.
With a crowd of over a hundred on the street, casualties would be high.
Even if it didn't actually explode the gasoline inside a tanker of that size would burn for the next seven hours.
I began gathering my swarm.
"Leave the area," I had my insects hiss close to everyone on the street. "The tanker may explode."
They hadn't reacted to my insects when they were mind controlled; they certainly reacted now. People started running in all directions in a panic.
I rushed up to the crashed cab of the vehicle.
It wasn't leaking yet, which was good.
I hauled myself up and touched the arm of the unconscious driver. He woke, groggy.
Someone tapped me from behind; I didn't look, but I saw that it was one of the people who'd been hypnotized by Hatter.
"If he pulls back it'll collapse the whole structure," the man shouted.
"What?" I asked.
"I'm a firefighter. This is a piece of crap building that's hanging on by a thread," he said. "If he pulls the truck back, the whole thing is going to collapse. We've gotta get the kids out."
"Can we get them out through the windows?" I asked.
I pulled back and stared up at the windows.
There were bars on the first and second stories for some reason, and the third story was high enough that it'd be dangerous. The first floor had collapsed on the back side; the structure was lower in the back, but it looked like the floors were already cracking on that side.
I sent insects looking for survivors.
"There's thirty children inside," my insects said. "Some injuries, but it looks as though they were having class in the front of the building. Two of the teachers are badly injured. One is pinned to a desk with three children trapped underneath the desk."
One of them had thrown themselves over a desk to protect children huddled underneath. The roof was pinning him to the desk and the children underneath him were crying.
My insects heard him murmuring encouragements to them, although he had to be in incredible pain.
"Fuck," the fireman said.
I stared up at the building.
Climbing up to the third floor I could probably do. There weren't any bed sheets or rope to lower children down with.
"How long until the fire department arrives?"
He'd already called.
"Twenty minutes," he said, grimacing. "Maybe thirty. This whole Hatter thing has crowds filling the streets and making it impossible to get through. There's been a number of traffic accidents from people panicking and driving away."
"Can you do anything about that?" I demanded into thin air.
"I will clear the streets," my insects said. "Whatever it takes."
"Don't kill anybody," I said irritably.
"Even if they've got clear streets it'll still be ten minutes," he said. He grimaced. "They shut down the closest firehouse, and medical teams are dealing with the aftermath of the whole Hatter thing."
Right.
It had been that way back home too. Essential services had always left the poor areas first.
I had butterflies moving through broken windows.
The whole building groaned.
"I don't think we have ten minutes."
The firefighter grimaced.
"All right," I said. "I'll see what I can do."
I climbed to the top of the truck cab and then I launched myself upward, grabbing onto the bars on one of the windows above. I could jump a ridiculous distance, probably because my strength had increased massively while my weight hadn't.
The bars held and I managed to pull myself up until I could launch myself higher, grabbing onto a window ledge.
The window had already shattered, and I grimaced as my hands were cut and started bleeding as I pulled myself up and through.
The children screamed again.
"I'm here to help," I said as I climbed inside.
Picking glass out of my hand I approached the desk on the other side of the room.
"I'm going to need your help," I said to the two teachers who stared at me. "Pull him out when I tell you to."
Moving over to the man I touched his arm.
He had a lot of damage, but I repaired as much as I could. It was a miracle that he was still alive. I wouldn't be able to heal everything until the weight on top of him was gone, but at least this way he wouldn't die the moment the pressure was released.
I leaned in, slid as close as I could to him, and I pushed my back against the ceiling.
I didn't have to move it much, only an inch, but it didn't budge. I could feel it move just a little, and I tried to push harder.
It was like pushing a mountain.
Even though my strength was enhanced it wouldn't be enough. I felt like Atlas holding up the sky, but my strength wasn't enough.
Then I felt hands on both sides of me.
The other teachers were with me, small women pushing up at the ceiling, and behind them small children with their hands upraised, even though they were too small to even reach the ceiling.
I felt something start to move.
"It's all like a dream," Mary said.
It was awkward, carrying all the bags as they walked, but Waylon found that he didn't mind. It was a pleasant evening, and the warmth of the sun on his skin was a pleasure that he hadn't been able to experience in his life before.
"Yeah," he said. "For me too. It's nice not to be looked at like a freak whenever you're around people."
"They like to pretend they don't see you," Mary said. "But they do."
"Maybe for you," he said. "They didn't even pretend for me...and that's when I was a kid and looked a lot more human. You and Elixir are the only two who didn't look at me like that."
Mary glanced up at him.
"You and her have a thing?"
He glanced down at her and snorted.
"After she changed me back my pants fell off and she didn't even look," he said. "Don't know what her type is, but it's clearly not me, and I'm kind of OK with that."
"It's a bad idea to date that young anyway," she said. "What would you even talk about? It's not like people that age have seen the same shows or listened to the same music. And the new stuff is all crap."
Mary tended to live in the past a little, even now, although she was getting better.
"Who knows if she's even really that young?"
"What do you mean?"
"She doesn't always look the same every time I meet with her. It's like she forgets sometimes what she's supposed to look like. I just kind of roll with it. The thing is, if she can make you younger, and she can affect herself…"
"Then she could be a hundred years old. That'd be just as bad!" Mary said. "They think all the great stuff we grew up with is crap, and they only want to listen to hokey old country and western, or classical music if they're a snob. You ever been to an old person's house? It's all MASH and Gunsmoke and Perry Mason reruns all day long!"
"She's a nice person," Waylon said mildly. "She didn't have to help either one of us. If she has crap taste in music, it doesn't matter."
It wasn't like he'd had that many chances to listen to music either. He'd listened to music on the radio when he was younger, but he'd never had the money to buy recorded music. As a result he recognized songs but not artists.
He'd seen some television too, including Mary's show.
But it had all stopped when he'd moved into the sewers, which meant his tastes were stuck in the eighties. Mary was the same way.
"Well, that's true of friends," Mary said. "You don't spend that much time with them. But somebody you're dating…"
"We spent a lot of time together," Waylon said. "Aren't we friends?"
She stopped and looked up at him.
"Of course we are!" she said. "We were roommates; but we've got the same tastes in music and television. We've already lived together so we know that we're not going to drive each other crazy."
Her face was flushed red for some reason.
In their old bodies he'd have had to knelt and leaned forward to be at eye level, and even then she'd have had to look up. In his new body and hers it wouldn't be nearly as hard.
"We're still gonna be friends no matter what," he said.
She was silent for a long moment.
"And what if one of us wants to be more than friends?"
Her face was fully red by this point.
"I guess we'd have to figure that out together," he said carefully.
Taylor would have to make her look older before he was really interested in her the way she was suggesting, but that wasn't out of the question. They really did get along well and had shared a lot and she'd never given up on him even through all her own struggles.
"That… sounds nice," she said, looking up at him.
"Yeah," he said.
They started walking again in silence for a few minutes before he spoke again.
"You were really worried about Elixir?" he asked incredulously. "She's way out of my league."
"And I'm not?" she demanded.
"You're out of my league too," he admitted. "You're smarter than me, and you were all famous and everything, and you're a lot better looking, even now that I'm human."
"Don't put yourself down," she said. "I'm a has-been. I was pretty distinctive looking as Baby Doll; if I couldn't make it in Hollywood looking like that, I'm not going to make it looking normal."
"You were a good actress!" he protested.
"I was good at mugging for the camera," she said. "Disney channel level crap. But changing your look can be death in Hollywood. You remember the girl from Dirty Dancing, right?"
"The girl with the nose?" he asked. He'd wondered what had ever happened to her.
"She got a nose job and nobody recognized her," she said. "She turned invisible. It was the one distinctive feature everybody remembered and when it was gone… so was she."
"Do you regret letting her fix you then?"
"Hell no," Mary said. "I always wanted to be a mom. According to Elixir it means I'm going to have to bother with some messy stuff every month, but it'll be worth it."
"You aren't wanting a baby right now, are you?" he asked uneasily.
She looked up at him and grinned.
"Worried?" she asked. "Afraid you'll have a litter of baby Crocs?"
"Is that possible?" he asked, startled.
The thought had never occurred to him before; it wasn't like there'd been a lot of women interested in a kid with a skin condition, and then when he'd become more animalistic they'd been more interested in screaming and running away.
It was a terrifying thought. There was no way he'd ever subject anyone else to the hell his life had been, no matter what. It'd be cruel. He wondered if his healing factor would reverse a vasectomy; it still existed in his human form but was slower.
"Elixir says no," she said. "She said your kids will have a metagene, but it probably won't manifest the same way. Maybe we could have kids that could fly."
They'd been talking while they shopped apparently.
"Wouldn't that be a bitch, though?" he asked. "Baby crawling on the ceiling while you yell at it to come down?"
She smirked.
"It's not like mutants in the comics, where the moment they get a pubic hair they can shoot beams out of their eyes," she said, rolling her eyes. "Elixir looked it up on the phone. It's usually when people get exposed to traumatic events or chemicals."
"So having a baby with laser eyes is actually likely in Gotham," he said dryly.
"Well, it's not like we have to stay in Gotham," she said.
"Bludhaven's worse, and Metropolis is a whole different kind of problem."
"You know most of the country doesn't have all this craziness, right?"
Waylon frowned.
"I've heard small towns are kind of… gossipy."
"There's big cities that aren't crazy," Mary said. "Cincinnati for example."
"Other than that one show about the radio show I don't know anything about it."
"That's the point," Mary said. "The cities you never hear about are the ones you want to go to! You want to go to a place where they report local traffic accidents."
"Why?"
"Because the news likes to report about the weird stuff," she said. "If it gets too common they stop reporting it. It's like you never hear about regular crime in Gotham. If they're reporting traffic accidents that means they don't have anything worse to report on the local news."
It made sense.
Gotham was so crazy that there wasn't any point in reporting ordinary crime. To raise a kid you'd want somewhere safer.
They climbed the steps then reached the door to her apartment.
"Well, this is my stop," she said. She opened the door and he set the bags in the entryway. "Do you want a drink?"
He opened his mouth to respond when a cloud of insects spoke from behind him.
"Help, Waylon."
"Skitter?" he asked.
"Elixir... is trapped under a collapsed roof," the insects said. The voice weirdly sounded like it was in pain. "At the old daycare center on Mayberry."
"That's just down the road!" Mary said. She pointed, and said, "Three blocks and take a left. You can't miss it."
"All right," he said. "I'm on my way."
He pulled off his shirt and kicked off his shoes; there was no point in wasting even more clothing. He transformed as he ran down the steps.
He was faster as Croc than he was in his human form, and from the sound of it time was of the essence. At his best he could hit forty miles an hour, and so he sprinted forward, his long stride eating up the distance.
It was less than a minute before he came in sight of the daycare center.
"The way on the bottom is blocked," Skitter said, her insect's voice sounding weak. "The whole building may come down. There are children needing to get free. Save them… then come get me."
He stumbled.
Was she saying what he thought she was saying?
Fuck.
People were already panicking as he sprinted to the truck that had hit the building.
"Where are the kids?" he demanded.
"Uh," someone said, staring up at him, face drained of blood.
"I'm here to save the kids," he repeated.
"There," a different man said. He seemed to be the one in charge.
"How likely is everything to fall apart if I lift this?" he asked.
He wasn't sure why he was even asking, but the guy seemed to be the one in charge.
"Fairly," the man said. "So be careful. But they're pretty small kids from what I hear, so you don't have to move it far. Just give us an opening for people to crawl through and that'll be enough.
The man glanced up at Waylon then called out in a loud voice. "You kids need to move back. Lyle Lyle Crocodile is here, and he's going to to lift up the door and make a hole for you to crawl through."
There was a long moment of silence before a small voice said "OK."
Bending down, Waylon shoved his claws under the wood and concrete and made room for his fingers.
"All right," he said out loud. "Here we go."
For a moment he was afraid nothing would move. He was strong, but he'd never exactly lifted an entire building before. The pressure was tremendous, but finally something started to move.
He grunted, and a moment later the first child crawled through. She was tiny, almost as small as Mary had been, and she looked up at him with a gap toothed grin.
"Mr. Crocodile!" she said as a man carefully helped her up.
More children came through, one after another. They all looked up at him in a way he wasn't used to, like he was a superhero.
"That's the last of the kids," he heard after a moment. "The teachers will need a bigger hole.
"Right," he grunted, and he lifted harder, shoving his knee under the opening as several adults came out. If his leg was crushed he could always cut it off and it'd grow back eventually, but the teachers wouldn't.
He could hear the structure groaning.
"There's still somebody up there," the last teacher said. "She helped get one of us out and several kids, but the roof fell on her and we couldn't get her free."
He carefully pulled his leg out, grimacing.
"I'll get her," he said. He tried to carefully lower the structure to the floor but his arms were burning. The last couple of inches fell, and he heard the whole structure groan.
He stepped back, and then he leapt up to the top of the fuel truck cab. He jumped up and grabbed the bars on a second floor window. They fell and he barely caught the windowsill. The glass had already shattered, the window deformed out of its normal shape.
Slipping inside, he moved, heading for the stairs.
They groaned under his weight, but he didn't want to become human; the whole building was likely to collapse any moment and he'd be crushed to death. He pushed his way to the top floor, and he saw where Elixir was trapped. He could see her legs, and he began moving debris as quickly as he was able.
She was unconscious, but still alive when he found her. The floor was groaning beneath him, and he could hear the sounds of things cracking. There was barely enough time to grab her and curl his body around her as the entire building fell.
It felt like tons of concrete covered him and he grimaced, but he held firm. It was dark. It felt like the whole building had collapsed in on this one point. He had no idea how much material there was above him, but it was enough that it was hard for him to breathe.
He rested for a moment; he'd start digging them out when he could get his breath.
At least Elixir was still breathing. The fall might have jostled her, but she had a healing factor. They'd both be OK as long as he could just get his breath.
He had no idea how long they both lay there in darkness. He concentrated on breathing. He felt things starting to move around him and he tensed.
"They're still alive!" he heard a voice call out from above.
He looked up and he was blinded by what looked like the last rays of the sun above. There was a silhouette above him, and he felt the pressure on his torso finally release.
A hand reached down and he took it.
Eyes as blue as the sea stared down at him.
"That was well done, Waylon," Superman said.
Waylon weighed almost four hundred pounds in this form, but Superman picked him up like he was light as a feather.
People were cheering.
It made sense; people were always cheering for Superman.
"You've got cracked ribs," Superman said. "Bruising under your scales. But I hear you've got enhanced healing."
"It'll be fine in a few hours," Waylon said. "What about her?"
"She's more badly injured," Superman said. "We're going to have some people confirm, and then we're likely going to have to get her somewhere safer to heal."
"She's got a healing factor," he said.
"We're just going to give it enough of a jump start that we'll make sure she's out of danger, and then she'll be able to heal her on her own. I've been through it myself."
"There's people after her," Waylon said. Just letting her be taken by strangers, even the Justice League seemed wrong. It wasn't what she would have wanted. "I need to protect her."
Superman was silent for a moment, then said, "You can come along. You've earned the right."
A moment later Superman lowered him to the ground and then took Elixir to an ambulance, where they put an oxygen mask on her. He stared at her and then slowly lowered himself to sit on the curb.
People rushed up to him and he flinched.
The first to reach him was the gap toothed little girl; she rushed up to him and tried to hug him, though he was too wide to do so.
"Thank you Lyle!" she said. "We read a story about you!"
He didn't know who Lyle the Crocodile was, although he'd heard what the man had told the kids to comfort them.
Another boy ran up to him.
"I know you aren't Lyle," the kid said in a low voice. "But I still think you're cool."
Parents crowded around him, and it was all he could do not to push them back, but they were tearful and they all reached out and touched him.
Why weren't they afraid?
They were treating him like a hero when he'd barely done anything. It didn't make sense. It slowly started to dawn on him that the cheering from before hadn't been entirely for Superman. Some of it, maybe just a little had been for him.
He didn't know what to make of it. He was a monster. He'd done monstrous things, and he knew that the parents at least knew what he'd done. But they were here, now trying to shake his hand.
A shadow fell over him.
He looked up and the Bat was there.
"We're ready to transport," the Bat said.
Waylon staggered to his feet, and a moment later he found himself being picked up by Superman again.
"You're too big to fit in the ambulance," Superman said, smiling down at him. "But you'll fit in the Zeta tubes. It's a good thing we planned ahead for heroes with different body shapes."
"What?"
There was something about the way he said that which didn't make sense. He'd emphasized the word heroes. Waylon knew what Zeta tubes were; he'd been transported through them a couple of times.
Superman smiled down at him, and a moment later they reached an alleyway. Batman was already there somehow, and the ambulance was not far behind.
They brought her out in a stretcher through what looked like a blank wall; there was a flash and they were all gone.
Batman stood beside him.
"Let's go Waylon," Batman said. He was silent for a moment and then put a hand on Waylon's back and patted it. "You did good work today."
They stepped through the holographic wall; it looked like there was a real wall behind the hologram that closed behind them as they stepped inside a white area.
"Recognized, Batman 02. Recognized, Guest, Waylon Jones, A-53."
"Welcome to the Watchtower," Batman said.