Chapter 400: The Fantastic Four
Bat Island, New York -- a short distance from Ryker's Island.
The Lizard Professor and the others were away. Only Batman and Venom Robin were there, sitting on the bare foundation of what would eventually become Parker Manor.
"So." Robin was perched on the Batwing's wing with the air of a man conducting a very important inventory. "This trip to Wakanda. What did we actually come home with?"
He ticked items off on his fingers, one at a time.
"Five hundred kilograms of refined Vibranium. Ten Kimoyo Beads on a bracelet. One formal treaty between Batman and the Black Panther. One axe."
He considered this lineup with the focused satisfaction of a child counting coins.
In practice, most of it had nothing to do with him. The one item he could actually use was the axe -- Skurge's greataxe, taken from the underground chamber beneath Wakanda's ancestral temple. It had traded blows with a symbiote copy of itself for the better part of a fight without so much as a scratch on the blade. It was heavy enough to matter, simple enough in design not to get in the way, and large enough to be worth carrying. Robin had not put it down since retrieving it from the chamber, which meant he had come very close to forgetting about everything else.
Almost.
He watched the Batwing settle into the lift platform on Bat Island and begin its slow descent into the underground cave below, and remembered.
"Old bat. Five hundred kilograms -- that's enough to build an entire Batmobile out of pure Vibranium, right?"
The previous Arkham Batmobile had been converted into a radio signal detection array during the operation against Nathan Garrett. The Villain mech, stored in the Batwing as a backup vehicle, had been left behind permanently in Wakanda. At this point Batman's ground transport options were essentially a pair of legs and whatever Robin had on him.
Robin was reasonably confident Batman had no intention of leaving it that way.
"Vibranium is not the rational choice of material for a Batmobile," Batman said.
"You're not going to use it all for the suit, are you?" Robin's eyes lit up at the thought.
"A portion will go toward the suit. The rest stays in the cave until it's needed."
Five hundred kilograms was extravagant even by Batman's standards. Less than four kilograms of Vibranium had been sufficient to construct T'Challa's full Black Panther suit. Batman's next suit would be more substantial than that -- it wouldn't be form-fitting in the same way, and it wouldn't be built from a single material throughout. But it would not eat through five hundred kilograms either.
There was also the question of Vibranium's primary vulnerability -- the specific sonic frequencies that could destabilize its atomic structure. The number of people who knew those frequencies was vanishingly small, and Batman intended to keep it that way. But he had not survived as long as he had by relying on other people's ignorance as a defensive layer. Pure Vibranium construction, head to toe, was not how he intended to build.
The trip to Wakanda and back, accounting for time zones, had cost New York two full days. Batman checked his records. No major incidents. Nothing catastrophic. The city had held.
"Robin," he said. "Go to North Brother Island and find Dr. Otto. Ask him about the progress on the Antarctic Vibranium."
Robin nodded, swung the axe onto his back, and launched himself from the island in a series of long bounding leaps toward the other island.
The moment he was clear, Batman dropped into the underground cave and moved directly to the workbench, where a prepared array of chemical reagents was already laid out and waiting. He had staged the materials before leaving for Wakanda.
He got to work.
Roughly thirty minutes later, Robin came bounding back across the water. He landed, looked around the surface of the island, found it empty, and dropped into the cave.
Batman was bent over the workbench, still working. He did not turn around.
"Why did that take so long?"
Robin grinned.
"Played with the Hulk for a bit."
The axe had done exactly what Robin expected it to do. Dr. Banner had spotted it the moment Robin arrived on the island, his attention locking onto it with immediate scientific interest -- and then the Hulk had taken over from Banner and reached for it with both hands, apparently under the impression that Robin had brought him a present. They had wrestled over it for a while, which had only ended when Dr. Otto hobbled over on his two remaining mechanical tentacles -- the other two having already been snapped by the Hulk and the Lizard Professor during an earlier sparring session -- and managed to talk the Hulk down through patient repetition.
"The Antarctic Vibranium?" Batman said.
"Right, yeah. Dr. Otto says he quietly obtained residual samples from Silver Sable's expedition. About 0.3 grams total." Robin paused. "But seriously -- what are we going to do with 0.3 grams? We've got five hundred kilograms of the good stuff sitting right upstairs."
"Standard Vibranium absorbs kinetic energy and vibration. Antarctic Vibranium does the opposite -- it broadcasts a vibrational field that liquefies surrounding metals. They're different materials with different functions." Batman still had not looked up. "The Adamantium in Kingpin's skeleton was created by fusing Antarctic Vibranium with steel and titanium-gold alloys. That process is what I need to replicate. Adamantium is the correct material for the Batmobile."
Robin scratched the top of his head -- he'd had to switch from the back of his skull ever since the axe started living back there permanently.
"So we need 0.3 grams of Antarctic Vibranium to make the Batmobile? For who to drive? This thing?" He crouched down, fished around in a corner, and came up holding a single ant between his fingers. He held it out with complete seriousness.
Batman pointed to a small block sitting on the far end of the workbench. Under ten grams of Vibranium, precisely cut.
"Take that to Dr. Otto. Have him test whether standard Vibranium can be converted to Antarctic Vibranium under controlled conditions."
Robin grabbed the sample and turned to go. He was almost out of the cave when Batman spoke again.
"Stay with Dr. Otto this time. Learn something from him. It'll serve you well."
Robin called back an enthusiastic agreement as he cleared the entrance.
Whether he would actually study anything once he got there was, Batman privately acknowledged, entirely outside his control.
Two hours passed. Batman worked without stopping. The workbench gradually accumulated casualties -- shattered test tubes, discarded reagents, chemical combinations that had failed and been set aside. None of it concerned him. What he was building required absolute precision, and he had run the procedure dozens of times in the lab and hundreds of times mentally before he was satisfied. The margin for error at the synthesis stage was essentially zero.
He set the last component in place and stepped back.
Sitting in a sealed container on the workbench was a single vial of deep red liquid.
Pym Particles.
He had begun analyzing the compound before leaving for Wakanda, and the research had been sufficiently advanced by departure that replication had become a matter of execution rather than theory. The formula was extraordinarily complex -- the precision required at each stage was the kind that defeated most chemists on principle -- but he had run the simulation often enough to execute it cleanly when the time came.
Batman picked up the vial and stored it carefully. The Hulk contingency was restored.
He moved to the intelligence station.
Two days away from New York meant two days of accumulated data to process. He worked through it methodically. Nothing catastrophic. But one thread stood out from the rest, demanding attention.
The Baxter Building. Reed Richards. The four of them.
Batman opened an encrypted channel to Tony Stark. Several minutes passed before the connection was acknowledged -- Tony was clearly in the middle of something.
"Which Reed?"
Batman let the silence sit for exactly two seconds.
"The Reed whose building I last saw you threatening with a repulsor pointed at his face. The one you imprisoned in a suit of armor as punishment for causing a dinosaur invasion. That Reed."
Another pause from Tony's end. Then, with the specific tone of a man who has just remembered something he had been successfully not thinking about:
"Oh. You mean the Fantastic Four."
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