Jude looked at the figure by the window for a long moment.
"Mysterious force attacks on Gotham — put that aside, there's nothing imminent on that front." He rubbed his eyes. "Can we do this tomorrow? I just got off a transatlantic flight. I've spent a week slowly dying in a basement. My sleep schedule has been comprehensively destroyed."
Batman didn't move.
"It's about Africa," Jude said. "The tribe. You know they're short of water, chronically underfunded, surviving on marginal land—"
"I'm aware of their situation."
"The Wayne Foundation has international aid projects."
"Yes." A pause. "That tribe isn't among the recipients. The threshold for inclusion is need relative to comparable communities, and — counterintuitively — their mortality rate is lower than surrounding tribes in the region."
"Because of the shaman's work."
"Presumably."
Jude sat with this for a moment. He'd suspected as much. Help went where the numbers said it was needed, and the numbers for this particular community, by some measures, looked survivable — which meant they fell outside the criteria while remaining, by any human measure, in serious difficulty.
"Africa is complicated," Batman said, with the flat precision of someone who has studied the problem and arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion. "The aid infrastructure has significant issues — dependency cycles, local industries undercut by material donations, financial aid losses to corruption at multiple levels. Interventions that seem straightforwardly helpful frequently cause harm. There's very little a foundation can do that doesn't eventually become part of the problem."
"I know," Jude said. "Changing the trajectory of a region takes a decade minimum. Usually more."
"Individual assistance to a small community is feasible. Systemic change is — limited." Batman looked at him steadily. "Salvation, if it comes, has to come from within. Or—" a brief pause — "from somewhere outside the ordinary constraints."
"Help where you can," Jude said. "No good deed is too small. And the Lord, for the record, is not keeping score — He doesn't reward devotion and doesn't punish neglect, so you might as well do things because you want to do them."
Batman looked at him with an expression that was unreadable in the dark, but was probably thoughtful.
"You call yourself an atheist," he said. "But you speak as though God exists."
"Those aren't contradictory." Jude yawned. "My atheism means no superstition — no blind deference to authority, no action taken because a divine figure demands it. I do good because I want to do good, not because I'm earning something. And if God is real, then He's real — that's just a fact about the world. It doesn't change my reasons for anything." He leaned back. "Be realistic. Be a decent person. Fix your mistakes. Distrust unquestionable authority." He paused. "On a more practical note — courier infrastructure in Sudan is unreliable. Can you arrange delivery of two items to that tribe?"
Batman's expression shifted fractionally. "What items."
"Two large packages. Square. Not heavy. You can hand them to a local guide at the border — I'll provide coordinates."
A long pause. Not disagreement. Assessment.
"Fine," Batman said.
He left through the window.
Jude looked at the open window for a moment, then lay back down and was asleep in under three minutes.
At dusk the following day, a truck turned off the main road and followed a track into the desert.
The settlement appeared gradually — tents, a water container, the worn paths between structures that mark a community that has been in the same place long enough to know where things belong. The truck's arrival brought people to doorways, watchful and not welcoming. This was not a community that received visitors with uncomplicated warmth.
The old shaman came out of his tent before the driver had finished parking.
He exchanged a few words with the driver and the guide — unhurried, calm, the particular authority of a person that a place belongs to. The tension in the watching crowd eased.
"The young Japanese man sent this," the guide said.
The shaman's face shifted into something that was almost a smile. "I thought he might."
The driver and guide unloaded the two packages and removed the outer wrapping. The assembled community looked at what was inside.
Two cubes.
One was a cactus — not a normal cactus, a perfect cube of cactus, its geometry so precise and regular it looked manufactured. One cubic metre of plant, exact on every dimension, a deep green that seemed slightly too saturated to be natural.
The other was a bin, also cubic, made of dark wood with metal fittings, its construction simple and obviously functional.
The guide handed the shaman an envelope.
Inside, a letter in Arabic and English, both sides covered in neat instructions.
Mnemoth has been dealt with. Do not worry.
The cactus is a special variety — grows between one and three metres tall, one metre of growth per two to five hours. Requires no water. Can only be planted in sand. Cut a cubic section to plant; it will not root in the conventional sense but it will grow.
Do not eat it directly; it has no nutritional value in solid form. Juice it. Warning: cactus juice will turn your tongue temporarily green. This is harmless.
The compost bin: place cacti inside it. Sufficient cactus material will convert to fertiliser — it resembles ash or fine powder but it is fertiliser. Do not inhale it.
The fertiliser accelerates plant growth significantly in barren soil — a sapling to a ten-year tree in under a minute. It does not accelerate cactus growth, so the system is not self-contained. The cactus supply requires ongoing planting.
Plant cacti wherever you need them. Use the compost bin with discretion — do not let the process draw the wrong kind of attention. Hopefully you do not encounter another Mnemoth.
— A passing stranger
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION
Cactus (Special Variety) — $1,000
No arable land required. No water required. You're welcome.
Magic Compost Bin — $10,000
Not a standard compost bin. Does not process vegetable scraps from other dimensions. Exclusively produces fertiliser from Minecraft-origin plant matter. The categorisation is what it is.
Jude had started thinking about the Sudan problem somewhere over the Atlantic, before the plane had finished its climb out of JFK. He'd worked through most of the obvious options and found them wanting — money helped, but slowly and imperfectly; personnel required logistics he didn't have; conventional aid ran into the structural problems Batman had confirmed.
It wasn't until Bruce's answer about the Foundation that he'd accepted the conventional route wasn't going to be sufficient and started looking sideways.
The system's shop had a surprisingly practical answer once he knew what to search for. Minecraft cacti didn't require viable farmland or water — they grew in sand, which the Dinka sub-tribe had in abundant supply. The compost bin couldn't scale indefinitely, but it could ensure the community didn't starve while longer-term soil conditions improved. The two items together were a workable intervention for something like $11,000 — roughly what Constantine had tried to charge him for the initial consultation before Jude had negotiated.
He'd wanted to add a bucket of infinite water from the same source. The system had declined: infinite water was a fundamental mechanic of the Minecraft world, not a transferable item, and importing it would create problems he wasn't equipped to manage.
Fair enough. The cactus and the bin would do.
By early evening, Jude had cleared the supermarket's snack aisle of most things worth buying and was walking back through streets that smelled like Gotham — oil, old stone, the specific metallic undertone that came off the bay on overcast evenings. He'd missed it, in the abstract way you miss something familiar that has also routinely tried to kill you.
He knocked on the classroom door.
Sounds of children from inside, and then footsteps, and then Jason opened the door holding a wrench for reasons that were presumably pedagogical and didn't require immediate explanation.
"You're back." He stared at Jude, and at the collection of bags. "You were only gone a few weeks."
"Longer than it sounds." Jude held up the bags. "I killed a demon."
Jason looked at him with the considered scepticism of someone who has heard a significant amount of nonsense and is calibrating where this falls on the spectrum.
"Sure you did," he said.
"I really did."
"Come in," Jason said. "The kids are going to lose their minds over the snacks."