Never before in the history of superheroing had there been such a gathering; the brightest minds from across the Earth, from distant worlds, and even the far future. All in one place. There were mystics and mages, engineers and physicists, the cybernetic or super-smart, and even a time-traveling 25th century security robot accompanied by its showboating jock of a sidekick, all crammed into Titans Tower and working at a superhuman pace to track down and recover the missing young heroines. And while the Tower had been built sturdy and roomy, for a team of super-powered teens who had grown very territorial and possessive when it came to their base of operations, it had nonetheless been gutted and refitted in a matter of hours to make way for the rescue efforts.
The room that used to be Raven’s quarters had had its walls torn down, and an interdimensional gate based not a little on the designs of Justice Lord Batman had been built where her bed used to be, while down the hall a vast array of scanning devices pick apart every tiny detail of Starfire’s nauseatingly bright domicile, over and over again, twenty-four hours a day.
The entrance hall of the Tower was where the theoretical work took place; pile after pile of papers piled high on hastily collected tables were covered in the scrawling and scribbling, the neat notations, carefully-drawn diagrams, and spilled coffee that can only come from hundreds of man hours worth of work. The mammoth computer core that should have been installed into the half-built second Watchtower sat in the middle of the room, jury-rigged to work in the less-than ideal conditions and crunching numbers for the industrious heroes, and on a large whiteboard off to the side, Batman, Robin, the Elongated Man and his wife, the Huntress, the Question, and (to the surprise of those not in the know,) the Flash, had pinned up photos of the missing girls, copious photographs of the scenes of their disappearances, and scrawled down masses of notes on any other pertinent information.
- Kara In-Ze Kent was taken in the dead of night from the Kent Farm in Smallville, Kansas, her bed looking slept in, and her costume still in her cupboard.
- Barbara Gordon, disappeared near the end of a patrol of downtown Gotham; after extensive searching a grappling line was found still attached to a stone gargoyle, with the cable ending in a melted stub dangling in the air.
- Donna of Themyscira vanished in a burst of light whilst in plain sight of several Amazon guards.
- Starfire, Raven, and Argent had all vanished from their respective rooms in two Titan’s bases. All evidence pointed to Raven having been meditating, Starfire sleeping, and Argent watching television.
- Pantha was older than the other females by several years, and was not a superheroine per say, but was tentatively added to the board for being an attractive masked female who had vanished at exactly the same time; security cameras showed her walking into a changing room and never walking back out again.
All of it old information. All of it read a hundred times over by the Kryponian who once again found himself standing in front of that messy board, staring at the photo of the cheerily smiling girl he called a cousin. So engrossed was he in the small picture, that he almost didn’t notice the approach of the one and only Dark Knight. ‘Steady heartrate, light steps, the smell and sound of faintly creaking body armor and the clinking of scores of gadgets. You’re sneaky Bruce, but not sneaky enough.’ Grim face slipping into a faint smile at the mental chastisement that he would never, ever verbalize, Superman turned to the Justice League’s one and only part-timer. “Batman.”
The dark clad hero nodded minutely in acknowledgement, then immediately rattled off a progress report, “The Gate is complete. Atom and Steel are triple-checking the hardware, and Cyborg and Skeets are going over the software, but it looks like we’ll be ready to go as soon as we find out where the girls were taken. On that end, we’re having more trouble. Zatanna, Jason, and Fate have done all of the searching they safely can, and all they can say is that the girls are ‘not in any dimension or universe even remotely close to this one’, but they’re also confident that the girls aren’t in any heaven, purgatory, or hell, either.”
Clark sighed, his shoulders slumping a little. “That’s something, at least. Though considering how much money you’ve spent to supply them with the necessary material components, I’m a little…underwhelmed.”
Nodding, Batman hesitated for the briefest moment (honestly, only Superman or the Flash could have noticed) before adding “Also, Aztek noticed that there is some temporal distortion in the energy traces we found at the kidnap sites; wherever the girls are, time is moving differently for them that it is for us. While this does make it a little easier to track them down, it also means that if Skeets’ estimation is accurate and we pinpoint their location by the end of the week, then by the time we get to them, from their point of view the girls would have been missing
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(Posted Sun, 29 Apr 2007 20:21)
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