multiversallogs | I went out into the night

Entry tags:

I went out into the night

Who: Stephanie Brown. Anyone who wants to meet Batgirl (Open).
What: Patrol.
Where: Starting in Mog Hill and heading towards the Spatters, passing through Bonetown and other neighborhoods.
When: Misdi/Coardi. Any time between sunset and sunrise.
Notes: Characters can run into her if they're on the rooftops as well, or if they're down on street level getting into, or up to, trouble. Rather than setting up a thread for each neighborhood, just LMK which area you're in.
Warnings: Violence/death/gore in the thread with Snape.

She had planned to wait longer until breaking out the Batgirl suit, not wanting it to be completely obvious that 'Batgirl' and 'Steph' were one and the same, but recent events have made her realize patrolling is more important than secret identities right now. And it's not like it matters if people know, they can't exactly go after her family or anything.

Even so, she was sticking to the rooftops, her aim for the night mainly reconnaissance. She's heading to the Spatters purely because the pamphlet warned against it, but she'll be making stops along the way to check things out. The city is big, and considering the distance she needs to travel, she expects to spend most of the night out. Having her grapple gun makes things easier; swinging across rooftops is quicker than running across them and she might get a lift from the El train by riding on top. She briefly wishes she had her car here, before reminding herself that she wouldn't get to see as much driving through streets as she does watching from above.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It startles her when Laura vanishes and she stands up, extending the bo staff in expectation of an attack. The sound of Laura's voice makes her turn towards it and slip into a defensive stance, until she registers what was said, and how it was said.

"Hi?" It's clearly a question, because Steph isn't sure what to make of this situation or the girl in front of her. She knows not to underestimate someone based on appearance; Cass was tiny and could look non-threatening when she wanted to. But there's no aggression and that's what makes her lower the bo staff.

Moderately pleased with herself for managing to do this non-violently, Laura takes Steph's confusion and slight lowering of her guard as a good sign. It's sometimes hard for her to communicate what she wants to, when what she wants to communicate is I am totally not a freakish ninja assassin killing machine, and the fact that Steph doesn't seem aggressive anymore must mean she did it right this time.

"What are you doing?" ... what are you doing, Laura. There's a reason they called her Creep and Weirdo even at Xavier's, designated home of Earth's weirdest teenagers.

She's partially interested because Steph is on what Laura considers her turf -- she's not quite territorial enough to chase her off just for being present, not when Steph isn't actually doing anything wrong or getting in the way, but she does want to know what her intentions are. Not everyone who patrols in a costume is out to do good.

"Patrolling. I'm... new," She doesn't really like giving up that little bit of information straight away, but telling the truth is more important and she doesn't recognize Laura from the network so it's possible Laura has never seen her as Steph, "I'm just getting my bearings, to see if there are places that need protecting."

As she talks, she collapses her staff and puts it back in her belt, then flicks up the lenses on her cowl, exposing her eyes. She's not completely relaxed, ready to fight or run if she needs to, but Laura doesn't seem like she's going to attack.

Laura reads everything that gets posted on the Network, and her memory is perfect -- so unless Steph is disguising her voice, she'll recognise her. Not that it matters to her at all, she's not in the habit of divulging others' secret identities. (Hers is such a non-issue; she is probably the only person in the entire city with adamantium claws in her particular arrangement.) She considers Steph, her head tilted to one side as the other girl adjusts her things. The gesture is curiously animal-like.

After a moment, she inclines her head to the west. "Rhuen Street." It's one of the Spatters' more dangerous streets, but mostly inclined towards petty crime and brawls, plus the occasional illegal cruorvore attack, which don't interest Laura; she's more in the business of collecting information on certain powerful organizations within Baedal. She takes care of things as she comes across them, but patrolling's not her game.

Steph never really mastered how to disguise her voice, so Laura would be able to recognize her. Once she's put everything away, she purposefully relaxes her posture and steps closer, she's just as curious about Laura and wants to get a better look at her.

"Thanks." She takes it as both a bit of advice, and permission to be in this area. She's not sure if this is Laura's 'territory' but she's used to dealing with Batman so she's kind of made the assumption.

"Why'd you follow me?" It's curiosity rather than an accusation, Steph doesn't think Laura was after her or planning any harm, so now she's just wondering why Laura started following her.

She holds very still, only her bright eyes following her. A single wrong move could put her off-balance and toppling over the edge of the building, but Laura doesn't seem like the type of person to carelessly make a wrong move; even the way she breathes is consciously controlled, barely visible even with how cold it is right now. "I wanted to know what you were doing." So, curiosity, nothing sinister.

To be fair, jumping around on rooftops in costume is pretty unusual behaviour.

"I have seen others do the same thing. Boys." Tommy and Billy, probably; she lives with them, they patrol here (and got their asses kicked here), she'd recognise them. But others, too, if not here, then elsewhere in the city.

"Ah," She smiles, "Mystery solved, then?"

It's relieving to know it was just curiosity, and even though Steph has a lot of questions about Laura, she doesn't want to ask them all straight away, deciding to try to make a friend -- or at least an ally -- of the girl first. And rigorous questioning usually doesn't help that.

"People patrolling?" Steph assumes Laura might have seen Tim, maybe even Conner. She hasn't met Billy or Teddy yet, and hasn't seen anyone else patrolling. "Did you ever talk to them?"

Usefully, Laura is both accustomed to and unintimidated by interrogation. Rapid-fire questions, she can handle.

"No."

Boys don't interest Laura. She watches, sometimes, but she never has to step in (she wasn't around when Venom was in the Spatters), and she doesn't really feel like making herself known to them.

"Fair enough."

Steph doesn't do, or say, anything for a moment. She's weighing up Laura and deciding what her next move should be. Eventually, in a show of trust, Steph walks over until she's next to Laura, facing the edge, then sits down and looks up at Laura with a small smile.

"Do you have a name you can give me?"

That almost startles her because it's unexpected. After a beat, she turns around and sits down, too. Baedal proper might be beautiful from on high with all its twinkling lights, but the Spatters aren't pretty from any angle, and the fog definitely isn't, laced as it is with an air of danger and menace.

She's quiet for a bit, hesitating: does she give her name or her designation? Or her codename, the one no one has ever used? (She's officially on the roster as Talon, but no one has ever let her forget who she really is.) It's strange because Steph is in costume, but she isn't.

Finally: "Laura." No surname offered. She's kind of in a confusing position on that front, anyway, Logan.

Steph gives a bright grin when Laura joins her, even if the view isn't great, it's better than standing around awkwardly. She waits patiently for Laura to answer, and is a little surprised at getting a real name rather than a codename and feels a little guilty that she can't do the same, at least not right now.

"Nice to meet you. You can call me Batgirl." Said in a way that clearly communicates Batgirl isn't her real name; that would be weird if it was.

"I don't think I've seen anyone but speedsters move as fast as you did." It's not quite a question, and it's also kind of hinging on the fact that Laura is familiar with the term speedsters, but she gives it a shot anyway.

"I know who you are. I saw you on the Network." So there's a head's up, in that regard, at least. Considering their cohort consists of less than 150 people in a city of two and a half million, it's not likely many people will recognise her in the same way, nor are secret identities as necessary here, but -- they're still useful.

Batgirl. Laura doesn't even blink; as far as codenames go, it's less literal than her peers tend to use -- her people prefer names that more directly reference a set of extant superhuman powers -- but it's not that out of place, considering people like Black Panther and Captain America.

"I have extensive training."

"Ah, so you know my real name?" There's a slight wince and wrinkle of her nose, "Please don't tell anyone? It's supposed to be a secret."

She won't actually say her name herself, just in case it's a trick. Spending too much time with Bats has made Steph paranoid.

"That include weapons training?" Which is Steph's way of telling Laura that she knows she's armed. Or, well, Steph is assuming Laura is armed, not that the 'knives' she saw on infrared were part of Laura's body, but that's neither here nor there.

"I will not." She's got no reason to, and if Steph is being honest about her intentions -- out here to help, not harm -- then she can respect her privacy.

Speaking of weapons training. She'd laugh if she were the type of person to laugh, which would probably be better for everyone, but she's not. Instead, she looks straight ahead at nothing in particular. Laura holds her hand out in front of her, closed in a fist, and pauses there for a moment so as to not startle her, but the abrupt snikt! of her claws emerging from her knuckles tends not to be what people expect. They are in her knuckles, not attached to some device; there's blood on them and on her hands. She holds her hand very still, never pointing those things at Steph.

Which is, you know, great, because they look awfully sharp.

"I am familiar with hand-to-hand combat in addition to melee and ranged weapons." 'Familiar' being an understatement. She is the weapon.

"Thanks." She's tempted to pull off her cowl, but Laura might not be the only person out here, and she knows she shouldn't risk it.

It does surprise her. She'd been expecting something after Laura held her arm out, but yeah, definitely not that. The surprise doesn't last long though, it quickly gets overwhelmed by curiosity and, most importantly, concern. "Does it hurt?"

Of course it's the first question Steph asks. She'll think about the rest of what Laura said in a moment, her primary focus right now is the blood on the girl's hand.

Laura glances down at her claws, at how they reflect the light of Baedal's moon. She never forgets they're there, the physical reminders of what she is supposed to be. New and Improved Wolverine.

After a moment, she retracts them with a similar snikt. There isn't even a scar on her knuckles where they emerged. She says nothing -- the answer to that question is almost certainly 'yes', but her feelings on the matter are inexhaustibly conflicted and how does she even begin to categorize hurt, on the scale she knows it?

"What is your training?"

"I'm sorry," she says to Laura's silence on the matter, assuming that it means 'yes' and 'I don't want to talk about it'. She's not trying to be condescending or pitying, she's juts expressing an apology for the crappy situation Laura seems to be in. The claws must be useful, but obviously they come at a cost.

"Um, how long have you got?" It'd take a while to answer that question properly, "It's been a bit haphazard, so it's a long story." She's not quite avoiding the question; she'll answer, she just doesn't want to say a lot if Laura doesn't care to hear it.

"I do not have anywhere to be." So... go ahead with the long story, evidently. It's not like she's ever had a problem listening to them before.

Also, everyone's situation's a little complicated here. That there's such a high incidence of superhumans, vigilantes, soldiers, warriors, and leaders in their cohort hasn't gone beyond her notice.

"I started doing this when I was fifteen, 'cause my dad was a criminal and I wanted to stop him. I went out with nothing more than a homemade costume and some gymnastics training, my first few months were spent like that. I guess you could call it training on the job." She hasn't talked about it much, because most of her friends have been there for the whole journey, so to speak.

"I took a break for a while, when I came back I got some training from different people in the same business, mostly martial artists. But that was on and off for a couple of years." The bitterness in her voice is fairly obvious; Steph had loved working with Black Canary, but it'd been stopped for reasons she still doesn't understand. And then Cass had stopped training her too, just because Bruce said so. She'd been mostly on her own then, until she became Robin. "I went through a four month period of pretty extensive training with one of the best in the business."

"After I had a falling out with that trainer, I spent a year not doing anything vigilante related, though I kept fit by doing kata, weight training, gymnastics, and other stuff like it. I've been back at it for a little over a year, and I've had consistent training for about six months of that, with assorted teachers."

There's a fair bit she's left out, mostly her reasons for spending time away from being a vigilante and Steph's not sure why exactly she felt compelled to give Laura a somewhat detailed history. Part of it is wanting to prove that she can handle it, that she's been at this long enough to kno what she's doing. But she also just appreciates the chance to talk about this stuff.

She listens without commenting and without any kind of judgment. She would never assume that Steph is incapable because of her age -- Laura's peers are all around the same age -- or any other superficial reason, but one thing in particular stands out to her.

"You do not have powers." That's interesting. It is very unusual where she's from for adolescents to pursue this line of work without having already developed superhuman abilities in some way; most are mutants, who find themselves thrust into an increasingly violently hostile world at puberty and mostly need to learn to fight or die early. (The Young Avengers are exceptions, and even then, most of them have powers.)

The X-men round up teenagers and do their best to train them, and managed to not fail miserably at it in spite of Cyclops; the Avengers do, too, lately, she went to their academy for a while. Iron Man's Initiative had that same goal in mind, although he went about it in the most fucked way possible, of course, because... Iron Man. Fuck that guy. Someone that young seeking it out on their own isn't unheard of, but it's not common by any means.

"Nah, most of my friends don't. We're just idiots in costumes," Steph doesn't have any illusions about how dangerous what they do is. They go up against metahumans and creatures that have them drastically out matched. But they train as much as they can and prepare themselves against their villains in the hopes they don't end up dead. And honestly, Steph is surprised more of them haven't died.

"There are people with powers in my world, and some of them do the superhero thing, but not all of us are."

"If you are still alive, then you are not idiots." Yes, thank you for that, Laura, so helpful and observant.

... because she knows a couple idiots and they're only alive due to luck, superhuman powers, or stubbornness. (She's thinking more Rockslide than Hellion, but...)

That makes Steph smile, a little wryly, "Well, it's been close once or twice, but we've managed to avoid any fatal injuries."

Except for Bruce. Sort of. She's not sure if getting sent back in time counts as dying.

"That is common." The coming close thing, she means. God only knows how many times her team's been on the brink of death. (How many times she's actually died, speaking of what counts -- Belasco is kind of an asshole, news at 11.)

"Yeah, it's amazing how that happens when you frequently throw yourself at people who are twice as skilled and like three times bigger than you are." Steph's smile is wry, her tone a little self-deprecating. Maybe one day she'll learn to only pick battles she can win, but that's unlikely.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I went out into the night

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject