From Out Of Town (open)

Participants: Cassandra Cain / Open
Open/Closed: Open
Location(s): Gotham City, Warehouse District
Time of Day: Night
Weather: Dark, damp - the usual in Gotham
Summary: On her return from Hong Kong, Cassandra encounters some criminals from 'out of town', which in turn leads her to clashing with a smuggling ring operating between Gotham's warehouse district and the Suicide Slums of Metropolis.

She stared unblinking through her eyeless mask, assessing every movement made by the five tattooed thugs that stood across from her. The sixth already lay unmoving at her feet, his weapon- an iron bar - knocked just out of the reach of his grasping fingers. The shallow rise and fall of his chest told Cassandra that he lived, though the limpness of his limbs suggested he had been knocked out cold, quickly succumbing to the speed and brutality of her initial assault.

Gesturing with a gloved hand toward the group's unconscious ally, she tilted her head a little, eyeing their faces. It was both a warning and a challenge. Should the others engage, they would meet the same fate.

Their response was to attempt laughing: loud guffaws that echoed around the enclosed alley, a sound meant to disturb, unnerve and mock her. Cassandra – the Black Bat – was entirely unaffected. Though they barked with boisterous confidence, she knew it to be feigned, their bodies giving them away. For all their bluster, they kept their distance from the vigilante, muscles tensed like those of frightened, cornered animals. They had no desire to rush forward and fight – not if they could find another, less risky way to end the conflict. Though new to Gotham, they were well aware of the Bats that protected the city. They knew the fear they instilled, if only by reputation.

They were about to experience it first-hand.

Taking a step toward them brought near-instant silence, all adopting more defensive stances, salvaged weapons – three baseball bats, a metal chain and a tire iron – raised protectively, as if hoping to ward the Bat off.
“Stay back, Freak!”
An angry shout that fell on deaf ears.
“Come any closer and you're gonna end up kissing concrete!”

Picking up her pace, Cassandra began to sprint forward, her purpose clear. In doing so, the criminal element she faced would react in one of two ways: they would scatter and flee, or be forced into a combat they would rather not enter – fight or flight. In her experience, Gotham's delinquents tended toward the former reaction, though they had little recorded success when doing so.

This encounter, she predicted, was to be no different, even if they were from out of town.

"I hate Gotham, Skeets. It's so dark and drab and booooring"

"::Sir, you are from Gotham yourself::"

"Doesn't mean I can't hate it. Even in the 25th century it still suuuucks"

The whining and complaining came from the golden hero known as Booster Gold, as he talked with his golden egg-shaped robot companion Skeets. The two had flown high above the city of Gotham to avoid detection earlier in the day, before spending the last hour or so sitting atop of of Gotham's many skyscrapers. Apparently tonight was the night for some criminal activity in the city. While that in and of itself was no surprise for Gotham, history had pointed to today as the start of a larger issue to eventually come to plague Gotham and Metropolis. In Booster's own time, the event had been stopped, but not for another few days. The other timeline that the hero had seen however came when no one stopped this weeks activities, resulting in this specific group gaining even more traction. While it didn't result in, say, the rapid collapse of society, this group did have the potential of becoming a powerful force on the Eastern coast of North America.

History itself, in the proper timeline they were currently still on, hadn't given a specific hero name or exact date as to who stopped this group, or exactly when they were stopped, but the general consensus Michael had come to was that someone had to stop them, and someone had to stop them within a week. Since there was no exact hero stated to have stopped this, Booster took it upon himself to guarantee the job was done.

After having waited for the suggested time Skeets had provided him, Michael flew off to crash the party, so to speak. As Cassandra had taken her first few steps towards the group, and before they really had a chance to fight or flee, a loud CRASHING could be heard as bits and pieces of the old warehouse came crashing down. "EVIL DOERS BEWARE, BOOSTER GOLD IS HERE TO TAKE YOU DOWN!" The loud, boisterous voice of Booster echoed through the building as Michael shone like a lighthouse in the dead of night. If Gotham was good for at least something, it was how good it made Booster look. A shining beacon of light against the black backdrop that was this city.

As the hero hovered above, he looked at the scene below before quickly turning to Skeets. "You told me no one else was gonna be here! That I'd get to do this solo! I needed this win Skeets! I needed to milk this fight for the PR!" That statement hadn't been true however. While Michael hadn't been aware of another hero being on site, he needed an excuse for why he was here. Ever the fast thinker he was, the fake persona he had built up for himself was leaned into heavily for this moment. "You're telling me, ME!, BOOSTER GOLD has to share the spot light with....with! Uh...Uh, hey, sweetcheeks, which Bat are you? Wait, pause. You, baddies stay where you are. Skeets, can I call this one that? I know Oracle is like, almost pushing 30 right? This isn't one of Batman's like 13 year olds he employs right? Ok, listen, Lady Bat, I take back the sweetcheeks comment, ignore that" If there was one thing Michael was good at, it was playing the fool and holding an audience. As he had talked and had told the gangsters to not move, his eyes had been scanning around the room, while his body language gestured broadly to ham up to over-reacting Michael was partaking in.

"Hey, actually...you, meaningless no named criminal number 3, do you know which Bat that is? Like, there's Batman, Batwoman, Batgirl, Robin, Nightwing, Oracle...and what, like 8 others? Why are there so many of them? Hey, Skeets; thought! Make a note that we need to get a sidekick! Some 13 year old we can exploit like Batman does! And a lady version too! She has to be hot though, make a big note of that. We'll call them KID BOOSTER and HOT BOOSTER LADY!" Really, the mans whole rambling and talking and show was a bit of a front. As he ranted and raved, he had began to move around the location. Skeets had followed suit and soon it would become apparent that the group of villains were now between a triangle of heroes, each blocking an exit.

"What do y'all think? Oh, do you think Black Canary will be my Hot Booster Lady?!"

There was no way Hardware's readings could be correct, and yet he knew his tech well enough to know that there was absolutely no way it wasn't. His trackers had alerted him to a hit in his scans and the locale he was being summoned to was the darkened city of Gotham. Hardware wasn't the type to let rumors of a place scare him off from it, he had grown up in a rough neighborhood of his own so Curtis had long discovered no single place was as scary as people made it. Reputation and rumor meant nothing to him, there was just a large degree of surprise that Gotham would be a place that his journey was taking him. Still, if that was where he was needed then that was where he would go, it was just that simple.

The deep silvers and grays of Hardware's armor shined with a stark brilliance against the consuming gloomy darkness of the city as the metal reflected the lighting cast by the moon above. He looked like a shooting star as his glowing armor arched across the sky, ultimately leading him to the huddled structures of the city's warehouse district. Thrusters in Hardware's jetpack began to wind down in a hushed hiss as he lowered into the expanse of crowded warehouses. Curtis had originally thought it was a quiet night, his eyes and ears hadn't picked up on any workers, or other commotion, in the area but the pop up HUD built into his helmet had otherwise to say. 

Curtis wasn't alone in his late night creep through the storage buildings, there were no less than seven other humans in the area. The spectral scanning of his equipment revealed that all of the others had convened at the same location, they were either a group of homeless trying to keep warm or a group of ne'er-do-wells up to the typical criminal activities that went on in warehouse districts. Hardware had been through his fair share of warehouse tussles throughout his career, he knew how cliche it all ways.

The hero of Dakota made a soundless stride across the night, his heavy armor inconsequential against his lithe movements. Hardware slipped into the area and heard shouting. It sounded a lot like monologging, just a lot more directionless and meandering. Curtis quirked a brow beneath the polymer alloy that was essentially a second skin, but he didn't move from his location close to the warehouse door. The silver moonlight shone through the high windows of the building kept from falling over Hardware as he hugged the edges of a metal staircase to remain under its shadow. He took a moment to spy on the unfolding situation. The rambling man in the brighter colors Hardware assumed was a Justice League type - he sounded full of himself enough. The others must have been the opposition: they looked like your usual run of the mill goon types, so not exactly what Hardware was expecting to face. 

The loudmouth seemed to have the situation relatively under control, but even if he ultimately did not he was still providing an adequate enough distraction for Curtis. He had no idea who the man in blue and yellow was, they'd never met before and that meant Hardware didn't really owe him a hand in any of this, plus he wasn't even from Gotham so it wasn't like it was his job to help clean the city up. He was there for what his scanners had originally alerted him to and it just so happened that Mr. Blue-and-Yellow and his tattooed buddies were in the same place. Hardware ignored the fight that was soon to break out, his bee-line aimed for searching the warehouse instead of engaging any person. DOBIE, his onboard CPU, was also alerting him to another sophisticatedly advanced computing system in the room, Hardware took a mental note but otherwise continued to mind his own business.

Michael Jon Carter  Cassandra Cain