Devil's Consultancy 26

Not happy with this one. Must have deleted twice as many words for this one as I wrote, but the show must go on.

------------------------

Alfred was more than just a butler. In a very real sense, he was basically Bruce’s father, and was, most of the time, given respect commensurate with that position. Despite his soft power, he never forgot that he was in the end a servant, so he always backed down to Bruce, even when the man was being a stubborn fool… but he was much more willing to exert authority on Tanya and Richard. Bruce would absolutely impose scientifically optimal amounts of rest and enrichment activities on his children even as he denied himself the same, so it took outright begging to get him to overrule Alfred on anything. 

One of the ways this manifested was, as previously noted, his maintaining of Tanya’s schedule, so she could maintain her various covers. It had every hour of the day blocked out for what she was supposed to be doing, including large time slots for activities she rarely, if ever, actually did, like singing practice, tennis practice, and studying. Those hours she spent as either Rhine doing Justice League business or as CEO of ArcWayne, handling whatever needed her direct attention. 

But some of those things she actually had to do, like piano practice. As noted, she was dressed for it: Alfred, with impeccable logic and cited productivity studies that she had already read two lifetimes ago, noted that dressing as if she had an audience during practice, compounded with the usual productivity benefits of dressing specifically for your job, getting you into the proper mindset. Granted, she neglected to change out of it once piano practice was over, which diminished the benefits, but she would have missed the start of Luthor’s ‘readiness exercise’ if she did that. 

No regrets. Even if it did mean she got to meet her father’s alternate dimension doppelganger while dressed for a recital, including some makeup. Granted, the fact that her fingernails were naturally black as obsidian did mean that she habitually wore nail polish and some colored chapstick to match whatever color her nails were that day, as it was the one physical feature that was shared between Tanya Wayne and Rhine. Today, they were light green. 

…Okay, some regrets. 

As her cage was wheeled into the hallway, Tanya noted each of the prisoners: Superman and Supergirl shared one with a Red Sun generator inside. Superman was in the heavy restraints, while Supergirl was clearly in a more improvised set, as this dimension’s Batman was not prepared to deal with two Kryptonians. Unlike Clark, Kara didn’t have the muscles that still let him exert large amounts of strength even without yellow sun radiation, which red sun radiation drained from Kryptonians without otherwise harming them, so the shackles that kept her hands behind her and were hastily attached to the ceiling via a chain was quite sufficient to keep her contained. 

The sad truth was that for Wonder Woman, The Flash, and Aquaman, they didn’t need any particular measures beyond the exceptionally sturdy restraints. She knew that Wally could theoretically phase through objects, but Tanya doubted that they hadn’t accounted for that. After all, he was still imprisoned. John was easy to restrain without his ring, so the only other one that required special measures was J’onn, and from the mystical containment circle beneath his cross combined with the fact that he was in his true form instead of the version of himself that was hybridized as a human so as to look less alien? She figured he couldn’t do anything either. 

As Aquaman was the only one there that didn’t already know her identity, he was disproportionately outraged on her behalf, which was nice of him. “Your craven ambush was one thing, but you are true villains!” He shouted dramatically, “Egads, Batman! I’m sorry I ever compared you to this… impostor!” Aquaman was a rather dramatic fellow. 

Batman smirked that smirk he uses when he comes up with a joke in his head. He never shares them. So Tanya decided to make her own joke. Speaking a pitch higher than she used with X-man and Dr. Nazi, not so much hightening it as stopping the pitching down she habitually does when she wants to be taken seriously, she brightly moved to alleviate Aquaman’s worries: “It’s okay Mr. Curry, I used to get put in a cage every night!”

“WHAT!?” Aquaman shouted in fury. 

Wally laughed. “What, you don’t have cribs in Atlantis?” 

Aquaman stopped and considered the statement. Then he barked out a laugh. “Ha! Good one, little girl! What’s your name?”

“I’m Tanya! They stuck me in a cage because Dr. Nazi’s racist!” She said, condemning the alternate Dr. Fate with the cheerfully oblivious tone of a nine year old girl. 

Dr. Nazi growled. “Do NOT call me that, demon child!” 

“Report.” Batman said simply. 

Tanya saluted. “Okay!” She pitched her voice back down a bit to make her sound more serious. “This cage uses King Solomon’s demon-binding techniques, the same isolative spellbinding I’ve got set up in the cave, but it has a lot more power behind it.” She gestured to Dr. Nazi. “Lords of Order are better at making prisons than demons, go figure. Anyway, he wanted to restrain my ability to change my form, so instead of the djinn-binding configuration, where I’d be able to affect anything inside the cage and make myself comfortable, he used one more suitable for interrogations, which… well, in regards to prison conditions, what you see is what you get.”

To his credit, Aquaman seemed to recognize what was going on. “Rhine?” He asked, confused. 

“Yep!” Tanya said, reverting to the cheery tone. “You’re all people, so you get the mental hospital can’t kill yourself restraints, but I’m a subhuman, so I get a cage!” 

“You’re not a subhuman.” X-man growled, in the exact same offended tone Bruce uses when the villains try the ‘we’re not so different’ conversations. He’s offended because they’re right. It never works though, also because they’re right. 

“Then why did you put me in a cage?” Tanya asked rhetorically. “What if I get thirsty? Actually, scratch that, I am thirsty! I demand a juice box!” To emphasize her ‘haughty ojou-sama’ persona, Tanya flipped her hair dramatically. “Where’s Alfred? You’re a terrible host, he’ll set you straight.”

X-man seemed like he was absolutely regretting listening to her about letting her be in the same area with the other Justice League members. When she mentioned Alfred, the man stiffened. Tanya wasn’t exactly a master of reading people, but if she saw that on Bruce, she’d characterize that as shame. 

Batman caught the flash of weakness. “He left, didn’t he?” He said evenly. Apparently he agreed with her assessment, and he has much more training in psychological profiling than she did, so Tanya mentally patted herself on the back for that one. “I can’t imagine him approving of this place, even without the demon cage.”

“...Fate. Adjust the prison.” X-Man commanded, “Just ensure she can’t escape.”

Dr. Nazi huffed, but followed instructions. Immediately, Tanya focused and created a portal in the palm of her hand, then withdrew a juice box from it using the other one. Pear juice this time. With the precision of long practice, the straw was taken out of its packaging and Tanya was drinking her victory in seconds. Now, how to use this to escape? 

“Hey, I want a juice box too!” Wally whined. 

“Sorry, can’t help you.” Tanya said, putting the empty juice box back in her pocket dimension. 

“...Wait, how much trash do you have in there?” John asked, morbidly curious. “My ring beeps at me when I let it get over a trash bag’s worth.”

Tanya took a moment to think about it. She didn’t actually have a sense for what is and is not inside there, it was really more like a search engine to fetch things, which is why, for example, didn’t know which flavor of juice she retrieved until it was already out unless she called for something specific. “...I’ve never emptied it.” She admitted, “I first figured out how to put things in there seven years ago, so… a lot.” One time last year, she used magic to pull out ‘the most disgusting thing’ she had and produced a years-old dirty diaper. It was not Poison Ivy’s lucky day. The stench snapped Bruce right out of his pheromone-induced haze, too. 

“You gotta clean out your room, Tanya.” Wally said admonishingly. “I know it’s not cool, but you gotta do it.”

“I know…” Tanya said, continuing the bit. “It’s so boring though! It’s not like it runs out of space.”

Dr. Nazi huffed in disgust. “I have much better things to do than entertain this farce.” He said, orienting his arms to make a manji shape with his body and fading away in that symbol made of light as Dr. Fate does when he teleports, except he uses an ankh symbol. 

Wow, that actually worked. Escaping will be much easier without him around. Unfortunately, X-man was probably just as intelligent as Bruce, so it will be by no means easy. “Hey, where are we on getting me out of this cage? Djinn bindings are super convenient, all you have to do is open the door.” She gestured to the locked cage door, which she could absolutely have picked if the bindings didn’t make it utterly impossible for her to even touch the bars, much less slip anything through them. This extended to anything she was touching too. Heck, she wasn’t even touching the floor of the cage. It felt a little bit like there was a coating of glass that she was actually sitting on. “I’ll grant you a wiiiiish~” She added jokingly. 

“Fate was supposed to keep you in check.” X-man growled. “So you get to stay there. I’m sure you have everything you need.” He was glaring coldly at her, like she was just another criminal. 

…Damn alternate dimensions. Tanya blinked away the small tears that had formed from the involuntary twist of her chest at the sight. “Fine.” She said, taking a deep breath and checking her hands for shaking. “Rhine. Berechnung. Mahou. Though this space is limited, nothing within is prohibited!” She warped the space inside of the circle, the world outside the cage appearing to grow larger. She then took out a beanbag chair and her game boy. As much as she loved the first monster catching game she played when she went into Bruce’s care, this new remake was truly superior. After a moment, she took out a hat and put it on, putting the brim down so she couldn’t see anything but her game. That’s better. 

“Hn.” X-Man wheeled her into an empty cell and left it there, closing the cell behind him, before leaving to another part of the cave. 

“Isn’t he personable.” John Stewart said sarcastically. “You have a plan, Batman?”

“No.” Batman said simply. 

“No as in not yet, or-” The Flash asked. 

“As in not going to.” Batman clarified, “He’ll be prepared for anything I can try. Anything most of us can try.”

“I wish I could keep some of that liquid sunlight on hand.” Superman said ruefully, “But the bottles keep breaking, no matter what I try.” He flexed uncomfortably. “Not that I’d be able to access it from here. How did that electrical attack hit me so hard without killing anyone?”

“It was Nth metal.” J’onn contributed, “Electricity channeled through Nth metal has more than just anti-magic properties. It can destabilize many more kinds of energy, including solar energy stored in your cells, apparently.” Which meant that it was a much less effective alternative to kryptonite, but when combined with red sun projectors it’s much better. 

“Shayera’s mace never hurt that badly.” Superman said, “Did it, Kara?”

“I mean…” Kara began, “Have you ever seen her hit a human with it? It doesn’t hurt them that much. Maybe her mace is just, like, on a low setting? Like a taser?”

“She told me that her mace was standard issue for law enforcement on Thanagar.” John said, “Despite what we know now, she might have been telling the truth.”

“It would have been prudent for her cover to have the Thanagarian equivalent to a stun baton, yes.” Batman pointed out, “In my experiments with the leftover Nth metal, I’ve found that it can be much more powerful than she’s demonstrated. Furthermore, the power of her strikes has never been consistent, I suspect it has a variable power setting that she just never felt the need to tell us about.” She also just has three non-identical maces now, but Tanya wasn’t going to go blabbing about how Bruce was using his new Nth metal scanner to keep tabs on Hawkgirl. 

“Guys! Focus!” Wally said, agitated. “How are we going to get out?”

“Well, we’re presumably going to be split up and moved into better prisons…” Diana said, “So we need to hurry.”

“Thank you!” Wally exclaimed. “Now, if Bats isn’t going to help, we need better ideas.”

“Their Justice League is smaller.” Batman observed, “This other Batman will have thought of everything that can be done by those who have counterparts in their world. To escape, we should take advantage of those who don’t have one.”

Kara’s eyes widened: “They only had a cell ready for one Kryptonian!” She exclaimed, “So they didn’t expect two!” 

“Exactly.” Batman said, “Although unless there’s something you can do that your cousin can’t, that’s probably a dead end.”

“They don’t have a Rhine.” John said. 

“This Batman considered her a complete stranger.” J’onn added, “While I couldn’t read his mind, he was clearly off-balance the entire time.”

More than one of the Justice League members mouthed ‘clearly?’ to each other. “Young Tanya!” Aquaman shouted, “Do you have any further idea on how to escape?”

“Nnnnno-pe!” Tanya shouted back, voice cracking as she looked outside again. She closed her eyes and continued after taking another deep breath: “Dr. Fate and his fascist doppleganger are both stronger than me by a fair bit. Lords of Order are on par with Archdemons, you know.”

“What about that diamond saw?” Wally asked. 

“Anything in my storage has been touched by my magical aura and will be repelled just the same, it’d take days for that to wear off.” Tanya shouted back, turning back to her game and paying only half-attention to the adult’s conversation. This part was rather difficult the last time around…

“There is one more we know they don’t have.” Batman said, “Flash.”

“Egads!” Aquaman shouted, “It’s true! The other Batman, he seemed particularly concerned about Flash’s safety. He even almost said-”

“The last thing we want is to lose another Flash.” John finished. “You heard him, he’s not going to be ready for what you can do.”

“Okay, give me some time to think.” The Flash said, going deep in thought. 

Time passed silently, maybe half an hour. No one seemed to have an idea, but that’s plenty of time for X-man’s guard to drop. 

Eventually, Wally seemed to come to a conclusion. “Okay, I’ve got an idea.” He declared. 

“Is it a good idea?” John asked. 

“Absolutely not.” Flash replied, “I might end up giving myself a heart attack trying.”

“Don’t.” Batman said authoritatively. 

“Too late!” Flash said, vibrating intensely. It didn’t seem to work, and then he slumped over, unconscious. The heart monitor display on his cell didn’t make noise, but it noted that he had flatlined. 

Summoned by his medical emergency, X-man rushed down, opening Flash’s cell and started extracting him. 

Then Flash revealed himself to be faking, and in an eyeblink X-man was trapped in his own prison. “You’ll appreciate this someday.” He said sarcastically. In short order, everyone else was out as well. 

Well, time to get back to work. The instant she was released, she incanted a spell: “Rhine. Berechnung. Mahou. Now that I’ve sprung from the tower, I must assume my maximum power!” After transforming back into their demon form, giggling at the sheer relief that washed over her now that she could fly again, Rhine sunk into Batman’s shadow, as usual. 

After a brief discussion on necessary objectives, they split up into groups to accomplish all objectives. 

-----------------------

As it turned out, the place they were held wasn’t the Batcave, but instead another underground complex a few miles of tunnels away. Batman still knew how to navigate them, so it didn’t take long to reach the portal. 

This Batcave was more in line with the one from their dimension. It was still… sterile, the trophies that Batman had claimed over the years were absent, instead replaced by even more laboratory equipment. 

The portal device held pride of place. “You should go.” Batman said, the long silence since they split from the other Justice League members broken. “Someone in the know needs to stall the other alternate Justice League members, ensuring they can’t do too much damage.”

“It would also be great, to warn them of Fate.” Rhine added, nodding. Reaching towards the portal machine, they started to gather power. “A path once walked, traversed half-cocked, now I return, it’s us he spurned, to punish the traitor, the ambitious dictator, open this path, so he’ll feel my wrath!”

A flood of magical power shot out to the portal machine’s aperture, creating a swirling vortex of magic. Rhine paused, taking a deep breath as the exertion drained them. They glanced back at Batman. 

“Go.” He commanded in a whisper, patting their shoulder. “Stay safe. Gotham needs you. I’ll get everyone else back.”

Rhine huffed. It all goes back to Gotham with him, doesn’t it? They still can’t really understand why; it was just shy of being a literal hellscape. They went into the portal. 

Batman better come back; he was Gotham’s favorite son, without him the flows of magic will snarl and that won’t end well for anyone. 

-----------------------

Naturally, Rhine had popped up where the portal was most recently opened: Metropolis. It wasn’t the exact same place that the portal to ambush the Justice League was placed, nor was it the battlefield with Doomsday, but Rhine entered that dimension through a portal opened by the Nabus, so they could only assume there was another transition at some point. Maybe the way Fate came back? 

Still, there were things to handle. The Batcave was… probably safe? If they had a better idea of which counterparts were here, that would help a lot. Fetching their phones, they activated the forced synchronization function, a necessity when one’s phones were frequently in different dimensions. 

As Rhine had both computationally overpowered phones and network priority on the Waynetech network (despite Luthor’s best efforts, even he couldn’t swing a telecommunications monopoly in a large city), it took mere seconds for the phone’s messages to update themselves. Hm, Robin left many panicked messages on her primary personal phone, which he shouldn’t have been using for that, but seemed to have properly locked down the Batcave and all associated systems. It wouldn’t stop any of the fake Justice Leaguers from busting their way in, but she got the impression that they intended to start off subtly. 

On the Justice League phone, Gear had repeatedly tried to call, as did Static, Barbie, and Victor. On the ArcWayne phone… just a summary of the report on the reagent collections for the week. On the secondary personal phone… More Gear and Robin calls. Hrm, Gear wasn’t supposed to have that number… Finally, on the phone for administrative Justice League matters… Apparently there are a lot of complaints from the staff about windows? They’ll need to check those out later. 

Rhine sent Robin a notice to summon them, which was immediately followed by a tug they allowed to work. Bad sign. Robin was there, in full gear, and he immediately started shaking Rhine’s shoulders. “What the hell happened!?” He exclaimed. “Batgirl’s out patrolling with Zatanna, but where’s Batman?”

Wordlessly, Rhine reverted to her true form. “The Justice Leaguers with the different costumes are from an alternate dimension, the missing members are in their dimension. I crossed back over to warn everyone.”

Robin processed that. “But Bruce is okay, right?”

“Sending me over early was his idea.” Tanya clarified. 

“So he’s in incredible danger, fuck.” Robin said, taking off his mask and rubbing at his eyes. “You don’t even notice half the shit he gets up to when he sends me back for it being ‘too dangerous’. I’ve been doing this for half my life! I can handle it!”

Hm. That was… a good point. “He also lets me stay out of it when he has the other members of the Justice League with him, and he does.” Sort of.

That made Richard feel better. “Okay, now we have to… what? Sound the alarm?”

“We should see what they’re up to.” Tanya said instead, “Oh yeah, Dr. Fate’s on their side, don’t trust him even if he does look right.”

Richard looked appropriately dismayed at the news that one of the League’s heaviest hitters was a traitor. Then he put his mask back on. “Okay, intel. We need intel.”

Tanya nodded firmly. “I have a lot of calls to make.”

As it turned out, after passing word to literally every Justice League member individually, even resorting to calling personal phones and enlisting associates to make sure everyone was informed, including some key government personnel, they had a pretty good idea of what the fake Justice League was doing. 

First, Superman has lobotomized Doomsday before allowing him to be taken into custody. When questioned about his new costume, he only said that it was “time for a change.” Which wasn’t good. 

Second, they spent a lot of time upgrading the Watchtower’s systems. While the security systems were such that it wasn’t as simple as just showing up, between Spotlight spoofing systems with “the greatest weapon in the universe”, the Green Lantern Ring, and Dr. Fate being a traitor, they had full access. 

Tanya wasn’t quite clear on where they got those weapons and armor plates, but she supposed that they could have brought them over from their dimension. After a thorough virus scan, they should be useful. They’ll definitely need to remove the modifications to the observation decks, though. Visual spotting was a lot more important than one would think, and she’ll be damned if she takes ‘view Earth from space’ off of the list of employee benefits. Half of the custodial staff would strike if they don’t get that fixed. 

Finally… well, that was it, actually. The Justice League had only been in the other dimension for, like, 8 hours. Which made it so late that it was technically early morning. She was tired. 

“Hey, the other Justice League members are probably not going to go loud with their takeover or whatever they’re doing for a while, so I’m going to go to bed.” Tanya said, yawning. “Wake me up if Superman kills the President or something.”

“Got it.”

Tanya knows that Bruce wouldn’t sleep in this kind of circumstance, but she’s been through a war. She knows that you have to get sleep where you can. This was a good time. So what if it wasn’t what Batman would do? 

She wasn’t Batman. Tomorrow, those Justice League imposters are going to find out what that means.