2013-02-20 Too short to be Batman

It is cold and dark, as usual for Gotham in February. Tommy came here because he needs cash, and he doesn’t want to meet any of his friends when he is burglarizing the apartments of people with too much money. Besides, Gotham is just half an hour running from New York.

Tonight’s target is an upper floor penthouse. It had a decent security system that didn’t handle too well being subject to too a kinetic overload. Tommy has gloves and a flashlight, and works fast. Picking up only jewels and cash. There should be a safe somewhere, but it is well-hidden and he has yet to find it.

The security may have given in to the kinetic overload, but not before it got out a chirp that it was being broken into. While Gotham's cops are busy with actual violent crime, and responding to a break-in is low on the priority list, Batgirl happened to be in the location and so Oracle tagged the little black bat to look into it.

Being a penthouse makes it easy for Batgirl to look into, landing lightly on the railing and peering within. The flashlight is kind of a dead giveaway. Batgirl works on sneaking into the penthouse herself, easy-peasy given that Tommy's already disabled the alarm, and sneaks up behind him. If she manages to get behind him without him noticing, she taps one of his shoulders lightly. Taptap.

Tommy does not look like the typical thief. For one, he is too young, for another, he is moving too fast, supernaturally fast. At the penthouse office, he goes over the desk in twenty seconds, then shifts to poke behind the books that line up one of the walls, floor almost to ceiling. Although he is usually pretty sharp, he has already checked he is completely alone in the penthouse, and it is rather dark, so Batgirl does sneak up on him and... yikes! He turns so fast his form blurs for a second, jumping back at the same time, lantern immediately moving to try to illuminate Batgirl’s form.

The bright beam plays over shadow given form. Peaked ears, featureless mask, long cape whose scalloped tips brush the floor in eerie silence. And the yellow outline of a bat, right in the center of her chest. In the contrast between light and shadow, it's likely only at the last moment that he'll notice her fist, comming for his face. He's obviously quick, and if she doesn't put him down, catching up with him is likely to be a trial.

A last moment can be a pretty long thing, which likely saves Tommy from a broken jaw. And Batgirl might be surprised when she misses. Yes, the young thief is impossibly quick. “Hey now... don’t youhavetocatch somecostumed psycho, or something?” He also talks so fast he would be hard to understand even for normal people. He turns off the flashlight, his eyes adapting to the dim light of the city outside very quickly.

Batgirl missed? She doesn't miss. She does manage not to stop and stare at her fist like it betrayed her, though. The words are just noise to her, and the lenses in her cowl compensate for the sudden plunge into darkness. His rambling objection gets only silence for an answer as a quick touch of her belt and Batgirl is throwing a bola at his ankles to try to slow him down.

“You aretooshort to beBatman anyway,” observes Tommy, jumping over the desk and trying to avoid the girl to reach the door. For a thief, he does not seem overly worried by being confronted by a batperson. Maybe overconfident, he does not see the bolas until they are wrapping around his feet. But he doesn’t lose balance either, instead falling to crouch to grab them.

This is turning out to be a lot more trouble than it was supposed to be. Quick detour, stop the B&E, get back to the important work of saving lives! But Batgirl can't really express that to Tommy, his quips going unanswered by the silent bat. As he crouches to grab the bolas Batgirl drops some flashbangs to try to keep him disoriented so that she can get a hand on him to put him in some kind of restraining hold.

Tommy touches the bolas cords and they melt, although Batgirl might not notice among the flash and bang of her grenades. Oh sure, that disorients, but Tommy recovers so quickly that by the moment she is grabbing him, just a second or two later, he is much less disoriented she would expect, and quite able to struggle against her grip.

Batgirl's fingers go for pressure points, her hold stronger than her slight frame would suggest as she tries to put Tommy down hard on the floor.

“Hey, stop a sec!” Tommy is not too keen at this idea of getting throw down and actually strong enough to keep up with Batgirl. He really doesn’t want to fight a superhero, he has a lot of superhero friends! But this crazy batperson is not even interested in talking before punching him! He spins in place, trying to get loose or throw Batgirl away, again his speed is unnatural, he moves perhaps 10 or 15 times faster than a normal person. Strong as a bear, too.

Talking *is* rather low on Batgirl's Modus Operandai. OK, it's not even on it since she doesn't speak. He starts to twirl like a top, the centrifugal force tossing Batgirl away. She tucks as she's thrown through the air, twisting so she hits the wall feet-first to push back towards Tommy. Batarangs come out, these aimed at cutting his pockets open to spill the loot he's been collecting and then she hits the floor in a neat, three-point stance.

Tommy has not been collecting much. He got a pair of jeweled cufflinks from a bedroom, but he was really looking for a safe or something with cash. Finally catching a good sight of Batgirl he blinks surprised. A girl, and small too? And throwing boomerangs. Funny that. He catches them on the way. Which was not a great idea, as they are sharp. “Ow! Damnit!” He drops the batrang he grabbed with his right hand, which has cut the palm of his hand pretty badly.

A girl that apparently doesn't know when to give up. She feeds out some of her decel cable as she jumps at him again, grabbing for his wrist in the hopes he start spinning again and in doing so, wrap himself up in the line for her. Even if he doesn't, she works on moving around him. She doesn't have superspeed, but she's pretty quick for a normal person.

Tommy does notice how quick Batgirl is, yes. So he assumes she is superhuman like him, because normal people don’t move so fast. And after all she is a superhero, so it is to be expected, at least in New York! Not being able to see very well in the lightless apartment does help to foster his mistake, too. Instead of trying to avoid her or grab her, he slides to the far wall, momentarily out of her reach, and then his form blurs again as he moves through the wall.

Batgirl is right behind Tommy, right until she... hits the wall. Gloved hands slide over the wall as though there's a secret entrance that she's missing. Then her head jerks around, searching... searching... but no. Nothing here. Just her.

And Tommy appears in a... storage room of some kind, with lots of coats and hats and stuff made of furs. Ack. Batgirl can hear the noises of things falling down and on someone, muffled curses, the wall is rather thin. In the coatroom, Tommy pulls the flashlight again and peers. “No one has the right to have so many coats,” he grumbles, looking for way out. Moving through walls makes him dizzy.

Batgirl presses an ear to the wall that *she* can't pass through, hearing the ruckus that Tommy makes. That tells her more than the words he speaks. Then she's ducking around to try to find how to get into the room Tommy's in.

Tommy finds the door of the coatroom, a slider to a side opening to another bedroom, a room that looks pretty sparse. Okay. He is not stupid, he made a ruckus and probably Batgirl is on the way, so he turns off the flashlight and tiptoes towards the door out, but instead of opening it, he stays at the side and behind. He can be sneaky too!

The door eases inward as Batgirl stalks the speedster, eerily quiet both in manner and in the fact that she hasn't said a word or made any kind of sound through the entire encounter.

That is so annoying. Normal superheroes quip and joke around, or make heroic statements like 'you won't leave with the loot, you thief'. Batgirl is not playing by the rules. If he had more common sense, Tommy would have opened the window and ran down to the street over the wall. Instead: taptap. "Hello, don't I even rate a menacing introduction or something?"

The tap comes from behind her, and instead of turning around to see who it is (because she knows who it is), one elbow comes up and back with (for a human) blinding speed right for Tommy's jaw. Face, meet elbow. That's pretty menacing, right?

Human bodies shouldn’t be able to bend like that. At least that is Tommy’s opinion as the elbow hits his face. He rolls with the blow, though, he almost had time to dodge it. “Alright, haveityourway!” He tries to push Batgirl forward, into the coatroom. If it works, he also closes the door at high speed. That’ll teach her.

Batgirl can see his intent, but he's moving so much faster to do it than most people. She's moving to get out of the way but he still manages to give her a good shove, sending her swimming amidst the coats. SLAM

Tommy's got time to dust his hands off and congratulate himself on a job well done when *BOOM* the door comes flying off its hinges with a bat right behind it. OK. Now she's annoyed.

Tommy would be dusting off his hands, but his right one still hurts where he cut himself. When Batgirl kicks the door out of the way, he is already at the door of the room, and sticks his tongue at her for half a second before running away.

Batgirl emerges from the coat closet, cape draped over her shoulders to the floor and her shoulders set in a line that bespeaks her annoyance more than words. The dust is still settling as she steps out... But he's already gone. If she knew how, she'd certainly be cursing him. As it is, she's going to have to explain to the Big Bat how the thief got away...