2013.09.23 - Even Museums Aren't Safe

Sundays are her day off. Sue Storm likes to visit museums when she's got the free time, and considering she's never seen the new exhibits in the Butler Museum of Modern Art, she thought today would be a good day to do so. And that was her mistake: thinking.

Now:

Spending the whole day museum-hopping, she's in the last room of the last exhibit when a shout distressingly close by startles her.

"GET OVER THERE!" A group of remarkably well-organized thugs armed with mostly automatic weapons start shoving and herding the last few museum-goers to one side of the exhibit hall, getting them clear of their apparent goal on display in the center of the room: the cut stone jewelry of a prominent British artist.

For her part, Sue is playing the role of just any other civilian, as the current group of goons outnumber the honest patrons, and it would be easier for her to protect them if they're closer together.

It doesn't take very long, does it?

The attention of Gotham's finest never quite has the opportunity to box in the kidnappers before an ill feeling settles on the room, a morbid kind of dread that slowly encroaches on the mounting adrenaline and panic already inherent in the room. It begins with just one screeching bat. The small shrieking rodent can be heard the moment the shouting dies down, flapping sporadically at all and sundry as it flaps around the airtight (!) case of the exhibit it finds itself in. Of course, a rational mind would look at the bat and consider it a curiosity, a small creature trying to escape an unfortunate confines.

For those who see patterns, the sudden flicker of a power outage in the region could very easily see the bat as trying to get out and hunt what it sees.

The power outage causes the lights to flicker and dim--several emergency lights click on, but none actually go out, as the deep thrum of laboring power somewhere struggles to keep up with the building's demand. Somewhere above, a shadow shifts. Impossibly hard to see, the dark form perched on the balcony raises a small pistol grip device, and activates it by depressing the trigger. It would be hard to tell that it's a high-powered microlaser with multiplex targeting lenses. One capable of targeting--and melting through--the trigger mechanisms of every automatic weapon within range inside the casing, in only a few seconds of indecision.

It would be quite the useless device in a straight up fight, because the user would be shot well before the trigger melted, and escape, if you know what's happening, is quite simple. But when successfully deployed, the microheating is quite impressive, disabling weapons with little more than a telltale sign of trailing smoke right around the scope. One that, today, quite eerily matches the smoldering, glowing eyes and fringes of every exhibit in the room, staring hauntingly, accusingly, at all gathered.

In that sort of situation, a small bat screeching seems a little different than just the usual.

Sue Storm flinches at the sudden appearance of the poor little bat in the sealed case, and that flinches causes a brief shimmer of pale blue to appear around the side of the room where all of the innocent museum-goers have been herded. Of course, with the lights flickering the way they are, it could very easily have been missed.

The goons appear to recognize the signs of impending Bat-dom and start yelling at each other, freaking out more than a little bit and losing some of their organization. The triggers on at least two weapons are rendered useless while the shouting is going on.

Sidling through the huddle of fearful patrons, Sue manages to get to the edge of the little group where hopefully none of them or the goons are paying attention, and then she completely disappears from view. Maybe if she plays this right she can disable those machine gun things before they... wait. What is that weird little glimmer? Having spent so much time in Reed's lab has sharpened her observational skills, and while still invisible she drifts up and over the top of the field corralling everyone else. Her goal: to figure out what that glimmer is and what's causing it.

The Batman doesn't seem to notice the subtle change.

Perched somewhere in the upper levels of the museum, his cape shrouds him against the vision of the superstitious almost as well as the total invisibility of the spritelike form floating up near him. That black drape seems to grip the shadows like a desiring suitor, removing all boundaries and making it very hard to tell where the darkness ends and the dark knight begins.

He manages to disable at least two weapons, this much is told to him in the fields of tangerine and pale blue that is his computer-enhanced postprocessed vision, told by a simple temperature ranging of the local point in the metal casings of the guns. However, once mass panic sets in amongst the kidnappers, his device becomes less useful, and is tucked away into the dull gold belt at his waist. He'll need to do the rest... personally.

He looks up, briefly, staring through soulless optics. For a second, he focuses on Sue Storm, as if he truly does see something where he should rightfully see nothing. A grizzled, unshaven face frowns deeply, aggressively.

And then, apparently disregarding Sue, the Batman moves to descend.

Out of the darkness above, a demon from the skies drops down. His full weight is brought to bear on the kidnappers, a combination of practiced talent and raw, elemental anger driving every motion, every step. He drops, brutally. He will break the collarbone of the first to wield a live weapon if he successfully lands on him. Flying blades in the night will lodge themselves in the barrels of the next two in the next second, if so.

In the whirling, shadow-drawn seconds thereafter, black fists.

He will not show mercy.

The Batman only lets you live so you can suffer choking on your own blood.

Or so the story goes. Let them talk about it in Blackgate.

Sue's eyes go wide when the black-clad vigilante seems to stare straight at her, and for an irrational second she stares back at the man's really very angry face. She has a fraction of a second to consider saying something to him, but then he's off of his perch and swooping down at the goons below.

It's not her style to beat up on bad guys when they can be easily caught like bugs in bell jars and kept that way for police to show up, so seeing the Batman's aggressive move she gasps almost audibly and throws one invisible hand toward the men stil arguing, putting a force field between them and the dark knight, and of course, all of the sharp pointy things also going their way. At the same time, though, another tiny force field pops into existence in front of each goon, neatly snipping off the front half of each of their automatic weapons and then disappearing again to let those sliced pieces fall to the floor.

Sue's really only able to pay attention to four or maybe five fields at the most at a time, so with one protecting the innocents and another keeping the Batman at bay, only three little bubbles munch on weapons simultaneously.

Cape spread wide like a predator's wings in full dive, the Batman collides magnificently with the force field, his boots slamming against it like a dropped boulder, but the translucent rippling blue surface holds fast against his weight, causing his cape to pool against the energy as if it were a solid surface. The lights from the energy dance off of his matte black armor, confusing the lines of his form much like reflected light from a pool.

It doesn't take the dark knight long to figure out exactly what happened. After all, he wasn't here to put a stop to a museum heist. Still, knowing just seems to make him angry. Rising, he takes a step back against the surface of the field, as if testing it. His movements are slow and calculating, exact to the millimeter. But one thing he certainly does not do is attempt to break through the field. Standing there in mid-air and fully exposed to the view of the criminals below, Batman stares down balefully, the full force of his scowl and that suppressed anger it shows turned on them. The scallops of his cape shift fluidly, rhythmically. It almost seems like he chooses to float rather than stand on the ground with the rest of them. He doesn't seem to do anything overt, but his optic lighting changes in intensity several times in quick succession. Consequently, his eyes seem to flicker ominously at the thugs, much like the statues and paintings were only a moment ago.

"You'll lay down your weapons," he orders, seething, "and get to the ground. Before I get angry."

Wow. The Batman took that surprisingly in stride. Sue finishes chomping the last the visible firearm she sees, and when one of the goons tries to break and run a faint blue shimmer almost like something out of a sci-fi movie is the only warning he gets before he slams into an invisible wall like a cartoon character. The rest are either too freaked out to try and run for it or smart enough to know better.

"Bad idea," Batman counters, to the face-flattened thug.

The Batman isolates the proper frequency, somewhere near the infrared range, where he can detect the slight insulating properties of the current form of barriers. A computer visual enhancement algorithm handles the rest, outlining each in blue. It's not out of the question that they can shield against fire and cold, however, so Batman's not counting on it in the future. It does give him one valuable piece of information--Storm doesn't quite know what his imaging abilities are capable of. However, to that end, he looks across the museum, scanning up, and not bothering to say anything else to the thugs, since they seem quite cowed enough. Which just leaves..

Right now, he's looking for an isolated force field. Depending on the type of person Sue is, she might have one of similar resonance around her. Right now, Batman realizes the futility in fighting through the fields. Instead, he's scanning the dark, looking for her.

"Impressive party trick," he echoes, very careful in the direction his voice goes. Right now, the criminals have a very convincing scapegoat to keep them compliant, and Batman has no reason to disrupt that belief.

As yet unaware that the Batman is using tech to locate her, Sue drifts down to float behind and just a little above him once he addresses her ... even if he's not lookiing precisely in her direction. She offers him a quiet reply, hoping to keep her voice quiet enough for only the vigilante to hear. "Not one I chose, but it comes in handy."

Below the Batman's feet, the force field that cartoon-halted the bolting thug expands to completely encompass all of the evil men then starts contracting again, pushing the ones still standing gently along and corralling them closer and closer together and over toward the still-downed man. At the same time, the force field that had been between the civilians and danger disappears with a visible pop like a soap bubble, clearly a very intentional action as other fields used here had not done the same thing. Maybe it's a way of letting the scared innocents know that there's nothing left to fear?

Well, except maybe for Glowery McFrowneypants still standing in mid-air on a similar light blue shimmer as what's got the would-be robbers all tidily penned in the middle of the room.

After a moment, the Batman settles into a relaxed posture, head forward as if he intends on doing nothing else in that moment. Cape mantling his dark form, he looks eerily like a judgmental ghost, staring down at the thugs silently, without one glance at the others. Ostensibly, he seems to be contenting himself with intimidating his enemies while some force or another corrals them together. However, in the end, it's just to buy time. He would normally retreat in this scenario, conceal himself in the darkness once again, but with this new information, he can't guarantee that Sue wouldn't oppose him. He has a distinct idea that she's simply pursuing some short-sighted pacifist agenda, but it might be within the scope of the Four to undermine his operations here in Gotham. It would be within Fantastic's purview to attempt to start limiting his ability to pursue crime in Gotham. That would be unfortunate. Batman's optics focus keenly. For them.

In short, he doesn't trust Sue Storm.

For the time being, he contents himself with playing along with the game, while he focuses on his search. Unbeknownst to her or anyone around him, he's actually cycling through the separate EM frequencies his cowl can passively detect. He should have been better prepared for this occasion. Without a full tomography suite, she's completely invisible to his detection systems, for the most part--it's not unreasonable to think that she's using some form of modified force field to mask her signature from his sight. After operating as long as the Four have, it would naturally come to the Invisible Girl to determine the ability of other metahumans to sense her and--within her ability--naturally limit them. Trying to find her optically confirms the suspicion. However, the Batman is nothing if not persistent.

When she speaks, a small reticule on the heads-up display in his cowl isolates it. He shifts--unseen in his cape, he activates a button-sized microrecorder from his surveillance kit, attaching it to his glove. Using a combination of the surveillance bug and the two recorders on either side of his head in his cowl, he can uplink the streams simultaneously to the Batcomputer. It's an old technique--by comparing the tiny receipt variances between the three audio streams, he can begin a triangulation subroutine. Even then, a side routine at the uplink catalogs the samples, and begins an audio isolation graph. He's trying to determine her exact vocal range, for some reason or another.

In short, if she keeps talking, Batman will know exactly where she is, and if she's a soprano or contralto.

And he is definitely in a talkative mood.

"Is it a habit of yours to use those talents of yours to impede justice?" he mutters to no one in particular, accusatory. He seems almost too calm to make that implication.

Sue Storm drifts away from the Batman before he speaks up again, reaching the floor quickly enough and reappearing there between the upright sushi-roll of bad guys and the still-confused museum-goers. "It's all right, it's safe to leave now." Hopefully, the museum staff will have already alerted the police, and she won't have to maintain those force fields for too much longer.

When the Bat speaks up, she looks up at him doing this grumpy black shadow thing, and answers easily, her voice carrying across the echoey room. She's used to facing down Ben Grimm when he's ANGRY, capes and frowny faces don't really faze her. "I was just here for the exhibits, but that doesn't mean I won't do what I can to keep people safe." Something she's done her whole life, not just since gaining her force field powers. A quick archive search under her name might well find a small town newspaper article applauding a then teenaged Sue's efforts to rescue a family of beavers from a rain-flooded river.

The levity with which she rises to meet him fails to achieve any sort of purchase in the Batman's intense concentration. He's like a rainless thunderstorm--you can shout as loudly as you want into the sky, it doesn't make a difference as to when the next bolt hits.

He doesn't let on as she speaks, even as her reappearance renders his acoustics location algorithms moot. She appears, and her words allow him to immediately triangulate her position, even independent of her appearance. Fortunately, a due diligence process that is rendered unnecessary is fortunate all the same: He can be relatively clear that Sue Storm doesn't intend to do something ridiculous with her powers as long as he knows where she's at. Which leaves the latter half of his curiosities, a vital piece of information that he catalogs for use--later.

Unfortunately, the side effect of Sue's speaking after she appears as opposed to before is that it gets just a touch of attention from the crowd--and the confused kidnappers. Many never heard Batman even say anything, let alone hold a conversation. That is one of the reasons why a few will inevitably look confused as to who Sue is talking to--and about what.

Because by the time she looks up after him, the Batman is gone.