Narrative + OPEN to BoP Who: Oracle and open Huntress, Black Canary and Lady Blackhawk Where: Clocktower When: 4/25 Summary: Barbara forces herself to stop falling to pieces and calls in her team for assistance.
"Bomb." Barbara paused the Marcy's security footage. She tapped through the frames. "No bomb." She rewound it. "Bomb." And tapped again. "No bomb....No Bruce either." They had all been too late, and the Joker had drawn first blood. This was his first strike, and were it any other villain, she would have called the attack aggressive. However, this was nothing in comparison to the carnage that the Joker could unleash. It was nothing in comparison to the chaos he wanted to creative.
The situation at the mall had been contained to the best of Batman's abilities, and because of his intervention a lot of lives were saved. That much was clear from the security footage. What wasn't clear was just where Bruce had taken the bomb, and its unfortunate hanger-on. She hadn't been able to contact him. She didn't for a second believe he was dead. First of all, that was too horrible of a thought to entertain, and secondly, if Batman was dead, the fallout in the superhuman community would have been swift and dramatic. Knowing what she knew about Bruce, she could assume that he was lying low, but it had to be particularly bad to keep him from being within communicator's reach during a full blown Joker crisis.
Knowing that he wasn't around changed something within her. She could not keep falling to pieces. He wasn't going to be around this time to pick up the slack. She had to be the one to make sure the Joker was taken down, but she recognized that she was on edge, her mind and spirit fraying. She alone would not be enough for this fight, and the Bat Family had lost its head. It was a bigger problem than she had accounted for, and so now it was time to pull in the extra resources that she hadn't wanted to before. She needed the Birds to do more than the weak investigatory work she had assigned to them. She needed them in the thick of the fight, to be an extension of her efforts at the base.
She typed a message--an urgent, repeated message for Dinah, Helena and Zinda. Report to Clocktower.