InsaneJournal

Who: Barbara Gordon (narrative)
Where: Storage Locker - Gotham City, NJ
When: July 1, 2012 - morning
What: Barbara shuts down a server.
Rating: PG


Barbara had woken up after more than twelve hours of sleep, and her body was thankful for it. She still ached. She still had a mess of bruises. But! She felt refreshed and like herself again. The first thing she had done that morning was fixed herself some breakfast, dragging all the food over to her computer set up. She spent an hour going through her messages--luckily, Tim had kept things organized. Next on her agenda was to go double back on the notable events she had missed--the murder of Tim's father, her own father's kidnapping and the incident at Blackgate.

Her training with Shiva had given her a new perspective--not Shiva's perspective because that woman was crazy, but it had been an opportunity to meditate on herself and her actions. Maybe she had been juggling too much, working from too emotional of a place. She had taken some risks, made some bad choices and it was time to correct one of those mistakes. The riot in Blackgate stuck in her mind largely because she felt she should have seen it coming. The Ramsey kid had escalated the Riddler's psychosis, giving him both an audience and a reason to be angry. Of course, the Riddler had gone looking for a big show!

She had been preaching to the boy that the man was too dangerous to deal with--that any bit of attention would have catastrophic consequences--but she hadn't taken her own advice. She had a dummy server sitting off network where the Riddler liked to post his riddles. It was nowhere near her system, and she only knew when he interacted with it because of an algorithm and some special alerts. Still, for all intents and purposes, he had to feel as though he had a direct hardline to Oracle and the superhuman community by proxy. Wasn't that a dangerous inflation of his ego?

Besides that, any external acknowledgement of her Oracle operation was a dangerous one. It would be better to stay completely disconnected, lest she put her loved ones or herself at risk. Looking over the articles about the incident, she realized it was time to sever ties. She grabbed her house keys (and a special key she kept in her drawer) and headed to the hallway closet, pulling out a metal bat. She grabbed her bag and headed out to the subway, which she rode to the outskirts of town to a storage unit. She headed up to a familiar floor, to the unit where she had set up the small server that was accepting the Riddler's messages. It was time to sever ties, and being in the information security racket, she knew there was really only one way to make sure information was gone for good.

She pulled her iPod and headphones out of her bag, scrolling to a song as she picked up her bat and swung, cracking open the chassis. She continued to pound the object until it was in pieces, pocketing the more in tact innards for further disposal in her industrial shredder.