Who: Barbara Gordon Where: A clocktower in LA When: Mid-Morning Rating: PG
Barbara Gordon was not a woman who asked for help. It was not an innate instinct which she felt the need to act upon and it wasn't a habit she wished to form. She was self sufficient and while she and her team depended on each other, that was it. The big boys came to her for help, not the other way around. She was proud of that, preferred that it remain the norm. She hadn't always been so headstrong, but things changed in life. Babs liked to think that this was for the best.
Los Angeles had never been one of her favorite cities. Three hours south of Platinum Flats, she'd not really had a chance to visit it yet, though it hadn't exactly been on the top of her 'things to do' list. More important were places like Star City and Coast City. Places where she knew that members of the Metahuman Mafia were spreading. LA had enough problems of its own, and heroes to take care of them. She and the Birds of Prey were on the West Coast for a specific reason and Babs had intended to follow through with it, and then head back to Gotham and Metropolis where, hopefully, Superman had calmed down.
As she looked around now out of a clock tower that wasn't very high off of the street and didn't offer the view of the one she'd destroyed in Gotham or the new building in Platinum Flats, she couldn't help but wonder exactly what had happened during the eight hour stretch of time she'd gone to sleep. There was no Charlie, no Helena, no Zinda, no Kate. Her laptop, her heavily encrypted and personal laptop, read July 6th, 2005. Odd time, according to the calendar she'd been keeping. The past year had been hell, but Babs knew she hadn't been off by three entire years.
Weirder things had happened, she supposed, but this seemed more within the domain of a Green Lantern. She was an informant, not a known hero, and thus not targeted. There was a reason she kept her face to herself.
Babs pushed back away from the face of the clock. As prone as she was to the urge to brood silently while staring down at the city (which she blamed entirely on Bruce) she knew it wasn't going to do any good. The internet was, as always, her first solace. She opened her laptop all the while shaking her head and chastising herself for not having done so sooner. The cars going past on the street weren't going to tell her anything.
And so she started reading, logging onto the City's message boards and going through posts upon posts where other seemingly lost people asked for help. It was more helpful, really, than posting a message herself. Not that she would have to be begin with. Babs simply read, going back as far as she could. The answers to the questions tended to all be the same. No one knew why people were here and no one knew how to get out. She started downloading messages to her hard drive, saving pertinent information and names to read over again later. There was enough that she didn't care to bother with anything that was encrypted or locked, though she was sure it existed. It seemed that when people explained what was going on, they tended to leave it open for the world to see.
Good trait, that, she thought to herself as she read through things. It certainly saved her time. She noted, as she read, that there were people who'd been here for months at this point. That certainly didn't allow for much hope, but it set the tone for an appropriate frame of mind. If Barbara Gordon was anything, she was a realist. Tomorrow she would start building; or rebuilding as it were. The place was empty. She was the Oracle, but even for her one laptop wasn't going to go very far. She needed servers, hard drives, wireless, cables, screens…
She'd blown up her own hideaway and rebuilt from scratch once. She could do it again.