Re: gotham; a bat and a turtle
For Donna, getting lost was one of those small guilty pleasures. She could plan a trip stop for stop, but the real parts of the city were always hidden away from view. "With this market and the economy, we need all the jobs we can keep." No, she didn't really know much about the economy, but she thought it sounded good. "I think you'd need a dedicated satellite with a very precise GPS signal for those reasons. One that could differentiate height or depth. Different floors in buildings. OH! If it could be paired with a sort of personal lidar scanner, that would be a start. Instant 3D environment. It could track anything moving within range-" It was then that she realized what she was saying, what her suggestions were for, and Donna flustered. Was she really debating how to make a theoretical tracking device for Batman? Yes. Yes, she was. This was clearly not the time or the place.
There was no way for Donna to ever explain that Bruce (Batman? Both?) was the light in Gotham. He knew, he had to. If he knew about the comics, he had to know how he was viewed by people like her. He did so much for Gotham, over and over again. His frustration was easy to understand. "Is it any easier if you know someone on the inside?" A sigh. "I'd like the news to be positive once." The comment about her appreciating what others missed took her off guard. A few fast blinks to process and then she smiled shyly, "Maybe. That sounds like a much nicer way of putting it than 'ignoring reality' which is how it is more often described." And then Donna giggled when he played along with her request, "Thank you. Just for that I'll sleep well tonight, instead of staying up to prepare for the inevitable blinking. I'll wait until the morning to do that."
She nodded in gratitude, "For ease, I'll gather them in one place. Overwhelm you with questions all at once." Besides, she could have asked questions about the hotel for a week straight. But then he brought up computers. "Oh," Donna pondered her skills for a moment. "Uhm, I used to work for one of the major video game companies while I was in college. I was mainly on the automation team. We wrote programs to make filing reports easier, made the internal programs faster, more efficient file sizes. Sometimes I'd go the coding competitions in Tokyo, or I'd be on a development team doing frameworks or databases, but for the most part I was constantly trying to improve compression algorithms for years. When I quit, I started contracting myself out. I've written a few very successful security programs. I'm currently working on a video game, but that requires a whole team to do properly so it's more a way to spend my free time until I need to hire digital artists." She shrugged with a small grin on her face. It was easy to forget that he was Batman at times as they walked, but even Donna realized that Bruce probably didn't want to know about video games. She continued very matter-of-factly, not a drop of arrogance behind her admissions, "For the most part, if it involves a computer, I can do it, I just can't make it look pretty. I was raised behind a keyboard. I knew the difference between Perl and Java before I could recite the alphabet. I wrote my first program when I was 8. I wrote my first operating system when I was 12. I've yet to meet a system I can't reverse engineer." Yes, that was her polite way of saying 'hack into'. She didn't like to think of herself as a hacker. Such negative connotations with that title, yet that's what she had turned into since leaving her job.
"I didn't realize it was you when I made the offer. I thought maybe virus removal, reformatting, little things," sheepishly added, her gaze dropping to her shoes. Donna was secure in her abilities, but having a chat with Bruce Wayne was still an absurd situation for her. A deep breath to gather herself and she lifted her head once more, "Not that the offer doesn't stand, it does, but I assume you'd be interested in more than basic maintenance." Her eyes darted up to his, a subtle raise of her eyebrows with a twitch of a grin at the corner of her mouth. She understood what sort of work he may need done, and that reflected in her look and dropped tone of her affirmation, "Which I can do."