i_flybynight The Picture [Challenge #1 - Max] "Dorian, Dorian," she cried, "before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theater that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night, and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real."
Nothing but shadows.
Dick tended to find himself relating to the gypsy characters in things. Granted, the one here was a 17-year-old stage actress who had just fallen hard for a bratty little Narcissis with a fancy portrait of himself. But for that paragraph, he... sort of actually got it. The life of a superhero was one that, when you took a big step back, was really rather ridiculous, but while you were living it, it was more real than anything else. Having a super-fancy car, and jumping off of rooftops was normal. Getting into fistfights with complete strangers was just part of a regular routine.
Sigh. And he'd thought the library would be a good place to relax, instead of thinking about things.
He was upended in an armchair that rested against the wall. His head barely had space on the seat, and his legs were stretched up along the wall, crossed at the ankles and in a comfortable sort of stretch. He turned the page.
"Yes," he cried, "you have killed my love! You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away."
[Text from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.]
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/09/2006 01:11:42
She'd figured out that if she wanted to see people, the library was the best place to do it. Everyone in this house came through the library at some point. Even Alfred.
So as usual Max walked into the library, books and notebooks in hand. Her usual spot on the floor, right next to the grandfather clock, was empty as always. She was the only one crazy enough to sit on the wood floor for hours at a time, hunched over and writing. It didn't really take hours for her to do her homework, but she'd taken to stalling. She saw more people when she stalled.
She didn't notice Dick sitting in his odd position until she'd pulled out her chemistry book and opened to the section on atom bonding.
"Hi," Max said, looking up breifly from her notebook and sticking a pencil behind her ear. True geekery at its finest. She looked over at him curiously as it occured to her that they'd yet to be in the same room together for an extended period of time. That was probably about to change.
"Acting! I leave that to you. You do it so well," he answe--
Dick was facing entirely the wrong direction to see who was speaking, at least until he pushed his feet against the wall a bit, arched his back, and tipped his head over the seat of the chair far enough to see her clearly.
Upside-down, but clearly. This would've been Maxine, then, unless they'd acquired another teenage girl from somewhere.
"Hello," he said pleasantly, and added, probably unnecessarily, "I'm Dick."
If she already knew who he was, perhaps it'd be a prompt for her to introduce herself, just in case he was wrong.
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/09/2006 01:31:41
"I know," she said, her voice very matter-of-fact. They might not have met, but she definitely knew who he was. She just hadn't gotten the chance to examine yet... still couldn't really, due to the awkward position he was sitting in.
"I'm Max. I've been scarce." Her tone was still frank, but she smiled and shrugged after a moment. "Not scarce enough though, 'cause I'm doing homework on a Saturday night."
The awkward position was going to start making all the blood rush to his head, which would lead to a headache, so he relaxed his spine and pulled himself back up into the less uncomfortable pose he'd been in before. Dick set the book aside, tucking it between the seat cushion and the side of the chair, and rolled.
It was a backwards somersault off the seat that seemed like it should end with a crash against the floor, but, well, it wasn't like he didn't have experience with this, and the roll ended with a bounce into an upright position. He dropped back into the chair, sitting the proper way, and dug around in the chair for the book.
"At least you get Saturday nights," Dick said, fully prepared to launch into a 'when I was your age...' story, and catching himself just in time. How lame would've that been. He shook his head. "Terry's friend, right?"
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/09/2006 02:05:26
Max watched with interest as he did his mini-acrobatic act in the chair. It was neat in that weird way that things were often neat in this house. That only-in-Wayne-Manor way.
She looked back down to her own books when he started digging his out. Ah, balancing equations. Max grinned. Those were fun. Really, they were!
"Yeah, I'm Terry's friend," she answered, pulling the pencil from behind her ear and flipping to a clean sheet of paper. "You guys met, I guess? Guess he's been here long enough for that."
"He came through the Cave once, when I was down there." Dick couldn't help the little smirk that crossed his face. "He had a bit of trouble getting in."
Guess the codes had changed in the few decades that passed between this time, and when Terry was the resident Bat-Person, or else Bruce had started to lose his edge in his old age. God, what would he look like, that far in the future? Or Babs? Or Dick, himself?
Right.
No meddling with the future.
"I haven't really talked to him much. Figured Bruce would give him the 'Now that you're Batman' speech, at some point, and that wouldn't have been my place anyways." He opened the book at random, and pretended to read it. Closed it again. "Just to clarify. You don't run around in a suit, do you?"
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/09/2006 15:06:06
"Oh, getting in's easy," Max commented idly. She glanced up at the grandfather clock and then back down at her books. She wondered if Bruce had changed the setting on the clock hands since her privilages had been revoked. She'd never considered trying, figuring the trouble she'd get in just wasn't worth it.
No one wanted to see Bruce really angry, after all. Max was pretty damn sure of that.
At Dick's last question she glanced back up and shook her head. "No, I don't," she said, just a tad bit resentfully. "I alternate between research girl and damsel in distress when Dana's busy. It's a living."
"From the outside," Dick added, not missing the look at the clock. It had been a constant source of distraction for... probably all of the residents, at some point, and with varying degrees of 'constant.' "But, you can always help him out if you think he'll lock himself out again."
It'd save Dick (or whoever else was down there) about five seconds of key-punching and button-pushing.
"Hm," he said. "Well, Barbara's got a lot of the research aspect down, I'd imagine..." Though maybe not so much when the power went out. "How's the damsel in distress bit working?"
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/09/2006 16:31:53
Max shrugged. "Well, I got my face beat in by the Joker in an ally way and almost slipped into a coma just 'cause I have pink hair, so I'd say I'm fulfulling that half of my job pretty well." She manages a smirk. Better to laugh at these things after all.
She chewed on her pencil eraser for a second before writing down a few numbers and continuing on. "How's the Nightwing bit working? I definitely haven't seen you around."
Well. Now she could join the club of Batfolk who'd found themselves a personal victim of the Joker. Granted, she'd have to get herself shot before she matched the other two Batman-sidekicks, but it was close enough.
"Maybe you should work on not doing so well at it. No sense in overachieving," Dick suggested. "And it's not as though you aren't surrounded by people who could give you a hand with learning some self-defense."
The last thing they needed - the last thing Bruce needed, was a dead teenager under his wing. He had enough of those.
"No shortage of criminals around here. It's been... mundane." A pause, and a blink. "How did you almost end up in a coma because of your hair?"
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/09/2006 17:24:13
"Yeah, I was kinda supposed to start that with Tim, but Tim is like... not around at all. Then Jesse put the Joker outa commision for awhile and I stopped worrying about it too much. Plus, I haven't seen Bruce around in a while and I'm technically not supposed to go down into the cave by myself so..." Max stopped what could have turned into a babble and shrugged.
She probably needed to look back into the whole self-defense thing, though. Just had to find a time to talk to Bruce.
She flipped through a few pages of her textbook. "You wouldn't happen to know the atomic mass of Scandium would-- oh never mind, 44.95, duh." That was a silly thing to forget. She scribbled it down and spoke at the same time.
"Joker... he liked my hair. So he decided he wanted to play with me. Playing for him was equivilant of smashing my face against a brick wall, hence the near coma," she explained. "Someone didn't get enough hugs as a child."
"He's not gonna stay like that for long. Everyone in this line of work seems to have a pretty good recovery time." Even Babs, who, while she never really healed, didn't end up wallowing in despair for the rest of her life. "I worked with Tim a lot, before this, so if you can't get Bruce to help you, you can come find me."
Dick wasn't, however, going to take over Tim's place as Bruce's sidekick, regardless of how MIA the boy was.
"Gotham seems to breed a macabre sense of humor, I think. Where else can you have a supervillain calling himself the Penguin? Er. Well, when I was Robin, we had the Penguin."
Maybe the future had... Glowworm, or something.
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/09/2006 18:11:08
"Thanks. May take you up on that." She grinned at him. Maybe now that she was planning on spending more time at the mansion she actually could. Definitely not a bad idea.
It took her a second to wrack her memory for details for the Penguin. When she finally did remember, another smile quirked on her lips. He'd been a weird one.
Max laughed slightly. "The names they give themselves in my time're just as weird. And kinda unoriginal. There're a bunch of kids who run around beating people up and carjacking that call themselves the Jokerz. And then there's the Royal Flush Gang. And... oh. Inque and Spellbinder and Terminal." She laughed, though what she was thinking about wasn't really something one should've been laughing over.
"Terminal tried to kill me because I had a higher GPA than he did."
Some of the strangeness of those names was lost just because she was saying them instead of writing them down - Inque simply became Ink, for instance. Still, they sounded a little less original than the ones Robin used to encounter. Of course, those were the early days of the Batfamily.
"Wow, so, your villains really had that whole... take-over-the-world vibe going on," Dick deadpanned.
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/09/2006 18:55:11
"Yeah, or at least, a take-over-Hamilton-High vibe," she laughed. "Most of ours aren't exactly big thinkers like the Joker or the Penguin or Ivy." That was probably a lucky thing, now that she thought about it.
Max had just about chewed off her eraser now, but she kept biting. Usually she used pens, they lasted longer against chewing asaults. "All the guys you faced, they're like... in jail now. Well most of them. Terry had to deal with Freeze once. And right before I got pulled in here, the Joker came back, except really, he was Tim and the Joker was inside him. It was really weird."
She thought for a moment. "Oh, and there's two girls in The Jokerz, who're Harley Quinn's granddaughters. But that's it for relation."
"So the good guys win in the end... sort of." One day, someone would have to explain the whole Joker-in-Tim thing, but it might be one of those things that Dick didn't want to know about. Yeah, probably. That future was a long ways off, anyways. But... Harley Quinn had a kid? Who had kids?
He could only hope that it might be some sort of alternate universe, as well as being in the future.
"Better a high school than trying to bring about the apocalypse," he commented. "Even if Bruce would glare at me for saying so."
All lives were equal, after all. Destroying one school was just as bad as the world... right?
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/09/2006 19:24:01
"If I was there I might glare too. Man, that place sucked sometimes." Actually, sometimes Gotham in general sucked. Once you got over all the psychos though, it kind of wasn't so bad. "Our guidance counselour turned a bunch of us into theives and terrorists once."
The fact that she could say this with such frankness and blase was an accomplishment.
"Yeah, you guys sorta win. Put a cap on the serious psychopaths at least." Max grinned brightly. "They all hang out in Metropolis now."
"Wow. Who would've thought that the city wouldn't be a shiny example of good citizenship in fifty something years?" It was easy to be sarcastic about Gotham. It wasn't his city anymore, not really. Bludhaven was enough to worry about, without trying to keep tabs on Gotham.
Dick shrugged, and grinned back. "Hey, Metropolis has its own share of heroes to deal with that. Better there than... here, right?"
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/09/2006 20:59:01
"I'd have to agree. Though," she looked at Dick mock seriously. "Between you and me, Supes is kinda losing his touch over in Metropolis. You shoulda seen the mess Terry got dragged into with the JLU back home. Superman had these things controling his mind, started knocking off members of the JLU... it was crazy."
She laughed and hunched back over momentarily to make more notes in her book.
"Really, that whole thing made me kinda thankful for Gotham and our predictable Arkham crazies," Max said. "I'd be at a loss anywhere else, really. I d'know how you left... well, I do. But kinda hard I'd guess. You get a whole new city and a whole new list of villians."
"The crazies start wearing you down, after awhile... you know, there comes the tenth time so-and-so returns from the dead, and you just wish you could actually make sure they stay that way. Not that it actually means much," Dick added quickly. Batman didn't kill. Neither did his sidekicks. It was the way things worked. "But sometimes you wish they'd actually leave."
So it really was sort of good that some of the villains had ended up in Metropolis, out-of-touch Superman or no.
"I needed it, I guess." A shrug. "I can't really explain it well."
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/10/2006 18:04:04
Max nodded. She was no advocate of killing, but she'd shared Terry's frustration more than once when they'd found out that Inque was back yet again. Three electrocutions and one betrayal by her daughter later, and she still hadn't gotten the picture.
"There're the ones who you think died too, but then you find out that they've been keeping themselves alive for years with weird technology. That's how Freeze did it. It was kinda fascinating, actually. ...scientificaly, I mean." She grinned sheepishly.
"I was born in the 'Haven," Max offered. "It's not as much of a cesspool as it was right at the beginning of the century. So, you did something right." She threw him another bright grin.
Dick didn't know that he'd run into many of those, but his career hadn't really been long enough for anyone to do that with much dramatic effect: mysteriously coming back to life/keeping yourself alive with advanced technology probably had more of an effect when you supposedly died five decades before, rather than five months.
"That's good. I'd hate for all of my hard work to go to waste." He matched her grin again, and then his attention flickered to the book and papers she had with her. "Whatcha working on?"
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/10/2006 20:01:06
"Chemistry. Balancing equations. Then history, Shakespeare, computer science, and French." Max pointed to each book on the floor. The English reading was going to take her the longest, but she'd just do it before bed. She hated trying to decode what the man was saying and swore to God that whatever he was speaking was not English. "Full course load. Sort of. I had a month before graduation back home, so I'm doing most of this over."
Not to mention that everything here was easier. Or at least it seemed like it. Probably because in fifty years, they knew a lot more about each subject and therefore had more to teach.
"What're you reading?" Max eyed the book that he'd been reading upside down before. That'd probably been headache inducing.
He definitely didn't miss school, and Max's list reminded him of that, just in case it might've slipped his mind.
"Dorian Gray," Dick said, and gave the book at quizzical look. It wasn't that it was a bad book, but in thinking about it, it wasn't really the sort of thing he read. He wasn't much of a reader at all, actually, but that was mostly because he didn't have time to just kick back and spend the time for it. "I think I read it in high school, but I spent most of those years in a zombie state, during the day."
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/10/2006 20:48:47
"You and Terry'd get along great." Max rolled her eyed jokingly. "He'd be out all night doing the Bat thing, then he'd come to school looking like some sort of corpse. It was entertaining for the first few weeks that I knew." Then she'd taken pity and started helping, figuring if she was going to take it upon herself to crack secret identities, she might as well do something with the information.
"I've never read it," she pointed back to the book. "I prefer computers. I've only got the Bard 'cause it's required that you do four years of English and this class doesn't require as many papers."
"And I preferred sleeping in, but you know, we don't always get what we want."
Another thing he'd wanted was for Babs to have been more decisive about where they stood, but that wasn't something to mention to Max. After all, she was a teenaged girl, and Dick's experience with teenaged girls had been... hello, gossip. Hell, that extended even to non-teenaged girls, and probably Tim.
He opened the book, guessing at where he'd been before. "Well, between you and Babs- Barbara, I guess you've got the city covered. When the computers are working, of course."
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/14/2006 18:39:38
"Yeah, when they're working. Did you see Babs the day they went down?" Max shook her head as if remembering something particually unpleasent. "She was... not happy." That was putting it lightly.
Ooh, French time. Max closed her science books after finishing the last problem and opened her others. Last subject for the night. She was very good at this stalling thing apparently.
"Babs is really taking care of it anyway. Seeing as they're making me go to school and everything, s'not like I have time."
"I think I was working that day," Dick said vaguely. And he hadn't really wanted to be anywhere within earshot of Babs when the power had gone weird, let alone in the same physical vicinity. "Very far away."
Max probably got that one. If she was the techy of the future, she couldn't have been dull-witted.
"Ah, well," he paused to burrow down in the chair a bit, "lucky you."
From: [info]i_assist Date: 04/15/2006 07:44:03
"Lucky?" Max rolled her eyes and shook her head. "Nah. I'd rather be working crazy vigilante stuff. Back home I had more time for it than Terry did. My parents are generally... not around... to tell me what to do."
Dick flipped pages. This wasn't a long book, really, but he was easily distracted, and he wanted to know what happened. He could always go back and read the middle later, if he wanted to.
"Hm," he mused, staring at the book. "My 'dad' tends to be a bit of a lurker, but you definitely know when he's pissed off."
Then you would feel a glower, and a frown. Bruce wasn't one to really yell; at least, he didn't shriek a lecture from two rooms away, but that might've been easier to take.