The Universe's Mixer

The plan was progressing slowly, but progressing. Bane and Brandt had come up with what they wanted to do, and determined that destroying a building was not going to do it here in this place. Not with the way that the buildings just fixed themselves pretty much immediately.

They were going to have to kill a lot of people.

Tunnels were being dug below the City streets, recruiting was easy. It had always been easy for Bane. He was a natural leader, the urge to follow him was deeply rooted in the bones of many. HH Holmes had killed the architects and builders of his murderous home, Bane killed only those who proved themselves too weak to continue under his employ. But it was no matter. The City seemed to be filled with a never ending supply.

He was upside for the first time in a while. Brandt handled everything that needed to be done up here most of the time. He was far less conspicuous. One might easily remember a very large man wearing a very strange mask. Bane was one of the League of Shadows, skilled in hiding in plain sight, but even that could not hide him when there needed to be a face to face interaction with somebody.

The night air was nice on his skin, not too cold, but he wore his heavy jacket anyway, to cover the vest under. Bullet proof kevlar, an accessory he refused to go anywhere without.

His task was to scout out the building that they were digging the tunnel to, though it was strange that things up here were not the same as those below. The tunnel was straight, despite how long it took him to find the shifting structure once he climbed out of the sewer entry. Bane walked by City PD, sizing it up as he moved, but did not linger. He made his way to a more innocuous business to spend some time before he walked past his target again to try to collect whatever data he might have missed on the first trip.

Bane stopped before reaching his destination to look to the skies. He'd heard rumors of who might be here and who might not.

Opportunity presented itself in the oddest fashion.

The afternoon that an argentinosaurus exploded through the outside wall of his cell, Cleric Brandt, First Class, had been exercising. In Blackgate, there was precious little else to do than that, and he was stronger and in better condition than he'd ever been in his entire career. It made him itch to find Cleric Preston and put him to the test. Finish the dual they'd only just started before Brandt was pulled into that strange world of dinosaurs and sense offenders.

Sweating and disbelieving, Brandt pressed himself up against the back wall of his cell and watched the large beast swipe through the wall of his confinement -- and out into the corridor. For the first time in months, Brandt saw the sky. He grinned.

His excitement was detestable, and he quickly stamped it from his face. Instead, he focused on what was going on outside. The dinosaur that crashed into his prison was not alone. There was another - and it looked like a tyrannosaurus - that pursued the larger, slower-moving beast responsible for his jailbreak. They two were moving off and away from the prison, which was just as well. If the beasts were distracted by each other, they wouldn't notice him as he escaped.

Brandt paused, then looked out toward the corridor. He heard, beyond the clashing of dinosaurs, the jangling of keys on a belt and the pounding of booted feet on cement. Brandt edged toward the gap in his cell and waited until the guard burst into view. He took him out with a few well-placed blows, crushing the larynx and pulverizing certain nerve clusters to cripple the man as he died. Unhooking the keys with one efficient swipe, Brandt looked across the corridor to the cell of the one who had spent time these months talking through his ideals.

Ideals that were not out of alignment with Brandt's. Sense offenders needed to be cleansed from the City. Others needed to be converted to the truth path of humanity's salvation. They two could work together toward these goals - Brandt and Bane. The decision was not difficult.

Moments later, the two were standing in the corridor together. Brandt grinned again.

Bane knew this place.

Not because he'd ever been inside of it before, he hadn't. He knew it because of the people he had freed from it. From the time that he had spent studying the gates so that he could tear them down and release all of those inside, causing havoc and mayhem with which to bring down Gotham city. The interior was just as bleak as the exterior. It was cold, unforgiving.

But still a warm and inviting place when compared with the pit.

He didn't know how long he'd been inside. His cell held no windows. There was only thick concrete brick. A heavy metal door with a small barred window. He could see only the cell opposite of his own, and there had been no stirring of life from over there since he'd woken up. Not that he'd called out or anything. Mostly, Bane had been brooding and plotting how to get out.

There had been an attempt to break the door, which had resulted in bloody hands and strained muscles. He had planned to overtake the guard that brought his meals, but while he was awake, nobody appeared. Even after staying awake for 48 hours, there had been no life, no food. But the second he began to drift off to sleep, Bane heard the sound of a tray clattering gently against the floor.

He had been reluctant to take the mask off, to have that weakness, but he knew that he would be weaker still if he didn't eat the pathetic food they offered.

They. Who were they. What had they done to get him here? Where was here? Gotham? There certainly had been no prison on the ruined world, where he'd been staying in Sanctuary. And nobody there that he'd found who could take him down. Certainly Bruce Wayne had been no match.

Since then his days had been spent sitting on the cot, staring at the small barred window, running his mind over complex formulations to keep his thoughts sharp, or working his body to exhaustion.

Preparing.

Waiting.