After the lab incident I decided to take a few days for myself. No training, no fights, just flying randomly across the continent and taking in so sights and trying to clear my head.
It was nice.
By the fourth day I had pretty much sorted myself out and while what Bizzaro did still upset , I decided he made his choice and I had to respect that even if I didn’t get why he did it. I would respect that.
Of course that left
in a slightly awkward position of what to do next.
I had a feeling all the older heroes were going to be weird about things for a while and I didn’t want to deal with that. I an, I didn’t bla them. Making sure other people were okay was kinda their whole thing…but I didn’t need that anymore.
And I didn’t want the first ti eting up with the Sidekick Squad after a while being awkward because they thought I was fragile or sothing.
So I needed to find soone who could let the Justice League know I was okay now and didn’t need to be babied and wouldn’t get weird about eting up for so fun.
…I was pretty sure Thanagarians dealt with all their problems by hitting them in the face like a proper person, so Hawkie should be a pretty good choice! Plus I hadn’t seen her in a while anyway.
Now I just had to find her…
-o-
Why was it so hard to find a woman with giant freaking bird wings attached to her?! Why was she harder to find than freaking Superman? Seriously, I found an internet post about how he helped put out a fire less than an hour ago with a two minute internet search, but the last thing I found about Hawkie was over a month old!
Wait, crap. She was an alien who wasn’t abandoned on Earth. Was she even on the planet?
I groaned and collapsed on the keyboard in front of . This sucked.
“Are you having trouble, dear?” A kind voice asked behind .
I looked up and around to see the old librarian had wandered over – probably to get
to stop laying on her equipnt – and was now looking kindly at
through so thick glasses and occasionally glancing at the computer monitor.
“School project?”
I shrugged, not surprised by the mistaken impression. Afterall, I had ditched my armor today for a tight black shirt and so looser fitting cargo pants – so many pockets! – that hid my tail pretty well so I did look like a normal human teenager just looking things up in the library.
“I’m trying to find stories about Hawkwoman, but it’s not going great. Nothing recent is coming up.”
“Oh, that’s because the dia started calling her Hawkgirl a while back. I think it was to make her seem a bit more friendly since she is so…aggressive…when she’s going around fighting.” the librarian sounded disapproving of that. “We don’t want little girls going around thinking that screaming your head off is sothing we want mature young won to do.” She sniffed.
“Right…”
I got the distinct impression that doing anything but smiling and nodding along was going to get
a long lecture about the ‘proper’ way of things and I had no interest in being talked at until I fell asleep.
Stolen story; please report.
I had other things to do!
Such as looking up sightings of Hawkie using her actual na since I had apparently lost that ntal coin flip. Seriously, Hawkgirl instead of Hawkwoman? Hawkie looked like she was around the sa age as Wonder Woman. If Donna showed up calling herself Wonder Girl or sothing like that and the dia put them on the sa level, Hawkie was going to flip.
I paused reading the article I found while I thought about that.
On second thought, I prayed that would happen. The ntal image of a bunch of newsies getting chased around by a pissed off Thanagarian screaming that she was a grown woman was too funny to pass up.
“This is exactly what I needed! Thanks, Miss Librarian!”
“Happy to help, dear. Good luck on your assignnt and please don’t lay on the keyboards again.”
-o-
Unfortunately Hawkgirl wasn’t as famous a hero as Wonder Woman, Superman, or the Flash.
Kinda, I an she was obviously well known considering she was a founding mber of the Justice League. Maybe it was better to say she wasn’t as popular? As dia friendly?
All of the others were constantly in the news in one way or another that my target simply wasn’t. Thankfully for
though, she wasn’t on the level of Batman, who was usually only caught by a cara when he wanted to be.
That ant that even the most recent sighting I could find in an afternoon using public internet was a few days old. And considering she could fly at a decent speed that ant it was almost useless. But it did give
a place to start looking.
So after one last check to see if there was a more recent sighting that turned up nothing, I was off to the northern part of the Rockies to hunt down a bird woman.
And promptly got stuck on what to do next because trying to find one person in a mountain range with no idea where to start looking was really freaking hard!
Even going by Ki sense and only looking for the bigger sources I wasn’t getting much luck. Thanagarians had more Ki than your average human, but it wasn’t so different that I could just pinpoint who I was looking for at a glance. I ended up dropping in on a few hikers, four bears, and so sort of gorilla man before I found a group of Ki signatures a bit stronger than usual that I imdiately went off to investigate.
Why?
Because there were six of them moving really close together, and more interestingly, they were underground…relatively. They were still pretty high up a mountain but being inside the mountain still counts.
But that ant there was so kind of secret base inside a mountain that was begging to be explored!
Unfortunately knowing that there was a secret base inside a mountain didn’t an that I knew where the entrance was. And I had gotten yelled at by Donna enough to know that blasting through the walls wasn’t a really good idea if you wanted whatever was on the other side intact. Or for the roof to not cave in on your head because walls were important for that.
So, yeah. No impersonating the kool-aid man unless I knew what the other side looked like.
But that was fine, I had learned infiltration from Batman, after all.
And one of the earliest lessons he had given
was that sotis all you needed to do to sneak inside a secure location was just wait until soone left and be quick. And since the six people I was sensing seed to be getting closer to the mountain’s surface, I had a hunch I wasn’t going to need to wait long.
Moving carefully just in case there were so kind of external sensors, I flew close to the rock face and hid behind so boulders. I didn’t need to wait long before the group of six got even closer before coming to a stop. The rock face split open as a hidden door revealed itself and I poked my head out to–
“Oh ffff—” I yelped and dove back down behind my own rock as so kind of ship ca screaming out of the mountain and almost took my head off. I turned to track it just in case they saw
on the way out, but the ship kept going slightly up into the air before vanishing into the sky.
Okay, I guess that explained why the six of them were moving so close together. Really didn’t appreciate the near-haircut, but no ti to complain, I needed to sneak in before the door shut again!
I managed to slip through just before the fake rock walls closed and landed in a crouch. I had to resist the urge to whisper ‘I’m in’ as I looked around.
Not that there was much to see initially.
So far I was just in a tunnel big enough for the ship I just dodged to fly down that went deeper into the mountain but not much else in sight.
Only one way to go then.
I flew down the tunnel keeping an eye out for anything that looked like a cara or sensor like Batman had taught , but I also rembered he told
going anywhere for the first ti without scoping it out almost guaranteed that you would miss sothing so I went in half expecting sothing to notice my presence.
So when the tunnel opened up into a large hangar with absolutely no sign that I had been noticed going off I wasn’t sure if I should be disappointed that I apparently managed to sneak in so easily or be proud of my stealth skills. For now I was going to go with a bit of both and see what I could poke into before sothing discovered . Maybe those six were the only living things here?
That thought was almost instantly disproven when a door at the back of the room opened and a bipedal lizard man in so sort of armor walked into the room and began digging through what looked like a toolbox. I hurriedly ducked behind a crate of so kind and peeked out to see if I had been spotted, but the lizardman seed focused on finding what he was looking for instead.
Definitely more people in the secret base then, but more concerningly I couldn’t sense him.
This wasn’t like with the squids the spacecrabs used or the suit the army had built because I could see the lizard was an alien and not a robot, yet even looking right at him he was invisible to my Ki sense. So function on his armor? But then why did the previous six show up? Was it intentional, or was it just a side effect? And what were a bunch of alien lizards doing in a secret mountain base in the first place?
Too many questions were piling up and I knew smashing through their base now ant I wasn’t likely going to get many answers. I was going to have to continue being sneaky.
But I consoled myself with the knowledge that if I couldn’t find answers by poking around I could always default to smashing stuff if I got caught or found nothing…
Now then, how to sneak into the main part of the base without getting spotted moving across a mostly open room?
I spotted a vent that looked just big enough for
to squeeze through and felt a giant grin stretch across my face.
If the lizardn hadn’t kicked up an alarm yet, that ant they definitely didn’t suspect soone had broken into their base. They doubly wouldn’t suspect soone to be crawling around inside their walls…
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