Kevin Curry
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Devil's Consultancy 28
🕑 Added 2025-06-09 14:00:13 +0000 UTCSomething she couldn’t really get away with anymore was being her usual persona during charity galas and other high society parties. The children of the rich and famous were expected to comport themselves well, and as she was now not only nine years old temporally, but supposedly also brilliant on top of that.
Bruce’s schedule was quite punishing, if you looked at it. He spent at least eight hours a day on matters related to Wayne Enterprises, although he did use large fractions of that time to handle research tasks for his vigilante activities, as well as go over what he needed to know about the Justice League’s operations, usually in the form of whatever report Tanya sent him about what she was doing but other administrators of the Watchtower’s various systems also sent him reports.
Such distractions did give Bruce Wayne a bit of a reputation for not being very good at his job, but he was very capable of schmoozing other billionaires, which was one of a CEO’s most important duties, and he also received personal credit for securing many of Wayne Enterprise’s success stories, particularly the license to operate the planetary shield generator for the Justice League. So his job at the top of his family’s company was quite secure, even with the rumors that he spends way too many of his work hours perusing pornography.
The good news, as thin as it was, was that Tanya wasn’t really expected to do anything unless Bruce was hosting, and even then expectations were simple: play something on the piano, do some singing, done. At this charity gala, which was the GCPD benefit dinner for officer widows and such, the only expectations on her was to be seen and not heard.
Well, unless Bruce decided to drag her into things. “Jim, you’ve met Tanya, of course.” Bruce said, gesturing down at her.
Police Commissioner James “Jim” Gordon was not something that Tanya’s had much chance to interact with. Sure, Batman interacted with him all the time, but Rhine only rarely tagged along at those times. Even when they did, they usually just hid in Bruce’s shadow and didn’t reveal themselves. He was a rather haggard man; he was fifteen years older than Bruce, which put him at fifty-three, but his mostly white hair and many stress lines made him look even older. Nevertheless, he smiled as if he liked dancing to Bruce’s tune in the name of that big fat Wayne check, like he always did when interacting with Tanya. “Nice to see you again.” He said, “I hope you’ve been a good girl for Santa this year.”
Ah yes, it was also the holiday season. Still, there was only one possible response: “Yu-huh! I’ve been extra good this year, Mr. Gordon.” Visha the Bear, toy golem, who was clinging to Tanya’s back like a furry backpack, waved at the police commissioner. The status symbol of having the golem outweighed the unseemliness of carrying a teddy bear around while wearing a nice dress.
“That’s nice.” Jim said, and with that the necessary pleasantries have been exchanged. He redirected his attention out towards the party, scanning the room. His daughter wasn’t present; one of the advantages of being an adult who isn’t a cop meant that she had no obligation to attend, like she used to when she was still in high school.
Richard, on the other hand… Seemed to be getting his misery quota in via the attentions of three teenage girls. All three were high society regulars; Emma Crowne, Alexa Dumas, and Mercedes Elliot. They were not important people; Tanya only knew who they were because their families were important people, families that have been in Gotham since the founding.
Jim chuckled at Richard’s predicament. “Your boy’s getting mobbed over there, Bruce.” He said, amused.
“It’s my fault.” Bruce admitted, “Dick may not have inherited his good looks from me, but he’s learned from my charm. Bringing him to this place was like waving prime steak in front of those lionesses.”
Tanya huffed, idly playing with the full-bodied curls that her hair had been put into for the occasion, which incidentally made them look a lot like her hair did when she was blonde instead of black-haired. “I told him to invite Zatanna, the dummy…” Unfortunately, Richard was so flustered at the thought that he screwed up several figure skating moves when she tried to bring it up.
Jim hummed. “Barbara’s new friend, the one with the stage magician for a father?” He asked, “Zatanna… Zatara? I remembered it was close to the same…”
“That’s her.” Bruce confirmed, “I know Giovanni from a chance encounter in Rio de Janeiro, back when I was traveling the world.” The way she heard the story, Giovanni was doing a few shows between his efforts to investigate rumors of the magical persuasion, and Bruce paid the man to teach him escapology.
“That sounds like a story.” Jim idly commented.
“Not one I’d like to repeat.” Bruce said, faking embarrassment.
Jim snorted. “I’ll have to pry it out of Giovanni, then.”
“Don’t you know? Magicians never reveal their secrets.” Bruce said jokingly.
“Your secrets, on the other hand…” Jim retorted.
“Oh no.” Bruce said dramatically. “I’m doomed… Tanya, save me!”
Tanya snorted, rolling her eyes. “Daddy never went to Rio.” Tanya said, waving her hand around while looking Jim in the eye. “Ooooh…” She added, wiggling her fingers in a spooky way. She did actually learn how to perform basic magical hypnosis for the purposes of removing short term memories, but of course she wouldn’t use it on such petty matters. No, it was only for when lives were at stake. Or, she supposed, on request.
“Bruce never went to Rio.” Jim repeated in a dazed voice and an amused smirk, playing along. He shook his head, putting on a dopey expression. “What were we talking about?”
“Dick’s admirers.” Bruce replied.
Jim looked at Richard again. Two of the girls had sidled up to his personal space, and he was not prepared. Admittedly, they weren’t usually this forward… “They’re going to eat him up.” Jim commented, shaking his head ruefully.
“You should help him, Tanya.” Bruce commented, and Tanya sighed dramatically before walking over, making sure to announce her approach by making the sound of her high heels twice as loud as they normally were; Alfred was surprisingly insightful and a relentless taskmaster on the topic of stealth in formalwear, so she knew exactly how to make them resound nicely. Or to tapdance any patter tune you’d care to name, but that was just making the training more interesting.
As planned, Mercedes, the one that wasn’t facing her direction, subtly tensed as she heard the approach, likely associating the sound with a female authority figure; the increased sound would have translated to thinking someone much larger than Tanya was walking with purpose in her direction. She turned her head and was confused briefly as she was looking over Tanya’s head, but she was off balance nonetheless once she realized her error. The other two were also discomfited, but as they could see Tanya coming it was less so.
“What are you doing?” Tanya asked imperiously, looking up at her brother.
“Nothing!” Richard said, extracting himself from the small group of girls.
Pathetic. “Well, come on, there’s talk about freezing the dance floor and I need a united front.” This was, of course, a lie. If they were to display their skills for the crowd, they’d simply need to use their magical ice skates, no mass ice magic required.
Catching on, Richard acted affronted. “What? Absolutely not, I’m not going to change clothes just to dance around with my sister for this party.” If Bruce was hosting, either directly or by simply allowing Wayne Manor to be the venue, they would have to perform, either musically or via figure skating, but this party was held in a public venue instead. It was pretty much the lowest class high society party of the season, if not all year. Wait, there was the fireman’s ball… which was classier?
Questions for later, she had a brother to extract. “Exactly.” Tanya said, grabbing him by the hand and pulling him along. “We are not circus animals who dance for peanuts.”
“Hey, some of my best friends were circus animals!” Richard retorted, smiling in humor.
They approached Bruce, taking defiant stances, arms crossed. “Pretend we’re saying no.” Tanya began.
“Okay, what am I saying no too?” Bruce said, frowning and crossing his own arms.
“We’re not figure skating on the dance floor.” Richard supplied.
Jim looked at the dance floor. “How?” He asked. “That’d ruin the floor.”
“Magic ice skates.” Tanya explained, “They’re back home.” She partially lied, she usually kept her magic items in her pocket dimension. In this case, she had two sets, the ones at home and another secret set she kept on her.
“You sure you can’t?” Jim asked, “That sounds like a way to spice this party up.”
“Absolutely not.” Tanya said, “I’m not going to sing, either.”
“Fine, I guess we can go back to the original plan, where you don’t do those things.” Bruce said, sighing in defeat.
“Thank you.” Tanya said, glancing back at the girls that Richard had left. They were still paying attention…
Another group of people approached the group, Tanya clocked them as businesspeople rather than socialites from their walk, after a while you learn to pick up on when someone was wearing their ‘nice’ clothes, the tender movements that someone comfortable with dressing that way wouldn’t make.
Jim, as the ‘host’ of the soiree, even if he was absolutely uninvolved in the organization, quickly extended a hand to the couple and their son, who looked to be about Tanya’s age. “Thank you for your contribution.” Jim said earnestly; a plate at this dinner cost five thousand dollars. Given that the current police widow fund paid out to about one hundred and fifty families, this was a reasonable amount to request if they wanted to keep the thing solvent.
“It's for a good cause.” The man said, “I’m Jack Drake, and this is my wife Janet, and my son Tim.”
“Police Commissioner James Gordon.” Jim said back, “If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, this is Bruce Wayne and his children, Tanya and Dick.”
Jack chuckled. “Well, I kind of have, is the thing. I’m an archeologist, you see, and I’ve spent a rather large amount of the last few years in South America.” Oh! She remembered now! Jack was one of the top archeologists ArcWayne had digging around old ruins for potential magic lore. Well, they didn’t work directly for ArcWayne, they were a separate company that ran dig sites that ArcWayne invested into in return for data. “But even there, we’ve heard of Bruce Wayne.”
“South America?” Bruce said, interested, “What’s it like? I’ve never been.” He said, giving an amused glance to Jim.
The man looked ecstatic to elaborate, but he caught himself. “Tim, why don’t you go off with Dick and Tanya while I talk with Bruce?”
Tim looked oddly triumphant as he nodded firmly to his father and gestured for the two of them to follow. With a single shared glance, both of them pursued the youngest child present.
The ‘dinner’ part of the benefit dinner hadn’t yet occured, but there was still a buffet of snacks to keep tempers cool. Tim led them there, and Tanya immediately whipped out a set of needlessly expensive ivory chopsticks (purses were really rather convenient covers for pocket dimensions) and put some steak tartare in her mouth as they passed. Delicious…
“So, how’s life been treating you, Tanya?” Tim said, a bit too familiarly. “It’s been a while.”
Wait… “I apologize, but have we met before?” Tanya asked, trying to think.
“It was a while ago, I’m not surprised you don’t remember.” Tim said, “You don’t look like you’ve aged a day, though. About four years ago in the park? We fought beetles?”
“I remember you now.” Tanya said, the memory coming back to her. “You were the boy who called out the beetle’s scientific names as a greeting.” She thought it was a bit of an awkward way to introduce oneself, but she was hardly a stranger to that particular mistake from her first life.
“It’s not hard, we only did that, what, twice?” Richard joked.
“Six times, actually.” Tanya idly corrected, “But we met Tim the first time.”
Tim served some punch into three glasses for everyone, interrupted only by him suddenly looking towards something behind them. Both Tanya and Richard turned to see what had drawn his interest. “Sorry, I thought I saw the Penguin for a second there.” He said bashfully.
Richard scowled at the thought before he smoothed his expression. “Hm. Think we should ditch?”
“Nah, it was just that short guy.” Tim said, pointing at a specific attendee who was, indeed, short and rotund.
“...That’s Oswald Cobblepot.” Tanya deadpanned, “It is legally slander to refer to him as the notorious crime boss known as The Penguin.”
“It is.” Tim agreed, passing out the punch. Tanya took a sip. Hm, did someone spike this? There was a mild burning going down… No, it didn’t burn right for alcohol, it was more of a spicy burning… She looked at Richard, who didn’t seem to notice. Tim, on the other hand, seemed rather interested in her reaction.
Wait a second… She remembered this pain from the holy water tests they used to develop the Bat Demon Repellent! Shit, was Tim onto them? “What are you looking at?” Tanya said evenly, raising her eyebrow. “Do I have something on my face?”
“I put a drop of chili oil in your drink.” Tim lied, his attempt at a poker face not terrible but insufficient.
“You sure you put it in mine?” Tanya asked, drinking the punch some more. It was definitely a downgrade over regular punch, but this wasn’t that bad… how much holy water did he use? “It doesn’t taste weird at all.”
They had a brief staring contest as Tanya drank the entirety of her glass of punch unflinchingly. Granted, her intestines are going to have some strong words with her for doing that, but assuming that he only put a drop of holy water like he claimed, it shouldn’t be a big deal.
Tim blinked first, of course, clearly disappointed with the results of his “prank”. He drank his own punch, and did a surprisingly good job of pretending that he had just accidentally dosed his own drink. Tanya laughed, it was only polite.
“Dope.” Richard said, lightly punching the smaller boy in the shoulder.
Briefly, Tanya considered hypnotizing the ten year old to cause him to drop his investigation or whatever he called the thing that led him to test her for being a demon, but reasoned that it probably wouldn’t work; he clearly had this planned out, he’d notice if his memory was tampered with. She’d just have to hope that he considered this a negative result.
Still, conversation drifted towards school, and how Tim was getting into high school early. Richard bragged about only needing one more semester of classes to graduate high school, and Tanya distinctly didn’t bring up how she was deliberately timing her academic progress to finish the program at the same time he was.
Tim apparently had a hobby taking apart electronics, something that Tanya was sure to mention was a valuable skill he should continue to cultivate, while Tanya admitted that she was learning the basics of magic, something she was deliberately incorporating into her public face.
“Can you show me a spell?” Tim asked, curious.
Richard also seemed intrigued. “Yeah, do you have anything prepared?” He asked.
Tanya fidgeted, but took a small magical catalyst from her purse. This was one of the things she had been developing to make training new practitioners a bit easier; it was a wand with a bit of concentrated energy drawn from The Red in the blood-formed crystal on the tip, she could theoretically use magical effects fueled by that crystal instead of her own nature, as long as she used a proper spellweaving method like her rhymes or the ritual chant she used most often.
“Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.” Tanya said, waving the wand and shaping the spell with her intent. “Guess what happens if you lie now.” She bragged. It wasn’t a spell that really fit the energy she was using, but the Red’s energy did work rather well on vague intent-based effects, even if deceptive intent was a bit at the edge of things. It was not something a novice could pull off, but Tim wouldn’t know that.
“I don’t know, what will happen?” Tim asked cheekily, before getting surprised by the small flame that combusted on his groin. Tanya took his punch and poured it on the fire, smugly grinning at the boy who tempted something much worse than fate.
Richard laughed at the stain on the boy’s trousers. “Oh man, you really did it now.”
After an obligatory amount of letting the boy sweat over the prospect of having a rumor of him having wet himself get out, Tanya used a drying spell to make his error less obvious, as outright cleaning directly with magic tended to discolor nice clothes in her experience, at the cost of making the stain much worse to remove once it was noticed, but a red stain on black clothes wasn’t too bad.
She did remember to remove the pants-combusting spell before the night was over, fortunately. She almost didn’t.
-----------------------
It had taken embarrassingly long for them to remember to follow up on Doomsday’s status as a false flag anti-alien operation of some kind. About two months, in fact. Fortunately, the fact that Gear had thought to trace it wasn’t exactly expected, but some of the more cerebral members of the League do look into these kinds of things in their spare time, so they just needed to claim The Question dug up the suspicious data and all was well.
Tanya liked The Question. He always understood when Tanya told him things like ‘we’re claiming you found data we’ve had for months because we forgot about it’ and unlike the majority of the League, seemed to appreciate the frank admission of dishonesty. He didn’t let principles get in the way of practical solutions to problems, which made him useful. The fact that he was a bit too willing to act like he worked in a Black Company as a detective was a bit of a problem, but unlike Bruce, he didn’t have tons of responsibilities tying him down so she regularly foisted some of Batman’s investigative scutwork on the man, for pay of course, so Bruce could focus on more important things than vigilantism. The detective work The Question took on outside of those work contracts was not Tanya’s problem.
Of course, the fact that he managed to actually penetrate the veil of Batman’s secret identity, and even connected her various identities together, was a bit of a problem, but it was also an endorsement of his skills, and he adamantly refused the bribe Tanya offered him to keep quiet. He “respected Batman’s work” too much to release the information, but also assured her that he had a deadman’s switch on releasing it in case Batman decided that information was too valuable and wanted to silence him over it. So Tanya now had a very good reason to ensure the man lived, which was probably his intention all along.
Bruce wasn’t happy about this arrangement, but agreed that having a Sword of Damocles over his own head for once was just turnabout, and thus was fair play.
So they needed to investigate Doomsday, and that meant taking a trip to the place he was incarcerated: Belle Reve federal prison, the highest security detention center in the country.
As this investigation was to be above board, Superman arranged the meeting: Attending was Batman, Rhine, The Question (his condition towards accepting credit), Gear, Static (who was mostly just Gear’s tagalong), Superman, Martian Manhunter (to probe Doomsday’s mind), and finally Captain Atom.
Belle Reve was located in a rather inconspicuous place: an old Louisiana plantation whose owners had died heirless just shy of the 20th century, the land having been claimed by the Federal government at some point and, when the Metahuman Containment Act passed, authorizing the executive branch to hold metahuman prisoners in a federal prison, even if that would otherwise be inappropriate, the question on where to build it came up and some paper pusher decided to just find a nice 500-acre plot of land in the list of federally owned properties and assign it to the job.
The security measures were… extensive. The entire property had a containment fence, an outer perimeter that was regularly patrolled. The place the meeting was to be was in the “front door” of the prison, a processing station that was the only spot in that entire perimeter where you wouldn’t get shot for approaching.
The Javelin had to set itself down a full mile away from the complex, right next to the single gated offramp from I-10 that allowed vehicles to approach. Static then used his magnetokinesis to carry those without travel powers on discs like his own, after Captain Atom called ahead and confirmed that they were expected.
The processing facility was pretty standard, for a prison, but the meeting they had was with the administrator, who maintained an office specifically to meet people from a position of strength.
Amanda Waller was an interesting person. Mother of five, who had only worked unskilled jobs until the age of forty-eight, gaining a degree in political science on grit and hard work alone only after putting all three of her surviving children through college. She started her career as a campaign director for Represenative Collins of Illonois, and managed to somehow rise up in prominence in the federal government until she was here, only seven years later, as the Warden of, it must be repeated, the single most secure prison in the United States of America.
It is of no surprise, between her name, her size, and her infamous stubbornness, that Warden Waller was given the nickname among federal agencies as “The Wall”. That is the person that the Justice League must convince to allow access to a captive, comatose alien, potentially compromising her facility’s security, just to follow up on a wild hunch of a 19 year old boy that is cloaked as the supposition of one of the craziest conspiracy theorists one can imagine.
This was not going to be easy.
Comments
Kevin Curry
He accurately assumed that a single drop would be noticeable, but not damaging. A non-fallen angel demon would have sputtered and coughed but they would not have been harmed.
Dragonin
Tim is probably lucky that she didn’t have a proper ‘demonic’ reaction to the holy water. I kinda get it though
Kevin Curry
Gear.
irregularGremlin
Ah nice to see Tim drake again, and he's totally onto Tanya and batman I see, and what 19 year old had that hunch?
