In the vast expanse of the Batcave, the only sound that echoed was Vicki Vale's excited voice as she continued her on-camera performance, seemingly unfazed by the surrounding chaos. Today was a jackpot for her—surviving an encounter with Deathstroke, uncovering dark secrets she hadn't imagined, and coming face-to-face with Gotham's hidden underworld. It was the kind of day that made her even more determined to stick with her career in journalism.
Unfortunately, Barbara wasn't as cheerful.
What she had seen today shattered her image of Batwoman as the city's hero. Instead, she was faced with a Batwoman who harbored a dark and distrustful heart, a hero living in the shadows, watching everyone. The discovery of the Batcomputer's surveillance network, spying on Gotham's entire population, left Barbara with a deep sense of disillusionment. It felt like the hero she had looked up to was just another paranoid figure in a mask.
Seeing her in a daze, Michael (Deathstroke) waved his hand in front of her face to get her attention.
"Hey, if you're going to mourn the death of your idealism, could you at least do it after we find that license plate number? Your father's still out there, waiting for us to save him."
Barbara blinked, snapping back to reality. "Right... Sorry."
She quickly typed the license plate number that her father had scratched onto his glasses into the system.
Batwoman... whatever she is, it doesn't matter right now, Barbara thought to herself. At the end of the day, she's just another person in a costume.
And regardless of Batwoman's unsettling surveillance habits, her search algorithms were as efficient as advertised. Within seconds, the details of the vehicle were displayed on the large screen in front of them.
The name of the registered owner wasn't important—it was likely fake. What mattered was the car's movement history. If it hadn't moved today, then its previous locations could still give clues—places where it had stopped, where it refueled, the areas it frequented. With that information, the system would be able to narrow down a search area small enough for a team of professionals like Michael and Cindy to work with.
No one could move around Gotham without leaving a trace.
Barbara set the system to cross-reference and pull up the surveillance footage, splitting the large screen into dozens of smaller ones that showed different angles of the city. The program would sift through everything, analyzing the footage to find relevant clues.
Fortunately, the worst-case scenario Michael had feared didn't happen. The system quickly identified the car's movements and highlighted its final destination on a map.
"Oh no… not there," Michael muttered, shaking his head in frustration as a red dot blinked on the screen, indicating the car's location.
"What is it? Is something wrong with that place?" Barbara asked, pulling up the information on the area. According to the database, the location was Indian Hill, a scrapyard near Gotham's eastern river docks.
Indian Hill had once been a Native American reservation before the city expanded and commercial forces bought the land. The tribe had sold off their sacred burial grounds in exchange for a fat check and left Gotham to seek better fortunes—rumor had it they'd opened a casino in Las Vegas and become wealthy. But no one remembered who had bought Indian Hill or what they'd originally intended to do with it.
Ever since automobiles were invented, Indian Hill had been used as a junkyard, a place where scrap metal from old cars was piled high, waiting to be recycled. Now, it was little more than a mountain of broken-down vehicles and the makeshift homes of Gotham's homeless. The destitute sought shelter inside the rusting shells of cars, starting fires to ward off the cold and surviving on what little they could scavenge.
It was a place no gang bothered to claim—there was no money to be made there, and the land itself was too barren to be of value. Even thieves and muggers avoided it, knowing they'd find nothing worth stealing from the vagrants.
Barbara couldn't understand why Michael seemed so uneasy about this place. He and Cindy had spoken casually about Blackgate and Arkham Asylum earlier, places filled with real danger, but this… it was just a junkyard.
Cindy, too, looked puzzled. Surely, Michael wasn't that squeamish—was he? He didn't strike her as the type to get grossed out by homeless camps. If that were the case, he'd have had a meltdown just breathing the air in Gotham.
Michael stood silently, his fingers fidgeting with the armor on his elbow as he weighed how much to tell them.
The thing was, Michael wasn't a native of this world, and he knew exactly what Indian Hill really was. In the main DC universe, Indian Hill was a covert research facility established by the U.S. government after World War II. And its focus? Biological weapons.
Given how everything in this dark multiverse seemed to take a turn for the worse, he had no doubt that this version of Indian Hill was even more dangerous.
If the facility had operated similarly here, Indian Hill would have housed experiments on bioweapons—human experimentation, genetic manipulation, chemical warfare agents, and worse. While he and Cindy might be able to handle it, the real concern was Gotham's population of 8 million. If any of those experiments got loose…
Gotham could be destroyed, and if that happened, Batwoman would be pushed to the brink. In this twisted version of Earth, it wouldn't take much to turn her into a full-blown supervillain.
Michael imagined the worst: If Gotham were destroyed—whether by an Atlantean invasion, a bioweapon catastrophe, or some other disaster—Batwoman could become one of Barbatos's dark knights. The ancient demon could manipulate her transformation into something like "Drowned" if Gotham was flooded, or "Poisoned" if it were a biological disaster. The possibilities were endless.
And right now, Falcone was setting a trap there for the League of Assassins.
If they went in before the assassins, they'd be walking straight into the crossfire. But if they waited too long, Gordon's life would be at risk.
Michael's mind raced as he processed the situation. He could feel the weight of his decision pressing on him, and both Cindy and Barbara could tell something was wrong. The two women exchanged confused glances but remained silent, waiting for Michael to explain.
Finally, he sighed. "In my world, Indian Hill is a secret bioweapons facility. It's underground, hidden beneath the scrapyard, and some very dangerous things came out of there."
Cindy's expression became more serious. "Dangerous things? Like what?"
"Think of it this way: Your world uses magic in warfare, right? Imagine what happens when you combine science and magic. I'm talking about things like magical zombies or a weaponized version of the Black Plague."
The realization hit Cindy and Barbara hard. All this time, they had thought Joker was the craziest thing they'd have to face. But now it seemed the true madness lay with politicians and generals, experimenting with forces they barely understood.
Gotham's population of 8 million had been living for decades, unknowingly sitting on top of a ticking time bomb.
"This… just got a lot more complicated," Cindy muttered, grimacing as she took a swig from her flask.
"There's one piece of good news, though," Michael added, pulling out his own flask and taking a swig. When he noticed Barbara watching him, he smirked. "No, you can't have any—you're underage."
Barbara stared at him, unimpressed. "I'm waiting for the good news, not your booze."
"Right, right. The good news is, that place was supposedly shut down in the '90s. If anything dangerous had broken containment, Falcone would've been the first to encounter it. And so far, he's still alive."