Devil's consultancy 24

The Temple of Olympus, name kept deliberately simple and neutral for future bribe potential, didn’t take very long to get refurbished. This particular Cathedral was not a stellar example of Catholic construction, as it was built from the ground up as a corrupt cover for the Falcone crime family. 

The exact crimes the church was used to perpetrate, beyond the fact that there was a wide variety of such, was unimportant, but after it was exposed by Bruce’s actions as Batman, the Vatican deconsecrated the holy ground (which does, in fact, harm demons. That was not fun to learn). It stayed abandoned for a few years, but after Diana came onto the scene and proved that the Greek Gods, at the very least, were real, Bruce bought the land as one of many contingencies for dealing with rogue elements of the Justice League, if it ever becomes necessary. 

Now, on the other hand, the exterior was re-detailed into more Grecian aesthetics, the pews were cleared, the walls were brightened up, and statues of the divinities that had assisted against the Thanagarians each got a statue or shrine, as they preferred: Athena, Apollo, Zeus (front and center, of course), Hermes, Erebus (who got the basement to himself), Hestia, and Artemis. 

“I think the Gods will be pleased.” Diana said, looking around. She was in civilian garb, the kind of black dress one would normally wear on a date. She certainly considered this outing one, despite Tanya’s presence. Richard was, of course, with Zatanna and Barbie, plotting their nightly activities, as Bruce had an obligation to be elsewhere tonight. “The only complaint I can imagine would be how empty it is.” Indeed, there weren’t many people inside, and there was definitely room for additional shrines and more statues. 

Bruce, acting like a smug billionaire admiring things he paid for, shrugged. “I agree, there’s room for improvement. I’ve already donated so much, though… Maybe someone more pious can pick up the check for more art.” 

Tanya thought that this toga-like dress that Diana had gifted her, an Themyscarian style, was surprisingly comfortable. It was a bit shorter of a skirt than she usually used when not wearing her figure skating outfit, but it was still plenty modest. Naturally, there were several paparazzi attempting discretion, so Tanya made sure to look around, superfluously twirl while moving, and otherwise bleed off the energy that used to suffuse her limbs every moment of using her youngest body. Ever since her metabolism stabilized, it got a lot easier to sit in place for extended periods, but she had already established her public persona as rather hyperactive, so she needed to keep up the ruse until at least she got instruction to grow up further. It wasn’t much of an imposition; it still took a lot to tire her out, and she’s always enjoyed the high provided by physical exertion. “Who’s that?” She asked, pointing at one of the statues. 

“That’s Zeus.” Diana said, “King of Olympus.”

“Cool lightning.” Tanya commented. “If I had one of those I’d go…” She pointed her hand like a gun, distinctly not in the direction of any of the shrines or statues. “Boom!”

Diana and Bruce chuckled at the childish performance. Tanya ran a circle around the statue of Zeus, arms out like she was trying to fly, before going off in another direction and stopping in front of the Hermes statue. “...Is that the Flash, Daddy?” Tanya asked guilelessly. 

“No!” Diana half-shouted, eyes wide. “That’s Hermes, the God of Messengers among other things. The Flash just… honors him. Apologize.” She commanded. 

“Okay.” Tanya said inanely, walking around the two adults before presenting herself in front of Hermes’ shrine. “I’m sorry for calling you the Flash.” She said, before whispering. “Also, I believe you said you accepted thanks in the form of…” She took out a bottle of wine and opened it, pouring some of the expensive vintage (well, it wasn’t that bad, the bottle was only five hundred dollars) onto the small bowl that was incorporated. With a spark of demonic power to mark the gift and magical intent, the wine caught flame as it was transported to Herme’s wine cup. “Ooh, cool…” It was a little nostalgic, actually. She hadn’t made offerings at shrines very often back in Japan, she could vaguely recall once, making an offering for… was it acceptance into high school or college? Probably both. Those Shinto shrines didn’t have special effects like this though. 

Bruce immediately reached for the bag he had been carrying, which he only had to facilitate this little skit, and rustled through it. “Tanya, that was not yours to share.” He said, frowning and waving his hand. “Now give it back.”

“But Diana said Hermes liked wine!” Tanya protested, “See? He liked it.” She said, gesturing to the flames that were just now fading. “He wants more.” She poured more wine, causing the fire to flare back up. 

Bruce snatched the bottle of wine from her and checked the level. Tanya had poured maybe a fourth of the bottle as an offering. “Maybe there should be a gift shop…” He muttered, “How hard would it be to get a liquor license…”

“Do churches need those?” Diana asked. “I know America has a lot of exceptions for religious organizations.”

“They can only ignore that requirement if it’s being served.” Bruce replied, his encyclopedic legal knowledge once again coming to the fore. Hm, she wonders if he could pass the bar exam… “Selling them, even if it’s so they can be offered, still needs it.”

It wouldn’t do for Bruce to get a license to practice law, he never went to law school. It would put him too close to Batman… He could pass the bar as Batman, maybe? Tanya giggled as she pictured Batman in an exam room with a bunch of other law school graduates. Full armor. 

Interrupting her thought, Diana picked Tanya up and positioned her on the amazon’s shoulders. Looking down at Bruce, Tanya took a moment to figure out an appropriate response to this, and smiled. “I’m taller than you!” She proudly announced, putting a hand at his head level and showing how it lined up with her shoulders. Bruce really was substantially taller than Diana. 

Bruce chuckled. “How’s the weather up there?” He joked. 

“Pleasant as Zeus’s mood, as usual.” Maximillian Zeus, the hiereus of the temple, segued in. “Today, he is pleased.” Maxie, as he was usually called, was one of Arkham’s few success stories of rehabilitation. One of the first villains that Tanya helped put away, he was a history teacher that went insane after the loss of his family, believing himself to be an avatar of Zeus. After eight years of therapy, he fully recognizes that Zeus is a distinct being that is not connected to him, and then promptly used his doctorate in Grecian Religious Studies to be the by far most qualified applicant to be the head priest of the Temple of Olympus. 

“Maxie!” Bruce said, genuinely pleased to see one of the villains he put away doing well. “Any problems? This is still Gotham, after all.”

“The Authority of Zeus has been challenged, but not defeated.” Maxie proclaimed, looking upward at the hidden security system: a series of not-magical-at-all electrical projectors that were mostly autonomous but could be directed by Maxie’s fancy staff. Diana assured them that Zeus would approve of the deception, which made sense: he got credit without needing to actually do anything. Being X would say the same. 

Bruce winced at the thought. Yeah, the projectors were nonlethal, but they could easily kill if mishandled. It was a worry of his that Maxie would go too far. “Remember that self-defense only goes so far.” He warned, “Be careful when… demonstrating the gods’ disfavor.”

“I assure you, Mr. Wayne, that the perpetrators were able to prostrate themselves in apology for their transgressions before the police escorted them away.” Maxie said, understanding Bruce’s evasive warning. 

“Good.” Bruce said, the small tension leaving him. 

Diana stepped in to change the topic. “It’s nice to meet you, hiereus, but I think it’s time for us to get going. Tanya’s apparently lost interest.” Tanya had decided to hang backwards off of Diana’s back, her shins firmly gripping Diana’s neck and her thighs completely unsupported. It was the kind of position that would unbalance and choke an ordinary woman, and one of the rules Tanya lived by when out in public as the Young Mistress of the Wayne family is to listen to random impulses like ‘I wonder how far back I can lean without Diana needing to adjust her balance’ and then follow through. The answer is: so far back that her long hair was dangling dangerously close to the ground. 

Fortunately, her magically augmented biology combined with weighing only about sixty pounds soaking wet meant she could hang by her shins for quite a while without falling, and she was wearing shorts under the toga. So she waved goodbye to Maxie as the adult superheroes walked off, hand in hand. 

They then went to the park and had a picnic. 

-----------------------

Something that Tanya always sympathized with was Lex Luthor’s insistence on piloting his own mecha when he fought with Superman and the occasional other members of the Justice League. It was easy enough to track when he was about to go on a rampage; he always made sure his ass was covered, bureaucratically. 

You’d be surprised how easy it was to set up an official readiness exercise without any of the actual heroes in the Justice League being informed of it. Sure, on paper Superman was well aware that LexCorp was merely providing OPFOR to ensure the Justice League’s readiness to repel alien terrorists or whatever. In reality? It was a legal fiction. One that passed completely under the notice of the members of the Justice League, because they don’t pay attention to the paperwork that flows through the Watchtower on a daily basis. It was one of the things they didn’t really appreciate about being a publicly sanctioned global defense organization; it meant there was military bureaucracy, and there were a lot of things you could get away with in the name of readiness. 

Was it a coincidence that Tanya aligned an official Justice League teamwork exercise to coincide with Luthor’s newest technically-legal shenanigans? Absolutely not. Did she actually tell them about it? Well, she told Bruce about the double-booking. He just said that it was efficient, patted her head, and sent an email informing everyone that he would not be participating in the exercise, doctor’s orders. 

This would normally be incredibly suspicious, but Bruce had structured the email to match Tanya’s own business professional tone, leading them to the obvious conclusion of Tanya having once again strapped Bruce to a bed in order for him to adequately recover from whatever near-death experience he had gone through that month. 

Look, Bruce could simply not be trusted with his own well-being at times. It sometimes required extreme measures. It frequently required extreme measures. Magical healing was effective, but she wasn’t that good at it. She couldn’t completely remove the need for recovery time, just cut it down by a lot. Strapping him to a bed overnight was easier and also much less stressful than having to bail him out when he inevitably falters due to insufficient recovery. One of the advantages of cultivating a reputation was that you didn’t need to go out every day to put fresh fear into the criminal element. Granted, the only thing that kept Bruce in that bed was Rhine going out and showing the flag if something did happen. 

Now, Luthor was obligated to send the data stream of the exercise to the Justice League, and while he could get away with not sending it ‘on accident’, sending a properly formatted, fully authenticated request to his servers from the Watchtower was not something he could ignore without consequences. So… they got to spend the afternoon in the Batcave, watching the fireworks on the big screen. Bruce and Richard were suited up just in case something unplanned happened, of course, and Barbie was having her own watch party in the Belfry with Zatanna. Unfortunately, her toy golems were not allowed in the Batcave after the third time one of them fell down into the dark abyss, so Visha, Pizza, Weiss, and all of her other animated stuffed animals were quiescent in her room, as usual. 

She had considered inviting Victor and Garfield to watch as well, but Jump City’s Titans Initiative hasn’t finished refurbishing that tacky high rise in the bay as a secure base. It would be the first properly fortified Justice League affiliated structure on the West American coast, so in return for the rights to the land and building, certain installed infrastructure, such as a Zeta Tube relay, as well as security requirements, the base’s setup and maintenance was fully paid by the Justice League. At least, that’s what Bruce thinks is the reason Tanya arranged for that deal; he’s all for setting up redundant fallback bases in new places. In other words, there wasn’t a secure enough connection. 

The teamwork exercise was simple enough: Superman had, when he was sent down to Earth, also been given a cache of kryptonian technology, most notably a form of crystal that could grow from available elements to create structures, which Earth’s oceans provided in abundance. So he had a fortress in the Arctic Ocean that he used to relax, completely isolated from the rest of Earth. As part of that cache, he had a small army of androids that were capable of impersonating him at about 15% strength, which was more than he used from day to day anyway, that he brought out to play OPFOR in the teamwork exercise, pretending to be one of the alien threats that he had faced before the Justice League’s formation, a hostile supercomputer known as Brainiac, which was genuinely the best translation from Krypton’s 118-character alphabet syllabic language. You needed to pull letters from seven different human languages to find translated symbols for them all, and it was exactly as large of a pain to those without magical translation as it sounded. But yes, even in Kryptonian, the name was a mildly mocking term for those who were intelligent but also arrogant. Which might have been one of the reasons why the AI rebelled, come to think of it…

So during the fake Brainiac crisis, Luthor instigated his own crisis, which in this case was some kind of ray that was meant to hijack the Zeta Tube network and… rob caches of alien tech or something? Admittedly, Tanya was in her child form when she was reading it over and her reduced attention span had run out before she got to that part. She suspected Luthor had a program that turned simple descriptions into obtusely thick military/scientific jargon that was difficult to understand even for her. 

Naturally, in the face of this ‘real threat’, Superman called off his androids and rallied the team to fight Luthor, whose power armor was truly a marvel of engineering. This exercise was a readiness drill for the Justice League, but it was destructive testing for the power armor. 

Batman’s phone rang. Bruce picked it up. “What.” He asked with a grumpy tone, his usual when answering that phone. 

Tanya was laying back on the armrest, close enough on the Batcave’s couch to hear the other side. “Batman, Luthor’s-”

Bruce cut him off. “I know.” He said, “I’ve tapped into the data stream he’s sending back to LexCorp. You can handle it without me.”

Clark continued. “That’s great! Where is he?” 

“It’ll take time to cut through Luthor’s fortress of proxy servers.” Bruce lied, “Just have Green Lantern scan for Luthor’s kryptonite-based power source, it’ll be faster.”

“Thanks, Batman.” Clark said, “Just stay at the computer, for your health.”

“Rhine’s got me pinned down.” Batman said, gesturing to Tanya’s legs which were stretched over his lap. “I’ll do all I can.” He lied, before hanging up and leaning back further into the couch. As it was an expensive, high-tech couch, the backrest section behind him adjusted for optimal comfort. He attempted to pull Richard into a hug, but the moody teenager pulled away, clearly embarrassed. 

“Refreshments?” Alfred offered. 

“Thanks Alfred.” Richard said, grabbing a soda from the tray. Tanya used a minor exertion of telekinesis to pluck the chocolate milk off of it while flashing a thumbs up, while Bruce silently took the coffee. Alfred then sipped at the last beverage, a cup of tea, as they all watched Lex Luthor and a squad of goons with identical suits do a surprisingly effective job of battling the Justice League… or at least the ten or so members that were participating in the teamwork exercise. 

Granted, being in an underground structure did put the League at something of a disadvantage, but their coordination without Batman issuing commands was just embarrassing. “Hey, I haven’t seen Flash in a while.” Richard commented, “Did he get knocked out?”

Tanya hummed and brought out her phone, linking it with the Batcomputer and checking Flash’s status from his Justice League communicator, which acted as a biomonitor as well as location tracker. “Ah, he took a trip to the men’s room.” It was a dilemma she sympathized with, needing to answer the call of nature while in the middle of life and death combat was a problem with a simple solution, but not one that anyone liked. So she understood why he decided to take advantage of his speed to handle it a different way. 

Still, the Justice League defeating Luthor’s forces was a forgone conclusion, with most of the League’s strongest all present in one place: Superman, Hawkgirl, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Static, Martian Manhunter, Dr. Fate, Aquaman, Green Lantern, and Supergirl. Collectively, they could probably conquer the planet. She’d wargamed it with Bruce once, the lowest number of Justice League members that could overcome the rest of it and impose an authoritarian regime. Without throwing Batman in the mix on their team, it would be chancy, but they might be able to pull it off with just those ten. It was a fun weekend, debating whether or not Constantine could defeat Dr. Fate and other similarly nerdy debates. Internet forums were unsurprisingly insightful on the subject of Justice League members fighting each other. Even if they had an understandable but vaguely insulting idea of Rhine’s level of magical power.  

Which was why they had new and improved countermeasures prepared after Hawkgirl stole the old ones. The idea that there wasn’t a way, for example, for other beings to access the Speed Force was ludicrous, and thus having a countermeasure to that particular powerset made sense. Clark was just too vulnerable to mind control-type effects for some stashed kryptonite to be out of line, and Mars was, while an ally, still a military threat that needed to be accounted for. Also, Bruce and Tanya agreed that Mars limiting their contact with Earth so much, they didn’t even know basic facts like Mars’ population, was suspicious. Tanya’s theory was that the Martian population reflected the ability for Mars to support organic life; i.e. it was a lot lower than Earth and they didn’t want Earth’s governments to realize how small they were. 

The Flash was the one to finally finish the battle, his speed allowing for rapid dismantling of the weapon, and Luthor was pretty quickly secured after that. Luthor and his goons were extracted from their power armor, then Static took charge of transporting the lot of them to Metropolis PD for processing, which Tanya fully expected to end with them walking out within a few hours. After all, it was just a readiness drill. Legally speaking, of course. Lexcorp picks up the costs of rebuilding and liability, of course. 

The Luxcorp feed ended at that point, so they didn’t get to see what happened next. “Well, party’s over.” Bruce declared, “Call the Belfry.” He commanded, and the Batcomputer complied. When Barbie and Zatanna showed up on the screen, he turned so that he was addressing both them and the ones on the couch. “Prepare a debrief criticizing the Justice League on their performance, pointing out Luthor’s mistakes as well.” Great, he’s giving homework. “Even without our tools, we’ll always have our minds.” An optimistic statement, but it’s motivation anyway. “Zatanna, I’m not expecting much but you should make one too.” Bruce had gotten better about not insulting people he was instructing, but he still was a bit overly brusque at times. 

Barbie calmed down the pissed off magician, though. “He just means you haven’t been doing this as long as the three of us have. Come on, I’ll walk you through how this works.” She gave an annoyed glance at Bruce before cutting the connection. 

Tanya was a few paragraphs into her assessment when the Batcomputer pinged an alert: multiple Justice League comms connections cut off abruptly. The systems were actually pretty invasive when it came to privacy; vital sign monitoring could be used to deduce out all kinds of unsavory information. It wouldn’t have sent an alert for the Flash outpacing the signal propagation again; literally all of the ones who she had been writing a report for had vanished off the face of the Earth, except for Static, who was just leaving the police station. 

“Uh… Batman?” Tanya said, the use of his codename immediately catching Bruce’s attention as he focused intently on her words. “We just lost nine Justice League signals. No warning.”

“Play back the last two minutes.” He commanded, and she obliged. 

The sequence of events was quite unbelievable; they had audio only, but apparently a J’onn from another dimension claimed that there was a catastrophe affecting many dimensions, and invited the present League members to discuss the matter further in his own dimension. Like fools, they walked inside the portal without telling anyone where they were going. 

“They probably assumed you were spying on them anyway.” Richard offered, “You know, because you are.” Tanya frowned at the boy. As he got older and more experienced, Richard had been chafing underneath the restrictions that were implemented to make letting a child fight crime a non-suicidal opposition. They had lightened over time, but not quick enough to him. “Such a mother hen.” He groused. 

Then, another alert popped up; this time from the tracking satellites detecting incoming meteors and things. One of the meteors that, previously, was not on a collision course abruptly changed headings and was minutes away from crashing into the Earth. “Send out a general alert.” Batman commanded, “Get Static to take point, that meteor is probably a ship in disguise. Reinforcements…” He took a moment to think it through. “Captain Atom is the heaviest hitter we have left, send him a priority alert.”

Tanya followed directives. Afterwards, she stood up and, after a moment downing the rest of her chocolate milk, incanted: “It’s been a while since I’ve been out, it’s time for Rhine to fly and shout!” 

Once more in their most powerful state, Rhine grabbed Batman and Robin, flying into the Batplane. “Robin, you’ll be the one flying. Don’t use the weapons unless ordered.” Batman ordered, taking the copilot seat himself.

“Really?” Robin asked, grinning widely as he took the primary pilot seat. “I won’t let you down!” He said, completely missing the fact that he was once again given the safer posting. He had only recently gotten his pilot’s license, so this was an understandable thing to be excited over. 

Well, this was a pretty busy day, huh? Rhine had the feeling that today wasn’t anywhere near over.