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eldabeTitle: Don't Tell Me Not to Fly
Fandom(s): DC Comics
Character(s): Lian Harper.
Rating: PG-13 for some creepiness.
Summary: Lian Harper came back to life in a world where heroes and villains never seem to stay dead. Now old enough to hold her own as a hero, Lian searches out the undisputed master of non-powered heroes in an age of superpowers. But Lian might not be the only one that has come back to life...
Acknowledgments:draconic_voices was the most fantastic beta ever, putting up with my absolute writer insanity. All remaining mistakes are completely mine. And thanks to iceshade, who shoved me back on track when I plateaued.
Complement:bliumchik put together an amazing mix to go along with this fic. It can be found here.
Flight Masterpost
Interlude: Cerdian's Story
Chapter Three
Lian spent most of her time alternating between patrolling assigned areas of Gotham – with or without Damian – or taking lessons in the cave. She could handle herself on the street, so she found some of the lessons frustrating. Bruce once had her sit and meditate for six hours. It wasn’t like Lian couldn’t meditate, Connor Hawke was her uncle, but that wasn’t why she came to Gotham.
But after a strict lecture on the proper application of detective work and two weeks in the Bat-labs mixing chemical potions and squinting into microscopes, Lian got her own patrol. Bruce called up a map of Gotham City and outlined a section close to campus, and told her that it was her responsibility Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. She was expected to patrol from eleven to three, and do a sweep in a randomized pattern. Lian nodded seriously and downloaded all of the info on the area from the computers to her handheld.
After that, she was a bit obsessed. But just a bit. She researched the area during the day, playing tourist and taking pictures. She started constructing a 3-D model on her computer, putting in notes on different buildings after patrols (“Good view from the Lexcorp Building.” “Definitely some sort of drug lab on 42 27th Ave. Sneak in?”) and marking areas that were particularly big targets for muggers. Iris complained that it was all she ever spoke about, but Lian cherished her patrol like a first car, dirty and used and in desperate need of maintenance, but all hers.
When Bobby mentioned that his Andalusian Philosophy professor was giving a speech in Reykjavik, and that he had a long weekend coming up, Lian invited him along for Thursday night patrol. Technically, she probably should have asked Bruce. But it was her patrol, on her night, and sometimes it was nice to not have to fly solo. Not that she would ever tell Damian that. He was just itching for a chance to breathe down her neck.
It wasn’t Bobby’s first time in Gotham to visit Lian, but last time had been a bit of a rush because Lian had forbidden him to fly home without pants and he’d wanted to try and catch his Epistemology and Metaphysics class. So this time she figured they could make a proper night out of it, going for pizza before patrol and sleeping at one of Bruce’s nicer safe houses – also known as the extremely expensive penthouses scattered across the city – before Bobby went to New York to hang out with Aunt Donna. So far, everything was going great. They had managed to stop three muggers and one domestic disturbance, and Lian was bragging about the crime statistics on her patrol. Bobby was obviously amused, but Lian was on a roll.
“…and drug-related crime is down 8%, but I’m trying to keep an eye out for dealers, because they’re harder to track on crime statistics-“
“You’ve had the patrol for a little less than three weeks,” Bobby pointed out. “Are you sure the 8% isn’t within the typical range of fluctuation over a month?”
Scientists. “Bruce tends to measure on a week-by-week scale, but I’ll be looking at overall numbers monthly, of course.”
Bobby nodded, and Lian crossed her arms. It felt odd to stand on a rooftop in Gotham with Bobby in full hero regalia. While she was in her Bat-suit, Bobby was in modified traditional Greek armor, sans helmet. Normally when he went out, he wore jeans and some sort of light chain mail - result of the jeans generation of Teen Titans, Lian had been told. Bruce hated the style. She was pretty sure Tim found it mildly amusing, but wouldn’t say so in front of Bruce, who occasionally grumbled at the increase in teens wearing jeans and some sort of insignia-top for a uniform. Totally impractical, Bruce claimed. So Bobby was even wearing sandals now, because Bruce insisted that if you wanted to operate in Gotham you had to be clearly identifiable as a non-civilian in a crisis. Lian could see his point, but when Bobby was literally flying to the rescue, the point was moot. Plus, not many people had a glowing rope hanging off their right hips.
“It seems quiet.” Bobby commented, looking out at the city. They were on the LexCorp building, because Lian liked the view. She varied her patrol patterns randomly every night, but she always took a breather on the building at some point. It was good to be high enough to not have to hear the sirens and chaos of bad nights, and it let her easily spot any-
“Smoke.” Lian said, pointing. Bobby lifted a few inches off the ground, and Lian prepared a jumpline. “It’s in my jurisdiction.”
They both headed for the source of the smoke, Bobby automatically keeping pace with her. Lian was slightly distracted with worry. This was her fourth fire in just about twenty days. Damian was floating a theory that it had something to do with arson, and they were tracking insurance payouts, but so far most of the fires hadn’t caused significant damage, and the only two fatalities were caused by smoke inhalation. It was nerve racking, though. Tuesday she had come back to the dorm stinking of smoke and sweat and spent a while in the shower scrubbing it off before crawling into bed.
They reached the building, but no fire alarms were going off. It wasn’t an apartment building like the last one. At the last one, a baby had died from smoke inhalation before Lian even got there. Lian resisted the urge to check Blackgate for Firefly and Firebug again. Iris had checked up on Heat Wave just yesterday.
“It doesn’t seem like a serious fire,” Bobby yelled down to her from the sky. “It just looks like a lot of smoke.”
Lian pulled the door open for the roof access and slipped on an oxygen mask. She had taken to bringing extras in the belt, just in case. She offered one to Bobby as he landed behind her. As they wandered down the stairs, Lian noticed that the heat wasn’t so bad, but the smoke was terrible. She waved her hands in front of her eyes to try and clear it, and tried to head toward where it seemed to be coming from.
Behind her Bobby was tense. She knew that he would much rather be leading, but it was her patrol and her Kevlar was just as good as his armor. Even if hers hadn’t been blessed by gods.
Lian rounded a corner and stopped short. The fire was completely contained in huge stone brazier in the center of the room, but it was spewing smoke around into the hallways. Tentatively, Lian stepped in the room, aware that the smoke was obstructing her view. Bobby walked in after her, and immediately pulled open the windows. Lian kept one arm hovering over her belt as she made her way to the table at the front of the room, which was set for an elaborate meal.
The smoke was clearing out of the room through the windows, although it probably made the building look even more damaged. Lian would have to intercept a call to the fire department if she waited too long, but the table was truly weird. There were two huge dishes in the center of the table, one contained a totally raw, dripping something, and the other one had what looked like a huge, well-cooked roast.
Bobby came up next to her and looked at the meat, then at the brazier, then back again. He frowned and pulled off his mask.
“Something smells wrong.” He said, and approached the table,
“How can you smell anything through the smoke anyway?” Lian complained. The whole scene was just eerie.
In front of the dishes was a small note with one word in a delicate script: “Choose.”
“What, one makes me shrink and the other makes me grow? Is that it?”
“Carroll, correct?” Bobby asked in a distracted way.
“Yeah, Alice in Wonderland. You have to keep up with your Disney movies, Bobby.”
“I wouldn’t choose just yet.” Bobby said, then picked up knife and a fork and cutting a deep chunk out of the roast and peeling it away. Underneath was jumble of bones, bloody and broken. Lian suppressed the urge to hurl.
“Ergh, what the hell is that?”
Bobby neatly put down the utensils and picked up another set, moving to the second dish. It revealed a huge, cooked steak underneath the raw meat.
“Huh.” Bobby said.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Lian asked. Her skin was crawling and she wanted out. But Bobby liked to think things through.
“It’s an altar,” Bobby said, pointed to the brazier. “We were supposed to choose one dish to put on the altar.”
“Wait, seriously?” Lian was incredulous. Who was going to sacrifice a random slab of beef in the middle of Gotham City?
“Well, obviously not literally. I doubt you would have done it. But that’s what the sign says.”
Bobby picked up the dish of raw meat and steak, and dumped it on the grill at the top. The smoke billowing out grew heavier.
“What the hell, Bobby!”
“It’s the right choice.” Bobby said, and Lian realized that she should have been taking pictures this whole time. She activated the camera in her mask and started snapping away, her results blurry in the smoke.
“And what exactly does that mean?”
“The sacrifice. To Zeus. It’s the original myth of Prometheus, how he angered Zeus before the gift of fire.”
Lian froze, the camera snapping a few pictures of Bobby’s face automatically.
“Prometheus?”
Bobby got into recitation mode, and Lian wanted to bang her head against the wall. Training in an oral tradition, that had to kick in now?
“It’s a different version of the myth you know. Prometheus had already been trapped by Zeus on the rock, but he had not yet gifted fire to man. After he was rescued by Hercules, wily Prometheus sought to deceive the master of lightning through cunning and trickery. Prometheus placed before the Olympians a selection of dishes, one appearing as a succulent dish of shining fat and one appearing as the stomach of an ox. Zeus selected the meat, only to discover that it was hiding a collection of bones, while the stomachs held thick meat. To this day, Zeus is punished by only receiving sacrifices of bones from the mortals below.”
Bobby blinked, coming back down to Earth while Lian snapped the last few pictures of the room and sent them to the cave and Damian.
Get out of there Damian sent back Someone else will handle the rest of your patrol.
“Like hell.” Lian muttered. She sent back. “I’ve got it covered. Clean up?”
Fine. I take better prints. Switch patrols?
Damian’s patrol was larger, and farther from campus. But she was planning to ditch class tomorrow anyway. Roger.
“We’re out, Bobby. Come on, I’ll give you a tour uptown.”
Bobby looked back at the table, the fire and the meat. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s get moving.”
Bobby climbed out of the window and reached back to grab Lian’s arms. “Sorry I ruined the scene. It was just a little too surreal not to try and fix the story, though.”
Lian shivered. Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to get to the skyscrapers and business buildings above 58th street. Prometheus.
Bobby flew her uptown, and the rest of the night was pretty uneventful. Damian kept a tight lock on his patrols, and Lian wrote up a detailed report for him while Bobby watched rerun episodes of Rome and made fun of the accents.
~*~*~
Friday afternoon, Lian sat in the Batcave alone, listening to the squeaking of the bats as a background to her fingers clacking across the keyboard.
There were three entries under ‘Prometheus,’ filed in the order of their first appearances. Lian ignored the second, longest, entry, and went to the oldest one, last edited by “Grayson, Richard”. For a moment, Lian felt a pang of loss in her gut. Uncle Dick would have been wonderful during something like this. Made some jokes and told her some stories about her dad, who hadn’t been much of a detective either, although he hadn’t done too badly. Lian knew that the cave would have been more upbeat if he had just been around to drop by occasionally. With Bruce in charge and Damian taking second-command and the new Robin deferring to both of them for everything, Lian's sense of humor didn’t have much to bounce off of.
She opened the file. It was pretty skimpy, all things told. Curt Calhoun wasn’t a terrible guy, but he had bad luck. It happened to a lot of people dealing with superheroes in their lives, and he had attacked Kord Industries back when the second Blue Beetle was still alive. He’d only had the name Prometheus for a short while before he fought the third incarnation of the Teen Titans, back when Uncle Dick was still leading them and they weren’t really all teens anymore. Lian tapped the screen. He had been involved in a fiasco with Roulette and the Hybrid team and the JSA had reported them all dead. He might be alive, but there had been no reported sightings in years. Lian flagged the file anyway, and quietly altered some of the police records so that they would be on the lookout for him. It couldn’t hurt.
Lian procrastinated for a bit, rereading the article and marking her name carefully so Bruce would know that she had accessed it. She considered calling her dad, or Aunt Donna, who had been part of the team when they fought this version of Prometheus. But when they'd encountered him, he had been a small-time thug caught up with a gang, in totally over his head.
Lian clicked on the last link, avoiding the middle name. Chad Graham was some punk kid who wanted to be Prometheus Jr. and managed to steal the tech for a few months. In that time, he somehow managed to fight off Uncle Ollie, and Damian’s mother, but what truly shocked Lian was that he had beaten Lady Shiva. That was a big deal, even though she couldn’t get any more details on their fight. He was sloppy, though, and he didn’t seem to meticulously plan out his battles the way his predecessor did. And, of course, Chad Graham had been found dead, a sign to anyone who dared steal technology from one of the few men to choose to take on the Justice League repeatedly instead of focusing on one or two of the other heroes. The really interesting part was that at no time did Chad try to establish himself as a unique individual; he simply slid into his so-called mentor's identity without calling any attention to it, while completely confusing his enemies. It was only after he was killed that all the pieces had been put together.
After Lian sent herself a copy of Chad’s file, she hurriedly clicked on the largest file before she could really start to think about it.
This file was huge, filled with as many images as possible from the internal JLA satellite cameras, and with a whole section on “Name: Unknown/Unconfirmed” because Prometheus -The Prometheus – was still a mystery. There were a few theories for his motivations and an outline of his general strategy. He enjoyed defeating the Justice League, and he was good at it, but he wasn’t a constant threat, and no one knew what he was doing when he wasn’t kicking Justice League ass. Maybe this was him, back from the dead, messing with her head.
Intellectually, Lian knew that he hadn’t planned her death exactly. There was simply no way he could predict the exact fall of the buildings and her panicked flight into the streets.
On the other hand, this was the man who managed to predict the actions of the League accurately enough to take them all down on his first try. There was no way she was on his level. If he was the one orchestrating this, Lian was in way over her head, and it was time to pass the baton.
But...none of them seemed to be particularly into the mythology of the name. None of them seemed like the type who would play around like this, leaving hints and rumors. Lian drummed her finders on the keyboard, then closed the files. She wrote her patrol report, cross-linked it all back to the scattered fires and wrote up a note suggesting that it wasn’t an arsonist at all. She didn’t suggest Prometheus, though. She did link the sacrificial offering to Maxius Zeus, and also suggested that the fires could be the result of a totally normal, non-costumed arsonist.
She didn’t want to come off as obsessed. She did not have a complex about dying, and she didn’t want to seem like she did. Bruce had come back from the dead, or something like it, and he had been fine; so was she.
~*~*~
Chapter Note: My source for the story of Prometheus is here. http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hesiod/theogony.htm
Interlude: Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean They're Not Out to Get You
Fandom(s): DC Comics
Character(s): Lian Harper.
Rating: PG-13 for some creepiness.
Summary: Lian Harper came back to life in a world where heroes and villains never seem to stay dead. Now old enough to hold her own as a hero, Lian searches out the undisputed master of non-powered heroes in an age of superpowers. But Lian might not be the only one that has come back to life...
Acknowledgments:
draconic_voices was the most fantastic beta ever, putting up with my absolute writer insanity. All remaining mistakes are completely mine. And thanks to iceshade, who shoved me back on track when I plateaued.Complement:
bliumchik put together an amazing mix to go along with this fic. It can be found here. Flight Masterpost
Interlude: Cerdian's Story
Chapter Three
Lian spent most of her time alternating between patrolling assigned areas of Gotham – with or without Damian – or taking lessons in the cave. She could handle herself on the street, so she found some of the lessons frustrating. Bruce once had her sit and meditate for six hours. It wasn’t like Lian couldn’t meditate, Connor Hawke was her uncle, but that wasn’t why she came to Gotham.
But after a strict lecture on the proper application of detective work and two weeks in the Bat-labs mixing chemical potions and squinting into microscopes, Lian got her own patrol. Bruce called up a map of Gotham City and outlined a section close to campus, and told her that it was her responsibility Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. She was expected to patrol from eleven to three, and do a sweep in a randomized pattern. Lian nodded seriously and downloaded all of the info on the area from the computers to her handheld.
After that, she was a bit obsessed. But just a bit. She researched the area during the day, playing tourist and taking pictures. She started constructing a 3-D model on her computer, putting in notes on different buildings after patrols (“Good view from the Lexcorp Building.” “Definitely some sort of drug lab on 42 27th Ave. Sneak in?”) and marking areas that were particularly big targets for muggers. Iris complained that it was all she ever spoke about, but Lian cherished her patrol like a first car, dirty and used and in desperate need of maintenance, but all hers.
When Bobby mentioned that his Andalusian Philosophy professor was giving a speech in Reykjavik, and that he had a long weekend coming up, Lian invited him along for Thursday night patrol. Technically, she probably should have asked Bruce. But it was her patrol, on her night, and sometimes it was nice to not have to fly solo. Not that she would ever tell Damian that. He was just itching for a chance to breathe down her neck.
It wasn’t Bobby’s first time in Gotham to visit Lian, but last time had been a bit of a rush because Lian had forbidden him to fly home without pants and he’d wanted to try and catch his Epistemology and Metaphysics class. So this time she figured they could make a proper night out of it, going for pizza before patrol and sleeping at one of Bruce’s nicer safe houses – also known as the extremely expensive penthouses scattered across the city – before Bobby went to New York to hang out with Aunt Donna. So far, everything was going great. They had managed to stop three muggers and one domestic disturbance, and Lian was bragging about the crime statistics on her patrol. Bobby was obviously amused, but Lian was on a roll.
“…and drug-related crime is down 8%, but I’m trying to keep an eye out for dealers, because they’re harder to track on crime statistics-“
“You’ve had the patrol for a little less than three weeks,” Bobby pointed out. “Are you sure the 8% isn’t within the typical range of fluctuation over a month?”
Scientists. “Bruce tends to measure on a week-by-week scale, but I’ll be looking at overall numbers monthly, of course.”
Bobby nodded, and Lian crossed her arms. It felt odd to stand on a rooftop in Gotham with Bobby in full hero regalia. While she was in her Bat-suit, Bobby was in modified traditional Greek armor, sans helmet. Normally when he went out, he wore jeans and some sort of light chain mail - result of the jeans generation of Teen Titans, Lian had been told. Bruce hated the style. She was pretty sure Tim found it mildly amusing, but wouldn’t say so in front of Bruce, who occasionally grumbled at the increase in teens wearing jeans and some sort of insignia-top for a uniform. Totally impractical, Bruce claimed. So Bobby was even wearing sandals now, because Bruce insisted that if you wanted to operate in Gotham you had to be clearly identifiable as a non-civilian in a crisis. Lian could see his point, but when Bobby was literally flying to the rescue, the point was moot. Plus, not many people had a glowing rope hanging off their right hips.
“It seems quiet.” Bobby commented, looking out at the city. They were on the LexCorp building, because Lian liked the view. She varied her patrol patterns randomly every night, but she always took a breather on the building at some point. It was good to be high enough to not have to hear the sirens and chaos of bad nights, and it let her easily spot any-
“Smoke.” Lian said, pointing. Bobby lifted a few inches off the ground, and Lian prepared a jumpline. “It’s in my jurisdiction.”
They both headed for the source of the smoke, Bobby automatically keeping pace with her. Lian was slightly distracted with worry. This was her fourth fire in just about twenty days. Damian was floating a theory that it had something to do with arson, and they were tracking insurance payouts, but so far most of the fires hadn’t caused significant damage, and the only two fatalities were caused by smoke inhalation. It was nerve racking, though. Tuesday she had come back to the dorm stinking of smoke and sweat and spent a while in the shower scrubbing it off before crawling into bed.
They reached the building, but no fire alarms were going off. It wasn’t an apartment building like the last one. At the last one, a baby had died from smoke inhalation before Lian even got there. Lian resisted the urge to check Blackgate for Firefly and Firebug again. Iris had checked up on Heat Wave just yesterday.
“It doesn’t seem like a serious fire,” Bobby yelled down to her from the sky. “It just looks like a lot of smoke.”
Lian pulled the door open for the roof access and slipped on an oxygen mask. She had taken to bringing extras in the belt, just in case. She offered one to Bobby as he landed behind her. As they wandered down the stairs, Lian noticed that the heat wasn’t so bad, but the smoke was terrible. She waved her hands in front of her eyes to try and clear it, and tried to head toward where it seemed to be coming from.
Behind her Bobby was tense. She knew that he would much rather be leading, but it was her patrol and her Kevlar was just as good as his armor. Even if hers hadn’t been blessed by gods.
Lian rounded a corner and stopped short. The fire was completely contained in huge stone brazier in the center of the room, but it was spewing smoke around into the hallways. Tentatively, Lian stepped in the room, aware that the smoke was obstructing her view. Bobby walked in after her, and immediately pulled open the windows. Lian kept one arm hovering over her belt as she made her way to the table at the front of the room, which was set for an elaborate meal.
The smoke was clearing out of the room through the windows, although it probably made the building look even more damaged. Lian would have to intercept a call to the fire department if she waited too long, but the table was truly weird. There were two huge dishes in the center of the table, one contained a totally raw, dripping something, and the other one had what looked like a huge, well-cooked roast.
Bobby came up next to her and looked at the meat, then at the brazier, then back again. He frowned and pulled off his mask.
“Something smells wrong.” He said, and approached the table,
“How can you smell anything through the smoke anyway?” Lian complained. The whole scene was just eerie.
In front of the dishes was a small note with one word in a delicate script: “Choose.”
“What, one makes me shrink and the other makes me grow? Is that it?”
“Carroll, correct?” Bobby asked in a distracted way.
“Yeah, Alice in Wonderland. You have to keep up with your Disney movies, Bobby.”
“I wouldn’t choose just yet.” Bobby said, then picked up knife and a fork and cutting a deep chunk out of the roast and peeling it away. Underneath was jumble of bones, bloody and broken. Lian suppressed the urge to hurl.
“Ergh, what the hell is that?”
Bobby neatly put down the utensils and picked up another set, moving to the second dish. It revealed a huge, cooked steak underneath the raw meat.
“Huh.” Bobby said.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Lian asked. Her skin was crawling and she wanted out. But Bobby liked to think things through.
“It’s an altar,” Bobby said, pointed to the brazier. “We were supposed to choose one dish to put on the altar.”
“Wait, seriously?” Lian was incredulous. Who was going to sacrifice a random slab of beef in the middle of Gotham City?
“Well, obviously not literally. I doubt you would have done it. But that’s what the sign says.”
Bobby picked up the dish of raw meat and steak, and dumped it on the grill at the top. The smoke billowing out grew heavier.
“What the hell, Bobby!”
“It’s the right choice.” Bobby said, and Lian realized that she should have been taking pictures this whole time. She activated the camera in her mask and started snapping away, her results blurry in the smoke.
“And what exactly does that mean?”
“The sacrifice. To Zeus. It’s the original myth of Prometheus, how he angered Zeus before the gift of fire.”
Lian froze, the camera snapping a few pictures of Bobby’s face automatically.
“Prometheus?”
Bobby got into recitation mode, and Lian wanted to bang her head against the wall. Training in an oral tradition, that had to kick in now?
“It’s a different version of the myth you know. Prometheus had already been trapped by Zeus on the rock, but he had not yet gifted fire to man. After he was rescued by Hercules, wily Prometheus sought to deceive the master of lightning through cunning and trickery. Prometheus placed before the Olympians a selection of dishes, one appearing as a succulent dish of shining fat and one appearing as the stomach of an ox. Zeus selected the meat, only to discover that it was hiding a collection of bones, while the stomachs held thick meat. To this day, Zeus is punished by only receiving sacrifices of bones from the mortals below.”
Bobby blinked, coming back down to Earth while Lian snapped the last few pictures of the room and sent them to the cave and Damian.
Get out of there Damian sent back Someone else will handle the rest of your patrol.
“Like hell.” Lian muttered. She sent back. “I’ve got it covered. Clean up?”
Fine. I take better prints. Switch patrols?
Damian’s patrol was larger, and farther from campus. But she was planning to ditch class tomorrow anyway. Roger.
“We’re out, Bobby. Come on, I’ll give you a tour uptown.”
Bobby looked back at the table, the fire and the meat. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s get moving.”
Bobby climbed out of the window and reached back to grab Lian’s arms. “Sorry I ruined the scene. It was just a little too surreal not to try and fix the story, though.”
Lian shivered. Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to get to the skyscrapers and business buildings above 58th street. Prometheus.
Bobby flew her uptown, and the rest of the night was pretty uneventful. Damian kept a tight lock on his patrols, and Lian wrote up a detailed report for him while Bobby watched rerun episodes of Rome and made fun of the accents.
~*~*~
Friday afternoon, Lian sat in the Batcave alone, listening to the squeaking of the bats as a background to her fingers clacking across the keyboard.
There were three entries under ‘Prometheus,’ filed in the order of their first appearances. Lian ignored the second, longest, entry, and went to the oldest one, last edited by “Grayson, Richard”. For a moment, Lian felt a pang of loss in her gut. Uncle Dick would have been wonderful during something like this. Made some jokes and told her some stories about her dad, who hadn’t been much of a detective either, although he hadn’t done too badly. Lian knew that the cave would have been more upbeat if he had just been around to drop by occasionally. With Bruce in charge and Damian taking second-command and the new Robin deferring to both of them for everything, Lian's sense of humor didn’t have much to bounce off of.
She opened the file. It was pretty skimpy, all things told. Curt Calhoun wasn’t a terrible guy, but he had bad luck. It happened to a lot of people dealing with superheroes in their lives, and he had attacked Kord Industries back when the second Blue Beetle was still alive. He’d only had the name Prometheus for a short while before he fought the third incarnation of the Teen Titans, back when Uncle Dick was still leading them and they weren’t really all teens anymore. Lian tapped the screen. He had been involved in a fiasco with Roulette and the Hybrid team and the JSA had reported them all dead. He might be alive, but there had been no reported sightings in years. Lian flagged the file anyway, and quietly altered some of the police records so that they would be on the lookout for him. It couldn’t hurt.
Lian procrastinated for a bit, rereading the article and marking her name carefully so Bruce would know that she had accessed it. She considered calling her dad, or Aunt Donna, who had been part of the team when they fought this version of Prometheus. But when they'd encountered him, he had been a small-time thug caught up with a gang, in totally over his head.
Lian clicked on the last link, avoiding the middle name. Chad Graham was some punk kid who wanted to be Prometheus Jr. and managed to steal the tech for a few months. In that time, he somehow managed to fight off Uncle Ollie, and Damian’s mother, but what truly shocked Lian was that he had beaten Lady Shiva. That was a big deal, even though she couldn’t get any more details on their fight. He was sloppy, though, and he didn’t seem to meticulously plan out his battles the way his predecessor did. And, of course, Chad Graham had been found dead, a sign to anyone who dared steal technology from one of the few men to choose to take on the Justice League repeatedly instead of focusing on one or two of the other heroes. The really interesting part was that at no time did Chad try to establish himself as a unique individual; he simply slid into his so-called mentor's identity without calling any attention to it, while completely confusing his enemies. It was only after he was killed that all the pieces had been put together.
After Lian sent herself a copy of Chad’s file, she hurriedly clicked on the largest file before she could really start to think about it.
This file was huge, filled with as many images as possible from the internal JLA satellite cameras, and with a whole section on “Name: Unknown/Unconfirmed” because Prometheus -The Prometheus – was still a mystery. There were a few theories for his motivations and an outline of his general strategy. He enjoyed defeating the Justice League, and he was good at it, but he wasn’t a constant threat, and no one knew what he was doing when he wasn’t kicking Justice League ass. Maybe this was him, back from the dead, messing with her head.
Intellectually, Lian knew that he hadn’t planned her death exactly. There was simply no way he could predict the exact fall of the buildings and her panicked flight into the streets.
On the other hand, this was the man who managed to predict the actions of the League accurately enough to take them all down on his first try. There was no way she was on his level. If he was the one orchestrating this, Lian was in way over her head, and it was time to pass the baton.
But...none of them seemed to be particularly into the mythology of the name. None of them seemed like the type who would play around like this, leaving hints and rumors. Lian drummed her finders on the keyboard, then closed the files. She wrote her patrol report, cross-linked it all back to the scattered fires and wrote up a note suggesting that it wasn’t an arsonist at all. She didn’t suggest Prometheus, though. She did link the sacrificial offering to Maxius Zeus, and also suggested that the fires could be the result of a totally normal, non-costumed arsonist.
She didn’t want to come off as obsessed. She did not have a complex about dying, and she didn’t want to seem like she did. Bruce had come back from the dead, or something like it, and he had been fine; so was she.
~*~*~
Chapter Note: My source for the story of Prometheus is here. http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hesiod/theogony.htm
Interlude: Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean They're Not Out to Get You
