CAT-TALES BBLUEPRINTS CAT-TALES BBLUEPRINTS By Chris Dee Edited by David L. COPYRIGHT © 2006 BY CHRIS DEE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. BATMAN, CATWOMAN, GOTHAM CITY, ET AL CREATED BY BOB KANE, PROPERTY OF DC ENTERTAINMENT, USED WITHOUT PERMISSION BLUEPRINTS Many Gothamites didn’t even know they existed, these rarified pockets of the world where the subtle and unconscious application of wealth and influence had fended off the ravages of time and change. One of these pockets was right in their midst, only a few minutes from the heart of the city: the Gotham suburb of Bristol. The ancient sycamores that once shaded Iroquois hunters tracking deer and pheasant had never been pulled down to build tract houses on quarter-acre plots. The roads were paved, but they didn’t lead to stripmalls or “superstores.” They led, under a canopy of those same leafy sycamores, to quaint, family-owned businesses like Perdita’s Florals and Harriman’s Gourmet Pantry. Mr. Harriman still wore a clean white apron, kept the customer accounts in a handwritten ledger, and tallied them himself at the end of each month. He didn’t bother sending the bill to Wayne Manor. He merely folded it in a brown envelope, wrote WAYNE on the flap, and handed it to Alfred Pennyworth when he came in the next Monday or Thursday to do his twice-weekly shopping. Alfred slipped the envelope into his pocket, for he would never insult Mr. Harriman by checking it in front of him. He would open it tonight while having his nightcap with Miss Selina’s little friend Nutmeg, and reconcile it with the records kept on his laptop. Outside Harriman’s, Alfred paused before loading his bags into the car. It was a window display of lilies and irises in front of Perdita’s Florals which made him stop and think. The rogue themed fundraiser called Gotham After Dark had been a disaster in every sense but one: in preparing for it, Batman had captured almost every villain in Gotham. Now that it was over, the city was quiet as never before. There was still a baseline of muggers and mobsters to be sure, but the day-to-day (or more importantly, the night-to-night) business of crimefighting was, temporarily, an infinitely more manageable undertaking. “Meals” had returned to Wayne Manor as a viable concept. Dinner in the dining room was suddenly considered the norm, and if Master Bruce expected to take only a sandwich in the cave before patrol, this was acknowledged as a deviation from the established routine of the house and he informed Alfred in advance like a considerate employer. Alfred was not so naïve that he believed this was a permanent change. Crimefighting was not a predictable activity, and he knew before long the villains would begin escaping, or be released, and resume wreaking havoc on Gotham. It would no longer be possible for Master Bruce to know a night’s schedule hours in advance. But for now, Alfred had something resembling a regulation household to maintain. With so many breakfasts and dinners, and even the occasional lunch, served in the dining room, it seemed appropriate to restore the fifth flower arrangement to the regular order from Perdita’s. So he proceeded into the florist and waited while Edith Mason finished with her present customer. Edith was a genteel lady with immaculate Cat-Tales white hair, dressed all in pink. For as long as Alfred had known her, she always dressed in pink. When she was free, she came up to him with a luminous smile and asked how she could help him today. Her smile was understandable. Whenever Alfred came into the shop in person, it meant extra business. The regular order for Wayne Manor had been in place since the 1880s and required no contact or confirmation: five arrangements, twice a week. One large for the foyer, three medium for the morning room, dining room, and south drawing room; one small for the master bedroom. The manor gardens could have supplied these bouquets well enough, but the Waynes had always preferred to support the town’s businesses any way they could. It was a principle Alfred heartily approved of, so he’d kept the standing order intact after the tragedy in Crime Alley pushed the daily running of the manor into his domain. He’d only reduced the order, removing the arrangement for the dining room, on specific instructions from Master Bruce. The boy was sixteen. It was the lowest point in their relationship, when he was full of plans for his grand tour of the world to “train for his mission.” Harsh words had been exchanged and tension ran high in the manor for almost a month. One night at table, Master Bruce set down his knife and fork and demanded the flowers be removed from the dining room. He said he couldn’t eat around flowers, the smell reminded him of the funeral. Alfred complied; it was his job. It was Bruce’s house, after all. While the rift of that one, bitter fight was soon healed, Alfred had never felt it appropriate to reinstate the fifth arrangement. The incident was just intertwined enough with “the mission” in his mind. Because of his nocturnal activities, Bruce didn’t eat in the dining room for months at a time. It seemed somehow deluded to make a deliberate effort to reintroduce flowers to the room. But now, since the advent of Miss Selina in Master Bruce’s life, these small patches of normalcy had sprung up in unexpected places. It was as if, having taken this one step with her and found it satisfying, he would experiment here and there. As long as he was certain it would do nothing to impair his mission, he might even one day consider… Alfred reminded himself that it was folly to expect too much. The present situation in Gotham was simply too good to last. The best he could do was to make what he could of the ideal conditions for however long they lasted, and for the moment that meant restoring a fifth arrangement of cut flowers to the regular twice-weekly order. The bats were back. It wasn’t the first time Bruce had noted the specific features of a particular bat among the hundreds in the cave. In the early days, he often singled one out and studied its movements, first as a template to model some aspect of his costume, but then after a while, he did it out of simple intellectual curiosity. But the notice of a particular bat never lasted more than an hour or two, and if he saw the same bat again a week later, he never would have recognized it. But these two: a larger black one, muscular, with a defect on the right side of its mouth that seemed to make the lower half sag in a permanent snarl; and a smaller brown one, lean and wiry with bulging, beady eyes; they’d kept his attention for a week. They were always together, which made them easy to identify, and they had started hanging lower and lower in 2 Blueprints the vicinity of his workstation. Bruce hypothesized that it was the hum or the heat of the computer systems that must attract them—although the scientist in him wondered why it was these particular two among hundreds, and at this particular time when the systems had been in place for years. But then he dismissed the thought and returned to work. It was simply one of those quirks of nature, a variation from the norm that might prove useful to the species or might bring these two into contact with some new hazard and remove the dangerous new variable from the equation. This thought caused him to look away from his computer screen and reconsider the bats… The Universe, as Jason Blood had referred to it so portentously in the recent crisis, did have a way of policing itself. This simple process of evolution reflecting in miniature what went on on the cosmic scale. Nature was coldly indifferent to the fates of these two individual bats; it was the greater good of the species that would be served or not by this quirky variation. If the experiment failed and the bats were injured or killed as a result—or if one had to venture into an alternate reality and face unimaginable danger while the other watched helplessly, if the one had to steep herself in some goggled persona that represented everything she despised just to fulfill the Universe’s aim and remove whatever experiment hadn’t worked out… Bruce stared again at his computer screen. He realized now that his efforts to help Selina recover from the horrors of that dimension hop had been for his own benefit as much as hers. Yes, she had been in terrible danger, and yes, she had suffered more than a little by having to become “that goggle horror,” as she described it. But he had suffered too. He had to watch, helplessly. She was in danger and she was suffering and he couldn’t do a thing to help her… And he’d been trying to make up for it ever since. He’d given her a jeweled necklace, taken her back to Xanadu, and even arranged the sale of the Gotham Post to give her some small bit of vindication against that paper’s slanders. Yet none of it quite managed to fill the void, and for the first time he understood why: she had been in danger and he couldn’t do a thing, she had suffered and all he could do was watch.