Chapter Text
A full month after Barbara told Rick that she was Oracle, they still hadn’t caught the Scarecrow.
She’d been able to help with plenty of things, of course; even Batman grudgingly acknowledged that. (She still couldn’t quite figure out the way that sometimes he was Rick’s friendly adoptive dad and other times he was a humorless and demanding taskmaster. One of them had to be fake, right?) With her evidence, they’d gotten a few more corrupt cops off the GCPD—maybe even the last ones, at least for the moment. They’d been able to take down a few criminals thanks to her tracking their spending. Batman even admitted that having a third party tracking them and coordinating their comms during patrols was helpful.
But Scarecrow was too goddamn careful. He’d bought the chemical precursors to his fear gas in bulk already, enough to blanket Gotham twice over, so she couldn’t track purchases of the more unusual chemicals so that Batman could stake out delivery sites and find him that way. He ditched stolen credit card numbers as fast as she could track them back to him. And Batman and Robin didn’t have time for more conventional detective work because, on top of the normal background levels of crime in Gotham, they had to keep responding to random fear gas attacks.
Which meant that more and more people were getting pumped full of paranoia-magic, and they still didn’t have a fix for it. Batman’s magician friend still hadn’t come up with a permanent solution.
(Neither of them would actually tell her who the magician friend was, which she guessed was fair, but Rick had referred to him as “Z” once, and she had a few theories. Not that it was easy to track down magic through the internet, especially since she’d only found out for sure that it existed a month ago, but she was starting to find some interesting stuff.)
Anyway, it was frustrating, and it kept her busier than she’d ever really been, but she had to find time to keep up her sockpuppets. She needed to keep up with—or preferably ahead of—any new developments in net sec and hacking, and there were only a few places where that kind of information was available. To keep her access to those places, sometimes she had to waste her time chatting with a bunch of assholes whose screen names were anagrams and memes. (Hers was NeverGonnaGive. Everyone was impressed that she’d managed to nab it before anyone else, although in fact she’d just taken over the deactivated account of the person who’d had it and then gotten tired of it.)
doc_runnum : Okay, I’m gonna bitch for a while, so strap the fuck in.
whatyousay : straps deployed, bitch away
doc_runnum : I
doc_runnum : fucking HATE
doc_runnum : living in Gotham.
NeverGonnaGive : so move
doc_runnum : I fucking wish
doc_runnum : I grew up in this dump
doc_runnum : Can’t wait until I finish my degree and I can get a job with LexCorp or Google or Amazon or something
doc_runnum : But in the meantime, runnum gots to get paid
doc_runnum : And Wayne Enterprises is the only place that does paid internships
doc_runnum : I mean I get it, nobody wants to give money to some asshole who doesn’t know what he’s doing, but they could give me a fucking test or something. I know more than most of the employees in this place.
doc_runnum : And WE has the most ass-backwards policies on everything
doc_runnum : Already got an official warning just for giving a bitch a compliment
doc_runnum : Anyway that’s why I’m stuck here and that’s why yesterday I got a nice big lungful of fear gas
doc_runnum : Let me tell you, shit sucks
doc_runnum : Okay </rant>
whatyousay : doesnt that shit make you hallucinate your worst fears?
whatyousay : whatyousee?
doc_runnum : You don’t just ask people that, you assclown
NeverGonnaGive : did you meet batman?
doc_runnum : Nah, I guess he gave the antidote to some cops and noped out of there
doc_runnum : Some pig with a mustache gave me the shot
The sympathy Barbara had been feeling for the guy—he must be stuck with the paranoia, since there were only nine amulets and some random civilian wasn’t going to get one—evaporated when she realized he may well have been describing her dad.
NeverGonnaGive : lol
doc_runnum : Anyway I’m kinda pissed at Batman. He’s supposed to keep this kind of shit from happening.
doc_runnum : I’m gonna hack his system. You know he must have some kind of database or something. I doubt it’s airgapped
doc_runnum : Bet LexCorp would give a signing bonus to the guy who tracked down Batman
doc_runnum : Who gives a shit about degrees when you have cred like that, right?
Barbara smiled to herself. He was welcome to try. She’d beefed up the net sec in the Cave to well beyond the cutting edge. Mr. “My screen name is an anagram for conundrum, aren’t I clever” would have an easier time trying to hack the NSA. Especially since he’d just warned her to keep an eye out for him.
whatyousay : yeah okay
whatyousay : lets back up a little though
whatyousay : youre still in college? i didnt realize we were letting babies in this chat
NeverGonnaGive : eh who gives a shit
doc_runnum : See this is the kind of shit I’m talking about
doc_runnum : Even you assholes underestimate me, and you’ve seen what I can do
doc_runnum : Everyone’s fucking underestimating me
doc_runnum : But I’m going to fix that
doc_runnum : I’m smarter than any of you, and soon you’ll know it.
doc_runnum has signed off
whatyousay : dude
whatyousay : is he gonna go become a supervillain or something?
whatyousay : thatd be kinda sweet if we knew a fucking supervillain
NeverGonnaGive : eh everyone says ominous shit sometimes
NeverGonnaGive : most people don’t actually become supervillains
NeverGonnaGive : and even if he tried hed probably just get caught
NeverGonnaGive : not really bragging rights if we just know a dude in prison
whatyousay : ngg you are such a fucking buzzkill sometimes
NeverGonnaGive : yeah well you can brag about it when you see The Mighty Buzzkill fighting superman on tv
NeverGonnaGive : I gotta head out though
whatyousay : lol
whatyousay : bye
Barbara logged off with a grimace. Sure, that one guy in that one chat probably wasn’t going to become a supervillain. At most, he might track down Batman’s computer presence, and she’d be surprised if he even got that far.
But more paranoid people meant more people afraid that they were being underestimated or laughed at, which meant more people with a desperate need to prove themselves, and that definitely could lead to more crime, possibly even of the “super” variety. She wasn’t sure where exactly the line was. Theming?
“O, we’re about to head out,” Rick said into her ear. They’d offered to give her an earpiece for their comms, but she’d made one she liked better. Theirs were designed to stay in if you got punched in the head; hers was designed to be unobtrusive. She could keep it in all day, even at school, without anyone noticing.
“Understood, R,” she said. She could hear the sound of the Batmobile speeding out of the cave. “Where are you headed tonight?”
“R’s doing a large-scale patrol. Pattern 7,” Batman said. He had ten different large-scale patrol patterns, and randomly selected one each night. “After he’s dropped me off by the docks. I got a tip that Maroni’s expecting a shipment. Probably guns.”
“I haven’t seen anything about that,” she said. “Could be a trap.”
“Hey, you’re good, but even you can’t track cash, O,” Rick said. “B knows what he’s doing.”
“Fair enough.”
Oracle pulled up the map of Gotham with blinking lights that indicated Batman and Robin’s current positions, and added an overlay of patrol pattern 7. If either of their trackers got somewhere they shouldn’t be without saying anything about it, she could alert the other to go back them up.
Honestly, Barbara didn’t know how they’d gotten by without her.
On her other monitor she logged into another of her sockpuppets. Maybe this one would hear something useful.