Chapter Text
The camera focuses in on a velvet-draped table that comes into view, deep green and matte, absorbing light rather than reflecting it. Five small candles line the edge of the frame, their emerald flames flickering gently, swaying to a breeze that doesn’t quite exist. Their wax pools never grow. A single object rests in the center-frame: a thick, heavy gold bar. Its surface is engraved with curling, ancient script that shimmers like it’s breathing. Its glow is not bright, but aware. The bar hums faintly, deep enough that you only feel it through your bones. The camera zooms in slightly. The audio captures only soft room sounds: the subtle rustle of fabric, a faint creak as someone shifts their weight nearby.
A hand enters from the left. Pale skin, fingertips faintly frosted over, nails short and clean. There's a gentle, unnatural shimmer along the knuckles, like the light refracts wrong just at the joints. The hand hovers above the gold bar for a long, silent moment.
Fingers flex once, then gently grip the bar with both hands.
A quiet, strained whine echoes through the microphone as the bar begins to yield. It doesn’t sound like gold should. It sounds tired.
A whisper, calm and smooth, barely above breath:
“Hey, phans…”
Another pause. The metal creaks a little more under pressure.
“Today’s bar is a late-period Ghost Kingdom ceremonial ingot. Roughly ninety-four percent gold, four percent memory-metal, and the last two percent is… probably regret.”
He begins to bend the bar slowly. Not with force, but patience. The gold doesn’t snap. Instead, it begins to warp. Its structure resists with a wobble, soft and strange, like it’s not fully solid in this dimension. There is a wet metal sound that squelches then cracks just slightly. As the bend deepens, faint green sparks begin to drift upward from the gold, rising like lazy fireflies. One spark crackles as it bumps into the edge of the mic stand. The air hums very gently.
“You can see the integrity’s been compromised. Old trauma… from the king’s vault collapse. It’ll flex more before it breaks.”
He lifts the warped bar closer to the camera, giving it a quarter turn to show fine fractures spiderwebbing through the surface. There’s a faint shimmer. An echo of something alive flickering across the glyphs. There is a faint exhale, and frost appears on the bar, stiffening it with a couple creeks and cracks. A thin sheet of frost blooms across the gold again with another soft exhale. The moaning stops. It stiffens instantly, and the little sparks wink out like blown candles. Ice creeps to the edges of the bar, settling in the engraved letters.
Creak. Crack. Snap.
With slow, deliberate motion, Danny bends the bar into a precise U-shape. The gold protests in quiet, crystalline clicks. He twists the ends slightly, and with one final push-
Shhhhhng.
A low, sweet chime is heard shortly before the bar crumbles slightly in the center and splits. It doesn’t shatter violently. It fractures more cleanly, like glass under a diamond blade. The break is smooth, lined with jagged flecks of frozen ectoplasmic residue that gleam like sugar crystals in moonlight.
“That’s better…”
Off-camera, barely a whisper:
“That’s the sound of late-stage capitalism being exorcised,” Sam murmurs, tone amused.
Tucker can be heard snorting faintly, then the camera shifts slightly as he zooms in for a close-up of the split edge. The focus tightens on the crystalized gold grain, glowing softly with residual ghostlight. A soft tap-tap-tap follows as Danny gently knocks the two halves together. He lines one of the pieces up on the table, keeping the other in his hand to completely crumble to dust in his hand, spreading it all over. Then picks the other piece up to gently do the same.
“Thanks for watching. Next time, we’ll be working with a chalice that used to scream when blessed water touched it… but now it just hums.” There is a soft chime before Tucker turns the video from Danny's hands to the wall in front with their Ghost Gold ASMR logo in glowing green font before the camera was turned off.
"Your intangibility is really convenient for some of these shots," Tucker said as he pulled the camera back through Danny's chest towards him.
"And cheaper than getting a stand," Danny agreed.
"You know, this is going better than I imagined it would be the first time you mentioned it," Sam said.
"Should we bring in Frostbite to do some videos," Danny asked.
Sam looked at Danny, unimpressed.
"What? He has a nice voice."
"He kind of does," Tucker agreed.
"Maybe we can ask him at the next council meeting."
"Well," Sam said, this time thinking about it seriously. "It would annoy the Eyeball Bureau. About the mention of the videos more than anything."
Danny smirked. “We are overdue for a cease and desist from the Floating Feds.”
“Two weeks without a ‘grave offense to temporal neutrality’ warning,” Tucker said, mock-sighing. “Honestly, I miss them.”
"For the last time, I swear to god this is not AI."
Bruce Wayne was not dealing with this.
Everyone was gathered around the Batcomputer like it was movie night and not a discussion about an internet enigma casually violating the known laws of physics. Except Bruce. He wasn’t even watching the screen anymore. He was staring into the middle distance like he was silently replaying every life choice that had led him to this moment.
On-screen, a pale hand calmly bent a gold bar in half like it was warm toffee. The mic picked up a shhhhng that should not, under any circumstance, be a sound gold could make.
“I’m telling you,” Tim said, tapping the keyboard as he fast-forwarded through the next video in the playlist, “this has to be AI. Or a deepfake. No one just… crushes a bar of pure gold in their hands like it’s foam. Gold doesn’t do that.”
Cass, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, tilted her head. “He blinked. Off-beat. Real.”
"It is not AI!” Damian snapped. "It is clearly a real person. Look at the way his hand shifts when the metal resists. It is fluid. No clipping or blur. That is muscle control, Drake."
“You might fall for scams in the future, baby bird,” Dick said, ruffling Damian’s hair before narrowly dodging a thrown knife.
"You literally know metahumans and aliens who could do this," Jason said from his seat, sipping from a half-empty mug of reheated tea. "You fought Clayface last week, and he turned a light post into some avant-garde violence and you didn’t even blink."
"No. You don't understand. The laws of physics literally don't just- I have frame-by-frame analysis,” Tim argued, pointing back at the screen. “Look-look right there! The metal shudders before breaking. It pulses. Like it’s alive, or reacting to something outside thermodynamic behavior. I ran it through two forensic VFX filters and a neural deepfake scan, and-”
Duke, still watching the actual video play, spoke up over him.
“He said it was from his ‘inheritance.’”
Tim blinked.
“His what?”
“His inheritance,” Duke repeated, deadpan. “He just casually said, ‘I got it from my inheritance.’ Oh- look. The bar is glowing. Like actually glowing. And sometimes it sparks.”
"That didn't even-"
On screen, the crushed gold began to float a little before hands calmly dusted it across a velvet tablecloth with a soft tap-tap-tap. The sparks hung in the air for several seconds. Jason leaned forward, squinting.
“Okay, but also, where is he getting this stuff? That bar had Sumerian inscriptions. The last one had runic wards. The one before that was humming in reverse Latin. This kid is either looting museums or breaking into pocket dimensions.”
“I’m telling you, it’s VFX,” Tim insisted again, practically vibrating now, “or, like… the most elaborate ARG of all time. A sponsored TikTak account funded by some hidden occult influencer startup. Maybe it’s a marketing stunt for Constantine.”
“Could be alternate reality footage bleeding into our dimension,” Duke offered thoughtfully. “Like that Interdimensional Cable TikTak. There was a theory about that after that dating show-"
"Oh, the one with that mothman!"
Bruce finally turned back to them, his jaw tight.
“I do not care.”
He let the silence stretch.
“What I do care about," he continued, "is why you’ve spent two hours watching sparkly ghost videos instead of doing patrol.”
Then Cass, deadpan:
“He has ice breath.”
Jason pointed at the screen.
“Oh yeah. Watch this part.”
Bruce stared. No one noticed.
He stood. Quietly. No cape flourish. No speech.
He turned and walked out of the room.
Grabbing his cowl off the nearby stand, he muttered just loud enough for Alfred to hear as he passed:
“I’m doing patrol alone tonight.”
And then he was gone.
The room stayed quiet for a beat.
Then Tim said, “Okay but seriously, that ice formed in a Fibonacci pattern-”
“Shut up, Drake,” everyone said at once.
“Okay, Tucker, is the camera at the right angle? I want full flex on the bend this time,” Danny said, casually picking up a long, ornate silver bar. It shimmered faintly with spectral glyphs, shifting just enough to make it look like the carvings were moving when you weren’t looking directly at them.
“It’s perfect. Go full goblin mode,” Tucker replied, adjusting the lighting with the reverence of someone setting the mood for a ghost-themed cooking show. “The mic’s hot. Sam, wanna hit 'em with the lore?”
Sam leaned in, straightened a tiny skull candle, and gave the camera a smirk sharp enough to cut glass.
“Welcome back to Ghost Gold ASMR,” she purred. “Today, Phantom’s destroying the last remnants of a Sumerian soul-vault that tried to eat my aura last week. Don’t worry, it’s vegan.”
Danny chuckled under his breath and flexed. The silver bar groaned under the pressure, the glyphs briefly flaring with green light. It let out a soft, pitiful whimper that sounded way too organic for metal.
“This bar came from a vault the Big Blinkies really didn’t want me to touch,” he said, deadpan. “So naturally, I asked Dan to guest star to melt it.”
He held the bar up to the camera. It shimmered again, the glyphs twitching like they were trying to climb off the surface. There was a quiet shift of movement behind the frame, and then larger hands entered the shot. Still pale, still frost tinged, but visibly broader and slightly blue. The bar hissed louder in protest.
“Shoutout to the Ocular Bureaucracy," Danny added, off camera now. "Your panic sustains me.”
Off-camera, Tucker wheezed loud enough to clip the mic. Sam clapped politely with a perfectly measured amount of mockery.
“I cannot believe they tried to file another cease-and-desist,” she said, deadpan.
“I can,” Danny replied. “I hung it on the fridge.”
A high-pitched hiss escaped the bar, then a sound like steam trying to scream. The metal slumped in Dan’s grip like it was melting into lava, oozing down and pooling over his fingers, but he didn't flinch. He rolled it slowly between his palms like it was nothing more than warm slime.
Molten silver dripped and reformed, held by invisible forces. The glow danced across Dan’s skin without burning, shadows flickering behind him in shapes that didn’t match anything in the room.
“Looks like it’s in the acceptance phase now,” Danny commented lightly, as if they weren’t filming someone casually torturing an artifact into submission.
Sam made a thoughtful noise. “Should we label this one ‘glorp edition’ or ‘visceral meltdown’?”
“‘Soul-vault slime time,’” Tucker offered, eyes glued to the thermal readout on the monitor.
Danny’s voice returned, calm and low. “Thanks for watching. Like, follow, and remember not to keep cursed metal in your crawlspace.”
There was a faint chiming noise off-camera. Something between a wind chime and the echo of an enchanted gong being very polite. Then a voice, deep and impossibly warm, spoke with the gentle care of someone holding a very fragile, very dangerous snow globe.
“Greetings, mortals. I am told this angle is… dramatic.”
The camera panned slightly to reveal Frostbite, easily taking up the whole frame. He was crouched to fit, but his enormous presence made even the heavy velvet backdrop look delicate. He wore a thick ceremonial sash over his usual fur-lined armor, and his claws were carefully tipped with polished crystal caps. A teacup sat next to him for scale. It looked like a thimble in his hand.
“Today,” he rumbled, “we are working with a high-density echo-core from the shattered spine of the North Wind Leviathan. Do not worry. It was deceased for at least two days before its brief revival. The core has been properly exorcised, blessed, and given three chances to leave peacefully.”
He held up a chunk of what looked like translucent, frozen stormcloud. It pulsed faintly. The mic picked up a heartbeat noise. Or a drumbeat. Or something deeper.
Tucker whispered off-camera.
“We are all gonna die, and I’m streaming it in 4K.”
Frostbite delicately set the core down on a crystal plate and held out both hands. Icy mist curled from his fingertips. The object screamed.
Not loudly. Not even in a human register. But the room dimmed and flickered slightly, and one of the skull candles hissed before going out.
Sam spoke, as if nothing horrifying was happening.
“You’ll notice the initial reaction is defensive. That’s residual grudge energy. Once Frostbite applies a steady thermal pulse-”
There was a low crack as the outer layer of the core began to split. Frostbite hummed, almost in harmony with the object’s fading scream.
“...it starts to mellow,” Sam finished.
The camera zoomed in. Cracks formed perfect concentric spirals, blooming outward like frostflowers. A shimmer of spectral light pulsed between each fracture. Frostbite gently tapped the side with a claw.
The core sighed.
It exhaled a puff of wind directly into the microphone. Somewhere, very faintly, a string quartet started playing one unresolved note and held it.
Frostbite turned to the camera. “Very good,” he said. “She has let go of her regrets.”
There was a beat of silence. Then Tucker whispered,
“I wanna be like him when I grow up.”
“I’m twenty percent sure that thing just forgave me for something I haven’t done yet,” Danny muttered.
Frostbite gave a satisfied nod and lowered the now glowing core into a containment bowl lined with dreamcatcher mesh and pink Himalayan salt. He dusted off his hands like a chef plating a soufflé.
“Thank you for joining us,” he said, dipping his head. “Next time, we may examine a haunted compass that spins only when someone lies within earshot. I believe young Foley is looking forward to that one.”
“Oh absolutely,” Tucker said. “I’ve been waiting just to test the range.”
Sam just shook her head, muttering, “You’re gonna get cursed again.”
They cut out the video before it goes on for too long. Danny clapped once.
“And that’s a wrap. Frostbite, ten out of ten. We gotta get you your own segment. Frostbite Fridays?”
Somewhere in Gotham, Tim Drake pressed pause and muttered, "Got you."
He pulled up the batcomputer and started to type in Foley and run a search on it. Trying to get the location from the video did not work the first time for some reason so he switched to something else. He did not think Foley was a real name in the video, but it was a start. He was going to track down the creator and prove once and for all that the videos were AI.