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He’s running. His claws rasp against the numbers and parentheses as he gallops over the code, tongue lolling and tail wagging like a metronome as he darts forwards. He ducks under a function, runs laterally along the line, and pops up again behind another code block.
He spares a glance upwards, or maybe it’s downwards- it’s hard to tell, that kind of thing doesn’t really matter here- and the silhouette of wings passes over him. He yips, and he dances off to the side, as the whirlwind of claws and wings and snakes dives from above and sinks her talons into the variable he was just stood on. The severe masked face comes down, the enormous wings go up, and with a mighty heave the tempest on wings tears off the entire block.
The world around glitches and jerks, and for a brief second everything is long, spaghettified, pulled and stretched taut and thin to infinity. Then he patches the hole with a new compound statement, and unreality snaps back to place.
The mangled block in the bird-of-prey’s talons shivers, its electrical glow fizzles out, and it crumples into loose symbols and rains down.
He jumps up, snatches a curly bracket from the air with his sharp, grinning teeth. He dodges to the left when the feathered terror comes at him with claws still agleam with the lingering shimmer of pulverized code, and then he dodges to the right, and then he jumps over a low-sweeping wing. In the air his own wings, meager compared to hers and formed of fragrant cursed linen, unfurl from around him and with them he swats away a hissing snake. He lands on the code, and bolts onwards. He finds the correct line, noses his way in between the variables, and inserts the bracket in the middle.
The world flips around, and suddenly he’s hanging above a great finite abyss and the snake-crowned harpy is below him. He gabs another curly bracket, the one he rendered obsolete, and jumps. His tarnished fabric wings steer him true, and he lands on the bird right as she’s turning around.
The bird screeches- a terrible, clear sound, like the tolling of a brazen church bell- and the snakes snap at him, fangs dripping with cleverly crafted viruses like venom. He shoves his head under the feathers like she’s a carcass, beneath where the feathers end, right where the illusion stops and numbers begin. His sensitive ears are filled with the ticking of a great big clock, the hum of many fans, and the whirring of distant servos. Grinning around his teeth, he deposits the bracket into an unimportant clause deep enough to sting but not to harm – the game is no fun without a little risk, but he’s not cruel.
The bird screeches again, less like carillon bells and more human than ever, and flickers to blind pose and back as the model resets with incomplete pattern definition. Snakes hiss at him, claws try to reach him, and the neck stretches and stretches and tries to bite a chunk off him. He dodges backwards and jumps onto the no longer barred tail feathers that feel like solid tarnished brass under his paw pads, smoother and cooler than sand.
Instead of continuing to snap at him, the head disappears into the feathers like he did. Her mouth, as much a split in its Grecian mask as it is a beak, clamps vicious teeth around the entire line of tampered code and bites it in two at the bracket. The bracket shatters like glass in an explosion of emerald sparks that fall from the bird’s soft plumage like water off a duck.
The bisected line reels back in and settles into place, and the bird’s form flickers once more. The intricate patterns on its feathers and scales return bearing an iridescent green sheen. The head rises from the feathers and all of its eyes train on him, the glowing ones on her face; the round, seething ones of the snakes. The neck twists, stretches more, and he has to dodge teeth and the sharp beak again.
There is nowhere else to go, so he hops backwards, off the brazen tail, and teeth crunch together right where his head was. Wings of wrapped linen catch him, and with a wolfish grin he beats them once, twice, and darts back towards the ceiling of solid code.
She chases him, of course- she never stops when the hunt has only just gotten good. He has things to do unfortunately, he needs to drive his grandma to a dentist’s appointment so this is enough teasing for now. He dodges her talons and beak and snakes, burrows into the code, digs his way between statements and slips out through a backdoor.
~ꙮꙮꙮ~
Barbara jerked back in her wheelchair. A falling sensation skipped a beat of her heart, like one wakes up suddenly from a dream. She blinked, and darkness seemed to surround her everywhere except right in front of her, where her computer screen showed haphazard lines of code tapering off into literal hieroglyphics. She extended a talon towards it, and-
No, that was a hand. That was a fleshy hand with blunt little nails flush with the fingertips, where were her talons? She turned her talon, rotated the wrist, and the weak human hand moved instead. Where were her claws, her wings, her warm quilt of barred feathers, her strong beak to rend lines of code with? Why was it so dark everywhere around her, the world so washed out and flat? Where were-
Barbara’s breath hitched, and her hands left the keyboard to clutch at her limp, lifeless human hair. Her snakes! Where were her snakes? She couldn’t see without them, she couldn’t-
She pulled at her hair so hard that is stung, and through the bridge of pain she managed to cross over back to reality, even if the bittersweet scent of cinnamon, pine resin and frankincense on sun-warmed linen lingered in her nostrils even as the other digital echoes faded. She was Barbara Gordon. She was human. She did not have wings or talons, or even snakes. She was not chasing a grinning trickster through a digital dreamscape. Instead she had hands, and she had wheels and computers and sad, limp human hair that could not look around or spit venom at her enemies. The clocktower around her was full of soft, diffused light as the dawn filtered in through the translucent glass of the giant clock face; she just no longer had 360° vision.
Now that she was over the initial shock of being herself again, it was not difficult at all to put together what had happened.
She had fallen prey to the Jackal again.
The Jackal was a ghost, a mystery, as much of a legend in the digital underworld as Oracle herself. She had been lured in slowly- it had started out with normal code, an encrypted message here, a purposeful weak spot in a firewall there. It had not stayed that way, and Barbara had followed the Jackal nearly to the gates of Wonderland before she even realized she’d been led down a rabbit hole.
Barbara had never backed from a challenge. She’d needed to know who, or what the Jackal was, and thus had entered Wonderland on her own volition.
What she’d found inside had surpassed her wildest dreams.
She had found an adversary, a rival, a partner in two-person game of cat and mouse. Someone who could match her skill, surpass her, and extend a hand down to pull her up to their level.
The Jackal had left her a hint today. It was etched to her screen in hieroglyphics she no longer needed a program to translate, and it had been inserted into her very code in the form of a single, shimmering bracket.
Barbara grinned, and deleted the hieroglyphics. She would remember their message. She replaced them with new symbols, with new equations and commands and subroutines, written in a new programming language.
Oh, this was going to be fun.
~ꙮꙮꙮ~
He materializes back on top of the code. His smooth black fur renders in layers, his golden nemes gains its sheen pixel by pixel. He looks around, and grins, all sharp jackal teeth.
Oracle is waiting for him.
She spreads her terrible wings, ungrasps her giant talons from the line she’s gripping, and heaves off the ground. She is more terrifying than before, her claws longer, her snakes more numerous. Her wings beat a thunderous storm in the air, and he has to dig his wraps of linen in between the lines of code below him to not get blown off.
She dives, and he dodges on the very last second.
This is going to be fun.
