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Jeff falls out of the portal, landing in an undignified heap on his nose.
He was having a playdate with some of the other Young Avengers while Gwen and Kate were busy, and was enjoying watching America Chavez practice her portals. She had just made one in a really nice purple that Kate would have loved, and Jeff had stepped closer to inspect it. Before he knew it he had fallen into the portal!
He straightens up and turns to hop back through, but the portal starts to flicker.
"Hold on, Jeff! I've almost got it back!" America calls, but the portal keeps closing.
"Mrrrr?”
"I can't hold it!" America says. "I'll find you, okay? Don't worry, Jeff, I'll get help!"
With that, the portal blinks shut.
"Mrrrr," Jeff says, nervous.
He's not supposed to wander off when Kate and Gwen don't know where he is. In the distance he can see a big city that reminds him of New York. Above the road leading toward the city, there's a big sign.
Jeff approaches the sign. He's been working very hard with Gwen and Kate to learn how to read.
G-O-T-H-A-M
Jeff carefully sounds out the letters like they taught him.
Got... Ham...
Got ham? Jeff loves ham! He turns in the direction of Got Ham so that he can get some ham. Now that he thinks about it, he would love a snack.
The journey to Got Ham is short, and on the way Jeff daydreams about the possibilities. Will the buildings be made of ham? Will there be people on every street corner passing out slices? Will the ham be honey baked? Jeff licks his lips in anticipation.
On first inspection, Got Ham doesn't seem to have much in the way of ham. The city is dirty, coated in smog and dirt. It smells terrible, not at all like the scent of a slow-roasting ham in the oven.
"Mrrr..." whispers Jeff in disappointment.
He sniffs the air. He won't give up! He'll find some ham! Jeff keeps walking until he spots a hot dog cart. That seems like a good place to start, he can get a snack to tide him over.
Most of the hot dog places in New York know him already and will toss him a treat or two whenever he waddles up to their cart. Kate says it's because Jeff is cute. Jeff knows better, though. It's because Jeff is a superhero!
He walks up to the cart he found and opens his mouth wide so the vendor can toss a hot dog to him, but instead of the excited "It's Jeff!" he expects, the vendor screams.
"Don't come any closer!"
"Mrrr?" Jeff asks.
"I said get back!" The vendor tosses the tongs at Jeff, who dodges just in time.
No one's been this mean to him since he was rescued from M.O.D.O.K.
"Mmmmrrrrrr!" He growls, but retreats.
Jeff hopes that whoever's in charge of sharing the ham is nicer. He's starting to get really hungry now.
Jeff keeps wandering, occasionally sniffing the air in hopes that it will lead him toward a snack. None of the other hot dog vendors are any kinder, and all the restaurants he approaches lock their doors before he can get inside. Got Ham is shaping up to be a terrible place, Jeff thinks.
It's starting to get dark. The little sun that managed to break through the cloud cover is gone, and a broken streetlight flickers on. Jeff hopes America will find him soon. Dejected and hungry, he sits down on the grimy sidewalk.
"Mrrrr..." He says, head hung low.
Suddenly, a net drops down from above, pinning him in place.
"Mrrrrr!" Jeff yells, struggling against the net as he tries to escape.
A group of masked people appear around the net. Jeff growls at them.
"Seriously? This is what Oracle’s been getting reports about all night? I don't know what this thing is, but the hot dog guy was lying, that’s definitely not King Shark," says one of the masked people.
"He's so cute!" says another, a very purple girl who reminds him of Kate. "Do you think he's friendly?"
Jeff growls. He doesn't want to be friendly to these potential land-shark-nappers! His stomach growls too, even louder.
"Are you hungry, little guy?" asks the purple girl.
Well... Maybe he can be friendly to these people, if they've got food. He nods.
"Can you understand us?" asks the masked boy in red.
"Mrr!" says Jeff, nodding again.
"I'm Spoiler," says the girl. "This is Red Robin."
"Mrr," Jeff replies.
The boy, Red Robin, speaks into what Jeff recognizes as a comm. "We found the shark, it seems intelligent. It's cooperating so far."
Spoiler chimes in on her own comm. "We're taking it to BatBurger!"
Red Robin pauses. "What? No we aren't!"
"He's hungry! Look at that little face! We've got to take him to BatBurger!"
"Mrrr!" agrees Jeff, trying to look extra cute under the net.
"We need to take it to B!"
"We can make a stop first. You want BatBurger, don't you, buddy?"
Jeff nods rapidly. Red Robin sighs.
"Fine! But if it runs away or tries to eat someone, I'm blaming you."
Spoiler laughs and releases Jeff from the net.
"Mrrr!" He says, grateful, and gently bumps her leg with his nose.
The two vigilantes stiffen, then Spoiler reaches down and starts to pet Jeff. He leans into her hand happily.
"See! Told you he was friendly! Who's a good little shark-thing?"
"Mrrrrr!" says Jeff. He's a good little shark-thing.
Jeff lets his new friends lead him to BatBurger. It's still not that ham that the sign promised, but a ham-burger is getting closer.
The two of them approach the counter and Spoiler rattles off a big order. Good, Jeff thinks. He's very hungry.
"Do we really need all of that?" asks Red Robin.
"I texted the group chat, everyone's coming to meet our new friend."
"That'll be $305.47," says the cashier.
Spoiler looks at Red Robin. Jeff looks at him too.
"Oh, I'm paying?" Red Robin raises an eyebrow.
"Did you think the shark was going to?"
Jeff nods in agreement. He doesn't have any money.
Red Robin sighs and hands over a pile of cash. "Are we sure he can even eat this?"
"I guess we'll find out!"
"Mrrr," says Jeff, trying to reassure them. He can definitely eat this.
Jeff waits for his new friends to grab their food then starts to eat everything left behind on the trays. He decides that he loves BatBurger, especially the seasoned fries. In a matter of minutes, everything on the table is gone, and Jeff is happily full. He still has room in his tummy for ham, though, if he can find some.
His new friends stare at him, eyes wide. So do the rest of their costumed friends, who had shown up during Jeff's feeding frenzy.
"Where'd he even put all that?" asks Spoiler.
"Look at that, Hood, something that eats even more than you!" says one of the friends, a tall blue one, elbowing a tall red one.
"Tt," chimes in the small one, "Batburger isn't even close to the proper diet for a shark. He needs fish."
"Regular sharks don't have legs, let him have his burger!" argues Spoiler.
"Let's get him a filet-o-bat," laughs the blue one.
"Mrrr!" Jeff doesn't know what that is, but he's willing to try.
The blue one pets him and goes back to the counter.
“We’ll take him home with us,” says the small one, snapping Jeff’s attention back to the small one.
“You mean we’ll take him to Batman, who will contact the Justice League and get him back to wherever he belongs,” says Red Robin.
“He doesn’t match any known extraterrestrials, and there hasn’t been any unusual atmospheric activity either. If he was made in a lab to be a weapon, we can’t send him back there. Father promised me another pet for my birthday, anyway.”
Jeff isn’t enjoying where this conversation is going, but eats the filet-o-bat that the blue one brings him and accepts pets from him and the quiet one with the full-face mask.
“He meant another cat or something, not a shark,” says Hood.
“Let’s just take him to Batman and figure things out from there, okay?” suggests the blue one. “He’s probably got someone who misses him.”
Jeff nods in agreement.
“I’m keeping him, Nightwing. He was wandering the streets, whoever had him last doesn’t deserve him.”
Jeff decides that this is where the conversation will have to end. His family was working very hard to find him and bring him home, and he absolutely would not let anyone insult them. He hops out of the booth and starts to walk away as the group starts to argue.
The little bell on the door gives him away as he makes his escape, getting the attention of the group who get up to chase after him. Jeff starts to run, pushing himself and his little legs as hard as he can. Before he can even make it to the end of the street, a clown steps out in front of him and blocks his path.
Jeff’s first thought is that this man is a terrible clown. He doesn’t want to be mean or anything, but nothing about this man looks funny. Maybe he’s a beginner, Jeff politely decides, and tries to go around him. The man stops him.
“Look at what we have here!” He cackles.
Jeff wonders why the man is laughing. He hasn’t even told any jokes. He tries to get past the man again.
“Get away from the shark,” Nightwing demands from behind him.
“So sorry, birdy! But I have plans for the evening, and adding this shark to the mix would be a riot.”
The clown’s grin spreads into an even creepier smile as a group of men in similar clown outfits emerge from the alleys behind him, carrying weapons and wearing their own creepy smiles. Jeff realizes then that the clown is some sort of villain. He still has mixed feelings about the BatBurger group, but they seem like the heroes here. Since Jeff is a hero too, he decides that he’ll help them out before he makes his escape.
With a triumphant cry of “yummy yummy” and the aid of the pym particles in his tummy, Jeff swallows the creepy clown and his creepy crew whole. He turns back to the group for instructions on where to spit them out.
The group stares back at him in varying degrees of shock. Hood, at least, looks elated. Jeff makes an inquiring noise toward them. No one responds, so Jeff sits down.
The sirens, which had been wailing throughout the evening, grow louder as a police car pulls up beside the group. Another car joins it. This one was black, reminding Jeff of the fancy cars Tony Stark liked. A man in a costume gets out. Jeff hopes it isn’t another villain.
“What happened?” the man demands.
Another older man with grey hair gets out of the police car. “We heard that the Joker was in the area.”
“He was, yeah,” says Nightwing.
“So what happened?” growls the costumed man.
“The shark ate him,” says Red Robin.
“What?” asks the policeman.
The BatBurger group just points at Jeff.
“Batman,” asks the policeman, “What is that?”
Batman turns to the group.
“Sorry, commissioner. We don’t know either,” says Spoiler.
Jeff is getting sick of all this waiting. If he waits any longer to spit out the villains he’ll probably get a tummy ache. A few more police cars were arriving, so Jeff was satisfied that they’d be able to deal with the villains.
“Bleh!”
The clown and his henchmen land in a slimy pile at the commissioner's feet. Pleased with his heroism, Jeff starts to waddle away. But like before, he doesn’t make it far. The net comes back down around him, this time accompanied by a jab of a needle into his side. Jeff lets out one last angry cry as the sedative kicks in and forces him to fall asleep.
Jeff wakes up in his least favorite place to be: a cage. He feels afraid, thinking he had woken up back in The Collector’s zoo, that all his time with his super hero friends and his amazing homes with Gwen and Deadpool and Kate had all been a dream. As he starts to wake up some more, he feels relieved to find that even though he was in a cage, it wasn’t his zoo cage.
He starts to look around to try to figure out how to escape. He’s in some kind of cave, with bats shrieking overhead and a massive computer. The cage has bars, so he can’t break it the way he could break a glass enclosure, but, he realizes happily, it has no roof! His captors must not have thought he could climb out.
It’s a tall cage, but Jeff is determined. He stretches up on his hind legs as high as he can, and jumps. His front paws catch the top of the cage, and he scabbles against the bars with his back paws until he manages to shimmy himself over.
“Mrrrr!”
Now it was time to be stealthy and get away before his captors came back. Jeff finds some stairs, and creeps up towards the door. It was cracked open, so he pushes it with his nose until the heavy door opens enough for him to get through.
He finds himself in an office, then in what seemed like a really big house. He starts to look for a way to get outside, but something catches his attention. He can smell something, something really good. Was that… ham…? He puts his search for an exit on hold and goes to investigate the smell instead.
He finds the source of the smell in a kitchen. A huge, beautiful ham sits on a plate on the counter. Jeff’s mouth waters.
Using a chair, he climbs up onto the counter. At long last, the ham is his! He takes a big bite, and without a doubt, this was the best ham Jeff had ever eaten. It was juicy, seasoned, and perfectly cooked. Jeff takes another bite, then another, and soon the ham is gone.
“Mrrr,” he says, finally satisfied with the offerings of Got Ham.
He lays down on the counter with a smile.
A voice drifts in from the hall. “Alfred? Have you seen the shark everyone’s talking about?”
Uh oh, thinks Jeff.
Someone wearing yellow pajamas and sounding like he just woke up comes into the kitchen. He and Jeff make eye contact. Uh oh, thinks Jeff again.
“Guys, I’ve got him!”
Jeff freezes as the rest of the group from BatBurger bursts into the room, now including Batman among them. Jeff backs up, but only makes it to the edge of the counter.
“Good work, Signal,” says Batman.
“That’s a nice shark. Don’t eat us,” Spoiler coos. “The Lantern Corps are on their way.”
The group starts to surround him. Jeff looks for an escape, but finds none until a shower of sparks appears beside him. A portal!
“Mrrr!” he exclaims. America is here! And so is Kate!
“Jeff!” Kate cries, scooping him up. Jeff feels so happy to be on the right side of the portal again. “Thanks for looking after him!” she tells the group in the kitchen.
America closes the portal behind them.
“Sorry, Jeff,” she says. “That must have been scary.”
Jeff shakes his head. He doesn’t want to worry his friends. And besides, everything had worked out in the end. He foiled a villain, escaped his captors, and even ate some delicious ham! Got Ham wasn’t that bad, he decides, but he’s happy to be home.
“My, you’ve eaten already?” Alfred asked as he entered the kitchen, finding a missing ham and a group of assembled bats. “And what have I said about masks upstairs?”
“The shark,” was all Bruce managed to get out, the rest of the bats nodding in agreement.
None of the bats knew what to make of the situation or the shark’s disappearance through the portal, though all were beginning to formulate theories about what had happened, and create contingencies for if it were to happen again.
“If he comes back, I’m keeping him,” Damian finally said.
“We’ll see,” said Bruce.