Chapter Text
Mia sat perched on her bedroom window sill, breathing heavy. A small crash came from downstairs, making her shoulders tense up and her eyes shut tightly. She knew it was her father, she was a detective after all, she also knew the crash wasn't something she wanted to stay around and hear more from.
Her father wasn't an angry man, never had been, but he was a very stressed man. With his wife's health deteriorating and his work without her help stressing him out, he always seemed to be holding back his anger. Mia knew this skill well, she had been learning it all her life.
They could not be angry at her mother, she had no choice in what she could and could not help with. It wasn't her fault the dishes kept piling up and that she couldn't go back to work, it certainly wasn't her fault how shaky she got or that her newest round of meds hadn't been helping.
So they bottled it up. They wouldn't shout. They wouldnt throw things. But they could keep it so far inside that it spun and spun like a cotton candy machine until the machine started to burst. It made them their own kind of shaky, the kind that made her father so tense he couldn't pay attention to his surroundings and would inevitably crash into something. Of course, this only made him angrier.
There wasn't much Mia could do about this. She helped where she could, but there was only so much time she could spend outside of her room before the memories of every tense moment got to her.
So, she sat on her window sill. And even if there was nothing she could do to help her family, she could help others.
Mia slowly eased herself out of the window and out onto the porch roof, being extra careful not to make the old tiles creak. She waited, but when she only heard the sounds of tense silence and crickets, she crept over the the edge of the roof, grasped the pillar, and climbed down.
This is a routine she's done any times, at first it was just to get out of the house and into the forest nearby, but in the last few months it'd been to sneak all the way to the bus stop and into gotham city.
You see, Mia lived on the outskirts of gotham, out in the scenic country that was further away from all the pollution and noise and, most importantly, crime. The exact crime Mia heard about Batman and Robin going out every night to solve.
As mentioned before, Mia is a detective. She yearned for the thrill of jumping across rooftops and chasing bad guys, she ached for the chance to put clues together and solve a mystery.
So, she biked the two miles to the bus stop, rode the bus into the heart of gotham city, and started to solve mysteries.
At first it was small, a group of kids from her school had been robbed on their way home and Mia managed to figure out who had done it and left them an anonymous note along with their belongings. Simple, anonymous. But then, people started actively asking for whoever helped those kids to help them too. Missing pets, cheating partners, all of their mysteries written down and placed on one specific table in the school library.
Gotham academy is a very old school, by a lot, and part of their appeal to the richer parents of gotham is that they've kept quite of few of their original ways. They still had most of the original buildings, many students stayed in dorms, there was only a very weak wifi signal for the receptionists desk, and their classes (while up to date with current curriculums, only the best for gothams elite) still included things like sewing and etiquette and fencing. But the real advantage of all this, to Mia at least, was that there was not a single security camera.
So, she kept getting her notes, and she kept solving their mysteries, and everything stayed pretty tame.
Until last week, that is.
The week before our story starts, Mia got the most intriguing mystery she'd ever had. Instead of a scrap peice of notebook paper, or the back of someone's math homework, it was a map.
Mia loves maps. It's her self assigned code name, in fact, so she was ecstatic to see not only a map, but a map that she was unfamiliar with.
The map was simple, which added to it's mystery, and had no note attached or even words written at all. Mia had compiled the following list of information about it.
-It had been drawn entirely in black ink, which Mia had recently learned was from some fancy brand based in gotham. She knew this because it had a strange floral scent to it, something she recognized from her father's own pens and was then able to further research.
-The paper it was drawn on was similarly expensive, good quality paper made specifically for ink, and had the top 2 or so inches ripped off. the same part of the paper that would usually hold someone's unique logo or motif for personalized stationary.
-It likely wasn't done while under stress, but instead had a decent bit of time put into it. the lines and curves that made up the drawing were pressed deep into the paper, clearly drawn slowly and as accurately as possible.
-Finally, there were a few areas on the map that had been pressed in just slightly, as though they had been drawn in by a pen with no ink.
The last bit was the part she was most curious, and confused, about, but other than that it was hard to figure anything out about the person that sent it. They hadn't left a note saying who it was from, which was pretty common, but why had they also gone through the trouble of removing the personalized bit on the paper? And what was the map of? There weren't any markings showing her where she might find anything, and it didn't match up with any of the streets in gotham.
She recognized that it was no use to keep going over it in her mind, and instead folded it back up to keep in her pocket. she might get more information on it soon, and her bus was about to arrive anyway.
~📓~
Mias bus, driven by a sweet little old lady that had long since stopped asking why mia was there so late, got her all the way into the middle of the city. Also in the middle was Robinsons park, and not too far from Robinsons park was her school, and on the 3rd floor of her school was the lab.
It want too hard to break into gotham academy, as stated previously their security wasn't great, but it did take her some practice to avoid all the sqeaky floorboards and the 2 guards that patrolled throughout the night.
By now she knew where to step and which areas to avoid at what time though, so in a few minutes she had made her way to the lab. Technically, there were 2 labs, one for the regular science classes, and the one for students working ahead in more serious courses. Mia stepped into the latter.
Once inside, she took out the note and smoothed out its crease to sit more or less flat on the table. The labs cabinet doors creaked slightly under her grip, but she knew that the security guard assigned to this floor would be on the opposite end of the long hall by now anyway.
Mia carefully grabbed the black light she needed, remembering the research she had done on invisible inks, and hoped that she was right. It was possible that the indents she was curious about were just the indents of someone writing on another peice of paper that this one had been under, but the markings just lined up so well with the drawing, never going over any of the ink, that she had to check.
The sound of the blacklight flashlight clicking on made Mia pause for second, waiting to listen for the guard that she knew would check into this room in just a few minutes. Having not heard anything, she moved the flashlights light from behind the palm of her hand to the paper, it's dim light illuminating the paper. The sound of her own gasp made Mia flinch, before she quickly composed herself and started tracing over the new images in pencil.
Once she had finished outlining the drawings, Mia quickly folded the map back up and shoved it into her pocket before quietly running back to the cabinet to put the flashlight back.
Right as she closed the cabinet, the door to the lab started to turn.