Young Justice Plus

North Cow Mountain Recreation Area- July 5, 01:18 PDT

God, no internet sucks. No way of knowing what is in the news, looking up places to go. When the Darknet was killed the internet became less useful, but it was still a lifeline. No WiFi here, in the "17 mile network of foot trails beckoning to the adventurous spirit."

Always, always have somewhere out of the urban environment nearby to run to. A stolen car, buried along the side of the road without a trace, color changed from blue to red and license plate changed to a couple of random letters and numbers, was hopefully the only sign of where you went.

You are bad at shape shifting. Forehead, ears, hair, clothes, fingerprints. It was going to hurt and take all night.

"Distance between the eyes, width of the nose, depth of the eye sockets, the shape of the cheekbones, the length of the jaw line. The program is sophisticated, too sophisticated for them. They must have had help."

You don't even know where to begin. You were supposed to have time to master all of this.

"Fingerprint, palm veins, face recognition, DNA, palm print, hand geometry, iris recognition, retina and scent."

Wikipedia could give you nightmares sometimes. How do you reconfigure the veins in your palms without ruining your hands? You were never supposed to do this alone.

Teeth too, right? Derrek Storm novels always talked about dental records.

You put your face in your hands. How many months can you spend hiding in the woods trying to figure out how to become someone new before floating up to Dreamland started to sound like a pretty good idea?

Oh no. You check your pockets, and of course, you lost the Wolfram and Hart card. Not that you were going to forget that phone number, but still.

Would the camp ground have a payphone or something?

It's cold. You miss New Mexico.

You really miss New Mexico.

It has been a very long day. Time to sleep.

North Cow Mountain Recreation Area- July 5, 10:56 PDT

There was a reason you chose this spot. Steep slopes are much, much easier for you to navigate than most people, and excellent for digging a small, natural looking cave to camp in.

The bug out bag and the backup bug out bag and the emergency bug out bag are in Star City, probably in CSI labs and evidence lockers by now.

You went from the girl with short platinum blonde hair to the girl with long dark red hair to the girl with a black pixie cut in the last few months. The pixie cut does not look good on you.

The fire ring is so fast to prepare when you can use your powers, as is the fire itself. The hardest part of your breakfast was the meat, a variety of small birds, unidentified rodents, and what you think is an opossum. You probably can't get sick from this mess of stripped meat, hopefully.

It is probably not healthy to live off raw bird and rodent meat for too long, but that had never mattered before.

It is fun, experimenting with wood and leaves and fur and dirt and rock to make your new little cave cozy. You spend a lot of time trying to make a ventilated window that allows you to sleep without a cave opening, but you can never quite convince yourself you won't suffocate. Your head can rest on a nice patch of fur that looks like a pillow, the rest of you looking buried, a long sheet of very fake moss covering your face. It seems unlikely that anyone will step on you when you sleep.

North Cow Mountain Recreation Area- July 8, 14:22 PDT

Camping alone without a computer, a phone, a book, a TV, or anything but your clothes, nature, and a travel map is really, really boring.

You tried hiking, power experimentation, and everything else you could think of, but you're going slowly insane. You're starting to miss everywhere you've ever been, every asshole who you should never have called a friend.

This cannot go on.

[X] You just need a phone. Wolfram and Hart can get you out of this mess. They are players, real ones. All you really need is a lawyer.

[X] You can head north. Stick to the old plan, just be more quiet about it. You can find somewhere small and quiet, somewhere nowhere near as boring.

[X] If you are going to make it in this life than you need real friends, not lawyers. On that bridge you had met another supervillain. They do get phone calls. If anyone can give you a plan it is Icicle Jr.

 

McKinleyville- July 5, 17:04 PDT

The library is some ancient building that looks older than Abin Sur. The elevator was probably added sometime after the government realized handicapped people were a thing. For what very little it is worth, you avoid using the elevator under the assumption it probably has a camera.

Star City was a footnote under the storm of news reports. It had been another of those "rough weeks" that the president would need a speech about. It had been just over three years since Project Ares, and the United States was mind controlling Superman's genetically altered baby son. The usual suspects had fallen along the traditional battle lines of incompetence, secrecy, conspiracy, and enemy action in the media. Attempted murder of sidekicks, slavery, mind control, and hacking Martian DRM.

One would think after the Company, and the Special Unit, and the destroyed army of dead soldiers pumped full of alien DNA in meteor rocks the good old USG would have seriously cleaned house, but no. No wonder the UNSC had let Green Lantern make the Justice League with those as the people supposed to defend Earth.

That was not the biggest news story. A supervillain who called himself, or herself, Wotan had attempted to do something that had involved blocking out the sun across the entire Eastern Standard Timezone, summoning something that had taken Green Lantern 15 hours of nonstop fighting to subdue, and Wotan themself had apparently switched bodies with Superman.

According to a League statement, Wotan was locked in a Green Lantern "sciencell" and there was no one else sentient to interrogate, so yet again the media was left to ramble on about the consequences and speculate endlessly.

You hadn't even made much of a headline in Star City. A few paragraphs about "a young superhuman of unknown name, nature, and origin" attacking "a young metahuman whose personal information is withheld due to privacy concerns."

Your defeat of Speedy wasn't even mentioned. "A young superhuman?" You are insulted.

The article spends more time talking about Martian medical tech allowing for her face to be repaired with six shots than it does about the fight.

The Star City Register is controlled by the Justice League. You sit there, scared. Of course the Justice League had influence, but could they do that? You head to Wikipedia to look up their charter, and the answer is vague. When Abin Sur died and Earth's successor was taken to Oa for training his secretive partner, Green Lantern 2814-b, had requested the permission to take on deputies from the UN so he could keep to his duties elsewhere in our Sector. Wikipedia has a picture of the founding members of the League standing with Earth's Green Lanterns.

The charter is vague and broad. When the United Nations was founded, they'd given the Green Lanterns police powers over international law, enforcing the laws of member nations in their territory, and general legal terms you don't understand so the Green Lanterns could do their jobs. Nothing that anyone who was alive during the Battle of Nanjing wouldn't have remembered to put in their charter.

The Justice League could act as members of any legitimate law enforcement agency, and any legitimate law enforcement agency would assist them, accept their help and advice, and counsel them if the League appeared to be making mistakes.

The fear begins to subside a bit as you start to think more clearly. Not many people had seen or heard what happened. Even if the reporter who wrote the story knew everything, why wouldn't you not mention some embarrassing details if a Green Lantern's deputy made the request?

The Justice League wouldn't need to own the Star City Register for this to happen.

The Justice League's website had the same list of superheroes and affiliated organizations that were on the page the last time you checked, with the usual vague references to metahuman training programs and a computer program to help you figure out who you should actually call if you have a problem instead of the Justice League.

That program guides you to the phone number for Dreamland and a link to their website. This call was going to be traced, so you go over the Dreamland privacy policy (which is that you have none if you call them) and a bit on the prison itself.

"The Dreaming Prison" is located in a secret location usually guessed to be an island in Alaska. Superman had started it back when he was The Blur in 2001 to hold Meteor Freaks in Smallville. Access to the facility had been requested by multiple governments due to war criminals and supervillains who could not be safely contained, and the facility had swollen in the past few years as an alternative to less humane methods of control. Supplies and prisoners were delivered by Green Lantern herself or "2814-b" with occasional trips by boat or another League member when neither one was available. Superman had stepped down as the warden in 2007 to an unnamed successor who had sparked an impressive set of conspiracy theories. You don't need to check the League's answer for why the warden was unnamed on their website, it was always security concerns.

There are 198 proven high level assassinations since 1989. Judges and presidents, superheroes and CEOs. The League doesn't want that list growing at all, much less including their friends. That isn't even including the Ciara War, when metahumans were being tracked to their homes and murdered daily.

The prison roster is mostly boring. A third are from Smallville, and half of the rest are the usual collection of gang leaders, war criminals, and former dictators who had either requested asylum in or been remanded to the custody of Dreamland.

Icicle Junior, or "Cameron Mahkent" was one of the newest "residents" of Dreamland. Interestingly, he is rated with an 88% chance of being released. No murder charges or anything on that level, not like his father. Icicle Senior was a bad, bad man. Sociopath, mass murderer, European gang leader, and genius inventor behind modern refrigeration tech. Modern container ships would be impossible without Dr. Joar Mahkent's inventions making pykrete ships practical. Too bad it needs blue Meteor Rock, which explains his son, and arguably the good doctor's mental problems. God, you got far too close to that stuff back in Star City.

Time to make a phone call.

---

"Hey gorgeous!" The voice is excited. "This has never happened to me before. Like, you called me! This is so much better than Sophomore Homecoming!" You can't help but smile at his enthusiasm.

"I kicked Speedy's ass for you, later," You tell Icicle Jr. There's a long silence on the end of the line.

"Are you for real?" The tone is reverent. He's adorable.

"You said you wanted in, so I didn't intervene on the bridge," You lie. "But they were just so rude. What else was I to do?"

"You. Have. Superpowers!" This is awesome. Man, Dad won't believe this! All the chicks in here are just scary, but a girl with powers on the outside?" You feel a tad objectified.

"I'm wondering, basically, how to get into the Biz." You drawl a bit, just because it's fun. "You know, the supervillain biz." Cameron laughs on the other end of the line.

"It's not like we have meetings, babe. I've met three in my life, counting my dad and not counting you. There's hardly any gangs left these days, since the Blur went to the FBI. There's no way they should have let him testify. The Supreme Court is broken. Anyway, what contacts are you looking for, exactly?"

"I knocked out one superhero and almost killed another one. I am not interested in prison, regular or Alaskan. Also, you can't just go making gold these days, you'd get laughed out of a pawn shop and shouted out of a jewelers. So..."

"You want to stay under the radar, make money, and not get caught. I think I know a guy for you out in Pennsylvania, the one who called me about this gig." Gig?

"That doesn't exactly sound encouraging." He laughs.

"Erie, Pennsylvania. Given, well, Molly's listening in I won't tell you more than that. But he's the real deal. He'll find you."

"Thank you, Cameron. Um, won't, you know, this 'Molly' call the police on me?" He laughs again.

"If you didn't already have an escape plan you wouldn't have called." You like this boy.

"Bye bye." You hang up and walk out. New car, new color, new details, new license plate. Time to drive.

[X] You're going to take a plane. Best not to give anyone time to track you down or notice behavior patterns. One big risk and you'll be in Pennsylvania.

[X] Cross country driving is risky, but what else could you do? You can change your car, no one will look for one like this. Tinted windows, a hat and hood, you should be fine.

[X] You are not looking forward to a cross country hike, but you're a supervillain. No one is going to find you this way.