Feathered Foes [Hawkgirl]

[Oswald Cobblepot]

Gotham was lousy with heroes. It was practically infested with them. For every one that put on a cape and got gunned down another seemed to pop up in their place. Most were easy to dispatch. The organised criminal element in the city was not one which suffered amateurs out looking for revenge for whatever slight they'd had in their otherwise benign lives that pushed them over the edge. Every so often though someone new popped up and stuck around. Gotham favoured the tough and the durable. For a hero to survive their first few encounters with the gangs and street thugs they needed an edge but to survive an encounter with one of the rogues they needed something special. Wings and a wild swing of a mace apparently was doing the trick.

Word had gotten around and naturally if there was talk in Gotham then Cobblepot wanted to hear it. A woman with wings was an instant fascination for the man of birds, though he did criticise the name. Hawkgirl? Had the people who came up with this even seen a hawks wings? The plumage was completely off for a start, never mind the changes in muscle structure needed to account for the difference in body shape and take off. It was a rant Oswald could have engaged in at length but it was wasted on his men.

Had situations been different he might have wished to meet her, a woman who could soar like his beloved birds sounded like a thing of dreams but Oswald had seen the fickle nature of dreaming many times and it was clear that this woman was intent on 'cleaning up the city' so unfortunately she would have to go. Perhaps he could still rescue her wings from the aftermath and take some solace from their study.



Getting a hero to show up for a disaster was almost as easy as getting Joker to choose chaos. Getting one particular hero, and especially not Batman, to show up however was considerably more difficult, requiring careful planning and a generous amount of bird watching. Oswald had been watching Hawkgirl for some time. She wasn't too difficult to track, the wings really did stand out and it wasn't hard to spy from afar someone who flew practically everywhere but the Penguin did have a slight edge on establishing an eye in the sky to help with his own winged companions.

With an abundance of pigeons in the city Oswald had steadily been branching out in to a mobile network of cameras on every rooftop and statue in Gotham. Pigeons had always been ideal creatures for covert missions, they were smart and everyone ignored them. They did have a tendency to scatter at loud noises but Oswald would never train them to stay in danger. Getting together the necessary equipment and shrinking it down to fit even a small fraction with disguised cameras had taken more time but Oswald was becoming somewhat of an expert at hiding small and complicated devices thanks to his work with umbrellas and now from the comfort of a random office block in the city the Penguin was accessing a whole new level of sticking his nose in where it didn't belong.

Oswald had the intel to draw up a trap, he had a plan to test exactly how far this Hawkgirl could be stretched or kill her trying. He'd had it in place for weeks but called it off multiple times already because it required him to know the location of several people in Gotham and to ensure they were busy in addition to Hawkgirl being airborne and in the right area but today it appeared the planets were aligning.

He was set up in a corner office on the twelfth floor of a building who on paper at least was housing Histiro Tech Ltd, a company that Cobblepot had made up and owned at arms length. It was staffed mostly by criminals but had a solid core of computer people that the Penguin was paying more than he'd like to do things he was still getting his head around. In the new digital age business had to move with the times, even if his wardrobe didn't. Still, there was something to be said for a good old fashioned pair of binoculars and a trigger switch.

Everything was in place. Oswald was safely hidden away in his building, out of the line of fire and action and he had a good view of the city sky line below him. He could see the winged woman in the sky, he'd run through every possible thing likely to go wrong and while never a zero chance Oswald considered them a minimal risk. At worst he didn't believe this could be pinned on him, he'd laid so many false trails in the bomb make up it could keep the police busy for months chasing dead ends. Some of the people who lived there were in deep with the mobs and could easily have a dozen enemies, he'd tried to pick his target to be as confusing as possible. All he had to do was flip the switch...

Oswald felt nothing for the people in the apartment building as he set off the bomb on the fourth floor. The explosion killed three people instantly, that of the apartment's inhabitance and the young man who lived next door. The elderly woman upstairs was injured and trapped, as were several people on the upper floors as the blast took out not only the stairs but engulphed the fire escape in flames, encouraged by some ill thought out garden furniture on the third floor. People began screaming as they tried to run anywhere and somewhere in the middle of the burning wreckage, at the press of a button from Oswald, the sound of a baby crying began to lure the brave in to danger.

[Shayera Hol]

Bit by bit Hawkgirl was becoming accustomed to this new city. In many ways, it was exactly the same, except there was more of everything. More, taller buildings and more, larger crimes. And to a certain degree, it wasn't all that difficult for her to adjust. Though St. Roch had been its own challenge, the challenge there had been learning how to live and work with humans - their language, their culture, and all the little nuances of how to be a winged alien woman living among them without accidentally being terrifying. The challenge had certainly not been physical - not usually, anyway. Patrolling a city the size of St. Roch had hardly tested her endurance, and the gangs and street thugs had been no match for her fighting ability. And though there was more of everything in Gotham so she'd had to step up what she was doing, that hadn't been a problem - at least so far.

Then again, so far she'd had minimal dealings with some of Gotham's more... unusual residents. Partly because she normally operated during the day and that was not the schedule many followed. Still, perhaps some were simply hesitant to face this new element patrolling the skies over Gotham. That wasn't something she cared to think about very much, though. Having only been in the city for a few weeks, she felt like she was still learning the ropes and didn't quite feel like it was time to step up her game even further by going beyond the low-hanging fruit unless she had a particular reason to. That would come later.

And though she was generally aware that there were bigger fish to fry and that those bigger fish were probably not happy with her presence in the city, she wasn't aware of the attention one in particular was giving her. In fact, she didn't have the slightest idea who he was. Perhaps someone would have given her a quick rundown of everyone she might want to know about, including him, but that hadn't been something she'd been curious about. Having been on more planets and dealt with more aliens than she could ever name or number, she had some combination of competence and arrogance about her ability to handle problems without having to be warned about them beforehand.

He was perfectly correct about her wings, though. She didn't have the broad, soaring wings of a hawk, but narrow, tapered wings like a sparrow - clearly designed for speed and agility. But also, her wingspan was too short by half given what her body weight appeared to be, so it would also be easy to argue she had no business flying at all, let alone well.

Still, arguments about her wings or not, ever since her arrival in Gotham she was easily spotted soaring above Gotham on the daily - at least if you knew what to look for. During her patrols, the route varying every day, she preferred to soar about a thousand feet above the ground - high enough to obscure any sense of scale to someone on the ground, making it difficult for someone who didn't know what they were looking at to not mistake her for an ordinary bird, but not too high for her to easily make out what was happening down at ground level. It was also high enough that she could fly right over most of Gotham's skyscrapers, making any attempt to track her movements by observing her from the ground nearly impossible, but as a good dozen or so buildings were even higher and she made no attempt to avoid them she clearly wasn't making any real attempt to hide - anyone regularly at a height to where they could see her properly was becoming accustomed to spotting her from time to time.

Though even they couldn't observe her movements all the time, even with binoculars, so equipping pigeons with cameras was an eccentric but not completely ridiculous way to keep an eye on her. Especially since pigeons didn't seem to see her as a predator like they would an actual hawk. Their instincts had no idea what she was, but whatever she was probably preferred to eat things far larger than a pigeon. Hawkgirl, in turn, ignored pigeons about just as much as anyone else in the city. Just because she was in some ways more like a bird than humans were didn't mean that she cared about them any more than most.

So when she suddenly heard an explosion, she had no idea that it was all a part of a plan. She didn't even view it as suspicious - human technology was rather primitive, after all, and it was more surprising to her that it didn't explode more often. And figuring out what exploded and who to blame for it wasn't her area of expertise anyway. Noticing things first was, but in this case, she instantly figured it would be redundant to try to alert anyone - that's something the humans would easily do themselves in this case. So instead she put her full attention on the thing she could do but they could not: getting in there immediately and saving lives.

And what caught her attention first, even as she approached the building, were the flames on the fire escape. Even without knowing that the staircase inside was compromised, she knew that was a problem. This wasn't the first time she'd had to deal with a building on fire, and the things were death traps even when their safety features weren't compromised. It also wasn't that difficult of a problem to fix: it took her all of a moment to glance down as she landed on the fire escape near the flames to be sure there weren't any unexpected people lingering directly below it, then use her mace to attack the garden furniture. She had to be careful not to accidentally hit the fire escape itself in the process because the weapon was absolutely powerful enough in her hands to destroy the strong, metal structure. The flimsy garden furniture took only one hit to crumble and she purposely aimed that blow to throw it over the side.

The fire escape cleared, she jumped off the fire escape, only to push herself higher with her wings. This was the tricky part: Injured people, panicked people, chaos, impossible to tell where she was most needed first. She has to guess and make choices, later comforting herself about any imperfect choices by pointing out to herself that those she did manage to help did get her help, at least. A look into the 4th floor revealed enough unidentifiable wreckage and flames to indicate that it was the location of the explosion. Low chance of survival there, and she didn't immediately hear anything indicating life, so her wings pushed her higher. 5th floor - a trapped, elderly woman was immediately visible. She's first, then.

Landing back on the fire escape, first she looked up to yell "The fire escape is clear!" She wasn't sure how far her voice would carry but, hopefully, it would calm the panic and help focus some attention in a good direction. She then took half a second to brace herself before heading inside for the first time. Only half a second, but she needed the time. Not because she was bothered by fire, but because these sorts of places are painfully small and tight inside. Focusing her attention on the old woman, she focused instead on why she needed to be there and not the dimensions. Forcing herself through the window quickly, she channeled her discomfort into getting back out again as soon as possible. But as she was about to remove the rubble trapping the woman she heard it: a baby's cry.

A fake baby cry. Modern digital audio was designed for human ears, not hers, and to her the difference was clear. But why would there be a fake baby cry in this building right now? Almost as quickly as she identified the sound, her years of military experience told her: It's a lure. This explosion is a trap. But that's all she could conclude at that moment. Other important questions like who the trap is meant for didn't occur to her. Partly because none of that would really change her actions now. Whether it's for her or for anyone else, what does that change? Does she sit back and not try to save who she can? Of course not!

It only took a moment for these realizations to hit her, but she immediately moved to save the old woman. She wanted to pinpoint the exact location of the fake baby cry and get everyone far away from it as soon as possible - not even knowing what the lure was meant to do she could guess it was bad to go to it - but she'd hardly turn away from rescuing the old woman. It wouldn't take a minute to move the rubble, grab the woman, carry her outside, and safely to the ground. And either that minute wouldn't matter or she didn't have time to do something better either.