HOME | DD

Description

JLA DOSSIER

n. RNL - 220976 NTR

CIVILIAN NAME

Barbara Nicole Gordon

SUPERHERO IDENTITY

Oracle

PERSONAL AND PHYSICAL DATA

Born: September 10, 1967
Age: 35
Civilian profession: book-keeper and martial arts teacher for the studentswith disabilities of the Mirai dojo
Marital status: in a relationship with Ma Kai
Birthplace: Chicago (IL)
Height: 170 cm (5' 8")
Weight: 61 kg (135 lbs.)
Eye color: vale green
Hair color: red
Measurements: 34DD - 25 - 36
Blood type: AB+
Shoe size: 9½ US female
Distinguishing features: paralyzed but not insensitive lower body

STATUS IN THE METAHUMAN COMMUNITY

- Former member of the US field black ops team Task Force X, a.k.a. "Suicide Squad", qualified as Deputy Director and IT manager;

- Associate member of the Justice League of America since 1996, qualified as main supervisor of all matters concerning intelligence, cybersecurity and digital communications;

- Co-founder (and originator) of the super-team known as Birds of Prey (active: 1994-2000), the group has never officially announced its formal disbandment and is therefore classified as "inactive";

- Alpha/2 access privilege to confidential data relative to planetary security;

- In direct contact with every recognized and unrecognized superhero organizations all over the world.

ORIGIN

1. The Right Woman. After earning her Ph.D. in Telecommunications at just 21 years of age, the life of young Barbara Gordon was rerouted to very unexpected tracks: those of politics. Under recommendation by his daughter, who had passed all of her math-related exams at university thanks to Barbara, a big wheel of the Gotham City Democratic machine managed to get her to become his party's candidate for a seat in the New Jersey General Assembly representing the most affluent district of the metropolis. The previous Assemblyman had been hit by one scandal too many and the election had the chance to become really competitive if the candidate hadn't been a clean-cut figure the likes of Barbara, already a very mature person with quite the magnetic personality and a father that was also the Police Commissioner (which was hardly detrimental). And the gamble succeeded. On November 7, 1989, Barbara Nicole Gordon was elected to the 205th legislative session of the NJ Assembly by a comfortable margin, becoming one of the youngest legislators in the country.

2. A Rising Star. Her freshman term in the lower house turned out to be a very satifying one for the young woman. Those were the years of the birth of the World Wide Web and a computer nerd like her moved heaven and earth to make her colleagues aware that a revolution was coming and that their state should be for the key role information technology would have soon fulfilled in every corner of public administration. The results had been encouraging and everybody in Trenton was sure that Miss Gordon would have landed a seat in one or more Committees no later than her second term in office.

Unfortunately, that second term never came.

3. Bad Jokes. One month before the 1991 election day, while she was taking a break from her campaigning activities to visit her father (her stepmother, Detective Sarah Essen, was mercifully out of town that day) the psychotic criminal and mass murderer known only as The Joker appeared on the doorstep of Commissioner James Gordon, shot his daughter in the abdomen causing irreparable damage to her spinal column and kidnapped him. The Joker was found only one day later, hiding in the abandoned carnival he had turned into his base. The levels of psychological and physical torture he had inflicted on his latest victim were horrendous. More than a decade spent terrorizing the citizenship of Gotham meant that his trial could have ended only one way, with the death sentence, but severing one life would have done nothing to fix the shattered lives of the Gordons.

4. Useless. Nobody in the city's Democratic Party would have ever thought to ask Miss Gordon to renounce her candidacy (especially since her numbers had gone up since her incident) just because she couldn't walk anymore: it was Barbara's own decision to stand down. Her body was definitively compromised, but she felt like she desperately needed time to heal her mind and at the same time help her poor father. But the inaction she was forced into didn't do any favors to her condition and by the end of the year Barbara was showing the first worrying signs of depression.

5. Feeling Suicidal. Then she received a visit from a mysterious woman. She presented herself as Amanda Waller and she apparently occupied a position in the federal government that couldn't even be enunciated outside of few select rooms in Washington D.C. She had read very good things about Miss Gordon's academic work and knew about her constant urging to keep on the lookout for the incoming IT revolution on the world stage. To cut the long story short, Barbara was exactly the kind of person Ms. Waller needed for a position inside the department she supervised and gave her that one chance for becoming part of an experimental program which aimed at creating the ultimate hacker, so that the US government (and Waller in particular) could have had one or more of them at its disposal to keep secrets from going public in that era of exponentially-growing connectivity.

Before she could even finish articulating her offer, Barbara accepted.

METAHUMAN POWERS

None, but the cybernetic implants that keep her legs tonic pending (hopefully) a definitive cure for her paralysis make Barbara fall into the cyborg classification. She's therefore registered as a Category 7/III.

OTHER SKILLS

- Extremely developed logical-mathematical intelligence, coupled with far above-average linguistic intelligence, that made her quite an effective campaigner during her days as a politician though she admits that she's become much shier after the incident that confined her to a wheelchair. She claims to possess an eidetic memory but since the existence of such a skill is heavily disputed among experts it's just possible that her mnemonic skills are just more developed than in the average person;

- A very talented karateka in her teen years, following her confinement to the wheelchair she developed her own personal fighting style consisting of consolidated self-defense techniques that are normally taught to people with motor disabilities and moves that she conceived and perfectioned all by herself. This style, jokingly christened "Babs-Jitsu" by Dinah Lance, is complemented by dual-wielding batons, which she handles with extreme dexterity, almost as if she were ambidextrous.

LIMITATIONS

- Since Barbara's relationship with psychoanalysts has been on pretty poor terms from her time in high school, the origin of her many issues with interacting with other human beings has been subject of wild speculation from her many colleagues and few close friends over the years. Dinah, the only person in the world who can honestly maintain to know Babs even better than Babs knows herself, thinks that her best friend's bouts of misanthropy and lack of empathy verging on full-blown ruthlessness stem not from the trauma inflicted on her by the Joker (the most common interpretation), but rather from her abandonment issues caused by her mother leaving her, her father and Gotham City with her 3-year-old brother James Jr. in tow she she was just 9. These issues were left to fester inside young Barbara, not helped by an often absent father figure, who was so busy with his crusade to clean the GCPD that even the only offspring that had stayed with him sometimes had to slide down the pecking order of his priorities. The fact that in present day, more than a quarter century after her mother and younger brother left to go back to Chicago, she still adamantly refuses to meet them despite their many pleads, especially in the years immediately following her injury to the spinal column, could be seen as a conformation of Dinah's theory;

- Despite her many intellectual gifts, she's always been considerably impaired whenever it came to learn and speak foreign languages. While she's perfectly capable of studying and assimilating the rules of a language, she's never mastered the "art" of pronouncing phonemes who are absent in English and stringing together foreign words in way that sounded natural, so that every time she tries speaking even an Indo-European language the likes of French or Spanish what comes out of her mouth sounds terribly stilted and with sounds all over the place. Since she came to terms with her linguistic ineptitude a long time ago, Kai's attempts at teaching Barbara Cantonese and the dialect of Gannan Prefecture are mostly a way to hear all the ways his fiancée is able to distort even the simplest sentences, so that they can get a laugh from them.

SEXUALITY

Purely heterosexual behavior. Her romantic life as a teenager was uncharacteristically sterile, to the point that her high school counselor suggested that she might suffer from Asperger Syndrome (she was a very poor counselor). That radically changed during her college years, when she was seduced by Jason Bard, offensive guard of the Gotham University football team and the erotic dream of every female acquaintance of hers. It was a very happy period for her, since that relationship propelled her to 'cool girl' status and the intense sexual life that came with it (her boyfriend was gifted with quite an impressive manhood and exceptionally skilled at using it) was a veritable psychological boost for her to pass her exams in record time. Unfortunately her happiness only lasted to the end of her sophomore year, when she realized that Jason's attraction for her was just skin-deep and that he was starting to grow bored of her and to look for new options (of the one-night stand kind). Barbara dumped him quite unceremoniously and she decided to take a long pause from romance, at least until she could finish her studies.

She did eventually re-open her heart to love but only when she was 30 and even then her first real relationship after the one with Jason Bard was a very inconclusive affair (unfortunately for her sweetheart, Ted "Blue Beetle II" Kord, who had focused very hard on making that relationship work). Things started looking up on that front in late 2000, during her stay in Hong Kong, when she met Ma Kai. That man, nine years younger than her, almost unnaturally beautiful and with a magnetic look that many superheroes would have killed to possess, was the first man in years to leave her immediately smitten. And in very characteristic Babs' fashion, she contacted Martian Manhunter to ask if he could check if she was under the effect of a mild form of mind control, since she had forgotten how it felt being dictated by the primitive part of her brain to pursue another person and do whatever it may have taken to succeed. As far as she's concerned, without Kai she'd still have to reach an adult understanding of the feeling of love after the relationship with Jason had shattered her adolescent view on the matter.

With her best friends being enthusiastic practitioners of bondage, she decided to give it a try to see if it could add a little 'spice' to her current relationship, an idea supported by Kai who has a very open mind when it comes to experimenting new things in the bedroom. It ultimately didn't play out as well as with Barbara's friends, since she found out that she makes for quite a poor dominatrix (though at least her 'trial period' earned her a nifty sexy leather outfit which she was gifted by Helena) and Kai somehow manages to be even more awkward than her in that role. To make up for it, during their many experiments they found out that they both felt their arousal growing when they knew that there was a video camera filming then during sex. Today, Barbara and Kai have amassed quite an impressive collection of self-produced porn DVD's (they're the real hot stuff now!) and they have four different cameras in as many different points of their bedroom so to give some variety to the finished product.

SPIRITUALITY

Agnostic. By her own admission, she never had the drive to take an interest in religion or spiritual matters in general. Things have slightly changed from the moment she began her relationship with Kai, who's instead very religious. While a conversion is very unlikely to happen, her resolution to know more about Islam made her more knowledgeable about the Muslim faith and tenets and the many ways they're declined across the Ummah than she would have ever thought possible.

KEY MOMENTS

Her first collaboration with the Justice League of America was an experience she has always felt very ambivalent about to this day. JLA Chairman Captain Atom couldn't stand the US government's policy to back the pan-Arab intervention to crush the young Revolutionary Republic of Dubai, with the immeasurable loss of human lives (of people who had been forced into quasi-slavery after being lured into UAE territory, no less) that would have inevitably followed it. Coordinating his efforts with select elements of the Middle-Eastern and South Asian superheroic communities (many of the revolutionaries were born in India or Pakistan), Operation Almond Tree was launched, its objective being the rescue of as many people with ties to the revolutionary government as possible, who, after the precipitous escape of the Dubai natives mere months before, made up nearly 100% of the population of the small country.

With every Leaguer busy with this definitely not US-sponsored operation, Captain Atom asked the legendary Oracle, the woman who had teared down the Wall, the faceless sensation of the hacker community, to supervise and direct the efforts of the many rescue teams. Barbara accepted. Everything went more or less smoothly until the very last day, when the last two cargo boats put out to sea escorted by Deputy JLA Chairwoman Power Girl. Aside from the usual shipments of refugees, one of them also carried Ms. Zainab Daudpota, President (whatever that meant by then) of the Republic of Dubai, the woman who had committed the unforgivable sins of showing to the Western world that slavery was still a very real thing in the late XX century and being really good at attracting sympathies even from people who could have done something to preserve the new Dubai. It shouldn't really come as a surprise that she had made many enemies in the Arabian peninsula, enemies who wanted her dead above all things.

About one mile into the voyage to a safe port, two kamikaze boats carrying substantial amounts of semtex were unleashed against the cargo ships escorted by Power Girl, who would have been strong and fast enough to dispose of both of them before they could inflict any damage if it hadn't been for a fatal order coming from Oracle. From an encrypted message that she had fortuitously discovered amid the mass of communications she intercepted every minute, she had found out that the the forces of the Arab Coalition had arranged for a double attack on the ship carrying President Daudpota, one in the form of the kamikaze boat, the other from below. Power Girl's new mission was to nullify the threat presented by the explosive craft and then to dive into the Persian Gulf and find the unspecified underwater menace, Daudpota's survival unfortunately having the precedence over the lives on board of the other cargo ship. In a tragic twist of fate, the message was actually a misdirection by the Arabs (who had realized that somebody was listening to all of their communications) to cover for a hired gun who was hiding amongst the refugees below deck and sprang into action as soon as the American superheroine disappeared under the surface of the sea, looking for something that wasn't there. Daudpota and nearly one thousand peple aboard the second ship tragically perished on that sad day.

Operation Almond Tree caused a terrible backlash from the American government against the JLA, which came dangerously close to being accused of outright treason. Things were so grim that a rehearsal of the 1951 audit by the House Committee on Un-American Activities that had ended the Justice Society of America was looking more and more plausible. Some heads had to roll. Quickly.

In the end, Power Girl was the first to catch the bullet so that it didn't hit the whole team. She resigned from the League four days after the incident and spent the following months coping with a form of PTSD. Captain Atom followed her two days later, explaining that he regretted nothing about his initiative but at the same time realizing that staying as leader would have done no favors to the organization. These resignations paved the way for the election of Wallace West (a.k.a. the Flash III) to the Chairmanship and the complete overhaul of the League's structure between 1996 and 1997. Part of this overhaul was offering Oracle a position inside the organization as the new figure who would have managed all JLA matters related to intelligence, cybersecurity and digital communications, since apart from the final oversight her handling of Operation Almond Tree had been top-notch and she was already a member of the superhero community, given her role as one half of the Birds of Prey.

Because of this sequence of events, Barbara's chances at enjoying a healthy professional-- let alone personal-- relationship with Karen Kent were seemingly irreparably ruined. Barbara feels incredibly guilty about all those deaths but cannot see what she could have done differently to prevent them while Karen kind of agrees that most people would have fallen for that trap but cannot stop ruminating on the fact that without Oracle directing her actions on that faithful day she could have saved everyone on both ships and that any decent person would have turned down West's offer.

OUTSTANDING FEATS

She was almost immediately involved by Jason Bard in his project for a self-defense course reserved to disabled people, so that the students affected by motor disabilities could be assisted by somebody who had a better understanding of their situation. Initially she was very reticent about accepting Jason's offer since she just couldn't see herself as a teacher. Despite quite the rocky start (complete with coming dangerously close to a panic attack in front of her pupils during the first lesson), she ultimately adapted to the role and is today well-liked by all of her students. From her point of view, this outcome is likely the most outastanding feat she's ever accomplished in all of her life, surpassing even the greatest accomplishments she achieved in her Oracle identity. Her close friends Dinah and Helena seem to agree across the board.

FUN FACTS

- Her only serious argument with Black Canary with a subject unrelated to mission planning happened when Dinah "my body is a temple" Lance found out that her best friend was a regular cannabis smoker and felt the need to help her 'find her way' again. With no success. Barbara had picked up that habit during her tenure in the Task Force X. Surprisingly, it wasn't because of the stress of the job, nor she was introduced to it by the shady personalities (to put it kindly) she was always surrounded by, but rather from Mari Jiwe McCabe, a.k.a. Vixen, the only heroine who ever volunteered to become an operative of the notoriious Suicide Squad. She was the only person Barbara developed a thing that could be vaguely identified as friendship over the course of those two long years, though both women preferred to refer to it as "a cordial relationship between two smoking buddies". Mari, who was born in central Africa and had escaped her war-torn country in 1980 to come to the US, had been involved in the mid-Eighties, aged 17, in the so-called 'Justice League Detroit', an attempt by Aquaman and Martian Manhunter to return the JLA to more straightforward ideals of heroism, after Green Lantern's war against the Reagan administration had shattered the aura of political neutrality that had been a fundamental principle of the insitution when it was founded. The experiment had only been half-successful at best, as proven by Mari's situation at the time. Still, making the acquaintance of that woman was Barbara's official introduction to the superhero community and the ideals that drove people from all over the world to wear a costume and start making a difference. After assuming the identity of Oracle, she tried many times to recruit Mari for her Birds of Prey team, since her metahuman powers (a connection to the Earth's morphogenetic field, channeled through a mystical artifact in her possession) would have been a great power boost to the BoP roster, but Mari proved to be more elusive than the animal she shared a name with. On the other hand she never refused her help if Dinah, Helena or both happened to be on a mission close to her whereabouts and in serious need of assistance;

- Her long stay in Southern China did very little to change her sedentary lifestyle (formed over years of being a heroine of the cyberspace) once she came back to Gotham City in early 2002 with the man that had become her soul mate. To the dismay of Dinah and Helena, she's so far turned down all of their proposals for the big Birds-only vacation the other two so keenly want ever since they received the news that their red-headed friend had grown weary of Hong Kong. Her main transfers happen on the Old Gotham-Robbinsville sky train route, whenever she wishes to see her father and stepmother. The former has by now completely recovered from his psychological scars (the physical ones are a different matter, as the awkward way he moves his right limbs attests) and he is in a way in the police force again, having been elected president of the Gotham City Police Officers Association as a compromise candidate in late 2001;

- Her relationship with Sarah Essen Gordon, current liaison between the GCPD and City Hall and her stepmother, has gone through many stages over the years. She started dating her father in 1979, when Sarah was a young detective who had been partnered with veteran Lt. James Gordon, who had by then been separated from his wife for six years. At 12 years of age, Barbara was already wise enough to recognize that her father had every right to find somebody special in his life again. She might have been jealous of him like every daddy's little girl would but she tried her best to be civil and even friendly with Detective Essen, who for her part proved to be a really kind person with the daughter of her fiancée. Barbara might have wished for earth to swallow her whole every time one of her classmates made a comment about the youthful look / hotness of her "mom" (though in their defense Sarah's red hair and green eyes were always bound to generate confusion about their actual relationship) on the days when she picked her up after school because her father couldn't, but things went along pretty swimmingly between the two of them for a couple of years. Things drastically changed in 1982 when James Gordon was promoted to the rank of police commissioner of Gotham City, with all the new responsibilities and workload that the position entailed. Him coming back at home suddenly gradually became a more and more sporadic event and while he tried his best to prevent his teenaged daughter from feeling neglected, Barbara became more and more envious of Sarah because of the time they could spend together at the police precinct that had been denied to her. And while she was already mature enough to realize that holding a grudge against somebody who wasn't actively trying to undermine her relationship with her father was wholly irrational and not constructive at all, she was still an adolescent who had a hard time keeping her emotions completely in check. Daddy's little girl became more and more independent, mostly unconcerned with the things her father and Sarah did in private.

It was only in the period between her graduation and the beginning of her political career that she started mending her relationship with her father, who had very much suffered the emotional estrangement between the two of them in the previous years, though she still refused to go back to seeing Sarah as a member of the family. Barbara's visits home invariably took place when her father's fiancée was overloaded with work or out of Gotham altogether and it was during one of them that the Joker struck. Over the months her father and she spent in hospital, Barbara had the chance to witness all the love and care Sarah poured on her beloved James, whose recovery from all the traumatic experiences he had undergone would have taken years and was not guaranteed to be total. That made her realize that maybe, just maybe, if the other important woman in her father's life had been at home that day, things might have gone in a different way. Blaming herself for the tragic events of that night was utterly absurd, but becoming suddenly unable to feel anything below one's waistline can really skew a person's perspective. By the time Amanda Waller came knocking at Ms. Gordon's door, poor Barbara couldn't even muster enough courage to call Sarah and ask how her father was doing. She was so full of remorse because of how unfairly she had treated her that she thought that her life with her father would have been much better without the involvement of his useless daughter.

Barbara would have come back to Gotham City only in January 1994, but somehow the time she spent in Task Force X had managed to heal her spirit. The first thing she did, even before beginning to prepare the watchtower she had bought to become the base of Oracle, was to visit her father and Sarah. To her immense relief, she found the former in a much better shape than she had left him two years before, at least psychologically if not physically. But most importantly, ex-commissioner James Gordon welcomed his daughter in his new home like the prodigal son of the parable and to this day he has never held against her that she had by all means abandoned him, invalid in mind and body, and never even written a letter to let him know that she was alive and well. It was in that moment that Sarah Essen, the main driving force behind that miraculous recovery and, as Barbara later learnt, the lack of any kind of resentment in her father's attitude towards her, stopped being a target of her envy, a home wrecker or her much worthier replacement as the most important woman in Jim Gordon's life and just became the family member she had always wished to become, ever since Barbara was a 12-year-old girl. That got even truer on the summer of that same year, when she got a marriage proposal from the man who had been her companion in good times and in bad for the previous fifteen years;

- She's the undisputed queen of the down-to-earth reply inside the American (possibly global) superhero community. Superheroism being a field of work that deeply wallows in symbolism, everyone always expects any action from a mask to hold some deeper meaning that the latter will be very willing to explain to those who can't really get it. That's definitely not the case for Barbara Gordon. Why did she choose the South Gotham Clocktower as her home and operational base when she came back to the city? Why, of course because it was the only building she could afford that was as large as she needed and guaranteed unimpeded access to disabled people. Why did she choose the Huntress, of all professional heroes, first as Black Canary's replacement while she healed up from some nasty injuries and then as the Birds' third member? The profile of the Italian vigilante had been submitted to her by an algorithm she had coded just for that kind of evenience, Helena being the best match for the kind of missions she usually entrusted to Dinah and it was by chance that the two of them ended up enjoying Helena's company enough to decide to 'enlarge the family'. Her honesty is always well appreciated, but it's clear that she's not really interested in the subtleties of superheroics;

- She's the only denizen of 96 Gorfinkel Street who doesn't follow the place's dress code (first and only article: "thou shalt be barefoot at all times while indoors"), strictly enforced by Dinah and Helena. The reason of course is that, since she needs a wheelchair to move around, Barbara's lower extremities always lie on the chair's footrests and thus do not touch the ground. Enforcing their rule on somebody who does not actually tread the floors of the building would be preposterous. Especially for two persons who know better than anyone else in the world how well their friend reacts to completely arbitrary stances entirely dictated by personal preferences, like Dinah's crusade against shoes.

CONFIDENTIAL INFO

- She's always been reticent to the extreme about the details of her time working under Amanda Waller in the department supervising the activities of the Task Force X, a.k.a. the Suicide Squad. The only things which are known for sure are (1) that Amanda and Barbara originally enjoyed an excellent working relationship and in fact the latter saw the ill-famed 'Wall' as a mentor figure and (2) that she was directly responsible for the dismantlement of the project of using imprisoned super-villains as human weapons at the disposal of the US government, with the help of several of said super-villains. The details surrounding these two truths are very confused, both because only Dinah Lance out of the whole superhero community knows the unabridged story, having heard it from Barbara herself and then taken an oath of secrecy, and because the accounts released by the criminals (those who lived to be able to release anything, at least) who allegedly helped her in 'taking down the Wall' are highly inconsistent. The other detail that's leaked out over the years, thanks to the mandatory medical examinations imposed to all League members, is that Barbara underwent two high-risk but potentially high-reward experimental treatment to heal her spinal column and let her take back control of her lower limbs. The first one, which utilized human stem cells hybridized with their Martian counterparts, was only partially successful, since she reacquired sensitivity under the waist but not control, though it also had the effect of removing all traces of the bullet's entry hole from her skin. The second one instead aimed at preventing excessive muscular decay in her legs and left her with one hundred small cyborg implants all over her lower half that take care of her muscular fibers and blood circulation in the hope that a new treatment can solve all of her issues;

- The years spent observing from the inside the way the gears of the American deep state moved and the eternal struggle between agencies was a really educational experience for the future Oracle, who came out of that period perfectly aware of the chances which that chaotic, backstabbing world could present to somebody who knew how to move without leaving too much of a trail. It's not a set of skills that Barbara can employ very often. In fact, she'd rather never have to resort to manipulation of forces that can potentially bring forward wanton death and destruction, but sometimes she may find the resolve to decide that it's the only way to put an end to a particularly thorny situation. For example, that was definitely the case with notorious drug lord Chakan 'Jackie' Pajapalakornkul, who was completely wiped out from the map with his little 'cottage industry' after he had ended up in Barbara's crosshairs due to his treatment of Dinah, Jason and other three dozen men and women (the only survivors of that violent retaliation) who had been kidnapped and reduced to slavery to blackmail their loved ones. With the assistance of an entire folder of counterfeit aerial and satellite pictures, a backdoor she had left in the computers of the Pentagon and three phone calls to as many middle-ranked bureaucrats in Washington D.C., she was able to bring the fury of the USAF Special Forces onto Jackie's criminal racket, wiping out him and everyone in his entourage. While nobody could find an explanation for the lack of a uranium refinery in the surroundings of his mansion, it was hard to ignore the kidnapped men and women (some of whom were American citizens) working as slaves in the man's poppy fields. To this day, nobody in the United States intelligence community has yet realized that the whole thing had been orchestrated by Oracle.

PEER REVIEW

Dinah: "Oracle and Canary forever, bay-bay! What else can I say? I've put my life into her hands so many times that even the expression 'best friend forever' feels painfully small."

Helena: "The relationship between Babs and Dinah is the paradigm of the way a relationship between two sisters should be. She and I, well, we're closer to the way a relationship between two sisters actually is! But no matter how loud we yell at each other, no matter how many insults we sling at each other, we can't imagine a life without each other."

Jason: "Had I been a better man when I was in college, I would have done everything to deserve her. Luckily I had the chance to show her that I recognized how right she was about that Jason Bard."

Kai: "I want to be her husband. It doesn't matter if history won't remember me: as long as that happens, it'll mean that the light of pure happiness will have existed for some time in this complicated and often sad world."

Karen: "I think there's been a misunderstanding. I actually hold nothing against Barbara. In my hands. In this instant."

Ray: "She's a member of the JLA, she got them-- and, therefore, us-- out of trouble more times that I could ever know and maybe one every million people knows about what she does. All of this while refusing to be held down by her disability. I feel proud for every moment my daughter spends in her company."

Terry: "Our relationship definitely didn't get off on the right foot, to be honest. But then I once heard her mentioning how Kai had 're-opened her heart to love' and I realized that maybe trying again, with a more open mind, would have been worth the effort."

{ AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've never been a fan of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl... there, I said it. On the other hand, I've always loved her Oracle identity. And in this Batman-less world, I could turn Babs into Oracle without going through the cape & cowl phase! The benefits of creating alternate continuities, I suppose. }

Description

JLA DOSSIER

n. RNL - 220976 NTR

CIVILIAN NAME

Barbara Nicole Gordon

SUPERHERO IDENTITY

Oracle

PERSONAL AND PHYSICAL DATA

Born: September 10, 1967
Age: 35
Civilian profession: book-keeper and martial arts teacher for the studentswith disabilities of the Mirai dojo
Marital status: in a relationship with Ma Kai
Birthplace: Chicago (IL)
Height: 170 cm (5' 8")
Weight: 61 kg (135 lbs.)
Eye color: vale green
Hair color: red
Measurements: 34DD - 25 - 36
Blood type: AB+
Shoe size: 9½ US female
Distinguishing features: paralyzed but not insensitive lower body

STATUS IN THE METAHUMAN COMMUNITY

- Former member of the US field black ops team Task Force X, a.k.a. "Suicide Squad", qualified as Deputy Director and IT manager;

- Associate member of the Justice League of America since 1996, qualified as main supervisor of all matters concerning intelligence, cybersecurity and digital communications;

- Co-founder (and originator) of the super-team known as Birds of Prey (active: 1994-2000), the group has never officially announced its formal disbandment and is therefore classified as "inactive";

- Alpha/2 access privilege to confidential data relative to planetary security;

- In direct contact with every recognized and unrecognized superhero organizations all over the world.

ORIGIN

1. The Right Woman. After earning her Ph.D. in Telecommunications at just 21 years of age, the life of young Barbara Gordon was rerouted to very unexpected tracks: those of politics. Under recommendation by his daughter, who had passed all of her math-related exams at university thanks to Barbara, a big wheel of the Gotham City Democratic machine managed to get her to become his party's candidate for a seat in the New Jersey General Assembly representing the most affluent district of the metropolis. The previous Assemblyman had been hit by one scandal too many and the election had the chance to become really competitive if the candidate hadn't been a clean-cut figure the likes of Barbara, already a very mature person with quite the magnetic personality and a father that was also the Police Commissioner (which was hardly detrimental). And the gamble succeeded. On November 7, 1989, Barbara Nicole Gordon was elected to the 205th legislative session of the NJ Assembly by a comfortable margin, becoming one of the youngest legislators in the country.

2. A Rising Star. Her freshman term in the lower house turned out to be a very satifying one for the young woman. Those were the years of the birth of the World Wide Web and a computer nerd like her moved heaven and earth to make her colleagues aware that a revolution was coming and that their state should be for the key role information technology would have soon fulfilled in every corner of public administration. The results had been encouraging and everybody in Trenton was sure that Miss Gordon would have landed a seat in one or more Committees no later than her second term in office.

Unfortunately, that second term never came.

3. Bad Jokes. One month before the 1991 election day, while she was taking a break from her campaigning activities to visit her father (her stepmother, Detective Sarah Essen, was mercifully out of town that day) the psychotic criminal and mass murderer known only as The Joker appeared on the doorstep of Commissioner James Gordon, shot his daughter in the abdomen causing irreparable damage to her spinal column and kidnapped him. The Joker was found only one day later, hiding in the abandoned carnival he had turned into his base. The levels of psychological and physical torture he had inflicted on his latest victim were horrendous. More than a decade spent terrorizing the citizenship of Gotham meant that his trial could have ended only one way, with the death sentence, but severing one life would have done nothing to fix the shattered lives of the Gordons.

4. Useless. Nobody in the city's Democratic Party would have ever thought to ask Miss Gordon to renounce her candidacy (especially since her numbers had gone up since her incident) just because she couldn't walk anymore: it was Barbara's own decision to stand down. Her body was definitively compromised, but she felt like she desperately needed time to heal her mind and at the same time help her poor father. But the inaction she was forced into didn't do any favors to her condition and by the end of the year Barbara was showing the first worrying signs of depression.

5. Feeling Suicidal. Then she received a visit from a mysterious woman. She presented herself as Amanda Waller and she apparently occupied a position in the federal government that couldn't even be enunciated outside of few select rooms in Washington D.C. She had read very good things about Miss Gordon's academic work and knew about her constant urging to keep on the lookout for the incoming IT revolution on the world stage. To cut the long story short, Barbara was exactly the kind of person Ms. Waller needed for a position inside the department she supervised and gave her that one chance for becoming part of an experimental program which aimed at creating the ultimate hacker, so that the US government (and Waller in particular) could have had one or more of them at its disposal to keep secrets from going public in that era of exponentially-growing connectivity.

Before she could even finish articulating her offer, Barbara accepted.

METAHUMAN POWERS

None, but the cybernetic implants that keep her legs tonic pending (hopefully) a definitive cure for her paralysis make Barbara fall into the cyborg classification. She's therefore registered as a Category 7/III.

OTHER SKILLS

- Extremely developed logical-mathematical intelligence, coupled with far above-average linguistic intelligence, that made her quite an effective campaigner during her days as a politician though she admits that she's become much shier after the incident that confined her to a wheelchair. She claims to possess an eidetic memory but since the existence of such a skill is heavily disputed among experts it's just possible that her mnemonic skills are just more developed than in the average person;

- A very talented karateka in her teen years, following her confinement to the wheelchair she developed her own personal fighting style consisting of consolidated self-defense techniques that are normally taught to people with motor disabilities and moves that she conceived and perfectioned all by herself. This style, jokingly christened "Babs-Jitsu" by Dinah Lance, is complemented by dual-wielding batons, which she handles with extreme dexterity, almost as if she were ambidextrous.

LIMITATIONS

- Since Barbara's relationship with psychoanalysts has been on pretty poor terms from her time in high school, the origin of her many issues with interacting with other human beings has been subject of wild speculation from her many colleagues and few close friends over the years. Dinah, the only person in the world who can honestly maintain to know Babs even better than Babs knows herself, thinks that her best friend's bouts of misanthropy and lack of empathy verging on full-blown ruthlessness stem not from the trauma inflicted on her by the Joker (the most common interpretation), but rather from her abandonment issues caused by her mother leaving her, her father and Gotham City with her 3-year-old brother James Jr. in tow she she was just 9. These issues were left to fester inside young Barbara, not helped by an often absent father figure, who was so busy with his crusade to clean the GCPD that even the only offspring that had stayed with him sometimes had to slide down the pecking order of his priorities. The fact that in present day, more than a quarter century after her mother and younger brother left to go back to Chicago, she still adamantly refuses to meet them despite their many pleads, especially in the years immediately following her injury to the spinal column, could be seen as a conformation of Dinah's theory;

- Despite her many intellectual gifts, she's always been considerably impaired whenever it came to learn and speak foreign languages. While she's perfectly capable of studying and assimilating the rules of a language, she's never mastered the "art" of pronouncing phonemes who are absent in English and stringing together foreign words in way that sounded natural, so that every time she tries speaking even an Indo-European language the likes of French or Spanish what comes out of her mouth sounds terribly stilted and with sounds all over the place. Since she came to terms with her linguistic ineptitude a long time ago, Kai's attempts at teaching Barbara Cantonese and the dialect of Gannan Prefecture are mostly a way to hear all the ways his fiancée is able to distort even the simplest sentences, so that they can get a laugh from them.

SEXUALITY

Purely heterosexual behavior. Her romantic life as a teenager was uncharacteristically sterile, to the point that her high school counselor suggested that she might suffer from Asperger Syndrome (she was a very poor counselor). That radically changed during her college years, when she was seduced by Jason Bard, offensive guard of the Gotham University football team and the erotic dream of every female acquaintance of hers. It was a very happy period for her, since that relationship propelled her to 'cool girl' status and the intense sexual life that came with it (her boyfriend was gifted with quite an impressive manhood and exceptionally skilled at using it) was a veritable psychological boost for her to pass her exams in record time. Unfortunately her happiness only lasted to the end of her sophomore year, when she realized that Jason's attraction for her was just skin-deep and that he was starting to grow bored of her and to look for new options (of the one-night stand kind). Barbara dumped him quite unceremoniously and she decided to take a long pause from romance, at least until she could finish her studies.

She did eventually re-open her heart to love but only when she was 30 and even then her first real relationship after the one with Jason Bard was a very inconclusive affair (unfortunately for her sweetheart, Ted "Blue Beetle II" Kord, who had focused very hard on making that relationship work). Things started looking up on that front in late 2000, during her stay in Hong Kong, when she met Ma Kai. That man, nine years younger than her, almost unnaturally beautiful and with a magnetic look that many superheroes would have killed to possess, was the first man in years to leave her immediately smitten. And in very characteristic Babs' fashion, she contacted Martian Manhunter to ask if he could check if she was under the effect of a mild form of mind control, since she had forgotten how it felt being dictated by the primitive part of her brain to pursue another person and do whatever it may have taken to succeed. As far as she's concerned, without Kai she'd still have to reach an adult understanding of the feeling of love after the relationship with Jason had shattered her adolescent view on the matter.

With her best friends being enthusiastic practitioners of bondage, she decided to give it a try to see if it could add a little 'spice' to her current relationship, an idea supported by Kai who has a very open mind when it comes to experimenting new things in the bedroom. It ultimately didn't play out as well as with Barbara's friends, since she found out that she makes for quite a poor dominatrix (though at least her 'trial period' earned her a nifty sexy leather outfit which she was gifted by Helena) and Kai somehow manages to be even more awkward than her in that role. To make up for it, during their many experiments they found out that they both felt their arousal growing when they knew that there was a video camera filming then during sex. Today, Barbara and Kai have amassed quite an impressive collection of self-produced porn DVD's (they're the real hot stuff now!) and they have four different cameras in as many different points of their bedroom so to give some variety to the finished product.

SPIRITUALITY

Agnostic. By her own admission, she never had the drive to take an interest in religion or spiritual matters in general. Things have slightly changed from the moment she began her relationship with Kai, who's instead very religious. While a conversion is very unlikely to happen, her resolution to know more about Islam made her more knowledgeable about the Muslim faith and tenets and the many ways they're declined across the Ummah than she would have ever thought possible.

KEY MOMENTS

Her first collaboration with the Justice League of America was an experience she has always felt very ambivalent about to this day. JLA Chairman Captain Atom couldn't stand the US government's policy to back the pan-Arab intervention to crush the young Revolutionary Republic of Dubai, with the immeasurable loss of human lives (of people who had been forced into quasi-slavery after being lured into UAE territory, no less) that would have inevitably followed it. Coordinating his efforts with select elements of the Middle-Eastern and South Asian superheroic communities (many of the revolutionaries were born in India or Pakistan), Operation Almond Tree was launched, its objective being the rescue of as many people with ties to the revolutionary government as possible, who, after the precipitous escape of the Dubai natives mere months before, made up nearly 100% of the population of the small country.

With every Leaguer busy with this definitely not US-sponsored operation, Captain Atom asked the legendary Oracle, the woman who had teared down the Wall, the faceless sensation of the hacker community, to supervise and direct the efforts of the many rescue teams. Barbara accepted. Everything went more or less smoothly until the very last day, when the last two cargo boats put out to sea escorted by Deputy JLA Chairwoman Power Girl. Aside from the usual shipments of refugees, one of them also carried Ms. Zainab Daudpota, President (whatever that meant by then) of the Republic of Dubai, the woman who had committed the unforgivable sins of showing to the Western world that slavery was still a very real thing in the late XX century and being really good at attracting sympathies even from people who could have done something to preserve the new Dubai. It shouldn't really come as a surprise that she had made many enemies in the Arabian peninsula, enemies who wanted her dead above all things.

About one mile into the voyage to a safe port, two kamikaze boats carrying substantial amounts of semtex were unleashed against the cargo ships escorted by Power Girl, who would have been strong and fast enough to dispose of both of them before they could inflict any damage if it hadn't been for a fatal order coming from Oracle. From an encrypted message that she had fortuitously discovered amid the mass of communications she intercepted every minute, she had found out that the the forces of the Arab Coalition had arranged for a double attack on the ship carrying President Daudpota, one in the form of the kamikaze boat, the other from below. Power Girl's new mission was to nullify the threat presented by the explosive craft and then to dive into the Persian Gulf and find the unspecified underwater menace, Daudpota's survival unfortunately having the precedence over the lives on board of the other cargo ship. In a tragic twist of fate, the message was actually a misdirection by the Arabs (who had realized that somebody was listening to all of their communications) to cover for a hired gun who was hiding amongst the refugees below deck and sprang into action as soon as the American superheroine disappeared under the surface of the sea, looking for something that wasn't there. Daudpota and nearly one thousand peple aboard the second ship tragically perished on that sad day.

Operation Almond Tree caused a terrible backlash from the American government against the JLA, which came dangerously close to being accused of outright treason. Things were so grim that a rehearsal of the 1951 audit by the House Committee on Un-American Activities that had ended the Justice Society of America was looking more and more plausible. Some heads had to roll. Quickly.

In the end, Power Girl was the first to catch the bullet so that it didn't hit the whole team. She resigned from the League four days after the incident and spent the following months coping with a form of PTSD. Captain Atom followed her two days later, explaining that he regretted nothing about his initiative but at the same time realizing that staying as leader would have done no favors to the organization. These resignations paved the way for the election of Wallace West (a.k.a. the Flash III) to the Chairmanship and the complete overhaul of the League's structure between 1996 and 1997. Part of this overhaul was offering Oracle a position inside the organization as the new figure who would have managed all JLA matters related to intelligence, cybersecurity and digital communications, since apart from the final oversight her handling of Operation Almond Tree had been top-notch and she was already a member of the superhero community, given her role as one half of the Birds of Prey.

Because of this sequence of events, Barbara's chances at enjoying a healthy professional-- let alone personal-- relationship with Karen Kent were seemingly irreparably ruined. Barbara feels incredibly guilty about all those deaths but cannot see what she could have done differently to prevent them while Karen kind of agrees that most people would have fallen for that trap but cannot stop ruminating on the fact that without Oracle directing her actions on that faithful day she could have saved everyone on both ships and that any decent person would have turned down West's offer.

OUTSTANDING FEATS

She was almost immediately involved by Jason Bard in his project for a self-defense course reserved to disabled people, so that the students affected by motor disabilities could be assisted by somebody who had a better understanding of their situation. Initially she was very reticent about accepting Jason's offer since she just couldn't see herself as a teacher. Despite quite the rocky start (complete with coming dangerously close to a panic attack in front of her pupils during the first lesson), she ultimately adapted to the role and is today well-liked by all of her students. From her point of view, this outcome is likely the most outastanding feat she's ever accomplished in all of her life, surpassing even the greatest accomplishments she achieved in her Oracle identity. Her close friends Dinah and Helena seem to agree across the board.

FUN FACTS

- Her only serious argument with Black Canary with a subject unrelated to mission planning happened when Dinah "my body is a temple" Lance found out that her best friend was a regular cannabis smoker and felt the need to help her 'find her way' again. With no success. Barbara had picked up that habit during her tenure in the Task Force X. Surprisingly, it wasn't because of the stress of the job, nor she was introduced to it by the shady personalities (to put it kindly) she was always surrounded by, but rather from Mari Jiwe McCabe, a.k.a. Vixen, the only heroine who ever volunteered to become an operative of the notoriious Suicide Squad. She was the only person Barbara developed a thing that could be vaguely identified as friendship over the course of those two long years, though both women preferred to refer to it as "a cordial relationship between two smoking buddies". Mari, who was born in central Africa and had escaped her war-torn country in 1980 to come to the US, had been involved in the mid-Eighties, aged 17, in the so-called 'Justice League Detroit', an attempt by Aquaman and Martian Manhunter to return the JLA to more straightforward ideals of heroism, after Green Lantern's war against the Reagan administration had shattered the aura of political neutrality that had been a fundamental principle of the insitution when it was founded. The experiment had only been half-successful at best, as proven by Mari's situation at the time. Still, making the acquaintance of that woman was Barbara's official introduction to the superhero community and the ideals that drove people from all over the world to wear a costume and start making a difference. After assuming the identity of Oracle, she tried many times to recruit Mari for her Birds of Prey team, since her metahuman powers (a connection to the Earth's morphogenetic field, channeled through a mystical artifact in her possession) would have been a great power boost to the BoP roster, but Mari proved to be more elusive than the animal she shared a name with. On the other hand she never refused her help if Dinah, Helena or both happened to be on a mission close to her whereabouts and in serious need of assistance;

- Her long stay in Southern China did very little to change her sedentary lifestyle (formed over years of being a heroine of the cyberspace) once she came back to Gotham City in early 2002 with the man that had become her soul mate. To the dismay of Dinah and Helena, she's so far turned down all of their proposals for the big Birds-only vacation the other two so keenly want ever since they received the news that their red-headed friend had grown weary of Hong Kong. Her main transfers happen on the Old Gotham-Robbinsville sky train route, whenever she wishes to see her father and stepmother. The former has by now completely recovered from his psychological scars (the physical ones are a different matter, as the awkward way he moves his right limbs attests) and he is in a way in the police force again, having been elected president of the Gotham City Police Officers Association as a compromise candidate in late 2001;

- Her relationship with Sarah Essen Gordon, current liaison between the GCPD and City Hall and her stepmother, has gone through many stages over the years. She started dating her father in 1979, when Sarah was a young detective who had been partnered with veteran Lt. James Gordon, who had by then been separated from his wife for six years. At 12 years of age, Barbara was already wise enough to recognize that her father had every right to find somebody special in his life again. She might have been jealous of him like every daddy's little girl would but she tried her best to be civil and even friendly with Detective Essen, who for her part proved to be a really kind person with the daughter of her fiancée. Barbara might have wished for earth to swallow her whole every time one of her classmates made a comment about the youthful look / hotness of her "mom" (though in their defense Sarah's red hair and green eyes were always bound to generate confusion about their actual relationship) on the days when she picked her up after school because her father couldn't, but things went along pretty swimmingly between the two of them for a couple of years. Things drastically changed in 1982 when James Gordon was promoted to the rank of police commissioner of Gotham City, with all the new responsibilities and workload that the position entailed. Him coming back at home suddenly gradually became a more and more sporadic event and while he tried his best to prevent his teenaged daughter from feeling neglected, Barbara became more and more envious of Sarah because of the time they could spend together at the police precinct that had been denied to her. And while she was already mature enough to realize that holding a grudge against somebody who wasn't actively trying to undermine her relationship with her father was wholly irrational and not constructive at all, she was still an adolescent who had a hard time keeping her emotions completely in check. Daddy's little girl became more and more independent, mostly unconcerned with the things her father and Sarah did in private.

It was only in the period between her graduation and the beginning of her political career that she started mending her relationship with her father, who had very much suffered the emotional estrangement between the two of them in the previous years, though she still refused to go back to seeing Sarah as a member of the family. Barbara's visits home invariably took place when her father's fiancée was overloaded with work or out of Gotham altogether and it was during one of them that the Joker struck. Over the months her father and she spent in hospital, Barbara had the chance to witness all the love and care Sarah poured on her beloved James, whose recovery from all the traumatic experiences he had undergone would have taken years and was not guaranteed to be total. That made her realize that maybe, just maybe, if the other important woman in her father's life had been at home that day, things might have gone in a different way. Blaming herself for the tragic events of that night was utterly absurd, but becoming suddenly unable to feel anything below one's waistline can really skew a person's perspective. By the time Amanda Waller came knocking at Ms. Gordon's door, poor Barbara couldn't even muster enough courage to call Sarah and ask how her father was doing. She was so full of remorse because of how unfairly she had treated her that she thought that her life with her father would have been much better without the involvement of his useless daughter.

Barbara would have come back to Gotham City only in January 1994, but somehow the time she spent in Task Force X had managed to heal her spirit. The first thing she did, even before beginning to prepare the watchtower she had bought to become the base of Oracle, was to visit her father and Sarah. To her immense relief, she found the former in a much better shape than she had left him two years before, at least psychologically if not physically. But most importantly, ex-commissioner James Gordon welcomed his daughter in his new home like the prodigal son of the parable and to this day he has never held against her that she had by all means abandoned him, invalid in mind and body, and never even written a letter to let him know that she was alive and well. It was in that moment that Sarah Essen, the main driving force behind that miraculous recovery and, as Barbara later learnt, the lack of any kind of resentment in her father's attitude towards her, stopped being a target of her envy, a home wrecker or her much worthier replacement as the most important woman in Jim Gordon's life and just became the family member she had always wished to become, ever since Barbara was a 12-year-old girl. That got even truer on the summer of that same year, when she got a marriage proposal from the man who had been her companion in good times and in bad for the previous fifteen years;

- She's the undisputed queen of the down-to-earth reply inside the American (possibly global) superhero community. Superheroism being a field of work that deeply wallows in symbolism, everyone always expects any action from a mask to hold some deeper meaning that the latter will be very willing to explain to those who can't really get it. That's definitely not the case for Barbara Gordon. Why did she choose the South Gotham Clocktower as her home and operational base when she came back to the city? Why, of course because it was the only building she could afford that was as large as she needed and guaranteed unimpeded access to disabled people. Why did she choose the Huntress, of all professional heroes, first as Black Canary's replacement while she healed up from some nasty injuries and then as the Birds' third member? The profile of the Italian vigilante had been submitted to her by an algorithm she had coded just for that kind of evenience, Helena being the best match for the kind of missions she usually entrusted to Dinah and it was by chance that the two of them ended up enjoying Helena's company enough to decide to 'enlarge the family'. Her honesty is always well appreciated, but it's clear that she's not really interested in the subtleties of superheroics;

- She's the only denizen of 96 Gorfinkel Street who doesn't follow the place's dress code (first and only article: "thou shalt be barefoot at all times while indoors"), strictly enforced by Dinah and Helena. The reason of course is that, since she needs a wheelchair to move around, Barbara's lower extremities always lie on the chair's footrests and thus do not touch the ground. Enforcing their rule on somebody who does not actually tread the floors of the building would be preposterous. Especially for two persons who know better than anyone else in the world how well their friend reacts to completely arbitrary stances entirely dictated by personal preferences, like Dinah's crusade against shoes.

CONFIDENTIAL INFO

- She's always been reticent to the extreme about the details of her time working under Amanda Waller in the department supervising the activities of the Task Force X, a.k.a. the Suicide Squad. The only things which are known for sure are (1) that Amanda and Barbara originally enjoyed an excellent working relationship and in fact the latter saw the ill-famed 'Wall' as a mentor figure and (2) that she was directly responsible for the dismantlement of the project of using imprisoned super-villains as human weapons at the disposal of the US government, with the help of several of said super-villains. The details surrounding these two truths are very confused, both because only Dinah Lance out of the whole superhero community knows the unabridged story, having heard it from Barbara herself and then taken an oath of secrecy, and because the accounts released by the criminals (those who lived to be able to release anything, at least) who allegedly helped her in 'taking down the Wall' are highly inconsistent. The other detail that's leaked out over the years, thanks to the mandatory medical examinations imposed to all League members, is that Barbara underwent two high-risk but potentially high-reward experimental treatment to heal her spinal column and let her take back control of her lower limbs. The first one, which utilized human stem cells hybridized with their Martian counterparts, was only partially successful, since she reacquired sensitivity under the waist but not control, though it also had the effect of removing all traces of the bullet's entry hole from her skin. The second one instead aimed at preventing excessive muscular decay in her legs and left her with one hundred small cyborg implants all over her lower half that take care of her muscular fibers and blood circulation in the hope that a new treatment can solve all of her issues;

- The years spent observing from the inside the way the gears of the American deep state moved and the eternal struggle between agencies was a really educational experience for the future Oracle, who came out of that period perfectly aware of the chances which that chaotic, backstabbing world could present to somebody who knew how to move without leaving too much of a trail. It's not a set of skills that Barbara can employ very often. In fact, she'd rather never have to resort to manipulation of forces that can potentially bring forward wanton death and destruction, but sometimes she may find the resolve to decide that it's the only way to put an end to a particularly thorny situation. For example, that was definitely the case with notorious drug lord Chakan 'Jackie' Pajapalakornkul, who was completely wiped out from the map with his little 'cottage industry' after he had ended up in Barbara's crosshairs due to his treatment of Dinah, Jason and other three dozen men and women (the only survivors of that violent retaliation) who had been kidnapped and reduced to slavery to blackmail their loved ones. With the assistance of an entire folder of counterfeit aerial and satellite pictures, a backdoor she had left in the computers of the Pentagon and three phone calls to as many middle-ranked bureaucrats in Washington D.C., she was able to bring the fury of the USAF Special Forces onto Jackie's criminal racket, wiping out him and everyone in his entourage. While nobody could find an explanation for the lack of a uranium refinery in the surroundings of his mansion, it was hard to ignore the kidnapped men and women (some of whom were American citizens) working as slaves in the man's poppy fields. To this day, nobody in the United States intelligence community has yet realized that the whole thing had been orchestrated by Oracle.

PEER REVIEW

Dinah: "Oracle and Canary forever, bay-bay! What else can I say? I've put my life into her hands so many times that even the expression 'best friend forever' feels painfully small."

Helena: "The relationship between Babs and Dinah is the paradigm of the way a relationship between two sisters should be. She and I, well, we're closer to the way a relationship between two sisters actually is! But no matter how loud we yell at each other, no matter how many insults we sling at each other, we can't imagine a life without each other."

Jason: "Had I been a better man when I was in college, I would have done everything to deserve her. Luckily I had the chance to show her that I recognized how right she was about that Jason Bard."

Kai: "I want to be her husband. It doesn't matter if history won't remember me: as long as that happens, it'll mean that the light of pure happiness will have existed for some time in this complicated and often sad world."

Karen: "I think there's been a misunderstanding. I actually hold nothing against Barbara. In my hands. In this instant."

Ray: "She's a member of the JLA, she got them-- and, therefore, us-- out of trouble more times that I could ever know and maybe one every million people knows about what she does. All of this while refusing to be held down by her disability. I feel proud for every moment my daughter spends in her company."

Terry: "Our relationship definitely didn't get off on the right foot, to be honest. But then I once heard her mentioning how Kai had 're-opened her heart to love' and I realized that maybe trying again, with a more open mind, would have been worth the effort."

{ AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've never been a fan of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl... there, I said it. On the other hand, I've always loved her Oracle identity. And in this Batman-less world, I could turn Babs into Oracle without going through the cape & cowl phase! The benefits of creating alternate continuities, I suppose. }