HOME | DD

Description
There’s no darkest hour of the night in Gotham’s Fashion District, the Mecca of all the nighthawks populating the second biggest city on the Atlantic seaboard. The levels of light pollution are so incredibly high along the district’s streets and avenues that the customers of the countless gourmet restaurants, nightclubs discotheques and theaters would just need to look away from the entryways they’re waiting in line to cross and up in the sky to see the figure in black, running and leaping across the cornices and roofs of the district’s tall buildings, getting closer and closer to her objective. Luckily for her, the kind of people that crowd into that section of Gotham City very rarely take their minds off their earthly concerns just to ponder on the vastness of the cosmos. She can easily ignore the throngs in the street more than 200 feet below. They are guaranteed to do the same with her.
She stops only when she reaches her penultimate destination: a bare, sloped terrace at the 37th floor of a skyscraper with a slightly staggered silhouette on the 4th Avenue. Right in front of her, her destination: a vaguely art déco residential building from the early 1930’s. She opens the snap-hook of her utility belt and uses her trusted line launcher hooked to complete the last leg of her trip.

She could simply step on the ledge of the window of the apartment’s living room to start working on the glass, but she doesn’t. Anything heavier than a pigeon would immediately lighten up the tenant’s alarm system like a Christmas tree. She’s forced to use her plasma cutter on the reinforced panel of glass with one hand while dangling from the launcher’s handle with the other arm. Four straight cuts and one positioning of a safety harness for the removed panel of glass later, she can enter the apartment through the square hole she has just created.

She activates the electromagnetic vision mode of the goggles integrated in her mask and swings from the launcher’s handle until she has acquired enough momentum to propel herself inside the living room with a feat of acrobatics, mid-air flip included. She uses that split-second and 360° movement to assess the position of all the photo-electric cells hidden in the baseboards of the room. She can’t see the invisible rays coming out of the devices, but she can calculate exactly where they are based on the position of their starting points. She lands almost without a noise right in the middle of a safe spot.

The figure in black immediately spots the large box fixed to the wall right over the window of the living room and proceeds to cut out the conspicuous electrical wire going to it from the corridor with a precise throw of one of her boomerangs. If she has to perform a quick tactical retreat, she definitely doesn’t want to find her escape route blocked by a armored rolling shutter. Then a couple of foam grenades take care of the nozzles she finds along the way to the tenant’s bedroom. Depending on the kind of narcotic or poisonous gas they’re supposed to fill the room with, she might not have the time to wear her emergency respirator. The electromagnetic vision also takes care of the many sensors of pressure embedded in the floor and hidden under the thick carpet.

Finally she reaches the main bedroom. Her objective is right there, curled up under the blankets a few yards from the figure in black. She switches the sophisticated goggles she wears to heartbeat detector mode and then CO2 detector mode. Slow, regular pulse and emissions of carbon dioxide. The data she gathers are unquestionable. There actually is a person under those blankets and she’s been fast asleep for more than an hour. She approaches the side of the bed, grabs one edge of the blankets with her right hand and…

She barely feels the prick of the electrodes hitting her skin under her costume before 50,000 Volts discharge into her body with devastating effects.

The last thing she sees before losing conscience, as her own weight pulls away the blankets she’s still grasping, is a very life-like dummy lying on the bed. Her last thought is a wordless swear directed at the people who produce lay figures complete with devices that simulate both heartbeat and respiration.

* * *

The tenant of the apartment was tying up the ankles of her new prisoner when the latter, i.e. Batgirl, woke up. Considering that she had hit her with a taser gun, her recovery in such a short time was a really impressive feat. If she had gone through with her original plan to strip her of her entire costume rather than "only" her mask, gloves, belt, boots and socks, it was even possible that she might have regained her senses before she had finished tying the knots behind her back. The tenant of the apartment blessed her luck that she had chosen a different course of action.

In a way, Ms. Pye felt sorry for her foe. She had seen the signs of her passage, from the living room to the threshold of the bedroom. Not only had she brought and devised countermeasures for all of her many security systems, she had also managed to spot every single one of them. And despite all of her training, all of her ingenuity, all of her impeccable timing, she had still been subdued by the woman she had come to subdue. Despite the fact that, if gazes could cut, the remains of the world-famous thief Magpie would have been brought to the morgue in a shoebox, she could still feel the girl’s mortification and disappointment with herself behind the layers of seething rage and burning desire to wallop her captor. Unfortunately for her, she couldn’t imagine that Margot was intercepting the live feed of all the security cameras within a radius of 3 city blocks from her home and that four computer programs were working 24/7 on the gathered data to find all traces of the passage of costumed vigilantes. She had been alerted of Batgirl’s arrival several minutes before the latter crossed the threshold of her bedroom.

But the fact that she felt somewhat sorry for the girl with almond eyes didn’t mean that she would have spared her from the rightful punishment she had earned by breaking and entering her apartment. She felt out the girl’s left ankle with her thumb while her other hand was busy with adding coil after coil of rope and found a clearly foreign object embedded between the bone and the Achilles’ tendon. 10 to 1 that it’s a tracker and she has some friends already looking for her, she thought, luckily I finished setting my jamming equipment this past Tuesday.

She decided that it was finally time to say something. “You might wonder why I brought you to the living room rather than stay in the bedroom” she told her prisoner, her tone as neutral as she could manage in the situation. “Well, just know that I’ve never brought a minor to my bedroom in all of my adult life. That, however, doesn’t mean we cannot enjoy some quality time between girls on this couch”, she added with a nod to the red sofa that dominated the living room.

The rage and violent intents were still there, but Ms. Pye was sure she noticed the ghost of another powerful emotion insinuating in those brown eyes: anxiety.

Part 1 of a two-part commission for the ever loyal

The Batgirl featured in this picture is Cassandra Cain/Thielman from my 96 Gorfinkel Street series (#1 - Cassandra Thielman ). Ms. Pye, a.k.a. Magpie, is an alternate take on the villainess of the same name from the official DC Canon, jointly developed by AnimeSage8 and myself.

Description
There’s no darkest hour of the night in Gotham’s Fashion District, the Mecca of all the nighthawks populating the second biggest city on the Atlantic seaboard. The levels of light pollution are so incredibly high along the district’s streets and avenues that the customers of the countless gourmet restaurants, nightclubs discotheques and theaters would just need to look away from the entryways they’re waiting in line to cross and up in the sky to see the figure in black, running and leaping across the cornices and roofs of the district’s tall buildings, getting closer and closer to her objective. Luckily for her, the kind of people that crowd into that section of Gotham City very rarely take their minds off their earthly concerns just to ponder on the vastness of the cosmos. She can easily ignore the throngs in the street more than 200 feet below. They are guaranteed to do the same with her.
She stops only when she reaches her penultimate destination: a bare, sloped terrace at the 37th floor of a skyscraper with a slightly staggered silhouette on the 4th Avenue. Right in front of her, her destination: a vaguely art déco residential building from the early 1930’s. She opens the snap-hook of her utility belt and uses her trusted line launcher hooked to complete the last leg of her trip.

She could simply step on the ledge of the window of the apartment’s living room to start working on the glass, but she doesn’t. Anything heavier than a pigeon would immediately lighten up the tenant’s alarm system like a Christmas tree. She’s forced to use her plasma cutter on the reinforced panel of glass with one hand while dangling from the launcher’s handle with the other arm. Four straight cuts and one positioning of a safety harness for the removed panel of glass later, she can enter the apartment through the square hole she has just created.

She activates the electromagnetic vision mode of the goggles integrated in her mask and swings from the launcher’s handle until she has acquired enough momentum to propel herself inside the living room with a feat of acrobatics, mid-air flip included. She uses that split-second and 360° movement to assess the position of all the photo-electric cells hidden in the baseboards of the room. She can’t see the invisible rays coming out of the devices, but she can calculate exactly where they are based on the position of their starting points. She lands almost without a noise right in the middle of a safe spot.

The figure in black immediately spots the large box fixed to the wall right over the window of the living room and proceeds to cut out the conspicuous electrical wire going to it from the corridor with a precise throw of one of her boomerangs. If she has to perform a quick tactical retreat, she definitely doesn’t want to find her escape route blocked by a armored rolling shutter. Then a couple of foam grenades take care of the nozzles she finds along the way to the tenant’s bedroom. Depending on the kind of narcotic or poisonous gas they’re supposed to fill the room with, she might not have the time to wear her emergency respirator. The electromagnetic vision also takes care of the many sensors of pressure embedded in the floor and hidden under the thick carpet.

Finally she reaches the main bedroom. Her objective is right there, curled up under the blankets a few yards from the figure in black. She switches the sophisticated goggles she wears to heartbeat detector mode and then CO2 detector mode. Slow, regular pulse and emissions of carbon dioxide. The data she gathers are unquestionable. There actually is a person under those blankets and she’s been fast asleep for more than an hour. She approaches the side of the bed, grabs one edge of the blankets with her right hand and…

She barely feels the prick of the electrodes hitting her skin under her costume before 50,000 Volts discharge into her body with devastating effects.

The last thing she sees before losing conscience, as her own weight pulls away the blankets she’s still grasping, is a very life-like dummy lying on the bed. Her last thought is a wordless swear directed at the people who produce lay figures complete with devices that simulate both heartbeat and respiration.

* * *

The tenant of the apartment was tying up the ankles of her new prisoner when the latter, i.e. Batgirl, woke up. Considering that she had hit her with a taser gun, her recovery in such a short time was a really impressive feat. If she had gone through with her original plan to strip her of her entire costume rather than "only" her mask, gloves, belt, boots and socks, it was even possible that she might have regained her senses before she had finished tying the knots behind her back. The tenant of the apartment blessed her luck that she had chosen a different course of action.

In a way, Ms. Pye felt sorry for her foe. She had seen the signs of her passage, from the living room to the threshold of the bedroom. Not only had she brought and devised countermeasures for all of her many security systems, she had also managed to spot every single one of them. And despite all of her training, all of her ingenuity, all of her impeccable timing, she had still been subdued by the woman she had come to subdue. Despite the fact that, if gazes could cut, the remains of the world-famous thief Magpie would have been brought to the morgue in a shoebox, she could still feel the girl’s mortification and disappointment with herself behind the layers of seething rage and burning desire to wallop her captor. Unfortunately for her, she couldn’t imagine that Margot was intercepting the live feed of all the security cameras within a radius of 3 city blocks from her home and that four computer programs were working 24/7 on the gathered data to find all traces of the passage of costumed vigilantes. She had been alerted of Batgirl’s arrival several minutes before the latter crossed the threshold of her bedroom.

But the fact that she felt somewhat sorry for the girl with almond eyes didn’t mean that she would have spared her from the rightful punishment she had earned by breaking and entering her apartment. She felt out the girl’s left ankle with her thumb while her other hand was busy with adding coil after coil of rope and found a clearly foreign object embedded between the bone and the Achilles’ tendon. 10 to 1 that it’s a tracker and she has some friends already looking for her, she thought, luckily I finished setting my jamming equipment this past Tuesday.

She decided that it was finally time to say something. “You might wonder why I brought you to the living room rather than stay in the bedroom” she told her prisoner, her tone as neutral as she could manage in the situation. “Well, just know that I’ve never brought a minor to my bedroom in all of my adult life. That, however, doesn’t mean we cannot enjoy some quality time between girls on this couch”, she added with a nod to the red sofa that dominated the living room.

The rage and violent intents were still there, but Ms. Pye was sure she noticed the ghost of another powerful emotion insinuating in those brown eyes: anxiety.

Part 1 of a two-part commission for the ever loyal

The Batgirl featured in this picture is Cassandra Cain/Thielman from my 96 Gorfinkel Street series (#1 - Cassandra Thielman ). Ms. Pye, a.k.a. Magpie, is an alternate take on the villainess of the same name from the official DC Canon, jointly developed by AnimeSage8 and myself.