Wax Figurine | T. Drake ✔

[19]

Tim watched closely as the recordings played. There was one recording each for all the times he had been dropped off at the McArthurs' residence by his mother. 

Watching the recordings by then he was certain of one thing; her parent's secret base was hidden somewhere in their house. Each time he would be taken to the same room where he would meet Olivia and apparently the two were on good terms with each other.

At first, she had been very shut out and blank, almost like a machine. But as the meetings passed, she grew more expressive and more normal toward Tim.

It was almost as if she was slowly learning how to function like a normal human child.

And then as time passed and his visits increased, both of them got competitive, attaining the rivalry that Tim remembered bits and pieces of. Every single thing he could do, Olivia would quickly learn and beat him at it, showing that she had a much faster learning process as compared to others.

Watching it right then made him even more amused at how childish they still were at annoying each other. But the more he watched the recordings, the more he felt that there was something not quite normal with Olivia.

He turned to see her and noticed that she probably felt uncomfortable watching those recordings so he spoke up, "you don't have to show me every single one."

"You sure?" She asked, "I thought you would need to see everything so that you know I am not lying to you when I explain stuff."

He shook his head, "if you can give me your word that you won't lie, I will take it."

A very slight smile threatened to break out on her face, "okay. I promise I won't lie to you about anything."

He nodded and she shut off the recordings, not yet retrieving them from the player. Instead, she turned to face him, her legs crossed underneath and her eyes focused on his blue ones.

"So time for your questions..." She had clasped her hands together tightly as if waiting for him to strike her with thousands of difficult questions, "ask nicely."

"Excuse my bluntness but there's no other way I can ask this," he spoke up, "what exactly are you?"

She paused, her hands clasped so tight that her knuckles had started to turn white, "um..."

"You can't be a clone because you age normally," he began to explain his own deductions and she listened closely, "my best friend is a clone and even though he ages too, the pace is not the same as that of an average human, it's relatively slow. On the other hand, you were six when I was six and even now we are of the same age so that too rules the possibility out of you being a clone. You can't be a metahuman because metas have powers and you've had plenty of opportunity to use your powers against us yet you didn't. And there's also no such thing in these recordings that can hint that you had any sort of powers. So no meta either."

It was kind of endearing how focused he got while explaining his findings, she thought, loosening her grip on her own hands as the tension began to fade. 

"That leaves only one option, or two perhaps. Either you are a genetically modified human or you are just an average human with somehow the ability to learn very quickly. Now you tell me which one of my guesses is true."

She nodded, "I am modified but at least not genetically. Or in other words, I am my parents' secretly successful experiment although they didn't mean for it to go this way. And they hid my existence so that nobody would find out about me."

"What do you mean?"

She stood up, beckoning him to follow her and took him to the lab. There she unlocked the drawer that even Bruce had seen but not been able to access, taking out a pile of files.