Just Breathe: A batsis story

10 - Unpredictable

Chapter 10 - Unpredictable

*Three Weeks Later*

"Maggie, have you seen my bookbag?" Alyna hoarsely shouted from her room at the end of a long day. Alyna woke up this morning with a stuffy nose, something that any normal person has dealt with before. But thanks to Alyna's powers she's never gotten sick till now, but what changed? Her congestion only grew worse as the day went on until it was clear; she had a cold. A quick trip to the school nurse for some tissues got her sent home for the day. Maggie being Maggie overreacted, closed the cafe, and wouldn't even let Alyna out of bed.

"Why do you need it? You're supposed to be resting!" Maggie yelled back from the kitchen, where she had been making some chicken noodle soup and fresh bread for dinner.

"I left my headphones in the front pocket," Alyna responded before faking a small coughing fit. It wasn't necessarily a lie, she HAD left her headphones in her bag but that wasn't necessarily the REAL reason she needed her bag. She recently was issued a laptop through school and figured out quite easily how to bypass the schools content block and disable its data tracking, with the computer fully unlocked Alyna created her own program that had been allowing her to safely track and monitor Xenon Corp. Last week Alyna single-handedly took out three labs, she wasn't fast enough to save any of the test subjects but she was nimble enough to avoid Batman and his birds who for some reason were really insistent on asking her questions. It also appeared they thought she was a boy which Alyna didn't mind as it allowed her to hide her identity better.

"Here you go, you left it by the couch," Maggie knocked on the open door before entering. She plopped Alyna's bag down on her bed before handing her a small spoon full of soup. "Does this taste all right?"

"Ummm, it could use some more salt," Alyna honestly replied after giving it some thought.

"I KNEW I was forgetting something!" Maggie loudly exclaimed as she left Alyna's room. Alyna was quick to pull out her Laptop and run her program. Last night she discovered a new potential lab and cold or not, she was going to raid them tonight. The computer slowly updated its location and pinpointed Alyna's exact prediction. All Xenon Corp. Labs used the same database for uploading their experiments. Although it was impossible to access said data without a physical hard drive, all of it was connected, and thus traceable. That's how Alyna had been finding these Labs, and she guessed that was how Batman was as well considering how his team always showed up to the fight at the very end.

Once Maggie had finally fallen asleep Alyna quietly locked her door, changed into her suit, turned invisible, and slipped out the window in the direction of this newest Xenon Corp. Lab. Despite being on the other side of town Alyna arrived rather quickly, not as fast as she normally would have but she blamed that on her cold. She waited patiently on a neighboring rooftop till she saw her opportunity. The guard out front was being replaced, something Alyna learned happened every three hours or so. She leaped off the rooftop and flipped in the air using one of the guards as a trampoline to catapult into the other. Once they were both dragged out of sight Alyna 'borrowed' their key cards and entered the lab unleashing a newfound definition of the word pain on its inhabitants. Just like all the previous labs she's raided, none of the test subjects were alive, Alyna truly was the only one who had survived the experiments, so far.

"Who are you?" Batman shouted startling Alyna.

"I don't answer to you," She darkly stated doing her best to make her voice sound deeper, more male-like through her suit's mask that covered the bottom half of her face. Alyna took a look at her surroundings and realized Batman's birds had her surrounded.

"We can do this the easy way or the hard way," Red Hood said with a crack of his knuckles "Well, this isn't going to be pretty, for them," Alyna thought before turning herself invisible.