Earth 42

Chapter Three: Captain Cold

A/N: I apologize for some of the weird formatting/indents. I'm afraid I'm too lazy to go back and fix them once I publish.

The large moon shed light on the city below. The remnants of the previous snowfall glittered in the pale light. Catwoman gracefully padded across a rooftop, overlooking the city. She sat down at the edge of a rooftop, her legs hanging off the edge. A soft whooshing sound landed behind her. It was like a soft breeze, barely noticeable, but it made Catwoman smile.

"Batman," she purred while turning around.

"Catwoman," came the deep reply. He stood, his cape circling his dark form against the moon, casting a menacing shadow that haunted the nightmares of many criminals within Gotham.

She slowly stood up and sashayed towards him and stopped so she was only a few inches away from him. His annoyance at their proximity caused her to smirk.

"Is there something you need?" her eyes roaming over his body and settling on his face only after she finished speaking.

"There is, actually," he replied and moved towards the edge of the roof, so he was overlooking the city.

"Do tell. The suspense is killing me," she retorted sarcastically as she stood next to him, their shoulders brushing.

He gave her weary look before he continued, "Have you noticed the mysterious appearance of people who don't quite fit in?"

The man with the brown hair immediately came to mind. He seemingly appeared from nowhere and stuck out as quirky, even in Gotham. Of course, she didn't voice all of this.

"What do you mean?" she asked instead.

He studied her, clearly seeing she was thinking something but not saying anything. He reached for something off his belt and pulled out something similar to a smartphone. He tapped something on the screen and handed it to her.

Catwoman looked at the pictures of nearly half a dozen average looking people. She was about to give it back, when she saw that one of the people was the brown-haired man.

"Who are they?" she asked, handing it back to him.

"That's the thing," he explained. "I don't know. Their faces don't match any on the databases on the planet, and they just showed up out of nowhere."

"But you have a theory."

"Yes, I do," he confirmed.

"And?" she urged him to go further.

"Just keep a lookout," he said, avoiding the question. "You know how to reach me." He jumped off the building, his cape unfurling, allowing him to majestically glide down to the city below. Cheeky vigilante.

<O>

"Tomorrow afternoon," Black Mask addressed. "We will invade the new courthouse while they are going over Jonathan Crane's trial. We will have three vans set up around the perimeter, and, on my mark, we will light that place up."

The men stood before Black Mask back in the crumbling, forgotten subway station as he explained his plans. Catwoman was perched in the shadows watching everything unfold.

"Stewart," Black Mask told one of the men off to the right. "You and your crew will be in the bus on the south side. Wesley," Black Mask told another, "you and your crew will be on the east. And, Ken," he said to the third man, "you and your crew will be on the north side of the courthouse. I expect you all to meet here tomorrow at one-thirty p.m. precisely. Are we clear?"