Devil's Consultancy 37

Unsurprisingly, Cyborg (Tanya had given up on convincing him to change it) and Beast Boy were playing videogames, having already moved in as part of their Titans Initiative contracts even if the team wasn’t officially on duty yet. “Ooh!” Tanya said, jumping onto the couch between them and, as they had just finished a fighting game match, grabbed the controller from Beast Boy and announced. “My turn!” She had shifted to her Witch Girl outfit, of course. 

“Hey!” Beast Boy objected, even as Cyborg smugly picked a new character and started the match. “Who are you? What are you, ten?”

Richard slammed his hand on either side of Beast Boy’s head, in full Nightwing regalia. “Witch Girl is a fellow hero.” He said, looking down on Beast Boy. “Just as I am your leader.”

“‘Sup Nightwing.” Cyborg said, having already known this. “This mean we’re going to get started soon?”

“Wait, is that legal?” Beast Boy asked. 

“I’m not actually part of the team.” Tanya clarified, “I’m just wearing this to conceal my identity.” In a completely predictable turn of events, Cyborg was extremely good at his favored fighting game. Tanya’s extensive experience let her compete, of course, but she wasn’t in the habit of playing a single game for hundreds of hours until it was mastered, so she was on the back foot from the start. “I’m actually Nightwing’s little sister.” 

“Yeah, we’ll start orientation tomorrow morning.” Nightwing said, “Witch Girl’s going to be our magic expert, she’ll teach you two about the magic we have here at the tower, and if we need any spellcraft I’ll call her in.”

Beast Boy looked back and forth between their chins. He opened his mouth, but Tanya beat him to it. “Full disclosure, my mask’s enchanted to make my skin look ambiguously brown.” Her ashen skin tone was extremely distinctive, it would be extremely easy to connect any masked identity to her real one if she didn’t conceal it. 

“I’m adopted, anyway.” Nightwing added. 

“Hey, does that mean you can make me a thing that makes my skin look normal?” Beast Boy asked, interested. 

“Yep.” Tanya said, making sure to pop her lips with the word. “I’ll whip something up for you later, figure out what skin tone you want in advance.” Once her defeat transitioned from an inevitability to a reality, Tanya took out another trick from the secret tome of the little sister: “Loser’s bracket, pass the controller.”

Cyborg smugly passed the controller to Beast Boy, and the game already started when he realized that he had been tricked. “Wait, since when do we do loser’s brackets?” He asked, offended. 

“Since now.” Tanya said easily, still disadvantaged when facing Beast Boy in this game, but after the warm up with Cyborg, she knew her character’s moves this time. 

“I play winner.” Richard said before Cyborg could think otherwise. 

“Argh, why did I have to only bring my two player games?” Cyborg groused. Perhaps because you only own two player games, perchance? 

“Nightwing, I left my Nintendo in my hat. Get it for me, I’m busy.” Tanya said, smiling to herself in amusement. 

Richard lifted Tanya’s witch hat and withdrew the four player console from a dark portal into her pocket dimension, as well as the four player fighting game that she might actually win playing. Then he put the hat back on her head, as the dark portal vanished. 

Cyborg grimaced. “I don’t want to play the kiddie console…” Elitist. There’s more to entertainment than processing power! 

“If you’re too scared, that’s fine.” Tanya said teasingly. 

“Hey now, nothing you can bring out will let you win against the Master!” Cyborg boasted. Too easy. “I’ll kick all three of y’all up and down the couch on any game you can name.”

After a hard fought battle, Tanya barely managed to beat Beast Boy through a thorough understanding of fundamentals (see: spamming the same move for as long as he keeps falling for it). For such an avid gamer, he wasn’t all that good at it, was he? 

Right when they had finished setting up the other console, Nightwing’s phone rang with a distinctive alarm. “Wait, that’s the Justice League” Richard said, confused. 

“Answer it! Answer it!” Beast Boy yelled. 

Richard did so. “Nightwing here.” He said, wandering off so the others couldn’t overhear. “Wait, why don’t you do it?” After a moment, he growled. “Really? Well we can’t have that, no.” Richard cut a pretty intimidating figure as Nightwing, but it was when he was being sarcastic that you really understood that he was still a teenager. “Yes, I’m in the area, but I’ve been driving all day! I’m exhausted.” Nightwing’s face fell. “Alright, point. We’ll intercept it.” He hung up. 

“Well?” Cyborg asked. 

“Okay, so apparently Green Lantern can’t be bothered to put pants on, and neither can Hawkgirl.” Richard summarized, “So this is now our problem. Short version: There’s an escape pod screaming distress signals about to land smack dab in the middle of the city. Worse: there are drones chasing this pod. Intercept the pod, destroy the drones. Got it?” At everyone’s nods, he took a dramatic pose. “Titans, go!”

Unfortunately, things like ‘deployment strategies’ were supposed to be covered over the next few days, so… “Rhine. Berechnung. Mahou. Trouble brought from beyond the sun, moving there, we go as one!” Tanya incanted, which teleported everyone straight to where the pod was about to impact. 

“...How did you do that?” Cyborg asked, mystified about how they were now in what appeared to be a public park. 

“Classified.” Tanya deadpanned. “Don’t get used to it, that kind of freeform spellcasting takes a lot out of me.” Four people, out of sight, using divinatory heuristics, and with a mediocre rhyme? Yeah, that took a pretty serious bite out of her magical reserves. “I’ll be paying for the emergency magic later, too.” Not actually true, but part of her backstory as Witch Girl was that she had brokered a deal with Rhine, Justice League Demon, to help out in hero emergencies. 

“What now?” Beast Boy asked. 

“I’m going to go hide, you all should make sure that pod isn’t about to land on top of you.” Tanya flew away, the type 66 easily taking her to a roof nearby where she can take an overwatch position. Then, she set the computation orb to perform mana fixation, sucking up environmental mana (which is far less potent here than in Gotham, particularly as it’s only sucking in demon-compatible mana) for her to use while she waited. It was a bit of a risk, as the spell was complicated enough that she couldn’t use much in the way of other spells while doing it, and if the opposition was magically sensitive, it would give away her position… but she felt like she could react in time if that was the case. 

The pod hit the atmosphere pretty fast; if they had taken a vehicle they’d have been far too late. Discerning the speed of orbital drops was not a skill that came in handy very often, but J’onn offered the lessons and Bruce wouldn’t miss that kind of class if it meant letting Joker escape Arkham. The key method to eyeball that kind of thing was that there was a visible change in the corona when something leaves the exosphere into the denser layers of the atmosphere, so tracking the amount of time it takes from the initial impact against Earth’s air to there was a good way to estimate how long it’ll take to go the rest of the way. The exact densities of each layer depended on gravity and atmospheric composition, but they learned the Earth figures either way, so… Assuming the escape pod was a typical example for the local cluster… “ETA two minutes!” Tanya said into her phone, which was already calling Nightwing. Given that free fall for a typical escape pod’s terminal velocity made going from the top of the thermosphere take nearly an hour, it was going fast. 

Fortunately, such escape pods usually weren’t used as kinetic kill vehicles, because they had systems to reduce the impact damage in the name of making sure their contents survived, and her calculations took that into account. So despite starting out at ‘kill the dinosaurs’ levels of kinetic energy, the escape pod hit the park with less force than an artillery spell. It still wasn’t pleasant to the park, but c’set la vie. 

It was also quite fortunate that the drones had to hold off on attacking, focusing their systems on surviving entering the atmosphere rather than attacking the escape pod, so they had about thirty seconds before they finished their efforts to avoid lithobraking and could resume combat. Idly, she shut off the mana fixation. It wasn’t a lot of additional mana, but she might actually need her formulas right now. Still, she’d prefer to stay in reserve, so she stood up on the roof, crossed her arms, put a contemptuous-yet-contemplative expression on… then used an illusion formula with the type 66 to make her look like she was a hundred meters in the air, just floating there menacingly. She queued up a barrier too, but that might be too obvious so she didn’t quite activate it. 

The drones numbered… seven. After the Thanagarian invasion, Tanya had done a little studying on the typical armaments of the local space powers, especially those by the Vega system, and these looked like capture drones used by Gorondians, notable slavers and incidentally also the assholes that have, last she heard, completely conquered Thanagar which made them pretty much the biggest kids on the block for not only this galactic arm, but also two more spinwise from Earth. At least, the outer arms. 

Yeah, the Watchtower was paying very close attention to all the skim lanes in the sector that lead to Gordonian territory for a reason. Or rather, John requested and received a few Oan observation drones, a fairly typical requisition as she understood things, to do that and they simply streamed the data to the Watchtower. 

The escape pod, however, was exactly as generic as she feared: Citadelian technology was more or less the most ubiquitous tech base to find, because their manufacturing capability was extreme, and they sold products (not technology, she checked. That Psion science officer was extremely rude about it, too) to literally anyone. Well, not that the Citadelians invented or designed most of the stuff themselves, they were also incredibly flagrant plagiarists who did not respect anyone’s patent. Not that anyone really enforced patents on a galactic scale…

Nightwing threw some explosive batar- threw some explosive wing-dings at one of the drones, and promptly earned himself a capture drone now trying very hard to capture him, the outer shell of the drone sealing itself up with some kind of regenerative technology. Similarly, Cyborg used his sonic cannon on another, and unfortunately it has just finished withstanding far greater vibrational forces with re-entry, so it did basically nothing except lure a second to separate to deal with him. Beast Boy, on the other hand, flitted up as a hummingbird before turning into one of those massive long-necked dinosaurs, which earned him the honor of being the only Titan to actually succeed at destroying his target. He broke several bones in doing so, but he shifted back into his human form immediately, shuddering in pain but not actually injured from the fall. 

Two of the drones, sensing the destruction of one of their fellows, broke from the group to engage Beast Boy, but that still left two more to pry open the escape pod. Hm. Tanya deliberately built up power in the illusion formula, creating a fakeout buildup of an artillery spell that looked more impressive than it was. “Hey!” Her illusion shouted, the sound reverberating throughout the area. “This is OUR PLANET! All aliens, shut up and go where we can see you, or else!” 

As expected, the drones ignored her warning, particularly because she didn’t disguise her voice beyond the ever so slight shift her mask’s glamour provided, not doing enough to do anything but throw off vocal analysis. The word choice further separated her identities, as Tanya Wayne is somewhat more eloquent than Witch Girl. 

Before Tanya could decide to start charging an anti-aircraft optical formula, the escape pod tore apart from the inside and green light bolts launched out: not a Green Lantern, the shade was different: brighter, more yellow. A feminine roar of challenge rang out as the occupant shoved her fists into one of the drones, the machine exploding into green energy shortly afterwards. 

The alien darted towards Tanya, away from the one unoccupied capture drone. She juked to the side, avoiding a lash of the capture drone’s tentacle, and promptly started to fly upwards. She seemed to be shouting something rapidly, but Tanya couldn’t make it out. She probably wasn’t speaking any local language, so… 

Tanya bolted forth, spinning up her full combat suite from the type 66. Her demonic energies were depleted,  but she should be able to handle that last capture drone to secure the objective before she lent support to her allies. She just needed to be efficient…

Fortunately, she remembered to fill her ears with demon magic beforehand, so she could understand the alien as she passed by: “I’m not attacking, not attacking, please help me!” The alien babbled. 

The girl appeared to be humanoid… or rather, kryptonoid, if Kara’s history lesson was correct, with orange skin, rather skimpy clothes, and red hair. The green energy around her hands and coming out of her eyes had faded with Tanya’s approach, waving her hands in surrender. 

Tanya slipped past the girl, tore open a hole in the capture drone with her knife coated in a mage blade, and deposited five pounds of plastic explosive in the hole the . She then fell back, slicing off a questing tentacle, and grabbed the alien before double-timing it away. A radio formula activated the detonator, and the capture drone exploded. 

Cyborg appeared to have also noticed the aliens’ means of bypassing the regenerative armor, and used an arc cutter to open up a hole for his sonic cannon to shoot inside, destroying his own. “BOOYAH!” He shouted in triumph. 

Nightwing, within seconds of Cyborg’s feat, repeated Tanya’s move by using a cutting charge to make a hole and throwing four explosive wing-dings into the opening before it closed, which did enough internal damage to destroy it. 

As if on cue, Beast Boy managed to get both drones beneath him and turned into what appeared to be a blue whale, except green, crushing both of them. He turned back immediately, groaning. “Agh, I hate doing that!” He complained, rubbing his stomach. “But they wouldn’t go down to the T-Rex…” Beast Boy really liked turning into a T-Rex. This was not because turning into one was effective. 

Fight completed, Tanya turned to the alien, and made sure to use that little demon’s trick of speaking all languages. “We will need a thorough explanation of what’s going on here.”

“Oh, you speak Tamaranean?” The girl asked, surprised. 

That’s one question answered, at least. “No.” Tanya said, “But I will be able to translate for Nightwing.” Best not give the girl the impression that Tanya was in charge, here. It’ll be good for Richard to get the experience. 

They set down next to the damaged but repairable escape pod. There was some material in there that Waynetech would love a bit more of. It’ll also give the alien some Earth money to pay her way. Win-win! 

Nightwing approached the girl, but whatever he was going to say seemed to die in his throat as he came to the realization that the person he saved was a pretty girl. “Uh…”

The girl proceeded to promptly challenge him to tongue wrestling. “Woah!” Beast Boy exclaimed. 

“What? Why him?” Cyborg added. 

Wait a minute… “I seem to recall that…”

The kiss broke, and the girl smiled brightly. “I am sorry, but my people can learn languages by the touching of tongues.” She explained. 

“...that.” Tanya finished. 

Nightwing had lost whatever composure he had managed to retain from his previous misstep, waving her apology away. “I mean, it’s fine… if that’s how you do it that’s how it needs to get done.”

“Joyous day!” The alien proclaimed. “I am Koriand'r, and I am ever so grateful for your help against those Gordonian slavers.” Cyborg and Beast Boy snorted in laughter as they simultaneously noticed the false cognate. 

“Right.” Nightwing said, salvaging his dignity at the reminder that something very serious had just occurred. “About that: Why were they after you? What happened to the ship where you got that escape pod?”

Koriand'r seemed mildly surprised. “You Earthlings are less ignorant than I heard.” She said in a transparently bad attempt at flattery. “I am from the Vega system, and as part of the near constant warfare that plagues it, I was captured in transit. I was then enslaved by the Citadelians, who in turn sold me to the Psions. They wished to perform experiments on my people. We are capable of sustaining our powerful bodies on sunlight,” Which Tanya supposed gave them something else in common with Kryptonians… “-so they sought to give me more and more until something broke.”

Nightwing frowned, but looked her up and down. “Looks like it wasn’t you.” He commented. 

“It was the ship.” Koriand'r agreed, “Eventually, my body adapted by allowing me to…” She coated her hands in that green energy again. “-do this. My first few moments with this power did enough damage to call for an evacuation, and I used one of their escape pods.”

“But the Gordonians found you.” Nightwing surmised. 

“Correct.” Koriand'r said, “The escape pods used by Psion ships are capable of going faster than light, but they have limited fuel. Fortunately, I was able to supplement the fuel with my…” She paused. “What should I call them?” She took a moment to think about it. 

“Well, they come from sunlight, so… Maybe sun bolts?” Nightwing suggested. 

“Star Bolts.” Tanya corrected, “Her name translates to ‘Star Fire’, so it’d be more personalized and still accurate.”

“Starfire sounds way better than Coriander.” Beast Boy said, to Cyborg’s firm nod. 

Koriand'r thought about the suggestion, and nodded. “Yes. I was able to use my star bolts to supplement the fuel of the escape pod, and was able to reach this system. Unfortunately, the Gordonians were looking for me, I assume because word of my breakout had reached them. Many Psions had also evacuated, after all. I have been fleeing from them for the last…” She took a moment to think, lips moving slightly. “Seven hours? Slightly less than one third of your planetary rotation.” That language package was pretty handy, if it managed that much. 

Nightwing hummed, thinking about this new information. Tanya, knowing the boy quite well, slipped into his field of view and made an illusion of the word ‘Asylum’. Perking up, Nightwing cleared his throat. “Ah, I assume you are requesting asylum, then?” He asked. 

Koriand'r smiled. “Ah, yes! I wish to stay on Earth for now, until it is safe to return home. Who should I ask about that?”

“The Justice League handles that.” Tanya pointed out, “Incidentally, does that mean you won’t be needing the remains of that escape pod?”

“No, I do not.” Koriand'r said, “It is damaged, but a new escape pod of that quality would buy a nice house on Tamaran.” Something that surprises new members of the League who learn about the galactic economy from the seminars is that spaceships are still expensive for space-faring societies, they just aren’t as expensive. 

“I will pay you twenty million dollars for it.” Tanya said immediately, before pausing. “Or rather, I know someone who will pay you that much for it.”

Both Beast Boy and Cyborg stared slack-jawed at Tanya at how casually she said that. 

“Is that a lot?” Koriand'r asked, turning to Nightwing. 

“You can buy a very nice house on Earth for that much.” Nightwing assured her. 

“You could buy a mansion!” Beast Boy corrected. 

Cyborg looked thoughtful. “Well, a mansion is just a really big house if you think about it.”

After paying attention to each of the boy’s reactions, Koriand'r replied: “Then that seems fair, as I do not know how to repair it.”

“I have to make a phone call, then.” Tanya said, floating away. Hm, it’s the middle of the night over in Gotham, so… 

“Batman here.” 

“We have an alien refugee.” Tanya began, “Is Lucius working with you tonight? If he acts fast we can claim all the salvage before Luthor gets a sniff.”

“No, but it’s quiet tonight. Just a corrupt boarding school.” Batman commented, “I’ll handle the paperwork myself. There’s still construction assets in Jump from the construction of the Tower, I’ll call them to take possession.”

“I offered her twenty million for her ship, it’s too damaged to survive usage, but the important parts should be intact.” Tanya summarized, “She’ll need some Earth currency if she’s staying, right?”

Batman grunted in amused approval. “Efficient.” He agreed before hanging up. 

Tanya looked at her phone strangely, some art of the Justice League’s founders reimagined as magical girls denoting the background of the ‘Witch Girl’ phone. Was she crazy, or did Batman sound like he was rushing to end the conversation? He said it was quiet… Weird. Still, while she had her phone in hand, she sent a few words of comfort to Ace before going back to the collected teenagers. 

Ugh, cleanup always sucked… 

-----------------------

The salvage team was quick, getting all the drones plus the ship into a Waynetech owned warehouse for later retrieval, and Starfire (as Koriand'r had decided was a preferable alias once informed of the false cognate) was happy enough to accept a room at Titan’s Tower. 

In the morning, Tanya sent Starfire to the Watchtower via the Zeta tube inside the Titan’s Tower’s basement, and followed with her own teleport after turning into demon form. “I have been informed, of your status transformed.” Rhine said, welcoming the Tamaranean. “We must now observe formality, if your presence will hew to legality.”

Starfire blinked, as that sentence was even more tortured in Tamaranean, which she understood it as. “Ah, yes, I am here to request asylum, how do I do that?”

Wordlessly, Rhine guided Starfire to an office, and presented the girl with paperwork. “Fill this out, fields without doubt. If it’s in question, we’ll discuss, a digression.”

After some back and forth, Starfire’s case file was constructed, and Rhine was able to submit it to the people who actually approve that kind of thing. As the list of alien immigrants was still incredibly small, Starfire was a recognized refugee by noon, officially existing in the legal system and with all the rights thereof. Which wasn’t a lot, but it did come with a bank account, which her twenty million dollars was promptly deposited into. There were relevant taxes, of course, but Waynetech picked up the bill on those, and used financial wizardry to minimize the tax burden anyway. Despite this, Rhine was confident that the salvaged materials and technology would end up being a net gain. 

“I suppose I would be needing a job, now?” Starfire asked after looking at her bank card. 

“In theory, not really.” Rhine said, “That money’s enough, if you live a little rough.” Twenty million isn’t enough to live extravagantly indefinitely, but if you were modest with it, it was plenty. “Your skills are few, but your life is new. Education could work, here your path’s a fork.”

“I am a great warrior.” Starfire insisted, a little insulted. “I could join the Justice League, correct?”

“You’re not quite an adult, you must wait for result.” Rhine corrected, “You could join the titan, their lives you could brighten.”

Starfire seemed a bit confused. “So I cannot join the Justice League, but I can join Nightwing and Beast Boy and Cyborg?” 

“Correct you are, you get a gold star.” Rhine said, poking her in the forehead and leaving just such a sticker. “In just a few years, you could find yourself here. In the meantime, you could fight crime.”

“Okay!” Starfire said, determined. “I will join the Titans!”