Chapter 6: Planning the Next Steps

Alyssa sighed in satisfaction as she let her floating meditation fade, smoothly coming to rest on her comfy new bed. The new bed, in the new two-bed, two-bath apartment she was renting in a decent section of town. It had been a full week, eight days actually, since her first arrival in this world, and she’d spent the last few making use of her new identity. Going through the official motions of getting a copy of her birth certificate (because hers had ‘been stolen with her safe,’ a hilariously easy sell of an excuse in Gotham) had been annoying.

As had getting a driver’s and motorcycle license, though the latter had been offset by the fun of getting to buy and ride a motorcycle afterward! She’d known how to ride one in her old life, but had never actually owned more than a trail bike. Reinforced with Major Kusanagi’s thorough knowledge, though, it had been a breeze. Gaining both forms of ID, plus hacking herself banking records that claimed she had financial history and was just switching banks, had allowed her to finalize her paper trail. She had a bank account, official state ID, social security number, and a pretty decent apartment.

Frankly, the need to break into and hack a few more places than anticipated, as well as the novel puzzle the whole situation represented, had been all that kept it from being boring as hell. Still, she’d done it. Her ‘civilian identity’ was now part of the system with a pretty solid paper trail. Someone on the level of Batman, if he was the World’s Greatest Detective here, would likely eventually realize it was fake if they looked hard enough. But it would pass official inspection even to a fairly thorough police investigation.

None of which had anything to do with why she was satisfied in the moment, of course. It was a satisfaction that only increased when she snatched up her smartphone and used it to check on her powers. The ability to ‘guide her’ with her various abilities had, honestly, been majorly undersold. It wasn’t just a bunch of textbooks or lectures. The ‘app’ for her powers was much more comprehensive than that, and included the ability to track her progress with them. Now, it was reading exactly what she’d hoped it would.

“Mental Shielding: 4”

It was something she’d prioritized, particularly once she’d had enough time to properly absorb the basics of what the app could tell her about various types of powers in general. While it didn’t track or identify anyone else’s abilities, it did compare her skills against a rating scale that was supposedly universally accurate. Meaning she could at least judge others by comparison to herself.

An example of that was her Mental protections. She’d found, on examining the interface, that her racial resistance had given her just that, resistance. Mental protection was split into Mental Resistance and Mental Shielding. Resistance set a hard limit for how much power it required to even affect her mind. At ‘Mental Resistance: 5,’ her personal baseline, no one without a mental power level at least one higher would even be able to affect her mind. Which, after working through it as best she could, basically meant anyone without Alpha level mental power could fuck right off.

Even someone who was that powerful would have their power cut drastically by her resistance, meaning that anyone that strong who relied on brute power was going to be fumbling around trying to make anything stick. Unfortunately, a skilled Alpha Level telepath would somewhat easily be able to read her mind, or even alter it. Which, of course, was where Mental Shielding came in.

Mental Shields were an actively applied protection, rather than passive resistance, and had to be bypassed for anyone to even read your mind, let alone change it. Thankfully, Alyssa hadn’t started out as a complete blank even there. The ‘basic mental shields’ that had come effectively pre-installed from her use of Ahsoka Tano in her template had meant she’d started on day one with Mental Shielding: 2. Mental Shielding: 1 was basically just being a particularly strong-willed baseline human who knew what telepathy felt like. They could pit their will against an invader with no actual power, but a skilled telepath would maneuver around them easily. Mentally Shielding: 2 was an upgrade to actual power-fueled shields that needed to be breached by an attacker before they could do anything.

Of course, even what her app labeled as an ‘apprentice level attack’ would be the same skill level as her initial shields had been, and might well have overcome them dependent on comparative power. Likely not, as the defender had home field advantage and she herself was resistant, but it had been possible. Thankfully, even her very first session of working on her Mental Shielding back in that hotel room had upgraded them to Mental Shielding: 3. Which was, essentially, a skill boost where you had multiple layers of shields and began incorporating false weaknesses and traps.

Normally, according to her app, that was one of the hardest jumps for new telepaths to make. It required you to be able to imagine what an attacker might do, anticipate it, and design complexity that would use their attempts against them. It was being able to play checkers against an opponent you’d never even met, based on strategies you only knew from reading the rule book and imagining them. Unexpectedly, his past life’s gift for lateral thought, combined with Motoko’s experience doing similar things on the Net, had made it hilariously easy.

Which hadn’t been the case with the next jump, sadly.

Mental Shielding: 4 was the equivalent of taking your checkers game and making it chess, instead. It involved turning your defenses into an intentionally confusing labyrinth of shields, with places that looped back on themselves, hit dead ends, or shifted so that the thread of the probe behind the attacking thought was cut off. That last was particularly nasty, as it left an attacker trapped in your mind and at your mercy. It was considered the pinnacle of what Shielding 4 was, and had been the goal for the system to label her as having reached that point.

She’d failed to create the labyrinth five times. With each one of those failures representing hours of meditation. Worse, each failure had destroyed her shields entirely, forcing her to rebuild them from scratch. She hadn’t dared leave the apartment while she’d been working on it for that reason, as a mind that was normally defended but had those defenses shattered apparently stood out if you came too close to someone skilled. She wasn’t sure there was anyone like that in Gotham, but she wasn’t chancing it.

Still, she’d finally pulled it off. At Mental Resistance: 5 and Mental Shielding: 4, it would take someone with serious power and skill to breach her mental defenses. There was no way she wasn’t going to continue to improve them over time, of course. But short of running into someone like Emma Frost, Jean Grey, or Martian Manhunter, and having them intentionally try to break into her mind with a serious effort, she was pretty safe.

For better or worse, all three of those people did exist in this world, as did others at that level or higher. Jean Grey was on one of the X-men teams. Emma Frost, oddly, was barely 18 and still in her last year of high-school. She was the current heir of Frost Pharmaceuticals and had thus appeared in the public eye, but that was about the total extent Alyssa had discovered about her. Martian Manhunter was a member of the main Justice League, and his niece was a member of the current Young Justice Team. Charles Xaiver was a champion of meta/para human rights, and who knew how many magic users with mind control spells might be floating around.

Suffice it to say she hadn’t been comfortable with the state of her mental defenses and had chosen to prioritize them when she reached the ‘Powers Training’ part of her plan. Not that she’d ignored everything else. She’d worked with her telekinesis a fair bit too. But getting Mental Defense built up had been the main priority. Now, however, she’d succeeded in shoring said defenses up enough to accept them as good enough for the time being. Which meant it was time to consider her medium-term plans again.

She’d acquired and suitably modified a net-diving chair. Thankfully, Motoko’s knowledge had made it easy to avoid the need for the implants most high-level hackers/netrunners used in this reality. Very cyberpunk and very creepy to her personally. Major Kusanagi had, despite being a full cyborg, regularly used ‘dummy barriers’ of her own design. Hardware that was fully capable of linking a human brain without an implant…once she’d added a neurochip and turned the combined device into a helmet, at least. The neurochip allowed it to link to her Ghost, rather than needing something cruder to connect with the meat of her physical body.

Doing research using her newly modified dive-chair had been one of the few things she’d done in the last few days beyond working on her powers. Which meant that her loose mental plans now had a lot more data to work with. Such as the current state of Gotham City. Which was bad, as expected, but thankfully not the worst she’d feared. If she’d been in the version of Gotham from Gotham Nights, one of the newer Batman games he had played before? She’d have ‘noped’ right the fuck out and tried a city that wasn’t set permanently to ‘ultra fucked hardcore mode.’

Instead, she’d discovered that Gotham had actually benefitted from being in the odd amalgam world found herself in. Sure, the average gangbanger was actually a bit more dangerous. Cyberware wasn’t uncommon in enforcers, even if it was rare for anyone in the States to be ‘chromed up’ to the level of someone from Neo Tokyo. Exoskeletal armor was also a military staple of the world in general…which meant it ‘fell off the back of a truck’ often enough to be regularly seen in the hands of larger gangs.

In exchange, though, Batman’s Rogues’ gallery didn’t have nearly as many people in it that were still alive. While most vigilantes, including the Bat family, stuck to a ‘no kill’ policy as a way to keep the police from labeling them as villains instead of vigilantes, the same was very much not true of the official super teams. Casual killing was off the table for them, too. But people like the Joker? He’d gotten zeroed the first time he tried a scheme in New York and the main Avengers Team responded. With the kill count the clown had already wracked up, Black Window hadn’t hesitated to fill him full of bullets. Then, just to be sure, Wonder Woman, who was an Avenger instead of a member of the Justice League for some reason, had sliced his head off with the sword she very much carried.

The PRT had an official ‘Kill on Sight’ list as well, and all of the major teams executed it to the letter. Combined with fights between fellow villains being more deadly than they could have been in an un-altered Gotham, the result was that a good sixty percent of the villains Batman had faced throughout his career were just flat out dead instead of in Arkham. Scarecrow? Dead. Bane? Dead. Mr. Freeze? Dead…and his wife was doing fine. Idiot hadn’t sought out magical treatment for reasons no one understood. Zatanna Zatara had healed her in about three seconds once they found her cryotube.

Some seriously dangerous people were still alive, of course. Ra’s al Ghul was alive, but thankfully international rather than specific to Gotham. Poison Ivy was alive, but actually doing well as an environmental scientist working for Stark Industries, far from Gotham. Most of the mob bosses like Falcone, Two-Face, Black Mask and Penguin were sadly still among the living, as they were smart enough to stick to Gotham where only vigilantes were currently active. The Court of Owls…might or might not exist. Hard to tell, given their whole thing was working from the shadows. They’d be something to keep an eye out for.

A pattern held, generally. Those who stayed local were still alive. Those who hadn’t were either dead or reformed. The net result was that Gotham was still a criminal hellhole, but city-wide threats weren’t as common as they could have been. More typically it was street crime, drug and organ trafficking, extortion…profitable crimes rather than insane schemes. This had prevented anyone from the major hero teams prioritizing it, leaving it as a hellhole barely kept in check by the Bat Family and a few other vigilantes.

Honestly, the thing that got it the most attention was the fact that they had a native Endbringer that was super prolific. Solomon Grundy was among the weakest known Endbringers, but he also reappeared regularly, rarely staying gone more than three months. His occasional appearances caused bigger name hero teams to pop in and smash him. Which mostly just annoyed those teams, since the reason he kept popping up was the out-of-control pollution in the area. It was also why they’d removed Poison Ivy from Gotham, as someone had realized her powers were tied to the Green and it was driving her to try and wipe out the city to stop the pollution.

Bruce Wayne was, indeed, spearheading about a dozen different efforts to clean up that pollution. Sadly, the various corrupt businesses were dumping more toxic shit into places like Slaughter Swamp than his initiatives could help remove. Worse, the state of New Jersey was apparently something of a mess. Those same corrupt businesses had a lot of sway with the government, which kept them from forcing the issue and coming down on the offenders properly. Honestly, Alyssa could see why the Bat family were failing to do more than band-aid the situation.

It did not, however, seem unfixable to her. Which meant that there was opportunity to be had here. She’d already set the goal of ‘I want to help,’ and analyzed the methods to do that by. The conclusion she’d come to was that, even if she got as rich as Bruch Wayne or Tony Stark, it wouldn’t be enough to fix the problems. There had to be a reason why both of those men, two of the five richest on the planet, had both resorted to being Heroes. Well, assuming Wayne was Batman, but her analysis had showed a 98.734% chance he was. So she was going to assume it was true until proven otherwise.

In this amalgam world, power beyond economic might existed, and a certain amount of it was required if you wanted to shift anything. It was a bit of a foreign thought to her, given that his last world hadn’t been the same way. But here it was true. Which meant if she wanted to do more than local amounts of good, she needed a platform. She needed a ‘seat at the table’ when the big boys and girls were speaking. Technically, she could get that seat by becoming a Hero and working her way up the ranks to lead something like one of the X-men, Justice League, or Avenger teams.

Thing is, she’d never exactly been much of a joiner.

Nor were sub-team leaders afforded the same respect as people like Iron Man, Xavier, or All Might. No, she’d determined already, through careful analysis, what the best way to get that voice she wanted was. While also helping a lot of people along the way. She needed her own team, and a city that it protected. The more radical the shift under her care, the more respect she’d get for reforming it. For what she needed?

Gotham was perfect.

... ... ... ...

A/N 1: A small bit of powers explanation. The interactions with so many worlds are complex enough that I'm breaking up the break down into a bunch of different places, so that there isn't some giant BLOCK OF DOOM of exposition to wade through.

A/N 2: To be clear, I don't really like Batman...but I don't hate him either. He's not going to be totally bashed in this fic. But if he's one of your favorites, you might not completely enjoy reading the story, as he's likely to get a little light bashing. Deserved, in my opinion, because the modern versions of him are kinda...bad a planning. Like, really bad. If he spent half as much time improving things as he did on planning how to counter his allies, Gotham would have been fixed in a couple of years.

A/N 3: This might be the only time it's appropriate to say 'Gotham was perfect.' :-p