Chapter 12: New Targets and Dossier Building

Alyssa hummed as she flitted from holoscreen to holoscreen, feet never quite touching the floor. One of the very few downsides she’d discovered to her new powers is that she didn’t precisely hold still very well. She just had too much energy for that. Unless, of course, it was lazing in a beam of sunlight, which she’d discovered she was just feline enough to find languidly enjoyable when she’d visited that beach for sunbathing.

In truth, he had been ADHD in his original life. She probably still was, based on a purely clinical view of her behavior. The difference came in the raw processing speed she now possessed. She wasn’t at all sure if it was the Starfire, Momo, or Major Kusanagi parts of her template, or some combination of all of the above, but she’d picked up a serious case of multi-threading ability.

He had already been extremely fast in his thought process. So much so that he’d been all-to-commonly labeled a genius. A label he’d grown to heavily disagree with on a personal level. He had been well above average intelligence, yes. But not a genius. It had only looked like he was on the outside because he was able to instinctively cross-reference material at speeds that would leave most people dizzy. The powers and physical changes had taken that and, instead of just dialing it up to eleven, had dialed it up to 999, broken the dial off, and then supercharged the result.

Alyssa’s brain power was probably over 9000!

Silly references aside, the reality had taken some adjusting. As well as some adaptation to her workspace. The multiple human-sized floating holoscreens and the neural link device at her temple were the result. She had, between randomly doing a few daylight patrols that all just so happened to happen while Bruce Wayne was busy somewhere else, worked out a system to actually properly take advantage of her new and improved ability to split focus and think at insane speeds.

Each of the holoscreens was actually subdivided, with one dedicated to efforts she was making on software projects for the civilian identity. A few of those were almost finished. Apps that had existed in his reality but which didn’t here, and which she was dead certain would be popular. It would start a more sustained cash flow for her that could be grown overtime, so that she didn’t need to rely on the precious-metals exchange method to sustain herself or a future team.

The other two were also about the future, though the second was more immediate than the third. It, the central screen and the one she was technically focusing on the ‘most,’ was an analysis of additional possible targets here in Gotham. The Hammer had been, in a lot of ways, low hanging fruit. Large enough to be a strong statement, but self-contained enough that the near-total annihilation of their operations hadn’t created a major power vacuum. The last of those operations had been an illegal casino that had been raided by the GCPD, in a desperate bid to not have too much egg on their face. For all intents and purposes The Hammer was done in Gotham. Surgically removed without causing a gang war.

There weren’t a lot of targets like that.

There were a few. The Ibanescu Crime Family operated out of East End and dealt in dog fights, small amounts of human trafficking, and prostitution. A good target, particularly as she’d always hated the idea of human trafficking. Except that they were small time. That didn’t mean she’d ignore them, and she’d added them as a solid potential option, but they weren’t exactly a strong follow up on her initial raid.

The third screen, of course, is why she was looking for a strong follow up.

That screen was a slowly compiling set of Dossiers on potential team members. Newspaper clippings, interviews, records both criminal and non, known motivations and personality traits. A few civilian identities that she’d discovered, then encoded in a Section 9 cipher even here in her own hideout. She’d winnowed through the locals first, settling on only three possibilities, before widening her search. She was hoping to recruit at least one of those three before trying to recruit others from outside Gotham, as it would make it an easier sell. But for any of them, she’d need to prove herself a bit more, or so she felt, at least.

Locally, the current Hawkeye was almost certainly actually Artemis Crock. Her father appeared to currently be in SuperMax prison, which was good, and her mother didn’t seem to be in the picture at all. She might still be around and inactive, but Alyssa wasn’t certain. One way or another, this version of ‘Hawkeye’ was in her early twenties and had come straight back to Gotham to try and make a difference after finishing her training with the original Hawkeye, who’d retired out of Hero or Shield life alike after training her.

Much to Alyssa’s considerable surprise, the second individual she’d tagged was Dinah Drake. At least in this reality, Black Canary was a local and semi-active as a vigilante, with no indication of having been married just yet. In fact, Alyssa hadn’t been able to find any mentions of a previous Black Canary, meaning she might not be a legacy hero like most versions of her were.

She’d popped up on the scene relatively recently, starting with her hammering the local gangs that had tried to move in on a dojo when its original owner died. Her relatively recent addition to the vigilante scene meant she conveniently had no known interaction with the Bat Clan, and was thus a tempting recruit. Particularly as she was a Meta of some flavor, possessing her classic Canary Cry.

The third individual wasn’t someone she’d expected to see in Gotham, for more than one reason. One was simply that she was still slightly struggling to align the wildly variant cast of characters from dozens of different ‘franchises’ as all being present in the world. Meeting Iron Man ‘in the flesh,’ or at least in the armor, had helped really set it in stone for her. But, despite her best efforts, she was still having ‘blindspot’ moments, where she didn’t notice an individual because she didn’t expect them to be where or who they were.

In this case, that was complicated by the fact that Nocturne, aka Talia Wagner, wasn’t the type to actively showboat. At least, not whatever version of her existed here. Something which meant her own efforts had gone almost unnoticed since she moved into Gotham several months ago. Despite that, hacking the local GCPD files had shown that she’d actually have been more effective than the Bat Clan in some ways…if the GCPD wasn’t burying all her efforts. A constant stream of hard evidence handed over had been flat out ignored, despite her doing it in a way that any other police department would have acted on it.

Recent sightings showed she was getting more violent in methods, likely in reaction, and might make a very easy recruit as a result of her apparent frustration. Alyssa knew the least about her, ironically, despite her having no hidden identity due to her appearance. The reason for that was telling in its own way, though, as she’d apparently been part of an X-men team until she aged out of the particular group she was in. For some reason, she’d chosen not to move up onto one of the older teams, but retained an independent affiliated hero license from the X-men. Which could be useful to legitimize their efforts.

Others had been evaluated and discarded for the moment. Alyssa had been able to piece together the fact that the current White Tiger was actually Selina Kyle, who’d gained powers by stealing a cat-themed amulet that just-so-happened to be magical. Leery of the possible link to Batman, she’d put off any thought of making an offer there unless Tiger came to her first. Same with Batgirl. Even if she could be recruited away, Alyssa wasn’t going to do so unless Barbara came to her. It was one thing to be dismissive of Batman’s methods. It was another to have the sheer gall to try and poach his adoptive daughter for your team.

Continuing to flit between holoscreens, Alyssa felt a bit like she was playing four-dimensional chess as she tried to sort out her next move…

… … …

Star Knight was playing stealth mission again, and starting to get a little bit annoyed about that fact. A growing part of her wanted to simply smash through the building and deal with the group she’d settled on targeting, but she knew how stupid that was. Not because the Neon Dragon Triad was actually a threat to her. Admittedly, they did have a couple of individuals with Quirks, which was one of the reasons she’d picked them out as a target. But neither of the Quirks she’d identified were really all that dangerous.

Well, not to her anyway.

One of their enforcers could cover themselves in scales, which seemed to be tough enough to be bulletproof. He wasn’t any stronger or faster than a fit human, though, so he wasn’t much of an issue. The other, a woman who was clearly an assassin type, had the ability to grow spikes from her body. A fast and deadly Quirk against most, it wasn’t likely to be able to penetrate her armor, even if the woman could hit her. Though, given it was a Meta ability, she had no intention of letting the woman hit her to find out, just in case.

It wasn’t the two Metas that made it a stupid idea to simply bulldoze into the building and knock everyone out for delivery to jail, though. No, the reason for that was the same as it had been with The Hammer. Evidence, evidence, evidence. Part of the reason, a big part of the reason, why she’d been able to burn out The Hammer so cleanly had been the miles, kilometers, reams and streams of evidence she’d collected against them. Being physically caught at the site of drug and counterfeiting operations was part of it, of course. But she’d also dumped oodles of forensic accounting evidence, CCTV footage, and digital communications on the DEA and Shield to sort through.

The sheer quantity of it ensured that none of those arrested were going to walk on technicalities. Not to mention that her first stealth visits had been the ones to reveal the counterfeiting operation in the first place. Meaning, if she just smashed this one location, a drug lab, she wouldn’t get any data on the other operations the Triad had elsewhere. Drugs in large quantities, which were present here, were a possible way to get the DEA involved again. But strong rumors had it that the Triad were the biggest human traffickers in Gotham. The local mob and mafia groups didn’t really go into that sort of thing, being far more the protection rackets, blackmail, and targeted hits sort of operations.

Ironically, the local Gotham crime families were legitimately disgusted by groups like the Triads. You could say many, many, many bad things about the local Gotham crime families. But human trafficking wasn’t part of their M.O. Nor, as it happened, was much in the way of heavy drug pushing, either. Some recreational drugs? Absolutely. The Penguin certainly pushed plenty of that sort of thing through his club for the guests. But none of the major families went into major pushing of drugs on the street. Druggies didn’t make for the greatest people to extort for protection money, nor did large scale drug use make for a profitable city to squeeze for its riches.

No, most of the drugs in Gotham came from the Mexican Cartels or various Asian Groups. The Hammer had dabbled in it too, but even for them it had been a sideline, with their main operations being the counterfeiting and illegal casino. Essentially, in Gotham, drugs came from the outsider groups. Groups that Alyssa could target and eliminate without causing too big of a stir with the Families. In fact, if they thought she wasn’t looking their way, they might even be cautious about poking their head out and drawing her attention by pushing too hard into territory she’d cleaned out. She was removing rivals they’d prefer to see gone, after all.

Effectively, targeting the foreign groups was a way to start removing bigger pieces, without completely setting off a gang war. There would be some tussling over territory if she removed the Triads, but the Families would mostly thank her for getting rid of them. At least, she thought they would. Hopefully. This was mostly guesswork based on Motoko’s memories. The authorities pushing foreign groups out had rarely bothered the Yakuza of Japan, beyond them wanting to snap up the empty territory.

Well, she’d already determined she was going to light the powerkeg when it came to it. So if it happened it happened. Still, it would be better to remove as many players as possible before everything exploded all over Gotham. Also, it would be nice to have backup by then!

So, for now, she snuck through the Neon Dragon Triad base in her stealth gear, looking for any information she could glean…

… … …

The Neon Dragons hadn’t been nearly as organized as The Hammer on a digital level. Which had worked out to both their advantage and disadvantage. On the positive side for them, it had taken nearly a week for Alyssa to penetrate enough of their dispersed operations for her to build up a truly good picture of what the Triad’s operations looked like. On the negative, once she’d found the various devices that higher-level members of the organization used, the security on them was laughably shit compared to the ex-KGB organization. She’d managed to outright clone most of the devices, to the point she’d replaced a couple of them with her own versions without anyone noticing.

This was particularly important as it had let her alter ‘orders’ they were getting from their overseas bosses. It wasn’t something that would hold up in the long run, of course. Inevitably, someone from the outside would put together that someone was altering communications both ways. Or else a more casual connection she’d missed between local and international gang members would cause someone to smell a rat.

In the short term, though, it had allowed Alyssa to set up the conditions to deal a devastating blow to the Triad group. She’d been appalled to discover, on digging into the issue, that there was no Federal level agency assigned to handle human trafficking. The earliest laws against it on the books in the United States didn’t occur until the year 2000. Given it was currently only 2017 in this reality, the coverage for busting human trafficking options was basically still falling to local Vice units. Which were, frankly, horrifically bad at it.

Thankfully, this reality also had another option, and that option had led to the discovery of why Wonder Woman was with the Avengers, instead of the Justice League. Part of that had been easy to understand from the start. Warrior woman with sword willing to stab people? Better off in the group that was more willing to let you stab people.

The JL didn’t refrain from killing when required, thankfully, but they were far more stringent on the rules of when it was allowed than the Avengers were. The Avengers, having had several founding members who weren’t nearly as willing to refrain from permanent solutions, was a bit more logical of a place for an Amazonian soldier whose primary weapon was a sword to end up.

That had merely been Alyssa’s own surface impression, though. The reality was far more complex. Relevant to the moment, the various Avengers teams were the single most proactive force against human trafficking in the entirety of North America. Something which, given the history of the Amazons, had been a pretty obvious and major draw for Wonder Woman.

She was, in fact, their primary point of contact for anti-human-trafficking operations. Not to mention she worked regularly with the HOI, the Hero Organization Interpol, on that sort of crime, extending her reach beyond North America. The fact this version of her had been around since WWII, had never gone inactive, and was widely respected in a lot of places because of it, eased that effort immensely. Most of Europe remembered her fondly, making anti-human-trafficking operations that extended there some of the smoothest the HOI oversaw.

So, that was one group she could count on responding to the fact she’d managed to use ‘internal orders’ to convince the Triad to shuffle all their human trafficking victims into a single location for a ‘mass movement for a specific buyer.’ Such wasn’t how the group normally operated, but there was precedent for it, which is how she’d been able to convince the local branch that the orders were legitimate.

She hadn’t been able to do the same thing with their drug operations, which were far more dispersed than those of The Hammer had been. There, however, she could count on the fact that the DEA were still leaning over the GCPD’s shoulders. If she hit those operations the same way she had with The Hammer, and forwarded the livestream evidence to both the GCPD and DEA simultaneously, the GCPD Vice unit would have no choice but to hit the major drug operations she highlighted.

It wouldn’t be as clean, but she should get roughly 80 percent of the Triad drug operation, along with the more critical human trafficking ring. Add in a few sweeps over the following week, ones that might just let her have a few first encounters with the local vigilantes, and she could pretty much guarantee the Neon Dragons would be done in Gotham. Since the only other Triad to operate openly in Gotham had been wiped out some years ago in the last major, city-wide gang war, the elimination of the Neon Dragons would largely end their involvement in Gotham. One less hand stirring the chaos.

Now, as she triple-checked her preparations and prepared to initiate her live feeds, it was time to meet the small team Wonder Woman had arranged to join her for the raid. She was realist enough that this one wasn’t something she wanted to try solo…

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

A/N 1: I spent a fair bit of time combing through options for who might be good local recruits in Gotham. That meant sorting through where I wanted each one to be within their personal framework/timeline, how powerful they are, and how willing to work with others they'd be. In example, I could have used Zatanna as she has a presence in Gotham at times. But she both tends to be a lone wolf if she's older than teen years AND the adult versions of her tour most of the time, which means she's not often in Gotham. Black Canary was actually a nice surprise, I'd forgotten that some versions of her are Gotham natives. 'Hawkeye' got an in as being one I'd already mentioned, with at least some versions of Artemis being reasonably team-oriented. For the third, since this is an amalgam universe, I really wanted to pull someone from Marvel or MHA. Nocturne is a bit niche, unless you happen to be familiar with the Exiles series. Which, as it happens, is actually one of the only comics runs I've read entirely through. This ISN'T her Exiles version, just to be clear. Much like many of the other characters don't fully match up to any one version of them from the various media, she'll be a little different from her Exiles version.

A/N 2: The Neon Dragon Triad technically does exist in some versions of Gotham. No idea which ones. I'm basically using a combined list with of all known Gotham villains groups to pull targets from.