Heavy Hitters

April 22, 2017:

Red Robin's investigation into a drug and human trafficking ring brings him to the NYC harborfront. Concerned about metahuman goons (it is New York, after all), he enlists the aid of a pair of heavy hitters of his own: Wonder Girl and Miss Martian.

Port of New York and New Jersey

One of the world's busiest ports, and an unsurprising magnet for all sorts of sketchy business involving extremely bad people.

Characters

NPCs: None.

Mentions:

Plot:

Mood Music: [*\# None.]


Fade In…

SATURDAY NIGHT

PORT OF NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY

There's never enough time.

Red Robin knows this very well: It's one of the more frustrating aspects of reality, especially for someone without any metahuman abilities. There's always dozens, hundreds of things that need doing, and never enough hours in the day to do them all - which is probably why most days he gets about four hours of sleep, if he doesn't just decide to forgo it entirely. The necessity of following one trail out of the country looms large over him, but he can't just ignore this either: A trail of bodies and broken lives, connected to a man who wants him very specifically dead.

Some of the information he gained after the disaster at the Gotham docks has led him here, further up the coast. Part of the distribution network for the drug known as the 'Blue Belladonna,' filtering into the New York nightlife just like it has in Gotham. But there's another wrinkle, when investigating ruthless organised crime hideouts in the Big Apple: They have access to a lot more superpowered goons.

This left the former Boy Wonder with little choice but to check through his 'special' contacts list, looking for suitable names. No one from Gotham, they'd be too far away. Zatanna has her own problems to deal with. Barnes would cause a bloodbath. Deciding quickly, he sends a message to one Cassandra Sandsmark. It reads as follows:

'Need your help with some bad guys. I'm on the roof.'

Then there's an address.

After a bit more thought, he sends the same message to another name. He doesn't really know Miss Martian very well, but her reputation is pretty solid. Besides, what's the worst that could happen?

Patiently, then, he settles in to wait… Crouched down in the shadows and watching the monitor on his laptop, which is currently providing him with live feeds from the small, stealthed drones he's got surveilling the warehouse in question.

Miss Martian had been spending some time with Fairchild and knocking about the JSA - training, never missions, it's not as if she's a member. Mostly she's been mixing her own freelance crimefighting with a lingering examination of the human condition.

Tentative conclusion? Confusing.

The summons comes in and she considers it. It's got a little map with a location, and so she arcs off in a green streak towards the right rooftop in New York.

From what she's heard of Robin, he likes thing quiet and stealthy, and it *is* night, so she shifts into her dark-colored costume. That doesn't keep her from de-phasing right next to Robin and giving a perky, "You called? What's up!?"

Cassie, on the other hand, hasn't found herself too involved in group efforts. It's been a couple of weeks and she is still in complete and utter shock that she got to meet Wonder Woman. *The* Wonder Woman, and with very off-line people to gush to about it, left Tim Drake to be the lightning rod of most of it.

That said, Cassandra is only slightly disappointed when the text she receives isn't to hang out. That disappointement is, of course, very short lived and it's mere moments after Miss Martian's arrival that the bewigged (is that a word) and begoggled (possibly also not a word) Wonder Girl sweeps up from the side of the building, then touches down upon the roof upon one foot.

Red Robin is a very perceptive person. He hears things most people don't realise they do, pays attention in ways someone who isn't intensively trained wouldn't even think to.

Phasing is cheating, though.

The start the young man in black and red gives is so small as to be almost imperceptible, a short sharp breath exhaled between clenched teeth as he realises who it is that snuck up on him. Batman wouldn't have even done that much, of course… But for all his training and talent, Red Robin is no Batman.

"Well—" he starts, his voice electronically modified, blurred by a device worn under his cowl to help obliterate any trace of 'Tim Drake' when he's on the job; he cuts off when Wonder Girl arrives, wearing a wig and goggles for a disguise.

Behind the featureless white lenses of his cowl, the vigilante squints.

"Seriously?" he asks, before shaking his head. "Okay. Wonder Girl, Miss Martian. Miss Martian, Wonder Girl," he introduces the two young women to each other just in case, his attention wandering back to the screen on his laptop (the case is red, and it has the yellow and black robin's head silhouette logo on the back, of course… branding is very important in the Bat Family) and watching the camera feeds.

"Here's the situation: I've been tracking an Eastern European mafia that's trafficking drugs into Gotham and New York, and trafficking people out… They get young women hooked, and then kidnap them out of the country. It looks like they've hired some metahuman muscle to beef up security in case any Avengers wandered into the neighbourhood. So, I figured I should bring some of my own metahuman muscle to bust some heads while I get onto their computer system and grab all the information I can find. Plus, busting up their operation here will slow them down. Near as I can tell, this place is just for distribution, I haven't been able to find where they manufacture their stuff yet. The idea is get in, cause some noise, then get back out without getting hurt in the process. Questions?"

Miss Martian has the look of a hyper-attentive student, eyes always just a bit wide, a smile on her face. Despite hte dark costume, still still stands out - she is green, after all, and the red hair just top it off. That, and she's hovering a bit as she leans int o listen to Tim. BEcause this is all cloak and dagger, which means whispering, which means leaning in, naturally.

Wonder Girl makes her arrival, though, which gets M'gann to straighten up and put her feet on the ground. Her wide-eyes go wider. "Nice to meet you!" she says, raising a hand and waving. Humans like shaking hands, she knows, but that just sets off too much psychic conctact for her taste. "That's really very very mean," she says after Tim explains, her bright face now contorted by a scowl. "Why would they do that?" she asks in passing wonderment, then says with more edge, "What kind of noise?"

Wonder Girl looks taken aback not once, but twice. The response from Robin makes her think she was late, but then something else clicks and her normally chipper expression falls sour for a moment, "Do *you* want to pay for my wardrobe?" Not that she'd let him. Probably. The other thing is Miss Martian, whom she's fairly certain she hasn't seen before, but that smile and positive attitude is pretty infectious so she can't help but smile in return. "H- Hi there. Don't worry about Robin, he's just jealous because his costume was assigned by his boss."

Made up on the fly.

It's a little weird for her, but she's excited; and she's already eager to learn more about their third partner, but it has to wait in liu of their mission briefing. Mid-way Cassie gives a little 'gasp'. Tim of course would recognize it as her being impressed with him. In the end, she casually slips her hand over her mouth to try (and fail) to fight back a chortle. Oh, this one is *adorable*.

"Red Robin," the vigilante corrects automatically, without even looking up from the laptop screen. "Someone else is Robin now."

There was a time when that really bothered him, of course, but he embraced his newfound independence - maybe too much, from what some of the others have said about his near-total absence from the Batcave, the way he buries himself in his own cases and projects, in his own secret hideout - rather than letting himself feel hurt and put out because he'd been replaced with an al Ghul.

"And Batman didn't pick this costume, it was a bad guy's, I took it when I beat him."

Miss Martian's first question gets a bit of a shrug out of Red Robin. It's one of those questions that seems simple but is actually extremely complicated. There's an innocence to it, he supposes.

"For money. They make money off of the women who get hooked on the drug, it's popular with middle and upper class women, they usually inhale it like a vapour so there's no unsightly marks or hard drug paraphernalia. Then they make more money off of the women when they ship them off. Word is that they end up at baby factories, there's always people willing to pay for healthy children."

Slowly, he shuts the laptop, slipping it into a nearby bag. He won't need that, right now.

"Basically, beat them up and break stuff," he answers the green girl's second question, rising to his feet as he does. "That kinda noise. Some of them are going to have superhuman strength and the like, but be careful anyway. We don't want any dead bodies."

At the edge of the roof, he gestures towards the other warehouse of interest. There's a few trucks at it, and definitely some men despite the late hour. None, at least, are visibly armed. It's not Gotham, after all.

"When you two are ready, head on down there. I'll follow twenty seconds after."

"I like this better," Miss Martian tells Cassie, "Much more colorful than the Batman's costume. All black? Ick," she says, shaking her head, then frowning and hunching in a bit at Red Robin's explanation. "So mean," he hisses. He stretches her fingers and swings her arms. "I'm ready!" she declares, with a brief jump up off the roof that leaves her hovering. She tilts her head slightly, and can use her Martian Vision to see down into the warehouse. "They're just walking around. I don't think they suspect anything."

'Someone else is Robin now'. "… Awkward." Wonder Girl mumbles with a nod, and as Tim goes into further details, and explanations her expression falls more serious, though again she can't help but smile a little at her new partner's comment. The plan is written out, she certainly doesn't see any issue with it, and since Miss Martian appears to be the greenest of the trio, figuratively and literally, Wonder Girl opens her mouth with a finger pointed upward to suggest that she take the lead. However Ms Martian bounds right into action to gather intel, so her pointer finger falls. "…" Another glance is given to Tim, "I'll keep an eye on her, we've got this."

A quick cut brings Wonder Girl to her partner's side, and she can't help but look impressed, "You can *see* them? That's awesome! Ok then lets keep it simple- We can bust through the ceiling, then work our way from the top floor down to the first. Sound good?"

Red Robin's outfit does, at least, have a lot more red. And some yellow.

"Don't break anything that looks like a computer," the caped and cowled young man says as the alien and the demigoddess leap into action; both of them are flyers, which offers them some options when it comes to situations like this.

The warehouse in question is fenced off, with two others looming fairly close beside it, one to the left and one to the right, the warehouses arranged in rows… But only the one Red Robin has been staking out is currently occupied. Most of the bad guys are concentrated on the ground floor, a few of them loading something into one of those trucks, but the warehouse has a partial upper floor, including what's probably an office, where someone seems to be sitting: A few more men are standing around the upper level, which lets them overlook the main floor of the warehouse.

The roof is, of course, distressingly breakable for someone like Wonder Girl or Miss Martian, let alone both of them.

"Yes!" Miss Martian tells Cassie. "It only works sometimes." She pauses, and then Cassie hears in her head, ~Are you okay with telepathy? I promise, it's just to communicate,~ she casts over to her partner. Miss Martian briefly flickers just head of Wonder Girl, but then remembers - Robin wants her to make noise! It feels wrong, and she hopes it doesn't cause too much trouble for the people who own this building. The green girl smashes through the roof, breaking it apart with her fist ahead of her, sweeping down and snagging a set of storage racks, yanking them over for added effect.

"'Sometimes'?" Cassie repeats with a raised brow. The suddenly wobble from left to right as she's flying may be a hint that the telepathy worked (as if there was a question of it not), and she's had a little bit of experience with it before. While it makes her cheeks suddenly flush red. Instinctively she raises her pointer finger to her forehead. ~ Well that's.. That's convenient, I can work with this, sure! .. You can hear me too, right? I don't actually know how this works.. ~

The duo make their smashing entrance, Cassie touches down upon one of the grated bridges, ~ I'll take the lef- ~ And she pauses for just a moment at her partners taking Tim's instructions literally. .. Sure, that works. ~ It's probably louder if you throw them *at* people. ~

It's definitely noisy.

The roof's structure of steel, concrete and asphalt is little protection against the Martian and the demigoddess, crumpling inwards and sending debris falling towards the floor some thirty feet below. The response is… Not immediate. Really, they've caught the gangsters with their proverbial pants down, at least at first. There's some shouting - in Ukranian, mostly - as panic spreads out from the center of the warehouse like ripples in a pond, only heightening as Miss Martian swoops further down and brings a storage rack crashing to the hard, paved floor, shattering canisters of some kind of blue sand, sending small plastic crates tumbling everywhere.

From the other rooftop, Red Robin reaches a slow count to twenty, and leaps off, his cape spreading, the memory material that makes it up assuming a winglike shape as he glides silently over the now-besieged distribution center.

The shouting results in a couple of things: The truck that was being loaded can be heard coughing and sputtering as the driver works to start the engine, the men who were loading it rushing to put some last crates inside. Some of the other men reach under their jackets for guns, while another one jabs himself with a hypodermic, injecting himself with something.

Something that makes him start to change and distort, his jacket and shirt tearing as muscles swell hideously, bone spurs tearing out of his skin.

So it won't be just the guns…

~Sometimes it gets blocked!~ Miss Martian explains to Wonder Girl. People start shooting at her, making her flinch. "Stop that!" she cries. She swoops down and kicks one guy in the chest, sending him sprawling, then turns, and with a quick blast from her eyes sets off a shockwave that leaves a crack in the concrete and sends a couple more goons falling.

Aha! That makes sense.. Wonder Girl takes a slight step back following the gunfire, which is abruptly followed by a suprised, "WHOA!!" once beams abruptly fire out of Miss Martian's eyes. ~ Hey partner, if you can beam the tires of those vehicles, that'll slow them down! ~

As for the guy hulking up, that causes her brows to raise as well as her lips to draw down to a frown. Cassie springs off from her higher point, ~ I've got the big one! ~ Eyes on the prize, as it were. And while it isn't a very visually appealing one, she'll take what she can get. She starts with a run, then bursts forward into a flight path in an attempt to not just shouldertackle right into the monsterous being, but push him back to take down a few other mooks in the process. Though she does need to keep the firearms in mind; those can be pretty tricky…

Most of the goons, at least, seem to be pretty much normal humans, fragile enough that it doesn't take too much work on the part of young women with tremendous strength to take them out of the action: The men who are sent sprawling by the shockwave caused by Miss Martian's deadly thermal gaze don't get up - nor does the one she kicked on the way in - but they do at least move, in the pained manner of humans who are alive but in no condition to stand back up again.

The ones who are still on their feet are starting to notice that bullets don't seem to be having much effect on the green girl.

The effort to start up the truck becomes all the more frantic.

On the upper level, Red Robin by now has the control room to himself, the few mobsters who hadn't been drawn by the chaos the two young women were causing now laying unconscious on the floor, while the caped and cowled vigilante helps himself to their computer system.

But down on the main floor, the brutish, transformed goon grunts as Wonder Girl hammers her shoulder into his still-warping midsection, a sharp-looking bone spur - or maybe a malformed rib - growing with unnatural speed like a spike out from his distorted abdominal muscles, the razor-sharp edge of it barely missing Cassie's face even as she propels him backwards, knocking over more of the mobsters like bowling pins.

He yells something, though at this point his voice is entirely incomprehensible even if he was using English to begin with - and his overmuscled, hideously still-mutating form shoves off of his own men, the sick sound of crushing bone joining with the rest of the cacaphony in the warehouse, throwing himself in a tremendous leap at the demigoddess, arms raised for a deadly hammerblow!

The Green Girl actually laughs at Cassie's request. ~~Absolutely!~~ she replies in Wonder Girl's head, perky andchipper as always. A moment later, the flyinger girl lets out anothe rblast that lands under the cars. The blast's enought to make it jump an inch or so, but not flip over or anything. Still, a few moments later there's a boom as one of the tires exploded. It's probably not going anywhere.

M'Gann actually screws up her face in reaction to that man. "Oh, that looks so painful," she says with what certainly sounds like genuine concern. "But it's no reasont o be mean!" she adds, as he shoves at his own men. M'gann's too far to grab, and her blasts would hurt Cassie too. ~~Are you okay?~~ she asks, as she swoops in to knock down a few of the goods with well placed kicks and punches.

"… Gross." Never mind that Cassie nearly pierced herself in the face, but she didn't think the guy was going to get *that* much.. Horrendous to look at. She wonders if Tim knows about this- If not, maybe she'll get some sweet praise for reporting it so that's a plus! That said most, if not all of Miss Martian's responses make Wonger Girl feel like grinning a little. ~~ Great shot! ~~

The big man's strike is simple enough for the blonde to read and by the time it's coming down she's already skipping back just out of range of impact, ~~ No sweat, thanks! ~~ Then dashes forward with a big uppercut of her own.

It's obvious that however willingly the man injected himself with… Whatever it was… It is extremely painful. The constantly shifting mutation might lend him superhuman strength and speed, but the sheer agony of it shreds through his sanity as surely as those bones are shredding through his skin. It makes him wild, impulsive… And for someone like Wonder Girl, who's had some experience in the world of superheroics and fighting for her life, it makes his attacks clumsy and telegraphed.

The truck skids out after jumping a little from the shockwave, the sound of an axel breaking with a sharp scrape of metal on metal cutting through the other noises; the doors on the truck's cab open, and the men inside made a run for it, as the other mobsters who are still standing try to do too.

But distantly, the sound of sirens can be heard. Growing louder. Closer.

The mutated goon howls in rage as Wonder Girl avoids him, but then she darts in with a thunderous uppercut, the force of it lifting him off of his feet and landing in a heap on the cracked pavement that used to be the warehouse floor. He's still shifting, changing… And it becomes increasingly clear that whatever's happening to him, it's starting to make it difficult, perhaps even impossible, to move.

"We need to leave," Red Robin's electronically modified voice calls from the catwalk overhead. "The authorities will be here soon to clean up… I got the information I was after." And then he's already leaving, of course, because he doesn't want to be around to answer questions when the NYPD shows up, and then probably ends up calling in SHIELD or whoever.

The plan then is to return to one of Red Robin's hideouts. Not his main place in New York, the penthouse - Miss Martian doesn't know he's Tim Drake, and information security is important - but a little bunker he's set up instead, a dreary little place whose decoration is mostly concrete and computers.

Hmn, nope, Wonder Girl doesn't really get it but if someone's willing to go through that much pain to get this mission done, it must be really important. Granted she can't imagine how important something as scummy as human traffiking could be seen as 'important' but whatever! Cassie is in a pretty well-off position though; she isn't a martial arts master but with her quick reflexes against his slowness, it's easy to stay on her toes; especially with Miss Martian helping out with taking care of the guys with firearms. Yep, a pretty good team if she doesn't say so herself!

She can't help but stare for a moment as the mutated abomination lay on the floor, and she doesn't even think much of the sirens until she heads Tim's 'voice'. ~~ Ok that's our queue, partner! Let's head back to the rendezvous point! ~~

Thankfully their job was simple enough that she doesn't have to think about getting things wrapped up in a neat bow this time around, but .. Those visuals aren't going to be un-seeable for a while.

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