BAE Chapter 76

Stephanie grabs the nunchaku, although she’s the only one who calls them that. Nightwing and everyone else calls them sticks, which Stephanie finds reductive.

“Are you quite certain?” Alfred asks, watching her heft the sticks and test the resistance of the cord.

“Sure. Watch.” Stephanie frowns and looks around. Alfred’s tea set is balanced on the counter on the next level up, near the Computer. “See that teapot?”

“The Christofle that is nearly a hundred years old?”

“Yeah. That one.” Stephanie throws. The stick slams into the tray that the pot is sitting on, sending forks flying and clattering. The stick whirrs back to Stephanie’s hand. She looks at Alfred sheepishly, then throws again, wrapping the cord around the teapot and yanking it back. She and Alfred dodge aside as the lid comes loose and scalding tea flies.

But she catches the teapot, just as planned.

“See? I still got it,” she says, waving the pot at him.

“Quite. I’ll be working on arrangements for Ms. Sara Smith to join Mayor Hill’s campaign.”

“Can we not talk about that? And how I have to work at night and in the daytime? Two days ago I had no jobs. Now I have two jobs. It’s depressing.”

“Mm,” Alfred replies neutrally. “Welcome back.”

“I love you too, Alfred.”

BAE

Gotham is noisy at night. Sirens and car horns never stop. Trains continue to rattle on their tracks and horns blow in the harbor. Loud music pours out of clubs while the skyline glows against a sky of purple and charcoal.

The noise seems distant when one is thirty stories up.

Stephanie’s purple hood and cape flutter in the cold wind as she peers through a rangefinder small enough to hold between her gloved thumb and forefinger. The new uniform is a little tight; Alfred should’ve taken new measurements, but it’s lighter and supposedly better-armored than her old one. It feels pretty good.

The Moench building is only forty years old or so, which means it wasn’t too difficult for it to be retrofitted with modern security measures. It’s not top-of-the-line, and not enough to pose a real challenge.

BAE

Daggett and Sionis have given the Janus offices at the Moench building a veneer of respectability. Work hours are over, but if one visited in the daytime they would find professionally-dressed people here in their offices, probably doing something perfectly legal.

There’s uniformed security as well. They look ordinary enough at a glance, but there are way more of them than any cosmetics company would need, and a closer look reveals them to be a bit too grizzled, battered, and tattooed to be mall cops. These are Black Mask goons given a change of clothes. It looks like Barbara’s intel was on the money. There’s something here with value.

A single guard occupies the security office. He has a setup of a dozen screens to monitor the feeds from the multiple levels of the building that Janus occupies. However, the guard is not using them to view surveillance footage. He’s rigged up the monitors to function as a single screen which he’s using to watch a pornographic livestream.

A pale young woman with a lot of tattoos and short, bleached blonde hair is arranged among pink sheets. She’s showing off her hard cock for the camera. It’s not very big, but it’s cute and incredibly erotic. Now that Stephanie has seen for herself what this is like up close, she can understand how it quickly became fetishized and has blown up culturally. It’s a good thing that Barbara is aggressively pursuing a cure, but Stephanie knows firsthand that these penises aren’t always unwelcome. Riley Beaumont, for example, probably wouldn’t give hers up for the world.

The girl on the screen gives her cock a few tugs, looking lustily at the camera. She lifts the shaft out of the way to reveal her damp, shaved pussy. All she’s wearing is a cutoff top that reveals her flat belly. The top has a bat symbol on it, and her pokey nipples are clearly visible.

She reaches offscreen and comes back with a large device that looks like a thick flashlight. She shows it to the camera, spreading the lips of a rubbery artificial vagina. The girl squeezes lube all over the toy, then uses two fingers to push it inside before slathering her small cock in gel. Biting her lip, she pulls the toy down onto her shaft. It squelches outrageously. She closes her eyes and moans softly.

The guard has his feet up on the desk. He’s been absently squeezing a stress ball, but now he pauses, his gaze fixed on the screen.

The girl speeds up, then slows down, sighing.

“Oh god,” she whispers, using the toy with one hand while she rubs her stomach with the other. Presently she lies down on her front, using her hands to keep the toy stationary while she moves her hips to thrust into it. She rolls onto her side, moving the toy close to the camera.

Her face is offscreen, but her pitiful whimpers and the spasms in her legs and hips make it clear that she’s pumping her load out into the toy. It’s intense.

After spending a minute limp, she withdraws her soft cock and pushes the toy toward the camera. White cum oozes out of it.

“Wowzer,” Stephanie mutters, blushing behind her mask.

The guard jumps in surprise and looks up in time to see Stephanie’s fist knock him cold. He slumps over in his chair and Stephanie leans past him, killing the porn stream and bringing up the security system. She disables the cameras and unlocks the doors, then leaves the office. It’s simple enough to avoid the guards and get to the server room, where she plugs in Alfred’s drive to pull the data, then considers the best way to accomplish her other two objectives: making a statement and destroying this equipment.

Well, the building has sprinklers and the stuff isn’t protected from water. So there’s no need for explosives. And if there’s a fire, it’s likely that guards will come running. Stephanie doesn’t want to be on camera, but it will be good if she’s seen here. People need to see the bat symbol in the wild. The Batman isn’t around, but that doesn’t mean these guys can just do whatever they want.

She pulls the drive and tucks it into her utility belt, then climbs onto a rack to hold a lighter up to the nearest sprinkler.

The fire alarm pops instantly and the sprinklers start up. Stephanie hops back down, water spraying and pouring down her cape and uniform. This was easy. Daggett and Sionis aren’t exactly the elite, but there’s definitely some complacency at work here. The Batman’s hardly been gone more than three months and they’re already cutting corners. Stephanie doesn’t know if this proves how effective the Batman is as a deterrent or how impotent GCPD is. Either way, she’s not complaining about an easy night.

The elevator dings behind her.

Water dripping from her hood, she turns to face it. The doors slide apart to reveal a lean, almost haggard, bald man in dark pants and a jacket.

Stephanie recognizes him instantly. That’s Victor Zsasz. So, they aren’t completely phoning it in here. They have some serious muscle on-site, but that won’t prevent these servers from being destroyed.

Zsasz isn’t supposed to be free. Stephanie doesn’t need any evidence to lock him up; he just has to be taken down. On the other hand, her plan was to beat up some comparatively helpless goons to send her message. Zsasz is dangerous, and Stephanie has what she came for.

Take Zsasz down?

Or just get out?