So he would follow the path of canon Bruce and become a grumpy old man living alone. Until some teenage punk with a heart of gold, who totally doesn't have Wayne bloodline in him courtesy by Waller, show up and end up as his assistant/successor of the Batman mantle.
Then Be Batman [DC SI]
- Thread starter Nugar
- Start date
- Location
- Somewhere with a Thousand Watchful Eyes
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I mean, hey, Batman Beyond is my favourite DCAU show, so I'm down with that.
Touche. It was my favorite too and Terry vs Joker was one of the best Batman Beyond fights.
Anyway, do you think SI Bruce would meet some familiar guys who have yet to become villains in their origin story like Oswald Cobblepot The Penguin or Harvey Dent pre-Two Face for example in his debut party?
- Location
- Somewhere with a Thousand Watchful Eyes
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I hope he and Harvey meet. I really like the tragedy of the relationship. Nolan didn't do it justice.
Agreed and it was depressing to see Harvey Dent apparently never went to therapy as we see he has a lot of emotional baggage kept within all this time until that tragic accident as we see in Batman the Animated Series.
Awesome. I look forward for SI Bruce in his public debut at the gala and this is gonna be fun.
How old is Zatanna Zatara in this story?
Even if Batman never learns magic, he still needs basic familiarity with occult lore so he isn't taken off guard by sorcerers, demons, vampires, and the various supernatural threats in the DC-universe.
Kent Nelson is retired and it's NEVER a good idea to interact with John Constantine the literal doom magnet.
- Location
- US-Ark
Very mild spoilers:
I one hundred percent agree that dealing with John is a dangerous crapshoot. It'll be John anyway. One, the guy absolutely needs some heads up about incoming shit that could destroy the world. Remember the dog and the nameless evil thing? Also, cloned lungs could head off the demon constatine bit. But mainly... PM me or join my discord if you want to see the biggest reason.
Is there any kind of timeline for new chapters? Or is this going to be one of those stories that get updated at random once or twice a year?
- Location
- US-Ark
For the month of august, I was going for one chapter a week. One Ice Pie, followed by one Batman. I should have posted a chapter of this yesterday, but this past week I had a lot of health issues. Friday I got new meds, but they make me fairly sleepy so I'm still behind.
However, fighting sleep is better than fighting pain and nausea, so I think my production rate is going to pick up. Also, I'm putting out a patreon poll and I bet people are going to vote for more Then Be Batman at the cost of Ice Pie chapters.
So I'm working on the new chapter for this right now. I can't guarantee it will be done by the end of the day, but I'm hoping. I will say I'm working as fast as possible, but as mentioned, I'm not in the best shape health wise. Still, it's better on this new med, so here's hoping for speed increase ++
- Location
- US-Ark
xxxxxxxxx Chapter 4
Batman needs the Batcave to have a place to store his batgadgets. Generally speaking, I've never seen any media really focus on how he transformed the limestone caves under his family mansion into a workspace for vigilantism.
I'll tell you how I did it.
Myself and Alfred.
Mostly me.
But I didn't want to just immediately start working on the Batcave when I got started. When I first got the Gamer system, the skills started at the level of both mine and the original Bruce Wayne's skills and stats combined.
Now, this is pre-Batman Bruce Wayne, so while he had some skills that were startlingly high in places, and a pretty broad selection of skills, he was a long way from Batgod. But while I used to be just a normal guy, I've had a long and varied life, with a lot of different hobbies and skills. I've worked as a painter, drywall hanger, carpenter, HVAC, and welder professionally, and I've done things like carpet, tile, roofing, plumbing, and electrical work as either home/family projects, or as part of other careers. Like, say, when I worked as a sysadmin for a city and police department, which occasionally involved running conduit, wires, and on no less than three occasions, sump plumbing, because we kept getting flooded.
So my combined starting construction related skills were actually pretty good. Nearly everything but stonework and cement was between a 5 and a 10. But I still didn't want to do amateur work on the Batcave, so I needed to grind my skills up into the teens.
I did that by building a cottage in the woods of the Wayne manor.
It hides one of the secret entrances to the Batcave, so it wasn't a useless project, but mostly it's just a nice little secondary house that allowed me to experiment with various ideas and practice my skills.
The whole house is made of welded steel, coated in lead sheets and a spray polymer Waynetech made. Then I clad it in stone and wood, so it would look like just a normal small cottage.
It has two bedrooms, one in the loft, one in the basement, with a half bath in the basement, and an actually nice, full bath on the ground floor. The ground floor is mostly fairly open, with a nice kitchen and living room combo. The kitchen is dual electric and gas, with a wood fired brick oven. The living room has a big stone fireplace, which runs on gas but can take real logs. The loft is cozy and smells like cedar. The basement is secure with a stone tile floor.
The whole place has heat tubes under all the floors and in the walls. The insulation is top notch. If you search around, the stairs that go down to the basement bedroom have a hidden mechanism that allows you access to the mini wine cellar inside them. The actual elevator that goes down into the Batcave is hidden under the stone around the fireplace.
The roof is raw cypress wooden shingles over the solid steel, and I mixed up a slurry of mud and moss and sprayed over the wooden shingles so it'd get that nice old mossy roof look I liked. No risk of them rotting and letting water in, not with the plastic coated metal underneath. Also, cypress resists rot.
I also planted a shitload of roses all around the outside, as well as some Virginia creeper that would eventually cover the walls. Again, with the real structure being made of welded steel, there's no risk of the plant compromising it, plus Virginia Creeper is a cling type vine, rather than a root type vine. It's safe for bricks and stone. And native. No point pissing off Ivy.
I also dug out and set up a water feature, a koi pond that wraps around two sides of the house, with a patio.
Unfortunately, my skills hit fifteen before I finished it, and, for efficiency's sake, I stopped working on it and started professional quality work on the Batcave.
The project DID give me a great way to dispose of some of the limestone dross from the Batcave, though. I mined out several large limestone blocks and piled them to the side of the house, worked them so that they looked a little bit like a single large natural boulder, and started an additional project to continue leveling up my stone working, which was my lowest skill.
I carved out a big Jacuzzi sized basin in the top of the boulder, about level with the roof of the cottage. Although I didn't add any actual Jacuzzi jets, I did give it a drain and fill options, and some secure wooden steps to reach it. I also added a small waterfall feature on the edge, which falls into the koi pond.
I stopped the work there while I really concentrated on the Batcave, and my skills got into the twenties while I did that. Actually, some of them got well into the twenties before I considered it done enough that I could afford to lower my skills for a while. As I mentioned, I was able to consolidate the group of related skills into a single 'Construction' skill, which is far more powerful.
The Construction skill started at zero, but a single 'How To' book got it up to level five and a perk, which is nice. I haven't had the time to level it up since.
Still, it's not efficient to do all the tedious shit myself, even with the need to grind. I hired contractors to finish some of the still needed work, like cabinetry, and the bathrooms.
No one likes doing bathrooms. That shit is tedious, finicky, and annoying. All the goddamn little ceramic tiles.
Alfred was reporting that the team hired to put in the stone patio and the walkway from the parking lot and garage to the cottage was finally complete.
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Alfred and I walked along the new stone pathway through the carefully tended but naturalistic forest.
Of course, with all the work, the ground was torn up a bit by tire tracks and dirt, at least alongside the path, but that was fine. The men had rolled out the ruts and replaced the turf where necessary, and the area would regrow.
The path itself was nice. Instead of just bricks, or natural cobblestone, the stones were rough cut to fit more closely together, with minimal grout in between them. The surfaces were even and easy to walk on, and I saw several locations where patches of ferns and berry bushes had been planted here and there under the trees. Once everything had grown up and been trimmed properly, you'd be able to pretend you were walking into an actual forest, not just a few hundred yards into a rich estate.
We nodded politely at a number of workers, who were largely removing tools and trash. It was getting close to the end of a working day, and I could tell they were looking forward to being done with the job.
Once we got to the cottage, we saw the truck and trailer that had carried in the nicer, much more finely cut stone used for the garden patio. A man with a pressure washer was cleaning up the stone, and several young men were tamping sod around the edges.
"It looks good," I announced cheerfully. "It'll be a nice little guest house for people who need privacy." My privacy, mainly.
"I'm sure it will be very picturesque. Though I still disagree with allowing moss to grow on the roof. You can have a cottage look cozy and natural without actually being overgrown," Alfred replied.
"The core of the 'cottagecore' movement is becoming one with nature. How can you be one with nature without moss on your roof?"
"A conundrum for the ages, I'm sure."
The foreman stepped out, but didn't move to join us, instead letting us wander around at our own pace.
I had no complaints with their work. The patio was nice, and was bordered by a mix of big stone planters and actual garden beds, though the roses were the only thing currently planted. Eventually, I'd fill them up with herbs and leafy vegetables. Not to eat, just to attract creatures.
The koi pond was still dry, though it was ready to be filled whenever. Likewise, the house hadn't been furnished yet, but it had water, gas, and electricity. Since the bathrooms had been done, the only major project left for the place, at least that I wanted to do personally, was to make some bas relief style wall molding, and some carved railings for the stairs to the loft bedroom. Neither was necessary for the cottage to be lived in, but I do need to do some art stuff for XP reasons.
Really, there was no need to rush the place. While I'm sure it'd be handy once we regularly had guests, and especially useful when I started adopting sidekicks, I made it to grind skill XP.
Still, the project had been soothing. A way to just immerse myself into the act of creating, always one of my favorite things to do, and slowly adapt to my new situation.
Really, building the cottage had been way more satisfying than going out last night. While yes, I had helped a few people, I lack the monomaniacal drive for vengeance most Batmen had. It doesn't make me feel better to punch a poor guy breaking into an apartment.
Though I confess to quite liking the bit where I dislocated the arm of the abuser. It's not that I don't have a core of rage in me, it just doesn't come out the same way as Bruce Wayne's crazy.
Hmm. That actually raises a good point. I should check in and see if that woman went to the shelter.
There's still time today, it's only a little after 4 P.M., and most shelter work gets done in the evenings, preparing people for the night. Time to wrap this up.
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I've got an entire personal fleet of pretty sweet cars, trucks, and motorcycles, most of which I inherited. Thomas Wayne was a bit of a car guy, and while there are certainly differences in the cars of the DC world I'm in compared to Prime Earth, some things line up really well. Thomas had things like a Lamborghini Countach, a Ferrari F40, a Porsche 911, and a Lancia Stratos. Those are fairly iconic cars that would be recognized on Prime Earth, though they do have some differences. But he also picked up things like a Panther 6, and a Jaguar known here as one of the worst 70s supercars ever made.
Actually, the man had a knack for picking out really cool looking but ultimately shit cars. I mean weak engines, bad engineering, and horrible build quality. I don't know, Bruce never really got a chance to discuss it with him, but maybe he did it deliberately so he'd have things to tinker with. There's some real gems in the collection, but they tend to be more along the luxury car line rather than exotic supercars.
Sometimes, like when I drive to the Waynetech building, I need to take something fairly fancy. It's an image thing. But I think it'd be in rather poor taste to drive out to a shelter for homeless abused women in a million dollar car.
So I took a fairly basic 'luxury' sedan. Something equivalent to a Lincoln rather than a Bentley, that won't stand out in traffic, or in a parking lot.
It's not obvious at all that the car is armored, with bullet resistant glass and runflat tires. The whole conversion was done in house. Although in other DC universes it can be pretty different, in this one, Waynetech is basically the equivalent of Prime Earth's Northrup Grumman, or Lockheed, just not as intensely focused on aircraft. Although the company does have a medical division, most of its 30-some odd billion dollars of value is from its portfolio of advanced materials, which it sells to basically everyone, and military gear ranging from personal tools to tanks and APCs to aircraft, bombs, and missiles.
Truthfully, Bruce's parents set up the medical division more as part of their philanthropic efforts than any real attempt to make money. It's cheaper to donate your own medical supplies at cost than it is to buy from others.
Alfred got left behind. I know the guy is my butler and my driver and everything else I need for him to be, but right now most of his duties have been more along the lines of intelligence gathering and administration, when he's not making me breakfast and shooting me.
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Gotham is a pretty big city. Various media has placed it all over the US, though it's consistently based on the gritty bits of New York City, except more so.
How do you grime up a place like New York City?
You move it south, to New Jersey.
Yup, I'm a Jerseyite now. The horror.
Here in this world, Gotham is on the southern coast of New Jersey, on the North side of Delaware Bay. A bit north of it, about 25-30 miles, is Blüdhaven, and 70 miles north of that is Atlantic City, which seems much farther north than I remember. Once you cross over the state border, you get Metropolis, City of Tomorrow, and it's iconic Statue of Liberty.
New York City? What's that? Oh, it's this small city in central New York State. Nothing much happens there.
I have to note, I don't have a photographic memory for the eastern US coastline, but I'm pretty sure there are some actual geological differences, not just city names and locations.
Gotham is way bigger than any of the cities I remember from New Jersey. It's bigger than Boston or Baltimore, and pretty much dominates Gotham Peninsula now that it's had time to grow and spread. It started on this sort of little sub-peninsula/coastal island cluster, which had an intermittent land bridge connecting it to the larger Gotham Peninsula. Since then, dredging and bridges have turned what most people call Gotham City proper into a real island, surrounded by port infrastructure. However, despite its laundry list of problems, the city continues to grow, and has long since jumped the watery gap to the mainland, absorbing neighboring towns as it goes, and there's even more cities that technically have their own government, but are so seamlessly integrated into the sprawl that even a lot of locals just say they live in Gotham.
Wayne Manor is in the northern peninsula, not in the city proper, though it's still in Gotham County. Although it was a little bit out of my way, thanks Bradley Anders and-or Robert Kane, the fastest way to the city from the manor is to drive east, crossing into southern Kane County, then taking the Robert Kane Memorial Bridge south into Gotham.
I'm actually somewhat grateful for the bridge's location. The original plan was to essentially point it directly at the Wayne Manor, driving traffic to the area. While it would probably have increased the family fortune, it also would have urbanized the shit out of the area. Right now, privacy is far more valuable than another billion.
The bridge deposited me onto Gotham's north island, and I quickly found my way to a place on the edge of East End. This was the Gotham Helping Hands Center, which ran a bit more than three-quarters of all the people shelters in the area.
It was a dismal, run down, 18 storey building that looked like it had been made of depression, furnished in hopelessness, and painted in nicotine stains.
It was so Gotham it shit tragic backstories.
I mean that literally. Helping Hands ran homeless shelters and women's' shelters. Most of the building was actually dedicated to a mix of group barracks style rooms and family suites, not that there was anything sweet about these accommodations.
That being said, while the organization certainly had some people who had the compassion and mercy drained out of them long ago, it also had both old battleaxe and young idealistic social warriors. It was very much an example of adversity as a grindstone. Some people got ground away. Some people just got sharpened.
They were also getting millions in Wayne money, and about to get even more.
Miranda Anderson was the director of Helping Hands. She was seventy three years old, one hundred and twenty nine pounds, and had permanent worry wrinkles. She had been a heavy smoker for about four decades, but had quit cold turkey and not touched tobacco since. Her left hip pained her, and a combination of arthritis and carpal tunnel had turned her hands into nearly ineffectual claws. Some people have resting bitch face. She had active bitch face. Everything she saw seemed to disappoint her.
She was carved from fucking wood.
Unbent. Unbroken. Undaunted.
For all she could make you feel about an inch tall with a look, she could calm a crying baby, sooth a frightened child, and reassure a scared young mother. Any evil out there that wanted to harm her charges had to get through her first, and so far, not much had.
She'd been accused of murder no less than seven times, all abusive people who totally deserved it, but in every case always had dozens of alibis ranging from the people she worked with and helped, to the guy that sold newspapers at a stand near her apartment building with whom she'd shared maybe a hundred words over the course of her lifetime. Every single one of them would swear they'd been glued to her twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, forever.
God she was cool.
I wanted to be her when I grew up.
Also, I'd looked into the murders, and I was pretty sure she hadn't actually done any of them, but had presented herself as a serious suspect to protect the people who had actually done it. For all that a lot of her alibis were clearly fake, there was always at least one that was unquestionably legit. Not that I think she wasn't mentally capable of murder, but she's had hand trouble for a long time. I don't think she could actually wield a gun.
"Oh lovely Miss Annnderson," I crooned at her when I spotted her at the end of the hall.
She had been conversing with two of her minions, a young woman and a man in his thirties. Both had clipboards and pens and were taking down notes. Mrs. Anderson, who was a divorcee with one grown child, gave me a glare.
The glare bounced off.
If I was my ordinary self, I'd think she hated me. Heck, I'd just about think that, anyway, but between the near magical Observe skill and my other people reading skills, I could tell she liked me.
A little. Deep inside.
She'd been exposed to entirely too many good looking flirts over the years to find my act noteworthy, but the shrewd old battleaxe had apparently been keeping an eye on my efforts to improve Gotham in the past year, and at some point had been convinced of my sincerity.
I could have dumped five times the money I'd already spent into charity, and she'd sneer like an aristocrat if she thought it was just a performative piece like most charity. However, when I'd actually sat down with her and discussed budgeting and planning, setting up long term improvements and trusts that would generate yearly income rather than just money to be spent today, she'd been reluctantly impressed.
"Bruce. How lovely to see you," she said in a tone that made it sound like she was imagining strangling me to death with my own intestines. "To what do I owe the favor of your visit."
The two minions glanced at me. I could see the whites in their eyes.
"Just checking in on my investments. I want to make sure my money is being spent for the good of Gotham, not lining some fatcat director's pockets," I said in my best stuffy CEO voice.
Minion one paled so much she looked albino. Minion two looked like he wanted to faint.
Mrs. Anderson all but growled. "Cut the shit, boy. The women's shelter on Bois d' Arc in Burnside just had a kitchen fire a few hours ago. They put it out fast, but not before it smoked up the place and ruined a lot of appliances. Now I've got twelve young women and eighteen children getting hungry, with no place to sleep tonight. Everywhere else is full. What do you want."
"I want a date to a charity gala that's coming up. It's raising money for a number of things, your organization included, disguised as my big debut into Gotham high society now that I'm of age. I had some of the usual type girls in queue but they all fell through, so now I need a replacement, and I can't think of a better date than you. It'd give you the chance to sneer at rich people and have them give you money for the privilege," I explained.
"No."
She glanced at Minion one, a not entirely unattractive young woman, who paled even further and shook her head frantically. If she lost any more blood, she was going to look like a cave fish.
With that failure, Mrs. Anderson turned her attention to Minion number two.
The guy glanced at me.
Hmm. You know…
The man, who was probably about a decade older than me, bolted, followed by Minion one.
Mrs. Anderson frowned a little bit harder, then gave me a shrug, like 'What can you do?'.
I didn't bother trying to convince her to go with me, as cool as that would be. Watching her aggressively lower middle class sensibilities go head to head with the kind of people who spend ten grand on a bottle of wine would cheer me up immensely, but one does not challenge Mrs. Anderson's decisions so lightly.
"The Burnside shelter?" she prompted.
"Yeah, I'll handle it," I replied, and left.
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AN: Later than I wanted. Last week was pretty bad, health wise. Like, really bad. But I got new meds on friday. I'm pleased to report less pain, and my blood pressure has finally come down from more than 200/100. It's been pretty stubborn, and they've just been adding more and more meds to me, but this latest one seems to be working.
Unfortunately, it's working a little too good. BP is a bit too low now, and I'm getting dizzy and feeling particularly stupid. I've made a few dumb comments here and there on various boards, where I have literally failed basic reading comprehension. Embarrassing. But hey, less likely to stroke out, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. Also, while I'm not on enough pain meds to be acutally pain free, it's definitely less than it was. You never really appreciate the absence of pain until you're in enough pain it's all you can think about.
As usual, the next chapters of Ice Pie, Then Be Batman, and a few bonus things are available on my Patreon.
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Batman needs the Batcave to have a place to store his batgadgets. Generally speaking, I've never seen any media really focus on how he transformed the limestone caves under his family mansion into a workspace for vigilantism.
I'll tell you how I did it.
Myself and Alfred.
Mostly me.
But I didn't want to just immediately start working on the Batcave when I got started. When I first got the Gamer system, the skills started at the level of both mine and the original Bruce Wayne's skills and stats combined.
Now, this is pre-Batman Bruce Wayne, so while he had some skills that were startlingly high in places, and a pretty broad selection of skills, he was a long way from Batgod. But while I used to be just a normal guy, I've had a long and varied life, with a lot of different hobbies and skills. I've worked as a painter, drywall hanger, carpenter, HVAC, and welder professionally, and I've done things like carpet, tile, roofing, plumbing, and electrical work as either home/family projects, or as part of other careers. Like, say, when I worked as a sysadmin for a city and police department, which occasionally involved running conduit, wires, and on no less than three occasions, sump plumbing, because we kept getting flooded.
So my combined starting construction related skills were actually pretty good. Nearly everything but stonework and cement was between a 5 and a 10. But I still didn't want to do amateur work on the Batcave, so I needed to grind my skills up into the teens.
I did that by building a cottage in the woods of the Wayne manor.
It hides one of the secret entrances to the Batcave, so it wasn't a useless project, but mostly it's just a nice little secondary house that allowed me to experiment with various ideas and practice my skills.
The whole house is made of welded steel, coated in lead sheets and a spray polymer Waynetech made. Then I clad it in stone and wood, so it would look like just a normal small cottage.
It has two bedrooms, one in the loft, one in the basement, with a half bath in the basement, and an actually nice, full bath on the ground floor. The ground floor is mostly fairly open, with a nice kitchen and living room combo. The kitchen is dual electric and gas, with a wood fired brick oven. The living room has a big stone fireplace, which runs on gas but can take real logs. The loft is cozy and smells like cedar. The basement is secure with a stone tile floor.
The whole place has heat tubes under all the floors and in the walls. The insulation is top notch. If you search around, the stairs that go down to the basement bedroom have a hidden mechanism that allows you access to the mini wine cellar inside them. The actual elevator that goes down into the Batcave is hidden under the stone around the fireplace.
The roof is raw cypress wooden shingles over the solid steel, and I mixed up a slurry of mud and moss and sprayed over the wooden shingles so it'd get that nice old mossy roof look I liked. No risk of them rotting and letting water in, not with the plastic coated metal underneath. Also, cypress resists rot.
I also planted a shitload of roses all around the outside, as well as some Virginia creeper that would eventually cover the walls. Again, with the real structure being made of welded steel, there's no risk of the plant compromising it, plus Virginia Creeper is a cling type vine, rather than a root type vine. It's safe for bricks and stone. And native. No point pissing off Ivy.
I also dug out and set up a water feature, a koi pond that wraps around two sides of the house, with a patio.
Unfortunately, my skills hit fifteen before I finished it, and, for efficiency's sake, I stopped working on it and started professional quality work on the Batcave.
The project DID give me a great way to dispose of some of the limestone dross from the Batcave, though. I mined out several large limestone blocks and piled them to the side of the house, worked them so that they looked a little bit like a single large natural boulder, and started an additional project to continue leveling up my stone working, which was my lowest skill.
I carved out a big Jacuzzi sized basin in the top of the boulder, about level with the roof of the cottage. Although I didn't add any actual Jacuzzi jets, I did give it a drain and fill options, and some secure wooden steps to reach it. I also added a small waterfall feature on the edge, which falls into the koi pond.
I stopped the work there while I really concentrated on the Batcave, and my skills got into the twenties while I did that. Actually, some of them got well into the twenties before I considered it done enough that I could afford to lower my skills for a while. As I mentioned, I was able to consolidate the group of related skills into a single 'Construction' skill, which is far more powerful.
The Construction skill started at zero, but a single 'How To' book got it up to level five and a perk, which is nice. I haven't had the time to level it up since.
Still, it's not efficient to do all the tedious shit myself, even with the need to grind. I hired contractors to finish some of the still needed work, like cabinetry, and the bathrooms.
No one likes doing bathrooms. That shit is tedious, finicky, and annoying. All the goddamn little ceramic tiles.
Alfred was reporting that the team hired to put in the stone patio and the walkway from the parking lot and garage to the cottage was finally complete.
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Alfred and I walked along the new stone pathway through the carefully tended but naturalistic forest.
Of course, with all the work, the ground was torn up a bit by tire tracks and dirt, at least alongside the path, but that was fine. The men had rolled out the ruts and replaced the turf where necessary, and the area would regrow.
The path itself was nice. Instead of just bricks, or natural cobblestone, the stones were rough cut to fit more closely together, with minimal grout in between them. The surfaces were even and easy to walk on, and I saw several locations where patches of ferns and berry bushes had been planted here and there under the trees. Once everything had grown up and been trimmed properly, you'd be able to pretend you were walking into an actual forest, not just a few hundred yards into a rich estate.
We nodded politely at a number of workers, who were largely removing tools and trash. It was getting close to the end of a working day, and I could tell they were looking forward to being done with the job.
Once we got to the cottage, we saw the truck and trailer that had carried in the nicer, much more finely cut stone used for the garden patio. A man with a pressure washer was cleaning up the stone, and several young men were tamping sod around the edges.
"It looks good," I announced cheerfully. "It'll be a nice little guest house for people who need privacy." My privacy, mainly.
"I'm sure it will be very picturesque. Though I still disagree with allowing moss to grow on the roof. You can have a cottage look cozy and natural without actually being overgrown," Alfred replied.
"The core of the 'cottagecore' movement is becoming one with nature. How can you be one with nature without moss on your roof?"
"A conundrum for the ages, I'm sure."
The foreman stepped out, but didn't move to join us, instead letting us wander around at our own pace.
I had no complaints with their work. The patio was nice, and was bordered by a mix of big stone planters and actual garden beds, though the roses were the only thing currently planted. Eventually, I'd fill them up with herbs and leafy vegetables. Not to eat, just to attract creatures.
The koi pond was still dry, though it was ready to be filled whenever. Likewise, the house hadn't been furnished yet, but it had water, gas, and electricity. Since the bathrooms had been done, the only major project left for the place, at least that I wanted to do personally, was to make some bas relief style wall molding, and some carved railings for the stairs to the loft bedroom. Neither was necessary for the cottage to be lived in, but I do need to do some art stuff for XP reasons.
Really, there was no need to rush the place. While I'm sure it'd be handy once we regularly had guests, and especially useful when I started adopting sidekicks, I made it to grind skill XP.
Still, the project had been soothing. A way to just immerse myself into the act of creating, always one of my favorite things to do, and slowly adapt to my new situation.
Really, building the cottage had been way more satisfying than going out last night. While yes, I had helped a few people, I lack the monomaniacal drive for vengeance most Batmen had. It doesn't make me feel better to punch a poor guy breaking into an apartment.
Though I confess to quite liking the bit where I dislocated the arm of the abuser. It's not that I don't have a core of rage in me, it just doesn't come out the same way as Bruce Wayne's crazy.
Hmm. That actually raises a good point. I should check in and see if that woman went to the shelter.
There's still time today, it's only a little after 4 P.M., and most shelter work gets done in the evenings, preparing people for the night. Time to wrap this up.
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I've got an entire personal fleet of pretty sweet cars, trucks, and motorcycles, most of which I inherited. Thomas Wayne was a bit of a car guy, and while there are certainly differences in the cars of the DC world I'm in compared to Prime Earth, some things line up really well. Thomas had things like a Lamborghini Countach, a Ferrari F40, a Porsche 911, and a Lancia Stratos. Those are fairly iconic cars that would be recognized on Prime Earth, though they do have some differences. But he also picked up things like a Panther 6, and a Jaguar known here as one of the worst 70s supercars ever made.
Actually, the man had a knack for picking out really cool looking but ultimately shit cars. I mean weak engines, bad engineering, and horrible build quality. I don't know, Bruce never really got a chance to discuss it with him, but maybe he did it deliberately so he'd have things to tinker with. There's some real gems in the collection, but they tend to be more along the luxury car line rather than exotic supercars.
Sometimes, like when I drive to the Waynetech building, I need to take something fairly fancy. It's an image thing. But I think it'd be in rather poor taste to drive out to a shelter for homeless abused women in a million dollar car.
So I took a fairly basic 'luxury' sedan. Something equivalent to a Lincoln rather than a Bentley, that won't stand out in traffic, or in a parking lot.
It's not obvious at all that the car is armored, with bullet resistant glass and runflat tires. The whole conversion was done in house. Although in other DC universes it can be pretty different, in this one, Waynetech is basically the equivalent of Prime Earth's Northrup Grumman, or Lockheed, just not as intensely focused on aircraft. Although the company does have a medical division, most of its 30-some odd billion dollars of value is from its portfolio of advanced materials, which it sells to basically everyone, and military gear ranging from personal tools to tanks and APCs to aircraft, bombs, and missiles.
Truthfully, Bruce's parents set up the medical division more as part of their philanthropic efforts than any real attempt to make money. It's cheaper to donate your own medical supplies at cost than it is to buy from others.
Alfred got left behind. I know the guy is my butler and my driver and everything else I need for him to be, but right now most of his duties have been more along the lines of intelligence gathering and administration, when he's not making me breakfast and shooting me.
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Gotham is a pretty big city. Various media has placed it all over the US, though it's consistently based on the gritty bits of New York City, except more so.
How do you grime up a place like New York City?
You move it south, to New Jersey.
Yup, I'm a Jerseyite now. The horror.
Here in this world, Gotham is on the southern coast of New Jersey, on the North side of Delaware Bay. A bit north of it, about 25-30 miles, is Blüdhaven, and 70 miles north of that is Atlantic City, which seems much farther north than I remember. Once you cross over the state border, you get Metropolis, City of Tomorrow, and it's iconic Statue of Liberty.
New York City? What's that? Oh, it's this small city in central New York State. Nothing much happens there.
I have to note, I don't have a photographic memory for the eastern US coastline, but I'm pretty sure there are some actual geological differences, not just city names and locations.
Gotham is way bigger than any of the cities I remember from New Jersey. It's bigger than Boston or Baltimore, and pretty much dominates Gotham Peninsula now that it's had time to grow and spread. It started on this sort of little sub-peninsula/coastal island cluster, which had an intermittent land bridge connecting it to the larger Gotham Peninsula. Since then, dredging and bridges have turned what most people call Gotham City proper into a real island, surrounded by port infrastructure. However, despite its laundry list of problems, the city continues to grow, and has long since jumped the watery gap to the mainland, absorbing neighboring towns as it goes, and there's even more cities that technically have their own government, but are so seamlessly integrated into the sprawl that even a lot of locals just say they live in Gotham.
Wayne Manor is in the northern peninsula, not in the city proper, though it's still in Gotham County. Although it was a little bit out of my way, thanks Bradley Anders and-or Robert Kane, the fastest way to the city from the manor is to drive east, crossing into southern Kane County, then taking the Robert Kane Memorial Bridge south into Gotham.
I'm actually somewhat grateful for the bridge's location. The original plan was to essentially point it directly at the Wayne Manor, driving traffic to the area. While it would probably have increased the family fortune, it also would have urbanized the shit out of the area. Right now, privacy is far more valuable than another billion.
The bridge deposited me onto Gotham's north island, and I quickly found my way to a place on the edge of East End. This was the Gotham Helping Hands Center, which ran a bit more than three-quarters of all the people shelters in the area.
It was a dismal, run down, 18 storey building that looked like it had been made of depression, furnished in hopelessness, and painted in nicotine stains.
It was so Gotham it shit tragic backstories.
I mean that literally. Helping Hands ran homeless shelters and women's' shelters. Most of the building was actually dedicated to a mix of group barracks style rooms and family suites, not that there was anything sweet about these accommodations.
That being said, while the organization certainly had some people who had the compassion and mercy drained out of them long ago, it also had both old battleaxe and young idealistic social warriors. It was very much an example of adversity as a grindstone. Some people got ground away. Some people just got sharpened.
They were also getting millions in Wayne money, and about to get even more.
Miranda Anderson was the director of Helping Hands. She was seventy three years old, one hundred and twenty nine pounds, and had permanent worry wrinkles. She had been a heavy smoker for about four decades, but had quit cold turkey and not touched tobacco since. Her left hip pained her, and a combination of arthritis and carpal tunnel had turned her hands into nearly ineffectual claws. Some people have resting bitch face. She had active bitch face. Everything she saw seemed to disappoint her.
She was carved from fucking wood.
Unbent. Unbroken. Undaunted.
For all she could make you feel about an inch tall with a look, she could calm a crying baby, sooth a frightened child, and reassure a scared young mother. Any evil out there that wanted to harm her charges had to get through her first, and so far, not much had.
She'd been accused of murder no less than seven times, all abusive people who totally deserved it, but in every case always had dozens of alibis ranging from the people she worked with and helped, to the guy that sold newspapers at a stand near her apartment building with whom she'd shared maybe a hundred words over the course of her lifetime. Every single one of them would swear they'd been glued to her twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, forever.
God she was cool.
I wanted to be her when I grew up.
Also, I'd looked into the murders, and I was pretty sure she hadn't actually done any of them, but had presented herself as a serious suspect to protect the people who had actually done it. For all that a lot of her alibis were clearly fake, there was always at least one that was unquestionably legit. Not that I think she wasn't mentally capable of murder, but she's had hand trouble for a long time. I don't think she could actually wield a gun.
"Oh lovely Miss Annnderson," I crooned at her when I spotted her at the end of the hall.
She had been conversing with two of her minions, a young woman and a man in his thirties. Both had clipboards and pens and were taking down notes. Mrs. Anderson, who was a divorcee with one grown child, gave me a glare.
The glare bounced off.
If I was my ordinary self, I'd think she hated me. Heck, I'd just about think that, anyway, but between the near magical Observe skill and my other people reading skills, I could tell she liked me.
A little. Deep inside.
She'd been exposed to entirely too many good looking flirts over the years to find my act noteworthy, but the shrewd old battleaxe had apparently been keeping an eye on my efforts to improve Gotham in the past year, and at some point had been convinced of my sincerity.
I could have dumped five times the money I'd already spent into charity, and she'd sneer like an aristocrat if she thought it was just a performative piece like most charity. However, when I'd actually sat down with her and discussed budgeting and planning, setting up long term improvements and trusts that would generate yearly income rather than just money to be spent today, she'd been reluctantly impressed.
"Bruce. How lovely to see you," she said in a tone that made it sound like she was imagining strangling me to death with my own intestines. "To what do I owe the favor of your visit."
The two minions glanced at me. I could see the whites in their eyes.
"Just checking in on my investments. I want to make sure my money is being spent for the good of Gotham, not lining some fatcat director's pockets," I said in my best stuffy CEO voice.
Minion one paled so much she looked albino. Minion two looked like he wanted to faint.
Mrs. Anderson all but growled. "Cut the shit, boy. The women's shelter on Bois d' Arc in Burnside just had a kitchen fire a few hours ago. They put it out fast, but not before it smoked up the place and ruined a lot of appliances. Now I've got twelve young women and eighteen children getting hungry, with no place to sleep tonight. Everywhere else is full. What do you want."
"I want a date to a charity gala that's coming up. It's raising money for a number of things, your organization included, disguised as my big debut into Gotham high society now that I'm of age. I had some of the usual type girls in queue but they all fell through, so now I need a replacement, and I can't think of a better date than you. It'd give you the chance to sneer at rich people and have them give you money for the privilege," I explained.
"No."
She glanced at Minion one, a not entirely unattractive young woman, who paled even further and shook her head frantically. If she lost any more blood, she was going to look like a cave fish.
With that failure, Mrs. Anderson turned her attention to Minion number two.
The guy glanced at me.
Hmm. You know…
The man, who was probably about a decade older than me, bolted, followed by Minion one.
Mrs. Anderson frowned a little bit harder, then gave me a shrug, like 'What can you do?'.
I didn't bother trying to convince her to go with me, as cool as that would be. Watching her aggressively lower middle class sensibilities go head to head with the kind of people who spend ten grand on a bottle of wine would cheer me up immensely, but one does not challenge Mrs. Anderson's decisions so lightly.
"The Burnside shelter?" she prompted.
"Yeah, I'll handle it," I replied, and left.
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AN: Later than I wanted. Last week was pretty bad, health wise. Like, really bad. But I got new meds on friday. I'm pleased to report less pain, and my blood pressure has finally come down from more than 200/100. It's been pretty stubborn, and they've just been adding more and more meds to me, but this latest one seems to be working.
Unfortunately, it's working a little too good. BP is a bit too low now, and I'm getting dizzy and feeling particularly stupid. I've made a few dumb comments here and there on various boards, where I have literally failed basic reading comprehension. Embarrassing. But hey, less likely to stroke out, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. Also, while I'm not on enough pain meds to be acutally pain free, it's definitely less than it was. You never really appreciate the absence of pain until you're in enough pain it's all you can think about.
As usual, the next chapters of Ice Pie, Then Be Batman, and a few bonus things are available on my Patreon.
Nugar | creating Original Fantasy and/or Scifi, and occasional fan proje | Patreon
Also, as requested by people who justifiably hate Patreon, I have a Ko-Fi now.
Support Nugar writes on Ko-fi! ❤️. ko-fi.com/nugar
I'll get a Subscribestar at some point. Thanks for reading and supporting!
Hey, there's nothing wrong with New Jersey! It has a cool giant robot with a car for a head with lots of DAKKA and chicks dig giant robots!
View: https://youtu.be/poV2mZuVOjI?si=uN-JjdC_sRejzhOd
Ardion Prosili
An (im)Perfect Cell
I really do like the focus on how mellowing and calming the making the cottage was, as well as the focus on how different this 'Bruce's' personality is compared to a typical Bruce Wayne's on a fundamental level. Mrs. Anderson is a great side character too.
- Location
- Somewhere with a Thousand Watchful Eyes
- Pronouns
- They/Them
- Location
- Dallas, TX
It was very important we know the specific materials of a cottage on the property and that the MC made it themselves to make number go brr
Me too. Megas XLR deserved Season 3. At least we have fanfics for Megas XLR to read and enjoy.
And yeah it was a pretty neat chapter especially Mrs. Anderson being no nonsense best side character.
EnygmaSoul
Company of Negotiable Virtue
- Location
- In your eyes and in your arms and in your head.
Miranda Anderson needs to star in her own fic. Holy shit that was an amazing bit of character work.
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
Batman is a loveable dork.
- Location
- US-Ark
I've gotten a number of negative comments on this chapter across the boards. And you know what? I actually agree. This needed an editor with a red pen and a grudge.
Now, the Bruce stuff, as opposed to the Batman stuff, is important. I'm not going to cut it all out. But I'm a very technical minded person, and I think a lot about details when I'm working on a fic. I mean, you all saw the technobabble thing. Well, unfortunately, a lack of a really mean beta, my own wandering mind, and just general setup for this fairly young fic means I babbled when I should have cut it short.
The patreon votes on what to focus on actually got fairly evenly split between this and Ice Pie, so I'm going to continue swapping back and forth. But, given this chapter is sort of subpar, and the next one, which is already available to patrons, sort of continues the bruce manning, I'm going to stop and redo this. The next next chapter, the one I'm working on, does take place at the end of the day when he goes out as Batman again. So for pacing and quality purposes, I'm going to do some serious editing, get more action going on, and combine this chapter four with the existing chapter five.
Give me a few days to get everything straight, and look for the rewrite. I'll leave this version up for now.
Thanks for everyone who's supporting me on patreon and ko-fi! You deserve better and I will deliver better.
Nitronorm5688
The Armchair Reader
- Location
- Oakdale, CT
I think you should leave it as it is.
Technobabble is fine. This is a Gamer Fic. Anyone coming into this having read the word Gamer in the tittle or read the Gamer Web Comic comes expecting a certain amount of techno, details, and numbers. Especially when it becomes relevant laters.
A given amount of technical information and gaming is like in the first Battletech books. I couldn't get into them because whole chapters and paragraphs would "game" their giant robot battles while the characters were stomping around in the woods. People who read those books and enjoy them expect a given amount of gaming.
Not all chapters are going to be the next level of perfection.
So expect some good with the bad. Find a balance you are comfortable with and stick to it.
- Location
- Dallas, TX
The problem with this argument is that the bulk of the chapter was not technical details. It was effectively "here's what I've done in Sims for the last 3 hours" when it could have more than adequately summed up as "It's been a slog the last few months but I took some time on a personal project to take a dilapidated cabin on the grounds and turn into my own little slice of cottage core heaven complete with idyllic moss on the top. Still had all the big money amenities I could throw at it. Got me a good few points in X, Y, Z. It was all prepping for bringing the Batcave up to snuff with other universes but I had a place to relax as me, not Bruce in his manor, not Batman in his cave, but me. Also it's likely Riddler will pull some nonsense clue regarding how a wood joint comes together in his trap or some obscure marble carving technique will tell me the time and location of his next heist. And im sure The Carpenter will do something...vaguely threatening." There, I've laid enough vague details for what was done for you to fill in what it all looks like yourself, the motivation for why he did it both as someone longing for the past and in a way useful to him as Batman, while also updating on skill gains that be used as fun little details in a future villain interaction. And a BtAS reference to a joke villain. Could that be expanded upon for more details and character bits? Yes definitely, it was the first thing to pop up on reading your post. But I'll still argue it doesn't need to take up the bulk of 4k words and "Sims: cottage core building Simulator" isn't what people think of when they read "gamer" without a "slice of life" right after that.
Last edited:
That would have been priceless to witness for SI Bruce Wayne. But that's fine. He might have to find another one in the meantime.
Chapter 4 revised and expanded.
- Location
- US-Ark
As promised, this is the revision and expansion of chapter four. This also includes what had been posted as chapter five on my patreon, so this does have quite a bit of new material.
xxxxxxxxx Chapter 4
The best thing about becoming Batman before he became Batman is that I'm not expected to suddenly juggle the forest of spinning plates he does with Gotham, the League, and the rest of the world and universe.
The worst thing about it was that none of the infrastructure is set up yet.
Well, no, actually, the worst thing about it was explaining to Alfred that it's vital to the fate of the world and universe that I put on a fur suit and run around punching criminals by night.
But mostly the setup.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a builder, a maker, a fixer. I like doing that kind of thing. But Bruce Wayne actually started out as a regular vigilante before he put on the batsuit, and he built his armory up over time, whereas I am going into this with full awareness of the scale I'll need to operate at. The scale of the duty in front of me is sort of overwhelming.
Also, I want to be smart about it, so I'm trying to do proper foundational work now, to be better prepared for later. What that meant for me for close to a year now was doing a lot of construction.
Well, and Alfred as well, but mostly me.
But I didn't want to just immediately start working on the Batcave when I got started. When I first got the Gamer system, the skills started at the level of both mine and the original Bruce Wayne's skills and stats combined.
Now, this is pre-Batman Bruce Wayne, so while he had some skills that were startlingly high in places, and a pretty broad selection of skills, he was a long way from Batgod. But while I used to be just a normal guy, I've had a long and varied life, with a lot of different hobbies and skills. I've worked as a painter, drywall hanger, carpenter, HVAC, and welder professionally, and I've done things like carpet, tile, roofing, plumbing, and electrical work as either home/family projects, or as part of other careers. Like, say, when I worked as a sysadmin for a city and police department, which occasionally involved running conduit, wires, and on no less than three occasions, sump plumbing, because we kept getting flooded.
So my combined starting construction related skills were actually pretty good. Nearly everything but stonework and cement was between a 5 and a 10. But I still didn't want to do amateur work on the Batcave, so I needed to grind my skills up into the teens.
I did that by building a cottage in the woods of the Wayne manor.
It's a nice place, built to disguise one of the alternate entrances to the Batcave.
Welded steel construction with stone cladding, with lead lining everything. I used it as a way of getting rid of a lot of the limestone dross I made when digging out the cave system. I even ended up mixing up moss and mud into a slurry and spraying over the roof, so in a year or so it'd look like something Studio Ghibli designed.
As a nod towards the potential future Poison Ivy, I included a lot of native plants in the design. As well as roses. I like roses.
But I did end up hitting my self-imposed goal of a fifteen before I finished it, and, for efficiency's sake, I started focusing on the Batcave with professional quality work. Given the scale at which I was working, my skills quickly got into the twenties while I did that. Actually, some of them got well into the twenties before I considered it done enough that I could afford to lower my skills for a while. As I mentioned, I was able to consolidate the group of related skills into a single 'Construction' skill, which is far more powerful.
The Construction skill started at zero, but a single 'How To' book got it up to level five and a perk, which is nice. I haven't had the time to level it up since.
Sure, it'd be a good idea to grind the lower levels of the new Construction skill by finishing the cottage, but it's really not efficient to do all the tedious shit myself. I hired contractors to finish some of the still needed work, like cabinetry, and the bathrooms.
No one likes doing bathrooms. That shit is tedious, finicky, and annoying. All the goddamn little ceramic tiles.
Alfred was reporting that the team hired to put in the stone patio and the walkway from the parking lot and garage to the cottage was finally complete.
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Alfred and I walked along the new stone pathway through the carefully tended but naturalistic forest. We nodded politely at a number of workers, who were largely removing tools and trash. It was getting close to the end of a working day, and I could tell they were looking forward to being done with the job.
Once we got to the cottage, we saw the truck and trailer that had carried in the nicer, much more finely cut stone used for the garden patio. A man with a pressure washer was cleaning up the stone, and several young men were tamping sod around the edges.
"It looks good," I announced cheerfully. "It'll be a nice little guest house for people who need privacy." My privacy, mainly.
"I'm sure it will be very picturesque. Though I still disagree with allowing moss to grow on the roof. You can have a cottage look cozy and natural without actually being overgrown," Alfred replied.
"The core of the 'cottagecore' movement is becoming one with nature. How can you be one with nature without moss on your roof?"
"A conundrum for the ages, I'm sure."
The foreman stepped out, but didn't move to join us, instead letting us wander around at our own pace.
I had no complaints with their work. With this, the cottage was officially finished and ready to move into, though it still needed furniture and gardening to truly be finished.
Really, there was no need to rush the place. While I'm sure it'd be handy once we regularly had guests, and especially useful when I started adopting sidekicks, I made it to grind skill XP.
Still, the project had been soothing. A way to just immerse myself into the act of creating, always one of my favorite things to do, and slowly adapt to my new situation.
Really, building the cottage had been way more satisfying than going out last night. While yes, I had helped a few people, I lack the monomaniacal drive for vengeance most Batmen had. It doesn't make me feel better to punch a poor guy breaking into an apartment.
Though I confess to quite liking the bit where I dislocated the arm of the abuser. It's not that I don't have a core of rage in me, it just doesn't come out the same way as Bruce Wayne's crazy.
Hmm. That actually raises a good point. I should check in and see if that woman went to the shelter.
There's still time today, it's only a little after 4 P.M., and most shelter work gets done in the evenings, preparing people for the night. Time to wrap this up.
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The car I took across town was a 'sleeper'. A high midrange vehicle that had been taken apart and converted to an unassuming but heavily armored high performance machine.
Although in other DC universes it can be pretty different, in this one, Waynetech is basically the equivalent of Prime Earth's Northrup Grumman, or Lockheed, just not as intensely focused on aircraft. Waynetech is just a subsidiary of the larger Wayne Enterprises, but it accounts for about 90% of the total value. And then, most of Waynetech's 30-some odd billion dollars of value is from its portfolio of advanced materials, which it sells to basically everyone, and military gear ranging from personal tools to tanks and APCs to aircraft, bombs, and missiles.
There is, actually, an entire, if somewhat small, armored car division. We made the President's limo, for instance. I've got a couple of bat-vehicle projects ongoing, but for secrecy, I'm doing the final design stuff myself, which means it's taking a while.
Sadly, despite my urge to just sit down and fully prepare an arsenal before I go out and start Batmanning, I know that if I waited until I'm fully prepared, I'd never go.
Alfred got left behind. I know the guy is my butler and my driver and everything else I need for him to be, but right now most of his duties have been more along the lines of intelligence gathering and administration, when he's not making me breakfast and shooting me.
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I took the Robert Kane Memorial Bridge south into Gotham. It deposited me onto Gotham's north island, and I quickly found my way to a place on the edge of East End. This was the Gotham Helping Hands Center, which ran a bit more than three-quarters of all the people shelters in the area.
It was a dismal, run down, 18 storey building that looked like it had been made of depression, furnished in hopelessness, and painted in nicotine stains.
It was so Gotham it shit tragic backstories.
I mean that literally. Helping Hands ran homeless shelters and women's' shelters. Most of the building was actually dedicated to a mix of group barracks style rooms and family suites, not that there was anything sweet about these accommodations.
That being said, while the organization certainly had some people who had the compassion and mercy drained out of them long ago, it also had both old battleaxe and young idealistic social warriors. It was very much an example of adversity as a grindstone. Some people got ground away. Some people just got sharpened.
They were also getting millions in Wayne money, and about to get even more.
Miranda Anderson was the director of Helping Hands. She was seventy three years old, one hundred and twenty nine pounds, and had permanent worry wrinkles. She had been a heavy smoker for about four decades, but had quit cold turkey and not touched tobacco since. Her left hip pained her, and a combination of arthritis and carpal tunnel had turned her hands into nearly ineffectual claws. Some people have resting bitch face. She had active bitch face. Everything she saw seemed to disappoint her.
She was carved from fucking wood.
Unbent. Unbroken. Undaunted.
For all she could make you feel about an inch tall with a look, she could calm a crying baby, sooth a frightened child, and reassure a scared young mother. Any evil out there that wanted to harm her charges had to get through her first, and so far, not much had.
She'd been accused of murder no less than seven times, all abusive people who totally deserved it, but in every case always had dozens of alibis ranging from the people she worked with and helped, to the guy that sold newspapers at a stand near her apartment building with whom she'd shared maybe a hundred words over the course of her lifetime. Every single one of them would swear they'd been glued to her twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, forever.
God she was cool.
I wanted to be her when I grew up.
Also, I'd looked into the murders, and I was pretty sure she hadn't actually done any of them, but had presented herself as a serious suspect to protect the people who had actually done it. For all that a lot of her alibis were clearly fake, there was always at least one that was unquestionably legit. Not that I think she wasn't mentally capable of murder, but she's had hand trouble for a long time. I don't think she could actually wield a gun.
"Oh lovely Miss Annnderson," I crooned at her when I spotted her at the end of the hall.
She had been conversing with two of her minions, a young woman and a man in his thirties. Both had clipboards and pens and were taking down notes. Mrs. Anderson, who was a divorcee with one grown child, gave me a glare.
The glare bounced off.
If I was my ordinary self, I'd think she hated me. Heck, I'd just about think that, anyway, but between the near magical Observe skill and my other people reading skills, I could tell she liked me.
A little. Deep inside.
She'd been exposed to entirely too many good looking flirts over the years to find my act noteworthy, but the shrewd old battleaxe had apparently been keeping an eye on my efforts to improve Gotham in the past year, and at some point had been convinced of my sincerity.
I could have dumped five times the money I'd already spent into charity, and she'd sneer like an aristocrat if she thought it was just a performative piece like most charity. However, when I'd actually sat down with her and discussed budgeting and planning, setting up long term improvements and trusts that would generate yearly income rather than just money to be spent today, she'd been reluctantly impressed.
"Bruce. How lovely to see you," she said in a tone that made it sound like she was imagining strangling me to death with my own intestines. "To what do I owe the favor of your visit."
The two minions glanced at me. I could see the whites in their eyes.
"Just checking in on my investments. I want to make sure my money is being spent for the good of Gotham, not lining some fatcat director's pockets," I said in my best stuffy CEO voice.
Minion one paled so much she looked albino. Minion two looked like he wanted to faint.
Mrs. Anderson all but growled. "Cut the shit, boy. The women's shelter on Bois d' Arc in Burnside just had a kitchen fire a few hours ago. They put it out fast, but not before it smoked up the place and ruined a lot of appliances. Now I've got twelve young women and eighteen children getting hungry, with no place to sleep tonight. Everywhere else is full. What do you want."
"I want a date to a charity gala that's coming up. It's raising money for a number of things, your organization included, disguised as my big debut into Gotham high society now that I'm of age. I had some of the usual type girls in queue but they all fell through, so now I need a replacement, and I can't think of a better date than you. It'd give you the chance to sneer at rich people and have them give you money for the privilege," I explained.
"No."
She glanced at Minion one, a not entirely unattractive young woman, who paled even further and shook her head frantically. If she lost any more blood, she was going to look like a cave fish.
With that failure, Mrs. Anderson turned her attention to Minion number two.
The guy glanced at me.
Hmm. You know…
The man, who was probably about a decade older than me, bolted, followed by Minion one.
Mrs. Anderson frowned a little bit harder, then gave me a shrug, like 'What can you do?'.
I didn't bother trying to convince her to go with me, as cool as that would be. Watching her aggressively lower middle class sensibilities go head to head with the kind of people who spend ten grand on a bottle of wine would cheer me up immensely, but one does not challenge Mrs. Anderson's decisions so lightly.
"The Burnside shelter?" she prompted.
"Yeah, I'll handle it," I replied, and left.
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On the way out, I stopped by the actual offices, and put in a request for a list of everyone currently in a shelter, names included, and a separate, higher priority list for everyone who had come to a shelter that day, whether they had been turned away or given a slot. It'd be a way for me to see if that woman from last night took my advice.
I hadn't realized that the shelters were so close to being full, but it did make sense. One of the existing places was being renovated, and the others had to pick up the slack. But also, there's always a bunch of people who have fallen off the 'poverty' tier.
Poor is struggle. Choosing between food and rent. Working three jobs. Perpetual exhaustion.
But below that is homeless. When you're homeless, you're just meat.
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Burnside is on the mainland across from Gotham's chinatown. One of the earliest 'outside' districts to get absorbed by the growing city, in fact. It's not very far away, but it took me more than half an hour to get there simply because of the combination of Gotham's old, twisty roads, and evening traffic fleeing the city.
And that was honestly pretty good time.
As an aside, I have to mentally thank Bat Mite again for the Gamer system. I, personally, have a shitty sense of direction. In the days before GPS, I owned a stack of maps, and printed out specific guides each time I went somewhere new. I fell in love with my first GPS, because suddenly I had freedom. The ability to drive somewhere new without anxiety is underappreciated, I think.
The Gamer system, though, doesn't connect me to any sort of advanced artificial intelligence or conceptual knowledgebase. Instead, it literally just taps into a sort of multi-universal gestalt of the knowledge of all the other Batmans out there. And no one knows Gotham like Batman. I've never personally been to this place, and my Batman skill isn't very high, but I drove there like it was the thousandth time.
Only having Bat-knowledge does have a limitation, though. It can never give me any sort of ability, skill, knowledge, or schematic unless there's a Batman out there that knows it.
That's not much of a drawback. Fucking Batman, at least one of them, somewhere, knows damned near everything. And while he's never been one of the top tier mad machine inventors out there, he's taken apart and studied a lot of their stuff, so theoretically, if I can get my skills high enough, I'll have access to even Golden Age ridiculousness. Admittedly, we're talking like, engineering and science skills at 50+, so I'm not holding my breath.
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I arrived to a scene of mild chaos.
The shelter was operating out of an old small apartment building, much like their headquarters, though this building was only three storeys tall, built before population pressure made buildings taller and taller the closer you got to Gotham. Burnside was a reasonably decent neighborhood, solidly middle class, and the shelter had seen some effort put into it when it had been commissioned. The inside had been gutted, and the layout had been designed for efficiency.
The bottom floor was utility and community. A rec room, daycare, kitchen, laundry, offices, and storage. The second floor was barracks style bedrooms, with bunk beds and lockers and two big community bathrooms. The third floor was divided up into individual rooms for families. Small, and without their own bathrooms, but private enough you could have a breakdown in peace without everyone hovering over your shoulder.
It'd be a pretty decent shelter if it wasn't so small, but, as I said, Burnside is a middle class neighborhood, and there was a lot of resistance to having a shelter in the area at all. Only by framing it as a shelter for abused women and children had it managed to get allowed at all.
Homeless people, especially men, are a threat, a nuisance, and highly undesirable. 'Abused' people, especially women and children, are given a bit more leeway.
When I got there, a milling crowd of women and teenage boys, sprinkled with younger children, were hauling soot covered furniture and appliances out onto the sidewalk. Curtains and towels had been piled up here and there, stinking of smoke and in some cases dripping with grimy water.
The children had that mix of anxious uncertainty coupled with nervous energy you often see after a disaster. The adults just looked tired and sad.
I parked the car a ways back and got out to meet them.
Charlotte Rusen was the site manager. She was a white woman in her early thirties, with limp brown hair and a little bit of pudge, but I could see how she'd ended up chosen for her role, as she was the most energetic of the lot, calling out encouragement to the others as the ones who weren't carrying out stuff wielded mops, brooms, and buckets of soapy water as they tried to clean up the mess.
Now, my impulse was to just wade in and start helping. But…
I'm embarrassed to say this, but this suit is expensive. I'm not in Armani or anything, it's just normal slacks and a shirt, but it's still expensive, custom tailored stuff. I didn't know I was going to end up needing to do manual labor tonight, so I dressed inappropriately. Sure, I could buy a thousand of these suits and not notice, but it just seems wasteful.
So instead, I just asked for her attention.
"Excuse me, Mrs. Rusen?" I called as she power walked by me without so much as a glance.
"Yes?" she snapped, then literally stopped and patted her face. "I'm sorry, I'm very busy. Yes, can I help you? Mr…?" She trailed off questioningly.
There was no sign of recognition in her face. I liked her already. Only the hard core society page followers would recognize me on sight at this point, because I hadn't really gone public. That was quite literally what the upcoming gala was for.
"Wayne. Bruce Wayne," I replied. "And I'm here to help. Mrs. Anderson sent me." I gave her a reassuring smile.
"Wayne? Of the rich Waynes?" one of the others, a black woman with a puffy bun, exclaimed.
"Mrs. Anderson sent you?" Charlotte gasped, focusing on the most important part. "Wonderful! I'm not sure what you can do, but anything will help."
"First, please tell me what happened."
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Apparently, there actually had been a gas leak. Several weeks ago, they'd moved one of the stoves to clean behind it, and the old gas line had cracked. One of the women's boyfriends had fixed it for free, but all he'd done was cut out the crack and put in a splice. It had worked fine at the time. But earlier that day, when they were cooking lunch, there had been a sudden burst of gas flame that engulfed that stove and part of a counter.
Fortunately, none of the women were hurt. Some hair was singed, but that was it.
Unfortunately, the flame had set several bags of sundries on fire, and startled one of the cooks so bad that a hot pot of frying oil had been spilled. Which then also caught on fire from the flame on the stove. And spread the fire along the floor and to other counters and cabinets.
The good thing was, it hadn't taken more than about five minutes for the women to get to the fire extinguishers and put out the flames, and turn the gas off at the master valve, before the fire department had even arrived. The whole situation showed excellent first responder training, and I praised them enthusiastically.
Still, a pot of flaming oil spreading across a kitchen can do a lot of damage in a hurry. The cabinets were scorched and blackened. The stoves were both burnt black, as were two refrigerators. And everything downstairs had been covered in smoke, soot, and fire extinguisher powder. The upper floors weren't completely spared, either. Nothing had been really damaged, but the stench of smoke and the stains of soot meant the whole building needed to be cleaned from top to bottom, and everyone had to clean their personal belongings.
"And all the other shelters are full up!" Mrs. Rusen all but cried. "I can't put them on the streets, but we're washing sheets as fast as we can, and there's no way it'll be clean by tonight. Who knows what kind of carcinogens and stuff they'll be breathing in if they sleep in there tonight!"
I doubt it'd be a serious health hazard to do it for one night, personally, but it'd be pretty unpleasant. And there was no way I, a billionaire, was going to tell these poor people to just suck it up.
Instead, I just gave her a gentle smile.
"Well, it sounds like there's a simple solution to your need for lodgings. I'll put everyone in a hotel for a week. And I'll pay to fix the shelter, too."
She gasped.
Actually, there were gasps and murmurs from most of the women. Except the black one, who'd commented on the family wealth. She looked more skeptical.
"You might not know this, but I've recently come home from studying abroad, to take up my role as head of the family," I explained, partially directing the explanation at the black woman. "The Wayne family has always been a major supporter of charity in Gotham, and I intend to expand that. We've actually got a big charity gala coming up next week to raise money to support the shelters, among other things."
"You're a billionaire, why do you need other people to give money?" This came not from the black woman, but from one of the teenage boys. "Can't you just pay for it all yourself?"
Mrs. Rusen gasped in horror. She knew that pissing off rich people was a terrible way of getting donations.
"It's called donation matching," I explained calmly. "Whatever other people donate, I match. So they can pat themselves on the back just a little bit harder because it seems like they donated twice as much as they are actually paying for. Then afterwards, I can just donate even more. But this way, I get other rich people to donate as well."
"Huh."
I don't think the young man actually expected a real reply.
"I'll be happy to explain the plans I have for improving everyone's lives later on, if you're interested. For the moment, let me make some calls. I won't be putting you in the Gotham Royal, but I promise it won't be some roach motel that also charges by the hour. Excuse me."
I walked back to my car. First, I called Alfred and explained the situation, and asked him to find a company that did disaster cleanup. Then I grabbed a phone book and started looking for a nice mid-range hotel. Ideally, I wanted to put them all in the same hotel, somewhere close.
Not surprisingly, fitting thirty people was a little difficult, even if they really only needed twelve rooms, because I also wanted them for a solid week. Also, Burnside was a residential neighborhood, so there weren't really any hotels to speak of.
Still, it wasn't hard to find suitable arrangements. I found two hotels, just a block away from each other. It was far enough away they needed transportation, though, so I called Mrs. Anderson.
"What do you mean, you don't have any group transportation options? How do you carry large groups of people to things like job fairs and doctor visits and such?"
"MISTER Wayne, we are poor. We've just had to send them on the city buses, or call a taxi," she said testily. "Or just tell them to find their own transportation."
"I bet that costs more than the running costs of owning a van," I muttered. "Okay. I'll handle it."
Ah, the classic 'It's expensive to be poor' catch 22 as so eloquently stated by Sir Terry Pratchet.
Fine.
So I called a local vehicle dealership Wayne Enterprises has a deal with. It's close to the end of the day, but I promised a nice bonus if they could source and deliver two large passenger vans in an hour or less. They had to be wheelchair friendly, as well. No one needed that right now, but I was obviously going to donate the vehicles to the shelter network.
While they were only able to source one of the actual dedicated transportation vans in that time, they did have a selection of large normal vans, and offered to let us use one of those as a loaner until the passenger transport came in. We'd have to make two trips, but that's no big hardship.
It's nice to be rich. People try to help you out.
Once that was settled, I went back to talk to the women.
"Okay, I've got things settled," I announced as the women and children gathered around. "I've got two hotels that know we're coming. I'm prepaying for a week, since I think that'll be enough time to get this shelter fixed up, but I can extend it if we need to. I know meals will be an issue, since you've been using this kitchen, so room service is included. It's not unlimited, so don't go nuts, but you'll all have fifty dollars per day, per person. Let Mrs. Rusen know if it's not enough for some reason, and she can call me. Or if I'm around, just say something."
There was a round of general cheering and excitement, mostly from the children. Most of the women just looked grateful.
"Now, I'm in the process of spending a lot of money to upgrade Gotham's shelters, and even add more. Thanks to your quick thinking of stopping the fire, you've saved me from having to pay to build one more. I think that deserves a reward. So I'll discuss things with Mrs. Rusen, but at minimum, every family will get a thousand dollars, with a bit more going to everyone who actually fought the fire."
There were real cheers at that.
"I'm working to find a cleanup company that can come scrub the place out. You've already done some of the work for them, and I'll see you paid for that. However, part of the contract with the cleaning company will be for them to work with you. Anyone who wants to make some extra money can help and learn from the cleaners. This won't be minimum wage work, either, but mainly, I want you to see the tools and techniques they use, and if you're interested, hire you to work at other shelters. Too many of Gotham's shelters are run down and dirty. Years of not being able to afford maintenance and supplies has taken its toll, and we're going to turn that around. This offer will be open to others as well, men included. If you know someone who needs a job, especially anyone who already knows how to do maintenance, give them a call."
They generally murmured and glanced among each other, clearly thinking about who they might know.
"Now, you've all had a rough day, so you can stop working on the place. When the vans get here, everyone can go to the hotels and have a bath and a meal. Tomorrow, and I want to be clear, this is voluntary, we'll get started fixing this place back up."
"What about whoever watches the children? Someone's going to have to," the black woman asked.
"That's helping out just as much as anyone pushing a mop, of course they get paid," I replied. "And I know full well it's going to take more than one person to watch this many kids."
"What about us boys?" one of the teenage boys cried, though there were two teenage girls, too. "Can we work?"
"State law says you have to be sixteen," I told him. "And it depends on how many adults there end up being. But even if you can't do things here, if you help watch the younger children, I'll count it the same."
This also proved generally popular.
My speech was largely over, though I did have to answer a few more questions about where they were staying and how should anyone else who wanted to work reach out to us.
It genuinely did not take long for employees of the vehicle dealership to show up with the vans. I got their names and numbers before giving them one of mine, promising them a generous tip, and to call me if their tip didn't get to them for some reason.
I couldn't give it to them then, as I didn't have that much cash on hand. An oversight. There's no reason I can't afford to carry several thousand dollars in cash on me, even tens of thousands, I just didn't think to do so. A hazard of being poor, plus being used to a largely cashless society.
They left in another vehicle that had followed them over, and we turned to the task of getting everyone into the hotels.
There actually was enough room to carry everyone in one trip, so long as I took the overflow in my car, but then there would have been no room for luggage.
I did have to drive over to the hotels myself. They were willing to hold the rooms for a few hours just on my say so, but the managers were a little skeptical of someone saying 'I'm Bruce Wayne, I need a bunch of rooms and I'll pay you later.' Understandable.
A black card convinced them. I don't think I've ever really seen someone's eyes bug out in surprise before.
Which is weird. My man, it's just a credit card. A rare one, with literally no stated limit, but it's just a credit card. I'm rich, yeah, but calm down. I'm not a celebrity. I don't deserve fawning over.
I made arrangements for everyone's clothes to be washed, set up the appropriate tips, and promised to see them all the next day.
I couldn't stop smiling on the way back to the estate. Now that was a day's work that improved some lives. Not running around punching people while dressed in my furry convention best.
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AN: Chapter six, which will be the new chapter five, is out on my patreon in an incomplete form. I'm going to be expanding it, also for tone and flow reasons, before I post. That'll be a bit, I'm already a week behind on Ice Pie, so expect a new chapter of that before you see anything else Batman.
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xxxxxxxxx Chapter 4
The best thing about becoming Batman before he became Batman is that I'm not expected to suddenly juggle the forest of spinning plates he does with Gotham, the League, and the rest of the world and universe.
The worst thing about it was that none of the infrastructure is set up yet.
Well, no, actually, the worst thing about it was explaining to Alfred that it's vital to the fate of the world and universe that I put on a fur suit and run around punching criminals by night.
But mostly the setup.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a builder, a maker, a fixer. I like doing that kind of thing. But Bruce Wayne actually started out as a regular vigilante before he put on the batsuit, and he built his armory up over time, whereas I am going into this with full awareness of the scale I'll need to operate at. The scale of the duty in front of me is sort of overwhelming.
Also, I want to be smart about it, so I'm trying to do proper foundational work now, to be better prepared for later. What that meant for me for close to a year now was doing a lot of construction.
Well, and Alfred as well, but mostly me.
But I didn't want to just immediately start working on the Batcave when I got started. When I first got the Gamer system, the skills started at the level of both mine and the original Bruce Wayne's skills and stats combined.
Now, this is pre-Batman Bruce Wayne, so while he had some skills that were startlingly high in places, and a pretty broad selection of skills, he was a long way from Batgod. But while I used to be just a normal guy, I've had a long and varied life, with a lot of different hobbies and skills. I've worked as a painter, drywall hanger, carpenter, HVAC, and welder professionally, and I've done things like carpet, tile, roofing, plumbing, and electrical work as either home/family projects, or as part of other careers. Like, say, when I worked as a sysadmin for a city and police department, which occasionally involved running conduit, wires, and on no less than three occasions, sump plumbing, because we kept getting flooded.
So my combined starting construction related skills were actually pretty good. Nearly everything but stonework and cement was between a 5 and a 10. But I still didn't want to do amateur work on the Batcave, so I needed to grind my skills up into the teens.
I did that by building a cottage in the woods of the Wayne manor.
It's a nice place, built to disguise one of the alternate entrances to the Batcave.
Welded steel construction with stone cladding, with lead lining everything. I used it as a way of getting rid of a lot of the limestone dross I made when digging out the cave system. I even ended up mixing up moss and mud into a slurry and spraying over the roof, so in a year or so it'd look like something Studio Ghibli designed.
As a nod towards the potential future Poison Ivy, I included a lot of native plants in the design. As well as roses. I like roses.
But I did end up hitting my self-imposed goal of a fifteen before I finished it, and, for efficiency's sake, I started focusing on the Batcave with professional quality work. Given the scale at which I was working, my skills quickly got into the twenties while I did that. Actually, some of them got well into the twenties before I considered it done enough that I could afford to lower my skills for a while. As I mentioned, I was able to consolidate the group of related skills into a single 'Construction' skill, which is far more powerful.
The Construction skill started at zero, but a single 'How To' book got it up to level five and a perk, which is nice. I haven't had the time to level it up since.
Sure, it'd be a good idea to grind the lower levels of the new Construction skill by finishing the cottage, but it's really not efficient to do all the tedious shit myself. I hired contractors to finish some of the still needed work, like cabinetry, and the bathrooms.
No one likes doing bathrooms. That shit is tedious, finicky, and annoying. All the goddamn little ceramic tiles.
Alfred was reporting that the team hired to put in the stone patio and the walkway from the parking lot and garage to the cottage was finally complete.
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Alfred and I walked along the new stone pathway through the carefully tended but naturalistic forest. We nodded politely at a number of workers, who were largely removing tools and trash. It was getting close to the end of a working day, and I could tell they were looking forward to being done with the job.
Once we got to the cottage, we saw the truck and trailer that had carried in the nicer, much more finely cut stone used for the garden patio. A man with a pressure washer was cleaning up the stone, and several young men were tamping sod around the edges.
"It looks good," I announced cheerfully. "It'll be a nice little guest house for people who need privacy." My privacy, mainly.
"I'm sure it will be very picturesque. Though I still disagree with allowing moss to grow on the roof. You can have a cottage look cozy and natural without actually being overgrown," Alfred replied.
"The core of the 'cottagecore' movement is becoming one with nature. How can you be one with nature without moss on your roof?"
"A conundrum for the ages, I'm sure."
The foreman stepped out, but didn't move to join us, instead letting us wander around at our own pace.
I had no complaints with their work. With this, the cottage was officially finished and ready to move into, though it still needed furniture and gardening to truly be finished.
Really, there was no need to rush the place. While I'm sure it'd be handy once we regularly had guests, and especially useful when I started adopting sidekicks, I made it to grind skill XP.
Still, the project had been soothing. A way to just immerse myself into the act of creating, always one of my favorite things to do, and slowly adapt to my new situation.
Really, building the cottage had been way more satisfying than going out last night. While yes, I had helped a few people, I lack the monomaniacal drive for vengeance most Batmen had. It doesn't make me feel better to punch a poor guy breaking into an apartment.
Though I confess to quite liking the bit where I dislocated the arm of the abuser. It's not that I don't have a core of rage in me, it just doesn't come out the same way as Bruce Wayne's crazy.
Hmm. That actually raises a good point. I should check in and see if that woman went to the shelter.
There's still time today, it's only a little after 4 P.M., and most shelter work gets done in the evenings, preparing people for the night. Time to wrap this up.
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The car I took across town was a 'sleeper'. A high midrange vehicle that had been taken apart and converted to an unassuming but heavily armored high performance machine.
Although in other DC universes it can be pretty different, in this one, Waynetech is basically the equivalent of Prime Earth's Northrup Grumman, or Lockheed, just not as intensely focused on aircraft. Waynetech is just a subsidiary of the larger Wayne Enterprises, but it accounts for about 90% of the total value. And then, most of Waynetech's 30-some odd billion dollars of value is from its portfolio of advanced materials, which it sells to basically everyone, and military gear ranging from personal tools to tanks and APCs to aircraft, bombs, and missiles.
There is, actually, an entire, if somewhat small, armored car division. We made the President's limo, for instance. I've got a couple of bat-vehicle projects ongoing, but for secrecy, I'm doing the final design stuff myself, which means it's taking a while.
Sadly, despite my urge to just sit down and fully prepare an arsenal before I go out and start Batmanning, I know that if I waited until I'm fully prepared, I'd never go.
Alfred got left behind. I know the guy is my butler and my driver and everything else I need for him to be, but right now most of his duties have been more along the lines of intelligence gathering and administration, when he's not making me breakfast and shooting me.
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I took the Robert Kane Memorial Bridge south into Gotham. It deposited me onto Gotham's north island, and I quickly found my way to a place on the edge of East End. This was the Gotham Helping Hands Center, which ran a bit more than three-quarters of all the people shelters in the area.
It was a dismal, run down, 18 storey building that looked like it had been made of depression, furnished in hopelessness, and painted in nicotine stains.
It was so Gotham it shit tragic backstories.
I mean that literally. Helping Hands ran homeless shelters and women's' shelters. Most of the building was actually dedicated to a mix of group barracks style rooms and family suites, not that there was anything sweet about these accommodations.
That being said, while the organization certainly had some people who had the compassion and mercy drained out of them long ago, it also had both old battleaxe and young idealistic social warriors. It was very much an example of adversity as a grindstone. Some people got ground away. Some people just got sharpened.
They were also getting millions in Wayne money, and about to get even more.
Miranda Anderson was the director of Helping Hands. She was seventy three years old, one hundred and twenty nine pounds, and had permanent worry wrinkles. She had been a heavy smoker for about four decades, but had quit cold turkey and not touched tobacco since. Her left hip pained her, and a combination of arthritis and carpal tunnel had turned her hands into nearly ineffectual claws. Some people have resting bitch face. She had active bitch face. Everything she saw seemed to disappoint her.
She was carved from fucking wood.
Unbent. Unbroken. Undaunted.
For all she could make you feel about an inch tall with a look, she could calm a crying baby, sooth a frightened child, and reassure a scared young mother. Any evil out there that wanted to harm her charges had to get through her first, and so far, not much had.
She'd been accused of murder no less than seven times, all abusive people who totally deserved it, but in every case always had dozens of alibis ranging from the people she worked with and helped, to the guy that sold newspapers at a stand near her apartment building with whom she'd shared maybe a hundred words over the course of her lifetime. Every single one of them would swear they'd been glued to her twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, forever.
God she was cool.
I wanted to be her when I grew up.
Also, I'd looked into the murders, and I was pretty sure she hadn't actually done any of them, but had presented herself as a serious suspect to protect the people who had actually done it. For all that a lot of her alibis were clearly fake, there was always at least one that was unquestionably legit. Not that I think she wasn't mentally capable of murder, but she's had hand trouble for a long time. I don't think she could actually wield a gun.
"Oh lovely Miss Annnderson," I crooned at her when I spotted her at the end of the hall.
She had been conversing with two of her minions, a young woman and a man in his thirties. Both had clipboards and pens and were taking down notes. Mrs. Anderson, who was a divorcee with one grown child, gave me a glare.
The glare bounced off.
If I was my ordinary self, I'd think she hated me. Heck, I'd just about think that, anyway, but between the near magical Observe skill and my other people reading skills, I could tell she liked me.
A little. Deep inside.
She'd been exposed to entirely too many good looking flirts over the years to find my act noteworthy, but the shrewd old battleaxe had apparently been keeping an eye on my efforts to improve Gotham in the past year, and at some point had been convinced of my sincerity.
I could have dumped five times the money I'd already spent into charity, and she'd sneer like an aristocrat if she thought it was just a performative piece like most charity. However, when I'd actually sat down with her and discussed budgeting and planning, setting up long term improvements and trusts that would generate yearly income rather than just money to be spent today, she'd been reluctantly impressed.
"Bruce. How lovely to see you," she said in a tone that made it sound like she was imagining strangling me to death with my own intestines. "To what do I owe the favor of your visit."
The two minions glanced at me. I could see the whites in their eyes.
"Just checking in on my investments. I want to make sure my money is being spent for the good of Gotham, not lining some fatcat director's pockets," I said in my best stuffy CEO voice.
Minion one paled so much she looked albino. Minion two looked like he wanted to faint.
Mrs. Anderson all but growled. "Cut the shit, boy. The women's shelter on Bois d' Arc in Burnside just had a kitchen fire a few hours ago. They put it out fast, but not before it smoked up the place and ruined a lot of appliances. Now I've got twelve young women and eighteen children getting hungry, with no place to sleep tonight. Everywhere else is full. What do you want."
"I want a date to a charity gala that's coming up. It's raising money for a number of things, your organization included, disguised as my big debut into Gotham high society now that I'm of age. I had some of the usual type girls in queue but they all fell through, so now I need a replacement, and I can't think of a better date than you. It'd give you the chance to sneer at rich people and have them give you money for the privilege," I explained.
"No."
She glanced at Minion one, a not entirely unattractive young woman, who paled even further and shook her head frantically. If she lost any more blood, she was going to look like a cave fish.
With that failure, Mrs. Anderson turned her attention to Minion number two.
The guy glanced at me.
Hmm. You know…
The man, who was probably about a decade older than me, bolted, followed by Minion one.
Mrs. Anderson frowned a little bit harder, then gave me a shrug, like 'What can you do?'.
I didn't bother trying to convince her to go with me, as cool as that would be. Watching her aggressively lower middle class sensibilities go head to head with the kind of people who spend ten grand on a bottle of wine would cheer me up immensely, but one does not challenge Mrs. Anderson's decisions so lightly.
"The Burnside shelter?" she prompted.
"Yeah, I'll handle it," I replied, and left.
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On the way out, I stopped by the actual offices, and put in a request for a list of everyone currently in a shelter, names included, and a separate, higher priority list for everyone who had come to a shelter that day, whether they had been turned away or given a slot. It'd be a way for me to see if that woman from last night took my advice.
I hadn't realized that the shelters were so close to being full, but it did make sense. One of the existing places was being renovated, and the others had to pick up the slack. But also, there's always a bunch of people who have fallen off the 'poverty' tier.
Poor is struggle. Choosing between food and rent. Working three jobs. Perpetual exhaustion.
But below that is homeless. When you're homeless, you're just meat.
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Burnside is on the mainland across from Gotham's chinatown. One of the earliest 'outside' districts to get absorbed by the growing city, in fact. It's not very far away, but it took me more than half an hour to get there simply because of the combination of Gotham's old, twisty roads, and evening traffic fleeing the city.
And that was honestly pretty good time.
As an aside, I have to mentally thank Bat Mite again for the Gamer system. I, personally, have a shitty sense of direction. In the days before GPS, I owned a stack of maps, and printed out specific guides each time I went somewhere new. I fell in love with my first GPS, because suddenly I had freedom. The ability to drive somewhere new without anxiety is underappreciated, I think.
The Gamer system, though, doesn't connect me to any sort of advanced artificial intelligence or conceptual knowledgebase. Instead, it literally just taps into a sort of multi-universal gestalt of the knowledge of all the other Batmans out there. And no one knows Gotham like Batman. I've never personally been to this place, and my Batman skill isn't very high, but I drove there like it was the thousandth time.
Only having Bat-knowledge does have a limitation, though. It can never give me any sort of ability, skill, knowledge, or schematic unless there's a Batman out there that knows it.
That's not much of a drawback. Fucking Batman, at least one of them, somewhere, knows damned near everything. And while he's never been one of the top tier mad machine inventors out there, he's taken apart and studied a lot of their stuff, so theoretically, if I can get my skills high enough, I'll have access to even Golden Age ridiculousness. Admittedly, we're talking like, engineering and science skills at 50+, so I'm not holding my breath.
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I arrived to a scene of mild chaos.
The shelter was operating out of an old small apartment building, much like their headquarters, though this building was only three storeys tall, built before population pressure made buildings taller and taller the closer you got to Gotham. Burnside was a reasonably decent neighborhood, solidly middle class, and the shelter had seen some effort put into it when it had been commissioned. The inside had been gutted, and the layout had been designed for efficiency.
The bottom floor was utility and community. A rec room, daycare, kitchen, laundry, offices, and storage. The second floor was barracks style bedrooms, with bunk beds and lockers and two big community bathrooms. The third floor was divided up into individual rooms for families. Small, and without their own bathrooms, but private enough you could have a breakdown in peace without everyone hovering over your shoulder.
It'd be a pretty decent shelter if it wasn't so small, but, as I said, Burnside is a middle class neighborhood, and there was a lot of resistance to having a shelter in the area at all. Only by framing it as a shelter for abused women and children had it managed to get allowed at all.
Homeless people, especially men, are a threat, a nuisance, and highly undesirable. 'Abused' people, especially women and children, are given a bit more leeway.
When I got there, a milling crowd of women and teenage boys, sprinkled with younger children, were hauling soot covered furniture and appliances out onto the sidewalk. Curtains and towels had been piled up here and there, stinking of smoke and in some cases dripping with grimy water.
The children had that mix of anxious uncertainty coupled with nervous energy you often see after a disaster. The adults just looked tired and sad.
I parked the car a ways back and got out to meet them.
Charlotte Rusen was the site manager. She was a white woman in her early thirties, with limp brown hair and a little bit of pudge, but I could see how she'd ended up chosen for her role, as she was the most energetic of the lot, calling out encouragement to the others as the ones who weren't carrying out stuff wielded mops, brooms, and buckets of soapy water as they tried to clean up the mess.
Now, my impulse was to just wade in and start helping. But…
I'm embarrassed to say this, but this suit is expensive. I'm not in Armani or anything, it's just normal slacks and a shirt, but it's still expensive, custom tailored stuff. I didn't know I was going to end up needing to do manual labor tonight, so I dressed inappropriately. Sure, I could buy a thousand of these suits and not notice, but it just seems wasteful.
So instead, I just asked for her attention.
"Excuse me, Mrs. Rusen?" I called as she power walked by me without so much as a glance.
"Yes?" she snapped, then literally stopped and patted her face. "I'm sorry, I'm very busy. Yes, can I help you? Mr…?" She trailed off questioningly.
There was no sign of recognition in her face. I liked her already. Only the hard core society page followers would recognize me on sight at this point, because I hadn't really gone public. That was quite literally what the upcoming gala was for.
"Wayne. Bruce Wayne," I replied. "And I'm here to help. Mrs. Anderson sent me." I gave her a reassuring smile.
"Wayne? Of the rich Waynes?" one of the others, a black woman with a puffy bun, exclaimed.
"Mrs. Anderson sent you?" Charlotte gasped, focusing on the most important part. "Wonderful! I'm not sure what you can do, but anything will help."
"First, please tell me what happened."
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Apparently, there actually had been a gas leak. Several weeks ago, they'd moved one of the stoves to clean behind it, and the old gas line had cracked. One of the women's boyfriends had fixed it for free, but all he'd done was cut out the crack and put in a splice. It had worked fine at the time. But earlier that day, when they were cooking lunch, there had been a sudden burst of gas flame that engulfed that stove and part of a counter.
Fortunately, none of the women were hurt. Some hair was singed, but that was it.
Unfortunately, the flame had set several bags of sundries on fire, and startled one of the cooks so bad that a hot pot of frying oil had been spilled. Which then also caught on fire from the flame on the stove. And spread the fire along the floor and to other counters and cabinets.
The good thing was, it hadn't taken more than about five minutes for the women to get to the fire extinguishers and put out the flames, and turn the gas off at the master valve, before the fire department had even arrived. The whole situation showed excellent first responder training, and I praised them enthusiastically.
Still, a pot of flaming oil spreading across a kitchen can do a lot of damage in a hurry. The cabinets were scorched and blackened. The stoves were both burnt black, as were two refrigerators. And everything downstairs had been covered in smoke, soot, and fire extinguisher powder. The upper floors weren't completely spared, either. Nothing had been really damaged, but the stench of smoke and the stains of soot meant the whole building needed to be cleaned from top to bottom, and everyone had to clean their personal belongings.
"And all the other shelters are full up!" Mrs. Rusen all but cried. "I can't put them on the streets, but we're washing sheets as fast as we can, and there's no way it'll be clean by tonight. Who knows what kind of carcinogens and stuff they'll be breathing in if they sleep in there tonight!"
I doubt it'd be a serious health hazard to do it for one night, personally, but it'd be pretty unpleasant. And there was no way I, a billionaire, was going to tell these poor people to just suck it up.
Instead, I just gave her a gentle smile.
"Well, it sounds like there's a simple solution to your need for lodgings. I'll put everyone in a hotel for a week. And I'll pay to fix the shelter, too."
She gasped.
Actually, there were gasps and murmurs from most of the women. Except the black one, who'd commented on the family wealth. She looked more skeptical.
"You might not know this, but I've recently come home from studying abroad, to take up my role as head of the family," I explained, partially directing the explanation at the black woman. "The Wayne family has always been a major supporter of charity in Gotham, and I intend to expand that. We've actually got a big charity gala coming up next week to raise money to support the shelters, among other things."
"You're a billionaire, why do you need other people to give money?" This came not from the black woman, but from one of the teenage boys. "Can't you just pay for it all yourself?"
Mrs. Rusen gasped in horror. She knew that pissing off rich people was a terrible way of getting donations.
"It's called donation matching," I explained calmly. "Whatever other people donate, I match. So they can pat themselves on the back just a little bit harder because it seems like they donated twice as much as they are actually paying for. Then afterwards, I can just donate even more. But this way, I get other rich people to donate as well."
"Huh."
I don't think the young man actually expected a real reply.
"I'll be happy to explain the plans I have for improving everyone's lives later on, if you're interested. For the moment, let me make some calls. I won't be putting you in the Gotham Royal, but I promise it won't be some roach motel that also charges by the hour. Excuse me."
I walked back to my car. First, I called Alfred and explained the situation, and asked him to find a company that did disaster cleanup. Then I grabbed a phone book and started looking for a nice mid-range hotel. Ideally, I wanted to put them all in the same hotel, somewhere close.
Not surprisingly, fitting thirty people was a little difficult, even if they really only needed twelve rooms, because I also wanted them for a solid week. Also, Burnside was a residential neighborhood, so there weren't really any hotels to speak of.
Still, it wasn't hard to find suitable arrangements. I found two hotels, just a block away from each other. It was far enough away they needed transportation, though, so I called Mrs. Anderson.
"What do you mean, you don't have any group transportation options? How do you carry large groups of people to things like job fairs and doctor visits and such?"
"MISTER Wayne, we are poor. We've just had to send them on the city buses, or call a taxi," she said testily. "Or just tell them to find their own transportation."
"I bet that costs more than the running costs of owning a van," I muttered. "Okay. I'll handle it."
Ah, the classic 'It's expensive to be poor' catch 22 as so eloquently stated by Sir Terry Pratchet.
Fine.
So I called a local vehicle dealership Wayne Enterprises has a deal with. It's close to the end of the day, but I promised a nice bonus if they could source and deliver two large passenger vans in an hour or less. They had to be wheelchair friendly, as well. No one needed that right now, but I was obviously going to donate the vehicles to the shelter network.
While they were only able to source one of the actual dedicated transportation vans in that time, they did have a selection of large normal vans, and offered to let us use one of those as a loaner until the passenger transport came in. We'd have to make two trips, but that's no big hardship.
It's nice to be rich. People try to help you out.
Once that was settled, I went back to talk to the women.
"Okay, I've got things settled," I announced as the women and children gathered around. "I've got two hotels that know we're coming. I'm prepaying for a week, since I think that'll be enough time to get this shelter fixed up, but I can extend it if we need to. I know meals will be an issue, since you've been using this kitchen, so room service is included. It's not unlimited, so don't go nuts, but you'll all have fifty dollars per day, per person. Let Mrs. Rusen know if it's not enough for some reason, and she can call me. Or if I'm around, just say something."
There was a round of general cheering and excitement, mostly from the children. Most of the women just looked grateful.
"Now, I'm in the process of spending a lot of money to upgrade Gotham's shelters, and even add more. Thanks to your quick thinking of stopping the fire, you've saved me from having to pay to build one more. I think that deserves a reward. So I'll discuss things with Mrs. Rusen, but at minimum, every family will get a thousand dollars, with a bit more going to everyone who actually fought the fire."
There were real cheers at that.
"I'm working to find a cleanup company that can come scrub the place out. You've already done some of the work for them, and I'll see you paid for that. However, part of the contract with the cleaning company will be for them to work with you. Anyone who wants to make some extra money can help and learn from the cleaners. This won't be minimum wage work, either, but mainly, I want you to see the tools and techniques they use, and if you're interested, hire you to work at other shelters. Too many of Gotham's shelters are run down and dirty. Years of not being able to afford maintenance and supplies has taken its toll, and we're going to turn that around. This offer will be open to others as well, men included. If you know someone who needs a job, especially anyone who already knows how to do maintenance, give them a call."
They generally murmured and glanced among each other, clearly thinking about who they might know.
"Now, you've all had a rough day, so you can stop working on the place. When the vans get here, everyone can go to the hotels and have a bath and a meal. Tomorrow, and I want to be clear, this is voluntary, we'll get started fixing this place back up."
"What about whoever watches the children? Someone's going to have to," the black woman asked.
"That's helping out just as much as anyone pushing a mop, of course they get paid," I replied. "And I know full well it's going to take more than one person to watch this many kids."
"What about us boys?" one of the teenage boys cried, though there were two teenage girls, too. "Can we work?"
"State law says you have to be sixteen," I told him. "And it depends on how many adults there end up being. But even if you can't do things here, if you help watch the younger children, I'll count it the same."
This also proved generally popular.
My speech was largely over, though I did have to answer a few more questions about where they were staying and how should anyone else who wanted to work reach out to us.
It genuinely did not take long for employees of the vehicle dealership to show up with the vans. I got their names and numbers before giving them one of mine, promising them a generous tip, and to call me if their tip didn't get to them for some reason.
I couldn't give it to them then, as I didn't have that much cash on hand. An oversight. There's no reason I can't afford to carry several thousand dollars in cash on me, even tens of thousands, I just didn't think to do so. A hazard of being poor, plus being used to a largely cashless society.
They left in another vehicle that had followed them over, and we turned to the task of getting everyone into the hotels.
There actually was enough room to carry everyone in one trip, so long as I took the overflow in my car, but then there would have been no room for luggage.
I did have to drive over to the hotels myself. They were willing to hold the rooms for a few hours just on my say so, but the managers were a little skeptical of someone saying 'I'm Bruce Wayne, I need a bunch of rooms and I'll pay you later.' Understandable.
A black card convinced them. I don't think I've ever really seen someone's eyes bug out in surprise before.
Which is weird. My man, it's just a credit card. A rare one, with literally no stated limit, but it's just a credit card. I'm rich, yeah, but calm down. I'm not a celebrity. I don't deserve fawning over.
I made arrangements for everyone's clothes to be washed, set up the appropriate tips, and promised to see them all the next day.
I couldn't stop smiling on the way back to the estate. Now that was a day's work that improved some lives. Not running around punching people while dressed in my furry convention best.
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AN: Chapter six, which will be the new chapter five, is out on my patreon in an incomplete form. I'm going to be expanding it, also for tone and flow reasons, before I post. That'll be a bit, I'm already a week behind on Ice Pie, so expect a new chapter of that before you see anything else Batman.
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