When Spidey Met Oracle

The Question only found herself living in Manhattan now for one reason and one reason only:

Bruce Wayne hated New Yorkers.

At least, that had become the general consensus. Montoya didn't personally believe it, but she could certainly see why the majority of average Americans polled on the subject saw it that way. There'd always been a bit of rivalry between Gotham and New York -- which had only intensified since the Knights beat the Yankees for the pennant last year -- so the idea that Gotham's favorite son had some deep-seated disdain for the Big Apple shouldn't have been all that surprising to anybody. That didn't mean it should be making headlines, but thanks to Spider-Man and the fickle viciousness of the 24-hour news cycle, it was a constant point of contention for the pundits.

In the many months since it had first formed, Batman Incorporated had enjoyed a lot of positive coverage from the American media. Especially when one considered the general sense of distrust toward superheroes since the SHRA had been repealed. Norman Osborn's constant and very public accusations against the Avengers and their tactics during his brief escape from federal custody certainly didn't help, nor did Superman's recent announcement that he was renouncing his citizenship. Yet during all of that controversy, Batman, Inc. had been "Teflon, baby" as John Stewart had so pointedly put it on The Daily Show, because the biggest win in Batman Incorporated's column had been its ability to symbolize hope in the face of fear itself.

Renee wasn't clear on the finer details of the Serpent's War. All she really knew was that an ancient Asgardian evil had come out of nowhere with a horde of Nazi robots to wreak havoc and let cry the old Norse gods of war and hate and terror. And while The Serpent brought devastation across the globe, Odin and his kingdom fled, leaving mankind to its dire fate as the Norse God of Fear warped some of Earth's mightiest heroes and villains in his own twisted image.

While the Justice League had flown out into the cosmos to fend off Parallax with the Green Lantern Corps before the Fear Entity joined its chosen disciple on Earth, the Dark Knight stayed behind to fight the Scarecrow -- who'd found frightful new powers through the use of the Norn Stones -- in the streets of Gotham while the rest of Batman Incorporated provided food and shelter for the cowering citizens of a terrified planet.

The truth of how the Serpent and his forces had been defeated was still wrapped up in the usual secrecy that ended those types of things, but the Avengers had clearly served some small part... Although all that amateur video footage of Captain America and his cohorts carrying Thor's battered body through Broxton to Asgard looked like them running away from the fight.

When it was all finally over, Batman, Inc. was lauded for its worldwide relief and rescue efforts during this harrowing, extinction-level event. The Asgardians had abandoned them all to a crisis Odin himself had started, and the JLA had gone off to face a greater threat out amongst the stars, but Caped Crusaders around the world had risked everything to maintain order and safety as the world burned. Where the gods and superheroes failed, Batmen prevailed. The Avengers may have technically saved the day, but in the annals of history, it was only because of Batman Incorporated that there was anything left worth saving.

All that good will toward the brand lasted about two weeks thanks to the "Spider-Island" fiasco.

You would figure the blame for a viral infection that gave everybody in Manhattan wall-crawling, web-slinging superpowers before transforming them into giant arachnids in the thrall of the malevolent Queen of Spiders would fall on the web-head's feet, but that wasn't the way that story broke. Somehow, the fallout wasn't about trying to hold the Spider-Man accountable. The question everyone suddenly found themselves asking was why Batman, Inc. hadn't done anything to help.

The easy answer, of course, was that once the virus went airborne, Mayor Jameson had ordered a quarantine to ensure that this "spider flu" didn't spread, which meant there was no getting into the city until after the situation had been resolved, but that wasn't enough to satisfy the critics. Somehow, that just begged the question why, after all this time, there still wasn't a Batman in New York City.

"Bruce Wayne's taken it upon himself to police the world because he thinks he can provide law and order better than the world's elected lawmakers and appointed peacekeepers," Trish Tilby had said on her new GNN show. "Batman can fight super-villains in Japan and give financial aid to crime-fighters in Africa, but when a genetic epidemic explodes 90 miles from Wayne's front door, the Caped Crusaders can't be bothered? I thought the whole point of Batman Incorporated was that the Dark Knight would be everywhere now..."

From then on, that was the story: If Batman, Inc. was so great, how did Spider-Island happen?

If Bruce Wayne was sweating all the flack he was taking from the media, he hadn't shown it. Not publicly, at least. He never issued any press statements in response to the commentary, which was surprising because, if the rumors Renee had heard were true -- and they usually were -- it would have been all too easy to shift the blame for all this back where it belonged. Apparently, despite heavy opposition from City Hall, Batman, Inc. had been vigorously looking to recruit a New York City operative since its inception, approaching several of the Big Apple's established vigilantes over the last several months with offers of cutting-edge non-lethal urban assault equipment and advanced training. They just hadn't found any takers. Montoya wasn't clear on how many almost-Avengers had been asked or who they were, though the largest number she'd heard had been twelve and most of her sources said that the first to decline was T'Challa, the King-in-exile of Wakanda who'd recently abdicated his throne and was now prowling the streets of Hell's Kitchen as the Black Panther.

While Bruce Wayne hadn't made any public response to the Spider-Island criticism, it was maybe two weeks after Jameson lifted the quarantine when the C.E.O. of Wayne Enterprises and Batman, Inc. called Renee to his office.

"I understand that you're occupied with your own... questionable activities, Miss Montoya," he said after she made the trip to meet him, "but Batman Incorporated would like to contract your services once again, if you're available."

"What could the Batman possibly need?" she asked. "Aren't you the one who gives him all those wonderful toys?"

Ever since Wayne had announced that he'd been funding the Dark Knight's activities in Gotham for years, Renee had been curious about the true nature of his relationship with The Terror That Flapped in the Night... The kind of questions she always figured Commissioner Gordon had pursued before he first teamed up with the Batman in the beginning. She eventually decided that Gordon had never gone public with his queries for a reason and Montoya saw little reason to go where the Commish hadn't dared...

"Batman needs an asset in New York," Wayne explained. "Temporarily," he assured her. "Just so we know what's going on. As soon as we find a proper operative for the city, you come home. Two weeks, tops, Ms. Montoya."

That had been three months ago. Montoya figured Batman Incorporated's overtures to Frog-Man hadn't gone so well after all.

Wayne had offered Renee a generous per diem and use of his Park Avenue penthouse while she was in town, but she had declined the posh lodgings. If she wanted to know what was really going on it was best to stay street-level, so The Question had hidden in plain sight, subletting a cramped, overpriced loft in Chelsea and finagling a few low-paying gigs in the right places.

The job on the cleaning staff at Avengers Tower had been the hardest to con her way into, which was ironic considering how little information she actually got out of scrubbing the toilets at the Avengers' recently rebuilt command center for eight hours.

She still had her cover with the Bugle staff, though. Back when she was checking on the web-head for Oracle, Renee had posed as the new coffee cart attendant at the paper. Re-engaging her old contacts had been easy enough. Any reporter worth their salt remembered faces. She was surprised back then by how much her time there felt like being back with the GCPD. When she was on the force, the only thing she hated more than superheroes were the crime beat reporters, but that week jocking java for the Bugle bullpen was the first time it didn't seem ironic that Charlie, who'd worked as a journalist for all those years he spent as The Question, would be the one to change her life. She orchestrated a run-in with the Bugle's managing editor, Joe Robertson, which earned her a friendly lunch date. She would have much rather spent that time with Betty Brant or Glory Grant, but apparently neither of them were still working for the paper. So Montoya regaled Robbie with stories about the new husband and baby she'd made up on the spot before he offered her a few shifts in the paper's new office.

The real boon turned out to be the bartending job at Josie's, a known hub of criminal activity in Hell's Kitchen. She was trying to work her way toward a post at the fabled "Bar With No Name," where New York's costumed criminals gathered and blathered, but she still needed to build trust before she could mix cocktails for the super thugs. Two months on and Renee thought she was getting there. The regular punks and skels at Josie's tended to talk to her because she was a friendly face who poured drinks that were a little too strong... an old habit from her own days as a drunk.

The lads and ladies at Josie's told their new favorite bartender about crimes going down all over the city. She heard from Stacy, a street girl with a HYDRA hook-up, that the Kitchen's personal guardian, Daredevil, had stumbled upon the ultimate criminal database and the whole world was gunning for the poor, dumb do-gooder.

A former middle-man for the Owl bragged how he'd brokered a deal between Mister Negative's Chinatown outfit and some guys from Metropolis looking to sell some black market weaponry from Apokolips. Montoya put two and two together and figured it was Intergang.

Those were just some of the good tidbits, and there were lots of them, but they came amidst the dross of stale rumors and folk legends, because the patrons at Josie's told her all the old stories, too. Like how the Man Without Fear used to break the bar's decorative plate window every time he stopped by looking for leads like it was his job. When they were drunk enough, some of them even slurred their own accounts of the sick, sordid shit they got up to that weird, wild night last fall when the whole neighborhood erupted into an orgy for no good goddamn reason. Everybody told her about how they celebrated a week later when they heard Oracle had died. Top shelf drinks on the house. Apparently it had been a hell of a party.

Renee knew the nice ladies who used to work with the late, legendary super-techie, so faking a giggle about free hooch the night Oracle died was a bit of a challenge, but she had a job to do. Besides, Montoya had worked a case with the Birds of Prey shortly before she left Gotham for this New York assignment and had some doubts about how that whole "death of Oracle" deal had actually played out...

Supposedly, eight months ago, the Calculator had blown up a sophisticated combat helicopter with Oracle at the wheel, but as far as Renee knew, the GCPD had never recovered a water-logged corpse. No body, no crime. It wasn't actually the first lesson you learned as a detective, but it was definitely in the top three.

Then again, it was easy for The Question to let her mind wander.

According to her contract with Batman Incorporated, she was really only supposed to be doing reconnaissance. A daily update on the movers and shakers in the New York meta-underground which she transmitted to the WayneTech secure server every morning. She wasn't insured for combat in the field. The Question was not the Dark Knight of Manhattan. But it was hard to hear about a shipment of laser guns at the docks and not do something about it, especially when it came from Intergang. Montoya would never jeopardize her precarious position on the criminal grapevine -- she was Batman's sole source in New York, after all -- but she thought she could get away with disrupting the transaction without blowing her cover. And when you got down to it, she just couldn't resist. Renee had left the force because they left her hands tied. What was the point of being a vigilante now if she was going to follow the rules?

The Question suspected that this Chinatown deal was Intergang trying to get a foothold in the Big Apple and Mister Negative must have figured the same, which is why she wasn't too surprised to find his forces in place when she arrived on the scene, but after three months of nothing but legwork, she was ready to pounce. And just like that, The Question found herself taking on forty guys at once on a spring morning in Red Hook.

After all this time, it was almost nice to be fighting Intergang again. Like coming home. She took down five of them in three seconds flat. Montoya quickly found that dealing with Mister Negative's forces, too, drained all those familiar niceties away. She'd heard all the rumors about these "Inner Demon" thugs, but she'd heard them from crooks and The Question had been made to understand that criminals were a superstitious and cowardly lot. Based on everything she'd seen Intergang conjure up against her, she assumed it was just another twenty guys to deal with. Then she pulled a takedown on one of the dragon-masked punks on Mister Negative's payroll that should have put him in traction for a few months and he shrugged it off like it was nothing.

"Hrm," she murmured. This was weird. Renee really had gotten used to the people she put down staying down. The Inner Demons were powered by something bordering on the supernatural.

The Question tried to re-engage the demon, but he wasn't messing around with her anymore. She suddenly wished she'd brought a gun to this swordfight as he slashed at her with a negatively-charged katana, but given her recently felled attacker's remarkable talent for recovery, she wondered how much good even that might have done.

The guy was just about to take off her head when she heard a muffled voice shout "Voice command: right shooter, impact cartridge," and just like that the Inner Demon was covered in some kind of quick-dry crowd-control foam and she had nothing to worry about... Unless you counted the other thirty-four fighters... and the fact that thick strands of grey goop were bursting from the foam and slithering toward her faster than she could avoid.

Suddenly there was this big white blur heading toward her.

"Goddammit, Reilly," Renee heard the man-shaped blur murmur before tackling her to safety. "What's that impact crap supposed to do?"

She looked up at her tackler to see he was dressed head-to-toe in blazing bright white with stylized jet black trimming. "Okay, miss, I'm going to suggest that you leave now," he said, barely glancing her way through those big black triangle-shaped mask-shades as he yanked her up onto her feet. "I really like your hat and all but this is what we call a 'gangwar' and those tend to get OH MY GOD, YOU DON'T HAVE ANY EYES!"

Based on his mid-quip mini-freakout, Renee was guessing the man in white had finally gotten a good look at her face... or lack thereof. Sometimes she let herself forget how unsettling the featureless countenance of The Question could be, even though that was the whole point of the mask. It's hard to look at a face without eyes, nose, or mouth, and it's even harder to lie to something like that when it's asking you questions... especially when this impossible thing in front of you's still somehow talking... still somehow breathing.

Montoya might have lost it herself when she first met Charlie as The Question if she wasn't a Gotham City cop and half in the bag when he suddenly showed up in her apartment. Instead, she'd taken a couple of shots at the spooky pendejo with the gun on her nightstand. The guy had just wandered into her apartment in the middle of the night after all. While she was entertaining a lady friend, no less!

"So, um, I'm guessing from your, uh, blank expression that you're not just some poor hipster chick from Williamsburg who likes to accessorize with a dainty fedora," Whitey mumbled, composing himself with a little more aplomb than The Question expected as Inner Demons and Intergangsters circled around them with a menacing sense of mutual purpose.

"I'll have you know this hat is vintage," she informed him. "And this isn't a gangwar, it's a gun buy, so no, I didn't just stumble onto this. I wouldn't mind a hand, though..."

"How about some of my fancy footwork instead?" he asked, attacking two Intergang guys with an impressive double-kick. "Though, I know what you mean. My hands are pretty spectacular." He pointed at two Inner Demons and they were suddenly ensconced in a thick sheath of that grey foam with two resounding thwaps.

Sadly, it wasn't until then that she knew who had come to her rescue... "You're Spider-Man!" she realized, disarming a Demon with a hard elbow to the face and seizing his sword.

"Well, duh," he said, confused. "Why wouldn't you think I was... oh god. It's the costume, right? I told Reed this thing makes me look like Anti-Venom, but oh no, try to get Mister frakkin' Fantastic to listen to you about costume design. He just waved me off with his big rubbery hands..."

The Question was well aware that the wall-crawler had joined the Future Foundation -- Reed Richard's new variation on the Fantastic Four in response to the untimely death of the Human Torch -- but the new FF hadn't been the media darlings they used to be. It was hard to shake the image of them in those bright blue uniforms, and Spider-Man's white and black Future Foundation costume took a bit of getting used to. Honestly, it was almost impossible to keep up with the wall-crawler's wardrobe these days. It seemed like he had a new outfit every other week while keeping the classic red and blue tights in regular rotation.

It was enough to make one question just how many Spider-Men were truly out there. If Batman could go global, maybe Spider-Man had expanded into some kind of limited liability corporation...

"You got a name?" the web-slinger asked as the two of them dug into the battle before them.

"Call me The Question," she replied with a slight wince. Montoya felt a little stupid every time she said something like that, but that's how these secret identity things were done, right?

To the web-head's benefit, he didn't bat an eyelash... she was guessing at least. It was pretty hard to tell with his own mask in place, especially when she was fighting three guys at once, but the way he himself laid into the task at hand without comment spoke to certain nonchalance.

Renee had actually met Spider-Man once years before, back when she was still in uniform. She was one of about a dozen cops who'd shown up when the web-swinger and the Vulture smashed into a mattress store in downtown Gotham.

"Welcome to Gotham, freakshow!" Montoya still remembered shouting to Spider-Man when he stumbled out of Wayne's World o' Beds, weak and dazed. It was clear to her then that he was just some poor, mutie kid in a costume playing superhero dress-up. Ten seconds later, he was leaping over all of their heads and dodging gunfire as he made one of the more daring escapes Montoya had witnessed at the time.