When Spidey Met Oracle

"I assure you, Miss Gordon, I am not."

"Um, please send him up, Creote," she said. "Direct to the, uh, the work station."

She desperately hoped Aleksandr would understand that she wanted him to stall Fox in the elevator so she had time to prep her command center so she could pretend it was just a typical freelance technician's office instead of the kind of place where she coordinated unsanctioned military incursions and orchestrated hotly contested regime changes. She didn't have to worry Lucius would see the stacks and stacks of sophisticated mainframes on the server floors. Those were in the sub-basements. Babs had no idea how much time she had. It's not like she and Creote actually prepared for something like this. There were thirteen people who were allowed access to her headquarters at the Tower. Lucius Fox was not on that list. How did he even know about this place? Was it possible that Bruce had actually told him? No. If anyone understood somebody's need for secrecy, it was Bruce Wayne...

She was still cleaning things up when the elevator dinged and Fox was in her high-tech henhouse.

It hadn't taken too much for her to clear her screens of anything too revealing -- she had been running a covert op with the Birds in Madripoor, but they'd be fine without her for ten minutes. Her data-crunching on everything she'd compiled about this "Leviathan" operation Batman Incorporated was fighting might be harder to explain, though. Babs figured she could just say it was something she was working for Batman, Inc. that she didn't quite understand, but she hated playing the girl who was just following orders she was too dumb to fully understand.

"Good morning, Miss Gordon," Lucius said with a whistle as he strolled onto the floor, clearly impressed. "You have a very sophisticated set-up here. Is that a Modell Mark IX holographic heads-up array? Wish we had two or three of those puppies over at the Wayne Enterprise Complex..."

Maybe he was too impressed.

"I've done a lot of beta-testing for the manufacturer," she explained. "They said I could keep it. I apologize for the mess. I would have tidied up if I knew I'd have company today."

"Oh, that's fine," Lucius shrugged. "Truly talented people work in their own ways, and I can see now that you're truly talented."

"Um, thank you," Barbara replied. Maybe this little pop-in was going to work out to her benefit after all.

"I'm beginning to understand why Mr. Wayne was so desperate to sign you to the division," he told her then. "Maybe even why he's been so forgiving of your lapses in corporate protocol. If I'm confused by anything now, it's why a young woman such as yourself, with enough resources to build all this, would even bother working for WayneTech in the first place. If you were a competing firm, I'd be shaking in my loafers."

"Well, I believe in what Mr. Wayne's trying to accomplish," she responded. It seemed as though as much honesty as possible was Barbara's best policy. "His plans are just so exciting, aren't they?"

"I suppose they are," he admitted.

"Is there something I can help you with, Mr. Fox?" she asked, as kindly as possible.

"No, I think I've seen enough," he remarked, still glancing at her set-up. "But I'd really appreciate it if you could be sure to forward those daily technical productivity spreadsheets. They help me keep all of our R&D projects on track and under budget."

"Yes, absolutely," Barbara agreed. "I'm sorry if I've been neglectful. I don't know if you know how it gets when you're in a serious coding jag, but it's very easy to lose track of time. You'll definitely get them by the end of the day."

It didn't take much to encourage him to leave after that, but she still didn't like that he'd shown up in the first place. When she accessed her WayneTech email account to contact Bruce about this unbelievable invasion of privacy, she saw that he'd already sent her an email:

FROM: bruce.wayne@wayneenterprises.com SUBJECT: Where are your daily TPS reports?

Barbara wanted to scream.

The next day, shortly before he went off on a mission in Argentina, the Dark Knight himself stopped by the tower to clarify things.

"It's different now," he explained. "Batman, Inc.'s beholden to the shareholders. I know I can get them on my side, even with all the Leviathan business, but we have to prove that we're still making money. That's why I need you, Barbara, not just Oracle. You. Internet 3.0 is our only chance of justifying the profitability of Batman Incorporated to Wayne Enterprises this entire fiscal quarter."

"I get that, Bruce," she sighed, "I really do, but how does Lucius Fox know where I actually live?" All of Barbara's WayneTech paperwork listed her apartment in East Gotham as her primary residence and while the Batcave might now possibly be on the books, Kord Tower was still hidden in her own ugly, expensive smoke screen of dummy corporations and shell companies.

"I don't know," he admitted eventually and she believed him. It was always unnerving when Batman revealed there was something he didn't understand. "Lucius is a very resourceful person. If you're going to continue working under him for the time being, you should understand that. I'm still not completely sure how much he's figured out about Bruce Wayne's real connection with Batman. I trust him either way, but I'm still not sure if I want to burden him with the whole truth if I don't have to. He's a lot like your father in that respect."

Barbara found this revelation just as troubling. If the world's greatest detective still couldn't read a man, it was best to tread lightly. Especially with that comparison to her dad. When Babs had finally decided to confess to the Commissioner that she had once been Batgirl, his response had been that he'd figured that much out already...

"Fine," she relented, "but there's got to be something you can do to get Fox from dropping in whenever he feels like it."

Batman paused for a moment. She could see his wheels turning. If there was anything more unnerving than him admitting he didn't know something, it was watching the Caped Crusader take more than two seconds to work something out.

"I have an idea," he said finally, "but you're not going to like it..."

And just like that, Barbara found herself reporting to the Wayne Enterprise Complex Monday through Friday from 9 to 5.

She'd been set up in a cubicle with discretionary remote access to her servers at Kord Tower on a separate, encrypted hard-line, but Fox was still stopping by to check up on her at least twice a day. And he kept stopping by even after weeks and weeks of thoroughly completed and promptly submitted technical productivity spreadsheets.

Just to be clear, he was never a jerk about it. Lucius always checked-in with this jovial, avuncular attitude, which just made it worse, really. Barbara didn't even get the pointed pleasure of hating the guy for being a stern, taskmastering bureaucrat. No. He was just doing his job.

And yet, she'd somehow managed to fall into this strange limbo where she had all the responsibilities of being the superhero-hacker supreme coupled with all of the mind-numbing tedium of her old job at the Gotham Public Library.

Well, not all of the tedium. She wasn't still back-logging outstanding overdue fines. And certainly not all of the responsibilities now that the world at large thought Oracle was dead. She and the Birds of Prey had orchestrated an elaborate ruse to make it look like the Calculator's long search for the mythical infojack had finally borne fruit and he had bested his rival in a fiery showdown.

It wasn't that Barbara was done being Oracle. She was still doing work with the Birds and the ever-expanding Bat-family, but now she had the time and space to work on the bigger picture, too. Calculator wasn't coming after her anymore and she wasn't getting calls from any and every crime-fighter who didn't know how to work a Smartphone. Oracle used to get a lot of calls from Booster Gold asking her to check the "Shack Cam" on the Shake Shack webpage so she could tell him how long the line was at their Madison Square Park location.

The cherry on this renewed anonymity sundae was that Barbara had to assume that if a certain wall-crawling one night stand she had recently reconnected with had been looking for her, he'd probably given up the search when he heard the news. At least she certainly hoped so.

Right now, her only real problem was that she was on Fox's radar, and she assumed he wouldn't be an issue once she had the 3.0 beta-test ready, but that had been a disaster. One of the possible investors Bruce had invited turned out to be an agent of Leviathan who smuggled a worm through his avatar. The "thrilling" experience of almost losing their fortunes had actually convinced the others to fund the project after Batman and Barbara sorted everything out, but she spent another month fortifying the anti-malware defenses. Once she was done with that she was willing to let the rest of the code monkeys at WayneTech work out the bugs so she could go back to her nice, private life at Kord Tower.

The morning she finished re-building the firewalls, Bruce was away on Batman business, helping Steph with Batgirl's mission infiltrating St. Hadrian's, Leviathan's evil finishing school for girls in England. That left Lucius in charge and he was suddenly asking her for suggestions to improve the offensive programming for the ro-bats, the combative drones WayneTech had developed for the military. The armed forces had passed, but Bruce had put them back into production for Batman Incorporated.

Unfortunately, Barbara didn't have a good excuse to skip out just then. There certainly wasn't anybody higher on the office hierarchy to cover her. It didn't help that she hadn't exactly made friends with her co-workers. So she spent an idle Tuesday afternoon looking over the A.I. specs, waiting for Bruce to come back so he could finally tell this guy to back the hell off.

At 4:45 that afternoon, Wayne still hadn't come back to the office but Lucius stopped by.

"What do you think, Miss Gordon?" he asked with a smile. "How do we build a better ro-bat?"

"Uh, well, I don't know," she said, flustered. "I only had a day to examine the designs." That should have been more than enough time, but she hadn't actually thought she'd have to do this.

"You're a smart woman," Fox sighed. "Wayne Enterprises is paying you for your ideas, aren't we? Are you telling me we designed the perfect automated combat droid and there's absolutely no room for improvement?"

And the way he said it... that smarmy sigh of his just set her off. She knew that kind of sigh. It was one of exasperated disappointment. As a lifelong overachiever, Barbara Gordon hated that kind of sigh being directed at her.

"The threat assessment subroutines are crap," she told him flat. "It's better than what most private security firms are using for selective vault access these days, but there are better options, especially considering the integrated facial recognition software you have in place."

"What's wrong with the principle component analysis program we have now?" he asked her, still smiling.

Lucius had the same condescending grin every time he said anything to her. Barbara desperately wanted to wipe it off of his face, just the once. So she went into a long, labored discussion delving into the benefits of biometric algorithms, skin texture analysis and three-dimensional facial mapping with the man.

The problem with Fox was that he knew a thing or two about what she was telling him. Not as much as her at this point, but just enough to argue. So while someone like Dinah or Helena would just take her word for it, with someone like Lucius or Bruce she always had to show her work. A little knowledge was a dangerous thing.

"Horizon Labs in New York just came out with a sophisticated Suspect Identification System that covers all of those bases with access to multiple law enforcement databases for detailed profiles on repeat offenders," she told him, finally. "Something like that, coupled with the offensive programming already in place would make the ro-bats less likely to capture and contain some poor kid who just kind of looks like the Mad Hatter."

"Agreed," Fox nodded. That damn smile never wavered. "As of now, they've only released that software to government-sanctioned police agencies. I'd like you to convince them to license it to Batman Incorporated."

"What?" Barbara was flummoxed. "Why me?"

"I saw all that tech from Horizon in your home computing center," he said. "None of that's actually on the market yet, so I have to assume that you've got an in with Max Modell."

Barbara did have an "in" with Modell. Not just the beta-testing. When she'd first started Clocktower Systems as a front for her work with Black Canary, she'd contracted with his Horizon Lab outfit for computer equipment. She liked Max. You couldn't consider yourself a serious hacker without liking the guy. He was a legend. And she supposed that Modell liked her well enough, considering the number of times he'd offered her a job, but she hadn't actually spoken to him since principle construction had completed at Kord Tower a year ago.

Fox only gave her stunned silence a moment of consideration. "I've already arranged a meeting with him at his office in New York for next week," he told her. "We're flying you out on the corporate jet. Mr. Wayne absolutely insisted on giving you access to his penthouse during your stay... Unless you have some other plans of which I need to be aware?"

Barbara was taken aback by the penthouse offer. The jet was technically Wayne Enterprises property, which Lucius could use as he saw fit, but the place on Park Avenue was one of Bruce's personal properties. That meant he knew about this. So Babs should just play along, right?

"Uh, that should be fine, Mr. Fox," she agreed. "Despite all appearances, I'm nothing if not flexible."

One more week, she told herself. Then I can go home and forget about all of this. One day in Manhattan and it's over.

What was the worst that could happen?

*

As worst-case scenarios go, Peter had to admit this wasn't all that bad.

When he came home after a long day at the office, there was a half-naked blonde girl in his kitchen.

It wasn't the only odd thing that he noted upon stepping into his apartment. The fact that this semi-nude nymph was hovering over his checkered kitchen tiles didn't completely escape him. Nor did the sweltering heat on what had been an atypically cool night in June...

That said, the breath-taking vision of this earthbound angel illuminated by the light of the open refrigerator had his complete, astonished attention for the time being as she plucked his half-gallon carton of 1% milk from the top shelf. She teased the spout open with slender fingers before lifting it to her mouth, hygienically conscientious enough not to mush her pouty pink lips directly to the container. She hefted it a few scant inches away as she poured Peter's milk into her open maw. The haphazard tangles of her long hair dipped down as she leaned her head back. Her raised arm forced her pert, tiny tits to pop forward as she drank. Panting as she slaked her obvious thirst, her slight breasts rose with every heavy breath and dropped with every gulp in this mesmerizing rhythm. A few errant drops spilled from her mouth, down her chin and her neck before splashing against her chest. One persistent ivory stream slid between her apple-sized breasts, down her toned tanned torso before stopping at the hem of a pair of bright red bikini briefs which just barely covered her hips and the juncture between those long, weightless legs of hers. The only stitch of clothing on her perfect body.

Peter felt like he'd had this dream a few times before...

"Gwen?" he just barely whispered from the doorway.

The impossible girl jerked her head his way, hearing his soft utterance like a gun had gone off.

"Eep!" she squeaked, blushing furiously. Her baby blue eyes went wide when she spied him, and then she was just... gone, like Peter had merely imagined her. The only evidence left of her was that open carton of milk that seemed to hover in place for a brief moment before the regular laws of physics realized what was what and decided to reassert a little bit of normalcy to these outrageous proceedings.

The milk tumbled toward the floor but didn't quite get a chance to splatter the linoleum as the girl abruptly appeared once again in time to catch it. She quickly righted herself with the carton in hand, almost exactly where she had once floated. She was dressed now, but she was still blushing and her hair was still a tussled, golden muss. Based on where Peter's eyes naturally drifted, the red and yellow shield-bound "S" emblazoned across her chest was practically the first thing he noticed.

"Supergirl?" Peter murmured, confused as she placed his milk back on its shelf before closing the fridge.

"You, um, have a very nice place, sir," she sheepishly beamed with this dazzling smile before disappearing all over again. A stiff breeze suddenly clapped his skylight shut.

This had all transpired over maybe twenty seconds. Peter opened the front door and there she was, then she wasn't, then she was again and gone...

Somebody else entirely suddenly burst from his bedroom.

"What the hell are you doing here?" the Human Torch blurted as he tumbled forward, just barely clad in a robe. "I thought you were busy building digitized widgets at the Imaginarium of Post-Graduate Parker."

"It's 8 o'clock, Johnny," Peter said, still just as perplexed as he'd been since he came home.

"A.M. or P.M.?" Johnny asked.

"Post meridian, moron," he replied, closing the front door.

"Huh. Guess we lost track of time...."

Just five weeks ago, Peter thought the Human Torch was dead. When Johnny returned a month back, Peter had been overjoyed. After this last couple of weeks, though, there were times Peter easily forgot how much he had missed the jerk. "What are you doing here?"

"I was entertaining," Johnny sighed, equally as exasperated as he flopped onto the living room couch.

"Was that who I thought it was?"

"That was Kara," he replied with this dreamy smile on his face. "She's a nice girl, don't you think?"

"That was Supergirl?"

"Yeah, she's pretty super alright..."

"How old is she?!" Peter asked.

"Old enough, Parker..."

"What does that mean?"

"Don't be crass."

"How am I the crass one in this scenario?!"

"Asking a lady's age," the Human Torch scoffed. "It's unseemly."

"Johnny..."

"Technically, she's older than the two of us combined if you count suspended animation during space flight from Argo City..."

"Johnny!"

"She's enrolled at Stanhope University, so she's fair game," he shrugged. "She's undeclared, of course, but she's thinking about hospital administration or photojournalism or something like that. Man, I wish I'd finished college. Hot teenage girls as far as the eye can see, and they're all excited to explore their newfound independence. But no, I dropped out so I could focus on all my fantastic adventures instead. It's so hard being me, Pete..."

"I can see that," Peter muttered. "Try to keep the robe closed..."

"Thank god Kryptonian girls go wild, too."

On some level, Peter knew he shouldn't have been surprised by any of this. It was exactly the kind of thing he'd been walking into since he'd inadvertently agreed to let Johnny live with him... but Johnny didn't live there anymore. After three horrific weeks, Peter finally pulled the plug on their little roommate experiment.