Mettle, Metal, Meddled - Chapter 80 - California star (Patreon)

When our patrol week in Japan ended, we returned home with a generally poor mood suffusing the two teams. We had spent most of our time in and around Tokyo since that was where Mauser had ended and spent the most time during his rampage. It was disheartening, to say the least, to inspect and investigate the various places that he had targeted. By now, they were starting to be cleaned and reopened to the public, but it was impossible to not see the scars left behind.

His attacks, which so far had a surprisingly low body count, were brutal, quick, and showed a level of chaos that made Nightwing and myself both think of the Joker. But unlike the Joker, while the crimes showed plenty of sociopathic behavior, his crimes lacked the scale or depths of insanity. His first crime in Japan, for example, was to rob a convenience store. He took a hundred and fifteen thousand yen, about eight hundred dollars, but also took several stacks of manga. The only injury in that robbery was when he bashed a customer's face with the door as he was leaving. He spent a full minute and thirty seconds chastising the middle-aged man he had knocked down for not paying attention to where he was going, all in fluent Japanese.

He then left without hurting anyone else, walking across the street and through a concrete wall as if it was a liquid, the wall rippling before going still. Zatara was unsure if he had teleported using the wall as a securing point for a portal or if he had just walked through the wall since there were no security cameras pointed at the right angle to see the other side.

A day later, he attacked an armored truck carrying money out from a bank, this time showing just how brutal he could be when he disabled one of the guards by blowing off his hand when he reached for his pistol. He then put the driver in a coma by tearing him out of the truck and throwing him across the street, where he slammed into an already moving car.

When Mauser stopped laughing, he waltzed into the back of the truck, pulled something from his jacket, and used it to cast some sort of decaying curse, one that affected the structure of the vehicle so badly it rusted into an easily breakable wreck. The spell hung around for an entire day, eating into the concrete below the truck and maiming one investigator, eating two of his fingers off his left hand. Luckily Hawkwoman was on the scene and used the magic nullifying effects of her Nth metal mace to stop the spell's progression, saving the rest of the investigator's hand and possibly his life in the process.

The criminal was chaotic, sociopathic, and violent, but so far had stuck to small, normal-scaled crimes rather than the large, ridiculously dangerous plots super villains usually got up to. He also rarely used the same type or style of magic twice, through both his rampage in the US and in Japan. Both Kent Nelson and Zatara had to work together to identify them all, and they still weren't sure about some of them.

"The first type of blood magic he used was a modified Russian spell dating back close to two hundred years," Kent Nelson explained at our briefing about the criminal. "But the spell of decay was definitely Aztec blood magic, at least at its base. What he pulled from his jacket was likely a human heart."

I could see Beatriz pale at the news he had used a human heart as a spell ingredient. I couldn't help but be disgusted at the fact that they likely killed someone to do a job that a saw or a pry bar could have easily done.

"Magic… it changes over time. Spells go out of style, new methods are developed, shifts in laws, in technology shift," Zatara explained. "It's actually rather fascinating. In 1920, a common home protection ward fell out of style because its primary ingredient was also used in a long-distance communication ritual."

He paused for a moment, looking at us expectantly. For a moment, there was silence before Garth spoke up.

"The telephone?" Nightwing asked, getting a smile and a nod in return.

"Precisely! Since there was now a perfectly mundane and easy way to communicate, the community almost immediately stopped using that spell," He explained. "But because people stopped buying such large quantities of the ingredient, people stopped using the ward because they never had any of this particular crystal on hand."

"As interesting as that may be," Batman said, in a tone that said he didn't believe what he just said. "Knowing one or two types of magic that have fallen out of style is not unusual. But knowing a dozen or so, well enough to use them off-hand as Mauser has been? It was unusual enough to investigate."

"I would imagine that someone who enjoyed magic and had the option could gather a bunch of eclectic magic," I asked, looking at the two magic experts on the other side of the table.

"They could, to a degree," Kent responded. "But several of the spells were from styles that I recognized but didn't actually know. And while it's not strange for someone to know more about some parts of magic, to know over a half dozen schools of magic that should be long dead? That's abnormal."

"Which was all I needed to connect a few dots we already knew about," Batman explained. "The largest of which was his style of Japanese. It was noted by one of the victims, a professor at a nearby university, that he spoke a very old form of Japanese, based on his outdated style and composition."

"What?" I asked in confusion, unable to understand how Batman's information gelled with what we already knew. "That…what?"

"We believe Mauser was laying low in Central City, pretending to be a simple weapons dealer," He continued. "Given the breadth, depth, and effectiveness of his magic, the speed at which he regained his finger, we believe him to be some sort of long-lived sorcerer. Potentially even an immortal."

"Immortal? Seriously?" Wally asked, looking baffled by the statement. "He regenerates and talks funny, and that makes him immortal?"

Batman stared at Wally for a long moment, the young speedster freezing like a deer in some headlights, as if suddenly realizing who he had just sarcastically challenged. After a moment of silence, Batman looked away, and Wally sagged in relief. Artemis, who was sitting next to him, barely held back her laughter.

"Immortal beings are not nearly as rare as you think. You've already met a handful since this team was put together," Batman responded. "There are several dozen that the League is friendly with, and we are reaching out to them in the hopes that they might recognize his MO."

"What about time travel?" I asked, getting several looks, including from Wally, who opened his mouth to say something but quickly decided to stay silent. "If we are dealing with someone bouncing through time, learning magic as he went…"

"Ignoring the fact that we have no idea how that would be possible… It could fit," Kent said, scratching his chin.

"We were functioning on the premise that his modern American English was so good because it's where he has been living most recently," Bartman admitted. "But it could be because it's when he was from…"

"At the risk of sounding like Wally… Time travel?" Robin asked, his eyebrow raised. "That's…"

"You already know one time traveler," I said with a smirk, gesturing to myself. "I came back several years when I jumped realities. Which reminds me, I need to start investing my money…"

"Quirks of inter-reality travel aside, we will look into all three possibilities," Batman said, steering the conversation back on topic. "In the meantime, finish your time off, and keep up the good work."

The next few days were spent going through our normal training schedule. We managed to maintain morning calisthenics despite everyone needing to go to school, which everyone complained about but begrudgingly admitted actually helped concentrate in class.

When the next weekend hit, the team was asked to patrol Star City, one of the many cities that did not exist in my world. It was located in California and, as far as I could tell, was somehow portioned off of the Los Angeles I knew. It was as if a writer had taken Los Angeles and divided its list of landmarks into two, giving one of them to the new city. It also had a few landmarks from other nearby cities, but most of them seemed to come from LA.

We divided the days into two shifts, a day and night, with the Alpha team claiming the day shift and the Beta team claiming the day. Twelve hours seemed like a long time on paper, so much so that Green Lantern Hal Jordan expressed concern about overworking us. Luckily he asked me first, rather than one of our few members who might have been insulted for being treated like a kid.

"It's not nearly as bad as it sounds," I assured him. "We trade off between active patrolling and on-call emergency response every two hours. One squad is stationed in the Bus or in Bioship, while the other patrols. After two hours or a particularly strenuous call, we switch places. Even better, now that Artemis has a handle on flying Bioship, we don't even need to mix up scheduling to keep M'gann inside them."

"Oh… alright. That's a lot better than any patrol schedule I've ever done…" He admitted. "And you'll be on 24/7?"

"Not me personally, but between the two teams, yes."

We talked a bit more about how our patrol system worked, about what he had handled before on previous patrols. After a while, the ring-empowered hero left, stepping through the Zeta-Tube to return to his work.

The Alpha team headed out in the Bus early the following day, bound for California. Beta team did their early morning calisthenics and some light sparring before we each spent an hour or so working with Ted Grant. He usually took groups of us depending on what he wanted to work on, like flying combat one day and enhanced strength the next, but working one on one was also important.

At around eleven at night, Beta team piled into Bioship and left the cave behind, meeting up with Alpha team on the roof of Star City's most central police station, the team having borrowed their helicopter landing pad, with permission of course.

"How was the day?" I asked, meeting Kaldur as the rest of the alpha team, minus Kid Flash, climbed into the Bus.

"Active, but not abnormally so," He responded. "There was a fire at the docks, but we were able to help evacuate everyone before Tula, Garth and myself extinguished the flames. Kid Flash saved a young woman from a riptide, and we stopped nearly a dozen muggings. We spotted…"

We spent about five minutes going over their patrol time and some of the things they noticed, including what Nightwing suspected was an uptick in gang activity in one portion of the city. We agreed that keeping a distant eye on the area was the best bet, as patrolling it directly would most likely only increase any tensions in the neighborhood and risk sparking conflict. We were close enough to respond to anything without putting boots on the ground.

After we were done with our mini-briefing, it was business as usual for patrols. Artemis piloted Bioship to the center of the city, the advanced ship tapping into police and fire dispatch. While Artemis, Superboy, and Fire hung out in Bioship. M'gann, Ice, and I patrolled the city. We were a bit spread out, each patrolling by ourselves, working larger chunks of the city, but backup was just a quick call away. We stayed in contact with the squad and with mission control, updating each other on what we were responding to.

We each had a few encounters, with M'gann getting the most "impressive" as she was patrolling downtown when a car lost control and plowed into a lamppost. The driver survived but had been pinned in his car, his leg broken and wedged in place. M'gann spent the better part of an hour helping the paramedics extricate the injured man, using her TK to bend and shift the crumpled car to get the man free. She only left when the ambulance pulled away.

Somehow we actually got to unwind for our entire two hours, only having to step in to stop a high-speed chase, which only took a few minutes. Rather than force the vehicle to stop, M'gann simply got Bioship nice and close before reaching out with her psychic powers, tearing a hole into the hood and sabotaging the engine, letting the criminals coast to a stop.

When it was our turn to head down and patrol again, we switched up where we were stationed, putting me in charge of a large portion of the high-end business sector. I was just over an hour into the patrol, making a large loop around a park area, when I stopped at a red light. Across the street from my stop was a large, white structure, artistically designed but still functional. In front was a sign marked with a golden star with a circle around it, the words "STAR Labs" written in the same golden finish.

As I waited for the green light, I looked down at the fuel gauge of my motorcycle, double-checking to make sure I had plenty left before looking back up. The light turned green, and I lifted my foot up, preparing to take a left turn.

Before I could make it past the crosswalk, an explosion rocked the STAR Labs in front of me. It wasn't a large explosion, or even a particularly energetic one, though that might have been because it was muffled by the rest of the building. But it generated enough force to blow out dozens of windows, smoke immediately pouring out of the newly opened rooms.

"Mission control, come in," I said, riding my bike across the street and right up the stairs leading into the building. "I just witnessed an explosion at the STAR Labs facilities. It blew a bunch of windows out, and I saw smoke, but I didn't see the explosion itself. I'm going to make my way inside and clear the area."

"Copy that, relaying to the rest of the team."

"Roger that, have M'gann reach out to me when she is in range," I said, before stepping into the building, ignoring the alarms and flashing lights.

I stepped into the facility, pulling my shield to my hand and making my way deeper into the building, following the increasingly intense vibrations coming from somewhere within. The explosion might have been what caught our attention, but something extreme was going on deeper inside the building, and I was going to find out what.