Barbara took a deep breath before she rushed forward transitioning into a serious of flips and handstands and ending it with a triple full twist flip.
She executed the routine perfectly, yet the young redheaded woman was not satisfied in the least.
It was all well and good when doing such complex manoeuvres on a gymnast mat in room with a flat elevation, but doing it out in the city, or in a fight was a completely different matter.
But unfortunately she didn’t have many places to train, so she’d have to make do with the gymnasium at Gotham academy.
Practically no one was here this early, and she easily looped the camera footage; wouldn’t want teachers asking too many questions.
The reason Barbara was doing such intense training was because she was frustrated.
Bruce Wayne, or the person she knew him as—Batman—had recently sidelined her due to her not following orders during a drug bust at the docks.
It wasn’t even her fault!
The suspect was getting away and if she hadn’t have acted when she did then he would’ve gotten away.
How was she supposed to know that was part of the plan?
Barbara huffed as she started moving into various different katas she’d learned, while adding her own twist on them by combining her flexibility and acrobatics.
While in hindsight it made sense, at the time it was hard to think.
Something Bruce didn’t hesitate to point out as inexperience and ‘needs improvement’.
What bothered Barbara the most was that he was right, she should’ve listened to orders.
She was smart, she should’ve been able to work on the same wavelength as Bruce and deduce what he was doing.
The problem was the fighting, she wasn’t used to it yet.
She’d only been working as Batgirl for around 6 months and most of those had been training with Bruce.
‘Yet he still didn’t trust me enough to train in the Batcave…’
When she fought she’d get tunnel vision, it was like her IQ dropped by forty points.
She knew that it was the adrenaline at work and that she’d just need to get used to it, but it didn’t frustrate her any less.
After finishing her katas she finished by dropping into a perfect split, her legs had gotten thicker over the past few months; not with fat but with muscle, her stomach was flatter and taut with slightly visible muscle, but the biggest improvement had been to her backside.
Barbara much to her dismay was flat as a pancake that had been made with half an egg.
While her training hadn’t done much in the breast department it had done a lot to her backside, and while it wasn’t the biggest it was bigger than it was, and very tight.
It also had a small round shape to it.
In summary it was the perfect little bubble butt that even jiggled when she moved.
Needless to say she was very happy with it, in fact it made the countless nights training worth it all.
Also the saving lives part.
After stretching her body from toe to toe she rolled back with her legs still in a split and went into a handstand, before pushing off it and onto her feet.
Sweat was rolling down her body, and going into the small valley between her breasts.
She walked over to her bag and grabbed a towel out of it before she started mopping up the sweat on her breasts and forehead.
*Ding*
The sound of her phone going off made her almost drop her towel.
It reminded her of the second thing she’d been frustrated about this morning.
Ethan Kane.
The mere mention of his name made her cringe, she wanted to disappear into a black hole when she thought about him.
The million or so texts she’d sent him after she hadn’t heard back from him had to rank among when of the worst ideas she’d ever had.
Ranked next to that was stealing his number from his phone.
What was she thinking!?
What kind of boy would be attracted to that kind of psycho stalker behaviour.
It was so unlike her, she’d never done anything like that before, but at the moment she just couldn’t help it.
Barbara sat down on the floor drawing her knees to her chest, blowing a strand of her ginger hair out of her face as she rested her chin on her knees.
As she sat there she thought about Ethan; he’d been on her radar for quite a while, almost a year in fact.
The first time she’d noticed him was when Justin was bullying him by his school locker.
He’d shoved Ethan into the locker and mocked him before he threw a punch and dropped Ethan to the ground.
Now from everyone else’s perspective it looked like Justin had punched Ethan so hard that he ended up injuring himself.
Barbara knew better.
She saw the slight movement of Ethan’s leg, he kicked Justin’s leg the moment he twisted his body.
It was at the perfect moment as well; right as Justin clocked back his fist.
Justin’s center of gravity would be unbalanced and he wouldn’t have planted his feet yet.
That small kick threw Justin’s punch off by an inch and his fist smashed into the locker instead of Ethan, yet to play it up Ethan still dropped to the ground and pretended he got hit.
Tactically it was genius, he was in a situation where he avoided conflict while managing to injure his foe and yet appear weak enough that the conflict ends.
That caught her interest.
After that she would start looking a bit more closely; and in doing so she realised that he was a certified genius with a capital G.
Every single class they were in he would do these doodles—never paying attention to the actual lesson.
At the end of every class he’d always throw the doodle away, which she would promptly collect.
The blueprints and different designs on those papers were incredible, on these papers he’d randomly pick anything that people use in daily lives and he’d pick it apart and improve it.
Car engines.
Submarines.
Guns.
Coffee makers.
Oven.
It didn’t matter, he’d pick it apart, get rid of everything inefficient and improve it all while trying to keep the cost relatively low.
In fact that’s the only issue she’s found with his more advanced designs, that they were too expensive to mass produce.
She was smart but even she had trouble following some of his designs.
Though give her enough time and she’d figure it out.
Her favourite was his improvement of the combustion engine.
He’d replaced them with rotational turbines set in a spiral, so instead of moving up and down, the air and fuel spun inward like a cyclone, building pressure until it ignited near the center.
The exhaust wasn’t wasted either; it got pushed into a secondary chamber where it boiled liquid in a closed loop, powering a mini steam turbine that compressed the next round of intake.
Any leftover heat got harvested and used to power things like the AC or to charge a battery.
It was about forty percent more efficient than a normal engine, with fewer moving parts and less chance of failure — and he’d sketched the whole thing in pen during history class and threw it in the bin like it meant nothing.
Sure someone else could come up with the same design and it’s possible that it might already exist out there, but to be able to do such advanced applications of physics and chemistry at seventeen was incredible.
Also it wasn’t just the engine, his mind seemingly worked the same way for anything.
If Barbara hadn’t been interested before she certainly was now, and what followed was an unhealthy amount of stalking; to the point where she’d even done so while donning her costume.
It was worth it though as she managed to see Ethan in his room working out and constructing his drone.
As you’d expect Barbara only got more enamoured with the young genius.
Eventually she put together a plan in order to facilitate their meeting, it wasn’t a very well thought out plan, but in the mind of Barbara who didn’t know the first thing about Ethan, it was fool proof.
Step 1: Use some leverage with the principle to form a club.
Step 2: Convince Bruce to donate some equipment from WayneTech.
Step 3: Ethan joins.
It was supposed to be foolproof, yet the first time she’d asked him he said no.
She didn’t give up however and kept asking and the very next day Ethan said yes.
It was amazing, having him in there with her made her heart beat a thousand miles a minute but she couldn’t keep the smile off her face.
He’d even spotted the defect in the rocket boots and helped her fix it!
She purposely created that defect with that in mind, but she didn’t think he’d actually help her himself.
Then she went and ruined it all by stealing his phone number and messaging a million times.
‘Stupid.’
‘Stupid.’
‘Stupid.’
Months of planing and observing and watching all for it to be thrown away.
‘Maybe I should just move…
metropolis is supposed to be nice during winter.’
‘Who am I kidding…
anywhere is nice when compared to Gotham.’
Barbara sighed before reaching into her bag and grabbing her phone.
“Probably dad checking up on me again…” she muttered a little exasperatedly.
He always worried about her, not that she didn’t understand, Gotham was…
well Gotham.
She could handle his protective tendencies, but she’d already left a note saying she was heading to school early.
Grabbing her phone she turned the screen on.
Her eyes widened when she saw that the message was not from her father, but from the very person she’d just been thinking about.
Ethan: Hello, I apologise that I did not reply to your message yesterday, I was preoccupied with certain events, as to answer your question I have no issue with you having my number, since we are to be part of the same club it would be more convenient.
Barbara looked at the message for a moment, she read it once, then read it again.
“Hahahahhhahaha!” She burst out laughing, she’d never met someone that wrote messages like that before.
He sounded like a posh robot; she wondered if he was talking like that on purpose or if he was just very socially inept.
He definitely didn’t talk like that at school, if he did she was sure the bullying would be a little worse than it was.
Though message etiquette aside, she was over the moon that she finally got a reply back from him, and a positive one too!
She was so sure he’d tell her to get lost or that he would just leave the club and never speak to her again.
With a smile on her face she began to type a reply when she paused.
What should she say?
Should she write him a long or a short text?
What should they talk about?
Does he want to?
Should I call him?
Barbara: Heyyyy I’m glad you messaged—
“No that’s way too familiar.” She shook her head as she deleted the text and started typing again.
Barbara: Omg I’m so happy you messaged me I—
“Nope way too desperate,” she said while rapidly pressing the delete button.
Barbara: Oh heyyy Ethie-kins, I’m soooo glad—
“Nope!
Too familiar and too desperate.” She huffed before blowing her hair out of her face again.
Barbara: Oh?
Hey Ethan right?
Yeah I was just chilling out maxin relaxin all—
Barbara threw her phone across the room before lying down and completely giving up on messaging Ethan.
She felt like she’d just been mentally checkmated by herself.
“Come on Barb…
gotta say something,” she muttered before rolling backwards onto her feet and walking over to her phone.
She thought about it for a few moments longer before a smile formed on her face.
“Maybe simple is the best route?” She turned the screen on and began texting a message to Ethan.
_____________________________________
Ethan had just crossed through the gates of Gotham academy when his phone dinged, indicating he had gotten a message.
It could only be from one person, considering his parents were currently in a drugged out stupor.
He slipped his phone out of his pocket and turned on the screen to read the message.
Barbara: I agree.
Ethan raised a brow, an interesting response.
Not the actual message itself, but the fact that she seemed to have done a complete 180 in her personality.
Did she have a mental health condition?
It was possible but unlikely.
He wasn’t adept in human relationships so he wouldn’t even try to understand; and from what he’s read even normal human males have given up on understanding females.
Putting his phone away he continued inside the school making sure to slip past any teachers that may go out of their way to annoy him.
When he arrived at the door to the science lab and tried to open it, the handle didn’t turn.
Made sense they’d lock it, especially with over a hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment in there.
He stood there for a moment wondering what he should do, of course he could find a teacher but he didn’t want to deal with them.
He also didn’t know how to pick a lock, in theory he knew since he was familiar with how a locking mechanism worked, but he didn’t have the equipment.
A smile stretched across his face.
*Ba-dum*
*Ba-dum*
*Ba-dum*
*Ba-dum*
*Ba-dum*
*Ba-dum*
*Ba-dum*
Sweat started to pour down Ethan’s forehead as he activated his stolen ability, after which he turned the handle and snapped the inner mechanisms which let the door fly open.
Ethan always got a rush when he used his ability, he couldn’t explain it, but it was like the pleasure centres of his brain were all being flooded with dopamine; pretty strange considering the amount of cortisol that would be in his system due to the increased amounts of adrenaline.
‘Unless…’ Ethan wondered as he began to piece certain things together.
It would make sense for dopemine to be realised, cortisol in such large quantities would no doubt be damaging to the body, balancing it out with dopamine would make sense.
Casting those thoughts away Ethan walked inside and closed the door behind him, when it swung back much harder than he intended he chided himself as he’d forgotten to deactivate his ability.
After doing so he walked to the DNA sequencer that was squared in the back of the room.
He put on gloves.
He took the vial of blood and added lysis buffer and proteinase K.
He sealed the tube and placed it in the centrifuge.
He turned it on.
When it stopped, he added binding buffer, spun it again, then began the wash steps.
He finished with elution and collected the purified DNA into a new tube.
He brought the tube to the spectrophotometer.
The readout showed the DNA was clean.
He went back to the bench, fragmented the DNA, added adapters, and loaded it into the PCR machine.
He started the cycle.
When the amplification finished, he pipetted the DNA into the cartridge for the sequencer.
He slotted it into the machine and tapped through the setup menu.
He confirmed the parameters and hit start.
When the machine powered up he walked away and sat down at a computer before logging on.
When the machine powered up, he walked away and sat down at the computer nearby.
A few lines of code removed the activity log.
Another wiped the machine’s background tracker.
He disabled remote backups, cleared local caches, and flushed the DNS history.
He opened a terminal window and typed quickly.
He created a new sandboxed process, isolated from the main OS.
No logs.
No trace.
He ran a script that masked his network traffic through layered proxies and changed the device’s MAC address.
Then he started coding.
The program was simple.
It opened with a search query module.
He fed it a string filter: keywords related to abnormal strength, speed, reactions, resistance, or anything tagged with “mutation,” “powers,” or “weird stuff.” It would crawl every open-source forum, message board, chatroom, or blog.
It flagged usernames, locations, and dates.
Anything that matched went into a separate encrypted file.
He saved it to an isolated folder, set it to run continuously, he didn’t have a personal computer at the level of the one in the school and getting one would waste the money he’d gotten from that druggy, so he’d have to make do with this.
He was certain that no one would be able find out what he was doing and even if they did he doubted they’d care.
At worst they’d think he was weird for believing in this kind of stuff.
The reason he was doing this was simple.
He had stolen that drug dealers power and there was a high likelihood that he could do it again.
What was the limit?
How many could he hold?
Just how powerful could he become?
Those were questions he needed answering and by looking online he’d surely be able to find people who developed powers as he had.
Then he’d find them and he’d taken them…
depending on the power of course, but he wouldn’t discard much considering he only had one.
The sequencing finished.
The screen flashed green.
Ethan walked over and removed the cartridge, slotting it into the analysis port.
The data loaded automatically.
He opened the sequence files, mapped them against the human genome, and filtered out common variances.
At first, everything looked normal.
Then he narrowed the results.
He isolated regulatory regions, filtered for non-coding segments with active expression patterns, and cross-referenced them against known databases.
One segment stood out.
A dense, structured gene cluster hidden in what should have been inactive junk DNA.
It had no match in any public or private genome archive.
It wasn’t a mutation.
It wasn’t damaged.
It had perfect symmetry, no transcription errors.
“This must be it…” he said to himself.
While he didn’t have a control group, from what he knew about DNA this was not normal.
It’s possible that it was this cluster that was triggered and developed his ability.
Looking back he grabbed his notebook and started making notes.
He had confirmed that the source of his power was from his DNA, but to be perfectly sure he’d need to test a few other samples, preferably from someone who doesn’t have this gene cluster, and from one who does but has not activated it yet.
He made all of these notes and crossed off a few of the questions he’d answered.
“It can’t be an uncommon occurrence,” he muttered as he took his sample out of the sequencer and then erased the results.
After he went back to the computer and sat down, his fingers tapping the table as he considered several different possibilities.
He wouldn’t have been the first one to notice this phenomenon, it’s also highly unlikely that the drug user is the first case of enhanced abilities of this nature.
That means it’s possible that a research paper exists out there.
Logging back into the computer he adjusted the parameters of his program to specifically search for research papers of any kind involving the subject, and almost immediately the program found something.
Clicking on the research papers he opened it up and was greeted with the title.
Genesis of the Meta-gene
By Dr.
Eduardo Dorado
‘The Meta-gene.’ Ethan smiled.
He liked that name, he liked it a lot.
*thud*
*thud*
Hearing footsteps coming up the hall Ethan quickly erased his research and hid his program in the background tasks.
A moment after that the door opened and none other than Barbara walked in, her eyes widened in shock when she saw Ethan inside, but her expression quickly morphed into a smile a moment later.
“Ethan!” She said brightly.
“I didn’t expect you to be here until after school.” She walked inside not even noticing the broken door.
“Not that it’s not good to see you it is!
I was just surprised…
not a bad surprise a good surprise!” Barbara finally managed to stop herself talking, she cringed at how badly this conversation was going already.
Ethan stood up from the computer and walked over to her.
“I wanted to inspect the equipment a bit more, there’s quite a few interesting machines in here,” he explained.
Barbara nodded enthusiastically.
“Yeah isn’t it great?
I doubt even Gotham General has this kind of equipment, we really lucked out.” She then looked past him and to the computer he was sat at.
“Did you use anything?” She asked.
Ethan shook his head.
“No,” he replied.
He then grabbed his back from beside one of the tables and swung it around his shoulder.
“I better get going to class, I’ll see you after school,” he said as he began walking towards the exit.
“You don’t have to go just yet, I was just going to—”
*slam*
He was already gone.
Barbara breathed heavily before slumping.
“Way to go Barb…”
(AN: So Ethan has figured out the meta gene and is actively searching for people with it.
Will he find them, will he give them the succ.
Will Barbara give him the succ.
Yes and yes.
Anyway I hope you enjoyed the chapter).
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