TDBB: Earth's Guardian #8.
Ivy got herself up slowly.
Toph felt her test each joint in sequence. Ivy carefully inventoried the damage her body had suffered after being introduced to a chamber wall at speed.
Nothing was broken. Ribs bruised. Her heartbeat had settled from its post-impact spike into a steadier beat. And she had made a decision.
"Dream all you want," she said. "But I'm out of here."
She brushed soil from her suit and walked toward the chamber's far exit.
Toph lifted a wall in her path.
Stone rose from the floor in a smooth, unhurried plane, sealing the exit from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Ivy stopped two steps in front of it, still, choosing not to give a reaction.
"What's the plan here, dolly?" Ivy's voice had recovered its precision. "Lock me in a cage and bully me to compliance with your stinky toes?"
Toph pulled the wall down.
The stone descended back into the floor as smoothly as it had risen, the exit clear again, and Ivy stood in front of it with nothing between her and the tunnel beyond.
"That could work for anyone else," Toph said. "But you're a knucklehead who would rather swallow her own feet than admit she needs help."
"My feet, for the record, do not smell."
"You're blind," Ivy said, and then paused, something shifting in her voice. "Not -- you can't smell. That's not --" A beat. "You know what I mean."
"I know exactly what you mean," Toph said. "And I can smell fine. My feet don't."
A silence that had something reluctant at its edges.
"You're free to leave," Toph said. "But you can't stand there and tell me I've got nothing to offer you. And it's not just conquest." She tilted her head toward the cracked soil behind her. "Your skills have a ceiling. I can show you where it is and how to move past it."
Ivy didn't move toward the exit.
"Was this your plan all along?" The precision in her voice had an edge now that wasn't quite anger -- something more considered than that, running a calculation. "Ruin my work so I'd have nothing left to defend. Then offer me yours."
"I have learned to tolerate terrible plans," Toph said. "I spent years working with someone whose plans were mostly held together with good intentions and a boomerang." She paused. "But yours didn't have a future. The foundation work alone --"
"And yours does," Ivy said. "Because?"
"This isn't going to work if I have to keep repeating myself," Toph said.
"Right." Ivy's voice shifted, something turning in it. "You think you're better than everyone."
"Now you're getting it," Toph smirked.
A sound from the far end of the chamber started. Short, low, involuntary. Ivy was chuckling.
Toph's brow went up. "What's funny?"
"No one likes a genius who knows it," Ivy said.
"I've never cared what people think."
"I can tell." A pause. "Your smell is screaming ignorance."
"Do you ever shower?"
"With dirt."
Silence.
"You're not joking."
"Why would I joke about dirt?"
Another silence, this one longer, and Toph felt Ivy's weight shift as she turned fully away from the exit and back toward the chamber. Her heartbeat had changed again -- not the cold fury of the fight or the calculated precision of the recruitment resistance, but something that was working its way toward a different register entirely, reluctant and alive.
"If this is going to work," Ivy said, and the careful deliberateness of the phrasing made it clear she was not conceding anything, merely establishing parameters, "you will need to think about your hygiene."
Toph worked her finger into her right nostril, found what she was looking for, and wiped it on her tunic.
"Seriously," Ivy said.
Toph grinned. "Sounds like you're in." She dropped her hand to her side. "But no one tells me what to do."
"I'm still furious with you," Ivy said. "For the record."
"Good." Toph turned toward the gap in the wall, back toward the tunnel. "You'll need all of it for what I'm planning."
"Which is."
The grin didn't move. "Follow me and find out."
She stepped through the gap and into the tunnel without waiting to hear whether the footsteps behind her followed, because she already knew from the floor that they would, and waiting would have made it into something it wasn't yet.
The tunnel closed around her, old stone and the slow breath of deep earth, and behind her the footsteps came through the gap after a count of three.
She didn't acknowledge it.
<--TDBB--->
Three levels above and six blocks east, Batman moved through a maintenance tunnel with his light off.
He didn't need it. His lenses read the thermal differential between the old brickwork and the moving air, painting the tunnel in the grey-green gradients of residual heat. He moved through the picture it gave him without assumption, reading what was there rather than what he expected to find.
He had been in the tunnels for two hours.
The trail wasn't obvious. Most investigators wouldn't have called it a trail at all -- a variance in dust distribution here, a section of tunnel wall with the mineral deposit pattern interrupted there, the faint compression in a patch of dried sediment that read as a barefoot print to anyone who knew what a barefoot print looked like in compacted tunnel floor.
He knew. He had catalogued every variation since their first meeting, and the first block and built the movement pattern from the aggregate. What the pattern told him was that she had been down here for one day and had covered more ground than he had initially estimated.
He stopped at a junction where three tunnels met and crouched, his lenses reading the floor. The sediment here showed multiple passes, a convergence point she had returned to more than once.
He pressed two fingers to the floor at the junction's center and felt nothing through the material of his glove. The gloves were insulated, designed to prevent conduction, and he had been wearing them since he entered the tunnels.
She read the earth. He would give her as little earth to read as possible.
He found the rat bones three minutes later, in a natural alcove where the brickwork had receded and the stone beneath it was exposed. The bones were wrapped in stone, a neat compression of sediment that had been shaped from the outside with a precision that no human hand could have managed.
He read the dust -- how it settled around a specific body-sized depression in the sediment at the limestone's base, the distribution of the particles consistent with a stationary weight over an extended period. She had slept here.
Sitting up, hands on the floor.
He photographed the bones, the depression, and moved on.
She was eating down here. Living down here. The tunnel was not a hiding place or a transit route -- it was a base of operations.
He stood at the limestone face and thought about what he was building toward.
She had deflected every physical approach he had made. Ground contact was her primary advantage -- she could read through the earth anything that touched it. Responding to metal or stone-based attacks was effectively instinctive for her.
The officers who had fired on her had given him data he would use -- she couldn't track aerial projectiles at speed. But.
She had demonstrated in the aftermath that a wounded version of her was more dangerous than an unwounded one. He had no interest in repeating that outcome.
He needed her senses compromised without physical escalation.
The sonic dampeners were already in fabrication. Frequency emitters that generated noise, the equivalent of filling her primary sense with static.
He had tested the frequency range against the seismic data Oracle had pulled from the building collapse and the resonance signature was close enough to be workable.
The weapons were a different consideration. She bent metal. She bent stone. She had demonstrated that she could feel and redirect anything with sufficient mineral content, which covered most of his standard equipment in ways that made him uncomfortable.
He had rebuilt his approach from the discomfort.
He had three batarangs already replaced with a ceramic composite that carried no metal and no mineral signature she could read.
The grapple housing was carbon fiber over a polymer core. The new restraint system was woven aramid rather than steel cable.
He had gone through his equipment inventory with the specific question of what she could touch and stripped out everything that answered yes. His new load out felt unfamiliar.
She had also demonstrated that she could feel him through the ground when he stood on it. His approach would need to happen from above, or from a surface that interrupted ground contact enough to buy him the seconds he needed to deploy the dampeners before she could respond.
Batman moved north through the tunnel, following the trail backward toward the junction where it had started, building the map of her underground range in his head as he went.
She would feel him the moment he touched the earth she was reading.
He intended to make sure that moment came on his terms.