Chapter Text
Day One - Protocol Black
Phase One: Protocol Black
The tunnel swallowed him in darkness. Black walls. Yellow striping. An underpass beneath the Gotham Narrows—or so the Batmobile’s navigation believed. The world beyond it was blurred, a projection cast in the glass-slick sheen of rain on asphalt. Bruce gripped the wheel with his left hand, the other resting over the drive selector. He was en route to Red Robin’s last ping—two kilometers and change to the east, near Coventry.
And then the light changed. It wasn’t gradual. The tunnel’s end ruptured into daylight like a stage cue misfired. There was no gray sky, no rooftops of Gotham hunched under their own weight. Instead: sun, wide, harsh, loud, assaulting all the senses. Bleached-out like overexposed film. Traffic. Civilian vehicles—compact, varied, far too clean. A tram line overhead.
The Batmobile’s HUD flickered.
ERROR: GEO-SYNC LOST
CONNECTION TO BAT-NET FAILED
SYSTEMS INDEPENDENT MODE ENGAGED
Bruce narrowed his eyes. "Report."
No response.
He adjusted the rear display panel manually. Still no network. He activated a fail-safe tracer, one designed to verify temporal continuity in the event of tachyon surges. A dead ping. No timestamp alignment. No Red Robin. No Oracle. No WayneNet satellites.
Only silence.
He braked at the edge of a crosswalk. Pedestrians stared, a few raised their phones, recording. One whistled at the car.
The Batmobile—low, matte-black, armored like a prowling beast—stood out like a specter among the hybrid sedans and buses. This wasn't Gotham. The architecture was wrong. The skyline, too shallow. No W.G.C. tower. No Wayne Tower. Nothing familiar. He toggled navigation again.
It refused to return a valid city.
CURRENT LOCATION: New York City.
Search radius: 500 miles. No ‘Gotham City’ located.
Bruce exhaled once through his nose. He reversed into an alley, shielded by shadow and the narrow squeeze between a sushi restaurant and a parking structure. The walls were wrong. The paint too vibrant. The signage too sterile. He switched off the engine and initiated Protocol Black.
The cabin dimmed. The internal system cycled into high isolation mode.
Protocol Black Engaged. Multiversal Displacement Suspected.
Communications Locked. External Ports Disabled. EMP Safeguards Ready.
Bruce didn't speak. He didn’t curse. He didn’t breathe heavily.
He simply accepted.
Within 30 seconds, the Batcomputer gave its first verdict. The core operating systems remained intact—firewalled to hell and back—but all satellite, cellular, and geolocation channels were either jammed, incompatible, or simply absent. There was no signal to piggyback. No Oracle to call. No Alfred to patch through.
This wasn’t a simple teleportation error. Not some trick by Zatanna or fate rewritten by a time anomaly. This was displacement. Dimensional.
Total.
He reached beneath the driver’s side console and pulled out a steel-jacketed compartment the size of a lunchbox. Inside: a manual cache.
Emergency currency, gold standard, crypto keys, portable black-box AI fragments, DNA test kits, local analog scanners. Most were offline.
The crypto wallet returned zero conversions—network error. The currency? U.S. dollars still existed. That was something. But everything else? No access to WayneTech patents. No identity backups. No alias threading.
He looked up, eyes narrowing as a small, silent drone passed overhead—civilian, most likely.
He keyed in a command: wipe all external broadcasting signatures.
If this world had its own heroes, he wasn’t ready to meet them. Not yet. He needed to vanish. Assess. Establish baseline technology. Isolate vulnerabilities.
And most importantly: remain unknown.
Still too many eyes for his liking. Phone cameras. Reflections in the glass. Curious glances that turned into scrutiny. Bruce didn't move for the wheel—he reached behind the driver seat into a recessed panel and pressed his thumb against a cold, matte surface. A soft hiss.
The Batmobile shimmered. Panels on the hull shifted—thin, hex-weave scales rotating into place—refracting the sunlight into something mundane. The matte-black menace melted into a high-end urban prototype: satin gray, luxury contours, civilian plates spun from adaptive holo-film. The cockpit adjusted its angle, simulating standard vehicle seating. The hum of the engine softened to a purr, mimicking an electric drive.
It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t need to be. He was no longer the object of attention. Just a man in a strange, expensive car.
Bruce checked the HUD. His digital blackout protocols were holding—optical masking to deflect drone targeting, signal ghosts to mislead pings, license plate replicators on a rotation. Against algorithmic surveillance, he was invisible.
But humans were harder to deceive. People noticed things. They remembered the strange. Not the shape—the feel. Camouflage had to be more than just a color.
He popped the driver-side door open, stepped into the alley’s shade. No cape. No cowl. Just black-on-black: boots, modular urban pants, a jacket with smooth-cut seams. Nondescript. Clean. The kind of man you see, then forget.
He walked and the Batmobile sealed behind him.
First priority: access.
Every asset, every plan, required an interface point. He needed something that could talk to this world—this dimension’s operating protocols, systems, file structures. His hardware wasn’t just outdated here—it was incompatible on a conceptual level. He needed a bridge.
Bruce entered a tech plaza on 45th and Lexington, drawn in by the signage: QuantumCore Solutions. Inside, clean glass, brushed steel, and blue accents. Devices displayed in pods like museum pieces. He didn’t browse. He observed.
The OS used by most machines here was layered. Mesh-based infrastructure. Cross-device linking through cloud nodes. The encryption reminded him of early WayneNet alpha-stage buildsbut leaner, less paranoid.
He smirked. Juvenile. But first impressions had misled me before.
He bought a consumer-grade neural syncpad, a local tablet with high-end specs, and a wearable processor core posing as a smartband. The clerk tried to upsell him on a warranty. Bruce didn’t answer. He left with what he needed.
Back in the alley, the Batmobile accepted the new interface after fifteen minutes of hard-spliced bridging. He retooled the smartband into a biometric relay, isolating it from system overreach. No unnecessary data leaks. No firmware backdoors. Just a temporary tongue to speak to this world.
He opened a private browser, searched for the financial framework and then began building.
No name. No face. A hundred small transfers. Accounts bounced across shell corporations he spun up in under an hour. LLCs with fabricated histories, complete with local taxes and innocuous invoices.
Slush fund established. Phase one of three.
Still no Oracle. Still no Gotham. Bruce closed the display.
He might be here for days. Or years. So he planned like he was never going back.
Someone who could bridge alien systems. Someone native. But not yet. Not until he had cover.
Phase Two: Fabrication
He drove until the light changed again.
Not the traffic—the atmosphere . That thin edge between late afternoon and evening, when shadows stretch long but the world hasn’t noticed yet. The perfect hour for disappearing. People were too busy. Too tired. No one paid attention to a man in a dark car turning into a parking structure on the edge of the Financial District. Bruce chose the second level from the top—high enough to see, low enough to remain unobserved by passing drones. He killed the engine and activated a passive scan. No nearby surveillance nodes. One dormant security cam, cracked and pointed at nothing.
Perfect.
He pulled the encrypted Bat-tablet from the Batmobile’s rear compartment and set it on his lap. There was no satellite sync, no tether to Wayne systems. Just brute-force tools and black-box code developed for the worst-case scenario.
This was the worst-case scenario.
He began with a name.
Not Bruce Wayne. Not anything that could tie back to him. The name had to be forgettable, but real . Something with depth—credit history, medical records, income tax filings. A name that could sign a lease or walk through customs. Something that would hold up to casual scrutiny, but collapse if anyone dug too deep.
Dorian Shaw.
Born in Chicago. Public high school. Two semesters at a community college. Three years overseas working for defense-adjacent logistics firms. Back now. Low profile. Quiet paper trail.
He built the entire profile in under twenty minutes.Then came the documentation.
Most people thought fake identities were about forging passports. They were wrong. In a digitized world, identity was infrastructure—utilities, social media fragments, transactional metadata, browser habits. Bruce seeded all of it. Web searches from a burner IP in Montana. Online purchases of office supplies. A rental car booked in Shaw’s name and canceled two hours later. Tiny, forgettable things. Together, they made him real.
Then came the financial footprint.
The slush fund was already fractioned, but it needed laundering. He broke it into four primary accounts under Shaw’s name, each with just enough variation in activity to suggest different phases of employment. A fifth was masked as a dormant startup checking account. Empty for now. He’d fill it later—when it was time for Dorian Shaw to become a consultant, or a CTO, or an “independent analyst.”
He tagged it all under an encrypted drive and buried the keys inside a low-usage blockchain ledger that no one would ever think to search.
Everything was in motion.
Still seated, still in shadow, Bruce adjusted the seat back and looked out across the city skyline. This world was new. But it was built on patterns. And patterns could be read, broken, reshaped.
He wasn’t here to play by this world’s rules.
He was here to write his own .
Phase Three: Integration.
The numbers were solid. The identity was complete, but it wasn’t enough.
Bruce stared at the Bat-tablet in his lap, watching as his secure OS attempted—again—to communicate with this world’s network protocols. The result was the same as the first ten attempts: partial handshake, followed by rejection.
Connection refused. Encryption mismatch.
Reason: Unrecognized certificate authority.
His tech was talking to a world that didn’t speak its language. He reached toward the console of the Batmobile and toggled a direct-line query to the onboard Batcomputer—his most powerful system, reinforced by modular A.I. partitions and military-grade encryption.
It should have been the solution, but instead, it returned a blunt truth:
System Compatibility: 5%
UI Rendering: Unavailable
Console Access: Terminal Only
Network Isolation Mode: Engaged
Risk of Compromise: Critical
Even now, he could open a window—black, blinking, text-only—but the system couldn’t translate the simplest of visual functions. Every attempt to bridge it with local data formats either failed or triggered internal defense protocols. He hadn’t built the Batcomputer to play nicely with anyone, and this place was everyone.
There was no workaround. No patch. Not unless he rebuilt entire frameworks from scratch or found someone in this world capable of reverse-engineering both alien hardware and his own digital DNA. That was a risk he wasn’t ready to take.
If the Batcomputer ever fell into the wrong hands…
No. He wouldn’t let that happen.
He locked it down further—deep freeze mode, with encryption updates fed manually every six hours to prevent stale key patterns. If anyone accessed it, it would burn itself clean figuratively and literally. The only thing they would walk away with is slag.
But that left him blind.
All he had now was the consumer-grade smartband he picked up earlier that afternoon—standard wearable tech, neural-linked, ubiquitous. A toy by his standards. But it spoke the local dialect. It understood the rules of the street.
He rotated it in his hand. Sleek. Cheap. Breakable.
He didn’t need it to perform. He needed it to translate.
Bruce disassembled it methodically. Fingernails and precise pressure were enough. The bonded shell came off with a faint snap. He burned through the sensor shielding with a micro-plasma arc and wired a data bridge into his Bat-tablet’s diagnostic port—careful not to allow any bidirectional control. It was a one-way relay. A speech translator between worlds.
Six minutes later, the Bat-tablet flickered.
Handshake Successful. Identity Tunnel Active.
Remote Masking Enabled.
Latency: High. Leakage: 0%
He breathed once. Controlled.
The Bat-tablet was now visible on this Earth’s network, not as a foreign object—but as a slightly broken local device pretending to be normal. From the inside out, it passed inspection.
He opened a blank browser window.
Scripts deployed under the hood—shadows wearing the name Dorian Shaw like a borrowed coat. Social trackers pinged on cue. Ad engines picked up his ghosted metadata. Payment processors validated fake subscriptions and bills. Local services now believed a man named Dorian existed. Not just as data, but as behavior.
Bruce disconnected the band, wiped it twice, and then shattered it underfoot.
No loose ends. No recyclables.
The Batmobile rolled again, never more than five minutes in one place.
Always surface-level—avoiding systems, cameras, GPS. Every light meant scrutiny. Every building, a map to be memorized. He moved like a shark, feeding on information. Newsfeeds streamed through the modified local tablet—financial reports, market shifts, political alignments, tech breakthroughs. He learned fast.
This world was obsessed with media, with noise, with constant digital exhaust. But buried in the mess was data—patterns. A volatile biotech stock had just dipped due to patent delays. He flagged it. A logistics firm was expanding into automation, something this Earth seemed decades behind in. He shorted a competitor and fronted phantom capital into the newcomer.
It was enough to start, but he needed more.
He began filtering for names—any mention of “Stark,” “Richards,” “OsCorp,” “SHIELD,” “mutants,” “vigilantes,” “vigilante registry,” “alien invasion.” He needed to know the rules. Who ruled from the shadows. What happened to their heroes when they disappeared.
If there was no Justice League here, fine.
He’d play in the dark alone.
He always had.
Night came late. This city didn’t dim. The lights only changed color. Blues and reds rippled through the side streets, bleeding into alleys like neon veins. Bruce didn’t park so much as pause—engine idle, shielded, tucked three buildings off the main road. He walked the rest of the way. The sign was faded, backlit by an old incandescent strip barely clinging to life.
Mason’s Repair & Toyshop
Odd pairing. Too odd. But the signal density around the back told a different story. Heat signatures inconsistent with retail. Metal traces in the air that didn’t belong to anything legal. Half a dozen scrap nodes—one giving off enough electromagnetic interference to register as a lab-grade capacitor. Compact. Dirty. Experimental.
He moved like breath on glass—silent and thin. No cameras on the alley. No motion sensors. Whoever ran this place believed in old-fashioned security.
He liked that.
He crouched low by a vent shaft with a busted grate. Inside, racks of half-dissected toys sat alongside retrofitted chassis, burnt-out cores, and fusion-welded shells of old Oscorp drones and what might’ve once been Stark surplus—maybe a gauntlet frame, or a scrap of boot armor with the Stark repulsor ring pried out.
His eyes narrowed. Jackpot. He was mid-assessment—scanning the exposed circuits with his portable band—when he felt the shift.
When she stepped out from behind him, Bruce didn’t flinch. He didn’t need to. Her posture said everything—anger, not fear. Protective instinct. Territorial. She wasn’t some frightened civilian stumbling into a break-in. She was the kind of person who built something worth protecting.
He let the silence stretch between them. Didn’t reach for a name, didn’t offer an apology. He simply held still—like the storm she wasn’t sure she wanted to start.
“You’ve got five seconds,” she snapped. “Pick a direction.”
He did. Back the way he came. The alley swallowed him again. He didn’t run. Didn’t slink. Just… walked. And when he turned the corner, he glanced once over his shoulder. She hadn’t followed.
Good.
She was on his list now. Not for surveillance. Not for leverage. For utility —potential. Smart. Defensive. Tech-minded. Maybe even underestimated in whatever strange hierarchy this city operated under. He filed her away without sentiment. The same way he filed every asset.
Later…
The Batmobile drifted along surface streets under cover of night—no lights, no sound. Bruce toggled the external profile to mimic a rideshare vehicle. No one looked twice.
He kept moving. Never stopped more than eight minutes at a time. Every pause, a scan. Every turn, a note. Every pattern recorded: patrol cars, civilian tech usage, network behavior. Even the low-flying drones had a rhythm.
He was starting to feel the city. It was no Gotham—there was no grime in the cracks, no weight in the air like lead pressing against your ribs. The corruption here wasn’t louder … it was lighter. Distracted. Hidden behind flashier things.
Gotham bled at the seams. This place just sparkled to keep people from noticing.
He parked briefly under an old bridge, at the edge of a construction zone. Kill-switch enabled. Surveillance blind spot confirmed. Then he walked a block. No cape, no mask, just a long coat and a tucked collar. He found a corner bodega, the kind open late and lit like a stage.
Inside, everything hummed—cheap refrigeration units, touchscreen kiosks, fluorescent lights. Too many cameras, but he didn’t care anymore. He picked up a sandwich. Some jerky. Water.
Nothing special. Just calories.
The clerk didn’t recognize him. That was good.
Back in the Batmobile, he ate in silence. Half the sandwich. All the jerky.
He reviewed the last twelve hours of data. Cross-referenced market trends. Set up two more identity flags with slow-drip funds. Recalibrated the camouflage cycle. Then leaned the seat back, dimmed the console, and closed his eyes.
The car sealed itself.
Alone. Unseen. Still moving tomorrow.
This wasn’t home, but it might be base.