Devil's Consultancy 46

In the four meetings she had with SivMana employees, she learned quite a bit about their operations. First, the primary translator was not demons, like she had assumed, but instead a man by the name of Oggar, who Mr. Karnes insisted was not connection to demons. One of the others said that Oggar claimed to be an immortal that was from Egypt, but he was apparently too pale for that to be a plausible story. 

Second, the fact that the Dr.s Batson were killed for the lore they had was, while not confirmed nor an open secret, a frequent joke that had enough credibility to actually be true. Tanya didn’t even try to get that information, the people she spoke with were just awful enough that they didn’t see anything wrong with talking about it in what they perceived to be sympathetic company. Apparently, the doctors were resistant to exclusivity and confidentiality, and died for it. 

The last thing she learned was some vagaries about the goals of their experiments: first, they sought a way to generalize the ritual that created Ibac, and apparently a different entity by the name of Shazam, drawing upon the idealized traits of greater entities to create metahumans in a much higher weight class than anyone else has managed. On top of that, they had four distinct Egyptian rituals that were being worked on as a front for their true goal, commercializing magic enough that they could continue to operate under the radar of the Justice League and ‘The Big Red Cheese’, as Sivana prefers to call Captain Marvel.

Oh, she also learned that they apparently had a breakthrough recently, but what that meant? Still unclear. She should probably warn the Captain about that if she gets the chance.  As it turned out, the Dr. and the Captian had a similar relationship as Lex Luthor and Superman did, which did not surprise Tanya at all. Maybe she should mention the lessons on how to stop your smarter villains from getting off? No wait, she absolutely mentioned those, his eyes just kind of glazed over in disinterest when she did. The Captain was not a fan of school, which was not unusual among the metahuman community. Tanya thought the attitude was childish, but if she got worked up over superheroes being jocks, she’d never get anything done. 

But she still had one more meeting to make: Ebenezer Batson, half-brother to Dr. Merrill Batson. Well, she didn’t need to meet with him, per se, although she was going to ask him some questions; she was more interested in his ward, one William “Billy” Batson. 

Unlike her business meetings, this wasn’t something she could effectively schedule. Well, she could have tried, but she used a coin flip divination to determine whether or not he’d accept, and got better results by divining what would occur if he was to ambush Ebenezer with the interview. 

Oddly, her divinations failed when she tried the same on Billy, but all that really meant in this case was that Billy got himself ensnared in Captain Marvel’s wizard’s anti-divination defenses, but whatever it was, it didn’t impact Ebenezer, so it wasn’t anything that substantially affected his guardian’s life. Billy probably just asked the Captain for his autograph today or yesterday, as she performed the divination two days ago. 

The Batson residence was a rather nice house, in a rather nice neighborhood. The lawn was professionally well-kept, something uncommon in households with children as young as Billy. The front door was protected from entry by an iron gate that was locked separately to the door, presumably acting somewhat similar to the chains that allowed one to open the door of an apartment slightly without allowing a potential intruder to just barge in. 

Drat, she needs to stop letting Bruce’s detective training (after she had reserved her original body to impersonate Batman, he insisted) distract her from the matter at hand. So what if Billy’s just responsible enough to keep his roughhousing in the backyard, or at the park? Maybe it was just recently mowed! No, it was clearly mowed four days ago with that level of growth this time of year- damn it, she did it again. 

Tanya rang the doorbell and waited, anxiously conjuring a reflective barrier to check her makeup; while her magically cleaned skin and young physical age meant she didn’t need to fully cover her face to look good, Selina had gotten her into the habit of touching up her eyelashes, and her habit of wearing colored lip balm to match her constantly painted fingernails had also eroded any resistance she had to wearing lipstick as an adult. 

She was willing to trust in her divinations most of the time, but she never particularly liked doing so, particularly when they encouraged her to take actions in opposition to what she’d have done without doing them. But if she didn’t listen to them, there’d be no point in performing them at all, and they’re too useful to abandon. 

Fortunately, this meeting was more of an afterthought after her previous meetings, so even if this didn’t go anywhere, it would still be a productive day. 

Ebenezer, a balding man who was only in his late fifties but looked like he was in his mid seventies, opened the door, the wrought iron gate preventing entry still locked, with a sour look. “Who is it?” He asked crankily. 

“My name is Tanya Degurechaff, Mr. Batson.” Tanya said professionally. “I’d like to speak with you about a matter related to your brother and his work. I’d be willing to pay for your time.”

“Not interes-” He started to say, before Tanya brought up the subject of payment. “Well, maybe it would be nice to have some company.” He said, flipping his attitude immediately. Whether he was a fool or just sexist in dismissing her a possible threat, he went to unlock the gate and allowed her in. 

The indoors of the Batson residence was just as well put together as the outside was, although Tanya expected to see Billy in the living room or something, it was in the evening. It was unusual for children to not have some kind of interest when someone was at the door, and she also didn’t see any sign that a child lived here at all. It gave her a bad feeling… Maybe Bruce’s training wasn’t just distracting her today…

“So, what is this about?” Ebenezer asked, sitting down in a comfortable chair while gesturing to the couch for her. “How much are you paying for it?”

“A thousand dollars if you answer all of my questions.” Tanya offered idly, eyes searching the room for literally any sign a ten year old lived here. 

Ebenezer harumphed. “Well, it’s a start.” He said, “But if I don’t like the questions, I want more.” What naked greed… 

“First question: When you received his possessions, was there anything related to his work among them? Maybe some trinket or journal he kept?” Tanya began, resisting the urge to frown at her failure to spot anything. 

Ebenezer didn’t seem to think the question was strange, which was a bit of a surprise. He seemed too self-absorbed to be able to guess why she was here. After a moment of thinking, he said: “Well, maybe? There was this box of books that I never went through.” Two beats later, he added, in a half-assed performative tone: “You know, it was all very difficult for me, and the box didn’t seem important.”

“Understandable.” Tanya said, sounding more sympathetic than she felt. “Do you still have it?”

“Hey now, you’re only paying for questions.” Ebenezer complained. 

“Sight unseen, I’ll pay another thousand for it.” Tanya said, “Or you could let me take a peek, and if I like what I see, I’ll pay more.”

“Well, we can take a look at it later.” He promised, once more flipping his attitude at the thought of more money. Disgusting. Was she ever this bad? “What are your other questions?”

“Did your brother ever tell you about his work?” Tanya asked, “I know that he died in Egypt, investigating tombs, but did he ever share with you which tombs he was researching?”

“Nah, he knows I didn’t give a rat’s ass about dusty mummies.” Ebenezer grouched. Admittedly, the honesty was admirable. “The last time I spoke with him was right before he left, anyway. We didn’t talk much.” He paused, then coughed. “Is that all you wanted to know?”

“From you, yes.” Tanya said, “I also wanted to speak with Billy on the matter, however. Where is he?”

Ebenezer’s face went incredibly neutral. “Who?” He asked. 

That was… strange. Also very concerning. “William Batson? Your nephew? Your brother’s orphaned child?” Tanya asked, “Is any of this ringing a bell?” Quickly, Tanya wracked her brain for what she knew of the boy. The first time she investigated, he was in the foster system, and it wasn’t until a few weeks after his parents died, a few days after she closed her own half-hearted investigation, that Ebenezer was located, reached, and got all of the paperwork in order to take the boy in. When was the most recent evidence of his existence after that in the files she perused? …A school photo, two weeks ago. 

“No such boy.” He insisted. What exactly was his plan? “Now pay up and leave. No box for you.” He growled and stood up, producing a pistol but without cocking it or pointing it at her. “Just put it on the coffee table.”

Tanya snorted and pointed a finger at him. “Though my anger you will reap, for now you should merely sleep.” She incanted, and the man immediately collapsed back onto his comfortable chair like a puppet with its strings cut, snoring the day away. Too easy…

Silently, she disassembled his pistol magically and set the pieces down on the coffee table, not touching them with her actual hands. Except for the firing pin, which she slipped into her pocket dimension. 

With the run of the house, Tanya inspected each room and eventually found a room that was clearly set up to house a young child… that had not been used for long enough for there to be visible, if faint, dust on the bedspread. 

Tanya looked through the room for something she could maybe use, and found no personal effects… except for one box filled with books and paperwork. Exactly the box that Ebenezer had mentioned before. She put it into her pocket dimension for later perusal. 

Well, she had a busy night ahead of her. She called Batman. “You know how we planned on me attending that meeting tomorrow morning?” She asked. At Batman’s grunt, she continued. “Gonna have to cancel, unless I can somehow find a probably-homeless little boy before midnight.”

“Do I need to print out adoption papers?” Batman asked. 

Tanya sighed. “...Maybe.”

-----------------------

Unfortunately, Captain Marvel’s wizard friend made tracking down Billy impossible, even with more powerful tracking spells that shouldn’t have hit those defenses. What kind of comprehensive bullshit was he using? 

…Wait. Was Captain Marvel connected to Billy more directly? What could… Ah. Perhaps Captain Marvel was so circumspect because he had already found the boy and was technically kidnapping him? Did that make sense? 

…It did seem like a stretch, but after asking Barbie to hack into C.C. Binder Elementary school’s databases, it was shown that not only was the boy still attending, not having raised any red flags among the teachers, there was someone still claiming to be Billy’s guardian as of last week, and while the security cameras were limited, they were still present, and Barbie’s data trawlers produced an image, someone who did resemble Captain Marvel. Not in the presence of Billy, mind, but the programs were 93% sure based on the timestamps of the meeting in question, which was apparently about some incident between Billy and… Timothy Karnes, oddly enough, and the respective videos. The presence of Stanley Karnes in the same image reinforced this. 

Okay, so the question remains: where is he? How would she go about tracking this boy, who is undoubtedly asleep or close to it as it’s nighttime now… 

Her best idea was to magically send messages to Captain Marvel and get his help, but they also failed to penetrate the Wizard’s comprehensive wards on the man. Her second best idea was to see if she could track down a homeless enclave and throw some money around, but as it turned out, Fawcett City was on the more hostile side when it came to the homeless, and it pushed the population sufficiently underground that she wasn’t able to hone in on any, even with her divinations. Actually, given that the city’s literal underground seemed to be similarly protected by the Wizard’s defenses, it might just be that the homeless enclaves were all in subway tunnels and she just couldn’t find them with her cursory search. 

Eventually, she gave up: after all, she doesn’t need to find where Billy Batson is, because she knows where he is going to be…

-----------------------

Batson was ten years old, so he was in the fifth grade. One of the more annoying parts of the American School system was the lack of national standardization for things like ‘is 5th grade elementary school or middle school?’, ‘what’s the schedule?’, and most critically ‘when do we stop giving the kids recess?’

The good news was that due to Barbie’s assistance, she knew the answers to all of these questions. The better news was that 5th grade in this school district was both still part of the elementary school and still came included with a recess period. 

So with this information, her plan was simple: sneak into the playground during the appropriate recess period, and make contact with Billy. Try to get him to agree to meet with her off of school grounds, and then use a Rhine shadow, a phone prop, and a Batman voice to figure out the real situation. Further plans branch off from there. 

If this fails, go to plan B: stalking. While this has a high possibility of Captain Marvel intervening, in this case that’s a good thing, as a Rhine shadow can then proceed to pry the real situation out of him and get Billy a proper living situation. 

This is exactly the reason why she pushed to have the Justice League provide education for their members: this is the kind of nonsense that meathead metahumans get up to when they are limited to a public school education, which may not even be complete. Garfield certainly wouldn’t be in school right now if Tanya didn’t push him to finish it. 

Naturally, this plan required that she use her true form. How does she avoid getting recognized? Quite simple: She took off her usual makeup (the elementary school banned makeup for their students anyway), applied a layer of her disguise makeup to her face and hands, painted her nails in a color specifically chosen to make her nails look unpainted but normal at a glance, changed into a jeans-and-sweater outfit she bought at Walmart that only left her face and hands visible, cute but cheap, and put on a pair of cute glasses that had non-prescription lenses. Hey, it worked for Clark. She thought about doing something to her hair, like curling, but decided against it and simply put it into a boring ponytail. No one would ever suspect her for being a rich heiress, much less the Wayne heiress, with this disguise. 

Insertion was a bit tricky, but quite doable: she waited for the proper time, the final recess period, watching the playground from a magically concealed position as the various grades were released to expend their youthful vigor, and once the 3rd graders were recalled, teleported inside one of the play structures that allowed one to go unobserved by the watching teachers for a short period. She could still see outside, of course, through the magical eyes in the sky she had watching things. The 5th graders were released soon after, and while some went to their waiting parents’ cars and drove off, or started a walk home, as there weren't any remaining classes for them (an unusual situation, but convenient for her), most of them stayed on the playground, socializing more than engaging with the playground equipment. 

Billy Batson was there, which Tanya expected: She already knew that the Wizard’s defenses didn’t do anything to direct observation, even through magical cameras. In the modern world, having someone glitch out cameras or other passive observation methods was a pretty good way to draw attention rather than deflecting it. 

Still, the number of children using the equipment wasn’t zero, so with careful observation of the teachers overseeing the chaotic recess, she found a good moment to slip out of the playground equipment that would require someone keeping meticulous track of the student body, the best she could do without using light mind control, and trusted in the fact that they’d take long enough to notice a child they don’t recognize and act on it for her to do what she needed. 

Billy was sitting on a hill, chatting with a boy that had a crutch next to him. He didn’t have a cast on his leg or anything, so it was likely some kind of long term infirmity. 

“Hi!” Tanya said, approaching the two ten year olds. 

The boys tensed, surprised that they were approached, but relaxed quickly. “...Hey.” Billy said, hesitantly. 

“My name’s Victoria, but my friends call me Visha!” Tanya said cheerily, “What’s your name?”

Billy’s friend seemed to be less suspicious, so he spoke first: “I’m Freddy, this is Billy.” He said, patting the ground on the other side of his crutch, between them. “Have a seat!” The ten year old gave what he probably thought was a flirtatious grin. Ew. 

Really, Tanya had assumed that her hormones would have kicked in by now, but puberty remained elusive. If it took too long, the plan was to give her pituitary gland a chemical kick in the butt to jumpstart things, but they hadn’t yet resorted to that. 

Not that this would be any more appealing if those were working properly, but still, Tanya sat on the appropriate spot, splaying out her jean-clad legs like a boy would. “Nice to meet you, Billy.” She said, patting his arm. 

Billy relaxed, deeming whatever paranoia that he had unwarranted. “Never seen you around here before, Visha.” Billy said, smiling reassuringly. 

“Oh, I used to go to another school.” Tanya said dismissively. “Then my stepdad kicked me out of the house.”

Billy’s eyes widened. “Really?” He asked, “That’s terrible!”

“I mean, it wasn’t so bad.” Tanya said casually, “I’m a metahuman, so I was fine.”

The boy’s face hardened. “That’s not enough.” he said firmly. “It’s hard out there, meta or not.” Freddy, tellingly, was giving Billy a deadpan look. 

“That’s what Firestom said,” Tanya said, namedropping Pittsburgh’s primary superhero. “-he was all ‘no, we’re heroes, we’ll help you even if you don’t sign up for the Justice League’. I had a cool name idea and everything!” She half-shouted. 

“What was the idea?” Freddy asked. 

“Miss Conception.” Tanya said immediately, having prepared it. “Firestorm just laughed, and he wouldn’t explain why!” She said, huffing at the fabricated indignity. 

Neither boy seemed to have noticed the double entendre. Despite this, Billy nodded knowingly. “Adults are weird.”

“So anyway, after that Firestorm found me a foster mom, bought me clothes, signed me up for this school, got my stepdad put in jail, gave me Dad’s money back…” She sighed. “-fixing every single one of my problems and I can still join the League when I turn 18 if I want.” This backstory was based off of something Firestorm actually did. The metahuman in question was actually a speedster by the name of Jesse, the 15-year old orphaned child of a metahuman superhero that was not a member of the Justice League, Liberty Belle. Naturally, Tanya gave the man ten thousand dollars of League ‘meta outreach’ funds to get the girl set up someplace and personally checked up on her weekly, much like she did for other underage League-seekers. “Even ones I didn’t even know I had!” Tanya continued, taking off her glasses. “Turns out, you’re supposed to be able to read the blackboard when the teacher writes kind of small.” That detail was taken from her first life. 

If Billy noticed all of the blatant parallels to his own life, he didn’t show it. Not being a metahuman may have caused him to automatically file it as different, but still… “Well, welcome to Fawcett.” Billy said, patting her shoulder. “You wanna go get some milkshakes?”

“...We can just leave?” Tanya asked, as if she didn’t already know that. 

“Yeah, we’re fifth graders, so they put our recess last. Next year, we go to middle school, and they don’t have recess.” He warned. Tanya’s eyes widened in faux-shock. No recess? A travesty! “You waiting for the bus?” He asked. 

Tanya shook her head. “No, I live close by.” She lied, “Let’s… go?”

Billy waved goodbye to one of the teachers as they left, Freddy using his crutch to support his apparently lame left leg. No one stopped them. Wow, this place was behind the times even more than she thought. This would never fly in Gotham. 

Unlike some of the other anachronistic Americana experiences that draw a small but extant amount of tourism to Fawcett, Tanya was quite familiar with the diner-like retro soda shop aesthetic, as Gotham also had those. Still, this isn’t quite according to plan, but it’s still in the same ballpark. She just needs to get Billy alone before she can start with the ‘I know you’re homeless’ talk. 

Tanya paid for the milkshakes before either boy could get out their own wallets: from how they acted, Freddy was the one expected to pay. They talked about heroes, specifically Captain Marvel and Firestorm. 

Apparently, Freddy was a massive fan of Captain Marvel, but Billy seemed to think it awkward to praise him: consistent with someone who knew the hero on a more personal level. Tanya threw a little fuel on the fire, praising Captain Marvel in general but wondering out loud why he didn’t join the Justice League. 

Billy outright scowled at that topic. “The Justice League isn’t so great.” He said petulantly. “They wouldn’t let Captain Marvel join.” He said firmly, knowing this as fact. 

“Really?” Tanya asked, pretending to be surprised. “How do you know that?”

Billy paled. “Uh… I asked him!” He said, managing enough intelligence to come up with a plausible lie. Or rather, realizing that he didn’t need to reveal a personal connection to tell the truth. “I met him, you know. I asked him why he didn’t join the League, and he said that the League said he wasn’t good enough.”

Tanya’s mostly neutral but vaguely positive expression vanished. Was that Captain Marvel’s takeaway? She would think that he could come up with something less inflammatory. Of course, she did suppose that he was probably a little angry… “Is that what he said?” She asked, to confirm. “Not good enough? That doesn’t sound like Superman.”

Billy looked like he’d rather gargle gravel than open his mouth. “...No.” He eventually admitted. “But it’s still stupid!”

As if on cue, something exploded somewhere outside. Oh good, She’ll be able to catch Captain Marvel soon.