Working on a Case, chapter 1: Agent R
Characters: Titans as of the end of the Family Lost paperback, starting with Bart Allen (Kid Flash) and Tim Drake (Robin).
Rating: PG.
Content: Mystery with comic relief, or perhaps comedy with mystery relief.
Word Count: about 1,200 words per chapter. Unknown number of chapters.
Summary: Bart Allen as Kid Flash wants to help Robin on a Titans case involving a convict with a super-power and a strange police record. He knows honing his investigatory skills will require insight, concentration, and...what was the third thing?
Continuity: DC Comics standard.
Disclaimer: The Titans and its members are owned by DC Comics under copyright and trademark laws. This pastiche is offered freely with no hope of commercial reward.
Notes: Usually I map out the entire plot of a story before I write, much less before I share it with any readers. That’s particularly helpful when writing a mystery. And yet I’m not doing that. How long before I write myself into a hole I can’t get out of?
Chapter 1
Agent R
I dash around the Tower for a whole forty seconds looking for Tim before I find him in tatami room working on his karate stuff, and then I run in and shove the piece of paper into his hand and say: “‘Urgent!’ This fax says, ‘Urgent!’ And it’s for you, right? ’Cause you’re still the Titans’ ‘Agent R’ even though Raven’s back, right?”
“Right,” says Tim. He looks at the page and then turns it over and looks at the other side even though that side is all blank. “Uh, Bart? This is the cover page.”
“Oh?”
“Where’s the rest of the fax?”
“Oh!” So I sprint back up to the Communications Room and grab the other pages off the tray and run them back down to Tim. “What’s it say now?”
“It says, ‘Page 1 of 17,’” says Tim, “so there are eight more coming after these-no, not yet!” Tim grabs my arm with his free hand. “It’ll take another minute to finish coming through.”
And I’m thinking, “A whole minute!” and wriggling around and Tim starts talking again as if that would ever distract me, except that I start thinking about what he’s saying and forget about the fax for a minute, and finally he says, “The rest of the pages should have arrived by now.”
And I dash up to the ComRoom and grab the pages and dash back to the stairs and all the while I’m thinking about what Tim was saying about the U.S. Marshals bringing a new prisoner with powers to Alcatraz and how the Titans have to be ready to guard him, and I’m also thinking about how the Marshals send their stuff to Agent R. and how if I learn to be a detective like Tim then they’d send their stuff to Agent KF! And then I’m at the bottom of the stairs, and there’s nothing but pipes and vents and cables and emergency generators, and I have to run back up to hand Tim the rest of the pages.
“Thanks,” he says. “You went down to the basement again, didn’t you?”
“How did you-”
“You’re tracking concrete dust on the mats,” says Tim, and I look and I am, so I take off my shoes and toss them in the corner beside Tim’s Robin boots, and I think about how annoying Tim can be when he does his detective stuff and how much I’d like to be able to do that, too.
And I look at Tim again, and he’s frowning at the papers, and even though he’s wearing his mask I know his eyes are flicking back and forth over the words, and I make a deduction by myself and I say, “Something’s wrong! There’s something strange about this prisoner!”
“Uh huh,” mutters Tim, still reading.
“Ooh, it’s a case! Lemme work with you! Last month I read twenty-four books about how to be a detective.”
Tim says, “You really want to investigate this case?”
“Yeah!”
And he slaps over the whole fax-all seventeen pages-in my hand. “Read the file.”
And I stare at the pile and groan. “Come on, Tim!”
“You’ll absorb all the details, Bart.”
“But you already read this stuff! Can’t you tell me the important-”
“Part of being a detective, Bart, is spotting what’s important,” says Tim, and he goes back to practicing his karate moves as if I’m going to start reading the pages just because he says so, but I show him because I wait till he’s finished three kicks before I get bored and start reading the pages.
So it’s a U.S. Marshals case file all about this guy named Eli Crossley who’s in prison for breaking into a bank vault in Texas, and the only interesting thing is that he cut his way into the vault with his fingernails, which I deduce is why beside his name on the first page of the file it says, “Eli Crossley, alias Cross Cut.”
I get to the last page about how the Marshals are flying him into San Francisco tomorrow, and Tim asks if I see what’s important yet, so I tell him, “Please. I’m reading,” and I review the whole fax in my mind to be sure. Eli Crossley is thirty-four years old, and he has brown hair, and he has no family, and he has lots of little scars, and he has a metagene that gives him incredibly sharp thumbnails that can even cut through diamonds, and after he was caught robbing the bank he got put in federal prison for twenty-two months, and that was seventeen months ago, and then last week the guards found a sharpened toothbrush in his cell-
“Aha! A shiv! That’s prison slang for an improvised cutting weapon, derived from the Romani word-”
“I know what a shiv is,” says Tim.
“Okay, so the guards found a shiv that Crossley made out of a toothbrush, and the federal prison system has a rule that any inmate with a metagene who breaks any rule has to go into the SIS!” (That means Special Incarceration System, which for half the country means Alcatraz, but I know Tim already knows that and since we’re working on a case together we can use that sort of detective jargon-)
“And why is the toothbrush important?” Tim asks.
“Um. Because it was against the rules?”
Tim shakes his head. “Logic, Bart. Why would Eli Crossley sharpen a toothbrush?”
“For protection,” I say, remembering the seventeen books I read about incarceration, and I slow down to explain to Tim: “The rate of personal assaults in prisons is more than twice the rate in even the communities with the most crimes, and improvised weapons are found in 84% of prison searches.”
“The latest statistic is 92%,” says Tim, “but that’s not the point. Why would a man who naturally grows blades sharp enough to cut through titanium steel need to make a shiv?”
“Oh,” I say, and I feel like I should have donkey’s ears growing out of my skull. But I decide to try harder at this detective stuff so I read all the pages again, quick so Tim doesn’t notice, even though I know he does notice, and I don’t see anything new and I’m trying to think why Crossley would make himself a shiv when he knew he might get caught and he knew what would happen if he got caught and-
“Tim! He knew what would happen if he got caught! He wanted to be brought to Alcatraz!”
“A definite possibility,” says Tim, and he starts pulling on his boots, so I put on my shoes again, and then he finishes with his boots and straps on his cape and heads for the door. “We need to find out more about Eli Crossley.”
Continued here.
Rating: PG.
Content: Mystery with comic relief, or perhaps comedy with mystery relief.
Word Count: about 1,200 words per chapter. Unknown number of chapters.
Summary: Bart Allen as Kid Flash wants to help Robin on a Titans case involving a convict with a super-power and a strange police record. He knows honing his investigatory skills will require insight, concentration, and...what was the third thing?
Continuity: DC Comics standard.
Disclaimer: The Titans and its members are owned by DC Comics under copyright and trademark laws. This pastiche is offered freely with no hope of commercial reward.
Notes: Usually I map out the entire plot of a story before I write, much less before I share it with any readers. That’s particularly helpful when writing a mystery. And yet I’m not doing that. How long before I write myself into a hole I can’t get out of?
Chapter 1
Agent R
I dash around the Tower for a whole forty seconds looking for Tim before I find him in tatami room working on his karate stuff, and then I run in and shove the piece of paper into his hand and say: “‘Urgent!’ This fax says, ‘Urgent!’ And it’s for you, right? ’Cause you’re still the Titans’ ‘Agent R’ even though Raven’s back, right?”
“Right,” says Tim. He looks at the page and then turns it over and looks at the other side even though that side is all blank. “Uh, Bart? This is the cover page.”
“Oh?”
“Where’s the rest of the fax?”
“Oh!” So I sprint back up to the Communications Room and grab the other pages off the tray and run them back down to Tim. “What’s it say now?”
“It says, ‘Page 1 of 17,’” says Tim, “so there are eight more coming after these-no, not yet!” Tim grabs my arm with his free hand. “It’ll take another minute to finish coming through.”
And I’m thinking, “A whole minute!” and wriggling around and Tim starts talking again as if that would ever distract me, except that I start thinking about what he’s saying and forget about the fax for a minute, and finally he says, “The rest of the pages should have arrived by now.”
And I dash up to the ComRoom and grab the pages and dash back to the stairs and all the while I’m thinking about what Tim was saying about the U.S. Marshals bringing a new prisoner with powers to Alcatraz and how the Titans have to be ready to guard him, and I’m also thinking about how the Marshals send their stuff to Agent R. and how if I learn to be a detective like Tim then they’d send their stuff to Agent KF! And then I’m at the bottom of the stairs, and there’s nothing but pipes and vents and cables and emergency generators, and I have to run back up to hand Tim the rest of the pages.
“Thanks,” he says. “You went down to the basement again, didn’t you?”
“How did you-”
“You’re tracking concrete dust on the mats,” says Tim, and I look and I am, so I take off my shoes and toss them in the corner beside Tim’s Robin boots, and I think about how annoying Tim can be when he does his detective stuff and how much I’d like to be able to do that, too.
And I look at Tim again, and he’s frowning at the papers, and even though he’s wearing his mask I know his eyes are flicking back and forth over the words, and I make a deduction by myself and I say, “Something’s wrong! There’s something strange about this prisoner!”
“Uh huh,” mutters Tim, still reading.
“Ooh, it’s a case! Lemme work with you! Last month I read twenty-four books about how to be a detective.”
Tim says, “You really want to investigate this case?”
“Yeah!”
And he slaps over the whole fax-all seventeen pages-in my hand. “Read the file.”
And I stare at the pile and groan. “Come on, Tim!”
“You’ll absorb all the details, Bart.”
“But you already read this stuff! Can’t you tell me the important-”
“Part of being a detective, Bart, is spotting what’s important,” says Tim, and he goes back to practicing his karate moves as if I’m going to start reading the pages just because he says so, but I show him because I wait till he’s finished three kicks before I get bored and start reading the pages.
So it’s a U.S. Marshals case file all about this guy named Eli Crossley who’s in prison for breaking into a bank vault in Texas, and the only interesting thing is that he cut his way into the vault with his fingernails, which I deduce is why beside his name on the first page of the file it says, “Eli Crossley, alias Cross Cut.”
I get to the last page about how the Marshals are flying him into San Francisco tomorrow, and Tim asks if I see what’s important yet, so I tell him, “Please. I’m reading,” and I review the whole fax in my mind to be sure. Eli Crossley is thirty-four years old, and he has brown hair, and he has no family, and he has lots of little scars, and he has a metagene that gives him incredibly sharp thumbnails that can even cut through diamonds, and after he was caught robbing the bank he got put in federal prison for twenty-two months, and that was seventeen months ago, and then last week the guards found a sharpened toothbrush in his cell-
“Aha! A shiv! That’s prison slang for an improvised cutting weapon, derived from the Romani word-”
“I know what a shiv is,” says Tim.
“Okay, so the guards found a shiv that Crossley made out of a toothbrush, and the federal prison system has a rule that any inmate with a metagene who breaks any rule has to go into the SIS!” (That means Special Incarceration System, which for half the country means Alcatraz, but I know Tim already knows that and since we’re working on a case together we can use that sort of detective jargon-)
“And why is the toothbrush important?” Tim asks.
“Um. Because it was against the rules?”
Tim shakes his head. “Logic, Bart. Why would Eli Crossley sharpen a toothbrush?”
“For protection,” I say, remembering the seventeen books I read about incarceration, and I slow down to explain to Tim: “The rate of personal assaults in prisons is more than twice the rate in even the communities with the most crimes, and improvised weapons are found in 84% of prison searches.”
“The latest statistic is 92%,” says Tim, “but that’s not the point. Why would a man who naturally grows blades sharp enough to cut through titanium steel need to make a shiv?”
“Oh,” I say, and I feel like I should have donkey’s ears growing out of my skull. But I decide to try harder at this detective stuff so I read all the pages again, quick so Tim doesn’t notice, even though I know he does notice, and I don’t see anything new and I’m trying to think why Crossley would make himself a shiv when he knew he might get caught and he knew what would happen if he got caught and-
“Tim! He knew what would happen if he got caught! He wanted to be brought to Alcatraz!”
“A definite possibility,” says Tim, and he starts pulling on his boots, so I put on my shoes again, and then he finishes with his boots and straps on his cape and heads for the door. “We need to find out more about Eli Crossley.”
Continued here.