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therealbeachfox · 7 months ago

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The Crime Alley Kid Saves Christmas!

[[A semi-noncanonical tale of that time Conrad got conscripted into a bunch of bullshit he didn't sign up for, and his Boss With Benefits didn't fare much better.]]

Twas the night after Christmas, and all through the Nest Not a creature was stirring, except for one guest. While the wind howled outside, blowing snow to and fro A certain hench worked by computer screen glow When up from above, there rose such a clatter He shot from the chair to see what was the -UNGHHPH!-

There was a sound not unlike a rapidly approaching motorbike, but before Conrad could even process the impossibility of that scenario he was no longer standing up from his chair, but instead embedded into the far wall of the Nest’s main chamber. His head bounced off hard enough to send explosions of light across his vision and he was certain that the metal paneling had crumpled slightly from the impact of his body.

He cursed from the pain, but all that came out was a gurgling squeak. He couldn’t breathe either. A heavy pressure was wrapped tight around his throat and keeping him a good foot off the ground to boot. A steel beam wrapped in a leather jacket if his fumbling attempts to grab it were anything to go by.

Someone was speaking to him, but his brain refused to make sense of the words. His vision was starting to clear, though. Details began to filter through the piercing brightness of the Nest’s overhead floodlights. A shock of black curled hair. Sunglasses? Sunglasses. Inside. At night. Ear-piercings that caught the light and glinted like daggers into his eyes. A snarling face. Black leather jacket. Blue shirt with a yellow and red pattern he couldn’t quite process.

The steel beam wrapped around his throat lifted him another inch and shook him, which just made the no oxygen problem even worse. No helping it. Conrad swung his legs forward and slammed his boots against the gut of whoever was pinning him to the wall.

It was like trying to kick through a concrete wall.

Conrad swung again, further this time, bending himself almost double to wrap his legs around the arm pinning him in place. He managed to keep his grip for almost a full second before something grabbed his entire body and slammed him flat against the wall. His arms and legs went flat against the wall, spread out and pinned like he was strapped into-

Momentary panic. Memories of a soundproofed room with walls of alternating black fabric and mirrors. So many different angles to see himself from. Strapped down across a giant X, every whip welt displa-

Just a moment of panic. He barely noticed either the flash of memory or stuffing it back down into it’s box in the back of his mind.

Conrad squinted his eyes and fought through the headache to get a better look at his assaulter. The symbol across the guy’s chest was the first thing to flicker into focus.

Oh.

Oh no.

“You need to get down here, Rob!” Superboy called over his shoulder. Because that was Superboy, floating(!!) a few inches off the ground and pinning Conrad in place with a single finger against his forehead. Somehow. “You’ve got an infestation in your Nest!”

Wow. Rude. Superboy should count himself lucky that he had a weak spot for pierced punk boys in leather who could kick his ass. Although… He scanned the floating kid up and down and frowned. “Weren’t you older than me?”

Superboy’s head snapped back to him, black eyebrows furrowed in anger. “What?”

Conrad tried to gesture between the cape’s face and his own, but his fingers barely twitched. Shit, he used his hands a lot when talking, didn’t he? “When you first showed. You were older than me. By at least a year or two. But now you look…” he let the rest of his thought drift into silence. The stormy expression Superboy was giving him would’ve been unnerving even if it wasn’t coming from someone who, Conrad was near certain, could shoot lasers from his eyes.

He coughed and broke eye-contact as he caught motion from the staircase in his peripheral. Red Robin was coming down the stairs, frowning at a slim pane of black glass that looked stupidly expensive. “That doesn’t make any sense. There’s no sign of an intrusion, just a couple of pings from-” He looked up, and the faintly glowing white eyes of his cowl widened slightly before he facepalmed. “Goddamit, Con.”

“What?” Conrad exclaimed in perfect synchronicity with Superboy. Con blinked in surprise as the other boy glared back.

“I can’t deal with this right now. Con, keep him there, we’ll figure out…” Red Robin trailed off as he took in the over-screen of the Robin-computer or whatever he was calling it. He stood like that for several seconds before turning towards them with enough force it left his cape swirling around him. “Con, what the hell is all this?”

“How the hell should I know?” Superboy asked.

“Pretty sure he’s the one keeping me here.” Conrad replied at the same moment. The two of them returned to exchanging bewildered-slash-suspicious glares.

Red Robin gave a sigh that was all Batman while massaging his temples. “Oh for… Conrad, also known as Con, meet Superboy, also known as Kon-El. Kon-El, my truest friend and companion, meet Conrad, some guy my brother’s banging. Who somehow broke into my stronghold while I was out.”

“You gave me the keys ‘in case of emergency’! And you weren’t answering your bat… pager.. thing when I was trying to get permission!” Conrad tried to explain in a way that didn’t come off too much like he was trying to convince an older sibling they shouldn’t sell them out to their parents over some infraction.

“Wait, which brother?” Superboy asked over him. “Because that hair’s not nearly red enough for Nightwing, and I know Batman would never let someone his age anywhere near Ro-”

Conrad wheezed as the pressure around his throat slammed back full force. Superboy was close enough their noses were nearly touching. All he could see was the other kid’s eyes. Piercing unnatural blue, with bright red pinpricks glowing in the center of his pupils. Where did his sunglasses go? “He’s fucking Red Hood?!”

Oh god, Superboy was choke-pinning him against the wall with his lips close enough to kiss. “I wished on a monkey’s paw when I was 15.” he choked out, muscles straining against whatever force was keeping him immobile. “It’s the only explanation for this.”

The last came out more gurgled whine than actual words, but that was apparently enough to earn his release. Gravity returned with a vengeance, and the very familiar sensation of landing ass-first on cold hard ground shot up his spine. Conrad made the executive decision to just stay there for a quick bit. Partially to massage at his throat and catch his breath, mostly to come off as utterly nonthreatening and not worth the bother of slamming up against anything else.

“What the fuck?” Superboy was a foot off the ground and several feet distant by the time Conrad could look up.

“When you first showed up,” Conrad hacked out, “you were older than me. You’re allowed to have fantasies about people older than you! But now you’re younger-” Conrad broke off and shook his head firmly. “You know what? No. I’m not even asking. Not my business, I don’t need to know. Now or ever.”

“Kon-El got decanted ahead of schedule and one of the side effects was a lack of aging until we figured out how to get that kickstarted. He’s been alive for about six years, is about 17 physically, and mentally…” Red Robin trailed off and waggled his hand with a shrug.

Conrad bit back an exasperated sigh. “I just said I wasn’t going to ask.”

“Okay, why are we telling one of Red Hood’s mooks my tragic backstory? And why is he here?”

“Because Red Robin gave me a key!”

“Con! Kon! Focus. Conrad. What. Am I. Looking at?” Red Robin pointed firmly at the screen which was currently taken up by a map of the greater Gotham metropolitan area. Specifically, he was pointing at the dozens (two dozen and three, supplied the part of his brain that sounded vaguely like his mother and never shut up) of routs that crossed, looped, and spread across the breadth of the city.

Con bit his lip and debated. This was something that was almost impossible to explain to someone who hadn’t had to live on the streets as a kid, even before you brought in all the… side details.

But Red Robin was a Bat. Perhaps the most Bat’esc Bat aside from the original. Con might not get dangled off a building during the process, but he��d still get interrogated a dozen different ways until he gave up every detail. Better to just bite the bullet.

“Okay,” Conrad pulled himself off the floor and squared himself into his most ‘I am a professional and am delivering a professional report’ stance. “Before I start, I just need to say: I promise I am not fucking with you or making anything up. I know how it’s going to sound, but-”

“Oh my god, dude, I spent last week having a fistfight with a version of me made out of sentient crystal that was trying to take control of the world’s beetle population. Just spill it, already!” Red Robin placed a hand gently on Superboy’s shoulder and lightly pushed him down until his feet were against the ground. Unreadable mask eyes turned back to him.

“Please. Just tell us.”

Con took another deep breath. “Okay, so. There’s this, um, care package… thing that homeless kids get around this time of year. Sweaters, cold-weather gear, snow-rated sleeping bags and shit like that. But it didn’t show up this year and we-”

“Oh &*#$ me, it’s a Santa thing!” Superboy exploded, suddenly two feet off the ground again. “I swear to whatever gods Krypton had, I’m going to go full Grinch if they pull this shit ever again.”

Red Robin ignored him and stepped forward closer to Conrad. “Santa’s presents weren’t delivered to the homeless kids in Gotham, so you’re trying to arrange deliveries of those supplies yourself. Thus…” He waved at the screen. “this whole thing to hit every location in Gotham in the minimum amount of time. Right?”

Conrad just stood there with mouth slightly agape for a second. Not at Red Robin figuring out what was going on just from examining the map and getting a sentence of setup. He was a Robin. Robins were smart. It was the Santa thing that’d clotheslined him. That’d always been the hardest part of the sell, even with the BossJason. He’d never once encountered easy acceptance of it from anyone over the age of maybe twelve. It took a light throat-clearing from Red Robin to snap him out of it. Superboy was up in the rafters now, mutter-ranting to himself. Red Robin was ignoring him, so Conrad did as well.

“Right. Um. So, this actually happened once before about-”

“Four years ago, when nothing showed up until late February, middle of March.” the vigilante inserted.

“Early February, but… yeah. We were lucky it was a mild winter that year or it could’ve been… Real bad.” Conrad shrugged off the echoes of dread from that long month that still lingered. “It’s something I’ve always tried to have a plan for in case it ever happened again. So when Christmas morning arrived with no deliveries...”

Red Robin nodded decisively. “Kris Kringle was abducted by forces unknown into a splintered off timeline tangent two days ago.” He said like he was just filling Con in on a few extra details about a shoplifting plan. “The elves didn’t contact us until yesterday; just hours before deliveries should’ve started.” The wrinkle of his nose showed just what Red Robin thought about that particular choice. “Most of the team’s followed the abductors into the timeline splinter, but a few of us stayed here to try and get Christmas deliveries taken care of.” He gave a rueful snort, looking back up at the big screen. “We’d come down to use the Nest’s mainframe to calculate our optimal routs. Guess you had the same idea.”

That was. A lot of information. Conrad shoved most of it on the back-burner to process when he had the time and focused on the important pieces. “I really just needed the Nest’s databases.”

Red Robin turned back to him, head tilted slightly, featureless white eyes watching. Conrad hurried to elaborate. “Hood’s got a lot of supplies saved aside for things like this, and if it was just the Alley kids we needed to look out for it’d be more than enough, but we’ve got a whole city to cover.” He waved his hand at the map like the vigilante didn’t realize just how fucking huge Gotham was. “I tried getting information on which companies or warehouses would have cold weather gear in stock that we could ..buy,” there was barely a millisecond of stumble over the quick word substitution, “on my own, but no one’s publishing their exact stock figures online and I don’t know how to acquire that kind of information directly from their systems.

“I tried asking Oracle for help,” that is, he’d turned on his webcam and mic, loaded up an empty Zoom call, and asked for the ghost-in-the-machine’s help every five minutes for an hour “but I don’t have any direct way of contacting them and my signal flares went unanswered. I pinged your…”

“Batpager.” Red Robin supplied the moment it looked like Con was struggling with the word. “Just call it the Batpager. Most of us do.” The faint undercurrent of exhaustion in his voice suggested that he himself was not one of them.

“Batpager, but I you were busy... with elves?”

“Rabble-scabble frigging elves.” Superboy muttered as he slowly drifted back down into the conversation. “Zap us away from Christmas dinner with demands, then refuse to let us use any part of their mission control setup-”

“Because lil’Lobo tried to set it all on fire with a flamethrower.”

“Which brings me to my next complaint of why was lil’Lobo brought on in the first place!”

“They were pretty liberal with their definition of ‘Young Justice Members’ when casting the summons, it looked like.”

“He hasn’t been on the roster for years,” Superboy continued like Red hadn’t even spoken. “I don’t think he was even with us the first time we had to fill in!” He stopped, furrowed his brow, and turned to Red. “Was he?”

“Dude, I don’t even know. My memories of those three months are completely shot.”

This was a situation Conrad was comfortable in. The guys in charge had gotten distracted by a conversation/argument about shit he had no knowledge of. He just had to hang out and be part of the background until they circled back around to him. Normally, this would’ve been the part where he also turned all the audio into static until he heard his name, but HoodJason kept being real insistent about not doing that anymore, so he didn’t. Instead, he just focused on the name lil’Lobo.

Lobo sounded like a mirror-inverse of Lupu, honestly. That combined with the lil’ gave Conrad the vivid mental image of a mirror-universe version of one of his cousins. Evil. With a goatee. God, evil Caleb with a goatee and a flamethrower. He could see it all a little too well, honestly. Mirror-flipped so his skin was super white and his body was super jacked. Hair so faintly brown it was nearly white? Or still a dark brown, just with blue-highlights where it caught the light? Some sort of meathead asshole just barging through things without a second thought about anything. Fucking terrifying.

“Anyways,” Red Robin broke into Superboy’s ranting, making Conrad snap back to attention. “You couldn’t get in contact with anyone, so you broke into the Nest.”

“You gave me a key!” Conrad’s explanation was getting a little more strained with each repetition.

“For emergencies.” Red Robin replied.

Conrad’s expression went blank. “We have blizzard conditions expected within the next 36 hours,” he said evenly. He wasn’t going to shout at a Robin. Definitely not when they had someone next to them who could punch through his spine. “with as much of five feet of snow and temperatures down to 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Kids will die without cold weather gear. Even if every shelter threw their doors open, there aren’t enough beds across Gotham to house more than maybe a quarter of us. Them.” It’d been almost three years, and it still took effort to remember he wasn’t one of them anymore. No longer homeless, definitely no longer a child.

“Kids are going to die from this and there’s not much shit I can do about it; but I can make sure that the death toll is in the low dozens instead of the low hundreds. I know it doesn’t count as an emergency by Bat standards – there’s no one to punch to make it stop – but it counts as one to me. And all I needed was information on where in Gotham additional supplies were located so the volunteer runners could pick up shit between stops. It was going to be a quick in and out. I’d only been here about half an hour and would’ve been gone in another twenty if you hadn’t shown up.”

Red Robin frowned and moved to the keyboard. A flurry of quick keystrokes and electronic blips and the symbols on the map Conrad had put down to mark warehouses and army surplus shops where additional gear could be acquired lit up. Con watched as the younger man tracked the various routs, seeing which ones passed by one of the restock points and which didn’t, which ones were sent out with all the gear they’d need and their paths verses the ones who’d be getting most of their supplies along the way.

“You have the usual districts divided up further into…”

“Gang territories. Most homeless kids are hooked into one street-kid gang or another. It’s almost impossible to stay alive and not snatched up by CPS or unmarked vans without support. Kids age out as quick as they come in, so the territories and numbers and even names of the gangs are always in flux, but I do my best to keep track of ‘em. I’ve no idea how to track down whatever kids are running independent, so I’ve got to focus on using the gang leaders as the point of contact to drop shit off with. There are a few groups,” He gestured to the larger circles centered around the Tricorner Tunnels access and the plaza around “Simon’s Church” on the southernmost island as examples. “where there’s more of a joint gathering spot for all the local street kids, so those drop-offs are a lot more straight-forward.”

“And you’ve got each path here making no more than five dropoffs-”

“The runners are gonna have to roll some diplomacy and spend time convincing them the gear isn’t some sort of trap, so we can’t be rushing people. I’m just glad so many volunteered to help.”

“Each route has a bare minimum of turns or side-streets required-”

“Needs to be easy to remember without having it written down. Not everyone can read that good.”

“Though there’s some weird changing around with the streets and notes about times that I don’t quite get…”

“Enough people’ve got work that there’s going to be the usual traffic. Plus, we almost always have someone pulling shit at the Steel Gables bridge in the first few days after Christmas, so we can’t rely on that being open.”

“And the neighborhoods on each side of it are getting taken care of by routes that follow the shoreline. There’s just…”

“Twenty-seven routes. We had sixty-odd volunteers and I wanted there to be at least two riders on each route so they could back each other up in case of trouble. A few of the least experienced I tripled up with an old wolf because there was overflow.”

Red Robin shook his head slowly before turning back to look at Conrad. “And you set up the algorithm for this in just thirty minutes?”

Conrad blinked again, eyes darting over to Superboy for a second (he was still scowling at him, damn) then back. “Ah. No. I… Don’t know how to do that. I already had the rough routes plotted out, then once I knew where supplies were located I just had to tweak things to account for them.”

“And you just… what, did that by hand? In half an hour?”

Conrad didn’t like that tone of voice. It wasn’t Red’s fault, he’d just heard it too many time from assholes (parental and otherwise) growing up. The ‘Pretty sure you don’t know what you’re talking about and are too stupid to even realize it’ voice.

He might be being unfair to Red. Probably wasn’t even what that voice meant coming from him. It was an effort to keep his hackles from rising, though.

“I had most of the routing already mapped out, but the adjustments for supplies, yeah. I was going over everything to make sure I hadn’t made any mistakes when, um,” he rubbed at the growing bruise around his throat distractedly, “you arrived.”

Red Robin was giving him the exact same look that Jason had many times at the start of their relationship. Like he was trying to pull up Conrad’s source-code for a deep dive to figure out exactly what was going on in there. He tried not to shift under the attention.

“So how did you plot the original routes?” He asked in a mild voice that Conrad did not trust in the slightest.

“It’s just something I work on in my head during downtime while security guarding. I update it as the various kid gangs change, that sort of thing. It’s just back burner shit.”

“So you worked all of this out in your head.” Red Robin continued in the same mild voice. Conrad nodded cautiously. “Then you reworked it to account for having to hit up places to restock. Also in your head. In half an hour.”

Conrad took a deep breath. He was pretty sure he knew where this was heading. He let it out in a slow exhale and nodded again. Red Robin made a small hmm of interest and turned back to the map.

Superboy landed with the faintest sound of sneakers against floor and slid around to break Red Robin’s line of sight. “You alright there, birdbrain? You’re doing that squint thing at the corner of your eyes you do whenever you’re upset someone’s done a smarts thing you couldn’t.”

“He does it in his head.” Red Robin said in a quiet even voice.

“That’s what he says…” Superboy gave Conrad a dubious look over Red’s shoulder. It wasn’t a glare, at least.

“It’s the prototypical NP-Hard problem, arguably what computer programing was invented to solve, where even the best quantum-exact algorithm can’t do better than 1.8 to the n’th power. And he’s just… ‘doing it in his head’.”

Now it was a glare. And he’d been doing so well. Conrad just shrugged helplessly back.

“Alright.” Red Robin snapped out of whatever disassociation he’d been in between one moment and the next making both Conrad and Superboy jump in surprise. “Kon,” he helpfully pointed at which of the two of them he meant, “grab the portable computing setup and the mega-atlas from Reference. I’ll get what the elves gave us onto the system so we can actually look at it and grab arctic gear for the three of us. Con,” this time the finger was pointing at him, “call whoever you need to and let them know you’ll be out of town. Hopefully just for a few days. Assuming lil’Lobo hasn’t burned everything down by the time we get back.”

“Where did he even get that flame-thrower?

“Uh, sure thing, boss.” Conrad answered instinctively, already pulling out his phone. “What exactly should I be telling them?”

*****

“ So let the guys know we don’t need the volunteer riders after all; I’ll sort out getting everything back to the supply caches when I get back, sorry for that too. And let Elina know she’s on the line for keeping the gremlins in line for a few days. I think that’s everything. Again, I’m real sorry about this, Boss, but at least it's gonna be a way more cost-effective way to get all the Gotham street kids bundled up for the year. And the rest of the world’s street kids, too .” (‘and every other kid!’ someone shouts in the background) “Sure, and also that , I guess. They’ve promised to get me flown back once I’ve worked out a usable flight plan for,” a small sigh, “the entire world. I’m just hoping that by the time we get up there, the others would’ve already rescued Santa. Fingers crossed. Love you, babe. Stay frosty! And sorry again, Boss. ”

The message ended with a beep. Jason looked up to Bruce from where he stood over the table with hands braced on each corner, his phone resting between them. “So yeah. Care to explain exactly why I woke up to a phone message telling me Tim shanghaied my boyfriend because of Santa Claus?”

“When was this call made?”

Jason blinked at the ice cold growl in Bruce’s voice. The man was still in the very exact way he got whenever he was keeping himself from vibrating in place. “Really don't think that's the thing to focus on, Bruce.” The man growled in response. Jason resisted rolling his eyes. “Three hours ago.”

Bruce – no, it was solidly Batman now, cowl or no – strode away without another word. Jason cursed and hurried to catch up. Whenever he was in this state, Batman’s grim stride tended to outpace anything slower than a quick jog from Jason. He followed the asshole across the main floor of the cave to the matted black cases where he kept his ‘specialized equipment’. Jason didn’t know what he expected to get pulled out, but a flip-phone that looked like it was made out of glittering ice and colorful tinsel was not it.

The entire world except for him had gone insane, then.

Batman had flipped it open and was already growling at whoever was at the other end by the time Jason caught up. “No, what I’m asking, Merrytwinkle, is why I had to find out my mentor had been kidnapped fourth-hand?” Jason couldn’t help the utter disbelief that crossed his face. Batman just held up a hand towards him. Though he did stick up one finger, then curled his thumb in the ‘one moment’ signal that’d developed between them back in the early days.

Jason was not going to dwell on the fact he still remembered it.

“It doesn’t matter if they’re the only other people in existence with experience running the Sleigh if they never got any training for it!” Another moment of silence during which Batman shook his head and shot Jason a ‘can you fucking believe this asshole?’ glare. Jason nodded back, brain spinning too fast to do anything else. “No, Merrytwinkle, that actually makes it worse.”

Batman’s nostrils flared at whatever ‘Merrytwinkle’ was saying. His lips thinned and jaw set and Jason nearly groaned out loud. The idiot on the other end had hit one of the Do Not Touch buttons. Everything was about to get Batman’ed up.

He was still listening, but Batman’s attention turned towards unlocking and flipping open storage cases from the Specialized rack seemingly at random. His free hand flashed a series of quick signs that had Jason already moving before he’d consciously translated them into “Collect contents. One for each of us. Time critical.”

“No, I’m already on my way. If I arrive and find nothing but ice-flows, I wont hesitate to force my way through the Normalcy Shield. … Yes, that’s exactly what would happen, which is why it’s not going to be up when we arrive.”

Jason didn’t recognize half the stuff he’d pulled out of the cases, but it was easy to tell where they were supposed to be equipped. Batman had already stalked off to Outfitting. There was nothing left in him to be surprised when the old man returned with arctic gear that matched both their current uniforms. The extra fur padding across his chest was even stained red with a scrawled bloody bat.

Batman snapped the phone shut and shoved it into one of his belt pouches as he strode past Jason towards the plane. Jason followed without even being directed to. Only the smallest part of him could make the effort to be pissed about it.

The engines were firing up as Jason hauled himself in, locking and sealing the doors for takeoff by muscle memory alone.

“Okay, old man.” he said as he dropped down in the copilot seat, only slightly disquieted to discover a winterized version of his helmet already waiting for him on the console. “What, respectfully, the fuck is going on here?”

Batman glanced over at him, and Jason would swear there was the slightest hint of a smile on the asshole’s lips. “What else? We’re going to save Christmas.” The faint smile vanished under the much more familiar scowl, “And those little bastards can just try to stop us from doing it.”

Jason groaned as he let the G forces of their takeoff push him back into the seat. He shouldn’t be here. He should be home. Or at headquarters. Planning shit. Prepping his holdings for whatever bullshit was going to get sprung for New Years like it did every year. Not in a supersonic jet with a possibly insane problematic father'esc-figure on the way to face off against non-existent children's stories.

Conrad was so fucking lucky he was hot.

#The Crime Alley Kid #The Completely Normal Adventures of a Crime Alley Kid #Conrad Nolastname #Batman #DCU #Gotham #Red Hood #Red Robin #Kon-El #writing #fiction #Hijinks

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therealbeachfox · 2 months ago

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u/RaddicalCon

Hey, congrats, you've stumbled across one of the all time great #GothamLifeHacks, go you!

Now be fucking careful with it. Don't use it too often, and never blame the same bat twice.

(If you've run out of bats and need to reuse one for your latest excuse, then you've been using this #GothamLifeHack too much and you need to stop.)

It's not about the boss noticing you've used the same sort of excuse for the last five fuckups (but trust me, even when it doesn't seem like they've got any brains in their head, you don't stay the boss of anything long in Gotham if you don't at least have enough sense about you to tell that Jerry doesn't keep loosing drug shipments because Black Bat has it out for him personally). It's about word getting back to the bats about all this shit they've been doing they've got no memory of.

Depending on which bat it is and how much sleep they've been getting, they're either going to assume that some goon's spreading stories again and you wind up getting dangled off a building having a stern talking to about that sort of thing, or they figure someone's erasing their memory and the only connection between all the incidents is one particular goon who was there every time, and then guess who's getting dangled off a building getting questioned about who the master mind is?

We pour one out for Malcolm "Fidgets" Ralley who spent the better part of a year blaming all sorts of random shit on the big bad Bat himself until I Am The Night caught wind of it.

We all know the Batman doesn't kill, so we all figure Ralley's alive out there somewhere, but it sure as fuck isn't anywhere along the East Coast anymore.

(As a related note: For an example of what happens when everyone overplays a #GothamLifeHack, there's the old "Take a picture of your car if you get a flat because of Poison Ivy thorns and use it whenever you're late for work" trick. It might've worked 15 years ago when that meme was new, but even shift bosses for the ball pit will be double-checking the rogue alerts if you try to pull that one nowadays. )

Gotham based goons definitely blame all their mishaps on the Bats.

Lost a shipment? "Yeah boss, Red Robin came outta nowhere, confiscated all of it."

Someone's cigarette caused a warehouse fire? "Batgirl dropped by and torched the joint."

Fell asleep while on guard duty? "Batman punched the daylights out of me."

Accidentally went to the wrong location and the buyer got arrested? "Bats were chasing the car boss, I figured I'd prioritize the product."

Killed a partner in crime? "Red Hood got him, sorry."

#DCU #Batman #Gotham #Normal people of Gotham City #For a very broad definition of 'normal'#Conrad Nolastname #The Crime Alley Kid #Reddit Posts of a Crime Alley Kid

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therealbeachfox · 1 year ago

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"So Outlaws should’ve been doomed from the start, and almost was. The thing that saved it though, strangely enough, was that fucking décor.

For those of you who never set foot inside one while they still existed (and good on you, you are truly wise) and don’t want to sit down with any of those old YouTube “Live Commentary of my Outlaws Trip Experience” videos (also good on you. No one has enough life-span to be wasting any of it on crap like that), it can be hard to describe. You had your cow skulls painted with American flags and wearing giant rhinestoned purple cowboy hats. You had guitars with red and black lightning bolts and flashing LEDs hidden inside. You had railroad crossing signs covered with barbed wire, shotguns with screaming eagles painted across the barrels in gold paint, and on and on and on.

Just… Truly godawful shit.

But this was Gotham, and that décor did not last long. I mean, around here most restaurants know better than to cover their walls with easily snaggable crap like that. It’s just free shit as far as most of the late-night customers are going to be concerned, especially when your business model is so heavily focused on the 20-somethings and teenagers with good fake IDs demographics like Outlaws was.

But this was Gotham, so we didn’t just steal all that shit, oh no. See, here’s what the rest of you don’t get about Gotham. It’s not that we’re all a bunch of amoral murderous criminals. Sure, our per-capita rate of those is truly unsettling compared to the rest of the country, but they’re still very much the minority. No, what makes a Gothamite truly a Gothamite is the utter gleeful perversity we take whenever we’re gonna be a shit. It can manifest in all sorts of ways (Just look at our own Bruce Wayne, who manifests his as pure ‘fuck the rich’ energy, setting his money on fire, pratfalling into fountains, and then grinning at all the other rich-people who have to put up with his bullshit because despite it all he’s still way richer than they’ll ever be.), but very often it manifests in not doing crime in a straight-forward manner, but insisting on being a little fucking bitch about it.

So people didn’t just steal that gaudy bullshit wall art; they replaced it.

The cow-skulls got switched out for manikin heads, still wearing the same gaudy cowboy hats. Then the hats were exchanged for headwear that was even weirder. Railroad signs were taken away, even with the barbed wire, and for awhile the walls were plastered with “Warning! Live Mines!” signage left over from No-Man’s. That terrible LED-illuminated lightning guitar was replaced with a full-ass gargoyle someone managed to pry off one of the smaller spires of St. Marie’s, and I really fucking wish I could claim credit for that one, but I have no idea who did it much less -how-. "

(494 words from chapter one of TCAKMJT) I would love to know about how you came up with the idea of Outlaws, because I (non-american) had to actually search up if it existed or not!

Hoo boy! Going from 0 to 60 right out the gate on this one!

*deep breath*

Outlaws (the restaurant) is what happens when I'm allowed to let an idea peculate for the better part of a year in the back of my head.

While I was in the process of pulling together Conrad the Crime Alley Kid from the various in-character comments I'd made on TaxiCabToSlowtown's "Am I the Bathole" series, TaxiCab was busy making their own version of the (at the time) nameless not-hench, which turned into How to Get (a) Partner(s) Through Reddit. In it, the big mask-off reveal that Red Hood was Jason Todd was made in the back alley behind a nameless East End bar with Starfire and Arsenal in attendance, and just as with Jason's screen name being TheFredHood, I knew I had to borrow/steal/homage that for my own version as well.

When I got to that point.

*Spongebob voice* 11 months later.

So during all the time I was working on the earlier stories, I had this scene churning away in the back of my head. The first thing I -knew- I had to do was name the bar they met at Outlaws. Because I strongly feel like Jason and pals would be unable to resist grabbing 1 AM burgers and beer while plotting out their next technically-not-a-crime-spree from a place called -Outlaws-.

However, Outlaws lead my mind to Outlaw Country music and all of its assorted motifs and flair, and I floundered around on how to reconcile my version of Red Hood voluntarily eating at a place like that. But that was fine, I had a bunch of other shit to write ahead of figuring out how to handle that.

A bit into all this, I came across the Skrunkfest post series, and my brain promptly shoved it into the Outlaws box and went "Eh? Eh??" at me while waggling its eyebrows, but it still wasn't jelling.

A bit after -that-... I can't remember a specific post or image or thing I read triggering it, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one, but I had the sudden mental image of a western-cyberpunk bar with the fog-machine ambiance and weird lighting, and walls covered with Batman villain gear with green and purple fairy lights strung through them, and just a total Skrunkfest style vibe as you got served at a grungy funky bar with a cracked Red Hood helmet mounted between one of Harley's hammers and a razor-wire wrapped "No Man's Land - Landmine Warning" signpost. And went "Okay. Something like -that-."

So by the time I sat down to start writing that story for reals, I had the mental image of "Outlaws: A kitchzy Western/Outlaw Country restaurant/bar turned Gotham Skrunk/Villain den." and began writing it based around that concept sketch.

Small digression: I usually write my stuff multiple times. I write the chapter, get out everything I feel needs to be in there. Then I put that to the side of the screen, and start writing it again from scratch. Now that I'm not coming up with the ideas fresh, I can write them... smoother? More detailed and more comfortable. Taking a sander and sculpting knife to it all. I honestly usually repeat this process two or three times before moving onto reworking stuff within the document instead of making a new one.

All that to say, the first... three? versions of the chapter still weren't working for me. Then I remembered: Oh wait, I don't need to have Conrad give a mental description of the place as he walks through the door, I have social media posts!

And it was while rewriting that whole section as Conrad's online review-slash-teardown that the full Outlaws experience jelled into being.

Outlaws, pre-Gothamization, is everything about American chain restaurants I hate. And everything I hate about the 2000's faux patriotismgasim that overtook and consumed Country music then swaggered around in it's skinned hide.

On the restaurant front, I started with the "Stick everything on the walls" philosophy you get out of Cracker Barrel or *deep sigh* Red Robin. I don't know how common this... concept is outside of the USA, but it's basically taking the contents of some barn's storage shed and just nailing it all to the walls. "Crazy Crap on the Wall decor", pastiche americana, faux Americana, "like a telekinetic went crazy at a flea market", there's no common name for it.

Basically, taking that concept, and blending it with all the insane-ass "We're calling ourselves Outlaw Country, but we've got million dollar budgets for this show tour" stuff I've seen over the years, shoving in the weird over-abundance of sauces that all taste different variations of sickly sweet you get out of places like Buffalo Wild Wings, and just everything that comes from the "A bunch of venture capitalists with too much money decide to just brute force a new dining institution by opening 80 branches all at once and money-bombing an advertising spree across every form of media at once" phenomenon.

So that left me with the original Outlaws, and I knew what I wanted the final results to look like. Then once I was writing Conrad writing about it all, the exact progression of how the former became the latter finally came together.

Ta-Dah!

Honestly, the Outlaws restaurant has one of the highest number of contributing concepts out of anything I've come up with so far. Which, again, is what happens when you get an entire year to just let something brew in the back of your head.

And I'm glad that it felt real enough to have to google because there are honestly so many places like this. I just sort of smooshed them all together and bumped the dials to max because comics!

#The Crime Alley Kid #Conrad Nolastname #Batman #DCU #Fanfic #Writing about writing

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therealbeachfox · 1 year ago

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Conrad, the Crime Alley Kid.

I finally found my drawing pad pencil, fallen between the back of the drawer and the bedside backing.

Enjoy this Conrad, the closest I've gotten to getting his particular brand of thuggish roustabout charm.

As seen in The Completely Normal Adventures of a Crime Alley Kid!

#Batman #Fanfiction #Original Character #Conrad Nolastname #The Crime Alley Kid

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conradconreg · 5 years ago

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Reginald Conrad Nolastname, what have you done? Do we need to bail you out?

No need to bail me out. I'm good now.

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therealbeachfox · 8 months ago

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"Why do we make laser grids like these?" came the chirp from across the table.

"What do you mean?" Otto responded without looking up.

"I mean, instead of a messy random arrangement of lasers that a nimble intruder might be able to jump through, why not a simple grid wall with no gaps large enough to allow a person to pass?"

Otto sighed heavily and looked up from the blueprints he'd been amending and reworking to focus on his nephew. One of his nephews. One of his multitude of nephews because none of his siblings understood the concept of wrapping it up. He was at Mykola's place, so probably one of his. Too young to be Aiden, too old to be Eric. A, B, C... Connor? Conway? Conrad? One of those. At that extra annoying age where they're too curious for their own good, and have started to believe they actually know something, so get real argumentative about it when you prove they don't.

There's a reason why Otto didn't have kids. Or deal with kids. And tried to talk the Boss out of putting kids into his deathtraps. Fucking kids. Ugh.

"Because if we did that, it'd be impossible to get through." he said, hoping it'd satisfy the kid.

"But isn't that what you're trying to do?" Mykola's boy had his head twisted around to try and look at the blueprints from his uncle's perspective and was tracing out the twisting pathways with his eyes. "This whole thing is a giant 'You Can't Get In Here' tunnel. I don't understand why you're leaving holes in the security."

Well, the kid had actually asked, instead of just flat out stating that his way would be better. Otto grit his teeth and settled himself back for a proper lecture. "You're thinking too mundanely, kid." The boy looked up curiously and brushed a tangle of near-black hair out of his eyes. Slightly mollified, Otto continued. "This isn't like designing security for a bank or vault or something. This is something for my Boss. So we're already not designing like we would for the public sector, right?"

"Yeah? Yeah." Con-whatever agreed, though still looking just as confused.

"So, our issue is, whoever comes looking for whatever it is that the Boss is gonna put at the end of this is already going to be uniquely skilled and driven. Not just your average jewelry robbers or beat cops, right?"

"Right, yeah, you're going to be dealing with capes or cowls and stuff, sure. But wouldn't that mean you'd want it all extra locked down?" The kid was now looking directly at him. But with the intense look of someone who didn't understand but wanted to. It was by far more annoying than if the kid had just been flat-out disparaging of the whole process. Now Otto couldn't just tell him to shove off without feeling bad about it. Ugh.

"Well, here's the thing. If this was something the Boss really wanted to keep away from people, he'd have it put in some indistinguishable bank vault lock-box by a patsy that one of us underlings had hired through a third party, leaving two whole layers unaware of who even wanted the thing in there, and at least three whole layers who have no idea what the object even is besides. But he's not doing that, he's putting it at the end of a long tunnel of traps, alarms, and obstacles. Which means, what he wants is for whoever's coming after him to go through the whole thing. Which means it's gotta be at least theoretically possible to get through the whole thing. If you were a cowl and you came across a perfect laser grid that there was no way to squirm your way through and no way to work around, what would you do?"

Mykola's kid frowned down at the blueprints, eyebrows furrowed in tweenage concentration. "Start cutting through the walls, I guess. Either to find a way to cut the power, or to bypass the tunnel all toget-OH! Ooooooh, okay! I see, I see!" Otto grabbed the edge of the table to steady it as the kid started bouncing a little in his seat. "If you make it impossible, the cowls will start thinking outside the box and start looking for ways to end-run around the whole thing. If you make it difficult, but still possible, they're going to be too busy focusing on how to do the almost impossible thing so they're still playing by your Boss' rules instead of making up their own!"

Otto grunted and bit back the hint of a smile that wanted to cross his lips. Last thing he wanted to do was encourage the brat; then he'd be stuck answering questions all day. "Now you've got it. Make it hard enough that they waste as much time getting through it as possible without breaking out their bat-themed metal cutters or retreating and finding another way to come in altogether. Same reason why museums do it this way. Otherwise, the only way to get at shit would be to blow a hole in the floor, and that'd damage way more artifacts than whatever the thief was targeting originally."

"Okay, I think I totally get it. Is that why the HVAC ducts are big enough for sidekicks to get through? In case they can't work stuff out?"

Otto blinked and scowled back down at the blueprints to figure out what the kid was talking about, "No? No! I've got them as small as they can get without leaving the air rank, and we've got mesh grids every five feet just in case they try anyway."

The kid pointed down at one point in the blueprints and traced out a line that went way from one-third of the way through the hallway to right near the end, "Not on this one. And it's got this other branch that leads out to the bathrooms in the laundry mat you're using as a front, even!"

Otto squinted down at what the kid was pointing out. It was a second branch of the air circulation network, focused mainly on the above ground business, but with a few pipes down below ground as federally mandated backups to the system he'd been focusing on locking down. "No. That's not for the sidekicks." He growled and grabbed for an eraser and pencil and got to work grinding out alterations.

"Huh. So what about the-" the kid started.

"One thing at a time. Let me get this fixed, then you can ask the next one, okay?"

"Yeah, sure, okay!" The kid shrugged and grabbed up one of Otto's old notebooks that had the first iteration of designs for the Boss' main vault and started reading while kicking his legs.

Otto just ground his teeth and focused on his work. Only thing worse than a kid was a precociously bright kid with an honest interest in your work. Worse thing in the goddamn world.

He should message Mykola and let him know he needed to get one of his other kids to bring up snacks for the brat. He was at that age where he was going to get hungry long before Otto was done.

"Why do we make laser grids like these?" "What do you mean?" "I mean instead of a messy random arrangement of lasers that a nimble intruder might be able to jump through, why not a simple grid wall with no gaps large enough to allow a person to pass through?"

#writing prompts #The Perfectly Ordinary Adventures of a Crime Alley Kid #The Crime Alley Kid #Conrad Nolastname #Uncle Otto #DCU #DCUish #Like I wrote it to be generically superheroy #But Otto henches for the Riddler

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therealbeachfox · 8 months ago

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r/NoStupidQuestions is there a style guide/dress code for gotham rogue henchmen out there somewhere

u/RaddicalCon

"I mean, not something that's written down or printed out.

(Unless you're from my birth-family, in which case it's all written down, mostly in ancient books that stink of dry-rot and leather where Hench're called things like 'Servitors' and 'Beholden' and there's a lot of rules about which parts of the manor you're allowed to drag bodies through at what particular times of the day.)

Otherwise, it's not like there's a HenchCo HQ that puts together an employee dress code or anything. As with most things Hench-related in Gotham, it's all about unspoken rules and running tradition. Vibes, you know?

So here's some of those unwritten rules written down, because fuck the not-police.

A lot of bosses are going to have their own style and Hench-branding already in place. In this case, you wear what the Boss tells you to. Hopefully, they'll supply you the uniform so you don't have to go down to the army surplus and hunt for body armor in the exact right shade of purple or something. Be careful of any Boss who has you buy/rent your uniform with promises you get your money back when you return it. Gotham is hell on clothes regardless of who you are, and there's no way you're going to keep that uniform clean enough to be given your 'deposit' back. Fortunately, these sorts tend to be flash-in-the-pans. They usually wind up dead after they piss off one of the bigger fish, or they don't have anyone willing to bust their cheep-ass out after the first time their cheep ass gets locked up by the capes'n'cowls set.

Even if the Boss doesn't have specific uniform for their hench, they almost always have a certain theme/style of their own going on, and you'll want to play into that. When you join up, take a quick look around. If everyone's decked out in a certain style (jaunty green caps, black leather jackets, red shirts), it's probably a good guess you want to dress similarly if you don't want to draw the Boss' attention (It's almost never a good thing to have the Boss notice you as an individual as opposed to just One of the Minions).

Alright, so you found yourself hooked up with a crew where there doesn't seem to be any theming going on. Here's where the unspoken rules come in. You get to make your own outfit, but if you want to come across as a professional Hench, or at least one who knows what the fuck they're doing, you're going to wanna stick with the standards. These will depend on exactly what kind of outfit you've landed in.

Organized: 'This is a professional operation, boys, and we expect you all to look professional when on the clock.' You're working with one of the crime families, henching for Two-Face on Mr. Dent's side of the room, or fronting for Sionis because you're an unmitigated asshole or a raving idiot. Regardless, you're going to want to get yourself a nice suit. Nothing too fancy, you're not trying to imply you're as good (or rich) as one of the big players. Something off the rack at one of those Fancyish Clothes wholesalers should do you fine. Add a fedora or something if you need to keep your hair warm, consider growing a pencil mustache if you're able, or go for the classic full-eyelashes & red lips makeup if that's more your thing. You might even be able to get away with a trench-coat. Just keep it all either black, grey, or very subdued colors and you'll be fine. And make sure you know how to fight in them. There's nothing worse than watching some guy who can normally tear it up in a street fight get a knife to the gut because he wasn't used to the way tight slacks constrained his ability to throw a kick or leap out of the way of something.

Heavies: It's easy to tell if you're in one of these outfits. If you're spending all your time moving unlabeled crates from one place to another place, standing guard over nondescript warehouses and abandoned factories, or showing up in back alleys to clarify the boss' intentions to some hapless Gothemite, than you're in a Heavy crew. None of the excitement of the others, but you don't have to dress up for it. You're not in the 'Public Facing' part of the Boss' operations, so you don't have to worry about keeping on-theme or even wearing something without holes in it. Conrats. My main suggestion and the most popular getup for this gig? Cable-knit turtleneck and knit cap. Gotham nights are piss-cold nine months out of the year, and it's 9-10 odds you're going to be doing all your work after sundown. Steel-toed boots are also a must. Basically: good, durable, sout, able to handle roughness and keep you warm. Don't try and be cute and wear ugly christmas sweaters or multicolored patterned hats or anything. The only ones there to appreciate your kicking swag are going to be your coworkers (and who gives a shit what they think) or the Bats. Who're going to use the fact that you're distinctive to pick you out for the first to get face-punched. Not worth it.

Street: The Default level for Henching as a whole. Wear what you want. Something that'll keep you as warm and protected as you feel like keeping yourself that you're comfortable beating up assholes and getting your ass kicked in. Some form of tank-top/open-jacket combo is popular these days, as is the Tight Black T-Shirt and Ballcap getup. We're still not letting our freak-flag fly high, here. If you're Henching, the point is usually not to have the cops and everyone else immediately notice you when you walk down the street. If that is your purpose, the Boss probably already has uniforms prepped alongside the gas bombs and explosives. The only thing I wanna stress is to keep up on your laundry. Too many guys take the chill of this setup as an excuse not to keep up on that, and there is nothing worse than having to work with someone who stinks like month-old foot-mold and shit. You are not earning yourself a breakout out of Blackgate if you're putting your coworkers through that.

Wild: Okay, now you can let your freak-flag fly. This is what you want to go with if you're henching for Two-Face on Harvey's side of the room, or in one of those 'are we foot soldiers for a Rogue or are we a street gang?' situations. Let's be honest, you probably don't want to sign onto one of these unless you're comfortable blasting your brain chemistry to pieces on shit you've never even heard of before. In exchange, you can wear whatever the hell you like, so long as it's eye-catching. Combine your mesh tank-top, pink camo cargo pants, and an army-helmet with a dozen spikes, studs, and dyed feathers. Break out your midriff-baring leather jacket, fishnets, and combat boots. Take a trench-coat and wrap a street's worth of road signs around it. Drill elk antlers into a hockey mask and drop the whole thing into neon green paint. Just realize that if it's fragile, it's going to break in your first fight. And you will be in fights. Either against rival Rogues' crews, or with the Bats. Learn how to take a punch, and for the love of god learn how to stay down after you've taken that punch. The only thing getting up over and over again in a blood-frenzy will get you is an ever increasing stay in the ICU.

Of course, the easiest way to make sure you're wearing the right shit for Henchwork is to NOT DO IT.

I'm fucking serious, y'all. Just don't. If you want a snazzy uniform and an excuse to beat people up, join a private security company. If you want to fawn over an evil megalomaniac while furthering their plans for world domination, both Amazon and LexCorp have plenty of job openings. And if you just want to tear shit up for the hell of it, join a street gang. At least then the people by your side might actually give half-a-shit about you at the end of the day.

You can find more of my 'how not to be an idiot and die in Gotham' advice here if you're really in the mood for that.

And to answer the most frequent question: You can find piles of discontinued hench outfits at any Gotham thrift-shop. They've almost always got their own rack you can dig through to your weird little heart's content.

is there a style guide/dress code for gotham rogue henchmen out there somewhere

#Batman #Gotham #WTF Gotham #Henching Lifestyle #Conrad Nolastname #The Crime Alley Kid

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