(Fair warning, fairly long)
A lithe figure sits across from the building watching everything take place. Raven hair flutters in the breeze along with tail of her long coat, the vigilantes of the city might recognize the outline of Lady Shiva. Mutely she approves of the efficiency with which her daughter handled the few men within, it would make things simpler for her as she has business of her own with the eccentric Dr Crane.
Quietly, she steals across the distance between the buildings with pure acrobatics. Careful to avoid the attention of the Bats she tails, Lady Shiva keeps to the shadows with skill unmatched 'by any in the underworld. If they had been her targets the hair would be rising on the backs of their necks as if someone were preparing their graves. As such, they aren't and she keeps a fair distance in case her daughter's own exceptional senses were alerted.
She watches as Nightwing puts on his special low light lenses and Black Bat taps a spot below her jaw on her helmet, triggering a similar feature. She whispers semi audibly, doubtlessly to Barbara Gordon who they'd be referring to as Oracle presently. If she knows Crane, he'll be further beneath the building. Down there, they'll be off of their grid if anything happens. She continues keeping to the darkest shadows, mindful of her steps as she lets them lead her to the man who calls himself Scarecrow.
This section of sewer is dangerous for many reasons. At one time, it was free from strangeness thanks to Killer Croc and his gang. That was around the time of the great quake, and when civilization sort of reclaimed this section of Gotham he was deposed by Batman. Croc had been halfway rehabilitated by Arkham, now he's a leg breaker for hire. She knows through the grape vine that for a bonus, he'll eat legs too.
Since they've left the sewer, the fringes of the literal underworld had moved in emboldened by the absence of Croc and his cannibal gang. By and large they amounted to little more than exceptionally violent muggers, desperate from starvation and sometimes sickness. What makes them dangerous is their animal cunning and tribalistic notions of loyalty. The duo ahead of her, to their credit, had thus far done a good job in these gothic catacombs not alerting anything further down to their presence.
Black Bat is leading the way, seeming to know her way in the nigh pitch darkness as she navigates the winding catacombs. She eventually comes to a service ladder down, but this is where they meet trouble. A group of pale and emaciated men are camped out by it. They've managed a small fire of odds and ends with a rat spitted on an antenna that they're cooking. Likely the closest thing they've had to luxury in recent memory.
Lady Shiva crouches to watch what happens. She doubts this will be any trouble, with the flames their darkvision will be diluted. Black Bat and Nightwing should have no trouble ambushing them and making their way past. The duo slip through the gloom in half crouch to minimize their appearance and ensure the evenness and softness of their footfalls.
Somehow, even Lady Shiva is surprised, one of the men senses their approach and rises erect from sitting in alarm. The man has a butcher knife in his hand that he'd planned on serving up the rat with, but now he's visibly planning on using it on the Bats as his two friends rise to join him. As emaciated and pale as they are, they could infiltrate one of the popular zombie crawls that happen around Halloween but their movements are more Dawn of the Dead than Walking Dead as they first fix their uninvited guests with suspicious glares. A heartbeat later, they charge with melee weapons bared.
The duo almost don't have a chance to take up defensive stances as even Black Bat is stunned by how quickly they switched their demeanors from casual to rabid animalistic fury. The lead with the knife she catches handily, his weapon reared back for a charging thrust that'd run an unarmored target through. She sidesteps the wirey man to take him by his outstretched wrist and apply her other hand to his shoulder whereby she whirls him by his own inertia face first into the wall before dislocating his shoulder and snapping the aforementioned wrist causing his knife to clatter to the slab floor.
Nightwing briefly squares off with the other two, one of which has a wine bottle in his hand like a club and the other a fireplace poker. He suspects in the back of his mind that that might be how they caught their dinner. He counters a swing of the wine bottle by intercepting it with a punch, trusting his kevlar reinforced knuckles to protect his hand. While the man is surprised by the shattering of his weapon, he takes the opportunity to utilize a maneuver he's seen Cassandra do a time or two and suddenly crouches to the ground and snatches one of his feet thus dodging a swing from the man with the poker. The man drops to the ground as Nightwing pops back up, but he doesn't sit still for another attack from his partner! Instead he hops forward, hyperextending the man's leg under his own weight as he falls backwards while planting an elbow in his face before rolling off to chuck a batarang at the face of his still standing partner.
The trio is thus dispatched in a fashion that Lady Shiva quietly approves of. The rejected refuse of a society might be better served with euthanasia, but she understands not honoring a victim so far beneath one's abilities. She watches them arrange the defeated against the wall sitting up in the light's glare, then rolls her eyes at the display of sentimentality before disappearing down the ladder. She gives them a few moments, then glides along after them with the grace and silence of a disembodied shadow. It wouldn't be long until others came to investigate the scuffle and racket and she had little interest in dispatching a gang of wildmen herself.
The next level down is utter pitch such that low light lenses fail. Lady Shiva is prepared with goggles that she slips on, suspecting this is the last leg of the journey. There are several levels beneath Gotham, including an entire subterranean city. Gotham had been collapsed before, but it was back in the early nineteenth century. The remnants of those buildings could still be accessed and indeed were periodically in spite of being dangerously unstable in places. They were merely in the upper sections of where the modern Gotham stopped bothering with maintenance.
The only sounds were their footsteps and the running of water where it fell through cracks from above. Only enough had been spared to ensure that the entire roadway didn't collapse when the city took to reclaiming these streets after the great quake remembered as The Clench. She had learned from Bane that it was in those days that Cassandra first turned up in Gotham, a feisty and dangerous street scrapper who earned Batman's eye by saving Gordon from her father.
Lady Shiva senses that they've doubled back along the winding subterrane. This meant that they literally were directly beneath the building, and confirmed that her daughter likely had a map of some kind in her helmet that she's following in the absence of Barbara's voice. Their destination is plain by a dim fluorescent bar of light over a service door. Dim as it may be, it''s almost blinding to Nightwing as he rubs his dialated eyes against the glare. She hears him mutter something about being grateful to not know what sort of rats they'd been walking past in the dark.
Before anyone can respond though, a voice sounds,"You got an appointment for the doc? You ain't on his schedule."
Lady Shiva glances quickly around, then takes cover behind a storm drain pipe in case the man greeting the Bats had night vision of his own. Spying him out under similar cover, she sees he's got a shotgun trained on them. Watching closely, she spars another grin for the duo as she watches Nightwing palm one of his throwing blades. She'd chastise her daughter later for letting him upstage her like this, twice now.
The man steps out from behind his cover, his shotgun never leavng its target as he approaches and states,"No, I guess folks like you wouldn't has an appointment, wouldja? I got me a pair of Bat party crashers."
Nightwing hrmphs, his eyes narrowing as the man comes into sight of his lowlight lenses. One more step, and the filthy man's scruffy grin turns to dismay as Nightwing's blade flashes out to score a hit directly in the barrel of his weapon, then a second that pierces his trigger hand releasing a litany of curses. Black Bat advances on that note, a swift shadow falling on him with an elbow beneath his chin that knocks him reeling as her other hand arrests and controls his weapon by the barrel. When he drops, she unloads it with several rackings of its pump before discarding it into the water.
With the door man dispatched, the Bats step through the door into what is likely Scarecrow's domain.
***
Within is a surprisingly vast chamber. What it had been will remain a mystery, but now it's a sweat shop chemical plant where Dr. Crane has several workers laboring to produce his new concoctions under his deranged supervision by fluorescent light that he's achieved through cables running up along the walls and into holes in the ceiling where they doubtlessly tie eventually into the city's powergrid. In this fashion, he also has computers powered with monitors flashing with chemical formulas.
The man in the strawman mask totes a long rifle wih a downward curving blade fixed to the end of the barrel. At first glance, the Bats think he has a scythe in hand until they notice the buttstock and trigger by Scarecrow's gripping hand. Just another of his lunatic contrivances, they figure. He mutters to his workers in an approving tone, micromanaging their efforts on whatever his latest chemistry development scheme is. Nearby he also has a pair of watchful guards armed with assault rifles.
The workers grind up powders, cutting the measurements meticulously with razors on metal plates that they then mix and combine through various means. The smells of the sewer are rank, but in here they are simply unique.
The duo split up as they maneuver through the shadow. The eyes of his guards weren't so good in the dim light that they'd notice a pair of darkly clad individuals slipping in, not when they've been staring more at the mad chemist with the ongoing expectation of having to go get a new worker because of a screw up resulting in the doctor killing someone or a mishap resulting in an accidental poisoning. The doctor's anal micromanaging style isn't completely without cause.
Lady Shiva waits in the darkness, once again slipping behind them to let them work. She intends to have words with this man when they finish with him. She doesn't know why they've tracked him down, but has her suspicions. She herself intends to persuade him into shifting allegiances to from providing Talia's League with his product to supplying Bane exclusively. If the duo are here to get answers about Samael and Deathstroke, so much the better because she and Bane have their concerns about this as well.
The insane chemist used to be a psycho pharmacist at Arkham. She herself isn't quite sure what happened to drive him off the deep end, but now when he isn't lost in delusions of grandeur driving him to terrorize the masses above he makes a healthy profit manufacturing unique hallucinogens for any purpose imaginable. All of them play on the element of fear, and as it happens there are those who actively seek thrills through the various aspects of their private terrors. The exciting raver subculture takes on an all new life for junkies with just one dose of the mad pharmacist's terror drug, known on the streets as Dread.
Nightwing and Black Bat carefully maneuver behind the guards, staying to the dim as they exploit the complacency of his security. Almost at once, they both drop their targets in a coordinated fashion with knife hand chops to the nerve clusters between the neck and shoulders.
Scarecrow can't help but notice when his men suddenly decide to nap on the job. He snaps to attention, a heavy breath wheezing through the air filters of his trademark mask before his voice issues forth,"Heeeh...to what do I owe the displeasurrre...? Did some rich prick decide to take a walk on the wild side?"
Nightwing upnods the man in the mask, his voice dropping to the gravelly tone he likes to take with the darker elements,"Samael and Deathstroke. What do you know?"
A chuckle escapes the lunatic pharmacist and he adjusts the gun scythe on his shoulder,"Samael, Hebrew for a fallen angel known as the Accuser...or Poisonerrrr. A name I like, for obvious reasons. Deathstroke on the other hand...Heeeh that's a name I don't like. He in town?"
Nightwing narrows his eyes at the question, retorting,"Wouldn't be asking if he weren't. You know something, don't play dumb with me, now is not the time."
Scarecrow chuckles even louder at the accusation, replying,"It never is, is it? Heeeh... A snake's slithered into the belfry and gotten you all worked up. That little civil warrr in our neck of the underworld has you on edge, so you come crawling to me for answerrrs...the king of fear to asuage yours...Heeeh appropriate...but misguided."
Black Bat's gotten frustrated at this point, and Lady Shiva shakes her head as she watches her daughter move up behind the lunatic. Scarecrow is one of those whose motives and methods can seem extravagant and pointles to the untrained, Lady Shiva herself doesn't try. She knows well enough of him to stay clear, however. He has an unhinged brilliance at times, guided by his insane fixation on fear itself. Black Bat snatches his weapon from him, ramming the buttstock against the side of his head to knock him down for formal question, alas the purpose is unfulfilled as the worm turns as soon as it hits the floor as he snaps his palm up to lash out with a burst of thick mist that enshrouds her.
Nighwing chuckles at him,"That helmet of hers has air filters too. It won't work, Crane."
Lady Shiva feels a knot in her stomach when Nightwing's words are met with laughter from the deranged man as she watches Black Bat clutch at her sides and stumble back from him. Nightwing hurries over to her, realizing immediately that something is wrong.
Scarecrow climbs to his feet and steps away from them, his laughter dying down to a snigger as he explains,"My old poisons have always been inhalants, tis true...Heeeh I got a little creative this time. Just for you two, I even made it personallll...You see, this versionnn...tis tactile. Heeeeh any moment now, she's liable to see the person or thinnng...that she fearrrrs mossst..."
As if verifying his point, Lady Shiva's eyes widen as watches Black Bat slowly look up at Nightwing. Her breath comes heavy and shuddering as she whispers,"David...get away from me..."
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