10296/By The Seat Of Our Pants Investigation

By The Seat Of Our Pants Investigation
Date of Scene:	03 December 2019
Location:	Themysciran Arts Center, East Side
Synopsis:	Stephanie Brown amasses video to help Diana discover who attacked the Themysciran Art Center. Cheetah's image is caught on tape.
Cast of Characters:	Spoiler, Wonder Woman, Cheetah

---

Spoiler has posed:
During Thanksgiving, Stephanie had offered Diana her sympathy for the events at the Arts Center and the loss of the items that Stephanie had had a hand in bringing to the Themysciran's attention. She'd intended to do more, but hadn't had the chance as she instead set off to shepherd a friend's parents to their volunteer work obligation.

That is a whole different story.

But the next afternoon, Stephanie spent on the Batcomputer. Or more likely, getting some of her allies to use it, as she is still not the best at that sort of thing. But after awhile she's able to pull in footage from a lot of cameras. Every camera on streets heading in each direction that is hooked up to a network and not immune to the hacking algorithms the team has at their disposal.

With some results in hand, Stephanie had contacted Diana and arranged to meet and show them to her. The timing meant a trip into New York, and so the Arts Center itself seemed a good place to view them, given it would also have footage on hand, or from the nearby Embassy which Stephanie did not get into.

Wonder Woman has posed:
The Arts Center is busy at almost all operating hours, but right now it is closed. The lights within most of the two story tall building are illuminated though and Diana is expecting of this appointment. When Stephanie arrives she'll be escorted by a Center employee through the lobby and to one of the hallways in the back that is lined with paintings, sculptures and relics all associated with Themyscira and Greek Mythology. Nothing outrageously valuable, but still very impressive displays of armor, weapons and artwork still in their own rights.

Stephanie is lead into a conference room that looks out on a small park behind the Center, its cold outside and the recently fallen snow has only partially melted away during warmer mid-day hours. Diana is inside of the conference room, the sole person at the large oval shaped table in fact.

Dressed in a white blazer with white slacks and her hair tied back into a bun on top of the crown of her head, Diana looks up from her laptop with the two enter. Her crimson painted lips upturn at their corners, she smiles brightly to Stephanie and rises from her seat.

"Welcome, it is good to see you again so soon, Stephanie." She says to the other. "Come come, sit." She'll motion to a chair aside hers. "Would you like anything to drink or eat? We have quite a lot on site."

Spoiler has posed:
Stephanie Brown's face lights up as she is brought to Diana. "You as well. I'm sorry I didn't get to stay longer. I really wanted to, but... well, it was worth it. Carrie's worth it. And that was just... ugh," the blond college student says. She moves over to join Diana, taking a seat next to her. "Oh, I'm fine, thank you though," she says of the offer.

Once the two of them are alone, Stephanie slides over a thumb drive. "So, those artifacts? I pulled up footage from every camera I could find in a couple of block radius on the night in question. I thought it might be helpful in finding whoever is responsible," Stephanie says. "The footage has all been processed for clarity and...well, you can imagine what Barbara's work is capable of," she says.

Stephanie rests her hands on the table, fingers laced. "And, if it does help find a culprit and you want some help with some butt-kicking, I'm volunteering to be your girl, too," she says with a grin.

Wonder Woman has posed:
Once they're both seated again, Diana leans back in her chair and just softly grins at Stephanie's first words. "It was a fun night, over all. I think Bruce feels as though he should've done more to make it more enjoyable, but... he's not used to nights like that. Nights all about family and celebration of our love and what we are thankful for. It might take a few more years to warm him up to the concept of such gatherings. The rest? Well... it is now memories to look back upon." Her grin fades then as the subject moves on.

Diana will reach out to let Stephanie use her laptop to display the footage. It is open and on, with a herd of zebras running through a grassy field as the desktop image. "Here." Diana tells her softly to let her know that she has her run of the laptop, just stay away from the browsing history!

A glance is given over to the college student then. "Mm, if we come up with anything... any way to find who did this... I would hope to talk to them before fighting them. I want to understand the 'whys' more than pound them into submission for the acts themselves. That is the true way of solving the problem, rather than possibly only digging the hole of disdain deeper and making it all the more worse."

Spoiler has posed:
"Well, it really meant a lot to me. If you want to tell him I said that, you certainly can. I will myself, but sometimes it helps to hear it from... certain people," Stephanie says, blue eyes peeking from the laptop over to Diana, and giving her a hint of a smile. Oh, yes, there was no doubt some conversation later about her presence.

Stephanie plugs in the thumb drive and then pulls up the folder contents. "I cut it down to the parts that looked the most useful, in this one, but the whole contents are on the drive. Never know what else might be significant." As she's bringing it up, she listens to Diana's explanation of how she'd want to handle matters. "Oh, definitely. But should that fail? I mean not that you need any assistance on such things. But I kind of took what happened to them personally though. Even if I don't have at all the connection you do."

Stephanie queues up the video.

Cheetah has posed:
The resulting screen is divided into quadrants each showing the approach to the Themysciran embassy at various points along the route starting with a feed showing the furthest point in the upper left-hand corner and ending with a rather obscure view of the front of the building in the lower right-hand corner. At the bottom of each quadrant is a digital counter silently ticking away the seconds. The timers are synchronized. Each clicks down in time with the other three.

Bureaucracy is a miserly thing even in a world littered with gods, aliens and mutants; sadly the quality of some of the footage reflects this. Nonetheless, Barbara's work here is nothing short of extraordinary and she has wrenched every pixel from digital oblivion. The images are far clearer than they have any right to be.

There's not much to see. A stray dog lopes across the street in one quadrant but little else. In the feed furthest from the embassy one can see a dark puddle reflecting light from a nearby streetlamp. It's riveting stuff. The wordless counters tick away.

Did you blink? If you did you might have missed an odd 'blip' in the video that started in the furthest feed and skipped its way (almost simultaneously) across the other three quadrants. Weird. There's probably a logical explanation for all of this that someone in this room is just DYING to give...

Wonder Woman has posed:
"This... means a lot to me." Diana motions to the laptop and what Stephanie had brought to her. "So thank you, and thank Barbara when you see her next."

Once the footage was loaded though, Diana's posture stiffens as she sits up straighter in the chair and places her hands in her lap. She gets accustomed to what she's looking at on the screen, taking in the finer details and gathering up a mental image of understanding what each quadrant was displaying...

The dog makes her show a half-smirk as she knows the animal, it often comes by the property after there is an outdoor gathering, looking for scraps or handouts of left overs. But its that speedy blip that catches Diana's eyes... she's not one to miss things like that, she can see it hit each of those little cameras in-succession.

"That." Diana says as she leans a little further in, even her perfect vision couldn't quite tell who or what that was. "A speedster?" She asks, using the generic term for anyone with super-human speed powers. "I... I do not know too many people who can go quite that fast..."

Spoiler has posed:
Stephanie's sensorium is nowhere on par with Diana Prince. But she saw the blip too, was wondering if it was the laptop give it crossed the screens so fast it seemed to her more likely to be the computer than an actual part of the image.

"Hrm," she says, pulling up the controls to the video and rewinding everything. She gets it near to the blip, and then starts going frame by frame.

It's slow going, as she's got about 15 frames to go through until finally they get to the one where the blip first shows up. If it is on all of the cameras simultaneously she pauses there. But if not she freezes just the first, and then continues on each of the others. Either way, she only finishes when all of the cameras are showing what they caught of the blur.

She leans back away from it, glancing over to Diana. "Speedsters would have an interest in doing this?" she asks, looking back to the screen to show if it helped reveal anything more.

Cheetah has posed:
Stephanie's super-exciting documentary about nothing restarts. The counters resume their death march from the beginning but gradually grind to a near halt as Steph works her A/V club magic.

A two nearly flips over into a one but is halted just before it can. In this strange netherworld that exists between frames nebulous images suddenly appear in each quadrant simultaneously. The varying viewpoints of each of the four cameras make it difficult to see precisely what one is looking at and the billowing quality of the object doesn't help -- it's almost as if whatever has been captures isn't entirely solid.

A black, featureless outline is seen in the black puddle at the top of the screen. Though ephemeral, one needn't strain to make it out: it is an outstretched hand moving in parallel to the street. In the second quadrant the ghostly outline of a humanoid figure. In the third quadrant, which was recorded from a height, there is little save a blur. In the final quadrant, one can half make out some sort of commotion near the entrance to the embassy; however, this is obscured.

Wonder Woman has posed:
"None that I know of." Diana responds with regard to the speedsters. "I only know a handful of them, members of the League or associates, but I have never met a speedster that was willing to vandalize like this." The response, and what is shown on the cameras is disheartening. The cameras get a lingering stare but when they ultimately show little to nothing, Diana has to look over to Stephanie.

"Was there anything more than that discovered?" She asks then, her voice sounds dour and serious in tone now.

Her eyes go back to the laptop and she reaches over to grab up her silver thermos off of the table beside her laptop and the folders she has stacked upon it along with a cellphone and a tablet computer... she's got a lot of tech these days, but it is 2027 and the world is rapidly changing more every year.

Spoiler has posed:
Stephanie Brown frowns and works the controls of the video, zooming in on the interesting parts, but they are enhanced about as much as they are going to get. "I don't think we're going to get much more than this from these," she says with a frown.

"There was a stretch where Impulse kept coming to Gotham and Batman was a bit cross about it. But, he was more, treading on Batman's turf. Not vandalizing. Annoying, not criminal," Stephanie says with a frown.

She pulls up another file and loads it into the video player. "Ok, and then this is from afterwards," she says, playing the video. "I don't know if there are any radar systems, like those ones that tell you how fast you're going, that might have records still? I don't even know if they keep records, but maybe one of their radars picked up something incredibly fast?" It seems unlikely and Steph realizes it. At most it would tell them where the person passed, probably no more than a single data point. Not enough to help.

She plays the video from after the events at the Art Center.

Cheetah has posed:
The blip retraces its steps in reverse. It starts in the feed nearest the Embassy and ends in the quadrant furthest afield -- as before it appears in all four quadrants simultaneously. This time, however, there is more to the tale of the tape. Though the camera sees little, the humble puddle in the upper-left sees all and reflects what it perceives for the viewer.

An uncertain whirl of activity instantly coalesces into a humanoid figure. Her (and it is most certainly a 'her') image is somewhat distorted by the water but not terribly so - an image search is likely possible. She is long and lean; calico colored like a cat; and, judging from her Cheshire leer, rather pleased with herself. What appears to be the dark outline of a helmet sits perched in the palm of her outstretched hand like the skull of poor Yorick ('I knew him, Horatio...').

The figure tosses back her head and, though the video lacks an audio track, the mocking cackle of her laughter seems to hang in the air. If one were of a vindictive mindset one might recall poor Professor Agathe who was nearly killed in the attack. One might recall, too, the incalculable loss of those priceless artifacts, which were destroyed for no good reason. If one were of a vindictive mindset. Luckily, we're all sunshine and rainbows here. Unicorn, anyone?

Wonder Woman has posed:
"Well." Diana says before the next segment of the video is shown. "What this does provide is some answers as to how this person accomplished this. With a great amount of speed and control of that speed." Her eyes go to Steph and she sips her drink again. "This means that the League has enough information to work with to install proper security measures to prepare for this kind of thing should it happen again. These cameras weren't prepared for this... other cameras are designed to film at a frame rate that -can- capture..."

Diana stops talking when the footage rolls on and a clearer image of the person and culprit is revealed. The Princess simply sits and watches... stares and-- "She's laughing?" Diana questions, with a confused look on her face.

She exhales, disappointedly. "Why do they always laugh at their misery-spreading?" She has to ask it, it goes against every fiber of her being and all of her core principles. "Well..." A soft sigh escapes between the Princess' lips then. "Looks like we know a little more about our new friend..." A glance to Steph again. "We should spread this out, see if anyone recognizes her from this. Maybe get a recent location..."

Spoiler has posed:
Stephanie frowns as she sees the figure's reaction to what they've done. She shakes her head and zooms in. Further enhancing the image though each frame has already been run through Barbara's filters so there is not really much more that can be done with it.

"Do you think it might be tied to what happened to those the artifacts originally belonged to? Or... targeting them just because they are Themysciran maybe?" she asks. She zooms in a wire frame and captures the figure, saving the pictures for each distribution. It's Diana's laptop, so Stephanie leaves that part to her.

She slides the laptop back over towards Diana a little more, signifying she's done controlling it. "Hopefully someone is familiar with her," she agrees. She lets out a sigh. "Sometimes I'm glad we just have the Penguins of the world to deal with. Not.. that they can't be enough problems."

Wonder Woman has posed:
With the laptop pushed back to her, Diana leans back in her chair again and places both of her hands around her thermos. She raises it up for another sip while she ponders internally over all of this before she lowers it down to her lap and then regards Stephanie again.

"I would not rule it out that this person dates back to the days where this armor was lost. Though that does feel a little unlikely..." Diana shows a little smirk then. "I have learned, however, that 'unlikely' is certainly far from impossible though." A moment later and Diana is moving to stand up, and to gather her items up to put them into the leather case they all fit within.

"Thank you again for this, I now have a lot more to consider and a bit of a face to go off of. I feel more confident we will be able to find 'her' now and get to the bottom of why she decided this was the path for her to choose in life."

A second later and Diana is putting the bag up over her shoulder by its strap. "Honestly? I hope she is just displeased with me and not an 'ancient enemy of my people'." There's a soft smile then a shake of her head. "Those are so much more complicated to deal with, and generally far more 'preachy' and boring." She flashes a playful grin then.

"Come, I will show you around the Center before you leave. Give you a guided tour!"

Spoiler has posed:
Stephanie rises, the girl having wore slacks and a nice shirt. Which pretty much is a sign that she dressed up to see Diana, as there are a small number of things that get her out of jeans. "That would be great, I appreciate it," Stephanie says of the tour. "I had another question for you, if I might. I've been planning to ask you for a while now."

Stephanie will follow along, though only continue with the question where the two of them will not be overhead. "There are werewolves that are moving into the area. Recruiting and turning others. Trying to recruit mutants or enhanced people, even," Stephanie tells Diana Prince.

"They are called Lycans, and apparently are at war with a group of vampires. So far, the vampires don't seem to be ones who prey on humans. We've had some contact with one of them, and she's been an ally, given us info on these Lycans. They appear to be setting up bases around the area before making a move on the vampires in New York."

It's a lot to go through, but Stephanie figures Diana should know the situation. "So... we're told these Lycans can't be cured. But we're not sure. We're loathe to kill them. That's what the vampires do. But the Lycans are big, and powerful. And dangerous. And frankly I don't know that I'd trust the government to get hold of them."

She's heard about ARGUS, and Superman's body.

"So, I was wondering if you knew of a way they could be imprisoned safely. I wasn't even thinking prison but like... stasis? Or, send them to some other planet or dimension or... I don't even know. That's not really a Gotham kind of thing. I just... don't want to have to kill them."

Wonder Woman has posed:
As they start to leave the conference room and Stephanie begins to lay out the plight of a war between other 'mytical' creatures, the Princess absorbs it and does again softly frown. "I have dealt with both Vampire and Werewolves in my day. Here in the United States and abroad. They are rare... Vampires tend to be in cities like this, but Werewolves often stick to less populated locations. Of course, nothing like that tends to ever stick to any 'rules' you assign to them."

A glance is given to Stephanie then. "I know that you are trained not to kill and I admire that a great deal. I, however, was trained to kill when I am given no other options. KIlling my enemies has been an unfortunate measure I have had to take on a number of occasions. It never pleases me. These... Lycans? I would probably kill one if it gave me no choice."

"But." Diana glances to Steph while they start down the hallway.

"Finding a more creative solution to a Lycan, or even a Vampire - if they are an issue as well - you might seek out the counsel of someone within the realm of magic. Doctor Stephen Strange is a good source for this. I can setup an appointment with him, if you'd like... he is... interesting. But, as capable as anyone you could ever meet."

"It is possible he could have solutions that do not involve killing."

Spoiler has posed:
Stephanie gives a small nod, the girl's blue eyes drifting away from the Amazon as her thoughts momentarily go off down a different path. Wondering if Diana Prince would have killed a friend, if they needed to be stopped and it was the only way.

She pretends to be interested in something they pass rather than look back at Diana just yet. Afraid something might show in her eyes just then. Though Stephanie nods, showing she's listening. When she finally looks back, she's more composed again. "Doctor Stephen Strange. I would appreciate that very much," Stephanie says with a smile. "Unfortunately their numbers are growing in Gotham. I'd rather we deal with them before the can recruit too many more," she says. If that is even possible.

Wonder Woman has posed:
Diana moves at a casual pace down the quiet hallway, there are employees of the Center still here and some can be seen here and there but their numbers are light too. "In my experience..." Diana starts her response. "Groups like that tend to grow and grow, then begin to fall in upon themselves. The internal dramatics of 'being' those things, often leads them to being too ferocious, too vicious and there-by too unstable to survive as a very large group. But..." She shakes her head very gently. "Maybe this is a different breed all together. I am happy to help should it come to it."

"Oh, and I will give you contact information for a few others, if Stephen is unable - or unwilling - to assist. Perhaps Zatanna Zatara could aid you as well, she would be a good choice also, I would think and is perhaps a bit more personable than Stephen." Diana shows another soft smile then to Steph.