Tanya began the show with a haughty laugh. "You have fallen into my trap, caped crusader!"
"The Court of Owls starts young, don't they?" Batman snarked back.
"Silence!" Tanya shouted over him. "I am Horned Owl, Mistress of the Mystic Arts! Now, you may think that you've found the secret of Talon manufacture, but you have only found… your DOOM!" Tanya laughed some more. "My associates have arranged diversions, stretching your allies thin, so you found yourself here alone, your arrogance assured that you could handle however many dozen Talons we have here, at our most secure sanctum."
"It takes more than the undead to daunt the fists of justice!" Batman declared, matching her energy. He actually does this more often than one would think, when the mood strikes him and the stakes are low, but he's not really… known for it.
But there's one reason he does it for tactics, which was why it was the plan. "Are you listening to yourself?" Tanya shouted, offended. "Take me seriously!" She didn't mean to have her voice crack with that line, but it was perfectly timed with her stomp.
"You're finished." Batman said, "The only thing the Court had were the Talons, and you've revealed your Full House. But I have a four of a kind!" He threw a set of four Batarangs at her, which Tanya waved a wand at to easily deflect.
"Talons, attack!" Tanya shouted. "You've underestimated the power of generations of wealth and magical lore, dating back to the founding of Gotham! Our Talons number in the hundreds, all with one job: killing you!" Indeed, the eight hundred or so undead started to get out of their coffins, already pre-prepared with enough dionysium to get them all moving, enough to create forty more.
Batman, of course, was prepared for this: He immediately started to fight them, using a sword Tanya had prepared for him earlier in the week for this. With each stroke, a Talon fell, each soul released from the eternal torment of undeath. Sure, Project Last Laugh still has yet to create a weapon that could do more than release a few of his victims before his soul retreats from his body back into Slaughter Swamp and forms into a new corpus, but against lesser forms of undead the results were impressive.
Still, there was a reason Tanya's plan got so much approval: the fundamental concept of Batman not being able to take on eight hundred skilled combatants when he was denied the ability to make it a running battle was sound. It would just… take at least a minute for Bruce to tire enough to have his combat performance diminish.
Which meant that they had to sabotage things. But first… "You'll regret that, you little brat!!" The shade of Rhine shouted.
Tanya spritzed the shade with some random perfume that she had in her dimensional storage; she wasn't exactly the biggest fan of the stuff, but it was a common enough gift that she received that she had quite the supply. However, the shade reacted as if she really did use the Bat Demon repellant, wheezing and avoiding the demon-killing knife stroke by retreating into Batman's shadow. "Come back here!" Tanya demanded. "How am I supposed to win if you run away?"
"Fuck you, God too." Said the Rhine shade's tilted middle finger before it fully slipped into Batman's shadow. Ooh, good improvisation. Sometimes her soul fragments surprise her with their cleverness.
"Bill!" Tanya commanded, "Why isn't Batman dead yet?"
"He is-" William Cobb disengaged, avoiding Batman's sword strike. "-quite skilled, Mistress."
"Alright, now I'm going to have to get serious." Tanya announced, "Yah!" She waved her demon wand, which allowed her to wordlessly grasp a few of the coffins telekinetically and start dropping them onto Batman's battlefield.
Surprisingly, she managed to hit… no one. She was deliberately avoiding Bruce, but the Talons were on the ball enough that the only ones that got squished were the ones who had already been exorcised.
Batman attempted to disengage with a usage of his grappling hook, but Tanya waved the wand again and severed the line before he could fully leave, allowing him to resposition to another part of the massive arena, one much less slick with embalmed gore, but not allowing him to escape. "Nuh ah ah!" Tanya said, waving a finger. "Naughty Bat, but this is a fair fight. No tricks, just naked force! You have no more backup coming, I will win!"
"I don't need to call for backup." Batman said seriously, cutting down more Talons. "All I need to do is help someone else. You see, I got an interesting call from Wonder Woman a half hour ago: as it turned out, her daughter had slipped away in secret. She's very worried."
Tanya stilled, pretending that she was trying not to respond. "-she'll be far too busy with that to help you!" She said, deliberately cracking her voice this time to convey panic. "Even if you called her now, she won't get here in time to save you."
"I called her the second I heard your voice." Batman boasted. "She's right behind you."
"Impossible!" Tanya said, turning around only to see… nothing. "You lie!" She said, turning back around… only to have her vision occupied by large breasts. Looking up, she saw that Diana really wasn't that good at acting: she was obviously trying to look angry, but she couldn't stop smiling.
"Shouldn't you be in bed right now, young lady?" Diana asked, her line in the script.
"I don't have a bedtime!" Tanya snapped back, which was technically true. She used to have an official one, but when she graduated high school it was decided that they didn't need to give her one for appearance's sake. "I can stay up as much as I want!"
"Well if this is what you get up to late at night, that's going to have to change." Diana said, crossing her arms. She seemed more comfortable in the role this play gave her. "You're grounded."
"What?" Tanya shrieked, hamming it up. "I don't get 'grounded'! What does that even mean?"
Diana paused. Did she forget her line? "...Batman, what does grounding mean? I know it's a punishment here in America, but what are the specifics?" Nice save.
"I'm a little busy." Batman said.
"Tch." Diana tutted, before joining the battle. On his own, Bruce managed to take out about one Talon per three seconds for about three minutes, totaling sixty slain undead, the rest of his time spent trying to stay alive. With Diana providing enough of a wrecking ball to destroy the Talon's ability to coordinate into a press of lethal bodies, that pace rapidly accelerated.
"Noooooo!" Tanya shouted. "My plan!" She took out her phone and called Jacob. "Uncle, Uncle, the plan is shot!"
"What?" The Voice of the Court asked. "Also-"
"I literally told you about blood magic." Tanya deadpanned, "Did you think I'd be fooled by a voice changer? I knew from minute one. You're the Voice of the Court, the first among equals in the Court of Owls."
"...Alright, what's going on?" Jacob asked.
"Mom showed up. She saw through my decoy and came looking." Tanya explained. "Batman and her are beating up all the Talons now."
"...What, did she not fall for the old pillows under your covers trick?" Jacob asked caustically.
"I do more than that!" Tanya insisted, "Daddy always falls by it! He could give my illusion a kiss goodnight and never suspect a thing!" This was blatantly false; Bruce could always tell, but not because of any deficiencies with her illusions.
"...this is the first time you've used it against her, isn't it?" Jacob deadpanned.
"She only moved in a few days ago!" Tanya protested, "This is not my fault!"
"It is." Jacob said icily. "With your arrogance, you've done more to break the Court of Owls than Batman himself. Where are you now?"
"Huh?" Tanya asked, playing dumb. "I'm still at the fight. There's…" Tanya peered down at the arena. "Maybe two hundred Talons left? They're still going at it. Super brave of them. Batman has an exorcist sword, it's pretty cool." Diana also had one, but it was plausible that she already had it, which was why hers was made to resemble one of her other swords, while Batman had a katana.
"You little idiot!" Jacob hissed.
"That's hurtful." Tanya complained. "I'm really smart!"
"You didn't escape when you had the chance? Only a fool would do that." Jacob retorted. "Order a retreat."
"Retreat to where?" Tanya asked. "If I told them just to retreat, they'd come here! Also, I'd get in even more trouble if I ran away! I heard on the internet that the Amazons still believe in spanking! I don't want to go over Mom's knee!"
"That's not- Where did you hear- Nevermind!" Jacob sputtered, as usual when Tanya makes an "inadvertent" dirty joke. "The Court can still survive this. We will merely have to lay low for the foreseeable future. Destroy all the evidence, the equipment and literature. Remember the code of silence: No one knows anyone else." Because of the masks, you see. It wasn't supposed to work, it was just a fig leaf that anyone who was questioned could use to claim that they knew no one else in the group. Even Tanya had only identified about half of them. Bruce probably had a more complete picture in his files.
"Okay Uncle Jacob." Tanya chirped. "I don't know who you are."
"...If you breathe a word of the Court, being my favorite niece will not save you from my wrath." Jacob threatened.
"Fear your wrath, got it." Tanya said airily. "Who are you again?"
"I've made a huge mistake…" Jacob growled to himself, the phone only barely picking it up. "Just don't forget to demand a lawyer. I'll send my best defense attorney, he's from the best law firm in Gotham, the same one Bruce uses for personal matters. He'll know how to get you out of this."
"I'm not taking an insanity plea." Tanya said immediately.
"You're a minor, you don't need to take an insanity plea. Listen to Mr. Clark," Ah, Clark was another one of the high society families. He must be a Court of Owls lawyer. "-do what he says, and be prepared to bring out the waterworks."
"Got it." Tanya said firmly. "But… is Mom going to listen to my lawyer?"
Jacob guffawed. "You're on your own for that one, kid."
"Traitor." Tanya said, also smiling. After seeing so many shit parents and other relatives in this world, even a manipulative asshole like Jacob could seem like a top-class uncle.
"You're the supervillain, I'm just a CEO." Jacob said, amused. "You get to handle the superhero."
"But I'm a Batman villain, not a Wonder Woman villain!" Tanya argued back. "Do you think I'm in Giganta's weight class?"
"I dunno, how many sweets have you eaten today?" Jacob joked. "Look, I have to go. Remember what I said." He hung up.
Tanya looked over the battlefield, strewn with embalmed gore, the more recently exorcised bodies still glowing from the magic breaking down in their bodies. "Even by my standards this is grisly." She commented idly, magically conveying the words to her parents instead of saying them out loud for the video feed that should still be streaming to other members of the Court. "Even the Rhine didn't get this bloody more than once or twice a week."
"It's done." Batman declared, looking rather ill.
Her Rhine shade, visually indistinguishable from her normal demon form, once more emerged from Batman's shadow. "Loyal retainers to the end, a feast for me, an upward trend." The shade directed its non-face towards Tanya, although it did not come closer. "Surrender now, no matter how."
Diana picked Tanya up by the back of her bra, which given Tanya's track record for slipping out of her clothes when younger, was probably warranted, if rather uncomfortable. "You're in big trouble, Tanya." She said, taking the mask off. "Now, I'll work out your exact punishment with your father, but trust me, you'll regret ever putting on that mask. Honestly, what were you thinking?"
"That I'd be the most popular girl in the secret society if I pulled it off?" Tanya said.
Batman actually snorted in laughter. She may have switched her line for a funnier one than was in the script.
Just as planned.
-----------------------
The Court of Owls case was, bluntly, the legal circus of the year. The amount of evidence turned over to Jim Gordon was immense, and Tanya sang like a canary about everything, pinning all of her own crimes squarely on the manipulative Jacob Kane, who inducted her into the secret society and repeatedly brought her in to do illegal collusion with them.
While Tanya was certain she wouldn't have been able to adequately conduct this defense if it had been tried in her war crimes defense, that was partially because nothing she could have done would have worked, partially because she had too much pride back then to play dumb, and partially because even if she did try, she wasn't a good enough actress to be properly vapid, and finally she would have had little to no supporting evidence or character witness to endorse that version of events.
But between her improved acting skills and her previously established reputation as a bit of an airhead…
"So I called Mr. Sachs-" Tanya said, idly fidgeting with a pen as she sat on a law text. She wasn't quite short enough for it to be a necessary measure, but the pageantry around getting a book for her to sit on was helpful to her defense, and she wasn't so tall that it was a useless measure, either.
"Who is he?" Asked her lawyer, a Mr. Shore, who was from a law firm that wasn't compromised by the Court of Owls.
"Ah, my trust fund manager." Tanya said, "So I told him that I wanted the places that we agreed were mine in the meeting, but not if they were too expensive. Put in an offer for them, and don't put in a bid for anything else. Two weeks later, they were mine! Once all the vacancies get filled I'm getting, like, two million a year from rentals? Something like that." That was actually the figure for just one of the buildings, a commercial structure with a hundred and thirty thousand square feet of usable space. The largest figure, but when combined with the other twenty properties, both apartment complexes and a few storefronts, that acquisition was more like six million annually. "I'd need to check my email to see what the real numbers are right now."
"I see." Mr. Shore said, making a show of seeming frustrated. "You do realize that what you just described was a crime, right?"
Tanya frowned. "...You're making that up." she said, pointing at him. "What's wrong with buying things?"
"It's not the buying that was illegal, it was the part where you and your friends agreed to keep the sale prices low by not getting into a bidding war." Mr. Short patiently explained.
Tanya stared at him, acting confused. "But everyone does it." She said, "Uncle Jacob said they did it all the time, it's just sharing. Sharing is caring."
"No more questions, your honor." Mr. Shore said, having gotten his point across.
Normally, any lawyer would tell you that putting your client on the stand was to be avoided if at all possible. However, the point of this exercise was not to convict a nearly-twelve year old girl with anything remotely serious. Instead, it was an exercise of establishing on the legal record a bunch of testimony and evidence that can't be as easily interfered with in all of those other Court of Owls cases.
Nevertheless, the district attorney, a blonde woman by the name of Janice Porter, who was the one to arrange this and thus was personally handling the prosecution in this case, still had to at least pretend she was doing her job. "Miss Wayne, that meeting on the 24th of December, carving up Gotham before the dust from the alien attack settled-"
"Objection, council is pontificating." Mr. Shore quickly said.
"Sustained." The Judge said boredly. "Ask the question and only the question."
"My apologies, your honor." Ms. Porter said, "Now, I restate: Miss Wayne, that meeting on the 24th of December, that was merely the first time you cooperated with the other members of the Court of Owls, yes? There were others?"
"I know this one!" Tanya said excitedly. "I am pleading the fifth."
"You already talked about the other one. You're already in trouble." Ms. Porter pressed.
"Objection." Mr. Shore responded, "Not a question, and my client's already pleaded the fifth."
"Sustained." The judge repeated.
"Alright, is it true that you claimed you had slept through that span of time, shortly afterward?" She asked instead.
"It's a secret society, of course I lied about what I was doing." Tanya said, her tone screaming 'are you stupid?'. "I used all kinds of lies to hide when I went to the meetings."
"Such as?" Ms. Porter pressed.
"Well, those times we had the zombies fight for our amusement, I said I was going beetle hunting." Tanya started, "The time we all talked about Batman planting bugs in our meeting places, I said I was going to an anime convention, but I only went there half the day. That time we hired the world's best assassins to kill Batman, Uncle Jacob and I went to the military history museum after and just said we spent more time there than we did." She paused. "...That's all I remember off the top of my head. Those meetings were pretty memorable."
"...How many times did you have the zombies fight for your amusement?" Ms. Porter asked, apparently put off-kilter.
"They were really good at it." Tanya said, smiling at the memory. "Super flashy, so many ninja flips. It was a monthly thing. Every Second Saturday, so I only got to see it twice." She shrugged. "I mean, it's not like the zombies cared, they didn't even remember the fights."
"...and there aren't any left?" Ms. Porter asked.
"Objection, relevance?"
"...I want to hear this too." The judge decided. "Answer the question, Miss."
Kind of a tangent, but okay. "I mean, there might be a few? Uncle Jacob may have held a few back from the plan to have Batman fight all of them at once." Tanya said, pretending to think hard on it. "Or anyone who put one in a box that they couldn't escape before the recall order went out, I guess. But they were all accounted for before the fight, so they'd also need to have hacked the computer, and that thing's from the 80s and isn't connected to the internet, so-"
"That's enough, Miss Wayne." Ms. Porter replied, looking visibly frustrated. "Now, you mentioned at least two separate plans to kill Batman. This didn't… alarm you?"
Tanya shrugged. "I had my own problems during that assassin thing. I was just at the meeting." She blatantly lied. "Mom and Dad were in space, Ace had just moved in instead of just visiting a lot and things were kind of awkward… I had to magically bind myself to a thousand tons of bedrock, recover from massive blood loss… I was swamped."
"Wait, blood loss?" Ms. Porter asked.
"Do you have any idea how much blood it takes to bind yourself to a thousand tons of bedrock?" Tanya asked rhetorically. "A lot."
"But… why?"
"So I'd be too heavy to teleport." Tanya explained, "Duh."
"What about the other plan?" Ms. Porter asked, moving on.
"What plan?" Tanya asked, staring blankly.
"The other plan to kill Batman."
"I said I was sorry about that!" Tanya half-shouted. "It just… got away from me there."
"Wonder Woman carried you away from an Olympic swimming pool's worth of gore." Ms. Porter said, her voice getting a little shrill from her incredulity.
"Objection." Mr. Shore said, not even bothering to elaborate.
"Sustained."
Tanya answered the unspoken question anyway. "It is not difficult to get Mom or Dad to carry me places. I'm not heavy." Or rather, answered a completely different question. "I can just climb Dad's back and sit on his shoulders and he won't stop me."
"So what was the other plan to kill Batman?" Ms. Porter said testily.
"I mean… everyone else's plans were just so dumb." Tanya said, slowly. "Like, sure, Batman was using his cool exorcist sword to make the zombies' souls pass on to their regular destination or whatever, but he was doing it piecemeal, you know? Only a couple at a time. The obvious solution was to just set things up so he fought… all of them. At the same time. Easy."
"...That's it?"
"I mean, when you have an immortal army of the undead, it doesn't take a college degree to think of that." Tanya said, waving her hand airily. "Uncle Jacob, although I think he was wearing his Voice of the Court mask at the time, so I had to pretend I didn't know him, he thought it was a stupid idea. Called it 'the backup plan' as if his plan was better."
"So his plan was the assassins?" Ms. Porter asked, for clarification.
"Yeah, but that didn't go well." Tanya said dismissively. "Talia was such a b-word, too, so I was mad when I got home. I went home and brainstormed the bones of the plan, because that's what you do when you're angry: channel that energy into something productive… or destructive, either way you're not mad anymore."
"So you made a plan to kill Batman." Ms. Porter said, "One that, according to Batman's statement, would have succeeded if not for Wonder Woman's incidental intervention."
"Yep!" Tanya said chirpily. "It was a really good plan. But I can't take full credit, the other members of the Court decided my distractions weren't big enough and subcontracted that to…" She took a moment to recall the full list. "Black Mask, Revenant, Two-Face, Scarecrow, and the Penguin? Anyway, they had them all make trouble instead of my plans. Also, I didn't make the zombie army, so credit goes to the Court's necromancers as well."
"How magnanimous." Ms. Porter said sarcastically. "Now, my next question, is why did you follow through?"
"I mean, at first it was just to prove I was smart enough." Tanya said, looking away. "But then I started thinking about my supervillain name, and writing my monologue, and how if I did it Uncle Jacob would probably give me a fancy title, which would be the coolest, and…" She waved vaguely. "It got away from me."
"So you wanted to be a supervillain because it would be 'cool'." Ms. Porter deadpanned.
"It was pretty cool until Mom showed up." Tanya agreed. "Zombie juice was going everywhere, I got to spray Rhine in the face with holy water, everything was great."
"...Tell me, exactly how do you think Wonder Woman would have reacted if she learned you killed Batman?" Ms. Porter asked, which was her 'hard-hitting' question to end things off with. "That her friend would be dead?"
Tanya blinked, visibly baffled. "What are you talking about?"
"If you had succeeded, Batman would be dead." Ms. Porter explained. "People die when they are killed."
Tanya stared at her. The difference between the 'head empty' expression and 'gears turning' expression was subtle, but she's had a lot of practice. "No, I'm pretty sure Batman's immortal." She said after a moment. "Like the Joker."
"The Joker can also die." Ms. Porter added.
"Objection! Facts not in evidence." Mr. Shore added.
"Overruled." The Judge said, "The Joker is just a sick man." The authorities really disliked admitting that the Joker was immortal.
"He's not, though." Tanya said. "Regardless, Batman's got a plan for dying, he'd have been fine." Tanya said with confidence. "He's Batman, after all."
Needless to say, she got off scott free. The trust fund manager should have been responsible enough to check why she gave such specific instructions, which got her off of the financial crimes, Jacob got culpability for all of the Court of Owls related crimes, and as far as the supervillainy charges? Responsibility fell to whoever decided to give deployment authority of an army of the undead to an eleven year old girl.
She got some on-paper punishments from Diana and Bruce, but as the whole matter was an undercover operation to make sure they could get good enough evidence to make the charges stick, an incredible challenge when dealing with the wealthy and politically powerful, the only real punishments she got were the ones she earned for trying to kill David Cain. Meaning, out of that whole display, the worst punishment she got was a schedule of five piano concerts.
Sure, the Court of Owls' power base was now shattered, but at what cost?