Rising Robin

Chapter XXX: Outsiders

Dick shut his bedroom door close & took a deep breath. He turned around and surveyed his bedroom. There was four pizza boxe lying across the floor. Two of them had already been eaten, & a third was almost finished beside the green boy & the half-robot man. They were clearly starving. The mysterious prisoner with the dark hair was sitting beside the window with his knees held up towards his chest. He was staring at everyone else with a clear look of anxiety across his face. Rachel was sitting beside Kori, who were both sharing a pizza box together. Kori was barely eating the pizza. Rachel ate her slice regularly, but was holding Kori with one arm around her. She was taking care of her. Roy was beside Jim on Dick's bed. Roy & Jim were talking, catching up almost.

Harper emerged from Dick's bathroom & looked up at everyone. She turned to Dick. "Well, I guess the pizza was a good idea."

Dick sighed. "I thought it'd be good for them to get something to eat since we weren't followed."

Harper nodded. "And...bringing them here..."

Dick shook his head. "Where else could they go, Harper?"

Harper was silent for a moment. "Well, on your way here, I continued to hack through Cadmus' servers & looked into the ones you broke out of the base."

Dick raised an eyebrow. "What'd you find?"

Harper cleared her throat. She looked around the room and nodded towards Jim. "That one was apparently cloned. Cadmus abducted him & engineered a superhuman clone capable of abnormal strength, healing, & speed. He's basically indestructible."

"Wow," Dick murmured to himself. "What else did you find?"

Harper nodded to Kori. "They established that Kori was an extraterrestrial being, & they extracted a few blood samples & reproductive cells from her."

Dick looked down at Harper, trying to find any sort of falter in her to indicate shock. She seemed to have already had her moment of surprise when she first looked into the server.

"Now, those two pigs over there are interesting," Harper said, gesturing towards the green boy & the half-robot man. "The kid is named Garfield Logan. He's 15 years old, & apparently his parents were both doctors who worked at Cadmus. They worked in some biology sector when they came across a kind of virus that infected them. They were unaware that they were sick when they came home & brought it to their kid. The doctors died, but when they did, Cadmus took Garfield in to study the effects of the virus. I didn't get to read what it had done to him, but apparently the virus is now dormant & non-threatening at this point in his life.

"The man is Victor Stone. He's only 20. He was a handyman at Cadmus. He didn't get paid a lot, & he didn't see a lot of what Cadmus really was. He would fix some computers, vehicles, some medical equipment. He was your average Joe. One day, while trying to fix one of Cadmus' military helicopters, the whole thing fell and crushed the poor guy. Cadmus fixed him up, but they used him as the first for their Cyborg Initiative project. They wanted to engineer the first half-man/half-robot in the world. They studied him for a while, but he was never able to test his abilities."

Dick looked at the two. They had such tragic stories, but Dick was staring at the two filling up their faces with pepperoni pizza & bonding. They couldn't be any happier to have been freed.

"What do you think will happen if Victor eats that pizza?" Dick asked. "Like, do you think it'll clog up the 'robot' in him, or...?"

Harper sighed. "The other dude back there, I looked up his prisoner code. SC-619 is registered as a classified project. I would be careful with him."