Growing Pains DC/DBZ

After the lab incident I decided to take a few days for myself. No training, no fights, just flying randomly across the continent and taking in some sights and trying to clear my head.

It was nice.

By the fourth day I had pretty much sorted myself out and while what Bizzaro did still upset me, I decided he made his choice and I had to respect that even if I didn't get why he did it. I would respect that.

Of course that left me in a slightly awkward position of what to do next.

I had a feeling all the older heroes were going to be weird about things for a while and I didn't want to deal with that. I mean, I didn't blame them. Making sure other people were okay was kinda their whole thing…but I didn't need that anymore.

And I didn't want the first time meeting up with the Sidekick Squad after a while being awkward because they thought I was fragile or something.

So I needed to find someone who could let the Justice League know I was okay now and didn't need to be babied and wouldn't get weird about meeting up for some fun.

…I was pretty sure Thanagarians dealt with all their problems by hitting them in the face like a proper person, so Hawkie should be a pretty good choice! Plus I hadn't seen her in a while anyway.

Now I just had to find her…

-o-

Why was it so hard to find a woman with giant freaking bird wings attached to her?! Why was she harder to find than freaking Superman? Seriously, I found an internet post about how he helped put out a fire less than an hour ago with a two minute internet search, but the last thing I found about Hawkie was over a month old!

Wait, crap. She was an alien who wasn't abandoned on Earth. Was she even on the planet?

I groaned and collapsed on the keyboard in front of me. This sucked.

"Are you having trouble, dear?" A kind voice asked behind me.

I looked up and around to see the old librarian had wandered over – probably to get me to stop laying on her equipment – and was now looking kindly at me through some thick glasses and occasionally glancing at the computer monitor.

"School project?"

I shrugged, not surprised by the mistaken impression. Afterall, I had ditched my armor today for a tight black shirt and some looser fitting cargo pants – so many pockets! – that hid my tail pretty well so I did look like a normal human teenager just looking things up in the library.

"I'm trying to find stories about Hawkwoman, but it's not going great. Nothing recent is coming up."

"Oh, that's because the media started calling her Hawkgirl a while back. I think it was to make her seem a bit more friendly since she is so…aggressive…when she's going around fighting." the librarian sounded disapproving of that. "We don't want little girls going around thinking that screaming your head off is something we want mature young women to do." She sniffed.

"Right…"

I got the distinct impression that doing anything but smiling and nodding along was going to get me a long lecture about the 'proper' way of things and I had no interest in being talked at until I fell asleep.

I had other things to do!

Such as looking up sightings of Hawkie using her actual name since I had apparently lost that mental coin flip. Seriously, Hawkgirl instead of Hawkwoman? Hawkie looked like she was around the same age as Wonder Woman. If Donna showed up calling herself Wonder Girl or something like that and the media put them on the same level, Hawkie was going to flip.

I paused reading the article I found while I thought about that.

On second thought, I prayed that would happen. The mental image of a bunch of newsies getting chased around by a pissed off Thanagarian screaming that she was a grown woman was too funny to pass up.

"This is exactly what I needed! Thanks, Miss Librarian!"

"Happy to help, dear. Good luck on your assignment and please don't lay on the keyboards again."

-o-

Unfortunately Hawkgirl wasn't as famous a hero as Wonder Woman, Superman, or the Flash.

Kinda, I mean she was obviously well known considering she was a founding member of the Justice League. Maybe it was better to say she wasn't as popular? As media friendly?

All of the others were constantly in the news in one way or another that my target simply wasn't. Thankfully for me though, she wasn't on the level of Batman, who was usually only caught by a camera when he wanted to be.

That meant that even the most recent sighting I could find in an afternoon using public internet was a few days old. And considering she could fly at a decent speed that meant it was almost useless. But it did give me a place to start looking.

So after one last check to see if there was a more recent sighting that turned up nothing, I was off to the northern part of the Rockies to hunt down a bird woman.

And promptly got stuck on what to do next because trying to find one person in a mountain range with no idea where to start looking was really freaking hard!

Even going by Ki sense and only looking for the bigger sources I wasn't getting much luck. Thanagarians had more Ki than your average human, but it wasn't so different that I could just pinpoint who I was looking for at a glance. I ended up dropping in on a few hikers, four bears, and some sort of gorilla man before I found a group of Ki signatures a bit stronger than usual that I immediately went off to investigate.

Why?

Because there were six of them moving really close together, and more interestingly, they were underground…relatively. They were still pretty high up a mountain but being inside the mountain still counts.

But that meant there was some kind of secret base inside a mountain that was begging to be explored!

Unfortunately knowing that there was a secret base inside a mountain didn't mean that I knew where the entrance was. And I had gotten yelled at by Donna enough to know that blasting through the walls wasn't a really good idea if you wanted whatever was on the other side intact. Or for the roof to not cave in on your head because walls were important for that.

So, yeah. No impersonating the kool-aid man unless I knew what the other side looked like.

But that was fine, I had learned infiltration from Batman, after all.

And one of the earliest lessons he had given me was that sometimes all you needed to do to sneak inside a secure location was just wait until someone left and be quick. And since the six people I was sensing seemed to be getting closer to the mountain's surface, I had a hunch I wasn't going to need to wait long.

Moving carefully just in case there were some kind of external sensors, I flew close to the rock face and hid behind some boulders. I didn't need to wait long before the group of six got even closer before coming to a stop. The rock face split open as a hidden door revealed itself and I poked my head out to–

"Oh ffff—" I yelped and dove back down behind my own rock as some kind of ship came screaming out of the mountain and almost took my head off. I turned to track it just in case they saw me on the way out, but the ship kept going slightly up into the air before vanishing into the sky.

Okay, I guess that explained why the six of them were moving so close together. Really didn't appreciate the near-haircut, but no time to complain, I needed to sneak in before the door shut again!

I managed to slip through just before the fake rock walls closed and landed in a crouch. I had to resist the urge to whisper 'I'm in' as I looked around.

Not that there was much to see initially.

So far I was just in a tunnel big enough for the ship I just dodged to fly down that went deeper into the mountain but not much else in sight.

Only one way to go then.

I flew down the tunnel keeping an eye out for anything that looked like a camera or sensor like Batman had taught me, but I also remembered he told me going anywhere for the first time without scoping it out almost guaranteed that you would miss something so I went in half expecting something to notice my presence.

So when the tunnel opened up into a large hangar with absolutely no sign that I had been noticed going off I wasn't sure if I should be disappointed that I apparently managed to sneak in so easily or be proud of my stealth skills. For now I was going to go with a bit of both and see what I could poke into before something discovered me. Maybe those six were the only living things here?

That thought was almost instantly disproven when a door at the back of the room opened and a bipedal lizard man in some sort of armor walked into the room and began digging through what looked like a toolbox. I hurriedly ducked behind a crate of some kind and peeked out to see if I had been spotted, but the lizardman seemed focused on finding what he was looking for instead.

Definitely more people in the secret base then, but more concerningly I couldn't sense him.

This wasn't like with the squids the spacecrabs used or the suit the army had built because I could see the lizard was an alien and not a robot, yet even looking right at him he was invisible to my Ki sense. Some function on his armor? But then why did the previous six show up? Was it intentional, or was it just a side effect? And what were a bunch of alien lizards doing in a secret mountain base in the first place?

Too many questions were piling up and I knew smashing through their base now meant I wasn't likely going to get many answers. I was going to have to continue being sneaky.

But I consoled myself with the knowledge that if I couldn't find answers by poking around I could always default to smashing stuff if I got caught or found nothing…

Now then, how to sneak into the main part of the base without getting spotted moving across a mostly open room?

I spotted a vent that looked just big enough for me to squeeze through and felt a giant grin stretch across my face.

If the lizardmen hadn't kicked up an alarm yet, that meant they definitely didn't suspect someone had broken into their base. They doubly wouldn't suspect someone to be crawling around inside their walls…

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