Daniel snapped his fingers, and both Kara and Harleen immediately lost consciousness. He caught them before they hit the floor and laid them safely on the bed.
Kryptonians were vulnerable to magic, so dealing with Kara wasn't much of a problem. Harleen was the one he actually wanted to understand.
Let's see if there's anything wrong with Harleen, he thought, examining her.
Kara could wait — her personality got strange sometimes, especially when something touched her mind. Harleen was different. Her behavior had shifted far too suddenly, and Daniel wanted to know if something had happened to her.
He checked for unusual energy, magical influence, anything that might explain the change.
Nothing.
Strange.
The bedroom door opened, and Rachel walked in. "Daniel, I wanted to ask you something..."
She stopped, eyes moving from Daniel to Harleen and Kara lying unconscious on the bed, then back to him.
"Pervert."
"Nope. Something else," Daniel said, not in the mood for the accusation.
Rachel glanced at the two women again. "Big pervert."
"Can you stop with the pervert business? I'm having a little trouble here."
She sighed and walked farther in, stopping beside him. "So, I'm going to Michigan for a while?"
"To learn more about your mother and your past?"
"Yeah. I want to see if I can find out what happened to my real mother, whether she's still alive."
Daniel nodded slowly. "So you're planning to search all over Michigan for her?"
"That's the plan."
"Teenagers are really hard to handle, huh?" he said, glancing at her.
"You were a teenager once too."
"Yeah, but I wasn't this difficult."
"Sure you weren't."
He sighed. "Fine. Maybe I was."
"So, can I go?"
"Yeah, you can go."
Rachel didn't move.
Daniel noticed the hesitation. "What?"
She looked slightly embarrassed. "I don't really have any money."
That explained the delay. "Right. Go ask Diana. She can go with you — travel together, she'll keep you out of trouble. She's an adult, and she can handle most of what you're likely to run into."
Rachel looked toward the hallway. "Diana? You mean the tall one?"
"Yeah, her. Just try to be considerate while you're traveling with her."
Rachel nodded and headed off to find her.
Daniel turned back to his phone, which had been buzzing nonstop with notifications. He unlocked it and found news alerts piling up from several cities.
He opened the first one.
"Communities across the country are reporting an unexpected increase in criminal activity involving metahumans. Authorities have confirmed multiple incidents involving individuals with previously undocumented abilities."
He frowned, scrolling through the reports. Videos everywhere — a man covered in flames fighting police in Chicago, an armored criminal tearing through an intersection in Metropolis, another metahuman throwing cars during a robbery, several more incidents all within hours of each other.
Why are villains suddenly popping up like mushrooms during the rainy season?
There had always been criminals with powers, but never this many at once. Yesterday hadn't been anywhere close to this bad.
The broadcast kept playing.
"Despite the sudden increase in metahuman crime, federal officials are urging the public to remain calm. The government's newly organized special task force has already responded to several incidents and successfully apprehended multiple suspects."
The footage cut to armed government personnel loading captured metahumans into armored vehicles.
"Officials say the successful operations demonstrate that the country does not have to depend entirely on independent superheroes for protection. A government-controlled response force is now capable of confronting threats that conventional police departments cannot handle."
Daniel's casual expression fell away.
He thought back to the strange energy that had vanished from his brain. Then he thought of Cisco's question.
If the energy left you, where did it go?
He lowered the phone slowly.
"...Oh, fuck."
***
"Wow, where did all these psychos suddenly come from? Riddler, Scarecrow... wasn't one Joker enough? Where the hell did all these clowns come from?"
Robin stood on the rooftop beside Batman, watching the scene below. A man in a torn suit was being loaded into a police vehicle while officers carefully bagged several canisters scattered across the street.
Robin pointed. "That's Scarecrow, right? The guy who uses that gas to cause hallucinations?"
Batman watched Jonathan Crane get taken away in silence.
Something is wrong.
*****
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