Robinson Hall cast long shadows across the quad at 7:15 AM, and Elijah was already on his second loop of the campus perimeter when the coffee cart opened.
He hadn't slept. Hadn't tried. The hours between 4 AM and dawn had gone into the tutorial — a dry, functional walkthrough delivered in clean system text, no fanfare, no congratulations. The MPES explained itself the way a piece of software explained itself: through menus and tooltips, patient and utterly without warmth.
The core logic was simple enough. Collective belief was a force in this universe. It already powered half of what made DC's heavy-hitters what they were — Superman's solar absorption worked better because humanity believed in his invincibility, Wonder Woman's strength scaled with faith in her divinity, the Bat's reputation alone stopped crimes. The MPES was a mechanism to let him harvest that same force deliberately. Build a legend. Make people believe in it. Become, functionally and measurably, what they believed him to be.
The word belief kept appearing in the documentation with the weight of a technical term, not a spiritual one.
He was still turning that over when the coffee cart worker handed him a medium dark roast without asking his order, which meant the previous Elijah had been enough of a regular to have a standing request. He paid with the cash from the wallet in the dorm room — fifty-three dollars and change, which wasn't much — and kept walking.
The alley between the student union and the science building was empty at this hour. He ducked in, checked both ends, and pulled up the HUD in full Combat Mode — just to see. The overlay expanded, filling his peripheral with data: ambient threat assessment (zero threats detected), environmental analysis (brick, two exits, sight lines north and south), his own stats in a compact sidebar. He toggled to Stealth Mode and the HUD compressed to a hairline bar in the upper right corner, barely visible unless he focused on it. The relief was immediate. He'd been faintly paranoid about his eyes doing something weird in public, glowing or tracking in wrong directions.
[STEALTH MODE: Active. HUD visibility suppressed. Passive monitoring continues.]
No visible glow. Nobody would see it.
That's not nothing.
He left the alley and bought a newspaper from the stand near the library entrance — physical copy, three dollars, the Gotham Gazette — and found a bench in the quad with a sight line to three different building entrances out of long professional habit from absolutely zero previous experience with surveillance. The pigeon that landed near his feet got a significant chunk of his muffin because he had nowhere to be for forty minutes and it seemed like a reasonable thing to do with time.
The date was September 15. That confirmed the year — three years into the decade, which put him right where the outline had suggested. Batman Year Eight. He found the anchor point in the Metro section, a seven-paragraph article about the GCPD booking three of Killer Croc's associates after a warehouse confrontation in the Narrows the previous night. The vigilante known as Batman was reported at the scene, the article noted in that particular weary Gotham journalist register that had learned to be precise about what it couldn't prove. The article's editorial framing — neither celebrating nor condemning the Bat — read like a city that had been having this argument for close to a decade and was tired of it.
A sidebar editorial on page five, half above the fold, discussed the Justice League's recent public statement on planetary threat response. Divisive was the word they used. Premature was the word three quoted officials used. The League existed, recently formed, not yet trusted by the institutions it had saved twice.
He folded the newspaper and mapped the timeline against his working knowledge of DC continuity, which was approximately the knowledge of someone who'd mainlined comics for two years in high school and caught up on major storylines via Wikipedia summaries as an adult. Good for broad strokes. Unreliable for specific dates. He knew the Court of Owls was active. He knew Ra's al Ghul had something coming. He knew Crane was operational and affiliated with the university in some capacity — the precise shape of that association in this version of continuity was fuzzy, but the broad strokes were there.
You know enough to be dangerous and not enough to be safe.
The meeting with Dr. Kaplan was at ten.
He spent the forty minutes before it in the library with the previous Elijah's thesis notes spread on the table, moving fast through the primary sources the dead man had already compiled: colonial-era Gotham census records, a digitized collection of the Gazette's predecessor papers going back to 1822, three secondary sources on urban mythology and vigilante archetypes. The previous Elijah had been genuinely good at this. The footnotes were careful, the sourcing was solid, and the chapt er outline for the Pale Rider section was more developed than the rest — twelve pages of notes versus three on the other figures.
He cared about this one, Elijah thought.
[Thesis Research logged. +45 EXP. Persona-Relevant Activity: Pale Rider archetype.]
He hadn't expected that. He blinked at the notification for a moment, then added thesis = not coincidental power source to his internal list of confirmed facts and kept reading.
Dr. Kaplan's office was on the third floor of the history building, stuffed floor-to-ceiling with books in four languages and covered in sticky notes in at least two different colored ink systems. She was sixty, sharp, and impatient in the specific way of academics who had been waiting twenty years for funding that kept not arriving. She waved him into the chair across from her desk without looking up from the paper she was marking.
"The Crane lecture announcement came through," she said. Still not looking up.
"I saw it."
"I want you in the front row taking notes. Crane's been publishing on crowd fear response and mass hysteria — there's potential crossover with the Pale Rider primary sources, the colonial mob behavior data specifically."
"I'll be there."
She looked up then. Studying him. He held still under it, keeping the previous Elijah's face calibrated to something between attentive and neutral, not the sudden spike of recognition that had hit him when she said Crane.
"You look tired," she said.
"Late night. The Fetter source on the 1823 incident opened a citation gap I needed to close."
She looked satisfied by that — a student who lost sleep over citation gaps was a student who was going to deliver a thesis on time. She spent forty minutes pulling apart the Pale Rider chapt er outline with the precise dismantling skill of someone who had received and destroyed thirty years of graduate drafts. He took notes. He pushed back twice, on points where the previous Elijah's argument was defensible with sources she hadn't checked. She nodded at him when he cited them. The nodding meant he'd passed some threshold.
He left with four pages of feedback, a harder October deadline than he'd expected, and the specific cold knowledge that Dr. Phoebe Kaplan was a sharp enough reader of people that he would need to maintain this cover consistently.
On the walk back across the quad, he stopped at the bulletin board outside Robinson Hall.
The flyer was printed on yellow paper, tacked at eye level. GCPD FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY DIVISION — COMMUNITY LECTURE SERIES. September 23. Dr. Jonathan Crane, PhD. "Fear Response and Urban Sociology: How Gotham's Culture of Threat Shapes Civic Behavior."
He stood there long enough that a passing student gave him a second look.
Jonathan Crane. Eight days away. Robinson Hall. A public lecture with a campus-wide audience.
He took a photo of the flyer with the dead man's phone and put it in his pocket and walked back toward the dorm, and the number eight sat in his chest like a stone with a countdown scratched into it.
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