They had the cover of night to work with. Batman had kept his batplane safely hidden and now that the transponder was fixed and the clouds had cleared up, he could access it. He was able to send his coordinates to the pilot-less plane, which arrived on the island twenty awkward minutes later. When they landed somewhere closer to Ambon City, she disappeared immediately, making no secret of her resentment.
UPON RETURN
When Bruce got back to the Batcave, he immediately parked the batplane and got out, happy to be headed to the shower. When he got out, Alfred was there, expecting him. He had brought down a big plate of foods full of protein and carbs.
"Well, Master Bruce, aside from being stranded and underfed... Was the mission a success?" Alfred asked as Bruce stuffed his face.
Bruce informed him of the details regarding the drugs and the criminals.
"...and then, I heard his partner, Sinaga, and he has Cheshire. Do you remember her? The one with the armor and the poisons?"
"Yes, of course, Master Bruce."
"And he's about to assault her..." he said, pausing to chew. "So, I get down to the lower floor and incapacitate several of them. And the next thing I know, I hit my head and I'm on the island."
"How did you get there?"
"Cheshire brought me there after there was an explosion and I was knocked unconscious. I know, you're going to ask if it was her that knocked me out, but she was tied up across the room. I saw her." he explained, now grabbing a bottle of Gatorade. The safety seal cracked as he twisted off the top. "She was building a shelter on the island. She was after Sinaga, too. Ended up having to kill him. Was kinda upset about it."
"And why would that be, sir?" Alfred asked as he cleared an empty plate from the console desk.
"She said she hadn't killed very often. Makes me wonder. I should look that up." he said, fumbling for a pen and writing a note on some scratch paper. "She didn't have her mask anymore, either. Sinaga had taken it. Did you know she's Asian and Hispanic?"
"I did not, sir," he replied. He watched Bruce go on with interest.
"Yeah, it's interesting," Bruce said. For a few moments, he concentrated on ingesting more food. "Oh, wait. I think she's Portuguese, so, latina. Not hispanic. You know what else?" Bruce said, smirking and shaking his head. "She was flirting with me. Flirting with me! She had me 'accidentally' see her naked," he scoffed.
Alfred said nothing and started hosing down the Batman suit while Bruce finished his food. When he was done, Alfred stacked the dishes back won the tray. Before he walked back to the elevator, he gently patted Bruce on the shoulder from behind.
"You've been at this too long, old boy," Alfred told him.
"Oh, come on. When she tried to kiss me, I decided I'd better think about it first," Bruce added. "She could've taken a page from Poison Ivy's book and had poison lipstick."
"How wise of you. You do seem rather intrigued, though, don't you?" Alfred asked, holding the tray with one hand and summoning the elevator with the other.
"She was attractive and may be turning over a new leaf. It's worth looking into," Bruce said firmly. He pulled up some old articles from the Gotham City newspapers and started to browse them on the batcave's computer. Alfred went back upstairs, leaving Bruce to solve his mystery about Cheshire.
WAYNE TECH
Bruce Wayne sat at his desk on the top floor of Wayne Tech headquarters. A few weeks had passed since his adventure in Indonesia with Cheshire. Due to an intense curiosity, he had almost immediately started to look for her identity in Gotham City. Why was he so interested in pursuing her? Was he overlooking some serious issues because he was physically attracted to her? He decided to discard such questions and label the whole thing "criminal research."
Finding her had not been difficult for him. Gotham City was huge, but once he figured out her ancestry, there were not many Japanese-Brazilian women in their twenties with a background in art. When he saw a photo of Jada Versailles at the opening night of her art gallery in the Gotham Observer, he recognized her as Cheshire. The gallery was about six years old. She had bought it from a wealthy pillar of the art community who later died from breast cancer. Still, it could have been a front for something, he speculated. He saw a local magazine's photographs from four different events.
One spread showed her looking flawlessly professional at the beginning of the evening, but as the night went on, she became the life of the party. Gorgeous, he thought, looking at a picture of her getting a kiss on each cheek from two drag queens.
For the second event, Jada looked shifty. Still dressed immaculately with perfect makeup, there was something elusive about her eyes. Her nose looked slightly red. The picture was taken in August. Not time for allergies or cold weather. Crying for a long time? Drugs? This was around the time he had tangled with her as Batman. As Cheshire, she had gotten in a few good hits and evaded capture.
The next series of photos showed a DJ and a few minor celebrities in attendance. The pictures of her were nothing special. Pretty, of course, until... he saw her in the background of a photo of a sculpture. She was talking to a man dressed in black, tilting her head in that flirty way that women do when they're talking to someone they like. She appeared to be on his arm for the rest of the photos, but there wasn't a good picture of his face.
Jada was not pictured in the last event at the gallery with photographers present about 8 months ago. He checked, she still owned it. Bruce was scrolling through some tax documents for the gallery when he was interrupted by a group of coworkers who were calling him into a meeting.
The first presentation was about their new solar power technology. WayneTech Industries had developed very safe methods of using this power source, with minimal risk of environmental damage. Technology was not able to store large amounts of power yet, so their plant would be very large and have a wind power system for backup. WayneTech was considering donating their technology to a city in need to showcase their discoveries but also because philanthropy was an important part of their mission statement.
During the presentations, Bruce's mind was wandering back to Jada Versailles. Then his ears perked up. One of the locations his coworkers were recommending was in Coroada, Brazil. Apparently, their nuclear power plant had been assembled on the cheap because different groups skimmed from the funding. There had been a nuclear waste spill and the area had only recently begun to be inhabited again, years later. There was no longer an adequate power supply in the area, so only very poor people were living there.
Bruce voted to give the new power plant to Coroada. At the end of the week, the company had decided that Coroada was the least problematic location overall and decided to move forward. Bruce asked a plucky young intern to find people in the Gotham area that grew up near or in Coroada around the time of the accident. He wanted to speak to them about what the needs of the community were. He also didn't think anyone would trust his company to come in and build this power plant for free. He wanted to have real Brazilian people understand the project and guide them in how to set up the power plant to be sustainable, to eventually run on its own in Brazil without foreign interference. It was true, his company would get a lot of big contracts from other governments if this new power plant ran well, but it was a win-win because Coroada would get a new power plant and local jobs.
A few days later, the intern came to Bruce with a list of Brazilians who grew up in the area where the power plant accident had been. Unfortunately, most of them were too young to really remember important details about the corruption and devastation. There were six people that were in the right age group and three of them spoke okay English, the other three spoke almost none. Of course, Wayne Tech had the resources to hire a professional translator, but Bruce had Jada in mind. He planned to introduce himself at her gallery and eventually offer her the translating job to spend more time with her.
During a night as Batman, Bruce had injured his shoulder for the millionth time and it was taking a long time to recover. He was advised by a doctor friend to rest it for at least a month if he wanted it to heal well. So, the day had arrived when Bruce finally got himself to go to Jada's gallery. He thought he was being extremely irresponsible, mixing Wayne Tech business with someone from the Batman world, but it seemed like it would benefit all parties involved. And, just to be safe, Bruce arranged for a hologram projection of Batman to be outside on the roof across the street from the gallery.
Once he saw that she caught a glimpse of "Batman," he entered. He also had to admire her poise. She acted as if she hadn't seen anything unusual.
Bruce started to walk around the sculptures off to the side. It was the only way he could take a good look at her without being completely obvious about it. Looking past the artwork, he saw her, standing at a brightly colored MacBook laptop at the front desk. It was definitely the woman from the island, in a beige cashmere sweater with an oversized collar, black leggings, and black stiletto heeled boots, floating around the gallery from one thing to the next.
He watched her walk from the computer to a well-dressed preppie couple. It looked like she was telling them the price. The man looked displeased at the information and his wife or girlfriend gently rubbed his forearm and cooed something into his ear as Jada looked on politely. Bruce moved along slowly to the next statue and continued watching her.
Her transaction looked like it was a success. Jada called over a younger (but just barely, Bruce noted) female employee to assist the couple as she turned away and walked to the front of the gallery. Momentarily, she rolled her eyes and smiled to herself. Bruce knew that smile. It was a smile of detached amusement that he would smile to himself after speaking with a particularly self-parodizing person from the world of the wealthy. Even though he knew he was getting ahead of himself, he felt like she was a kindred spirit. Confirmation bias, he told himself. He was seeing what he wanted to see. He turned his attention to some canvases on the back wall.
"That's THE Bruce Wayne, Jada. The millionaire guy who owns all those tech companies and funds orphanages and shit," a young employee named Ricardo told Jada, pointing Bruce out to her. "He could buy every painting in this room and it wouldn't put a dent in his bank account."
