April Yang and Dick Grayson share deep-rooted connections to Gotham, even if they prefer not to give them much thought and keep their emotions to themselves. When Dick turns up in Devon City, where April works towards becoming a surgeon, she inevita...
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Pamela Isley was a woman of ambition.
She had tried to carve her way into Gotham's finest and seize the city for herself and her plants, but there would always be someone else. Whether that was Joker or The Riddler or Penguin having grander and more obnoxious plans than she did, there would always be something in her way. Gotham was, in a sense, getting too crowded for criminals. At one point, she came to the realisation she'll have to move places; temporarily, at least, until she had enough force to claim Gotham for herself.
Starting her new experiments, she had to find the subjects. The first ones were obvious letdowns—dying after less than a week in agony, bleeding black liquid from their eyes and mouth. She'd inject them with solutions of her own blood and certain acids. The mixtures would vary depending on the week; If Pamela was in good spirits, she'd inject less of the doubtable fluid, and so on. The subjects would be kept in empty rooms underground, where it was damp and cold, and given gradually stronger doses of either xanax or fentanyl.
There were issues such as vigilantes raiding Pamela's lab and freeing the subjects, that would eventually die either way, but then she'd simply find a new place, and abduct more people.
It had taken her over a fifty subjects dying before one made it out alive. Weak, but surviving.
The subject's alias was Aloe, and he would live on to see other experiments live past the agony of the first week. Over the last few days of his life he would witness Pamela planning and abducting her youngest subject yet. The little girl couldn't be much older than ten, yet she was already shaped into a member of higher society. She didn't slouch or break eye contact, wouldn't make sound when crying or voice her discomfort. Pamela really liked her, Aloe would think to himself as he was dying in the wet corner, and wondered how long that liking would last.
The girl would remember looking at the strange man dying in the corner, coming to terms that that might be her soon enough. For the time being, though, she had to get used to her new surroundings.
"Give me your arm." Pamela's stern voice echoed through the empty room, effectively snatching the girl's attention. It was about to be the third injection in a matter of two days. "Come on, we don't have all day."
Subject 71 extended her pale and childish arm, bracing for the perforation of the large needle. "What is that?"
"Blood, distilled lactic acid, and a specimen of fusarium taken from the agave plant," she said calmly whilst the girl was squinting her eyes in pain. "You're a smart thing, aren't you?"
The girl didn't answer. She was soon left alone as Pamela went on to attend to her other subjects.
What started as an experiment to a find way to make herself more powerful soon turned into a plan to raise a legion of her own.
Pamela made good use of her connections to Gotham's criminal underworld. She'd group her subjects and train them for different aspects of invigilation. The most successful ones were the youngest, which is why she had started to abduct them younger and younger. She would seek out the help of known assassins and thieves, who would take the subjects under their wings and train them.
Subject 71, Agave, was the closest thing Pamela could create to mirror her own powers. Though there was much promise in the future, for now she had to be satisfied with the immense progress the children were making.
Years passed—somewhere along the way Pamela decided to move her entire operation to Devon City, as her and her legion were gaining too much traction in Gotham. Her subjects were getting Pamela the recognition she had always deserved. Her methods might have been cruel, yes, but the results were astounding. Their powers ranged from mutations to the body, through things like telekinesis, to abilities to produce energy. They were, in a sense, unstoppable, with the only problem that not many of them were making it out alive and the rest had to be properly trained.
In the eighth year of the legion's operation, something happened. In a blink of an eye, on a random Tuesday, it was all gone, along with their true memories and abilities. The legion dispersed in a matter of a day, forgotten as if it never existed. Pamela returned to Gotham, confused and angry, soon making a cruel reputation for herself. Even she forgot about the legion, and could only remember that she had lost something dear to her.
It lasted until one of the lost subjects, whilst leading a normal life, had died, although the tricky part was that they actually didn't.
That day, in Gotham, Pamela got the strangest of feelings. It was as if something got unlocked in her brain—Just a small portion of her memories, and she had known there and then where the lost subjects was. She didn't lose time and flew straight to Dallas, where she felt she had to go to a nearby cemetery. Pamela asked the man that worked there to show her the way to the grave that had been sealed most recently. As she was left alone to grieve, Pamela urged the plants around her to help her get the coffin out. The ground shook as she watched the grave being torn apart, but her instincts weren't wrong. There, inside the coffin, there was someone yelling for help.
The situation would happen every once in a while. There would be months when none subjects were recovered at all, and also months that would bring back too many for Pamela to deal. She could only imagine how it must've felt to be locked in a coffin for so long, not knowing if anyone would come, but she figured it would only strengthen their characters.
Only now, after about eight years of getting her legion back together, it was complete. She could go back to Devon and finish what was once taken away from her so brutally. It was hers, they were all hers once again.
Agave was always the favourite out of the legion, which was both a blessing and a curse. She would lead in the field most of the time, earning her quite the reputation. If she wasn't being sent on missions, she was supposed to distract the vigilantes of Gotham so that Pamela could work in peace. Playing cat and mouse with Batman and Robin were some of the more stressful nights of her life, but it was the price she'd pay for Pamela not killing her off.
After the hospital shooting, Devon was taken over by chaos. Pamela couldn't have picked a better time for her comeback—along with her legion, she was starting to get comfortable in there. What she didn't know, however, was that there was an additional player in Devon, and he was eager more than ever to keep the bad away from the city.
