Robin has handled a lot of nonsense.
Gotham practically mass-produces nonsense. After years of vigilante work, cult-adjacent training regimens, and being mentored by a billionaire who thinks contingency plans are a love language, he’s learned to roll with it.
Still—this?
This is new.
It starts with an explosion. A derelict factory on Carson Street goes up in flames like it was personally offended by the concept of existing. Robin is already mid-swing, comms crackling, eyes searching for survivors—
—when something luminous streaks past him.
White-hot and half-transparent, the figure phases straight through a collapsing support beam, reappears on the other side with a terrified kid under one arm, and rockets clean through a concrete wall.
Robin lands hard outside just in time to see the glowing stranger gently set the kid down with EMTs, movements calm and oddly practiced, like this is just another Tuesday.
Robin, catching his breath: “Okay. Impressive rescue. Meta-human? Tech-based? Magic?”
The floating teen glances over, eyes glowing an unhealthy shade of green. “Ghost.”
Robin blinks. “Right. But, like—classification?”
The glow intensifies. “I am a ghost.”
Silence.
The kind that stretches. The kind that hurts.
Robin’s face tightens into that particular expression—the one where his brain is sprinting through possibilities and finding absolutely none he likes.
Eventually, he exhales and mutters: “…I am never going to hear the end of this from Batman.”
The ghost—Cassian Vale, apparently—just shrugs, radiating the exhausted calm of someone who’s dealt with dimensional rifts, cursed artifacts, and at least one ghost bureaucracy before lunch,
Readmore
