“A lot of the kids, I mean sidekicks, have been talking about forming their own superhero team. That sound like something you might be interested in? Could do a lot of good with that power.”

John is looking dissaproving at Batman.

She considers.

"Not - " she says, after a moment, and then seems to get stuck trying to figure out how to say what she means; she ends up shooting a small bolt of lightning at John, again dissipating well before it hits anything. "Not," she asserts.

“Okay okay ill stay out of it.” Hands up placatingly.

“Don’t want to use your powers against people? I get that, but sometimes it’s the only way to help even more people.”

Apparently it is now staring down Batman time.

Batman is very good at staring contests, he does not back down from the child staring him down.

Batman knows he is right from years of experience fighting bigger threats and doesn’t care enough about regular social rules with children to back down.

She's not actually going to budge on this one.

She is going to have to lie back down, though, even if she waits for her arm to nearly give out to do it.

“The world would have ended if I had refused to fight threats to it out of a general objection to violence, same with anyone on the justice league.” Being all annoyed injury took away a legitimate win on that confrontation.

"Not," she repeats. "I not."

"Look if the only way to save a lot of people is to stop one person by nonlethally hurting them, that is a worthwhile tradeoff. If someone has prisoners and says they will shoot a prisoner every hour just because they can it is the right thing to do to nonlethally take them down so they can't kill those people." Batman is mildly miffed he has to explain what seems just obvious to him. "Do you think it would be okay to let those people get hurt just because you don't want to do anything violent to the bad guy?"

This seems to give her pause; she considers it, and huffs in frustration.

“Stopping bad guys from hurting people is what hero’s do, we even have a UN charter now partially funding and sanctioning our actions so it appears the world agrees.” And that is not actually something Batman ever thought would happen, he expected to always be an illegal vigilante but it was nice to be validated by an official body.

”But if you really do not want to join a hero team I can think of a few people who would be okay giving someone powered a place to stay until you figure out what you want to do. Just don’t become a supervillian.” And with that comment Batman glares all warningly at the child like the insensitive serious warrior he was.

(Turns out she doesn't do well being glared at.)

Well batman said his piece and turns to leave. “I assume you can keep her for a few more days?” He says to John.

“Yeah till the end of the week.” John replies.

”I will be back in a few days for either your decision on hero work or with options for people you could stay with that would be able to understand about powered people.” And Batman swoops out the door of the tiny apartment as dramatically as he can. The Batman wishes so hard that john lived off ground floor so he could climb out the window and jump off the fire escape as was normal for him for extra flair.

John stands there looking annoyed for a while. “Batman can be kind of intense... I thought he might tone it down around a kid but I guess not. Sorry Anet.”

She's a little calmer with Batman gone, but that barely works out to looking at John when he speaks, never mind speaking herself.

Bruce is back at Wayne manor looking up missing children's reports to try and identify this girl John had found. He is scrolling through when he sees a certain institute has put out a notice that a girl called Denice had gone missing, and to please call the authorities if she is seen so she can be returned to them. The picture is very clearly that of the girl John had found.

Bruce goes digging a little deeper. Trivially breaking into the files of the institute and finding her file.

Her name is Denice Dimas, and she's severely autistic, nonverbal with an estimated mental age of six to her actual age of fourteen and a third grade education. She's a ward of the state, her parents having given her up when she was five; they seem to have never so much as called to ask about her, and have since moved out of state. Her current treatment plan is 40 hours a week of ABA, supported with a 'food plan'. She was on an aversives protocol, too, until the law changed a few years ago to forbid that; the records claim that she responded well to it, her stimming having been extinguished almost entirely and instances of ignoring her therapists having been reduced significantly by the time they were forced to stop. Behaviorally, she's noted as being stubborn, though not violent or aggressive; most of the things she's been punished for have been refusals to cooperate with treatment, though she also has a habit of 'interfering' with the other patients - trying to mitigate their punishments, in particular, and in one notable case, she worked out a way to 'lose' part of her lunch and get the staff to replace it, so she could pass the hidden food off to another kid on a food plan; it took several days after they caught on and started refusing to replace the meal for her to stop trying to pull that off.

Bruce does not know much about the treatment of autistic children but this sets off a lot of red flags just on a cursory examination. He spends a good while looking up all the technical terms and he is NOT left with a good impression of this institution. If they receive any Wayne foundation money that will stop instantly and he will be contacting the new york state surgeon general to look into this.

The girl did not seem only mentally 6 like the report said either, She had difficulties sure but she seemed to follow the conversation with concepts that many 6-year-olds might have trouble with just fine. She had strong opinions and clearly wanted to communicate her ideas on them.

Sending her back to the institute did not seem like an option at all. Maybe having her join the team immediately would be a bad idea even if she did want to join. Some time with someone less callous and inhuman than the institute might be good for her. Alan was good with children maybe he should ask him, Alan was one of the warmest people he knew.

John spends the days until the Batman comes back trying to keep Anet comfortable and not push any boundaries. He still doesn't really know how to interact with kids much less what he just thinks is a traumatised kid so It is still mostly just comfortable silence between them and him backing off any time Anet looked annoyed or bored with him. He does assure her that she doesn't have to go be a hero and put herself in danger unless she really wants to.

John is not very comfortable with kids going out and fighting. Robin and Batgirl seemed competent enough but...still made him feel bad thinking about it.

His guest continues to be quiet and undemanding. She doesn't seem to ever get bored, and it's hard to annoy her, though she does occasionally get frustrated - at her own continuing weakness, more often than at anything he does. She listens to his assurances, doesn't react to them in any particular way, doesn't try to communicate anything about it one way or the other.

Well, he can't really do much about that so he just does his best until batman comes back.

There is a knock at the door and the Batman is let inside. This time when he looks at who he now knows is Denice his gaze is sympathetic.

...why is he doing that. This is concerning.

"The people who were looking for you are not going to get you, understand? Not going to let it happen." Being as blunt as usual. The Batman could certainly learn some tact.

Denice doesn't seem to mind - she relaxes a bit, and nods, solemnly.