This last, they will actually start on first, leaving the others to percolate while they try.

It's a bit tricky. So far, Wildcard has only done instantaneous, flash-in-the-pan effects. But they have plenty of time to work it out, and it is not terribly difficult to tangle their emotional associations with flight into the crystal of their bracer.

There's a zapping sound from the teleporter in the other room and a knock on the doorway to her lab.

"Wildcard? Is now a good time? We have a situation."

"Well it's a better time than when we were still working on the flight aura.  What's happening?"

She opens the door.

...This came up in the massive debrief, and she wouldn't have even been able to hope she could recognize an Oliver Queen out of costume.  But it's still a little bit strange to see girl!Green Arrow, even though that's actually pretty cool.

"Klarion has escaped. And also the country of Bialya has gone missing, and we're pretty sure they're connected," Green Arrow explains. "Since you've provided us with some useful intelligence, Wonder Woman wanted me to check whether you remember anything like this happening, or if you might know what's going on."

"...I almost would have preferred the Young World, as disastrous as that would have been, because now I don't have a clue how he's done what he's doing.  I mean, I wouldn't have had that anyway, it's chaos magic, but I think the butterflies are really flapping now.  So basically, I don't have any shortcuts on hand.  That sort of world out of phase bullshit happening early is not a good sign..."  Well.  It's a sign that he thinks that this sort of thing is where he will have narrative relevance, which is both kind of flattering and also terrifying.  Modulo the unfortunately-hopeful idea that this was just how he could reach her now.  "When you say 'Bialya is missing'...  What does that mean?  Is there a hole in the ground, is -" no, if this was an 'Islamic Republic of Eastern Samothrace' sort of situation it would look different than that and besides, ret-goning Queen Bee and also the Apokolips connection just seems bizarre on a meta level...  Klarion might want to not go punch Darkseid in the schnozz himself, for character reasons, but she has no doubt he doesn't have much love for the New God of Tyranny.  Tyranny can be capricious, but it's rather fundamentally Ordersome.

Not entirely impossible, but not likely, she doesn't think.

"- there still evidence of Bialya having existed that's not in our heads or in...  Oh, hell, I think I have entirely new vistas of paranoia to give Batman.  If he hasn't already deduced them from hearing the story so far."

"Anyway.  I do not have anything to add that isn't probably better said by an actual wizard.

"That said, I might be able to tear information from the firmament if someone can tell me where I should be looking.  Haven't exactly tried divination before but there's plenty of support in principle, and I want to know all I can about this quite a bit."

Gift, could she have that 'am I about to cause a galactically-visible Light disturbance' power back again?  If she's trying to pull an entire country out of Wherever It Went...

Brute force would be boring, though.

Probably best to not bore him.  That way lies Infinite Improbability Incidents.

...This was, on some level, their doing.

They struck that bargain, after all.

This is, therefore, their responsibility to fix.

"And I feel an unfortunate sense of responsibility for this, because I'm fairly sure I'm the reason this butterfly flapped today.  So while I can't say I'm going to have insight, I will at least certainly make what skills I have, available.  To - wherever it is that we're meeting?"

"...How did he break out in barely hours and then disappear Bialya...  I mean, it's chaos magic, but how'd he get to the point where he could?"

Sure, it can do that!

"We don't think there were any retroactive effects — he hasn't erased Bialya's history, or anything. But we can't get any communication into or out of the country, including via the League's teleporter network, and anyone attempting to cross the border, in the air or on foot, comes out on the opposite side of the country a moment later with a feeling of disorientation," Green Arrow explains.

"As for how he escaped ... Doctor Hugo Strange was doing his intake psychiatric evaluation, and this was about an hour before you finished giving us information, so we hadn't yet put out a request for Warden Waller to keep an eye on Dr. Strange. The doctor was later found in Klarion's cell wearing one of those 'hello my name is' name tags labeling him Klarion the Witch Boy, a disguise which had somehow fooled all of the guards and inmates at the prison up to that point."

"Because of the damage to the Hall of Justice—" and the fact that Wildcard isn't cleared for the Watchtower, even if she definitely knows about it, because Batman doesn't need help coming up with new forms of paranoia "—we're staging a response from one of the League's fallback shelters. If you're willing to help, follow me."

Of fucking course it's Hugo fucking Strange.

Not that she trusts Amanda Waller much further than she can throw her, most of the time.

"Of course."  And off she goes.  "I have some things I could try, at least."

"08: Green Arrow. A-04: Wildcard."

It's handy not having to introduce yourself, at least.

The League facility in question is, on the inside, bare concrete. What makes it more visually interesting for readers  impressive is the dedicated holo-computer, currently showing a satellite view of some bare scrubland, into which a dusty road dead-ends.

"... the weather disruption for at least a few days, after which it should settle out naturally. So no need to divert anyone," an androgynous figure in a brightly colored bird-themed suit finishes explaining as they arrive.

"Thank you, Robin. Wildcard! Good of you to join us! Batman is currently interrogating Doctor Strange, so I'm organizing our incident response in the meantime. Green Arrow has gotten you up to speed?"

"Bialya's missing, the Witch Boy's out of Belle Reve because Hugo Strange should not be trusted with a rubber duck let alone a medical license, and he hasn't left any mysterious riddles that we know of but we think he probably did it.  If you go in one side you come out the other.  Have we tried going straight down?  From orbit, probably; we can observe that there is an upper bound since it looks like the satellites are still normal."

Wonder Woman looks thoughtful, and then types a short message on a floating orange holo-keyboard.

"We hadn't tried that yet, but it's a good idea. I've asked Superman to try it once he's done with his current emergency, as one of our space-capable members."

She gestures at the assembled heroes — Green Arrow, Red Arrow, Kid Flash, Miss Martian, Robin, and Red Tornado.

"This is who we have available at the moment, not counting Batman. Could you tell them what you told me earlier about why Bialya might be relevant to future threats? I'm going to see about contacting a priestess of Hecate to see if she can help us identify the cause of the disappearance."

"...He'll drop a probe first or something, right?  Don't really want to empirically determine who would win between the planet and Superman, if the magic tries to yeet him into the core or something."

Her gaze flicks to Red Arrow and Red Tornado.  "We're clear to talk about that without introducing infosec threats beyond 'more people knowing'?"

That looks like a 'yes'.

"O-kay.  Bialya.  I've never done this before, so bear with me if you please.

"First off, if my information is correct, Queen Bee, the ruler of Bialya, is part of a big supervillain conspiracy known as 'The Light' - it has pretty much everyone's masterminds - and I believe the Witch Boy knows that.  They want to take over the world and they'll do stupid things to try and make it happen.  Do not try to backstab the Reach, they're better at it than you.  But the Reach, despite being part of 'The Light''s plots, isn't as immediately relevant to Bialya itself.  Bialya as a country has a different big universe-spanning threat more directly tangled up in it.

"Again if my information is correct, Bialya is the site of an Intergang smuggling - and who knows what else - operation.  And that brings in Apokolips.  Not sure who's exploiting whom harder, on the villains' side, but the friendly New Gods are likely coming off worse for it regardless.

"Relatedly, if you know it, please try to avoid uttering the name of the tyrant of Apokolips and the singular present tense of the verb 'to be' in that order.  I don't know if he's listening but he jammed himself into a universal constant by those words and you shouldn't invoke them.  No matter how magical you are or aren't.

"...Not that this low-level operation would have his direct, personal attention, that I know of, but we really don't want it to."

"He's done this sort of thing before," Wonder Woman assures her, before retreating to the corner of the room and placing a perfectly ordinary phone call with her perfectly ordinary phone (read: dipping it into a chalice of water that clears to show the reflection of the inside of a Greek temple).

"Who are we expecting? People from Intergang? And if Queen Bee is a supervillain, is she going to be fighting Klarion about stealing her country, or fighting us?"

Red Arrow's eyes betray slight nervousness.

Red Arrow's eyes betray slight nervousness.

The Fatebinder makes a Note of this.

"We won't find out who Queen Bee is going to be more irked at until we actually find Bialya.  But I'm expecting chaos.  Everyone against everyone else, internal fault lines blown open, etcetera.  Chaos is the Witch Boy's whole shtick."

"Of course, since I'm expecting that, it's probably suddenly more likely that everyone has been turned into ferrets and they're having a tea party, because - if I were to get inside his head a bit - predictability is for chumps, but there's bound to be something going on in there, beyond just the sudden disappearance."

"As for who and what we're expecting...  I expect League resources to be better informed on the technical details of both Intergang and the Bialyan military than I have ever been, so if you wouldn't mind, Robin?  And there's Queen Bee's...  pheromone...  Thing.  If you're attracted to women, or possibly if you have a Y chromosome, watch out, though I don't recall the exact details and I do not want to determine them empirically if we don't already know.  I should add that I suspect that a psychic who calls himself 'Psimon', with a P - likes to do compulsions in the pattern 'Simon says <X>', so be careful with psychic connections and if he starts saying, or thinking, something like that, don't let him finish - may be in the vicinity of the smuggling operation, as additional security on the Bialyan payroll."

"There's a file on Psimon, but I don't think we knew he had ties to Intergang," Robin remarks, glancing at their wrist computer. "So that's good intel. Other known Intergang operatives ..."

Robin gives a brief rundown of probable threats.

"... none of which matters much if we can't figure out how to get in."

"Good news and bad news on that front," Wonder Woman adds. "Superman tried coming down from the top and ended up in the center of the Earth. The dinosaurs hadn't seen anything, though, so he returned via the borehole at the North Pole. Hecate's high priestess has agreed to do a scrying ritual, but expects it will take more than an hour."

"At this point I think it makes sense to see if Miss Martian can pick up on any telepathic signals from Bialya. Since Psimon might be on site, Red Tornado should go with her as an extra defense. Kid Flash, can you go as well, so that you can try walking the entire border and seeing if there's a weak spot?"

The three nod.

"Okay — Robin, check in with Batman and make sure he's aware of the Intergang connection, and then ask him if there's anything we can do to help with the investigation. Wildcard, Arrows — now's the time for clever ideas."

...Yeah, sure, that may as well happen.  Does she vaguely recall that from somewhere?  Perhaps.

"I have some thoughts.  Either throwing orange or indigo at the problem, or improvising something else.  Or green, but while I'm stubborn I'm not sure I'm quite that stubborn.  If I can get on-site we can see if they might work."