Bat-son challenge | Glowfic Constellation

Sure! They were mostly planning on just watching squirrels today until there ended up being way too many squirrels for some reason and they needed to go report that, they're happy to sit on a bus for 3/4 a period.

the-dark-knight

When the Batmobile arrives at the Grand Canyon, Batman is already there, hanging upside-down with his feet attached to the side of a cliff. "You thought you could surprise me because my eyes were closed. But Batman is always watching."

boy-wonder

"Or you just heard the sound of the Batmobile?" suggests Robin.

the-dark-knight

Batman dismounts from the cliff and shakes Robin's hand. "Did you bring the gear?"

boy-wonder

"Yes, I brought the gear." Robin reaches into the Batmobile and pulls out a large glass container filled with rubber gloves and cotton candy. "I still don't understand why you asked me to buy all these things."

the-dark-knight

"Because the squirrels have been... uncooperative. I've been asking them questions for hours and they still haven't responded. That leaves me with no choice but to ask the birds. This is why I chose you to be my Boy Wonder, Robin; a man with a bird for a name should know how to speak to birds."

boy-wonder

Four years ago, when Batman had first begun his adventuring, he arrived at a school and attempted to recruit a boy to serve as his sidekick. He was quickly told by the Local Defense in no uncertain terms that he could do whatever he wanted with his own self, but risking the lives of children was entirely off-limits. Batman eventually managed to convince the school's economics teacher to be his sidekick, and named him "Robin". The teacher had no experience with fighting crime, solving mysteries, technology, athletics, or, of course, speaking to birds.

"So, once again, Batman, what is this gear for?"

the-dark-knight

"Birds live in the sky, and neither of us is light enough to float up there. If we want to speak to the birds, we need something to make us lighter. Cotton candy is light; attach it to the Batmobile and it will become a Bat-jet."

boy-wonder

"And the gloves?"

the-dark-knight

"Once we reach the birds, we will need to make conversation with them. You cannot engage someone in conversation without a handshake. But birds have no hands. Hence, the gloves."

boy-wonder

"And the glass container?"

the-dark-knight

"To investigate our little mystery, we must determine if the birds ate the woman and the squirrels. To do that, we must look inside the birds. Birds are not transparent, but glass is. So to look inside them, we must encase them in glass."

boy-wonder

"Wonderful. The prediction markets on whether you'll figure out what happened to Berra have just dropped from 40% to 16%, and the prediction markets on whether you'll kill yourself in the process have risen to-"

the-dark-knight

"Kill myself?" mutters Batman, scratching his chin. "Kill myself... of course! Robin, bet up on that first market, because you've solved the mystery!"

boy-wonder

"Batman, what are you talking about?"

the-dark-knight

But he vanishes into the night.

Nemesia

The Watching of Squirrels in an exacting Art. Any old fool can see a squirrel, and perhaps even begin to appreciate the beauty of the squirrel, but few can truly Watch one. To Watch a squirrel, you need to be able to get inside the squirrel's head. This is substantially more difficult than the analogous task for, say, chimpanzees or bonobos. Here is one way of understanding the challenges involved:

Try, for a moment, to imagine a Human Watcher — a being that, while no god nor ideal rational agent, is in a rough intuitive sense as far above humans as humans are above squirrels. The Human Watcher sits, perched atop a metaphorical mountain, gazing down upon what we would call "a small conglomeration of humans" but which to it feels like somewhere around five to ten squirrels. How could this Human Watcher cross that gap, and truly put itself in the mind of a human? The thoughts it habitually thinks would be much too unlike ours. But if it aligns its own thoughts along just the right angle within just the right set of subdimensions, perhaps the Human Watcher can come to see how a certain pattern of thought or action that the little tiny humans go through might be insightfully analogized to its very own patterns of thought and actions. And, if this is the sort of Human Watcher that is inside our reality, rather than one who Watches from some higher-dimensional reality within which ours is embedded, perhaps we can look back and see it, and come to understand at least some insignificant portion of its experience. Much like squirrels can with us. That moment, the mutual understanding, is what Watching is about.

Jubilee Veritas

Or at least, that's what the Queen of the Esawa Region Squirrel Preservation Society Preservation Society explained to you, when you tried to get answers out of her about why, exactly, she was trying to hire you while in custody at the holding house on the outskirts of the Emergency Services campus. You're not really sure you entirely followed whatever she was on about, though you of course had a professional obligation to try.

Jubilee Veritas