"Better than going back."

"Antarctica was not one of the better places we went to, no."

(Except that it was the last place they went to that they would go to with Dick and Sanjay-- and that thought feels like teetering over the edge of an abyss and if her hand slips she's never going to stop falling--)

She scoots closer to the fire.

It isn't actually that soothing. In the past few days things have been exploding into fiery infernos at an alarming rate. But it's warm, and if she gets too cold it gets harder to move, and that's worse than getting burnt. (There isn't any real risk of that right now. But in the past few days things have been freezing solid at an alarming rate too.)

(If they hadn't gone to Antarctica Dick and Sanjay would still be here.)

"You are... magic, now?" This is still exciting but it's joined the list of major adjustments.

"I'd prefer to say that I've always been magic, and now I know for certain that I am magic and not engaged in an elaborate form of self-deception."

She could make people stronger before. Not very much stronger-- a little more likely to remember a fact, a little more likely to recover from an illness, a little less likely to die. And she could sense when things were magical, but it's not like she had an opportunity to do a proper experiment. "I am getting a magic vibe off this book written in Aklo and bound in human skin" didn't require any supernatural powers to explain. 

It had always seemed unlikely to Inaaya that she was elaborately self-deceiving, but her evidence that she wasn't self-deceiving was that she was the sort of person who said 'I know that it definitely feels like I'm doing magic but I don't have anything I can empirically verify as supernatural and most psychics are con artists', and that seemed too uncomfortably self-referential to derive any firm conclusions from. 

"When Oliver Queen and I were fighting the plant lady, I was desperate and I wanted something to help and then I just-- reached out-- and suddenly there were stars on the ceiling. Which the plant lady did find very distracting but I have to imagine it wasn't primarily intended for combat applications."

"You are magic. And B is a bat." (By all rights Kai Li should call him Mister Wayne but that takes an unconscionable number of syllables.) She considers. "B was... already a bat, too." At least, at some point he started habitually wearing a weird bat outfit. There is no reasonable way that this was the first step in a process leading to his transformation but she hasn't got any better explanations for it.

"Mr. Wayne says that Iog-Sotha mutated some of the bats in Gotham. He listened to the bats talk when he was a child, in the same way that Mr. Cobblepot and Mr. Fries listened to the penguins in Antarctica. He's turned into a Bat-Man, as Mr. Cobblepot and Mr. Fries transformed into a penguin-man and an ice-man. I assume the amount of time he's lived with-- the changes-- has allowed him to preserve much of his mind."

"Not the rest of him." Kai Li may well be much more concerned about this than Inaaya. Inaaya spends practically her whole life in her mind. Kai Li is using her body for things. 

"And I have not... become... anything." Yet? She thinks? Current trends not promising?

It would never occur to Inaaya that Kai Li might be concerned about this. Mr. Wayne is obviously much more capable of killing things now that he is a bat-man and Inaaya is not really sure what else you would use your body for. 

"Mr. Wayne and I were both already magical. As far as we know, your father trained you in a purely natural fashion. Is that right?"

For literally anything outside of reading books. Possibly reading too! What if bats have weird eyes!

"Yes," she says. She has no idea how she'd tell. She is not going to make an effort to communicate that.

"So we'll keep an eye out and not-- borrow trouble from the future." She collapses in the chair. "We need... a to do list."

Yeah okay, sure. Just let her think for a minute.

"How is B. Are we... living here." She was told they were living here and Inaaya has an entire job here now but she's pretty sure living in one place indefinitely is a fake concept. "Is... Gotham... still... on fire."

(From, y'know, the massive demonic tunnel explosion.)

"The fire department seems to have put out the fire, but we're going to have to fund the rebuilding effort. We can live here with Alfred-- well, I mean, I guess we can travel wherever we want, we have the money and everything is set up so that we don't have to be here, but I want to take care of Mr. Wayne and I'm not sure how to get him on a boat. You should probably go talk to Mr. Wayne yourself, Kai Li."

She wonders how much the people who objected to Lucius Fox de facto running Wayne Enterprises are going to object to it being run by two Asian teenage girls instead. She knows lawyers are scrambling around Gotham to find some other heir. But they aren't going to succeed. Wayne Enterprises had been run by Thomas Wayne for centuries, ever since he settled in New England in the sixteenth century and summoned Iag-Sotha in exchange for immortality and prosperity, and until Bruce he did not have heirs who might contest his position. Personally, Inaaya thinks she's a much better person to have in charge of a company than an immortal sorcerer, regardless of his race and sex, and they ought to be grateful. 

(It was always going to be Dick who inherited, they had always planned for it to be Dick, Dick who was in his twenties and white and male and American and handsome and charming and who could form complete sentences one hundred percent of the time, and Inaaya was going to do her research and Kai Li was going to fight and neither of them would have to talk to much of anyone. But Dick is dead, and they had thought of the possibility enough to hire a lawyer to make the will iron-clad but not enough to give her any idea of what she was supposed to do.)

She doesn't know how to say this. "B is... I can't..."

"It's. different. I don't know what -- face, arms, shape, voice, it's all -- I can't understand..."

Inaaya doesn't have this problem. Inaaya can just listen to the words Bruce is saying and know exactly what's going on. She probably isn't even that tripped up by the changed vocal cords. That wasn't ever Kai Li's primary communication channel with him. She could process the actual words, if she tried, but she barely needed to, most of what she cared about was already broadcasted by what the rest of him was doing -- a lot of the time he would do it deliberately, he could understand and control his body on a level only Kai Li herself surpassed --

And now he's having to relearn all of it. His body isn't built for human instincts.

"Oh-- I didn't even think--"

She's not very good at speaking body language but she can communicate "do you need a hug."

Being as fast and silent as a ninja, Kai Li can start hugging her back before Inaaya has managed to actually initiate this.

Hugs are very reassuring. 

"What kinds of things do you need? Or should I just-- ask Alfred--"

"I need to learn."

(Learning isn't even the hard part. It can be complicated and frustrating and tedious but it isn't difficult. The hard part is everything that's gated by it.)

"Could you... say. If he is bad."

She wishes Dick were here. Dick was the people person, Inaaya doesn't do people, she does books and she does science and she does magic, Mr. Wayne had crafted them into a team that was supposed to survive him and now they still have a Mr. Wayne but they're missing two-fifths of the team and she keeps reaching out and expecting Dick to be there and he's not--

"I think he's having some trouble adjusting to no longer being a human but if anyone was going to adjust smoothly to suddenly becoming a bat-man it would be Mr. Wayne. If anything he's having more trouble with the fact that he fulfilled the entire purpose of his life since he was eight years old. I don't think he intended to survive banishing Iag-Sotha." A thought she had never quite thought until she spoke it, at which point it had been the perfectly obvious conclusion ever since Mr. Wayne first adopted the two Indian urchins who were picking his pocket. "I don't think he's evil. But who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" She makes the joke automatically and then quickly hurries to her next sentence before she could think too hard about who would have laughed at it.

"Gotham is a very good place to learn. They have world-class libraries and universities. Lucius Fox knows everyone in the city, we can hire tutors who are... discreet."

That's not quite what she meant by learning, but since Inaaya will be doing it regardless she might as well see what it can do. "The dead man. He was a bat scientist."

"We have his final confession. I was planning to look at them. --Apparently he talked to bats like Mr. Wayne did."

"I want a bat scientist to tell me about bats."

"Well, he's dead."

And somehow that's what gets her to start crying.

Oh no she was too focused on getting across that she cares specifically about knowledge relevant to bat-men and managed to say exactly the wrong thing.

Here is a benefit of hugging over talking: in this domain she actually knows what she's doing.

Through sniffles, she says: "I can read it to you, would that help, or would it be--"

Probably not. It isn't why she brought him up and it won't be written for her and it might just dredge up the whole apocalypse business again. But Inaaya wants to read them and reading them for Kai Li might make the grief attached to them less sharp and right now she'd rather do that than take another crack at her own problems. "Okay."