They're sitting by the fireplace. The manor is far too big (was too big even when everybody was still here), but the fire is very warm.

"What was the strangest?" She says 'strangest' the way Inaaya did, accent included. She is smiling a little, in a tired way. "Demons... and magic? Or... the foundation?"

"My previous model of the world included foundations! It did not include the Lurker on the Threshold, demons that speak exclusively in rhyme, or my foster-father permanently turning into an enormous bat."

"That is all... fighting things. Normal. " But Kai Li deflates. "...Where is he?"

(She means: it's been a while since we last saw Mr. Wayne, are you still worrying about him, I'm still worrying. But saying it like that would take a lot more words.)

"He seems to be adjusting well or... as well as can be expected. He's rather hard to talk to."

"He has... the strangest week."

"Rather." She coughs into her handkerchief. "--Did I tell you that we've figured out whether my powers are real or placebo?"

She figures it out from Inaaya's face. "Show me!"

She closes her eyes, focuses--

And the ceiling above them transforms into the night sky above Antarctica. 

That is actually more dramatic than she was expecting, even after the week they've had.

She stares up.

It disappears in about thirty seconds.

"I can only do it once a day. I can do it for everywhere I've been, but I don't know if I can do it for places I haven't been, or for places that aren't on Earth."

"Always the sky?" She keeps watching the ceiling after the stars disappear.

"Always the sky, always at night. It's beautiful."

"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."

"All right-- I left it in the wine cellar--"

She's reluctant to leave the warmth by the fireplace. But she was going to have to eventually.

Partway to the wine cellar she remembers what the wine cellar actually is and moves ahead of Inaaya, no longer reliant on her for direction. It'd be nice if they'd stop using multiple names for it and just settle on calling it the cave.

Mr. Wayne is in the wine cellar. This is a fact of Inaaya's life going forward, and she is going to have to accept it. She must treat this fact with the same equanimity that she treats any other fact about Wayne Manor. Inaaya's room is on the third floor. Alfred lives near the kitchens. The library has the complete works of Jonathan Swift. Mr. Wayne lives in the wine cellar.

(There's no wine there anymore. Hasn't been for twenty years.)

Despite their ongoing efforts, the space below the manor is still cold and dark. The various lamps they've brought down only reach so far, and their light doesn't touch the ceiling or the distant side of the cavern; the majority have ended up clustered in a single area near the entrance a few dozen feet across, lighting up a few tables, several boxes of books and documents, an ice box as near the ladder leading upstairs as can be managed, and what arcane devices they've managed to unpack. (The shipments of specialized equipment have been piling up in here for the last few years, carefully transferred downstairs by Lucius Fox and left sealed away in their crates until Mr. Wayne could make use of them.)

Mr. Wayne himself has his own set-up deeper into the cave. There's a dim light visible from behind a bend in the cave wall, that might illuminate some furnishings half-hidden away. At some point Alfred set up a cot over there. It is unclear whether Bruce uses it.

He isn't at the moment, in any case. Right now he's carefully unpacking another crate.

From some angles, in some positions, in lighting like this, Bruce Wayne might almost look human. His legs are the same length, bend the way they ought to, even if they now end in claws. Torso's roughly the same shape, maybe broader at the top, more conical. There's the fur, of course, thick and almost smooth, dark grey in the lamplight, and the eartips visible even in silhouette, but one could achieve something mistakable for it with fabric and a mold -- he had, in fact, done that, had been wearing it until the moment he became the disguise.

The wings do not look human. They're massive, twice the length his arms had been, folded now at the place where less than half of each hand remains usable, thin black membranes reminicient of a giant bat. He has to make an effort to keep them out of the way while he works. His eyes glint a jarringly bright yellow in the darkness. His teeth are sharp. His face defies description.

He looks up when they enter, then returns to the crate.

"Hello, Mr. Wayne," Inaaya says in a very NORMAL way to her extremely NORMAL bat housemate/surrogate father. 

"Inaaya. Kai Li." His voice is deep and raspy. They don't know yet how much of his vocal range he'll get back -- he can get above a whisper now, which might be promising.

Delicate apparatus goes from the crate onto the table, where he can fiddle with the settings for a bit. He is doing his best to make this enterprise look both effortless and fully engrossing.

(Kai Li watches the awkward grip of his remaining fingers and the tension in his shoulders and sees where he should've put everything down to re-adjust and tries to map memories onto him until she can guess why he's acting like this, if it's practice or distraction or stubbornness or pride, if he's being stupid or she is.)

"We're looking for Kirk Langstrom's final confession," she says in a calm and businesslike way, because she is going to be talking to a batman every day for the rest of her life and so there's no sense getting upset about it, is there, she can just skip ahead to the part where it is normal. 

"The Gotham file's in the center drawer," he says without looking up. (There's a specific desk where most of their documents have been gathering.)

"Right. I... could have guessed that." 

She goes over to pick it up and then sits in a corner of the batcave. 

The final statement of Kirk Langstrom.

Kirk Langstrom

"You know," Inaaya says to the universe at large, "why is it that everyone wants to write down a final statement and no one wants to write down a useful final statement? When I write a final statement about my findings it will include fewer Sodom and Gomorrah references and more detailed explanations of how reality could possibly have a doorstop."