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One late July evening, Daniel “Danny” Fenton tripped. Thus began the cascading effects that would, without exaggeration, change the world.
…
Danny was just ten years old when he went down into his parents’ laboratory, also known as the basement. His parents were out visiting some colleagues a few states away to see why their portal invention wasn’t working, leaving thirteen-year-old Jazz to watch after her baby brother for a few days.
Danny and Jazz weren’t exactly what you would call “normal” children. Exposure to radioactive ectoplasm since birth did not make for a standard human child. Danny’s teeth were slightly pointed as were his ears if you looked closely. His eyes seemed to reflect in the dark, and his freckles shone like constellations on his face. His sister, equally affected, had hair red as a fire engine and eyes that pierced with their intelligence. She likewise seemed human as first glance, but when you looked more closely, you could see how her steps never made a whisper on the pavement and how her voice had an odd whimsical sound to it, almost like chiming bells.
Nonetheless, they were children, and they had been left alone for two days. It was enough to make a young boy very curious.
Danny Fenton stepped into the nonfunctioning portal to an afterlife that his parents had designed. He understood only the most basic aspects of what it would do. It would take you to the world of ghosts, like the green blob his parents had gotten a couple years ago but bigger and more complicated. He wanted to see it, but the machine wasn’t working. He laced up his tennis shoes and stepped into the giant contraption.
Years later, he could never really tell you what caused him to trip. Maybe it was a loose wire, or maybe his shoe just snagged on unevenly cut metal. Whatever caused it, Danny felt one foot fall in front of the other as his weight shifted quite out of his control. His fingers brushed a button.
The last thing he felt was pain.
...
When Danny next opened his eyes, it was to nighttime, so he hoped that he at least had not been knocked out for long. Nonetheless, he was very confused why he saw smog above him and not the familiar ceiling, pockmarked with the remains of his father’s poor aim. Weird.
He glanced down and was unhappy to see that his clothes were damp from resting in what appeared to be an old alleyway. He tried to wring his shirt out, but it wasn’t wet enough for that and didn’t do any good. Then, he felt what he could only describe as a tingle as a few fat droplets fell from his shirt and pants to the ground, leaving his clothes bone dry. Cool! Since when could clothes do that?
He felt a gurgle in his stomach, and he wondered how long it had been since dinner. He would have to ask Jazz for a snack.
Wait.
Where was Jazz? Suddenly much less sure of himself, he walked forward a few steps toward what looked like the mouth of the alley. He couldn’t hear anyone talking or walking around, and he didn’t know which direction his house was in.
With no better plan, he began walking along the shadows, which seemed to caress his skin like a favorite blanket. He should be more scared, right? He didn’t feel very scared, but he still wanted Jazz.
The cool night air felt good. His muscles seemed to ache less with every step, and his head seemed to clear with every minute that passed. He finally came upon a newspaper called the Gotham Gazette. He wondered what a Gazette was. Wasn’t that some kind of razor?
“The Batman saves Defense Attorney Harvey Dent!” the headline proclaimed. What was a Bat-Man? What it someone half person, half bat? That sounded kinda cool. He wondered if the Bat-Man could fly.
He tried to make out the rest of the words on the page, but the dirty glass covering the paper from rain (and thieves) obscured most of the rest of the words. Nonetheless, he could see a few. “Gotham” came up a lot, and he was pretty sure it was the name of a place, maybe the city. He saw a lot of buildings around, so he was pretty sure this was a city, not a town like Amity. He didn’t remember a place called Gotham from his geography class, but he knew there were cities they hadn’t talked about in class. Was he still in Illinois?
He heard what sounded like a scratch and then a bang as a door flew open several buildings down, spilling light amid the darkness. Danny could just barely see a man with something in his hands, running quickly away from shouts. Scared of the yelling, Danny hung back and hid behind the newspaper stand. He was very glad for this when he saw the men who were chasing the first man. They wore police uniforms, Danny was pretty sure, but their accent sounded different, like something he’d heard on TV. They sounded very, very mad about something, but Danny couldn’t understand the words. What he did understand was the gun that flashed before the first man fell to the ground. He barely heard the bang as blood seemed to roar in his ears.
That wasn’t a blaster. The man didn’t get up.
But… they were policemen, right? Unless they were dressed up like Halloween. Halloween wasn’t until October though, right? Did this place celebrate Halloween on a different day? No longer in a hurry, the two police officers walked toward the man who lay still on the pavement. They pulled something from his hands that Danny couldn’t see even as he peaked forward, but he knew that something had given him away when one of them turned sharply toward him.
“Hey!” One of them shouted, sounding angry. Danny knew what to do when someone approached you sounding angry from his experiences with Dash; he ran.
As his sneakers slapped the pavement, Danny cursed his short legs. He could hear the man getting closer as Danny haphazardly turned corners, trying to get away.
“Stop him! No witnesses!” The second officer yelled after the first, heaving himself forward and panting all the way. Danny didn’t have time to think. He turned one last corner to what he hoped was another alleyway and nearly screamed in frustration as he saw no way out. He ran toward the wall, looking desperately for a way out.
“There’s nowhere to run now, kid. Just come quietly, and I won’t hurt you.” The officer said, slowing to a walk at the mouth of the alley.
Danny turned to face the man and gulped.
No, no, no, this was bad. This man was bad. But he was a police officer? But he’d shot someone.
Danny needed to get away! The brick against his back rubbed at his shoulders as he pushed further into the wall like he could meld into it. As the officer came in clear view from a window above, Danny closed his eyes and leaned back with all his might—
He fell. Backwards.
His butt hurt from the unexpected fall as he glanced around him to see what happened. The man was no longer in sight, but a wall was in front of him. The room was dark with no windows as Danny cautiously made his around the walls looking for a light switch.
Instead, he found a door first, and opened it cautiously. In this new room, he was able to see what looked like a clean industrial space like someplace people would make stuff like lightbulbs or chairs. No, there were candles all around. Maybe it was a candle factory? What was with all the red duck candles in the corner? And how had he even gotten in here? He wanted Jazz. It was dangerous here and scary. He tried pinching himself to see if this was a dream, but he didn’t wake up, and the pinch hurt enough to make his lip wobble. He wanted to go home. Instead, he kept walking.
After what felt like days, Danny couldn’t walk anymore. He was scared and tired and didn’t know what to do. He felt no closer to home and had no more clue that he did before about where he was or how he had gotten to this new city. Finding a quiet corner in an alley as the sun began to rise, Danny curled up on the ground and fell into a fitful sleep.
When Danny woke up hours later, it was to faint noises all around him. He smelled trash, warmed by the sun, and his nose wrinkled. Whatever this place was, it was stinky. He watched as a small bird flew toward a trash can, picked as some old bread, and flew off again. His stomach grumbled; he was hungry. Jazz still wasn’t here.
Danny stood up and kept walking.
…
It took Danny longer than he would like to admit that he was now “homeless.” He had found a library where the kind librarian lady “Miss Barbara” told him how to use the computers and gave him her ham and cheese sandwich and some water. She kept watching him, and it was making him nervous. Was it because he was dirty? He felt really self-conscious about the dirt all over his clothes from when that man in the fancy suit pushed him down earlier.
The first thing he looked up was Amity Park. The computer told him that there wasn’t a place called Amity Park. Did he mean Amity Place, Arizona? Or maybe Amity Lake in Ontario? He tried Illinois instead, and that at least had an answer, but Illinois was apparently a long, long, long way away from where he was now. Gotham, New Jersey had a population of a little under 2 million people. Danny was still scared. How had he ended up here? How was he able to get through walls whenever he really needed to? Why had he been floating when he woke up yesterday, and did he seem to be able to disappear whenever he saw the police?
He wanted to go home, but he didn’t know how. If Amity Park didn’t exist, then how could he go home? It was like he was in a whole new world. He was scared, hungry, and confused.
Miss Barbara tried to tell him where the police station was, and when he refused that, tried to direct him to the homeless shelter. He had seen that two days ago though, and stayed there for a night, but then the police had come, and he had run again. He felt bad for the food he had to steal, but he was thankful for the way he could make himself just move through things like air. It helped him take things at night, like bread from the bakery display or candy from a vending machine.
He looked up what someone needed to survive. The internet told him he needed food, water, clothing, sleep, and shelter. He could get food, and water was easy since lots of places had bathrooms where he could cup his hands under the faucet, and he carried a water bottle with him everywhere now. Clothing was find for now too—he had his sneakers, his shirt, and his jeans, even though they were dirty. He knew he was supposed to change clothes every day, but he didn’t have any other clothes with him. Maybe that’s what he needed next. Sleep was snatched in the brief hours between the late night and early morning and during the few times he could find an unoccupied bed. Shelter… he did need shelter. Once he found someplace he could stay for a while, then he could also get more sleep! But when he tried to find a place online, it only told him about hotels and homeless shelters. With a sigh, he gave up on that and tried a new search. He tried to find maps of Gotham and asked Miss Barbara if he could print things from the computers. Jazz always said that having information was important, just like his teachers.
He needed more information.
…
After a few more days, he found his shelter. It was a weird building underneath the candle-making business he had found earlier. The building itself was dusty and covered in cobwebs like it hadn’t been used in a long time. The lights didn’t work when he tried them, but the water did even though it was dirty looking and cold. Still, it was a working toilet, and Danny was able to take his first shower in far too long. He immediately loved it and started calling it his hideout. He shoved things against the door so no one else could come in though he didn’t know anyone would want to since it seemed like this place had been forgotten about. There were even beakers and test tubes all around, just like home! Danny finally felt like things were starting to go right.
That night, he met “Kay” Kendall and “Sneaks” Raini. Kendall and Raini, Danny thought, were probably about his age and even dirtier than him. To be fair, it helped that Danny could just ask the dirt to fall off his body and it would. They were both skinny and tired looking, but they had immediately decided to dish out any advice they had for the new homeless kid on the block. Instead, Danny took them in. Once he trusted them, he showed them his hideout and moved the things from the door so they could get in. Eventually, they convinced him to “borrow” a padlock with keys so they could keep the door locked and not have any surprise visitors.
After Kendall and Raini came Lee, TikTak, Sprinter, Pops, Red, Teddy, and everyone else.
As it turned out, Danny wasn’t too bad of a leader when he put his mind to it. There was already a kind of unofficial network for the homeless children of Gotham, and Danny’s “meta powers” and engineering abilities meant he could patchwork a lot of stuff together for the older kids to sell or for them to have hot water or ways to defend themselves or…
The first time someone tried to take Danny away about two weeks into his stay in Gotham, the man (a “child trafficker,” TikTak told him) was quite surprised when Danny shot a green blast into his face and burned him, getting away. The police, Danny quickly learned, were mostly bad guys, with only rare exceptions like Mr. Gordon. Danny didn’t have to go to school, since his parents weren’t here to take him, and none of the other kids did either. Instead, he showed the other kids what he learned from his parents’ inventions or the computer he stole from the fancy store that rudely kicked him out after he asked to use their bathroom.
None of it was what his parents had taught him, but after talking to the other kids about parents, he wasn’t sure he wanted to do what they’d said.
Here, he got to do whatever he wanted. He could sleep all day if he wanted to! He could have desserts for breakfast! When people weren’t fair to him and his new friends, he had ways to even the odds by taking what they needed from the mean people. Between the “hoard”, everyone was contributing something. Most of them though traded in information.
Where could they get food without stealing? Who was being a butt and kicking them out for existing? Where were the paw patrol? The Bats seemed to hate that name, Danny found out.
The problem was that everyone who Danny had been told would help him, wasn’t. The police were actually the bad guys here, hurting good people and stealing from the homeless like him. Batman and the Robins were determined to take the homeless children of Gotham to child services, except the foster system would put them with child traffickers and rapists and abusers, or the police would just return them to the bad home they were escaping in the first place.
Thankfully, whenever Danny got captured, he just took the handcuffs off and walked away. When Teddy told him about the Red Hood, Danny was impressed. Hood and his guys protected kids, giving them food and shelter and supplies but not trying to take them to the cops or CPS. Hood was a legend amongst the homeless for his programs and help and most importantly for killing the people who wanted to rape and kill kids. Hood was their hero.
So they decided to help him.
Danny and the rest of the hoard were able to get places adults couldn’t. Danny especially was both tough and impossible to capture permanently, making him great at spying on people, stealing things from bad guys, and reporting everything to Hood.
He wondered sometimes what Hood thought about how the hoard had all pretty much adopted him as one of their own. While Hood certainly didn’t want to encourage the kids to get into a tight spot, he also appreciated all the help they could give him like the location of Joker’s latest base or where Scarecrow was hiding his most recent batch of fear gas. In exchange, he helped them with education and jobs if they wanted them. Hood’s crew, though far too old to join the hoard, were good people. Joe had twin daughters of his own and was happy to pass along syllabi from their school to Hood and help tutor the young ones. Honey, who Danny learned was a prostitute, helped the kids learn about who was safe and who wasn’t in Gotham as well as who was who, the big names in the area. Peter, who used to be named Penelope, helped the older homeless kids get enrolled in “GED” programs, whatever those were, to finish school properly.
But the best thing, the absolute best thing, was when Danny woke up one day in November to a knock at the door. It wasn’t the knock all the hoard knew, which was suspicious on its own. Still, Danny sensed something familiar on the other side. He was still adjusting to all these powers, especially since he seemed to get new ones every other week, but he could tell that this felt like TikTak, and Kendall, and Sprinter, and all the other early additions to the hoard turned up to a thousand. He carefully opened the door to a sight he was worried he would never see again.
Jazz looked like she always did, only dirtier and skinnier than before. She also looked stressed out like he’d never seen.
“Daniel James Fenton, I could just about kill you!” she said, tears coming to her eyes, and she hugged her brother. In pieces and tears, Jazz revealed that she too had appeared suddenly in this new world in the city of Gotham. She’d found Hood a few days ago who eventually led her to Danny almost by accident. Their parents, she revealed, were in trouble for losing Danny and leaving them alone, and she’d been stuck with a creepy man named Vlad ever since because he apparently paid money to keep her instead of her going to Aunt Alicia. She’d been desperate to find Danny, and Vlad wouldn’t help her, so she snooped around until she found a hidden basement like the lab at home and stuck her head through a portal, then woke up in Gotham with just the clothes on her back.
Though confused how they’d ended up in what appeared to be a different dimension, though presumably not a dimension of the dead, they celebrated having found each other again. Danny had fun teaching her all about Gotham and how it worked as well as how being part of the “hoard” worked. Jazz quickly adapted to her new life and had Danny buy some books on psychology from the money he and the hoard stole from criminals who tried to hurt them. All the hoard were trained by Danny in Fenton engineering and weaponry and by Hood and his gang in self-defense, to the point that child trafficking was basically non-existent in Gotham because of how rarely anyone got away with it and because child traffickers always seemed to mysteriously go missing after the hoard brought them to the Red Hood.
Jazz immediately latched on to Hood, realizing that he had severe trauma he was still working through. It took many sessions before he started to realize that he could open up to her even though she was a kid. She was scarily good at her job, a trait most of the hoard seemed to mysteriously share. It’s like everyone in the hoard just seemed to pick up and retain information like nothing else, learning quickly and never forgetting what they saw or were told, making them both invaluable spies and enviable students. Still, Jazz had everyone beat when it came to psychology, and though certainly not a licensed therapist, she seemed to be just what the Red Hood needed.
Hood revealed that his name was Jason and he had once been the second Robin. One day, he received a message from his mother asking for help, so he went there only to find out that it was all a trap by the Joker, and he died before he woke up mysteriously in his own coffin and then was taken in by people known as the League of Assassins. With Jason came seven-year-old Damian, a kid Hood told them was actually Batman’s biological son. He’d rescued Damian from the League of Assassins. Damian, though younger than Danny or Jazz, slowly began to adapt to the hoard. His prickly demeanor had not made him fast friends, but his abilities in fighting, tactics, espionage, and understanding your enemy slowly won over the hoard, and he began working closely with Danny whenever Hood wasn’t looking.
They had sworn Jazz to secrecy on their twenty-year plan for Gotham’s reform, but she had convinced them to speak to Hood, which successfully got the plan down to a mere twelve years.
Jazz also learned of the big Bat, who Jason revealed was rich but, though he tried to finance projects to improve Gotham, felt that direct action through a symbol of justice was the best way to bring about a better Gotham. Despite not having any powers, Batman fought off bad people like the Joker, Scarecrow, Bane, the Riddler, and Penguin. However, Jazz, like Jason, felt that Batman had abandoned his second son, and now failed to reconcile with him due to personal biases and a staunch unwillingness to consider others’ perspectives as valid. Even without such knowledge of the Hood’s background, many suspected that he was the fallen second Robin and rallied behind him and against Batman who had never seemed to help them before with his insistence on involving the corrupt police or child protective service employees.
Despite what Danny was able to put together of Hood’s background, which wasn’t much since Jazz believed quite firmly in patient confidentiality, Danny felt that the sons should not be punished for the sins of the fathers and was willing to give Nightwing and Robin (now going by “Red Robin” for some reason) the benefit of the doubt. He and the rest of the hoard had encountered the entire Batclan on a number of occasions both in living their everyday lives and in their spy network or necessary illicit activities. Most of the time, Danny only had time for a few quips with the heroes, though he did work with them on occasion if he didn’t have to be working directly with the Bat and happened to be in the area. Nightwing was a much less frequent visitor, having apparently moved to the city next to Gotham, but while he was an adult, he certainly didn’t act like it, and Hood let them in on the fact that he didn’t take care of himself like it either. Cue members of the hoard occasionally flagging him down on casual patrols to remind him to do things like laundry or cooking like grandparents nagging children. Nightwing’s faces were always so funny when that happened.
Red Robin was a different case entirely. It had been so easy for the hoard to pick up on the independent tendencies he showed just like them and hazard a guess that his background hadn’t been too dissimilar from many of theirs. From there, it was easy to convince the hoard to give him a try, and from there, Red Robin likewise found himself adopted rather without his knowledge. It helped that Red Robin was only a step away from the mad science genius of the Fenton siblings from the start. Once he saw past Batman’s opinion on the hoard and had sufficient interactions with them head-on, he very quickly came to support them and the justice, care, and survival they stood for. Since he didn’t live with the Bat most of the time either, he regularly hung out with the hoard and slept in their headquarters, where he and Hood were able to have a confrontation, moderated by Jazz, and work out many of the issues and trauma Jason felt over having been replaced and that Red Robin (Tim) felt over feeling like a stand-in for someone else, someone greater than himself.
Of course, with Hood, Nightwing, and Red Robin came the man known as Agent A. Agent A was an older man, and Danny and Jazz caught on rather quickly that he was the Batkids’ grandpa. Agent A visited every Wednesday afternoon from two to four pm to teach lessons on cooking and household management.
Danny and Jazz, quick as whips, were perhaps not child prodigies, but they were incredibly intelligent, resourceful, and able to put together patterns that others couldn’t always see. It had been all too easy to guess the identity of every Bat once they had all the pieces. From there, they worked with Damian and Jason to concoct a plan to improve Gotham from the ground up. Jason was already protecting the prostitutes, giving people jobs, keeping drugs from kids, and taking out the scum of the earth like child traffickers or rapists. However, he wasn’t tackling the system issues that lead people toward prostitution or drugs or homelessness, and while Bruce Wayne may have been funding initiatives to fix the city’s infrastructure or support the police, it simply wasn’t working. Danny, Jazz, Damian, and Jason instead devised plans to expose corruption, protect abuse victims, establish education programs, and take down every one of the big villains in Gotham. It helped that Jason and Damian had skills and information needed as well as connections around the world, while Danny had his powers to go just about anywhere unnoticed and without fear for his safety since he could be intangible, invisible, and floating on the ceiling (no one ever seemed to look up!). As the hoard as well as Red Hood’s gang spent more and more time with Danny and Jazz, they also became increasingly liminal, giving them more speed, better memory, a greater ability to hide, and a language of their own. With their desire to fix the world and their combined ability to do it, was it any wonder they were prepared to take over Gotham from the hands of the evil and corrupt?
Their twelve-year plan was already in motion.