Chapter 2
As of right now, Jason was actually feeling pretty good about his chances. He had found a long abandoned apartment building and ended up crashing there. Dusty broken down buildings tended to attract him. While there, Jason decided to do a little research. He had no reason to believe he wasn't in an alternate universe, because he definitely doesn't remember a giant tower with an A on it in the middle of NYC. Opening his laptop, he typed into the search bar :
"Gotham"
Nothing showed up. So they must've not been lying. No Gotham means no Bruce Wayne, which means no connection between himself and wherever the hell he was now.
"Iron Man"
It was the next logical thing to check. And he was pleasantly surprised to find thousands of articles and new stories and all the other shit about this Iron Man. The 'founder' of the Avengers. Jason doubted that the arrogant bastard could bring anyone together. Probably just a cover story. And while on the Avengers, he decided to catch up on their names. After all, he wouldn't be surprised if he ends up in another chase with them. Next to Iron Man was 'Captain America'. A tall possibly drugged up blonde, wearing the stars and stripes with a pretty comically small shield. Jason has to remember to aim for the knees. Thor was the next one he saw. Another dude, blonde, giant and muscular, and apparently an actual god. Like legimently a living god. He knows WW talked about Ares and Orion sometimes, but he never paid much attention. Guess he shouldn't be that surprised by it. And this Thor had an enchanted hammer that magically returned to his hand. Ok, Jason is definitely steering clear of that one. And the next one. The 'Hulk', a big green bodybuilder with anger issues. Yeah, he wasn't gonna touch him with a 9 foot pole. The next two he found were Black Widow and Hawkeye. Black Widow was a famous Russian assassin, one of the best in the world. Makes Jason wonder how she's the best if everyone knows her face. Nevertheless, Jason has been fighting enough women to know that underestimating them is mistake #1.
And this Hawkeye seemed to just be the 'Purple Arrow'. There really wasn't that much to read up about him. Seems like most people found him as boring as Jason did.
And it was just his luck that there were almost no articles or online traces of the Spider kid he met yesterday. He could only assume the kid was new and Stark was trying to keep his activities a secret from the public. At least, for now. To Jason, Stark seemed to be an alien less Lex Luthor personality wise.
But that was enough. Jason didn't want to bother mindlessly scrolling through any more web pages and just shut the laptop. He took a second to examine his gear. Jason hadn't had his full arsenal when he was blasted here, but what little he did have was pretty useful. Bat-tech rarely disappoints. Looking at the gear spread across the table, he saw his two pistols. They were normal handguns in most ways, minus the taser spikes at the bottom of the magazines of course. And who was the Red Hood without his hood.
The eerie empty red mask stared back at Jason. When he had first returned to Gotham, his helmet looked a little different. He had eye holes, kind of similar to what the Spider kid had. After his battle with the Bat, Jason changed the mask. He found the empty emotionless stare of the new mask to induce even more fear into the poor criminals who crossed him. He also found it reflected his fucked up psyche pretty well.
There was the leather jacket, very iconic and with all sorts of bombs and weaponry stuck into pockets or wherever Jason could fit them in cozily. He always wore it over his body armor. The design of the armor was similar to the new Robin's more armored chest plate, but coated black with a broad red bat spray painted across. Nobody in their right minds fucks with a Bat. At least nobody who knows what Gotham is.
Besides that, he had combat boots, pants, his Al Ghul curved knife, and some miscellaneous tools of lethal chaos. Y'know, the usual things.
What Jason was concerned with was getting back home. Don't get him wrong, he's enjoying a vacation from Bruce and his little birdies but he didn't exactly want to stay in a completely different universe. And for that, he needed to sneak into Avengers Tower.
Was it a dumb idea? That's not a question, of course it was. But Jason handled worse situations and got out in one piece before. His plan was as follows:
Follow the van of an undercover shield agent and wait until he can get the agent alone.
Take him down and steal his uniform and access equipment. He'd use these for infiltration.
Infiltrate one of the highest security buildings on this Earth and hopefully find an answer as to why he ended up here.
And if there were no answers to his question there, which Jason realized was maybe an 80% chance. Well, in that case, he'd be just a little screwed.
But hey, there's no reason not to try.