damned_institute | Day 37: Men's Showers

I wouldn't really call this a locker room. More like a bathroom with lockers. The place was uncomfortably crowded, with almost every adult male patient being hustled into the showers at once, but Phoenix wasn't as annoyed by the claustrophobic, milling throng of bodies as he might have otherwise been. Every extra person was one more person who might end up standing between himself and Edgeworth.

He knew that the prosecutor would have a fit if he found out about this. He'd known since he'd tacked that first response up on the bulletin board. And in a way, he couldn't blame him. Phoenix knew that he jumped into things all-or-nothing more often than most people. At the same time, he had some kind of reality testing. He wasn't going to learn the basics of how to defend himself and suddenly decide that he was Rambo.

He found an unoccupied locker in the southwest corner and glanced around, trying to gauge how long he could possibly stall in a locker room, looking as if he was expecting something, before people started looking at him strangely. It would have been easier if he'd known something of the description of the man he was supposed to be meeting. As it was, all he had was handwriting and a military rank, neither of which guaranteed any particular appearance.

It's not as if there was a better way to plan this, though. "Yeah, meet me by the lockers. I'll be wearing gray and a smiley face, just like about a hundred other guys."

[for Hughes]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Justice League? Bruce had never heard of the Justice League before, but judging by the way West had so casually referred to it, the existence of such an organization was common knowledge in his world. Bruce paused for a minute to think carefully, noting the…well, not exactly familiarity of the phrase, but…the familiarity of the idea it seemed to represent. ‘Anyone else in the Justice League.’ Likely an organized group of superheroes, who worked together to fight crime and save the world from imminent destruction.

…come to think of it, Bruce could recall a particular conversation with Clark, in which Superman’d mentioned the possibility of the world’s superheroes organizing to be able to fight the bigger problems. Bruce could also recall shooting the idea down, saying something about it being dangerous to gather together the most powerful individuals in the world and trust them not to abuse their collective might. His other argument had been that aside from a single shared goal, none of the superheroes were used to working in teams; most of them were leader-types, with dominant, independent personalities. He could remember Clark dropping the subject with what Bruce had thought was silent agreement.

But that could have changed.

…a group of superheroes working together. That would explain how Batman and Wally met, as well as why Bruce had never heard of Wally West until today. While he did make an effort to keep track of the other superheroes in the world and their activities, there were a few reasons why aside from gathering general information about their personalities, whereabouts, and activities, the Batman didn’t invest too much time to uncovering their secret identities. One, Batman had Gotham, and the other heroes had their cities: so long as their paths didn’t cross, there was no real reason to know anything more about them asides from hypothetical ways to stop them in case they went rogue. Two, there were frankly better things the Batman could be doing with his time, and if the other heroes were even half as careful as he was in regards to his personal life it investigating their identities would involve not only extensive amounts of time and patience, but also frequent or prolonged trips to their cities. And three, strange as it was, it seemed almost an unspoken rule that superheroes wouldn’t probe too closely into each others’ lives unless strictly necessary. A sort of respect, given from one crime-fighter to another.

If they had to work with each other on a regular basis, however, then it’d be Batman’s responsibility to find out who those people were, and what sort of backgrounds had led them to don masks. Alternatively, if it’d been the Flash that’d stumbled upon Bruce’s secret first, then the need to be on equal footing with the other hero would have driven him to discover the other man’s identity anyway. While Bruce had every intention of getting the entire story out of West sometime soon, he felt more reassured knowing the reasons behind why the Flash and the Batman had become all—

Day 37: Men's Showers

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