Chapter Text
The sky was too dark.
That was the first thing the 17-year-old psychic thought when he first woke up.
It has been a year since the meteorite incident, and of course, the "revival" of his psychic powers.
Ever since then, his power has been growing. Fast. Too fast. It became increasingly difficult for him to control his abilities, even with the limiters.
In order to not hurt the people around him, he... went away. He knows that he has to go, somewhere, somehow. So he closed his eyes.
And teleported.
He had never really paid attention to the night sky before, but something about this night felt different. Even where he lived, there would be at least a few dots in the sky, or when he visited his grandparents in the countryside, the sea of stars would advance for as far as the eyes could see.
This? This felt like someone put a black blanket over the sky.
At that moment, he knew that he was no longer on Earth, his Earth.
The giant flash of light with a bat emblem on it definitely wasn't helping.
And why does his body feel so strange?
Saiki Kusuo, lying on the ground, stared at the bat-themed searchlight signal in the sky like a deer in the headlight and contemplated whether a furry invested and was behind this.
The light made his eyes feel itchy somehow, so he attempted to massage his eyelids.
And then the ground crumbled beneath him like they were soft tissue being stomped upon by a thousand-foot-tall robot as he tried to move his arm.
Huh. He was pretty sure he exerted the right amount of strength.
His brain worked on this observation:
1. His limiter is missing or broken.
He concentrated, ignoring the sudden urge to brush his eyes because it felt so damn itchy. Stupid searchlight. Soon enough, he sensed a light fizziness against his good old cranium, the thing was definitely still needling his brain, and it didn't feel like it was broken. So it wasn't the limiters.
2. The ground was too fragile.
Except the damn thing was concrete, he had broken enough walls of the neighbor's house to know what cement felt like to the touch.
3. The final option, his body mass has increased.
It seemed like the only plausible conclusion.
And no, this was definitely not the consequence of eating too much coffee jelly. Shut up.
And thankfully, this one was easier to confirm, he just needed to move his head slowly, very slowly so as to not create an even bigger crater on the ground, and looked at himself in the spot where humans would associate with the "torso".
He found fur. Pure white, fluffy fur. He recognized it. It was from the time when he shapeshifted into a cat.
And then he saw an eye staring back. Unblinking. Magenta. Dark. Pupilless. Reflected no light. Almost considered beautiful.
His eye.
It felt itchy.
He immediately regretted it.
Something just happened.
It wasn't a particularly astute observation on Tim - Red Robin's part.
Not with the Bat Signal flaring right after they finished dealing with an Arkham Asylum breakout, in an entirely separate part of the city.
And especially not with the roar - no, the wail that was just heard.
Something so loud, a power so potent that it could be heard from anywhere in Gotham, the sound of it didn't even feel like a sound. It felt like the crackle and growls of the air when lightning struck, like the thumping of a tsunami before it hit shore, like the ticking of a bomb. Like calamity. Something that, even so far away, made him wary.
"Oracle. Report." The brooding voice of the B man resounded next to him, amplified by his ever-non-changing frown underneath the cowl.
It was rare to see Oracle not answering within the first second.
And the next second.
Third second's the charm. "So anyone here volunteers to catch a 150-foot-tall, 6-eyed, 3-tailed, white-furred cat/abomination? Oh and beware of the mouths and claws, doesn't seem to be vaccinated, you know?"
Sigh.
Gonna double the caffeine intake when this is over. Tim was sure of it.