A plant? Bruce looked back and forth between the plant and crystal. What had these men been planning?
He strode over to the potted plant on the ground, trying to determine any irregularities. It was possible that there was something hidden in the soil or in inside of the rock. Considering that these men hadn’t been armed, he did not think it was an explosive, but he wasn’t going to break it to look inside.
Batman knelt down before the plant, activating his lenses. His technology did not detect any electrical circuitry in the soil, nor did he see anything hidden from within the plant. What he did find, however, was a missing stalk between the two mounds. Most split rock succulents as large as this would have sprouted by now.
He turned off his detective vision, then peered between the rocks. The sprout appeared to have been ripped out, as the slit where it would have grown had a tear that ran up the side of one of the rock walls. The plant appeared to be alive despite this.
He frowned. Looking closer, he could see that the hole where the sprout should have been was leaking a faint red gas. It swirled in a twisting pattern an inch or two above the two rocks before dissipating.
Is there an explosive hidden inside after all? he wondered. He resumed his detective vision and leaned down to get a better look inside of the hole. A detonation device hidden inside of an ordinary object could be an effective assassination tool. Had their intent been to stash the plant in the bank, make sure that Batman had not shown up, then leave the plant behind? Was there a specific target in mind?
The scanners couldn’t find anything inside, but he got a whiff of the red smoke as he got close.
It smelled sweet, aromatic… like paradise.
He suddenly felt very, very contented. He found that he enjoyed the sensation, not caring as his arms went numb, subsequently losing his grip on the pot. It landed loudly against the floor, but the pot didn’t shatter from such a short height and a guided fall.
He stood up awkwardly and took a few steps away from the plant. He still had control over his body, but there was a certain disharmony that came with any movement he made.
“Alfred,” he said. Who was he again? “I feel… strange.”
“Perhaps you should take a rest, sir,” he heard back.
That was it. That was exactly what he had said. There was no need to check with him again and there was no possibility that he had said anything else. He definitely wasn’t making any excuses. The person on the other side of the radio had absolutely just given him permission and he hadn’t been misheard. One-hundred percent, he was not pretending to have heard the voice say anything other than what he had most assuredly heard.
He switched off his detective vision and turned off his radio, letting the world come back into focus. Only it didn’t. The emergency lights became brighter, his sight developing more defined. Not unbearably bright, but just enough to make it seem like they were as bright as the moon and as warm as the sun. He bathed in the warmth.
Relaxed, he slumped down to lay against the tiles, basking in the glow. He closed his eyes.
He felt content. He felt rested. Restored, refreshed, pleasant, complete.
Peaceful.
Suddenly, he heard some reverberating clicks of steel, followed by the soft sounds of metallic squeaking. Moments later, he could feel an even brighter light than those emergency lights along the walls enveloping him from his side. Had the sun risen already?
He cracked an eyelid, peeking out to his right. It took his eye a moment to adjust to the light.
There was a rectangular patch of a bright, yellow light over there. So bright, in fact, that he couldn’t see the emergency lights any longer. In fact, he really couldn’t see much outside of the light, as it consumed everything else and leaving it in a blurred shadow.
I died, he thought immediately. It wasn’t nearly as concerning a thought as it should have and normally would have been. That plant probably killed me. That patch of light in front of his eyes must have been the gates of heaven. He hadn’t been particularly religious in life, but it was comforting to know that he had an afterlife to look forward to beyond that gateway.
A figure moved into the center of the frame from the side, standing there as if a pillar separating the two halves. His vision was too blurry- and the figure too backlit- for him to see much about it, though he guessed that it was a person from the height and general silhouette outline.
The person began walking toward him, exiting the frame and resolving into a more defined shape. It appeared to be a woman, given the long, chest-length hair and the swaying hips. She also appeared to have an hourglass shape.
As she got even closer to him, he could see even more of her. Or, rather, he could see more about her. She didn’t wear any traditional clothing on her body, but she had a sparse covering of what looked like maple leaves there to maintain the pretense of modesty, though much more was flaunted than hidden.
Long, shapely legs connected her shoeless yet sightly feet to her elegantly graceful hips, the width of which he had never even thought possible. Higher up her curvaceous form, a firm abdomen had a rim disguised by the shadows. Behind some leaves and hair strands, a bountiful bust stood proudly on their own without a need for physical support, no matter how much they begged for physical contact. Her balanced neck gave rift to a curved jawline and full, pouty lips. Her eyes- though not fully visible in the darkness- had an almond shape and fluttering lashes.
With another few steps forward, he noticed two other striking characteristics about her. First, her flowing, uncurled hair was red, like the color of a ruby. It highlighted the face fronting the sea of scarlet, with the symmetrical features.
Second, her skin was green.
He had thought it a trick of the light at first, but as she closed in, he could see the tint to her features that complemented the red mane. Not as dark as the maple leaves that adorned her flesh, she dressed in the skin of a lime that dazzled his mind.
And finally, she came to a stop while standing over him, looking down at him with eyes he could finally see. Upon her beautiful face, two emerald eyes shone warmly with an enchanting glint.
He was definitely in heaven.
This is no woman, he thought, no longer knowing anything else. This has to be an angel. Idly, he wondered at the initial reactions of other people who had died and found her. They had probably gawked like him.
She lowered down to her knees beside him and settled back on her heels and ankles. Her eyes, then hands, roved over his armor, inspecting him. She flashed him an absolutely radiant smile, so bright that he had no choice but to smile back at her.
She purred, her hands finding his chest plate and rubbing it fondly. Obviously, she was pleased to see him, though he couldn’t feel her touch.
“Are you divine?” he asked softly.
The angel smiled at him again. She gently moved one of her palms up to his forehead, covered by the cowl. He still felt no touch, but he knew the weight of her hand. Light, like the rest of her.
“I am Poison Ivy,” she announced. The thumb of her hand traced around a spot on his cowl above his eyes. “You are my pet.”
Something about that didn’t seem quite right to him, but he couldn’t focus on it the way he was focusing on her.
Still smiling, her hands left his head and chest respectively and drifted down to both of his hands, slipping her fingers under his. Tenderly, Ivy helped him to a seated position, bringing him to eye level with her face.
So close. Almost nose to nose, the angel tilted her head and beckoned to him with her eyes. An invitation.
Her hands trailed behind as she stood and turned around, facing the gate to heaven. Upon turning, she revealed to him a gratuitous bottom almost obscenely uncovered if not for a few leaves and vines separating his head from her flesh. Her two ass cheeks rippled as she walked a few steps away. A quarter of the way back to where she had come from, she turned, full hips twisting as she turned over her shoulder to look down at him.
“Come,” Ivy said. Her smile was still too warm for any other recourse.
Slowly, he made his way to his feet, his boots abnormally carrying the only sound between them. As he came up beside her, Ivy reached out her hand and took his once more, pulling him without resistance over to the new world.
Or so he thought. As he got closer, he recognized the emergency lights coming back into view, the rectangular light becoming somehow dimmer than it had appeared before. It was not heaven before him; it was the bank vault. He was still alive.
He frowned. That meant that this woman leading him into the vault was not an angel, though he had no explanation for her unusual skin tone.
Beneath the surface, he began to recognize other things wrong, like the bodies strewn about the area. He had knocked them out himself, to the best of his recollection. This was a battlefield, not a quiet place for a woman as beautiful as Ivy. That had to mean that she was involved with what these men had done, perhaps even orchestrated the entire job on the bank.
Just as he opened his mouth to protest, they arrived at the entrance to the vault, and they stopped. Ivy’s hand left his as he twitched forward, eyes widening.
He gasped. It may not have been heaven, but it was still a paradise.
The interior looked nothing like the steel walls nor the concrete foundations surrounding. It was a grassy meadow with an abundance of color that made up what could only be understated as a garden. Flowers of all different varieties blossomed in every corner. Mouthwatering fruits grew from small bushes and trees. Warm yellow lights from the ceiling reflected off of a tiny reservoir. The ceiling itself was covered over with green, branches and vines obscuring even the slightest hint of gray.
He could find no words, choking a few off as he stepped deeper into the chamber. At the center of the garden, a giant tulip pod seemingly stopped directly at the ground selfishly took up a lot of empty space with only grass around it. As he got closer, the pod opened up, a half-dozen petals extending in all different directions and setting down on the ground. Those petals looked incredibly thick, as if the enormous flower was meant to sustain a lot of weight. It also looked spacious enough to be a mattress.
That metal squeaking sounded out behind him again. Reluctantly, he turned from the heavenly visage to find Ivy’s back to him as she sealed the vault with several pronounced clicks, which was truthfully an even more heavenly visage. As the door locked, the vines and brush suddenly expanded, covering the door and making it disappear.
She turned around. In the greater amount of light, he could better appreciate her stunning beauty. If she was not an angel, then it seemed impossible that he had never seen nor heard of her before. Green skin notwithstanding, she could captivate any man on the cover of any magazine or the front of any movie. Poison Ivy her name, loveliness and sex her game.
He was just about drowning in it.
In her hands was the potted succulent, which she placed down on the grass next to her feet. She then straightened out, slowly and sensually. In the same manner, she walked past him with a grazing touch to his side. She moved to stand in the center of the open tulip before turning around to face him.
Ivy raised an arm over and behind her head, then lifted her other arm toward him, palm to the floor and fingers half-extended. “Come to me, my pet,” she said, two fingers curling and uncurling in invitation.
He complied, taking a few steps forward. He took Ivy’s outreached hand in both of his, green skin atop black gloves. She used her free hand to guide him down to his knees before her.
She smiled down to him once more, making him smile back at her. Despite her confident and beautiful smile, something still felt off to him. He couldn’t quite place it; how could anything be wrong with this environment and this woman? But then, that was the unusual bit, wasn’t it? Green lands were not usually found inside of a bank vault.
A bank vault. It suddenly occurred to him that he was trapped in the vault, incapable of opening it from the inside. Ivy had only been able to exit once the handle wheel had been turned by one of the men outside, but closing it had caused the locks to engage again.
And Poison Ivy had been working with those men outside.
“Are you ready to serve me, Batman?” Ivy asked breathily.
I’m nobody’s pet, he thought. I’m Batman!
His dual grip on her hand tightened, pulling her a bit closer as he growled. “I don’t serve anyone.”
She didn’t appear to be too concerned about his comment, though her smile did fade into a quizzical frown. Her expression seemed to ask the rhetorical question “Really? You really think so?” rather than the usual “Please don’t hurt me!” that most gave him at such close range. It was a look of disdain, not concern.
Her expression shifted again to one of pain as he roughly pulled her by the wrist off of the tulip and threw her down to the vines and moss that obstructed the vault door. Batman loomed over her, casting half of her form in a slight shadow.
“Who are you?” Bruce demanded. He wasn’t totally sure how threatening he could look under the bright lights on the ceiling, but he hoped his posture would indicate that he was willing to hurt her if necessary. He expected her to respond with an outpouring of fear and regret.
Instead, she sighed and rolled her eyes, adjusting her body so that she reclined on one elbow, the other hand trailing along her hip. “I thought I made it perfectly clear earlier.” She reached a hand down to the base of the plant wall.
The moss splatted suddenly, exploding outward in green slime. Bruce flinched back, narrowly avoiding the moss’s reach toward his eyes, though he ended up with a few drops on his gauntlet.
He stepped back right onto the open tulip, then felt it rumbling. Alarmed, he dodged to the side as something burst out of the bud. What in the hell?
He dropped to one knee, pulling up his cape as the object grew like a standing cobra. As he regarded it, he recognized it as a stamen. A large stamen, in fact. It was thin, only a few inches in diameter. The filament coiled about itself several times as it continued its ascent to the ceiling. The yellow anther pointed directly down at him, threatening to pop at him.
It then occurred to him that tulips had two stamens. Looking down, he caught the barest glimpse of the second stamen’s anther popping out from the bud, just in time for him to roll out of the way.
He came to a stop a few feet from the center of the enlarged tulip head, armed with a Batarang in his right hand. Bruce raised it up beside his head as the two filaments twisted around themselves.
Was this a hallucination? Sentient plants in a giant garden? It seemed far too out of the realm of an elaborate, staged performance by a bunch of conmen. He had to treat these plants as if they were as real as he was.
And the woman behind him had to have the answers. Bruce looked under his raised arm to see Ivy finding her feet, brushing off her thighs and knees as if there was a scuffing there. Instead, all that came off were a few leaves that made up her “clothes,” as it were.
The skin previously beneath those leaves looked ever so inviting. He hesitated.
Just long enough for one of the stamens to wrap itself around his bicep.
Batman turned back to it as it tightened its hold. He tried to bring the sharp and of the Batarang down on the filament, but the Batarang was in the immobilized hand. Quickly, he flicked the Batarang to his other hand, then swiped it through the green tendril. It disconnected at the point where it began wrapping around his arm, letting the tendril fall back to the ground. In that split second, Bruce determined that there were no wires in half of the stamen.
The part still around his gauntlet would come off with another cut. As he raised the Batarang to deliver the strike, the second stamen came in for that arm, this time finding his wrist. Abruptly, it squeezed tight, not allowing him the option to use the Batarang. The anther then opened as it continued coiling around his wrist.
With its open head, it caught the detached tendril on his bicep. The two pieces clasped to one another as if they had been meant to do just that. The single remaining stamen began wrapping around both of his arms now.
It jerked them both up above his head. Batman struggled in the grip, losing the Batarang and watching as it fell harmlessly to the petals below just out of his leg’s reach.
He redoubled his efforts, hoping to slip an arm free before it became too tight that he lost all feeling in them. His right arm was less secure than his left, as the detached tendril wasn’t as tight as the still moving one. Twisting, he heaved and bent his arm. If he could just-
That Batarang disappeared under Ivy’s foot, who had stepped onto the flower behind him. Bruce looked at her and found her to be holding the succulent in both hands.
Smirking, she raised the succulent up to his face, red smoke drifting up so that he could smell the aroma.
He gasped, slinking back to try to avoid taking in more of it. Even from such a small exposure, he could already feel the total, overpowering sense of peace taking hold.
Batman wound up in the center of the bud, losing his base control as the stamen lifted him up a foot off of the surface. Still holding the potted plant, Ivy stepped off of the petal onto the pistil.
Immediately after, the petal began a slow fold upward. To his horror, the other petals did the same, each rising up simultaneously to wall the two of them inside of the bud. She moved closer to him in a slow gait, reveling in her victory.
“Surrender, Batman,” Ivy soothed. “You don’t need to fight anymore; you cannot fight anymore. You cannot fight Mother Nature.”
Already, he could feel his muscles relaxing, relieved to have been given a rest after so long a battle. Desperate, he gritted his teeth, squirming with every fiber of his being to free his right hand. Almost there.
The petals above them ended their ascent, forming fifteen-foot walls that slanted inwards. There were slits between them to allow light to seep in, but they were not wide enough for him to fit through. Bruce had a sinking feeling that he wouldn’t be able to cut through the petals; either they would be too plush- like the pistil beneath them- to tear or too tough to break.
Badly, he wanted to hang his hang down and take a break. He could always escape later, right? It was not like he could escape now, anyway.
But he could still feel the arm. Almost there.
“It’s great what you can do when you have the right imagination,” Ivy said. “When nature is on your side.” She inspected the object in her hands. “Pleiospilos Nelli. A wonderful scent, I know. Makes you more… agreeable.”
“You used it… on those men outside…” Batman replied, pushing through the calming haze. It was difficult to focus on anything other than how much he wanted to quit. That and her gorgeous face.
“Not quite,” Ivy hinted. “They didn’t need to relax.” Oddly, she caressed the succulent with her fingertips. “What they needed was a leader. I gave that to them, made them worship me.” She then used her hand to push her hair back behind her shoulders. “Of course, the pheromones didn’t hurt. Another good way to change minds.”
“Why?” Bruce asked, doing his best not to get distracted by the skin now exposed without her hair in the way.
“You, Batman.”
Showing teeth, she stepped directly in front of him. If he could, he would have kicked at her or swung her up with him, but his legs were practically useless, leaving him just dangling by his arms. Ivy raised the succulent up to his face once more. The effect was immediate, leaving him barely able to think. He couldn’t formulate any sort of plan other than to get her.
“That’s it, Batman,” the green-skinned beauty encouraged. “Give in to me. Don’t fight it. You can’t resist. No man can resist Poison Ivy.”
In one final attempt, his right arm finally slipped free of the stamen. It came down with barely any control, trying to grasp her shoulder before he lost total control of the limb.
It fell much slower than he’d wanted it to fall. Ivy easily caught his arm by the wrist without dropping the succulent in her other hand. She took note of his limp hand, grinning wide and catching his eye with hers.
Batman’s head finally drooped, falling into the opening between the rocks. That put him even closer to the source of the aroma.
Amusedly, Ivy let go of his arm, letting it flop back to his side. She didn’t even care enough to take away his belt. It was already over. He accepted it with closed eyes.