Barbara Gordon, daughter of the Gotham City Police Department commissioner, likes practicing her hacking by competing with her friend Ben and jumping across rooftops to watch the police work in her free time. One night she gets shot when she follows a police scanner to an active crime and becomes a paraplegic. After weeks in the hospital her father checks her into the Arkham Center for Independence for therapy, but she quickly realizes that all is not what it seems at Arkham...
Contains examples of:
- Adaptational Distillation: This a story about how Barbara Gordon becomes Oracle, but doesn't involve Batman, Barbara being Batgirl, or her being shot and crippled by the Joker to hurt her father.
- Alternate Continuity: This is a timeline where Barbara gets shot in a universe where she never became Batgirl, and she's a White Hat Hacker instead.
- And the Adventure Continues: The story closes with Babs accepting another hacking challenge Ben's found.
- Art Shift: There are several segments focusing on Jena's ghost stories and each are drawn in a different style despite all being illustrated by the same artist.
- The Cavalry Arrives Late: Even though Babs couldn't get a call out Ben realizes something is wrong when she doesn't contact him and the information he'd gotten showed that there was definitely something criminal going on so he contacted Bab's dad, the police commissioner. By the time the police show up Babs and the others have escaped and disarmed and restrained the criminals.
- Cell Phones Are Useless: When Babs finally starts putting things together about the missing kids her phone doesn't have enough signal to send messages or get calls out. Later when cornered by the armed corrupt doctor in the private ward she still can't get a call to connect, and it's implied the doctors installed a jammer.
- Deer in the Headlights: After finding the "private ward" Babs has a flashback to getting shot and her hospital stay that freezes her as Yeong and Izzy call her name trying to get her attention back on the situation they're in.
- Didn't Think This Through: Barbara likes watching police work in real-time, by following her dad's scanner. She didn't consider that even if she's on the roof and a distance away, that stray crossfire could get her.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Yeong and Izzy find their friend Shanta who they'd been told had gone to a different institution in the private ward and she wakes enough to give an ominous warning right before Lachlan appears willing to kill everyone to keep what he's been doing silent.Izzy: We thought she just left. She was nearing the end of her therapy. They told us they couldn't do anything more for her. People leave the center all the time.
Shanta: No one leaves the center. - Gaslighting: After Jena's brother Michael disappears, Babs is told by Maxwell and Lachlan that Michael supposedly died in the fire that killed Jena's parents and she was only imagining he was still alive. Jena herself later vanishes, but Babs and her friend are able to find concrete evidence outside the institute that Michael definitely survived alongside Jena.
- Handicapped Badass: Babs loses the use of her legs early on, but not her hacking or lock picking abilities or tenacity and as Ben notes her therapy means that she's physically stronger than ever before too. She manages to take down a pair of corrupt doctors who have been experimenting on patients the public won't notice missing.
- Medical Horror: It turns out that the patients who have no one to miss them on the outside get sent for "experimental therapy" in the "private ward" where two of the doctors are illegally experimenting on them and keeping them sedated.
- Percussive Pickpocket: Babs bumps into one of the therapists in order to steal their employee I.D. card.
- Posthumous Character: Clara Maxwell died when she was eleven, and learning about her informs Babs what Jena meant when she said her stories had truth to them, since she'd turned Clara into one of her bedtime stories before disappearing. Clara's portrait also turns out to hide the entrance to the private ward.
- Rewatch Bonus: On the first read through it really does seem like Jena was just denying her brother's death in her grief before Ben comes across news of the fire that killed their parents and sees that both kids survived, but when she first appears in the background she's actually standing next to her brother.
- Roofhopping: The night Babs gets shot she and Ben hop rooftops to get to the site mentioned on the police scanner after she wins their hacking contest, which they were doing from the roof.
- Secret Room: Babs discovers that the missing patients have been removed to the basement where they are being experimented on, with the other patients being told they moved to other facilities and the outside world unaware. The passage in is hidden behind a portrait.
- Shout-Out: While it’s not even clear if superheroes exist in the setting as more than franchises with merchandise Yeong wears a denim jacket with Superman and Wonder Woman badges, and wears an Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld shirt one day and a Green Lantern shirt the next, Ben's jacket has a Cadmus badge and Micheal has a Teen Titans Go! style Robin doll, that ends up being left behind at first when he's taken. The girls also play card games with a Batman deck. The only indication heroes might be a thing is a picture on Ben's laptop of him and Babs with the Bat-signal in the background.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Barbara is The Ace with hacking skills and stamina to go roof hopping, plus her dad taught her self-defense. This means she thinks that she'll be fine watching crime scenes from a distance, since she may want to become a cop someday. A stray bullet catches her from an active police confrontation, despite the precautions that she took; sometimes life is a bitch when you risk it.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Lachlan decides to kill the patients being experimented on when the "private ward" gets found by three patients who will be missed if taken, and arrange an accident for the three who uncovered his unethical work.
- Younger and Hipper: Babs was always a college grad with experience as a congressional representative before becoming Oracle; here she's much younger.
