Burnside Vigilante

If you walked across the bridge from old Gotham, across the wide gray river, you would come to a neighborhood called Burnside.

Burnside was a different kind of place. The buildings were painted bright colors. There were murals on the walls and string lights between the lampposts. There were cafes where students sat with laptops and bicycles parked outside in long colorful rows. Burnside was young. Burnside was new. Burnside felt like sunshine after a long rainy week.

And Barbara Gordon, who had been Oracle for a long time, decided it was time for a fresh start.

Something wonderful had happened. Doctors had built her a tiny, brilliant machine called a neural implant — a little chip that helped her brain speak to her legs again. After all those years in her wheelchair, Barbara stood up. She wobbled. She laughed. She walked.

And then, very quietly one evening, she opened the box where she had folded away her old costume, and she made a new one.

This Batgirl was different. Her cowl was sleek and dark. Her cape and boots and gloves were a bright, bold purple, the color of twilight just before the stars come out. Her belt was yellow, the color of the moon. She did not want to hide in shadows. She wanted Burnside to see her. She wanted the kids on the bicycles to look up and know that someone good was watching over them.

She rented a small apartment above a coffee shop. It smelled like cinnamon and old books. She filled it with gadgets and laptops and stacks of library books, because Barbara had always been a librarian at heart. By day she helped people find books. By night she swung between the bright neon signs of Burnside, listening for trouble.

The trouble in Burnside was different too. Not city-shaking monsters. Not cosmic invaders. Here, the villains were quieter and sneakier. Identity thieves who pretended to be other people online. Gangs that organized themselves with secret messages. Bored, clever hackers with too much time and too little kindness.

One evening, all the small businesses in Burnside started losing money. The flower shop. The bookstore. The little ice cream parlor on the corner. Their bank accounts emptied, their computers crashed. Someone was attacking the neighborhood from the shadows of the internet.

Barbara traced the signal across rooftops and satellites and back down to a fancy rooftop lounge, where a group of rich young hackers were laughing and clinking glasses and celebrating their "conquests."

WHOOSH — a purple cape swept across the rooftop.

CRASH — Batgirl landed in the middle of their party.

The hackers leapt up. One of them tried to launch a cyber-attack at her cowl. Barbara smiled behind her mask, pulled out her own custom-built smartphone, and TAP TAP TAP — she turned their own attack right back around. Their laptops glowed and then went dark.

"The digital world has consequences," she said, very softly, as she pinned the leader to the floor.

Before the night was over, every dollar had found its way home. The flower shop got its money back. The bookstore got its money back. The little ice cream parlor on the corner opened the next morning like nothing had ever gone wrong.

But Barbara did more than catch hackers. She visited schools. She started a little club where kids could come learn to code, and another one where they could learn how to defend themselves with kindness AND with their hands if they ever truly needed to. She wanted them to be ready. She wanted them to be strong. She wanted them to know that being smart was the greatest superpower of all.

Of course, being a Batgirl that people could actually SEE came with new problems. People posted photos of her online. Every time she swung past a building, someone snapped a picture. She had to be cleverer than her fans and trickier than her enemies. She had to keep one step ahead of every camera in the city.

But Barbara liked Burnside. She liked the murals and the coffee and the way the bridge sparkled at sunset.

Late one evening, she sat on the edge of a rooftop, her purple cape rippling in the warm wind, and she looked out over the bright lights of the Burnside Bridge. The road back to being Batgirl had been long. It had been painful. It had taken every ounce of patience she had.

But it had led her here, exactly where she was meant to be.

She pulled up her cowl, smiled into the soft city night, and dropped silently into the bright, beautiful streets below.

The Batgirl of Burnside was on patrol.