Ivy's Latest Scheme {darkest_fate&Mathim}

[darkest_fate]

"I'll be fine. It's Ivy, and she's pretty easy to deal with if you've got these," snarked Black Canary, giving her impressively clad breasts a little bounce for good measure. That was usually enough to shut Olly up quick enough. and if that didn't work, Dinah could generally point out that she was now literally training most of the younger heroines. Sure, it had been a duty she'd volunteered for, but she actually thought it a pretty good idea. Help her transition from sexy vamp heroine to potential mom, which was a transition she'd need to make if her and Olly were going to have the family together they sometimes talked about. Plus the gig would set her up nicely as something she could sort of slide into during that point, since she wasn't sure she wanted to keep doing hero work forever. Only issue was that her still pretty sexualized costume made a lot of her teenage proteges lose their focus. Flattering, given that Dinah was starting to get up there, but she did still have, well, the superheroine figure: impressive curves, tight body, breasts that threatened to explode out of her costume.

So, yeah, she was semi-retired already, fairly recently married to Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow, and mostly spent her time training younger heroes on the finer points of heroism, namely combat, as she was still one of the best at CQC in the entire League. All of which did little to explain why she was sliding her protective leather jacket, short as it was, over her corset style top and making sure everything was in place. Olly was starting to protest again, which had Dinah giving him a hard look.

"it's a distress signal. From Helena," she said, her voice flat, broking no argument. He knew she and Helena were close, had been since they'd worked numerous cases together. Helena had been at their wedding, and Dinah had been encouraging her various romantic entanglements. Apparently Helena had been investigating something Poison Ivy was doing, and figured that Black Canary would be help. Given that Dinah's "canary cry" could probably handle anything Ivy had in hand, and she happened to be female, dodging most of the pheromone nonsense, and on top of all that, she had the same antidote that most of the Gotham bound heroes now had against most of Ivy's standard toxins, and Dinah should be fine. Go in, help Huntress with the situation, get the fuck out. Celebrate by riding Olly till he shot quite a few little green arrows into her. Job well done.

Dinah gave Olly another kiss before taking off, mounting on her bike and zooming through the winding streets. She and Olly had already boomed over here using the various Boom Tubes the League and Team had in place. From there, Dinah had found one of her old stashes and mounted the slick, black bike, taking off. She already had the coordinates memorized, winding through the streets to find it in no time. She gave one last signal to confirm to Olly and a few others where she was, before cautiously entering the inevitable greenhouse lair. So far, no signs of Huntress anywhere. Black Canary frowned at that, checking her signals. Huntress should already be in there, scoping things out.

But all Dinah saw were a bunch of plants. She opted for stealth, trying to work her way through, but her worry was making her rush just a little. Her friend was here. In fact, the signals seemed to indicate she was really close by. Were those... pods? "C'mon, Ivy, you can't be doing pod people," mumbled Dinah, fighting the urge to sigh. At least this was something she could probably handle. Hopefully Huntress wasn't already inside one of those...

 

[Mathim]

Ivy's plans often changed. Plant supremacy, where the world would be overrun and animals would either be subjugated or made extinct in favor of plant life. Taking revenge on a particular person or company for their crimes against the environment. Creating a disaster and holding the victims to ransom. Usurping money or political power via creating clones of humans from her mutant plants. But Batman and his allies foiled her every single time, forcing her to continue to change and adapt. It seemed almost inevitable that she would always meet defeat at her enemies' hands. Even on the occasions she allied herself with others like her gal pal Harley Quinn, they didn't manage to be much more successful before being brought down.

Someone who understood evolution on the level of plants that she did, however, needed to practice this sort of evolution in their thinking. So what seemed to work before, and what failed? Nip in the bud the strategies that didn't bear fruit in the past, and cultivates the aspects that did. It took some time, laying low, mustering her resources in secret, but Ivy finally figured out a way to come out on top. While it did require assistance from other villains, she minimized their involvement and only borrowed what she needed from them. Joker's toxic chemicals. Ra's Al Ghul's Lazarus Pit waters. Killer Croc's metahuman mutant DNA. Scarecrow's fear-inducing gases. Anything she could play with in her chemistry lab and make into something tailored to her style.

The plan did have some great risk, too. She didn't have an end goal in mind going in. World conquest? Forming a criminal empire? Just making enough money to retire on and erase her own criminal record? That didn't exactly matter, and having too linear of a path to follow meant the plan would be more prone to failing. Being able to adjust and re-scale the scope of her endgame was a necessity. If she had to cut and run early then maybe the heroes would never suspect what she had actually intended and she would not then have to start over from level zero. So starting small, with many different options available to her depending on her level of progress, was a better strategy than she had ever utilized before, and with any luck that would serve her better than her previous endeavors.

But the one thing she was certain of was that she needed to turn her enemies' strengths against them. She needed to fight fire with fire, or whatever the plant-based equivalent of that would be, and while she did have some ability to influence the behavior of humans when they were under the effects of her spores and pollens, she could not maintain it at a distance or long-term, or against someone like Batman whose mental discipline was virtually unshakeable. There was another way to gain their power, have a Justice League of her own under her control and with the powers they always threatened her with. But it would take time. It would draw attention and require great caution. It would have to involve distractions, diversions, decoys, traps, anything to distance herself from ground zero where the trouble was most likely to become focused. She needed a barrier of false operations centered around her base to keep anyone from finding the true headquarters where the heart of the scheme was really hidden.

It started simply enough. She needed someone of good physicality, like Batgirl, but one without any actual powers which would overwhelm her vassals. Luring her in innocuously, making her believe it was a small-time robbery, and hitting her with an overwhelming force and dragging her into the sewers quickly before anyone could tell what, if anything, had happened. Unconscious, quickly disarmed, unmasked immediately to avoid the foolish opportunity to gloat before doing it that she and so many others had not been able to resist doing up until now, Batgirl was helpless in Ivy's clutches and with her identity now known as Barbara Gordon, Ivy had even more incentive to make the petite redhead her first guinea pig. But being that it was in the very early experimental phase, it did not go over well and Babs was poisoned badly and soon comatose, and Ivy had to keep her preserved in one of her large flowers so she didn't just die.

Huntress was next. An unaffiliated heroine, not an official part of the League nor a member of the Bat-Family, this would make her easier prey than most others, second only to Batgirl due to the younger woman's inexperience and overconfidence. Huntress was older, more experienced, but a loner and so any situation in which she could not rely on backup would be her downfall. Ivy led her into another trap, and with no way to contact anyone to rescue her before being disarmed, Huntress also quickly became tranquilized and stripped down and unmasked. Helena Bertinelli, a former mob boss' daughter turned vigilante, hardly interesting compared to the daughter of a police commissioner. But still, Ivy could learn from the mistakes with Batgirl and try to have more success with Huntress. Alas, it also proved too much for her, but allowed Ivy to refine the amounts of chemicals she used and have a much better idea next time of what would be a good ratio to avoid poisoning a body beyond its ability to recover from.

Batgirl's utility belt beacon would have brought a world of trouble down on her so Ivy had it disposed of by one of her moving plants, and it was soon flushed out to Gotham Harbor, making it impossible to determine an origin point or trace it back to anywhere in particular. Huntress' on the other hand was a general distress beacon that wouldn't automatically bring the wrath of Batman down on her, and, once again using a moving plant to run it to a false location in order to set up an ambush, she activated it, hoping that whoever was sent would be an appropriate, meaning female, candidate. The greenhouse there was set to explode, destroying any traces of evidence, but only as a last resort. Self-sealing, pumped with gas to knock out anyone who wandered in, attacking plants to restrain anyone strong, but with emphasis on cutting off the use of the person's mouth so they could not call for help, coordinate with anyone they were working with, or, in the case of Black Canary, preventing her from using her one superpower. Ivy saw her arrive on security camera footage and was delighted that Huntress' sometimes-partner was the one. Physically similar to Huntress in age, fitness level, musculature and martial arts skill, yet with a power that could potentially be adaptable to Ivy's plants...that was almost too good to be true, at this early stage of the operation. She had to be very, very careful with this one to avoid a mistake, losing this sample would be heartbreaking.

A plant that was vaguely human-shaped, wearing Huntress' discarded garb including her distress signal, was laying prone on the floor of the greenhouse. It would be alarming and disarming for Black Canary seeing her comrade in such a state, and make her more concerned about getting Huntress out of there rather than taking precautions against danger, and sure enough, Ivy was right, heroes were so predictable. Self-sacrificing to a fault. The impostor Huntress exploded into a cloud of spores, as well as having a flashbang effect to already disorient anyone caught by it, and then being unable to avoid breathing in the spores. Only someone like Batman himself would have been fully prepared, going in wearing a gas mask ahead of time. Thank her lucky stars he seemed to be a no-show lately, no idea why that was, though there were rumors, even among criminal circles, that he was spending more time with Wonder Woman. Oh, what an acquisition THAT one would be! One day...

 

[darkest_fate]

As Black Canary looked, she saw the shape. That urge to just leap into action, to sprint forward and save the day, welled up within her, even took her forward a few steps .But she hesitated. Were she inexperienced, she'd just go with her gut. But Dinah knew better; she'd literally warned younger heroes about precisely this sort of thing. Clever opponents, and Ivy was nothing if not clever, could lay traps for you, playing to your weaknesses. Black Canary needed to take in everything.

So yes, a shape... wearing Huntress's outfit, that the signal was directly beeping about. Black Canary could feel every urge within her screaming to dart forward, to save her longtime friend, to do what it took. She didn't see any traps immediately. And the longer she waited, the greater the chances were that anything infecting Helena would do its job. Black Canary pulled out an antidote and decided that she'd better make a dash for it.

Her precautions might have worked, had the body itself not been rigged. Black Canary stumbled back, caught slightly off guard, just enough that she inhaled a mouthful of spores before she could process. Were her powers not tied to her voice, Black Canary might have been able to make it out of there. She did jam the antidote she had in hand into her thigh, injecting herself with the counteracting agent, but whatever Ivy had planted here had some pretty major effects. It should counteract whatever she'd been hit with, but Dinah could feel her knees weakening. Should she fake getting effected to get closer? Her head already started spinning, and she was pretty sure that she wouldn't need to fake much; whatever this thing was, it already was starting to work, only slowed by the dose Dinah had given herself, not stopped completely.

 

[Mathim]

Know your enemy. That was a lesson all of Batman's rogues gallery thought they had applied but sadly in their arrogance they proved time and time again that it was simply not so. Batman seemed almost impossibly knowledgeable, about all of them, and adapted almost instantly to all of their tactics. So it was time for Ivy to turn the tables. Batman and his allies had all been either inoculated against a number of Ivy's toxins and/or carried with them instant antidotes to them. It wasn't enough for Ivy to try to cut off their ability to use them, no, she had to take measures to negate the effects of them. By utilizing what research she had already been able to do with Batgirl and Huntress, she had combined new genes into her plants and made new strains of pollen and other chemicals that were outside of the standard ones she had previously used. No one, not even Batman, would be immune to their effects, but she wasn't targeting the man himself anyway. So the combination of her strategy to cut off air supply and the use of her victim's mouth, and the potent strain of new pollen exploding and filling the room was likely to trap anyone other than someone already wearing a gas mask. With that, Black Canary became easy prey.

Ivy, of course, did not go anywhere near that trap in person. Too risky. She wanted to ensure as little clues were left behind as possible to tie the disappearances back to her. In exchange for what she had promised Joker for his chemicals and cooperation, the Joker would increase his activity on the other side of Gotham and make sure to create plenty of distractions to keep other heroes from getting wind of any plant-related incidents. Even Killer Croc was helping with that, making sure that any activity going on in the sewers was chalked up to his doing when she needed it, as that was her primary transport route for supplies and her human cargo. The greenhouse had served its purpose and once a carrier plant had ensnared Black Canary's unconscious body and carried it down into the sewers to make its way back to its master, she triggered the self-destruct. It was a cheap place anyway, and would not likely have appeared to be a greenhouse once it was in flaming ruins. But with Huntress' burnt costume in the rubble, it would likely give the impression that she had fallen and be presumed dead, making a search for her body less of a priority as time went on. Dead was a better cover than missing, and Ivy could use that sort of distraction to keep attention away from her activities.

With Dinah now delivered to her, and being a high-profile heroine that required no mask, her identity well-known and even among heroes being a rare one in that regard, there was no need to do any uncovering. In fact, Ivy allowed her to keep her already rather revealing outfit on for the time being. Still keeping her restrained with extremely strong vines, which could cause very sharp thorns to jut out if they met too much resistance, she allowed Dinah to remain upright and tightly gripped against the wall, bound by her entire legs, around her waist, under each armpit and two around her neck. They were constricting and could easily choke her out before she could let out a canary cry, but she wasn't aimed at anything important anyway, and they were so far underground that nobody on the surface would hear anything. Ivy could take her time with this one, taking samples, testing by pieces rather than on the whole, ensuring the best results and not letting her go to waste. That metahuman gene, like Killer Croc's, would be invaluable in strengthening her plants. Taking out a valuable member of the Justice League and being able to turn her power against them, to boot? It was almost too good to be true! And all things considered, honestly, it was almost too easy.

The vines around Dinah's neck already had their thorns out, lightly poking against each side of her neck, allowing her to speak, if not without difficulty from their tight grip, but the message would be clear that if she tried anything, she'd be given a very sloppy tracheotomy, likely with an injection of some kind of toxin that would render her unconscious again anyway. Not that Ivy was looking for a chatting partner but now that she was holding all the cards, with no chance of anything internally going wrong, it couldn't hurt to have the girl awake for a little gloat. But what she really wanted Dinah awake for was when the fun really started, and that wasn't going to be for a little while yet.