Link : https://forums.space battles.com/threads/blink-and-youll-miss-it-young-justice-si.648947/
WC : 20k+
Plot : Mercenary MC with Jumper power.
Chapter 1
I snorted awake as my phone buzzed in my pocket. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes and pulling my feet off the desk, I blearily answered it, "Yeah?"
"Boss, we've got incoming," My trusted lieutenant's Russian-accented voice came out of the speaker, "It's the Bat."
That snapped me awake real quick. I checked the computer in front of me, clicking through the helmet camera footage attached to twenty personnel. It was poor quality due to how tiny they were, but they sufficed. Sure enough, three of them had stopped moving.
I didn't bother to rewind and confirm whether it was Batman or not. My trusted lieutenant was trusted for a reason. The ex-Russian Mafioso was, in many ways, more competent than I was. Much more competent actually. I still wondered why he worked for me.
"Has Freeze been given a head's up?" I asked as I stood up, slipping a blank-faced white mask onto my face. Wouldn't want to be identified after all.
Walking forward, the world blurred for a moment before I was standing next to one of the downed men.
"Yes," Alexei replied, "He and a few of the boys are already packing up and heading out to the secondary lab, just in case."
Putting a hand on the unconscious man's shoulder, we flashed back to a specially prepared safehouse. It took me roughly three seconds to repeat the process with the other two.
"Preparations done?" I continued, pulling up the camera feeds for the remaining seventeen.
Alexei was quick to report, "Security data has been wiped, but the cameras are a loss."
"They're cheap, low end things. We're getting paid more than enough to replace them," I shook my head, even though he couldn't see it, "The demolition charges?"
"Set and…" I heard a click on the other end of the line, "Armed. Thirty seconds to detonation and counting."
With that in mind, I didn't ask anything else. Instead, I only gave him a warning, "Brace yourselves for a quick bugout."
I hung up before the man could start his usual response to that sentence, which typically consisted of lots of swearing in Russian and threats of bodily harm. One by one, I blurred to each soldier's location, grabbed them, and blinked back. Each one only took a second.
Alexei didn't stop his tirade of Russian as he was pulled back, though he fell over when he tried to take a swing at me. He didn't really do well with motion sickness.
After the last of my men were pulled out, I plopped myself back down in my chair and clicked open a window on my computer connected to one last camera. Positioned on top of the bomb in the center of the "laboratory," it was perfectly placed to see Batman's face when he emerged from the shadows. Sadly, he only let out a brief grunt before breaking out into a dead sprint back the way he came. Fifteen seconds later, the window went black as the camera was destroyed.
Sighing in disappointment, I closed my laptop and swiveled my chair to face my men. Most were stumbling around as they tried to deal with their respective motion sickness, though a few were taking it better than others. I frowned as I spotted that one of the unconscious ones had a broken arm. That would take him out of commission for a long time.
I pulled up my phone again and dialed another number.
"Yes?" Freeze's rasping voice responded from the other side.
"The decoy lab's been destroyed," I reported as I leaned back in my chair, "No evidence left behind for the Bat to find. He'll have to start from scratch if he wants to find you."
"Excellent," The ice man was a man of few words and his praise was equally short, "Once your men finish here, your services will no longer be required. Our agreed upon payment will be waiting in the indicated account. I trust your men will be able to arrange their own transport?"
"Yeah," I replied simply.
Mr. Freeze didn't bother to say anything else and just hung up. A shiver involuntarily went down my spine as I shut off my phone. It was always fucking creepy dealing with him. With most people, you could get a general idea of what they were thinking by their facial expressions or their body language. Freeze, on the other hand, didn't emote at all. It was like trying to talk to a brick wall.
Suffice to say, it was damn hard to read a brick wall.
I gestured to the three unconscious men, "Someone get them patched up. The rest of you, clear this place out. After that, drinks are on me tonight!"
A cheer went up from the conscious members of my merry little band as they rushed to complete their tasks. Essential equipment was quickly stripped out of the safehouse and packed up, namely computers, weapons, and supplies. We never used the same safehouse twice after a job, but we still stocked them with useful things.
All in all, it took ten minutes to get everything and everyone loaded into the waiting vans parked nearby. After that was all done, I slipped my laptop into a backpack, swung it onto my shoulder, and stepped out into London.
======================================================
Five years ago, I appeared in Gotham, not knowing my head from my ass. Given that it was, you know, Gotham, it didn't take long to accidentally discover I had superpowers. One moment, I was getting mugged in an alleyway. The next, I was standing on top of Wayne Tower.
I Jumped. Exactly like from Jumper. If I could see a place, even from a picture, I could go there in a blink. It was as easy as walking. Well, it was later on. Randomly teleporting doesn't help one's nerves, so in my panic I blinked in and out of reality about fifty times all over Gotham before I managed to calm down.
I think I accidentally sparked an urban legend. One time while I was flipping through tv channels, I saw a group of ghost hunters looking for a "screaming ghost" in Gotham. Again, it's fucking Gotham, so it could have been something else entirely.
After I figured out what I was doing, I practiced. A lot. I'm not proud to admit that I gave into the temptation my powers gave me. At first, it was small change. Stealing food and clothes from stores, popping into unoccupied hotel rooms for a quick shower, etc. Necessities of life. Then, I started letting it go to my head. Thankfully, it only took one bank robbery to snap me out of it. Ironically, it was due to a near miss with Mr. Freeze.
By coincidence, he and his then goons were robbing the bank at the same time I teleported into the vault. I had been filling a bag with bills when I'd noticed that the door was starting to frost over and it was getting a lot colder. I Jumped out before he got through, though the point was made.
I pulled back on committing crimes for a while as I reconsidered my options, especially since it seemed I would have a good chance of stepping on a villain's toes if I went further. Sure, getting beat up by the heroes wasn't good, but they wouldn't kill. Usually. The villains weren't so charitable.
Eventually, I decided to become a mercenary. No overarching evil plan that would put me at odds with anyone, no archnemesis to deal with, etc. A mook, essentially.
I ended up getting my start with Cobblepot, though I didn't use my powers where people could see. Huge asshole, but he paid his men well and didn't blink at forging an identity. Also, Batman tended to break them less than the mooks of other villains. Nowadays, Penguin gets premium rates and the occasional favor, even though he doesn't remember who I am.
I went independent after about a year and freelanced with other villains. I avoided the crazies like Joker, Zsazz, and Mad Hatter, focusing on the more rational members of the Gotham Rogues Gallery. Freeze and Riddler got most of my business. I even got a supervillain name out of it too.
Blink.
At first, I was solo. But soon enough, I started to gain a following of my own. Mooks dissatisfied with their current bosses, ex-mobsters, and the occasional punk. People who saw what I was doing and wanted a part of it. They became MY people, expanding my solo merc act into a PMC.
And with how quickly I could work my power, I made it look like there was an entire company of teleporting mercenaries able to be anywhere in the world at a moment's notice. Suddenly, Blink wasn't just a sole metahuman. Blink became the PMC and that got attention. We got job offers from bigger people, even a few governments. We had to turn a lot of them down since we couldn't take jobs that involved high-tier supers.
Blink has no other metahumans besides me. They're regular people armed with contemporary weapons. With good tactics and equipment, they could hold their own against street-level crime fighters. Anything higher than that and they'd need some serious technological mojo to compensate.
It's why I never take jobs from Luthor that involve Metropolis. Getting on Superman's radar is practically a "go straight to jail" card. At my best, I can chain teleports together to punch hard enough for a heavy-weight super to feel it, but Superman can move faster than my brain can process and can tank anything in my arsenal. At least Flash can be surprised by hidden traps. That's why I try my best to keep us at C-list level.
I know my capabilities inside and out due to testing them at every opportunity. I had the same powers as a Jumper, so I reasoned that I had the same weaknesses. I did. A mild electrical current running through my body is more than enough to disable my teleporting for a while. I wasn't sure I was leaving fractures in space-time in my wake, but I didn't want to take chances of having someone track us through them. It's why we scrap safehouses every time we return from a job.
The biggest object I've ever teleported was the M1 Abrams tank that I dropped on the Joker after he shot one of my men two years ago. He wasn't happy with me before that, but the clown's been holding a grudge ever since he came out of his coma.
I'm comfortable where I am. Just powerful enough to be respectable in the super community, but not notorious enough to be considered a threat the League needed to crack down on.
======================================================
The next morning, one of my burner phones buzzed.
"Blink," I answered after swallowing a mouthful of coffee. This early in the morning, I was tempted to hang up.
"I have a job for you, if you're interested."
Luthor.
"I'm listening," I replied, setting my cup back down on my desk. Lex Luthor was not a man you just hung up on. Refused the job? Certainly. But being rude was not in the equation.
Luthor knew about our "no Metropolis" policy and tended to act accordingly, so I usually didn't have to worry about getting involved in his crazy anti-Superman schemes. He was a sleezebag, but he was a sleezebag who paid on time in the exact amount he promised.
"There is a research facility in Washington D.C. that has suffered an accident and is in danger of exposing a number of sensitive projects. I need you to retrieve one such project and get out before that happens, preferably without being seen."
Something about this seemed familiar, but I was willing to go along with it for now, "Let's talk price."