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—
Metropolis
"Trent Blackwell. You help an organization kidnap innocent women. Why?" Question's inquiry was rhetorical.
"Because you have been rejected so many times. All those women, who didn't even give you a second glance, who were repulsed by you, and now, you are seeking revenge." The detective's interrogation style was to destabilize his target, seed paranoia, and cause emotional outbursts so the person before him would make mistakes and let information slip.
Question leaned in, bringing his featureless face on level with Trent. "Tell me, Trent, how many women have refused to date you because they knew what a waste of space you were?"
"Fuck you." Trent was struggling against his bonds with gritted teeth, trying to reach for Question.
"Dozens. You are so hapless; even prostitutes didn't look your way. But now, you are getting revenge on them, aren't you? Does it make you feel powerful, Trent? Do you feel vindicated when those women are taken away?"
"Fuck you." Trent's struggles became furious, which meant Victor had done his research well. Milex expected nothing less.
Question leaned closer to whisper to Trent's ear, not even bothered by the man's frantic attempts to kill him."And the only reason those women even date you? Because of all the wealth you are suddenly touting around. We both know that if you had the last bucket of water on Earth and any one of those girls was on fire, they would rather sit down and wait for death."
The deduction was on point, and Trent lost it, falling down with the chair he was tied to.
"Fuck you, and fuck those whores! So what if I helped those guys kidnap them? They deserved it. What did I lack for them to treat me like dirt?!"
"I can count a lot of reasons, but time is short, and I can't spare any more for a pawn like you."
"Pawn?! I am not a pawn. My handler knows I am the best he has."
"Your handler? Do you mean the one that I found with a bullet in his head?" Miles understood what Victor was doing now.
Trent was out of control now, so fishing information out of him had become a lot easier.
"Eddie is dead?" The bound man stopped his struggles, suddenly afraid.
And without even realizing, he had given up the fact that he had a handler and that his name was Eddie.
"Oh yes, the cops just found his corpse in a trash bin. I was going to go after him first, but someone was quicker." Question pulled out a photo from his coat, showing the decomposing body of a man inside a garbage bin.
The photo was a fake, obviously, but Trent was too scared to realize it.
"Shit."
"He was a liability, Trent, and now that you've been caught, so are you. Sooner rather than later, the police will find your body in a trash bin too." Question tapped on the photo, forcibly raising Trent's head to make him look.
"Speak, and maybe, just maybe, you might rot in prison, rather than be food for rats in the sewers." And the final line, offering salvation.
"Okay, okay. I'll talk. I only know Eddie and his group. I take the women to a bar in New Troy, the Shade. It's an expensive place, so they fall right in. When they were drunk enough, Eddie and his boys took them away. I don't know where." Question let go of Trent and continued his interrogation.
"How did you let Eddie know you were ready?" Miles had checked his phone, and it was a bust.
"They contact me over the internet through a program they uploaded to my computer." That would explain it, and with the computer turned off most of the time since Trent was too busy spending his wealth outside, it wasn't surprising that Zalika couldn't find anything.
"Sounds like a visit to his home is in order." Claire was itching for a go at the bastards, and Miles nodded.
He turned to Neumann while Question left the room. "Have your men keep Trent confined here until I order otherwise."
"Yes, sir."
Miles leaned into Neumann's ear. "And Captain, your weapons must be on stun mode all the time. I don't want any deaths with Question here."
—
Trent's apartment was a mess, and he definitely heard Claire gag.
Question took a look around the room and headed straight for the computer, having decided there wasn't anything more valuable than their original target.
"Password locked."
Question typed in something and unlocked it.
"Let's see." He muttered and clicked the chat app, which required another password, but Question found it too.
It seems Trent wasn't very concerned about security.
"A private chat app. These guys aren't playing around." This matter was getting more serious by the minute.
"We can lure him into a trap." Claire offered, but Miles shook his head.
"Not without Trent, and we don't have anyone his size." Trent was three hundred pounds after all.
A shapeshifter would have been useful now.
"Give me a minute to make a call."
—
Zalika had managed to track Eddie thanks to her meta abilities, rendering the security measures the other side had set up useless.
Miles had sent his team ahead to raid the hideout and take the criminals away to be interrogated.
On the ride, Question had turned his attention to Miles. "Miles Beckett. Appeared out of nowhere, founded a company that quickly rose to fame, and is working with the Justice League."
He wondered when Victor would ask. "Question, I didn't know you were a fan. Would you like an autograph?"
"I would like answers." Question's sense of humor was not with him today.
Perhaps it was because Miles wasn't as pretty as Huntress?
"Any answer I would give, you can find it on your own." Since there was nothing to find except his activities in the last several months, there should be no reason for Victor to be suspicious.
Of course, the lack of information on Miles would only make Question dig deeper.
"So why not tell me?"
Miles smiled. "Why should I waste my breath when we both know you wouldn't believe it?"
"Touché."
—
By the time they arrived, the raid was over, and the targets were in custody. "Captain, have you found anything inside?"
"Several items belonging to the kidnapped women, a lot of cash, and computers." Neumann reported, gesturing to a room.
"And our guests?"
"Tight-lipped."
Fat, just like Trent, Eddie was tied to a chair, wearing a dirty Hawaiian shirt and shorts. "Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. Why can't you play nice? Now, we're going to have to do this the hard way."
Eddie snorted. "Go scare a kindergartener with that attitude."
"Captain, have one of your men find me a rat."
"Yes, sir." Neumann nodded, no matter how odd the order itself was.
"A rat?" Claire asked, while Question was no doubt running scenarios in his mind. The detective did not have the time to do any research on Eddie to exploit the man's weaknesses, so this interrogation required a bit more of a hands-on approach.
"Do you know what makes humanity truly dangerous in my humble opinion? Our creativity. In the direst of situations, in the depths of darkness, we always find a way out, through our creative minds. Of course, it's not always used for noble purposes." Miles shook his head.
Ignoring the disturbed looks he received, Miles continued. "Throughout our history, several people and organizations have used rats as a torture method to inflict fear, pain, or death on captives. One method was to put a rat in a bowl and fasten it on the prisoner's stomach, then heat the bowl. In an effort to escape, the rat would burrow into the bowels of the victim."
The monologue was not over yet, and Miles turned sharply, looking Eddie straight in the eye. "A truly cruel idea, and what else but our creativity, a tool both wonderful and terrible, could have created it?"
"You're bluffing." Though he tried to appear confident, Eddie did avert his eyes.
"We will see as soon as they are back with a rat, won't we? Alternatively, you can speak and spare yourself the pain." He should just find himself a mind reader and save time.
"Here it is, sir." Half an hour later, two men brought a rather large and menacing rat in a large plastic container.
"Now, do any of you gentlemen have something to use as a bowl?" A metal bowl was handed to him, and Miles nodded.
"Hold Eddie down, and take off his shirt."
Eddie began to struggle but couldn't escape from the four men pushing him to the ground.
"Last chance before I take the rat out, Eddie." Afraid, but not enough yet, the handler did not fold.
"Your choice." Miles shrugged before opening the lid of the container. He brought the rodent closer to Eddie's naked chest, and the man finally yielded.
"Wait, wait." He begged, and Miles raised an eyebrow, still holding the container. "Oh?"
"We take the women to a mysterious backer in Jump City in return for cash." Eddie confessed, which confused Miles and the others.
"Jump City? That's on the other side of the country. Why gather women here?" That side of the country had fewer heroes and villains compared to the east coast, which meant the chance of discovery was lower.
Unless there was a specific reason for the women to be from the East Coast.
Or this was just the tip of the iceberg, and this web was much larger than what the investigation has revealed so far.
"I don't know. They gave us specific targets and told us to ship them to Jump City." So the targets weren't random, meaning this chain of kidnappings wasn't just a sex trafficking operation.
"Tell me everything you know about this mysterious backer of yours."
"He looked and spoke weirdly. Wore some sort of robe with a red S on it." Since Eddie did not specify it, Miles didn't think it was related to Kryptonians.
Taking out a pen and paper, Miles handed it to the half-naked man, ordering the operatives to let him go. "Draw it."
With three strokes, his worst fears were confirmed. "God damn it."
"You know them?" The question was asked, and Miles nodded with a heavy heart.
"I know the symbol. It belongs to Trigon." The Mark of Skath was carried by Trigon's children, a warning sign that they must end the world.
A cult carrying the symbol meant something weird, and most importantly, not canon, was happening.
"Trigon?" Claire racked her head but didn't remember him being one of the villains Miles mentioned.
"He is a demon from another dimension who has an insatiable hunger for evil and seeks to conquer and enslave entire universes."
"You are kidding, right?" Question's unreadable posture broke due to the ridiculous explanation.
Government conspiracies, shadow wars, and connections between secret societies were all in his field, and all were human-made schemes.
This was something too outlandish even for the most paranoid detective on Earth.
"I wish I was. If this cult is attempting to summon him or something along those lines, then the whole universe is in trouble." Either something had happened to Raven, or she did not exist here at all, leaving Trigon to search for other means of expanding his dark reach.
"Shouldn't you call your buddies for help?" That sounded exactly like the kind of thing the Justice League had to deal with.
"Not right now. We still don't know exactly who we are dealing with. As soon as we have substantial knowledge on the exact location of the cult, they will be informed." Sending the League to search for an aversive group would only force the enemy's hand, and it was not a desirable outcome.
"Wait a second, summoning a demon? Nobody told us anything about this." Eddie exclaimed, and Miles considered shooting him before remembering why he couldn't.
"Were they supposed to? You might have just doomed us all to an eternity of suffering."
—
"So what are we doing now?"
"We are heading to Jump City while the computers are scanned to track the cult." Zalika was working round the clock to locate the main base of the cult, but something had been stalling her.
Miles turned to their tag-along. "Question, are you coming? The League has extremely advanced methods of travel."
While the detective was not exactly equipped to fight cultists who had a high probability of possessing arcane abilities, Vic Sage still was an expert tracker.
"Alright."
Once in a remote location, Miles called a Javelin, and the trio was off to Jump City. Miles had called J'onn to keep the members of the League on ready, warning the Martian that there was a potential interdimensional incursion.
"Were you actually going to torture him?" Shooting someone dead was not comparable to letting a rat gnaw through his intestines.
"Of course not, I just needed to scare him into spilling the beans."
"And if you had failed?" Question didn't prefer the heavy-handed methods Miles and Batman used but wasn't above them if the situation called for it.
"There are less gory and fatal ways of extracting information out of someone. Rat torture is for terrorizing the populace through an example, not to interrogate." Such as starvation or waterboarding.
Sufficiently satisfied, for now anyway, Question turned his attention to the matter at hand. "Tell me more about this Trigon."
"My information is limited. He is extremely powerful, dangerous, and has an unending hunger to feed on pain, suffering, and souls." Honestly, it was his mistake to not keep an eye on someone vital like Raven, provided she was even on Earth by this time.
"How is he supposed to cross into Earth?"
"All I know is that he supposedly had a daughter, a half-human one, meant to open the way for him, but she detests her progenitor. It is possible that Trigon is looking for other ways to cross into Earth.
"So what? They are going to sacrifice those women to open a portal to hell?" Claire almost snorted at the absurdity of it.
This was becoming something straight out of a horror movie.
"Possible. The cult also might just send those females to Trigon so they could be impregnated." Provided they failed, which he did not intend to, the second option might at least give them time to thwart Trigon.
"I don't know which one is worse."
His answer chilled the pyrokinetic. "They'll either die during the conception or commit suicide afterwards."
—
Jump City
Jump City was a major urban hub, but not the powerhouse Metropolis was. Beaches, suburbs, and industrial areas dotted the city, and it possessed a much brighter and more colorful aesthetic compared to Gotham.
There was no Titan Tower yet, of course, but the city itself rarely saw any villain attacks, for now.
Zalika had discovered only a name before she was repelled: Arrival.
Miles was inclined to believe the enemy utilized arcane means to protect themselves and their systems.
What "Arrival" meant, whether it was a location or a date, was unknown to them, but no secret could stay buried forever.