Wait.
Jude stood on a wet London pavement and let the memory surface.
"Harvey, I need to go on a long trip — I might need your help at some point. You have time for that?"
"Victor, I'm going to be away for a while. Can I count on you? Come with me when the time comes?"
"Commissioner Gordon, I'd like to borrow the roof access key. I need to get up there and signal Batman."
"Alfred — is Bruce available? I need a few minutes."
He had told everyone. Essentially every significant person in Gotham had received some version of the announcement. The cover story had been a plane ticket — bought, shown to the right people, and then quietly abandoned while he snuck back to his rented room to wait out the dimensional transfer.
[SYSTEM — CLARIFICATION] Your flight was ticketed to London. System detected Batman en route to your rental residence. Emergency response protocols activated. Business trip initiated ahead of schedule.
Jude looked at the gray London sky.
"How long was I gone, exactly?"
[Business trip duration: 25 days, 21 hours, 8 minutes, 47 seconds.]
[Time elapsed in home universe: Zero seconds.]
He stared at this.
"The business trip comes with a built-in time stop." He said it slowly, like a man testing whether the words sounded as absurd out loud as they did in his head. "You could have mentioned that at any point before I constructed an elaborate fake travel itinerary."
[You did not ask.]
He took a breath and looked at his surroundings properly for the first time.
London in drizzle. The particular gray of it — not Gotham's gray, which had weight and threat in it, but a softer, more resigned gray, the gray of a city that had made its peace with the weather sometime around the thirteenth century and never revisited the question. Thin puddles had formed on the asphalt between the cobblestones. A mangled bicycle — not stolen, he decided, but actually dismantled, pieces arranged in a rough arc on the pavement — occupied a strip of curb near a bin. Chewing gum and cigarette ends pressed into the wet stone.
He turned his nose away from the bins. Pigeons were working through a collapsed bag of garbage with the focused competence of professionals. They didn't look up.
He walked a few steps and the smell retreated, replaced by something more tolerable, and the buildings came into full view. That was better. Stone carvings above the windows. Chimneys. Gothic spires on the older structures, gone slightly soft at the edges from centuries of rain. Warm light through arched white frames. The architecture was doing a lot of heavy lifting for the city's overall impression, and it was mostly succeeding.
Treat it as a sightseeing trip, he decided. You are on a business trip that happens to involve a city worth looking at.
The streets were crowded. Some of the trees along the pavement had been strung with colored lights, which in the drizzle had a pleasant blurred quality. Jude paused by one and had a brief, instinctive conversation with the plant — or attempted one. It did not have strong feelings about the lights either way. Its primary concerns were water and light, in that order, and it was currently well-supplied with both. The emotional depth available was limited.
He moved on.
At the next corner, two men sat on the pavement against the wall, cushions under them, heads down, not talking, not asking for anything. Just sitting. Jude couldn't tell if they were resting or exhausted or somewhere beyond both.
He took out a US dollar bill — and then stopped, looked at it, and turned around to find a bank instead.
The upgrade was straightforward.
[SYSTEM — STATUS UPGRADE AVAILABLE] "Local Resident Status" (Gotham City) may be upgraded to "Local Resident — Global." Cost: $10,000 asset points. Includes: global account access, automatic visa processing, documentation, phone card, and associated registration.
He spent the points, and then went to the bank anyway. The asset point upgrade handled the paperwork, but the cash in his shop space was US dollars from a parallel universe that had been converted to gold and then — because the system declined to store raw gold — carved into the shape of a pumpkin.
[SHOP ITEM: SANS Golden Pumpkin Headgear (Sanity-Reducing)] Price: The system does not accept junk files. Note: The mental state of whoever sculpted this is difficult to imagine. However, given the material, it's hard to envision anyone actually refusing to own it. In a narrow numerical sense, it has value.
Jude did not read the note. The pumpkin existed, it was storable, and that was the entire point. Space items were still priced well outside his range, and improvised solutions were a core competency by now.
He exchanged $10,000 USD at the counter and walked out with a little over £7,000 in a new account. Enough for a month, probably. It didn't matter enormously — he wasn't planning to stay in London for the full two years the visa covered. The actual plan was to get a feel for the place, figure out what the system wanted from him here, and then go back to Gotham at intervals to check on Bruce's reform project. Wayne had promised a rolling payment structure: periodic deposits, amounts tied to how the plan was performing. Not a large fortune, but recurring.
It's something. He had arrived in Gotham with seven dollars. He left with a million and ninety thousand, some skill upgrades, and a global residential status. By most metrics, this constituted progress.
He was back on the street, thinking about this, when he noticed the food truck.
British food. Now's as good a time as any.
He was halfway there when a man came out of nowhere at speed.
Mediterranean complexion, well-cut suit, completely soaked despite the light drizzle — not from the rain but from himself, sweat-dark through the collar and cuffs. He moved with the urgent, slightly unsteady gait of a man who had a very specific problem and no time for anything else.
"Gino." He addressed the man at the food truck without preamble. "Six Super Burgers. Now."
The food truck operator stared. "Six? Henry, what — did you not eat today? Are you alright?"
"Don't ask, just make them."
Jude watched from the side. The man — Henry — did not have the build of someone who ate six burgers for lunch on a normal day. He was heavy, yes, and moved like his joints had opinions about it, but there was something off about the whole picture. The reaction time was slightly slow. The situational awareness was limited. He wasn't reading his surroundings, wasn't clocking Jude watching him, wasn't doing any of the small environmental assessments that people with enhanced physiques tended to do on reflex.
Not a superhuman. Or at least not a trained one. Just a man with an unusual metabolic situation and a strong need for hamburgers.
Henry collected the first two in both hands and started eating before the third was wrapped. He ate in the specific way of someone operating on urgency rather than hunger — bite, swallow, next one, bite, swallow, next one, the rhythm of a man trying to meet a deadline that happened to involve burgers. Six disappeared. He asked for six more. The food truck operator was watching with the expression of someone witnessing something they didn't have a category for.
This is the DC universe, Jude reminded himself. Strange metabolic conditions are not even in the top fifty unusual things you've encountered in the last month. He filed it under "local flavor" and turned toward the restaurant across the street.
Fish and chips. Genuine British national dish. The bar for this experience had been set low by every person he'd ever encountered who had opinions about English cuisine, which made it an ideal first meal — anything short of actively bad would register as a win.
He ordered, sat down, and took out his phone to look at the news.
Three minutes later, urgent footsteps came again from the street outside.