Chapter Text
As soon as the group got within ten paces of this ‘Timezone’ it was obvious that it was an arcade. What gave it away, I hear you ask? Was it the eardrum-shattering noise? The sticky linoleum flooring? Or the obnoxious neon lighting?
Steph got everyone, even Damian, to join her in destroying playing the Angry Birds Whack-a-Mole. While it was meant for only one person as there was only one mallet, there was nothing stopping
Bruce tried to get one of his older kids to okay Basketball Connect Four with him but none of them wanted to/disappeared on him, leaving him to play it with Damian who hadn’t been able to get away in time.
The concept was simple: shoot baskets to play your respective token and try to get four in a row. The execution wasn’t so simple.
The basketballs would randomly decide to not fall into the basket that it was shot into, instead favouring the one to its right.
It didn’t make sense, their aim was not at fault, they had good depth perception (they couldn’t be vigilantes if they didn’t), yet the basketballs seemed to have minds of their own.
“I was going for the far right column, not that one!” Damian grumbled as he watched his red token get added to the board on the wrong column.
Cass had pulled Dick towards one of the dancing games, specifically the one where you had to hit specific panels on the floor at specific times.
It was pretty close. Dick had inhuman flexibility on his side but Cass practised actual dance on a near-daily basis.
Tim ended up at the claw machines. When Dick came over to check how he was faring half an hour later, the seventeen-year-old had a small pile of prizes beside him.
Not only should it have been impossible for Tim to have won this many prizes in half an hour, but to manage to even win one? Incredulous.
Everyone, even if they had never set foot inside any kind of arcade, knew that any and all claw machines were rigged to stop you from winning anything.
Jason had gravitated towards the shooting games. The first victim was Ten Ring Shooting. The most notoriously terrible game.
“I’m aiming for the centre circle but it hits the light blue ring?” Jason questioned. “Why is aiming on this one so shitty?”
It didn’t get any better after that first one. Not at all. It was like trying to walk up a slope covered in soapy suds in the pouring rain, while blindfolded.
All six of them dispersed across the prize alley. Dick headed straight for the POP figures, some familiar designs caught his eye.
Cass had chosen only one prize, something that came in a replica bamboo steamer basket. It was a steam bun-shaped squishy she discovered upon opening it. As soon as it was freed of its confinement, Steph stole it from her hands.
Then Dick stole it from Steph. Jason stole it from Dick. Tim from Jason. Until Damian stole it from Tim. In short, the squishy steam bun unwillingly participated in Batkid Hot Potato.
Once everyone had experienced the distracting allure of the squishy, the five bun-less Batkids swarmed the rest of the steam buns.
“There are forty-seven buns in this box and if one costs 420 powertickets, we can get all of them for 19,740 powertickets,” Tim announced, after a moment. Damian checked his calculations against those of an actual calculator and huffed when it was correct.
“We have enough for that, right?” Steph asked.
“That was an utterly stupid question, Brown, of course, we do,” Damian told her.
“Between us six we have enough for all those and then some,” Jason agreed.
There was one whose wrapper didn’t match the others in the box and there was purple poking through the gaps. Steph pounced on this potentially purple steam bun like Bruce did on the opportunity to adopt a black-haired, blue-eyed orphan.
It was indeed a purple-coloured version of the squishy, much to the blonde’s joy.
The one that Damian got was different from the rest. The container was about three-quarters of the size of the others and, as Damian was soon about to discover, so too was the squishy inside.
“Why must I be stuck with the runt of the group?” Damian questioned. He had tried to pass the mini bun off to one of his siblings but all of whom had rejected it.
They were on the way out of the door when Jason spotted the sign for the laser tag arena. They had time for one game before they left, surely?
“Hey, old man,” Jason called. The man turned back to face his third-oldest child. “We have time for a game of laser tag before we leave, right?” he said.
His siblings all latched onto the appeal of the idea and swarmed behind him.
“We have to get going, Alfred’s waiting for us—“
“We are already here and the laser tag arena is not currently occupied by other patrons, thus now is the best opportunity to engage in a game,” Damian logic-d.
His youngest made a good point. And all his kids were backing him up.
The billionaire sighed.
“Alright, we can play one fifteen-minute game,” Bruce relented. He pulled out his phone to update Alfred as everyone else headed towards the arena.
The first thing they did once everyone was geared up was divide into teams. And then those teams had to be reorganised twice to ensure there was some semblance of fairness between them.
After all, it would look suspicious if the entirety of one of the teams acquired a very high number of points within the first five minutes of starting the game.
Damian ducked behind a block and pulled out a roll of duct tape he had gotten during their Bunnings trip. He ripped a couple of small sections off to cover both the lights on his vest and the laser on his ‘gun’, and set it down on the floor beside him.
He was going to win this game.
When Damian reached down to put the roll back in his pocket, he found it missing.
Oh.
But that was not his top priority right now, his top priority was winning the ‘laser tag’. He stood up and headed off after anyone in a red vest.
Around the corner from where Damian had been, Tim and Cass (who also had pieces of duct tape covering parts of her vest and the nose of her gun) cornered Duke.
“Hey, Duke,” Tim sing-song’d. “You want to win, don’t you?” he asked.
“Yeah, where are you going with this?” Duke asked back.
“We want you to use your powers to help us win,” Cass told him.
“Don’t we want to win honestly, without cheating?” he questioned.
“Yes, but Robins should always use all the resources available to their advantage,” Tim piped up.
Duke was still dubious but they were wasting time standing here chatting. “Alright, as long as Bruce doesn’t know,”
“Okay,” Cass agreed.
“Sure but he won’t do anything about it; Bruce will be too preoccupied with not letting Dick’s team win,” Tim said.
With that decided upon, the remaining three members of Team Red headed off into the fray.
“Dad,” Jason called, standing out in the open but right next to a corner. His laser gun pointed nose down to his feet.
Bruce’s brain screeched to a halt.
Error. Error. Bruce.exe has stopped working. Error.
Did he hear that correctly? Or did his ears just deceive him?
One of his kids called him ‘Dad’. One of his kids called him ‘Dad’ willingly. One of his kids called him ‘Dad’ willingly outside of the Manor. Jason just called him ‘Dad’.
Damian appeared from around the corner, his own laser gun pointed at his father’s vest…and fired.
The red lights of Bruce’s vest died out, indicating he had been hit.
He might have been hit but his kids had ganged up — they had worked together — to distract and then hit him!
By the time Bruce had been able to return fire, Damian and Jason were nowhere to be seen.
Not too long after she had started the current game of laser tag, the employee — whose name badge read ‘Louise’ — manning the entryway of the laser tag arena was seconds away from falling asleep and/or smacking her head onto the table she was leaning on when an ageing man in a suit (minus jacket) approached.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes, may I please have a vest and a gun? I would like to join the current game of laser tag,” the man requested, his British accent catching her slightly off guard.
“You’re too late, man: the game’s full — if you join, the teams’ll be uneven,” Louise said.
“I don’t think that will be a problem if I join the team my son is on, he is rather rubbish at this game,” he countered.
A few moments of silence passed as Louise thought it over.
“Alright,” she said. “You can join. I’m assuming your son is Bruce? So I’m gonna put you on the red team,” She stood up and headed to the cupboard just inside the entryway, pulled out a laser gun connected to a vest with red lights, and handed it to the man.
“You know how to play laser tag? And the rules?”
“Yes, I do.” he said.
“Alright, you’re good to head in then,”
“Thank you,”
Once the man had entered the arena, Louise went back to nearly dozing off at the table.
Who would willingly play laser tag in a suit? Maybe the man had come straight from work? But he looked too old to still be working?
Someone kept hitting repetitively Dick’s team members repeatedly and earning the other team an annoying lot of points. And whoever was doing it was very good at this game. That in itself was concerning as, as far as he knew, this was everyone’s first time playing. They might be trained vigilantes but that didn’t automatically translate to being good at laser tag.
And they managed to remain unseen by him.
Who was it? This game only consisted of his family, so it couldn’t be anyone else. That didn’t narrow it down much.
In the end, no team won because they all ended up being kicked out for a rather sizable list of reasons. Including but not limited to, breaking every single one of the base rules: no climbing, no running, no physical contact, and most interestingly, no offensive language.
Tim and Damian were responsible for breaking the ‘no physical contact’ rule. Tim had also broken the odd ‘no offensive language’ rule, for calling Damian ‘Demon Brat’?! It wasn’t even intended to be an insult!
Jason had started off the game edging towards being the one to break the aforementioned rule but had stopped rather abruptly with the language just seven minutes in. Meanwhile, Steph had the honour of breaking the ‘no crawling’ rule. Dick, predictably, had broken the rule of ‘no climbing’.
On the way back, Tim was taking occasional sips from a bright, lemon-yellow soda can whose name was in bright green font.
Spri — something. Tim’s hand was covering the latter part of it.
Where had he even gotten that from? There hadn’t been a cafe area in the arcade and they hadn’t stopped by any places selling food or drinks on their way either.
While it was odd seeing Tim drinking something that wasn’t coffee or RedBull, it wasn’t either of those overly caffeinated beverages so Dick elected to leave his brother to his soda. Timmy choosing to drink soda instead wasn’t a problem in itself nor cause for concern.
If only Dick knew…
Tim, on the other hand, was quite pleased with himself for having found a workaround for the annoying ‘only two shots of espresso per day’ limit: Sprite Lemon .
There was about 91 mg of caffeine in this bottle. And if he added that on top of his restricted coffee consumption, he could surpass the measly 80 mg of caffeine he would have been limited to. He had found it in a drinks vending machine near the entrance to the TimeZone.
He had to find more of this, they were here for another two days yet. Which meant at least forty-eight more hours of this bothersome caffeine limit.
As long as his family didn’t find out about the caffeine content of this soda and he could find more of it, he was set.