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A random thought, feel free to contribute your own ideas for spin-offs based on the Legion of Super-Heroes, or 20th century concepts being advanced to the 30th century!
Birds of Prey 3k Oracle (computer program, possibly AI, possibly the electronic ‘ghost’ of Barbara Gordon?) has served the SP ‘forever’ as a crime database, with them unaware of ‘her’ true nature, or history, thanks to ‘her’ skill at covering up records of her own installation and upgrade history. ‘She’ has also worked behind their backs, amassing and collating data which has led to a not-insignificant part of their reputation for excellence, as she has ‘dropped clues’ from time to time to SP officers who have in some way impressed her with their ethics and potential.
Finally, replaced during an upgrade, and relegated to maintaining records of items in SP high-security storage (usually tech used by criminals or for criminal purposes), Oracle discovers a cryo-coffin, with inconsistent designators, and advanced tech that defies ‘her’ attempts to snoop at what’s inside of it. She has one ally outside of the department, a ‘free agent’ that she has slipped information to about criminal cases, when there is a situation that SP resources can’t legally touch, an agent who goes by the moniker of ‘Sensor Girl,’ because she’s supposedly able to find anything, no matter how well hidden (or buried). For the first time in the half-decade that the two have been informally working together, Oracle gives her a mission that challenges her skills to the utmost, to sneak into SP ultra-secure storage and find out ‘what’s in the box!’
Sensor Girl, aka Kara Zor-El (stripped of all of her Kryptonian powers, save her super-senses, through circumstances that remain unclear), takes this mission, over her own reservations, and discovers that a person is stored in the mystery crate, one presumed not only dead, but to have never been alive in the first place! Opening the crate, Kara decants Laurel Kent, who was replaced by a robot Manhunter assassin soon after surgery for a Kryptonite-related injury. The Manhunter incapacitated her in her weakened state, post-surgery, and stored her away, using it’s own ability to interface with machinery to sneak her into the most secure location it could find, the same storage unit in which it had spent the last thousand years!
It’s been two years since then, and Laurel Kent is disoriented. A tense confrontation with the SP ensues, and the girls are on the lam for an issue or two before they manage to not only foil a major criminal organization, but in the process verify that Laurel Kent is not a killer robot, and indeed never was! Furious at having lost years of her life, and uncertain of her place, Laurel grudgingly accepts an offer to continue working alongside Sensor Girl, whose exact identity remains a mystery (Sensor Girl is aware of her own identity, and knows that Laurel is family, albeit family a thousand years removed, but still…). Oracle continues to advise them, although they do not physically ‘meet’ her until later in the series (or, more precisely, meet the hardware that stores her artificial intelligence, hardware that is archaic by 30th century standards, and is nearly destroyed in an arc that culminates in Oracle being downloaded into more modern, and less vulnerable, hardware, gaining the ability to holographically project an image of herself in various locations using a mobile drone that she has previously only been able to use as a mobile spy-camera).
And so the Birds of Prey rise again, in the 30th century, from surviving legacies of Batman and Superman alike. Oracle, digital ghost, Sensor Girl, one-time Supergirl, Laurel Kent, last heir of the House of El.
[I’d prefer the Birds didn’t work on the same level as the Legion, just as the 20th century Birds of Prey don’t generally rub shoulders with the JLA. The ideal situation would be for the Legion to have a Legion World type of orbital presence, and the Birds can handle local Metropolis stuff. The less ideal choice would be for the Legion to remain in Metropolis, and the Birds to occupy ‘New Gotham,’ a newly colonized world, terraformed and settled by a much-changed Wayne Enterprises, which, over a thousand years, had turned into a vast industrial machine, and would provide a very ‘cyberpunk’ type setting for the Birds, working outside the system on a world that is the ultimate ‘company town,’ with it’s own corporate security replacing the SP jurisdiction, and leaving room for all sorts of conflict-of-interest and megacorp corruption themes… Either would be better than having the Birds be some two-bit operation working out of a Metropolis already inhabited by 25-30 ‘real super-heroes.’]
Registered: Aug 2006
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