"Catherine, come down and play with us…"
"Mommy, it's so dark here. Come play with me."
"You filthy woman—I'll never forgive you, even in death!"
The lavish bedroom echoed with whispers that didn't belong to the living.
A middle-aged woman jolted awake, drenched in sweat. "No—! Stay away from me!"
Tick… tick… tick…
The steady rhythm of the clock grounded her back to reality. She glanced around, realizing she was in her own room. The reflection staring back from the mirror was ghastly—ashen, exhausted, and tinged with fear.
She rubbed her forehead, muttering under her breath, "Third nightmare in a row. Damn it! I can't stay in this cursed house."
Slamming the call button by the bed, she waited for her bodyguards to escort her to another safe house.
Three minutes passed. Nothing.
Only her own ragged breathing filled the silence.
Her stomach dropped. Something was wrong.
She snatched a pistol from her nightstand and scanned the room, finger trembling on the trigger.
"Evening, madam," a polite voice greeted from the window.
She didn't think—just fired.
The intruder toppled backward out of sight. Relief flooded her… for about three seconds. Then the same voice came again.
"Evening, madam."
The same tone. The same figure. The same window.
Her third shot came shakier than the first. By the time the fourth identical figure appeared, her nerves were hanging by a thread. She was sure her bullets had hit—she'd practiced enough to know her aim—but these things didn't bleed.
What are they? What am I dealing with?
Trying to calm herself, she clutched the pistol tighter, telling herself to think. When the figure returned again, she held her fire, desperate to know what it wanted.
The shadowy intruder, wrapped in swirling black mist, seemed to smile—though no human face was visible. Seeing her hesitate, it vaulted casually through the window.
"Don't come any closer!" Catherine's voice cracked as she raised the gun, hands shaking uncontrollably. The smoke-covered being was wrong—unnatural. No living body could move like that.
But the real terror came when the figure snapped its fingers.
"Give me the gun."
The words sank into her like a command from her own brain. She knew she shouldn't obey. She knew she was still conscious.
But her body betrayed her. Step by step, she walked forward and placed the weapon gently into the intruder's hand.
Her mind screamed. Her body wouldn't listen. Logic collapsed, reason shattered.
This is it, she thought numbly. I've done too many terrible things. Now I'm going to die for them.
Fear, disbelief, and despair twisted together as she trembled before the being.
The shadowy figure, of course, was none other than Thea Queen, Gotham's newest "friendly neighborhood problem-solver."
After the Solomon Grundy incident, Thea knew her time in Gotham was nearly up. Moira's campaign work and her studies both demanded her return to Star City—but before leaving, she wanted to deal with the Court of Owls once and for all.
The "Court," she'd learned, wasn't so much an organization as a decadent social club: Gotham's old-money aristocrats who had ruled the city from the shadows for two centuries.
Batman had smashed a few of their operations in his youth, but the core members had always slipped away to rebuild later. Now, with Gotham in chaos, they were creeping back into power.
Thea didn't need to find all of them—just one weak link.
Three days earlier, she'd activated a nanotracker planted in a Talon's corpse. The signal led her straight to this woman, Catherine Monroe, the Court's external liaison.
For three nights, Thea had invaded Catherine's dreams, weaving terror after terror, chipping away at her sanity until tonight—when the woman's will finally crumbled.
Not that she'd ever admit it, but part of Thea's motivation for researching mind-control magic might have had something to do with a certain red-caped muscle god who'd gotten a little too curious with his x-ray vision. A total coincidence, of course.
Thea sighed. The process had been clumsy and exhausting, but it worked.
If Merlin himself could see how long she'd struggled with a basic Dream-Entry spell, he'd probably claw his way out of some distant dimension just to smack her upside the head with a fireball.
Such was the pain of being self-taught.
Her so-called "spellcraft" was a Frankenstein of half-remembered notes from the trial realm, runic etching techniques from the dagger she'd studied, and assorted online theories—most of them dubious at best.
To make the illusion more convincing, she'd even used three expendable shadow-clones as cannon fodder inside Catherine's nightmares. Every time Catherine thought she'd found an escape, Thea—or rather, one of her clones—would drag her back into terror, pushing her mind right over the breaking point.
By the fourth night, the woman's psyche was soft clay.
Now Thea pressed her palm against Catherine's forehead.
Her eyes glazed over, irises flickering with faint silver light as she began reading the woman's memories.
Strictly speaking, "reading" wasn't accurate—memory wasn't a flat page, but a tangled, multi-layered scroll. Even with preparation, Thea had to stop after three surface layers; the sheer flood of mundane thoughts was overwhelming.
She exhaled, shaking off the noise—shopping lists, petty grudges, gossip. None of it mattered. She only wanted what connected to the Court.
Chuckling softly—a sound distorted by her voice-changer into something more demon than human—Thea sat cross-legged on the bed, opened a notebook, and began tweaking her spell.
Catherine Monroe stood motionless beside her. She wasn't paralyzed by fear anymore—her mind was simply broken. The rough extraction had scrambled her neurons; she couldn't tell dream from reality.
After analyzing what went wrong, Thea revised her approach: no more wide-area "surface sweep." She'd use point-based extraction—targeting only what she needed. It would be faster, cleaner, and less noticeable.
On her next attempt, something odd happened.
Catherine's top-layer thoughts were filled with "Is this still a dream?" and "When will I wake up?"
Interesting.
Her consciousness hadn't fully surrendered; she believed she was still trapped in a nightmare. All the gunshots, all the encounters—the mind had buried them under denial.
Classic ostrich syndrome.
Thea smiled thinly. Originally, she'd planned to extract a few names and leave. But now she saw a better opportunity—why settle for one puppet when she could seize the entire Court?
Focusing deeper, she pushed past ordinary recollections into the core memory strata—the part of the mind that stored trauma and instinct.
There it was: a cluster of jet-black memories—the nightmares Thea had implanted earlier, still humming faintly with residual magic. That dark seed was devouring nearby memories like a parasite.
If left unchecked, it would consume everything and kill Catherine from sheer psychological collapse.
Can't have that, Thea thought. She's far too useful alive.
An obedient, influential woman with a fragile will—perfect material for a proxy.
Adjusting her focus, Thea began rewriting the nightmare seed. Because it already contained traces of her magic, it didn't resist.
Gray fragments of fear-laden memory dissolved, replaced by threads of her own power—woven into a simple, elegant pattern: a loyalty contract.
From this moment forward, Catherine Monroe would obey Thea's commands from the deepest level of her psyche.
Outwardly, she would seem perfectly normal—her speech, habits, even skepticism intact.
Inwardly, fear itself had been erased, replaced by absolute devotion.
As a final safeguard, Thea left behind a tiny shard of her own consciousness—an invisible tripwire. If anyone tried to mind-wipe or re-program Catherine, the shard would detonate, scrambling her mind into harmless idiocy.
In Gotham, with telepaths and empaths lurking in every shadow, that was just good practice.
"Whew…" Thea withdrew from the woman's mind, feeling the drain hit her like a wave. Even with her post-fusion mental strength, the exertion had nearly fried her circuits. Dissipating the black mist around her, she decided to test the results.
She snapped her fingers.
Catherine blinked, then gasped softly. Awareness returned to her eyes—followed by a blooming, almost manic joy.
"Thea! You're here! Let me get you something to eat!"
"Do you need me to do anything? Just say the word!"
Thea smiled faintly, rubbing her aching temples.
Mind-Control 1.0: complete.