Fandom High Dormitories

The ceremony was over. Nothing had eaten his diploma. He got to test out the taser function of his grapple. He punched a bear until it cried (basically).

Bruce was having a pretty great day.

Of course, the day was ending soon, and it was almost time to start focusing on leaving in a few days. Almost time. For tonight, he could give a small token of thanks to the students of Fandom for the past three years by paying for pizza, cake, and refreshments and getting it set up in the common room.

Yes, it was completely impromptu. But if people remembered him putting together a quick celebration, maybe they would focus less on him tasering a bear. Probably not. Oh well, he could deal with being known for that here.

[OOC: Open for an impromptu celebration!]

"I see you're still around," Bruce noted when he spotted Terry in the common room eating a donut from an assorted box. Terry didn't buy them. They just happened to be there.

"There's free food," Terry said with a shrug. "Lots of stuff going on. Why would I leave?" Also, no GCPD chasing him.

"Because a portal called you back?" Bruce offered. "Clearly that hasn't happened yet." He assumed it had to be irresistible to any kids, otherwise some of them would probably end up stuck in Fandom, either due to boredom back home or their parents refusing to let go.

"Yeah, sure," Terry said with a roll of his eyes. "By the way, can I get some more money? I know you have it."

"Now that you've found the free food? I don't think so," Bruce said. "But there's always the chance you can earn some babysitting."

"Do I really look like the kind of person you'd trust with kids?" Terry asked.

"No, but I'll be watching out, just in case," Bruce said, taking a seat on the couch and putting some cartoons on the TV in case some smaller children wandered in. He figured he kind of owed this kid some supervision since he kept finding Bruce on these weekends. "I'm still not paying you, though."

"You have terrible taste in TV shows," Terry noted before going back to focusing on his donut.

[OOC: Yep, open!]

Bruce had barely walked into the common room before a pie went whizzing past his head and splattered against the wall. Following the path of travel back to the source, he saw reason to duck as another pie was winged over his head. As he dove to the side, he caught a quick look at the culprit standing on the kitchen counter.

It looked like a leprechaun standing next to a tray filled with pies. But it was a little too green-skinned and its teeth were a little too pointy. Apparently a gremlin was celebrating some unholy combination of Pi Day and Saint Patrick's Day the only way it knew how: with slapstick comedy.

And that was fine as far as Bruce was concerned. A leprechaun meant potential magical powers he didn't understand and a legendary ability to flee capture. A gremlin could be defeated with ease.

As the next pie made its way toward his head, Bruce waited, then dodged, got a hand on the back of the pie plate so he could change its direction, and flung it back at the gremlin in one smooth motion. The pie hit the gremlin just as it was about to throw another one (in fact, it was about 14% of the way through its throwing motion). The gremlin stumbled back blindly, backed into a pot, fell into it, and then the suddenly potted gremlin fell off the counter. Bruce walked over casually, grabbed the pot's lid, and secured it to seal the gremlin in for the time being.

After inspecting a tray with several remaining unthrown pies, Bruce decided that they were free of gremlin venom. So carried the tray over by the couches for people to share. He wasn't sure if it was the gremlin who made them, or if the gremlin stole them, but Bruce had to admit that they tasted pretty good.

[OOC: I'm starting to realize that Bruce has a long history of battling individual gremlins. I need to do something with this.

Anyway, CR is open. There is pie. And a gremlin in a pot in the kitchen.]

After taking a little bit of a beating - and, technically, a bullet - the other night, Bruce spent Friday resting up. But now that it was Saturday, it was back to work.

He spent most of his fight training time in the cave these days so he could practice some of his more complicated moves and combos in private where nobody would ask questions. But since he was still a little sore, he was keeping things simple. Just him, the punching bag, and lots of straight-up punches being thrown at said bag. He could do that in public. And, frankly, he kind of missed this punching bag. It had been a while since he'd beaten it up. Every punch that connected was like meeting up with an old friend... and punching them?

Okay, it wasn't a good analogy at all. But that was okay. The punches drowned thoughts like that out pretty effectively.

[OOC: I woke up insanely early. My choices were to continue to spam Twitter with things I read about Batman on the internet, or write something on the internet about Batman. So, open gym!]

Maybe it was surprising, but Bruce's first move once he was back in Fandom wasn't to spend the whole day in the cave. There was plenty of time for that coming up in the next few days. For now, the most important thing was figuring out his new routine. With Spring Break marking a rough halfway point to the end of the semester, he needed to work out priorities and how they fit into his schedule during the remaining stretch run.

So, of course, he had a day planner with all of the unavoidable planned distractions over the next couple of months (prom, finals, a few floating weekends for unspecified insanity), and some time for off-island training, regular class work, that kind of stuff.

The biggest change to his previous planning was making sure he scheduled some time for social behavior instead of just letting it happen when he needed a break. The fact that this was likely to be the last stretch of time where he would ever have a relatively normal life had come into sharp focus for Bruce recently. And with that came the realization that it might not be a bad idea to actually experience relative normalcy in a somewhat genuine way rather than putting on a complete facade like he was accustomed to.

It was that line of thinking that had him buying drinks for a whole bar in Rio. Twice. And now it resulted in his bringing pizza to the common room and turning on Oscars pre-show coverage so that people could have a meal, some entertainment, and not focus on the day planner.

[OOC: In celebration of getting rid of a migraine, I post a CR. Huzzah!]

Bruce was watching cable news. Nothing but talk of financial meltdowns, political bickering, angry old people yelling at each other, and something about cute animals every fifteen minutes or so.

It wasn't terribly exciting or interesting or anything. It was exactly what the night called for. Because dear god, Bruce needed a quiet night in after the way his week had been going.

With that in mind, he was drinking water, eating some crackers, and wearing a plain black hoodie. Nothing exciting at all. This was a matter of willpower, and nobody had more willpower than Bruce Wayne.

Well, by definition any given Green Lantern probably did. But screw those guys, willpower wasn't even an emotion.

[OOC: Seriously, screw those guys.]

Bruce was only a few months from returning to Gotham for the first time in six years. That meant that everything he'd done here in Fandom, off on training trips, and recently in Baltimore, was so much closer to coming together. It also meant that he needed to start preparing himself for that.

That's why he was out in the common room tonight with a spiral-bound book of aerial photos of Gotham City. He had to familiarize himself with paths across rooftops. With hidden alleys. With places from which to strike. And the lighting in the cave was too dim to review aerial photos very effectively, so it was either in public or in his dorm room. He figured he would spare Chuck that.

[OOC: I've been trying and failing to get a CR post up at a halfway respectable time for like three weeks. I don't care, I'm proud of myself. I'm going to do a victory lap.]

Break was actually in pretty nice as far as Bruce was concerned.. Some good was done, some sights were seen, and Bruce was able to keep up with his training to some degree. After checking out the cave to make sure everything was in order, Bruce decided to stop in the common room and make a show of social behavior.

In this case, Bruce turned on the TV and it was on some kind of zombie show. Not having any particular issue with zombies himself, he settled in with a glass of water and started considering what he knew about the science of dead bodies, the state of zombies as depicted on the show, and the only zombie he'd ever fought, Solomon Grundy. He was making notes about these comparisons. And yes, he was considering this as "a show of social behavior."

[OOC: Open CR!]

Kicking that fake goat in class yesterday had felt good. Kicking the punching bag repeatedly felt better, mainly because Bruce knew it was actually solid and not just some solid-seeming hologram. (Not that he would have kicked a real goat in the face, unless the goat started it.) Really, that was the end result of his more anti-social feelings most of the week. When you didn't feel much like dealing with people, you could just deal with an inanimate object that you could hit as hard as you could. And after that, normalcy could be achieved once again.

After a while, he was almost feeling relatively chipper! But he would be able to fake it way before then.

[OOC: I'm up way too early. Why not post? Open gym, with the warning that I'll be spotty later in the morning.]

Bruce had no interest in dealing with the television today. It was going to just show something that some people would think he'd find embarrassing, he wouldn't be embarrassed (or even annoyed), and that would be it. But there was enough embarrassment and annoyance going around the dorms today, it seemed, so Bruce was going to try to tackle that in some small way: with cake.

Sure, he didn't usually eat much junk food, but he figured that a day when someone changed genders might not be so bad if it was changed to the day when someone changed genders and also had cake. In the meantime, he was just going to read a book about chess strategies while having a piece of cake himself.

[OOC: Open CR, open cake. Whatever that means, I don't know.]

Bruce was not in a particularly good mood. Yesterday morning, he was assaulted and knocked out by monster deer. He wasn't sure yet how he survived that, but he woke up in a storage closet in the joke shop, Who's There?, later that afternoon. When he woke up, there was a rubber chicken on his head.

By that time, Bruce realized, the town and its people were back to normal, which was unfortunate because he really wanted to hit something. He tried to let it go overnight, but the feeling persisted. So right now he was going to settle for a punching bag. And later on, he might check in at the amusement park right across the causeway and make sure there weren't any corporate mascots that were misbehaving. Really, he was just mad it wasn't a Six Flags for his own corporate synergy.

[Open like a gym.]

Well, it seemed the television didn't hate Bruce nearly as much as it normally did today. He would have liked to have watched that one prison movie, or even some soccer. Instead, it gave him the Yule Log, which was at least appropriate given the temperature. And that was better than one of the movie channels airing a marathon of the sparkling vampire movies.

Considering the show and the weather, Bruce felt it was only appropriate to spend a little time making some hot cocoa (with, yes, plenty for everyone). He didn't need a butler to do it or anything.

[OOC: I actually have a day free of work crushing my soul, so open CR!]