Chapter 318: Pheromone Control
If Batman hadn't spoken when he did, the Lizard Professor would have already bitten the red Tyrannosaurus Rex's throat out.
"After you heal it — then what?" The Lizard Professor dropped to all fours, tilting his enormous scaled head back to look up at Batman. "You're planning to hand a Tyrannosaurus Rex over to some little girl?"
"That's exactly what I'm trying to figure out," Batman said.
He wouldn't break his promise to Lunella. That wasn't negotiable. But handing a creature with functional psychic abilities over to a child wasn't something he could do in good conscience either. The two positions were in direct conflict, and he hadn't resolved it yet.
The Lizard Professor settled comfortably onto his haunches, watching the strip of Batman's jaw visible beneath the mask. He couldn't see the full expression, but he didn't need to. The slight tension in that jawline told him everything. Whatever was going on behind those lenses was nothing good.
Batman had already considered the ankle restraint approach — the same solution he'd used on Norman Osborn. Fit the red T-Rex with a control device and hand it over with the limitation built in. Clean. Simple.
Then he thought about Reed Richards. Then he thought about Lunella Lafayette, who was eleven years old and had spent two hours studying an active full-wave projector before most adults had even understood what it was.
The restraint would be off by the next morning. Neither of them had leverage over him the way Osborn did. No son. No company. No criminal record he was protecting. They'd dismantle the device without a second thought and probably send him a polite note explaining why his engineering was substandard.
He'd also considered training. Conditioning the animal before the handoff, establishing behavioral parameters, reducing the risk. That would work. That would take months he didn't have.
One by one, Batman ran through every approach that might let him honor his promise to Lunella without releasing an apex predator with telepathic capabilities into a world that had enough problems already. One by one, each solution collapsed under its own conditions.
He pulled his focus back to the present and looked at the Lizard Professor.
"Professor. What's your condition?"
Before they'd entered the primitive world, the Lizard Professor had been volatile — golden slit-pupils burning with barely contained aggression, every movement carrying the threat of violence. Now he sprawled on the ground in the afternoon quiet like an enormous crocodile basking on a riverbank, completely at ease. The transformation was striking.
"Never better." His tail swept lazily across the earth and clipped a tree with a trunk the width of a man's arm. The crack of splintering wood broke the silence. The Lizard Professor glanced at it, then coiled his tail and sent the broken trunk spinning through the air. Several seconds later, a distant splash echoed from the East River, several hundred meters away.
"Can you still shift back to your original form?" Batman asked.
"Yes." The Lizard Professor didn't look up. "But I'm not one of those druids from the stories. When I change back, I won't be wearing anything."
Batman studied the dark green scales covering the Lizard Professor's frame and said nothing.
The Lizard Professor said nothing either. He resumed his relaxed posture, seemingly content to wait. Patient. Unhurried.
One minute passed. Then two. Batman continued thinking, working through his mental inventory of problems, and the Lizard Professor found himself being completely ignored.
That lasted until it didn't.
The Lizard Professor pushed himself upright, shifting from all fours to standing on two legs, and moved to stand beside Batman in front of the injured red T-Rex.
"Are you forgetting something?" he asked.
Batman looked at him.
"Maybe."
"I control reptiles." The Lizard Professor extended one clawed hand toward the red T-Rex lying in the dirt. "That one is a reptile."
Batman kept his eyes on him, waiting for the rest.
"That one —" The Lizard Professor pointed toward the massive corpse of the giant horned T-Rex, still where it had fallen. "Its horn gave it psychic capabilities strong enough to suppress my ability entirely. I couldn't touch the others while that thing was alive."
His claw moved back to the red T-Rex.
"But this unfortunate creature..."
The red T-Rex exhaled through its nostrils — a weak, ragged sound — and watched the Lizard Professor's gleaming claws with exhausted eyes.
"Its horn is gone. Which means the situation reverses. Now I'm the one doing the controlling."
"How confident are you?" Batman asked.
"One hundred percent." The Lizard Professor's scaled face held an expression that left no room for doubt.
Batman gave a single nod and stepped back to watch.
The Lizard Professor raised one hand. From the East River, movement began — a rustling, splashing migration of small bodies converging on the island. Snakes. Turtles. Lizards. Every reptile within reach answered the call, filing in an orderly procession directly into the red T-Rex's open mouth.
The T-Rex didn't resist. It lay still, swallowing mechanically, as nearly a hundred kilograms of living reptiles disappeared down its throat over the course of several minutes.
When the last one had gone, the Lizard Professor spread both clawed hands.
"Done."
Batman looked at him. "Done?"
"For today, yes. Let it digest. Let it recover some strength. We move to the next stage tomorrow." The Lizard Professor said this the way someone might explain that bread needs time to rise — as though the answer were self-evident.
Batman paused.
"You're functioning as a queen," he said. "Like an ant queen."
Ant queens produced specific chemical signals that suppressed the reproductive systems of workers and regulated the behavior of the entire colony. Batman had processed the Lizard Professor's earlier demonstration — the way reptiles had mutated and evolved under his influence — and reached the conclusion in a matter of seconds.
The Lizard Professor blinked, visibly surprised.
"I expected that to take you at least a little while."
Batman shook his head. "It's only a working theory."
The Lizard Professor used his tail as a prop, settling his weight onto it in something that might have been an attempt to sit. His body structure prevented anything more refined than that.
"What I did just now was use pheromone signals to redirect its metabolic energy. Right now, the majority of its biological resources are being directed toward digestion. Once it's processed enough of that food, the energy will shift toward cellular repair and healing."
"You didn't even need to bring it to North Brother Island," Batman noted. "You can treat it from here."
But what concerned Batman wasn't the healing. He already believed the Lizard Professor could manage that. What concerned him was the long term.
"If its horn eventually grows back," Batman said, "can you maintain control? Or does the suppression reverse again?"
"That situation won't arise." The Lizard Professor met his eyes with something close to amusement. "On the pheromone level, I'm its father now."
Batman stared at him.
The Lizard Professor appeared to find this genuinely satisfying.
---
By the time the situation on Bat Island had settled into something resembling order, the Hulk, Robin, Batman, and the Lizard Professor had all returned — to Bat Island or North Brother Island depending on their business. The immediate crisis was contained.
Manhattan was a different story.
The dinosaur invasion had torn through the city's infrastructure, its streets, and its institutional capacity in ways that were going to take weeks to fully account for. The NYPD was already stretched past its operational limits, and the problems arriving at Manhattan's precinct houses were unlike anything in the department's training manuals.
Police Chief George Stacy stood in the detention block of the Manhattan precinct and pressed two fingers against his temple.
His holding cells, which had processed thousands of criminals over the years, currently contained seventy or eighty primitive humans.
They had come through the portals with the dinosaurs — men and women from a world tens of thousands of years removed from the present, wearing animal skins and carrying stone weapons, staring at fluorescent lighting with expressions that ranged from terror to fury. They had been corralled here because there was nowhere else to put them, and because releasing them into midtown Manhattan was not a serious option.
"&...%!"
The noise coming from behind the bars was continuous, layered, and absolutely incomprehensible. His deputy, Ogg, walked up to the cell door and rapped it sharply with his baton, using the universal tone of someone who expects results.
"Quiet!"
The primitive humans responded by getting louder.
The din built until it was rattling the light fixtures. George Stacy pressed his jaw closed against a headache that had been developing since the first portal opened and showed no signs of stopping.
THOOM. THOOM.
Heavy footsteps. Deliberate. Unhurried. Each one landed with enough weight to feel through the floor, coming from outside the building and then through the entrance and down the corridor toward him.
George Stacy turned.
The man who stopped beside him was armored in black and red, his helmet under his arm. Tall. Broad. The kind of person who filled a doorframe without trying.
"I'm Agent Garrett of S.H.I.E.L.D.," the man said. His voice was calm, professional, carrying the practiced ease of someone accustomed to introducing themselves in difficult situations. "And the inheritor of the Black Knight title — a legacy passed down from the age of King Arthur through the Whitman family line."
It was the same man who had been riding a winged black horse through the canyons of Manhattan's streets less than an hour ago, cutting down dinosaurs with a laser staff while NYPD helicopters filmed every second of it.
George Stacy looked at him for a long moment.
The headache intensified.
***
20+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces