Disclaimer: Don't own The Batman or any of it's aspects. All I might own are the altered parts of the plot of this non-profit work of fiction.

An: WHY?! Why are there literally like only TWO other stories with this AU plot?! You could even call it one, since one of those two sucks and the other is hard to find. Anywho, let's do this thing!

I don't even know where this story's title came from...

Ch 1: Well, that could have gone better...

Chlorogene Research Labs-

"Temblor?" Barbara Gordon accused Pamela Isley with a stern scowl -hands on her hips, as she glared down her wayward, protestor friend. "Is he a friend from homeroom?" she snapped out sarcastically.

"Ah-heh," Pamela shrugged, snapping her black laptop closed and standing up from where she had been sitting against a wall outside the entrance to Chlorogene Research Labs. "Look like you caught me red-handed, Red," she grinned guiltlessly.

Barbara scoffed and stomped up to Pamela, glaring mightily. "Did one of your twigs snap, Pam?" she jibed out harshly in not-so-subtle reference to the taller fellow red-head's borderline obsessive nature towards plants and the protection thereof. "You hired a thug!"

"You'd be surprised what you can find on the internet," Pamela waved Barbara off dismissively.

Barbara gave her friend a sad, disappointed look. "Pam, it's not too late; you have to stop this." She sighed in near resignation. "I don't want to have to watch my dad read you your rights."

"Tch, and here I thought we were two peas in a pod," Pamela snorted with touch of rather foreign and uncharacteristic hostility in her tone, along with a small touch of quiet bitterness. She glared and began to stride away -head lowered. "Shoulda' known I couldn't trust the Commish's kid. I'll miss ya', Red."

Barbara's turned her head to follow her friend's retreat, and her eyes widened in alarm at what Pamela was walking carelessly towards. Pamela looked up and gasped in fear.

Before her, stood the giant-like, trench coat-clad, gauntleted form of Temblor, the mercenary she had, in fact, been scamming in order to have him destroy Chlorogene facilities across all of Gotham.

"Well, well," Temblor rumbled. A single gauntlet shot out and easily snatched Pamela's laptop from her arms. Flicking it open, Temblor grinned maliciously. Lem'me see how this works." He tapped a button and said into the small mike, "Testing."

"Testing," growled out his altered voice in response.

The mercenary's grin only widened, and he crushed the laptop into scrap with a gesture. "You are not at all how I picture you... Boss," he finished mockingly, rounding on the girls. Pamela backed away fearfully, seemingly finally aware how deep in it she was. "You see, the way it works, Boss, is when you don't pay," He slammed his gauntlets together, causing them to spark electric yellow in a decidedly menacing way, that did nothing to reassure the girls and promised a painful end. "You pay~."

"H-hey, we're good sports," Barbara interjected nervously, stepping between Temblor and the back-tracking Pamela. "We'll uh... We'll raise the funds with a bake sale?"

Temblor only lowered his shades from his forehead to his eyes in answer and smirked.

"You like brownies?" Barbara tried again futilely. Mentally, she was screaming, 'Damn it! Why now of all times do I suddenly have to become fluent in plucky super hero taunts?! WHY NOW?!'

Temblor gave her a flat look and cranked up the yellow dials on both his gauntlets; Barbara blanched in response.

"Later, Red!" Pamela called suddenly, bolting for the front doors of the labs. "You two have fun."

'Well, throw me to the wolves why don't you?' Barbara groused internally at the girl's back, before turning back to the immediate threat. 'I'm really beginning to wonder what her definition of "fun" is and if I should be worried. On a side note, she is in the deepest of shit, if -no, when- we get out of this.'

Temblor suddenly lunged with a pair of horizontal haymakers. Yelping, Barbara skipped backwards with reflexes she hardly realized she had and summersaulted away, barely managed to keep herself from being flattened like a human pancake outright. She landed in a crouch. "I'm warning you. "I'm-I'm an Olympic hopeful." The wavering of her voice only resulted in Temblor grinning and being silently encouraged to try just a tad harder.

"Grah!" Temblor grunted, slamming his right gauntlet into the concrete with a flash and rumble.

Barbara's eyes bugged out of her head, as the ground erupted -not unlike an earthquake fissure- and rushed towards her. Barbara turned on her heel and sprinted like the hounds of Hell were on her tail -even as the area around her was blown to smithereens. A large chunk of the pavement suddenly launched upwards from beneath her. Barbara stumbled but managed to leap to another area, only to have to nimbly flip away from that spot as well with all the acrobatic skill available to her, as it shared the fate of her former position. A third time jumping to safety, however, Barbara landed heavily and awkwardly, only for the largest pavement boulder yet to erupt from directly where she had landed. Surprised and unable to regain her balance, Barbara tumbled backwards in an uncontrolled roll and slammed headfirst into the cracked pavement, slipping into fitful unconsciousness.

That nuisance taken care of, Temblor strode passed her form utterly nonplussed and blew the doors to the lab off their hinges with a metallic crash.

The inside of the large, metal-coated lab smelled, oddly enough, much like one would expect from the inside of a greenhouse and was scattered with experimental plants and chemicals, as the rumbling and low droning of machinery provided a buzzing background. Temblor briefly paused to glance at a vine of altered tomatoes growing next to an example of a regular tomato vine. "Mutant tomatoes... yum," smirked Temblor. Perhaps when he was done dealing with the bespectacled brat, he would indulge in the vegetables.

Stalking deeper into the bowels of the factory, Temblor glanced around lazily, searching for the target of his wrath. The screeching sound of metal above him, caused the mercenary to quickly glance up.

Upon a high, steel balcony, Pamela Isley was pushing and heaving small, heavy generator the size of her body. Sending it tipping over the edge, she growled, "You've been terminated." Except that, Temblor smacked the heavy machinery away with little more than a bat of an eye. He grinned all too smugly. "Uh, heh heh heh," Pamela chuckled nervously, before she immediately dashed away along the walkway.

Temblor, of course, was having exactly none of that and slammed a hand down into the flooring, sending an explosive tremor through one of the walkway's support beams and bringing down a heavy pipe from the ceiling that smashed straight through the walkway. Pamela cried out in shocked pain, as she plummeted all the way to the ground and landed roughly on a lowered lift, her lags pinned down by heavy debris.

Pamela groaned in pain, gritting her teeth and attempting to remove the rubble, as Temblor ambled over without hurry and raised a hand, preparing to blow the girl to smithereens.

It was this action that finally heralded the fortuitous arrival of Batman by way of swinging through on a rappel line, ramming Temblor to the ground and causing the mercenary's explosion to go wide in the opposite direction.

The entire structure shook and groaned dangerously, as Temblor immediately picked himself up and turned to face the new arrival. Glancing above Batman's head, Temblor spotted two large, precariously-swinging canisters of toxic plant growth hormone sludge.

Smashed his gauntlets into a nearby pillar, Temblor sent one of the canisters hurtling to the ground with a crash and caused the second one to crack. Batman dodged wide, as the contents of the canister were blown all over the floor. The Dark Knight narrowed his eyes, as the dangerously reactant chemical managed to somehow begin growing plant life from nothing but itself and open air.

Temblor sent a pair of separate tremors towards Batman, which the vigilante dodged by leaping high -even as something exploded violently in the background, framing the dark outline of his cowled form.

Rubbing the back of her aching head, the newly-recovered and arrived Barbara Gordon had a front row seat to such a sight and muttered with a gasp, "The Batman."

Batman landed a dropkick on Temblor, that sent the larger man sprawling regardless of superior size and fired off a batarang.

"And he... He is awesome," Barbara muttered to herself with a wide smile.

As Batman rolled away from a more precise tremor, Barbara heard the shout of Pamela. "Red, help! I can't move!" A definitive cracking noise got Pamela to look up in horror at the badly damaged and worsening canister of chemicals above her. "Oh no. Toxic sludge!"

"Oh crap. Hang on Red!" Barbara called, dashing across the room towards Pamela.

Batman hurled several explosive pellets at Temblor, but the massive man easily absorbed the damage with his gauntlets and swept away the smoke. A second later, he unleashed a tremor aimed for Batman that flipped Batman over onto his back heavily and moved on towards Barbara. Barbara stumbled heavily but managed to ride the tremor's explosion closer to her friend, though it left her dazed from the collision with the concrete floor.

The sludge canister groaned in painful warning, and Pamela began to panic. "That stuff mutates plants; I don't want to see what it does to humans!"

Barbara groaned and shook off the rest of her dizziness, reaching the lift and desperately clambering on. The girls frantically began tugging and pushing off the scrap that pinned Pamela's legs.

Batman groaned, as Temblor raised his gauntlets for a stronger, duel strike. "Here comes the big one," he cackled. Batman suddenly lurched upward and whipped out a cord that caught both Temblor's charged gauntlets and slammed them together, resulting in a blinding explosion that shook the building, hurled Temblor backwards into a previously damaged pillar, and collapsed said pillar.

For the abused toxin canister, that was the final straw, and it burst over the red-heads, dumping it's green powder-like contents down on them. Batman lurched and turned at Pamela's scream, and Barbara barely had time to look surprised before the two were buried completely in a massive cloud of fumes and chemicals. Batman immediately hurled a batarang into the lift controls, raising the two girls high out of the green cloud.

Barbara choked and heaved as the toxins invaded her system. She could feel them burning all over her skin, and her lungs, and eyes, and muscles. Every fiber of her body hurt, and her vision was blurring mightily, as her chest constricted. Pamela appeared to be unconscious; thank Arkham for small mercies, 'cause she felt like hell. Then her vision darkened, and everything went black. Her last thoughts mostly consisted of hoping her dad wouldn't strangle Pam while she was down.

Later-

Commissioner Gordon watched worriedly with veins bulging in his clenched fists, as the paramedics wheeled Barbara and Pamela into the back of an ambulance. He couldn't help but have a small panic attack at the fact that both girls were apparently outright toxic to the touch and currently sparkling strangely from whatever horrid chemical compound they had been so heavily exposed to.

He sighed, and his broad shoulders slumped near imperceptibly. Perhaps with a miracle, they could thoroughly analyze the compound and create a successful antidote to any adverse affects. He wouldn't have hoped for such things if he had known what was coming next...

The Ambulance-

Moments after departure, Pamela Isley flinched in her sleep, and a green glow briefly emanated from beneath her eyelids. A few moments later, a similar glow flickered a few times beneath Barbara's closed eyelids as well. As the medical vehicle made its' way towards the nearest hospital, it was suddenly forced to brake by the trunk and stems of a massive sakura tree erupting from the concrete and snatching the ambulance off the road. As the vehicle lurched, the driver was knocked unconscious by a deploying airbag, and the backseat medic was dazed by the lack of cushioning.

The back of the vehicle was ripped open, and the lone, conscious, bespectacled medic had the presence of mind to throw his coat over Barbara and snatch her from her stretcher and toss her through the window to the driver's seat, shutting it behind her moments before he was bashed unconscious by a vine.

The branches of the sakura tree slowly, delicately began to slip themselves beneath Pamela, snapping her handcuffs and carrying her out of the vehicle and into the ground. Another branch seemed to take pause on whether or not to retrieve the other girl as well, but the sound of sirens fast approaching seemed to make up its' 'mind'. The doors were no obstacle and were easily rent asunder for the plant to retrieve their second prize.

Each girl would be swiftly transported to somewhere where they felt safe. If that happened to be completely separate locations, then so be it. The second tree carried the unconscious Barbara away into the depths of the earth and then began tunneling to where the girl would feel most secure.

Gotham Greenhouse-

Out of the ground, massive vines and trees began to sprout wildly as well as a large, pink pod filled with liquid, wherein rested a sleeping Pamela Isley

Gordon Home-

In the hardly-used backyard of the Gordon household, the ground began to quietly rumble before sprouting a large, glowing, pink pod on a giant stem, which held a certain, unconscious girl floating in an unidentifiable liquid.

Around the backyard, a plethora of taller trees began to grow, slowly forming an unseen canopy out of the house's backyard to shield their precious cargo from prying eyes.

It would be only moments earlier that Jim Gordon had received a call about the missing girls and rushed out to the site of the ambulance's destruction, thus missing all this happening in his literal own backyard.

Later-

As the police force collected testimonies from the drivers, Batman used tweezers to gather a single small, shriveled leaf. His eyes narrowed to suspicious slits, as he tucked the leaf away in a plastic bag. Coincidence? Batman didn't believe in coincidences.

AN: Like it? Hate it? Something there that could have been done better? I actually think this story might get a lot of attention due to the aforementioned lacking on Fanfiction in this particular AU.

R&R! No flames if you can help it, or Ivy might strangle you. Poor plants. :D