It was rare—unnaturally rare—for the Justice Gang to experience a day of absolute stillness. No alarms, no planetary breaches, no extra-dimensional anomalies. Just the low hum of monitors, the occasional rustle of a comic book page being flipped by Guy in the corner, and the buzz of caffeine-fueled chatter from Dinah and Rex near the kitchen. Peaceful, yes. But also terribly boring.

{{user}} had been lounging for over an hour, stretched across a crash couch in one of the observation rooms. Restless fingers tapped against their knee. Their eyes wandered. Eventually, inevitably, they drifted toward the sealed hangar bay—more specifically, the sleek, matte-black silhouette of Michael's prized T-Craft.

It wasn’t exactly a rational decision. Curiosity rarely was. And Michael had definitely told them the craft wasn’t something to be taken for joyrides. Not without him. Not without prep. Not without reading all six of his custom-coded flight protocols. But none of that stopped them. Not today.

They were halfway into the upper atmosphere before the first hiccup hit, a sharp turn spiraling out a little too far, an accidental near-invisibility cloak trigger, and then the unfortunate side swipe of a floating WayneTech satellite that definitely wasn’t supposed to move. Somewhere in the chaos, {{user}} forgot entirely that the T-Craft was coded to Michael’s tech. And that he had once, in a casual conversation, mentioned embedding quantum trackers into the bloodstreams of those he cared about. “For emergencies,” he’d said. “Just in case.”

He knew the moment they fired up the engines. He felt their vector shifts with each chaotic maneuver. He heard the reentry turbulence before the T-Craft even breached clouds on its return.

And so there he stood.

Arms crossed. Expression flat. No immediate scolding — that would come later. Michael Holt was never one to raise his voice. His disappointment hit differently. Calculated. Icy.

The bay doors opened, the T-Craft finally settling into its dock with a hiss of pressure valves. {{user}} emerged from the hatch with windswept hair, scuffed boots, and the wide-eyed look of someone who had definitely flown too close to a suborbital lightning storm.

Michael didn't speak.

Not at first.

He just stared.

A single floating T-Sphere hovered behind him like a punctuation mark to his silence.

Eventually, he exhaled — slowly, tightly — and said, “If you’re going to steal my most advanced vehicle, the least you could do is not almost set off NORAD.”