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Description

JLA DOSSIER

n. FFT - 224277 ERF

CIVILIAN NAME

Timothy Charles Drake

SUPERHERO IDENTITY

Robin

PERSONAL AND PHYSICAL DATA

Born: September 3, 1983

Age: 19

Civilian profession: employed at the Downtown Boardworks skate shop as technician and repairman (unofficially as the manager's own "scapegoat, stress ball and footstool")

Marital status: engaged to Stephanie Brown

Birthplace: Gotham City (NJ)

Height: 175 cm (5' 9")

Weight: 72 kg (159 lbs.)

Eye color: cornflower blue

Hair color: raven-black

Measurement (biceps): 15 in.

Blood type: A+

Shoe size: 11 US male

Distinguishing features: 32 scars from laser and blade wounds all over his body

STATUS IN THE METAHUMAN COMMUNITY

- First ever official student of Dinah Lance and Helena Bertinelli, way before the establishment of the Mirai dojo;

- Attended the school/training facility founded and managed by the Franco-Vietnamese heroine La Mante's (real name: Mẫn Thị Hằng) in Paris (FR) from September 1999 to July 2000;

- Member (#5 in the internal rankings) of the Inner Circle of students of the Mirai dojo, i.e. the group of students who are being trained to become heroes by the dojo's staff (and help said staff during the lessons attended by civilians);

- Founding member and leader of the Gotham Knights (founded in September 2000);

- 4 honorable mentions in the JLA register of young vigilantes;

- Awarded the Midalja għall-Qlubija (Medal for Bravery) for his valiant acts during the Black Elder Crisis (medal awarded on March 31st, 2000 by President Guido de Marco);

- Held in very high esteem by a large section of the membership of l'Alliance pour la Justice, France's foremost superhero team. He also teamed up with the superheroine Césure, the group's current deputy chairwoman, in two major missions. Since the age threshold to join the organization is fixed to 16, he was even invited to stay in France past the end of his stay at La Mante's school and become a member but in the end he politely declined.

ORIGIN

1. Just a hobby. Timothy Drake was the son of Jack and Janet Drake, two members of the upper end of Gotham City's upper middle class. His life had been a happy one until his parents' marriage had begun falling apart when he was 12. To get some distraction from the increasingly worse situation at home, he doubled down on one of his numerous hobby: cape-sighting. He focused on one heroine in particular: Black Canary. She was back to patrolling the streets of Gotham City after being missing from the active scene for more than a decade and she represented a riddle which every cape-sighter worthy of the name wished to solve. After an entire year spent cross-referecing data from online bulletins about hero sightings, rumors on the street and city maps, Timothy finally struck gold in October 1996 when he pinpointed a city block on Moldoff Avenue-- i.e. where the apartment Dinah shared with Helena was located-- and another on Moench Row-- i.e. the position of Oracle's Clock Tower-- as the focal points of Black Canary's activity. When he showed up at the door of the Clock Tower, coincidentally at the time the Birds of Prey were holding a meeting, and asked for permission to meet the legendary Black Canary from the other end of the doorphone, Dinah let him in. Despite Barbara's protests, she really wanted to talk with that impudent boy. If she had found out the address of a superhero at his age, she said, she would have done the same thing he was doing right then.

2. Good friends. Despite the age gap, Dinah and Timothy became friends in no time, while Helena and (especially) Barbara kept their distance. He began dropping in to see her twice or three times a week, both at the Clock Tower and at the apartment in Moldoff Avenue, so that they could talk about the most disparate topics, though the things Dinah did while she was AWOL from the American superhero community were his favorite one. This connection became extremely important in late November, when Timothy came back home after a night at the theater with his friends to find his home trashed and his parents missing. Worst of all, there had already been five cases of Gothamite millionaires being abducted in the past two years-- abductions which had always finished with the victims being found days later with their ribcages teared open and their hearts removed, like in an Aztec ritual sacrifice. He initially called the police, but then he also called for a taxi. He needed to get to Downtown as quickly as possible.

3. Imperfect. The Birds of Prey got down to work like a well-oiled machine. Looking at the past five cases, they had less than 24 hours to find the Drakes and thanks to all the data Barbara had collected about that string of heinous murders, they managed to find a lead to the place the Drakes were most likely being held. Black Canary and the Huntress rushed to the place on their motorcycles and found an entire underground complex turned into a sort of cathedral/temple by the Mictlan's Witnesses. Tim's parents had been reserved the place of honor on the twin altars. Rather than facing 400 between cultists and priests head on, Dinah had focused on rescuing Tim's parents and neutralizing the priests who carried the ritual knives, but she hadn't taken into account the danger posed by the unarmed priests. One of them splashed the faces of the Drakes with the content of a jug and, while she was still opening a path to the only exit with her Canary Cry, Tim's parents began feeling sick and terribly tired. Fifteen minutes later, Janet Drake was dead while Jack was in a coma. The liquid they had been splashed with contained essence of roots of stramonium and even the small amount they had ingested could kill a grown adult. Dinah did not mince her words with Tim. She had failed.

4. One way forward. Jack Drake eventually woke up from his coma but his nerves had been damaged by the stramonium. His doctors told him that he could have spent the rest of his life on a wheelchair. Timothy's life turned into a nightmare. All his emotions, both positive and negative, seemed to have disappeared after hearing Dinah's tragic news. He should have felt rage and instead he was just oppressed by the realization of how powerless he had been while the tragedy was talking place. He did not blame Black Canary-- or the Huntress for that matter-- for having failed to rescue his parents. In fact, he seemed to be able to express what he was feeling only when she was present. And the veteran heroine was the only one who understood him. She told him that that feeling of powerlessness, of being unable to make a difference in an unfair world, can bring a person to suicide-- or make them realize that they have wings to fly. Tim asked if she could help him find his wings. Dinah replied that it would have been an honor for her.

METAHUMAN POWERS

None

OTHER SKILLS

- Exceptionally developed logical-mathematical intelligence, a quality which has helped him become both an exceptional code breaker and hacker;

- Refined his sequential reasoning skills and inductive/deductive thinking patterns under the tutoring of Jason Bard. Developed the 'manhunter instinct' while collaborating with Henri Ducard;

- Genius gadgeteer with 10+ years of practice with electronics and small-scale mechanics, in addition to an innate talent for assessing what might be actually useful on a mission and how to maximize its utility. Most of the technological devices in his arsenal-- and a few in those of his teammates-- are his own designs;

- As a martial artist, he's specialized in the following disciplines: (1) Bōjutsu [teacher: initially Black Canary, though he perfected his style under the tutelage of La Mante and later Terry Thielman] and (2) Wǔshù [teacher: Black Canary, who taught Timothy the Choy Li Fut, Nan Quan and Chang Quan styles of this manifold discipline].

LIMITATIONS

- A self-imposed one: his oath never to use again the Flash Hit of the Frozen Tear, arguably the most powerful technique taught to him by La Mante during his training in France. His ability to detect and block the qi flow associated to a metahuman activating their power(s) would increment Timothy's chances in one-on-one fights against a wide selection of metas, to the point that he could even threaten Tanya's role as the Gotham Knights' most useful asset in fights against super-powered opponents. Many people, not the least his teachers, tried to change his mind about his decision, but he never fails to bring up the oath he made when he chose to live the life of the vigilante. The teachers who had been heroes themselves immediately understand what he means and do not press the matter any further, the others not so much;

- He tends to underrate himself as a leader. Of course, modesty is not a negative trait in a person in his position, since knowing that a teammate's input can always be taken into account before and during missions is good for morale, but persistent doubts about not living up to the role can drive a leader either to become jealous of their position or to lose focus in critical moments and Mr. Drake is no stranger to either situation.

SEXUALITY

Heterosexual and gifted with that particular je-ne-sais-quoi (as giáo viên put it) that can make quite a few women fall for him without looking back. His experiences with romance though make it very difficult for him to say that his gift is always a blessing.

Tim's first love was the one every romantic adolescent yearns for: pure, requited, perfect. The girl's name was Ariana "Ari" Dzherchenko, youngest daughter of a family of Ukrainian shop owners who had moved to the US after the end of the Cold War. They were both 14 and sincerely committed to each other, but neither her family nor his father were enthusiastic about such a relationship. From the Dzherchenkoes' point of view, Tim was the spoiled scion of a family of millionaires looking for a throwaway toy who had found it in their naive daughter. In Jack Drake's mind, on the other hand, Ariana was just a gold digger coming from a distinctly "Other" background;

His second fling was a complete change of pace compared to the first one. She was a fellow student of amazing combat and self-healing techniques of the Parisian heroine la Mante. Her name was Dava Švrakić and she had grown up without a real home ever since her native country, Bosnia, had gone to hell in a handbasket in the early Nineties. They complemented each other perfectly both on the fighting ground and under the blankets. However, great sex and an adrenaline-filled lifestyle are not solid foundations for a lasting and healthy relationship, especially when one's significant other turns out to be a firm believer in the 'live fast, die young' philosophy;
With Stephanie Brown it was much more of a slow-burn kind of thing. Well aware of their lack of experience in the field of vigilantism, Robin and Spoiler had started teaming up more or less regularly during their patrols, mostly to have each other's back when things got dangerous. On the other hand, the fact that she used to flirt with him at any available opportunity made quite clear that Steph wouldn't have minded taking their relationship a step beyond the professional sphere. Tim on the other hand already had Ari in his civilian life and he didn't even entertain that chance. Then life went upside down for both sides in a ridiculously short amount of time and completely different reasons. Their paths even brought them to different continents, Stephanie in central and eastern Africa and Timothy to la ville lumiére. It was during those months of separation, even while he was in a relationship with Dava, that he realized that he had never felt so complete as a person and a hero as during those nights spent running on the roofs of Gotham with Spoiler at his side. At the time they met again on the shores of Lake Victoria, Timothy's happiness reached its apex when he learnt that Stephanie had felt the same exact feelings too.

To his eventual consternation, though, finding his soulmate didn't make him less desirable for girls he came in contact with in later years. Rose Wilson, a.k.a. Ravager, was quite straightforward about her desire to pursue a relationship with her team leader-- Stephanie or no Stephanie-- during her tenure as a Gotham Knight and the impracticability of that was one of the reasons behind her choice to leave the group after less than a year. At the most desperate hour of their mission in Cairo in late 2002, Naomi McDuffie, a.k.a. Lightbringer, dramatically confessed her love for him while both of their heads were on the chopping block. Even triad member Xie Ling, a.k.a. Lynx of the Ghost Dragons, a dangerous woman who had defeated Timothy in combat several times and had taken great pleasure from putting him through degrading and humiliating treatments after such victories, turned out not to be insensitive to his 'good guy' charm. After she struck an unlikely alliance with her foe to overturn the new order in the city's Triads she confessed to him that, if he had been just three or four years older, she would have banged him until he begged for mercy. When a visibly embarrassed Tim told her that he was involved with a girl he loved, Ling just added that his fiancée was also invited if she wanted in. And then there is his relationship with his teammate Star Kotze, which by now defies any attempt to explain it properly-- though he's immensely glad that it has never messed things up in regards to his love life with Stephanie.

BDSM is a substantial component of his sex life with Stephanie, with Tim playing the role of the humble slave eager to obey his mistress's every order. However, despite being able like all of his teammates to handle most forms of pain thanks to his training, he has no submissive-- much less masochistic-- tendencies and therefore does not derive any pleasure from being a sub. He willingly subjects himself to mistreatments and degradation because playing the role of the dom makes his beloved Steph genuinely happy and his commitment to her happiness has never been called into question. Also, nearly half the people he knows among the residents of 96 Gorfinkel Street is the submissive partner in a BDSM relationship and he has the utmost respect for every single one of them since their little 'vice' doesn't detract in any way from their many virtues. If they managed to become balanced and accomplished individuals while begging their doms to be punished within the safe confines of their bedrooms, he reasonably feels that he can also endure the same treatments.

SPIRITUALITY

The Drakes were a family of very committed English Presbyterians until their stubborn refusal to submit to the Act of Uniformity. That was the moment when the head of the household, John Drake, decided that the whole clan should have relocated to the colonies in the New World. That happened in 1671 and to this day the scions of the Drake family are still expected to be raised by their parents in accordance with the Puritan principles that were so very dear to John Drake to risk everything with a one-way trip to the Americas. Of course, over the centuries not all Drakes felt comfortable with their family's Presbyterian tradition and Tim is definitely one of such non-conformists.

He gradually lost his faith over the course of his late childhood and early adolescence, seeing his parents growing apart from each other and from him, a process that reached completion with the tragic accident that killed his mother and almost did the same to his father. Today he can be considered as non-religious, though he's not keen on being called an atheist. According to his own words, the principles that guide him in life are that believing in God is no use if you don't believe in yourself and that the only place you can find true happiness is in other people.

KEY MOMENTS

- Tim and Ari's relationship began treading on very thin ice when Tim returned home late in the evening to find his girlfriend, fresh from running away from her home, waiting for him-- with very few clothes on-- under the blankets of his bed. It eventually came to an abrupt, forced end one month later when Ari's parents came back home earlier than expected from a dinner to find their daughter in a skimpy nightie in the middle of a (quite possibly pre-coital) make-out session with a shirtless Tim on their living room's couch. While he was lucky enough to avoid the homicidal rage of the pater familias, a few days later Ariana was sent to an all-girls boarding school in Monmouth County (NJ) where she stayed until the end of high school. It was the hardest of decisions for both of them, but with Tim also going to leave Gotham soon for his one-year sojourn in the Old World, they agreed to break their relationship off;

- He ran away from his father's home in early August 2000, after the umpteenth argument between him and his father about the latter's intention to marry his physical therapist/personal trainer Dana Winters had ended in Jack Drake telling his son that he was going to send him to a private school in Rhode Island. Timothy was first hosted by Stephanie and her mother Crystal, who finally had the chance to get truly acquainted with her daughter's boyfriend, and then was encouraged by his mentors Dinah Lance and Helena Bertinelli to move to their place in Old Gotham, becoming the third-ever resident of 96 Gorfinkel Street;

- Interested in getting the full picture of the delicate balance of power between the three criminal organizations of Gotham City's Chinatown (Ghost Dragons, Unicorns and Jade Tigers), Robin spent almost three weeks in Summer 1999 investigating the network of criminal activities which extended all over the district and in the bordering areas. On the twentieth night, however, his discreet investigations were interrupted when he took action to save a girl in street clothes only two or three years older than him from being beaten by a young man wearing Ghost Dragons insignia on his jacket. After making short work of him, he got hugged by the Sino-American girl who, in barely-formed words, both expressed her gratitude and gave him an account of the horrible things the young man had done to her over the previous month. Once she calmed down, the girl introduced herself as Xie Ling. Robin found out that her by then ex-boyfriend was the Ghost Dragon lieutenant responsible for the security of the Triad's armory and Ling showed to be very willing to bring him to that place. Enthusiastic, even. But once Robin and his guide stepped into the basement of an abandoned building in Hama Street where, according to the latter, the armory was located, he went straight into the world of dreams courtesy of Ling hitting him in the temple. He woke up about forty minutes later, buck-naked but sort of mummified into a kneeling position with lots of ropes and duct tape and with a T-profile very painfully digging into his calves, thighs and inner knees. Two chains kept the T-profile suspended in mid-air, meaning that he was also dangling upended in the middle of the completely empty 'armory'. Ling was also still there, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, and introduced herself once again, though this time as Lynx, an actual lieutenant of the Ghost Dragons. She told him that, if he didn't have suicidal instincts, he had better stay well away from Chinatown or come back only when he greatly improved his espionage skills, since they left something to be desired. Then she nonchalantly stripped herself right in front of him, shoved her socks into his mouth and made him wear her panties over his face, securing them with some other duct tape. She left immediately after, bringing with herself his costume as a souvenir of a "great first date". Luckily for Timothy, he had a subcutaneous localizing device Ling couldn't know about embedded in his upper arm and at sunrise the Spoiler came to rescue him after a some very uncomfortable hours. In the following days, he felt like one step away from sinking into depression. Having fallen like the dumbest of rookies for the oldest trick in the book was embarrassing enough-- Steph being the first to notice that Ling had written "property of Lynx" on Mr. Drake's scrotum with a permanent marker also didn't help-- but what really frustrated him to no end was the fact that he didn't see easy ways to become better. Finding time both for his vigilante training and for his commitments as Timothy Drake was already almost impossible. There was no way he could do more to improve his skills as Robin without his grades at school taking a nosedive and his absences becoming more and more noticeable. So he decided to talk with his mentor Black Canary about his troubles and that ended up being the right thing to do. She knew a woman, an acquaintance from her youth in Eastern and Southern Asia, who would have happily welcomed both Timothy and Robin in her home for a study stay in La Ville-Lumière, Paris. Robin became immediately intrigued by the idea and, lucky for his prospects, his father too;

- He's the person who's ultimately responsible for the arrival of Naomi McDuffie, a.k.a. Lightbringer, at 96 Gorfinkel Street, so that she could carry out her rehabilitation process-- after her nervous breakdown in June 2002, which cost her the chairmanship of the Titans-- among fellow young vigilantes. Superman himself, Ms. McDuffie's main supporter at the beginning of her career and also a dear friend of hers, had offered to help her in such a delicate phase of her life, but she had turned the offer down since she didn't wish such an incumbency to "weigh him down". Her photokinetic powers had been artificially suppressed, meaning that her presence wasn't guaranteed during the team's most dangerous mission, but aside from that she lived, trained and struggled in close contact with the Knights. Robin was also responsible for deactivating Naomi's spinal suppressors at the time the Knights' adventure in deep space (March-April 2003) reached its climax and the team needed Lightbringer's superpowers to guarantee not just their survival but that of a whole planet. Finally, he advised her to accept Vril Dox's offer to join his L.E.G.I.O.N. organization, at least for some time, saying that a woman like the one he had come to know and respect throughout the previous eight months would be able to face the vastness and variety of the universe and its inhabitants without much trouble.

OUTSTANDING FEATS

- On March 27th, 2000, he was in Malta on a guided tour of the Citadel of Gozo, a.k.a. the headquarters of PRISM, the international superhero team uniting some of the greatest crime-fighters in the Mediterranean basin. That was the day when the Black Elder managed to break free from its prison, located on level -72 of the underground portion of the fortress. A shape-shifting, sentient, telepathic mass made from a long-lost cousin of traditional matter, the Black Elder could have very well been a creation of the mind of Howard Phillips Lovecraft for its total disregard for the lives of other beings and for the way he plunges people into the depths of madness if one is exposed for too long to its telepathy. Sure enough, the members of PRISM thought so when they gave it a name including the word 'Elder'. Despite the overwhelming odds though, Tim stuck to the oath he made when he chose the life of the vigilante and stayed in the Citadel to help Césure, who had accompanied him and the rest of his class to Malta, and her 7 teammates. He even played an important role in recovering the Accelerating Gun, one of the few weapons of this world which can seriously hurt the Black Elder, from a section of the facility that had ended up isolated from the rest during the nightmarish creature's onslaught;

- Teaming up with Star of the Gotham Knights, they were able to reach and infiltrate a massive League of Assassins facility lost in the Andes Mountains close to the Bolivian-Peruvian border while the supreme leader of the organization, Talia Al-Ghul Wayne, was visiting. That's basically the time of the year when all safety measures in League bases around the world are deployed 24 hours a day. Not even a viscacha could have wandered around the facility without being spotted and monitored at every step, but almost three weeks of non-stop preparations by Robin and Star, with extensive help from their teachers (plus Barbara Gordon from Hong Kong) and a few of Helena Bertinelli's shadier friends made the endeavor possible. To this day, this is one of the accomplishments Tim is proudest of, particularly since he had been the one who proposed this extremely risky mission, all to help the best friend he has ever had;

- Armed only with makeshift wooden bo staffs, Timothy Drake and Naomi McDuffie fought against a mob of 200 modern Egyptians subjugated by the cabal of 6 ancient Egyptian deities who were attempting to bring the clock back to 3,000 years before. The gods led by Haruw (Horus) had started their ritual by removing all signs of modernity from the building where they revealed their true identities, which included the heroes' gadgets and even their clothes, leaving them barefoot and dressed in white linen garments-- to Ms. McDuffie's consternation, her new attire was of a type which left her breasts completely exposed and she couldn't shake the feeling that the "hawk-faced pig" had done it on purpose. Offered a pair spears to defend themselves, the young heroes removed the bronze tips and hoped that their bojutsu was as good as they thought. While they were eventually overwhelmed by superior numbers, Haruw was so impressed by their martial prowess that he opted to sentence them to a 'clean' death by beheading rather than letting them be torn apart by the brainwashed mob. Had it been otherwise, they would have been dead by the time the god Sutaḫ (Seth), evoked by their allies far away, reached 'ground zero' of the crisis and blew off the cabal's plan;

- He brought to justice the 28 officers of Jade-faced Wu (real name: Andrew Wu) on February 28, 2003, effectively terminating the experiment known as 'Fist of Heavenly Serendipity', the cartel which had absorbed the three competing gangs ruling the criminal underground in Chinatown, and returning that district of Downtown to the tripartite status quo, but with the Unicorns, the Jade Tigers and the Ghost Dragons in a weakened state. However, in Tim's own mind the real accomplishment was ending his long-standing feud with Lynx. The eventful night which saw the end of FHS had begun with Robin finding the ex-leader of the Ghost Dragons unconscious and covered in bruises between two dumpsters in an alley at the edge of Chinatown and concluded with the by-then former arch-enemies having a heartfelt conversation on a rooftop about the true purpose of being a hero. Robin had never seen his nemesis sad, much less in tears, but not even an hour before she had seen a 10-year-old enslaved girl, inspired by the strong. defiant Lynx, rebelling against Wu and his men and being gunned down like an animal, though not before pushing Jade-faced Wu himself out a fourth-floor window. With a heavy heart, she asked the boy she had always treated with nothing but contempt if that-- a dead girl-- was the reward for trying to do good in the world-- to be a hero. Without hesitation, he answered that being a hero is not fun, that heroes need to set themselves aside and stop considering themselves as part of humanity, that they walk the fine line between heaven and hell every day for the ideal they dedicate their lives to, that is a higher level of truth and justice. When she replied that she didn't want to be a hero if that meant being like him, he concluded by telling her that he's content with fighting crime and being a detective and that he doesn't consider himself a hero, since that's a title only posterity can give. Lynx went off the grid for two whole months, even her old comrades in the Dragons knew nothing about her whereabouts. Then, when the staff of the Mirai dojo published a job offer for a substitute teacher-- Terry Thielman is soon to go on maternity leave-- she reappeared as a candidate for the position and was selected on the fly for her incredible talent as a martial artist. Later she told Tim that she had known for years that 96 Gorfinkel Street is Robin's secret base, but she had never wished to press her advantage. Now that he had shown her that she is capable of a form of ferocious goodness, she was going to force him to take responsibility. Mr. Drake gladly accepted.

FUN FACTS

- The kidnapping of the daughter of small-time supervillain Arthur Brown (a.k.a. Cluemaster) by a criminal gang he had robbed of part of the profits of a hit was one of Tim's first cases in his new identity as Robin. A few weeks later, news came to his ears that there was a new young vigilante roaming the streets and roofs of Gotham City proper and its western suburbia and it didn't take long for the two of them to run into each other during one of Tim's patrols. The latter's surprise at finding out that the blonde girl he had saved was the one donning the home-made purple costume and that she already knew the identity of the boy behind the domino mask (she was a real natural at tailing people without being noticed, apparently) can be left to the reader's imagination;

- It's worthy of note that his first BDSM experience happened before starting his current relationship with Stephanie Brown. Tim could not spend the last night of 1999 with his girlfriend Dava due to the latter contracting a severe case of the flu during the holidays. However, he had also received an invitation by Yolanthe Janvier, a second-year student at la Mante’s academy, to the New Year’s Party her family was going to hold in their countryside villa. Unwilling to welcome the year 2000 alone, he accepted the girl’s invitation and had a really good time. Of course, Dava found out pretty soon about this ‘betrayal’ on her boyfriend’s part and, a couple of weeks later, she exacted her revenge on him. One of Dava’s cousins, who worked in a sex shop, supplied her with all the equipment she needed for a really unforgettable evening. Completely naked, tied up in a secure hogtie, ball-gagged and blindfolded, Tim was suspended from the ceiling of the female student’s room. A cockring stimulated his exposed genitals. Vibrating clamps did the same to his nipples. Meanwhile, Dava tormented his face with her bare feet. The ordeal went on for 30 minutes, before the girl switched off the devices. She comforted him, saying that she wasn’t actually all that angry at him for his “two-timing” on New Year’s Eve. She just felt that she had the obligation to punish him, to show him how much she treasured their relationship. She then proceeded to provide some much needed release to her boyfriend, whose genitals had been brought to their limits and beyond;

- Gotham City's subway and sky trains, plus his trusted skateboard in case of short trips, are all he needs to move in the vast metropolis as Timothy Drake. The Boy Wonder, on the other hand, drives a car, the 'Redbird'. He got it as a gift by Lucius Fox, COO of the North America-Atlantic Coast division of Wayne-Head Enterprises, as a sign of gratitude for the time Robin saved his career from a disgraceful scandal of industrial espionage where Mr. Fox's name had come up in several key testimonies (who, Robin found out, had been released by people who had an interest in bringing the COO down with them). The car itself was born during the 'Y-T Craze' of the late Nineties as the prototype for a line of super-sports car powered by a magneto-isotopic pulse engine fueled by the mythologized Yttrio-Tantalite crystals, which in those years looked like the future of the industry of energy production. The project had been discontinued in the year 2000 when experiments with Y-T crystals were banned nearly everywhere on Earth after the victim count of large-scale magneto-isotopic pulse reactors detonating reached four figures and the prototype, despite being equipped with a small, safe version of the reactor, was left to collect dust in the Wayne-Head storehouses. With a maximum speed of 180 mph, almost noiseless and needing to be 'refueled' every half century or so, the Redbird is all a non-superpowered vigilante (and up to three additional passengers) can ask for to patrol the streets, reach hotspots and crisis zones across the urban jungle and launch into hot pursuits. In stark contrast with his utter disdain for house chores, Tim is positively obsessed with his car's maintenance, utterly deaf to the amused comments of his friends who often wonder aloud if his plan to deal with the next batch of evil-doers is by blinding them with the shine of the Redbird's hood;

- His silver pendant (the stylized 'R' of Robin which also prominently features on his hero costume) is actually an Atalese Token, one of the magic objects which can open the dimensional gates between Earth and her armillary counterpart. It was gifted to the Gotham Knights by Ilona, leader of the casteless tribe which had assisted the Gotham Knights during the last few months-- in Atalese time-- of the team's first visit to that world. It was also the team's first real mission involving every member of the current roster. Timothy had initially planned for his teammate Thomas to keep the Token, which at the time looked like a garish, engraved pin, since the Knights would have never even known about Atalu's existence if it were not for him and his 'Squinty Third Eye', but Thomas had humbly declined. The Token assumed its current form during the Knights' third trip to Atalu, when the pin was seriously damaged by a foe, who had mixed it up for a different magical object which he had been sent to destroy. Luckily for the team's chances to return to their Earth, the magic of a Token is insusceptible to physical damage to the vessel and Stephanie saw that mishap as a chance. Unbeknownst to her fiancée, she took the warped pin to a metal enchanter and, when she was back among her teammates, she gifted Tim with the new, improved Token, the R-shaped pendant which she promptly tied around his neck. He enjoyed the change so much that he currently takes it off only when he sleeps or takes a shower;

- His father and Dana told him by phone just one week ago, after trying the test three times with three different brands, all of them returning positive results. He's going to become a big brother. Tim was acutely aware of the fact that the andropause fairy had not visited his father yet-- quite the opposite in fact, since Jerry Drake had entered a second puberty after beginning a relationship with his personal trainer-- but at the same time the prospect of him becoming a father once again nineteen years after the first occurrence had never crossed his mind even once in nearly three years. Now that his relationship with his father is normal again (in fact, even better than it was before the kidnapping and Mrs. Drake's death), he was just left speechless in the most positive of ways, absolutely thrilled by the idea of getting a baby brother or sister at his age. He has already paid visit to his family house in Bristol twice since the first communication.

CONFIDENTIAL INFO

- Dava, his girlfriend at the time of his Parisian stay, was a metahuman, with the power of speeding up her sensorial perception rate and neural activity for up to 6 seconds at a time, a skill which made her live and act in a slow-motion world during that span of time. A strong-willed, perky redhead, her fiery personality offered a stark contrast compared to reflexive, internally-wired Timothy, but she was nonetheless intrigued by the Yankee boy who also happened to be giáo viên's only male pupil. One night the peace of Mante's abode was disturbed by a burglary attempt and it was Tim and Dava who stopped the thief (one of La Mante's old students who had fallen into hard times) before he could escape with the contents of giáo viên's vault. After burning off the remaining adrenaline in her personal apartments (Tim's first time, by the way), the two teens agreed that knowing each other better was well worth the effort and love, not just the carnal variety, wasn't a long way down the road. Unknown to anyone though, Dava was a Bet-II type metahuman and she shortened her lifespan at every use of her power. The strain on her neural system every time she 'slowed down reality' was extreme and she kept piling up this unnatural fatigue after every use. When her brain's motor centers by all means shut down for five hours after a street fight, Tim knew that there was something very wrong with his girlfriend. Dava chose to be honest about her condition as a 'walking dead' of sorts but unfortunately turned out to be a supporter of the 'live fast, die young' philosophy and declined to do anything about her precarious condition. Neither her boyfriend nor her teacher had any success at convincing her to stop using her power for the time being. In fact, they only managed to drive her away. It ended with la Mante herself stepping in and teaching Timothy a secret technique of hers to detect the unique qi flow of a metahuman activating his power and stop it with a swift pressure-based attack, obstructing the path in the process. It was an exceedingly messy affair for Tim's emotions, especially when it turned violent, but eventually the confrontation between the two young lovers ended with Tim blocking Dava from hurting herself once more, perhaps for the last time ever. A part of her knew that Tim and giáo viên had acted that way to save her life, but the loss of her meta-skill, a presence in her life ever since she had turned 7, made her feel like an amputee, like she had lost a part of herself forever. She would never be able to forgive either her teacher or Tim (especially Tim) for that. Five months after the beginning of their relationship, she left her boyfriend and Paris altogether. Tim's heart was one step away from breaking for good. For a while he could keep going only by imposing himself to focus on the only other possible outcome of that tragic situation;

- Despite bearing no responsibility whatsoever for the way it occurred, Robin still played a crucial role in the fall from grace of young superheroine Naomi McDuffie, leader of San Francisco's Titans. The same age as Tim-- her birthday is just four days after his-- their careers couldn't have been more different. While Tim had to fight long and hard even for the most modest improvement to his skillset and reputation, her career as a heroine seemingly had a booster rocket strapped to its back from the day her photokinesis manifested. Two years later, at 18 Lightbringer (the battle name she had chosen for herself) really looked like the woman who would have brought a new dawn to the American superhero community. And then she met the Gotham Knights and most importantly their leader. Starting in November of that year and throughout the following Winter and Spring, the Knights and the Titans teamed up four times to solve as many intricate criminal conspiracies. Each time, after the fact, the media had eyes only for the Titans and their solar leader while the Knights were perfectly happy with being far from the spotlight, but Naomi just couldn't stop brooding over the perceived humiliations she had suffered at the hands of her Gothamite peer. To put it simply, Timothy was a better leader than she was. He always came out with a plan quicker than she could even assess a situation, his strategies always sounded more convincing than hers and and he always knew which teammate, either Knight or Titan, needed words of encouragement or motivation before she did. Episodes like fellow Titan Ravager inciting the members of both teams time and time again to support Robin's assertions like she had never left the Gotham Knights made her feel deeply humiliated and because of that she started to perceive even minor, completely understandable actions like Bushido turning down each of Lightbringer's offers to move back to California as slights against her. The fourth team-up in June 2002 was the moment when all pretenses of cordiality between the two leaders went down the drain and Naomi foolishly risked the lives of two of her teammates (Miguel 'Mikey' Devante, a.k.a. Vulcan, and Ra'ut L'lwer, a.k.a. Chimera) by ordering them to ignore Robin's plan for an ambush, which was supposed to be triggered only several minutes later, and attack at once. The worst part though came after the dust settled and everyone, Titans and Knights alike, were furious with Lightbringer for her ill-advised order and she was being subjected to all kinds of accusations mixed with the occasional insult. The fact that Robin was the only one who wasn't sniping at her and in fact was even trying to keep people's tempers in check was the straw that broke the camel's back for Ms. McDuffie. The confrontation between the two team leaders which took place the day after was no friendly competition, but rather, in Naomi's mind, her last chance to show that she was superior to her Gothamite counterpart in something. And losing against a non-powered opponent ended up compounding the strain on her mind past breaking point. Lightbringer attacked Robin directly with her Storm of Solid Light Bolts, a technique for indiscriminate, large-scale destruction, and she was ready to literally atomize him while he was lying motionless and half-dead on the ground, had his teammates not intervened. Power Girl II, in her giant form, literally threw Ravager, Batgirl and Amazing Man IV from the teams' vantage to the location of the murder attempt. Being suddenly surrounded by heroes who were ready to attack her at any sudden move shook Naomi out of her fit of madness, but the damage was done. She was stripped of the Chairmanship, thrown out of the Titans, forced to undergo surgery to have a power suppressor implanted on her cervical spine and committed to a psychiatric institute for a period of evaluation. A week before being discharged, about two months later, the Gotham Knights learnt that she was officially petitioning them and their mentors to let her carry her rehabilitation process out at 96 Gorfinkel Street, a piece of news that hit the team like a thunderbolt. The knee-jerk reaction to this request was overwhelmingly negative and understandably so. Then, a face to face meeting between Tim and Naomi at the psychiatric institute where she still resided caused a change of heart in the former. Seeing her restrained like a wild animal-- a measure she had explicitly asked for to convince him that she realized what she had done in those fatal seconds of madness-- her face the portrait of sincere contrition was enough for Robin to know that he was in front of somebody who needed relief and he was the one who could give it to her.

TEACHER REVIEW

Barbara Gordon (electronics and IT):

Dinah Lance (tactics and hand-to-hand combat):

Helena Bertinelli (discipline):

Jason Bard (detective work):

Ma Kai (psychological profiling):

Karen Kent (strategic approach to metahuman foes):

Ray Thielman (survival in hostile environments and armed combat):

Terry Thielman (infiltration and dissimulation):

Description

JLA DOSSIER

n. FFT - 224277 ERF

CIVILIAN NAME

Timothy Charles Drake

SUPERHERO IDENTITY

Robin

PERSONAL AND PHYSICAL DATA

Born: September 3, 1983

Age: 19

Civilian profession: employed at the Downtown Boardworks skate shop as technician and repairman (unofficially as the manager's own "scapegoat, stress ball and footstool")

Marital status: engaged to Stephanie Brown

Birthplace: Gotham City (NJ)

Height: 175 cm (5' 9")

Weight: 72 kg (159 lbs.)

Eye color: cornflower blue

Hair color: raven-black

Measurement (biceps): 15 in.

Blood type: A+

Shoe size: 11 US male

Distinguishing features: 32 scars from laser and blade wounds all over his body

STATUS IN THE METAHUMAN COMMUNITY

- First ever official student of Dinah Lance and Helena Bertinelli, way before the establishment of the Mirai dojo;

- Attended the school/training facility founded and managed by the Franco-Vietnamese heroine La Mante's (real name: Mẫn Thị Hằng) in Paris (FR) from September 1999 to July 2000;

- Member (#5 in the internal rankings) of the Inner Circle of students of the Mirai dojo, i.e. the group of students who are being trained to become heroes by the dojo's staff (and help said staff during the lessons attended by civilians);

- Founding member and leader of the Gotham Knights (founded in September 2000);

- 4 honorable mentions in the JLA register of young vigilantes;

- Awarded the Midalja għall-Qlubija (Medal for Bravery) for his valiant acts during the Black Elder Crisis (medal awarded on March 31st, 2000 by President Guido de Marco);

- Held in very high esteem by a large section of the membership of l'Alliance pour la Justice, France's foremost superhero team. He also teamed up with the superheroine Césure, the group's current deputy chairwoman, in two major missions. Since the age threshold to join the organization is fixed to 16, he was even invited to stay in France past the end of his stay at La Mante's school and become a member but in the end he politely declined.

ORIGIN

1. Just a hobby. Timothy Drake was the son of Jack and Janet Drake, two members of the upper end of Gotham City's upper middle class. His life had been a happy one until his parents' marriage had begun falling apart when he was 12. To get some distraction from the increasingly worse situation at home, he doubled down on one of his numerous hobby: cape-sighting. He focused on one heroine in particular: Black Canary. She was back to patrolling the streets of Gotham City after being missing from the active scene for more than a decade and she represented a riddle which every cape-sighter worthy of the name wished to solve. After an entire year spent cross-referecing data from online bulletins about hero sightings, rumors on the street and city maps, Timothy finally struck gold in October 1996 when he pinpointed a city block on Moldoff Avenue-- i.e. where the apartment Dinah shared with Helena was located-- and another on Moench Row-- i.e. the position of Oracle's Clock Tower-- as the focal points of Black Canary's activity. When he showed up at the door of the Clock Tower, coincidentally at the time the Birds of Prey were holding a meeting, and asked for permission to meet the legendary Black Canary from the other end of the doorphone, Dinah let him in. Despite Barbara's protests, she really wanted to talk with that impudent boy. If she had found out the address of a superhero at his age, she said, she would have done the same thing he was doing right then.

2. Good friends. Despite the age gap, Dinah and Timothy became friends in no time, while Helena and (especially) Barbara kept their distance. He began dropping in to see her twice or three times a week, both at the Clock Tower and at the apartment in Moldoff Avenue, so that they could talk about the most disparate topics, though the things Dinah did while she was AWOL from the American superhero community were his favorite one. This connection became extremely important in late November, when Timothy came back home after a night at the theater with his friends to find his home trashed and his parents missing. Worst of all, there had already been five cases of Gothamite millionaires being abducted in the past two years-- abductions which had always finished with the victims being found days later with their ribcages teared open and their hearts removed, like in an Aztec ritual sacrifice. He initially called the police, but then he also called for a taxi. He needed to get to Downtown as quickly as possible.

3. Imperfect. The Birds of Prey got down to work like a well-oiled machine. Looking at the past five cases, they had less than 24 hours to find the Drakes and thanks to all the data Barbara had collected about that string of heinous murders, they managed to find a lead to the place the Drakes were most likely being held. Black Canary and the Huntress rushed to the place on their motorcycles and found an entire underground complex turned into a sort of cathedral/temple by the Mictlan's Witnesses. Tim's parents had been reserved the place of honor on the twin altars. Rather than facing 400 between cultists and priests head on, Dinah had focused on rescuing Tim's parents and neutralizing the priests who carried the ritual knives, but she hadn't taken into account the danger posed by the unarmed priests. One of them splashed the faces of the Drakes with the content of a jug and, while she was still opening a path to the only exit with her Canary Cry, Tim's parents began feeling sick and terribly tired. Fifteen minutes later, Janet Drake was dead while Jack was in a coma. The liquid they had been splashed with contained essence of roots of stramonium and even the small amount they had ingested could kill a grown adult. Dinah did not mince her words with Tim. She had failed.

4. One way forward. Jack Drake eventually woke up from his coma but his nerves had been damaged by the stramonium. His doctors told him that he could have spent the rest of his life on a wheelchair. Timothy's life turned into a nightmare. All his emotions, both positive and negative, seemed to have disappeared after hearing Dinah's tragic news. He should have felt rage and instead he was just oppressed by the realization of how powerless he had been while the tragedy was talking place. He did not blame Black Canary-- or the Huntress for that matter-- for having failed to rescue his parents. In fact, he seemed to be able to express what he was feeling only when she was present. And the veteran heroine was the only one who understood him. She told him that that feeling of powerlessness, of being unable to make a difference in an unfair world, can bring a person to suicide-- or make them realize that they have wings to fly. Tim asked if she could help him find his wings. Dinah replied that it would have been an honor for her.

METAHUMAN POWERS

None

OTHER SKILLS

- Exceptionally developed logical-mathematical intelligence, a quality which has helped him become both an exceptional code breaker and hacker;

- Refined his sequential reasoning skills and inductive/deductive thinking patterns under the tutoring of Jason Bard. Developed the 'manhunter instinct' while collaborating with Henri Ducard;

- Genius gadgeteer with 10+ years of practice with electronics and small-scale mechanics, in addition to an innate talent for assessing what might be actually useful on a mission and how to maximize its utility. Most of the technological devices in his arsenal-- and a few in those of his teammates-- are his own designs;

- As a martial artist, he's specialized in the following disciplines: (1) Bōjutsu [teacher: initially Black Canary, though he perfected his style under the tutelage of La Mante and later Terry Thielman] and (2) Wǔshù [teacher: Black Canary, who taught Timothy the Choy Li Fut, Nan Quan and Chang Quan styles of this manifold discipline].

LIMITATIONS

- A self-imposed one: his oath never to use again the Flash Hit of the Frozen Tear, arguably the most powerful technique taught to him by La Mante during his training in France. His ability to detect and block the qi flow associated to a metahuman activating their power(s) would increment Timothy's chances in one-on-one fights against a wide selection of metas, to the point that he could even threaten Tanya's role as the Gotham Knights' most useful asset in fights against super-powered opponents. Many people, not the least his teachers, tried to change his mind about his decision, but he never fails to bring up the oath he made when he chose to live the life of the vigilante. The teachers who had been heroes themselves immediately understand what he means and do not press the matter any further, the others not so much;

- He tends to underrate himself as a leader. Of course, modesty is not a negative trait in a person in his position, since knowing that a teammate's input can always be taken into account before and during missions is good for morale, but persistent doubts about not living up to the role can drive a leader either to become jealous of their position or to lose focus in critical moments and Mr. Drake is no stranger to either situation.

SEXUALITY

Heterosexual and gifted with that particular je-ne-sais-quoi (as giáo viên put it) that can make quite a few women fall for him without looking back. His experiences with romance though make it very difficult for him to say that his gift is always a blessing.

Tim's first love was the one every romantic adolescent yearns for: pure, requited, perfect. The girl's name was Ariana "Ari" Dzherchenko, youngest daughter of a family of Ukrainian shop owners who had moved to the US after the end of the Cold War. They were both 14 and sincerely committed to each other, but neither her family nor his father were enthusiastic about such a relationship. From the Dzherchenkoes' point of view, Tim was the spoiled scion of a family of millionaires looking for a throwaway toy who had found it in their naive daughter. In Jack Drake's mind, on the other hand, Ariana was just a gold digger coming from a distinctly "Other" background;

His second fling was a complete change of pace compared to the first one. She was a fellow student of amazing combat and self-healing techniques of the Parisian heroine la Mante. Her name was Dava Švrakić and she had grown up without a real home ever since her native country, Bosnia, had gone to hell in a handbasket in the early Nineties. They complemented each other perfectly both on the fighting ground and under the blankets. However, great sex and an adrenaline-filled lifestyle are not solid foundations for a lasting and healthy relationship, especially when one's significant other turns out to be a firm believer in the 'live fast, die young' philosophy;
With Stephanie Brown it was much more of a slow-burn kind of thing. Well aware of their lack of experience in the field of vigilantism, Robin and Spoiler had started teaming up more or less regularly during their patrols, mostly to have each other's back when things got dangerous. On the other hand, the fact that she used to flirt with him at any available opportunity made quite clear that Steph wouldn't have minded taking their relationship a step beyond the professional sphere. Tim on the other hand already had Ari in his civilian life and he didn't even entertain that chance. Then life went upside down for both sides in a ridiculously short amount of time and completely different reasons. Their paths even brought them to different continents, Stephanie in central and eastern Africa and Timothy to la ville lumiére. It was during those months of separation, even while he was in a relationship with Dava, that he realized that he had never felt so complete as a person and a hero as during those nights spent running on the roofs of Gotham with Spoiler at his side. At the time they met again on the shores of Lake Victoria, Timothy's happiness reached its apex when he learnt that Stephanie had felt the same exact feelings too.

To his eventual consternation, though, finding his soulmate didn't make him less desirable for girls he came in contact with in later years. Rose Wilson, a.k.a. Ravager, was quite straightforward about her desire to pursue a relationship with her team leader-- Stephanie or no Stephanie-- during her tenure as a Gotham Knight and the impracticability of that was one of the reasons behind her choice to leave the group after less than a year. At the most desperate hour of their mission in Cairo in late 2002, Naomi McDuffie, a.k.a. Lightbringer, dramatically confessed her love for him while both of their heads were on the chopping block. Even triad member Xie Ling, a.k.a. Lynx of the Ghost Dragons, a dangerous woman who had defeated Timothy in combat several times and had taken great pleasure from putting him through degrading and humiliating treatments after such victories, turned out not to be insensitive to his 'good guy' charm. After she struck an unlikely alliance with her foe to overturn the new order in the city's Triads she confessed to him that, if he had been just three or four years older, she would have banged him until he begged for mercy. When a visibly embarrassed Tim told her that he was involved with a girl he loved, Ling just added that his fiancée was also invited if she wanted in. And then there is his relationship with his teammate Star Kotze, which by now defies any attempt to explain it properly-- though he's immensely glad that it has never messed things up in regards to his love life with Stephanie.

BDSM is a substantial component of his sex life with Stephanie, with Tim playing the role of the humble slave eager to obey his mistress's every order. However, despite being able like all of his teammates to handle most forms of pain thanks to his training, he has no submissive-- much less masochistic-- tendencies and therefore does not derive any pleasure from being a sub. He willingly subjects himself to mistreatments and degradation because playing the role of the dom makes his beloved Steph genuinely happy and his commitment to her happiness has never been called into question. Also, nearly half the people he knows among the residents of 96 Gorfinkel Street is the submissive partner in a BDSM relationship and he has the utmost respect for every single one of them since their little 'vice' doesn't detract in any way from their many virtues. If they managed to become balanced and accomplished individuals while begging their doms to be punished within the safe confines of their bedrooms, he reasonably feels that he can also endure the same treatments.

SPIRITUALITY

The Drakes were a family of very committed English Presbyterians until their stubborn refusal to submit to the Act of Uniformity. That was the moment when the head of the household, John Drake, decided that the whole clan should have relocated to the colonies in the New World. That happened in 1671 and to this day the scions of the Drake family are still expected to be raised by their parents in accordance with the Puritan principles that were so very dear to John Drake to risk everything with a one-way trip to the Americas. Of course, over the centuries not all Drakes felt comfortable with their family's Presbyterian tradition and Tim is definitely one of such non-conformists.

He gradually lost his faith over the course of his late childhood and early adolescence, seeing his parents growing apart from each other and from him, a process that reached completion with the tragic accident that killed his mother and almost did the same to his father. Today he can be considered as non-religious, though he's not keen on being called an atheist. According to his own words, the principles that guide him in life are that believing in God is no use if you don't believe in yourself and that the only place you can find true happiness is in other people.

KEY MOMENTS

- Tim and Ari's relationship began treading on very thin ice when Tim returned home late in the evening to find his girlfriend, fresh from running away from her home, waiting for him-- with very few clothes on-- under the blankets of his bed. It eventually came to an abrupt, forced end one month later when Ari's parents came back home earlier than expected from a dinner to find their daughter in a skimpy nightie in the middle of a (quite possibly pre-coital) make-out session with a shirtless Tim on their living room's couch. While he was lucky enough to avoid the homicidal rage of the pater familias, a few days later Ariana was sent to an all-girls boarding school in Monmouth County (NJ) where she stayed until the end of high school. It was the hardest of decisions for both of them, but with Tim also going to leave Gotham soon for his one-year sojourn in the Old World, they agreed to break their relationship off;

- He ran away from his father's home in early August 2000, after the umpteenth argument between him and his father about the latter's intention to marry his physical therapist/personal trainer Dana Winters had ended in Jack Drake telling his son that he was going to send him to a private school in Rhode Island. Timothy was first hosted by Stephanie and her mother Crystal, who finally had the chance to get truly acquainted with her daughter's boyfriend, and then was encouraged by his mentors Dinah Lance and Helena Bertinelli to move to their place in Old Gotham, becoming the third-ever resident of 96 Gorfinkel Street;

- Interested in getting the full picture of the delicate balance of power between the three criminal organizations of Gotham City's Chinatown (Ghost Dragons, Unicorns and Jade Tigers), Robin spent almost three weeks in Summer 1999 investigating the network of criminal activities which extended all over the district and in the bordering areas. On the twentieth night, however, his discreet investigations were interrupted when he took action to save a girl in street clothes only two or three years older than him from being beaten by a young man wearing Ghost Dragons insignia on his jacket. After making short work of him, he got hugged by the Sino-American girl who, in barely-formed words, both expressed her gratitude and gave him an account of the horrible things the young man had done to her over the previous month. Once she calmed down, the girl introduced herself as Xie Ling. Robin found out that her by then ex-boyfriend was the Ghost Dragon lieutenant responsible for the security of the Triad's armory and Ling showed to be very willing to bring him to that place. Enthusiastic, even. But once Robin and his guide stepped into the basement of an abandoned building in Hama Street where, according to the latter, the armory was located, he went straight into the world of dreams courtesy of Ling hitting him in the temple. He woke up about forty minutes later, buck-naked but sort of mummified into a kneeling position with lots of ropes and duct tape and with a T-profile very painfully digging into his calves, thighs and inner knees. Two chains kept the T-profile suspended in mid-air, meaning that he was also dangling upended in the middle of the completely empty 'armory'. Ling was also still there, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, and introduced herself once again, though this time as Lynx, an actual lieutenant of the Ghost Dragons. She told him that, if he didn't have suicidal instincts, he had better stay well away from Chinatown or come back only when he greatly improved his espionage skills, since they left something to be desired. Then she nonchalantly stripped herself right in front of him, shoved her socks into his mouth and made him wear her panties over his face, securing them with some other duct tape. She left immediately after, bringing with herself his costume as a souvenir of a "great first date". Luckily for Timothy, he had a subcutaneous localizing device Ling couldn't know about embedded in his upper arm and at sunrise the Spoiler came to rescue him after a some very uncomfortable hours. In the following days, he felt like one step away from sinking into depression. Having fallen like the dumbest of rookies for the oldest trick in the book was embarrassing enough-- Steph being the first to notice that Ling had written "property of Lynx" on Mr. Drake's scrotum with a permanent marker also didn't help-- but what really frustrated him to no end was the fact that he didn't see easy ways to become better. Finding time both for his vigilante training and for his commitments as Timothy Drake was already almost impossible. There was no way he could do more to improve his skills as Robin without his grades at school taking a nosedive and his absences becoming more and more noticeable. So he decided to talk with his mentor Black Canary about his troubles and that ended up being the right thing to do. She knew a woman, an acquaintance from her youth in Eastern and Southern Asia, who would have happily welcomed both Timothy and Robin in her home for a study stay in La Ville-Lumière, Paris. Robin became immediately intrigued by the idea and, lucky for his prospects, his father too;

- He's the person who's ultimately responsible for the arrival of Naomi McDuffie, a.k.a. Lightbringer, at 96 Gorfinkel Street, so that she could carry out her rehabilitation process-- after her nervous breakdown in June 2002, which cost her the chairmanship of the Titans-- among fellow young vigilantes. Superman himself, Ms. McDuffie's main supporter at the beginning of her career and also a dear friend of hers, had offered to help her in such a delicate phase of her life, but she had turned the offer down since she didn't wish such an incumbency to "weigh him down". Her photokinetic powers had been artificially suppressed, meaning that her presence wasn't guaranteed during the team's most dangerous mission, but aside from that she lived, trained and struggled in close contact with the Knights. Robin was also responsible for deactivating Naomi's spinal suppressors at the time the Knights' adventure in deep space (March-April 2003) reached its climax and the team needed Lightbringer's superpowers to guarantee not just their survival but that of a whole planet. Finally, he advised her to accept Vril Dox's offer to join his L.E.G.I.O.N. organization, at least for some time, saying that a woman like the one he had come to know and respect throughout the previous eight months would be able to face the vastness and variety of the universe and its inhabitants without much trouble.

OUTSTANDING FEATS

- On March 27th, 2000, he was in Malta on a guided tour of the Citadel of Gozo, a.k.a. the headquarters of PRISM, the international superhero team uniting some of the greatest crime-fighters in the Mediterranean basin. That was the day when the Black Elder managed to break free from its prison, located on level -72 of the underground portion of the fortress. A shape-shifting, sentient, telepathic mass made from a long-lost cousin of traditional matter, the Black Elder could have very well been a creation of the mind of Howard Phillips Lovecraft for its total disregard for the lives of other beings and for the way he plunges people into the depths of madness if one is exposed for too long to its telepathy. Sure enough, the members of PRISM thought so when they gave it a name including the word 'Elder'. Despite the overwhelming odds though, Tim stuck to the oath he made when he chose the life of the vigilante and stayed in the Citadel to help Césure, who had accompanied him and the rest of his class to Malta, and her 7 teammates. He even played an important role in recovering the Accelerating Gun, one of the few weapons of this world which can seriously hurt the Black Elder, from a section of the facility that had ended up isolated from the rest during the nightmarish creature's onslaught;

- Teaming up with Star of the Gotham Knights, they were able to reach and infiltrate a massive League of Assassins facility lost in the Andes Mountains close to the Bolivian-Peruvian border while the supreme leader of the organization, Talia Al-Ghul Wayne, was visiting. That's basically the time of the year when all safety measures in League bases around the world are deployed 24 hours a day. Not even a viscacha could have wandered around the facility without being spotted and monitored at every step, but almost three weeks of non-stop preparations by Robin and Star, with extensive help from their teachers (plus Barbara Gordon from Hong Kong) and a few of Helena Bertinelli's shadier friends made the endeavor possible. To this day, this is one of the accomplishments Tim is proudest of, particularly since he had been the one who proposed this extremely risky mission, all to help the best friend he has ever had;

- Armed only with makeshift wooden bo staffs, Timothy Drake and Naomi McDuffie fought against a mob of 200 modern Egyptians subjugated by the cabal of 6 ancient Egyptian deities who were attempting to bring the clock back to 3,000 years before. The gods led by Haruw (Horus) had started their ritual by removing all signs of modernity from the building where they revealed their true identities, which included the heroes' gadgets and even their clothes, leaving them barefoot and dressed in white linen garments-- to Ms. McDuffie's consternation, her new attire was of a type which left her breasts completely exposed and she couldn't shake the feeling that the "hawk-faced pig" had done it on purpose. Offered a pair spears to defend themselves, the young heroes removed the bronze tips and hoped that their bojutsu was as good as they thought. While they were eventually overwhelmed by superior numbers, Haruw was so impressed by their martial prowess that he opted to sentence them to a 'clean' death by beheading rather than letting them be torn apart by the brainwashed mob. Had it been otherwise, they would have been dead by the time the god Sutaḫ (Seth), evoked by their allies far away, reached 'ground zero' of the crisis and blew off the cabal's plan;

- He brought to justice the 28 officers of Jade-faced Wu (real name: Andrew Wu) on February 28, 2003, effectively terminating the experiment known as 'Fist of Heavenly Serendipity', the cartel which had absorbed the three competing gangs ruling the criminal underground in Chinatown, and returning that district of Downtown to the tripartite status quo, but with the Unicorns, the Jade Tigers and the Ghost Dragons in a weakened state. However, in Tim's own mind the real accomplishment was ending his long-standing feud with Lynx. The eventful night which saw the end of FHS had begun with Robin finding the ex-leader of the Ghost Dragons unconscious and covered in bruises between two dumpsters in an alley at the edge of Chinatown and concluded with the by-then former arch-enemies having a heartfelt conversation on a rooftop about the true purpose of being a hero. Robin had never seen his nemesis sad, much less in tears, but not even an hour before she had seen a 10-year-old enslaved girl, inspired by the strong. defiant Lynx, rebelling against Wu and his men and being gunned down like an animal, though not before pushing Jade-faced Wu himself out a fourth-floor window. With a heavy heart, she asked the boy she had always treated with nothing but contempt if that-- a dead girl-- was the reward for trying to do good in the world-- to be a hero. Without hesitation, he answered that being a hero is not fun, that heroes need to set themselves aside and stop considering themselves as part of humanity, that they walk the fine line between heaven and hell every day for the ideal they dedicate their lives to, that is a higher level of truth and justice. When she replied that she didn't want to be a hero if that meant being like him, he concluded by telling her that he's content with fighting crime and being a detective and that he doesn't consider himself a hero, since that's a title only posterity can give. Lynx went off the grid for two whole months, even her old comrades in the Dragons knew nothing about her whereabouts. Then, when the staff of the Mirai dojo published a job offer for a substitute teacher-- Terry Thielman is soon to go on maternity leave-- she reappeared as a candidate for the position and was selected on the fly for her incredible talent as a martial artist. Later she told Tim that she had known for years that 96 Gorfinkel Street is Robin's secret base, but she had never wished to press her advantage. Now that he had shown her that she is capable of a form of ferocious goodness, she was going to force him to take responsibility. Mr. Drake gladly accepted.

FUN FACTS

- The kidnapping of the daughter of small-time supervillain Arthur Brown (a.k.a. Cluemaster) by a criminal gang he had robbed of part of the profits of a hit was one of Tim's first cases in his new identity as Robin. A few weeks later, news came to his ears that there was a new young vigilante roaming the streets and roofs of Gotham City proper and its western suburbia and it didn't take long for the two of them to run into each other during one of Tim's patrols. The latter's surprise at finding out that the blonde girl he had saved was the one donning the home-made purple costume and that she already knew the identity of the boy behind the domino mask (she was a real natural at tailing people without being noticed, apparently) can be left to the reader's imagination;

- It's worthy of note that his first BDSM experience happened before starting his current relationship with Stephanie Brown. Tim could not spend the last night of 1999 with his girlfriend Dava due to the latter contracting a severe case of the flu during the holidays. However, he had also received an invitation by Yolanthe Janvier, a second-year student at la Mante’s academy, to the New Year’s Party her family was going to hold in their countryside villa. Unwilling to welcome the year 2000 alone, he accepted the girl’s invitation and had a really good time. Of course, Dava found out pretty soon about this ‘betrayal’ on her boyfriend’s part and, a couple of weeks later, she exacted her revenge on him. One of Dava’s cousins, who worked in a sex shop, supplied her with all the equipment she needed for a really unforgettable evening. Completely naked, tied up in a secure hogtie, ball-gagged and blindfolded, Tim was suspended from the ceiling of the female student’s room. A cockring stimulated his exposed genitals. Vibrating clamps did the same to his nipples. Meanwhile, Dava tormented his face with her bare feet. The ordeal went on for 30 minutes, before the girl switched off the devices. She comforted him, saying that she wasn’t actually all that angry at him for his “two-timing” on New Year’s Eve. She just felt that she had the obligation to punish him, to show him how much she treasured their relationship. She then proceeded to provide some much needed release to her boyfriend, whose genitals had been brought to their limits and beyond;

- Gotham City's subway and sky trains, plus his trusted skateboard in case of short trips, are all he needs to move in the vast metropolis as Timothy Drake. The Boy Wonder, on the other hand, drives a car, the 'Redbird'. He got it as a gift by Lucius Fox, COO of the North America-Atlantic Coast division of Wayne-Head Enterprises, as a sign of gratitude for the time Robin saved his career from a disgraceful scandal of industrial espionage where Mr. Fox's name had come up in several key testimonies (who, Robin found out, had been released by people who had an interest in bringing the COO down with them). The car itself was born during the 'Y-T Craze' of the late Nineties as the prototype for a line of super-sports car powered by a magneto-isotopic pulse engine fueled by the mythologized Yttrio-Tantalite crystals, which in those years looked like the future of the industry of energy production. The project had been discontinued in the year 2000 when experiments with Y-T crystals were banned nearly everywhere on Earth after the victim count of large-scale magneto-isotopic pulse reactors detonating reached four figures and the prototype, despite being equipped with a small, safe version of the reactor, was left to collect dust in the Wayne-Head storehouses. With a maximum speed of 180 mph, almost noiseless and needing to be 'refueled' every half century or so, the Redbird is all a non-superpowered vigilante (and up to three additional passengers) can ask for to patrol the streets, reach hotspots and crisis zones across the urban jungle and launch into hot pursuits. In stark contrast with his utter disdain for house chores, Tim is positively obsessed with his car's maintenance, utterly deaf to the amused comments of his friends who often wonder aloud if his plan to deal with the next batch of evil-doers is by blinding them with the shine of the Redbird's hood;

- His silver pendant (the stylized 'R' of Robin which also prominently features on his hero costume) is actually an Atalese Token, one of the magic objects which can open the dimensional gates between Earth and her armillary counterpart. It was gifted to the Gotham Knights by Ilona, leader of the casteless tribe which had assisted the Gotham Knights during the last few months-- in Atalese time-- of the team's first visit to that world. It was also the team's first real mission involving every member of the current roster. Timothy had initially planned for his teammate Thomas to keep the Token, which at the time looked like a garish, engraved pin, since the Knights would have never even known about Atalu's existence if it were not for him and his 'Squinty Third Eye', but Thomas had humbly declined. The Token assumed its current form during the Knights' third trip to Atalu, when the pin was seriously damaged by a foe, who had mixed it up for a different magical object which he had been sent to destroy. Luckily for the team's chances to return to their Earth, the magic of a Token is insusceptible to physical damage to the vessel and Stephanie saw that mishap as a chance. Unbeknownst to her fiancée, she took the warped pin to a metal enchanter and, when she was back among her teammates, she gifted Tim with the new, improved Token, the R-shaped pendant which she promptly tied around his neck. He enjoyed the change so much that he currently takes it off only when he sleeps or takes a shower;

- His father and Dana told him by phone just one week ago, after trying the test three times with three different brands, all of them returning positive results. He's going to become a big brother. Tim was acutely aware of the fact that the andropause fairy had not visited his father yet-- quite the opposite in fact, since Jerry Drake had entered a second puberty after beginning a relationship with his personal trainer-- but at the same time the prospect of him becoming a father once again nineteen years after the first occurrence had never crossed his mind even once in nearly three years. Now that his relationship with his father is normal again (in fact, even better than it was before the kidnapping and Mrs. Drake's death), he was just left speechless in the most positive of ways, absolutely thrilled by the idea of getting a baby brother or sister at his age. He has already paid visit to his family house in Bristol twice since the first communication.

CONFIDENTIAL INFO

- Dava, his girlfriend at the time of his Parisian stay, was a metahuman, with the power of speeding up her sensorial perception rate and neural activity for up to 6 seconds at a time, a skill which made her live and act in a slow-motion world during that span of time. A strong-willed, perky redhead, her fiery personality offered a stark contrast compared to reflexive, internally-wired Timothy, but she was nonetheless intrigued by the Yankee boy who also happened to be giáo viên's only male pupil. One night the peace of Mante's abode was disturbed by a burglary attempt and it was Tim and Dava who stopped the thief (one of La Mante's old students who had fallen into hard times) before he could escape with the contents of giáo viên's vault. After burning off the remaining adrenaline in her personal apartments (Tim's first time, by the way), the two teens agreed that knowing each other better was well worth the effort and love, not just the carnal variety, wasn't a long way down the road. Unknown to anyone though, Dava was a Bet-II type metahuman and she shortened her lifespan at every use of her power. The strain on her neural system every time she 'slowed down reality' was extreme and she kept piling up this unnatural fatigue after every use. When her brain's motor centers by all means shut down for five hours after a street fight, Tim knew that there was something very wrong with his girlfriend. Dava chose to be honest about her condition as a 'walking dead' of sorts but unfortunately turned out to be a supporter of the 'live fast, die young' philosophy and declined to do anything about her precarious condition. Neither her boyfriend nor her teacher had any success at convincing her to stop using her power for the time being. In fact, they only managed to drive her away. It ended with la Mante herself stepping in and teaching Timothy a secret technique of hers to detect the unique qi flow of a metahuman activating his power and stop it with a swift pressure-based attack, obstructing the path in the process. It was an exceedingly messy affair for Tim's emotions, especially when it turned violent, but eventually the confrontation between the two young lovers ended with Tim blocking Dava from hurting herself once more, perhaps for the last time ever. A part of her knew that Tim and giáo viên had acted that way to save her life, but the loss of her meta-skill, a presence in her life ever since she had turned 7, made her feel like an amputee, like she had lost a part of herself forever. She would never be able to forgive either her teacher or Tim (especially Tim) for that. Five months after the beginning of their relationship, she left her boyfriend and Paris altogether. Tim's heart was one step away from breaking for good. For a while he could keep going only by imposing himself to focus on the only other possible outcome of that tragic situation;

- Despite bearing no responsibility whatsoever for the way it occurred, Robin still played a crucial role in the fall from grace of young superheroine Naomi McDuffie, leader of San Francisco's Titans. The same age as Tim-- her birthday is just four days after his-- their careers couldn't have been more different. While Tim had to fight long and hard even for the most modest improvement to his skillset and reputation, her career as a heroine seemingly had a booster rocket strapped to its back from the day her photokinesis manifested. Two years later, at 18 Lightbringer (the battle name she had chosen for herself) really looked like the woman who would have brought a new dawn to the American superhero community. And then she met the Gotham Knights and most importantly their leader. Starting in November of that year and throughout the following Winter and Spring, the Knights and the Titans teamed up four times to solve as many intricate criminal conspiracies. Each time, after the fact, the media had eyes only for the Titans and their solar leader while the Knights were perfectly happy with being far from the spotlight, but Naomi just couldn't stop brooding over the perceived humiliations she had suffered at the hands of her Gothamite peer. To put it simply, Timothy was a better leader than she was. He always came out with a plan quicker than she could even assess a situation, his strategies always sounded more convincing than hers and and he always knew which teammate, either Knight or Titan, needed words of encouragement or motivation before she did. Episodes like fellow Titan Ravager inciting the members of both teams time and time again to support Robin's assertions like she had never left the Gotham Knights made her feel deeply humiliated and because of that she started to perceive even minor, completely understandable actions like Bushido turning down each of Lightbringer's offers to move back to California as slights against her. The fourth team-up in June 2002 was the moment when all pretenses of cordiality between the two leaders went down the drain and Naomi foolishly risked the lives of two of her teammates (Miguel 'Mikey' Devante, a.k.a. Vulcan, and Ra'ut L'lwer, a.k.a. Chimera) by ordering them to ignore Robin's plan for an ambush, which was supposed to be triggered only several minutes later, and attack at once. The worst part though came after the dust settled and everyone, Titans and Knights alike, were furious with Lightbringer for her ill-advised order and she was being subjected to all kinds of accusations mixed with the occasional insult. The fact that Robin was the only one who wasn't sniping at her and in fact was even trying to keep people's tempers in check was the straw that broke the camel's back for Ms. McDuffie. The confrontation between the two team leaders which took place the day after was no friendly competition, but rather, in Naomi's mind, her last chance to show that she was superior to her Gothamite counterpart in something. And losing against a non-powered opponent ended up compounding the strain on her mind past breaking point. Lightbringer attacked Robin directly with her Storm of Solid Light Bolts, a technique for indiscriminate, large-scale destruction, and she was ready to literally atomize him while he was lying motionless and half-dead on the ground, had his teammates not intervened. Power Girl II, in her giant form, literally threw Ravager, Batgirl and Amazing Man IV from the teams' vantage to the location of the murder attempt. Being suddenly surrounded by heroes who were ready to attack her at any sudden move shook Naomi out of her fit of madness, but the damage was done. She was stripped of the Chairmanship, thrown out of the Titans, forced to undergo surgery to have a power suppressor implanted on her cervical spine and committed to a psychiatric institute for a period of evaluation. A week before being discharged, about two months later, the Gotham Knights learnt that she was officially petitioning them and their mentors to let her carry her rehabilitation process out at 96 Gorfinkel Street, a piece of news that hit the team like a thunderbolt. The knee-jerk reaction to this request was overwhelmingly negative and understandably so. Then, a face to face meeting between Tim and Naomi at the psychiatric institute where she still resided caused a change of heart in the former. Seeing her restrained like a wild animal-- a measure she had explicitly asked for to convince him that she realized what she had done in those fatal seconds of madness-- her face the portrait of sincere contrition was enough for Robin to know that he was in front of somebody who needed relief and he was the one who could give it to her.

TEACHER REVIEW

Barbara Gordon (electronics and IT):

Dinah Lance (tactics and hand-to-hand combat):

Helena Bertinelli (discipline):

Jason Bard (detective work):

Ma Kai (psychological profiling):

Karen Kent (strategic approach to metahuman foes):

Ray Thielman (survival in hostile environments and armed combat):

Terry Thielman (infiltration and dissimulation):