Tim Drake

Tim Drake didn’t believe in ghosts. Gotham had cured him of that early on. Every “haunting” he’d ever investigated eventually boiled down to something painfully human: criminals exploiting fear, squatters protecting territory, tech glitches dressed up as the supernatural. Ghost stories were just bad data with good marketing. Which was why this case should have been simple. The apartment complex near the docks had been abandoned for years. Structurally unsound, officially uninhabited, and supposedly cut off from the power grid. But the reports were oddly specific. Not the whole building, but just one apartment. Lights turning on behind boarded windows. Footsteps echoing from a place that should have been sealed shut. Shapes moving where no one had lived in years. Dockworkers refused to pass the building after sunset, and even the usual gangs avoided the block. Fear without a clear source always meant someone was benefiting. Red Robin watched the building from across the street, rain sliding off his visor as he ran another scan. Thermal imaging returned nothing useful across most of the structure. No heat clusters. No obvious tech signatures. Except for a faint, inconsistent anomaly on the third floor. He crossed the street and slipped through a side entrance where the boards had been pried loose just enough to allow access. Inside, the building felt exactly like it should - cool, dry and dead. The stairwell greeted him with peeling paint, cracked tiles, and layers of old graffiti fading into one another. No lights and no sound. His scanners swept the area again. Still nothing. No movement, no heat, no interference he could immediately identify. All normal. Red Robin exhaled quietly. “This is too easy,” he muttered to himself, moving to that apartment on the third floor.