#dazboy1000

Maps gets really into the Batman investigation community in Gotham, and personally buys into a lot of the more mystical/occult explanations for him. Weird shit starts going down at the academy the year she befriends Damian (Shadow doesn’t officially exist yet, but he’s fighting for it constantly!) and she & Damian often find themselves investigating the same things even though he refuses to join her club. When things become actually dangerous & Olive starts having memory lapses, Maps recognizes that she’s in over her head and tries to reach out to Batman.

Bruce assumes Damian set his friend up to this to make Bruce allow Damian to become an active hero, and basically brushes her off.

Maps is heartbroken & shocked. Realizing her most famous local hero isn’t going to help her, like so many kid heroes before her, she buckles down & gets to work trying to find even more in-depth studies of magic & science to get an explanation. (Damian does join her club at this point, largely out of guilt.) Maps starts digging up actual occult tomes, and eventually discovers Gotham’s “actual real fucking magic” community. Very specifically, she becomes Jason Blood’s apprentice.

(I don’t know much about Jason Blood either, I’ve read a few of his crossover issues from the 80s & early 90s, and he seems pretty cool so I added his series to my list but I was planning to backfill that once I got done with the many 90s events I’ve been slogging through. He also was living in Gotham during that time, which shocked me to learn there was a full-fledged magic “hero” there at that time. He doesn’t seem like he’d want to take an apprentice, but this is going to be like Bruce & Duke creating Moonbeam: the kid keeps running headlong into danger that you are an expert in, your choice is sacrifice your time & sanity to be their adult supervision or let the kid get killed. And Jason is more of an anti-hero it seems—he mostly wants to keep to himself was the impression I got—but he is enough of a hero that he’s not going to let Maps risk her life like that.)

The whole Calamity thing with Olive steadily builds in the background of this until it hits its breaking point. Maps has magical training & Jason on-call to help, so not nearly as many people get hurt and their friendship isn’t damaged the way it is in canon. Jason offers to train Olive to help her control this spirit inside of her, as that hits very close to home for him.

Maps finally chooses a hero name for herself at this point, deciding to be “Harmony” to balance out Olive’s “Calamity,” and before they even graduate high school they have a whole plan to be magic-investigators & curse-breakers, a job I’d imagine is probably decently in demand in Gotham. Black Alice reaches out to Jason for help with her own powers when they manifest (again: I know of her, but not much) and he bows out halfway through to let his protégés take over because teen girls? He’s several centuries old, and they’re still outside his paygrade to keep controlling his life like this. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s mentor, thank goodness Maps & Olive are so talented & better at understanding Alice than he is.

So the Birds of Prey are primarily a magical team in this universe! They still have metahuman members like Black Canary, and Huntress is more than happy to team up with them once they’re established, but the core of it is functionally a coven of self-made witches doing both paranormal investigator shit as day-jobs & superhero shit whenever they can. Olive does retire early after another arc or two where she loses control of Calamity & the group expands enough she feels comfortable stepping down. She & Maps are very QPR in their relationship as adults—partners, best friends, roommates, ready to risk everything for eachother but shhhh, this is functionally 80s comics-land, we can’t say there’s anything actually queer going on!—so she’s still very much a part of that story in my mind, just mostly the civilian side.

(It’s also pretty much a “Call me if the world is ending” retirement, in that she’ll still show up sometimes for world-threatening events and you know shit’s got real when Calamity feels the need to help in a fight. That’s basically the writer saying “If Olive loses control and glasses this entire city in the process of taking out these aliens/portals/robots/whatever, it will still be a net positive for our side of this war.”)

I know that Babs-as-Oracle had a metahuman apprentice/semi-adopted daughter named Charlie at one point, so she’s probably part of this team. When Tim goes independent, the Birds are more than happy to hit his Oracle-equivalent up for tech support when they need it, and he in turn hires them to help the other teams he runs tech support for when those teams run into obscure magic /occult/paranormal bullshit. Eventually, about a year & a half before Dick shows up, tiny Babs powers her way onto the team and demands to learn everything she can from both them & Tim once she finds out he exists. She likes to mix the two mediums, not just treating magic as its own science with its own rules, but using programming knowledge to start making proper magitech advancements that terrify everyone around her (<- complimentary).