Chapter Summaries

Edward visited Schiller after leaving the hospital and helped Bruce decode a cipher that pointed to Ares. Schiller agreed to use a trip to Mercury Base to lure Circe into a trap, while the group continued investigating Hecate and recruiting young trainees.

• Cobblepot brought Edward to visit Schiller, and Schiller offered Edward a recommendation to study Classical Literature at Gotham University.
• Edward decoded Bruce’s cipher, leading Bruce through a high school website and a program that produced the name Ares.
• Schiller told Bruce he had avoided taking snowdrops because he wanted Circe to sense their connection and return to Gotham.
• Bruce proposed drawing Circe out by taking Schiller and Wonder Woman to Mercury, where Clark could carry her into the Sun, and Schiller agreed to stay at Mercury Base temporarily.
• Bruce said the Justice League was looking for the Wonder Twins, and Schiller offered to teach Jena practical skills while insisting on a forty-hour workweek.

Schiller and the Gotham group traveled through the Wayne Enterprises portal to Mercury, where Bruce and Diana helped organize arrivals from Metropolis. The Atlanteans and Mexican fighters arrived after a scuffle, and the chapter ended with the groups safely entering the base.

• Schiller and Barry reviewed Barry's thesis while the Gotham travelers gathered, including magic academy students and young Amazons from Themyscira.
• Schiller and the students passed strict security at Wayne Enterprises, then entered Mercury through the portal with Bruce and Diana leading the group.
• Bruce and Diana left Schiller to maintain order while they went to assist with the Metropolis group.
• Oliver told Schiller that Atlantean mixed-bloods had arrived in unusual forms, stumbled on land, and fought with the Mexican Revolutionary Army fighters.
• Bruce and Diana defused the conflict, and the Metropolis group passed through the portal safely.

Schiller, Oliver, and Diana helped establish the first Justice League training classes at Mercury Base and discussed the recruits who might join them. The chapter left them heading to meet Bruce and Clark, who had returned with new arrivals.

• Schiller surveyed the gathered recruits as Bruce and Oliver organized them into four classes, with Bruce and Oliver as homeroom teachers and Schiller as a Psychology Professor.
• Diana showed Schiller and Oliver the base’s dormitories and offices, then explained its automated facilities and solar energy system over lunch.
• Schiller, Oliver, and Diana discussed potential young recruits, including Cassandra Cain, Blue Beetle, Golden Pioneer, the Wonder Twins, and Omen, while noting that Starfire and Spoiler were unavailable.
• Diana received a message that Bruce and the others had returned with newcomers, and Schiller and Oliver went with her to meet them.

Schiller met the new students at the academy, and Bruce began assessing their talents after classes started. When Jena analyzed photographs from the serial murder case, she concluded that the killer believed the force that shattered his mind was God.

• Schiller and the others met Cassandra, Lilith, Blue Beetle, Golden Pioneer, The Wonder Twins, and the other students, and Bruce introduced them.
• Jena flattered Bruce into letting her and her brother join the class, and Bruce soon decided he wanted to recruit her as a detective and possible Batgirl.
• The students began classes, and Jena stood out for her intelligence and detective skills.
• Bruce showed Jena photographs from the serial murder case and asked her to analyze the clues.
• Jena identified the dismembered body as the first murder and the impaled victim as the third, then inferred that the killer believed God had shattered his mind.

Jena interpreted crime-scene photographs for Bruce, repeatedly guessing details that he verified through forensic evidence. While profiling the killer, she began reading Bruce’s past and suddenly recognized a disturbing connection between his memories and the killer’s experience.

• Jena described the killer’s pain, transformation, and defiance based on the photographs, and Bruce challenged her to support her impressions with evidence.
• Bruce showed Jena how wound patterns proved the killer had used two weapons and how marks on the oil drum showed it had been dismantled and reassembled around the victim.
• Jena correctly guessed that the wooden stake came from the tallest section of a farm fence, while Bruce urged her to rely on observation and inference rather than luck.
• Jena profiled the killer as a young man who had recovered from mental illness and was celebrating a new life, then questioned Bruce about his own ability to love himself.
• Jena sensed that an authority figure had once given Bruce both security and an embrace, but she stopped in terror as she looked at him.

Bruce discussed his growing closeness with Selene and realized they had each taken steps toward understanding the other's world. After Jena struggled with her assigned paper, Bruce spent the evening fielding her calls and missed the chance to speak properly with Selene.

• Bruce gave Jena an assignment to identify ten details in the crime-scene photos and write a detailed five-hundred-word paper by morning.
• Bruce told Schiller that he and Selene had begun sharing more about their past and future, and Schiller explained how both had grown to understand each other's worlds.
• Bruce learned that Selene's friend Maggie had urged her to leave Gotham because she and Bruce seemed to belong to different worlds, but Selene had made one final attempt to reach him.
• Bruce joked with Schiller about Jena's talent and answered her first call to clarify the assignment's requirements.
• Bruce tried to call Selene, but Jena repeatedly called to argue over the number of details and word count, and Bruce eventually shouted at Clark that the five-hundred-word deadline was final.

Bruce struggled to understand whether Jena genuinely could not write a paper or was deliberately frustrating him, and her assignment turned out to contain speculative deductions about the killer. Jena insisted she could recognize the killer immediately and claimed the killer had once suffered from insomnia but had been cured, leaving Bruce to question how she knew.

• Clark told Bruce that Jena's repeated calls showed she respected him and wanted to learn, while Bruce remained frustrated that she had not written her paper sooner.
• Jena handed Bruce a paper filled with grammar and punctuation errors, and he assigned both classes five-hundred-word papers in anger.
• Jena complained to Bruce that Diana had made her do more than six hundred push-ups, while humans had only been required to do sixty.
• Bruce questioned Jena's unsupported deductions about the crime scene, including the killer's movements and the meaning of blood spatter.
• Jena said the killer was obvious to her and described the corpse in the oil drum as posed like a sleeping baby, suggesting the killer had overcome insomnia.
• When Bruce asked how she knew the killer had been cured, Jena pointed out that Bruce himself had fallen asleep the previous night.

Bruce faced student complaints after assigning homework to only two of his four classes, and Clark and Diana urged him to take his teaching role more seriously. He apologized and prepared a detailed lesson plan using the unsolved Riddler serial murder case for his next class.

• Diana and Clark told Bruce that students were upset because he had assigned homework to Classes Three and Four but not Classes One and Two, and they criticized his casual teaching style.
• Bruce admitted he had been unfocused, promised to wear formal clothes, and posted an apology that made the assignment voluntary while explaining his plans to the students.
• Bruce asked Jena to get Schiller’s psychology lesson plan, then learned that Schiller’s class had consisted mainly of definitions and a simple memorization assignment.
• Bruce chose the Riddler serial murder case for a practical Criminal Investigation lesson and spent the morning drafting a detailed plan for presenting it and organizing group discussions.

Bruce observed the teaching at Mercury Base and helped Jena study psychoanalytic theories after Schiller was unavailable. Their conversation revealed Jena’s preference for pursuing justice beyond the limits of law, and Bruce saw her as a promising future detective who would turn criminals over to him.

• Bruce watched Diana teach physical training, Clark teach social studies, Victor Fries teach basic science, and Amanda’s agents teach practical skills at Mercury Base.
• Bruce observed Schiller’s psychology class and later learned from Jena that Schiller had been too unwell to answer her questions.
• Bruce spent half a day explaining psychoanalytic theories to Jena and recognized how quickly she understood them.
• Bruce asked Jena about Behavior Analysis, and she explained that she preferred tracing social problems to their causes rather than analyzing individual behavior.
• Jena said she would pursue justice without always relying on the law, but would not kill criminals and would hand them over to Bruce.
• Bruce concluded that Jena’s clarity about her limits made her a promising detective for Gotham.

Schiller discussed Oliver’s feelings for Dinah and his prospects for an ordinary life, then told him Bruce might try to adopt the clever alien girl Jena. The chapter left them anticipating Bruce’s struggle to teach Jena behavior analysis when she preferred psychoanalysis.

• Schiller told Oliver he could smell strong emotions and correctly identified his feelings for Dinah, then advised him to pursue her.
• Oliver wondered whether he could settle into ordinary life, and Schiller said he was better suited to adventures with someone like Dinah.
• Schiller revealed that Dinah had asked about Oliver’s measurements for a custom suit and had become more interested after learning about his privileged background and revolutionary commitment.
• Oliver described the students’ success in Military Class, and Schiller told him Bruce might want to adopt Jena, a highly capable young alien.
• Schiller explained that Jena excelled at psychoanalysis but not behavior analysis, and he and Oliver anticipated Bruce’s difficulty teaching her to focus on the process.

Schiller planned the next stage of his Basic Psychology course and consulted Oliver and Clark about the students’ group activities. He realized the other professors were teaching without student-focused lesson plans and arranged a teaching seminar for that evening.

• After discovering that his students had memorized the first lessons quickly, Schiller planned to shorten the review section and prepare group discussion classes.
• Oliver advised Schiller to form mixed-race groups with no more than one student of each race per group to prevent cliques and balance participation.
• Schiller asked Clark about the students, and Clark described their different levels of maturity and strengths.
• Schiller explained that group discussion and social practice kept students’ thinking active, then found that Clark’s lesson plans focused on knowledge rather than students.
• Schiller set a teaching seminar for nine that evening and said he would email the professors.

Schiller held a teaching seminar for the Justice League instructors, reviewing their lesson plans and explaining the standards they needed to follow. After hearing their teaching approaches, he realized that lesson plans were not even the biggest problem.

• At dinner, Schiller told Victor about Clark's teaching, and they discussed how the Justice League needed practical instruction in modern teaching methods.
• Oliver gathered the instructors before the seminar, and they worried that Schiller had called them in to criticize their teaching and demand lesson plans.
• Schiller coached Clark on improving his lesson plan, while Oliver hurriedly revised his own before the others arrived.
• Barry collected the lesson plans, and Schiller found Nora and Victor's plans strong while identifying serious flaws in Diana's, Arthur's, Oliver's, and Bruce's.
• Schiller used Nora's plan as a model and explained the required lesson-plan sections, then began reviewing the instructors' teaching progress and approaches.

Schiller reorganized the youth training school’s teaching into a standardized curriculum, assigned mixed-race discussion groups, and planned end-of-term performances. Bruce struggled to keep up with his compressed courses while Jena relentlessly pursued Behavior Analysis, slipping into his room in animal form when he tried to avoid her.

• Schiller helped the teachers establish lesson plans, fitness and technique tests, group discussions, practical activities, and future internships.
• Schiller spoke with influential leaders from each race, then formed diverse student groups and assigned them psychological theory discussions and presentations.
• Schiller announced that students would stage subject-related performances at the end of the term, while worrying that psychology students might dramatize his past.
• Bruce worked long hours preparing compressed Criminal Investigation lessons as Jena became fascinated with Behavior Analysis and repeatedly asked him to review her papers.
• Jena kept using psychoanalysis to guess answers before searching for evidence, and she used her powers to slip under Bruce’s door when he ignored her.

Bruce reviewed Jena's case analysis and struggled with how her unsupported leaps repeatedly led to correct answers. After her methods sparked a fierce student dispute, Bruce ended the chapter unable to explain her talent or reconcile it with his teaching.

• Bruce read Jena's paper and saw that she had correctly identified a male hairdresser as the owner of a handkerchief, despite offering implausible reasoning.
• Bruce recalled that Jena's instinctive deductions had split his students into logic and inspiration factions, whose argument escalated into a brawl.
• Bruce called Clark and Diana to help control the students and was pressed to decide which approach was right.
• Bruce explained that Jena leaned toward psychoanalysis, but could not clearly explain its principles beyond the textbook definitions.
• Bruce acknowledged that Jena's mental-analysis ability was a genuine talent, yet could not tell the students that some people could solve cases without learning his methods.
• Bruce put down Jena's paper and went to the refrigerator for another beer.

Bruce struggled to stop Jena’s correct but illogical psychoanalytic guesses from disrupting his Behavior Analysis class, then resolved the conflict by making her his assistant. When he found another essay full of accurate deductions, he discovered its author, Lilith Clay, claimed she could read minds.

• Jena’s successful guesses encouraged students to imitate her, undermining their confidence in evidence-based deductions and disrupting Bruce’s class.
• Bruce realized that Schiller had once needed to rein in Bruce’s own influence to keep a class of talented students focused.
• Bruce spoke honestly with Jena, and they agreed she would stop explaining her reasoning and present her conclusions as an inborn power.
• Bruce made Jena his assistant, and she agreed to learn from him after class.
• Bruce found an accurate, wildly reasoned essay signed by Lilith Clay and summoned her to his office.
• Lilith told Bruce she had identified the killer because she could read minds.

Bruce met Lilith, a headstrong student who could read minds and see the future, and learned the limits of her abilities. After Lilith uncovered the truth about Bruce’s parents and read his case-analysis thoughts, they agreed to use her paper to demonstrate behavioral analysis alongside Jena’s psychoanalytic approach.

• Lilith used her precognition to describe Bruce and Selene’s future marriage and a chain of events involving Maggie, while Bruce challenged her habit of reading people’s minds.
• Lilith explained that she could focus on one person at a time, read memories with effort, and identify a culprit when she encountered them; Bruce invited her to pursue joining the Justice League.
• Lilith first concluded that Bruce’s parents were alive, but after searching deeper through his memories, she discovered they had been resurrected and found the memory of their deaths in an alley.
• Bruce told Lilith that Schiller Rodriguez had a vast mental world and asked her not to let her unusual methods disrupt the other students’ learning.
• Lilith revealed that she had learned her case-analysis approach by reading Bruce’s thoughts, and Bruce realized the confusing paper was his own psychoanalytic reasoning.
• Bruce and Lilith agreed that she would put part of his behavioral-analysis answer in her paper while Jena focused on psychoanalysis, giving the class examples of both approaches.

Bruce realized that suspicion and resentment toward Jena had spread through his class, and he stepped aside rather than worsen the conflict. Professor Rodriguez arrived as the substitute, and Jena’s attempt to analyze Schiller left her terrified by what she perceived.

• Bruce heard students whisper that Jena might have cheated by receiving answers from him during private meetings.
• Bruce recognized that his earlier choices had fueled the students’ suspicions and that he needed convincing evidence before intervening with authority.
• Jena noticed her classmates’ rejection and gave Bruce a reassuring look, though she understood he could not publicly support her without worsening matters.
• Bruce announced that he was unwell and left the class to a substitute teacher.
• Professor Rodriguez arrived, and Jena used her Mental Analysis Talent on Schiller, perceiving him as a terrifying monster.

Jena endured Schiller’s unsettling attention and used her heightened Mental Analysis Talent to glimpse that he shared the killer’s perspective and nature. Schiller began teaching criminal profiling, challenging the students to focus on the killer’s mind rather than physical appearance.

• Jena pretended to suffer an emotional breakdown while watching the students and Schiller through her fingers.
• Lilith Clay silenced the class and then stopped Ellie from speaking, growing visibly alarmed as Schiller began his lesson.
• Jena sensed that Schiller had the killer’s perspective, knew the killer, and was the same kind of person as the killer.
• Schiller questioned Ellie’s profile of the serial killer and argued that physical traits were less useful than understanding the killer’s mind.
• Schiller urged the students to become precise Mind Catchers by capturing a killer’s mind.

Schiller challenged his students to abandon ordinary legal standards when investigating supercriminals and to judge their methods by whether they reliably found the culprit. He left Jena exposed as the class’s new target after she echoed his insult about people who lived among monkeys.

• Schiller rejected Ellie’s vague description of the killer, and Holder argued that the murderer was a pervert who humiliated women.
• Schiller challenged the students’ reliance on evidence and legal procedure, arguing that Justice League agents had to handle threats ordinary police and courts could not.
• Schiller said students could use any investigative method if testing showed their reasoning was more than ninety percent accurate, even if that involved cheating or honey traps.
• Schiller argued that agents had to break free from ordinary moral restraints and prompted Jena to complete his sentence about intelligent people living among monkeys.
• Jena spoke the insult aloud, drew the class’s hostile attention, and addressed Schiller as “My honor, Professor.”

Jena reconsidered her analysis of a series of unsolved scarecrow murders after Schiller taught her to value emotion alongside logic. She concluded that the killer saw himself as restrained and humiliated, and that financial hardship may have limited his crimes as an artistic act.

• Jena suggested the killer had stuffed straw into the victims as a form of revenge, but Schiller challenged her to stop forcing her feelings into a logical explanation.
• Schiller explained that emotion and reason were both essential to psychological analysis, and that empathy followed its own internal logic.
• Jena realized she did not need to choose between psychoanalysis and behavior analysis, and asked to revise her answer.
• Jena deduced that the victims were law enforcement officers whom the killer mocked as failed guardians, and that removing their genitals symbolized taking away their weapons.
• Jena concluded that the killer identified with the straw and felt constrained and humiliated, possibly by his financial circumstances.