Name: Cassandra Cain
Aliases:Orphan, Batgirl
Species:Human
Nationality: Eurasian
Marital Status: Single
Occupation: Assassin (formerly), Vigilante
|
Affiliations: |
Last Known Residence: |
Intel[]
David Cain was the loyal assassin to "Mother". While utterly devoted to her and her ways, when Mother began using Doctor Jonathan Crane's Fear Gas to simulate trauma, David felt that the old ways of "moulding" a child through the trauma of witnessing actual death was still viable and sought to prove this to her by secretly siring and moulding a child of his own to serve her as a tribute.
Following a theory of his, Cain kept the child; whom he named "Cassandra", at The Nursery and kept her from interacting with anyone other than him, never allowing her access to verbal communication. This forced the parts of her brain that were normally used for speech to be trained to instead read other people's movements and body language and by extension predict their next move, much like how a person might predict how a sentence would be structured by watching it being created. Cassandra's isolation was not as total as Cain had intended, however, as Cassandra frequently snuck out of her living quarters to explore the Nursery and was constantly stewarded away by The Sculptor, who pitied the girl.
Subjecting her to witness numerous killings and slaughters, Cain forced Cassandra to fight various opponents, all of whom she bested. However, when Cain revealed his experiment to Mother, he was berated for his reliance on the old ways and, although he was allowed to keep her, she warned him not to let her see "his pet" again.
Some time later, on September 29th, when Cassandra was around ten, Mother decided to have David use Cassandra to assassinate the parents of a child named Harper Row as part of a ploy to force Batman (Bruce Wayne) into accepting a "perfect soldier" from her to use as his next Robin in his war on crime. While Batman fell for the ploy, despite his best attempts not to, Cassandra was unable to carry through with the assassination; only managing to kill the mother, Miranda Row, before emotionally breaking down.
Leaving Miranda's body at her family's doorstep (while her husband, Marcus Row, had abandoned her to be assassinated) Cassandra returned to her father as a failure.
Batman and Robin Eternal[]
Some years later, when Mother intended to return from hiding and hypnotize the planet's children into killing all adults, Cassandra sought Batman's help, only for him to direct her to approach Richard Grayson instead as he was on the verge of facing the Joker at the pinnacle of the villain's "Endgame" attack. Bruce gives Cassandra a datafile to give to Richard Grayson should something happen to him during the battle. Inside the file was all the information he had gathered on Mother in their previous encounter. With Bruce initially thought dead following his battle with the Joker, and then returning with no recollection of his life as Batman, Cassandra goes to find Grayson as Mother begins her take over plans. Encountering Grayson just as he managed to escape from Mother's forces, Cassandra gives him the file and then leaves him to save the people she has targeted; getting to Harper Row in time to save her from an assassination attempt made by her father, David Cain. Chasing Cain off just as Grayson arrives, she then leaves to find Jason Todd before her father does, with the former Robin mistaking her for an enemy due to her inability to express herself. With Grayson, Timothy Drake, Stephanie Brown and Harper managing to catch up to them and stop their fight, the group shelters at the Batcave to stitch Harper's injuries and analyse the data on Mother.
While Grayson, Drake and Todd dealt with an attack on the amnesiac Bruce Wayne, Cassandra escaped the Batcave with Harper Row and made her way back to an old lair she and her father used in Gotham only to discover that Cain was residing within it. Managing to fight Orphan off once again, this time cutting of his right hand in the process, Cassandra and Harper are taken with Grayson to Prague to further investigate Mother's operations.
As Cassandra and Harper attend the ballet at Prague with the intention of protecting the first ballerina of Prague, whose name was on Cassandra's list, Grayson encounters Mother while the entire ballet troupe is revealed to be Mother's thrall and attacks Cassandra and Harper. Abandoning Mother to help his partners fight the troupe, escaping the theatre the trio share a conversation before Harper touching her hair sends Cassandra into a panic attack; remembering how she murdered Harper's mother, and runs away.
While Grayson and Harper try to track clues on Cain in order to find Mother, Cassandra infiltrates The Nursury near Ukraine to find a way to save the children there before they are executed, however, she discovers that she is too late and is thrown into a disposal pit filled with the bodies of all the children attending the Nursery at the time by her father. Escaping the pit, Cassandra fights her father until they are interrupted by the arrival of Harper and Grayson, who had discovered the location of the Nursery after interrogating another of Mother's agents; the Sculptor.
Escaping the destruction of the Nursery with a captured Cain in tow, Grayson takes the group to Spyral headquarters underneath the St. Hadrian's Finishing School for Girls to interrogate Cain. As Drake and Todd arrive at the headquarters with information from their own mission; the details on Mother's secret weapon to gain control of the planet's children and have them kill the adult population and give total control to Mother, Cain reveals to Harper that Cassandra had murdered her mother as part of a plan to kidnap Harper and remould her at the Nursery to be the perfect agent for Batman. However, Cassandra had failed the mission, letting Harper's father live, and Batman refused to become involved with Harper's "warping". As Mother activates her virus, the entire populace of the school under a certain age becomes her mass murdering thrall and they start attempting to kill the older populace. As Cain and ex-Spyral agent Poppy Ashemore escape their imprisonment, Drake reveals that Johnathan Crane's fear gas can momentarily cure the enslavement, even though it makes them see fear-based illusions instead.
As Grayson and Cassandra embark onto the school campus to rescue Todd and Harper, Drake, Doctor Netz and Helena Bertinelli go to shut down the school's generator to stop the transmission of the virus only to encounter interference from Cain. As Grayson and Cassandra find Todd and Harper, Harper attacks Cassandra and attempts to kill her for killing her mother. With both girls under the influence of the fear gas, Todd attempts to stop them from fighting each other only for Cassandra to hallucinate him as her father and fires one of Harper's taser weapons while they were all dowsed in water, electrocuting all three of them into unconsciousness. Following this, Poppy and Cain manage to gain access to Spyral's satellite through Grayson and Bertinelli's Hypno implants and, as Drake and Netz manage to shut down power to the campus, they escape with Cassandra and Harper.
As Mother enacts her global plan, using satellites around the globe to broadcast her virus and turn everyone under twenty into murderous killers, the Robins gather as many acquaintances as possible and, using Midnighter's portal technology, send them to different cities around the world to shut down the transmitter towers broadcasting Mother's signal as Grayson himself infiltrates Mother's fortress in the Arctic Circle where Mother is in the process of tempting Harper into killing Cassandra to avenge her mother and become Mother's new agent.
As the heroes dismantle Mother's transmitters, and Grayson himself successfully infiltrates Mother's fortress and aids Harper in freeing Cassandra and thwarting Mother's operations, with the villainess herself presumably dying when her own assassin, David Cain, stabs her and takes her with him to fall into the pit of an active volcano.
Some time later, after the Robin War incident and the return of Bruce Wayne as Batman, Cassandra begins calling herself "Orphan" after her father and starts operating as another Batman-sanctioned vigilante in Gotham City. During the Joker War, Cass and Stephanie decided to give hope to the people of Gotham during its darkest hour. So they claimed the title Batgirl for themselves. And have been together as Team Batgirls ever since.
Trivia[]
- This version of Cassandra Cain first appeared in Batman and Robin Eternal #1 (November 2015)