-Robin-
How unfortunate could I be to get kidnapped twice in two weeks? I’m a little ashamed of myself to tell the truth. I’m better than this. Well, I should say that I was taught better than this. If I manage to get free again, I’m taking that trip to England no questions asked.
I can’t stop thinking of Killer Croc. Somehow Joke-Man managed to get that behemoth under his influence and use him to kidnap me. Joke-Man seems to have assembled quite a roster of super baddies lately. Since when can a guy so fresh on the scene pull so much weight? Seriously, Killer Croc? Croc’s never been one to work along side anyone, let alone being able to expel the thought of eating everyone he sees from his mind. Whatever Joke-Man offered Croc, it must be something that the beastie wants really bad. Could Joke-Man have a cure for Croc’s disease?
I manage to put these thoughts out of my head for a minute or two as I work on eating my pizza. The last time I was here my diet consisted entirely of pizza and tacos, so I was hoping for at least one different meal this time. I don’t care how much someone has a favorite food, eventually you have to get burnt out on it. Maybe Croc threw himself in with Joke-Man for the food. Lack of variety aside, I’ve seen the food they serve at Arkham and I’ll take what I’ve got now over that any day.
Joke-Man’s left me alone in this room again, but after the gassing I got before I figure it’s best if I don’t venture away from here. Joke-Man is a true enigma. Riddler would have a heyday trying to figure out the answer to this guy. Seriously, every time anyone else has seen him they say he’s as crazy as Joker. Then, whenever I see the guy he’s as cool as a cucumber. Does he have a thing for me? I hope not. Maybe next time he comes back I should tell him that my door doesn’t swing that way. What do I know? Maybe he really is just a screwed up, nice guy and all of the theatrics is just an act.
I finish what pizza that is left in the box. Thankfully my metabolism is fast enough that eating a whole pizza doesn’t affect my body fat percentage. I don’t think things would work out too well for me as a crime fighter if I was overweight. I can picture it now: Batman and I are swinging through the air over the rooftops; my cord breaks under my massive weight and I fall to my death, crushing Joker when I land. It would be a fitting end to The Clown Prince of Crime, having a fat Boy Wonder land on his goofy melon.
Speaking of the Joker, Joke-Man’s using me to lure him in. Since when am I good bait? I thought that role was usually assigned to the chicks with the busty bosoms that get jumped while trying to get a story for the local paper. Well, I guess Joker’s idea of a damsel in distress would be someone that he’d like to kill. Now I know what it feels like to be a worm on a hook.
I take my one man party back to the small room that I was forced to sleep in the last time I was here. Not much has changed since I was in here last time. The only difference is that now there are a lot of strange markings on the wall. Some of the minute drawings are clearly smiley faces, but most of them just look like random scribbles that a two-year-old could tell you are supposed to be elephants.
I flop down on the bed, trying to get comfortable in my clothes. I’m still wearing my Joker disguise and it’s not really that comfortable to sleep in. I’ve had to keep the makeup on my face too, lest my identity be revealed. Leaving that much oil on my face for this long at this young age isn’t going to end up well. Come Monday, if I’m still alive, my face is going to look like the pizza I’ve been downing the last couple of days.
Needless to say, there isn’t much here to help pass the time. More drawings and the joke book are still under the bed, but they weren’t much help in entertaining me last time and they probably won’t do too much for me this time either. So, as bored as I am, I start counting the tiles on the ceiling.
One…Two…Three…
Really, there are about a million other things I could be thinking about right now other than how many tiles are on this small room’s ceiling. For instance, I could very well die tomorrow night. How’s that for a way to pass the time? Yeah, Tim, think about how good your life has been because it might all be over tomorrow. Honestly, I’d rather not like to venture to that state of thinking.
Well, it’s a little too late for that then isn’t it?
Crap! I lost count!
One…Two…Three…Four…
…I get all the way to ten before I realize how sad this really is. I’m counting ceiling tiles! I bet the other kids my age are out doing something fun tonight. Then again, those kids probably aren’t planning on getting tied to a chair tomorrow night and broadcast across a cable cartoon station. Yeah, other kids my age are worried about what shirt they’re going to wear to school tomorrow or if they’ll be able to get to second base with their date.
Looking back on in now, this was all really my doing. Bruce had no intentions of replacing Jason, but I had to push him and push him until he agreed to let me be Robin. If I had known that a few years later that I’d be in this mess, I would have kept my mouth shut and went on with my mediocre high school life. It’s not like I got roped in like Dick or Jason. I chose this. I’m realizing now that I may not be the best at making choices.
There’s something I’ve been wrestling with for some time and, since I’ve got nothing better to think about right now, the thought creeps back into my attention. Why Robin? I’m not slamming Dick’s choice of names or anything, but why did I take the name? Robin was Dick’s legacy. Dick chose that name because it meant something special to him, but what meaning did it have for Jason or me? Jason actually had a choice and he chose to be Robin. I strode in like a proud fool wanting the same thing. Why? Jason and I weren’t Robin; that was Dick. I guess we both settled into something comfortable and familiar to avoid staining what once was. Maybe that was it. Maybe the idea of breaking up the whole concept of “Batman and Robin” was too much for us newcomers to bear. Maybe we weren’t confident or strong enough to stand up against that concept. I suppose originality was a small sacrifice to keep that symbol strong.
Besides, what else would I have called myself? It’s hard to even fathom that now. It’s been “Batman and Robin” for so long that I wouldn’t have been able to come up with an original name for myself if I had tried. I could have fed off of Batman and called myself “Batboy” or something, but how lame does that sound? “Batboy” is reeking of sidekick cliché. Why does everyone always take the easy way out by slapping “boy,” ”girl,” “woman,” or “man” on the end to be opposite yet similar to their higher-up? I guess Dick and Roy were the only original sidekicks on the market.
Well, I’m still bored to all hell. Couldn’t Joke-Man at least have left a television in here for me or something? Seriously, it’s not like I can make some kind of weapon or escape device out of a TV. I’m not McGuyver.
I decide that lying in bed isn’t going to help any. I’m not really tired and if I get up and walk around I might think of something to do. I stand up and walk out of the room. This really is a prison. In fact, it’s worse than a prison. There is no toilet in this room. Whenever I have to pee I have to knock on the front door and tell whoever’s out there that I need to take a leak. I have to get blindfolded to relieve myself! Is a toilet some much to ask for? Joker gets better treatment than this in Arkham!
Joke-Man has left nothing in these two rooms for me to entertain myself with. I have a bed, a table, and two chairs. I also have a crappy joke book and a bunch of angel drawing, but what am I supposed to do with all of that?
Then, a thought occurs to me. Why would Joke-Man leave the joke book in the room? It’s not likely that it’s there just to give me a few laughs before I go to sleep. No, he left the book in there for a reason.
I jog back into the room and reach under the bed, grabbing the joke book. I open the book, quickly flipping through the pages. When nothing immediately stands out, I shake the book upside-down, waiting for something to fall out of the pages. Nothing falls out, but I notice that the final pages of the book are all stuck to the back cover.
Not even giving myself a second to think, I start to rip the back cover from the pages. The whole mess is glued together very well and I have a hard time prying the pages away from the back cover. I look around the room for anything that may be sharper than my fingernails. After finding nothing, it occurs to me that the flower on my jackets is being held on by a pin. I remove the pin and start digging at the glue as harshly as I can possibly manage.
Eventually, I get enough of the glue chipped away that I can stick in my fingers and pull the pages away from the back cover. I stick my fingers into the gap and ferociously rip the pages from the back cover. A second later, a disc falls to the floor from a hole dug into the glued pages.
“It’s times like these that I really do feel like the world’s second-greatest detective,” I say aloud to myself as I pick up the disc.
As I look over the disc, it occurs to me that, even with this in my possession, I have nothing with which to play its contents. I go back to the book, searching its contents for anything else that may be of help. It doesn’t take me long to find a small paper shoved into the same hole as was the disc. I pull the paper out and, as I unfold it, I find that Joke-Man has left me a note.
“Congrats, Robin! That disc isn’t all that’s in these hollow walls!”
Hollow walls? I didn’t find the disc in the wall…
A second later I’m knocking on the walls, searching for any place that might be hollow. I pass over every inch possible, not leaving a single place unchecked. Joke-Man wants me to hear or see whatever is on that disc. Whether it’s good or bad, I know that I have to know either way.
Eventually, I hear the sound of emptiness behind the wall. Balling my hand into a fist, I plunge my whole arm deep into the wall. The wall crumbles like dirt. If I had been paying attention, I would have noticed the fresh drywall. However, my concerns were elsewhere and the walls weren’t exactly grabbing my attention. I feel around inside the walls and my hand eventually brushes over something foreign. What ever it is, I grab it and pull it from the wall.
It is nothing more than a small stereo with a build in CD player. Without hesitation, I find an outlet in the room and plug in the stereo. Not even a second later I pop in the disc and hit the play button. The anxiety builds in me as I wait to hear what Joke-Man has to tell me.
A moment later, the silence is broken and a voice comes through the speakers:
“This is all about vengeance. Everything else aside, all I want from this is to avenge those that I have lost. My first move was to ally myself with the escaped Arkham inmates…”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-Green Arrow-
Frankly, I’ve nerver dealt all that well with deadlines. For instance, when I was actually still running my company I never made the deadlines for any of the companies that we were working with. I never was good at running the company. I’ve always been better at the late night ass-kicking. Little did I know that deadlines and late night ass-kicking were going to come together when I came to Gotham.
“Find Scarecrow and find out what he knows before noon tomorrow,” Bruce had said.
No pressure at all.
Luckily, Oracle was able to give me some leads on where I could start looking. Apparently, other than allegedly working with Joke-Man, Scarecrow has been selling a narcotic mixture of his hallucinogen on the streets. I’ve worked my way up the line to get to the top. This would be simple if I had more time. All it takes to bring down a drug ring is find out who all of the higher-ups are that are selling to the people below them. However, I’ve had to do all of this in accentually one night.
Fortunately for me, Jonathan Crane’s operation isn’t all too large. I hit up some high school kid in Crime Alley and he ratted out his source. I went to the source in the narrows and that guy gave me an address. Now, I’m standing on the roof across from a condemned building that for some reason still has lights on inside. If that guy in the narrows gave me the address to a homeless colony I’m going to be pissed.
So, as things are now, I’m trying to assess how I’m going to approach this situation. I need to get into that building quietly and then figure out how many targets I’ll have on the inside. The problem is, with a building such as this one make a quiet entry is a difficult task. Just in the few minutes that I’ve been standing here I’ve watched half a dozen chunks of that building fall off of their own accord. Who knows what would happen if I jumped onto the roof.
In a continuation of my luck tonight, one of the assumed goons steps out of the front door. Well, the guy looks pretty clean cut and he’s wearing a fresh windbreaker, so I’m guessing that he’s not a homeless. Now I at least know that I don’t have to go back and beat on that guy in the narrows.
The goon has a large bulge in his pants and, unless they’re filming a porno in there, I’m gonna guess it’s a gun. The goon’s left the door open behind him and it looks like he’s come out for a smoke. Something inside must be flammable because most drug peddlers don’t worry about secondhand smoke. Just on intuition alone I can keep firm in my belief that this is the place where they make the drug. Whatever’s inside that’s flammable isn’t being used to fuel that goon’s car.
So, I could walk right in the front door. That’s just like me really. Make a show of everything and take out the bad guys as I’m trash talkin’ ‘em. The only problem with that is that if Crane is in there then me causing a ruckus would give him a chance to scurry away. However, there are few options otherwise. I’m not risking walking on that roof or trying to go in through a window. I’d feel safer starting a fight with Superman.
So, as much as I regret having to do it, I pull an arrow from my quiver. Now, I can’t just shoot the guy with a regular arrow, so I pull out the stun arrow. If I used a regular arrow, the goon would run back inside crying to his pals and then I’d be screwed. It’d be that, or I’d have to kill him with it and I’m not going to kill him. Killing someone in Batman’s city is superhero suicide and I don’t want to kill this guy anyway. I’m sure he gets enough shit for wearing that windbreaker. So I put the stun arrow into the bow and immediately launch it into the wall of the building right above the guy’s head.
The stun arrow is supposed impact and then release a gas that stuns the enemy. The arrow does this, but what stuns the goon is the debris that falls on his head from the arrow’s impact. One tiny arrow just caused fifty pounds of brick to fall off of the side of that building. I can only imagine what the roof would have done had my full weight landed on it. Either way, the goon is out cold and I just got a way into the building.
I quickly descend the fire escape of the building on which I was standing. Once I am down in the alley below, I run to the end peeking out around the corner. No one else has come out through the door yet and not a soul is out on this street. It’s not exactly like this is a neighborhood to being walking through anyway. The drug factory isn’t the only condemned building on this street and it probably isn’t the only criminal base either.
With the coast being clear I dash across the street into the neighboring alley. Empty streets or not, I don’t want anyone catching me lurking around that front door. That and I have to wait for the stun arrow’s gas to dissipate anyway. While I’m waiting, I unfold my crossbow and load a bolt. If I run into anyone at that front door, I want a quick hit.
After some time, I run up to the front door a quickly slip in. Not much is around me. This used to be an apartment building and I’m standing in the foyer at the bottoms of the stairs. There is no light coming from under the doors of any of the rooms on this floor. I should have known that from the windows outside, but I could see the windows to the rear rooms. That means that the actual operation is on a higher floor or in the basement. Just for my general well being, I decide to check the basement first in fear that the stairs in front of me might collapse.
The door to the basement is at the end of the hallway at the back of the building. As gently as I can, I turn the knob and open the door. The door creaks, but this entire building creaks with a soft breeze so it goes unnoticed. Looking down the stairs, I don’t see any lights. However, to feed my curiosity I go down anyway.
I pull out a small flashlight so I don’t fall down the stairs and break my neck. Unexposed to the conditions of the world unlike the rest of the building, the basement stairs are sturdy and safe. At the bottom, I shine the light all over the basement. As I suspected, there are various canisters and tanks lining the floor and walls. These are the ingredients of the drug no doubt. Without much else in the basement to see, I head back up the stairs.
I had hoped to avoid going upstairs, but it’s unavoidable at this point. After quietly closing the basement door, I walk back to the foyer. When I reach the stairs, I quickly jump into the shadows as someone begins to hop down the steps. I keep my crossbow at the ready, but whoever it is simply skips the bottom step and heads down the hallway.
The idiot walks right past me as he heads for the basement door. More than likely, he’s going down to grab some more supplies. When I hear the door open and shut behind me, I get up quickly and run up the stairs as light-footed as possible. I leap the handrail, completely skipping over the landing and going quickly up the next flight of stairs.
Once I get to the second floor, I throw myself behind a couch in the hallway. In contrast to the first floor, every door on the second floor has light radiating from the cracks at the bottom. I have to think fast and smart now. Every one of those rooms probably has men in them and there’s a guy two floors below me that won’t waste too much time getting back up here with them.
Thinking fast, I push the couch that I’m using as cover in front of the first door. I noticed downstairs that the doors in this building open out, not in. Therefore, I just limited the amount of men that can kill me. There is a second couch and two chairs further down the hall. Moving as fast as I can, I push the other couch against another door and prop the two chairs against another two doors.
There are now only two doors in the hall that I don’t have barricaded. Now all I have to do is choose which door I’m going to burst through. Before I make that decision, I decide to go back down to the landing and set up a trip wire for the guy in the basement. After doing that, I approach the door nearest to the stairs that isn’t barricaded.
I knock on the door.
I can hear the sudden commotion rise within the room. The sound of confused grunts and the sounds of glass shattering fill the hall. I’m standing right in front of the door waiting it to open so I can start fighting. I hear the sound of footsteps shuffling towards the door. The slowness of the footsteps gives me time to set a trap. I take a small charge from my belt, setting the time for only a few seconds as I stick it to the door.
“Who is it?” an angry grunt echoes through the hallway.
My answer is the explosion that follows. A hole is blown in the door and I hear the goon fall to the ground inside. I immediately swing open the door and rush in with my crossbow armed. The men in the room abandon their drug processing stations and aim their weapons at me.
I had not expected so many men to be in this one room. Though, technically the room is three rooms. Scarecrow’s men have merged the three rooms on this side of the hall by breaking down the separating walls. There are over twenty men in front of me, aiming their weapons at me. The odds are in favor that the rooms across the hallway are merged in a similar fashion and those men will also soon be over here.
What’s strange is that they don’t seem too surprised to see me here.
“He wasn’t expecting me,” I say, lowering my crossbow and pointing to the guy on the floor.
There is a wave of nods throughout the room.
“You were,” I say, motioning towards the small crowd.
Again, their heads go up and down in unison.
From outside of the room I can hear someone coming up the stairs. The guys from across the hall have started to pile into the room behind me. One of them, a gigantic mountain of a man, grabs my throat and shoves me up against the wall adjacent to the door.
When I look down at the hand that has hold of my throat, I notice the green scales for the first time. Then I realize that the man’s claws are digging into my neck. I writhe and try to get free, but it’s pointless. The monster puts me down a second later.
Killer Croc.
The footsteps in the hall come to the door and another man of tall stature enters the room. The straw-like hair hangs down over his masked face like a frayed broom. His stitched and patched clothes are stained with blood and sweat. His fingerless gloves make way for his grotesque, long fingernails. His pointed hat brushes the door frame as he enters the room.
Scarecrow.
“All around the mulberry bush the monkey chased the weasel,” Scarecrow sings as he pinches my cheeks in between his vile fingers.
“What do we do with him now?” Croc asks.
“How does the middle part go…?”
“What?”
“The middle part of the song, I’ve forgotten it. What’s the verse?”
“I don’t have a damn clue! You’re the one who knows the plan! What do we do with him now?”
Scarecrow grabs a gun from one of the men.
“Oh well…” Scarecrow says as he puts the gun under my chin. “Pop goes the weasel.”