The Angel Of Reprisal

Welcome to anyone who has made it this far, you can call me Vera, EB, or my full username. I consider myself the number zero Azrael scholar. For those unfamiliar with the dark age of comic books, that’s similar to number one, only it’s a zero. I also do art requests, fanfic requests, and art trades with anyone willing to give me a chance. Now, who am I? Well, here’s a few fast fun facts.

Name: Vera

Gender: Woman

Age: Secret (Anything I say about my personal life should be taken with a bowl of salt, because I greatly value online safety and may say something untrue to protect my privacy)

Favourite Comic Book Series: Azrael 1995

Second-Favourite: Iron Man 1968

Favourite Manga: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure

Favourite Anime: Fist Of The North Star 1984

Favourite Book: The Morning Offering, by Abbott Tryphon

Who Can Interact: Anyone and everyone can interact, but be aware that I do not impose any filters on how I talk.

Timezone: Chicago [Central Time]

When Do I Post: Whenever someone interacts with me or whenever I have an idea.

What Do I Post: Media takes, literary fanfiction works, text adaptations, reblogs, joining in on discourse in various areas of life, and loud and unhinged ranting and raving about whatever.

Favourite Musicians: The Bee Gees

As my top text states, this blog is one dedicated to Dennis O’Neil’s Azrael and his universe. While it’s not the only thing I talk about here, it will probably continue to be the primary focus. In fact, let’s talk Azrael a bit more, shall we?

Too Long, Didn’t Read: Azrael, created in 1992, is the ambiguously-real angelic alternate personality of Jean-Paul Valley, brainwashed programmed former cult assassin, who was also the third person to hold the title of Batman, twice over, once from June 1993 to August 1994 and once from March 2002 to January 2003. His original story is a long, complex, and tragic narrative, spanning over a decade and establishing a mythos and sphere of the DC universe entirely of his own.

Would you like to know more?

You can read his introduction in Batman: Sword Of Azrael (December 1992-March 1993), and continue with the Knightfall crossover story from there (Vengeance Of Bane, Knightfall, Knightquest, KnightsEnd, Prodigal, Troika, and Vengeance Of Bane II), followed by the 100+ issues of Azrael 1995 (December 1995-May 2003). From there, you can choose any of his future appearances to check out.

Also, if any of the legendary Azrael diehards who see my posts are interested, me and some of the other angels have got an Azrael-themed Discord going that’s both wild amounts of fun and always open to fresh membership. Simply ask to be invited and I can almost guarantee that you can be granted access.

That should be all for now, I do hope that we can become friends or acquaintances. I wish you all good reading.

Sincerely And With Slight Pretension,

ANGEL INSANE

PART II OF II

EXIT

SPECIAL THANKS TO

@azraelgirly

Jeanne-Paula Valley was forced to wake up from slipping in and out of consciousness by the bitter coldness of the unclean asylum floor, her messy blonde hair spilled in a fan out in front of her, streams of blood from being struck by a giant furry ape-man leaking from her mouth and staining her lips a deep shade of red, sparks of red and black and white emanating from the corners of her eyes, her vision going in and out of focus, even though she could only see the tiled dark green floor of the indoor prison yard and a bit of bangs in her face. To make things worse for her and exacerbate the situation, she didn’t even have her clothes, save her black underthings, for all of them had been stolen away from her and were currently the worn property of a certain white-skinned man with a green mullet, sharp fanged white teeth, dark green eyes, and red lips that perpetually curved into a sickly smile. The joker had been busy with prancing around in her Azrael outfit while she had been unconscious, and now that she was, in fact, awake, she was now able to hear him speaking as well.

“Well, well, well, what a fun evening this has turned out to be! And here I thought that I would have nothing to do tonight but sit around here eating our dead. But nobody was going to show up for the human sacrifice, anyway, so it’s assuredly much of an improvement.”

Turning over to the now-awakened blonde on the floor, he smiled his slasher grin at her and kept on talking.

“Well, now, anyway, whatever shall we do with our most unexpected guests? Kill them, murder them, slay them, or slaughter them? I always did particularly love the word slaughter. It’s laughter… But it’s with an S! How could you not love it? Ah, slaughter is so soignee, n’cest’ pas, everyone? Of course, I’m so soignee, myself, what with these fantabulous new drip and ice and all that fun stuff.”

“Killing them would be a waste.”, muttered the Ventriloquist while carelessly holding her gun.

“I mean, we could eat them.”, the Joker responded. “There’s nothing stopping us from eating them. Plus we’re all here because they falsely call insane murderers, lunatics, and criminals, right? So a bird and a bat with one stone, we get to down our meal, and further confirm our residency in this defenceless funhouse instead of a no-fun boring conventional jail, am I right, ladies?”

“I once knew a really vindictive cannibal.”, came the cry of Socko upon the Ventriloquist's hand. “Up and ate a guy he disagreed with. Ah, what a fine fellow, that Stirk man was. Wonder where he went to. Oh well.”

“But no, seriously, folks…”, Riddler began.

“We can very well use them for bargaining chips.”, finished Mister Freeze in his place. “These odd fellows right down here with us, this pathetic little vigilante and this even more pathetic little doctor… They can buy us our freedom.”

“It might very well work, Doctor Victor…”, replied the blonde woman in the white hat while she struck a cigarette against his armour to light it up. “By now those oppressive fascists they call the Gotham Police doubtless have this place surrounded. Now, I’m just a simple little mobstress, but surely even I could see that we stand much better odds of getting out and free if we have an edge.”

“Ough, it seems we have a disagreement amongst ourselves. Predictable, yes, but utterly disappointing, most especially to me. We are at loggerheads and I don’t have a gun to make you people listen to me. I mean, you would think that being Batman’s biggest opponent would give me SOME swing in here, but NOOO, all of you figurative clowns have to go and be all independent.”

Responsively to the Joker’s whining, Ventriloquist and Socko proceeded to step on over to the centre of the room and take the proverbial stage.

“I know.”, Socko said in the puppet’s trademarked exaggerated, cartoony voice, like an adult woman voicing a male character. “Now you can call us crazy — but not to my face —”

“I can call you a wacky-dacky, a really droll fellow, AND call you late for dinner.”, Joker grumbled.

“ANYWAY,”, Socko continued. “I have just the perfect little solution to solve the conflict problem. Why. Don’t. We…”

The sock-gloved hand pointed right to Two-Face.

“Toss a coin?”

Two-Face, who had been busy with pointing a pistol at the asylum doctor, snapped back to attention and made him turn his attention to one of a total of three blondes in the room.

As the man split in half turned his focus to the centre of the mob, Socko’s owner took over. “Anyone in this general vicinity think that that might be a good idea? Hmmmmmmm, Harvey…?”

“Yes.”, the man with two faces replied as he picked up a coin from his breast pocket. Both faces featured the same relief of a woman’s face, but the side considered to be tails was marked with a nasty scar, induced by a common knife, serving as the physical manifestation of its owner’s own evil.

“Let’s begin with the psychologist and psychiatrist…”, began Ventriloquist, her heels stomp-stomp-stomping on the dark tile floor and carrying her to within breathing distance while she slapped her gun in her hand with an oddly-soothing rhythm. “Now throw your two-faced coin and we’ll see if we need to put a girl away…”

Flippppp…!

The black man’s hand immediately slapped the coin down onto the other hand, the one with scars cut into it, the result of the psychosis of his two halves compulsing him to spread the split even further. A few more seconds of tension as a hush came over the crowd, everyone looking right at him to inspect the result.

His hand slid away from the coin.

He brought his scarred left hand up to his face.

The silver woman’s appearance was undamaged.

“HEADS!”, he proclaimed, to the jeers and the boos of everyone in there except for two of the three blondes, that being the powerless angel in black underwear, and the other being the dazzled and frazzled Harleen Quinzel, who, against all odds, had been overcome with a rushing sense of thrill with being right in the heart of these criminal minds, even while the loonies pointed a loaded gun at her.

“Unscarred side lands Up?”, The Joker asked out to the aether. “Why, ‘pon my word, it did!”

Pointing over to Doctor Quinzel, he smiled and cartoonishly slapped his hand on her shoulder like they were just the best of chums. “Con-grrradulations, sissy! You are now the proud winner of every next breath you take! Courtesy of your good old buddy Mister J! By the way,”, he said as he turned over to face two more faces.

“By the way, Two-Face, are you named after the coin, or did you name it after you?”

Silent treatment from the man in the suit.

“Well, never mind. There are some things a decent man keeps to himself. Now, let’s go about moving right on over to our other contestant…”

Soon enough his face was staring up at Jeanne’s bloodied visage and his annoying mannerisms now turned themselves over to her, while she was powerless to do anything against him, especially considering that she was being held in place by someone whom she had met before; Killer Croc, a dense-muscled man with what Damian had told her was a terrible medical condition that warped his flesh into a reptilian form with a carnivorous crocodile face. They were only the same height as each other due to the croc’s warped spine that made him hunch over, and she could only hope against hope that he didn’t recognise her in time to try and eat her himself. “That is, the chap – or chapette, I can’t really tell – who supplied these boss threads I’m sporting. Say, who is your tailor?”

A dwarf. She thought.

“Not telling, huh?”, the clown prince of crime responded to the air of silence, never something that he liked, not one little bit. “Well, I don’t blame you, Mum’s the word. Though only if you have a mum.”

The look on her face was so miserable and so glum that it could even kill somebody’s illegal spice high.

“Enny-wayy, time to decide the fate of the fashion plate. Give ‘er the old flipperoo, Mister Face!”

Flippppp…!

The other man’s hand immediately slapped the coin down on his flesh, the one with scars cut into it. A few more seconds of tension as another hush came over the crowd, everyone looking right at him to inspect the result.

His hand slid away from the coin.

He brought his scarred left hand up to his face.

The silver woman’s appearance was scarred.

“Well, the plate of fate has sounded once more, and my, oh, my!”, proclaimed Joker while bending over to inspect the coin. “I guess we’ll just have to bury your silent hide.” His voice still retained its always-on comedy as he turned back over to the powerless Jeanne-Paula Valley, grinning even wider and smiling at her even harder, but now it had a different edge. Now not everything was just a joke, now it was cold and chilling.

“But you won’t be able to mind. Matter of fact, you’ll be at peace. Resting in peace.”

Batman had been busy with the finishing touches on stopping a caper done by several of the Riddler’s men in his absence by securely leaving the money with a branch of the city police to give back to the bank, and now he was busy with swinging himself through the air, kicking out his left leg in a jackknife pose configuration while a giant length of corded metal rope kept him from falling down below to his doom at the hands of simple pedestrians. His cape fanned out behind him like a proper set of wings, casting the image of a bat-man in shadow, a silhouette against the moon that cascaded across the skies, gliding through the night, and landing smoothly upon the roof of a Waynetech office building that overlooked one of the only good, clean-looking Gotham streets. He was the sole ruler of the city, he was above them all, both literally and figuratively, he was…

…Standing in the presence of a Vampire.

The woman known only as Nocturna stood there waiting for him, the regal expanse of her intricate black dress patterned with webs of red and grey and white blowing about in the winter night wind, her presence on the roof itself sending out a chill in the air. Initially, Batman tried to brace himself for combat, but he quickly realised that her intention was not to fight.

“What are you doing up here?”

“I have not come to engage in the typical heroic and villainous routine against you. Nay, nay, nay, nay, I have… A different strategy to deal with you. Mostly, because… I need something from you?”

“Spit it out and then get out of my sight.”

Nocturna simply stepped a little closer, closing her pale-skinned hands into tight fists and looking down at the caped crusader through blowing long curly black bangs, speaking to him while the lights of the technological expanse bared the sharp fangs of her canines under her lips.

“Your son. Nightwing. The bird had disappeared in Blüdhaven, and he had not surfaced for a number of weeks. Now he has turned up in the hospital, and he needs to get out if he wishes to have any hope of care for his injuries. You know just as well as I do that Blüdhaven is Hell, no chance to get the resources Dick needs, and doubtless you would want to save your son from such a situation, correct, bat?”

“Of course I would. I would do anything to get Dick back. Point me where to go and I’ll get him out.”

“Good, good, good, good. I shall provide a convenient transportation for you to reach him.”

“Why are you telling me any of this?”

Nocturna simply sighed, and the howling of the bitter winter breeze even cut into her living dead body a little.

“Because once upon a time, I cared enough about you to care about your happiness. I suppose that’s why I want you to save your son.”

With that, Nocturna became a swarm of giant furry black bats, and the Batman was swept up in their embrace, speedily escorting him down to his vehicle in the abyss below, a gesture of compassion from someone who had once been more than just another woman in Batman’s life.

Meanwhile, back in the crowd, a certain ape-man from earlier and his handler were shifting around a little bit, having now become uneasy with how the situation in front of them had played out. The man with the long white beard now had a look of regret upon his wrinkled face, leaning a bit more on his wooden gold-tipped cane than usual, and realising that he may have made a mistake. Sensing his thoughts expressed all over his visage, Charles pronounced out loud.

“Ghadda.”

“Perhaps this should not happen.”, the abbot began. “They will take him. They will mutilate him. They will desfigure and desecrate his corpse. Unideal. I have yet to learn much about his body after death, and now I might not ever get that chance again.”

“Ghadda.”

“Ah, but what if we were, in our infinite wisdom and largesse, decided to spice up how to kill this fellow a little bit here, HMM?”, Joker rambled as he continued on and on. “OI, Ivy! You’re a poisoner, correct? How about you kill him?”

A response was heard from the inside of a cell, the only one with its barrier still not broken through, not for lack of effort, but simply because its occupant, one Poison Ivy, simply didn’t like being out of her environment. In practical terms she was a plant couch surfer and she didn’t feel like leaving her warm, damp, and comfortable nature-filled asylum cell.

“Don’t bother me, clown, we don’t work for you. Don’t get me wrong, I find that one annoying, but not annoying enough to make me move. And don’t make me have to come down there, you would not like it. Now let me nap.”

“I noticed that these here glad rags come equipped with a blade or two.”, the clown-man said as he turned his attention back to Jeanne in a surprisingly good example of verbal rebounding. “Just the proper ticker-ticket for getting or two on the bus, am I right, folks? Or for slicing and dicing a guest.”

Regrettably for him, once he found a way to turn the flame-activation mechanisms on, he was rudely responded to by the mechanical systems with an uncontrollable blaze that immediately set his green mullet on fire.

“YEOWWWWW!!!!!!!!”

“Hmmph. That clown accidentally activated the fire mechanism.”, Brother Khass snarled while the Joker began running around like the crazed maniac that he was, except this time with his head a-blazing.

“Ghadda.”

“Azrael needs to be wearing his garb to possess and harness his full power…”, the abbott continued while kneeling down to grab the Azrael mask undetected from the floor. “But perhaps the mask will be sufficient. AZRAEL, HERE!”

Barely managing to catch the mask in time, Jeanne’s hands automatically flew out to grab it, spending a single second that she didn’t have to look into its waiting eyes, before shoving it on over her head and feeling herself shift away.

“HAAAAAAALLLLPPPP!!!!”, the Joker kept on screaming while everyone was distracted by turning their attention over to him, Killer Croc included.

“Don’t just STAND there!”, yelled the Gray Abbot to the woman in the mask. “You are Azrael! VANQUISH THEM!”

“Vanquish them…”, Azrael finally said, turning her fist over to the crocodile-man and intercepting an attempt from him to claw her arm off.

“Azrael vanquishes…”

After dropping Killer Croc with a sporting tackle that sent him flying into the crowd and a subsequent throw that sent him into a wall, and getting back up with a slightly increased quantity of gusto, the next one up was Two-Face. A shot from his revolver was barely dodged, but a responsive punch right to his clean and unscarred half was definitely not.

“No fair!”, the suited man moaned as he held his eye. “You hit HARVEY! He’s the GOOD one!”

Azrael just kicked him while he was down and sent him into the mob, too.

For a solid moment of about ten seconds, the crowd was simply stunned. Not even Batman started out fights so callously, this one was something different. Too much like the bat for them to not care, but so unfamiliar to all but a few that the assembly of villains was left unsure of what to do. Then, they all became enraged. Supremely enraged. And so naturally, all of them jumped her at once.

While a flurry of weapons and punches and kicks and hair-pulling and all other forms of dishonourable combative tactics were busy being employed by Azrael while scrapping against almost the entire cast of Arkham Asylum’ regular attendees, plus an alternate or two and a newcomer or ten, the Joker had finally managed to put his hair out with the fabric of the Azrael suit, while having accidentally to a corner of the room, wherein the doctor who had just been under the literal gun had been busy with huddling in fear.

“Somebody could have splashed a little water on my hair! I wasn’t even asking for conditioner!”

Then, he began to fiddle with his garments, shrugging them all off while grumbling to the doctor, who was the only one nearby who would listen. “As for the suit, better get rid of it before I discover a nuclear bomb underneath the lapel.”

“Probably… Probably should… Mister J…”, Doctor Harleen said through physical takeover of extreme fear.

“And don’t think it’s any funny business, either, Doctor Harley Quinn!”, the clown said, not bothering to remember what her name actually was. “Haven’t you ever seen a comic strip?”

“I haven’t really…”, she responded, her face distorted from shedding tears of fear mixed in with the sensation of being unable to take her eyes away from the evil of the asylum. She really didn’t quite know how to feel, right there with the Joker, of all people, taking casually to her. She probabl should’ve been dead by now. But she wasn’t. Maybe all of the things that they had said about him wasn’t true. Maybe… he just liked her. She just had to think about it.

“Riddle me THIS, masky!”, Riddler yelled to Azrael while Tweedledum held her down and the man in the bowler hat prepared to swing his reinforced cane right at her head. “When is somebody who hates country boys like a rock groupe? When they’re Smashing Bumpkins!”

Riddler’s question-mark cane connected with its target, knocking her back a little bit, but inadvertently letting her escape from Tewwdledum’s grasp with the difference in momentum.

“That wasn’t really up to my standard.”, the man in green remarked while his back was turned, right before he was the fifth villain to be taken out of the game, by an unamused Angel who had just finished knocking silly the dumb muscle-man and taken Tweedledee out along for the ride.

“I’m Commissioner Gordon. Gotham P.D. I got your call. What’s goin’ on around here?”

The Gotham City Police Department had by then assembled outside of the Asylum, crowded around at the front gate, the wrought iron entrance topped with pointed spikes and emblazoned with reliefs of bats and rats and cats and angels, and so many more creatures, all engaged in a never-ending battle, the fight to the death over all of time. Red and blue lights covered the cold stone fronts of the complex, bathing the atmosphere in blinding lights that only the most insane people on the planet would fall asleep in. Rain by then was pouring down upon them, and the wind was blowing both their voices and their wardrobes.

“Ugh. The inmates are loose.”, replied Doctor Jeremiah Arkham, a man dressed in a black-trimmed cold grey coat with stark white hair pristinely combed to his left side, which was now frazzled with several strands out of alignment as the night breezes blew his hair about, and a pair of thick-framed black spectacles that he had taken off at the moment in exasperation. “The inmates are loose. Fault of some intruder who blazed in hard enough to trip every single one of the fire systems. Which automatically opened all the cell doors.”

“So the patients wouldn’t be trapped.”, finished Gordon while scratching his rough steel-grey mustache and pushing up his dark polarised sunglasses. “Don’t blame yourself, doctor. It was the humane thing to do.”

“While I don’t agree, I do get where you’re coming from, Jim.”, remarked Police Detective Renee Montoya while holding her dark grey trenchcoat and fedora as close as she possibly could to hang onto whatever semblance of warmth she could. Brushing a bit of her curly black hair from out of her face in the sharpened winds, she walked up to the two bosses with an update.

“Nobody’s managed to actually get out yet. Seems to be some sort of hangup in the primary detention block. They seem to be holding some kind of a tribunal. A court of sorts.”

“Perfect.”, Gordon replied. “We send in a S.W.A.T. Team—”

“Maybe not a good idea, sir. We got two hostages. An asylum doctor… and a mask.”

“Someone in a costume, huh? One of those masked do-gooders again. Must be Tuesday. Or Saturday, I forget which one.”

The commissioner sighed.

“It’s never simple.”

“He’s fighting, but not well.”, Brother Khass remarked as him and Charles continued to observe. “Azrael should have disposed of them all by now. The mask alone is not enough.”

“What are you, a bunch of sissies?!”, Joker yelled from the corner while the carnage continued. “He’s just one man with a terrible taste in clothes! LAY HIM DOWN LOW!”

“You must go to his assistance, Charles.”, Khass finished.

“Ghadda Ghadda.”, the ape responded. “You said to me: ‘Remember that I told you of him? How he humiliated me? How he murdered his own brother?’”

“The situation has changed. I now realise that he can help me unlock the secrets of nature, just like you can, Charles. Now help him.”

“Ghadda.”

Charles entered into the mix of the chaos in a combination of running and jumping, crushing at least six different nameless asylum inmates as he started to pulverise the ranks.

“Heathens of Gotham, you are all about to be slain by Charles.”, the abbot began while tapping the hard ground with his Tanzanian blackwood cane to get their attention. “Charles is the true reason why I am in this prison. When I learned of his potency and precision of powerful prowess, I reasoned that he must have been a descendant of experiments that the order initiated. Dumasian Great Apes, a species of experimental enforcers so powerful and yet so unpredictable that they had to be exterminated en masse. But one of Charles’ ancestors must have mated with a normal human woman before the apes were wiped out, and thus Charles’ mix of brute strength from ape genes, blended together with carnage-rending traits from other predatory species, and the restraint and capacity for sentience, sapience, and intelligence afforded by the presence of human Deoxyribonucleic Acid, producing a creature capable of embodying both ends of the spectrum between beast and man. He may very well be the Rosetta Stone of unlocking the key of enhancing human genetics to beyond even Azrael’s power. This affords me the opportunity to undertake experimental studies even the order has forbidden. He and he alone will be sufficient enough in killing you.”

“Oooh, oooh, goody, goody!”, the Joker exclaimed from all the way back in his corner. “A contest! Winner gets to drink the blood of the loser!"

“So then you didn’t come in here to hide?”, asked Azrael while Charles began to run through the mob.

“Hide?”, responded Brother Khass. “From that fool Rollo?”

Charles proceeded to slam his fists down on the floor and send everyone flying.

“A canary could outsmart that witling!”

Gunfire didn’t even make the great ape flinch.

“I am a scientist. My passion is knowledge.”

At that point the only thing protecting the villains from Charles was their numbers, which were dwindling down further and further with each and every successive strike.

“Charles is the greatest secret of the human species, the missing link between the human species and their own potential just out of their reach.”

“Heh. Stone rockin’.”, Doctor Harleen Quinzel remarked as a smile slowly began to return to her face. “Get it, mister J? Stone? Rockin?”

“Hehehaha. Stone. As in rock. Hehehaha.”

“What did… What did Charles do to get himself in Arkham?”, Azrael asked, knowing full well she was not going to like the answer.

“Oooh-Ee-oohh, it was disgusting!”, said the Ventriloquist, nursing a head wound and stopping the bloodflow with Socko.

“All that gore! All that carnage! All those infants!”, Mister Freeze continued.

“The moment I heard about it, I knew I loved the guy.”, the Joker finished.

“Fast, is he not?”, the bearded Ethiopian said concerning Charles while stepping over to Azrael resting on the floor. “And since he has few nerve endings, he is nearly impervious to pain.”

Then he turned back to the crowd and proclaimed: “You have made a grave mistake in electing to trifle with me and my studies.”

“Get your Ghadda fender on that, boyo.”, Charles agreed while simultaneously trash-talking the mob. “Definitely not Marquis Of Queensbury Rules, I can tell you that much. Hauling a pigsticker into the fracas is what I come here to do. Steams my clams, and that is no Ghadda lie. Wave bye-bye to any nice guy, if you can catch my signification and sophistication.”

One more attack came from him, a breaking swipe of his clawed fist that swung right into the crowd, sending them all scattered across the floor in piles of human bodies.

“Ghadda Ghadda.”

“As I said, he is fast.”

“And eloquent.”, Joker interjected. “Actually sounds a little bit like me.”

“Good work, Charles, now get him out of here!”

Instantly obeying, Charles turned around immediately and picked Azrael up by her feet, slinging her onto his back and running back through the now-cleared path, followed by the man in the purple robe trailing close behind them after absconding with Azrael’s other apparel.

“In here, the both of you!”, he shouted, and all three of them were soon enough some measure of safe inside a room accessed by a door inscribed with the proclamation Janitorial Supply Closet, while the pursuing tidal wave of remaining villains bulldozed right on past them through the hallways.

The Gray Abbot quickly presented Azrael with the rest of her suit like a sacred and sacrificial offering, calling upon her to: “Take it. Slay them.”

“Why? There’s no need.”, Azrael responded, the newfound fragile peace of the situation inviting some semblance of Paula to return and let her think a little harder and a little bit more. “Besides, we would still have the Police to contend with, and by now they doubtless have the whole area surrounded…”

“So what’s the deal, Commissioner?”, Montoya inquired while adjusting her hat. “Are we doing to try to do something to save those hostages or are we just going to stand out here all night?”

“We’re waiting for the S.W.A.T. Teams to be in place, Detective.”

“Fair enough. You know, I’m pretty surprised he isn’t here. You know, old pointy-ears, as we call him.”

“Now that I think about it, so am I.”, James retorted. “He must be terribly busy to be ignoring something as big of a deal as this.”

“This place here did always give me the creeps…”, Renee remarked. “I can only wonder what’s happening in there…”

Back in the walk-in supply closet, Azrael was currently busy with rifling through an assorted set of cleaning equipment, sanitising products, tools for covering up whatever gore and blood that the staff didn’t feel like touching all too much that night or day, and, most importantly, a replacement uniform for the janitor employees, clean and white enough to seem like it was still in good condition, with a certified Arkham patch on the top half of its left arm — proof that it was legitimate — and a nice dosage a of pleasant grey trimming along the edges of the worn-out collars and cuffs and lines near the buttons. It wasn’t the prettiest thing out there, but it would definitely do.

“Let me see the suit a minute.”, the avenging angel started as she got her new pair of red-rimmed glasses out of the literal glove pocket and got her mask off. Then she grabbed a random set of ropes — she didn’t even want to know what that was about — and started to tie her now-free hair back as the three in the closet began to hear another set of footsteps; approaching guards.

“You two, get away from the door. Let me try and handle these guys.”

RHAP!!

RHAP!!

RHAP!!

RHAP!!

Soon enough the door was kicked open by gun-carrying men in brown uniforms, pointing their rifles and pistols into the darkness of the room while their black ties flopped around a little.

“COME ON OUTTA THERE NOW!!”

“Gotta be one of the crazies!”

“Or the guy in the suit…”

“Get your pieces ready…”

“Oh, thank Heaven, it’s just you men…”, said a woman dressed in the white uniform, with her light blonde hair wrapped up with a length of black and gold-patterned cord into a messy low bun behind her and with a few bangs hanging out and over her eyes, as well as a pair of oval-shaped red-framed spectacles worn a bit looser than normal. “I was beginning to worry that they had beaten you… Whew, I was afraid to run into more inmates!”

“Who are you?!”, yelled a black-mustachioed guard while shoving his gun in her face.

“Joan Arceuid.”, the woman responded while throwing her hands up in the air in attempted surrender. “I’m an exterminator. I was checking the cells for mice when all hell broke loose. I panicked and ended up ducking in her to try and hide from them all.”

“Hmm, whatever, checks out.”, the guard replied as he put his gun down. “Where did they abscond to, lady?”

“I think it might have been that way.”, she responded as she pointed to the hallway with the most obvious blood spatters and footprints all over the floor. “You’d better hurry, too — I heard that they were gonna kill that Doctor Quinn person.”

“Duly noted. Do you know the way back to the lobby from here, or do you need some help getting back there?”

“Thank you very much, sir, but I should be fine. Down that hall, and to the left, and down another hall and to the left.”

“Sounds about right. Okay then, sorry for the inconvenience."

With that, the brownshirts departed down the blood-spattered hall and left her alone by the closet door. Once a solid minute or two had passed, she went back into the closet and looked upwards into the ventilation duct.

“You can come out now.”

Charles and the abbot dropped out of the ventilation shaft with a mild noise of thudding, and Jeanne-Paula managed to get the rope out of her hair as they did so. While she kneeled down over to get her uniform, the abbot asked her a question.

“Why did you feel that the impersonation was necessary? Do you not claim who you are and your own identity?”

“I don’t see how that’s something you would care about, considering how many times you called me ‘him’.”

“Hmmph.”

“But more importantly,”, Azrael continued before slipping her mask on again. “They were between us and the hole that I made.”

Azrael’s golden hand pointed to a giant hole in the roof that now they could clearly see after walking a few feet across the corridor, the same one that she had cratered when she waltzed into the prison, and had purposely directed the guards away from.

“I did not wish to chance instigating a physical confrontation and getting someone hurt in the process. And by that, I mean them.”

Her attention then turned back to the pockets in her gauntlets, and she proceeded to pick up a Two-Way Wrist Radio and pressed the rectangular button to make it crackle to life, all while holding it delicately with her gigantic fingers.

“Nomoz, can you hear me? Calling Nomoz in the aircraft, can you hear me?”

“Perfectly clear.”, the Dwarfling replied while hovering in his helicopter and hidden behind the darkened clouds, beginning to move in downwards and enter into the view of the cops.

“Pick us up as soon as you can.”

Unfortunately, the helicopter was spotted immediately by Detective Montya, even in the immense wind and rain.

“COMMISSIONER, A CHOPPER!”, she yelled while her finger pointed to the silhouette of a vehicle against the moon.

“I see it, Detective!”, Gordon confirmed while reaching into the inner pockets of his dark brown trenchcoat to pull out a communicator of his own. “We can’t wait any longer!”

His communication crackled up to life as he flared with zeal and emotion.

“ALL UNITS, MOVE IN! I SAY AGAIN, MOVE IN!!!!”

Chop-Chop-Chop-Chop-Chop-Chop-Chop-Chop…

“We only have a few seconds.”, the red-garbed angel said while spotting the chopper in the distance. “Abbot, you come along with me.”

“I noticed that you neglected to mention Charles in that particular command, Azrael.”

“He stays behind. End of story.”, she responded. “It was you yourself who told me he was dangerous to an unprecedented degree.”

Brother Khass stood there for a few seconds while leaning on his cane, and he then responded.

“This is the farthest thing from satisfactory. No doubt I would learn very much from examining your brain, Azrael… But from Charles much more is to be learned. The very key to completely understanding the human condition certainly lies with him.”

“Irrelevant to me. You come. He stays.”

Chop-Chop-Chop-Chop-Chop-Chop-Chop-Chop…

The Grey Abbot just leaned over a little bit more, and for a few more precious seconds, looked at her with the faintest hint of regret in his face. Then he pointed.

“Then you force me to choose. It is an immeasurable choice between treasures, but… I must leave with my specimen. BREAK HIM, CHARLES!”

“Ghadda.”

The Great Ape of Saint Dumas pulled his fist back to pound her into pulp, but before he could get the chance to act on that impulse, driven by nothing but the simple yet selfish desire for total freedom to once more act with impunity upon the civilized world, the nearby doors were broken down by a squadron of the Gotham S.W.A.T., or Special Weapons And Tactics, an armoured unit of supposed law enforcement that was more often simply used to gun down criminals to avoid the hassle of the process of a trial, now hot on the trails of a crazed red vigilante and a bizarre pair of folks who came to Gotham from a cult.

“THERE THEY ARE!!!”

“FREEZE!!!”

“ON YOUR KNEES!!!”

“NOW!!!”

CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP!!!!

Azrael was the only one of them lucky enough to jump upwards and soar through the hole in the roof and catch the thick and corded braided rope that Nomoz had let down, grabbing on just in time to look downwards at the grisly sight going on down there.

“Wait!”, the abbot yelled to her from below. “You must help me! You promised to help me!”

Charles said nothing, just looked beyond, arrested with shock.

RAT–A–TATT–TATT–AT-TATT--TATT–TA–TATT–AT–TATT–TATT!!

RAT–A–TATT–TATT–AT-TATT--TATT–TA–TATT–AT–TATT–TATT!!

RAT–A–TATT–TATT–AT-TATT--TATT–TA–TATT–AT–TATT–TATT!!

RAT–A–TATT–TATT–AT-TATT--TATT–TA–TATT–AT–TATT–TATT!!

RAT–A–TATT–TATT–AT-TATT--TATT–TA–TATT–AT–TATT–TATT!!

RAT–A–TATT–TATT–AT-TATT--TATT–TA–TATT–AT–TATT–TATT!!

RAT–A–TATT–TATT–AT-TATT--TATT–TA–TATT–AT–TATT–TATT!!

RAT–A–TATT–TATT–AT-TATT--TATT–TA–TATT–AT–TATT–TATT!!

“AUGHFF!!!!”

“EUGHFFFF!!!!”

A swarm of bullets buzzed like a hornet’s nest and tore through the abbot’s clothing and Charle’s fur, riddling right through the both of them and sending the abbot falling down in a pool of his own red blood, mixed with some of Charles’, coloured a sickening blue. The last thing that Azrael saw from Brother Khass was him raising his hand in vain, perhaps to plead for her to assist him, or perhaps to curse her. She didn't really know. What she did know was that her biggest priority in the moment was to climb on up there to Nomoz and try the best that she could to try and find a way to spin this disaster of a narrative at Batman’s feet.

CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP-CHOP!!!!

She just tried her hardest to keep her focus on getting up that rope, a task that was made at least a little bit easier by the soothing rhythm of the chopping blades of the old Army surplus helicopter.

A minute later, a gold-gloved hand touched down upon the metal floor of the craft, and Azrael pulled herself up and in.

Shambling on over to the passenger seat, Paula tugged her mask off, throwing it away down onto the red-carpeted diamondplate metal floor, and getting her glasses back on over her extremely-red eyes. While she panted and wiped a trail of sweat off of her forehead, Nomoz, naturally confused, asked her the following question.

“Where is the ~Feh~ Gray Abbot, Azrael?”

“Dead. Maybe. Or maybe not. The cops, they shot him.”

“You did not rescue him?”

“What’s it to you? Didn’t you say that Azrael does not rescue?"

“Azrael did not rescue. This Azrael evidently does.”

“Shhgghhhhhh… I didn’t fail him. He failed me. Cared more about his wicked experiments than about his own safety.”

“Of course you were not the party to fail. Azrael does not fail her missions.”

Her. He called her… her. Her missions. Perhaps he was learning, after all.

“Even if the Abbot didn’t fail me, I think I still wouldn’t have left with him. Jeanne-Paula Valley, she… I… made a promise to Batman. I promised him that I wouldn't let any of Arkham’s inmates escape. Then, when I was in there, I realised that included the abbot.”

“Was it you who realised? Or Azrael?”

“Both. It was both of us. The barrier between my two selves fell away for a moment.”

She slumped a little in her chair and sighed heavily out loud.

“It felt good.”

The dwarf was silent for a few seconds, before he gave her a mix of a warning and a reminder.

“Sister Lilhy will be angry. Very angry.”

The woman sighed again, this time with a bit more emotion put into it.

“Then she’ll just have to be angry. I can’t worry about it right now.”

A momentary pause followed, and then Jeanne noticed the radio installed into the helicopter’s front seating area.

“Could you put something on while we go back to Gotham? Or we can honestly go wherever, I don’t really care right now, either.”

“I can.”

Nomoz’s fingers flicked the system on, and soon enough the dial was set to a station playing music they actually liked.

“In violent times,

You shouldn't have to sell your soul.

In black and white,

They really, really ought to know.

Those one-track minds,

That took you for a working boy,

Kiss them goodbye.

You shouldn't have to jump for joy!

You shouldn't have to jump for joy!”

A minute into the song, and a sharp-clawed hand touched down upon the metal floor of the craft, and a loud THUD was heard by the both of them, just in time for Paula to turn around and see that Charles had somehow followed them and climbed aboard. She practically didn’t even have time or room to breathe before the great ape picked her up by the foot and threw her out of the craft, while all that Nomoz could do was to keep flying the helicopter and try to pretend that the fear on his face wasn’t there, that the look in his eyes didn’t exist, as the red-eyed Dumasian creature sat himself down in the passenger seat and made himself at home.

“Booley Booley and ‘Pon my word.”, the ape said while grinning his sharp teeth ear-to-ear.

“I’ve never before copped myself a ride in one of these helicopters before, and I must opine the fact that I am assuredly and positively delighted with the experience.”

Meanwhile, under the chopper, Azrael’s civilian half was hanging on, but barely, having caught onto one of the railings with her left hand, and now left to behold the rising light of the night sky and hope against all hope in the world that her arm didn’t give out.

At least the sky was pretty. Twilight was just a few minutes away. That was always beautiful. Not the oppressive light of the day, instead still carrying the haunting and yet comforting darkness of the night.

“Shout, shout, let it all out!

These are the things I can do without!

Come on!

I'm talking to you, come on!”

“Say-Say, old chap, old bean, old pip-pip-cheerio, are you aware of the undeniable fact that we are descending?”, observed Charles out loud.

And, sure enough, they were. The helicopter, piloted by a nervous Nomoz, had been descending, whether consciously or subconsciously, into a clearing in the forest in the sprawling and area surrounding Arkham, where the grass was a dead shade of tan, the surrounding evergreen trees stabbed high up into the sky, and someone could disappear into for ages. Fortunately for all of them, it was by no means an unexpected descent, and the landing was, very thankfully, one with no resemblance of a crash. And so, when Charles got out of the door of the passenger side and beheld the signs of the oncoming light of the day, he was unhurt, save for the small amount of bullets that had managed to pierce through his toughened hide.

“Ah, ‘The dusky night rides down the sky and ushers in the morn—’”

“Not another step.”

The voice obviously belonged to Azrael, who had jumped ship before they had landed, was somewhat hunched over with her fists ready for combat, and the bright red eyes behind those glasses sporting dilated feline pupils and her whole entire body practically trembling with rage.

“Ghadda?”

“You’re going back. I made a promise and I’m going to keep it.”

“Ghadda.”

“They gave you life,

And in return, you gave them hell!

As cold as ice,

I hope we live to tell the tale!

I hope we live to tell the tale!”

Charles turned around to face Azrael, who was once again experiencing that sensation of her two selves being on the same proverbial page, working with one another, not against one another. It was indeed Azrael who was in the front seat, but Azrael alone would not have cared about ensuring that the great ape went back to Arkham, at her fists if she had to. It was Paula’s promise and it fell to Azrael to keep that promise.

“Ghadda-Bool.”, Charles said while his silhouette was darkened by the incoming light, and pointing down to her, almost mocking. “Are you of the lucidity to be aware that I clobbered and cleaned your clockishness free from effort?”

Azrael was not amused and simply replied: “This time it’s not going to be a dirty sneak attack.”

WW

HH

AA

KC

KK

KK!!!!

Charles’ fist struck first, sending Azrael flying back onto the field with a stone-cold punch to the jaw. Still not amused, and despite her head ringing and vibrating from the shock of a giant fist to the face, she still just got up and spit the blood out.

TT

HH

WW

AH

CK

KK!!!!

“Shout, shout, let it all out!

These are the things I can do without!

Come on!

“I’m talking to you, come on!”

Shout, shout, let it all out!

These are the things I can do without!

Come on!

I'm talking to you, come on!”

Azrael’s fist, in response, struck with the sound of a rocket mixed with a piston when it struck Charles’ jaw for revenge, sending him into the dirt and the dead tan winter grass with visible spouts of thick blue blood spurting out of his mouth on his way down. He proceeded to drive Azrael right into the metal side of the helicopter, impacting her with enough force to feel like the Earth itself was quaking from her point of view. Instinct seized control of her and both of her knees drove themselves right into his snout, spouting out even more blood and forcing him to let her go. His next shot when he got up was to her stomach, causing her to spit out another round and load of deep red blood, this time spilling onto and staining the front side of her mantle and spilling down onto the knees. As he proceeded to pick her up by her neck, once more he pulled back his fist, this time preparing to slice her skin open with his claws.

“Ghadda.”

And it was then that the tide turned.

Azrael managed to duck down low enough to avoid the claws of the ape in the baggy pants, taking advantage of his attack landing in the air to strike from down below, slugging him with the side of her fist and her wrist and following that up with a rush of flurried punches that had so much energy and so much passion put into them that they finally managed to something that nothing and no one had ever done to the hulking thing; they left a flurry of bruises upon him and actually drew blood from his furry skin. She kept the chain up with a good KICKCKCK!!!! to the head, a connecting punch to the gut, and another punch to the head.

Charles was left reeling as he stepped back a few paces and brought his pawed, clawed, hands up to his canine snout and held it as it bled, which gave Azrael the opening to take a couple much-needed breaths, reel on her knees for a few seconds, and finally swell up the physical and mental power inside of her to launch a devastating two-handed uppercut to the jaw, with enough force behind to make her own vision violently shake and throttle and black out for a few seconds, coming back to just in time to watch the ape-man soar through the air and come back to Earth with a final mighty THHUUDDD!!!!!!!!

He didn’t move.

Charles was conquered.

The last remaining Great Ape of Saint Dumas was defeated.

His conqueress stood proud against the rising sun. The darkness was now interspersed with the glow of the light, the faint oncoming of the light of day just beginning to make its presence known.

Azrael wiped a trickle of blood from her mouth with her wrist and wiped a bit of the fighting-induced fog off of her glasses with one of the banners of her mantle, and finished up with that just as Nomoz made himself known again as he climbed out of the helicopter and came up to stand by her side.

“Azrael… Your mask…”, he commented, as he held the black and red and white solid mask in his hands, and Azrael realised that she had been present even without the aid of the physical object that let her come up to the forefront.

“Didn’t need it… I didn’t need it…”

But now, the barrier had once again temporarily fallen away, and Azrael could think with Paula’s sense of emotion and compassion, and the red eyes once again managed to prove it. In response to the Dwarfling, the angel smiled, relaxing a little bit in the soothing winter breeze that cooled down her body and her spirit.

“Not as long as I’ve got a promise.”

ANGEL INSANE

PART I OF II

ENTRANCE

“It happened about a week before Thanksgiving on the first day of the Gotham Mall’s annual Holiday Season two-month-long charity promotion, the Neal Adams Memorial Santaland Extravaganza.”

Down in the centre of the supposedly-affluent yet extremely run-down and mostly-downsized and on-its-last-legs pillar of modern society known as the Gotham City Shopping Mall, in the middle of the north end court bordered by a McDonnell’s branch that sold cheap and addiction-inciting fast food, a Wagner’s location that sold high-end antiquated men’s fashion catering to all shapes and sizes and eccentricities, an in-house branch of the illustrious Mitchell International Bank boasting several kiosks in the same giant mall, and a supposedly innocent and high-class lingerie store that many suspected was secretly a front for courtesans and several escort services, a category of business that was illegal in Gotham on paper but many cops and governmental authority figures simply ignored and thus allowed such exploitative and horrific business practices to go completely unpunished, on the centre of it all was none other than the Jolly Old Elf himself, one of the many Saint Nicks that dotted themselves around the country around the season of yuletide that grew ever-so-slightly-larger with the incoming of every single year, surrounded by an artificial happyland of boxy presents for the children wrapped in paper of red and green and blue and white and tied with sparkling and shining bows and signed with notes supposedly garnered straight from the North Pole, mixed in with imported natural evergreen christmas trees wrapped with tinsel of soft and shiny red and blue topped with non-melting powder snow and glowing red, green, blue and white LED Cristmas lights strung inbetwixt them, and inbetwixt those trees there was set up a gigantic wooden chair with snowflakes carved into it by the thousands, and draped with a big red cusion and led up to by a long, wide carpet of deep scarlet red and guarded by statues of frosty snowmen with goofy top hats, upon which the mall Santa sat.

“Oh, what a good girl,

Oh, what a good boy!

Oh what a big smile,

All because of a toy!

If you sit on my lap today,

A kiss a toy is the price you'll pay!

When you tell what you wish for --

In a whisper,

Be prepared to pay!

Now if you sit on my lap today,

A kiss a toy is the price you'll pay!”

The man claiming to be Kris Kringle had just finished up with singing his humble little song about giving presents to the little ones in exchange for them sitting on his lap and whispering the gifts that they wanted in his ear, which, as part of his job, he would report to the charity he was a part of to help secure those presents for the poor, and had also just finished up with listening to the requests of a child named Mindy and bid her a jolly goodbye as she gleefully returned to her mother, Patricia Partridge, when he turned his head around to receive the wishes of the next child to request his help, when instead he was rather rudely greeted by an enraged black man in a large light grey trenchcoat with military-style shoulder straps, and a large light grey fedora with dark golden trimming and a band with Rosa absynnica flowers tucked into its left side, same as the left breast pocket of his coat, and sporting a long white trimmed rectangular beard that flopped around a little bit when the man proceeded to dive right onto the fat old elf and clasp both of his hands around his neck, the left one showing itself off as a robotic one, the same kind of technology that covered the left half of his face, which boasted a glowing red left eye under his hat, all the while shouting insane obscenities about the lies of the Christmas holiday and the contemptuous western commercialism that was emblamatic of the vile and contemptable spirit of America as a nation, its buisnesses, and its people, which he screamed was examplified in the fakeness and false mythology of the story of Santa Claus and shouting out that it made a mockery of the sanctity of the holiday season. Overall it was not a pretty sight.

“The Gray Abbott forced his way up to the throne of Santa Claus and proceeded to begin what looked very much like an act of spontaneously-enraged yuletide murder.”

Santa was defenceless in the man’s grasp, with the ability to do nothing but kick his black leather boots in vain while his green-wearing female elf employee looked on in horror and revulsion at the brutal sight occurring in front of her. The brutality of the incident was only prevented from spiralling even further by the intervention of Police Commissioner James Gordon himself, who had been out shopping for extremely-early Christmas presents for his daughter Barbara and his best friends Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent, and immediately responded by pistol-whipping the loving daylights out of the would-be Santa-Claus-murderer and forcibly prying both his hands off of the Jolly Fat Man. Naturally, he booked the man immediately, and because of Gotham’s systems having to process so much crime at once, there was a pretty clear protocol for sending folks who looked like someone could have seen them inside of a comic book or a cartoon show terrorising costumed superheroes, just send them on straight to trial, it wasn’t worth it to waste any more government money to jail anyone up in the already beyond-capacity jail cells of the Gotham P.D.

“He was not promoting peace on Earth. Nor good will towards men. The commissioner of police had to come in and personally remove him from the building, and the following day he was brought before a courtroom and a jury. When the judge asked him who he was and where he had come from, the man replied:”

“My name is Brother Khass, also known by the title of the Gray Abbot of the Order Of Saint Dumas.”

“When the judge, understandably confused, asked him about what that group even was, he launched into a long, detailed diatribe about the origins of the order and its mission statements, but the gist of it was delivered in his opening remarks.”

“A secret, glorious, and holy brotherhood that has existed since the thirteenth century and guided many portions of mankind's sinful destiny by pulling the strings of world events dating back to the days of the first pillagings of the African continent and of the western world by the European peoples, and up to and including the current American military operations in Ruritania and Bolvania, with as much gospel truth and absolute certainty as the words that leave my lips or the oxygen of life that I breathe. Even as I speak to you now our brothers are orchestrating the burning of villages and the assassinations of any government figures that they see fit, they are turning the flow of world commerce to expand their magnificent coffers and hordes of gold and silver and platinum and precious rare gemstones even further than their already ludicrous stores and coffers of fabulous, priceless belongings, and they are even more doubtless planning the proper method to end my life before they perceive that you will torture me for even more information about the order’s ancient secrets, secrets far too valuable to risk one of their most key members, in your words, ‘Spilling any info’. That, O justice of the courts and O jury of the circuit courts, is who I am.”

“The judge and the jury carefully considered this answer from him, and, after about ten minutes of deliberation, the jury and and the judge both decided together that, because of the man’s bizarre occultic appearance, his weird cybernetic enhancements, and the fact that he spoke of bizarre, esoteric cults that controlled the entire world behind our backs and behind the curtains of our world governments, coupled in tandem with the violence of the old man’s deed, that there was only a single logical punishment for him. They concluded that the abbot must have been another one of Batman’s kooky costumed supervillains and thus they pulled the usual stunt with him; they consigned the old man to that particular peculiar Gotham institution of kooks and weirdos known as Arkham Asylum…”

Brian Bryan, casually dressed in a dark green button-up shirt with two buttons upon in pure relaxation, who had been telling the story to the two women in the upper room, continued to sip on his ice-filled Mexican Dr. Cherry while reclining upon the brand-new leather couch and shrugging in mild disappointment while taking the hot but breezy evening air.

“And to my knowledge he’s still locked in there.”

“Which leaves us with several additional questions,”, commented Lilhy as she slowly paced around the upper room, dressed to kill in a form-fitting knee-length black dress that both hugged her smooth-skinned body and revealed the existence of a brand-new artificial pair of implants in her breasts, which she had just disappeared one day and returned home with, having told them next to nothing about it and recovering from the operation astonishingly quickly. Her hair, a blended mix of black and light brown and dark brown strands, was puffed out in volume, twirled into wavy and curly strands, and pulled back in a gigantic high ponytail that reached down the halfway point of her spinal cord, and was contrasted rather nicely by her substantial bangs cut at the line of her eyebrows. The backlessness of her little black dress also exposed another thing: a series of black tattoos in the shapes and designs of various Lily flowers and poisonous Deadly Nightshades, all interspersed with smooth, soft, and yet thorny vines, flowered in deep whites and blues and greens and purples. A string of stark white precious pearls strung itself around her smooth, pale neck and bony, defined collarbones, which were paired in polished symmetry with two large spherical pearl earrings hanging from both of her earlobes that shined a brilliant pure white in the evening sunlight of the hot Mexican urban terrain. “The first one of which is this; Did he get himself put in there intentionally?”

Jeanne-Paula Valley looked up from the maroon countertop she had been sitting on in a balled position, holding her legs close together and adjusting her replacement pair of glasses framed in dark red and with a slightly more ovular shape framed on the x axis. She had gotten her spectacles replaced about a week ago, because her face just didn’t feel right without them. But her previous pair was destroyed by lava, so she didn’t really have a reference point to go on. But, she had seen that movie with Lilhy, so she figured that it would be fun to obtain a pair of glasses like the ones worn by one of its romantic leads, and it turned out that it was indeed quite fun, a bright spot in the midst of a pre-holiday season filled with many changes, not the least of which was moving between countries about a month ago. She had tried to avoid discussing anything relating to the heroics business and just tried to enjoy herself down here, but she found that she really couldn’t, her mind was far too preoccupied with everything else that tore through it like a tidal wave.

“Okay, so we know where he is, but why would he think doing that was a good idea?”

“You defeated him, remember? The order does not look kindly upon any form of failure. Perhaps Brother Khass, having failed to prevent Azrael from learning the secrets of her birth, and then failing to stop her from annihilating his laboratory and absconding with forbidden holy texts, made him feel as if he would be much safer behind government walls.”

Stepping over to the miniature refrigerator and spotting an excellent bottle of white Chardonnay wine, she took it out and began to pour its contents into a tall glass that was star-studded with nebula swirls of purple and black while tapping on the glass with her lavishly-manicured nails of polished purple, the same deepened shade that matched her matted lip gloss. “The second question is; How can we secure his release?”

“Why would we possibly ever want to do that, Lilhy?”

Since the woman in black was busy with sipping her drink, Brian took over the duty of answering that question in particular. “We want his knowledge, Lass. It was the abbot who conferred upon you, and your father before you, almost superhuman abilities. If we could put him to work, put his skills at the service of healing humankind instead of performing horrific experimentations upon innocent animals and genetically engineering assassins who look like Elves mixed with Felid qualities.” He continued to sip on his glass of Dr. Cherry and soak in the air and temperature, which, while not sweat-igniting, certainly made him feel fried, even in spite of the open windows. “We might even be able to make up for some of the untold harm that the order has done to the world.”

“Do you think that he knows the order no longer exists for all practical purposes?”, Jeanne asked Brian out loud.

“Not likely at all, Sister.”, the woman in black answered for him while adjusting the platinum bracelets worth thousands of lifetimes of personal labour upon both of her wrists. “No one, save for the three of us within this very chamber and our little Dwarfling friend, are aware of this grand order’s sudden collapse. What little they do know is that the international stock market is behaving in rather fantabulous fluctuations and the global weather patterns have become disrupted and are acting awry.”

“Ah, yes, worldwide fallout from the total dissolution of an enormously powerful and totally clandestine group of total madmen. No offense, of course Lilhy.”

“Hmph. None taken, doctor. I have been quite busy with doing whatever I can to minimise the damage that the supposed destruction of the order is currently causing, if I may add. It is by no means a pleasant task, but it is one that only I am capable of carrying out.”

“So if I may ask, why did you relocate here to Mexico City?”

“I find the heat of the climate to be rather congenial for me. And, of course, anyone would agree with me when I say that I do indeed owe myself a great amount of reward for my labours.”

Jeanne could suppose that that was the explanation for her surprise cosmetic surgeries and extreme makeover in fashion sense. Though oddly she had chosen to preserve some of the wrinkles on her skin. Perhaps it was a bizarre point of pride she had in them. Azrael’s human side couldn’t help but be just the slightest bit jealous. She was always afraid of surgeries and procedures, but by this point she would live in the dirt for seven years to look that good.

“Back to business…”, Brian Bryan began as he looked over and on into the sunset. “How do we plan on freeing the Abbot?”

“It’s very simple, doctor Brian. We do not. Azrael does.”

Both the blonde girl and the couch-lounging man had the exact same thing to say to that.

“Eugh. That’s what I was afraid of.”

“Eugh. That’s what I was afraid of.”

In response to that response, Sister Lilhy took her sweet, succulent time stepping over to the girl on the countertop, planting her high-heeled shoes into the floor with the resonating sound of KLAK-KLAK-KLAK-KLAKing, and the bespectacled blonde couldn’t help but think that maybe Lilhy was overdoing it with the makeover and attitude, whether that was her intention or not. But then her next move was not a move of anger, instead she gently put down her wine and smiled that goddamn cunning expression that betrayed both classical amusement and a rise in tensions over authority. The next movement of her right hand was to lift Jeanne’s chin up and the next line from out of her purple lips was:

“Surely the mighty Azrael is not somehow afraid of being unable to manage such a minor task for an excellent cause, is she?”

“I would rather not return to Gotham…”, the woman in the red-rimmed glasses tried to stammer out in a move of futile protest.

“Well, as their people, the Americans, would say… Get Over It.”

She just lowered her head. “I’m on my way, Lilhy.”

A purple kiss upon her lips was her reward for compliance. “Sister Lilhy.”

“What do you even expect from me anymore?! Admit it, you would let Nightwing or Robin — who, might I add, is a child — or Batwoman or Catwoman, or hell, maybe even the goddamn Question do this, and yet somehow when it’s me very generously telling you about my intentions ahead of time, all of a sudden you say I’m not good enough?! I’m not even asking you for your help!!”

Batman continued to stand on the flat roof of an investment firm building with Jeanne, armoured up in Azrael garb except for her head and face, while his immense black cape blew about in the high winds that carried the oncoming arrival of the yearly devastation of the Gotham winter, and his eyes, which his mask made appear to be solid white, kept their usual position when talking to this egotistical blonde pipsqueak, narrowed in severe disapproval and disappointment.

“You severely overestimate how much faith I’ve ever had in you.”, he retorted to her. “It doesn’t matter that you’re asking for my help, you’re asking for my blessing to break into Arkham and you can’t have it.”

He kept up his usual pose of pointing a single accusatory finger at the target of his verbal tearings-down, which, nineteen times out of twenty, worked completely and without flaws, because he was BATMAN, criminals lived their entire lives in fear of Batman, regular everyday civilians obeyed the will and orders of Batman, thugs and lowlifes cowered before Batman, and even the other heroes of the city looked to him as the shining beacon of heroism that all should aspire to respect and revere.

All of the other heroes except Azrael.

If Azrael could even call herself a hero with all she had done, up to and including two goddamn months ago.

“I should stop you right here, right now. Make an example to my son out of you of what happens if you try and get my approval for your stupid little superheroing adventures. Maybe I should put you in there personally with the rest of them, maybe then you’ll get your wish and stop grovelling to me for all of your own insular grievances. Jim certainly won’t question me just branding you as another one of my block-wrapping lines of supervillains. How about that, Paula? Does that sound fun?”

“As a matter of fact it does, Batman. It does, in fact, sound like quite a lot of fun to head into the den of lions to rescue an old man who could bring benefits to the entirety of the human species. And maybe even me, since I’m not even one of the human race anymore, which I still don’t think I’ve finished understanding. Matter of fact, it might even be fun to keep mouthing off to you and see what happens. Prove that I’m growing something of a spinal cord. It may do me some good.”

“If that was intended to be a snide at me about the incident wherin I mistankley let you be Batman, then I do not at all find it clever. But I think you are right about one single thing. You don't have any semblance of a backbone. So you might as well start right here, right now. I’m going to tell you this, and you’d better listen carefully. If you blunder once more, just like you have done numerous times in the past… If just a single one of the army of monsters who dwell in that Asylum besides that man end up escaping because of you… I will punish you.”

The man in the bat costume lowered his tone even more, his bat ears painting his inky black silhouette in the guise of a Devil-man, or more accurately a Bat-devil, with irate eyes and endless pointed ends of his gigantic cape that blew all around them, a dark force against the lightness of Paula’s red and gold clothing and her light blonde hair and bangs blowing about behind her in the dark of the night.

“SEVERELY.”

“Understood.”

“I doubt it.”

“I swear I–”

But the man in the bat costume and dark bat-eared cloak was already gone.

“Urgh. He’s gone again. How does he do that? Figures that he never taught me how to do that.”

She turned her head to look behind her shoulders at the area behind a gigantic rooftop ventilation system to check on the man that she brought with her. “Nomoz, did you see how–?”

“No. But he didn’t catch wind of my presence, either, so I suppose that would be even.”

“Did you get it ready?”

“I did.”

In next to no time at all the two of them were seated in the front dark red leather seats of a refurbished dark green helicopter, some kind of Army surplus job, and on their way to Arkham Asylum through the air of the city, overlooking the assembled mass of buildings, through the streets riddled with trash and disease and blood and traps, through the outskirts of the city limits that slowly but surely gave them the sight of concrete giving wazy to trees, miles upon miles of trees that surrounded the winding road that took them up the hills and mountain rocks that elevated the asylum above it all, making their ascent while the cockpit bathed both of them in red light, matching the redness of the skies above the ancient and cursed-appearing gothic institution, almost a dark and malicious parody of the concept of a beautiful shining city upon a hill. To be sure, it was beautiful, in its own distorted and chaotic manner, obviously run-down and never sincerely rebuilt ever since its establishment to house the supposedly-insane Elizabeth Arkham away from the thin skin of polite society and consign her to eternal isolation with the other varying degrees of loonies that the city decreed ought to go to that cursed and reviled institution. The first thing they saw was the mass of dark grey and black victorian stonework and almost mideval towers and jutting structures of prisoner housing and areas closed off to all public observation that most certainly served as places or torture in the name of breakthroughs and progress in mental health, staffed by those with hearts ranging from bleeding beacons of sympathy who thought they could cure pure evil, to those whose actions would make one think that their internal consciences and moral compasses had been surgically removed by special apathy-ensuring surgery, and a great deal of staff workers who simply enjoyed the thrills of getting to deal out punishments to the villains and keep them under wraps. They could see the presence of searchlights around the perimeter that served less as a method of watching for escaped prisoners and more of a method of displaying the fortress of dark stone and rotting wood, with all of its windows having not glass but thick black iron bars, its roofs shingles of various dilapidated degrees of red and black and green and purple, and interpseresed into the gigantic complex were abandoned guardian towers of giant cobbled stones with mideval wooden plank roofing and patches of dark black bricks and brown wooden patches interspersed with it all. The compound was surrounded by forests of tall and dark evergreen trees that only enhanced the haunting settings and surroundings, and the only mountain roadway in or out was quite obviously in desperate need of repair.

“Arkham City is more like it.”

“Quite. Now do you have a plan for actually getting into and out of the asylum?”

“Not exactly. I had a couple of thoughts about impersonating one of the doctors or pretend to be some kind of chef or cook, or sneak in through a laundry truck, or enter via the sewer systems… But then I remembered that it’s still me doing the job. Subterfuge is not part of Azrael’s war chest, it’s just not in my repertoire. When I was Batman I only went outside in my human appearance once and it did not end well. No. What Azrael does is she breaks in. Then she grabs what she was after. And then she breaks her way out. It’s unfortunately that simple.”

“You’re certain it will be so ~Feh~ simple?”

“Well, why wouldn’t it be?”, she asked as she grabbed a long, thick rope and her black and red white-eyed Azrael mask. “You really think that Azrael will have any problems blowing through an annoying little alarm or two and a couple of armed guards?”

“You would not enjoy my answer.”

Jeanne-Paula stood up and moved on over to the back of the air transport with a rope in her hand and a mask in her arm, opening up the back door and letting the winds of time and change to blow right in her face. Removing her spectacles and tucking them into one of her left glove-pockets, she took a quick look at one of the roofs that the two of them were soon approaching, and inhaled a breath she absolutely needed.

“I’ll get the Abbot. And I won’t blunder.”

Mask on, hood on. One more look towards the sky, which was now mixing in shades of neon yellow-green below with the red above, and both hands on the rope.

“Be prepared to pick the both of us up when you get my signal.”

And then she jumped.

THUD!!!!

“Something’s hit the pressure sensors on the roof!”, screamed out a frazzled tan-and-brown-haired uniformed guard with a slate grey denim jacket and charcoal black and grey cuffs and collars, with an Arkham Security badge on his left arm sleeve and a couple of silver-coloured buttons on his cuffs, having been watching the motion detector systems from the central security office, the darkness and dinginess of the Arkham atmopshere allowing all of the posted security watchmen to view the red light of the source of the disturbance, and having just thrown himself back in his chair at the sight of an expected disturbance. Picking up the security room telephone, another guard with gold-coloured buttons on his jacket dialed up the asylum-wide communication lines and aimlessly started shouting.

“Blue alert! Units seven and eight to area five! Some bastard, some thing’s on the roof!”

That order instantaneously became out-of-date when Azrael drew her two-handed sword of polished Ulfberht Steel, pressed the switch to ignite the entire thing in flames, and swung it like the deadliest kind of baseball bat, and instantly the rooftop caved in in a pile of fiery red shingles.

“Sunnuva bitch! Now that something’s set off the fire gears! That only means–!”

“RED ALERT! RED ALERT RIGHT GODDAMN NOW! ALL UNITS I SAY AGAIN! RED ALERT! REDDER THAN THE LOWEST AND DEEPEST PITS OF HELL!!”

Fortunately for Azrael, she had already busied herself with leaping down through the smoking hole in the shingles just as all of the lights turned red and the fire foam dispensers began to shoot off a flood of pale seafoam green light and airy extinguishing substance. Against the guardsmen of the prison she had, if she were to be generous and an optimist, a thirty-second lead of physical distance. But, if she made a singlle wrong turn, then that lead was going to go down into the negatives. As the sirens above her head started to screech out their horrible WHHHIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!–WHHHIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!–WHHHIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!–WHHHIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!! noises and the already-haphazard signs of the building’s long, winding corridors became even harder to read in the darkness, her enhanced and sharpened vision was only barely able to make out the words on the walls, at frst running like an angel with her head cut off between the office complexes and the dilapidated kitchens, through hallways filled barred-walled ‘holding cells’ for some of the ‘much less troublesome criminals’, tumbling down stairwells going nothing but down, past medical ordelies and electricans working on fixing the faulty wires of the lighting, and smashing through locked metal doors and bolted bars like it was completely less than nothing, until finally she came upon an impotant-looking set of double doors.

WHHHIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!–WHHHIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!–WHHHIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!–WHHHIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

The guards were going to catch up to her in no due time, and she had remembered from the map and the blueprints that Nomoz had shown to her on the way to the chopper had said this was something of a cutoff point, a halfway mark, beyond the polite end and into the chaotic end. No doubt that beyond this gateway was where all of the villains were. Well. Wouldn’t hurt to check. Might as well meet the relatives.

SMAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The doors sprang open and Azrael was then promptly greeted by the sight of one last corridor, with all the lights put out and many of them just simply shattered, into the convict living area, which she covered in barely only a few seconds, and then it was just one more door into Mordor. Azrael then realised that that phrase sounded much cooler in her head than it did when trying to use it in that particular situation. But that didn’t matter right now, all that mattered was the mission. Nothing mattered but the mission. The angel of death kicked open the double iron doors into the Inmate Block, only to find a much-appropriate scene of utter madness on all levels. Hordes of prisoners in various states of clothed had all broken themselves free and had congregated all over the place; all four levels of the block were jam-packed with crowded stacks of prisonsers partying and riting and beating one another up in glorious communal mosh pits, folks who had grabbed ropes were busy with swinging from the rails between the catwalks and the lantern-like light fixtures that cast down a festive form of green light upon the entirety of the indoor prison yard. But, of course, above all of the small fry, were the merry malignants in the colourful costumes, on the floor and assembled in all their insane ignant glory, snockering and bickering and dpisuting and living it up amongst themselves. There were so many as far as Azrael’s eyes could see that they resembled a minor army of costumed criminals, but all of the main ones had turned their attention over to the sword-wielding and gold-armoured intruder.

“Before you say anything or you make any sudden moves against us…”, began a tall black man dressed in a broad-shouldered suit split cleanly down the middle, with its orange right half perfectly smooth, properly creased, lint-rolled, gold-buttoned, the whole fancy shebang, and its violet left half torn in multiple places, leaking strings and fabric, done in a plaid-lined pattern, improperly-fitting, and with a chest pocket sporting one blue Morning Glory flower and one orange California Poppy flower fastened to it, and, most strikingly of all, the entire left half of his face utterly melted and completely mishappen, coloured a disgusting shade of deep and fleshy pink and purple and showing off the left half of his set of teeth, naturally in deep disrepair to fit with that half of his appearance, and his entire red-tainted left eye on full display, as well as the left half of his hair bleached white and wild and flowing loose in stark contrast to his brushed, combed, and properly-styled black hair on his right side, which was also the side that bore a meticulously-maintained black mustche and skin that was showing a few wrinkles on that half. “You oughtta see what we’ve got for our insurance.”

The ball of explaining was thus passed to the villain next to him, a man armoured in a dark blue suit with a clear ice-blue helmet that made his whole face seem like a darkened skull insulated in a controlled sub-zero temperature. “You see, we have in our hands this cool fellow right here from the Arkham staff…”, he uttered as he gestured to a red-haired man in a bright green bodysuit with black question marks printed all over it, and a dapper bowler hat in the same colour with a dark green band, who shoved a poor, poor Arkham psychiatrist clad in a white coat and gold name tag with name Doctor Harleen Quinzel, who happened to have the unfortunate bad luck of being in the room when they had collectively broken loose, up to the front of the lines for Azrael to personally behold.

“Riddle me this, Mister Freeze, what are we gonna do to this sap of a specimen of a staffer chick if anyone dares to lay a finger or a hand or a weapon or ANYTHING upon our innocent little selves.”

“Only one anwer there, Riddler, WE ICE ‘EM!”

“You have to be bluffing.”, the angel in the hooded cloak said, somewhat unintentionally sounding like a baseless threat.

“I assure you that we are absolutely not.”, responded the man with the split face and clothing, before he snapped the fingers of his left hand and pointed to a platinum-blonde woman dressed in a cherry red fur coat over a ruby-coloured ball dress and sporting a white fedora hat with a black and red band, a long white sock with eye-like marker markings worn over her left hand, and a Thompson Machine Gun in her right. “Peyton, how about you show that red punk we’re not playing around?”

Nodding with both her head and her left hand, the woman in the red fur approached the helpless therapy specialist and aimed the gun right in her face. “If I squeeze just one of my fingers onto this trigger, one innocent little broad goes bye-bye, and the janitorial staff have one more bloody mess to clean up off the floor in the morning. Capiche’, ya big red punk?”

“I get it, I GET it!”, Azrael responded in a panic, having recognised that letting an innocent hostage perish would not land her in Batman’s good graces. “Um, if I put my weapon down, will you at least take that barrel out of her face?”

“Well, you tell me, how about that?”, the woman, who had bangs that covered the entirety of the left half of her face, as if intentionally styled to keep some aspect of it hidden, said in mock surprise while turning over to let the mock puppet on her hand do the talking.

“The real question is, what do our distinguished cohorts think of such an idea?”, proclaimed the literal sock puppet in a cartoonishly high registry out to the crowd of costumed capers. “Two-Face? How about it?”

“We’ll need the dame alive if we plan to keep using her later, Socko.’, replied the man with half of his face melted off, while addressing the puppet as if it were its own completely separate creature, and not just a crowd of insane folks indulging another villain’s insane fantasy of there being a friend inside her that she could talk to via a poorly-drawn sock on her hand. “But, Ventriloquist, please do me an indulgence and take this situation seriously for a change? Insisting that we speak to you through a sock puppet reduces the gravity of this grave situation.”

“Who on Earth do you think you’re talking to?”, the Riddler replied.

“You’re the only serious one among all of us in here!”

“Durr, you know he’s akshally kinda riht.”, were the pair of comments made by the pair of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, a classical kind of smart-but-small and big-but-idiotic duo, who had taken over the restraining of the doctor.

“And also a huge buzzkill.”, finished the Ventriloquist. “But you’re right, we do need her for our insurance. Fine, I’ll put the gun down. For now.”

“Say…”, came the eerily-familiar voice of another man from behind the crowd, whose footsteps grew closer and closer as the sea of incarcerated inmates began to part to allow him to come closer to the forefront and personally greet the unwelcome guest. Azrael could see him in small glimpses of his body: a purpleish-pink business suit with a gigantic bright red ribbon bowtie tied to the collar of a black button-up undershirt, an uncannily-sharp jawline that made him look like an outright cartoon, his entire skin from the top of his head down to the tippiness of his tippy toes bleached a brilliant and dead-looking white, his hair washed out to a bright emerald green and worn in a regressive mullet that made him seem like the forgotten clown corpse from a hair metal concert.

Or more like Graham Nash in the nineteen-eighties if he were entirely without any sophistication, and severely lacking the tender heart in his vocal delivery, and if his mullet was somehow even more of an affront to polite societal conformity. And also definitely not gentlemanly. And not British, either.

“You know, Peyton, it has been quite the perplexity on my mind for quite a while of what exactly has become of that other Ventriloquist that we all used to hang out with?”

The insane man with the bleached skin, emerald eyes, and bright red lips with surprisingly-clean teeth started to snap his fingers and tap his skull over and over and over and over again while he attempted to remember that one’s name. “What was his name, what was his name? The meek old man with the bald cap and the glasses? The one with that one Scarface doll who always seemed far too meek and too much of a doormat to be associated with us? Whatever on Gotham’s green Earth could have possibly become of that upstanding old man?”

“Wesker? You mean Arnold Wesker? Chuff, that fool wasn’t cut out for the mob life, they say that he’s turned over a new leaf or whatever. Lives in some kind of orphanage, helping the children and saving the rainforest or whatever an ex-con does. It’s all just as well, now we don’t need the embarrassment of having him weighing down our most reputable repertoire."

“Quite, quite, quite, thank you, princess and socky-boyo. But, anyways, backwards onto boring business…”

The clown in the pink jacket and pants waltzed his way over to the angel in red and cartoonishly put his hand over his lips while pondering out loud. “Say, say, say, say again, you look… familiar. Vaguely familiar. That gigantic, gaudy golden armour, those outright offensive huge hockey gloves, that same look of trying-far-too-hard in your eyes, that unmistakable aura of attitude… I could swear that I’ve crossed railroads with you before… Eh, well, it may or may not be nothing.”

As the pale man with the green hair threw his hands up in the air and looked like he was about to walk away, suddenly Azrael’s spirit could’t handle the ego bruise of Batman’s biggest villain not having her in his memory, and so she got his attention again.

“I think that you remember me, Joker. You remember that one scrap back at Palmiotti Studios? The one with the unstable giant piano keys that resulted in the only broken bones of yours that that I didn’t give to you myself? The one with you in the white suit and the beret wherein I broke your gun in half? The one where the police had to stop me from killing you? Remember that?”

The Joker instantly snapped his head back to attention.

“You… You’re that awful, awful Batman who put me in the hospital for upwards of ONE AND A HALF YEARS! OH, I REMEMBER YOU NOW, YES I DO!”

“Tough luck. I’m not here to finish you off. I’m here for the Abbot.”

“Who?”

“Who?”

“Who?”

“Who?”

“He’s referring to me, thank you.”

Amidst a set of murmurs from the crowd the abbot himself stepped forward, once more dressed in his usual grey and purple vestments lettered with gold, walking forward on a black wooden walking cane, and accompanied by a massive muscular great ape, with fur of a burnt-coloured hue of wheat-ish brown, eyes of that signature glowing red that seemed to affect all species born out of Dumasian experiments, and a jawline that, unlike most apes, protruded outwards like a canine’s, and with definitely not ape-like fur that was almost pettable like a felid’s. The ape-thing’s tail was as long as two human arms, and wrapped around its waist as if the creature's primitive mind somehow knew that its tail was more of a vulnerability than anything else in a social context, and it was also somehow smart enough to actually be wearing pants, having dressed itself in nothing but a baggy pair of grain-coloured large pants tied up tightly to its waist with a dark red cord length of braided rope. But the most frightening quality about the ape-thing was its tranquility; it wasn’t needlessly moving about, it wasn’t speaking out of turn, it was even walking like a human being on its two legs; it made Azrael feel severely uncanny, as if it was silently waiting for the chance to pull a truly explosive and violent stunt.

“So it is you yet again, Azrael. I take it you have come to me all the way from the order to do me harm? To end me before I can spill the beans.”

Then, the giant ape next to him with the bizarre features began to speak in perfect coherent English to enhance his statement.

“Ah, but what kind of beans, brother Khass? Might you be referring to Pinto, legume, lima, or refried in a nacho stew? Please, please, please, do enlighten us about the origins and specifications of these supposed and imaginary beans that you say that you are in extreme danger of spilling?”

Azrael simply ignored the thing’s sentiments.

“There is no order anymore. It has crumbled away.”

“I do not believe you. I cannot believe you.”

“You don’t have to believe me. You just need to come with me.”

“Oooh, can weee come along with you?”, The Joker interjected with his usual comedic elongated syllables, before Azrael simply shoved him aside, refusing to suffer the fool.

“Step aside.”

“HMPH! Such total rudeness, no good-night glasses of battery acid for you, punk! Might as well just call you Katie Killjoy!”

Meanwhile, the old abbot had slung his arm around the shoulders of the kneeling ape-man and been whispering into his right ear the entire exchange.

“You see that, Charles? That is him. Azrael. Remember what I told to you about him? How he humiliated me? How he destroyed my work and my sanctuary? How he murdered his own brother before he was even born? You may kill him now.”

Charles, wasting no time, took the easy option and motioned for a dirty sneak attack, picking Azrael up by her left foot while she wasn’t paying any attention to him or the Gray Abbot, and slammed her down onto the floor with the force of a moving car. Barely clinging to consciousness, she tried to reach for her weapon, but the ape-man simply took the blade of the angel and tossed it away, whereupon it was caught by Two-Face, and meanwhile just proceeded to squeeze his claws against her hooded head.

“Charles, Finish him!”, the old man screamed out.

“WAIT!”, interjected the Joker again as he got inbetween Charles and the abbot. “I have myself a better idea for how to punish this here punk…”

The world from Azrael’s line of sight became overwhelmed with sparkling red dots, then yellow, then white, and then it all gave way to black as she stopped being able to think.

By the time that Jeanne-Paula Valley had come back to consciousness, a stream of deep red blood was leaking from her lips and creating a metallic taste in her teeth and on her tongue, at least two ribs were feeling broken, probably more, and found her body sprawled on the dirty asylum floor, stripped down to nothing but her black compression underthings and her almost-unclothed body left on the floor for all to see and observe and point and laugh at.

Wait… If she was just in her barest items now… And her costume had been taken away… Then who was possessing it now?

Then the universe answered that question.

“Know that The Joker is now sporting the grooviest of groovy threads in the world!”

The Joker was practically high on getting revenge for his extended hospital stay as he almost twirled around in place, dancing on his tippy tappy toes, swinging his arms out behind him as tra-la-la-ed along, and letting his truly heinous emerald mullet swing and swish behind him in rhythm with the double cape and shoulder-mounted stiff ribbons that now belonged to him.

“Oh, right, and know something else, too, while you’re at it…”

His thirty-two fangs of sharpened white teeth assumed their all-time favorite position, a red-lipped grin that stretched from ear to ear and looked both simultaneously ready to crack a joke that would floor someone with laughter and floor someone with sudden death. Flashing his signature smile, he looked down upon the civilian form of the angel assassin, and suddenly he became filled with so much more than joy. He was merry. Very. Very merry.

“Know that the merriment has only just BEGUN!”

TO BE

CONTINUED…

NIGHT’S END

The initial trek up the first flight of stairs was just a determined walk, before the angel was greeted by the sight of so many stairs just leading in numerous different directions, corridors and hallways and extra rooms stuffed for days with mountains of remarkable treasures and electrical gizmos, gadgets, and greebles, all seeming to be connected to one spot upwards. It didn’t take the brain of a twentieth-level intellect to determine where she needed to go. Up the blue stairs she went, taking the winding paths and picking up more and more speed as even more of the systems went dark, her enhanced eyes taking up the chore of her visual vision, registering the twists and turns several seconds before they would have made her hit them and stalled her progress. She could even pick up the faint sightseeing of each of the individual black bricks with just a faint bit of light left. But even her own immensely-gifted angelic eyesight began to fail her, as the darkness became more than just the absence of light and all that was holy, no, no, not so, for now the blackness had become an oppressive force all around, leeching off of the light within her soul to try and deter her on her final stretch up, but, fortunately for her, the blazing light of the angelic soul proved to be just enough to finally make it up, passing through one final flight of stairs and through a final hall, flanked by giant dark blue pillars on both sides, with bat-like figures of all varieties that all seemed to frame the way and point to the door for her. As if consciously reacting to the signal emitted by her unique physiology, the metal door with lines and electrical veins of gold and blue lifted itself up along its rail-grooves, allowing Azrael to step into the final room of the tower.

The queen’s chamber.

What she saw when she stepped into the sacred darkness was a grotesque expanse of technology, tubes and wires and switches and circuits all along the walls and over the floor, coloured in depressing, dreary shades of muted moody blues and teals and greys and blacks, glowing with a subtle sense of golden energy that made the room feel a bizarre form of hot and heavy, and, upon the backmost wall, all flowed into an apparatus of glowing orange electrical panels and dark blue and black and grey cable and systems and dials that all cradled… her. The Bat-Queen, the living destination of her journey, lay suspended in the open air by metal tubes and wires and pipes and cables that kept her alive and living and breathing… even with a giant hole in her chest where her heart used to be. The energy flowed into that hole through the tubes and several cables were also interested into it that found some sort of connection with her veins and blood-pumping systems, constantly jumpstarting them to ensure that her enchanted heart would never give out. Her bat mask was still on, which, along with her whole entire outfit, was weary, weathered from seven years of complete global isolation, seven dreary and lonely Gotham years constantly spent hooked into the system, cycling reports of her entire vitals always being fed into the machine through thick, winding, giant cables implanted into her back and her neck, that ran through and between her cape, which loosely hung up behind her, almost in a mockery of the woman that she used to be. From the angel’s vantage point of view, she just… might as well have been a corpse.

She spoke.

“You’re… You’re here… You’re finally here…”

If Azrael already didn’t know better, she would have placed the way she even sounded as belonging to a corpse. A living corpse, to be sure, but still something that shouldn’t be alive, and only kept by magic off of death’s door.

“Yes, Bat-Queen of Gotham. It is I…”, she said as she took a few hesitant steps up closer to her. “I am Azrael.”

“It… Is so good that you are here… Fear me not, child. Come closer… See who I am… See who you are… See who you truly are…”

“I must see who I am?”

A few more steps through the nest of cables and up the small stairs to the machine, and they were within touching distance.

“Angel… Remove my mask…”

She did. She went slowly, minding the former monarch’s moans of pain, and peeling it back as gently as an Azrael could, until, finally she saw her. Her face was extraordinarily pale from loss of blood, crowned with black hair the texture of a thorny bush, streaked with greys and blues and whites in roughened patches along its numerous edges, bearing a facial structure that had become extremely sharp from severe malnourishment, a mouth that had not been used the day she was put in prison, and two still-sharp eyes of a faded but still shining blue, the same kind that she had. And, most importantly of all… two red lines running down her face, like perpetual, endless tears, one from each eye, composed of the same burn-scar-like substance that formed the facial stripes of the angel. And Azrael knew it. She could feel it. Azrael could feel it. The truth was right there. All over her face.

She stepped back, just one step, then two.

“You… You…”

She threw off her gauntlets, one after the other, and hastily tossed off her mask, stepping back up to the dais, bringing her hands up to the queen’s and touching the prisoner’s face as gently as she could.

“You have my face…”

The other woman’s face relaxed by just a little bit, and, with a sound like splitting rock accompanying the movements of the air, she finally spoke once again.

“Or you have mine.”

Azrael’s eyes reverted from red to blue, and soon Sister Jeanne was the one in control.

“Are we sisters? Twins? Separated from one another?”

“No…”, the Bat-Queen replied, slumping over a little bit as her artificial heartbeats started to change. “Something much more personal. We are the same person, divided in two after our birth and kept separated for our whole lives.”

Azrael was left in shock.

But she believed it.

Then, the orange glow turned darker, golder, and the Bat-Queen began to dissipate, and disappear, almost as if her body was burning itself, vapourising into the air in the form of dark energy.

“T’was done by Brother Rollo to help him maintain his power…”

The queen closed her fading eyes and slumped a little bit further, taking some level of solace in the ultimate fulfilment of the sad destiny of the twin stars. Azrael started to feel the same thing, feeling some of her flesh turning into steam and vapour, and an almost magnetic pull taking her in and drawing her closer.

“To deny us our destiny…”

“Think about,

Think about how many times I have fallen!

Spirits are using me, larger voices callin'.

What Heaven brought you and me, cannot be forgotten!”

The two of them joined hands, intertweining fingers and clamping down on one another for support, as the both of them started to melt into the air and become two separate energy-filled spirits, and soon enough began to mix together. Now the both of them were having the same visions, which were blending together into just one single shared vision, two souls, one black, one white, one dark, one light, coming apart and blending together in the form of two energy shapes mixing inside and outside, light gaining dark, dark gaining light, the black-and-white rigidity and irreversible, unshakeable morality inherent to each half being forced into opening up, letting in the views of the other. On one side, the angelic side, unshakeable, unmoveable, unmatchable force for justice and an unmatched fiery wrath, the sun of righteousness, a blazing, but short-sighted star that ran right through everyone and everything in its path, any and all senses be damned. On the other side, subtleness and subterfuge, queenly, nightly majesty meant to prowl around and serve her inner darkness, molding herself to thrive in it, but never with the power to accomplish a righteous hymn of battle, forever condemned to dishonourably attack behind and from deep in the shadows. Each of them was found wanting something that the other had, and now both of them were complete. Their unifying world erupted into warping flames, flames that parted and formed into visions, visions of what had already come, what was coming in the present moment, and what would be there to come for them in the future. Dancing harmonies of angels in red and blac, swaths of purple swiping through a dense tree thicket, the curls of a woman’s hair blowing in the wind, the grinning grimace of a suited insane clown in the depths of some dark prison complex, losing consciousness inside of the catacombs, and being carried away on white-capped waves of a violent storm. Amidst their screams and contortions, they felt not the pain of being broken down and forged together, but, rather, a joyful kind of burning, the kind that promised a guaranteed satisfaction and pleasure after the initial shock had abided and after the pain had passed.

“I have been arou-ou-ouuunnnd the world!

Lookin' for that womaaaaan girl!

Who knows love can endure!

And you knooooow it willllll!”

“‘How could such a thing be possible?’, Azrael started to ask. Then, she remembers the words she recently heard spoken: ‘Here, in Gotham City, anything is possible, provided it has absolutely no logic and cannot possibly do anyone any good.’ That is all that she remembers, because, in an instant, something extremely extraordinary, something strange and eerie and utterly inexplicable happens to her, and as her body shifts and melts and reforms, she hears and speaks with the words and voice of the Bat-Queen, which have now become her own. ‘The dragon has robbed me of my heart,, and now I have yours.’”

The chamber erupted into a blazing explosion.

“Then, after what may have been either a moment or an eternity, but somehow still seemed to be both…”

Rising from within the fire and smoke of the highest chamber in the royal tower, the newly reformed and rearmoured queen, an amalgamation of the two halves of one being now reunited into a whole and single lifeform, took her first steps into the brand-new world. An extremely dark blue bodysuit covered everything from the top of her neck down to going over her toes, atop which a top of golden armour was fitted over the top half of her chest, emblazoned with the bladed bat-symbol, their now-unified emblem, also in that dark navy blue. Her bat mask was firmer, and now had for its only symbol the same teary streaks running down its visage, but in a white shade, still shedding tears but for different reasons, now sorrowful in regret for the fact that they had ever been apart. Two shoulder ads added to the regality, and were complimented by a long, large, and ragged cape, a decently thick cloak that hung down just an inch or two above her angles, and its hem purposefully torn into tasteful raggedy and almost-burned looking frayed ends. Over her hands were two golden gauntlets, Azrael’s, but with the bat’s gold, on her hips was a golden utility belt, and on her side, slung into a side-worn buckle on that belt, was a refined, smaller sword, lesser in blunt force but stronger in its sharpness. She was whole. She was complete. And she was magnificent.

Meanwhile, Brian and the Guardian were still unsuccessfully trying to keep the dragon at bay, and now he had begun to grow tired of meeting them on their level.

“Your turn, cat lady, I think I’ve run out of material.”

“I’ll do my best,”, she replied. “But I hope Azrael returns to us soon, we can’t keep this oppressor distracted all night.”

The one in the purple proceeded to then stop being serious and pull her mouth open with her fingers, wagging her tongue at the lizard and beginning to hiss and taunt him.

“NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH NYAH!!!! Oy, get over ‘ere, ‘eyou insufferable FUCKING SIMPLETON!!!!”

The dragon was not amused and proceeded to lift his club high into the sky, proclaiming that; “I’LL TASTE YOUR MEAT–!”, before he was interjected by the strained but satisfied-sounding words of the new queen.

“The menu has just changed.”

“Who… Is that?”, asked Brian.

And the guardian answered; “Our mistress. Times two.”

“Hmmph. You’ve gotten… bigger… Fiercer… Meaner…?”, the giant lizard asked the reformed ruler over all of Hell.

“Oh, no, very much so.”, she responded while stepping over the drawbridge and letting her ragged cloak blow behind her as she walked. “You still wish to challenge me? Still hunger for meat?”

Beginning to shake and quake under his mask, Bane hastily acknowledged reality and put the weapon down.

“Meat? Me? Good old vegetarian Me?”

Bat-Queen pointed right to the broken gates of her burning city, and gave him the ultimatum.

“Out. NOW. And only stop going when someone asks you your name… In Chinese.”

He ran.

“I doubt we’ll ever have to see his like again.”, proclaimed the Cat-Woman with a sigh of satisfaction. “Now, the both of you, go on and stand on this square.”

Once all three of them had stepped onto the square carved into the first room of the queen’s tower, the ground began to shake at the slamming down of the Cat’s enchanted spear, and the entire section became a platform, and soon enough all three of them were descending down underneath the Earth, beholding the treasure underground, a sprawling fantastical and technological complex, sleek in its building designs, hustling and bustling with life, and lighting up the entire giant cavern with its magical light.

“We happen to be standing upon one of hundreds of elevators cunningly concealed throughout the city.”

“Where will we stop?”

“Hades?”

“No. Far from it. Welcome, my queen, into the true Gotham City. Here you will come to the final crossroads, the river that will take you to Paradise, or to a Knightmare. Whichever one you will find is entirely up to your decision.”

“And so, they came upon the waterway, the final dock leading up to it containing two things: A fine boat for them to use, and a familiar sorceress waiting for them by the lamppost. Paying her respects, the queen bowed, and began to strike a conversation with her.”

“Greetings, sister. I can see that you’ve been waiting for us.”

“Indeed I have, Azrael; or should I now call you Queen? Your performance in your quest has pleased me, and so I have come down here to personally see you off on your truly final leg. Oh, and to you, Brother Brian, your guidance of Azrael has proven to be satisfactory to my sensibilities. I thank you as well. Now, please tell me, Bat-Queen, what do you think of this serene city?”

“I see an underground metropolis. Quite a beautiful underground metropolis.”

“Oh no no, not Metropolis.”, Sister Lilhy said with a laugh. “That’s another city entirely, with their own king, their Super-Man. But, as I said, this is Gotham. Years ago, its people constructed the mountainous monstrosity above us to discourage unwelcome guests.”

“Quite the successful scheme until the Argonian and his Demon friend made a stop into our territory.”, remarked the guardswoman with the cat ears.

“Surely the devil who attacked the Ice Palace!”, was the next remark, this time from Brother Brian.

“That would be the demon Bis, yes.”, remarked the sorceress while guiding them to the boat with an extended hand reaching out into the air to gesture toward it. “Now, here we are.”

“An underground river?”

“Indeed. The one that we were told did not exist.”

Both of them stepped into the boat and sat themselves down upon it, looking up to the sorceress and the guardian and addressing them one final time before they went.

“Are you not going to come along with us for the ride?”

“My duty is to Gotham, and until you return I will not leave it. That is my sworn duty, to be a protector and a stewardess serving you in unwavering faith.”, was the response of the feline fighter.

“I will return to the both of you once you have finished up your business ahead.”, finished Lilhy, with a smirk that so obviously betrayed her knowing something that they definitely didn’t. “Rest assured, I will make my new home in this dark paradise, this Gotham. And I will wait for you, Bat-Queen.”

“I can’t leave the quest unfinished.”, Brian muttered. “I’m sticking with you until the end has been reached.”

“Assuming that there even is a quest at the end of it all.”, the queen muttered. “Assuming it’s a goal. And assuming that I’ll recognise it when I see it.”

“You will go, but you will return.”, the sorceress responded, before kneeling down on one foot, untying their boat from the post, and giving their boat an enchanted flick to push them off into the rushing river of blue and grey and white, sending them off into a subterranean cave and the women at the dock eventually losing all sight of them, as they disappeared into the darkness.

“You will come back to me.”

“They came upon, after several hundred feet, an even split in the cavern ways, and in the middle of it was a platform of rock connected to a wall of stone. The river divided, as did the road. But this time there was no Two-Face to give them the runaround. Far from it. A faint presence could be felt in the air, a faint pair of voices coming from just ahead. And as they came closer, the previously-unseen torches embedded by iron into the walls of stone turned themselves on, revealing where and who the voices had come from, a malnourished-looking woman clothed in white and sporting a diadem of sapphires with fine rubies set into it, the silken fine hair of darkened gold that fell from her head fanning out onto the rocky floor of the crossroads, and her long and smooth bangs swept entirely over her face’s left half, as she continued to sit down on the edge of the stone terrain, her legs and feet submerged in the water, much like the creature at her side, an Imp with faded skin that made it look like a puppet, in a stitched-together robe of deep blue patches mixed with lighter and brighter shades, sitting still by her side and waiting for any new souls to arrive and seek their counsel. They said nothing, did nothing, not until they looked their faces up to behold the unexpected visitors from the world above.”

“What is this display, Brian?”

“We must be getting close to the Ice Palace, Miss Bat. The legends told of a pair of wayfinders who stood, or, I suppose, now sit, at the entrances of the two states of existence. One has the face of the peaceful, childlike realm of paradise and harmony, and the other reflects the harsh, churning lakes of fire and torment of the inferno.”

“Ahh, but which one is which?”

“That…”, the maiden in white told them, her bony limbs and sharp edges somewhat visible underneath the flowing and baggy garments. “Is irrelevant to your quest. What is relevant, indeed, to you, is what you want from us.”

“You seek the way back home.”, finished the Imp. “You will need our guidance to avoid being Wasted On The Way.”

“To see the true light of the Southern Cross.”, added the woman, before the two of them began to harmonise their answers.

“Especially so to bypass Our House, to ensure that you’ve Got It Made, to finally get to Woodstock aboard the Marrakesh Express.”

“I presume that you will also help us sing a Night Song and successfully Carry On?”

“How do we even know that they’re not simply going to leave us Helpless, before we get to see Daylight Again?”

“We assure you, siblings of Saint Dumas, that we remain here only to point you away from Deja Vu, for we are impartial and we could never live without Fair Game, for we have obtained through the gossip grapes of the vineyard, morsels, so many morsels, sweetness of buzz and rumors and gossip and reports about your powerful exploits.”

“So, no, I would never steer you wrong, oh Dark Star.”, the maiden with the crown finished.

She lifted her scrawny left arm and pointed to the tunnel to her left.

“This way to your order.”

“And so they went, staring at the peculiar couple of waypointers as they rowed by, the claws of the bat providing all of the momentum that they needed, rowing with her sheer force through the mild waters.

Waters that became cold.

And colder.

And even colder.”

“Those fellows were certainly something else.”

“Certainly.”

“Most definitely.”

“But I feel like they still have some kind of wisdom hidden underneath that hair and those robes. Otherwise, why would they choose to be here?”

“Well, I can tell you one thing.”

“And that would be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Very. Helpful. Very helpful.”

“And now suddenly it’s danker, darker, and far colder.”, Brian muttered.

“And there’s the reason why.”, commented the Bat-Queen as she pointed on beyond ahead to a thick and frigid wall of ice that covered the entirety of the pathway ahead and blocked off the tunnel. “We are beneath the Ice Palace."

“And we can proceed no further.”, Brian said with an annoyed moan. “That ice bars—”

“Not for long.”

Once again her left arm rose up and the blade at her side began to burn, transferring its presence into her hand and lighting up the cavern, but this time, in a darker, muted blue. A simple blazing swing would be enough.

“The tunnel hummed and hissed with the swinging of the bat’s flaming blade, and audibly cracked with the shattering of frozen frosted obstructions, clearing out a giant hole in the expanse of the river that allowed them to move further, and in less time then it takes to speak of it.”

And now, the true destination was finally available to them.

“At last, we have arrived, I can feel it.”

“And here before our very eyes lies the greatest secret of the Order Of Saint Dumas.”

Brian and the Bat-Queen stepped off of the boat and onto the dry land of the underground, for now they had come into a vast and open chamber that went high up into the air, so high that they couldn’t see the ceiling, and through it all positively stuffed with machines upon machines upon machines, cranks and tubes and boxes and wires and cables and steam pumps that filled the underground with the radiating heat that was only kept non-fatal by the unparalleled coldness of the ground under the palace. The population of this space was not normal humans, rather, they were of the small sort, dwarf-like beings dressed in hooded robes that obscured their faces from the view of outsiders, busy with tending to the machines on various ways, pouring coal into chutes, maintaining the temperatures of the cooling systems, turning wheels, and cranking valves all with their own two hands.

“The chamber of the acolytes.”, finished Brian. “Well, at least that’s the order’s name for them, anyway. ‘Acolytes.’ Most other reasonable human beings would just call them ‘slaves’.”

“What are they so occupied with doing?”, inquired the queen, who was busy herself with looking around, both at the machines and at the little people, dressed in their middy greens and dusty browns, in a rhythmic trance of working all day and all night long.

“Everything.”, Brian began to answer. “Operating the machinery which freezes the water and keeps the palace intact. Growing food and making bread and weaving cloth and sewing garments. Seeing to every need and comfort of those above them.”

“Including you and I.”, Batqueen muttered, flaming sword still in hand, while stepping towards one of the Acolytes, turning him around with her claw on his shoulder to distract him from his work of pushing along a cart of coal, threatening him with the edge of the blade, and then asking him a question.

“You! What is your reward for this labour?!”

“Reward?”, asked the acolyte as if he didn’t understand the concept. “There are no rewards, there is no compensation, no rest, and no breaks. We are slaves, Bat, slaves, and what we do is what we always have done, what we must always do.”

The little man in the brown hood and robe looked up to the roof of the underground chamber, where all of the machines and the systems joined together.

“The machines have to function, they have to!”

In response, the Bat’s eyes narrowed.

“I don’t think so.”

And so, with a few steps forward and a single powered-up blue flaming strike, the Bat-Queen brought her sword upon the machines, just one attack causing a chain reaction that caused the entire system to come crashing down, folding in on itself, and causing a series of explosions of steam and flames and fuel, the crowd of slaves huddling along the carved and dug stone walls to hide from the material falling down, and up above, the entire palace melting and turning into steam, the ice quickly becoming nothing but dripping and evaporating water, and then becoming a pillar of icy, steamy smoke, before an entirely new sensation came to the slaves.

Rain. Rain began to pour on them from up above, melted ice from the crumbled palace mixed in with the falling pitter-patters of droplets of precipitation from the dark and cold clouds above. It was a rain of repentance, of refreshment, and a rain of freedom, of renewal. It formed droplets on their robes and left puddles on the ground, cooled the heated air left by the oppressive mechanical operations of the sinister system, freshened up the air and cleared out the steam and smoke, and allowed them, all of them, Brian, the Bat-Queen, and all the slaves, to look upwards and see into the sky, seeing the raining sky through the natural bridges of rock that the palace had formerly sat on, behold its raining beauty, and marvel at it.

“And so, in the end, Azrael did become an adult.”, finished the man named John, still sitting upon the well in front of all the children.

“And perhaps, even something more.”

“That was a really, really great story, Nunky…”, began one of the older girls at the front of the crowd, with her smooth brown hair tied into both long twintails and a pair of donut buns at each side of her head, and a few scratches and spots of wear and tear on her robe.

“But what was the point of it?”, added the child next to her, a littler girl with a cleaner, neater robe with her teal hair tied into two jagged tails behind her ears. “What does it mean?”

“Yeah, Nunky, what does it really mean? Come on, you don’t have to be shy about it. Come on, you can tell us if it has a meaning!”, finished the girl with the brown hair.

‘John’ took a heavy breath and rested his hands on his knees, before telling them what he thought it meant. For, in the end, that was all that the Martian could tell them. He could only give them his opinion, his perspective, his point of view. Everything else, the children, the future of this human species that he had dedicated his whole life to protecting and mentoring, would have to make their own ways, find their own stories, and find their own meaning. He lifted up his head, which, like the rest of his body, was green in skin colour, with no hair but a defined brow shape from his skull, and sported a pair of glowing red eyes that could make anyone lost in how much they seemed to see and know at all times, and beheld the overcast sky for himself, before looking back down to the children and delivering his statement.

“Yes. Or no. Yes and no. You children, you must do as Azrael did. Seek your own answers, blaze your own trail, carve your own path, make your own way, find your own truth. And, if it ever sees fit for you to tell this story to someone else, and find even more truth in so doing, tell this fantastic tale in your own words, then that would be amusing and good and useful.”

And then the Martian Manhunter, J’onn J’onzz, the hero, and now the peaceful teacher of the future, smiled, and finished addressing the crowd.

“And so indeed, that is the reason for why I have told you this tale, or any other.”

“Well…”, Brian said. “That was simple."

Stepping to her side, he continued to opine.

“The palace is now a puddle. With no need to maintain it anymore, there’s nothing for the slaves to do.”

The queenly response from the armoured titan was a simple one.

“Except stop being slaves.”

The crowd of acolytes began to murmur and talk amongst themselves, talking with one another, looking up at the darkened sky, feeling the coolness and refreshments of the rain, and looking to the queen to ask her for guidance.

“Why, Bat-Queen? Why?”

“Why would you end all that we’ve ever known? Why would you bring about the fall of what has been our existence for all our lives?”

“Wherever shall we go?”

“Whatever shall we do?”

The queen of Gotham sheathed her now-deactivated sword, smoothly slipping it back into its fine leather scabbard, and turned her gaze down from the raining sky, and told them her own view on the situation, and how she thought that freedom stood above all else, whether for good or for evil, if one were free, they could exist with no bindings, no chains, no bonds.

“Seek for yourself your own answers…”

Her clawed gauntlets gripped onto her bat-mask, taking a deep breath, inhaling the freshened-up air through her mask’s filters, and removed it, holding it by her side with her left arm, and letting her ears and hair flow free in the wind. She looked upon the sky with bright red eyes, shining gems the colour of blood, and then down to the crowd of the freed slaves of the order of Saint Dumas, who witnessed them go back to blue, that beautiful light blue, the sign that Azrael had withdrawn in the newfound time of peace, waiting until if the other ever needed to put the mask back on and save any others. But for now, in this concentrated moment of freedom, Jeanne was the one underneath the armour, the one whose hair and cape blew in the windy and rainy and now-open chamber. Getting rained on. And feeling good. And the one who spoke to the former acolytes once more.

“Just as I will seek mine.”

NIGHT’S QUEST

A man of dark skin, dark hair, and an outfit split cleanly down the middle, just like his face, stood at the point of the crossroads that, from an outsider’s viewing angles, on their left side veered off into a pleasant path of nice and smooth cobbled stones and flanked by all pleasant forms of wildlife such as rabbits, tigers, bears, trees bearing succulent and plump fruit, meadowy flowers in blues and whites and reds and lavenders, and on their right side trailing off into a beaten path bearing harsher and more dead-looking vegetation, such as ground-sprouting palm fronds charred with red and black, burnt-up husks and remnants of poisonous hemlocks and bitter berry trees that enshrouded the entirety of the canopy in volcanic ashes and played host to veins of liquid in the ground leaking poisonous acid.

The man failed to notice the two of them at first, simply grimacing with the hideous side of his face and looking tense and pensive with the clean one, while holding a pole in his left hand with two arrow signs, one of which coloured in light wood with dark lettering that proclaimed: Right Way and the other pointing in the opposite direction, rendered in dark wood and carved in lighter text proclaiming: WRONG WAY. His other hand was busy with flipping a two-sided Saint Cloud Silver coin, both sides of it heads, showing a depiction of a woman’s face seen from the side, but one of those heads intentionally scarred with dagger-originated wounds across its facing cheek and disfigured over its eye, while the man just kept flipping, and flipping, and flipping, and flipping, over and over and over again until by that point he had almost hypnotised himself.

“Okay, now, give me a heads, lady, it’s gotta be heads.”

Flippppp…!

“Or maybe I’m not too sure heads is right. Maybe? What if that was what I was searching for? Oh well.”

Flippppp…!

“Okay, maybe, two out of three? Two and a half out of five?”

Flippppp…!

“Okay, maybe three out of five. Heads I’m good, tails I’m evil…”

Flippppp…!

“Um, pardon me, good sir…”, Brother Brian interjected, which caused the man with two faces, dressed in an outfit that was one half of a princely uniform, bright, calming blue colours against a white canvas in a military fashion, and finely fitted to every specific aspect of his bodily framework, and one half of a dark knight’s radiant raiment, red and baggy with a giant black shoulderpad and golden trimming over his left arm and shoulder side, a wild leather belt, and a garment torn up at every last possible location, just enough to keep it from falling off of his body, to be thrown out of his focus and drop his coin.

“GODDAMNIT YOU DUNCE YOU MADE ME LOSE COUNT!!”, the man responded in a rushing flurry of anger, making his left half appear to be the stronger in the environment of the moment. As he frantically knelt down upon his hands and knees to pick up his precious, precious coin, his left sharp and pointed fangs accidentally bit down upon his tongue, causing him to yelp in panic and lose his coin again, scurrying about in even more panic to rectify his blunder of a mistake.

“Come on, come on, come on, woman… Was it two heads and a tail…? Or two tails and a head…? Or…?”

“Sir, might I inquire about what you’re up to?”, Sister Jeanne finally asked him out loud while feeling a spark of flames gather in her eyes, just in case she needed to let Azrael out right now and initiate a preemptive counterstrike against this split madman.

“Tossing a coin.”, the man replied. “Trying once again to come to the daily decision of whether or not I should be good or should be evil.”

Finally reclaiming his beloved scarred-side coin, the split-up man in the wild outfit looked up and finally managed a grimace and grin combo, naturally featuring one on each side.

“With a face like mine you can definitely see how it would become an issue.”

“Do you know the way to Gotham?”

The man sighed in reply and folded his fists up against his hips, before leaning into their airspace and responding with extreme sarcasm: “Do I look like I know the way to Gotham?”

Failing to recognise this particular form of semi-verbal communication, Sister Jeanne bounty replied to his query: “Actually, half of you does.”

Reasoning that the path labeled as the wrong one was honestly much more likely to be labelled that way to deter people from going there, Brian took the initiative to point towards the acidic and charred way right.

“We’ll take this road.”

“Ughh, now where was I?”, the man said as the two of them began to walk up, up, and away from him, up the stone steps and through the grim dark woods, careful to avoid the plumes of lava and the purple acid geysers.

“Now, three out of five… Four out of seven…”

“Through the darkest night that they had ever experienced, the two of them slowly trod their way through the winding, hole-pocked path, in the middle of the rains that seemed less like a pleasant shower and much closer to something resembling an unholy marriage between a tornado and a hurricane. Day brought neither warmth or comfort. First, there came a blazing wind that required Azrael to transform in order to protect Brian and survive, second there came upon them a plague of total darkness, third the sky gave up and attempted to send down upon them a hail of glistening icicle spears that were only barely kept at bay, and finally, it once more returned to it being miserable rain, a rain positively stuffed full of ice and misery. That following evening, then, they came to a sign.”

Azrael and Brian stood before a gigantic rectangular wooden sign upon posts marked with blood, the same life-giving liquid that spelled out a missive in barely legible text that seemed like a final message.

B E W A R E

T H E

M O N S T E R

“Monster? What monster?”, Azrael asked as they looked beyond the limits of the shore, surrounded by the very deep and very dark evergreen tree forest, with its dark edges coming up to a violent and abrupt halt at the bay of dark brown rocks and navy blue-grey water, dark water that seemed itself to be imbued with a heinous and evil presence.

“That could be it.”, Brian dryly commented, a stark contrast to the fact that the pelting dark rain was leaving no part of them dry, the churning black-blue skies ushering in the coming of the torrent of the night, the winds igniting the dark water into roaring seismic waves tapped with freezing white edges and carrying enough power to annihilate a ship.

“Far too wide for us to cross, even if it wasn’t such a raging flood. Which it most definitely is. Oh dear. I am afraid our journey is at an end, Azrael.”

“And so the fork says to the spoon…”

A third voice was heard by the rain-soaked expeditioners, a clownish tone belonging to a man dressed in purple and white for a comedian’s garment, whose white-skinned face was peeking out from behind the wooden sign, having been waiting for the perfect opportunity to emerge and to mock them. As he stuck his head out to laugh at them, the silver bells of his purple jester hat began to ring, sending all attention onto him, while his green hair continued to move about in the screaming winds and his red lips remained parted in a psychotic smile to show his sharp teeth.

“‘Oh, who was the fine little ladle that I saw you with last night out there in the drawer?’ And then the spoon says, ‘That was not just a ladle, that was my knife!’”

Somehow Azrael and Brian felt so much worse.

After the two of them had finished exchanging winced and painful glances between themselves, the third man, who had been safely sheltered under a wooden-poled umbrella in his usual purple and green and white, stepped out to the tune of more of the swinging bells, which he also had on the edges of his boots. Gesturing in an exaggerated bow, he told them; “Why so glum, chums? Joker’s the name, and comedy’s the game! I’m rather happy to be working here today. Fact is, I’m happy to be working anywhere today!”

Neither one of them knew how they were supposed to react to that statement of intent.

The ‘Joker’ took notice.

“You’re.

NOT.

LAUGHING.”

“Perhaps we would if you were willing to inform us if there’s a way across the river.”, the white angel bluntly replied.

“Well, well, well, well, now we’re getting interesting. Most certainly and most excellently I can! I could. But why would I? Oh, well, I’m just such a nice and caring philanthropist who dedicates all his time to feeding the children and saving the rainforest. I can help you. But… Only on one condition…”

“And that condition is…?”

“That you appreciate my skills. Applaud my art. Tantalise my talent. Recognise my absolute unparalleled brilliance. Acknowledge my unrivaled mastery. Laugh. At. My. Jokes. You disgusting pair of revolting rats.”

“Um. Well. Okay.”, Brian uttered.

“We’ll find funny anything that you present to us.”, Azrael agreed.

“All right, Joker. Tell us a joke.”

Smiling even more psychotically, the man with the green hair and the white skin took both of his white gloves off to feel the rain with his bare white hands, his mullet of deep green blowing about in the soaking winds as he continued to step and hop around.

“Oh, ho ho, ho, but, no, seriously, folks, how about this weather, huh? Am I wrong for thinking it people, or is it here just…”

The two observers could sense it; they could feel it; the immense horribility of the incoming punchline just waiting to make them wish they were already dead.

“One damp thing after another?”

Yep. They both thought the exact same thing. They were probably better off dead than standing still and listening.

“That’s… That’s rather clever… Haha, ha, ha, ha, ha, haha…”

“Yes… It’s so funny… Mister… Joker… Sir. Ha-ha–ha-ha Ha-ha-ha-ha.”

As the insane man in the jester outfit and the green mullet smiled in response under his safe and dry umbrella, he gestured with his left hand towards one of the walls of rain pounding down upon them and that had been overfilling the lake, and as if by force of magic the wall parted and revealed a wooden dock and jetty of old wood planks and utterly soaked in the pouring rain, but thankfully accompanied by a dark wooden boat, which at least looked reasonably sturdy against the harsh and pounding force of the water. Picking up a pair of wood paddles from out of nowhere, the Joker grinned again and told them this.

“Thank you, thank you, one and all among you. You’ve been such a truly great audience for me, and I do mean that oh so sincerely. Now, then, on to what you revealed your happy-chappy taste for my jokes for. BUT, before we push off into the briny deep, I’ve got to warn the two of you about something. Now, you listen here to me and you listen to me good: Whatever you two do, anything but for this one thing; DO. NOT. WHISTLE. GET IT?!?!”

The two of them just had to sigh, keep slouching, and reply in unison as they got on the boat.

“We do.”

“We do.”

Once all three of them had finally left the dandy duffy dock and parked themselves into the boat, the Joker at the front with his back facing the same direction, Azrael seated at attention in the back and facing towards the Joker at the head of the helm, and Brian having drawn the unfortunate luck of having to be sat in between the two of them and looking out over the side, the clown man continued to explain his bizarre sense of warnings.

“Because, you see here, fine and upstanding fellows, there exists a terrible sea serpent in the middle of the river which we are deigned to go across, and if anyone, anyone, just so happens to whistle out for him, then he will rear himself up and ferociously eat them. Chomp. One bite. Down the throat. Down the hatch. Right down the line. Upchuck. The end. You understand me, adventurinos?”

“We do.”

“We do.”

“Is this sea serpent meant to be another joke of yours? Should we be laughing? Or at least chuckling? Smiling in amused appreciation at your artistry and mastery?”, inquired Brian.

The Joker in the puffy pants made his response to Brian’s particular ask, responding with, “Could you really possibly think that I would jest about a Sea Serpent? Why, however on Earth could you think that of me? Now remember, distinguished gentleman, now matter how much you may want to whistle, regardless of how great your need to whistle…

DO NOT WHISTLE!”

Azrael took a brief moment to pause from rowing the boat and let her fingers go up to her face, feeling the mask for a few brief moments and then slowly removing it, alongside with changing her hair-hood into her proper hair, setting down the mask onto the floor of their transportation and breathing in a chilled air. Now it was Jeanne’s face underneath the mask that had been made visible, but nonetheless it was Azrrael who still remained in control of her form, taking the moment to breathe free from immediate violence and take in some of the environment around them without a mask on all the time.

The air smelled of smog and smoke and singed everything, but nonetheless the rain felt good. Her red eyes could see everything in the distance up until the surrounding walls of smoke and rain and trees made it impossible for her, her nose could smell the aroma of the acid being drenched out by the winds and the rains, the wafting air of the evergreen trees filling her entire being with a pleasant sense of serenity that she had never truly sensed before. It reminded her of something near to her heart, but she didn’t quite know what it was. But this much she did know. She was Azrael, she was getting rained on, and somehow, in this vortex of chaos, she was feeling good.

“So, my fabulous guests, shall we sing for ourselves a spirited shanty of the sea?”, the jester proclaimed seemingly apropo of nothing.

Azrael just sighed while her hair blew about in the raining wind.

“Well, you know what? Why not?”

“Supple! Superb, Splendid, even! All right, now, you two, let’s sing along to a song that you already know!”

So, in his deranged cadence and melody, he started singing.

“I started a joke,

Which started the whole world crying.

But I didn't see,

That the joke was on me, oh no…”

Then it was Brian who joined in to supplement the singing of the clown.

“I started to cry,

Which started the whole world laughing…

Oh, if I'd only seen,

That the joke was on me…”

Following that, the angel reluctantly started singing along with the both of them.

“I looked at the skies,

Running my hands, over my eyes!

And I, fell out of bed,

Hurting my head, from things that I'd said!”

Now, it was all three of them singing together in the torrent of rain.

“'Til I finally died,

Which started the whole world living.

Oh, if I'd only seen…

That the joke was on me!

I looked at the skies,

Running my hands, over my eyes!

And I, fell out of bed,

Hurting my head, from things that I'd said!”

'Til I finally died,

Which started the whole world living;

Oh, if I'd only seen, oh yeah,

That the joke was on me;

Oh no, that the joke was on me, oh…”

For a few brief, calm, peaceful moments, the three of them just sat there and they drifted.

In the chilling water,

In the torrent.

Bobbing in the rapid waves of deepest blue and black and white.

Getting rained on hard.

In the dark night.

Alone.

Then, the Joker broke the silence.

“Well, this ought to be far enough.”

Standing atop the boat’s dark wooden floor, the clown tossed his umbrella aside and threw his arms out in an exaggerated gesture of… something, what it was, Azrael was really not quite sure. What she ultimately was sure of, however, was what the green-mulleted jester proceeded to do after.

“Shrill, piercing, and loud enough to break down windows and eardrums from miles away, if there had been any windows for miles around – That was what ripped out of the Joker’s pursed lips. The most irritating kind of whistle.”

And sure enough, the jester’s warning had indeed been true; for an abominable, towering, slippery scaled creature the colour of the sea with two serpentine flaming eyes and a line of giant angled fins lining up across its back, four different sets of teeth in rows atop one another, and an extreme thirst for fresh blood, erupted from its home out of the chilling depths, almost revering the flow of water upwards as it made itself known to the passengers in the boat, bending the very presence of the water around it and causing an extreme horrid tsunami to flow in a vortex around it.

Naturally they were thrown right out of the boat as the Sea Serpent smashed it with a single slithering strike.

“WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!?!”

“WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!?!”

“Hey, what can I tell you? I’m just a nutty little guy. It’s my nature, you know.”

Utterly unamused, Azrael foiled around for a few moments to find her mask, which reconfigured her hair into its long and wild hood-hair-esque configuration once she donned it over her head, then proceeded to illuminate the darkness in a ten-foot radius as her left once more raised itself up. In no time at all the surface of the water began to catch fire, erupting into an explosive blaze with a red edge and a white core, sending fireworks of flames up into the sky as the angelic sword manifested itself into her hand. With a gigantic leap up into the vortex, Azrael managed to find her way to landing atop the beast’s body, running her way across its massive hardened scales and fighting to hold on for dear life against its powerful bucking and brashing in its vain attempt to get her off before she could to it any proper damage. But it was ultimately futile, for a single fired-up deep and radiating stab into one of the spots between the scales on its head proved to be the sole, and finishing, move. Instantly a geyser of blood spurted out of its wound, sending its nervous systems into an automatic thrashing, and ultimately making the corpse fall over into the ocean with its full weight and knock Azrael and Brian away with a devastating, crashing wave that blocked them from seeing anything else for almost a solid minute. By the time that Brian had poked his head out of the water and retrieved his hat from the river, he was greeted by the very welcome sight of the angel Azrael, perched atop the departed reptile, her armoured hands and fists covered in a peculiar kind of green and blue blood, extending a gauntleted hand to him to pull him out. As the two of them finally got their coveted immediate vision back, the path to the desaturated reddish-brown rocky terrain finally became clear to them.

“Come along with me, Brian; for the dead beast has made for us our way to the shore, our bridge has come out of additional carnage.”

“Nice to know it’s actually useful for something.”

“What about me?”, asked the Joker from the calmer waters, utterly soaked. “Aren’t you going to help out an old friend in need?”

“That is without question the first funny thing that you’ve ever said.”

“You didn’t like the one about the ladle and the spoon?”, he asked in response, genuinely hurt.

As the two of them simply walked away towards the cracked and crooked and jagged mountain pass and disappeared in the distance, the clown just continued to blather on in vain. “You hear the one about the priest, the rabbi, and the agronomist?”

“The terrain the two of them were crossing slowly began to change its shape and its features, from the tempest of the river, to the darkness and haunting atmosphere of the forest, to the roughness once more of the beaten pathways half as old as the species who built them itself, to the penultimate roadway to their destination, what seemed like endless steps cut into the mountains in perfect measurement with each other, winding up through the mountainside, exposing the terrain down below as a rocky landscape in washed-out shades of browns and greys and reds and greens and blues and clays, harsh and dry terrain with a middling average temperature and little to no fall of the same pouring rain that had been their previous torment. Once the two travellers had been spit out of the winding tunnels that had taken into the heart of the rock itself, they were ushered by the pathway onto the overlook, the peak of the mountain landscape, wherein they could see almost everything as far as the receptors of their vision would let them. Seeing the utility of this as a stopping point, both Azrael and Brian decided to sit down and talk some things over.”

“Hm. The storm’s stopped.”

“Yes. Yes it did. It died the moment you materialised your weapon.”

“Could be coincidence.”

“Quite unlikely, my aura-blazing friend. You, Azrael, have a special kind of gift for yourself. It seems that your energy, aggression, passion, and power can somehow bring light to areas cloaked in the physical and spiritual darkness simply by existing and being exercised. Much like your free will, actually. Much like all our free will.”

“Free will?”

“Yes, at least if you believe in that sort of thing. Personally, I do put my faith into it, the idea that we are all in control over our own destinies. No matter what we think may be appointed by the sands of time for us to follow until the end of eternity.”

“If what you say to me is true, then it would certainly bring me comfort. Then again… perhaps the truths of life aren’t meant to bring us comfort. Maybe, they’re meant to keep us in reality. Keep us away from bogging ourselves down in stupid, foolish fantasies of complete freedom and the accompanying insanity that it could bring.”

“That’s a rather sour way of looking at things, isn’t it? Besides, it’s not like it’s just a negative thing for us and for our minds. Free will is a muscle that must always be exercised in order to be preserved, and it is that muscle of the will that can allow you to break free of the unseen chains that hold you down.”

“The chains that hold all of us down…”

“Azrael, I think you might be closer to understanding free will than you think.”

“Later on, the both of them looked on, out, and over the mountain, finally beholding the ultimate goal of their journey hidden in the rocks and walls of the surroundings attempting their best to bar it off. They beheld a city of ruined houses and buildings, Frankensteined from wood planks, cobblestone bricks, wrought iron supports and beams of timber showing through the outsides of the walls for support, all of them interspersed with various random stacks of flame and smoke and pitchforks and execution stakes, walled off from the outside world by a wrapping-around set of grey and brick castle walls with various shades of dark blue thrown in, such as scattered in between the bricks and rather very prevalent on the roofs. Crennellations of spikes and gothic latticed fences adorned the layers of walls and the city battlements, and atop it all, upon a hill at the northernmost section of the territory, stood a tower of layered and stacked square levels, a blue rooftop for each of them that grew progressively shorter, a tower reaching up over every last one of the buildings in the city, scraping up to the sky and each roof lines with dark and spoked metal lattice fencing, matching quite nicely with the iron bars of each of the slitted windows. Both of them knew it, both of them could feel it, this was their final destination, the home of the fabled Bat-Queen, the dark hell plagued by the shadow of doom, the pit of devils and darkness, and the flaming fortress of the undead.”

“Gotham.”

“Standing there for us to conquer.”

“The air…”

“Even from up here. I can just feel how it must be down there Foul. Pestilent. Reeks similar to a dead rat.”

“Come on, Azrael. The end is in sight.”

“Let’s go to Hell.”

Gotham City, the infernal stronghold where violence reigned supreme and the most ruthless were lured in and attracted. Once Azrael and Brian had gotten to within a distance of a few hundred feet from the city they had received a different kind of view of it. And most definitely a worse one. Fire and smoke erupting everywhere, the screams and cries of the lawless and their few innocent victims emanating for miles around, the walls in extreme disrepair and belching out plumes of blackened flame, boxed in on all sides by mountains and valleys that left it at the very bottom of the territory, skies that had been turned a sickened, bruisened purple by the constant flames and smokestacks as well as the collective energy of the vileness of the place and its inhabitants almost having a physical effect on the space sound them.

“Are you still sure you want to claim your adulthood? Or wherever it is that you were sent after?”, Brian inquired while turning back to Azrael to face her. “I’m not too sure anything is worth going into that hellhole.”

“We’ve already come this far…”

“And you should come no further!”, came the voice of another woman standing atop a set of cragged rocks, dressed in a black robe with purple trim on all relevant sides, with a collar and hem lined with battle-earned dark grey fur, sporting upon her form short cut hair of charcoal, toughened skin of olive, eyes of a blazing emerald, two black-furred cat ears atop her head that replaced the role of normal human ears, and in her left hand a staff of fine thin wood with lions and jaguars and leopards and panthers carved into it, topped with a stake spearhead that pierced through a bat-shaped decoration crowning its top, and several scars across her face and limbs, looking utterly displeased with the presence of these newcomers.

“Gotham is a terrible, vile place. It’s actually even worse than it looks. You two really should avoid it. Never too late to turn back, eh?”

“Pardon me for being so blunt, but who are you?”, raised the question of the angel.

“Cat-Woman. Guardian of Gotham in the queen’s absence. With how long it’s been since she was here with us, it might as well be my full-time occupation. Unfortunately.”

“You say that your queen’s been missing?”

“Possibly something much, much worse.”, the Cat-Woman replied. “For years our ruler has been held a prisoner in her own home by the dragon of the Sevii Islands. After so long without a thing we’ve heard from her… We the people of Gotham fear the worst. And it’s most definitely not exactly going to get better, either. Not unless…”

Pointing to the two of them, the woman asked them a question that could possibly change everything.

“You two wouldn’t happen to be adept at dealing with monsters… Would You?”

“Monsters, monsters, SURELY MONSTERS!”, Brian began while gesturing to the angelic figure by his side. “Obviously you do not recognise who you are talking to! The one next to me, she is Azrael! Avenging angel assassin par excellence, second to none! She deals with six monsters before breakfast in the morning. Sometimes she has them for breakfast in the morning. With milk and sugar. And sliced strawberries, occasionally.”

Azrael would have objected to the stretching of the truth around her accomplishments, but considering that it was a nice little boost for the ego, she chose to not mention it.

The woman above responded with a nod of possible approval. “Well then, if what you tell me is even a half-truth, then she might have to do. She just might.”

“Just might have to do what?”

“You’re right, I should explain.”

She dropped down onto the beaten path with a minor thud, and ushered the both of them down the hill, the path that was flanked on both sides by flaming pyres of blazing corpses that stretched their infernal plumes and lines and stacks of smoke up into the bruised purple sky.

“We have ourselves a problem, and it’s quite a knotty one. Around seven years ago, a giant bipedal lizard man named Bane appeared from out of nowhere and came to Gotham and challenged our queen to combat.”

“You mean the Bat Queen?”

“Yes. The very same.”

“I do seem to remember reading something about that.”

“Brian… She is the one I seek.”

“Naturally the Bat-Queen trounced the Argonian, of course.”

“Oh, no, no, far from it.”, the short-haired woman replied while putting on her black hood and leading them through the broken and opened city gates, leading them into hell and all three of them being greeted by a series of gigantic screens scattered throughout the buildings and the inner city walls.

“The lizard erected these large screens throughout the city – Calls them Video Screens – to show it off how he effortlessly conquered the queen.”

“Your lizard is a classical scholar? Video means, ‘I see’ in its original Latin.

The red static of the video screen suddenly came to life, detecting the arrival of the passers-by and showing to them the story.

“The presentation has begun.”

The video screen played before them a vision of a gigantic dragon on two legs covered with dusty brown scales, with its reptilian face masked underneath a black leather facial covering that let it see through white lenses, a red symbol emblazoned onto its mask that served no purpose other than to intimidate and hide its snout until it was too late, a black combo top and pants over its giant muscular chest, legs, and large clawed feet, kept on with giant leather straps in the same shade of red and buckled by a golden buckle each, and two weighted braces on both its wrists, slamming a figure dressed like a bat, in dark blues and golds for its belt and the silhouette of a Bat symbol upon its face over its mouth, and two long, sharp and, tall bat ears that matched the protruding bladed spikes of her gloves and her boots, right down upon his knee, the blackness of her long bat-mantle draping down like blood behind her, all as the speakers around them played the sound of when the incident happened.

KKKKRRRRAAKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Azrael could see the fear in her eyes as she was lifted up, the instant acceptance as she was sent onto the dragon’s knee, her spine practically breaking into two pieces as the impact was felt across her entire body, and the sheer brutality and callousness with which he simply just tossed her over his shoulder and dragged her across the drawbridge and into the tower, never to be heard from again.

“Starring at the image upon the viewing screen, Azrael was overcome with a strange shock of recognition…”

“So painful to watch…”, the replacement guardian of Gotham remarked. “Not even all my power, cunning, and deceptions could save her…”

“Is your queen dead?”, asked Brian while attempting to ignore the mass of massive crowds.

“No. Not yet. But her fate may very well be worse than death.”

She pointed up to the grand north fortress. “The dragon keeps her alive, imprisoned in that tower.”

“Has anyone ever made an attempt to rescue her?”, asked Azrael.

“Once upon a time several warring criminals of the city were finally able to put their differences aside and try to rescue her. We found enough from four out of them to bury.”

“It was then, and only then, that the angel Azrael finally felt the truth behind her steely determination, the source of all her dreams, her knightmares, and all her troubles, brewing up inside her. It was her, this mysterious fallen ruler, the living object which had brought her here through the spirited efforts of the oracle.”

“Can a dragon really be so much worse than a serpent?”

Both Brian and the guardian instantly took on panicked expressions and turned over to face the angel in white, whose gaze had almost-hypnotically been turned and become fixed on the tower, surrounded by fire and smoke, and littered around by the skeletons and dust and bones and ruination of huge swaths and chunks of the bane’s victims.

“Azrael! Surely you’re not actually considering–”

“The Oracle was very clear. She said that I must unite with the Batqueen. I can’t possibly do that if she’s stuck in the tower.”

“Well… If you think you must…”

“I do.”

Her blood began to rush and feel as if it had been set alight.

“But more than that…”

A new kind of fire flared from within her eyes.

“I want to.”

Her feet automatically started to pick her up and carry her as she ran up though the stairs and the bridges and the alleys and the pitfalls.

“And I NEED to.”

“Azrael, WAIT!” the guardian began as she started to run after the sprinting assassin. “There’s something I have to tell you!”

“You’ll never catch her.”, Brian muttered as she took off for the running assassin.

“I MUST! I NEED to tell her! My mistress’ life depends on it!”

“And so, in a trice, or possibly even less than just a trice, Azrael reached the ebony blackwood drawbridge of the queenly tower, and was quickly met at its bone-and-skeleton-flanked border by the drago in question, the bipedal lizard-beast dressed in rough and baddy black leather, and carrying with him a gigantic club in his left fist, with several nails and claws and skulls seemingly lodged into it. He towered over her, nearly nine feet in height, and having to bend himself down to talk with her eye-to-eyes and face-to-faces. While the guardian of Gotham raced faster than she ever had in an attempt to save her queen from her own rescuer, the lizard spoke.”

“HAHA! A stripling, come to the challenge against the one and only Bane? This fellow seeks to mount a campaign against the mighty himself? Then, quite simply, you present me with a rather vexing problem. Are you perchance an appetiser…”

THUUNNNNKKKK!!!!

“Or dessert?”

Having avoided the bone club of the oppressive biped by a hair, the avenging angel drifted off to the side, almost like she was on autopilot, Azrael fanned herself out and began to radiate the air around her with a warming glow.

“Every single foe that I encounter one after another insists upon the accursed repartee! Save the serpent. There should be much more serpents in this world!”

The air continued to blaze even brighter and hotter, the angelic holy aura flowing with a bright red and white as the concentrated power of the light inside her blazed like a moving sun, illuminating the drawbridge and forming into a column of fire to become her blade.

“Now I offer you a bargain, clumsy dragon. I will end you quickly if you agree to die without another word.”

In response, a simple surprise sudden uppercut from the dragon in the black leather sent her back by at least ten feet, crashing into a crater that wasn’t there a second ago, right at the feet of the approaching cat-woman.

“AUGHFFFF!!”

“Ahem.”

“Oh, it’s you… Care to explain?”

“The dragon is so strong, stronger than even before he left his home, his Black Marsh, and this is the reason: He took our master’s heart and put it in his OWN body! Slay the dragon and you slay the Batqueen with the same stroke!”

Once Azrael had gotten herself up and recuperated, both of them automatically rushed him and started swinging and stabbing.

“Is such a thing even possible, guardian?!”, Azrael shouted while leaving a trail of flames and landing a series of cuts to the beastly man’s thick-scaled skin.

The protectress with the cat ears took a brief moment to pause from hissing and jabbing the dragon at blinding speed with her spear and clawing at the creature in vain to respond to her inquiry. “Here in Gotham, sorcery and science flow together like twin streams of the dark that combine together into a single rushing white water river of evil, and anything is possible…”

Another swipe of her sharpened spear only managed to free a few of the scales upon its arm.

“Provided it has absolutely no logic and could never possibly do anyone any good.”

“Then in that case…”, the angel in white began to respond while flipping the dragon over after running between its legs, while both Bane and the guardian made a sound like an auditory question mark.

“The time is long passed for me to meet your Batqueen.”

AZRAEL ANNUAL II

LEGENDS OF THE DEAD EARTH

SPECIAL THANKS TO

KIRK STOWE

CRAISY DAISY

AND A HOST OF OTHERS WHO MADE THIS PARTICULAR TALE POSSIBLE

“My name is J’onn J’onzz. Once upon a time I was known unto the people of Earth by the identity of the Martian Manhunter, a hero. Other times, I was known by my human disguise of John Jones. A man.

The Earth is dead. Those who have once called it their home have long since scattered or have been scattered unto the endless stars and beyond into any other worlds that may or may not happen to be beyond ours. But, in that scattering, upon a thousand different worlds, and in a thousand different ways… Still, Earth’s legends live on.

The story that I will weave for your consumption is one of these precious living legends, a surviving story from a dead planet that continues to be preserved in our hearts and in our souls, because we are here to remember them, speak them aloud in our words, and to think and ponder about them. Without minds to think about them, all stories would inevitably disappear into the aether of being forever forgotten, just the same as for a former living being. So now it is my hope that, by the passing on of this story as a personal gift from me to you, that the flame of the legend will live on in you and stoke the wonders of its world within your mind. And now, with the hope that you have not gone away, but rather have remained here with me to hear my story, please make yourself comfortable, and let me begin…

Call it a parable, or call it a fable, or call it merely an ancient tale told to you by an old man in the quiet of a sweet October evening…”

CHAPTER I

NIGHT’S FALL

At about ten minutes till the midnight hour on the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the planetary year, the sanctuary of the Order Of Saint Dumas was in the midst of being broken through and into by a gigantic demonic being with a face and jaw like a reptile crossed with a dragon crossed with a human-esque skull, with huge thick horns bending upwards from his forehead like a demon’s, thick-skinned five-fingered hands with prominent dark veins popping against his tan-toned flesh, and one of his clawed gripping hands carried in it a weapon that could be accurately be described as both as sharp as a sword and as heavy and as unseemly as a wooden club, with his skulled visage adorning its pommel and its leather-covered hilt being protected by a handguard shaped in the form of the creature’s horns, all of which added onto the intimidation of a blade that was taller than an entire human being’s body height and thicker than a slab of homemade sourdough loaf left upon the counter for an unseemly number of weeks.

The creature came up into the chamber of the great hall by way of the gilded black stone tile floor, bursting in upon the vast open room lined with arches and columns of desaturated rose-red stone that lined the entirety of the walls of the three-story-high connecting area that obscured hundreds of hidden stairways and passages that took the residents of the Ice Palace through its ancient corridors and hallways since their building and establishment in time immemorial. Rather annoyingly for the demon, he had only managed to find an audience of just one of the order’s membership, a young woman with short, messy and light blonde hair, dressed in an expansive flowing robe of a muted bloody shade of red, with an assortment of crystallised blood jewels hanging from braided cords and laces on her neck and in diamonds from her long, pointed ears, eyes of a light blue shade and skin that seemed in desperate need of blood to fix its uncanny paleness. From her point of view she had been sent on her task to visit the out-of-the-way northwest tower to begin her holy quest for her adulthood, at the instructions of the order’s authority, and had also been informed that her angelic training would now become her entire purpose in the order once her quest had begun. She had no idea of what to expect, reasoning that not even the highest echelons of the order bothered themselves with learning too much about their killing angels. Matter of fact, she had always been at a distance from everyone else due to such a distinction of her entire being, being viewed as distant, separate, and not in a good way. So it naturally came as quite the shock to her when her path and her thoughts were interrupted by the unseemly sight of a beastly intruder seeking to cause wanton mayhem and destruction to the order, the institution that had been the entirety of her life, and seemed none too happy to see her in his line of sight.

“Or call it history if you’d like to. Though I would advise against such a thing. Whatever it may be, it might have meaning and explanation for even our times, so far ahead of it in the future, or in what we would now consider to be our present. Though it begins several millennia away from us, on the homeworld of this planet’s ancestors, the planet known as Earth, its meaning can very well indeed carry on, past the times of its originators…”

“Who are you?”, the woman asked to the demonic being in both inquisitiveness and apprehension.

“Labelled Bis. Rhymes with Hiss. Point of origin: The pits of Gotham, otherwise known by the title of Hell. Plan and my primary pleasure:…”, the creature began to respond as it made its image much more clear, revealing its massive clawed feet, its solid steel armour on its shins and its dragon-symbolled shield, its dense brown shoulderpads and bracers upon its wrists, all of which bore deadly spikes that could impale a wolf or a tiger, and its giant green cloak that blew behind him from the force of its entrance through the flooring, clasped with stolen gold medallions from all of the order’s agents that he had murdered in his indeterminable lifespan, that also extended to the daggers, gems, and shreds of robes that decorated his thick and sturdy leather belt and its many giant pouches.

“The bisection of your angelic self.”

The demon swung its gigantic club-greatsword in her general direction, just missing her by a few fractions of hair, which allowed her the opportunity to escape from his clutches into the passageway she had been seeking, a doorway hidden from sight by several dark stone columns and thin enough that the woman was barely able to evade the pursuer physically by a narrow breadth and escape into the accompanying stairwell. The rose-red walls gave way to smoother blendings of purples and blacks and reds and tans, which all created a smoky and reflective effect as she stepped up each one of the small inclining stone slabs with increasing urgency as the creature began to slowly but surely smash away the obstacles to his mission of killing her. Light which had previously coated the both of them in substantial dark red illumination slowly faded away as she continued to go up and up, step after smooth stone step, up through a hidden section of the palace she never even thought once of exploring herself. Of course, it did help that the order of Saint Dumas strictly frowned upon individualism, for it was seen as purely troublemaking.

Of course, it did help that the order of Saint Dumas strictly frowned upon individualism, for it was seen as purely troublemaking. Perhaps that was why the angels were kept at many arms’ length and kept isolated in their own spaces and living quarters, except for the rare occasions wherein they were needed to mete out divine punishment.

Perhaps that was why father never expected too much from her in regards to having much of a life. Then again, he was gone, and she was here instead of him, so what did he know, anyway?

Following a few more minutes of being lonesome with her thoughts, interspersed with various looks behind her and over her shoulders she reached the single solitary door, composed of black wooden planks that seemed to somehow be enchanted, a lock adorned in gold and platinum ornamentation to match the hinges, and completely lacking any slits or windows to see beyond its protection.

What was waiting for her beyond that door? Pain? Probably. Perception? Not likely. A person? Yeah, most probably. Oh well.

Might as well knock on wood.

The door opened up for her the moment that she knocked on it, and swung open to reveal a dark space adorned only by purple curtains and mountains upon mountains of books, lit up only by a central fireplace surrounded by cobbled pieces of wood and stone, that illuminated a single figure in silhouette who had been sitting by the flames, as if she had been waiting years, perhaps even decades, in silent and meditative patience for the arrival of another one.

“So, sister, you have come to me at last…”

The figure covered in shadow motioned for the blonde girl to step through the open doorway, an order that she dutifully and immediately obeyed, to the sounds of the door Creeeaaakkkkiing into place behind her and locking itself with another passive spell. Stepping over to close the distance between them, the silhouetted form made a single motion of its left hand to summon up an additional light, and instantly a purple flame began to swell up in a perimeter around them, before the lanterns hanging from black iron chains on the ceiling which had gone previously unseen turned themselves on and glowed with a warm and ominous orange light. The newfound illumination exposed the figure of the room’s single inhabitant, a woman with curly hair of intertwining black and brown that fell right down to her ankles, a flowing robe of deep royal purple woven so long that it dragged behind her like the train of a fabulous dress, trimmed with the finest golden silks and with patterns resembling elegant lace embedded into the golden edges that touched her sleeves, the extensive hem, and the line of its neck. Her eyes were voids of blue midnight, perpetually seeing in a different fashion from the rest of humanity, a living, breathing betrayal of her own otherness, her lips were stained with the same deep blue shade in continuation with them, almost as if to draw the eyes of all towards her ever-mystical viewing receptors. Upon one finger of her left hand she boasted an obsidian ring, adorned with a deep green–blue demonic crystal, a gift to her from so long ago that it now felt like a former life, and all of her ten fingernails were both painted in that same captivating blue shade as on her lips that matched her eyes, and meticulously filed to perfection to become sharper than ten individual daggers. The girl in red had heard of this woman, she had been spoken about in hushes and whispers by the numerous brothers of the order, she was a figure about whom was not spoken unless someone absolutely had to, a figure whose title alone sparked fear in those who did not possess her immense power, a form of isolative othering that had left her content to simply devote her life to a single job; the empowering and training of the angels.

“Welcome home, Sister Jeanne. I am Sister Lilhy… better known as the sorceress of the order.”

“I have heard of your many and softly-forbidden legends, of the fear that the order has in your necessary skills, how you have silently utilised your abilities to keep the order thriving in secret, bringing us all to untold heights of wealth and power and glory. It… It honours me to meet with you face-to-face.”

Kneeling before her almost out of complete instinct, Jeanne made herself a presence down at her blue-nailed feet, looking down onto the stone tiled floor, she awaited the imposing figure’s response. What she got in reply was a playful chuckle, and a pair of hands gripping onto her jawline both gently and firmly, and her face being lifted up to view the one above, kneeling down with one knee to remain in facial contact with her.

“Now, now, now, there’s no need to be my sycophant, my dear. What I am capable of will speak for itself, just the same as the miracle that I am soon to bestow upon you. Now, get yourself up, we have quite a few pearls to talk about.”

Motioning once more for her to move, this time to have herself a seat upon a second chair that had just come about into existence, Sister Jeanne sat herself down in the exquisite light wooden chair with various symbols of flame carved into it, and awaiting the next directions from the other woman in the room. Once she herself had stepped over to the fire, Sister Lilhy turned to inquisition in her verbal approach.

“How much have you been made aware of your duty, Sister?”

“I am an angel of vengeance. An assassin in the midst of training. I was told that I must go to you to advance further within my path.”

“It seems you have been informed correctly… But only to a point. There exists another step on the ladder to your adulthood. Or, more accurately, another step to achieving what you truly are.”

“What am I?”

“Azrael.”

Azrael. The word seemed somehow familiar to her. Like some kind of presence, some kind of companion. Father had spoken of it as some kind of a friend inside him, a force with its own consciousness that he was merely a host to. She supposed that it came free with being born an angel. That she was born with this friend inside her.

“I can sense your thoughts, my Sister. Your feelings place you upon the right track. For what Azrael is, is a skillful blending of all of those concepts of which you think. It is you, and it is another, you are Azrael, and yet you are you, she is the force inside your heart, your mind, your soul, and yet you are what gives her life. You and she are separate, and yet inseparably intertwined. It has been like that since your birth. Azrael and its host are a balance, serving different uses and purposes, but neither one is complete on its own.”

The sorceress moved away from the fireplace and over to behind Sister Jeanne’s line of sight. The girl with the shortened blonde wavy hair initially felt some kind of chill down her spine and by instinct gripped onto the wooden handrests, right before she felt ten sharp fingernails caressing her head as if inspecting her form. The fingers found their way to her pointed ears, then traced the shape of her eyes, the shape of her sharper-than-normal teeth, and eventually moving down to measure the density of her muscles and the shape of her frame, the sorceress that the fingers and hands belonged to evidently looking for something in particular, something about her that set her apart from the rest, or possibly just wondering if she met any physical requirements of being seen as an angel from the point of view of an outside observer. From the dark laughter that left her lips, it seemed that she had indeed found what she was looking for.

“Now remain calm and remain still, angel-in-training, the time has come for me to fulfil my greatest duty once more, for the newest of the esteemed line of vengeance, and awaken the blazing spirit dormant within your soul. The features that make you different in appearance from humanity are no accident. From the moment of your conception inside a human womb, you were molded, altered, modified to serve your destiny, physically transformed on the inside to harbour Azrael. She has been awakening at a slow pace for all your life, slowly but very surely. But now, you will finally meet her in her entirety, make the final necessary change to transform you into her. What was once the title and the force that gave your father his immense power will now become yours. With the completion of your metamorphosis, your destined quest will begin in earnest. Prepare yourself, this will come to you as a feeling you have never felt before.”

She tried to close her eyes as the sorceress circled back to face her yet again, and she found she couldn’t. Something inside of her was keeping her attention focused squarely on the incoming hands of the one who was about to let the spirit out. First one smooth but well-used hand laid itself upon her red-covered chest, and then another. The veins upon the other woman’s hands began to make themselves more prominent, and she could feel as if the flow of the air and life itself was being focused solely upon one single area.

Her heart began to beat faster. She couldn’t tell if that was expected or not. Then the sensation came.

Her heart itself began to feel as if it was being pulled on in all directions, tugging every which way and pumping her blood at faster and faster and faster rates, making her own veins surge outward and the blood moving underneath begin to change colour, growing darker, darker, and still darker, and much richer in its redness. Some sort of thing was beginning to make her feel like she was being split open from the inside, altered in an even more radical fashion with every beat of her heart and every thought from her brain. Jeanne could feel it, the invisible hands moving toward her other features, elongating her ears, altering the chemistry of her eyes, sharpening and lengthening her fangs, scultping her bones themselves to handle more strength. Each and every muscle fibre was burning on the inside, reforming by tearing themselves down and building themselves back up stronger, over and over and over and over again at lightning speeds, growing outwards and hardening, sculpting themselves into prominent displays of physical strength, altering their proportions to align with the planned new frame, warping and shifting and forming again into a physique sculpted by the blessings of nature, the force of fate that made her into what she was born to be, the union of woman and beast, now realised upon her appearance for all to see. The last feeling within her from the transformative experience was a new sort of fire being lit behind her eyes, the flame of burning passion that was now revealing itself unto her for the first time.

The invisible hands faded away.

She drew her first breath in her new body.

She felt almost lighter with the newfound alterations to her structure, for it was as if even the way she thought was different now, integrated with a new kind of feeling. The feeling of the superheated fire now made known to her. There most definitely was a presence inside of her, an angel of annihilation just waiting to be made manifest. It tugged even more at her mind, insisted on being let out, screeched and screamed with zeal for her to let her come up to the forefront for the first time.

“I feel… Different…”

“You feel awake. Azrael feels awake. My spell has brought her out of her residency within your heart by force, and now that you have been remade into a dormant titan capable of handling her extreme powers, she wishes to meet the world with a body of her own.”

Sister Jeanne stood up to get used to her new state, gripping onto a nearby mirror to inspect the changes made to her body, and slowly looking towards it with extreme nervousness. What she found was a version of her natural body, but stronger. Broader, more muscular, more prominent beastly features, most notably her longer pointed ears, sharp fangs integrated into her teeth that could shred the meat of a dragon with nothing in the realm of difficulty, alerted eyes with pupils like a feline, that blessed her with sharpness in her vision like she hadn’t ever even dreamed of before this day, sculpted muscle mass all over her frame that was most prominently exemplified with her rock-hard core, with six sculpted abs that could grind meat, and in the strength of her solid arms and robust legs that looked as if they had been hardened by the finest of sculptors with the finest attention for details. But the most curious of her new aspects was a brand-new addition; six large and prominent tiger-like stripes upon her face, three for each half, that stretched from the edges of her face to halfway across each of her cheeks, all of them in slightly curved arcs and coming to sharp points for their tips, and all of them coloured a somewhat darker and redder shade of her own actual skin tone, altogether an unexpected addition but not an unwelcome presence. She thought that a feline face with large kitty stripes looked rather cute to counterbalance her new status as a mountain of dense womanly muscle.

“So what happens to me now?”

“The time is upon us for Azrael to emerge in her entirety. She is inside you, she lives in you, and she is you. Call her. Look within yourself and ignite the flames.”

Jeanne’s hands, which now sported sharper and more claw-like nails dyed the same shade as her stripes, caressed herself for just a few more fractions of the moment, before she moved her hands down to her heart and felt its rhythm, the pulsing sensations of the cycle of her blood renewing itself every second or so, the slow rise and fall of her solid chest with every breath she drew in and the relaxation that came with every time she released it.

“Yes, Sister.”

She took another breath, and then she let go.

As she exhaled her breath, she released all of the pent-up flaming energy, aggression, and burning fighting spirit all at once. She concentrated, focused her mind on the dormant anger that the presence inside her fed on, and amplified it, self-radicalising every last portion of her mind by becoming angrier and angrier at everything and everyone; at the order for isolating her, at the world for its wanton sin and fallen corruption, at the demon no doubt barreling up the stairs right towards them at Mach Five for killing the previous Azrael, for killing father along with him, at the sorceress herself for making her be the one to carry this weight, and, most of them all, enraged at herself for being weak, for being hurt at all by being alone for most of her life. She was supposed to be better. She was supposed to not care about what anyone else thought about her. And yet she did. She cared. She cared so much about what everyone else thought of her, she was not at all assassin material. Who was she to have this responsibility of killing demons in a magical costume? Surely there must be another way!

THERE HAD TO BE SOMETHING MORE TO HER THAN JUST A SINGLE ROLE FOR THE REST OF HER ANGELIC LIFE!

THERE HAD TO BE!

She erupted.

Instantly the rage of Azrael boiled over out of the containment of her mind and exploded into the physical realm with extreme heat, burning off all of her clothing, turning the woman’s body into a superheated vessel, and causing it to glow from the sheer intensity of the burning wrath, and yet she did not burn, but rather became a blazing core in such a way that the angel’s own appearance could be added onto it. And, surely enough, various arguments of armour and adornment began to show themselves in the air, conjured by the spirit to suit her own tastes in apparel. An off-white bodysuit began to spread over every portion of her body below the head and only stopping at her wrists, entirely white except for her arms, which dyed themselves a beautiful black shade, covering her feet and providing a base garment for the rest of her angelic arguments. As this was occurring, she could hear a pleasant sound within her own mind, something that both calmed her down and energised her as her body was being so radically changed.

“Oh, my life,

Is changing every day,

In every possible way…

And oh, my dreams;

It's never quite as it seems,

Never quite as it seems…"

The next thing that she conjured into existence was a vast length of gorgeous black fabric that seemed to separate itself into segments, several of which began to wrap themselves around her new clothing as if drawn by magnetic force, forming a belt tied off in the back in a knot the shape of a ribbon bow, and a much larger length of fabric wrapping around her neck and her shoulders, cutting and arranging and folding themselves into a hybrid of an omophorion without its hanging front or back ends and a quadruple cape, two layers of a black mantle, each one of them cut in half to form a double-double cape, while the emerging angel waved her hands to sprout six ribbon-esque protrusions from the shoulders of her mantlepiece that hung over the back of her cape like off-white-coloured Peacock feathers.

“I know I felt like this before,

But now I'm feeling it even more,

Because it came from you.

Then I open up and see,

The person falling here is me!

A different way to be.”

Her hair turned from blonde to that same shade of close to white and quickly grew in length, before warping into a fabric-like consistency and forming around her head like a hood shaped like a mane of wild hair and bangs. She lost her pupils, and her eyes first glowed a brilliant red, before settling into a burning but far from blank shade of white. A full-face black mask began to form on her face, the same shade as her arms and cape, and six white white pointed tiger stripes began to show themselves upon the mask, as if forcing their way up to not be ignored.

“And now I tell you openly;

You have my heart so don't hurt me,

You're what I couldn't find.

A totally amazing mind,

So understanding and so kind,

You're everything to me!”

Finally, a series of lattice-patterned gold ribbons embedded themselves onto the edges of her black fabric items and a pair of large creamy-coloured metal gauntlets fastened themselves over her arms and hands and wrists, with intentional cracked lines in them resembling the internal edges of stained glass windows, and lined at their top ends by her elbows with six wheat-coloured and golden-buttoned oversized pouches. She could sense that the process was finished. She felt… different again. In a good way.

“What now?”, Azrael asked as she opened her eyes and regained her pupils, a blood red in shade and colour.

“Now…”, began the sorceress Lilhy, detecting the rapidly-oncoming demon coming to their doorstep. “I’m afraid that I won’t have the time to explain everything to you right now, the more important task at hand is for you to defend us against the invader.”

Azrael nodded and headed for the door, but before she could leave through it, Sister Lilhy turned after some hesitation and told her something less on-script.

“It’s good to have you here with us again.”

She flicked two of the fingers on her left hand and instantly two golden symbols of a bladed fleur-de-lis embossed themselves onto both front sides of Azrael’s mantle, the order’s symbol, and now her own.

“Now you are ready.”

In her mind, the angel had to agree. In her reality, she was somewhat mixed in how she felt about going against the hulking creature again. But this much, she could think. This time needed to be different. It had to be. Otherwise she would just be another dead assassin. Not special. Not unique. Just another corpse on his blade. For her own sake, this had to be the time that it all changed.

With the sound of an otherworldly screech preceding it, the door to the sorceress’ sanctum violently burst open and the shape of the order’s newest warrior tackled the approaching green-cloaked menace down the stairwell. A gigantic streak of green and white tore its way through the red palace walls before once again ending up in the great hall, creating a crater three feet in depth and scattering a cloud of tiles and golden tile borders up into the surrounding air. The first one to rise was the enraged white angel, who, realising that fistifighting against a creature with a blade taller than she was would most definitely not be a good idea, reached her left hand up in the air and concentrated on focusing her inner river of rage, a form of anger that was an active and essential part of her existence, into something much more tangible and physically meaningful in her present situation.

“One morning, I woke up, and I knew you were really gone,

A new day, a new way, and new eyes to see the dawn,

Go your way, I'll go mine and carry on!”

“Her name was Azrael, and she was both more and less than human. Angel and warrior and justice and executioner was this one…”

An aura of blazing red flames with a white-hot core began to surround the angelic figure, and quickly they all travelled up to her awaiting left hand, forming into the shape of a weapon and cooling itself down into a polished steel-platinum blade, with a handguard and hilt covered in the finest dragon leathers, trimmed with platinum and adorned with champagne diamonds, and sporting a demon-slaying blade taller than the length of a normal sword, but still light enough to be wielded in just one of her mighty hands, that almost radiated with a subtle white and blue light, as if the holy weapon itself was a superheated infernal star refurbished into the enchanted steel of a deadly but elegant weapon for a civilised kind of beast.

“The warrior and executioner parts tending to take precedence over the justice and angel parts. As long as there was even a single parcel of emptiness around her, the avenging angel had easy access at hand to the tools of her hideous trade.”

The angel in white and black chose to allow the demonic being to get himself up from out of the crater. Despite his numerous kill count, wailing on him without giving him the honourable chance would still leave a bad taste in her mouth. She couldn’t pinpoint a clear and concise reason for why she felt this way, but Sister Jeanne’s own internal sense of restraint probably had something to do with it. Once the demon had risen to his feet, she assumed a fighting stance and prepared to confront the devil in her new form.

“And as long as breath grazed her lungs, she was of the biggest delight to use those tools.”

“Tell me this much, demon; Why have you chosen to guarantee your own doom, Bis-Rhymes-With-Hiss?”

“Guaranteed my doom?”, the devilish dealer of death inquired to her as he brought his sword down to positively bisect her in twain, before it was instantly countered by her enhanced reflexes, causing a minor flurry of sparks to get in between them for a few precious seconds.

“Of course you have, you have come to call without a proper invitation. Such utter rudeness can only be rebuked and redeemed by the shedding of your chains, of both blood and mortality, as I cause you to gush whatever gummy fluid courses through your devil-veins.”

“I need no invitations, high and mighty Az. I obey a command centuries old, the command you have chosen to ignore, and the only etiquette that I require…”

Slashing at the air to create some distance between them, the demon Bis managed to get himself back and swing again, narrowly missing his target by the tense breadth of a few golden hairs.

“Is found on the edge of my blade!”

“Chuff, a dull form of etiquette, then. Firmly fitting for a dingy and dull fellow such as yourself, would you not say, O devil?”

“I’ll say this in your favour, you battle better than you banter.”, cried the devil while being put on the defensive by a series of counterstrikes from the angel and her shining, divine, enchanted sword.

“The sky is clearing, and the night has cried enough,

The sun, he comes, the world to soften up,

Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on.”

In response, the warrior angel leapt high up into the chilling air, high enough to swiftly avoid the following series of rapid strikes from the giant being, her quadruple cape fanning out behind her like they were a quartet of angelic wings of rich black energy, and her shoulder-mounted peacock feather-like stripes fanned out in tandem with them and provided a nice bit of pink and turquoise with their integrated colours while her blade began to heat itself up in increasing levels of incinerating energy; first glowing red, then white, and then a cold and haunting shade of burning blue.

“And as for you, demon, you do neither one of them well.”

THWOCK!!!!!!

With a single mighty strike the angel’s impact overcame the demon’s blade and knocked it away, blowing past his subsequent attempt to defend with his mighty iron dragon shield and landing a devastating burn upon his right eye, knocking him back into crushing several rose pillars under his immense weight.

“All that you have succeeded at doing is to let me get away and get myself awakened in a new vessel body, one far younger and much more powerful than my previous host. And I am sick and tired of being sick and tired”, she said as she began to address the demon in a more serious tone. “Brother Ludo… Jeanne’s father, will be the last in the grand and glorious line of Azraels to become one of your victims.”

“The fortunes, of fables, are able to sing the song!

Now witness, the quickness, with which we get along!

To sing the blues, you've got to live the dues, and carry on!”

Her blade continued to glow its brilliant blue, leaking an aura of fire so hot it almost became cold, and, after stepping back just a little bit to ready herself and not be blown away, she concentrated all of her energy into one last swing, sending out a shocking arc of fire that bisected the devilish figure in twain himself, reversing his intentions and turning his preferred method of killing others upon himself, cutting him in half not with the blazing metal of the holy blade, but with the rage of the beast in the incarnation of internal shockwaves. The creature's two charred and flaming halves dropped right to the floor in an unceremonious display of scorched violent carnage.

“Is a cheer the response you desire, Azrael?”, came the voice of another man, dressed in all-black attire with white accents on his collar and across his wrist areas, as well as a Dumasian sharp fleur-de-lis symbol on the left side of his chest right over his heart, also in white, and atop his head sporting a black cap in a rhombus, or diamond, shape, with a white band where it sat atop his head and positioned at a vertical angle to be seen behind his head as well as being on the top of it.

“Well, bravo, then.”, the man finished with an answer to his own question as his weathered hands began to clap.

“Brian, or more accurately Brother Brian – A counselor, physician, and literate sage, summoned by the sorceress to guide Azrael in matters all too human in nature, who had been observing the fiery battle of the angel and the invader from afar, now chose to reveal himself and step forth…”

“Thank you.”, the angel in white responded to him as she dusted off some of the excess blood of deep green spilled by the burning and departed demonic being off of her suit. “The difficult thing was the words. He was right about one thing – I’m not much good at bantering in battle. I wish I could have thought of a witticism less generic as I sent that fire shockwave to him.”

“Pity you didn’t. It would have added so much.”

“Cleanse your sword, Mistress Azrael?”, inquired one of the acolytes, little beings cloaked in dark brown hooded robes who skimpered about the floors of the Ice Palace mostly hidden from being seen, though in this case one of them was indeed present in public, his only features visible under the hood being a pair of dark green eyes, and the sound of clink-clink-clinking being heard behind him as the chains that bound his robes onto his body clicked and moved about while he walked.

“Why? There’s no need.” She simply reached her hand up once again and the aura of red flames swelled up around her once more, the blade beginning to dissolve and melt away. “When I want it again it will return to me as clean as tomorrow’s sunrise.”

“Clean as tomorrow’s sunrise…”, Brian remarked. “That has a good ring to it. Come on now, Azrael, we must not be late for our designated meeting time.”

Soon enough the two of them were going up the spiralling ramps upwards to the highest floors of the palace, which on the outside resembled a mass of different towers built from stone and ice, capped with hauntingly beautiful powder and snow, its roofs stabbing through the layers of white and reaching up high into the sky like sharpened sticks aimed at the eye of the washed-out sunlight.

“Brian, what did the demon Bis mean when he spoke of a command that I have chosen to ignore?”

“How could he have spoken any more clearly, Sister Jeanne? In accordance with the rules of the order we are all sworn to obey, you must choose the moment when you become an adult, and you must signify this by consulting the ancient oracle to become educated of your destined task. You have yet to do this, have you not?”

“I haven’t felt ready.”, Jeanne confessed, now busying herself with getting used to being back in the front seat after Azrael left her due to being no longer needed.

“No one is ever ready to progress into their adulthood, Azrael.”, Brian responded while absentmindedly gazing out the slitted slotted windows on their way up. “I am afraid the appearance of the demon was a sign from the universe, a sign that your rite of passage happens to be long overdue.”

“And how do you know this?”

“Because the task the oracle gave me is to dedicate my entire life to knowledge and pass that knowledge onto you.”

“Oh. That is an answer. I guess.”

Once the two of them had come upon a fine and large pine box lined with stained cherry oak wood trimming in various details in the resemblance of bats nestled within one of the top rooms that was lined entirely with stained glass windows on half its walls to permit a semicircular viewing room, Brian knelt down to get its lid open while Jeanne continued to have herself doubts.

“Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the day after that.”

“Unwise. Very unwise. Now is the time for your appointed consultation with the Oracle. Open the box. Consult the oracle. End the suspense. That is the itinerary rearranged for today.”

“Oh, well, all right.”

Once the man’s hands had gotten the lid open, a miasma of icy blue air began to seep from and leak out of the pine wood coffin, followed by a series of red bats formed from spiritual energy that soon and posthaste reformed themselves into a misty blue-coloured spirit taking the form of a woman, just a head and pair of shoulders and collarbones, as well as having a crown of neatly-sculpted short hair and a pair of all-seeing eyes that would give any being pause.

“It’s about time, young fumbler.”

“What?”, asked a confused Jeanne as the spirit took on its appearance and began their destined conversation with a clear tone of displeasurement with her.

“For starters, stop staring so much at me, little girl! Have you for yourself acquired next to no societal manners?!”

The girl meekly bowed her head. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re certainly one whipped little bastard, ain’t ya? But, anyway, SORRY? SAVE the SORRY!! Shut your lips and open your ears. We oracles never repeat ourselves, ever, ever, ever, and I mean that most sincerely and severely. We never, ever, ever, ever repeat ourselves, understand and remember? You have come for your task, do not state differently. We oracles always know what’s really transpiring ‘round the parts. Always. Always. Do you understand? Always. Always. Now here it is. Ahem: You are to go to Hell and face its queen, be brave. Unite with her and in glory liberate each and every slave. Come to see your true identity and then all will be free.”

“You’ll have to forgive my pardon, Lady Oracle…”, Brian began. “But your poetry isn’t very poetic.”

“Then how about you give it a try? Wait until you’re twelve thousand years old. See how you versify and verify.", retorted the oracle while radiating with a white light.

“Could you at least be bothered to explain what it is I’m supposed to do?”, Sister Jeanne retorted back in a rare moment of annoyance in someone else.

As the head and shoulders of the oracle began to lower themselves down into her plush-and-red-lined coffin, the blue spirit spitefully responded the following like so:

“Oracles never explain — any more than they repeat themselves. But any idiot could get the sense that the proper interpretation would be to deduce that you’re supposed to go Hell — Gotham City. Gotham City. That’s your destination.”

She finally descended back into the box and laid herself down upon the back of her head, her eyes pointed straight up at the starlight ceiling enchanted to resemble the heavens of the dark night studded with nebulae and shining stars, a mix of warm and cold burning beacons in the functionally endless and infinite celestial expanse.

“Now close the box and let me nap. I need the far-from-beauty sleep because I tire easily. Now close it up and let me nap, I say.”

After Sister Jeanne had shut the lid up, Brother Brian broke the merciful silence with a small remark of: “Oracle and demon seem to agree. You’re bound for Gotham.”

“I guess I am.”, she replied with a shrug. “Where is this place and how do I get there?”

“You mean how do we get there, Sister Jeanne? Well, for one thing, I’ve heard tales of an underground river—”

His patterns of speeching were subsequently broken by the entirely unpleasant vocal tones of a wrinkled man dressed in an indigo and black checkerboard-patterned hooded robe lined with trims of yellow, accompanied by an entourage of acolytes carrying various attachments, specifically one at the front with a gigantic feather from the immortal phoenix sweeping in front of him, and another at his left side holding up and carrying a tray of smooth rectangular wood with spherical balls of chocolate and fruit pressed into spherical configurations as well as a tube-esque cup of purple wine,, as his indigo shoes stepped in through one of the adjoining doors to the oracle room and the light of the icy desaturated grey-blue skies illuminated his solid white eyes without any irises or pupils to be seen upon them. His eyebrows were extremely bushy and revealed his true hair colour of cold steel grey, mixed in with shades of lighter greys and patches of whitening strands of hair. His mouth always seemed to be curved into an unhappy smile, which was definitely not helped by his blank eyes that made him off-putting to everyone in his order.

“NONSENSE! An underground river tunnel? Preposterous witchcraft. Lies, fibs, mendacity, old wives’ tales, balderdash, frivolous frou-frou. Charcuterie. Total hogwash.”

“Rollo, or more accurately Brother Rollo, the leader of the unholy institution to which Azrael’s life had been sworn since the moment of her birth. Legend states it that his voice was like crude oil filled with ground and ground glass.”

“Forget underground rivers in the underworld, forget subterranean methods that curb your honour. That is not Saint Dumas’ ways. Take the roads that span this good green Earth. Go claim your adulthood in the sun. By the way, you two, did the oracle say anything about the predestined slaying of the queen of hell, the Bat-Queen?”

“You were listening in on us, Brother Rollo?”

“I always listen in, to everything, and all the time. Not even a mouse eructates in these halls but I hear it all. A dirty job that I’m happy to do.”

Both Jeanne and Brian simply looked at him in a dazed state of shock. Not even they knew how exactly they should react to this outright bizarre man and his bizarre methods of speech.

“Now anyway, as to the slaying of the queen of hell—”, Rollo started up again while pointing to the girl in red clothes.

“The oracle told me that I needed to unite with the queen rather than to slay her.”, the girl responded in a flatter delivery that betrayed some Azrael within her tone.

“Oracles, they speak to you in riddles, riddles, I say. What she very clearly meant was that your task is to terminate the queen. Kill her. Slay her. Cut her. Chop her. Grind her into cat food. Stab her and skewer her and slice her and slay her. Have I expressed myself clearly? Do I make myself clear? Because I will not be repeating myself. Most certainly not.”

“You have.”

“Well, then. Good, then. Could the two of you possibly have any questions?”

“No.”

“We don’t.”

“I’m very glad to hear that. When you return we’ll have a party.”

“And so the two of them began to go off on the roads away from the palace, Jeanne and Brian…”

The words of a bald man with a minor amount of wrinkles and dressed in a simple stitched robe of grayish-wheat fabric with no hood and wide, long sleeves, were heard by the human children of the village, all of whom had gathered together by the well in the centre of the valley, surrounded by dense forests of healthy, dark and growing evergreen trees present on both the grassy terrain around them and the cold grey mountains above, which had all been recently soaked in a refreshing rain of repentance and renewal, a sign that the population of human beings upon the alien planet they now called their home had somehow managed to finally come to an understanding of the immense hubris that had practically annihilated their own species, and somehow having been given the second chance to redeem their entire race, had taken the lessons they had been forced to learn and adopted a peaceful existence, dwelling in simple but sublime shelters that blended alien architecture with human design sensibilities, devoting themselves to farming bountiful harvests in the forested planet that felt like it rained almost all the time, living not in opposition to the nature and the cold and rainy weather, but adapting to it and learning to live in symbiosis with it.

The children were clad in similar robes to the one the man was wearing, which had become the default template for the attire of the entirety of the human species, theirs in shades of burnt orange rather than wheat-grey, and their mothers dressed in shades of lavender and green waited for them on top of the nearby forested hills, monitoring their legacies and futures at a distance and talking amongst themselves as the little ones crowded by the well to hear the words of the unique man.

“On a quest that was sure to bring Azrael to her adulthood.”

“You’re repeating yourself, Nunky.”, commented one of the little children who were seated down upon the cobblestone surroundings next to the well and shaded from the occasional direct sunlight by a shackled roof of navy blue tiles atop a quartet of carved wooden poles.

“Yeah, Nunky,”, another child chimed in, using their pet name or nickname for the broad bald man as she poked her head out of the tiny little crowd of tiny little humans who had been patiently listening to him while the vivid imagery of the stories that he unfolded from out of his lips like it took him little to no effort filled their pretty little heads with visions of wonder, almost like he had some kind of telepathic ability to make them see exactly what he was telling them about. But they reasoned that couldn’t be possible.

“They’re right, you’re repeating yourself.”

“Just like the oracle.”

The man known to them as John simply just laughed a little and adjusted himself while continuing to sit down upon several bricks that formed the ring of the well, looking off into the distance, seemingly at nothing, and then addressing them again.

“And I’ll have to repeat the whole of what I say to you again, in three years, five years, ten years, or twenty. Because any tale worth telling to anyone at anytime, at any point, and in any place, should be of enough value to first be told to a child and fill them with wonder and give them hope, then told once more to the adult that the child becomes, but imparting unto their grown minds a different effect and a different lesson. What would once have been a tale that gives a child hope and offers them a lesson for how to go about their own youthful initial stages of life, an adult who hears the same tale will depart from hearing it with a deeper understanding of what it means to be a living, breathing human person, and a whole new host of questions about their lives and their universe for them to go out and seek the answers to. That is, if the tale itself can live up to its intended purpose and if the tale itself to it carries any quality. Now, children, if we could continue…”

John looked back down to face his little audience of little people and started to move his hands to enhance the point of what he was saying, delving back once again into the tale of the angelic hero with the spirit of vengeance deep inside her…