#laszlo valentin

As it turned out, the majority of Batman’s worries about Deathstroke were proven absolutely right. That man was an absolute nightmare to fight. There was barely any room for error, or breathing.

So when Deathstroke accused him of winning by luck on the drive to the GCPD, Batman didn’t have it in him to directly disagree.

“The important part is that I won. If you want to make excuses, go ahead. But at least you fought with honor instead of hiding in a tank,” reasoned Batman.

“We’re not through, Batman. You’ve earned yourself a break, but I will kill you,” said Deathstroke. “And I won’t wait for someone to hire me next time, either.”

After dropping off Deathstroke, Batman knew he couldn’t exactly take a break, but he needed to at least find some less strenuous crime to fight. So imagine his surprise when he got a call from Aaron Cash about loud opera music alerted and a wall-mounted corpse.

Fantastic! Minus the fact that, you know, there was a dead guy. On a wall. With opera music.

Upon reaching the location and getting out of his car, Batman noticed that someone had painted “FLAWED” in big block letters next to the body. Okay, that ruled out simple revenge. The initial lack of identifying signs or marks meant that nobody he knew of was trying to send a message. Still, the killer had certainly gone out of their way to display the body.

Maybe there was enough of a face left under the bandages to ID whoever it was…

Nope. While what was on the victim’s head technically qualified as a face, it had clearly been surgically altered to remove any distinguishing characteristics. Their DNA had been corrupted and the fingerprints appeared to have been burned off.  So the killer wanted to send a message, but hoped to avoid getting caught. Time to break out the ol’ Deep Tissue Scanner and look for clues. A slightly malformed ear, swallowed wedding ring, and a hip replacement pointed to a man on the Missing Persons List named Anthony Lund.

That wasn’t enough to determine the killer’s identity, but once he had identified more victims (and no way was someone this dedicated to putting on a show stop at one), he could see if they had anything in common.

Five bodies and identical faces later, Batman found a common link. All the victims had been kidnapped along the traveling route of something called the Circus of Strange.  As it turned out, a man named Laszlo Valentin had worked with the circus and rented out a local beauty salon called the Pretty Dolls Parlor. What a lovely and not at all sinister name. Still, at least he had a suspect.

Batman entered the parlor to find it in surprisingly good condition, considering the lease had expired and nobody was supposed to be in there. Then again, if Valentin had made a habit of doing what he was supposed to, there wouldn’t be six dead people hanging around Gotham.

And good gracious, why did every last thing have to be pink? There was so much of it. Was this how Alfred felt when Batman insisted on making all of his stuff either black or dark gray? He broke through a wall to find shelves of fake candles and curvaceous mannequins on the other side. In retrospect, that pink stuff was looking a lot nicer.

Batman followed the sound of live opera singing to find Valentin facing away from him and operating on someone, but a gate blocked his path. He heard the person on the table beg Valentin to stop. Good gracious, the poor dude was conscious! Time to find another way around, and fast.

He ran to the front and noticed that the victim was wearing a blank mask and Valentin was wearing a pig mask. Valentin noticed that someone had walked into his operating room.

“Step away from him, Valentin.” warned Batman.

“Not finished! Not complete,” Valentine responded. “Pyg will make him perfect.”

“Perfect?” asked Batman.

“Yes, show Batman how perfect you are.”  The man on the table stood up and faced Batman.  “Perfect…like the rest!” shouted Valentin, as five more masked people in hospital gowns dropped from the ceiling.

“Do you see now, Batman? More perfect Dollotrons for Mother!”

Batman really hoped Valentin meant “Mother” in a more abstract sense as opposed to an actual person he’d have to fight. Maybe he could figure out more about these Dollotrons first.

“If they’re perfect, then why are you covering up their faces with masks?” Batman began. “Are they less perfect than you’d like to admit or does your definition of ‘perfect’ include dollar-store opera masks?” In retrospect, that last part was a bit of a low blow.

Valentin squealed. No, he didn’t yell or scream, he straight-up squealed like a…well, like a pig. He reached to his waist and - Wow. Warped beauty standards aside, that guy could throw a mean butcher’s knife.

Make that several mean butcher’s knives.

Batman got started on the Dollotrons while Valentin sang about how perfect and invincible they were.

Invincible, huh? That explained why Batman’s famous “hit them a lot” strategy wasn’t working as well as it usually did.  

As it turned out “invincible” in this case seemed to mean “unable to feel pain” so Batman just had to knock them unconscious. Once he had knocked out the…well, technically they were Valentin’s victims…Anyway, then he went after Valentin. The guy kept throwing knives and running to the other side of the stupid operating table, so Batman slammed his head into it and broke his weird mask.

More Dollotrons walked out, but they didn’t do anything. It seemed like they wouldn’t do anything without an order from Valentin, which sounded like a great reason to get Valentin out of there.

On the way to the GCPD, he considered taunting Valentin about how his “imperfect” victims led Batman to him, but decided that would be kind of an unnecessary jerk move. Also, he might start singing again and Batman didn’t want to deal with that in an enclosed space. Thus, he drove on in silence.

“Who the heck is this guy?” asked Aaron Cash.

“Laszlo Valentin, serial killer and plastic surgeon,” explained Batman. He changed his victims into identical, painless drones. There are a bunch of them in the Pretty Dolls beauty parlor who need to be picked up.  Also, sometimes he calls himself Pig and I’m not 100% sure why.”

“Not Pig, Pyg! With a Y!” clarified Valentin.

“Okay, right,” said Cash. We’ll take ‘Pyg with a Y’ off your hands then, Batman. You go deal with all the other…the other… you know what, I’m going to be polite and just say ‘criminals.’”

Batman drove off to look for more Riddler trophies, but was interrupted by a phone call.

“Batman, it’s Robin. You need to hurry, Harley Quinn has-“

“Ya got that thing, working Bird boy? Great, now can it, this is my call,” interrupted Harley. “Hey. Harley Quinn here. Your super secret movie studio hideout just got a whole lot less secret. You want your Eminem kid back? Get over here and take ‘im before I take him down like you took out my Mistah J!”

And it was on to the next life-threatening situation for Batman.

Meanwhile, in goodness knows where but probably close to Gotham:

Thomas Elliot decided to save his revenge against Bruce Wayne for another day. He figured he’d have one heck of a hard time getting Batman’s attention with all the competition tonight. Besides, waiting a bit would give him more time to practice with his new face.

Speaking of faces, he wondered how Scarecrow was doing. Thomas reflected that maybe he shouldn’t have asked Crane what he wanted for reconstructive surgery directly after telling him how he made himself a Bruce Wayne lookalike by stitching together facial features from dead people. In retrospect, that may very well have been why Crane insisted that he only restore function and forget the cosmetic element. He clearly didn’t enjoy looking so…gruesome, so it must have been Thomas’ more creative side that threw him off.

Huh. Some people just had no appreciation for skilled work.