Chapter 1: Template 1
Some days, it's true, crime just doesn't pay.
Most days, it pays quite a lot, until one day it suddenly doesn't. Then there's lights and sirens and blue boys everywhere, or if you're real unlucky just the growing terror as people start missing check-ins and the lights go out and suddenly the Bat is standing in the middle of the room. Ah well, if there's one thing life in Gotham has taught me.... Okay, it's never get into a fist fight with a man who dresses like a bat. But if there's two things it's taught me, th' runner-up would have to be "Easy come, easy go."
Today though is special. Today my luck is turning around, at least til it all goes down the crapper again. It's my last day in sunny Arkham Asylum, my little home away from home.
Heh. How does the song go? "Back across the ocean to my home away from home. I'm glad to be returning, but sad to have to go." I won't miss the walls, the rules, the guards or the food. But maybe the society, you meet the most interesting people here.
But nice as it is to catch up with Victor or Dr. Crane, there is one overwhelming reason to hate this place. They won't let me read. Not off the library cart, not magazines, not even a newspaper. In Blackgate, they let me read. Then, they're a lot dumber over there. Lack of the Darwinian pressures at work in Arkham, I think. Here, stupid guards get another job or they get dead, and everyone knows all to well what I can do with a Reader's Digest. So on balance, imma say: fuck this place and everyone who works here. I'm gone, baby! Gone!
First though, a man's got to do his penance. Even after all the shrink sessions and meeting the parole board, there's paperwork to be done. I take a bit too long going over the papers, savoring my first real contact with the written word in weeks, and the guards start getting nervous. Eh, most days I like to keep them guessing, but today I take it as a sign to hurry up. There's a thing they don't tell you about the funny farm, you go to the pokey and do your time, and you're done. You go to Arkham, you'll stay until the shrinks say you're ready to rejoin normal society, which could take a few months or maybe the rest of your life. Luckily, I'm a master bullshitter with a lot of experience telling people what they want and a genius manipulator on tap to help convince people I'm not crazy.
How nice to be remembered, James' voice sounded off in my skull, but I believe you're imagining a primacy in our relationship that simply doesn't exist. Also, it bodes ill for your mental health that you need my help to suade others. I remain concerned, Jonathan, about what happens the next time you assay your talents. I will not see you kill us both with your folly.
Pushy guy. I'm fine. Sober, sane, with no more than a couple a' voices in me 'ead. But he's always been like that, ten to one he takes over before supper. Control freak can't help himself when he thinks I'm messing up. 'Least he lets me finish up me papes.
Next up, turning it in, gettin' it looked over and recovering my effects. Well, those that weren't incinerated or faded away in my long months of captivity. We get that done, and it's off to meet the wizard, Dr. Arkham himself to see me off. We chat a bit, both pretending like I'm not going to be back this time next year, it's an old dance between us and it helps a lot that he wants to be fooled. Every time. I feel bad for the guy, he wants so hard to make a difference in people's lives, help us, but that ship has simply sailed. So he lives somehow with the disappointment of our high recidivism rate.
So pay him the proper respects, my personal Jimmy Cricket chimed in, a sanctimonious fool he remains but he at least acts to control his world. Unlike certain parties I could mention.
Did I not mention James isn't a big fan of "easy come easy go, go with the flow?" Case in point, his entirely inappropriate rage when we step out and our ride is late. Doc Arkham felt the need to ask.
"John, Is someone coming?"
"Yeah, Doc. A couple of friends." I answered while stamping as hard as I could on James' biting retort. And he lectures me on respect?
"Alright then, just keep your nose clean, Bookworm. I'd hate to see you fall back into a negative spiral."
James took over so fast and smooth it didn't even register.
"Bookworm is no more, Doctor. Ancient history. I wish to be only Jonathan Binder and move forwards." Inside he seethed at me Another insipid and transparent test? If he were anything less than totally confident in our transformation, why even bring us to this point? Fortunately for my debatable sanity, the good doctor decides to leave me then.
So here I am, waiting for my friends. I suppose if you're still reading this you'll be wanting an explanation as to how I wound up in Arkham. Well there's a short and a long story there, the short you can guess, a rich guy who dresses in a cape beat me up, and here I am. Now the long one, how does a nice fellow like me end up a regular in Batman's Rogues Gallery, why would any reasonably intelligent person run a criminal operation in Gotham anyways, and what's with the voice in my head? Well, that may take some telling.
It all starts with Loki. For the last long while he's been playing my personal ROB, dropping in me in fairly random settings, usually with some kind of unusual tool and power to live out my life, sometimes with a mission, then I wake in my bed with no memory. When I see him or I'm on another of his things, I can at least dimly recall certain things, like that I've done this before but no real details. Oh, and there's one perpetual rule, I'm there to entertain my easily bored patron. If my antics don't amuse, I will slowly become more and more of an unlucky weirdness magnet as he throws "funnier" events and situations my way. This go around started out so well, some version of DC, still not sure of a lot of the specifics, and libriomancy, the ability to pull items from books. Well, it's more complicated than that, but you know, basically.
So of course, I set out wanting to be a hero. Only it turned out to be a fairly early version of DC. The Batman was just a rumor going around Gotham those days, and no sign of Big Blue, though I was amused to learn that Metropolis is just across the bay, maybe forty minutes drive if you take the Metro-Narrows Bridge, just not in the mornings or from around 4-7 in the afternoon. Every so often, I make the trip to kick up a little sand in Mr. Kent's box, the guy has zero defenses against magic mind-control and it's sort of hilarious to get him involved in petty crimes. But back to the story, devoid of other supers I sought out Bruce Wayne, only it turns out it's really hard for a random vagrant to meet up with a security-paranoid billionaire. Who knew? And I really was a bum, little money, no ID or records, pretty unemployable.
So I shook down a few ne'er-do-wells, looting their bodies as a an adventurer ought. Then I used an amber charm to duplicate my small stacks of bills. Big mistake, as it turned out. Batman learned quicker than I could have imagined about the bills with the same serial numbers, tracked them to me and I got to meet the Batman like I wanted- when he punched me out and sent me for my first stint in Blackgate. Was there the Falcone crime family took an interest in my skills, my forged bills were perfect, indistinguishable from the real deal except for the amateur mistake of the duplicate serial numbers. Some of their boys set out to recruit me, and- look I'm not proud, and I wasn't cut out for prison life, scrawny bookish fellow that I am. I was feeling fairly stressed between the daily life and the threat of getting shanked by these guys. But in those days, they let me into the prison library.
One of the occupational hazards of libriomancy is, the more you use it the more you sort of... blur. You lose yourself and become not just you, but also characters in the book, maybe a bunch of characters shifting back and forth like Sybil or running together into a mess of conflicting memories and feelings. Happened a bunch of times over my career, and definitely caused some of my crazier moments. Thing is, it's real easy to do on purpose. Now, I'm not proud. I can admit, I was out of my depth, surrounded by scary criminals who could and had beaten me, and then this offer... I couldn't handle it. But James could. The setting that scared me so much, those were the waters he swam in, as safe and familiar as he could imagine.
It may have been a century and a half, but with very few exceptions (computers jump to mind) anything James Moriarty doesn't know about crime or dealing with criminals isn't worth knowing.
Those early days were especially harsh, I had blackouts or would lose control completely. James was really unhinged by the transition from the page to my skull, but that actually worked out in our favor. Mostly because we were psychotically violent and James signed on with the Falcones readily. It's nice to have allies and a rep in prison, and even deranged James instinct was to insinuate himself into and subvert the Falcone power structure rather than build our own from scratch.
The rest, as they say, is history. James and I sort of alternated being in control throughout our prison time and after, and the residency space in my head has flexed at times, at one point there twenty literary figures in there, but somehow or other it all comes back to me an' him. I did quite well for myself with the Falcones, two years in and I was a made man. Even got to run the family for six months when everyone above me in the food chain went to prison. I never did drugs or prostitution, but I've run numbers, sold magic to some really shady types, enabled supervillains, armed robbery, and a host of other crimes. James has always felt really driven to rule the underworld of Gotham, me, I'm fairly easy-going. And yeah, there was the incident with the death ray, but I legitimately wasn't in my right mind! Heck, I've worked with the Bat and the League a few times on the big stuff, alien invasions and so on, no Crisis yet, fingers crossed.
Well now you're asking yourself "he's a gangster in Gotham from outside that universe, why doesn't he use that knowledge to kill or unmask Batman." It's how I can tell you've never lived in Gotham. Of course I know who Batman is and I have a decent guess which Robin. That's not the point. The point is, the guy's a real hero, he's made this place so much better while I haven't made it worse but I've definitely profited handsomely off the problems. He's a stabilizing influence and if he sometimes hands out broken ribs, that's the cost of doing business in this town. Mind, I can feel a bit bitter, he was the one who figured out my powers and told the police. And every time, every single time, I've had the Joker in my sights, the one guy I could cheerfully kill and not a lose a wink of sleep over, suddenly he's there sticking a batarang all up in my business. I know why he does it, I even respect it to a point, but it's damned annoying to think of all those people who'd be alive if he'd just been a little late this one time years ago.
Besides, James enjoys having a worthy opponent too much. You've never experienced true frustration or horror until you've watched helplessly, knowing exactly what was going to happen, while Bruce gets my other half to start monologuing.
There's a lot of time and craziness in-between there and here, of course. Getting in deep with the mob is like that, and so's living in a comic book universe. But forgive me skipping over, here comes a car, an ugly green Ford older than I am.
The big guy with the Elvis hair behind the wheel is Freddie, my strong right hand. He started out as muscle for the Falcones around the time I started duplicating bills, and we wound up working together a bunch. Been, what, five years since I ran the Falcones, actually had a turf war with them since, but to him I'll always be "the Boss." You just can't buy loyalty like that. Speaking of bought loyalty, the shorter guy with the all the bling is my attorney/mouthpiece Vinny. Vinny's a snake, but I saved his niece's life once and pay on time, and that makes him my snake. Three times I've had to rebuild my organization from scratch and each time started much like now, with these two men.
"Boss!" Freddie's voice is really deep, with a crisp kind of accent I've never identified "You're lookin' good. Ready to get out of here?"
I smiled.
"You have no idea how ready I am." I climbed into the backseat. "Vinny, you got my package?"
"Here, Bookworm. Thirty books, all come out in the two years you were in. Nice sampling of what's popular, and some weight towards your interests." Meaning books I could use for magic, largely speculative fiction, but you'd be amazed how useful mythology, fairy tales and children's stories can be. Remind me to tell you about the time I escaped the Flash armed only with Bartholomew and the Oobleck.
As I held a book for the first time again, I could almost feel the magic, hear whispers just below the edge of understanding I was- no. Not right now, I just wanted to enjoy the act of reading. A quick check and I saw Vinny, or maybe Freddie, had gone through and dog-eared pages that might be useful. I preferred to add tabs, but this worked. For now though, just the reading.
"Too much to hope there was a new Martin or Rothfuss while I was in?"
Freddie smiled, seeming at ease with me acting more like me and less like James.
"No Rothfuss. Sort of on Martin, a prequel and a world-book."
"Darn."
Vinny being a bit of a heathen was never much one for literary discussion.
"We're heading to the old place at the Burley, unless you have another idea. Speaking of, got any plans?"
"Depends. It's hard to get news on the inside, except for the MCU crowd. Who's running the shows these days? Who do I have to beat?"
"Whale is down, Black Mask is up. Carmine Falcone died while you were in, his daughter's running things. We've got Ibanescus in fights and prostitution in Eastend, and the Maronis and the Russians are going at it."
Okay. I released a breath while James and I both went through our half-baked ideas and contingency plans. Time for another lateral shift and I'm forced to agree. Thing about life in Gotham, you need to keep moving and trying to come at things in new and exciting ways.
"Well boys, I thought I'd go straight this time." I will always treasure the look on Vinny's face, hope with the dawning suspicion this is a joke. "Or less obviously crooked. Seems there's nothing in my parole about not standing for public office, I was thinking mayor. True, nobody's gone from my criminal history straight to office yet, but then nobody's done a ton for Gotham either. I think the time is ripe for an... anti-establishment candidate."
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