In Gotham City, a new arrival tries to not just survive the city of The Batman, but also escape...
Strawman (DC SI)
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Chapter 1
Gideon020
Really in the mood for ribs.
Chapter 1:
It was, as tales of this nature typically go, a dark and stormy night in Gotham city.
Storm winds coming in from the coast ensured that a massive curtain of water had swiftly covered the brooding metropolis in its traditional cloak of soaking darkness. The water mercilessly drowned the streetlights.
This was Gotham City after the sunset, right before the filth crawled out of the woodwork.
Residents of Gotham could set their clocks by the regularity of the first shots ringing out in the early evening and the wailing of police sirens echoing in response. Parents did their best to shield their children, but often there would be a child who went to sleep hearing gunfire, or a scream in the night.
It was inevitable that a child's dreams would be tainted by all this, but that would always pale in comparison to the nightmares being dreamed inside a derelict apartment building. For inside that urban decay was a man, a man obsessed with something that every man, woman and child usually takes for granted as a useful survival mechanism: Fear.
This man wanted to know everything about fear, it consumed him, until he decided that the best way to study fear...was to become fear itself. And with qualifications in chemical engineering and psychology, he was able to create the best tool for his work.
This man's name is Jonathan Crane, although in recent times he has come to prefer a more appropriate name for his evil, cruel work. Scarecrow.
It was a dark and stormy night in Gotham City, and the Scarecrow was about to finish his work on a new variant of his primary tool, the chemical used for his Fear Toxin and Fear Gas.
"Yes, this new compound should create a state of suggestiveness in the test subject," Crane muttered into a recorder, "if the calculations are correct, and I am supremely certain that they are, it should open the way for targeted hallucinations. And targets…" The man chuckled darkly as he adjusted the flame burning under the beaker, watching the chemical mixture bubble with focused eyes. "Oh, I could think of a few."
So engrossed was the man in his work, that he didn't notice the hole in reality open in the air above him, just below the ceiling. The driving rain and thunder outside the windows also served to keep the madman from hearing a faint sound coming from the hole.
Right up until with a loud scream, another man fell out of the hole and slammed into Crane. Hard.
Crane had just started turning to the source of the scream when the impact happened. The result was a predictable result of physics and the two of them slammed into the table and the still active experiment. Glass and chemicals went flying as the cheap wooden table snapped in two with barely any resistance offered.
What made a confusing situation possibly worse was when the man who had fallen into Crane managed to recover just enough see the various chemicals on the ground starting to bubble and hiss as they mixed on the wooden floor.
"Oh...fuck…"
There was a flash, a loud bang drowned out from the thunder outside, and in seconds the air started to waver just visibly enough to warn anyone that there was gas filling the room. And even in his half-stunned state, the new arrival was able to recognise enough of his surroundings, particularly the costume hanging on a rack nearby, to know just how much trouble he was in.
"Oh fuck...oh fuck...oh fuck," Muttering the litany to himself, the intruder painfully hauled himself off the stunned Crane, swayed unsteadily for a moment, before staggering towards the costume on the rack, "Mask. Gotta get that mask." He tipped sideways, slamming into a stack of crates, barely avoiding falling again, "Fuck! Okay, keep moving. You have to get that mask."
His vision was blurring badly but so far the gas hadn't reached a high enough density in the room, but he wasn't going to take any chances, not with his life on the line. He stumbled, nearly tripping over his feet, and recovered just in time to hear a noise he didn't want to hear.
The groan of Crane recovering.
Turning slightly, the intruder managed to spot Crane's blurry form shifting. But if Crane was feeling anything like he was feeling, and there was a very good chance he was feeling worse. The intruder realised he still had a chance to save his own neck and turned back to the costume.
He coughed and smelt something in the air, "Crap!"
A stumbling walk turned into a desperate, clumsy sprint towards the costume that sent him to the ground more than once. But even as the world started to shift minutely, shadows lengthening and strange noises whispering in his ears, he still managed to grab the rack and pull the costume down with a crash. Cracks spidered along the floor and gave glimpses into Hell.
Even as the demons reached up to him, the intruder managed to jam Crane's mask over his face, breathing deeply to force the filters into doing their work. The demons howled and the storm outside seemed to come to life, but nothing else changed and as he kept breathing through the mask the hallucinations began to weaken.
He was lucky, but only just.
Lying there on the ground feeling pain coming from all over his body but mostly his back, the intruder looked around for Crane before hearing what sounded like him moving. With a groan and a pained sigh he slowly and agonisingly forced himself to turn over and look back to where he had last seen Crane, his vision now cleared enough to look for him properly.
The intruder found the man who had constantly and tirelessly plunged Gotham into waking nightmares convulsing violently on the floor with his eyes wide and unseeing. As the intruder watched, Crane's mouth worked itself open and shut noiselessly.
"...oh yeah. He's not the Joker." The intruder blinked as he said his though out loud, before he chuckled, wincing as a stab of pain went through him, "Ouch. But seriously, why else would he have a gas-mask in his costume if he wasn't immune?"
Taking a deep breath, glad for the extra effort of breathing through filters, the intruder lay back and stared at the ceiling watching faintly hair-tingling patterns dance and twist. Even with a pounding storm outside, a room full of what had to be a prototype Fear Gas, and the all but shouted confirmation that he was where he thought he was, he couldn't help but realise something.
This was probably going to be one hell of an adventure, and no-one was ever going to believe him if he ever found a way home.
Then he groaned and placed a palm to his masked forehead as another realisation came to him.
"I have to kill Crane now, don't I? Fucking wonderful."
It was, as tales of this nature typically go, a dark and stormy night in Gotham city.
Storm winds coming in from the coast ensured that a massive curtain of water had swiftly covered the brooding metropolis in its traditional cloak of soaking darkness. The water mercilessly drowned the streetlights.
This was Gotham City after the sunset, right before the filth crawled out of the woodwork.
Residents of Gotham could set their clocks by the regularity of the first shots ringing out in the early evening and the wailing of police sirens echoing in response. Parents did their best to shield their children, but often there would be a child who went to sleep hearing gunfire, or a scream in the night.
It was inevitable that a child's dreams would be tainted by all this, but that would always pale in comparison to the nightmares being dreamed inside a derelict apartment building. For inside that urban decay was a man, a man obsessed with something that every man, woman and child usually takes for granted as a useful survival mechanism: Fear.
This man wanted to know everything about fear, it consumed him, until he decided that the best way to study fear...was to become fear itself. And with qualifications in chemical engineering and psychology, he was able to create the best tool for his work.
This man's name is Jonathan Crane, although in recent times he has come to prefer a more appropriate name for his evil, cruel work. Scarecrow.
It was a dark and stormy night in Gotham City, and the Scarecrow was about to finish his work on a new variant of his primary tool, the chemical used for his Fear Toxin and Fear Gas.
"Yes, this new compound should create a state of suggestiveness in the test subject," Crane muttered into a recorder, "if the calculations are correct, and I am supremely certain that they are, it should open the way for targeted hallucinations. And targets…" The man chuckled darkly as he adjusted the flame burning under the beaker, watching the chemical mixture bubble with focused eyes. "Oh, I could think of a few."
So engrossed was the man in his work, that he didn't notice the hole in reality open in the air above him, just below the ceiling. The driving rain and thunder outside the windows also served to keep the madman from hearing a faint sound coming from the hole.
Right up until with a loud scream, another man fell out of the hole and slammed into Crane. Hard.
Crane had just started turning to the source of the scream when the impact happened. The result was a predictable result of physics and the two of them slammed into the table and the still active experiment. Glass and chemicals went flying as the cheap wooden table snapped in two with barely any resistance offered.
What made a confusing situation possibly worse was when the man who had fallen into Crane managed to recover just enough see the various chemicals on the ground starting to bubble and hiss as they mixed on the wooden floor.
"Oh...fuck…"
There was a flash, a loud bang drowned out from the thunder outside, and in seconds the air started to waver just visibly enough to warn anyone that there was gas filling the room. And even in his half-stunned state, the new arrival was able to recognise enough of his surroundings, particularly the costume hanging on a rack nearby, to know just how much trouble he was in.
"Oh fuck...oh fuck...oh fuck," Muttering the litany to himself, the intruder painfully hauled himself off the stunned Crane, swayed unsteadily for a moment, before staggering towards the costume on the rack, "Mask. Gotta get that mask." He tipped sideways, slamming into a stack of crates, barely avoiding falling again, "Fuck! Okay, keep moving. You have to get that mask."
His vision was blurring badly but so far the gas hadn't reached a high enough density in the room, but he wasn't going to take any chances, not with his life on the line. He stumbled, nearly tripping over his feet, and recovered just in time to hear a noise he didn't want to hear.
The groan of Crane recovering.
Turning slightly, the intruder managed to spot Crane's blurry form shifting. But if Crane was feeling anything like he was feeling, and there was a very good chance he was feeling worse. The intruder realised he still had a chance to save his own neck and turned back to the costume.
He coughed and smelt something in the air, "Crap!"
A stumbling walk turned into a desperate, clumsy sprint towards the costume that sent him to the ground more than once. But even as the world started to shift minutely, shadows lengthening and strange noises whispering in his ears, he still managed to grab the rack and pull the costume down with a crash. Cracks spidered along the floor and gave glimpses into Hell.
Even as the demons reached up to him, the intruder managed to jam Crane's mask over his face, breathing deeply to force the filters into doing their work. The demons howled and the storm outside seemed to come to life, but nothing else changed and as he kept breathing through the mask the hallucinations began to weaken.
He was lucky, but only just.
Lying there on the ground feeling pain coming from all over his body but mostly his back, the intruder looked around for Crane before hearing what sounded like him moving. With a groan and a pained sigh he slowly and agonisingly forced himself to turn over and look back to where he had last seen Crane, his vision now cleared enough to look for him properly.
The intruder found the man who had constantly and tirelessly plunged Gotham into waking nightmares convulsing violently on the floor with his eyes wide and unseeing. As the intruder watched, Crane's mouth worked itself open and shut noiselessly.
"...oh yeah. He's not the Joker." The intruder blinked as he said his though out loud, before he chuckled, wincing as a stab of pain went through him, "Ouch. But seriously, why else would he have a gas-mask in his costume if he wasn't immune?"
Taking a deep breath, glad for the extra effort of breathing through filters, the intruder lay back and stared at the ceiling watching faintly hair-tingling patterns dance and twist. Even with a pounding storm outside, a room full of what had to be a prototype Fear Gas, and the all but shouted confirmation that he was where he thought he was, he couldn't help but realise something.
This was probably going to be one hell of an adventure, and no-one was ever going to believe him if he ever found a way home.
Then he groaned and placed a palm to his masked forehead as another realisation came to him.
"I have to kill Crane now, don't I? Fucking wonderful."
Last edited:
Interesting. Unless he gets superpowers somehow, I don't expect the SI to have much control over anything. I bet it will be entertaining either way.
Hammerheadcruiser
Eagle-1 my beloved
- Location
- Anaxes
Its interesting how much you learn through osmosis on the internet, like how I actually know who that bad guy is (vaguely) even without ever reading anything DC
Will watch
Will watch
You didn't watch the recent Batman movies? He was in all three.
I think he only had his scarecrow mask in the first though.
The second as well.
Hammerheadcruiser
Eagle-1 my beloved
- Location
- Anaxes
I have not watched any batman movies, overall DC does not interest me
Ridiculously Average Guy
I'm you, but stronger
- Location
-
This looks interesting.
From the title, I assume he's going to suborn the Scarecrow identity?
From the title, I assume he's going to suborn the Scarecrow identity?
Gideon020
Really in the mood for ribs.
Step 1: Secure means of making more Fear Toxin/Gas.
Step 2: Secure means of intelligence.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
Step 5: Batman.
Probably outsource the mad science somehow and replace the rest with common sense.
That should handle most of it.
BlackoutSampler
So Easily Forgotten
One thing that has me confused is Why? as in Why assume the identity of the Scarecrow? I'm sure it has some benefits, but it seems like such a odd decision for someone who has apparently just been thrown into the DC universe. Also, the idea of killing a guy who is (currently) helpless seems a bit extreme, even if he is well known as cruel and a supervillain. It just doesn't feel like anything the SI is doing would be the first thought in a person's mind in this kinda situation. Given that this person would be fundamentally you, I could be wrong and this would be how you act, but "oh shit my car is gonna crash/has crashed" ==> instantly recognizing Scarecrow and Fear Gas and remembering that his mask has a built in gas mask ==> fuck I gotta kill this guy, seems like it skipped a few steps.
Ridiculously Average Guy
I'm you, but stronger
- Location
-
Well he can't steal his identity of the real Scarecrow is still alive.
Also, there's a (very) good chance that Crane will attempt to kill him later.
That said, yeah it's a bit of a jump. Unless he's , like, a clone of Crane I don't really see him getting all that much out of this, besides an unused nom de jure.
Also, there's a (very) good chance that Crane will attempt to kill him later.
That said, yeah it's a bit of a jump. Unless he's , like, a clone of Crane I don't really see him getting all that much out of this, besides an unused nom de jure.
Gideon020
Really in the mood for ribs.
1: Yes, I would kill the Scarecrow, because I would be terrified of him recovering enough to hunt me down.
2: I wouldn't willingly replace the Scarecrow. But it's Gotham City, and nature abhors a vacuum.
BlackoutSampler
So Easily Forgotten
I'm not saying it is wrong to choose to kill the Scarecrow, just that you thought of it really quickly. it is like you skipped the question now what the hell do I do with him? there was seemingly no deliberation on fuck, there is no way for me to hold him by myself. and shit getting him arrested is likely to get myself killed. the way it is worded in the update makes it sound like he just remembered a chore he forgot to do.
... no. That's like being in a position to kill the joker and not taking it. Its justified self defense. Even if your a mile out with a sniper rifle. You feared for your life. This is especially true with scarecrow given he literally works with fear and the person just got a good lungful or two of the stuff in his system. He fears for his life and he is under the effect of fear drugs. What your saying would break credulity in his situation. He isn't the gamer. He isn't going to think clearly in that sort of situation. He is currently drugged and in a locked room with a known sociopathic killer. My first reaction in that situation is to look for a weapon and to remove the threat as quickly as possible through whatever means necessary once I recognized where I was and just who that was.
- Location
- Chile
Really? My first reaction would be to try to escape.
Also, was it mentioned anywhere that the room is locked?
Its Gotham. Of course its locked. Its also currently full of fear gas. Some people run when afraid others fight back. Its called a fight or flight response.
jaiveer00
Siding With Thanos
- Location
- The Beginning and The End
Bullshit. You're being justifiably paranoid. It's Gotham.
Fredo
Climbing Mt Doom
It's a little strange that the SI had so much difficulty coming up with a means of killing Crane. Did the SI not consider breaking his neck, or smothering him with a pillow, or strangling him with an electrical cord, stomping on his throat, or drowning him in the toilet? Killing someone who is just lying there helplessly is pretty simple mechanically - it's the actual decision to kill someone in cold blood that most people (thankfully) have difficulty with.
Gideon020
Really in the mood for ribs.
I dropped a heavy object on his head. That's Killer Croc-level of sophistication of killing right there. You think I was in the right state of mind with a lungful of unknown Fear toxin and experiencing outright panic?
Gideon020
Really in the mood for ribs.
Again. Scared. Fear Toxin. Not Thinking Straight.