Why So Serious?

Prologue

A yellow folder. With several typed-up pages.

A bag, containing a leather-bound journal. Bloodstains on the bottom of it.

And underneath it all, the transcript of a girl's confession to murder, and the results of the trial.

Slowly you pulled out the small sheet of paper containing the results. "Zoe Hugh was found guilty of the first-degree murders of 65 people. Due to her mental instability, we are sentencing her to life in Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane."

You opened the folder, glancing through the pages. Zoe had been a pretty girl. Before everything. Only 21 when found guilty of all those murders.

Reaching over the pile of evidence on the steel table, you delicately stretched on a pair of latex gloves, snapping them onto your wrists. The sound echoed in the empty lab. Then you opened the evidence bag containing the journal.

Cautiously, you opened the journal. Inside your mind, you were begging the spirits not to bring the two of them back. Gotham wouldn't be able to handle it again if they came back.

You blinked a couple of times. Nope. That won't happen. Focus. You are just here to read the evidence. This is for a class. This all happened years ago. You. Are. Fine.

You opened the journal and began to read.

The Journal of Jason Hugh

-all events may or may not be slightly exaggerated for dramatic purposes-

If you are my sister, Zoe, stay the fuck out of this. It's not yours. For real. Bye bye. Go away.

Entry One

He had escaped.

The whole city was rocked with fear, remembering what had happened the last time he had been loose. The chaos. The murder. The sheer insanity of it all.

Harvey Dent. Good guy, bad guy, what the fuck. Blown up by the Joker, Commissioner Gordon said he was a bad guy, who knew what was going on. Maybe he had been manipulated by the Joker. Maybe he had actually been working for the bad guys all along. The more the story circulated, the more outrageous it grew.

At any rate, Batman was...no more...or something like that. Nobody had seen him since Bane.

For that matter, no one had seen Bruce Wayne either, except for some gossip magazine's cover of his "super-private, super-secret" wedding to Selena Kyle. We all know the truth. He just wants publicity and money from the tabloids. Come on, this is Bruce Wayne we're talking about. He probably was just hiding in Wayne Manor or something with Ms. Kyle. Mrs. Wayne now.

Anyway. The important thing is, he had escaped.

He. (If you're not getting the seriousness of this whole thing, let me reemphasize it. He had escaped.) Out of Gotham's elite prison for the criminally insane, Arkham. Which basically means, everyone was screwed. Like. Screwed.

This was worse than Bane last year. I remembered his reign of terror 9 years ago, when I was just 7, it was that bad. He blew up a hospital. Later it turned out he'd doused about $10.5 million in gasoline and burned it all, or at least that's how the story went. It could be more, it could be less. He blew up Harvey Dent, the guy who had been Gotham's White Knight. He sent Batman into hiding.

And don't get me started on the corpses of his victims. The ones he took care of personally had the most grotesque methods of torture performed on them. One had been found with a pencil sticking through his eyeball into his brain. Some more remains were found that appeared to have a bomb stitched into their body. Somebody dressed in a Batman costume had been hung, with his mouth sliced up to his ears, like his own smile. And the makeup was the same too, except the red wasn't paint. It was blood. And always, somewhere, he left his calling card: a joker card from a regular deck of cards.

Chaos. It's so easy to add a little chaos to everything. To do something out of the ordinary, to shock people. It's sticking by the rules that's hard. Doing what society expects of you, all that. That's why Zoe's so fucking weird. She's lazy, I guess, according to that reasoning. Only wears black, loves horror films, has a list of Top Ten Crimes She'd Commit, the whole yard. It's gotten so bad that she's been forced to stay in a hospital more than once for monitoring. That and her suicide attempts. I don't even know what's wrong with her, except that Mom and Dad say she's like bipolar or something. I don't even know. Those mental diseases are too much to keep up with anyway.

She's like the female version of the Joker. If the Joker hadn't killed anybody, that is.

Speaking of the Joker.

Let me repeat the most important thing.

He had escaped from Arkham Asylum. And everyone heard about it.

So, naturally, what any citizen did was email the editor of the Gotham Gazette and ask him to find Batman. The next thing each citizen did was to buy a gun and extra security. You know, just in case...no, that was too terrifying to think about. We're upping our home security. Yeah, that's what we're doing. Nobody wanted to admit to themselves that a lunatic killer was out there.

A lunatic killer whose only purpose was to watch Gotham burn.

A week went by since his escape. Nothing happened.

And we all kinda started to relax. He hasn't killed anybody, so maybe Batman caught him again. Secretly. People began returning their guns to the police, lowering security, an—

*at this point, there was a lot of blood across the bottom of the page, rendering everything else illegible. You sighed and flipped over a couple of pages carelessly. Then you noticed some writing and flipped back to read it more carefully. The words were written in large capitals, scrawled hastily on the page.*

MY NAME IS ZOE HUGH. YOU HAVE JUST WITNESSED THE MURDER OF MY YOUNGER BROTHER, JASON. FUCK YOU, JASON, FOR THAT DESCRIPTION OF ME.

AND FOR THAT DESCRIPTION OF HIM. HE'S SO MUCH BETTER THAN YOU THINK. HE'S TAUGHT ME SO MUCH.

I AM GOING TO TEACH THE WORLD THE BEAUTY OF CHAOS. INTRODUCE A LITTLE ANARCHY, WHY DON'T YA?

ssag2g����-