Author's Notes:

EDIT: Rewrote the first half.

Allow me to inform you, if you happened upon this story, read the summary, and expected something magical and endearing...then this story may disappoint you. If you wanted an enchanting story about romance and supernatural things, then this story may not be for you.

No, see, this story is about a girl who comes from a poor-but-not-so-poor family (that family meaning her dad) and she joins a gang of clowns.

This story is also about those clowns, which may or may not be limited to...

Twins

A hyena

A 'graverobber'

A man who hides his scarred face behind a mask

And possibly their families.

This story takes place in the not-so-nice parts of the Gotham City of the future, in the year 2040.

The first few chapters take place before the events of Return of the Joker...

----------The story begins with a girl who lives in her father's basement...or rather, the sub-floor below the basement.----------

The black-and-blue silhouette of a man flashed onto the television as "Breaking News" written in a headline appeared behind him above a small window with the incident shown in freeze-frame.

"Another break-in at the bank happened just a few moments ago, only about an hour after the bank closed. Our reporter is on-scene with Commissioner Gordon."

"This is the third time this month that the bank has been broken into. Due to the lack of video footage of the perpetrator, we suspect that it may be an inside job. For precautions, we're doing background checks on all the employees. It's still an ongoing investigation, so we're not ruling anybody out. Judging by the amounts they take, we can only assume that the sum will only be getting larger. "

"A job well done, eh Toto?" the TV clicked off as a ghastly figure, which looked for the world like some sort of demented scarecrow, stood and turned to a creature, that give the impression of being the product of what you might get if you crossed a tarantula with a scorpion and maybe a small dog.

The scarecrow being chuckled and threw off her black trench coat onto the futon behind her. (Judging by the pitch of their voice, it would to be assumed that it was be a girl.)

"I can't believe those chumps are actually doing whatever I say, ha ha!" she laughed. "The things people will do to keep their precious affairs and secrets hidden." Her yellow pupils rolled in the darkened sockets that were her eyes. "What dregs."

With another crazed giggle, she seized her eight-legged companion and skipped around in circles. "Dorothy Atkinson, you are indeed a genius!—Oof!" it was a severely cluttered and crowded room, so bumping into, say, a furnace, was to be expected. But it didn't hurt. In another moment she tossed the creature aside squealing and aggressively sat down on her futon, which promptly collapsed towards the wall under her weight.

"They wouldn't dare squeal. Not on me. Too much is on the line for them…or at least that's what I need them to believe."

Her foot tapped irritably on the floor, but the sound it normally would have produced was muffled by the clothes that were thrown about under her feet.

After a pause, Toto peered out from the heap of laundry he landed in. Just when he began to creep out of the pile his instincts threw him behind the futon just as a projectile landed in the same heap he had. It wasn't until a few seconds later he realized it was a heavy stapler.

"They need to think that it's worth it…" Dorothy snarled. Toto dared another peep, but his scarecrow-girl owner was surprisingly a lot calmer than she sounded.

"No use worrying over it now, I suppose."

Before he knew it, Toto was snatched from his hiding spot and held in the air over Dorothy, who had rolled over onto her back. It was like holding a puppy, rather than the garish fearsome creature he actually was. She knew just the way to hold him without getting cut by the razors on his back, or snagged by his barbed "fur".

Sitting up and petting Toto like some sort of cat that an evil genius would in a movie she stared blankly into the mess of useless and useful junk she had been collecting over the years. Anything and everything could be found in that room…probably. Though it might take some digging (literally.) Antiquated posters from the 1970's to the early 2000's lined her walls, from rock bands to movie advertisements. And where there wasn't a poster there was a shelf full of the strange and bizarre. Lava lamps with Barbie doll heads floating inside, surgical scissors, little black boxes, a miniature stapler with the pattern of a fish skeleton on it, to name just a few of her medley of daunting playthings. She even had a bone saw and the head of some mutant animal mounted over her head (which she claimed was the chupacabra.) To top it all off, every corner of everything was connected to spider webs. Her room was definitely a box full of remarkable, often florescent, horrors.

"I want some pudding." She said finally, after a long, agonizing pause. Toto let out a shrill cry and twisted in her hands. There was only so much attention and nonsense from her he could take. Getting the signal, the adolescent let him go and allowed him to roam about wherever he pleased.

Toto bolted into a dark corner of the room as the juvenile girl staggered carefully over the debris on the floor over to a junky desk with a junky old computer on it with a whole bunch of miscellaneous items crowding it. Swatting a few skeletal toys out of the way, she squatted beside the broken office chair and swung open the mini refrigerator door.

"Lukewarm pudding with not-whipped cream. Yum."

Despite the fact that she had the electrical company wrapped around her finger, she was still waiting for them to hook it up down in the basement. (The TV was wired from the upstairs.) Which was either really unfortunate for her, or really unfortunate for them; she hadn't decided yet. She just knew that she hated lukewarm things. Pudding either had to be hot, or cold.

In her mind, there were no gray areas. Good or bad, hot or cold, black or white, Batman or Joker. The only thing that was allowed to be in the middle was Malcolm, and he technically wasn't even in the middle until the later seasons of the show. (Not that anyone she knew would actually get what she meant by that, but that was their problem.)

Her plan was slowly falling into place. With all the bank robberies, there would be less protection everywhere else. It was perfect. The only question remaining was how they were going to sic Batman on them.

A pair of shady figures walked hurriedly through Gotham's back alleys. They were quite a site to see, if anyone actually did happen to see them. One of them was tall and skinny, the other was almost as tall, but took up a lot more room. Large, but not down in the belly; no, not at all. It was all in his shoulders and back. They were both shrouded in black cloaks, rather unusual for that day and age, but if you could see them, you would definitely suspect the latter to be some sort of animalistic creature or something.

"C'mon, Woof, hurry." The taller said to the other as he fought against the draft that gusted through the wind-tunnel-like alleyway. He appeared paranoid; he was constantly watching his back, and made quick with his steps. "I don't like 'is neighbor'ood." He said, rather ironically. The other, the beast, stopped what it had been amusing itself with and ran up to be near the other.

"'Get in, get out' he says." The taller began. "'With your brains and 'is brawn, you'll be out in no time' he says. 'Just follow the blueprints' he says. Well I assure you that dreg is gonna get a piece of my mind when we get home."

So home wasn't the best description of their most recent dwelling. In fact, after the job they were going to do Halloween, the place was probably going to get torched. Not that anyone was going to care. The apartment was in a neighborhood not much different from the one they were in now. You could gain access to it from one of the forgotten alleyways; it was underground, for the most part. A few small rectangular windows kept the view of the outside from its dark depths. Despite its rather lame disposition, he and the group had to admit, it was a pretty schway place to hang out.

Torching it would be just to get rid of evidence, just in case. No one could probably be tracked there, since no one went into the slums of that district anymore, unless they had business in a higher part of the building. And, lucky for them, it had been proven from an earlier experience that fire would have limited movement and power down in those basements. The materials used in buildings nowadays prevented fire from spreading, and, having had the newer age of Gotham built over it, the basement would be destroyed, but the fire would stop once there was nothing left to burn…or something like that. Besides, there was also pipes and stuff that spat out water when needed, so that might come in handy. Long story short: they needed to find somewhere else to bunk in about a week until the heat cooled down.

"We should probably start looking for another room t' bunk in, eh?" the tall one said to his companion, who only snorted in reply.

They walked in silence until they came upon their current hideout. They stripped off their dark exteriors and joined a group of clowns sitting at a table. A large pink one wearing a mask spoke first.

"What took ya so long, Ghoul?"

Ghoul, the tall one, slammed his palm on the table and set himself down on a stool next to a pair of blond twins who were removing each other's clownish makeup. "I'm not in the mood for your crap, Chucko."

Without the covering of the cloak, him and his companion were far stranger than one would imagine…especially Woof. Woof, as his name would suggest, was a beast. Gray coarse fur with dark spots covering his neck and arms. It could be assumed that they were on other parts of his body too, but like any normal human being (not that he was one), he wore clothes; black shirt and pants (or it could have been a jumpsuit; they were the same color and overlapped each other, so it was hard to be sure) and an old, blue vest. If fitted on any other person, his clothes would have fallen off or sagged, but they seemed to fit Woof perfectly.

As for Ghoul, he was just as gray as his companion, maybe a bit lighter. His eyes were dark, and a jagged, skeletal smile tattoo came from the corners of his mouth; to finish it all off, stitch markings could be found on his forearms and his other appendages, as well as his abdomen. Those could only be seen given that his sleeves had been torn off to the elbows, his pants nearly to the knee, and the torso of his shirt almost to his chest.

"I was only asking. You're late by half an hour."

"We had to hide in a storage closet for twenty minutes so we wouldn't get caught!" Ghoul pulled a crumpled, torn, and folded sheet of gridded paper from his pocket and tossed it to the clown. "Your map needs revising." Chucko flattened out the charted paper and laughed.

"Well no wonder, you had it upside-down!"

The twins giggled, but a sure-sounding slam on the table from a glaring Ghoul silenced them. Chucko shrugged sheepishly. He was probably still laughing behind that mask of his.

"So did you at least set it up?"

Ghoul took a moment to pause and settle himself leaning comfortably over the table.

"It's all in place."

Ghoul, the Dee Dees, Woof, Chucko, Batman, etc. belong to the Batman franchise.

All else probably belongs to me.