A/N: Here you have it. The revised chapter. SUMMARY OF THINGS CHANGED: All mention of the Riddler as a Rogue has been removed. Instead, we have mention of the mysterious 'Broker', a superior and rival in the information trade to our lovely OC, Tayna Nabokov. Hobbes is still around, but instead of the Prince of Puzzles, he works for Roman Sionis. This will be useful to the plot later on. There is further exposition on what Tayna does as a job, as well as why she does it. She's become more impressive yet also a little more arrogant as a character. Since this is before the Joker, before the Batman is a big deal, and before the Riddler becomes a Rogue, she is also just a little naive to the ways of Gotham. Disclaimer: I don't own Batman or any copyrighted content associated with Batman.

"Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I'd been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye."

By Dorothy Parker

They say that curiosity is the beginning and end for every great mind. I don't know much about endings, it's hard to say something has ended when the world keeps turning. In my job, things are always moving. Data is always becoming obsolete, players are always falling behind in the great information Game. The human mind is naturally inclined to think of things finishing. We obsess over our own endings, how will our name survive us? How will we go out? Will it be with a bang? A whimper?

Even when we talk about creation, there are endings- All of history was created, and then came Man.

But endings are illusory; after that first man came another, and after you will follow someone else. The story only continues, the actors change costumes, the curtain draws, and someone in the wings starts dragging out the props for the next scene. There isn't much to be said about endings, because it's really just another word for 'change'. You could say death is the end, but your body then rots, teeming with life of a different kind.

The one thing that is constant, and undeniable, is a good start; beginnings are a fact of life. After all, it all had to start somewhere- and for me, that beginning was in curiosity.

"You will die if you go on tonight's run, find a way out of it."

"How do you know that, miss?"

In every story, there are always the thugs. Big, brutish men with hands like sledgehammers, little eyes, and short haircuts. The thugs are always stupid, piggy men. Every time the female heroine goes to a bar, the thug is the guy hitting on her- and how dare he hit on her. She always says something sufficiently catty or knees him in the unmentionables(never mind the poor man just thought she was beautiful, never mind that most social interactions only play out that way in someone's head). He's always the guy left to tie the good guy up, guard him, or teach him a lesson- and he always gets outsmarted.

"Do you see the crystal ball Jeffrey?"

"Yes, Miss"

"Make a deduction, Jeffrey. Don't go on tonight's run, and pay me now, in case you're stupid enough not to take my advice."

Jeffrey, the Thug, was currently sitting in the 'office' of one Tayna Nabokov. Yours truly. At first, I had tried to get away with leaving the room outfitted like a normal office, but when Thugs started dropping left and right, it was time to make a change. Nobody believes you're a real fortune teller unless you play the part. Now, the small room was draped in various dark linens, most of them a deep red or purple- smoke hung in the air, twirling upward from a stick of incense that the 'fortune teller' had lit. A few paltry cushions littered the floor. There wasn't any light save for the candles- after all, my 'office' was simply a room I'd found in one of the many abandoned buildings of the Narrows. There was no electricity.

I also didn't have to pay rent or put anything in my name, so you know, that's a plus.

"There isn't gonna be a fire brigade when those candles light up" Hobbes had grunted when he first saw the place. But he hadn't argued- most people learned not to argue with me after hanging around. He says I'm insufferable, and even more so after winning an argument.

I know of a different Thug than the one everyone else knows. He is a poor man, too poor to get an education save for the one every kid gets on Gotham's streets. His alma mater is his mother's alcoholism. He graduated cum laude with a degree in "Surviving The Ghetto" with a Minor in "Shitty Upbringing". He didn't know how to talk to people, let alone the opposite sex, and his only social interaction came from other Thugs in whichever gang he'd joined for protection. He came to the fortune teller of the Narrows for information (though he didn't know it) and drugs, which he paid for with information (again, unknowingly) and money.

Jeffrey is a thug, lower case 'T', one of Gotham's; not some ogre from a story, but a human being, and that's how I see him. That's how I stay alive. I don't let the Story overpower my common sense; everybody has a motivation, everybody has a reason; every reason can be manipulated. A thug's reason is survival, and so they come to me to have their fortunes told- at first in only a trickle, but when enough of the superstitious started dodging figurative bullets, a flood.

If he took my advice and played sick instead of participating in the Falcone's raid tonight (there were plenty men to replace him if he didn't show up), then he wouldn't get caught in the trap Two Face had set inside the target warehouse- twenty armed enemies all waiting to take on Penguin's strike team of ten. For this essential service, he paid me ninety dollars (ninety was just ten shy of 100, but for whatever reason, they were always more willing to pay ninety dollars). He then bought some drugs and chatted for a while, loosening up now that the air of mysticism cleared and Tayna the Fortune Teller became just another drug dealer- in the process, letting slip that Roman Sionis was planning a heist at Gotham Bank, thus distracting Gotham's newest Player- 'the bat-man'. Penguin would use that opportunity to steal a cache of weapons that the Black Mask had hidden by the wharf. This advice would no doubt rake in around one thousand dollars ( more like 900$, if I sell it to ten people on average, since that ten dollar difference was important when convincing the hired muscle to spend their hard earned cash).

Many people would use my position to make more money than that, to sell the information to one of the big Players. Many people before me have died doing exactly that. The only way being an information broker is profitable is if that information never reaches the ears of someone who can use it to alter events. It's much safer and much less noticeable to sell the information to the little guy- the pawns caught in the crosshairs of the big guy's plans. Lives get saved, but never enough to tip the balance, never enough to draw attention. And because the little guy usually isn't the smart guy, they were superstitious enough to believe they were getting fortunes- or just grateful enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

This was two birds with one stone; because nobody saw me as an information broker, they never watched their words around me, and because I only dealt with the lowest common denominator, none of the big guys ever knew there was someone collecting information on them. Basically, I existed at the bottom of a long chain of people underestimating one another- the Rogues of Gotham underestimated the information that their thugs had, and the thugs of Gotham assumed that what they were dealing with was simply a drug dealer with a penchant for telling accurate fortunes.

After buying his pot and hanging around for a little while, Jeffrey got up and left. I waited a while to see if anyone else would knock on my door tonight, then sighed and stood up. It was almost time to go, anyway. I went around, blowing out each of my candles, one by one. As the last flame went out a rapping on one of the curtain-hidden windows sounded out. All the windows were covered with the coloured cloth- partially for effect, partially for privacy, but mostly because it was getting cold outside. I went to the window and pulled aside some fabric.

"Hey girlie, ready to be walked home?" Hobbes peered up at me from underneath the window, cigarette clenched in his teeth. Most people would have classified him as a thug like all the others- after all, he worked for crime bosses and looked like a dangerous brick wall. I had known better from the second he walked into my office. His teeth were too clean, though a little crooked, and his fingernails were well-trimmed. His clothes were raggedy to be sure, but they, too, were kept clean and smelled like cheap laundry detergent. Otherwise, he had dark eyes, dark hair, and an unremarkable face.

He was clearly someone ambitious, trying to rise up from the murk of the Narrows. To me, that showed he was someone with a bit of wit. That's why he worked for two crime bosses, and not just one. Hobbes worked for both the Penguin and the Black Mask, but his loyalties lay only with me. He, like me, was someone who played the Game.

He and I had met in the early days; Penguin had sent him to inspect my joint- I had been incautious and used my information to advise one too many of the opposition's goons. One of Penguin's informants had caught wind of me and hinted to his boss that there was someone who might know more than they should. So Hobbes showed up, clean-toothed and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, acting like he wanted his fortune told. Luckily, my lack of caution did not mean I was stupid, just young- after a bit of back and forth questioning, I had realized what he was. We came to an… arrangement: as long as I never outed him to Sionis as a spy, he would go home and tell Penguin that I was just a lucky fortune teller, nothing to worry about. These days, we were more like friends than mutual blackmailers- he walked me home every day.

"If I have to trust you with my secret." The man grunted, eyes squinting in thought. "Then I have to make sure ya don't die, girlie. Yer just a little thing, even though you're too clever for yer own good. You get in the hands of the wrong type, and they'll squeeze all sorts of things out of ya." I schooled my expression and smiled, slow and lazy, and looked up at him from behind my crystal ball.

"Are you saying you aren't the wrong type, Mr. Hobbes?"

"Whatever you say, girlie." He half-replied. And that was that.

As we walked home through the darkening streets, we chatted about things.

"Weather's getting cold again." He muttered, by way of conversation.

"Do you have enough warm clothes?"

"Yes, mother." I frowned.

"Don't be like that, I can't have my bodyguard freezing to death this winter, now can I?" He grumbled something inaudible, but I didn't pursue the point. "Are you going on that heist tomorrow night?" For that I got a sharp look, and a quick scan of our surroundings. He didn't like when I mentioned the information I had out loud, unfiltered by spooky voices or crystal balls. After he was sure that the rain slicked streets were truly empty, taking a moment to peer through the steam that had begun to vent from the city's pores, he replied.

"No, too public. All hands on deck, but the officers have to stay away from the gunfire, in case another Rogue is around. Mr. Sionis protects his 'assets'. I'm on guard duty, with my little brother."

There, a prick of fear; I knew this day would come. My lips moved, numb, while the world shrunk into a pinprick in the distance. I watched myself ask him the question, though I already knew the answer.

"Will you be on the wharf?"

This was the moment I was going to fuck it all up. I had become friends with someone involved in the Game. That was against the rules I had set out for myself when I'd become a Player myself. Albert Einstein was quoted as once saying "You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else." I thought that because I had been playing better than anyone else, darting like a fish, unnoticed, through the currents of Gotham's underworld, that I could afford to break a rule. Of course not. The rules were everything.

Rule number one was don't get noticed.

Rule number two was don't make friends with the Players.

I saw my mistake, I knew that tonight, I would make a second one, willingly. That was the danger of friends.

"Don't go."

That night, when I got home, I cleaned my apartment. Then I got on my computer, and deleted everything. To be an information broker, you need to be smart with tech as well as with people, and I was pretty damn smart. In school, I had studied Game Theory, with a Minor in Computer Programming. I doubt anyone had expected me to use my knowledge like this, but this is the only way it felt useful. I saved people's lives, and I made money.

We live in a world where you grow up watching adults lie to one another, accuse each other of cheating, or of taking bribes; knowing that nobody was really trustworthy, and hating that you couldn't separate the good from the bad in people. After living life in the dark, there's nothing like having absolute knowledge, it makes you finally feel like you can trust people. It is a cheat, a hack, a backdoor.

After all, trust is just a subjective measurement of an individual's predictability. Most people guess how trustworthy a politician, police commander, or friend might be.

I know.

Computers are a fantastic tool in this, but they aren't like passed notes or the exploding sunglasses from Mission Impossible; they always left a trail. No matter how careful you are, if someone smart gets their hands on your hardware, you're screwed.

The Game that I've been mentioning is a very old game, older than those board games they found in King Tut's tomb. Older than prostitution. It's the Information Game. Once you play a little, you can't stop- because you know too much, and all the other Players are after you. It's a cutthroat game; more competitive than any race. If you fall behind, if your information becomes out of date, you tend to stay behind, watching the backs of those in the know. The cruelest fate for any player of the Game is to fall behind, have their knowledge become obsolete. It's like being in on the world's joke for once in your life, then one day waking up and noticing that all your friends are laughing over this thing you weren't around for. Giggling and saying "Remember when x did y? That was so funny!" and then saying something lame like "You had to be there" when you try and join in. Except the joke is deadly and might mean you're getting shot in the head as a spy next week.

Luckily, I had never fallen behind. I stayed in the upper echelons. I wasn't the best- the best was some kind of computer genius only known as The Broker, but I was close. That wasn't the safeast place to be, though. As the second in the city, I was a direct threat to The Broker himself; a minor one, but one that he would quickly eliminate if he could. It was something that kept me up at night sometimes.

You know when your enemy's only name is their job title, you're facing up against a badass. Who would you want to face in the fist fight- a judge, or The Judge?

Exactly.

For the first time since I'd taken second place in Gotham's Game, though, I felt truly scared. Paranoid. Terrified. Up until now I'd been squeaky clean, but now two guards- the ONLY two guards- of an important weapons cache are going to magically vanish from duty right before a heist. Everyone who knew anything about the Game would have their eyes on this event. If I were on the outside looking in, I'd be asking "Where did they get that information?".

So I took out all my RAM, all my memory, every replaceable chip on my computer, and I did what any paranoid information broker in the country's crime capital would do.

I lit it all on fire.