I hated Gotham City. After seven years with my mom in Arizona, I'd decided to give her and her new husband some privacy and volunteered to move to this urban wasteland with my father, Charlie, the Deputy Commissioner of the Gotham City Police Force. Don't get me wrong, my father was a good man; unlike 99.9% of the rest of Gotham's cops, he was honest and refused any bribe the mob ever offered him; of course, being as rich as he was, he could afford to, something many of the underpaid and overworked Gotham cops couldn't do. So the money kept us from the kind of poverty that might draw someone into Gotham's criminal underbelly…but the downside was, my dad was always being invited to miserable, boring cocktail parties and dinners and fundraisers and a dozen other "social functions" as he put it, which seemed to only "function" as excuses for rich old men to get drunk and hit on waitresses.

And he was dragging me along to all of them, of course.

Take tonight for instance; we were at a black tie fundraiser for Jasper Hale, Gotham City's District Attorney, thrown by Jacob Black, owner of Black Enterprises and Gotham City's favorite loud mouthed playboy, in his high-rise penthouse.

I was bored out of my mind.

It had been interesting to see just how young Jacob Black was (he seemed to only be a few years older than me), and just how awkward the normally hard as nails district attorney was in the company of Gotham's trust fund brigade. But the novelty quickly wore off, and I settled into an isolated corner by the penthouse's windows.

So I was doubly surprised when the normal dull drone of the cocktail party was shattered by a shotgun blast. I pressed myself to the window, my eyes desperately seeking my father as chaos erupted around me; a half dozen or so armed men were stalking through the crowd, their faces covered by bizarre clown masks.

"Good even-ing ladies and gentlemen…we are tonight's entertainment!" the voice rose and fell in odd ways, stressing syllables in the wrong places,

"I only have one question…where…is…Jasper Hale?"

The room grew quiet; you could have heard a pin drop, and I could here the voice moving through the crowd of people, asking questions about Jasper but I couldn't see who it belonged to yet.

I started to move slowly away from the corner and towards the center of the room, trying to find Charlie, but I still couldn't see anything through the crowd of people.

Suddenly a new voice, this one pompous and deep, announced bluntly,

"We're not intimidated by thugs!"

Silence fell again.

"Y'know…" the bizarre voice picked up again, "You remind me of my father…I hated my father!"

I heard a small scuffle, and then a woman's voice rang out from the other end of the party,

"Okay, stop!"

The crowd parted, and I could see the woman as the clown masked gunmen surrounded her. It was the short, black haired woman the district attorney had arrived with; I think her name was Alice Dawes…

"Well hullo beautiful." the bizarre voice gloated, as the crowd closed me off again,

"You must be Jaspers squ-eeze…and you are beautiful."

I could hear the voice keep talking in low tones, but when I tried to edge forward and see what was going on, one of the armed clowns stuffed a gun in my face and pushed me back. Suddenly there was an outburst of bizarre laughter, and then all hell broke lose.

The crowd parted and I could finally see.

And I kind of wished I couldn't.

A man in a jet black suit of armor and black cape, his face covered by a black cowl, was brawling with the clowns. I knew who that was of course; he was on the evening news every night—Batman. Gotham City's vigilante extraordinaire.

The fight was over in a matter of seconds, and the clowns were on the ground, except for one. He was dressed in a purple over coat and wore a bizarre mask with long green hair. That was all I could see, as he quickly snatched up Alice Dawes and put a gun to her head.

"Let her go!" Batman ordered,

"Sure, you just take off your little mask and show us all who you really are."

The clown laughed, and then shot out one of the windows behind him.

He held Alice out of it.

"Let her go!"

The clown giggled,

"Very poor choice of words." he said, laughing, before dropping Alice out the window.

Alice screamed as she fell, and Batman dove out the window behind her.

Laughing maniacally, the clown watched them fall.

And then he turned, and he was eye to eye with…me.

I realized that the clown was not wearing mask.

His face was coated smeared with white make up, with black circles daubed around his eyes…and red around his mouth and in the deep, puckered scars that gave his face a permanent smile. Keen eyes leered at me from the black circles, and the clown spoke;

"My oh my…I've uh, been going to all the wrong parties, haven't I? Looks like all the hotties are at the fundraisers."

The clown let out a piercing cackle that made me flinch.

"It's too bad that I'm going to have to get goin' here…hey, maybe you could es-cort me to the elevator, huh gorgeous?"

Before I could say anything, the clown encircled my waist with an arm and began to drag me along with him towards the penthouse elevator. My face was inches from his scarred, bizarre visage, and I began to shudder,

"Ahhh…" the clown smirked, "I can see my uh, peculiar charm is having an effect."

I turned my head a bit and saw that his green dyed hair was shot through with locks of bronze. A detached part of my mind wondered if this was his natural color…

Thankfully we soon arrived at the elevator doors, and he loosened his grip on my waist before punching the "down" button.

"Well it's been fun, folks!" the clown shouted at the still frozen crowd of socialites, "But I'm gonna have to bring my performance to a close for the night."

He turned to me and winked, his mouth breaking into a crooked smile that lost nothing to his mutilated face.

"You've been a great audience!"

The clown reached into a pocket on his green waistcoat and pulled out a small cylinder; a grenade. He casually yanked the pin out and tossed it into the middle of the crowd.

People started to scream in terror and panic as the grenade rolled around on the floor; they scrambled to get over each other, tearing their expensive evening wear to pieces in the struggle, while all the while the small grenade was kicked all over the marble floors by the surging mass of humanity. I watched in shock, too amazed to feel fear, as the grenade skittered around under the crowd, which darted back and forth to try and avoid it.

I kept waiting for the explosion, but when I glanced at the clown and saw his gleeful expression, I had the feeling there wasn't going to be one.

The grenade was a dud.

The clown howled with laughter at his insidious joke.

And, amazingly, I found myself giggling as Gotham's elite ran headlong in terror from a harmless prop.

The clown manic laughter ceased and he turned to look at me in surprise.

"Oh my…beautiful and a sense of humor." he licked his scars lips and waggled his eyebrows at me, "I like that."

Behind us, the elevator doors swung open.

"So, if you're ever in the mood for some more fun." the clown began, as the terrified cries reached a crescendo, "Give me a call."

He tucked a playing under one of the shoulder straps of my dress.

He winked a me again, and I finally noticed the his eyes were gold; a deep, warm, gold that seemed to clash horribly with his bizarre make up, purple suit and green hair.

And then he ducked into the elevator and the doors slid shut.

Still staring at the closed steel doors, I idly reached for the playing card he'd tucked under my dress and looked at it; it seemed to be an antique.

I flipped it over to look at the face side;

It was a Joker. And beneath the cackling fool on it, a phone number had been scratched in rust-red ink.

I suddenly realized who the clown was, and what had just happened.

The Joker, the dark menace who had been terrorizing the city for months, had just asked me out.