"Do you know what I love about mud? It's clean and it's dirty at the same time."
- King Koopa, Super Mario Bros.
Gotham City's industrial district wasn't the most ideal place to chase down criminals at night. Stephanie weaved through an endless maze of boilers, pipes, and maintenance equipment with expert stealth in pursuit of her target. The environment felt just as dangerous and unpredictable as the violent psychopath she was tracking.
The sound of a cappella music suddenly flowed down from the smoke-spewing beams above Stephanie's head. A single cheerful, high-pitched woman's voice became a haunting chorus of thousands thanks to the treatment plant's natural acoustics.
"Ring around the rosie, Batgirl's a little poser! Ashes, ashes, now she's gonna get clowned!"
Stephanie groaned and rolled her eyes. That one didn't even rhyme.
She was caught by surprising when a weapon shaped like a small trapeze wire connecting two pink and purple yo-yos came spinning out of the darkness. The wire hit its mark by striking Batgirl's neck and wrapping around her throat several times, partially blocking her windpipe as the colorful round weights magnetically twisted together.
A small metal sphere dropped straight down from the factory ceiling and landed at Batgirl's feet. A second later, it exploded into a curious combination of whistling party streamers and a light dose of sleeping gas.
As Stephanie gagged and wiped her eyes, a shadow descended beside her. Harleen was dangling upside-down with the backs of her knees elegantly locked over a steam pipe. Stephanie blinked just in time to see a slab of smooth, polished wood sailing for her face.
"Batter up!" Harleen sadistically cackled.
Batgirl was knocked out cold in a home run for the ages.
Harleen shifted out of her hiding spot with a delicate grunt and a tiny flip, landing on the factory floor with a curtsy. She gave Stephanie a light jab with the toe of her boot before calling the coast clear. Soon a flood of voices other than her own were echoing over the pipes.
A mob comprised of every major player in the Gotham underworld crawled out of the darkness of the mill. Far at the front of the group was the Joker. He was flanked by a pair of helpers wearing jester face paint and full-bodied HAZMAT suits.
Joker wrung his hands in mischief. The villains behind him grew silent. The HAZMAT team glanced toward the playful Harleen stretching her baseball bat behind her shoulders, the motionless Batgirl on the ground, and then toward each other.
"So which bitch is getting the chemical bath?" one goon muttered to the other.
"Now whaddid I tell you guys?" the Joker boasted in front the crowd. "Is this new sidekick I've picked up one sweet peach or what?"
"I took 'er out just like you ordered, Mistah J!" Harleen exclaimed while Stephanie lay crumpled at her feet.
Joker giggled hysterically at the sight in front of him, but his voice trailed and his grin faded slightly when he peered at the ground. A sense of agitation in him grew as he leaned to get a closer look at the downed superheroine. Then all of his sarcastic charm faded.
"Ugh. You cotton candy-headed klutz!"
"Huh?" Harleen blinked in confusion.
"You were supposed to bring the redhead!" Joker screamed, pointing at Stephanie. "The blonde only gets you half the points!"
"How was I supposed to know there's more than one of 'em?" Harleen scoffed. "They all look like the same rubber bimbo to me."
"Everyone knows the redhead is more popular!" the Joker said with even more anger. "The whole point was to bring the redhead here for the show! This one's just a copycat!"
Joker awkwardly stopped as his eyes shifted toward the audience. He spotted Selina Kyle's costumed visage standing in the gang. Her arms were crossed and there was a growing scowl twisting across her mouth.
"No offense to our feline friends, of course," Joker added politely.
"You told me to nab the Bat and I nabbed ya the Bat! Now you're changing the rules on me!" Harleen shouted back.
"Are you honestly telling me you can't tell two completely different people named Batgirl apart? What kind of shrink are you?" Joker said.
"A good one who knows how to categorize her patients with the same disorders and come up with a consistent treatment method for all them. And from the sounds of it, I'd say we're in the middle of a pandemic of girls wearing shiny black jammies jumping around on buildings thinking they're nocturnal rats, thank ya very much! I'm out of my office on Mondays!" Harleen argued back in an unusually sophisticated manner.
"…But does this mean I don't get to pass?" Her heart sank and she sadly sniffed. Her emotions turned on a dime.
The anger on Joker's face instantly faded. He shook his head as he looked down at the pouting Harleen. She had the kind of psychotic puppy dog look he could never turn down.
"Aw, phooey," he sighed. "One freshly served Bat Babe is as good as any in my book."
Harleen hopped on her toes and clapped in celebration.
"I can't let all that acid go bad, anyway," Joker said. "It took forever for these guys to get the formula just right for your body weight."
Joker draped his arm over Harleen's shoulder and slowly led her to the imaginary center stage. Quietly and ominously, he introduced her to her future supervillain allies.
"Now, for the last step of your initiation, you'll have to decide what we should do with our little lamb. You're done a brilliant job setting up the joke, schnookums. Now it just needs a good punchline." His grin grew nightmarishly wide. "Carnival toys and party crackers are one thing. This is where you get into the real dirty work of being one of us."
One by one, the most distinguished members of the gang offered their suggestions.
"I could infect her with a single bite and curse her to a life covered in scales. The depths will be her new home," Killer Croc snarled.
"Perhaps this bat would make a lovely snow angel once her wings are clipped." Mr. Freeze observed.
"My babies are always looking for fresh soil to sow their roots," Poison Ivy whispered through sultry lips. "I could make a walking rose garden out of her."
"I'll consume her like quicksand and change every cell in her body to clay until she knows what it's like to be a true masterpiece," Clayface rumbled.
"I'll share so much of my Venom with her that her muscles will come bulging out of that tight little costume. She'll forget what's it like to be a weakling and become addicted to me," Bane menaced.
"I'll spread so much fear through her veins, her mind will turn to straw in seconds. She'll think we're all from Oz and she's our Dorothy," Scarecrow hissed.
"Hm." Harleen smiled thoughtfully at all of their colorful threats.
"How about you, Mistah J?" she tilted her head toward the Joker. "What would you do with her if I gave her to you? Throw a pie in her face? Stick a whoopee cushion under her cape?"
"How the hell should I know?" Joker shrugged. "I never plan these things out. I'd probably just shoot the flying rodent in the head."
Harleen pursed her lips in disappointment. She glanced toward the group, scratched her chin curiously, and started to make her decision the only way she knew how. Sticking her tongue in the corner of her mouth and picking up her wooden bat with one arm, she pointed the end of the shaft to the gathered mob.
"Eeny meeny miney moe, catch a tiger by his toe…"
She cheerfully bobbed the bat toward each supervillain in the group as she let a final game of chance determine Batgirl's fate. She made an obvious effort to skip over Joker in each pass.
"…meeny miney moe!"
The end of the bat froze between two of the imposing figures. The suspense grew unbearable as Harleen slowly waved the weapon back and forth between Scarecrow and Clayface. She moved her arm like the bat had a mind of its own and she was simply holding onto it while she considered her options.
Finally she let the bat point in a specific direction.
"You're up, Mudslide."
"Clayface," the creature grunted in detest.
"Whatever." Harleen smiled and shrugged.
Clayface lifted Stephanie's limp frame off of the factory floor with the ease of a giant with a porcelain doll. Her feet dangled five feet off the ground as he held her to his eyes, taking in her rough measurements and adjusting his internal structure in anticipation. The close feeling of his hot, swamp-scented breath brushing against her face was enough to stir her back to awareness.
Batgirl drowsily blinked, then widened her eyes. Clayface's entire torso drew open like a second massive mouth in the middle of his body. She made a face to scream before she was abruptly absorbed head-first into shapeshifting abomination.
The jaws of Clayface's stomach clamped down on her waist, burying the top half of her body in his swarming mass. Her hunched-over lower half frantically kicked in the air, struggling to save herself from being completely absorbed using her leg strength alone. Clayface had a difficult time getting her to budge even after small tendrils of clay caught around her ankles and tried to pull her forward.
Harleen stepped up and gave Stephanie a rude shove on the old caboose with the end of her baseball bat.
"In ya go, Bats!"
The extra push was more than enough to send Batgirl diving into her muddy doom.
Her fight for survival continued from within Clayface. Impressions of her hands and feet appeared on his surface. Her entire physique became sculptured on his torso like a full-body plaster cast as she still tried to push herself out of the amorphous mass.
Poison Ivy blew a handful of pollen on Stephanie's clay-veiled figure, clouding her with microscopic enzymes that would keep her moisturized and ensure all the right molecules bonded. Batgirl sank back into the bulk of the clay, slowing her struggles as her lungs got their first taste of living dirt. She became weaker and weaker, until the only indication that some other living thing was trapped inside Clayface's opaque husk were the occasional indistinct bumps appearing on his torso.
Mr. Freeze used his ice ray to freeze the front of Clayface's torso solid, putting Stephanie in a form of deep stasis until she was ready to thaw.
"Okay, okay. That takes care of our runner-up." Joker turned to his two hazard-suited subordinates. "Now show our lovely assistant what she's won as the grand prize." He pointed with his thumb toward Harleen.
"Aww, can't I watch?" she complained.
"The soup will get cold!" Joker growled in response. "You're the one who's been bugging me about this for months!"
"Sorry! Just got a little ahead of myself," Harleen snickered. She anxiously and submissively crossed her wrists behind her back as the HAZMAT jesters approached her from either side and locked their arms over hers. "Send Batskank a postcard for me when she gets out of that greaseball, 'kays?"
"I'll even get her balloons," the Joker promised. "Now be a good cupcake and scooch."
The two workers steadily marched in line with Harleen between them, like police officers transporting a prisoner.
"Have a blast in there! We've got 20 thousand gallons of toxic industrial waste with your name on it, dumpling!" Joker said as he saw them off, brightly reminiscing on his own youthful experiences. "Oh, and boys! Make sure to scrub behind her ears and get ALL those little nooks and crannies! Heeheeheehahaha!"
The three figures disappeared into a black corridor leading to some unforsaken corner deeper into the plant. Harleen skipped merrily on her toes the entire way.
Joker, quite audibly, let out a sigh of relief.
"Aaah. I love that gal, but she can really drive a crazy man sane sometimes."
He turned toward the rest of the assembled villains after he wiped his forehead with a string of handkerchiefs.
"Hmm... Now that the kiddies are out of the pool, I wonder what After Hours is going to bring for us at Gotham Municipal."
A pair of breasts flopped out the cascading mud on Clayface's back. The rest of Stephanie's new bizarre, earth-colored anatomy rapidly bubbled out of the surface and staggered away on dissolving feet.
She was shaped like she was still wearing the bat costume, or at least a rough estimate of it. The pointed ears sitting on top of her head only managed to hold their shape for a view seconds before they melted into the wavy mud that was supposed to be her hair. Her cowl dripped forward before melting into her face. Her vulnerable civilian identity was revealed to anyone who knew her face well enough as a clay mask for a couple of seconds, before the finer details started running together and distorted into an unrecognizable molten mass.
Her body lines spontaneously changed between the wrinkles of a half-formed Batgirl suit, the patterns of various street clothes and casual attires she was used to wearing, a nude human anatomy, and back. Every time she uncontrollably changed features, each form became less detailed then the last. When rapid shifting came to an end, she was left in a form that resembled a second Clayface that was about two thirds his size and sculpted with a vaguely female profile.
The rogue gallery watched intently. Stephanie stood facing the mob with Clayface towering behind her. His back was still toward hers, creating a stark contrast between the male creature's broad, grimy structure and the female's thin, silky silhouette.
Coming out of a haze, the clay woman glanced down at herself. The sight of her own quivering, shapeless hands caused a look of terror to fill her sunken white eyes.
The senseless transformation was causing Stephanie's mind to decay just as drastically as her body. Where she should have screamed, the sound came out as chilling hysterical laughter. She lowered her head into her hands and shook like she was going to sob in defeat, but instead she ran her molten fingers over her face like she was rubbing in beauty cream.
The creature gracefully lifted a loose layer of soil dripping from her shoulders and let it sink down her back into a puddle as if she were still Batgirl removing her cape. She made every effort to focus her body into a more reasonable shape, but she found it exhausting just to force her hands to stay solid for a few seconds. She needed extensive practice if she ever hoped to pose for a human again, and even then it would only ever be a temporary effect.
Her body was gone. Her sanity was gone. Everything that defined her until now had been thrown into a smoldering compost pit and dissolved into worthless sludge. Clayface was standing behind her; every quivering sediment in her soil would always despise him. But when she looked in front of her, she saw a family of hideous monsters just like her.
The day Harleen Quinzel was reborn as Harley Quinn was the same day Stephanie Brown lost her humanity and became Slag Gown.