Yes. I am a powerful pop-culture conglomerate called DC Comics, I am affiliated directly with Rocksteady, and I am a personal friend to the recently resurrected Bob Kane. Thanks for asking.

Relates with tracks 2 and 3 in the 'Inquisition' Playlist on my bio page.

Inside, Green Without;

I was granted a day off for my extensive services through the night and early morning of the Joker Rebellion. That's what they were calling it now, in the papers and the news on the radio. The Joker Rebellion. As if the Clown Prince knew any other way to operate, aside from rebellion.

At home I slept, for the most part. I had arrived at my condo around eight in the morning - it had taken at least two hours to make my way off of Arkham Island, the security was so thick - and I had immediately crawled into bed and relented to the forces of unconsciousness. Six hours passed before I finally roused again and worked up the will to move; I shuffled to the shower and stood blearily beneath steaming water, mechanically scrubbing away all traces of the last twenty four hours.

Cleanliness had a limited but lasting effect on my mental clarity, I discovered. I was up and about now, feeling awake, but I still had little appetite beyond a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee. I recognized that I was still very much in shock, even if I'd been handling it well all night. Until that Rogue had been brought in, anyway. That must have been the tipping point. Just enough to send me over the edge.

The breakout had been a complete nightmare, even without the leaking fumes of fear toxin.

Outside it was still raining. That slow, soaking rain that fell softly and calmly but managed to leave the ground wet for days. It had been raining like this since yesterday evening. The city looked cold and dismal from my window, as if the very atmosphere were quietly mourning the victims of the Joker's massacre. I shut the blinds, trying to block it out. I wanted to curl up into a ball on my couch and sleep, but my mind was restless. It wouldn't shut up.

Conversely the rest of the house was silent. Occasionally my ear caught the noise of the refrigerator thrumming in the kitchen, or a pipe creaking, or the foundations shifting; but not even the usual bustle of the city made it through my windowpanes today. There was just no sound. Nothing. I felt deaf, and it was disconcerting. Unnerving. Too much nothing.

Impulsively I turned on the TV and curled into my knees, relaxing minutely as the sound filled the room. I was met with the news. Today's stories talked of nothing but the breakout, and they were even more depressing than the grey city outside.

Repairs were a popular topic. How will such extensive damage be dealt with? many wanted to know. Even with billionaire Bruce Wayne's hearty contributions, the Asylum's foundations had been reduced mostly to rubble; graffiti and death and destruction had decimated every wing of the institution, and that was even discounting the grossly massive Titan plants invading the grounds and winding through the buildings like so many poisonous snakes.

Experts bantered back and forth about the statistics. Essentially, they were saying that Arkham Asylum was, for all intents and purposes, a ruin. The only way to rebuild would be to level the entire facility to the ground and build anew. But most of these experts agreed that much of the damage lay not above but below the institution, in the island's ancient bowels. Between crumbling base foundations, giant parasitic plants, old sewers, corrosive toxins and fragile cave systems, the island had become a serious hazard: collapsing the surface would collapse the interior, and that would render the entire island an immense death trap.

Basically, one news-guest summated bluntly, there is just no rebuilding Arkham.

I knew that the asylum's cell blocks currently had power, for the most part, and what we lacked in technological security we now made up for in manpower. The island was secure. For now, at least. But it made me uneasy to think that these news people might carry a very valid point: much of Arkham was in a sorry state, and it was possible that I would be out of a job very, very soon - and not because of some Rogue in my medical ward.

Newscasters and commentators expressed with appropriate exaggeration their concerns about the situation. Where would Gotham's crazies ultimately be housed? What was being done to compensate the families of the injured and deceased? Who had allowed the situation to spiral so helplessly out of control? What was Titan? And what if the Dark Knight was finally losing his touch?

I zoned out after a while, staring unseeing at the television screen and losing myself in the babble it emanated. It wasn't until they started casting tributes to the deceased that I was roused back to the present. The reminder of dead people - the ones I remembered stepping over in our haste to evacuate, the ones I had helped tag and transport to the morgue - nauseated me to an unbearable level, and I snatched up the remote and turned off the TV, feeling sick again.

I wandered around for a while, straightening the house a little and making some more coffee. Not that cleaning up mattered much. I was never really home to mess up anything but coffee dishes in the sink and the occasional load of laundry. Everything but my bed and the bathroom sat around collecting dust these days. Home is really just a bit of furniture, when your life is your job and your job is in an asylum. This morning, taking the day off had seemed incredibly inviting. But now that I was here, I remembered that there was nothing for me in my own home. Everything was in my office at work, in the medical bay and the operating room. I didn't even have family pictures on the walls - those were in my office, too. I was never here, so why would anything actually related to myself be here either?

Absently I scratched a fingernail over a chip in my coffee mug. All the more reason why I can't lose my job, I thought grimly. I would come back to this place with nothing. I would be nothing. Nothing.

Too much nothing.

I ended up on my couch again but left the TV off. The house was silent once more. I picked at a cuticle, feeling fidgety. I was bored. And still in shock. Not a good mix. But there was nothing I could do, not here. Nothing for me to do.

I need to get out of here.

But where to go, on such a dreary Gotham afternoon?

It doesn't matter, I decided. As long as I'm doing something.

I found myself beneath an umbrella on the corner of the new Monarch Theatre, looking up at the ecstatic signs proclaiming welcome to all visitors. It was bright and cheery on the outside, but the ticket booth was closed and the doors were locked. Now, when a door locked in Gotham, it was like a vampire hunter hanging garlic and crosses outside his home. The locks were superstitious measures. They gave the inhabitant a sense of partial security, but no guaranteed safety, symbolic of their hopes of warding of the demons of the night with the only protection in their grasp. A simple lock, maybe a chain: they were mere talismans. Small obstacles, in reality. Any fool could pick a lock.

And the fools who couldn't - they had guns and explosives.

I walked on, trudging away. I shared the walkway with only a few people, the bustling kind that rushed through the rain to get wherever they were going as fast as possible. People that didn't want to be outside milling about. People with things to do, places to be. In Arkham I was one of those people, always busy. Always needed. I shouldn't have skipped work today.

No, my brain fired back. You needed this. You wouldn't have been able to take another day. It was too early. Lacking the energy to argue with myself, I let the thought slip away.

A few hours passed before I stopped walking - meandering, more accurately - and I looked up from beneath my umbrella to see that the skyscrapers had dwindled in size to two and three story buildings, and the road and the cars had lost their Upper Gotham glamour. This was the outskirts of town, I realised. The edge of the slums and the bay. I stopped in my tracks, looking out over the water. My feet had taken me to the bridge of Arkham Island.

The asylum owned more of me than I really knew, apparently.

I registered for the first time the sound of policemen and helicopters and armoured trucks milling about the entrance to the bridge, still guarding the city from what lay across the bay. You would think it would be the other way around. Not in Gotham.

Leaning against a gaurdrail, I looked out over the choppy waters to the foggy mass that was the asylum. I could still see Poison Ivy's enormous vines protruding from the island in every direction, clenched around the mansion, snaking through the infirmary, curling up and around the lighthouse and disappearing into the water. I couldn't make out details in the gloom, but even from a distance it became clear to me just how correct those news people had been. Arkham was a wasteland, corrupted and crumbling. How hadn't I seen it this morning? How had I missed the complete devastation?

You were still in shock, I reminded myself, sighing heavily. The cold air currents wafting off the bay mixed with the rain, the combination disconcertingly damp and refreshing in my lungs. You weren't seeing anything but the road.

"Ma'am?"

I gave a start, my heart faltering for a split second. I looked up too see a thoroughly soaked officer standing a few metres away. "Ma'am," he repeated. "This area is still off-limits to civilians until the island is properly secured." He was awake enough to at least look apologetic, though it was obvious he'd been out here far too long. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

"Oh, um. I -" I work there, I wanted to say, but there was really no point. I was off-duty and I was not ready to go back. Even if I wanted to. "I'm sorry. I'll just - yeah." I turned and started quickly away, heading back the way I'd come. I was back to sloshing through puddles again, it seemed.

I entered a coffee shop when I got closer to Upper Gotham again; it was one of the few establishments even open. Without ordering anything I simply sat down inside, staring at the window and reveling in the heat. The sounds and smells of the place, minor as they were, were still a far cry more comforting than the emptiness of my own house. I stayed there for a while, losing track of time as I lost myself inside my head, trying to come to terms with everything that had happened to me in the past... however many hours.

The breakout had been like the plague, I recalled clearly, spreading fear and panic through the asylum with wild contagion. Doctors and psychiatrists and guards had fled, others remaining in a vain attempt to maintain order. Most of those brave souls had been captured, tortured, ransomed, or killed. For some, all of the above. My group had been one of the luckier ones, fleeing just outside of the grounds and awaiting the all-clear, should it come at all. We listened as Joker declared his control of the facility. We held our breath and rode out the deep tremours rocking the earth. Watched as giant plants sprouted up from the ground, blocking off the front gates and tearing the roads to pieces as they emerged. Gaped in horror at the sight of a Titan-amped Joker screaming gleefully at helicopters from atop the mansion's roof.

But as soon as the Rogues had been beaten and the asylum released, everything had become business.

We, the survivors, had gathered our ranks and gone to work with a numb efficiency. My group had established a functional triage/infirmary camp in under an hour. Unconscious inmates, both crazy and criminal, were wheeled in by the dozen, examined, signed in, and then carted back to whatever cells were still intact. We had had checklists and charts everywhere, choreographing ourselves down to the notes on our medicine labels. At the time I had only been barely aware of the other camp set up across the grounds: the Rogue infirmary, where the Titan-affected Joker and Poison Ivy were being admitted, along with any others that had managed to escape and wreak havoc.

But then, this morning we'd finally finished admitting everyone that had been released. Hours and hours of nonstop work had paid off, and we'd started cleaning up. And then there had been the straggler, brought in by the police and transported by Arkham guards: the Rogue. The Riddler. I'd dealt with him myself. I could have gotten myself killed - or perhaps worse, fired. But I'd done it anyway, and I'd gotten away with it.

Sitting here in the quiet coffee shop now, I seriously wondered how this would effect me once I was back at work again. Riddler's exam would have to be filed under my name. Because he was a Rogue, that made me responsible for him until I officially signed him off into another doctor's care. Why had I not thought of that before?

You were borderline hysteric, I reminded myself once more. But even so, I had no other excuse and the process would still raise questions. Perhaps the electronic filing backlog caused by the devastation would allow the situation to mellow out before it came into the focus of my superiors. We would be using paperwork for a while, and the electronic system had been heavily outdated and backlogged as it were. The thought made me relax a little bit, and the aching muscle in my jaw finally relented.

I hadn't even noticed that I'd become so tense.

At some point I wandered back home. Shaking out my umbrella and stamping my boots, I shuffled through the door and locked it behind me, staring straight ahead without actually seeing. I was tired, finally. I'd actually managed to waste the day away: it was already dark outside, any traces of sunset cut off by the overcast sky. An early bedtime couldn't hurt, could it?

I shed my coats and scarves and retreated to my room, turning out the lights and climbing beneath my duvet. Envelped in the warmth, with the rain pattering silently against the window and my mind heavy, I slipped into unconsciousness.

My dreams were haunted with bats, fireworks, and bloodshot green eyes.