She adjusted her shoulders and smiled. A comforting smile. Her honey brown hair shining like her thin, red lips. Big logos and mounted LCD screens and sectioned cubicles out in the distance.
Shuffle of paper and then . . .
She speaks.
"Good evening, Gothamites. I'm Brittany Colvin and here's what making news at 11."
This was the local news. Gotham's news. A respiratory for tragedy, broken dreams, and new, domestic design initiatives to rebuild the city and start from the ground-up, which never really panned all the way out.
The anchor transitioned, broadcasting across the city. And as she began, she wore not a smile, but more of a frown.
"A man was found dead in a bathtub at the Sunrise Bay Hotel in Burnley this afternoon. Officers believe he may have worked there as an employee, although they have not yet identified the victim's name or age, due to the gruesome state of the deceased at the scene of the crime."
A caster rolls down a long stretch of textured, patterned carpet. It squeaks with each rotation, a loose screw. We hear plates chiming and rattling about nearby. Black loafers tut close behind.
"However, the authorities have pinpointed their primary suspect-."
The caster stops. And now we pan up to see a young man with smooth, gelled, blonde hair and a small goatee and a friendly face. He's wearing a velvet blazer with a white undershirt and a black bowtie. There's a cart of food in front of him.
He knocks on the door beside him.
"Room service!" he calls out, looks down, hands akimbo, and waits. Nothing. He calls out again, growing impatient.
"Hey man!" he hollers. "Your food's here!"
Then the door opens. A bulky, hooded figure steps forward, shrouded in the black, deep hollowness of his room.
The figure inhales. The figure snarls. The figure grins.
"It sure is," the figure says.
"One Waylon Jones."
And before the man can react, before he can sprint, a mangy, green hand reaches out, its scutes and scales bouncing off the light above, and violently grasps his collar. The young man screams. The figure laughs deeply; almost a growl.
And in seconds . . . all that's left in the hallway is the cart.
"Also known as Killer Croc."
Jervis shuffles through the collection on his desk, listening. There's a swath of profiles, mugshots, dossiers; of each villain in Gotham. Each politician, attorney, innovator, celebrity, and superhero.
Then he finds Croc's picture and picks it up, timidly but cheerfully, hands trembling. The blue, grainy glow of his laptop illuminates his face; his deranged, unshaven, sleep-deprived face. And from the computer's screen, the anchor sadly informs her attentive audience that Mr. Jones's whereabouts are still unknown. That he had left the hotel shortly after his dinner; and that this merciless, carnivorous, hungry nightmare of a man is now loose on their streets. Probably in the sewers, waiting below in green waters until he decides where to go eat next.
Tetch struts over to the bulletin in the corner of the darkened room and pins the animal's picture to the board.
He gauges it. He giggles. He nods.
And then he takes out a sharpie and uncaps it. Above Waylon Jones's photographed, angry sneer he simply writes the word:
Jabberwocky.
"In other news, a famous, antique painting crafted by late 16th-century Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo was recently pilfered today from the Otisburg Art Gallery in North Gotham."
In the middle of a bright, pristine room (with a parquet floor and a diverse assortment of flowery portraits and drawings covering the white walls), a trope of confused police officers walk around, aimlessly rubbing their heads. To their left, a very upset curator holds her arms tightly over her chest and seethes in both shock and anger.
And then we see a forensic scientist swabbing the corners of one of the walls with a fiber duster, a puzzled look on his face.
"Although all signs point to our notorious burglar Catwoman as the culprit, the research team has still yet to find any incriminating evidence against her. If she was there, it seems our feline friend simply disappeared after taking the painting for herself."
Selina scoffs as she sips her coffee in her small, quaint apartment quarters. She's wearing a robe, sitting on the couch, watching. There's a canvas-wrapped, rectangular-shaped object at her feet.
Oddly enough.
Bruce Wayne, her beautiful, exotic, mysterious Abyssinian, jumps up on the cushions and purrs softly. She strokes it. She smiles. She drinks.
"Good luck boys," she says. And then she smirks.
Jervis hurries and culls her face from the motley pile in front of him. He tacks it beside the last. Tilts the flap into position. And above it he writes:
Cheshire.
The screen on the laptop changes and a camera lens catches a busy, pantsuit-wearing woman in her mid-30s rushing down a set of concrete steps, a briefcase swinging down by her side. Gotham's East Courtroom is behind her; those big, marble pilasters fading into the distance.
"In a recent press conference with the Gotham Gazette, councilwoman Alex Shelby has confirmed, by popular demand, that she will indeed be running for mayor come this fall."
Alex Shelby makes her way into the parking lot and flips her short, red hair in the rushing wind. She walks closer to her car. She unlocks it. She starts to get in . . . and then she's ambushed. A flood of reporters surging in from nowhere. Crowding her. Snapping, clicking pictures of her surprised face as if this were some high-school prank.
They wave and shout and greet her.
And she just smiles gently and greets them and waves back.
"When asked about her change of heart, she had this to say:"
"Well I just remembered thinking," she responds, now in front of a microphone, still smiling, looking prepared and approachable, "Thinking about the people of this city. Of our past of bad blood. Of corruption. Of greed. How each year, no matter how morally right or wrong our mayor is at the time, they always manage to avoid the main problem. The main issue here. With our prisons, our hospitals. And I think it just takes a woman's certain sensibility to recognize it. A queen. Not a king. A queen; a queen is what Gotham needs right now."
Jervis finds her. Assigns her role on the bulletin.
Queen.
And moves on to the next.
"-homicidal maniac Victor Zsasz still at liberty. Two more casualties found in the Boweries."
Hatter adds him. Marks him.
"-zealot terrorist makes bomb threat to GCPD-"
Him too.
"-naked, plastered college student pees in municipal fountain and-"
But not him, obviously.
Two hours later, he has them all decked out on the board, and his hands jitter in excitement. His eyes sweep over the bulletin restlessly. His mouth twitches.
Everyone was invited. Everyone had their parts, and their parts had them. Everything was good. Planned. Ready. Perfect.
But then he remembers. Then he remembers the missing link as he stands there in the dark, feeling cold and isolated. Then Jervis frowns, remembers, and feels the white-hot, painful rage billow up inside him like smoke from a backdraft.
Everything was perfect. Except for Alice.
And so after a few intense moments where it seemed he would just flip the fuck out, Tetch decided to search. To search and search, on the verge of hysteria, on the verge of absolute ruin, rummaging through the pile on the desk over and over again until finally . . . he saw it.
Until he sighed and happily reprimanded himself for not realizing it years before; slapping his head, laughing. Until he found his perfect match, the perfect picture of the deranged, pink-and-blue, red-and-black cheerleader popping a plump ball of bubblegum in front of the camera, lips puckered out. Until he found that blonde-haired girl with cotton candy pigtails and fishnet leggings and white, pale makeup on her enthusiastic, albeit naive, face.
Until he simply found Harley Quinn.
His Alice.