Click, click.
The tape recorder ticked on and Doctor La Marche sat back in his seat, smiling at the young woman across from him. She didn't smile back, just stared. Granted, having been restrained in a straight jacket, she didn't have all that much to smile about, but La Marche had hoped she'd adopt a positive attitude.
"Now, Miss…er…" He flipped through the pile of paperwork on his desk, sending at least one spare paperclip skittering across the surface until it teetered over the edge and-tink, tink-fell to the floor. He finally found what he was looking for and, after glancing at the paper from over his glasses, he looked back at her. "Thompson, I believe? Or is it Stuart? Or—" he scanned the sheet again and chuckled, "Holloway? We have a lot of conflicting reports. Which is it?"
"MacDonald," Techie responded in pure, dry monotone.
He looked back at his chart and smirked. "Of course. One we don't have. So!" He set the chart aside and clasped his hands on the desktop, leaning forward and smiling at her again. "What would you like to talk about?"
Techie chewed on her bottom lip for a second and looked up, brow furrowed in thought. Her expression was exaggerated the way a child's might have been and La Marche had a hard time telling whether it was intentional—or rather, faked—or not. It was even harder to tell when her face lit up, she beamed at him and chirped, "Bartlett."
La Marche's own brow knit ever so briefly before his practiced air of ease took over. Having already dealt with the Captain's nonsense, and that of countless other nutcases, La Marche wasn't thrown by Techie's. "Bartlett. I see. Are we referring to the pear?"
"Hendley," she answered cheerfully.
"Hen-I beg your pardon?"
She wiggled her eyebrows at him as though she were Groucho Marx. "Ramsey."
"Miss MacDonald-"
"Velinski," she said with a smoothly blossoming smile.
"If you persist in playing games—"
"Dickes!"
"—there will be dire consequences."
"Blythe Sedgwick Ashley-Pitt," she practically sang, growing ever more gleeful with each utterance of gobbledygook. A light of pure, unbridled mischief danced in her eyes and she shimmied her shoulders inside her straightjacket, as much as the contraption would allow and then crooned, "Cavindish Ives!"
And then, without any warning whatsoever, she leapt up from her seat, leaned over the desk and propped herself up very awkwardly on her confined elbows. It took milliseconds for her to lean as close to the good doctor as possible, smile at him most becomingly and whisper not-quite-menacingly, "Hilts."
Instantly, recognition waltzed its way across La Marche's face. It flirted with his expression but a moment before he slammed his fist into the big red panic button on his desk and two very large guards burst into the room and wrestled the wayward patient to the floor. Some of the papers that she'd been leaning on scattered, a flurry of patient files and confidential information flying every which way, and she hit the ground, face smushed into the carpet, grunting under the weight of the guards as the paper showered down.
She didn't struggle (much) and once she was subdued and brought to her feet, she had the good grace to look a little guilty.
La Marche, unflappable as ever, straightened his coat and fixed her with a very, very stern look-the sort of disapproving look a father gives to his daughter's greasy, motorcycle riding prom date. He huffed and glared like an irate bull.
"Captain Hilts. The Cooler King."
She smiled a little sheepishly and nodded.
"Listing all the characters in The Great Escape, Miss…whatever-your-name-is? Really? If you're going to be sarcastic, why be esoteric about it? Why not just give me rank and serial number?"
Her face immediately fell into a mask of indifference and she intoned, very matter-of-factly, "Chekov, Pavel, United Federation of Planets, service number six-five-six-dash-five-eight-two-seven-dee."
La Marche felt the strangest urge to throw his hands up in exasperation, but somehow suppressed it. Instead, he opted to rub his left temple briefly and waved his other hand in a gesture of dismissal. "Put her in solitary."
The guards started to drag her away but La Marche laughed suddenly and called, "Stop."
They paused and looked back at him, awaiting further orders.
"Give her a baseball," he chortled a little meanly. "Leave her in the straightjacket and give her a baseball."
Techie looked like she might protest but he cut her off. "Or doesn't that suit you, Hilts?"
Her mouth snapped shut instantly and she looked away.
And with that, the henchgirl was hauled off to solitary block.
The cells in S-Block were not as plush as those in the rest of Arkham. Rather than thickly padded walls and reinforced concrete, they were double layered reinforced concrete and very little padding. Where most cells had bulletproof, shatterproof, break proof, Joker-proof glass walls on one side, giving the illusion of more open space than there actually was, the doors to the solitary block were solid steel with a small rectangular window at the foot of the door for slipping food and medications in. They were bare bones, dank, depressing and everything you'd expect from a prison movie.
Communication between cell occupants wasn't impossible under these circumstances, but it was a lot more difficult. However, as Techie was dragged past the guard station, cell one (Victor Zsasz), cells two and three (unoccupied) and cell four (the Captain), she whistled a favorite theme song as loudly as she could manage and then, when the guards stopped her in front of her 'room', she said a little too loudly, "Ah! Six! My lucky number!"
The guards tugged open the door and threw her hastily inside, tossing a baseball from the now defunct exercise yard in after her and slammed the door.
Their footsteps echoed down the hall and were followed by the slam of the door to the guard station. Almost immediately, there was a far off, slightly muffled call of, "Ops!"
Like a sausage trying to escape its casing, Techie squirmed around on the bare floor and sat up awkwardly, as close to the mailbox-sized slot in the door as she could manage. She squirmed some more and the paperclip she'd managed to get hung on her straightjacket in the scuffle with the guards fell—tink, tink—to the ground.
"I'm here!"
"You okay?" the Captain called back.
"Yeah! I—" Techie announced proudly to the door, "have a paperclip!"
There was a brief, pregnant pause before the Captain called, "You have a papal twit?"
Techie's head hit the door with a thunk. "I said I have a PAPERCLIP!"
"Oh!" The Captain's voice sounded relieved. "Good! Paperclips are good."
Techie wriggled inside the straightjacket and then frowned. "However, I have a paperclip and am stuck inside a straightjacket. These two things don't really work all that well together."
"I'm sorry."
"How about you, Captain? Got anything useful?"
"I…um…" The Captain sounded uneasy. "I have a cockroach?"
Techie's head suddenly snapped up and she scanned the cell from top to bottom, looking for creepy crawlies. There weren't any, but she still felt a little paranoid even as she leaned back towards the door and continued her conversation. "If you have a cockroach in your cell, why aren't you screaming your head off?"
"Oh, I screamed. For the first twenty minutes or so. Then I got all lung hurty and stopped." There was another pause. "And I kinda forgot it was there until you reminded me-it's off in its own little corner. I…uh…I've named it Jiminy."
Techie recoiled in horror. "It's not a pet, Captain."
"It's a coping mechanism! Maybe if I pretend it's a cuddly-wuddly cricket, I won't be—EEEEK! IT'S SKITTERING! Oh God, Ops, it's skittering this way!"
"Captain, stay calm, it-"
"Oh God! It-it-"
Sudden, abrupt silence.
"Captain?" Techie called with obvious concern. "Captain!"
"Ops," the Captain said slowly, "I think I gave it a heart attack."
Techie actually tipped over, she laughed so hard.
"Well," the Captain continued, "my assets are now comprised of one dead cockroach…and yours consist of a paperclip."
"And a baseball."
"A baseball?" Techie couldn't be sure, but she thought she heard a giggle.
"Yeah…Great Escape smartassery got me tossed in here. I didn't think that routine would be enough to exasperate the doctor, but I guess you must've done a number on him already."
"I gave him the nonsense act," the Captain replied with considerable and completely excusable pride. "So…got any ideas?"
"Even if I did," Techie responded a bit forlornly, "I'm in a straightjacket and I never mastered the art of popping my own shoulder out of its socket to escape…so I'm pretty much stuck."
"My hands are free," the Captain said. "But I don't have any tools. Well, none that would work, anyway. Though I've never tried, I'm pretty sure you can't pick a lock with a dead cockroach…and even if it's possible, I'm not touching that thing."
"Okay. So we wait for Al."
"Al!" The Captain's voice was laden with an uncharacteristic amount of hope. "I hope she gets here soon."
"Me too. I—"
Suddenly, there was a screech from the direction where the Captain's voice originated, followed by another and then another.
"Captain?"
"It's twitching!" the Captain cried. "It's aliiiiiive! I knew it! I knew it! This is how it starts!"
"What?" Techie shouted in confusion. "How what starts?"
"The zombie cockroach apocalypse!"
