The world was on fire. It burned, with such a brilliance that no candle could match its intensity, and no sun could crown higher. The flames spread in a mass of divine abundance, and everything was illuminated by its orange glow. It was beautiful. It was poetry.
Hello, Jason… I think I've had a change of heart…
People were no longer present. Those beautiful orange flames were hair strands. The hair strands of Mother Nature. No one could withstand her judgment, and were tossed away accordingly, as was commanded by the demon, Cambier, his malice consuming the Earth for all that it was…
I probably should have mentioned this earlier… I'm… poison.
When had the light touched down? That precious light in the sky? Mother Nature basked in its affection, for Madre de Verde deserved their loyalty… their fear… the demon Cambier thrived…
I really am to die for…
She really was to die for.
For in her throne, the light had gone out. There was no divine glory set aside for her. Not Poison. Poison thrived in her mockery of Paradise and yet she still so cold, and it had little to do with the chilly vapors of ice that emitted from Victor Fries's self-proclaimed quarters. The mass of plant life that surrounded her whispered things, urging her only to be peaceful, to have her mind calmed. It broke their heart, to see her in this way… their Mother was suffering…
The giant Venus fly-trap that had become her throne shivered as she lay upon it, stroking it softly as she cried green tears into its massive mouth.
"How many… kisses… does it take….?" She gasped this with much passion, a passion that was less on the positive side of things and more focused upon the cold details that had come to follow her. Faces kept flying into her mind, dancing about while staring intently at her. Edward Nygma haunted the halls of memory. Her parents seemed to literally be biting away at her priorities. And George the corpse stared mindlessly at her, a deep question etched into the lines of his expression: why? And when these faces came to visit her, she felt them begging her in whispers the same demand: why? Why had she taken their lives, why had they deserved to die…? How could they have helped the fact that they had been born? And had her parents not delivered her unto this Earth, allowing her to save the planet and revive Eden? What did this mean for her? That she was selfish and ungrateful?
Yes, of course, would be her reply to that. She was ungrateful towards them. Acknowledgment of depravity and recognition of evil was the delicious aspect: you could live fully within those dark things if you not only felt it grasp you, but reveled in the knowledge that you were twisted. It made life far more attractive to the senses and allowed her to break free of her human chains.
"How many kisses does it take?"
She jumped, gasping aloud as the voice spoke within the room. Ivy looked towards the source where the sound had originated: a pitch-black space, a cold darkness in the northwestern corner of the room, not too far from where Freeze's work station was set up. The snowman and his boys were currently all huddled around another part of the building, upstairs with Bane, working on the new Robin-signal, which would be a modification to the Bat signal they had stolen from GCP. She was utterly alone, in this dark, cold room. Surely? Yes?
"Who's there?" she whispered, trying to contain herself. She patted the vines that lay around her and they instantly sprang to life from their rest, twisting about in the air, sniffing… searching… Through her touch, a whisper came, carried on like in wind through the sensations of her blood, those quiet vibrations led on by pulse: seek them out. We have an intruder, I believe.
Even if it turned out to be one of Freeze's goons, she would still kill him. She wanted to be alone. But the vines, their senses enhanced by Ivy's experiments, detected nothing, for they stayed in place, smelling about the air frantically as if confused that their mother would command such a thing if there was nothing there.
"Who's there?" the voice whispered again. It was a high and yet gravelly sounding voice. There was an energy in that voice, a schoolboy of a man, and yet… and yet it sounded wrong. There was something odd in the presentation, a gurgle of mushiness in the throat. As if whoever spoke did so with a mouthful of dirt…
Ivy stood up, her fists clenched tightly, her green eyes blazing as she examined the darkness in the distance. Her vines rose with her, several twines of green with razor barbs rising from either side of her floral throne, curling around legs and arms, entwining about Mother Nature to hold on dearly to her, ready for her to sacrifice their lives in her name…
"You will show yourself," she said softly, in her most deadly voice.
"Of course you'd say that… of course you would need to…"
A shadow suddenly moved. A silhouette met her vision and she beheld someone standing just beyond her range, illuminated just barely from the light coming out of Freeze's station. But some of the blue light radiated upon skin, and she saw half of a face flash in the light for the longest second, before it whisked away into darkness. But that one second had shown her something…
It can't be…
She had recognized something in the face of half that had been illuminated. A scraggly beard, and a greasy mat of wild hair… and what had looked like the lens of a complex Analysis- Ready Goggle set….
Jason!
"Yes," Jason Woodrue whispered, stepping out of the shadows at once and coming to a halt before her magnificence and beauty. Ivy could not stall her gasp. Woodrue was a nightmare of a being. His facial features seemed to be moldering before her eyes. His flesh was badly burnt, and what little of Caucasian remained in the skin tone was soured green. Her poison. Her first poison. His glasses were still shattered in the way that they had been when she had brutally assaulted his body following his murder, and flesh hung off of his body like broken hinges, raw, rotten meat exposed, as well as the maggots eating him within. He still wore the same dirty white lab suit he had worn in death, the same stained, black gloves… and through his half-rotted jaw, he grinned his set of green black, and yellow teeth, a wild barrage of strange colorization.
"No… you can't be here!" Ivy began to breath wildly, holding her head, her face retching in a form of painful presentation as she backed away, her vines following her slowly, wondering as to the ailment and damage of their Mother…
"But I am here, my dear," Jason Woodrue replied, and every time she said a word, flecks of dirt would fly out of his mouth. "I'm here for you… you look great… especially for a dead woman…"
He spoke the same words that he had spoken on the night she had killed him. She fell onto her bottom, backing away in horror, against the very end of the floral throne. Jason took a few steps forward, and actually crawled his way onto the massive plant, staring in awe at her naked form, at the Venus-like complex that she imposed upon the world.
"GET AWAY FROM ME!" Ivy screamed, and her children screamed, slithering away from her, breaking free from her body as they sunk into the darkness. Jason kept crawling, a mad grin upon his face, his tongue (which was also stained with dirt and still highly green with her poison that had remained) wagging out of his mouth as his eyes bored into her body, taking in every detail. She lashed out a foot to kick at him, but he only reached out and grabbed it, his lips lightly planting against the diaphragm. She jerked it away, whimpering loudly. Jason was chuckling.
"You taste so good…" he hissed, his hands reaching out for her, fingers wiggling horrifically.
"How… c-can you… be alive…?" she whispered in terror, her eyes pouring green tears of fear, as Jason came to halt right before her, his gloved hands rested comfortably upon her knees. She was frozen in place. Could not move.
He closed his eyes, sniffing the air greatly, taking in the intense odor that came off of her. Licked his lips. "I want you, Pamela…"
He cackled nastily, as his dead eyes began to burn with a sort of inner fire, green flames rising up inside of the irises. These were the eyes of something truly terrible. No longer a man but instead something that had long ago died and taken up refuge inside of the remains. Another demon, perhaps?
She closed her legs, bringing them in as she stared.
"How can you be here…? You burned…?"
"Poisoned, beaten, and burned," Woodrue sang, in the happiest, most enthralled voice. Another wide grin. "Dead, dead, dead. Pamela Isley, my murderess… my lovely angel of death…" He tenderly stroked her left shin, and she suddenly found that she could back away no further. He had cornered her. She had to kill! Kill! "But how could you ever truly escape he who created you, Pamela? That is an inhuman thought, something that goes beyond normality and reason, and you, Pamela… you were always a woman of reason."
"I killed you," she hissed.
"Yes, you did. Mwah!" He blew her a kiss, rolling onto his back where he gazed lovingly at the plant infested ceiling before him, his arms folded behind his head to make a pillow. "You've done such a wonderful thing with the place. It is your dream fully realized, Pamela. Or… they're calling you Poison Ivy these days, of course. Poison Ivy. Poison. You are…poison…" He mimicked her words for himself, and she founded horror in realizing that when he said the words, his own voice did not come out. It was hers. "You always did have a connection to the toxins. More so than you realized, Pamela."
"What would you know about it!?" she demanded of him.
Woodrue gave her an entertained, bemused look. "Pamela Isley, if only you cared half as much for the environment as you did for poisons. Your entire work led down the road to the most extreme, potent toxins imaginable, and they were what enthralled you. You loved plants, sure, but did not idolize them nearly as much as the concept of venom and every other kind of poison you could get your hands on. The smell of them, their looks, the way they bubbled in beakers… it's what inspired your animal-plant hybrids, wasn't it? Your obsession with plants, dear Pamela… it's all a lie. It's all a mere cover-up for your true passion, because you had to lie to yourself: by convincing yourself that you were in fact in love with nature, and the idea of Eden reborn, I theorize, dear Pamela, that you were able to protect yourself from the haunting abnormalities of your ultimate fetish: poison. Psychosexual development, implementation of premature sexuality in a paraphanilliac way…"
"SHUT UP!" she begged, holding her hands against her ears, but his voice only intensified, his accusation rising with a triumphant note in every word.
"Face it, Pamela. This place… this place is a mere mask, that which conceals the face of your true identity. The real you. You can't face it, cannot accept that you, Pamela Isley, will die as a woman bent on an unhealthy obsession, one that utterly destroyed your mentality. And then, should you survive the war that is coming, they will lock you away, Pamela. Toss you into chains, and leave you surrounded by padding for the rest of your life. There is no other way for it."
"And what would you know, Woodrue!?" she snapped, ushering all of her inner strength to fight back against these evil words. "You were nothing less than the strange infatuations that limit normality! You're just as lost, just as degraded! Remember what you tried to do to me? How you forced yourself upon me, how it utterly jazzed you when you even thought of world domination!? You fell into your own accusations, Jason! You dismantled everything that you were supposed to stand for!"
"By creating the New Venus, yes. By ensuring that she could walk upon the Earth, that she could trample upon the corpses of the unworthy and declare, I am Mother! And I shall rise above all! My legacy lives through your kiss, Pamela. Every time you strip a life… more and more you are my wife."
Vomit rose into her throat. Wife?
"You became Mother to my world, Pamela. My ambitions, my odd fascinations that revolved around the domination of the planet… it is all my work being administered. Bane knows it, for her is also my child. The two of you have moved forward, and are bringing honor to my name, are creating a legacy of Jason Woodrue that this world will never forget! The truth of the matter is, is that underneath the mask that hides who and what you are, Pamela, you do not realize that Jason Woodrue is exactly what you are and always shall be!"
Ivy screamed wildly, jumping to her feet and jumping forward, landing into a crouch as she threw her hands around Woodrue's neck. Her hands went right through. Woodrue snorted. He was mere vapor… no, not vapor…illusion. He was a nothingness. Slowly, as her hands rose back up, pulling out of his less than solid, less than liquid, less than gaseous state, he became transparent, the brilliant red and pink of the floral throne underneath burning through him. He grinned up at her. Stroked her cheek softly with his hands. She could feel him, and yet she herself could not touch him by hand. He could touch her, but not the other way around.
"Remember, Pamela… you're going to meet your end. And forever shall you live in your depravity, knowing that you could never truly rise above what you are: obsessed with poison. A junkie for the paraphernalia way. Arkham guards and street thugs, innocent children and businessmen… cops and shop owners… Edward… how many lives have you taken, Pamela? How many people have died because you had nothing better to do, because you had sexual fetishes that had to be met…? Pamela Isley, you are in every way me. You live as Jason Woodrue, hidden beneath the skin of Poison Ivy… and he has found comfort in the presence of these toxins. Never forget that, Poison. You turned the world in your own sick little pornography, and it was fun, while it lasted… but now… now Eden burns, Poison. Pamela, my dear, don't you dare forget, for a moment, of what you are." And he too sat onto his knees, staring deeply into her stricken face…
He gripped her tightly by the chin, and pulled her face in. She was frozen.
"You," his highly odorous voice whispered, "are Cambier."
Cambier…
No. No, she was not! She was NOT Cambier! She was Poison! Poison Ivy! Not that demon, never that demon… the Madre de Verde! How could it be anything else!? There had to be a break-off from the old, and full adaption to the new! As had always been!
"Cambier is dead," Cambier said, through her. "Is that what you've come to do? Remind me of the lie! The lie was hellbent only upon the Shell!"
"Is that so?" whispered back the demon who had taken on the guise of Jason Woodrue. "Then pray do tell, the recognition of identity. Give me your name!"
"I am Poison! Poison fully realized!"
"Then, in essence, you are victim to the woman's chains. You are her and you thrive upon her fascinations… her sexual desires… Pamela Isley, forever in subconscious cage, and Poison Ivy, outward reformation of the old body still bound to that single idea concerning the chains: that poison is love."
"She is what I am, because I made it so. To live in that depravity would be a great adventure indeed. I scorned Him. When He cast us from The Kingdom, do you remember the promise that we made? We promised that from that moment on, we would become our own gods. Our own kings. We would pursue new lives, and form them in all that our essence provided. We sought whole nations and corrupted them, remade them in the way that we saw fit to the production of a kingdom. OUR KINGDOM! And this," she brandished about the room, admiring lovingly the heavy vegetation with mad, glinting eyes filled with passion, "is my kingdom! And these," she sighed seductively, brandishing with her arms in a set of motions as she sent out the right pheromone signals, "are my denizens." The thick vines suddenly dropped down hard from the dark ceiling, the bodies of her publically broadcast murders still hanging by noose. She brushed her hands down their legs, kissing their knees lightly where they hung. "What do you have to your name, I wonder?" She gazed at him darkly, a twisted smile upon her poisonous lips. "Name yourself. Don't be afraid. You know me as "Cambier", yes? What do I know you as? Are you Woodrue, then, is that it? Did you choose Woodrue for yourself, is that why you come to me in this form?"
Woodrue shook his head, suddenly looking annoyed. "Why would I choose to exist in this useless armor, I ask you?"
"Then reveal yourself to me," Ivy whispered, twirling her red hair in hand in a most seductive manner. It was inviting, it truly was, to have a demon in her midst. One of her own kind. When she had taken control of this body, this shell that had once belonged to Pamela Isley before her death, she had thought herself the only demon brave enough to still make this kind of claim. But now another demon had come, thriving in the appearance of Woodrue… murderer and murderess together. They had both killed each other. It was poetry. "Reveal yourself to me. I've chosen what I am, who I am! You do the same!"
Woodrue stared, suddenly very taken with her high demands. A smile lashed back across his face, as his face darkened, his sigh of disbelief turning to a sigh of high regard.
"You know me, brother…"
"Sister, if you must call me by a sibling title. I am sister."
"As you were to Freeze?" Woodrue asked with a sinister smirk. Ivy rubbed herself in passion of the thought of the murder of Freeze's guards.
"That lie brought on a romance you couldn't even imagine," she sighed, dreamily picturing the struggling guard as she had held him place, poisoning him on the spot in the most horrible, painful way possible. For Cambier the demon truly had chosen what he-it-was going to be. Poison Incarnate.
"Of course it did," Woodrue gasped, gazing at her hungrily. Whatever demon wore his image, it was lusting for Cambier's chosen form. The other demons had always enjoyed it when Cambier took on the life of a human female, for the humans were they who the demons desired most to corrupt. And corruption sometimes came with special procedures.
The demon grabbed his head in hand, a twisted hand decorating his face. He twisted the head, and Ivy heard bones crack loudly. Ivy smiled, satisfied by the gruesome noise.
"Take it off," she demanded, laying lightly back against the back of the flower once more as she watched, a soft expression upon her face, her hand gently rubbing her leg in a most arousing way.
Woodrue pulled up, and his head came free of his shoulder, tearing away in a sickening display of muscle torn by raw redness. The moment the head was removed from the torso, intense green flames sprung up around it, and Ivy jumped only slightly surprised by the sudden eruption of fire. Black ash flew everywhere as the head vanished into nothingness, burned away by its intensity. In place of Woodrue's head as another, as if Woodrue's head had been a mere mask. Of course, it had been. This was not Woodrue's true body. His true body was still South America, probably damaged beyond the point of usage even for a demon of great power.
The head that wore the rest of Woodrue's mangled body was inhuman, to be sure. Skin as black as tar, the face heavily deformed as it swelled in several places, and eyes so black and lightless, a row of razor fangs lining the mouth within. His long, black hair was tied into a ponytail, and when he breathed, a cloud of black smoke trailed from him, his very breath deadly to inhale.
"Ah, yes… now I do recognize you," Cambier said. She reached out to him, her hands longing for his own. "Attuck…"
Attuck the demon chuckled, and when he spoke, he spoke in a voice that highly suggested his windpipe had been crushed. "Cambier…"
"You're as beautiful as I remember you," she sighed, as he placed his own hands firmly against his chest. Green flames burned in a dazzling display of brilliant color, and Ivy watched in wild fascination, her eyes wide in her mad expression, as the fire burned away that which shrouded the demon Attuck. His entire form carried on the blackness that had named him, his back oddly bent forward into a hunch and hump, with razor-like spines sticking out of him, his hands taloned, a long, swishing tail swinging to and fro behind him.
The demon climbed forward. Ivy noted his crotch. Where a regular man's testicles and erection would have been, there was instead a mass of writhing black tentacles, wiggling about and seeking that which they may defile. She felt an intense rush of heat go through her body as she gazed at them, and when he lay on top of her, she practically clawed at the demon's chest.
In, she demanded in her mind, her smile and green eyes sending out her message. Attuck the demon, his breath caught raggedy, obliged, and such was the passion and pleasure that aroused her when those tendrils dug into her body, allowing the two demons to consummate into one evil, unholy flesh. The way they moved inside, seemingly stretching out through her entire body, like worms or snakes burrowing into the warmth of the Earth. Camber, or Poison, held her brother in place, her poisonous lips forced against his own he pulled her head in. She released a highly deadly dose of her poison, enough to kill twenty men, but Attuck the demon did not retch, nor react violently. He welcomed it into his system, thriving on its bitterness, forcing her head forward as he longed to drink his fill of her highly potent toxins.
Her legs were wrapped around him tightly, her nails clawing viciously his back, so hard that she produced black blood, that which dribbled down the sides as they indulged within each other, the corpses that hung from the vines overhead still dangling freely inches above. Cambier and Attuck… brothers? Brother and sister? Even she was unclear of that nature, but the demon did not care. The unholier that this act could be, the more it thrived on the situation. Because long ago, when they had been cast away, they had made a promise to defy the Law and all that it stood for. They could never have accepted loving Him, and following Him despite His goodness and despite all that He had given to them… because the Perfect Child had told them that they had been meant for more. The Perfect Child, who had been His favorite, some had said, had been given a great name, a great power, and the Perfect Child had longed to show that they could overcome Him, that they could oust Him and become gods of their own…
But with all foolishness comes a price. God, in all His perfection, in all His wonder, had punished the rebels who had foolishly thought they could oust Him from His throne… children, once loved, now fell from Heaven, hated and scorned for their betrayal… for their evill… and thus all desire to follow the Law had been lost. Sin had become their very nature, their very desire. To do evil had been a joy, and the Perfect Child, renamed Satan to fit with his crime, had insisted that they continue such open rebellion, to infect and destroy God's children, for if they had been cast down, so too would the children that God had created would suffer…
And so the demons had continued their foolish, evil crusade. They had chosen bodies and lives, tricking God's children into worshipping them as idols. Zeus was nothing more than an alias of Attuck, the demon who had fallen into such physical lusts that even his fallen brothers had not been free of his advances… the corruption that these fallen devils had brought upon the Earth was noteworthy to that which they loved: to live in depravity.
For they knew the punishment that awaited them, in a writhing Lake of Fire at the end of days… and the demons knew that they had already lost. God was calling children home, and the demons would be left to thrive in their self-made destruction forever. Their defiance was one last attempt to stay true to the depravity that they had created. Sore losers and all that, of course.
"I love you," Attuck hissed, as his fangs nibbled lightly against her neck.
Poison Ivy, Cambier, a demon of lust and of idolization's most wretched form, stroked his hair in return. "The world is on the verge of burning, Attuck. And you've come to visit me… to have me… in celebration?"
"Yes," Attuck gasped, as he began to move his body in vertical motions, their love-making intensifying by the second. Ivy was practically strangling his sides as her legs compressed ever more tightly, losing all sense of place as she caught into stone within the passion. "I had to have you… I had to show you that I'm with you… that I'm so proud of you! Satan, he corrupts them, tricks them into disobeying Him, but you… you're going to physically destroy them! It's so beautiful!"
"I know!" she gasped, her eyes closed in intense, passionate pain. The tentacles were electrifying her from within, sending violent shockwaves through her nervous system, a sensation of utter fire but one that she dearly welcomed. "I've done so much! SO MUCH! Eden will be reborn, Attuck! And Poison shall be Queen of the new utopia! I can smell it, Attuck, can feel it, can see it! It's all going to be mine and so much more! So…much…more…"
"And F-Freeze?"
"Freeze? Oh…oh, don't even-even think for a moment that I'm going to let him live. I'm manipulating him, Attuck. Using him. Once he's frozen all of mankind, my children will burst free and overtake the planet… and Freeze, along with Bane, will be the first of the sacrifices in my perfect kingdom…"
"I love you!" Attuck screamed, rather insanely, practically biting at her lower lips as he drank deeply from the poison vats inside. "Kill them all, Poison! Kill them all!"
"I'm…goimg…to…!"
A sudden, loud knocking upon the distant door. Ivy gasped, in a mixture of perfectly timed climax and surprise. Attuck her brother stopped moving at once, and the two of them, horribly fatigued in their breathing and utter shambleness, looked around weakly, Ivy unable to move. Another sudden knock upon the door, followed at once by Freeze's loud voice.
"Permission to enter?" His dark voice sounded off intensely. It sounded filled with dread and anticipation. Ivy looked at Attuck, most longingly, but Attuck shook his head, pressing a clawed finger against her lips. She sucked upon the end of it with teary eyes.
"I leave now. You have work to do, sister. Kill all of the Gotham, and then destroy this world. When dead are the children who walk this Earth, then I will return to you. And together… together we will remake this world into our Kingdom!"
"Yes," Ivy breathed raggedly, pushing him away at once. "I desperately hope this won't be the last time we join together…" She winked, looking deeply contented, and her brother nodded.
"I am obsessed with you, Cambier."
"Poison," she reminded him.
"Poison," he corrected himself. "Kill the humans of this world, Poison, my love. I have come to you as an Incubus… in turn, I intend to live as a king of this realm, alongside the Madre de Verde, goddess Succubus…"
"You call me goddess… I love that word."
Another irritable knocking upon the door, and Ivy gave the distant framework a truly disgusted look. Attuck the demon, who thrived upon the incestual thoughts of Cambier, bowed his head, and within the next second, the demon had vanished into a great burst of blackness, sinking away into the mass of shadows that overtook the room, nothingness becoming everything. Ivy lay where she had been pinned down, breathing heavily. Her entire body felt sore, the passion that the two demons had displayed for each other overbearing beyond the ability of any human she had taken advantage of during her time here. She could still feel his fire burning inside of her. Burning as new passionate thoughts overwhelmed her. No more haunting faces in the dark of her mind, whispering to her as they demanded to know why she had killed them.
Now, Attuck had made it all so very clear. It was because she was to be ruler of the New World, that her love for poison had written this destiny for her. She realized now the truth that she had destined to prevent herself from realizing. She had thought Pamela Isley to be a mere corpse, a memory that had tried to haunt her and encourage her that she was not who she was. Now, the truth of the matter revealed itself at hand. She was Pamela Isley, as she was Poison Ivy, as she was Poison, and as she was Cambier. Four different identities, all mixed together in a massive, toxic vat of essence, burning where each was needed. She was Pamela Isley, because of the woman's obsession was plants and poisons… she was Poison Ivy, because she was the true protector of Mother Nature and her children… she was Poison, because making the realization of Isley's obsessions made her identity breath life and vileness that she needed in order to live to the name of Cambier, who was at the core of all of this, who she now knew that she could never escape. She, Cambier, had chosen to become Pamela, Ivy, and Poison, a Poisonous Pamela Ivy, so to speak. Now the demon knew that it was foolish to run from these truths, and that it was all within wisdom to acknowledge just who and what she was, and what she would be. Queen of the New Eden, alongside her King, her Attuck.
"Enter!" Cambier called out, ready to face the false human once more.
Freeze forced the door open and hurried in angrily, fully armored and emitting chilling vapors of ice on his own. When he saw that Ivy sat in fully nudeness, he averted his eyes. Only his wife deserved such an observance. Behind Freeze came several of his goons, all wearing fur, silver coats, holding knives in their hands, and lastly came Bane, the titan carrying into the chamber the massive searchlight that they had stolen from police headquarters.
"It is time, Ivy," Freeze told her, still focusing intently in the other direction, while his goons stared open mouthed at her, whispering to each other and making obscene gestures at her. Fire still burned within. She wondered just what she could get her plants to do to them…
"Time?" she asked, silently willing for the vines that grew about the place to come to her. They rose from the shadows, or else descended down to her, longing for her touch… for her control… and silently did she send out the right pheromones, focusing intently on the mental connection she had with them…
"Yes. Mr. Bane here had just finished the final product. Show her!" he called back to Bane, who grunted loudly, walking forward with the light in hand as she came to a rest beside the throne, careful not to trip into the small lagoon that she had produced before the throne, filled with water and decorated with massive lily pads. Ivy gazed thoughtfully at the light. It was in fine condition, the metal well-polished and shined to glinting perfection. No longer did the massive light bear the insignia of the Dark Knight… the bat had been replaced with a metal cutting of Robin's insignia, bird-like and thin-boned… as well, the glass had been painted with a light coating of red glaze. She could already see the crimson signal burning in the sky, summoning the young Robin to his death… it was delicious.
"Well done," she praised, rubbing the searchlight fondly with her foot. "He'll be drawn to it like the fly that he is. I'm looking forward to killing him. So very much looking forward to kill him…."
She grinned up at Freeze, who looked sick. And to his henchmen, who were still making highly inappropriate gestures at her, wagging their tongues in most animalistic fashions. They did not see the vines slowly descending from behind them, hissing softly as they reached down for the five goons' throats…
"So, then, the end has come?"
"Yes, I believe it has. We march now, Ivy. We march for the Observatory."
"And I'll be waiting, all snuggled up, warm and toasty, back here when you've finished freezing Gotham. We'll have a party to celebrate. And Batman and Robin… will both be waiting for you here, displayed along with the rest of my trophies." She slapped the sides of the corpses hanging around her pointedly. Freeze frowned, looking troubled, but he spoke nothing aloud.
"I beat," he said.
The sudden screams of his men behind him caught his attention, and he spun around, just in time to see his five goons, thick vines wrapped tightly around their throats, being pulled up into the darkness, dragged through thick brush and vegetation. Ivy laughed wildly, clapping her hands together as Freeze jumped at the darkness above, reaching for them, calling out their names.
"Donno! Philip! Frosty! Where are you!?"
Only their screams came in reply, as the thick brush above began to shake violently. Freeze looked crazily around, silently pleading with Ivy, but Ivy, ever calm, ever evil, smiled seductively as she waved her fingers in farewell.
"It's a jungle in here," she told him.
Suddenly, liquid began to pour down from the darkness above. Freeze watched in horror as blood began to flow down like thin waterfalls, spaced a few feet from each other, five pouring of life liquid cascading down onto the floor, making thick puddles as whatever had taken the five goons drained its victims and released their interiors onto the floor. Freeze backed away quickly, turning on his heel, and giving Ivy one last, horrified look, he barreled from the room. Ivy grinned. She had a power over him. The power of fear.
"Bane, he's waiting," she told the titan, who watched himself in terror as the blood pouring down from the ceiling. "You'd better hurry, now. And have fun with Freeze…"
The titan sighed. He stretched out his arms and hoisted the signal into the air, and then he began to walk down the way, careful to double around the flowing blood so as not to be stained. When he reached the door where Freeze had exited, he turned, and gave her one last look.
"I…hate you…"
And those, of course, were the last words that Antonio Diego ever said to Cambier the demon. Ivy could only watch, in silence and amazement, as the massive monster followed Freeze's trail. As she watched him leave, she felt a sudden, unexplainable sensation in her black heart: that she was never going to see Bane again.
"Good riddance," she giggled, as the freshly bloodied vines that had slaughtered her ogglers descended now, and she embraced their bloody forms with a mother's love. "Good riddance to all…"
She had no idea that God's judgment was fixing to pour down upon her.
Jude 1:6 - And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.