When the former patients of Arkham Asylum made the news every day, Sophie had a hard time believing that this could be something actually happening.

She had seen the picture of a man called Hugo Strange on the news who would have looked like a friendly and compassionate doctor - hadn't it been for the glasses that seemed far too small for his round face and of course the headlines accusing him of experimenting on human DNA.

Sophie could not help feeling pity for the people who had not only been proclaimed dead, but also been put through torturing experiments. The thought that no one had missed them sent shivers down her spine. To her, these people were victims and she found it unfair and hurtful whenever she heard her colleagues or people on the streets referring to them as 'freaks'.

But when the penguin-man, Oswald Cobblepot, started to make appearances in the media, Sophie couldn't help the shift in her attitude.

While she disapproved of his whole agenda and felt disgusted by how he used the citizens' fear of the escapees to get the voters on his side, she knew that him being invested in that matter equalled Victor Zsasz being tangled up to some extent.

She had seen footage from some of the former patients. There was a woman who could move so incredibly fast that she didn't even leave a blur in the air.

Back in school, one of her teachers had been very enthusiastic about film and she could still remember his explanation: "You see, film consists of a frequency of images. Our brains need to see at least 16 frames in one second to perceive them as a fluid film. Anything less than 16 would merely be like looking at a handful of photographs quickly. Initially, everyone was satisfied with those 16 frames per second, but today, everything we see on TV runs with 24 frames per second."

Sophie had stayed glued to the TV after seeing the footage of that woman and skipped through the channels until she found another broadcast and managed to record it. Only when she slowed down the recording twice, she could see a blur. At least she's not teleporting. Although Sophie had never been extraordinarily good at mathematics, common sense told her that if this woman was fast enough to beat a camera, she would be fast enough to beat a bullet.

There were rumours on the streets that one of the escapees could drain people of their youth through his touch, leaving behind corpses that looked like mummies. People said one of them looked like a vampire with bat-like wings and a thirst for blood.

As a child, Sophie had enjoyed the goose bumps on her skin that came with every ghost story her friends told her. As a teenager, she had enjoyed watching horror films, pretending to be unimpressed with all the gore in front of her friends and making fun of how the characters would always do the least logical thing.

Now, she could understand how Cobblepot's promise of "making Gotham safe again" was so appealing to the masses.

But Sophie was not concerned about her own safety. Why would they harm civilians, anyway? Their inbreaks into pharmaceutical establishments probably meant that they were either trying to 'cure' themselves from the effects of the experiments conducted on them or struggling with some kind of side-effects. Sophie could imagine that having their genetic material changed must have been awful enough. The thought that they might be still in pain after being 'transformed' deepened her feelings of sympathy.

She would not vote for someone who talked about "killing monsters" when she considered it the government's task to not overlook something as big and controversial as a mad scientist performing illegal experiments in the city's only psychiatry for the criminally insane.

What Sophie was concerned about was the safety of Victor Zsasz. In general, worrying about someone as lethal as Victor Zsasz seemed like a silly thing to do in more than one aspect.

There probably were a great deal of people to whom the death of Victor Zsasz would have fallen in the category of things for "making Gotham safe again", but Sophie saw herself far from ever being one of them by now. Other than that, she had witnessed the man's agility and skilfulness with a gun and his ridiculous ability to leave situations in which he had been outnumbered by large with merely a scratch.

But what if his boss put him up against these people with, well, super powers? Her brain bestowed her with countless images of Victor Zsasz being drained of his blood, youth, life, of someone turning up behind him, seemingly out of nowhere. From time to time, Sophie would jump awake from her sleep by the sound her mind imagined the bald man's pale neck to make when it was snapped by a figure so large it looked beyond human.

There probably wasn't anyone as interested in watching the news as she was. Before the dreams came and her nightmares mocked her with the hidden fears of her sub-conscious, Sophie had told herself that she was only fascinated by the paranormal aspects because she was a writer.

In fact, they had inspired her to add a couple of pages to her novel which had felt utterly satisfying. But after she had squeezed these pages out of her fingers, she still followed every news broadcast and the Gotham Gazette, as well as other papers, with a perseverance that came close to obsession.

And every day the headlines did not include any notions of a hitman being killed by an escapee left her with a feeling of relief.

At some point, Oswald Cobblepot had seemingly fulfilled his promise of freeing the city of the 'monsters' and Sophie had seen images of him in front of a bonfire in which the corpses of two dead escapes were burned. The penguin-man promised that the 'freaks' would not return to Gotham and thereafter became mayor elect.

The whole situation seemed absurd to Sophie. While she was convinced that every human being deserved a second chance, she could not quite picture the penguin-man, a former rather successful mobster, in the role of a political leader. A small part of her actually almost found it funny. She wondered how Victor Zsasz's conditions of employment would change.

Author's note: I hope the film-bit makes sense- I feel like I couldn't really express what I wanted to say. Oh, and thank you for reviewing, Sam! You gave me an idea, there. ;)