Something about the Joker made me chuckle. Maybe it was just the ridiculous nature of his persona. He seemed straight out of a comic book; he wasn't a good person turned bad, or a good person doing bad things; he was just bad.

"You look a bit tired." He said as we roared down the road at the Gotham unwritten speed limit of 80 mph. "I know a nice place…" he said, and trailed off as if he was about to give directions. He didn't.

"Are you going to kill me?" I asked, taking my eyes off the road for a split second, just in case I had reminded him that he hadn't finished the job earlier.

"I will," He replied, and then added, with another devilish smile, "if you let me." With a flash he produced his knife and I barely caught his hand in the downward motion of the strike. He quickly re-doubled his efforts and so I let go of the steering wheel. In the struggle we bumped it back in forth, and the car along with it, but the back-and-forth motions meant every time we turned the car one direction, before long we would turn it further the other way.

In my concentration on keeping the knife away from my head, I had been pushing down on the gas pedal, and we were now tearing down the streets of Gotham, though our exact location was a mystery to me. My tardiness in getting both my hands into the fight set me back quite a ways; the point of the blade was very near the tip of my nose, and my hands were in a way so that the very beginning of the knife was digging deeper and deeper into the flesh between my thumb and the rest of my hand.

Just as a small bead of sweat bridged the tiny gap between metal and flesh, some static object collided with the car (or, more accurately, the car collided with some static object), and we were both shaken up. I'm sure we would have both been flung through the windshield had we not been tangled up in a fight; unfortunately, this also had the unfortunate side effect of bashing my shin incredibly hard.

I stumbled from the wreckage, and, after a moment of trying to walk, fell over and rolled up my left pant leg. The skin was already beginning to bruise, but, after regaining my composure I was able to stand, and limp around, looking to see if any help had come. Of course, it had not; this was Gotham.

"What are you, ah, waiting for?" I heard from behind me, and wheeled around. The Joker licked his lips and pushed his hair back, exposing the creases in his forehead, where some of the white face paint had worn off. Then he turned around and disappeared in the darkness.

I wasn't sure if he was simply sneaking around so that he could get a fright out of me before he flayed me alive, or if he really was turning me loose. He sounded as if he wanted me to follow, but the sentence by itself was ambiguous. As attractive an offer my freedom was, some little mischievous thought in my mind wrestled with common sense and won.

My only justification for following him was my own hope that it might actually be less dangerous in the short term, and that as long as he had someone to terrorize, he would be garnering a lot of attention; though that wasn't always an easy thing to do in Gotham.

I walked in the direction he had headed, and I could see his silhouette a ways ahead of me, confirming I was headed the right way. I passed by a shop with a number of TVs piled in the window. The majority displayed just black and white static, barely illuminated the darkness on these run-down streets.

The working ones showed the news, where it showed the aerial view of a half-collapsed building. The title below the screen, just above the news ticker, said 'Arkham Collapses!' I couldn't hear the volume, but the subtitles explained, in a great many misspelled words, that it appeared the foundation of Arkham had been crumbling for years, and that many attempts had been made to relocate the prisoners to a more secure asylum, but just never had happened.

I was about to walk away, as the Joker's form was beginning to grow faint, but just as I walked on, the subtitles declared that the police had found a great many of Arkham's residents crushed, and didn't expect any had escaped.

I couldn't help but frown at the Gotham Police Department. I hoped that they were really just trying to keep the public calm; I wished we weren't in such narrow streets either, so I could see if they were calling for Batman. The Joker had already made it abundantly clear that Batman was the only thing standing between Gotham and an anarchic concrete jungle.

I was wrenched from my thoughts when ahead of me, the Joker's silhouette disappeared entirely into a tall building that looked out of place here. None of the buildings around were taller than 3 stories, but this one reached nearly the height of some of the skyscrapers deeper in the city.

It was still under construction, and in place of a proper door, I stood in front of a loose piece of metal laid against the doorframe, but stopped before I pushed it in. Who knew what was inside; a sick trap followed by hours of torture and a slow painful death, or perhaps I would unwittingly become an accessory to untold amounts of murders for which I would surely pay the price.

Slowly, I laid my hand on the cold metal, and with a small push, knocked it to the ground with a loud clang that echoed throughout the barren street I was on.