Chapter Three

Morning came, and it was now three days until Halloween. Gotham City was preparing for this holiday, as spooky themed decorations were strung everywhere in the suburbs, and the larger department stores put jack o lanterns and witch's brews in their windows. For the poorer parts of town, Halloween marked a steady upswing in petty crime, as bored kids and young adults helped themselves to whatever was foolishly left lying around, be it candy, lawn ornaments or even strings of lights, the copper wiring being worth something on the black market.

When Barbara awoke, Ray had already left for work, though he'd called Patricia and left an apologetic note for Barbara along with a reminder for her to take her medicine and to drink some of the coffee. Patricia would be along in half an hour it seemed. She rose from the couch, yawning. She got to her feet groggily, her thoughts swimming. Her face throbbed, her body still felt weak and fragile, and despite having drunk nothing alcoholic she felt like she had the worst hangover in the world, a throbbing headache and a powerful urge to vomit. Stumbling to the bathroom, she looked around the mess that constituted the home of the man who had been her only real foster parent for a year now.

Once she felt steadier, she drank plenty of water and took the pills that had become such a familiar ritual by now. It was probably far too early to decide if the laughing fits had left her for good, and she didn't want to take any chances. Going to the Gala had been a vital step for her, but doing so had left her completely exhausted. It would be a long time still, she felt, before she could approach the level of physical fitness she had previously enjoyed, if ever.

Ray's apartment was...almost depressing, in a way. It was clearly a place he simply slept and ate, from time to time. It didn't feel much like a place anyone would live in. There was no TV, no personal pictures, no decorations, and no personal effects. Just a bed, a couch, a kitchen-space, a tiny bathroom and box-shower, an overcrowded desk with an outdated Lextop personal computer plugged into a charger. If her house felt with memories of a previous life, Ray's place held no life at all.

Bored, and feeling incurably nosy, she looked around his desk, for signs of anything interesting. She fired up his Lextop, but wasn't surprised much to see it required a password. She could probably guess it or crack it with ease, but she had no reason to trespass on what was probably just a means for the old man to continue his work off-hours. There were books and scattered papers, as well as a few faded copies of the Gotham Post and the Daily Star. All of it seemed work-related. Even his copy of Shakespeare's The Tempest was simply a library book he'd rented to deal with this Prospero case.

Although she knew she probably shouldn't, she read through the case notes he'd left anyway. Once she'd held ambitions of following in her father's foot-steps. She still had no idea what she was going to do in the future, but frankly after spending a year cooped up with nothing but her thoughts and a nurse who wasn't overly chatty, her brain hungered for for something, anything else to do. Maybe she could help out in some way. She felt a pang of nostalgia, remembering the way her father had tested her wits and ability to recall details. She'd developed a photographic memory, able to recall trivial details that from time to time she'd been able to offer her father on his cases, helping him find answers that might otherwise have gone overlooked.

The Prospero Oil Spill was big news for Gotham city, and most of the material Ray had and which the media was reporting was treating it like an unexplained industrial accident, another example of greedy big oil companies skimping on safety measures. Ray had been working on finding a criminal link, and had delved into some fairly esoteric sources and material to try to assemble...something.

She looked at the Question Mark picture, which had become iconic. It seemed to signify something. A scientist's report, which she briefly skimmed through, confirmed it was unlikely to be chance.

"If this is the question, then what's the answer?" she mused aloud. She could see why it had gotten Ray's attention, and she sensed perhaps why he was so driven to investigate something that would usually have been far out of his jurisdiction or line of ability. She recalled how it had started, nearly two years ago, her father talking about a surge of...lunatics, odd cases. Masked villains and strange mutants. He'd also mentioned the Dark Knight, a figure he seemed to regard with...humour? Familiarity? Re-examining Ray's notes, she could see that he was looking for...something crazy. Some evidence that those strange times had returned.

Until now, she'd not really thought much about that. Her dark experience had completely consumed her, such that she struggled to remember a time in the past year when she hadn't been stuck reliving her trauma, or desperately trying to avoid thinking about it, which more often than not had meant she'd simply not...been thinking, at all.

Now she had Ray's case notes before her, and the obsession, no, desperation, that it betrayed, made her want to re-examine her past, and her father's past, as well. She'd never thought before, about the Dark Knight, or the Joker. The horror of what had occurred had blotted out everything else. But where had they come from? Were they unique, terrible things, or, as Ray seemed to assume, part of a trend that had occurred, stopped, and might re-occur again?

She awoke from her deep reverie by the sound of a heavy buzzer. Patricia was downstairs, and demanding to be let in. She didn't seem too happy. Barbara had the grace to at least feel somewhat embarrassed. Staying the night, even at a friend as trusted as Ray's, wasn't very good behaviour for someone in Barbara's condition.

She quickly tidied away the notes, having already memorised them. She would do more research later, perhaps. She had decided that feeling angry all the time was something she couldn't really support. Perhaps a good Mystery, something that could tax her brain, would both distract her and allow her to better regain control of her thoughts and memories. No longer would she let certain thoughts and ideas intrude on her consciousness, forcing her to see and feel things she really didn't want to. She would ignore the... Event, as best she could, and focus on something new.

As she went to let Patricia in, she was already plotting what she would do, and how she would go about investigating things.

Perhaps it was time to start being Oracle again.

Raymond Wills massaged his temples, still feeling a little hung-over from the night before. Montoya and Bullock had both elected to take the day off, and it seemed like most of the police department had chosen to do the same. He was part of a skeleton crew still keeping things ticking over. His leads into this Prospero case were going nowhere, and word had come down from above that he was done with this investigation. The City was satisfied now, apparently, that there had been no outside criminal influence, and that the Oil Rig explosion was an industrial accident. FEMA and federal investigators would take over from here on in.

The frustrating thing was, he couldn't disagree with them. Based on what he'd been able to find out, he couldn't even put together a half-way legible conspiracy theory, let alone a plausible chain of events. The Question Mark, he was sure, signified –something-, but what? He'd even started digging around in Prospero's past. They had plenty of enemies, plenty of people who'd want to do this. None of them were claiming responsibility though, and even if they wanted to hide their direct involvement, a question mark was...well...a pretty ambiguous calling card, by its nature.

But now he was off the case. It seemed they were transferring the bulk of their resources to focusing on this rash of cop-killings. Word from on high was that if nothing else got solved this month, it would be these cases. A high murder rate, a high arson rate, and a high petty crime rate could all be fudged or overlooked. One need only look to Hub City to see how a modern American city could function even amidst a state of near-anarchy. But something that absolutely could not be overlooked or excused was a high attrition rate of law enforcement officers.

So, after reluctantly packing away all his official material on the Prospero case; he already had backups at home anyway- he started to sift through some of the material that Bullock had been working on.

Harv had been right. This was pretty ugly and violent stuff. He'd also established several surprisingly plausible theories that linked all the murders together. Although officially the cop-killing was simply opportunistic violence from criminals grown too cocky, Bullock felt convinced that they were all the work of one darkly gifted person. He'd named this theorised serial-killer the "Judge", a dark pun on the nature of the killings.

As Ray flipped through the forensics reports, he found his stomach churning. He hadn't seen violence this calculated, this methodical, since...well, since the Joker. But where that killing had been creative, intended to evoke some sort of dark parody of real humour, these killings were simply ruthlessly efficient, designed to kill their target as brutally and as quickly as possible, and leave the presumed assailant completely untraceable.

He noted one lead that sparked his curiosity. One of the victims had been Jim Corrigan, a junior detective who had worked the Joker case back in the day with them. He'd been transferred out at his own request after narrowly escaping an encounter with the madman, who'd killed Jim's then partner. There'd been some suspicion that Jim had been deliberately let go, and his story about how he'd escaped had always seemed somewhat off.

Another victim had been a famous defence attorney. Milton Delgue. He'd been the defence for many of the Joker's henchmen, and helped get them light sentences, arguing convincingly that many of them were victims of brainwashing, or just plain crazy.

Bullock was working on a theory that someone was trying to get revenge for the handling of the Joker case, but Ray was doubtful. Bullock was pretty notorious for his conspiracy theories, and had earned Ray's ire a few times with his private conviction that the Joker was still alive. It was bullshit, and he'd made it clear to Harv that if he ever spouted that crap to him again he'd knock him out cold. It...cheapened what they'd been through, somehow, to Ray's mind. Harv hadn't had to hold Barbara's hand through her laughing fits. He'd not been the one to dig Jim's burnt body out of the rubble. Such memories made his patience for conspiracy theories like that very thin indeed.

One lead that did intrigue Ray was one of the first cop-killings. The victim had been a beat-cop with a long history of drunkenness, who'd been on the force for twenty years, but had somehow never been discharged. There was no connection there to the Joker case, which had soured Harv, but something that had turned up in the autopsy had sparked his interest recently. The victim had been almost completely decapitated. Lodged in his bloodied throat, forensics had managed to find slivers of metal, which analysis had shown were a rare and potent alloy called Vibranium. Harv had looked at manufacturers, and there were only two in Gotham city. Wayne Enterprises and Prospero Incorporated.

Harv's curiosity about the oil rig suddenly made sense.

Assuming the murders were all linked, their killer had some sort of connection to one of those two companies.

Ray grinned. He knew how he'd be spending his afternoon. He was going to get into Prospero, and solve this mystery. Even if the cases weren't directly linked, what were the odds of two Lunatics running around Gotham city?

Barbara had endured Patricia's well-meaning lecture with stoicism, and even managed to give a somewhat convincing apology. Driving home, Barbara had braced herself for a return to a bleaker state of being. The thought of this person, through no ill intent of their own, confining her to a lesser state, had made her angry. She wasn't angry at Patricia, but the broken system for care that seemed to exist in Gotham.

She was angry too, that a girl of her age needed a minder. It was hard not to see the justification in some respects, but she knew now that she had found a purpose, something to turn her mind too, which could consume her as it had consumed Ray. She realised that she and the detective were more alike than she'd realised, and she wondered briefly what pain, what demons he was burying with his dogged approach to detective work.

After an hour, eating lunch and taking her pills and reassuring Patricia that yes, she was fine, Barbara had shut her bedroom door, and gotten to work. She closed the window, and shut the curtains, even though it was daylight. She'd spent far too long staring at the trees, at the sky, and getting lost within herself and her memories.

For the first time in a while, she fired up her old computer, inputting her password. She decided not to check her e-mail. She worried how much of it would be sympathy mail, or worse, hate-mail. She didn't need any of that now. She had a mission in mind.

She returned to a place she hadn't been in over a year. Hacker forums, communities of bored teenagers like her with brilliant minds and insatiable curiosity for classified information. She'd learnt a lot from such places, and had often snooped into the GCPD's most secure servers, taking care that she wasn't traced. It had been another way of getting a thrill, she realised. She'd been a bored, spoilt teenager, seeking thrills both intellectual and physical.

She logged on under her pseudonym, for the first time in a year. Oracle had been her handle, a pretentious name, but she'd been a cocky teenager, full of herself, convinced she knew everything. She browsed the forum, sinking back into her persona, old habits coming back to her as if she'd never been away.

She noted the usual topics. Pop cultural allusions, conspiracy theories, multi-media nonsense. She'd been absent for a year, and didn't much care such things, and didn't see catching up with that stuff as useful or helpful to her. She searched for stuff on the Question Mark, and fired up her instant chat client, waiting for it to download a year's worth of software patches. Tedious but necessary.

As she did so, she noted that much of Ray's work had already been pieced together by others, and theories were circulating about the Question Mark and what it meant. Some were, like Ray had tried to do, drawing on Prospero Inc as the victim, and cobbling together crazy theories that referenced the Tempest. Some had pointed out that the rig had exploded in a precise lull during the storm, and that the question mark-slick seemed to trail out towards remote islands that Prospero used for chemical research.

She filed away these facts for later analysis. On a whim, she decided to search the words "Grey Ghost."

She found an old TV show, dating back decades. Thomas Wayne would probably have been a boy at the time. A campy 1960s live action show, where a grey-clad noir hero and his boy sidekick had solved crimes and thwarted colourful villains. Disturbingly, the Grey Ghost had also sometimes been called a "Caped Crusader". She wondered if there were any links to the Dark Knight. A quick search found thousands of websites making that exact comparison, with some even drawing links to other vigilantes and...super heroes across the world.

She found a few, blurry photos of the Dark Knight, dating back to 2 years ago and to the weeks leading up to that final tragedy. There were some similarities. Grey and black colour motif. A Gas mask. A long cowl. A brimmed hat. The fedora in particular disturbed her. It looked like the hats Ray and her father had worn when out on duty, from time to time. She ignored the threads talking about the events that had surrounded her and the victims, conspiracy theories about what had happened to James Gordon, to the Dark Knight, the Joker. She curtly avoided the few threads that even talked about her, and the Gala. She had no interest in what the wider world thought of her, and knew better than to pick at sore wounds like that.

She checked, and found her chat client had finished updating. She quickly sent off some messages to her old friends, hoping her re-emergence after a year didn't too badly shock them. She hoped they were still around, at any rate.

Spoiler was the first to respond. She didn't know who Spoiler was, anymore than Spoiler knew who Oracle was. All she knew was that Spoiler was a fellow Gothamite, with similar passions.

Spoiler92: hey

Oracle: hey there! Long time no see

Spoiler92: Thought you were dead

Oracle: No, just ill :/

Oracle: Sorry not been social

Spoiler92: S'ok. Been busy too lol

Oracle: You wouldn't happen to know anything about a Grey Ghost/Dark Knight connection would you?

Spoiler92: ...Who have you been talking to?

Oracle: Noone.

Spoiler92: There is a connection. Pop Culture becoming reality becoming mythology again

Oracle: That's a heavy thought.

Oracle: What's up?

Spoiler92: Last night was the Anniversary of another story. The End of the Dark Knight

Oracle: Some people remember it for other reasons.

Spoiler92: Yes. From the GCPD's night-logs, there were eleven arson attacks, nineteen muggings, thee murders and twenty-three domestic disturbances.
Oracle: You still have access to the GCPD's logs?

Spoiler92: Doesn't everyone?

Oracle: What's the connection?

Spoiler92: Prospero Inc was just served a subpoena over the Oil Rig Disaster. It's CEOs are sweating. Everyone thinks its a malfunction. But they're asking the wrong questions.

Oracle: What are you trying to tell me Spoiler?

Spoiler92: Gotham has many ghosts. You're the Oracle, what future do you see?

Oracle: I don't know

Spoiler92: g2g. gl

Spoiler92 Disconnected.

Barbara scratched her head, wondering why her friend had suddenly decided to start speaking in Riddles. The information tallied with what she'd spied from Ray's notes, though there was no way Spoiler could know she'd been looking into that case as well. But her curiosity was well and truly piqued. It felt like one of those detective mysteries her father had always laughed about. Maybe she would look into this Prospero Inc thing too.

One thing was clear, though.

She was definitely going to visit Wayne Manor.