"You're gonna bleed," predicted my cellmate, and drew back his arm.

A locker door might not be as humorous a prop as a ladder, but I'm adaptable. I snatched up the loose door and swung it around to meet my cellmate's fist. Instead of knocking me square into next week, he connected with metal. Klang-crunch, the door had a dent and he had a fistful of pain. I laughed, flipped the door up and sliced his head, tearing loose a flap of scalp and a couple of his pointy little cones. Scalp wounds always bleed with enthusiasm, but I didn't waste time to appreciate the details.

Three quick rams to the nose and mouth, and he flew backward, along with a few of his teeth. I usually don't begin with the head, but with so many other new playmates, I didn't want to spend too much time on just one. The others might feel neglected or unwanted and I don't like to hurt people's feelings. Just the rest of them.

"Y' see, Bozo," I said, spring-boarding off my cellmate's face as I leapt out of the cell to meet my other new friends, "I have some, uh, is-sues about your definition of winning. You seem to think that we're just part of the herd." I slammed the edge of the door into the Adam's apple of the nearest expendable, then smashed his toes hard. "And. We're. Not."

Where was the other goon? Ah, he was trying to be smart. He went back to get his own locker door, but he then tried to get out of the cell the wrong way, widthwise, not lengthwise, and knocked the wind out of himself. "I say that—," Pausing a moment to trip up the guy with the smashed toes, I sent him right into one of the bug zappers.

He stuck to it for a moment, twitching and babbling involuntarily before he sagged, unconscious, to the ground. I had to laugh. "That was funny. Those, uh, things are good for something after all. I say the game isn't lost or won until one or the other of us, that is, you—" The goon with his own locker door figured out how to get through the door and charged at me. I sidestepped and smacked him on the ass with my door as he went by. "Olé!" I laughed again, this time at the look on his face. "Until either you or I throw down."

"What are you talking about?" he asked, irritated.

"The name. The title. There can only be one Joker. That's, uh, that's what this is really about. Otherwise, you'd have waited for Bats to show." The guy with the door turned around for another pass, but I sidestepped again, swung and knocked him into another bug zapper. "Damn, but that's good, uh, comedy. When one of us says to the other, 'You are the J-word.', then it's over."

He guffawed. "Do you really think you can get me—me!—to give up the title?"

"Yes. I think I can. I think I, uh, will." No more playmates here—not conscious or living, anyway. Where was Gracie? Still in the observation office, where Commissioner Gordon was trying to get the stool away from her. It was too much to expect her to lay his head open with it instead, she still had scruples about things like that.

Bozo was speaking again. "Well, who am I to say you can't make it harder for yourself?" He giggled. "To the throw down it is, then!—I suppose that means I'll have to leave your tongue intact so you can say the words. I'll enjoy making you grovel when you say it... Back to the show! Fresh from Blackgate Correctional Facility, with a combined sentence of seven hundred fifty-two years—It's Round Two! Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding!"

A crash behind me told me that Grace had won the fight for the stool and with the glass. As the other set of bug zappers fizzled out, releasing the other four expendables, first one of my shoes and then the other flew past my ear. "Watch it, Sassy girl! Are you going to help or are you just going to stand around and look beautiful?" I said, using the door as a shield as they attacked all at once. I finally had my shoes, but somehow I doubted my new friends would let me call a time-out so I could put them on.

"I thought I would watch as they hand your ass to you in a swing and laugh and laugh and laugh," she retorted. "Far be it for me to tell you what to do, but have you noticed that black box on the wall over there? The one with the emergency light on it? The one marked—Now I know you can read, even if they can't."

Black box. On the wall. Oh. The one marked 'Guns'. And it didn't have a nice strong practical padlock on it. It looked like it could be pried open, in fact. (Institutional suicidal tendencies again.) However, it seemed that some of these goons could read, as long as it was words of one syllable, and one of them ran over there and was already heaving on the handle. "Thanks for, uh, calling their attention to it!" The emergency light was not there just for show. It was flashing and a siren was going off, but since alarms now seemed to be going off everywhere.

I fought my way over to the box, slashing, slamming and jabbing with my locker door, just as the goon got it open. "More firepower over here!" he whooped, before he first realized there was only one gun, (but a nice semiautomatic) and secondly realized a locker door to the face.

Guns are not my weapon of choice, but somehow I knew this night would offer lots of unique and rare opportunities for violence of all kinds, and these new friends were boring me already. So I finished them off quickly in order to get to the good parts. Just like swallowing carrot coins without chewing so dessert would come faster.

Then I put my shoes on.

"Maybe you're not all hot air after all," Bozo said, sounding petulant. "Those were just the warm-up. I've got much bigger surprises in store for you. Aaah, this is simply too, too stultifying. Why don't you just come find me?" The bug zappers on the asylum side fizzled out.

More glass crashed, and Gracie (still tangible and still dressed as Arkham staff) leaped down from the broken window to join me, over the protests of Gordon.

"Shall we?" she asked, quirking an eyebrow at me.

"After you," I waved a hand.

A/N: A short one. Next chapter: Victor Zsasz and Harley Quinn.