She doesn't know if he has any sort of idea how they're going to finish this goal of his, but she knows that she's going to help him do whatever he wants to try.

Michelle, as Schwarzwald, hangs her head out the window of their stolen car as she drives like a madman, her mind a haze of impulses and desires. She doesn't care about consequences right now; she doesn't care about anything at all. There's something about the Joker, now sprawled in the back seat and giving her directions now and then, his voice still relatively light and cheery, that compels her, somehow, to do as he does, feel as he does. His mood is like the weather; when it's good, everyone's happy. But when it's bad…

You just pray that the storm doesn't cause too much damage.

"Stop here," He tells her, and she slides to an easy stop in front of two unmasked men. They wave rubber clown masks to show who they are and Joker slides up into the passenger's seat, the two thugs that left the van earlier on sliding in back.

"What happened to the van?" One asks, almost hesitantly, and only gets a chortle in response.

"Nothing important. Drive." He tells Michelle, and she, not knowing where he wants her to go, pulls into the street again and just drives. Her makeup is smearing from the sweat on her brow, and she haphazardly wipes running paint away from her eyes, as it's rolled dangerously close to them and she doesn't need to get stinging grease paint in her eyes while driving, before glancing over to Joker.

"Where to, boss?" She asks, casually, and he ignores her while leaning back to look at the thugs.

"You two," He points at them, and they perk up as they straighten their masks again. "Are the fireworks ready?" One thug looks down at the duffle bag Michelle never noticed that they were carrying, zipping it open and looking inside.

"We got three more charges."

"Good." Joker sits back in his seat, casually rubbing a bloodstain off the windshield with his thumb. "Since the cops are going to be preoccupied with our little diversion," He glances to Michelle, before back to the bloodstain, "We shouldn't have trouble finishing up. Drive down to the first light, take a left, and keep going until I say stop." He tells Michelle, casually, and she does so, wondering what's going to happen later on tonight. The sun is setting right now, actually, and it's going to be pitch-black soon. The night makes her slightly nervous, but Gotham's so bright that she's usually fine if it's in a nicer, well-lit part of the city.

When she stops where he tells her to, the thugs grab something from the bag and casually walk out towards a building that Michelle recognizes as a very large day care center. People are going to be picking up their kids soon after a long day of work. Michelle herself is too hopped-up on adrenaline to really work this out, and merely taps her hands on the dash while she waits for the two to get back. "Why are we doing these ourselves?" She asks, after ten or so minutes of waiting, and glances over at Joker.

"No greater teacher than experience." He responds, before cracking his neck. "It's been a while since I've done anything, anyway; need to get back into the motions. Arkham's pretty…restrictive with its guests." It's now that the two thugs come back, without the thing they went in with, and she drives again to the next spot she's told to go. The thugs leave to set up whatever they're setting up at a building fully lit up, and apparently full of people. It looks like there's a big party happening inside. Michelle, after waiting for five more minutes through thick silence, can't help but ask.

"Hey, what was it like? Arkham, I mean." She asks, glancing sidelong at him, and he laughs very slightly.

"Stuffy. Sterile. Drugged. What you'd expect of a giggle farm." Joker looks over and sees her waiting for more detail. "What, you expected something amazing? It's an asylum, not a birthday party." He chides her at the end, and she glances into the rearview mirror as the thugs sit back down. She drives to the last spot, a retirement home about the same size as the daycare and the building with the partygoers, and now Michelle realizes that they're all about the same size, and the thugs get out doing whatever they're going to do.

"So…heard you escaped." She asks, leaning on the steering wheel. "How'd you manage that? Can you tell me?" She watches as Joker crosses his arms over his chest, closing his eyes.

"Hm…no."

That answers that question. The rest of the wait is in silence, before the thugs come back, smack the top of the car, and walk back into the building with masks on, and Joker directs her to a derelict old building in the warehouse district, windows cracked and busted and rats and cockroaches the only things that dared live in the dangerous old building. Now the only things that dare wait there are rats, cockroaches, a stray bird or two, an escaped mental patient, a Stockholm-afflicted accomplice who may or may not be losing her mind, and three clown-masked thugs that have been waiting there for them the entire time. Michelle asks one of the thugs for a briefing on what he knows, and he dismissively tells her that they're waiting for Joker to pull the pin and start the entire 'operation', if it can even be called that. They wait for five minutes, seemingly at random, before a thug from somewhere else radios in and tells them that they're all set to go, and so are the others.

"Let's start the party," Joker mumbles, taking the radio and beginning to narrate; it almost looks like he's talking into a walkie-talkie, except for the noises on the other end being loud, as if the entire thing were jimmy-rigged to a speaker system. From the sparse moments that he's not talking, Michelle can hear whimpering and crying from someone else in the background.

"Hello, good people of Gotham, and welcome to our little game. I'm happy that we've got so many players." He lets his thumb off the button and hears people crying, and Michelle can catch that it sounds all jumbled together, like there's more than one radio on the same frequency. "You can even say hello to the police, since we're on the same channel. Feel free to do so. Anyway," He paces around as he speaks, and Michelle tries to fix her makeup in the reflection of herself in what's left of a window, "We're going to play a game. I have five buildings rigged with enough explosives to blow them to Metropolis, and I'll even tell you, good police officers listening in, where they are. But, and there's always a but," Michelle notices that even though he's pretty crazy, and very unpredictable, and incredibly dangerous, he's actually a good public speaker. Weird. "I'm going to give you an address once every five minutes. After I say an address, I have the bomb for that building armed and you have five minutes before it blows. All of the buildings are five minutes away from Gotham PD, by the way. You can go after the first building I say, and sacrifice the others, or you can wait for me to tell you where a more important building is, and listen to the others blow sky high while you wait. And you're only going to be able to save one of the buildings, because after anyone so much as steps foot inside one of them, then I let that one go and I destroy all the others right then and there. Anyone walks out of a building and I destroy it anyway, and we continue with the other four." When he lets the button go, shrieks of terror cut in for that second. "Ready to hear what the buildings are? One is a daycare with lots of children and their parents, one is a busy clinic, one is full of rich partygoers that donate to the police department on a regular basis, one is a homeless shelter filled with the unfortunate and downtrodden, and the last…is a police department. Now, let's see who Gotham's 'guardians' find the most valuable." He lets his thumb off the button and instantly, a cacophony of screams of terror, cries and pleas for help, and alarmed police officers sound out.

"How do you know that the people themselves aren't going to run away?" Michelle asks, glancing back at him, and Joker tosses the radio at one of the thugs.

"Because there are goons there, keeping them in."

"But why are the goons even staying in the building? Don't they want to leave so they don't die?" She asks, and for some reason, the children crying in the background of the haze of noise from the radio is making her feel sort of sick. Joker glances sideways at her as he paces, smiling wryly.

"They've been told that after I pick a building, they've got a minute to leave."

"Are you going to give them that minute?" Michelle turns around, after having been tracing the tattoo on her face, and Joker shrugs.

"Maybe." He smiles at her, and the way he says the word is chilling. She looks out the broken window, and realizes that they can see every building from where they are.

"You know they're probably going to figure out that we're in the middle of all the buildings, right?"

"That, Shorts, is why we have these fine gentlemen." He gestures to the thugs with the heavy weaponry while he takes the radio from one of them and starts again. Michelle is wondering if she should change her alter-ego's name to something that Joker can remember. She decides that she will; Schwarzwald is cool, to her at least, but it's just too hard to remember for some people and nobody's ever going to fear her if they don't even know who she is.

"Have we made a decision? I hope so; these people are getting antsy, aren't they?" Joker cuts her thoughts as he starts speaking again, letting his finger off the button long enough to hear wild sobbing from at least one of the targets. "The first building is the homeless shelter, Heaven's Little Helpers," He laughs at that, a bit, "on the corner of Licell Street and Lorelei Avenue. Are the bums worth the others' lives? I wonder." The radio goes off and there's loud noise of police officers shouting insults at Joker, the man himself picking up a detonator and arming it, and talking hurriedly with other police officers through their radios, and people in the background sobbing. Someone is screaming, 'Screw the hobos; we're the ones that actually contribute to the damn city!', and others are cheering in agreement. Michelle grimaces in disgust; she remembers why she doesn't trust people anymore, and it's because when they're under the microscope, this is what they are. Rats.

What new name is she going to have? Hysteria? No, that's way too obvious. Harley? It's too esoteric. Salt 'n Peppa? She snorts in muffled laughter at the idea, and Joker stares at her like she's insane for a moment, before speaking into the radio again.

"Hm? No love for the homeless? One minute." He sounds impatient, but also bored with how things are happening. Michelle is pacing just like Joker is, and it's almost jocular how they happen to be pacing in a figure eight without noticing it, both caught up in their own thoughts. Another minute passes and she hears a clicking noise about half a second before another explosion ripples out like fireworks against the wet velvet of Gotham's night, as the sun has already set. Michelle hears screams start and others silence, hostages screaming about how they should be saved. Joker starts narrating again, stopping his unconscious figure eight with Michelle to do it.

"All of you think that the police are your saviors, your protectors. But when push comes to shove, there are only a few really worth saving." He narrates, staring down over Gotham City's expanse, and Michelle listens to him very quietly. "The homeless aren't worth saving. Let's see if the partiers are worth it, instead. The location? Anderson Road. Make your choice." He walks back to a molded old wooden table, ignoring the shouting and screaming and pleading from the people on the other end. Michelle stares at him as he walks, noting for the first time that while she's a cacophonic mixture of blacks and whites, patterns that hurt the eyes, he's muted dark colors that blend in. The only thing that's really striking about him in this low light is the face paint.

"Looking at something?" Joker asks, in a tone that suggests bored, barely-there curiosity. She shakes her head, before averting her eyes out the window where embers of the detonated building burn. She's shaking, very slightly, and feels a little sick to her stomach. The glee of earlier is long gone. She's so worried, or afraid, or maybe even guilty. There's no way to tell.

"Nervous?" He asks her, suddenly, and she turns to look at him. A moment of seeing him causes her to turn sheepish, lowering her eyes to the dirty glass-covered floor.

"Yeah, I guess…sorry."

"The first time is always the worst." He tells her, staring her down with a mellow, slightly thoughtful look on his painted face. She blinks, staring at him with slight confusion. She doesn't quite get it, but she's listening to him very intently now.

"You think, 'I can't do this sort of thing. This is wrong. This is what killers and crazies and psychos do. I'm not one of them. I'm not a monster'." He folds his hands in his lap, as if he were a professor at a college giving a lecture to a student, and Michelle listens intently enough to play the student part. "But you don't stop. You can't. And the more you do it…the easier it gets." His tone rises slightly at the last part, and Michelle can't tell if it's slight hysteria or just excitement, or if he's just playing with her.

"You don't think of them as people, after long enough. They're just human shields. Fuel. Walking bombs. They're tools just waiting to be taken advantage of by capable hands. And by the end, you can do things…like this." He glances at the detonator, flips a switch, and presses a button. Another explosion tears through the Gotham night. Michelle is a shade paler by the time he finishes, and seeing this, he flashes a wolfish grin.

"Unless you saw things differently in the first place. Then, it's just funny."

He stands, walking past her and to the large broken window, to stare out at his handiwork. "The partiers weren't worth it? I wasn't really gunning for them anyway. Next up on our list is the beloved clinic; it's full of sick and poor. Are we going to let them burn? Let's see. Umbrell Street, Saints Clinic."

Michelle watches him switch off the radio, before walking over towards her. She's instantly nervous, almost neurotic. He stares at her a moment, seeing her nervously glancing up at him now and then, before walking off to pace again. It's almost like he can't sit still for more than a minute or two.

"Why do you do it?" She asks, dumbly, and he stops and glances back, confused.

"Why?"

"Yeah, why?" She leans forward in her seat, eager to know, and he sits across from her, crossing his arms over his chest in a bored fashion, staring her down.

"Guess."

"Um…" She wasn't expecting him to deadpan that question to her, and she's got almost no idea what he could possibly want to do. All she knows is that it's chaos he excels in; she doesn't know why he does it. "For fun?" She asks, tentatively, and he expels a single, barking laugh.

"It's fun, yes, but that's not the reason."

"I never knew you even had a reason. Hm…is this a trick question? Is the answer, 'none'?" Michelle asks, leaning forward in her seat. He closes his eyes, shaking his head slightly. She's befuddled.

"Hm…" She thinks, putting a thumb to her lips like a child, and can't figure it out. She stares at her boots, the dizzying patterns and white-against-black-against-white-against-black of her costume. She's so entranced by it that she doesn't notice that he's moved until a gloved hand closes around her bottom jaw and pulls her head up, and she notices that he's right in her face, and terror strikes her again. Why? She's devoted to him; why should she be afraid? But she is. There's something about him that terrifies people.

"For being such an intelligent woman, you have no common sense. No creativity, either." He says it in her face, and she's too entranced by the wondrous horror of being so close to him that he could snap her neck in an instant to really register anything but his eyes. "It's not about the fun, or the money, or anything so…insignificant."

"What is it, then?" She mumbles, because it's hard to talk with him holding her jaw almost closed, and she's sure that he can feel her pulse through his gloves. Her heart is pounding like a drum.

"It's about sending the message." He basically purrs in her ear, and the sound of it revolts her for some reason, on some primal level. Maybe it's because the Joker is personification of everything wrong with Gotham, everything dangerous about it; a disease that never goes away, no matter how hard the city tries to rid itself of him. She doesn't ask what the message is, because she can't; there's too much terror in her veins to let her do anything but stare, blankly, at him as he lets go of her and walks across the room as if nothing had just happened. A glance at the timer, a glance out the window, and another explosion goes off not too far from here.

"Sorry, clinic goers, but no dice. Two buildings left; why don't we mix things up a bit?" Joker laughs into the radio, ignoring Michelle's still-as-a-statue figure sitting in the corner of the room. "The last two spots are free game; pick which one you want to save, and the other one goes up in flames. The daycare, at Grivolgi Avenue, or the police station, at Hampton Street? Pick one; and remember, I'm watching you close, so don't cheat or they both blow."

The flash of red and blue lights light up the streets below as they seem to all rush for the same place.

"The daycare; predictable." Joker murmurs, before his attention is caught by something else. There's a person, they're too far away to have an easy to decipher gender, and they're rushing at the police station, panicked. Cars are coming up at their back, and Joker now glances between the two buildings, watching for which one they go into first. He snaps his fingers, not looking away from the scene, and a thug grabs Michelle and shoves her towards the Joker. He grabs her himself now, dragging her to the window and pressing the detonator into her hand. "You're going to do this one." He says into her ear, as she's at his right side so close that he can feel the body heat off of her. She almost drops the detonator at the notice, before trying to give it back to him.

"I can't!" Michelle whines, and he notices that her hands are shaking again. It's pathetic. He puts a gloved hand on her shoulder, tightening his grip as she still tries to push it back into his hands.

"You can. One press and it's done. Do it." He growls in her ear, as the cops rush into the daycare. The lone figure is almost at the police department's door, and there are officers behind them, rushing, trying to stop them. Michelle closes her eyes tightly, shaking her head back and forth.

"No, no I-"

"If you're going to be so useless, then I don't need you."

She freezes at the harshly spoken words, and stares, blankly, at the detonator, and then up to him again, and she's tearing up and it's so pathetic.

"No! I…I can…be useful…"

"Then prove it."

The lone figure throws open the doors to the police department right as a mother and child are being lead out the doors of the daycare. Michelle numbs herself completely, and pushes the button at the very bottom, the one he's been pointing to. Both buildings blast in a storm of smoke and dust and debris, and Michelle doesn't even jump as Joker laughs in her ear, deafeningly loud.

"People; you've got to love them." He states, his tone dropping to what sounds like it could either be disgust or resentment; it's hard to tell which. "They're willing to sacrifice anyone else just to have what they want. But you already know that, don't you?" He asks Michelle, but she doesn't answer. She's pale as a sheet, and just as mute. He stares at her a moment, before growling under his breath and grabbing her by the back of her neck, dragging her towards the fire escape as red and blue flash at the bottom of the building. "Let's go; no doubt the police aren't going to be happy with us. I don't feel like talking with them, either." He drags her down, before sliding down the red ladder and to ground level, moving quickly. Michelle staggers after him, dazed; she's preoccupied with wondering how many lives she just took.

They're willing to sacrifice anyone else just to have what they want. But you already know that, don't you?

There's the thug's car parked not too far away, and it's a black van. Roomy enough for everyone to sit comfortably in it, while the driver takes a shortcut to twist around the cops and get away from the wreckage scene. They killed so many people tonight, innocent people, fucking kids, and they get away without so much as a slap on the wrists. Michelle's now very sure that there's no God. But she knows, for sure, that there's a devil; he's sitting across from her in the van, looking at his gloves disinterestedly.

((So, how was the first attempt at a real act of chaos? I admit, I'm not very good at trying to think these things out.))