The sheet of paper in the side pocket of Jonathan Crane's brown tweed jacket felt unnaturally cold as he ran its folds between two spindly fingers before pulling it out, unfolding it, and holding it up at arm's length. With his free hand, he adjusted his glasses and glanced past the sheet to the number on the door.
This was the specified address: a low-rent high-rise on the east-end. The grimiest tumbler in the sewage processing plant the world knew as Gotham city... the city he'd called home for some-odd years since he'd finished putting fear into the sleepy north-Georgia town where he was raised.
Crane scanned the frame of the door from the top downward, examining the chipping eggshell white paint and the rotted wood the missing flecks exposed before resting his eyes on the mat where his feet were. He scooted his loafers to either side to read the message on it: "Home Sweet Tooth."
Droll surrealism. The Os in the word "tooth" had been transformed into sunglasses on a face with a sly smirk and a cigarette poking from its mouth.
He returned his head to an upright position, straightening his entire posture as he did so, and extended his hand to ring he doorbell. Realizing that the bell was assuredly non-functional, he retracted his hand and moved it toward the knocker. Upon wrapping his fingers around the metal U, he heard the doorknob jiggle and suddenly the door was jerked inward. Should have expected that.
Crane took a second to regain his composure and peered through the threshold. Standing just past it was the woman from the Asylum, same beautiful, bright red shoulder-length hair, pallid complexion, wide eyes... in the half-light Crane could just make out that they were two different colors: one blue, one green, speckled with goldenrod. A jagged scar crossed the green one, starting just above the left eyebrow and running to the top of her cheekbone.
Her? The person was now wearing a slim-fit black suit with white pinstripes over a white dress shirt with an inverted color scheme, a tie with diagonal black-and-white stripes tied neatly into a thick Windsor knot.
Their pants were tucked into charcoal combat boots that stopped halfway up the shins. "Professor Crane," they spoke, gravelly male voice in dissonant interplay with their otherwise elegant, maidenly features, "I trust you didn't have any trouble finding the place. I intentionally picked a relatively innocuous spot in what's undoubtedly the... scariest part of town."
The man fumbled in a pocket of his blazer for a moment and produced a pack of English Ovals and a Zippo lighter emblazoned with the image of a dead tree. He flipped open the pack, then the lighter, and pulled a cigarette from its spot, popping the cancer-stick into his mouth. He presented Crane the pack, offering one, which the professor declined with a two-handed "I don't partake" gesture. Accepting this, the man flicked the wheel on the lighter and lit the cigarette. He snapped the lighter shut with a flick of his hand—this allowed Crane to take note of the fact that further, parallel scarring covered the back of his hand, and that his nails were painted black and white, alternating from finger to finger.
After a brief period of watching the man smoke, Crane cleared his throat. "I believe you said something about a psychology experiment?"
The man smiled, allowing smoke to escape from his teeth... a devious, malicious grin that would have done the Joker himself proud. "Yes," he began. "I'm hoping to pull a Big Albert."
"Excuse me?" Crane intoned.
Cigarette quickly burning down to the butt, the man nonchalantly rolled up one sleeve and extinguished it noiselessly on the inside of his forearm. There were a number of other burns in various stages of healing which dotted the ivory flesh. He flicked the butt through the frame of the door and onto the balcony, then stepped aside. "Would you like to come inside and see my set-up, Dr. Crane?"
As a trained psychologist, Crane could see better than anyone, beyond the faintest shadow of a bat-shaped doubt, that this man was certifiably insane. He liked it.
Obliging the offer to look inside, Crane filed through the threshold and the man proceeded.
"Surely you know of the Little Albert experiment."
"Ah yes," Crane replied. "The infamous 1920 exercise in classical conditioning conducted by John Watson, where the subject was a little boy and the conditioned response they aimed for was fear. In which a pair of doctors instilled musophobia—fear of rats—in a child by playing a horrifying sound in tandem with an otherwise unrelated stimulus: a cute, harmless little white rat."
After getting past the distracting state of disarray the apartment was in, Crane could barely contain his excitement upon observing several tables piled with all the supplies he could ever need to produce multiple batches of especially potent fear gas.
"By 'Big Albert,' I presume—and wholeheartedly hope—that you intend to use my special talents to recreate this experiment on a grander scale."
This time it was Crane who smiled a wicked smile.
"Precisely." the man responded, joining Crane at the tables. "My next mark is Blackgate, and I'd like all the inmates there to suddenly develop a strong aversion to bats. One they can only respond to with violence. I've already set a rather twisted and talented duo out to divert any potential interlopers... I'm a big fan of their performances. Should be a barrel of laughs."
By the time Crane turned to face his newfound ally, the man had left his side, retrieved a glass of something and was sitting in a Victorian wing-back chair across the room, sipping from the glass, legs crossed.
"Can I get you a drink, doctor?" the man questioned, sloshing the liquid in his glass. "I've procured essentially all the accoutrements of a full bar. Man like you... cognac?"
"I'd love that, actually." Crane stated. "Does my benefactor have a name?"
"I have a few I go by." the man announced, moving to the kitchen to fetch Crane's drink. "Currently..." he continued as he poured a glass for the professor. "Last name Fir, like the tree." In an instant he was by the tables again, offering Crane the drink. "First name Lucille, like the ball."
"Lucy... Fir" the professor mouthed. "Clever."
"I thought so. Tell me... what do you believe constitutes 'sanity'? Is sanity an ability and desire to comply with what present-day society views as acceptable behaviour? The nature of a dynamic society is to gradually accept what, one hundred years ago, would have been 'insane' actions… it's a form of evolution, necessary for the advancement of culture.
The lack of tolerance in Gotham compared to the presence of 'insanity' means we're drastically behind the times as it is."
He set the glass alongside the chemicals on the table and returned to the chair with silent, animal grace.
"Is sanity shared perceptions and interpretations of the world? If so, does embracing subjectivity make one insane? How is mass hysteria distinguished from sanity?
Let's induce some mass hysteria. Unite this city in sanity."