self_composed | plotting to unnerve her

"What makes you think there's a next?" he asks innocently.

There is totally a next.

"Well all right, smarty pants," he sniffs. "I blew up a hospital—don't worry, they evacuated it first. Well, they almost evacuated it," he corrects himself. "I did have to shoot a couple of cops on the way out. And of course, the man himself, our glorrrrious new District Attorney, was left in the building juuuust long enough for me to have a quick chat with him. Boy's a looker even with half his face burned off." He winks. "Don't tell anybody, but I woulda gone for it in a hot second. 'Specially when he held a gun to my head. That was definitely a highlight of the evening."

"I don't think you'd previously mentioned the face burning," Bella says.

"Yeah, that time bomb I mentioned blew up on their way out," he says. "Guess it musta caught him funny, 'cause he was a steak dinner all down one side and good as new all down the other."

"Ah-huh. Well, go on, you're not at the part where they caught you and you found out how to locate Milliways through a barred door."

"I got another good one for ya in between," he says temptingly.

"So now you're a member of the general public. Some awful person," he beams a grin that invites her to guess who that might have been, "has been terrorizing the city for days, blowin' up buildings, dangling corpses from the roof of City Hall, all that reign-of-terror kinda stuff. This villainous character kidnaps a news anchor and makes him read out a message, innn which he says that we are all gonna play a game and anybody who doesn't wanna join in had better get out now. Oh, he adds, and the bridge and tunnel crowd are gonna be in for a surprise."

He flashes a grin.

"I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you'd be too smart to take the ferry after that, but bear with me anyway."

"Oh, you live on an island. That's worse," comments Bella.

"Mm-hmm. So. Let's suppose you ended up on that ferry anyhow - there's only one available, because they're using the other one to evacuate about five hundred prisoners. Smart move, really. Who knows what I could get up to if I got my hands on those guys."

Here he pauses, to see how she's taking all this.

"Let's suppose I did that, instead of buying an inflatable raft," Bella says agreeably.

"Smart cookie," he says appreciatively. "So you're on this boat, and you're halfway across the water, and allll of a sudden who could it be on the loudspeakers but your friend the Joker. Who tells you that your boat is rigged to explode, and - ha! - so's the one with all the criminals on it! And it just so happens that he has left you each a present, to wit, the detonator for the other - boat. Annnnd, naturally, whichever boat hits the button first wins the race and gets to live, whereas if you both wait around past midnight, or if anybody tries to escape, well, he's got detonators too."

"And has my friend the Joker generally shown himself disposed towards being honest about these games, or has he - say - lied about the locations of his kidnap victims?"

"Well, you don't know that," he says. "Not unless you're secretly the Bat." He gives her a look of exaggerated suspicion across the table, then laughs. "Which you're not, 'cause she was with me at the time."

"She didn't publicize this information? The cops didn't?" says Bella exasperatedly. "Grand. Well. If I'm not cheating, I have no hopes of overpowering the average person who might lay hands on the detonator, or want to take it from me if I had it in the first place. The choice is out of my hands here unless I want to jump into the water, and my swimming abilities without cheating always amounted to "dog paddle and wait for rescue". I don't imagine said rescue would be a priority on this day. I don't think a not-cheating me-on-this-ferry has any options besides sitting tight."

"Poor you," he says. "Don't worry, though, you got out safely. Nobody hit the button, and Bats got to me before I could hit mine. That was when she threw me off the building," he explains. "And left me hanging upside down from a grappling hook for the SWAT team to collect. As I recall, they stood around watching me giggle until I passed out, annnnd the next thing I knew - Milliways!"

"Welcome," says Bella, lifting an imaginary glass. She hasn't ordered anything and for some reason it seems rude to conjure beverages in a sentient bar.

"Turns out I come here in my sleep," he elaborates.

"And I gotta ask. What do ya think the twist was that time?"

"Besides rigging the ferries after warning about the bridges and tunnels? The detonators could be wired the other way around, or they could be dummies, or only one of them could be either, or there were only enough explosives to sink, not obliterate, the boats, so you'd get to watch survivors fighting over wreckage to hang onto..." She shrugs.

"Ooh, you're vicious," he says approvingly. "I like that in a woman. But nope, that's not it. The trick is, one of the boats had a detonator for its own bomb. The other one had a detonator for both."

"Which was which?"

"You tell me."

"I could see either one," Bella says. "If the prisoners blow themselves up and it looks like the civilians did it, the civilians think whoever had their detonator pushed the button. That person's confused, no one believes them if they say otherwise, everyone thinks they had the stomach to blow up five hundred people, they start doubting their own memory - just a little button, maybe they slipped, maybe they deluded themselves, maybe they repressed the memory? - and you've still got lots of live non-criminal civilians, the city doesn't mass-evacuate out of grief and panic the next time they think it's safe to do so and leave you with a ghost town. If the civilians blow themselves up and it looks like the prisoners did it, there's a crackdown on the prisoners, maybe you find your next stint in prison more interesting, political interests that care about looking after the welfare of prisoners get into fantastic fights with political interests that don't - I guess they do that in either case. Maybe a guard on the boat presses the button and you get most of the psychological benefits - so to speak - against him that you could've against a civilian who doesn't remember pressing hers in the other scenario. And it doesn't matter who pushes the button if they all explode. From the outside, from the perspective of everyone left alive, it looks like they both did it at the same time. It especially doesn't matter if you just explain the trick after the fact - then no matter what the buttons actually did, you get to leave everyone paralyzed with indecision if they get caught in one of your pranks." She regards him steadily. "I think I'm glad you're in jail."

"I think I'm glad you're not the Bat," he says.

And almost immediately admits -

"That's a filthy lie, I'd love to run a game against you. It'd be short but oh, would it ever be sweet."

"I'd make a terrible Bat. If you presented me with a building with an explosive and a district attorney in it, and I wasn't cheating, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I am an eighteen year old girl with a lot of magic and a lovely brain that, prior to locating the magic, I mostly exercised with high school curriculum and classic literature, not anything practical for combating terrorism. If it would be short, it would be because you got bored with me not being able to do anything but snark at you and you decided to kill me or move on."

...The Joker seems to find this hilarious.

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