Created by, Story by, and Executive Produced
by Dams Up Water

New Bat City

Gotham never sleeps. It just lies there with its eyes open, pretending.

They say the city was built on bedrock. That’s a lie. It was built on paper—trusts, foundations, shell companies, sealed indictments. Paper and bones.

Bruce Wayne learned that before he learned long division.

The official story was simple: young heir falls into abandoned well on the family estate, swarmed by bats, develops lifelong phobia, withdraws into seclusion. The tabloids called it formative. The therapists called it symbolic. The board of Wayne Enterprises called it unfortunate branding.

Alfred called it what it was.

“Dissociation,” he’d murmur in the cave beneath the manor, his voice calm as rainfall on slate. “The mind creates images it can survive.”

Bruce remembered the hole differently.

He remembered the gala upstairs—velvet laughter, perfume thick as incense, the city’s grandees speaking in code about “population management” and “long-term stewardship.” His father, Dr. Thomas Wayne, smiling with surgical precision. His mother, Martha—born and bred into the “in” society—moving through the room like she owned not only the house but the air inside it.

He remembered being led away from the lights.

After that, the bats came, swarming.

Not wings. Not claws.

But shadows.

A thousand black shapes beating against the inside of his skull. When he told Alfred about them years later, the old man didn’t flinch.

“You weren’t afraid of bats, Master Bruce,” Alfred said, pouring tea in the cave like it was a drawing room. “You were afraid of the darkness behind the masks.”

The night Thomas and Martha Wayne died, the newspapers called it a senseless act. A mugging gone wrong. A lunatic. A gun. A smile painted red. And in the pale moon light, a laughter.

He shot them in an alley behind the Monarch Theatre while the marquee flickered like a dying pulse, leaving Bruce untouched.

The boy stared at the painted grin hovering in the smoke and gunpowder.

“You’re free now,” the clown said softly.

But Bruce heard something else entirely.

You’re alone.

Years later, when the Joker would replay that moment in his mind—because he lived in the perpetual present, and the present contains all things—he’d sigh at the misunderstanding.

“Children,” he’d say to no one, standing in the clock tower of the old Gothic cathedral the city council condemned but never dared to demolish. Structurally sound, spiritually offensive. “Always confusing mercy for malice.”

The Joker made his home there among cracked saints and rusted bells. Gotham hated God but loved monuments; so the church stood, unwanted and indestructible, like him.

They said he couldn’t die.

That wasn’t quite right.

He could die, as any man could.

But he would not die until the Hand that moved him withdrew. And the Hand had work yet left to do.

The virus was the first trumpet.

It slipped into Gotham’s infrastructure on a Tuesday afternoon, disguised as a routine patch. By dusk, every billboard, smartphone, courthouse monitor, and subway display flickered with a single sigil: a laughing jester’s face dissolving into binary rain.

Then the files began to unspool.

Encrypted ledgers. Offshore accounts. Emails between city council members and a consortium known in whispers as “the Cabaala.” Minutes from private symposia discussing “civic hygiene.” Research grants signed by Dr. Thomas Wayne on population control initiatives that read less like medicine and more like arithmetic with a body count.

The Gotham District Attorney’s Office tried to pull the plug.

It couldn’t.

The servers were already mirrors of mirrors.

Inside the DA’s war room, beneath portraits of solemn men who’d once sworn to uphold the law, the new power brokers sat in tailored suits: the senior partners of Weasel, Badger, Beaver, Mink & Otter.

The name drew snickers in polite society.

No one snickered now.

They had stepped in after Harvey Dent’s fall from grace—a corruption scandal so baroque it made the old mob look like pickpockets. The firm marketed itself as benevolent, subterranean, corrective. They believed in sunlight and injunctions in equal measure.

“We are looking,” said Mr. Badger, peering over half-moon glasses at the cascading data, “at systemic criminality at the highest levels.”

“And a masked vigilante beating up dockworkers,” added Ms. Mink dryly. “One must admire Gotham’s sense of proportion.”

Commissioner Gordon stood near the window, trench coat collar up despite the sealed glass. The Bat-Signal’s housing cast a long shadow across his office roof.

“Batman means well,” Gordon said. “He’s a blunt instrument. Trauma wrapped up in a black cape.”

“And the Joker?” asked Mr. Otter, putting a lit cigarette to his smiling lip.

Gordon exhaled smoke toward a city that had long ago stopped coughing.

“He’s… something else.”

The partners exchanged glances.

“A first amendment actor,” Ma Beaver offered carefully. “Satire as scalpel. Bank robberies as theater. Terrorism as performance art.”

“Redress of grievances,” Badger added. “Albeit with explosives.”

On cue, another bank in the Financial District erupted in confetti and smoke. No fatalities. Vault emptied. Ledger copies left behind.

The Joker’s calling card wasn’t a body.

It was a balance sheet.

Batman watched the virus unfold from the cave’s glow of monitors. Alfred stood behind him, hands folded.

“They’re calling it the Cabaala,” Bruce said. “An international network. Elites. Judges. CEOs.”

“Yes,” Alfred replied. “Conspiracy thrives in darkness. Sometimes it even happens to be true.”

Bruce froze a frame: his father’s signature beneath a proposal on “genetic optimization.” His mother’s correspondence with a foundation tied to foreign intelligence fronts.

“They were ringleaders,” Bruce whispered.

“Or participants,” Alfred said gently. “Or pawns. Or sinners. Gotham does not lack for categories.”

The bats stirred in Bruce’s chest.

“He killed them,” Bruce said. “The Joker.”

Alfred’s voice softened. “He removed them.”

Bruce spun. “You knew.”

“I suspected,” Alfred said. “About the galas. The rhetoric. The way certain guests looked at you as if you were not a child but an inheritance.”

The cave hummed.

“You think he wanted to help me,” Bruce said.

“I think,” Alfred replied, “that the world is rarely arranged along the lines of hero and villain. I think you built Batman to contain something unbearable. And I think the Joker sees that.”

As if summoned by diagnosis, the clock tower bell tolled across Gotham’s damp night.

Batman found him there, silhouetted against stained glass that depicted a judgment day no one down at city hall believed in.

“You’re busy,” the Joker said cheerfully, adjusting the purple gloves on his hands. “Your family’s trending.”

“You murdered them,” Batman growled.

“I interrupted them.”

Lightning fractured the sky behind the steeple.

“They were part of something,” Joker continued. “A little club. International. Ritualized in its own bureaucratic way. They called it stewardship. I call it appetite.”

“You expect me to thank you?”

The Joker laughed, but there was no mockery in it. Only wonder.

“Oh, Bats. Gratitude is for transactions. This was revelation.”

He stepped closer to the edge of the tower. Far below, squad cars formed a nervous halo.

“I lead criminals,” he said, almost wistfully. “They despise me. They fear me. Good. Fear is honest. The elites fear something else.”

“Exposure,” said Batman.

“Judgment,” Joker corrected. “Not mine. I rank below it. Far below. But I point.”

“You rob banks.”

“I return grievances with interest.”

“You unleash chaos.”

“I unveil order.”

Batman lunged. The two figures grappled amid broken pews and dust. It was always like this—fury meeting laughter, fists against philosophy.

Batman pinned him against the stone balustrade.

“You won’t kill me,” Joker said quietly. “You can’t. You need me to be the monster so you don’t have to face the terrible truth of what Mummy and Daddy exposed you to in the dark of the glitz and glamour.”

“I don’t need you.”

“No,” Joker agreed. “You need the bats, that Rorschach of yours, blotting out those memories in the hole.”

For a moment, the city fell away. There was only the boy in the dark and the man who had cut the lights.

“Why didn’t you kill me?” Bruce demanded.

The Joker’s painted smile didn’t waver.

“Because you were the only innocent thing in that alley.”

Sirens wailed closer.

From the streets below, Gordon watched the silhouettes struggle against the skyline. Beside him, Ms. Mink adjusted her lapels.

“They’re both symptoms,” she said.

“Of what?” Gordon asked.

“A city that outsourced its conscience.”

Up in the tower, Batman’s grip faltered.

The Joker slipped free—not by strength, but by surrender. He stepped backward onto open air.

For a breathless second, gravity considered him.

Then a grappling line snapped taut from somewhere unseen, and he swung into the night, laughter trailing like incense.

Batman stood alone among the saints.

Alfred’s voice crackled through the cowl.

“Master Bruce.”

“He’s not afraid of me,” Bruce said.

“No,” Alfred replied. “He fears only what you have yet to face.”

Below, Gotham’s screens flickered again—new documents, new names, new indictments drafted by hands that had once been complicit.

The partners of Weasel, Badger, Beaver, Mink & Otter prepared emergency filings. Gordon lit another cigarette. The elites locked their doors and checked their mirrors for smiles painted in blood.

In the cave, Bruce removed his mask and stared at his reflection in the dark glass.

The bats were quieter now.

Not gone.

Never gone.

But quieted down.

New Bat City was being born—not from vengeance, not from laughter, but from exposure. From files dragged into daylight. From a traumatized vigilante who meant well. From a very jolly jester who refused to stay dead because his work was not yet finished.

Gotham still didn’t sleep.

But for the first time, it seemed to be waking up.

[composed with artificial intelligence]