Dollotron (Gotham Stories) - Batman: Arkham Knight (2015)

Mr. O'Neil staggered into the spotlight. Alone. Gripping a briefcase. Beyond the harsh light the depths of the circus tent were a black void. He squinted, trying to focus. His sleep-deprived mind was playing tricks. He thought for a moment he could see an audience.

"Welcome!" A voice boomed operatically.

The spotlight shifted. There he was: the pig-masked man who'd summoned him, the Professor - standing proudly behind a small boy, his blood tinged hands finger drumming those delicate shoulders. A pained murmur sounded from the child, muffled through a plain white face mask, at its edge, a shoreline of weeping, fused flesh; his salted-slug of a tongue writhing in the mouth-slit. The horror wasn't unimaginable, it was there in front of him. It was fact. Just as he was a parent and this was his son. Butchered and transformed. O'Neil's stomach imploded and bent him double, retching onto the straw bedded ground.

"Daddy-man is upset," whined the Professor. "Daddy-man not pleased with our work." He loosed a terrifying squeal. The young boy moaned like a busted instrument.

"I've got money..." O'Neil wiped the bile from his mouth, then popped the briefcase and threw it to the ground; wads of green packed tight. "Give me my son... please."

The Professor shook his head. "Not your son now. My dol-lo-tron."

Before O'Neil could fathom the meaning of that word, something caught his eye. There in the void, they were being watched. Faces shuffled closer: plain white masks, dozens of them. Encircled. Sons. Mothers. Fathers, once like him.

Payback - Batman: Arkham Knight (2015)

Penguin yelped as his foot broke through a sodden floorboard. Moments later one of his bodyguards burst into the room, brandishing a pistol.

"I heard a scream!" He saw Penguin trying to extricate himself. "Boss, what's wrong?!"

"What does it look like?!"

The bodyguard scrambled to find the words, he hoped it wasn't a trick question.

"Never mind!" Penguin barked. "Just help me!"

Holstering his gun, the bodyguard heaved Penguin free and started brushing the watery pulp from his trousers.

"Get out of it!" Penguin snapped, finding his balance against a window still. Out there, looming above, Gotham's latest monstrosity: Wayne Plaza.

"This was my old man's study," Penguin proclaimed. "It'd kill him if he had to see that poxy thing day and night."

Cobblepot Manor had been derelict for years, left to rot. In Penguin's mind, just the way Bruce Wayne wanted it. A permanent reminder of defeat.

The bodyguard was tugging at a strip of wallpaper. "So I guess we wait for the compensation, huh?"

"Not likely," Penguin scooted back to the broken floorboard, dropped to his knees and plunged his arm into the hole. "You think I'm waiting around for Gotham City to cough up, you got another thing coming."

With that he pulled out a yellowing wad of paper. The deeds to a company operating out of Blüdhaven: North Refrigeration.

Penguin pocketed his ace and lit a cigar. "Don't count the Cobblepots out yet, Mr. Wayne."

Visiting Hours - Batman: Arkham Knight (2015)

Prison. The irony wasn't lost on Quincy Sharp. But that didn't mean he appreciated it.

Quincy cried on the hard, cramped bed in his small, sterile cell longing for the splendour of his City Hall. He wished his master was here. Dr. Hugo Strange had awoken Quincy, lifted him to a higher state of awareness. Made him Mayor of Gotham! The... therapy. The drugs. The loss of free will. A fair, fair price for such a gift. In return Quincy had defended Strange through both trials.

Even now, he clutched onto Strange's remaining secrets - dear mementos of a parted friend.

"It's OK, Quincy," he heard Strange say. "I'm here."

"Hugo?" Quincy asked, wiping his tears on the cheap Arkham City jumpsuit the guards made him wear.

There he was. Dr. Hugo Strange, with his radiant white lab coat and paternal smile.

"Quincy. My servant. My friend," Hugo said. "We don't have much time."

Quincy was crying again, with joy. "How, master, how did you-?"

"Psychology, Quincy. Science. I'm a being of suggestion, etched into your subconscious by my living self."

The therapy, Quincy realised. The hypnosis. The drugs.

"Stay with me master, please!" Quincy tried to grab hold a phantom hand.

"I cannot." Strange said, looking benevolently down at Quincy, stroking his hair with a touch the prisoner couldn't feel. "But there is one last service you can perform me."

"Anything, Hugo, please."

"First, remove the sheet from your bed, Quincy. And tie it to the light-fixture on the ceiling."

The Demon's Head - Batman: Arkham Knight (2015)

The messenger dropped down onto the puddled street and stayed crouched in shadow, her hand resting on the hilt of a katana; caution was innate, trained into every sinew and fibre of her body.

She waited for the drunken couple to stagger past and approached her canvas: a wall of decaying posters. She unfolded the stencil and held it in place. The small nozzle concealed in her wrist guard released a pressurised spray of black paint. With a few waves of her hand the image was complete.

It would join the others she had spent the night emblazoning on Gotham's walls. Most people would think it was just another work of art. They wouldn't know of the war that raged. The war to bring him back. To resurrect Ra's al Ghul.

The air whistled; instinct turned her head as a blade grazed skin and embedded itself in the centre of the dripping insignia.

The assassin stepped out of her throwing stance and drew a sword from her back. "You openly defy the League of Assassins. The penalty is death."

Wiping the blood from her cheek, the messenger faced her enemy. "There is no league without him, that is the truth!"

Surveying her surroundings, the assassin approached. "You will not find his body."

"What makes you think we're still looking?" The messenger unsheathed her katana. "The Demon's Head will live again."

Critter - Batman: Arkham Knight (2015)

Roach wrenched against his restraints, and watched the beetles skitter across Scarecrow's gloved hand. He wasn't sure what made him sicker: Scarecrow's creepy new face. Or the rocking of the damn cargo container they were hidden inside. Joker wouldn't find him, surely? They couldn't have gone far from the Steel Mill.

"Fascinating creatures, aren't they?" Scarecrow said. "So small." Scarecrow was holding a bug by one of its legs, now, as the other five limbs scrabbled at the air. A wave hit the boat and the poor thing swung back and forth. "No warning colours, either." He dropped the bug to the floor, it scuttled towards Roach who fought back to the urge to stamp on it. He didn't want to look afraid.

"Do they want their predators to fall for it?" Scarecrow asked, watching another insect creep across his palm. "To sink their teeth into this fragile shell?"

Scarecrow made a fist, crushing the insect in his hand.

"The beast that does so will regret it," Scarecrow explained, wiping the mashed up insect into a glass beaker. "Not through sickness, or death." He added chemicals to the beaker now, muddling the mixture into a greenish-black, sludgy cocktail. "But through the hallucinations this creature's toxic secretions cause. Through the beating of their overworked heart, the adrenaline coursing through their bloodstream. Through fear."

He turned to Roach now, the beaker in one hand. A funnel in the other.

"My toxin failed me at Arkham. Together, we will ensure that never happens again."

Social Outcast - Batman: Arkham Knight (2015)

"Y do u attack B@tman? He is BASED ! U r a fa-"

Riddler deleted the email, and all the others like it, as prickly hot anger and shame squirmed through his insides. No point denying it: #CrusaderGate had been a disastrous social media campaign.

He couldn't understand it. It seemed the internet's idiotic and easily roused rabble could froth itself into a full-fat cappuccino of frenzy over 'white knights'. But offer it up a Dark one - on a plate! - and you get a soy latte's worth of indignation at best! Didn't they understand what Batman had done?

The memories rise up like bile: Riddler is back in Arkham City, Batman places an explosive hat - Riddler's OWN invention - on his head, forces him to march in endless circles lest the device detonates. It's hours before Riddler realises the trick, that the explosives had been defused.

Having borne witness to shame, this computer was tainted now. Yet Riddler paused. He still had electrical burns from the last time he'd angrily ripped 128 gigs of RAM from a motherboard.

His search for a hammer concluded when another email arrived.

"To the owner of Enigmatic Holdings Ltd., Gotham City Council hereby APPROVES your purchase of the disused sewerage and water processing facilities beneath the city", it began.

For the first time in months, Edward smiled.

Revenant - Batman: Arkham Knight (2015)

Zak hated Mondays. He'd been working the early shift at the morgue for all of three weeks and he was already starting to resemble a pallid corpse. The bourbon-induced hangover certainly wasn't helping. His stomach had been growling all morning and it was still an hour until lunch. His bowels lurched at the thought of another plate of slop from the commissary, only this time the accompanying growl was deeper, more resonant. From another place.

He scanned the room for the source. The stiffs sometimes released pockets of gas when they started to decompose. Pungent gifts from the afterlife. But this sound was different, almost like a word trying to be formed, trapping by shuddering lips. It was coming from one of the new cold storage units.

These compartments weren't supposed to have locks, but this one had four. They weren't usually this big either. And they certainly didn't have WayneTech branding. The door swung open and plumes of dry ice poured out around Zak's legs.

As the lights flickered on, he could see the outline of a hulking corpse spread out on the floor. It was inhumanly large and... breathing?!

"Bor-bor-bor-bor... bor-bor-bor-"

Zak slipped on the tiles and landed hard, sending his glasses skidding across the room. Feeling with his hands, he worked his way over the huge slabs of cold muscle to the wrist - as thick as a thigh. He wiped the frost off the plastic ID tag and strained to see the name: Solomon Grundy.

Like the nursery rhyme...

The body shifted, its giant lungs filling with ice-cold air. The voice was rough, guttural... angry.

"BORN ON A MONDAY!"