Objective: Infiltrate the Botanical Gardens
Mirage twirled down the cracked stone path of the abandoned gardens, her boots crunching broken glass, humming a carnival tune no one else could hear. A fractured gas mask hung from her hip, spray-painted neon pink. In one hand, a broken mirror shard that she swore whispered back to her.
"Oh, Ivy, Ivy, Ivy…" she cooed, spinning until she slammed against a wall draped in ivy's crawling green. "Your roots, your vines, your big bad plants. So alive, so wild, so… delicious."
She leaned in, stroking the leaves with her fingertip like they were hair strands on a lover's head.
"I wanna be just like you," Mirage whispered, eyes wide and shimmering. "But with prettier colors. You grow things. I make things. Little nightmares. Little stories. Want to see?"
She snapped her fingers. The vines around her writhed—not Ivy's work, just illusions wrapping her in a false embrace. They curled around her arms like snakes, coiling until they sprouted carnival masks for heads. They laughed with her laugh.
"Ahahahaha!"
A thug's flashlight cut through the night. "The hell was that?"
Two of Penguin's men, rifles slung over shoulders, wandered into the gardens. They weren't scared. Nobody was scared of Mirage.
But they should've been.
"Showtime!" she whispered, sliding into the shadows.
The first thug blinked. The second blinked harder. Suddenly, they weren't standing in the garden anymore—they were in a hallway of cracked funhouse mirrors, stretching endless in every direction. Their reflections smirked back with Joker-like grins, each one whispering: wrong way, wrong way, wrong way.
"What the—" The thug fired his rifle. The mirrors shattered. Except… there were no shards. No glass. Just empty air.
"Peekaboo!" Mirage giggled from behind him. She tapped his helmet with her mirror shard, and his world collapsed into spirals of neon color. He dropped, convulsing, eyes wide with terror at things no one else could see.
The second thug ran—straight into a wall that wasn't there. His nose broke with a crunch.
Mirage leaned over his fallen body, grinning ear to ear. "Not so funny when the joke's on you, huh, birdie boy?" She blew him a kiss, then skipped deeper into the gardens.
New Objective: Reach Ivy's Cell.