It always rains in Gotham.
Batman melted into the night, standing atop a gargoyle, expressionless as he watched the city through the curtain of rain.
It was something he did three hundred and sixty days out of the year—but today, something went wrong.
Without warning, the world around him whirled like a kaleidoscope, scenes flashing past his eyes like a flickering reel.
Catwoman, Harley, Zatanna, Wonder Woman, Talia…hours or whole nights with them in different places, at different times;
judges on the take, psychiatrists bought and paid for, cops dodging hard truths, officials in bed with the mob;
the Joker, Two-Face, the Penguin, Scarecrow…criminals trapped in the same loop of crime, arrest, and breakout.
The rapid-fire images made his head swim, yet Batman didn't so much as sway; he only ratcheted up his guard.
The scene shifted again. In a cramped, aging apartment, a stranger of an old man addressed him in a stern voice:
"If you have the ability to help others, then you have the moral responsibility to help them. It's not a choice—it's a duty. The greater the power, the greater the responsibility!"
A gunshot cracked an instant later. The severe old man collapsed in a pool of blood, weakly clutching Batman's hand.
"Peter…"
"Peter!"
The call snapped Batman back to the present. It wasn't aimed at him, but he looked toward the voice on reflex.
A slightly heavyset, middle-aged man in a white lab coat was watching him with open concern.
"Peter Parker, are you alright?"
Peter Parker?
Batman's gaze flicked over the man, sharp eyes catching the name on the badge clipped to the lab coat:
Otto Gunther Octavius.
Who is he?
Questions rose in a rush. Batman looked down at himself and realized he wasn't wearing Kevlar and titanium—just an ordinary plaid shirt. He wasn't standing in the rain, either. He was in a brightly lit laboratory.
Scarecrow's fear toxin? Or Mad Hatter's mind control?
Unruffled by the sudden change of setting, he swept the room with a practiced eye:
a clean, well-lit lab; portraits of scientific luminaries on the walls—including the very same Otto Gunther Octavius in front of him. Some of the faces he knew—Einstein, Newton. Others he'd never seen: Bruce Banner, Hank Pym.
Instruments lined both sides of the room. Up front loomed a large device like an upside-down octopus, with a whiteboard beside it crammed with equations.
"Otto, world-famous nuclear physicist? And that's a tokamak?"
Batman ignored Dr. Octavius and ran the numbers in his head, eyes settling on the whiteboard.
Wayne Enterprises had once tried to develop fusion power for Gotham.
Unlike Octavius's compact tokamak, Wayne Enterprises had pursued a magnetic-confinement design; the math behind the two approaches was entirely different.
After he'd shut the project down, Batman had continued studying on his own. He knew tokamak-based fusion well enough to spot a subtle parameter error on the board; the rest held up.
The incorrect parameter would skew the final result, but the fact the underlying equations were sound was enough for Batman to discard the "hallucination" theory.
Neither Scarecrow nor the Mad Hatter could conjure knowledge they didn't possess.
"Peter, you don't look quite right. I suggest you go home, get a good night's sleep, and come back another day."
Seeing the young man still not responding, Dr. Octavius frowned. The kid seemed unreliable. If Harry Osborn—the Oscorp golden boy—hadn't personally vouched for him, Octavius would've thrown him out already.
Before Batman could answer, a sudden prick needled the back of his neck—icy and sharp. The chill detonated, racing down his spine and through every nerve.
The world seemed to freeze and stretch. The tiniest sounds—the brush of fabric, the faint shift of equipment, even his own heartbeat—
each one swelled and warped in his ears. That cold warning pointed straight at the tokamak, as if it were the source.
An alarm chirped through the lab, the white lights flipping to pulsing red.
Octavius spun to the console beside the tokamak and worked the controls. In under two minutes the lights steadied and the alarm cut off.
"As you can see, my fusion experiment still isn't there yet. I'll need to step through the procedure and see where it went wrong."
Dr. Octavius gave Batman a quick smile—no trace of frustration at the failure.
Experiments fail. Each failure adds to the ledger of experience. Octavius wasn't discouraged.
"That…felt like an instinctive reaction to imminent danger," Batman thought, then addressed him:
"Doctor, I'd like to borrow your computer."
He didn't explain why, and Octavius didn't ask. Busy retracing the test, he answered readily:
"No problem."
With permission, Batman sat at an idle workstation and woke it up, fingers flying over the keys.
Whether this was some other phenomenon or not, the first order of business was to get a handle on the identity he currently occupied. He hacked the local police database and queried "Peter Parker."
Identity. Rental records. School enrollment.
"So this is who I am? A junior at Empire State University. An orphan raised by Uncle Ben and his family."
Expression unreadable, he logged out and scrubbed his traces, then excused himself.
Using the address from the rental file, Batman walked nearly an hour to the listed apartment.
He locked the door, drew the curtains, and sat cross-legged in the dark living room, eyes closed.
An hour on foot—people, buildings along the way—gave him ninety-nine percent confidence this wasn't an illusion. But one last test was necessary: meditation.
Zatanna had taught him to meditate—to harden the mind against psychic attack and blunt illusions.
Three full hours later, night had fallen. In the blacked-out apartment, Batman's eyes snapped open.
"Not an illusion. But I can't rule out Barry Allen—the Flash—did something that triggered a chain reaction in the timeline."
"I need to find out why my consciousness is in this stranger's body—and figure out how to get back to Gotham."