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A few days earlier, Darren had been sipping cheap coffee in a dingy diner when the morning newspaper landed on the counter in front of him.
The headline was small, tucked below the fold, but it hit like a gunshot: Two-Face resurfaces—armed robbery at East End savings & loan, coin decides fate of guard.
The grainy photo showed the familiar scarred profile, half in shadow, half in sickly light.
Darren folded the paper neatly, paid his tab, and walked out into the gray morning. That was the moment he designated Harvey Dent—Two-Face—as his next target.
But after that single, violent appearance, the coin-flipping criminal vanished again. No sightings, no new crimes reported in the tabloids, no whispers on the street. Two-Face had gone to ground.
Darren tried investigating on his own.
He lacked the Riddler's theatrical compulsion to leave taunting clues scattered across the city like breadcrumbs. He also lacked a partner like Oracle—someone who could crack databases, tap cameras, and feed him real-time intel from a keyboard in a hidden basement.
Without those advantages, his options were painfully limited.
He couldn't predict where Two-Face would strike next. He couldn't monitor Gotham's endless streets around the clock. All he could do was wait for the man to resurface.
Waiting, however, was unreliable.
By the time a crime made the evening news or the police scanners, Two-Face would have already collected his winnings and disappeared into the night. Darren would arrive at the scene hours later to find only broken glass, bloodstains, and the faint smell of gunpowder. Too late to issue a Notice. Too late to do anything meaningful.
After several frustrating days of dead ends, Darren came to a clear conclusion: if he wanted to confront Two-Face on his own terms, he needed to find the man's current base of operations. And since he couldn't locate it himself, the logical step was obvious.
Ask someone who could.
Gotham had no shortage of underworld information brokers, but only one fit the bill perfectly: Oswald Cobblepot.
The Penguin maintained one of the most extensive and reliable intelligence networks in the city. He sold secrets the way other men sold liquor—freely, discreetly, and at whatever price the market would bear.
Darren had no intention of handing over a briefcase full of cash, though. That was why the Lupin III persona had been born.
The casino stunt had worked better than expected. He walked away with several thousand dollars in winnings (and left a few high-rollers considerably poorer), but more importantly, he had forced Penguin's hand.
The flaw he'd planted in the cheating mechanism—originally just a personal safeguard against losing—became the perfect bargaining chip when the greedy bird demanded more than simple gratitude.
Heh~
In the end, Darren obtained the location of Two-Face's hideout without spending a single real dollar.
He just hadn't expected the answer to be that place.
"Well... I just didn't expect Two-Face's base to be in a spot like that," he muttered as he stepped out of the alley.
By now, he had already shed the previous hoodie and swapped it for nondescript dark clothing suitable for night 'work'.
Hood up, gloves on, he moved through the city toward the address Penguin had slipped him on a folded slip of paper.
The Audisburg District had once been the beating industrial heart of Gotham. Long before the glittering towers of the Diamond District rose, nearly a quarter of the city's population had lived and worked here. Factories churned day and night; smokestacks painted the sky gray; the rumble of machinery was the city's heartbeat.
Today the district was a ghost town. Mile after mile of cavernous warehouses stood empty, windows shattered or boarded, steel beams rusted the color of dried blood. Weeds pushed through cracked concrete. The wind carried the faint metallic tang of decay.
Officially, the story was clean and palatable. If you asked a city council spokesperson, they would deliver the prepared statement with practiced sincerity:
"The Audisburg industrial zone was phased out due to severe environmental contamination. Ten years ago the air over Gotham was unbreathable, the sky permanently overcast. Aggressive cleanup efforts and relocation of remaining operations to newer facilities allowed the city to reclaim its blue skies and healthier future."
It sounded almost noble. A government that cared about its people.
But if you stopped a longtime Gothamite on the street—someone old enough to remember the before—and asked the real reason, their face would drain of color. They might glance over their shoulder, lower their voice, and tell you to drop the subject.
Only if you pressed hard enough, long enough, would the truth finally slip out.
It wasn't pollution.
It was one man.
A man who walked into the ACE Chemical Plant as Jack Napier and walked out as something else entirely.
A creature who could no longer be called human.
He called himself the Joker.
One person. One madman. And yet he had been enough to make an entire industrial district too dangerous, too cursed, to keep operating. Entire companies pulled out overnight. Workers quit without collecting their last paycheck.
The city simply… abandoned the place, drew an invisible line around it, and pretended the ruins didn't exist.
Only in Gotham could one lunatic's laughter empty a district the size of a small town.
At this moment, the ACE Chemical Plant—the very cradle of the Joker's rebirth, a place he had returned to again and again like a grotesque operating theater—received a new visitor.
Darren paused at the edge of the overgrown perimeter fence. Rusted chain-link sagged under its own weight. The famous sign, half its letters missing, still read ACE CHEMICALS in peeling paint.
"Hmm.. Thinking about it," he said quietly to himself, "I've been in Gotham for years now, and this is somehow my first time standing in front of the famous ACE Chemical Plant. Does this count as a pilgrimage to a holy site?"
He allowed himself a dry, humorless smile.
Then he slipped through a gap in the fence, careful not to rattle the metal, and disappeared into the long shadows of the abandoned factory.
According to Penguin's information, this was where Two-Face had chosen to hide.
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