The shadow of a carriage emerged slowly from the diffuse green mist.
It looked like something from a Victorian ghost story—horse-drawn, old-fashioned, completely out of place in modern Gotham. Two horses pulled it, prancing nervously despite the mind-control devices attached to their heads. Their eyes were glazed, vacant, movements mechanical.
Two figures sat in the carriage.
One was thin and tall, clothes tattered and hanging loose, voice strange and muffled behind a burlap mask. He looked like a scarecrow transplanted from a wheat field into an urban nightmare.
The other was short and rotund, wearing an absurdly oversized top hat, voice rising and falling in sing-song cadence as he continued his cheerful ballad from Alice in Wonderland.
"If seven maids with seven mops Swept it for half a year, do you suppose, the Walrus said, that they could get it clear? I doubt it, said the Carpenter, and shed a bitter tear."
The roar of fireworks overhead covered everything. The distant parade's cacophony—music, shouting, car horns—drowned out the explosion that had just blown a hole in Gotham Bank's reinforced outer wall.
Jude, lying on the ground pretending to be incapacitated, had to admire the timing.
Once these two emptied the vault, they could simply blend into the festive parade and vanish. Aided by the flow of traffic, the chaos, the crowds—perfect cover for a heist. Gotham's Independence Day celebration would inadvertently provide their escape route.
It was actually quite clever.
Which made it all the more annoying that he had to stop them.
Jude lay curled on the ground, shivering like everyone else affected by the fear gas. His Advanced Acting Skills allowed him to blend perfectly with the other victims scattered across the bank's entrance. No one could tell the difference between his performance and genuine terror-induced paralysis.
The carriage rolled past him, wheels crunching over broken glass and concrete debris.
Jude waited three seconds—enough for them to focus forward—then slowly rose to his hands and knees. Drew out his blowgun with practiced silence. Started creeping forward, using the lingering green mist as cover.
The fog was still too thick. He needed to get closer to ensure accurate shots. Blowgun darts were lethal at close range but harder to aim through obscured sight lines.
Closer. Just a bit closer.
SNAP.
A hand grabbed his ankle.
Jude froze.
He looked down. One of the bank guards had somehow reached out despite being deep in a fear gas nightmare. His eyes were unfocused, pupils blown wide, but his grip was iron-strong.
"No," the guard gasped, voice breaking. "No, don't go—call the police—"
Jude's eyes widened.
On one hand, he was genuinely touched. This man, lost in personalized hell courtesy of Scarecrow's neurotoxin, was still trying to protect a civilian. Still doing his job despite everything.
On the other hand, the guard had just blown Jude's stealth approach by both grabbing him and making noise.
How can I sneak around like this?
"Huh?" Mad Hatter's voice cut through the mist. "Who's there?"
Shit.
Jude reacted on instinct. His hand shot to his dimensional storage and pulled out—
A pumpkin.
Not just any pumpkin. The Sans Pumpkin Head from his system shop. The defensive item that had saved his life against Solomon Grundy on Halloween. He jammed it over his head just as the Mad Hatter's gun came up.
Then he broke free from the guard's grip and rolled sideways.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
Four gunshots erupted from deep in the fog. Muzzle flashes strobed through the green mist like lightning.
Jude came up in a crouch, heart hammering.
Three new bullet holes had appeared in the pumpkin covering his head. Three perfectly placed shots that would have killed him instantly if not for the protection.
"Damn," Jude breathed, genuinely shaken. "Are super-criminals' reaction times and shooting skills really that outrageous?"
He glanced sideways. The guard who'd grabbed him had passed out completely, overcome by whatever nightmare the fear gas was showing him.
"Thanks for the timing," Jude muttered.
The green mist was dissipating now—fear gas settling to ground level, dispersing in the evening breeze. Through the thinning fog, two figures became visible.
The Crazy Duo stood side by side, flanking their horse-drawn carriage. Both were completely unaffected by the gas. The horses and Hatter showed no symptoms either.
Which meant they'd all taken the antidote in advance.
Made sense. Protecting against Scarecrow's fear gas required complicated countermeasures. The two guards earlier had only gotten skin contact with the airborne version, and it had still eroded their sanity completely. The toxin could enter through skin and respiratory system.
No way the Crazy Duo wanted to rob a bank while wearing heavy biohazard suits. Better to just dose everyone with the antidote beforehand.
Wait.
Jude stared at the figure holding the enormous pistol.
Mad Hatter.
Not Riddler.
Where the hell is my Riddler? Jude thought frantically. The mission briefing said 'crazy duo'—I assumed that meant Scarecrow and Riddler! Why is it the Mad Hatter?
Had the system changed the parameters? Had he misread the mission? Was there a third villain hiding somewhere?
The two super-criminals couldn't see Jude's expression behind the pumpkin head. They could only see the three fresh bullet holes in the carved face.
Scarecrow turned to look at Mad Hatter, genuinely surprised. He hadn't expected the ugly little dwarf to be such an excellent marksman. Locating position by sound alone and landing three headshots in heavy fog? That was professional-level skill.
Then he saw the confused look on Hatter's face.
Is my shooting really that good? Tetch seemed to be wondering.
Jude sighed internally.
His most convenient and safe plan—stealth approach, blowgun darts from concealment, minimal risk—had completely failed. Now he had no choice but to prepare for frontal assault.
The three of them faced each other across fifteen feet of debris-strewn ground.
Standoff.
The Mad Hatter finally seemed to process what he was seeing. "The pumpkin man's been shot three times in the head," he said slowly, "but he doesn't seem to be dead."
"Or rather," Scarecrow added, tilting his burlap-covered head, "there's no blood. At all."
"Ghost?" Mad Hatter's voice pitched higher. "Ghost? Is it a ghost?"
"Whatever it is—" Scarecrow interrupted, raising one tattered sleeve toward Jude, "—shoot it a few more times and see what happens."
Mad Hatter lifted his pistol again.
Jude immediately leaned forward, reaching behind his back into his dimensional storage.
He drew out a double-edged straight sword.
The blade gleamed in the firework light.
Both villains stopped.
"Where did he pull that sword from?" Mad Hatter asked.
"I don't know!" Scarecrow's clinical detachment was cracking slightly. "There's nowhere to hide a blade that size!"
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Three more shots. All headshots. All hitting the pumpkin with devastating accuracy.
The pumpkin cracked but held. Jude kept advancing, sword raised.
Mad Hatter stared at his pistol, then at the pumpkin man who refused to die. With theatrical frustration, he stuffed his automatic pistol into his oversized hat and pulled out an extra-large caliber revolver.
This gun looked like it could stop a car.
Jude kept moving forward. The pumpkin on his head was already broken into pieces, chunks falling away, but he himself remained completely unharmed.
"I definitely hit him in the body," Mad Hatter said, raising the hand cannon. "But the only thing getting damaged is the pumpkin on his head."
"Then smash the pumpkin!" Scarecrow's voice carried across the distance. He raised both sleeves, pointing them at Jude like weapons.
Which they were.
Jude waved his gardening gloves—the ones from Dave's Dimensional Kitchen Garden—and a flowerpot materialized in mid-air.
The pot floated. Defied gravity. Inside it, a small plant with three leaves sprouted and grew at impossible speed.
The leaves began spinning. Rapidly. Like helicopter rotors.
Suddenly, a strong wind kicked up—gale-force, coming from nowhere, centered on the tiny plant.
The green poisonous mist still lingering in the area got caught in the wind. The high-concentration fear gas Scarecrow was spraying from his sleeve-mounted dispensers got swept up with it. All of it—every particle of toxin—was carried into the sky by the unnatural wind and dispersed harmlessly into the upper atmosphere.
Blover.
One of the most useful plants in Plants vs. Zombies. Cleared fog, blew away balloon zombies, and apparently worked just fine on chemical weapons.
Scarecrow stared at the flowerpot.
Mad Hatter stared at the flowerpot.
Jude waved his hand again, and the three-leaf clover disappeared. In its place, an ice-blue mushroom materialized—small, round, glowing faintly with cold light.
Jude was very glad they'd chosen to attack at night. During the day, he would have needed to spend asset points buying coffee beans to wake up the nocturnal mushrooms. But at night? They activated automatically.
The large-caliber revolver bullet flew from Mad Hatter's gun.
It shattered the pumpkin head on Jude's face completely. Fragments exploded outward. The carved face disintegrated.
Underneath was another pumpkin head.
Not the ugly Pumpkin Jude carved, but more useful pumpkin form PVZ, the reason why he can take so many headshots and why all bullet attracted to his head.
This one looked more realistic. Better detail. Almost like a real carved pumpkin instead of the stylized Halloween decoration the first one had resembled.
The synchronization rate between Scarecrow and Mad Hatter reached 100% in that moment.
Both of them stared at the second pumpkin head.
Both began to doubt their sanity.
They'd been in Gotham for years. Seen plenty of weird shit. Fought Batman. Survived Arkham. Encountered genuine supernatural phenomena on multiple occasions.
But the thing standing in front of them—pulling swords from nowhere, summoning wind-generating plants, wearing nested pumpkin heads—was testing the boundaries of what they could accept as real.
"What," Scarecrow said slowly, "the hell—"
The blue mushroom in the flowerpot began to swell.
It grew rapidly. Doubled in size. Tripled. The glow intensified, shifting from pale blue to brilliant ice-white.
Mad Hatter's instincts screamed danger. He raised his gun and fired immediately.
Another pumpkin head materialized. This one appeared on the mushroom itself, protecting the plant.
The bullet tore through the pumpkin, leaving it badly damaged.
But the Ice-shroom had already reached critical mass.
It exploded.
Not with fire. With cold.
A terrifying freeze wave swept outward in all directions—absolute zero made manifest, temperature dropping so fast that moisture in the air crystallized into visible ice particles.
The frost enveloped everything. Swallowed everyone.
In one second, the entire area around Gotham Bank's entrance transformed into a sky-blue ice sculpture garden.
Every person, every object, every surface—frozen solid.
The Scarecrow became a statue, burlap mask coated in a thick layer of frost, one arm still raised mid-gesture.
The Mad Hatter froze with his mouth open, mid-shout, the enormous hat on his head now covered in delicate ice crystals.
The horses. The carriage. The scattered debris. The unconscious guards.
Everything.
Inside the bank, everyone who'd been affected by the fear gas froze in their nightmare poses—curled up, hands over faces, mouths open in silent screams.
For a long moment, everything fell into strange, crystalline silence.