Capítulo 43: Issue #41: Punchline
"Batsy!" Harley Quinn exclaims.
"Harley Quinn." Batman drawls.
"Blackie!" Harley Quinn giggles.
"Bitch!" Black Mask spits.
"Sparrow!" I spit out. Batman eyes me cruelly. "Sorry. Just had to, you wouldn't understand."
"You've gotten a little pudgy, Harley. Allesandra giving you too much cream and corn on Arkham?" Black Mask snickers with disgust as he eyes Harley's costume.
The red-and-black Jester costume fits the woman a little too much, flesh warbling at side angles. Although Black Mask finds her stuffy appearance to be unappealing, I, myself, am partial to the certain heftiness found on her body; mostly around the waist and butt area, although there's something in her thighs–
"Dude, you're drooling." Robin nudges me with his shoulder, startling me from my dreams.
I clear my throat and whisper back, "I-I think I'm starting puberty early."
Harley pouts cutely and walks further in, swaying her delicious hips while scrutinizing the dance floor amidst the throng of fleeing crowd.
"Wowie, Blacky! You've certainly made a name for yourself." She grins at the sight of nearly naked men and women stampeding around her. "Where's your freaks with masks? Waita second. Awwww, did the little groupie leave the wowie-blacky all alone?"
I can hear Black Mask grit and chip his teeth in wrath as Harley mocks the crime lord. Her raucous laughter ringing even amidst the cacophony of screams and clacking of guns.
She struts forward, disregarding the imminent threat posed by Black Mask's men as she holds her wooden mallet across her shoulders. It's only when the last of the 'innocent' party goers has left the club that her grins grow wider.
Batman notices Black Mask inching away from him and taps into our comms channel.
[Black Mask is of no concern. Survival is your primary concern. Both of you are injured and aggravating the injuries would deteriorate–]
"And you, Batsy boy!" The large wooden mallet bounces up and down her shoulders with ease as she blinks her comically large eyelashes at Batman. "I thought better of you. I come out of the playhouse and you're roughhousing with the big baddies. What would your mother think of you?"
Batman answers like a straight man out of a comedy routine, "That is a vast oversimplification of the matter at hand."
"You think you can explain your way out of this? I caught you chicken-handed cheating on us and Mistah J! You're a two-timin' cheater." Her lips twitches in anger and that's when she notices the two of us. Her anger morphs into confusion before settling on burgeoning disgust.
"Batsy! Are you trying to break the Geneva conventions again?" She points an accusatory finger at Batman. "I told you we don't do war crimes and especially on children."
Batman steps forward as Black Mask takes a step back behind his henchmen. "I have no time for this, Harley. Either go back to Arkham or I will force you to."
Harley's grin and jolly attitude suddenly turn solemn. The six goons behind her raise their various cold weapons, aiming it at us. Although they are outgunned and out-manned by Black Mask's henchmen, there's a certain steadiness in each of their face-painted expressions that speak of utter obedience.
I don't know how Joker brainwashes his expendable goons or how Harley can command them, but I have a feeling that those six will not fall down easily.
Harley points her wooden mallet at Batman and asks, "Fine. Let's get to business, then. Where is he, Batsy?"
Batman now stands in the center of the dancefloor, guns aiming at his person while two supervillains stand ready to kill him at a moment's notice. Yet for all that danger, he's still sending us messages on how to survive;
"Oh, what a meek bat you are. Where's Mistah J, Batsy? I know you jailed him somewhere because he hasn't even met me since I left the playhouse." She grits her teeth as Batman merely stands still, "I swear to your mama, Batsy. I'll kill your child soldiers if you don't tell me where he is. I'll do it!"
Batman stands taller, cape draping over his stalwart form. "He is missing, Harley. I tried to find him throughout the year, but any traces of his whereabouts are currently cold. I would have asked you about it if not for your tendencies to go ballistic at any mention of his well-being."
"Oh! OH! OH! Ballistic?" Harley shows off her canine, pearly whites, tainted by the crimson-blood lipsticks spread across her lips. "I'm gonna show you ballistic–"
"There is no need for anger, shouting, nor violence, Harley. I can talk to you if you want." Batman placates the jolly-red jester, whose twin hats ring its bells constantly.
His words falter Harley as she sways and locks her hips to one side and places two fists on her waist in contemplation. "Well, you're right. My bad, Batsy. I'm just a little cranky. Haven't had breakfast, you know?"
Robin's brows furrowed in confusion before whispering a question, "Isn't it the middle of the night?"
"That's quite alright. Now, tell your men to lay their weapons down." Batman then gazes at Black Mask through the thin hole in between his guards. "Same goes to your, Roman. I don't want casualties, even if a criminal, happening on my watch."
Black Mask pushes past his bodyguards and goes off, "You think you can hurt me, threaten me and make me surrender peacefully? You've got the gall of a goddamn–"
An odious bang rings through the hall as a red boxing glove soars through the air and smashes into Black Mask's already ruined face, knocking him off the ground and into the air for a few moments before ultimately falling to the ground with a thunderous thud.
All of us look towards the offender in question as Harley Quinn drops the modified grenade launcher onto the floor and tries to sweep it up with a nonchalant whistle.
"What? He was cursing in front of kids." She says innocently.
That was the punch heard around the world as Black Mask's men began firing their weapons. Even those who are not affiliated with Harley or Black Mask who have yet to leave, but are nevertheless carrying some sort of weapon, join in on the fight.
"Now, it's a party!" Harley hollers and quips as her wooden mallet launches in the air, smacking an armed guard in the face. The guard's body flies a few inches off the air before his back smashes onto the ground and cracks the tiles into large web-like shards.
'Stormtroopers, the lot of them.'
The henchmen's aims are less than ideal to them, rapidly depleting their munitions while having no real chance of hitting any of the key players in the fight; Namely, Batman, Robin, me, and Harley Quinn.
Sure, one of them hits Harley's goons in the arm while five others fend off the white-faced, crazed-smile, yellow-teeth goons with knives and other kitchen utensils.
Batman rolls away from an armed henchman, letting his boots do the talking as he cracks the guy's jaw away from the rest of his body.
He crouches down to a still a few meters away from Harley and glowers at the girl clown. "Is this really necessary?"
"C'mon, chump. I just got out of Arkham…" She does a swan-like Fouette and smashes her shins on the crotch of another henchman, eliciting pitiable groans from every man who sees it. "What's a few egg breaks for a gal like me?"
"Jesus, let her break a few eggs!" I shout at the top of my lungs as I run headfirst into the stomach of Black Mask's bodyguard. The bodyguard barely moves an inch from the blow, but no matter, I'm quick to remove my thick thermal scarf and throw it over his shoulders.
"What the hell are you doin' kid? You think I'm cold?" The henchman snarkily told me off.
"You know the Atom Smasher? His suit is made of the same material as this scarf." I grin at him as I jump into the air and rotate my body, leveraging the weight and height disparity between us.
"Wha–" After folding my knees back as far as I can, I unleash like a loaded spring and stomp the shit out of his chest. Once again, I underestimate my suit as the Durasteel lining reinforces my blow and audibly cracks the guy's ribs.
He groans in agony–actually; it sounds more like a whimper–before falling to his knees and spanking his face into the tiled floor, unconscious.
"Cha-Cha, Waltz, Hoola! Take the kids to the park, won't ya?" Three goons with striped suits run towards me, all of them wielding some sort of cold weapon that can be obtained from a garage.
Robin springs away, leaving me with Harley and her three remaining goons.
Cha-Cha swings his gilded tire iron downwards, which I block with the keratin plates in my forearm. Unlike King Shark's humongous blow, Cha-Cha's tire iron is surprisingly light and easy to follow, which allows to counterattack with a check hook. Cha-Cha slides away real smooth before Robin sweeps in with a sweeping kick, hurtling the poor goon into the ground and into unconsciousness.
"Thought you're leaving me to fend them off." I remark offhandedly.
Waltz, a hulking man with a head as big as my torso, tries to smash Robin away with his electric pot kettle, aiming for the Boy Wonder's head. Yet trouble does not hit its target as I conjure a portal and push in an elbow right next to Waltz's neck, a small pentagonal plate branding itself into his flesh.
As Waltz drops to the ground in pain, I smirk at Robin and say: "Boy, it's a good thing that you didn't land on hot water!"
"Huh? What does that mean?" Robin, like the simplistic fool that he is–objectively speaking and not at all because I felt embarrassed about my first quip of the night–only realizes the joke after Hoola is dealt with. "Oh, I get it. Hot water, trouble, and he has a kettle. Nice one."
Robin springs away, yet again, leaving me to deal with Harley as the woman's crazed smile shivers through my timbers.
"You gotta work on your quips, honey badger." Harley twirls her mallet with ease, swinging its butt end and hammer end in ten different directions to make use of my injured arm.
Thanks to that, though, Batman sends a Batarang her way. The projectile tears through the air and, though Harley blocks it with her mallet, the Batarang explodes with miniscule nanites that rapidly eats through the wood.
Harley drops the mallet in fear and the nanites finish the mallet and continue eating through the tiles and concrete.
"Jeez, Batsy. I thought we were friends?" With her mallet down for the count, Harley, out of fucking nowhere, takes out a big-ass scissor and nicks me in face.
'I don't even have a stubble yet and you're giving me facials! No, too quippy.'
"On your left, Sparrow." Robin warns me as a draft passes by my neck. I duck down to evade a hail of gunfire and cart-wheel away when it follows me.
Fortunately, Robin deals with the ambusher with two Birdarangs. One of the projectiles releases a fine, pink gas as it hits the henchman's kevlar chest before the secondary projectile creates a spark that engulfs the man in a fiery explosion.
"Really? Your codename's Sparrow?" The big-ass scissors tries to break through my keratin plates, causing sparks from the collision of the copper lining the plate's borders and the steel blades.
"You… You don't," I remove the small plate under my wrist and throw it at her to halt her continued onslaught, but her flexibility knows no limits as she bends her back to her knees until the plate passes through and flips her legs to an ax kick. "Ah, crap, like it?"
"You look like a mole, Vigilante Lite!"
Harley pirouettes away from my punch as she continues to evade my attacks with such gratefulness that I wonder what it would be like to dance with her. That thinking leads to her shin hitting the back of my neck, dropping me to my knees before she jumps in the air and the soles of her red-and-black boots smashed into the side of my face.
The blow disorients me, as evident by the ringing in my ears and the slow numbing across my face. Robin arrives to my aid, using his cape to slither here, there, and around the woman with as much agility as Harley had been showing off earlier.
While Robin has Harley beat in the game of deftness–as is expected of a kid who was born into a family of famed Trapeze flyers–Harley is much more experienced in punching kids in the face and also has no moral reservations in beating them unfairly.
Harley smacks Robin in the face with her brass knuckles, sending the Boy Wonder tumbling across the tiled floor. "Yahtzee!" She exclaims, clapping excitedly as Robin shakes off the hit.
Batman grunts as he covers for Robin, taking out a cattle prod from the back of his belt. "Enough of this, Harley. I have been searching for him for a year now and any traces of him are gone. You know him, Harley. If he wants to disappear, not even I can find him."
Her jolly tone morphs into a heartbroken one. "B-but, B-man, the last time we met, Puddin' told me he was just waiting for the right time to make a white knight a little dirtier. He wouldn't blow like a bubble if he was plannin' something. So you must have done something!"
She winds up the big-ass scissors and tries to take Batman's head off with it, only to find a small black eye between the tip and her target's neck. The eye blinks and the big-ass scissors passes through the eye and so does her entire hand.
"What in the Jiminy Crickets!?" She exclaims before I chop her wrists and make her drop the big-ass scissors. Unlike the other people that had gotten trapped in my portal, Harley is the only quick-thinking and fast-moving enough to fully escape the portal before it snaps shut and that fact just adjusted my danger rating of the woman to the top ten.
"Is this truly what you want, Harley?" Batman swings his cattle prod and nearly electrocutes Harley's foot, but she backflips at the last second and hits the caped crusader in mid-air. "Ugh. Listen to me, Harley. He is gone. You don't need him anymore, you don't need to pity him anymore. You can take your life back."
Tears rolled down the woman's eyes, scarring her white full-face makeup. Her big, blue eyes look gorgeous from this close, yet the Tommy machine guns on each of her hands betrays that beautiful look.
"Pity him? Mistah J gave me attention and love when no one else in the world wanted me. I want my Puddin' back!" She roars hysterically as she lets her gun's roar along with her.
Munitions flash a mixture of gun-orange and white colors across the tiled floor that connect the dancefloor to the bar, which also breaks almost a hundred bottles of liquor and flood the alcove where they reside.
Harley is being hysterical in her gunfire, allowing us to move away from the breath of her damage. Still, her leaking madness is becoming more of a danger and, frankly, her beautiful red-and-black jester suit is being ruined by her desire to draw Batman's blood.
'Where the hell did she get her machine guns?'
I roll a few meters behind her, body keeping close to the floor as I shout: "Psychiatrist-that-fell-in-love-with-a-homicidal-and-abusive-megalomaniac-says-what?"
"WHAT?" I leap from my crouching position, portal above her and emerge a meter above her head to return the kick she gave me earlier. The metal-lined soles of my combat boots smash into her shoulder pads and bring her to her knees with a welching crack.
Still, that hit doesn't knock her out completely. Hell, it doesn't even disorient her for a few seconds. All it does is leave a single gun pointed towards me while the other one slides across the dance floor and away from her. The gun spits out a satisfying empty clicks, earning an irate groan from the woman as she throws it at me.
"What are you made out of? Also, can I get your autograph after this?" I ask as I duck under the gun, hopeful that she'll say yes.
"Teflon and makeup. Of course, kiddo!" She assents before leaping from her position and hitting me in the chest with a front kick. I stumble a few steps back and barely reconfigure myself before she hits me yet again with a nimble knee at the chests.
My keratinous breastplate does its job well and protects me from the brunt of the damage, but the force behind the blow still causes me to stumble back.
'Damn you, Newton and your second law.'
Thankfully, before she can break my jaw with a stomp, Batman has finished with his half of Black Mask's henchmen and stops her from committing more war crimes.
Batman growls away from her boxing gloves, grabbing her by the shoulder before throwing her over his shoulder. "Stop this, Harley." He says as Harley recovers from the throw and lands deftly on the other side.
"No!" She says like a petulant child. She tries to smash her head into Batman's cowl, but finds the hardened polymer to be tougher than her own nogging. "Ow! That hurts!"
"Enough, Harley." Batman grabs the clown's arm. "It has been a year now and you know that he's gone. Why break out, Harley? You've been rehabilitating well, weaning off the venom. According to Doctor Bartholomew, by next year, you would be able to avail a parole hearing."
Harley's eyes widened in surprise. "Y-you've known about my parole hearing? You've been keeping up on me, Batsy?"
"Of course, I have." He says innocently.
'Yeah, you and the dozen supervillains. You know what, I bet he's keeping tabs on all his villains locked up in Arkham.'
"You don't see me, but I visit you often. Asking doctors about your progress and, frankly, you're doing very good, Harley. Better than Riddler and Scarecrow combined." He continues.
"W-well, yeah. I guess so." Harley, quite unexpectedly, shyly twists and turns like a schoolgirl and bats her long eyelashes towards Batman. "Although I think they're being harsh to Professor Crane. The man is pretty cookie, but he makes a great frittata."
"I've tasted it before." Batman nods, appealing to Harley's irrationality with a sense of calmness and a tone you take to talk to a toddler.
For a moment, I thought Harley would surrender without another word, but in that moment of silence, Black Mask wakes up with a scream and points at Harley.
"You fucking bitch! Kill her!" As if waking up from their eternal slumber, a dozen more mob henchmen come out every door in the club with guns and cold weapons that would put Gotham's Human Weapons Hall to shame.
"Give it up, toots. I can take any of ya in a battle!" She hollers, all the while barrel-rolling out of gunfire.
Seeing the dozens of armed men gunning after us, I jump towards Batman and Harley for cover. Batman immediately drapes his cape over us, protecting us from the hail of bullets.
"I take it back, B-man. I don't think I can escape that much lead." She giggles at Batman's slowly irking face. "Uh… Truce?"
"Fine, but after this, you go back to Arkham. Voluntarily." Batman makes another deal, one Harley shakes on with giddy relief. "Good. Sparrow."
All three of them look at me as if I'm supposed to be doing something good. "What?"
"Teleport us out of here." Batman informs me of my purpose.
"Uh, no can do, amigo." I say with a nervous grin. "My tummy's hurting and that means one more portal and I'm going to pass out."
"Jeez Louise! I'm starting to regret our deal, B-man. But I don't wanna go back to the bin."
Batman glares at Harley, shutting her up for once before taking out a cereal bar out of his utility belt. "Flash gifted this to me when he saw you during the Mr. Freeze incident. Use it and re-energize. In the meantime… they just ran out of bullets."
His words rings true as a series of clicks reverberates throughout the club. "Didn't anybody get the memo to replace our stock with extended clips?" Black Mask complains as Batman and Robin rush forward to cover for me.
With no other job than to be a freaking porter, I gulp down Flash's cereal bar in portions.
"Hey, slow down, toots." I glare at her, tears in my eyes because this bar is as lifeless as Barry's mother. "Fine. Why didn't we just use the door?"
Harley pounces forward, flipping like a gymnast on steroids before reaching the double doors and tries to open it. Unfortunately for her, this gets the attention of a slew of henchmen, who immediately go after her.
I know she'll be alright, even a well-placed hit from me barely got her and I doubt losers who can't even get a job from the real mafiosos can take care of Joker's right-hand woman–however lowly that job truly is.
Bones breaking, blood dripping, gun reloading, raucous laughter, grunts grunting, and one man–Me–chewing the whole twenty thousand calorie cereal bar just so we can get the hell out of here.
"I'm good to go!"
Robin arrives first, huffing and puffing, while Harley slides in with a whooping whistle.
"Heya, kid. What's your codename?" She asks before turning to me. "Door's locked and tight."
"Told you–" She bops my nose mid-sentence and laughs away my glare. "No time. Alright. Hang on tight!"
Batman jumps in just in time as I open my largest portal as of yet. Within my mind, I travel through my memories and picture the sleek black chrome of the Batmobile, its aerodynamic design, and the puddle of dirty water right next to it.
Although I have been noticing it since the start of the night patrol, it had only occurred to me at this moment that my metahuman ability is easier to control and conjure. Not that I can operate it manually like Jake does, but it seems that my pleas from my birthday have somewhat lessened the restrictions on its use.
Even now, as I pour my energy into the eye below all our bodies, there's a certain feeling of liberation that comes across my form. I dream of no longer being constrained to eye-shaped portals, but in the meantime…
"Time to save the day." I grin at Black Mask's lamentable expression as we all drop into the portal and disappear from the enclosed nightclub.
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