"Oh, dear Lord! Rhinoceros! Tiger! Rabbit! Tortoise! Hedgehog! Cat! Gorilla! Lion! Elephant! Monkey! Beetle! Dinosaur! Watermelon! Banana! Apple! Blueberry! Grey-suit Robot! Cowboy! Police Officer! Construction Worker! Nurse! Doctor! Mister!"
"Stop fighting! All of you, stop!"
"Stand down! Everyone stand down!"
Ethan Cross crouched at the edge of the room with his arms resting on his knees, watching.
Arnold Wesker had a hand puppet on every finger. Both hands. And, in a development that Ethan was choosing not to examine too closely, both feet as well — plush animals and caricatures jammed over each toe, all of them apparently at war with one another. More puppets were arranged in a semicircle around him, drafted as spectators or combatants depending on which personality was currently in command of Wesker's arms. The floor looked like a toy store had suffered a catastrophic structural failure.
A faint thread of smoke was rising from Wesker's bald head.
That wasn't literal. Probably.
What was literal was the noise — dozens of distinct voices cycling through Arnold Wesker's body in overlapping waves, none of them willing to yield, the whole system running at capacity and then past it. His face had stopped being a face in any functional sense. His eyes were aimed in different directions. His jaw worked without producing coherent language. A thin line of drool had formed at the corner of his mouth.
"Aaaaaugh!"
One of the puppets — a bird, by the look of it — had apparently organized a coalition. Five fingers on the same hand curled into a fist, drew back, and punched Arnold Wesker directly in his own eye socket.
"Help! Someone help me!"
Ethan slowly shook his head.
Hopeless, he thought, without particular judgment. Absolutely irreparable.
In the original timeline, this scene had played out differently. Wesker had come to the Evidence Bureau to recover Scarface, found him unavailable, improvised Mr. Socky as a stopgap — and when that situation resolved, he'd had enough of a dominant personality structure to calmly select a single new puppet and consolidate around it. The police officer figure, as Ethan recalled. Clean transition. Functional outcome.
The key variable had been Mr. Socky himself. A strong suppressor personality — aggressive enough to hold the others down while a new hierarchy established itself.
Ethan had removed Mr. Socky from the equation before any of that could happen.
Which meant fifty-odd new personalities had spawned simultaneously, none with sufficient force to dominate the others, all of them equal in strength and equally convinced of their own authority. The result was less a mind and more a server room running fifty conflicting programs on hardware rated for three.
Several dozen viruses sharing one processor, Ethan thought. That's about right.
The gabbling continued. Wesker's face cycled through expressions that had never been designed to appear on the same face at the same time. His body rocked.
Ethan stood up.
Enough. Next phase. If I let this run much longer the hardware actually burns out.
He reached into the pile and found what he was looking for.
It was a Batman plush toy — miniature, cartoonish, clearly designed for children under three. The cowl was slightly oversized. It had a pacifier in its mouth. It wore a tiny fabric utility belt stitched with visible thread, a small black cape, and a diaper. Its expression was one of profound, guileless contentment.
Ethan had also installed a wireless radio module in the chest cavity before leaving the cave. Remote vocal control. He could make it speak from up to thirty meters away.
You'll do.
He crossed the room, reached down into the puppet chaos, and systematically stripped every single one off Wesker's hands and feet.
Arnold Wesker lunged forward and grabbed Ethan's leg with both arms, pressing his face against the tactical suit's thigh and producing a sound of pure, unfiltered grief.
"Oh my God, what are you going to do with Rhinoceros and Tiger and Rabbit and Tortoise and Hedgehog and Cat and—"
"Get off."
What followed was not something Ethan would ever describe to anyone in the Batcave. He removed every puppet from Wesker's person, and then, on reflection, removed every other piece of clothing Wesker was wearing, on the grounds that anything fabric was a potential substrate for a new personality and he wasn't leaving any openings. He piled everything in the center of the floor — plush toys, the bag's remaining contents, all of it.
Then he took out a lighter.
"No — no—"
Wesker fought hard enough that Ethan tucked him under one arm, held him there, and lit the pile one-handed.
The synthetic materials caught fast. The flame climbed.
Ethan watched it for a moment, then turned to the tactical bag and emptied the remaining puppets onto the pile as well.
All of it. No exceptions.
Arnold Wesker went limp.
He sat on the floor with nothing on him and nothing within reach, staring at the fire with the expression of a man who had reached the far edge of what a human nervous system could process. After a moment he began to cry — not quietly, not with any dignity, but with the full-body commitment of someone who had stopped caring about witnesses. His hands came up and started slapping his own face.
"Take me with you," he was saying, to no one, to the fire, to the specific chemical compounds that had once been his friends. "Take me with you—"
He lurched toward the flames.
Ethan caught him by the shoulder and pulled him back without comment.
Good, he thought, reading the state of the man in front of him. Right where I need you.
He reached into the belt and produced a small canister. Pressed the nozzle. A pale mist expanded across Wesker's face.
Wesker inhaled it before he could think to hold his breath.
For a half-second, nothing.
Then every muscle in Arnold Wesker's body fired at once.
Fear Toxin. Jonathan Crane's formulation — the compound that didn't create terror so much as it excavated it, pulling whatever was already buried at the bottom of a person and dragging it into full daylight. Ethan didn't know exactly what Wesker was seeing. He could make educated guesses. Fire featured prominently in them.
He crouched down, gripped Wesker by the throat — not hard, just enough to anchor him — and forced eye contact.
"Look at me."
Wesker looked. Whatever he was seeing was not a man in a bat costume.
"It doesn't matter how many new friends you make," Ethan said, keeping his voice low and even. "I will burn all of them. Every single one."
The scream that came out of Arnold Wesker's mouth was less a sound than a structural event. Ethan held the eye contact through it.
He let it run for a few seconds — the fire, the toxin, the exposed unprotected core, the accumulated weight of losing every guardian personality in rapid succession — and then he held up the Batman plush.
"This," he said. "This is the only one I'll allow."
He pressed it into Wesker's hands.
"He carries my authority. He'll be watching — making sure you're listening. He won't ask you to hurt anyone. He won't push you toward things that get you locked up." He brought his face close enough that there was no looking away. "He will not betray you. I will not betray you. Everything I've done tonight has been for your benefit."
He was nearly shouting by the end of it — not from anger but from volume, the words delivered at a force designed to cut through the toxin and the shock and every layer of fractured cognition between his mouth and whatever part of Arnold Wesker was still capable of receiving information.
Wesker's hand closed around the small plush figure.
One tear ran down his cheek and dropped onto Ethan's glove.
Then he went still.
Ethan studied him. "Arnold. Say something."
Nothing.
Please don't have actually broken him.
He delivered two measured slaps. "Come on. Show me something. Even a smile."
Silence.
Then — from somewhere below Arnold Wesker's sternum, distinct from his own voice, distinct from anything that had come before, carrying a faint and unmistakable resemblance to the register of the man crouching in front of him:
"Don't be afraid, Arnold. As long as you listen to Batman, you won't be harmed."
Ethan sat back on his heels.
There it is.
A genuine smile crossed his face — brief, private, gone before anyone could have catalogued it.
"Good." He stood up, looked down at Wesker cradling the small caped figure with both hands. "Remember. Starting tonight — you belong to Batman."
Arnold Wesker looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes.
"Woof."
Ethan paused.
Stared.
…I'll examine that later.
The silver text ignited across his vision before he'd taken a full step toward the door — not a quiet notification but a cascade, line after line firing in rapid sequence.
[ WARNING — WARNING — Anchor Item Detected!]
[ Acquired: Tear of the Ventriloquist's Shattered Persona]
[ Description: A tear produced at the moment of total collapse of the Ventriloquist's alternate personalities. Can only be obtained through a sequence of acts that most would consider deeply unconscionable. May be used to summon a Batman from a parallel universe.]
[ Note: An entity called forth by something this morally compromised… would it really be someone worth having?]
[ "Yes. You got him. But you also lost something."]
[ "Was it worth it?"]
Ethan looked at his glove. The single tear was drying at the fingertip, catching the light from the burning pile across the room.
He didn't answer the prompt.
[ Crisis Energy Units Converted: 10]
[ Batman Memory Synchronization: Now Available]
Something moved in his chest that he didn't immediately have a word for.
It worked. The system actually—
[ Protocol Engaged. Synchronizing… Complete.]
[ New Batman Identified. Assigning designation…]
[ Your designation: No. 52]
[ Alfred Protocol initialization complete.]
The text shifted. The font changed — no longer the clipped, clinical notification style. What followed was something older. Something that felt less like a system message and more like words someone had chosen carefully, a long time ago, and meant.
[ Mortal flesh. Yet rival to monsters.]
[ Human hands. Yet equal to gods.]
[ In a world of darkness, standing watch.]
[ The Bat — unmatched, as ever.]
[ The wicked fear the light he carries.]
[ No shadow stands against him.]
[ His light endures.]
[ Across every world, it endures.]
[ Welcome, Batman No. 52.]
[ You have joined the Batman Legion.]
The fire crackled behind him. Arnold Wesker murmured something quiet and contented to the plush figure in his hands.
Ethan Cross stood in the middle of the Gotham Evidence Bureau, surrounded by the smoke of burning puppets, and let the synchronization begin.