Chistmas Cruelty

It is widely known throughout Gotham City that Halloween was the absolute tip-top peak of the Scarecrow and The Murder’s villainous escapades. It was also widely known that although they were most active at that time of the year, it was by far not their most violent time of the year. Yes they produced more schemes, carried out more ill-advised heists, and kidnapped more test subjects than normal, but it wasn’t their most violent time. If anything, this time was their most predictable.
But their most violent of times, those came at Christmas.

For some reason, the women in Professor Crane’s employee (as well as Crane himself, really) seemed to go further off the deep end than normal, which was something to be said. It all started about Thanksgiving time, the issues, and it wasn’t until the second few attempts at public arson that anyone put anything together at all. Because on the Friday following Thanksgiving, all the Christmas decorations started to go up.

The trees and tinsel went up into every available spot in the windows and streets of Gotham –including the Narrows- and the music was starting to play full blast on a never ending loop, and regardless of what people seemed to think about the mystic healing powers of Holiday Cheer, it only seemed to fuel them on even more. It just started with public shouting, which soon escalated into public displays of anger, then physically trying to remove the unnaturally bright tinsel from every orifice in the immediate vicinity, then trying to just send up the dry trees, which soon progressed to trying to just light the entire building on fire and all those trapped inside.

Indeed, Christmas Time (or whatever holiday time you wanted to stash there) was the most violent time of the year for them. And if Batman and his gang had anything to say about it, it was the time of the year that they’d most like to see The Murder and Crane stashed away in Arkham. (Not that they didn’t want to see that all year round, of course, but most of all at Christmas time. It was a sore subject for them, it seemed. One too many butt ends of a bad carol rendition at the Joker’s hands.) Regardless, it was also their busiest time of the year.
Something about sparkly lights and the laughter of children seemed to draw in the crazies.

That and Murphy’s Law.

Which is how Bruce Wayne, aka Batman, and his adopted family found out that there are such things as black fake-pines, and an overabundance of ignorant people filling the streets and stores of Gotham City. It was really Tim who’d seen them, standing in the midst of the Home-Depot, hands busy picking around through the odd colored fake trees, a small, ginger child standing with an overloaded cart filled to the brim with on-sale Halloween decorations.

They hadn’t even spotted Crane until Tim had volunteered to go and “find a tree” for them, quickly striding into the fray and right past a very unhappy man in a patched-up coat, oversized glasses dipping down the beakish nose with freakish accuracy. He was standing off to the side, though his hawk-like eyes were trained carefully on the child with the cart, who in turn was watching the two woman man-handle a large, boxed pine into submission. In fact, if Bruce hadn’t been looking, he probably wouldn’t have even noticed the little ticks and twitches when the music changed or someone wished someone else a ‘Merry Christmas!’ at the top of their lungs.

But he was the Batman, so of course he did.

And it was Dick who spotted the color of the pine they were currently wrestling with.

Though, it was Alfred who first caught the whiff of melting plastic and artificial fire.

About an hour later, and several long and lengthy interviews by some unobservant firemen and police officials, it was determined that a spark from one of the long cords of Christmas lights –because there were so many- had been the cause of the fire that took out the Home-Depot and the Lowes that was built right next to it in the cramped city neighborhood, and not foul play. About an hour after that, another series of stores went up a few neighborhoods over for the exact same reason, although instead of the lights, faulty wiring was to blame. After another couple of hours, a total of six department stores, four do-it-yourself stores, and several general convenience stores, had gone up for the exact same reasons.

Almost four hours after that, a small, abandoned building went up, followed closely by the Bat-mobile screeching away from it, the sounds of shouting and fighting following closely behind.

The next morning, Christmas Morning, the headlines of the Gotham paper declared the capture of both the Scarecrow and The Murder and a correlation of events involving massive electrical fires at department stores.

If Arkham just so happened to play Christmas tunes really loud in the cell-blocks, who would ever know?

Continuity: Winter of 2013