DRAFT: Survivor's Guide to Henching Ch. 2 (Patreon)

Chapter 2: Scarecrow

A little more than a week had passed since the blog first appeared, but that had been more than enough time for word to spread in certain limited circles. By the fourth day people were asking when the next post would go up; by the seventh, people were speculating that Penguin had objected to something and made sure there wouldn’t be a second post.

It appeared on the ninth evening after the first post.

REMEMBER THOU ART STUPID

Hello again.

Before I get into the meat of this post, I want to say thank you to a certain person who made their support for this project known in a substantial manner. Since I went to great pains to be as anonymous as possible about this, I also take this gesture as a warning- as should anyone else in this business- that if I screw up badly enough, no matter what precautions I take, I WILL be found. Fair enough.

That leads me into my lesson for this evening, fellow henchmen (and molls). And that lesson is, well, the title is a hint.

We must always remember, we who are the dumb muscle to the masterminds of Gotham’s underworld, that we are indeed the dumb muscle. We are not intelligent. If we were, then we’d be the one picking out the theme costumes and designing the death traps (and to all my past bosses reading this, I am sorry, but really, when did any of those EVER do more than maybe slow the Batman down?). In fact, if we were even of normal intelligence, we would have jobs much more steady and less life-endangering than the life we actually lead. Smart people don’t get dragged into this. (Though a number have jumped in with both feet- most of them didn’t last long, but a couple did make it to the “top,” which means their gang got the Bat’s personal attention.)

But I’m rambling. Let me give some concrete examples.

Some of my fellow henchmen turn to petty street crime and the like when in between bosses or gangs. They think that, because GCPD failed to catch them slipping out the back while Batman and his peanut brigade chased the boss through the abandoned factory, they’re smart enough to not get caught on their own. THIS IS WRONG.

The cops- and the Bats- are not interested in you when you’re only one of a dozen or two hired meat. They want the ringleader. If the cops have sufficient time they will get together an entire precinct or two and round everyone up, but if they’re responding to an alarm call and see Batman boxing with someone in a brightly colored costume, they’re going to give priority to taking down the guy who might just be able to blow up the whole city with the push of a button. In this way, even if your boss thinks of you as nothing more than disposable, you are protected by them- and, also, by the fact that there are a lot of you henchmen all fleeing the scene at the same time.

Freelancers do not have that protection.

When GCPD finds out you’re doing a shake-down racket, some neighborhood muggings, or a string of burglaries, they’re not going to be distracted. There’s no boss with a doomsday device to get their attention. There’s no crowd of identically dressed men to confuse or overwhelm them. There’s just you, doing all the kind of things they are especially trained to counter. In their own good time, they will nail you- and, unlike with your boss’s showdowns with the Bat, you will never see it coming until the cuffs are around your wrists.

And that’s if you’re lucky. On slow nights Batman and his buddies work the beats, too. Their equipment is better than the cops’. And the cops have laws that limit how much stuffing they can beat out of you. Piss off Batman, and you’ll spend the first week or two of your jail life in a hospital bed.

“But I have the perfect scheme!” “But I left no evidence!” “Nobody could possibly know it was me!” No, no, and no. You THINK it was perfect. You THINK there was no evidence. You THINK nobody saw you. And you think that because you, like me, are STUPID. You are not smart enough to see the holes, but the Bat is, and Jim Gordon is, and incidentally so are Rupert Thorne and Roman Sionis and any other gang leader in town who wants to know where all this unsanctioned crime is coming from all of a sudden.

Do NOT freelance in Gotham City. The absolute best you can hope for is a long, peaceful prison sentence. (Which means, if you can at all swing it, don’t get sentenced to Blackgate. Your time will not be peaceful, and you may not live to see parole, what with the bosses and their flashy escapes.)

Now, all of that is one symptom of stupidity you must watch out for. Here’s another one.

Envision your boss, or if you are between employments, your most recent boss. They’ve come up with a new and inventive method of getting rid of Batman, because let’s be honest, he really is the biggest obstacle to any criminal’s long-term goals. And they describe the plan, and your role in it, in the kind of loving detail that tells you they’ve invested a lot more in this plan than is healthy for anybody, especially for you.

Now your boss has left a flaw in the plan. To them it’s literally insignificant, but to you it’s a barn door wide open for the entire Justice League to stroll in by. And you think, aha! I have thought of something the boss has not! I shall point it out to them, and they shall correct the problem and reward me for my insight!

To which I reply: Are you really so stupid as to tell a homicidal lunatic, who is still wearing Arkham Asylum issued underwear beneath their newest costume, that they have erred? To their face? And you expect this to go well?

No. When the boss makes a mistake- even a good boss- you KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT, STUPID. Nine times out of ten being Teacher’s Pet will get you killed, an object lesson for the other potential doubters. Even if you’re right about the plan, what’s that to you? There was already at least one other reason it was never going to work, i. e. BATMAN. It’s going to fail. Let it. When it does, the boss will blame the Bat, and you will be alive along with whatever loot you pocketed during your employment. That puts you ahead of the game.

It is a life or death thing to remember that not only is the boss the smartest one in the room, they NEED to feel like they’re the smartest in the room. (Yes, every boss. No, I’m not naming names. The ones that most need to be the smartest in the room are also the ones most likely to kill anyone who suggests they aren’t.) You are not employing them; THEY are employing YOU. That means they are smarter than you are, and if you enjoy the taste of oxygen in your lungs, you’ll always act like they are, no matter what you may think otherwise.

All of which brings me up to my second employer, and unlike the first, this one was NOT voluntary on my part. As I mentioned in the first post, a number of bosses will grab anyone and draft them into their organization on pain of death. Well, Scarecrow can bring a pain much worse than death- and he gets off on using it.

Dr. Jonathan Crane- and NEVER forget that he is DOCTOR Crane, or he will ensure you never make the mistake again- literally grabbed me off the street as I was leaving one of Mr. C’s business establishments. I was one of about a dozen or so experimental subjects- that’s all the Scarecrow thinks of us as, anyone who ever works for him. His experiment at the time was an attempt to make a permanent form of his fear gas and then extort his victims using the antidote… which would wear off after a few hours. Free labor, perfect blackmail, protection racket- I’m sure you can see the possibilities, and obviously so could he.

Now let me tell you: Scarecrow’s fear toxin is the real deal. Take a sniff of it, get a drop on your skin, and things get bad immediately. The more imaginative, like me, got hallucinations of our worst fears, so vivid that we literally couldn’t see or hear anything from the real world. The less imaginative, those who can’t visualize things, still got the fear response- overwhelming, paralyzing, heart-racing, body-tremors fear.

After a few hours of that, during which Dr. Crane watched every moment with a smile you could see even through that mask of his, he gave us the antidote. And then he told us it would last from between six to ten hours, after which the fear would return. And if we wanted another dose of the antidote, we’d do what he said, because (these are his exact words) he held our very sanity in his hands.

Now, it ought to go without saying that for several days we did everything without question. Some of us (not including me) actually begged for extra work to make sure that next dose was coming. When the time began to run out, and we felt the anxiety rising, and we thought the shadows in the corners of our vision were moving around, we begged him for the drug. And, with a purr in his voice and a sneer on his stitching, Scarecrow came across- but not without making us dance a little more for it, because that’s who he is.

But on the fourth day, I noticed that I’d been so busy on errands, the details of which I won’t turn into evidence by writing them here, that I’d let twelve hours pass… and not once, in that twelve hours, had I had even the slightest twinge of fear. Not a bit. I realized that Dr. Crane’s experiment was a dud. The toxin would wear off on its own if not renewed.

So what did I do? Well, I wasn’t dumb enough to walk away and get chased down, which I knew would happen. Bosses do that. (And if you’re wondering about Mr. C and where he was during all this, I’ll get to that.) No, I knew the safest place for me was, ironically, as close to the Scarecrow as possible. The antidote didn’t seem to have any strange side effects, so I could keep getting my doses and keeping quiet.

Of course, I had to explain my lapse first. I returned to base with a habanero in my pocket. I spent a few minutes making sure Scarecrow was in sight but not directly looking at me, palmed the pepper, and slapped it into my mouth. I bit down, chewed a couple times, and swallowed it- and yeah, it hurt quite a bit, but I needed it to bring on the sweats.

Falling down and screaming didn’t take much acting ability, under the circumstances, but I put everything I had into it. I imagined my previous hallucinations (again, not hard) and used that to drive the screams, the shakes, the tremors. My one genuine fear (aside from what would happen in the bathroom in about four hours) was that Dr. Crane, the self-proclaimed top expert on fear, might spot that I was faking.

He didn’t. He tut-tutted, chided me for trying to tough it out, patted himself on the back for his genius, and gave me the injection. And after that, I never let more than nine hours go by without begging and pleading for my regular dose.

That lasted three or four days until, when Dr. Crane was telling us about how he was ready to go big-scale on the entire city of Gotham, one of my fellow test subjects opened his dumb mouth to point out that he hadn’t had a dose for two days and felt perfectly fine.

There’s always that guy, isn’t there? Don’t be That Guy.

Dr. Crane is absolutely insane and a terrible boss, but he knows his science, especially the stuff he developed himself. In ten minutes he’d confirmed that none of us had any fear toxin in our system, that we’d either been shamming or just too stupid to know. (And why not? We felt anxiety coming on because we were afraid of being afraid. Could you tell the difference between that and an actual flashback of the worst drug trip imaginable?)

Anyway, he was pissed. And, more to the point, he was determined to get it right the second time, so he dosed us all with a gas grenade, then somehow got us all on lab tables and strapped down (you wouldn’t believe how strong a scrawny guy like that can be), and then he dosed us with some OTHER stuff. I only know that because the hallucinations, which were already as bad as you can imagine, got even worse.)

For obvious reasons I don’t know what happened for a while after that, or for how long. The next non-hallucination thing I remember is the Batman standing over me, a needle in his hand.

He let us go. He even gave us a card from Wayne Enterprises- you know, the usual “get off the street” outreach thing they do, as if we could- and walked away with Scarecrow slung over his shoulder. I think he thought we were all just innocent victims coerced into whatever- and that would be right, except for the “innocent” part. What with one thing and another, all of us had been street thugs when Scarecrow had rounded us up.

Anyway, that was two weeks or so, I think, of my life gone, and no pay to show for it. And to make things even better, I found out that a couple of days after Scarecrow had bagged me, Mr. C and the Bat had had one of their little confrontations, and as a result the Penguin was in the lockup while his lawyers worked on ways to spring him again. But that left me, at least for the time being, out of work. I had some savings (and I’ll talk about that whole subject next time), but I needed to find a new boss pretty soon.

And, thankfully, I have never worked for Scarecrow again. Fortunately he doesn’t put together gangs that often- he prefers to solo. That’s fine by me, because he is a horrible boss.

But not the worst. No, not even close. But that’s for later.

School’s out, students. Try not to die.