8674/A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity: Adverse Reaction

A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity: Adverse Reaction
Date of Scene:	22 November 2021
Location:	Briefly, the Hyperloop; then, Arkham Asylum
Synopsis:	Jon is captured by a shadowy foe intent on using his connection to a certain costumed Gotham vigilante, and in the process manages to put two and two together about said vigilante's secret identity.
Cast of Characters:	Jonathan Sims, Tim Drake

---

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon is supposed to meet with Hugo Strange, to get his input on the psych profile of Tim Drake that Jon had provided to him. Not that Jon had /said/ it was Tim Drake, of course, just a 'subject' that he was studying. Still, he'd let Strange know that he was curious about the possibility of this 'subject' leading a double life, and now, two weeks later, Strange had finally gotten back to him.

    Of course, in those two weeks a lot has happened. Jon found out the man he'd thought was his old friend was actually a demon, he went to Egypt and fought a necromancer alongside the Outsiders and the Night Brigade, he met Lady Death, he got whacked with a book by an ancient necromancer, he jumped through a portal to a strange magical world and came back alive. All of that's led to him examining his choices, and particularly how he's been treating the people who are supposed to be his friends.

    It's not particularly friendly to give a psych profile to your old boss, after all.

    So on the way down to Gotham he texts Tim, opening with: <I need to apologize. I've done something that might be considered... something of a betrayal. I've been curious about certain things that don't quite add up about your life, and so I was trying to figure out if you might be a superhero. I did a great deal of research, but found nothing. So I took a psych profile I had made--scrubbed of identifying details--to my old mentor, Hugo Strange, to ask his opinion.>

    Shortly after: <Here's the thing: I'm going to tell him I don't want to know. I should have trusted you from the start. Whatever is going on, it's your secret to keep. I'm dreadfully sorry I even looked into it, let alone brought in anyone else.>

Tim Drake has posed:
    While some of the particular details about Jon's intensive research into the secrets of Tim Drake's irregular lifestyle are beyond him, Tim himself is... aware. Not that he'd gone to Dr. Hugo Strange about him, specifically, though of course the Bats are aware of who comes and goes at Arkham.

    And the thing is? He's not mad. Really. It would be far too hypocritical of him to be upset about Jon doing something Tim has done for just about every personal acquaintance he has.

    Though he probably should at least project a tiny bit of dislike, if only to discourage further snooping.

    His reply texts go as such:

wait, the head of psychiatry at arkham? do you think i'm crazy?

i'm not crazy.

    A trio of young men enter the train car Jon is in, two from one direction, one from the other. They slowly begin to box Jon in, taking up the seats in a loosely scattered configuration around him. Non-descript the lot of them, beyond that the two paired together are speaking in low tones about a local sportsball team, their Jersey accents thick.

    Eventually Tim responds again, after Jon's apology:

okay. thanks, i guess.

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    <No crazier than I am. No, Strange has a certain specialty, well, his particular interest is more in the /villainous/ sorts, whereas I treat heroes, but that's where I first got the, ahh... idea.>

    Jon flicks a glance up and frowns. He can /feel/ the hostile intent from the men around him, strong enough to get past the barriers and filters he's been trying to set up in his mind.

    <I really am sorry. One moment, though. Have to stop a mugging, I think.>

    Then he looks up, and right at whichever man is in front of him. There's a heavy static in the air as he speaks: "What are your intentions toward me?" Telepathic compulsion to /answer truthfully/ threaded through the words.

Tim Drake has posed:
right, yeah, i know what he does. everyone in gotham knows about arkham.

    Tim is sat in the computer lab at the Roost, skin uncommonly sickly in the light from his monitors. He's still recovering from the back-to-back flights to and from Ecuador, which isn't an easy trip to make with less than a full day in-between even if you're flying private.

    He's distracted, neck-deep in financial records from his father's old travel agent. Who is long since dead himself, which made tracking down said records a hell of a thing.

    But his phone beeps at him, and Tim glances briefly at the notifaction on his smart watch. His eyes snap immediately to the word mugging.

wait, what? be careful!

    And then because he can't leave things alone, Tim minimizes all of his investigative work and instead follows a pre-installed backdoor into the Hyperloop's security system. It takes him some time to find the right train, given how many are actively running at once, but there Jon is. In an empty train car nearly arrived to Gotham, three men with menacing intent obvious to Tim's critical eye surrounding him.

    "We're gonna kidnap ya," the closest man says, almost jovially, though immediately afterward he blinks several times. "Wait, what the hell? I wasn't supposed to tell you that!"

    Of course, while he's saying that, another man is approaching Jon from behind to try and press a jet injector against his neck, the vial attached to it filled with a powerful sedative.

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    "No, you're not," Jon says, static still thick on the words. "You're going to--"

    The trouble Jon has is that he can't hit more than one person with the compulsion yet. Or that he's not used to watching his flanks. Or that it doesn't occur to him that people trying to kidnap him might have a sedative to press against his neck. It'd normally be a difficult thing to do, however cliched, but Jon's so focused on the man in front of him that he doesn't even notice.

    So the sedative injecting goes just as it should, and presumably he's slumping in the train seat in short order.

Tim Drake has posed:
    And Tim has to watch it happen through the security feed. He's cursing to himself where no one can hear him (unless maybe Conner is in the Roost today, though usually the Outsiders' resident Kryptonian does his best not to eavesdrop) as he scrambles to see which member of the Batfamily is nearest to the Hyperloop station.

    No one is what Tim would call nearby, and he can do nothing but sit there as the train comes to a stop and a man and a woman, both dressed in the uniform of a private ambulance company rush in, towards where Jon is being "cared for" by his kidnappers.

    "He just fell over!" one man says.

    From another, "Maybe he's on drugs."

    Look, they're... the acting isn't the best, but it's at least a convincing story. Not that it matters because the EMTs are in on out, bustling Jon's unconscious body out of the train and into a waiting ambulance. By the time the doors have slammed closed, Tim has already confirmed on his side of things that neither supposed EMTs are employed by NJ MedFast.

    He very much suspects a report about a stolen vehicle to come in from them shortly.

    The Roost's computer begins tracking the ambulance's progress away from the station and towards the Gotham City docks as the chair within the computer lab spins, Tim already on the move, gearing up and pinging the Outsiders members who are in tonight.

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon comes to groggily, and maybe earlier than his kidnappers had anticipated, given that he's got rapid healing these days. There's no one there, at any rate, and he peers around the empty room--a supply room, maybe? At least the lights are on, so that's... something, right?

    He's bound to a chair, which he tests a couple of times before groaning and giving up. There's a small window at the top of the wall, which he peers at, but it's not going to do him much good down here tied up.

    So, finally, he shouts, "Hey! Can anyone hear me?!" Tries the bonds again. "Where's the sneering villain monologue to keep me company?" Have to project, you know... strength. Despite the terror. Because ye gods, this is kind of terrifying.

Tim Drake has posed:
    Silence.

    No answer is forthcoming.

    Eventually it becomes obvious that there are people milling about, beyond the door. Jon can hear them, the distant scuffling of footsteps, quiet conversations, though it's at the very furthest edges of his senses. He has to strain for it. It'd be a stretch for his telepathy, too, though the faint brushes against their minds is at least enough to confirm that they are the same group who took him out on the train.

    Before he can try to influence them, though, the resounding slam of a door sounds. Silence descends once more.

    It was dark out when Jon came to in this little room, and it's still dark out, from what he can see through that small, dirty window.

    Tracking the passage of time is difficult, but time indeed elapses. There's little to discover in a slow perusal of the room he's in; dust bunnies, mostly. Crop circles left behind from when furniture was moved at some point prior. Just the chair, the heavy-duty leather cuffs and straps attaching Jon to it, and the slow buzz from the light fixture up above.

    Just his own breathing, and the steady pumping of his heart.

    It is a long, long time before there is sound again from beyond the room. A slow, creaky noise of something being rolled along the ground. The doorknob turns, and Jon is confronted with a literal walking anachronism.

    He'll recognize the robot, with its cheerful LED face and its sleek white body, as a typical unit tasked with delivering supplies around hospitals, the kind of work that needs to be done but is rote enough that a trained medical professional is best spending their time elsewhere. And with its little grabby pincer claws, it is pushing an old CRT television on a cart, the source of the squeaking creak.

    Jon is treated to several moments where the robot carefully adjusts the placement of the cart so that it is right in front of him, and then slowly the robot rolls out of the room. The extension cord feeding into the tv confounds the bot for a while, until it manages to get the door closed again.

    Once more, everything is quiet. It must be at least five minutes (or fifty) before the television clicks on to a screen full of noisy static.

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon yells a few more times during that interminable wait, just enough to hurt his throat and realize that it wasn't going to do anything good. A dozen possibilities cascade through his mind while he sits there in the silence, none of them good. Did Melina Vostokoff find out he'd mentioned her name at SHIELD headquarters? No, she'd have come back to his office, likely. Did /SHIELD/ decide to find out what he knows about the Russian assassin? No, they have much easier access to him than on the damn hyperloop. Is this an enemy of the prior Archivists? Minions of that damn Carnelian fellow? Was he randomly targeted?

    That possibility is so ridiculous he actually laughs at it aloud. The way his life has been going, it's /got/ to be someone that's targeted him directly.

    At least they've got his broken arm tied at a good angle in this whole psychiatric hospital getup--old-fashioned straitjacket style restraints and all. And... the walls and floors, the dust, the /smell/... it's all terribly familiar.

    Wait. Is he in /Arkham/?

    His eyes widen as the cheerful little robot comes in, and then his jaw drops. "Oh, /shit/," he whispers.

    "Why the /hell/ am I in /Arkham/?!"

Tim Drake has posed:
    Well, the static has no answers to give Jon either. It's loud, not quite ear-splitting but enough for it to be uncomfortable, given the small space and the television's proximity to Jon.

    He gets to sit and listen to that for a while. Long enough that, when the channel abruptly changes, the ensuing silence is almost as loud as the noise from before. And there, on the old screen, is a grinning skull.

    Literally, a grinning skull. Possibly from an old medical anatomical model. Its jaw clacks up and down on a loop as a robotic voice speaks overtop.

    "Hello Mr. Sims," it says. "I hope you are enjoying our hospitality."

    The skull's jaw does not stop moving in-between words. All it does is slowly grind its teeth together as its empty sockets glare balefully out at Jon.

    "I am sure it will not be long now. The young detective is oh so reliable, isn't he? Tell us... how long have you known Red Robin?"

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon actually flinches at the sudden transition from static to silence, bracing for... something. When all that comes up is a grinning skull on the screen, he... blinks rapidly. What? What is going /on/?!

    Well, this is definitely /weird/ enough to be Arkham.

    "I... Red Robin?" Jon stares at the skull, confused. What did /Red Robin/ have to do with anything? "I... barely... I think I met him /once/, in Egypt? Look, what's this all about?" The pounding of his heart gives lie to the calm he tries to force into his tone.

Tim Drake has posed:
    The skull's teeth clack together, clack clack clack, like it's laughing. As if Jon has said something terribly, terribly funny.

    Once it settles down, it continues speaking. "We saw the profile you brought to Hugo. Nothing happens in Arkham that we don't see. We even remember you, little Jonny Sims. You tried your best, didn't you? But Arkham doesn't suffer fools."

    Whoever is speaking through the skull allows the implication to hang in the air for a time. Overhead, the light flickers.

    "You were never going to make it here as a doctor, Jonny. What do you think your odds are as a patient? Maybe we should toss you in with the raving lunatics you thought you could save and see how long it takes for them to tear you apart."

    More deranged miming from the skull as it plays at cackling.

    The robotic voice, clearly speech-to-text and not one of the newer versions that has entered the uncanny valley, cuts back in.

    "Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    Jon's eyes widen as the skull says 'profile you brought to Hugo,' and the wheels in his mind start turning, fast. Two plus two is four, four and four is eight. He gave Hugo Strange Tim Drake's psych profile, and now someone's kidnapped him thinking he knows Red Robin.

    Ipso facto, Tim Drake is Red Robin.

    Why didn't he /see/ it before?! How could he have been so /stupid/?

    Jon's reaction to the laughter is not at /all/ what the skull likely expects. He doesn't shrink back the way he once would have, wither under the criticism. If whoever's speaking through the skull had done a little more research they might have realized that in the seven years since he left Arkham he's opened his own practice, lost a daughter, and by his own admission 'put on the cape.' He's presented papers at psychiatric conferences, had the knowledge of millenia of his ancestors dumped into his head, fought necromancers, traveled to other worlds, learned to shoot a gun. He's grown up, is the point.

    Or maybe he always would have reacted like this. Jon was always braver in defending other people than he was himself, particularly people he cares about.

    "I'm not telling you a /damn/ thing about Red Robin, except that if you hurt him I /swear/ I will find out who you are and make sure you die screaming." Nobody at Arkham ever saw Jon with his adopted daughter. It's the missing piece of the psych profile, really--you don't threaten children or young people around Jonathan Sims and not piss him off.

    For whatever /that's/ worth, tied to a chair. But if he can... /focus/... then maybe...?

Tim Drake has posed:
    The laughing doesn't stop. It becomes a backing track to Jon speaking up, threatening the unseen mastermind of his kidnapping and subsequent confinement in this old, forgotten corner of Arkham Asylum.

    In fact, it continues well after Jon is done.

    "You have no power here," is the first thing the skull says, eventually. "You never did and you never will. You're just another worthless bleeding heart who doesn't have what it takes to survive, here. The heart of Arkham saw you, Mr. Sims. It sees all. And it knew what you were as soon as it spotted you."

    For a good long while after that, Jon is treated to a static image of the skull staring at him. It no longer has anything to say, no more taunts to give, no more mad cackling to torture Jon's ears.

    Silence reigns, once more.

    Until, distantly, noise. And the skull's teeth chatter in amusement. "Don't you realize, Mr. Sims? All you've ever been..."

    "...is BAIT!"

    "Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha."

Jonathan Sims has posed:
    "Did it, now?" Jon's voice is /very/ quiet. He's focusing. "See my heart? Whoever you are, you ought to know that I'm not just 'Dr. Sims' anymore." He emphasizes /Doctor/. He /earned/ that, damn it. "I'm the Archivist now, and it's /my/ business to see hearts. To judge them. I have a /lot/ more power than you think... and I think I don't feel like letting you /watch/ this. You want to see what happens? Come here and show your damn face."

    There's an orange glow directly next to his head. The skull's pauses for laughter, as /painful/ as they've been, have given him time to focus his magic. It's hard, with his head pounding from the sound and all the terror and without his bracer.

    "So, yes, perhaps I'm bait--but you're just a second-rate villain who never learned the first rule of dealing with superheroes."

    He smiles. He really does enjoy this bit. "Don't bloody well /monologue/!"

    And finally he manages to manifest a glowing yellow-orange crystalline shard right next to his head. It's in movement as it manifests, as if he's throwing it, so whoever's on the other end is only going to get a brief glimpse before the crystal smashes through the TV's screen with an almighty crash.

    Then Jon slumps in the chair, exhausted. That took everything he had, and he's no closer to getting out. He just has to pray that Tim will be safe--because he knows there's no way he's /not/ coming. Damn it.