Alas was a brooding young boy and heir to a prestigious family which was deposed by revolution. Alas's parents, sister, and Alas emigrated to America in the 1980s and lived in a small apartment in New York City where they struggled financially for some years. Alas's father became an alcoholic and was very abusive until his suicide. Alas and his mother and sister inherited some family money and used it to move to a nice suburban townhouse in Virginia in the early 1990s. While living in New York as a young boy under the terrible shadow of his abusive father, Alas became very reclusive and experimented with bizarre fantasies about darkness and hell.
Alas was very ambitious growing up in Virginia. He wanted to succeed to help his mother and sister. Alas was accepted into Princeton University on a merit scholarship and excelled in psychology, his major. During his junior year, Alas went on an exchange program to UCLA where he snapped and robbed a bank as a masked clown. After accomplishing the daring but criminal deed, he regretted his criminality and decided to give the money he stole to an AIDS charity. He then went back to Princeton University to complete his senior year.
In his senior year at Princeton, Alas took a course on criminal psychology and wrote his thesis on the motivations of cops and criminals caught up in tangled chases. Alas had a revelation and decided he wanted to be a vigilante. After graduating from Princeton, he took up a lucrative position at a wealthy consulting firm in Chicago and sent about $50K to his mother and sister every year. Alas was happy but was ready to begin his secret double-life as a masked vigilante. Alas made himself a bat-shaped costume and mask and called himself Batman. He was always fascinated by the survival skills of bats and their ability to see at night.
Alas was about to discover that his newfound quest for vigilante satisfaction would be tested by Chicago's overwhelming rise in criminal mania. Alas/Batman was prowling the city streets on a Saturday night, looking out for thugs and hoodlums when he noticed a strange man dressed in a giant top-hat and large bow-tie and carrying a glowing stick. Batman followed this man walking down the street. The man's name was Jervis and Batman noticed Jervis walk up to a policeman who was standing in an alley and use his glowing stick to jab the cop in the ribs, causing him to fall down. Jervis then lit the fallen cop on fire with a flame that came out of his glowing stick and then started running away. Batman chased Jervis down the block after helping the cop and then used his specially-made rope-gun to tie up Jervis's feet and wrestled him to the ground. Batman then transported Jervis to the police station, but on the way there, Batman asked Jervis why he did what he did to the cop to which Jervis eerily replied, "Because I'm the Mad Hatter, and I despise uniformed policemen!"
Alas was sitting in his lavish apartment and reading news stories on the Internet on a fine Saturday morning. Alas/Batman was satisfied that Jervis (the Mad Hatter) was incarcerated in an institute for the criminally insane. Alas read a strange editorial on the Internet website for the Chicago Tribune newspaper which read, "We are the Red Hood Gang, and we will take up the reins of the Mad Hatter!" Alas/Batman realized that this Red Hood Gang had written the editorial as a tongue-in-cheek social critique piece but intended to actually carry out the crimes in the pattern of the Mad Hatter somehow. Batman decided to prowl around Chicago that night searching for the Red Hood Gang. At about midnight, he found a group of individuals, a gang of five, dressed in red ski masks, and one of them was a female. This gang, which must have been the Red Hood Gang, Alas realized, walked up to the Chicago Police Department and threw smoke bombs into the windows and then sped away in their car. Batman followed them in his specially jet-boosted black Cadillac. The female member of the gang was thrown out of the car.
Batman pulled over and helped the woman up and asked her who she was and why she was thrown out of the car. She replied, "My name is Harley Quinn. I thought I was a loyal member of the Red Hood Gang, but they threw me out knowing you were following us and would stop to help me so they could speed away! The Red Hood Gang, I don't mind telling you, intends to recruit orphaned children as bomb-carrying minions against Chicago!" Batman escorted 'Harley Quinn' to the police station and returned to his apartment to begin taking notes on the Red Hood Gang. Alas/Batman realized that Chicago was about to face the criminality of very bizarre super-terrorists. Alas wondered if tackling criminals of this evil nature would test his mettle and spirit as a vigilante and his confidence in his education in psychology. "What's the difference between a vigilante and a terrorist?" Alas asked himself; he also thought about his own troubled childhood. He knew he needed to be confident about his sense of ethics, and Chicago was about to become the staging ground for a serious psychological rapture.
In the cell of the Mad Hatter, Jervis was reading a letter someone had sent him. It read, "Greetings, Jervis! You've become something of a celebrity! My name is Scarecrow, and I plan to haul you out of your cell next week so you can help me with my awesome scheme to poison Chicago's drinking water." The Mad Hatter gave an eerie grin and realized that criminality in Chicago was burgeoning, and not even Batman could inspire peace. The Mad Hatter hatched a terrible scheme to turn Batman into an outcast. Jervis planned to convince the people of Chicago that Batman was a Satanist.
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