Robin King had not listened at all at first, but later he realized that some of Bruce's words contained intelligence about other universes—for example, which universes were at war, what Batman was like in certain universes, and so on. Every piece of information was highly detailed, far easier to obtain than collecting it himself.
So he began filtering out the nonsense from Bruce's complaints and only noting down the situations in the universes Bruce mentioned.
But to record that intelligence, he could not simply let the nonsense in those complaints go in one ear and out the other. He had to think it over. And as he thought, Robin King inevitably started taking some of it in.
Honestly, Robin King's career as an employee had been nothing but misery.
In the original comics, Robin King had slaughtered the superheroes of his universe before Laughing Man recruited him. But when he had been recruited, he had not known he was going to be modified. Only after arriving did he realize he had been conned.
At the time, Laughing Man had created a huge pool and thrown every Robin he had captured from across the universes into it, transforming them into Mad Robins. All that talk about being his right-hand man or one of his top generals had been complete bullshit. Robin King and the other captured Robins had been no different; they had all gone through assembly-line modifications.
And the modified Robins had no consciousness of their own. Laughing Man controlled them completely, turning them into rabid, doglike monsters.
But though he was called Robin King, he merely liked the sound robins made. He was not actually some Batman's Robin. He was Bruce Wayne—how could he allow someone else to control him?
So he had made a little pill. As long