No Batman Incident (Part 1)

Lightning flashed and thunder roared, and the rain poured down. Gotham's nights are always so dark and terrifying. A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, illuminating the darkness of Arkham Asylum. In the One room with a light on, two people were facing each other.

When Hugo awoke from his dizziness, he saw a figure in a white coat sitting opposite him, looking at him with considerable concern.

Hugo closed his eyes again, trying to move his eyeballs to clear the hazy light from his vision. He saw that the Doctor sitting opposite him had green hair and Joker makeup on his face.

The green-haired Doctor took a medical record from the bookshelf next to him, looked up at Hugo and said, "Hugo Strange, you suffer from severe hypochondria and have been hospitalized for three months. This is your second follow-up appointment this month. Is your condition any better?"

Hugo opened his mouth and said, "Jack, what are you doing here?"

Hugo looked down and saw that he was wearing a straitjacket for a mental patient. He twisted his body violently and said, "... Stop your pranks! Jack, what are you doing? Let me go!"

The Doctor across from me, known as Jack, gave me a helpless look and said, "It seems your condition has worsened again. You're not still imagining yourself as a Doctor and treating all Doctor as patients, are you?"

"What are you talking about?" Hugo exclaimed, his eyes wide with surprise. "I'm a Doctor, and you're that mental patient who likes to call himself Joker. Didn't we work together before... wait a minute!"

Hugo shook his head vigorously, fragments of memories surfacing in his consciousness. He said, "No, I should be in Schiller's Consciousness World right now, how could I be..."

"Have new symptoms appeared?" Jack frowned at Hugo. "What story did you come up with this time?"

"Listen, Mr. Hugo, I don't know where you heard those high school and college experiences from, or if you made them up, but no matter how detailed your stories are, you are not the world-renowned psychology master you imagine yourself to be."

"I really don't want to spend another 20 minutes repeating your life story, but if this is the only way to make you feel more awake, then I have no choice."

"Hugo Strange, you're a truck driver working for a gang on Elizabeth Street. You're not an outsider; you're Gotham native..."

"On a rainy night, you laughed and attacked Bruce Wayne, the heir of the Wayne Family, with a dagger. But Young Master Wayne was a good man. He saw that you had a mental illness and not only did not hold you responsible, he also sent you here."

"Listen, Hugo, you have to cooperate with the treatment. My time is precious. If it weren't for the Wayne Family paying for it, I wouldn't be treating you here..."

"What?! I am... What nonsense are you spouting???" Hugo said incredulously, "Those backgrounds you're talking about are clearly your own, Jack, stop joking, this isn't funny at all, let me go!"

"Look, that's you. To be honest, your symptoms are quite rare. Once you hear about other people's backgrounds, you start to imagine them as your own. And you're the most uncooperative patient I've ever seen."

Jack sighed and pressed a button on the table. After a while, another Doctor in a white coat walked in. He adjusted his glasses, and Jack waved to him, saying, "Doctor. Victor, I really have a headache right now."

Jack stood up from his chair, pointed at Hugo, and said to Victor, "I know his medication dosage has reached its limit, but his condition shows no improvement whatsoever..."

Hugo, who was opposite him, had already started swaying from side to side, trying to break free of the restraints. He looked at Victor and said, "Victor, have you gone mad too? Consciousness space... Where is this?"

Where is this place?

As Victor's voice rang out, Hugo's room transformed into a square box, gradually shrinking as the four walls supporting the box unfolded and flattened. Sections of wood rose from where the walls had been, forming a wooden stage. Two thick red curtains then fell down from either side of the stage with a "whoosh."

Looking down from the stage, there are rows and rows of audience seats. Victor is sitting in the audience asking a question, Schiller, with his globe-shaped head, replies, "This is the 'Tower of Inversion'."

"Tower of Inversion? What's that?"

"You can think of it as a section of my Mind Palace, just like a theater."

"The Tower of Inversion is located on the 7th, 8th and 9th floors of my Mind Palace. Of course, as you saw before, I had the elevator Administrator give Hugo a back door, otherwise he probably wouldn't have been able to even climb the first step."

"Then why did you teleport him here? Is there anything special about this place?"

"This kind of teleportation is random; I didn't specify it. He was quite lucky."

"Good luck? What do you mean by that?"

"As I've said before, each area in my Mind Palace has its own unique rules."

"So what special rules does the Tower of Inversion have?"

"The Tower of Inversion is where I practice perspective-taking. When I treat patients, I need to put myself in their shoes to understand their current mental state and determine whether their stress threshold can withstand my next question..."

"Therefore, the Tower of Inversion was created. Here, all the identities you believe in will be reversed. Doctor will become patients, and patients will become Doctor."

"So when you're treating a patient, you put yourself in the patient's shoes and try to see things from their perspective?"

"That's right, that's why I said he was lucky. The rule in the consciousness space is 'what you believe to be true is true,' but here it's reversed to the opposite of what you believe to be true. Hugo, who firmly believed he was a Doctor, became a patient here, while the patients in his memory became Doctor."

"So how exactly is he going to get out of here?" Evans asked, somewhat puzzled.

"A crazy person once passed by here while climbing the building, and he set a pretty good example."

What is that?

"When you believe you are a Doctor, you become a patient; conversely, if you believe you are a patient, you become Doctor."

"Similarly, if you believe there is a staircase leading to the upper level, then there isn't; if you believe there will never be a staircase leading to the upper level, then there is."

"Actually, it's not difficult. Perhaps it's difficult for ordinary people to convince themselves to believe the complete opposite, but for someone who has made achievements in psychology, it's not too difficult. That's why I said he was quite lucky."

"The One problem is how long it will take Hugo to figure out the rules here, find the patterns, and leave."

Victor turned his head back, his gaze falling once more on the stage. By then, Hugo, still wearing his Hugo, had returned to his ward, clearly still reeling from the shock and bewilderment.

His first question was, of course, why was Schiller's consciousness space so fancy?

This is no longer just a matter of how realistic it is; every person, every object, and every detail here is completely consistent with the real world. For a moment, Hugo was even shaken.

Then, what follows is the strangeness of this space. Generally speaking, something that appears in the space of consciousness represents a certain aspect of personality. For example, a pink room may represent love or thoughts about gender. A pencil may represent one's academic life or childhood memories.

But now Hugo is a little confused. What does a mental hospital with its identity reversed represent?

The things here are no different from those in the real world, but that's precisely why they seem strange.

Regardless, Hugo, perplexed, began his life as a mental patient.

After all, he was a Doctor, and he knew what mental patients did in mental hospitals. He had tried to secretly spit out his medication, find a way to loosen his restraints, and even jump off a building, but he hadn't succeeded because there were just too many Doctor watching him, including Jack with the Joker makeup, as well as Victor, Cobblepot, and Alberto.

Day after day, the rain outside Gotham never stopped, and Hugo failed to escape the Doctor's surveillance. As he struggled to think and try to unravel the secret, he suddenly realized that this peaceful life was slipping into an unpredictable horror.

When he tried to spit out the pills again, Doctor. Jack, who was dressed as Joker, had a nurse bring a funnel and then poured a whole bottle of pills into Hugo's mouth. When he tried to untie the straitjacket again, they brought out huge chains and tied him up again.

Their Treatment Methods became increasingly dangerous, from initially forcing Hugo to take medication, to binding him tightly with chains, to tying him to a treatment chair, and then using electric shocks on him...

The rain outside the mental hospital window grew heavier and heavier, and the night in Gotham grew darker and darker. Then one night, a figure holding a dagger walked into his ward. Lightning flashed outside the window, illuminating his face clearly. It was a Joker with Laughing Man.

He approached Hugo with a dagger in hand. Hugo screamed and tried to back away, but his hands were bound by chains, and he had nowhere to escape.

The Joker slashed open his face with a dagger, peeling off his skin. Hugo screamed in Hugo. In the Shade cast by lightning on the wall, the dagger fell again and again, blood splattering, and the maniacal laughter carried further and further away...

Amidst laughter and the sound of rain, the curtain slowly closed. Victor, sitting in the audience, rubbed his arm and said, "You know what? This movie will definitely be rated for viewers aged 21 and up..."

"Things are out of control, why?" Cobblepot asked.

"As I said before, the lower the floor, the more chaotic it is, while the higher the floor, the more orderly it is. In the 330-story Mind Palace, the 7th, 8th, and 9th floors are already considered very low, so the speed of loss of control will be very fast."

"The longer you stay there, the more out of control the world will become. After all, this is a space of consciousness and a dream, where anything terrible can happen, just like having a nightmare."

Evans shuddered and said, "That's a terrible nightmare, a Doctor dreaming that he's become a patient and is even being..."

"To be honest, he disappointed me a bit. That lunatic who climbed the stairs last time solved everything in less than a day. He even made the stairs appear right in front of him and still had time to blow kisses to the people on this floor..."

As he spoke, Schiller, with his globe-shaped head, turned his head toward Jack, who was dozing beside him, but Jack acted as if he hadn't noticed his movement and didn't respond at all.

"If this was truly a nightmare, he should have woken up by now. What will happen next?"

"If he is startled awake, it means he has failed the challenge and will have to go back to the first floor."

"So let's see where the elevator will take him next."