Ian, Blessed with Both Son and Daughter

Deep within the Batcave.

It no longer had its former precision and coldness.

The air was thick with the sharp reek of chemical reagents, the scorched stink of ozone, and something faint and elusive, like whispers from an abyss, interfering with the mind.

Of course, only Batman himself, afflicted by the influence in his mind, could hear the latter. The whisper did not travel through the air, but plucked directly at the strings of his psyche.

He had officially named the influence brought upon him after staring directly at Ian within the Speed Force the Pollution Force. Whether that name would one day ring as loudly as the other forces of the universe, he had no idea.

"Damn it! Its influence on me is deepening!"

Bruce Wayne, Gotham's Dark Knight, now looked more like a prisoner trapped in his own purgatory.

His eye sockets were sunken, his cheekbones protruded, and the stubble he had not tended to in a long time spread across his jaw like weeds. The gaze that had once been sharp as a hawk's was now threaded with cobweb-like blood vessels.

It flickered with an unstable, almost burning light.

The white lab coat he wore was covered in stains of unknown composition: splashes of chemicals, oil smears, and even a few unobtrusive, dried, darkened spots of blood.

"Time won't wait for me—"

In front of Bruce, three test tubes were arranged in a row, holding agents refined and compounded from Ian's blood. They gave off an eerie glow.

One was an eerie blue, like ghostly fire frozen beneath polar ice, pulsing faintly as if it possessed a life of its own. One was dark purple, as deep as the cosmic abyss, with tiny, ominous, lightning-like strands of energy occasionally darting through it. The last was an unsettling