(This is outside the main storyline and contains a little foreshadowing, but skipping it will not affect your understanding of the main plot. Going forward, I may write more interludes after meeting my update quota. If an interlude is a paid chapter, I will mark it in the title so readers can decide whether to skip it.)
Some said he was the mastermind behind several bank robberies, some said he was connected to Gotham's many missing people, and some said he had once used a fake bomb to toy with two bosses of the Roman Empire.
But compared with those stories, he was more like an urban legend.
Perhaps no one had ever really seen Joker, but the freaks in the Joker Gang certainly did not think so.
They stubbornly insisted they must have seen him.
To get a response from him, the Joker Gang's members donned biker vests covered in spikes, dyed their hair vivid colors, and painted themselves up like circus clowns. They paid tribute to their leader through violence and defiance of every social norm, all in the hope that he might deign to call on them.
But their leader had never responded.
Perhaps, in Joker's eyes, these people were more clownish than he was.
Under the strain of that torment, day after day, Quinn was beginning to buckle.
Who would have imagined that, five years earlier, the leader of the Joker Gang had been in charge of Ace Chemicals in the Gotham South Industrial District? It had been a stable, well-paid job, enough for Quinn to support a family of four. Then that damned Red Hood had fallen into a chemical vat and ruined its entire contents.
He had lost his job, the bank had repossessed his house when he could not repay his debts, and his wife had left with their two children.
Quinn felt the whole world was one enormous, malicious joke. From one of Gotham's success stories to a man with nothing, all in a single day-could anything be crazier than that?
Once, he had sneered at gangs. After losing his job, though, he had been forced to join the Roman Empire and become Maroni's parking attendant.
Would life go on like this forever? Trading a pitiful wage for two slices of black bread so hard they hurt to chew?
Puddles reflected neon signs, and flickering strips of light smeared mottled shadows across his ashen profile. As he stood outside the nightclub he had once frequented, sinister tendrils tore through his moral defenses, growing and twisting in his hollow heart.
That night, he dragged a convenience store clerk heading home late into an alley.
Quinn sexually assaulted and strangled her.
Under the flickering lights, the victim's tightly clamped legs twitched, her broken high heels kicking at the puddles.
As those images seared themselves permanently into his mind, the skin of his face seemed to be seized by invisible hands and pulled toward the back of his head. Like cracks spreading across a frost-shattered window, grotesque, sickly creases crawled over his face.
He laughed, the corners of his mouth stretching toward his ears. He laughed.
The chemical plant incident was like a sneeze from an infected person, its droplets carrying despair and madness into every street and alley of Gotham.
Between lifted bricks, behind cracked plaster, and down in dark sewers, deathly pale smiling faces rose, adding a footnote only madmen could write to Gotham's approaching doom.
The Joker Gang was born, but even Quinn did not know how it had happened. As if answering a summons, the madmen had been squeezed tightly together by an invisible hand.
But unlike Joker, a one-man army, a gang needed plans and a common program, not whimsy and madness. That ran counter to the very reason the Joker Gang had been founded, so over the following years, its members scattered through every walk of life in Gotham.
They ranged from impeccably dressed bank managers and respected corporate executives to factory workers toiling from six in the morning until nine at night, and even beggars curled beside trash cans, struggling to survive.
Apart from a few occasional, organized small-scale robberies, they had barely attracted anyone's attention.
After the long torment of day after day, Quinn felt he could not hold on much longer.
Then, late one night two weeks earlier, a call came from an unknown number.
When he heard that twitchy, hoarse male voice with its northern accent, he was so overcome that he nearly cried.
He had known his leader would not abandon him.
"Don't cry, darling. What I'm asking isn't that frightening~ I just want you to buy up all the weapons at Miller Bay Harbor for me. Gotham's a little too peaceful right now. So peaceful it makes you sick, doesn't it?
"The protagonist's script tells me it might be time to make a little noise... oh! Don't worry, you'll all have parts in this grand performance!"
The call ended with the protagonist's signature hoarse chuckle.
Quinn turned off his screen and looked across the room.
Bathed in suggestive purple light, a woman in revealing nightwear lay on a soft bed, her corpulent body sinking deep into the mattress, a contract held between her lips.
She gave him a flirtatious look, curling and uncurling her index finger toward him like an octopus's tentacle.
"Come here, honey~ Don't just sit there. You don't want to ruin this deal and get chewed out by your boss, do you?"
Quinn smiled. It was the first time he had smiled in the face of coercion.
Tugging at his collar, he rose from the sofa and walked toward her at an unhurried pace. As he passed the coffee table, he slipped a fruit knife into his sleeve.
"Honey, who was that on the phone?"
"Someone interesting. He told me a joke." Quinn bent down and planted a light kiss on her forehead.
"I can tell. You haven't stopped smiling..." the woman replied, looping her arms around his neck.
"But the joke wasn't funny..."
Quinn's kisses descended from her forehead to the tip of her nose, finally stopping just short of her lips.
"Then why are you still smiling?"
"Because this world is ridiculous enough all on its own. Every time I see it, see its true face... I laugh so hard I can't close my mouth. Hahahahahahahahaha!"
The fruit knife plunged into the woman's artery, and the purple light painted her fresh blood a dark reddish brown.
She clutched the wound, blood filling her throat until she could not make a sound.
But that made no difference. Even if she had been able to scream, she could never have drowned out Quinn's hysterical laughter.
Under her terrified, despairing gaze, Quinn drove the knife in again and again.
The fruit knife was not sharp, Quinn was scrawny, and the woman's fat was too thick. Every time he stabbed her, he had to brace the handle against his ribs and press down with his full weight.
The light in the shower brought him back to reality from that bizarre purple space.
Quinn washed away the sticky blood clinging to his skin and lathered himself in a thick layer of foam.
The pleasure that seeped into his marrow after killing made him hum despite himself.
He seemed to have rediscovered the passion of that night five years ago, and remembered why he had become the leader of the Joker Gang.
"This damned, boring world is like a steak without black pepper. Let's sprinkle it with a little seasoning called madness!"
Before you continue