Man, part 6 already. And right after COAEG3 and 4 and BTAS 5.  You've really
been working hard the past couple of weks, haven'tcha Rod?

                 --------------------------------
                      Part 6: Gotham Knights
                 --------------------------------

Ummm....... you DO know that "Gotham Knights" is actually the name of Gotham's
professional baseball team, right?
[I thought that was the football team?]
    

 Gotham.
 
 I soar through her towers, horrified at what she's become.
 
 Gotham's towers reach up to the sky higher than before,
 dozens of towers of Babylon housing men believing themselves
 gods, and the working class drones that serve under them.

Refresh my memory, but wasn't Gotham actually like this even BEFORE he
retired? Why would it come as such a big surprise to make him "horrified"? He
already WAS horrified.

[Maybe it's a constant state of horror that he's in.  Would explain why he's
so grim . . ]
  

 Mother.  Father.
 
 Your son has returned.
 
 The war goes on.  

  
See, now THIS is the kind of understated DKR reference I can go for, rather
than the wholesale-stealing of entire scenes. (I:e the cotton candy section)  

[They could always go the way of the scene stealer and say that it was an
"Homage"]

"This looks exactly like the sort of place I'd expect Sylia
to stay in," she murmured.  "Don't you think so, Nene?"

"Zzzz..."

Linna blinked, then turned around.  Nene was already
sprawled on her bed, fast asleep.  

HA! That's CLASSIC Nene. Well done!

Linna kicked the door wide open and brought her gun up.

"FREEZE!"

"Aaaah!  Don't shoot!  Don't shoot!"

Everone blinked.

"Mackie?"

YESSSSS!!!!!!!!! The boy is back! On behalf of all Mackie fans everywhere,
THANK you.

[There are "Mackie" fans?  0_o]

I guess this means I can't make fun of you anymore for using cheap, Crash-
esque copouts. Damn.

[Well, better than having him stuck in a mental hospital]

All joking aside: Mackie has been inside Sylia's room for an hour, poking
around her dresser drawers. Now would be the PERFECT time for some good
perversion humor.

[Yes, and I'd imagine that you have the perfect idea for one.]

He landed atop the Gotham Police Department building
undetected, as he knew he would.

It was far different than the GPD building he remembered.

Minor Nitpick: you might want to go with GCPD inside of GPD. One, it's how
they do it in the comics (but you're using BTAS rather than the comics, so
that really isn't that good of a reason) and two, four letters is generally
how one abbreviates police department names, for some reason. Think about it:
on the news, they always refer to NYPD and LAPD by the initials, but when it's
a city with just one name, like Chicago, they don't say CPD, they just say
"the Chicago Police."

'Feh, police.  BUZZ OFF!' He reared back his fist and
punched towards the helicopter and the air before his fist
seemed to ripple in a wave.

And then the helicopter exploded.

Ah, Largo's gravity-wave weapons. NICE touch.

[Gravity wave?  I thought that it was a kinetic blaster . . .]

The Joker had a plan.

It went something like this:

In front of Batman, he'd have Jim Gordon's last descendent
shot and killed, with him helpless to do anything about it.
Then with his new body's neat bag of tricks, the Joker would
pound Batman to his knees.

Three things wrong with this:

One, Barbara Gordon is NOT his last descendant. The Commish did have a son:
James Gordon, Jr. We just never see him, that's all.

[Ahem . . .BTAS continuity.]
 
Two: Barbara Gordon is not, strictly speaking, his descendant at all. She is
his niece, whom he adopted when she was very, very young.

[Ahem . . . BTAS continuity, and in that continuity Batgirl is his daughter.] 

Three: This sort of thing isn't the Jokers style. I mean, where's the humor in
it? The Joker does, after all, consider himself to be a comedian, and all his
personal (i:e not for money) plans are ALWAYS funny, in his own sick, sick,
hideously wrong way. The Joker fish? Funny. The opera gag? Funny. The
harpooned cop? EXTREMELY funny, albeit improvised. But this? Not so much.

[Maybe he was going to twist the bodies in new and hilarious positions?  Or
maybe he is going for the ironic comedy . . .]

Also, this quite simply isn't grand enough for the Joker's takedown of Batman.
He could always, in the past, have had his goons beat Batman into submission,
or shot him himself, or something: he's had numerous oppurtunities to take him
down the easy, brute force way. But he doesn't WANT to win that way; it's too
pedestrian for him. He himself has said that wants to take Batman down in a
grand scheme worthy of the Dark Knight, so that Batman can bow to his superior
comedic genius right before he perishes. This, quite simply, isn't nearly what
he would have in mind. I can see him taking Bar hostage (he's done it before)
but he'd put her to better use than THIS.

[Hrrm.  There's that.]

//I've got Priss, but... you're not going to believe this.//

"What?"

//I'm... I think I'm in the Batjet.//

Just out of curiosity, where'd you get Batjet from? I've never heard it
reffered to that way in BTAS (where it's always Batwing) or in the comics
(which had Bat-Plane in the 40's, 50's, and 60's and then switched to Batwing
in the 70's) but it's gotta come form somewhere, or you wouldn't have used it.

[Maybe it changed into the Batjet because. . . mm . . no one knew what Batman
called it, and it has been quite a few decades since he used it, and Linna
only vaguely heard about it in japanese?  Do i get a No-Prize?]

Barbara stepped closer, resting a hand on Batman's steel
gauntlet.  'Bruce... why haven't you taken off the suit
yet?'

'I... something's wrong.'

'Wrong?'

'Something... something's wrong with me.  I... I don't
understand.'

Slowly, Batman removed the seals of his helmet.  One by one,
they snapped and hissed out of place.

Finally, he lifted the helm away from his face.

Barbara gasped.

 
Damn you and your cliffhangers ^_^....... but I see two possibilities here.

One, which I HIGHLY doubt, is that he's done the Mr. Freeze thing, and there's
nothing left but a head attached to the suit with some electrodes.

[Eww.  Yes, I too doubt this.]

Two, which is what I'm banking on, at least until you reveal all the
answers....... I don't think this is Batman at all. I think this is Boomer-
Batman, Bruce Wayne's mind transferred into a robotic body, either using one
of Karl Rossums replicants or your standard boomer. Yeah, I know, it's way out
there, but stranger things have happened in your stories, so this is my
theory.

[A possibility that sprang to my mind as well.]

All in all, despite my criticisms, a fine piece of work. I like seeing it set
in Gotham, and for a guy who relentlessly claims to hate battle scenes, you've
done well with all of them, especially with the Joker, who must be quite
difficult to do battle choreography for seeing as how he's always been a wimp
before this. And kudos again for bringing back Mackie.

[You and your Macki fandom . . . and he was right, though I found that whole
gunning down of the grayson family to be too quick for such an important
event, it was good overall.
[And here's my whacked out, out there theory.  It's a Batman from -wait for
it- Earth 2 BTAS!  Yessir, he went through Hypertime!  It's the answer for
EVERYTHING]

My question is, where is Sylia, and when is she going to show up in that
kickass colormorphed red-and-black hardsuit you have her wearing in your
fanart? 'Cause that thing looks like it can do some serious damage.

[That was Sylia???]
-Mercutio
"A plague 'a both your houses!"

[-Murmur the Fallen]