Arkham Asylum: a serious house on a serious earth.
For decades it has housed the dangerous and criminally insane residents of Gotham City, offering rehabilitation and strength for those too weak to find it. Despite this, retention rate of Arkham patients has plummeted upon the introduction of “super-criminals” and their effects on modern culture. The pacifism of those mentally unable to function cohesively with the rest of Gotham City has become muddled with merely trying to contain these so-called supervillains, leaving treatment for those with more traditionally damaged psychoses severely lacking.
What’s more is that most of the “inmates” at Arkham Asylum, those being held at the Asylum for lack of a better prison to hold them and their peculiar abilities, have the lowest retention rate of them all. Every other week, it seemed that one of their high-profile patients had found some way to make their way out of the asylum. Be it Two-Face with his connections on the outside, Victor Zsasz fashioning a shiv to stab the guards out of seemingly nothing, or the Joker somehow fashioning a great escape out of a paper clip, a rubber band, and two Dixie cups. These people are a poison to those around them, and their mere presence dissuades any actual growth in their fellow patients.
Which was why Jeremiah Arkham, the current director of the Asylum, sought outside assistance in an effort to treat the problem—an unconventional treatment for an equally unconventional prognosis. Dr. Hermann Gilman, one of the best minds in criminal psychology, was brought aboard as soon as the director contacted him.
His new approach towards patient pacification was highly unorthodox, and it was no wonder no other credible institution had permitted him to test his hypothesis before Jeremiah Arkham contacted him. His theories on the correlation between mental health and physical health weren’t so out of the ordinary; it was how he intended to abuse these theories.
But Arkham wasn’t exactly a credible institution anymore.
After being brought aboard and formally promoted to Head of Patient Rehabilitation, Dr. Gilman was given a lab and several assistants, along with all the equipment he would need to test his hypothesis. The only missing component to his little test was a subject—a new inmate, one of these “super-criminals”, preferably without any superhuman abilities that might alter the course of his experiment. But where, in a place like Arkham Asylum, was he going to find someone who fit all the criteria? Most of the high-profile cases had at least some form of super-human abilities that stemmed from a cellular level. One of the very few that fit the bill was the Joker, and he was warned very explicitly that it would not be wise to conduct experiments with him.
But he was perfect—the result of a chemical bath and completely insane, but otherwise with no superhuman abilities to muddle the process. The Joker was the perfect candidate for Dr. Gilman’s experiment, and if he could cure him, just imagine what credibility that would lend to his methods? However, despite the great power and authority bestowed upon him, Dr. Arkham was very adamant that the Joker was a very special case.
Dr. Gilman was literally just about to settle for a lower-profile character, Roxanne “Roxy Rocket” Sutton, when the answer to his prayers came kicking and screaming through the door.
“HEY, GETCHER HANDS OFF ME YA MOOKS!” came the shrill nasal whining of their most recent readmittance through the security monitors, “I’VE GOT RIGHTS, YA KNOW!!”
Harleen Quinzelle—better known as Harley Quinn—was of a similar makeup to the Joker, with whom she was usually romantically involved with. Similar skin bleaching, abnormal hair color as a result of a similar chemical bath (red and black to his green) and of a comparable insanity fueled by inherit sociopathic tendencies and a desire for Joker’s affections. She, like the Joker, often committed crimes dressed up as a clown and had a penchant for using lethal gag-themed weapons. If his information was correct, she used to be a doctor at Arkham Asylum.
He looked at her on the surveillance monitors and instantly knew that she was perfect.
A smile slid across Dr. Gilman’s face upon the arrival of his newest subject. He immediately had her ordered to—
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