“Uuuuuunnnngggg…” The white-faced woman groaned as she slowly faded into a muddled conciousness, the last thing she remembered was calling out to Jonathan Crane in vain before falling onto the cold linoleum floor of her cell.
Opening up her heavy eyelids slowly, Duela turned her neck, moaning in misery as her green eyes adjusted to the light. She took a deep breath, her chest expanding and contracting as she awakened with no haste. The girl felt herself in an upright sitting position, and looking down at herself as her vision became stable, she saw that she was no longer bound by that infernal jacket they stuck her in. She felt her lips forcing themselves open as her stiff neck stretched out, and she let out a loud yawn as she extended her arms out to either side.
“So what the fuck did you go and do this time, Duela?” a male voice with a heavy accent that just screamed “Texas” said to her. She tilted her head back down and saw a very familiar face across a featureless steel table, that of her doctor, Jesse Custer. He didn’t even try to sound like a professional psychiatrist, maybe he just figured his patients would have an easier time talking to someone that spoke like just another guy. He leaned forward, resting his forearms flat on the table, and she could smell the cigarette smoke on his breath as he stared at her, waiting for an answer.
She ruffles her own red hair when she rubs the top of her head, one eye closed trying to remember what was going on before she was so violently sedated. “I… Uhhh…” She brought her chalk-white hand down her face, “Oh! Right, nobody would be quiet and I was yelling because I couldn’t sleep, and Doctor Crane had those girls he’s always with tie me up and stick me with something.”
He began to write something on a pad he took out of his pocket when she was talking before tapping his chin with the inkpen. “And what was everyone talking about?”
“They were saying that Shredder wasn’t my dad,” she complained, the claim that she was a victim clear in her voice.
“Shredder? Shredder is your daddy this time?” he repeated back to her, his hand returning to the pad and writing down the name in a lengthy list of other criminals and costumed villains.
“Huh?” she asked, confused as she blinked slowly, yawning once more, reminding them both that she still wasn’t quite awake. It worked better this way, usually Duela is far too energetic to have any kind of productive therapy. “What do you mean ‘this time’?” she asked him.
Shaking his head, Doctor Custer explained it to her again, like he did in every one of their sessions, sometimes multiple times. “Listen, Duela,” he told her in a straightforward voice, “Every time you talk to anybody, you always say a different man is your daddy, or a different woman’s your mother.” Looking her square in the eye, the curly-haired man continued. “Lemme ask you a question - do you remember how you got here in the first place?”
The corner of her bright red lip twitched, her eyes narrowed in anger when she heard it. She remembered, she couldn’t forget when her “friends” decided to bring her to this hellhole, saying it would help her. “Clearly,” she told him, and when that answer wasn’t good enough, she told him what she always did. “The Teen Titans - I was a member of the Teen Titans - decided that I was too ‘crazy’ for them so they brought me here. Didn’t I say that to you before?”
He shook his head. “I reckon you did tell me that same bullshit before,” Custer told her bluntly, “And not a lick of it’s true. Your memory’s pretty fucked, and I know you haven’t been taking your pills for that.” He leaned back into the folding chair on which he sat, tapping the table with his interlocked hands. “You were going on some fucked up killing spree, Miss. Yelling about being M. Bison’s daughter and running down any old boy wearing one of them white karate suits in a damn semi. Batman, one of them, is the one brought you here, not the Teen Titans.” He began to reach into the inside pocket on his black jacket, “We talked to Robin, he said he doesn’t know you. Squall said the same thing.”
“But that’s not true!” she protested, slamming her palms loudly against the cold table. “Robin and I were even lovers! Why would he say that he doesn’t know me?” She shook her head violently in denial, hair whipping from side to side wildly. “No, he didn’t,” she said, steadying herself, “You’re making that up, aren’t you? This is just another one of your damn tests!”
“It’s not,” he told her, pulling four pictures out of his pocket and throwing them onto the table with a flick of his wrist. “These are pictures of all the Teen Titans from seven months ago, two weeks before you were admitted.” He reached out with his right hand, turning the pictures so they were all facing her, “Tell me, where the hell are you in these?”
She looked at the pictures, then at the doctor, and back at the pictures. “I’m right there!” she shouted, pointing at a white-skinned girl with chin-length red hair. “Can’t you see me? Maybe you’re the crazy one here!”
“Paranoid delusions, serious denial, y-”
“How can you even say that! I’m not in denial, I have the proof right here,” Duela protested, her facial muscles visibly twitching from frustration, “It’s right here in the pictures you gave me!”
The doctor shook his head calmly. “Duela that’s not even you,” he told her. “She goes by Velocity, and you’re just fooling yourself into thinking it’s you because of the visual similarity. Look, you might not believe it, but you’re paranoid, delusional, you remember things that never happened. Now there ain’t a plainer way to say this to you,” the man explained bluntly, “You’re fucked in the head. The techinical term is schizophrenia, but it means the same thing. The sooner you can admit it the better.”
The redhead jumped out of her chair, again slamming her palms onto the table, the pictures jumping up from the impact, “NO! That’s me!” Raising her right hand, she pointed with a thin finger at the doctor, “Get the Titans over here, they’ll tell you!”
“Duela,” the doctor sitting across the table said calmly, “Sit back down, take a deep breath, and then I want you to tell me something.” Slowly, she picked the folding chair off the ground and set it upright again, doing as he said and taking a seat. “Now, you just said the Teen Titans were the ones that brought you here, what makes you think that they’d help you out all of a sudden?”
“What do you mean ‘all of a sudden,’ Doctor Custer?” she asked him. “I was a Teen Titan, I was even in love with Robin. They’ll tell you. And…” She thought for a bit on what he’d just told her, folding her arms and staring up at the ceiling for a bit before looking back to the man in the room with her, “And what’s this about the Titans bringing me here? The Avengers are the ones that brought me here when I got framed for killing Kung Lao but I totally didn’t! It wasn’t me, it was my dad…”
Jesse pinched the bridge of his nose, hanging his head before spreading his fingers to rub his brow in frustration. “Now it’s the Avengers… And who exactly was the one that killed him?”
“Jabba the Hutt,” she answered, raising both hands and pointing to her face, “Can’t you see the family resemblance?”
“No, goddammit!” he shouted, trying to get her to see through her own clouded delusions, “There ain’t no fucking resemblance because there ain’t no family. He got nothing to do with you.”
Duela stamped her foot while folding her arms, giving a “hmph!” as she cocked her head to the side. “And how you you know?” she demanded of him, rolling her eyes to the side to look at him menacingly.
Doctor Jesse Custer was not amused, nor was he afraid. If anything, the curly-haired man in the eyepatch was getting angry, or simply annoyed. In the back of him mind, the Texan cursed his evil grandmother for forcing this profession onto him. Shaking his head before running his hand down the back of his neck, he looked up at her. “Look, goddammit, I know because it’s fucking obvious you’re not a damn Hutt.” He shook his head and walked over to the door, pressing a button and after a buzz that caused the woman to perk up and begin scanning the room for the source, Jesse spoke into a voice receiver. “Alright, the session with Miss Dent is over,” he said after a sigh, “Bring her back to her room, I’m gonna prescribe some new anti-psychotic pills for her.”
“Oh? Done already?” Duela asked him, a bit annoyed that he was cutting her session short. As much as she hated it, at least Custer wasn’t a slobbering psychopath and it made her feel better to talk to someone with a clear head. “So,” she asked, going over to him and placing a thin arm around his shoulder, leaning in with a smile on her red lips, “In your expert opinion, what’s wrong with me?”
“Probably everything,” an unimposing guard said in jest as he walked through the sliding door. “Come with me, Duela.”
“Okay,” the orange-clad girl answered, walking over to him as the doctor left the room from a different entrance. As the pair walked down an empty hallway, an idea came to her. She turned to him, realizing she’d never seen this one before. “I’ve got one for you,” she told her escort. Looking at her puzzled, he tried to say something but she kept talking and didn’t give him a chance. “What happens when the new guy is alone with the Riddler’s Daughter?” He scratched his head. Didn’t she look more like The Joker? “Give up yet?” she asked him anxiously before grabbing his shoulders. “A JAILBREAK!” Duela yelled, throwing the guard to the ground and grabbing his card key, turning and running through the white halls of Arkham.
She probably ran for a little over a minute before the alarms actually went off, it was hard to tell anymore now that she lost whatever sense of time she may have had after so long being stuck in that room. Now the guards she knew and feared were after her, but she was free, she wasn’t trapped this time. She could get away, and when they turned the corner, Duela turned around and headed in the other direction. Turning down another hall, she found herself surrounded. Getting nervous, the redhead simply ran straight at them, her cries of “Out of the way!” not really doing much.
Thinking quickly, she pressed her palms onto one of the guards’ shoulders, leapfrogging him and extending her legs, kicking the other two square in the chin before landing gracefully behind them, a smile across her pale face. Running down a hallway, she found herself in one of the wings that the prisoners were held in, and testing her stolen keycard on one of the doors, Duela found a certain satisfaction in the fact that it worked, the door sliding open to reveal a man with long silver hair and a x-shaped scar between his eyes, dressed in the same orange jumpsuit she wore. “So,” he said in a calm voice as he looked up from his shadowy quarters, “Who are you?”
“Your savior, now come on!” she called to him, grabbing the man by the wrist and pulling him out, reading the name “Saix” on the white tag pinned to his chest. “So what were you here for?”
“Anger management issues,” he told her bluntly, watching the staff chasing her down, yelling rather generic things like “stop” and “get back here”. Grabbing one of the carts the nurses used to transport medicine from room to room, he tore off one of the metal poles of the frame. “And I’ll say one thing, these guys sure pissed me off!” With a loud, angry cry, the man ran towards them like a berserker, swinging down his makeshift weapon with all his fury at one of them, smashing the man’s head.
“Oh, shit…” Duela said, looking at the berserker she just let out. Backing away slowly, she turned around and tried to find the exit, at least he’d provide her with a great distraction.
Duela is open for interaction, if anyone happens to be in Arkham, she’s trying to get out.
