That night, Will couldn't sleep.
The woman in the next cell hadn't stopped talking since lockup. The man across from him snored like a bandsaw. His cellmate, at least, seemed normal by comparison.
Well. Normal was pushing it.
The guy's eyes kept sliding over to Will the way a hand finds somewhere it wasn't invited.
He was a good-looking young man with slicked-back hair and sharp blue eyes above a prominent hooked nose. His suit was a size too large. He sat perfectly straight on the bunk with one leg crossed over the other, watching.
Their eyes met. The young man spoke first.
"Name's Oswald. I work for Mr. Maroni. What's yours?"
"I don't know." Will was already in a foul mood — he'd spent the last hour convinced he'd be shipped to Arkham in the morning. If he'd stayed in that room five more minutes, Gordon might have told him it was just a psych evaluation. But he didn't know that.
He turned over in protest and presented his back.
Oswald didn't take the hint.
"Nice body."
Will went rigid.
"What the hell—"
He spun back around, hands clamped over himself.
Oswald spread his palms, grinning wide, all teeth.
"Relax. Just a joke."
The grin stayed.
"But seriously — good build. You're exactly the kind of guy I look for. I'm actually hiring right now. Interested in joining the Romans? Move into the Senate, build something real?"
"The Romans?"
The name pulled at something in the back of Will's mind.
"Wow. A Gotham man who's never heard of the Romans?" Oswald tilted his head. "Don't tell me you don't know Mr. Carmine Falcone either."
That name Will knew. The biggest mob boss in Gotham. And if he remembered right, his outfit called themselves the Romans.
So Oswald was recruiting him into the mob.
No Batman, no answers, and now a gang pitch in a holding cell. Reality and expectations had never been further apart. But the real problem wasn't whether to join — it was that not joining meant Arkham.
"If I say yes, can you get me out of here?"
"Of course, my friend. We run errands for Mr. Maroni. You think we can't walk out of a police station?"
The words were barely out before footsteps sounded in the corridor. Keys rattled. A guard with a gut straining against his uniform swung the door open.
Oswald stood and straightened his collar.
"I want to take him with me." He pointed at Will.
"He's a separate price."
The corridor was full of cameras. The guard held his hand out anyway.
"We pay your precinct every month, on time." Oswald's voice went flat. "Take it up with your commissioner. Not me."
"He's not one of yours. And Gordon processed him personally."
"Is that right."
Oswald shook his head slowly, like a man grieving a minor disappointment.
He unclasped his watch.
It was gold, visibly heavy. Will stared at it, briefly wondering why someone he'd known for twenty minutes would spend something that valuable on him.
Then Oswald slipped the watch over his right fist and drove it into the guard's face.
The man folded, retching. The cells erupted — shouting, laughter, someone rattling bars. Oswald followed up with a kick, straightened his jacket, and turned to Will.
"You're free."
After that, Will joined the Romans. He became muscle for Maroni's crew, specifically under a lieutenant who answered to Maroni, which made Will the lieutenant's guy's guy.
The bottom of the food chain, in other words.
He moved into the Senate with a bright future ahead of him.
The Senate was Oswald's name for the building, lifted from ancient Rome. Oswald had told Will with complete sincerity that the gang would one day rule Gotham, and everyone living in that building would be remembered as founding members of something historic.
In practice the Senate was a two-story wooden tenement in the East End, permanently soaked in damp, with something living under every floorboard. Step wrong and you'd hear it — a small, crisp crack underfoot.
It was hard to believe in Oswald's vision when you were listening to roaches die beneath your feet.
Three months passed. Will got used to it, more or less.
Collecting protection money, watching corners, trading fists with rival crews during the occasional brawl. He'd learned quickly that gang life looked nothing like the movies. The street presence was real — the sharp suits, the formation walking, the way the neighborhood parted around you. But the actual texture of it was sitting on a concrete block eating stale bread and wondering if this was all there was.
Luckily there was Oswald.
He was a good boss, patient in ways that didn't seem to cost him anything. Without him, Will wasn't sure he'd have made it through the first month.
Back in the present, face damp from the tap, Will headed back to his room feeling marginally human. Oswald caught him in the corridor.
"Hey, we've got a job. Maroni's casino — security until three in the morning. Two hundred each."
Will nodded on autopilot.
Oswald squinted at him. "Come on, cheer up. First time working outside the East End. You might even get to see Maroni in person."
"Oh... right. Good."
He forced a smile for Oswald's sake. It came out looking worse than nothing.
How was he supposed to smile? Three months in and there was still no system. No mission list, no shop to unlock, no special ability, no way home, not even a hint of one. According to basic human psychology — Maslow, survival first, then purpose — now that he'd covered food and shelter his brain had started asking what exactly he was doing here.
He didn't have an answer.
He'd sunk hundreds of hours into open-world games. Skyrim, mostly. Right now all he wanted was a quest marker and an autopath.
Fine, you threw me in this hellhole. I'll deal with it. But could you at least tell me what I'm supposed to be doing?
He pushed open his door and went to the wardrobe. It smelled of mothballs. Inside hung one all-black suit.
Joining the Romans had one dress code requirement — a proper suit, hair slicked back if possible. Dress sharp regardless of where you lived. The building was rotting, the rent was cheap, and the outfit had to be immaculate.
Will pulled the jacket off the hanger.
Something fell out of the inner pocket.
A comic book.
He didn't remember owning one. Wasn't even sure comics like this existed in this world. He picked it up and flipped through it, and within a few pages he knew something was off.
It was a Batman comic.
Three months in Gotham, and that was the first time Will had seen that name anywhere.
Even just in a comic, it was enough to make his chest do something.
The villain was a biologist named Hugo Strange. Short on research funds, Strange had borrowed heavily from Maroni. When he couldn't repay it, Maroni's men humiliated him. Strange came back with three augmented men he'd built from his research and hit Maroni's casino — killed everyone inside, took everything on the tables.
The story stopped there. The rest of the pages were blank.
"So this is the system's hint." Will ran a hand through his hair. "An open-world game. Of course it's an open-world game."
He wasn't stupid. Pull the keyword ~casino~ and the rest assembled itself in seconds.
The reason there were no more pages was because he and Oswald were heading to that casino tonight. And like every nameless background character in every comic panel that didn't bother giving them a face, they were going to get torn apart.
Two hundred dollars. That was what tonight's life was worth.
Without the comic he'd have walked straight into it. With it, he had at least a chance.
Option one: tell Oswald the truth.
"Hey, I've got this comic that says we both die tonight."
Right. That would go well.
Besides, two hundred dollars was real money, and Oswald was the kind of person who'd take the risk anyway. Will had watched him dismantle a dozen men in red hoods outside the apartment the week before, and the only damage was a split seam on his trousers.
Option two: fake sick. Stay behind.
Good plan. Except he wasn't leaving Oswald to walk into that alone.
Oswald had pulled him out of that holding cell. Found him work. Lent him money for the suit he was currently putting on. In Gotham, that made him the rarest thing Will had found — someone who could actually be called a friend.
"Forget it," Will muttered. "Stop overthinking. Deal with it when you get there."
He tucked the comic into the back of his waistband and shrugged the jacket on.