WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!
Part 2: Ace Chemicals
There was no route into the Ace Chemicals facility other than to take the Batmobile back over, blow a hole in a high wall, then use a crane to maneuver a conveniently ramp-shaped piece of metal into place in order to launch myself inside. The inner workings of that facility were cavernous enough to allow me to drive unhampered, which may become important later. At the end of the line, Scarecrow had a cadre of armed thugs systematically loading canisters of chemicals into the central mixing chamber. While taking them all out, I noticed that the Arkham Knight had trained some of his militia members to be medics, with the ability to revive one of their fallen comrades a limited amount of times during each encounter. I guess it was only a matter of time before someone used my zero-body-count policy against me.
Once I cleared the room and confronted Scarecrow, he responded to my threat by threatening to kill Barbara Gordon! My first thought was: How did he know she was working for me? My first action was to get her on Bat-Facetime to warn her, but it appears I was too late, as her feed cut out mid-conversation. It could have just been crappy AT&T service, but at this point I had to assume the worst. And it turns out the worst was that Scarecrow had used the time I had spent conversating to make a quick getaway and lock me in the mixing chamber, with his bomb counting down to explosion. Rather than look for a way out, I went to the computer terminal and immediately started to prepare a neutralizing, hoping that I could synthesize enough to reduce the blast radius while still getting out in time, but resigning myself to a heroic sacrifice for the sake of saving Gotham.
I don't know if you've ever tried it, but moving highly volatile canisters across a room that's about to explode is slow and monotonous work. But it was worth it to hear the computer announce a 25% reduction in the blast radius for each of the first two canisters I was able to prepare. But upon inserting the third canister, I didn't hear the expected 75% reduction in blast radius, but rather a 1,000% INCREASE! I wheeled around to examine the computer, which I was sure had to be malfunctioning, only to find myself face-to-face with a pistol held by... the Joker!
It was at this point that I knew I was affected by Crane's fear toxin, since the Joker was dead: I saw him die and watched his body become a pile of ashes at the GCPD morgue. But his appearance in my hallucination triggered an involuntary memory into my recall tube: It was that time I invited Commissioner Gordon to my remote quarantine facility not too long ago. I showed him my four "patients" - performer Johnny Charisma, professional boxer Albert King, corporate executive Christina Bell, and harmless retiree Henry Adams. All four received transfusions of Joker's TITAN-infected blood back during the Arkham City affair, and the disease had been altering them, making them look and act more and more like the Joker. Actually, it only affected three of the four patients, Henry Adams was somehow immune to the toxin, which means I would have to use his blood to find a cure.
Important point: I told Commissioner Gordon that five people were infected with Joker's blood, yet I only had four in my custody. It seems perfectly obvious that the the fifth victim is yours truly - I mean, I was the victim of Joker's first blood transfusion towards the beginning of Arkham City, and who knows whether that cure manufactured by Mr. Freeze was 100% effective in ridding it all from my system. Joker's appearance in my fear toxin-addled hallucinations just proved that conclusion. Thankfully the memory/hallucination festivities didn't take much time in the real world and there was still plenty of time to use the Batmobile's power winch to tear down a wall and then use the Batmobile's awesome speed to escape from Ace Chemicals before it went up in flames.
I knew I had a duty to let Commissioner Gordon aid in the the search for his daughter, so I picked him up from the GCPD and sped over to the Clock Tower to look for clues. After clearing away Arkham Knight's drone tanks in the streets surrounding the building and the armed guards he had stationed to guard it, I entered the secret apartment, only to be met with another hallucination: the night Joker singlehandedly transformed Batgirl into Oracle by shooting Barbara Gordon in the spine. I was only shaken out of it by her father's arrival into the room. I knew that I had to use Oracle's super computer to gather enough evidence to track her whereabouts, but I also knew that activating the computer in front of Gordon would reveal her secret identity as my sidekick. But in desperate times like these, sometimes a paradigm shift is necessary. Needless to say, Jim was pissed when he found out Barbara worked for me, throwing down the Bat Phone I had given him in disgust, and leaving to embark on a search himself.
Part 4: Chasing Oracle
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