He let the stillness build, held the eyes, then—without warning—let the Joker's laugh erupt.
The sound shocked even himself, the echo of it in the bathroom tile almost too loud for the size of the space. The face in the mirror didn't flinch. It was ready for the laugh, as if it had been expecting it all along.
He tried it again, and this time, the reflection smiled first.
The System HUD lit up, not as a warning, but as a notification:
TRAIT DEVELOPMENT: 76%
He squinted at the number.
"Cute," he said, voice still raw.
He leaned in, nose almost touching the glass. He let his breath fog the surface, then drew a smiley face in the condensation with his fingertip.
He laughed, softly, and the mirror laughed too.
He killed the bathroom light, returned to the main room, and began to pace. The city lights cut harsh angles into the space. He imagined himself as a predator trapped in a glass box, forced to stalk the same five meters of territory until the food was brought to him, or until he broke through the wall.
He practiced the walk again, but this time, he tried to move without making a sound. He felt the air shift around his body, listened for the smallest disturbance.
The silence became a thing to be conquered, not avoided.
In the mirror, he watched the way his body changed. The chest expanded, then hollowed. The arms hung loose, then tensed, then loose again. He let the posture go slack, then whip-tight, back and forth, until the transition was invisible.
He turned, moved to the center of the room, and stood perfectly still.
For a minute, nothing happened.
Then the System flickered, and he saw another flash.
This time, the memory was tactile: a gloved hand resting gently on a man's shoulder. The man was seated, shaking, eyes wide with the terror of imminent death. The Joker leaned in, mouth to the man's ear, and whispered:
"You want to know the secret? I don't care if you hear me."
The words hung in the air, then faded.
He snapped back, found himself with his own hand clamped hard around his bicep, nails digging into the flesh. His breath was shallow, heart racing. He let go, flexed his fingers, and found that the tips were almost numb.
He walked to the bathroom again, flicked on the light, and confronted the mirror.
He let the body move on its own this time.
A strange, fluid sequence emerged—not quite a dance, not quite martial arts, but a hybrid of both. The arms rose and fell, slicing through the air with precision.
The head snapped from side to side, then went perfectly still. He swayed, then froze, then pivoted, all with the economy of a thing that had never needed to move any other way.
He watched the movements in the mirror, appraising them. The transitions became smoother, the edges sharper. The effect was uncanny: a human body, but no longer operating under the rules of humanity.
He smiled at the reflection, and this time, the face smiled back before he did.
He heard the System ping again, louder now:
TRAIT DEVELOPMENT: 80%
He leaned close, studying the eyes in the glass.
For a moment, he thought he saw the green in them flicker, like an animal's in a camera flash.
He let his head fall forward, bracing both hands on the sink. He stared at the drain, breathing hard, the world swimming with afterimages.
He felt, for the first time, a line of separation: Marcus Vale on one side, the Joker on the other.
He wondered how many more points it would take before they traded places.
...
The next phase of training was about subtraction. Marcus started by cutting his meals: first to protein shakes, then to water and the occasional lemon, then to nothing at all for as long as his body could tolerate it. The effect was immediate and cumulative.
Within three days, the hollow under his cheekbones grew visible, the skin at his neck pulled tight, veins rising blue against the pallor. His body ran on fumes, but the mind—if anything—became sharper, every sense stripped of distraction and tuned to the pitch of hunger.
Sleep went next. He researched polyphasic schedules online: 90-minute microcycles, alarms set to drag him up from whatever depth he could reach. It was torture, but also a kind of revelation.
By the second night, the distinction between waking and dreaming blurred. He'd wake in the dark, thinking he was in the studio, or the bathroom, or the flash-memory of a kill, only to find himself tangled in sweat-damp sheets or standing in the center of his living room with no memory of moving there.
The apartment changed, too. The kitchen cabinets filled with empty bottles and cups, counters littered with vitamin packets, supplement jars, a pharmacy's worth of adaptogens and nootropics. The bedroom was stripped to mattress and blanket, every extra object exiled to the main room.
The walls became a canvas of obsession.
It started with a single sketch—his own face, as the Joker, inked in ballpoint on the margin of a newspaper. But it multiplied, fast. He covered every open space with new renderings: grimaces, rictuses, experiments in muscle and sinew.
Some in profile, some head-on, some painted over with whiteout, then redrawn until the features blurred. At first, he used pens and pencils, then moved on to lipstick, then his own blood, dabbed from the tip of a sterilized needle.
The effect was a mural of faces, each iteration more unhinged, less like him and more like the thing he was meant to become.
He pasted up pages torn from old books, lines from the script, snatches of dialogue he wrote in the blackout of near-sleep. Some were poetry, some nothing but the word "smile" over and over in different hands.
In the kitchen, he set up a table with a corkboard, mapping out the Joker's psychological logic in colored yarn, pinning news clippings and celebrity mugshots and photos of his own face at every stage of the transformation.
The days and nights bled together. He kept the blinds shut, the lights on a perpetual dim. Sometimes, he forgot what time it was, or even the day of the week. The only clock that mattered was the System, its updates appearing with the regularity of heartbeats.
TRAIT DEVELOPMENT: 81%
....
TRAIT DEVELOPMENT: 85%
The changes became harder to ignore. His hands trembled, sometimes uncontrollably, but the rest of his body grew stiller by the hour. He found that he could stand in the center of the room for minutes at a time, not moving, not blinking, not even breathing unless absolutely necessary.
He timed himself, watching the second hand crawl, trying to reach five minutes, then ten. By the end of the first week, he could go a quarter of an hour without so much as a twitch.
The System responded, updating each time:
TRAIT DEVELOPMENT: 88%
He started hearing the warnings then, cold as a scalpel in the mind's ear.
CAUTION: 100% EMBODIMENT CARRIES RISK
He read the text, then closed his eyes, then went back to the exercise. There was no other way to become the thing he needed to be.
The nights grew stranger.
He'd wake to find himself sitting at the table, staring at the mural. Sometimes, the faces on the wall seemed to move, to shimmer in the periphery.
Once, he caught his own reflection in the window glass, and for a split-second, he didn't recognize it.
He spent the third night entirely awake.
No TV, no phone.
He sat cross-legged in the center of the floor, hands on his knees, watching the patterns of the candle flames as they danced against the walls. He'd set up a ring of them, an impromptu ritual, the wax pooling and cooling in uneven stripes.
The scent of smoke and melting paraffin filled the air, a chemical incense.
He wore the makeup, now—white foundation, black circles around the eyes, lips painted red in a lopsided, furious grin. The pigments felt heavy on the skin, but necessary.
He applied them with care, using a fine brush, working by candlelight. He painted his own face the way a monk might ink a calligraphy scroll—each stroke a meditation, a vow.
He held the mirror in his lap, studying the changes. He practiced the stillness, letting the face in the glass become the anchor. He did not move for thirty, then forty-five, then sixty minutes at a time.
During these sessions, the flashes came faster.
He'd see the Joker, fully formed, leaning over the body of a victim. Sometimes, the faces were familiar—people from his old life, a girl he'd once dated, a teacher from high school, his own father.
Sometimes, they were strangers. But the logic was always the same: terror, silence, a smile. He'd feel the sensations as if they were real—the press of the blade, the stickiness of blood, the heat of breath against the skin.
He let the flashes pass, then returned to the mirror. He never wrote down the memories, but they lingered at the edges of thought, ready to be summoned when needed.
In the final hours before dawn, he prepared for the culmination.
He set the alarms for every half hour, but disabled the snooze. He arranged the candles in a perfect ring. He painted his face again, this time exaggerating the angles, letting the makeup bleed down his neck and collarbones.
He donned a white shirt, buttoned to the top, sleeves rolled to the elbows. He sat in the center of the ring, legs folded, hands resting on his thighs.
He picked up the mirror, held it at arm's length, and stared into it.
His eyes were black, the pupils so dilated the green was nearly gone. The skin around them was bruised with pigment and exhaustion. The smile—painted, but now also real—curved up at the corners, exposing the tips of the canines.
He stared, unblinking, for as long as he could. He waited for the face in the mirror to move first.
After a minute, it did.
The reflection mouthed the laugh—no sound, just the shape of it. The jaw opened wide, the tongue curled against the lower teeth, the whole face contorting into a parody of pleasure.
He watched as the reflection laughed again, and this time, the image lingered.
The System flashed its final warning:
TRAIT DEVELOPMENT: 92%
CAUTION: EMBODIMENT THRESHOLD APPROACHING
He set the mirror down, closed his eyes, and breathed in the scent of wax and ash.
He waited, motionless, until the sun crept through the slats of the window, until the light bled across the floor, until he was sure that he would never move again unless it was for the character.
For the role.
For the kill.
When he opened his eyes, he was still sitting in the ring of candles, but he was not alone.
The Joker was there, in the mirror, smiling wider than before.
And for the first time, Marcus Vale smiled back—like it was the easiest thing in the world.
....
[Okay, I'm thinking we could set targets going forward with power stones. I don't know much about what would be acceptable but we could figure something out. Let me know what you guy's think.
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