Last Time: Poison Ivy emerged as a villain and, based on the Wayne name being on a piece of equipment in her lab, surmised that Bruce Wayne was responsible for…whatever was happening in a secret rainforest lab, sort of the equivalent of being called a mean name by someone in Nikes and assuming Nike is behind the whole thing. Ivy and a newly recruited Bane left to catch a flight, and we join our other villain, Mr. Freeze…
A pale moon shone down on the long-abandoned Snowy Cones Ice Cream Factory. The company didn’t last long, mostly because naming an ice cream after snow cones, an also-tasty, also-frozen, but very different, treat, was a really dumb marketing idea. It’s like naming your sandwich shop “Pete’s Tacos Sandwich Stand.”
In its time, the building had been one of the strangest buildings in all of Gotham City, which is saying something in a city where we seemingly see sequences of Batman driving the Batmobile up a giant statue that must be suspended from the side of a building hundreds of feet in the air, and the statue’s fingers are easily 20 feet wide.
These statues were the topic of much debate in other cities. Were they constructed by ancient aliens using super space technology? Didn’t Gothamites get tired of a statue’s fingernail popping off and smashing an entire class of schoolchildren into a paste that people called “GothGoo”?
But in Gotham, people just kind of shrugged and moved on. I mean, we’ve got Batmen, Freeze Guys. There’s a lot going on.
The ice cream building was shaped into a giant snowman’s face., which had suffered decay over the years and become nightmarish. To complete the image, a huge dripping ice cream cone was stuck onto the massive snowball head.
Some architectural journals called it “grotesque.” Others used words like “fuck,” as in “What the fuck?” for the very first time. Usually that sort of thing is highly inappropriate for a professional design journal, but in this case, the architecture world agreed it was warranted. “You can’t just build everything in the shape of what it does, Gotham,” Architectural Digest said. Although Gotham responded by building a slaughterhouse in the shape of a cow’s head being smashed by a sledgehammer, and real blood from the slaughterhouse poured from the cow’s mouth and eyes at all times.
In the arms race of architectural aesthetics, NOBODY fucks with Gotham.
Inside the building, snow covered every surface. Ice sculptures stood in a dozen locations, ranging from the tasteful to one sculpture that depicted a sequence of sex acts that were, up to that point, purely hypothetical and probably made up by 14 year-old boys on Reddit. What the hell was a “Ventriloquist’s Delight?” A “Sperm Bathory?” Well, Freeze had hired an ice sculptor to make a best, educated guess.
Yes, hiring an ice sculptor to work in Freeze’s secret hideout was probably unwise. And, okay, being in the one building in the entire world that was ice themed in its exterior design seemed like a mistake. But maybe all those other guys got caught because they were TRYING to hide. What’s more suspicious than someone who is trying to stay hidden?
In the monument to cold, Mr. Freeze paced like a trapped animal.
“To be frozen,” he muttered to himself, “to never change. A life of perpetual ice-olation. There is no perfection in that.”
Freeze was always rehearsing lines for his memoir: Powerful Column of Ice: The Mr. Freeze Story.
Just then, a display on Freeze’s cryo-suit began to flash: LOW POWER.
Freeze was always annoyed by this feature, which drew power in order to warn him of low power, like a smoke detector that claims to be low on battery power yet has the juice left to chirp for YEARS. How low could the power be if there’s still enough battery left to power that goddamn incessant chirping for years on end?
Battling the Batman had exhausted his energy supply as well as his supply of personal lubricant (nothing got him…hotter than watching a man in a rubber suit nearly expire), and there was only one way to replenish it. He took three small diamonds from a safe, the sort of puny diamonds you’d save several months to buy only for your fiancé to be mildly disappointed, an apt metaphor for what remained of your entire relationship. You’d tell her that you’d buy her some better diamonds, you’d be a better person who could hold down a job sooner or later, even though, inside, you’re like, “BITCH, these diamonds could power a cryo-suit, and you’re just wearing them on your stupid finger so your dumbass coworkers can see that you’re good enough at sex to warrant an expensive purchase!”
Freeze placed the diamonds carefully in the suit’s compartment. At once his power levels spiked to normal, and the suit emitted a sexualized moan from a speaker near the groin, another little customization Freeze had created and was quite proud of.
Atop a pedestal sat a strange machine, Freeze’s most recent stab at making a blowjob machine, which, if effective, would easily keep him in diamonds for the rest of his life. People already bought diamonds for what was basically a biological blowjob machine in the form of a spouse, Freeze pondered one evening. Maybe they’ll spend the same for a mechanical version!
Next to the failed blowjob machine, which was gummed up with…let’s say old lube, which is honestly the least gross option here, sat ANOTHER strange machine, this one NOT blowjob related. Probably.
Niches in it held two giant diamonds—its power supply. But slots for two more diamonds stood empty.
Freeze pulled out the giant gem he’d stolen at the museum—the Second Sun of the Sudan—and placed it in one of the vacant slots.
One more giant diamond and his Freezing Cannon would be complete. All he needed was one more of a ridiculously hard to come by thing that he had chosen as a power supply after his experiments burning actual hundred dollar bills in a giant furnace didn’t yield the energy he needed.
He intended to hold the entire city hostage with it, turning Gotham into eternal winter unless his demands were met. The city fathers would have no choice but to give him the billions of dollars he required to complete his research. And find the cure for Nora, MY blowjob machine, Freeze thought blue-balls-ed-ly.
Could Freeze just sell the diamonds to get the money? Maybe. But there were all sorts of pesky rules about selling incredibly expensive, famous diamonds like this.
We live in a world where there are diamonds, compressed carbon blocks, that are more famous and beloved than you, a thinking, feeling person. Those diamonds will never experience pain or joy. They will never experience anything.
Just in case you were feeling good today, I wanted to remind you of that fact.
Freeze headed into a large walk-in freezer stuffed with packages and cans of frozen food. He went directly to a certain frozen dinner box and lifted it, setting a secret mechanism in motion. Park of the wall slid back, revealing a spacious hidden vault, a secret compartment hidden within his secret base. Hidden from…himself?
Let’s face it, we all want to have a hidden room. Shakespeare bust with a button hidden inside, bookshelf where you tip a book and a wall rotates to let you pass through, phone that opens a door when you dial a secret number. Once it was built, you’d probably just do the same shit in there, watch Netflix and fall asleep at 7:45 pm. But I guess when you’re literally burning diamonds, you can afford to indulge in some teenage bullshit fantasies. It’s that or try skateboarding again, anything to not feel AS old as you are, just for a brief moment.
Within the chamber, a computerized, glacierlike holding tank contained a female figure. Nora Fries. His wife, remember? Did you think it’d be someone else, you lil’ dumbass? Some other frozen lady?
Frozen in suspended animation, dressed pretty distastefully if we’re being honest, until Freeze could find a cure for the awful disease that had ravaged her more than the guy the Fries family had hired on Craigslist to knock Nora’s back out, a guy with the handle “HumanR3@mer.”
Light sparkled off the snowflake pendant she wore around her neck. The pendant he’d once given her, to declare his eternal love and also remind her of the nickname she gave to his copious ejaculate: The Blizzard of Ahs.
Tenderly, the villain leaned in to touch the glass with his whole body. Especially the penis part of his whole body. Which would be stuck to the frozen glass like a tongue on a flagpole, but, no matter, what was a moment of penis pain to a man whose heart was frozen solid?
Actually, it was still pretty painful. Being in emotional distress doesn’t really make it any less unpleasant to peel skin off your schwanz.
“Soon we will be together once more,” he whispered. Then he said it again, this time at a yell, hoping one of his henchmen would hear and ask him about it so he could launch into the story about his dead wife for like the 1000th time.