Batman and Robin: the re-Novelization

Episode 49

Did you see I changed from “part 49” to “Episode 49”? This is sure to get me a lot more attention for my great works. I’m a fucking genius.

When we left off last time, Freeze fucked up some scientists who just kind of wanted to jerk off to an awesome telescope because they’re nerds, Robin wanted to run off and see the Robin Signal Poison Ivy put on the roof of Police HQ because he’s been poisoned with love juice, Alfred was dying in bed and also a virtual assistant who was only slightly worse than Clippy, Batman was just kind of there, Barbara had just discovered the Batcave because Alfred is probably in the throes of dementia and thinks it’s a good idea to put a completely untrained individual in a Batsuit and have her fight a giant steroid monster in the form of Bane and a less giant less steroid monster in the form of Arnold.

It’s that part of a story where things are all winding in together, except in this case, all the different plots have nothing to do with each other and just sort of exist OH WELL!

---

Robin had tracked the mysterious Bird-Signal to its source: The abandoned Turkish baths on Blossom Street. Repeating a looped litany of gay slurs under his breath, Robin passed the heavy metal signal chained to the door, and looked around in surprise at the lush plant growth that seemed to burst from every nook and cranny, every lube barrel and interior design magazine left behind by the previous occupants.

The interior was something no human could have ever imagined without being given far too large a budget for plastic flowers, a huge pile of cocaine, and a very short deadline. Large floral fans rotated lazily, somehow, even though that doesn’t seem like it’d work from a pure engineering standpoint (how would something turn in one direction constantly while still being a biological thing? Is there such a thing as bio-gears?), circulating the warm air.

Curtains of multicolored leaves undulated in the slight breeze. These were actually left over from the bath house days. Fruit burst with colors that could previously only be seen in Zebra-themed chewing gum that tasted amazing but lost its flavor immediately, sparking many playground debates about the merits of delicious flavors that were short-lived. Life is fleeting, I say, and a short-lived flavor is better than none atall, I’d exclaim before tough boys beat the shit out of me for making such proclamations about gum while wearing a full Shakespeare costume, including that truck air filter thing around my neck.

In the center of the room was a bedlike platform made out of flower buds. Poison Ivy reached to stroke them gently, and they instantly blossomed. Then shot out white strands of goo, which was quite grotesque and more than a little on the nose, but the set designer had enough money for some Henson puppets and animatronics, so he went all in.

Ivy heard a slight noise, and looked up as Robin entered.

She smiled and extended her hand toward him.

~

[two things: One, this original manuscript is so jammed with comma splices I can hardly stand it. I’m not a stickler about a comma splice, but the comma in the sentence above has been entered as-is. Alan Grant, you can’t, just, put a comma, wherever. I’m very open to commas that splice when used to indicate a pause, when that facilitates ease of reading, but this has gone too far.

Two, that’s it! That’s a whole section of this book! These sections are so short and NOTHING HAPPENS. We’ve gotten into a portion of the book I like to call “the chess game,” which is the part where we’re just moving the pieces around, but there’s no real plot or anything substantive happening here.

I felt the need to put in a little aside here because I go back and forth about whether to correct these things myself, and also because for some sick fucking reason, I want you to know that I know that these things are wrong and bad. Like it matters to me, somehow, in the context of this wacky shit, that you know that I’m competent and know what a comma splice is. Which is crazy because a competent person wouldn’t be doing this project, wouldn’t be about a YEAR IN on this!]

~

On the observatory tower platform, Mr. Freeze finished hooking up his Freezing Engine to the telescope itself using what we all know is the standard Freezing-Engine-to-Telescope Ports and cabling. Even if your telescope doesn’t have that hookup built in, you can buy a conversion kit on Amazon for like $7 bucks, and it doesn’t take much know-how to do this because, ha, it’s not like someone would build a telescope that CAN’T be hooked up to a Freezing Engine! That’d just be ignoring the obvious utility that comes with connecting a thing that nobody has ever heard of to a giant telescope, which is useless until it’s turned into a big gun, obviously.

Bane finished laying his explosive charges, and came silently over to join him.

“Big family?” Freeze asked. “Like pets? Don’t talk much, do you?”

Freeze knew there was no point waiting for Bane to reply. He wouldn’t. Not this Bane, anyway. Every other iteration of Bane was actually quite intelligent, masterminding the events of the Knightfall among others. But this one was a puffy weirdo played by Jeep Swenson, who has the most badass Wikipedia photo:

That is, until you read the caption and realize the one on the left IS HIS DAUGHTER.

Who takes a shirtless pic with his daughter?

Oh, well, then you find out, a little further into the ol’ Wikipedia, that Swenson started using steroids in his 20s, and supposedly could not put on a shirt, walk up stairs, or “shower properly.” Which, if you can’t shower “properly,” we can just shorten that to “can’t shower.” It’s like wiping: there is a wiped butthole and an unwiped butthole. There doesn’t need to be a third tier, a “properly wiped” butthole, because the “properly” is implied within the “wiped butthole” category.

So maybe this is a result of being unable to put on a shirt. Although it still doesn’t explain why his daughter ALSO appears to be shirtless.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Far more than a Batman and Robin product warrants. So let’s just whiplash right back into the narrative.

Freeze engaged the engine, and the entire pedestal was washed in a blue wave of freezing cryonic energy that looked suspiciously like a laser effect from a gay disco but was not, it was definitely a super serious, deadly science thing happening and not a light show component meant to accompany that one Cher song.

The ambient ice wave spread down from the telescope, encasing the building below. Outside, nearby banks whitened, turning into snow cliffs. Running swiftly downward, the energy froze the river itself into an icy channel.

The amount of energy required to work this deadly miracle was phenomenal, but Freeze’s power gems were able to provide it. I know you were worried about the economics of fuel usage here, but rest assured, there’s enough made-up bullshit to power the other made-up bullshit.

Miracle on Ice, Freeze thought. Maybe that’s what I should call this. Freeze, of course, being a science nerd, had no idea about that popular use of that name already in the culture.

Within minutes, the entire observatory was transformed into a fortress of ice. Maybe even a fivetress.

~

“I’m glad you came,” Ivy whispered. She and Robin sat together on the platform, Ivy leaning seductively close to the young hero. “I can’t breathe without you,” she said, which, little known fact, was the inspiration for the Black Lives Matter slogan of the 2020s and was appropriated in a horrific act of—

[the rest of this part of the original novelization has been redacted by me, the re-novelizer, due to taste reasons. Yes, I have A form of taste]

Robin regarded Ivy seriously. “I want to be together, but I need to know you mean it about turning over a new leaf. And about the, you know,” Robin said as he pointed to his asshole, then raised his eyebrows, then made a circle with one hand near his asshole, brought that circle up near his mouth, and pretended to tongue it vigorously. “I need a sign.”

Mischief twinkled in Ivy’s eyes. “How about ‘Dangerous Curves’? she teased.

“A sign of trust,” Robin persisted. “Tell me your plan.”

“How about ‘Analingus Springs Dead Ahead’?” she tried again. “Or ‘This way to Poundtown, Population: Me and You, Naked and Doing Sex Stuff?’”

Robin didn’t budge, so Ivy said, “Kiss me and I’ll tell you my plan.”

“Tell me and I’ll kiss you,” Robin replied.

This went back and forth for an embarrassingly long time without much deviation or alteration of the lines, except for a brief period where Ivy switched what she was saying, flipping the lines each used like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. But Robin was too thick, or had devoted too much blood to his fleshy bludgeon, to notice, so she seamlessly switched back to the original lines and he was none the wiser, so it was kind of a waste on her part.

Ivy finally shrugged. What difference would it make if Robin knew? Soon he would be like putty in her hands. Specifically, he would be like putty in her hands after a hybrid rubber tree she’d developed consumed his body and converted it into a putty that was mostly useless except for copying newsprint onto it on a very temporary basis. Man, has the Silly Putty industry completely collapsed with the death of newspapers? Can’t copy a computer screen with Silly Putty, can you, you Zoomer Fucks with your tablets!!!! Look at your lives and weep, you ridiculous, digital dolts!

“Freeze has transformed the new telescope into a Freezing Gun,” she explained. “He’s about to turn Gotham City into an ice cube.”

“Wait, hold on a sec,” Robin said as an earpiece he wore that connected him to the police band crackled to life and said that it appeared Mr. Freeze had transformed the new telescope into a Freezing Gun and was turning the city into one big snow cone. So not EXACTLY the same thing Ivy said, one could argue that this whole Ivy/Robin subplot has some purpose, I guess, beyond knowing what Freeze is up to about 15 seconds earlier than he would have otherwise.

“I’ve got to stop Freeze!” Robin shouted.

Ivy grasped his arm, pulling him down toward her. “One kiss, my love. For luck.”

It seemed as if Robin couldn’t resist. I mean, it’s 90s Uma Thurman, so maybe being killed by a single kiss…not the worst risk/reward ratio I’ve been confronted with.

Their faces came together, and their lips met. Robin made a bizarre suctioning motion that made Ivy wish her poison was either faster-acting so it could kill Robin immediately, or that it would turn on her, just so she didn’t have to live with this memory.

Ivy pulled back first, a smug look on her face. “Bad luck, I’m afraid,” she said contentedly. “It’s time to die, little bird. You should have heeded your pointy-eared pal.” She touched a finger to her lips, then quickly remembered she needed to wash her hands because while the poison wasn’t deadly to her, it did give her wicked bad acne if she touched her body somewhere, and was also totally, probably to blame for that bout of the clap that couldn’t possibly be the result of sexual irresponsibility and was almost certainly part of her new weird biology. That was it, for sure.

“Then…you never loved me?” Robin choked the words out.

Ivy looked at him disdainfully. “Love you?” she scoffed, allowing her true feelings to surface for the first time. “I loathe your bipedal arrogance, your animal superiority. My only joy is knowing that even now, my poison kiss is sucking the life from your apelike face.”

Robin paused briefly in shock. This was the third time he’d heard almost this exact monologue during a breakup. The poison kiss part was new, but “apelike face” and “bipedal arrogance” were components of three different breakup speeches he’d heard now, and it was starting to seem as though there perhaps WAS something arrogant about the way he walked upright.

Ivy’s eyes widened with a surprise as a voice behind her said, “I’m not saying I told you so.”

Batman walked from the shadows where he’d concealed himself after following Robin to Blossom Street. It was easy for one with his skills to enter undetected, especially as a patron of the former Turkish bath house who knew not only where the bath house’s back door was, but also the many jokes made about the back door of a Turkish bath house.

“You’re too late,” Ivy hissed. “Say bye-bye, birdie!”

But Robin didn’t look as if he’d been poisoned. In fact, he was grinning. “Sorry to disappoint you, Ivy,” he said triumphantly. He reached up, grasped his lip, pulled—and a strip of thin latex coating came away in his hand. “Rubber lips are immune to your charms.”

Ivy stared, dumbstruck, as Batman explained: “Robin and I found the cure to your evil spell. And that’s teamwork.”

Ivy vomited on the spot, the line was so cheesy. Robin also felt a little queasy as he bent over to remove the latex barrier from his asshole, which he’d insisted on “Just in case.” And let’s not even discuss how this was applied, Robin insisting that an oral application was the only truly protective way as he crept into the room where an ailing Alfred was awoken from his whatever-the-fuck-disease-he-has stupor.

Suddenly, the villainess screamed, her rage pouring from her in one awful, high-pitched shriek that would have come off as authoritative if it was a man, but because Ivy was a woman, people thought of it as bitchy. This is something people always get wrong. It’s not that a woman is ACTUALLY being authoritative and decisive. No, it’s that a man, exhibiting the same behavior, is also being bitchy. Everyone is being such a bitch all the time.

She shoved Robin hard, and he fell back into the lily pool with a splash. Immediately, predatory “Priest” vines began to entangle his boyish body.

More vines sent tendrils and branches shooting out to wrap around Batman. He snapped a few, but more grew to take their place, and within seconds he was engulfed in vicious vegetation. He felt himself wrenched off his feet, hanging upside down as the shoots and stalks did their best to squeeze the life from him.

“Sorry, boys,” Ivy said with total insincerity, sort of the way that Batgirl would’ve said it if instead of being a schoolgirl she was an actress who played an LA brat with a terrible attitude. “My vines seem to have a crush on you.”

She leaped onto a massive lily pad, skipping off onto another before the first could sink. “Gotta run. So many people to kill, so little time.”

Later on, Freeze would watch video footage of this encounter, and it would drive him up the wall that she didn’t say, “So many people to kill, so little VINE.” Jesus, he’d think, this is why you can’t work with women, who have a proven lesser capacity to be hilarious because they rely on their comely body shapes as opposed to their genuine abilities. I mean, christ, they’re letting these babes be firefighters now, and unless she can unzip her top and show enough cleavage to convince a strong MAN to climb a ladder and save you, you’re out of luck, my friend.

Above Ivy, the skylight shattered without warning, which is usually the case with shattering glass, it’s not often that glass shatters in a planned fashion. Bright moonlight streamed in, illuminating the dark-clad figure that descended from above, but only briefly before the massive form blocked out all the moonlight in a sort of earthbound eclipse.

The figure wore a long cape and an eye-mask and landed gracefully, considering, given the girth, in front of Poison Ivy.

Batgirl was on her very first mission.

Did you get that? Did you know that was Batgirl? Do you think I could’ve put off explicitly telling you that a little longer and you would’ve figured it out? Or is the tiny mask so effective you’d have had no idea who we were looking at here?

“You’re about to become compost,” Batgirl threatened, a point in the tape at which Freeze stood and clapped.

Batgirl defended herself expertly as Ivy launched a furious martial arts assault, because for some reason, both of these broads, who previously had no real fighting experience, are fistfighting now.

Kicking, chopping, striking, blocking, and in my memory of this, which is mostly manufactured in my balls, pulling hair not too hard, tearing clothes away, clearly becoming more aroused, their crotches saturated with the go-go juice women make down there, really defining the fine line between consensual rough trade and genuine fighting.

Above them, Batman had managed to draw a slim knife shaped like a bat’s dick, which is pretty much like a dude’s dick (I looked it up for you, I wrote this line before I’d actually seen a bat’s dick, and it turns out it’s not as hilarious as I was hoping, although their lil’ balls are kinda funny), from his Utility Belt and was desperately hacking at the clingy vines, which had developed larynx and were telling him that he really shouldn’t go out for a beer with the boys tonight and instead should stay in and listen to their interminable work stories about Diane, who was totally a bitch but, like, goddamn, how many times can you hear the same story about the same bitch being a bitch?

In the lily pond, Robin struggled to free himself from the aquatic stems that imprisoned him, physically and emotionally, using against him the time that 15 years prior, he’d “emotionally cheated” by foolishly agreeing with his girlfriend that her sister was quite attractive.

“Using feminine wiles to get what you want,” Batgirl said, using her common parlance of “wiles” meaning “tight jugs.” “Trading on your looks. Exploiting men’s weakness. Read a book, sister. Like a Neil Gaiman book, HE’S a feminist. Or Bill Cosby’s book about love! That’s wholesome!”

Batgirl kicked and punched and licked her lips a lot and did take a moment to use body glide on her nipples for chafe-age. A long moment that lives in my memories, replacing most of my childhood and, oop, there goes long division.

“That feminine wiles nonsense went out in the seventies. Chicks like you give women a bad name!”

Batgirl retreated as Ivy redoubled her attack and mentioned something about how “fat chicks” always hate on hotties for using their god-given assets to get what they want instead of being a total drag about it all the time and trying to guilt people into behaving differently.

Ivy smiled in anticipation of victory. “As I told Lady Freeze when I pulled her plug,” she said smugly, only briefly wondering why she would phrase a little verbal jab as a confession to something she had done that could prove very dangerous for her, “this is a one-woman show!”

“I don’t think so,” Batgirl avoided the blow, and grabbed Ivy by the hair (YEEEESSSSSS). Jerking down hard, she brought up her knee to connect with Ivy’s forehead. The plant woman swayed, then slumped to the floor, unconscious, passed out in that super hot way Bill Cosby suggests in his book as a surprisingly alluring pose that wives should try on their husbands because it, “Gets ME going 100% of the time, without fail.”

Batgirl was already cuffing her, slowly, sensually, and ball-gaggin her when Batman finally dropped to the floor and Robin crawled from the pool.

“And you are?” Batman asked.

“Batgirl.” She lifted the mask for a moment. “It’s me, Barbara. I found the Batcave!”

Bruce said, “Yeah, we knew it was you. You know that mask covers like 5% of your overall appearance, right? And only the skin around your eyes, so far from the most significant portion?”

Robin said, “Uh, right. Yes, I also knew that was you without being told. I could tell immediately without the information you provided. This was very clear and at no point confusing for me.”

Minutes later, I guess that back and forth being enough discussion to add an entirely new team member to a hyper-secret, incredibly illegal operation that protected the fate of the planet from time-to-time, the three heroes raced into the Gotham night.