Dreamworks

Dreamworks is the sixteenth chapter in the Wombles Seven.

David Vincent walked into a pet shop. A sinister looking man greeted him. David asked him if he could have an entire tank of fish. “No! This is a business. I need to make money! Why are you wearing a radiation suit?” was the stern response. The sinister man was the owner Devon Devious. He was in fact a super villain but David didn’t know.

Vincent went to grab the tank but Devious pressed a red button and lots of mice came out of the walls around the shop. Their eyes lit up and David ran. He ran all the way back to his lair at the CRACKED prison. “Did you get them?” asked the Joker. “No, the pet shop man is actually a super villain with an army of deadly mice” replied Vincent. “We need that tank! They are our Delta team! We need them for the invasion!” he added.

The Joker suddenly fainted. Vincent panicked. He had used too much hypnotism, as soon as the Joker woke up he would have free will. Vincent had no choice now but to kill the Joker. He couldn’t risk keeping him alive when he knew his whole plan. Vincent grabbed a knife but the Joker woke too soon. He disarmed him, taking the knife, and ran out of the cave while threatening Vincent with it. He found himself in front of a lot of strange creatures with long faces and a man with a mustard coloured trench coat just outside of a tearoom.

The man in the trench coat saw him.

“Hey!” he called,  “You! I’ve heard of you! You’re most wanted down in Gotham. What’re you doing up ‘ere in Soton?”

The Joker didn’t answer. He had no idea where he was or how he’d gotten there. He leapt down into the sea and started to swim away.

Along the way, he saw a reflection of electricity in the water. He started to panic and attempted to swim fast away from it. But the spark just kept getting faster. Then there was a big streak of red, and the Joker was heavily electrocuted.

That streak was The Flash, who was still running along the water trying to remember where the Batcave is. He eventually found it, but Batman wasn’t there. Instead, there was Green Lantern looking very confused. He spotted Barry immediately.

“Flash! Have you seen the rest of the league? We were just being given our mission briefing and then… Well, I think I fell asleep. I had a strange dream about killing Batman! Then I don’t remember the rest.”

“Okay, Lantern, that sounds serious. What else do you remember about the dream? Maybe there was some kind of trigger in Batman’s speech which caused it?”

“Not much… I thought I’d woken up in a field in London. Or, something like that. Maybe more of a common. Anyway, I was just walking up to… Huh. I don’t know what it was. There was some kind of studio for a panel show. Bruce Wayne, a woman I didn’t recognise and a strange creature with a long face were all sitting on chairs ranting at the woman presenting it. I don’t know why though, she was very pretty. Red head.”

“Focus, Lantern.”

“Oh, ummm… Sorry, yeah. Anyway, I walked right through the studio and no one seemed to see me. Then I saw Batman attacking the woman who’d been a contestant, and then… I got angry, and I killed him. I materialised a knife with my ring to stab him over and over and over. I remember yelling something about… my daughter? He killed my daughter?!”

Green Lantern suddenly came back into the real world. He hadn’t realised that he’d been under a trance with Wonder Woman’s lasso around him.

“Batman killed your daughter?” asked The Flash in shock.

“No… I remember shouting something along those lines, but the thing is, I’ve never had a daughter. Or a son. It’s completely impossible.”

All the other members of the League of American Justice Bringers were standing around Green Lantern looking serious. Wonder Woman was holding the lasso.

“Come on guys, it was just a dream.”

“No.” said a deep voice that seemed to come from nowhere. Batman walked into the cave. “It was far from just a dream. The mission briefing was about the Joker. He’s leading a group called The Old Dickensian Empire, or TODE for short, to give people dreams in which they kill someone. Theoretically, if that happens enough times, the person with the dreams will be hypnotised into thinking that they actually do want to kill that person. We can’t risk keeping you on the team. For now, you’ll be locked up in Iron Heights penitentiary.”

“Iron Heights?!?!”  Green Lantern remembered the stories that Barry had told him about that place. It was a prison on an island in the middle of nowhere originally designed to keep the Reverse Flash- a very powerful and very evil speedster- locked up. The cells supress any metahuman abilities, and now a large handful of The Flash’s enemies were locked up there. Then he realised.

“How do you know about Iron Heights, Batman?”

“It’s my job to know everything about threats such as metahumans. Also- your friend The Flash here told me about it. Apparently, he’s worked there a few times.”

“Barry, you’re exposing your identity!”

“You just called me Barry, Hal.”

“He just called me Hal, Kal!”

Superman chuckled and turned to Batman. “He just called me Kal, Bruce!”

Bruce was shocked. Superman quickly explained. “X-Ray Vision.”

“He called me Bruce, Diana.”

Wonder Woman shrugged and turned to Aquaman.

“He called me Diana, Arthur.”

Everyone waited. “Aren’t you going to say ‘he called me Arthur, J’onn’?” asked Martian Manhunter.

“No. That would be stupid and childish.” Retorted Aquaman. “You are leading this team with no consistency! I have experience with leadership. I say we make me the leader instead of this ‘Batman’.”

“I say we don’t.” said The Flash. Green Lantern nodded in agreement. Aquaman rolled his eyes and jumped out through the roof. Then he made his way back to the sea.

In the sea, he found a soot black Joker. He fed him to his pet seahorse then continued on his way.