The Killing Joke: A Prince's Madness
High above the blood-red wasteland that was once Australia, a small Britannian transport craft sliced through storm clouds pregnant with chemical rain. Inside, nobleman Bartley Asprius sat rigid in his seat, cold sweat trickling down his spine like ice water. The cabin lights flickered intermittently—a fitting metaphor for his chances of survival.
Click-click-click. His fingers drummed against the armrest in a nervous rhythm, the only sound besides the drone of engines and his own ragged breathing. He was flying straight into the heart of madness itself, summoned by a member of the royal family whose very name was whispered in the same breath as nightmares.
Prince Clovis's death at the hands of Zero had been just the beginning. Now, as one of the officials who'd failed to prevent that catastrophe, Asprius knew he was about to face something far worse than execution—he was about to meet Prince Christopher Britannia, the royal family's beautiful monster.
The man they called... The Joker.
Lightning split the sky as the pilot's voice crackled through static: "Approaching the Funhouse. Landing in three minutes. God help us all."
Asprius pressed his face to the rain-streaked window and beheld a vision from the depths of hell. The Australian desert had been transformed into a twisted carnival of death—a sprawling complex of laboratories, testing grounds, and torture chambers that defied all military convention. Neon lights in garish purples and greens cut through the perpetual twilight, casting everything in a sickly, otherworldly glow. Where once red earth had stretched to the horizon, now stood towering structures shaped like enormous playing cards, their surfaces adorned with grotesque smiling faces.
As they descended toward the coastline, the true horror came into view: a colossal fortress built to resemble a house of cards, its impossible architecture seeming to mock the laws of physics. Massive screens displayed a rotating slideshow of smiling faces—some laughing, some screaming, all frozen in expressions of beautiful agony.
The transport touched down on a landing pad painted like a giant dartboard, complete with bullseyes that looked suspiciously like human silhouettes. As the doors hissed open with the sound of escaping gas, Asprius was greeted by a sight that made his blood turn to ice.
A dozen figures stood at perfect attention, but these weren't ordinary soldiers. Each wore the distinctive purple and green uniform of Joker's Gang, their faces hidden behind masks painted with different expressions—some grinning maniacally, others weeping blood-red tears, all utterly terrifying. At their head stood a man in an immaculate suit the color of fresh bruises, his face a porcelain mask of perpetual amusement.
"Hiya there, Mr. Asprius!" the figure chirped in a voice like breaking glass dipped in honey. "The boss has been just dying to meet you! Literally! Well, not literally literally, but you know what I mean! Or do you? Ahahaha!"
As they walked through the facility, Asprius felt reality bending around him. The corridors were painted in impossible geometries—optical illusions that made his eyes water and his brain ache. Purple and green stripes spiraled endlessly upward, while portraits of historical figures had been "improved" with red smiles carved into their faces.
They passed training areas where Joker's Gang practiced their unique brand of warfare. Some juggled live grenades while laughing hysterically. Others engaged in "combat training" that looked more like a deadly dance, their movements synchronized to the discordant melody of carnival music that seemed to seep from the very walls.
But it was the glimpses into the private chambers that truly shattered Asprius's sanity. Through reinforced windows that had been painted to look like giant eyes, he witnessed "experiments" that defied all reason. Prisoners—war criminals and terrorists—were subjected to Joker's special brand of "therapy." Some were forced to watch comedy shows until they laughed themselves to madness. Others underwent procedures that left them with permanent rictus grins carved into their faces.
One room contained what appeared to be a giant roulette wheel, with test subjects strapped to the outer rim. As it spun, they screamed—not in pain, but in uncontrollable laughter, their faces twisted into expressions of pure, terrified joy.
"The Prince's Wheel of Misfortune!" his guide explained cheerfully. "Everyone's a winner! Well, except for the losers. And they're winners too, in their own special way! Hehehe!"
Finally, they arrived at doors that towered three stories high, painted to look like a massive deck of cards. As they swung open with a sound like breaking bones, Asprius stepped into a throne room that belonged in a fever dream.
The chamber was a study in organized chaos. The walls were covered in graffiti that moved and shifted when he wasn't looking directly at it. Carnival lights blinked in patterns that seemed almost musical, while the floor was a checkerboard of black and white tiles stained with substances Asprius didn't want to identify.
And there, seated upon a throne made from what appeared to be an enormous jack-in-the-box, was Prince Christopher Britannia himself.
The Joker.
He was beautiful and terrible to behold—tall and lean, with alabaster skin that seemed to glow with its own inner light. His hair was a shock of green that defied gravity, falling in wild tangles around a face that might have been carved by angels... if those angels had been suffering from severe mental illness. His smile stretched from ear to ear, literally—surgical scars at the corners of his mouth had been carefully hidden with makeup, creating the illusion of a permanent, impossibly wide grin.
But it was his eyes that truly captured Asprius's attention. They burned with an intelligence that was both brilliant and utterly, completely mad—purple irises that seemed to swirl with their own inner storms, pupils that dilated and contracted independent of the light.
"Bartley, Bartley, Bartley!" The Joker's voice was a symphony of contradictions—melodious and harsh, welcoming and threatening, sane and utterly deranged. "Welcome to my little corner of paradise! Isn't it beautiful? I do so hope you appreciate the aesthetic—I had the decorator killed! Well, not really killed, just driven insane. Same difference! Ahahahahaha!"
He clapped his hands—long, pale fingers ending in nails painted alternating purple and green—and one of his gang members wheeled forward an ornate chair that looked suspiciously like an electric chair, complete with leather restraints.
"Please, please, take a seat! Make yourself comfortable! Well, as comfortable as one can be when they're about to die! Hehehe!" The Joker's laugh was like the sound of children playing mixed with the screams of the damned.
Asprius approached the chair on trembling legs, his voice barely a whisper. "T-thank you, Your Highness."
"Oh, please!" The Joker waved dismissively, rising from his throne with fluid grace. "Call me Joker! All my friends do. Well, I don't actually have any friends—I killed them all in a fit of artistic inspiration—but if I did have friends, they'd call me Joker! Hahahaha!"
He began to circle Asprius like a shark that had learned to walk, his movements a bizarre combination of elegant dance and predatory stalking. "Now then, my dear Bartley, let's talk about my father's delicious little speech, shall we?"
The Joker produced a remote control shaped like a severed hand and pressed the thumb. The walls themselves seemed to dissolve, replaced by massive screens that displayed Emperor Charles's solemn address to the empire.
"Such passion! Such conviction! Such... lies!" The Joker's voice rose to a shriek before dropping to a whisper. "A beautiful performance, really. Almost brought a tear to my eye. Almost. You see, I had my tear ducts removed years ago—kept getting in the way of the aesthetic! Hehehe!"
His expression shifted like quicksilver from amusement to something darker. "But you know what's really funny, Bartley? He never once mentioned dear brother Clovis. Not once! The brother who died under your watch while you sat there picking your nose and dreaming of sheep! Ahahahahaha!"
Before Asprius could respond, The Joker's foot connected with the chair, sending him tumbling to the checkerboard floor. Above him, the Prince's shadow fell like a shroud.
"That senile old fool sits on his throne, preaching about equality while the world burns around him! Equality! What a joke! The only equality in this world is that everyone dies the same way—screaming! Hahahaha!"
The Joker began to pace, his hands gesticulating wildly as his voice rose and fell like a deranged opera singer. "Because of his beautiful philosophy, our enemies grow stronger every day! Instead of studying them, learning their weaknesses, understanding what makes them tick-tick-tick like little bombs waiting to explode, we reduce them to numbers on a spreadsheet!"
He stopped directly over Asprius, his purple eyes blazing with manic intensity. "We know nothing about our enemies! And now they have a leader—this Zero character! How deliciously dramatic! Like you and my dear departed brother, you both underestimated your opponents, believing in your own superiority!"
The Joker's laugh started as a giggle and built to a roar that shook the walls. "And now poor Clovis has a bullet in his brain! Well, several bullets, actually. I counted! One... two... three... four... such a lovely pattern! Like Jackson Pollock, but with more viscera! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
He returned to his throne with a theatrical flourish, settling into it like a king claiming his birthright. "Now then, my trembling little mouse, tell me—why was my brother playing in the Shinjuku Ghetto? And remember..." His voice dropped to a whisper that somehow carried more menace than his loudest scream. "I can always tell when someone's lying. It's a gift. Lying makes people's faces do the most interesting things, and when they do..."
The Joker reached into his jacket and withdrew a knife that gleamed with more than metal—its blade seemed to hunger for flesh.
"I like to give them something to really smile about! Hehehe!"
Asprius's voice cracked like breaking ice. "P-Prince Clovis was conducting experiments! On a test subject! She escaped, and to cover it up—"
"He claimed it was poison gas!" The Joker finished, his grin impossibly wide. "Oh, how perfectly boring! Leave it to Clovis to take something as beautiful as human experimentation and make it mundane! Where's the artistry? Where's the style? Where's the panache?"
He leaned forward, his eyes gleaming with sudden interest. "But tell me, my quivering little butterfly, do you have proof of these so-called experiments? Pictures? Video? Finger paintings done in blood?"
Still sprawled on the floor, Asprius fumbled for a manila envelope with shaking hands. He withdrew several photographs, and The Joker descended from his throne like a spider dropping from its web.
The Prince examined each image with the intensity of an art critic studying a masterpiece, occasionally making small sounds of appreciation or disappointment. When he reached one particular photograph, his entire demeanor shifted.
The laughter stopped.
The manic energy drained from his face like water from a broken dam, replaced by something far more dangerous—cold, calculating intelligence that was somehow more terrifying than his madness.
"Where," he said in a voice like winter wind through broken glass, "is this woman now?"
The question hung in the air like a blade waiting to fall. Asprius felt his bowels turn to water.
"I... I don't know, my lord! We lost her in the Shinjuku Ghetto, but given time—"
"Time?" The Joker's voice rose like a siren. "TIME?! Do you know what time is, Bartley? Time is a joke! A cosmic punchline! Time is what separates the living from the dead, the sane from the beautifully insane!"
His knife moved faster than thought, faster than prayer, faster than hope. A thin line of red appeared across Asprius's throat like a second smile.
"And your time..." The Joker whispered as blood began to flow. "...is up! AHAHAHAHAHA!"
Asprius collapsed, his life painting the checkerboard floor in abstract patterns that would have made the Joker proud. The Prince cleaned his blade with a purple handkerchief embroidered with laughing skulls.
"Art," he declared to no one in particular, "is eternal. Unlike Britannian bureaucrats! Hehehe! Guards! Clean up this mess! And do try not to disturb the composition—it's actually quite striking!"
Later: The Nerve Center of Madness
The Joker entered the facility's command center like a king returning to his court. The chamber was a monument to organized insanity—dozens of screens showing feeds from across the facility, each one displaying a different form of controlled chaos. The walls were covered in maps of the world, but instead of political boundaries, they showed "Smile Zones" and "Laughter Distribution Networks."
His staff—a collection of brilliant minds driven to the edge of madness and loving every minute of it—snapped to attention with military precision before breaking into synchronized laughter.
"Hail Joker! Hail Joker! Hail Joker!" they chanted, their voices creating a harmony that sounded almost musical.
The Joker acknowledged them with an elaborate bow, complete with a flourish of his purple coat. "My beautiful lunatics! My gorgeous psychopaths! What delicious news do we have today?"
He approached the central display, which showed archived footage from the Battle of Shinjuku Ghetto. The images of destruction and death played across his pale features like a slideshow of fond memories.
"Such waste," he murmured, tracing patterns in the air that only he could see. "Such beautiful, terrible waste. All those people, dying for nothing. At least when I kill people, it's for art! For the aesthetic! For the joke!"
He turned to one of his subordinates—a woman whose lab coat was splattered with substances that defied identification. "Tell me, my dear Dr. Quinzel, who will be ruling Japan now? And please don't say 'Area 11'—that designation makes me want to vomit. Which, incidentally, I cannot do anymore due to certain modifications I've made to my digestive system! Hehehe!"
Dr. Quinzel consulted a tablet covered in heart-shaped stickers and smiley face decals. "Princess Euphemia has been assigned primary control, Mr. J! But intelligence suggests her older sister Cornelia will be joining her as military commander!"
The Joker's expression shifted through a dozen emotions in as many seconds—annoyance, amusement, calculation, and something that might have been genuine affection before settling on manic glee.
"My darling sisters! Oh, how I've missed them! Well, not really miss them—missing implies emotional attachment, and I had that surgically removed along with my appendix—but I've certainly thought about them! Constantly! Usually while sharpening knives! Ahahaha!"
He clapped his hands together like a delighted child. "Establish communications! I simply must speak with them! It's been far too long since we've had a proper family chat!"
The technicians worked with the efficiency of the professionally deranged, and soon the main screen displayed the faces of his two sisters. The contrast was immediately apparent—Euphemia's expression brightened with genuine joy upon seeing her brother, while Cornelia's face hardened into a mask of suspicious concern.
"Christopher!" Euphemia exclaimed, her voice filled with warmth that seemed to physically pain The Joker. "It's wonderful to see you! You look... different. Have you been eating enough? You seem so thin..."
The Joker's laugh was like champagne flutes shattering against marble. "Eating? Oh, my dear sister, I've been feasting! Feasting on chaos! Dining on madness! Supping on the screams of my enemies! It's a very balanced diet! High in irony, low in sanity! Hehehe!"
Cornelia's voice cut through his laughter like a sword through silk. "Christopher, what do you want? You only contact us when you're planning something terrible."
"Terrible?" The Joker pressed a hand to his chest in mock offense. "My dear Cornelia, you wound me! Right here, in my heart! Well, not literally—I had my heart replaced with a much more efficient model years ago! Tick-tock-tick-tock! Can you hear it? Ahahaha!"
His expression shifted suddenly, the laughter dying as his purple eyes became calculating laser beams. "I want to participate in governing Japan. I believe I'm uniquely qualified to bring order to chaos, meaning to madness, and beautiful suffering to the masses!"
Cornelia's patience snapped like an overstressed cable. "Absolutely not! Christopher, I don't know what's happened to you, but you're not fit to govern a doghouse, let alone a territory! And stop calling it Japan—it's Area 11 now!"
The Joker's smile became something that belonged on the face of a hungry shark. "Area 11? Area 11?! Oh, my dear sister, that's where you're wrong! Names have power! Magic! Music! When you call a place by a number, you steal its soul! And I intend to give Japan back its soul... along with a few extra appendages! Hehehehe!"
He began to pace in front of the screen, his movements becoming more agitated, more manic. "You see, dear sisters, our empire suffers from a terrible disease—sanity! Logic! Rational thought! It's disgusting! People need chaos in their lives! They need fear! They need to laugh until their faces hurt and cry until their tears run red!"
"Christopher..." Euphemia's voice was soft, filled with concern and barely contained tears. "What happened to you? You used to be so... so kind..."
The Joker stopped pacing, his entire body going completely still. For a moment, something flickered behind his eyes—a ghost of the person he used to be, a shadow of the brother they remembered.
Then he smiled, and the moment was gone.
"Kindness," he whispered, the word dripping with venom, "kindness is what got Clovis killed. Kindness is what makes our enemies strong. Kindness is the greatest joke of all—because in the end, everyone dies the same way, whether they're kind or cruel, sane or beautifully mad!"
His laugh started small and built to a crescendo that shook the very foundations of the building. "AHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, but enough philosophy! I have a proposal for you both!"
Euphemia straightened, hope flickering in her eyes. "What kind of proposal?"
"I want to work alongside you, dear sister! Think of it—your compassion and my methods! Your mercy and my justice! Your sanity and my beautiful madness! We could create something truly special together! A work of art painted in blood and laughter!"
Cornelia's voice was ice and steel. "Absolutely not. I won't let you turn Japan into another one of your experiments."
The Joker's expression became thoughtful, almost philosophical. "But my dear Cornelia, everything is an experiment! Life is an experiment! Death is an experiment! Love, hate, war, peace—all just different hypotheses waiting to be tested!"
He leaned closer to the screen, his purple eyes burning with intensity. "However, I'm feeling generous today! So here's what we're going to do—Euphemia gets to play governor, making all the boring political decisions and signing the tedious paperwork. But I get to handle security. All those troublesome terrorists and rebels and spoilsports who don't appreciate the beauty of Britannian rule!"
"Christopher..." Euphemia began, but he held up a pale hand.
"But," he continued, his voice dropping to a whisper that somehow carried more menace than his loudest scream, "remember that this will be Joker's operation. My rules. My methods. My beautiful, terrible justice. And if either of you tries to intervene with my art..."
His smile stretched impossibly wide, the surgical scars at the corners of his mouth becoming visible for just a moment.
"I'll kill you both! And it will behilarious! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
The laughter went on and on, building to a crescendo that seemed to shake reality itself. Cornelia clenched her fists, her face twisted with anger and disgust, while Euphemia's expression crumbled into heartbreak.
"Joker out!" He served the connection with a theatrical flourish, the screens going dark.
In her private chambers, Euphemia sat before a family portrait that seemed to mock her with its display of happier times. There was Christopher, younger and sane, his smile genuine instead of madness, hope instead of the terrible hunger that now consumed him.
Tears fell like rain on the glass as she whispered to the painted image of her lost brother.
"What happened to you, Christopher? What turned you into... this? Where did my kind, gentle brother go?"
But the portrait offered no answers, just the memory of a smile that had once been real, before it became a weapon sharper than any blade.
Somewhere in the distance, carried on the chemical wind, she could hear the sound of laughter—beautiful, terrible, and utterly, completely mad.