Re: Batman/Maria/Superman
On the edge of the bank of keyboards, a small cartridge case sat waiting. Batman reached for it now and handed it to Hill. It contained several flash drives, neatly slotted into place. "Everything I've shown you is stored here, as well as some other data that may be of use to you in your investigation," he told her.
"There are variants of the Fear Gas," he responded. "The main components are the same, but Crane modifies it to suit his purposes. The basic gas is non-lethal, however approximately thirty percent will die of heart failure or accidents related to their exposure. The fatal version is a one-hundred percent effective unless the antidote is administered. Unlike the Joker Toxin, there's no window - anytime before death will do, however there still is a risk of mental instability afterward.
"They're not aware of their surroundings except as a peripheral image," he tried to explain, frowning slightly. "The thing in the corner of your eye that's gone when you turn to look directly at it. Subconsciously, you know it's there, but all you can focus on is the nightmare in front of you. Someone walking in front of an oncoming car is aware the car is coming, but is so transfixed by whatever is terrifying him that he can't process the information enough to get out of the way."
Batman stared at the images with her, grimly. He had seen each of these faces, taken the videos or pictures personally, for his own records. These were his failures. He nodded in agreement with her hypothesis. "He wanted Kal out of his mind and out of control," he said. "Fear, pain - the common animal lashes out at his attacker. He was counting on that with Kal - on humilating him by taking him down to that base level with the rest of us. I believe what he got was something else, but it achieved the same end. Kal shot at him, and to all the world, it appeared that he had killed a man."
Looking at Hill for a long moment, Batman got up and signals for her to follow him. "I want to show you something." Taking her back down to Sub-Level One, he turned in the opposite direction from the Library this time, leading her past the workshops and medical bay to the labs. The sound of a waterfall echoed behind them as Batman unlocked a lead cabinet and withdrew a small box, also made of lead.
Opening it with a key from his utility belt, he showed her a collection of hundreds of tiny glowing green fragments, each no bigger than size twelve lead shot. "I don't want to leave this open long," he said quietly. "He can feel it up there. This is what I pulled from him afterward. He told you what it feels like. Even so, this isn't actually enough to kill him; not by itself. It was cause him extreme pain - agony. It dilutes his powers even. Joker had this packed in his teeth, so that when Kal punched him, it embedded in his fist, his face, arms, chest..."
He closed the box. "Once weakened, adding the Fear Gas, and Joker Toxin to his system would have been a mental and physical assult intended to push him over the edge, if not kill him. I think killing Kal would have been only a secondary goal to humiliating him by making it appear as though he'd betrayed his code of ethics."
Putting the box back in the case, Batman locked it away again. He still had some tests he wanted to run on it before he added it to his own stores. "Kryptonite is mildly radioactive; prolonged exposure to humans will result in carcinoma. A few years ago, Kal and I did a sweep of the planet and our solar system for any traces of it we could find. We threw everything we located into the sun to destroy it, but we know that there are two people on the planet who still have some in their posession: myself, and Lex Luthor. I believe Joker got his from Luthor."
Batman didn't tell Hill precisely how much Kryptonite he had, stored in a vault just a few levels below them. SHIELD didn't need to have that information. He wouldn't have told them that Luthor had any at all, except that he needed to provide a source for Joker's procurement, and there was only one other supplier. "Luthor wouldn't have given it to him for free, either," Batman added. "It's incredibly valuable to him; if he gave even this much to Joker, it was because Joker promised him something big."