Nasty Habit (Riddlebat)

I

11:34pm, Friday 10 December

Edward Nashton sat in his dank, plain prison cell, bored out of his mind. Lost in his thoughts of taking down all the rich businessmen and politicians. He was so distracted, he barely registered the cackling from the cell next to him. The laughing got louder and louder until it was almost hysterical, and Edward was curious about what was so funny. He readjusted his glasses and moved towards the wall so the person on the other side could hear him better.

"What's funny?" Edward disdainfully asked the man in the other cell who- if he remembered correctly- was called 'The Joker'. Personally, Edward didn't think that that was his real name. A villain name, like what 'The Riddler' was to him.
Joker kept cackling, and Edward got steadily more annoyed.
"What's so funny?" he asked again.
Joker giggled and said, "Oh, you'll see, alright."
Edward rolled his eyes. His fellow villains seemed to absolutely hate giving specifics- it was always 'you'll see' or 'just you wait'. Couldn't they just tell him what they were going to do?

Fortunately, he didn't have to wait long to find out.

BOOM.

A boom echoed through the prison and Edward found the wall opposite to him blasted away; a quick glance showed that everyone else's cells had had the same treatment. Not missing a beat, Edward sprinted out of the cell and into the grounds, where he struggled to get over the wire fence due to having bound hands. Thankfully, one of Joker's goons was there to help him- he assumed that they were the ones that had blown a hole in his wall- and they made a hole with pliers for him.
He grinned, giving quick thanks to the goon, and made his way through the fence and out into the city of Gotham.

He heard shouts of other prisoners as they were handcuffed and sent back into the prison. This motivated Edward to run, still with his chains binding his hands on, and get as far away as possible from Arkham.
"Stupid... things," Edward muttered to himself as he fiddled with the cuffs, trying unsuccessfully to get them off. Police sirens sounded in the distance, and, startled, he darted into an alleyway to hide from the approaching police cars.

The few seconds that the police cars went by were stressful to say the least, but thankfully the cars missed him and went cruising past.
Edward continued walking down the streets of Gotham, walking for another twenty minutes or so, until he came across a junkie, slumped over in another small alleyway and clearly unconscious.
Edward glanced right.
He glanced left.
He glanced down the street.
There was nobody out on this dark night.

Almost desperately, Edward grabbed the man's jacket, looking for anything that could help him.
"C'mon, come on, have something good," he muttered quietly to himself as he looted the unconscious man's pockets.
He found something good.
A pocket knife.
"Yesss," Edward hissed in jubilation, grinning and holding the pocket knife up to the street lamp's light to see it gleam; it was barely used, yet a little bit of dried blood lay on the blade.

He used the lower part of the knife to mould one of his handcuffs to a different shape, which he easily slipped his hand out of. With one hand free and a pocket knife at hand, it was easy to discard the rest. He could no longer be identified as an Arkham Asylum escapee.
Apart from his striped shirt that clearly read 'Arkham' on it.
Shit.

Edward knew he had a flimsy white vest underneath the shirt, so he did the only thing he could. He took the shirt off.
In the middle of December.
Freezing? Maybe, but at least he couldn't be tracked down any more.
That was an advantage of what he looked like- all these other villains had weird alterations or weird hair colours or whatever else, but The Riddler? He was literally just your average white man. Brown hair, glasses, round face- that could describe anyone; it was so easy to blend in with normal society.