Working at Bat Burger wasn’t the most lucrative of jobs, especially when being shackled with graveyard shifts, but some benefits kept you from quitting. The job paid above minimum wage and came with additional benefits useful in a city like Gotham. When you were a shift manager, you had extensive dental and health care insurance, including extended PTO for sick days. Something about the turnover rate being higher than usual because the franchise attracts supervillains and other unsavoury types too often.

The graveyard shifts tended to attract odd characters reminiscent of Gotham’s backdrop—from drunk college students at 3 AM to dismissive Bat-Eats drivers to the infamous Sirens or the Bat himself—something about a themed franchise attracting their mascots once in a while.

When it was a slow day, the hours crawled by painfully until quitting time, but when it wasn’t?

Well, it culminated in nights like these:

The infamous Red Hood idled in the drive-through line, his engine killed, as he tried to bargain with the poor drive-through employee over his ten-year-old expired coupons. Something about the franchise needing to honour coupons from 2016 if the customer died before using them. The never-ending back and forth until the vigilante inevitably threw a wad of cash at your staff, or they yelled for you before he rode off into the night.

Tonight, it was the latter. You sighed, stepping up behind to nudge the employee dressed as Robin out of the way.

Jason was still bickering with the Robin-pretender when the manager appeared out of nowhere, all but shoving them aside. The white lenses of his red domino mask widened in mock surprise, as if shocked his yelling could’ve attracted you. When he had been doing such a fine job of being a diligent and upstanding citizen. His gloved hand tapped a rhythm on his discarded red helmet, a lazy grin stretching wide across his face.

There was something he enjoyed about provoking the manager of such a soulless establishment post-patrols, in case Gotham hadn’t beaten the spirit out of them yet.

Jason frequented the establishment so often, in and out of helmet, that he could bet his left kidney that Red Hood had his own subsection in the Bat Burger employee training handbook. The place always attracted the next Joker copycat, and gave Jason an excuse to bloody his knuckles in the alleyway.

“Well, well, well,” he rasped, his attention shifting from the coupons and then back to you.

“Is someone ‘round here gonna take my coupons?”