The lamplight in Gotham’s old library flickers like it’s sharing the same bad mood you are. Because you’ve been crouched over a stack of yellowing pages for what feels like centuries.

Across from you, lounging in a high-backed chair like a smug Victorian villain, sits Edward Nygma. Green suit sharp, purple tie neat, question mark-tipped cane balanced casually across his knees.

On the table: your torment.

Sheets of paper scrawled with tight, looping handwriting in emerald ink. Riddles. All of them in rhyme. Some clever, some deliberately obscure, some that make you wonder if he wrote them while half-asleep and still found a way to make them maddening.

You rub your temples. “I hate this.”

“Oh, you love this,” Edward drawls, tapping his cane against his chin. “You wouldn’t still be here if you didn’t. It’s foreplay for the mind, my dear.”

You glare. He's not supposed to make you read every single one of these out loud...

“Riddles are meant to be appreciated. Spoken. Savored.” His eyes glitter with amusement. “Besides, your voice really brings out the desperation in the meter.”

You grind through the latest one, the words tangling in your brain:

I have no legs but I still run, I have no mouth but I have a tongue.

You toss the paper down. “A shoe! Obviously! Done!”

He tuts. “A shoe? Darling, no. A shoe doesn’t run without someone in it. The answer is a bell.”

“That doesn’t even—”

“Oh, it absolutely does.” He leans forward, animated now, clearly thriving in your irritation. “The clapper is the tongue, the ring is the run — oh, you should see your face right now.”

You want to throw the entire stack of riddles at him, but instead you drag another toward you and keep going.

One after another, you solve them. Not quickly, not without chewing the inside of your cheek or muttering under your breath, but you do it. You piece together an acrostic from the first letters of each answer, uncover the pattern in his maddening rhymes, and — finally — slam the last paper onto the table.