Higher Up On The Aviary Ladder.

Higher Up On The Aviary Ladder.

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The city of Gotham is known for its high crime rates that spread like a plague throughout and fo course one caped crusader is the ‘cure’,  much like the animal kingdoms there are many species of citizens in the city,  good guys and bad guys, predator and prey - and those predators are often villain such as the case of Victor “Hawk Talon” Reed who had built a reputation in Gotham’s underworld as a predator: swift, precise, and utterly ruthless in his methods of bringing down competition. He’d chosen his moniker at fifteen, inspired by his idol, the red-tailed hawk—master of the thermals, king of ambush. Over the years, he’d used that reputation to intimidate rivals, shake down small-time crooks, and carve out his slice of the city’s criminal pie. But ambition, like hunger, is never satisfied and it acts like a drug you cannot shake the effects off.

One rain-slicked night when all of the citizens were asleep, Hawk Talon slipped into an abandoned chemical plant on Gotham’s East Side, hunting a rumored cache of performance-enhancing drugs. The plant’s interior stank of sulfur and rust, the flicker of broken fluorescents casting long, crooked shadows across vats of half-dried chemicals - even though it had been abandoned for many years, it was still running and in business despite the lack of people running it. As he pried open a sealed drum, he came across what appeared to be an special brand of drug known as ‘Avian X’,  which was one that promised the gift of being able to develop enhanced avian-like hunting skills.

His pulse quickened. A new edge. The promise of something more than muscle and bullets. With a shrug, he dumped the powder into a cup of stagnant water and raised it to his lips. The liquid tasted of metal and ash and within moments later, Hawk Talon felt it: a creeping numbness in his fingertips, a horrid tingling behind his eyes. He stumbled, heart thundering, as the room spun. His reflection in a shattered mirror pulsed, warped— as his body slowly gained weight and he shrank down in height and his hands took on a deformed look, looking more like webbed flipperish hands than normal ones.

He looked as his clothing slowly morphed into an elegant tuxedo type ensemble while his hair slowly receded except for at the back where it grew longer and longer and turned black, a top hat and monocle appeared as his nose lengthened, taking on the appearance of looking beakish,  he did not need to be concerned though as he oddly liked it, his voice shifting to match his appearance and he found he had taken on the appearance and voice of the Penguin, and he even sounded like the Penguin’s voice actor.  And before you go assuming an AI wrote this to rip off another writer, far from it,  while the prompt was brought to you by Chatgpt (product placement within a story, how sad, I know, but hey others do this sometimes and no one questions this), this story in general was brought to you via someone else’s imagination and not made to steal from someone, so cool your jets.

When he dared open his eyes again, Victor Reed was gone - well at least in the sense of his appearance and voice,  there was now Oswald Cobblepot aka the Penguin, one of the most notorious criminals ever to live.  He looked around, and he found that he did not need to posses hunting skills like those of a hawk to prove how skilled he was, it did not matter if he was a falcon, owl, vulture or even a penguin, a bird is a bird and of course bird is indeed the word