| abstract | - Thanks to some of the girls Batman had interrogated and offered to help out earlier, Bruce is able to get back to one of his penthouses and alert Alfred. During his bout of unconsciousness, Bruce dreams of the two previous fake Batmen. In his dream, he senses the forthcoming arrival of a third Batman and his feverous mind tries to make a connection between all of this and the arrival of his son Damian into his life. Bruce shoots up out of bed to find that Tim has gone off to take on the second Batman. A monstrous hulk whom Batman believes has been dosed with both Hugo Strange's Monster Serum as well as the Venom formula. Bruce prepares to go back out to help Tim but first he asks Alfred if he recalled the Black Casebook, a series of cases from Batman's earlier career pertaining to UFOs, vampires and other paranormal phenomenon. Alfred replied that he had recently ran across it and assumed that they were the hallucinatory results of some exposure to either the Joker toxin or Scarecrow's fear gas. Regardless, Bruce can't help but feel that the recent appearances of these false Batmen have something to do with one Black casebook case in particular. In the case, Bruce encountered three versions of himself, a gun toting killer Batman, a roided out bestial Batman and a third which had sold his soul to the Devil and destroyed Gotham. After toweling himself off in his testosterone laden alpha male boardroom attire, Bruce arrives to find Tim in over his head with the gigantic Batman imposter. He gets Tim out of harms way and begins battling the Beast but before he can unmask him and find out who the Third potential Batman might be - a Gotham PD squad car pulls up and holds Batman at gunpoint, ordering him to stop. Batman triggers the self-destruct mechanism on the Batmobile as a diversion and escapes. Later, he talks to Gordon and finds that Jim is facing the same wall of silence regarding the imposter Bat-cops. Even the mayor is putting pressure on Gordon to back off. Elsewhere, Talia and Damian return to their base following the battle in Gibraltar. While Damian is getting his wounds attended to, Talia receives word that Bruce has been continually spotted with the heiress Jezebel Jet. Talia is less than pleased by this information. But Talia isn't the only one keeping an eye on the budding couple of Bruce Wayne and Jezebel Jet. As the two are hounded by paparazzi while they vacation in Venice, someone wearing a pair of black gloves seems very interested in the two young lovers.
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