If you had to choose between your ambition and the life of someone you care about, what would you do?
A list of moral questions to developing a villainous character @halfghcst , @qu-tipie asked these too
"Of all the questions you had to ask, it just had to be this one, didn't it?" Edward said. He's frowning, thin face scrunched up in an odd mixture of contemplation and, dare he say, confliction. Because his answer would have been very different had he been asked this conundrum not so very long ago. Killing the Batman had become his burning ambition. It didn't always used to be that way. The vigilante had only been an annoyance at the start, a roadblock on his path to pulling the plug beneath Gotham's sordid underbelly and exposing her filth for all to see. His noble goal had been stopped however, Batman no doubt being in on that corruption. Worse still, Edward had been punished for it! Thrown into Blackgate like some common criminal, and everything that had gone wrong in his life since was all that stupid bat's fault. But he'd made certain acquaintances along the way, hadn't he? People that might not have wormed their way into his life had Edward never been pushed to such extreme measures. People like Artemis, even Jonathan to some extent. Killing Batman was still something Edward very much wanted but... was he really willing to go that far? Risk their lives just for a chance at revenge? Before the answer would have been so easy. It would have been a resounding yes, a thought he wouldn't have thought twice about. Now Edward wasn't so sure, and it was disturbing to think how he could be swayed so easily by such silly, sentimental feelings. His face scrunches further, clearly not liking what he was about to say.
"As the Riddler, I have hundreds, thousands of ideas I can put into action at any given moment. Were I forced to pick between killing the bat and ensuring at least one life I remotely cared about would be safe, I'd pick the latter." Edward said grudgingly. Oh, he'd hate it, especially if victory was within grasp of his ambitious hands but Lady Luck favoured the bat too often for his liking and Edward wasn't about to put that theory to the test anytime soon. "I can always come up with another plan, another brilliant idea to extract my rightful revenge against that bothersome bat no matter how long it takes. As it is, bringing somebody back from the dead is a lot harder than it is killing them, but I only need one perfect idea to succeed in my goal. It can be done." He was the man, he had the plan and Edward was nothing if not patient. He'd waited a long time for his revenge, what was a few more until the perfect opportunity arose?
