Well, you guys wanted it, I felt compelled to do it, so here's a little follow-up for Nerd. It won't be anywhere near as long, but I think it'll do.

By the way, if you're reading this and saying "What the hell is Nerd?" you might consider reading it first. It will inform you in all the ways of the world. Okay, no it won't. It's just the prequel and it'll fill you in on how the characters got where they are. If you don't feel like reading Nerd, in all its glory, read the first and last chapters. That might be enough, though you'll miss the toaster action. Yeah, that caught your attention, didn't it? No? Then there is no pleasing you.

Summary: Poison Ivy and the Scarecrow have joined forces and are plotting murder. Batman would never admit it, but he almost wants them to succeed. Why? Because their intended victim is the Joker. Sequel to Nerd.

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Poison Ivy was busy tending to the dozens of specimens she kept in her home when Harley and the Scarecrow returned from their adventure in the greenhouse. Judging by the way Crane was hanging onto Harley for support, the visit with Mel the giant Venus flytrap hadn't gone well. Ivy supposed she should have warned them that early morning was Mel's usual feeding time. It might have saved them some trauma.

"Mel tried to eat the Professor, but I saved him," Harley said.

"That's nice. I'll find you some cereal after I finish watering the orchids." Ivy replied.

The Scarecrow, stunned by his near-death encounter with a plant of all things, had nothing to add to the conversation. He didn't want cereal; he wanted a plane to drop napalm or Agent Orange on Mel and wither the toothy son of a geranium.

"Do you have Lucky Charms or Fruit Loops?" Harley asked.

"No, I have Raisin Bran."

"But that's old-people cereal! I want marshmallows and fun shapes and little prizes inside the box. Don't you have anythin' like that, Red?" Harley whined.

"All that sugar is bad for you."

"No it's not. I need it, I really do."

"That's because you've become addicted to chemical additives and commercials with leprechauns in them. There are no marshmallows in nature, Harley."

"But nature's boring!"

Crane was not in the mood to listen to an argument, especially not an argument over cereal. He unattached himself from Harley, managed not to collapse, and limped off for the kitchen. Maybe he'd get lucky and find Ivy kept some kind of wine in the fridge. Many kinds of fruit--everything from grapes to apples--could be fermented into some sort of alcoholic beverage. Considering how he felt, he'd drink kumquat wine if offered.

Alas, there was nothing that resembled homemade booze in Ivy's fridge. There wasn't much that even resembled food. The fruit and vegetable bins were the only things stocked with items Crane could readily identify. As for what Ivy had arranged on the shelves, he had no intention of touching any of it. Especially not the green capillaries that, even as he watched, reached for the open air and light of the world beyond the refrigerator.

Plants were not supposed to do that! They were supposed to stay firmly rooted, make only imperceptible movements as they followed the sun, and die without a fuss. They were not supposed to eat people, have a mind of their own, or usurp territory inside refrigerators.

"They're nothing to worry about, Crane. I've been trying to create a plant that could spread faster than kudzu, but stand severe cold. Right now, that's all I've managed to achieve. It can survive temperatures a few degrees below freezing, but the movement and growth stops entirely right at 32 degrees."

The Scarecrow turned around to find Ivy and Harley entering the room. Harley was wearing a pout, which meant she wasn't going to be fed anything with a high sugar content. Ivy was pointedly ignoring her.

"Your plants disturb me."

"That's only because you don't know them better. Spend a little time in the green, Crane, and everything will start to grow on you."

"That's what worries me. You don't happen to know a little film put together in 1982 called Creepshow, do you?" Crane asked.

"I rarely watch television."

"In the movie, a man is unlucky enough to have plants literally 'grow on him'. The man commits suicide to escape the parasitic plants overtaking his body. I'd prefer not to share his experience."

Ivy sighed, "He only acts like that because he's a man. He's too self-centered to see the beauty of what's happening."

"I don't know, Red, it sounds gross." Harley said.

"I'll show you plants are the most perfect things on Earth. Harley, go eat a bagel or something. Crane, come upstairs with me."

The Scarecrow wanted to go upstairs with Ivy just a wee bit more than we wanted to go knocking around in the sewers with Killer Croc. Reluctantly, he compelled his tired feet to turn away from the fridge. Ivy had all ready disappeared into the hall. She apparently didn't care that he'd landed heavily on his left leg when Mel had dropped him and that he now limping thanks to the damned weed.

Ivy was waiting at the top of the stairs. When Crane finally made it up to the second floor, she led him to a bathroom that was practically swarming with plants. Mercifully, none of them were moving or abnormally large.

"Sit on the edge of the tub, and make sure you don't fall in."

Crane sat down. He had no idea why he was trapped in Ivy's bathroom with a hundred potted plants to observe whatever was about to take place, and he was far from comfortable. He still couldn't sleep, he couldn't even get drunk and dull his misery that way, and he was still freaked out by the liveliness exhibited by some of the foliage.

"What are you planning on doing to me?" Crane asked.

"In case you didn't notice, you look like crap." Ivy said.

"Thank you. It's the best compliment I've been given in days. Let me go to sleep and I'll look better in the morning."

"Going to sleep isn't going to fix that limp, or whatever injury is hiding beneath your hair, or the spider bite you told me about."

"My injuries are exactly that: mine. I'm a trained medical professional and fully capable of treating myself.

"Let me see them."

"Absolutely not."

"You're in my bathroom, and I'm telling you to at least let me see what that revolting clown did to you. I'm not going to have you die on my couch."

The Scarecrow glared. "I am in no danger of dying. Help Harley butter her bagel and point me to the nearest Advil."

"I don't have Advil."

"Damn, I all ready tried Tylenol. Never mind, I'll take it again."

"I don't have Tylenol, either."

Well, that was just jolly. What did she have, children's Motrin? A great lot of help that would do him.

"Do you have any commercial painkillers, or should I just suffer?"

"I never buy medicine. Nature provides everything I need; that's what I wanted to show you."

Crane rose from the tub and headed for the door. He trusted so called 'natural cures' as much as he trusted the insane men with long beards and wild eyes that dwelled in the park and claimed to be the shooter on the grassy knoll. If he wanted stinking plant sap rubbed all over his body, he'd go out and roll in some bushes.

"Sit back down before I make you."

"By all means, try. In case you failed to notice, I hold the height advantage and the weight advantage, if only by ounces."

Instead of sweeping his legs out from under him, knocking him on the back of the head, or putting him in a headlock, Ivy took pity on the Scarecrow. She grabbed his shirt, spun him around, and gave him the singularly most exciting kiss of his life.

Seconds later, the toxins in Ivy's kiss all but immobilized Crane. He slid to the floor despite his best efforts to crawl away. Whatever pretty poison Ivy carried, the Scarecrow was little match for it.

"Don't…touch me…I'm warning…you."

He passed out immediately after uttering his pointless warning. Once her victim was getting the sleep he so desired, Ivy set to work.

An unknown amount of time later, Crane became vaguely aware of sensation in the void. He felt...pressure. Not crushing pressure, like someone was sitting on his chest in an attempt to stymie his breathing, but not a light touch, either. It felt like a heaviness in his feet, akin to what he supposed poor circulation would feel like.

"Professor."

A voice, high, feminine, far off in the distance. He didn't want to respond to the voice. He wanted to stay where it was dark and peaceful and his beaten body and exhausted mind could recover.

"Hey, Professor, anybody home?"

No, nobody was home, the lights were off, the driveway was empty, the newspaper subscription had been canceled. He was on vacation, relaxing, kicking up his heels. And he was not to be disturbed.

"Professor, if you get up now, you can see yourself on the news. Look, it starting! There's that floozy Mister J said had a nicer smile than me."

The Scarecrow sat straight up, all drowsiness and annoyance forgotten. He ascertained that he had been sleeping on the couch and Harley, having her usual seat taken, had decided to perch on his outstretched legs. Normally, Crane disliked being used as furniture, but right now there were more important things. He was going to be a headline; Gotham's residents would see him and cower in their little hovels.

"As many of you know, the criminal known as the Scarecrow attacked a supermarket yesterday. Over two dozen people were treated for exposure to his poison gas, which causes fear and hallucinations in anyone unlucky enough to breathe it in. Tonight, we've got a follow-up story and a really amazing video sent to us by a viewer." The anchorwoman said.

Crane would not have called himself vain--it was quite hard to be vain when you spent a good deal of the time hiding your body so it wouldn't frighten people off--but he did enjoy airtime. It was basically free publicity. Let the news networks broadcast his image, let them beam toxin-induced nightmares right into peoples' homes, let the populace see that Glenn Beck's War Room wasn't the scariest thing on television.

"This was the scene yesterday. The following video was recorded by a store security camera and may be disturbing to some viewers."

The Scarecrow relished those words: disturbing to some viewers. Yes, seeing shoppers panic and stampede like the frightened sheep they were certainly could be disquieting. The idea that a villain could shop with them, stand in a checkout line with them and they'd be none the wiser until escape was impossible would terrify people. Make them paranoid. Make them jumpier than grasshoppers on a hot griddle whenever they went out to buy bread and eggs.

The blonde's male counterpart threw in his two cents, "Yes, that is certainly difficult to watch. Luckily, all those affected were treated successfully. A cashier suffered a head injury and is still hospitalized, but he is expected to make a full recovery within a few days. It's always good when these terrible stories have happy endings."

Crane chuckled darkly, in the way only villains could, "The end, is it? We'll see how many of those people wind up in therapy, on medication, reduced to fearful, quivering-"

"Some of us are trying to watch the news and the 'Master of Fear' act is getting a little too loud."

Ivy! She'd kissed him, her kiss had knocked him out faster than a crowbar applied to the skull, and he had no idea what she'd been up to with his unconscious body. For all Crane knew, the green redhead had sprinkled him with deadly spores that would sprout soon and drain nutrients from his body like the strangler fig did to its host tree.

"You kissed me!" Crane accused.

Ivy smirked and Harley gasped. She looked from Red to Crane and burst into laughter. She'd been expecting Ivy and Professor Crane to stand each others' presence, but apparently they were getting frisky when she wasn't around.

"Please, Harley, it wasn't anything like that. I had to subdue him and I didn't want to hurt him."

"What did you do to me while I was drugged? Did you plant anything on me, anything in me?" Crane demanded.

"I'll explain everything I did in painfully boring scientific detail as soon as I see this news segment. And no, I didn't plant anything in, on, or around you. So calm down."

Still groused by Ivy's audacity, Crane settled down to watch some more glorifying footage. To his horror, the image that appeared on the screen was of him crawling on his hands and knees like an infant. It was the video shot by that insipid Internet hound, the one that banged on the window to get his attention. Yes, as soon as the Joker was dead and buried--or burned, or thrown in a Dumpster, or ground up, turned into inedible meat pies and served to the inmates of Arkham--Crane was definitely seeing if he couldn't get the Riddler interested in crashing YouTube and all sites like it.

"Hey, Scarecrow, look up here," The cameraman said.

The crippled, pathetic Scarecrow on the television flipped off the cameraman. A pixilated blur blocked out the offending digit. Ivy and Harley both laughed. Crane wished he had never woken up.

"That was really terrifying, Crane. I think I hear some of my plants watering themselves. Either that, or they're laughing."

"You got blurred out! It's like on that episode of Cops when they arrested all the drunk, naked people and had to block out the boobs and junk." Harley said.

"Boobs and junk? That's the medical term nowadays, Harley?" Ivy asked.

"I mean the ta-tas and the hotdogs." Harley said.

Ivy rolled her eyes. It didn't matter to her whether they were male or female, censored or not. They were all body parts of the same species. Besides, wasn't Harley a little old and educated to be speaking about genitals in euphemisms?

"I don't want to watch my younger self suffer any more. Get off my feet up so I can crawl into a dark, secluded space and lick my wounds. Have a crawlspace handy, Ivy?"

"Yes, but it's currently filled with cereus cactus and evening primrose."

"Of course it is. If anyone wants me, I'm going to contort myself until I can fit in the cupboard."

With that, Crane got off the couch, took a few steps, and then started walking backwards. With a perplexed look on his face, he took another few steps forward. Then a step to the left, a step to the right, and a return to the starting position.

"Are you doin' the Time Warp?" Harley asked.

"What? Absolutely not. I simply noticed that I no longer have a limp. Curious."

"Curious and curiouser, that's what the Hatter would say." Harley said.

"And the next time I see the Hatter, the only things coming from his mouth are going to be screams. That little man is not normal. You'd like him, of course, child. Everything that irritates or attempts to injure me, you want to hug. The Joker, Mel, the Babies. Damn it all, I mean Bud and Lou!"

Harley grinned broadly at the slipup. She didn't even know why Crane tried to hide it. The hyenas had won his heart.

"I fixed that. And I treated the spider bite. And the wound to your head. What did that clown wallop you with, a brick?" Ivy asked.

"No, it was a canister of fear toxin. I can't believe I didn't notice my head was no longer engulfed in agony."

Crane cautiously put a finger to his injured head, expecting lightning bolts of pain. He got a dull throb, like a headache that was either building or diminishing but little to worry about at the moment. Something gelatinous and sticky coated his fingers and was apparently smeared all through his hair. Disgusted at the goo, he brought his probing fingers way and looked with disdain at the substance that coated them.

"What is this? It feels like something that would be discovered in a fluid-filled sac during an alien autopsy."

"Stop being so dramatic. It's just a little medicinal cream I invented. It's made entirely from plants, as is everything else I used to fix you up. I told you nature provided, and I was right, wasn't I?" Ivy asked.

"If your ego is so hungry it needs me to feed it, yes, you were right. Plants are a delight. Now, I'm going to hide my shame. What room would you suggest, Isley? The attic?"

"It's home to my Sand Verbenas, though their flowering season is almost over. I had to put them up there because the attic traps heat."

"How considerate of you. Is there any place I can go where I won't be bothering your plants and they won't bother me?"

"The storage shed with Bud and Lou, but asides from that, not really. I've had some amazing luck with several species this year, and space is limited until some of them go to seed." Ivy replied.

The Scarecrow could have pulled out his hair, if it hadn't been coated in freakish plant slime. Was the couch the only island in the sea of green? Was he really going to have to sleep with Bud and Lou if he wanted to avoid creeping vines snagging him in the middle of the night.

"Maybe I should go sleep out in the yard. At least that's just grass."

"Go ahead. Harley and I will just eat dinner without you." Ivy said.

Crane's stomach made its empty state known. "Food, yes, I forgot about that."

"Guess who provided the food, Crane?"

Now it was the Scarecrow's turn to roll his eyes. "Nature."

Ivy beamed, "What do you know, the man can learn! Now if we can only teach you to sort the recycling."

The Scarecrow moaned. "After dinner, I'm going to sleep with the mutts."

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Author's Notes:

Agent Orange was a defoliant used in the Vietnam War.

Kudzu is an invasive plant species from Japan. It grows very fast and is sometimes called "the vine that ate the South" because of how widespread it is in southern American states like Georgia.

Glenn Beck, a fear-monger equal to if not surpassing the Scarecrow, has a segment called The War Room, where he makes people terrified of the future. In one discussed scenario, civil war broke out after social security fell apart and hyper-inflation made money worthless. And I thought fear toxin was bad.

And these are probably the worst pies in Gotham. Sorry, I'll stop.

There was an episode of Cops dedicated to all the people they arrested in the buff.

Cereus cactus and evening primrose are night-blooming plants. They'd flower in the dark crawlspace.

The Time Warp was a dance on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The pelvic thrusts were very important.

Sand Verbenas are flowers that thrive in hot, dry places. I don't know about your attic, my mine's hot as hell in summer.