The only thing in the envelope is a slim book with black covers. It's a softcover, perfect bound, and has the words "Death Note" on the front in white in a kooky-looking font. There are no other markings on the outside: no author, no barcode, nothing. 

Well, no mysterious white powder means it's probably safe. The gloves and the mask stay on for the moment though. She carefully opens up the book to see if there's anything inside.

It appears to be a blank, lined notebook. On the inside cover is more writing in the same white text as the title. 

How To Use

1. The person whose name is written in this book shall die. 

2. The death will not take effect unless the writer has the person's face in mind when writing the name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected. 

3. If the cause of death is written within 40 seconds of writing the name, it will happen. 

4. After writing the cause of death, details of the death should be written in the next 6 minutes and 40 seconds. If you want to change the details of death, you can do so during this time limit by drawing two straight lines through the original text and writing in a correction. 

5. You cannot change the time of death, however soon it may be. 

6. You may also write the cause and/or details of death prior to filling in the name of the individual. Be sure to insert the name in front of the written cause of death. You have 19 days to fill in a name.

7. Multiple names can be written for the same cause and details of death so long as they are written within 40 seconds of each other. 

8. The conditions of death will not be realised if they are physically impossible or would require someone to act against their basic nature. 

9. If the cause of death is possible but the situation is not, only the cause of death will take effect for that victim. If both are impossible, that victim will die of a heart attack. 

10. The Death Note can only operate within 23 days. Thus, the time of death cannot be more than 23 days after writing the name. 

11. The Death Note will have no effect on someone who has less than 12 minutes left to live. 

12. The Death Note will have no effect on someone if their name is misspelled four times. 

13. Erasing a name written in this book, or destroying the book, cannot prevent the death from occurring. 

So... someone is having a laugh at her expense, probably. Still it wouldn't hurt to test it. Who absolutely unequivocally deserves to die? On second thought, who unequivocally deserves to die and wouldn't be more useful to blackmail? And... who on that list would she also be likely to hear about the death of. Probably a supervillain of some sort for the first criteria and one in custody for the second.

This calls for some research.

Several hours later she has a name. Jonathan Crane, currently in Arkham Asylum. Known for using psychoactive chemicals on civilians with a thin veneer of research. It's people like him that give science a bad name and slow down actual efforts to make the world better.

There's a picture in a news article taken from a college yearbook. She stares at the photo as she carefully writes his name in the book. It's not clear if she needs to specify the cause of death but just in case she puts it down as stroke. It seems a plausible enough death for someone who plays fast and lose with dangerous chemicals.

The "Death Note" responds to being written in exactly like a regular notebook. The words don't start bleeding or anything else obviously supernatural. 

On a more practical note, there's no magical feedback on whether it worked. 

She stares for a few more seconds just in case and then stuffs the book in a drawer. She sets a reminder to search for news on Monday.

It's a generally unremarkable weekend. She's not dating anyone at the moment so she mostly spends it taking walks and reading. She does take a few notes on what she might do with the Death Note in the extremely unlikely event it's real. It's a mostly harmless fantasy and well, there is a man who flies around in spandex and a few more who use effectively magical green energy to punch things. Who knows what's possible?

Come Monday she carefully checks the news. Even if she doesn't see a story today she'll keep checking for a few days. Who knows what the procedure for reporting deaths at Arkham is.

It doesn't make national headlines, but it's all over the local news in Gotham by Monday morning, and she can easily find it online if she looks.

SCARECROW DIES IN ARKHAM

ARKHAM INMATE DIES OF STROKE

Dr Jonathan Crane, better known by his supervillain alias of "Scarecrow", was found dead in his cell late on Friday evening by Arkham staff. The cause of death has been identified as a stroke, and the time of death is estimated as a few hours earlier, shortly after she wrote the name. There will be an investigation into whether Arkham was negligent for not monitoring its patients closely enough to intervene in a medical emergency like this one. 

The general public sentiment can be summed up as 'good riddance'. 

Well, that changes things doesn't it. Either the Death Note is real or someone absurdly capable is targeting her specifically. Between those two the death magic seems more likely.

Someone has handed her a tool to change the world. Now how should she use it?

She thinks for a few minutes, the most important part of successfully changing the world is going to be anonymity. She doesn't have any personal powers and even if she limits herself to killing monsters the so called heroes won't like that.

So she puts the thoughts of the Death Note aside as best as she can and spends her day as normal, doing programming work for a visual effects company.

It's definitely harder to focus than usual but she manages, she is very good at what she does after all.

Now, what's her plan. No, more important than that what's her goal. This world is an absurd broken mess. How can it be better and how can she make it happen?

She forces herself to actually think about it for a few hours, going over all the things wrong with the world: political corruption, morally bankrupt dictators, massive amounts of pollution, greed, supervillains, the stupid way the world seems to trust in a tiny group of people to save them from all these supervillain plots. They're all bad they're just not particularly solvable with death or extortion.

In the end, she settles on schizo-tech, there's so much incredible technology that's only used for supervillain plots or for stopping them. If only some of that could be used to actually improve the world.

There's no particular need to rush so she plans very carefully from there.

She makes a list of board members and CEOs of major companies that could make something happen. She makes an order for which of them she'll kill first based on eliminating people who seem likely to be opposed to her goals and those accused of other crimes they've gotten away with due to their immense wealth. Politicians listed on the same basis.

 She plots out a mix of digital and physical means to conceal her identity, she finds print shops that fully automate their processes and uses a couple of them to mail her letters for her.

Her demands are simple, these companies should begin very public efforts to make better power generators, better farming equipment, less polluting factories, and more advanced and widely available medical technology. The government should support these efforts and ensure they actually go towards helping people not just making these companies richer.

She retrospectively claims credit for Crane's death and as further proof she schedules the death of one Alex Venquist, recently convicted of killing at least fifteen people in the Bay Area in California. He's not as prominent as she might like but he's far from Gotham and it's actually really hard to find supervillains with public identities and high kill counts. Maybe the Justice League is more competent than she thought.

She isn't sure what to put down as the cause of death because surely they'll have people standing by to try to save him. Eventually she settles on aneurysm. It sets up a fake pattern of her only being able to effect brains and it's unlikely he can be saved.

With all that decided she composes her villain speech and sends it off to major media outlets and some of the people on her list.

People of the world, for too long the powerful have hoarded their advanced technologies and capabilities. Either to use them in pointless crimes like the supervillains or out of simple greed. I have found myself with the unusual and unasked for metahuman ability of killing at a distance. I could simply choose not to use this power but instead I've decided to get creative with my hammer. My full list of demands are attached but in short I demand that the advanced technologies and magics that the powerful people of this world already have in their possession are used for the common good. Also attached is a list of leaders in government and industry. If they do not take public actions towards my demands I will kill one person on this list each week. I've already tested my ability on Jonathan Crane also known as Scarecrow and as further proof I'll kill Alex Venquist, the recently convicted serial killer in two days.

May tomorrow be better for us all.

It doesn't make headlines the next day. The day after that, the Daily Planet runs a small column on page 10 about an interview with Lex Luthor, who claims that he's received a "threatening letter" from an unidentified metahuman. Most of the wordcount is dedicated to Luthor's impassioned speech about how this proves that all metahumans are untrustworthy and dangerous, etcetera, something something, Superman delenda est. 

Alex Venquist dies of a brain aneurism that afternoon, on schedule. 

The day after that, the headlines are full of "NEW SUPERVILLAIN THREATENS GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS" and "METAHUMAN KILLER AT LARGE". 

She should have predicted that angle, she regrets the backlash metahumans might face but she steels herself and prepares for the next step. She won't kill Luthor himself quite yet but he gets bumped up a few places on the list.

The day after news of Alex Venquist's death breaks, the Gotham Gazette publishes an interview with Bruce Wayne, owner and CEO of Wayne Enterprises. 

V. Vale: "So, is it true that the metahuman who killed Scarecrow and Alex Venquist has threatened to kill you? Are you afraid for your life?" 

B. Wayne: "Not particularly, no." 

V. Vale: "So you haven't received threats?" 

B. Wayne: "Oh, no, Wayne Enterprises got a letter, just like LexCorp and Queen and STAR and everyone else. But the thing is, this metahuman's list of demands...have you read the full list? It's quite ambitious, isn't it? But most of it is things Wayne Enterprises is already involved in, through Wayne Tech and other subsidiaries. Granted, we could publicise our efforts a little more, but—I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, Vicki—it's hard to make exciting press releases out of 'we can't figure out how to mass-produce this cutting-edge technology yet, either'!" 

V. Vale: "You're not wrong there. So you feel that you're safe from this mysterious killer because you're already meeting their demands?"

 B. Wayne: "That's right! Obviously the details of the tech itself are hush-hush, and I don't have the head for that kind of thing anyway, but it's not exactly a secret that Wayne Tech works on reverse-engineering alien technology, supervillains' gadgets, and so on. Most of it doesn't go anywhere, of course, and most of the rest isn't cost-effective at scale, but there are a few things in the pipeline that the big brains tell me might just pan out into something we can market to consumers."

V. Vale: "Exciting stuff! If it does pan out, that is." 

B. Wayne: "That's the idea! So—sorry, have you lot decided what you're calling them yet? Saying 'the metahuman who claims credit for killing Scarecrow' gets a bit clunky." 

V. Vale: "I don't think anyone's settled on a particular codename yet. Why, do you have a suggestion?"

B. Wayne: "No, no, I'm terrible at coming up with names, at least according to my son. But then, he's contractually obligated to think I'm uncool; he's a teenager." (He laughs.) "Anyway, to the person who sent those letters, if you're reading this: we're working on it. And if you want a way to be a part of making the future happen—that doesn't involve blackmailing CEOs—Wayne Tech and the Wayne Research Institute are always hiring!" 

Batman is not having a good week. 

Whoever wrote the 'Tomorrow Letter', as the media has started calling it, either killed Alex Venquist (or is working with whoever did) or had some other means of predicting—down to the day—a fatal brain aneurism in a previously healthy man. In the first scenario, either the killer can kill at a distance, as the letter claims, or they made it in and out of the highest-security unit of the San Francisco County Jail undetected, which isn't all that much less impressive. (Batman could do it. But most people aren't Batman.)

There isn't, actually, particularly strong evidence that whoever killed Alex Venquist also killed Dr Jonathan Crane. A supervillain is a higher-profile target than a mundane serial killer; they might simply have been waiting for one to die of natural causes so they could claim credit and launch their plan. But if they did—if a metahuman killed someone in his city—then they've made themselves his responsibility to deal with. 

What can he find out about where those letters came from? 

The letters all came from print shops, specifically one brand known for their discretion. If he can get access to their systems they were routed through an elaborate network of proxies and if he can back track those sent from a public library in Columbus Ohio while it was closed.

Of course he can hack their systems and dig through the layered proxies, he's Batman. 

"B, isn't this a bit unethical? Invasion of privacy, and all that?"

"They've killed at least one person already this week, and they're planning to do it again."

Has the mystery letter-writer gone to equal pains to disguise who paid for the letters to be printed, or can he get their credit card number?

They paid using prepaid credit cards bought in a convenience store in Dayton Ohio without any surveillance cameras using cash.

Alright, so they're less of an idiot than most supervillains. Good to know, if inconvenient.

He'll flag the cards and set up a program to alert him if they're used again, although he suspects they won't be. While he's at it, he sets up another alert to let him know if any new orders are sent to the print shop containing any of the keywords 'Wayne', 'Luthor', 'LexCorp', or any variation on the name of STAR Labs or its board members. He'll get a lot of false positives, but it's worth it if he can get advance warning of threats to himself and his allies. And Lex Luthor. 

The article about Wayne Enterprises is interesting. It's possible it's a trap, that seems a little indirect though. And it's not very consistent of her to content herself working on frivolities while there are opportunities to do more. What sort of positions do they have available for programmers?

Working there would also give her a sense as to whether the article is true or just hot air. For the moment, she takes Wayne Industries off her list.

Wayne Tech is recruiting programmers at all levels of experience in software development! The pay is competitive and the employee benefits are better.

The catch is that their closest office is in Philadelphia. She could also move to New York, Gotham, or LA.