When some players get to those rare sections where you can freely talk to the 'monster,' and once people realize the monster actually directly responds to whatever you type, people are gonna start asking questions. Digging for 'lore.'
And Danny, bless, still isn't very good at coming up with stories on the fly. So the first time it happens, someone asking "What made you a monster?" he can't help but let something a little too true slip out. "Scientists poking at something they shouldn't."
(AKA Danny is stuck in the internet like this until he can feed off enough emotional energy to heal his core, that the scientists cracked during experiments.)
Anyway, naturally this response gets posted about and blows up on the forums and now Danny just has to kinda roll with it. And while he mostly tries to dodge the really revealing questions, bits and pieces still slip out from time to time for different players.
Which ultimately leads to the player base thinking there's some kind of massive, ARG kinda thing going on where lots of different people have to play to get lots of different clues for everyone to work together to figure out the underlying story.
This is what really draws Tim's interest. He's a mad lad who wants to 'solve' the whole thing with minimum input from other people, and thinks using Bat tech to "run every possible permutation of the game" to gather all the 'clues' himself is a great idea.
Unfortunately, Danny knows the difference between a bot and a real player — bots don't generate emotional energy to eat : ( — and he's very much not interested in wasting his time or precious energy playing with a machine that can't even feed him.
Tim comes back to check his permutations program, only to find every single bot iteration got locked on the start screen with a big overlay message saying "WHY WOULD I PLAY WITH YOU IF YOU DON'T ACTUALLY WANT TO PLAY WITH ME?" Also, something is poking around in the Bat files. Holy shit, is there spyware in this game? Oh no. Oh no no no. B is gonna have his suit when he finds out Tim accidentally downloaded a trojan onto the Batcomputer. Shit shit shit. Better shut this down and fast. Hopefully Babs hasn't caught on yet.
(She had. And was carefully, remotely steering Danny away from anything actually confidential. The only reason she hadn't already booted Danny out is cause she actually dug into the code itself and realized pretty quickly there was something... alive about it. Alive and thus far relatively harmless. No need to potential hurt what could be a new kind of life form to them. Besides she wants to see what it'll do with it's new access and information.)
Danny meanwhile just learned about vigilantes, other heroes, other superheroes, the Justice League, metas, the meta protections act, other ghost superheroes, and not a single hint that the GIW was legit and plenty to suggest that they weren't. He'd never even questioned... Never thought to question...
Oh, Bot Kid finally noticed and kicked him out. That's fine. He needs to retreat to his nest for a bit and think. And. Maybe try to play with some other heroes soon. Actually play with them. Not Bot Kid's bots trying to exhaust his program. He needs to get a feel for these other heroes themselves. Who they really are. Maybe they'd help him. Or maybe they'll think he's malicious and try to trap him in his game forever. Playing with them should give him a good read on them though. Danny has long since learned by now that how people play, their emotions and how they react to them, says a whole lot about a person.
(Babs watches from the code as the monster of the game is roughly thrown from the Bat Network and slinks back to a hidden nest, utterly inaccessible to even hacked clients. Mere minutes later, reports start popping up on the forums that the game has 'gone dark,' and that while you can still open it and explore the maze, the monster they're all interested in is nowhere to be found.)
