One of the first pieces of wisdom contained in the Knowledge is that there are basically two kinds of apocalyptic scenarios. The first, let's call it the Mad Max/Mortal Engines scenario, involves constant war for diminishing resources because, hey, war, war never changes. On the other hand, you have Night of the Comet and most zombie movies, a sudden mass depopulation event that, like a neutron bomb, leaves most of our stuff intact.
The latter is clearly the preferred scenario for scavenging and rebuilding.
If you were to set these two as the extreme points of a scale, I suppose we'd sit in the middle somewhere. Lots of shit got wrecked in the quake, but much was left behind in the evacuation.
Ah, but I get ahead of myself.
The National Guard was a godsend in many ways, especially food, water and medical supplies, all desperately needed. On the downside, they imposed a curfew to try and limit looting, and there a series of issues with Guardsmen picking fights with the locals, diverting, hoarding or selling supplies, and flat out ignoring our people. So they introduced a whole new series of headaches. On the whole, don't get me wrong, I'd much rather have them than not. If nothing else, a platoon of Guardsmen proved most useful when a gang called "the Bones" tried to storm Mercy Hospital (our largest, now that Gotham Central was pancaked) for it's drug supply. Despite Batman and Robin's best efforts, a bunch of gangbangers wound up in the morgue full of holes.
For those first few days, support flowed in, especially cash. Sadly, our biggest problems were never monetary, but logistical. That's how disasters work, they overload your infrastructure, your ability to cope, and if you aren't careful they cause a cascade of further problems, which grind you down even more, costing more lives, and more time. For Pete's sake, ruptured water mains in Burnley and Tricorner/Chinatown led to cholera outbreaks. Goddamned cholera, in a major city of the First World. And what would normally be trivial recovery became hard, because nobody could move the drugs around and even magic swords can only stab a couple people at a time.
Infrastructure and getting around continued to be a huge problem. Without pixie dust, and that frantic first night had well and truly burned out Peter Pan, the fire department was having a big problem getting around. Trash collectors too, leading to piled garbage, an explosion in the rat population and the further spread of disease. All problems feeding into each other.
Fortunately, solutions and resources can fuel each other too, ask any Civ player. Heh, or Imperium Romana. Sometimes the beautiful thing about having so many problems is that they suggest mutual solutions. I had a million homeless, jobless people, filling up shelters and teetering on the brink of despair, and a million jobs that needed doing. Like James Michael Curley would say, getting the working class out there and working is the first big step, so I got people organizing work crews and they took the streets in the thousands to clear away the roads. Sometimes with lifting gear and dump trucks, often with picks and shovels and bare hands.
I do feel the need to include an amusing occurrence. One Devlin Davenport (the third, I can only assume) objected rather strenuously to our planned demolition of the Davenport Center. The same Davenport Center that toppled like an enormous tree, crushing Theater Row and blocking two more streets, including a main thoroughfare and was adding about two hours to everyone's trips through the city, to circle around. Mr. Davenport made quite a nuisance of himself, insisting on the protection of his property over the common good, and threatening to sue the city for "every penny you've got left." if we harmed his precious sideways tower.
I was not amused to get the call on that one, to say the least.
So I came to resolve the issue and found this blonde popinjay in a ludicrously expensive powder-blue suit, unmarred by any dirt, and listened as he raved about injunctions and his fierce army of lawyers, how we had no right to do this to him, and other words to the effect of "I'm a rich bastard. I have so much money and I'm so very important. Why didn't you love me, Dad?" Now, I can justly be called a heartless man, but there was something truly... special about a man who could stand in the midst of all this destruction and human misery and think only of how it inconveniences him. At some point, I just had to laugh. After, I promised him the heavy machinery wouldn't come near his precious building, waving them off to other tasks. Then I handed him a Benjamin, told him I was buying his building at it's approximate worth as judged by an expert just then and no, he did not have the option to refuse (eminent domain becomes a lot more fun when you're the government) and set my phaser to setting 16.
There was an episode of Star Trek once, one of those mindscrew ones with Riker flashing back and forth between the ship and an asylum, and at one point he sets a phaser to full and says it will take out half this building. Never shown that kind of firepower before or since, not from a hand phaser. But the fans remember, bless them, and they debate endlessly. I don't one-shot the skyscraper, but it takes me less than thirty seconds to carve it up like a roast goose. I think I made the road a little wider than it was, actually. Okay, I know I did.
Then I just smiled nicely at the fop and told him I looked forward to that lawsuit, unless he'd prefer pistols at dawn? He took off for the hills and I've not yet seen him since.
I do hope he didn't think I was serious? I'm told I often come off as serious when I'm joking, or smug and supercilious when I really don't mean to be at all.
I guess people were asking the big question before the rubble even finished shifting. "Can Gotham come back from this? Should it?"
The big corporations were the first to pull out. Officially, they'd suffered billions of dollars worth of damage, much of their workforce was dead or scattered across the islands with no way of getting to work, and the bean counters figured a fresh start elsewhere, with a select cadre of workers, would be quicker and cheaper than rebuilding. Personally, I think Gotham kicked in their teeth with a disaster nobody saw coming and now they're running scared. I understand Bruce Wayne spoke to a group of CEOs about remaining, but did not impress with his business acumen and reputation. Which may have been deserved, since he apparently made an appeal to compassion and civic pride speaking to a group of businessmen. I'd have gone with salvaging most of what they'd lost and the PR benefits myself, but I didn't rate an invite and only heard of this secondhand and some time after the fact.
Either way, eight days after the quake, the only corporations left in Gotham were the various Wayne Industries umbrella groups, S.T.A.R labs (technically a nonprofit, still a major employer) and Rossum's Universal Robotics, and just between us, that last was more of an intricate money-laundering operation than a legitimate company. With a few side interests, ah, precognitive market speculation, exploring the commercial applications of a nanolathe and nigh-limitless processing power, and hiring dozens of high school and college students to read speculative fiction and write essays describing magic systems, artifacts and technologies, properly cited with page numbers for reference. Good for putting my money to work, great for developing ties to LexCorp, not so good as a platform to put people to work and rebuild society from.
Speaking of Chrome Dome, it seems I remember he was a major mover behind NML, some sort of plot to destroy and/or alter Gotham's property records, get tons of valuable property free and make a killing in the rebuilding. Well, bless my little boots, it took me twenty years in the DCU, but I finally get to see Lex Luthor pull a vast over-complicated real estate scam. Be still, my beating heart.
Obviously, that's not going to happen now that I'm aware of it. I shall back-up and protect the records of Gotham! Less a small protection fee, assayed purely against those who can afford to pay, of course. I'm not a charity, I just object to my people getting screwed over, and 95% or so Gotham are "my people" now. Mr. Davenport from before and the late Simon Stagg don't really need all their land holdings in Gotham, for instance.
Well, funny thing, but once all the corporations jumped ship, a bunch of people got the idea, reasonable under the circumstances, that they weren't getting their jobs back and it was time to make for greener pastures. So a flood of refugees began leaving the city.
And, being Gotham, the crazy train was never going to just stop for monumental tragedy. A week after the quake, some scrub I've never heard of calling himself Narcosis tries to "bliss" Gotham, releasing a drug that makes everyone extremely high and pleasant on a semi-permanent basis. Honestly sounds like we could use some of that around here, but mommy always told me never to trust a drug-dealer giving away free samples, or one afraid to show his face to the clientele.
I found out about all this after Batman had already beaten up Narcosis and some confederates, but failed to completely stop a factory from belching out a cloud of drugs that was descending very slowly over a large portion of the city. In fact I heard about it when Oracle, sorry Ms. Gordon demanded emergency use of a chopper to drop/mix-in some more flammable gasses and burn the 'Bliss' out of the sky.
"Sure." I said, "Do whatever you need to and consider it authorized. But we'll call that plan B." Then I went up to the roof, such as it was, read myself out Aelous' sack of winds from the Odyssey, pointed it in the general direction of Otisburg and unleashed atmospheric chaos.
Victor Fries also escaped custody in the quake and stole millions of dollars worth of diamonds. Which I was surprisingly okay with, he told me once he needed diamonds to make his cyro-tech work, so at least he's almost certainly putting them to a better use than Zales. He also left behind four dead copsicles which I was surprisingly less okay with. Generally, I figure a cop in this city knows what he (or she now) is getting into, but these police start answering to me and suddenly it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Look at me, getting all responsible in my middle age. Who'd have thought it of the man who mixed Gandalf's fireworks with Fred and George Weasleys'?
Inside two weeks, some bright accountants started estimating the cost of repairing and restoring Gotham. The estimates started at between one and a half and two trillion dollars, and got significantly worse from there, which was about when the average taxpayer's enthusiasm for Gotham relief started to dry up.
It was around this time I first heard the name of Dr. Nicholas Scratch, a name that immediately commanded my undivided attention.
Nick Scratch is a name given to the devil in certain segments of American folklore. It's exactly the kind of hiding-in-plain-sight alias that immensely appeals to me, and thus presumably to Capricorn. I say this as a man who can produce ID in the name of Randall Flagg and Walter O'Dim. Then, I've used a lot of aliases over the years from innocuous seeming ones like Sam Clemens, Simon Dermott, Felix Leiter and Mark Aurelius to out-there names like Curucha an Gros and Hieronymus Munchausen. What can I say? Sometimes you need to be a face in the crowd, sometimes it's best to be very obvious, very weird, loud and annoying. Then people will never believe you're trying to hide, and have trouble later recalling anything but your strange accent and obnoxious Hawaiian shirt.
I saw a video of Dr. Scratch trash-talking my city, and asking why anyone else should pay to fix it. He didn't look like me, but what do appearances matter between wizards? It is only slightly more difficult for me to change my face than my coat. He is tall and fit, with messy black hair slightly long, and a goatee that calls to mind every pretentious hipster I ever knew in college.
Him, I will have to keep an eye on. And utterly annihilate if it looks like he might be, or be in any way connected with, my evil counterpart.