In the end, Congress did not pass No Man's Land.
Not because Bruce Wayne did an impressive "Mr. Smith goes to Washington" type speech, and not because we flooded the capitol with paid lobbyists, though both of these things happened.
Because the President of the United States passed it as an executive order a day before they could. I hadn't voted for the guy, no polling station in Arkham and they don't issue day passes to go out and vote, but still I expected better from an avowed liberal.
Mostly I had to get the cliff notes from Vinny, who'd been organizing the "Save Gotham" campaign. A mass breakout from Arkham really is an "all hands on deck" kind of situation.
Here's what we knew. In the initial quake, several prisoners were freed from their cells and began trying to free the rest. This is a lot less serious than it sounds, Arkham is a veritable fortress, designed and rebuilt to withstand siege from without and within. Steel shutters and security doors slammed down, and the inmates were trapped in a single wing until order was restored.
Incidentally, a single rookie security guard was trapped in with them, and spent an entire night as a hostage while the usual Arkham residents debated who would get to kill him. Joker convinced the others to make it a contest, each telling something about themselves with the agreement that the one who scared the guard the most would get the kill. Come dawn, he says he can't decide, they're all terrifying, which is probably the best possible answer for that situation.
So with knives and fire, they divided his body into sections, and each signed their chosen pieces. He's alive, but now living in terror of the day they come for their pieces, jumping at shadows and such. Arkham's last resident, and the guards have already taken to calling him Patchwork Man.
When I have a chance, I should see if removing his scars will help. Probably most of the bunch have forgotten him by now, but you never know.
Joker in particular tends to take this kind of thing very seriously.
But as I was saying, the initial breakout was fairly well contained, and by dawn, everyone was back in their cells, except those whose cells were damaged. For a time, everything seemed fine. Seemed being the operative word. But with everything else going on in the city, it seemed safe to leave Arkham on the back burner.
Funny how it happens in life sometimes, a bunch of things just sort of come together all at once. More so in this world, I think.
Under questioning, Firefly said that the Devil had broken him out of custody and sent him to light up the city. It seemed like a glib answer, until he repeated the story (in somewhat more detail) under Veritaserum, with a verifier in his hand, still insisting he owed his freedom to Satan. Even less like a joke after four guys in devil masks tried to jump Gordon on his way to Barbara's apartment, apparently unaware of Jim's catlike reflexes and local pistol-shooting champ legend. Damnedest thing, autopsy revealed the guys had been genetically altered, given a degree of super-strength (not enough to worry Superman, Bane, maybe) and had their faces altered to look like rubbery devil masks.
You'd think Capricorn would use some kind of supernatural means to empower his minions, and while magic genetic engineering is possible, I know he can do much better, heck, just crack Old Man's War. Unless these guys are just canon fodder and there are elite mooks out there. But I can't think of a single book this might have come from.
Sweeping the cells of out-of-towners, using various truth magics to speed things along firmed up the picture some. Several of them had been hired to commit seeming random or meaningless, but very public, crimes. All by a devil-face guy, whom several seemed to think was the genuine Prince of Darkness.
Which is patently ridiculous, I can confirm that he was still in his nightclub at least six months ago.
So think it through. If the crime itself is irrelevant, what effect does it provoke? Who benefits?
The one common thread, these crimes were public and seemed aimed at Gotham's infrastructure. Which suggested, to my newly political mindset, that it was about perception. Gotham the city is failing, see Mayor Bookworm fiddling while it burns. I can imagine myself in his shoes, being exactly this petty, but he'd have to realize that wouldn't fly in the face of literally thousands of testimonials of my saving lives, so...
No. Think three moves ahead. What is gained by a public exception of Gotham sliding into the abyss? The vote in Congress. No Man's Land. Capricorn wants this to happen. Why? What does he gain from it?
I don't have an answer, and the question has me thinking in circles long enough to give up that line of thought as unproductive. I'm sure I'm on to something, but there's still a prominent piece or two missing.
Well, if NML is going to be a thing, I'll need to expand my immediate circle of associates into something that can govern a city. How convenient that I happen to know of another strongly-principled mastermind. So I pull back out a DnD crystal ball and look up Bradford Thorne.
Looks like he wasn't among the dead, but at the camp off Kane street. Bit of a trip, but worthwhile.
I find him helping someone bandage a cut-up hand in an olive-green tent, probably from the Guard. He's an older gentleman, clean shaven with his dark going to gray, but his eyes are as quick and sharp as ever.
"Crime Doctor, could I have a word?"
He looks up quickly, scanning, recognizing, filtering through several options for dealing with me before settling on 'dismissal' in less time than it would take most people to finish the first step.
"If you want to talk, let's talk, but I don't know any 'Crime Doctor.'"
Right. His identity is pretty much an open secret, but the forms matter. Courtesy is especially important when dealing with supervillains who can and will flip out and kill someone if offended in the wrong way.
"Of course. My mistake. Well, sir, may we discuss the supply situation? Distribution has gone all to hell and I need to know what medications you need before we can get them to you."
So off we wander from the tent, to a hollow shell of a building down the street that affords some privacy. He leans back against a wall, arms crossed and gives me a very level stare.
"What, precisely, do you want, Bookworm?"
Straight to point, I can respect that. We're both busy men.
"Help. Specifically yours."
"You seem to be doing alright for yourself, Mr. Mayor. Whatever you have in the works, if it wasn't completed by your assumption of the office, it's halfway there, no?"
"No. Well, yes. But mostly no." I paused a moment, mostly to get a handle on my babbling. Some help you are, James. "What I'm trying to say is, whatever plans I had were made irrelevant by the Quake." Because I'm not going to insult his intelligence or waste time in the argument that would ensue if I tried to tell him I had no ulterior motive. "Right now, I have to worry about a city that's been wrecked, and is hemorrhaging people and money as quickly as it can filter out. We have so many health and humanitarian disasters that just figuring out which we should prioritize is eating up an unacceptably large chunk of the day. A good doctor could shave that down a lot, and give us some ideas for what we need."
"And give you, what, extra legitimacy? I suppose you might be hurting for some now. That's the problem with being in charge, you're responsible for everything, logic be damned."
"And give me fewer corpses and more able-bodied people to rebuild the city with! I'm not playing political games here. Do you really think, in the wake of all this, I could be that petty?" I paused half a moment. "Don't answer that question. It could only serve to hurt our professional relationship."
He seemed amused.
"Which tells me you already know the answer. I tell you what, I'll consider it, but if this happens at all, it will be on my terms. More later, but the two big items are; I won't spend all day in meetings while people need help, and if I later find out you did use me, you'll discover the precise limits of how much pain I can inflict without doing lasting harm. Are we clear?"
"Crystal. That's all I ask, that you think about it."
"Excellent. Then please leave, I have a lot of patients to see."
So I did. But while Thorne and I were talking, another group of devil-faces were attacking Arkham, now thoroughly isolated by severed phone-lines and downed cell towers. The battle was pretty fierce, this wasn't the first breakout by a long shot and Arkham had been fortified a lot over the years, I still have no idea how they can legally have an anti-air battery. But surprise, numbers and heavy weapons count for a lot. Also, we think they sent some kind of infiltrator in to let the inmates out.
In the end, most of the security and medical staff were dead, the inmates fled, leaving only Doc Arkham, his administrative assistant, Patchwork Man, and the one guy who brought meals and always bent over backwards to satisfy everyone's special tastes and needs.
Glad for it. I always liked that guy.
But the mass breakout was pretty much the death knell for saving Gotham. Our reputation, and that of the Arkham residents, are nationally known, and everyone getting out at once is pretty much a Chernobyl-scale disaster in people's minds and the word on everyone's lips was : containment.
The National Guard set up on every bridge, the one subway main being rendered useless in the quake, and the lines of refugees fleeing Gotham slowed to a crawl as everyone leaving had their names checked against a list, criminal record, suspected mob ties, supervillainy, each and every one of these would disqualify someone from leaving.
I happen to know, from having lost my library card, that there are no less than fifteen other people in Gotham named John Binder, maybe more. I guess it sucks to be them, if they survived the quake. It was, tactfully implied to me by Col. Winters that I not waste my time trying to leave, he had orders to prevent this eventuality. As if I'd abandon my city and people in their hour of need!
I did manage to see Vinny's family out, before the bureaucratic dum-dums thought of the Marina. I have a rich person's fishing boat, fast and with a bunch of special modifications, the El-Ahrairah, and Vinny took his folks out in it and gave them a million bucks. Then, inexplicably, he came back.
I called him an idiot, several times.
Alright, I was happy to have him back, but I know he's never been entirely comfortable with what we do. He had a clean break, access to most of my accounts, the keys to the kingdom. Why come back to a citywide prison/asylum?
Heh, reminds me of that Kurt Russel film. Escape from Gotham. That's what everyone with sense is trying to do.
You truly don't understand? James asks. I am quickly becoming concerned about your mental state. Your growing impulsive and obliviousness. So much magic in a short time has deletrious effects, yes?
I'm fine.
….
Probably fine. I can rest when the next wave of crises is over, or in the grave whichever comes first.
Well, if we're going up against everyone without support, we're not just going to have to expand our list of allies and brutally assert our legitimacy. I've had an upgrade, it's probably time my oldest and closest friends in this world follow me.
I've had an idea for Freddie for a long time, but have been concerned about making him too powerful... yes, I don't think we're quite there yet. Fortunately, there are alternatives.
Long ago, in another lifetime, I had wondered at the connections between DC and Marvel comics. They were separate opposing universes, each was fiction to the other, there were even crossover comics that treated the settings as though these heroes had always lived on the same planet but never met face-to-face before now, which raised infinite questions about both continuity and cosmology.
Well, I learned for myself (after an embarrassing incident in which I adopted a secondary identity as Dr. Doom) that Marvel comics do indeed exist in this world, and it took Batman roughly twenty seconds to connect us. Thank goodness Freddie and Vinny don't know about that one.
There are competing comics companies, the Comics Guild produces a series of adventures rather similar to the Justice Society, there's Whiz Comics and even an Empire comics which some obscure characters and two flagship titles, the Escapist and Luna Moth. We're even four films into our own MCU.
All of which means I have access to a special title, forgettable in general, Revenge of the Sinister Six does contain a particular flashback scene of great interest. With heavy gloves and four tries, I manage to fish out a very irate little arachnid that bites Freddie's arm where I place it, before dying of radiation poisoning.
I have a feeling the coming weeks will be... interesting.