Then.
I heard the squeaky creak of the door followed by a familiar, heavy tread.
"And how is our favorite literary critic today?"
"Peachy keen."
"Glad to see you're feeling so well. Enjoying the accommodations?"
"The view's a bit lacking."
A fist buried itself into my chest, and I fell over.
"Funny man. Be careful you don't bust a rib."
Despite the pain, I grinned. He was always going to hit me. Making him lose control, even a bit, was the kind of small victory that made my day.
"Still, I'm glad you can laugh about it." He kicked me. "It's nice to think that the man who made such a fool of the GCPD isn't all magic tricks."
"Still committed-" I inhaled suddenly and hard "-to living up to the name, Bolton?"
"Now what did I say about all these literary references?"
The hardest part was knowing it was coming, but not when or where.
THWACK!
My shin hurt, quite a bit. Still, I'm surprised it was so light- And right into my guts. Damn his eyes.
"They're just a way of making yourself feel better than other people. But you're not better, are you?"
His follow-up found my kidneys, and I was too busy with pain to retort.
"Though..." He was back to sounding like honey, always dangerous that. "I suppose I should thank you. For giving me such great ideas...
======================================
Now.
Lyle Bolton, AKA Lock-Up.
Imagine, for a moment, that you're Bruce Wayne. Good looks, lot of money, lot of childhood trauma that drives you to use your fortune and your fists to help out the city. You have a lot of charities helping the needy of Gotham, and I do mean a lot, and your corporation employs something like twenty percent of the city workforce. At nights, you stop crazy people from blowing people up, or gassing them or whatever is going on this week.
But you've got a problem. Every time you beat up said crazies and send them to Arkham, it holds them for, at most a year, and sometimes just a fortnight. Then they're back to terrorizing the city.
What do you do?
Well, if you're Bruce Wayne, you're probably a past expert at security, more at sneaking past it, but you'd be amazed how relevant those skills are to designing security. The safecracker appreciates a well-made safe. Of course, you've already done a lot to beef up security, logically Arkham should be the most secure prison in the country, just from the work you've already put in (and it largely is, but some of us are very hard to hold. At least they never let Joker into the kitchens or laundry after that incident.) and you're concerned. If you get any more hands-on, people might wonder when the careless trust-fund brat became such an expert in security.
So what do you do?
Why, you make that fortune and public attention work for you of course! By hiring out the best security consultant money can buy to whip the place into shape.
Sure, maybe he got a dishonorable discharge from the service before doing three tours in a PMC. Maybe he's had some excessive force citations in the past. You're Bruce Wayne! You're big into second chances, or you're used to giving vague directives and letting other people handle the details, in your public life anyways. Maybe, just maybe, you're sick and tired of all this bullshit and figure a little excessive force is just what the place needs, I don't know.
…
Okay, to be perfectly fair to Batboy, I'd have to admit that if he was the one who foisted Lock-up on us, he's also the man who demanded the investigation that ultimately rid us of him. I'm still entitled to be a little bitter over the whole thing.
Lyle Bolton brought to the job a dogged determination, a carefully hidden sadistic streak, and a fertile imagination well-suited to Arkham's unique security needs. His protocols were ruthlessly effective.
Ivy's cell and person were sprayed down with herbicides twice a day. More, if any guards felt threatened.
Crane got a taste of operant conditioning, 20 ccs of his own fear toxin for every escape attempt. Bolton was well-pleased with his early results, I think he was planning to expand the study before he got the boot.
Victor's containment suit was bolted to a wall, kept in just enough diamonds to keep him alive, and his cell turned into a steamy sauna. No yard time for Mr. Freeze, he just sat there all day along with his thoughts. I had to help him with the sores later.
I neither know nor terribly care what Lock-up did to the Joker. I thought I heard some more screams mixed in with the laughter, but it's Arkham. There were always screams.
What do you do about a book wizard?
I'd proved time and again that I didn't need a lot to escape. Banning the written word from my presence helped, but all I really needed was to bribe or convince Nigma to fork over his regular issue of Popular Science and I was good to go. To say nothing of my faithful minions busting me out, not many people can claim they're the reason an AA battery had to be added to their residence.
Well, a bunch of world leaders, I'd assume.
Bolton's solution to the Bookworm problem was at once ruthlessly simple, yet positively byzantine. But I'll get back to that.
Right now, as much as I'm dying to show Lyle the fruits of my creativity, I can't. There's too much I need to do between offloading building a functioning society onto Vinny and the new children's crusade.
The largest group of children from the images seemed to be running from a crowd of zombies underground, near Diamond District. That definitely strikes me as a more urgent situation than Blackgate, and maybe a chance to work out some frustrations.
Oh don't look at me like that. Zombies and Nazis are the last socially acceptable targets of gratuitous violence there are.
Specialized zombie-hunting gear is pretty rare, but I have a few things in mind and if all else fails, a shotgun and some incendiaries go a long way, even if they're terrible for a rescue mission. My first choice I pluck from Lirael, Daughter of the Clayr, though really any Old Kingdom book would do, a proper set of seven Necromancer's Bells in a bandoleer across my chest, and Townsaver belted at my hip.
Along the way, running in my cloak of darkness,I saw a bunch of kids in wifebeaters and leather jackets going at each other with clubs and blades. That simply wouldn't do. I was considering stunning everyone, but decided I could use this. So.
Step one, I climbed atop the highest nearby rubble-heap and made some balefire at my feet from Dark Lord of Derkholm. No, it's not super-powerful reality-warping fire or anything, just a pale blue illusory and transparent flame. Honestly kind of hard to see in the sunlight. Hence step two. I pulled a pebble from Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends, tossed in my hand a moment while mentally aiming, and then ZIIING!
I knocked.
Down.
The Sun.
Darkness fell near instantly as the bright orb suddenly fell beneath the horizon like a string holding it up had been cut, and I quickly shrugged off the cloak so they'd see me when they looked to what was suddenly the only light source, the flames at my feet.
They saw a man in perfect pale white suit glowering down on them from his high perch, bottom-lit and apparently unbothered by the eldritch flames licking at his knees.
You can call me a drama queen if you want, but Vinny has really hammered into my head the need for a strong first impression, and nothing accomplishes this better than a good entrance. Alright, I'm fairly certain this isn't what he meant.
And no, I didn't really destroy or move the sun. Past experiments showed this to be a purely local illusion, like the balefire on a much larger scale. Of course, for most people an illusion of darkness is effectively the same thing as true dark, but here I just want to get their attention while making a point.
"What's all this then?"
Some idiot tried to take a potshot at me. He missed entirely and I didn't flinch away from the sound.
He didn't try again.
"I say again, what do you think you're doing?"
There was a sudden chorus of yelling, each part quite indistinguishable from any other.
"SILENCE!" I pointed at a representative from each side. "You, and you. What are you doing here?"
There followed a long and colorful recitation of territorial rights and past slights, to which I only half paid attention and couldn't muster the energy to care much.
"So if I'm to understand you, each of you has claimed a territory, including this street?"
Hesitant nobs all around. Sure, now they mind the supervillain. I paused a moment to phrase my next idea carefully.
"That's stupid, and you're stupid." Wait, that didn't come out right. "Well, maybe not stupid, per se, but you're not thinking this through. Say you got your whole territory, then what? We're not really back to a point where land has much value, what's important is food and water. Can you feed everyone in your territory?" The leaders looked down. "Then it doesn't matter if you take this or that square of land, without basic necessities you can't possibly hold it."
"Hey, if it's ours, it's ours. That makes it worth something."
I resisted, barely, the urge to facepalm.
"Yeah, the whole thing about ruling in hell being better than serving in heaven? Hell doesn't have plumbing or much in the way of warm meals. Look, the law is much-depleted and on the backfoot in this town, we can always use some legbreakers in Old Gotham if you've got violent impulses to work out. But fighting over scraps of frankly useless land is just getting yourselves hurt, maybe killed for no reason. Look, just try out old Gotham alright? If you hate it, you can leave."
Reluctantly, suspiciously, they agreed to at least see what was what in the city's alleged center of power. Fortunately a few minutes before the illusion broke and the sun came back.
Save me from self-destructive idiots.
======================================
I remember the first time I ever went through metal detector.
Not exactly where, it was in Boston, I think a courthouse? Some species of government building my dad took me to, on some boring adult errand. I was pretty young, if that's not clear. Mostly, I remember when my dad explained to me what it was all for while we emptied our pockets of loose change, how they had to make sure we weren't hiding guns or knives or anything metal that could hurt someone, and I said it was stupid. Why, there are lots of things besides metal you could hurt someone. Even, I thought of bombs, things better than a knife.
I was a strange kid, alright?
Well, my dad, the first thing he does is tell me to be quiet and get through this. Then he tells me never to discuss in front of security guards how you'd get past their security, it makes them scared and angry. Third, he tells me it's impossible to keep someone smart enough and determined enough from anything. All you can really do is keep out most people, and not make it easy for them. Do it well enough, you can make it far more trouble than it's worth.
A lesson I've carried forth. In the end, there is no absolute security, there is no inescapable prison or impregnable fortress. Given the brains, the determination and, I now know, the resources, anything can be broken into or broken out of.
That's the thing people don't get about the Arkham crowd. You might say "Freeze has a freeze-ray? So do half a dozen villains." or "Isn't he an ordinary man with a gimmick?" And you'd be wrong. There is far more to us than just our gear or powers, same story with the white hats, and none of us is ordinary.
The Joker has devoted his life to becoming chaos incarnate, Dent used to be the star DA, Nigma may be the smartest person I've ever met and that's an impressive list. Ivy, Freeze, Scarecrow, each has a sheepskin from our prestigious university and has made amazing, game-changing discoveries within their field.
We, as a group, are the people who are smart enough, and committed enough. The ones who will devote a hundred hours to learning to pick one custom lock for one job, who find the angle you never dreamed of to pull that impossible heist, that incredible assassination. Even those of us who didn't start out that way learned fast. Arkham is a very Darwinian place, for guards and patients, you adapt fast or you die.
And this is why Arkham, with all it's expensive and constantly revamped security, has such a terribly high escape rate. That's simply what happened when every impossible escape artist ends up under one roof.
Let me give you an example. People laugh at Nigma, the Riddler, aka the guy whose gimmick is always leaving clues towards his planned crimes. Funny right? Self-sabotaging? Well, it's because of his childhood. He has a pathological need to tell the truth, and confess all his misdeeds. He can distort, exaggerate or misdirect you, that's the point of the riddles, but never tells a direct falsehood and can't long withhold information.
So the day he he seized Gordon on his regular inspection of our cheery slice of hell with an atomizer containing a nerve toxin, "enough to kill thousands" nobody really questioned it. Riddler never lies, and he's a genius right? Whipping up a nerve gas from the contents of the prison laundry is about in line with what you'd suspect. It took one of the Bat-family, namely Batgirl, and hearing the threat a second time to realize that Nigma, who is always so very careful with his choice of words, never specified precisely what his toxin would kill thousands of.
Yeah, that's right. The man whose "superpower" is that he cannot tell a lie bluffed his way out of prison and walked out armed only with a cockroach spray.
So it is with us all. If three of my limbs were crippled, if I were concussed, exhausted and bleeding out, armed only with half a ratty paperback, you'd do well to run.
How do you keep a person like that locked away? It requires creative problem-solving.
=====================================
I crisscrossed the city searching. All my old tunnel entrances were gone, the low road had really not done well in the quake. Still, there had to be an entrance somewhere. I had seen the kids underground.
Finally, I found an old brownstone with a curious bit mixed in the graffiti. White line, almost waist-high, and a regular series of boxes in the same paint. Wainscotting. Little in-joke. I scratched at the wall, as they used to do in Versailles, and the way was opened.
There's lots of places like the Low Roads. It's the nature of cities to be built over the bones of other cities (How many cities were piled atop Troy again?) and to be expanded in a haphazard manner that leads to lots of forgotten spaces. Heck, Cincinnati once built an entire subway system save only the laying of tracks before abandoning the project in the '20s. Something about that is familiar, but I'll investigate later. The point is, all these hidden nooks and crannies and forgotten spaces have a way of filling up, with homeless people, fugitives, black markets and the like. Even the odd monster and mage. Places like the Narrows in Chicago, or London Below where I once spent a wild weekend, a whole hidden society.
Supervillains tend to all interact with the Low Roads and the Forgotten to various extents, as a pool for manpower or a convenient place to disappear or get that one crystal you absolutely need for a giant death ray. Today I'm after information. Somewhere in this city, twenty-eight children are huddling in a large stone cellar. Somebody here knows where. If I learn anything else of value, great.
Besides, it can only help to know how hard the Forgotten community has been hit, and I'm sure someone here is already working on some half-baked but surprisingly workable idea for getting off the island and back.
=====================================
No ordinary prison can hold someone like me.
Arkham can't, not if I'm let in general pop or allowed visitors who might somehow slip me some text or just let me see it a moment.
How do you keep a man from ever reading?
The answer is simple. You put out his eyes.