"Indian Hill..."
Gordon tried to remember, but even as chief of police, he didn't know much about it.
He knew it was nobody's place, a huge junkyard with a lot of homeless people living there.
And all the land is cursed. No weeds can live there.
HMMM... Plus, it actually has the lowest crime rate in Gotham, so not many criminals come here to make a living.
"You don't seem to be thinking of anything." Falcone looked at him with a smile and shook his head, either disappointed or with emotion. "Would it give you some idea to call it something else? Like Indian Hill paramilitary area? Or the Gotham City Institute?"
"!!
Part military part Institute, in Gordon's experience, instantly understood what kind of place this was, which made his pupils dilate involuntarily.
At this point his only thought was that, after all these years, Falcone had gone mad, too.
Even if he hadn't heard the names, he had a sense of what was going on here. Although Paradise was a place that despised technology, the Amazons had naturally used it to make weapons that could arm ordinary people or decimate their enemies during their long war with Atlantis.
Some of them, I am afraid, would be seen by Lei Xiao Gu would be silent, and the jester would be moved to tears, but he did not think that there is such a place in Gotham.
"Ah, it seems that you have thought of something, well done, and so perceptive, I am glad. As you might expect, this was once the site of the Amazonian Council's special research institute for chemical and biological weapons."
Falcone clapped softly and motioned for Sophia to sit down and listen to him talk about the founding of Gotham.
"Our city, founded in the 1980s, was built by four families." He walked quietly over to the fireplace and watched the flames in his glass. "They were the pioneers of the city. It took nearly ten years, and in 1891, Gotham was finished."
"The four great families were the Vernes, to whom little Bliss's mother belonged; the Cairns, to whom her father belonged; the Elliots, to whom Thomas is known today; and the Cobblepotts."
"Well, technically, of our ten families, except the Cobblepotts, all were latecomers, poor wretches who had no place to live before our ancestors arrived in Gotham."
"I seem to digress. Ah, back when Gotham was founded, the four families were not as rich as they are today. They had a little money at best. They wanted to build a town here. TSK TSK..."
"Just as they were running short of cash, Amazonian council powerbrokers came unsolicited to the door with an offer they couldn't refuse."
'The Amazonian Council will fund them to build a city here, specifically, a bridgehead against Atlantis on the east coast.'
'When the city is built, the four families will be able to run it for them without the council interfering. The council would build research institutes, military bases, prisons and temples here, and the four families would have to be completely responsible for logistics and supplies, right in the city."
"The four families were presented with a barren shoal and a small town, not the tall buildings of today. They could not refuse this pie from heaven, so they hit it off and became the white gloves of the Amazonian Parliament."
"The city was established, and the council kept its promise and handed it over to them. They, too, kept supplying the Council with Gotham's supplies, such as fish, such as steel, such as human resources."
"Do your police stations, and the Blackgate Penitentiary, and Arkham Asylum, and so forth, feel very much like fortments? Because they all date from that period. '
"As the decades passed and the forms of warfare changed, soon the council decided it still needed a bigger stick to deter those guys in the water. So they bought the graves of Native American ancestors and built the Gotham City Institute to eliminate their opponents once and for all in the event of a possible war."
"What could be more convenient than setting up a biochemical institute in a coastal city, where you can pour poison directly into the ocean?"
"This is where we are now, and I have to say, the imagination of those people in the last century was amazing to me. You should have seen the monsters on top of us, and they really gave me a lot of fun."
Gordon was already fidgeting, as if he were sitting on a pegboard and writhing on the sofa. "So, Falcone, what's your point? What on earth are you going to do with your occupation?"
The old man took a sip of wine and turned around calmly. "My purpose is to give you another chance to build the Gotham you imagined. We gangsters have always depended on society for our lives.
"Eh?" Gordon really doesn't understand Falcone's thinking anymore, even if he doesn't think he ever did.
"Under our feet, there are 40 million cubic meters of green liquid, special compounds modified by magic. Dissolved in water, it easily penetrates the skin and body of an animal, and turns it into a corpse... According to the instructions, they call it Super Sarin and it was originally intended to be thrown into the sea during the war to kill the Atlanteans once and for all."
Falcone also sat down on the sofa, put down his glass, and continued to smile as he spoke to Gordon.
"But then science figured out that if you polluted all the oceans, these toxic substances would rain all over the planet, and the Amazons wouldn't survive, so in 1990, it was abandoned."
'Just say what you plan to do.' Gordon pressed.
"I've come back this time to cleanse Gotham with them, just a little bit, to bring it back to when it was founded, when it was empty. Then, Gordon, you will be free to build your city as you please, and when this rain stops, you will walk out of here tomorrow, and the light of Gotham will shine bright."
"You seem to have forgotten to mention your daughter. This is her city, right?" Gordon scoffed at the idea as he pondered ways to stop the madness.
Falcone shook his head gravely and raised his hand to cut Gordon short. "No, Gordon, it's just you. The new Gotham will be all about you, and Sophia will only help you manage the darkness. If she runs the city, how will it be any different than when we ten families ran it? You promised me to keep Gotham hopeful, for the future of the city!"
"Yes, I want Gotham to be better, but not in this way!" Gordon widens his eyes and shakes his head.
'Don't be afraid, Gordon. It will soon be over. Everyone in Gotham will die unconscious and painless in their sleep now.' Falcone gently took his hand, the skin of both men more or less equally shrimped: "The inhabitants of Gotham are hopeless. They are filled with madness and darkness, and the city cannot be reborn until they are cleansed of Gotham."
"You're mad, Falcone, you're mad." Gordon withdrew his hand and leaned back in his chair as the swinging firelight illuminated the faces of the three, only Gordon's livid.
Falcone smiles as he returns to his place, takes one from a humidor on the table and patiently trims it: "No, Gordon, it's not madness, it's something I learned when I got to Hong Kong. They have a saying over there that it's never too late to learn, and I've got a lot to gain..... I finally found the cure for Gotham in the magic East, and it's what they call a mighty man breaking his arm."