I'm Energy In DC

Chapter 12 Found Him

United States.

Gotham...

Nighttime, downtown Gotham city. Possibly, the worst place on Earth, any living person could find themselves in when it came to living circumstances.

Looking at its long history, what more would one need to accurately describe it?

Corruption, Chaos, Crime, all of it was synonymous with its name, making it a hotspot for criminal enterprises and black market activities.

This was a city where people had learned the essential rules that no one within said city was kind enough to explain to any possible newcomers.

The first and most indispensable rule, mind your business. Poking your nose in things that don't concern you in any way would mostly likely have your corpse floating in the sewers or lying in an alley the following morning.

A lady could get dragged into an alley in broad daylight by random things while kicking and screaming for help, yet wouldn't even elicit a reaction from the passersby.

Would people see it? Yes. Would they do something about it? Absolutely not. There had been many cases of such happenings in the good old days, and they all knew how the cliché plot of the hero trying to save the beauty played out when played in a Gotham alleyway.

The result was always the usual. The screaming would momentarily stop before resounding again in a louder tone and ultimately dying out. The son of some random poor fella who tried to enact the play would end up in a body bag by morning.

As for the cops? Let's just say that Gothamites had more faith in their shoelaces than they did the GCPD.

Bribery and looking the other way when confronted with criminal activities, something that would get police officers fired in other cities, wasn't even enough to leave a stain on the record here.

Rule two, trust no one. In a city like Gotham, handing out a twenty dollar bill to a beggar out in the open was a textbook example of the phrase, 'perfect way to kill someone with a borrowed knife'.

If you weren't rich and powerful, you could even set a target on your own back.

Such an action was capable of getting someone and anyone involved with them murdered before dawn.

Your relative could stab you in the back with a kitchen knife while he/she was smiling with you a minute ago.

Death and rampage had become so common that no one would flinch if they opened their front door and what greeted their sights first thing in the morning was a mangled corpse.

After all, it happened almost every other day.

So yeah, it was a mess. A filthy mess if you weren't being polite about it.

Were all these narratives correct to the last letter? Maybe, Perhaps not. Still, it didn't change the fact that Gotham was a shithole.

Unlike its neighboring city, Metropolis, it hardly experienced as much when it came to powered villains. There were no kryptonite-powered robots shooting beams of mass destruction, no aliens with superhuman abilities and no freakish monsters capable of ending the world.

The problems mainly experienced were simple enhanced versions of crime performed by individuals who were baseline humans. No superhuman strength, no apocalyptic weapons, just serial killer clowns with messed up minds, an egotistical maniac who had a thing for riddles, a fat drug and weapons dealer with the stature of a penguin who actually calls himself The Penguin..... basically stuff along those lines.

Metropolis had experienced more disasters in five years than Gotham had since the day of its existence, yet metropolis was a much safer place than Gotham would ever be.