Mapmaking

September 5th, 2015
7:30 PM
The Batcave, Beneath Wayne Manor
Tags: currently none

Five days. It's been five days of nothing but absolute hell outside.

Gotham City, already in a state of disrepair due to rampant criminal activity, had been reduced to utter chaos. Any existing maps were now obsolete as the area surrounding her had been cobbled together using bits and pieces of worlds not of this one, all in the criminal mastermind Arcade's efforts to advertise and promote the creation of his biggest "Murderworld" as of yet. And the public broadcast of the death of Clark Kent—whom the world knew as Superman—at Arcade's hands was the very tip of this nefarious, convoluted iceberg. What was the goal behind all this, the reason, the justification for endangering thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent lives? Who is Arcade? And where, exactly, did he come from?

That was something the Batman was desperately working to figure out.

Fingers typed endlessly at the Batcomputer's many keyboards as numerous eagle-eye images, all of which were taken sixty-thousand feet in the air using the Batwing's surveillance cameras, filled the monitor screen, allowing the costumed billionaire to quickly compile a detailed overhead map of the city as he spent the last four nights rounding up most, if not all of the people he had spent locking away, whether they were sent to Blackgate Prison to rot behind bars or to Arkham Asylum inside a padded cell. For once, Bruce was glad he had installed his vehicles with a remote-control option, because it would make his job a hell of a lot easier.

But as he continued to render the aerial photographs together, the Batman began to mull over the events of four days earlier. Behind the milky white slits where his eyes would be, those of Bruce Wayne's quivered with concern. This freak in the white suit had accomplished the impossible, done what no other being, human or otherwise, had ever been able to accomplish: he had killed Superman. The instrument of murder? A pool of liquidized Kryptonite, combined with a lethal series of kicks to the vertebrae in Clark's neck. Anybody with the potential to not only defeat, but end the life of Earth's mightiest protector was not one to be underestimated.

It did not take a rocket scientist to acknowledge that what had transpired four nights ago had only been done to serve as a warning to all who had been pulled into Arcade's twisted little game, unwillingly or otherwise. But that in itself gave the Batman some inkling of an idea as to how he acted and behaved, based on the broadcast from four days ago. The fact that it had been transmitted worldwide meant he was likely narcissistic and was a compulsive attention-seeker, something he shared in common with one Edward Nygma. He also did a terrible job at hiding his frustration, likely produced by his forced participation in the sadistic "game" he had worked so hard to create.

'Don't fuck with me.' Bruce repeated the words in his mind, processed them, until he arrived at two possibilities: either Arcade wasn't educated in fair sportsmanship and was afraid of the possibility of being beaten at his own game, or he was merely a control freak and hated having his authority challenged. Fear was likely the motivator behind his decision to destroy Superman before everyone's eyes, seeing as he was the only one that could have withstood whatever this Arcade fellow had to throw at him—otherwise, he wouldn't have used liquid Kryptonite to do his dirty work for him.

For the briefest of seconds, the Batman smirked. He was finally getting somewhere.