(no subject)
Mar. 11th, 2014 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wildfireBy the 31st century, Metropolis has grown to encompass many of the surrounding major cities, such as New York and Gotham. It is, by all accounts, a prosperous place. Certainly, there is still crime, but nothing like the levels some of those cities experienced during their heyday.
But in the parts of Metropolis that used to be Gotham, there is a small section of the city that no one goes. With Park Row at its center, a twenty square block area is utterly dark and completely without power. It's walled off, guarded. No one goes in.
Three hundred years ago, when the city was still mostly called Gotham, terrorists calling themselves the Sons of Laughter attempted to upload the digitized brain patterns of the long-dead criminal called the Joker into the city's mainframe. The madness infected much of the city's computers, until it was beaten back by that era's Batman. Unable to defeat it completely, Batman and his allies were able to drive it back into a smaller area, whereupon they cut the power, cut the lines of communication, evacuated the people, and completely sealed it up.
Of course, in the intervening years, this 'Dark Zone' has become home to many criminals and vagrants, despite the best efforts of the authorities. In some small ways, unofficial policy is to leave it alone. Any lawman who enters seems to go irrevocably insane.
And now, somewhere, some stupid criminal is bringing power into the Dark Zone...
But in the parts of Metropolis that used to be Gotham, there is a small section of the city that no one goes. With Park Row at its center, a twenty square block area is utterly dark and completely without power. It's walled off, guarded. No one goes in.
Three hundred years ago, when the city was still mostly called Gotham, terrorists calling themselves the Sons of Laughter attempted to upload the digitized brain patterns of the long-dead criminal called the Joker into the city's mainframe. The madness infected much of the city's computers, until it was beaten back by that era's Batman. Unable to defeat it completely, Batman and his allies were able to drive it back into a smaller area, whereupon they cut the power, cut the lines of communication, evacuated the people, and completely sealed it up.
Of course, in the intervening years, this 'Dark Zone' has become home to many criminals and vagrants, despite the best efforts of the authorities. In some small ways, unofficial policy is to leave it alone. Any lawman who enters seems to go irrevocably insane.
And now, somewhere, some stupid criminal is bringing power into the Dark Zone...
