Goddess: Descention

Chapter Two: Asylum

Chapter 2

Asylum

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:

Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Gotham City

Arkham Island squats like a malignant toad in the middle of the dark oily pond that is Gotham Bay, but it hasn't always been so... Ages before human habitation, fresh water from a then unnamed and unobstructed river mixed and eddied with the saltwater of the ocean which supplied the area with nutrients making the small bay and estuary; a place teeming with life. This meeting of waters also left deposits of sediment that were trapped by a jagged granite outcropping near the river's mouth and over a time measured in millennia, an islet was born.

When the abundance of the New World was discovered it was at first cultivated and soon abused. What took millennia to grow has only taken a century to destroy. Now the pollution of a rapidly growing mega-metropolis has irreparably poisoned the small bay. The island within however, is continually fortified by the constant supply of sediment from the Gotham River, but eaten away by the relentless current and the bite of polluted seawater that eddy around it… Thus Arkham Island grows and decays simultaneously.

Once, not so long ago, the islet was a city within a city. A low-income housing district complete with schools, businesses, a municipal train station and a port for the Gotham Ferry Line grew next to the Arkham Estate-turned Asylum and all was well. Then Arkham expanded, it became a prison that housed the worst of the worst of humanity. It swallowed up the land around itself to accommodate it’s own growing degenerate population. Soon the shops and schools shut down as displaced and frightened citizens left for the mainland. Property value on the island dropped dramatically while Arkham continued to grow. After a time the trains and the ferries stopped going to the island altogether. The few citizens that remained and couldn't’t afford to move relocated to the island’s west side and created a slum of desperation and despair.

Just when it seemed life on Arkham island couldn't’t get any worse the earthquake struck. Gotham was never considered a hot-spot for seismic activity; no one expected it and no one was prepared for it. Certainly not the builders of the skyscrapers or the condos, the homes and schools, and the hospitals… But it wasn't’t only that the building codes were not strict enough, it was that the building inspectors got rich looking the other way. So when the temblor rolled through the city it caused billions in damages affecting every structure in the city and cost an invaluable loss of life. Homes were said to fold in on themselves, apartment buildings collapsed, gas leaks and fires raged across the whole of Gotham but nowhere was hit in the city worse than the island. The Arkham prison facility was dreadfully damaged and the inmates were quick to use the confusion and devastation to their advantage. On top of the desolation of the earthquake and the looting and desperate violence that followed, Gotham also suffered the consequences of the mass escape of many of Arkham’s most dangerous and deranged prisoners. It was a dark time for Batman and his city, but they both endured, scarred to be sure, but a handful of years later, both still survive.

Though the entirety of the island belongs to the prison facility now, the areas beyond the walled-off section of the prison proper are a labyrinth of shanty-towns and quake-damaged buildings that precariously stand to provide dangerous shelters for the homeless and dysfunctional of Gotham’s underground population. It is a no-man’s land with little infrastructure and no authority. There is no police presence there because, as it is a prison, it is considered State property and the guards of the Arkham correctional facility rarely venture out from behind the safety of the prison walls. Once in a while however, the city bureaucrats make a show of cleaning up the island - usually during an election year. They coordinate the GCPD and Arkham internal security and patrol the island in force. But like vermin under a spotlight, the itinerate inhabitants of the island scatter and hide. Only the slowest, dimmest and most damaged are caught; a frighteningly small number of the island’s actual population. Nevertheless the effort is always considered a magnificent success.