The Prism of the Prison

Brrr…  

…BRRR!  

Swooooosh…  

…SWOOOSH!  

The evening January night encasing Gotham City was abound with frivolous cold and forceful winds. Snow piled up all around sidewalk crevices, gathering in balconies, on the edges of the park water and the shoulders of the huddled mass of people who meandered across the streets. They were like ants, swarming about a field lush with disorder; they cut right, left, north, south, dodging oncoming traffic along the roads, trying to break through concessions stands and shop lines—altogether forming a horde of disunity. They bumped into themselves, walls, lampposts, arguments; fists. Their heads turned, scanning their surroundings, rustling up their scarves as they were pelted by the frigid air, seeking the slimmest gauge of direction in this frozen hellhole of city life. 

It was comprehensive dissonance on a massive scale, infiltrating every aspect of Gotham society. 

The perfect backdrop for such unwavering chaos was none other than Gotham's glorious buildings themselves: an amazingly varied smattering of some of the best rusted metal, chipped-away bricks, and shattered windows that apathy could buy. 

Why, take your pick! There were the beauteous park ponds with sewage water leaking in aplenty from below, the reservoir with its mighty system of fifty-year-old lead pipes, or even the grand city hall at its epicenter, booming with graffiti markings splattered all over the walls and the doors reeking of oxygenated iron. There had always been a distinct artistic culture flourishing across the surface of the city's central edifice, the pieces simultaneously elegant and acerbic in their form, weaponized against the elites that locked themselves inside with several feet of steel and solitude separating them from the crowd. 

All that metal was put to good use, too, insulating this metropolitan bourgeoise from the sights and sounds of a city undergoing a widescale decline. Indeed, from the manholes to the newspaper mastheads to the unmoored moorings on the dockyards off the Hudson Sound—they all stunk of decline. 

Decline, oh yes. A word you'd probably throw around a bit when talking about the collapse of fallen empires or the undoing of disgraced celebrities who were exposed for their faults in life; hell, it's even something you'd use to describe a species that's simply lost its way, shriveling up further and further till it eventually ceases to walk the Earth. Where does the word really begin, and take hold of something? Ah, that's right, with a departure from a state something or someone once was. A descension from the very point of grace that was once the standard, the pinnacle, the apex. And, if nothing else, this process marks a divergence from a period of stability . The stretch when things don't change at the snap of a finger. When there's a sparkle of satisfaction, of serenity, and satiation. The thought that maybe life is, simply put, alright . Sure, there's still a way to go, but never a distance so daunting that it keeps you up and shivering in your sheets at night. 

No, the consuming thought of decline, the very conception of a plunge from Gotham's golden age into the pit of despair, was a sickening idea no city denizen could ever push out of the back of their mind. Much less could they come to terms with it and forgive the people in the penthouses who caused this mess in the first place. This was such a gripping, condescending force over those poor men and women, boys and girls, shopkeepers and customers, landlords and the peasant tenants under them, that their eyes were pried from looking at the starry night sky above, forced to gaze at the carnage unfolding before them. 

This truly was the Rotting Apple. 

This viewpoint was shared by the alignment of the constellations themselves, composed of a disordered jumble of stars; Cancer and Sagittarius seemed to split off into these inchoate masses of stellar matter that sailed across the emptiness of space as they shined down before the Earth. 

At the forefront of this cosmic jumble, the crown jewel? None other than the Moon, that grand sphere of pale-white fluorescence, glistening the most out of any of its peers. The Earth's right-hand man, it shone the gladdest. Sadly for him, however, there was nary a soul in town looking up to smile back. 

Well, except for a certain middle-aged man in a funny black suit and cape, perched high atop one of the Rotting Apple's tallest construct, head cocked at a ninety-degree angle northward, the slightest of smirks dangled precisely on his otherwise stoic face. He was crouched down, feet a way's apart, hands hung down by his hips, his cape bellowing back and forth in the crusading wind. His eyes glared up at the starscape overhead. They were just open enough to enjoy the moment to its fullest, just closed to not take in too much of the bright lights above. He was proudly staring at the reality he presided in. 

People cried foul at the mayor, the politicians, the wealthy men in the beautiful suits whose faces revealed both a salutary neglect of the reality beyond them and a silent guilt on their role in the matter. But think: were the notorious fat cats of Gotham really responsible for allowing the city to go down into the gutter? Sure, they might've started it, but they weren't the actual culprits of the decline's devastating continuation. They played no significant part in how it lingered on, festering, marinating along the city's jam-packed streets, on the rusty scaffoldings of construction sites, over the green water of the park lakes, even swirling high up into the air with the black smog of the Gotham Ironworks. No, there was an enabler, perhaps, doing his dirty work throughout the city limits. One who believed he was doing right upon the Rotting Apple…yet due to their ignorance, was procuring its putrid state. 

That enabler was the very same 6'2'', 210 lb man of such intrigue and mystery veiled under a dark façade, bearing a mystique about him despite a less-than-humble upbringing. He balanced sharply aloft a tower possibly just as intimidating as the man roosting over it. He had a broad, conspicuous face that contrasted with the rest of his dreary aesthetic, just barely revealing a sense of pride for what he'd done. What had he done? Oh, it was simple. He'd left the apple out in the front yard for Nature to do its magic. 

What would the analogists opposed to fruit use, however? A decrepit prison, of course! 

Bars withering away with impunity, prisoners shackled within their somber soliloquies as they gaze into nothingness, guards walking along the halls with their bloodied batons ready while they tacitly heeded every command of the warden lurking in the shadows. A containment center of obstinate pain. A correctional facility correcting any notion of positive change. 

...That's not to say there weren't any inmates with outbreak plans, though, of course. 

Nestled towards the core of Gotham, there laid a sizable warehouse, once abandoned but now a place where criminals from all boroughs, buildings, and backgrounds congregated to discuss common matters of business. What was that business, exactly? What even is the point of life for a criminal in this draconian world? Well, easily put, survival. What else was someone tormented by the horrors of living in a dumpster fire (whether figuratively or literally) supposed to do? They were the hardest, craftiest, smartest gang of people in the whole city for even realizing that action had to be taken against their unfriendly environment, to forge a sense of stability in the face of de facto anarchy. If those bureaucrats at the top didn't give a damn about the common people, why should they feel the same for them? They stood up for themselves, no matter the so-called 'injustices' and 'crimes' they committed. 

But, even still, that Batman always stood in the way of their full dominance over the city, a position that was more than just survival; they sought a wholesale cultural transformation that Batman worked to prevent at every turn. His deadpan, devious ways of keeping good men behind bars were seemingly undefeatable. His schemes were intricately tailored and impeccably crafted, engaging in his network of relations within the city government and even the criminal underworld itself—not to mention his own ample store of resources and gadgets—to plot the gang's demise. 

And so, seeing this invincible threat rise to prominence, they did what any intelligent band of people would do in a situation like theirs: they banded together within the concrete chamber the warehouse offered and put their minds to work at a grand counter-attack, the cops so dimwitted that they weren't even able to snuff them out. Their goal was to beat the living daylight out of the wretched Bat, once and for all. To do that, though, they needed a strong leader, one with enough passion and boldness to corral the gang of people society left to die and transform them into an organized army that would bring Batman to his knees. 

Many people had taken up the reins of this lofty endeavor over the past decade to…middling success, all eventually ending up in the dreaded encapsulation of Gotham's condition that was Arkham Asylum. The microcosm in physical form of the city if there ever was one. But, if nothing else, the answer to the gang's unification was a proud product of the Asylum's ranks. 

Only one man, who undoubtedly had more hatred for Gotham City's ultimate stop-gapper than anyone in the world, possessed the tenacity and wit to even come close to cracking him. An individual of humble roots and an unknown past, but someone who'd come to completely redefine his image among the ranks of civilians, criminals, and bureaucrats alike as more of a character than just a single being. A character almost as infamous and spellbinding as Batman himself. A character, a persona…of a clown. Truly, it'd be fitting that a clown, a symbol of fun and whimsy, would be the one to upend the Bat's frigid disposition. The perfect image to capture the revolutionary spirit that was bottled up in many a local city dweller, but couldn't be fully realized till the man himself came-a-knocking. And what better name to capture the spirit of a clown? 

Joker.