Arkham City Post #5: The Search for Mr. Freeze

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!

Part 4: The Joker's Steel Mill

When I came to, I found myself strapped to a chair; so for those of you keeping score at home, that's 3 prolonged periods of unconsciousness on the night so far, after 2 of which I woke up in some form of restraint.  But this one was followed by the most drastic consequences and dynamic plot twist encountered so far.  The look of Joker's more-disgusting-than-usual white, scarred skin was enough to deduce that his blood was indeed contaminated with Titan... but now, so was mine!  After I couldn't squeeze anything from Joker about Protocol 10, he directed my attention to some recently used blood transfusion equipment, with me on the other end.

After I got over the initial sense of revulsion (and the subsequent recognition of the severe irony) of having some of my arch enemy's blood intermingled with mine, I couldn't deny the brilliance of the tactics: now finding a cure was my priority as well as Joker's.  I was also blown away by the drastic increase in personal stakes between last year's adventures in Arkham Asylum and now: before I was fighting to save my city, to take another step forward in my crusade to rid the citizens Gotham of their ridiculously costumed persecutors.  But now I was fighting to save my very life.  It kind of puts things in perspective, and hopefully gets more people interested in the plot of the game...

Joker threw me one last piece of information before sending the wheelchair to which I was tied crashing through the window down to the street below: Joker had commissioned Mr. Freeze to find him a cure.  This is nothing too surprising - remember Mr. Freeze was formerly Dr. Victor Fries, a brilliant scientist - and it seemed like the good doctor was close to completing his task... until he completely vanished off the map.  My first objective was to find him.  I figured I'd head to the coldest point in Gotham, which I could easily figure out using my hi-tech, totally advanced, state of the art Bat-Thermometer.

But first, I felt compelled to add yet another side mission to my list.  This materialized when I stopped to chat with a political prisoner who had figured out how to send an SOS signal over the radio.  He told me that he worked for Strange before he was thrown in there, but before he could go into any detail, he was killed by a perfectly-placed shot from a sniper.  I scanned the scene for evidence and was able to discover the trajectory of the bullet, which led me right to a shell casing that I immediately recognized as belonging to... that's right, Deadshot.  There must be some people in Arkham City that Strange wants taken out pretty thoroughly if he's willing to hire the world's deadliest assassin.  I would have to try and get to them first.

The coldest point in Gotham turned out to be the old GCPD building, where Freeze was using one of the old forensic labs to do his research.  But all I found was Penguin's thugs, who had apparently kidnapped Freeze and set up a guard around the place.  Penguin's thugs were noticeably tougher than Joker's: they were equipped with heart monitors resembling the suicide collars used by the old Asylum.  Joker wouldn't have been industrious enough to deck his henchmen out like that if he hadn't stumbled upon the equipment at the Asylum.  Now that there are multiple sets of henchmen running around, it's fun to see the different types of people each villain chooses to fill his crew with.  Joker goes for quantity (i.e. anyone who'll sign up), Penguin goes for quality, and Two-Face actually sends his goons out to give campaign speeches.  I guess he wants to keep his henchmen "on message."  Whatever, they all make the same sound when they hit the ground, so it doesn't matter to me.

Seeing as my leads to finding Mr. Freeze had gone cold (so what if there's a pun intended wanna start something?), I had to use some of my newly cultivated powers of persuasion to interrogate one of Penguin's thugs.  He told me right away that Cobblepot had set up his secure fortress in the Gotham Museum.  But as I headed for the door, I found that my remote electrical charge couldn't open it.  I could, however, use the cryptographic sequencer for the purpose it was originally built for: to open locked doors.  All I had to do was download the municipal codes so I could hack into government computers.  It felt good to hack into The Fed's computers to get what I needed - usually my sense of justice causes me to refrain from messing with government business, but these circumstances were rather dire.  Now I knew where to go, and had the means to get there.

Part 6: Questions Questions with the Riddler