Arkham Origins, Part 1 - Black Mask at Blackgate

Hello, loyal readers. It's me again: vengeance, the night, Batman! It's been a couple of years since I shared with you the case files from arguably my greatest adventure ever, the one where I took on Two-Face, Penguin, Ra's al Ghul, Mister Freeze, and of course the Joker, all within the confines of Hugo Strange's Arkham City prison facility. While I doubt I'll ever be able to top that story in terms of pure drama, I feel the time is right to relate another entry from the Black Casebook, a defining moment from early in my career. Over the coming weeks, I will give you the story piece by piece, and hopefully it will give you a unique perspective into the events that made Batman who he is today...

It was a dark and stormy Christmas Eve in Gotham City. I had first donned the Batsuit to fight crime about two years earlier, a fact I was reminded of when a snippet of an interview I did with Vicki Vale came up on the screen as I madly channel-surfed in the Batcave. She mentioned that I had returned from my post-graduate hardcore international training montage two years ago, which I hoped no one would put together with the first sighting of the Batman. Flipping to the next station brought word that criminal overlord Black Mask had staged a highly irregular break-IN to Blackgate Prison, presumably targeting police Commissioner Loeb, who was there to witness the execution of Julian Day, AKA Calendar Man. I suited up in a frantic, jump-cutty montage, amid Alfred's protestations over me going out on Christmas Eve, but he always was somewhat of a homebody. I jumped into the Batwing and before the background music could come to a bombastic blaring climax, I was at the prison grounds, commencing my search for Black Mask.

I rescued Warden Joseph from a particularly nasty mobster in a Black Mask mask, but since he had no information about what the villains might be doing with Commissioner Loeb, I had fight my way through the prison until I got a chance to use my advanced interrogation techniques on another one of his henchmen. Even though I went through that entire fateful night back at the Asylum without having to squeeze information from anyone, being a detective, interrogation was actually one of the first things I mastered. Not surprisingly, I learned that Black Mask was taking his prey to the execution chamber.

I knew I had to act quickly, but to reach the chamber, I had to make use of most of my arsenal of gadgets. You see, during the Arkham Asylum time period, I was going through a "fast and light" phase, resulting in an almost empty utility belt (except for Batarangs and my grapnel gun of course) which gave me greater speed and maneuverability. Both in my early years and since then, I kept items like my Explosive Gel and Batclaw directly in my belt, which came in handy that night as I came across no shortage of structurally weak walls and air vents covered in grates. The drawback was that my suit was more cumbersome, which made my appearance more bulky and my moves more cartoony, giving the effect that I was playing an arcade game of my life. But since I was less well-known back then, henchmen were also not expecting me, so it all evened out in the end.

I arrived just too late to save Commissioner Loeb, who it turns out was in Black Mask's pocket the whole time. With him in the chamber was his number one thug, a giant of a man covered in scaly, reptilian skin who I would come to know very well over the years as Killer Croc. The next thing I saw the crocodile-man do, after throwing the former Police Commissioner into the gas chamber, was to smash a suspicious-looking drone that was flying around the prison. This was years before Obama was elected president, thus it couldn't have come from the government, so I grabbed the memory card to see what I could find out from it. Then I rushed outside into the snowstorm.

Again I was just too late to apprehend Black Mask, who barely had time to escape in his helicopter. But luckily he had left behind his croc monster for me to play with. He was quicker than he looked, even in those stupid striped slacks with dangling suspenders, but even his speed and his thick hide couldn't protect him from a quick flurry of blows, provided I could knock him off balance with my cape first. It didn't help that Black Mask's chopper kept swooping by to drop more henchmen on me, but it did help when Croc would periodically pick up gigantic fuel tanks with the intention of throwing them at me, because I could pepper them with enough quick batarangs that they would blow up in his face.

After a long, drawn-out battle, I finally got the lizard pinned down and made with the interrogation again. Apparently Black Mask had issued a sort of Christmas challenge to a group of assassins, charging them with the unenviable task of taking me down. Croc passed out before I could ask him why sudden beef Black Mask had with me, and I barely had time to drag him away from the cliff face on which the prison was built before I was surrounded by the Gotham City Police Department, led by the very capable Captain James Gordon. It was a shame that so many of them got such a good look at me, but it was bound to happen. What wasn't bound to happen was the police taking me into custody, as I dazzled them all with a death-defying leap off the cliff and into the cockpit of the Batwing, which I immediately flew back to the Batcave to get some answers.

Analyzing the memory card from the drone provided evidence that Black Mask had hired eight assassins, only seven of which were listed: Deathstroke, Firefly, Copperhead, Deadshot, Electrocutioner, Shiva, and Bane. I wondered who the last would be, unless it was maybe Killer Croc, who I already defeated? I also wondered who would be spying on Black Mask, until I recognized the calling card of another established criminal in Gotham, the Penguin. Alfred of course urged me to lay low, but I couldn't risk innocent people getting hurt on my account. I had to be aggressive if I wanted to make it through this night, and the best way to do that was to get whatever information I could from Penguin about what was going on in this City of Assassins.