[Betterman] The Little Mermaid

At the city tea party afterwards, Gotham maintained his usual silence; when his brothers and sisters asked him to communicate, he passed on the influence of Bruce Wayne's previous eight years of record to them.

Gotham was a bit worried that his brothers and sisters would give him a tirade because he paid too much attention to a human, but luckily they didn't: they didn't recognize that it was the same person.

Then the urban consciousness chatted with each other as usual. They shared the feeling of human roads, expressed the hunger and thirst caused by the long-term infiltration of rainwater into the soil, and complained about the garbage filled in the suburbs of the city—— Atlantis seldom said a lot, because humans flushed nuclear waste into the sea, making him want to vomit several times.

Then Central City thought of seafood, so their topic changed smoothly.The metropolis projected the image of the delicacies it secretly collected to other urban consciousness bodies, and the central city visibly shook its body, asking the metropolis to record the taste and share it with him next time.Seaside City rushed to make a promise to Central City, vowing that it would not forget it next time.Paradise Island conveyed a happy mood. He began to recall the delicacies he had seen that exhausted human imagination, and successfully attracted the attention of Central City.

Gotham quietly stretched out its body, its tentacles intertwined with those of its brothers and sisters, just like a normal human afternoon.

Tea parties come one after another, and the daily life between cities is always so boring.

For the rest of the time, Gotham continues to watch over its city.In this way, the construction of the residential planning area in the East End was suspended, and the tomb-like, featureless rectangular buildings stood one after another on the edge of Gotham Bay. The unpainted dark gray shell became dirty as some people moved in. And messy up.The people in it came and went, some moved to the neighboring, safer neighborhood, and some moved to another world.The only thing that has remained the same is the gang outside the law that manipulates the place. They control the place with high pressure. Drug trafficking has become more attractive to children who have no schooling than fighting. Under the pretext of accepting it into the hands of the boss of the neighborhood and even the gang leader, providing them with a few cars and a few girlfriends.That money then goes to Las Vegas, paid off politicians and expensive brands.

Gotham has condensed a little water vapor, and it walks like a human being in the streets under neon lights, through the deep and foul-smelling sewers, and leans against the glass curtain wall at the top of the skyscraper.He stayed in many places, overlooking the corners of Gotham City from the detached perspective that belongs to the city consciousness——

A woman was beaten by thugs for failing to pay the protection fee in time. Her young daughter hid in the closet in horror while holding a skinny black cat. The invisible water vapor embraced her, and the cries for help outside were subtly covered by the wind;

The child who looks like an egg is regarded as an ominous symbol because of the death of his parents and unlucky things always happen around him. The grandmother who raised him also regards the death of his parents as his fault. whip him and abuse him.When the child held the portrait of his parents and doubted the world, the portrait seemed to show him a relieved smile;

The boy who was bullied at school hid in the shadow of the woods. He carved one villain after another out of wood, painted them red, and put them in the schoolbag of the bully.When things came to light, he was pressed on the floor of the toilet and beaten, and the water vapor condensed on the mirror to form different Rorschach ink marks, scaring away the bullies;

Gotham City General Hospital's gardens were torn down to make way for a new building.In the ward facing this small garden, the red-haired girl quietly watched the flowers and plants she had given her name being uprooted, and a wilting rose fell in front of her window;

Edward Nygma had taken his senior classes ahead of time and was small and thin in class.He was ostracized by the fraternity, and could only play with toys that only he understood, although Eddie would never understand that there was a pair of eyes watching him;

The boy in Copperpot's family was ridiculed because of his body shape, and he always hung out with the birds in the bird shop. After his mother passed away, the bird shop was seized by the bank to offset the loan. He knocked on the locked shop door in the rain. A sparrow landed on top of his head, and little Cobblepot's crazy features were reflected in his black pearly eyes.

Oswald Copperpot broke the glass and set the birds free.His hands and face were bloody and bloody from the shattered glass, but he was laughing out loud, as if years of depression had been released.

Gotham's attention slipped away, and he stepped on the broken glass. In the dark corner, a child curled up, staring at Cobblepot with green eyes like smoke, just like watching "Godzilla". At the same time, he stared intently at Cobblepot, who was laughing maniacally... and Gotham.

Gotham thought of his Bruce again, and he looked up at Bruce Wayne's school.

He saw him come to school alone in the shadows of the hallway, and everyone called him "Wayne," and He heard them say, secretly or to his face, that he was an orphan, and they knew nothing but his last name.

There's a fire burning deep in Bruce Wayne's night-sky eyes, like Serena Kyle, Humphrey Temple, Jonathan Klein...everyone.The fire was so hot that sooner or later it would burn others and themselves to ashes.

Gotham drives the wind over Bruce Wayne's eyelids, and he knows it's never going to work.So his tentacles went down and touched Gaia's consciousness.

"My people are sinking into the abyss," Gotham asked. "I can feel them calling for help from gods, or whatever, but there is no answer. You said that all cities will have guardians , why haven’t I seen one so far? Don’t humans suffer enough? I’ve never seen the existence of gods, but it’s not true that they are not saved because they are paying for their sins?”

"Life always finds its own way." Mother Gaia replied, "You are too young, you are born to be the best port in this land, one of the centers of everything in the world. Everyone respects you You are the most beautiful pearl in the ivory tower. My child, Washington has been burned, London has been bombed, Berlin has been divided into two, and every street in Volgograd has been the front line of the battlefield... But you You have never experienced any of these, you will always stand on the outermost edge of the storm of war, and the scythe of death has never been stuck in your throat."

Gotham's body puffed up a little, expressing his confusion.

"Suffering is the most real emotion in this world. Where consciousness is born and life has its own thoughts, the perception of pain becomes the best means for genetic material to control biological behavior. Happiness is another. It is human nature that they need extra stimulation to be happy, but not to feel pain, hunger, tiredness, fear... The world is shaped by and guided by these emotions. Suffering is destructive but helpful for the individual and Societies construct meaning. Meaning determines how they deal with suffering."

"Why don't we face this?" Gotham asked. "I feel sorry for my people...but only; I know what happened to them, but I still can't understand how they feel."

Mother Gaia was puzzled by His question: "Why would you want to know how they feel, my child? That is not a good feeling. We exist because of human settlements, and we will disappear with them. Ours is almost as close as the solar system." For the same long life, there is no opportunity to make choices. We don't need to deal with suffering, so we don't face pain."

"So I can only wait for the guardian," Gotham said, "I can clearly feel every drop of blood shed by the people in the city, their lost lives, and their fallen souls, but I can only watch it happen, just Like my brothers and sisters."

Gotham withdrew its tentacles.He is still "standing" in front of Bruce Wayne, and he is flipping through a book, which is a university textbook, "Human Anatomy" written by Hugo Strange.

Gotham let the wind blow past the book sadly, turning several pages backwards. "What are you thinking, my child?" He lowered his perspective and pretended to cup Bruce's face.

Suddenly someone was calling Bruce, Gotham and Bruce looked up together, and recognized that it was a man of the school, one of the few friends of Bruce Wayne, Harvey Dent.Bruce hastily slapped the Wuthering Heights cover on the book for this friend.

"Don't worry, Mr. Wayne, Harvey Dent is more schizophrenic than you," Gotham thought.When he was about to leave, he suddenly found Thomas Elliott hiding behind the Roman column at the edge of his field of vision, looking at him with unclear eyes.

Gotham remembers Thomas Elliot looking like that the night before he set out to cut the brake lines on his parents' car, and when his mother was rescued.

Before long, Bruce Wayne decided to leave Gotham.When sending him on the plane, Gotham didn't know whether it was the sadness of the child leaving in his heart at that time, or his blessing for him to go to a better place.

After he left, he felt that he was trapped in the dark quagmire day after day, with no way to escape.He saw that Sionis finally mastered the drug trade after killing another core member of the family; Basil Caro bribed a high-level member of the Falcone family and finally got his wish to participate in the male lead of the movie ; Garfield Lyns set fire to the basement and burned his adoptive parents, and was sent back to the orphanage again; Waylon Jones escaped from the room where his aunt who guarded him imprisoned him, and went into the bottomless sewer without hesitation ...

He devoured them, He contained them.

He knew Serena Kyle started stealing jewels for money, Humphrey Temple mutilated and killed his grandmother in the darkroom, Jonathan Klein... He went to college and studied how to scare people.Pamela became a Ph.D. in botany, and she claimed to be able to hear plants talking, while Eddie still liked to tease other people with weird puzzles, and someone who was teased by him "accidentally" fell into Gotham Bay.Coppert attended his first mob rallies, wearing a tailored suit and carrying his Bulgarian umbrella, and no one would laugh at his physique anymore.

They also got stuck in the quagmire, and when they called for help to no avail, they dived deeper.The quagmire pulled him down, but there was no trace of his guardian; Gotham scanned the world repeatedly, but found no one who could hold him up.

The author has something to say:

Try to imagine that as I write this, I have the Koch Industries biography on my computer, the history of the American gangsters on my tablet, and the famine chronicle on my phone... Batman's schizophrenia is not his fault.

Egghead strayed into the front line of the Gotham fandom.