Cold. Wet. Something rattling underneath him.
Jude's skull throbbed in time with whatever metal surface he'd managed to fall asleep on. His thoughts arrived slow and waterlogged, the way they did in that last murky stretch before real consciousness—awareness without context, instinct without facts. Some distant part of his brain was firing warnings. He couldn't yet read them.
A voice cut through.
"Sir! Sir, are you alright?"
English. Clear, American-accented English.
He forced his eyes open.
Metal ceiling. Rows of cracked vinyl seats. Windows slicked with rain and motion blur, the outside world strobing past in grey and black. The rhythmic clatter of steel wheels on tracks. He was on a train, lying on the floor between two rows of seats, and nobody around him looked the least bit surprised to find a person there.
When did he get on a train?
The cold hit him first, that particular damp chill that gets into the marrow and stays. Then the smell. Rain, diesel, and underneath both of those, something copper and organic that his lizard brain recognized before his thinking brain could catch up. Blood. Not fresh. Old. The kind that had soaked into surfaces and dried and become part of the architecture.
That smell cleared his head faster than any alarm clock.
Jude pushed himself up off the floor. His palms stung against cold metal. The train car swayed around a curve, and he grabbed the nearest seat back and hauled himself upright.
The last thing he remembered: his apartment. His laptop. An unfinished sentence on the screen, the cursor blinking with the patient contempt of a thing that has nowhere to be. He'd been three chapters from deadline, running on coffee and spite, and then—
Nothing.
A conductor stood two feet away, watching him with the expression of a man who has seen worse but is professionally obligated to pretend otherwise. Concern on the surface. Underneath it, something tighter. Not fear exactly. Calculation. The look of someone deciding how much this was going to cost them.
"Sir, are you alright?"
"I'm…" Jude stopped.
What exactly was he supposed to say? That he'd fallen asleep at his desk writing the most critically un-acclaimed romance novel in publishing history, and woken up somewhere that smelled like dried blood and transit neglect? That didn't seem like information this man needed.
"I'm fine," Jude said. "Sorry."
The conductor's smile was the practiced kind. "We're almost at the terminal, sir. Just one more stop."
The word "terminal" landed strange. Heavy. The man had said it the way people say "final destination" when they mean something more literal than they're letting on.
Jude turned to the window.
Gothic architecture clawed at a grey sky—stone spires and gargoyles, buildings that looked like they'd been designed by someone whose only reference point was Victorian nightmares. Art deco towers studded with lit windows, rising above streets that seemed to swallow light rather than reflect it. Below the towers, spreading outward like a bruise, block after block of low buildings: cramped, stained, desperate. Neon signs buzzed in colors that had no business being that bright against that much dark.
And there, through the rain-smeared glass, a station sign.
He couldn't read all of it. His English was barely functional, absorbed from years of video games and American film. But one word on that sign he knew. He'd seen it his whole life. Comics, movies, games, the shared cultural vocabulary of everyone who'd ever read a Batman issue or watched a man in a cape punch a clown on a television screen.
GOTHAM
The syllables landed in his stomach like dropped concrete.
He stared at the sign.
He kept staring.
"No," he said, very quietly.
The train slowed. Brakes screamed.
"No, no, no, no—"
The conductor had already retreated to the far end of the car. The other passengers gathered their belongings with the specific efficiency of people who have learned not to make prolonged eye contact with anyone talking to themselves. Jude barely registered them. His eyes stayed on the platform sign as the train ground to a halt.
GOTHAM CENTRAL STATION.
Gotham City.
The city where the violent crime rate had long since stopped being measured in conventional statistics because conventional statistics didn't have the range. Where seventy percent of the working population was employed, in some capacity, by organized crime. Where the remaining thirty percent were either victims, eccentric billionaires in animal costumes, or those few catastrophically unlucky people who were neither—just ordinary people caught between the factions, walking collateral damage in someone else's war.
The city where a man in a bat suit was considered a reasonable civic institution.
The doors hissed open. Cold air rolled in. Somewhere beyond the platform, a siren started up and then cut off mid-wail, like whoever was driving had thought better of it.
Jude let the crowd carry him out onto the platform.
The station was dim, the fluorescent lights in a constant argument with themselves—buzzing, flickering, losing. Puddles on the concrete reflected the damaged light back in broken pieces. The air smelled like rain and exhaust and the specific staleness of a building that hadn't been cleaned in a decade because nobody was going to pay for that and nobody was going to make anyone pay for it either.
Above the exits, a sign confirmed what he already knew. GOTHAM CITY. Population: several million people making terrible decisions.
Jude covered his face with both hands.
He stood there for a moment on the platform while the crowd flowed around him, just breathing. Trying to process. Trying to find some angle from which this situation made sense.
He found none.
Then, like a switch had been thrown somewhere in the architecture of reality, words materialized in his vision. Not in front of him—inside his vision, overlaid on the world like a heads-up display from a game he'd never agreed to play.
SYSTEM: Starting from Scratch
Current Assets: $7
Congratulations! You've successfully transmigrated to Gotham City, statistically the worst place in the DC Universe to build financial security through legitimate means.
Your mission is simple: find legal employment and become rich through honest labor. The world is full of opportunity! Unlimited chances await you, provided you remain completely penniless.
Best of luck. You'll need it.
NOVICE SHOP—Special Starter Bundle Limited time offer. Offer expires: never, because you will always be broke.
Basic English Proficiency—$1 Note: How DO you spell "abandon"? Asking for a friend.
Local Identity Documents—$1 Note: The bosses in Gotham are VERY busy shooting people and stealing things. They definitely don't have time for paperwork!
Fast Life Recovery—$1 Note: Works great! 99.99% discount for the first purchase!
Save Point (20 uses)—$1 Note: Salary paid in installments. Can't afford it next time!
REMINDER: Assets can only be earned through LEGAL employment. Please work diligently and achieve prosperity through legitimate means!
Jude stared at the floating text that only he could see.
A system. He had a system. The golden finger that every transmigrator in every novel he'd ever written wished for—the magical interface that was supposed to make starting over in another world survivable. The cheat code. The leg up.
A system that required legal employment.
In Gotham.
The laugh started somewhere he couldn't control and came out as a slightly broken sound. A businessman nearby clutched his briefcase tighter and walked faster. One of the platform attendants glanced over and then decided, with great deliberation, to look somewhere else.
"Legal work," Jude said to no one. "Legal. In Gotham."
He patted his pockets. Force of habit, hope against hope—wallet, phone, keys, anything from his actual life. His fingers found nothing but damp fabric lining.
Of course.
He was in Gotham City with seven dollars, no luggage, clothes that smelled like a train floor, and a system that had all the hallmarks of something designed by a deity with a very specific sense of humor. The kind of deity who thought that the funniest possible version of "magical transmigration adventure" was dropping a man with no combat skills and no criminal connections into a city where the question wasn't whether you'd get shot but how many times and by whom.
Above him, Gotham's skyline rose in the rain—broken teeth against a sick grey sky. A siren wailed somewhere in the middle distance. Glass shattered. Someone shouted once, short and sharp, and then went quiet.
Seven dollars.
Jude tipped his head back and looked up at the weeping clouds.
"What kind of lunatic," he said to the uncaring sky, "would even think of finding a legal job in Gotham?"