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    The place is Gotham City. The time, 1987 -- once removed.

    The city of Tomorrow: stark angles, creeping shadows, 
    dense, crowded, airless, a random tangle of steel and 
    concrete, self-generating, almost subterranean in its 
    aspect... as if hell had erupted through the sidewalks and 
    kept on growing. A dangling fat moon shines overhead, ready 
    to burst.
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    Amid the chrome and glass sits a dark and ornate Gothic 
    anomaly: old City Cathedral, once grand, now abandoned -- 
    long since boarded up and scheduled for demolition.

    On the rooftop far above us, STONE GARGOYLES gaze down from 
    their shadowy, windswept perches, keeping monstrous watch 
    over the distant streets below, sightless guardians of the 
    Gotham night.

    One of them is moving.
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    The pulsing heart of downtown Gotham, a neon nightmare of 
    big-city corruption, almost surreal in its oppressiveness. 
    Hookers wave to drug dealers. Street hustlers slap high-
    fives with three-card monte dealers. They all seem to know
    each other... with one conspicuous exception:

    A TOURIST FAMILY, Mom, Dad, and little Jimmy, staring 
    straight  ahead as they march in perfect lockstep down the 
    main drag. They've just come out of a bit show two blocks 
    over; the respectable theatre crowd has thinned out, and 
    now -- Playbills in hand -- they find themselves adrift in 
    the predatory traffic of Gotham's meanest street.
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