Asprin, Robert Lynn – Catwoman – Tiger Hunt (With Lynn Abbey)

The room was bright, summertime hot, and stuffy when Selina woke up in the middle of the afternoon. Her head was throbbing; no wonder the cats preferred canned food. Fending off the light with an upraised hand, she navigated to the refrigerator. There was a double-sized container of orange juice in the freezer. She was too impatient to let it thaw properly and ate it like ice cream instead. The effect was indescribable and nearly instantaneous. When her eyes came back into focus, Selina was ready to take on the world.

Despite writing the Wilderness Warriors address on an envelope every month or so, Selina had not wasted much thought on their organization or location. She sent them money anonymously and they did Good Things with it. She didn’t feel the need to check up on them, and they had no idea who she was. It had seemed, to Selina, a perfect relationship.

She was somewhat disappointed, then, to find herself on a Gotham side street in a neighborhood that was just a bit cleaner, a bit safer, a bit luckier than the East End. The street was lined with six-story brownstone buildings that looked fundamentally no different than her own—except that the walls weren’t covered with profane graffiti, no one was passed out on the steps to the front doors, and every building had a phalanx of garbage cans securely chained to those steps. Trees grew behind stout metal fences at intervals along the sidewalk; someone had taken the trouble to plant daffodils in the soil around them.

These were the differences between poverty and comfort in Gotham City.