Countless Joyful Dawns - Chapter ?? - 5: Meet and Greet

There were a silly number of groups and gangs in Brockton Bay. Frankly, what was the local government doing? They had their own forces, and should be hammering down all the gangs as fast as they cropped up. Instead, they seemed to just stand around with a thumb up their ass. In no particular order, there was the Empire 88, Azn Bad Boys, Merchants, Undersiders, Coil, Uber & Leet, Parian, Circus, New Wave, Faultline, and I was probably forgetting someone.

Well. I couldn’t forget with my perfect memory, but the idea was there.

Sure, I could see why the PRT was struggling against some of the gangs. The Empire 88 - not to be confused with the Exterreri Empire - had significantly more parahumans and troopers than the local government. Which basically meant there was a cold civil war going on, as there were larger, hostile, armed forces inside the city. Why the hell the Federal government hadn’t stepped in and squashed the insurrection like a bug, I didn’t know. But, I could give the locals a pass on being hilariously outgunned there. 

All the small time crooks? The individuals? The multiple mercenary groups? Yeah… I wasn’t giving them a pass there. Who the hell let mercenaries operate in their territory, and didn’t expect trouble? Then again, healers seemed to be pretty rare, and if I reframed it as ‘they allowed this one super rare healer to have her own family be bodyguards and stay sharp with a license to arrest low-level crime’... alright, fine. I’d seen enough [Healers] have their own bodyguards and get plenty of slack for their skills. Heck, I’d gone through my own life using - never abusing, no matter how much Auri and Iona teased me - the slack being a powerful [Healer] gave me. Couldn’t fault the local doing the same thing.

The other oddity with Panacea - why was she being classified as a healer, instead of a biomancer? All credit to the girl, using biomancy to heal was hard, and… well, okay, I suppose if the locals knew beyond a shadow of doubt that she was a fully-fledged biomancer, they’d run screaming. It was only obvious to me because I knew my speciality inside and out, and could absolutely draw the difference between a biomancer and a healer based on reputation and rumors alone. It didn’t hurt that I’d dabbled in biomancy myself, using my own body as my magnum opus. Scales under my skin, improved blood, marrow, and organs, metal and runes etched on my Kun-Peng bones, among dozens and dozens of other changes. 

Well, either way, maybe she’d appreciate some of Pallos’s notes on the subject. If there were no other civilized biomancers here, there was nobody to train and teach her. I wasn’t going to insist or anything, but I absolutely had a soft spot for a fellow healer.

Until then? There were a dozen bigger and badder problems to deal with.

Why the hell Faultline was allowed to persist baffled me. The Protectorate outgunned them, outclassed them, and knew exactly where they were going to be. Like… walk up to them, arrest them, medals all around? They hadn’t exactly been shy trying to arrest me.

I needed there to be peace and quiet in Brockton Bay. The mushroom ring I’d planted was only one plan I had to get back home. Instead of sitting around, twiddling my thumbs, and hoping that would get me back home, I was going to try other stuff. The fae would absolutely fuck me over if they thought I was using them, and thought I was trying to get one up on them. I didn’t want to get back to Pallos, only to find 23,456 years had passed and try to track down my loved ones again. That’d be monstrously unfair to them… if they even survived that long. No, better to have several irons in the fire, and see if any of them panned out. 

It wasn’t a hard rule of dimensional travel, but it’d be much easier to open a portal back from a place where the fabric was thin, so to speak, or where there was an existing connection. Since I’d been dropped off in Brockton Bay, any portals back home would be best done from Brockton Bay. Given what an utter shithole the city was, it’d be easier to build a portal without junkies constantly trying to break in, a gang shootout hosing the place down, or other parahumans sticking their own fingers into the mess.

Plus the whole genocide thing the Empire 88 had going on.

If I was going to get some damn peace and quiet to get back home, I had to let everyone know I was the biggest, meanest, scariest thing around. I didn’t have thousands of years of the Sentinels establishing their reputation here. I didn’t have all the smoke and mirrors usually available. Nobody was going to recognize the badge. 

I had to do this from square one.

It wasn’t going to be quite as easy as ‘beat up the gangs, go home’. That was only the first step. The next step involved an economic revival of the place. Normally impossible for one person to achieve, but I had quite a few ways to horribly cheat. Namely, I knew how to reliably funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to the area, and how to start a business from the ground up. Critically, I didn’t need to turn a profit. I could run it at a loss, just to get the economic benefits going while I was around. It was going to suck - I hated that particular adventure, and only seeing how Iona lit up and thrived in the environment kept me going - but hey, I’d done it before. The utter lack of classes and levels was going to take getting used to, but…

I spun off a dozen thought processes to handle Step: Economic Revival of a City, then refocused back on the mission.

Operation: Pax Elaine. The sun had gone down, but from what I could tell, that was when everyone came out to play. Kinda like vampires, except they all pretended to also be able to hold down a day job of one sort or another.

I activated the Jiwa [Greater Invisibility] rune in my chest, and sped through the city at top speed. I went up and down most roads, and while I didn’t get everything, I got enough. I knew where enough gangs were hanging out to get started. It helped that the Undersiders had just robbed a bank that morning, and I could easily pick up their scent and followed it back to their lair. It was practically cheating. Those dogs smelled so strongly I was surprised normal people couldn’t pull it off. Or was this more of the ‘we’re ignoring all the gangs here’ business?

Speaking of mercenaries, I figured Fautline and her crew would be the easiest to approach and test out. I stopped outside of Palanquin - their nightclub, honestly, why the hell the local government wasn’t raiding the place still baffled me - dressed in clothes that were trendy 400 years ago and I still looked great in, and waited patiently in line with the other partygoers. Soon enough, pretty privilege had me through the door, and I completely ignored the bar and dancefloor in favor of homing in on Faultline.

The other members of her crew were on my list of ‘oh, this is interesting, let me see if I can poke around when I get some spare time’. Newter was basically a lizard-person with hallucinogenic sweat - I was willing to bet I could heal through it and utterly ignore it - and Gregor the Snail was gigantic, with a clearish body and shell-like growths all over. Case 53’s were apparently some big mystery, and I was willing to poke around myself, out of professional curiosity if nothing else. There was also Labyrinth and Spitfire, but they were less interesting at first blush. Reshapes buildings and creates all sorts of mazes and architecture, fairly high-level but not too dangerous. And… spits fire. I could do that at 16, and I’d grown so far past it, I just wasn’t impressed. 

Being utterly immune to fire also probably contributed to how unimpressed I was. Extra-extra unimpressed with the PRT and Protectorate. A handgun countered their entire team. 

Could my healing image be updated? Was there anything useful to share with other biomancers? At the same time, I didn’t want to give anyone too many ideas, and get yet another biomancer trying to break the divine decree against creating new species. Seriously, some days I swore that was the cause of a quarter of our problems. Stop kidnapping babies to experiment on, honestly, it wasn’t hard. That, and eugenics programs. They weren’t hard to not do. 

‘Arrest people performing large-scale unspeakable atrocities’ - I thought it’d be a once a decade thing, not a once a month thing!

Yet another thought process was spun off to continue nattering about that. How I got anything done before [Parallel Thoughts] was frankly a miracle. 

There were minimal problems slipping through the nightclub to Fautline’s office. Then again, I did teleport through two walls, so I was cheating a bit. I briefly considered just appearing in her office, but that sort of dramatic entrance tended to set people on edge, so I politely knocked on her door instead.

I could see her start and scramble around for a moment, before drawing herself up and squaring her shoulders. I was a little unimpressed with her outfit. Ballroom gown and welding mask?

Was everyone here a rank amateur? At least the PRT dressed properly!

“Enter.” She commanded, and I smoothly opened the door and stepped into the room.

“Hi!” I cheerfully waved. “I’m Elaine! I’d like to hire you and your whole crew for a job you already do!”

“This isn’t a game.” Faultline calmly said. “You don’t have an appointment, and I do need to know how you slipped past Big Rob at the door.”

I shrugged.

“I teleported through the walls, and I’ve got gold ingots to pay you with.”

I could see right through her welding mask. Clearly, thinking she couldn’t be seen had her freely expressing her emotions, making her easy to read. She tapped her fingers on the desk, obviously tempted but mistrusting.

“You know… if you’re a cape, it’s polite to meet each other in mask. It’s considered threatening to have this discussion while you’re unmasked. I don’t know you well enough to take it as a sign of trust.”

I rolled my eyes. Gods, this nonsense again?

“Fine.” I said, then teleported a sticky notepad and a pen from her desk, shamelessly pilfering her office supplies. I wrote down ‘Gud masc’ on the sticky note, then pressed it to my forehead.

“Tada!” I flourished my hands. “A mask!”

Faultline started to talk, but I bulldozed straight over her.

“It’s just as effective as yours! I’ve got a strong, er, you’d call it a Thinker rating. I can see all around me, including your face.” I shrugged. “Masks do nothing for me, and a helmet is far more threatening where I’m from. That means ‘I’m probably going to try to kill you’. Same with the cape. I take it off, I’m not playing around.”

Faultline looked steadily unhappier, but she wasn’t trying to throw me out of the place yet.

“What’s the job?” She curtly asked me. 

“Do nothing! Here.” I told her, teleporting out two gold ingots. That should be plenty, right?

“Excuse me?” She asked.

“Take no jobs in Brockton Bay. Fight nobody. Be a force for peace and quiet while I get out of here.”

“There are four buses a day from the central terminal. They can take you to Boston or New York City. I’ll even buy you a ticket.” Faultline drily replied… but her fingers were playing across the gold ingots. 

I shook my head.

“Oh, if it were a matter of normal travel, I’d be gone already. No, dimensional nonsense. I’ve got to stay in Brockton until I get out of here. Hopefully, it’ll only be a month, maybe a year. A century, tops. Then I’m gone, and you can go back to ‘not being paid to not operate in Brockton Bay’ like you are now, instead of ‘getting paid to not operate in Brockton Bay’ like I’m proposing! A good deal, yeah?” I asked with my best smile and an extended hand.

“Is this gold real?” Faultline asked.

“I can provide some gems if you’d prefer that.” I told her. “But yes, it’s real. Good for jewelry, but a little too easy to counterfeit where I’m from to have a practical use. It’s complicated.”

Fautline drummed her fingers on the desk, clearly tempted.

“Do the terms of the agreement involve not stepping in on S-class threats?” She asked.

I grinned.

She was haggling, but already I knew - I had her.

One down.

Countless more to go.