Ember

Taking out the empire had made a lot of people nervous, but things ended up being quieter than expected. Uber and Leet, as well as the Undersiders, did become more active without the Empire to wo0rry about, but the real big threat - The ABB were surprisingly quiet.

We couldn't make sense of it. The analyst we hired for Nightwatch initially suspected a sudden increase in gang activity near the edges of ABB territory as the unpowered bulk of the E88 attempted to maintain control over their territory. Or an increase in kidnapping as they took advantage of the lack of opposition to their predation.

But all signs pointed towards the ABB consolidating power for some reason, stabilising their control over their territory. My attempts at hacking their communications, charting out the network of texts and calls that they used to coordinate made us think that with most of the other parahumans gone, they thought that they might be able to break off from the ABB and reform the unpowered gangs that Lung had conquered to form the ABB in the first place.

Lung seemed to be mainly concerned with enforcing his control over those dissidents, but Armand didn't think so - apparently, Lung's actions didn't fit his profile. He seemed to think that Lung was planning something, but that the plan would take longer to become useful.

I would love to think that it was something I did, that I had somehow scared the Dragon of Kyushu into his reticence, but I wasn't that deluded. Lung was definitely up to something.

We were trying to figure out what that might be, but we didn't have a solid idea on what that might be.

There were all sorts of theories, but our best guess right now was that Lung had gotten a hold of something, maybe some tinkertech, or some sort of new suppliers and they were waiting on the deal to go through before trying to expand out in the city.

It might even be a deal with one of the other villain groups that were migrating towards Brockton Bay now that the Empire had been ousted. My taps into the PRT were pointing at members of the Herren Clan moving towards Brockton bay in an effort to take over the E88, as well as signs of other white supremacist groups doing the same. Some evidence even suggested that Purity might be returning to the group. That had its own interesting implications as to why she left, but it hadn't been confirmed so far.

Even ignoring that, the Teeth and the Fallen were showing signs of coming this way.

Everything was pointing towards some serious chaos in the coming months. Something I had to keep a careful eye on.

I mentally checked over what the PRT was considering and frowned. This was going to make me rush my anti-master powers.

Dating Amy meant spending way more time around Barbie than I wanted to, and it had reminded me that I was getting to the stage where I needed to worry about masters… and Thinkers, I guess.

I did have a lead on how that might be possible, at least with Glory Girl and Gallant. I still remembered how my mind was immune to the effects of my anger and panic during fights since most of it wasn't running on my actual brain, but safely hidden away from my powers.

Unfortunately, I was starting to suspect those powers were somehow linked since Gallant turned out to be Dean Stansfield, Glory Girl's long-time boyfriend. I needed to find out how more master powers worked before committing to them. Hacking into the PRT gave me some ideas as to how that sort of thing worked, but surprisingly, the PRT didn't have a lot of detail on the specific mechanisms of most master powers.

Still, hacking the PRT was a welcome break from trying to track down the vial-makers. I had managed to uncover a few things, but a name - Cauldron - and whispers of some sort of extremely powerful cape enforcer were not what I was hoping for.

After discovering that Triumph was Rory Willians, a nephew to the mayor, I was eventually able to track a possible contact point. His father had withdrawn a great deal of cash, just shy of three million dollars over the course of several months prior to Triumph debuting.

That was a lot of money.

Less money than I was charging for some of my services sure, but it wasn't the kind of money I could throw around carelessly. Though, it could be an indication of the difficulty of making the vials.

If they were selling it for millions of dollars, they were cutting down on their market. I mean, I had learned a lot about economics when I was working out precinct tables for some of the more expensive treatments I carried out, trying to figure out how to price things to make sure I could heal people while still making as much money as I could to fuel my future projects.

Yeah, they might be making millions of dollars per vial, but there's only so many people who would be able to afford that.

I mean, they do want to remain secret for some reason, so that might explain it.

But that's even more confusing. Why are they even selling powers? I mean, research into Case53s meant that I could only find a few hundred of them.

If the vials failed half the time, then Cauldron had hundreds of capes at their disposal, even if I say that every Case 53 is released, which I sincerely doubt.

I just didn't have enough information to do anything about them, and so far all I had found were dead ends. My skills in haking had slowly been getting better, but I didn't want to spend charges on a power for that, especially since adding stuff I could find online about computers and hacking into my tinker repository was doing a decent job so far.

Still, I had to put it out of my mind eventually. I had exhausted my leads so far, and I think I needed to decide on my anti-master protections if I was dealing with that many capes.

Though, it was starting to look like it might be worth making a couple more powers. By this point, I had managed a fairly significant reserve at eighty charges. Even with the eight that I was reserved for emergencies, I had enough to make a seventh-level power and still have enough that I could probably make powers to give away.

And powers on that level were frankly impressive. Even without optimising powers to squeeze as much out of the powers as I could, I could make myself a power that would let me stand alongside some major capes, like Lightslinger or Assault.

Actually optimising it… I might even be able to stand alongside people like Alexandria or Narwhal.

But I didn't know what I should use it for. Eighty charges were more charges than the sum total of all the charges I had already spent at this point.

But I was feeling comfortable enough to spend a few of them. I was starting to run low on Targets again, and I was starting to see the limits of my Mark. I've been working on a thinker suite and I had some ideas for some better movement options.

I would have to spend some time soon just sitting down and considering options sometime soon. The number of charges I had at my disposal meant that I could probably get away with spending some of them.

But until then, I had work to do.

I was capitalising on the end of the Empire as hard as I could, spending the money I had stockpiled from all my healing quickly as I brought in more construction to build the more affordable housing.

Thankfully, I could get away with having the people buying nicer houses to cover the seed money in the name of 'custom housing'.

I still owned the land, and even the houses… sort of.

With the bulk construction contracts I was taking out, I could could co-ordinate with the people looking to move into my property to build houses according to their plans at a lower rate, which meant that they were renting from me. Except that in order to get the money to build the places, I had to mortgage the houses. Which kind of sort of meant that I was selling it to a bank and buying it back over time? I didn't really properly get that. I was getting better than market rate on that though. I managed to find a few banks that had people higher up with medical issues I could… assist them with.

But effectively, that meant that I was charging my tenants two thousand bucks a month in rent for these houses. I mean, I'll probably end up paying off most of those mortgages well before the thirty-year terms were complete. But according to Alice and Layton, this would end up being more profitable in the long term, especially since I would be paying for some of those places entirely out of pocket to help with making sure I was chipping away at those loans as much as possible.

Given that I was still somehow charging less than the market rate on those homes, despite the premium for living in a gated community with private security and the proximity to all the stuff I was building, it was no wonder I was getting bidding wars just to get the right to rent the property near me.

Sure, to make it more attractive, a portion of those bids went into paying off a portion of the rent, but getting the money upfront meant that I could save even more money on the mortgages.

Which was as good a reason as any to do it I guess? Though, now that I have this many people renting from me, I should really expand my maintenance department.

But honestly, the big thing was the school. Gobtown was pretty far away from any functioning schools, and the closest one was Winslow. I didn't want the people living here to have to deal with that nonsense. So, I had to deal with figuring out how to start a school… and one that wasn't shit.

Because what do you know, US schools are shit. No wonder everyone hates school.

I've mostly been going off the Scandinavian model, but I've been cheating a bit and using my powers to crunch the numbers of how to best make a school that goes from pre-k all the way up to high school. Accreditation was going to be annoying, but I had months to deal with it before the start of the next school year.

For now, I was just hosting a guaranteed shuttle bus service over to Winslow. Slow, since it was more than an hour, but it was all that I could do right now.