Ember

With the Empire and the Merchants gone, buying land the Brockton Bay was starting to get expensive, especially the land in and around Gibtown, near one of the three garages I was setting up for Nightwatch.

Still, the land in the docks was dilapidated enough that I could still maintain the cash reserves to start connecting Gibtown to my new holdings. Finalising everything was going to take some time, but enough people had seen what I had done that I could work out a few non-standard deals.

A portion of the money from renting it out, either as a discount to the chosen tenants or as cash forwarded to the previous owner was usually enough, but what really interested people were the… more clandestine dealings.

I had spent several days, discussing things with Mom and Jenny, using my accelerated thought precognition and extensive research to try and figure out better ways of dealing with crime in my neighbourhood.

Which the city still won't let me rename to Melody Park.

Still, a good portion of keeping crime down was in managing the circumstances of people around me. Desperate people do desperate things, and as long as I made it so that people had a solution to their problems that wasn't illegal, or at least, not problematic, most people wouldn't commit crimes just because it was less annoying.

The way I saw it explained was with music piracy. Sure, you could pirate music and end up possibly getting in trouble for it for free, or you could buy it from iTunes for a buck and not have to worry about anything. It was cheap, convenient and safe.

Plus, by hiring people, I got even more power to throw around at city hall to finally get rid of this terrible name.

So, some stuff was simple, I was in the process of renovating a bunch of the old abandoned fast food places into branches for "Breakroom", my new fast-casual restaurant. Setting up a few locations and hiring people at a living wage meant that most of the people committing crimes out of desperation would just get a job.

I also had plans for sponsoring several restaurants, once I could find the talent to make food good enough to warrant an actual restaurant, which would give me more options.

But that wasn't the end of it.

With the migration of people came their businesses, and I could invest, giving them access to newly renovated storefronts in exchange for a stake in their companies. From there, it was just a matter of convincing them to keep the same employment policy I was using at Breakroom. Mainly living wages, but a sweetheart deal with Ascelpian Insurance meant that they could attract people with access to that priority channel for appointments with me.

But I couldn't just hire everyone, I just didn't have enough money.

For some things, there really wasn't a better solution than improved security and CCTV around the apartments and the home security package that I offered through Nightwatch was decent enough. At least it worked as a decent enough deterrent.

I still didn't have the pull I needed to control the reformation of the Gibtown PD. It was still working its way through the city council, so hopefully, I would be able to pull together enough leverage over the next few months to make sure I had contacts that could make sure that the police here wouldn't be as corrupt as the police in other parts of town.

But that left things that couldn't be dealt with that easily.

I looked at the woman across from me, "What do you need to take care of the girls."

Unfortunately, prostitution wasn't something that would just go away, which meant that I had to manage it.

"We need a safe place to work, a way to remove unruly clients and some way to manage STIs." She listed off.

The Highland Hospitality Group was one of my recent ventures, starting mainly because I wanted to start a couple of hotels near here for medical tourism. But it quickly ballooned past that.

Given that I would be catering to a not-insignificant number of rich people, I researched the sort of extra services that high-end hotels offered as I started work on the Paradise Inn.

"The girls also want some sort of daycare so that their kids are taken care of, but we are already offering that."

With the work already being put into setting up those services for the hotel, spinning them off into their own branches meant that I could hire more people, and even expand to independent locations that would in turn make Gibtown a nicer place to live. The Breakroom locations will actually operate under the same overarching hospitality license belonging to Highland Hospitality and Apex Gyms was coming along nicely.

But that wasn't what I was here to talk about. Madam Odina. I was here to talk about the babysitters, caregivers, pet sitters, cleaners, delivery people, odd-jobbers, personal trainers, massage therapists, escorts, strippers and other service staff I hired under that label.

Sure, a lot of them were normal jobs, but many offered 'extra services' to the right customer.

Madam Odina had previously taken a number of Merchant women under her wing before I had taken apart that gang, protecting them from the worse pimps. Some of the girls I rescued from violent clients had introduced me to her after I had brought up my plans with them.

"The safe place should be easy enough. I can arrange to have some apartments set aside for 'vacation rentals' so between that, Paradise Inn and Fortune Bed and Breakfast we can arrange something when you need it." I considered the other points, "The hotels and apartments have security, but I assume you want something for housecalls too."

She nodded, "I know that it might be difficult, but I want to make sure to girls are safe."

"In the apartments, it's easy enough, I can have the building security handle it. But if you want to cover the houses." I toyed with my carbon rod for a moment as my accelerated thinking gave me time to consider the options at my disposal. "Right now, the best I can do is a panic button and self-defence training. I'm still working on how to give Nightwatch better options for rapid response. Once that's sorted, we can figure out something better. But until then, we can do a panic button that gets routed to the nearest Nightwatch team. Our expected response time, assuming nothing else is happening is thirty minutes at worst, but we haven't really tested that."

She considered it, "My girls can handle the self-defence training. We can use your gyms, right?"

I nodded, "I can provide a couple other things, tazers, mace, stuff like that."

She laughed, "Well, I guess it won't hurt. And the STIs?"

"I have an idea, but I'll have to get back to you." I'll have to speak with Amy about it. A wide spectrum STI test seems like the kind of tinker project she would enjoy, and it wasn't far enough away from modern science that we had to fully hide it. Plus, it would be a good way for Lighthouse to enter the medical field. That, the TB cure and the trauma nets should be enough to establish our credentials and minimise the problems with establishing a Tinker brand.

She nodded, "It's going to take a while for everyone to move here anyways, and building up a customer base will take a while."

I nodded, "How long do you think it will take."

"At least two months to get up to full speed, though I'm sure there are already enough people working here that we can start work in a couple of weeks."

"It's going to take some time to ramp up the other services too," I considered it as she took a sip of wine, "I don't know how well Breakroom is going to do, but I've already seen enough reservations for both the hotels once they are done that we can get things going on that front. How has the massage training been going?"

She swirled her wine, "Well enough. One of the boys learned some sports-massage for his workout routine, and he's been teaching the girls. They'll be ready by then."

"Excellent! It seems like things are going well!" I cackled

She raised an eyebrow at me and chuckled sheepishly. She sighed, "Well, I guess it's nice to see that you are actually taking care of yourself."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amy was cackling when I told her how things were going, "You know, when I started dating you, I didn't think I was going to be dating a pimp."

"I'm not a pimp," I argued, "I employ a Madame. There's a difference."

"Still illegal." she remarked as she settled down.

I shrugged, "It's Brockton Bay, and I figure that if there are going to be prostitutes in my territory, then I'm going to make sure that it's not hurting anyone."

"Nobody that doesn't want it, at least." Amy completed for me, "It's nice of you, you know?"

I shrugged, "It's my part of town, I'm going to make sure that it's the best part of town."

She spun around on her stool, leaning in to take a look at the pile of parts at my workstation. "I mean, I get it. I've had to heal a lot of people with these sorts of issues. How is it looking?"

"We basically need to use urine samples, so I've been able to use pregnancy tests as a jumping off point. I've been able to cheat a few things, so depending on how successful this is we could scale pretty easily into one of the factories in the Trainyards. The only problem is getting the right antigens for testing."

She nodded, "I've made some progress, doing some genetic sequencing, and I can make a yeast derivative that produces the protein in suspension. I'm guessiong you can purify it? But we are going to have to wait until we get a hold of the reference samples to test against."

I winced at the memory of how much I paid for those samples, "There are a few things that could work to purify it, but the best option only works with a protein that have certain structures, so we will have to see once we get the samples."

She sighed, "I wish my memory was better. I've healed these sorts of things before, and if I could I bet I could just make samples for us so that we can get started."

Where she couldn't see me, I winced. I could easily give her my ability to recall the past. It wouldn't even have to be permanent. But as much time as we had spent together, we had only known each other for a month.

Still, it would speed things up by a few days, what's the worst that could happen.

I twirled the carbon rod between my fingers. By this point the size was fairly flexible. With my ability to manipulate matter growing by leaps and bounds since I finalised my Tinker power, I could rather easily grow this to any size I had the matter for, and I had made a point of keeping my reserves full.

I shook away the disquiet. "So, what do we do until then? The TB treatment is done, I'm still trying to properly understand what it is that I can actually make with my tinker power."

Amy sighed, "The last designs were good enough."

"But the range is barely inter-city! Come on, I still don't understand how this stuff works, but I think I've figured out how to get some better range out of it."

"James, the last version you made literally microwaved everything within five feet of it. The version you have is good enough for now."

"I'm so close! The last time was just because I didn't know that the energy the antennas emitted was able to interact with matter like that. I'm sure I can get it working better!"

She shook her head, "Even if you can do that, it's probably not for the best to reveal the full extent of your tinkering ability just yet. A modification that can do direct secure calls to other hones in a city. A set of six or so phones would go for tens of millions of dollars."

"I mean, sure, I can sell this version, I'll even put it in whatever model of phone they want but I want a version for myself, and this isn't good enough."

Amy shook her head in exasperation as we discussed our plans.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amy ended up going home when we couldn't find anything else to do with each other, but I eventually started to finalise my plans to figure out where vial-powers came from. Since my little spending spree, I had managed to recover the majority of the charges I spent, enough that I could make a seventh level power, and have a few spare on top of my fourth level emergency reserve.

So, since I kept having trouble tracking down those fucking vial-makers, I decided to make a power that would solve the problem.

I got the idea when Jenny commented that, since I already could see the future and the present, all I needed was the past and I could complete the set.

And well… it turns out that postcognition was cheap.

Technically my memory power was already a form of postcognition. A cheap one, which focused only on my own brain, but postcognition nonetheless. A single charge and an old man at the end of his life could easily recall what their mom fed them for their first solid meal. Eighty years or more, just from a single charge.

A more general power was less effective, of course, but with a little work, a single charge could let me use my sensory powers on anything up to a week in the past. And the power grew quickly. Something about the way looking into the past scaled better than looking into the future. I didn't get diminishing returns. Quite the opposite in fact. A level two charge got me a little over two months.

I checked on the charge nearing completion and considered it. With this latest charge, I would have seventy-nine. If that number went down to seventy two, I wouldn't actually lose any capability. I would still be able to make a level seven power with my emergency supply left over.

The next charge was already maturing, still a spark, so I think it would be worth it to make the consideration. A third level charge put me just over a year into the past. The real question was if I wanted to push it further.

I knew from talking to the Travellers that they got their powers almost two years ago. Which meant that pushing the power a little more and getting a little more than nine years of postcognition would allow me to easily trace their path to where they got their powers, and go from there. The vials they took probably weren't lying around for longer than that, at least.

The new charge was growing quickly enough at any rate, and the more I invest in this power now, the less likely I am to need to upgrade it in the future.

Or should I hold off for a while, and let my charges build up and let me look back nearly a century into the past. At that point, I would be able to see past the first parahumans.

It would even be worth it, at that point, I could use my powers to scan powers I couldn't touch now, like Hero's or Doctor Haywire's.

It would only be a little longer to wait. It wouldn't change my plans all that much to give myself another week or so to try and make progress while I figured out what to do.

And to be fair, I've made a lot of progress since managing to break into the PRT system.

I've managed to find a map that the PRT and other parahuman organisations across the world have been putting together, tracking the appearances of Case 53s. But there is also something else.

PRT Case File 43 refers to an investigation into a rumoured individual known as the Dealer. While he wasn't directly linked to Case 53s, they had testimonials from several people describing the eastern indian man who sold them their powers in the form of vials.

Whomever they were, they were pretty much immune to any form of ranged Thinker detection. Still, descriptions of the man seem to suggest a briefcase in the style that the Travellers found.

It is possible, I suppose, that they stumbled across the man's work, but it didn't fit.

The Dealer seemed to meet his clients in person and alone. He would give them a vial from a briefcase, sure, but only the single vial.

Plus the man seemed mobile.

He might be a front for this organisation, nut everything I've managed to uncover to this point tells me that there is more here than it seems.

But one thing surprised me about The Dealer, his prices.

The prices varied drastically, but the highest price the PRT had information on was roughly two hundred thousand dollars - and that seemed to be an outlier for the man. Nowhere near the three million I had managed to connect to Triumph.

It could be possible that I hadn't managed to properly link some of the money, and not all of it was going to Triumph's powers. But, even discarding some of the more iffy data, it only brought the price down to a little over two-point-three million dollars.

Even if I assume that some of that went into equipment or something else, two million dollars was still a massive outlier.

On top of that, the PRT seemed entirely unaware that Triumph got his powers from a vial, nor were they aware that Gallant was in the same boat.

It didn't make sense. There was something else going on here.