Countless Joyful Dawns - Chapter ?? - 21: The Butcher I (Patreon)

It only took 10 days to fall into a routine. Wake up, breakfast, zip around the world granting Immortality, get paid, go back to Brockton Bay, handle the latest set of fires on my businesses, and as working hours turned to evening hours, rub whatever elbows I needed to while working on dimensional magic.

Busy busy busy. Everyone and their brother tried to throw various legal and bureaucratic challenges our way, and the dozen or so lawyers in different fields that I had working for me fought back. The legal proceedings had basically ground to a halt, but every day there was something new. Lisa had asked to ‘move out’ because ‘going the whole night without an internet connection had to be some form of torture.’

Teenagers. If it wasn’t one thing they couldn’t live without, it was another. Some things were the same, no matter what universe or dimension I found myself in. Granted, at some point in my teens I probably had more mango juice coursing through my veins than blood, so I wasn’t one to talk.

Speaking of mangos! Oh, the wonders of modern logistics! Oh the joys of bulk transportation! 

Grocery stores - the really, really big ones that littered the USA - deserved a place as one of the wonders of the world. Holy logistics. Holy management. Getting so much fresh fruit, produce, meat, milk, eggs, and everything else in one huge store? Being able to do months worth of shopping in an hour? It absolutely deserved its place as one of the wonders of the world. I’d like to nominate them for the #1 spot.

And oh god, the mangos. 

I had tons of orchards in the fields of [Manor], all producing the most delicious ambrosia of the gods. My favorite variety dominated, of course, but I had a few trees dedicated to every variant of mango I’d found so far. It was nice - it stopped my favorite from no longer being my favorite, variety was the spice of life, and they all had slightly different grow cycles, letting fresh mango season extend longer.

I occasionally got in the mood to run a long-lasting project dedicated to creating different cultivars, to mixed success. If I ran the project, I inevitably got impatient or distracted somewhere in the multi-decade project, and missed timing windows or otherwise got careless with pollination. If I handed it off to someone else, they never got it exactly right. Close enough to expand my orchards, but not so well that I became the [Mistress of Mangos], with ten thousand delicious, juicy variants in my pocket.

 I had runes and enchantments dedicated to preservation, of course, which meant I could have an effectively fresh mango whenever I wanted… but there was a special type of magic that came from directly plucking the fruit off the tree and just chowing down.

With the beauty of modern logistics, I had even more varieties to get. Atkins, Honey, Kent, Keitt - every mango was fresh with subtly different flavors. I saved the seeds, to expand my own orchards. New fruit!

Acquiring said mangos was, in my opinion, one of my subtle masterpieces.

I sent someone to do my shopping for me.

It kept them vaguely employed while ramping up operations, it saved me a bunch of time - I just knew I’d go into the store and only emerge a week later, ranting about product codes or something - it helped me avoid all the cursed apples that happened to be placed next to the mangos half the time - seriously, was some capricious god or prankster playing a bad joke on me? - it got me said mangos, it helped me avoid the general public, who inevitably got autograph happy, and it gave me plausible deniability when she washed the mangos before delivering them.

Modern logistics, yes. All the pesticides and other crap that ended up coating mangos before delivery? NO!

I wasn’t eating the skin here. Every Earth Bet-acquired mango got peeled before I brought it anywhere close to my mouth.

Speaking of business and keeping people employed, thank my lucky stars, nobody had tried to directly seize or shut down operations. It was many parts ‘we can’t’ - I didn’t have factories or other strong tangible assets in easy grabbing range, several parts political suicide - ‘yes, we arrested all of these fine citizens picking up garbage and scrubbing graffiti off of walls. For, err… reasons.’, and possibly one part ‘Dawn tangled with the entire Triumvirate and effectively walked away, do we REALLY want to start a fight with her?’

I’d been sorely tempted to leave my ‘usual’ entrance to my house a mile above the Protectorate rig, an old oil pump in the bay. The reasoning was simple. Any ambush would need to occur high in the air, over water, over extremely valuable real estate. Simply getting to me was a major challenge, let alone waiting, let alone allowing me to dictate the type of battle. I was fast, I was mobile, and any conflict in the air started off heavily tilted in my favor. Forget setting up emplacements.

But… there was value in letting people get ahold of me. Sadly, I wasn’t operating in purely hostile territory, where I would operate like that. I was trying to build businesses and improve the city, all while at negative relations with the governments involved. It was weird, and it shouldn’t work at all. Back on Pallos, they’d either send in a Classer to deal with me, surrender entirely to the Legions marching to get them - I made it clear that I was the ‘soft’ option, and the ‘harder’ options involved a lot more heads on pikes by other Sentinels or soldiers - or, most depressingly, attempt to eradicate my entire support base, to prevent ‘rebellious rot’. Fortunately, this was a more ‘enlightened’ society. For as soft as they were on literal fascists, they were nearly as soft on me.

Bizarre. But I wasn’t going to complain while I was benefiting.

I wasn’t entirely naive about it, and anchored my portal about 16 feet off the ground. Still within easy reach, but they couldn’t exactly try to pour concrete to brick me in. Not that it would work, but it’d be annoying to dig through, assuming they made it large enough. No, better to be high up and avoid temptation. It was possible that the general public would cotton onto where I was and start harassing me, forcing me to move, but that hadn’t happened so far.

Really, the only challenge had been getting sued by virtually every medical provider in… quite a distance. Who would’ve thunk, massive ‘heal all problem’ auras were giving the medical industry a gigantic headache. Which I knew.

Sorry all, you were doing a terrible job and competition is cutting you off at the knees.

At the same time, I did strongly sympathize. If I kept it up too long and ended up shutting down half the hospitals in the city, they’d be screwed when I left. It was a delicate tightrope I walked, but fortunately I had experience walking it before. The best argument I’d seen was I was utterly ruining plastic surgeons. Which… fair. The people trying to go under the knife wanted things my healing wasn’t able to provide, but my healing was utterly stopping the surgery cold in its tracks.

‘Scapel’

Slice.

‘That did nothing, let’s try again’

That’s roughly how it went in my head, but far more likely was the anesthetic entirely failing to work. 

Anyway. I wasn’t going to submit myself to the local government’s judicial system - that would entirely undermine my ‘I’m part of a different government, please recognize’, but it could potentially be used as leverage. 

All this to say, I wasn’t terribly surprised when I opened my door in the morning, and two members of the Protectorate were waiting for me. Miss Militia and Assault, carrying a knife and a manila folder. Given that her power was literally ‘has a weapon on her at all times’, I was entirely forgiving of the knife. It was an unusual skill, to be sure, but I’d seen it once or twice before. Heck, Iona practically had that skill with her mallium! Let her morph the metal into any shape she wanted. There was a familiar scent about them, what was… oh Ciriel curse it all. They already got Armsmaster back!? That was going to be such a legal nightmare when I bumped into him again.

Blasted ‘officer of the law’ thing, legally mandating I do things. Hmmm, was there any reasonable way around this that wouldn’t end up with my ass on trial… 

I spun off a few parallel thoughts to try and work my way through the situation, immediately rejecting the ‘if… if I see him’ argument, because that was perjury.

“Hi! Can I help you?” I asked the two, closing my portal behind me and choosing to fly in the most aggravating way possible. Mostly by slowly spinning, showing off the full range of motion I had… and they didn’t. And not making proper eye contact, because I was looking at the clouds. And being somewhat upside down, but at an angle.

If I squinted very, very hard, the clouds looked like a mango. Not my family. Nope.

That took no squinting at all.

Miss Militia had a very put-upon sigh. I think it was the lack of eye contact. I didn’t have Auri around to make a wild bet about it.

“Dawn. We’re here to inform you of a threat you should be aware of, and to encourage you to exercise your usual restraint.”

I flipped back over, a little more interested.

“Oh?” I asked, quickly scanning through the manila folder she’d brought along. Wow, these guys…

“There’s a parahuman known as the Butcher.” Miss Militia explained. “If you kill her, it’s suspected that her consciousness will hop into your body, and slowly drive you insane.” 

The entire time I was reading the dossier on the Butcher, along with the rest of her gang, the Teeth.

Seriously, the naming convention here was a crime against linguistics. Then again, glass houses and rocks - we named our Sentinels such thrilling titles like ‘Ocean’, ‘Brawling’, and ‘Magic’. When the name wasn’t an outright lie.

Thank all the gods - and Night - I’d gotten the much nicer ‘Dawn’.

“If you kill the Butcher, you become the Butcher.” Assault explained, his mouth set in a grim line. “We’re on Butcher XIV right now, but we believe they’re hoping you’ll kill them and inherit the mantle. A weakened version of their powers transfer over, and I hope I don’t need to explain how bad it’d be if the Butcher ended up with your skillset.”

Just like… what the fuck? 

Part of me instinctively wanted to reject the entire premise, just because nothing like that existed on Pallos. Another part of me thought I could handle 14 screaming voices in my head. Stick each on inside a parallel thought, have my own [Luminary Mind] either counter them or adapt to beat them, and call it a day. External mind magic didn’t exist in Pallos, but internal did. I was the master of my own mind, and I should be able to kick out invaders.

Should.

But I should listen to the subject matter experts. There was no telling if the influence was external, and would work around anything I could bring to bear. What if each mind got their own parallel thoughts, for example, and instead of 14 screaming voices I had 448 voices? I could see how I’d be driven insane.

Well. More insane.

“Yeah, that might be a problem.” I agreed. The two shared a glance, and Miss Militia gave Assault a tiny nod.

“We’re hoping you’ll leave town until the Butcher is gone.” He said. “The Butcher is bad enough. Getting the ability to fly and move at your level? With your personal dimension? And teleporting? She would be impossible to contain.”

“MMmmmm.” I hummed non-committedly. “What’s the rest of the reason you think she’s here?”

I had no plans on leaving, not right as things were getting running and I was finally able to dedicate some time to my dimensional experiments. 

Miss Militia coughed awkwardly.

“Once in a while, the Protectorate is able to clear a city of villains. This is generally seen as a flag that the city’s underworld is up for grabs, and a number of people try to move in.”

I stared at them in frank disbelief.

“Is there something in the water here?” I asked. “Like, how stupid are the criminals? ‘Ah yes, we see someone came and kicked everyone’s ass then arrested them. I know! We’ll head over there and be their only target’. The fuck?”

Not to mention the secondary implication. They had no control over the criminal element. Anywhere. There wasn’t a single city that they’d be able to remove all the villainous Classers from. There had to be something in the water supply. Or, er, given that it seemed to be a nation-wide phenomena, something in a lot of water supplies. Powers here were weird. Did someone get a power to ‘drop idiot juice in every water tower’ or something?

Well. If that were true, my job was about to become a lot more depressing but hilariously easy at the same time. If people would keep coming to me, then that made them easy to arrest. Usually the challenge was finding people, and the rest was cleanup. Maybe I should make a flag, to make it easier to find me. 

Oooh! I know! I’d set up an arena! Could get the whole A-Z processing done there, a truck on standby to the local jail, sell tickets… it could be a whole thing.

Assault’s laugh was surprisingly bitter.

“Ah, Dawn, if only. No, just good old-fashioned people being people.”

No way. I’d seen power go to people’s heads before, and it looked nothing like this.

Then again, I hadn’t seen slow decay like this. Usually, if a place was having problems as big as the USA was having, a neighbor would’ve invaded long ago… except everyone was having the same problem.

This was now Officially Weird, and I was going to make some strong notes about it in my after-action report. 

Assault clapped and rubbed his hands.

“Sooo… going to take a break? A nice vacation? From what I hear, you can afford to buy a resort at this point. I can give you a list of recommendations.”

I nodded along, going back to slowly spinning. 

“A trip sounds nice.”

The two heroes sagged in relief.

“To the PRT building.”They tensed back up.

“I think I’m going to need more confoam.”

Assault smacked his forehead and turned around, cursing. Miss Militia frowned.

“Dawn, that’s not-”

The rest of what she was going to say was lost in the wind, as I took off towards the blessed armory of goodies.