Countless Joyful Dawns - Chapter ?? - 23: Incessant Pests I (Patreon)

I stared at my mushroom rings in utter disbelief.

Someone - I had no idea who - had sprayed herbicide over the entire area.

Okay, not only had they sprayed herbicide, but they’d really gotten it into the dirt, for a not-insignificant radius. They’d also plowed the area, digging iron fillings into the entire place.

The area was about as fae-unfriendly as humanly possible. I don’t think I could’ve done a better job ensuring no fairy rings would grow in the area. 

And it was just this one random patch of forest in the middle of nowhere that had gotten torched. Someone was targeting me hard. More specifically, they were targeting my ways back home. Like. The size of the patch was exactly the area I’d call close enough to grow a ring from my initial entrance to maximize my chance of getting home. I couldn’t just replace the soil wholesale, Fae-logic didn’t work that way.

When I found out who did this, I’d cause them an equal amount of grief. No harm, no violence… but I had a long list, Immortality, and a vivid imagination. Mundane grief was best. Their socks would always be wet. Their showers would always be cold. Or changing temperature, if I could manage it. Itching powder in their underwear. Or ‘toys’. Rearrange their pillows, subtly fuck with their furniture. Restitch their clothing so it was lopsided. Make their hinges stick and creak. Vanish their keys, disappear their wallets, have their glasses lose a screw. Enchant their pillows so both sides were unreasonable warm. Pebbles in their shoes, crumbs in their clothes, appliances that broke down, misaligned chair legs, unraveling half their socks, holes in their winter clothes, and of course, the penny curse.

Just keep putting pennies everywhere. No matter where they look? A penny. Even if they just looked there. Especially if they just looked there.

Of course, at this level of pain, there was always the old standby.

Burning their house down.

Seriously, fuck whoever was doing this. Turn about was fair play.

Seriously, fucking with my one goal to get back home? I was furious. 

My phone rang, and I sighed.

I was going through a new phone - or new simcard, whatever the difference was - every few days. My number kept getting leaked, and clearly there was a ‘Dawn’s Number Distribution List’ out there. People got my new number, my phone started getting bombarded with calls, and then I needed a new phone number to keep the ringing to a manageable amount. 

This was after I had screen calling and other fancy things people installed for me or got to stop randos calling me. The downside of catering to the rich and powerful. On one hand, all the media attention of me was suddenly positive - I’d made the people who owned the TV stations quite happy, and they’d passed along instructions to make me look good. On the other, they also had the strings to pull to bypass the telecom’s blocks. Some poor worker in the middle was getting very rich off the whole thing. I hoped.

It probably didn’t help that I picked up unknown numbers, never knowing what the lottery of life would give me. Someone I knew, frantically calling from whatever phone they could get, trying to send me an SOS? A Nigerian prince? Someone with more money than sense willing to pay a BILLION dollars to make them young again? Who knew! It was like getting a present, but the present was filled with aggravation most of the time. 

This time, however, I was lucky enough that caller ID told me it was one Lisa, AKA Tattletale. I frowned at the phone. The girl had a somewhat annoying habit of constantly calling me directly, instead of going through the chain of command. Like, she had a boss, that boss had a boss, and her boss was the one that should let me know things. But, as arrogant teenagers the world around were wont to do, she believed she was better than that and liked skipping the line and procedures.

I picked up anyway, on the reverse ‘Boy who cried wolf’ principal. However annoying a kid was, however many false alarms they raise, inevitably the one time you decided to ignore them was exactly the time that everything was going to shit, and we needed to listen to them. Constant, mild irritation was far, far better than a huge, preventable death toll.

I’d read up on phone etiquette, but seemed to be doing something wrong with it. Nobody was explaining in small words what I was doing wrong, so I kept following it anyway. Better to be polite.

“Hi! This is Elaine, what can I do for you?”

I was expecting an aggravated huff. I wasn’t expecting a panicked stream of words. Plus one for the inverse boy who cried wolf theory.

“Dawn! It’s the Slaughterhouse Nine! They’re in town!” Lisa frantically said.

“Who?” I asked.

“You’ve got to be fucking with me again. Wait. No. You’re not fucking with me. God damnit.”

“Short version.” I said.

“The worst kind of murderhobos.” Lisa started with, and started to explain.

I started flying back, and as Lisa talked, I flew back even faster. Not that it took too long. I ended up hovering in the sky above Brockton Bay, getting a rundown on the Slaughterhouse Nine.

Lisa’s initial summary had been correct. The Slaughterhouse Nine were an ever-changing band of murderhobos that enjoyed murder and carnage on a huge scale. Members kept dying to heroes - or villains - nearby, but they somehow kept finding more to join up.

Seriously, what the fuck was in the water here?

There was some sanity. The locals had issued a ‘Kill Order’ on the S9, effectively making them outlaws. With bounties on their head! They had none of the regular protection of the questionable rule of law here. 

Their current known cast was as follows:Jack Slash, the leader of the S9. He could project force from a knife, and cut things long-distance. It seemed like a fairly underwhelming power, all things considered, but he had a long and storied murderhobo career.

Bonesaw, 12 years old, bio-tinker. Apparently redefined ‘a fate worse than death’. I’d seen some Classers who tried things like she did, and was quite willing to make her fate the same as theirs, regardless of her current age. 

A wanna-be Classer around her age had killed my best friend.

There was a note to be careful - she’d loaded herself up with a dozen world-ending plagues in case she died. I was willing to test my thousands of years of healing, medical knowledge, and power against her germ warfare, but Lisa wasn’t so sure. The incident with Coil and the drugged kid also gave me pause - it was possible she’d found a way around my healing. 

She’d also given the rest of the S9 a ‘tuneup’, making them all bigger, badder, and stronger… but that generally didn’t play nice with my healing. It was a coinflip if the S9 members were improved or not.

The Siberian. Truly, properly invincible. Had taken out one of Alexandria’s eyes… so the rumor mill went. She seemed to have two proper eyes back when we fought, but my healing was kinda bullshit. Went around completely naked, was black and white, and could selectively ignore physics.

I believed in ‘everything could die’, but some parahumans had absurd bullshit going on. It was possible that she was truly invincible. Something not possible on Pallos, but I had to keep reminding myself that they played by different rules here. 

Also, a cannibal. That could grant her invincibility to other people or objects.

It was entirely possible that I’d have to work around her.

Shatterbird. Probably had one of the highest kill counts of the S9, and that was saying something. Could control glass, and liked to blow up every single object made out of glass in a city. Which started off at the obvious, all the windows, and got weird, like computer chips and cellphones. Medical equipment as well, but I was sort of obviating the need for anything.

Crawler. The second ‘I’m not sure I can kill them’ of the S9. He had a super adaptative physiology, and didn’t look remotely human anymore. Anything that hit him, he rapidly adapted to until it couldn’t hurt him anymore. He’d spent the better part of a decade getting hurt in every way he could imagine, by hundreds or thousands of heroes trying to off him, and was all the stronger for it. Also had an acidic spit.

Overwhelming alpha strike or bust for him. It did give me an interesting idea though! A skill like [Omniresist] would be amazing for a warrior. Maybe I’d see if I could guide some people towards getting the skill. Without the horrific mutations part.

Mannequin. Tinker, made himself into a murder puppet bot thing? He apparently liked to hunt down other Tinkers, but like… I wasn’t getting super dangerous vibes off him. Yes, yes, deadly serial killer, twisted horrifically by the Simurgh, but… eh… only killing specific targets vs widespread general murder. I had confidence in my skills against him. 

Burnscar was another ‘yeah… I got this’ member, although considerably more dangerous than Mannequin. Basically a Fire [Mage], with added flame to flame teleportation. It was another example of how bizarre Earth Bet was. Like, level 16 spells, level 32 power… oh, and we’ll just casually throw in a level 2000 skill into the mix. The fuck?

I’d picked out Radiance out of all the possible elements for a damn good reason, and the ability to hit people at the speed of light was one of them. Teleporting didn’t matter too much if I could hit her before she reacted. 

Her capacity for harm was quite a bit greater than Mannequin’s, simply because she could burn down an apartment building. I had full faith that Mannequin could do the same thing, but like, he’d need to go door to door to get the same results. 

Rounding out the cast was Hatchet Face, who was the only one who scared me personally. He was a power nullifier, who were usually a tossup for me. They often could shut down my offensive abilities, while my healing was so ludicrously powerful it could usually punch through any nullifier. 

But the rules here didn’t make any sense, and most of my usual logic had to be discarded. Burnscar had a bunch of weak skills, then a random high level skill. It was entirely possible that Hatchetface, in defiance of all the normal rules, could shut down my healing. 

I wasn’t confident that I could kill every member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, but I was confident in my ability to walk away from a fight from every single one of them except Hatchetface. 

However, that did leave one last question.

“Lisa, are any of them high level Thinkers?” I asked.

“Pure Thinker? No. Some of them obviously have a Thinker rating as a subsect of their power, like Shatterbird’s probably awareness of silica, but as a Thinker? No.”

I frowned.

If it wasn’t the latest infamous band of murderhobos, then who had poured herbicide all over my fairy ring back home?