Countless Joyful Dawns - Chapter ?? - 28: WAR! I (Patreon)

I stepped out of my [Manor] and was instantly on the defensive.

This. This was why I’d anchored my portal 20 feet off the ground. The entire Protectorate, and a silly number of troopers, were waiting for me, guns deployed. Armsmaster was ‘officially’ back - in that they were letting me see him - and the rest of the Protectorate were lined up with him. Troopers were kneeling or standing, all armed with confoam sprayers. My portal closed behind me.

Welp. It was the consequences of my actions finally trying to catch up with me. Couldn’t remove every other problem in the city, then declare it under martial law. Funny how the locals were utterly helpless when the fascists were trying to overthrow the government, but another, legitimate government coming in? One that was duly elected by the people? Oh no, we couldn’t have that.

That, or it was sticking the remains of the Slaughterhouse Nine on pikes by the highway. Sadly, I didn’t have their heads for the traditional message, but it got the point across nicely. It was rapidly becoming traditional to honk as people drove past.

“Dawn. By order of the PRT, you’re under arrest. Please come quietly. You’ll find that your teleportation and portals have been disabled.”

I discretely tried to teleport a pebble, and found that he was correct.

Wow. Tinkers were bullshit, although I suppose teleportation was complex enough that it was relatively easy to disable.

Huh, the Birdcage might actually be able to hold me. Mmm. This was a problem. This was a problem in so many ways.

I wanted my pipe. This would be a good moment for a smoke. Or a better outfit. Alas, I’d ambushed people often enough with their pants down, it was only fair the same happen back. Why did they have to become competent now?

And I couldn’t let it stand, oh no. 

“You realize you’re attacking a diplomat, right?” I asked him. I’d gone over this often enough. Everyone was tense and ready for a fight.

“Proclaiming yourself as a foreign entity does not grant you the rights of a diplomat.” He ground out with gritted teeth.

Sheesh. Here I thought he’d been happy with our time together. Clearly not.

“Regardless, you are aware it’s an act of war, and I have to respond accordingly, right?” I said.

Some of the Protectorate members shifted uneasily. I mean, they had seen me clean up most of the Slaughterhouse Nine in a few hours, it was only reasonable they were unsure about their chances against me. I wasn’t sure how well publicized my fight against the Triumvirate was, but if I’d beaten their entire elite team working together, what hope did they have against me?

“Sorry Dawn, you know how it is.” Velocity said. “Lawful orders came down from on high, and it’s our duty to carry them out.”

I nodded. Velocity’s file had mentioned he was ex-military, and I could see where he was coming from. In this time and place, I was going to borrow some of Nina’s philosophy. The troops on the ground clearly didn’t want to be here. Well, some of them. Either way, we’d been happily leaving each other alone until orders had come from on high.

“Are you all willing to do me a very small favor, then we can get down to it?” I asked.

“No.” Armsmaster said, at the same time Assault said “Maybe.”

I crossed my arms, unimpressed.

“Paper and pencil to formally declare war would save me a mountain of paperwork on the back end.” I said.

“No. We’re taking you in.” Armsmaster said.

So I left.

I just shot straight up into the sky, completely avoiding the confrontation on their prepared ground. Once I was high up, I quickly checked my skills and found both my teleportation and [Manor] worked again. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking.

Well. Apart from the higher ups had given orders. Fighting the Protectorate, even the new director? Utterly pointless. None of them were the ones making a decision. No, the only way I was going to get anything done was by harassing the heck out of the people in charge.

First things first. I grabbed my phone, ignored the flurry of texts, and called the business manager.

“Hi! It’s Elaine. We’re closed for the next week, send everyone home with pay. The PRT’s gotten a bug up their rear, and let’s not put our people in the line of fire.”

“Understood.”

I hung up. Off theo Washington DC I go!

The one-two punch of ‘Bring a large government to its knees’ and ‘I was one person’ was going to be a tricky one. I had some major points going for me. One, I’d been through a number of AAR’s of ‘this is how we brought down a country’, generally a city-state as whatever iteration of Exterreri was going through its expansionist phase. Two, I was operating on a power level far, far greater than the locals were. Three, the decision makers were helpfully grouped up in one place. Four… they were probably so large and cumbersome they weren’t talking with each other. They didn’t recognize Exterreri as a legitimate government, so why would the PRT talk with the State Department about me?

Right.

First step, open dialog. There was no point in making a mess if nobody knew why I was making a mess, or what I wanted. I was entirely prepared for all sorts of ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ and the like… but that’s where I’d given them an out. I wasn’t a terrorist, I was an employee of a legitimate and recognized government.

Then I make life quite difficult for the people who actually made the decisions. The Secretary of State was one obvious candidate, but then there were the layers of politics I didn’t know. How much input did the President have? Congress? What was the right mix of ‘fuck their day up’ did I need?

I also had to be somewhat careful in the problems I caused. If I cut off all their power and phone lines, for example, and they didn’t have a way to communicate with each other, I could accidentally cripple the entire government. If they were crippled, they couldn’t make a decision, then communicate it back to me. At the same time, if I left them with power, communications, and other good things, they wouldn’t be uncomfortable enough to surrender.

I was a cynic. It wasn’t about ‘what was best for the country’, it was whatever the people with wealth and power wanted. Usually more wealth, power, and their ego being stroked. Hence my Immortality doing so well. Sadly, I didn’t have any representatives in power who’d taken me up on my offer… yet. 

Hmmm, actually… that was a good point. I should tap that network. I picked up my phone again and called my manager.

I frowned when she didn’t pick up. Damn. I hope she hadn’t been arrested. I was going to ask her to organize a phone bank to call everyone I had made Immortal, and make them lean on Congress and the other people in power. The absurdly wealthy didn’t do petty things like work for a living, even if it was as a Senator. They bought, bribed, and otherwise threw money around to make things happen. 

Except they were also on my side, so I had the thought that getting them to lean on Congress would work out. However, without my office manager, I didn’t have a quick and easy way to get a hold of them all.

Ah well. Hopefully they’d hear ‘Dawn’, and remember which side their bread was buttered.

Oh, I could also offer that as a carrot. ‘Too poor to afford my Immortality at this point? Well, Senator, I’ll make you and your wife young again if you just lean on the State Department to sign my little piece of paper. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’ Heck, if I’d read the US laws correctly - which, good chance I hadn’t, given my lack of education in the country’s jurisprudence - it might even be legal, assuming I phrased it properly.

A similar level of broker influence and power occasionally cropped up in Exterreri, usually a little before an Immortal War broke out. We tended to be pretty good at passing laws to prevent that sort of thing from happening, but we weren’t perfect. My own [Manor] and the endless supplies of everything I had in there was proof enough.

Speaking of, I popped in and wrote out a quick pamphlet, and got several thousand copies printing. I then wrote out a very fancy formal declaration of war in triplicate.

Ugh. SO much fucking paperwork. If Armsmaster had been a hair less of a dick, I’d need to file 70% fewer forms. As it was, I was going to need to spend an entire week doing nothing but filling out forms, a second week getting grilled, and I just knew the Senate would want to interrogate me over the whole thing. A ‘This was in a parallel dimension’ should get me out of most problems, but it was going to be an easy way for people to score political points against each other. Huzzah. I loved being a kickball. Legally, I’d be in the clear, but law didn’t matter too much when politics came to play.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. I was manipulating politics to my own end here, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they would circle back and bite me again.

Why had we decided to stop being hermits in the mountain and deal with people again? Oh right, Iona loved being around people, and civilization did have its benefits. Like tanned leather without needing to piss in jars myself. Shortest career ever, we’d all agreed after a week it wasn’t working out. On a more serious note, it let me be a Sentinel, which most crucially, got me the intelligence network needed to know when and where there was a medical crisis I could help with.

I hovered over DC for a moment, looking down.

Hitting national monuments was always a trap. It looked like a great idea. It didn’t hurt anyone, it was emotionally important, it applied pressure to fix things. Nobody got truly hurt or even inconvenienced.

Long experienced showed us that people got furious, and wanted payback at any cost. They’d fight to the bitter end. No, if I got to the point where hitting monuments seemed like a good idea, I’d already lost.

Speaking of lost… I was lost. Lots of fancy buildings, ooooh, shiny. I had no idea which one was the one I wanted, to say nothing of personal homes.

Also, I realized I’d been a little lazy and kicking the can down the road. I didn’t want to play high-level diplomacy. I’d been banned from doing it, multiple times, and I just didn’t want to go through the whole song and dance. I’d been content asking at the start, getting told no, and then shrugging and not running it up the chain. People were leaving me alone, I left them alone, it was all great, yeah? But nooo, somebody, probably somebody in DC, decided they finally needed to flex their muscles.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. 

Right, carrot and stick. Let’s do this politely, and see what happens.

I debated between business formal and a toga, before deciding that business formal was going to have me taken more seriously. I teleported the clothes on, then dropped down by one of the national monuments. There, I found one of the tour groups and slipped in, shrugging off the dirty looks I got from the tourists.

“... and here is the Lincoln Monument. It was built in…”

I waited until the tour ended - only 20 minutes - and approached the tour guide after.

“Hello! Did you have any questions?” He asked. 

“Yes! Kind of random, sorry. Do you know where the State Department is?” No need to over explain.

“It’s in the Harry S Truman building. Just down the road, actually! Walk down, it’s the second building on your right.”

Oh. That was convenient. 

“Thank you!” I said, turning on my heel and walking away.

I walked into the building. All the armed guards, metal detectors, partitions between the lobby and the rest of the building, the works. I patiently waited in line, and when I walked through the metal detector, it chirped. The guard waved me off to the side, and ran a wand over me, which beeped at my shoulder.

“Can I pat you down?” She asked.

“Sure.” I said. “I’ve got some metal stuck in my shoulder. Doesn’t cause me much grief, but I assume that’s what set the metal detector off.”

She grunted in assent, and started to pat me down. Finally satisfied that I wasn’t smuggling in weapons - oh, if only she knew - she waved me through. I walked up to the receptionist, who was behind a thick plastic barrier.

“Hi!” I said. “I’m Sentinel Dawn of the Eternal Empire of Exterreri. Where do I declare war?”