Worth the Price Ch. 29 (Worm AU) (Patreon)

(Every character depicted in the story below is a consenting legal adult over the age of 18)

A/N: Lucas does some research to figure out his next steps.

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On the one hand, one could argue that Brockton Bay was small potatoes compared to making deals with the likes of Uppercrust and Dragon. Lucas certainly wasn’t going to be saving the world just by focusing all of his attention and time on one city.

On the other hand, one could argue that if he couldn’t save one city, how could he possibly save the world? And ultimately, when it came to hot beds of villainous activity, it was hard to find one worse than Brockton Bay. The place was definitely an action hot spot, which was part of the reason that Lucas settled down just outside it in the first place.

Ignoring his own backyard in order to focus on the big picture would only lead to the steady degradation of the little picture… and that in turn would have knock-on effects that Lucas would no longer be able to ignore.

So, rather than waiting for that to come to pass… he would take Brockton Bay in hand himself and make his new home the safest place to live in all of Earth Bet.

Of course, that necessitated a bit more effort than the other option, which would have been using Dragon to get in with the ENE Protectorate so he could offer them all deals that would empower them to handle the villains of Brockton Bay for him.

Since he wasn’t doing that, he needed to actually research what he was up against and figure out how he wanted to go about tackling this particular meal. It wouldn’t do for him to get ‘too full’ halfway through after all.

Luckily, that was what his new rig was for. Dragon had even made a couple of upgrades to his ‘battle station’ in the process of using it to connect to her systems so she could ensure that things like the Birdcage didn’t fall apart after he’d shunted her into a new human body. It wasn’t anything too serious, but damn if his machine didn’t run smoother than butter now.

Of course, he didn’t have access to any of those systems now, Dragon hadn’t been so foolish or distracted that she’d forgotten to log out or disconnect or what have you from all of that. And so Lucas is stuck with just the normal, ordinary internet… but even that can tell him a lot.

After all, PHO was a website dedicated to discussing parahuman activity. And Brockton Bay, as previously mentioned, was a hot spot of said activity. There was an entire Brockton Bay subforum, along with a ton of threads discussing the villainous activity in the city.

After a couple of hours of deep diving, Lucas has a pretty good idea of where everyone stands. The two major gangs in the city are in a bit of a hot-and-cold war, one where they constantly push on one another but neither goes far enough to start a real fight.

This is in large part because of how these two gangs, the Empire Eighty-Eight and the Azn Bad Boyz, are structured. On the one hand you have the ‘E88’, a group of neo-nazi racist scum backed by actual nazis all the way over in Europe. On the other hand you have the ‘ABB’, led by Lung, one of the most powerful parahumans in the world and almost certainly the most powerful parahuman in Brockton Bay.

The Empire had the largest roster of capes in the Bay bar none. Even the Protectorate could not match their sheer numbers, as depressing as that was. But the ABB had Lung, whose ability to constantly grow more powerful the greater the threat he was up against, left him the only individual in the entire city who could reliably take on the whole of the Empire in a straight up fight and potentially win. He actually had taken on the entire Protectorate back when he’d first arrived in the city and came out the victor of that encounter.

So in the end, the Empire had so many capes that if Lung tried to go to war with them, they could just be where he and his lieutenant Oni Lee weren’t and cause untold damage to his gang’s operations. But at the same time, if the Empire tried to engage in total war with the ABB, Lung would almost certainly go on a rampage that would do untold damage to their gang’s operations.

They were in a stalemate… one that Lucas’ research showed Brockton Bay’s PRT was all but supporting. Constant threads complaining about ‘revolving doors’ at the PRT’s jails and how prison transports were hit so often and so successfully that being assigned to one was considered all but a death sentence to any PRT trooper working in the Bay.

And those were just the two gangs who held territory. There were plenty of other villains in the Bay as well that weren’t even affiliated with the E88 or the ABB. Groups like the Undersiders or the ‘content villain duo’ known as Leet and Uber, and also a mysterious entity known as ‘Coil’ who had a bunch of mercenaries running around with tinkertech laser rifles.

There were also the Archer’s Bridge Merchants, an extremely drug-focused gang that didn’t hold territory so much as existed in the parts of the city that neither the Empire nor the ABB actually wanted anything to do with.

It was a lot to wrap one’s head around and by the time Lucas was eating dinner with Sveta and Emily and talking it over with them later that night, he was more than glad he’d decided to take a personal hand in pacifying Brockton Bay. Because at the end of the day, if this was everything that was happening in such a small chunk of the world, he needed to learn how to deal with it now rather than later. He couldn’t just wave his hand and make entire countries happy and safe and healthy… no, he needed to take care of things piece by piece.

Of course, that still left him with a bit of a conundrum.

“… I honestly don’t know where to start. If I’m not going to involve the Protectorate, then I think my best bet is to co-op some of the villains and use them to begin undermining the bigger groups, right? I need to arrange things so I can take down both the ABB and E88 at the same time, to minimize the damage either might cause in the absence of the other.”

Sveta and Emily both nod at this… but neither seem to have any immediate ideas. Sighing, Lucas leans back in his seat, hands laced over his stomach.

“I don’t know how to reach out to the Undersiders, but they’re pretty small time anyways so setting them up to tackle the bigger gangs would probably be a wash. And I’m definitely not considering recruiting the Merchants. Shit, they’d probably be a great ‘test’ for whoever I do recruit, because nobody will care overly much if I remove them from the board first.”

Emily chews and swallows her latest bite before finally speaking up.

“What about Uber and Leet?”

Lucas looks at the freckled brunette and frowns.

“… Haven’t paid much attention to them since that stupid GTA episode, if I’m honest.”

Emily cringes at the reminder of that, squirming a bit in her chair.

“I used to watch them before I… well, back before you found me where you found me. Leet seems like he’d be right up your alley in terms of deal potential. You could fix his ability so his tinkertech stopped malfunctioning and you’d probably earn his undying loyalty… and Uber’s in the process.”

Lucas tilts his head to the side. She wasn’t wrong there. Leet was an infamous fuck up at this point and PHO largely agreed that it was only Uber that had kept him out of prison all this time. Uber was the competent one, Leet was the idiot.

But Lucas knew a bit better than the average layman how a parahuman power could fuck with the parahuman’s head. Alice was a great example of that. Her narcissistic personality had definitely been amplified by the conflict drive hard baked into her power.

What was Leet’s problem, exactly? If he was just incompetent… well, Lucas could still probably help him by just adding more training wheels to his tinker ability. But if it was the tinker ability itself that was sabotaging him for some reason, Lucas could likely help there as well.

And yet, he still sort of shies away from the idea. Once upon a time, Uber and Leet had gotten away with being considered ‘joke villains’. Aka loveable goofballs who were just having the time of their lives making their show and incidentally breaking some dumb laws in the process of ‘creating content’.

And then the idiots had gone and taken bats to some prostitutes while ‘recreating’ an Earth Aleph game called Grand Theft Auto. It was at that point where their status as ‘loveable goofballs’ had died a firm death. Recruiting them wasn’t necessarily out of the question, but Lucas imagined it would require a whole lot of effort to properly rehabilitate them… and he doubted they would be interested in rebranding either.

Giving Emily a smile, he nevertheless shakes his head.

“Not a bad idea… but let’s table them for now. I feel like there has to be better options to go after first. If I’m going to recruit the likes of Uber and Leet of all people, I don’t want them ‘getting in on the ground floor’.”

Even Emily understands that, nodding thoughtfully as she returns to her food. Lucas, meanwhile, just sighs.

“I could try to reach out to the Undersiders I suppose. If I made another burner account on PHO and posted a message, maybe it’d get back to them. I’m just not sure if it’s worth it, not after my last one got banned.”

Sveta nods, looking just as aggrieved over that as he is still. Then, she points her fork at him.

“I think you’re overlooking something rather obvious. Something staring you right in the face, in fact.”

Lucas blinks.

“Oh? And what’s that?”

“Simple, there’s already an established group for you to recruit here in the Bay… and technically, they aren’t even full-fledged villains.”

He understands almost immediately, having run across who she’s talking about in his research.

“You’re speaking of Faultline and her Crew.”

Sveta nods, chewing on a bite at the moment as she lets him sit with the idea. She was right, Faultline’s Crew weren’t really villains necessarily… they were mercenaries who tended to work for the highest bidder. And that often turned out to be villains.

However, they had a strict policy of not shitting where they ate. Meaning, they didn’t take jobs in Brockton Bay. This allowed a small veneer of plausible deniability that left them with warrants in other states but kept the Brockton Bay Protectorate from going down to the nightclub Faultline owned and trying to arrest them outright.

It was a weird situation to say the least, but then weird situations like that were repeated across the whole of Earth Bet. When your world was as fucked up as theirs was, you tended to just roll with the punches.

Still…

“They don’t work within the boundaries of Brockton Bay so I didn’t necessarily think they were worth recruiting. Not this early anyways.”

Sveta just shakes her head though, finally swallowing.

“Faultline herself might be normal, but half her crew are Case 53s. Its kind of what they're known for. And given how you helped me… well, if you want to inspire loyalty, that’s how you can do it. By giving them their lives back like you did for me.”

… He hadn’t thought of it that way. Of course, from what he knew none of Faultline’s Crew were in quite as dire straits as Sveta had been. Gregor the Snail and Newter both had bodies at least. But that didn’t mean they were bodies they were happy with, now did it?

Hm… it would seem like he was stuck with a bunch of bad options. There was Uber and Leet, who he’d rather not approach any time soon if he could help it. There were the Undersiders, who he didn’t even really know how to approach. And then there was Faultline and her Crew, who he definitely could approach, but wasn’t sure he could convince to join him in fixing Brockton Bay.

… Ugh. Things could never just be simple and straightforward, could they?

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Google Doc Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zkMVMaRUtS9qoRgtNCivq7kCbWUMKFPSOXpypzpxBf0/edit?tab=t.0