BRASILIA RISING
[X] For now, do nothing directly. Over the rest of the week, when opportunities arise and other matters aren't monopolizing your resources, gather intel on the Jacksonville PRT and villains.
For all that you've been working hard to develop good working relations with the Protectorate and PRT, you mustn't blind yourself to its flaws. Institutional problems must be tackled head-on.
At the same, it would make little sense to rush into this. You could easily end up doing more harm than good, especially when all your information so far comes from a single, unverified source.
"I will look into this matter, ma'am," you say. "If it's truly that bad, then I will take action."
"Thank you, Avatar," she nods. "Every day this goes on is a day they're endangering those children's lives."
You can't prioritize this over your work in Brazil, Mexico City or Vietnam… but you can begin looking around and asking a few questions.
The Brazilian President has elected to follow your advice concerning Belo Horizonte - seizing the wealth of many cartel-era profiteers and dismantling the police department that collaborated with the cartel. It takes a lot of effort to perform such a transition smoothly, and as such, the Guild is devoting a significant number of man-hours to keeping the peace in Belo Horizonte.
During your own shifts there over the past couple of days, you have run high-visibility patrols, pacified two small riots, helped oversee the disarmament of the disbanding police department, arrested an oligarch who'd fortified himself in his manor with some mercenaries and threatened to have anyone who tried to take his wealth shot, and raided a major brothel where much of the workforce had been employed under threat of violence (and, incidentally, had a policy of offering free or highly-discounted services to the police and members of the cartel). Said workforce, which numbered in the dozens, included a lot of minors; you made sure everyone was registered with social services and fast-tracked to receive compensation via the wealth seized from the cartel.
You don't doubt there's going to be a lot of ugliness, corruption, abuse, and people falling through the net in the coming years, but you do what you can to minimize it. Which includes a short visit to the administrative center where the bureaucrats are working overtime to put together the social services Belo Horizonte's people need.
"I'm… honored, but I'm not entirely sure why you're here."
"Partly to offer my assistance, should there be anything I can assist you with," you explain, loud enough for everyone to hear. "And partly to thank you all. I can fight supervillains and put out literal fires, but that's hardly enough to save a city, or a country. To run any society larger than a village, to make sure everyone gets everything that they need, requires incredible levels of organization, which becomes exponentially more complex as the number of people and the needs of society grow. I can't be there for every orphan that needs a roof over their head and an adult to protect them, for every recovering addict who needs a rehab program, for every starving, jobless family that needs a welfare cheque to survive the month. All those things require the hard work and dedication of an army of competent, dedicated administrators to build and run a complex bureaucratie. I know how essential your work is. I know the fate of millions is in your hands. I know how much your country needs you. And I want to thank you for doing what I cannot."
"I, I see." There's a pause. "...We're struggling to get IDs for everyone in the bidonvilles. If you could convince the people there to register more proactively…"
You proceed to spend some time doing just that. But perhaps more importantly, you've greatly boosted the morale of the city's administrative body.
It doesn't mean no-one there will be corrupt. It doesn't mean no-one there will slack off. But from experience, you expect both problems have just been significantly reduced.
"Not gonna lie, it's good to have you around," says Angel Verde as you patrol what is generally considered one of the most unsafe neighborhoods in Mexico City. "We usually don't even
come to this neighborhood - it's considered Cognito Cartel territory. Heroes and cops only enter with permission from Cognito's goons."
You will grant the Cognito Cartel this much - from what you've been seeing, they're much more organized than the average criminal syndicate. They have men wearing cartel
badges patrolling the area and keeping order - here, more than in most places, the difference between the organized criminals and a corrupt police force is fuzzy.
"How does the cartel monetize this area? Drugs and protection money?"
"That's part of it, obviously," says Verde, "but Cognito goes further. His people have actually bought a pretty big chunk of the buildings, so he gets to play landlord to a lot of these people, even local businesses. But when people can't make this month's payment… well, they often end up paying in
favors. Those favors can involve trailing someone for a few hours, hiding a stash for the cartel overnight, providing a week's worth of off-the-book labor… often enough, it's just spending some time acting suspiciously, to deflect attention from the cartel's real work. It means Cognito always has tens of thousands of people he can call up to work for him on a day's notice. And the worst part is, a lot of them end up
grateful to him for being the lesser evil."
"Compared to the other cartels? Or to the worst of the cops?"
"Or to the banks. Cognito's less likely to evict you if you miss payment on your rent."
"I see."
"Unrelatedly, penny for your thoughts about Bastion."
You pause. "Bastion? The leader of the Houston Protectorate?"
"The leader of the Houston Protectorate who's been using anti-Hispanic slurs.
Again."
"...I don't think I caught that last time I got caught up on the news," you admit. "When did it happen?"
Bastion, apparently, was already in trouble somewhat before you were dropped in Earth-Bet, for precisely this sort of thing. His role in the Leviathan battle, however, allowed the PRT's PR department to salvage his career at the time.
With Mexico joining the Protectorate and twenty of its national heroes being transferred to the Houston branch, Bastion was apparently eager to quickly establish his "not a racist" cred, working with them to organize the recent victory against the Freedom Congress (the largest far-right supervillain group in Protectorate territory). Things seemed to be going well for a while, from an outside perspective… but there were hidden tensions behind the scenes, and some comments shared behind the new recruits' backs which have trickled into the public view.
As far as your quick research into the matter suggests, Bastion probably doesn't have the virulence and hatred one might find in members of the Freedom Congress, Empire 88, or other such groups. Rather, his is the more subdued bigotry of people who assign far more of a human's inclinations and abilities to ethnicity than is reasonable, unthinkingly treats those different as uniform members of their category rather than individuals, resents being required to be polite while decrying it as "political correctness", and assume that he they are "good guys" because there are people out there who are far worse.
There's a lot of people like that. But
this one is leading the largest Protectorate branch in Texas, in a politically sensitive position. If he is allowed to retain his position, it will raise tensions, while Mexico is still transitioning into being a Protectorate member. If he is demoted from his position, it will enrage many Americans who will decry punishing a key Protectorate hero in order to placate Mexico and the Hispanic minority in the USA.
You're neither an agent of the PRT nor a member of the Houston Protectorate - none of this falls under your authority. You suppose you
could get involved in a few manners, though, but would that be preferable to letting things play out?
"Upside of my Thinker power is, I don't miss much," Mister Clue chuckles mirthlessly. "Downside is, when I miss something? I can't tell myself I'd have figured it out eventually. I miss a connection, I know for a fact I wasn't smart enough to get it."
"You're being unduly harsh on yourself," you tell the Nigerian superhero, who as of yesterday is a provisional member of the Guild, along with the Tinker Optima. "Without your contribution, we might have lost the Nine's trail."
You're in Worcester, Massachusetts, helping gather clues from the location of the latest Slaughterhouse Nine sighting. With the manhunt drawing closer and closer, it looks like the Nine were here too briefly to do more than perform a short supply run for their Tinkers.
The information the Guild and its allies get is nonetheless consequential.
"The powers displayed are far too consistent with the Butcher's established profile for it to be a coincidence," Wing Warrior explains. "Seeing how the Teeth haven't been seen since that time and the identity of Hemorrhagia's body has been confirmed, it suggests the Slaughterhouse Nine have attacked the Teeth and got Butcher."
"What's much worse," Tattletale goes on, "is that their pattern now looks
a lot like what they would do if they had something like Coil's power. Try two different courses of action at the same time, keep the one that works out best. It would help explain how they've been staying a step ahead of us, even with all the extra Thinker powers used to hunt them down."
"But you've already established that they've recruited an emotion controller," you point out. "How attached do you think Jack Slash is to the Nine
being nine?"
"He's big on style," Tattletale considers. "He might break the rule for his grand finale, but only in a way that he thought had proper class - what
he views as class. Mind you, there's no reason to think the Butcher currently in the Slaughterhouse is the same as the Butcher from a few weeks ago - probably one of the Nine killed the previous Butcher."
Guild duties briefly take you to Kenya once more, this time to deal with a villain in Mombasa. Ransom, as she is known, is the most powerful crime boss in the city; her power allows her to remotely kill people she has touched at some point in the past, but the exact limits of her ability are a closely-guarded secret - meaning that a lot of people on both sides of the law have no idea whether or not she can kill them with a thought. As she also has a minion whose power confers a Brute rating upon her, and often travels discreetly between safehouses multiple times per week, no-one has been both willing and able to kill or capture her, and she's been amassing power in Mombasa.
The Kenyan heroes are able to track her down, and the Pentagon (assisted by Dauntless and a handful of other Guild heavy-hitters) stand ready to assault the compound… but that only works if you keep her from firing off her ability.
Your power pool allows you to phase through the ground until you're almost below her. You then rise up and switch to planar blocking, preventing Ransom from using her power - more than enough for Strider to teleport in with the Pentagon's Mamba and Kinesis, who knock her out while you handle her bodyguards.
Once that's done, not wasting a second, you switch your power pool to mind-reading, getting information from Ransom's unconscious brain about how her powers work. Once you have
that, you switch to mind-control, forcing her to let go of the 192 victims her power has kept a hold on. She gets carted off to the Birdcage, her entire criminal empire destroyed in mere hours.
"I think your versatility's almost as much of an asset as that Endbringer-killer Blaster power of yours," Radar comments later. "People don't exactly think 'mind control' when they picture the ideal hero, but you made good use of it."
For the second time since you got to this world, the first being Coil. "It's not an ability I use lightly, but it's useful for hostage situations." The one time you made the most use of it was in May of 1944 - you'd just come back from your imprisonment in the Sun to find Earth in the throes of World War II, and Allied Command wanted to keep your return a secret until the assault on Normandy. You grudgingly accepted, bowing to strategic necessity… but still made a discreet nighttime visit to every Axis death camp, forcing the people in charge to grind down the machinery of extermination for the duration. You repeated your stealthy visits to each camp until it was liberated.
You know this saved a lot of lives, but you do wish you could have saved more.
Five days after the victory at Belo Horizonte, with rival cartels all escalating their efforts to take Novo Império's territory within São Paulo, the assault on Goiânia begins. The city is only one-fifth as large as Belo Horizonte, and is also only an hour's drive away from Brasilia; it was essentially where Novo Império was dropping off the failures and undesirables among its capes, leaving them to guard the doorstep of the cartel in front of the last government-run city. This means lots of frustrated supervillains, many of whom are bad at working with others even by Earth-Bet supervillain standards. This has
not been good for the city.
There's between 35 and 40 villains in the city. The Guild could easily take them alone.
The Guild does not attack alone, but with 62 Brazilian heroes (and Captain Argentina, once again). Nigerian recruits Optima and Mister Clue are not directly involved with this operation - not before some more training exercises with other Guild members - but even so, you have your foes out-numbered and out-prepared. Goiânia's villains may have been nervous for years about the massive concentration of heroes a stone's throw away from them (which never came down upon them before due to fear of cartel reprisal), but they don't actually have much in the way of defensive tactics against your attack.
You personally lead a spearhead of several highly-resilient heroes who quickly dispatch several of the hardest-hitting villains in the city. Aura takes down a Tinker specialized in poisons. Wing Warrior's tinkertech successfully stabs through a highly powerful Brute. Narwhal flushes out an enemy team by slicing through the front of the building they were bunkering in.
Once again, you multitask, reading the minds of captured villains in order to both establish the best way to contain them, and to gather information on the city's remaining villains. That's how you confirm that they number 39. Of those 39, two are dead and all the rest are in custody less than an hour after the start of operations.
Several more hours are spent handling weapon caches, stored narcotics, and hundreds of nonpowered minions. In the end, a metropolitan area home to over two and a half million people is once again placed under the Brazilian government's control - smooth as clockwork.
"Thanks to the Thinkers' work, four of Goiânia's parahumans have been confirmed as trustworthy; Brasilia will be putting them to work in its hero forces," Narwhal explains at the debrief. "The Brazilian government is going to need some time to catch its breath as it reasserts control over this much territory. Seeing as they cannot survive a full-scale counterattack by the cartels, the goal is to delay their reprisal until we're ready for it - and the best plan we have for that is to take multiple jabs at Novo Império and
only Novo Império. This, we believe, will encourage the other cartels to opportunistically try to capitalize on Novo Império's losses and seize as many of its assets as they can."
"In the meanwhile, though," says Director Wayland, "Brasilia is entirely aware that without the Guild, it has no hope. They're thus intent on gathering as much support from both the Guild and the international community as they can, and have thus been trying to get a number of their heroes into the organization."
"We've been looking over potential recruits," says Narwhal, "with an emphasis on solid teamwork and trustworthiness, as before. Besides that, they have also offered the assistance of multiple Thinkers with the hunt for the Slaughterhouse Nine."
"
Good," says Voodoo. "That's several times now we've
almost got them, and it's time we finished those bastards."
"With that said," Wayland resumes, "the coming weeks are going to be a very sensitive time for the Guild's efforts. Not only because the hunt for the Nine is becoming an extremely close affair, but also because of the multiple balls being juggled. Brazil's situation - not to mention South America in general - is something that will require continued Guild attention, given the overwhelming power of the cartels. In middle Africa, Kolwezi remains under siege, and while the Guild has done much to repay Nigeria and Kenya, they're still far from stable; if the goal is to have an international African coalition for good and stability, then a lot of work remains to be done. In Europe, the Brigade may yet turn into a force able to stem the tide, but between Gesellschaft and the Three Blasphemies, you don't lack for potential targets - and while Europe is better off than most of the world, you should still consider being more active there, in order to garner support. After all, a lot of the countries you help also require international aid to make things right."
You can see the rest of the Guild members pondering these questions. You ponder them as well. It's true that you have your fingers in a lot of pies - a necessity, because Earth-Bet has been continuously getting worse for nearly three decades now, and a lot of different actions are required to reverse the trend. But where should your efforts focus at the moment?
[ ][Bastion] You're not in charge of the PRT, and the PRT wouldn't like you overstepping your authority. Best to trust them to handle it.
[ ][Bastion] A racist being allowed in a position of power is bad for the organization as a whole. Talk to the relevant PRT leadership and explain why you think Bastion needs to be transferred to a lesser position.
[ ][Bastion] The PRT needs to come down on Bastion hard and apologize to the public. Make that much clear to them. Be insistent.
[ ][Bastion] The PRT can lose important political capital no matter what it does. See if you can convince Bastion to save them the trouble and do the responsible thing himself.
[Two will be selected]
[ ][Guild] Focus efforts on the Slaughterhouse Nine. Forcing them into a final battle early denies them further chances to prepare and gather forces.
[ ][Guild] Take further shots at the Novo Império cartel - the other Brazilian cartels will smell blood in the water and focus on their weakened rival, rather than on your own efforts with the Brasilia government.
[ ][Guild] Clean up further threats in Kenya and Nigeria - the more stable they are, the more they can assist other African nations and hotspots.
[ ][Guild] Offer India's Thanda heroes the Guild's assistance in hunting down Asura - she's considered the most dangerous villain in the nation, and India is a major powerhouse in terms of parahumans.
[ ][Guild] Begin hunting down the Three Blasphemies - the trio are the most powerful villains in Europe, and taking them down would be quite the coup.
[ ][Guild] Begin working toward the Gesellschaft's downfall - the organization nurtures white supremacist gangs across several continents.
[ ][Guild] Try to recruit more South-American heroes to work with Brasilia's government.
[ ][Avatar] Spend extra time on Protectorate work in Mexico. In this transitory period, they need all hands on deck.
[ ][Avatar] Spend extra time on Guild work, whichever missions the Guild goes for.
[ ][Avatar] Help with mankind's space programs. It's a symbol of hope and progress.
[ ][Avatar] Spend more time in Belo Horizonte while the Brazilian heroes try to get a handle on it.
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