World Wonders
Page 20
It was argued that the death of one person in the vault was worth preventing another Detroit. Which is why being assigned to Vault duty was often considered an execution warrant. Still, anyone who worked in a vault had a sizable life insurance policy provided by the government as part of their hazard pay. Proof that not all politicians are completely horrid bottom feeders.
[22] Read: the unable to dance and nervous about that. Deeper read: McCoy, myself, and Danvers.
[23] Some background there. From what I could tell, Lindsey’s boss hated her for the simple reason that she was a woman and thus was unqualified for the workplace. Thus, he had stuck her in the Vault hoping that either she’d quit out of fear for her life or get roasted one day. Lindsey, who had delayed her graduation to get a metaphysical anatomy minor added to her degree, took this in stride. She wanted to be in the Vault anyways, so it was really a win for her. Less time with her boss, access to what she wanted to do, and to top it off she filed a complaint with HR. The boss had wormed out of it and now spent every chance he had trying to catch her on regulations to get fired. Part of the reason why she didn’t party outside of conferences. Ultimately, this meant there were two Lindsey’s. The work-slash-professional-flawless-and-polite Lindsey who was boring but unfireable and the actual I-know-how-to-cut-all-your-vital-parts-and-hurt-you conference goer who I had a major crush on. The fact that she was able to keep the facade up so well only increased my respect for her. And the crush. But mostly the respect thing.
[24] Official government record had me at around 4000. So I held back. Sue me.
[25] Recent scientific breakthroughs had given us the Heisenholtz remedy to werewolf infections. Frederick Heisenholtz had figured out that if you could get the DNA from a werecreature that bit you 72 hours before the next full moon, it is possible to brew up a sort of antitoxin to counteract the lycanthropy “infection” and stop someone from turning. The things had something like a 42% success rate, which was astounding, but still a way to go to fully perfect. Federal government mandated that any werecreature’s corpse had to be kept for one full lunar cycle in case it might save anyone.
[26] I.e. They had more odd gifts. Like surviving the plot to Temple of Doom apparently.
[27] That might just be the understatement of the year. San Antonio SWAT had kicked in the door on a believed gangbanger. When he resisted arrest, they shot him, which only pissed him off enough to go full on werewolf. Seven dead officers and 300 normal rounds later, the werewolf was down. Unfortunately for the San Antonio PD, the man they killed was the local Alpha. Seeking vengeance, his pack strolled into the San Antonio police station, went furry, and assaulted the station, killing nineteen other officers and maiming four before they were pushed back. The US MCD Marshals organized a massive manhunt for the members of the pack and to date have killed, since capture is damn near impossible, nine of the twelve perpetrators while suffering only four more casualties. I had been part of two of those raids and had been very grateful that I didn’t need to test if advanced healing meant healing from werewolf infections yet. Officially, the werewolf community condemns the actions of the San Antonio pack, but wouldn’t you just know that those last three have proven damn impossible to find. The werewolves may be carnivorous monstrous bastards, but they’re a tight knit family and gun to any of their heads, I guarantee every last one of them would’ve done the same if their Alpha was killed.
[28] Jacob was an EEP actually. Low grade technopath, which made his Google searches twice as efficient and his ability to troubleshoot tech difficulties almost legendary. This had made him the go-to guy for finding things out, which is why we kept him in the office as support staff instead of a proper deputy. Well that and the fact that he couldn’t shoot straight.
[29] Jacob was also a horrific nerd in the worst way. The first conference we went to, instead of coming out to the bars with Lindsey, McCoy, and myself; he tried to stay in and Skype into a DnD session. I say try because once McCoy found out about those plans she made it her personal mission to teach the boy how to have a “proper good time.” Which, in McCoy speak meant getting horrifically drunk and letting your inhibitions out into the wind. I didn’t find out about how she had wrangled him until Jacob was at the bar and four shots in. Apparently McCoy had literally kicked in his hotel room door, stole his laptop, and stuffed it in her room, refusing to give it back until Jacob came out drinking with us. She then plied him with as much alcohol as she could handle, which was enough to reduce the poor kid to vomiting and left me to clean up the mess. He was extremely grateful for both the care and the fact that I didn’t let any pictures be taken, and we’ve been friends ever since.
[30] Officially, we were supposed to be very well funded. When the MCD was founded, the U.S. Marshals were supposed to double their budget to accommodate the new division and responsibilities. Unfortunately, how to pay for that increase had resulted in several government shutdowns and was always pushed off to future budgets. As such, we generally lived off the meager increase to funding the Marshals had received at creation and the scraps other Marshal offices could supply. The argument in Washington was the same one that had been raging on every budget complaint for years. The Dems wanted more taxes. The GOP wanted to cut money from anywhere that wasn’t the military.
All the arguing meant that the MCD ran more like a task force than an actual section within the US Marshals, pulling resources and people in from where we could to supplement our meager supplies. Despite those struggles, Slate was able to not only extract our operating funds out of the Marshal’s budget, but was also able to secure the regular donations from some wealthy business owners to help us out. I wasn’t exactly sure if it was legal for Beretta to donate 75 handguns and 50,000 rounds of ammunition, but I wasn’t complaining. Especially to Slate.
I mentioned he was scary, right?
[31] I was humming the “Bumblebee song” on loop. It was my personal hold music. Got stuck in my head 12 years ago and never got out. By this point, I had grown attached to it in the weirdest form of Stockholm syndrome ever.
[32] Werewolves are so territorial that most metropolitan areas don’t have more than two packs. One pack for first-gen werewolves and one pack for second-gen. Smaller packs are either absorbed into a larger pack, run out of town, or killed off. There are a couple areas, Portland in particular, where there was only one werewolf pack. Those tend to be bloody affairs where one generation kills off the other. Werewolf generations do not know how to play nice with each other.
[33] Katelyn Walker was the heir to John Walker’s Walker Incorporated, a series of investments and ties to the local unions, community groups, and associations that put them somewhere just south of full on organized crime. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Mayan Event made them turn furry once a month, the Walkers were well in line to become the next Daley’s or Kennedy’s. After the Event they started going the way of the Gambino’s or the Bonanno. As a cynic, my response was largely, “What’s the difference?” If someone had clipped Katelyn Walker it would take a lot of stress off the Chicago PD’s Org Crime and VC units, provided the power vacuum could be handled graciously.
[34]Some terminology for a second. First generation Supernaturals, including werewolves, are things you see in movies and myths that were part of the long existing supernatural community prior to the Mayan Event. That community kept to the shadows and was largely kept out of the public’s eye due to secrecy, our tendency to censor anything subtly weird, and our tendency to make conspiracy theorists into outcasts. Second generation supernaturals were those made by the Mayan Event. In many cases, second generation supernaturals were still faster and stronger than humans, but less so than first-gens.
However, almost to compensate, they picked up weird abilities not commonly associated with their mythos. Second-gen werewolves, for example, were able to use whatever mental state was appropriate for the situation, could fade out of existence, and were more likely to manage a job, which kept them off the radar.
[36] Werewolves rarely, if ever, left their packs and became Lone Wolves, as the act somehow marked them as outsiders which caused a very large aggression response in pack wolves. This meant that any werewolf that either chose or was forced to become a Lone Wolf tried to stick to the unclaimed territories, cut off from anyone who might understand what they were going through, which lead to staggeringly high depression and suicide rate. Those who didn’t off themselves, almost inevitably went to find a pack that was accepting of Lone Wolves. One was in Colorado, and the other was in the Northwest Territories Province, and both were founded by Lone Wolves who felt they were kicked out falsely. Apparently, the call of kinship and understanding won out in the long run. Interestingly, Werewolves who had never been part of a pack didn’t provoke the same aggression response and had far better mental health. Jennings and Danvers had theorized about that for hours on end, but I’d be lying if I said I paid attention the entire time.
[37] I was starting to get annoyed by everyone hanging up on me at this point, but couldn’t think of a way to exact my vengeance upon those who had wronged me. Yet.
[38] As a Deputy Marshal, I wasn’t exactly privy to tax records. What I was privy to was the Risk Assessment documents provided on every legal vampire and registered metahuman in the United States. The O’Dell’s had paid 1.2 billion dollars in back taxes, through 1913 when the Income Tax was legally introduced, including their incomes from investment and return and interest on amounts unpaid and inflation adjustments effectively in cash as one lump sum. Apparently, they had set money aside for this very day. Even when the government waived those amounts after heavy legislation in hopes of encouraging other vampires to become legal citizens and get access to their income taxes going forward, the O’Dells didn't want it back. And that isn’t including the amounts they spent on lobbying to be citizens. Conservative estimates of their net wealth put it around 20.2 billion dollars.
[39] Supernatural is a descriptor that vampires use to describe creatures and people that were around from before the event and is slowly being adopted. To date, this includes vampires and werewolves among other things. Unfortunately, that list is far from complete. It turns out even vampires and werewolves have their myths and legends.
[40] Near as I could tell, not a single cent from those shows ended up in either Cris or Jim’s pockets. Jim donated the money to various charitable organizations. This past year alone he had raised 1.4 million dollars for Breast Cancer research. In an interview, he was asked why. He simply responded, “I love playing. The simple joy of it. The fact that other people want to hear me do it is enough. But, they insist on giving me money for doing what I love. Money that, I quite honestly just don’t need. So, I give it to someone who does and go on doing what makes me happy.” I nearly vomited when I read it, given how saccharine it was. In my professional opinion, he was playing the nation for good PR and they were buying it. Disgusting how gullible some people can be sometimes. Doesn’t stop me from enjoying the shows however. He really is a damn good musician.
[41] The O’Dells are frustrating to me on a personal, and very petty level. There are two of them, with the same last name and I need to distinguish between them which means I need to use their first names. It was a mental struggle with my military training and it made talking to vampires just that more stressful.
[42] Apparently, centuries of living in the shadows, playing a long game of politics, and the ability of some vampires to turn invisible had made paranoia, innuendo, and doublespeak a way of life. The fact that most sane people couldn’t keep up was seen as a failing on their part by the larger vampiric society. Welcoming bunch, aren’t they?
[43] Vampires made a huge thing about whether you were speaking for yourself or for a higher power. Jim could’ve hated my guts, but if I was here as an envoy of someone he respected or representing an office he held respect for, he wouldn’t touch me. Vampires respected the office of a person even if they didn’t respect the person, and it had started to rub off on those who worked with them, myself included. Personally, I thought it made a lot of sense. Had Donald Trump actually been elected president, I would’ve probably done the same thing.
[44] Information and favors were the commodities of the vampiric world. I knew the O’Dells weren’t at the top, but given the popularity of Serendipity and the amount of gossip here, I had to imagine they were somewhere close.
[45] Precognitives were a major boon to the Physicists of the world as they pretty much verified that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was actually correct. Your average precog saw snippets of the future. However, the farther in the future they attempted to see, the more possibilities they saw and the less likely the mind could handle it, leading to the aforementioned issues. The most successful precog in existence was the now deceased Warren Caravaugh. Warren was caught in a hostage situation and managed to take out all twenty-three hostage takers in a non-lethal manner while unarmed just by being able to find the perfect spot to be at any second to avoid any setbacks, from gunfire to broken glass. He then died from a massive brain hemorrhaging due to the amount of strain that put on his brain. The U.N. has officially banned any research into precognition with promise of heavy sanctions to any nation that defied the order. Smart money still said that any nation with a pocket book was doing that research on the lowdown. Precogs, if ever mastered in a meaningful way, would render nuclear weapons and most forms of conventional warfare obsolete. They would be, in theory, unstoppable. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.
[46] The formal definition of psychic abilities was long and mired in painful legal speak. Depending on who read it, my telekinesis was either absolutely psychic or not at all. My rule of thumb was: If you can feel something you couldn’t before with your brain, it was psychic. Thus given my t.k.-fingers, I tended to say I was psychic.
[47] Vampire blood has a number of properties that make it very dangerous for the average person, especially since it is powerfully addictive. The exact effect depends on both the person imbibing the blood and the specific vampire donating the blood. Possible effects included: Hallucinations, temporary vampiric powers, sun sensitivity, increased healing, decreased aging, heightened senses, increased strength, increased speed, increased stamina, increased libido, and often death. More sadistic vampires used it to leash humans to them much like sex traffickers did with heroin, either through controlling the source of the human’s addiction or through the fear of introducing the addiction. Doing so was a capital offense which meant any vampire that wanted to be a citizen, such as the O’Dells, didn’t do it. At least openly.
[48] I can do plenty of things over a campfire fire and with MRE’s. You had to get creative in the military to stop yourself from going insane. However, even the best MRE salvage operation was far worse than anything people could do at home. My skills at home largely involved frying pans and attempting to apply my military cooking on the stove. The results were mixed at best.
[49] Kyle Jennings, our local research contractor, had several fascinating theories about that. He theorized that there was some kind of supernatural or Mayan dark secret that Slate had that a video call would expose. He was always going on about things like that, even with the far more reasonable explanation of Slate being old and not wanting to adapt to new technology and methods. Before the Mayan event we would’ve called him a quack or suffering from paranoid fantasies. Now, we hired people like Jennings to give us access to their encyclopedic knowledge of myths, legends, and other such things come to life. Funny how fast some things change.
[50] From what I can tell, Carlson had been working out West when he got arrested for illegally bounty hunting. Either the person he was picking up wasn’t who the papers said they were or something, but regardless, he got pinched. His choice was either going to Citadel Prison
for metahumans or working as a Deputy for the US Marshal’s. Some days, I think he wishes he would’ve gone to Citadel.
[51] According to McCoy, during work she didn’t really need to drink much. Most EEP’s had a low grade interference with her powers. She didn’t get their thoughts without trying. The non-EEP’s in the office were either relatively harmless or not offensive enough, so she didn’t feel the need to drink. I was willing to believe her given how hard Slate cracked down on the department, but I didn’t trust it would last. Deeds, one of the aforementioned infantrymen, always had said that he was one bad day away from sticking a flask in his bag and I couldn’t imagine McCoy was any better.
[52] Quinn Eckles, for all I talk about her, doesn't actually work in Illinois. She’s off in Vegas, but we get along well enough that we try to stay in contact and schedule trainings together. It generally makes them more bearable to have someone you know suffering through them. We joked about one of us moving, generally her to Chicago given the density of people she liked out here, but the idea of having to deal with snow was too much of a no go for her. Jennings guessed that it interfered with her pyrokinetic abilities, but I think she was on the level about not wanting to live where the wind hurt her face.
[53] Anything that lived primarily in the water. Merfolk, amphibious people, and the odd sentient animal.
[54] Displays of strength were the traditional merfolk way of settling disputes. Anything from who got the last portion of dinner to the authority to arrest one of their people for a crime. The average merfolk was stronger than your average human, but Carlson was stronger than both put together. Man seriously went out and won money arm wrestling vampires when he was bored.
[55] I had to bite back a scoff at not being able to go to the judge with the O’Dell’s information. What Slate was actually saying was that he didn’t want to spend that particular political capital quite yet.