205 Epilogue 5
Brockton Bay, New Jersey, April 8th, 20:40
Reputation.
Indisputably, reputation is perhaps the most important thing in the whole gape game. It is through reputation that his Empire stands strong, stronger even than the dragon's.
Theirs is a different type of reputation; while the dragon prefers to rule solely from a reputation of fear and power, Kaiser himself is not so barbaric.
Granted, there is still plenty of fear placed upon him, especially by those of the 'lesser' races, something that he has worked to ensure, that is not all there is to his Empire.
They have the most parahumans in the Bay, even more than the Protectorate. The reason being, that Kaiser does not necessarily have to actually go out of his way to search for recruits. Instead, they come to him.
He may not buy into his father's ideology of Nazism, but he's not above using the blind hatred of the fools around him to get himself a nice, enjoyable life. with all the wealth, power and women he could ever want.
And in exchange, all he has to do is sprout some drivel about the ethnics ruining the country, being savages and criminals and the like. It helps that the actual police have already done such a good job manipulating statistics to make said ethnics seem like even more of a cancer to society than they are, because it means he doesn't have to bother manipulating those statistics himself.
Plus, for some reason, people are often even more inclined to join him when they realised that the 'facts' that he shares come from the government itself. As if the government has never lied to them.
Truly, he surrounds himself with deluded fools, but it's hardly much of a sacrifice for all that he enjoys because of it.
Just like the dragon. He certainly enjoys himself. The sex trade he's set up is no secret to anyone in the bay; he's been quite frivolous in stealing women from the streets or their homes to fill his brothels, and likely his own bedchambers for the particularly attractive ones.
Luckily, for all that he is unambitious and headstrong, Lung is not a fool. So he has not tried to kidnap any women from Empire territory, which has, incidentally enough, only served to drive even more men to his side.
There's nothing like having your wife and or daughters kidnapped and raped repeatedly in forced prostitution by a gang of Asians to make a man racist.
Oh well, more manpower for him, better PR for him, more gratitude for him. At the end of the day, it will always be Kaiser who wins.
Of course, things could never simple be that easy.
His Empire was not born simply by his father on his own, no. They had a sponsor, the main Nazi organisation in the world, Gesellschaft. He never particularly liked owing the larger organisation any favours, and had done his best to separate his Empire from the Nazis ever since he came into power.
However, Gesellschaft have experienced something of a 'hiccup' recently, in the form of the worlds latest Endbringer, or Endbringer-lite, really. Lusia Abel.
Her, alongside the rest of those psychopaths calling themselves Clowns, hit Gesellschaft harder than they had ever been hit before. Even The Meisters could never have done so much damage, so thoroughly and so quickly. As a matter of fact, they hardly even managed to seize the opportunity they were given to push their nemesis even harder.
Their display was frankly embarrassing, he knows this and he was on the other side of the planet when it happened. Either way, they've reinvented themselves as Valhǫll, and have tried to reassert their control over him.
Naturally, he's resisted, being far less intimidated by them, and knowing that he has at least another year before they can focus on sending proper forces to America.
That doesn't however mean that none of them have crossed the ocean. With their brief fall, a lot of Gesellschaft members felt the need to jump ship, that their leadership wasn't good enough, or maybe that they just wanted a change in scenery.
Either way, he now has about a hundred Germans sitting around, not a big deal in and of itself, especially with the fact that most of them speak decent enough English. The issue, is the influx of capes.
He already had the most capes in his organisation, and that was enough to keep the others from starting trouble, but now he not only has another four capes on his side, but he also has to be suspicious of their loyalty.
He's sure he can win them over in time, but time is the issue. He already had thirteen capes, one of which he suspected to be more loyal to Gesellschaft than he let on, and two that he knew for a fact are more loyal to them, given that Gesellschaft made them.
Now he has four more capes, giving him a total of seventeen, eighteen if he counts himself. That is more than all of the Heroes in the city combined, not counting the Wards, because the Youth Guard would never let them fight in any meaningful capacity in the first place.
Armsmaster being dead has actually somehow made things worse for him, because now the Protectorate has started focusing even more on his Empire, instead of the shitstains that call themselves Merchants, or the literal sex trafficking rage dragon.
People like to call him racist, but they like to ignore that the Asians are just as racist, if not even more so. At least his Empire is united together. The Azn Bad Boys, Lung's gang of Asians, is more racist against itself than anyone else.
Seriously, just spend five minutes watching a Vietnamese man fight with a Korean, and you will see racism far beyond what his gang of Nazis does.
It's all just another way in which the Fake Endbringer has inadvertently made his life more difficult.
Which brings him all the way back to the one constant of cape culture.
Reputation.
Nobody challenges Lung, because he fought Leviathan and sank Kyushu. People support him because they know that he is a good leader.
But the thing with reputation, is that is is fragile, being entirely dependant on public perception. There's a reason people say that the PR in PRT stands for Public Relations. Because at the end of the day, that is their job. Controlling the public's perception of parahumans to keep the public from freaking out.
Because of this, every group values it's reputation, positive or otherwise. When a Protectorate Hero, or a Ward fucks up, the PRT jumps on the media wagon immediately doing damage control.
Even Kaiser is victim to this. Just two years ago, an Empire aspirant killed the Hero Fleur, of New Wave, in her home, while she was sleeping. Such a blatant violation of the rules could have been quite the problem if not for the damage control he ran, namely denouncing the man publicly, and releasing his information, allowing the police to try him without issue.
However, there is a caveat to all of this, and that is power.
If you have enough power, anything else becomes pointless. But the power you would need for that is incredibly rare. Even Lung cannot just ignore the rules completely, he needs to charge up after all.
But in the end, for any group or organisation, reputation will always be a priority.
And then there's Lusia Abel and her Clowns.
That Fake Endbringer has a direct kill count over half a million, and an indirect kill count well over a million by now, with even more lives just ruined by her actions.
In any other organisation, no matter her power, she would be a liability.
But The Clowns?
What was their collective response to one of their members, their founder at that, causing such destruction that is only ever seen in Endbringer attacks?
They fucking doubled down, and kicked The Elite out of Florida.
What the fuck kind of response was that!? Any other organisation would be scrambling to do at least some form of damage control.
Instead of doing that, The Clowns fucking shitposted about it all online, and attacked the second largest parahuman organisation at the same time.
The worst part? There reputation has hardly even been damaged. If anything, it's grown.
The simple fact is, they are all insane. The problem is, they have never hid that fact. Their 'FoolsNet' has become the go to place for psychopaths and anarchists.
Their reputation is fine, because they never pretended to be anything other than a group of selfish, insane assholes who only care about themselves, with not a single moral code between them.
It also helps them that they are so decentralised. They don't technically work for or alongside each other, they're more like just a group of friends, which means that when Lusia ruins millions of lives, they can just insult her online and nobody bats an eye.
That's an exaggeration, plenty of people are still trying to counter them, to limited success.
Then there's the fact that they aren't eve a purely negative influence on the world. People have been using the fact that one of their members, Negante, has been working with Dragon to cure just about every disease they can think of, starting with HIV.
Besides, people are still sort of holding their breath for whether or not Lusia will return anytime soon. She has certainly joined the ranks of parahuman boogeymen. First the Faerie Queen, then the woman with the fedora, and now Lusia Abel.
It's a complex situation, and frankly not Kaiser's biggest concern at the moment.
That would be the Dockworker's Association. He's been trying to get those overly stubborn men to fold into hi influence for years to no avail. Obviously, it's not like he was trying that hard, forcing them with muscle would only invite treachery.
But the best he could get was some workers joining up. Good workers mind you, techies and hard men used to doing heavy lifting and with the build to show for it.
But they've always refused any of his 'subtle' offers of employment, having spoken with their Head of Hiring Daniel Hebert himself, not that the other man knows that he has spoken with Kaiser. But the man is as stubborn as he is reticent.
However, recently a new company has decided to set up a HQ in Brockton, known as Estrella. They hired the entire Dockworker's Association almost immediately, also bringing jobs to a lot of the destitute that would otherwise have ended up joining the Merchants most likely.
At the very least, Estrella seems to be more open to negotiation, and he is in talks with their CEO, Gabriella Vargas, about providing protection to her business, keeping all the undesirables out, in exchange for benefits, maybe a favour or two.
He's hopeful for that to come through, needing anything he can get now that he's passed that event horizon with everyone in the city seemingly ganging up on him, now that he's the biggest fish in the pond.
He predicts that Lung is going to come downtown for a stroll sometime in the coming days, something he would feel a lot more confidant about if he had all of his forces that he trusts with him.
But once again, Clowns are inadvertently making his life more difficult, as Hookwolf, Cricket and Stormtiger have all become inured with the new colosseum that has been set up by Last Laugh Inc., a company that barely even tries to hide it's connection to The Clowns.
To all the world, they are just an arcade company, but anyone who knows anything, knows that the actual purpose of their arcades it to both provide a neutral ground for capes to talk on, and to provide transportation nationwide. For an extortionate price of course.
Now they've set up a semi-legal gladiatorial event. You sign up online, generally with FoolsNet, but PHO or more personal social medias work too. Then you go to the nearest arcade, and are 'ported to a whole other dimension.
Not an actual alternate dimension though, that would have been enough that the Protectorate would have come down on the whole thing hard. No one wants to start an inter-dimensional war, it's clear how poorly that would go.
Their Earth would dominate, seeming to have by far the most parahumans. But Scion destroyed all nuclear weapon production back in the cold war, and the other Earths will not have that problem. so they would only win until nukes get launched. Even then, there's still the Endbringers to consider.
So inter-dimensional travel is highly illegal. Even Professor Haywire only exchanges information between dimensions, not actually opening portals.
Luckily, the colosseum is in a fake dimension, created exclusively for the purpose of holding these fights, and decorated with only a colosseum the size of a dozen stadiums combined, floating in the middle of a pitch black void.
Apparently, they got the dimension from a fresh trigger with Toybox called Dodge, who specialises in pocket dimensions. According to rumours, not only was this colosseum his first commission, but it was also made in exchange for a ludicrously large amount of money.
It's certainly served as good advertisement at the same time, and Kaiser can imagine that he will be swamped with orders for as long as he keeps working.
There's also bound to be a resurgence in people seeking to hunt down Toybox, but that has never worked before, and now that they are almost certainly inside of a pocket dimension of their own, well, he wishes them luck.
The main reason for the dubious legality however, would be the betting. And by dubious, he means that it's just illegal.
All betting, except for private, is done through FoolsNet, where there just isn't any moderation or care for laws, and with some of the numbers he's seen already popping up, even though it's only been around for a few fights so far, Kaiser is pretty sure that the whole thing will be making profit hand over fist soon enough.
It' likely fair to say that they are witnessing what will soon become the fastest growing sport in all of human history. No one has really seen parahumans doing any sports. The closest they've gotten is seeing the occasional fight between Heroes and Villains.
The audience will be huge, and the bets bigger.
And Kaiser intends to be a part of that audience too, as there is a bigger part to all of this that hasn't yet been considered.
This can become something of an advertisement site. Not for companies, but for capes.
Typically, if a new cape wants to join an organisation, they have to negotiate for a good position, as they have no reputation of their own.
With this, just about every parahuman organisation in the country will be watching closely, looking for potential recruits to reach out to, and the participants will be able to grow their reputations without making enemies for once.
All said, things are changing, and Kaiser intends to continue winning.
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A/N: He~llo! Dear readers!
We said fuck the nazis earlier, so why not get a pov from said nazis, except he's not really a nazi deep down, but eh, semantics.
Also, I really have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm not a lawyer and my ability to understand society caps out well before hitting the national scale, so i have no idea how realistic this shit is.
Like, people would obviously be excited about parahuman MMA, but I have no idea how legal it would be.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, forgot to do the numberman reference again, I'll post it here this time fr fr
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