Chapter 68: 6-4 Omen

Omen 6.4

2001, October 22: Washington, DC

Three days after my tenth birthday, Canada made international headlines. They announced the results of a nationwide referendum: In a sixty-eight percent supermajority, Canadians voted to allow the expansion of the PRT into their borders. The PRT was officially an international organization. There was much more legalese involved and a whole lot more to do on the bureaucratic end, but that was the gist; the ball was rolling.

I apparently had more to do with that discussion than expected. Or more specifically, my warning. The whole mess started early this year when Behemoth hit British Columbia. The endbringer's target was Mica Dam, the third largest hydroelectric generator in Canada.

Thanks to my warning, the PRT and the Guild worked in concert to identify potential targets in British Columbia and prepared accordingly. Unlike in Hyderabad, they guessed correctly and prevented the worst of the damage. There was still massive flooding and a chunk of the province was without power for a while, but it still came as a huge relief for the Canadian people. Tinkers quickly provided stopgaps to the damaged dam, allowing mundane construction crews to reinforce the superstructure in short order.

All told, a manageable loss ameliorated by early warning and tinkertech.

Preliminary discussions had taken place months ago and this referendum merely cemented ideas that were being brainstormed between the two countries. One of the concessions made by the United States was the extension of the Worldstone Network. As a sign of goodwill, I was to build Worldstones, pylons, and Wayfinders, for the most populous cities in Canada: Toronto and Montreal.

That was November's quota set then.

Another point of contention was what to do with the Guild.

The Guild was in a bit of an awkward place. On one hand, it was the Canadian answer to the Protectorate and that alone made them politically relevant. On the other hand, it was… less than effective.

Unlike the US, Canada lacked a civilian, unpowered federal agency dedicated to supporting their capes; there was no "PRT-Canada" until this point. They had an oversight committee that approved funding and conducted audits, but that wasn't a replacement for nationwide support. This meant that they suffered from extensive response times and other logistical issues in local theaters.

Just as important, they lacked banners. When people thought of the Protectorate, they thought of the Founders, capes who were so powerful that they could stagger endbringers. Rightly or wrongly, the Founders were seen as unfailing paragons of virtue and justice, the tangible proof that good will ultimately triumph. More than simple power, it was the gravitas of their status that shaped the Protectorate.

The Guild didn't have that. Most capes affiliated with them were nothing special. They were smalltown heroes and neighborhood celebrities, not nationwide cultural icons. Things were slowly turning around with the inclusion of Narwhal a month ago, but changing public perception was a difficult task for a lone woman.

Besides, she had her own criticisms surrounding public indecency to deal with. It got hear a lot of fans of the male persuasion, but also plenty of flak from conservatives.

I knew of course that the Guild would blossom. In ten years, they would be an international task force. Their mission would be to tackle A and S-class threats beyond the scope of local heroes. They would be peacekeepers and diplomats, neutral parties trained in conflict resolution and threat response. Narwhal, and eventually, Dragon would become symbols of peace, just as sure as the Triumvirate.

But that wasn't now. In the moment, opinions seemed to range between dissolving the Guild altogether to making them a subordinate branch of the Protectorate. I thought about what I wanted out of them, but truth be told, I didn't know either.

Dragon. Narwhal. And… no one else, really. There was no one else of consequence that canon spoke favorably of. I was certain there were plenty in the background, but they weren't critical to Taylor's story so Wildbow never elaborated on them. And since Dragon wasn't even active yet, I decided to let the chips fall where they may. If the Guild dissolved, I had no doubt that Narwhal would excel as a member of the Protectorate. She was a brilliant leader by all accounts; she'd excel wherever she ended up. If the Guild became what it was in canon, I was fine with that too.

I scribbled a quick note to Fortuna and tossed it through a Doorway: "Narwhal = great leader. Second triggered, not Manton-limited. Cultivate. Andrew Richter = AI-tinker. Lives in Newfoundland. Makes (Will make?) 'Dragon' AI. Powerful. Keep & progressively loosen restrictions. -H"

X

2001, November 22: Washington, DC

It was Thanksgiving. Turkey Day. The Let's-Pretend-Gran-Gran-isn't-Racist-as-Fuck Day.

Thankfully, that meant nothing to me or mom seeing how Chuseok, the Korean harvest festival and our Thanksgiving equivalent, was on the thirtieth of September. I helped mom make songpyeon and everything, though we didn't exactly have any extended relatives anymore.

It was a bittersweet evening. The holiday was a time to give thanks to our ancestors for a plentiful harvest. Of course, we were not farmers, but something about the holiday made us both think about dad. He loved the ocean so the two of us headed down to the waterfront in Old Town Alexandria. Mom and I stayed well away from the water, but we did get to watch the boats go by in the evening sun.

All told, that meant that Thanksgiving was just an extended weekend for the two of us. We spent it watching a terrible translation of a Founders-inspired movie in Korean. It was a cheesy action-comedy involving a turkey-themed villain named the Gobbler trying to sabotage Thanksgiving by starting a turkey rebellion, only to be turned to the light through the power of friendship and given a presidential pardon. The Founders even made cameos and I'd never seen Becky look more awkward.

All I got from that, besides plenty of things to tease Eugene over, was that the eighties was a different time.

The two of us spent the rest of the morning trying to recreate the cheesy superhero soundtrack using her piano and my sax. It was apparently the only tolerable thing about the movie according to mom.

One of these days, I was going to tell Keith she said his costume looked tackier than that the Gobbler's.

After a morning spent lazing around with mom, I headed to Babylon to look over the facilities. Most of it was finally finished and ready for large scale production. We were however still waiting to stockpile enough brightsteel. The brief delay did give me a chance to do two things: Make something else that wasn't quite resource intensive and recalculate the resources necessary for the project.

Galio, and his hextech cousin, stood at a gigantic one hundred sixty feet. Behemoth stood at forty-five. As hilarious as it would be to make something that could punt Behemoth like a field goal, actually using it to fight would be highly impractical. At that height, he'd just get in the way of other participants.

No, I wasn't building Hextech Galio to defeat Behemoth by itself. I was building Galio to act as a shield and protector. I wanted to drain Behemoth's Shard of every external manifestation. No kill aura. No lightning blasts. No heatwaves that baked entire cities. No radiation that made the area uninhabitable. At the same time, I needed it to grab and hold Behemoth, keeping him immobile and away from his objective while either myself or Hero figured out a way to displace and disrupt his core.

I didn't need a hundred sixty feet of colossus. Just fifty-five feet would be fine, and still tower over Behemoth to provide that extra bit of leverage. That meant a proportional reduction in resources, and hopefully build time. It was still well over a thousand tons of materials, but definitely manageable.

The delay also gave me the chance to build something smaller, but equally mechanical.

I looked up at it, my newest creation. Admittedly, I looked up at most things, being a hair shy of five feet tall and all, but that wasn't the point. It was a Plaza Guardian, a card I was familiar with from Legends of Runeterra. Plaza Guardians were mechanical golems made of reinforced steel utilized by the Piltover Wardens to keep the peace. They were giant and mostly good for breaking up riots rather than catching individual purse-snatchers. The original was a donation from one mercantile clan or another, a shining proof of the clan's "progress" compared to its competitors.

Sure it was a prop in the giant dick-measuring contest between clans, but it was hard to argue with a twenty-foot tall steel golem. If nothing else, it looked suitably impressive and had the brute rating to match. It was also deceptively fast, easily exceeding thirty miles per hour. Best of all? It could be charged via conventional electricity, though a shit-ton of it.

I caught the last Wrenchbot as it dropped down from the Guardian's shoulder after soldering the faceplate in place. The Guardian's faceplate, like the rest of its body, gleamed like bronze, an aesthetic choice common to the steampunk city-state. Five tubes extended from its head to a spherical torso, from which four large tanks sprouted. They in turn extended into four launchers, two wrapping around each shoulder. The tanks contained a fire-retardant foam that could be used to break up riots, quell fires, and herd crowds.

I considered adjusting the Guardian by giving it shoulder-mounted guns but decided against it. The foam-launchers and its own ridiculous strength were plenty to do its job.

I set the Wrenchbot to its preprogrammed task and let it go. It would go back to what it was doing before I conscripted it to finish the Plaza Guardian. I'd made enough of those things that I wasn't sure exactly what, though either gardening or feeding the brightsteel foundry seemed likely.

Behind me, I saw an unexpected guest enter my range.

"Eugene, what can I do for you?" I called as my nominal boss walked into the factory. He had on his full armor, albeit without the large cannon he typically carried around on patrols.

"Not much, just came to get you so you're not late to the Thanksgiving dinner. You have an hour, but I know how you can get," he said as he dodged past another two Wrenchbots, these dragging a cart loaded down with Petricite branches harvested from the forest. He came to stand beside me and looked up at the Guardian. "So… a robot…"

"Hey, a giant robot is a tinker's romance," I defended myself.

"I'm not arguing with you, but wasn't that what the Hextech Galio project is supposed to be?"

"It is, but I wanted to make sure I could make something like that on a smaller scale, you know?"

"Good plan." He rapped the Guardian's shin. "What's this made of? I assume it's not bronze."

"It's just regular steel with a paintjob. Good steel, but nothing really special about it. I just wanted to make sure the fabricators were all configured right."

"Right. And the four giant cannons? You know I can't let you take this to DC, right? There's no way we can pass it off as something you made at the Madhouse."

"Yeah, I figured. The tanks have some fire-retardant foam. I'm thinking about letting it patrol the local forest. If a forest fire starts, it can put it out and we don't need to worry about losing locals. Or Wrenchbots."

"Makes sense. Good call. How's the AI?"

I grinned. "Pretty good. I mean, I started with the idea that it'd be a part of law enforcement, but then realized I couldn't take it to Earth-Bet so I had to scrap the original programming in favor of forestry. It basically uses thermal recognition to identify fires and put them out. If someone starts a fire, it'll gauge level of threat by taking stock of flammable materials in the area before demanding the fire be put out in twenty seconds if the level of threat exceeds acceptable levels, acceptable levels being basically a campfire."

Eugene let out a low whistle. "Huh, I didn't know you could code."

I grinned smugly back at him. "That's the beauty of it all: I can't. More mana bullshit."

And it was true. The likes of C# and JavaScript may as well be foreign languages to me. And yet, Piltover's hextech creations had plenty of examples of artificial or otherwise altered intelligence, from Oriana and Viktor who replaced their very brains to Heimerdinger's robotic assistants. Hell, there was even a scientist who swapped his mind with that of a cat.

It took some doing, but I managed to make a Mana Crystal that contained one such AI. The crystal contained its various directives and sat in its skull. It wasn't a true AI in that it could not grow. I'd need something on the level of a Brackern crystal if I wanted to make something resembling true life, but it was smart enough to follow commands and that was enough.

"Have I ever mentioned how much I hate you sometimes?"

"Jealous?"

"Very, you smug brat. You plan on mass production?"

"Of the Guardians? No way. I think we should focus on Galio. Then, if we can churn one or two a year, and see how it handles an endbringer… maybe?"

"Sounds good. Now come back to Bet so we can go to that charity dinner."

I made a face. "Ugh. I don't even celebrate Thanksgiving and turkeys are all dry, obese chickens."

"Yeah, well, we're stuck with the dinner. I have no living family and you don't celebrate so there isn't any private dinner for us to miss. Everyone else is taking a well-deserved break."

"Fine, give me a minute…" I marched off to the shower like a man walking to my grave.

"I swear, you're somehow grumpier than Rebecca," Eugene quipped behind me.

I flipped him off without looking back, only to get a round of mocking chuckles for my trouble.

X

In the end, Hero and I ended up arriving a full half an hour before the event started, something about being respectful. He was quickly ushered away by the organizer, leaving me alone to explore the venue.

The charity dinner took place at the Renwick Gallery, part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It was an absolutely breathtaking building filled with contemporary art. I saw paintings, freestanding sculptures, and exhibits that made use of glass and LED lights to shower the walls in a rainbow of colors. I was no great connoisseur of the arts, but even I couldn't help but feel a bit of awe as I wandered the marble halls.

"First time?" an aging gentleman asked kindly, his salt and pepper beard hiding a bemused smile. "Andre Lubbock – Gallery Curator," the brass nametag on his chest read.

I collected myself and gave him a respectful bow. "Yes, sir. I visited the Museum of Natural History with family, but this is my first time in the Renwick Gallery."

"Ah, I find that art can be just as educational as science." He stepped up to a painting in the corner. It looked suitably impressive and depicted a golden man descending from the clouds before an awestruck crowd. "For example, this one, Dawn of a New Age, was made by Grace Hawke. Is the name familiar to you, young man?"

I shook my head. I didn't know of anyone by that name. "No, sir."

"Then perhaps… Andrew Hawke?"

"I don't know any Hawkes…" The words died in my throat as an obscure bit of trivia came to mind. "Vikare…"

He nodded solemnly. "Indeed. The second hero. Grace Hawke was his sister. She was there, you know. She met Scion alongside her brother as he descended. Having some talent with the brush, she put paint to canvas and gave us this exquisite piece."

That… I could see it now. Looking closer, the crowd was clearly on a boat, with a young man reaching out towards Scion, kept from falling into the water by a woman who was undoubtedly his sister. I thought that it was some cliché homage to the "greatest hero," but knowing who painted it certainly put it in a different light.

The looks on the siblings' faces were reverent, almost religious. In their positions, not knowing any better, I suspected most would feel the same.

"This moment is what started it all," Lubbock said in a whisper. "Many exhibits have come and gone since I began working here, but this painting has remained, an homage to a new dawn."

"It's… something, sir." I didn't know what else to say. What else could I say? It was a stark reminder that should we ever be brought to the light, Cauldron would be vilified. To most, Scion was the greatest hero of all time, the hero.

"It is. You'll find art can stir something in the most callous of us."

I allowed the man to lead me on a guided tour. Every piece was exquisite and Andre Lubbock really knew his stuff, but I found myself distracted. The contrast between the truth and what the world knew was a harsh one.

I spent the rest of the evening sitting next to Hero as a representative of the Wards. We had turkey that did my best to choke down. Hero gave a speech about gratitude and the American spirit and sat around while people with more money than braincells talked at us. Still, I was grateful to be next to Hero. If nothing else, I was a passing curiosity at best.

It was all to get the fat cats to donate to a fund that would be divvied up between several nonprofit organizations, all dedicated to relieving food shortages in low-income communities across the country. Noble cause, but horribly tedious dinner.

I returned home with a newfound distaste for the "upper crust" life and swore once again that I'd never accept a position of command over a city.

Author's Note

Originally, Canada becomes a part of the PRT network in 2002. Adding Canada to the network early was always the plan, but a reader on QQ helped me flush out the effects of Behemoth's attack on BC. Shoutout to Blackshard on QQ; thanks for that comment.

Has anyone else noticed how short the endbringers are? Behemoth is only 45 feet tall. Comparatively, Gypsy Danger (Pacific Rim) is said to be 260 feet tall, Godzilla (Planet of the Monsters) is 393 feet tall, the original Megazord (Power Rangers) is 333 feet tall, and even the original Gundam was registered as being about 59 feet tall. As far as city-busting kaiju go, Behemoth is surprisingly the runt of the litter.