Chapter 26

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Story Day Twenty Nine, May 4th 2011, Wednesday - Mid-Morning

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As they were walking through the mansion, Dinah asked, "Jared? I've been wondering, when she first visited us, why did Tammi offer to model undies for you?"

He smiled, amused. "Oh? Well, she was hoping that my seeing her nearly naked would overpower my mind with lust for her, which she could use to seduce me and entrap me into a relationship. It's a fairly classic strategy when a girl wants a boy. She tells herself that if she gets pregnant, she could probably rope him into marriage. Historically this worked very well. Today, with practically everyone sleeping around? And nearly half of all US births to unwed mothers? Not so much."

Lisa gave him a strange look, and corrected him, "Jared? The percentage of births to single mothers is under three percent."

He goggled.

That rocked him.

In his own homeworld, that statistic Lisa had given was true up until sometime in the mid 20th Century. However, it changed drastically, starting in the latter half. In 1980 in the United States, some 18 percent of all women who gave birth were unmarried. As of 2019, the percentage of births to unmarried women had increased to over 40 percent. In three states, it averaged above 50%.

Then it struck him, debauchery had always been among the most popular of sins, but a successful, wordwide movement to get the entire world to embrace it? That had only happened once in modern history. The Free Sex movement had really been started by Joseph Stalin, Hitler's buddy, as post World War Two he had found himself in charge of a destroyed country with almost no surviving men, facing a population implosion because there did not exist enough Russian men to father the next generation in traditional marriages.

It was Stalin's own fault, really.

He and his buddy Hitler had entered into a pact to start World War Two together, and inevitably one had betrayed the other as evil people always do. The only real question had been who would do it first, as both had been not just considering it, but working towards it.

Stalin had had a number of forward assault bases on his border with Germany, already under construction, preparing to launch an invasion. Hitler had just attacked before those were ready.

But Stalin's policies had utterly devastated the Russian population, not just during that war, but before and after.

Exact figures were hard to come by, as the Russians routinely lied about them (as people often do about information that makes them look bad - have you tried asking a woman about her weight? Or age? Or anything that she feels self-conscious about? Just like men routinely lied about their height, mistakes, sports achievements, and income.) But immediately after the communists took power, there was a famine - there always was as communist governments took over. Mao did the same thing in China. Communists were great about seizing power - not so hot about using it; and when a bunch of idiots who don't know a thing about farming take over all of a nation's farms? Well, predictable things happen.

Then, after being devastated by famine that left unknowable droves dead (unknowable because ever since it happened that government had been trying to insist that it'd never happened, and had destroyed nearly all records - and lying to foreigners had been a Russian sport since before the Huns had left. Winston Churchill once said of Russia that "It is a riddle, wrapped up in a mystery, inside of an enigma.", and he did not say that because the country was honest and forthcoming with all of their data), according to the official figures war losses alone during WWII had claimed the lives of roughly 80% of all Russian men born between 1923 and 1929, inclusive. And those years were just the worst hit. None got spared. The NKVD recorded that between 26 and 27 million Soviet citizens had been killed, with millions more being wounded, during that war. It was established that 1,710 Soviet towns and 70,000 villages had been destroyed.

Then Stalin's post-war purges of those disloyal to him had killed at least a million more - that they'd admit to, meaning it was probably much worse.

Needless to say, Post-WWII Russia had been practically depopulated of young men. Estimates varied between two women per man, to nine women per man, and nobody knows for sure which figures are accurate.

In Jared's homeworld, Russia had never recovered to the population levels seen in that same country pre-communism (despite Tsarist Russia having a medieval infrastructure, and the time period following World War II seeing the rest of the world experience explosive population growth, even in impoverished countries. That population growth had just apparently skipped Russia entirely), with a population in 1900 reported of 136 million for the territory of Russia alone, without factoring in the rest of their empire, making them the third largest country in the world by population at that time (when the USA had a population of merely 75 million).

However, in the 2020s Russia had an estimated population of 146 million, a figure which included all of the much more population dense territories under Russian control (Crimea alone contributing 2 million). At the same time, Bangladesh, a country 118 times smaller than Russia in land area, had a population of roughly 170 million on their 2023 census, and the island of Java, 123 times small than Russia in land, had a comparable population of 141 million.

Anyway, Stalin had found himself leading a country filled with women, but almost no young men. That sort of situation could easily kill a country. The solution he'd thought up had been to invent the Free Sex movement. He'd spent years encouraging Russian women to sleep with any man they could, regardless of marriage.

This had, regrettably, spread to the West during the late sixties, although most of the hippies and their communes had really taken place during the early to mid seventies.

On his own homeworld, that had exploded and become the dominant culture, eclipsing and in many cases outright persecuting the traditional way of life.

Here?

Something big had come along to interrupt that sequence of events, and stop it from occurring.

They'd had parahumans appear in the early 1980s.

On his own homeworld, people had taken advantage of the prosperous, relatively peaceful decades of the 80's, 90's and 2000s to really let their hair down and explore drastically different lifestyle options.

Add to that, the government being pushed as the caretaker in the relationship when single women had children, so they could have children and daddy government would take care of them with all the 'free' benefits of the single largest welfare state in human history.

A welfare state that Earth Bet simply could not afford - could not afford one-percent of!

He had not previously considered that here, with the arrival of parahumans, crime rates and violence had soared, and peace was something people looked back on the 50s and 60s to see. Here, the 80s and 90s had seen events like riots over the collapsing economy, entire towns being destroyed by the likes of Nilbog and Ash Beast, and seemingly unconquerable threats like the Three Blasphemies and the Slaughterhouse Nine appearing to ravage and destroy as they pleased.

Then the first Endbringer appeared, and society really started going downhill.

Completely unlike those relaxed, prosperous and comparatively peaceful decades of his own homeworld, this place had been beaten up, battered, and hammered by an ever-escalating series of threats over that same period, and no government attempt to control or contain those disasters had succeeded.

Of *course* that would have an effect on the marriage and birth rates!

He felt a fool for not even considering it. Women, above all, desired safety - which required stability. When society was rich and prosperous, peaceful and safe, and it felt like they had all of the stability they could ever want, many felt they could afford to take on some risks, like listening to the free sex agenda.

But when society was a mess, and safety nowhere to be found?

The answer was they would do their best to build that safety and stability they desired, and they would go to the proven ways of doing so, the ones tested over millennia as being able to best withstand crisis and tumult: the traditional family.

Here, the free sex movement had probably been the first casualty of the disruptions surrounding the arrival of parahumans. Basic human nature said it stood about as much chance to prosper in this environment as the proverbial snowball in Hell!

"But why would she want *you*?" Dinah said with some distaste, before apparently realizing how that sounded, and spluttering a bit while the rest of the girls laughed. Hastily, she amended, "I mean, when she doesn't know anything about you?"

Apparently, it was Tammi's plans for which Dinah held distaste.

"Ah! That's because women are hypergamous." He answered happily, before he paused to look around at the sea of unenlightened faces. "All that means is that women are very unwilling to marry anyone they perceive as a social inferior. So a woman with a high school diploma, who gets proposed to by a high school dropout, is most likely going to turn him down because she views herself as more accomplished, and therefore superior - even if she is broke and the guy owns a successful garage. Men are not like that. Take the most wealthy, accomplished man in the world, and he'd be perfectly willing to marry a yoga instructor who was barely getting by, if she was pretty enough. But women are overwhelmingly of the desire to marry someone more wealthy and accomplished than themselves, or at least not anyone inferior."

Jared rolled his eyes. "This is actually among the many disasters in our society, as a woman with a college degree is, on average, overwhelmingly unwilling to marry a man without one - and our college and university system now graduates nearly two women for every man. This gets celebrated by some - but is the worst possible thing from a genetic or evolutionary standpoint, as it assures that as many as half the population's most intelligent women never have children, because a large enough supply of college-educated men do not exist to marry them. So roughly half those women who get degrees do not marry, thereby making the entire human race dumber, because those genes for high intelligence do not get passed on."

He gave a shrug. "Anyway, on the day Tammi and I met I made a bet, which she trusted enough to copy. I won ten million dollars, and so did she. Now, from her perspective, this elevated her status tremendously. She was worth a fortune, and thus anyone less wealthy was suddenly inferior and no longer acceptable for her to date. Because while a women with a wealthy husband may cheat on him with a delivery driver or a pool boy, she'd never consider *marrying* one! So her pool of potentially acceptable husbands instantly dropped from whatever it was down to practically nothing, as she eliminated those now viewed as inferior. Boys with nice cars worth a few grand are very interesting to a young girl who has nothing. But once that same girl has a fortune, those pretty baubles worth only a few grand are no longer interesting at all. So you can bet that she did some mental casting about, checking all those boys she knew for who might still be acceptable under her new standards; and, lo and behold! She knows that I also won that same ten million dollar bet, so ought to be at least close to as wealthy as she was!"

He gave them all a playful wink. "Do understand this is all taking place below the level of conscious thought. Most women are not so shallow as to *admit* they'd marry a man solely for his money - even though enough of them have done so they have given their entire gender a bad reputation for doing exactly that."

He shrugged. "Anyway, odds are she knew exactly one person her age who might still be acceptable according to her new dating standards: me. You'd better believe that focused her attention. Now money is not the only factor. It's important, true, but she still would have wanted to give me a few more tests to see how well I qualified. So she would have watched, intently, how I treated you - my 'sisters' and the other women in my life. And she obviously approved of what little she saw. She had probably also convinced herself that I was a cape long before that event with her costume..."

"She WHAT?!" Rachel blurted, suddenly hostile, ready to go off and stomp the interloper.

Jared very mildly placed a comforting hand on her shoulder, between that and his smile gently calming her down. "Humans are *very* good at jumping to conclusions based on nothing more than wishful thinking. I have been capable and competent in everything I've been doing every time she's seen me. All this actually reflects is standard officer traits for any wartime military, which I effectively was on those fantasy worlds, where people either keep their heads or lose them - quite literally. Since I did not die, I have become very cool under fire, and respond appropriately to a crisis situation, pushing hard towards a solution rather than suffering an emotional breakdown that would almost invariably have wound up with myself and all my comrades dead."

Here the apparent youth paused and shook his head. "I know in modern movies all of the time people take the biggest, most desperate crisis they can find, just so they can stop in the middle of it in order to resolve whatever emotional conflict has been brewing. But you can't do that. If you try that out in actual life, in an actual crisis, or actual combat, that's the single best way there is to get you and everyone around you killed. Circumstances will steamroller you, because events don't care about your emotional crisis.

"Hollywood does it because it is dramatic, and the actors don't care whatever explosion or battle is playing on the bluescreen behind them, they are just there to say their lines and collect a paycheck. But if you try what they do, following their bad example will get you killed faster than anything else I can think of!"

He met all of their eyes, one at a time, instructing, "In moments of crisis, time is the most precious resource you have, and doing anything with it but seeking out the best way to resolve that crisis and save your lives is garbage. That is the only true use of time when lives are on the line - getting them back out of danger again. Anything else is a waste. Freak out when the battle is over, not when it will get you shot. If you must ask if someone loves you, or if they really killed your brother, or if they truly can't stand your meatloaf, do it when the delay won't get anyone killed."

His eyes glittered like twin diamonds, and his chin went up and his shoulders back. "Break down on your own time. When you're on the clock you've got a job to do - and that job is to bring to pass that essential victory that will keep everyone on your side alive. It's not hard to keep hold over your emotions, then process them later, but during a crisis you've got to keep going *now*. Do the emotional work during the rest of the cleanup. Crying when it will get your loved ones killed will only make you feel worse, not better!"

The boy shook himself out of 'officer mode', as he'd called it. "Anyway, Tammi correctly had me pegged as someone who knew how to handle himself during a crisis situation. That's bad, in a way, because the only people her age she could think of who've had to regularly deal with any danger are capes. So she, correctly as it turns out, suspected me as having powers - although at least half of that was wishful thinking on her part. But she did it because who wants to look over their dating pool and find not a single, suitable person in it? Nobody, that's who. So, since she'd already eliminated everyone else her age as not being rich enough, she focused all of those hopes on me, hoping I would qualify in the rest of the ways too."

Here, he helplessly spread his hands. "She has decided that I do. At least half of that is her wanting it to be true. But I do know how to handle myself in just about any kind of dangerous situation imaginable - as a fantasy wizard facing down rampaging dragons is just part of the business day. Trolls? No problem. Zombie outbreaks? Don't make me yawn. What movies here present as an 'end of the world' zombie apocalypse is a light work week for any adventuring party I could think of. Some idiot opens a portal and literal demons by their uncounted thousands start pouring out? I've personally dealt with those scenarios *four times!* Usually I knew about them ahead of time, and knew enough we were able to take care of them before the worst could happen. But you just have no concept... I mean, Gandalf deciding to leap onto a Balrog and stab it to death once all else had failed? For an adventuring wizard, that's Tuesday!"

The wizard drew himself up and stared off into the distance. "As an adventurer of any sort, you have to make those sort of decisions All. The. Time. The ones who handle it best are the ones who survive. They train *thousands* of us, and not even a tenth of one percent survive to reach high level. Most die. Most of the rest decide they can't handle it and give up to retire and live peacefully somewhere. That's why I don't even mind, really, when Headmaster Andarlin steals my ideas. His focus is on keeping his students alive - and I can't even blame him. I don't want my friends and fellow students dying either."

"Jared? You, uh... don't ..." Taylor stumbled to a halt. "Are you upset?" she ventured to ask.

Jared sat down heavily, head dropping into his hands. "You don't get it. Of course you don't get it, as I've never explained it to you. Okay, here it is: I am an adventuring wizard based on a fantasy world. That's who I am by training and by inclination. In that line of business, you live or die by split second decisions. He who hesitates is lost. So you do what must be done, making the best choices you can with the information you have, and live with the consequences - even if that means seeing your friends die. It's better than eternal torment, right?"

Suddenly covered in girls offering comfort and support, the boy collected himself, drawing in a deep breath. "Back on the subject: Tammi knew I had won just as much cash as she had. Then she came up here and saw the manor, which admittedly reeks of even more wealth. So she decided I was superior to her in that one crucial department, confirming I was datable by her standards. Then she ran the rest of her battery of tests. When she arrived I treated her kindly. She saw Rick treat his 'sisters' and female friends well, and finally from mostly guesswork she'd decided I had to be a cape - probably thought I was some kind of Thinker, just as you girls once did. Then, when that got confirmed later, she would have felt vindicated, and more confident with all of her other guesses. Put those together, and she has determined that I am a good catch. Trouble, from her perspective, is that I am the only good catch in her available dating pool, and she comes here and sees that there are plenty of non-related females in mine. So she does what you could expect any female in a chaotic emergency would do, and she grabs for stability as best she knows how - making a full court press to grab that guy she has focused on for her own."

He rolled his eyes. "Offering to show herself to me nearly naked in hopes of ensnaring me is a desperation move, but not an unexpected reaction for a girl having her life threatened every day, as hers was. I'd even supplied her with the method she's been using to defeat Lung. That put me in the very rare territory of someone who could possibly protect her from him somehow - probably by thinking up something else."

"So... what are you upset about?" Lisa asked, striking right to the core of it.

Jared buried his face in his hands once again, moaning, "That I did not see this COMING! It is ALWAYS better to predict and dodge out of the way of trouble before it arrives, and I just waddled blindly into this one! I mean, it's not like this was a hard analysis to do! How could I not have done it *before* I had her amorous intentions zeroed in on me? She was supposed to be my *enemy*; and now if I turn against her, it would be the worst sort of betrayal!"

They came to the room Tammi had been assigned and he knocked.

Upon hearing her call out, "Come in!" They all walked into the room, only to stop in surprise to find Tammi lounging on the bed wearing silky lingerie and making bedroom eyes.

"Hi!... uhm..." the joyful warmth drained out of Tammi's voice in surprise as she pulled a blanket over to cover herself. "Uhm... I was hoping our first few times together would be private? If that's ok, that is!"

The way she finished indicated that she would do it, whatever he chose, even if that was not her preference.

Jared's palm met his face, "That's right. She's still operating under the understanding that 'lots of sex' is required to be a member of my group," he mumbled, as much to inform his Sirens as to remind himself.

Still, he had to give her credit. That joining their group and 'sealing the deal' as it were, was so important to Tammi that she would put up with less than ideal conditions for her first time caused his heart to melt towards her a bit.

When people are willing to sacrifice a bit of their own happiness for you - mark it! That's important!

Jared took his bundle of mixed-up emotions and metaphorically dropped them in the bucket labeled 'To Be Dealt With Later'. Right now he had a girl having an emotional crisis on hand he had to deal with. She had priority.

He turned to the rest of his Sirens. "If you could give us a moment alone?"

They all filed out, much to Tammi's relief.

He did not see fit to inform her that a tiny distortion in the air that caught the corner of his eye meant his Sirens were most probably peeping on them, and listening to every word.

Yeah, the bugs were trying not to be obvious... but Taylor needed to work on that.

Tammi started to move the blanket away, smiling, but Jared interrupted her, "No, no. Let's talk."

Thinking he was rejecting her, her face fell, and she cried, "You *need* me!" Tammi pled desperately, "You've got to have telekinesis for that Jedi thing! As Rune, I am your best option for that!"

"I lied about my powers," he told her bluntly. "I make it a policy never to give away valuable information to an opponent, as Victor and those supporting him were at that time. To be clear: I do *not* gain the powers of people I have sex with. In point of fact, nobody here at this manor has been having sex with anyone, to my knowledge. I have not had, and will not have, sex outside of marriage."

Tammi's face fell as she descended further into her emotional crisis, fearing for her safety, as her one sure route to security had just vanished before her eyes. "So... which of those girls have you decided to marry?" Then she tried to rally, "It should be me!"

He cut her off. "Not arguing that you would be a great candidate. However, we are getting ahead of ourselves. That's not something you rush into or make snap decisions on, since that's a great way to end up in a bad situation, because you did not do your homework in advance. No one can get on your nerves and bother you quite as much as a poorly chosen spouse, and it takes extended contact and effort to be sure that you really can get along well long-term. You and I have had a grand total of... ten minutes together? That's not a sound basis for making such decisions."

"You think I'm ugly," she replied in a despairing voice.

The boy could actually feel himself making a Will save, not to roll his eyes over that.

He gently placed his hand over hers. "I am saying we do not have enough information about each other to know for certain yet. I do *not* think you are ugly, rather the opposite, in fact. You are very attractive. But I also do not think that should be the sole, or even the most important basis for deciding anything. Frankly, one of the best tests for seeing if someone would make a good mate is seeing first if they make for a good friend. If they can't manage that, they won't be a very good spouse. But if you can get along... well, they say that best friends make for the best marriage partners."

Then he whiplashed the conversation. "So, tell me about yourself. For instance, how do you feel about Adolph Hitler and his policies? You did just come from a group that officially supports those."

Hope sprang up in Tammi's eyes over his wanting to get to know her, then fell as she heard the topic. "Uh, I actually don't know all that much about him. My family is all messed up, and after I developed powers I got sold to the Empire. I did not really have much choice."

He smiled comfortingly. "Yeah, perfect families exist only in fiction. Sorry they dumped you in that situation. In the interests of getting to know me, I will tell you that my opinion of Mr. Hitler is that he was one of the most evil men ever to live, and his ideas and actions are poisonous and destructive. But what's this I hear about having to kill a black man to join the Empire?"

She snorted, pulling the blanket closer to cover her chest better. "That rumor? You actually believe that?"

"No," he admitted. "Seriously, the only time I'd ever heard anything similar was propaganda, when the Japanese government during WWII told their people that men had to kill their own mothers to become an American Marine. That led to tens of thousands of suicides among the Japanese people, rather than being taken prisoner by those awful Americans - because who could trust someone willing to do anything so awful? Anyway, it was a ridiculous lie then, just as it's ridiculous now. That's the sort of thing hack fiction authors write, when they can't be bothered to come up with anything believable."

Tammi nodded. "Talk about believable, if they had a requirement like that, the gang would be less than a hundredth the size that it is. There just aren't that many black people living here. And the ones they did not kill would have left. I mean, seriously!"

Jared nodded. "And the ones that did not get killed, or leave, would have armed themselves. People aren't stupid. You give someone that big a threat to their lives, and they will react to defend themselves. If the Empire actually had that policy, the blacks would have armed themselves, grouped together, and *they* would be the biggest, best armed, and most powerful gang in Brockton Bay before long! Human nature permits no other outcome! As they'd have had more motivation than anybody to get armed, get trained, then work together - and very shortly, they would have discovered how powerful that made them."

"I know, right?" Tammi agreed.

"It's absurd in multiple ways," Jared nodded. "For one thing, there is no way the local police could have gotten away with ignoring deaths on the scale having that 'kill a black man' in place as a policy would have resulted in. They do have oversight on the State and Federal levels. There are limits to what local corruption can get away with, and genocide is generally frowned upon. National organizations would have been shrieking over the humans rights abuses if local cops had even tried to cover up such an atrocity."

She agreed, letting the blanket slip a little.

"For another," he continued, "I've seen no signs of major, all-black gangs forming in Brockton Bay, which historically speaking they *do* when any group feels threatened in that way. So that's pretty convincing evidence that, whatever racist stuff the Empire does, it's pretty much got to be mostly talk, and very little action. Otherwise they would have created their own major opposition force already. I mean, the closest we get is the Merchants, and that's not even a black gang, that's a 'We'll Take Anyone' equal opportunity drug enslavement ring."

The boy shook himself clear of that topic. "Ok, so if you don't know much about Hitler's policies, that suggests the E88 does not have something like regular, mandatory classes on it."

She openly laughed. "I think some of the guys might talk about that kind of stuff, but I never heard any of it. I think most of the reason they claim to believe as they do, is just to look tough."

He was nodding along. "So, the same reason some other groups embrace snakes, or skulls, or some other stuff. They think it makes them look brave, powerful, ruthless, or strong. But it's just a facade. Underneath, most of those groups are just weak men overcompensating, trying to hide their weakness behind whatever symbols they take to mean strength."

Tammi nodded, blanket slipping further. "Some of the guys will beat people up, and use racist excuses, but I think they're just that violent and would beat anybody up."

Jared continued nodding along. "That perfectly describes what I have heard about Hookwolf. He doesn't much care who he fights, just so long as he gets to fight."

"That's him," Tammi declared.

He gave her a side-arm hug, along with a big smile. "You see? This is the kind of conversation that you need to have many of before you know someone well enough to even consider marriage. So this is great. We need to continue. But we need to do it with the rest of the group, and your clothes on, so we can all get to know each other. So I'll just slip outside, giving you the privacy to dress. Then how about we all go down to the dining room and have ice cream?"

Jared smiled as he left the room.

Frankly, the most reassuring thing about that conversation was not anything she'd said. Tammi hadn't actually said very much at all, in fact. However, the ongoing Detect Thoughts power he'd been using throughout that encounter had revealed to him her surface thoughts, all of the unspoken comments, things left unsaid, and unvoiced opinions that had been running through her head had been *very* reassuring.

There was also the fact that Tammi had not pinged on his Detect Evil senses at any point, at any time he'd met her, nor had she lied to him during that conversation.

Looked like that kid could be redeemed.

OoOoO

They had a lovely 'Welcome Home' feast for Jared.

There was ice cream.

Tammi got voted in as a member of Skysaber's Sirens, then there was more catching up to do.

"What do you mean you spent it ALL?" Jared goggled, unable to believe what he'd been told. "There was over three billion dollars in that account!"

"Exactly!" Lisa chimed eagerly.

The wizard's mind boggled. Okay, he had earned and spent some crazy sums on his own, at times. But wow! They had robbed the ABB gang of a positive fortune, enough money to have kept them living comfortably for the rest of their lives. And he had just been informed that was now all gone, spent by his team.

And it had been a staggering fortune. As Lisa had previously said, the ABB gang made better than $200 million per year on prostitution alone, with another $100 million on drugs, and about as much again on gambling, protection money, and various other rackets like tributes from wealthy families paying Lung not to torture their kidnapped daughters too much.

Put it all together and the gang made well over $400 million a year in total.

And the gang had been running for almost ten years.

Of course, that was gross. But even the net was a staggering sum. Most people who worked for the ABB did so because if they did not, Lung would kill either them or their families. He demanded tribute from every Asian in town, and would accept payment in cash or service. Parents would pay for their children, relatives for invalids, etc. But you would pay, or else.

There were nearly twenty thousand Asians living in Brockton Bay during the time he'd been doing this, which was roughly the national average, and Lung extracted about $5,000 from each of them in tribute, fees and fines, leading to about $100 million annually that just went straight into Lung's pockets, so did not get counted in the gang's $400 million.

Lung was a creature of many faults. One that amused Jared no end was that the would-be dragon had an impulse towards hoarding. Part of that manifested in how the gang leader hated to pay for anything. Lung preferred to use intimidation and force to get things for free. So, though he had lived a lavish lifestyle with plenty of creature comforts, expensive meals at every Asian restaurant in town, hot and cold running whores, plenty of security, and so on, he had accepted all of that in the form of tribute from his subjects. He'd lived like a feudal lord and never spent a dime on it. He never spent money, period, when he could avoid it.

It turned out the Asian gang leader had actually been a prodigy at avoiding paying in any form. To him, taking without paying proved his strength, which was something he loved to do. To pay would indicate weakness, unless it was something like his drug suppliers who were based well out of town and so not people he could just threaten into compliance.

So Lung took about 50% right off the top of his gang's cash, and that, plus his own $100 million they paid him in tributes, over ten years worked out to three billion dollars he'd had, just in his own personal bank accounts.

Lisa had stolen it all. The would-be dragon's entire hoard.

Only now Jared's team had spent it all.

The rest of the ABB was far more typical for gang members in that they had spent money almost as quickly as they'd gained it. There had been a couple hundred million scattered among the various accounts of Lung's lieutenants and divided among the hundreds of unpowered civilians who basically ran the day-to-day operations of his gang, but all told when Lisa had gone through swiping all that it had only amounted to about 10% of Lung's savings.

And, of course, the girls had somehow managed to spend that too.

"We bought up just about every abandoned property in the bay!" Taylor enthused.

"For pennies on the dollar, even at the current depressed prices! So we'll have enough left over to build!" Missy excitedly agreed.

Jared was shaking his head. "Not with only three billion, you don't."

"You know the recent scare caused by Lung's rampages and Bakuda's bombings?" she teased.

He stared at her. "The one that nearly got the city evacuated? Yes, of course I know of it. How could I not?"

Lisa grinned like a shark. "Well, the banks saw that too. Those very same banks that are holding those mortgages for the houses and things that people are willing and getting ready to just walk away from. People who are still unsure they want to stay? Those banks realized they were faced with holding the papers for properties that are worth nothing, so were desperate to get anything for them. So I bought them up for a song!"

"How much?" the wizard inquired carefully.

Rachel smiled. "If the banks offered to sell for a thousand, Lisa countered with ten dollars. They would try to insist on the thousand and she would point out that 'last week it was worth one thousand. This week you could not sell it for a hundred. Next week you won't be able to sell it for ten. So do you want ten now, or nothing later?' They all sold for ten dollars on the thousand."

"Which was already sharply depressed from the previous values," Lisa gloated.

Jared did some rough calculations in his head. "Still, that should have taken roughly all of our cash on hand. To make that money back, we'd have to develop the properties, fix the problems that made them sell so cheaply, so they could be resold. That won't come cheap, and if you've spent all of our money buying properties..."

Lisa smugly answered. "So I called Numberman, he gave the ok, and we formed our own bank! Using that three billion as our initial deposit, at the current fractional reserve rate of 0.15%, we were able to give ourselves loans amounting to two trillion dollars!

Jared's knees went weak. He sat down, he did not care where, licking his suddenly dry lips. "Numberman okayed that?"

"Yes. He basically replaced the Federal Reserve." Taylor cheerfully informed him.

"I know that, but why would he okay it?" Jared asked.

Lisa smirked. "Oh, that's easy. He's basically planning to cheat us out of our three billion, by doing the equivalent of a 'margin call' at an inopportune time, and then foreclosing on all of our assets. But we'll beat him, by having actual equity equal to that amount or more. We're aiming to have several times what is needed, expecting him to manipulate real estate values when he tries to get us."

Jared took in a shaky breath. To him, it looked like they were now poised to lose everything. "I think you'd better give me the full presentation, as I am a stockholder in this enterprise."

"Gladly!" they rushed to comply.

OoOoO

"Well, I am impressed," Jared concluded at the end of one very long, highly detailed, and brilliant presentation on their plans for the city. "Your plan is highly detailed, and brilliant. But you made a couple of mistakes."

"I think this is all well within our abilities," Lisa disagreed, playfully pretending arrogance in objection to his criticism, but really just enjoying having him back again.

Jared smiled fondly as he rose to hug her. "Ah. Now we see the difference between skill and experience. Yes, every one of you has the ability to do all that you said, but you don't have the *people* that a person in your position normally does! You are each certainly qualified to lead any investment organization on this world or any other," he agreed. "But any company operating near the scope of your ambitions will have, at minimum, hundreds of true experts to distribute most of the load among. Normally you would provide the leadership, and they would cause your vision to happen. That's where most of an organization's true power and thrust comes from, the second-rank standing behind the leader, pushing along their leader's plan. But we don't have those hundreds of experts, there are only the six of us."

He glanced aside to Tammi, "That will be seven once we get you up to speed. We have a device from Cranial from Toybox, that can implant recordings we've acquired of Uber's skills on certain subjects. Finance is among them, and as a part of our group, you naturally will be receiving that, just as everyone else has."

Tammi beamed.

Rachel cocked her head, dog-like, in puzzlement. "Will that be eight? I know you acquired a girl or two on your travels."

"In time, probably," he allowed, then released Lisa from the hug, holding her by both shoulders, looking down in amusement over her gaping like a fish, seeing that she could now perceive this flaw in their plan.

Jared hugged her again, warmly, still explaining, "Then, standing behind those second-string experts, you would normally have thousands more helping them along, just to have enough bodies to handle all of the bureaucracy, doing research, and fiddly little details they'd run into just carrying out their parts of your instructions. That third string sounds minor, but is desperately important, and usually has quite impressive job titles. Every last one of them would be considered managers, and have a fourth layer made of tens of thousands supporting them, doing the actual work. Then after that you'd have even more just to handle hiring and firing, insurance claims, answering the phones, and all of the other details that keep a company functioning. Organizations that handle this kind of money are normally huge, well over a hundred thousand employees."

Jared chuckled. "Well, it is only fair. Only a little over a dozen nations on earth have ever had a GPD that measured in trillions. No one can handle that kind of money without a lot of support."

"So? We'll hire people." Missy insisted.

Jared nodded, acknowledging the point. "But how do you find good people? That's what makes this a problem, as out of every ten or so potential new hires, at best only two or three turn out to be any good. Finding people both able and willing to do the job, that you can trust, without causing any problems or helping themselves to any of the vast sums of money that are going to be passing through their control? Every institution that has ever existed has struggled to do that, and all of them have failed, at least partially. Embezzlers sneak in to every business, or give in to temptation when they realize just how easy it would be to steal, and how hard it would be to catch them. Most governments can't pass a dollar through two hands without losing ninety cents in the process. At its height there was just short of two hundred nations on Earth, and most of them were places like Zimbabwe. Graft and corruption are the default, they are the norm. That's because they are human nature. Getting around that, on a large scale, has proved impossible nearly every time it has been tried."

"Then how does anything function?" Dinah challenged.

"Because it is possible on a limited scale." Jared acknowledged. "People like to tell each other that prosperity is the norm. It's not. Wealth and prosperity means goods and services, but those goods and services require human effort to achieve, they don't just appear out of nowhere. You can't just sit out on a bench and have the wind cut and style and shampoo your hair. Nor do cars assemble themselves out of coconuts as they fall from trees. Even things that do occur naturally, like cow's milk and fruit from trees, you are paying for someone's effort to gather that and bring it to you. No, if you want wealth, someone has to work for it. That's all money is, anyway, a promissory note backed up by someone's labor. You agree to that when you take a job and sell your time for a certain wage, you are offering your labor in return for that money. If you had all of the money on Earth, but no people were left, you'd have no way to spend it and your money would be worthless."

Jared paused, considering. "Actually, I think I know people who have been to that Earth. They call it Night of the Comet. Almost all of the people there are dead, but their cities and stuff got left intact, and you know what? Nobody there bothers with money. It's worthless. You could fill a dumptruck with cash and nobody would take it for any service you could imagine. None of the survivors would make you lunch if you offered them all the riches of Wall Street in return... but they might make you lunch for free if you asked nicely. So, yeah. Money can't buy what others would give for nothing. That's worthless by any standard."

"Anyway, back to organizations. You could build the one you want, the one you need to take care of the details and things, letting your plans proceed, but such a thing has to be done slowly, because at every stage you've got to sift through the people available for you to hire. You've got to find the ones that will actually do the work, that won't cause you problems or rob you blind, and dismiss those that won't. And that can only be done a little at a time, because you can't do it all yourself. You've got to select people you can trust to manage the hiring and the firing, doing all of the sifting, so you can focus on running the business. And if you rush it, you'll get people in there as managers who are corrupt, who will steal when you aren't looking, and they'll do the sifting the opposite to the way you want it done - they'll want to select more dishonest people like themselves, who will also steal, thinking they can trust such people to cover for their own crimes. And once that has gone far enough to where you have too many corrupt, dishonest people, they will inevitably define the company's culture, and then you'll never get any other kind. Because even if they did hire someone who normally wouldn't cheat or steal, once hired they'll train him to do what everybody else is doing, even if only by example.

"Once things have gone to the point where you have dishonesty and theft as your company culture, that's it. The only thing you can do at that point is sell it all and start over - Which is a problem when it's your government that is the organization with that culture, because governments do not go down gently. No, they do not, and they make sure to make everybody sorry when it inevitably happens anyway. Governments do not live forever, any more than rats do. Regardless, it takes years to build a large enough organization to do what you want done, and we do not have years to build one. That's mistake number one, and I'm not certain we can fix it."

"There's ANOTHER mistake that bad?" Taylor was horrified.

Jared nodded. "Sadly, two more. The first is quite bad enough to get us in real trouble, but the other two are almost as bad. You see, by buying up every abandoned, derelict, or blighted property in Brockton Bay, you have inevitably also purchased all of the territory the gangs rule, and currently think of as theirs - including their headquarters, safehouses, and bases."

"We've already budgeted for that!" Lisa sprang up to their plan's defense. "You see, right here? There's extra installments to be paid out to all of the local law enforcement agencies to go clear out those zones and take care of the crime."

The wizard sat down heavily, already feeling tired. "I know that," he said, massaging his forehead to try to deal with the forming headache. "But if money could deal with crime, then with what the US government has already paid, there would be no crime. We paid more for law enforcement than any nation ever had before, but frankly our crime stats are worse than most of them. There is actually no relation whatsoever between the money paid to reduce crime, and actual crime levels. Counter-intuitive, I know. However, there is a LOT of relation between crime levels and morality, as one rises, the other falls, pretty much inevitably. But morality is not so popular anymore, which means crime rates are high across the board, and rising - which is also why it is so hard to find good employees. Because it takes morality for a person not to steal even when they think the boss is not looking and they can get away with it. Now, paradoxically, it *may* be possible to deal with the gang problem - but you're not going to like the solution."

"What is it?" Rachel was not afraid to face their problem and deal with it.

The wizard returned an unhappy smile to her. "We do not pay that money to law enforcement. Instead, we pay it to one of the gangs, to get them to wipe out the other gangs. Because law enforcement is bound by certain rules, and the gangs are not. So there is a lot more effectiveness there to be tapped, if you are ruthless enough. So, we'll have to decide which gang we can deal with, and which get chopped - very likely literally. It sounds nasty, but it is what nations have defaulted to more often than not in these sorts of situations, because it's effective. The British nearly conquered the world doing their occupations that way. The Romans likewise."

Tammi was beaming, and schmoozed over, placing herself on the arm of his chair where it was natural for his arm to wrap around her waist. "And since you already have such an *excellent* working relationship with the Empire..." she ran her fingers through his hair.

Jared obediently accepted her affections. It would be rude not to! "Yes. We are not going to repeat the mistakes of New Wave. We are not going to knock out the least objectionable gang in town, only to create an opening that would be filled by something much worse. Besides, have you considered the alternatives? You've got Lung, whose defining characteristic is his pride - and part of that is that he absolutely refuses to let others tell him what to do. So we couldn't trust him to keep any bargain even if we made one with him. Plus, let's be honest, the way his fights are going now he *couldn't* drive out the other gangs for us. Then you've got the Merchants, who are not so much an armed force as a free-floating drug orgy, who will take anyone - whether they want to enter or not. The ability of Skidmark to motivate his gang to do anything at all beyond taking drugs, or raiding for more resources to obtain drugs, is highly in question. So really, what other choices do we have?"

Jared's face sobered. "Besides, I have it on excellent authority that should the Empire be knocked out of power in Brockton Bay, the Teeth will take that as an open invitation to return here."

Everyone traded sober glances at that.

The Empire were a gang, and did gang-style things, crimes and so on. They were bad. But the Teeth were not so much a gang as a tribe of mass-murdering cannibals.

They were worse.

By whatever metric you cared to use, the Teeth were worse than just about any group you could think of - except the Slaughterhouse Nine, who were in a special case all their own.

"What's the last problem?" Lisa asked. "You said there were three."

Jared sighed, lowering his head. "Potential government interference is the third problem, and one at least as bad as the other two, as they don't like to let anyone do anything without their permission. So whatever we do, they will be regulating and interfering with it, just as fervently as if they were firefighters battling a blaze about to consume orphans. To them, maintaining control over everything and everyone is at least that important, and they will act desperately to preserve their ability to do so, as if it was life-or-death, imagining horrible results if they did not stay in charge."

The girls looked around, many of them quite new to the idea that government could be the major obstacle in anything they wanted to do, because they, like *everyone* of their generation, had been raised to think the opposite - that government was the *solution* to all problems.

"So what do we do?" Taylor asked.

Lisa smirked, already knowing the answer. "Luckily, as it happens, most of the local government are already fleeing Brockton Bay like rats fleeing a sinking ship - grabbing all of the money they can on the way out, of course."

Jared nodded. "But that leaves a vacuum. So we'll just hold 'emergency elections' and build our own government. This effectively doubles our first problem, as now we'll have to build *two* organizations composed of people we could trust. So, come on, we're all going to Cranial's chair, where we will pick up the Administration skill - which is all about how to build and operate large organizations like this, including how to run governments so they function properly and do what they are supposed to."

Jared grinned. Rising from his seat, arm still around Tammi, he proclaimed, "Besides, I have an idea that should get property values here among the highest in the nation. Let's replace the local government first, then I'll implement it."

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Beta work by Dogbertcarroll