Chapter 7: Building Up

Of course, simply saying one needed a team of meta/para humans that could get shit done was a long way from being able to pull it off. Particularly when literally no one knew who you were. Which means there were a hell of a lot of smaller steps Alyssa needed to take care of first. She needed at least a decent reputation and some history of success. She needed resources and equipment. And she needed to pick the right people.

Picking the right people would be a long-term concern. Her meta knowledge wasn’t just unreliable, it was downright dangerous, given that quite a few people that should have been heroes were villains and not a small number of villains or rogues were, conversely, heroes here. She had some leads, at least one of them local in the form of White Tiger. But each option would need to be vetted carefully, and they weren’t likely to listen to her unless she had the first two points of the trifecta covered.

So, Reputation and Resources/Equipment.

She’d at least started the process of handling the second part the day after she’d stopped to reassess. Gotham to New York was only two hours by bike, and her work with mental shielding had helped her work out another useful trick. The ‘Jedi Mind Trick’ was really just a telepathic suggestion, and understating such had been a basic requirement to construct defenses against it. She hadn’t used it for anything truly nefarious, instead simply using the technique to ease  broad-spectrum liquidation of a lot more gold without having to come up with different stories.

Frankly, she hadn’t even been comfortable forcing a certain price out of the sellers with it. She’d only used it to make them not question where the gold came from or ask for ID. Since said gold was completely legitimate, and she’d let them each negotiate as hard as they wanted, she only felt a small amount of guilt at the usage she’d put the skill to. It wasn’t something she wanted to become a habit, as her mind being fucked with was one of her own major fears in a setting like this, but it had been a multifaceted need. Needing to offload the gold for money, yes. But she also needed to actually use her mental abilities a bit if she had a prayer of getting any farther with her defense building. It had still made her feel a bundle of ‘yuck’ though, even if she’d barely done anything. Which…might be a problem for learning more.

It was a problem for later, though. For now, she’d used a few offshore accounts that had been easy to set up now that she had a proper Net-Diving rig, filling them by offloading a couple of hundred pounds of gold in various places across the city of New York. Someone was almost certain to notice, eventually. But that’s why she hadn’t done it in Gotham, had carefully disabled any cameras, and had done her best to change her appearance each time. Since the gold was real, and there wasn’t anywhere nearly enough of it to crash the markets or anything long term, there was little chance anyone would pour in the sort of effort needed to track her down through the layers of obfuscation.

The net result was just over $6 million sitting in a trio of offshore accounts. Hardly enough to threaten the truly rich, or even to attract all that much attention. But enough to get a running start on resources and equipment a Hero team would need. Particularly as she’d promptly turned around and dropped $1.2 million on an old manufacturing facility. She’d honestly overpaid, given that real estate in the slightly questionable part of Gotham the building was located in wasn’t exactly in high demand. But doing so had meant the transaction was fast…and that the agency selling it hadn’t poked too hard into the shell company she’d used to make the purchase.

The next two weeks had been a combination of Powers Practice and Heroic Lair Setup. Yes, Heroes could have Lairs. She’d declared it and thus it was so. Also, she probably needed to start finding actual people to talk to soon if she was doing things like that. Regardless, she’d gotten a very good feel for her strength, in particular, as she cleaned out the warehouse.

Well, parts of it.  

The reason she’d wanted the specific warehouse she’d settled on was that it was damn near 20,000 square foot of space, but built into a hill that made it look like it was maybe half of that. It was two floors, with one being sunken enough that it wasn’t obvious it existed from street level. She’d procced to cut the ‘surface’ off from the bottom floor and carefully used her energy projection ability to cut new access from hidden doors. One for people, one for vehicles.

With the surface floor, she’d gone to some effort to make look like it was in the process of being retooled by the new owners. In truth, she actually was vaguely planning to set up a heavily automated manufacturing line of some sort up there. She needed a more obvious means of making money. She had been, when she was bored of moving and making stuff, coding up some programs that she fully expected to sell well. They had in either Motoko’s world or his own previous reality. Money from those would eventually sustain her ‘civilian’ persona quite handily, without her having to hold down a day job. But eventually setting up a manufacturing line above her Heroic Lair that produced something useful wouldn’t hurt. It would also be something to point to as where they got their funding from to other heroes, without compromising her civilian identity.

Both of those things were long-term, though.

In the shorter term, her real work had been done on the lower level. A level she’d gone to considerable effort to erase any obvious existence of. Soundproofing, external entrance concealment, generators so it wasn’t drawing power from the city grid. Her creation ability got more and more of a workout as she started creating pieces for bigger or more complex items. Ironically, the one thing she’d originally thought would be hard had  actually proven easy, because her skills from Motoko had given her an insanely in-depth understanding of electronics. Not to mention a seared-into-the-brain set of blueprints to use for guiding her creations.

Yeah, she’d felt like a proper idiot and probably looked like a kicked puppy when she’d realized she could have just played with creation a bit more and made a ton of the electronic hardware Section 9 used. The only reason she hadn’t realized it was that she hadn’t tried, which had caused her to spend an entire day playing with her creation powers to see where her current abilities with them were.

Electronics were actually one of the easiest, with mechanical creations being the next in line, since Major Kusanagi had done a lot of maintenance on different vehicles throughout her career. Up to and including the Tachikoma, but she wasn’t remaking those anytime soon. She had made a pair of pretty badass motorcycles that wouldn’t match up with anything made on this Earth, though. They were, for the moment, set dressing for when she eventually needed to convince other people to get on board with her still-imaginary team.

Still, the entire point of setting up the Heroic Lair was to do just that. Help sell herself as a good option once it was time. She’d put together some pretty serious computer hardware, based on a mix of reverse engineering equipment from this reality and making some of Section 9’s military-grade supercomputers. A training room with some solid equipment was added, as was a small but well-equipped armory. The Lair even had a pair of small bedrooms, sound-isolated from the rest, for people to crash in. In effect, she’d created a very viable Hero Team’s First Fortress.

Honestly, she was probably going about all of this completely ass-backwards. But Alyssa had good reasons for doing so. First and foremost, of course, was because it had let her get practical experience with a lot more of her power and skill sets. She’d needed to properly understand her strength, even if she could instinctively control it (for which she was very grateful). She’d needed to practice with creation and quantify what it could do. She’d even needed to run through some of the comprehensive martial arts she now knew and figure out how to adjust them for everything else.

It was all, she felt, time well spent. Even if there was a good chance she would barely use the lair for weeks or months. Depending on how long it took her to build up a reputation and single out some possible recruits, of course. Still, it had taken two full weeks to do everything, meaning it had now been just a few days shy of a month since her arrival. After sorting out the last thing she felt she’d needed, a costume and pre-made set of gear, she sat down at the impressive bank of computers in The Heroic Lair.

“Alright. Now we just need some motherfuckers to beat up. Possibly with other motherfuckers. So…to make a difference in Gotham, ignore the costumed loonies unless they try something in front of you.”

That, she’d realized after her research, had been Batman’s stupidest failing. He’d failed to recognize that the weight dragging Gotham down and causing the costumed loonies was the organized crime. A list that farther poking around had shown was depressingly full.

“Black Mask is the biggest local name. But the Triads are raking in something like a billion a year from Gotham. Neon Dragon has links to the Mandarin, which could be bad. Lucky Hand…proxies for the Hand, as in the Ninjas? Really, bit on the nose there. Two other major drug cartels, but mostly those are just funneling things into the families. Berettinelli, Dubeiz, Falcone, Sullivan, Maroni, Dimitrov, even a branch of the Tyger Claws who are connected to Arasaka. No wonder this city is completely fucked.”

The question was…where to start. It was tempting to hit a little fish, to get her feet wet. But that wasn’t the right approach. No, she needed to break one of the big families, one with cyberized enforcers and possibly a few ‘capes’ on call. Yet, hitting them wrong would cause an abrupt power vacuum, which might trigger a gang war. Which, of course, was probably why the Bat had hesitated.

Alyssa didn’t agree with that hesitation at all. Even if she did trigger a gang war, bad tasting medicine was still medicine. More people died yearly to the gangs in Gotham than would die in rooting them out, even if she had to do that while they were waging war in the streets. Leaving them be just so that they didn’t do worse was killing more people in the long run. Still, trying to take out someone like Falcone would be a mistake as a first shot. Too much destabilization too quickly, and without the backup needed to fix it.

“The Hammer. The Russian mob isn’t as entrenched here as some of the others, and KGBeast is both a cyborg and on both Shield and the PRT’s most wanted list. After the death of Comissar, he’s rumored to be in Gotham running their operations here. Shutting the group down and bringing him directly to the Shield offices in New York would be a nice big splash to start with.”

Nodding, target chosen, Alyssa leaned back in the chair and pulled down the neural-link visor. Time to see what leads she could dig up regarding the group…

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A/N 1: I'm apparently unable to NOT do some planning. Even with a heavily tweaked character who's more OC than SI. It's just in my nature, I guess. Seriously, why do so many SI's jump right into punching shit instead of setting up a medium/long-term plan?

A/N 2: You can totally have a Heroic Lair! I mean, look at the Batcave. That's clearly not a Base, it's a Lair! And who wants a Base when you can have a Lair. Lairs are much cooler, everyone knows that.

A/N 3: As far as I'm concerned (obviously) Alyssa is correct. Batman's focus on the Costume Criminals is a bit foolish. For every one person the Joker kills, regular gang violence in Gotham likely kills two dozen, the drugs they peddle kill 50, and the common citizen gets more scared. It's unlikely you'll get caught up in any particular Costume Rogue's scheme. It's SUPER likely you'll be a victim of far more ordinary crime.

A/N 4: Likewise, the argument common to settings like Gotham or Brockton Bay that you'll touch off a gang war? Tough fucking toenails. If a gang war kills 500, but you managed to root out the gangs? Better than the long-term bleeding death toll that would kill five times that many over five years. Mitigate if you can, obviously. But failure to act is just as much a choice as acting is, and the deaths failure to act causes for those that have a responsibility to act? They are just as guilty of those deaths as they would have been the more obvious ones.