PomPoko

Chapter 1: Less than you Wished For

I woke up suddenly, alert and aware, and shot to my feet so rapidly that I should have experienced vertigo. I didn't. I also rose a lot higher than I had expected to. I looked around at the horrors that surrounded me, and nearly screamed as malign shaped charged toward me, intent on violence. Reaching out with my bullshit powers I instinctively stopped time. Gazing at the hordes of monstrous creatures, now frozen, I shuddered. There were time-suspended spines and other biological projectiles mere feet from me hanging in the air.

Ellisburg. I should have known that I would end up here. Still, the two points I got for "without a map" were worth it. I casually re-wrote reality within my range, making every living creature within it forget that I had ever been here.

I tore a hole in reality and stepped through, to a random unobserved spot in Brockton Bay, restoring the flow of time as I left. Hmm… As I stepped through I realized that the range my abilities could affect was present on both sides of the tear in space/time... I put aside that thought for later, it had possibilities.

I found myself in a dark alleyway surrounded by garbage. A cat that had been nearby hissed at me as it ran away, the small pile of trash under its feet scattering as it took off. I found a reasonably clean spot on the ground and cleared it further with a sweep of my giant bushy tail, and absently called into existence a super-comfy armchair with a hole in the back for my beautiful (if I do say so) tail, and sat down to gather myself and make a plan.

I had thought I would be more confused or uncertain when I arrived, but thanks to my Absolute Stamina and the localized clairvoyance granted by my Existence Manipulation I was ready and raring to go physically and completely aware of around 22 meters in every direction from me. Including down. Damn it was trippy, seeing water moving through pipes and electricity flow through wires. I manipulated space-time to make myself speed up and reality outside slow to a crawl so that I could think about things without wasting time.

I also instinctively knew how to get the most out of all of my abilities, and thus my new body had zero learning time and it's use, if anything, easier done and more instinctual than my old body. I began thinking, deciding what to do from here. I could either go hide somewhere for the next 10 years, or try to rescue this stupid, corrupt, hopeless crapsack world from itself. I never gave a thought to not helping; there were children here, after all. As a father I would rather die than not help a child in need, and goddamn these people needed help. Now, how best to help them?

First, I need to list the threats to this world and decide which of them had priority. Obviously, keeping Zion from destroying the human race was priority number one. Really, the way the entities operated they were the enemies of all other sentient life so he really had to go. If I could catch his real body in my omnipotence field then I was pretty sure I could use my "Existence Declaration" to completely erase him from reality. How to get to his dimension, though? I didn't know where it was or how to get there. I could probably use Existence Manipulation to open a hole between parallel earths but I would need to know where Zion was located first. Maybe I could use his projection and trace it back to where it came from? Before I gave priority to killing Zion I would need to put an end to the Endbringers first, I realized, as he was the deciding factor in most of the engagements with them.

The Endbringers presented problems of their own. They were slowly destroying human civilization, and they had already changed the physical, geo-political, and moral landscape of the world. Because of them terrible crimes were tolerated to encourage criminal parahumans to come to Endbringer fights. Criminals were given free reign to walk the streets. They were tolerated so that they could defeat this menace to humanity. The authorities let these criminals ruin lives and impoverish the people they were supposed to protect so that they would maybe, hopefully, help fight the beasts of the apocalypse. Without the "unwritten rules" and the "Endbringer truce" then both criminals and authorities would likely stop holding back. Rule of law would collapse in the face of overwhelming firepower via superpowered warfare and the world would likely see a dark age if it survived at all. Well, that was the worst-case scenario, I figured. Things would definitely get much worse, though. Destroying the Endbringers was necessary, and I would do it, but first I had to make sure that their destruction wouldn't leave the world ruined. If one of them attacked before I was ready I would fight it and drive it off, but I would have to postpone killing them until society was ready to survive their destruction without imploding.

So, it looked like the first step to my plan would be to develop a plan that would allow society to cope with parahumans who had nothing to lose once the kid gloves were off. What would be needed for that? I didn't know. I considered myself a very intelligent person, and I definitely had an idea, but I needed thinker powers for this. Luckily I had a way of obtaining this precious resource. I smiled, ready to flex my metaphysical muscle, as it were.

I activated my "Gift" power, the amped-up version of Othala's ability that I had purchased, and gave myself a thinker power that gave me superhuman understanding of human nature and sociology. It was a good power, and would rate around a 4-5 on the PRT scale, and with my Ability Intuition I could effectively use it at a level or two higher than that. I used my Power Manipulation ability and boosted it as far as I could without using a charge. When all was said and done it was effectively a level 8-9 power.

I activated this new ability and felt the world around me change. Connections formed between people, places, and events that were not present before. The very fabric of the socio-behavioral construct called society lit up my brain. I had never imagined how amazingly complex and fragile human society was before. The new insight was allowing me to intuit facts and understand things that I didn't even know existed before.

I realized at once that I had been on the right track before, but that I had grossly understated the problem. Without Zion and the Endbringers society based on equality and rule-of-law would last at most another ten to twelve years here on Earth Bet, probably less, and then devolve into some sort of neo-feudal state. Already, the world was basically controlled by parahumans, with governments only existing because most of those affected by the shards of Eden and Zion did not have the patience to lead from behind the scenes, craving constant conflict. Still, many parts of these governmental bodies would be controlled indirectly by Thinkers and Masters, I understood.

I shivered, in awe of these thoughts. This was me using my new power without any real information about this world, only what I read in Worm and understood of my own Earth. I could tell that my "Sociology" Thinker Power would be orders of magnitude more useful with raw data to give it. The power told me what information it would need to be fed before I could use it to make any really in-depth plans. It had provided me with the first step, however.

I understood now that without the backing of legitimate authority I would never be able to succeed in my plans. I needed to get some high-ranking people in government involved in this plan in order to help society. Yet I was needed in combat roles as well. I was needed in many, many places. Eventually I would need to gather people together to help complete my goals, but for now I would be forced to use a shortcut.

I completely cloaked the alley I was inhabiting from detection with a casual use of Existence Manipulation, then used the "Life Mastery" subset of my greatest power to call into existence a human-normal clone of myself without the Tanuki features and towering height, and sculpted him to be a preternaturally handsome man in his mid to late 40's, using everything that Sociology indicated would make people want to respect and listen to him. His voice was crafted to sound like liquid velvet, his appearance immaculate, and his smile winning. I named this clone Politician.

Politician was a real human being with his existence slaved to mine. He would have thoughts and feelings, wants and needs, but he would be completely subordinate to me in all things. He would be allowed to live his own life, but he would follow my directions. His goals would be mine. There was no "control" to maintain, and no hard feelings; he was created to be my follower and I made it extremely fulfilling to him to do so. My will was his purpose.

I used Gift to give Politician a slight Master power that would allow him to talk people into doing what he wanted if it was within the realm of plausibility, and optimized this new Master power, not for strength, but for ease of use and undetectability. It would functionally be rated a "2" on the PRT scale, extremely subtle, but very broad in it's scope of applications. It would literally make people happy to do what he wanted them to do. I named this Master power "Persuasion".

I also gave Politician a copy of Sociology so that he would better understand how to achieve his goals. I created two additional powers for him as well, that I was sure I would be using with my other clones. I gave him a Mover power I named "Recall", which would allow him to teleport to my location and then back to where he teleported from. It also had a function much like Mouse Protector's power, which allowed him to mark people, objects, items, and locations and then recall himself to them. I kept a copy of this power as well, as it was insanely useful.

The second power I created was True Telepathy. I created a master version for myself and amped it up as far as a I could without using charges, and then created a lesser, subordinate version for Politician, which I called Lesser Telepathy. With my True Telepathy, I would be able to detect life, listen to the thoughts and memories of every animal or other thinking being around me in a large radius, mentally command/control them as well, and perform basically any mental manipulation you could think of.

Politician would be able to read the thoughts and memories of people in his line of sight one at a time, and in emergencies he could stretch this power to allow him to escape people's perceptions, much like Imp's power. The main purpose of Telepathy, however, was so that Politician could stay in touch with me at any distance. With this, he was complete and ready to roll. I used Space/Time manipulation to make a fold in space, creating a portal to Washington D.C. I gave Politician a spiffy five-thousand dollar suit and a wallet containing authentic looking Identification, as well as a briefcase filled with 1.2million dollars in non-sequential $100 bills that my power created based on other bills that I sensed within my Existence Manipulation radius.

Politician's first mission was to lease an apartment. He would then locate someone who he could purchase a fake identity from so we could get him on the grid. He would be starting out as a consultant/lobbyist to make contacts and then rise in the ranks of Washington bigwigs from there. By the time he had made the right connections to get our plans started I should have enough resources to create a stone-clad identity for him.

I began smiling, as I released the space/time distortion that I had been holding, causing time to resume flowing for me once more. It was time to enact phase two of my plan; exploring town to get an idea of what Brockton Bay was like. I used my Tanuki Shapeshifting to clothe myself in the appearance of a white male in average clothes, as I figured that this would be the most common demographic in town. It should grant me a measure of anonymity. I walked out of the alley and stepped onto the sidewalk, my illusion hiding it fading away, and walked toward the ocean. I could see it a mile or two away, blue and untamed.

'I think that I'll visit the boardwalk,' I thought to myself, smiling.