203 Epilogue 3 (scrapped version) (Patreon)

Unknown location, Unknown time.

The Number Man clicks his pen, spinning over his palm once and setting it's tip back down on his desk as he focuses on his monitor.

A swipe here on the touchscreen, a tap there. Three point eight billion dollars. Another swipe and it moves across the digital world. His fingers work at the keyboard as the money keeps moving from one account to another, splitting into smaller increments as it goes.

Money is the lifeblood of civilisation. People bleed for it, die for it. Money makes the world go around. Without this fantasy, civilisation would collapse. Slips of paper and metal coins, no intrinsic worth beyond the materials they are made of, numbers on a screen, even less real.

And yet, they have value, because people give them value. There's a simple beauty in that, he thinks.

His pen spins around his palm again and taps back on the desk.

Soon enough, all of that money will end up in various accounts, mostly in the form of anonymous donations.

The King's Men were still in debt, another donation will keep them afloat for another month or two.

He'll have to defund some media outlets, and fund others to be louder, recent events putting quite the spotlight on the Heroes. But the Protectorate still has it's uses, and will continue to be important for the next decade, most likely, maybe even two. So he can't let their reputation get too damaged, though it's an inevitability really.

It's a shame so many parahumans have to be so... rash, shall we say. Alas, without making the majority seek conflict, the Agents wouldn't get the data they want.

His pen spins again.

Valhǫll, formerly Gesellschaft, have started building themselves back up after being trounced by a collective assault from The Clowns. Money has been moving around, consolidating and protecting. They were preparing for something before, he'd noticed money leaving their accounts, just at the same times as various arms dealers were getting the same amount richer.

Unfortunately for them, Number Man didn't even have to deal with that himself. It's going to take some time for them to get themselves in a stable position again, half a year, most likely. It would have been longer, years even, if their leader had been killed. But Lusia spared his life, for whatever reason.

On the thought of Clowns, Number Man moves over to another set of accounts, splitting the screen to show all accounts made in the last month.

Still no change.

He spins his pen.

He predicts that his services will get called soon, a request from Negante, also known as Joker, asking to transfer her accounts to his own.

If everything she told him about Negante is accurate, he'll purport something about getting his money back as his reasoning. Except he likely won't touch the funds, just hold onto them.

It's a strange relationship they have. Then again, he supposes that's par for the course with Lusia. Their own relationship is hardly normal.

Another spin.

Every Clown uses his services, as recommended to them by Lusia. Of course, that means that he knows exactly how many of them there are, and he can extrapolate more from their spending habits and income. Alexandria would not be very happy with him if she knew about that. In fact, his power tells him that there is a high likelihood that she would lash out and break at least some of his bones.

Oh well.

He doesn't owe her anything, and she'll calm down once she stops being so pissy about her eye. She already didn't have an eye in that socket, so really what reason does she have to even be so upset?

Either way, he made a deal with Lusia that he wouldn't tell anyone how many Clowns there are, in exchange for her making sure that each of them make use of his services. A deal he was happy to make.

He doesn't think she knows about Cauldron, never mind his presence in it, but he suspects that she has at least some idea. Leopold knows about them after all, and he knows that for all she likes to claim that she prefers being ignorant, he knows that she likes knowing secrets, if nothing else. So it's not too hard to believe she traded his life for information.

He figures that if she knew he was a part of Cauldron, she would have touted her knowledge right away, attempting to hold it over his head.

She never did.

The pen spins again.

There are not a lot of people Number Man would consider a friend. His co-workers certainly aren't friends. They don't even necessarily get along, such as with Alexandria, who can't get over who he used to be.

But he supposes that's fair enough.

She lost her eye to The Siberian, who then joined up with Jacob, or Jack Slash, as he called himself after they killed King together.

Jacob was his polar opposite, but he was a friend, by some definition of the term. It's somewhat ironic that she now considers Lusia as something of a friend, considering she killed his old friend Jacob.

Tortured him to death really, and supposedly sold the memory to Toybox, if his information is accurate.

Shaking his head lightly, Number Man lays his pen down, perfectly parallel with his keyboard, just the same as everything else on his desk. Parallel or perpendicular.

Turning around, not having to stand as he prefers a standing desk, not liking the idea of being vulnerable to attack by remaining seated, the Number Man takes in the expansive view behind him.

At the back of his office, is a wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor window, showing a mot beautiful scene. An impossibly huge waterfall in the distance, spitting up a cloud of mist as it crashes against the lake it has formed, surrounded by orange foliage and trees that tower for kilometres into the sky.

The view is not one of this Earth. It is an Earth, just not the one he was born on. Not even the Earth he was currently on. Just one of the many, many Earths where Humanity was never born, where life is purely floral. He has Doormaker keep a portal open in the back of his office, changing it every week or so, so as to spruce the place up a little bit.

He's never liked the endless whites of the compound. White walls, white floors and ceilings. It's all so inexpressive, so sterile.

So he tries to make his office a little less bland. To his right, he has a large print of the Golden Mean, the Phi decimal as a fractal image in gold against black paper, with mathematical notation surrounding it.

His opposite wall used to have Dali’s Crucifixion, Corpus Hypercubus, blown up to one-and-a-half times the size, showing Jesus crucified on a fourth dimensional cross.

But he got rid of that in favour of a cute little thing that Lusia left for him. It's a series of photos, split into a four by three grid, with each photo showing her in the middle of a dance move. It took him barely a second to realise what she had done, beyond simply giving him a way to piss off Alexandria every time she enters his office.

She is using her arms to show mathematical functions, the first image being the wave of sin, then cos, tan, cot, all the way down to one over x, and then, amusingly enough, finishing with what seems to just be a random conflagration of limbs, using strings of her power to make even more lines. But a closer look shows that it is just all of the previous functions stacked on top of each other.

Honestly, the part he is most impressed by, is that she did it perfectly, the angles are all completely right. He's not surprised of course, he knows of her capabilities, but it's an important distinction. If the angles were all slightly wrong, then it would annoy him and be a joke, but as they are correct, it is simply a gift.

It also means that she went through the effort of checking that the photos are correct, something he is fairly certain she cannot do so accurately by herself.

She sent him it shortly after he confided in her what his power was, as part of another trade, of course, so she definitely knew he would appreciate the angles.

Now if only he could find out where she is, and what she's doing.

Ever since her stint in Oakland about a month ago, she has fallen completely off grid, to the point that even the Number Man can not find her.

Interestingly, Thinker predictions have unanimously confirmed that 'Tear' is gone. Dead to never be seen again.

The PRT and media has taken that to mean that she is gone, but clearly their critical thinking skills never developed.

Identity, like money, is entirely fictional. Money has value because we give it value, and names have weight because we give them weight.

'Tear' is dead, but predictions into 'Lusia Abel' have all come back either with mixed responses, or simply inconclusively.

He's curious.

As to what she will do, how she will return to the spotlight. He doesn't have much faith in her ability to keep from doing anything drastic eventually.

He only hopes that they don't need to come up with a plan for immediate extermination. No matter how much Alexandria might want them to.

In part simply because of the difficulty of the task, they only managed to convince the Faerie Queen to retire because Contessa could cheat, but also simply because he'd rather not have to kill her.

She is quite fun, most of the time, and he somehow doubts that there even is a Path that could convince her to retire.

Well, it hardly matters right now. He should instead focus on more immediate issues.

Such as the Endbringers. For all the Lusia is being called a Fake Endbringer, that doesn't mean that she is going to reset their schedule.

Leviathan attacked last, two days after Lusia caused worldwide floodings, so it's not going to be him.

Between Behemoth and Simurgh, his power tells him that there is a sixty-eight percent chance that it will be Behemoth, quite possibly pushing further against San Jose and the bay area that is still damaged from Lusia's actions.

There's also a eighty-six percent chance that the attack will happen three days from now, relative to Earth Bet's time, that is.

Which means it is his job to manipulate the world once more, move around enough money that groups that are fighting will cease hostilities enough that they can respond to the attack, hopefully working to stop the decay of humanity just that little bit more.

So with a light sigh, the Number Man turns away from the scenery and returns to his desk.

Truly, work is never done.

///

Istanbul, Türkiye, March 25th, 16:30.

Watching the Simurgh fly away back to low orbit, Armsmaster only lets out a grunt to show his discontent.

They had once again only left superficial wounds on the Angel of Death, but all said, the fight went better than expected, and worse than they had hoped.

The canal to the Black Sea is blocked again, but that shouldn't be too hard to fix with parahuman effort, and the number of lives lost was relatively low. But that tends to be par for the course with the Hopekiller. Death is better than becoming a Ziz bomb.

Luckily, she wasn't here long enough for the city to be considered for a quarantine zone, but he doubts the citizens will find that to be much of a comfort.

His frustrations get the better of him, and Armsmaster pulls apart the device he was disassembling with a bit too much force. Not enough to break it, he would never be that careless, but enough to get him looks from the still keyed up Tinkers around him.

But that only frustrates him more. Reminding him that he was not out there, fighting the Simurgh directly.

He knows it's the logical thing to do. She sticks to the skies most of the time, and he is better suited to keep back coordinating the Tinkers, both to protect the medical tent, and to organise an offensive.

But he can't help but want to do more. He doesn't want to sit on the side-lines and watch as someone else fights.

It feels like he is plateauing, and he hates it.

At the start of his career, he was the star Tinker, standing just behind Dragon, and Hero too, if he was still alive.

He won nearly every fight he was in, even the ones where he was incredibly out matched. By all accounts, he is an incredible Hero.

And then Lung came to the bay, and fought him, as well as his entire Protectorate team all by himself just to establish his dominance.

Before then, it had only been Endbringers that had left him feeling so helpless, but then again, Lung fought Leviathan to a standstill, so perhaps it makes sense.

That doesn't mean he was happy about it, but he has come up with solutions, designs in the making to take out Lung one on one. That is the joy of being a Tinker. You might lose, but you can always improve, always come back stronger, better.

But then, Lung is no longer the only Villain he has been incapable of fighting.

Tear, Lusia Abel. He was there. Of course he was. He's one of the top Heroes in America, someone who is thought of alongside the the very best the Protectorate has to offer.

And yet, he could not even participate in that fight. Her speed eclipsed that of anything any of the Endbringers have shown, and she isn't so easily baited. He would never be able to keep up as he is.

She injured Alexandria, so his armour wouldn't hold up to her attacks. He cannot even fly, so, like with the Simurgh, he was relegated to the background, helping construct the forcefields that she so easily cut through, and forced to abandon the fight entirely, too weak to even distract her.

He hates it. But he will use this feeling of weakness as fuel and build a better, stronger suit, better tech. Work out a counter for regeneration, something to boost his speed, grant himself flight.

He knows he can do it, it's only a question of how long it will take, and if he can get enough budgeting to actually build it all.

=================

A/N: He~llo! Dear readers!

Wrote a little Armsmaster bit because I was questioned on where he was, as if that is something I would forget. So yeah, now you know. He just wasn't enough of a man for Lusia to even recognise he existed.

I honestly contemplated having Armsmaster be one of the 38 that died right at the start, it would have been really funny.... actually, I might do that.

If when you are reading this, there is no Armsmaster, then that means that I changed my mind after posting the chap to patreon, in which case, sucks to suck I guess, bro got wiped out by a stray thought lmao. Also means you plebs missed out on a scrapped 500 words of Armsmaster being Armsmaster. (btw, that's him going "boohoo, I'm not the greatest hero ever! wahhh")

Also, I wonder what Simurgh was doing over in Istanbul? Surely that won't have any consequences down the line, right?