Chaotic Clusterfuck 1 (Patreon)

Commissioned by Definitely Not Dio

Chaotic Clusterfuck

Chapter 1

-VB-

We all talk about America.

America!

It’s where everything happens!

America!

It’s where the U.S.A. is!

America!

The greatest land on Earth!

America!

The home of the first hero!

America!

The home of the first villain!

America!

The home of the Grimm!

Amer- wait, what?

The home of the dragons!

Okay, what’s going on-?

The home of demon vanquishers!

Seriously, what the fuc-?!

-VB-

Brockton Bay, New Hampshire, USA

Earth Bet(?)

Those were my feelings when I found myself in Brockton Bay. I expected to encounter the same Brockton Bay that I had written about hundreds of times. Brockton Bay was a decaying city whose people willingly clawed even faster toward its condemnation with their support of ethnic and/or racist gangs, nihilistic indulgence of drugs, and the general corruption and ineffectiveness of the law, government, and society at large.

Brockton Bay I was looking at wasn’t that different yet oh so fucking different.

As I leisurely walked down the Lord’s Market in the early morning on the very day that I found myself dropped into this version of Brockton Bay, I found myself looking at very weird things.

“Come get your anti-demon charms here! I’ve got Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, and pagan charms! Come get your anti-demon charms here!”

“Holy water made from the tears of a virgin! I’m selling 1-ounce bottles of holy water! It’s only $5.99!”

“The Toronto Sailors are recruiting sailors! Roundtrip from Brockton Bay to Toronto, 3 days of travel, you’ll get paid $500!”

“I’m looking for more people join me in my fishing trip! You’ll get paid $100 dollars for the day’s work!”

It was fascinating. The market - and the city by extension - just looked more alive than I imagined this place to be. It was also filled to the brim with people, and while it wasn’t exactly New York City or Tokyo subway level of packed, I was bumping shoulders at least once every minute.

“Hey, you.”

I paused and looked toward the person who called in my direction rather loudly. I looked toward the source of the voice and found myself looking at a very muscular man … with tattoos… and maskless Asian -.

‘... That’s not Lung, is it?’ I thought to myself. When I tried to move with the crowd, his hard gaze lingered on me. ‘Ah, fuck.’ With a sigh, I stepped out into the small open space in the Lord’s Market that the parting crowd had made as they tried to avoid Lung’s attention. “Sup?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I haven’t seen you before.”

“Yeah. I just arrived here.”

He grunted. “You looking for work?”

Was Lung offering me work?

“What kind of work?” I asked him cautiously. I didn’t want to appear like I already had a job lined up but I also didn’t want to spurn him without even taking a second to listen. Who knows? I might learn something interesting about this new version of Earth Bet I’ve arrived on.

“Depends on what you can do,” he replied mysteriously.

Yeah, that sounded less like a recruitment pitch and more like a sales pitch. I didn’t know how but he knew that I had powers. Was it something about his shard power that let him suss out other parahumans?

“... Sorry,” I replied with a half-apologetic grin. “But I already have something lined up.”

He hummed. “Then it can’t be helped. Just be careful about taking walks in the west, alright? The racists there won’t care that you’re white. You don’t look white enough.”

I blinked as he walked away and the crowd closed back in to fill the gap.

… That was a pretty alright interaction with Lung. Better than I could have ever imagined.

The west… wasn’t that where all of the suburbs were? Lord’s Market and the Docks was the northeast, the Trainyard was in the north, Downtown was in the coastal center and southwest of the city, and everything else was residential suburbs or commercial zones.

I grunted almost like I was mimicking Lung because with all of the changes that’s happened to Brockton Bay from events years if not decades ago, I now didn’t know the state of the city. I was a stranger in a strange land, and hated not knowing anything substantial about this place.

Worse, I don’t remember everything I picked. I knew for a fact that this had to be some kind of CYOA because that’s what I was doing right before I inexplicably fell unconscious in front of my computer, and it certainly couldn’t have been from a measly one-hour workout. But I don’t remember the choices I’ve made.

… It was time to hit up the local library.

-VB-

The locals called it the First Impact. Oddly fitting for the apocalypse they went through.

A series of geological natural disasters broke up the world's landmasses into smaller chunks until Earth lost around forty percent of its landmass. The current record for human casualties sat around in the low of two billion and as high as four billion, effectively halving the world population on average, though places like China, which lost all of its flat lands, suffered worse than others. Landmasses also broke away. The USA, for example, lost a fifth of its lands and a new sea some two hundred miles wide separated the west and the east. Not only that, this sundering wiped out two-thirds of America’s fertile agricultural heartlands, including California’s Central Valley. The resulting famine in the greatest country on Earth led to the death of at least ten million Americans. No one knew how many people died in India from a similar famine, especially when the violent continental drift that split them from the rest of Asia also flooded and drowned all of northern India and most of its fertile coastlines.

The Second Impact happened when new sources and systems of power began to emerge. Aside from a single source, the Devil Fruits, all systems of power followed the first system’s Trigger requirement.

As for the Triggered powers, there were four: chakra, quirks, magecraft, and Gamer. People put a lot of different meanings and connotations on people with those specific powers. For example, anyone with chakra was assumed to be a conservative traditionalist while anyone with Gamer was a talentless hack who needed the System (not the power system but the computer user-interface-like display that all Gamers could use) to be anything more than the average joe or jane.

The Third Impact (which didn’t end humanity) was when the monsters began to crawl out of the dark. Dragons, demons, Grimm, and unnatural beasts started attacking nations from within and without. And if that wasn’t all, there was an active alien invasion in the shattered African Archipelago in what was once the Sahara Desert but now the Green Sahara Island. The surrounding island nations that survived the First Impact - Morocco, Algiers, a very small Egypt, and Ethiopia - were now in a constant state of war. And the aliens were familiar to me as well.

One of the reasons why a spacefaring civilization like the Batarians from Mass Effect franchise didn’t come down to enslave everyone (because their Hegemony was an enslaving piece of shit pirate-state) was because of the monsters from the Second Impact and the Dark Continent of the First Impact.

I never thought to see dragons fighting spaceships, but there it was on the internet, which somehow survived all of the Impacts more or less intact.

I clicked on a video on the ParaHuman Online forum, and watched in fascination as a giant red fuck-off dragon tangled with a motherfucking cruiser and downed the thing… and flew out of the wreck bleeding profusely but nonetheless alive.

The Dark Continents was the home to such monsters, and even power-empowered parahumans (they still called all power-possessing humans as parahumans) didn’t dare venture into the two continents that now sat in the middle of the previous five continents.

Speaking of the previous continents, most of them were now archipelagos, and the largest was still Asia, stretching from Turkey to no longer cold Siberian frontiers with multiple flavors of revolutions (Revolutionary Iran vs. Republic of Iran), warlords (Afghan tribes, Chinese warlords, Middle Eastern warlords, Indochinese warlords, etc), and struggling states (Himalayan states stuck between Chinese warlords and Afghan tribes, Laos and Thailand constantly fighting off the warlords to their west, and Caucasian Mountains nations still cucking each other while having the Iranian civil war to their east, warlords to their south, and Russian remnants to their north in the Ural Archipelago).

As for how many people had powers…

PRT, which operated in North America’s six main islands estimated conservatively that, in North America alone, there were around one point five million active parahumans with another estimate of three hundred thousand inactive parahumans. This meant that, even though I chose in the CYOA for 20% of the population to have the potential to trigger, only 0.5% of North Americans had power.

This meant that Brockton Bay, with PRT ENE’s official listing of three hundred seventy parahumans and capes in the city and its surrounding county, was still the cape capital of the East Coast - or rather, the Appalachian Island. New York City would’ve been the capital but, well, it was underwater with only the skyscrapers still sticking above the waves.

On a whim, I looked up all of the capes that I remembered from the canon timeline.

New Wave, including the younger generation, check.

Protectorate ENE, bigger but core members all still here, check.

Empire Eighty-Eight, same size, check.

Azn Bad Boyz, Lung was still in charge, check.

Archer’s Bridge Merchants, bigger, check.

Undersiders? An unknown.

Coil… non-existent.

Endbringers? Never heard of them.

It was … going to be interesting around, especially when I had access to all sources of powers most parahumans only got one of and on top of that, I had even more powers that no one had access to.

But more importantly, what was I going to do for fun around here?