Chaotic Clusterfuck 2 (Patreon)

Commissioned by Definitely Not Dio

Chaotic Clusterfuck

Chapter 2

-VB-

I had no money.

This meant that I couldn’t rent out a motel room to sleep comfortably.

I was homeless. I’ve been so caught up in my situation and new life that I completely forgot about the most basic needs of life: shelter, food, and water.

… Water.

Right, I completely forgot. One of the powers that I came to this verse with was Clean Water, the ability to turn any pool of water - but not the ocean or sea - into clean, fresh drinking water. I walked around until I found a empty bottle in a trash can, walked over to the bay, cleaned it out as best as I can, and then submerged it so that the dirty bay water flowed in.

I waited as it filled up, and when I didn’t see any more air bubbles, I brought it out of the water and stared at it.

Yup.

There were stuff floating everywhere, the water was super murky, and it wasn’t even bluish green but something closer to yellow.

If I drank this, then I would end up sick or even dead.

I glanced at the shipwrecks dotting the horizon.

Who knew what kind of materials those ships were made out of. Some paints used arsenic in the old days, which meant that there might be high concentration of arsenic in the bay’s water. It might even partially explain why there were no fish in the water.

Still, I had to test out my power, right?

Because if this didn’t work, then I was some kind of amnesiac with delusions of grandeur, and I don’t know what I’ll do if that really was the case.

I took a deep breath in and stuck a finger into the bottle.

And my eyes widened as I immediately saw the water clear up. The floating particulates all disappeared and the water became so clear that I could see through it.

“Hot damn, I’m not dreaming,” I muttered to myself as I pulled my finger out and took a sip. And then I gulped down the entire thing.

Water problem: solved.

-VB-

Next problem: food.

Or rather, it wasn’t a problem.

Just like with water, I had a power that could feed me, if indirectly, but I needed to quickly solve a problem before I could do that.

This was why I was sitting in the library very close to its closing hours with a piece of paper, a black pen, and my phone. Ring Ring was another perk I had, but this one just gave me a phone that had access to the internet wherever I was and also had an app that was an encyclopedia. With it, I could look up the composition of gold down to the electron, neutron, and proton. I would take that information and reverse calculate how much the clean water I could make into gold through alchemy.

Yes, alchemy, which I had thanks to the perk Beep Beep. I had the Fullmetal Alchemist kind of alchemy, and there was also a microchip inside my head that would give me all of the necessary calculations and symbols needed to create the circle that would allow me to turn water into gold.

But I found a problem in the calculation.

See, if it was turning lead to gold, it wouldn’t be that big of an issue because lead and gold were, mass-wise, very similar. Water was nowhere close, and unlike lead and gold which were elements, water was a compound. To help make conversion possible, I had to break the bonds between oxygen and hydrogen elements to break the molecule, and then convert both elements into gold. Oh, and the fact that water was liquid and gold was solid didn’t make it any easier.

This … was not easy.

Essentially, I had to do three different calculations when doing one calculation on an alchemy circle was already tough for a beginner like me. The brain chip was helping, but there was a limit to what a newbie could do with alchemy without a lot of experience.

I was making progress, though.

---

I gave up.

I just opted to change iron to gold. Far easier, far simpler, and far more abundant.

---

Now back out in the streets since the library closed and in the ship graveyard because that’s where the biggest source of iron was, I sat down in a reasonably flat ground and set the paper with the improvised alchemy circle. I gathered the most pure-looking bits of iron and then set them down on top of the circle.

I looked around, making sure there wasn’t any around, and then clapped my hands before pulling them apart and pressing down on the edge of the circle.

My eyes widened as the circle lit up and -.

“Is the iron supposed to glow-?”

BOOM!

I coughed as I fell backward.

That hurt.

What the hell just happened?

The smoke around me faded away, and I looked down at the circle. The explosion had obviously ruined it, and I grimaced at the pile of black soot that I found there.

“Fucking hell. What went wrong?” I muttered to myself as I shifted through it… and then bumped into something heavy and hard. Frowning, I dusted the rest of the soot off and pulled up the thing.

It was heavy but black.

Grumbled, I tried wiping it.

And nearly choked on my own spit when I saw the glinting yellow underneath.

Gold.

Lumpy and ugly gold but gold.

I quickly dunked it in a nearby pool, which also turned clear and drinkable the moment I touched it, and then pulled out the gold nugget. It was only the fourth the size of the iron - and probably steel and rust as well, which could have been the cause of the explosion - that I put on the alchemy circle, but that made sense. Iron was just a bit more than a fourth the weight of gold for the same volume.

I quickly hid it, kicked the site of my work so that it scattered, and then powerwalked out of the ship graveyard.

---

“...” the small jewelry store owner looked at the gold and then looked up at me. “I don’t know how you got this,” he mumbled. “In fact, I might just call the police on you…”

I glared at him and then called upon my third blatant (or not so blatant) power. Invisible black matter flowed out of me and coalesced into a mummy-like bandaged Ajin. The ajin, an invisible being to all those who weren’t also ajin or capable of producing invisible black matter like I could, lifted a hand and put it down on the table between me and the jeweler.

And crunched.

He shrieked and almost fell out of his chair as the table abruptly splintered with claw-like marks running almost the length of a forearm. His face suddenly paled and he looked up at me, and saw me looking down at me unimpressed.

“But of course I r-really shouldn’t do anything so rash…” he replied with a weak smile. He quickly - but tremblingly - pulled out a digital precision scale. He set the gold down on the circular silver plate and the result was 2.1 kilograms.

The current gold price, which I checked not with my phone but with the library computer, was $2,332.09 per troy ounce. And 2.1 kilograms - I pulled out my own phone and checked - was 67.517 troy ounces. This meant that the gold that sat on the scale was worth over $150,000.

That was too much money for a small time jeweler to provide, even if being a jeweler in the first place meant that he probably had more wealth than the bottom 80% of the city’s populace.

“How much do you have on hand?” I asked the sweating jeweler. He was young, though not much younger than I was.

“I-I have two hundred thousand on hand…”

“Hmm,” I muttered. “How about this?” I asked him as I picked up the gold and handed it to my ajin. To the jeweler’s eyes, the gold just hovered as if something was holding and turning the gold nugget. And then the gold chunk got halved.

He jolted in place, hearing nothing but a sharp and loud thunk of metal getting split quickly.

I set the gold down.

“Give me fifty thousand dollars for this,” I told him as the scale told us that the halved gold chunk weighed in at 35.4142 troy ounces. I knew that fifty thousand was worth far less than what the gold was actually worth. However, I could also make more gold. I didn’t need to haggle and argue over the exact price I would get. What I needed was cold, hard cash. “You forget what happened today, and keep forgetting when I come back and keep selling you gold under its market price.”

Despite the paleness and sweating, I could see greed worming its way into the jeweler’s eyes.

“... Is this real gold?” he asked me with more bravery than he’d shown so far. Or rather, this was the businessman within the jeweler speaking.

“It is. I just needed to melt it so that no one would recognize its former appearance,” I replied with a drawl. This wasn’t a lie. I melted iron into gold. No one would believe me, but that was the case for me.

He gulped not in fear but with anticipation.

“... Okay. Only me, alright? Only sell to me, and I’ll agree.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Don’t forget that I could’ve just wore a mask and robbed you. And you saw what just happened. No one would’ve seen a thing.”

There was a moment of silence as the two of us waged a battle of wills with our stares alone.

Finally, he spoke up again. “Simon Deballay,” he introduced himself.

“Alan,” I replied with a smile. “Just Alan.”

I waited as Simon the Jeweler brought out the 50k in a small suitcase. When I grabbed the handle to take it, he resisted for a second.

“You know that I will be testing the gold, right?”

“Of course,” I replied with a raised eyebrow. “There’s a limit to how much you can accept even under some duress.”

“And if it is not gold…”

“I’m sure you have camera in the shop and now my name.”

He let go and I left.

-VB-

With the funds secured, I found myself looking for a home.

But I couldn’t buy a home without any identity, which wasn’t something I arrived here with, so I instead spent the night at a motel.

When I woke up the next day, I got to work to get myself a new identity. I pulled up a map of New Hampshire on my phone, chose a random small town, and took a cab to there.

After three hours of travel, I found myself in front of a very small town’s mayor office and walked in. The mayor was in… and he was more than happy to look the other way to simply give me a look at the records his town had in store.

For a price, of course. Five grand was so much bigger than keeping guard over a few records.

I wrote a few things down and left.

When I returned to Brockton Bay, I used the social security of a man around my age and similar appearance but left town. I went to the Brockton Bay city hall, claimed that I’ve been robbed, told them by social security number, and then, viola, I had myself a new identity as the mayor’s office helped me get file for new passport and more.

Of course, for a price paid to the city hall worker in a dead-end job with no real potential for future salary increase.

By the end of my second day on Earth Bet, I had myself a new identity, enough money to place a down payment on a small four hundred square feet condo, and funds to last me several months. Oh, and I was now Johnathan “Alan” McKinsey.

With the preparations done…

What was there fun to do in Brockton Bay?

-VB-

Fun, I found out, could be found at Palanquin. The nightclub was still the cover business Faultline’s Crew used - and they were still here and in the same form as canon. So I walked into the nightclub expecting to take a glimpse of her and the Case-53s, I instead found myself drawn to someone older than the average person in the crowd.

Sitting by the quieter end of the bar nursing a cup of something strong in her hands was a red-haired beauty.

“You look like someone killed your dog,” I spoke up as I slid into a seat next to her.

She glanced at me and looked me up and down before smirking. She wordlessly showed me her wedding ring.

“You wouldn’t be here nursing a drink if there wasn’t some problem at home. Lay it on me,” I told her. If she didn’t want to fuck, then nah.

She looked at her ring wordlessly before pulling it off.

“I’m divorced,” she croaked out, sounding like she had cried a lot.

“... Shit. Sorry.”

“Yeah. He was cheating on me.”

I almost reared back. “Did you cheat on him first or something?” I asked incredulously. “Or blueball him for years?”

“No. I … I just found him with a younger girl in our wedding bed,” she whimpered.

“Damn,” I muttered, wondering who exactly would leave a hot woman like her. She didn’t look like she had saggy tits or something, either.

“The worst part is that … she looked like I did when I was young!”

Oh yeah, that was just the man. This wasn’t an issue in the family; the man couldn’t keep it in his pants.

“My condolences. Bartender, a cup of whiskey for the lady here on me.”

I guessed that I could listen to a lady talk about her woes-.

---

-how did I end up here?

I stared blankly out into space before looking to my left where the same ginger-haired lady from last night was in bed under my quilt.

‘Those are huge bodonkers,’ my monkey brain aped from the back of my mind. ‘Those are huge, firm, and juicy bodonkers!’

‘I get it,’ I told myself as -.

“Yes~! Squeeze them like that~!” she squealed as I took her from behind while grabbing her tits with my hands. They were soft on the outside but bouncy and firm in my fingers and palms-.

-as memories of last night returned.

Yes, those were juicy bodonkers. Now, shut up.

More importantly, I needed to remember her name…

What was her name?

Oh God, this was going to be super awkward if she woke up and I didn’t remember her name.

… I couldn’t remember her name.

No. Wait. I can!

Her name was -!

“Well… It’s nice to meet a man who can listen to a woman. My name’s Zoe Barnes. Well, soon to be just Zoe. What’s your name?”

Damn. She did not look like a late 30s woman who had two kids.