Work Text:
The Travellers get Rich, Quick.
“Krouse?” a pained voice called out. Fearful, not quite yet hopeless, and hungry.
“Yes Noelle?” he replied, looking at the darkness in front of him. She was in a bad way these days. Growing more and more monstrous, more and more dangerous. But he couldn’t just do nothing, couldn’t look away from her, the way everyone else did.
“I think… I think I know how to solve this,” Noelle said.
Another half-baked idea, he expected. She’d had a lot of those, seeking hope and refuge in whatever could possibly work. Even peppermint oil and faith healers hadn’t done a single thing for her condition.
He nodded, hoping he could see her in the darkness of the room.
“When I’m hungry, I need meat. Not lettuce or grains or things like that, but red, juicy meat. I was thinking. Maybe the reason things are going so wrong, maybe it’s because the meat isn’t good enough?”
“Please tell me you’re not thinking about people meat,” Krouse whispered.
“No, nothing like that, just… have you ever heard about A5 Wagyu meat? It’s really expensive, especially in the quantities we’ll need it, but I really thinking this will work.”
Krouse closed his eyes, and did some mental arithmetic. That stuff was expensive on Aleph, and probably even rarer here on Bet. But… if it had any chance of working at all, could he really say no?
“I’ll look into it,” Krouse said, gears turning in his head. For this to work, he’d need to get really rich, really fast, and he knew just how to do it.
***
A fiery sun scorched the ground in front of the most exquisitely build office complex of the city. Large, tastefully recessed off-silver letters adorned the walls above the entrance, slowly melting away in the burning heat. Inside, panicked lawyers, accountants and all the other different gears of the financial institutions of the world dashed throughout, burning sensitive papers before anyone, villain or hero, could get their eyes on them. Somewhat deeper inside of the building, other forces prepared, launching out a deluge of water moving harmlessly through the crowd, it’s physics ever so slightly manipulated.
They were met by a strange balloon-like creature spitting out a dangerous, acrid smelling gas that deadened the senses, and a series of small impacts, gas canisters flying straight through walls before spreading a massively thick cloud of smoke.
A strange mind-killing wave smashed through the sun-wielding assailant’s psychosphere, before she was plunged back through time several seconds, but all of the fireworks were only a distraction as a terrified office worker suddenly appeared on the roof of a nearby building, replaced by a strangely charismatic young man smoking a cigarette through his mask, entering the foreboding room in front of him.
Inside was a man who very much looked like the picture you got when you looked up “overcompensating” on wikipedia. Short, with a slightly unimpressive power, Accord was the kind of man who considered himself a man of impeccable financial understanding. He basically ran the city, and half the country, and a good portion of international trade. If ever there had been a mark, it was him.
A mechanical mask-eyebrow raised itself as Krouse walked into the room, opening up a small suitcase, containing mathematical descriptions of a product from his home dimension.
“Good morning,” he said with a polite nod.
Accord just seethed in response.
“Forgive my interruption. But I have, right here, for your eyes only, an amazing business opportunity.”
Darkness pooled behind the eyeholes of Accord’s mask, but he did not speak.
“Surely, an intellectual powerhouse of you has heard of the wonders of blockchain, creating a non-governmental currency that you can use to buy anything from drugs, to hitmen, to other, slightly different blockchain currencies. In here, however, I have something completely different, a non-fungible variant that can be used for massive new advances, like pictures of weird monkeys, or pictures of weird lions, or any other type of pictures of weird animals.”
The mask twisted, opening slightly, showing real teeth, though Krouse wasn’t certain whether or not those teeth originally belonged to the person whose face they adorned. It was a really intricate mask.
“I know, I know, it’s clearly some sort of weirdo nutcase elevator pitch, but think about it. With my creativity, and sheer force-of-nature salesmanship, and your vast network that heavily blurs the line between legitimate and illegitimate business opportunities, we have a massive market for cape-based NFT’s. Think about it, currently, the heroes have the entire merch market cornered, but these are unique, single purchases, with a built-in merchandise machine in every news network, and a semi-anonymous nature that automatically white-washes your money for you!”
Another eyebrow raised on the mask, and a finger went for a button. The alarms downstairs disappeared.
“This sounds like some sort of scam,” Accord stated, impatiently tapping his pen on his desk.
“It is,” Krouse admitted. “Whole thing is literally just selling hotlinks for PHO wiki pages.”
“And why shouldn’t I have my Citrine kill you where you stand?”
“Because it’s a scam where you can get in on the ground level.
***
Thomas Calvert looked at the extradimensional travellers in front of him. A good pitch, a great deal. It was a scam, yes, but a scam he could work with. At least in one dimension. In the other, he’d try and fight them off. Defeating the Travellers would be a good way of getting his organisation some of what the youngsters these days called ‘mucho cred’ .
“I’ll give it a shot,” Coil said.
***
A raging inferno raged between two massive raging fires of pure and utter rage, Sun and Cigarette equally matched, in that neither could hurt the other.
Trickster was having a far easier battle with the French teenager in front of him. Cherish could use her abilities to temporarily change the mood of anyone within a hundred feet or more, but Krouse was far more skilled at emotionally manipulating people than her.
Ballistic was having a blast, hitting both a bird and a beast with a random van he’d found lying around, shattering everything but Crawler in his first shot.
In the meantime, Oliver was talking to a guy he was pretty certain was Johnny Depp, explaining the intricate economic details of a special set of 100+ kill count cape NFTs with a shiny red glowing border and five stars. Basically a Gacha game.
***
Leviathan, it turned out, was only interested in water, and not in Waves of irresponsible spending on barely-existent products.
***
“There’s one thing I don’t understand… how exactly is this scam going to work. Isn’t selling hyperlinks to jpegs kind of dumb?” Marissa, sweet, silly Marissa, asked.
“Of course it is,” Krouse replied, “The hype will probably fade in a couple months. Thing is, by that time, we’ll have cashed out.”
“But how do you get the first sales? Who will even buy something like this? And why would they buy it from highly dangerous criminals?”
Krouse turned away from his computer, where he was putting in reservations for a shipping container from Japan to Brockton Bay. “Think about it like this. You’re a normal millionaire, sitting in your rich house drinking whatever rich people drink, and suddenly crawler smashed through your fence, and the doorbell rings. It’s Jack Slash, the Siberian and Bonesaw. But they’re not here to kill you. They’re just offering you an incredible economic opportunity to invest in a brand new product. What do you say?”
“You obviously play along,” Marissa slowly said, not yet understanding where this was going.
“Right, and you spend a few mil on a product that you’re pretty certain is a Scam, because your life depends on it. Then, once they’re gone, you have two pieces of knowledge. One, you just spend millions of dollars on what you’re pretty sure is some sort of pyramid scheme. Two, you can look out the window and see the Siberian walking up to the house of your even richer neighbour. Whatever it is, it’s soon to be the greatest hit, and you’re basically on the ground floor, right below some of the most dangerous criminals in the world, and above that, us.”
***
A disgusting mass of flesh sloshed around, enfolding itself around another, slightly less disgusting mass of flesh. Krouse could hear the happy sounds, noises made by the most wonderful woman in the world, his most wonderful woman. Thousands of kilograms of the highest grade of meat in the world, all of the money they’d made with their NFT scam, gone within seconds. But if it made her feel better, it was worth it.
The whole spectacle was over in a matter of minutes, and a healthier looking Noelle looked at him.
“Krouse? I… I think it worked a bit, but… it’s not quite the right kind of meat.”
His heart sank. He’d had a feeling, with the vile way that superpowers tended to work. Cow meat wouldn’t be good enough. It would be… it would have to be the other thing. The one he couldn’t even do for his Noelle. But… if it was the only choice.
“I’ve… I’ve been reading up. There’s this special kind of pork, over in Spain, Jamon Iberico de Bellota. It’s from pig fed purely on wild Acorns, and because they currently use steel instead of oak in naval vessels, the forests they roam in are slowly going extinct, so it’s incredibly difficult to get ahold of, but I think it might work.”
Krouse’s mind began spinning. He… he didn’t expect this to work, but if it did? If Noelle’s instincts were right and they could save her this way?
“I’ll look into it,” Krouse said, gears turning in his head. For this to work, he’d need to get really rich, really fast, and he knew just how to do it.
***
The Simmurgh descended upon the city of Brockton Bay, her unearthly song burning through the minds of everyone in the towers. For once, it wasn’t just strange mystical vocals, but a message.
“Now, I’m not just selling these all-natural flower oils, although they’re great products. No, instead, I’m offering you all the opportunity to be an Entrepeneur !”
Dragon winced, then decided to just detonate all the collars then and there.