The Power of Ten

Master Fred found skull fragments and cracked bones, some with bits of meat still on them, most of them broken so the marrow could be sucked out. There were also mats and things woven of human hair, and based on the tanning agents, they might have been stripped of their skins first, too.

Mmm. We could only mark the spot, bring some remains back for DNA identification, and depart.

Sue Harrison’s tracking didn’t require us to hang around. There were more than a few Powered with an interest in pursuing the Hag, and the military was interested in maybe dropping some mortars on their asses.

The troll blood was a resource for those making Healing potions, especially Alchemists, but we saved the red goo for Heavenbound Hall, who could doubtless use it all, and if nothing else, sell the Potions made thereby for money.

Toledo was naturally on our way, but it had nothing to do for Master Fred other than to wave hello at his familiar presence and send him on by. Detroit, Flint, and Toledo, and everything close by, were training grounds for Heavenbound, Stormbound, and Citybound, as well as more than a few Initiates of the various Good Faiths working with them. If you wanted to cause trouble here, you generally had a whole shitload of Warlocks and Powered on you in short order...

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Detroit had changed a lot in the past sixty years.

As a metropolis, it had uniquely covered a huge amount of area for its population, so building it up further with apartment buildings for all the new people coming in had been pretty easy, and given businesses lots of places to expand to. The importance of the manufacturing industry and access to waterways made it a natural hub, without all the craziness that Chicago soon devolved into as the center of the non-human races who had popped up.

The establishment of Heavenbound Hall had cemented the area as the center of Good for the whole continent, and maybe even the world. The Heavenly Churches had ringed it round, and started attracting a certain kind of person with moral standards... but not the racism and archconservatism of the Law Churches, who actively created schisms between their own followers and others.

That Good kind of movement had rapidly dealt with racism problems, corruption in city politics, crime, and similar problems, alternately shaming, refuting, educating, and sometimes even shooting the problems out of existence.

As a result, it had become the tech hub of the country, as the young and clever non-Casters moved there, building on its engineering and manufacturing capabilities.

I was somewhat amused at how it had usurped California’s role, but nobody wanted to live in Cali. Too much shit came up out of the sea, and the earthquakes were not friendly after the San Andreas ripped open and was now a widening canyon slowly splitting the state away from the rest of the country. Definitely not a place to build a technology center.

The resulting area was full of a lot of green, and despite it being the primary headquarters of automobile production, there weren’t actually that many vehicles on the roads. There were a LOT of bicycles, and they had their own enforced routes on many of the roads. That, in turn, meant a lot of the people were in great shape, biking to work every day instead of driving, and it also meant they were located closer to their workplaces.

People who lived out of town and had huge commutes either got the shit taxed out of them for pollution or took the regular bus and train routes into town. Learning that Detroit actually had a fairly developed public transportation system now was pretty cool.

There had been a lot of resistance from the Big Three carmakers to the idea, but they’d been bulldozed over and past, basically shamed into shutting up and doing their part with everyone else. It actually hadn’t hurt their sales all that much, as every home still wanted a car, it was just homes didn’t cycle through them as fast as before.

They got called out for making shitty, easy to wear-out cars, too, and the continuing QL evaluations of their new cars meant they started investing in higher engineering.

The unions had to shoulder a lot of the blame, too. Corruption investigations and cover-ups slammed them again and again, until they actually started policing and training their own workforce.

The UAW was still around, but at least in Detroit, its character had changed markedly. It was an elite blue-collar workforce, its members expected to be knowledgeable in every facet of the production lines they worked on, and valued as the same.

Their versatility and skill in production meant a lot of military contracts came to Detroit, and the airline industry, of all things, was now centered in Toledo, taking advantage of their level of technical expertise. QL was a very important thing now, as it allowed magic to grip something...

The UAW had renamed themselves the United Production Workers, as they didn’t handle just things on wheels anymore.

There were plenty of people who complained about Alignment bias when assigning Union positions, especially those who wanted the power and perks that went with it. Some of those people were indulged, and almost inevitably became examples of how the UPW policed its own when they abused their power.

The various mafias always wanted to get their fingers in the pies of the UPW, too, but having White and Blue folks watching over the finances was REALLY annoying to them, and as they very rapidly learned, threatening the families of those in charge of the money was a very quick way for a whole Mafia family to go missing. There were plenty of UPW folk who weren’t Good who liked their jobs, and the benefits and respect it gave them, and did not want some crooks ruining it for them...

All in all, Detroit had far less traffic, far more green, and a much more upbeat, positive atmosphere than anything I remembered. There were magical Lights everywhere, the occasional Permanent Holo proclaiming this or that company was domiciled here... which was significant, because given the nature and influence of the Good churches here, if they didn’t want a company to come in, literally nobody native to the area would work there, buy from there, and might not even sell to them.

That naturally did NOT make a lot of Trose Money-Is-Everything businessmen very happy, especially when a lay follower of Harse was happy to explain to them that the Churches were VERY aware how they worked, and making it too expensive to do business there via alternate means they couldn’t employ in return was just Doing Proper Business. Non-violent Dogma Accord tactics were definitely a thing.

It definitely pissed a lot of businessmen off. When the Good Churches said to boycott a company, break a monopoly, or not work somewhere, people actually paid attention. Likewise, getting their approval was literally a license to mine money... but that approval was usually centered on their own. Most hungry-for-success types could only hope for their uninvolved neutrality and cross their fingers.

A Harsite Review was called a Harshist Review by just about anyone subjected to it. If you cleared it, you were golden. If you didn’t... well, it didn’t matter how much money you offered them, they wouldn’t take it. The complete inability to buy a Harse Cleric really, truly annoyed a lot of people...

My shadowed memories of the city and area weren’t all that clear, but clear enough for me to recognize changes, even if I couldn’t clearly picture the originals. Just the better atmosphere, less run-down nature of it, and the color and green and natural spaces going on for miles was a thing.

A key thing was that many major roads, highways, and all the railways were buried, which meant they no longer chopped up communities like they had before. Artificed hydrogen engines were all the rage, too, meaning the oil companies and their very un-environmentally friendly drilling had been tapering off for years, much to their dismay. Since they supplied raw material for plastics, they had some staying power for cheap crap items, but magic wouldn’t cling to plastic, so most materials made of plastic were seen as junk.

Living under a perpetual dark cloud, there was still some Light in the world. It was nice to see.

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Heavenbound Hall was located in Brightmoor, and had basically bought out the NW square mile of the City of Detroit as it was being put up. Pretty much only the faithful of Heaven dwelt within a mile of it, knowing that it was in opposition to a lot of powers, and without a military background, the Churches didn’t want their people settling there.

It did mean that if there was trouble, every household in the area was armed and ready to fight.

Of course, the Dark Powers had precious few scruples, lots of time, and a great deal of fiendish cunning on their side. Atomic weapons did exist, even though the wild magic fallout from using them was horrific and had introduced a lot of unwanted magical creatures into the world. It was expected that someone would try to figure out a way to pop one atop the Hall, and kill a lot of Good people doing so.

But Heavenbound Hall had some truly momentous resources, which not a lot of people knew about.

The most important of those was that a noble Djinn lived there, too. Heavenbound Hall actually administered more Stormbound Pacts than all other locations in the world combined, which meant the Stormbound Warlocks were severely slanted towards Good people. If you couldn’t serve the Heavens, serving the Wind under a Djinn sponsor was a totally worthy substitute.

Noble Djinn could grant three Wishes a day. That was not a small thing.

A truly nasty attack by scheming bastards was going to run right into careful Wish-level magic that would stop them cold. After all, Good was not dumb, much as Evil would like to think.

Said Djinn profited by having people around him he could trust not to imprison him and try to torture Wishes out of him. He did use those Wishes, but he had complete veto power over them, and according to Master Fred, often used them in a completely frivolous manner, as so many genies did love the whimsical.

On the other hand, any undead, beings who had raised them, or beings with a Dark Pact being covered by Faerie Fire when within twenty miles of the Hall was a much more serious use of Wishes that couldn’t be avoided by necromancers or Evilbound Warlocks. I imagined that any nuclear device that got within a threatening distance of the place was either rendered immediately inert, or sent away somewhere harmless, maybe into orbit to be auto-detonated or something...

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The walls around Heavenbound Hall were twenty feet tall and pretty thick, crenelated like castle walls, even having archer slits and towers spaced every so often. They could have looked pretty ominous, were it not for the fact that every inch of them was done in artistic murals done by faithful of the Heavenly Gods... which, when it included both Tiirith and Nuava, meant pretty much the best of them.

So, rather than looking like an ominous, imposing barrier cutting the Hall off from the people, it instead was a tourist attraction, with the faithful coming from all over to take a real tour of the walls.

They couldn’t be photographed, so there were no computer tours you could take or books you could look through, and Scrying the place was not a good idea at all.

Master Fred did indeed take me on a tour of the wall, joining a slow parade of cars with license plates from all over as they made the right-hand circuit of the place, sometimes pulling off into an idle lane just to study some of the incredibly intricate scenes playing out. A good chunk of them were moving pictures, rendered by paint in 3D, or transcendentally profound in ways that could stir the soul.

A lot of effort had gone into those paintings over the years, and we even passed by a crew of mixed-races artisans working on the next masterpiece. As the Patrons of the Arts, the walls bowed to the dictates of the two Nuavan and Tiirithi churches, and the images were always being upgraded and replaced. Churches could hold any specific section they wanted to static and simply maintain it, but by and large they simply allowed the artists to continually and slowly replace what had been painted before with the next great inspiration.

Every ten years, the four miles of Walls were painted completely anew, and there was always a waiting list of prospective painters awaiting their chance at fame...