Mountain, meet Endbringer

[sturdycoldsteel]

The Fate who calls herself Mountain tried to convince some of her neighbors to allow the occasional mountain in their lands, for stability purposes.

"I meant no insult!" Dodge ball of lava. "I don't intend to interfere, you said no!" Dodge house-sized spear of ice. "I'm leaving peacefully, okay, so stop tearing up the tile!"

"You'll respawn at home. No permanent damage. You interrupted an important meeting, you need to learn a lesson about territory, mountain bitch." Dodge- no, fail to dodge a thrown tree, and then another ice ball. The next sphere of magma is what destroyed that form.




She wakes up, stripped of all her tools and enchantments and even clothes, and groans in pain.

Comments

[peterxy]

Ex-henchman is very pliant but uncreative. He does not care too much about what he's made to do, fumbles through a description of something that would very much not work for the internet, and is clearly fishing for Mountain's preferred answer to it. He has very little business knowledge to speak of.

Fashion magazine lady's job before she quit was basically "doing everything and anything her boss asked for, including stuff like getting her hands on unreleased book drafts for her boss' children." She is impeccably organized, has a very gather-lots-of-information-and-call-upon-her-myriad-contacts approach to install satellite internet, and has very strong feelings about moral conundrums. And in general, she seems to have a fierce, challenging personality.

PRT person does indeed have relevant legal knowledge. She's also very organized with her schedule, in a different way than fashion magazine lady but not strictly better or worse than her. Her approach to installing satellite internet is mainly figuring out how the mountain differs from anywhere else and what would need to be changed in the usual approach. She is carefully amoral about conundrums. She's very professional and doesn't express much in the way of personality.

Errand boy's power consists in being really agile and good at parkour to a preternatural degree, using some luck manipulation to guarantee he doesn't have trouble moving. He can use the luck manipulation is small amounts for other tasks than moving, and he'd probably want to keep working for other people. His schedule is somewhat messy but in a structured way, and once you get the logic behind it it's actually quite elegant. His approach to installing satellite internet is similar to PRT person's, and he also has very strong (if naive) feelings about moral conundrums. He's quite eager to please and somewhat excitable.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Ex-henchman is out. She works out an arrangement for errands with errand-boy but does not hire him full-time.

She's not quite sure about fashion lady's personality, but the pre-existing web of contacts cinches the decision. Welcome! Here's the first week's pay advance, here's the login and password for the email account I've been talking to companies with, you don't need to move to the mountain yet it's not finished (and doing that at all is still not necessarily required), here's my detailed explanation of my abilities but you probably already know that, here's some lawyery things the lawyer said you'd need, your first job is to arrange some jobs for me as soon as possible. My schedule is almost totally open, I want to work about ten hours a day weekdays and four on weekends.

[peterxy]

Laura (that's fashion lady's name) thanks Mountain for the opportunity quite warmly, and the following day Mountain has a medium-sized list of various kinds of company wishing to hire her, from construction to jewelry through mining, ordered by Laura's estimation of benefit (variety, quantity, interestingness) versus cost (time spent, what she could infer about the personality of the people Mountain would be working with).

[sturdycoldsteel]

Nice. She informs Laura about her preferences, tuning them a little. Less priority to personality except if it looks like they're going to waste her time, and a slight priority to usefulness - pick a mining-related job before a jewelry one all else being equal. Can Laura do most of the arranging companies' schedules and negotiating and contract-signing or should Mountain be helping?

[peterxy]

She can do the schedules and negotiating, but Mountain will ultimately be the one responsible for contract-signing.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Great! Let's get some work lined up.

Over the next couple of days she grows her mountain to the height where it will stay for a long while. Once more stuff is installed it will be inconvenient to grow it large amounts without damaging things.

She goes over the personal hydro plant schematics with Laura and asks her to start looking into turbines and electrical engineers to put things in place on the mountain. And the Mountain Internet interview question is now a legitimate task.

"Do let me know if I start asking too much too fast."

[peterxy]

"As long as you're asking me things that are actually possible, I probably won't have a problem."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Good, good."

In the days, or hours if Laura is particularly efficient about it, between then and getting everything arranged with the first company to hire her she works on a shopping list for the base, finishes the parts of her hydro plant she can do herself, puts in a miniature port (just a flat area and one medium-sized berth grown vertically from the underwater part of her mountain so far), and a set of stairs aaall the way up and starts on a tunnel straight into the interior that will lead to elevators eventually.

[peterxy]

She is! She is particularly efficient.

Mountain's first job is helping erect a twelve-story building.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Okay, let's do this. Best smile on for the company reps. Where's the place, is she making the material or using what's provided, where's the blueprints?

[peterxy]

It's in the city, actually supposed to become a nice beach front condo. They don't have much of a grasp on her powers yet, so they've provided materials and workers.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Well, they don't need a crane or concrete workers or welders. They're still going to want finishers - plumbers, electricians, people to install drywall and carpet and elevators and so on.

She goes over the blueprints with the foreman and owner (if they're available) and discusses how her power can finish any concrete without an annoying drying and setting period. She can have the frame up in two hours at most. She's not completely up to speed on building conventions on Earth yet, but she can definitely follow blueprints to the inch.

[peterxy]

They're definitely available, and so are blueprints. They can also give her any directions she might need about building conventions on Earth, and are very pleasantly surprised by the ETA.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Up goes the concrete-and-steel frame, all according to blueprints. She measures things almost constantly as I-beams and reinforcing rods wobble and grind into concrete pillars. She uses all materials present then makes some more, compressing the rock below the site slightly to store away the not steel-and-concrete byproducts. It takes her an hour and a half. She even makes the fire stairs - they're steel, after all.

She suggests that they could take a quick tour now to make sure everything looks right, then she'll go home so they can inspect it thoroughly and call her back for corrections and detail work. Oh, and none of the steel is rustproofed yet so they need to paint it. She's not a painter.

[peterxy]

They are very impressed by and happy with her job, and are pretty sure (though they do not say it) that they have just gotten the bargain of their lives, would she like to work more jobs like this in the future?

[sturdycoldsteel]

Yes, though she's completely open about how her rates will go up once she has a proper rep for this kind of thing.

[peterxy]

That's fine, they guess.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She took a few pictures during the process. Not of the blueprints, just to help publicly show that she can do this sort of thing. Do they mind at all if she takes a few more of the completed frame and publishes them like that?

[peterxy]

Yeah, they're fine with that too.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Fly, picture, picture. Digital cameras are handy.

She reports completion of the building and gives the pictures to Laura and asks her to find a reporter to interview her. Hopefully someone who fought Leviathan, fixed parts of Japan, and built 60% of a 12-story condo complex in two hours is interesting enough. She wants to be publicly known for building things and making material, so her rates can go up and still leave her busy for much of the day.

[peterxy]

Laura can most definitely do that, she's very used to dealing with the press.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Great, she has no idea how to deal with the press and would like some tips. Should she hide how she isn't from Earth and isn't really the same kind of parahuman?

[peterxy]

...yes, she should definitely not mention that part.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She hasn't exactly been hiding it so far. Significant parts of Japan's upper level, the PRT, and the Protectorate know. Maybe a few others, she hasn't been keeping track. What's so bad about it?

[peterxy]

Well, for one, it makes her look crazy. Other Earths do exist, though they typically have less parahumans than Earth Bet, and no one's ever been able to cross-over yet. She says something like that, she'll be put in the same mental bucket the likes of Glaistig Uaine are.