This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/DragonStryk72 on 2024-04-10 02:57:44.
Part 1 here:
Author’s Note: This is Part 32, I accidentally mislabeled Part 31 as part 30.
So… fuck. According to what I’m looking at here, as far as Portland goes, I’m basically fully off the leash. Let’s take a moment to go over the basics. So as a full hero, I now had full arrest and detainment authority in line with police and federal agents. That was the big one, and it also removed the weapons restrictions I had as a teenager. If I had a weapon, I could use it. I could start and do patrols, coordinate with law enforcement, and even military.
That was the hero stuff. The next bit, the emergency powers, is where things went off the rails. Portland had declared homelessness a state of emergency several years ago, in order to be able to cut through a bunch of red tape, and be able to apply for federal relief. When the H.A.A. declare it an exigent crisis, it changed the rules in profound ways. By change, I mean burned them to the ground and pissed on the ashes.
Let’s for a moment go over what my new powers and authority looks like
Vehicle Restrictions- Gone. Whatever it takes to get the job done as far as vehicles, I’m considered to be licensed through the H.A.A. and federal government behind them. I could literally roll a tank down Cesar Chavez, and while I might have to explain myself in later reports and hearings, it was otherwise perfectly legitimate.
Weapons Restrictions- Nope, don’t have that. I couldn’t drop a nuke except under special provision, but my restrictions more or less ended there. Everything else was on the level, and I had authority to kill, though obviously, I would have to answer for it after the fact. Not that I would, but the fact is, that was still there.
Command- I am in command off all H.A.A. assets in the entire state of Oregon. Heroes and employees, John included, fall under assets. Apparently, this is the provision in the military that lists attempted suicide as ‘destruction of government property’. This included all offices of support, including tactical teams within the STATE of Oregon. Yeah, the fourteen year old now has command of a small army. Truly, what I’m looking at in the armory of these guys is… extreme, even by Texan standards. I could even order up the National Guard if I so chose, but I didn’t… wait, does the National Guard have access to Army Corps of Engineers? Okay, I might have a use there.
Requisition- I can order emergency requisitions. Sure, if I go full monkey shit, I’ll get told no, or be explaining myself to a Congressional Budget Committee, but shy of that, I could order just about anything I needed, personnel included, as long as they were attached to the H.A.A… Given the presence of magic, and the research being done, that could get frightening quickly.
Authority- I had emergency authority over federal agencies in Oregon. FBI, DEA, ATF, just so many three-letter groups. I could direct and guide efforts, and state and local government branches were obliged to work with me, though that part was a bit more nebulous.
Access- I had full access to the H.A.A., including files. First thing I did with that was get copies of all the contracts in the system, encrypting them to the full extent of my own abilities, technopathy included, and then moved the files to an air-gapped computer, a fresh laptop from Best Buy. I didn’t really care about specs, I just found one that was essentially intended to be used in heavier work, like construction yards and the like.
There were tons of things like this, all essentially designed around the concept that in a crisis, a hero couldn’t be held back by unnecessary rules, regulation, or pig-headed bureaucratic bullshit. I could build and declare emergency structures, declare curfews, it was truly insane. If this fucked up in any way, John was going to disappear down the deepest darkest hole.
After reading to Merida and tucking her in, I got to work, learning the rules. The short version of it was that, as far as the crisis in Portland was concerned, I was answerable to the Geneva Conventions and God. Everyone else would have to wait 'til afterward to tear me a new one.
First things first, I copied files outlining my authority, made physical copies, and essentially just got paperwork in order. I was rapidly realizing that if you had the right paperwork, you could get away with anything. John sent over official paperwork via pdf with his signature on it, and told me to be certain to pick up my badge as soon as possible from the H.A.A…
Okay, think. The crisis is homelessness, so what do we need? Shelter. I mean, I could make more tents, but that was inefficient when I could just order actual army tents. It wasn’t ideal, though. According to the most conservative estimates, there were just shy of seven thousand homeless people in Portland as of last year. Of course, it was insanely difficult to get actual numbers, so the real answer was almost assuredly higher than that, so I made the assumption that Portland had missed about half of the actual number, so I planned around fourteen thousand people.
I initially started from a baseline of looking for how to house everyone in Portland, but it was a serious problem. Even assuming the seven thousand was accurate, you would still need at least seventy camps, assuming you limited the camps to a population of one hundred each, which was a pretty big camp. Where do you even put that many people? Generally speaking, I could commandeer buildings, but that would turn into a giant clusterfuck, spreading out forces across the entire city, creating massive traffic snarls… no, that’s not gonna work.
I reached out with my technopathy, let my senses reach for the search, Sync following as fast as I could think, and my own speed of thought being rather augmented already. Images began snapping up in front of me, I was sifting through information spanning across all of Oregon, when I saw it: An article. It was one of those touristy sites, and they had written an article on the top ten ghost towns in Oregon. Some were left over from the gold rush, some had been nearly wiped out in natural disaster, or the a new rail-line took their business away, killing the town. They were perfect.
One of the core problems of treating things like addiction is neighborhood familiarity. An alcoholic in Portland was under constant exposure to places to get a drink, making it steeply more difficult in the beginning days of sobriety, when your willpower is weakest, and your stress around sobriety is highest. I cross-referenced, and for most recovery programs, they pushed for ninety days, whether it was AA with their “90 meetings in 90 days” point out of the gate, or more formal rehab facilities. Thirty days was a sort of minimum, but ninety from the research I was doing was far and away better, with markedly lower percentages of relapse. I mean, of course it made sense, the more time you got to work on you, and the longer you could be kept in a controlled environment away from the substances you abused, the better.
Scanning the map, I even located a good foundational strip, just east of Warm Springs Reservation, home to the Wasco bands of Native Americans, which were a part of the larger Chinook if I’m reading their home site correctly. Hm, I should talk with them if I’m going to be operating around them. Guess it’s time to learn conversational Wasco.
The towns themselves were absolutely minute, places like Shaniko, Kent, and Antelope, to which even other Oregonians would respond, "Where?" but they were located along the same strip of highway. People here don’t really think about it, but Oregon is large enough to fit the entire UK landmass inside of Oregon, with thousands of square miles left over. Population-wise, however, we were one-fifteenth the size of the UK, 4.2 million people in Oregon, versus just over 66 million in the UK.
There were concerns to this idea as well. What residents did exist would need to be spoken with. Yes, I could just do what I wanted, but what I wanted was to make sure I had everyone on-board. Guess getting that public speaking merit badge is about to be a reality. I contacted SolCo. They were working on the move already, but I would need them to send folks along. Whatever we were doing, we would need power, and solar was fast to put together, and we could always hook into larger power later. I ran through their catalog of stuff, and notice two prospective projects that were interesting for different reasons: For one, a projection of how to use solar panels to cover parking areas… I could use that for the mall, and let Raj know about that, but the second piece was a bit more long-term, solar roofing tiles. At current, they… didn’t look all that great, but I moved that off. I could work on that later when I had more time to explore, but I couldn’t help but think it had promise.
I knew I would need to make adjustments, reposition, but I couldn’t waste time trying to be perfect. I could use local Portland locations to process the homeless, then relocate based on more targeted groups. The first and largest separation would be in delineating which ones had serious mental disorders, and get them into facilities that could care for them. We would need to keep families together as best as we could. I kept going through what was essentially sorting groups based on the various challen…
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