So... fuck. According to what I'm looking at here, as far as Portland goes, I'm 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, no more having to hear about it from the H.A.A. or other adults. 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, and coordinate with law enforcement, and even the military.

That was the hero stuff, and it was pretty standard. The next bit, the emergency powers, is where things went off the rails. Portland had declared homelessness a state of emergency several years ago, to be able to cut through a bunch of red tape and be able to apply for federal emergency relief funding. When the H.A.A. declared it an exigent crisis, it changed the rules in profound ways. And by change, I mean burning them to the ground and pissing on the ashes.

Let's for a moment go over what my new powers and authority look like:

Vehicle Restrictions- Gone. Whatever it takes to get the job done as far as vehicles go, I'm considered to be licensed through the H.A.A. and the 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 in the moment.

Weapons Restrictions- Nope, don't have that. I couldn't drop a nuke except under special provisions, but my restrictions more or less ended there. Everything else was on the level, and I had the 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 of 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 not-so-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 the 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 down the line, 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. The first thing I did with that was to get copies of all the contracts in the system, encrypting them to the full extent of my abilities, Technopathy included, and then moved the files to an air-gapped computer, a fresh laptop from Best Buy. I didn't 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, regulations, or pig-headed bureaucratic bullshit. I could build and declare emergency structures, and 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 all 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. Yeah, I was certain I was running over by a significant number, but that was also the point, to have so much extra that even if it was far worse, there would be no break in the chain.

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 and difficult to locate places for camps of that size. Where do you even put that many people in a city? 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 need new options.

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 a natural disaster, or 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 yourself, and the longer you could be kept in a controlled environment away from the substances you abused, the better.

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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. Hmm, 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 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, with 4.2 million people in Oregon, versus just over 66 million in the UK.

There were other 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 from the jump. Guess getting that public speaking merit badge is about to be a reality. I contacted SolCo, now in the midst of changing their name to Aegis Solar. 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 noticed 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 and 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 getting 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 challenges in making people self-sufficient for the long-term.

One huge part of it would be the mall. It had to be finished as soon as possible, to be able to start housing people. If we switched to a 24-hour construction model, we could run three shifts, but I was certain I could find other ways of moving things forward. Again, talk to locals, but in this instance, there was a good chance they would be more receptive since it was mostly commercial around us, and a brand new mall brought brand new business. Other shops and such had closed down around the mall after it closed down, without that main draw. It was like a well that ran dry. Yeah, the people suffered, but so did the local plants that were getting incidental water from the well's natural reservoir. Same thing, the mall had been an anchor for the neighborhood, so went it dried up, it started triggering the same in everything built up around it.

The problem was people. I needed people, and finally, I turned to the H.A.A. files. John had given me access, and now I started looking through it. The H.A.A. was a sort of weird amalgam of law enforcement and disaster relief organizations. This meant they also had access to construction personnel and equipment, so let's get that. Meanwhile, I needed supers.

The inherent problem of my plan is that it wasn't humanly possible to pull it off. So, let's go superhuman. For instance, the hero Rockalanche sprang up almost immediately. Rockalanche's power was control over stone, but he was mostly considered for crime-fighting. Criminal underuse of his powers from what I was seeing of the ability, since he could lay cement, even reshape existing stone. In the context of a super-fight, his speed was an issue, but those were situations where a quarter of a second was the difference between life and death. In construction terms, he would have radical capabilities that couldn't be matched by whole teams of builders.

Siren, a heroine out of L.A., could use her voice to create an effect akin to Reaver's fear aura using her voice. The difference was that she could trigger endorphins instead of fear, and based on the power she put behind her voice, it could be a general uptick, or she could 'bliss' everyone in range of her voice out. It was D-tier as a power, and she was fresh out of the academy, trying to make a name for herself, but since her power, like the fear aura, hit everyone within its range, she was having trouble getting on a team. For my needs, she was perfect.

There were dozens of E-tier and low-end D-tiers like this scattered out across the country. Their powers weren't really being examined for their maximum utility, and I got why as I looked through the Tier System itself. Most of the infrastructure of hero assignments was done by people who themselves did not have powers and were only looking at the direct military applications of the powers. They didn't properly understand them, but as I examined the powers, I could see the use.

I made my selections of personnel, building a team of empaths and fellow psychics for Anna. We would need them, and I sent the roster off to her to go over it. Then I looked at folks who had construction abilities, grabbing Rockalanche and Bloom as a pair. Bloom had plant growth, able to markedly speed up the growth of plants. Again, in a construction capacity, this was insane, with the ability to grow and age trees, creating fresh lumber without the need to cut down vast tracts of forest land. Finish it up with Push, a kinetic E-Tier, and the trio could speed build most construction, as long as they had someone with practical knowledge and experience. Enter Hector Suarez, and we had what we needed for the team.

I was just about done when it occurred to me that we had a secondary issue: Drugs. It was less weed problems, but the harder stuff, opioids especially. A well-meaning but ill-informed law, Measure 110, had de-criminalized drug use in Oregon, and the problem exploded. The idea was to get the addicts the help they needed rather than arresting them and putting them into a prison system that tended to make them into harder criminals, but it came across as tacit approval instead. It had recently been rolled back, re-criminalizing drug use, but that was still in its infancy, and the damage had been done. Once we started moving the homeless back into Portland, the availability of drugs would be a problem, and we needed to prevent relapses. We had to take the dealers off the board, that much was clear. I could use Reaver's Prey Scent to find the drugs, but we would still need others with us, and of course, scouring across the city ran into an issue of sheer territory. I could coordinate with the police, and request heroes, but also sent in requests for DEA, ATF, and FBI support. If I could learn to coordinate them all, then under the Crisis Protocols, we get most of the drugs off the street, at least long enough to break the current cycle of abuse. Of my entire list of people I'd grabbed, the highest power was a D-tier and a whole lot of E-tiers who could be put together as much more effective teams.

I was only just finishing up the work a little after dawn and after some food, headed over to the H.A.A.. It was then that the news hit. It was everywhere. News stations across the globe were reporting on the Crisis Protocols in Portland, and my face was everywhere as well. I only found out when I got a call: Marisol Reyes. Ms. Marisol called me personally this time.