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Minds and whiskers: the rat king's rise to power
Chapter 5: Contacting your local operators

Chapter 5: Contacting your local operators

Henry took a while to think about how he would get the PMA to do his job for him, because even if he had the option to just call the police and give the info it would take ages to get past the bureaucratic nightmare that was law enforcement.

So he decided that he needed dramatics, something to make the PMA hesitate to hunt him down, but also not dramatic enough to make them decide that getting rid of him was worth all the risks.

So, given he had found many hideouts he started to investigate them. Turns out it was easier than he expected, as most didn't protect against rats. A perk of still being an unknown awakened you could say, to the point that the guards even look away from his rats as they enter their territories.

He decided to look into the three closest to himself, he wasn't stupid to send the PMA some addresses to point them to his house so he would only send this info later on. But he did want to know what kind of groups were around his home, turns out it was a den for drug addicts, a gun smuggler and lastly a secret brothel. Not bad, he wrote them on his map and looked into the next ones.

Beneath a garage building there was a drug production facility, and it seemed to be run by some Korean gang. It was some kind of synthetic dust they were pressing onto pills, and there were like fifty people working on production while being almost naked. He thought that working on drugs in underwear besides the protective gear was an exaggeration from tv just like cars tanking a bunch of bullets, but regardless of tv accuracy it was a great first target.

Now that he had a target that wasn't that close to home, he only needed a way to give the info to the PMA. Just a 911 call had worked before but if he was going to act as a Parahuman then he needed a Parahuman way of giving the message as a first time presentation.

So he googled about the PMA and found the buildings they had, it was only the public ones but he didn't mind. What he needed was a way into the very innards of the local branch of the agency.

He sent his rats to the closest building, it turns out it was three blocks away from his home. One of the local branch branch facilities, in this case an set of administrative buildings meant to monitor the surrounding districts with the cooperation of the respective commissaries.

His recon gave him little information about the employees, as it had gotten past midnight already and the rats couldn't access inside the building.

So he just let them patrol around as discreetly as possible as he prepared to go to bed, and it turns out that was a great plan.

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At around two in the morning, he woke up to his rats sending him a warning. Turns out a group of teenagers were drawing graffiti onto the building and also throwing rocks at the windows. This was mostly since the PMA didn't have the best of reputations in the lower districts, despite having an overall positive image with all the heroes and superheroes.

This was mostly since people didn't trust a government organization that controls parahumans when they are getting robbed and killed by normal humans and that organization does not react, but who could blame them as the PMA was founded to fight Doombringers and parahuman criminals labeled as villains or supervillains.

So not only did he not call the police as he actually didn't like the PMA either, he watched as the teenagers made their vandalism and left. Because those rascals had given him a golden opportunity he wasn't going to waste a way onto the building.

He ordered his rats to pile up against the window, there were some coordination mishaps but he managed to get four rats inside the building.

He sent two to explore this floor for any stairs and the other to look for any sort of hiding spot to make a burrow.

Well, turns out the rats weren't alone as one cat popped out of a corner. It was white and orange, fluffy enough that he wanted to pet it and as he now found out, vicious when hunting rats.

The minimalist style of the furniture didn't leave many hiding spots for the rats and the cat toyed with them as he killed them one by one.

Facing his new adversary Henry decided that he would just take advantage of the cat and he looked for a set of gloves on his drawers.

He then wiped with a cloth both a pen and a sheet of paper, as to erase any previous fingerprints. He was kind of screwed if they brought a psychic but then it wouldn't matter if they tracked him through a letter or not.

He wrote in the most blocky letters he could throw off any of those people that study handwriting, And the message he wrote was pretty simple but it conveyed the information he wanted to give them.

He cut the piece of paper that had the message and rolled it up before tying it with a rubber band, and then taking it with him as he walked out of his apartment and onto a nearby alley.

He had a rat stationed here and he tied the message to the rat with a second rubberband, then he sent the rat to the PMA building as he went back to his apartment and took off his gloves.

The rat went three blocks and the rest of the rats piled up again by the window to let it inside the building, the rat then ran straight towards the cat and was promptly killed. But the message was delivered so that was all that mattered.

Henry was then sure that they would take care of those drug dealers so he ordered the rest of the rats to disperse and went to bed, this time hoping nothing unexpected happened.