Chapter 3-89: Coming Home to a Place You’ve Never Been Before... (1/2)

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.