Chain 163: The Watchmen

Chain 163: The Watchmen

Location: New York City, 1981
Identity: Drop-In
Drawbacks: [+200] I Did It!

[Free]      Small World
[100/1200]  Who Watches The Watchmen?
[300/1200]  Doomsday Clock
[400/1200]  Retirement
[600/1200]  Untraceable
[1000/1200] Just Me And The World
[Free]      Comics
[Free]      Photo
[Free]      Rorschach Test
[1200/1200] Companion Import: Demona and the Conspiracy

In 1981, I arrived in a world that had seen masked vigilantes become heroes, and that had turned on those heroes and driven them to underground or to retirement in all but a handful of cases.

I'd seen this story play out before in more than one way, and in my opinion, there had to be a better way for things to end. Oh, the Conspiracy set themselves in place for their usual roles with aplomb, and Demona turned out to have some company that was big enough to compete with Veidt Enterprises, so disrupting his efforts wasn't as hard as it would have been. Doubly so considering diplomacy involving the Conspiracy generally tended to either involve a sudden outbreak of world peace or their forcibly taking over the world. This time, it seemed to be the former. With the Doomsday Clock ticking slowly back from the brink, the whole plan with falsifying an alien invasion to give humanity something to rally toward was no longer needed, and instead I started my usual project - though since the world was utterly jaded when it came to the supernatural, I skipped out on magic and focused on technologies instead.

Things took a very abrupt nose-dive in 1985, though, and at the time I couldn't figure out what was going on. Things had been pretty decent, and abruptly it turned into a high stakes game of brinksmanship. Doctor Manhattan didn't bother to get involved other than to leave Earth for Mars as far as I could tell, and not very long after he did that... the missiles started flying.

I found Demona on the roof of a skyscraper in New York City, watching the missiles fly overhead.

"Why?" I asked her.
>"It had to be done."
"The Conspiracy was doing a fine job. You know this. You went around my back and made sure that I couldn't fix it. Why?"
>"The situation was untenable. Without a free source of lithium, the situation will decline and things will crash inevitably."
"You realize that without our being here, half the people in New York would have died?"
>"That's incorrect... signs pointed to Doctor Manhattan losing his mind and destroying cities."
"No, that's divergent from the main line universe, but he wasn't the one that did it, it was Veidt."
>"We checked. It was him. He'd have depopulated the planet starting eighteen months from now, convinced that intelligent life was a mistake. Him leaving Earth is the best-case scenario."
"Huh. That's... well. Shit. You realize you could have told me to kill him and I would have, right?"
>"Sure... then mutually assured destruction, humanity dies shortly after."
I rubbed my face and cast a shield charm around us. "As opposed to now."
>With a fanged grin, Demona answered, "Ninety-nine percent are duds on both sides, the only ones left are low-yield fusion bombs, no fallout."
I gave her a pointed look as I cast another charm, casting the city below us in twilight. "Yes, that means only six hundred warheads instead of sixty thousand. Way to go, Dee."
>"More like six, it's a limited exchange."
"Six cities annihilated."
>"It will change the global political landscape, when they pull back from the brink!"
I carved a portal open and pointed at the sky through it. "China is launching at Russia, who are retaliating with short-range batteries, by the way. Did you disarm those ones?"
>She blanched. "Um... oops?"
I exhaled a sigh. "This is your mess, Demona. YOU get to clean it up. You're just lucky I'm able to see ahead of time so that I can keep the deaths down further with the Chinese nukes being disarmed, but that's still a good dozen, never mind that you may have started World War Three... way to go."
Demona muttered under her breath and sat down on the edge of the roof. I sat beside her and we watched New York City burn under an artificial sunrise, my charms shattering.