Jungle Gym (part 7)
Mr Zoat
Dedicated ragequitter
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18th March
14:21 GMT -3
"Hm."
Beryl carefully studies the damage to the cab of one of the log-hauling lorries, and I take a moment to scan the metal and transmit a representation of the stress pattern into her computer. I'm letting her acquire evidence and eavesdrop while her pattern recognition abilities really get to work trying to work out what people aren't sharing.
And… I'll admit, I am treating this like a training mission. For the rest of my squad. I'm not using empathic vision on the workers or site overseer or even the manager who is heading towards me at a scurry-walk.
The forest here is in the early stage of being cleared. There's a dirt road to a.. slightly better maintained dirt road, and a small cleared area for the lorries to turn around in. Outwards from that there are a great many tree stumps, cut through just above ground height. Clearing those out will come later, hopefully after they've made some sort of arrangement to keep the soil from being washed-.
No, no, that's not going to happen, is it?
Angelika is on overwatch duty. Beatriz and Raquel headed off to the nearest town to see if they could pick up any information, because when Beatriz wants something from a person she can be beguiling in a way she.. never bothered to be with me. And Raquel wants to learn something about what life is actually like in this part of the world, a goal I fully support. Garth is attempting an aura reading from the apparent entry point, but… If it actually was a magic creature he'd have found something almost immediately.
"Orange Lantern!"
I smile at the manager, descending through the air to land just in front of him. Cotton trousers rather than jeans, and.. a little overweight. His employee file says that he started with the company doing clearance work himself, but whatever muscle he built up swinging a chainsaw has long since been subsumed by middle age.
I smile pleasantly and take the offered hand. "Mister Souza."
"I didn't think that the Justice League was actually going to send anyone."
"It's a slow-peril day. And I do like getting on top of these things before anyone dies."
"Thank you."
Small wafts of fear, but it's all… Failure to deliver penalties and danger to his crew. I'm not seeing any sign that he's worried about us. Which means that if there's any kind of put-up job going on that he almost certainly isn't part of it. Which is nice.
"So, if you could please summarise events for me?"
I've repeatedly read the actual briefing document, but Batman expects us to check things for ourselves. And Mr Souza certainly hasn't read the briefing documents and almost certainly also didn't read the briefing document's grandfather, which would have been prepared by someone in Corporate or Public Relations. And because of that, he probably isn't certain what the 'official line' is. The route of enquiry I'm supposed to be encouraged to follow.
Another Discworld quote… No, I can't remember it well enough to quote it. Samuel Vimes said… Something about police work. That you poked around and asked sensible questions but in your heart of hearts you just hoped that the guilty party's nerve would break and they'd give themselves away. No one with any sense would attack a site with either myself or Overgirl present. Even just having an increased security presence might well intimidate a potential attacker; not necessarily because they couldn't outfight it, but because they wouldn't be able to do so without identifying themselves. And superheroes they couldn't identify would mean that they'd have to at least consider that they might lose the fight.
"It was… Two days ago. We start work at dawn, so the damage wasn't immediately obvious, you know? Then Pablo -he's the truck supervisor- told me that some of the trucks had been vandalised." He shrugs. "That could be a lot of things. We're too far away from anywhere for it to be drunks, but I've had environmental protestors on sites before. But they don't just rip engines apart. So I thought maybe it exploded or something? But there wasn't any burning, and then the other workers started reporting the rest of the damage."
I nod.
"Do you have any security on site?"
"There's a checkpoint down the road, but that's mostly for making sure that people are at work when they're supposed to be." He shrugs, shaking his head. "That's about it. No one lives around here."
"No tribes?"
He shakes his head. "No, if we were anywhere near a tribal reserve or whatever, we'd have some armed guards. We haven't had any kind of complaints or anything like that."
And while I'm not a perfect lie detector… I'd say that he's probably telling the truth. Still…
"No complaints?"
He face-shrugs. "Sure, some, there's always some, but nothing special. This just came out of nowhere."
"Were any people injured?"
"One guy cut his hand on broken metal. Oh, directly? No. We pretty much shut down during the night. It's too dangerous when we can't see what we're doing, and it's a pain setting up floodlights somewhere like this."
Bad roads. They have to move people and equipment in and the wood out without turning them into a quagmire. March is a reasonable temperature… Still too hot for me, but not bad for Brazil. But it's also pretty darn wet. Add in generators, lights, fuel for the generators… Yeah. They could only do it if they at the very least dumped stone chips to give the road some sort of surface, and the added cost would be significant.
Which… Ah. Getting replacement people would be easy, up to a point. If everyone died then the fear would keep replacements away, but one or two deaths? Not really an issue. Getting replacement machinery is difficult. They can't have broken machines blocking the site, which means they need to get another truck up here to drag it away-. Unless they're planning on asking me to do it. So is whoever did this planning on delaying work? It won't stop, but if they need to slow it down until something else happens…
Nothing much happening in Brazil's political calendar. Certainly nothing of immediate relevance. At least, that I can see as an outsider. If we get stumped here I can head over there and find an insider to pump for information. Nothing special economically. So, geography? Someone or something-?
"Had anything changed recently? Were you moving onto a new area?"
"We cut trees where there are trees. Sure, we were moving up, but we're always moving up. We didn't pass any.. obvious barrier or marker. I mean, not that I noticed."
Again, no obvious sign of dishonesty.
"Alright, thank you. My team and I will keep looking around, and I'll let you know when we have something."
"Do you know..? How long this is going to take?"
"Not really. If it's just a matter of tracking down one malcontent then I doubt that we'll still be here this evening. If something more complicated is going on then it'll take longer."
"Like..?"
"If the damage was caused by manifested forest spirits then it could take years and radically change the Brazilian economy."
"But you can deal with it, right?"
"Yes, but… We're here to prevent harm to people, not to support any one economic policy. If all logging had to stop tomorrow, then as long as you're given time to evacuate then our job is done."
"Oh."
I nod and smile again.
"Excuse me."
14:21 GMT -3
"Hm."
Beryl carefully studies the damage to the cab of one of the log-hauling lorries, and I take a moment to scan the metal and transmit a representation of the stress pattern into her computer. I'm letting her acquire evidence and eavesdrop while her pattern recognition abilities really get to work trying to work out what people aren't sharing.
And… I'll admit, I am treating this like a training mission. For the rest of my squad. I'm not using empathic vision on the workers or site overseer or even the manager who is heading towards me at a scurry-walk.
The forest here is in the early stage of being cleared. There's a dirt road to a.. slightly better maintained dirt road, and a small cleared area for the lorries to turn around in. Outwards from that there are a great many tree stumps, cut through just above ground height. Clearing those out will come later, hopefully after they've made some sort of arrangement to keep the soil from being washed-.
No, no, that's not going to happen, is it?
Angelika is on overwatch duty. Beatriz and Raquel headed off to the nearest town to see if they could pick up any information, because when Beatriz wants something from a person she can be beguiling in a way she.. never bothered to be with me. And Raquel wants to learn something about what life is actually like in this part of the world, a goal I fully support. Garth is attempting an aura reading from the apparent entry point, but… If it actually was a magic creature he'd have found something almost immediately.
"Orange Lantern!"
I smile at the manager, descending through the air to land just in front of him. Cotton trousers rather than jeans, and.. a little overweight. His employee file says that he started with the company doing clearance work himself, but whatever muscle he built up swinging a chainsaw has long since been subsumed by middle age.
I smile pleasantly and take the offered hand. "Mister Souza."
"I didn't think that the Justice League was actually going to send anyone."
"It's a slow-peril day. And I do like getting on top of these things before anyone dies."
"Thank you."
Small wafts of fear, but it's all… Failure to deliver penalties and danger to his crew. I'm not seeing any sign that he's worried about us. Which means that if there's any kind of put-up job going on that he almost certainly isn't part of it. Which is nice.
"So, if you could please summarise events for me?"
I've repeatedly read the actual briefing document, but Batman expects us to check things for ourselves. And Mr Souza certainly hasn't read the briefing documents and almost certainly also didn't read the briefing document's grandfather, which would have been prepared by someone in Corporate or Public Relations. And because of that, he probably isn't certain what the 'official line' is. The route of enquiry I'm supposed to be encouraged to follow.
Another Discworld quote… No, I can't remember it well enough to quote it. Samuel Vimes said… Something about police work. That you poked around and asked sensible questions but in your heart of hearts you just hoped that the guilty party's nerve would break and they'd give themselves away. No one with any sense would attack a site with either myself or Overgirl present. Even just having an increased security presence might well intimidate a potential attacker; not necessarily because they couldn't outfight it, but because they wouldn't be able to do so without identifying themselves. And superheroes they couldn't identify would mean that they'd have to at least consider that they might lose the fight.
"It was… Two days ago. We start work at dawn, so the damage wasn't immediately obvious, you know? Then Pablo -he's the truck supervisor- told me that some of the trucks had been vandalised." He shrugs. "That could be a lot of things. We're too far away from anywhere for it to be drunks, but I've had environmental protestors on sites before. But they don't just rip engines apart. So I thought maybe it exploded or something? But there wasn't any burning, and then the other workers started reporting the rest of the damage."
I nod.
"Do you have any security on site?"
"There's a checkpoint down the road, but that's mostly for making sure that people are at work when they're supposed to be." He shrugs, shaking his head. "That's about it. No one lives around here."
"No tribes?"
He shakes his head. "No, if we were anywhere near a tribal reserve or whatever, we'd have some armed guards. We haven't had any kind of complaints or anything like that."
And while I'm not a perfect lie detector… I'd say that he's probably telling the truth. Still…
"No complaints?"
He face-shrugs. "Sure, some, there's always some, but nothing special. This just came out of nowhere."
"Were any people injured?"
"One guy cut his hand on broken metal. Oh, directly? No. We pretty much shut down during the night. It's too dangerous when we can't see what we're doing, and it's a pain setting up floodlights somewhere like this."
Bad roads. They have to move people and equipment in and the wood out without turning them into a quagmire. March is a reasonable temperature… Still too hot for me, but not bad for Brazil. But it's also pretty darn wet. Add in generators, lights, fuel for the generators… Yeah. They could only do it if they at the very least dumped stone chips to give the road some sort of surface, and the added cost would be significant.
Which… Ah. Getting replacement people would be easy, up to a point. If everyone died then the fear would keep replacements away, but one or two deaths? Not really an issue. Getting replacement machinery is difficult. They can't have broken machines blocking the site, which means they need to get another truck up here to drag it away-. Unless they're planning on asking me to do it. So is whoever did this planning on delaying work? It won't stop, but if they need to slow it down until something else happens…
Nothing much happening in Brazil's political calendar. Certainly nothing of immediate relevance. At least, that I can see as an outsider. If we get stumped here I can head over there and find an insider to pump for information. Nothing special economically. So, geography? Someone or something-?
"Had anything changed recently? Were you moving onto a new area?"
"We cut trees where there are trees. Sure, we were moving up, but we're always moving up. We didn't pass any.. obvious barrier or marker. I mean, not that I noticed."
Again, no obvious sign of dishonesty.
"Alright, thank you. My team and I will keep looking around, and I'll let you know when we have something."
"Do you know..? How long this is going to take?"
"Not really. If it's just a matter of tracking down one malcontent then I doubt that we'll still be here this evening. If something more complicated is going on then it'll take longer."
"Like..?"
"If the damage was caused by manifested forest spirits then it could take years and radically change the Brazilian economy."
"But you can deal with it, right?"
"Yes, but… We're here to prevent harm to people, not to support any one economic policy. If all logging had to stop tomorrow, then as long as you're given time to evacuate then our job is done."
"Oh."
I nod and smile again.
"Excuse me."
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Let her observe without havign to talk to the people and discover she has the power to swallow her own foot.
