Lisa woke up with a smirk on her face in the apartment she had obtained using some of the tides of cash that had been washing in ever since she signed up to work with Sage.
As she let out a breath and yawned, she felt a new part of her power well up inside her, throwing up dozens of errors as the noises she made failed to affect the ambiance around her in any meaningful way.
Yawning is not a valid spell.
"Oh good, that's working now," she muttered, feeling her soul now producing energy that made her power's side of the equation redundant.
With one last shrug, she walked over to her laptop, flipping it open and checking the security feeds. Being the owner of an apartment wasn't the best source of money, but it was a great security investment for a social-thinker with money to spare. A fortress that paid for itself.
Flipping through the feeds, Lisa was satisfied with the lack of any suspicious activity, and moved on to get ready for the day.
Now that she finally got this whole 'soul' business sorted out, Lisa had every intention of capitalizing on it, and with how her power seemed to rapidly adapt in response to mana producing an artificial ambiance for the sole purpose of letting Lisa keep using the magic words it had picked up on, she knew it was only a matter of time before she met whatever criteria was required for a creature to independently produce mana.
Looking in the mirror, she ignored the slew of little facts about herself that came with looking at mirrors, and instead brought her hand close to her mouth, practically whispering to it.
"*Let magic act like ordinary water. Let it cling to five-fingered hands and pool together on them. Let mana stop responding to sound.*" Lisa spoke, using long-winded, overly intricate prose to describe in Water what in plain English took three sentences.
The mana turned from an invisible distortion in the air into clear, swirling water that clung to her hand as if in zero gravity. A bit of soap made it suitable for quick and efficient washing up.
With a frown, Lisa tried to manipulate the watery magic by thinking at it, but it remained unresponsive. Unlike Sage, it seems Lisa's power didn't give her direct control over the mana it produced.
She called forth mana from her own meagre reserves into her other hand, and found it much more responsive.
"Some people just have all the luck," she mutters, dismissing all of the magic with a flick of her wrists, water splattering onto the mirror as she reached for a towel to dry off.
To someone else, it might have seemed incredibly petty, for Lisa to complain within minutes of her power growing stronger and even more versatile, but those people didn't know a quarter of what she did.
She wondered if her boss had even an inkling of how messy Brockton Bay was about to get with a Trump of her caliber in it?
Sage wanted her to man the register while she dug out and replaced the ruined foundations of the building underneath them with magic.
"I just need you up here while I'm down there," she said, pointing to the fenced off area she was working in. The building being uprooted had been damaging for more than one reason, and it took money and time for the rogue to get certified in all the things she needed in order to legally mess with the wiring and plumbing that had been torn up by the Merchants.
Time that Sage apparently planned on spending by reworking the very foundations of the building while Lisa had to play cashieer.
"Sure," Lisa shrugged, and with a thumbs up, Sage leapt down into the pit, already channeling vast swathes of magic to begin the repairs.
Lisa, glancing down to see that her boss was busy, started weaving some magic of her own. Ambiance was spoken to, and her own magic placed at the helm.
While water couldn't act like a person, it could fill a vessel perfectly, which was very well represented in the language she knew. Several minutes of speaking was all it took for Lisa to create a dead-eyed double of herself to handle sitting at the counter accepting payments.
"And that's that," Lisa said, clapping her hands.
"What?!" Sage called out from the pit.
"Nothing! Don't mind me!" Lisa cried back down, giving her double once last glance before leaving. The attack on Sage had consequences, and Lisa needed to find out what those were.
The Palanquin was a very clean establishment, which marked it as an oddity among nightclubs intended for the 'common folk'. Despite lacking a strict dress code (Fat wallets were mandatory in other, equally high-quality places), it still had a fresh smell and the audacity to use backlights decoratively.
Of course, when you considered the band of parahuman mercenaries who lived here, it made a good deal more sense.
"ID?" the bouncer asked, looking at the young girl at the front of the line.
Lisa didn't even bother being coy, handing over a few bills bound together with rubber bands. While most other minors here at least had the decency to be a little subtler about it, with a fake ID and some money clipped to the bottom of it, it was hardly necessary, in Lisa's opinion.
The bouncer seemed to agree, as he simply unclipped the cliche velvet rope blocking potential patrons from entering, letting Lisa through.
People in the massive room were dancing, drinking, or trading money for "nothing" and then making their way to the bathroom to use that "nothing". Lisa paid it all no mind, beelining it to one of the backrooms, where the fruit of several spent favors was waiting.
To be frank, Lisa wasn't the biggest fan of Faultline's crew, mostly due to their leader being an annoying person who liked to think of herself as Lisa's intellectual equal. What Lisa absolutely loved, however, were the words "Information" and "Free". Faultline's crew, ignoring the price of admission, were a source of both.
As she walked down the hall to the room they agreed to meet in, she pulled a simple domino mask on, before opening the door and entering a rather spartan area, a few couches, a lamp in the corner, and the faint thrum of the loud music resonating all the way back here from the dance floor were the only real points of interest.
Well, aside from the gaggle of Case 53's hanging around in it, Faultline being the only person there who wasn't either distracted by something, or a case 53 herself.
"So, you're finally here. The infamous informant," Faultline says, her voice slightly muffled by the thick metal mask she wore at all times. The scars on it were a testament for why she felt it a neccecary addition to her outfit.
Lisa smiled. She may not have played the cape game, but when someone steals zeroes from bank accounts, it builds a reputation no matter how careful you are.
"Yeah. So, do you know why I'm here?" she asked, her power already helpfully building a clue-filled picture of the room around her.
"You want information. I think that's ironic and suspicious, all things considered," she said, arms folded as she leaned back in her chair.
'See, shit like that is exactly why you annoy me,' Lisa thought to herself. Did this woman think she plucked knowledge from the ether? Even thinkers universally needed input to get their outputs. Even if that input was something absurd, like humidity or micropostures on television.
"Well, as I don't play the same games as you and your group do, I don't have the same connections. It stands to reason that you would know less about-"
'Practical things,' Lisa carefully doesn't say, catching herself at the last moment. With all the information Faultline has gathered up on Brockton Bay to keep her crew out of the way of major players, Lisa would be able to wrap the city around her finger, as far as keeping Sage out of the way of the worst of it. It was the sort of thing money couldn't buy without paradoxically getting the wrong kind of attention. Not getting thrown out of this meeting was more important than verbally fencing with Faultline.
"The same things I do, and more about what I don't. I need information on gang movements. Your group prides itself on being neutral and not catching flak from the gangs here, and wouldn't you know it, my employer could use a bit of neutrality themselves," she explains, coaching her expression.
The woman across from her doesn't immediately respond.
"And in return? The information you want is valuable, and it's less valuable if it's leaked," she retorts.
"Our eternal gratitude?" Lisa says snappily.
"More," Faultline says, not even entertaining the joke.
Lisa rolls her eyes.
"How about the gratitude of a Case Five?" she says, summoning up a magical ball of liquid.
Everyone in the room jumps to attention.
A Case 5, or, in layman's terms, a Permanent Trump Effect. It was the sort of thing that people scoffed off as rumors until reminded of how uncomfortably often capes with powers like that seemed to crop up.
It was exactly the sort of thing that a band of Case-53s would be interested in, considering how many of them resisted surgical and parahuman methods of returning them to some semblance of normality.
"My employer is powerful, but she's in her growth period, and gathering attention. While I can get the information I need myself, I'd rather not when you all have a vested interest in helping, free of charge," Lisa explains, dismissing the magic immediately to show she means no harm.
"You know how it goes. The longer my employer goes under the radar, the more she'll grow into her abilities, and thus, the more you'll get out of approaching her later on. You're investing in your future, giving me everything you know on the local scene."
Faultline frowns beneath her mask.
"That doesn't mean anything if she isn't actually useful to my crew. What exactly is her power?"
Lisa grins, a downright mischievous, vulpine thing that promises headaches.
"Yes."
With a USB drive full of secrets and a song in her heart, Lisa made her way back to her apartment, humming merrily as she unlocked her door, checked for intruders, and plugged the drive into a disposable laptop to examine it.
As the drive's program began downloading files from a secure server, Lisa decided to give her power the attention it had been craving, an itch that only one thing would scratch.
Laying down on her bed, she flipped a mental switch, and a particular mana type was summoned by her power from nothingness, the last quirk her power's adaptation had to offer.
Ambient Noise was brought into being, and Lisa heard.