AN: Betaed by
@Trek,
@Esprit and
@hoth
0o0
Chapter 06 : Negotiations
0o0
Thursday, February 10th, 2011
0o0
*+3 charges for Interlude 04*
*Power Buy Attempt 2.1.29 Maintenance Systems (100), Requires 2.1.28 Your Robots (200), Requires 2.1.27 Central Control (100) Bought. Banked 0 points. *
Selene paused her search of the city for her missing gear as her powers activated, grabbing an assortment of perks.
Useful perks too, they gave her a central command center in her warehouse. Something that she could access from a terminal in any room, or from any computer inside her warehouse. In addition to this, she also now had an assortment of robots that not only sorted everything for her, but also maintained and repaired anything she knew how to herself.
The Central command was extremely useful in that she could now have it open a portal to her house constantly, or any door she had used her key on. It also allowed her dad to redirect it anywhere if he was inside the warehouse.
This portal could only be open when the door her key could open was closed, and would close if she used her key, but it expanded her options greatly.
This wouldn't let her dad open a portal from the outside yet, as he couldn't interact while outside of the warehouse, but it moved her increasingly flexible mover abilities to even greater heights. She would have to talk to him about that later when she was done searching Brockton Bay for her missing gear; she hadn't had much luck in finding it just yet.
Although she could build a longer-range sensor to expedite the search, anything with a scanning radius of more than 1 kilometer would require her to carry around something closer in scale to a small car, rather than the fairly bulky but still handheld sensor array that she was currently using.
With a 1-kilometer radius, she could cover everything inside the city within an hour by starting in the center of Brockton Bay and following a slowly expanding spiral in the air just above the buildings. Although increasing the scale of the device would save some time, anything not in the city proper would require a much larger sensor that was the size of a small building to locate.
Even though she didn't think the PRT had kept her tech, particularly given that Armsmaster hadn't lied, she still checked both the RIG and PRT HQ just to be safe, before starting her spiral around the city.
Her sensor was good, but it could be blocked by sufficient quantities of dense matter at this scale. Scaling it up to break through would increase the range massively as a side effect, but Selene had a feeling her items were more likely to have left the city than to be properly shielded. Even a minute air gap would be enough for her sensors to bypass mass shielding.
Finished circling the city, Selene sighed when her gear failed to show up on the scanner. At least she learned a lot about the state of the city and had a good idea where a bunch of gang holdouts were, as well as drug trafficking and other locations.
She was going to have to curate that data before sending a copy to the PRT. As much as she would have liked to just turn the information over to the Police and let them handle it, doing that would reveal more of her capabilities than she wished to show. It could also violate the unwritten rules, which she now understood were used to keep the city stable.
For an independent hero like her, the rule was simple. Only arrest villains that were actively committing a crime. Don't go back to their base of operations and arrest them there.
Ergo, Grue's gang's pair of bases were off limits for now. She would have to set up some hidden sensors to track them and catch them in the act rather than knocking them all out when they were asleep in their base.
Shaking her head, Selene turned her thoughts back to what mattered at the moment. Finding her missing gear was going to take more effort, since it was now quite clear that this wasn't the work of a foolish civilian keeping souvenirs, but an intentional theft that had shipped the goods out of the city.
She was going to need to build a bigger sensor or find some other way to track down what had happened.
*Power Buy Attempt 2.6.3 All Your Stuff (100) Bought, Banked 0 points.*
Selene considered her new perk, which didn't help her at all. It just gave her a copy of everything she had owned before she got her powers, which nicely included her mother's lost flute. It made her smile; she would have to timelock it in a card and keep it safe. She wasn't going to lose it again.
There were photo albums that had been lost and some other childhood items that had been lost or destroyed, which was nice but from a usefulness standpoint, they weren't going to be much use unless she met a young girl who would fit all her old items. She hadn't owned anything worth duplication before getting her powers.
Sighing, annoyed that she couldn't find her missing blankets, Selene made her way to an out of the way door to return to her warehouse. Her dad should be awake by now, given the improvement his bed provided to sleep quality, but she would wait for him to find her while she considered her next steps in case he needed more rest.
0o0
While waiting for her father, Taylor turned to design work as she considered how to both pick up her missing gear at long range and get the sensor around the entire planet quickly.
Drawing on Dead Space, she could see plenty of sensors she could drop in orbit that could find her item's energy signature, but none would work properly unless she had some sort of control network to collect and process the data, so she would have to build that first.
Recalling why people stopped trying to get into space—the Simurgh—Taylor was about to reject that when she remembered that her Blank II perk ensured that everything she made was invisible to precognition or even being found by remote viewing abilities.
Unless someone put their eyes on something or detected it with a sense that was physically present it was better than invisible, which opened up a lot of options as she considered the idea. Sight was something that wasn't blocked by her perk, so if the Simurgh saw it, she could see it, but she had several ways to hide something from sight. The Simurgh might not see through her eyes anyway, given that endbringers seem to have no trouble fighting when their ocular flesh is damaged.
Sound didn't travel meaningfully in space, and what little did would be trivial to block. An artificial gravity field around the satellite could stop any 'sound' from that. When combined with her other stealth options, unless the Simurgh had some extremely exotic senses, the perk would be able to mask everything else Taylor could think of that she might notice—heat, gravity fields, and so on.
Taylor was busy debating how sure she was that said Simurgh didn't have a sense Taylor didn't know how to block that wouldn't count as an ability and thus be hidden anyway, given how much easier this would make searching the Earth for her missing gear. As she spun the cost benefit analysis in her head, her father arrived.
"Any luck?" Danny asked her.
"No, either it's shielded beyond what my sensor could find, or it's not in Brockton bay. Given it was stolen, I think it is more likely the later."
"Unless you got any hints for which city or town it is in, I don't think you can search more for it?"
"Not without making something else… like this."
Taylor showed her father the design she had half made in her debating.
"A satellite? Taylor, I don't want to accuse you of not thinking this though but…"
"She is up there, yes. Blank does mean she won't see it with her abilities, she could see such with her 'eyes', but I can shield that easily enough. The issue is, does she have some sense we don't know about yet… Nevermind I can't believe I missed this."
"What did you miss?"
"The Simurgh only reacts to things that get close to her. I don't need to leave it up there forever, just until I find my missing gear. I just need it to fly over the United States, she is currently on the other side of the world. If I get this in place, I can locate my gear and take this down afterwards, before the Simurgh could ever get close enough to notice. I need to get started on this, but before I do that, there is some new information you need to know."
"What?"
"I got another upgrade, and now you can use the computers in here to redirect the portal out to any door I have linked to yourself. It only works while I don't have the warehouse open with my key, and I can't let you open it from the outside, but I can program it to always open it to my closet door in my house when I don't have it open anywhere else. I set it to shut if anyone but us is on the property, and since it can't detect anything when the door is closed. I will set it to reopen once an hour, closing if it then finds there is someone there and then waiting another hour before it tries again."
"You sure that is safe?"
"It does mean you can access this place without me leaving it open, Dad. If we have people in the house without me knowing ahead of time to turn it off, we have bigger problems."
*Power Buy Attempt 1.4.15 Supernatural Engineer (200) Not Bought, Banked 100 points.*
Taylor noted that this perk was based around merging magical energy into technology designs. Given her limitation around granting blank to other people needing clothes, she could already see at least one use for this ability.
There were far more uses she could guess at, even for her planned satellite, if Taylor could get this before she built it, she could likely manage proper invisibility rather than mixing various techs to approach the effect.
She locked it in as she spoke to her dad.
"Anyway, I need to get this built as soon as possible. Getting my stuff back from whomever stole it is a high priority. Healing blankets are not dangerous per say, as they can only heal people. I am more concerned with who stole them in the first place, as they were able to do so with disturbing ease. Worse, if they are targeting my gear now, they are going to try and steal something more volatile later. I need to have systems in place so I can recover stolen items when that happens, Systems that I will need anyway when I join the Guild, so it's not a waste of time.
Taylor sighed.
"It's going to be a few days until I can finish this— so much to do and so little time."
0o0
Saturday, February 12th, 2011
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Selene made her way into the room where the three wards she would be talking to were waiting for her, escorted by a PRT trooper that had met her at the front door.
There had been no real security checks on her, just a short escort, and no questions if she had a weapon or not. Her sword was stored away in her Sylladex, ready to be withdrawn if needed.
"Hello Selene, right on time." Gallant greeted her, as Selene took in the room. Boxes of pizza, enough to feed all the wards and then some, were off to the side on a table. Based on the smell, it was an assortment of every normal combination on the menu at a store, clearly intended to make sure that they had at least something she liked.
At the same time, Selene focused on each ward at the same time in her mind, studying them in detail. Kid Win was rather eager to meet her, partially because his power was pushing him to study her own gear closer, learn how it worked, and mix it into his own gear. Fortunately, all his power could see now was the paint covering her armor.
Gallant seemed quite interested in getting to know her personally, with signs that he had heard about her from Vicky and picked up a positive impression.
Yet, clearly trying to outdo them in eagerness, was Vista herself; the girl hummed with hope that Selene would join them, as her power pushed her to try and use it around Selene's gear.
That last one puzzled Selene a bit, since she couldn't see why Vista's power cared about that. She made a note to go over that later while watching the tape in her warehouse.
"I thought I was early? I was expecting something more of a security check."
She hadn't been expecting that she would undergo anything like she had out of costume. That would have been a clear violation of the unwritten rules, which the PRT partly upheld, but she had expected to at least be asked to empty or show the contents of the bag she had at her side.
There was, after all, a big difference between unmasking her and asking her to show that her bags didn't have weapons or bombs in them.
"That's only when you're not invited in already. If anyone shows up without warning, looking to talk to someone in costume, they do a lot more security checks, to make sure they were not mastered to bring in some explosive—or something like that."
Selene could see that wasn't entirely true. It was mostly true, but she got that this had also been done to try and make things look nicer for her to increase the chances of her joining the Wards.
Amusingly, their efforts were counterproductive for that goal, because even if she was still interested in the wards, she would much rather have better security than the convenience of taking a stranger at their word.
Gallant indicated for her to sit down, and Selene did so as Vista spoke up.
"I'm rather surprised you wanted to talk to me. Those two make sense because they are both tinkers, but you're the first person that wants to join who wanted to talk to me first."
Selene glanced over at Vista, since Vista had lied about both being tinkers.
The other claims rang true, and Selene glanced between the two. Gallant was likely the non-tinker due to what she had been told about him. Armsmaster had said that he could only work on his own gear and failed to work on other tinker tech.
"Well then, they were all fools. You have more experience than several of the adult protectorate members. After 5 years, anything you haven't seen personally likely isn't to come up in the wards."
"You'd think the PRT themselves would know that." Vista noted, making her displeasure at that thought quite clear, as she internally preened at being called out as experienced.
To make eating possible, Selene activated a partial retraction of her helmet, the plates from her helmet gaining seams and flowing downwards to expose her nose down to the top of her neck, letting loose a soft clanking sound. Before they retracted, a carefully designed hologram came into place, making the parts of her face that could be seen look very different with hints of asian heritage, primarily through different bone structures and teeth.
Kid Win whistled at that as he noted. "That's some rather smooth tech. I have only seen Armsmaster pull something like that off with his gear… and for his work, I can at least see some hints of how it worked."
Selene could see that his power was extremely interested in what he had just seen, which seemed to grow even more as she could feel its attempts to read her gear fail. She was able to isolate the specific scan amongst countless millions now that she was physically with the source and looking for it.
*2/3 charges*
As she glanced over at Gallant, she realized that his power was trying to read her emotions. Blank was projecting the emotions she wanted him to think she had to allow her to lie perfectly without being caught. But his power was clearly not just reading emotions. In light of his publicly known ability, he could manipulate them as well— a trait he shared with his girlfriend, which was rather interesting.
"I doubt he took as long as I did to get this working. It took me months before my armor was good enough to head out."
She made a point to lie to blur any connection between Selene and Taylor, taking advantage of the information that Taylor would have triggered a month ago, not months. It wasn't much of a ruse, but every bit helps.
She hoped to take advantage of how totally her gear would, hopefully, outstrip the normal tinker cycle to throw interested parties off her scent.
"But I'm not here to talk about me. I have questions about how things are in the wards, both in general through Vista and for a tinker specifically from the two of you."
"Right, well…" Kid Win hesitated.
"One of the main selling points to joining the wards, is the access to tools, raw materials and in some cases even experts when it comes to helping you tinker." Gallant answered for him.
"Although with armor that good, I am not sure she needs those." Kid Win muttered, making it clear that had been why he hestated himself.
"I doubt that." Selene answered with a bit of a smile, she wasn't going to tell them she wasn't joining the wards just yet, she wanted to get to know them and make them think she had a chance to join up. "I spent a lot of time fighting to get tools to make this properly, and there is so much more I want to build that I just can't get the machinery for. Which I would assume is a problem you've both seen?"
"Partly, if you get Armsmaster to approve it, anything the PRT can get legally is an option for you, although you do have to stick to a budget."
"Has that been an issue for either of you?"
"Generally no, my bigger issue is getting them to approve my gear for field use. The PRT limits what we can carry outside of S-class threats, and given the unpredictability of some tinker tech, they take a very cautious view on things. That said, we are free to build what we like and test them in safe conditions, so don't think they will tell you no unless you want to build something that would crash the moon down on us or something like that. But until it's quite clear any tech is safe to the public, you're not allowed to be seen using it in public." Kid Win confirmed.
"Which is your side. Not Gallant's." Selene pressed as she looked at the boy, curious if he would maintain the lie or not.
"Correct, because I am not really a tinker."
"You're not supposed to just tell her that." Vista noted.
"She already figured it out, Vista. She noticed I didn't react like Kid Win did to her gear being used."
"Yes. I found it rather curious that people kept pushing me away from you, when they decided to suggest Vista who most certainly isn't a tinker, more so when they had no proof yet that I wasn't a focal tinker like they claim you are. If anything that should have made it a bigger priority for me to talk to you. Which begs the question, does the PRT do that often? Vista also doesn't exactly hide how much more she could do with her power."
"Eh…" Selene could tell that Vista's mind was spinning as she tried to think of a proper way to answer that.
"Vista is a rather unusual case, and not something you would run into Selene." Gallant offered. "At her current age she would already be young for a new ward. It's rare for people to trigger with powers under the age of 14, 15 is where most people trigger and that's why the Wards program was designed around about 3 years until you join the Protectorate proper. Vista being young enough when she joined to do that three times over is extremely rare. They ran out of official things to let her do, you're not going to end up in the same boat as she is. They don't like to send elementary school girls out on patrols even if they have powers after all."
*Power Buy Attempt 1.4.15 Supernatural Engineer (200) +100 Tax Bought, Banked 0 points.*
Selene briefly focused on her new perk, finding it to be everything she wanted it to be and more, then postponed that train of thought until she wasn't in the middle of a conversation and had time to plan out her meeting with Dragon and Armsmaster.
Conversations with the wards shifted to revolve a lot more around the little things they did as wards for the rest of lunch.
0o0
Selene enjoyed talking to the wards over lunch. Although she would have liked to dig deeper into their backgrounds, she was able to collect a lot of basic information about how the day in the life of a ward went. While this primarily concerned how often they had to attend training and the review process that Kid Win had to undergo for all of his tinker tech, she also learned that Vista, like her, was a very avid reader of fantasy novels.
If it wasn't for her issues with the PRT overall, it wasn't that bad, and a part of Selene wondered how things would have gone if Sophia had never been a ward in the first place, since she would likely have joined the wards by now.
Then, her thoughts turned to her meeting with Dragon and Armsmaster.
She was looking forward to finally meeting with them to do some tinkering. There were so many designs in her head, and, thanks to the powers she had, creating an outright spaceship that could swiftly travel to other planets in the solar system was more limited by construction time than design and functional constraints.
Had it not been for the Simurgh she likely would have already started on that. The Hope Killer ruined everything like always.
Mindful of her plans, Selene needlessly triple checked in her mind what she would share— nothing more advanced than anything she had used prior to Blank. After that, she would find some way to get them to accept a proper Blank generator for their own use, then bring them into the long term plan properly— a plan that would take months, if not longer. That said, she might be able to use the coming endbringer attack as leverage.
The last attack was just over 2 months ago, and, according to the schedule, that meant the next one could happen any day, even if another 3 weeks' wait would be closer to normal. Taylor wasn't ready, so she could only hope it was really three weeks away. There was no way to guess how much more she'd achieve by then.
"Selene, right on time." Armsmaster greeted her as another PRT officer brought her to his office after confirming she didn't need a short break after the meeting with the Wards.
Selene noted that Armsmaster really liked her promptness, even though she hadn't really set a time for her to be done with the wards, and that he was quite eager to start looking at her tech properly.
"To start with, the PRT hasn't been able to locate what happened to your missing gear. I interviewed everyone that handled it personally and reviewed all the security footage myself, but no one that had gotten even close to it had anything to do with it. We are assuming that the officers were not given the proper gear in the first place and are doing a search of those that held them."
"Unless they mailed them out of the city you can hold off on that."
"Why is that?"
"I have a much longer-range sensor then the one I carry around that is attuned to picking up the marking signals I placed in all my gear. After we met, I deployed it and checked, it's not something I can just leave set up so I don't know where they went until it went online, but unless they are in some shielded location with no air gap, like the PRT HQ or the RIG, they would have shown up. This isn't something the people I wrapped them around would have unless they are a tinker or working for one."
"Do you know what exactly would block your sensor?" Dragon asked.
"Quite a few things, although the exact materials would require you to tell me what they used to shield the RIG and PRT HQ. When normal materials, stuff I haven't made myself, block my sensors, it seems to amount to extremely large amounts of high density mass, far more than even the banks use. I had to get close to the sealed Endbringer Shelters to scan completely in them, which should give you an idea for the scale we are talking about."
"That is a rather potent scanner. But it's not the one you brought with you, is it?" Dragon continued, moving the topic to the purpose of Selene's visit.
"Right, as I indicated, I want to help with medical matters, and I brought my best attempt at reversing engineering my sensor with off the shelf parts that I could. There were only a few things I had to make that I couldn't buy off the shelf. If I may?"
"Of course, put whatever materials you have right here." Armsmaster indicated to a cleared table that was clearly cleared for her use ahead of time.
Selene started to unpack her items, which included not just a trio of working scanners, but the various parts that went into it, the blueprints she had drawn up, coding for the dumbed down if slower embedded code that was required and just about everything that was needed to reproduce this to the limits of what she could infer. All of this was just for a medical scanner that could only give basic biosign readings. Everything else had been stripped out.
The only person she could cross reference with had been her father, who wasn't an Engineer, and could only guess that it was good enough.
"The sensor is functional as is, I presume?" Dragon asked, as Armsmaster picked up one and looked at it.
"It is, it doesn't show me because my armor shielded against such scans, but it should work on Armsmaster unless he has done the same to his own armor."
"I had thought I had done the same myself," Armsmaster noted, as read the readout, "but this matches my own biometric readouts. So I can confirm it's accurate— but why are there three of them and parts for one more?"
"And blueprints and software, which should be everything strictly necessary for a non-tinker to reproduce this."
"Have you had a chance to see someone try?" Dragon quickly asked, the concern in her voice quite clear.
"Both of my parents looked the designs over, although neither is enough of an Engineer to know if I was missing something."
"Plenty of tinkers have thought they had plans for something that anyone could build, only to discover they were unknowingly still blackboxing something critical," Armsmaster informed her, "It's an issue that tinkers don't always learn about until they deal with an expert in their fields, since, to the layman, tinker tech and advanced technology might as well be the same."
Armsmaster was looking over the blueprints as he said that, flipping through the pages as he went.
"I have digital copies of all of those, including all the source and embedded code required." Selene injected up as she looked over at the picture of Dragon on the monitor.
"You are well prepared for this, which is unfortunately quite the rarity among tinkers." Armsmaster noted, as he indicated with one hand to a computer, not taking his gaze off the plans as he read them himself. "Plug it in there, and Dragon will download a copy."
Selene did that, and waited as the two went over it, she could tell when Dragon very quickly came to realize what was there, as well as how the AI waited until Armsmaster had come to the same realization, so she wouldn't be 'too fast' compared to a human.
*Power Buy Attempt 3.2.22 Grease Monkey (Bubblegum Crisis) (300) Not Bought, Banked 100 points.*
At a brief thought of what that would grant her, Selene let that perk go. It was near future tech and she already could build all of that with her existing perks from what she could see without securing the perk first. It would just take her a few upgrade cycles on normal technology. It was better not to waste charges by locking that in.
Selene could tell when Armsmaster realized what she had handed over, but rather than bring it up right away, he just started to go over everything again.
She waited quietly for him to say something.
"Dragon. Am I mistaken here?"
Armsmaster didn't say about what, and Selene could tell it was entirely because she was there. Dragon answered the question before she said anything.
"No, I don't seem to see any blackboxing."
"That's because there isn't any." Selene injected. "It's the best I was able to do without including those."
"Now I really want to see your devices that have blackboxed parts." Armsmaster noted.
"You can look at them later, but isn't this what I was here for? To let Dragon take a look at this and then spread it around the world?"
"Have you released these plans to anyone besides your parents? " Dragon pressed in a concerned voice.
Selene looked over at her, surprised at how concerned the woman was, guessing the likely reason she replied. "No, I didn't know how to do that safely, I figured you were the best one to do that."
"You are turning into an increasingly perfect ward." Armsmaster noted, and Selene preened a little at how honest he was in those words as she looked back at him.
While she might not want to join the wards, being an ideal candidate was something she felt was a standard she didn't mind being measured against.
"Well, let me answer that quickly for you. There is no safe way to release these."
Selene's joy at Armsmaster's praise came crashing down as she spun hard at Dragon, wanting to make sure the woman understood how surprised she was at that. "What? How? I mean, if it's too advanced, I could scale it back more but isn't it more useful like this?"
"There is no amount that you can scale it back that would make it acceptable."
"What?"
"Well, you do seem to understand at least the basics, so let me start with this, Selene." Dragon started. "You get that releasing this will cause widespread issues as you make entire industries obsolete correct?"
"Which is why I am asking you on how to do that without causing said issues."
"Well, as it turns out there is no safe way to do this, Selene. I learned that the hard way myself when I tried it once with containment foam."
"But that… worked out, didn't it?"
"If by working out, you mean me having to spend months in courts, ultimately bending to countless laws implemented explicitly to restrict it, then yes."
Seeing that Dragon was being truthful, Selene let the AI continue to speak rather than bursting out in dismay.
"When I first released containment foam, I had grand visions that all law enforcement would use it. No longer would there be any danger of policemen with guns harming bystanders by accident, or even misidentified innocents. Containment foam is perfectly safe, non-toxic; you can't suffocate in it even when fully covered. It absorbs impacts perfectly, so only a thin layer would be required to stop someone from suffering from fall damage, and dissolves completely after an hour even if forgotten. Simply put, it's the perfect non-lethal compound, and much like you I spent months getting it to be workable by completely mundane processes. Anyone who knows the formula can make as much as they want, and that's the issue."
"Ignoring the practicalities of enforcing it. Law enforcement in the United States is duty bound by law to use the minimal force required, and since containment foam is always safe, carrying anything but that becomes mostly redundant. A police officer won't carry a handgun, because containment foam can serve just as well in almost any situation." Armsmaster added in for her.
"So the entire industry around police gear, such as weapons, tasers, handcuffs, and such was set to collapse completely. You can't harm yourself on containment foam, and with a small bottle you can trivially spray it over someone's hands as temporary handcuffs, then apply a fixer so they don't stick to anything."
Dragon paused a few seconds then continued.
"It was the first real case of any tinker tech being refined to the point that it could be made by anyone, and useful enough to shut down entire industries. The law at the time did allow me to push through, but new laws were quickly put into place to make proper tinker innovation illegal, in much the same way that it's now illegal for parahumans to act in large scale markets."
Dragon paused so Selene could answer the implied question she had put on her.
"Besides the fact if the Parahuman dies, what they supplied would go away, it also gives them unusual leverage by making demands on the threat of stopping, yes, I know that quite well. But… if it's something anyone with the right knowledge could just build and the parahuman can't change that...."
"You're not thinking about the long-term impacts. This is the best you could reverse engineer, so how does technology improve? What incentive does the entire medical industry have to work on improved medical devices when your scanner obsoletes so much of what they have right now. Sure your scanner is better, but as your own design indicates, this one has limits to just biometric data. There are a lot of more useful things that other tools could scan for, but why would a hospital bother to buy those when this could be cheaper and give them most of it? Why would companies invest in developing it when you could release an update in a few months to obsolete that."
Selene was silent for much longer than she needed to ponder the topic. Much like Dragon, she was pretending to need to think it over to cover up her mental speed.
"Now, don't take this the wrong way, Selene." Armsmaster added, "This is good work, and the PRT can slowly spread it to outside companies as they reverse-engineer it from first principles, which can then refine them and release new products based on tinker tech, which is where most of the computer hardware you see today comes from. For something this large, even with all of your documentation? You're likely looking at many years before it can be released publicly."
"But all the people it could help? At Endbringer fights?"
*Power Buy Attempt 3.10.3 Mauler (Command and Conquer: Tiberium Wars) (400) Not Bought, Banked 200 points.*
Selene focused one of her trains of thought on that perk. Seeing it revolved around repurposing damaged technology into working forms, not something she needed, she let it go.
"Among Protectorate members, that is fine, so long as we keep tight control on them," Armsmaster informed her, "We can arrange to do that as soon as you join the wards."
Selene mentally flinched at that, and she asked.
"And if I don't want to join the wards?"
"I wasn't aware you found any issues with the wards over lunch? Is there something holding you back that you haven't asked about yet? I won't mind answering it." Armsmaster asked her, and Selene could see he wanted her in the wards, not just for her sake, but for his own reputation. He viewed her joining the wards as a very big plus to his own reputation.
Selene rapidly had to work on her plans in her head. There was no way she was joining the wards, but it was quite clear that she wasn't going to get a good answer without laying out the facts, or a version of them.
There was only one way she could take this, and so she let out a sigh as she said.
"Let me explain fully, because it's not based on a misunderstanding or anything like that. I had no intention of joining the wards, I just wanted to establish contact with all of you. The reason for this is rather big."
Selene paused as if she was trying to bring herself to say the next part, continuing just before they could ask her what.
"I won't say where it happened or when exactly, but I am sure you can guess that I didn't really throw this all together in a month, it has been closer to a year's worth of work, but what you don't know is that my trigger event was caused by a Protectorate member."
Selene watched as both wanted to deny that to her, only for Armsmaster to speak up as he clearly got the reading from his lie detector Selene was expecting him to.
"You're not lying about that? Who was it?" He demanded.
"They have already been dealt with. The PRT didn't tell me they were a protectorate member at the time, I coincidentally found out on my own when I was investigating the events around my trigger, I won't say exactly how to keep my anonymity, but people in the perpetrators department knew of other offences and didn't do anything about them, the person was only dealt with after major crimes."
Selene paused to let that sink in before she continued.
"It took almost killing me for the PRT to act on it, and I can't join a group that would allow someone like that to work within their numbers without stopping them far sooner, especially when their pattern of misbehavior was already well known. I am not talking about something that happened only once; they abused me for almost 2 years, and at least some of their coworkers helped cover it up. We decided to come here to escape those people, as even if they weren't as bad, they did help cover it up. You being here in Brockton Bay and your spotless record was a very big reason we chose this city, Armsmaster. But even when we first met, I never intended to join the wards even though I still wanted—want—to be a hero. If there was some other option than New Wave locally, I might have joined them already, but I don't want to unmask."
"I am very impressed that you decided to be a hero anyway." Dragon noted after she had waited long enough for Armsmater to call out any of that as a lie.
Selene was quite pleased at how well their belief in his lie detector helped her here. Her story was completely fictional if truth-adjacent, but since it looked completely true coming from her, they wouldn't assume it was made up until they discovered she could trick their tinkertech polygraph, something she didn't intend to ever let be known. If it came to it, she would blame it on her gear messing up their lie detector.
"But I am afraid that the only way to pass out such gear requires you're a member of the Protectorate." Dragon added sadly.
"You're not a Protectorate member, and you pass your gear out." Selene noted.
"That's not entirely right. Guild Members are honorary protectorate members."
"Who aren't subject to normal Protectorate oversight?"
Selene watched as Dragon quickly thought that over, clearly understanding where she was going with this far faster than Armsmaster, then started to act like she didn't already know.
"Correct, the Guild expects its members to hold a large degree of autonomy, and while we do have some civilian oversight, that's mainly to ensure no one is committing crimes on the side and to direct us to where we are most needed. Which you already knew and planned for?"
"Right, the Protectorate was out as soon as I learned what was allowed to happen to me under their rules and bureaucratic structure. It shouldn't take me almost being killed to end the years of abuse I suffered or to get someone like that out of their ranks, not when so many in the office knew it wasn't a matter of if it could happen, but when. None of them was surprised to learn what the person had been doing to a preteen girl at the time. The only real option outside of going completely independent was the Guild. There isn't really another good second option, and given what I can make—"
Selene indicated to her scanners.
"I can do far more good with these in Protectorate hands, so I figured you're the best way to join the Guild."
*Power Buy Attempt 3.4.9 Workaholic (Sonic) (300) Bought. Banked 0 points. *
Selene mentally blinked at the perk she just acquired, which made it such that anything she made would either come in fives or be 3 times larger in all dimensions.
It would have been far more useful before she got the Alchemiter, at least until she realized that, thanks to this new perk, items she created with the Alchemiter, provided she could afford one of them, would now either get her five copies for the same price or require significantly fewer resources. She could then recycle any copies to get full grist refunds for each one. This meant that her grist reserves would grow exponentially by printing items and recycling the extra copies.
She could already see problems in that she couldn't turn this off, so anything she made would have to fit those terms as well. It would likely be a bad idea to try and make anything around anyone that didn't know about her real powers just yet—although she did have her Sylladex. So long as she was careful about how she did things, she could just captchalogue the extras for later before anyone noticed.
"Normally, we don't recruit minors, nor people without a good reputation already. But, I can see where you are coming from; you have potential. It's not something we have done before, but it's not against Guild rules either. I have to talk to the others about it, but before we do that, I will need more proof of your skills."
"Meaning you want me to reverse engineer something, here? I mean, I can try but something like that took me weeks of effort."
Selene pointed to her scanner as she said that.
"I don't expect you to finish now, but I do have an item for you to study that we were going to let you work on while we went over your scanner with our own tools. That part of our plan has changed, although I am sure Armsmaster will want to work this scanner into his own gear. But before he can do that, we should talk about licensing costs."
"I am willing to sell the PRT rights to make and use as many as they wish for 100,000 per year plus 1% of the material costs of every scanner made. The Guild, as a PRT affiliate, will be covered under that, like all PRT affiliated groups."
"You could hold out for a lot more than that." Dragon noted.
"I don't need a mountain of money; and I worked this out with my family before I came here. I would much rather do as much good as possible than get every cent I could squeeze out from an already underfunded organisation."
Left unsaid was that with her workshop and Alchemiter, the only thing she needed was land. Literally everything else she could duplicate if she wanted it at this point. Money was a weird concept for her now.
"What about future designs? Tinker materials can be expensive." Dragon pointed out.
"This scanner is not the only design that I wish to sell, although that requires that I have access to the appropriate legal channels, namely membership in the Guild. Although my family is funding things right now, this scanner is not the only thing I plan to sell. I plan to charge more for the rarer or more potent items, because of the extra time investment from my end, but I want the PRT to give this one to every relevant official if they can. Now if the PRT wants me to build and sell these personally, then we are talking a whole different figure, since I would need to set up the factories myself, train and hire people and so on. But that's not something I want to do in the near future if at all possible."
"Dragon, would you be able to produce these?" Armsmaster asked her.
"Under the contract I already have with the PRT and Protectorate? Of course."
"Then I can authorize this myself. I assume you don't want your funds placed in your civilian account?"
"Correct."
"I will submit the paperwork needed. Although, we will need a proper way to contact you other than PHO. Are you willing to leave some sort of proper contact details with us?"
"Is it contractually needed?"
"All bank accounts that belong to Cape IDs must have a form of contact, yes."
Selene considered her options there. "If I were to give you a computer that connected securely to another of mine, would that work?"
"So long as you checked it at least once a day, and understand that if there is a hold on your accounts due to suspected stranger activity, you need to head to it to confirm things first."
"I need a few days to get it together, but I guess you need a few days on your end as well. Does Wednesday evening work?"
"We will have everything in place by then." Armsmaster agreed.
"Now, if there is nothing else, Selene, I am curious how well you can understand another tinker's gear."
"No, that was everything. Let's have a look." Selene agreed.
"Armsmaster?"
Armsmaster removed a box and opened it to take out a small handheld item.
"What is this?" Selene asked.
"We would rather see what you can tell on your own before we tell you."
Selene glanced at the scans for it, quickly drawing matches to parts of her sensors. It was a sensor, but she couldn't understand the blueprints enough to know what kind.
"It seems to be a sensor of some kind, I am allowed to interact with it, right?"
"Of course, if you want to take it apart, you're free to do that as well."
Selene nodded as she got to work doing just that, leaving the other two to their own designs.
0o0
Taylor found out that the sensor that Dragon had given her was designed to detect minerals. Once she knew that, she was able to work out how to build such a scanner with her own techbase, however she didn't do that, rather starting to make designs in that direction that were partial and incomplete, only using the tech she had before getting Blank, while mixing in sensors for completely different things in the hope that it would look a lot like a more normal tinker's design efforts to the pair as she worked out the proper way to blackbox it.
Ironically enough, her upgrade powers didn't handle faking the process that well.
Well Taylor was still there, she had managed to quickly captchalogue the device to get the code while neither Armsmaster or Dragon were looking, the cameras and scanners in the room not noting she did such thanks to her covering it up in her examination.
Afterwards, she was told that she could look at it again later, but only on the RIG itself. Before she left, she made plans to do further examinations that next weekend, citing she was too busy during the week to do such.
On the way home, Taylor felt her power try and grow.
*Power Buy Attempt 1.5.29 Power Combination I (200) Not Bought, Banked 100 points.*
Taylor briefly considered what she knew about the perk she hadn't acquired, and on learning that it was about combining her powers actively she let it go. Her powers already meshed well, to the point where she was doubtful a direct combination would help much.
Putting that out of her mind, she wondered if perhaps she should try locking in something to build up a large number of charges then let it go to get a lot of perks. She found herself torn if that would be useful in the long run.
It would make certain she got a perk, unless she pulled an 8 charge one again, but at the same time it also made certain she would get a perk, and some of her perks were less than ideal.
Arriving at home, she met with her dad, just in time for dinner.
"So, how did it go?" Danny asked over dinner.
"Worse than I thought."
"Worse? The wards are not good kids after all?"
"No, they were fine. I am sure I could get along with them if it wasn't for the Protectorate. The issue is, well, my plans for sharing stuff are a bust."
"The PRT is not willing to let you do that?"
"Not as freely as I want, it's going to be limited to only them. Can't sell to hospitals or anything else like that."
Taylor let out a sigh of annoyance at that, "I really wanted to help everyone."
"Is the PRT never going to share it?"
"No, they will share it, just slowly, over years. A lot slower than I would have liked."
Taylor let out another long sigh at that as she looked over at her father, thinking.
He waited a bit, before asking. "What are you thinking? Do you want to share it out anyway?"
"Not exactly. Dragon was happy with what I showed off, but on hearing what she told me, then when I considered the fact I don't have enough people to help me… well, how hard do you think it would be to hire some people and train them up? Although my stuff is not blackboxed, teaching anyone who is not a genius any of it in a good time frame will be impossible."
"You're just throwing this at me out of nowhere?"
"Not entirely nowhere, I have been thinking about how I can get the manpower to build my larger stuff. I was hoping there would be an easy way to do things by the book and set up something under the PRT to do that. Now that I know it is not possible through legal channels, our only option is to look for ways off the books. It is not like I am limited in supplies or anything."
"You'll have to explain where it all is coming from if they ask."
"Yeah, I know. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying we should go hire anyone today or even this week. Let's find my missing stuff first, give me time to get more things in place first, and get past the coming endbringer attack. I also want a proper base outside of my warehouse before we do that first."
"Do you have a location you have been considering for that?"
"I do, and it might sound a bit extreme, but I want to build it on Mars."
"What? Mars? Why there?" Her dad asked, clearly not understanding why she would want to do that without more explanation.
"Legally, I have to own somewhere on Earth as defined by the locals for blank to protect it. No one lives on Mars, so if I get there, I can claim it, or at least claim wherever I am working without needing anyone to agree with it."
"Thats nice?"
"It also means that anyone on Mars, being in something I own would be covered. I could put them underground since it wouldn't immediately hide from anyone with eyes but… maybe the moon is better? It's closer so it would be faster round trips."
"Did you forget about her?" Danny vaguely gestured into the air.
"No, but she is exactly why I want to do this. I want to shift humanity out of her reach. If I could puzzle out an FTL drive, I could just put us in the next solar system, but that's not an option just yet. This is all just long-term plans."
"Long term plans for what?"
"Everything dad… everything."
0o0
After dinner, Taylor went back to debating the pros and cons of her medical bay. The fact that the Counseling Bay could fix anything was nice, but there was no way to get Amy into it just yet. She wasn't even sure how she could talk the girl into getting counselling willingly.
Vista could likely use some time in there, in fact, as Taylor was starting to see from those around her, it looked like everyone could use some time in there.
If only she had a way to get it outside of her workshop to let them into it.
Sighing at that thought again, her efforts moved to designing her satellites. Her new perks helped a lot with construction speed and figuring out how to hide them without making them out of magic cloth.
*Power Buy Attempt 3.11.2 Doll Maker of Bucuresti (Touhou) (200). Bought, Banked 0 points.*
The perk that Taylor just got was enough to stop what she had been doing, as understanding of how to reverse-engineer magic using pure science, even with no background in either to start from, filled her mind.
The perk she just got claimed it made her a genius, and given how easily she could now see tests to run on her clothing to figure out how it worked and convert that over to more mundane methods, she could already see hints of where to start, as this perk was aided by Simple Scientific Solution, which already cut her research time in half.
Add in everything her senses could tell her and how quickly she could move and Taylor was a one-woman reverse-engineering team to be reckoned with.
A much happier Taylor made her way to the Alchemiter to make a few items for study, then headed to her lab so she could start breaking them down.
0o0
Monday, February 13th, 2011
0o0
Despite spending all day Sunday studying her items under the lab, Taylor hadn't made much headway into understanding the runes that made up her magical gear, nor the version that the tinker device she had copied and then printed from than Armsmaster did. It was increasingly clear to her that they did something, but the logic behind them still escaped her; more experiments would be needed.
Although she could see how versatile the underlying principles would be once she puzzled them out, she couldn't afford to push off her other plans. Her biggest concern was whoever had stolen her gear from the PRT, since they could repeat their performance while she was working with Dragon and Armsmaster and likely were doing the same for other gear the PRT had. It was a hole she wanted plugged before it became a major problem, which she was sure would help her attempts to join the Guild.
Taylor was busy putting the final touches on her new control station for her satellites. Those were already done, five of them after cloning from her recent perk. She was only going to recycle two of her control stations when she finished, as she had use cases for the other three.
One was for her to monitor, one was for her dad if he wished to do the same, and the last was a backup just in case.
Danny arrived just before Taylor finished.
"You done, Taylor?"
"Almost… and done."
With a pop, four other stations appeared next to Taylor.
"Now for the risky part."
Taylor captchalogued all of the stations, going to recycle the extra two, before she made her way to the door with her father and the three remaining stations.
The nature of her warehouse meant that she had to be outside for the communication systems to work without a hard wire passed in through the door, and given how quickly she could captchalogue anything, it was faster to build it into a single unit then put it outside, since she wanted to be near them if she had to run into the warehouse and shut the door.
Before opening the doorway to a rooftop in the city, Selene swapped into her armor, while her father put on his own costume, which she had made for him to help cover for this. He wasn't so much helping her locate her gear as keeping an eye on Simurgh, in the event one of her alerts didn't work right.
Selene deployed his station first, and quickly pulled up the public data on the Simurgh location, currently near Europe, highlighting it to make sure it stood out.
Making sure she didn't react, which Selene expected, she quickly deployed her own and the five cloaked satellites she was about to let loose.
Monitoring Simurgh with one eye, she directed all five to take off into the air, quickly reaching the height she wanted them to be, well above any airplanes flight levels and in the edges of space.
She would have run it lower, but the satellites didn't have good avoidance systems just yet and she didn't want them to crash into a plane or birds. She had to take them up out of visual range to make sure it was safe, and once they started their search pattern, she wouldn't be able to monitor all five, keep an eye on Simurgh, and see what data she was getting at the same time,. Her multiple threads of consciousness could only stretch so far.
"No reaction yet."
"I am starting the search program." Selene answered back, and all five satellites started a search pattern as they spread out in all directions trying to find her gear. Given her location in the United States she didn't need to check all directions, with only one heading north and the other four satellites handling various arcs South and West.
Selene had figured it was more likely that they would have ended up west, or maybe south to Boston, then north into Canada.
This turned out to be correct as all four of her missing blankets turned up in Boston.
"Found them, all of them." Selene told her dad as she called back her satellites. As much as she would prefer to leave them up there for more data, The Simurgh being up there made it too risky to do when Selene couldn't monitor her position 24/7.
"So, they were close by after all. Where?"
"Boston. I don't know the precise location from these coordinates; I need to go check. Let's get this stored away. My handheld sensor will be good enough once I am near where they are."
0o0
Selene ended up using a flying cape to reach Boston after her father was back at home. She was rather curious who had stolen her stuff from the PRT. As she travelled, she accessed a few out of the way doors along the route for future access so she could get back to Boston quickly.
Once she was close enough to get scans of the building her satellites pinpointed, she found that it wasn't officially owned by anyone, given that the blankets were in a clearly abandoned and condemned building.
Since there was no one around, just an alarm system, Selene decided that a smash and grab was the best method here. She activated a hologram to disguise her as a random man wearing a mask and hoodie as she went in.
The place was reinforced, but not to the point that it would be hard to break in. The security system was good enough that she couldn't avoid showing up on it before disabling it, so she didn't bother to try.
Rather, she just kicked down the front door and went straight to her missing gear.
Grabbing it, she shoved them into a bag she had brought for the occasion, and noticed a number of other items around, most of them also tinker tech as her scanner showed.
They were almost certainly stolen items as well, and she did have a lab that lacked things to study.
She decided to pick them up as well, and quickly emptied everything stored there into her bag. Quickly, she headed out the same way she came in and took to the sky while turning invisible, leaving before anyone could respond.
0o0
After getting a good distance away from the location where her items had been, Selene found a door, and used it to access her warehouse before closing it and leaving it shut. Her dad was expecting her to look over her blankets to make sure there were no trackers added, so he wouldn't be concerned by the lockout unless she took more than a few hours.
She quickly scanned the items she had picked up for sensors, finding a lot of black boxes she didn't know understand, but no clear emissions that looked like 'communications' of any kind, just the sort of thing she wanted to study more in detail to figure out how other tinker tech worked.
*Power Buy Attempt 1.5.26 Power Toggle (50) Bought, Banked 50 points.*
Reroll since last perk was fully bought/brought to some level of ranking and points > 0
*Power Buy Attempt 1.1.9 Creature Soul I (50) (Cat). Bought, Banked 0 points.*
Taylor hadn't thought that she would ever get anything that would be enough to stop the four mental processes she had all at once, but she now discovered her error, as all four came to a grinding halt over what she just picked up.
On one hand, she got the ability to turn any aspect of her power off, suddenly solving the issue of never being able to not just read people like they were open books.
On the other hand, she gained the ability to gain cat features, ears, tail, claws and so on. This didn't include fur, so she wouldn't be some human/cat hybrid like some pictures she had seen before. She would be just a human with optional cat ears, tail and claws on her fingers— and toes if she wanted them.
This would have increased her vision and hearing if they hadn't already been as good as the best animals, although she did get a slight boost to her dexterity as well, so it wasn't entirely useless from a practical perspective.
Curious how she would look, Taylor made her way over to a mirror and called out her cat ears.
Staring at them, she was quite surprised to learn how much better it made her look, as if somehow this was the real her. Maybe it had to do with her liking cats over dogs.
Deciding she should show them to her father, and wishing more than she expected to show them around town as well, she laughed at her own flight of foolishness, as that wasn't an option because it would out her. Taylor left them in place as she made her way to the collection. The items she had secured that had been with her blankets were quickly sorted in her lab for study.
She learned what she could from the blankets, taking a deep sniff of them as she focused on who had handled them. She did the same to all the other tinkertech as well. Most of the useful scents on them were gone, but there were a few she memorized in case they were useful in the future.
Most of the people she already knew were PRT officers, indicating that the blankets had made it to the PRT first, but there were other people, who matched the scents she had picked up outside of the Endbringer base that Grue's gang had a connection to.
But one of them really caught her eye, namely that the same girl who had been watching her had handled one of these herself.
Taylor looked up from that, realizing the implications of that. Whomever the girl was, she was a lot more involved than Taylor had first thought.
No longer was she just an idle curiosity, but someone that she should go research a lot more in depth. If she was a part of the group that had stolen her gear from the PRT, they clearly had moles in there, which Armsmaster should be informed about.
0o0
End of Chapter 06
0o0
Interlude 05: Coil
0o0
New Parahumans were always something that bothered Coil, because they upset plans he had laid carefully over the years in a way that was literally impossible to predict.
The only counter that had proven useful time and again was to isolate everything as much as possible and avoid interactions between his groups that didn't pass solely through him, lest a new trigger break his cover wide open.
Were it not for his deal with Cauldron, he never would have been able to remain in the PRT as an officer, and even he could see how close that coverage ran. It was quite clear to him that if he reneged on the favors he still owned them, they would ruin him by stopping running interference.
Coil had no intention of doing that because he knew better then to break a deal with the devil. With as much control they had over the PRT, and what he had seen of their resources, he knew that was a fool's errand.
His thoughts went most often these days to a new parahuman from a few weeks ago, one who had managed to almost draw Tattletale into an obsession over figuring the secrets of her thinker blocking tinkertech and getting around it.
This was something that Coil himself was torn on, given that it drew into question how much of his alternate timelines he could trust.
Several times since she had appeared, he tried to secure her for questioning, but it proved to be impossible with the sheer damage the girl could cause. Even attacking her out of costume on the streets had failed to yield anything more than proof that she could withstand weapons big enough to not just bring in the local Protectorate within minutes, but enough that he started seeing Legend show up, which meant if he kept pushing he would start seeing the entire Triumvirate show up thinking it was a new S Class threat.
Coil had never attacked her like this in his kept timelines, but it made him wonder, given Tattletales's report on her gear.
She claimed it could tank a hit from Behemoth, that not even the Simurgh could destroy it.
He doubted both of those facts. But the issue was, whatever she was doing was clearly stopping him from learning more about her. She never seemed to sleep, the protections on her and her house couldn't be broken by anything he brought to bear without the PRT reacting, and since said girl would tell the PRT what happened, with supporting video to back herself up no less, even that attempt resulted in a failed timeline.
The only bright thing in this mess was that she had told Armsmaster, who had reported it to the PRT and thus into his files, that she had no intention of joining the wards because she had been attacked by a Protectorate member in the past and was from out of the city.
Coil knew that to be almost completely wrong. Taylor had been attacked by a Protectorate member yes, but it was a ward, local to the city, and not as Armsmaster reported, in a sexual manner.
Since all of that had been backed up by his lie detector, Coil knew that whatever thinker protections she had, were quite potent.
And since anything that messed with his plans meant the outcome of any of his side timelines were debatable, he either had to consider Tattletale reports of what her gear could do to be true, in that Selene's gear was new fundamental laws of reality— or assume that she was a tinker trump and messing with his power.
The first couldn't possibly be true, so Coil figured that it was the latter. There was no way she was really rewriting fundamental laws.
His inferences also meant that removing her would be hard, since he couldn't try and keep a safe timeline where he didn't as that would assuredly show her heroically fighting off all three endbringers if he could ever arrange for such a thing thanks to her protections.
The only option he could see was a scenario in which he didn't take part, but he needed to remove her from this city before she uprooted him.
Recalling that Accord wished to send a group known as the Travelers his way, he decided it might be best to task them with dealing with her as a condition for staying in the city. It would nicely serve double duty, as it would both test how useful they were, and would leave him free to continue as normal if they succeeded.
0o0
A few days later, Coil was in his office, when a buzzer went off, and Coil looked at it, seeing one of his minions had urgent data. Accepting it, the door opened, and in walked one of his men.
"Sir, information from one of your agents at the hospital."
"Place it on my desk." Coil ordered and the man did such, then left.
Checking the file, Coil confirmed that it hadn't been opened by the man who passed it on, as expected. The man did good work.
Since this was a hospital agent, it likely meant a new trigger, one that hadn't flagged the PRT systems so could be a new resource to recruit.
Opening the file himself, he was quite surprised by what he read. The Mayor's niece, Dinah Alcott, had triggered with thinker powers allowing her to tell the odds of an event happening.
His man inside the hospital had managed to be the one that gave her the test when her family brought her in concerned because of the headaches and had lied to them saying she didn't have powers and was making it all up.
It would be extremely useful to secure her, although so long as Selene was still around, how much he could trust his other timelines was in question. Coil decided it was best to give Accord a call to see how much longer the Travellers would take. He would need to be able to trust his dropped timelines before he could make a proper move on Dinah. She would make a good pet, he had been missing a pet for quite a while ever since his old one died.
0o0
End of Interlude 05
0o0
2.1.27 Central Control (100)
2.1.28 Your Robots (200)
2.1.29 Maintenance Systems (100)
2.6.3 All Your Stuff (100)
1.4.15 Supernatural Engineer
3.4.9 Workaholic (Sonic)
3.11.2 Doll Maker of Bucuresti (Touhou)
1.5.26 Power Toggle
1.1.9 Creature Soul I (Cat)
